Could someone please clarify how much improvement in rendering time/quality would a proper hardware-based 3D acceleration bring to the experience of web browsing? I mean, what would the differences be on e.g news sites or/.org with hardware vs software rendering?
I'm a bit puzzled, because if 3D support on browsers is an important issue, how are Android tablets, which are going to take the market by storm this year, supposed to even work as mainly browsing devices? Especially when they don't feature Nvidia graphics hardware? Or is there no hardware-based graphics acceleration at all on these devices?
Expect much criticism to your post, because nobody is willing to accept that if the names of the signs were not millenia old or astrology-related but just arbitrary time coordinates homomorphic to the months of the year (like e.g. 12 spectrum colors), they would have no problem considering real studies upon the correlation of time of birth of their kids to aspects of their future life.
I firmly believe that if some decades of work had been spent on such studies, they might possibly get as reliable predictions as genetic testing by now (and yes, I have a physics degree and I am not really convinced about the predictive powers of genes upon one's non-medical/physiological features). But then again, who really wants to know his (or his child's) future?
Probably not, because it relates to the theme of Public Understanding of Science, and/. has in the past done great efforts to address and debunk human and urban myths.
Just wait until somebody posts a slashdot poll with questions like:
- If your terrified wife told you that she read on the horoscope that today your sign is very prone to accidents, would you exercise additional caution when driving to work?
- If your kid got a C at school and was crying his heart out, would you be willing to comfort him by saying this was due to a bad Saturn influence that particular day and it won't ever happen again?
- If you were fired at work today and felt like committing suicide, would you rather attribute it to your incompetence or the square between Venus and Mars?
I'm not riding the astrology wagon, but I can provide some interesting cues:
1. There have been several statistical studies that revealed strong correlations between the signs and people's occupations in a given country. Can't remember a citation right now, but I remember percentages like 70% or lawyers in France belonging to a particular sign.
2. The issue whether planets could in principle influence our lives is not trivial. For example, the gravitational force of Jupiter upon you is comparable to the gravitational force from a human person standing 1 meter away from you. The role and impact of gravity (or lack thereof) on cell's growth and evolution is an active theme of research in space stations.
3. Regarding synchronicity, you could look up the importance of the effect of resonance in Astronomy, namely how it affects the stability or the chaotic evolution of a cluster. Have you ever thought why the Moon faces the Earth with the same side all these millenia? It's a synchronicity effect between the Earth's and Moon's gravitational fields. To provide a clue, the gravitational field above an Earth or Moon mountain is slightly higher than the average, therefore facilitating the 'locking' of the Moon's revolution about its axis to the Earth's 24-hour revolution about its own. Regarding synchronicity effects on us humans, I'd just suggest reading about several circadian rhythms, our various internal biological clocks and women's menstrual cycle and it relation to Lunar phases.
After some decades of studies (or sooner with the help of supercomputers) science might be in position to uncover some correlations and make tentative predictions, without however claiming that correlation implies causation.
It is both a poor man's DRM and an ad vehicle because you can't save it or copy/paste it in an email, you have to provide a link to it, which leads to more views/ads.
Thank you very much, good Sir. I had not been aware of the Jane Elliot experiment before and the link you provided (which led to the freeview PBS documentary) was a real eye-opener to me. Apart from the social issues, it appears she demonstrated there was a significant improvement in pupils' academic ability *within 24 hours*, just because of the fact they believed they belonged in a privileged class. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if people thinking they shifted into the Aries sign became instant winners in life.
It is puzzling to see everyday that most people will simply refuse to test the zodiac-related 'facts' and ideas by e.g. reading the many available statistical debunkings, making their own experiments or simply compare a week's prediction with their actual life. After all, have you ever seen a printed newspaper without an astrological predictions column? Zodiac signs are here to stay, they help millions of people acquire an ethereal identity in addition to an ethernet one (as the Beatles said, 'All the lonely people, where do they all belong?') and provide apparent colour and variability in their lives through the day-to-day, different in their sameness, 'predictions'. Who am I to disrupt believers' faith and hopes for a better day by debunking their myths? It has worked for thousands of years and it will certainly survive until the end of the world (or 2012, whatever comes first).
Imagine your country's economy working according to a similar scenario where everybody was paid by their employee according the same rules... Can you? It seems Apple can and did.
"don't talk about your family": subconscious rule to suppress the guilt both FB posters and readers might experience due to the fact that spending time on FB is by definition cheating (== stealing time from your family). Somehow I sense a similarity of this rule with the Mickey Mouse universe, where parents don't exist (only uncles, aunts, nieces and cousins).
"don't refer to time": subconscious rule strongly related to the previous one (spare time should be spent with the family) and also used to suppress the guilt caused by procrastination (instead of working or taking care of pressing errands, they got stuck in FB).
Mine is a psychoanalytic approach. My guess is that eventually somebody will come up with a religious interpretation of the results, demonstrating that these FB commandments are the inverse of the biblical Ten Commandments and therefore FB is the Antichrist.
There is substance and there are appearances and perceived effect (within US and globally).
Being #1 in supercomputer power is the 2010 perceived equivalent of technological superiority as was the 1969 landing of the first man on the Moon. I may not be an expert on NASA history, but I bet that there were big debates at the time whether the latter was actually a "useful performance measure" or a "waste of US resources".
In such a perspective the boundaries between substance, appearances and theater (as is insightfully suggested in some of the comments) can get very blurry.
Now, suppose law enforcement shuts down within a month 90% of all torrent sites, all storage lockers (Megaupload, Rapidshare, Hotfile etc) and generally all opportunities of getting massive content. Could somebody you provide estimates for:
1. The increase of publishers' revenues due to the suppression of illegal content?
2. The decrease in hardware sales like PCs and accessories (e.g. external storage, HTPCs, media players)?
3. The decrease of software sales and market shares due to the stabilisation or even decrease of hardware base to run on (according to 2. above)?
4. The estimated decrease of the growth of ISPs infrastructure (why deploy fibers when the traffic goes down?)
5. The effects on the future of the new forms of hardware currently planned like e.g. internet tablets?
6. The effects on the pricing of hardware and software
7. The effects on the technological, manufacture and IT job market?
Hardware, software, content, workforce - it's all an ecosystem now, and you can't possibly intervene in one aspect of it without producing an avalanche and messing it all up. According to your numbers, everybody profits from the present state of affairs, so the ecosystem works and everybody should be happy. If it ain't broke, why mess around with it?
Partly they are, because they provide crime undue publicity. When you can read in one and the same physical media (in one newspaper or even on the same page) simultaneously the report of a satellite launch, a president's speech, a cure for a disease and a murder, doesn't the murder get somehow the elevated status of science/tech/govt ? Similarly, are violent computer games or violent TV shows and movies not guilty of promoting violence/crime?
I hate watching crime-related news on TV because they validate, justify and possibly make a hero of both the criminals and the enforcement agency that arrested them.
Surely there must have been long-term metastudies regarding the effects of exposure to crime-related media reports on actual urban criminality. It's no surprise they don't get the attention they deserve.
I think this is a really interesting comment, suggesting that social factors may invert causation. I'd add that more research is needed on whether "common sense", folk knowledge, urban myths or even the 'collective unconscious' affect the placebo effect. Some relevant research questions, just out of my head:
1. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was not administered by white-coat doctors, but from big pharma industry representatives?
2. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was administered at home and not in a hospital?
3. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was administered by recruited relatives/friends/coworkers of the patients? (situation similar to office culture "try this for your migraines, it does wonders for me").
The above would also address the "medical ritual" aspects mentioned in the study's discussion, which by the way may be have deep evolutionary origins or even are embedded in our genes, after so many thousands of years of shamanistic practices (not forgetting the practices of Hippocrates, especially his labyrinth rituals).
4. Would the placebo effect be the same if the pill explicitly contained a quasi-inert ingredient like e.g. natural menthol "the same contained in bubble gums, which of course has no effect on IBS but a lot of people think that it helps"?
5. Would the placebo effect be the same if the pill explicitly contained a well-known folk medicine, like e.g. cinnamon oil, explicitly administered as non-effective in IBS treatment?
Just think about the case of folk cures for cancer: Some years ago there was a fuss about the healing properties of olive tree leaves juice and the issue had taken large mass media exposure in our little third-world country (Greece). IIRC, the medical community out-rightly dismissed the whole issue calling bullshit and nobody dared to suggest making a rigorous clinical trial.
But.. WHAT IF the cure for cancer is indeed hidden is such a natural product, and our medical/scientific orthodoxy prejudices inhibit us from detecting it?
What makes them think that "sucks" and "blows" are the preferred verbal weapon of the domain-registering masses?
Answer: Their perceived IQ level of readers of conspiracy theories and Wikileaks cables.
Their strategy is not to inhibit media exposure (which is impossible), but to funnel it into known (best predetermined) destinations and therefore control the anger. Just imagine the alternative where millions of citizens start writing protest letters to all possible media causing a massive withdrawal of deposits.
Mathematics is counter-intuitive and all humans most of the time do need "remedial math". In addition, there are so many branches of "math" today that even having obtained a Math Dept degree some 10 years ago doesn't guarantee you'd still remember the basics of say probability theory (a *very* counter-intuitive one). Having an IT-related degree or even being a C# programmer also does not guarantee that you would approach at first sight an everyday life problem like the formation of queues in a relevant or correct way. Therefore, I expect a lot of noise in./ comments and frankly, I like noise, mainly because I am a lonely guy and I have the perversion to enjoy observing knowledgeable people's reactions to the "obvious". Noise to me is study worthy and keeps me busy on long winter nights. All pure signals, proper theorems and clever corollaries render life much less worth pursuing and would collapse./ into 'true' and 'false' twits.
Your approach is that this post is a "drivel" and therefore "this site went to shit". Could you please also express your opinion on the TFA and video?
What you could accuse the/. poster and editor is that they fail to make explicit what makes this video worth of our precious attention. IMHO, the commentary should make mention of a) the counter intuitive nature of probability b) the interdisciplinary application field of queuing theory and c) the elusive connection between abstract mathematical theories to situations of everyday life. The video excels in all three aspects and was really insightful and informative, especially given that its target audience is not the seasoned mathematician, but Joe Six pack who hates Christmas shopping precisely because of the perceived long queues. Therefore, I'd add: d) a very concise, clear and effective example of popularization of science using elementary tools (looks like the visualizations were made with Impress or Powerpoint).
Mod parent up. After having seen free condoms to prevent AIDS we saw Microsoft Security Essentials (however, to my knowledge MS never said it's "free" - because free by definition means "not good enough for the job"), it's time to see some free anti-CP software.
Why not add a sprinkle of free arms restraining legislation and perhaps some free $$$ for the homeless?
Me: Hi, I'm calling because I want to confirm... CSR interrupting: (thick Indian accent): Thank you for calling us Mr. Smith, the URL you wanted to visit does not exist. Period. Me: But... how did you know what I wanted to ask? CSR: It's our duty to serve and protect. Have a nice day.
I'm tired of the browser wars and smartphone battles - it's the addons and apps that make the difference. Been using FF too long and some features are now so natural to my browsing habits that I can't (didn't say "won't") consider any other browser that apart from the usual Adblocking, Noscript, Ghostery etc security addons does not offer at least:
1. Hyperwords (integrating the Internet like it is meant to be, an immersion to a total hypertext experience)
2. Autopager (to end the endless segmentation of reality into easily digestible bits and pages)
3. YetAnotherSmoothScrolling (to bring back the paper-like hardware buffer based motion of the screen from the Amiga days)
4. Stylish (to make the horrible eye-straining white themes of the usual suspect sites more readable)
5. A truly portable version allowing to easily copy the installation around all my PCs without having to reinstall everything (including bookmarks etc) from scratch (thank you Portableapps.com!)
IMHO all of the above should by now have become standard integrated features of any browser - hell, it's been 17 years since NCSA Mosaic. Thank you FF developers of these addons!
Does the time invested pay off? Does it increase your income? Does it increase your creativity? Does it heal your pain? Does it open new horizons for you? And finally, how much damage will it incur to you if you lose access to it (or if it disappears) and all your data and so-called friends evaporate?
Long ago I judged the pros and the cons, and I said NO. Hell, sometimes I wish the internet hadn't been invented at all - especially when I hear the tubes "running around my brain".
This is the question I'd like TFA to address and I hoped that some of the comments here would provide me some pointers for further reading.
I'd really like to know whether there's any fMRI research going on or scheduled addressing my working hypothesis that Hollywood movies and CGI effects in particular rewire our brain and alter our perception of what is real and what is unreal. I mean, if education, both informal (preschool) and formal (school) actually manages to do the same (because by definition education is rewiring), movies and TV can and do effect our ability to discriminate between "objective truth" and, say, "conspiracy theories". It's the notion of a reality distortion field.
The TFA describes a gradual threshold rise to both what is perceived as novelty and what is able to trigger and maintain our attention span. The term "numbing" should not be interpreted as habituation and accommodation, where senses are getting increasingly insensitive to repeated stimuli. This is going to develop into a vicious circle and a dead end: sometime in the future moviegoers will rush to the theaters to experience the ultimate CGI effects, the ones experienced by death itself.
I am glad that we are still rather easily triggered by instances of the uncanny valley and reject (either consciously or unconsciously) some percepts as "unnatural". This means that our deeply rooted wardwired human instincts are resistant to tampering and that there's still hope we'll be able to judge what's real and what's an artifact when this decision becomes life critical, say in a battlefield.
I know all this is no real science breakthrough, but still it is good to remember that in fact it's not us watching the movies, it's the movies watching us.
Slashdot Mirror
Could someone please clarify how much improvement in rendering time/quality would a proper hardware-based 3D acceleration bring to the experience of web browsing? I mean, what would the differences be on e.g news sites or /.org with hardware vs software rendering?
I'm a bit puzzled, because if 3D support on browsers is an important issue, how are Android tablets, which are going to take the market by storm this year, supposed to even work as mainly browsing devices? Especially when they don't feature Nvidia graphics hardware? Or is there no hardware-based graphics acceleration at all on these devices?
+1 informative.
Expect much criticism to your post, because nobody is willing to accept that if the names of the signs were not millenia old or astrology-related but just arbitrary time coordinates homomorphic to the months of the year (like e.g. 12 spectrum colors), they would have no problem considering real studies upon the correlation of time of birth of their kids to aspects of their future life.
I firmly believe that if some decades of work had been spent on such studies, they might possibly get as reliable predictions as genetic testing by now (and yes, I have a physics degree and I am not really convinced about the predictive powers of genes upon one's non-medical/physiological features). But then again, who really wants to know his (or his child's) future?
Probably not, because it relates to the theme of Public Understanding of Science, and /. has in the past done great efforts to address and debunk human and urban myths.
Just wait until somebody posts a slashdot poll with questions like:
- If your terrified wife told you that she read on the horoscope that today your sign is very prone to accidents, would you exercise additional caution when driving to work?
- If your kid got a C at school and was crying his heart out, would you be willing to comfort him by saying this was due to a bad Saturn influence that particular day and it won't ever happen again?
- If you were fired at work today and felt like committing suicide, would you rather attribute it to your incompetence or the square between Venus and Mars?
I'm not riding the astrology wagon, but I can provide some interesting cues:
1. There have been several statistical studies that revealed strong correlations between the signs and people's occupations in a given country. Can't remember a citation right now, but I remember percentages like 70% or lawyers in France belonging to a particular sign.
2. The issue whether planets could in principle influence our lives is not trivial. For example, the gravitational force of Jupiter upon you is comparable to the gravitational force from a human person standing 1 meter away from you. The role and impact of gravity (or lack thereof) on cell's growth and evolution is an active theme of research in space stations.
3. Regarding synchronicity, you could look up the importance of the effect of resonance in Astronomy, namely how it affects the stability or the chaotic evolution of a cluster. Have you ever thought why the Moon faces the Earth with the same side all these millenia? It's a synchronicity effect between the Earth's and Moon's gravitational fields. To provide a clue, the gravitational field above an Earth or Moon mountain is slightly higher than the average, therefore facilitating the 'locking' of the Moon's revolution about its axis to the Earth's 24-hour revolution about its own. Regarding synchronicity effects on us humans, I'd just suggest reading about several circadian rhythms, our various internal biological clocks and women's menstrual cycle and it relation to Lunar phases.
After some decades of studies (or sooner with the help of supercomputers) science might be in position to uncover some correlations and make tentative predictions, without however claiming that correlation implies causation.
I'd certainly prefer Pyrex over Monsanto...
It is both a poor man's DRM and an ad vehicle because you can't save it or copy/paste it in an email, you have to provide a link to it, which leads to more views/ads.
Thank you very much, good Sir. I had not been aware of the Jane Elliot experiment before and the link you provided (which led to the freeview PBS documentary) was a real eye-opener to me. Apart from the social issues, it appears she demonstrated there was a significant improvement in pupils' academic ability *within 24 hours*, just because of the fact they believed they belonged in a privileged class. Therefore, I wouldn't be surprised if people thinking they shifted into the Aries sign became instant winners in life.
It is puzzling to see everyday that most people will simply refuse to test the zodiac-related 'facts' and ideas by e.g. reading the many available statistical debunkings, making their own experiments or simply compare a week's prediction with their actual life. After all, have you ever seen a printed newspaper without an astrological predictions column? Zodiac signs are here to stay, they help millions of people acquire an ethereal identity in addition to an ethernet one (as the Beatles said, 'All the lonely people, where do they all belong?') and provide apparent colour and variability in their lives through the day-to-day, different in their sameness, 'predictions'. Who am I to disrupt believers' faith and hopes for a better day by debunking their myths? It has worked for thousands of years and it will certainly survive until the end of the world (or 2012, whatever comes first).
Please, please, pretty please, with a lychee on top, can you also create a female mammoth and a Scrat so we get a full Ice Age sequel?
Ooops I meant Amazon, not Apple... Freudian Slip :-\
Imagine your country's economy working according to a similar scenario where everybody was paid by their employee according the same rules... Can you? It seems Apple can and did.
"don't talk about your family": subconscious rule to suppress the guilt both FB posters and readers might experience due to the fact that spending time on FB is by definition cheating (== stealing time from your family). Somehow I sense a similarity of this rule with the Mickey Mouse universe, where parents don't exist (only uncles, aunts, nieces and cousins).
"don't refer to time": subconscious rule strongly related to the previous one (spare time should be spent with the family) and also used to suppress the guilt caused by procrastination (instead of working or taking care of pressing errands, they got stuck in FB).
Mine is a psychoanalytic approach. My guess is that eventually somebody will come up with a religious interpretation of the results, demonstrating that these FB commandments are the inverse of the biblical Ten Commandments and therefore FB is the Antichrist.
Has anybody positive proof that this kind of hidden software is NOT already running in every (non - tampered with) iPhone?
Firefox Portable v3.6.13, Score: 6536/50000 rwb points
Firefox Portable v4 beta 8, Score: 8006/50000 rwb points
Opera Portable v11: Score: 10756/50000 rwb points
Chrome v8.0.552.224, Score: 11464/50000 rwb points
OS: Win7 x64, PC: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 @2.66, 4GB RAM, VGA: Radeon HD 4670, Catalyst 10.10, Core@750, Memory@800
There is substance and there are appearances and perceived effect (within US and globally).
Being #1 in supercomputer power is the 2010 perceived equivalent of technological superiority as was the 1969 landing of the first man on the Moon. I may not be an expert on NASA history, but I bet that there were big debates at the time whether the latter was actually a "useful performance measure" or a "waste of US resources".
In such a perspective the boundaries between substance, appearances and theater (as is insightfully suggested in some of the comments) can get very blurry.
If another country starts to outshine you, try changing the rules.
Is this Rule 2012?
I nominate your comment for an Oscar in the "2010 most insightful Slashdot comments" category.
Great numbers summary.
Now, suppose law enforcement shuts down within a month 90% of all torrent sites, all storage lockers (Megaupload, Rapidshare, Hotfile etc) and generally all opportunities of getting massive content. Could somebody you provide estimates for:
1. The increase of publishers' revenues due to the suppression of illegal content?
2. The decrease in hardware sales like PCs and accessories (e.g. external storage, HTPCs, media players)?
3. The decrease of software sales and market shares due to the stabilisation or even decrease of hardware base to run on (according to 2. above)?
4. The estimated decrease of the growth of ISPs infrastructure (why deploy fibers when the traffic goes down?)
5. The effects on the future of the new forms of hardware currently planned like e.g. internet tablets?
6. The effects on the pricing of hardware and software
7. The effects on the technological, manufacture and IT job market?
Hardware, software, content, workforce - it's all an ecosystem now, and you can't possibly intervene in one aspect of it without producing an avalanche and messing it all up. According to your numbers, everybody profits from the present state of affairs, so the ecosystem works and everybody should be happy. If it ain't broke, why mess around with it?
Partly they are, because they provide crime undue publicity. When you can read in one and the same physical media (in one newspaper or even on the same page) simultaneously the report of a satellite launch, a president's speech, a cure for a disease and a murder, doesn't the murder get somehow the elevated status of science/tech/govt ? Similarly, are violent computer games or violent TV shows and movies not guilty of promoting violence/crime?
I hate watching crime-related news on TV because they validate, justify and possibly make a hero of both the criminals and the enforcement agency that arrested them.
Surely there must have been long-term metastudies regarding the effects of exposure to crime-related media reports on actual urban criminality. It's no surprise they don't get the attention they deserve.
I think this is a really interesting comment, suggesting that social factors may invert causation. I'd add that more research is needed on whether "common sense", folk knowledge, urban myths or even the 'collective unconscious' affect the placebo effect. Some relevant research questions, just out of my head:
1. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was not administered by white-coat doctors, but from big pharma industry representatives?
2. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was administered at home and not in a hospital?
3. Would the placebo effect be the same if the 'drug' was administered by recruited relatives/friends/coworkers of the patients? (situation similar to office culture "try this for your migraines, it does wonders for me").
The above would also address the "medical ritual" aspects mentioned in the study's discussion, which by the way may be have deep evolutionary origins or even are embedded in our genes, after so many thousands of years of shamanistic practices (not forgetting the practices of Hippocrates, especially his labyrinth rituals).
4. Would the placebo effect be the same if the pill explicitly contained a quasi-inert ingredient like e.g. natural menthol "the same contained in bubble gums, which of course has no effect on IBS but a lot of people think that it helps"?
5. Would the placebo effect be the same if the pill explicitly contained a well-known folk medicine, like e.g. cinnamon oil, explicitly administered as non-effective in IBS treatment?
Just think about the case of folk cures for cancer: Some years ago there was a fuss about the healing properties of olive tree leaves juice and the issue had taken large mass media exposure in our little third-world country (Greece). IIRC, the medical community out-rightly dismissed the whole issue calling bullshit and nobody dared to suggest making a rigorous clinical trial.
But.. WHAT IF the cure for cancer is indeed hidden is such a natural product, and our medical/scientific orthodoxy prejudices inhibit us from detecting it?
What makes them think that "sucks" and "blows" are the preferred verbal weapon of the domain-registering masses?
Answer: Their perceived IQ level of readers of conspiracy theories and Wikileaks cables.
Their strategy is not to inhibit media exposure (which is impossible), but to funnel it into known (best predetermined) destinations and therefore control the anger. Just imagine the alternative where millions of citizens start writing protest letters to all possible media causing a massive withdrawal of deposits.
Mathematics is counter-intuitive and all humans most of the time do need "remedial math". In addition, there are so many branches of "math" today that even having obtained a Math Dept degree some 10 years ago doesn't guarantee you'd still remember the basics of say probability theory (a *very* counter-intuitive one). Having an IT-related degree or even being a C# programmer also does not guarantee that you would approach at first sight an everyday life problem like the formation of queues in a relevant or correct way. Therefore, I expect a lot of noise in ./ comments and frankly, I like noise, mainly because I am a lonely guy and I have the perversion to enjoy observing knowledgeable people's reactions to the "obvious". Noise to me is study worthy and keeps me busy on long winter nights. All pure signals, proper theorems and clever corollaries render life much less worth pursuing and would collapse ./ into 'true' and 'false' twits.
Your approach is that this post is a "drivel" and therefore "this site went to shit". Could you please also express your opinion on the TFA and video?
What you could accuse the /. poster and editor is that they fail to make explicit what makes this video worth of our precious attention. IMHO, the commentary should make mention of a) the counter intuitive nature of probability b) the interdisciplinary application field of queuing theory and c) the elusive connection between abstract mathematical theories to situations of everyday life. The video excels in all three aspects and was really insightful and informative, especially given that its target audience is not the seasoned mathematician, but Joe Six pack who hates Christmas shopping precisely because of the perceived long queues. Therefore, I'd add: d) a very concise, clear and effective example of popularization of science using elementary tools (looks like the visualizations were made with Impress or Powerpoint).
Mod parent up. After having seen free condoms to prevent AIDS we saw Microsoft Security Essentials (however, to my knowledge MS never said it's "free" - because free by definition means "not good enough for the job"), it's time to see some free anti-CP software.
Why not add a sprinkle of free arms restraining legislation and perhaps some free $$$ for the homeless?
Your scenario should in fact be much shorter:
Me: Hi, I'm calling because I want to confirm ...
CSR interrupting: (thick Indian accent): Thank you for calling us Mr. Smith, the URL you wanted to visit does not exist. Period.
Me: But... how did you know what I wanted to ask?
CSR: It's our duty to serve and protect. Have a nice day.
I'm tired of the browser wars and smartphone battles - it's the addons and apps that make the difference. Been using FF too long and some features are now so natural to my browsing habits that I can't (didn't say "won't") consider any other browser that apart from the usual Adblocking, Noscript, Ghostery etc security addons does not offer at least:
1. Hyperwords (integrating the Internet like it is meant to be, an immersion to a total hypertext experience)
2. Autopager (to end the endless segmentation of reality into easily digestible bits and pages)
3. YetAnotherSmoothScrolling (to bring back the paper-like hardware buffer based motion of the screen from the Amiga days)
4. Stylish (to make the horrible eye-straining white themes of the usual suspect sites more readable)
5. A truly portable version allowing to easily copy the installation around all my PCs without having to reinstall everything (including bookmarks etc) from scratch (thank you Portableapps.com!)
IMHO all of the above should by now have become standard integrated features of any browser - hell, it's been 17 years since NCSA Mosaic. Thank you FF developers of these addons!
Does the time invested pay off? Does it increase your income? Does it increase your creativity? Does it heal your pain? Does it open new horizons for you? And finally, how much damage will it incur to you if you lose access to it (or if it disappears) and all your data and so-called friends evaporate?
Long ago I judged the pros and the cons, and I said NO. Hell, sometimes I wish the internet hadn't been invented at all - especially when I hear the tubes "running around my brain".
What's next, the Peace Nobel Prize?
This is the question I'd like TFA to address and I hoped that some of the comments here would provide me some pointers for further reading.
I'd really like to know whether there's any fMRI research going on or scheduled addressing my working hypothesis that Hollywood movies and CGI effects in particular rewire our brain and alter our perception of what is real and what is unreal. I mean, if education, both informal (preschool) and formal (school) actually manages to do the same (because by definition education is rewiring), movies and TV can and do effect our ability to discriminate between "objective truth" and, say, "conspiracy theories". It's the notion of a reality distortion field.
The TFA describes a gradual threshold rise to both what is perceived as novelty and what is able to trigger and maintain our attention span. The term "numbing" should not be interpreted as habituation and accommodation, where senses are getting increasingly insensitive to repeated stimuli. This is going to develop into a vicious circle and a dead end: sometime in the future moviegoers will rush to the theaters to experience the ultimate CGI effects, the ones experienced by death itself.
I am glad that we are still rather easily triggered by instances of the uncanny valley and reject (either consciously or unconsciously) some percepts as "unnatural". This means that our deeply rooted wardwired human instincts are resistant to tampering and that there's still hope we'll be able to judge what's real and what's an artifact when this decision becomes life critical, say in a battlefield.
I know all this is no real science breakthrough, but still it is good to remember that in fact it's not us watching the movies, it's the movies watching us.