I think your theory is about right, except that I think people often do this unconsciously. When being watched, people are just more conscious of what they're doing, and so their timing is different, the way they press keys is different, and they may avoid shortcuts that they usually take just because they're more focused on what they're doing. With problems that are caused by an oversensitive or otherwise buggy user interface, this can make a difference. When the expert goes away, users revert to their usual mode of operation, and the problem returns.
I saw one problem which went on for the longest time where in a system with a web interface, one particular user out of a dozen kept creating duplicate copies of the records she was entering. My guess is that she was probably just double-clicking the submit button. But no matter how many times anyone watched her do it, it would never happen. But a few minutes after the observer left, it would happen again.
They're talking about carbon dioxide (CO2) ice. In Earth's atmosphere, CO2 turns to gas at temperatures above -78C. On Mars, with no atmospheric pressure, it would be gaseous at even lower temperatures. So the fountains would happen as soon as the temperature rose above whatever that point is. Now who's lost the plot?
So what does this tell us? Almost nothing we didn't already know - Search engines DO indeed negate the impact of popularity, because popularity has little to do with relevance, while search engines generally try to maximize relevance.
If the story had described this as "search engines level the playing field, leading searchers to relevant sites even if they're not the most popular", it's doubtful that it would have made it to Slashdot. For their next project: "Snakes on a plane: how dangerous are they, really?"
How do plutons manage to stay so fetchingly slim? Simple: as you can tell from their name, they're actually a kind of elementary particle. A big kind, to be sure, but an elementary particle nonetheless. What do you think plutonium is made of? Obviously not protons, because then it would have to be called protonium. No, plutonium is made of plutons -- smaller plutons than Pluto, but still plutons.
Of course, everyone knows that elementary particles can't be as big as real planets. So that's how they stay slim: it's genetic, so to speak. As for what they want: they like to hang around bigger planets because they hope someday to become a real planet, just like Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy. So there's no need to be afraid of plutons, unless one tries to merge with your planet.
Nothing is a tool for proving anything in this area, so we can only go with the weak tools we have. Regarding simple explanations, a simple one would be an omnipotent being who creates the universe and then leaves it alone, and doesn't act like a big den mother to all its creatures. The idea that fails Occam's Razor is the one which has God having minimal interaction with us except when it comes to judging our behavior in ways that we don't get to find out about until an afterlife. A deity I could believe in wouldn't be passive-aggressive like that.
Well, one interesting point we can take from a theory of an omnipotent God is that she chooses not to act in ways that would make it abundantly clear that she exists. If she was continually doing really obvious things which violate the repeatable physical laws we've discovered, we'd have noticed. Unfortunately, this approach to wielding ominpotence does tend to raise Occam's Razor - you don't need a god to explain the behavior of a universe that behaves quite reliable and predictable when observed carefully.
One conclusion we might draw from this is that if there's a God, she's actively trying to trick us into not believing in her. Seems like a petty game for an omnipotent being to play, no matter how you spin it - you can talk about "tests of faith", for example, but the theory that there is a God is essentially unfalsifiable, which makes it pretty suspect from a scientific perspective. So I'd say yes, there are issues with an omnipotent God of the kind described by the major religions and science coexisting.
According to a leaked memo from the HR department, during his annual evaluation God was found to be a huge control freak, who doesn't work well in teams, doesn't always communicate clearly, can be a bit too harsh when meting out punishment, and perhaps worst of all, has a serious God complex. They had to let him go.
Good point. I have a similar situation, but after messing around with Skype and such, I found that using a dial-around service is so cheap (6c/minute to most of Europe), and much easier, so I use that. It does require a landline though.
Right, but UMTS is a replacement for GSM, based on W-CDMA. GSM is not only backwards, it's obsolete. Phones that support UMTS are dual-mode phones.
As for the "for mobile use, 50KB/s is more than adequate", don't be silly. For you, maybe. Plenty of other people have a need for higher bandwidth. The Bluetooth connection is only an issue if you're connecting a computer, and your phone doesn't support something faster like wifi.
Or are you one of those "backwards" users stuck using CDMA and thus (in North America and most other CDMA-using places (except Korea)) locked by phone and provider?
The way CDMA is marketed in the U.S. may be "backwards" from a consumer choice perspective, but technology-wise, CDMA has a much better story for data services - 1xEV-DO, implemented by Verizon and others, can give DSL-like speeds, up to 700kbps, whereas GSM's GPRS and EDGE systems are still closer to dialup modem speeds, maxing out in practice under 200kbps. So for data, GSM is backwards right now.
Using Skype over the cell network would be kinda pointless, even if it were possible, wouldn't it? But the point seems to be that the device supports Wifi, which is fast enough for Skype. So if the 312MHz CPU is fast enough, you could have one phone device which can use the regular cell network, but can also use Skype to avoid cellphone charges whenever you're somewhere that has decent Wifi - offices, college campuses, coffee shops, bookstores, wifi'd buildings, wifi'd neighborhoods...
Digging around a Windows hard disk for text files? You haven't grokked the Windows mindset. (Some might consider that a plus.) There's a GUI Event Viewer that lets you browse the logs. See How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP. A similar viewer is available in all varieties of Windows NT and W2K.
In general, randomly browsing around a Windows filesystem won't tell you much, because most system file formats are binary, and system files are treated more like central repositories than documents, which means that they don't have file associations. You're better off randomly clicking around the GUI, if you insist on the trial and error approach, but you'll still miss a lot.
BTW, the only way I know about Windows is from a misspent pre-Linux youth. I'm posting this from a Debian box, honest.
First, let me say I'm not a blind GPL fan, but I've published some stuff under the GPL for the opposite reason of what you suggest: if someone wants to use my code unencumbered, they can pay me a license fee. You can't call me small-minded without contradicting your own premise: if I were to release under BSD, it would be "taking from the mouths of the people who...", i.e. from my mouth.
My own work is pretty small-scale (a handful of licensees), but there are bigger companies that do this. Another scenario is that companies contributing to open source often like the fact that their contribution can't be easily profited from by some other company, so it's not just the bearded FSF-loving hippies that like this feature of the GPL. Which brings me to a point which doesn't get talked about much, but which you seem to be touching on: the GPL is absolutely about competition - it's a weapon, which can be used by corporations as well as individuals. The GPL fans of the hippy persuasion think of it as a weapon in a fight against capitalism, or something like that, but capitalists use it as a weapon in the fight against their competition (think about why Sun supports a LGPL office suite, for example). So your complaints at the GPL are really complaints about competition: you may as well complain that the guy down the road is undercutting your prices. That's life & business, get used to it.
BTW, your potted history of Unix is also pretty strange: Unix hasn't "always been a genuinely free product", nor was it "released by corporations to the public freely". If that were really the case, the whole SCO affair could never have happened. Unix became free much more in a kind of "information wants to be free" way, than because corporations explicitly decided to relinquish their intellectual property rights.
You just need to change that expectations when it comes to 'domestic' travel as well.
Um, why?
There's a reason that people conglomerate in cities and so on. It's more efficient. Faster travel makes for more efficient business. If the New York/London trip time could be cut down for a competitive cost and without sonic booms along the flightpath affecting people on the ground, you could bet it would happen. What you're suggesting is a reduction in efficiency. The idea of being productive while traveling on a train, or a plane, is generally pretty bogus - only some kinds of jobs allow you to be productive in that environment, and enforced productive periods like that don't really work. It's be more realistic to say you can relax on a train.
And that's the problem right there. We have unrealistic expectations.
How are they unrealistic? They're being satisfied every day, for thousands upon thousands of travelers. Sure, some people might be whining about security delays, but they're nothing compared to the delay involved with trains. After the scare yesterday, most airports in the U.S. were doing fine by the afternoon.
What has to give is that expectation that you can fly in, conduct the business, and fly out all on the same day.
Why does it have to give? Are you talking about the oil running out, or something like that?
Certainly, business was conducted prior to the jet aircraft. But at that time, most of the technology we rely on today didn't exist, and the global economy was nothing like it is today. The one is quite dependent on the other. I point to my subject line again: you seem to have romantic visions of a slower time. Good luck recapturing that, but meanwhile the people who are willing to use resources to be more efficient are going to be the ones creating the majority of the economic value on the planet, and everyone else will complain about how wasteful they are, while using their products and inventions.
I hear a lot of bad things about Bill O'Reilly, but I don't like him or dislike him for the simple fact that I've never seen his show
Right, so no wonder you don't understand the Colbert show. You need to watch Bill O'Reilly at least once (and probably more than once, to get a representative sample) to understand the Colbert Show. I made a wrong assumption because I didn't imagine you'd be complaining about a parody show without knowing anything about what it's parodying.
You're complaining about my assumptions, but making just as many of your own.
This is not about politics at all. The skewering I enjoy most is the skewering of real hypocrites, of either political party, or in business, or whatever. It seems to be an issue of comedy style - I'm guessing you don't like "roasts" either. Guests who appear on Colbert pretty much always know what they're in for - and they do it anyway. Think about why that is.
My suspicion is that you're the one looking at Colbert through a filter. Next time you watch, think about what's in it for the guest, and why they're participating. If anything, it's the Daily Show that skewers people who aren't aware of it - I see many more uncomfortable skits on that show than on the Colbert Report.
Hey, two out of three people agreed with me, so maybe they're seeing something you're not.
And notice I didn't advocate wiping out any particular group - that was you, projecting. (Why do you hate Arabs so much?) The hypothetical genocidal leader could start with North Korea, for example, and take it from there. Other Western nations would probably object, but a few nukes will keep those peace-loving Europeans in line for a while. Of course, a nuclear-trigger-happy leader would have to be taken down somehow, which would mean major war, which is where all those billions of spare people come in.
The result would be a newly chastened world, desperate to avoid such things in future. You'd also have had a situation in which multiple countries collaborated to bring down a superpower, which would be a positive shift of the balance of power. Plus, once the radiation died down, there'd be lots of room for growth. Really, a win-win situation. I don't understand your negativity.
Slashdot Mirror
I think your theory is about right, except that I think people often do this unconsciously. When being watched, people are just more conscious of what they're doing, and so their timing is different, the way they press keys is different, and they may avoid shortcuts that they usually take just because they're more focused on what they're doing. With problems that are caused by an oversensitive or otherwise buggy user interface, this can make a difference. When the expert goes away, users revert to their usual mode of operation, and the problem returns.
I saw one problem which went on for the longest time where in a system with a web interface, one particular user out of a dozen kept creating duplicate copies of the records she was entering. My guess is that she was probably just double-clicking the submit button. But no matter how many times anyone watched her do it, it would never happen. But a few minutes after the observer left, it would happen again.
They're talking about carbon dioxide (CO2) ice. In Earth's atmosphere, CO2 turns to gas at temperatures above -78C. On Mars, with no atmospheric pressure, it would be gaseous at even lower temperatures. So the fountains would happen as soon as the temperature rose above whatever that point is. Now who's lost the plot?
Er... that typo correction was by an AC, so there's no obvious reason to think that the OP knew the difference between port 24 & 25.
I'm just wondering how it was that he accidentally garrotted her and bashed her head in...
How do plutons manage to stay so fetchingly slim? Simple: as you can tell from their name, they're actually a kind of elementary particle. A big kind, to be sure, but an elementary particle nonetheless. What do you think plutonium is made of? Obviously not protons, because then it would have to be called protonium. No, plutonium is made of plutons -- smaller plutons than Pluto, but still plutons.
Of course, everyone knows that elementary particles can't be as big as real planets. So that's how they stay slim: it's genetic, so to speak. As for what they want: they like to hang around bigger planets because they hope someday to become a real planet, just like Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy. So there's no need to be afraid of plutons, unless one tries to merge with your planet.
I think you forgot to take your selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor this morning...
Nothing is a tool for proving anything in this area, so we can only go with the weak tools we have. Regarding simple explanations, a simple one would be an omnipotent being who creates the universe and then leaves it alone, and doesn't act like a big den mother to all its creatures. The idea that fails Occam's Razor is the one which has God having minimal interaction with us except when it comes to judging our behavior in ways that we don't get to find out about until an afterlife. A deity I could believe in wouldn't be passive-aggressive like that.
I agree, but confusing a particular technology with a marketing practice doesn't make sense.
Well, one interesting point we can take from a theory of an omnipotent God is that she chooses not to act in ways that would make it abundantly clear that she exists. If she was continually doing really obvious things which violate the repeatable physical laws we've discovered, we'd have noticed. Unfortunately, this approach to wielding ominpotence does tend to raise Occam's Razor - you don't need a god to explain the behavior of a universe that behaves quite reliable and predictable when observed carefully.
One conclusion we might draw from this is that if there's a God, she's actively trying to trick us into not believing in her. Seems like a petty game for an omnipotent being to play, no matter how you spin it - you can talk about "tests of faith", for example, but the theory that there is a God is essentially unfalsifiable, which makes it pretty suspect from a scientific perspective. So I'd say yes, there are issues with an omnipotent God of the kind described by the major religions and science coexisting.
According to a leaked memo from the HR department, during his annual evaluation God was found to be a huge control freak, who doesn't work well in teams, doesn't always communicate clearly, can be a bit too harsh when meting out punishment, and perhaps worst of all, has a serious God complex. They had to let him go.
Competition is good. Asterisk competes quite successfully (in its own niche) against the big telecom companies, too.
Good point. I have a similar situation, but after messing around with Skype and such, I found that using a dial-around service is so cheap (6c/minute to most of Europe), and much easier, so I use that. It does require a landline though.
Right, but UMTS is a replacement for GSM, based on W-CDMA. GSM is not only backwards, it's obsolete. Phones that support UMTS are dual-mode phones.
As for the "for mobile use, 50KB/s is more than adequate", don't be silly. For you, maybe. Plenty of other people have a need for higher bandwidth. The Bluetooth connection is only an issue if you're connecting a computer, and your phone doesn't support something faster like wifi.
Using Skype over the cell network would be kinda pointless, even if it were possible, wouldn't it? But the point seems to be that the device supports Wifi, which is fast enough for Skype. So if the 312MHz CPU is fast enough, you could have one phone device which can use the regular cell network, but can also use Skype to avoid cellphone charges whenever you're somewhere that has decent Wifi - offices, college campuses, coffee shops, bookstores, wifi'd buildings, wifi'd neighborhoods...
Digging around a Windows hard disk for text files? You haven't grokked the Windows mindset. (Some might consider that a plus.) There's a GUI Event Viewer that lets you browse the logs. See How to view and manage event logs in Event Viewer in Windows XP. A similar viewer is available in all varieties of Windows NT and W2K.
In general, randomly browsing around a Windows filesystem won't tell you much, because most system file formats are binary, and system files are treated more like central repositories than documents, which means that they don't have file associations. You're better off randomly clicking around the GUI, if you insist on the trial and error approach, but you'll still miss a lot.
BTW, the only way I know about Windows is from a misspent pre-Linux youth. I'm posting this from a Debian box, honest.
First, let me say I'm not a blind GPL fan, but I've published some stuff under the GPL for the opposite reason of what you suggest: if someone wants to use my code unencumbered, they can pay me a license fee. You can't call me small-minded without contradicting your own premise: if I were to release under BSD, it would be "taking from the mouths of the people who...", i.e. from my mouth.
My own work is pretty small-scale (a handful of licensees), but there are bigger companies that do this. Another scenario is that companies contributing to open source often like the fact that their contribution can't be easily profited from by some other company, so it's not just the bearded FSF-loving hippies that like this feature of the GPL. Which brings me to a point which doesn't get talked about much, but which you seem to be touching on: the GPL is absolutely about competition - it's a weapon, which can be used by corporations as well as individuals. The GPL fans of the hippy persuasion think of it as a weapon in a fight against capitalism, or something like that, but capitalists use it as a weapon in the fight against their competition (think about why Sun supports a LGPL office suite, for example). So your complaints at the GPL are really complaints about competition: you may as well complain that the guy down the road is undercutting your prices. That's life & business, get used to it.
BTW, your potted history of Unix is also pretty strange: Unix hasn't "always been a genuinely free product", nor was it "released by corporations to the public freely". If that were really the case, the whole SCO affair could never have happened. Unix became free much more in a kind of "information wants to be free" way, than because corporations explicitly decided to relinquish their intellectual property rights.
Lenovo has nothing to do with IBM's software business. Lenovo just bought IBM's PC manufacturing group.
Um, why?
There's a reason that people conglomerate in cities and so on. It's more efficient. Faster travel makes for more efficient business. If the New York/London trip time could be cut down for a competitive cost and without sonic booms along the flightpath affecting people on the ground, you could bet it would happen. What you're suggesting is a reduction in efficiency. The idea of being productive while traveling on a train, or a plane, is generally pretty bogus - only some kinds of jobs allow you to be productive in that environment, and enforced productive periods like that don't really work. It's be more realistic to say you can relax on a train.
How are they unrealistic? They're being satisfied every day, for thousands upon thousands of travelers. Sure, some people might be whining about security delays, but they're nothing compared to the delay involved with trains. After the scare yesterday, most airports in the U.S. were doing fine by the afternoon.
Why does it have to give? Are you talking about the oil running out, or something like that?
Certainly, business was conducted prior to the jet aircraft. But at that time, most of the technology we rely on today didn't exist, and the global economy was nothing like it is today. The one is quite dependent on the other. I point to my subject line again: you seem to have romantic visions of a slower time. Good luck recapturing that, but meanwhile the people who are willing to use resources to be more efficient are going to be the ones creating the majority of the economic value on the planet, and everyone else will complain about how wasteful they are, while using their products and inventions.
Right, so no wonder you don't understand the Colbert show. You need to watch Bill O'Reilly at least once (and probably more than once, to get a representative sample) to understand the Colbert Show. I made a wrong assumption because I didn't imagine you'd be complaining about a parody show without knowing anything about what it's parodying.
You're complaining about my assumptions, but making just as many of your own.
This is not about politics at all. The skewering I enjoy most is the skewering of real hypocrites, of either political party, or in business, or whatever. It seems to be an issue of comedy style - I'm guessing you don't like "roasts" either. Guests who appear on Colbert pretty much always know what they're in for - and they do it anyway. Think about why that is.
My suspicion is that you're the one looking at Colbert through a filter. Next time you watch, think about what's in it for the guest, and why they're participating. If anything, it's the Daily Show that skewers people who aren't aware of it - I see many more uncomfortable skits on that show than on the Colbert Report.
Hey, two out of three people agreed with me, so maybe they're seeing something you're not.
And notice I didn't advocate wiping out any particular group - that was you, projecting. (Why do you hate Arabs so much?) The hypothetical genocidal leader could start with North Korea, for example, and take it from there. Other Western nations would probably object, but a few nukes will keep those peace-loving Europeans in line for a while. Of course, a nuclear-trigger-happy leader would have to be taken down somehow, which would mean major war, which is where all those billions of spare people come in.
The result would be a newly chastened world, desperate to avoid such things in future. You'd also have had a situation in which multiple countries collaborated to bring down a superpower, which would be a positive shift of the balance of power. Plus, once the radiation died down, there'd be lots of room for growth. Really, a win-win situation. I don't understand your negativity.