I suppose science - or at least its standards - must have changed a lot since I was in school.
While i'll admit there was certainly a lack of detail in the BBC article about how actual measurements where made. It seems that it would have made the most sense to have an MRI or at least electrodes hooked up to be taking measurements of brain activity while the experiment was going on. That is how you associate a person's perception with physical brain activity, nothing new there. So, yes if they didn't take any such actual measurements, then I would be very critical of the experiment as just speculation without substantive value, but I think you would be wise to reserve final judgement unless you have actually read details of the study.
The thing about birds is that they attack at distance and at speed. Stereoscopic vision, which is really at the crux of the hypothesis, is only really effective at short ranges. Human stereoscopic vision is most effective in the 0-30 foot range, after that we can only really perceive depth through head movement.
So, I'd say it makes sense that snakes drove some of our evolution and probably played an epsecially important role in early evolutionary development of vision, but at some point other predators and environmental factors were probably driving evolution of our other traits.
Calling anyone with a website who writes about something they saw on TV a journalist is kind of strange.
You could say the same thing about anyone with a newspaper press who writes articles and hands their paper out on the subway to try and make a buck. Focusing on the manner of delivery rather than the form of the writing is a mistake.
That said, I'd think we would be much better off using the word "reporter" to mean someone who reports facts that they have collected and verified themselves from an objective viewpoint, rather than the seemingly more loosely defined word "journalist".
Really the word "Journalist" itself does not imply quality nor any particular achievement on the part of the writer. Same as the label "Poet" or "Playwright" it merely indicates the form of writing.
Yes thanks for correcting me, I had heard the larger number on the radio yesterday, I should have noticed the error.
Though that would still leave the average household which is making $43,318 (census) paying 10%, whcih is about $4350, of their income every year to pay off the debt in the next 30 years, assuming a 4% interest rate.
So, 10% of every able working adult's income for the next 30 years just to get to broke.
Clinton held the congress' feet to the fire on budgets and in the end generated surplus and was paying down the debt.
Yes Clinton was probably the most fiscally responsible American president in the last 40 years. At least relatively speaking.
But please stop repeating a falsehood! At no time during the Clinton presidency did the debt actually go down! In the best fiscal year 1999-2000 he and a Republican Congress still added 18 Billion dollars to the overall debt! Sure, debt held by the public went down for several years, but that means that intragovernmental debt shot up because the Federal government was borrowing from Social Security and Medicare to "balance the budget". Guess what? The government has to start paying back that money to Social Security in less than 10 years.
Clinton still your hero? Or is he just another tricky dick?
I'd like to pass a resolution telling Congress to stop wasting our money. Oh right, but our national debts aren't piling up nearly as fast as they were last year, so everything is going to be just fine? I mean every household only owes about $400,000 in government debt which I'm sure is sustainable.
Great. I think it is about time to start printing more money.
I've alway liked the idea of SVG overtaking Flash as the format of choice for more complex multimedia online, but nobody seems to use it very much. Any ideas why not? Why isn't the OSS community promoting SVG more?
Promote something that you can't yet use as it was intended? I came looking at this thread specifically to find out about SVG support in firefox 2 and see if anyone had posted about it. Once a sufficient subset of SVG features are supported in firefox, you will see development and content start to accelerate. Already there is a thriving community of SVG developers out there and with the ability to inlcude rich inline SVGs in your html pages along with ajax interactivity. You will see content and applications that are far better and better integrated than what you could do with either flash or ajax alone.
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of wikipedia because of its less-than-authoritative nature
I also recall that professors would usually penalize the citation of any encyclopedia in a paper for the same reason. An encyclopedia is not a primary or authoritative source. Encyclopedias are just a way to get up to speed on a particular subject quickly and in one place. The day that any encyclopedias be it wikipedia or britannica are accepted as proper references in a university or even high school level work would be a sad day for education.
And on top of this, let's all congratulate these guys on breaking the RFCs by "helping" shovel us to the address we "meant" to type in.. Let's not report back an error and help the end user correct their mistake, but transparently forward them so they never know.
Google does this with the "I'm feeling lucky" button. A lot of people use this or use google to type in addresses instead of the url bar, beacause it is far more user freindly. Errors are not always good user interface design.
And what happens when someone registers wordpres.org? Then where are we? Well, I meant wordpres, not wordpress.. Thanks for sending me where I don't want to be.. A haven for phishers?
Sure the challenge in running this service would be keeping your list of legitamite mispellings up to date, but to call this a haven for phishers misses their main selling point which is the blocking phishing sites at the DNS level.
There service is probably not going to see great adoption because it really seems aimed at internet novices, but requires them to change their own DNS settings. But I could definately see using their DNS servers for Grandma's PC.
As for breaking RFCs... How is this any worse than most firewall products out there? They allow all sorts of blocking of selected content based on matched patterns, and often block particular web sites without explanantion. At least they are saying for some redirected or blocked content they are going to tell you what just happened and give you some option to go somewhere else.
Though I might think just running your urls through google is preferable, since they will still give you the option of going to the url you intended. But with a site blocked at the DNS level, then the only option might be to type in the IP address and even then that wouldn't allow you to access name based virtual hosts.
Plus trying to get the entire internet to change one of its key components is a rather ambitious attempt.
This is not to replace the "entire internet" with a new DNS system. From my read of their website, it is a individual choice to set up your computer using their DNS servers. And they are being very clear about how their servers will behave and what they will do with incorrectly typed addresses. This is from the same guys who have been running one of the most reliable free DNS services, everydns.
Somone needs to figure out how to economically and quickly find and travel to habitable planets outside our solar system, or to quickly terraform Venus (not Mars).
Short of that, we need to also get very serious about asteroid defense technology.
All the other crap that comes up: global warming, population growth, oil running out are mostly qualiy of life issues not mere survival. Even super volcanoes and other catastrophes won't likely cause global destruction, even though they have the potential to reduce our civilization back to subsistence living. A hundred years isn't likely a timeframe when the planet would be completely destroyed of all human life, unless we nuke ourselves. But it is a likely time frame when we still have abundant enough resources and a large enough population to expect that we can solve some of the more elusive answers to our longer term survival and prosperity. After a hundred years though, or even far less than that, we start running out of resources to sustain such a large population. Even now we are seeing the signs of economic strain on our available resources.
Or population growth will eventually take care of itself as it has in many countries already, but actual declines in population will reduce the chance that some of those people will be smart enough (and lucky enough) to figure out the real challenge, which is how to get some of us off this planet to somewhere else where we can propser.
Heck if it was practical, I'd want google to be software running on my computer and I'd want the entire up to date content of Internet cached locally on my computer.
Networks are great for communication, but communication will come to a halt from time to time which could excacerbate a crisis or cause one. The risk of being without critical information just when you need it most is a considerable risk, but the risk of everyone being without critical information at the same time is an even greater risk.
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep.:(
Why is this sad? "Thru" is more economical than "through", sounds the same, is in common use, and is unambiguous in meaning. Language should be allowed to evolve.
never mind, this fella was simply on a power trip if he was using other people's accounts to authorize "adding a printer or moving a new computer onto the system"
Sure the system might suck, but to hack around it just to get things done is not the way to fix it. The key to bureaucracies is to let system fail if it cannot be made to work, not to break the law just to make it work.
I'd like to know why specifically he felt he needed these passwords to get his job done. It probably says a lot about why this project has cost half a billion dollars already.
My guess would be that it has something to do with not having a proper development environment with adequate test data. I could see this become a problem if they were expected to test this new system against their existing production user database.
This fella sounds like a scapegoat for a badly managed IT project.
People has been saying that security is THE good argument for switching forever, be it Linux, Solaris, BSD or Mac folks, but this has never been a sufficient argument to fuel the switch.
Face it, security is a good scare tactic when a politician is trying to spend OPM (other people's money) to get some pork defense spending in their home district, but not such a good argument when getting people to make decisions about which software they are going to use. Security concerns just don't influence that many people's decisions. Sure if you computer becomes unusable because of malware and such, then people start to notice, but until it happens to you it is someone else's problem.
The problem I have is this: if IE7 reverses the spread of Firefox, what's to stop Microsoft from repeating history and ceasing all serious development again?
Well, funny thing about firefox is that it isn't going away. As long as the mozilla foundation remains focused and/or as long as there are developers out there willing to take up the slack if they do. Microsoft complacency will only fuel firefox development and Microsoft arrogance will fuel its adoption. A new release of IE will not significantly hurt firefox, yes it may slow migration away, but how long until Microsoft mis-steps again?
That isn't exactly useful rhetoric. The fact is that using open formats has nothing to do with accessibility as there are third party plugins around in MS Office itself to read and write these standardized formats. Accessibility is just a last ditch talking point of Microsoft's marketing department to delay the mass exodus.
Unfortunately, I don't know the profile of the average windows pirate, but I would assume that he doesn't know the things that we know, and that retaining access to the files that are important to him and the other software (office, iTunes, digital camera, etc.) that he is used to - and may have paid for - is going to outweigh the cost of purchasing windows (which is like $88).
I agree... some people will think it is worth it and others won't. Some people just want to browse the web in firefox, occassionaly create a letter or resume in openoffice, and sometimes play a little game to pass the time. And maybe they will want to edit an image occasionally in gimp, or do something else in the many applications available for linux for free. Those people will be quite content with a ubuntu based desktop computer for $50-100 less than a properly licensed ms windows based computer. Heck if I were a parent buying a computer for a kid, I might just choose linux to avoid having to get nickel and dimed to death with third party software.
Sure, making Windows a pain for pirates isn't going to be a panacea for linux, but that doesn't mean the windows user base won't shrink a little. Microsoft really have nowhere to go but down.
Sure... they could go to Linux or other open source based systems but the fact that most have never heard of it and just want their PC to work exactly as it did before basically precludes this possibility.
People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together. What are the numbers of new enrollment in other religions besides the state run religion, in Finland? I am just saying that if your desire is to seperate church and state, then create a movement to seperate the two. Don't create a movement to get people to abandon religion. That is just subversive.
What is the difference? If your religion is state sponsored and you believe in seperation of church and state, then what other principled choice do you have? Or do you suggest illegally dodging the tax and still going to church on Sunday?
But I doubt that is what actually is going on. I suspect that most of the people resigning were never really members in the first place. In advertising it is called "opt out". The only choice you are given is to resign if you are by default a member of the church.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose science - or at least its standards - must have changed a lot since I was in school.
While i'll admit there was certainly a lack of detail in the BBC article about how actual measurements where made. It seems that it would have made the most sense to have an MRI or at least electrodes hooked up to be taking measurements of brain activity while the experiment was going on. That is how you associate a person's perception with physical brain activity, nothing new there. So, yes if they didn't take any such actual measurements, then I would be very critical of the experiment as just speculation without substantive value, but I think you would be wise to reserve final judgement unless you have actually read details of the study.
It doesn't require much creative effort in terms of plot, it's just exploiting the franchise.
Did someone say Ewoks?
The thing about birds is that they attack at distance and at speed. Stereoscopic vision, which is really at the crux of the hypothesis, is only really effective at short ranges. Human stereoscopic vision is most effective in the 0-30 foot range, after that we can only really perceive depth through head movement.
So, I'd say it makes sense that snakes drove some of our evolution and probably played an epsecially important role in early evolutionary development of vision, but at some point other predators and environmental factors were probably driving evolution of our other traits.
Calling anyone with a website who writes about something they saw on TV a journalist is kind of strange.
You could say the same thing about anyone with a newspaper press who writes articles and hands their paper out on the subway to try and make a buck. Focusing on the manner of delivery rather than the form of the writing is a mistake.
That said, I'd think we would be much better off using the word "reporter" to mean someone who reports facts that they have collected and verified themselves from an objective viewpoint, rather than the seemingly more loosely defined word "journalist".
Really the word "Journalist" itself does not imply quality nor any particular achievement on the part of the writer. Same as the label "Poet" or "Playwright" it merely indicates the form of writing.
Yes thanks for correcting me, I had heard the larger number on the radio yesterday, I should have noticed the error.
Though that would still leave the average household which is making $43,318 (census) paying 10%, whcih is about $4350, of their income every year to pay off the debt in the next 30 years, assuming a 4% interest rate.
So, 10% of every able working adult's income for the next 30 years just to get to broke.
Clinton held the congress' feet to the fire on budgets and in the end generated surplus and was paying down the debt.
Yes Clinton was probably the most fiscally responsible American president in the last 40 years. At least relatively speaking.
But please stop repeating a falsehood! At no time during the Clinton presidency did the debt actually go down! In the best fiscal year 1999-2000 he and a Republican Congress still added 18 Billion dollars to the overall debt! Sure, debt held by the public went down for several years, but that means that intragovernmental debt shot up because the Federal government was borrowing from Social Security and Medicare to "balance the budget". Guess what? The government has to start paying back that money to Social Security in less than 10 years.
Clinton still your hero? Or is he just another tricky dick?
I'd like to pass a resolution telling Congress to stop wasting our money. Oh right, but our national debts aren't piling up nearly as fast as they were last year, so everything is going to be just fine? I mean every household only owes about $400,000 in government debt which I'm sure is sustainable.
Great. I think it is about time to start printing more money.
to when the US is a Democratic Socialist country like Norway or Sweden.
As opposed to the Communist 1 1/2 party state that it is today?
I look forward to a day when the US is at least more Democratic. I think we already have much of the Socialist part already.
I've alway liked the idea of SVG overtaking Flash as the format of choice for more complex multimedia online, but nobody seems to use it very much. Any ideas why not? Why isn't the OSS community promoting SVG more?
Promote something that you can't yet use as it was intended? I came looking at this thread specifically to find out about SVG support in firefox 2 and see if anyone had posted about it. Once a sufficient subset of SVG features are supported in firefox, you will see development and content start to accelerate. Already there is a thriving community of SVG developers out there and with the ability to inlcude rich inline SVGs in your html pages along with ajax interactivity. You will see content and applications that are far better and better integrated than what you could do with either flash or ajax alone.
Being optional is more of a bug than a feature. My internet is bigger than yours.
I know you are just being flip, but there is a point there to address. They are not trying to fragment the Internet anymore than a firewall does.
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of wikipedia because of its less-than-authoritative nature
I also recall that professors would usually penalize the citation of any encyclopedia in a paper for the same reason. An encyclopedia is not a primary or authoritative source. Encyclopedias are just a way to get up to speed on a particular subject quickly and in one place. The day that any encyclopedias be it wikipedia or britannica are accepted as proper references in a university or even high school level work would be a sad day for education.
If something more "friendly" needs to happen, it needs to happen at the application layer instead.
DNS happens at the application layer.
And on top of this, let's all congratulate these guys on breaking the RFCs by "helping" shovel us to the address we "meant" to type in.. Let's not report back an error and help the end user correct their mistake, but transparently forward them so they never know.
Google does this with the "I'm feeling lucky" button. A lot of people use this or use google to type in addresses instead of the url bar, beacause it is far more user freindly. Errors are not always good user interface design.
And what happens when someone registers wordpres.org? Then where are we? Well, I meant wordpres, not wordpress.. Thanks for sending me where I don't want to be.. A haven for phishers?
Sure the challenge in running this service would be keeping your list of legitamite mispellings up to date, but to call this a haven for phishers misses their main selling point which is the blocking phishing sites at the DNS level.
There service is probably not going to see great adoption because it really seems aimed at internet novices, but requires them to change their own DNS settings. But I could definately see using their DNS servers for Grandma's PC.
As for breaking RFCs... How is this any worse than most firewall products out there? They allow all sorts of blocking of selected content based on matched patterns, and often block particular web sites without explanantion. At least they are saying for some redirected or blocked content they are going to tell you what just happened and give you some option to go somewhere else.
Though I might think just running your urls through google is preferable, since they will still give you the option of going to the url you intended. But with a site blocked at the DNS level, then the only option might be to type in the IP address and even then that wouldn't allow you to access name based virtual hosts.
Plus trying to get the entire internet to change one of its key components is a rather ambitious attempt.
This is not to replace the "entire internet" with a new DNS system. From my read of their website, it is a individual choice to set up your computer using their DNS servers. And they are being very clear about how their servers will behave and what they will do with incorrectly typed addresses. This is from the same guys who have been running one of the most reliable free DNS services, everydns.
Somone needs to figure out how to economically and quickly find and travel to habitable planets outside our solar system, or to quickly terraform Venus (not Mars).
Short of that, we need to also get very serious about asteroid defense technology.
All the other crap that comes up: global warming, population growth, oil running out are mostly qualiy of life issues not mere survival. Even super volcanoes and other catastrophes won't likely cause global destruction, even though they have the potential to reduce our civilization back to subsistence living. A hundred years isn't likely a timeframe when the planet would be completely destroyed of all human life, unless we nuke ourselves. But it is a likely time frame when we still have abundant enough resources and a large enough population to expect that we can solve some of the more elusive answers to our longer term survival and prosperity. After a hundred years though, or even far less than that, we start running out of resources to sustain such a large population. Even now we are seeing the signs of economic strain on our available resources.
Or population growth will eventually take care of itself as it has in many countries already, but actual declines in population will reduce the chance that some of those people will be smart enough (and lucky enough) to figure out the real challenge, which is how to get some of us off this planet to somewhere else where we can propser.
Heck if it was practical, I'd want google to be software running on my computer and I'd want the entire up to date content of Internet cached locally on my computer.
Networks are great for communication, but communication will come to a halt from time to time which could excacerbate a crisis or cause one. The risk of being without critical information just when you need it most is a considerable risk, but the risk of everyone being without critical information at the same time is an even greater risk.
Sadly, I've seen 5th grade papers where the kid spelled through 'thru' and the teacher didn't let out a peep. :(
Why is this sad? "Thru" is more economical than "through", sounds the same, is in common use, and is unambiguous in meaning. Language should be allowed to evolve.
never mind, this fella was simply on a power trip if he was using other people's accounts to authorize "adding a printer or moving a new computer onto the system"
Sure the system might suck, but to hack around it just to get things done is not the way to fix it. The key to bureaucracies is to let system fail if it cannot be made to work, not to break the law just to make it work.
I'd like to know why specifically he felt he needed these passwords to get his job done. It probably says a lot about why this project has cost half a billion dollars already.
My guess would be that it has something to do with not having a proper development environment with adequate test data. I could see this become a problem if they were expected to test this new system against their existing production user database.
This fella sounds like a scapegoat for a badly managed IT project.
People has been saying that security is THE good argument for switching forever, be it Linux, Solaris, BSD or Mac folks, but this has never been a sufficient argument to fuel the switch.
Face it, security is a good scare tactic when a politician is trying to spend OPM (other people's money) to get some pork defense spending in their home district, but not such a good argument when getting people to make decisions about which software they are going to use. Security concerns just don't influence that many people's decisions. Sure if you computer becomes unusable because of malware and such, then people start to notice, but until it happens to you it is someone else's problem.
The problem I have is this: if IE7 reverses the spread of Firefox, what's to stop Microsoft from repeating history and ceasing all serious development again?
Well, funny thing about firefox is that it isn't going away. As long as the mozilla foundation remains focused and/or as long as there are developers out there willing to take up the slack if they do. Microsoft complacency will only fuel firefox development and Microsoft arrogance will fuel its adoption. A new release of IE will not significantly hurt firefox, yes it may slow migration away, but how long until Microsoft mis-steps again?
That isn't exactly useful rhetoric. The fact is that using open formats has nothing to do with accessibility as there are third party plugins around in MS Office itself to read and write these standardized formats. Accessibility is just a last ditch talking point of Microsoft's marketing department to delay the mass exodus.
Unfortunately, I don't know the profile of the average windows pirate, but I would assume that he doesn't know the things that we know, and that retaining access to the files that are important to him and the other software (office, iTunes, digital camera, etc.) that he is used to - and may have paid for - is going to outweigh the cost of purchasing windows (which is like $88).
I agree... some people will think it is worth it and others won't. Some people just want to browse the web in firefox, occassionaly create a letter or resume in openoffice, and sometimes play a little game to pass the time. And maybe they will want to edit an image occasionally in gimp, or do something else in the many applications available for linux for free. Those people will be quite content with a ubuntu based desktop computer for $50-100 less than a properly licensed ms windows based computer. Heck if I were a parent buying a computer for a kid, I might just choose linux to avoid having to get nickel and dimed to death with third party software.
Sure, making Windows a pain for pirates isn't going to be a panacea for linux, but that doesn't mean the windows user base won't shrink a little. Microsoft really have nowhere to go but down.
Sure... they could go to Linux or other open source based systems but the fact that most have never heard of it and just want their PC to work exactly as it did before basically precludes this possibility.
Money is a suprisingly efficient motivator.
People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together. What are the numbers of new enrollment in other religions besides the state run religion, in Finland? I am just saying that if your desire is to seperate church and state, then create a movement to seperate the two. Don't create a movement to get people to abandon religion. That is just subversive.
What is the difference? If your religion is state sponsored and you believe in seperation of church and state, then what other principled choice do you have? Or do you suggest illegally dodging the tax and still going to church on Sunday?
But I doubt that is what actually is going on. I suspect that most of the people resigning were never really members in the first place. In advertising it is called "opt out". The only choice you are given is to resign if you are by default a member of the church.