They are only talking about "characters" in a password, which is a bit dubious. The important information is how many bits long the password provides. For a discussion on this see, for example:
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/dicewarefaq.html#howlong
For this reason and others, I'll take their "report" with a grain
Google will only find you the books you are asking it to find. Consider a high school student looking for information on a certain event in World War II. Sure, she could google "world war 2", but then what? If she doesn't know what she's looking for, she's completely lost from that point on.
A good librarian, on the other hand, could help our hypothetical student and guide her between the different sources of information: encyclopedias, litterature, magazines, maybe even movies. Sure, nobody's perfect, but it's much better to have someone to talk to than to be presented with a prompt for keywords, especially when you don't know what those keywords might be. The job description of a librarian, simply put, is wider than "take keywords, fetch books relevant to those keywords".
Google might be good for when you know what you're looking for. Librarians is for everything else.
True. In my opinion, we should socialize the wires in one way or another. For example, we could transfer the ownership of all wires and equipment to a non-profit trust fund run by EFF. All money people are now paying for an internet connection could actually go into paying people to make the internet better, new equipment etc. instead of going down greedy corporation owners' pockets.
Ah, but the dreams. It will be many years still until that's even a feasible option.
It's not very hard to realize that the same mechanisms which would allow for helpful behavior in a small group might also allow for helpful behavior on an aggregated scale. That is to say, the thing in our brain which tells us "it's good to help one another" might not be able to distinguish between situations depending on whether there is an evolutionary benefit to the action or not.
The timeframe in which altruistic behavior according to your definition would even be possible is miniscule compared to the time it took our species to evolve. We invented agriculture a mere 10,000 years ago. Philanthropy didn't become a possibility until much later. This means there simply hasn't been enough time for the "nice on small scale but asshole on large scale"-gene to evolve.
There is also the possibility not all human behavior is encoded in our genes, but in our society (education, parenting, religious values etc).
Slashdot Mirror
They are only talking about "characters" in a password, which is a bit dubious. The important information is how many bits long the password provides. For a discussion on this see, for example: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/dicewarefaq.html#howlong For this reason and others, I'll take their "report" with a grain
This kind of makes me warm inside. Is this expected?
Google will only find you the books you are asking it to find. Consider a high school student looking for information on a certain event in World War II. Sure, she could google "world war 2", but then what? If she doesn't know what she's looking for, she's completely lost from that point on. A good librarian, on the other hand, could help our hypothetical student and guide her between the different sources of information: encyclopedias, litterature, magazines, maybe even movies. Sure, nobody's perfect, but it's much better to have someone to talk to than to be presented with a prompt for keywords, especially when you don't know what those keywords might be. The job description of a librarian, simply put, is wider than "take keywords, fetch books relevant to those keywords". Google might be good for when you know what you're looking for. Librarians is for everything else.
True. In my opinion, we should socialize the wires in one way or another. For example, we could transfer the ownership of all wires and equipment to a non-profit trust fund run by EFF. All money people are now paying for an internet connection could actually go into paying people to make the internet better, new equipment etc. instead of going down greedy corporation owners' pockets. Ah, but the dreams. It will be many years still until that's even a feasible option.
If you believe themselves more than the music industry, they made square even when you also considered their expenses. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=sv&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.svd.se%2Fkulturnoje%2Fnyheter%2Fartikel_827981.svd
I will use OneSwarm too, as soon as they fix headless usage (i.e. no X).
It's not very hard to realize that the same mechanisms which would allow for helpful behavior in a small group might also allow for helpful behavior on an aggregated scale. That is to say, the thing in our brain which tells us "it's good to help one another" might not be able to distinguish between situations depending on whether there is an evolutionary benefit to the action or not.
The timeframe in which altruistic behavior according to your definition would even be possible is miniscule compared to the time it took our species to evolve. We invented agriculture a mere 10,000 years ago. Philanthropy didn't become a possibility until much later. This means there simply hasn't been enough time for the "nice on small scale but asshole on large scale"-gene to evolve.
There is also the possibility not all human behavior is encoded in our genes, but in our society (education, parenting, religious values etc).