Yes, there IS a debate over it. This study doesn't establish a causal effect, just a correlation. This is a theory for which debate still rages over in the mainstream scientific community.
I seriously hope you're joking. The moderation system of Slashdot would make it nothing more than a popularity contest, with ideological and political agendas always winning over science. I can't even believe your comment was moderated up. Peer-reviews should only be done by a select group of well qualified experts who discuss their review with eachother. I have no idea why you think the horde of unqualified idiots like there are on Slashdot would make a better system.
I agree with the sentiment of halfbaked plan. It is true that being publically available == higher quality. Television, blogs and tabloids are all great examples of blind acceptance of crap improving the quality of things.
I'm also not sure why you're talking about talks instead of published journal articles. You never really address the point of peer-review, you just shrug it off on the basis that some lesser journals may have let some papers through the cracks that they shouldn't have. In other words "they system isn't totally perfect, so let's throw the baby out with the bath water."
Or it would probably be more accurate to describe this as the libertarian fallacy "if there's one tiny of flaw in the system, dismantle the entire system as if it were fundamentally flawed instead of correcting it." Obviously, a few cases of imperfection are nothing compared to the mountain of them that would come with no peer review at all.
The whole reason scientists read journals is because they know they've already been peer-reviewed for quality. If you have blind acceptance, then scientists, who are already extremely busy, have to waste many hours of their time sorting through 99% garbage to get to the 1% of the quality stuff. Most of them, especially researchers, would just give up--because they don't have time for that bullshit. Of course, in magic tom-land, your time is worthless, so it doesn't really matter what you do.
With a peer review system, most of the garbage is weeded out for them ahead of time, that's the whole damn point. And no tom, you're not a scientist. You searching for random crypto papers online to satisfy your personal curiosity is not equivalent to what doctiors, biologists, physicists and chemists would be doing for their jobs.
And now that the evidence about both global warming in general and our role in it in particular is conclusive, the line will now be "oh well...water under the bridge. There's nothing we can do about it now".
It's not conclusive though. Even if you take this study at face value and accept its conclusions, it would not be conclusive evidence that humans were the cause of it. The conclusion of this study is simply that warming is at its highest level in 650k years, it doesn't attempt to assess the cause of it. So no, it's not conclusive. So much for critical thought processes.
That said, there has been no scientific review of this study yet to challenge its results. They used Anarctic ice to determine this? Give me a break. You criticize the Bush administration for just accepting things as given, but that's what you're doing here. Every time a new study comes out supporting your ideology, you proclaim "here's conclusive evidence that we're right", without bothering to challenge it in the sligthest. It's a ridiculous double standard. Of course, I wouldn't accept Slashdotters to apply critical thinking skills and be skeptical of studies which support global warming theories. Hypocrisy at its finest.
This is from the company's website: "Thermal Gradient's flow-through capabilities and simplicity make the technology uniquely suited for miniaturized environments such as Lab-On-A-Chip applications. Additionally, this technology can enable a practical, cost effective and truly random access nucleic acid diagnostic analyzer. Nucleic acid based testing (NAT) can now perform at the same rates and with similar system configurations as those for clinical chemistry and immunochemistry." http://www.thermalgradient.com/
They explicitly refer to it as a lab-on-a-chip, I'm not sure what other evidence you need. I think the idea is that you'd use this in conjunction with another microfluidics device for analysis, not that it would work with other traditional equipment. They already have microchips that can identify specific genetic defects, so this is just a step further in more complete genotyping.
However, the paper you linked to is a lab on a chip devise, and TFA is a macro scale PCR machine.
Not true at all, did you even read the article? It specifically said IN THE ARTICLE TITLE: "New York tech start-up develops DNA amplifier the size of a paper clip." And from the article: "New York company's first-generation fluidic micro-device gets to the marketplace."
The article is clearly referring to a microfluidics device. How you thought it was referring to macroscopic lab equipment is beyond me, especially with them emphasizing it being so tiny.
Well, if you really understand this subject matter, it shouldn't be confusing to you, right? His assertion that speeding up heating rates won't help seems to run contrary to those actually doing this research. Others who responded in this thread even seem to think his one hour estimate is off. Why would they bother reducing the heating time if it was a wasted effort? Are all these different experts spending over a decade researching this just idiots who managed to overlook something so obvious that a Slashdotter realized it right away?
I will never get why Slashdotters who, in their infinite wisdom, will manage to be extremely skeptical of numerous researchers who have performed over a decade of research in many different universities, without even bothering to read about the research. I apologize if it's arrogant sounding of me to side with actual experts who specialize in this rather than take the word of a Slashdotter.
I'll bet these same researchers aren't even aware that microfluidics is already being used to rapidly detect genetic defects. You're stuck in a mode of macroscopic thinking.
Yes, you can speed up the process. By doing it on a microscopic scale with microfluidics, you can shortcut the process. This research has been done by people a hell of a lot smarter than you, and I wouldn't doubt them just because your understanding of traditional technology doesn't let you think you can do it. read my comment here for information on the past research on this. And I'm not taking your estimates at face value, especially if they involve low-end, crappy equipment that wouldn't be used for any real analysis. Your "doubts" are founded on nothing other than ignorance, as I somehow doubt you have any background in MEMS or microfluidics technology whatsoever.
I did a quick search and came across a paper summarizing past research. It seems that some methods 'cheat' to simulate PCR and other use methods which simply aren't possible to achive on a macroscopic scale. I don't understand why people are criticizing what would essentially be a super cheap (by comparison to the expensive traditional lab equipament) chip which can do this in minutes. Keep in mind,microfluidics is helping revolutionize lots of areas of biology. It's already being used to create microchips that can detect individual genes in a blood sample given to it.
Polymerse chain reaction PCR is a process used to exponentially replicate double-stranded DNA, allowing even a very small amount of DNA to be amplified into a sufficient amount for sophisticated analysis. PCR involves a three-step thermal cycle in the presence of a reagent soup: i heating the solution to melt the DNA by separating each ds-DNA into two single strands; ii cooling so that DNA primers and DNA polymerase enzymes bind each strand annealing; and iii warming slightly to promote the base-by-base DNA replication by the polymerase extension. Ideally, each PCR cycle doubles the number of double-stranded DNA molecules. Integrating PCR into microfluidic devices has been achieved by many groups, typically by cycling the temperature of a microfluidic sample to replicate the standard macroscopic PCR Wilding et al., 1994; Burns et al., 1996; Cheng et al., 1996; Woolley et al., 1996; Schmalzing et al., 1997; Belgrader et al., 1999; Khandurina et al., 2000; Chiou et al., 2001; Hong et al., 2001; Lagally, Emrich, and Mathies, 2001; Lagally, Medintz, and Mathies, 2001; Auroux et al., 2004. An alternate strategy involves pumping solution through various temperature zones to mimic PCR Fig. 35a Kopp et al., 1998; Liu, Enzelberger, and Quake, 2002, whose benefit is that cycle time no longer depends on the time required to heat or cool the solution and its surroundings. Another approach exploits high-Ra buoyant flows to perform PCR in a steady temperature profile without an external pump Krishnan et al., 2002; Braun et al., 2003. The basic idea involves establishing a large convective flow whose roll fills the experimental cell. This flow advects
DNA molecules Pe1 through the variable temperature profile in the fluid. By properly designing the experiment, the temperature profile experienced by DNA can be made to resemble that of conventional PCR, thus allowing the chain reaction to proceed. The underlying convective flows have been established in two ways: i uniformly heating the bottom plate and cooling the top plate enough to drive Rayleigh-Benard convection at Ra106 Krishnan et al., 2002, or ii heating the fluid inhomogeneously Fig. 35b at Ra104 to establish laminar convective flow Braun et al., 2003. Finally, DNA molecules advect with the flow along the bottom of the cell towards the center of the roll, but also move outwards via thermophoresis itself poorly understood, leading to trapping in a ring so long as Pe1 Braun and Libchaber, 2002.
It makes no attempt to filter spam, which like email will soon account for about 80% of content.
Not true at all. Insider screenshots of Google's special internal interfaces to employees show that they actually have a human driven spam filtering services. They basically display a page at a time and have the user rate how likely they think it is spam. I can't remember where I saw the screenshots, so I can't find them.
When Google claims to have 28,600 results, in fact there are only 36. Now that's a con.
Did you read the disclaimer at the end? Google excludes many results if they're too similar. You can click that link at the end to show all of the 28k+ results if you like, but it would be rather pointless. This tends to happen when google indexes things like web forums. Because of the way links to forum threads work, you get a lot of overlapping content, and google is simply smart enough to identify it as overlapping content and just count it as one hit.
Mod (-5) Google bashing. No. This applies to all the search engines.
You'll probably be moderated down for spreading misinformation and not actually bothering read this message at the end: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If those are spam as you say, I think google did a good job by omitting many thousands of spam sites.
I didn't even have to read through all the details of the study to see how it was bunk. I was quite suspicious as to how someone could conduct a small study to determine this, especially considering the extremely large amount of sampling and data analysis require to do such a study. And then, it would rely on a bunch of assumptions about your relatively uknown and non-established testing procedures being accurate. Of course, reading the study it appears they have used the notoriously unreliable Alexa rankings and google's also equally unreliable "link:" feature to gauge popularity (the backlink feature returns a tiny subset of pages that link to it).
I'm sorry, but this study doesn't even attempt to index a large set of data itself, it relies on existing crappy search engine data to validate that those search engines are OMG SO GREAT AND EGALITARIAN. Hello? You can't use search engine data, especially ones known to be unreliable, to confirm shit about them.
Even google admits that phenomenon such as Googlebombing and similar phenomenon is a serious problem and yet, these idiots, with their shitty meausures, think they know better than the people who run the damn search engine.
And when has that EVER stopped Slashdot from America-bashing? I've seen Slashdot post about proposed American bills, with people getting all hot and bothered. So no, I don't see the difference, because whenever a proposed American bill gets posted on Slashdot it gets treated the same as a bill that's been passed.
That's nice, but you still didn't read their website:
5. What protocols are used for voice calls?
Google Talk supports a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling.
You say Google does nothing by using Jabber, except they obviously do, by making it easier to write clients and requiring no reverse engineering. Although I suppose if you're an end user who doesn't give a shit what programmers have to go through, I suppose that's a valid argument, especially when companies like AOL deliberately try to alter the protocol to block alternative clients. Even with the extensions that weren't documented, it's XML based, it's not hard to figure out. Voice chat is more of a minor feature anyway, so you're really getting bent out of shape over nothing.
And this is why you Canada is going in a downard spiral of tyranny. You don't realize how bad you have it. You need to move down to America where it's truly free, instead of being in such an oppressive regime. It never ceases to amaze me how Canadians can tout their freedom with things like this going on.
Now, reverse "Canada" and "America" and this comment gets moderated +5 Insightful. As it stands though, this kind of comment on Slashdot gets moderated -1 Troll. The hypocrisy hurts.
...so you just spewed out all of that bullshit to say "user defined keywords"? Seriously, I love how everyone tries to sugar coat what are really just user defined keywords.
Throwing out words like "free association" doesn't make your point more valid, it makes you look stupid. This isn't free association. Free association is when you say one thing, then someone says the next thing that comes to mind, then the next thing after that which comes to mind, etc... This is an example of free assocation: cat, kitty litter, trash, garbage man, truck, diesel, rockefeller.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the user defined keywords you describe. If people tagged by free association, then the system would be totally useless, because the tags would end up being essentially random (tagging something related to cats as "rockefeller").
If only I had mod points right now, I'd so mod you up and the grandparent down. It just goes to show you, views on Slashdot are moderated based on the strength of their conviction, not based on actual FACTS. It's very well known that OS X is based on ther FreeBSD kernel, it's gotta suck when even the "lesser" lay people than an alleged know-it-all.
I love how Slashdotters continually prove their complete lack of critical thinking skills. Your own example disproves your point. Currently, people are still capable of reading information off the computer screens at airports. After these new passports are issued, people will still be capable of doing the exact same thing. It is not made any easier.
If you're accusing the government of foul play, that's ridiculous, since the current system already allows them to track all the flights you take, since current passports HAVE ALL YOUR INFORMATION WRITTEN ON THEM.
Now that's the part you missed: CURRENT PASSPORTS HAVE ALL YOUR INFORMATION WRITTEN ON THEM IN PLAIN, HUMAN READABLE LANGUAGE. And yet, somehow these are going to increase the risks somehow? Whaaaaaa?
It amazes me what gets moderated as insightful, considering how a little critical thought here reveals that obvious statement. Government tracking is not actually made the slightest bit easier here. If you actually read critiques by security experts, none of credible ones are even using that as a point of criticism, their issue is criminals using the information ( and the financial costs of implementing the system), which is quelled by the fact that it can only be read a few centimeters away and is self-shielded.
Now the benefit of this technology, w hich you ignored, is that it makes passports much harder to forge. But I guess you want passports to be easy to forge, because you believe strongly in identity theft (maybe not, but I'm just exercising the same hyperbole you use).
In twenty years, a whole generation of the world's people will have grown up in a virtual prison, and won't even notice.
Only on Slashdot can a comment like this get moderated up to be insightful. This should be an instant sign that this guy is an idiot and should be moderated down to -1. Go ahead you paranoid, anti-american twits, moderate my comment flamebait, but I know you won't sleep well doing it--you will only mod me down to censor me (hypocritically at that), because you can't rationally address my arguments.
by fix i even mean some 3rd party idea of a shielded passport wallet or something if that is what it comes down to.
Er, did you even read the Slashdot summary? Wow, not only are people not reading the articles anymore, they're not reading the summaries provided by Slashdot. The passports have built-in shields. This concern has already been address. Mod this down -1000, moron.
What's the point in giving a replacement passport for one that's been damaged? Are you serious? How is that even remotely insightful?
I'm not even sure what you're getting at here. Getting a replacement passport wouldn't be easy, obviously, so it's not like you could say "hey I want a replacement" and they just hand it over. They'd require you to go through the same kinds of verification that you'd need to go through to get the passport the first time you had it issued. That's not something they could do while you're sitting at terminal waiting for a plane to take off.
Thanks for that totally generic and useless anti-American rant. I expect your comment to be moderated +5 Insightful despite the fact that it offers nothing of substance.
How did this get modded up? There's nothing insightful or funny about it. It's blatant flamebait in the form of America bashing. Only on slashdot can you say "america is fucked" over and over and get moded up as +5 insightful. Seriously, every mod who moded this up deserves to be taken out and shot. Regardless of whether or not you agree, this comment was not worthy of a +5 insightful ranking, especially considering this idiot didn't even read the prior comments, which state that this isn't even an issued patent.
I'm really getting sick of people disparaging the patent office soley based on patent titles and patent abstracts. I looked through that list and those patents aren't nearly as obvios as they seem. The patent title and abstract are just a SUMMARY of what the patent is about. If I create a revolutionary new display technology, for example, it might have the mundane, unoriginal title of "technology for displaying pixelated graphics on a screen." YOU NEED TO READ THE DAMN PATENT TEXT.
And it seems you didn't read the responses to the comment you linked to. As one person pointed out, the patent for the stamp applicator was actually referring to something LIKE a human tongue (as in it resembles one physically), but which is not actually one. I went to the official US patent office website to look at the illustrations for the patent and it's very clear that it's a unique mechanical device.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, there IS a debate over it. This study doesn't establish a causal effect, just a correlation. This is a theory for which debate still rages over in the mainstream scientific community.
I seriously hope you're joking. The moderation system of Slashdot would make it nothing more than a popularity contest, with ideological and political agendas always winning over science. I can't even believe your comment was moderated up. Peer-reviews should only be done by a select group of well qualified experts who discuss their review with eachother. I have no idea why you think the horde of unqualified idiots like there are on Slashdot would make a better system.
I agree with the sentiment of halfbaked plan. It is true that being publically available == higher quality. Television, blogs and tabloids are all great examples of blind acceptance of crap improving the quality of things.
I'm also not sure why you're talking about talks instead of published journal articles. You never really address the point of peer-review, you just shrug it off on the basis that some lesser journals may have let some papers through the cracks that they shouldn't have. In other words "they system isn't totally perfect, so let's throw the baby out with the bath water."
Or it would probably be more accurate to describe this as the libertarian fallacy "if there's one tiny of flaw in the system, dismantle the entire system as if it were fundamentally flawed instead of correcting it." Obviously, a few cases of imperfection are nothing compared to the mountain of them that would come with no peer review at all.
The whole reason scientists read journals is because they know they've already been peer-reviewed for quality. If you have blind acceptance, then scientists, who are already extremely busy, have to waste many hours of their time sorting through 99% garbage to get to the 1% of the quality stuff. Most of them, especially researchers, would just give up--because they don't have time for that bullshit. Of course, in magic tom-land, your time is worthless, so it doesn't really matter what you do.
With a peer review system, most of the garbage is weeded out for them ahead of time, that's the whole damn point. And no tom, you're not a scientist. You searching for random crypto papers online to satisfy your personal curiosity is not equivalent to what doctiors, biologists, physicists and chemists would be doing for their jobs.
And now that the evidence about both global warming in general and our role in it in particular is conclusive, the line will now be "oh well...water under the bridge. There's nothing we can do about it now".
It's not conclusive though. Even if you take this study at face value and accept its conclusions, it would not be conclusive evidence that humans were the cause of it. The conclusion of this study is simply that warming is at its highest level in 650k years, it doesn't attempt to assess the cause of it. So no, it's not conclusive. So much for critical thought processes.
That said, there has been no scientific review of this study yet to challenge its results. They used Anarctic ice to determine this? Give me a break. You criticize the Bush administration for just accepting things as given, but that's what you're doing here. Every time a new study comes out supporting your ideology, you proclaim "here's conclusive evidence that we're right", without bothering to challenge it in the sligthest. It's a ridiculous double standard. Of course, I wouldn't accept Slashdotters to apply critical thinking skills and be skeptical of studies which support global warming theories. Hypocrisy at its finest.
This is from the company's website: "Thermal Gradient's flow-through capabilities and simplicity make the technology uniquely suited for miniaturized environments such as Lab-On-A-Chip applications. Additionally, this technology can enable a practical, cost effective and truly random access nucleic acid diagnostic analyzer. Nucleic acid based testing (NAT) can now perform at the same rates and with similar system configurations as those for clinical chemistry and immunochemistry."
http://www.thermalgradient.com/
They explicitly refer to it as a lab-on-a-chip, I'm not sure what other evidence you need. I think the idea is that you'd use this in conjunction with another microfluidics device for analysis, not that it would work with other traditional equipment. They already have microchips that can identify specific genetic defects, so this is just a step further in more complete genotyping.
However, the paper you linked to is a lab on a chip devise, and TFA is a macro scale PCR machine.
Not true at all, did you even read the article? It specifically said IN THE ARTICLE TITLE: "New York tech start-up develops DNA amplifier the size of a paper clip." And from the article: "New York company's first-generation fluidic micro-device gets to the marketplace."
The article is clearly referring to a microfluidics device. How you thought it was referring to macroscopic lab equipment is beyond me, especially with them emphasizing it being so tiny.
Well, if you really understand this subject matter, it shouldn't be confusing to you, right? His assertion that speeding up heating rates won't help seems to run contrary to those actually doing this research. Others who responded in this thread even seem to think his one hour estimate is off. Why would they bother reducing the heating time if it was a wasted effort? Are all these different experts spending over a decade researching this just idiots who managed to overlook something so obvious that a Slashdotter realized it right away?
I will never get why Slashdotters who, in their infinite wisdom, will manage to be extremely skeptical of numerous researchers who have performed over a decade of research in many different universities, without even bothering to read about the research. I apologize if it's arrogant sounding of me to side with actual experts who specialize in this rather than take the word of a Slashdotter.
I'll bet these same researchers aren't even aware that microfluidics is already being used to rapidly detect genetic defects. You're stuck in a mode of macroscopic thinking.
Yes, you can speed up the process. By doing it on a microscopic scale with microfluidics, you can shortcut the process. This research has been done by people a hell of a lot smarter than you, and I wouldn't doubt them just because your understanding of traditional technology doesn't let you think you can do it. read my comment here for information on the past research on this. And I'm not taking your estimates at face value, especially if they involve low-end, crappy equipment that wouldn't be used for any real analysis. Your "doubts" are founded on nothing other than ignorance, as I somehow doubt you have any background in MEMS or microfluidics technology whatsoever.
I did a quick search and came across a paper summarizing past research. It seems that some methods 'cheat' to simulate PCR and other use methods which simply aren't possible to achive on a macroscopic scale. I don't understand why people are criticizing what would essentially be a super cheap (by comparison to the expensive traditional lab equipament) chip which can do this in minutes. Keep in mind,microfluidics is helping revolutionize lots of areas of biology. It's already being used to create microchips that can detect individual genes in a blood sample given to it.
R evModPhysJul05.pdf
Here is the text from Microfluidics: Fluid physics at the nanoliter scale:
http://thebigone.stanford.edu/quake/publications/
Polymerse chain reaction PCR is a process used to
exponentially replicate double-stranded DNA, allowing
even a very small amount of DNA to be amplified into a
sufficient amount for sophisticated analysis. PCR involves
a three-step thermal cycle in the presence of a
reagent soup: i heating the solution to melt the DNA
by separating each ds-DNA into two single strands; ii
cooling so that DNA primers and DNA polymerase enzymes
bind each strand annealing; and iii warming
slightly to promote the base-by-base DNA replication
by the polymerase extension. Ideally, each PCR cycle
doubles the number of double-stranded DNA molecules.
Integrating PCR into microfluidic devices has been
achieved by many groups, typically by cycling the temperature
of a microfluidic sample to replicate the standard
macroscopic PCR Wilding et al., 1994; Burns et al.,
1996; Cheng et al., 1996; Woolley et al., 1996; Schmalzing
et al., 1997; Belgrader et al., 1999; Khandurina et al.,
2000; Chiou et al., 2001; Hong et al., 2001; Lagally, Emrich,
and Mathies, 2001; Lagally, Medintz, and Mathies,
2001; Auroux et al., 2004. An alternate strategy involves
pumping solution through various temperature zones to
mimic PCR Fig. 35a Kopp et al., 1998; Liu, Enzelberger,
and Quake, 2002, whose benefit is that cycle
time no longer depends on the time required to heat or
cool the solution and its surroundings. Another approach
exploits high-Ra buoyant flows to perform PCR
in a steady temperature profile without an external
pump Krishnan et al., 2002; Braun et al., 2003. The
basic idea involves establishing a large convective flow
whose roll fills the experimental cell. This flow advects
FIG. 35. Color in online edition Polymerase chain reaction
PCR in a steady temperature field. a Solution is driven
along a channel that winds through temperature regions i,
ii, and iii designed to cause DNA melting, extension, and
annealing. Thus the temperature profile seen by the solution
matches a standard PCR cycle. Reprinted with permission
from Kopp et al., 1998. ©1998 AAAS. b A PCR reactor in
which temperature gradients drive a convective fluid flow that
takes suspended DNA molecules through a temperature profile
designed to resemble that of PCR. Reprinted with permission
from Braun et al., 2003
DNA molecules Pe1 through the variable temperature
profile in the fluid. By properly designing the experiment,
the temperature profile experienced by DNA
can be made to resemble that of conventional PCR, thus
allowing the chain reaction to proceed. The underlying
convective flows have been established in two ways: i
uniformly heating the bottom plate and cooling the top
plate enough to drive Rayleigh-Benard convection at
Ra106 Krishnan et al., 2002, or ii heating the fluid
inhomogeneously Fig. 35b at Ra104 to establish
laminar convective flow Braun et al., 2003. Finally,
DNA molecules advect with the flow along the bottom
of the cell towards the center of the roll, but also move
outwards via thermophoresis itself poorly understood,
leading to trapping in a ring so long as Pe1 Braun and
Libchaber, 2002.
So taking minutes instead of hours and not requiring millions of dollars to be spent on a lab is a minor upgrade? What?
Yes, it's a bug. It normally expands to show all results.
It makes no attempt to filter spam, which like email will soon account for about 80% of content.
Not true at all. Insider screenshots of Google's special internal interfaces to employees show that they actually have a human driven spam filtering services. They basically display a page at a time and have the user rate how likely they think it is spam. I can't remember where I saw the screenshots, so I can't find them.
When Google claims to have 28,600 results, in fact there are only 36. Now that's a con.
Did you read the disclaimer at the end? Google excludes many results if they're too similar. You can click that link at the end to show all of the 28k+ results if you like, but it would be rather pointless. This tends to happen when google indexes things like web forums. Because of the way links to forum threads work, you get a lot of overlapping content, and google is simply smart enough to identify it as overlapping content and just count it as one hit.
Mod (-5) Google bashing. No. This applies to all the search engines.
You'll probably be moderated down for spreading misinformation and not actually bothering read this message at the end: "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 22 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included." If those are spam as you say, I think google did a good job by omitting many thousands of spam sites.
I didn't even have to read through all the details of the study to see how it was bunk. I was quite suspicious as to how someone could conduct a small study to determine this, especially considering the extremely large amount of sampling and data analysis require to do such a study. And then, it would rely on a bunch of assumptions about your relatively uknown and non-established testing procedures being accurate. Of course, reading the study it appears they have used the notoriously unreliable Alexa rankings and google's also equally unreliable "link:" feature to gauge popularity (the backlink feature returns a tiny subset of pages that link to it).
I'm sorry, but this study doesn't even attempt to index a large set of data itself, it relies on existing crappy search engine data to validate that those search engines are OMG SO GREAT AND EGALITARIAN. Hello? You can't use search engine data, especially ones known to be unreliable, to confirm shit about them.
Even google admits that phenomenon such as Googlebombing and similar phenomenon is a serious problem and yet, these idiots, with their shitty meausures, think they know better than the people who run the damn search engine.
And when has that EVER stopped Slashdot from America-bashing? I've seen Slashdot post about proposed American bills, with people getting all hot and bothered. So no, I don't see the difference, because whenever a proposed American bill gets posted on Slashdot it gets treated the same as a bill that's been passed.
That's nice, but you still didn't read their website:
5. What protocols are used for voice calls?
Google Talk supports a custom XMPP-based signaling protocol and peer-to-peer communication mechanism. We will fully document this protocol. In the near future, we plan to support SIP signaling.
http://www.google.com/talk/developer.html
You say Google does nothing by using Jabber, except they obviously do, by making it easier to write clients and requiring no reverse engineering. Although I suppose if you're an end user who doesn't give a shit what programmers have to go through, I suppose that's a valid argument, especially when companies like AOL deliberately try to alter the protocol to block alternative clients. Even with the extensions that weren't documented, it's XML based, it's not hard to figure out. Voice chat is more of a minor feature anyway, so you're really getting bent out of shape over nothing.
Er, did you even bother reading their website? They use the Jabber protocol.
And this is why you Canada is going in a downard spiral of tyranny. You don't realize how bad you have it. You need to move down to America where it's truly free, instead of being in such an oppressive regime. It never ceases to amaze me how Canadians can tout their freedom with things like this going on.
Now, reverse "Canada" and "America" and this comment gets moderated +5 Insightful. As it stands though, this kind of comment on Slashdot gets moderated -1 Troll. The hypocrisy hurts.
...so you just spewed out all of that bullshit to say "user defined keywords"? Seriously, I love how everyone tries to sugar coat what are really just user defined keywords.
Throwing out words like "free association" doesn't make your point more valid, it makes you look stupid. This isn't free association. Free association is when you say one thing, then someone says the next thing that comes to mind, then the next thing after that which comes to mind, etc... This is an example of free assocation: cat, kitty litter, trash, garbage man, truck, diesel, rockefeller.
That has absolutely nothing to do with the user defined keywords you describe. If people tagged by free association, then the system would be totally useless, because the tags would end up being essentially random (tagging something related to cats as "rockefeller").
If only I had mod points right now, I'd so mod you up and the grandparent down. It just goes to show you, views on Slashdot are moderated based on the strength of their conviction, not based on actual FACTS. It's very well known that OS X is based on ther FreeBSD kernel, it's gotta suck when even the "lesser" lay people than an alleged know-it-all.
I love how Slashdotters continually prove their complete lack of critical thinking skills. Your own example disproves your point. Currently, people are still capable of reading information off the computer screens at airports. After these new passports are issued, people will still be capable of doing the exact same thing. It is not made any easier.
If you're accusing the government of foul play, that's ridiculous, since the current system already allows them to track all the flights you take, since current passports HAVE ALL YOUR INFORMATION WRITTEN ON THEM.
Now that's the part you missed: CURRENT PASSPORTS HAVE ALL YOUR INFORMATION WRITTEN ON THEM IN PLAIN, HUMAN READABLE LANGUAGE. And yet, somehow these are going to increase the risks somehow? Whaaaaaa?
It amazes me what gets moderated as insightful, considering how a little critical thought here reveals that obvious statement. Government tracking is not actually made the slightest bit easier here. If you actually read critiques by security experts, none of credible ones are even using that as a point of criticism, their issue is criminals using the information ( and the financial costs of implementing the system), which is quelled by the fact that it can only be read a few centimeters away and is self-shielded.
Now the benefit of this technology, w hich you ignored, is that it makes passports much harder to forge. But I guess you want passports to be easy to forge, because you believe strongly in identity theft (maybe not, but I'm just exercising the same hyperbole you use).
In twenty years, a whole generation of the world's people will have grown up in a virtual prison, and won't even notice.
Only on Slashdot can a comment like this get moderated up to be insightful. This should be an instant sign that this guy is an idiot and should be moderated down to -1. Go ahead you paranoid, anti-american twits, moderate my comment flamebait, but I know you won't sleep well doing it--you will only mod me down to censor me (hypocritically at that), because you can't rationally address my arguments.
by fix i even mean some 3rd party idea of a shielded passport wallet or something if that is what it comes down to.
Er, did you even read the Slashdot summary? Wow, not only are people not reading the articles anymore, they're not reading the summaries provided by Slashdot. The passports have built-in shields. This concern has already been address. Mod this down -1000, moron.
What's the point in giving a replacement passport for one that's been damaged? Are you serious? How is that even remotely insightful?
I'm not even sure what you're getting at here. Getting a replacement passport wouldn't be easy, obviously, so it's not like you could say "hey I want a replacement" and they just hand it over. They'd require you to go through the same kinds of verification that you'd need to go through to get the passport the first time you had it issued. That's not something they could do while you're sitting at terminal waiting for a plane to take off.
Thanks for that totally generic and useless anti-American rant. I expect your comment to be moderated +5 Insightful despite the fact that it offers nothing of substance.
How did this get modded up? There's nothing insightful or funny about it. It's blatant flamebait in the form of America bashing. Only on slashdot can you say "america is fucked" over and over and get moded up as +5 insightful. Seriously, every mod who moded this up deserves to be taken out and shot. Regardless of whether or not you agree, this comment was not worthy of a +5 insightful ranking, especially considering this idiot didn't even read the prior comments, which state that this isn't even an issued patent.
I'm really getting sick of people disparaging the patent office soley based on patent titles and patent abstracts. I looked through that list and those patents aren't nearly as obvios as they seem. The patent title and abstract are just a SUMMARY of what the patent is about. If I create a revolutionary new display technology, for example, it might have the mundane, unoriginal title of "technology for displaying pixelated graphics on a screen." YOU NEED TO READ THE DAMN PATENT TEXT.
And it seems you didn't read the responses to the comment you linked to. As one person pointed out, the patent for the stamp applicator was actually referring to something LIKE a human tongue (as in it resembles one physically), but which is not actually one. I went to the official US patent office website to look at the illustrations for the patent and it's very clear that it's a unique mechanical device.