A game where you have a half-dozen things to say to a half-dozen people is NOT a good dialogue game. Honestly, good dialogue games must be really hard to make, because I've never even HEARD of one. Oh, and they're expensive per gameplay - because if they're about dialogue and not speed, then once you do a mission right you'll have zero problems with it again. MUCH of Trek is about the "reveal" at the end of the episode, where something is not as it seemed at the beginning and it's amazing and cool how clever the writers were or weren't about it.
Star Wars, by comparison, had basically just one "reveal" in the whole series, involving who was related to who was related to who.
To a large extent it's also about teamwork and team interactions - where people involved in the mission have subtly different goals and you have to work out what they are. That has some definite MMORPG possibilities, if they do it right.
I've just heard on Slashdot about the end of Pegasus Mail and Mercury. Being often in the Linux and OS X worlds, I liked PMail and it seemed extremely well written, but I was never the most hardcore user. I never had a need to use Mercury. I'm also a professional developer.
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain why I think you should probably Open Source these products. Not because it's good for the world, but because it's good for YOU. (I do think your creations have been good for the world, and I do think open sourcing them would be good for the world, but that isn't my main point.)
I wouldn't tell someone selling commercial software and making a big profit that it'll be better for them if it's Open Source. Indeed, if you promptly get a substantial monetary offer for continuing it or for selling the codebase I can understand why you might do that. But if you don't get one promptly, people are going to start migrating away in droves - so the chances are going to rapidly go down, not up.
You have basically two assets: A codebase and a userbase. (I'll include publicity with your userbase.) There are also many free competitors to your products. You have tough decisions to make that seem to involve: How can I turn these assets into money? Simply closing it down doesn't get you any money.
You could open source this project with minimal cost. As I understand there may be portions you can't release that way, simply remove them. With some luck, enough people will want to help that they'll fix it. If you strike while the iron is hot and you still have many users, I think this is quite likely. If it doesn't happen, you aren't out anything but a few hours work, and the world has your code. If so few people cared about it, you probably weren't going to get any more for it. But if it does happen:
1. You can continue to release new versions of the software, even if you do minimal work on it yourself. By keeping it alive, you set yourself up to continue getting support contracts, and you'll still be the prime source for them. (If you aren't charging enough for the support contracts, that's an independent problem...)
2. Since you have already created the majority of the code, you can use a MySQL type dual license, which would allow you to release embedded versions of the code for someone else to wrap into a closed-source pay product. This is a niche that a pure-GPL product can't fill.
3. You could even simply put up some ads on the site.
Perhaps Roland has no grasp of science, English, or both. Or more likely, he's simply a whore who doesn't care about the truth. I wouldn't have read this if I'd noticed it was him.
He ALWAYS lies, horribly, in the summaries to make them sensational. These lies are inconsistent with the blog HE WROTE, so I have to go with the (ad-revenue?) whore theory.
Honestly, I think anyone who _repeatedly_ pimps their own links without pointing out that it's THEIR link should get a warning... and then be cut off from posting those links. (I'm not even saying "he can't post other stories" I'm saying "stories with that blog linked in them get at least SOME scrutiny)
Even your watered down version isn't right. Scientist predicted a theoretical limit "L". Scientist noticed all actual materials are at or below 0.3*L. Now we've found materials with... *drumroll* - 0.45*L. That does NOT break his law.
Admittedly most of the common carriers you think about HAVE monopolies, but that's not the point.
I'm definitely for Net Neutrality - AND I'm moderately libertarian. But if you're going to HAVE a government issued monopoly - like EVERY DSL and Cable company does - then they need to be regulated to be fair about what they carry.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, it should always be legal for a municipality to create a competing free highspeed (including WiFi) service if that's what the voting taxpayers want. Making money off your monopoly is NOT a right, it's a priviledge. It doesn't not overrule the responsibility of government to be for the people.
"Why think about the actual issue brought up by the parent post, when you can just taunt Slashdot like that's relevant"
MicrosoftRepresentit (1002310)
Maybe you need more explanation than that elegant quote provides and you couldn't follow it, so here goes.
I'm not saying we definitely shouldn't have the cameras - in fact, in most cases I'm pro public-cameras but anti-wiretapping. But I am saying that anyone who thinks the topic doesn't deserve continued discussion or doesn't think that quote is relevant doesn't understand the issue.
Liberty: In some hypothetical selfish dictatorship you might decide to execute 100 people if it's guaranteed to stop that serial killer, because your goal is not weighed against the good for the people.
In some hypothetical benevolent dictatorship you might decide to execute* 2 people even though only one of them is the serial killer - if you think the killer will kill more than 1 more person, the benefit DOES outweigh the cost when viewed across all people.
In the United States as envisioned by our forefathers we value PERSONAL liberties. So the benefits must not merely outweigh the costs but must _massively_ outweigh the costs to the individual. Under their model, the government wouldn't execute 2 people unless it would save not merely 2 but at least tens of other people, or more... This is the principle upon which we have the freedom of one person to speak when no one else wants it and one person to practice a religion everyone else might hate.
Taking away the ability for someone to walk from one house to another without being recorded is definitely a liberty that has largely been removed. Perhaps the benefits do massively outweigh the costs, but that calculation depends on factors such as how much oversight is placed on the camera operators.
Murder: The only other point I want to note is that some people have said that since death is more or less the ultimate penalty, 1 death = infinite anything less than death. That's simply not the way the world works. If you want to know how much death is worth, perhaps calculate how much it would cost to reduce the average number of traffic deaths by one by improving cars - or more effectively by improving driver's education classes. Even better, simply strengthen the currently idiot-proof tests to get your license. That would cost the governments very little and put the responsibility on the driver to learn how to drive better. (Naturally a nationwide program would cost a lot and reduce deaths by alot - you'd need to divide to find a unit cost.)
Or the costs for better medical accountability to reduce needless deaths during medical procedures. Or the costs to stop someone in the US from dying of hunger. (Not to mention the much-lower costs to reduce some kinds of death in other parts of the world.) Or the costs for meat-safety inspections that are more independent of the meat-packing industry that cause deaths through foodborne illnesses. Or the economic impact of improving the health quality of foods and dividing by the reduced number of deaths from heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
The numbers will vary, but they're all lower than you'd think.
*Obviously if you can actually arrest them you could put both of them in jail and hope it sorts itself out - and there are a zillion other tricky police things to do, like letting them go and watching both of them really carefully. That's why this is a hypothetical. Maybe the killer is flying away in a little stealth plane with a hostage and you only have this opportunity to reliably shoot him down.
RFID IDs are TERRIBLE for personal security, because it adds RANGE to detection and forgery. Parent post has ABSOLUTELY missed the point.
No one is claiming that magnetic stripes and/or bar codes are bad for security. In both cases they make it very marginally harder to copy and virtually eliminate data-entry errors. RFID has a BIG problem beyond that: It can be read without the knowledge of the holder.
No one can read the inside of my paper passport without me giving it to them - nor my magstripe nor bar code. I have complete control over who sees it. Sure, I might be conned into showing someone, but they have to con me. RFID means that:
1. They can copy my information without me ever showing it to them. 2. They can READ my information without me ever showing them, allowing them to identify me from a distance. 3. Even with a perfectly random RFID system, they can identify your nationality from afar, which obviously may make you a target in some circumstances.
To be SAFE, an RFID system must have a) zero emissions in the closed state (eg a tested foil cover) AND b) No non-random information broadcast from the chip. (that is, a random passportID that is broadcast that has NO other information until you look it up in the appropriate database.)
"b" is necessary because "a" alone still allows someone nearby you to snoop whenever you have to show your passport somewhere.
I generally agree with the parent, that if I as a developer agree to give away my product for free to increase visibility, no one should complain about that. And as the sibling post says, everyone wins in this deal...
TFA is highly misguided.
But this deal is much BETTER than that. First, promotion is hard. The idea that promotion bringing much greater sales isn't worth anything implies the speaker doesn't know anything about business. I bet there's NO product where you couldn't spent 100,000 in advertising correctly and manage to get 10,000 in sales. (Obviously, that would be stupid.) But the better you do it AND the more money you spend on it the more sales you get. The idea that MacHeist didn't bring TREMENDOUS value to the table in terms of successful marketing.
Second, MacHeist put up all the money for it. They took a gamble on their successful promotion. If they hadn't sold enough, they'd have lost a lot of money. The developers only risked the possibility that a lot of people might get licenses to their software... adding to their mindshare and marketshare in historically valid software marketing. (The traditional downside is that people will see your software as valueless if you gave it away... but wait, in this case they paid for it.) The other way to run MacHeist (the only really different one I can think of) is to COLLECT a bunch of money from each developer for marketing and then split the profits. The analogy of a "manager or agent" from TFA is NOT appropriate. An agent MIGHT loan some money to an artist for advertising expenses, but they DO take that money back out of the artist's cut.
Third, TFA's quote: "...developers a flat fee in exchange for an unlimited number of licenses tilt grossly in the favor of the MacHeist team" is OBVIOUSLY wrong. _Perhaps_ the AMOUNT of the flat fee was too low... But $1,000,000 would still be a flat fee, and no one is claiming that would've been unfair to the developers. This deal is structured how it should be: The developers have no differential say in the success or failure of the sales numbers. Their contribution is static (existing software) and unchanging. But everyone wants MacHeist to have a strong incentive to sell a lot of copies. SO MacHeist should get the vast majority of the value from the Nth copy sold as N approaches a high number, to make them make maximum marketing effort to get to high numbers.
Entire TFA is based on the idea that MacHeist being really successful makes them evil. Profitable marketing and distribution engines without heavy developer investment are EXACTLY what shareware needs. The more profit they can make without costing the devs, the better.
First, because you need about a Ghz to make everything work at once on a single stream...
Second, because more CPUs is NOT directly related to how loud your machine is. Whether you bought good, powerful, quiet fans (case/PSU/CPU/GPU) is the single biggest factor in the noise, NOT the number of them.
I have the general feeling that your answer is correct but nonetheless confusing. I would explain it this way:
If you pass near a large object, you accelerate towards it. If it's gravity doesn't cause you to crash into it, at your nearest point you'll be going much faster and then you'll slow down. This is generally akin to putting your car in neutral and going down into a ravine and up the other side.
Look at that analogy from the side, and you can see that the angle you had pointing "down" is much different than the angle pointing "up" - in this process, without acceleration, we've turned a lot - with a substantial change in vector momentum but in the end no change in the amount of momentum. (If we're at the same height and didn't accelerate, we have the same amount of momentum, but in a different direction.)
Now, in our analogy the object is below us (earth) whereas in space we go AROUND it to make this happen - and there's a limited kind of curves the ravine will follow.
There are huge advantages to making adjustments to your course during this process, because these adjustments can help you make perfect use of the "slingshot" of the object - so a small amount of thrust may result in gaining the most perfect exit trajectory possible.
(The post that said impulse = net momentum change isn't wrong, except that we're talking about "impulse generated from the probe" and excluding "impulse generated by getting lower into the gravity well of something" (etc.))
It might not scale for other reasons, but it DEFINITELY doesn't scale for the same reason any surface effect doesn't scale.
We're going to make something 10x as long (which assumes a ~20 cm Gecko to get to man-sized, which I think is generous.)
So the surface area of the giant-gecko feet are 100x bigger. (10^2 - because you have length and width) But the Gecko ways 1000x as much (lenght, width, depth) So for a 10x scaling factor in length, you have 10x more mass PER surface area - in other words you stick 10x LESS well if you make a giant Gecko. Real Geckos have pretty big feet, too - and a cousin-post listed all sorts of reasons why humans aren't evolved to be surface-climbers.
But the other BIG thing to remember is that most surfaces are simply not made to have a hundred-fifty lbs STUCK to them. Have you ever tried to glue anything heavy to a painted wall? If you're lucky the glue fails and the thing falls. If you're unlucky the wall surface (paint) fails and a big piece rips off. If you're MORE unlucky the WALL fails - you do know that interior walls are NOT structural - they're just fireproofing. Only the studs are EVER structural. Drywall can't hold 20lbs sideways and never 150 lbs straight down. Most ceilings are actually worse for this...
And if you're falling because this happened, the chunk will be stuck to you, stopping you from catching yourself on anything else.
So in effect your spidey suit can only work where you have certain kinds of exposed structural materials, and even then a fair bit of luck and care.
So, my first point is that I hadn't done a bunch of independent research on Protected Mode - I was using the quote you gave. I then did a little research, and it does seem better than that quote led me to believe.
I have my fears that in the name of installable DRM (protecting the MPAA's rights) or compatibility that they're going to either allow bad things to happen without prompt or - almost as bad - get people so used to the prompt that it's meaningless.
For instance, I ALREADY have to click something to get ActiveX controls to install fairly often. Am I still going to have to click on those? Does that mean they're going to defeat the sandbox, and I can't run them IN the sandbox? Or does that mean that because they can't install I'm going to have to click ok every time I load that page? Do pages that are supposed to be dealing with DRMd music get special privs to make sure you're not ripping the stream? None of these are acceptable... They've left themselves a minefield of problems, but I'll admit that on further research I can't find one they've definitively stepped on.
DorkusMasterus's comment is very informative about fair use. And I agree that copying is never stealing. (Note: IANAL)
HOWEVER:
The BIGGEST reason why the DMCA needs to be struck down is that it does an end-run around fair use. It is completely within fair use to use clips from a copyrighted work. It certainly depends on the amount, but sampling is definitely allowed.
What you _can't_ do under the DMCA is exactly what you're asking about: You can't circumvent copy protection no matter how trivial - and almost all commercial DVDs are encrypted. Under the DMCA (in the US only, of course) you can't legally do this EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THE CLIP (under fair use) You can't even do this if YOU MADE the DVD. (Although presumably no one would sue you for that)
Strangely, this seems to mean that if someone anonymously sent you the clip you WOULD be able to use it. (I'm also not yet aware of a case where they went after anyone for viewing any number of "shared" files - to my knowledge they've only gone after claims that someone did the SHARING. But I think they have a potential traditional-copyright claim, it just doesn't give them the massive powers of the DCMA) Or if you recorded the clip from an analog or unencrypted digital video out on a legitimate DVD player. Or from a VCR. Note that HDMI is NOT unencrypted, which is why they want to put it on your devices and why you _don't_ want it - because that's not an output that you can legally decrypt stuff from unless you're an approved HDMI device.
IE7 Protected Mode lets you browse without installing any controls. Which is great. Somewhat better than just turning ActiveX off entirely in an earlier version of IE.
But that does NOT fix the problem. Because with it off things won't work, and it's not going to ship off by default because people will then think it's "broken" Microsoft created the problem with ActiveX security. They can only fix the problem in two ways:
1. Force ActiveX into a tight, tight virtual machine. Which will be a real pain, and the occasional applet will still fail.
2. Turn ActiveX off by default and do it to SO MANY machines that people are forced to replace it on their websites with something else.
(Note, for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter if "something else" is "ActiveX2.0" - as long as THAT _IS_ in a sandbox. Or it can be Flash or Java or Javascript - all of which have potential flaws but all of which are not wide open.)
Amazon's A9 HAD this, but they killed it. As part of stopping their own search and just using someone else's... Oh wait, that someone else's was MSN Live Search.
Personally I interpret the article summary as anti-Apple FUD. Everyone has security problems, and everyone can do better. I'm not - at all - trying to say that Apple shouldn't be better. They should. But there are two huge problems that make Windows worlds worse than anything else, and will continue to do so until they're actually fixed... Until then, comparing Windows to OS X in desktop* security is merely FUD.
I. ActiveX. ActiveX is DESIGNED to give a web server full control over your machine. With Flash or Java, even if they're enabled a website can only do stuff if they also exploit a - very rare - flaw in your Virtual Machine. In ActiveX, if you let that control run it can basically do anything. They have some checks to try to block the probably-worst applets, but in the end it runs the code unprotected. Until ActiveX is limited to a VM, it should be totally disabled.
I'd personally guess that this alone accounts for more regular attacks than everything-else-put-together. Don't use ActiveX. And if you're not using ActiveX, there's little reason to use IE...
II. Administrator use is chronic. Basically nobody runs OSX in root or sudo-d mode. LOTS of people run Windows routinely in Administrator mode, for a few main reasons: 1) Lots of software only runs that way, and switching is a pain. NO user app should need to be root to run. 2) LOTS of software is very hard to install so a nonAdmin can use it properly, for starters because it only works on the account it was installed into.
I will completely admit that if all the ISVs behaved perfectly 1 & 2 wouldn't be a problem - but it is VERY plausible for Microsoft to exert enough control to make this better for the vast majority of users. Also, I don't believe all these ISVs do it just to be stupid - my guess is that the structure of Windows makes it MUCH easier to do it that way.
3) Lots of software that shouldn't even need admin privs to install does for no good reason. (I presume because of the way DLLs and the registry work they need to modify system folders even if they're only going to run as a local user - but that's definitely a Windows problem that it's structured that way.) And once you give those pieces of software admin privs, they can do anything - like installing themself as System so you can't kill them even WITH admin privs. All software should be installable with the MINIMUM possible privs. (Obviously system software or a virus checker needs admin privs.)
There are plenty of smaller reasons to be unhappy with Windows security, and I'm not trying to say I love their track record. I didn't address at all the fact that it comes out of the box extremely remote exploitable, (average of ~20 minutes for an unpatched box to be exploited on the internet - and several hours to download the patches!) But those are problems other OSes at least sometimes have and you can make reasonable comparisons. Until the two above are fixed, you shouldn't even COMPARE Windows desktop* security to OS X or Linux.
*Note that I said desktop. While there are some problems, neither of the above super-problems is a server problems. In fact, if you have to choose a server OS, you should probably choose based on what your admin is experienced in - better to have a well administered box than ANY badly admined box.
Mod parent up - the "+" is quite unreliable. qmail uses a "-" for the mostly-same purpose.
For those who think this strategy well-and-truly evaporates when companies realize it, think again.
Let me back up a step: There are three reasons to use such a strategy: Tracking (eg, to prevent them realizing that the same person registered at two sites when they control both) spam ( to prevent spam) and spam-tracking (to track who SENT you spam.)
The tracking requirement is only met with very unique addresses - ideally at different such services from different IPs, perhaps using TOR - or using TOR sometimes. Gmail w/ plus isn't really good enough for this if companies figure it out, but it isn't really good enough anyway, personally.
The other two requirements it IS good enough for. Even if spam companies figure out to strip back to the plus, that only gives them access to the main account. Since the main account isn't secret, simply don't use it as your "private" account - let it get filtered like all the other semi-spam. If you want some mail to have a "nospam" priority do something like "me+secretworkemail@gmail.com" where you're ADDING more/different stuff after the plus.
I'm not sure I've ever said this before, but for the most part I agree with both the parent and the gp. And the next root post down that talks about how important China is. (And India too)
I'd like to add the concept of taxation simplicity, though. As an example, you generally don't want to make, say, a tax on computers because then you make it important whether someone defines something as a computer. Is an XBox a computer? You don't want to put the government in the business of deciding how much carbon you spent - at best you want a situation where you present them with data following their accounting rules and they occasionally audit you - like the IRS.
You want to tax what's important to you. Carbon-neutrality is NOT important. Carbon-reduction IS important. (The distinction is between binary or an open ended scale. Getting rid of more is better.) So you don't want a tax on something that isn't carbon neutral, you want a taxation system that taxes adding carbon and credits removing it.
I'd suggest that we need an import tariff on goods that can't verify their carbon and pollutant status - and if they can have a few different gradations. This is extra good because it addresses a major imbalance of free trade. There will be some cheating, but over time you tighten up the rules and increase the amounts.
Domestically, you don't want to try to account for the carbon status of every home. A nonrenewable energy tax does a similar job in many ways, so I'd start with that. It's already metered at the power station or at the pump, so that's an advantage.
Then you need to systematically address practices that release carbon and pollutants in disproprotion to the amount of energy they use and figure out similar ways to tax them.
Certainly you should also reward carbon-negative practices, like a tax credit for private forests over a certain size - or installing filters that remove the CO2 somehow.
Well, you seem to have been intent on interpreting everything I said backwards*. I agree with you that some of the words you put in my mouth are silly. You seem to be some kind of fundamentalist athiest - I can't talk about philosophy without you seeing everything in a black and white that makes me your enemy.
The very first paragraph was bible-specific, the rest was not. Honestly my whole post was about telling religious people evolution wasn't bad, not about telling evolutionists they need to join a religion. I'm not sure where you got that second idea because I sure wasn't trying to make that point, and wouldn't.
First off, what I actually said was "...evolution... is closer to be proof OF G-d than a refutation of him/her" I did NOT say that it DID prove there was a G-d, did make me believe in him/her, that I did believe in a god or (especially) that it encouraged belief in the Bible - which is NOT synonymous with believing in a god!
I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other on a proof of a god, which is by its nature impossible to prove. _ALL_ I said was that I thought evolution was usually grouped on the wrong side of a debate about divinity.
Similarly, I did NOT say that most scientists believed in a god** I also said "if someone can't understand how I can have this position (even if they disagree)" That last part, which you quoted, should've told you something. Whether they believe in it or not, I'd be willing to bet those scientists can UNDERSTAND the point I'm trying to make.
While your post doesn't seem to be a good example, it is quite possible to understand something without agreeing with it. Scientists do it all the time.
computers: I by no means am trying to reduce the value of the countless years of hard work to make modern computers. I'm merely trying to say that most of that work is in making arrangements of a relatively small number of components - that you can _make_ complexity from simplicity. I never meant that the arrangement was easy.
quarks: I completely agree that we aren't at any pinnacle of science. I purposefully chose a less than current "psuedopinnacle" so that point would be clearer. I know what a quark is, I used to work at FermiLab.
I personally think there's some suggestion in the math that quarks will eventually be broken apart farther. I certainly wasn't trying to claim that protons were unbreakable. What I WAS trying to claim goes like this: Chemistry with ~100 elements is much simpler than alchemy with a zillion materials. Chemistry with protons, neutrons, and electrons is simpler than that... And with EM, those alone DO make up all the stuff we "usually" encounter in the sense of people interacting with materials in a conscious sense.
The history of science doesn't suggest to me that we're going to find out that protons don't exist, even if we may learn much more about them and may learn about other weird particles we didn't know existed.
Numbers: I never said irrational numbers weren't USEFUL, or that we might not use any variety of numbers in performing calculations. What I said was that at the most basic physical level we only needed a few numbers that weren't integers***. But I can explain more:
If we were calculating how long it was going to take light to cross some distance, we'd probably use "c" - the speed of light. This number is very important in many calculations, but it's not philosophically important, because it has units, so this number is different depending on the units. With the right units, this value would be 1. This number is only important within the context we happened to chose for meter and second. It turns out that if you combine important physical equations you can do so in such a way that the units cancel. If you do this you either get an integer or not. But if not, it's one or a combination of a very few numbers.****
pi and e are _math_ constants. They can be derived purely from math. pi can be derived as long as you assume flat plane
I'm not actually Jewish, I just have Jewish friends. But that's the genesis for my spelling it that way, because it feels to me like respecting them and because it might start this discussion.
(To my knowledge it's probably actually fine for a non-Jew to write it out... my understanding is that conversion to Judaism is discouraged because according to Judaism if you're a non-Jew you basically just have to be a good person to go to heaven but if you're a Jew you need to also follow like 3000 laws. So converting does NOT get you access to heaven, it actually makes it HARDER to get to heaven. So broadly speaking converting people isn't really a nice thing to do to them. I'm guessing this is one of those differential laws. )
The worst of the fundies take a very old document from a time when metaphor was often used and interpret it both very literally AND very selectively. (eg gays are bad but wearing blended clothes is ok and they don't keep Kosher*. That's the same old testament! ) And they choose to very literally interpret the English translation, no matter what the original probably said. In a country which is really not that literate I can see how this happens - religion is about your pastor, not about the book.
But not everyone who's religious is like that. It's perfectly reasonable to think that G-d guided each step of evolution - evolution isn't incompatible with G-d at all. But I think this doesn't give your G-d enough credit...
Which do you think shows more omnipotence: Building a car that G-d has to tuneup every 100 miles, or building a car that drives forever and constantly improves itself on the fly to be better for existing road conditions.
Evolution does not logically require a god. But to me the wonderful elegance of evolution - and indeed of most science once humankind actually understands the topic fairly well - is closer to be proof OF G-d than a refutation of him/her.
My personal feeling is that if someone can't understand how I can have this position (even if they disagree), they need to take more math and science classes.
Computers are really built on just a couple SIMPLE elements - transitors. But millions of these SAME elements working together in a particular way gives us the computer I'm typing this on, Google, and Wikipedia. There is a wonderful elegance to this extreme complexity being built from the extreme simplicity of the evolutionary process.
Alchemy was really hard. With chemistry we can do much more... and we realize that all things we're familiar with are made up only of protons, neutrons and electrons. (and those of quarks - and yes there are less-common particles and radiation)
When you get down to basics, there's only a very few times numbers we need that aren't integers... All around, it's extremely elegant.
*and Kosher food is often healthier than "normal" food, in the same general way that Organic is - there are rules about icky things you aren't allowed to do prepping them.
Submitter asked for a tagging solution like ID3 - got many results for IPTC. Which I didn't know about, and which sounds great for what it is. In particular, if you're going to email files around and then need to be able to find the source FROM the image file, an in-file tag like this is what you want - and I'm sure why newspapers use it.
But for the INTENT you talked about - managing and searching for your photos - it's all wrong unless your system 100% caches it - which for YOUR purposes is a lot like not using it. You do NOT want to have to open every single image file on every single filesystem to search for something, especially to do complex searches. Furthermore, since your search information is MUCH smaller than the images, you want to be able to search through tags of images that you don't currently have. (eg, that aren't mounted or are unplugged)
(Note that if you search a bunch of files by filename you only open the fs chunks for each DIRECTORY, not for _any_ files.)
This is doubly true if your tagging format is multiple-file aware, and you can tell it that you have two copies of the same files on different drives and that it should never return two results for them.
XML is probably a good enough solution for your purposes, which is why I posted this below one talking about how KPhotoAlbum is XML based.
For a multiple simultaneous write situation, flat file XML is simply not enough and you'll need a DB (and with some indicies you'll get MUCH better search speed) - but you can always export backups to XML.
Now you've gone and made me think we should be making such software.
I don't know about the even older stuff, but for the mac, there was freeware - Transmac I believe - that lets you read MacOS floppies on a Windows machine. (I was using it on NT4, but I'm reasonably certain it or an analog is still around..)
And I'm reasonably certain a newer mac without a floppy can still read the old floppies if you get a USB floppy drive for it.
The problem is NOT that Google is letting you fake CallerID - it's that CallerID is trusted by anybody, when the telcos don't care a lick about securing it. (There are dozens of for-pay but cheap services to alter your callerID...) I'd even accept a nontechnological solution involving it being both criminally and civilly illegal for you to spoof it. But that clearly doesn't exist, either.
If anything I hope this abuse gets really widespread and callerID gets dropped as a trustworthy source.
And to think that lots of times telcos will let you into your voicemail based ONLY on spoofable callerID, when they could be using a more secure system. (Since legitmate calls to the voicemail on THEIR system would come from THEIR system)
This is a less important version of the SSN problem. The real SSN problem is NOT that some places don't guard your SSN carefully enough. The problem is that you have an ID number that you MUST give to all employers, employees, banks, etc. (fine...) AND which those places have decided to use as a password. It's this second part that completely bonkers and needs to be abolished. My SSN is NOT proof of who I AM! It can't be, I have to give it to dozens and dozens of people. Nor is anything on the public record, like my actual mother's maiden name. (I use a fake one, of course)
Slashdot Mirror
A game where you have a half-dozen things to say to a half-dozen people is NOT a good dialogue game. Honestly, good dialogue games must be really hard to make, because I've never even HEARD of one. Oh, and they're expensive per gameplay - because if they're about dialogue and not speed, then once you do a mission right you'll have zero problems with it again. MUCH of Trek is about the "reveal" at the end of the episode, where something is not as it seemed at the beginning and it's amazing and cool how clever the writers were or weren't about it.
Star Wars, by comparison, had basically just one "reveal" in the whole series, involving who was related to who was related to who.
To a large extent it's also about teamwork and team interactions - where people involved in the mission have subtly different goals and you have to work out what they are. That has some definite MMORPG possibilities, if they do it right.
I've just heard on Slashdot about the end of Pegasus Mail and Mercury. Being often in the Linux and OS X worlds, I liked PMail and it seemed extremely well written, but I was never the most hardcore user. I never had a need to use Mercury. I'm also a professional developer.
If you'll bear with me for a moment, I'll explain why I think you should probably Open Source these products. Not because it's good for the world, but because it's good for YOU. (I do think your creations have been good for the world, and I do think open sourcing them would be good for the world, but that isn't my main point.)
I wouldn't tell someone selling commercial software and making a big profit that it'll be better for them if it's Open Source. Indeed, if you promptly get a substantial monetary offer for continuing it or for selling the codebase I can understand why you might do that. But if you don't get one promptly, people are going to start migrating away in droves - so the chances are going to rapidly go down, not up.
You have basically two assets: A codebase and a userbase. (I'll include publicity with your userbase.) There are also many free competitors to your products. You have tough decisions to make that seem to involve: How can I turn these assets into money? Simply closing it down doesn't get you any money.
You could open source this project with minimal cost. As I understand there may be portions you can't release that way, simply remove them. With some luck, enough people will want to help that they'll fix it. If you strike while the iron is hot and you still have many users, I think this is quite likely. If it doesn't happen, you aren't out anything but a few hours work, and the world has your code. If so few people cared about it, you probably weren't going to get any more for it. But if it does happen:
1. You can continue to release new versions of the software, even if you do minimal work on it yourself. By keeping it alive, you set yourself up to continue getting support contracts, and you'll still be the prime source for them. (If you aren't charging enough for the support contracts, that's an independent problem...)
2. Since you have already created the majority of the code, you can use a MySQL type dual license, which would allow you to release embedded versions of the code for someone else to wrap into a closed-source pay product. This is a niche that a pure-GPL product can't fill.
3. You could even simply put up some ads on the site.
Perhaps Roland has no grasp of science, English, or both. Or more likely, he's simply a whore who doesn't care about the truth. I wouldn't have read this if I'd noticed it was him.
He ALWAYS lies, horribly, in the summaries to make them sensational. These lies are inconsistent with the blog HE WROTE, so I have to go with the (ad-revenue?) whore theory.
Honestly, I think anyone who _repeatedly_ pimps their own links without pointing out that it's THEIR link should get a warning... and then be cut off from posting those links. (I'm not even saying "he can't post other stories" I'm saying "stories with that blog linked in them get at least SOME scrutiny)
Even your watered down version isn't right. Scientist predicted a theoretical limit "L". Scientist noticed all actual materials are at or below 0.3*L. Now we've found materials with... *drumroll* - 0.45*L. That does NOT break his law.
Admittedly most of the common carriers you think about HAVE monopolies, but that's not the point.
I'm definitely for Net Neutrality - AND I'm moderately libertarian. But if you're going to HAVE a government issued monopoly - like EVERY DSL and Cable company does - then they need to be regulated to be fair about what they carry.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, it should always be legal for a municipality to create a competing free highspeed (including WiFi) service if that's what the voting taxpayers want. Making money off your monopoly is NOT a right, it's a priviledge. It doesn't not overrule the responsibility of government to be for the people.
"Why think about the actual issue brought up by the parent post, when you can just taunt Slashdot like that's relevant"
MicrosoftRepresentit (1002310)
Maybe you need more explanation than that elegant quote provides and you couldn't follow it, so here goes.
I'm not saying we definitely shouldn't have the cameras - in fact, in most cases I'm pro public-cameras but anti-wiretapping. But I am saying that anyone who thinks the topic doesn't deserve continued discussion or doesn't think that quote is relevant doesn't understand the issue.
Liberty:
In some hypothetical selfish dictatorship you might decide to execute 100 people if it's guaranteed to stop that serial killer, because your goal is not weighed against the good for the people.
In some hypothetical benevolent dictatorship you might decide to execute* 2 people even though only one of them is the serial killer - if you think the killer will kill more than 1 more person, the benefit DOES outweigh the cost when viewed across all people.
In the United States as envisioned by our forefathers we value PERSONAL liberties. So the benefits must not merely outweigh the costs but must _massively_ outweigh the costs to the individual. Under their model, the government wouldn't execute 2 people unless it would save not merely 2 but at least tens of other people, or more... This is the principle upon which we have the freedom of one person to speak when no one else wants it and one person to practice a religion everyone else might hate.
Taking away the ability for someone to walk from one house to another without being recorded is definitely a liberty that has largely been removed. Perhaps the benefits do massively outweigh the costs, but that calculation depends on factors such as how much oversight is placed on the camera operators.
Murder:
The only other point I want to note is that some people have said that since death is more or less the ultimate penalty, 1 death = infinite anything less than death. That's simply not the way the world works. If you want to know how much death is worth, perhaps calculate how much it would cost to reduce the average number of traffic deaths by one by improving cars - or more effectively by improving driver's education classes. Even better, simply strengthen the currently idiot-proof tests to get your license. That would cost the governments very little and put the responsibility on the driver to learn how to drive better. (Naturally a nationwide program would cost a lot and reduce deaths by alot - you'd need to divide to find a unit cost.)
Or the costs for better medical accountability to reduce needless deaths during medical procedures. Or the costs to stop someone in the US from dying of hunger. (Not to mention the much-lower costs to reduce some kinds of death in other parts of the world.) Or the costs for meat-safety inspections that are more independent of the meat-packing industry that cause deaths through foodborne illnesses. Or the economic impact of improving the health quality of foods and dividing by the reduced number of deaths from heart disease, diabetes, obesity and cancer.
The numbers will vary, but they're all lower than you'd think.
*Obviously if you can actually arrest them you could put both of them in jail and hope it sorts itself out - and there are a zillion other tricky police things to do, like letting them go and watching both of them really carefully. That's why this is a hypothetical. Maybe the killer is flying away in a little stealth plane with a hostage and you only have this opportunity to reliably shoot him down.
RFID IDs are TERRIBLE for personal security, because it adds RANGE to detection and forgery. Parent post has ABSOLUTELY missed the point.
No one is claiming that magnetic stripes and/or bar codes are bad for security. In both cases they make it very marginally harder to copy and virtually eliminate data-entry errors. RFID has a BIG problem beyond that: It can be read without the knowledge of the holder.
No one can read the inside of my paper passport without me giving it to them - nor my magstripe nor bar code. I have complete control over who sees it. Sure, I might be conned into showing someone, but they have to con me. RFID means that:
1. They can copy my information without me ever showing it to them.
2. They can READ my information without me ever showing them, allowing them to identify me from a distance.
3. Even with a perfectly random RFID system, they can identify your nationality from afar, which obviously may make you a target in some circumstances.
To be SAFE, an RFID system must have a) zero emissions in the closed state (eg a tested foil cover) AND b) No non-random information broadcast from the chip. (that is, a random passportID that is broadcast that has NO other information until you look it up in the appropriate database.)
"b" is necessary because "a" alone still allows someone nearby you to snoop whenever you have to show your passport somewhere.
I generally agree with the parent, that if I as a developer agree to give away my product for free to increase visibility, no one should complain about that. And as the sibling post says, everyone wins in this deal...
TFA is highly misguided.
But this deal is much BETTER than that. First, promotion is hard. The idea that promotion bringing much greater sales isn't worth anything implies the speaker doesn't know anything about business. I bet there's NO product where you couldn't spent 100,000 in advertising correctly and manage to get 10,000 in sales. (Obviously, that would be stupid.) But the better you do it AND the more money you spend on it the more sales you get. The idea that MacHeist didn't bring TREMENDOUS value to the table in terms of successful marketing.
Second, MacHeist put up all the money for it. They took a gamble on their successful promotion. If they hadn't sold enough, they'd have lost a lot of money. The developers only risked the possibility that a lot of people might get licenses to their software... adding to their mindshare and marketshare in historically valid software marketing. (The traditional downside is that people will see your software as valueless if you gave it away... but wait, in this case they paid for it.) The other way to run MacHeist (the only really different one I can think of) is to COLLECT a bunch of money from each developer for marketing and then split the profits. The analogy of a "manager or agent" from TFA is NOT appropriate. An agent MIGHT loan some money to an artist for advertising expenses, but they DO take that money back out of the artist's cut.
Third, TFA's quote: "...developers a flat fee in exchange for an unlimited number of licenses tilt grossly in the favor of the MacHeist team" is OBVIOUSLY wrong. _Perhaps_ the AMOUNT of the flat fee was too low... But $1,000,000 would still be a flat fee, and no one is claiming that would've been unfair to the developers. This deal is structured how it should be: The developers have no differential say in the success or failure of the sales numbers. Their contribution is static (existing software) and unchanging. But everyone wants MacHeist to have a strong incentive to sell a lot of copies. SO MacHeist should get the vast majority of the value from the Nth copy sold as N approaches a high number, to make them make maximum marketing effort to get to high numbers.
Entire TFA is based on the idea that MacHeist being really successful makes them evil. Profitable marketing and distribution engines without heavy developer investment are EXACTLY what shareware needs. The more profit they can make without costing the devs, the better.
First, because you need about a Ghz to make everything work at once on a single stream...
Second, because more CPUs is NOT directly related to how loud your machine is. Whether you bought good, powerful, quiet fans (case/PSU/CPU/GPU) is the single biggest factor in the noise, NOT the number of them.
Third, of course is dual-core chips...
I have the general feeling that your answer is correct but nonetheless confusing. I would explain it this way:
If you pass near a large object, you accelerate towards it. If it's gravity doesn't cause you to crash into it, at your nearest point you'll be going much faster and then you'll slow down. This is generally akin to putting your car in neutral and going down into a ravine and up the other side.
Look at that analogy from the side, and you can see that the angle you had pointing "down" is much different than the angle pointing "up" - in this process, without acceleration, we've turned a lot - with a substantial change in vector momentum but in the end no change in the amount of momentum. (If we're at the same height and didn't accelerate, we have the same amount of momentum, but in a different direction.)
Now, in our analogy the object is below us (earth) whereas in space we go AROUND it to make this happen - and there's a limited kind of curves the ravine will follow.
There are huge advantages to making adjustments to your course during this process, because these adjustments can help you make perfect use of the "slingshot" of the object - so a small amount of thrust may result in gaining the most perfect exit trajectory possible.
(The post that said impulse = net momentum change isn't wrong, except that we're talking about "impulse generated from the probe" and excluding "impulse generated by getting lower into the gravity well of something" (etc.))
Why are the three IPs with private ranges all marked differently? All of 10. and all of 172. are private...
It might not scale for other reasons, but it DEFINITELY doesn't scale for the same reason any surface effect doesn't scale.
We're going to make something 10x as long (which assumes a ~20 cm Gecko to get to man-sized, which I think is generous.)
So the surface area of the giant-gecko feet are 100x bigger. (10^2 - because you have length and width) But the Gecko ways 1000x as much (lenght, width, depth) So for a 10x scaling factor in length, you have 10x more mass PER surface area - in other words you stick 10x LESS well if you make a giant Gecko. Real Geckos have pretty big feet, too - and a cousin-post listed all sorts of reasons why humans aren't evolved to be surface-climbers.
But the other BIG thing to remember is that most surfaces are simply not made to have a hundred-fifty lbs STUCK to them. Have you ever tried to glue anything heavy to a painted wall? If you're lucky the glue fails and the thing falls. If you're unlucky the wall surface (paint) fails and a big piece rips off. If you're MORE unlucky the WALL fails - you do know that interior walls are NOT structural - they're just fireproofing. Only the studs are EVER structural. Drywall can't hold 20lbs sideways and never 150 lbs straight down. Most ceilings are actually worse for this...
And if you're falling because this happened, the chunk will be stuck to you, stopping you from catching yourself on anything else.
So in effect your spidey suit can only work where you have certain kinds of exposed structural materials, and even then a fair bit of luck and care.
So, my first point is that I hadn't done a bunch of independent research on Protected Mode - I was using the quote you gave. I then did a little research, and it does seem better than that quote led me to believe.
I have my fears that in the name of installable DRM (protecting the MPAA's rights) or compatibility that they're going to either allow bad things to happen without prompt or - almost as bad - get people so used to the prompt that it's meaningless.
For instance, I ALREADY have to click something to get ActiveX controls to install fairly often. Am I still going to have to click on those? Does that mean they're going to defeat the sandbox, and I can't run them IN the sandbox? Or does that mean that because they can't install I'm going to have to click ok every time I load that page? Do pages that are supposed to be dealing with DRMd music get special privs to make sure you're not ripping the stream? None of these are acceptable... They've left themselves a minefield of problems, but I'll admit that on further research I can't find one they've definitively stepped on.
DorkusMasterus's comment is very informative about fair use. And I agree that copying is never stealing. (Note: IANAL)
HOWEVER:
The BIGGEST reason why the DMCA needs to be struck down is that it does an end-run around fair use. It is completely within fair use to use clips from a copyrighted work. It certainly depends on the amount, but sampling is definitely allowed.
What you _can't_ do under the DMCA is exactly what you're asking about: You can't circumvent copy protection no matter how trivial - and almost all commercial DVDs are encrypted. Under the DMCA (in the US only, of course) you can't legally do this EVEN IF YOU HAVE THE RIGHT TO USE THE CLIP (under fair use) You can't even do this if YOU MADE the DVD. (Although presumably no one would sue you for that)
Strangely, this seems to mean that if someone anonymously sent you the clip you WOULD be able to use it. (I'm also not yet aware of a case where they went after anyone for viewing any number of "shared" files - to my knowledge they've only gone after claims that someone did the SHARING. But I think they have a potential traditional-copyright claim, it just doesn't give them the massive powers of the DCMA) Or if you recorded the clip from an analog or unencrypted digital video out on a legitimate DVD player. Or from a VCR. Note that HDMI is NOT unencrypted, which is why they want to put it on your devices and why you _don't_ want it - because that's not an output that you can legally decrypt stuff from unless you're an approved HDMI device.
According to your post:
IE7 Protected Mode lets you browse without installing any controls. Which is great. Somewhat better than just turning ActiveX off entirely in an earlier version of IE.
But that does NOT fix the problem. Because with it off things won't work, and it's not going to ship off by default because people will then think it's "broken" Microsoft created the problem with ActiveX security. They can only fix the problem in two ways:
1. Force ActiveX into a tight, tight virtual machine. Which will be a real pain, and the occasional applet will still fail.
2. Turn ActiveX off by default and do it to SO MANY machines that people are forced to replace it on their websites with something else.
(Note, for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't matter if "something else" is "ActiveX2.0" - as long as THAT _IS_ in a sandbox. Or it can be Flash or Java or Javascript - all of which have potential flaws but all of which are not wide open.)
Amazon's A9 HAD this, but they killed it. As part of stopping their own search and just using someone else's... Oh wait, that someone else's was MSN Live Search.
n e-war-continues-with-amazon-a9-powered-by-msn-live /
/. story:0 3
I'm sure that's not related at all.
Google:
http://www.geckoandfly.com/2006/05/05/search-engi
Prev
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/01/03562
Personally I interpret the article summary as anti-Apple FUD. Everyone has security problems, and everyone can do better. I'm not - at all - trying to say that Apple shouldn't be better. They should. But there are two huge problems that make Windows worlds worse than anything else, and will continue to do so until they're actually fixed... Until then, comparing Windows to OS X in desktop* security is merely FUD.
I. ActiveX. ActiveX is DESIGNED to give a web server full control over your machine. With Flash or Java, even if they're enabled a website can only do stuff if they also exploit a - very rare - flaw in your Virtual Machine. In ActiveX, if you let that control run it can basically do anything. They have some checks to try to block the probably-worst applets, but in the end it runs the code unprotected. Until ActiveX is limited to a VM, it should be totally disabled.
I'd personally guess that this alone accounts for more regular attacks than everything-else-put-together. Don't use ActiveX. And if you're not using ActiveX, there's little reason to use IE...
II. Administrator use is chronic. Basically nobody runs OSX in root or sudo-d mode. LOTS of people run Windows routinely in Administrator mode, for a few main reasons: 1) Lots of software only runs that way, and switching is a pain. NO user app should need to be root to run. 2) LOTS of software is very hard to install so a nonAdmin can use it properly, for starters because it only works on the account it was installed into.
I will completely admit that if all the ISVs behaved perfectly 1 & 2 wouldn't be a problem - but it is VERY plausible for Microsoft to exert enough control to make this better for the vast majority of users. Also, I don't believe all these ISVs do it just to be stupid - my guess is that the structure of Windows makes it MUCH easier to do it that way.
3) Lots of software that shouldn't even need admin privs to install does for no good reason. (I presume because of the way DLLs and the registry work they need to modify system folders even if they're only going to run as a local user - but that's definitely a Windows problem that it's structured that way.) And once you give those pieces of software admin privs, they can do anything - like installing themself as System so you can't kill them even WITH admin privs. All software should be installable with the MINIMUM possible privs. (Obviously system software or a virus checker needs admin privs.)
There are plenty of smaller reasons to be unhappy with Windows security, and I'm not trying to say I love their track record. I didn't address at all the fact that it comes out of the box extremely remote exploitable, (average of ~20 minutes for an unpatched box to be exploited on the internet - and several hours to download the patches!) But those are problems other OSes at least sometimes have and you can make reasonable comparisons. Until the two above are fixed, you shouldn't even COMPARE Windows desktop* security to OS X or Linux.
*Note that I said desktop. While there are some problems, neither of the above super-problems is a server problems. In fact, if you have to choose a server OS, you should probably choose based on what your admin is experienced in - better to have a well administered box than ANY badly admined box.
Mod parent up - the "+" is quite unreliable. qmail uses a "-" for the mostly-same purpose.
For those who think this strategy well-and-truly evaporates when companies realize it, think again.
Let me back up a step: There are three reasons to use such a strategy: Tracking (eg, to prevent them realizing that the same person registered at two sites when they control both) spam ( to prevent spam) and spam-tracking (to track who SENT you spam.)
The tracking requirement is only met with very unique addresses - ideally at different such services from different IPs, perhaps using TOR - or using TOR sometimes. Gmail w/ plus isn't really good enough for this if companies figure it out, but it isn't really good enough anyway, personally.
The other two requirements it IS good enough for. Even if spam companies figure out to strip back to the plus, that only gives them access to the main account. Since the main account isn't secret, simply don't use it as your "private" account - let it get filtered like all the other semi-spam. If you want some mail to have a "nospam" priority do something like "me+secretworkemail@gmail.com" where you're ADDING more/different stuff after the plus.
I'm not sure I've ever said this before, but for the most part I agree with both the parent and the gp. And the next root post down that talks about how important China is. (And India too)
I'd like to add the concept of taxation simplicity, though. As an example, you generally don't want to make, say, a tax on computers because then you make it important whether someone defines something as a computer. Is an XBox a computer? You don't want to put the government in the business of deciding how much carbon you spent - at best you want a situation where you present them with data following their accounting rules and they occasionally audit you - like the IRS.
You want to tax what's important to you. Carbon-neutrality is NOT important. Carbon-reduction IS important. (The distinction is between binary or an open ended scale. Getting rid of more is better.) So you don't want a tax on something that isn't carbon neutral, you want a taxation system that taxes adding carbon and credits removing it.
I'd suggest that we need an import tariff on goods that can't verify their carbon and pollutant status - and if they can have a few different gradations. This is extra good because it addresses a major imbalance of free trade. There will be some cheating, but over time you tighten up the rules and increase the amounts.
Domestically, you don't want to try to account for the carbon status of every home. A nonrenewable energy tax does a similar job in many ways, so I'd start with that. It's already metered at the power station or at the pump, so that's an advantage.
Then you need to systematically address practices that release carbon and pollutants in disproprotion to the amount of energy they use and figure out similar ways to tax them.
Certainly you should also reward carbon-negative practices, like a tax credit for private forests over a certain size - or installing filters that remove the CO2 somehow.
Well, you seem to have been intent on interpreting everything I said backwards*. I agree with you that some of the words you put in my mouth are silly. You seem to be some kind of fundamentalist athiest - I can't talk about philosophy without you seeing everything in a black and white that makes me your enemy.
The very first paragraph was bible-specific, the rest was not. Honestly my whole post was about telling religious people evolution wasn't bad, not about telling evolutionists they need to join a religion. I'm not sure where you got that second idea because I sure wasn't trying to make that point, and wouldn't.
First off, what I actually said was "...evolution... is closer to be proof OF G-d than a refutation of him/her" I did NOT say that it DID prove there was a G-d, did make me believe in him/her, that I did believe in a god or (especially) that it encouraged belief in the Bible - which is NOT synonymous with believing in a god!
I'm not trying to weigh in one way or the other on a proof of a god, which is by its nature impossible to prove. _ALL_ I said was that I thought evolution was usually grouped on the wrong side of a debate about divinity.
Similarly, I did NOT say that most scientists believed in a god** I also said "if someone can't understand how I can have this position (even if they disagree)" That last part, which you quoted, should've told you something. Whether they believe in it or not, I'd be willing to bet those scientists can UNDERSTAND the point I'm trying to make.
While your post doesn't seem to be a good example, it is quite possible to understand something without agreeing with it. Scientists do it all the time.
computers: I by no means am trying to reduce the value of the countless years of hard work to make modern computers. I'm merely trying to say that most of that work is in making arrangements of a relatively small number of components - that you can _make_ complexity from simplicity. I never meant that the arrangement was easy.
quarks: I completely agree that we aren't at any pinnacle of science. I purposefully chose a less than current "psuedopinnacle" so that point would be clearer. I know what a quark is, I used to work at FermiLab.
I personally think there's some suggestion in the math that quarks will eventually be broken apart farther. I certainly wasn't trying to claim that protons were unbreakable. What I WAS trying to claim goes like this: Chemistry with ~100 elements is much simpler than alchemy with a zillion materials. Chemistry with protons, neutrons, and electrons is simpler than that... And with EM, those alone DO make up all the stuff we "usually" encounter in the sense of people interacting with materials in a conscious sense.
The history of science doesn't suggest to me that we're going to find out that protons don't exist, even if we may learn much more about them and may learn about other weird particles we didn't know existed.
Numbers: I never said irrational numbers weren't USEFUL, or that we might not use any variety of numbers in performing calculations. What I said was that at the most basic physical level we only needed a few numbers that weren't integers***. But I can explain more:
If we were calculating how long it was going to take light to cross some distance, we'd probably use "c" - the speed of light. This number is very important in many calculations, but it's not philosophically important, because it has units, so this number is different depending on the units. With the right units, this value would be 1. This number is only important within the context we happened to chose for meter and second. It turns out that if you combine important physical equations you can do so in such a way that the units cancel. If you do this you either get an integer or not. But if not, it's one or a combination of a very few numbers.****
pi and e are _math_ constants. They can be derived purely from math. pi can be derived as long as you assume flat plane
I'm not actually Jewish, I just have Jewish friends. But that's the genesis for my spelling it that way, because it feels to me like respecting them and because it might start this discussion.
(To my knowledge it's probably actually fine for a non-Jew to write it out... my understanding is that conversion to Judaism is discouraged because according to Judaism if you're a non-Jew you basically just have to be a good person to go to heaven but if you're a Jew you need to also follow like 3000 laws. So converting does NOT get you access to heaven, it actually makes it HARDER to get to heaven. So broadly speaking converting people isn't really a nice thing to do to them. I'm guessing this is one of those differential laws. )
The worst of the fundies take a very old document from a time when metaphor was often used and interpret it both very literally AND very selectively. (eg gays are bad but wearing blended clothes is ok and they don't keep Kosher*. That's the same old testament! ) And they choose to very literally interpret the English translation, no matter what the original probably said. In a country which is really not that literate I can see how this happens - religion is about your pastor, not about the book.
But not everyone who's religious is like that. It's perfectly reasonable to think that G-d guided each step of evolution - evolution isn't incompatible with G-d at all. But I think this doesn't give your G-d enough credit...
Which do you think shows more omnipotence: Building a car that G-d has to tuneup every 100 miles, or building a car that drives forever and constantly improves itself on the fly to be better for existing road conditions.
Evolution does not logically require a god. But to me the wonderful elegance of evolution - and indeed of most science once humankind actually understands the topic fairly well - is closer to be proof OF G-d than a refutation of him/her.
My personal feeling is that if someone can't understand how I can have this position (even if they disagree), they need to take more math and science classes.
Computers are really built on just a couple SIMPLE elements - transitors. But millions of these SAME elements working together in a particular way gives us the computer I'm typing this on, Google, and Wikipedia. There is a wonderful elegance to this extreme complexity being built from the extreme simplicity of the evolutionary process.
Alchemy was really hard. With chemistry we can do much more... and we realize that all things we're familiar with are made up only of protons, neutrons and electrons. (and those of quarks - and yes there are less-common particles and radiation)
When you get down to basics, there's only a very few times numbers we need that aren't integers... All around, it's extremely elegant.
*and Kosher food is often healthier than "normal" food, in the same general way that Organic is - there are rules about icky things you aren't allowed to do prepping them.
>>>soon that will be XML-based or SQL-based
Sure, but someone had mentioned they didn't want a SQL solution because they were concerned about being able to use it much longer.
>>>I think we (using the word in its most general sense) are.
I meant it in a less general sense.
Submitter asked for a tagging solution like ID3 - got many results for IPTC. Which I didn't know about, and which sounds great for what it is. In particular, if you're going to email files around and then need to be able to find the source FROM the image file, an in-file tag like this is what you want - and I'm sure why newspapers use it.
But for the INTENT you talked about - managing and searching for your photos - it's all wrong unless your system 100% caches it - which for YOUR purposes is a lot like not using it. You do NOT want to have to open every single image file on every single filesystem to search for something, especially to do complex searches. Furthermore, since your search information is MUCH smaller than the images, you want to be able to search through tags of images that you don't currently have. (eg, that aren't mounted or are unplugged)
(Note that if you search a bunch of files by filename you only open the fs chunks for each DIRECTORY, not for _any_ files.)
This is doubly true if your tagging format is multiple-file aware, and you can tell it that you have two copies of the same files on different drives and that it should never return two results for them.
XML is probably a good enough solution for your purposes, which is why I posted this below one talking about how KPhotoAlbum is XML based.
For a multiple simultaneous write situation, flat file XML is simply not enough and you'll need a DB (and with some indicies you'll get MUCH better search speed) - but you can always export backups to XML.
Now you've gone and made me think we should be making such software.
I don't know about the even older stuff, but for the mac, there was freeware - Transmac I believe - that lets you read MacOS floppies on a Windows machine. (I was using it on NT4, but I'm reasonably certain it or an analog is still around..)
And I'm reasonably certain a newer mac without a floppy can still read the old floppies if you get a USB floppy drive for it.
Google is NOT the problem.
The problem is NOT that Google is letting you fake CallerID - it's that CallerID is trusted by anybody, when the telcos don't care a lick about securing it. (There are dozens of for-pay but cheap services to alter your callerID...) I'd even accept a nontechnological solution involving it being both criminally and civilly illegal for you to spoof it. But that clearly doesn't exist, either.
If anything I hope this abuse gets really widespread and callerID gets dropped as a trustworthy source.
And to think that lots of times telcos will let you into your voicemail based ONLY on spoofable callerID, when they could be using a more secure system. (Since legitmate calls to the voicemail on THEIR system would come from THEIR system)
This is a less important version of the SSN problem. The real SSN problem is NOT that some places don't guard your SSN carefully enough. The problem is that you have an ID number that you MUST give to all employers, employees, banks, etc. (fine...) AND which those places have decided to use as a password. It's this second part that completely bonkers and needs to be abolished. My SSN is NOT proof of who I AM! It can't be, I have to give it to dozens and dozens of people. Nor is anything on the public record, like my actual mother's maiden name. (I use a fake one, of course)