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User: Mark+Trade

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  1. Scholastic Aptitude a Myth, Study Says on IQ 'a Myth,' Study Says · · Score: 1

    "Can the entire distribution of scholastic aptitude be accounted for by just one general factor?"

    Seriously? I mean: seriously? Are we really debating indexes (as in "statistics") and whether they are meaningful? Whoa. Way to go, folks. Words fail me. And here I thought, at least scientists would get the idea of abstracting a complex construct into a single metric.

  2. What I read first, was ... on Ask Slashdot: Tech For Small Library Automation? · · Score: 1

    "Tech for a Small Liberation Army". %-)

  3. Re:answers on Teacher Asks Students To Plan a Terrorist Attack · · Score: 1

    Damn campers.

  4. What about the other substrings? on Facebook Says It Owns 'Book' · · Score: 1

    What about "ace" - that's in "facebook", too. Or "ok"?

  5. Re:Search is still relevant... on The End of Free · · Score: 1

    That, my friend, is called "anecdotal evidence". I doubt that it is much better than no evidence at all.

  6. Re:CSM elected by less than 6% of the players on What Game Devs Should Learn From EVE · · Score: 1

    To quote Jed Bartlet: decisions are made by those who show up.

    Of course if the other 94% of the players don't know they should show up, there might be a problem.

  7. Re:"too much unnecessary porn" on Wales Supports Purging Porn From Wikipedia · · Score: 1

    This does raise a good question: What is a necessary amount of porn?

    And what is porn? And who gets to decide this? Some Las Vegas entrepreneur or a born-again from the bible belt?

  8. Preservation on Long-Term Storage of Moderately Large Datasets? · · Score: 1

    Other than the bare physical layer, you will want to think about restoring and reusing the data at some point in the future when the software used to generate the data is no longer available. What good is a RAID 5 of a couple Gigs of data when you can't use it? Or don't know what the data actually meant?

  9. Re:Ask.com on Simplifying Search For a Younger Audience · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I don't think their search boxes not being big enough is the main improvement they need to work on.

    In fact, there is empirical evidence that supports your idea: the average web search query is about 3 words long (depending on which search engine was examined, this varies +- 1 or so).

    For example, see this paper: http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=281250.281253&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=68253875&CFTOKEN=24736044

  10. Re:Why laptops? on Skeptics Question OLPC's Focus With $75 Tablet · · Score: 1

    I studied in Mexico for a while and it is quite common for many people, especially kids, to go to the neighborhood Internet cafe and pay a small fee to use their computers.

    There are places where there is no neighborhood, let alone an internet cafe. This is why the XO has mesh Wifi.

    1.) These are poor countries and the devices may be lost/stolen/sold to pay for essentials of life

    There wouldn't be any market if everybody had an OLPC and it would be only good for learning.

    2.) Not likely to have Internet access at home, may not even have reliable electricity

    See above: mesh wifi.

  11. Re:Why is this done in software at all? on Entropy Problems For Linux In the Cloud · · Score: 1

    Where would the CPU get the randomness from? Out of thin air?

  12. Re:Bullshit on Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished? · · Score: 1

    I don't know if it's just in Information Retrieval or also in other branches of CS, but in IR journals are less prestigious than conferences. So, your first try, in general, is submitting it at a conference. You have to pay admittance to the conference, but I haven't had to waive my copyright yet.

  13. Re:No on Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished? · · Score: 1

    Plagiarism in academics is not a legal problem, but an ethical one. And the tool of choice is a publication. If you can prove that a given text fragment is yours because it first appeared in your paper, then every uncredited quotation will be frowned upon. Nobody checks "the copyright" for this even today. If you use a colleagues text in your paper without properly giving credit for it, that's bad even without an IP lawyer being involved.

  14. Re:Cite? on Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished? · · Score: 1

    I guess the problem is you still have to buy the paper. I don't get the copyright-claim fear cited in TFS, either. For me, it's the idea of having to pay a publisher with tax-money to get access to a paper that one's own government has already paid for, what is ridiculous.

  15. Re:Encryption on Delete Data On Netbook If Stolen? · · Score: 1

    With that solution, you have no control over your passwords that might end up in unencrypted swap or temp files. Anything but whole-disk encryption is just encoding.

  16. Re:Wtf is tethering? on USB Tethering Working On iPhone 3.0 Through Hack · · Score: 1

    So it's the same thing that e.g. Siemens mobile phones have had for ages (at least since the S25), but now it has a cool name?

  17. Re:Short answer... no on Are We Searching Google, Or Is Google Searching Us? · · Score: 1

    Yes, we can (sorry) search the internet directly. The protocol for it is called HTTP. The problem is that it is so damn slow to crawl the whole web and perform your search at the same time by looking at each harvested web page. This is why search engines have so much storage: to reduce time in exchange for space (space-time trade-off).

  18. Re:Why latex at all ? on Modern LaTeX Replacement? · · Score: 1

    That makes it look like the math problems were solved with a pencil, the way a real mathematician would do it.

    Actually, there is a book co-authored by Knuth ("Concrete Mathematics") that used a custom-made font for the math parts that was inteded to look like an accurate math teacher wrote it.

  19. Re:Skype isn't Open Source on TechCrunch Wants To Create an Open Source Tablet · · Score: 5, Funny

    Asterix for voice communications.

    I hear Obelix is way better.

    (But other than that I agree. Skype is not open source and a security liability.)

  20. Re:RFTA on Shuttleworth Sees Possibility For a QT-based GNOME · · Score: 2, Interesting

    RTFA yourself. Because he also says that he would like to see standardization in infrastructure and he sees exciting the FSF over this issue as a challenge. This reads to me very similiar to "yes, I'd like to do that and I have already spent some time thinking it over but it will be difficult."

    Whether we'll be able to have the FSF excited about something, have GNOME excited about something, have Nokia excited about something which makes life better for developers - that's gonna be the interesting challenge for me. I'd like to see both desktops focusing on a common infrastructure.

  21. Re:In other news on Shuttleworth Sees Possibility For a QT-based GNOME · · Score: 1

    Well aware that you are joking, I still have to say I know places where cats and dogs are living together.

  22. Re:No, GNOME-like values on QT on Shuttleworth Sees Possibility For a QT-based GNOME · · Score: 1

    As soon as you accept there are different desktop environments for Linux out there, you have to also accept that there are differences in their respective UIs. If there weren't, there just were no different desktop environments. UI standardization is for /within/ a desktop.

  23. Re:fantastic on Amazonian Tribe Has No Word To Express Numbers · · Score: 1

    You probably should. But beware: you get what you pay for.

  24. Re:Naw, it dosen't on The Handwriting of Type Designers · · Score: 1

    Unless you count "Erikrighthand" by Erik Spiekermann as a font. Oh, wait. It is one.

  25. Re:"Open Source" != "Open Standards" on Five Ways Microsoft Could Change After Gates · · Score: 1

    There have been a number of open source projects over the years that have been kept under the control of a single source (by dual licensing, for example), and others that have ignored, ridden down, and flagrantly broken standards. There's been at least two high profile projects that have deliberately used embrace-end-extend to knock competing software (including other open source projects) out of the ring.

    Cite your sources, please.