To me, the answer depends quite a bit on the labor and political conditions in the country to which the work is being outsourced.
If this was a factory job being outsourced to a country that's politically repressive, then outsourcing could mean forcing US workers to compete with workers in a country where there are no child labor laws, workers put in 16 hours day and sleep in a shack on the factory grounds, or where trying to organize a labor union means that the police come, shoot you in the head, and throw you in a ditch.
However, this is an IT job, so most likely it's not going to be done by child labor or under sweatshop conditions. Is it being outsourced to Ireland or India, both of which are democracies with real labor laws? If so, then I'd agree with Cohen, with the caveat that a lot of India's problems are caused by Malthusian issues, and no matter how many jobs you send there, it won't do jack for the vast majority of the population.
In fact, a lot of the world's problems have lack of birth control as their underlying cause. Global warming is an overpopulation issue. Poverty in places like Mexico and Egypt is an overpopulation issue. Deforestation is an overpopulation issue. Air pollution in the US is an overpopulation issue. India's inability to provide education at the same level as China is an overpopulation issue.
Some physicist is very welcome to fill in here, but I'm not sure it's correct to say that the universe "expands faster" than the speed of light. Locally, the expansion is slow[...], and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.
The speed of expansion of point A relative to point B depends on how far apart A and B are. If you take A and B to be sufficiently far apart, the speed is greater than c. If you take A and B close rnough together, the speed can be as small as you like.
and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.
Either explanation is OK. General relativity doesn't say that one is right and one is wrong.
As a side note: One theory of the ultimate fate of the universe is that the expansion rate will increase past the point where the observable universe becomes smaller than atoms and other particles (a higher expansion rate means objects must be closer to each other for light travelling between them to overcome the expansion of the distance between them), essentially ripping all matter apart.
The WOWIO interview left me with a lot of questions, and those weren't cleared up by the very brief info on wowio's web site. As far as I can tell, they sell DRM-free books with ads in them, give 100% of the purchase price to the author, and keep 100% of the ad revenue for themselves. What I don't quite understand about this is what's stopping someone from writing software that simply strips the ads out of a WOWIO book. There's also the question of what WOWIO sees as the service they provide to authors and/or readers. As a reader, what service are they providing me that I couldn't get by buying a book directly from the author? Do they filter submissions at all? As an author, what are they doing for me that I couldn't do by selling directly to readers? I doubt that any significant nuber of readers browses WOWIO looking for books to read.
It doesn't make sense to let the standardization* process be dictated by them, with no one else having a say on it, whether they are competing companies (MS included)
WHATWG invited Chris Wilson from MS to join. He turned them down for a number of reasons, including a belief that it would be "irresponsible" to break bug-for-bug compatibility with IE6. Considering the destructive, antisocial behavior of MS with java and ooxml, I can't say I'm sorry that they didn't choose to participate -- but it was their choice.
It's not like supporting xhtml content type is a requirement for supporting xhtml syntax[...]
Yes, it is a requirement. When you serve xhtml with content type text/html, you're simply exploiting a bug in browsers that makes them ignore xhtml constructs that aren't legal html. More info here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445#q8
[...] or mathml syntax for that matter.
Mathml is not a separate syntax. It's simply an xml namespace. If a browser is going to support xhtml properly, then it will have to support xml, and supporting xml means you already have automatic support for parsing mathml. Rendering mathml correctly is another matter. It's correct for a browser to ignore tags that it doesn't understand, and in the case of mathml, this actually results in a pretty reasonable fallback (looks OK on the screen, has some chance of being usable by blind users).
xhtml content type support is not trivial, because it requires an entirely different xml based parsing engine rather than an html based one.
It is trivial, because xml is a stable, well-defined format for which there are a gajillion different free and non-free parsers available. The reason html parsing is so incredibly hard is that real-world browsers all try to incorporate heuristics for recovering from badly formed html; if they didn't do that, they wouldn't be able to render a large percentage of html web pages. Since xhtml isn't allowed to be malformed, parsing it is trivial.
In what sense? The site I'm working on is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant and renders properly in IE 6, 7 and 8. No, we don't use MathML, but to say simply "IE doesn't support XHTML" seems somewhat disingenuous.
You're mistaken. Xhtml only works in IE if you serve it as text/html. If you have xhtml+mathml content, you're supposed to deliver it as application/xhtml+xml, but then IE won't display it. This makes it impossible to make a single, static xhtml web page that uses xhtml features (such as mathml) and renders in both IE and other browsers.
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? [...] I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much
Huh? The "b" tags still works. Here you go: bold. Tables still work too. If you want to use them, use them.
If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.
Most people use GUI apps to create web pages. They couldn't care less whether the code produced by their GUI is done according to one standard or another. And suppose they did care. Are you claiming that a wave of popular support would then cause WHATWG to be successful, MS to support web standards, and patent holders to release their codecs under royalty-free terms?
HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster. It should not be focused on animation.
Well, first off, html 5 isn't just about frivolous stuff like making cartoons jump around on a web page. For example, it includes support for mathml; that's not exactly frivolous for a blind physics student who can't read equations that are rendered as bitmaps for compatibility with IE. And in any case "the masses" you refer to want animation. They want farmville, etc. The question is whether we're going to have a web where the only way to accomplish that is through proprietary browsers and proprietary plugins.
It seems to me that everybody is moaning and groaning about what a bad job WHATWG is doing, when in fact WHATWG is just doing the best it can in an extremely difficult environment created by patents and Microsoft.
The confusion with respect to audio and video codecs only exists because of patents. A certain patent-encumbered codec shows up that's good enough, so it gets widely adopted, and then it's impossible to displace it because of network effects. This is not WHATWG's fault.
The html 5 feature that I really care about is mathml, and here it's very, very clear that MS is the bad guy and W3C and WHATWG have just been trying, unsuccessfully, to work around MS. Mathml worked fine in xhtml years ago, but MS never bothered to support xhtml in IE, which would have been technically trivial to do. They stated that their policy was to have independent vendors supply support for mathml rendering via plugins, and Design Science did their best to do that, but MS made it impossible for them to do that in a standard way, because the standard depended on xhtml, which IE didn't support. So xhtml died in the crib, and WHATWG decided to pour the svg and mathml namespaces into the flat html 5 namespace. Kind of an ugly solution, but they had no other choice. Now for the first time it is theoretically possible to write a web page coded in a standard way that has mathml in it and that might render properly in some future version of IE. But meanwhile big institutions are still sticking to IE 6 because they need compatibility with all its bugs, and preview versions of IE 9 have broken mathml support.
The big problem is that commercial entities have interests that oppose the interests of their customers and internet users at large. MS wants users to be locked into their browser through proprietary plugins and bug-compatibility, and they don't stand to profit by supporting features like mathml, which are only used by a relatively small proportion of their users. (Never mind that blind people can access mathml but not bitmapped renderings of equations. Blind people aren't economically important to MS.) Owners of patents on codecs want to harvest licensing fees, and they don't care if that screws everybody else up and makes a mess out of audio and video on the web.
McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense? These are the people who acually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.
Anyone here actually using Go? It seems like a sweet little language, basically an update of C that is true to the original spirit of the language (small, close to the hardware). When C was created, garbage collection wasn't a mature technology; now it is, so it makes sense to have it built in. However, Go seems pretty raw, and there are other carefully designed C-like languages (D, objective C) that have a huge head start. It's also a drag that Go's binary interface isn't compatible with C's, and I'm not aware of any significant real-world projects using Go.
Here are a couple of places from whom I've bought linux boxes: http://system76.com/ , http://www.zareason.com/ Based on my extremely small sample size, I've found system76 to be a little better in terms of quality, but I've seen lots of positive comments about both of these businesses on the web.
Of course I realize that the existence of alternatives doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't massively exploiting its monopoly power over the market ("monopoly" in the legal sense, which does not require 100% market share). But if nobody bothers to buy from the alternatives, then I can sure as heck guarantee you that the situation will get worse, not better.
Some big retailers such as Fry's, Target, and Walmart have tried selling linux machines. As far as I've been able to tell, none of them have been successful, and I don't think the failure has anything to do with strong-arm tactics by MS. A while back, Fry's used to sell linux machines for $180-250 that were actually pretty decent. I bought several of them (one for my father, one for my daughter, etc.), and they lasted a long time and gave yeoman service. But they stopped selling them, and when I asked one of the salespeople at Fry's he said that they'd had so many returns that it wasn't profitable. Realistically, what was happening was that a lot of people were buying them, wiping linux off the hard disk, and installing a bootlegged copy of windows. Then when the windows install didn't work correctly, they would return the machine. This wasn't subtle at all. The machines came with a custom linux distro (ThizLinux) that nobody in the U.S. had ever heard of and that didn't even have a web page in English. The docs that came with the machines consisted of five pages of instructions on how to install windows, and no info whatsoever on how to use the linux that came preinstalled. Walmart was selling the gPC for a while. I bought one, and although the hardware was decent, the quality of the software integration stank to high heaven.
What the smaller sellers like system76 and zareason are doing right is to stop trying to invent their own crappy linux distro and just ship their machines with ubuntu, which works. Another thing they're doing right is to market their computers to people who actually want to run linux, as opposed to people who don't know about, don't care about, or don't want linux.
The price for the hardware also doesn't seem very cheap to me. I buy refurbished computers on ebay from a guy in Illinois and get them shipped to me here in California at $100 a pop -- free shipping, no sales tax. This is for a perfectly decent P4 with 512 Mb of ram.
I think it's foolish to think that we will ever find out "the best way" to distribute humanity (to prevent Human extinction) if we never try to experimentally and/or temporarily populate our closest celestial bodies.
If we wait until "the best" procedure is theoretically proposed we still won't know for sure until we try -- Better to try a bit now with what we have in order to advance the science of extra-planetary habitation and accelerate the discovery of the optimal procedure than to only day-dream until we're all extinct.
The journey of a thousand light-years must begin with a single plank length.
I never said anything about *never* trying. I just don't think there is any reasonable justification *today* for space colonization, in the sense of making self-supporting colonies. Actually the obvious next step is LEO space hotels for tourists. That will almost certainly happen without government spending. There's nothing wrong with the "try a bit now" philosophy, and space hotels would fall in that category. But there is something wrong with spending billions of dollars of US tax money, year after year, on completely pointless national propaganda/porkbarrel projects like the shuttle (whose only mission was to get to the ISS) and the ISS (whose only mission was to give the shuttle someplace to go).
There are two completely orthogonal ideas being discussed in these articles: (1) Send humans to the moon again, and help them to survive and return, all at a more reasonable price, by extracting drinking water and rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) from lunar ice. (2) Extract water from the moon and bring it down to low earth orbit for sale as a commodity (rocket fuel).
#1 raises the question of why it would be valuable to send humans to the moon again. The author of the airspacemag.com article says that we should do this as a warm-up for colonizing other planets in the solar system, and it should be done by the US federal government using tax money. This seems foolish to me. The other planets of the solar system are not good real estate, and there needs to be a clear justification for why humans should colonize space at all. If the justification is profit, then the US federal government doesn't need to fund it with tax money. If the motivation is the Larry Niven quip that "the dinosaurs didn't have a space program," then it's not at all clear that moon-then-Mars is the best way to go, and if we want to find out the best way to go, flying nationalistic propaganda missions for the US is not the best way to do it. The best way to go may be, for example, a space station orbiting Europa. We just don't know right now.
#2 is very sensible for any for-profit entity that can find a customer at low earth orbit willing to buy rocket fuel. But: (a) #2 doesn't require sending humans to the moon at all, and (b) this raises the question of who the LEO customers are, why they are there, and why they want to buy rocket fuel. Presently, the only prospective customers are the US and Russia, who keep humans in LEO for nationalistic propaganda purposes, and who might want to buy some drinking water; I doubt that that type of demand is sufficient to justify lunar mining. In the near future, we may have space tourists in orbit, but again it's not clear that they need *that* much drinking water. Uncrewed space probes going to the outer solar system could use rocket fuel, but I doubt that they need *that* much rocket fuel. So really the only reasonable customer would be someone who wants to send very large payloads to someplace like Mars, and this simply leads us back to the same issue, which is that the justification for sending humans to Mars is extremely weak for the foreseeable future.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole?
Gravitational pull is probably the biggest factor. A black hole simply gets so massive that at one point the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape. It will have objects orbitting around it like planets orbit stars except at distances far greater than a star would normally hold.
Dark Matter, on the other hand, simply seems to have the gravitational pull of a regular star, but doesn't emit any light.
No, this is completely wrong. A black hole doesn't have stronger gravity than the star or stars that it formed out of.
One thing to note is that when we observe things out there, it's not just a 2D plane we're observing but a great deal of depth is involved. When observing a black hole, the light behind the black hole will get sucked into the black hole if it happens to cross the event horizon. This will create a nice black circle in the sky. However dark matter, on the other hand, would not stop the light behind it from reaching our eyes, it might bend it a little but nothing too extreme.
This is also wrong. Gravitational lensing occurs both for black holes and for other objects that aren't black holes. The black hole in the sky that you're describing is not what is predicted for a black hole either.
That's still 525 children, and they're exactly doing what they should - increase their exposure, currently via Facebook. But since you seem to have better ideas, do suggest them.
My better idea is to take the same effort and focus it on something that will do more good and have fewer negative effects. A good example would be better enforcement of traffic laws near schools when kids are coming in and out of school.
And yes, I really do believe that things the AMBER Alert have negative effects that are greater than their positive effects. For example, a lot of my kids' friends don't walk. Anywhere. Ever. They don't walk anywhere by themselves, because of the parents' fear that they'll get kidnapped. (It's not about traffic. They aren't even allowed to walk around the block without crossing a street.) They don't walk with their parents, because their parents get in the car to drive anywhere. This is the kind of thing that has helped to create the obesity epidemic.
It drives me nuts that adobe has such a high penetration in the ebook DRM market because they don't have tools for most platforms. AFAIK no official readers exist for any platform beyond Windows or Mac, which is great (sarcasm) given how many portable platforms exist nowadays (Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, iOS)
When I go to this URL, it automatically recognizes that I'm running linux, and it offers me the linux version of Adobe Reader to download.
In typical case where the user simply wants to view or print a document, there is an incredibly simple solution. Tell the user to switch to something other than Adobe Reader, e.g., Foxit on Windows, Preview on MacOS X, or Evince on Linux. (For Windows users who get annoyed by how long it takes to open a PDF in a web browser, this has the added selling point of fixing that problem.) For users who can't switch (either because they need features of AR or are in a corporate environment where they can't install software), the next best option is disable JavaScript: go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript."
Just to point out that on Windows, it is actually more secure to use reader x. The sandbox and exploit mitigation techniques are much better than the negligible gain in security by obscurity in using foxit or sumatra.
It took me a while to figure out what you meant. Foxit didn't used to support javascript at all, and that meant that its added security was more than just security through obscurity. It was actually more secure, because all the exploits for AR were based on javascript, which foxit didn't implement. I hadn't realized that foxit later added javascript support. At this point it looks like foxit is roughly equivalent to AR in terms of security: both have js turned on by default, and both allow you to turn it off. ( http://blog.didierstevens.com/2009/05/06/a-very-brief-history-of-foxit-reader-and-javascript/ ) The only possible difference would be whether Adobe or Foxit is more competent in implementing js securely, and that's going to be relatively hard to know, since both are closed source.
> Excuse me, but a document format used for storing printed documents on a system should represent the document as if it was printed when viewed again, _not_ suddenly switch the language or layout or whatever.
It sounds like what you want is PDF/A ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A ), which restricts the PDF to a simple non-scripted document. The fact that PDF is almost solely used to produce printed documents doesn't mean that's the intent of the format. DjVu ( http://djvu.org/ ) I believe would also be a good fit.
For example, we're looking at taking in student essays in PDF, attaching a form to the front that marks can be entered into, and the whole document returned to the submission system that then pulls the mark out (as opposed to having to track the mark independently of the material it applies to). I've seen presentations run from a PDF before. It would be a pity to lose these possibilities.
Everything in your post makes sense, but now let's get back to the security issues.
If the security issue is that unsophisticated users get their computers owned because they click on a PDF link, then PDF/A isn't a solution. It isn't a solution for at least three reasons: (1) PDF/A is not an appropriate format for general use on the web, because it requires embedding all fonts. This makes the PDF much bigger, and that means the user's experience is slower. People already get bent out of shape about how long it takes for a PDF to load. They don't want a solution that makes it worse. (2) Advocating that people distribute their documents in PDF/A doesn't help, because bad guys will not follow that advice. (3) Telling users to restrict themselves to software that only accepts PDF/A will not work, because virtually no PDF's they encounter on the web are in PDF/A.
In typical case where the user simply wants to view or print a document, there is an incredibly simple solution. Tell the user to switch to something other than Adobe Reader, e.g., Foxit on Windows, Preview on MacOS X, or Evince on Linux. (For Windows users who get annoyed by how long it takes to open a PDF in a web browser, this has the added selling point of fixing that problem.) For users who can't switch (either because they need features of AR or are in a corporate environment where they can't install software), the next best option is disable JavaScript: go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript."
The cases where I don't know of any good, general solution are cases like the one you're describing, where you want to put students' grades on their papers. The problem here is that you need a feature that goes beyond simply printing and viewing a document. Presumably you've thought about the security issues, and you have a PDF application that has the particular feature you want without exposing you to security issues. The trouble here is that the message now becomes much too complex for the average web user. It's easy to tell them "Use Foxit," and then their problem is solved. But what if they say, "I need features x, y, and z that aren't in Foxit, and I need JavaScript enabled, but I don't want to spend several hours researching how to do this without a security risk?" The only answer I have for such a person is, "Don't do that, because Adobe is clueless about security."
One particularly ugly issue is that if you're in the print advertising or publishing business, you really can't get away with not testing your PDFs in Adobe Reader, but AR is poorly engineered and a security risk. The best you can do is to disable JavaScript.
Not surprisingly, most of the posts so far show no signs of having actually RTFA.
Lehrer goes through all kinds of logical contortions to try to explain something that is fundamentally pretty simple: it's publication bias plus regression to themean. He dismisses publication bias and regression to the mean as being unable to explain cases where the level of statistical significance was extremely high. Let's take the example of a published experiment where the level of statistical significance is so high that the result only had one chance in a million of occurring due to chance. One in a million is 4.9 sigma. There are two problems that you will see in virtually all experiments: (1) people always underestimate their random errors, and (2) people always miss sources of systematic error.
It's *extremely* common for people to underestimate their random errors by a factor of 2. That means the the 4.9-sigma result is only a 2.45-sigma result. But 2.45-sigma results happen about 1.4% of the time. That means that if 71 people do experiments, typically one of them will result in a 2.45-sigma confidence level. That person then underestimates his random errors by a factor of 2, and publishes it as a result that could only have happened one time in a million by pure chance.
Missing a systematic error does pretty much the same thing.
Lehrer cites an example of an ESP experiment by Rhine in which a certain subject did far better than chance at first, and later didn't do as well. Possibly this is just underestimation of errors, publication bias, and regression to the mean. There is also good evidence that a lot of Rhine's published work on ESP was tainted by his assistants' cheating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine#Criticism
If Perl 5's default OO is the wrong choice, how is Python's OO the right choice? Syntactic differences aside, they're the same system.
Syntactic sugar is important. Another difference is that in python, ruby, and perl 6 everything is an object, but in perl 5 everything is not an object. I can see various design trade-offs inherent in the everything-is-an-object decision, but, e.g., in ruby one big benefit is that the namespace is clean and the structure of the libraries is very logical and easy to understand. Cf. perl 5, where basically you just have a ton of functions that are thin wrappers for everything in the traditional C/Unix toolbox.
Yeah, now try hiring for a good OO software engineer to write Perl. The applicant pool isn't spectacularly broad. Not too surprising, I suppose, since most of the positions out there featuring Perl are either QA automation or something titled "Build Engineer".
Well, I would say it's not too surprising for a different reason: perl 5's support for OO is ugly and bolted on, so anybody who's a real enthusiast for OO probably isn't using perl. Although perl 6 is designed so that OO isn't ugly and bolted on, perl 6 is still very much at the language-hackers-and-early-adopters phase, so it's not at all surprising that there are not a lot of people in your applicant pool using it.
I like perl 5, and I still do a lot of my programming in it. But realistically if OO is your thing, or if OO is the right tool for a particular job, then perl is the wrong choice. The right choice would probably be either python or ruby. Although ruby is still far less mature than perl 5, it's far more mature than perl 6.
The great reason to choose perl 5 for a new project today is the quality of the implementation. It's very efficient and has a very low incidence of bugs.
This is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.
They claim that they've succeeded in preventing people from inadvertently viewing child porn. This doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I live in the US, where there is no such law in place, and I've never inadvertently viewed child porn. Presumably this is because child porn is illegal, so nobody just puts it up on a publicly accessible web site. I'm sure people who want to get child porn can get it, and presumably they do it using various workarounds, such as encryption, anonymization, and file-sharing on darknets, so that they don't end up in jail. However, most people who arent chil-porn users aren't going to bother learning how to use the complicated workarounds, because it would be a lot of work and they don't need it.
Now let's imagine what happens with this new setup they're proposing to protect boys from seeing naked ladies. Adolescent boys are generally extremely interested in seeing naked ladies. So now you've taken a large chunk of the population and given them a strong motivation to route around censorship. Every adolescent boy in Britain now wants to know how to use workarounds in order to evade the controls put in place by their parents and their parents' ISP. Learning to use these workarounds will be some work, but these fine young British boys are highly motivated to do that work because they've got Big Ben in their pants aching like a bad tooth.
So the net result is to take anti-censorship workarounds that are currently used by a tiny population of child-porn users and ensure their widespread adoption by every horny kid in England, Scotland, and Wales. Congratulations.
Usually Not Even Wrong points me in the correct direction but they gave this paper an unusually short nod [...] I think this is a good indication that everyone is waiting for the real scientists (not my lame armchair ass) to look this over and weigh in. [...] It doesn't outright disqualify them but it sure is a vote of no confidence in a lot of the popular String Theory models.
IAARS (I am a real scientist.)
You misunderstood the paper. The paper doesn't test string theory. Not Even Wrong was just being snarky and sarcastic; they've posted an update explaining this.
And here is an addendum that the Not Even Wrong blog posted after they saw that this was on slashdot:
Update: Since this is getting wider than usual attention via Slashdot, I suppose I should remove tongue from cheek and make clear what is going on here. Claims such as the one in the 2000 Times headline always were nonsense: string theory unification failed long ago because it can’t predict anything. Various physicists back then came up with “string theory inspired” models of extra dimensions that would in principle have observable effects at LHC energies. There never was any reason at all to believe these models (and they were no more “predictions of string theory” than anything else), but there was a lot of hype about them, often promoted to the media by people who should have known better. Now that the LHC is finally working, the result is exactly what everyone expected: these exotic phenomena that had no good reason to happen don’t actually happen. It’s great evidence that the LHC is working as expected, but not an experimental refutation of string theory.
So this should clearly establish that eldavajohn misunderstood what was going on.
BTW, I disagree with Not Even Wrong's statement that the theories with large extra dimensions "had no good reason to happen." There is a very clear physical motivation for these theories, which is that they close the gap between the Planck scale and the electroweak unification scale. (At the risk of introducing further major confusion, these theories actually redefine the Planck scale so that it *is* the electroweak scale. So "large" extra dimensions means extra dimensions on their redefined Planck scale, which is large compared to what people normally take to be the Planck scale in 3+1 dimensions.)
Slashdot Mirror
To me, the answer depends quite a bit on the labor and political conditions in the country to which the work is being outsourced.
If this was a factory job being outsourced to a country that's politically repressive, then outsourcing could mean forcing US workers to compete with workers in a country where there are no child labor laws, workers put in 16 hours day and sleep in a shack on the factory grounds, or where trying to organize a labor union means that the police come, shoot you in the head, and throw you in a ditch.
However, this is an IT job, so most likely it's not going to be done by child labor or under sweatshop conditions. Is it being outsourced to Ireland or India, both of which are democracies with real labor laws? If so, then I'd agree with Cohen, with the caveat that a lot of India's problems are caused by Malthusian issues, and no matter how many jobs you send there, it won't do jack for the vast majority of the population.
In fact, a lot of the world's problems have lack of birth control as their underlying cause. Global warming is an overpopulation issue. Poverty in places like Mexico and Egypt is an overpopulation issue. Deforestation is an overpopulation issue. Air pollution in the US is an overpopulation issue. India's inability to provide education at the same level as China is an overpopulation issue.
I'm a physicist.
Some physicist is very welcome to fill in here, but I'm not sure it's correct to say that the universe "expands faster" than the speed of light. Locally, the expansion is slow[...], and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.
The speed of expansion of point A relative to point B depends on how far apart A and B are. If you take A and B to be sufficiently far apart, the speed is greater than c. If you take A and B close rnough together, the speed can be as small as you like.
and objects aren't really "moving away" from each other -- rather more space is added in between them.
Either explanation is OK. General relativity doesn't say that one is right and one is wrong.
As a side note: One theory of the ultimate fate of the universe is that the expansion rate will increase past the point where the observable universe becomes smaller than atoms and other particles (a higher expansion rate means objects must be closer to each other for light travelling between them to overcome the expansion of the distance between them), essentially ripping all matter apart.
This is incorrect. Strongly bound systems like a hydrogen atom, a solar system, or a galaxy are almost completely unaffected by cosmological expansion. More info here: http://www.lightandmatter.com/html_books/genrel/ch08/ch08.html#Section8.2
The WOWIO interview left me with a lot of questions, and those weren't cleared up by the very brief info on wowio's web site. As far as I can tell, they sell DRM-free books with ads in them, give 100% of the purchase price to the author, and keep 100% of the ad revenue for themselves. What I don't quite understand about this is what's stopping someone from writing software that simply strips the ads out of a WOWIO book. There's also the question of what WOWIO sees as the service they provide to authors and/or readers. As a reader, what service are they providing me that I couldn't get by buying a book directly from the author? Do they filter submissions at all? As an author, what are they doing for me that I couldn't do by selling directly to readers? I doubt that any significant nuber of readers browses WOWIO looking for books to read.
It doesn't make sense to let the standardization* process be dictated by them, with no one else having a say on it, whether they are competing companies (MS included)
WHATWG invited Chris Wilson from MS to join. He turned them down for a number of reasons, including a belief that it would be "irresponsible" to break bug-for-bug compatibility with IE6. Considering the destructive, antisocial behavior of MS with java and ooxml, I can't say I'm sorry that they didn't choose to participate -- but it was their choice.
It's not like supporting xhtml content type is a requirement for supporting xhtml syntax[...]
Yes, it is a requirement. When you serve xhtml with content type text/html, you're simply exploiting a bug in browsers that makes them ignore xhtml constructs that aren't legal html. More info here: http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=393445#q8
[...] or mathml syntax for that matter.
Mathml is not a separate syntax. It's simply an xml namespace. If a browser is going to support xhtml properly, then it will have to support xml, and supporting xml means you already have automatic support for parsing mathml. Rendering mathml correctly is another matter. It's correct for a browser to ignore tags that it doesn't understand, and in the case of mathml, this actually results in a pretty reasonable fallback (looks OK on the screen, has some chance of being usable by blind users).
xhtml content type support is not trivial, because it requires an entirely different xml based parsing engine rather than an html based one.
It is trivial, because xml is a stable, well-defined format for which there are a gajillion different free and non-free parsers available. The reason html parsing is so incredibly hard is that real-world browsers all try to incorporate heuristics for recovering from badly formed html; if they didn't do that, they wouldn't be able to render a large percentage of html web pages. Since xhtml isn't allowed to be malformed, parsing it is trivial.
In what sense? The site I'm working on is XHTML 1.0 strict compliant and renders properly in IE 6, 7 and 8. No, we don't use MathML, but to say simply "IE doesn't support XHTML" seems somewhat disingenuous.
You're mistaken. Xhtml only works in IE if you serve it as text/html. If you have xhtml+mathml content, you're supposed to deliver it as application/xhtml+xml, but then IE won't display it. This makes it impossible to make a single, static xhtml web page that uses xhtml features (such as mathml) and renders in both IE and other browsers.
Remember when it was ok to use a "b" tag, and no one scoffed? How about table layouts? [...] I could teach my grandparents how to edit HTML 10 years ago. Now, not so much
Huh? The "b" tags still works. Here you go: bold. Tables still work too. If you want to use them, use them.
If you want more adoption, focus HTML on what actually is important - layout that's understandable to the masses.
Most people use GUI apps to create web pages. They couldn't care less whether the code produced by their GUI is done according to one standard or another. And suppose they did care. Are you claiming that a wave of popular support would then cause WHATWG to be successful, MS to support web standards, and patent holders to release their codecs under royalty-free terms?
HTML should be more focused on making layouts easier, and faster. It should not be focused on animation.
Well, first off, html 5 isn't just about frivolous stuff like making cartoons jump around on a web page. For example, it includes support for mathml; that's not exactly frivolous for a blind physics student who can't read equations that are rendered as bitmaps for compatibility with IE. And in any case "the masses" you refer to want animation. They want farmville, etc. The question is whether we're going to have a web where the only way to accomplish that is through proprietary browsers and proprietary plugins.
It seems to me that everybody is moaning and groaning about what a bad job WHATWG is doing, when in fact WHATWG is just doing the best it can in an extremely difficult environment created by patents and Microsoft.
The confusion with respect to audio and video codecs only exists because of patents. A certain patent-encumbered codec shows up that's good enough, so it gets widely adopted, and then it's impossible to displace it because of network effects. This is not WHATWG's fault.
The html 5 feature that I really care about is mathml, and here it's very, very clear that MS is the bad guy and W3C and WHATWG have just been trying, unsuccessfully, to work around MS. Mathml worked fine in xhtml years ago, but MS never bothered to support xhtml in IE, which would have been technically trivial to do. They stated that their policy was to have independent vendors supply support for mathml rendering via plugins, and Design Science did their best to do that, but MS made it impossible for them to do that in a standard way, because the standard depended on xhtml, which IE didn't support. So xhtml died in the crib, and WHATWG decided to pour the svg and mathml namespaces into the flat html 5 namespace. Kind of an ugly solution, but they had no other choice. Now for the first time it is theoretically possible to write a web page coded in a standard way that has mathml in it and that might render properly in some future version of IE. But meanwhile big institutions are still sticking to IE 6 because they need compatibility with all its bugs, and preview versions of IE 9 have broken mathml support.
The big problem is that commercial entities have interests that oppose the interests of their customers and internet users at large. MS wants users to be locked into their browser through proprietary plugins and bug-compatibility, and they don't stand to profit by supporting features like mathml, which are only used by a relatively small proportion of their users. (Never mind that blind people can access mathml but not bitmapped renderings of equations. Blind people aren't economically important to MS.) Owners of patents on codecs want to harvest licensing fees, and they don't care if that screws everybody else up and makes a mess out of audio and video on the web.
McAllister complains that WHATWG is dominated by a clique consisting of Google, Apple, Mozilla, and Opera. But that clique is basically a list of all the browser vendors, and doesn't that kind of make sense? These are the people who acually need to implement the standard, so of course they should be the ones with the most influence. The only browser vendor missing from the list is MS, which is only interested in subverting standards.
Anyone here actually using Go? It seems like a sweet little language, basically an update of C that is true to the original spirit of the language (small, close to the hardware). When C was created, garbage collection wasn't a mature technology; now it is, so it makes sense to have it built in. However, Go seems pretty raw, and there are other carefully designed C-like languages (D, objective C) that have a huge head start. It's also a drag that Go's binary interface isn't compatible with C's, and I'm not aware of any significant real-world projects using Go.
Here are a couple of places from whom I've bought linux boxes: http://system76.com/ , http://www.zareason.com/ Based on my extremely small sample size, I've found system76 to be a little better in terms of quality, but I've seen lots of positive comments about both of these businesses on the web.
Of course I realize that the existence of alternatives doesn't mean that Microsoft isn't massively exploiting its monopoly power over the market ("monopoly" in the legal sense, which does not require 100% market share). But if nobody bothers to buy from the alternatives, then I can sure as heck guarantee you that the situation will get worse, not better.
Some big retailers such as Fry's, Target, and Walmart have tried selling linux machines. As far as I've been able to tell, none of them have been successful, and I don't think the failure has anything to do with strong-arm tactics by MS. A while back, Fry's used to sell linux machines for $180-250 that were actually pretty decent. I bought several of them (one for my father, one for my daughter, etc.), and they lasted a long time and gave yeoman service. But they stopped selling them, and when I asked one of the salespeople at Fry's he said that they'd had so many returns that it wasn't profitable. Realistically, what was happening was that a lot of people were buying them, wiping linux off the hard disk, and installing a bootlegged copy of windows. Then when the windows install didn't work correctly, they would return the machine. This wasn't subtle at all. The machines came with a custom linux distro (ThizLinux) that nobody in the U.S. had ever heard of and that didn't even have a web page in English. The docs that came with the machines consisted of five pages of instructions on how to install windows, and no info whatsoever on how to use the linux that came preinstalled.
Walmart was selling the gPC for a while. I bought one, and although the hardware was decent, the quality of the software integration stank to high heaven.
What the smaller sellers like system76 and zareason are doing right is to stop trying to invent their own crappy linux distro and just ship their machines with ubuntu, which works. Another thing they're doing right is to market their computers to people who actually want to run linux, as opposed to people who don't know about, don't care about, or don't want linux.
The price for the hardware also doesn't seem very cheap to me. I buy refurbished computers on ebay from a guy in Illinois and get them shipped to me here in California at $100 a pop -- free shipping, no sales tax. This is for a perfectly decent P4 with 512 Mb of ram.
I think it's foolish to think that we will ever find out "the best way" to distribute humanity (to prevent Human extinction) if we never try to experimentally and/or temporarily populate our closest celestial bodies.
If we wait until "the best" procedure is theoretically proposed we still won't know for sure until we try -- Better to try a bit now with what we have in order to advance the science of extra-planetary habitation and accelerate the discovery of the optimal procedure than to only day-dream until we're all extinct.
The journey of a thousand light-years must begin with a single plank length.
I never said anything about *never* trying. I just don't think there is any reasonable justification *today* for space colonization, in the sense of making self-supporting colonies. Actually the obvious next step is LEO space hotels for tourists. That will almost certainly happen without government spending. There's nothing wrong with the "try a bit now" philosophy, and space hotels would fall in that category. But there is something wrong with spending billions of dollars of US tax money, year after year, on completely pointless national propaganda/porkbarrel projects like the shuttle (whose only mission was to get to the ISS) and the ISS (whose only mission was to give the shuttle someplace to go).
There are two completely orthogonal ideas being discussed in these articles: (1) Send humans to the moon again, and help them to survive and return, all at a more reasonable price, by extracting drinking water and rocket fuel (hydrogen and oxygen) from lunar ice. (2) Extract water from the moon and bring it down to low earth orbit for sale as a commodity (rocket fuel).
#1 raises the question of why it would be valuable to send humans to the moon again. The author of the airspacemag.com article says that we should do this as a warm-up for colonizing other planets in the solar system, and it should be done by the US federal government using tax money. This seems foolish to me. The other planets of the solar system are not good real estate, and there needs to be a clear justification for why humans should colonize space at all. If the justification is profit, then the US federal government doesn't need to fund it with tax money. If the motivation is the Larry Niven quip that "the dinosaurs didn't have a space program," then it's not at all clear that moon-then-Mars is the best way to go, and if we want to find out the best way to go, flying nationalistic propaganda missions for the US is not the best way to do it. The best way to go may be, for example, a space station orbiting Europa. We just don't know right now.
#2 is very sensible for any for-profit entity that can find a customer at low earth orbit willing to buy rocket fuel. But: (a) #2 doesn't require sending humans to the moon at all, and (b) this raises the question of who the LEO customers are, why they are there, and why they want to buy rocket fuel. Presently, the only prospective customers are the US and Russia, who keep humans in LEO for nationalistic propaganda purposes, and who might want to buy some drinking water; I doubt that that type of demand is sufficient to justify lunar mining. In the near future, we may have space tourists in orbit, but again it's not clear that they need *that* much drinking water. Uncrewed space probes going to the outer solar system could use rocket fuel, but I doubt that they need *that* much rocket fuel. So really the only reasonable customer would be someone who wants to send very large payloads to someplace like Mars, and this simply leads us back to the same issue, which is that the justification for sending humans to Mars is extremely weak for the foreseeable future.
How do you tell the difference between a blob of dark matter and a black hole?
Gravitational pull is probably the biggest factor. A black hole simply gets so massive that at one point the gravitational pull is so strong that not even light can escape. It will have objects orbitting around it like planets orbit stars except at distances far greater than a star would normally hold.
Dark Matter, on the other hand, simply seems to have the gravitational pull of a regular star, but doesn't emit any light.
No, this is completely wrong. A black hole doesn't have stronger gravity than the star or stars that it formed out of.
One thing to note is that when we observe things out there, it's not just a 2D plane we're observing but a great deal of depth is involved. When observing a black hole, the light behind the black hole will get sucked into the black hole if it happens to cross the event horizon. This will create a nice black circle in the sky. However dark matter, on the other hand, would not stop the light behind it from reaching our eyes, it might bend it a little but nothing too extreme.
This is also wrong. Gravitational lensing occurs both for black holes and for other objects that aren't black holes. The black hole in the sky that you're describing is not what is predicted for a black hole either.
For anyone who wants to see the actual paper, here it is: http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/1101.0815
That's still 525 children, and they're exactly doing what they should - increase their exposure, currently via Facebook. But since you seem to have better ideas, do suggest them.
My better idea is to take the same effort and focus it on something that will do more good and have fewer negative effects. A good example would be better enforcement of traffic laws near schools when kids are coming in and out of school.
And yes, I really do believe that things the AMBER Alert have negative effects that are greater than their positive effects. For example, a lot of my kids' friends don't walk. Anywhere. Ever. They don't walk anywhere by themselves, because of the parents' fear that they'll get kidnapped. (It's not about traffic. They aren't even allowed to walk around the block without crossing a street.) They don't walk with their parents, because their parents get in the car to drive anywhere. This is the kind of thing that has helped to create the obesity epidemic.
It drives me nuts that adobe has such a high penetration in the ebook DRM market because they don't have tools for most platforms. AFAIK no official readers exist for any platform beyond Windows or Mac, which is great (sarcasm) given how many portable platforms exist nowadays (Symbian, BlackBerry, Android, iOS)
When I go to this URL, it automatically recognizes that I'm running linux, and it offers me the linux version of Adobe Reader to download.
In typical case where the user simply wants to view or print a document, there is an incredibly simple solution. Tell the user to switch to something other than Adobe Reader, e.g., Foxit on Windows, Preview on MacOS X, or Evince on Linux. (For Windows users who get annoyed by how long it takes to open a PDF in a web browser, this has the added selling point of fixing that problem.) For users who can't switch (either because they need features of AR or are in a corporate environment where they can't install software), the next best option is disable JavaScript: go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript."
Just to point out that on Windows, it is actually more secure to use reader x. The sandbox and exploit mitigation techniques are much better than the negligible gain in security by obscurity in using foxit or sumatra.
It took me a while to figure out what you meant. Foxit didn't used to support javascript at all, and that meant that its added security was more than just security through obscurity. It was actually more secure, because all the exploits for AR were based on javascript, which foxit didn't implement. I hadn't realized that foxit later added javascript support. At this point it looks like foxit is roughly equivalent to AR in terms of security: both have js turned on by default, and both allow you to turn it off. ( http://blog.didierstevens.com/2009/05/06/a-very-brief-history-of-foxit-reader-and-javascript/ ) The only possible difference would be whether Adobe or Foxit is more competent in implementing js securely, and that's going to be relatively hard to know, since both are closed source.
> Excuse me, but a document format used for storing printed documents on a system should represent the document as if it was printed when viewed again, _not_ suddenly switch the language or layout or whatever.
It sounds like what you want is PDF/A ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A ), which restricts the PDF to a simple non-scripted document. The fact that PDF is almost solely used to produce printed documents doesn't mean that's the intent of the format. DjVu ( http://djvu.org/ ) I believe would also be a good fit.
For example, we're looking at taking in student essays in PDF, attaching a form to the front that marks can be entered into, and the whole document returned to the submission system that then pulls the mark out (as opposed to having to track the mark independently of the material it applies to). I've seen presentations run from a PDF before. It would be a pity to lose these possibilities.
Everything in your post makes sense, but now let's get back to the security issues.
If the security issue is that unsophisticated users get their computers owned because they click on a PDF link, then PDF/A isn't a solution. It isn't a solution for at least three reasons: (1) PDF/A is not an appropriate format for general use on the web, because it requires embedding all fonts. This makes the PDF much bigger, and that means the user's experience is slower. People already get bent out of shape about how long it takes for a PDF to load. They don't want a solution that makes it worse. (2) Advocating that people distribute their documents in PDF/A doesn't help, because bad guys will not follow that advice. (3) Telling users to restrict themselves to software that only accepts PDF/A will not work, because virtually no PDF's they encounter on the web are in PDF/A.
In typical case where the user simply wants to view or print a document, there is an incredibly simple solution. Tell the user to switch to something other than Adobe Reader, e.g., Foxit on Windows, Preview on MacOS X, or Evince on Linux. (For Windows users who get annoyed by how long it takes to open a PDF in a web browser, this has the added selling point of fixing that problem.) For users who can't switch (either because they need features of AR or are in a corporate environment where they can't install software), the next best option is disable JavaScript: go to Edit, Preferences, JavaScript, and uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript."
The cases where I don't know of any good, general solution are cases like the one you're describing, where you want to put students' grades on their papers. The problem here is that you need a feature that goes beyond simply printing and viewing a document. Presumably you've thought about the security issues, and you have a PDF application that has the particular feature you want without exposing you to security issues. The trouble here is that the message now becomes much too complex for the average web user. It's easy to tell them "Use Foxit," and then their problem is solved. But what if they say, "I need features x, y, and z that aren't in Foxit, and I need JavaScript enabled, but I don't want to spend several hours researching how to do this without a security risk?" The only answer I have for such a person is, "Don't do that, because Adobe is clueless about security."
One particularly ugly issue is that if you're in the print advertising or publishing business, you really can't get away with not testing your PDFs in Adobe Reader, but AR is poorly engineered and a security risk. The best you can do is to disable JavaScript.
The article can be viewed on a single page here: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/12/13/101213fa_fact_lehrer?currentPage=all
Not surprisingly, most of the posts so far show no signs of having actually RTFA.
Lehrer goes through all kinds of logical contortions to try to explain something that is fundamentally pretty simple: it's publication bias plus regression to themean. He dismisses publication bias and regression to the mean as being unable to explain cases where the level of statistical significance was extremely high. Let's take the example of a published experiment where the level of statistical significance is so high that the result only had one chance in a million of occurring due to chance. One in a million is 4.9 sigma. There are two problems that you will see in virtually all experiments: (1) people always underestimate their random errors, and (2) people always miss sources of systematic error.
It's *extremely* common for people to underestimate their random errors by a factor of 2. That means the the 4.9-sigma result is only a 2.45-sigma result. But 2.45-sigma results happen about 1.4% of the time. That means that if 71 people do experiments, typically one of them will result in a 2.45-sigma confidence level. That person then underestimates his random errors by a factor of 2, and publishes it as a result that could only have happened one time in a million by pure chance.
Missing a systematic error does pretty much the same thing.
Lehrer cites an example of an ESP experiment by Rhine in which a certain subject did far better than chance at first, and later didn't do as well. Possibly this is just underestimation of errors, publication bias, and regression to the mean. There is also good evidence that a lot of Rhine's published work on ESP was tainted by his assistants' cheating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Banks_Rhine#Criticism
Wikiquote says your sig isn't actually something Voltaire said: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire#Misattributed
If Perl 5's default OO is the wrong choice, how is Python's OO the right choice? Syntactic differences aside, they're the same system.
Syntactic sugar is important. Another difference is that in python, ruby, and perl 6 everything is an object, but in perl 5 everything is not an object. I can see various design trade-offs inherent in the everything-is-an-object decision, but, e.g., in ruby one big benefit is that the namespace is clean and the structure of the libraries is very logical and easy to understand. Cf. perl 5, where basically you just have a ton of functions that are thin wrappers for everything in the traditional C/Unix toolbox.
Well, I would say it's not too surprising for a different reason: perl 5's support for OO is ugly and bolted on, so anybody who's a real enthusiast for OO probably isn't using perl. Although perl 6 is designed so that OO isn't ugly and bolted on, perl 6 is still very much at the language-hackers-and-early-adopters phase, so it's not at all surprising that there are not a lot of people in your applicant pool using it.
I like perl 5, and I still do a lot of my programming in it. But realistically if OO is your thing, or if OO is the right tool for a particular job, then perl is the wrong choice. The right choice would probably be either python or ruby. Although ruby is still far less mature than perl 5, it's far more mature than perl 6.
The great reason to choose perl 5 for a new project today is the quality of the implementation. It's very efficient and has a very low incidence of bugs.
This is likely to have the opposite of the intended effect.
They claim that they've succeeded in preventing people from inadvertently viewing child porn. This doesn't really make a lot of sense to me. I live in the US, where there is no such law in place, and I've never inadvertently viewed child porn. Presumably this is because child porn is illegal, so nobody just puts it up on a publicly accessible web site. I'm sure people who want to get child porn can get it, and presumably they do it using various workarounds, such as encryption, anonymization, and file-sharing on darknets, so that they don't end up in jail. However, most people who arent chil-porn users aren't going to bother learning how to use the complicated workarounds, because it would be a lot of work and they don't need it.
Now let's imagine what happens with this new setup they're proposing to protect boys from seeing naked ladies. Adolescent boys are generally extremely interested in seeing naked ladies. So now you've taken a large chunk of the population and given them a strong motivation to route around censorship. Every adolescent boy in Britain now wants to know how to use workarounds in order to evade the controls put in place by their parents and their parents' ISP. Learning to use these workarounds will be some work, but these fine young British boys are highly motivated to do that work because they've got Big Ben in their pants aching like a bad tooth.
So the net result is to take anti-censorship workarounds that are currently used by a tiny population of child-porn users and ensure their widespread adoption by every horny kid in England, Scotland, and Wales. Congratulations.
Usually Not Even Wrong points me in the correct direction but they gave this paper an unusually short nod [...] I think this is a good indication that everyone is waiting for the real scientists (not my lame armchair ass) to look this over and weigh in. [...] It doesn't outright disqualify them but it sure is a vote of no confidence in a lot of the popular String Theory models.
IAARS (I am a real scientist.) You misunderstood the paper. The paper doesn't test string theory. Not Even Wrong was just being snarky and sarcastic; they've posted an update explaining this.
Update: Since this is getting wider than usual attention via Slashdot, I suppose I should remove tongue from cheek and make clear what is going on here. Claims such as the one in the 2000 Times headline always were nonsense: string theory unification failed long ago because it can’t predict anything. Various physicists back then came up with “string theory inspired” models of extra dimensions that would in principle have observable effects at LHC energies. There never was any reason at all to believe these models (and they were no more “predictions of string theory” than anything else), but there was a lot of hype about them, often promoted to the media by people who should have known better. Now that the LHC is finally working, the result is exactly what everyone expected: these exotic phenomena that had no good reason to happen don’t actually happen. It’s great evidence that the LHC is working as expected, but not an experimental refutation of string theory.
So this should clearly establish that eldavajohn misunderstood what was going on.
BTW, I disagree with Not Even Wrong's statement that the theories with large extra dimensions "had no good reason to happen." There is a very clear physical motivation for these theories, which is that they close the gap between the Planck scale and the electroweak unification scale. (At the risk of introducing further major confusion, these theories actually redefine the Planck scale so that it *is* the electroweak scale. So "large" extra dimensions means extra dimensions on their redefined Planck scale, which is large compared to what people normally take to be the Planck scale in 3+1 dimensions.)