Wow, I've never seen such an egregious overuse of underlining. And caps, for that matter. And bold and italics, too! Geez, there's only five lines of text that are not emphasized in some hysterical fashion. Oh, God, pray they don't discover WordArt.
I think they should have written it like this:
...If you fail to respond... We will turn your name over to our outside counsel for consideration of legal action!!!!!!!!111111!!!!!!!!
When did google become a conventional search engine...?
Yeah, that was my reaction, too. I remember Google being the next generation search tool that coped with the glut of hits that resulted from conventional search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista.
Internet time sure is fast.
"100,000 hits? That's nothing! In my day, we used to get over ten million hits, and we had to follow every link before we found what we wanted! And we liked it!"
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
Of course, this is ridiculous. But there have been many who claimed that producing a hoax as convincing as the Voynich papers was virtually impossible. Rugg has shown that, at the earliest known date of "discovery," it was possible, and perhaps well worth doing for the price it fetched.
So, your analogy is incomplete. The insurance company's argument would have some relevance if you had previously been claiming that it was technologically impossible for you to light the fire. They just produced a counter-argument.
Coming back to the Voynich manuscript, it just means that the possibility of a hoax cannot be ruled out because of the effort required to produce it. Turns out it's not as hard as people thought.
Vega was the source of the extraterrestrial signal in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."
You mean "Contact," surely. And unfortunately, although it was the source of the signal, the system itself contained no life. So I don't think we can draw any parallels here.
There is no mechanism inherent in the Linux development process to assure that intellectual property rights, confidentiality or security are protected. The Linux process does not prevent inclusion of code that has been stolen outright; or developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts.
Wha-? What about, oh, openly distributed source code??
Isn't SCO in the process of trying to protect its own IP right now? Does he expect us to believe that SCO discovered IBM's putative IP transgressions without looking at the Linux source code?
The ones they should be going after are the ones in Nigeria -- the scam is the third largest source of foreign currency for that country.
Really? I find that hard to believe. If I were a Nigerian trying to scam people, I would make the scam complete by claiming to be from a different country, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or something...
Programmers, especially those working independently, can gain invaluable information on the available means for protecting or profiting from their work.
It should be noted that this leaves out entirely the third pillar of the great IP law triumvirate: patents - which often get confused with copyright by laypeople.
BTW, I am one of those laypeople... but perhaps just slightly less confused than some others.
Based on a pre-existing fan-produced translation, I produced my own... if people are at all interested in reading it. I also talk about various translation issues I dealt with (or didn't deal with) in my "Notes and Reflections" page.
The hardest parts, for me, had less to do with cultural differences, but with linguistic differences where a Japanese expression was extremely compact and difficult to express in English, given the time constraint (one could argue that this is due to a cultural difference). One of my goals was to try and come up with something that could potentially be used for dubbing.
Of course, the opposite problem, where the Japanese phrase is longer, is not an issue, because it's always easy to make something more wordy.
Ranting about poor scientific method is often an easy way of getting modded up... I know; I've done it myself. But unless you've read up about this study elsewhere, the article is so bare in terms of details of exact methods, that I think you're being unfair here.
22% reported feeling odd when the infrasound was playing.... 78% also didn't notice ANYTHING.
You're right that this by itself doesn't mean much, but that doesn't mean it cannot mean much... if the same test without the infrasound resulted in 1% of people feeling odd, then you probably have a statistically significant result. But the article doesn't elaborate.
This wasn't a double-blind study.... Can you IMAGINE all the "Hey, do you feel funny? I feel funny!" discussion polluting the results?
Discussion among the listeners will have an effect on the outcome, but it could still have been a valid double-blind test. The subject was the group, not individuals. Obviously, the result has to be considered in that context. As long as they do what they say and say what they do, I think it's fair. Although I can't deny that an individually administered test would have been better (but more expensive).
If your rant is based on the fact that you can't draw any conclusions from this news report, then I'd be far more concerned about the scientific methods of the reporter.
For a moment, I thought that an Aibo was launched into space with some new European earth observation satellite. And I was thinking, what the HELL kind of publicity stunt is THIS???
Available number of IPv4 addresses: 4.2 billion
Number of people on earth: 6.35 Billion according to ibilio
Wait, but according to the article, 70% of those 4.2 billion addresses are allotted to the United States.
That leaves just over a billion addresses for the other 6 billion or so on the planet. And according to the article, the distribution among countries seems grossly unfair, for instance, "India.. has just 2 million IP addresses."
I don't know about other people, but it's been true for me - not because I made a conscious choice between internet and other media - but just because the internet has been far, far more available.
During university, it was there in all the computer labs, and now, when I'm at work, it's right there on my desk for seven or eight hours every day.
Mind you, even if I did make an unbiased choice, I'd probably still spend more time browsing the web than watching TV.
...few in notoriously conservative Ottawa will likely fret witnessing the company's slow retreat...
Hmm, I hope Ottawa isn't that notorious... I mean, sure, we're a government town. But if you look at the sheer number of festivals and celebrations that go on over a year in the Ottawa region, you'd think those politicians never get any work done (well, maybe you think that anyway).
We have the Jazz Festival, the Blues Festival, the Fringe Festival, the Chamber Music Festival, Winterlude, the Tulip Festival, the Hot Air Balloon Festival, Canada Day... and that's just off the top of my head.
While I agree that language influences the way you think, I've never agreed with the simplistic examples of "they have more words for X" or "they have a word that means Y". And I think your conclusion about linguistically caused colourblindness takes the idea way, way too far.
If, instead of colour perception, you had referred to the perception of verbal sounds, then I would have agreed more. If a sound doesn't exist in your language, the brain tends to "snap" it to the closest sound that does exist, and it's virtually impossible to hear it any other way.
But if you want to dig deeply into linguistic influences on thought, I think it's more instructive to look at things like grammar and fundamentally important language constructs.
In my native Japanese, for instance, the sentence structure places the predicate (the verb) at the end of the sentence. All your objects and completions come first, unlike English where the verb is sandwiched in between. You have to think about things in a different order when speaking Japanese.
Japanese has no future tense. You just use the present tense conjugation, and if it's not obvious from the context, you explicitly specify that it's in the future (e.g., by saying "tomorrow" or "next week").
Here's a biggie: Japanese has no direct translation for "to be." There are translations for certain specific meanings, like "to exist" or "to be [in a location]" and adjectives get conjugated like verbs if you are describing something. But Hamlet's "to be or not to be" would have to be translated into something completely different in Japanese.
IMHO, it's these sorts of things that influence thought, not some simple word-count.
it actually has 65,000 screens, each of which is visible in an alternate universe, a la quantum
So, assuming that every possible configuration of the display is rendered in all universes, we can conclude that the screen is either a 4x4 pixel screen in black and white, or maybe 2x2 pixels at 16 colours.
But when I leave the computer I don't really wanna take it with me. etc.
This bugs me. If this technology doesn't interest you, why post in a discussion about it?
I mean, leading a balanced life is good, obviously. Of course, it's insightful. Maybe it's even "news for nerds," at least those nerds who have no life outside their nerd-life.
But I propose we avoid this kind of comment - it could be posted on almost every news story that comes up on Slashdot. It amounts to little more than "I hate this because I'm more than just a nerd!" Which only invites someone else to retort, "just because you hate it shouldn't mean I can't use it!" And that's a very, very, tired discussion.
Yes, it's "Insightful," but I almost feel that "Redundant" is more appropriate.
For non-techie users, I imagine it's baffling that something that disappears when you turn the computer off should be called "memory." And disk space, the stuff that the computer really remembers, is specifically not called memory.
More memory doesn't mean that a computer will "remember" more. In most cases, it just means better performance. In the mind of a user, that makes it part of the CPU (almost like another level of cache, which it is, kind of). On the other hand, more disk space actually means more "memory."
It really is nonsensical from the average users' point of view. I think, sometimes, techies will have to get used to using the "incorrect" term just to avoid confusion.
The type of object that an identifier points to cannot be declared; it's established at run-time. This is either a strength or a weakness depending on your philosophical leanings.
It's a strength in that it makes prototyping very fast. If you want some function to operate on a class that it wasn't originally intended to operate on, then you just have to make the new class interface-compatible and jam it in there. No worrying about subclassing or prototypes or anything.
It's a weakness for maintenance, because, when you're debugging this function, all you know is something has been passed in, and you're calling GetValue() on it. And cripes, you've got fifty six classes that have a GetValue() method! Which one is it getting? You have to run the program to find out.
If you're doing scripting, then dynamic typing can be a godsend. If you're doing larger scale development, it can be a pain in the butt, because all of your developers need to be very disciplined.
In general, Python is almost too powerful for its own good. If you have any undisciplined or "cowboy" programmers on your team, Python gives them enough rope to hang themselves... and everyone else... and their managers.
But I love it. Treat it with respect, and Python will work wonders for you.
So many people have expressed insane frustration about this whole issue... but I imagine that insane frustration is exactly what many blind people experience every day as they try and make their way through a world that is built for sighted people.
If you're ranting because the U.S. courts are out of control, then put the blame where it's due.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, I've never seen such an egregious overuse of underlining. And caps, for that matter. And bold and italics, too! Geez, there's only five lines of text that are not emphasized in some hysterical fashion. Oh, God, pray they don't discover WordArt.
I think they should have written it like this:
When did google become a conventional search engine...?
Yeah, that was my reaction, too. I remember Google being the next generation search tool that coped with the glut of hits that resulted from conventional search engines such as Yahoo and Alta Vista.
Internet time sure is fast.
"100,000 hits? That's nothing! In my day, we used to get over ten million hits, and we had to follow every link before we found what we wanted! And we liked it!"
Example, my house catches fire. Firefighters are unable to determine the source. The insurance company denies my claim on the grounds that the technology existed to rub two sticks together to generate heat and produce fire.
Of course, this is ridiculous. But there have been many who claimed that producing a hoax as convincing as the Voynich papers was virtually impossible. Rugg has shown that, at the earliest known date of "discovery," it was possible, and perhaps well worth doing for the price it fetched.
So, your analogy is incomplete. The insurance company's argument would have some relevance if you had previously been claiming that it was technologically impossible for you to light the fire. They just produced a counter-argument.
Coming back to the Voynich manuscript, it just means that the possibility of a hoax cannot be ruled out because of the effort required to produce it. Turns out it's not as hard as people thought.
Actually, the love of money is the root of all evil. Therefore,
love * money = (all evil)^(1/2)
So
love * (girls)^(1/2) = (all evil)^(1/2)
And so uh, maybe
love^2 * girls = all evil
Too much love of girls is evil?
Hey, I tried.
Vega was the source of the extraterrestrial signal in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."
You mean "Contact," surely. And unfortunately, although it was the source of the signal, the system itself contained no life. So I don't think we can draw any parallels here.
Quoting the letter...
There is no mechanism inherent in the Linux development process to assure that intellectual property rights, confidentiality or security are protected. The Linux process does not prevent inclusion of code that has been stolen outright; or developed by improper use of proprietary methods and concepts.
Wha-? What about, oh, openly distributed source code??
Isn't SCO in the process of trying to protect its own IP right now? Does he expect us to believe that SCO discovered IBM's putative IP transgressions without looking at the Linux source code?
The ones they should be going after are the ones in Nigeria -- the scam is the third largest source of foreign currency for that country.
Really? I find that hard to believe. If I were a Nigerian trying to scam people, I would make the scam complete by claiming to be from a different country, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, or something...
Wait a minute--
Programmers, especially those working independently, can gain invaluable information on the available means for protecting or profiting from their work.
It should be noted that this leaves out entirely the third pillar of the great IP law triumvirate: patents - which often get confused with copyright by laypeople.
BTW, I am one of those laypeople... but perhaps just slightly less confused than some others.
Based on a pre-existing fan-produced translation, I produced my own... if people are at all interested in reading it. I also talk about various translation issues I dealt with (or didn't deal with) in my "Notes and Reflections" page.
The hardest parts, for me, had less to do with cultural differences, but with linguistic differences where a Japanese expression was extremely compact and difficult to express in English, given the time constraint (one could argue that this is due to a cultural difference). One of my goals was to try and come up with something that could potentially be used for dubbing.
Of course, the opposite problem, where the Japanese phrase is longer, is not an issue, because it's always easy to make something more wordy.
Ranting about poor scientific method is often an easy way of getting modded up... I know; I've done it myself. But unless you've read up about this study elsewhere, the article is so bare in terms of details of exact methods, that I think you're being unfair here.
22% reported feeling odd when the infrasound was playing. ... 78% also didn't notice ANYTHING.
You're right that this by itself doesn't mean much, but that doesn't mean it cannot mean much... if the same test without the infrasound resulted in 1% of people feeling odd, then you probably have a statistically significant result. But the article doesn't elaborate.
This wasn't a double-blind study. ... Can you IMAGINE all the "Hey, do you feel funny? I feel funny!" discussion polluting the results?
Discussion among the listeners will have an effect on the outcome, but it could still have been a valid double-blind test. The subject was the group, not individuals. Obviously, the result has to be considered in that context. As long as they do what they say and say what they do, I think it's fair. Although I can't deny that an individually administered test would have been better (but more expensive).
If your rant is based on the fact that you can't draw any conclusions from this news report, then I'd be far more concerned about the scientific methods of the reporter.
For a moment, I thought that an Aibo was launched into space with some new European earth observation satellite. And I was thinking, what the HELL kind of publicity stunt is THIS???
Available number of IPv4 addresses: 4.2 billion
Number of people on earth: 6.35 Billion according to ibilio
Wait, but according to the article, 70% of those 4.2 billion addresses are allotted to the United States.
That leaves just over a billion addresses for the other 6 billion or so on the planet. And according to the article, the distribution among countries seems grossly unfair, for instance, "India.. has just 2 million IP addresses."
I don't know about other people, but it's been true for me - not because I made a conscious choice between internet and other media - but just because the internet has been far, far more available.
During university, it was there in all the computer labs, and now, when I'm at work, it's right there on my desk for seven or eight hours every day.
Mind you, even if I did make an unbiased choice, I'd probably still spend more time browsing the web than watching TV.
Why don't people work on making more of Stephen Hawking's exoskeleton?
In Japan something has to do done to cope with the tide of electronic waste.
Omigod, Slashdot grammar has spread to the BBC!! How long before the Queen's English becomes 1337?
Hmm, I hope Ottawa isn't that notorious... I mean, sure, we're a government town. But if you look at the sheer number of festivals and celebrations that go on over a year in the Ottawa region, you'd think those politicians never get any work done (well, maybe you think that anyway).
We have the Jazz Festival, the Blues Festival, the Fringe Festival, the Chamber Music Festival, Winterlude, the Tulip Festival, the Hot Air Balloon Festival, Canada Day... and that's just off the top of my head.
I like living in Ottawa.
While I agree that language influences the way you think, I've never agreed with the simplistic examples of "they have more words for X" or "they have a word that means Y". And I think your conclusion about linguistically caused colourblindness takes the idea way, way too far.
If, instead of colour perception, you had referred to the perception of verbal sounds, then I would have agreed more. If a sound doesn't exist in your language, the brain tends to "snap" it to the closest sound that does exist, and it's virtually impossible to hear it any other way.
But if you want to dig deeply into linguistic influences on thought, I think it's more instructive to look at things like grammar and fundamentally important language constructs.
In my native Japanese, for instance, the sentence structure places the predicate (the verb) at the end of the sentence. All your objects and completions come first, unlike English where the verb is sandwiched in between. You have to think about things in a different order when speaking Japanese.
Japanese has no future tense. You just use the present tense conjugation, and if it's not obvious from the context, you explicitly specify that it's in the future (e.g., by saying "tomorrow" or "next week").
Here's a biggie: Japanese has no direct translation for "to be." There are translations for certain specific meanings, like "to exist" or "to be [in a location]" and adjectives get conjugated like verbs if you are describing something. But Hamlet's "to be or not to be" would have to be translated into something completely different in Japanese.
IMHO, it's these sorts of things that influence thought, not some simple word-count.
it actually has 65,000 screens, each of which is visible in an alternate universe, a la quantum
So, assuming that every possible configuration of the display is rendered in all universes, we can conclude that the screen is either a 4x4 pixel screen in black and white, or maybe 2x2 pixels at 16 colours.
Man, that sucks.
In the GNU tradition:
Linucs Is Not Using Code from SCO
But when I leave the computer I don't really wanna take it with me. etc.
This bugs me. If this technology doesn't interest you, why post in a discussion about it?
I mean, leading a balanced life is good, obviously. Of course, it's insightful. Maybe it's even "news for nerds," at least those nerds who have no life outside their nerd-life.
But I propose we avoid this kind of comment - it could be posted on almost every news story that comes up on Slashdot. It amounts to little more than "I hate this because I'm more than just a nerd!" Which only invites someone else to retort, "just because you hate it shouldn't mean I can't use it!" And that's a very, very, tired discussion.
Yes, it's "Insightful," but I almost feel that "Redundant" is more appropriate.
For non-techie users, I imagine it's baffling that something that disappears when you turn the computer off should be called "memory." And disk space, the stuff that the computer really remembers, is specifically not called memory.
More memory doesn't mean that a computer will "remember" more. In most cases, it just means better performance. In the mind of a user, that makes it part of the CPU (almost like another level of cache, which it is, kind of). On the other hand, more disk space actually means more "memory."
It really is nonsensical from the average users' point of view. I think, sometimes, techies will have to get used to using the "incorrect" term just to avoid confusion.
The type of object that an identifier points to cannot be declared; it's established at run-time. This is either a strength or a weakness depending on your philosophical leanings.
It's a strength in that it makes prototyping very fast. If you want some function to operate on a class that it wasn't originally intended to operate on, then you just have to make the new class interface-compatible and jam it in there. No worrying about subclassing or prototypes or anything.
It's a weakness for maintenance, because, when you're debugging this function, all you know is something has been passed in, and you're calling GetValue() on it. And cripes, you've got fifty six classes that have a GetValue() method! Which one is it getting? You have to run the program to find out.
If you're doing scripting, then dynamic typing can be a godsend. If you're doing larger scale development, it can be a pain in the butt, because all of your developers need to be very disciplined.
In general, Python is almost too powerful for its own good. If you have any undisciplined or "cowboy" programmers on your team, Python gives them enough rope to hang themselves... and everyone else... and their managers.
But I love it. Treat it with respect, and Python will work wonders for you.
So many people have expressed insane frustration about this whole issue... but I imagine that insane frustration is exactly what many blind people experience every day as they try and make their way through a world that is built for sighted people.
If you're ranting because the U.S. courts are out of control, then put the blame where it's due.
That's like one of those simple NP-complete problems.
:-)
There's a leak in the Linus kernel, someone please post a patch.
Here ya go, mayteee! Arrrr!!