Among the FDA-regulated products being sold are sunscreens containing titanium dioxide or zinc oxide nanoparticles (which offer strong ultraviolet protection while remaining colorless) and cosmetics with nanoscale liposomes -- tiny chemical bubbles that deliver moisteners and other ingredients to the skin.
They are asking for better regulation of currently-regulated products. Seems pretty in-scope to me.
Or better yet, how about the government just stay the eff out of things for a change and let's see what happens, and deal with issues as they arise? That would be a novel idea, wouldn't it?
Is it possible that it makes more sense to conduct controlled trials with a limited number of subjects, rather than poorly controlled trials with possibly millions of subjects? That the risk of harm of the latter case might be significant?
I submit that regulation of something with plausible but poorly understood impacts on human and/or enviromental health may not be a terrible idea. The problem, of course, is that it's really hard to write regulations that achieve their ends without being painfully burdensome for the regulated. This is partly due to having to loophole-proof the regs, as history has shown that regulated parties are really good at meeting the letter of the law while butchering the spirit. Also, not all regulations have sucked: from what I can tell, SO2 trading, which has a specific target but allows flexible, market-based solutions, basically works.
I enjoyed your screed, but I would kindly ask you to read my post again. No, I am not comparing the current Administration's acts to date to the crimes of the Nazis (that's where Godwin's law really kicks in). Not even close. As another responder notes, I simply get the willies when I look at our current trajectory in the context of other regimes of the 20th century.
I personally don't celebrate Cuba (sorry- you got the wrong liberal); among other things, I have a good friend whose father had everything taken from him by the current regime. I sure as hell do not want to live there. As far as South America goes, I oppose death squads regardless of their politics. I'm not a big fan of nationalizing industries without compensation, either. So, sorry about the straw man.
I realize that our current regime, as of today, can't hold a candle to Stalin or Hitler at their peaks, in terms of killing and raw evil. What freaks me out is the Herman Goering quote sure sounds familiar, and that there are any comparisions to be made.
We have gone from the City on the Hill to... what?
Thanks. Out of (bad?) habit, I use single quotes with my hrefs, which bit me in the ass this time because the Wikipedia link has a ' in it ("Nixon's enemies list").
(shudder, I suspect I'm going to get hammered on this one)
I hope you do. Am I the only one that remembers Nixon's enemies list?
The primary issue with all of this news regarding government snooping is oversight. Don't give me this "we're at war," "why do you care if you aren't doing anything wrong" crap. We should have a goverment of checks and balances, which were designed to limit the (almost invariably corrupting) concentration of political power. What happens when the Administration alone gets to decide what constitutes what is "wrong?"
First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. -Martin Niemoller
I feel like an alarmist raising the specter of the creep of Totalitarianism in the U.S., but how else do you explain this? Don't feed me the war on terror talking points; consider:
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."
The "I" here is Gustave Gilbert; the respondent is Hermann Goering. I realize that by Godwin's Law I've lost this argument already, but if Goering's comments from 60 years ago don't make your spine tingle, what does?
It's hardly surprising, but I don't trust the AV companies. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they simply have an interest in keep in us scared about viruses and such so that we buy their products.
When SiteAdvisor was independent, I felt I could trust it (partly because they it founded by geeks). Of course, I had no idea how they planned to stay in business, but as a free service it was great. Now I have the perception, at least, that it could have an agenda beyond objective detection of spyware etc. (mainly, scaring the bejeezus out of us).
What I meant to say (I go for speed rather than clean grammar/train of though) is that although the iPod is certainly designed for iTMS-FairPlay, which is a closed, proprietary system, it's perfectly usable as an MP3 player. So it does support a de-facto industry standard (yeah, mp3 isn't Free like ogg, but in practical terms it's free enough for most people), unlike, say, that Sony crap of recent memory. Note that in this context, fully proprietary systems get hosed b/c of convenience and network effects (I already have all these MP3 files, my friend sent me his demo as MP3, etc).
I don't think that's fair. Dvorak and Cringely have a business model that's based on coming up with crazy shit.
Mossberg is a technologist for the common (business) man. He writes about technology from the perspective of a normal person (what we might call 'user').
There is nothing overly provacative over this particular theory, except that it is probably wrong. In new fields, integrated, proprietary technology usually gets the headstart because it can innovate faster (not having to worry about standards and such). But eventually, as the new field matures, innovation slows and the advantages of standardization and commoditization catch up. Here is an excellent talk by Clayton Christensen at the 2004 Open Source Business Conference. It is really an excellent talk. Christensen may not be 100% right, but he is at least mostly right, and has some great insights and stories.
Apple is kicking butt right now because they developed an awesome family of music players that while proprietary, are not overly so, decent software for managing said devices (iTunes is great at some things, sucky at others, but overall is pretty decent), and the first sane online music store (and kudos to them for their successful negotiations with the record labels). It's excellence of execution more than a winning business model. Plus, the industry's perceived need for some sort of DRM, which will let Apple sustain it's closed system for awhile.
If we ever get past the DRM BS (hah!), we'd at some point be able to buy music from store A and play it on player B. At that point, Apple will lose margin in both markets (stores and players) due to increased competition (right now they are exploiting the oft-talked about but rarely observed concept of 'synergy').
Fields where investment would be nice but probably won't happen: Alternate fuels, Safe nuclear fission power plants or practical fusion.
There is a lot more private sector money going into alternate fuels right now. Probably not nearly enough, but an increasing amount. My impression is that 'safe nuclear fission' technologies have come along way; the main obstructions there are political (which may be a good thing, on balance- I'm on the fence re: nukes right now, myself). On the fusion front, there's been plenty of public sector investment there- it's just a really hard frickin' problem. You know, building a small star and such (back off nuclear physicists, I'm speaking in inexact terms).
Reorganize our entire suburban sprawl into small tightly integrated cities with housing next to workplace and markets.
I'm all for it but you're talking about long timescales and either really innovative, forward-looking thought leadership from government, or heavy-handed restrictions of the types of freedoms that many of us enjoy. I'm just saying this is a tough brownfield problem (an easier job is maintaining this structure where it exists, e.g. many parts of Europe).
orbital solar power plants
Let's say that we could build these really cheaply, and send the juice down space-elevator-like transmission lines (or microwaves, if you like to cook). Let's say we can do this really cheaply. While our current energy consumption is a fraction of the energy flux from the sun, it continues to grow; what happens when we start directly throwing off the energy balance of the planet (rather than indirectly via greenhouse gases)? Just curious. Let's get those space elevators built first.
Please note that I basically agree with you, but I sometime like to be a (pragmatic) contrarian ass.
'The bubble generation is much more attuned to the fact that things can get really out of hand,'
If this is true, it'll last another 5-10 years before we forget all lessons learned (correct or not) and return to business as usual. Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results. We deluded ourselves regarding tulips, electronics, radio, the internet, and who knows how many other bubbles; we will do so again.
For a couple very good talks on the self-deception issue (somewhat OT), listen to Robert Trivers and Nassim Taleb
The Dell model based on the "all capital gains, no dividends" business practice pioneered in the 1980s in Silicon Valley is 0xDEADBEEF.
I think that you are sort of right, but only accidentally. I'm talking a little out of my zone, but I think this is right (and Investopedia seems to agree.
If a company is confident that it can take a dollar of profit, invest it in its own operations, and yield a return substantially higher than an investor could by receiving that dollar as a dividend and investing it somewhere else (accouting for risk, task implications and such), the investor is better off if the company re-invests that dollar (which would ultimately lead to a more valuable company and thus capital gains). If a company is mature and/or can't generate a lot of incremental profits from re-investing that dollar, it should kick it out to the shareholders, and let them figure out how to allocate it.
So as Dell's growth slows down, it's ability to generate more profit through re-investment of profits diminishes (yes, it's a lot more complicated than that). So the logic dictating retaining profits vs. paying out dividends may very well change- let's see what Dell does.
Man, the ApplixWare I used (vintage 1998 or so) made Office 97 look stable. I liked it otherwise, though.
The original company, Applix, has gone through some interesting transformations. After ApplixWare, it focused on CRM for awhile, but has since returned to focusing exclusively on TM1, its OLAP database. Once upon a time, you could buy TM1 for Linux for $100; now, licensing a TM1 server cost 5 figures and the primary platform is Windows (I think there is still some development for HP-UX and maybe one other Unixy platform). It's pricey and somewhat buggy, but has some OLAP capabilities (speed, flexibility, Excel integration) that make it unique.
There's an open-source project PALO with similar features that looks promising. It went 1.0 about a month ago.
Substantial. People have actually looked at this, but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips. It's a big number, but I think that when you filter out for the ones that could realistically have panels on 'em, it is only a pretty big number.
Parking Lots
This is my personal favorite. However, you'd need to build the infrastructure to hold the panels off the ground, which adds not insignificant costs. So in this case, efficiency is a strong driver of overall costs.
Paved roads
There are lots of practical constraints here, but in some contexts it could make sense.
But only tree hugging idiots think in terms of ALL solar.
It's a scaling exercise. I am not suggesting we cover a single state with PVs (I'd have to go with AZ or NM in that case), I just want to provide a sense of scale.
My point is that any significant use of solar energy (which I am a huge proponent of) will require a non-trivial use of land. Nogt a deal killer, but not something that can be ignored.
One interesting aspect is that these things seem to be pleasant to look at.
Aesthetics are an important issue for solar collectors, because if we want to generate any significant amount of power from solar, we are going to be looking at a lot of them. On average, with 10% efficiency, you can generate about 150 kWh per year per square meters. US electric power generation in 2004 was about 4 trillion kWh, so if solar were to provide even 10% of that, we'd need to cover the better part of Rhode Island with cells. If you were to provide 100% of total US energy consumption with solar (no, I'm not suggesting we do that), I think you'd need 1-2 Maines.
Who cares if it's only 5% efficient, so long as it is cheap? Tile your house with the stuff to get the area.
You are almost absolutely correct. Except for two things:
1. Low efficiency leads to higher indirect costs- specifically, the infrastructure that holds the cells and connects them to the grid. As you get down to lower efficiencies, these costs become significant.
2. Even at 10% efficiency, you need a huge area to produce a significant amount of juice. Sure, we could in theory generate all the energy we need in the U.S. by covering "only" around 1% of the U.S. land area with 10% efficiency PV (practical issues aside), but that still works out to be a huge area. Like, say, Maine. So even if we had a nice, cheap, low-efficiency solar technology, it's usefulness would ultimately be limited by land use constraints.
Re:Javascript is insecure - AJAX is security hole
on
Ruby On Rails Goes 1.1
·
· Score: 1
Mod parent up; for a small inconvenience (you have to add each site to your whitelist with 2 clicks), NoScript provides a lot of protection. It also shows you how much fricking code is pulled from other domains- scary. The page on which I type this pulls code from:
slashdot.org google-analytics.com 2mdn.net questionmarket.com falkag.net and good ol' doubleclick.net
NoScript lets you select which code to run, and which to ignore. Inconvenient but awesome.
I think what the grandparent meant is that a database can do more than handle SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT queries, and that web apps that use DB backends contain a lot of code for functionality that could have been handled more efficiently and cleanly by the DB itself.
Ironically, I think your post kind of validates the grandparent, in that you seem to implicitly be thinking of SQL databases as little more than a better place to store data than a flat file.
At the end of the day our actions are dictated by a combination of emotion, idealogy/faith, and rational thinking.
I think it's generally OK that our actions are informed by this combination of factors (purely rational thought isn't all it's cracked up to be), but it becomes a problem when aggressive emotions (e.g. hatred) combine with an enabling idealogy and/or faith (this is not a commentary on religion, the concept applies equally well to secular ideologies), and our rational selves take a backseat.
The question is, what can one do to minimize these potent mixtures of destructive emotion and ideas, both in ourselvs and others?
Why would one need batch-sized automatic image editing?
Examples of edits that don't need to be manual: Thumbnails. Resizing. Addition of timestamps/watermarks/copyright info. Conversion to other formats. Motion detection. Mosaics. Proof sheets.
Gentle readers: just because something doesn't seem useful or make sense to you does not mean that it is categorically useless or senseless for everyone.
For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).
SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from our families' computers, we decided to take action.
We realized there was a gaping hole in existing Web security products. While traditional security companies had gotten relatively good at addressing technical threats like viruses, they were failing to prevent a new breed of "social engineering" tricks like spyware infections, identity theft scams, and sites which send excessive e-mail.
To address this challenge, we built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. We document all these results and supplement them with feedback from our users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from our own employees.
Our easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes our safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.
Our goal is to pioneer a new approach to Web safety and make the Internet safer for everyone.
Slashdot Mirror
From TFA:
Among the FDA-regulated products being sold are sunscreens containing titanium dioxide or zinc oxide nanoparticles (which offer strong ultraviolet protection while remaining colorless) and cosmetics with nanoscale liposomes -- tiny chemical bubbles that deliver moisteners and other ingredients to the skin.
They are asking for better regulation of currently-regulated products. Seems pretty in-scope to me.
Or better yet, how about the government just stay the eff out of things for a change and let's see what happens, and deal with issues as they arise? That would be a novel idea, wouldn't it?
Yeah, that approach carries no risks.
Is it possible that it makes more sense to conduct controlled trials with a limited number of subjects, rather than poorly controlled trials with possibly millions of subjects? That the risk of harm of the latter case might be significant?
I submit that regulation of something with plausible but poorly understood impacts on human and/or enviromental health may not be a terrible idea. The problem, of course, is that it's really hard to write regulations that achieve their ends without being painfully burdensome for the regulated. This is partly due to having to loophole-proof the regs, as history has shown that regulated parties are really good at meeting the letter of the law while butchering the spirit. Also, not all regulations have sucked: from what I can tell, SO2 trading, which has a specific target but allows flexible, market-based solutions, basically works.
Hey dood,
I enjoyed your screed, but I would kindly ask you to read my post again. No, I am not comparing the current Administration's acts to date to the crimes of the Nazis (that's where Godwin's law really kicks in). Not even close. As another responder notes, I simply get the willies when I look at our current trajectory in the context of other regimes of the 20th century.
I personally don't celebrate Cuba (sorry- you got the wrong liberal); among other things, I have a good friend whose father had everything taken from him by the current regime. I sure as hell do not want to live there. As far as South America goes, I oppose death squads regardless of their politics. I'm not a big fan of nationalizing industries without compensation, either. So, sorry about the straw man.
I realize that our current regime, as of today, can't hold a candle to Stalin or Hitler at their peaks, in terms of killing and raw evil. What freaks me out is the Herman Goering quote sure sounds familiar, and that there are any comparisions to be made.
We have gone from the City on the Hill to... what?
OK. Don't post as AC and we'll have a conversation.
I think libertarianism is great in theory, but I don't understand how its ideas could ever scale to communities over, say, 150 people.
The article linked in my sig is pretty weak, but I agree with the central argument- no government generally doesn't pan out so well.
Thanks. Out of (bad?) habit, I use single quotes with my hrefs, which bit me in the ass this time because the Wikipedia link has a ' in it ("Nixon's enemies list").
Subpoenas? Warrants? We don't need no stinking warrants!
I hope you do. Am I the only one that remembers Nixon's enemies list?
The primary issue with all of this news regarding government snooping is oversight. Don't give me this "we're at war," "why do you care if you aren't doing anything wrong" crap. We should have a goverment of checks and balances, which were designed to limit the (almost invariably corrupting) concentration of political power. What happens when the Administration alone gets to decide what constitutes what is "wrong?"
I feel like an alarmist raising the specter of the creep of Totalitarianism in the U.S., but how else do you explain this? Don't feed me the war on terror talking points; consider:
The "I" here is Gustave Gilbert; the respondent is Hermann Goering.
I realize that by Godwin's Law I've lost this argument already, but if Goering's comments from 60 years ago don't make your spine tingle, what does?
It's hardly surprising, but I don't trust the AV companies. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they simply have an interest in keep in us scared about viruses and such so that we buy their products.
When SiteAdvisor was independent, I felt I could trust it (partly because they it founded by geeks). Of course, I had no idea how they planned to stay in business, but as a free service it was great. Now I have the perception, at least, that it could have an agenda beyond objective detection of spyware etc. (mainly, scaring the bejeezus out of us).
while proprietary, are not overly so,
What I meant to say (I go for speed rather than clean grammar/train of though) is that although the iPod is certainly designed for iTMS-FairPlay, which is a closed, proprietary system, it's perfectly usable as an MP3 player. So it does support a de-facto industry standard (yeah, mp3 isn't Free like ogg, but in practical terms it's free enough for most people), unlike, say, that Sony crap of recent memory. Note that in this context, fully proprietary systems get hosed b/c of convenience and network effects (I already have all these MP3 files, my friend sent me his demo as MP3, etc).
Did you write this with a straight face? Forward-looking leadership? In a government?
It is rare, but it does exist from time to time.
I don't think that's fair. Dvorak and Cringely have a business model that's based on coming up with crazy shit.
Mossberg is a technologist for the common (business) man. He writes about technology from the perspective of a normal person (what we might call 'user').
There is nothing overly provacative over this particular theory, except that it is probably wrong. In new fields, integrated, proprietary technology usually gets the headstart because it can innovate faster (not having to worry about standards and such). But eventually, as the new field matures, innovation slows and the advantages of standardization and commoditization catch up. Here is an excellent talk by Clayton Christensen at the 2004 Open Source Business Conference. It is really an excellent talk. Christensen may not be 100% right, but he is at least mostly right, and has some great insights and stories.
Apple is kicking butt right now because they developed an awesome family of music players that while proprietary, are not overly so, decent software for managing said devices (iTunes is great at some things, sucky at others, but overall is pretty decent), and the first sane online music store (and kudos to them for their successful negotiations with the record labels). It's excellence of execution more than a winning business model. Plus, the industry's perceived need for some sort of DRM, which will let Apple sustain it's closed system for awhile.
If we ever get past the DRM BS (hah!), we'd at some point be able to buy music from store A and play it on player B. At that point, Apple will lose margin in both markets (stores and players) due to increased competition (right now they are exploiting the oft-talked about but rarely observed concept of 'synergy').
Fields where investment would be nice but probably won't happen:
Alternate fuels, Safe nuclear fission power plants or practical fusion.
There is a lot more private sector money going into alternate fuels right now. Probably not nearly enough, but an increasing amount. My impression is that 'safe nuclear fission' technologies have come along way; the main obstructions there are political (which may be a good thing, on balance- I'm on the fence re: nukes right now, myself). On the fusion front, there's been plenty of public sector investment there- it's just a really hard frickin' problem. You know, building a small star and such (back off nuclear physicists, I'm speaking in inexact terms).
Reorganize our entire suburban sprawl into small tightly integrated cities with housing next to workplace and markets.
I'm all for it but you're talking about long timescales and either really innovative, forward-looking thought leadership from government, or heavy-handed restrictions of the types of freedoms that many of us enjoy. I'm just saying this is a tough brownfield problem (an easier job is maintaining this structure where it exists, e.g. many parts of Europe).
orbital solar power plants
Let's say that we could build these really cheaply, and send the juice down space-elevator-like transmission lines (or microwaves, if you like to cook). Let's say we can do this really cheaply. While our current energy consumption is a fraction of the energy flux from the sun, it continues to grow; what happens when we start directly throwing off the energy balance of the planet (rather than indirectly via greenhouse gases)? Just curious. Let's get those space elevators built first.
Please note that I basically agree with you, but I sometime like to be a (pragmatic) contrarian ass.
I didn't RTFA yet, but I had to react to:
'The bubble generation is much more attuned to the fact that things can get really out of hand,'
If this is true, it'll last another 5-10 years before we forget all lessons learned (correct or not) and return to business as usual. Our species is really good at self-deception, group-think, extrapolation forecasting, and greed, with varying results. We deluded ourselves regarding tulips, electronics, radio, the internet, and who knows how many other bubbles; we will do so again.
For a couple very good talks on the self-deception issue (somewhat OT), listen to Robert Trivers and Nassim Taleb
The Dell model based on the "all capital gains, no dividends" business practice pioneered in the 1980s in Silicon Valley is 0xDEADBEEF.
I think that you are sort of right, but only accidentally. I'm talking a little out of my zone, but I think this is right (and Investopedia seems to agree.
If a company is confident that it can take a dollar of profit, invest it in its own operations, and yield a return substantially higher than an investor could by receiving that dollar as a dividend and investing it somewhere else (accouting for risk, task implications and such), the investor is better off if the company re-invests that dollar (which would ultimately lead to a more valuable company and thus capital gains). If a company is mature and/or can't generate a lot of incremental profits from re-investing that dollar, it should kick it out to the shareholders, and let them figure out how to allocate it.
So as Dell's growth slows down, it's ability to generate more profit through re-investment of profits diminishes (yes, it's a lot more complicated than that). So the logic dictating retaining profits vs. paying out dividends may very well change- let's see what Dell does.
Man, the ApplixWare I used (vintage 1998 or so) made Office 97 look stable. I liked it otherwise, though.
The original company, Applix, has gone through some interesting transformations. After ApplixWare, it focused on CRM for awhile, but has since returned to focusing exclusively on TM1, its OLAP database. Once upon a time, you could buy TM1 for Linux for $100; now, licensing a TM1 server cost 5 figures and the primary platform is Windows (I think there is still some development for HP-UX and maybe one other Unixy platform). It's pricey and somewhat buggy, but has some OLAP capabilities (speed, flexibility, Excel integration) that make it unique.
There's an open-source project PALO with similar features that looks promising. It went 1.0 about a month ago.
Rooftops
Substantial. People have actually looked at this, but I don't have the numbers at my fingertips. It's a big number, but I think that when you filter out for the ones that could realistically have panels on 'em, it is only a pretty big number.
Parking Lots
This is my personal favorite. However, you'd need to build the infrastructure to hold the panels off the ground, which adds not insignificant costs. So in this case, efficiency is a strong driver of overall costs.
Paved roads
There are lots of practical constraints here, but in some contexts it could make sense.
But only tree hugging idiots think in terms of ALL solar.
It's a scaling exercise. I am not suggesting we cover a single state with PVs (I'd have to go with AZ or NM in that case), I just want to provide a sense of scale.
My point is that any significant use of solar energy (which I am a huge proponent of) will require a non-trivial use of land. Nogt a deal killer, but not something that can be ignored.
One interesting aspect is that these things seem to be pleasant to look at.
Aesthetics are an important issue for solar collectors, because if we want to generate any significant amount of power from solar, we are going to be looking at a lot of them. On average, with 10% efficiency, you can generate about 150 kWh per year per square meters. US electric power generation in 2004 was about 4 trillion kWh, so if solar were to provide even 10% of that, we'd need to cover the better part of Rhode Island with cells. If you were to provide 100% of total US energy consumption with solar (no, I'm not suggesting we do that), I think you'd need 1-2 Maines.
Who cares if it's only 5% efficient, so long as it is cheap? Tile your house with the stuff to get the area.
You are almost absolutely correct. Except for two things:
1. Low efficiency leads to higher indirect costs- specifically, the infrastructure that holds the cells and connects them to the grid. As you get down to lower efficiencies, these costs become significant.
2. Even at 10% efficiency, you need a huge area to produce a significant amount of juice. Sure, we could in theory generate all the energy we need in the U.S. by covering "only" around 1% of the U.S. land area with 10% efficiency PV (practical issues aside), but that still works out to be a huge area. Like, say, Maine. So even if we had a nice, cheap, low-efficiency solar technology, it's usefulness would ultimately be limited by land use constraints.
Mod parent up; for a small inconvenience (you have to add each site to your whitelist with 2 clicks), NoScript provides a lot of protection. It also shows you how much fricking code is pulled from other domains- scary. The page on which I type this pulls code from:
slashdot.org
google-analytics.com
2mdn.net
questionmarket.com
falkag.net
and good ol' doubleclick.net
NoScript lets you select which code to run, and which to ignore. Inconvenient but awesome.
And somewhat on-topic, check out siteadvisor.com
This a cute story, but it promotes a rather simplistic view of the world.
What about the snake whose best friend is a hamster?
I think what the grandparent meant is that a database can do more than handle SELECT, UPDATE, and INSERT queries, and that web apps that use DB backends contain a lot of code for functionality that could have been handled more efficiently and cleanly by the DB itself.
Ironically, I think your post kind of validates the grandparent, in that you seem to implicitly be thinking of SQL databases as little more than a better place to store data than a flat file.
Cheers.
Good thread.
At the end of the day our actions are dictated by a combination of emotion, idealogy/faith, and rational thinking.
I think it's generally OK that our actions are informed by this combination of factors (purely rational thought isn't all it's cracked up to be), but it becomes a problem when aggressive emotions (e.g. hatred) combine with an enabling idealogy and/or faith (this is not a commentary on religion, the concept applies equally well to secular ideologies), and our rational selves take a backseat.
The question is, what can one do to minimize these potent mixtures of destructive emotion and ideas, both in ourselvs and others?
Why would one need batch-sized automatic image editing?
Examples of edits that don't need to be manual: Thumbnails. Resizing. Addition of timestamps/watermarks/copyright info. Conversion to other formats. Motion detection. Mosaics. Proof sheets.
Gentle readers: just because something doesn't seem useful or make sense to you does not mean that it is categorically useless or senseless for everyone.
Arab/Muslim societies produced some fantastic engineering in their day, much of which is described in the dry but quite informative A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times.
For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).
This is all you need:
Verbatim from the site:
About SiteAdvisor
SiteAdvisor is a consumer software company founded in April 2005 by a group of MIT engineers who wanted to make the Web safer for their family and friends. Having spent one too many holiday breaks trying to clean a mess of spam, adware, and spyware from our families' computers, we decided to take action.
We realized there was a gaping hole in existing Web security products. While traditional security companies had gotten relatively good at addressing technical threats like viruses, they were failing to prevent a new breed of "social engineering" tricks like spyware infections, identity theft scams, and sites which send excessive e-mail.
To address this challenge, we built a system of automated testers which continually patrol the Web to browse sites, download files, and enter information on sign-up forms. We document all these results and supplement them with feedback from our users, comments from Web site owners, and analysis from our own employees.
Our easy to use software for Internet Explorer and Firefox summarizes our safety results into intuitive red, yellow and green ratings to help Web users stay safe as they search, browse and transact online.
Our goal is to pioneer a new approach to Web safety and make the Internet safer for everyone.