Something I never understood is why the hashtags need to count towards the 140 character limit - IMO they should be parsed out and stored as post metadata
IIRC from the times when I used yeast in my PhD research, wild type (that means: not mutated) S. cerevisiae clumps in advanced stationary phase (end of growth curve, nutritional deprivation). Such circumstances happen more often that not in the real life of S. cerevisae: just imagine that in nature it cannot walk to the nearest grapevine and say 'hey lets do some sugar fermentation here'... no it depends on being able to survive in times of drought. ne way it does that is through forming spores, another way of temporarily surviving could be this kind of 'clumping'. So, the 'clumping gene' is already there, it is just expressed in certain circumstances, circumstances easily simulated in a lab situation.
In my mind the argument would revolve around self-organisation versus (old, dormant) organisational information still present in the S. cerevisae genome. I'm bummed I cannot access the original article at the PNAS site, else I could comment on that in a bit more detail.
Companies like Facebook base their income on the information they collect from you, and are therefore in a continuous arms race with you to lure you into giving out more information. I admire your absolute understanding of privacy choices on every level and nuance imaginable, but most of the other people in this world are less aware and more easily tricked... and even if they are rather smart, they make mistakes.
Is it therefore fair to put the onus on the person who has a Facebook profile to protect their privacy? Especially when the founder of Facebook has been on record a few times, stating that privacy is on a slippery slope anyway, and they'll just go with the flow? Especially when the "I've got nothing to hide" argument has been thoroughly debunked, because just about any information can be (selectively) used to incriminate you, even when you're entirely innocent?
As much as I am a fan of individual responsibility, I do believe that this tit-for-tat game of deception between social networking sites and their users is rather immoral on the side of the social networking sites, and that it is a cop out to say that the user is being stupid. This is where Assange draws the line, which is not paranoid, but realistic. They really are after eroding our privacy.
I love the concept, but I imagine myself stretching over the touchpad area to type, which wouldn't be very ergonomical. I can also imagine that the base of my palms would rest on the touchpad area occasionally as I type.
I agree with the parent post to a large extent, but I think that maybe some things get mixed up here with regard to who is responsible for what.
The extension of human knowledge through science is based on verifiable experimentation. If I do an experiment, and publish an article based on it, the reviewers of the article require that I specify the exact circumstances needed to find the published outcome. If others cannot repeat the experiments, the speculations in my discussion are unfounded and therefore discarded.
The problem is not one of relativism and Popperian verifiability issues. The problem is that people mix up the notions of information and truth. Information, from any source, can be seen as a form of communication. One can agree or disagree, and when something new is presented, the onus is on the information provider to explain why (s)he thinks this information is relevant to a certain problem.
In the case of Wikipedia, this becomes difficult, but it's not Wikipedia that's the problem, but a general property of compendia of knowledge. Printed encyclopedia, textbooks, reviews in scientific magazines all have this property: the presentation of conclusions.
Conclusions are not the outcome of scientific research, they are merely new questions asked to the scientific community. They state: I found X, and within the current state of affairs in this discipline, I think it means Y. Sometimes Y becomes a temporary truth, a dogma, but that's not the fault of science, but of people thinking they are right;-)
The issue at hand is the issue of critical reading. When we criticise Wikipedia for being incorrect, we are actually saying that we want them to be trustworthy enough so that we don't have to be critical anymore.
If there is a general underlying problem, it is the problem of trust, and why people seem to have adopted the notion that they should assume the worst relying on the simple dichotomy of truth and lie. There are 'factual untruths' in Wikipedia, as there are in any encyclopedia. The problem is that anyone can edit, and that we don't trust them.
Now, without spinning off into conspiracy theory land, what are the variables influencing trust that someone's intentions are genuine? I can think of a few, but it's a problem that needs collaborative solving. After all, I may be 'wrong';-)
I got the impression that Ogg Theora was removed as the default codec because certain parties were arguing for the inclusion of DRM in the HTML 5 standard. Was that an incorrect assumption?
My point was exactly that pushing for a standard which does not exist would be similar to the non-standard tags pushed through in the period when NS4.7 & IE4 where the main browsers.
From the above link:
"we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing"
No problem.
"compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable,"
Quality is disputable, of course. But what other open sourced alternative is there at the moment?
"and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies."
This is not a problem, as far as I understand matters. Ogg Theora allows everyone to use the patented methods used, right? No other format I know of does. It would be lovely if there were "open" alternatives.
"They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
I'm sure the guys at Netscape thought they were great activists when they introduced <blink>, to compete with IE's <marquee>. But since it's open source, it's ok to introduce deviations from standards, right? After all, we wouldn't want to deflect to the Dark Side.
No, this is not a troll, although perhaps a bit sarcastically worded. I just think it's smarter (and way more difficult, yes) to focus on getting competitive open formats into the standard.
This would never fly, period. People are too blase for a revolution, and they are being kept busy by the tremendous workload that comes with the two or more jobs they need to pay the ever increasing bills.
The only hope I have is the spread of wealth concentration. The US government doesn't seem to be interested in that, though, and here in Europe the tendency is to follow the US trend, slowly killing the social welfare systems.
Relative wealth is generated through the creation of bottlenecks (e.g. the current talk of 'world food shortage' being a great example). People need to learn how this works, and decentralise the power by applying this knowledge.
One way is to build a grey economy, totally independent of money, and based on value. I make something for you, you make me dinner or treat me to a couple of beers, something like that.
the oracle has spoken and we are struck with awe...
linus is just a guy, quite opinionated, and quite harsh in his words at times. are we gonna see this kind of slashdot story everytime he misbehaves somewhat? (i hope not)
dealing with the facts, you can only conclude form success rate that the devices will do what they are told in 99.7% of the cases. period. alternatively, the device gets a wrong signal, or a distorted signal, or nothing (all three are very reasonable possibilities).
the products behave well within their specifications. IMO overclocking is lots of hype over small differences. what i care for is a product that works well. and 90% (or more) of the customers feel exactly the same way (or are too ignorasnt to understand what overclocking is)
god, i wish sometimes that geeks were a tad bit more pragmatic, and would put themselves in the position of manufacturars (or anyone "regular" for that matter)
(no i don't deal in popular opinions. it's not my style)
grandparent made a strong point. not even from the POV of making money... if you care about your photography, you're probably gonna be upset if you miss that special shot you wanted to make but couldn't because you didn't have your camera with you.
> > I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything > > supports MySQL. > > I'm glad you don't work for me with that attitude. I'd rather work > with someone who is interested in learning new things and will bring > some creativity to the job. People of your mentality have to be careful > they don't fall into the "false laziness" trap--using some tool or > technique or techology because you are too lazy to learn something new, > only to end up doing load of extra work to avoid the shortcomings of your > inappropriate design choices. The result is scads of legacy code at higher > layers of an application to handle things like datatype verification, basic > referential integrity and so on.
not to attack you, but i feel you are presenting the situation quite black and white. i had a similar talk with a friend the other night, who develops in MySQL/PHP in a very innovative and creative environment (art/new media).
the gist of his response was something like "creativity exists *because* of limitations and boundaries. you need them to be forced to think outside the box" (loosely paraphrasing).
"just getting the job done" is often a very important issue as well. if your company makes money by selling a product with a complex MySQL database and a PHP frontend that has been developed by someone else, it's a big big effort to change all that to Postgres and some more "up-to-date" scripting language like ruby... especially if you have to meet deadlines all the time. and i'm not even considering what other team members think of this sudden change.
having said that, i'm all for google-like policies, where people can invest 20% of their time in coding hobby projects. in this way you can invest part of your time on learning new fun stuff, and enlarge the array of possible solutions to the problems you need to tackle in the future.
...is that this decision was not motivated by health considerations, but more a political decision, covered up by a smokescreen named "wifi is bad for your brains".
given the amount of reactions to the absurdity of the claim that wifi can have detrimental effects on the (developing) human brain, the smokescreen would seem to be be quite effective.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Something I never understood is why the hashtags need to count towards the 140 character limit - IMO they should be parsed out and stored as post metadata
Totally relevant. And he is a great grandson, this shows great character. It is very rewarding to work together on something you love doing.
Also, it's heartwarming to see some true love and care instead of the sea of self-serving irony/cynicism that oftentimes dominates comments on /.
Excellent point.
I think they made a movie about you. Have you released your inner Tyler Durden already?
IIRC from the times when I used yeast in my PhD research, wild type (that means: not mutated) S. cerevisiae clumps in advanced stationary phase (end of growth curve, nutritional deprivation). Such circumstances happen more often that not in the real life of S. cerevisae: just imagine that in nature it cannot walk to the nearest grapevine and say 'hey lets do some sugar fermentation here'... no it depends on being able to survive in times of drought. ne way it does that is through forming spores, another way of temporarily surviving could be this kind of 'clumping'. So, the 'clumping gene' is already there, it is just expressed in certain circumstances, circumstances easily simulated in a lab situation.
In my mind the argument would revolve around self-organisation versus (old, dormant) organisational information still present in the S. cerevisae genome. I'm bummed I cannot access the original article at the PNAS site, else I could comment on that in a bit more detail.
Companies like Facebook base their income on the information they collect from you, and are therefore in a continuous arms race with you to lure you into giving out more information. I admire your absolute understanding of privacy choices on every level and nuance imaginable, but most of the other people in this world are less aware and more easily tricked... and even if they are rather smart, they make mistakes.
Is it therefore fair to put the onus on the person who has a Facebook profile to protect their privacy? Especially when the founder of Facebook has been on record a few times, stating that privacy is on a slippery slope anyway, and they'll just go with the flow? Especially when the "I've got nothing to hide" argument has been thoroughly debunked, because just about any information can be (selectively) used to incriminate you, even when you're entirely innocent?
As much as I am a fan of individual responsibility, I do believe that this tit-for-tat game of deception between social networking sites and their users is rather immoral on the side of the social networking sites, and that it is a cop out to say that the user is being stupid. This is where Assange draws the line, which is not paranoid, but realistic. They really are after eroding our privacy.
E16 used to check for 'mass quantities of bass ale in fridge'... has this now become reality? I'm impressed
In North Korea, Duke Nukem releases you!
I don't see how this topic is related to having sexual intercourse with your mother.
I love the concept, but I imagine myself stretching over the touchpad area to type, which wouldn't be very ergonomical. I can also imagine that the base of my palms would rest on the touchpad area occasionally as I type.
from TFA: "Microsoft knows free software is not going anywhere ...."
Methinks that line is up for revision. Something like: "Microsoft knows that free software is here to stay..."
I agree with the parent post to a large extent, but I think that maybe some things get mixed up here with regard to who is responsible for what.
The extension of human knowledge through science is based on verifiable experimentation. If I do an experiment, and publish an article based on it, the reviewers of the article require that I specify the exact circumstances needed to find the published outcome. If others cannot repeat the experiments, the speculations in my discussion are unfounded and therefore discarded.
The problem is not one of relativism and Popperian verifiability issues. The problem is that people mix up the notions of information and truth. Information, from any source, can be seen as a form of communication. One can agree or disagree, and when something new is presented, the onus is on the information provider to explain why (s)he thinks this information is relevant to a certain problem.
In the case of Wikipedia, this becomes difficult, but it's not Wikipedia that's the problem, but a general property of compendia of knowledge. Printed encyclopedia, textbooks, reviews in scientific magazines all have this property: the presentation of conclusions.
Conclusions are not the outcome of scientific research, they are merely new questions asked to the scientific community. They state: I found X, and within the current state of affairs in this discipline, I think it means Y. Sometimes Y becomes a temporary truth, a dogma, but that's not the fault of science, but of people thinking they are right ;-)
The issue at hand is the issue of critical reading. When we criticise Wikipedia for being incorrect, we are actually saying that we want them to be trustworthy enough so that we don't have to be critical anymore.
If there is a general underlying problem, it is the problem of trust, and why people seem to have adopted the notion that they should assume the worst relying on the simple dichotomy of truth and lie. There are 'factual untruths' in Wikipedia, as there are in any encyclopedia. The problem is that anyone can edit, and that we don't trust them.
Now, without spinning off into conspiracy theory land, what are the variables influencing trust that someone's intentions are genuine? I can think of a few, but it's a problem that needs collaborative solving. After all, I may be 'wrong' ;-)
I got the impression that Ogg Theora was removed as the default codec because certain parties were arguing for the inclusion of DRM in the HTML 5 standard. Was that an incorrect assumption?
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#video0
My point was exactly that pushing for a standard which does not exist would be similar to the non-standard tags pushed through in the period when NS4.7 & IE4 where the main browsers.
From the above link:
"we need a codec that is known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing"
No problem.
"compatible with the open source development model, that is of sufficient quality as to be usable,"
Quality is disputable, of course. But what other open sourced alternative is there at the moment?
"and that is not an additional submarine patent risk for large companies."
This is not a problem, as far as I understand matters. Ogg Theora allows everyone to use the patented methods used, right? No other format I know of does. It would be lovely if there were "open" alternatives.
"They may have gotten the words 'Vorbis' and 'Theora' removed from the HTML5 spec, but the market will tell them when their browsers are sucking."
I'm sure the guys at Netscape thought they were great activists when they introduced <blink>, to compete with IE's <marquee>. But since it's open source, it's ok to introduce deviations from standards, right? After all, we wouldn't want to deflect to the Dark Side.
No, this is not a troll, although perhaps a bit sarcastically worded. I just think it's smarter (and way more difficult, yes) to focus on getting competitive open formats into the standard.
When it comes to hot dogs and buns it's not the mass that counts, but the volume.
This would never fly, period. People are too blase for a revolution, and they are being kept busy by the tremendous workload that comes with the two or more jobs they need to pay the ever increasing bills.
The only hope I have is the spread of wealth concentration. The US government doesn't seem to be interested in that, though, and here in Europe the tendency is to follow the US trend, slowly killing the social welfare systems.
Relative wealth is generated through the creation of bottlenecks (e.g. the current talk of 'world food shortage' being a great example). People need to learn how this works, and decentralise the power by applying this knowledge.
One way is to build a grey economy, totally independent of money, and based on value. I make something for you, you make me dinner or treat me to a couple of beers, something like that.
Yes, indeed.
(-1: Redundant)
the oracle has spoken and we are struck with awe...
linus is just a guy, quite opinionated, and quite harsh in his words at times. are we gonna see this kind of slashdot story everytime he misbehaves somewhat? (i hope not)
ever heard of variance? it could be 99.7 +/- 0.03
dealing with the facts, you can only conclude form success rate that the devices will do what they are told in 99.7% of the cases. period. alternatively, the device gets a wrong signal, or a distorted signal, or nothing (all three are very reasonable possibilities).
the products behave well within their specifications. IMO overclocking is lots of hype over small differences. what i care for is a product that works well. and 90% (or more) of the customers feel exactly the same way (or are too ignorasnt to understand what overclocking is)
god, i wish sometimes that geeks were a tad bit more pragmatic, and would put themselves in the position of manufacturars (or anyone "regular" for that matter)
(no i don't deal in popular opinions. it's not my style)
i'm dutch, and i *always* have my camera with me.
grandparent made a strong point. not even from the POV of making money... if you care about your photography, you're probably gonna be upset if you miss that special shot you wanted to make but couldn't because you didn't have your camera with you.
"Camera phones are not for people that want artistic or even "good" pictures."
wouldn't be so sure about that. what if crappy cams like the one on your phone are the lomo of the future?
> > I can't be bothered to learn something new when it seems everything
> > supports MySQL.
>
> I'm glad you don't work for me with that attitude. I'd rather work
> with someone who is interested in learning new things and will bring
> some creativity to the job. People of your mentality have to be careful
> they don't fall into the "false laziness" trap--using some tool or
> technique or techology because you are too lazy to learn something new,
> only to end up doing load of extra work to avoid the shortcomings of your
> inappropriate design choices. The result is scads of legacy code at higher
> layers of an application to handle things like datatype verification, basic
> referential integrity and so on.
not to attack you, but i feel you are presenting the situation quite black and white. i had a similar talk with a friend the other night, who develops in MySQL/PHP in a very innovative and creative environment (art/new media).
the gist of his response was something like "creativity exists *because* of limitations and boundaries. you need them to be forced to think outside the box" (loosely paraphrasing).
"just getting the job done" is often a very important issue as well. if your company makes money by selling a product with a complex MySQL database and a PHP frontend that has been developed by someone else, it's a big big effort to change all that to Postgres and some more "up-to-date" scripting language like ruby... especially if you have to meet deadlines all the time. and i'm not even considering what other team members think of this sudden change.
having said that, i'm all for google-like policies, where people can invest 20% of their time in coding hobby projects. in this way you can invest part of your time on learning new fun stuff, and enlarge the array of possible solutions to the problems you need to tackle in the future.
a sitesearch on the universities' website did not reveal any reference to this decision. is this a hoax?
...is that this decision was not motivated by health considerations, but more a political decision, covered up by a smokescreen named "wifi is bad for your brains".
;-)
given the amount of reactions to the absurdity of the claim that wifi can have detrimental effects on the (developing) human brain, the smokescreen would seem to be be quite effective.