What is your evidence for this?
It seems prefectly reasonable that two people sharing the same environment would moderate their conversation to suit that environment better than when only one person in the conversation is in that environment.
you're relying on the sensibility of people on the passenger side of the argument (to mind the road hazards) while casually dismissing the sensibility of the cellphone using driver
He's doing no such thing. He's saying that those sensibilities (if that is the right word) added together have a superior effect than just one of them.
The fridge? Not if you dont want you food to spoil.
Heating/Cooling. Not if you want to be in your house while you are awake.
Try using just a little bit of thought.
A fridge that is aware of peak/off-peak could easily be designed in a way that super-chilled part of itself during off-peak time and used that to cool the fridge during peak hours.
Air conditioners that do that already exist.
It's not the same as the meaning of the word outside scientific circles. In science, a "theory" is basically as close to truth that you can get apart from direct observation.
Utter bollocks. Theory is a term that is in no way used with such precision, even in science. See string theory etc etc.
Because it is unintuitive and because our language is limited. You yourself just wrote:
Before time, there is no before
Our language relates to the universe we live in so all we have is words like "before" whether we are talking about time or a causally related chain of states. For us they are the same thing.
You may be right about time as we know it not existing until the big bang (and I say "may" on purpose, your statement was rather definitive for something that is really on the edge of our theory and understanding).
That doesn't mean there wasn't something else which, in a causal sense, existed 'before' the big bang and resulted in it. It's difficult to talk about and difficult to conceptualise because both our language and science are based on describing, analyzing and explaining the universe as we do experience it. When we approach something fundamentally different from what we experience it gets very difficult indeed.
Yes, as it was a reply to my comment which in no way addressed that comment which was simply:
I think you are the one being dishonest. There is hard science behind the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, ie hard science behind increased C02 concentration in the atmosphere causing the Earth to retain more heat.
You are disingenuous and blatantly guilty of the exact behaviour you decry in others.
Science most definitely has found a correlation between temperature increase, and atmospheric carbon increases. Most certainly.
But, to claim that science has established a cause and effect is either ignorant, or dishonest. Ignorance can be cured, though.
I think you are the one being dishonest. There is hard science behind the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, ie hard science behind increased C02 concentration in the atmosphere causing the Earth to retain more heat.
Now you mention it I have one Sony device, a VCR, which has an "Easy Timer" combined button/knob that makes setting timers incredibly easy, every VCR should have it. I swear that the Sony engineer who designed that must have forgotten to mention it in all his meetings and ultimately got fired for producing something so useful when the managers found out after release.
I think the worst product I've ever had from them was a "Network Walkman". It looked beautiful and was tiny but the software was an absolute pain to use. They'd obviously put some effort into it because it had it's own (horrendous) look and widgetry, they just didn't put the effort into making it usable.
Sony's biggest crime is letting the "Walkman" brand fade into ignominy. As a tech company with an existing brand there's no question that they should have been the "iPod" of music devices. They simply screwed the pooch by not giving a shit about the user.
These days the usability of a device has to be counted as a significant part of it's slickness.
Sony devices get marks for looking nice when they are turned off but always seem to fall short when you want to use them.
Amnesty saves captives' lives by the very principle of spreading information of their capture, and has been doing so for a very long time.
Why don't you think of some examples then spend half a second thinking about how those examples might be different from this situation?
Amnesty typically shines a light on governments. Governments, by their very nature, are subject to political pressure as they often depend to some degree on the goodwill of other nations.
Freelancing militants? Not so much.
And your argument is facile. Discrimination in South Africa was not based on individual "productivity" but on colour. That discrimination effectively prevented blacks from being as productive as they might by preventing them from running businesses in white designated areas.
If the same thing is happening in America the lesson is not for the government disenfranchise the "welfare class" because that route is simply unsustainable. Eventually the walls will come down and a heavy price will be paid by many. The challenge is to find a way to help these people lift themselves up.
Your sympathy for your friend is reasonable, your blindness to what people on the other side of Apartheid suffered is not.
I'm one of the whites who's going there for my honeymoon later in the year.
No doubt many South Africans have and still are paying a price but that price is the inevitable interest owed from the disfunctional Apartheid era.
No one would suggest that South Africa doesn't have it's problems.
God knows that citizens of countries with a long established history of representational democracy struggle to get good, honest representation let alone a society that has only had it for 15 years.
Sadly there's no way to magically undo decades of oppression without any problems. That is no argument for denying people their liberty and equality however.
But you just go ahead and live in your little world of black and white. I suppose it never occured to you that blacks were not allowed to participate in government because they were largely non-participitory.
It sounds like you are the one living in a little world of black and white.
South Africa is a success story in that a large number of people were empowered. What happens after that is up to them, however it should be no surprise that things don't go perfectly as it will take time for people who have been denied power to learn how to use it.
I'm not sure what you are suggesting Zimbabwe is "another example" of as what has gone on there is very different to what has happened in South Africa.
South Africa is a good example of the western world wielding sanctions (economic and otherwise) for good effect but I think it's worth considering the differences between Iran and South Africa.
The South African ruling classes valued their place in the western world and it hurt them to lose that relationship. I'm not sure the same can be said of Iran, I think a large proportion of them would be quite happy to have the west as an enemy they can blame for their woes, there is no good relationship to be lost, only the ability to make everyday Iranians poorer.
As far as Nokia and Siemens goes I think it's also worth thinking about how their technology is also empowering everyday Iranians. No doubt some of the footage and messages being passed around in recent days comes from Nokia/Siemens equipment. I'd bet their overall effect is a net benefit in terms of freedom so asking them to avoid selling anything to the country would be a mistake.
Information technology will empower the Iranian people no matter how many barriers the Iranian government may hope to put up more and more stuff will leak through. I agree that we should pressure companies to stay clear of ethically dubious things the government there does but avoiding the country entirely would be a mistake.
When MS puts clippy in, I don't know how much of that was some developer of pinhead thinking it would be really cook, and how much of it was actually user centric design.
When I was at university I'm sure I remember a "toolbar" in Excel or Word that displayed useful information, it watched what you did (such as highlight something and click bold) and displayed the keyboard shortcut for doing the same or offered some other form of advice for things you did frequently. I found it very useful and the things it taught me made me much more efficient over time.
At the same time it wasn't intrusive, it didn't interject and most of the time I'd ignore it until the end of the session when I'd review if there was anything useful there (you could scroll back through the hints it offered). It seems like a precursor to Clippy and a good idea that seems to have been badly implemented in the "Clippy".
If people aren't using escaping functions like that at all then this tool isn't really needed, a simple parser could see the functions aren't being called. This tool seems like it may be useful for catching occasional cases where something has mistakenly being omitted. Ie because people are imperfect, not because they are clueless.
That said I don't think it's really something that developers should have to care about. PHP is primarily a language for interacting with databases and web browsers and as such should make this easier (to the extent of not requiring any code at all). I work on PHP applications and we have a heap of code using all the escaping functions and it makes an ugly, overly verbose mess. I'm currently near the end of a DB layer which takes care of escaping automatically (the layer 'knows' the DB schema and uses that knowledge to validate and escape input automatically).
The coder shouldn't need to state that data going to the DB needs escaping, it should happen automatically.
Similarly I'm disappointed that things like Smarty need special instruction in order to escape variables heading to the browser. Almost everything in a web app should be escaped, Smarty should do that be default and require a special modifier to be set in the rare instances it isn't desired.
ACID isn't comprehensive enough to do this, and futhermore it encourages browser vendors to develop for the test.
And what is?
Even if it only covers x% of the overall specs it is good to have an open set of tests that all browser makers can work with to get some common ground in how their browsers behave..
Without a common set of tests two browser makers might both manage to cover 90% of the specs right but the 10% they get wrong might not be the same, ie there could be a 20% difference in browser behaviour.
The problem with development isn't just the overall correctness of individual browsers, it's the degree of commonality between them. That the ACID tests help promote commonality in known areas is useful to web developers.
Slashdot Mirror
Including the owner!
What is your evidence for this? It seems prefectly reasonable that two people sharing the same environment would moderate their conversation to suit that environment better than when only one person in the conversation is in that environment.
He's doing no such thing. He's saying that those sensibilities (if that is the right word) added together have a superior effect than just one of them.
Why wouldn't it?
Person A: What shall we use to fill this round hole?
Person B: I've seen this really cool square peg someone made!
Try using just a little bit of thought.
A fridge that is aware of peak/off-peak could easily be designed in a way that super-chilled part of itself during off-peak time and used that to cool the fridge during peak hours.
Air conditioners that do that already exist.
And there I was thinking this machine was supposed to be doing work for me, not the other way round.
Utter bollocks. Theory is a term that is in no way used with such precision, even in science. See string theory etc etc.
Our language relates to the universe we live in so all we have is words like "before" whether we are talking about time or a causally related chain of states. For us they are the same thing.
You may be right about time as we know it not existing until the big bang (and I say "may" on purpose, your statement was rather definitive for something that is really on the edge of our theory and understanding).
That doesn't mean there wasn't something else which, in a causal sense, existed 'before' the big bang and resulted in it. It's difficult to talk about and difficult to conceptualise because both our language and science are based on describing, analyzing and explaining the universe as we do experience it. When we approach something fundamentally different from what we experience it gets very difficult indeed.
That might be easier with CSS3.
Yes, as it was a reply to my comment which in no way addressed that comment which was simply:
You are disingenuous and blatantly guilty of the exact behaviour you decry in others.
Er, one minute you are accusing people of being ignorant and dishonest. The next you are ignoring what I said and embarking on some unrelated rant.
I think you should look at yourself before having a go at others.
I think you are the one being dishonest. There is hard science behind the greenhouse effect and radiative forcing, ie hard science behind increased C02 concentration in the atmosphere causing the Earth to retain more heat.
Now you mention it I have one Sony device, a VCR, which has an "Easy Timer" combined button/knob that makes setting timers incredibly easy, every VCR should have it. I swear that the Sony engineer who designed that must have forgotten to mention it in all his meetings and ultimately got fired for producing something so useful when the managers found out after release.
I think the worst product I've ever had from them was a "Network Walkman". It looked beautiful and was tiny but the software was an absolute pain to use. They'd obviously put some effort into it because it had it's own (horrendous) look and widgetry, they just didn't put the effort into making it usable.
Sony's biggest crime is letting the "Walkman" brand fade into ignominy. As a tech company with an existing brand there's no question that they should have been the "iPod" of music devices. They simply screwed the pooch by not giving a shit about the user.
These days the usability of a device has to be counted as a significant part of it's slickness. Sony devices get marks for looking nice when they are turned off but always seem to fall short when you want to use them.
Local public opinion, not global public opinion.
Why don't you think of some examples then spend half a second thinking about how those examples might be different from this situation? Amnesty typically shines a light on governments. Governments, by their very nature, are subject to political pressure as they often depend to some degree on the goodwill of other nations. Freelancing militants? Not so much.
Not any more, now you're an anecdote.
Google's core business is intelligence.
Facebooks core business is stupidity.
And your argument is facile. Discrimination in South Africa was not based on individual "productivity" but on colour. That discrimination effectively prevented blacks from being as productive as they might by preventing them from running businesses in white designated areas.
If the same thing is happening in America the lesson is not for the government disenfranchise the "welfare class" because that route is simply unsustainable. Eventually the walls will come down and a heavy price will be paid by many. The challenge is to find a way to help these people lift themselves up.
Your sympathy for your friend is reasonable, your blindness to what people on the other side of Apartheid suffered is not.
I'm one of the whites who's going there for my honeymoon later in the year.
No doubt many South Africans have and still are paying a price but that price is the inevitable interest owed from the disfunctional Apartheid era.
No one would suggest that South Africa doesn't have it's problems. God knows that citizens of countries with a long established history of representational democracy struggle to get good, honest representation let alone a society that has only had it for 15 years.
Sadly there's no way to magically undo decades of oppression without any problems. That is no argument for denying people their liberty and equality however.
It's not surprising people want to get get high.
It sounds like you are the one living in a little world of black and white. South Africa is a success story in that a large number of people were empowered. What happens after that is up to them, however it should be no surprise that things don't go perfectly as it will take time for people who have been denied power to learn how to use it. I'm not sure what you are suggesting Zimbabwe is "another example" of as what has gone on there is very different to what has happened in South Africa.
South Africa is a good example of the western world wielding sanctions (economic and otherwise) for good effect but I think it's worth considering the differences between Iran and South Africa.
The South African ruling classes valued their place in the western world and it hurt them to lose that relationship. I'm not sure the same can be said of Iran, I think a large proportion of them would be quite happy to have the west as an enemy they can blame for their woes, there is no good relationship to be lost, only the ability to make everyday Iranians poorer.
As far as Nokia and Siemens goes I think it's also worth thinking about how their technology is also empowering everyday Iranians. No doubt some of the footage and messages being passed around in recent days comes from Nokia/Siemens equipment. I'd bet their overall effect is a net benefit in terms of freedom so asking them to avoid selling anything to the country would be a mistake.
Information technology will empower the Iranian people no matter how many barriers the Iranian government may hope to put up more and more stuff will leak through. I agree that we should pressure companies to stay clear of ethically dubious things the government there does but avoiding the country entirely would be a mistake.
When I was at university I'm sure I remember a "toolbar" in Excel or Word that displayed useful information, it watched what you did (such as highlight something and click bold) and displayed the keyboard shortcut for doing the same or offered some other form of advice for things you did frequently. I found it very useful and the things it taught me made me much more efficient over time. At the same time it wasn't intrusive, it didn't interject and most of the time I'd ignore it until the end of the session when I'd review if there was anything useful there (you could scroll back through the hints it offered). It seems like a precursor to Clippy and a good idea that seems to have been badly implemented in the "Clippy".
If people aren't using escaping functions like that at all then this tool isn't really needed, a simple parser could see the functions aren't being called. This tool seems like it may be useful for catching occasional cases where something has mistakenly being omitted. Ie because people are imperfect, not because they are clueless.
That said I don't think it's really something that developers should have to care about. PHP is primarily a language for interacting with databases and web browsers and as such should make this easier (to the extent of not requiring any code at all). I work on PHP applications and we have a heap of code using all the escaping functions and it makes an ugly, overly verbose mess. I'm currently near the end of a DB layer which takes care of escaping automatically (the layer 'knows' the DB schema and uses that knowledge to validate and escape input automatically).
The coder shouldn't need to state that data going to the DB needs escaping, it should happen automatically.
Similarly I'm disappointed that things like Smarty need special instruction in order to escape variables heading to the browser. Almost everything in a web app should be escaped, Smarty should do that be default and require a special modifier to be set in the rare instances it isn't desired.
And what is? Even if it only covers x% of the overall specs it is good to have an open set of tests that all browser makers can work with to get some common ground in how their browsers behave.. Without a common set of tests two browser makers might both manage to cover 90% of the specs right but the 10% they get wrong might not be the same, ie there could be a 20% difference in browser behaviour. The problem with development isn't just the overall correctness of individual browsers, it's the degree of commonality between them. That the ACID tests help promote commonality in known areas is useful to web developers.