The marketing guys originally wanted to say 1000x, but when they ran it past the engineers, the engineers couldn't stop laughing at such a ridiculous assertion. The marketing guys kept lowering the number, but the engineers just couldn't stop laughing. 570x is how low they got before the engineers passed out from laughing so much, which the marketing guys interpreted as agreement.
I don't doubt the prediction at all, I just have concerns about the vat of liquid nitrogen I'm going to have to immerse my computer in to keep that thing from overheating, and the power substation I'm going to need to build in my backyard to power it.
I hammered this comment out in about a minute; I imagine a video of comparable quality would've taken me ten times as long.
And just think how much longer it would take to record a GOOD comment!
Sorry, nothing personal. I just couldn't let such an easy opportunity get by. Seriously though, I do mostly agree with you, but compare the quality of the comments on a site such as this and the comments on a site like youtube. I also prefer to read things on the Internet rather than watch them, because usually it takes less time to get more information that way, but the number of people who think like that may shrink as generations coming up experience the Internet as a medium primarily concerned with video-based content.
Also, discussion forums, most of which feature comments that are barely intelligible, will probably remain text for the foreseeable future. However, longer blog posts and news articles -- in which sentence structure, grammar, and things of that nature are generally give more attention -- may move largely to video. This alone could reduce or eliminate this so-called "literacy revolution."
I like the "continual revolution" thing, but I think it's been going on for longer than you might think. I would argue the Industrial Revolution was the last true "revolution", and it's been virtually continuous change ever since then. We've had a fairly steady flow of life-changing technologies ever since then, and there's no particular sign of that stopping in the near future.
I can see why the Internet would have increased literacy in the short term. After all, it's still primarily a text-based medium, and so you need some level of reading and comprehension skill to be able to participate.
However, as the Internet moves more toward video, from youtube to video blogs to more and more stories on news sites being offered only as videos, will that jump in literacy be sustained? We're quickly moving from an Internet where large volumes of text were passed back and forth to an Internet where videos are passed around, and commentary on them is in the form of very brief twitter-length comments. So, I'm skeptical that people using the Internet in 10 years will be doing any more reading (or writing, for that matter) than people watching TV do now.
I didn't mean to imply the teachers are to blame, although I can see how my post could have been interpreted that way. The administrators should be the ones primarily responsible for auditing the schedules, not the teachers. And believe me, I sympathize with the fact that school personnel are constantly asked to do more with fewer resources. That's the big reason I elected not to go into teaching. My mother and older brother are both teachers, and I just don't want to deal with the aggravation they have to deal with on a daily basis.
If it's anything like the "human sexuality and family life" class I took in high school, it's basically a class on how babies are made for about the first couple of days (which is review, because the first time I was told that in a school setting was an hour-long health class in fifth grade), and the rest of it is teaching you how much of a royal pain in the ass it is to raise kids. The overall idea is to teach kids how to survive if they do have kids of their own, and to convince them doing so is so monumentally difficult that they'd really better wait until they're both out of college and independently wealthy.
Which is what ought to happen, since the kids are being deprived of instruction days in any case. They still will not have the number of required days in their assigned classes if they're sitting in a gymnasium rather than sitting in the classroom.
I understand that there might be some concern with unleashing all these teenagers on the unsuspecting public, but after all they have been home all summer, so making them stay there for another couple of days while they get all this sorted out doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Nothing good can come of packing a bunch of teenagers into one room with nothing to do (and especially no air conditioning!). At the high school I went to, there would have been at least 2 fights on the first day of such an arrangement, and it would have gone downhill from there.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
It just takes an intelligent person to notice that, realize he can't do shit about it, realize this means he's stuck with his personal difficulties, and thus become depressed as a result. Unless he has high capacity for self delusion, in which case he becomes schizophrenic or bipolar instead.
Realizing there exist multiple things that make life difficult, and also realizing you can't do anything about them, does not have to result in depression. If you are highly intelligent and also the type of person who gets emotionally bent out of shape easily, then I suppose it would. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who is both intelligent and adaptable, these things do not have to depress you. If you look at things from a pragmatic point of view, these things shouldn't depress you.
After all, if there are things you can't change that make life difficult, what is the point wasting emotional energy getting depressed over them? It's far easier to look at the problem rationally, find ways to adapt yourself to minimize your own discomfort, and move on with your life.
The old design had a separate button you had to click to apply the moderation. Yet another example of how the new design actually decreased the usability of the site.
This is the problem with science journalism...it tries to jazz up stories to make them more interesting to the layperson, but in the process ends up making scientists look like idiots. I seriously doubt these astrophysicists discovered this planet and immediately ran to the nearest reporter, and breathlessly declared that 400 years of accumulated knowledge in orbital dynamics is wrong because they just discovered an "impossible" planet.
What probably happened is something more like this:
An astrophysicist and a journalist sit at a bar after a long day's work looking through telescopes/making shit up.
Journalist: Anything interesting happen today? Astrophysicist: Actually, yes. We discovered a planet orbiting around another star. Journalist: Another one? I said interesting, not yet another stupid gas-ball orbiting around another star...that's page H12 at best. Astrophysicist: Well, the funny thing is, this star is orbiting closer to its star than it ought to be able to...so it's kind of weird. Journalist: (rolling eyes) So what? Astrophysicist: The orbit its in should be unstable...it should eventually fall into the star and burn up. Journalist: Okay, so we have some planet that might be about to burn up...okay, we're probably page 5C with that one. Astrophysicist: Sure, that's probably what will happen. Of course, if the orbit its in is somehow stable, which is impossible, that would mean 400 years of understanding in orbital dynamics is wrong...(chuckles)...but of course that's ridiculous. Journalist: 400 years of physics wrong? Impossible planet? I smell a Pulitzer! To the presses! Astrophysicist: Hey, wait! Come back! That's not what I said...Oh well, at least I can use his article in my next grant application.
No, actually I think this study might have some merit. You see, fat people tend to have fat, stubby fingers. It is very difficult to play the Nintendo DS, with its small buttons and tiny touch screen, with fingers that resemble sausages. Even the Wii is difficult to play for morbidly obese people, since its buttons are also small, and the physical movement required is beyond the capability of those whose couches have become permanent parts of their anatomy.
What does this have to do with brain aging, you might ask. Elementary, my dear lardass. Without the Nintendo Brain Age series of games, how can we possibly keep our brains from aging? They're like steroids for your brain, except the link between the games and shrinking testicles has not yet been firmly established. So, unless we can come up with a good way for fat people to play these Brain Age games without causing them to sweat even more profusely than they already do, I'm afraid they're all doomed to early-onset Alzheimer's.
No no, you have it all wrong. The correct strategy is to go back in time and become your opponent's father. It may not necessarily help you win the game, but it will give all of your future "your mother" taunts a devastating ring of truth, thereby increasing their impact. Plus, you'll get laid, which is always a bonus.
I don't know how you can expect us to fix your problems when you won't even take the time to read the documentation provided with the release.
In order to solve your problem, you need to set the RANDOMLY_DISCHARGE_BATTERY flag in the kernel source to "0" at compile time. Ubuntu, as well as other "desktop" distributions, set this flag to "1" by default for some reason, but simply installing the source packages and recompiling your kernel will fix the issue.
Honestly, a simple well-tailored Google search and a few measly days of sifting through the docs would have given you this answer without having to waste everyone else's time.
That alone means there is bias: selection bias. They can simply commission enough studies under enough different conditions and then select the (possibly tiny) subset of studies that show what they want.
Sure, except that the only available evidence we have is that this study was commissioned as a private study by the engineers within MS in order to determine how they might improve their own list, and was not initially intended as any sort of marketing effort. It was only picked up by marketing after the positive results were known. Unless you have some evidence that MS spent a lot of time commissioning multiple studies on this, there's no basis on which to claim bias.
The EU is designed in part to be a very close union between member states, in order to combat the extreme nationalism that predicated two major ruinous conflicts on the European continent in the 20th century. Every EU nation gives up some measure of sovereignty (although really not that much in the grand scheme of things) in order to promote the greater good.
Even having said that, though, I would argue that the simple requirement to inform other nations of standards and laws you pass is not really any more of a surrendering of sovereignty than most other provisions in any other treaty between nations.
The focus of the story is colored by the blogger's own bias. Rather than focusing on why MS isn't doing better than 81%, the focus should be on why Google's product performs so abysmally in comparison to Microsoft's. Sure, MS could in theory make marginal improvements, but Google is the one that really ought to be taken to task for their poor results.
I know the conventional wisdom is MS == bad, and Google == good, but trying to find an MS-bashing angle to every bit of news is counterproductive and tiresome.
Sure, the results could be biased. On the other hand, NSS is a supposedly independent lab with no apparent connection to MS other than that MS commissioned this particular study. Unless there's a pattern of pro-MS bias in NSS-run tests, it's probably likely that this test was as evenhanded as any such test can be.
The fact that MS marketing is touting this result is not evidence of bias, it's just evidence that the test results favored MS. If the test were completed and showed Google's list performed better, MS would have simply not published the result at all and we never would have heard about it.
Rather than crying about bias, perhaps the OSS community should be spending their time figuring out how to make their own lists better.
I used to have disturbingly in-depth dreams about the games when I was MUDding. What made this especially disturbing, of course, is that MUDs are text-based, so I would be dreaming entirely in text.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe not, but they do require a lot more cooling and power than they did before.
The marketing guys originally wanted to say 1000x, but when they ran it past the engineers, the engineers couldn't stop laughing at such a ridiculous assertion. The marketing guys kept lowering the number, but the engineers just couldn't stop laughing. 570x is how low they got before the engineers passed out from laughing so much, which the marketing guys interpreted as agreement.
I don't doubt the prediction at all, I just have concerns about the vat of liquid nitrogen I'm going to have to immerse my computer in to keep that thing from overheating, and the power substation I'm going to need to build in my backyard to power it.
I mean, maybe if we wait long enough, far enough into the future - they'll release IPv6!
You know, you were making some really good points, but then you went way off into crazytown with this one.
I hammered this comment out in about a minute; I imagine a video of comparable quality would've taken me ten times as long.
And just think how much longer it would take to record a GOOD comment!
Sorry, nothing personal. I just couldn't let such an easy opportunity get by. Seriously though, I do mostly agree with you, but compare the quality of the comments on a site such as this and the comments on a site like youtube. I also prefer to read things on the Internet rather than watch them, because usually it takes less time to get more information that way, but the number of people who think like that may shrink as generations coming up experience the Internet as a medium primarily concerned with video-based content.
Also, discussion forums, most of which feature comments that are barely intelligible, will probably remain text for the foreseeable future. However, longer blog posts and news articles -- in which sentence structure, grammar, and things of that nature are generally give more attention -- may move largely to video. This alone could reduce or eliminate this so-called "literacy revolution."
I like the "continual revolution" thing, but I think it's been going on for longer than you might think. I would argue the Industrial Revolution was the last true "revolution", and it's been virtually continuous change ever since then. We've had a fairly steady flow of life-changing technologies ever since then, and there's no particular sign of that stopping in the near future.
I can see why the Internet would have increased literacy in the short term. After all, it's still primarily a text-based medium, and so you need some level of reading and comprehension skill to be able to participate.
However, as the Internet moves more toward video, from youtube to video blogs to more and more stories on news sites being offered only as videos, will that jump in literacy be sustained? We're quickly moving from an Internet where large volumes of text were passed back and forth to an Internet where videos are passed around, and commentary on them is in the form of very brief twitter-length comments. So, I'm skeptical that people using the Internet in 10 years will be doing any more reading (or writing, for that matter) than people watching TV do now.
I didn't mean to imply the teachers are to blame, although I can see how my post could have been interpreted that way. The administrators should be the ones primarily responsible for auditing the schedules, not the teachers. And believe me, I sympathize with the fact that school personnel are constantly asked to do more with fewer resources. That's the big reason I elected not to go into teaching. My mother and older brother are both teachers, and I just don't want to deal with the aggravation they have to deal with on a daily basis.
If it's anything like the "human sexuality and family life" class I took in high school, it's basically a class on how babies are made for about the first couple of days (which is review, because the first time I was told that in a school setting was an hour-long health class in fifth grade), and the rest of it is teaching you how much of a royal pain in the ass it is to raise kids. The overall idea is to teach kids how to survive if they do have kids of their own, and to convince them doing so is so monumentally difficult that they'd really better wait until they're both out of college and independently wealthy.
Which is what ought to happen, since the kids are being deprived of instruction days in any case. They still will not have the number of required days in their assigned classes if they're sitting in a gymnasium rather than sitting in the classroom.
I understand that there might be some concern with unleashing all these teenagers on the unsuspecting public, but after all they have been home all summer, so making them stay there for another couple of days while they get all this sorted out doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Nothing good can come of packing a bunch of teenagers into one room with nothing to do (and especially no air conditioning!). At the high school I went to, there would have been at least 2 fights on the first day of such an arrangement, and it would have gone downhill from there.
Oh yeah, and don't most schools have their administrators, and usually the teachers, report in at least a week before school starts? Wouldn't that have been a perfect time to conduct audits and make sure everything was ready for the students to arrive?
That's not really a very secure password.
What are you talking about? 'hunter2' is a great password!
It just takes an intelligent person to notice that, realize he can't do shit about it, realize this means he's stuck with his personal difficulties, and thus become depressed as a result. Unless he has high capacity for self delusion, in which case he becomes schizophrenic or bipolar instead.
Realizing there exist multiple things that make life difficult, and also realizing you can't do anything about them, does not have to result in depression. If you are highly intelligent and also the type of person who gets emotionally bent out of shape easily, then I suppose it would. On the other hand, if you're the kind of person who is both intelligent and adaptable, these things do not have to depress you. If you look at things from a pragmatic point of view, these things shouldn't depress you.
After all, if there are things you can't change that make life difficult, what is the point wasting emotional energy getting depressed over them? It's far easier to look at the problem rationally, find ways to adapt yourself to minimize your own discomfort, and move on with your life.
The old design had a separate button you had to click to apply the moderation. Yet another example of how the new design actually decreased the usability of the site.
This is the problem with science journalism...it tries to jazz up stories to make them more interesting to the layperson, but in the process ends up making scientists look like idiots. I seriously doubt these astrophysicists discovered this planet and immediately ran to the nearest reporter, and breathlessly declared that 400 years of accumulated knowledge in orbital dynamics is wrong because they just discovered an "impossible" planet.
What probably happened is something more like this:
An astrophysicist and a journalist sit at a bar after a long day's work looking through telescopes/making shit up.
Journalist: Anything interesting happen today?
Astrophysicist: Actually, yes. We discovered a planet orbiting around another star.
Journalist: Another one? I said interesting, not yet another stupid gas-ball orbiting around another star...that's page H12 at best.
Astrophysicist: Well, the funny thing is, this star is orbiting closer to its star than it ought to be able to...so it's kind of weird.
Journalist: (rolling eyes) So what?
Astrophysicist: The orbit its in should be unstable...it should eventually fall into the star and burn up.
Journalist: Okay, so we have some planet that might be about to burn up...okay, we're probably page 5C with that one.
Astrophysicist: Sure, that's probably what will happen. Of course, if the orbit its in is somehow stable, which is impossible, that would mean 400 years of understanding in orbital dynamics is wrong...(chuckles)...but of course that's ridiculous.
Journalist: 400 years of physics wrong? Impossible planet? I smell a Pulitzer! To the presses!
Astrophysicist: Hey, wait! Come back! That's not what I said...Oh well, at least I can use his article in my next grant application.
Aaaaaand...scene!
No, actually I think this study might have some merit. You see, fat people tend to have fat, stubby fingers. It is very difficult to play the Nintendo DS, with its small buttons and tiny touch screen, with fingers that resemble sausages. Even the Wii is difficult to play for morbidly obese people, since its buttons are also small, and the physical movement required is beyond the capability of those whose couches have become permanent parts of their anatomy.
What does this have to do with brain aging, you might ask. Elementary, my dear lardass. Without the Nintendo Brain Age series of games, how can we possibly keep our brains from aging? They're like steroids for your brain, except the link between the games and shrinking testicles has not yet been firmly established. So, unless we can come up with a good way for fat people to play these Brain Age games without causing them to sweat even more profusely than they already do, I'm afraid they're all doomed to early-onset Alzheimer's.
It's basic common sense, really.
No no, you have it all wrong. The correct strategy is to go back in time and become your opponent's father. It may not necessarily help you win the game, but it will give all of your future "your mother" taunts a devastating ring of truth, thereby increasing their impact. Plus, you'll get laid, which is always a bonus.
so either you were -trying- to see that or you have really bad reading skills.
Now, now, don't be too hard on him...there's no reason it can't be both.
I don't know how you can expect us to fix your problems when you won't even take the time to read the documentation provided with the release.
In order to solve your problem, you need to set the RANDOMLY_DISCHARGE_BATTERY flag in the kernel source to "0" at compile time. Ubuntu, as well as other "desktop" distributions, set this flag to "1" by default for some reason, but simply installing the source packages and recompiling your kernel will fix the issue.
Honestly, a simple well-tailored Google search and a few measly days of sifting through the docs would have given you this answer without having to waste everyone else's time.
That alone means there is bias: selection bias. They can simply commission enough studies under enough different conditions and then select the (possibly tiny) subset of studies that show what they want.
Sure, except that the only available evidence we have is that this study was commissioned as a private study by the engineers within MS in order to determine how they might improve their own list, and was not initially intended as any sort of marketing effort. It was only picked up by marketing after the positive results were known. Unless you have some evidence that MS spent a lot of time commissioning multiple studies on this, there's no basis on which to claim bias.
The EU is designed in part to be a very close union between member states, in order to combat the extreme nationalism that predicated two major ruinous conflicts on the European continent in the 20th century. Every EU nation gives up some measure of sovereignty (although really not that much in the grand scheme of things) in order to promote the greater good.
Even having said that, though, I would argue that the simple requirement to inform other nations of standards and laws you pass is not really any more of a surrendering of sovereignty than most other provisions in any other treaty between nations.
The focus of the story is colored by the blogger's own bias. Rather than focusing on why MS isn't doing better than 81%, the focus should be on why Google's product performs so abysmally in comparison to Microsoft's. Sure, MS could in theory make marginal improvements, but Google is the one that really ought to be taken to task for their poor results.
I know the conventional wisdom is MS == bad, and Google == good, but trying to find an MS-bashing angle to every bit of news is counterproductive and tiresome.
Sure, the results could be biased. On the other hand, NSS is a supposedly independent lab with no apparent connection to MS other than that MS commissioned this particular study. Unless there's a pattern of pro-MS bias in NSS-run tests, it's probably likely that this test was as evenhanded as any such test can be.
The fact that MS marketing is touting this result is not evidence of bias, it's just evidence that the test results favored MS. If the test were completed and showed Google's list performed better, MS would have simply not published the result at all and we never would have heard about it.
Rather than crying about bias, perhaps the OSS community should be spending their time figuring out how to make their own lists better.
I used to have disturbingly in-depth dreams about the games when I was MUDding. What made this especially disturbing, of course, is that MUDs are text-based, so I would be dreaming entirely in text.
Diablo III is still a really long way from being released. Dammit.
Have there been even any ballpark estimates on the release date? Next year? 2011? 5 years after the heat death of the Universe?