The problem is that the stories on this in America are generally technical and involve complicated recommendations for "open source" systems with "paper trails." Thats too difficult to keep anyone's attention. America pays attention when it gets Sensation and Scandal! We absolutely need someone in the United States to hack a Diebold machine into changing its votes and demonstrate how they can do that in a quick and easy way when they have access to the machine. If it can be turned into a 2-minute feature on a news station (with enlarged graphics showing the vote totals changing LIVE) it will become big news.
In this case, though, the policies of the manufacturer are equally at fault.
Rather than have a single default password for all machines, the default password should be randomly set, and tied to the machine's serial number in an internal company database. The possibility of the entire database being released is much less likely than the possibility of a single 6-digit number being released.
Have you ever written code which uses the java.net.NetworkInterface class? Thats a core part of the language, and its pretty damn easy to get code which runs completely differently on Windows and Linux simply because they are going to provide different NetworkInterface implementations (and frankly, a different number of NetworkInterfaces).
And that's science if you ask me. Especially the antenna - the results of experiments can, and seeminly do, often go against "common sense" and give answers which are "unintuitive".
That's impressive. But it is engineering, not science. When computers start proposing new experiments to which will help us understand things unknown, then they will be doing science!
Many of the responses to this story say that stupid people breed with stupid people, and reproduce more than smart people. I'm curious what evidence this is based on. There is plenty of evidence that poor people reproduce more than rich people. But where is the evidence that poor people are stupid?
Intelligence undoubtedly plays as big a role in survival as it always has. Yes, medicine reduces the selective pressure, but it does not eliminate it. There are plenty of opportunities throughout our lives to make choices that would result in our death, and both rich and poor make such choices all the time.
Do you feel that way about free roads? Or do you think every block should have a toll? In this case, I think the Information Superhighway will soon be seen as fundamental infrastructure and just as necessary for commerce as the real highways. So maybe government *should* be paying for it.
By far for me, the most awesome aspect of Eclipse is the code refactoring and auto-creating.
1. Highlight a block of code, and convert it to become a method. The method will automatically have the correct input variables (whatever variables are used in the block, but not created there), and a return variable (if a variable is created in the block and used after it)
2. Renaming of moving variables and classes.
3. Automatically creating try-catch blocks with the correct errors caught!
These save so much time and make coding so much more fluid than it would be otherwise.
A decent chunk of it is caused by politically correct bullshit like pushing for diversity over qualification, allowing people to sue merely for being offended rather than telling people to deal with it, the constant threat of corporate-to-corporate lawsuits over nothing and things of that nature.
I call BS. You have no idea what you are talking about. What percentage is "a decent size chunk?" You are just letting your own insecurities and prejudices fuel your ignorance (or is it the other way around?). American workers are expensive primarily because America is successful. Life is expensive here. Things cost a lot, good benefits especially. I challenge you to find a single study that states how much corporations are losing by "pushing for diversity over qualification," etc.
Clay Shirky's objections don't hold water. His examples of faulty logic assume that RDF statements should be reasoned on in isolation. In fact, many systems which pair truth-values with statements are quite capable of avoiding the faulty logic he claims is an inherant consequence of using RDF statments. Look at http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/peiwang/papers. html NARS or probabilistic term logic for example.
Your logic is flawed, and mirrors the "what me worry" attitute of people who deny that there is significant evidence for human-caused global warming.
If 6 people are looking for a connection, and 3 find it, there is good evidence that a connection exists. It is always more difficult to prove something doesn't exist than to prove that it does exist. So once a connection is found, the burden of disproving it is much higher. As Bush has pointed out with the WMDs, if you cant find it, that doesn't mean its not there. The people who failed to find a connection may have been looking at the wrong things. So even if only 25% of studies successfully found a connection, it is something to be concerned about and merits much much closer attention.
Not if you voluntarily gave over the film. If they asked for it and you refused and they took it anyway, then you would have a case.
But that *is* the point of the Patriot Act. Because the boundaies are so blurred, everyone is scared into compliance. In the past, you may have felt confident that you could simply refuse. But now, you may wonder about what will actually happen to you if you do.
I interpret this as an argument for agencies like NASA. NASA took up the initial costs for fundamental research. This research has trickled down to the private sphrere, allowing private organizations to achieve something that was once impossible. A private organization would never have been able to reach space so cheaply had NASA not absorbed the initial fundamental research costs. This doesn't look like a condemnation of NASA. It looks like NASA living up to one of its initial purposes: It's government stimulation of private enterprise working at its best!
I also got 100%. My method was simple. Any mail that encourages you to click on a link to update account information is a fraud. Anything that tells you to go to your account without providing a link is legitimate. I
Its exactly the same way you detect phone scams. If they call you, its a fraud. But if they let you look up the company in a phone book and call them, then it is legitimate.
The fact is that private companies do not have the long-term interests of society in mind. They have a mandate to increase profits.
Socialism is bad when it causes the state to interfere in short-term market issues (ie, price fixing), because no single entity can affectively micromange such a complex system. But applying broad long-term pressures to the market is not socialism, its a smart policy that recognizes the deep complexity of the market system.
They can use the same compression for attachments as they do for spam/emails. Think about it. If you send a power-point presentation to 10 Gmail accounts, Google only stores it once. Add to that an ability to compare newly uploaded files with those existing on the system, and you've got incredible compression (How many people will store the exact same Britney.mp3 file as an attachment?)
The receipt should never come in to the voter's hands. It should scroll underneath a clear window, where it can be viewed and checked. Pressing 'OK' should scroll the paper out of sight. Pressing 'Error' should lock the paper and screen so that a voting official can verify that the information on the paper does not match the information on the screen, and take that machine out of service. This would be so easy.
Remember those little stickers, covered with ridges, where you turn them and watch the image change to one of 5 or 6 possibilities? If a computer screen is covered with verticle ridges, you could control the flow of light to left and right eye from limited viewing angles.
Such a monitor would only work if the person's head was in certain positions.
Other technologies are possible which would allow the viewer to be in any position and orientation. Think tiny lenses instead of long ridges.
But flexibility breeds corruption. The proliferation of rarely-enforced laws leads to a situation where most citizens are unwittingly breaking some minor law all the time. This allows police too much discression to detain people whenever they want. It would be much better if all laws were ridgedly enforced -- public pressure would then ensure that we only get reasonable laws. Flexible laws give power to the enforcers. Ridgid laws give power to the people.
Basicly, the problem with his argument comes from his vague use of the word "nature." Sometimes nature behaves in such a way so that little changes make a difference. Sometimes it doesn't. It all depends on what level you look at. The same goes for a computer. Change the voltage at a chip pin from 5V to 4.9V and it still behaves fine. Change the value of a key variable, and it crashes. Modify the input to a face recognizer slightly, and it will gracefully recover.
This is my first time with Mozilla. It seems great. Can someone point me to a place to get the best plug-ins for multi-media files. Or perhaps a review of various plug-ins. Thank you
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the stories on this in America are generally technical and involve complicated recommendations for "open source" systems with "paper trails." Thats too difficult to keep anyone's attention. America pays attention when it gets Sensation and Scandal! We absolutely need someone in the United States to hack a Diebold machine into changing its votes and demonstrate how they can do that in a quick and easy way when they have access to the machine. If it can be turned into a 2-minute feature on a news station (with enlarged graphics showing the vote totals changing LIVE) it will become big news.
In this case, though, the policies of the manufacturer are equally at fault.
Rather than have a single default password for all machines, the default password should be randomly set, and tied to the machine's serial number in an internal company database. The possibility of the entire database being released is much less likely than the possibility of a single 6-digit number being released.
Oh wait...
Have you ever written code which uses the java.net.NetworkInterface class? Thats a core part of the language, and its pretty damn easy to get code which runs completely differently on Windows and Linux simply because they are going to provide different NetworkInterface implementations (and frankly, a different number of NetworkInterfaces).
That's impressive. But it is engineering, not science. When computers start proposing new experiments to which will help us understand things unknown, then they will be doing science!
Many of the responses to this story say that stupid people breed with stupid people, and reproduce more than smart people. I'm curious what evidence this is based on. There is plenty of evidence that poor people reproduce more than rich people. But where is the evidence that poor people are stupid?
Intelligence undoubtedly plays as big a role in survival as it always has. Yes, medicine reduces the selective pressure, but it does not eliminate it. There are plenty of opportunities throughout our lives to make choices that would result in our death, and both rich and poor make such choices all the time.
Do you feel that way about free roads? Or do you think every block should have a toll? In this case, I think the Information Superhighway will soon be seen as fundamental infrastructure and just as necessary for commerce as the real highways. So maybe government *should* be paying for it.
By far for me, the most awesome aspect of Eclipse is the code refactoring and auto-creating.
1. Highlight a block of code, and convert it to become a method. The method will automatically have the correct input variables (whatever variables are used in the block, but not created there), and a return variable (if a variable is created in the block and used after it)
2. Renaming of moving variables and classes.
3. Automatically creating try-catch blocks with the correct errors caught!
These save so much time and make coding so much more fluid than it would be otherwise.
I call BS. You have no idea what you are talking about. What percentage is "a decent size chunk?" You are just letting your own insecurities and prejudices fuel your ignorance (or is it the other way around?). American workers are expensive primarily because America is successful. Life is expensive here. Things cost a lot, good benefits especially. I challenge you to find a single study that states how much corporations are losing by "pushing for diversity over qualification," etc.
Umm... tell me again how labels limit you?
Now: I work in the legal field and every attorney and paralegal in the office saves documents in case specific folders.
In the future: I work in the legal field and every attorney and paralegal in the office saves documents with case specific labels.
A folder system is equivalent to mandating that files have only a single "location" label. Labels are nothing to be afraid of.
Clay Shirky's objections don't hold water. His examples of faulty logic assume that RDF statements should be reasoned on in isolation. In fact, many systems which pair truth-values with statements are quite capable of avoiding the faulty logic he claims is an inherant consequence of using RDF statments. Look at http://www.cogsci.indiana.edu/farg/peiwang/papers. html NARS or probabilistic term logic for example.
Your logic is flawed, and mirrors the "what me worry" attitute of people who deny that there is significant evidence for human-caused global warming.
If 6 people are looking for a connection, and 3 find it, there is good evidence that a connection exists. It is always more difficult to prove something doesn't exist than to prove that it does exist. So once a connection is found, the burden of disproving it is much higher. As Bush has pointed out with the WMDs, if you cant find it, that doesn't mean its not there. The people who failed to find a connection may have been looking at the wrong things. So even if only 25% of studies successfully found a connection, it is something to be concerned about and merits much much closer attention.
But that *is* the point of the Patriot Act. Because the boundaies are so blurred, everyone is scared into compliance. In the past, you may have felt confident that you could simply refuse. But now, you may wonder about what will actually happen to you if you do.
I interpret this as an argument for agencies like NASA. NASA took up the initial costs for fundamental research. This research has trickled down to the private sphrere, allowing private organizations to achieve something that was once impossible. A private organization would never have been able to reach space so cheaply had NASA not absorbed the initial fundamental research costs. This doesn't look like a condemnation of NASA. It looks like NASA living up to one of its initial purposes: It's government stimulation of private enterprise working at its best!
Its exactly the same way you detect phone scams. If they call you, its a fraud. But if they let you look up the company in a phone book and call them, then it is legitimate.
The fact is that private companies do not have the long-term interests of society in mind. They have a mandate to increase profits.
Socialism is bad when it causes the state to interfere in short-term market issues (ie, price fixing), because no single entity can affectively micromange such a complex system. But applying broad long-term pressures to the market is not socialism, its a smart policy that recognizes the deep complexity of the market system.
They can use the same compression for attachments as they do for spam/emails. Think about it. If you send a power-point presentation to 10 Gmail accounts, Google only stores it once. Add to that an ability to compare newly uploaded files with those existing on the system, and you've got incredible compression (How many people will store the exact same Britney.mp3 file as an attachment?)
They already have "industry analysts" (the guys in the next cubicle) quoted
How about harnessing the power of a solar-panel brush!
The receipt should never come in to the voter's hands. It should scroll underneath a clear window, where it can be viewed and checked. Pressing 'OK' should scroll the paper out of sight. Pressing 'Error' should lock the paper and screen so that a voting official can verify that the information on the paper does not match the information on the screen, and take that machine out of service. This would be so easy.
Here are some NYTimes columnists who should be writing about this:
krugman@nytimes.com (Paul Krugman)
nicholas@nytimes.com (Nicholas Kristoff)
liberties@nytimes.com (Maureen Dowd)
Lenticular images
Remember those little stickers, covered with ridges, where you turn them and watch the image change to one of 5 or 6 possibilities? If a computer screen is covered with verticle ridges, you could control the flow of light to left and right eye from limited viewing angles.
Such a monitor would only work if the person's head was in certain positions.
Other technologies are possible which would allow the viewer to be in any position and orientation. Think tiny lenses instead of long ridges.
But flexibility breeds corruption. The proliferation of rarely-enforced laws leads to a situation where most citizens are unwittingly breaking some minor law all the time. This allows police too much discression to detain people whenever they want. It would be much better if all laws were ridgedly enforced -- public pressure would then ensure that we only get reasonable laws. Flexible laws give power to the enforcers. Ridgid laws give power to the people.
Basicly, the problem with his argument comes from his vague use of the word "nature." Sometimes nature behaves in such a way so that little changes make a difference. Sometimes it doesn't. It all depends on what level you look at. The same goes for a computer. Change the voltage at a chip pin from 5V to 4.9V and it still behaves fine. Change the value of a key variable, and it crashes. Modify the input to a face recognizer slightly, and it will gracefully recover.
This is my first time with Mozilla. It seems great. Can someone point me to a place to get the best plug-ins for multi-media files. Or perhaps a review of various plug-ins. Thank you