Not really. Mars One, for instance, is claiming to have a plan to permanently colonize Mars beginning in 2023, at a fairly modest cost. That, of course, is really optimistic, but at the same time, it'd be really pessimistic to say that nobody will be living on Mars in 2070. And once there are people on Mars, odds are good that they'll be starting some kind of terraforming effort almost immediately, if only as a small-scale experiment to see how easy it is to affect change. Now, I don't expect them to have much success within this century... terraforming is a very long-term project. But something would have to go drastically wrong (engineered pandemic, asteroid strike, or some similar civilization-ending cataclysm) in order to stop us from at least getting started.
Not sure why people tend to get really freaked out by things like minor pH shifts and whatnot. It's a change in environmental conditions, the same as occur all the time, even without our involvement. Those species which can adapt to the new conditions, do so, and thrive. Those which cannot, die off. The view that we should somehow intervene to save species which are being selected against is baffling to me. Extinctions, even mass extinctions, happened before we came along, and they'll continue to happen regardless of what we do. So, say you're right, and the coral reefs do get wiped out. That's not something that'll happen immediately, for one thing; we'll have plenty of warning to see it happening, and plenty of opportunity to do something about it. And not 'do something about it' in the sense of 'emissions reduction' and similar unfeasible nonsense; whatever we in the First World begrudgingly contribute on that front, wringing our hands over the economic impact of the smallest marginal reductions, China and India, and the rising Third World, will more then make up for as they modernize. I'm talking 'do something about it' in the sense of geoengineering. When the environment becomes a problem to become an actual threat to humans, instead of to some marginal species which was dying off on it's own anyway, then we humans will go out there and fix it. If it comes down to it, and everything really is going to hell in a handbasket, we can design our own replacement ecosystems, to the tolerances needed to survive the conditions at hand, in less time than it'd take for mere warming to wipe us out. Unpalatable solution, unintended consequences? Most certainly. But climate change is slow, and humans think fast. In 100 years, by the time the more alarmist predictions suggest we'll be dealing with 5 degrees more global heat, we'll be busy terraforming Mars, and long since have mitigated our own climate problems, to whatever degree they happen to need mitigating.
Which is NOT what the 'sawtooth' approach suggests. Google 'sawtooth', on an image search. Line goes up at a fixed rate, then crashes to nothing; repeat forever. So you basically get to alternate ramping up your caffeine intake with crushing withdrawal. Doesn't sound fun.
Good math, but you're ignoring the effect of mass on density. Earth is more dense than (for example) Mars because its greater mass results in more gravitational pressure, thus compressing its core, and increasing the density. There are limits, of course, and composition really does play a much bigger role than mass... hence why Mercury is the second densest planet in our system, despite being significantly less massive, and why gas giants have much lower densities, despite being vastly more massive. Even so, given that we don't know anything about the composition of this planet, odds are that since it's more massive than Earth, it'll have a higher density. How much higher would be pure speculation, of course, but because of that factor, I'd bet on a radius less than 1.9 Earths, and a gravity of more than 2 G.
The article suggests that it actually gets less radiation than Earth does, so that sort of bombardment probably isn't an issue. That said, the lack of radiation could very well make advanced life unlikely, given the effects it'd have on mutation rate.
As a search engine or other aggregator, sure you can. The incentive to do so is revenue, the disincentive to do so is a fee. If you think it feasible that a French court could actually compel you to pay a fee, you drop the content. If you're pretty certain that you don't give a shit about the French legal system, you might consider 'pirating' the content, by linking without paying the fee... but major sites like Google won't be able to get away with that. They can, however, get away with not indexing non-free content, in the same way they can get away with not indexing robot-excluded content.
I'm skeptical. The 'monster' data they have doesn't seem particularly focused, and statistically saying 'well, it was all over the place, but it averages to the eyes' doesn't seem right in this case. A study of images showing humans and animals might be more revealing.
Good point, actually. You can't write a law that says 'Google', really; and you probably can't even apply it only to search engines. Accordingly, the law will be fairly broad and crippling... to people that have to abide by French law. Since those people are mostly French, and since people outside France will just not bother and drop French content, such a law would be damaging to France, and have minimal impact everywhere else.
That's pretty much the only logical response for Google, yeah. If some law says "you can't index this content without paying fees", Google (or any search engine) must respond by saying "fine, all content that costs a fee to index will not be indexed... and by the way, if you really didn't want us to index your content, you could've said so in robots.txt"
Yeah, it seems really unlikely that Microsoft would actually do this. It's one thing to declare win32 obsolete, but you still want some kind of compatibility package, regardless of the advantages of moving to a more closed system. Forget the anemic PC gaming market; it's business that's at stake here... we're talking about millions of licences, to large corporate entities. Most business these days rely on lots of really old code, ancient proprietary scripts and databases and VPNs, not replaced because they work well enough, and the cost of keeping them patched is less than the cost of replacing the software and retraining the employees. If a new OS is not compatible with all that legacy code, the company will not switch. Hell, even if the new OS is compatible, the company probably won't switch; look at all the trouble Microsoft is having with convincing their corporate clients to switch away from XP. Given that, we'll probably never see a version of Windows without backwards compatibility. And, almost certainly, we won't see a closed-system version of Windows; businesses want to use and tweak their own software in-house without having to beg Microsoft for permission and patch approval, so they'll use an OS that lets them do that. Microsoft knows this, so regardless of any short-term profits they might make by imprisoning home users in an app-store-only model, the bottom line rules against the idea.
Yes, in fact, people -do- kill "in the name of atheism", provably, as a matter of simple historical fact, and do so by the millions.
From your link:
During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavorably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention – land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917."
Essentially, then, the killing of priests wasn't so much 'in the name of atheism' as it was 'in the name of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie'. It was a consequence of the Marxist philosophy of the Soviet Union, not of it's atheist position.
It'll never happen. You could make a law that Google (or any search engine) has to pay to index you, but if you do, then Google and co will simply stop indexing anyone who tries. Hence the suggested French media ban.
Fine. You still have the option to block Google from your site if you like, just like you'd block any other robot from snatching your content. You do not, however, get the option to charge Google for looking at your content; if you'd rather Google not look at it, it'll simply do that, rather than pay.
That's the way news is going in general these days. The old way of news gathering is, indeed, old; an outdated 20th-century concept that's increasingly becoming unsustainable. Propaganda is something people will happily pay to do, so the old way will continue regardless of profitability... but that doesn't stop the old guard from wishing they could get still paid to propagandize.
Emphatically NOT true. 'Generally Known' and 'Known to Experts' are two entirely different sets, with very minimal intersection; at the levels of doctoral research, even the experts don't have time to read all the papers, and there really isn't a lot that can be said to be 'Generally Known'... so 'Generally Known to Experts' isn't a useful criteria.
And even if something was so 'Generally Known to Experts' that citation really would be redundant, it's still useful to have the citation. That makes it easier for your expert readers to look up the original for cross-referencing, for non-expert readers to have access to background info they lack, and for keeping track of relevant statistics like 'How many works have cited this work?'
All that's ignoring the fact that it's impolite to not cite, but that much goes without saying.
Its not a crime to ignore the DNT flag. AND, there can never be a law to make it a crime, as microsoft actions have made DNT not a true indicator of a users preference.
"There can never be a law"? That's fairly naive of you. It's always possible to make a law mandating 'X', regardless of whether X is fair, sensible, sane, or even possible. And since in this case, any 'unfair' repercussions of the law will fall squarely on advertisers, there'll be great public support for the law, since it'll be easy to spin positively. The only people who'd dare disagree are evil privacy-hating advertising executives that want to spy on you, but now that almighty government has stepped in, their evil plots are thwarted. Aren't you glad? (glad enough to vote for us again next election, of course)
Uh... no, you missed a more important point, there. It's quite crippling if the company can't configure different security levels to actually be, you know, secure... essentially, this vulnerability means that if Janitor Bob has guest access, he can escalate to superuser and walk off with whatever he wants. And since as a company, you want to have most people have limited access and a very few trusted people have full access, this is huge. Sure, it'd be nice if you had everything totally locked down, with the background checks on your janitors as intensive as those on your administrators... but since that's a huge deal of expense, it makes a lot more sense to simply make sure that your janitors don't actually have access to anything sensitive.
The fact that this security flaw also means that any of your passwords are gold to hackers is just a side effect.
Do note that this ruling only applies to the law as it stands. Do note that the CPFB has the authority to overturn this ruling (according to the article, at least), and this practice, by adopting a regulation prohibiting mandatory arbitration clauses. In other words, if you are an American, and concerned about this practice, go to consumerfinance.gov and send them your concerns.
Actually, in this case, 'pretty damn close' really means they settled to avert a damning precedent. The law is on the books, but it hasn't been tested; and no one who might be in a position to be punished by it wants that precedent. If any class-action stuff starts up from this, I would expect it to also be settled, for the same reason the Sony rootkit was.
Yeah, really. Been playing around with a few alternatives... netvibes.com seems pretty close to what I'm looking for in most respects, but their Gmail app is really terrible compared to Google's (perhaps unsurprisingly), since it just gives you a short listing of unread messages only, that doesn't actually let you read the whole message, like the iGoogle app does. Maybe they'll get better before Google sinks their own ship, maybe not... or maybe the minimalism of their app appeals to you, who knows? It'd be worth the effort for you fellow lamenters to check it out, at the very least.
That's just the default setting, actually. You can totally change it by right-clicking on the start menu > Properties > Start Menu > Customize; and from there increasing the start menu size.
Hrm. I've been using iGoogle as a homepage for years, now... nice convenient place to simultaneously check email and news before doing whatever else I'm doing with my browser at the moment. Heck, I mainly check/. based on the iGoogle widget; it's a convenient way to promote things to my attention. In contrast, I rather dislike the Reader interface; if iGoogle is indeed axed, I probably won't start using Reader afterwards (or at all, probably)... they do different things in different ways, and Google really doesn't have a good replacement on hand.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Mars One, for instance, is claiming to have a plan to permanently colonize Mars beginning in 2023, at a fairly modest cost. That, of course, is really optimistic, but at the same time, it'd be really pessimistic to say that nobody will be living on Mars in 2070. And once there are people on Mars, odds are good that they'll be starting some kind of terraforming effort almost immediately, if only as a small-scale experiment to see how easy it is to affect change. Now, I don't expect them to have much success within this century... terraforming is a very long-term project. But something would have to go drastically wrong (engineered pandemic, asteroid strike, or some similar civilization-ending cataclysm) in order to stop us from at least getting started.
Not sure why people tend to get really freaked out by things like minor pH shifts and whatnot. It's a change in environmental conditions, the same as occur all the time, even without our involvement. Those species which can adapt to the new conditions, do so, and thrive. Those which cannot, die off. The view that we should somehow intervene to save species which are being selected against is baffling to me. Extinctions, even mass extinctions, happened before we came along, and they'll continue to happen regardless of what we do.
So, say you're right, and the coral reefs do get wiped out. That's not something that'll happen immediately, for one thing; we'll have plenty of warning to see it happening, and plenty of opportunity to do something about it. And not 'do something about it' in the sense of 'emissions reduction' and similar unfeasible nonsense; whatever we in the First World begrudgingly contribute on that front, wringing our hands over the economic impact of the smallest marginal reductions, China and India, and the rising Third World, will more then make up for as they modernize. I'm talking 'do something about it' in the sense of geoengineering. When the environment becomes a problem to become an actual threat to humans, instead of to some marginal species which was dying off on it's own anyway, then we humans will go out there and fix it. If it comes down to it, and everything really is going to hell in a handbasket, we can design our own replacement ecosystems, to the tolerances needed to survive the conditions at hand, in less time than it'd take for mere warming to wipe us out.
Unpalatable solution, unintended consequences? Most certainly. But climate change is slow, and humans think fast. In 100 years, by the time the more alarmist predictions suggest we'll be dealing with 5 degrees more global heat, we'll be busy terraforming Mars, and long since have mitigated our own climate problems, to whatever degree they happen to need mitigating.
Which is NOT what the 'sawtooth' approach suggests. Google 'sawtooth', on an image search. Line goes up at a fixed rate, then crashes to nothing; repeat forever. So you basically get to alternate ramping up your caffeine intake with crushing withdrawal. Doesn't sound fun.
Good math, but you're ignoring the effect of mass on density. Earth is more dense than (for example) Mars because its greater mass results in more gravitational pressure, thus compressing its core, and increasing the density. There are limits, of course, and composition really does play a much bigger role than mass... hence why Mercury is the second densest planet in our system, despite being significantly less massive, and why gas giants have much lower densities, despite being vastly more massive. Even so, given that we don't know anything about the composition of this planet, odds are that since it's more massive than Earth, it'll have a higher density. How much higher would be pure speculation, of course, but because of that factor, I'd bet on a radius less than 1.9 Earths, and a gravity of more than 2 G.
The article suggests that it actually gets less radiation than Earth does, so that sort of bombardment probably isn't an issue. That said, the lack of radiation could very well make advanced life unlikely, given the effects it'd have on mutation rate.
As a search engine or other aggregator, sure you can. The incentive to do so is revenue, the disincentive to do so is a fee. If you think it feasible that a French court could actually compel you to pay a fee, you drop the content. If you're pretty certain that you don't give a shit about the French legal system, you might consider 'pirating' the content, by linking without paying the fee... but major sites like Google won't be able to get away with that. They can, however, get away with not indexing non-free content, in the same way they can get away with not indexing robot-excluded content.
I'm skeptical. The 'monster' data they have doesn't seem particularly focused, and statistically saying 'well, it was all over the place, but it averages to the eyes' doesn't seem right in this case. A study of images showing humans and animals might be more revealing.
Good point, actually. You can't write a law that says 'Google', really; and you probably can't even apply it only to search engines. Accordingly, the law will be fairly broad and crippling... to people that have to abide by French law. Since those people are mostly French, and since people outside France will just not bother and drop French content, such a law would be damaging to France, and have minimal impact everywhere else.
That's pretty much the only logical response for Google, yeah. If some law says "you can't index this content without paying fees", Google (or any search engine) must respond by saying "fine, all content that costs a fee to index will not be indexed... and by the way, if you really didn't want us to index your content, you could've said so in robots.txt"
Yeah, it seems really unlikely that Microsoft would actually do this. It's one thing to declare win32 obsolete, but you still want some kind of compatibility package, regardless of the advantages of moving to a more closed system. Forget the anemic PC gaming market; it's business that's at stake here... we're talking about millions of licences, to large corporate entities. Most business these days rely on lots of really old code, ancient proprietary scripts and databases and VPNs, not replaced because they work well enough, and the cost of keeping them patched is less than the cost of replacing the software and retraining the employees. If a new OS is not compatible with all that legacy code, the company will not switch. Hell, even if the new OS is compatible, the company probably won't switch; look at all the trouble Microsoft is having with convincing their corporate clients to switch away from XP. Given that, we'll probably never see a version of Windows without backwards compatibility. And, almost certainly, we won't see a closed-system version of Windows; businesses want to use and tweak their own software in-house without having to beg Microsoft for permission and patch approval, so they'll use an OS that lets them do that. Microsoft knows this, so regardless of any short-term profits they might make by imprisoning home users in an app-store-only model, the bottom line rules against the idea.
Though you did succeed in creating deep existential angst in me that I may be unable to read, I'll provide the same link to you as I did previously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_Soviet_Union
Yes, in fact, people -do- kill "in the name of atheism", provably, as a matter of simple historical fact, and do so by the millions.
From your link:
During the first five years of Soviet power, the Bolsheviks executed 28 Russian Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 Russian Orthodox priests. Many others were imprisoned or exiled. Believers were harassed and persecuted. Most seminaries were closed, and the publication of most religious material was prohibited. By 1941 only 500 churches remained open out of about 54,000 in existence prior to World War I.
Such crackdowns related to many people's dissatisfaction with the church in pre-revolutionary Russia. The close ties between the church and the state led to the perception of the church as corrupt and greedy by many members of the intelligentsia. Many peasants, while highly religious, also viewed the church unfavorably. Respect for religion did not extend to the local priests. The church owned a significant portion of Russia's land, and this was a bone of contention – land ownership was a big factor in the Russian Revolution of 1917."
Essentially, then, the killing of priests wasn't so much 'in the name of atheism' as it was 'in the name of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie'. It was a consequence of the Marxist philosophy of the Soviet Union, not of it's atheist position.
Interesting definition of 'hold you to ransom' you've got there, when it's France trying to extort money from Google, and not the other way around.
You got a citation for those assertions, or just random unfounded conspiratorial ranting?
It'll never happen. You could make a law that Google (or any search engine) has to pay to index you, but if you do, then Google and co will simply stop indexing anyone who tries. Hence the suggested French media ban.
Fine. You still have the option to block Google from your site if you like, just like you'd block any other robot from snatching your content. You do not, however, get the option to charge Google for looking at your content; if you'd rather Google not look at it, it'll simply do that, rather than pay.
That's the way news is going in general these days. The old way of news gathering is, indeed, old; an outdated 20th-century concept that's increasingly becoming unsustainable. Propaganda is something people will happily pay to do, so the old way will continue regardless of profitability... but that doesn't stop the old guard from wishing they could get still paid to propagandize.
Emphatically NOT true. 'Generally Known' and 'Known to Experts' are two entirely different sets, with very minimal intersection; at the levels of doctoral research, even the experts don't have time to read all the papers, and there really isn't a lot that can be said to be 'Generally Known'... so 'Generally Known to Experts' isn't a useful criteria. And even if something was so 'Generally Known to Experts' that citation really would be redundant, it's still useful to have the citation. That makes it easier for your expert readers to look up the original for cross-referencing, for non-expert readers to have access to background info they lack, and for keeping track of relevant statistics like 'How many works have cited this work?' All that's ignoring the fact that it's impolite to not cite, but that much goes without saying.
Its not a crime to ignore the DNT flag. AND, there can never be a law to make it a crime, as microsoft actions have made DNT not a true indicator of a users preference.
"There can never be a law"? That's fairly naive of you. It's always possible to make a law mandating 'X', regardless of whether X is fair, sensible, sane, or even possible. And since in this case, any 'unfair' repercussions of the law will fall squarely on advertisers, there'll be great public support for the law, since it'll be easy to spin positively. The only people who'd dare disagree are evil privacy-hating advertising executives that want to spy on you, but now that almighty government has stepped in, their evil plots are thwarted. Aren't you glad? (glad enough to vote for us again next election, of course)
Not sure if actually crazy, or just pretending to be crazy. Awesome troll either way.
Uh... no, you missed a more important point, there. It's quite crippling if the company can't configure different security levels to actually be, you know, secure... essentially, this vulnerability means that if Janitor Bob has guest access, he can escalate to superuser and walk off with whatever he wants. And since as a company, you want to have most people have limited access and a very few trusted people have full access, this is huge. Sure, it'd be nice if you had everything totally locked down, with the background checks on your janitors as intensive as those on your administrators... but since that's a huge deal of expense, it makes a lot more sense to simply make sure that your janitors don't actually have access to anything sensitive. The fact that this security flaw also means that any of your passwords are gold to hackers is just a side effect.
Do note that this ruling only applies to the law as it stands. Do note that the CPFB has the authority to overturn this ruling (according to the article, at least), and this practice, by adopting a regulation prohibiting mandatory arbitration clauses. In other words, if you are an American, and concerned about this practice, go to consumerfinance.gov and send them your concerns.
Actually, in this case, 'pretty damn close' really means they settled to avert a damning precedent. The law is on the books, but it hasn't been tested; and no one who might be in a position to be punished by it wants that precedent. If any class-action stuff starts up from this, I would expect it to also be settled, for the same reason the Sony rootkit was.
Yeah, really. Been playing around with a few alternatives... netvibes.com seems pretty close to what I'm looking for in most respects, but their Gmail app is really terrible compared to Google's (perhaps unsurprisingly), since it just gives you a short listing of unread messages only, that doesn't actually let you read the whole message, like the iGoogle app does. Maybe they'll get better before Google sinks their own ship, maybe not... or maybe the minimalism of their app appeals to you, who knows? It'd be worth the effort for you fellow lamenters to check it out, at the very least.
That's just the default setting, actually. You can totally change it by right-clicking on the start menu > Properties > Start Menu > Customize; and from there increasing the start menu size.
Hrm. I've been using iGoogle as a homepage for years, now... nice convenient place to simultaneously check email and news before doing whatever else I'm doing with my browser at the moment. Heck, I mainly check /. based on the iGoogle widget; it's a convenient way to promote things to my attention. In contrast, I rather dislike the Reader interface; if iGoogle is indeed axed, I probably won't start using Reader afterwards (or at all, probably)... they do different things in different ways, and Google really doesn't have a good replacement on hand.