Websites determine the popularity of articles by how many people read them and comment on them. If you want to see less of a particular type of story, don't click on it and read it. If you want to see more like it, click on it, and actually comment on it, indicating an even greater level of interest, like you just did now. (What you actually write in the comments is irrelevant -- it won't show up in the metrics, they'll only reflect that you liked the story so much that you not only read but commented on it.)
The sad thing is, there was a time (it was called "the eighties") when Microsoft Word was my favorite word processor on my Mac. It was perfectly Mac-like, extremely functional, and not at all bloated. Then they decided to make a Windows version, and then they decided to port the Windows version back to the Mac. *sigh*
I had a computer screen once that would turn bright pink after about 2 hours of being on. I sharp whack to the side would fix it for about half an hour, before I'd have to hit it again. It was quite the therapeutic computer.
Ha! I had the *exact* same problem with an old monitor of mine. I think I kept using it for more than a year after it developed this little quirk. It was a wonderful monitor except for that one problem -- I couldn't justify dropping another $500-600 for a new monitor when that one worked just fine except for needing an occasional whack. (Yes, I know you can buy cheaper monitors, but you get what you pay for...)
And I have a third theory: A lot of us curse at things our computer does, but the target of our cursing is the gang of malevolent idiots who built the software.
Ah, that's probably the distinction that 61% of respondents are making. They're all willfully misunderstanding the question so they can give a misleading answer on the basis of an arbitrary technicality.
I doubt it. I don't cuss at the idiots who built the software either, unless they're in earshot. Cussing that them when they can't hear me would be every bit as stupid as cussing at the computer. I suspect 61% of respondents simply understand that talking to inanimate objects or people who can't hear you is pointless. What surprises me is that 39% of people actually talk to imaginary listeners, or at least claim they do.
I wonder if they remembered to correct for precession of the equinox.
I wonder if you know what that is. If you think precession impacts where the sun appears to be relatively to stones on the ground on the solstice, you either don't understand what precession is or don't understand what a solstice is.
For anyone who doesn't -- precession of the equinoxes is a phenomenon which causes the sun to move, relative to the background stars, over a long period of time, such that it'll be in a different constellation on the vernal equinox than it was thousands of years previous or will be hence, caused by a change in the orientation of the Earth's axis of rotation. If you understand what it is and what causes it, it's easy to see that although a stone circle aligned to point at some star other than the sun on the solstice would not be pointing to the right star on the right day millennia later, it has no impact at all whatsoever on anything designed to point to the Sun, and thus no "correction for precession" would be called for. The sun will have appeared to have moved in the sky relative to the background stars, not relative to the Earth. Give what "equinox" and "solstice" mean, the sun will always appear to be in the exact same position in the sky relative to the ground observer unless the axial tilt changes (which will cause it to appear higher or lower in the sky) or continental drift moves the location sufficiently, since the only thing that changes where the sun appears to be at a given time on the solstice is your latitude, which is not altered by precession.
Interesting to think of these timelines, regarding common perception. Cleopatra lived and died closer in time to the era of Moon landings than she did to the building of the great pyramid at Giza.
Is it really common perception to associate Cleopatra with the era of ancient pharaohs? She's most popularly known as an intimate part of the story of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, i.e. early AD. I would expect the mistake most people would make would be to think if she hadn't killed herself, she'd have been dragged back to Rome and been thrown to the lions along with some Christians (which, of course, would not be happening yet).
It's called entertainment. Some may call it useless. Frankly, I would say it's the only inherently useful thing humans create -- all other "useful" inventions are useful only to the extent that they further our ability to enjoy. The only useless invention is one that never leads to any increase in human joy. Anything that is properly classified as entertainment does, by definition.
If you think AI does not include brain simulation, you're as misguided as the person who thinks that's all AI is. Research is proceeding down multiple avenues, using many different approaches. The ever-progressing field of AI cares quite a bit for such things, although specific researchers either may or may not, depending...
Because then you open-up parents to all kinds of liabilities:
They already are. Do you favor repealing laws against incest and child abuse? If not, then you already agree that there should be laws against what parents are allowed to do with their children, as long as they are reasonable. You can pull out all the unreasonable examples you want (and I highly agree the whole nudist and interracial things are ridiculous), but that's not in any way an argument against perfectly reasonable requirements and restrictions on parents, just an argument against bad/silly ones.
yes, and Bill Gates worrying about this kind of shit kills Microsoft... little by little
lolwut? Why would anything he does have any impact on Microsoft? Do your actions have much impact on your former employer years after you've left the company?
... What's happening is that the Bing search bar monitors everything that a user clicks on, something that the user explicitly agrees to. The "Bing Sting" methodology that Google outlined on their blog involved inserting bogus search results that returned an unlikely match. They then had their engineers deliberately search for these terms in Google and then - wait for it - click on them. So the Bing toolbar analysed those clicks, and because no-one else in the world was clicking on a link with those terms, they went straight to the top of Bing's results.
Except, it all they were doing is what you say, the "Bing Sting" would not have worked. They have to be doing more than simply monitoring what people click on. No amount of click analysis would cause pages THAT DON'T CONTAIN THOSE TERMS AND ARE NEVER LINKED TO BY ANYTHING CONTAINING THOSE TERMS to rise to the top of anyone's search results for those terms. Google did not insert search results that returns an "unlikely" match, they returned an impossible match. Impossible unless (like Google) you were deliberately futzing with the results or (like Microsoft) copying someone else's results.
... Google complaining about this would be total hypocrisy, considering the millions of websites Google analyses without permission to get their data.
Websites are publicly published. When I publish a page, I'm implicitly granting permission for you or Google or anyone else to read it, unless I specify otherwise somehow (which I can, in robots.txt, which Google respects). That's a bit different from essentially keylogging people's personal computers, which is what Microsoft is doing, in order to gather their data. A lot of users won't read the ToS closely enough to realize they're giving Microsoft permission to keylog them, and perhaps that's their fault then, but there's a different expectation for data I deliberately publish on a public web page (which I expect to be world readable unless I specify otherwise, opting out), vs. text I type into a text entry box on my personal computer (which I expect not to be published unless I specify otherwise, opting in).
I never thought I would be defending MS...
Oh please, after the comment about hypocrisy because Google indexes public information? This is the most obviously, ridiculously biased bit of MS shill I've seen posted on Slashdot in ages...
...Even their robots.txt is irrelevant, because it's the users' text input and click that is being recorded, not the Google search results.
Complete logic fail. The former does not preclude the latter -- in fact, you're confirming the truth of the second part (they're copying Google's search results) by acknowledging and describing how they're doing it in the first part. If your point is that, using this method, they're not just copying Google's search results, that would be true -- using the method described, they're recording everybody's search results. But guess what, Google is part of "everybody". You can't claim they're recording everybody's search results and then deny that they're recording Google's search results. (Well, obvious you can claim that, you just did, but it makes you look really stupid.)
In one billion years (what you almost certainly meant), Earth itself will be most likely uninhabitable (if nature takes its course).
That seems unlikely. Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "uninhabitable". Today's ecosphere would expire quickly if transported forward to the Earth a billion years from now. But Earth will probably continue to support life for another two to three billion years -- just life that has adapted to the changing world. What would be interesting to see is what direction life goes once photosynthesis ceases to be viable (due to low CO2 levels). But life predates photosynthesis and aerobic life, there's no reason to think it won't continue even after plants and the oxygen atmosphere they create are no longer around.
So, does this mean there are approximately ( 4 * pi * 250^3 ) / 3 more stars than we thought there were?
No, unless for some reason you were certain that the observable universe and the entire universe were one and the same, in which case, yes, but then you mean "you", not "we", since most of us thought otherwise.
It's possible because nothing prevents it. Matter cannot move faster than the speed of light, but a radius is not made of matter, it's a mathematical abstraction. There's nothing to suggest it can't change in value at any speed it wants. This does not mean the speed of light changes, nor does it mean matter can move faster than it, it merely means space (which is not matter, it's nothing) can expand at whatever rate it likes, causing distances between non-moving objects (and thus, not breaking the cosmic speed limit for matter) can expand and speeds far greater than the objects could possibly move apart if space were not expanding between them. The rate at which the universe expands is dependent on how quickly space expands between the objects, not the speed at which the objects are moving -- they can be perfectly stationary and the distance between them expanding at a rate that causes them to be ten light years further apart in only one year.
The expansion of the universe is not caused by all the matter in the universe moving away from each other, it's caused by the expansion of space itself, with the matter being just "carried along" so to speak.
At the moment of the big bang, every point in the universe was at the same point. Which is to say, no matter where you are in the universe today, you're at the point that was the center of the universe where they big bang occurred. It occurred at one particular point, yes, but that point is everywhere. Every single point in the universe today is "the center" where the big bang actually occurred.
Doesn't that suggest that when (if?) the universe stops expanding, it would be possible to look through a theoretical super-telescope and see your own galaxy as it existed a zillion years ago?
In theory, yes. Indeed, if you had some kinda of magical telescope that could see any distance instantly, and you looked through it as far as you could see, you would see the back of your head.
...and if it's radius can't expand faster than light...
But it can. That's the part you're missing. Matter cannot move faster than light, but the radius of something is a mathematical abstraction, not a bit of matter. Mathematical abstractions have no speed limits.
...but this is the one explanation I have always thought was a cop out. If you don't know what the universe is expanding into, then say so. Don't say it's expanding but not into anything.
If you don't understand how the universe can be expanding but not into anything, then say so. Don't insist everyone must be feeding you crap, just because you don't understand it -- that's just a cop out.
Thank you Microsoft apologist, but no, it's not trolltastic not misleading, it's a perfectly accurate statement. What your own experiment would prove, even if the results were positive, is not that Bing isn't copying Google's results, but merely that Bing isn't copying only Google's results. It does mean that they are copying Google's results, regardless of who else they may also be copying from.
...and if you this comment is relevant, you've entirely misunderstood what's happening here, since the information Microsoft is using to do this is not on the web. Google's proof that Microsoft was indeed doing what it's doing involved using words like "mbzrxpgjys" that it verified beforehand are NOT on the web. The fact that Bing started producing the same results on that search proved the Microsoft was taking information other than what's on the web to produce results -- specifically, taking information from people's personal computers regarding what they were typing into web searches. In effect, Microsoft is keylogging users to see what they're searching for on Google, and what results they click on when Google returns the results. Neither of these are pieces of information that at on the web. Arguably, neither are pieces of information Microsoft can even have access to without engaging in some pretty gross violations of personal privacy. But it has now been proven that that is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
No, it isn't. You're looking at the Terms of Service for the Google Web Search API. Since Microsoft is not using the Google Web Search API to do this, it cannot possibly be violating any of the rules here for how that API is to be used.
I heard an interview with Greene on the radio last week. He was talking about a junior-level quantum mechanics problem and he said something so wrong my head just about exploded. He said that something fundamentally changes about an electron when you localize it. That what was a probability wave now becomes a point particle. What?!? No it doesn't. It's still a wave that is governed by quantum mechanics. It doesn't suddenly become a point particle governed by Newtonian mechanics.
What Greene said was sorta-true, in an admittedly oversimplified way. What you're interpreting him as saying is obviously false, and also obviously goes beyond what he said to the point that he himself would doubtless disagree with it. You're reading far more into what he said than he actually said, and you're right, your interpretation of what he said is absurd, but that just points out the absurdity of your interpretation.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to say, when they identified and reburied Copernicus, they gave him the coolest tombstone I've ever seen. Very nice...
If you don't want people messing with your corpse for centuries to come, get cremated.
Websites determine the popularity of articles by how many people read them and comment on them. If you want to see less of a particular type of story, don't click on it and read it. If you want to see more like it, click on it, and actually comment on it, indicating an even greater level of interest, like you just did now. (What you actually write in the comments is irrelevant -- it won't show up in the metrics, they'll only reflect that you liked the story so much that you not only read but commented on it.)
The sad thing is, there was a time (it was called "the eighties") when Microsoft Word was my favorite word processor on my Mac. It was perfectly Mac-like, extremely functional, and not at all bloated. Then they decided to make a Windows version, and then they decided to port the Windows version back to the Mac. *sigh*
I had a computer screen once that would turn bright pink after about 2 hours of being on. I sharp whack to the side would fix it for about half an hour, before I'd have to hit it again. It was quite the therapeutic computer.
Ha! I had the *exact* same problem with an old monitor of mine. I think I kept using it for more than a year after it developed this little quirk. It was a wonderful monitor except for that one problem -- I couldn't justify dropping another $500-600 for a new monitor when that one worked just fine except for needing an occasional whack. (Yes, I know you can buy cheaper monitors, but you get what you pay for...)
And I have a third theory: A lot of us curse at things our computer does, but the target of our cursing is the gang of malevolent idiots who built the software.
Ah, that's probably the distinction that 61% of respondents are making. They're all willfully misunderstanding the question so they can give a misleading answer on the basis of an arbitrary technicality.
I doubt it. I don't cuss at the idiots who built the software either, unless they're in earshot. Cussing that them when they can't hear me would be every bit as stupid as cussing at the computer. I suspect 61% of respondents simply understand that talking to inanimate objects or people who can't hear you is pointless. What surprises me is that 39% of people actually talk to imaginary listeners, or at least claim they do.
Why would you want to avoid offending fundamentalists?
They like to kill people they disagree with.
I wonder if they remembered to correct for precession of the equinox.
I wonder if you know what that is. If you think precession impacts where the sun appears to be relatively to stones on the ground on the solstice, you either don't understand what precession is or don't understand what a solstice is.
For anyone who doesn't -- precession of the equinoxes is a phenomenon which causes the sun to move, relative to the background stars, over a long period of time, such that it'll be in a different constellation on the vernal equinox than it was thousands of years previous or will be hence, caused by a change in the orientation of the Earth's axis of rotation. If you understand what it is and what causes it, it's easy to see that although a stone circle aligned to point at some star other than the sun on the solstice would not be pointing to the right star on the right day millennia later, it has no impact at all whatsoever on anything designed to point to the Sun, and thus no "correction for precession" would be called for. The sun will have appeared to have moved in the sky relative to the background stars, not relative to the Earth. Give what "equinox" and "solstice" mean, the sun will always appear to be in the exact same position in the sky relative to the ground observer unless the axial tilt changes (which will cause it to appear higher or lower in the sky) or continental drift moves the location sufficiently, since the only thing that changes where the sun appears to be at a given time on the solstice is your latitude, which is not altered by precession.
Interesting to think of these timelines, regarding common perception. Cleopatra lived and died closer in time to the era of Moon landings than she did to the building of the great pyramid at Giza.
Is it really common perception to associate Cleopatra with the era of ancient pharaohs? She's most popularly known as an intimate part of the story of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, i.e. early AD. I would expect the mistake most people would make would be to think if she hadn't killed herself, she'd have been dragged back to Rome and been thrown to the lions along with some Christians (which, of course, would not be happening yet).
Most useless invention ever...
It's called entertainment. Some may call it useless. Frankly, I would say it's the only inherently useful thing humans create -- all other "useful" inventions are useful only to the extent that they further our ability to enjoy. The only useless invention is one that never leads to any increase in human joy. Anything that is properly classified as entertainment does, by definition.
If you think AI does not include brain simulation, you're as misguided as the person who thinks that's all AI is. Research is proceeding down multiple avenues, using many different approaches. The ever-progressing field of AI cares quite a bit for such things, although specific researchers either may or may not, depending...
Because then you open-up parents to all kinds of liabilities:
They already are. Do you favor repealing laws against incest and child abuse? If not, then you already agree that there should be laws against what parents are allowed to do with their children, as long as they are reasonable. You can pull out all the unreasonable examples you want (and I highly agree the whole nudist and interracial things are ridiculous), but that's not in any way an argument against perfectly reasonable requirements and restrictions on parents, just an argument against bad/silly ones.
yes, and Bill Gates worrying about this kind of shit kills Microsoft... little by little
lolwut? Why would anything he does have any impact on Microsoft? Do your actions have much impact on your former employer years after you've left the company?
... What's happening is that the Bing search bar monitors everything that a user clicks on, something that the user explicitly agrees to. The "Bing Sting" methodology that Google outlined on their blog involved inserting bogus search results that returned an unlikely match. They then had their engineers deliberately search for these terms in Google and then - wait for it - click on them. So the Bing toolbar analysed those clicks, and because no-one else in the world was clicking on a link with those terms, they went straight to the top of Bing's results.
Except, it all they were doing is what you say, the "Bing Sting" would not have worked. They have to be doing more than simply monitoring what people click on. No amount of click analysis would cause pages THAT DON'T CONTAIN THOSE TERMS AND ARE NEVER LINKED TO BY ANYTHING CONTAINING THOSE TERMS to rise to the top of anyone's search results for those terms. Google did not insert search results that returns an "unlikely" match, they returned an impossible match. Impossible unless (like Google) you were deliberately futzing with the results or (like Microsoft) copying someone else's results.
... Google complaining about this would be total hypocrisy, considering the millions of websites Google analyses without permission to get their data.
Websites are publicly published. When I publish a page, I'm implicitly granting permission for you or Google or anyone else to read it, unless I specify otherwise somehow (which I can, in robots.txt, which Google respects). That's a bit different from essentially keylogging people's personal computers, which is what Microsoft is doing, in order to gather their data. A lot of users won't read the ToS closely enough to realize they're giving Microsoft permission to keylog them, and perhaps that's their fault then, but there's a different expectation for data I deliberately publish on a public web page (which I expect to be world readable unless I specify otherwise, opting out), vs. text I type into a text entry box on my personal computer (which I expect not to be published unless I specify otherwise, opting in).
I never thought I would be defending MS...
Oh please, after the comment about hypocrisy because Google indexes public information? This is the most obviously, ridiculously biased bit of MS shill I've seen posted on Slashdot in ages...
...Even their robots.txt is irrelevant, because it's the users' text input and click that is being recorded, not the Google search results.
Complete logic fail. The former does not preclude the latter -- in fact, you're confirming the truth of the second part (they're copying Google's search results) by acknowledging and describing how they're doing it in the first part. If your point is that, using this method, they're not just copying Google's search results, that would be true -- using the method described, they're recording everybody's search results. But guess what, Google is part of "everybody". You can't claim they're recording everybody's search results and then deny that they're recording Google's search results. (Well, obvious you can claim that, you just did, but it makes you look really stupid.)
In one billion years (what you almost certainly meant), Earth itself will be most likely uninhabitable (if nature takes its course).
That seems unlikely. Well, I guess that depends on what you mean by "uninhabitable". Today's ecosphere would expire quickly if transported forward to the Earth a billion years from now. But Earth will probably continue to support life for another two to three billion years -- just life that has adapted to the changing world. What would be interesting to see is what direction life goes once photosynthesis ceases to be viable (due to low CO2 levels). But life predates photosynthesis and aerobic life, there's no reason to think it won't continue even after plants and the oxygen atmosphere they create are no longer around.
So, does this mean there are approximately ( 4 * pi * 250^3 ) / 3 more stars than we thought there were?
No, unless for some reason you were certain that the observable universe and the entire universe were one and the same, in which case, yes, but then you mean "you", not "we", since most of us thought otherwise.
It's possible because nothing prevents it. Matter cannot move faster than the speed of light, but a radius is not made of matter, it's a mathematical abstraction. There's nothing to suggest it can't change in value at any speed it wants. This does not mean the speed of light changes, nor does it mean matter can move faster than it, it merely means space (which is not matter, it's nothing) can expand at whatever rate it likes, causing distances between non-moving objects (and thus, not breaking the cosmic speed limit for matter) can expand and speeds far greater than the objects could possibly move apart if space were not expanding between them. The rate at which the universe expands is dependent on how quickly space expands between the objects, not the speed at which the objects are moving -- they can be perfectly stationary and the distance between them expanding at a rate that causes them to be ten light years further apart in only one year.
The expansion of the universe is not caused by all the matter in the universe moving away from each other, it's caused by the expansion of space itself, with the matter being just "carried along" so to speak.
At the moment of the big bang, every point in the universe was at the same point. Which is to say, no matter where you are in the universe today, you're at the point that was the center of the universe where they big bang occurred. It occurred at one particular point, yes, but that point is everywhere. Every single point in the universe today is "the center" where the big bang actually occurred.
Doesn't that suggest that when (if?) the universe stops expanding, it would be possible to look through a theoretical super-telescope and see your own galaxy as it existed a zillion years ago?
In theory, yes. Indeed, if you had some kinda of magical telescope that could see any distance instantly, and you looked through it as far as you could see, you would see the back of your head.
...and if it's radius can't expand faster than light...
But it can. That's the part you're missing. Matter cannot move faster than light, but the radius of something is a mathematical abstraction, not a bit of matter. Mathematical abstractions have no speed limits.
...but this is the one explanation I have always thought was a cop out. If you don't know what the universe is expanding into, then say so. Don't say it's expanding but not into anything.
If you don't understand how the universe can be expanding but not into anything, then say so. Don't insist everyone must be feeding you crap, just because you don't understand it -- that's just a cop out.
Thank you Microsoft apologist, but no, it's not trolltastic not misleading, it's a perfectly accurate statement. What your own experiment would prove, even if the results were positive, is not that Bing isn't copying Google's results, but merely that Bing isn't copying only Google's results. It does mean that they are copying Google's results, regardless of who else they may also be copying from.
If its on the web, then its fair game, period.
...and if you this comment is relevant, you've entirely misunderstood what's happening here, since the information Microsoft is using to do this is not on the web. Google's proof that Microsoft was indeed doing what it's doing involved using words like "mbzrxpgjys" that it verified beforehand are NOT on the web. The fact that Bing started producing the same results on that search proved the Microsoft was taking information other than what's on the web to produce results -- specifically, taking information from people's personal computers regarding what they were typing into web searches. In effect, Microsoft is keylogging users to see what they're searching for on Google, and what results they click on when Google returns the results. Neither of these are pieces of information that at on the web. Arguably, neither are pieces of information Microsoft can even have access to without engaging in some pretty gross violations of personal privacy. But it has now been proven that that is exactly what Microsoft is doing.
No, it isn't. You're looking at the Terms of Service for the Google Web Search API. Since Microsoft is not using the Google Web Search API to do this, it cannot possibly be violating any of the rules here for how that API is to be used.
I heard an interview with Greene on the radio last week. He was talking about a junior-level quantum mechanics problem and he said something so wrong my head just about exploded. He said that something fundamentally changes about an electron when you localize it. That what was a probability wave now becomes a point particle. What?!? No it doesn't. It's still a wave that is governed by quantum mechanics. It doesn't suddenly become a point particle governed by Newtonian mechanics.
What Greene said was sorta-true, in an admittedly oversimplified way. What you're interpreting him as saying is obviously false, and also obviously goes beyond what he said to the point that he himself would doubtless disagree with it. You're reading far more into what he said than he actually said, and you're right, your interpretation of what he said is absurd, but that just points out the absurdity of your interpretation.