One of the great things that Google is doing is making it possible for users to migrate data away. What this means is that although a sudden death of Google could be very serious for a company that builds on Google's infrastructure, a more orderly closure would be much less painful.
Along with Google, we should be looking at a big company like Salesforce.com. Many companies have integrated their customer records with Salesforce, so things could get very tense if Salesforce suddenly bites the dust.
I teach my daughter at home also (Gr 7), and for algebra I allow her to use the calculator instead of working out things manually. My reasoning is that the point of algebra is to learn algebra, not arithmetic. In a couple of years I will likely get her up to speed on 'R', because again the purpose will be to understand and solve a problem, not to plod through unnecessary mechanics. For similar reasons, I have also made her complete assignments using Google Documents and Google Wave.
That said, I did make her work things out by hand in the lower grades so that she wouldn't be helpless during a blackout.
And there's no real evidence of the proper scientists massaging or ignoring anything. Just because a detailed, written account of everything doesn't exist in stolen, incomplete private documents doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.
The behaviour surrounding the data is certainly indicative of a lack of confidence in the findings. Refusing FOI requests and claiming that "the dog ate it" do not show a group filled with the belief that their research is unassailable.
One likes to think the best of people. So even though the UN is as transparent as a block of cement and has programs rife with corruption, one would like to think that this time, with the IPCC, science and the pursuit of truth reign. So now that the fraud is unravelling, I am disappointed but not surprised.
Lock out? They thought the publication was publishing poor quality papers. If that was their belief, why would they not refrain from publishing there or citing articles?
The problem is that by their lights *every* dissenting paper is of "poor quality".
The analogy here, where the AGW proponents are the sole source of knowledge, is to the Christian church in the Middle Ages. The Bible was in Latin, which no one but the (better educated) priests could read. Instead of the laity being encouraged to learn Latin, or instead of translating the Bible to the local language, the priests and bishops decided what meanings the Bible would have.
Similarly, the AGW priest-kings deny raw data to the public and hold themselves as the exclusive interpreters of the data. It seems to me high time that this Global Warming belief system underwent its own Reformation.
1. White. 2. Male. 3. Wealthy. 4. A lawyer or successful businessman, preferably both. 5. At least 50+ for any significant office. 6. Already in politics for at least 20 years for any significant office. 7. Part of a family that is already well connected to the conservative wealthy elite and politics.
I dunno. I mean, Obama misses many of those points, but his record to date is underwhelming. It seems to me you need a Cheney, who isn't afraid to use the levers of power (and who knows where the bodies are buried), combined with an ideologue of the appropriate political hue.
There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular.
Google Documents are still on the utilitarian side, but Spreadsheets are quite useful. They lack indentation (needed in accounting) and pivots, but add Google search capability and distributed sharing. For ad hoc management of numbers, it's quite convenient.
This is not to take anything away from the OP's prediction, which sounds like a certainty.
OSS -- *not* the old stuff that comes with most distributions, but the Open Source OSS v4 at opensound.com -- is a better alternative to ALSA and the PulseAudio abomination.
It's trivially easy to make up cases where violence cannot be avoided.
For example, Bob the bomber is about to press a button that will caused hundreds of deaths. Sam the sharpshooter is in position to kill Bob. Should Sam shoot? Either way, violence is committed.
This is off-topic, but the new OSS is quite decent.
Issues with pulse (cpu-hog + buggy) and ALSA made me re-evaluate OSS and it has turned out to be very workable. A second look at what OSS is today would not be a bad idea.
[A} warrant would still be required for eavesdropping, but "basic subscriber information" (name, address, telephone number and Internet Protocol (IP) address, e-mail address, service provider identification and certain cell phone identifiers) would be available without a warrant.
It will be interesting how this all plays out. First, given that this is a minority government, at least one of the opposition parties must support the bill. Not likely if there is a chance they can score political points by voting against. Second, if the bill is eventually made law it will inevitably face a constitutional challenge. Given current privacy concerns it is by no means a slam dunk that the law will survive unscathed.
Most likely, however, is that the government will fall shortly after parliament resumes after the summer break, killing the bill.
You really, especially as an undergrad student, have to write all that much. Just quote a bunch of cited sources, and fill in a little around it with your words. Bang..done.
This used to work fine for me as long as I was using the regular footnoted citations. But recently I've had to use the APA style, and that has made it much harder to cite things to the degree that I think they ought to be, especially in cases where one would otherwise use a lot of "ibid." and "op. cit.". Can anyone shed light on how to follow APA properly for this?
And is "revolutionize file access in branch offices" the filesystem MS promised for Vista, or is that still DOA?
I would hope by now that people are able to see through this as yet another defense against encroaching Free and Open Source solutions. If this "feature" is actually delivered, any bets that it will not play well with Samba? Given Microsoft's history, there is every reason to suspect poison in every Microsoft offering.
You can tell most Open Source advocates have never had to make costing decisions in large businesses.
Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business.
To get ever closer you have to look at how efficient it is for people to get their work done on that platform when compared to the competition.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
1. We have anecdotal remarks, at the very least, that have found retraining costs can be surprisingly low. In any event, those costs are non-recurring, as opposed to keeping up with Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
2. On support costs between Linux and Windows, I think there is sufficient evidence available to show that the cost difference is either a wash or favourable towards Linux. Microsoft-sponsored studies claiming otherwise have been largely discredited.
3. Efficiency. True. No tool drives in a nail as efficiently as a hammer. In some cases, proprietary applications either outclass or have no Open Source competitor. However, the less specialized the task, the more likely that a Free/Open Source solution is "good enough", or even the better choice. Cases in point: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Apache, Asterisk, the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities. And one more thing, just because you *can* have lots of eye candy doesn't mean that you should.
4. Another consideration that affects how products work and attitudes of business is that many proprietary products are built assuming that the user is a thief and should not use the product. As a result, you pay Microsoft for software that can decide to downgrade your multimedia playback, for example.
Further on this point, the culture of user as probable thief spawns the BSA. As long as you use software by BSA members you risk a costly license "audit", whether your licenses are 100% compliant or not. Productivity loss during these audits has a real bottom-line cost to a business.
That's the list of software that you have to trust not to contain a backdoor in order to trust your own system.
The list of contributors, package maintainers, webserver admins,... that are implicitly trusted is ridiculously long.
Refresh my memory: how many lines of code does Microsoft say Windows has these days? Given some of Microsoft's incredible QA fails (the most recent to block access to Google) I am sceptical that they have set the bar very high.
If we can surmise anything from their OOXML fiasco, it is that Microsoft values obscurity over comprehension, product lock-in over the rigour of open debate, and most of all that Microsoft neither understands nor is able to implement its own specifications. There may or may not be intentional backdoors in Microsoft products, but given the thinking that drives product development I doubt that malware authors worry about job security.
Assuming the best -- that the cause is incompetence rather than malice -- the obvious question is whether the filter is actually any good at all. If it fails with something so large, it's almost a certainty to be rife with errors overall.
In general I have found that movies based on books tend to be more complex and "complete". Of course, such movies rarely do justice to the book, but it is a case of having to condense something well, rather than trying to puff out a "concept" into a 90-minute script.
Re:The author is wrong about accupuncture
on
Trick or Treatment
·
· Score: 1
This side-swipe skepticism is not science, it is marketing in order to sell a bullshit book. Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.
I agree. Sceptical though I am about alternative therapies, dismissing them out of hand suppresses rather than promotes scientific discovery. Even if 99.99% of some therapeutic approach can be shown to be bogus, exploring that unexplained.01% could reveal something earth-shaking.
Asimov: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'
Further, I would say that being open to criticism and being able to accept that, move on and improve (based on the criticism) separates the mediocre from the brilliant. It doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. We all make mistakes and we all overlook things. We all say silly things now and again.
This is what makes the "science" of Global Warming so frustrating. Criticism or scepticism is anathema, and we hear the constant chant that "the debate is over". Real science thrives on argument and experiments, and not on ad hominem attacks.
And there is absolutely nothing scientific about the "intelligent design" theory.
Attitudes like this stifle scientific inquiry. When "the debate is over" on global warming, or against Intelligent Design, or String Theory, then what was science becomes religion.
To my mind, a belief that is unwilling to stand up at any time to challenge is probably in some way fatally flawed.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the great things that Google is doing is making it possible for users to migrate data away. What this means is that although a sudden death of Google could be very serious for a company that builds on Google's infrastructure, a more orderly closure would be much less painful.
Along with Google, we should be looking at a big company like Salesforce.com. Many companies have integrated their customer records with Salesforce, so things could get very tense if Salesforce suddenly bites the dust.
Why not simply take a picture of the diagrams and embed them with the notes later?
I teach my daughter at home also (Gr 7), and for algebra I allow her to use the calculator instead of working out things manually. My reasoning is that the point of algebra is to learn algebra, not arithmetic. In a couple of years I will likely get her up to speed on 'R', because again the purpose will be to understand and solve a problem, not to plod through unnecessary mechanics. For similar reasons, I have also made her complete assignments using Google Documents and Google Wave.
That said, I did make her work things out by hand in the lower grades so that she wouldn't be helpless during a blackout.
And there's no real evidence of the proper scientists massaging or ignoring anything. Just because a detailed, written account of everything doesn't exist in stolen, incomplete private documents doesn't mean it doesn't exist at all.
The behaviour surrounding the data is certainly indicative of a lack of confidence in the findings. Refusing FOI requests and claiming that "the dog ate it" do not show a group filled with the belief that their research is unassailable.
Where are my moderator points when I need them?
One likes to think the best of people. So even though the UN is as transparent as a block of cement and has programs rife with corruption, one would like to think that this time, with the IPCC, science and the pursuit of truth reign. So now that the fraud is unravelling, I am disappointed but not surprised.
Lock out? They thought the publication was publishing poor quality papers. If that was their belief, why would they not refrain from publishing there or citing articles?
The problem is that by their lights *every* dissenting paper is of "poor quality".
The analogy here, where the AGW proponents are the sole source of knowledge, is to the Christian church in the Middle Ages. The Bible was in Latin, which no one but the (better educated) priests could read. Instead of the laity being encouraged to learn Latin, or instead of translating the Bible to the local language, the priests and bishops decided what meanings the Bible would have.
Similarly, the AGW priest-kings deny raw data to the public and hold themselves as the exclusive interpreters of the data. It seems to me high time that this Global Warming belief system underwent its own Reformation.
You also need to be:
1. White.
2. Male.
3. Wealthy.
4. A lawyer or successful businessman, preferably both.
5. At least 50+ for any significant office.
6. Already in politics for at least 20 years for any significant office.
7. Part of a family that is already well connected to the conservative wealthy elite and politics.
I dunno. I mean, Obama misses many of those points, but his record to date is underwhelming. It seems to me you need a Cheney, who isn't afraid to use the levers of power (and who knows where the bodies are buried), combined with an ideologue of the appropriate political hue.
There will be a subset of users who will hate it, mostly serious Excel jockies and the extremely change averse, but on the whole it'll be pretty popular.
Google Documents are still on the utilitarian side, but Spreadsheets are quite useful. They lack indentation (needed in accounting) and pivots, but add Google search capability and distributed sharing. For ad hoc management of numbers, it's quite convenient.
This is not to take anything away from the OP's prediction, which sounds like a certainty.
PulseAudio is demonspawn.
OSS -- *not* the old stuff that comes with most distributions, but the Open Source OSS v4 at opensound.com -- is a better alternative to ALSA and the PulseAudio abomination.
It's trivially easy to make up cases where violence cannot be avoided.
For example, Bob the bomber is about to press a button that will caused hundreds of deaths. Sam the sharpshooter is in position to kill Bob. Should Sam shoot? Either way, violence is committed.
This is off-topic, but the new OSS is quite decent.
Issues with pulse (cpu-hog + buggy) and ALSA made me re-evaluate OSS and it has turned out to be very workable. A second look at what OSS is today would not be a bad idea.
[A} warrant would still be required for eavesdropping, but "basic subscriber information" (name, address, telephone number and Internet Protocol (IP) address, e-mail address, service provider identification and certain cell phone identifiers) would be available without a warrant.
It will be interesting how this all plays out. First, given that this is a minority government, at least one of the opposition parties must support the bill. Not likely if there is a chance they can score political points by voting against. Second, if the bill is eventually made law it will inevitably face a constitutional challenge. Given current privacy concerns it is by no means a slam dunk that the law will survive unscathed.
Most likely, however, is that the government will fall shortly after parliament resumes after the summer break, killing the bill.
Cory Doctorow: "[M]y biggest threat as an author isn't piracy, it's obscurity." (http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/14/why-publishing-shoul.html)
I suppose it's a different issue if the book is required for a course, in which case we delve into questions of monopoly prices and substitutes.
You really, especially as an undergrad student, have to write all that much. Just quote a bunch of cited sources, and fill in a little around it with your words. Bang..done.
This used to work fine for me as long as I was using the regular footnoted citations. But recently I've had to use the APA style, and that has made it much harder to cite things to the degree that I think they ought to be, especially in cases where one would otherwise use a lot of "ibid." and "op. cit.". Can anyone shed light on how to follow APA properly for this?
And is "revolutionize file access in branch offices" the filesystem MS promised for Vista, or is that still DOA?
I would hope by now that people are able to see through this as yet another defense against encroaching Free and Open Source solutions. If this "feature" is actually delivered, any bets that it will not play well with Samba? Given Microsoft's history, there is every reason to suspect poison in every Microsoft offering.
You can tell most Open Source advocates have never had to make costing decisions in large businesses.
Businesses are a lot more interested in the total value of something than its price tag.
Linux might be "free" but if you include the support contract, [re-]training, only then do you start to get close to its real cost in a business.
To get ever closer you have to look at how efficient it is for people to get their work done on that platform when compared to the competition.
I personally find getting almost anything done on Linux much more time consuming than either OS X or Windows...
1. We have anecdotal remarks, at the very least, that have found retraining costs can be surprisingly low. In any event, those costs are non-recurring, as opposed to keeping up with Microsoft's upgrade treadmill.
2. On support costs between Linux and Windows, I think there is sufficient evidence available to show that the cost difference is either a wash or favourable towards Linux. Microsoft-sponsored studies claiming otherwise have been largely discredited.
3. Efficiency. True. No tool drives in a nail as efficiently as a hammer. In some cases, proprietary applications either outclass or have no Open Source competitor. However, the less specialized the task, the more likely that a Free/Open Source solution is "good enough", or even the better choice. Cases in point: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Apache, Asterisk, the Linux kernel, various GNU utilities. And one more thing, just because you *can* have lots of eye candy doesn't mean that you should.
4. Another consideration that affects how products work and attitudes of business is that many proprietary products are built assuming that the user is a thief and should not use the product. As a result, you pay Microsoft for software that can decide to downgrade your multimedia playback, for example.
Further on this point, the culture of user as probable thief spawns the BSA. As long as you use software by BSA members you risk a costly license "audit", whether your licenses are 100% compliant or not. Productivity loss during these audits has a real bottom-line cost to a business.
Open a prompt ... type dpkg -l
That's the list of software that you have to trust not to contain a backdoor in order to trust your own system.
The list of contributors, package maintainers, webserver admins, ... that are implicitly trusted is ridiculously long.
Refresh my memory: how many lines of code does Microsoft say Windows has these days? Given some of Microsoft's incredible QA fails (the most recent to block access to Google) I am sceptical that they have set the bar very high.
If we can surmise anything from their OOXML fiasco, it is that Microsoft values obscurity over comprehension, product lock-in over the rigour of open debate, and most of all that Microsoft neither understands nor is able to implement its own specifications. There may or may not be intentional backdoors in Microsoft products, but given the thinking that drives product development I doubt that malware authors worry about job security.
There are thousands of attack vectors into linux, far more than there are into any windows software.
How do you know this? A claim this large needs to be supported by something more than mere assertion.
Assuming the best -- that the cause is incompetence rather than malice -- the obvious question is whether the filter is actually any good at all. If it fails with something so large, it's almost a certainty to be rife with errors overall.
In general I have found that movies based on books tend to be more complex and "complete". Of course, such movies rarely do justice to the book, but it is a case of having to condense something well, rather than trying to puff out a "concept" into a 90-minute script.
This side-swipe skepticism is not science, it is marketing in order to sell a bullshit book. Ignore idiots like him and read peer reviewed journals and abstracts before basing your own judgment.
I agree. Sceptical though I am about alternative therapies, dismissing them out of hand suppresses rather than promotes scientific discovery. Even if 99.99% of some therapeutic approach can be shown to be bogus, exploring that unexplained .01% could reveal something earth-shaking.
Asimov: The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds the new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it) but 'That's funny...'
I got 30/33. For me, an average Canadian, this speaks volumes about the reach of American culture.
Further, I would say that being open to criticism and being able to accept that, move on and improve (based on the criticism) separates the mediocre from the brilliant. It doesn't matter how much knowledge you have. We all make mistakes and we all overlook things. We all say silly things now and again.
This is what makes the "science" of Global Warming so frustrating. Criticism or scepticism is anathema, and we hear the constant chant that "the debate is over". Real science thrives on argument and experiments, and not on ad hominem attacks.
And there is absolutely nothing scientific about the "intelligent design" theory.
Attitudes like this stifle scientific inquiry. When "the debate is over" on global warming, or against Intelligent Design, or String Theory, then what was science becomes religion.
To my mind, a belief that is unwilling to stand up at any time to challenge is probably in some way fatally flawed.
And why would Google use OpenOffice to fill that gap when they could just improve Google Docs? Footnotes. Text boxes. Styles.
Whether Google can put these into their online Docs is a valid question, but it doesn't look easy.