The problem here is that most people won't change their email provider simply for the hassle of keeping contacts up to date. People who hate hotmail's service, yet know that it would be near-impossible to ensure that everyone who may need to email them has any updated email address details. (the problem is not the same as number portability between phone networks due to the difference in routability and the 'brand recognition' part of email.
For this to work, therefore, we need to divorce an email recieving account from a sending account - and very few services exist to be able to hire a secured smtp account exclusively for the purpose of sending from a 'trusted' domain.
The big problem here is perceived vs actual volume.
Due to the blocking of local sound and own voice by the cellphone against the ear, combined with the perceived 'distance' of the other person and the quietness of their voice in the ear, most cellphone converstations are conducted in far louder tones of voice than person-to-person.
This is combined with the higher 'annoyance' factor of a cellphone conversation. This is because you only hear one side of the conversation, and you don't hear a steady flow. These bursts of speech cause your mind to wonder whether they might be talking to you, and hence puts you in a more alert/tense mood.
It's also harder for your mind to filter irregular intermittent noise than steady conversation.
The net effect, therefore, is that mobile conversations have a much bigger impact on your thoughts and current activity than a two-or-more person conversation at an equivalent distance.
(groups of Liverpool fans in First Great Western trains notwithstanding...)
A word like that is called a 'portmanteau' word. It's got a nice story behind it; like 'chortle', it is one of the many words that Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland, added to the language.
Does this mean statues will now come equipped with DRM? If this machine can make Venus de Milo knockoffs with arbitrary precision, it can save the data it uses to carve. Then put that datafile on a P2P, and anyone with a statue burner will be able to make bootleg Venuses!
I'm sure the art industry is already getting worried!
I think that this is not a good way forward. What makes you think that a professional generic information-content-presenter will have any real understanding of the needs of a professional information-user when it comes to a system that is not directed at a mass audience, and must be excatly tailored to achieve maximum efficiency and usability.
Too often hav I seen professional designers choose technology over stability and form over function when it comes to implementing everyday tools. When it comes to mass market solutions, certainly, a professional designer would be then person to choose, rather than ask someone who doesn't really understand how he wants to interact with the system to make the interface choices.
However, when it comes to information professionals, and doctors rank among those, they will have a far better idea of how their thoughts are arranged when recording a case, and how much flexibility/rigidity is required. In the design stage, a doctor will have far more immediate insight when an interface isn't right for his needs than a designer writing to specification.
And the other benefit, tying this nicely in with arguments for open source as this is slashdot, is that in the even the user interface isn't optimal, it can be easily modified if one of the users is the designer. He will be far better placed to respond to problems or niggles or inefficiencies or illogicisms in the system, and will intuitively find the solution.
In short, never assume you know how someone else conceptualises their information unless you are really sure you know what you're doing.
Shorter, people who understand what they need will know what they want, and will be best placed to implement it. People who don't know what they want can be given what you want to give them.
I'm here, I've been a student at Oxford (postgraduate and undergraduate) for 5 years, and I know the OUCS network well.
There are 3 important points that most people have failed to recognise. Many of the have to do with the fact that the colleges are more or less partly-autonomous entities.
1) There are college LANs, supervised by a college IT officer. These (usually) sit behind a college firewall.
1a) same goes for the departments and faculties.
2) there is the OUCS network, linking the colleges and departments to each other and JANET
3) oucs also provides services, e.g..ox.ac.uk DNS, herald email, HFS backup, site-license software, training, etc. etc. etc. OUCS also run the University level (ox.ac.uk) firewall. They also advise the colleges on network security.
Now, of the various problems observed here, three are pulled out as particularly noteworthy.
1) email passwords stolen.
Herald, oucs's email system, has both plaintext and encrypted authentication modes. Although some use pop3 or imap, most users connect via webmail. This used to live at herald.ox.ac.uk, and users were recommended to login via https protocol. Of course, few users did. They just typed herald.ox.ac.uk in their browser bar. So oucs began to fix this by introducing webamil.ox.ac.uk which requires https. They kept herald on as a lecacy service for a month or two to allow people to trnsition. It was at this point the report was published, as the accounts were opened. The falw was being fixed, and a big education campaign was in place about the new secure service. In addition, herald has always required very strong passwords (one of the main complaints about the oucs systems among users, in fact, is the password requirements).
2) msn messenger conversations listened to
MSN is not an OUCS provided service, they don't control the protocol, or the software. Student personal machines connect to the network, and these nowadays come with msn. If users use software without understanding how secure it is, it's no the university's fault. This is made clear here.
These same students ALREADY have pretty private/personal/embarrasing comversations shouted at 3am in the morning in Radcliffe Square!
3)CCTV. Only one college has this problem, and it was due to poor installation by a service engineer of the company. It was a black box solution, selected more by the governing body of the college than the IT office, and the only way to run the cables in a mediaeval college is to use existing networks. Really, the CCTV traffic should have been encrypted, but if the company who installs the solution fails to do this, then the college (i'm sure) will be dealing with the company.
Meanwhile, the important thing to remember is that all students who gain a network address and network access have to sign a contract and code of conduct not to do anything bad
So we have three problems. 1 was in the process of being addressed, and user inertia was the problem. The problem is now solved. 2 is nothing to do with the university. 3 was a localised failure of solution affecting a single college, and has now been addressed.
...who workes purely as a commissioned artist and expert. I work for travel companies, tourist agencies, media, personal commissions and the like, but the bulk of my work is as a theatrical photographer.
When I am comissioned, my clients pay my for an agreed period of time, for a minimum number of images, of subject matter and style they specify.
We discuss the shots, we discuss the intent of the shoot, and I go to work.
I then provide the customer with the copyright, a full set of RAWs, TIFF and JPEG versions of the postprocessed images (straight RAWs are never at their best, but give more versatility for the customer if they want to do other things with the images).
My fee is for hire of myself and my equipment, along with my expertise. I give the customer the photos that had they owned what I own, in terms of kit and ability, they would have wished to create.
As part of my agreement, I buy limited rights back from the customer to use as portfolio shots.
And I seem to make enough money... the market for fully-owned images definitely exists. My per-hour fee is higher of course than some, but not so very much higher.
My advantage is that I don't have to worry about being a reprographics business as well as a photographer! The shoot's done, and I can worry about the next commission.
Well, if others had set up (as I did) an address purely for testing this hypothesis, they would have been in the same infinite return-per-unit-risk bucket I was. Mailexpire, which I use, is very handy for all this sort of thing (obtaining the GBP10 coupon if you subscribe to a newsletter, etc, etc).
Our department standardises on Python for scientific code prototyping. We write physics simulation and analysis code in Python, and those of us with Windows machines happily use the IDLE development environment. It is there, out of the box, and suits us fine!
The bizarre thing in this article here is that the four-slit experiment is somehow radically new, whereas the article cheerfully (and incorrectly) explains the two-slit pattern as being commonplace.
Apparently we don't detect 'parallel universes' until we do the four-slit experiment. Read the article - this is what the author states. Now IAARP* , but I can't understand why, unless the intensities or pattern spacings do not agree with the standard 4-point interference pattern, that there is any new physics here. If we see a result from two slits, we've already shown the wave nature of light.
One of the most glaring problems with the article is where the author states
"What should happen, or is expected to happen, is that the same pattern as with the two holes appears. Light beams, according to "Fabric of Reality", normally pass through each other unaffected. So, the same pattern as the two holes, should be repeated, only brighter and slightly blurred."
If we have a pattern, we already have light beams interfering. If light beams don't interfere, we should see no pattern. This is not, and never has been, the case! The four-source pattern is a consequence of the same physics as the two-source pattern.
I'd do a nice derivation, but maths in HTML never really works.
I think that author is just deeply confused as to what is going on here. He probably hasn't read David's book; if he has, he hasn't understtod it. Now I haven't read David's book either, but I have read his papers (he and I are in the same field) and I'm sure there's nothing in the literature about the four-source pattern having any new physics not observable in the two-source pattern.
In fact, we set students multiple-source interference problems in optics in the first and second years, and no-one's noticed anything radically new happening there!
We were tourists in a strange land (America), it was all rather sudden - and my memory of it is rather hazy, to tell you the truth.
Nervous != guilty - does scanner obey this logic?
on
Cry To Beat Iris Scanners
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
This seems a worrying trend with biometric systems - even innocent fear/nerves cause physiological changes which can cause a scanner to give a 'no match' scenario. If biometric ID were to become compulsory, there is the distinct possibility of this problem becoming a real danger to the population.
For example, if you have some nerves or phobia about the screening process (big men with guns, what-ifs about false positives), your physiology changes, and your biometrics no longer match your card. You are therefore taken in for further questioning.
Even if you are cleared, the next time it happens, you are more nervous, and eventually this becomes a common event for you.
In extreme cases, some people's reinforced phobia would then prevent them claiming benefits, travelling, anything that the ID was required for, sine they fear the accusations and questioning.
This is similar to effects seen on the now-discredited polygraph, still in use by agencies worldwide.
For example, I always get tense going through metal detectors. This is partly due to a childhood visit to Washington from the UK, when by accident I triggered the bomb detectors on a visit to the CIA buildings. (I was about 7, and didn't realise my pocket fan would set off the detectors.) I was taken away from my parents, and searched. This is a big thing when you're seven, and now these sorts of checks make me (irrationally, I know) very twitchy.
If failing these tests due to phobia were to become a pattern with me, even if it meant I was often singled out in any sort of official process, I am sure my phobia's symptoms would increase, just driving up the error rate. Positive feedback, you see.
The one consistent question that keeps being raised in my mind whenever I hear about mission critical systems being brought down by worms/viruses is:
Why were these systems ever connected to the wider world in the first place?
Mapping systems? Baggage loading computers? Surely these don't need to talk outside anything but a single discrete group of computers. My fear is that people tend to put web browsers, email clients etc on any system these days, for convenience, which is quite bad for security.
Here in my office we have two networks, with two machines on the desk (on a KVM switch), one for external email, internet etc, and one for internal work (it's called COREnet).
We've had problems with the former, but the critical, internal stuff has gone on quite happily on the latter, untroubled by worms.
Oh, and software patches and antivirus are available centrally on COREnet, so the boxes on the internal network aren't just left to chance should something come on via zipdisk/cd.
And our company rolls on....
Entirely as organised as a crystalline. In fact, structures similar this are indeed termed crystals - see a good site on photonic crystals for examples.
This system consists of a periodic lattice convolved with a basis (the onion). This is in fact the definition of a crystal, as any condensed-matter-physicist will tell you. Any system with this property will disply many analogues of the properties of traditional crystals.
..is an effective solution for your problem.
Find it here. I would extoll its benefits directly, but the page linked does quite an effective job there.
I am aware that SonicStudio has licensed ATRAC3plus from Sony for their N-code project, but this is probably a rather heavy-duty package for your needs, with a price tag to match. It's mostly used by professionals, although, to be fail, Photoshop was once solely the province of pro graphic artists.
ATRAC3plus is a Sony proprietary standard, with all this complex licensing issues this entails, hence it's unlikely anyone else will be using this technology, particularly in the free/open source software community. Sony are somewhat canny about releasing details of the licensing, so I haven't found anything more detailed about their licensing strategy than this.
This paper also gives some peripheral insight.
This was on my Physics undergraduate course; a rather nice technique. Releated resources from my lecture notes give:
An abstract, a presentation on applying similar techniques to volcanoes, a citation [L. Alvarez et al, Science 167, 832 (1970)] (accessible only to subscribers of Science, I'm afraid), a Physics Today article, a useful paper.
This seems interesting from a psychological viewpoint. The players have effective foreknowledge of the end of their world, with the knowledge that all actions undertaken in the short while left will, ultimately, have no consequence. Result - disruption of enforced and evolved social fabric.
I wonder if this has anything to say about how society would react if we knew that we would all die in a week; or if we knew the time was about to be rolled back by a week, and would have 'never happened'.
The true judge of morality is what one does if one could never be found out; however, on the other hand, as everyone is aware that there _are_ no consequences, can there be any morality defined in this sort of situation?
As a physicist, I'd just like to draw everyone's attention to the error bars on these charts. For the majority of the tests, it's possible to draw a horizontal line through the 95% confidence intervals of nearly all the points.
Hence, the conclusions declaring clear winners/losers in these cases are invalid. If 99% confidence intervals were used (which gives a better statistical test), I feel that no clear winners or losers would be drawn.
Be careful with these sort of studies - even though the author has used confidence intervals, he has failed to use them to infer the proper conclusions.
That said, it's awfully nice to see error bars on this sort of website. Simple data points give such a false sense of precision, I find...
Slashdot Mirror
The problem here is that most people won't change their email provider simply for the hassle of keeping contacts up to date. People who hate hotmail's service, yet know that it would be near-impossible to ensure that everyone who may need to email them has any updated email address details. (the problem is not the same as number portability between phone networks due to the difference in routability and the 'brand recognition' part of email. For this to work, therefore, we need to divorce an email recieving account from a sending account - and very few services exist to be able to hire a secured smtp account exclusively for the purpose of sending from a 'trusted' domain.
Well, the previous models' batteries can be replaced with a TORX screwdriver, so no reason why the newer should be any different.
The big problem here is perceived vs actual volume.
Due to the blocking of local sound and own voice by the cellphone against the ear, combined with the perceived 'distance' of the other person and the quietness of their voice in the ear, most cellphone converstations are conducted in far louder tones of voice than person-to-person.
This is combined with the higher 'annoyance' factor of a cellphone conversation. This is because you only hear one side of the conversation, and you don't hear a steady flow. These bursts of speech cause your mind to wonder whether they might be talking to you, and hence puts you in a more alert/tense mood.
It's also harder for your mind to filter irregular intermittent noise than steady conversation.
The net effect, therefore, is that mobile conversations have a much bigger impact on your thoughts and current activity than a two-or-more person conversation at an equivalent distance.
(groups of Liverpool fans in First Great Western trains notwithstanding...)
A word like that is called a 'portmanteau' word. It's got a nice story behind it; like 'chortle', it is one of the many words that Lewis Carrol, author of Alice in Wonderland, added to the language.
See Wikipedia and this site for more details.
I love the English language...
Yes, but in the Bod you're supposed
not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame
on which basis the venerable Librarians may object to the laser part of the proposal...
Does this mean statues will now come equipped with DRM? If this machine can make Venus de Milo knockoffs with arbitrary precision, it can save the data it uses to carve. Then put that datafile on a P2P, and anyone with a statue burner will be able to make bootleg Venuses! I'm sure the art industry is already getting worried!
I think that this is not a good way forward. What makes you think that a professional generic information-content-presenter will have any real understanding of the needs of a professional information-user when it comes to a system that is not directed at a mass audience, and must be excatly tailored to achieve maximum efficiency and usability.
Too often hav I seen professional designers choose technology over stability and form over function when it comes to implementing everyday tools. When it comes to mass market solutions, certainly, a professional designer would be then person to choose, rather than ask someone who doesn't really understand how he wants to interact with the system to make the interface choices. However, when it comes to information professionals, and doctors rank among those, they will have a far better idea of how their thoughts are arranged when recording a case, and how much flexibility/rigidity is required. In the design stage, a doctor will have far more immediate insight when an interface isn't right for his needs than a designer writing to specification.
And the other benefit, tying this nicely in with arguments for open source as this is slashdot, is that in the even the user interface isn't optimal, it can be easily modified if one of the users is the designer. He will be far better placed to respond to problems or niggles or inefficiencies or illogicisms in the system, and will intuitively find the solution.
In short, never assume you know how someone else conceptualises their information unless you are really sure you know what you're doing.
Shorter, people who understand what they need will know what they want, and will be best placed to implement it. People who don't know what they want can be given what you want to give them.
Good lord, I can't read this thread any longer.
.ox.ac.uk DNS, herald email, HFS backup, site-license software, training, etc. etc. etc. OUCS also run the University level (ox.ac.uk) firewall. They also advise the colleges on network security.
I'm here, I've been a student at Oxford (postgraduate and undergraduate) for 5 years, and I know the OUCS network well.
There are 3 important points that most people have failed to recognise. Many of the have to do with the fact that the colleges are more or less partly-autonomous entities.
1) There are college LANs, supervised by a college IT officer. These (usually) sit behind a college firewall.
1a) same goes for the departments and faculties.
2) there is the OUCS network, linking the colleges and departments to each other and JANET
3) oucs also provides services, e.g.
Now, of the various problems observed here, three are pulled out as particularly noteworthy.
1) email passwords stolen.
Herald, oucs's email system, has both plaintext and encrypted authentication modes. Although some use pop3 or imap, most users connect via webmail. This used to live at herald.ox.ac.uk, and users were recommended to login via https protocol. Of course, few users did. They just typed herald.ox.ac.uk in their browser bar. So oucs began to fix this by introducing webamil.ox.ac.uk which requires https. They kept herald on as a lecacy service for a month or two to allow people to trnsition. It was at this point the report was published, as the accounts were opened. The falw was being fixed, and a big education campaign was in place about the new secure service. In addition, herald has always required very strong passwords (one of the main complaints about the oucs systems among users, in fact, is the password requirements).
2) msn messenger conversations listened to
MSN is not an OUCS provided service, they don't control the protocol, or the software. Student personal machines connect to the network, and these nowadays come with msn. If users use software without understanding how secure it is, it's no the university's fault. This is made clear here. These same students ALREADY have pretty private/personal/embarrasing comversations shouted at 3am in the morning in Radcliffe Square!
3)CCTV. Only one college has this problem, and it was due to poor installation by a service engineer of the company. It was a black box solution, selected more by the governing body of the college than the IT office, and the only way to run the cables in a mediaeval college is to use existing networks. Really, the CCTV traffic should have been encrypted, but if the company who installs the solution fails to do this, then the college (i'm sure) will be dealing with the company.
Meanwhile, the important thing to remember is that all students who gain a network address and network access have to sign a contract and code of conduct not to do anything bad
So we have three problems. 1 was in the process of being addressed, and user inertia was the problem. The problem is now solved. 2 is nothing to do with the university. 3 was a localised failure of solution affecting a single college, and has now been addressed.
Move along please, nothing to see..
...who workes purely as a commissioned artist and expert. I work for travel companies, tourist agencies, media, personal commissions and the like, but the bulk of my work is as a theatrical photographer.
When I am comissioned, my clients pay my for an agreed period of time, for a minimum number of images, of subject matter and style they specify.
We discuss the shots, we discuss the intent of the shoot, and I go to work. I then provide the customer with the copyright, a full set of RAWs, TIFF and JPEG versions of the postprocessed images (straight RAWs are never at their best, but give more versatility for the customer if they want to do other things with the images).
My fee is for hire of myself and my equipment, along with my expertise. I give the customer the photos that had they owned what I own, in terms of kit and ability, they would have wished to create.
As part of my agreement, I buy limited rights back from the customer to use as portfolio shots.
And I seem to make enough money... the market for fully-owned images definitely exists. My per-hour fee is higher of course than some, but not so very much higher.
My advantage is that I don't have to worry about being a reprographics business as well as a photographer! The shoot's done, and I can worry about the next commission.
Well, if others had set up (as I did) an address purely for testing this hypothesis, they would have been in the same infinite return-per-unit-risk bucket I was. Mailexpire, which I use, is very handy for all this sort of thing (obtaining the GBP10 coupon if you subscribe to a newsletter, etc, etc).
Ooh..gmail? Forgive use of a mailexpire account, some people here may not be trustworthy... glolmaskal AT toungucyol.mailexpire.OBFUSCATED .com
These seem to be USB 1.1 devices. For all the snazzy features, high-speed data transfer should be a priority.
Our department standardises on Python for scientific code prototyping. We write physics simulation and analysis code in Python, and those of us with Windows machines happily use the IDLE development environment. It is there, out of the box, and suits us fine!
The bizarre thing in this article here is that the four-slit experiment is somehow radically new, whereas the article cheerfully (and incorrectly) explains the two-slit pattern as being commonplace.
Apparently we don't detect 'parallel universes' until we do the four-slit experiment. Read the article - this is what the author states. Now IAARP* , but I can't understand why, unless the intensities or pattern spacings do not agree with the standard 4-point interference pattern, that there is any new physics here. If we see a result from two slits, we've already shown the wave nature of light.
One of the most glaring problems with the article is where the author states
"What should happen, or is expected to happen, is that the same pattern as with the two holes appears. Light beams, according to "Fabric of Reality", normally pass through each other unaffected. So, the same pattern as the two holes, should be repeated, only brighter and slightly blurred."
If we have a pattern, we already have light beams interfering. If light beams don't interfere, we should see no pattern. This is not, and never has been, the case! The four-source pattern is a consequence of the same physics as the two-source pattern.
I'd do a nice derivation, but maths in HTML never really works.
I think that author is just deeply confused as to what is going on here. He probably hasn't read David's book; if he has, he hasn't understtod it. Now I haven't read David's book either, but I have read his papers (he and I are in the same field) and I'm sure there's nothing in the literature about the four-source pattern having any new physics not observable in the two-source pattern.
In fact, we set students multiple-source interference problems in optics in the first and second years, and no-one's noticed anything radically new happening there!
* (I am a research physicist)
We were tourists in a strange land (America), it was all rather sudden - and my memory of it is rather hazy, to tell you the truth.
This seems a worrying trend with biometric systems - even innocent fear/nerves cause physiological changes which can cause a scanner to give a 'no match' scenario. If biometric ID were to become compulsory, there is the distinct possibility of this problem becoming a real danger to the population.
For example, if you have some nerves or phobia about the screening process (big men with guns, what-ifs about false positives), your physiology changes, and your biometrics no longer match your card. You are therefore taken in for further questioning.
Even if you are cleared, the next time it happens, you are more nervous, and eventually this becomes a common event for you.
In extreme cases, some people's reinforced phobia would then prevent them claiming benefits, travelling, anything that the ID was required for, sine they fear the accusations and questioning.
This is similar to effects seen on the now-discredited polygraph, still in use by agencies worldwide.
For example, I always get tense going through metal detectors. This is partly due to a childhood visit to Washington from the UK, when by accident I triggered the bomb detectors on a visit to the CIA buildings. (I was about 7, and didn't realise my pocket fan would set off the detectors.) I was taken away from my parents, and searched. This is a big thing when you're seven, and now these sorts of checks make me (irrationally, I know) very twitchy.
If failing these tests due to phobia were to become a pattern with me, even if it meant I was often singled out in any sort of official process, I am sure my phobia's symptoms would increase, just driving up the error rate. Positive feedback, you see.
The one consistent question that keeps being raised in my mind whenever I hear about mission critical systems being brought down by worms/viruses is: Why were these systems ever connected to the wider world in the first place? Mapping systems? Baggage loading computers? Surely these don't need to talk outside anything but a single discrete group of computers. My fear is that people tend to put web browsers, email clients etc on any system these days, for convenience, which is quite bad for security. Here in my office we have two networks, with two machines on the desk (on a KVM switch), one for external email, internet etc, and one for internal work (it's called COREnet). We've had problems with the former, but the critical, internal stuff has gone on quite happily on the latter, untroubled by worms. Oh, and software patches and antivirus are available centrally on COREnet, so the boxes on the internal network aren't just left to chance should something come on via zipdisk/cd. And our company rolls on....
Entirely as organised as a crystalline. In fact, structures similar this are indeed termed crystals - see a good site on photonic crystals for examples.
This system consists of a periodic lattice convolved with a basis (the onion). This is in fact the definition of a crystal, as any condensed-matter-physicist will tell you. Any system with this property will disply many analogues of the properties of traditional crystals.
..is an effective solution for your problem. Find it here. I would extoll its benefits directly, but the page linked does quite an effective job there.
I am aware that SonicStudio has licensed ATRAC3plus from Sony for their N-code project, but this is probably a rather heavy-duty package for your needs, with a price tag to match. It's mostly used by professionals, although, to be fail, Photoshop was once solely the province of pro graphic artists.
ATRAC3plus is a Sony proprietary standard, with all this complex licensing issues this entails, hence it's unlikely anyone else will be using this technology, particularly in the free/open source software community. Sony are somewhat canny about releasing details of the licensing, so I haven't found anything more detailed about their licensing strategy than this. This paper also gives some peripheral insight.
This was on my Physics undergraduate course; a rather nice technique. Releated resources from my lecture notes give:
An abstract, a presentation on applying similar techniques to volcanoes, a citation [L. Alvarez et al, Science 167, 832 (1970)] (accessible only to subscribers of Science, I'm afraid), a Physics Today article, a useful paper.
is the conference where the experiment was originally proposed.
These guys are using nanotubes to create a quantum computer.
This seems interesting from a psychological viewpoint. The players have effective foreknowledge of the end of their world, with the knowledge that all actions undertaken in the short while left will, ultimately, have no consequence. Result - disruption of enforced and evolved social fabric.
I wonder if this has anything to say about how society would react if we knew that we would all die in a week; or if we knew the time was about to be rolled back by a week, and would have 'never happened'.
The true judge of morality is what one does if one could never be found out; however, on the other hand, as everyone is aware that there _are_ no consequences, can there be any morality defined in this sort of situation?
Just food for thought...
As a physicist, I'd just like to draw everyone's attention to the error bars on these charts. For the majority of the tests, it's possible to draw a horizontal line through the 95% confidence intervals of nearly all the points.
Hence, the conclusions declaring clear winners/losers in these cases are invalid. If 99% confidence intervals were used (which gives a better statistical test), I feel that no clear winners or losers would be drawn.
Be careful with these sort of studies - even though the author has used confidence intervals, he has failed to use them to infer the proper conclusions.
That said, it's awfully nice to see error bars on this sort of website. Simple data points give such a false sense of precision, I find...