So what's the #xxxxxx code for pink or do we just use 'pink' ( which is kinda dark ).
Yeah; I was wondering about that. You'd think they'd have a standard shade. So I followed a few of the links, and looked around the source. I didn't find a #xxxxxx number anywhere.
When I re-enabled the web pages' colors, I didn't find many that were pink, and those seem to have done it with a background image. Hmmm...
Anyone know if there's a standard pink here, and what its RGB values are?
Not really. Since it hasn't been tested, it's a hypothesis or a conjecture. In common scientific parlance, "theory" is reserved for things that have passed at least a few major tests. Consistency with past observation isn't sufficient to elevate a new hypothesis to the status of "theory". It takes testing against new observations for that.
Of course, scientists can be nearly as sloppy in their terminology as anyone else. And those pushing a new explanation do like to call their own ideas a "theory", in an attempt to get a status that they don't yet deserve.
And it is getting harder to make up good tests of new physics. Einstein only had to wait a year or two to see the first attempts at debunking fail, and his newfangled "relativity" stuff made it to "theory" level in a short time. It'll take the "string theory" people a bit longer.
It'd be fun to read about an actual test of an 11-dimensional universe...
I know there were detractors that said "animations suck, we need to ban them"... GIF is still THE format for basic animations,...
And that's why I tell all my browsers to run animations zero or one times. I install all the browsers I can, because I do a lot of testing of web stuff. But aside from testing, browsers that won't let me turn off animation simply don't get used much. Animations take over my CPU and stop my work, so anything that won't let me stop them gets killed.
For example, when I looked at one of the earlier pages demoing the use of GIF movies to illustrate orbital mechanics, it was interesting for a minute, but it drove the brower's CPU usage to 40%. When I turned the animation off, the CPU usage dropped back below 1%.
The real problem here is how awkward it is to enable animation for a single usage, and then disable it again. Only Opera seems to get this right, with a "quick preferences" menu item. If browser makers wanted to be really user-friendly, they'd have all such movies (GIF, flash, javascript, whatever) disabled by default, with a gimmick like what flashblock does to enable animation in just a single image (or maybe a whole page or site). This thing of having only a single global on/off flag for GIF animation (and no builtin on/off control for other animations) is one of my major examples of the cluelessness of all the browser makers.
Fact is that 99% of all animations are purely CPU-gobbling garbage intended to distract the user and get them to look at an ad. Yes, a few are good content. And 99% are garbage. Any browser makers should consider this one of their top usability problems, and would have included a control for it at the start. With a default of "off".
Properly made GIF images are almost always smaller than PNG images of comparable bit-depth and features,...
Well, I have a bunch of web stuff that I've ported to a number of different systems and tested after upgrades. Part of it offers the user a choice of graphic formats for downloaded images, including GIF and PNG. I've yet to see a single case where the GIFs came out smaller than the PNGs. The PNGs are generally about 10% smaller than the GIFs.
Of course, this might just mean that I've never seen a system with "proper" GIF software. But I just use the conversion software that's in the system libraries. I don't have the time (or interest) to replace the conversion software. So I'll just keep using what's installed, and my brief explanations to users will continue to say that PNG is usually about 10% smaller than GIF.
I do sometimes wish that I could find and install the best version of everything that I use in a system's libraries. But the fact that something could be done better isn't all that useful to those of us with a finite amount of time per day.
Hmmm... sounds like you just don't know any German. Any lanuage you don't know tends to sound nonsensical, because to you it is literally "non-sense".
German does have a whole list of words for various kinds of craziness, though that's one of the areas where it's difficult to align the words exactly in two languages.
It is fairly crazy to claim that your furniture has reproductive organs. The French do, too, and they don't even agree on the gender of some furniture. This does make sense, because you'd expect any species of furniture to have both male and female members. Anyhow, English used to have grammatical gender like German and French, but we gave up on it a while back, except for some pronouns. Now if we could just fix our pronouns the same way. The difficulty we have with this in English illustrates why other languages have similar problems. (OTOH, Finnish has a single pronoun for he/she.)
It is of course literally true, that "wacky" isn't a German word. But then, "German" isn't a German word. Just like "Deutsch" isn't an English word. They do have words like 'verrückt', 'toll' und 'meschugge', but not 'wacky' (which looks Polish to me).
My favorite anecdote on this topic was when Ronald Reagan asserted that "Russian doesn't have a word for freedom." My immediate thought was "What about 'svoboda'?" But I suspect that Reagan would have just thought I was being a smart ass.
So why would the article being in German (or some other wacky language) be a problem???
Hey, wait a minute; German doesn't even come close to the wackiness of English.
Any reasonable scale of wackiness would put English right near the top. Of major world languages, the only real challenger for the top wackiness position is probably Japanese (what with its three writing systems that are routinely intermingled).
In comparison to English and Japanese, German is a model of sanity and probity.
I bet we could go years without a congress or a president...
I've read an interesting proposal along these lines. It starts with the suggestion that in every election, every office should include a "nobody" entry.
Now, there are a few cases where you can vote for "none of the above", but they always implement this wrong. If "none" wins, they do the election over. But what they should do if "nobody" wins is to say that nobody is allowed to carry out the duties of the office for the next term.
This could have interesting consequences. Thus, suppose "nobody" won the election for US president. Then we'd have no president for 4 years. Every bill in congress would die due to a "pocket veto". To pass a new law, it would always require a 2/3 majority.
Also, the Speaker of the House would become the official leader for 4 years. There's a term for this. Rename the Speaker to "Prime Minister", and it's obvious that what this would do is give the US a parliamentary system of government for 4 years. We could study this and see if it worked out better than our current imperial presidency (with the president above the law). If so, we could ammend the Constitution to make it permanent.
Of course, looking at countries with parliamentary systems (e.g., the UK) shows that this system also has its bugs and gotchas. But the Speaker/PM office could also be won by "nobody", and nobody would be allowed to carry out the duties of that office for 2 years.
And so on. It's interesting to think about. Of course, it's not likely that we'd ever try such an interesting and educational experiment. There are too many entrenched power centers that like the current system.
Quote: Our job is to think critically and rationally... Isn't this an oxymoron for the media and government?
Perhaps for the politicians. But not for security analysts like Bruce, or for the many people with security-related jobs inside the government.
And it shouldn't be for a gang of high-tech "nerds" like us. Instead of the usual political flameage, we should be behaving like the geeks we claim to be. We should be discussing how we can use our high tech to expose and interfere with both the terrorists and the politicians who are trying to take advantage of it and push us back into authoritarian societies with them in charge.
With the Internet, we have the best tool yet for tracking and exposing the people like bin Laden, Bush and Blair (and Cheney and Rumsfeld and...). It's a tool that can't be controlled from the top nearly as easily as the centrally-managed mass media. We should be using our expertise with this tool to get the details of their shenanigans into the minds of the general population.
The growing importance of the political blogs is a good sign. But they're mostly journalist types; they really could use the help of us techie nerd types to develop tools for exposing the political and religious types, and for blocking their attempts to control our communications.
So get to work out there. For a few fun reads on the topic, google for "sousveillance".
Look at the page's history. It took about 7 minutes for someone to create it. Of course, it's mostly a redirect to the Full_disclosure page. That may change if a bit of discussion shows that it's worthwhile to separate the topics.
When I was an undergrad, you could be failed for missing enough lectures. I have no problem with this at all.
There's an alternate theory that you enrole in a class to learn the material. You "pass" and get credit by showing that you've learned the material. You can learn the material by attending class lectures, sure, but if an alternate approach such as reading the lecture notes and textbooks gives you enough information to pass the tests, that should be considered as getting what you paid for. Some profs are good lecturers, some aren't. So maybe you want to attend the lectures for some profs and not for others.
I often considered that, as a good reader, I could read the lecture notes 3 or 4 times faster, than any lecturer could speak. I could assimilate an hour's lecture in 10 to 15 minutes. And with the notes, I could stop and reread passages, something that's rarely possible in a lecture. So using lecture notes was usually a better use of my time than attending the lecture. The only exceptions were the rare lecturers who put useful things up on the board (or displayed useful pictures), and who would answer questions from the audience. But this was rare, and the pictures could go into the notes, too.
I did once see the cute comment that the lecture system is the best method yet discovered for teaching people who can't read. Rather to the point, I'd say.
Nah; someone just observed that the article (bashing '. users for being anti-MS and pro other good things) didn't mention wikipedia or say anything relevant to wikipedia. So it was off topic, and they gave it the obvious rating.
(With any luck, they'll do the same with this message, though my mention of wikipedia might slow them down for a few seconds.;-)
What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction.
Well, I've noticed that it's difficult to find anyone anywhere who doesn't hate Microsoft. The users of Microsoft software seem to hate them the most. So you're going to have to ignore almost everyone.
This phenomenon does have interesting implications for "the Market" and "market forces" that some people do seem to like so much. Think for a while about why it might be that so many people keep buying software that they hate from a company that they hate. And then ask yourself what you believe about the rationality of the marketplace.
No need. Any user can do it themselves. The/. page I'm looking at has a 60%-grey background, black text, and colors only for links. I told my browser to use those colors and ignore the page's attempts to set colors.
I also don't see any images at all, but that's because/. has a preferences setting for that and I used it. I do override the ads fairly successfully.
But it would be handy if/. had settings for all this. Then on the rare occasion when I have to use someone else's machine, I could log in and not have to worry about figuring out how to do all that suppression of "features" from scratch.
Face it; there's no content to/. other than the text. There's no point in wasting time and screen space for the eye candy and ads. Unless you like them, of course.
[The proposed approach] measures 'edits' as opposed to the reputation of the author.
Over the last few weeks, I've contributed to an example of why counting edits isn't necessarily a good idea. As part of an "i18n" project, I've been reading some of the wikipedia stuff on a few writing systems such as Chinese characters. Incidentally, I've made a bunch of edits to some pages, mostly adding tone marks to the pinyin. These aren't edits in the sense of correcting errors; they are edits in the sense of making tiny additions that will help other readers who don't know much Mandarin (like me;-). They also make the text a better test for software, since it contains more non-Latin1 chars. This is fairly easy to do, especially now that there are a couple of good Chinese dictionaries online. I've also started working on understanding the problems with Arabic and related scripts, and I've made a few small enhancements to a few of those pages.
Anything that treats such edits as corrections or criticisms is simply wrong. But I don't know how you'd write software that would generally distinguish the various kinds of edits. I could write an ad-hoc check for the pinyin-tone case, as that's a fairly straightforward test. Just remove marks from chars and see whether this gives the original text. But in general, it takes human intelligence to distinguish enhancement edits from edits that attempt to change the information.
I doubt we'll care much about 9/11 after... oh wait, I've said too much.
Yeah; best to keep quiet about the upcoming Incident. If you talk too much, they'll think you were part of it. It's safer to just be quiet about what you know.
I know some people who believe that the US won in Vietnam. We left behind a peaceful, democratic country, didn't we? The Vietnamese are now our friends now, aren't they? (Funny thing is that this essentially correct. Americans visiting Vietnam report a rather open, friendly country.)
I also know people who believe the Bush crowd's take on Iraq. We've won, except for a handful of remaining terrorists that we'll mop up Any Day Now. They'll probably still believe that long after US troops have left, regardless of why they left.
Hey, fart jokes are common even among scientists when discussing atmospheric methane. It's been known for a couple decades that roughly 1/3 of the methane in our atmosphere comes from the digestive systems of ruminants (cattle, etc.), so fart jokes are inevitable. Actually, a recent report claimes that cattle produce most of their methane by belching, which sorta took a bit of the fun out of it. But cattle also fart a lot.
OTOH, a few years ago some researchers tracked down the source of another 1/3 of the methane: termites. Most people don't suspect how incredibly many termites there are on this planet. They are all digesting plant fibers via a process similar to that of cattle (and using some of the same bacteria). This produces the image of trillions and trillions of tiny little termite farts.
That discovery did pretty much account for most of the methane. Aside from those two major sources, there are thousands of small sources, none of them very good sources of humor.
Others have pointed out the logical problem with Pascal's Wager. I'll just mention a more relevant argument: No matter what the situation, we're better off understanding what's going on that we'll be if we don't understand.
If we act without understanding, the outcome is unpredictable, and is as likely to be worse as it is to be better. If we understand the system, and can thus predict the outcome of our actions with some accuracy, we stand a much better chance of fixing whatever problems actually exist.
Most of the anti-climate-change rhetoric has the goal of suppressing scientific research. This is most likely a losing wager, no matter what's happening.
Technically the sun's heat isn't coming from its gasses; the heat comes from the part that's a plasma. The gaseous part is called its "atmosphere", and it doesn't really contribute to the heat. It just scatters the photons produced down in the plasma portion.
Shouldn't it be more like "Faster Global Warming Possible From Permafrost Melt?" or "Major Climate changes could happen from Permafrost Melt".
Well, I tried a few such headlines, but found that/. has a rather small limit to the length of an article's title. So I went with a shorter one that didn't get truncated.
(But/. does allow longer headlines than just about any newspaper.;-)
Indeed, good science has NO facts, just the latest hypothysis (sp?) which has yet to be proven wrong.
Actually, typically we have both. Except that "fact" isn't a common technical term, perhaps because it's monosyllabic. Usually scientists talk about "observations" or "data". "Fact" is just the informal (layman's) term for observed data.
The release of methane from permafrost isn't a hypothesis. It's observed data, as described in the recent Nature article. The recent increase in the release rate is also observed data. Just what it means is up for hypothesizing. This is going to include the fact (verifiable in laboratories anywhere) that methane is a strong "greenhouse gas".
Predicting the effects of the methane really isn't hypthesizing, but rather calculating from the documented physical properties of methane. The main unknown here is the pending rate of methane release. Stay tuned to data from people making precise methane measurements in various parts of the world. Data from Canada and Alaska is probably in the pipeline.
There's also the lurking bogeyman of the huge deposits of methane-ice "clathrates" in the deep oceans. That one is currently in the "conjecture" phase, with researchers applying for grants for more field trips to make the needed measurements. Again, the physical properties of these ices are well known. What's not known is how big the deposits are and how close they are to a phase change.
If i [commit a crime] and then use the information gained to my advantage, its my understanding that in most western countries i am personally liable in law (usual IANAL disclaimer here). However, it seems that if i do it on company time, then my employer is normally held responsible?
Exactly. If you dig around in the historical record, you'll find that that's why the concept of a "corporation" was invented. Its original purpose, and one of its primary functions nearly everywhere in the world, was to insulate people committing profitable crimes from prosecution. The legal argument was and is "I didn't do it; the corporation did." It's a variant of the "I was just following orders" defense, but it also applies to those giving the orders.
Incorporation is usually used to protect the top officers, who can't really use the "I was just following orders" defense. But it may be used to protect any employee who is acting in the interests of the corporation (i.e., on orders from superiors).
There is a common pretense that corporations exist to make profit. That's actually a side effect of their primary function, which is to commit profitable acts that would be illegal if an individual did them. If a profitable act is legal, you can do it yourself, without a corporation to protect you. But most employees would reasonably be unwilling to commit acts that may be illegal without the protection of a corporation.
The primary reason that this works is that, since a corporation is legally "incorporated", i.e., is legally a living body, the corporation itself can be considered liable and can be punished for crimes. Thus, a corporation may be "executed" (i.e., disincorporated), and the law will treat this as executing a living criminal offender.
This in general isn't necessarily anything evil; it may be just an accounting thing. Thus, you as an individual have to pay income tax on your total income (minus certain deductions). You can't deduct all "expenses". If you were to attempt to deduct the cost of things like food and clothing, that would be considered tax fraud, and you'd be fined or jailed. But in many countries such as the US, you can form a corporation with yourself as the sold employee. The corporation receives what was your income, and pays you a much lower salary. The corporation can deduct legal expenses, and this often does include "business-related" meals and clothing (and housing and phone service and...). This is all open and above-board, and is completely legal. But it's also a clear example of a corporation profiting from accounting practices that, if you did them as an individual citizen, would be illegal. My wife and I do a fair amount of computer-related work at home, and this practice has saved us quite a lot of tax money over the years.
Slashdot Mirror
So what's the #xxxxxx code for pink or do we just use 'pink' ( which is kinda dark ).
...
Yeah; I was wondering about that. You'd think they'd have a standard shade. So I followed a few of the links, and looked around the source. I didn't find a #xxxxxx number anywhere.
When I re-enabled the web pages' colors, I didn't find many that were pink, and those seem to have done it with a background image. Hmmm
Anyone know if there's a standard pink here, and what its RGB values are?
The other thing is that this is a theory...
...
Not really. Since it hasn't been tested, it's a hypothesis or a conjecture. In common scientific parlance, "theory" is reserved for things that have passed at least a few major tests. Consistency with past observation isn't sufficient to elevate a new hypothesis to the status of "theory". It takes testing against new observations for that.
Of course, scientists can be nearly as sloppy in their terminology as anyone else. And those pushing a new explanation do like to call their own ideas a "theory", in an attempt to get a status that they don't yet deserve.
And it is getting harder to make up good tests of new physics. Einstein only had to wait a year or two to see the first attempts at debunking fail, and his newfangled "relativity" stuff made it to "theory" level in a short time. It'll take the "string theory" people a bit longer.
It'd be fun to read about an actual test of an 11-dimensional universe
I know there were detractors that said "animations suck, we need to ban them" ... GIF is still THE format for basic animations, ...
And that's why I tell all my browsers to run animations zero or one times. I install all the browsers I can, because I do a lot of testing of web stuff. But aside from testing, browsers that won't let me turn off animation simply don't get used much. Animations take over my CPU and stop my work, so anything that won't let me stop them gets killed.
For example, when I looked at one of the earlier pages demoing the use of GIF movies to illustrate orbital mechanics, it was interesting for a minute, but it drove the brower's CPU usage to 40%. When I turned the animation off, the CPU usage dropped back below 1%.
The real problem here is how awkward it is to enable animation for a single usage, and then disable it again. Only Opera seems to get this right, with a "quick preferences" menu item. If browser makers wanted to be really user-friendly, they'd have all such movies (GIF, flash, javascript, whatever) disabled by default, with a gimmick like what flashblock does to enable animation in just a single image (or maybe a whole page or site). This thing of having only a single global on/off flag for GIF animation (and no builtin on/off control for other animations) is one of my major examples of the cluelessness of all the browser makers.
Fact is that 99% of all animations are purely CPU-gobbling garbage intended to distract the user and get them to look at an ad. Yes, a few are good content. And 99% are garbage. Any browser makers should consider this one of their top usability problems, and would have included a control for it at the start. With a default of "off".
Professional web designers should use the best tool for the job, not what's hip and trendy.
Ah, but to most of the people paying those designers' salaries, what's hip and trendy is the best tool for the job.
(This is based on bitter experience. YMMV.)
Properly made GIF images are almost always smaller than PNG images of comparable bit-depth and features, ...
Well, I have a bunch of web stuff that I've ported to a number of different systems and tested after upgrades. Part of it offers the user a choice of graphic formats for downloaded images, including GIF and PNG. I've yet to see a single case where the GIFs came out smaller than the PNGs. The PNGs are generally about 10% smaller than the GIFs.
Of course, this might just mean that I've never seen a system with "proper" GIF software. But I just use the conversion software that's in the system libraries. I don't have the time (or interest) to replace the conversion software. So I'll just keep using what's installed, and my brief explanations to users will continue to say that PNG is usually about 10% smaller than GIF.
I do sometimes wish that I could find and install the best version of everything that I use in a system's libraries. But the fact that something could be done better isn't all that useful to those of us with a finite amount of time per day.
What I find genuinely hilarious, however, is the United State of America's Patent System.
Well, that was a rather hilarious misuse of the term "system".
Hmmm ... sounds like you just don't know any German. Any lanuage you don't know tends to sound nonsensical, because to you it is literally "non-sense".
German does have a whole list of words for various kinds of craziness, though that's one of the areas where it's difficult to align the words exactly in two languages.
It is fairly crazy to claim that your furniture has reproductive organs. The French do, too, and they don't even agree on the gender of some furniture. This does make sense, because you'd expect any species of furniture to have both male and female members. Anyhow, English used to have grammatical gender like German and French, but we gave up on it a while back, except for some pronouns. Now if we could just fix our pronouns the same way. The difficulty we have with this in English illustrates why other languages have similar problems. (OTOH, Finnish has a single pronoun for he/she.)
It is of course literally true, that "wacky" isn't a German word. But then, "German" isn't a German word. Just like "Deutsch" isn't an English word. They do have words like 'verrückt', 'toll' und 'meschugge', but not 'wacky' (which looks Polish to me).
My favorite anecdote on this topic was when Ronald Reagan asserted that "Russian doesn't have a word for freedom." My immediate thought was "What about 'svoboda'?" But I suspect that Reagan would have just thought I was being a smart ass.
So why would the article being in German (or some other wacky language) be a problem???
Hey, wait a minute; German doesn't even come close to the wackiness of English.
Any reasonable scale of wackiness would put English right near the top. Of major world languages, the only real challenger for the top wackiness position is probably Japanese (what with its three writing systems that are routinely intermingled).
In comparison to English and Japanese, German is a model of sanity and probity.
I bet we could go years without a congress or a president...
I've read an interesting proposal along these lines. It starts with the suggestion that in every election, every office should include a "nobody" entry.
Now, there are a few cases where you can vote for "none of the above", but they always implement this wrong. If "none" wins, they do the election over. But what they should do if "nobody" wins is to say that nobody is allowed to carry out the duties of the office for the next term.
This could have interesting consequences. Thus, suppose "nobody" won the election for US president. Then we'd have no president for 4 years. Every bill in congress would die due to a "pocket veto". To pass a new law, it would always require a 2/3 majority.
Also, the Speaker of the House would become the official leader for 4 years. There's a term for this. Rename the Speaker to "Prime Minister", and it's obvious that what this would do is give the US a parliamentary system of government for 4 years. We could study this and see if it worked out better than our current imperial presidency (with the president above the law). If so, we could ammend the Constitution to make it permanent.
Of course, looking at countries with parliamentary systems (e.g., the UK) shows that this system also has its bugs and gotchas. But the Speaker/PM office could also be won by "nobody", and nobody would be allowed to carry out the duties of that office for 2 years.
And so on. It's interesting to think about. Of course, it's not likely that we'd ever try such an interesting and educational experiment. There are too many entrenched power centers that like the current system.
Quote: Our job is to think critically and rationally... Isn't this an oxymoron for the media and government?
...). It's a tool that can't be controlled from the top nearly as easily as the centrally-managed mass media. We should be using our expertise with this tool to get the details of their shenanigans into the minds of the general population.
Perhaps for the politicians. But not for security analysts like Bruce, or for the many people with security-related jobs inside the government.
And it shouldn't be for a gang of high-tech "nerds" like us. Instead of the usual political flameage, we should be behaving like the geeks we claim to be. We should be discussing how we can use our high tech to expose and interfere with both the terrorists and the politicians who are trying to take advantage of it and push us back into authoritarian societies with them in charge.
With the Internet, we have the best tool yet for tracking and exposing the people like bin Laden, Bush and Blair (and Cheney and Rumsfeld and
The growing importance of the political blogs is a good sign. But they're mostly journalist types; they really could use the help of us techie nerd types to develop tools for exposing the political and religious types, and for blocking their attempts to control our communications.
So get to work out there. For a few fun reads on the topic, google for "sousveillance".
Look at the page's history. It took about 7 minutes for someone to create it. Of course, it's mostly a redirect to the Full_disclosure page. That may change if a bit of discussion shows that it's worthwhile to separate the topics.
When I was an undergrad, you could be failed for missing enough lectures. I have no problem with this at all.
There's an alternate theory that you enrole in a class to learn the material. You "pass" and get credit by showing that you've learned the material. You can learn the material by attending class lectures, sure, but if an alternate approach such as reading the lecture notes and textbooks gives you enough information to pass the tests, that should be considered as getting what you paid for. Some profs are good lecturers, some aren't. So maybe you want to attend the lectures for some profs and not for others.
I often considered that, as a good reader, I could read the lecture notes 3 or 4 times faster, than any lecturer could speak. I could assimilate an hour's lecture in 10 to 15 minutes. And with the notes, I could stop and reread passages, something that's rarely possible in a lecture. So using lecture notes was usually a better use of my time than attending the lecture. The only exceptions were the rare lecturers who put useful things up on the board (or displayed useful pictures), and who would answer questions from the audience. But this was rare, and the pictures could go into the notes, too.
I did once see the cute comment that the lecture system is the best method yet discovered for teaching people who can't read. Rather to the point, I'd say.
Nah; someone just observed that the article (bashing '. users for being anti-MS and pro other good things) didn't mention wikipedia or say anything relevant to wikipedia. So it was off topic, and they gave it the obvious rating.
;-)
(With any luck, they'll do the same with this message, though my mention of wikipedia might slow them down for a few seconds.
What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction.
Well, I've noticed that it's difficult to find anyone anywhere who doesn't hate Microsoft. The users of Microsoft software seem to hate them the most. So you're going to have to ignore almost everyone.
This phenomenon does have interesting implications for "the Market" and "market forces" that some people do seem to like so much. Think for a while about why it might be that so many people keep buying software that they hate from a company that they hate. And then ask yourself what you believe about the rationality of the marketplace.
And, naturally, make it optional.
/. page I'm looking at has a 60%-grey background, black text, and colors only for links. I told my browser to use those colors and ignore the page's attempts to set colors.
/. has a preferences setting for that and I used it. I do override the ads fairly successfully.
/. had settings for all this. Then on the rare occasion when I have to use someone else's machine, I could log in and not have to worry about figuring out how to do all that suppression of "features" from scratch.
/. other than the text. There's no point in wasting time and screen space for the eye candy and ads. Unless you like them, of course.
No need. Any user can do it themselves. The
I also don't see any images at all, but that's because
But it would be handy if
Face it; there's no content to
[The proposed approach] measures 'edits' as opposed to the reputation of the author.
;-). They also make the text a better test for software, since it contains more non-Latin1 chars. This is fairly easy to do, especially now that there are a couple of good Chinese dictionaries online. I've also started working on understanding the problems with Arabic and related scripts, and I've made a few small enhancements to a few of those pages.
Over the last few weeks, I've contributed to an example of why counting edits isn't necessarily a good idea. As part of an "i18n" project, I've been reading some of the wikipedia stuff on a few writing systems such as Chinese characters. Incidentally, I've made a bunch of edits to some pages, mostly adding tone marks to the pinyin. These aren't edits in the sense of correcting errors; they are edits in the sense of making tiny additions that will help other readers who don't know much Mandarin (like me
Anything that treats such edits as corrections or criticisms is simply wrong. But I don't know how you'd write software that would generally distinguish the various kinds of edits. I could write an ad-hoc check for the pinyin-tone case, as that's a fairly straightforward test. Just remove marks from chars and see whether this gives the original text. But in general, it takes human intelligence to distinguish enhancement edits from edits that attempt to change the information.
I doubt we'll care much about 9/11 after... oh wait, I've said too much.
Yeah; best to keep quiet about the upcoming Incident. If you talk too much, they'll think you were part of it. It's safer to just be quiet about what you know.
And we won the war in Iraq too, right?
Sure, just like we won the war in Vietnam.
I know some people who believe that the US won in Vietnam. We left behind a peaceful, democratic country, didn't we? The Vietnamese are now our friends now, aren't they? (Funny thing is that this essentially correct. Americans visiting Vietnam report a rather open, friendly country.)
I also know people who believe the Bush crowd's take on Iraq. We've won, except for a handful of remaining terrorists that we'll mop up Any Day Now. They'll probably still believe that long after US troops have left, regardless of why they left.
Hey, fart jokes are common even among scientists when discussing atmospheric methane. It's been known for a couple decades that roughly 1/3 of the methane in our atmosphere comes from the digestive systems of ruminants (cattle, etc.), so fart jokes are inevitable. Actually, a recent report claimes that cattle produce most of their methane by belching, which sorta took a bit of the fun out of it. But cattle also fart a lot.
OTOH, a few years ago some researchers tracked down the source of another 1/3 of the methane: termites. Most people don't suspect how incredibly many termites there are on this planet. They are all digesting plant fibers via a process similar to that of cattle (and using some of the same bacteria). This produces the image of trillions and trillions of tiny little termite farts.
That discovery did pretty much account for most of the methane. Aside from those two major sources, there are thousands of small sources, none of them very good sources of humor.
Others have pointed out the logical problem with Pascal's Wager. I'll just mention a more relevant argument: No matter what the situation, we're better off understanding what's going on that we'll be if we don't understand.
If we act without understanding, the outcome is unpredictable, and is as likely to be worse as it is to be better. If we understand the system, and can thus predict the outcome of our actions with some accuracy, we stand a much better chance of fixing whatever problems actually exist.
Most of the anti-climate-change rhetoric has the goal of suppressing scientific research. This is most likely a losing wager, no matter what's happening.
Technically the sun's heat isn't coming from its gasses; the heat comes from the part that's a plasma. The gaseous part is called its "atmosphere", and it doesn't really contribute to the heat. It just scatters the photons produced down in the plasma portion.
...
Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky
Shouldn't it be more like "Faster Global Warming Possible From Permafrost Melt?" or "Major Climate changes could happen from Permafrost Melt".
/. has a rather small limit to the length of an article's title. So I went with a shorter one that didn't get truncated.
/. does allow longer headlines than just about any newspaper. ;-)
Well, I tried a few such headlines, but found that
(But
Indeed, good science has NO facts, just the latest hypothysis (sp?) which has yet to be proven wrong.
Actually, typically we have both. Except that "fact" isn't a common technical term, perhaps because it's monosyllabic. Usually scientists talk about "observations" or "data". "Fact" is just the informal (layman's) term for observed data.
The release of methane from permafrost isn't a hypothesis. It's observed data, as described in the recent Nature article. The recent increase in the release rate is also observed data. Just what it means is up for hypothesizing. This is going to include the fact (verifiable in laboratories anywhere) that methane is a strong "greenhouse gas".
Predicting the effects of the methane really isn't hypthesizing, but rather calculating from the documented physical properties of methane. The main unknown here is the pending rate of methane release. Stay tuned to data from people making precise methane measurements in various parts of the world. Data from Canada and Alaska is probably in the pipeline.
There's also the lurking bogeyman of the huge deposits of methane-ice "clathrates" in the deep oceans. That one is currently in the "conjecture" phase, with researchers applying for grants for more field trips to make the needed measurements. Again, the physical properties of these ices are well known. What's not known is how big the deposits are and how close they are to a phase change.
If i [commit a crime] and then use the information gained to my advantage, its my understanding that in most western countries i am personally liable in law (usual IANAL disclaimer here). However, it seems that if i do it on company time, then my employer is normally held responsible?
...). This is all open and above-board, and is completely legal. But it's also a clear example of a corporation profiting from accounting practices that, if you did them as an individual citizen, would be illegal. My wife and I do a fair amount of computer-related work at home, and this practice has saved us quite a lot of tax money over the years.
Exactly. If you dig around in the historical record, you'll find that that's why the concept of a "corporation" was invented. Its original purpose, and one of its primary functions nearly everywhere in the world, was to insulate people committing profitable crimes from prosecution. The legal argument was and is "I didn't do it; the corporation did." It's a variant of the "I was just following orders" defense, but it also applies to those giving the orders.
Incorporation is usually used to protect the top officers, who can't really use the "I was just following orders" defense. But it may be used to protect any employee who is acting in the interests of the corporation (i.e., on orders from superiors).
There is a common pretense that corporations exist to make profit. That's actually a side effect of their primary function, which is to commit profitable acts that would be illegal if an individual did them. If a profitable act is legal, you can do it yourself, without a corporation to protect you. But most employees would reasonably be unwilling to commit acts that may be illegal without the protection of a corporation.
The primary reason that this works is that, since a corporation is legally "incorporated", i.e., is legally a living body, the corporation itself can be considered liable and can be punished for crimes. Thus, a corporation may be "executed" (i.e., disincorporated), and the law will treat this as executing a living criminal offender.
This in general isn't necessarily anything evil; it may be just an accounting thing. Thus, you as an individual have to pay income tax on your total income (minus certain deductions). You can't deduct all "expenses". If you were to attempt to deduct the cost of things like food and clothing, that would be considered tax fraud, and you'd be fined or jailed. But in many countries such as the US, you can form a corporation with yourself as the sold employee. The corporation receives what was your income, and pays you a much lower salary. The corporation can deduct legal expenses, and this often does include "business-related" meals and clothing (and housing and phone service and
I just dropped an even $1093 in Canadian dollars on a laptop that ...
Hey, I knew there was something funny about Canadian dollars, but I didn't know that they'd made 1093 even. Thanks for informing me.
(I wonder what other odd numbers are even in Canada, and vice versa?)