So true. You have to be born into the right tribe to understand technology. *Our* tribe.
There's no point in trying to educate yourself. Unless your English, you'll never understand Shakespeare. Only Germans can understand Beethoven. Only black Americans can understand basketball.
You've got be born and raised a geek, otherwise you can't understand something as quintessentially technological as corporate control of access to news, opinion, and culture.
There ain't no point askin' us, man, 'cause unless you can show me your code it's all shuck and jive.
It is apparently software for illiterates. I followed the trail of links to the project's homepage, which consists of two links: "log in" and "watch a video". The "watch a video" link is a big shiny button, so I think they hope their user base will be attracted to the sparkle and accidentally click on it.
President is Commander in Chief of the army, he can literally say "this is bullshit guys, you must treat people of all sexual orientations equally".
No he can't. People (liberal and conservative both depending on the issue) seem to think that "Commander in Chief" means the president has the same powers over the US military that a dictator would have. He does not.
The president may *command*, but he doesn't have absolute unilateral control of the military. His command is subject to regulation by Congress, which passes laws, approves budgets, and holds hearings. Just to make that very clear, the President can't just appoint officers. Congress has to approve all military commissions, and establishes the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I'm not even sure the President has veto power over the Uniform Code.
So, the President can *sometimes* set a policy unilaterally, as when Truman ordered the military desegregated, but Congress *could* have stopped him. In this case Congress has *preempted* any move Obama might make by passing DADT into law. This is the law of the land and the President is legally bound by it.
If the President decided to ignore the law, that might well precipitate a constitutional crisis in which officers have consider what their oath to support the Constitution demands of them. If it didn't start an immediate crisis, in a way that might almost be worse. That'd be a set-up for a more serious crisis later. It's quite possible that he would get away with countermanding the DADT law initially, because that'd make everyone happy. The liberals in Congress would be glad to see DADT go because they don't like the policy. The conservatives would be glad to get a hot button issue to rally their base. Everyone would get what they want in the short term.
Why would this be a bad thing? Because it's a very bad thing to cede legislative power to the executive branch. Hitler came to power not by winning a majority in the Reischstag, but by convincing a minority party to give him the majority he needed for a measure "temporarily" ceding legislative powers to the Chancellor's office. This was after a suspicious fire in the Reischstag building was blamed on communist agitators, and the arguments were much the same you hear today for giving the President absolute control over the military.
This is the kind of situation where it would be very foolish to say, "yeah, but this is an emergency *bad* things will happen if we handcuff the President with laws and legislative oversight." Bad things *might* happen, it is true, but bad things *also might* happen when you let any one person run the military as if they were his to do with as he pleases.
Control of the military is one of the most important, and I think well thought out parts of the US Constitution. The framers looked back to how King Charles precipitated the first English Civil War, and then to the early and unproductive conflicts between the Continental Congress and Washington as CinC of the Continental Army, and decided they liked the middle way eventually worked out between Congress and Washington. Washington was given a free hand to *command*, but Congress retained the power to regulate, budget and oversee. It's a system that works amazingly well when there is political consensus about a war. That it works less well without political consensus is a *feature*, not a bug.
It's like those perverse situations that come up at zoning board hearings. The developer stands to make a bundle, but the people in the neighborhood all stand to lose a little bit. If you add up all those little bits, they amount to a lot, but the developer keeps showing up at meeting after meeting until the opposition gives up from fatigue.
The companies who want to control the Internet stand to win so big it's worth spending a lot of money over a long time. There isn't symmetry for the pro-net neutrality companies.
In a corporate plutocracy, it's the party with the single biggest stake that wins.
Here's the problem. This is a *trial*. That means any assertion that bears on the outcome can be challenged by either side either to its accuracy, relevance or interpretation.
Suppose they jury convicts the defendant based on this wikipedia article. The defendant doesn't even *know* this has been brought into deliberations, and has no chance of challenging it.
I've just been through this. As you deliberate, you can submit questions. These are debated in the courtroom by the prosecutor and defense attorney in front of the judge as you wait in the jury room. Then they bring you out and the judge provides you with a narrowly worded answer. We asked a number of questions about the law and the specific criteria the prosecution had to meet in order for us to convict. We didn't ask any CSI type evidence questions. I suppose if we had, they'd have been debated, the judge would have called us in and most likely told us the question was not relevant. If both sides agreed to it, I suppose she might have read us a short, carefully worded statement.
Let me tell you, this is very, very hard. You *don't* have all the information you'd *like* to have. What you have is the information the two sides have brought up and which the judge has admitted into the case. Some jurors create all kinds of cock-eyed theories. In the case I was recently on, speculations about how much force would be needed to produce bruises of a certain kind. It's very natural in that case to want to do a little independent research, but even if you get *good* information, you aren't necessarily qualified to apply that information. If that information (a) helped either side and (b) could be explained in a way that laymen could understand without going astray, it would have been brought up.
We were very frustrated by things we weren't allowed to see, and speculation about them was rife. Why didn't the prosecution call such and so as a witness? Why didn't the defense? Why couldn't we see the police report? What would happen to the defendant if he was found guilty?
The judge was kind enough to address us afterward and answer many of these questions. We weren't allowed to see the police report because it contained the officer's opinion, and couldn't be cross-examined by the defense. Instead we got the officer himself on the stand, although his memory was far from perfect. Each side managed to slip in bits of the police report by cross examining the witness under the pretense of impeaching their credibility. "You say such and so. I'd like you to look at this statement you made to the police. Is what you just testified consistent with what you told the police?" etc.
Many things we'd have liked to know about the defendant the *judge* didn't know. They hadn't been brought up by the prosecution, probably because they'd have no legal bearing, and even the judge wasn't allowed to bias herself by doing independent research. Likewise the judge didn't know why one side or the other declined to call a certain witness, and was not allowed to pry into that.
One of the most difficult tasks in the jury room was wrestling with the various castles in the air that some jurors spun. You go into the jury room with the information presented at trial and the judges instructions as to the law. You also bring your experience and prejudices, because short of brain surgery there's no way to separate you from those. Letting the jurors bring in *new* information that *neither* side has had a chance to examine only increases the tendency of the jury to fall down the rabbit hole. You end up reaching a conclusion is largely a matter of giving up on all the pet theories you've generated. Out of sheer exhaustion, you circle back to the actual *evidence* presented and the criteria the prosecution is required to meet. If every day a different juror brought in a different wikipedia article creating yet another wrinkle in the deliberations, the fun would never stop.
Actually having a hard password and writing it down is not such a bad idea. It's leaving the password under the keyboard that's a bad idea.
Look at this this way. That guy driving a Ferrari around town unlocks it with a key that *anyone* can use. It's reasonably safe, however, because he keeps the key in his pocket.
Of course, wallets get stolen. So what you do is this: you generate a strong eight character password, print it on a laminated card and keep it in your pocket. You choose a memorable six character password and keep it in your head. Then concatenate the two to form your working password. That's poor man's two factor security.
It amazes me how many Slashdot has, how quickly people here will believe some amazingly complex and willy explanation over a simple and obvious one. So what is the obvious one here? Simple: HP support.
Well, I think the reluctance to accept this simple explanation might have something to do with the fact that a syphilitic monkey could eat a bowl of molex connectors and shit a more sensible support password recovery scheme than that.
Of course, the idea that the gummint is behind this isn't sensible. It's irrational. On the other hand, there's no sensible, rational explanation for something so idiotic. The closest thing I can come up with to a reasonable explanation is that the backdoor got put into the software during testing but was never taken out. That's pure speculation, but it certainly makes more sense than a support option that will give every customer who forgets his password the password to every other customer's array.
Hint to the lovelorn: don't start a conversation with a potential mate by complaining that none of the women in Australia are good enough for you. That's something you might want to avoid.
Also: looking for women with tragic backgrounds sends creepy vibes, like you're looking for somebody who's used to being a victim.
And how about: saying something that sounds vaguely Jeffry Dalmer-ish then bragging about your "neuroscience background" as if that were a chick magnet is... just plain weird. Unless you're looking for neuroscience geek chicks, but then you'd better be able to back your claims up.
They've done better than that. They've got laptops that convert into tablets with a twist of the screen. I've got one. I like it as a laptop, but I *never* use it as a tablet.
The problem is that it's all very good to say "UI-switching problem", as if that were a single, discrete problem that could be solved by something like enabling touch input. It's not.
The problem is with the "value proposition", which runs roughly like this: "Use the apps you've already invested in exactly the same as you always have, but on a *tablet*." On paper that sounds like genius, but unfortunately it's not a self-consistent idea. Tablet interaction is radically different than mouse and keyboard driven interaction, so if the apps don't behave radically differently, they're going to suck in tablet mode.
You can't fix this problem by imposing a shallow tablet interface on top of the old app (which Win 7 does with approximately as much success as is possible). The app's UI has to be redesigned from the ground up to give users a tablet experience, not a mouse/keyboard experience simulated on a tablet.
On one hand, I'd prefer for people to engage in a fair, honest and open debate, scrutinizing the arguments and supporting evidence for all sides, condemning sensational, propagandistic methods no matter in whose favor those methods are employed.
On the other hand, that preference makes me a lonely, lonely man.
What most people seem to want is to force people who disagree with them to put down the tools of propaganda without being required do so themselves. They want ideas they don't like to be easy to refute. They want the reassurance of only hearing opinions that confirm what they already believe. They want to be patted on the back for thinking the way everyone else does, but expressing it in a slightly different way. In other words, they're more than delighted to be mental sheep in wolves' clothing.
Let me tell you, being the one who points out the irrationality of believing in and dishonesty of promoting your side's urban legend du jour does not earn you gratitude or popularity.
Now I think to actually earn the label "honest",it's not enough to stick to the truth. You have to speak the whole truth without distortion or distraction. That kind of honesty exists, but it is exclusively a private virtue. If honesty were a commodity, it would have no market value.
Under the circumstances, I'd say Mr. Moore at least serves a useful function. He provides at least a *kind* of balance to right wing and commercial propaganda. It makes no sense to demand he be scrupulous and fair because that is not a standard to which we as a society hold our information sources.
Short of developing a replacement for humanity as we know it, dueling propaganda is as close to balance as we're ever likely to get.
Every have, say, French Onion Soup? That's basically beef bone soup with onions and bread in it and topped with melted cheese.
Obviously you can't munch on the calcium in bones much,but bones are chock full of nutrition. That's why dogs evolved to gnaw on bones. They're mainly after the marrow, which have lots of fat and protein, but even the bone walls have nutrients and flavor in them.
What you do is boil the bone, skimming off the mineral scum that floats to the surface. It works best if you roast the bone first. All the goodies leach out, then you put the liquid in the fridge so the fat can separate out. Peel off the layer of fat, and what you've got is thin beef flavored gelatin. Don't bother giving the bone to the dog after that. He won't be interested because all the flavor and nutrients are gone.
The Boston Globe reported today that a the mutilated body of a teen boy found last month in a Boston suburb probably fell out of the wheel well of an airplane he is believed to stowed away on. Several articles of his clothing were found scattered along the flight's approach to Boston's Logan Airport.
Earlier this year in Japan a body was discovered in the wheel well of a flight originating at New York's JFK. Investigation later revealed that the unfortunate hadn't stowed away in New York, but in Lagos Nigeria *two months earlier*.
What does this tell you about all this body scanning hoopla? We're building a fortress that sports a fearsome looking portcullis but has open windows on the ground floor.
Well, you should add that that top 1% of the population paying 37% of the taxes earns between 20% and 24% of income depending on whether you prefer conservative slanted sources or liberally slanted ones.
Likewise the top quintile which pays 85% of the taxes according to your figures earns 49.4% of the income according to the US Census Bureau.
These figures are hardly evidence of a "soak the rich" tax policy. By historical and international standards its pretty flat.
The lawsuit I'll grant you, but no company has a moral imperative to support any open source project indefinitely. That's a big part of what made me an open source advocate, because of the number of *closed* source products that had the plug pullled and left all their customers twisting slowly in the wind.
I'd say that if a company decides its not in its economic interest to continue sponsoring a project, that's their prerogative. It's nice if they do it in an orderly way that gives customers a path forward and contributors a chance grant source code for the latest builds and organize a fork.
Oracle is a nasty piece of work in my opinion, but I can't fault them on how they handled OpenSolaris. They just stopped doing binary releases. They continue to cooperate with upstream projects and they even say they're going to release Solaris source code under CDDL when they do binary releases, although you can't get nightly updates anymore.
I read that as them telling the community that they don't want to be married anymore. That's sad and its understandable if the community feels betrayed, but Oracle hasn't tried to drive a stake through the community's heart so far as I can see. They intend to keep sharing code, they just don't want any kind of joint custody of the development process.
but a cataclysm destroyed their civilization and the landform it was built upon. A few survivors made it to Egypt,where they built the pyramids and started an occult tradition of secret knowledge that has been passed down to this very day.
I know this because my insurance agent told me. He belongs to this fraternal organization where they dress up in robes and are instructed in that secret knowledge by the guy who sold me my house.
Of course humans are taxonomically animals. However from our own point of view we are rather exceptional.
As for the carpenter making furniture being ridiculous, are you claiming that carpenters are somehow *unable* to do woodworking? I suppose that means you've never heard of Norm Abram. Woodworking is a different skill from carpentry, but if it *wasn't* there wouldn't be much point to the analogy, would there?
Oracle has some really intriguing products, but they've raised arrogant indifference to their customers to an art form. For years their attitude toward tech support was that if their wonderful product bites you on the ass, it must be because you aren't smart enough to use it. And of course we all know about their byzantine licensing models which they're all too happy to let customers trip over, after which they are not at all inclined to extend a helpful hand.
What drives this is a sense of entitlement; a belief that you *have* to use Oracle's products that they've successfully foisted on many of their customers because most people in this world are apparently incapable of critical thought.
In truth Oracle products do have many useful and unique features, but as a designer I'd be chary of relying on those features because if you are an Oracle customer, Oracle isn't your friend. Of course no vendor is *really* your friend, but Oracle in particular is a vendor you can't trust because they don't care if they do something that makes you hate them, provided they've got you locked in.
There's an island a few miles off the coast of New England that's a popular destination for sea kayakers. They have proven that we can perform a successful traversal to and from that island. NOW they have have to move on to going to Greenland and back.
See how extravagant that mode of argument is? It's not that the Greenland expedition isn't worth somebody's attention, but if it is ever done it will be done for entirely different reasons. And if those guys really need to go to Greenland, they have a more practical way of getting there than paddling.
The same goes for Mars. Earth orbit is way easier than Mars, and far more immediately rewarding. We sometimes forget, but the reason we as a species developed orbital capacity largely entailed being able to drop bombs on other members of our species. Once we'd got good at that, the Moon wasn't really that much of a stretch, well worth doing to show the world that capitalist America had the biggest pair in the Cold War.
I think we *should* explore space. That's why I'm not excited about bootprints on Mars being our top immediate priority. That will suck the money out robotic missions and near earth manned missions that would build fundamental knowledge and technological capabilities. There's no doubt we *can* put boots on Mars soon if we spend enough money on it, which is precisely why it's not an exciting enough basket to put all our space exploration eggs in.
There will inevitably come a time when landing people on Mars will be the best next project for us to do. That will come when the cost to stage the mission in orbit is a lot cheaper, when space propulsion systems and life support systems are a lot better than they are now, and we know enough about Mars to know where putting those boots is the best investment. A premature manned Mars program would be like the Apollo program in that it would be a spectacular feet that quickly loses public interest and support. A sustainable space exploration program is a better investment. That naturally involves maintaining our manned spaceflight capacity.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about that. You're assuming that the bacterium needs those conditions and is a one trick pony whose survival is dependent on having a rotting ocean liner handy.
This is *probably* not something that is going to become any kind of threat to the future of technological civilization. In fact I'd go out on a limb and say that it's virtually certain to be nothing to worry about. But one thing to keep in mind about biology is its propensity for having surprising and mind-numbingly complex tricks up its sleeve.
Over the years I've worked a bit on the fringes of the field of zoonotic disease surveilance -- that is to say diseases that hop from animal populations into humans. In many cases what we think of as human diseases, things like like influenza, yellow fever or encephalitis, are primarily diseases of animal populations. The human infections are a kind of sideline for the infectious agent, kind of like a carpenter who makes his living building houses but also has a side business selling unfinished furniture.
If I were studying this thing, one of the things I would certainly look at is how adaptable it is. Apart from the shear scientific interest of the question, if any practical concern were unearthed that would surely be a good source of additional funding. The one thing scientists can *always* agree upon: more study is needed.
Can you imagine such a thing developed into kind of biological warfare agent? It might not destroy the enemy's marine infrastructure overnight, but a few years down the line he might find maintaining that infrastructure unexpectedly costly.
Slashdot Mirror
So true. You have to be born into the right tribe to understand technology. *Our* tribe.
There's no point in trying to educate yourself. Unless your English, you'll never understand Shakespeare. Only Germans can understand Beethoven. Only black Americans can understand basketball.
You've got be born and raised a geek, otherwise you can't understand something as quintessentially technological as corporate control of access to news, opinion, and culture.
There ain't no point askin' us, man, 'cause unless you can show me your code it's all shuck and jive.
It is apparently software for illiterates. I followed the trail of links to the project's homepage, which consists of two links: "log in" and "watch a video". The "watch a video" link is a big shiny button, so I think they hope their user base will be attracted to the sparkle and accidentally click on it.
President is Commander in Chief of the army, he can literally say "this is bullshit guys, you must treat people of all sexual orientations equally".
No he can't. People (liberal and conservative both depending on the issue) seem to think that "Commander in Chief" means the president has the same powers over the US military that a dictator would have. He does not.
The president may *command*, but he doesn't have absolute unilateral control of the military. His command is subject to regulation by Congress, which passes laws, approves budgets, and holds hearings. Just to make that very clear, the President can't just appoint officers. Congress has to approve all military commissions, and establishes the Uniform Code of Military Justice. I'm not even sure the President has veto power over the Uniform Code.
So, the President can *sometimes* set a policy unilaterally, as when Truman ordered the military desegregated, but Congress *could* have stopped him. In this case Congress has *preempted* any move Obama might make by passing DADT into law. This is the law of the land and the President is legally bound by it.
If the President decided to ignore the law, that might well precipitate a constitutional crisis in which officers have consider what their oath to support the Constitution demands of them. If it didn't start an immediate crisis, in a way that might almost be worse. That'd be a set-up for a more serious crisis later. It's quite possible that he would get away with countermanding the DADT law initially, because that'd make everyone happy. The liberals in Congress would be glad to see DADT go because they don't like the policy. The conservatives would be glad to get a hot button issue to rally their base. Everyone would get what they want in the short term.
Why would this be a bad thing? Because it's a very bad thing to cede legislative power to the executive branch. Hitler came to power not by winning a majority in the Reischstag, but by convincing a minority party to give him the majority he needed for a measure "temporarily" ceding legislative powers to the Chancellor's office. This was after a suspicious fire in the Reischstag building was blamed on communist agitators, and the arguments were much the same you hear today for giving the President absolute control over the military.
This is the kind of situation where it would be very foolish to say, "yeah, but this is an emergency *bad* things will happen if we handcuff the President with laws and legislative oversight." Bad things *might* happen, it is true, but bad things *also might* happen when you let any one person run the military as if they were his to do with as he pleases.
Control of the military is one of the most important, and I think well thought out parts of the US Constitution. The framers looked back to how King Charles precipitated the first English Civil War, and then to the early and unproductive conflicts between the Continental Congress and Washington as CinC of the Continental Army, and decided they liked the middle way eventually worked out between Congress and Washington. Washington was given a free hand to *command*, but Congress retained the power to regulate, budget and oversee. It's a system that works amazingly well when there is political consensus about a war. That it works less well without political consensus is a *feature*, not a bug.
No. We're too busy worried about Obama's birth certificate to pay attention to things like corporate control over access to information.
What's wrong with them? Nothing's wrong with *them*.
It's like that riddle about why a dog licks his balls. Why do congressional Republicans support policies like this? Because we let them.
It's like those perverse situations that come up at zoning board hearings. The developer stands to make a bundle, but the people in the neighborhood all stand to lose a little bit. If you add up all those little bits, they amount to a lot, but the developer keeps showing up at meeting after meeting until the opposition gives up from fatigue.
The companies who want to control the Internet stand to win so big it's worth spending a lot of money over a long time. There isn't symmetry for the pro-net neutrality companies.
In a corporate plutocracy, it's the party with the single biggest stake that wins.
In other words: you're screwed with whipped cream and a cherry on top.
Here's the problem. This is a *trial*. That means any assertion that bears on the outcome can be challenged by either side either to its accuracy, relevance or interpretation.
Suppose they jury convicts the defendant based on this wikipedia article. The defendant doesn't even *know* this has been brought into deliberations, and has no chance of challenging it.
I've just been through this. As you deliberate, you can submit questions. These are debated in the courtroom by the prosecutor and defense attorney in front of the judge as you wait in the jury room. Then they bring you out and the judge provides you with a narrowly worded answer. We asked a number of questions about the law and the specific criteria the prosecution had to meet in order for us to convict. We didn't ask any CSI type evidence questions. I suppose if we had, they'd have been debated, the judge would have called us in and most likely told us the question was not relevant. If both sides agreed to it, I suppose she might have read us a short, carefully worded statement.
Let me tell you, this is very, very hard. You *don't* have all the information you'd *like* to have. What you have is the information the two sides have brought up and which the judge has admitted into the case. Some jurors create all kinds of cock-eyed theories. In the case I was recently on, speculations about how much force would be needed to produce bruises of a certain kind. It's very natural in that case to want to do a little independent research, but even if you get *good* information, you aren't necessarily qualified to apply that information. If that information (a) helped either side and (b) could be explained in a way that laymen could understand without going astray, it would have been brought up.
We were very frustrated by things we weren't allowed to see, and speculation about them was rife. Why didn't the prosecution call such and so as a witness? Why didn't the defense? Why couldn't we see the police report? What would happen to the defendant if he was found guilty?
The judge was kind enough to address us afterward and answer many of these questions. We weren't allowed to see the police report because it contained the officer's opinion, and couldn't be cross-examined by the defense. Instead we got the officer himself on the stand, although his memory was far from perfect. Each side managed to slip in bits of the police report by cross examining the witness under the pretense of impeaching their credibility. "You say such and so. I'd like you to look at this statement you made to the police. Is what you just testified consistent with what you told the police?" etc.
Many things we'd have liked to know about the defendant the *judge* didn't know. They hadn't been brought up by the prosecution, probably because they'd have no legal bearing, and even the judge wasn't allowed to bias herself by doing independent research. Likewise the judge didn't know why one side or the other declined to call a certain witness, and was not allowed to pry into that.
One of the most difficult tasks in the jury room was wrestling with the various castles in the air that some jurors spun. You go into the jury room with the information presented at trial and the judges instructions as to the law. You also bring your experience and prejudices, because short of brain surgery there's no way to separate you from those. Letting the jurors bring in *new* information that *neither* side has had a chance to examine only increases the tendency of the jury to fall down the rabbit hole. You end up reaching a conclusion is largely a matter of giving up on all the pet theories you've generated. Out of sheer exhaustion, you circle back to the actual *evidence* presented and the criteria the prosecution is required to meet. If every day a different juror brought in a different wikipedia article creating yet another wrinkle in the deliberations, the fun would never stop.
Actually having a hard password and writing it down is not such a bad idea. It's leaving the password under the keyboard that's a bad idea.
Look at this this way. That guy driving a Ferrari around town unlocks it with a key that *anyone* can use. It's reasonably safe, however, because he keeps the key in his pocket.
Of course, wallets get stolen. So what you do is this: you generate a strong eight character password, print it on a laminated card and keep it in your pocket. You choose a memorable six character password and keep it in your head. Then concatenate the two to form your working password. That's poor man's two factor security.
Word processors that remember your name and fill in author metadata for you are sure helpful, aren't they?
No they're not. If you doubt me, I'll forward you the memo. Check the metadata and you'll see that it's from the desk of God Almighty Himself.
Aha! So you don't deny it!
Hold it... Oh, sorry. Forgot to take my meds again. My bad.
It amazes me how many Slashdot has, how quickly people here will believe some amazingly complex and willy explanation over a simple and obvious one. So what is the obvious one here? Simple: HP support.
Well, I think the reluctance to accept this simple explanation might have something to do with the fact that a syphilitic monkey could eat a bowl of molex connectors and shit a more sensible support password recovery scheme than that.
Of course, the idea that the gummint is behind this isn't sensible. It's irrational. On the other hand, there's no sensible, rational explanation for something so idiotic. The closest thing I can come up with to a reasonable explanation is that the backdoor got put into the software during testing but was never taken out. That's pure speculation, but it certainly makes more sense than a support option that will give every customer who forgets his password the password to every other customer's array.
OK, where do I start?
Hint to the lovelorn: don't start a conversation with a potential mate by complaining that none of the women in Australia are good enough for you. That's something you might want to avoid.
Also: looking for women with tragic backgrounds sends creepy vibes, like you're looking for somebody who's used to being a victim.
And how about: saying something that sounds vaguely Jeffry Dalmer-ish then bragging about your "neuroscience background" as if that were a chick magnet is ... just plain weird. Unless you're looking for neuroscience geek chicks, but then you'd better be able to back your claims up.
They've done better than that. They've got laptops that convert into tablets with a twist of the screen. I've got one. I like it as a laptop, but I *never* use it as a tablet.
The problem is that it's all very good to say "UI-switching problem", as if that were a single, discrete problem that could be solved by something like enabling touch input. It's not.
The problem is with the "value proposition", which runs roughly like this: "Use the apps you've already invested in exactly the same as you always have, but on a *tablet*." On paper that sounds like genius, but unfortunately it's not a self-consistent idea. Tablet interaction is radically different than mouse and keyboard driven interaction, so if the apps don't behave radically differently, they're going to suck in tablet mode.
You can't fix this problem by imposing a shallow tablet interface on top of the old app (which Win 7 does with approximately as much success as is possible). The app's UI has to be redesigned from the ground up to give users a tablet experience, not a mouse/keyboard experience simulated on a tablet.
Yes. I'm assuming the poster probably doesn't know what consomme is.
Well, I'm ambivalent about the guy.
On one hand, I'd prefer for people to engage in a fair, honest and open debate, scrutinizing the arguments and supporting evidence for all sides, condemning sensational, propagandistic methods no matter in whose favor those methods are employed.
On the other hand, that preference makes me a lonely, lonely man.
What most people seem to want is to force people who disagree with them to put down the tools of propaganda without being required do so themselves. They want ideas they don't like to be easy to refute. They want the reassurance of only hearing opinions that confirm what they already believe. They want to be patted on the back for thinking the way everyone else does, but expressing it in a slightly different way. In other words, they're more than delighted to be mental sheep in wolves' clothing.
Let me tell you, being the one who points out the irrationality of believing in and dishonesty of promoting your side's urban legend du jour does not earn you gratitude or popularity.
Now I think to actually earn the label "honest",it's not enough to stick to the truth. You have to speak the whole truth without distortion or distraction. That kind of honesty exists, but it is exclusively a private virtue. If honesty were a commodity, it would have no market value.
Under the circumstances, I'd say Mr. Moore at least serves a useful function. He provides at least a *kind* of balance to right wing and commercial propaganda. It makes no sense to demand he be scrupulous and fair because that is not a standard to which we as a society hold our information sources.
Short of developing a replacement for humanity as we know it, dueling propaganda is as close to balance as we're ever likely to get.
Every have, say, French Onion Soup? That's basically beef bone soup with onions and bread in it and topped with melted cheese.
Obviously you can't munch on the calcium in bones much,but bones are chock full of nutrition. That's why dogs evolved to gnaw on bones. They're mainly after the marrow, which have lots of fat and protein, but even the bone walls have nutrients and flavor in them.
What you do is boil the bone, skimming off the mineral scum that floats to the surface. It works best if you roast the bone first. All the goodies leach out, then you put the liquid in the fridge so the fat can separate out. Peel off the layer of fat, and what you've got is thin beef flavored gelatin. Don't bother giving the bone to the dog after that. He won't be interested because all the flavor and nutrients are gone.
The Boston Globe reported today that a the mutilated body of a teen boy found last month in a Boston suburb probably fell out of the wheel well of an airplane he is believed to stowed away on. Several articles of his clothing were found scattered along the flight's approach to Boston's Logan Airport.
Earlier this year in Japan a body was discovered in the wheel well of a flight originating at New York's JFK. Investigation later revealed that the unfortunate hadn't stowed away in New York, but in Lagos Nigeria *two months earlier*.
What does this tell you about all this body scanning hoopla? We're building a fortress that sports a fearsome looking portcullis but has open windows on the ground floor.
Well, you should add that that top 1% of the population paying 37% of the taxes earns between 20% and 24% of income depending on whether you prefer conservative slanted sources or liberally slanted ones.
Likewise the top quintile which pays 85% of the taxes according to your figures earns 49.4% of the income according to the US Census Bureau.
These figures are hardly evidence of a "soak the rich" tax policy. By historical and international standards its pretty flat.
The lawsuit I'll grant you, but no company has a moral imperative to support any open source project indefinitely. That's a big part of what made me an open source advocate, because of the number of *closed* source products that had the plug pullled and left all their customers twisting slowly in the wind.
I'd say that if a company decides its not in its economic interest to continue sponsoring a project, that's their prerogative. It's nice if they do it in an orderly way that gives customers a path forward and contributors a chance grant source code for the latest builds and organize a fork.
Oracle is a nasty piece of work in my opinion, but I can't fault them on how they handled OpenSolaris. They just stopped doing binary releases. They continue to cooperate with upstream projects and they even say they're going to release Solaris source code under CDDL when they do binary releases, although you can't get nightly updates anymore.
I read that as them telling the community that they don't want to be married anymore. That's sad and its understandable if the community feels betrayed, but Oracle hasn't tried to drive a stake through the community's heart so far as I can see. They intend to keep sharing code, they just don't want any kind of joint custody of the development process.
but a cataclysm destroyed their civilization and the landform it was built upon. A few survivors made it to Egypt,where they built the pyramids and started an occult tradition of secret knowledge that has been passed down to this very day.
I know this because my insurance agent told me. He belongs to this fraternal organization where they dress up in robes and are instructed in that secret knowledge by the guy who sold me my house.
Of course humans are taxonomically animals. However from our own point of view we are rather exceptional.
As for the carpenter making furniture being ridiculous, are you claiming that carpenters are somehow *unable* to do woodworking? I suppose that means you've never heard of Norm Abram. Woodworking is a different skill from carpentry, but if it *wasn't* there wouldn't be much point to the analogy, would there?
Oracle has some really intriguing products, but they've raised arrogant indifference to their customers to an art form. For years their attitude toward tech support was that if their wonderful product bites you on the ass, it must be because you aren't smart enough to use it. And of course we all know about their byzantine licensing models which they're all too happy to let customers trip over, after which they are not at all inclined to extend a helpful hand.
What drives this is a sense of entitlement; a belief that you *have* to use Oracle's products that they've successfully foisted on many of their customers because most people in this world are apparently incapable of critical thought.
In truth Oracle products do have many useful and unique features, but as a designer I'd be chary of relying on those features because if you are an Oracle customer, Oracle isn't your friend. Of course no vendor is *really* your friend, but Oracle in particular is a vendor you can't trust because they don't care if they do something that makes you hate them, provided they've got you locked in.
There's an island a few miles off the coast of New England that's a popular destination for sea kayakers. They have proven that we can perform a successful traversal to and from that island. NOW they have have to move on to going to Greenland and back.
See how extravagant that mode of argument is? It's not that the Greenland expedition isn't worth somebody's attention, but if it is ever done it will be done for entirely different reasons. And if those guys really need to go to Greenland, they have a more practical way of getting there than paddling.
The same goes for Mars. Earth orbit is way easier than Mars, and far more immediately rewarding. We sometimes forget, but the reason we as a species developed orbital capacity largely entailed being able to drop bombs on other members of our species. Once we'd got good at that, the Moon wasn't really that much of a stretch, well worth doing to show the world that capitalist America had the biggest pair in the Cold War.
I think we *should* explore space. That's why I'm not excited about bootprints on Mars being our top immediate priority. That will suck the money out robotic missions and near earth manned missions that would build fundamental knowledge and technological capabilities. There's no doubt we *can* put boots on Mars soon if we spend enough money on it, which is precisely why it's not an exciting enough basket to put all our space exploration eggs in.
There will inevitably come a time when landing people on Mars will be the best next project for us to do. That will come when the cost to stage the mission in orbit is a lot cheaper, when space propulsion systems and life support systems are a lot better than they are now, and we know enough about Mars to know where putting those boots is the best investment. A premature manned Mars program would be like the Apollo program in that it would be a spectacular feet that quickly loses public interest and support. A sustainable space exploration program is a better investment. That naturally involves maintaining our manned spaceflight capacity.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about that. You're assuming that the bacterium needs those conditions and is a one trick pony whose survival is dependent on having a rotting ocean liner handy.
This is *probably* not something that is going to become any kind of threat to the future of technological civilization. In fact I'd go out on a limb and say that it's virtually certain to be nothing to worry about. But one thing to keep in mind about biology is its propensity for having surprising and mind-numbingly complex tricks up its sleeve.
Over the years I've worked a bit on the fringes of the field of zoonotic disease surveilance -- that is to say diseases that hop from animal populations into humans. In many cases what we think of as human diseases, things like like influenza, yellow fever or encephalitis, are primarily diseases of animal populations. The human infections are a kind of sideline for the infectious agent, kind of like a carpenter who makes his living building houses but also has a side business selling unfinished furniture.
If I were studying this thing, one of the things I would certainly look at is how adaptable it is. Apart from the shear scientific interest of the question, if any practical concern were unearthed that would surely be a good source of additional funding. The one thing scientists can *always* agree upon: more study is needed.
Can you imagine such a thing developed into kind of biological warfare agent? It might not destroy the enemy's marine infrastructure overnight, but a few years down the line he might find maintaining that infrastructure unexpectedly costly.