I'd say the problem isn't really people misinterpreting the content of the bible, but rather misinterpreting the nature of the bible (which is then going to affect how you interpret it). If your starting assumption (indoctrination) is that the bible is essentially the work of god, then that assumption is going to color everything else about it. If OTOH you accept it as just a book, then you are in the better position of being able to look at it critically, and will realize that it necessarily is a product of it's time and needs to be judged accordingly.
I think the real problem is that many people have very little control, if indeed any, over how they view the bible, since many were indoctrinated into their family religion at a very early age, and it has now become an inherent part of their belief set and self-identify. You can see the profound effect of this childhood indoctrination when you realize that the exact same child raised in a family of another religion would have then as an adult have similarly unshakable views on the correctness of THAT religion. Anyone who's religious beliefs were formed before they had the knowledge to critically evaluate what they were being taught, has therefore lost the ability to view their own religion objectively, since their views of science and different religions is no longer an objective "A vs B vs C" but a highly biased "ME vs B vs C"... Religion A isn't an alternative - it's their self-identity.
If you are going to throw down the false idols and smash them under the feet of non-believers, you're going to have to show how your belief system is more right than religion. Religion has been around a long time and doesn't have to answer to you. To expect it to is like expecting the stones on the shore to suddenly become sand.
I think a better tack is just to point out how irrelevant and powerless "god" has become.. you can believe in him/it all you want, but with the advance of science it's not possible to attribute any power to him, and he's therefore become irrelevant - a purely philosophical entity. There's never yet been a single instance where a fundamental partical, molecule, cell, neuron, or anything else has ever done anything other than obey the laws of science. Not once has "god" ever intervened and made even the slightest difference whatsoever in the world (except in the mind of a believer). Constrast this to a few hundred years ago when due to lack of human knowledge all sorts of power over health, life, death, the weather, etc could be attributed to this mysterious "god" because we didn't know any better.
History shows us that scientific knowledge will eventually enter the collective consciousness and change the way people look at the world, and there's already a vast difference between religous belief as it existed a few hundred years ago and the way it does today. Even the most hardcore creationists often believe that animal species can change a bit(!) due to genetics and natural selection. Ideas/memes that are entrenched in society certainly take a very long time to change, but science is slowly displacing religion, and there's no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so. I don't think that fundamentalist religious belief (in the western world at least, even America!) will be regarded as mainstream in a few hundred years.
One graph tells the whole story...
on
An Inconvenient Truth
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I've seen the movie, and it's well done. There's a single slide in it that really tells the whole story, that I've recreated here in hand-drawn version.
In a nutshell:
The global population, in absolute numbers, was relatively small untill the last few hundred years, since when it's been growning exponentially
Global CO2 levels follow a natural cycle, but are recently WAY above the natural cycle level due to industialization caused by population growth
Global temperature naturally tracks CO2 levels (greenhouse gas effect), but lags it. Global temperatures are currently close to the natural cycle level, but we only need to look at the CO2 and population curve to see where they are headed - into disasterous territory
The natural cycle timeline here (per Gore's graph) is very long - these are the last few ice ages we're looking at, with data derived from artic ice cores etc.
The inevitable conclusion is that global temperature follows CO2 level and CO2 level is already way above normal due to industrialization. The vertical/horizontal axis here are about in correct ration (showing how far above the normal range the CO2 level is).
I'm not sure why you assume it must take many generations for a change to occur. Note that we're not talking about time for the genetics to change, but rather time for slowly preaccumulated genetic change have an effect based on a modified environment. In the extreme case where absence/presence of a genetic variation suddenly (due to environmental change) became a life or death issue, then you'd see the population genetics sharply change from one generation to the next.
Note that when it comes to things like predators, a small percentage advantage in some trait is all one needs to make a difference. Obviously it would take time for a non-climbing species evolve an ability to climb, but if a species had an ability to climb that was already sometimes sufficient to evade predators, then increased predation would very rapidly cause the species as a whole to become better climbers becuase it only takes a small difference in evasion ability to make one individual able to escape while an incrementally less able one, on average, does not. If you do mathematical simultations, it turns out that very small improvements can very quickly become dominant in this way.
Of course useful (= survival/breeding advantage) traits are emphasized! That's the definition of useful in this context. Each generation has more "useful" traits than the preceding one simply because lack of those traits is what caused some members of the prior generation to die before breeding or to be less successful at breeding and therefore be disproportionatly underrepresented in the following generation. This is evolution 101.
Depending on how dire the environmental change is that made previous accumulated genetic change now critical (e.g. new predator or major climate change = extrememly dire!), then change can indeed be quick as those without the advantageous genetics (ability to escape predator as well as alternate predator lunch) quickly get wiped out.
The biggest influence on evolution is the environment (competetors, predators, food sources, climeate, etc). What seems to happen is that genetic variation slowly (by it's nature) builds in a population over time, then the environment occasionally quickly changes (the environment can change quicker than genetics can) thus suddenly making some previously begign genetic changes beneficial and others detrimental. I believe this is the basis for the "theory" (i.e. observation) of punctuated equilibrium - animal species remain relatively stable for long periods of time then undergo periods of rapid change.
Introducing a new predator is going to immediately have an effect on the population, and will immediately shift the average genetics of the population (and therefore future generations) in the direction of being better at evading the predator, since the ones that were worse than average (at this previously theoretical, but now real, task) will now be lunch.
In other news, Mark Cuban is considering buying Microsoft on the off chance it may give him an excuse to sue Tux the Penguin.
"I told you Tux was going down" said Cuban.
Cuban is also considering killing his neighbor, a Ford Pinto driver, to prove how dangerous the Pinto is, and plans to detonate his mother's Macintosh to prove that she should have bought a PC.
As a general comment that's very true, although searchmash.com does seem to produce better focused ("more correct") results than google.com does. I tried a few varied searches, and was quite impressed.
I agree that google should concentrate on finding information rather than commercial sites, since that's what people use it for. They could have information/commerce buttons to flip between the two modes. Given that Google make their money from paid advertisements, you'd think it'd make it even more attractive to advertizers if theirs were the only commercial links that appeared, and they weren't "competing" with the search results themselves.
Maybe, but not in the way most people celebrating it as a religious holdiay believe...
The Dec 25th "christmas" holiday was started by roman emperor Aurelian (270-275AD) as the Feast of Sol Invictus (= invicible sun [god]), with the date, close to the winter solstice, reflecting the rebirth of the sun (hours of sunlight start getting longer again, having reached their shortest point). The holiday grew to incororate other roman seasonal traditions such as the gift giving of Saturnalia which preceded it, and later in northern europe also grew to include the winter solstice festival of Yule together with it's trappings of trees, yule logs, and assorted greenery.
When Christianity became the dominant religion in the 4th Century, the church wanted people to stop celebrating the old pagan holidays, but given the practical difficulty of stopping people from celebrating a holiday they enjoyed, they adopted the policy of "embrace and extend" instead (not just for Dec 25th - for many pagan holidays), so they redefined the feast of Sol Invictus as the feast of Christ (Christ-mas) (redefining rebirth of the Sun -> birth of the "Son"), totally ignoring the fact that the bible has Jesus born at a warmer time of year when the shepards are still out at night with their sheep! The Christian attempt to usurp the pagan solstice feast was obviously neveer very successful as most people still adhere to the pagan traditions of feast, presents, tree, greenery, yule logs, etc.
The typical "Christian" "christmas" tree is even topped with an Angel which is a Christian version of the winged pagan goddess Nike/Victory.
The difference is that with the Soviet Union the problem was getting OUT, here I suspect there'll be less of a problem getting OUT, and more of one getting back IN... Makes mexican spring break or european vacations pretty exciting, huh?... "We hope (if uncle Sam will kindly allow us back in) to be back on date...".
No doubt there's going to be all sorts of horror stories of bureaucratic screw-ups and people delayed abroad for days while they fix it up.
You don't need a holographic projection - much simpler would be to wear LCD goggles that display what you're sketching, either on it's own or overlaid on reality, combined with what other people in the same room are sketching.
I agree with careful partitioning, but I do it in a fairly crass way... I just have one partition for "/home" (ext3), one for swap, and then a bunch of partitions for "/" of each each distro/release I want to install. I always do fresh installs to a new partition - never upgrades.
This approach is a compromise - your old and new installs are guaranteed to work (as much as any new install is!) since there's no sharing of any system files, but you do then have to reinstall anything outside of/home after a new release, which is tolerable as long as you don't do it too frequently. In the meantime the older version remains 100% unmodified (untouched by the new install) and you can continue to use it until your post-install updates are complete. I try to upgrade as infrequently as possible - I don't upgrade just because there's a new version, but because there's some extremely compelling reason to do so.
One has to account for X possible previous versions (Dapper, Hoary, Breezy...
Ubuntu doesn't officially support upgrading from anything other than the immediately prior release (in this case Dapper) - if you want to upgrade from older versions then you're meant to do a sequence of upgrades (i.e. one version at a time).
Re:What does a version release *really* mean?
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Informative
It's good for updates to be lumped into releases since they can be tested better. Individual updates can be individually tested, but in terms of the whole distro this is really just unit testing. System testing each entire release (via release candidates, etc) is likely to find additional bugs such as where updrading some component broke something else that relied on the old version.
I can't imagine NASA doing it for loss of face, but since a Soyuz launch is $5m vs $50M for the shuttle (which is anyway overbooked for the short remainder of it's lifetime), couldn't NASA just pay the Ruskies to take their Hubble repairman up for a day trip?
I hadn't heard that Janet Baker had said that about HMMs...interesting. Do you have a link or reference to the article where she said that, or any more information about why she said HMMs are inadequate and what alternatives she's proposing?
I'd have thought though that use of HMMs or alternate approaches is orthoganal to what features (articulatory vs cepstra, etc) are being used.. is it really HMMs themselves that she's panning?
Is the ATI (Radeon) driver fixed?
on
Ubuntu 6.10 is Out
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I just installed 6.06 last week, and am quite impressed by it compared to other flavors of Linux I've tried.. Nice philosophy of installing best of breed applications rather than 101 alternatives and the kitchen sink, and it all seems to work.
One thing that spoiled the experience though, was that I initially got a blank screen with the Live CD, so had to go back and do a "safe graphics mode" boot/install. It turns out (no mention of this in the release notes - had to dig for a day to find it) that the X.org ATI driver for 6.06 is broken such that it doesn't work for RV280 based (Radeon 9200) cards using the DVI output (flat panel)... The fix requires downloading and editing the source and rebuilding the driver.
There's also another bug in the 6.06 ATI driver just discovered a week ago where with xorg.conf RenderAccel="yes" it can corrupt drawing in some circumstances (themes that use Cairo).
Does anyone know if either or both of the fixes for these made it into 6.10 ?
True in general, but in practical terms I bet that a really large database of pre-translated pieces, with suitable fall-back algorithms, could do very well, perhaps especially in more formal domains such as technical papers. Google is trying this approach, and apparently already do much better than conventional translation approaches using it. I'm waiting for them to take it out of the lab and use it to replace Bablefish or whatever they use on google.com.
Doing speech recognition based on articulatory data is much easier than doing it based on spoken speech data... It'd be a speech researcher's dream if s/he could always derive accurate articulatory data from speech, rather than having to make do with an inaccurate mapping from the modulations of the glottal source that it produces (formants, fricatives, stops, etc).
Adding the translation step (which is doomed to be not much better than using a guide book to translate, given current levels of translation know how) is really a gimick, either to attract attention and get reseach funding, or based on some very limited domain (military?) that they are targeting.
According to this article on the EGL webiste, DeBeer's DaimondView system is able to use ultraviolet imaging to deteect the different growth patterns of natural vs lab made diamonds.
Also, gemstone inclusions are very characteristic. I'm not sure about diamonds, but for some stones such as (natural) ruby a lab can tell you which country it came from, and maybe even which mine.
Top Tax rate is irrelevant to most people. At one point in the UK the top rate was 90% (or more?), but that had no effect to most people (other than getting subsidized my multi-millionaires!).
For a fair comparison you need to show total the tax rate for the same salary level in each country. For the US you need to minimally add Social Security to your taxes paid.
US taxes are actually pretty high if you do an oranges and oranges comparison... even more so if you note that in many countries healthcare is covered by taxes, while in the US it costs (a lot) extra. In many countries your taxes also provide a good quality national train system vs the US where it's not really a viable means of casual travel.
I'm curious why it was decided not to add CSS "display: table/table-row/table-cell" support to IE7 since this would do so much to make it easier to create web pages whose layout looks consistent across all browsers? Was there some technical reason why this was not done, or is there a more machievellan reason?;-)
Google's entire business (web search, book search, news, Google Video) is based around fair use and media agreements, so YouTube doesn't really present any different issues than Google and their laywers are familiar with, and they've also been very busy forging better reltions and deals with the media industry.
I can see why many companies might shy away from YouTube (although I doubt the sincerity of Ballmer & Mark Cuban's opinions), but for Google this is their turf - negotiating content rights is what they do.
The fact that they got YouTube for free considering their share price increase since the announcement doesn't hurt either. It seems to have been a pretty savvy purchase, but time will tell.
Interesting answers, but more because of the different take on things than any individual specifics.
However, I wasn't too impressed with the answers to the productivity question.
While general intelligence doesn't hurt, I think the real key to productivity comes down to maintaining an interest/passion in the craft of designing and writing code. If you care about it then you will always be trying new techniques and paying attention to lessons that can be learned. At the neurological level, one only learns (lays down new memories) for something if one is paying attention to it, and form the strongest memories when there is emotion attached to the experience (totally different areas of the brain are used for emotional memories).
A "blah" programmer just trudges through his/her work without ever really paying attention and trying to learn - they just want to get the job done and go home. A programmer more likely to climb the productivity curve will be always be excited about what they are doing, trying to do it in the best/most consise way (I'd even say correct - many probloems do have minimal solutions that can be found), trying new techniques, etc.
It's too bad that the reality of difference in programmer producticvity isn't better understood, or there might be less outsourcing. The whole premise of outsourcing is that programmers are equivalent and therefore cheaper means better value... Personally I'd prefer to seek out the programmers who are 10-20x more productive than the herd and pay them 2 x normal rather than outsource to some Indian college graduate and pay them 1/3 x normal.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the problem isn't really people misinterpreting the content of the bible, but rather misinterpreting the nature of the bible (which is then going to affect how you interpret it). If your starting assumption (indoctrination) is that the bible is essentially the work of god, then that assumption is going to color everything else about it. If OTOH you accept it as just a book, then you are in the better position of being able to look at it critically, and will realize that it necessarily is a product of it's time and needs to be judged accordingly.
I think the real problem is that many people have very little control, if indeed any, over how they view the bible, since many were indoctrinated into their family religion at a very early age, and it has now become an inherent part of their belief set and self-identify. You can see the profound effect of this childhood indoctrination when you realize that the exact same child raised in a family of another religion would have then as an adult have similarly unshakable views on the correctness of THAT religion. Anyone who's religious beliefs were formed before they had the knowledge to critically evaluate what they were being taught, has therefore lost the ability to view their own religion objectively, since their views of science and different religions is no longer an objective "A vs B vs C" but a highly biased "ME vs B vs C"... Religion A isn't an alternative - it's their self-identity.
If you are going to throw down the false idols and smash them under the feet of non-believers, you're going to have to show how your belief system is more right than religion. Religion has been around a long time and doesn't have to answer to you. To expect it to is like expecting the stones on the shore to suddenly become sand.
I think a better tack is just to point out how irrelevant and powerless "god" has become.. you can believe in him/it all you want, but with the advance of science it's not possible to attribute any power to him, and he's therefore become irrelevant - a purely philosophical entity. There's never yet been a single instance where a fundamental partical, molecule, cell, neuron, or anything else has ever done anything other than obey the laws of science. Not once has "god" ever intervened and made even the slightest difference whatsoever in the world (except in the mind of a believer). Constrast this to a few hundred years ago when due to lack of human knowledge all sorts of power over health, life, death, the weather, etc could be attributed to this mysterious "god" because we didn't know any better.
History shows us that scientific knowledge will eventually enter the collective consciousness and change the way people look at the world, and there's already a vast difference between religous belief as it existed a few hundred years ago and the way it does today. Even the most hardcore creationists often believe that animal species can change a bit(!) due to genetics and natural selection. Ideas/memes that are entrenched in society certainly take a very long time to change, but science is slowly displacing religion, and there's no reason to believe that it won't continue to do so. I don't think that fundamentalist religious belief (in the western world at least, even America!) will be regarded as mainstream in a few hundred years.
In a nutshell:
The natural cycle timeline here (per Gore's graph) is very long - these are the last few ice ages we're looking at, with data derived from artic ice cores etc.
The inevitable conclusion is that global temperature follows CO2 level and CO2 level is already way above normal due to industrialization. The vertical/horizontal axis here are about in correct ration (showing how far above the normal range the CO2 level is).
http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/8480/globalwarmin gua0.jpg
I'm not sure why you assume it must take many generations for a change to occur. Note that we're not talking about time for the genetics to change, but rather time for slowly preaccumulated genetic change have an effect based on a modified environment. In the extreme case where absence/presence of a genetic variation suddenly (due to environmental change) became a life or death issue, then you'd see the population genetics sharply change from one generation to the next.
Note that when it comes to things like predators, a small percentage advantage in some trait is all one needs to make a difference. Obviously it would take time for a non-climbing species evolve an ability to climb, but if a species had an ability to climb that was already sometimes sufficient to evade predators, then increased predation would very rapidly cause the species as a whole to become better climbers becuase it only takes a small difference in evasion ability to make one individual able to escape while an incrementally less able one, on average, does not. If you do mathematical simultations, it turns out that very small improvements can very quickly become dominant in this way.
Of course useful (= survival/breeding advantage) traits are emphasized! That's the definition of useful in this context. Each generation has more "useful" traits than the preceding one simply because lack of those traits is what caused some members of the prior generation to die before breeding or to be less successful at breeding and therefore be disproportionatly underrepresented in the following generation. This is evolution 101.
Depending on how dire the environmental change is that made previous accumulated genetic change now critical (e.g. new predator or major climate change = extrememly dire!), then change can indeed be quick as those without the advantageous genetics (ability to escape predator as well as alternate predator lunch) quickly get wiped out.
I don't get what this has to do with behavior.
The biggest influence on evolution is the environment (competetors, predators, food sources, climeate, etc). What seems to happen is that genetic variation slowly (by it's nature) builds in a population over time, then the environment occasionally quickly changes (the environment can change quicker than genetics can) thus suddenly making some previously begign genetic changes beneficial and others detrimental. I believe this is the basis for the "theory" (i.e. observation) of punctuated equilibrium - animal species remain relatively stable for long periods of time then undergo periods of rapid change.
Introducing a new predator is going to immediately have an effect on the population, and will immediately shift the average genetics of the population (and therefore future generations) in the direction of being better at evading the predator, since the ones that were worse than average (at this previously theoretical, but now real, task) will now be lunch.
In other news, Mark Cuban is considering buying Microsoft on the off chance it may give him an excuse to sue Tux the Penguin.
"I told you Tux was going down" said Cuban.
Cuban is also considering killing his neighbor, a Ford Pinto driver, to prove how dangerous the Pinto is, and plans to detonate his mother's Macintosh to prove that she should have bought a PC.
As a general comment that's very true, although searchmash.com does seem to produce better focused ("more correct") results than google.com does. I tried a few varied searches, and was quite impressed.
I agree that google should concentrate on finding information rather than commercial sites, since that's what people use it for. They could have information/commerce buttons to flip between the two modes. Given that Google make their money from paid advertisements, you'd think it'd make it even more attractive to advertizers if theirs were the only commercial links that appeared, and they weren't "competing" with the search results themselves.
Maybe, but not in the way most people celebrating it as a religious holdiay believe...
The Dec 25th "christmas" holiday was started by roman emperor Aurelian (270-275AD) as the Feast of Sol Invictus (= invicible sun [god]), with the date, close to the winter solstice, reflecting the rebirth of the sun (hours of sunlight start getting longer again, having reached their shortest point). The holiday grew to incororate other roman seasonal traditions such as the gift giving of Saturnalia which preceded it, and later in northern europe also grew to include the winter solstice festival of Yule together with it's trappings of trees, yule logs, and assorted greenery.
When Christianity became the dominant religion in the 4th Century, the church wanted people to stop celebrating the old pagan holidays, but given the practical difficulty of stopping people from celebrating a holiday they enjoyed, they adopted the policy of "embrace and extend" instead (not just for Dec 25th - for many pagan holidays), so they redefined the feast of Sol Invictus as the feast of Christ (Christ-mas) (redefining rebirth of the Sun -> birth of the "Son"), totally ignoring the fact that the bible has Jesus born at a warmer time of year when the shepards are still out at night with their sheep! The Christian attempt to usurp the pagan solstice feast was obviously neveer very successful as most people still adhere to the pagan traditions of feast, presents, tree, greenery, yule logs, etc.
The typical "Christian" "christmas" tree is even topped with an Angel which is a Christian version of the winged pagan goddess Nike/Victory.
So yeah... it's a religious holiday...
The difference is that with the Soviet Union the problem was getting OUT, here I suspect there'll be less of a problem getting OUT, and more of one getting back IN... Makes mexican spring break or european vacations pretty exciting, huh? ... "We hope (if uncle Sam will kindly allow us back in) to be back on date ...".
No doubt there's going to be all sorts of horror stories of bureaucratic screw-ups and people delayed abroad for days while they fix it up.
You don't need a holographic projection - much simpler would be to wear LCD goggles that display what you're sketching, either on it's own or overlaid on reality, combined with what other people in the same room are sketching.
I agree with careful partitioning, but I do it in a fairly crass way... I just have one partition for "/home" (ext3), one for swap, and then a bunch of partitions for "/" of each each distro/release I want to install. I always do fresh installs to a new partition - never upgrades.
/home after a new release, which is tolerable as long as you don't do it too frequently. In the meantime the older version remains 100% unmodified (untouched by the new install) and you can continue to use it until your post-install updates are complete. I try to upgrade as infrequently as possible - I don't upgrade just because there's a new version, but because there's some extremely compelling reason to do so.
This approach is a compromise - your old and new installs are guaranteed to work (as much as any new install is!) since there's no sharing of any system files, but you do then have to reinstall anything outside of
One has to account for X possible previous versions (Dapper, Hoary, Breezy...
Ubuntu doesn't officially support upgrading from anything other than the immediately prior release (in this case Dapper) - if you want to upgrade from older versions then you're meant to do a sequence of upgrades (i.e. one version at a time).
It's good for updates to be lumped into releases since they can be tested better. Individual updates can be individually tested, but in terms of the whole distro this is really just unit testing. System testing each entire release (via release candidates, etc) is likely to find additional bugs such as where updrading some component broke something else that relied on the old version.
I can't imagine NASA doing it for loss of face, but since a Soyuz launch is $5m vs $50M for the shuttle (which is anyway overbooked for the short remainder of it's lifetime), couldn't NASA just pay the Ruskies to take their Hubble repairman up for a day trip?
I hadn't heard that Janet Baker had said that about HMMs...interesting. Do you have a link or reference to the article where she said that, or any more information about why she said HMMs are inadequate and what alternatives she's proposing?
I'd have thought though that use of HMMs or alternate approaches is orthoganal to what features (articulatory vs cepstra, etc) are being used.. is it really HMMs themselves that she's panning?
I just installed 6.06 last week, and am quite impressed by it compared to other flavors of Linux I've tried.. Nice philosophy of installing best of breed applications rather than 101 alternatives and the kitchen sink, and it all seems to work.
One thing that spoiled the experience though, was that I initially got a blank screen with the Live CD, so had to go back and do a "safe graphics mode" boot/install. It turns out (no mention of this in the release notes - had to dig for a day to find it) that the X.org ATI driver for 6.06 is broken such that it doesn't work for RV280 based (Radeon 9200) cards using the DVI output (flat panel)... The fix requires downloading and editing the source and rebuilding the driver.
There's also another bug in the 6.06 ATI driver just discovered a week ago where with xorg.conf RenderAccel="yes" it can corrupt drawing in some circumstances (themes that use Cairo).
Does anyone know if either or both of the fixes for these made it into 6.10 ?
True in general, but in practical terms I bet that a really large database of pre-translated pieces, with suitable fall-back algorithms, could do very well, perhaps especially in more formal domains such as technical papers. Google is trying this approach, and apparently already do much better than conventional translation approaches using it. I'm waiting for them to take it out of the lab and use it to replace Bablefish or whatever they use on google.com.
Doing speech recognition based on articulatory data is much easier than doing it based on spoken speech data... It'd be a speech researcher's dream if s/he could always derive accurate articulatory data from speech, rather than having to make do with an inaccurate mapping from the modulations of the glottal source that it produces (formants, fricatives, stops, etc).
Adding the translation step (which is doomed to be not much better than using a guide book to translate, given current levels of translation know how) is really a gimick, either to attract attention and get reseach funding, or based on some very limited domain (military?) that they are targeting.
According to this article on the EGL webiste, DeBeer's DaimondView system is able to use ultraviolet imaging to deteect the different growth patterns of natural vs lab made diamonds.
d f
http://www.eglcanada.ca/media/ScooponSynthetics.p
Also, gemstone inclusions are very characteristic. I'm not sure about diamonds, but for some stones such as (natural) ruby a lab can tell you which country it came from, and maybe even which mine.
Huh?
They're colored diamonds, and look just like any other colored diamonds.
High quality colored diamonds (such as the Hope blue diamond) are actually rarer than colorless ("white") ones. The rarest are red.
Top Tax rate is irrelevant to most people. At one point in the UK the top rate was 90% (or more?), but that had no effect to most people (other than getting subsidized my multi-millionaires!).
For a fair comparison you need to show total the tax rate for the same salary level in each country. For the US you need to minimally add Social Security to your taxes paid.
US taxes are actually pretty high if you do an oranges and oranges comparison... even more so if you note that in many countries healthcare is covered by taxes, while in the US it costs (a lot) extra. In many countries your taxes also provide a good quality national train system vs the US where it's not really a viable means of casual travel.
I'm curious why it was decided not to add CSS "display: table/table-row/table-cell" support to IE7 since this would do so much to make it easier to create web pages whose layout looks consistent across all browsers? Was there some technical reason why this was not done, or is there a more machievellan reason? ;-)
Google's entire business (web search, book search, news, Google Video) is based around fair use and media agreements, so YouTube doesn't really present any different issues than Google and their laywers are familiar with, and they've also been very busy forging better reltions and deals with the media industry.
I can see why many companies might shy away from YouTube (although I doubt the sincerity of Ballmer & Mark Cuban's opinions), but for Google this is their turf - negotiating content rights is what they do.
The fact that they got YouTube for free considering their share price increase since the announcement doesn't hurt either. It seems to have been a pretty savvy purchase, but time will tell.
Interesting answers, but more because of the different take on things than any individual specifics.
However, I wasn't too impressed with the answers to the productivity question.
While general intelligence doesn't hurt, I think the real key to productivity comes down to maintaining an interest/passion in the craft of designing and writing code. If you care about it then you will always be trying new techniques and paying attention to lessons that can be learned. At the neurological level, one only learns (lays down new memories) for something if one is paying attention to it, and form the strongest memories when there is emotion attached to the experience (totally different areas of the brain are used for emotional memories).
A "blah" programmer just trudges through his/her work without ever really paying attention and trying to learn - they just want to get the job done and go home. A programmer more likely to climb the productivity curve will be always be excited about what they are doing, trying to do it in the best/most consise way (I'd even say correct - many probloems do have minimal solutions that can be found), trying new techniques, etc.
It's too bad that the reality of difference in programmer producticvity isn't better understood, or there might be less outsourcing. The whole premise of outsourcing is that programmers are equivalent and therefore cheaper means better value... Personally I'd prefer to seek out the programmers who are 10-20x more productive than the herd and pay them 2 x normal rather than outsource to some Indian college graduate and pay them 1/3 x normal.