On Firefox/Mac, the "a" of the IDN char is rendered slightly differently than is the regular "a". This is true both of the mouseover prompt and the URL bar version. The IDN is slightly more rounded, with a droopier slope.
That said: it's a *slight* difference. I had to look at the source to figure out what the hack was, then stare closely at the characters before I noticed the difference. It's not something you'd notice in a glance at the URL.
It's very few clicks from my/. username to my CV. Moderately intelligent use of google will do it; so will following the URL in my profile.
Btw. Have you ever READ a newspaper? It's extraordinary rare for any to check facts in a letter-to-the-editor, or a guest editorial for that matter (and they're up-front about this... they only check artciles). That's almost exactly what an invited paper is in an academic journal.
Reading this thread, I'm pretty confident that I'm the only participant in this thread who's actually been widely published in peer reviewed journals, and also been a peer reviewer (and published in some journals with mechanisms other than peer review). It just doesn't work anything like the way that thread posters seem to view it through their rose-tinted glasses. You rarely *really* don't know who submitted an article, and there's always a lot of deference to (perceived) authority.
The entirety of what Sokal managed to prove was that the masthead of _Social Text_ was truthful in saying it didn't use peer review. Quite a brilliant "experiment", huh? He cajoled editors who were looking for cross-disciplinary work to accept his piece outside of the normal review process. Maybe they shouldn't have done that, or shouldn't have had the general policy they did about article publication, but their policy was stated and up-front.
It's about on par with me getting the local newspaper to print a letter to the editor that contains inaccurate information, and then claiming it proves something about the journalistic standards of the paper (not that I think my local paper is very good, but I ain't gonna show that with such an open letter).
Have all of the respondents to this note never heard of an INVITED article. In every field I know of, invited articles (like Sokal's) are exempted from the normal process of peer review.
If, e.g., Hawking wanted to publish some utter nonsense in _Physical Review_ he'd have no trouble getting the placement. Big deal, we trust Hawking not to do that because he's shown insight and judgement (and brilliance).
This is, of course, a very inaccurate characterization of the so-called Sokal Affair. Wikipedia does much better, as usual.
A more accurate characterization is that Sokal, through deliberate fraud,and playing on his legitimate reputation within physics, got the _Social Text_ editors to publish an article that they themselves did not think was of high quality. But the editors felt that allowing a professional physicist to publish positions--which they presumed he was expressing, because he said exactly such--informed by his background in Physics.
It's true that LitCrit professor are not physicists. Nor do/did they claim to be. They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
I am a legitimate expert in a number of things, for example. I could certainly get journals or magazines concerned with other subjects to publish my deliberately misleading characterizations of those subjects I know, particularly if they were journals in other areas that had an interest in cross-discipline discussion. So what? You can lie and deceive, and still get published. Big deal!
It's true that Sokal doesn't really understand modern science studies and postmodernism. But the crude caricature he's formed of the area is unlike his simple, traditional and positivistic notions of science. And for whatever reason, it was easier for him to get a big chip on his shoulder than it was to learn about another area of knowledge. Hence the whole affair.
Gates donation certainly *is* a good thing. The money given for schools to "buy" Windows machines is far more self-interested. But vaccines are unambiguously good.
Yeah, all of Gates' money is ill-gotten; but given that context, giving it to vaccines for poor people is a lot better than just buying another zillion dollar house.
The percentage *is* certainly less than *I* give, however. My total assets are... well, the US$165k house that I now own outright (I paid a lot less than that for it, but I have reason to think it could sell for around that). I guess you could throw in my car, which might be worth $6k used. Really reaching, a few old computers and other items might be worth a few thousand more.
So 1.5% is around $2.5k. I gave $3k to Doctors without Borders in 2004 (another $500 to EFF; and maybe $750 in-kind to the local survival center--homeless support and the like).
I suspect that few thousand affects my standard of living more than the $750M does Gates'. But then, the people who benefit from my few thousand have so much less than I do--even with some medicines I bought--that it's pettty to make the former comparison. I'm comfortable enough.
What really makes sense, IMO, is something I wrote a couple articles about several years back. Namely, rather than define a custom binary format that every tool needs to understand, simply perform a reversible transformation on XML (i.e. compression) for the storage and transmission steps. So the XML writing application and the XML reading application have no need to know anything about the compression. That's all pipelined, in a way invisible to the ends.
Of course, standard tools like 'gzip' can do exactly this. But it's also possible to take advantage of the inherent structure and redundancy of XML to get far better compression ratios. But the concept isn't really much different. See these (and also the longer articles for Intel that they link to, but the basics are in the below):
Actually, you can find better formatted versions of the Intel versions at:
http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_ids.html
In any case, the concept is the same... (losslessly) futzing with structure can help out standard compression like gzip. But there's no need to build binary or different semantics into the heart of XML.
Of course, in REAL LIFE, no evolutionist--nor any biologist in general--has ever called evolution "only theory and not fact." At least not for well over a hundred and fifty years.
These idiot fundamentalist christian anti-science types sometimes try to play on those areas within evolutionary theory that are still open to try to create the illusion that the fact of evolution itself is less than certain. For example, reasonable opinions differ on the importance of genetic drift, regulatory genes, genomic acquisition via viral insertions, group-level selective mechanisms, and various other things.
Yeah, some issues are open within evolution. And some issues are open within quantum physics. And some issues are open within crystal dynamics. And what not. The basic principles of scientific fields--at the level laypeople understand them--aren't in question.
I'm borrowing from a post over at Kuro5hin. More people read/., so it's more interesting to discuss it here.
Does it really work, or not? (none / 1) (#250)
by cjames53 on Mon Jan 3rd, 2005 at 12:38:53 PM EST
[...]An Encyclopedia is:
* Comprehensive: Articles on every subject of interest to virtually anyone.
* Complete: Each article covers the topic
* Accurate: Each article is accurate and factual, or where there are issues of controversy or opinion, the various points of view are laid out clearly.
* Indexed and cross-referenced: Articles on related topics are cross referenced, and there is a way for authors to identify keywords for an index.
* Readable: Articles are written with a tone, language and style that can be understood by the typical person, i.e. a person who is otherwise unacquainted with the topic.
The comment author argues that by these standards, Wikipedia is not really an encyclopedia. The problem in his/her argument is its blindness. A traditional encyclopedia, like Encylopedia Brittanica fails in more of these criteria than Wikipedia does! By the stated criteria, nothing has ever been an encyclopedia... maybe being one is still a worthwhile goal, but it's only a theoretical idea (and an ideal Wikipedia is approaching much faster than anything else is approaching it).
Comprehensive: Wikipedia arguably wins over Brittanica here. Or at least it's a mixed bag. On current topics, and especially in technical/computer areas, Wikipedia wins hands-down, simply because of its instantaneous nature.
Complete: Win for Brittanica. Not complete success, but generally those topics included in Brittanica have a reasonable thoroughness. Wikipedia has too many stubs (but it is moving towards filling them in, every day).
Accurate: Tie. Every encyclopedia has some errors. My feeling is that Wikipedia does better on neutrality, but worse on minor factual issues.
Indexed and cross-referenced: Hands down win for Wikipedia. Not just because the links are clickable on the web, but because of the richness of links, both internal and external. Tradional print encyclopedias have valuable "See Also" footers, but they are overly parsimonious with the use of them.
Readable: Tie. More typos in Wikipedia, but less outright obscurity of intent
The issues UnapprovedThought raises have all been thoroughly discussed and addressed by Open Voting Consortium. The online "web demo" demonstrates some of the answers. In very briefest form:
Headphones (and a distinguishable braille ballot itself compromises anonymity: how many blind voters are there per precinct?)
Good interface design (not excluding pre-printed instructions
Default screen has button in large font reading "Press for large fonts".
The OVC design does use a normal ballot box, padlock and all. The machine is just a way of printing out a prepared ballot to cast into the ballot box.
Bev Harris and BlackboxVoting are certainly doing great work in exposing fraud and corruption among DRE voting machine makers (and other types, for that matter).
But the real solution to the problem, long term, past the current election, is to get electronic voting machines based on open source code, and that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. It just so happens that there's an organization for that purpose that could really use some assistance (financial and otherwise) right now: the Open Voting Consortium.
Just to be extra-sexy, our reference system uses Linux and Python:-).
BTW. Some readers will think: "What's wrong with plain old paper and pencil?" Actually, there's not so much wrong with that. I just used a pencil to vote in Massachusetts yesterday, and it worked great. Paper ballot. Zero line at the polls. Perfectly transparent. Great security (just look at that padlock on the ballot box).
But electronic machines do have a few good things, as long as their source code is open and the print out paper ballots after selections are made: Multi-lingual; blind accessible (using audio interface) and special interfaces for motor-impaired voters; large fonts for vision impaired voters; prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes.
LinuxWorld indeed has "Linux" in its name/URL. Likewise, hypothetical sites like AOLsux.com or microsoftsux.com have "AOL" or "microsoft", respectively, in their names. Generally you would not expect the sites I mention to be pro-X, despite containing X in the name.
Likewise, LinuxWorld is by no means anything close to a pro-Linux site. It may or may not be a covert MS project; but in either event, it AIN'T a good source of Linux information.
I really like Mac OS X but I don't want to drop $2000 on a computer that is only as fast as an x86 computer at half the price.
Why do/. editors allow such idiotic misinformation in main articles. The plain fact is that Apple machines are very reasonably and competitively priced relative to x86 machines. It's true, you can't get the absolute lowest-end home-built or semi-built systems from Apple. But for what they sell (which is, realistically, what most people want to use), it's right on target. Even apart form PPC really being a much nicer chip family.
For example, a G5 is generally a better chip than a P4; but P4's go to faster clock speeds, and maybe even slightly faster top end bogo-mips. But an Athlon64 or Xeon is a more realistic comparison. In any case, you can buy a G5 iMac with a 17" flat panel monitor--in a beautifully integrated package--for $1300. And it comes with a a DVD/CD-RW drive; good memory architechture; and so on.
Does anyone think they can buy an x86 matching that spec for $650?! Maybe you can get an ugly white box with an external 17" monitor for $1000-1100. So yeah, you pay a few hundred for much better ergonomics, aesthetics, usability, stability, etc.
Likewise, a dual G5 tower for $2000 is a fast machine, and well-architected. No one is going to be buying a dual Xeon, or even dual Athlon64 system for $1000. Maybe you can bargain-basement it for a bit less than $2k, but let's not promote the "half as much" lie! And what you get is really not as nice in lots of ways.
And even more so of the same analysis with Apple laptops, with Xserves, and so on.
It doesn't even seem bizarre that people have circular preferences.
Someone downthread mentioned Tversky and Kanneman, which is a good reference for actual decision processes. Part of what you need to think about in understanding preferences is that people "frame" their decisions in contextual schemata.
For example, the most germane contrast between candidate A and candidate B might be their views on health care policy. On that, A is clearly better than B. But once you come to B vs. C, the obvious conflict is over taxation laws. And here you really like B. But coming full circle to A and C, the disagreement between them has mostly been over security and military actions. In this case, C's policies are much better than A's.
IOW, not every pairwise decision is formulated in terms of the same issues as each other one. And bringing different issues to the conceptual framework can give you non-transitive preference structures.
davejenkins is as wrong as wrong can be. The "Australian Ballot" system has remarkably strong checks on ballot integrity and trail. davejenkins has never taken a close look at a polling place, apparently.
At the beginning of the day, an elections worker opens a ballot box to make sure it is empty, under the watchful eyes of observers from contesting political parties (e.g. a Democrat and a Republican). Given their contrary desires about election outcome, no observer would consent to pre-stuffing the ballot (i.e. they might like fake ballot of their own party, but not of the other party).
Then the ballot box is sealed, and a lock is placed on it. The box is also watched by those mentioned observers during the course of the day, so stuffing becomes difficult.
At the end of the day, everyone watches the box being unlocked; watches the ballots being pulled out and shuffled (to increase anonymity for early- or late-voters by eliminating sequence).
Then under the watchful eye of all the observers (and of several elections workers), the ballots are counted and sorted. Totals recorded. Vote tallies posted at the polling place. Procedures signed off on by judges and observers. And the records sealed back up into envelopes or lock boxes.
NONE of these safeguards exist in Omega's secret system that lacks any observers.
I don't think the reporter's poor investigation has much to do with this piece. I'm not saying the "research" was any good--Bruce is probably right about the ignorance of Businessweek. But the knowledge part is kinda irrelevant.
Instead, Businessweek, being what they are, is in the business of fantasizing about free giveaways to large companies. Sort of the Enron model of capitalism. What could Businessweek readers like more than a massive donation of free programming efforts into the private coffers of big business? Well, I suppose they like massive corporate welfare even more (the Haliburton model); but they'd certainly be happy to accept the free money of "privatized" Free Software.
The patent issue is OF COURSE completely irrelevant here. Or maybe BSD-licensed software would be slightly more vulnerable to patent suits. But the difference is small, in any case. The main patent danger is big companies spending a lot more on lawyers than Free Software developers possibly can--and quite independent of the "merits" of patent claims, getting injunctions against Free Software.
Real launched a campaign to astroturf Apple (and the press) to sell its songs. It sure looks like Apple hired a bunch of its own astroturfers to post anti-Real comments on Real's bulletin board.
A pox on both houses, I say. There's no higher ground in claiming greater rights to screw consumers with DRM. (but on the narrow point, reverse engineering is a good thing, which must be protected... so Real is narrowly right on this thing, though wrong on most everything else).
Hmmm... isn't Amsterdam in 'The Netherlands'. For that matter, isn't Mars in 'The Solar System'. I may buy pants at Target; but I might find a pair I like at The Gap. Having or lacking an article is a very poor indicator of whether something is a proper noun.
Well... at least neither "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" nor "Gigli" has Celine Dion on their soundtracks. Heck, not even "Battlefield Earth" does:-). Of course I managed to stay away from all of those.
The really horrible thing was I KNEW how bad "Titanic" would be, and steadfastly refused to see it every time my GF implored me to go to it... but after about six months (with the big steam roller of publicity), I caved in. Terrible moment of weakness to agree.
On the plus side--as another poster observes--Leonardo DiCaprio *does* eventually die. If you were to remove the first three and a half hours of the film, it might actually be enjoyable. Maybe splice in a special effect of walls of water or two (say two or three minutes worth).
...was, of course, "Titanic". Not just the worst *movie* I've seen, but the worst *three hours* of my life. Dental surgery is a lot more fun, for example.
Our truly despicable Massachusetts Governor (but not resident) Romney has tried to resurrect this old law from the early 20th Century (I forget, maybe 1914 or something). The law has not been used since Loving vs. Virginia, and is almost certainly unconstitutional under Loving. The point of the law, after all, was to enforce anti-miscegenation laws... even though MA wasn't quite so bad as to have them itself.
I am confident that the old anti-miscegenation will be explicitly overturned by the current appeals. And on the plus side, I don't know of a single Massachusetts town clerk who is going along with Romney's homophobic putsch.
'matthewn' is flat out wrong on the "full faith and credit" clause. States *always* recognize marriages granted by other states. Even if the relationship exclusions are different; even if the age requirements are different; even if the waiting periods or medical exams are different. That's why the meme about "going to [other state] to get married" is so prevalent, after all!
It *is* true that there is some precedent for non-compliance with the Constitutions mandate of full faith and credit: anti-miscegenation laws. Back before Loving vs. Virginia, some states indeed excluded marriages valid in other states. What a surprise that many of the very same people who are today's homophobes grew up as yesteryears' racists.... well, they were homophobes then too, and mostly they're still racists now. But it's a matter of priorities.:-(
'devilspgd' claims that the insurance company will not investigatge "99.99999%" of the time. Or in other words, they WILL investigate one time out of 10 million. Which amounts to probably one investigation in the company's history of laptop policies.
I think s/he got a little overly fond of typing "9"s. I'm rather certain that one should lose most of them to get a sense of the actual likelihood. I agree that the company will "usually not" investigate--why not just say it that way?
Something about pseudo-numeric claims just kinda bugs me.
The lyric with "No Trespassin'" is certainly a variation that Woody sang at times, as have other people. But the version that has the sign saying "Private Property" was also sung by Woody. There's a photostat of that verse in Woody's handwriting floating around the 'net in various places. And the "Private Property" line was the one recorded by Alan Lomax for Folkway Records/Smithsonian Museum.
I personally like the "Private Property" lyric better... it puts Woody's anti-capitalism in clearer relief.
FWIW, the "God made America for me" line was an earlier refrain than "This land was made for you and me"... as far as that goes, I don't like the "God made" thing as much. Folk songs are fluid, and variations are how they evolve.
Slashdot Mirror
On Firefox/Mac, the "a" of the IDN char is rendered slightly differently than is the regular "a". This is true both of the mouseover prompt and the URL bar version. The IDN is slightly more rounded, with a droopier slope.
That said: it's a *slight* difference. I had to look at the source to figure out what the hack was, then stare closely at the characters before I noticed the difference. It's not something you'd notice in a glance at the URL.
It's very few clicks from my /. username to my CV. Moderately intelligent use of google will do it; so will following the URL in my profile.
Btw. Have you ever READ a newspaper? It's extraordinary rare for any to check facts in a letter-to-the-editor, or a guest editorial for that matter (and they're up-front about this... they only check artciles). That's almost exactly what an invited paper is in an academic journal.
Reading this thread, I'm pretty confident that I'm the only participant in this thread who's actually been widely published in peer reviewed journals, and also been a peer reviewer (and published in some journals with mechanisms other than peer review). It just doesn't work anything like the way that thread posters seem to view it through their rose-tinted glasses. You rarely *really* don't know who submitted an article, and there's always a lot of deference to (perceived) authority.
The entirety of what Sokal managed to prove was that the masthead of _Social Text_ was truthful in saying it didn't use peer review. Quite a brilliant "experiment", huh? He cajoled editors who were looking for cross-disciplinary work to accept his piece outside of the normal review process. Maybe they shouldn't have done that, or shouldn't have had the general policy they did about article publication, but their policy was stated and up-front.
It's about on par with me getting the local newspaper to print a letter to the editor that contains inaccurate information, and then claiming it proves something about the journalistic standards of the paper (not that I think my local paper is very good, but I ain't gonna show that with such an open letter).
Have all of the respondents to this note never heard of an INVITED article. In every field I know of, invited articles (like Sokal's) are exempted from the normal process of peer review.
If, e.g., Hawking wanted to publish some utter nonsense in _Physical Review_ he'd have no trouble getting the placement. Big deal, we trust Hawking not to do that because he's shown insight and judgement (and brilliance).
This is, of course, a very inaccurate characterization of the so-called Sokal Affair. Wikipedia does much better, as usual.
A more accurate characterization is that Sokal, through deliberate fraud,and playing on his legitimate reputation within physics, got the _Social Text_ editors to publish an article that they themselves did not think was of high quality. But the editors felt that allowing a professional physicist to publish positions--which they presumed he was expressing, because he said exactly such--informed by his background in Physics.
It's true that LitCrit professor are not physicists. Nor do/did they claim to be. They deferred to someone who really was in a position to share expert knowledge, and put it in a context of postmodernist theory.
I am a legitimate expert in a number of things, for example. I could certainly get journals or magazines concerned with other subjects to publish my deliberately misleading characterizations of those subjects I know, particularly if they were journals in other areas that had an interest in cross-discipline discussion. So what? You can lie and deceive, and still get published. Big deal!
It's true that Sokal doesn't really understand modern science studies and postmodernism. But the crude caricature he's formed of the area is unlike his simple, traditional and positivistic notions of science. And for whatever reason, it was easier for him to get a big chip on his shoulder than it was to learn about another area of knowledge. Hence the whole affair.
Gates donation certainly *is* a good thing. The money given for schools to "buy" Windows machines is far more self-interested. But vaccines are unambiguously good.
Yeah, all of Gates' money is ill-gotten; but given that context, giving it to vaccines for poor people is a lot better than just buying another zillion dollar house.
The percentage *is* certainly less than *I* give, however. My total assets are... well, the US$165k house that I now own outright (I paid a lot less than that for it, but I have reason to think it could sell for around that). I guess you could throw in my car, which might be worth $6k used. Really reaching, a few old computers and other items might be worth a few thousand more.
So 1.5% is around $2.5k. I gave $3k to Doctors without Borders in 2004 (another $500 to EFF; and maybe $750 in-kind to the local survival center--homeless support and the like).
I suspect that few thousand affects my standard of living more than the $750M does Gates'. But then, the people who benefit from my few thousand have so much less than I do--even with some medicines I bought--that it's pettty to make the former comparison. I'm comfortable enough.
What really makes sense, IMO, is something I wrote a couple articles about several years back. Namely, rather than define a custom binary format that every tool needs to understand, simply perform a reversible transformation on XML (i.e. compression) for the storage and transmission steps. So the XML writing application and the XML reading application have no need to know anything about the compression. That's all pipelined, in a way invisible to the ends.
/ x-matters13.html
/ x-matters19/
Of course, standard tools like 'gzip' can do exactly this. But it's also possible to take advantage of the inherent structure and redundancy of XML to get far better compression ratios. But the concept isn't really much different. See these (and also the longer articles for Intel that they link to, but the basics are in the below):
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/xml/library
Actually, you can find better formatted versions of the Intel versions at:
http://gnosis.cx/publish/tech_index_ids.html
In any case, the concept is the same... (losslessly) futzing with structure can help out standard compression like gzip. But there's no need to build binary or different semantics into the heart of XML.
Of course, in REAL LIFE, no evolutionist--nor any biologist in general--has ever called evolution "only theory and not fact." At least not for well over a hundred and fifty years.
These idiot fundamentalist christian anti-science types sometimes try to play on those areas within evolutionary theory that are still open to try to create the illusion that the fact of evolution itself is less than certain. For example, reasonable opinions differ on the importance of genetic drift, regulatory genes, genomic acquisition via viral insertions, group-level selective mechanisms, and various other things.
Yeah, some issues are open within evolution. And some issues are open within quantum physics. And some issues are open within crystal dynamics. And what not. The basic principles of scientific fields--at the level laypeople understand them--aren't in question.
I'm borrowing from a post over at Kuro5hin. More people read /., so it's more interesting to discuss it here.
The comment author argues that by these standards, Wikipedia is not really an encyclopedia. The problem in his/her argument is its blindness. A traditional encyclopedia, like Encylopedia Brittanica fails in more of these criteria than Wikipedia does! By the stated criteria, nothing has ever been an encyclopedia... maybe being one is still a worthwhile goal, but it's only a theoretical idea (and an ideal Wikipedia is approaching much faster than anything else is approaching it).
Bev Harris and BlackboxVoting are certainly doing great work in exposing fraud and corruption among DRE voting machine makers (and other types, for that matter).
But the real solution to the problem, long term, past the current election, is to get electronic voting machines based on open source code, and that produce voter-verifiable paper ballots. It just so happens that there's an organization for that purpose that could really use some assistance (financial and otherwise) right now: the Open Voting Consortium.
Just to be extra-sexy, our reference system uses Linux and Python :-).
BTW. Some readers will think: "What's wrong with plain old paper and pencil?" Actually, there's not so much wrong with that. I just used a pencil to vote in Massachusetts yesterday, and it worked great. Paper ballot. Zero line at the polls. Perfectly transparent. Great security (just look at that padlock on the ballot box).
But electronic machines do have a few good things, as long as their source code is open and the print out paper ballots after selections are made: Multi-lingual; blind accessible (using audio interface) and special interfaces for motor-impaired voters; large fonts for vision impaired voters; prevent overvotes and unintentional undervotes.
LinuxWorld indeed has "Linux" in its name/URL. Likewise, hypothetical sites like AOLsux.com or microsoftsux.com have "AOL" or "microsoft", respectively, in their names. Generally you would not expect the sites I mention to be pro-X, despite containing X in the name.
Likewise, LinuxWorld is by no means anything close to a pro-Linux site. It may or may not be a covert MS project; but in either event, it AIN'T a good source of Linux information.
Why do /. editors allow such idiotic misinformation in main articles. The plain fact is that Apple machines are very reasonably and competitively priced relative to x86 machines. It's true, you can't get the absolute lowest-end home-built or semi-built systems from Apple. But for what they sell (which is, realistically, what most people want to use), it's right on target. Even apart form PPC really being a much nicer chip family.
For example, a G5 is generally a better chip than a P4; but P4's go to faster clock speeds, and maybe even slightly faster top end bogo-mips. But an Athlon64 or Xeon is a more realistic comparison. In any case, you can buy a G5 iMac with a 17" flat panel monitor--in a beautifully integrated package--for $1300. And it comes with a a DVD/CD-RW drive; good memory architechture; and so on.
Does anyone think they can buy an x86 matching that spec for $650?! Maybe you can get an ugly white box with an external 17" monitor for $1000-1100. So yeah, you pay a few hundred for much better ergonomics, aesthetics, usability, stability, etc.
Likewise, a dual G5 tower for $2000 is a fast machine, and well-architected. No one is going to be buying a dual Xeon, or even dual Athlon64 system for $1000. Maybe you can bargain-basement it for a bit less than $2k, but let's not promote the "half as much" lie! And what you get is really not as nice in lots of ways.
And even more so of the same analysis with Apple laptops, with Xserves, and so on.
"Prescious [sic] few things are more efficient than the free market."
If only the free market could bring about better spelling too!
It doesn't even seem bizarre that people have circular preferences.
Someone downthread mentioned Tversky and Kanneman, which is a good reference for actual decision processes. Part of what you need to think about in understanding preferences is that people "frame" their decisions in contextual schemata.
For example, the most germane contrast between candidate A and candidate B might be their views on health care policy. On that, A is clearly better than B. But once you come to B vs. C, the obvious conflict is over taxation laws. And here you really like B. But coming full circle to A and C, the disagreement between them has mostly been over security and military actions. In this case, C's policies are much better than A's.
IOW, not every pairwise decision is formulated in terms of the same issues as each other one. And bringing different issues to the conceptual framework can give you non-transitive preference structures.
davejenkins is as wrong as wrong can be. The "Australian Ballot" system has remarkably strong checks on ballot integrity and trail. davejenkins has never taken a close look at a polling place, apparently.
At the beginning of the day, an elections worker opens a ballot box to make sure it is empty, under the watchful eyes of observers from contesting political parties (e.g. a Democrat and a Republican). Given their contrary desires about election outcome, no observer would consent to pre-stuffing the ballot (i.e. they might like fake ballot of their own party, but not of the other party).
Then the ballot box is sealed, and a lock is placed on it. The box is also watched by those mentioned observers during the course of the day, so stuffing becomes difficult.
At the end of the day, everyone watches the box being unlocked; watches the ballots being pulled out and shuffled (to increase anonymity for early- or late-voters by eliminating sequence).
Then under the watchful eye of all the observers (and of several elections workers), the ballots are counted and sorted. Totals recorded. Vote tallies posted at the polling place. Procedures signed off on by judges and observers. And the records sealed back up into envelopes or lock boxes.
NONE of these safeguards exist in Omega's secret system that lacks any observers.
I don't think the reporter's poor investigation has much to do with this piece. I'm not saying the "research" was any good--Bruce is probably right about the ignorance of Businessweek. But the knowledge part is kinda irrelevant.
Instead, Businessweek, being what they are, is in the business of fantasizing about free giveaways to large companies. Sort of the Enron model of capitalism. What could Businessweek readers like more than a massive donation of free programming efforts into the private coffers of big business? Well, I suppose they like massive corporate welfare even more (the Haliburton model); but they'd certainly be happy to accept the free money of "privatized" Free Software.
The patent issue is OF COURSE completely irrelevant here. Or maybe BSD-licensed software would be slightly more vulnerable to patent suits. But the difference is small, in any case. The main patent danger is big companies spending a lot more on lawyers than Free Software developers possibly can--and quite independent of the "merits" of patent claims, getting injunctions against Free Software.
Real launched a campaign to astroturf Apple (and the press) to sell its songs. It sure looks like Apple hired a bunch of its own astroturfers to post anti-Real comments on Real's bulletin board.
A pox on both houses, I say. There's no higher ground in claiming greater rights to screw consumers with DRM. (but on the narrow point, reverse engineering is a good thing, which must be protected... so Real is narrowly right on this thing, though wrong on most everything else).
Hmmm... isn't Amsterdam in 'The Netherlands'. For that matter, isn't Mars in 'The Solar System'. I may buy pants at Target; but I might find a pair I like at The Gap. Having or lacking an article is a very poor indicator of whether something is a proper noun.
Well... at least neither "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians" nor "Gigli" has Celine Dion on their soundtracks. Heck, not even "Battlefield Earth" does :-). Of course I managed to stay away from all of those.
The really horrible thing was I KNEW how bad "Titanic" would be, and steadfastly refused to see it every time my GF implored me to go to it... but after about six months (with the big steam roller of publicity), I caved in. Terrible moment of weakness to agree.
On the plus side--as another poster observes--Leonardo DiCaprio *does* eventually die. If you were to remove the first three and a half hours of the film, it might actually be enjoyable. Maybe splice in a special effect of walls of water or two (say two or three minutes worth).
...was, of course, "Titanic". Not just the worst *movie* I've seen, but the worst *three hours* of my life. Dental surgery is a lot more fun, for example.
:-(.
Then I clicked the link for top gross...
Our truly despicable Massachusetts Governor (but not resident) Romney has tried to resurrect this old law from the early 20th Century (I forget, maybe 1914 or something). The law has not been used since Loving vs. Virginia, and is almost certainly unconstitutional under Loving. The point of the law, after all, was to enforce anti-miscegenation laws... even though MA wasn't quite so bad as to have them itself.
I am confident that the old anti-miscegenation will be explicitly overturned by the current appeals. And on the plus side, I don't know of a single Massachusetts town clerk who is going along with Romney's homophobic putsch.
'matthewn' is flat out wrong on the "full faith and credit" clause. States *always* recognize marriages granted by other states. Even if the relationship exclusions are different; even if the age requirements are different; even if the waiting periods or medical exams are different. That's why the meme about "going to [other state] to get married" is so prevalent, after all!
:-(
It *is* true that there is some precedent for non-compliance with the Constitutions mandate of full faith and credit: anti-miscegenation laws. Back before Loving vs. Virginia, some states indeed excluded marriages valid in other states. What a surprise that many of the very same people who are today's homophobes grew up as yesteryears' racists.... well, they were homophobes then too, and mostly they're still racists now. But it's a matter of priorities.
'devilspgd' claims that the insurance company will not investigatge "99.99999%" of the time. Or in other words, they WILL investigate one time out of 10 million. Which amounts to probably one investigation in the company's history of laptop policies.
I think s/he got a little overly fond of typing "9"s. I'm rather certain that one should lose most of them to get a sense of the actual likelihood. I agree that the company will "usually not" investigate--why not just say it that way?
Something about pseudo-numeric claims just kinda bugs me.
The lyric with "No Trespassin'" is certainly a variation that Woody sang at times, as have other people. But the version that has the sign saying "Private Property" was also sung by Woody. There's a photostat of that verse in Woody's handwriting floating around the 'net in various places. And the "Private Property" line was the one recorded by Alan Lomax for Folkway Records/Smithsonian Museum.
I personally like the "Private Property" lyric better... it puts Woody's anti-capitalism in clearer relief.
FWIW, the "God made America for me" line was an earlier refrain than "This land was made for you and me"... as far as that goes, I don't like the "God made" thing as much. Folk songs are fluid, and variations are how they evolve.