I don't asking my cable ISP to support linux. I only ask them to keep their network working, and to give me the basic network configuration info I need, in some form. At Home did that -- the policy was "we don't support linux", by which they meant "we aren't prepared to handle linux-specific issues." They'd make a reasonable attempt, and ping my cablemodem or whatever, and I could talk to second level techs when necessary.
Attbi wasn't as nice about it, and Comcasts's "we don't support linux" means "We won't talk to you if you mention linux," or perhaps "If you aren't running windows, the issue can't possibly be on our end." The one time I've called them, I had had the problem pretty well pinpointed, and the first-level tech I talked to didn't even know what I was talking about. He asked for, and didn't get, permission to escalate the call. I ended up on the line with his supervisor, whose best suggestion was making a complaint, which had to be by snail mail. (As for faking having a windows box, I simply don't know windows well enough to fake it. And the only time I've set up a windows box to pacify the techs was for the original At Home install; it's a 486 with Win95, and the techs couldn't get ethernet going on it.)
And I'm not asking for handholding -- I don't call them until I'm sure there's no way I can fix it from my end. Finding a work-around is faster, easier, more pleasant, and more reliable than calling them.
I'm sure there's no business case for training techs in linux. There may even be a business case against trying to help at all. That doesn't make it any less of a raw deal.
Anyone who chooses to become a parent out of a sense of shame or obligation is setting up a disaster. I pity the child, because their childhood is very likely to be one long guilt-trip. That may be an overstatement, but some adoptees have heard "Do what I tell you, because if it weren't for me you'd still be in...." enough times to internalize it.
(I'm only talking about those who make an active choice. I'm not saying anything about people who become parents accidentally and choose to accept it.)
I used to think that wanting kids, in a direct, selfish, I-wanting-a-baby-to-hold way, was an awful reason to have a child. During soul-searching before I adopted a child, I concluded the opposite: that kind of wanting is necessary to the psycological health of the child.
which is bullshit, because the habitable zone only applies to our particular ecosystem
Pulsars are the remains of massive stars, and massive stars don't last very long. So life wouldn't have had a chance to get started there.
And we don't know how big they were before their star went supernova. I'm no astrophysicist, but I'd guess they were Jupiter-class, and everything but the core got stripped away.
I don't think capitalism is an entirely flawed model.
Perhaps more to the point, it's futile to try to eliminate capitalism entirely. Every society will have some aspect that are capitalist in some form (with the possible exception of some with communal ownership that actually works, probably limited to <100 people). All you need are possession, voluntary exchange and negotiable terms -- and rules banning those are unlikely to be enforced.
As a description of what goes on in the world, then, capitalism makes useful predictions. As a model for how we should act -- well, any model that doesn't have capitalism embedded in it probably won't work as described.
I don't always like it, but I've concluded it's true: capitalism happens.
It's the kind of thing advocated by Enemies of Unix
who think that everybody on the net should be a Couch Potato Infotainment Consumer
instead of a first-class citizen.
Well said. Broadband vendors should sell the pipe and nothing more -- not necessarily the only option, but it should be an option. They want to sell to couch potatoes. They should be enabling first-class citizenship.
In the papers figure 1, I think I see why sphere 3 turns clockwise, but I can't figure out why sphere 1 turns counterclockwise.
If the charge on 2 is positive, then 1 and 3 can be approximated by dipoles with their negative ends toward 2. 3, being closer to 2 than 1 is, will interact more with 1's negative end than its positive end, so it will turn clockwise. But it looks to me like a similar argument should have 1 turning clockwise as well.
I also can't figure out why the spheres move instead of electrons moving about on the spheres.
The radiation that makes black holes look bright comes from stuff falling in. I don't know what the mechanism is, but the energy comes from the mass's gravitational potential energy. So radiation, and therefore radiation pressure, increases (proportionally?) with how much mass is falling in per unit time. So the eddington limit is a limit on the black hole's accretion rate, not it's size.
Black hole evaporation is a slow process. It has essentially no effect on big black holes, and it isn't relevant to the eddington effect.
This has been going on for several years in the US. The first baby selected this way -- at least for Fanconi anemia -- was born in August or Sept 2000. I believe there have been several dozen such selected-sibling transplants since. More info here, here, and here.
And, as others have noted, calling this a "designer baby" is very misleading. The embryos are created by letting normal sperm and egg cells do their normal thing, only in glassware, and the embryos aren't modified afterwards. The lab work is to decide which embryos would be implanted, so that the resulting child (1) won't have Fanconi anemia, and (2) can be a marrow donor for the sick older sibling. (1) is pretty common now for parents who carry serious genetic diseases and know it.
The success of this procedure says very little about the need for embryonic stem cells, because the stem cells used in this experiment were fundamentally different from embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells -- the ones from embryos a few days old, also called pluripotent stem cells -- can develop into any kind of cell in the body. The ones used in this experiment must have been multipotent stem cells, because the other kinds disappear long before birth. Multipotent stem cells come in may variations, some more specialized than others. Each kind can turn into a limited number of tissue types. See this for more info.
BTW, the embryos from which embryonic stem cells are taken were not aborted. They couldn't be -- to get pluripotent stem cells, you need embryos only a few days old. The source of those is fertility clinics, which created them as part of in vitro fertilization. For various reasons, fertility clinics sometimes have leftovers. It's quite a stretch to associate them with abortion in any way, and I fail a consistent line of reasoning that could allow these leftover embryos to be destroyed but discourage using them in medicine or science.
You're probably right that six wedges is about the limit. But why can't pie menus be hierarchical? If the pointer moves more than N pixels from the starting point, a (pie) submenu pops up. You'd probably need to use one wedge of the submenu as a way back to the parent menu. I've never tried pie menus, but I'd like to.
I agree that a menu bar is useful, but I want the frequently used functions on a right-click menu as well. A few years ago I spent much time with a desktop publishing app that had everything in the menu bar accessible from the right-click menu -- there was one choice in the top-level menu for each pull-down in the menu bar. It had way too much stuff, and if I didn't use it for things I had to look for or think about. For functions I knew and used often -- e.g. edit-menu, bold/italic -- it was faster, and less disruptive to my train of thought, than the menu bar.
As for where to put the menu bar, the edge of the screen makes sense if, and only if, you're talking about a window manager or an app in full-screen mode. What do I do when I want several things on the screen at once? One possibility is to have edges of the window block the pointer (it's possible under X -- there's a maze program floating around that does this) unless a special "let me out" action is taken. That gets you the "infinitely tall" effect without involving the edge of the screen.
Quite often, after doing something with a menu, the user wants the mouse pointer pretty close to where it was before he went for the menu. Putting the menu at the top of the screen makes it easy to hit the menu, but then getting back means a harder movement -- typically halfway across the screen without the edge of the screen as a backstop. What's more, you shifted your gaze up to the menu bar, so you have to find the target with your eyes before you can jump to it. A menu system which kept the pointer and your gaze in the right part of the screen would be faster.
There are (at least) two parts to understanding most science or engineering subjects -- theoretical and experiental, for lack of better words. I don't think you really understand something until you have both and you've tied them together. Traditional classroom teaching doesn't pay much attention to the experiental part -- in demos and labs, but only a little. For some
subjects (e.g. mechanics) you can develop the experience in your daily life, and that's pretty clearly the way to go. For subjects where that doesn't work, simulations has a lot of potential. And this sounds like a good way to do the simulation. If the fidelity is adequate, great!
But you still need the theory. If you learn the experiental part without the theory, you become a technician, rather than an engineer. The theory lets you calculate where that knob should be set, rather than trying all the settings. It lets you figure out of there's any setting that will work before you build the plant. And it lets you program simulators.
I don't see how any simulator can teach the theory. I usually find that if I have the simulator, I spend lots of time playing with it, and I can confirm my understanding of theory I know, but I can't learn new theory.
Another way they could maintain their frequency with inadequate energy input would be to lower the line voltage a bit. If I'm not mistaken, they could lower the voltage by reducing the field current. This would reduce the current drawn by most loads and thus reduced torque and keep the frequency stable.
I'm claiming this is a good way to do it. Significant voltage reductions will destroy many motors, among other things. But (if it's linear, which I don't know) they could get the 0.1 hz they need by lowering the voltage by.17 percent -- 0.2 volts for 120v lines. The input voltage tolerances are big enough that that won't mess up equipment -- unless, of course, they've already lowered it to the bottom of the range.
Something like this was done in Vietnam a few years ago, and probably still is. I don't know what the frequencies were, but the voltage was said to vary from 90v during peak use to 300v in the middle of the night. Every TV I saw when I was there was plugged in to a voltage stabilization box -- basically an induction dimmer adjusted by a servo.
Any two given drops of oil are pretty much interchangable, so nobody who understands the business cares where the oil they use comes from. Take Iraq's oil off the market and the prices go up just as much for the US as for France.
You clearly aren't singing the same tune as ICR -- I got that, and I should said it more clearly. I wonder if they'd even consider you a creationist. To me, ICR's brand of creationism is the important one to address because it's the one that's impeding the teaching of evolution in the US.
I'd be curious to see an informed attempt to fit a literal interpretation of Genesis to current scientific understanding. My conclusion is that it just doesn't fit, even if you stretch or retranslate "day" by a factor of a trillion. How can you deal with having plants arrive before the sun? So I'd mostly be curious about how the inconsistencies are explained away.
Biblical literalism isn't really all that interesting to me, except from an anthropological perspective. There are people for whom it's an honest and consistent belief system, but I have no common ground with them. They start with faith in the bible's literal truth and end doing dances like this to reconcile their belief with logic. I start by trusting observation and reason, look at the bible as a historical document, and see the same passage as a minor case of sloppy journalism. It doesn't make for a satisfying debate.
The real problem that extreme evolutionists have with creationism is that it is founded in a
religious faith, and this is anathema to a scientist (that being blind acceptance of anything
without proof).
I don't know whether or not you'd call me an extreme evolutionist, but I don't care where the ideas come from -- many good ideas in science have come from scientists' religious beliefs, and some have come from some very strange places. And I can understand belief without proof -- I can't believe in any god, but I can understand how someone could. And I recognize my belief that natural science can, in principle, explain all phenomena, as a belief without proof.
I draw my understanding of creationism from from Institute of Creationism Research pamphlets put out in the mid-80s, so this may not apply to any individual creationist. My objections are:
Dishonesty: Creationism claims to be a science, but ICR's goal is to persuade. The goal of science is understanding, but ICR does FUD.
Insisting on a belief in the face of evidence to the contrary. I'm not talking about believing something in the absense of proof. I'm talking about insisting that Genesis is literally true and that the earth is less than 10000 years old, in the face of abundant, fairly unambiguous, and accessible evidence to the contrary.
Radioactive dating, drift rate of land masses vs distance travelled -- there are probably sea-floor core samples with more than 10,000 consecutive visible annual layers. I can see how someone could reject some of the lines of reasoning after honest consideration. But I can't understand how someone could honestly consider all these signs of great age without concluding either that the earth is very old or that the earth was with the intent of deceiving us. And I can't understand how fundamentalists can insist on weighing a book written by the ancients over their own sense and senses. Even if the authors were divinely inspired, they didn't have the words to write what we now understand.
Evidence and arguments for evolution are less accessible (in the sense of understandable without specialized training), but as solid. We have an outline of what happened; we have vestiges of earlier forms; we have a mechanism of change; we have continuity of the infrastructure under it. What more does it take to convince a reasonable person?
A "solution" like that would trash my outbound mail. I forge my From: addresses routinely.
My primary mailbox is with a small, local ISP. I can't buy broadband from them, so I get my connectivity via cablemodem. I do have a mailbox in the cablemodem company domain -- that's the one I give out when I expect abuse. (I do it this way because I expect to be dealing with that ISP long after the cable vendor has either ceased to exist or has treated me badly enough that I left.)
So I want my outbound mail to appear to have come from the ISP. Setting Reply-To is usually adequate, but not always -- when a human is looking for the address, they could easily grab the wrong one. And it creates potential confusion I don't want to create. So I set my from address to name@isp.com.
I can't relay through the ISP's relays, because I'm outside of their IP range. (If they did some form of authenticated SMTP, such as SMTP-after-POP, they could let me.) And the cable vendor's mail relays won't send mail out with some other domain name on it. So I send everything out directly, no relays.
If you look at many headers, I suspect you'll find that I'm not the only one forging my From: address for legit reasons. The presence of the X-Authentication-Warning header some MTAs add correlates fairly weakly with spam. (Some details of it -- e.g. no valid reverse DNS for the sending machine's IP -- could be useful indicators.)
but I still routinely remap the keys to put ctrl next to A. My years on sun keyboards trained me well.
And I can't imagine using emacs with the control key so far from the home finger positions. If I had live with control down there, I might even convert to vi.
It won't catch all blogs, true. But it will get a lot of them -- probably a substantial majority -- and it is a consistent way to get a sample.
The next question is, will the sample be close enough to unbiased that it will be statistically useful? I say it's as biased as the set of blog packages it recognizes. If it's only set up to recognize a couple blog packages, and those packages are only used by narrow subsets of bloggers, then it's probably useless. If it includes most blog packages, it's probably good enough.
How about defining a blog as a site which uses weblog-specific software? It shouldn't be too hard to map web pages to the package that produced them -- some probably put their name in the page somewhere, and others should be recognizable. Of course it would miss those that use custom software. But as long as the set of packages you recognize is fairly inclusive, it shouldn't be badly biased.
The real problem is in identifying sites. Spidering follows power laws, even if the search itself is neutral. That's because it follows the link structure, which follows the power laws. I don't see any way around it. If you -- or your spider -- don't know that a site exists, you can't check it out. And everybody who can tell you about gets their information from sources governed by the same power laws.
Shirky's synopsis of the theoretical network results misses, or glosses over, this point -- the papers I've
read make the very reasonable assumption that the odds of picking up a given new reader are proportional to the number of readers you already have.
Small meteors slow down to terminal velocity as they fall. Big ones don't slow down that much. I'm pretty sure that bowling balls qualify as small for this purpose.
What I don't like is the neo-luddite response to this. When was the last time you had an "authentic" culinary experience? How "real" is antibiotic-filled meat processed eight-ways til Sunday? More importantly, how many people can afford good food?
It takes more time to cook from scratch than to buy prepared food, but it doesn't cost more. In fact, it is *much* cheaper to buy ingredients and do the cooking yourself than to buy prepared food. Its still much cheaper if you buy your ingredients from alternative stores, which often sell things that aren't mass-produced and often have higher prices.
What's more, if you do that, you will have an authentic culinary experience on a very regular basis.
(Ingredients are commodities. Processed foods, unless they're sold as generic. This is related to the fact that farmers have been hurting financially for the last couple decades.)
And I don't like having other people manipulate my perceptions, especially when I'm not warned or have no choice. My perceptions are mine, and I depend on them. There's nothing luddite about that.
Remember this? At the time, I thought these plans were a political ploy to get more money. Now I wouldn't be surprised if they happen, even if the shuttle fleet isn't grounded for long. Trips to ISS took so much of the shuttle fleet's capacity that I doubt they'll be able to do it with only 3 machines.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't asking my cable ISP to support linux. I only ask them to keep their network working, and to give me the basic network configuration info I need, in some form. At Home did that -- the policy was "we don't support linux", by which they meant "we aren't prepared to handle linux-specific issues." They'd make a reasonable attempt, and ping my cablemodem or whatever, and I could talk to second level techs when necessary.
Attbi wasn't as nice about it, and Comcasts's "we don't support linux" means "We won't talk to you if you mention linux," or perhaps "If you aren't running windows, the issue can't possibly be on our end." The one time I've called them, I had had the problem pretty well pinpointed, and the first-level tech I talked to didn't even know what I was talking about. He asked for, and didn't get, permission to escalate the call. I ended up on the line with his supervisor, whose best suggestion was making a complaint, which had to be by snail mail. (As for faking having a windows box, I simply don't know windows well enough to fake it. And the only time I've set up a windows box to pacify the techs was for the original At Home install; it's a 486 with Win95, and the techs couldn't get ethernet going on it.)
And I'm not asking for handholding -- I don't call them until I'm sure there's no way I can fix it from my end. Finding a work-around is faster, easier, more pleasant, and more reliable than calling them.
I'm sure there's no business case for training techs in linux. There may even be a business case against trying to help at all. That doesn't make it any less of a raw deal.
Anyone who chooses to become a parent out of a sense of shame or obligation is setting up a disaster. I pity the child, because their childhood is very likely to be one long guilt-trip. That may be an overstatement, but some adoptees have heard "Do what I tell you, because if it weren't for me you'd still be in ...." enough times to internalize it.
(I'm only talking about those who make an active choice. I'm not saying anything about people who become parents accidentally and choose to accept it.)
I used to think that wanting kids, in a direct, selfish, I-wanting-a-baby-to-hold way, was an awful reason to have a child. During soul-searching before I adopted a child, I concluded the opposite: that kind of wanting is necessary to the psycological health of the child.
Pulsars are the remains of massive stars, and massive stars don't last very long. So life wouldn't have had a chance to get started there.
And we don't know how big they were before their star went supernova. I'm no astrophysicist, but I'd guess they were Jupiter-class, and everything but the core got stripped away.
Perhaps more to the point, it's futile to try to eliminate capitalism entirely. Every society will have some aspect that are capitalist in some form (with the possible exception of some with communal ownership that actually works, probably limited to <100 people). All you need are possession, voluntary exchange and negotiable terms -- and rules banning those are unlikely to be enforced.
As a description of what goes on in the world, then, capitalism makes useful predictions. As a model for how we should act -- well, any model that doesn't have capitalism embedded in it probably won't work as described.
I don't always like it, but I've concluded it's true: capitalism happens.
Stem cells are not all equivalent. See my writeup here
who think that everybody on the net should be a Couch Potato Infotainment Consumer
instead of a first-class citizen.
Well said. Broadband vendors should sell the pipe and nothing more -- not necessarily the only option, but it should be an option. They want to sell to couch potatoes. They should be enabling first-class citizenship.
In the papers figure 1, I think I see why sphere 3 turns clockwise, but I can't figure out why sphere 1 turns counterclockwise.
If the charge on 2 is positive, then 1 and 3 can be approximated by dipoles with their negative ends toward 2. 3, being closer to 2 than 1 is, will interact more with 1's negative end than its positive end, so it will turn clockwise. But it looks to me like a similar argument should have 1 turning clockwise as well.
I also can't figure out why the spheres move instead of electrons moving about on the spheres.
Can you clue me in here?
Black hole evaporation is a slow process. It has essentially no effect on big black holes, and it isn't relevant to the eddington effect.
And, as others have noted, calling this a "designer baby" is very misleading. The embryos are created by letting normal sperm and egg cells do their normal thing, only in glassware, and the embryos aren't modified afterwards. The lab work is to decide which embryos would be implanted, so that the resulting child (1) won't have Fanconi anemia, and (2) can be a marrow donor for the sick older sibling. (1) is pretty common now for parents who carry serious genetic diseases and know it.
Embryonic stem cells -- the ones from embryos a few days old, also called pluripotent stem cells -- can develop into any kind of cell in the body. The ones used in this experiment must have been multipotent stem cells, because the other kinds disappear long before birth. Multipotent stem cells come in may variations, some more specialized than others. Each kind can turn into a limited number of tissue types. See this for more info.
BTW, the embryos from which embryonic stem cells are taken were not aborted. They couldn't be -- to get pluripotent stem cells, you need embryos only a few days old. The source of those is fertility clinics, which created them as part of in vitro fertilization. For various reasons, fertility clinics sometimes have leftovers. It's quite a stretch to associate them with abortion in any way, and I fail a consistent line of reasoning that could allow these leftover embryos to be destroyed but discourage using them in medicine or science.
You're probably right that six wedges is about the limit. But why can't pie menus be hierarchical? If the pointer moves more than N pixels from the starting point, a (pie) submenu pops up. You'd probably need to use one wedge of the submenu as a way back to the parent menu. I've never tried pie menus, but I'd like to.
I agree that a menu bar is useful, but I want the frequently used functions on a right-click menu as well. A few years ago I spent much time with a desktop publishing app that had everything in the menu bar accessible from the right-click menu -- there was one choice in the top-level menu for each pull-down in the menu bar. It had way too much stuff, and if I didn't use it for things I had to look for or think about. For functions I knew and used often -- e.g. edit-menu, bold/italic -- it was faster, and less disruptive to my train of thought, than the menu bar.
As for where to put the menu bar, the edge of the screen makes sense if, and only if, you're talking about a window manager or an app in full-screen mode. What do I do when I want several things on the screen at once? One possibility is to have edges of the window block the pointer (it's possible under X -- there's a maze program floating around that does this) unless a special "let me out" action is taken. That gets you the "infinitely tall" effect without involving the edge of the screen.
BBC has something -- color commentary might be the best description. But to say that the linked BBC article has the details is just plain wrong.
Quite often, after doing something with a menu, the user wants the mouse pointer pretty close to where it was before he went for the menu. Putting the menu at the top of the screen makes it easy to hit the menu, but then getting back means a harder movement -- typically halfway across the screen without the edge of the screen as a backstop. What's more, you shifted your gaze up to the menu bar, so you have to find the target with your eyes before you can jump to it. A menu system which kept the pointer and your gaze in the right part of the screen would be faster.
But you still need the theory. If you learn the experiental part without the theory, you become a technician, rather than an engineer. The theory lets you calculate where that knob should be set, rather than trying all the settings. It lets you figure out of there's any setting that will work before you build the plant. And it lets you program simulators.
I don't see how any simulator can teach the theory. I usually find that if I have the simulator, I spend lots of time playing with it, and I can confirm my understanding of theory I know, but I can't learn new theory.
I'm claiming this is a good way to do it. Significant voltage reductions will destroy many motors, among other things. But (if it's linear, which I don't know) they could get the 0.1 hz they need by lowering the voltage by .17 percent -- 0.2 volts for 120v lines. The input voltage tolerances are big enough that that won't mess up equipment -- unless, of course, they've already lowered it to the bottom of the range.
Something like this was done in Vietnam a few years ago, and probably still is. I don't know what the frequencies were, but the voltage was said to vary from 90v during peak use to 300v in the middle of the night. Every TV I saw when I was there was plugged in to a voltage stabilization box -- basically an induction dimmer adjusted by a servo.
Any two given drops of oil are pretty much interchangable, so nobody who understands the business cares where the oil they use comes from. Take Iraq's oil off the market and the prices go up just as much for the US as for France.
I'd be curious to see an informed attempt to
fit a literal interpretation of Genesis to current scientific understanding. My conclusion is that it just doesn't fit, even if you stretch or retranslate "day" by a factor of a trillion. How can you deal with having plants arrive before the sun? So I'd mostly be curious about how the inconsistencies are explained away.
Biblical literalism isn't really all that interesting to me, except from an anthropological perspective. There are people for whom it's an honest and consistent belief system, but I have no common ground with them. They start with faith in the bible's literal truth and end doing dances like this to reconcile their belief with logic. I start by trusting observation and reason, look at the bible as a historical document, and see the same passage as a minor case of sloppy journalism. It doesn't make for a satisfying debate.
I don't know whether or not you'd call me an extreme evolutionist, but I don't care where the ideas come from -- many good ideas in science have come from scientists' religious beliefs, and some have come from some very strange places. And I can understand belief without proof -- I can't believe in any god, but I can understand how someone could. And I recognize my belief that natural science can, in principle, explain all phenomena, as a belief without proof.
I draw my understanding of creationism from from Institute of Creationism Research pamphlets put out in the mid-80s, so this may not apply to any individual creationist. My objections are:
Radioactive dating, drift rate of land masses vs distance travelled -- there are probably sea-floor core samples with more than 10,000 consecutive visible annual layers. I can see how someone could reject some of the lines of reasoning after honest consideration. But I can't understand how someone could honestly consider all these signs of great age without concluding either that the earth is very old or that the earth was with the intent of deceiving us. And I can't understand how fundamentalists can insist on weighing a book written by the ancients over their own sense and senses. Even if the authors were divinely inspired, they didn't have the words to write what we now understand.
Evidence and arguments for evolution are less accessible (in the sense of understandable without specialized training), but as solid. We have an outline of what happened; we have vestiges of earlier forms; we have a mechanism of change; we have continuity of the infrastructure under it. What more does it take to convince a reasonable person?
My primary mailbox is with a small, local ISP. I can't buy broadband from them, so I get my connectivity via cablemodem. I do have a mailbox in the cablemodem company domain -- that's the one I give out when I expect abuse. (I do it this way because I expect to be dealing with that ISP long after the cable vendor has either ceased to exist or has treated me badly enough that I left.)
So I want my outbound mail to appear to have come from the ISP. Setting Reply-To is usually adequate, but not always -- when a human is looking for the address, they could easily grab the wrong one. And it creates potential confusion I don't want to create. So I set my from address to name@isp.com.
I can't relay through the ISP's relays, because I'm outside of their IP range. (If they did some form of authenticated SMTP, such as SMTP-after-POP, they could let me.) And the cable vendor's mail relays won't send mail out with some other domain name on it. So I send everything out directly, no relays.
If you look at many headers, I suspect you'll find that I'm not the only one forging my From: address for legit reasons. The presence of the X-Authentication-Warning header some MTAs add correlates fairly weakly with spam. (Some details of it -- e.g. no valid reverse DNS for the sending machine's IP -- could be useful indicators.)
And I can't imagine using emacs with the control key so far from the home finger positions. If I had live with control down there, I might even convert to vi.
The next question is, will the sample be close enough to unbiased that it will be statistically useful? I say it's as biased as the set of blog packages it recognizes. If it's only set up to recognize a couple blog packages, and those packages are only used by narrow subsets of bloggers, then it's probably useless. If it includes most blog packages, it's probably good enough.
The real problem is in identifying sites. Spidering follows power laws, even if the search itself is neutral. That's because it follows the link structure, which follows the power laws. I don't see any way around it. If you -- or your spider -- don't know that a site exists, you can't check it out. And everybody who can tell you about gets their information from sources governed by the same power laws.
Shirky's synopsis of the theoretical network results misses, or glosses over, this point -- the papers I've read make the very reasonable assumption that the odds of picking up a given new reader are proportional to the number of readers you already have.
Small meteors slow down to terminal velocity as they fall. Big ones don't slow down that much. I'm pretty sure that bowling balls qualify as small for this purpose.
It takes more time to cook from scratch than to buy prepared food, but it doesn't cost more. In fact, it is *much* cheaper to buy ingredients and do the cooking yourself than to buy prepared food.
Its still much cheaper if you buy your ingredients from alternative stores, which often sell things that aren't mass-produced and often have higher prices.
What's more, if you do that, you will have an authentic culinary experience on a very regular basis.
(Ingredients are commodities. Processed foods, unless they're sold as generic. This is related to the fact that farmers have been hurting financially for the last couple decades.)
And I don't like having other people manipulate my perceptions, especially when I'm not warned or have no choice. My perceptions are mine, and I depend on them. There's nothing luddite about that.
Remember this? At the time, I thought these plans were a political ploy to get more money. Now I wouldn't be surprised if they happen, even if the shuttle fleet isn't grounded for long. Trips to ISS took so much of the shuttle fleet's capacity that I doubt they'll be able to do it with only 3 machines.