The article gives an interesting perspective: can you get good answers out? But the reverse perspective is interesting to me: is it worth answering the questions?
I've been "playing" on Yahoo Answers for a few weeks. I've got a few areas of real expertise, as well as a general interest in, well, stuff. The points are a silly reward; it's not like I'm going to cash them in on a new washer-dryer. But it's just kinda cool to know that my answers are appreciated. And it's sometimes fun to have the questions drive a bit of random web-searching in topics that I'm interested in when I'm otherwise bored.
But like Slashdot, there are some trolls. They've just this week promised new tools against trolls, but without specifying what they are. It's unpleasant to read some asinine question, clearly written with the intent of pissing somebody off, or seeing how subtly they can ask a stupid question so that I don't feel justified in flagging it as offensive. No, it's not destroying my life, but it gets in the way of what I think of as a game.
And there are a number of silly questions. No, I'm not going to factor that equation for you; it's clearly your homework. If you'd asked for help on the concept I'd provide it, or even if you explained why you couldn't get this one out of the rest of them. But I'm not doing your homework for you.
In the case of TV, the networks have a special consideration: nearly free bandwidth. They get premium advertising space delivered into everybody's home for free, which allows them to produce really expensive shows with a truly national audience. And the must-carry laws mean that they have to be available on cable systems, too.
Therefore, pay-to-download doesn't just substitute one form of income for another; it completely undermines this immense boondoggle they've been given in over-the-air broadcasting. And if they aren't broadcasting on the air, they aren't automatically on the cable, either.
So it's not just about losing control of the content. It's about losing control of the means of distribution and becoming just another thing, lost in the noise like a YouTube video.
The real work of Congress isn't done on the Congressional floor. The real work is done in committees, and most of the committee meetings are closed, even the ones that are nominally open.
If they can't find a way to close them, they'll hold the meeting in their offices in private, come to a conclusion, and then open the meeting for a trivial few minutes to announce the results.
C-SPAN is for making speeches, not for legislating.
Until some jackass forwards you an article, includes you on a mass email, sends you an e-card, etc.
Like you, I've got an array of email address (scores of them, actually), with one final true "use this if you must reach me" email address known only to a very few close, personal, and technologically savvy friends. Gradually I blacklist the ones that get too much spam, but sadly the primary general-acquaintances email address is in full spammer rotation now, and I may have to drop it soon. That will be painful. The filter I use keeps it to a tolerable level, but just barely.
Since book shelves are ordinarily sorted by the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress codes, it sounds like it would be easy to mimic that in a virtual library. I'm surprised nobody's done it before. It would be great if Amazon were to add a link to other books on the same "shelf", though they've got even more sophisticated ways of making suggestions.
Yeah, I'd realized later I'd forgotten cufflinks and tie tacks. There are also a few other bits, like that tie-support thing that some people wear in their collars. And on tuxedos you have the option of fancy studs rather than buttons.
Slashdotters may not, but watches are one of the only forms of jewelry allowed for upper-class and upper-middle-class men. Necklaces and earrings are still considered gaudy, and rings are restricted to a wedding band and perhaps a class ring/military ring.
The sorts of guys who wear suits as fashion statements are very likely to wear a watch as well. It's not so much about knowing what time it is as about wearing something pretty (and expensive) on your wrist. Your tie and your watch are the most expressive things you're allowed to wear.
Hey, I don't make the rules. I just talk about 'em. Me, I stopped wearing a watch years before I acquired a cell phone, and I don't wear any jewelry at all.
And far, far scarier than that. I've seen stuff that would turn your hair white. And most bizarre is that many of the writers of such thing seem to be women.
That's an excellent question. Warner's contract with the BBC probably makes them the exclusive US distributor. If the BBC allows downloading from the US, then they may be in violation of the contract.
I'd love to believe that the BBC's lawyers have thought about this first.
Actually, it means we're in the exact center of it. If the universe is 14 billion years old, then there's a ring of 14-billion-year-old objects around us.
Well, we're not really in the center. The classic two-dimensional analogy is the surface of a balloon. As the balloon expands, everything moves away from everything else. No matter where you are, everything appears to be moving away. Every point gets to think of itself as the "center".
So you have the idea that if we look in one direction and see something 14 billion years old, all we have to do is turn around and we're at the end. In fact, there's another 14 billion light-years in the opposite direction. And bizarrely, that's true everywhere in the universe. No matter where you look you're seeing a ring (actually, a sphere) that used to be fairly small but has now been blown up to a circle with a diameter 28 billion light-years across.
I'm radically oversimplifying some of the geometry, but the analogy holds well enough to answer the question.
Some electric burners come with dials, rather than buttons, and they have perfectly fine heat control. In fact, I find that they do better at the low end: I can lower the burner so low that I can practically put my hand on it. It's much easier to keep things simmering without becoming a rolling boil, and I can melt chocolate without a double boiler. And I don't have to invest in copper-sandwiched $300 pots to distribute the heat evenly or risk a burned ring in the center of my pot.
Where electric really sucks is its inability to change temperatures quickly. If you turn one on full it takes perhaps a minute to hit full heat, where a gas stove achieves full heat instantly.
Professional chefs use gas for a different reason: a professional stove can put out far more heat than an electric one can. However, that only applies to the big commercial gas lines that can deliver 15,000 BTU; the ordinary home stove often tops out at 9,000 BTU. In many cases an electric stove can boil a large quantity of water faster than a gas stove. (But gas is faster for a small quantity, since it starts up faster.)
I don't know the full pattern, but I suspect that they go electric-only in inexpensively-built houses (like suburban developments) because it saves them the trouble of running gas lines. I've grown up around electrics so I can compensate for their failures (preheating burners before I use them, setting things aside rather than just turning the burner off).
If the RBLs go offline, will spammers shift back to using open relays? I suspect not; the bot-nets are harder to stop and, from the spammer's POV, probably more reliable. The dark side of distributed, highly redundant networks.
Still, it's pretty nice to think that they're going offline because they've largely solved the problem they were fighting. It's like declaring smallpox or polio extinct. And if they come back, we'll remember the formula.
You're right that it's not new, but you're missing a crucial step. They need to exchange port numbers, not just IP addresses, via the central server (or at least one port number). Then they need to prime the firewall to pass connections through to that port by sending out a packet to the peer from that port, even though the final destination of that packet will be filtered out.
If you don't like Darwinism, you're welcome to try Lysenkoism. It's got a long, if not exactly proud, history in Soviet Russia. It's been pretty thoroughly proven false, but unlike Creationism, it's at least a falsifiable theory.
Nothing wrong with positing a doohickey in sci-fi, as long as tech-ing the doohickey doesn't become the whole reason for the episode. Dramatically, it's a nifty idea to say, "A lot of people are dead, and your movements are restricted". It doesn't really matter what happened.
It's a classic kind of sci-fi story: throw out one (or a small handful) of technological thingamabobs and see what people do about it. As long as it's about the people and what they do, it's a pretty solid basis for a story.
But yeah, if they reconfigure the modulations and the doohickey goes away... that's what made TNG so intolerable.
A devalued dollar has one particularly pernicious side effect: we're no longer _the_ money to invest in. Right now our economy is largely propped up by the fact that countries buy dollars because dollars are good, stable things to have, rather than anything they particularly want to spend dollars on.
Should people decide that, say, the euro is a safer place for their money, the US government will have to raise the prices it pays to borrow money, and the economy overall will suffer a serious squeeze.
But the cheaper dollars would make it easier to buy back all that old debt we'd sold. It could be the beginning of a substantial re-balancing of the US economy, albeit with a side order of massive pain along the way.
The copyright is expired on the works, but not on this particular edition of the works, which is a particularly well-researched one.
Think of an edition as being like a translation from another language. You could, if you want, transcribe the music yourself from Mozart's original documents, if you had them. (They're in various libraries and collections throughout the world; a friend of mine worked with some at the Library of Congress.) In fact, there are often several originals, some incomplete and some conflicting with each other.
It's a lot of work, like doing a translation, and like a translation, the resulting document is itself a new work with a new original copyright date.
Part of science is being skeptical about everything, including (and especially) what seems completely obvious. Banning people who question evolution is just as dogmatic as a religious text.
I'll concur that anybody promoting a purely religious six-day-creationism story really doesn't belong here. It's a theory that's been pretty vigorously refuted from a scientific standpoint, and there's no point in discussing it any further. Skepticism means questioning what you believe to be true, not pursing what's already been proven false without substantial new evidence to back it up.
But if they have problems with the evolutionary theory, even if they're inspired by their faith, this is as good a place as any to discuss them. (As long as they're willing to accept that evidence against evolution does not necessarily comprise evidence for creationism; they're not simple opposites.)
As best I can tell, he thinks that Dean's site is not about whatever-[edited]-is at all, so he deserves it more than Dean does. He's probably reasoning by analogy to domain names, where you can (sometimes) have a domain name taken from you if the name is your trademark and your site isn't using it for the purpose.
It's designed to prevent cybersquatting, but it doesn't do much good at that, and a lawsuit there is only intermittently successful. Either way it only applies to domain names, not Google search keys.
He also seems to believe that Google wants him to have it, on the theory that Google makes more money off of businesses than off blogs. At that he's completely misunderstanding where Google makes its money (not from the listed sites but from the advertisers).
The upshot: he's an idiot with no chance, but it would really suck if the guy had to spend money on a lawyer to defend himself. And if he finds himself in front of a technologically-ignorant judge, the judge may even order him to shut down the web site.
That doesn't solve his problem completely. He already knows about zooming. It's just that some sites don't zoom well, especially those with fixed layouts. Even Slashdot has some ugliness when you zoom the text; the left and right columns remain fixed in place and the middle column (the one with the actual relevant text) gets squeezed).
This is more CSS's fault than Firefox's; they picked a very bad model for laying out vertical columns.
There's also the whole image-text problem, which is more the designer's fault but can also be laid to the fact that we lack a better way to achieve some relatively basic visual effects. An image is the only way to get a specialized font, for example. Also, even if you can put an image background for a button and lay text out over it, the effect fails when you zoom the text and the image stays put. I gather that Opera has a real zoom, but I suspect that even then text-over-background-image is fragile.
I knew that there was a meteor shower tonight as soon as I got up this morning, because it was cloudy and raining after several days of clear skies. Here in the DC area that's an infallible predictor of an astronomical event.
Slashdot Mirror
now, OTOH, liquor before beer
Or would that be ETOH? Skip straight to the ethanol and ignore the irrelevant flavorings and bubbles.
The article gives an interesting perspective: can you get good answers out? But the reverse perspective is interesting to me: is it worth answering the questions?
I've been "playing" on Yahoo Answers for a few weeks. I've got a few areas of real expertise, as well as a general interest in, well, stuff. The points are a silly reward; it's not like I'm going to cash them in on a new washer-dryer. But it's just kinda cool to know that my answers are appreciated. And it's sometimes fun to have the questions drive a bit of random web-searching in topics that I'm interested in when I'm otherwise bored.
But like Slashdot, there are some trolls. They've just this week promised new tools against trolls, but without specifying what they are. It's unpleasant to read some asinine question, clearly written with the intent of pissing somebody off, or seeing how subtly they can ask a stupid question so that I don't feel justified in flagging it as offensive. No, it's not destroying my life, but it gets in the way of what I think of as a game.
And there are a number of silly questions. No, I'm not going to factor that equation for you; it's clearly your homework. If you'd asked for help on the concept I'd provide it, or even if you explained why you couldn't get this one out of the rest of them. But I'm not doing your homework for you.
In the case of TV, the networks have a special consideration: nearly free bandwidth. They get premium advertising space delivered into everybody's home for free, which allows them to produce really expensive shows with a truly national audience. And the must-carry laws mean that they have to be available on cable systems, too.
Therefore, pay-to-download doesn't just substitute one form of income for another; it completely undermines this immense boondoggle they've been given in over-the-air broadcasting. And if they aren't broadcasting on the air, they aren't automatically on the cable, either.
So it's not just about losing control of the content. It's about losing control of the means of distribution and becoming just another thing, lost in the noise like a YouTube video.
The real work of Congress isn't done on the Congressional floor. The real work is done in committees, and most of the committee meetings are closed, even the ones that are nominally open.
If they can't find a way to close them, they'll hold the meeting in their offices in private, come to a conclusion, and then open the meeting for a trivial few minutes to announce the results.
C-SPAN is for making speeches, not for legislating.
Until some jackass forwards you an article, includes you on a mass email, sends you an e-card, etc.
Like you, I've got an array of email address (scores of them, actually), with one final true "use this if you must reach me" email address known only to a very few close, personal, and technologically savvy friends. Gradually I blacklist the ones that get too much spam, but sadly the primary general-acquaintances email address is in full spammer rotation now, and I may have to drop it soon. That will be painful. The filter I use keeps it to a tolerable level, but just barely.
Since book shelves are ordinarily sorted by the Dewey Decimal System or the Library of Congress codes, it sounds like it would be easy to mimic that in a virtual library. I'm surprised nobody's done it before. It would be great if Amazon were to add a link to other books on the same "shelf", though they've got even more sophisticated ways of making suggestions.
Yeah, I'd realized later I'd forgotten cufflinks and tie tacks. There are also a few other bits, like that tie-support thing that some people wear in their collars. And on tuxedos you have the option of fancy studs rather than buttons.
No, you may not. But thank you for offering.
Slashdotters may not, but watches are one of the only forms of jewelry allowed for upper-class and upper-middle-class men. Necklaces and earrings are still considered gaudy, and rings are restricted to a wedding band and perhaps a class ring/military ring.
The sorts of guys who wear suits as fashion statements are very likely to wear a watch as well. It's not so much about knowing what time it is as about wearing something pretty (and expensive) on your wrist. Your tie and your watch are the most expressive things you're allowed to wear.
Hey, I don't make the rules. I just talk about 'em. Me, I stopped wearing a watch years before I acquired a cell phone, and I don't wear any jewelry at all.
They used a smaller bait squid to lure the giant squid to the water's surface.
Does that mean that we can use this squid to get an even BIGGER squid?
And far, far scarier than that. I've seen stuff that would turn your hair white. And most bizarre is that many of the writers of such thing seem to be women.
That's an excellent question. Warner's contract with the BBC probably makes them the exclusive US distributor. If the BBC allows downloading from the US, then they may be in violation of the contract.
I'd love to believe that the BBC's lawyers have thought about this first.
Actually, it means we're in the exact center of it. If the universe is 14 billion years old, then there's a ring of 14-billion-year-old objects around us.
Well, we're not really in the center. The classic two-dimensional analogy is the surface of a balloon. As the balloon expands, everything moves away from everything else. No matter where you are, everything appears to be moving away. Every point gets to think of itself as the "center".
So you have the idea that if we look in one direction and see something 14 billion years old, all we have to do is turn around and we're at the end. In fact, there's another 14 billion light-years in the opposite direction. And bizarrely, that's true everywhere in the universe. No matter where you look you're seeing a ring (actually, a sphere) that used to be fairly small but has now been blown up to a circle with a diameter 28 billion light-years across.
I'm radically oversimplifying some of the geometry, but the analogy holds well enough to answer the question.
Some electric burners come with dials, rather than buttons, and they have perfectly fine heat control. In fact, I find that they do better at the low end: I can lower the burner so low that I can practically put my hand on it. It's much easier to keep things simmering without becoming a rolling boil, and I can melt chocolate without a double boiler. And I don't have to invest in copper-sandwiched $300 pots to distribute the heat evenly or risk a burned ring in the center of my pot.
Where electric really sucks is its inability to change temperatures quickly. If you turn one on full it takes perhaps a minute to hit full heat, where a gas stove achieves full heat instantly.
Professional chefs use gas for a different reason: a professional stove can put out far more heat than an electric one can. However, that only applies to the big commercial gas lines that can deliver 15,000 BTU; the ordinary home stove often tops out at 9,000 BTU. In many cases an electric stove can boil a large quantity of water faster than a gas stove. (But gas is faster for a small quantity, since it starts up faster.)
I don't know the full pattern, but I suspect that they go electric-only in inexpensively-built houses (like suburban developments) because it saves them the trouble of running gas lines. I've grown up around electrics so I can compensate for their failures (preheating burners before I use them, setting things aside rather than just turning the burner off).
If the RBLs go offline, will spammers shift back to using open relays? I suspect not; the bot-nets are harder to stop and, from the spammer's POV, probably more reliable. The dark side of distributed, highly redundant networks.
Still, it's pretty nice to think that they're going offline because they've largely solved the problem they were fighting. It's like declaring smallpox or polio extinct. And if they come back, we'll remember the formula.
You're right that it's not new, but you're missing a crucial step. They need to exchange port numbers, not just IP addresses, via the central server (or at least one port number). Then they need to prime the firewall to pass connections through to that port by sending out a packet to the peer from that port, even though the final destination of that packet will be filtered out.
So it's not new, but it's still pretty clever.
If you don't like Darwinism, you're welcome to try Lysenkoism. It's got a long, if not exactly proud, history in Soviet Russia. It's been pretty thoroughly proven false, but unlike Creationism, it's at least a falsifiable theory.
Nothing wrong with positing a doohickey in sci-fi, as long as tech-ing the doohickey doesn't become the whole reason for the episode. Dramatically, it's a nifty idea to say, "A lot of people are dead, and your movements are restricted". It doesn't really matter what happened.
It's a classic kind of sci-fi story: throw out one (or a small handful) of technological thingamabobs and see what people do about it. As long as it's about the people and what they do, it's a pretty solid basis for a story.
But yeah, if they reconfigure the modulations and the doohickey goes away... that's what made TNG so intolerable.
A devalued dollar has one particularly pernicious side effect: we're no longer _the_ money to invest in. Right now our economy is largely propped up by the fact that countries buy dollars because dollars are good, stable things to have, rather than anything they particularly want to spend dollars on.
Should people decide that, say, the euro is a safer place for their money, the US government will have to raise the prices it pays to borrow money, and the economy overall will suffer a serious squeeze.
But the cheaper dollars would make it easier to buy back all that old debt we'd sold. It could be the beginning of a substantial re-balancing of the US economy, albeit with a side order of massive pain along the way.
The copyright is expired on the works, but not on this particular edition of the works, which is a particularly well-researched one.
Think of an edition as being like a translation from another language. You could, if you want, transcribe the music yourself from Mozart's original documents, if you had them. (They're in various libraries and collections throughout the world; a friend of mine worked with some at the Library of Congress.) In fact, there are often several originals, some incomplete and some conflicting with each other.
It's a lot of work, like doing a translation, and like a translation, the resulting document is itself a new work with a new original copyright date.
Part of science is being skeptical about everything, including (and especially) what seems completely obvious. Banning people who question evolution is just as dogmatic as a religious text.
I'll concur that anybody promoting a purely religious six-day-creationism story really doesn't belong here. It's a theory that's been pretty vigorously refuted from a scientific standpoint, and there's no point in discussing it any further. Skepticism means questioning what you believe to be true, not pursing what's already been proven false without substantial new evidence to back it up.
But if they have problems with the evolutionary theory, even if they're inspired by their faith, this is as good a place as any to discuss them. (As long as they're willing to accept that evidence against evolution does not necessarily comprise evidence for creationism; they're not simple opposites.)
As best I can tell, he thinks that Dean's site is not about whatever-[edited]-is at all, so he deserves it more than Dean does. He's probably reasoning by analogy to domain names, where you can (sometimes) have a domain name taken from you if the name is your trademark and your site isn't using it for the purpose.
It's designed to prevent cybersquatting, but it doesn't do much good at that, and a lawsuit there is only intermittently successful. Either way it only applies to domain names, not Google search keys.
He also seems to believe that Google wants him to have it, on the theory that Google makes more money off of businesses than off blogs. At that he's completely misunderstanding where Google makes its money (not from the listed sites but from the advertisers).
The upshot: he's an idiot with no chance, but it would really suck if the guy had to spend money on a lawyer to defend himself. And if he finds himself in front of a technologically-ignorant judge, the judge may even order him to shut down the web site.
That doesn't solve his problem completely. He already knows about zooming. It's just that some sites don't zoom well, especially those with fixed layouts. Even Slashdot has some ugliness when you zoom the text; the left and right columns remain fixed in place and the middle column (the one with the actual relevant text) gets squeezed).
This is more CSS's fault than Firefox's; they picked a very bad model for laying out vertical columns.
There's also the whole image-text problem, which is more the designer's fault but can also be laid to the fact that we lack a better way to achieve some relatively basic visual effects. An image is the only way to get a specialized font, for example. Also, even if you can put an image background for a button and lay text out over it, the effect fails when you zoom the text and the image stays put. I gather that Opera has a real zoom, but I suspect that even then text-over-background-image is fragile.
I knew that there was a meteor shower tonight as soon as I got up this morning, because it was cloudy and raining after several days of clear skies. Here in the DC area that's an infallible predictor of an astronomical event.
Thank you for pointing that out; I'd left out half the experience.