Car analogies really are great. About a year ago I had to design a website, which isn't that big of a deal, but there was a lot of information to organize. I did 13 layouts and usability testing before I could say that I had found the absolute best one. It really was a great layout. More importantly, it made use of common web UI standards. For example, where is the link back to the homepage? Click the logo. Where do you expect to see the search box? At the top of the page somewhere.
For some reason, you can take a great website and shoot it up on a wall with a projector and people will start picking it apart in ways that they wouldn't do if they were actually using the site. So people were actually saying things like, "what? Click the logo? Nobody will figure that out!"
So here was my car analogy: If I showed you a car on paper, and you'd never driven one before, you wouldn't believe that it was going to work. "what? I make it go forward by putting my foot on something?? That's insane!" you'd say. But you'd be wrong.
That isn't satire. That is an actual liberal posting on an actual mainstream liberal website and he is obviously batshit insane. I have never seen anything on freerepublic.com as retarded as that thread on democraticunderground.com
What sort of a brain-dead moron would actually fall for spam?
I wish that somebody would do a TV show like "To Catch a Predator" except that they would go after the people who buy spam. Embaras them a little.
"Hi, I'm Chris Hansen from NBC. Why don't you have a seat there. Why are you here sir?" "uh well I, I'm here to see a friend." "You're here to have your penis enlarged aren't you?" "no, no, I'm just here to hang out." "Sir this is an email that we sent to you advertising penis enlargement. You clicked on this email." "omg, is this on TV??"
Did anyone else notice that the picture in the story appears to be a screenshot from Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator? (it's free by the way, and very cool)
?? Did you see the original ending, where everybody stands around going, "congratulations Shinji." ugh. That sucked! There was practically rioting in the streets over that in Japan.
The movie, Evangelion Rebirth was the true ending of the story.
They became formulaic. It became just like every other scifi show ever. They were *never* going to find Earth, just like Voyager was never going to get home, just like Gilligan was never going to get off his island, just like Lost will never end, just like Wagon Train will never get to California.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. People are tired of that. When you follow that premise, you very quickly run out of show ideas and then you fall back on the cliches. I guarantee you, if BSG had stayed on the air long enough, we would have seen:
1. the time travel episode 2. the holodeck episode 3. the OMG ITS ALL A DREAM episode 4. the whoa, I have a long lost twin episode 5. the Everybody has Amnesia! episode
etc. etc. That's bullshit.
You want to make a good quality scifi show? Here's how you do it. You commit ahead of time to make it two seasons. Then you pick a story arch. To use BSG as the example, you make the first story arch, "invasion of the 12 colonies - journey to Earth." and basically, at the end of that second season, everything is wrapped up. They found Earth. They are safe. There is a conclusion.
See the thing is, people will commit to that. People will tune in to that just like they tuned into the miniseries. Know why? Because that's not jerking them around. They know that if they invest in that, they will be rewarded by a conclusion and not jerked off by never ending formulaic cliches. Unfortunately, it takes discipline to do a show this way, and nobody in hollywood has discipline.
Anyway, the money that you invest in the show isn't lost when the show ends. To stay with the BSG example, after that first story arch, you make another arch that will last two seasons. For example, you might do the first cylon war. You can use all the same sets and crew - and some of the actors too. Do that for two seasons and end it with. People will watch. Ratings will be higher than they are now. After you do that, come up with another story arch. Maybe make it really dark and do a story about a battlestar that gets destroyed. It wont have a happy ending, but people will still watch it.
The thing is, they've been doing this with anime for decades. This isn't even my idea! Evangelion had a story arch and it ended (badly). Bubblegum crisis had a story arch and it ended (sorry, I'm old school these are the only examples I can think of). They *almost* figured this out with BSG. They are going to do a miniseries about the Battlestar Pegasus. More people will watch that than watched season 2. Know why? Because it's not going to jerk you around. There wont be boxing episodes or flashback episodes. It will have a story and it will go somewhere.
Note that 24 also follows this pattern - almost. The mistake they made is that every season was basically the same, but that's not totally their fault, they are painted into a corner having to make every season one full day.
The problem is, the kind of person who needs to pay a consultant to do this kind of thing is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between the two.
I would just add that the kind of person who owns the kind of business that is typically sleazy anyway is the kind of person who has the kind of mentality that sleazy business is ok.
For example, you probably could sell used cars without being a douche bag. But if you are a douche bag, then you will make just a tiny bit more money selling used cars. This is because sometimes you'll get a car in that you know is utter crap. You can sell the car at a fair price (for a car that's utter crap) but you can make a bit more money if you steam clean the engine and sell it as if it's pristine.
That kind of person, the person who thinks that sort of behavior is ok for them to do, that's the kind of person who thinks its ok to game the search engine. It will NEVER occur to a used car salesman that having an honest, standards-compliant website is the "the right thing to do." The mentality is that they want to cheat.
Use unique titles and meta descriptions for each of your pages.
I've been telling people that google doesn't look at meta tags.
Ensure that your content is original and unique.
How do you avoid duplicating the navigational links on every page? For example, I often use a page layout that creates menus and popout menus from nested ul's. All of that is duplicated at the top of every single page.
wow. thanks for pointing that out. I was starting to worry. But after seeing your comment, I can now assume that there is no mercury in CFLs. I mean, that was you're point, right? - that the author is a liar and made the whole thing up and CFLs are actually filled with cinnamon and happy thoughts?
I mean, you *didn't* just commit the logical fallacy of attacking the messenger but making no substantive point at all to dispute the message. Right? Right?
US media companies are what keep upstream caps low. It's one more "anti-piracy" technique if it takes you 2 weeks to upload that DVD you just ripped to a single friend.
I think it's more to do with switching. On copper you can't talk upstream and downstream at the same time. So they don't have x Mb/s up AND xMb/s down. They have x Mb/s total and they can divide that into upstream and downstream as they like, but if they give you a lot of upstream and your downstream suffers, you're much more likely to call them to complain.
Why does life have to based on processes similar to our own
Why do stars have to be based on H2? Why can't a big chunk of water ice like a comet start up nuclear fusion and become a star? If you say, "physics" then I think you just aren't imaginative enough.
I am personally very curious about why when the majority of college students are women why a statistic like this is so important.
That's an easy question to answer. If you are in charge of the Computer Science department and you go to the University administration and say, "may I please have more money" then you will be told that times are hard and everyone is having to do more will less.
But, if you go to the administration (or congress for a grant) and say, "we are interested in starting a program to attract women and correct gender inequalities and institutionalized sexism in our department - may we please have more money" then they will shower you with money.
It's a lot like global warming in that respect. It's a buzzword that you tack on to something when you want people to care about it. "We want to be the best computer science department" nobody cares. "we want to help the poor poor oppressed women." Here, have a million bucks.
Look at the wording of the linked article. "Women are losing ground" it says, as if they are fighting an uphill battle against an arm of orks. The truth is, NOBODY IS STANDING IN YOUR WAY. If you want to major in CS you are welcome to do so. If you don't want to major in CS, that's not losing ground.
really puts things into perspective, doesn't it? We, as geeks, enjoy tech. But there's nothing more important than human life. It does seem odd to be complaining about things that don't really matter, when a lot of people have just been murdered.
And what will really bake your noodle - this is an everyday experience in the middle east.
that made me think of the first two xcom games. oh god, it's a wonder I graduated college given all the time I spend killing aliens. And when xcomutil came out and suddenly I could create missions where my squad had to battle 50 baddies at a time, oh boy, I was screwed (or not screwed really).
I'm sure there are good games out there today, and this is just selection bias because I don't have time to play as much anymore, but I have never enjoyed a game as much as I enjoyed xcom.
LOL. I wrote that comment in Word to spell check it, then select-all cut/paste. I had been working on a web service and got part of the documentation. pwned!
would that make us the smartest or the stupidest creature ever to have come out of the evolution theory?
Well, let me turn the question around on you. We evolved from (something very like) Australopithecus, but those creatures don't actually exist anymore. So does that mean they were dumber than crocodiles? Crocadiles haven't really evolved all that much. They are still around after a hundred million years. But I don't think they are smart because they have hit an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
I think that the answer is no. I think that this is what we are supposed to do.
If we create a machine intelligence that outlives us and spreads throughout the galaxy, then I would say that we have actually been successful as a species. Atoms give rise to genes, genes give rise to memes (ideas that propagate themselves). Our memes will survive through our mechanical children.
The only way to be unsuccessful is to leave nothing behind but fossils.
it is very arrogant for somebody to think that BoA's security team did not think of this problem themselves.
I agree. In fact, I would go further and say that the author of this blog should actually be quite embarassed and ashamed of this post. His "amazing discovery" is actually the whole point of sitekey. Yes, you can be a man in the middle and get the sitekey images yourself. Congratulations. You and everyone else already thought of that.
And guess what, your man-in-the-middle now has to make a sitekey request to bank of american for *every potential victim* and as a result, BoA will easily identify your IP block as running a MITM scheme.
So in other words, this blogger is an idiot. He hasn't defeated sitekey at all. Set up a MITM site, make ten requests, and now you're out of business and the ten accounts that you phished are locked.
When all of us PC gamers pwn the 360 players to hell, daily, using our superior control mechanism. I just came in here to say the same exact thing - but I see that you have everything under control.
I predict 360-only servers will be set up after a very short time due to all the whining.
it's overrated and incredibly dull. well then you're not an astronomy geek - and that's cool. Me, I loved the in-depth discussions of things like a star's habitability zone. If you're content to learn about this stuff from dumbed-down TV documentaries narrated by Patrick Stewart, then good for you. If you want more detail, then you want a book, and this is a good one.
sure, you could take Earth-life and transport it there. but the other side of that equation is, can life evolve on that planet. There are a couple of theories about how life got started on Earth. One is that it came here on comets. Another (this is from Dawkin's book, The Blind Watchmaker) is that life starts in streams with silicate crystals in clay, and that's not something you're likely to find on a hot jupiter.
It turns out that evolution is easy, but genesis is hard. Remember, scientists have managed to make things evolve in a laboratory (or just take a look at what selective breeding can accomplish) - but NO SCIENTIST has ever managed to create life from non-life. Hell, we can't even do a test-tube baby without taking an egg from a woman (meaning, even having DNA is not enough).
So my point is, life can live on MArs or on the moon or on this hot jupiter, but I don't know if it can get started there.
civilizations can still be both miraculous and "common" Wait. Isn't "common" usually defined in terms of a ratio? dictionary.com definition 4 says: widespread; general; ordinary
So by that definition, even if there are billions of civilizations, if the ratio is 1/10000000000000 then I don't think you can call it common.
Anyway, the grandparent post asked, "who believes in ET" and I think that a scientific answer: ET is out there, but maybe not even in our galaxy. So we are very very unlikely to ever find any life that we can talk to. The question that people want to know the answer to is, is our universe like the one on Star Trek, with aliens everywhere. I think that the answer is no.
There is a great book that anyone interested in this question should read: Rare Earth.
It is a very well-researched book that goes into great detail on all the different terms of the drake equation (and a few extra terms) and shows what the best scientific evidence suggests are the actual values for those terms. The bottom line of the book is that single-celled life is probably incredibly common, it's probably everywhere. Life that's big enough for you to actually see is probably pretty rare. Intelligent life is very rare, and technological civilizations are practically a miracle.
I see your point, but I need to make a minor correction: the throw-away society is mostly a problem when we suck oil out of the ground, turn it into plastic, and then throw the plastic away so that we have to suck more oil out of the ground. Solar panels are made out of glass and wire, right? So we should be able to recycle them, but even if you throw them away it's not as bad as throwing away plastic.
yep. It's a good idea. It would also be neat to have something like mouse gestures so that you could "throw" a window to the left-half of the screen or the right-half or whatever.
Slashdot Mirror
Car analogies really are great. About a year ago I had to design a website, which isn't that big of a deal, but there was a lot of information to organize. I did 13 layouts and usability testing before I could say that I had found the absolute best one. It really was a great layout. More importantly, it made use of common web UI standards. For example, where is the link back to the homepage? Click the logo. Where do you expect to see the search box? At the top of the page somewhere.
For some reason, you can take a great website and shoot it up on a wall with a projector and people will start picking it apart in ways that they wouldn't do if they were actually using the site. So people were actually saying things like, "what? Click the logo? Nobody will figure that out!"
So here was my car analogy: If I showed you a car on paper, and you'd never driven one before, you wouldn't believe that it was going to work. "what? I make it go forward by putting my foot on something?? That's insane!" you'd say. But you'd be wrong.
on the other hand, you can go over to democratic underground.com and see this amazing trip down the road of stupidity and failed critical thinking
That isn't satire. That is an actual liberal posting on an actual mainstream liberal website and he is obviously batshit insane. I have never seen anything on freerepublic.com as retarded as that thread on democraticunderground.com
What sort of a brain-dead moron would actually fall for spam?
I wish that somebody would do a TV show like "To Catch a Predator" except that they would go after the people who buy spam. Embaras them a little.
"Hi, I'm Chris Hansen from NBC. Why don't you have a seat there. Why are you here sir?"
"uh well I, I'm here to see a friend."
"You're here to have your penis enlarged aren't you?"
"no, no, I'm just here to hang out."
"Sir this is an email that we sent to you advertising penis enlargement. You clicked on this email."
"omg, is this on TV??"
Did anyone else notice that the picture in the story appears to be a screenshot from Orbiter Spaceflight Simulator? (it's free by the way, and very cool)
?? Did you see the original ending, where everybody stands around going, "congratulations Shinji." ugh. That sucked! There was practically rioting in the streets over that in Japan.
The movie, Evangelion Rebirth was the true ending of the story.
They became formulaic. It became just like every other scifi show ever. They were *never* going to find Earth, just like Voyager was never going to get home, just like Gilligan was never going to get off his island, just like Lost will never end, just like Wagon Train will never get to California.
I'm sorry, but that's bullshit. People are tired of that. When you follow that premise, you very quickly run out of show ideas and then you fall back on the cliches. I guarantee you, if BSG had stayed on the air long enough, we would have seen:
1. the time travel episode
2. the holodeck episode
3. the OMG ITS ALL A DREAM episode
4. the whoa, I have a long lost twin episode
5. the Everybody has Amnesia! episode
etc. etc. That's bullshit.
You want to make a good quality scifi show? Here's how you do it. You commit ahead of time to make it two seasons. Then you pick a story arch. To use BSG as the example, you make the first story arch, "invasion of the 12 colonies - journey to Earth." and basically, at the end of that second season, everything is wrapped up. They found Earth. They are safe. There is a conclusion.
See the thing is, people will commit to that. People will tune in to that just like they tuned into the miniseries. Know why? Because that's not jerking them around. They know that if they invest in that, they will be rewarded by a conclusion and not jerked off by never ending formulaic cliches. Unfortunately, it takes discipline to do a show this way, and nobody in hollywood has discipline.
Anyway, the money that you invest in the show isn't lost when the show ends. To stay with the BSG example, after that first story arch, you make another arch that will last two seasons. For example, you might do the first cylon war. You can use all the same sets and crew - and some of the actors too. Do that for two seasons and end it with. People will watch. Ratings will be higher than they are now. After you do that, come up with another story arch. Maybe make it really dark and do a story about a battlestar that gets destroyed. It wont have a happy ending, but people will still watch it.
The thing is, they've been doing this with anime for decades. This isn't even my idea! Evangelion had a story arch and it ended (badly). Bubblegum crisis had a story arch and it ended (sorry, I'm old school these are the only examples I can think of). They *almost* figured this out with BSG. They are going to do a miniseries about the Battlestar Pegasus. More people will watch that than watched season 2. Know why? Because it's not going to jerk you around. There wont be boxing episodes or flashback episodes. It will have a story and it will go somewhere.
Note that 24 also follows this pattern - almost. The mistake they made is that every season was basically the same, but that's not totally their fault, they are painted into a corner having to make every season one full day.
The problem is, the kind of person who needs to pay a consultant to do this kind of thing is unlikely to be able to tell the difference between the two.
I would just add that the kind of person who owns the kind of business that is typically sleazy anyway is the kind of person who has the kind of mentality that sleazy business is ok.
For example, you probably could sell used cars without being a douche bag. But if you are a douche bag, then you will make just a tiny bit more money selling used cars. This is because sometimes you'll get a car in that you know is utter crap. You can sell the car at a fair price (for a car that's utter crap) but you can make a bit more money if you steam clean the engine and sell it as if it's pristine.
That kind of person, the person who thinks that sort of behavior is ok for them to do, that's the kind of person who thinks its ok to game the search engine. It will NEVER occur to a used car salesman that having an honest, standards-compliant website is the "the right thing to do." The mentality is that they want to cheat.
Use unique titles and meta descriptions for each of your pages.
I've been telling people that google doesn't look at meta tags.
Ensure that your content is original and unique.
How do you avoid duplicating the navigational links on every page? For example, I often use a page layout that creates menus and popout menus from nested ul's. All of that is duplicated at the top of every single page.
wow. thanks for pointing that out. I was starting to worry. But after seeing your comment, I can now assume that there is no mercury in CFLs. I mean, that was you're point, right? - that the author is a liar and made the whole thing up and CFLs are actually filled with cinnamon and happy thoughts?
I mean, you *didn't* just commit the logical fallacy of attacking the messenger but making no substantive point at all to dispute the message. Right? Right?
US media companies are what keep upstream caps low. It's one more "anti-piracy" technique if it takes you 2 weeks to upload that DVD you just ripped to a single friend.
I think it's more to do with switching. On copper you can't talk upstream and downstream at the same time. So they don't have x Mb/s up AND xMb/s down. They have x Mb/s total and they can divide that into upstream and downstream as they like, but if they give you a lot of upstream and your downstream suffers, you're much more likely to call them to complain.
That's my theory on it.
Why does life have to based on processes similar to our own
Why do stars have to be based on H2? Why can't a big chunk of water ice like a comet start up nuclear fusion and become a star? If you say, "physics" then I think you just aren't imaginative enough.
(see where I'm going with that? Probably not.)
I would prefer to wait as long as possible before having to verify this first-hand.
I volunteer to conduct the research. I'll just need a small yearly grant for 64 million years.
I am personally very curious about why when the majority of college students are women why a statistic like this is so important.
That's an easy question to answer. If you are in charge of the Computer Science department and you go to the University administration and say, "may I please have more money" then you will be told that times are hard and everyone is having to do more will less.
But, if you go to the administration (or congress for a grant) and say, "we are interested in starting a program to attract women and correct gender inequalities and institutionalized sexism in our department - may we please have more money" then they will shower you with money.
It's a lot like global warming in that respect. It's a buzzword that you tack on to something when you want people to care about it. "We want to be the best computer science department" nobody cares. "we want to help the poor poor oppressed women." Here, have a million bucks.
Look at the wording of the linked article. "Women are losing ground" it says, as if they are fighting an uphill battle against an arm of orks. The truth is, NOBODY IS STANDING IN YOUR WAY. If you want to major in CS you are welcome to do so. If you don't want to major in CS, that's not losing ground.
really puts things into perspective, doesn't it? We, as geeks, enjoy tech. But there's nothing more important than human life. It does seem odd to be complaining about things that don't really matter, when a lot of people have just been murdered.
And what will really bake your noodle - this is an everyday experience in the middle east.
Try and find a good ... turn-based strategy game.
that made me think of the first two xcom games. oh god, it's a wonder I graduated college given all the time I spend killing aliens. And when xcomutil came out and suddenly I could create missions where my squad had to battle 50 baddies at a time, oh boy, I was screwed (or not screwed really).
I'm sure there are good games out there today, and this is just selection bias because I don't have time to play as much anymore, but I have never enjoyed a game as much as I enjoyed xcom.
(and yeah, I've played laser squad nemesis)
LOL. I wrote that comment in Word to spell check it, then select-all cut/paste. I had been working on a web service and got part of the documentation. pwned!
Web service
Inputs:
PassthroughID
PassthroughToken
TargetDirectory
would that make us the smartest or the stupidest creature ever to have come out of the evolution theory?
Well, let me turn the question around on you. We evolved from (something very like) Australopithecus, but those creatures don't actually exist anymore. So does that mean they were dumber than crocodiles? Crocadiles haven't really evolved all that much. They are still around after a hundred million years. But I don't think they are smart because they have hit an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
I think that the answer is no. I think that this is what we are supposed to do.
If we create a machine intelligence that outlives us and spreads throughout the galaxy, then I would say that we have actually been successful as a species. Atoms give rise to genes, genes give rise to memes (ideas that propagate themselves). Our memes will survive through our mechanical children.
The only way to be unsuccessful is to leave nothing behind but fossils.
it is very arrogant for somebody to think that BoA's security team did not think of this problem themselves.
I agree. In fact, I would go further and say that the author of this blog should actually be quite embarassed and ashamed of this post. His "amazing discovery" is actually the whole point of sitekey. Yes, you can be a man in the middle and get the sitekey images yourself. Congratulations. You and everyone else already thought of that.
And guess what, your man-in-the-middle now has to make a sitekey request to bank of american for *every potential victim* and as a result, BoA will easily identify your IP block as running a MITM scheme.
So in other words, this blogger is an idiot. He hasn't defeated sitekey at all. Set up a MITM site, make ten requests, and now you're out of business and the ten accounts that you phished are locked.
I predict 360-only servers will be set up after a very short time due to all the whining.
sure, you could take Earth-life and transport it there. but the other side of that equation is, can life evolve on that planet. There are a couple of theories about how life got started on Earth. One is that it came here on comets. Another (this is from Dawkin's book, The Blind Watchmaker) is that life starts in streams with silicate crystals in clay, and that's not something you're likely to find on a hot jupiter.
It turns out that evolution is easy, but genesis is hard. Remember, scientists have managed to make things evolve in a laboratory (or just take a look at what selective breeding can accomplish) - but NO SCIENTIST has ever managed to create life from non-life. Hell, we can't even do a test-tube baby without taking an egg from a woman (meaning, even having DNA is not enough).
So my point is, life can live on MArs or on the moon or on this hot jupiter, but I don't know if it can get started there.
So by that definition, even if there are billions of civilizations, if the ratio is 1/10000000000000 then I don't think you can call it common.
Anyway, the grandparent post asked, "who believes in ET" and I think that a scientific answer: ET is out there, but maybe not even in our galaxy. So we are very very unlikely to ever find any life that we can talk to. The question that people want to know the answer to is, is our universe like the one on Star Trek, with aliens everywhere. I think that the answer is no.
There is a great book that anyone interested in this question should read: Rare Earth.
It is a very well-researched book that goes into great detail on all the different terms of the drake equation (and a few extra terms) and shows what the best scientific evidence suggests are the actual values for those terms. The bottom line of the book is that single-celled life is probably incredibly common, it's probably everywhere. Life that's big enough for you to actually see is probably pretty rare. Intelligent life is very rare, and technological civilizations are practically a miracle.
I see your point, but I need to make a minor correction: the throw-away society is mostly a problem when we suck oil out of the ground, turn it into plastic, and then throw the plastic away so that we have to suck more oil out of the ground. Solar panels are made out of glass and wire, right? So we should be able to recycle them, but even if you throw them away it's not as bad as throwing away plastic.
yep. It's a good idea. It would also be neat to have something like mouse gestures so that you could "throw" a window to the left-half of the screen or the right-half or whatever.