The goal is not just to get a fair count; it's to convince people they're getting a fair count. Consider: what if Diebold IS actually on the level and there is no tampering or assistance to tamperers from them or their employees. Even if this were true, we'd still be in our current mess because we wouldn't believe them.
I think that important technology like this should be open simply because it makes it transparent and therefore accountable. Suspicion of tampering? Send in whatever body of independent investigators you like, without signing any NDAs, and they can evaluate it and report (completely) on any problems.
No, actually that's one of the cool things about the system. You push the buttons and get your printed ballot.
Then you walk over to a completely different machine and wave the bar code in front of the machine. It will show you the decoded bar code information (privately of course) so you can see that it all works.
For someone to tamper, they would have to tamper with every machine at the site, not just one.
And then... if there is a recount (or even just a redundant slow count) you use the printed portion of the ballot, NOT the bar code.
The poster above cites one problem, which illustrates why this system would be hard to understand. I agree with everything said.
But I think it's a much more deeply flawed idea: you would hate this system!
Pretend that it's not an expert system in the OS doing this. Pretend that you got an intelligent, experienced, very clever co-worker in the next room, connected to your OS as root, with a screen up so he could see everything you are doing. Pretend that it is this intelligent agent that is doing these things for you.. he notices you have a hard time finding the XYZZY tool and puts it into a palette for you. He notices that you ignore email alerts and so reconfigures your alerts. He sees the header on the incoming email and so decides to give it high priority... all the things this magical "OS" is doing.
You would loathe this guy. You would hate him more than clippy. He's popping things on your screen. He's changing how the computer alerts you to things, so you might miss something, or think it's broken. He's changing defaults. He's interrupting your work.
Remember the scene in Jabberwocky, where the "efficiency expert" moves the chair and the whole workshop explodes? It would be like that. Or perhaps more colloquially, like a helpful friend who knows more than you about computers leaning over your shoulder as you're trying to write a paper... you might get a few percent more efficient, at the expense of having your work interrupted and bursting a blood vessel.
This goes back to the above point: you don't want an intelligent OS... you want an OS that's simpler to understand. That doesn't mean a simple OS, it just means that it has to do things in a way that is predictable and easy to learn.
"The death of IPv4 has not really killed the Internet. In fact, far from it, we've managed to make an industry around it."
In other words, by keeping IPv4, we can sell NAT boxes (which we're already selling in huge numbers.. the wireless network hub in my den is a prime example.) Cisco has a big investment in building hardware to take care of IP space limitiations.
"You will still be able to get addresses, if you pay for them, because a market will appear."
In other words, this damned internet isn't making us enough money, because IP addresses are free. We want people to start trading them, so we can get commissions on the sales.
It's clear that this is "good buisiness" for the big internet companies: why invest in a new system that will make users's lives cheaper and easier when we can continue to sell patches on the old stuff, and make a market so that we can start charging the freeloaders?
It's also clear to me that the only way IPv6 will get adopted is if public bodies start using them and demanding their use. For instance, if Internet2, the US military, or all of.gov start adopting, then it will get off the ground. Of course, this is unlikely to happen because Cisco doesn't sell IPv6 switches.
I'm no expert, but to my cynical eye it looks not like market forces, but like the usual problems with capitalism exploiting a local maximum and avoiding short-term risk.
"In an unusual demonstration of video game innovation with limited funding and resources..."
This sentance presumes far too much. I have yet to see a well-funded, well-resourced game that was innovative. I urge all you game players to think back to the games that truely broke ground (that is, did not simply have the most detailed graphics or the slickest 3d interface.) All of them were made by a small group with very limited resources.
I have not seen ONE big-media title that was in the slightest bit innovative in any grand sense. Slick, yes. Fun, often. Innovative, never.
Make up your own list here for innovative games. I'll get you started:
First, it's to force you to learn the topic, and give you guidance on what you need to understand. This requires no marking at all.
Second, it's to give you feedback on what you did wrong. A computer marking you would give you feedback something like how a compiler does when you write code: awful. Beginning programmers frequently need expert help in understanding compiler errors, so I doubt a machine would be any good at telling you that you got the limits of the integral backward.
Third, the assignment is there to teach you how to write: that is, how to present work in an intelligable way. This is common to all subjects, and I seriously doubt that any computer program will tell you how to write something that humans can understand.
Forth, it's to give you a grade. This is the least important reason for the assignment.
While the copy editors may be bad, and while the majority of the reviewing is done by peers, there is still very important jobs that you need good top-level editors for:
- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand the article to begin with.
- Dealing with fraud, plagurism, etc. Not easy.
You want smart, well-educated people for these jobs. And then you still need copy editors, layout, indexing, administration, etc etc, which don't come free.
Yes, you still need money to run a reputable journal. But it's also clear that it's time for a change, and that the subscription model simply doesn't work very well anymore. What we really need is someone to fund the peer-review process, and then web-based citations, indexing, archiving, and retrieval of articles.
This seems to have been a gradual phenomenon that people want to see movie trailers: downloaded, in theatres, whatever.
Why?
If I look at old or new movie trailers, they are inevitably very bad edits conveying nothing of the spirit of the film. They usually have only cheap laughs. Naturally, they have no plot, no dialog (although they do have snippets of monologue), just a few big explosions. (Like I haven't seen those before.)
Who cares? I'm honestly mystified why anyone would care about a movie trailer.. even for a movie they really want to see.
This looks an awful lot like Holywood pushing it's values on the rest of us by sheer force of marketing.
Here's the brainstorm: don't have character advancement. Throw away the rather unrealistic old D&D idea of 'levels' or 'advancement'. Let people build the character they want right up front.
What's to keep people playing? Well, I assume that you have quests, storylines. Players play for prestige, for wealth (which can't buy power, only nice things like clothes and property), for dare-I-say-it actual role-playng (the RP in RPG) and just because the game rocks.
Rather than the characters changing all the time but the world staying static, I would try to build a game where the characters don't advance much, but that the world changes.
Not a great deal more energy than mining fossil fuels.
I tend to agree that nuclear fission is a pretty good interrim solution, particularly when coupled with aggressive conservation measures.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods. The first is controllable, the second is a pain in the ass. Both are suffer from the 'not in my backyard' mentality.
But nuclear power is NOT a long-term solution. There probably isn't even a long-term magic bullet. Some of the things that can save us: high-temperature superconductors (for zero-loss transmission lines), nuclear fusion, alternative energy sources, and reduction of power use.
The latter needs to be taken seriously with the others. If it's too hot to live where you are in the summer, the right answer might be 'don't live there' rather than 'turn up the A/C'. This is easy to manage: simply let the price of power rise to match how much it actually costs to make.. INCLUDING the environmental cleanup costs of the technology you use.
Oh! I have been smited by the eloquance of your rhetoric! My country at least taught me to write.
America is a great place, and has admirable democratic ideals. But it's not the only place with that, and the solutions the US has are not always the solutions the rest of the world agrees with.
NO rights are absolute. My right to swing my first... your face.. etcetera etcetera. The question is about the sensible places to draw the line.
Your argument may hold in the specific but not in the general. A glance at the stats on the MADD website show that drunk driving is very common: the best stat I found was that in 1999 ~1 out of every 120 drivers was arrested for drunk driving. That's arrested.. not just people who had too much to drink.
This means that the majority of accidents are NOT caused by repeat offenders: there are so many of these guys out there that the case you state is likely to be the exception, not the rule. If you have some data on recitivism, then maybe you can make the case. Yes, locking THAT guy up would have saved a life. But it wouldn't have helped all the OTHER drunk driving victims that year.
Your second paragraph: wouldn't it be more fair just to remove their licenses? You don't need to lock someone up to keep them from driving. You're making the commmon mistake of confusing punishment and prevention: make up your mind which you are arguing for.
Your third statment is pretty stupid compared to the previous one. You're willing to remove ALL of a person's rights for 5 years to save a life, but you won't take away a tiny little insignificant right (i.e. the right not to have a breath machine in your bar) to save a life? That's pretty wierd. After all, bars also need to comply with a lot of rules already: they have to have bathrooms, hygiene standards, fire saftey standards, pay minimum wage, pay taxes, close at certain hours, etc. Seems a pretty small thing to ask to "save that little girl's life".
It's been shown in numerous cases that increasing punishments only increases desperation not to get caught; it rarely reduces the actual incidence of crime.
I would think that this case is one where this is even more obvious: the person in question is already drunk when the decision is made. Or, if he's not drunk, he's had a few drinks.. but that means he may be OK to drive. As the severity of the crime increases, his judgement decreases.
Now, that's not to say that drunk drivers aren't criminals or shouldn't be treated harshly. But it's far from clear that treating them more harshly will mean there are fewer drunk drivers.
In fact, there ARE ways to reduce drunk driving: For instance, put the pub within walking distance and don't have a parking lot. Make sure cabs are available late at night. Don't penalize people for leaving their cars parked overnight. Give more power to servers to say "no" to those who have had too much. Encourage friends not to drive, even after only one drink. Increase road checks (i.e. increase the chance of getting caught, not the penalty for getting caught). Install breathylizers in bars as a novelty. Reduce the use of cars if you can't reduce the use of alcohol.
I simply do not believe in "getting tough on crime" as the answer to every social ill.
Canadian-born, I'm often a political pragmatist. My first question is not "does it intefere with people's rights" but "is the interference beneficial"?
Are these tests easy to fool? I can imagine keeping a can of compressed air handy. Can they be easily disabled? How often will the car start even if the driver is drunk? What about variability for body size?
More importantly: will having such a device actually prevent people from driving drunk? If a drunk person IS driving a car started by someone else, is it really a good idea to have the lights and horn start going off on him suddenly? How the hell do you take the breath test _while you're driving_ for heaven's sake?
To sum up: has a pilot project been done? What quantifiable success did it have?
Yeah, and RedHat is really just Linux.. all they did was compile Midnight Commander.
Give me a break. This wasn't just a X11 clone.. this is an entire user interface. And user interface is everything in the desktop world.
Moreover, your statement is just plain wrong.. even putting together someone else's open source pieces into a coherent, stable, maintable, expandible OS requires pretty big effort. That's what all the Linux distros do for a living.
I took the 'bookcase' rack out of it, but it remains a good pack: it's got oodles of room, it's sturdy as hell, it has a great handle on top for carrying. It's got side tighteners that allow you to reduce the size if you're not carrying much, and it's got lots of compartents and meshes for letting you organize. One of the best $50 purchases I've ever made.
In skimming threads, it looks like people have missed the real problem: that the have pre-selected there sample.
There sample is the servers of the "fortune 1000 companies". Now, I don't know how the Fortune 1000 chooses it's companies, but I'll bet they don't choose those companies that have succeeded due to good IT choices. Microsoft will be on the list.. but how much money does Google make? Is it on the list?
Moreover, and this is the really important point, they are completely ignoring every other kind of site. Government, educational, research, NGO, military, etc, etc. It ignores all the sites that don't make any money but are vitally important.
OK, they're just doing the study to prove that _companies_ use MSII. But even that's bad: it only proves that BIG companies use microsloth. This may be an intelligent decision for big companies, but not for small ones.
So, in general, the only thing that Port80 really says in it's study is that big, rich companies use Microsoft. This implies no causality: few of these companies make money from the web.
The Netcraft survey shows that PEOPLE use Apache.. and I think that's much more interesting.
The question is not, as you put it, a question of truth or untruth in the pictures. It is not a question of the perception of truth in the pictures, althought that is more important. Nor is the question one of how easily pictures can mislead, as an earlier poster put it.
The basically offensive thing about this is that it even further reduces the simplification of the news (or even of thought in general). We ARE living in a complex world, and complexity requires deep and subtle thinking to navigate and make decisions in. This should be the age when there is more text, fewer pictures.
Representing current events or politics in the visceral fashion that they are in the popular press really does a disservice. I remember when I first saw the 24-hour news channels, and was applauled.. they actually managed LESS insight, less background, less insight, fewer opitions, more bland coverage than earlier TV news.. despite the fact that they had 24 times more air time to show it.
Happily, this website is just a fad.. but it's in exactly the wrong direction.
The basic problem is the laser: lasers are inefficient. For nearly every laser currently available, 99.9% of the energy you use to pump the laser goes into heat; only a small fraction is converted to coherent light.
Current laser designs are capable of delivering watts of power, at the cost of kilowatts of energy. A few watts, even a few hundred watts is barely enough to power the map light in a plane/space capsule/whatever, let alone make it fly.
They got away with this by: (a) using incoherent light (a spotlight) which is much more efficient (but of course cannot be focused on very distant targets) (b) having a very low-energy toy aircraft
.. they just announced that Halo for the PC went Gold yesterday. Whoohoo! Forget Half-Life.. I've been salivating over a New Bungie Game since the movie in '99.
This may be nitpicking, I look at something like this and immediately distrust it: they quote percentages to four significant figures, yet they only had 10000 respondents. Anyone who understands sampling errors knows that 10k data points means approximately 1% error on any number you measure with them.. possibly much less.
And it's hard to read with all them number things.
Slashdot Mirror
The goal is not just to get a fair count; it's to convince people they're getting a fair count. Consider: what if Diebold IS actually on the level and there is no tampering or assistance to tamperers from them or their employees. Even if this were true, we'd still be in our current mess because we wouldn't believe them.
I think that important technology like this should be open simply because it makes it transparent and therefore accountable. Suspicion of tampering? Send in whatever body of independent investigators you like, without signing any NDAs, and they can evaluate it and report (completely) on any problems.
---Nathaniel
No, actually that's one of the cool things about the system. You push the buttons and get your printed ballot.
Then you walk over to a completely different machine and wave the bar code in front of the machine. It will show you the decoded bar code information (privately of course) so you can see that it all works.
For someone to tamper, they would have to tamper with every machine at the site, not just one.
And then... if there is a recount (or even just a redundant slow count) you use the printed portion of the ballot, NOT the bar code.
---Nathaniel
The poster above cites one problem, which illustrates why this system would be hard to understand. I agree with everything said.
But I think it's a much more deeply flawed idea: you would hate this system!
Pretend that it's not an expert system in the OS doing this. Pretend that you got an intelligent, experienced, very clever co-worker in the next room, connected to your OS as root, with a screen up so he could see everything you are doing. Pretend that it is this intelligent agent that is doing these things for you.. he notices you have a hard time finding the XYZZY tool and puts it into a palette for you. He notices that you ignore email alerts and so reconfigures your alerts. He sees the header on the incoming email and so decides to give it high priority... all the things this magical "OS" is doing.
You would loathe this guy. You would hate him more than clippy. He's popping things on your screen. He's changing how the computer alerts you to things, so you might miss something, or think it's broken. He's changing defaults. He's interrupting your work.
Remember the scene in Jabberwocky, where the "efficiency expert" moves the chair and the whole workshop explodes? It would be like that. Or perhaps more colloquially, like a helpful friend who knows more than you about computers leaning over your shoulder as you're trying to write a paper... you might get a few percent more efficient, at the expense of having your work interrupted and bursting a blood vessel.
This goes back to the above point: you don't want an intelligent OS... you want an OS that's simpler to understand. That doesn't mean a simple OS, it just means that it has to do things in a way that is predictable and easy to learn.
---Nathaniel
"The death of IPv4 has not really killed the Internet. In fact, far from it, we've managed to make an industry around it."
.gov start adopting, then it will get off the ground. Of course, this is unlikely to happen because Cisco doesn't sell IPv6 switches.
In other words, by keeping IPv4, we can sell NAT boxes (which we're already selling in huge numbers.. the wireless network hub in my den is a prime example.) Cisco has a big investment in building hardware to take care of IP space limitiations.
"You will still be able to get addresses, if you pay for them, because a market will appear."
In other words, this damned internet isn't making us enough money, because IP addresses are free. We want people to start trading them, so we can get commissions on the sales.
It's clear that this is "good buisiness" for the big internet companies: why invest in a new system that will make users's lives cheaper and easier when we can continue to sell patches on the old stuff, and make a market so that we can start charging the freeloaders?
It's also clear to me that the only way IPv6 will get adopted is if public bodies start using them and demanding their use. For instance, if Internet2, the US military, or all of
I'm no expert, but to my cynical eye it looks not like market forces, but like the usual problems with capitalism exploiting a local maximum and avoiding short-term risk.
----Nathaniel
"In an unusual demonstration of video game innovation with limited funding and resources..."
This sentance presumes far too much. I have yet to see a well-funded, well-resourced game that was innovative. I urge all you game players to think back to the games that truely broke ground (that is, did not simply have the most detailed graphics or the slickest 3d interface.) All of them were made by a small group with very limited resources.
I have not seen ONE big-media title that was in the slightest bit innovative in any grand sense. Slick, yes. Fun, often. Innovative, never.
Make up your own list here for innovative games. I'll get you started:
Tetris. Nethack. Myst. Bolo.
Add your own here.
What is the assignment in Calc I for?
First, it's to force you to learn the topic, and give you guidance on what you need to understand. This requires no marking at all.
Second, it's to give you feedback on what you did wrong. A computer marking you would give you feedback something like how a compiler does when you write code: awful. Beginning programmers frequently need expert help in understanding compiler errors, so I doubt a machine would be any good at telling you that you got the limits of the integral backward.
Third, the assignment is there to teach you how to write: that is, how to present work in an intelligable way. This is common to all subjects, and I seriously doubt that any computer program will tell you how to write something that humans can understand.
Forth, it's to give you a grade. This is the least important reason for the assignment.
While the copy editors may be bad, and while the majority of the reviewing is done by peers, there is still very important jobs that you need good top-level editors for:
- Throwing out the complete garbage, crackpottery, etc: seeing if the author exists, is at a real institution, etc.
- Finding people to peer-review the article. This is not easy; it's often difficult to find 3 or 4 good people in the right sub-field who don't actually have a connection to the work. This means the editor has to understand the article to begin with.
- Dealing with fraud, plagurism, etc. Not easy.
You want smart, well-educated people for these jobs. And then you still need copy editors, layout, indexing, administration, etc etc, which don't come free.
Yes, you still need money to run a reputable journal. But it's also clear that it's time for a change, and that the subscription model simply doesn't work very well anymore. What we really need is someone to fund the peer-review process, and then web-based citations, indexing, archiving, and retrieval of articles.
This seems to have been a gradual phenomenon that people want to see movie trailers: downloaded, in theatres, whatever.
Why?
If I look at old or new movie trailers, they are inevitably very bad edits conveying nothing of the spirit of the film. They usually have only cheap laughs. Naturally, they have no plot, no dialog (although they do have snippets of monologue), just a few big explosions. (Like I haven't seen those before.)
Who cares? I'm honestly mystified why anyone would care about a movie trailer.. even for a movie they really want to see.
This looks an awful lot like Holywood pushing it's values on the rest of us by sheer force of marketing.
..but they'd have to change significantly.
Here's the brainstorm: don't have character advancement. Throw away the rather unrealistic old D&D idea of 'levels' or 'advancement'. Let people build the character they want right up front.
What's to keep people playing? Well, I assume that you have quests, storylines. Players play for prestige, for wealth (which can't buy power, only nice things like clothes and property), for dare-I-say-it actual role-playng (the RP in RPG) and just because the game rocks.
Rather than the characters changing all the time but the world staying static, I would try to build a game where the characters don't advance much, but that the world changes.
Not a great deal more energy than mining fossil fuels.
I tend to agree that nuclear fission is a pretty good interrim solution, particularly when coupled with aggressive conservation measures.
The problem is, it's got a lot of problems that we are simply deferring. Two big ones: risk of disaster, and what to do with the dead fuel rods. The first is controllable, the second is a pain in the ass. Both are suffer from the 'not in my backyard' mentality.
But nuclear power is NOT a long-term solution. There probably isn't even a long-term magic bullet. Some of the things that can save us: high-temperature superconductors (for zero-loss transmission lines), nuclear fusion, alternative energy sources, and reduction of power use.
The latter needs to be taken seriously with the others. If it's too hot to live where you are in the summer, the right answer might be 'don't live there' rather than 'turn up the A/C'. This is easy to manage: simply let the price of power rise to match how much it actually costs to make.. INCLUDING the environmental cleanup costs of the technology you use.
---N
Oh! I have been smited by the eloquance of your rhetoric! My country at least taught me to write.
America is a great place, and has admirable democratic ideals. But it's not the only place with that, and the solutions the US has are not always the solutions the rest of the world agrees with.
NO rights are absolute. My right to swing my first... your face.. etcetera etcetera. The question is about the sensible places to draw the line.
You are entirely correct: -rights +priviledges, but it doesn't read so well. :)
Your argument may hold in the specific but not in the general. A glance at the stats on the MADD website show that drunk driving is very common: the best stat I found was that in 1999 ~1 out of every 120 drivers was arrested for drunk driving. That's arrested.. not just people who had too much to drink.
This means that the majority of accidents are NOT caused by repeat offenders: there are so many of these guys out there that the case you state is likely to be the exception, not the rule. If you have some data on recitivism, then maybe you can make the case. Yes, locking THAT guy up would have saved a life. But it wouldn't have helped all the OTHER drunk driving victims that year.
Your second paragraph: wouldn't it be more fair just to remove their licenses? You don't need to lock someone up to keep them from driving. You're making the commmon mistake of confusing punishment and prevention: make up your mind which you are arguing for.
Your third statment is pretty stupid compared to the previous one. You're willing to remove ALL of a person's rights for 5 years to save a life, but you won't take away a tiny little insignificant right (i.e. the right not to have a breath machine in your bar) to save a life? That's pretty wierd. After all, bars also need to comply with a lot of rules already: they have to have bathrooms, hygiene standards, fire saftey standards, pay minimum wage, pay taxes, close at certain hours, etc. Seems a pretty small thing to ask to "save that little girl's life".
It's been shown in numerous cases that increasing punishments only increases desperation not to get caught; it rarely reduces the actual incidence of crime.
I would think that this case is one where this is even more obvious: the person in question is already drunk when the decision is made. Or, if he's not drunk, he's had a few drinks.. but that means he may be OK to drive. As the severity of the crime increases, his judgement decreases.
Now, that's not to say that drunk drivers aren't criminals or shouldn't be treated harshly. But it's far from clear that treating them more harshly will mean there are fewer drunk drivers.
In fact, there ARE ways to reduce drunk driving: For instance, put the pub within walking distance and don't have a parking lot. Make sure cabs are available late at night. Don't penalize people for leaving their cars parked overnight. Give more power to servers to say "no" to those who have had too much. Encourage friends not to drive, even after only one drink. Increase road checks (i.e. increase the chance of getting caught, not the penalty for getting caught). Install breathylizers in bars as a novelty. Reduce the use of cars if you can't reduce the use of alcohol.
I simply do not believe in "getting tough on crime" as the answer to every social ill.
--N
Canadian-born, I'm often a political pragmatist. My first question is not "does it intefere with people's rights" but "is the interference beneficial"?
Are these tests easy to fool? I can imagine keeping a can of compressed air handy. Can they be easily disabled? How often will the car start even if the driver is drunk? What about variability for body size?
More importantly: will having such a device actually prevent people from driving drunk? If a drunk person IS driving a car started by someone else, is it really a good idea to have the lights and horn start going off on him suddenly? How the hell do you take the breath test _while you're driving_ for heaven's sake?
To sum up: has a pilot project been done? What quantifiable success did it have?
Consider: 400 workers all lose 1 day to the virus. 1 day out of 365 times 400 workers adds up to one worker-year of salary being blown.
However, this figure is exaggerated by at least a factor of two: not everyone spends a whole day working on recovering from a virus.
--N
Yeah, and RedHat is really just Linux.. all they did was compile Midnight Commander.
Give me a break. This wasn't just a X11 clone.. this is an entire user interface. And user interface is everything in the desktop world.
Moreover, your statement is just plain wrong.. even putting together someone else's open source pieces into a coherent, stable, maintable, expandible OS requires pretty big effort. That's what all the Linux distros do for a living.
http://homeworktips.about.com/cs/productreviews/gr /raknotebook.htm
I took the 'bookcase' rack out of it, but it remains a good pack: it's got oodles of room, it's sturdy as hell, it has a great handle on top for carrying. It's got side tighteners that allow you to reduce the size if you're not carrying much, and it's got lots of compartents and meshes for letting you organize. One of the best $50 purchases I've ever made.
In skimming threads, it looks like people have missed the real problem: that the have pre-selected there sample.
There sample is the servers of the "fortune 1000 companies". Now, I don't know how the Fortune 1000 chooses it's companies, but I'll bet they don't choose those companies that have succeeded due to good IT choices. Microsoft will be on the list.. but how much money does Google make? Is it on the list?
Moreover, and this is the really important point, they are completely ignoring every other kind of site. Government, educational, research, NGO, military, etc, etc. It ignores all the sites that don't make any money but are vitally important.
OK, they're just doing the study to prove that _companies_ use MSII. But even that's bad: it only proves that BIG companies use microsloth. This may be an intelligent decision for big companies, but not for small ones.
So, in general, the only thing that Port80 really says in it's study is that big, rich companies use Microsoft. This implies no causality: few of these companies make money from the web.
The Netcraft survey shows that PEOPLE use Apache.. and I think that's much more interesting.
---Nathaniel
The question is not, as you put it, a question of truth or untruth in the pictures. It is not a question of the perception of truth in the pictures, althought that is more important. Nor is the question one of how easily pictures can mislead, as an earlier poster put it.
The basically offensive thing about this is that it even further reduces the simplification of the news (or even of thought in general). We ARE living in a complex world, and complexity requires deep and subtle thinking to navigate and make decisions in. This should be the age when there is more text, fewer pictures.
Representing current events or politics in the visceral fashion that they are in the popular press really does a disservice. I remember when I first saw the 24-hour news channels, and was applauled.. they actually managed LESS insight, less background, less insight, fewer opitions, more bland coverage than earlier TV news.. despite the fact that they had 24 times more air time to show it.
Happily, this website is just a fad.. but it's in exactly the wrong direction.
4-bit computers, with the honkin' big floppy drive. We kept three of them around to read old spectrum data from double-beta decay experiments.
The basic problem is the laser: lasers are inefficient. For nearly every laser currently available, 99.9% of the energy you use to pump the laser goes into heat; only a small fraction is converted to coherent light.
Current laser designs are capable of delivering watts of power, at the cost of kilowatts of energy. A few watts, even a few hundred watts is barely enough to power the map light in a plane/space capsule/whatever, let alone make it fly.
They got away with this by:
(a) using incoherent light (a spotlight) which is much more efficient (but of course cannot be focused on very distant targets)
(b) having a very low-energy toy aircraft
> 25 ( 46 ) + 254 - 2462 / ( 645 - 2453 )
>
>25*46+254-2462/(645-2453);
No, the correct way to do this is:
2453-645=(1/x)*2462+24+25*36=
Which lets you see along the way what you're doing.. Saves a couple of keystrokes, but more importantly doesn't mess with the brackets.
-DoctorPedanticNathaniel
.. they just announced that Halo for the PC went Gold yesterday. Whoohoo! Forget Half-Life.. I've been salivating over a New Bungie Game since the movie in '99.
This may be nitpicking, I look at something like this and immediately distrust it: they quote percentages to four significant figures, yet they only had 10000 respondents. Anyone who understands sampling errors knows that 10k data points means approximately 1% error on any number you measure with them.. possibly much less.
And it's hard to read with all them number things.