I basically agree, though I think you didn't word the criticism directly enough. The deeper point revealed by the "serious" publication of this kind of tripe is that America is moving to a police state where the convenience of the police is a primary consideration over the freedoms and rights of the citizens. Since they (the political monopolists, not the police) want to monitor everything and everyone in search of their political enemies, then of course they want to maximize the convenience of the process. Searching for terrorists is just an excuse for standardizing browsers in this specific case, and the police are just the hired agents.
By the way, that's actually an important point: As far as I know from my studies of history, the police themselves are never the instigators of police states, just as terrorists are never the instigators of reigns of terror. The dark "oxymoronic" side of English?
Of couse it's impossible to know exactly how the present will look from the historical perspective. Some elements are clear, such as Dubya being a miserable failure, but I have trouble imagining how they will label the dominant philosophy of these times. Royal fascism?
This article sounds like something Ann Coulter would write.
One of the things that most annoys me about/. is what I think can only be described as a kind of intellectual dishonesty. That stands in sharp contrast to almost all scientific papers. In this particular case, what they are trying to say is that research papers in new areas are often less than perfect and contain flaws. If we already knew the answers, we wouldn't need to do the research, would we?
Meanwhile, the/. editors post provocatively-worded "articles" apparently intended to "stimulate" discussion--while the system is actively abused by moderators who use the moderation system to anonymously attack any positions they dislike. I have yet to see a legimate use of anonymity on/., though I've seen plenty of examples of abuse. If it wasn't hidden by the system, I'm sure there are plenty more examples we simply can't see.
As regards this particular article, what it really proves is that the word "scientist" is being used increasingly loosely these days. If you can't claim to be a "scientist", who's going to listen to you? Actually, if you can't make the claim, you just set up a think tank for your pet prejudice and find some "scientists" who are for sale, preferably cheap.
Finally, let's consider whether or not ost/. articles are wrong. Actually, that's a silly question. If we want to consider the question as it applies to/. articles with inaccuracies, the question is 95%, 99%, or 99.44%.
Amusing version of efficiency theory. You're assuming that people actually know what is going on so that they can make meaningful choices.
It works rather differently in Bushevik Amerika. Whether they are selling you laundry soap, gasoline, or an eternal war on terrorism, they are not going to reveal any more of the truth than is convenient. Whatever is necessary to manipulate the sheeple is the rule. What happens if the truth is a "problem"? In that case, lies are no problem. At least that's how they see things. Sure the lies will eventually unravel, but they'll have your money by then. Worst case scenario, they'll need a pardon, too, but that's why those politicians and judges are bought and paid for.
Law of the Jungle works okay if you think you're the biggest lion.
You obviously have very little experience with printers. All spawned by Satan.
Actually, I should have noted that the point of the original article is that they only unleashed the natural paper-hating spirit of the demon that lurks in the heart of every printer. (Benjamin Franklin excepted.)
But it still deserves to get modded redundant? Will it help avert redundancy if I tell the story of my three of my early printers? One was this weird thermal paper jobber. Then there was this early daisy wheel thing by Brother. Major breakthrough in that it had two colors, and I even had an italic font wheel to use with it. The third one was actually a more normal dot matrix printer, but it still needed tractor fed paper... Ah, those were the paper rending days of yore.
That was exactly the point I was going to make. The only purpose printers have is to shred as much paper as possible. Once in a while they actually print a good page, but that's just bait to trick you into feeding it more paper.
What I'd actually like to see are the release criteria--and a realistic system to help OpenOffice move toward it. Thinking along those lines reminds me of a related suggestion I recently submitted to/. (but to absolutely no avail). That part of the suggestion was to basically sell improvements to the interested users. The reply from/. was apparently that they don't think money matters. Or something.
There is no Word 2003 in this country. It's actually Word 2002 AKA Word XP.
I can't believe I wasted the keystrokes to reply to an anonymous coward. With a typically stupid spelling mistake and factual error, too. What/. really needs is an option to completely and utterly ignore anything posted as AC, even when posted in reply to one's own posts.
Away from/., it would also be nice if there were some combined HTML tags for bold and italic at the same time, without having to resort to CSS. Hmm... Does/. honor embedded local CSS?
No, that is NOT the problem I encountered. DRM blockage is just an example of broken as designed.
In the case I was referring to, the files seemed to open without problem in OO 2b, and I seemed to be able to work on them effectively. OO even said it was saving them in the PPT format, and I was able to open them up again within OO and they still looked normal. It was after returning to Powerpoint that the files were revealed to be hopelessly mangled. I spent a while trying to unmung them, but without success. Microsoft had conquereth.
However, since you've mentioned DRM, I'll note that I recently encountered an example (from a different author) of DRM problems within Powerpoint, and that was broken even beyond the design. Powerpoint at MY end insisted that the files (actually two versions of the same file) contained embedded read-only fonts, and were therefore uneditable. The author of the files at the other end, and one of his colleagues, insisted there was no such problem. The versions of Powerpoint were apparently identical right down to the build number and patch level.
Amusingly enough, I was able to sort of fix that problem by using OO 2b. From OO I was able to save the file under a new name, and that file is now editable using Powerpoint. It was slightly damaged, but the original author confirmed that he could still edit it, and he said he could fix the new version, so I should work from that one. (It's actually a current project, second in the queue...)
Getting off the original topic here, but that's one of the main reasons I'd like to see more competition in all of these products. I think the software without DRM will crush the DRM-crippled versions--as long as there is some real competition that allows people to freely choose their tools.
Boy, you touched a nerve there. Actually, the revision tracking and collaborative editing features of Word 2000 are significantly better than in Word XP. This is a area where Microsoft took a downgrade, labeled it an upgrade, and rammed it down our throats. I spent months trying to find workarounds. I'm quite convinced there aren't any. I think Microsoft's real plan is to reintroduce those features of Word 2000 as "new" in the next version.
Yes, there are some improvements in Word XP, but collaborative editing is not one of them.
I haven't used OO enough to assess whether or not there are any comparable features there. I'm basically constrained to use what my customers use, and so far none of my customers has sent me any OO files. I'd be delighted, but...
Anyway, I have used the beta 2, though I was basically constrained to do so. The company has a corporate license for Microsoft's garbage, but it's restrictive. Not having Powerpoint on a particular machine, and not wanting to risk any attempt to tiptoe past Microsoft's lawyers (or our own lawyers), I went ahead and installed OO. Unfortunately, I must report that Microsoft is (predictably) still succeeding in protecting their incompatibilities, at least as regards PPT files.
I really dislike having Microsoft products rammed down my throat, and I really would like to switch. Won't happen, however. My employer would have be make a major commitment to support OO. Basically, they'd have to insist on and guarantee that I not be penalized for any impact on my work that came from using OO instead of the Microsoft Office "standard" files.
As it actually worked out in this recent case, the post-OO PPT files were hopelessly mangled, and I wound up working late on several evenings to redo that work on a different machine that has Microsoft Powerpoint on it.
No, there is *NO* claim that IQ is related to earning potential. Not even the most stupid supporters of "intelligence" testing would try to defend that one. There are claims regarding successful participation in certain professions, some of which do have high average incomes, and some of which match the test makers' own professions.
Is that post some sort of parody? If you haven't noticed that there are differences between men and women, you are not very observant. If you think you can understand what those differences mean, then you're the first person to succeed in that research--which has been going on for thousands of years.
When people start pushing all these personal questions, it starts making me paranoid. You don't work for BushCo, do you?
Anyway, I'll say that most of my actual "education" is simply a kind of memorization, and I'm probably some sort of idiot savant. I've read thousands of books, and I seem to retain much more than most people. I think I do well on tests because I tend to recall the missing contexts used by the questioners in formulating their questions.
And yes, I know about the renormalization that needs to be applied to such specialized tests as the LSAT.
The question of creativity is very interesting, and something that tests do not touch. My own take on this issue is that real creativity cannot be evaluated or predicted, though certain people may have a track record. Amusingly enough, I'm probably regarded as creative, but I think of myself as an analytic and synthetic thinker, not creative. What seems like creativity to other people is just the result of recombinations of existing components, whereas the few truly creative people I know are sometimes pulling something out of nothing--their creations come from nowhere that I can understand. (However, it is a completely separate question as to whether or not any of those creations influence the larger world, and the answer to that question is usually related to the skills of ramming new things down other people's throats.)
Studies should not stop just because some people [inclusive reference to Gould] who are clueless about the subject matter have written a few books "debunking" those fields.
Emphasis added.
Never limited to "since my previous post"? Or are you now claiming it was some other rude, worthless, lying, anonymity-abusing coward?
Do you imagine anyone cares? But have you thought about going into American politics? Wait! Maybe you are a politician! That would at least give a pragmatic spin to your worthlessness.
I really wonder what conceivable functional purpose the/. programmers imagine is served by anonymous cowards. Perhaps inspiring that "sense of wonder" is their purpose?
I mentioned my own test scores because I count them as strong evidence against the validity of IQ testing--but I probably have more money than you, too. Looking back on my life, I cannot say that IQ testing was in any way constructive, and any success I've achieved had much more to do with persistance, timing, and a bit of luck than anything measured by those tests. That makes me a kind of counterexample, though the more significant counterexamples are people who had low scores and still succeeded in life, and the people who had high scores and failed. I personally know a number of people in both categories--and for anyone who is claiming these tests are universally valid, a single counterexample destroys their claim.
Actually, it's another metric of the tests' bogosity when you read how most of their supporters qualify their claims and equivocate within an inch of their lives. The trick here is supposed to be predicting the future, and like Rocky always told Bullwinkle, "That trick never works." At least the prediction of the failure of the trick was always valid.
Gould as clueless? Amusingly clever banter from our typical anonymous coward.
Please do me a brave favor. Add me to your foe list and set your scoring to drop my posts out of your sight. I'm not writing for the benefit of spineless and cowardly morons like you. I'd even reciprocate if you had a friggin' name.
Yet another example of the abuse of anonymity. There are times when it is called for, but this is not one of them. Actually, on/. the purity of the abused anonymity is about 99.44%.
The Mismeasure of Man does include mention of those tests and a bunch of others, too. However, the current tests were mostly "standardized" based on the large-scale testing of draftees for WW I. Before that, it was hard to claim "scientific validity" because the sample sizes were basically too small. After that, they basically were able to ignore the question of validity because they had lots of "validated" numbers for "normal" people to wave about. I don't have the book to hand, or I'd check, but I think the psychologist was from Stanford, which is where the Stanford Binet label came into the picture. (It's been more than 10 years since I read it.)
You sound like you'd be more interested in the parts about phrenology, however. Or maybe the intelligence metrics based on brain size. It's actually a rather wide-ranging book.
In actuality, human performance is complicated and unpredictable. There are many forms of "intelligence", and they are combined in many strange ways. The idea of intelligence testing was to predict something about the future performance of the testees, but my recommendation is tarot cards. Rather more time efficient, and with a bit of clever wording, nothing is actually refutable. Or there's always astrology and palm reading.
Actually, I'm rather surprised to see this IQ malarkey coming up again and again. The best rebuttal I've read was the late Professor Gould's The Mismeasure of Man. The "standard" IQ test is anything but standard, and the notion of reducing human intelligence to any single metric is pure hogwash. With my historical bent, I fond the most interesting part of the book to be the copious details about the history of IQ testing, which was basically created to facilitate the sorting of American draftees for WW I. What the tests actually measure is a kind of similarity metric between the testees and the authors' of the test.
There is so much confusion about the notions of intelligence, cleverness, wisdom, creativity, etc., etc. that belief in the signficance of IQ testing only proves someone to be an elitist fool--usually because that person "does well" on certain tests.
By the way, I almost always score in the top 1% on every standardized written test, including IQ tests. The only exception I can recall was the LSAT, where I only scored in the top 10%. However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
Really unlikely in Japan. Actually, there's often furniture standing by the road waiting for removal. In many places you have to pay for that service. The resale market for used stuff is not very strong.
Actually, I suppose it's closer to a deep thought to note that many Japanese are very security minded even though crime is so rare here. A few weeks ago the police were handing out flyers in the station to warn people about a "crime wave". Something like 30 burlaries in a month for a large district was really worrying them. Many of the new apartments have gated access with cameras and intercoms and all that stuff.
Actually, what this article mostly reminded me of was a manga I recently came across. Not sure if I'm overgeneralizing, but at least in this case, the cute women with big ears in the manga were supposed to be human-shaped personal computers with a wide range of functions (including house-sitting). The particular one I saw was called Chobits, and is available in English translations, too.
Someone else mentioned putting cameras in every room, and the reality is that's already trivial. You can even use free software to detect image changes that might be burglars and send those images to a safe remote location.
How did that get rated insightful? Oh, I forgot this is/.
Anyway, the obvious answer is that you should have a chance to decide whether or not it's a false alarm. In Japan, you probably left your door unlocked and it's just your neighbor moving your laundry out of the rain.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, that's actually an important point: As far as I know from my studies of history, the police themselves are never the instigators of police states, just as terrorists are never the instigators of reigns of terror. The dark "oxymoronic" side of English?
Of couse it's impossible to know exactly how the present will look from the historical perspective. Some elements are clear, such as Dubya being a miserable failure, but I have trouble imagining how they will label the dominant philosophy of these times. Royal fascism?
This article sounds like something Ann Coulter would write.
Meanwhile, the /. editors post provocatively-worded "articles" apparently intended to "stimulate" discussion--while the system is actively abused by moderators who use the moderation system to anonymously attack any positions they dislike. I have yet to see a legimate use of anonymity on /., though I've seen plenty of examples of abuse. If it wasn't hidden by the system, I'm sure there are plenty more examples we simply can't see.
As regards this particular article, what it really proves is that the word "scientist" is being used increasingly loosely these days. If you can't claim to be a "scientist", who's going to listen to you? Actually, if you can't make the claim, you just set up a think tank for your pet prejudice and find some "scientists" who are for sale, preferably cheap.
Finally, let's consider whether or not ost /. articles are wrong. Actually, that's a silly question. If we want to consider the question as it applies to /. articles with inaccuracies, the question is 95%, 99%, or 99.44%.
It works rather differently in Bushevik Amerika. Whether they are selling you laundry soap, gasoline, or an eternal war on terrorism, they are not going to reveal any more of the truth than is convenient. Whatever is necessary to manipulate the sheeple is the rule. What happens if the truth is a "problem"? In that case, lies are no problem. At least that's how they see things. Sure the lies will eventually unravel, but they'll have your money by then. Worst case scenario, they'll need a pardon, too, but that's why those politicians and judges are bought and paid for.
Law of the Jungle works okay if you think you're the biggest lion.
Actually, I should have noted that the point of the original article is that they only unleashed the natural paper-hating spirit of the demon that lurks in the heart of every printer. (Benjamin Franklin excepted.)
But it still deserves to get modded redundant? Will it help avert redundancy if I tell the story of my three of my early printers? One was this weird thermal paper jobber. Then there was this early daisy wheel thing by Brother. Major breakthrough in that it had two colors, and I even had an italic font wheel to use with it. The third one was actually a more normal dot matrix printer, but it still needed tractor fed paper... Ah, those were the paper rending days of yore.
That was exactly the point I was going to make. The only purpose printers have is to shred as much paper as possible. Once in a while they actually print a good page, but that's just bait to trick you into feeding it more paper.
What I'd actually like to see are the release criteria--and a realistic system to help OpenOffice move toward it. Thinking along those lines reminds me of a related suggestion I recently submitted to /. (but to absolutely no avail). That part of the suggestion was to basically sell improvements to the interested users. The reply from /. was apparently that they don't think money matters. Or something.
Come on someone. Anyone. Remind me what was supposed to be the constructive purpose served by anonymous posting? Better yet provide an actual example.
I can't believe I wasted the keystrokes to reply to an anonymous coward. With a typically stupid spelling mistake and factual error, too. What /. really needs is an option to completely and utterly ignore anything posted as AC, even when posted in reply to one's own posts.
Away from /., it would also be nice if there were some combined HTML tags for bold and italic at the same time, without having to resort to CSS. Hmm... Does /. honor embedded local CSS?
In the case I was referring to, the files seemed to open without problem in OO 2b, and I seemed to be able to work on them effectively. OO even said it was saving them in the PPT format, and I was able to open them up again within OO and they still looked normal. It was after returning to Powerpoint that the files were revealed to be hopelessly mangled. I spent a while trying to unmung them, but without success. Microsoft had conquereth.
However, since you've mentioned DRM, I'll note that I recently encountered an example (from a different author) of DRM problems within Powerpoint, and that was broken even beyond the design. Powerpoint at MY end insisted that the files (actually two versions of the same file) contained embedded read-only fonts, and were therefore uneditable. The author of the files at the other end, and one of his colleagues, insisted there was no such problem. The versions of Powerpoint were apparently identical right down to the build number and patch level.
Amusingly enough, I was able to sort of fix that problem by using OO 2b. From OO I was able to save the file under a new name, and that file is now editable using Powerpoint. It was slightly damaged, but the original author confirmed that he could still edit it, and he said he could fix the new version, so I should work from that one. (It's actually a current project, second in the queue...)
Getting off the original topic here, but that's one of the main reasons I'd like to see more competition in all of these products. I think the software without DRM will crush the DRM-crippled versions--as long as there is some real competition that allows people to freely choose their tools.
Yes, there are some improvements in Word XP, but collaborative editing is not one of them.
I haven't used OO enough to assess whether or not there are any comparable features there. I'm basically constrained to use what my customers use, and so far none of my customers has sent me any OO files. I'd be delighted, but...
Anyway, I have used the beta 2, though I was basically constrained to do so. The company has a corporate license for Microsoft's garbage, but it's restrictive. Not having Powerpoint on a particular machine, and not wanting to risk any attempt to tiptoe past Microsoft's lawyers (or our own lawyers), I went ahead and installed OO. Unfortunately, I must report that Microsoft is (predictably) still succeeding in protecting their incompatibilities, at least as regards PPT files.
I really dislike having Microsoft products rammed down my throat, and I really would like to switch. Won't happen, however. My employer would have be make a major commitment to support OO. Basically, they'd have to insist on and guarantee that I not be penalized for any impact on my work that came from using OO instead of the Microsoft Office "standard" files.
As it actually worked out in this recent case, the post-OO PPT files were hopelessly mangled, and I wound up working late on several evenings to redo that work on a different machine that has Microsoft Powerpoint on it.
Excuse me, but I need to go do something useful with my time.
No, there is *NO* claim that IQ is related to earning potential. Not even the most stupid supporters of "intelligence" testing would try to defend that one. There are claims regarding successful participation in certain professions, some of which do have high average incomes, and some of which match the test makers' own professions.
The test makers definition of "smart"? That they got there (mostly "there" = "teaching positions at universities") first.
In spite of your adversarial tone, we seem to be mostly in agreement on the actual issues.
Is that post some sort of parody? If you haven't noticed that there are differences between men and women, you are not very observant. If you think you can understand what those differences mean, then you're the first person to succeed in that research--which has been going on for thousands of years.
Anyway, I'll say that most of my actual "education" is simply a kind of memorization, and I'm probably some sort of idiot savant. I've read thousands of books, and I seem to retain much more than most people. I think I do well on tests because I tend to recall the missing contexts used by the questioners in formulating their questions.
And yes, I know about the renormalization that needs to be applied to such specialized tests as the LSAT.
The question of creativity is very interesting, and something that tests do not touch. My own take on this issue is that real creativity cannot be evaluated or predicted, though certain people may have a track record. Amusingly enough, I'm probably regarded as creative, but I think of myself as an analytic and synthetic thinker, not creative. What seems like creativity to other people is just the result of recombinations of existing components, whereas the few truly creative people I know are sometimes pulling something out of nothing--their creations come from nowhere that I can understand. (However, it is a completely separate question as to whether or not any of those creations influence the larger world, and the answer to that question is usually related to the skills of ramming new things down other people's throats.)
Never limited to "since my previous post"? Or are you now claiming it was some other rude, worthless, lying, anonymity-abusing coward?
Do you imagine anyone cares? But have you thought about going into American politics? Wait! Maybe you are a politician! That would at least give a pragmatic spin to your worthlessness.
I really wonder what conceivable functional purpose the /. programmers imagine is served by anonymous cowards. Perhaps inspiring that "sense of wonder" is their purpose?
Actually, it's another metric of the tests' bogosity when you read how most of their supporters qualify their claims and equivocate within an inch of their lives. The trick here is supposed to be predicting the future, and like Rocky always told Bullwinkle, "That trick never works." At least the prediction of the failure of the trick was always valid.
Please do me a brave favor. Add me to your foe list and set your scoring to drop my posts out of your sight. I'm not writing for the benefit of spineless and cowardly morons like you. I'd even reciprocate if you had a friggin' name.
Yet another example of the abuse of anonymity. There are times when it is called for, but this is not one of them. Actually, on /. the purity of the abused anonymity is about 99.44%.
You sound like you'd be more interested in the parts about phrenology, however. Or maybe the intelligence metrics based on brain size. It's actually a rather wide-ranging book.
In actuality, human performance is complicated and unpredictable. There are many forms of "intelligence", and they are combined in many strange ways. The idea of intelligence testing was to predict something about the future performance of the testees, but my recommendation is tarot cards. Rather more time efficient, and with a bit of clever wording, nothing is actually refutable. Or there's always astrology and palm reading.
Is it clear why that style of argumentation is invalid? I rest my case.
There is so much confusion about the notions of intelligence, cleverness, wisdom, creativity, etc., etc. that belief in the signficance of IQ testing only proves someone to be an elitist fool--usually because that person "does well" on certain tests.
By the way, I almost always score in the top 1% on every standardized written test, including IQ tests. The only exception I can recall was the LSAT, where I only scored in the top 10%. However, I'm not foolish enough to think those tests indicate anything of significance.
Actually, I suppose it's closer to a deep thought to note that many Japanese are very security minded even though crime is so rare here. A few weeks ago the police were handing out flyers in the station to warn people about a "crime wave". Something like 30 burlaries in a month for a large district was really worrying them. Many of the new apartments have gated access with cameras and intercoms and all that stuff.
Someone else mentioned putting cameras in every room, and the reality is that's already trivial. You can even use free software to detect image changes that might be burglars and send those images to a safe remote location.
Anyway, the obvious answer is that you should have a chance to decide whether or not it's a false alarm. In Japan, you probably left your door unlocked and it's just your neighbor moving your laundry out of the rain.