Scientists often discuss new theories, etc, and in that context dark matter has it's place, but to claim it exists - as this story does - without being able to actually measure anything is quite silly and premature.
The whole point of these observations is that they are an entirely new probe of extra-galactic dark matter, and they are consistent with dynamical estimates of extra-galactic dark matter distributions.
Ergo, they consistute compelling evidence that extra-galactic dark matter is not just a mistake fix for an error in our understanding of the dynamics of the universe on a large scale, but rather a real, observable component of the universe that has multiple unrelated effects.
The new lensing and colliding-cluster measurements are precisely "measuring something" that compels anyone who does not have a faith-based epistemology to believe that extra-galactic, non-baryonic dark matter exists, in the ordinary and always somewhat uncertain meaning of the term "exists".
Previously, dark matter was plausible but unconvincing. Now it would be surprising as hell if anything else turned out to be the correct explanation for the dynamical anaomalies that gave rise to the hypothesis in the first place.
Some portion of it could be ordinary matter that's simply non-luminous, but I think there are observations that limit that to a small proportion.
Big Bang nucleosynthesis limits the amount of baryonic (that is, "normal") matter to a relatively small fraction of the total observed mass of the universe. The basic idea is that we know how big the universe was when protons and neutrons (collectively known as nucleons) were being formed--at some point the cosmic fireball cooled off to the point where quarks were no longer free, so they condensed into nucleons. We also know that the lifetime of a free neutron is about 15 minutes, so there was only about an hour for nuclei more complex than hydrogen to form.
So, if the universe was VERY dense in the hour or so after nucleon formation then every single proton would have run into a neutron or two and there would be almost no plain old hydrogen in the universe--everything would be helium and deuterium. On the other hand, if the the universe were extremely diffuse during that single hour there would be hardly any helium--only the few percent made by stellar fusion and supernova in the past ten billion years. As it is, we are pretty sure based on observations and theory that about 20% of the helium in the universe was formed in the Big Bang. That, plus some more problematic numbers from deuterium and lithium and helium-3, give us a very good estimate of the total baryonic mass in the universe.
The visible mass is quite a bit smaller than the total baryonic mass, and there is some reason to believe that the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies are due to baryonic dark matter, although it would have to be in the form of small clumps of matter like comets or dead stars or something to not do any significant scattering of light.
Dark matter on larger scales is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter--the use of the single term "dark matter" for these totally unrelated problems is unfortunate and confusing, as I point out every time this topic comes up on/.
The observation reported here, like the colliding galactic clusters observation reported a month or so ago, is amongst our first clear view of extra-galactic dark matter, which is too copious to be explained as normal baryonic matter.
The problem that cold dark matter theorists have to deal with is that the extra-galactic dark matter can't just interact gravitationally, because gravity is too weak a force to produce structures in the short time the universe has been around. To clump in the manner observed, extra-galactic dark matter has to have some mechanism for losing energy. Otherwise two pieces of dark matter (or a piece of dark matter and a peice of ordinary matter) would just pass through each other. The dark matter would never be slowed down by anything, and so would never form clumps on any scale.
So it is probable that extra-galactic dark matter is pretty exotic, or that something was sufficiently different in the early universe to make gravity sufficiently dissipative to form the observed clumps. Either way, the flood of observations using these new microlensing techniques is going to start killing off theories in droves--at least those theories that make actual predictions.
If they were really able to find you a suitable partner (a) they wouldn't need to be a service, and (b) they would loose all their customers. This is simple logic. If you believe otherwise, you are only deceiving yourself.
If you subscribe to any online dating site for a while you'll see there are two distinct populations: transients who are there because they are passing through a phase, and "lifers" who are clearly serial daters with lots of short relationships behind them. The second population is the larger of the two, as simple statistics would lead you to expect. In my age group the first population consists mostly of people who are re-entering the dating world post-divorce, and find such sites a non-intimidating way of doing it. Once we figure out that there's nothing to be intimidated about we tend to drop out and meet others in more traditional ways.
Being hard to cancel makes it possible for these sites to pull more cash out of the lifers, who would otherwise cancel and renew their subscription ever few months. Although from my own experience I haven't found cancellation to be a major issue with any of them--certainly nothing like the costly nightmare that Vonage was.
The big challenge for these sites are free sites that do at least as good a job, which is what I would recommend to anyone interested in online dating. The population represented there is similar to the pay sites, and there are no cancellation issues at all.
Ajax, by itself, can't possibly cause any of the problems you describe.
The point is that AJAX makes it easy to do things badly, in the same way that Java makes it easy to do things slowly and Perl makes it easy to do things incomprehensibly.
As with any new language, it takes time to develop and institutionalize the idioms that work around the inherent problems, and because AJAX is flavour-of-the-month that hasn't happened yet. Thus, the OP's experience with badly written AJAX apps. They are the result of some marketing droid saying, "Hey, code me up some AJAX--it's what customers are beggging for!" and ever-optimistic technologists saying, "This stuff is bleeding-edge kewel, we'd love to!" and then doing a crappy job of it because the idioms for doing it well aren't yet well known and the gotchas are still being discovered.
So you're right that there is nothing "inherent" about AJAX that makes it necessary that AJAX apps will be crap, but there is something inherent about where we are on the AJAX learning curve and adoption cycle that makes it an absolute certainty that most AJAX apps will be badly-written unscalable pieces of garbage. And AJAX apps from large third-party vendors with big marketing budgets that are purchased by PHBs with an eye to nothing more than buzzword compliance will the worst hit. In-house service apps like Google's offerings will in general be much better because the people who write them also have to live with them.
The unfortuante side effect of this is that the technology itself will get a bad rep, and people will avoid it until it is revivified under a new name.
The weird thing is that they must have a whole staff of highly qualified computer geeks who do their effects who could tell them this was bullshit.
You need to realize that CSI is science fiction masquerading as a cop show. Their impossible tricks with image processsing and the like are the show's equivalent of FTL travel. But despite having miraculous technology, they actually get the method and attidudes of science right, at least on the original series. They look at the evidence, and struggle to overcome their prejudices regarding what they would like to be true. Sometimes they follow false trails, and have to accomodate new facts by discarding the theory they've built up so far.
Gil Grissom may be the only character in TV history who actually behaves more-or-less like a real scientist.
CFLs may not be recommended for high humdity areas. As with dimmer bulbs, this may no longer be true, but the ones I've been buying say this on the package. I run them in the bathroom anyway, and the one bulb I've had fail in two years was one of those, but the others are holding up fine.
Back when I canceled my Vonage account some 2 years ago, it took a 2 hour hold time, plus mailing their hardware back at my expense to cancel.
Yeah, and they charge you a "cancelation fee" even when they do not provide accurate information about number portability.
I signed up with Vonage purely because they assured me I could keep my existing number. When I was connected, I found they had assigned me a long-distance number in a city 100 miles away, but sharing the same area code. For a wannabe phone company they seem to have a fuzzy grasp of the concept of "local exchange".
I complained and cancelled, which they did promptly. However, they never provided the promised refund of the initial fee despite my timely return of their hardware (at my own expense), and they also charged me a cancellation fee despite promising they would not. I contested the cancellation fee with my credit card company and won.
Vonage has the worst cancellation policy of any online company I have ever dealt with--including various online dating services that one might expect would be a little more dodgy--and are clearly commited to squeezing the last buck out of unhappy customers, because apparently they believe that cute advertising and suspect promises will attract more customers than their well-documented sleezy behaviour will drive away.
Thanks--from the article it seemed insane that anyone would be the least bit worried about this if it required script injection from the host site, so I was giving the authors the benefit of the doubt (and my ignorance). As it stands it's just a really arcane XSS exploit. Yawn.
There is no security vulnerability in this paper that hasn't been known and worked around for years.
As I understand it the attack describes in the paper proceeds as follows:
User visits malicious site A, which has all kind of cool AJAX stuff and incidentally redefines the HttpXMLRequest prototype.
User then visits some inoccuous site, like Yahoo mail, that uses all kinds of cool AJAX stuff and creates a new HttpXMLRequest object from the corrupt prototype, which results in all of their communciations being copied to the evil hacker that set up the malicious site.
This does not require any access to the inoccuous site's scripting system. All it requires is that the user visit the two sites in sequence without closing their browser.
I may be completely misunderstanding the nature of the attack, but this is what the paper seems to be describing. But assuming I've characterized it correctly I'm curious as to what the known work around for this is (or conversely, interested in understanding what the proposed attack really involves.)
Regardless, does anyone ever bring up the possible benefits of global warming?
Yes, very frequently, as you would know if you followed the issue at all.
The problem is that fast-paced environmental change is always a short-to-medium-term massive economic negative. That is, if we woke up tomorrow and the world was 5 C warmer with no rising sea levels or any other long-term negative consequences, the immediate result would be a world-wide recession the like of which has never been seen.
This is because human economies are highly optimized for things just as they are now. We are extremely adaptable creatures and we have adapted to our current circumstances. Our adpative strategies are almost always incredibly short-sighted and amazingly inflexible, because that is how we squeeze the last drop of cash out of the economy. We build major cities on top of known faults because there hasn't been an earthquake in a while. We build major cities on flood plains or below sea level and then claim "no one could have predicted this" when they wind up under water. We build huge amounts of infrastructure on the basis that nothing is ever going to change, and then pretend to be shocked and outraged when it does.
So the thing about global climate change is not that "the weather is going to get worse everywhere", as I once heard it put. It is that we are inflexibly adapted to the climate as it is now, and therefore change as such will cost money. Depending the scope and scale of the change, it could cost lots and lots of money--enough to drive economic growth to zero or below world-wide.
People who make a big deal about climate change because they are worried about the polar bears are idiots. The polar bears survived the Younger Dryas, amongst other things. They have a good chance of surviving this. What does has a less good chance of surviving is the global economy, and the global civilization that depends on it.
Fighting the arbitrary assignment of all value from medical inventions to the last people to use their predecessors to cross a commercial threshold seems not only more obviously moral, but more relevant to basic survival.
This arbitrary assignment of all value to the people at the end of the line struck me as well, particularly given the comment quoted in the story: Sampathkumar and his colleagues built upon 20-year-old findings... It is very clear that these guys are capitalizing on decades of public science. By what right do they get to collect all the marbles? I know libertarians will suggest that the solution is to not do any science, but that seems unsatisfactory--would they really want to live in a world with no Newton, no Einstein, no semi-conductors, no lasers, no heat engines... Because if we hadn't funded public science we would not have any of those things. Without public science there is no science at all: private science depends crucially on the foundations public science puts down.
The economics of scientific reward are based on the fact that the first person to discover something contributes value to humanity, but the second person contributes nothing. Thus, scientific prizes and prestige go to the first and only the first. This is quite unlike normal economics, where the first person to build a car contriubutes value, but so do all the competitors. More car makers out there is a good thing for all, at least up to a point.
Patents exist in the shadowlands between these economies: they are an attempt to recognize that the first inventor of something has a special place and deserves a reward, but also that the second and third people to go ahead and take the risk of investing in the development of a technology also contribute value to humanity and also deserve a reward, which is why patents, unlike claims of scientific discovery, expire.
But patents fail to reward the contributors who may have made crucial yet not-quite-there-yet contributions to a given discovery. This kind of thing happens in science, as well, probably most famously with the contributions of various researchers to the elucidation of the structure of DNA. In science, we all know this is a risk, and people take various strategies to avoid it. But we rarely think about the case that some interesting bit of theoretical work we are doing today might be foundational to a cure for cancer tomorrow. Yet for anyone working in cell biology this must be a possibility.
So how do we reward these people, who lay the foundations for the next great patent medicine, but don't actually invent it themselves?
The more one thinks about the way patents work, the less one thinks they work at all.
None of them predict search engines - because they were a genuine and unexpected innovation.
And ain't it grand that no one thought to patent, "A system and method for systematic traversal of a computerized document network for the purpose of keyword indexing."
If they had, there would only be one search engine in the world, and it would suck.
It's amazing how many people confuse popularity for authoritative, scientific thought.
Chimpanzee social systems are strongly ordered by the ability of individuals to get and hold the troops attention. This is an observation dating back to at least the '60's, when primatologists noticed that the alpha male in chimpanzee troops held onto his position long after he could be overcome physically by younger, stronger members of the troop. But he can hold his position so long as he is able to command the attention of the troop.
As highly evolved chimpanzees we use a similar mechanism as the biological basis for our own social heirarchies. When someone is capable of gaining and holding a lot of people's attention by any means there is something in our monkey brains that says, "leader". And so what they say tends to be classified as "important" even when it is arrant nonsense.
This basic biological mechanism explains a great deal about politics and celebrity in human societies. I'm sure there's been more recent work done on it, but one of the earliest book that discusses it, which is dated but still interesting, is called "The Imperial Animal".
'It has been shown that cameras increase car accident rates by between 7 and 24 percent.'
If you dig more deeply into it you'll see that the rate of "rear-end collisions causing injury" is what accounts for the increase. Angle accidents don't change significantly and injury accidents involving red light running decrease.
If, by your hypothesis, ALL accidents were simply being reported more frequently due to the presence of cameras, you would not see this structure in the data. Ergo, your hypothesis is probably false.
The reporting on the issue is really wretched, but it appears that the effect of red-light cameras is to cause people to make more conservative judgments regarding when to "rush" the light, which results in more rear-end collisions. Note that this is how people actually behave, and no amount of wishing about how they "ought" to behave will change it.
This kind of unintended consequence is a routine product of all human activity, in part because people are really, really bad at reasoning about conditional probabilities. We have a strong tendency to imagine one situation and reason about it as if it was the only situation, rather than being one of many. We also have a strong tendency to imagine ONE way that people might respond to a given incentive, and forget all the others because we thing they "ought" not behave that way.
This effect is apparent in the larger debate on cameras, which are both a useful tool in finding criminals and a useful tool for the organs of the state to violate the civil rights of citizens. To do an honest cost-benefit analysis you'd have to have some idea how frequently each of these things was likely to happen. It is a certainty that both will--only an idiot would suggest that we won't catch a few criminals with these things, and only an even bigger idiot would suggest that the power of track individual citizens won't be abused by the people who have access to it. So the question becomes: what level of abuse is worth catching criminals?
We already have to answer that question with regard to the police themselves, who as well as catching bad guys are certain to sometimes do very bad things, like plant evidence and coerce false confessions to indict innocent people. The question with cameras is no different, but it won't get anywhere until both sides recognize that the situation they are concerned with is only one of the possible outcomes of widespread camera use.
but light coming from them somehow seemed dimmer due to it being a colder temperature light.
That's extremely doubtful, given that that colour-temperature of CFLs is inherently much higher than incandescents, and one of the big challenges has been to convert it down to something more in tune with people's expectations.
An ex-g/f used to complain that CFLs produced light that was too "cold" (by which she meant "blue") and was astonished when I told her that the room we were in was lit by (modern) CFLs. They really are very nearly indistinguishable from ugly old incandescents, and if every one used them there would a power plant or two that would never need to be built.
Another telling omission: the power of all those neat functional programming features is dramatically reduced when you can't construct functions on-the-fly.
All these on-the-fly kind of features, for example anonymous inner classes in Java, are enemies of good programming practice. They are suitable for scripting languages, but they encourage developers to define essential functionality in the middle of blocks of more-or-less unrelated code, making that functionality impossible to reuse and potentially difficult to debug.
Features like this have a certain theoretical nicety, but they make the overall design, development and documentation process very hard to implement in a well-engineered way. How do you discuss the design of a block of code that doesn't even have a name?
I know that these features can be used in safe and intelligent ways, but I also know from experience that managing a project in a language that permits them can allow even diligent, professional developers to hide a multitude of sins in places that are hard to see, difficult to debug and nearly impossible to maintain.
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
You mis-spelled "secure".
I'm hoping to be able to visit the US again after the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is overturned by the courts. I'd like to see the Statue of Security in New York Harbour, and the Security Bell in Philadelphia.
There's nothing wrong with cloning for the end user/customer, but cloning sets up for some interesting economic effects should disease strike.
On the contrary, supporting husbandry practices that are certain to create a massive market disruption at some point in the future, wiping out the a significant fraction of industrial producers, is not at all in my interest as a consumer. I'd have to be an idiot to support practices that will with certainty result in greater monoculture and therefore greater susceptibility to epidemic disease within the population of food animals.
Beef isn't a big deal to me personally because I only eat it a couple of times a year, but most people, including the people opposed to cloning, are barking up the wrong tree (maybe a lodgepole pine...) The only reason to be concerned about the health effects of cloned food animals is that health effects are what trigger the strongest regulatory response. But it fails to deal with the real problem, which is monoculture. It also creates a poisoned scientific process, because the people opposed to cloning have decided in advance of any evidence that cloned animals must be unsafe to eat, and will not accept any level of proof that they are not. They have the same level of honesty and integrity as Creationists who pretend to enter into scientific debates.
Cloned animals, like GM animals and plants, should carry labels to that effect, because there are lots of reasons why people may want to know what they are eating. The only issue here is the individuals freedom to make an informed choice. It has nothing to do with food safety, but with a personal freedom that can only be exercised if foods are properly labeled.
Those who muddy the issue with faith-based claims regarding the safety of cloned animals or GM animals and plants are doing a great disservice to the public discourse.
"I'll take cash flow over gross margin -- I can eat cash flow."
Only if there's enough of it to pay off the costs of generating the cash flow in the first place.
While no one number is sufficient to capture the financial health of an enterprise, an over-emphasis on cash-flow was one of the characteristics of the bubble investing in the late '90's. Cash flow management is critical to the success of a startup, but too often investors and managers focused on cash flow maximization at the expense of sustainability.
In the main, I'm with the GP: comparing Facebook's cash flow with that of Costco is uninteresting. Growth potential and long-term margins are what matter. Your comment elsewhere that Facebook has been taking on investors in the past twelve months does give one pause, though: it was one of the characteristics of the Web 1.0 bubble to see companies that had nothing to spend money on but a website get tens of millions in investment, which they spent on frills. Given that Facebook is nothing but a website with an advertising department, one has to wonder what the money is going to be spent on. Superbowl spots?
Someone (from the EFF?) who was debating an industry hack on F/OSS vs proprietary software suggested this as a question for any industry hack. The point is that they are paid mouthpieces, not advocates in any sense of the word, and expert witlesses are much the same.
So the free market is incapable of solving Global Warming without Government.
What is this "the" free market of which you speak?
All markets are made by laws, and laws are made by governments. There is no "the" free market, any more than there is "the" internal combustion engine. Markets are machines, made by human beings to solve human problems. Laws made by governments are the mechanism by which we define markets. There are no markets in nature; without governments, there are no markets at all.
So to set "the free market" up as being in any way opposed to "Government" is to fundamentally fail to understand the nature of the relationship between the two. All markets are created by governments or quasi-government (i.e. violent) forces. They are shaped by various forms of regulation, including incorporation requirements, insurance requirements, and other things. "Free" markets are more-or-less free of overt governmental price-fixing and other direct political interference of the type Haliburton depends on. But there are many free markets of various types. And all of them depend on laws and therefore government for their existence and operation.
How do you do that? Lots of intermediate deadlines. Then your team can't wait for the end and just crunch to get it in on time.
How do you know he isn't talking about an intermediate deadine? In the teams I've managed, ANY deadline, no matter how small, is likely to lead to at least a small amount of crunch at the end. This is not about procrastination, but about tidying up loose ends and dealing with last-minute surprises. Deadlines that are spaced too close together can produce continual crunch, which is a sure burnout generator. Deadlines that are spaced too far apart produce larger errors in estimation that can lead to slippage. As with most things, the optimum can be found in a moderate middle path.
One way of managing this problem is to actively revise deadlines on a regular (say weekly) basis. This is not always an option in pointy-haired-boss-land, or even in smaller companies where the project lead is a gross incompetent whose faith-based time estimates are the result of what he personally needs or wants to be true rather than what is actually possible. But in that rare organization managed by people who aren't insane, it is generally possible to rebalance the time-features-resources triangle regularly, and thereby keep your team focused and well-paced, but not at risk of burnout.
From a project lead's perspective, this is also a way of communicating with your manager, as weekly project meetings are an opportunity to present the updated schedule. This will shock some managers, when you present a schedule as a living document that can be used to chart actual progress toward a progressively-better-defined goal, rather than as a fictional abstraction that has no meaning or relevance. And that can only be a good thing.
I agree that the Iranian nuclear program is indeed a nuclear BOMB program and that it is a very serious problem, but this sort of deception and 1984 style manipulation is exactly why I hate Bush so much.
Believe it or not, it is actually possible that the Iranian nuclear program is exactly what they say it is. It's just that every single time the word "Iran" gets mentioned in a news story that contains the words "enriched uranium" those words are followed by the false statement "which can be used to build nuclear weapons." Some enriched uranium can, some can't. Making a blanket claim like this is like saying that "Harley-Davidson Motorcycles is a manufacturer of internal combustion engines, which can be used to power main battle tanks." Despite the low-end torque your average Harley can supply, this is still a logical error of the form:
Some X are Y. A is an X. ---------- A is Y.
Until we have more hard evidence, I think we should be cautious about drawing conclusions regarding the Iranian nuclear program. The odds are that they will build a bomb, because almost every country that has developed nuclear technology has done so, and they are pugalistic enough and probably scared enough to think it is a good idea. But if we've learned anything in the past five years it is that we should be very cautious about interpreting claims regarding the weapons programs and intentions of Muslim nations, and even more cautious about carefully orchestrated American press campaigns to get certain ideas fixed firmly into the public consciousness.
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Scientists often discuss new theories, etc, and in that context dark matter has it's place, but to claim it exists - as this story does - without being able to actually measure anything is quite silly and premature.
The whole point of these observations is that they are an entirely new probe of extra-galactic dark matter, and they are consistent with dynamical estimates of extra-galactic dark matter distributions.
Ergo, they consistute compelling evidence that extra-galactic dark matter is not just a mistake fix for an error in our understanding of the dynamics of the universe on a large scale, but rather a real, observable component of the universe that has multiple unrelated effects.
The new lensing and colliding-cluster measurements are precisely "measuring something" that compels anyone who does not have a faith-based epistemology to believe that extra-galactic, non-baryonic dark matter exists, in the ordinary and always somewhat uncertain meaning of the term "exists".
Previously, dark matter was plausible but unconvincing. Now it would be surprising as hell if anything else turned out to be the correct explanation for the dynamical anaomalies that gave rise to the hypothesis in the first place.
Some portion of it could be ordinary matter that's simply non-luminous, but I think there are observations that limit that to a small proportion.
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Big Bang nucleosynthesis limits the amount of baryonic (that is, "normal") matter to a relatively small fraction of the total observed mass of the universe. The basic idea is that we know how big the universe was when protons and neutrons (collectively known as nucleons) were being formed--at some point the cosmic fireball cooled off to the point where quarks were no longer free, so they condensed into nucleons. We also know that the lifetime of a free neutron is about 15 minutes, so there was only about an hour for nuclei more complex than hydrogen to form.
So, if the universe was VERY dense in the hour or so after nucleon formation then every single proton would have run into a neutron or two and there would be almost no plain old hydrogen in the universe--everything would be helium and deuterium. On the other hand, if the the universe were extremely diffuse during that single hour there would be hardly any helium--only the few percent made by stellar fusion and supernova in the past ten billion years. As it is, we are pretty sure based on observations and theory that about 20% of the helium in the universe was formed in the Big Bang. That, plus some more problematic numbers from deuterium and lithium and helium-3, give us a very good estimate of the total baryonic mass in the universe.
The visible mass is quite a bit smaller than the total baryonic mass, and there is some reason to believe that the flat rotation curves of spiral galaxies are due to baryonic dark matter, although it would have to be in the form of small clumps of matter like comets or dead stars or something to not do any significant scattering of light.
Dark matter on larger scales is completely unrelated to galactic dark matter--the use of the single term "dark matter" for these totally unrelated problems is unfortunate and confusing, as I point out every time this topic comes up on
The observation reported here, like the colliding galactic clusters observation reported a month or so ago, is amongst our first clear view of extra-galactic dark matter, which is too copious to be explained as normal baryonic matter.
The problem that cold dark matter theorists have to deal with is that the extra-galactic dark matter can't just interact gravitationally, because gravity is too weak a force to produce structures in the short time the universe has been around. To clump in the manner observed, extra-galactic dark matter has to have some mechanism for losing energy. Otherwise two pieces of dark matter (or a piece of dark matter and a peice of ordinary matter) would just pass through each other. The dark matter would never be slowed down by anything, and so would never form clumps on any scale.
So it is probable that extra-galactic dark matter is pretty exotic, or that something was sufficiently different in the early universe to make gravity sufficiently dissipative to form the observed clumps. Either way, the flood of observations using these new microlensing techniques is going to start killing off theories in droves--at least those theories that make actual predictions.
If they were really able to find you a suitable partner (a) they wouldn't need to be a service, and (b) they would loose all their customers. This is simple logic. If you believe otherwise, you are only deceiving yourself.
If you subscribe to any online dating site for a while you'll see there are two distinct populations: transients who are there because they are passing through a phase, and "lifers" who are clearly serial daters with lots of short relationships behind them. The second population is the larger of the two, as simple statistics would lead you to expect. In my age group the first population consists mostly of people who are re-entering the dating world post-divorce, and find such sites a non-intimidating way of doing it. Once we figure out that there's nothing to be intimidated about we tend to drop out and meet others in more traditional ways.
Being hard to cancel makes it possible for these sites to pull more cash out of the lifers, who would otherwise cancel and renew their subscription ever few months. Although from my own experience I haven't found cancellation to be a major issue with any of them--certainly nothing like the costly nightmare that Vonage was.
The big challenge for these sites are free sites that do at least as good a job, which is what I would recommend to anyone interested in online dating. The population represented there is similar to the pay sites, and there are no cancellation issues at all.
Still, if it was under $25K, I'd consider one.
My first thought was, "I want one!" Then I saw the pictures...
Ajax, by itself, can't possibly cause any of the problems you describe.
The point is that AJAX makes it easy to do things badly, in the same way that Java makes it easy to do things slowly and Perl makes it easy to do things incomprehensibly.
As with any new language, it takes time to develop and institutionalize the idioms that work around the inherent problems, and because AJAX is flavour-of-the-month that hasn't happened yet. Thus, the OP's experience with badly written AJAX apps. They are the result of some marketing droid saying, "Hey, code me up some AJAX--it's what customers are beggging for!" and ever-optimistic technologists saying, "This stuff is bleeding-edge kewel, we'd love to!" and then doing a crappy job of it because the idioms for doing it well aren't yet well known and the gotchas are still being discovered.
So you're right that there is nothing "inherent" about AJAX that makes it necessary that AJAX apps will be crap, but there is something inherent about where we are on the AJAX learning curve and adoption cycle that makes it an absolute certainty that most AJAX apps will be badly-written unscalable pieces of garbage. And AJAX apps from large third-party vendors with big marketing budgets that are purchased by PHBs with an eye to nothing more than buzzword compliance will the worst hit. In-house service apps like Google's offerings will in general be much better because the people who write them also have to live with them.
The unfortuante side effect of this is that the technology itself will get a bad rep, and people will avoid it until it is revivified under a new name.
The weird thing is that they must have a whole staff of highly qualified computer geeks who do their effects who could tell them this was bullshit.
You need to realize that CSI is science fiction masquerading as a cop show. Their impossible tricks with image processsing and the like are the show's equivalent of FTL travel. But despite having miraculous technology, they actually get the method and attidudes of science right, at least on the original series. They look at the evidence, and struggle to overcome their prejudices regarding what they would like to be true. Sometimes they follow false trails, and have to accomodate new facts by discarding the theory they've built up so far.
Gil Grissom may be the only character in TV history who actually behaves more-or-less like a real scientist.
CFLs may not be recommended for high humdity areas. As with dimmer bulbs, this may no longer be true, but the ones I've been buying say this on the package. I run them in the bathroom anyway, and the one bulb I've had fail in two years was one of those, but the others are holding up fine.
Back when I canceled my Vonage account some 2 years ago, it took a 2 hour hold time, plus mailing their hardware back at my expense to cancel.
Yeah, and they charge you a "cancelation fee" even when they do not provide accurate information about number portability.
I signed up with Vonage purely because they assured me I could keep my existing number. When I was connected, I found they had assigned me a long-distance number in a city 100 miles away, but sharing the same area code. For a wannabe phone company they seem to have a fuzzy grasp of the concept of "local exchange".
I complained and cancelled, which they did promptly. However, they never provided the promised refund of the initial fee despite my timely return of their hardware (at my own expense), and they also charged me a cancellation fee despite promising they would not. I contested the cancellation fee with my credit card company and won.
Vonage has the worst cancellation policy of any online company I have ever dealt with--including various online dating services that one might expect would be a little more dodgy--and are clearly commited to squeezing the last buck out of unhappy customers, because apparently they believe that cute advertising and suspect promises will attract more customers than their well-documented sleezy behaviour will drive away.
Thanks--from the article it seemed insane that anyone would be the least bit worried about this if it required script injection from the host site, so I was giving the authors the benefit of the doubt (and my ignorance). As it stands it's just a really arcane XSS exploit. Yawn.
There is no security vulnerability in this paper that hasn't been known and worked around for years.
As I understand it the attack describes in the paper proceeds as follows:
User visits malicious site A, which has all kind of cool AJAX stuff and incidentally redefines the HttpXMLRequest prototype.
User then visits some inoccuous site, like Yahoo mail, that uses all kinds of cool AJAX stuff and creates a new HttpXMLRequest object from the corrupt prototype, which results in all of their communciations being copied to the evil hacker that set up the malicious site.
This does not require any access to the inoccuous site's scripting system. All it requires is that the user visit the two sites in sequence without closing their browser.
I may be completely misunderstanding the nature of the attack, but this is what the paper seems to be describing. But assuming I've characterized it correctly I'm curious as to what the known work around for this is (or conversely, interested in understanding what the proposed attack really involves.)
Regardless, does anyone ever bring up the possible benefits of global warming?
Yes, very frequently, as you would know if you followed the issue at all.
The problem is that fast-paced environmental change is always a short-to-medium-term massive economic negative. That is, if we woke up tomorrow and the world was 5 C warmer with no rising sea levels or any other long-term negative consequences, the immediate result would be a world-wide recession the like of which has never been seen.
This is because human economies are highly optimized for things just as they are now. We are extremely adaptable creatures and we have adapted to our current circumstances. Our adpative strategies are almost always incredibly short-sighted and amazingly inflexible, because that is how we squeeze the last drop of cash out of the economy. We build major cities on top of known faults because there hasn't been an earthquake in a while. We build major cities on flood plains or below sea level and then claim "no one could have predicted this" when they wind up under water. We build huge amounts of infrastructure on the basis that nothing is ever going to change, and then pretend to be shocked and outraged when it does.
So the thing about global climate change is not that "the weather is going to get worse everywhere", as I once heard it put. It is that we are inflexibly adapted to the climate as it is now, and therefore change as such will cost money. Depending the scope and scale of the change, it could cost lots and lots of money--enough to drive economic growth to zero or below world-wide.
People who make a big deal about climate change because they are worried about the polar bears are idiots. The polar bears survived the Younger Dryas, amongst other things. They have a good chance of surviving this. What does has a less good chance of surviving is the global economy, and the global civilization that depends on it.
Fighting the arbitrary assignment of all value from medical inventions to the last people to use their predecessors to cross a commercial threshold seems not only more obviously moral, but more relevant to basic survival.
This arbitrary assignment of all value to the people at the end of the line struck me as well, particularly given the comment quoted in the story: Sampathkumar and his colleagues built upon 20-year-old findings... It is very clear that these guys are capitalizing on decades of public science. By what right do they get to collect all the marbles? I know libertarians will suggest that the solution is to not do any science, but that seems unsatisfactory--would they really want to live in a world with no Newton, no Einstein, no semi-conductors, no lasers, no heat engines... Because if we hadn't funded public science we would not have any of those things. Without public science there is no science at all: private science depends crucially on the foundations public science puts down.
The economics of scientific reward are based on the fact that the first person to discover something contributes value to humanity, but the second person contributes nothing. Thus, scientific prizes and prestige go to the first and only the first. This is quite unlike normal economics, where the first person to build a car contriubutes value, but so do all the competitors. More car makers out there is a good thing for all, at least up to a point.
Patents exist in the shadowlands between these economies: they are an attempt to recognize that the first inventor of something has a special place and deserves a reward, but also that the second and third people to go ahead and take the risk of investing in the development of a technology also contribute value to humanity and also deserve a reward, which is why patents, unlike claims of scientific discovery, expire.
But patents fail to reward the contributors who may have made crucial yet not-quite-there-yet contributions to a given discovery. This kind of thing happens in science, as well, probably most famously with the contributions of various researchers to the elucidation of the structure of DNA. In science, we all know this is a risk, and people take various strategies to avoid it. But we rarely think about the case that some interesting bit of theoretical work we are doing today might be foundational to a cure for cancer tomorrow. Yet for anyone working in cell biology this must be a possibility.
So how do we reward these people, who lay the foundations for the next great patent medicine, but don't actually invent it themselves?
The more one thinks about the way patents work, the less one thinks they work at all.
None of them predict search engines - because they were a genuine and unexpected innovation.
And ain't it grand that no one thought to patent, "A system and method for systematic traversal of a computerized document network for the purpose of keyword indexing."
If they had, there would only be one search engine in the world, and it would suck.
It's amazing how many people confuse popularity for authoritative, scientific thought.
Chimpanzee social systems are strongly ordered by the ability of individuals to get and hold the troops attention. This is an observation dating back to at least the '60's, when primatologists noticed that the alpha male in chimpanzee troops held onto his position long after he could be overcome physically by younger, stronger members of the troop. But he can hold his position so long as he is able to command the attention of the troop.
As highly evolved chimpanzees we use a similar mechanism as the biological basis for our own social heirarchies. When someone is capable of gaining and holding a lot of people's attention by any means there is something in our monkey brains that says, "leader". And so what they say tends to be classified as "important" even when it is arrant nonsense.
This basic biological mechanism explains a great deal about politics and celebrity in human societies. I'm sure there's been more recent work done on it, but one of the earliest book that discusses it, which is dated but still interesting, is called "The Imperial Animal".
'It has been shown that cameras increase car accident rates by between 7 and 24 percent.'
If you dig more deeply into it you'll see that the rate of "rear-end collisions causing injury" is what accounts for the increase. Angle accidents don't change significantly and injury accidents involving red light running decrease.
If, by your hypothesis, ALL accidents were simply being reported more frequently due to the presence of cameras, you would not see this structure in the data. Ergo, your hypothesis is probably false.
The reporting on the issue is really wretched, but it appears that the effect of red-light cameras is to cause people to make more conservative judgments regarding when to "rush" the light, which results in more rear-end collisions. Note that this is how people actually behave, and no amount of wishing about how they "ought" to behave will change it.
This kind of unintended consequence is a routine product of all human activity, in part because people are really, really bad at reasoning about conditional probabilities. We have a strong tendency to imagine one situation and reason about it as if it was the only situation, rather than being one of many. We also have a strong tendency to imagine ONE way that people might respond to a given incentive, and forget all the others because we thing they "ought" not behave that way.
This effect is apparent in the larger debate on cameras, which are both a useful tool in finding criminals and a useful tool for the organs of the state to violate the civil rights of citizens. To do an honest cost-benefit analysis you'd have to have some idea how frequently each of these things was likely to happen. It is a certainty that both will--only an idiot would suggest that we won't catch a few criminals with these things, and only an even bigger idiot would suggest that the power of track individual citizens won't be abused by the people who have access to it. So the question becomes: what level of abuse is worth catching criminals?
We already have to answer that question with regard to the police themselves, who as well as catching bad guys are certain to sometimes do very bad things, like plant evidence and coerce false confessions to indict innocent people. The question with cameras is no different, but it won't get anywhere until both sides recognize that the situation they are concerned with is only one of the possible outcomes of widespread camera use.
but light coming from them somehow seemed dimmer due to it being a colder temperature light.
That's extremely doubtful, given that that colour-temperature of CFLs is inherently much higher than incandescents, and one of the big challenges has been to convert it down to something more in tune with people's expectations.
An ex-g/f used to complain that CFLs produced light that was too "cold" (by which she meant "blue") and was astonished when I told her that the room we were in was lit by (modern) CFLs. They really are very nearly indistinguishable from ugly old incandescents, and if every one used them there would a power plant or two that would never need to be built.
Zero delay on modern bulbs. My only current complaint is that they don't play nice with dimmers. I use them everywhere else.
Another telling omission: the power of all those neat functional programming features is dramatically reduced when you can't construct functions on-the-fly.
All these on-the-fly kind of features, for example anonymous inner classes in Java, are enemies of good programming practice. They are suitable for scripting languages, but they encourage developers to define essential functionality in the middle of blocks of more-or-less unrelated code, making that functionality impossible to reuse and potentially difficult to debug.
Features like this have a certain theoretical nicety, but they make the overall design, development and documentation process very hard to implement in a well-engineered way. How do you discuss the design of a block of code that doesn't even have a name?
I know that these features can be used in safe and intelligent ways, but I also know from experience that managing a project in a language that permits them can allow even diligent, professional developers to hide a multitude of sins in places that are hard to see, difficult to debug and nearly impossible to maintain.
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?
You mis-spelled "secure".
I'm hoping to be able to visit the US again after the Military Commissions Act of 2006 is overturned by the courts. I'd like to see the Statue of Security in New York Harbour, and the Security Bell in Philadelphia.
There's nothing wrong with cloning for the end user/customer, but cloning sets up for some interesting economic effects should disease strike.
On the contrary, supporting husbandry practices that are certain to create a massive market disruption at some point in the future, wiping out the a significant fraction of industrial producers, is not at all in my interest as a consumer. I'd have to be an idiot to support practices that will with certainty result in greater monoculture and therefore greater susceptibility to epidemic disease within the population of food animals.
Beef isn't a big deal to me personally because I only eat it a couple of times a year, but most people, including the people opposed to cloning, are barking up the wrong tree (maybe a lodgepole pine...) The only reason to be concerned about the health effects of cloned food animals is that health effects are what trigger the strongest regulatory response. But it fails to deal with the real problem, which is monoculture. It also creates a poisoned scientific process, because the people opposed to cloning have decided in advance of any evidence that cloned animals must be unsafe to eat, and will not accept any level of proof that they are not. They have the same level of honesty and integrity as Creationists who pretend to enter into scientific debates.
Cloned animals, like GM animals and plants, should carry labels to that effect, because there are lots of reasons why people may want to know what they are eating. The only issue here is the individuals freedom to make an informed choice. It has nothing to do with food safety, but with a personal freedom that can only be exercised if foods are properly labeled.
Those who muddy the issue with faith-based claims regarding the safety of cloned animals or GM animals and plants are doing a great disservice to the public discourse.
"I'll take cash flow over gross margin -- I can eat cash flow."
Only if there's enough of it to pay off the costs of generating the cash flow in the first place.
While no one number is sufficient to capture the financial health of an enterprise, an over-emphasis on cash-flow was one of the characteristics of the bubble investing in the late '90's. Cash flow management is critical to the success of a startup, but too often investors and managers focused on cash flow maximization at the expense of sustainability.
In the main, I'm with the GP: comparing Facebook's cash flow with that of Costco is uninteresting. Growth potential and long-term margins are what matter. Your comment elsewhere that Facebook has been taking on investors in the past twelve months does give one pause, though: it was one of the characteristics of the Web 1.0 bubble to see companies that had nothing to spend money on but a website get tens of millions in investment, which they spent on frills. Given that Facebook is nothing but a website with an advertising department, one has to wonder what the money is going to be spent on. Superbowl spots?
...to become a witness for our side?
Someone (from the EFF?) who was debating an industry hack on F/OSS vs proprietary software suggested this as a question for any industry hack. The point is that they are paid mouthpieces, not advocates in any sense of the word, and expert witlesses are much the same.
So the free market is incapable of solving Global Warming without Government.
What is this "the" free market of which you speak?
All markets are made by laws, and laws are made by governments. There is no "the" free market, any more than there is "the" internal combustion engine. Markets are machines, made by human beings to solve human problems. Laws made by governments are the mechanism by which we define markets. There are no markets in nature; without governments, there are no markets at all.
So to set "the free market" up as being in any way opposed to "Government" is to fundamentally fail to understand the nature of the relationship between the two. All markets are created by governments or quasi-government (i.e. violent) forces. They are shaped by various forms of regulation, including incorporation requirements, insurance requirements, and other things. "Free" markets are more-or-less free of overt governmental price-fixing and other direct political interference of the type Haliburton depends on. But there are many free markets of various types. And all of them depend on laws and therefore government for their existence and operation.
How do you do that? Lots of intermediate deadlines. Then your team can't wait for the end and just crunch to get it in on time.
How do you know he isn't talking about an intermediate deadine? In the teams I've managed, ANY deadline, no matter how small, is likely to lead to at least a small amount of crunch at the end. This is not about procrastination, but about tidying up loose ends and dealing with last-minute surprises. Deadlines that are spaced too close together can produce continual crunch, which is a sure burnout generator. Deadlines that are spaced too far apart produce larger errors in estimation that can lead to slippage. As with most things, the optimum can be found in a moderate middle path.
One way of managing this problem is to actively revise deadlines on a regular (say weekly) basis. This is not always an option in pointy-haired-boss-land, or even in smaller companies where the project lead is a gross incompetent whose faith-based time estimates are the result of what he personally needs or wants to be true rather than what is actually possible. But in that rare organization managed by people who aren't insane, it is generally possible to rebalance the time-features-resources triangle regularly, and thereby keep your team focused and well-paced, but not at risk of burnout.
From a project lead's perspective, this is also a way of communicating with your manager, as weekly project meetings are an opportunity to present the updated schedule. This will shock some managers, when you present a schedule as a living document that can be used to chart actual progress toward a progressively-better-defined goal, rather than as a fictional abstraction that has no meaning or relevance. And that can only be a good thing.
I agree that the Iranian nuclear program is indeed a nuclear BOMB program and that it is a very serious problem, but this sort of deception and 1984 style manipulation is exactly why I hate Bush so much.
Believe it or not, it is actually possible that the Iranian nuclear program is exactly what they say it is. It's just that every single time the word "Iran" gets mentioned in a news story that contains the words "enriched uranium" those words are followed by the false statement "which can be used to build nuclear weapons." Some enriched uranium can, some can't. Making a blanket claim like this is like saying that "Harley-Davidson Motorcycles is a manufacturer of internal combustion engines, which can be used to power main battle tanks." Despite the low-end torque your average Harley can supply, this is still a logical error of the form:
Some X are Y.
A is an X.
----------
A is Y.
Until we have more hard evidence, I think we should be cautious about drawing conclusions regarding the Iranian nuclear program. The odds are that they will build a bomb, because almost every country that has developed nuclear technology has done so, and they are pugalistic enough and probably scared enough to think it is a good idea. But if we've learned anything in the past five years it is that we should be very cautious about interpreting claims regarding the weapons programs and intentions of Muslim nations, and even more cautious about carefully orchestrated American press campaigns to get certain ideas fixed firmly into the public consciousness.