You're entirely right: it should be about both. I just wanted to point out that the article is about something else than what the HTML gurus are reading in it. In saying that, I didn't mean to imply that the technical part is irrelevant.
I also dislike the site (oh the colors!), but you're all mixed up in your evaluation. What that webvastu thing is all about, is the graphical design, not the underlying HTML/CSS. Sounds like you're an IT person who has learned that design is about structuring but who was never really told that it also is about the look and feel. I can make a good looking site with crappy HTML, just as much as I can make a crappy looking site with perfectly clean and standard compliant HTML.
(Hey, I'm an IT guy, so I somewhat know what I'm talking about. It's just that I was raised in a context with many professional artists with strong interests in non-Western cultures.)
Similar story here. I'm an MBA student right now and the (European) school organises several 1 week exchanges for us to choose from early in 2007: New York, Milan, Bejing, and St. Petersburg. I ruled out New York from day one because I refuse to visit the US under the current regime. Guess where I will most likely be doing business instead after graduating?
The last time I was in the US was in May 2003. That was a business trip that I could not possibly escape from, but the airport experience was telling. The worst part of it, is that I was there to help a US based spin-off company of ours get off the ground. They were going to sell the stuff that I had been working on for 7 years and that so far was mostly funded by EU research grants. Yes, you got that right: we did the most risky bit, they were going to do the packaging and run away with the profits. And then the US treat me like criminal. (A criminal who also happens to have a Nato Secret security cleareance at that!) That's when I decided to never ever go back unless the US clean up their act a *lot*. Sadly, things have only gotten worse since then.
With an IQ of 115 (the number I remembered, so I'm not refering to that hoax page), he's above population average (as I wrote) and likely below presidential average (what I claimed), because 115 actually is even below university average. Computing the true presidential average is hard, since we don't have historical data for many of them, but I'd be pretty confident about my claim anyway.
Kerry is irrelevant. He never made it to the top. I never mentioned him either.
I know about the non-obvious correlations - or lack thereof - between IQ and many other things like speaking skills. I have 150 myself (sorry, I can't help that either), so I have 40+ years of first hand experience with the advantages and disadvantages of being above 3 sigma.
Actually not. Most US presidents had an IQ way above average. Even George W. scores above population average. It's just that within the group of US presidents, he's way below average.
Well, actually it's not only that. One thing is having an certain IQ, another is having an attitude and background that allows/enables you to use it in the face of political/cultural/religious/... bigotry, and yet another is to actually use it. Many a high-potential human being has been intellectually ruined during childhood.
You'd be better of reading my posts before replying. I posted to seperate paragraphs, each covering a different side of the same argument. You're mixing them up.
On top of that, the word evolution means exactly that: things evolve. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no implied meaning of improvement attached to it at all!
Applying your own reasoning to your own example: I have CDs that I bought 15 years ago and they still work. My parents have vinyl records that they bought 40 years ago (and even a few that are over 60 years old) and they still work. Nevertheless, we only payed your symbolical £10 for each of them. So there's nothing new or "digital" to the idea of buying once and expecting to get enjoyment for many years.
Having said that, there's no reason why things should not be allowed to change. Today's technology allows us to do and expect things that were impossible when I was a teen. Must I therefor consider these things bad? Allow society to evolve, for $DEITY's sake!
The entire credit check history idea is wrong, not just when used for filtering job appplicants. It builds on the notion that those who pay their debts are more reliable, completely ignoring several key facts.
For instance, it "paints over" the problems of people who structurally use debts to pay back earlier debts. In other words: you can easily dig a hole as deep as you want, provided that you are sufficiently clever at hiding it by moving it around.
It also ignores those who do not want/need to have debts at all, as they simply have no "history". Never mind that Mr. X has had enough money of his own to survive for years and has carefully built this position by working hard from day one and by never spending money on stuff he didn't need or couldn't afford. I'd argue that people in this situation are much better at keeping track of their money and spendings than those who have payed back debts everywhere.
It's not only that. How does a customer in the end know that the degaussing actually took place?
If a disk that is supposed to have been shredded surfaces intact you can sue them. One such incident will basically kill their business, so a company that offers such a service has very very very good reasons to stick to the deal. But who will ever find out of a disk that was supposed to be degaussed before being shredded hasn't been?
The amount of testing needed for any patch, as variable or fixed as it may be, does not in itself justify the "second Tuesday of the month" approach.
I fully understand that there may be very critical patches that may take a few weeks to develop and test properly. I also fully agree that MicroSoft should not release those prematurely. However, it is not because one critical patch isn't ready that others that are ready must be queued up for up to a month. After all, if said critical one doesn't make the deadline, do they then also postpone publishing the others for an extra month? No. So why postpone at all the first time round? MicroSoft should just release each patch when it is ready, testing included. Not sooner, but also not later.
I'm sure it's an inconvenience to elderly people who do understand the Internet and computers, but then I'm sure speed limits are an inconvenience to people who can safely and skilfully drive at 100mph.
The purpose of the speed limit also is to protect people from those who do know how to "drive safely at 100mph". Accidents kill innocent bystanders, no matter how good the driver. Badly secured computers don't irrevocably "hurt" nearly that much.
To get back on topic: My father is 78. He has used computers since +- 1975. Yes, you've read that correctly: 1975. He still uses one on a daily basis and regularly reads about what's going on in the PC world. So far he never had an internet connection, due to a variety of reasons, but recently he expressed interest in getting one (using Linux, no less). I have no doubt whatsoever that he'll use it more safely than the average permanently connected schoolkid.
Who cares. Celebrate both. And then add the 15th birthday of the day you first heard of Linux. And the 15th birthday of the day you first saw it in action. And...
Ineed, you can modify stuff along the way to make it look like I'm in touch with Bin Laden himself. But that's not a solution to the original worry. The majority of stuff is not modified in such ways, and therefore anything you find about me in some backup somewhere will likely give you a reasonable indication about at least one piece of my life (if only that I may have told a ton of conflicting lies and therefore cannot be trusted to tell the truth when asked). If you put all those bits together, a picture emerges and even if it's not a fully accurate one, it does give you a ton of hints where to most effectively look for additional info for verification/discovery purposes. In the end, if the stakes are high enough, you come to me and try to talk me into a corner until I stop claiming that "I'm not involved in whatever it is you're accusing me of and that all info that you found about me were obviously falsified by obscure forces that control the entire internet".
The PM had already postponed his holidays due to the Middle East crisis. Why would it have been suspicious to postpone it for another few days?
The security services were watching this group for months already. Are you suggesting that the PM never leaves on holiday as long as any such group is under surveillance? After all, you never know that the one piece of extra info that prompts the police to openly take action isn't unexpectedly going to show up within hours of the PM leaving?
Be reasonable! Yes, he should return. But no, he should nor stay at home at all cost just because something might possibly happen. Or do YOU know what exactly caused the police to take action today instead of last week or next week? If you do, I'd suggest you go do your job, because it's more vastly important than hanging about on/. If you don't, I'd suggest you stop making unfounded allegations.
And the poster you replied to is right: sometimes you have to act as if nothing is special going on, just so as to prevent the other side from finding out that you do actually know what they're up to.
Eh? Using it as a file cabinet is how it should be used!
I agree with you in principle (not fully in practice in that I do clean up old cruft after X years, except for folders containing data with a special financial or emotional importance, but that's another issue).
But the parent poster has a valid point "in disguise". Because a normal human being has no control over what happens to his/her data stored at an ISP or, worse, the ISP as a whole, they should not use it as their filing cabinet. My e-mail filing cabinet sits here right in front of me, on my own disk where only I can read it. My daily level 1 backup is within reach - but on purpose unconnected - for emergencies, and my level 2 backup is stored at my father's house on a monthly basis.
We ordinary users get told all the time that we need to make backups like the pros do, but this incident is a perfectly good example of the pros not having proper backup procedures. And even if they do have them, imagine asking a typical ISP helpdesk for a restore of a single 1 year old message that you deleted by accident at unspecified moment more than 8 weeks ago... I've once had a sysadmin at work give me weird looks because of something similar, and he didn't anywhere near get to manage the amount of data that any semi-serious ISP does. Eventually he did satisfy the request, but partly because I happened to be in a postion of power and could have make life rather difficult for him.
It's not unusual and he didn't use it in order to cheat, but the physiological effect is the same nonetheless. Of course, chemotherapy is very much performance diminishing, so it doesn't really matter.
Landis' case is more interesting, however. He's using cortisone because of his (serious) hip problem. Cortisone a known performance enhancing drug and Landis is very much using it while he's actively racing. Here too, I'm not saying that he's cheating, but the physiological effect is present nonetheless. Whether or not it overcompensates for the hip issue is something I cannot judge, but considering that Landis didn't even inform his team until very recently, the negative effect of his dying hip on his performance cannot be huge yet.
What's more, said acceptable justification is a piece of cake to come up with. The agreement/rule was struck down for formal reasons only. The governments involved can have a second try simply by following the correct procedure this time around. For doing so, they need to unanimously agree to the measure, something that they didn't need to for the procudure used the first time round). The snag is that 1) the unanimity was there already even then, it just was not exploited; 2) once the EU commission does follow the correct procedure, the EU parliament has no say in the matter whatsoever. And remember: the only thing that allowed the EU court to intervene in the first place was a complaint by parliament.
... a lot of crap happens in the world and it is not wise to let foreigners run around anonymously.
1) What does preventing anonymity have to do with fingerprinting friendly businesmen with a NATO Secret security clearance (my case), a valid European passport, and a valid US visum? It's not like I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm in the US, now is it?
Besides, you can have somebody's finger prints on file and still not know who he is. After all, you only want them when you think the person's passport technology isn't "reliable", so...
2) You should come and visit us, for a change. We live in the same world that you live in, but we don't need to fingerprint you in order for us to feel safe.
If the US want to have me fingerprinted just for visting them, they can wait forever. As long as this requirement applies to me (right now it does, because the US don't like the amount of biometrics on my passport), I will not visit them again, nor will I do any business with them.
I'm a European who has in the past co-developed some European IT technology that is currently being marketed worldwide by a US company, creating jobs for US workers. And what do I get in return? They want to treat me like a criminal! I'm sorry guys, but not with me!
And even if coding would not have a lot to do with mathematics (something that, like you, I also disagree with), proficiency in either of them is strongly favoured by the same underlying skillset(s): analytical thinking, rigour in logic, accuracy and knowing when that is and is not relevant, attention to detail,...
Embedding active hyperlinks in documents could be a reason.
Having said that, I also use LaTeX as much as possible for all the reasons you indicate.
Finally, please note that Word is not WYSIWIG! What Word shows on your screen depends on the default printer you have configured. Send the document to your boss who has a private printer, and he'll likely get something different with tables and figures moving about in ways you do not expect, with suddenly text overflowing the box it is in, and whatnot.
Nice try, and it would help. But please note that you're just plastering over the problem without really solving it. What happens when I use a non-constant function pointer and forget the parenthesis? Who's gonna warn me in that case? Without needlessly warning about every single function pointer test, that is.
And please don't tell me that the solution is to declare
if (fptr)...;
illegal and to always require
if (fptr != 0)...;
because then we're not writing C anymore. (Maybe that's a hint to the real solution...)
Slashdot Mirror
You're entirely right: it should be about both. I just wanted to point out that the article is about something else than what the HTML gurus are reading in it. In saying that, I didn't mean to imply that the technical part is irrelevant.
I also dislike the site (oh the colors!), but you're all mixed up in your evaluation. What that webvastu thing is all about, is the graphical design, not the underlying HTML/CSS. Sounds like you're an IT person who has learned that design is about structuring but who was never really told that it also is about the look and feel. I can make a good looking site with crappy HTML, just as much as I can make a crappy looking site with perfectly clean and standard compliant HTML.
(Hey, I'm an IT guy, so I somewhat know what I'm talking about. It's just that I was raised in a context with many professional artists with strong interests in non-Western cultures.)
Similar story here. I'm an MBA student right now and the (European) school organises several 1 week exchanges for us to choose from early in 2007: New York, Milan, Bejing, and St. Petersburg. I ruled out New York from day one because I refuse to visit the US under the current regime. Guess where I will most likely be doing business instead after graduating?
The last time I was in the US was in May 2003. That was a business trip that I could not possibly escape from, but the airport experience was telling. The worst part of it, is that I was there to help a US based spin-off company of ours get off the ground. They were going to sell the stuff that I had been working on for 7 years and that so far was mostly funded by EU research grants. Yes, you got that right: we did the most risky bit, they were going to do the packaging and run away with the profits. And then the US treat me like criminal. (A criminal who also happens to have a Nato Secret security cleareance at that!) That's when I decided to never ever go back unless the US clean up their act a *lot*. Sadly, things have only gotten worse since then.
With an IQ of 115 (the number I remembered, so I'm not refering to that hoax page), he's above population average (as I wrote) and likely below presidential average (what I claimed), because 115 actually is even below university average. Computing the true presidential average is hard, since we don't have historical data for many of them, but I'd be pretty confident about my claim anyway.
Kerry is irrelevant. He never made it to the top. I never mentioned him either.
I know about the non-obvious correlations - or lack thereof - between IQ and many other things like speaking skills. I have 150 myself (sorry, I can't help that either), so I have 40+ years of first hand experience with the advantages and disadvantages of being above 3 sigma.
Actually not. Most US presidents had an IQ way above average. Even George W. scores above population average. It's just that within the group of US presidents, he's way below average.
Well, actually it's not only that. One thing is having an certain IQ, another is having an attitude and background that allows/enables you to use it in the face of political/cultural/religious/... bigotry, and yet another is to actually use it. Many a high-potential human being has been intellectually ruined during childhood.
On top of that, the word evolution means exactly that: things evolve. Nothing more and nothing less. There is no implied meaning of improvement attached to it at all!
Having said that, there's no reason why things should not be allowed to change. Today's technology allows us to do and expect things that were impossible when I was a teen. Must I therefor consider these things bad? Allow society to evolve, for $DEITY's sake!
The entire credit check history idea is wrong, not just when used for filtering job appplicants. It builds on the notion that those who pay their debts are more reliable, completely ignoring several key facts.
For instance, it "paints over" the problems of people who structurally use debts to pay back earlier debts. In other words: you can easily dig a hole as deep as you want, provided that you are sufficiently clever at hiding it by moving it around.
It also ignores those who do not want/need to have debts at all, as they simply have no "history". Never mind that Mr. X has had enough money of his own to survive for years and has carefully built this position by working hard from day one and by never spending money on stuff he didn't need or couldn't afford. I'd argue that people in this situation are much better at keeping track of their money and spendings than those who have payed back debts everywhere.
It's not only that. How does a customer in the end know that the degaussing actually took place?
If a disk that is supposed to have been shredded surfaces intact you can sue them. One such incident will basically kill their business, so a company that offers such a service has very very very good reasons to stick to the deal. But who will ever find out of a disk that was supposed to be degaussed before being shredded hasn't been?
The amount of testing needed for any patch, as variable or fixed as it may be, does not in itself justify the "second Tuesday of the month" approach.
I fully understand that there may be very critical patches that may take a few weeks to develop and test properly. I also fully agree that MicroSoft should not release those prematurely. However, it is not because one critical patch isn't ready that others that are ready must be queued up for up to a month. After all, if said critical one doesn't make the deadline, do they then also postpone publishing the others for an extra month? No. So why postpone at all the first time round? MicroSoft should just release each patch when it is ready, testing included. Not sooner, but also not later.
The purpose of the speed limit also is to protect people from those who do know how to "drive safely at 100mph". Accidents kill innocent bystanders, no matter how good the driver. Badly secured computers don't irrevocably "hurt" nearly that much.
To get back on topic: My father is 78. He has used computers since +- 1975. Yes, you've read that correctly: 1975. He still uses one on a daily basis and regularly reads about what's going on in the PC world. So far he never had an internet connection, due to a variety of reasons, but recently he expressed interest in getting one (using Linux, no less). I have no doubt whatsoever that he'll use it more safely than the average permanently connected schoolkid.
Who cares. Celebrate both. And then add the 15th birthday of the day you first heard of Linux. And the 15th birthday of the day you first saw it in action. And...
Ineed, you can modify stuff along the way to make it look like I'm in touch with Bin Laden himself. But that's not a solution to the original worry. The majority of stuff is not modified in such ways, and therefore anything you find about me in some backup somewhere will likely give you a reasonable indication about at least one piece of my life (if only that I may have told a ton of conflicting lies and therefore cannot be trusted to tell the truth when asked). If you put all those bits together, a picture emerges and even if it's not a fully accurate one, it does give you a ton of hints where to most effectively look for additional info for verification/discovery purposes. In the end, if the stakes are high enough, you come to me and try to talk me into a corner until I stop claiming that "I'm not involved in whatever it is you're accusing me of and that all info that you found about me were obviously falsified by obscure forces that control the entire internet".
The security services were watching this group for months already. Are you suggesting that the PM never leaves on holiday as long as any such group is under surveillance? After all, you never know that the one piece of extra info that prompts the police to openly take action isn't unexpectedly going to show up within hours of the PM leaving?
Be reasonable! Yes, he should return. But no, he should nor stay at home at all cost just because something might possibly happen. Or do YOU know what exactly caused the police to take action today instead of last week or next week? If you do, I'd suggest you go do your job, because it's more vastly important than hanging about on /. If you don't, I'd suggest you stop making unfounded allegations.
And the poster you replied to is right: sometimes you have to act as if nothing is special going on, just so as to prevent the other side from finding out that you do actually know what they're up to.
I agree with you in principle (not fully in practice in that I do clean up old cruft after X years, except for folders containing data with a special financial or emotional importance, but that's another issue).
But the parent poster has a valid point "in disguise". Because a normal human being has no control over what happens to his/her data stored at an ISP or, worse, the ISP as a whole, they should not use it as their filing cabinet. My e-mail filing cabinet sits here right in front of me, on my own disk where only I can read it. My daily level 1 backup is within reach - but on purpose unconnected - for emergencies, and my level 2 backup is stored at my father's house on a monthly basis.
We ordinary users get told all the time that we need to make backups like the pros do, but this incident is a perfectly good example of the pros not having proper backup procedures. And even if they do have them, imagine asking a typical ISP helpdesk for a restore of a single 1 year old message that you deleted by accident at unspecified moment more than 8 weeks ago... I've once had a sysadmin at work give me weird looks because of something similar, and he didn't anywhere near get to manage the amount of data that any semi-serious ISP does. Eventually he did satisfy the request, but partly because I happened to be in a postion of power and could have make life rather difficult for him.
It's not unusual and he didn't use it in order to cheat, but the physiological effect is the same nonetheless. Of course, chemotherapy is very much performance diminishing, so it doesn't really matter.
Landis' case is more interesting, however. He's using cortisone because of his (serious) hip problem. Cortisone a known performance enhancing drug and Landis is very much using it while he's actively racing. Here too, I'm not saying that he's cheating, but the physiological effect is present nonetheless. Whether or not it overcompensates for the hip issue is something I cannot judge, but considering that Landis didn't even inform his team until very recently, the negative effect of his dying hip on his performance cannot be huge yet.
What's more, said acceptable justification is a piece of cake to come up with. The agreement/rule was struck down for formal reasons only. The governments involved can have a second try simply by following the correct procedure this time around. For doing so, they need to unanimously agree to the measure, something that they didn't need to for the procudure used the first time round). The snag is that 1) the unanimity was there already even then, it just was not exploited; 2) once the EU commission does follow the correct procedure, the EU parliament has no say in the matter whatsoever. And remember: the only thing that allowed the EU court to intervene in the first place was a complaint by parliament.
I can't speak for him/her, but I actually do write out ":-)" in snail mails.
1) What does preventing anonymity have to do with fingerprinting friendly businesmen with a NATO Secret security clearance (my case), a valid European passport, and a valid US visum? It's not like I'm trying to hide the fact that I'm in the US, now is it?
Besides, you can have somebody's finger prints on file and still not know who he is. After all, you only want them when you think the person's passport technology isn't "reliable", so...
2) You should come and visit us, for a change. We live in the same world that you live in, but we don't need to fingerprint you in order for us to feel safe.
I'm a European who has in the past co-developed some European IT technology that is currently being marketed worldwide by a US company, creating jobs for US workers. And what do I get in return? They want to treat me like a criminal! I'm sorry guys, but not with me!
And even if coding would not have a lot to do with mathematics (something that, like you, I also disagree with), proficiency in either of them is strongly favoured by the same underlying skillset(s): analytical thinking, rigour in logic, accuracy and knowing when that is and is not relevant, attention to detail, ...
Having said that, I also use LaTeX as much as possible for all the reasons you indicate.
Finally, please note that Word is not WYSIWIG! What Word shows on your screen depends on the default printer you have configured. Send the document to your boss who has a private printer, and he'll likely get something different with tables and figures moving about in ways you do not expect, with suddenly text overflowing the box it is in, and whatnot.
Nice try, and it would help. But please note that you're just plastering over the problem without really solving it. What happens when I use a non-constant function pointer and forget the parenthesis? Who's gonna warn me in that case? Without needlessly warning about every single function pointer test, that is.
And please don't tell me that the solution is to declare
illegal and to always requirebecause then we're not writing C anymore. (Maybe that's a hint to the real solution...)Sure,
would not silently compile into something bad, but the following still would: