IE 7 is cool. I think I'll switch to it for my Windows computers (despite having used Firefox since its first beta). What I like about beta 3: tooltips that show keyboard shortcuts, in fact an entire list of keyboard shortcuts is available from the option menu on newly opened tab. Also I like the option on shutdown to open up with the current tabs next time.
"But there are extensions for all that!"—In fact that gets me to what I hate most about Firefox. Extension hell. Every time I install Firefox on a new system I have to hunt down a list of extensions for it or my user experience is going to change radically. And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
Another thing I like about IE 7 is its sandbox mode on Vista. That should, I think, provide several security advantages over competing browsers. (In fact, IE 6 with ActiveX turned off was already reasonably secure.)
Overkill? Oh no, my computer is working harder than it should! Look, for 99.9% of conversations, I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order. But I, and everybody else, is still damn glad that protection exists.
Wow -- encrypting traffic "between the two companies' computers" according to the article. Would it really kill them to encrypt all messages between users?
Doesn't come close to adblock plus with automatic updates from filterset.g. I haven't seen a web adverstisement in forever, and it requires no work on my part.
But the network is the slowest part of home computing. The data bus is orders of magnitude faster than the internet connection (or even intranet connection) in nearly every circumstance. This doesn't make thin clients a bad idea necessarily—there are substantial advantages to having the equivalent of a system admin in every home—but performance isn't one of them.
John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, keeps an awesome blog that deals with this topic from time to time. I think that he'd suggest that artistic craft and technique can add a whole lot of reality to the performances of cartoon criters. The golden age of all this stuff, 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros, demonstrates that the state of the art can get pretty high.
I wouldn't be worried -- it won't go very far. Too many people like Google, and that actually matters. Less importantly, it's a silly lawsuit.
At the same time, I wouldn't consider Google stock a good bet. They make all their real money through advertising, of which some significant fraction is fraud. They are desperately groping around for some other way to make money, but none has shown up yet, despite their having snapped up every bright mind in the tech industry for the last couple years. Google knows as well as anybody that as soon as they start trying to make money by charging for all their free services, there will be an instant public relations backlash. There is nothing that the public hates more than having to pay for something that used to be free. When Google starts cashing in on everything they've built, they a) still won't make more money from it than from search, which is probably tapped out, and b) they will become more hated than AOL.
I like this Backslash—the comment quality is what separates slashdot from digg. On slashdot, there is are a lot of crap comments, but there are often some gems mixed in too.
As far as SETI goes, I suppose what I'm most interested in is the leak comment in the main story. Is there really only a few hundred year window to find advanced technological socieities from their radio waves? Does everybody really switch to cable TV instead of broadcast?
I have a physicist friend who is enamoured of the rare Earth hypothesis—that the universe is mostly inhospitable to life and that we're it.
What utter crap. You actually think that Windows users should still be paying third parties any time they want to connect to the net, browse the web, or stream video? The Bush administration has been a plague upon the country, but dropping the anti-trust wackiness against Microsoft was the right way to go. The anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft have not resulted in one ounce of good for the consumer. It was all a matter of key industry players trying to use the legal system to subvert the free market.
Yeah! If you offload your FFTs to your GPU, the system resources on your monster work box are now freed enough up to let you play Quake while you're supposed to be calculat...oh, damn.
It's the genetics. Half of all children under the age of 5 in the U.S. are now minorities. Had we been importing Chinese (average IQ ~105), or another high-performing group, this problem wouldn't exist (ditto for if we had not been importing anybody).
When you look at the standardized test numbers, the central fact that pops out is that schools, on average, don't matter at all. The only thing that seems to budge the numbers in demographic change.
You are wrong about the numbers. If you keep a tissue sample, you'd just need to do an initial sequencing for a few markers. When possible matches come up, you can follow up with a more reliable test. This can be done on the cheap. And like everything else in the universe, it'll get a lot cheaper if you do it on a large enough scale. But even with your bad numbers, $100 billion is small compared to the total law enforcement budget.
Those rare cases where it would be useful are generally murders and rapes.
And before you start off on taxes, how much will this cost? Do you have a good estimate? This is a lot more doable now than it was a few years back due to automated DNA sequencing.
How expensive do you think it would really be? You'd have the expense of tissue storage, of initial sequencing, and of data storage. Of the three, the second is probably the most expensive, but automatic sequencing has gotten far cheaper in recent years.
I'd really like to see a universal DNA database for all U.S. citizens, mainly for use in criminal investigation. No one has yet suggested to me a downside that compares with the upside. The scares over such a thing are way overblown.
Didn't read the license when you downloaded that? One of the provisions is that source code and modifications can only be shared with other licensees. Notice all the "Personal Research Use Only" parts?
Java has an NDA you have to sign before seeing the source. Java allows Linux distributions to ship with pre-built binaries. So it's as open-source and free as...Nvidia and Microsoft? Maybe Stallman has a point.
Slashdot Mirror
IE 7 is cool. I think I'll switch to it for my Windows computers (despite having used Firefox since its first beta). What I like about beta 3: tooltips that show keyboard shortcuts, in fact an entire list of keyboard shortcuts is available from the option menu on newly opened tab. Also I like the option on shutdown to open up with the current tabs next time.
"But there are extensions for all that!"—In fact that gets me to what I hate most about Firefox. Extension hell. Every time I install Firefox on a new system I have to hunt down a list of extensions for it or my user experience is going to change radically. And all those extensions take up memory and processor time, and often have bugs or security flaws of their own.
Another thing I like about IE 7 is its sandbox mode on Vista. That should, I think, provide several security advantages over competing browsers. (In fact, IE 6 with ActiveX turned off was already reasonably secure.)
Maybe this is good:
Censorship in a technically savvy, non-repressed country, will spur censorship-circumvention technology by leaps and bounds.
Overkill? Oh no, my computer is working harder than it should! Look, for 99.9% of conversations, I don't care that there are legal protections keeping the government from tapping my phone without a court order. But I, and everybody else, is still damn glad that protection exists.
Wow -- encrypting traffic "between the two companies' computers" according to the article. Would it really kill them to encrypt all messages between users?
Doesn't come close to adblock plus with automatic updates from filterset.g. I haven't seen a web adverstisement in forever, and it requires no work on my part.
But the network is the slowest part of home computing. The data bus is orders of magnitude faster than the internet connection (or even intranet connection) in nearly every circumstance. This doesn't make thin clients a bad idea necessarily—there are substantial advantages to having the equivalent of a system admin in every home—but performance isn't one of them.
John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren and Stimpy, keeps an awesome blog that deals with this topic from time to time. I think that he'd suggest that artistic craft and technique can add a whole lot of reality to the performances of cartoon criters. The golden age of all this stuff, 1930s and 1940s Warner Bros, demonstrates that the state of the art can get pretty high.
I wouldn't be worried -- it won't go very far. Too many people like Google, and that actually matters. Less importantly, it's a silly lawsuit.
At the same time, I wouldn't consider Google stock a good bet. They make all their real money through advertising, of which some significant fraction is fraud. They are desperately groping around for some other way to make money, but none has shown up yet, despite their having snapped up every bright mind in the tech industry for the last couple years. Google knows as well as anybody that as soon as they start trying to make money by charging for all their free services, there will be an instant public relations backlash. There is nothing that the public hates more than having to pay for something that used to be free. When Google starts cashing in on everything they've built, they a) still won't make more money from it than from search, which is probably tapped out, and b) they will become more hated than AOL.
I like this Backslash—the comment quality is what separates slashdot from digg. On slashdot, there is are a lot of crap comments, but there are often some gems mixed in too.
As far as SETI goes, I suppose what I'm most interested in is the leak comment in the main story. Is there really only a few hundred year window to find advanced technological socieities from their radio waves? Does everybody really switch to cable TV instead of broadcast?
I have a physicist friend who is enamoured of the rare Earth hypothesis—that the universe is mostly inhospitable to life and that we're it.
Wow. That's some awesome security.
By the way, for making your 1361st comment on Slashdot, you win a free USB drive. Where do I send it?
What utter crap. You actually think that Windows users should still be paying third parties any time they want to connect to the net, browse the web, or stream video? The Bush administration has been a plague upon the country, but dropping the anti-trust wackiness against Microsoft was the right way to go. The anti-trust lawsuits against Microsoft have not resulted in one ounce of good for the consumer. It was all a matter of key industry players trying to use the legal system to subvert the free market.
Yeah! If you offload your FFTs to your GPU, the system resources on your monster work box are now freed enough up to let you play Quake while you're supposed to be calculat...oh, damn.
You've hit the nail on the head.
It's the genetics. Half of all children under the age of 5 in the U.S. are now minorities. Had we been importing Chinese (average IQ ~105), or another high-performing group, this problem wouldn't exist (ditto for if we had not been importing anybody).
When you look at the standardized test numbers, the central fact that pops out is that schools, on average, don't matter at all. The only thing that seems to budge the numbers in demographic change.
Chill out.
I asked for a "good estimate."
Calm down. Drink a beer or something.
You are wrong about the numbers. If you keep a tissue sample, you'd just need to do an initial sequencing for a few markers. When possible matches come up, you can follow up with a more reliable test. This can be done on the cheap. And like everything else in the universe, it'll get a lot cheaper if you do it on a large enough scale. But even with your bad numbers, $100 billion is small compared to the total law enforcement budget.
That doesn't hold water. It's easy to make someone a suspect now. Just make an anonymous phone call. "I saw so-and-so going into..."
Those rare cases where it would be useful are generally murders and rapes.
And before you start off on taxes, how much will this cost? Do you have a good estimate? This is a lot more doable now than it was a few years back due to automated DNA sequencing.
What stops that from happening now?—In fact, you can be pretty sure it is happening now.
How expensive do you think it would really be? You'd have the expense of tissue storage, of initial sequencing, and of data storage. Of the three, the second is probably the most expensive, but automatic sequencing has gotten far cheaper in recent years.
I'd really like to see a universal DNA database for all U.S. citizens, mainly for use in criminal investigation. No one has yet suggested to me a downside that compares with the upside. The scares over such a thing are way overblown.
Didn't read the license when you downloaded that? One of the provisions is that source code and modifications can only be shared with other licensees. Notice all the "Personal Research Use Only" parts?
Stallman mentions the NDA in the article.
Java has an NDA you have to sign before seeing the source. Java allows Linux distributions to ship with pre-built binaries. So it's as open-source and free as...Nvidia and Microsoft? Maybe Stallman has a point.