Actually, it does. That' how it works, see? There might be a pink elephant on top of the Eiffel tower (a small one, that hides whenever someone looks directly at it - or maybe even an invisible pink elephant!). But if it does exist, its existence is so flimsy, so irrelevant, and has such a small impact on the rest of reality, that it's not worth taking into account.
When something that is as actively sought as "little gray men in flying saucers" is supported by exactly zero evidence, it's pretty safe to say that it doesn't exist.
If you read my post, I wrote that there is a high probability of alien life. Just not alien humanoid life, visiting the Earth. We would have noticed it (where by "we" I mean sane people, with cameras and radars and telescopes).
Over 10 people filmed the airplanes hitting the towers on 9/11, and they weren't actively looking for airplanes hitting skyscrapers. There are thousands of people looking through telescopes, analysing data from radars and just recording video of the sky. Many of them are actually actively looking for alien spaceships and little gray men visiting the Earth. Grand total of evidence? Zero.
When something is the subject of so much observation, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's not proof, of course, but you can't really prove anything, outside the domain of pure maths. Everything else can, at best, be "undisproved".
You left out the rest of the sentence (for a broad enough definition of "life"), but in any case, it's not a single data point. Fossils of primitive "life forms" (or self-organising compounds) have been found in meteorites. And even on Earth there are extremophiles adapted to environments similar to those of known planets, so we know that life could survive there, even if only in primitive forms. Put two and two together (meteorites don't hit just the Earth), and the probability is quite high that there will be some bacteria or "complicated crystals" (which is really what life is) living elsewhere.
Obviously we can't study the bacteria in Uranus without actually going there, and while I have no intention of doing so, I'm sure someone will be brave enough to do it.;-)
Chaos theory. Unless it started out exactly the same (same mud, same crystals, same acid rain), the end result would be very different. Alien life? Almost a certainty. Alien humanoid life? Not bloody likely.
Oh, and natural selection (which I take it is what you mean by "evolutionists" - "evolution" simply means "change over time", the name of the theory is "natural selection") has nothing to say about how life started, just about how it changes over time: by mutation and natural selection.
Considering that no one seems to agree on a definition of "life", it's even less meaningful to talk about "intelligent life". Even on Earth, what counts as "intelligent life"? Are bacteria intelligent? Are insects? Are virii intelligent? Are they even alive? Are computers intelligent non-life?
I'm with Stanislaw Lem: chances are, if we came across intelligent alien life, we would have a hard time even identifying it, let alone communicating with it (and they with us).
Then again, the longer I live and the more people I get to know, the more I agree with Eric Idle, too: let's hope there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.;-)
No... based on the fact that there is zero evidence of it, despite much active searching.
It's kind of like saying that "there are no pink elephants on top of the Eiffel tower... based on the current level of technology and scientific understanding". No, it's based on the fact that lots of people look at the top of the Eiffel tower and none have seen a pink elephant there (except for my uncle, once, but he was on LSD).
Yet more proof that NASA skimped on the radiation shielding on those helmets.
It's statistically quite likely that alien life exists (especially for a broad enough definition of "life"). But the chances that it will be close enough to Earth to "visit us" or that it will look like "little men" is approximately zero.
Does anyone know if Dr. Edgar Mitchell has signed a book deal recently?
the implementation of miniature refrigeration systems in computers can dramatically increase the amount of heat removed from the microchips, therefore boosting performance
Really? So my CPU will perform faster if I put it in a refigerator?
Opera has been free for a long time (before Firefox even existed). The free version simply had an ad banner at the top-right corner (you could turn it off by switching to full screen, though). The paid version got rid of that and entitled you to direct tech support (still does - it's now under "premium support" in their website). I think they stopped doing the banner thing for two reasons:
1. Not many people were interested in advertising in a browser with a small market share (this was back in the day when MSIE had 95% share). I remember half the ads were actually cartoon strips (which Opera sent to the browser when it didn't have a relevant ad to show).
2. Opera has a deal with Google to use it as its default search engine, and Google makes money from displaying ads on the search results page. One of Google's conditions was probably that Opera got rid of other (non-Google) ads.
What's the point of tabs, if they just duplicate existing window manager functionality, and waste screen real-estate with an extra tab bar taking up your screen? It's a complete pointless waste.
You might as well ask what is the point of each application window having its own menu bar instead of piling all menu options of all applications into a single menu bar.
If you really can't understand it, you must either never have more than 4-5 applications and 4-5 web pages open at the same time, or you must belong to some sect of UI masochists.
As to the rest of your comments, just like the claim that "Opera's window manager is like Windows 3.11" (which, as anyone can check by comparing the two UIs, makes absolutely no sense), they seem to be based on your imagination or your misunderstanding of something you've read, rather than on actually using the software. Opera's tab manager does everything the main WM does, and a lot more (and, in any case, it has the option to let the main WM handle the windows, so again, why are you complaining? Because it gives you a choice, and has done so for ten years?).
Oh, and writing in CAPITALS doesn't MAKE you SOUND right, it just MAKES you sound FANATICAL. Which I suppose is appropriate, since this is clearly a religious matter for you. Sigh...
Using Opera was like having a window on your destop, running it's own little session of Windows 3.11 in a VM...
Last time I checked, Windows 3.11 used a "program manager" window with groups and icons. Opera uses a taskbar and taskbar buttons. If anything, its window manager looks (and behaves) exactly like the window manager on virtually all modern operating systems, which every user is accustomed to. I see how this can be confusing... (not)
You're absolutely right that Opera, since the start, styled itself to be like "the internet running on a VM" (or "the browser as a platform"). A design that has since proven to be visionary (and which has been copied by every other major browser).
Mozilla, from the start, implemented tabs linearly... Close one, and you go to the next one to the left (later, the right). [...] Opera had tabs, [...] the cycle based on when they were last viewed.
Yes, when you close a tab in Opera, the one "under" it is the last one you used. Just like pretty much every window manager does when you close an application, or like any MDI application does when you close a document.
Your example is actually a pretty good one of how Opera does things right (by applying the same paradigm already in use by the vast majority of applications) instead of coming up with some arbitrary new rule ("always switch to the tab whose icon is on the right" or "always switch to the tab whose icon is on the left" - as you pointed out, FF and Mozilla don't even agree on which "side" to pick).
But hey, if you like non-standard, non-intuitive MDIs, Opera has you covered, too. You can make it behave "linearly", based on what taksbar icon happens to be to the left or to the right. So why exactly are you complaining? Because Opera has had MDI since 1998 and they "didn't copy Firefox", which didn't even exist at the time (and, instead, implemented MDI as it was and is implemented by all other applications and by the OS window manager)?
Seriously, I never throught I'd see someone complain that a window manager is "complex and unintuitive" because it behaves like the vast majority of existing window managers.
And Opera is feeling so pressured by Firefox that it is systematically forced to copy Firefox's features months and even years before Firefox releases them... ^_^
It's also a problem for PGP Desktop and every other commercial (or non-commercial) encryption tool out there. Or rather, it's a problem for the people using them.
This hardly counts as "research" or "figuring out a way to break the deniability of TrueCrypt's hidden files", as the article implies.
Besides, the hidden volume isn't "revealed", as such. If you find a shortcut to z:\secret\destroytheinternet.txt, that still doesn't tell you where the actual data resides (let alone how to decrypt it).
Now, unencrypted copies of the actual data (temp saves, swap files, search indexes), that's the real risk, but that doesn't just "break the deniability", it breaks the actual encryption.
The real question is what does it offer over Server 2003 x64 (or XP Pro 32) that offsets the less mature (sometimes non-existent) drivers and compatibility problems.
create an entire 3d world [...] apples will act like apples and cars will act like cars, etc. [...] You can choose how you want to participate in the action and your actions will have consequences on the plot line that are dynamic and non-fragile.
That already exists. It's called real life. I realise this is news for most slashdotters.
No, seriously, the modeling-from-photographs part already exists and it's called photogrammetry. But, just as a human needs multiple points of view to avoid making mistakes, so will (do) computers; there just isn't enough information in a single 2D photo, unless every single object in the scene is "known" (which rather limits the use of the system).
As to the rest, you'd have to couple photogrammetry with object identification and a (really, really, really good) physics simulation. Oh, and AI good enough to figure out the consequences of your actions in that "virtual world that's just like the real world", meaning the "supercomputer" would have to a) be able to simulate the minds of all the people in the "game" and b) it would have to be able to simulate itself (since it's part of the "real world"). Good luck with that.
Anyway, the real question is: what for? Do you really want to be able to change your point of view during a movie (insert pr0n joke here)? That's why good directors and cinematographers get the big bucks: to make that choice for you, and deliver a "message" through a consistent work. Pan the camera up during the first scene and you solve the murder mystery in 2 minutes. Not much fun.
Maybe one day computers will be able to analyse Van Gogh's sunflowers and deliver a 3D model of real sunflowers, plus some paint, some paintbrushes, and a large bottle of absinthe, so you can paint them from any other angle...:-P
Instead of sending an ad, send a message asking people if they want to opt into your mailing list. This is legal in most countries, as long as that message doesn't contain advertising for any actual product. Also, in that message, make sure you mention the name of the (competing) company that revealed their e-mail address, and explain that _they_ made it public, and that by using the to: and cc: fields, they are exposing their clients to all sorts of spam and e-mail worms.
It can also send the message in "self-destructing" form, preventing forwarding, printing, copying and saving. MS Outlook has been doing that for years, with one extra feature: it also prevents the recipient from actually reading the message. All he sees is an empty message with an attachment called "winmail.dat".
Now, if Outlook could come configured by default to prevent sending the messages in the first place, that would really help conserve bandwidth.
Yes, because, as everyone knows, network latency is caused by using long cables. Kinks slow down the electricity, too.
[sarcastic mode off]
It takes approximately three millionths of a second for an electric signal to travel across a 100-metre cable. Network cables are usually kept short to minimise interference and signal loss, not for any reason related to latency. Light speed ought to be be fast enough for anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, it does. That' how it works, see? There might be a pink elephant on top of the Eiffel tower (a small one, that hides whenever someone looks directly at it - or maybe even an invisible pink elephant!). But if it does exist, its existence is so flimsy, so irrelevant, and has such a small impact on the rest of reality, that it's not worth taking into account.
When something that is as actively sought as "little gray men in flying saucers" is supported by exactly zero evidence, it's pretty safe to say that it doesn't exist.
If you read my post, I wrote that there is a high probability of alien life. Just not alien humanoid life, visiting the Earth. We would have noticed it (where by "we" I mean sane people, with cameras and radars and telescopes).
Over 10 people filmed the airplanes hitting the towers on 9/11, and they weren't actively looking for airplanes hitting skyscrapers. There are thousands of people looking through telescopes, analysing data from radars and just recording video of the sky. Many of them are actually actively looking for alien spaceships and little gray men visiting the Earth. Grand total of evidence? Zero.
When something is the subject of so much observation, absence of evidence is evidence of absence. It's not proof, of course, but you can't really prove anything, outside the domain of pure maths. Everything else can, at best, be "undisproved".
You left out the rest of the sentence (for a broad enough definition of "life"), but in any case, it's not a single data point. Fossils of primitive "life forms" (or self-organising compounds) have been found in meteorites. And even on Earth there are extremophiles adapted to environments similar to those of known planets, so we know that life could survive there, even if only in primitive forms. Put two and two together (meteorites don't hit just the Earth), and the probability is quite high that there will be some bacteria or "complicated crystals" (which is really what life is) living elsewhere.
Obviously we can't study the bacteria in Uranus without actually going there, and while I have no intention of doing so, I'm sure someone will be brave enough to do it. ;-)
Chaos theory. Unless it started out exactly the same (same mud, same crystals, same acid rain), the end result would be very different. Alien life? Almost a certainty. Alien humanoid life? Not bloody likely.
Oh, and natural selection (which I take it is what you mean by "evolutionists" - "evolution" simply means "change over time", the name of the theory is "natural selection") has nothing to say about how life started, just about how it changes over time: by mutation and natural selection.
Considering that no one seems to agree on a definition of "life", it's even less meaningful to talk about "intelligent life". Even on Earth, what counts as "intelligent life"? Are bacteria intelligent? Are insects? Are virii intelligent? Are they even alive? Are computers intelligent non-life?
I'm with Stanislaw Lem: chances are, if we came across intelligent alien life, we would have a hard time even identifying it, let alone communicating with it (and they with us).
Then again, the longer I live and the more people I get to know, the more I agree with Eric Idle, too: let's hope there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth. ;-)
No... based on the fact that there is zero evidence of it, despite much active searching.
It's kind of like saying that "there are no pink elephants on top of the Eiffel tower... based on the current level of technology and scientific understanding". No, it's based on the fact that lots of people look at the top of the Eiffel tower and none have seen a pink elephant there (except for my uncle, once, but he was on LSD).
The two main reasons why laptop CPUs lower their clock speed and voltage are:
1. Saving the battery.
2. Saving the next generation. ;-)
Yet more proof that NASA skimped on the radiation shielding on those helmets.
It's statistically quite likely that alien life exists (especially for a broad enough definition of "life"). But the chances that it will be close enough to Earth to "visit us" or that it will look like "little men" is approximately zero.
Does anyone know if Dr. Edgar Mitchell has signed a book deal recently?
the implementation of miniature refrigeration systems in computers can dramatically increase the amount of heat removed from the microchips, therefore boosting performance
Really? So my CPU will perform faster if I put it in a refigerator?
Opera has been free for a long time (before Firefox even existed). The free version simply had an ad banner at the top-right corner (you could turn it off by switching to full screen, though). The paid version got rid of that and entitled you to direct tech support (still does - it's now under "premium support" in their website). I think they stopped doing the banner thing for two reasons:
1. Not many people were interested in advertising in a browser with a small market share (this was back in the day when MSIE had 95% share). I remember half the ads were actually cartoon strips (which Opera sent to the browser when it didn't have a relevant ad to show).
2. Opera has a deal with Google to use it as its default search engine, and Google makes money from displaying ads on the search results page. One of Google's conditions was probably that Opera got rid of other (non-Google) ads.
Just think of the money you'll save by not having to buy a fancy tablet and a copy of Fractal Painter.
What's the point of tabs, if they just duplicate existing window manager functionality, and waste screen real-estate with an extra tab bar taking up your screen? It's a complete pointless waste.
You might as well ask what is the point of each application window having its own menu bar instead of piling all menu options of all applications into a single menu bar.
If you really can't understand it, you must either never have more than 4-5 applications and 4-5 web pages open at the same time, or you must belong to some sect of UI masochists.
As to the rest of your comments, just like the claim that "Opera's window manager is like Windows 3.11" (which, as anyone can check by comparing the two UIs, makes absolutely no sense), they seem to be based on your imagination or your misunderstanding of something you've read, rather than on actually using the software. Opera's tab manager does everything the main WM does, and a lot more (and, in any case, it has the option to let the main WM handle the windows, so again, why are you complaining? Because it gives you a choice, and has done so for ten years?).
Oh, and writing in CAPITALS doesn't MAKE you SOUND right, it just MAKES you sound FANATICAL. Which I suppose is appropriate, since this is clearly a religious matter for you. Sigh...
The same research team also said they would be releasing a CPU (codenamed "Origami") based on these transistors. It's optimised for F@H.
Using Opera was like having a window on your destop, running it's own little session of Windows 3.11 in a VM...
Last time I checked, Windows 3.11 used a "program manager" window with groups and icons. Opera uses a taskbar and taskbar buttons. If anything, its window manager looks (and behaves) exactly like the window manager on virtually all modern operating systems, which every user is accustomed to. I see how this can be confusing... (not)
You're absolutely right that Opera, since the start, styled itself to be like "the internet running on a VM" (or "the browser as a platform"). A design that has since proven to be visionary (and which has been copied by every other major browser).
Mozilla, from the start, implemented tabs linearly... Close one, and you go to the next one to the left (later, the right). [...] Opera had tabs, [...] the cycle based on when they were last viewed.
Yes, when you close a tab in Opera, the one "under" it is the last one you used. Just like pretty much every window manager does when you close an application, or like any MDI application does when you close a document.
Your example is actually a pretty good one of how Opera does things right (by applying the same paradigm already in use by the vast majority of applications) instead of coming up with some arbitrary new rule ("always switch to the tab whose icon is on the right" or "always switch to the tab whose icon is on the left" - as you pointed out, FF and Mozilla don't even agree on which "side" to pick).
But hey, if you like non-standard, non-intuitive MDIs, Opera has you covered, too. You can make it behave "linearly", based on what taksbar icon happens to be to the left or to the right. So why exactly are you complaining? Because Opera has had MDI since 1998 and they "didn't copy Firefox", which didn't even exist at the time (and, instead, implemented MDI as it was and is implemented by all other applications and by the OS window manager)?
Seriously, I never throught I'd see someone complain that a window manager is "complex and unintuitive" because it behaves like the vast majority of existing window managers.
And Opera is feeling so pressured by Firefox that it is systematically forced to copy Firefox's features months and even years before Firefox releases them... ^_^
Looks like HTML 5 and CSS 3 were definitely worth the wait.
It's also a problem for PGP Desktop and every other commercial (or non-commercial) encryption tool out there. Or rather, it's a problem for the people using them.
This hardly counts as "research" or "figuring out a way to break the deniability of TrueCrypt's hidden files", as the article implies.
Besides, the hidden volume isn't "revealed", as such. If you find a shortcut to z:\secret\destroytheinternet.txt, that still doesn't tell you where the actual data resides (let alone how to decrypt it).
Now, unencrypted copies of the actual data (temp saves, swap files, search indexes), that's the real risk, but that doesn't just "break the deniability", it breaks the actual encryption.
So if you open files from an encrypted drive and let your software auto-save backups to a non-encrypted drive, those files can be found?
So if you store a shortcut to a file in your hidden volume, that shortcut can indicate that a hidden volume exists?
So if you let your search application create an index of files in a drive, that index can indicate that the drive exists, and contains those files?
So if your paging file isn't on an encrypted volume, any memory contents swapped out to it are stored unencrypted?
When I ran these revolutionary conclusions through my patented semantic compressor, they were replaced by the following byte sequence: "Duh!"
Anyway, how does any of this apply specifically or exclusively to TrueCrypt? It's just a consequence of caching / autosaving / search indexing.
So Server 2008 is better than Vista. What isn't?
The real question is what does it offer over Server 2003 x64 (or XP Pro 32) that offsets the less mature (sometimes non-existent) drivers and compatibility problems.
Gives a whole new meaning to "Adult Magazine"...
That already exists. It's called real life. I realise this is news for most slashdotters.
No, seriously, the modeling-from-photographs part already exists and it's called photogrammetry. But, just as a human needs multiple points of view to avoid making mistakes, so will (do) computers; there just isn't enough information in a single 2D photo, unless every single object in the scene is "known" (which rather limits the use of the system).
As to the rest, you'd have to couple photogrammetry with object identification and a (really, really, really good) physics simulation. Oh, and AI good enough to figure out the consequences of your actions in that "virtual world that's just like the real world", meaning the "supercomputer" would have to a) be able to simulate the minds of all the people in the "game" and b) it would have to be able to simulate itself (since it's part of the "real world"). Good luck with that.
Anyway, the real question is: what for? Do you really want to be able to change your point of view during a movie (insert pr0n joke here)? That's why good directors and cinematographers get the big bucks: to make that choice for you, and deliver a "message" through a consistent work. Pan the camera up during the first scene and you solve the murder mystery in 2 minutes. Not much fun.
Maybe one day computers will be able to analyse Van Gogh's sunflowers and deliver a 3D model of real sunflowers, plus some paint, some paintbrushes, and a large bottle of absinthe, so you can paint them from any other angle... :-P
Instead of sending an ad, send a message asking people if they want to opt into your mailing list. This is legal in most countries, as long as that message doesn't contain advertising for any actual product. Also, in that message, make sure you mention the name of the (competing) company that revealed their e-mail address, and explain that _they_ made it public, and that by using the to: and cc: fields, they are exposing their clients to all sorts of spam and e-mail worms.
Now, if Outlook could come configured by default to prevent sending the messages in the first place, that would really help conserve bandwidth.
Yes, because, as everyone knows, network latency is caused by using long cables. Kinks slow down the electricity, too.
[sarcastic mode off]
It takes approximately three millionths of a second for an electric signal to travel across a 100-metre cable. Network cables are usually kept short to minimise interference and signal loss, not for any reason related to latency. Light speed ought to be be fast enough for anyone.
I doubt it'll work very well for Ethernet, though. :-)