the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service. How will / can it cope?
Huh?? I'm not sure what you're talking about but I'm pretty sure I don't recognize it. Quality television service is much more widespread than the Internet. I'm N. American, but I've lived for years in Africa and Asia. I can assure you that in "None of the above" has the web surpassed broadcast media as a source of news for any but an elite few. And the comment is irrelevant for the elite since they have access to "all of the above"-plus.
Seriously, even in the smallest, poorest villages around the world several people will have radios and access to VOA, BBC, a national broadcast network and one or two regional stations. In addition most villages will have at least one television.
The internet is a bit player if it's a player at all
My first thought was something on the lines of biocybernetics or cyberbotany, but I'm stumped to include or even understand the role of physics in your degree.
What are some of the courses you've included in your degree? Is there a thread which ties these different subjects together in your mind? What project / seminar are you doing to complete your degree?
C'mon guys did you even read the article. NSF is not proposing changing the structure of the web, rather they are hoping to utilize the structure to make data more secure by storing it in decentralized fashion. No one server will contain enough data to reconstruct the file, any server can crash and the file will still be available.
Google News has been my primary news source since I discovered it a couple of months ago. I like it precisely because its _not_ a portal, at least not in the sense of Netscape News or Yahoo News.
Google News provides the same clean UI to news sources that we've all come to treasure for Google's web search. Occasionally I look at Google Headlines, but more often I go directly to Google News Search I've been wishing for a long time that Google would provide a search of news sources. I've lived overseas (Asia, Africa) about half the time in the last 15 years and have found it extremely difficult to get news about places I care about. Google news has changed that. I just typed in the name of the small resort town where I lived in Northern India and found 14 stories from 9 sources. That's the power of Google!!
Windows is an OS, whereas Mozilla is just an application / framework, which is multi-platform. From what I understand, Mozilla is only tied to the platorm you compiled it under.
Ha... another victim of M$ propaganda. Windows(r) hasn't yet been an OS. Each version of Windows(r) has an underlying, unnamed OS and a window manager application running on top of the OS. These Windows(r) window managers are not functionally dissimilar to Linux window managers, nor would they be dissimilar to a cross-platform window manager based on mozilla.
The military must have been aware of this effect for some time. The use of video-game style simulators has greatly increased the percentage of soldiers who are willing to unthinkingly shoot to kill when under threat. In WWII, it was less than 50% in the most recent conflicts over 90%. I've heard military trainers say that videogame programmers are doing the job for them. They are making military training much easier as young recruits join the military without emotional "baggage" about killing.
And how do the bee teach to each other the smell
of TNT ?
I just heard this story on NPR and the researcher described how to train the bees. Simply add the scent of TNT to a feeding station filled with sugar water. Pretty soon the bees associate the smell of TNT with food.
I'd guess the bees learn from each other in a similar way. They follow the directions (given in the normal way) to the feeding station and soon they too associate the smell with food.
Some of what you describe is true today. But in an historical context, it's total drivel. Judaism flourished when Spain was under Moslem control, there was a holocaust when Christians took over.
There is a significant Christian minority to this day in middle-eastern countries which have been under Islamic rule for over 1000 years. The history of these Christian communities has mostly been peaceful co-existence with their Moslem neighbors.
Slashdot's coverage of remote-controlled rats was woefully inadequate. SatireWire has the full story. It appears that the Pentagon is having a difficult time deciding which is the politically correct animal to control. Many slashdotters have experience working with ratlike animals, perhaps they can lend their expertise. Which species would you chose for remote-controlled search and rescue missions?
If I may assume for the moment that Madnick is neither stupid nor lying, what could he possibly be trying to say? Maybe he was simply using Microsoft's definition of operating system.
Windows has always been a combination operating system and windows manager not unlike linux/kde or linux/gnome. I myself have run win95 on top of Novell DOS. It worked just fine after a bit of tweaking. MS has tried to pretend over the years that what the user sees _is_ the OS. Hence, the WinXP window manager _is_ the WinXP OS, the KDE window manager _is_ the KDE OS, the Gnome window manager _is_ the Gnome OS.
Hmmm... I wonder if anyone has tried to use WINE to run Win95 on Linux!
I'm using a commercial service called BuzMe It provides the functionality you request. If you are online you get an instant messenger type pop-up, which gives you the option to accept the call (which would drop your modem), type a response, or let the caller leave a message.
I remember once installing a program with a EULA that scrolled at a set speed. It's probably the only EULA that I've read in its entirety, but it was dead boring. I almost just decided to hit cancel and be not install.
But its not just EULAs, I don't think most people read many of the contracts they sign.
But there are businesses who sell new customized cars. Actually a better example would be customized trucks and vans with close to 50% of vehicles sold being modified in some way before reaching the consumer.
The point is that the original manufacturer doesn't have a bogus contract restricting the allowed customization. They also still honor all warranties on parts which they manufactured.
The Skeptic column in the March, 2002 issue of Scientific American had a good summary of pseudoscience titled Hermits and Cranks.
They quote Martin Gardner's characterization of the pseudoscientist. Written in 1952, they are amazingly relevant 50 years later:
(1) He considers himself a genius.
(2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads....
(3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. The recognized societies refuse to let him lecture. The journals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to "enemies" for review. It is all part of a dastardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this opposition may be due to error in his work....
(4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein....
(5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.
I laughed as I read through the patent, then was surprised by the hostility displayed in this discussion. Maybe I have a different concept of a patent than others.
IANAL, but I've always seen thought Patent is to Invention, as Copyright is to Writing. The patent office is just there to check for plagiarism. A patent doesn't indicate effectiveness, usefulness, marketability or even compliance with physical laws. It does indicate that a cursory examination found it to be significantly different than any prior patents.
Capitalism may not have a conscience, but many people using the fruits of capitalism do. Although it may at times appear to be, the global economic system isn't self-perpetuating. It is in fact perpetuated by powerful people making decisions which affect the powerless.
So I am offend by all the posts saying, "It's inevitable, so boo hoo!" It's _not_ inevitable that Africa pays both ways, and technologically privileged users can make a difference. Slashdotters in particular have a responsibility to act on behalf of their less privileged counterparts.
How many of you have ever had to pay for an email which has been sent to you?
The Feb 11, 2002 issue of India Today had the story of the discovery of Cambay off the coast of Gujarat in January of this year. The India Today website is subscriber only, but here is the teaser.
The article is somewhat sensationalist, but here are the highlights: Wood from the site has been dated between 5500BC and 7500BC. Structures found include stone roads, a bath complex, and acropolis-style raised platforms. Among the artifacts were large numbers of semiprecious stones and beads.
After spending the '80s as a programmer / DP manager in healthcare, I decided that there were better things to do with my life than sit in the bowels of buildings staring at computer screens. I had taken some education courses in college, so I went back and got my teaching degree and have been teaching at the HS level since '94. I'm currently finishing up a Masters in educational technology. My focus is helping teachers use technology for their own learning / professional development.
Money is an issue. Before becoming a teacher, I had decided that a sane life was more important than money. But then I discovered the overworked side of the equation. My first year teaching I virtually never got to bed before 2 AM. Summers off are nice, but very few teachers actually take more than a few weeks off. Instead they teach summer school, participate in curriculum development or take courses to work their way up the pay-scale.
It was a good career change, but I look forward to being a technology coordinator / teacher trainer / technology consultant. I'd like to be able to use technology to make teaching a more humane, more relational, more respected profession.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling...
on
Google Juice
·
· Score: 2
As long as Google continues to get free publicity from Slashdot, I can't imagine it being dethroned.
Seriously though I fail to see a problem here. Yeah, I read the links and checked out a couple of so called "Google bombs". It certainly didn't convince me that Google was flawed in any way. Even if it did indicate a gaping hole in Google's algorithms, Google recognizes blogs. Didn't they announce just a few months ago that they were starting to crawl blogs daily to stay up-to-date? If this really became an issue, it would be a simple matter of "talentless hack -blog" to remedy it.
In Microsoft's anti-monopoly case, Microsoft's lawyers had to use WordPerfect to prepare their case because MS Word didn't meet the relevant bar association standards. If I remember correctly Word didn't count words reliably, so both sides couldn't be certain that they were looking at complete documents.
Also I believe there is a similar set of standards for accountants using spreadsheets.
Most of us just assume that our software is going to work and tell horror stories when it doesn't, but for those whose very careers depend on the accuracy of their programs, software is indeed very closely monitored.
Slashdot Mirror
the Internet is going to be the primary news source for many millions of people, particularly those without access to a quality television news service. How will / can it cope?
Huh?? I'm not sure what you're talking about but I'm pretty sure I don't recognize it. Quality television service is much more widespread than the Internet. I'm N. American, but I've lived for years in Africa and Asia. I can assure you that in "None of the above" has the web surpassed broadcast media as a source of news for any but an elite few. And the comment is irrelevant for the elite since they have access to "all of the above"-plus.
Seriously, even in the smallest, poorest villages around the world several people will have radios and access to VOA, BBC, a national broadcast network and one or two regional stations. In addition most villages will have at least one television.
The internet is a bit player if it's a player at all
My first thought was something on the lines of biocybernetics or cyberbotany, but I'm stumped to include or even understand the role of physics in your degree.
What are some of the courses you've included in your degree? Is there a thread which ties these different subjects together in your mind? What project / seminar are you doing to complete your degree?
Almost 500 posts in response to a non-existent (?!) article!
Never before in history have so many said so much about so little.
C'mon guys did you even read the article. NSF is not proposing changing the structure of the web, rather they are hoping to utilize the structure to make data more secure by storing it in decentralized fashion. No one server will contain enough data to reconstruct the file, any server can crash and the file will still be available.
Sorry about the broken links. Try these instead...
Google Headlines
Google News Search
Google News has been my primary news source since I discovered it a couple of months ago. I like it precisely because its _not_ a portal, at least not in the sense of Netscape News or Yahoo News.
Google News provides the same clean UI to news sources that we've all come to treasure for Google's web search. Occasionally I look at Google Headlines, but more often I go directly to Google News Search I've been wishing for a long time that Google would provide a search of news sources. I've lived overseas (Asia, Africa) about half the time in the last 15 years and have found it extremely difficult to get news about places I care about. Google news has changed that. I just typed in the name of the small resort town where I lived in Northern India and found 14 stories from 9 sources. That's the power of Google!!
Windows is an OS, whereas Mozilla is just an application / framework, which is multi-platform. From what I understand, Mozilla is only tied to the platorm you compiled it under. Ha... another victim of M$ propaganda. Windows(r) hasn't yet been an OS. Each version of Windows(r) has an underlying, unnamed OS and a window manager application running on top of the OS. These Windows(r) window managers are not functionally dissimilar to Linux window managers, nor would they be dissimilar to a cross-platform window manager based on mozilla.
I'm gonna have to call bs on this one... I want to see a source...
Checkout Lt. Col. Dave Grossman's killology website. He is a retired West Point professor and has some very interesting ideas.
The military must have been aware of this effect for some time. The use of video-game style simulators has greatly increased the percentage of soldiers who are willing to unthinkingly shoot to kill when under threat. In WWII, it was less than 50% in the most recent conflicts over 90%. I've heard military trainers say that videogame programmers are doing the job for them. They are making military training much easier as young recruits join the military without emotional "baggage" about killing.
And how do the bee teach to each other the smell of TNT ?
I just heard this story on NPR and the researcher described how to train the bees. Simply add the scent of TNT to a feeding station filled with sugar water. Pretty soon the bees associate the smell of TNT with food.
I'd guess the bees learn from each other in a similar way. They follow the directions (given in the normal way) to the feeding station and soon they too associate the smell with food.
hunt for 2,4-dinitrotoluene, or DNT, a residue in TNT and other explosives, in concentrations as tiny as a few thousandths of a part per trillion.
Speaking of innumeracy, that would be parts per quadrillion, not parts per billion.
Some of what you describe is true today. But in an historical context, it's total drivel. Judaism flourished when Spain was under Moslem control, there was a holocaust when Christians took over.
There is a significant Christian minority to this day in middle-eastern countries which have been under Islamic rule for over 1000 years. The history of these Christian communities has mostly been peaceful co-existence with their Moslem neighbors.
Slashdot's coverage of remote-controlled rats was woefully inadequate. SatireWire has the full story. It appears that the Pentagon is having a difficult time deciding which is the politically correct animal to control. Many slashdotters have experience working with ratlike animals, perhaps they can lend their expertise. Which species would you chose for remote-controlled search and rescue missions?
If I may assume for the moment that Madnick is neither stupid nor lying, what could he possibly be trying to say? Maybe he was simply using Microsoft's definition of operating system.
Windows has always been a combination operating system and windows manager not unlike linux/kde or linux/gnome. I myself have run win95 on top of Novell DOS. It worked just fine after a bit of tweaking. MS has tried to pretend over the years that what the user sees _is_ the OS. Hence, the WinXP window manager _is_ the WinXP OS, the KDE window manager _is_ the KDE OS, the Gnome window manager _is_ the Gnome OS.
Hmmm... I wonder if anyone has tried to use WINE to run Win95 on Linux!
If samba.org was slashdotted, this might be a useful post. But its not and it isn't!!
I'm using a commercial service called BuzMe It provides the functionality you request. If you are online you get an instant messenger type pop-up, which gives you the option to accept the call (which would drop your modem), type a response, or let the caller leave a message.
No linux support, but otherwise it works for me.
I remember once installing a program with a EULA that scrolled at a set speed. It's probably the only EULA that I've read in its entirety, but it was dead boring. I almost just decided to hit cancel and be not install.
But its not just EULAs, I don't think most people read many of the contracts they sign.
But there are businesses who sell new customized cars. Actually a better example would be customized trucks and vans with close to 50% of vehicles sold being modified in some way before reaching the consumer.
The point is that the original manufacturer doesn't have a bogus contract restricting the allowed customization. They also still honor all warranties on parts which they manufactured.
(1) He considers himself a genius.
(2) He regards his colleagues, without exception, as ignorant blockheads....
(3) He believes himself unjustly persecuted and discriminated against. The recognized societies refuse to let him lecture. The journals reject his papers and either ignore his books or assign them to "enemies" for review. It is all part of a dastardly plot. It never occurs to the crank that this opposition may be due to error in his work....
(4) He has strong compulsions to focus his attacks on the greatest scientists and the best-established theories. When Newton was the outstanding name in physics, eccentric works in that science were violently anti-Newton. Today, with Einstein the father-symbol of authority, a crank theory of physics is likely to attack Einstein....
(5) He often has a tendency to write in a complex jargon, in many cases making use of terms and phrases he himself has coined.
I laughed as I read through the patent, then was surprised by the hostility displayed in this discussion. Maybe I have a different concept of a patent than others.
IANAL, but I've always seen thought Patent is to Invention, as Copyright is to Writing. The patent office is just there to check for plagiarism. A patent doesn't indicate effectiveness, usefulness, marketability or even compliance with physical laws. It does indicate that a cursory examination found it to be significantly different than any prior patents.
Capitalism may not have a conscience, but many people using the fruits of capitalism do. Although it may at times appear to be, the global economic system isn't self-perpetuating. It is in fact perpetuated by powerful people making decisions which affect the powerless.
So I am offend by all the posts saying, "It's inevitable, so boo hoo!" It's _not_ inevitable that Africa pays both ways, and technologically privileged users can make a difference. Slashdotters in particular have a responsibility to act on behalf of their less privileged counterparts.
How many of you have ever had to pay for an email which has been sent to you?
The Feb 11, 2002 issue of India Today had the story of the discovery of Cambay off the coast of Gujarat in January of this year. The India Today website is subscriber only, but here is the teaser.
The article is somewhat sensationalist, but here are the highlights: Wood from the site has been dated between 5500BC and 7500BC. Structures found include stone roads, a bath complex, and acropolis-style raised platforms. Among the artifacts were large numbers of semiprecious stones and beads.
After spending the '80s as a programmer / DP manager in healthcare, I decided that there were better things to do with my life than sit in the bowels of buildings staring at computer screens. I had taken some education courses in college, so I went back and got my teaching degree and have been teaching at the HS level since '94. I'm currently finishing up a Masters in educational technology. My focus is helping teachers use technology for their own learning / professional development.
Money is an issue. Before becoming a teacher, I had decided that a sane life was more important than money. But then I discovered the overworked side of the equation. My first year teaching I virtually never got to bed before 2 AM. Summers off are nice, but very few teachers actually take more than a few weeks off. Instead they teach summer school, participate in curriculum development or take courses to work their way up the pay-scale.
It was a good career change, but I look forward to being a technology coordinator / teacher trainer / technology consultant. I'd like to be able to use technology to make teaching a more humane, more relational, more respected profession.
As long as Google continues to get free publicity from Slashdot, I can't imagine it being dethroned.
Seriously though I fail to see a problem here. Yeah, I read the links and checked out a couple of so called "Google bombs". It certainly didn't convince me that Google was flawed in any way. Even if it did indicate a gaping hole in Google's algorithms, Google recognizes blogs. Didn't they announce just a few months ago that they were starting to crawl blogs daily to stay up-to-date? If this really became an issue, it would be a simple matter of "talentless hack -blog" to remedy it.
In Microsoft's anti-monopoly case, Microsoft's lawyers had to use WordPerfect to prepare their case because MS Word didn't meet the relevant bar association standards. If I remember correctly Word didn't count words reliably, so both sides couldn't be certain that they were looking at complete documents.
Also I believe there is a similar set of standards for accountants using spreadsheets.
Most of us just assume that our software is going to work and tell horror stories when it doesn't, but for those whose very careers depend on the accuracy of their programs, software is indeed very closely monitored.