I think it's worth distinguishing between GM food and companies that use GM to prop up the agri-industrial complex by making ever more robust monocultures. The problem isn't genetic modification--we've been doing that since Mendel, the only difference is the techniques.
The problem is, instead of using this newfound genetic knowledge to do something worthwhile, companies like Monsanto use it to create corn that can thrive in giant swaths of land that grow nothing but corn. All of the fear levied at GM food in this thread and everywhere is misplaced. It should be aimed at the practice of growing monocultures that deplete soil and wreck the land.
I'm surprised that there's so much FUD in this thread aimed at GM, though. I thought/. was supposed to be mostly pro-science nerds that don't confuse evil corporations with anti-science hippie propaganda.:-)
I don't think he sees the world the way you and most other people do (including the Clay institute bunch).
That is the very point of consulting him: to get a different perspective. If I or the Institute already knew what he was going to say, I would not have suggested it.
To me this is the actual problem - trying to give 1 million dollars to Perelman is like giving a million dollars in $1 notes directly to a champion race horse.
Did you haughtily sniff after you typed this? I think you haughtily sniffed.
If you genuinely want to benefit the race horse you use your brains and figure out how to use the 1 million dollars to help the horse in a different way.
This is the first sensible thing in your post, except for the horrible and dehumanizing use of the term "horse" to refer to a brilliant mathematician. I have a completely new idea that has never been put to words before, a suggestion along the lines of what you have written here. I suggest, in the process of figuring out how to use that $1M, they begin by sitting down and talking to Perelman instead of presuming to know what's best for him.
(I have intentionally written this post with extra snarkiness and parsed your post to cast you in the most negative light possible. I did not do this because I wanted to, but because it is what is expected of me here on/..:-) )
We call movies art. We call literature art. We call silence art [wikipedia.org]. We call a single color art [wikipedia.org]. Hell, we even call graffiti art [wikipedia.org]. The crudest symbols our kind could muster [wikipedia.org] gets to be called art.
Are you asserting here that Ebert agrees that all of these things are art? If not, then his views on what should and should not be considered art may very well be consistent.
It sounds like what you're saying is that if someone, somewhere recognizes something as "art" then Ebert ought to be compelled to agree. I'm perfectly happy to let the man make his own decisions about what he considers art. Furthermore, even if I don't agree with his view, I prefer he makes his views known as long as they are intelligible, and doubly so if he can be eloquent on the matter.
This is great and will save a lot of confusion, especially in devices that stack batteries between contacts. I think the directions will read something like this: With MS Instaload technology, you can now install batteries any way you like unless your device stacks batteries between contacts. In that situation, make sure that the batteries are all in the same orientation between a given set of contacts, but you have complete and total freedom to orient the battery stacks—not the inidividual batteries in these devices—in any way you like! Please refer to the several pages of diagrams we've included that show all the different orientations of stacked battery configurations that will work, followed by several more pages of permutations of battery installation configuration that you should avoid while installing your batteries in any way you want!
It used to be that you'd have to be constrained by that simple little diagram embossed in the plastic next to the battery compartment. Now, there's no need to have those instructions placed right on the device...this innovation allows several pages of off-device instructions to take its place. Excellent!
Does anyone know the answer to this question: has the complaint here ever been about anything other than the number of bars displayed? In other words, has anyone actually done any tests on, you know, actual call reception? If I hold the phone in different ways, does it actually cause the call signal to degrade compared to previous iPhones and other smart phones?
Am I the only person with a scientific bent here on/.?
His problem seems to be that Hamilton's work isn't being recognized as well, and more generally that the process used to assess the award is unjust. Why don't the key people at the Clay Mathematics Institute offer to sit down with him and hear what he has to say on the matter with an open mind about changing the way they work?
They don't have to ultimately do anything, but here they have a smart guy telling them something is wrong with their organization at great personal cost to himself. Wouldn't that prompt you to take a look at yourself?
As noted above, I'm switching to tau. Still, I thought this warranted a response. Making an equation equal zero is sensible and natural notation: x^2 - x - 1 = 0, not x^2 - x = 1 (x is the golden ratio here, another thing worth a related tattoo, maybe).
Why not specify you want your own stylesheet applied to emails you receive then? Or have the client allow you to apply your own stylesheet with a single click (which you would presumably do if the email is too annoying)?
I think email clients should not execute anything without either asking or verifying that it's ok. And I think Gmail has a nice solution to the webbug problem of HTML email, where they refuse to contact other servers when you open a message unless you say it's ok (by clicking "display images" for instance).
Yep, that's the one. The subtlety there is when people extend the problem, they still have Monty only open 1 of the other doors showing a goat (out of the million). The correct extension of the problem that makes the change obvious, though, is to have Monty open all remaining doors other than the one you picked and the one with the prize (or, in the case you actually did pick the correct door to start, the one you picked and one randomly selected one with a goat behind it).
It's easy to create counterintuitive probability problems like this by altering the sample space. (Like the famous Monty Hall problem--by the way, if you've ever had a problem visualizing the MHP and don't find the answer intuitive, let me know and I'll post the "proper" way to look at that problem to make it clear.) The problem comes in in the problem statement when the sample space is ambiguous or misleading. If the problem statement seems to clearly say one thing but can actually be parsed for a less likely alternate meaning, isn't this just making the problem difficult by engaging a form of lying?
For example, here's an impossible problem: I flip a fair coin, what is the probability that it comes up heads? Answer: 100%. It's fair in that both sides are equally likely to come up, but that doesn't mean it has a heads side and a tails side, it's a fair two-headed coin. By letting the reader make an assumption about what is meant by "fair," have I created a devious problem here, or have I just lied in the problem statement?
These brain teasers have always seemed problematic for me because they require the "right amount" of skepticism at the right level from the person that's supposed to answer...but there's no information about what that right level of skepticism is. If I can't trust you to completely formulate a sensible problem statement, then where do I draw that line? Would it be a good response to the problem for me to just outright accuse you of lying about the basic facts of the problem? "How do I know the guy has at least one son? Just b/c you said so? But I can't trust you not to mislead me, so...where does that leave us?"
P=NP is more computer science that straight math or science. Still, maybe worth it. I would reject concision as a criterion, though...I'd want a tat represents an important idea and looks good aesthetically moreso than one that's simply concise. (Actually, I wouldn't want a tat period, but that's beside the point.)
But attachments can have executable content in the actual email...so are you for them or against them?
I think we're due for a change. It's not right that in this day and age we're limited to sending off text notes. I want the technology to serve me, not the other way round. If I want to take up a collection of money from friends to buy someone a birthday gift, for instance, then I don't want to have to deal with a bunch of notes and start a spreadsheet up. I don't want to navigate to a bunch of websites if I'm a participant. I want to publish a widget that lets people commit the amount they want to (maybe even pay directly) and vote on how it's spent, and the technology should keep track of it all and let me know directly what I want to know when I want to know it. As a user, I don't want to have to be concerned with some arbitrary detail of how some technology works (oh no, you can't have that in there because it's executable! what do I care?).
I really do think that Wave lays the groundwork for this kind of communication. Unfortunately it's not getting the adoption required, and the UI isn't right for how most people would use it, so it's not there yet. But the underlying tech and the idea is in the ether now, so hopefully something will happen.
Why should they take relativity into account? Are you asserting that relativity is less wrong than Newton's laws?
They're both equally "wrong"--which is to say not much at all. We must keep in mind here that scientific theories describe scientific models. The model takes inputs and produces outputs that are useful to us. What's inside the model is a black box--it need not correspond to reality to be useful, and no real scientist would claim that what goes on in the black box does correspond to reality.
Well, they can claim it, actually, but only if they split the model into two new black boxes...in that case, they can talk about the outputs of the new smaller black box as having something to do with reality...but once again, not what's inside it.
Consider the probability wave for instance. Does any physicist really believe that all matter and energy propagates as probability waves that collapse upon observation? Or do they believe that how matter & energy are described by the model may do that, but more to the point, it doesn't really matter as long as that model allows us to make accurate predictions?
This is the difference between science and faith people. All scientists worth anything recognize that the inner workings of scientific models resembling reality is purely incidental. If that were not the case, the Einstein would have proceeded from Newton's laws as though they were on equal footing with experimental results that contradicted them, and he would have been a mystic.
I think I get what you're saying, but a multicolored chart would make your point more effectively. Perhaps an interactive animation or two.
Look, I'm not saying text isn't sufficient for most email communications, but to decry an advance because you think it won't be done right is kind of dumb. Why not advocate doing it right?
Attachments were not part of the original email spec--the reason they were added is that people do want to send stuff besides text. It'd be even better if it could all be inlined. And interactive, basically what Wave allows while maintaining the simplicity of email.
How is this even possible if every human retina is different? There's no strict definition of human eye resolution if every human is different.
Kinda skipped that step in logic, eh?
Um, I think my point was that there is no canonical definition of "resolution of the human retina."
So let's summarize. You read what I had to say. You said it back in a different form, as though it was your own idea. Then you accused me of not understanding my own point, the point that you quoted in your post.
Huh, I was under the impression that the primary function of email was to enable communication between humans, not principally the prevention of exploits.
Um, if you're gonna get it tattoo'd, you probably want to go with the more traditional form of: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. This single equation shows a relationship between 5 important mathematical constants, as opposed to the other form, which just shows 3 (I don't think -1 qualifies, as i is the more fundamental).
Or, you could go with the more general form: e^(i*theta) = cos(theta) + i*sin(theta).
I might also go with the Euler product form of the Riemann zeta function, arguably the greatest unsolved problem in all of mathematics: sigma(n=1, infinity, n^-s) = pi(p prime, inv(1 - p^-s)).
I wouldn't worry about putting stuff on your arm that might get proven wrong—it doesn't mean F=m*a isn't a significant step in the evolution of human thought just because Einstein improved upon it. Speaking of Einstein, how about the Minkowski invariance relation (I think that's what it's called?): s^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + (i*c*t)^2.
Another significant idea worth memorializing is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem...you'd have to find a form using logic notation.
Finally, you might think about getting N E R D C O R E across your knuckles...
We don't need someone to discuss something we already know. Is anyone here under the impression that this needs to be studied for the first time in human history because Apple created a phone? c = 2 × d × tan( theta ÷ 2 )
Who cares if the iPhone 4 strictly meets the resolution of the human retina? Different people have different eyesight. Certainly the Guiness record holder for best eyesight would not agree, but most of us need glasses, so what difference does it make to Apple's target market? It's better, that's what matters. In a couple of years, if every device has > 300ppi because Apple did this, I will be very, very happy. (I'm into photography, I'd love to be able to show images on a device that give some notion of sharpness.)
Apple fumbled this marketing claim. They should have said, Hey all, it's better! By making a scientific claim, they invited people to challenge it. The conversation has become about whether they have met some arbitrary goal rather than: it's better. Whee.
Does anyone really believe that all of the companies listed are collectively worth 1.5 times more?
Does anyone believe they were worth that much less after the market cratered in 10/2008? Same companies, same people going to work everyday, doing the same things.
What all this reflects, of course, is that the market is volatile. Volatility is a measure of the market's certainty about what things are worth. So, to directly answer your question, because the market is volatile these days people are less inclined to believe the companies are worth their stated value.
However, the way the market reflects what people think is not a "thing to be fixed." It's working as it should. The solution here is to address the underlying problems that are making people feel so uncertain, not the measurement device.
But if you've read news over the last couple of years about what most smart people think we ought to be doing, you already know that, don't you?
Yea, I don't understand this either—to me, XHTML is a much better paradigm that should have been carried over into HTML5 without a doubt.
As for whether it's too hard to make it validate: please raise your hand if you plan to hand-craft large amounts of HTML5/XHTML anyway. If you have your hand up, you're doing it wrong. Use GWT. Let the compiler do the work. Is letting the compiler do the work not a familiar concept to you, as a developer?:-)
This is a good question, the same thing a lot of people are asking. It's unfortunate that Google isn't making more effort to clarify this because I think Wave should take off, and it will help us all in the end if it gets over this hump.
Look briefly at the history of email. It starts as structured ASCII text with some headers. Then it gets attachments. Then it get HTMLized so images can be embedded in line. The point is: everyone wants to put their content in line, no matter what it is: pictures, movies, a gadget. That's one thing Wave can do, and has led to this strategy of a "soft rollout," by which I mean to say that Google apparently thinks we can't handle the truth and has decided to sell Wave on this idea. But for what it is, it's way too complicated to just be an email replacement.
What Wave actually does to achieve this capability of embedding content anywhere is this: Wave has inverted the typical application model. What is an application? It's a bunch of functionality bundled together. If you think deeply about it, for any particular task at hand, an application is actually a bunch of related, yet mostly arbitrarily chosen functionality that is bundled together. The problem is, when you want to type up a simple letter, you're confronted with a UI that does things you're not interested in, like mail merge. (When was the last time you used the mail merge feature of your word processor? When was the last time you exercised a significant chunk of any application?)
In order to let you embed whatever, Wave breaks the application up and disperses functionality into gadgets and robots. You want to do something weird with a piece of content right where it lives in the wave? Ok, just get the gadget that renders it that way. You want to have some functionality change the content? Get the robot. If you think about this, we've been on this path since the componentization of apps have made the more into extensible frameworks than anything else: Firefox comes to mind as a basic browser that you can infinitely configure to do pretty much anything you want. (Emacs was first, I know.) Eclipse without plugins is like a Linux kernel without a shell--it literally is just a framework for plugins that does nothing else without at least the default plugins.
Anyway, so that is, I believe, the idea behind Wave. Invert the application model, let people focus on content as a first order thing, not as a mere byproduct of some application.
So now on to the practical...what is Wave actually good for? I don't think the main use case Google is using to sell wave, as a modern replacement for email, is the right thing. Wave is very good when you want to create a work product that is the result of many people playing different roles (provided the right widgets and gadgets exist, of course). Think not about email, where two people are playing the same role (email author, bouncing back and forth). Think about writing a book, where you have an editor, an author, a layout person, etc. Think about the traditional way a book's content moves around from person to person, their view of that content and how they'd like to work with it. Then think about how that same thing could be done with Wave with much greater ease, with each participant controlling exactly when and how they want the others to access the content and play out their role.
I'm not the only one advocating this as the type of use case for Wave either. Check out the concept for film making and the managing the workflow of a scienceresearch lab too. The three ingredients where Wave will excel: complex workflow, multiple people, different roles. You just need the gadgets and robots specific to that workflow.
I'm just glad that there's absolutely no way an electronic license plate could be hacked to display whatever the owner wants. Good thing about that, too, because that being the case nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
I do like the idea of being forced by my government to show advertisements on my private property from companies out of my control. Why don't they do this with all our private property, actually? Think of the tax money it would save if your house was a giant diaper ad.
You know what else they should do, they should cut mirror images of ads into the soles of police jackboots. That way, when they stomp you the state can monetize your bruises.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's worth distinguishing between GM food and companies that use GM to prop up the agri-industrial complex by making ever more robust monocultures. The problem isn't genetic modification--we've been doing that since Mendel, the only difference is the techniques.
The problem is, instead of using this newfound genetic knowledge to do something worthwhile, companies like Monsanto use it to create corn that can thrive in giant swaths of land that grow nothing but corn. All of the fear levied at GM food in this thread and everywhere is misplaced. It should be aimed at the practice of growing monocultures that deplete soil and wreck the land.
I'm surprised that there's so much FUD in this thread aimed at GM, though. I thought /. was supposed to be mostly pro-science nerds that don't confuse evil corporations with anti-science hippie propaganda. :-)
That is the very point of consulting him: to get a different perspective. If I or the Institute already knew what he was going to say, I would not have suggested it.
Did you haughtily sniff after you typed this? I think you haughtily sniffed.
This is the first sensible thing in your post, except for the horrible and dehumanizing use of the term "horse" to refer to a brilliant mathematician. I have a completely new idea that has never been put to words before, a suggestion along the lines of what you have written here. I suggest, in the process of figuring out how to use that $1M, they begin by sitting down and talking to Perelman instead of presuming to know what's best for him.
(I have intentionally written this post with extra snarkiness and parsed your post to cast you in the most negative light possible. I did not do this because I wanted to, but because it is what is expected of me here on /.. :-) )
Are you asserting here that Ebert agrees that all of these things are art? If not, then his views on what should and should not be considered art may very well be consistent.
It sounds like what you're saying is that if someone, somewhere recognizes something as "art" then Ebert ought to be compelled to agree. I'm perfectly happy to let the man make his own decisions about what he considers art. Furthermore, even if I don't agree with his view, I prefer he makes his views known as long as they are intelligible, and doubly so if he can be eloquent on the matter.
This is great and will save a lot of confusion, especially in devices that stack batteries between contacts. I think the directions will read something like this: With MS Instaload technology, you can now install batteries any way you like unless your device stacks batteries between contacts. In that situation, make sure that the batteries are all in the same orientation between a given set of contacts, but you have complete and total freedom to orient the battery stacks—not the inidividual batteries in these devices—in any way you like! Please refer to the several pages of diagrams we've included that show all the different orientations of stacked battery configurations that will work, followed by several more pages of permutations of battery installation configuration that you should avoid while installing your batteries in any way you want!
It used to be that you'd have to be constrained by that simple little diagram embossed in the plastic next to the battery compartment. Now, there's no need to have those instructions placed right on the device...this innovation allows several pages of off-device instructions to take its place. Excellent!
Does anyone know the answer to this question: has the complaint here ever been about anything other than the number of bars displayed? In other words, has anyone actually done any tests on, you know, actual call reception? If I hold the phone in different ways, does it actually cause the call signal to degrade compared to previous iPhones and other smart phones?
Am I the only person with a scientific bent here on /.?
His problem seems to be that Hamilton's work isn't being recognized as well, and more generally that the process used to assess the award is unjust. Why don't the key people at the Clay Mathematics Institute offer to sit down with him and hear what he has to say on the matter with an open mind about changing the way they work?
They don't have to ultimately do anything, but here they have a smart guy telling them something is wrong with their organization at great personal cost to himself. Wouldn't that prompt you to take a look at yourself?
As noted above, I'm switching to tau. Still, I thought this warranted a response. Making an equation equal zero is sensible and natural notation: x^2 - x - 1 = 0, not x^2 - x = 1 (x is the golden ratio here, another thing worth a related tattoo, maybe).
I was not aware of this, but I agree...pi is wrong, I'm switching to tau.
Why not specify you want your own stylesheet applied to emails you receive then? Or have the client allow you to apply your own stylesheet with a single click (which you would presumably do if the email is too annoying)?
I think email clients should not execute anything without either asking or verifying that it's ok. And I think Gmail has a nice solution to the webbug problem of HTML email, where they refuse to contact other servers when you open a message unless you say it's ok (by clicking "display images" for instance).
Yep, that's the one. The subtlety there is when people extend the problem, they still have Monty only open 1 of the other doors showing a goat (out of the million). The correct extension of the problem that makes the change obvious, though, is to have Monty open all remaining doors other than the one you picked and the one with the prize (or, in the case you actually did pick the correct door to start, the one you picked and one randomly selected one with a goat behind it).
It's easy to create counterintuitive probability problems like this by altering the sample space. (Like the famous Monty Hall problem--by the way, if you've ever had a problem visualizing the MHP and don't find the answer intuitive, let me know and I'll post the "proper" way to look at that problem to make it clear.) The problem comes in in the problem statement when the sample space is ambiguous or misleading. If the problem statement seems to clearly say one thing but can actually be parsed for a less likely alternate meaning, isn't this just making the problem difficult by engaging a form of lying?
For example, here's an impossible problem: I flip a fair coin, what is the probability that it comes up heads? Answer: 100%. It's fair in that both sides are equally likely to come up, but that doesn't mean it has a heads side and a tails side, it's a fair two-headed coin. By letting the reader make an assumption about what is meant by "fair," have I created a devious problem here, or have I just lied in the problem statement?
These brain teasers have always seemed problematic for me because they require the "right amount" of skepticism at the right level from the person that's supposed to answer...but there's no information about what that right level of skepticism is. If I can't trust you to completely formulate a sensible problem statement, then where do I draw that line? Would it be a good response to the problem for me to just outright accuse you of lying about the basic facts of the problem? "How do I know the guy has at least one son? Just b/c you said so? But I can't trust you not to mislead me, so...where does that leave us?"
P=NP is more computer science that straight math or science. Still, maybe worth it. I would reject concision as a criterion, though...I'd want a tat represents an important idea and looks good aesthetically moreso than one that's simply concise. (Actually, I wouldn't want a tat period, but that's beside the point.)
But attachments can have executable content in the actual email...so are you for them or against them?
I think we're due for a change. It's not right that in this day and age we're limited to sending off text notes. I want the technology to serve me, not the other way round. If I want to take up a collection of money from friends to buy someone a birthday gift, for instance, then I don't want to have to deal with a bunch of notes and start a spreadsheet up. I don't want to navigate to a bunch of websites if I'm a participant. I want to publish a widget that lets people commit the amount they want to (maybe even pay directly) and vote on how it's spent, and the technology should keep track of it all and let me know directly what I want to know when I want to know it. As a user, I don't want to have to be concerned with some arbitrary detail of how some technology works (oh no, you can't have that in there because it's executable! what do I care?).
I really do think that Wave lays the groundwork for this kind of communication. Unfortunately it's not getting the adoption required, and the UI isn't right for how most people would use it, so it's not there yet. But the underlying tech and the idea is in the ether now, so hopefully something will happen.
Why should they take relativity into account? Are you asserting that relativity is less wrong than Newton's laws?
They're both equally "wrong"--which is to say not much at all. We must keep in mind here that scientific theories describe scientific models. The model takes inputs and produces outputs that are useful to us. What's inside the model is a black box--it need not correspond to reality to be useful, and no real scientist would claim that what goes on in the black box does correspond to reality.
Well, they can claim it, actually, but only if they split the model into two new black boxes...in that case, they can talk about the outputs of the new smaller black box as having something to do with reality...but once again, not what's inside it.
Consider the probability wave for instance. Does any physicist really believe that all matter and energy propagates as probability waves that collapse upon observation? Or do they believe that how matter & energy are described by the model may do that, but more to the point, it doesn't really matter as long as that model allows us to make accurate predictions?
This is the difference between science and faith people. All scientists worth anything recognize that the inner workings of scientific models resembling reality is purely incidental. If that were not the case, the Einstein would have proceeded from Newton's laws as though they were on equal footing with experimental results that contradicted them, and he would have been a mystic.
I think I get what you're saying, but a multicolored chart would make your point more effectively. Perhaps an interactive animation or two.
Look, I'm not saying text isn't sufficient for most email communications, but to decry an advance because you think it won't be done right is kind of dumb. Why not advocate doing it right?
Attachments were not part of the original email spec--the reason they were added is that people do want to send stuff besides text. It'd be even better if it could all be inlined. And interactive, basically what Wave allows while maintaining the simplicity of email.
Um, I think my point was that there is no canonical definition of "resolution of the human retina."
So let's summarize. You read what I had to say. You said it back in a different form, as though it was your own idea. Then you accused me of not understanding my own point, the point that you quoted in your post.
Nice!
Huh, I was under the impression that the primary function of email was to enable communication between humans, not principally the prevention of exploits.
Thanks for clearing that up!
</snark> :-)
Um, if you're gonna get it tattoo'd, you probably want to go with the more traditional form of: e^(i*pi) + 1 = 0. This single equation shows a relationship between 5 important mathematical constants, as opposed to the other form, which just shows 3 (I don't think -1 qualifies, as i is the more fundamental).
Or, you could go with the more general form: e^(i*theta) = cos(theta) + i*sin(theta).
I might also go with the Euler product form of the Riemann zeta function, arguably the greatest unsolved problem in all of mathematics: sigma(n=1, infinity, n^-s) = pi(p prime, inv(1 - p^-s)).
I wouldn't worry about putting stuff on your arm that might get proven wrong—it doesn't mean F=m*a isn't a significant step in the evolution of human thought just because Einstein improved upon it. Speaking of Einstein, how about the Minkowski invariance relation (I think that's what it's called?): s^2 = x^2 + y^2 + z^2 + (i*c*t)^2.
Another significant idea worth memorializing is Godel's Incompleteness Theorem...you'd have to find a form using logic notation.
Finally, you might think about getting N E R D C O R E across your knuckles...
It's a shame that it's not a galaxy-sized, warm incandescent light.
:-/
Fluorescent light is so not-flattering for us here on Earth.
Does anyone believe they were worth that much less after the market cratered in 10/2008? Same companies, same people going to work everyday, doing the same things.
What all this reflects, of course, is that the market is volatile. Volatility is a measure of the market's certainty about what things are worth. So, to directly answer your question, because the market is volatile these days people are less inclined to believe the companies are worth their stated value.
However, the way the market reflects what people think is not a "thing to be fixed." It's working as it should. The solution here is to address the underlying problems that are making people feel so uncertain, not the measurement device.
But if you've read news over the last couple of years about what most smart people think we ought to be doing, you already know that, don't you?
Yea, absolutely. You know what else is based on perceived value? Real money.
Then again, you said "based off" instead of "based on," so maybe we're saying the same thing?
Yea, I don't understand this either—to me, XHTML is a much better paradigm that should have been carried over into HTML5 without a doubt.
As for whether it's too hard to make it validate: please raise your hand if you plan to hand-craft large amounts of HTML5/XHTML anyway. If you have your hand up, you're doing it wrong. Use GWT. Let the compiler do the work. Is letting the compiler do the work not a familiar concept to you, as a developer? :-)
This is a good question, the same thing a lot of people are asking. It's unfortunate that Google isn't making more effort to clarify this because I think Wave should take off, and it will help us all in the end if it gets over this hump.
Look briefly at the history of email. It starts as structured ASCII text with some headers. Then it gets attachments. Then it get HTMLized so images can be embedded in line. The point is: everyone wants to put their content in line, no matter what it is: pictures, movies, a gadget. That's one thing Wave can do, and has led to this strategy of a "soft rollout," by which I mean to say that Google apparently thinks we can't handle the truth and has decided to sell Wave on this idea. But for what it is, it's way too complicated to just be an email replacement.
What Wave actually does to achieve this capability of embedding content anywhere is this: Wave has inverted the typical application model. What is an application? It's a bunch of functionality bundled together. If you think deeply about it, for any particular task at hand, an application is actually a bunch of related, yet mostly arbitrarily chosen functionality that is bundled together. The problem is, when you want to type up a simple letter, you're confronted with a UI that does things you're not interested in, like mail merge. (When was the last time you used the mail merge feature of your word processor? When was the last time you exercised a significant chunk of any application?)
In order to let you embed whatever, Wave breaks the application up and disperses functionality into gadgets and robots. You want to do something weird with a piece of content right where it lives in the wave? Ok, just get the gadget that renders it that way. You want to have some functionality change the content? Get the robot. If you think about this, we've been on this path since the componentization of apps have made the more into extensible frameworks than anything else: Firefox comes to mind as a basic browser that you can infinitely configure to do pretty much anything you want. (Emacs was first, I know.) Eclipse without plugins is like a Linux kernel without a shell--it literally is just a framework for plugins that does nothing else without at least the default plugins.
Anyway, so that is, I believe, the idea behind Wave. Invert the application model, let people focus on content as a first order thing, not as a mere byproduct of some application.
So now on to the practical...what is Wave actually good for? I don't think the main use case Google is using to sell wave, as a modern replacement for email, is the right thing. Wave is very good when you want to create a work product that is the result of many people playing different roles (provided the right widgets and gadgets exist, of course). Think not about email, where two people are playing the same role (email author, bouncing back and forth). Think about writing a book, where you have an editor, an author, a layout person, etc. Think about the traditional way a book's content moves around from person to person, their view of that content and how they'd like to work with it. Then think about how that same thing could be done with Wave with much greater ease, with each participant controlling exactly when and how they want the others to access the content and play out their role.
I'm not the only one advocating this as the type of use case for Wave either. Check out the concept for film making and the managing the workflow of a science research lab too. The three ingredients where Wave will excel: complex workflow, multiple people, different roles. You just need the gadgets and robots specific to that workflow.
I'm just glad that there's absolutely no way an electronic license plate could be hacked to display whatever the owner wants. Good thing about that, too, because that being the case nothing could possibly go wrong with this plan.
I do like the idea of being forced by my government to show advertisements on my private property from companies out of my control. Why don't they do this with all our private property, actually? Think of the tax money it would save if your house was a giant diaper ad.
You know what else they should do, they should cut mirror images of ads into the soles of police jackboots. That way, when they stomp you the state can monetize your bruises.