Including the ones who needed to do a study to figure that out.
Okay, this is just a stupid statement.
First, this study actually provided specific reasons why phishing works. Even if you concede the reason is because people are idiots, there's a lot of different ways they can be idiots.
Second, and more generally, if we never tested anything that appeared obvious we would never have figured out that light travels, that neglecting air resistance things of different weights fall at the same speed, and that going really really fast makes you weigh more. The obvious solution is not always right, so testing to make sure the obvious solution IS right can be valuable in itself even if it confirms that hypothesis.
The grandparent's post already deals with the issues you raised. The diagrams, and the photos, are not porn because their primary role is not sexual arousal
My point is that there are some people that would consider many of the things that fall into this category porn.
And the painting I think would be almost universally considered NOT porn.
I think your prinicpal concern with it (as raised by your advertising example) is that you're really after a filter on age-restricted content rather than a filter on porn.
Porn is imagery whose primary purpose is sexual arousal.
Really?
So what about imagery that causes sexual arousal but isn't intended to? What about educational things... like diagrams you might find in an anatomy book. If you don't think that is, what about actual photographs, but still meant for medical purposes?
What about abstract paintings, say one that obstenantly is a painting of a flower but is strongly suggestive of sexual organs?
What about commercials that use seductiveness in order to sell products?
You think wrong. Some quotes from the Wikipedia entry:
In recent years, the use of a byte to mean 8 bits is nearly ubiquitous
Meaning even today it's not universal.
A contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, or from a disk-drive head, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.
Here I think is the most revealing definition for the discussion in the present context.
The eight-bit byte is often called an octet in formal contexts such as industry standards, as well as in networking and telecommunication, in order to avoid any confusion about the number of bits involved.
* Pre-1965, and including the IBM 701, bytes were almost always 6 bits, though they weren't called that much then, but rather characters.
* 9 bits were sometimes used
* The PDP-6, PDP-10, and DECsystem 20 all supported changing the byte size with instructions from 1 to 36 bits (probably only some of those)
The latter reference, looking up the PDP-10 on Wikipedia, gives this quote:
Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits)
My best guess is that it goes back to when networks were first being built and the size of a byte varied a lot more than today. Everyone agreed as to what a bit was, so it was a consistent measure, instead of some people saying a byte is 8 bits, others 11, others 9, etc.
Then just the inertia of moving to a more sane unit, perhaps combined with the marketing ideas others mentioned.
I don't know if that's the case, but it seems like a reasonable guess. I doubt it's solely marketspeak, because it's used all over the place in networking, not just promo stuff.
as far as I can tell hardly anyone has figured out what the box in the upper right corner is for. It's painful to watch how they'll open a tab and type in the Google URL instead of simply using the search box, even after it's been pointed out to them.
Old habits die hard.
I hardly ever use the search box in Firefox, and just search from the location bar. (In my defense, I set it up so I can type "g " to return the results of a Google search, so that's what I use. It's possible without that I'd use the search box.)
Surely you appreciate the fact that there are less annoying/bloaty/redundant features (did someone say Clippy?) in OO?
Hmm, let's see if I have Clippy installed. Oh look, I don't. I wonder how I did that.
Oh yeah, by doing a custom install of Office and not installing it.
Sure, OO isn't perfect but for something free its bloody good. For the majority of tasks people would use MsOffice for OO is a perfect substitute.
I can probably agree with that. I don't use OOo *too* often because I have run into too many things where I do notice a difference so can't comment fully. However, for power users there are still several things I can name that Word does that OOo either doesn't do at all or does substantially worse, and only one advantage of OOo, which is its price. (You could view it being open source or using odf and stuff like that as a second; I'm not tied to the free software philosophy (especially where it's distinct from open source) so I don't see these as huge advantages.
Anyway, I have OOo's equivalent of whatever you're talking about running at boot (soffice), and even on second load Word STILL loads faster.
A rough time (this is me counting, but I do count pretty consistently) -Word, 3 seconds -OOo, first load, with soffice in background, 9 seconds -OOo, second load, soffice not running, 5 sec
I'd appreciate it if you could either deliver some citation that says the majority of the world's population is better at committing information to memory by writing than by typing, or retract your statement.
I don't think that "the majority" is sufficient, because that could leave lots of people who that WOULDN'T be true for. And as long as there are people who would learn better taking notes on a laptop than on paper, the justification for banning laptops should be a lot stiffer.
I want to see a citation that ALMOST ALL college students (we'll restrict the latter parameter; it could be even more specific, like law students) is better at committing information to memory by writing than by typing, or retract your statement.
If the teacher is keeping the notes from the students because they think that it will be better for the students, this is a very misguided approach. Sure, some people will pay less attention and learn less, but *that's their choice*. Some people will get the notes and learn less than they would have had they taken notes, but they'll have other classes where they DON'T get notes beforehand and learn that ignoring the notes that are given out is better for them. But some people will get the notes beforehand and discover that not having to scribble everything down frees them up to listen closer to what's going on and make the eye contact that the prof in this particular story says that laptops hurt. Different people learn in different ways.
Giving out the notes beforehand allow the people in the last group to take their approach while not depriving the second group of their approach (since they can ignore the notes). Not giving out notes beforehand give the second group what they want but deprive the third group of their method. (I have no sympathy for group 1.)
I had a computer architecture class in which we had a quiz at the beginning of every class on the material from that day's slides. The point was so that when we were going through the class everyone would have an idea of what were were covering that day, so the prof could expound on stuff not explicitly on the slides and ask questions of the students. (It was also very helpful that we got the notes in advance, though that's a somewhat orthagonal issue.)
I'm curious to hear what people have to say about this method in something like math or computer science rather than law. It seems like a lot more of law can be taught through discussions hypothetical (or not) situations and what arguments you could put forward for various positions (I'm thinking mostly the adversarial parts of law here (so criminal law, torts, and contract disputes), but I can see how the same idea applies to other areas) than the sciences. Like I don't know how I would develop calculus for instance with the socratic method. That may be just because I've never had a course that really operated that way; closest I've come is a couple classes that were mostly lecture-based (complete with PPT slides) but with lots of questions from the prof.
That being said, I think the teacher should be able to teach how she wants.
That's interesting, because I think the students should be able to LEARN how they want. And if that includes taking notes on a laptop, they should be able to take notes on a laptop.
If the noise or image is bothering people that's a different story, or if they interfere with a specific teaching style (such as the socratic method, which could be hindered by laptops), but I don't think the prof should ban laptops just because he or she thinks that the students aren't getting as much out of the course. Maybe the teacher is wrong, and just doesn't understand how the students using laptops are doing as well or better as they would with paper. And even if they're sitting there playing solitare, if they aren't distracting to other students or interferring with the teaching, they should be able to continue. It's their education.
Out of curiosity, what would you think about a tablet PC? I've been planning to get one for taking notes in grad school because I think it carries almost all the benefits of having a computer (which for my usage I think would probably be substantial) without much of the first three drawbacks. I don't type up notes later, so (iv) doesn't really apply anyway, so it seems a tablet would be as good as paper in that respect.
It was not acquired by the voluntary cooperation of the source.
RTFA. It WAS acquired by at least the semi-voluntary cooperation of the source.
The rule wouldn't let the IRS or gov't sell your information, it would only allow 3rd party preparers to. There's nothing that says that you couldn't do your taxes yourself and keep your information private.
Sure, that choice sorta sucks in relation to going to a professional (hence the semi-voluntary), but it's still an option.
That is not a limitation of any specific technology; rather, it is a limitation of mathematics. You have no more business expecting an extension compiled against 1.0.8 to work with anything except 1.0.8, than you have expecting that a CD will play on a cassette walkman.
Oh really?
Perhaps then you can explain how programs written for *DOS* continue to work under XP without recompilation. Or how modern programs come with one exe, and not different ones for 95, 95osr2, 98, 98se, ME, NT3.5, NT4, 2K, XP, XP SP2, and 2003. Or how most binaries that ran on the IBM S/390 in 1970 or whatever still run on IBM's zServers today.
It is CERTAINLY possible to make an ABI so that plug-ins could be compiled once and work for at least long periods of time. Might not be worth it, but it's certainly possible.
Second, when you download a FF extension, do you see links for EVERY VERSION of Firefox? No! If I go to the Flashblock page, I have to choose between the 1.0 and 1.5 series browsers, but that's it. I don't have to choose between the release for 1.0.7 and 1.0.8. That alone pretty much destroys your theory.
Third is what others have already said about why it works with FF in reality.
You're risking starting a fire so that there's an attractive and colorful pattern on the wall BEHIND the TV???
No, it case of a fire, there will be a VERY insteresting thing to watch. Fire looks cool, no? Just think of it catching fire as winning the lottery then... in that case, it enhances your entertainment experience.
MacOS, sure, but Windows... what are you smoking? What company is "PC"? You can buy a Dell, a Gateway, an IBM, a Compaq, a HP, a Sony, a Tiger Direct, an eMachine, etc. computer and all will work (somewhat) equally well with anything that works on any of the others.
we can't expect publications aimed at the average Joe to provide the kind of detail we'd like on these stories.
No, we DON'T expect them to. And thus they don't publish details like that. If people started writing in complaining about the imprecision in scientific articles, they'd improve them.
Imagine Microsoft says it has the definitive authoritative search engine, and then blocks Oracle from the results. Now when you search for anything related to databases you don't get Oracle, even searches directly related to do with Oracle databases.
Are you OK with that now?
Depends. If the reason Oracle doesn't appear is because of a deliberate attempt by MS to block it, then no. If MS changed their search strategy in even a semi-reasonable manner and just one of many consequences was a lower rank of Oracle, yes.
In your example case, the fact that even searches directly related to do with Oracle don't give it to you is an indication of the former. In this case, some searches with Kinderstart DO give it. Others somewhat suspiciously don't (e.g. "Because kids don't come with instructions" gives a bunch of sites that link to Kinderstart but not one to kinderstart).
Also, Google is far from a monopoly in searching. Sure, it's substantially the most popular engine, but MSN and Yahoo especially aren't exactly minor players.
Finally, even if MS *WAS* blocking Oracle, it STILL wouldn't be OK for Oracle to sue until it had evidence of anti-competative behavior. What do you want to bet that Kinderstart doesn't have the equivalent?
Slashdot Mirror
Including the ones who needed to do a study to figure that out.
Okay, this is just a stupid statement.
First, this study actually provided specific reasons why phishing works. Even if you concede the reason is because people are idiots, there's a lot of different ways they can be idiots.
Second, and more generally, if we never tested anything that appeared obvious we would never have figured out that light travels, that neglecting air resistance things of different weights fall at the same speed, and that going really really fast makes you weigh more. The obvious solution is not always right, so testing to make sure the obvious solution IS right can be valuable in itself even if it confirms that hypothesis.
The grandparent's post already deals with the issues you raised. The diagrams, and the photos, are not porn because their primary role is not sexual arousal
My point is that there are some people that would consider many of the things that fall into this category porn.
And the painting I think would be almost universally considered NOT porn.
I think your prinicpal concern with it (as raised by your advertising example) is that you're really after a filter on age-restricted content rather than a filter on porn.
Good point.
Porn is imagery whose primary purpose is sexual arousal.
Really?
So what about imagery that causes sexual arousal but isn't intended to? What about educational things... like diagrams you might find in an anatomy book. If you don't think that is, what about actual photographs, but still meant for medical purposes?
What about abstract paintings, say one that obstenantly is a painting of a flower but is strongly suggestive of sexual organs?
What about commercials that use seductiveness in order to sell products?
The line is a lot harder to draw than you think.
You think wrong. Some quotes from the Wikipedia entry:
In recent years, the use of a byte to mean 8 bits is nearly ubiquitous
Meaning even today it's not universal.
A contiguous sequence of binary bits in a serial data stream, such as in modem or satellite communications, or from a disk-drive head, which is the smallest meaningful unit of data. These bytes might include start bits, stop bits, or parity bits, and thus could vary from 7 to 12 bits to contain a single 7-bit ASCII code.
Here I think is the most revealing definition for the discussion in the present context.
The eight-bit byte is often called an octet in formal contexts such as industry standards, as well as in networking and telecommunication, in order to avoid any confusion about the number of bits involved.
Another site says that:
* Pre-1965, and including the IBM 701, bytes were almost always 6 bits, though they weren't called that much then, but rather characters.
* 9 bits were sometimes used
* The PDP-6, PDP-10, and DECsystem 20 all supported changing the byte size with instructions from 1 to 36 bits (probably only some of those)
The latter reference, looking up the PDP-10 on Wikipedia, gives this quote:
Some aspects of the instruction set are still considered unsurpassed, most notably the "byte" instructions, which operated on arbitrary sized bit-fields (at that time a byte was not necessarily eight bits)
My best guess is that it goes back to when networks were first being built and the size of a byte varied a lot more than today. Everyone agreed as to what a bit was, so it was a consistent measure, instead of some people saying a byte is 8 bits, others 11, others 9, etc.
Then just the inertia of moving to a more sane unit, perhaps combined with the marketing ideas others mentioned.
I don't know if that's the case, but it seems like a reasonable guess. I doubt it's solely marketspeak, because it's used all over the place in networking, not just promo stuff.
as far as I can tell hardly anyone has figured out what the box in the upper right corner is for. It's painful to watch how they'll open a tab and type in the Google URL instead of simply using the search box, even after it's been pointed out to them.
Old habits die hard.
I hardly ever use the search box in Firefox, and just search from the location bar. (In my defense, I set it up so I can type "g " to return the results of a Google search, so that's what I use. It's possible without that I'd use the search box.)
Surely you appreciate the fact that there are less annoying/bloaty/redundant features (did someone say Clippy?) in OO?
Hmm, let's see if I have Clippy installed. Oh look, I don't. I wonder how I did that.
Oh yeah, by doing a custom install of Office and not installing it.
Sure, OO isn't perfect but for something free its bloody good. For the majority of tasks people would use MsOffice for OO is a perfect substitute.
I can probably agree with that. I don't use OOo *too* often because I have run into too many things where I do notice a difference so can't comment fully. However, for power users there are still several things I can name that Word does that OOo either doesn't do at all or does substantially worse, and only one advantage of OOo, which is its price. (You could view it being open source or using odf and stuff like that as a second; I'm not tied to the free software philosophy (especially where it's distinct from open source) so I don't see these as huge advantages.
What processes? I'll kill them and time that.
Anyway, I have OOo's equivalent of whatever you're talking about running at boot (soffice), and even on second load Word STILL loads faster.
A rough time (this is me counting, but I do count pretty consistently)
-Word, 3 seconds
-OOo, first load, with soffice in background, 9 seconds
-OOo, second load, soffice not running, 5 sec
The summary and ESPECIALLY the headline are misleading enough I think that /. should post an edit to it...
I'd appreciate it if you could either deliver some citation that says the majority of the world's population is better at committing information to memory by writing than by typing, or retract your statement.
I don't think that "the majority" is sufficient, because that could leave lots of people who that WOULDN'T be true for. And as long as there are people who would learn better taking notes on a laptop than on paper, the justification for banning laptops should be a lot stiffer.
I want to see a citation that ALMOST ALL college students (we'll restrict the latter parameter; it could be even more specific, like law students) is better at committing information to memory by writing than by typing, or retract your statement.
Here's my argument about this though:
If the teacher is keeping the notes from the students because they think that it will be better for the students, this is a very misguided approach. Sure, some people will pay less attention and learn less, but *that's their choice*. Some people will get the notes and learn less than they would have had they taken notes, but they'll have other classes where they DON'T get notes beforehand and learn that ignoring the notes that are given out is better for them. But some people will get the notes beforehand and discover that not having to scribble everything down frees them up to listen closer to what's going on and make the eye contact that the prof in this particular story says that laptops hurt. Different people learn in different ways.
Giving out the notes beforehand allow the people in the last group to take their approach while not depriving the second group of their approach (since they can ignore the notes). Not giving out notes beforehand give the second group what they want but deprive the third group of their method. (I have no sympathy for group 1.)
I had a computer architecture class in which we had a quiz at the beginning of every class on the material from that day's slides. The point was so that when we were going through the class everyone would have an idea of what were were covering that day, so the prof could expound on stuff not explicitly on the slides and ask questions of the students. (It was also very helpful that we got the notes in advance, though that's a somewhat orthagonal issue.)
I'm curious to hear what people have to say about this method in something like math or computer science rather than law. It seems like a lot more of law can be taught through discussions hypothetical (or not) situations and what arguments you could put forward for various positions (I'm thinking mostly the adversarial parts of law here (so criminal law, torts, and contract disputes), but I can see how the same idea applies to other areas) than the sciences. Like I don't know how I would develop calculus for instance with the socratic method. That may be just because I've never had a course that really operated that way; closest I've come is a couple classes that were mostly lecture-based (complete with PPT slides) but with lots of questions from the prof.
That being said, I think the teacher should be able to teach how she wants.
That's interesting, because I think the students should be able to LEARN how they want. And if that includes taking notes on a laptop, they should be able to take notes on a laptop.
If the noise or image is bothering people that's a different story, or if they interfere with a specific teaching style (such as the socratic method, which could be hindered by laptops), but I don't think the prof should ban laptops just because he or she thinks that the students aren't getting as much out of the course. Maybe the teacher is wrong, and just doesn't understand how the students using laptops are doing as well or better as they would with paper. And even if they're sitting there playing solitare, if they aren't distracting to other students or interferring with the teaching, they should be able to continue. It's their education.
Yes, because what makes better notes than a complete transcript of what the prof said.
Agreed, unless the noise from typing/images of porn were being disruptive to other students, which would be somewhat understandable.
Out of curiosity, what would you think about a tablet PC? I've been planning to get one for taking notes in grad school because I think it carries almost all the benefits of having a computer (which for my usage I think would probably be substantial) without much of the first three drawbacks. I don't type up notes later, so (iv) doesn't really apply anyway, so it seems a tablet would be as good as paper in that respect.
It was not acquired by the voluntary cooperation of the source.
RTFA. It WAS acquired by at least the semi-voluntary cooperation of the source.
The rule wouldn't let the IRS or gov't sell your information, it would only allow 3rd party preparers to. There's nothing that says that you couldn't do your taxes yourself and keep your information private.
Sure, that choice sorta sucks in relation to going to a professional (hence the semi-voluntary), but it's still an option.
It would. But that's not what the sentence says. Read again:
In other words, all features have a chance of not working. Or every feature has a chance of not working.
I'll agree that it's awkward wording, but you're trying to be pedantic to the point of being wrong.
Don't you mean to say that "SOME of the plugins might not be compatible"?
Hey, (s)he could have written "ALL of the plugins might not be compatible" and still been fine even if all plugins worked.
That is not a limitation of any specific technology; rather, it is a limitation of mathematics. You have no more business expecting an extension compiled against 1.0.8 to work with anything except 1.0.8, than you have expecting that a CD will play on a cassette walkman.
Oh really?
Perhaps then you can explain how programs written for *DOS* continue to work under XP without recompilation. Or how modern programs come with one exe, and not different ones for 95, 95osr2, 98, 98se, ME, NT3.5, NT4, 2K, XP, XP SP2, and 2003. Or how most binaries that ran on the IBM S/390 in 1970 or whatever still run on IBM's zServers today.
It is CERTAINLY possible to make an ABI so that plug-ins could be compiled once and work for at least long periods of time. Might not be worth it, but it's certainly possible.
Second, when you download a FF extension, do you see links for EVERY VERSION of Firefox? No! If I go to the Flashblock page, I have to choose between the 1.0 and 1.5 series browsers, but that's it. I don't have to choose between the release for 1.0.7 and 1.0.8. That alone pretty much destroys your theory.
Third is what others have already said about why it works with FF in reality.
You're risking starting a fire so that there's an attractive and colorful pattern on the wall BEHIND the TV???
No, it case of a fire, there will be a VERY insteresting thing to watch. Fire looks cool, no? Just think of it catching fire as winning the lottery then... in that case, it enhances your entertainment experience.
MacOS, sure, but Windows... what are you smoking? What company is "PC"? You can buy a Dell, a Gateway, an IBM, a Compaq, a HP, a Sony, a Tiger Direct, an eMachine, etc. computer and all will work (somewhat) equally well with anything that works on any of the others.
we can't expect publications aimed at the average Joe to provide the kind of detail we'd like on these stories.
No, we DON'T expect them to. And thus they don't publish details like that. If people started writing in complaining about the imprecision in scientific articles, they'd improve them.
Imagine Microsoft says it has the definitive authoritative search engine, and then blocks Oracle from the results. Now when you search for anything related to databases you don't get Oracle, even searches directly related to do with Oracle databases.
Are you OK with that now?
Depends. If the reason Oracle doesn't appear is because of a deliberate attempt by MS to block it, then no. If MS changed their search strategy in even a semi-reasonable manner and just one of many consequences was a lower rank of Oracle, yes.
In your example case, the fact that even searches directly related to do with Oracle don't give it to you is an indication of the former. In this case, some searches with Kinderstart DO give it. Others somewhat suspiciously don't (e.g. "Because kids don't come with instructions" gives a bunch of sites that link to Kinderstart but not one to kinderstart).
Also, Google is far from a monopoly in searching. Sure, it's substantially the most popular engine, but MSN and Yahoo especially aren't exactly minor players.
Finally, even if MS *WAS* blocking Oracle, it STILL wouldn't be OK for Oracle to sue until it had evidence of anti-competative behavior. What do you want to bet that Kinderstart doesn't have the equivalent?
Gambling is a game of luck
Tell that to the people who play in the big poker competitions. See what they have to say about that.