That rather makes the parents point though. The flu virus was something evolved to attack humans already. So when it, evolved to attack humans, met humans without an immune system that had experienced it before and was ready to fight it, proved lethal.
Anything on Mars hasn't been evolving to attack humans, so won't have the advantage of the flu virus. If there isn't any multi-celluar life on Mars, the single cellular stuff probably isn't geared to attacking it at all.
It could by sheer random chance be able to attack us in a way the immune system couldn't cope with, but the odds don't seem to high.
If you don't like it, just stick to the regular search. Nothing about making maps/froogle/gmail/movies/desktop stops the search engine doing one thing well.
Now Google results are getting clogged up with spam, but that is a separate issue. The quality of the main search can go down or up completely independent of other search types they do. Nor would pulling people of other things and putting them on the main search necessarily make things better.
You've lost most of the advantage of consoles though.
They just work. You don't have to install and OS, you don't have to worry about cards and spec because they are all the same. PCs vary way too much.
They aren't PCs. They are a small box (well, maybe not the XBox;) ) that lives under the TV by the DVD player. You don't need keyboards and monitors, you sit in a big comfy chair and just need the controller and TV.
I can't see a gaming OS for a PC winning over console games. PCs are always going to me much more hassle to get working with all the different specs they could have.
Go look at Google maps and Gmail. You can do some really good stuff now with Javascript, particularly as you can make a request back to the server with it and update part of the page without a reload.
Like any web tech it can be abused, but if you are a half decent developer the reason you are putting in JavaScript is to make the app a better experience for the user.
Maybe you want a world of basic pages and lots orf reloads, but most user seem not to.
I live in the UK, and have worked in the US. My parents live in France.
It seems to me European news is much more global than US news. Sure, the US new reports the really big things, but in general it reports a lot less about the rest of the world. There is a big area between the massive things like the tsunami, and trival stuff that never gets coverage.
Now, it may be becuase Americans on average care less about the rest of the world. Or maybe they care less becuase they know less, becuase they are shown less. Hard to know.
We are making loads of progress, at least in sceintific and technological terms. The rate of progress in the last hundred years is probably faster than at any other time in human history, and shows no sign of slowing down.
What is more, I don't see any indications scientists and engineers have forgotten the natural world. We haven't exaclty had walking robots long, and people have certainly been looking to nature, the very fact we are building walking robots is proof.
In short, I think your whole post is pretty much bunk.
Well, one advantage is it can easily navigate places built by humans for bipeds. Robots in factories designed for them is one thing, but would you redesign you house just for a domestic robot?
But doesn't the school already track them? They take attendence, they should know where they are already.
Kids grow up now with the expectation that as they get older they will have more freedoms and privacy. Do you really think having RFID badges while in school will make them think it is OK to be tracked all their lives? Or will it be another freedom they look forward to (at least outside work)
If your kid is going to die, it'll be for a good reason which you can't and probably shouldn't be able to foresee or prevent.
Wow, just, wow. My mum taught at a school where one kid stabbed another. Did he die for "good reason"? It certainly could have been foreseen and prevented (although not by RFID tags for sure).
Does you anecdotal experience trump mine?
Not every kid breaking the rules is some special creative individual who needs space to flower. Kids can be nasty, mean, badly socialised, violent, destructive and self-destructive. Some are just inexperienced. We expect children's parents to control and supervise them to a degree. Schools take on that responsibility, and also have many more kids per adult and have to protect them from each other. One disruptive kid can ruin things for the whole class.
Now you certainly have to balance protection with freedom, too much of either is going to cause problems. If you have hundreds of kids in the same building, too much freedom will be anarchy (and not in a good way). Too much protection will stifle them.
When you make the rules, you have to take into account some kids will push past. That doesn't mean the rules are bad (they could be, but it doesn't follow automatically), the point is that enough kids will follow enough rules that some teaching can happen.
Now it sounds like you school sucked badly, but like some kids are bad, some schools are good, and some kids want to learn. I don't just mean good academically, but good in that most kids want to be there.
Sure, it's never cool to like school, but some people want to learn. Maybe just hoping it will get them a better job, or maybe they just like learning. I used to love science and learning how stuff worked, and though I could, and did, teach myself stuff outside there is one thing about many teachers. They know how to teach, they can impart knowledge at lot more effectively than most other means. Sure some suck, and some seem to hate kids and you wonder why they are there.
Just because you have been through the school system and done well doesn't mean you have become obedient to authority and confirming. University was full of people who were the opposite, and they had all had to do pretty well at school to get there.
It seems to me you had a pretty bad expirence of school, and it's given you a very skewed view on the subject. Although certainly questions should be asked about why it was so bad, and could something have been done differently.
Once everyone is used to this kind of Big Brother handling, its easy enough to extend it into "the real world".
I am so sick of hearing this on Slashdot.
Point one, kids already have "big brother" handling in schools. That's because we accept that there are different rules for them, because they are not competent to look after themselves yet.
Nobody complains about that. Nobody complains about all the limits we put on kids that don't go on adults. Kids grow up expecting to have more freedoms when they are older, so I don't buy for a second the "they will be used to it" argument.
And right now, in the real world, I'm sitting here with an RFID ID badge that lets me in the building and opens the doors. Like being at school, I don't have the same expectations at work as life in general. Companies can monitor you all sorts of ways on their property while you are working for them.
I can't see the old slippery slope argument holding up though. If I really don't like the RFID tags at work I can quit. Parents can take their kids to other schools, or collectively elect a new school board. It is a massive step from that to some government mandated system that applies all the time. It isn't a slipper slope as gaping ravine.
I know in the UK schools get money per pupil, so unpopular schools lose pupils and funds. The downside is schools in small communities end up closing down, despite large protests by the parents.
So now the government a parents are out of line again. You trade one problem for another.
I think it is an immensely weak argument to take this one case and try and use it as a general argument against socialism. The parents can exert a lot of control over the school if they choose. Then again, I hardy equate having a public school system with socialism, the word seems to have a practically different meaning in Europe. Here even the right wing parties are not against public health and schools, as it would be political suicide. What do you know, responding to the will of the people.
If they are too apathetic to do that, then they can't really care that much about it. In that case, the school isn't really so out of step after all.
For the record, I think business and government are both pretty lousy at responding to public demand. Business do seem better at managing public perception of them though.
Same thing goes for standards compliance -- back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM.
Yes they can, because the web is different from many application areas in that you don't know what client the user has (except in an intranet). So if you used bad HTML/CSS to get what you wanted, it's going to look wrong on standard complaint browsers. When IE was the only game in town it didn't matter so much, but with more popularity of things like FireFox this is an issue for developers anyway, even if IE isn't updated.
Not to mention IE6, and other browsers, have a compliant and quirks mode. In the quirks mode it emulates the old quirks the developers used. So they could at least fix the bloody bugs in the supposedly standards compliant mode.
Some legitimate programs may inadvertently use security holes in the browser. Closing them up will break compatibility.
But isn't security their new watchword? They were happy to break computability with apps for XP SP2 they did insecure things.
Using a security hole to do something is like using an undocumented API. You are unlikely to do it without realising, and it is your own fault if something later breaks it.
The Danish government can't just block aquisitions. In the EU you would have to have an investigation, and prove that the resulting company would have too much control over the market.
Also, if you are a public company you have legal obligations to your sahreholders. CEOs rarely own their companies, small businesses aside, trashing it during a hissy fit would almost certainly be illegal.
Of course the main reason it is wrong it is immoral. Firing people as leverage on their goverment, when it doesn't actually help you patent sutff anyway (stuff developed outside the US can be pateneted there). There are lots of things you can do with things you own or control, but becuase you can do it doesn't mean you should.
Then buy a different phone. Honesty, nothing stops you getting a cheap phone which doesn't play MP3. OK even basic phones probably have a couple of games on them or something these days, but you can just not play them.
I have a basic mobile phone, and a separate MP3 player, and I'm happy. Clearly though there is a market for integrated devices as well. Nothing wrong with people having choice.
Why? What harm does it do? I have no problems with a site putting up a techincal barrier to deep links (and you can do it without that info). It is doing nothing and saying to people, you can't link becuase we say so.
As for web standards, you must be kidding. Sure, things are better, and often you can check by object for JavaScript/DHTML which is better anyway. All the pages that didn't would break though, and sometimes browsers have nasty quirks and the best thing to do is try and spot them.
If you put up a sign in a public place and said to people, you don't have a right to read it, how seriously would they take you?
You don't have a right to the contents of someone's website, in the sense they can certainly not put the contents up on the web.
You can also put technical restrictions on how it can be seen. Indeed, if you don't want the general public to see it, you really ought to.
If you don't though, you are really putting it into a public space. Now, you stil own copyright on your site, people don't have a right to take it. But look at it? Sure.
Now, I don't think any country has a law saying people can read stuff in a public space, but rather it would come under those rights you have becuase nobody says you can't.
It isn't so much people don't like it, it just isn't helpful. Scripture doesn't prove anything, because it there isn't any particular reason to assume just because something is written there it is true.
I'm quite interested in the history of the Bible, and the more I find out about it, the less reason I have to believe it could possibly be the word of anything but men. It's a fascinating mix of myth, history, cultural identity and much of its content determined by what at the time was current politics.
And why should I take the the Bible over the writings of any other religion? Why take Christian myths over Islamic, Hindu or ancient Greece?
So no, a fascinating read though it is, I think the Bible just tells as a lot about man. That doesn't rule God out, but makes it rather useless to support arguments about God pretty much anywhere where everyone involved doesn't agree on its content being true.
I don't think experiments like the one in the article will ever show as much about evolution vs ID, as by their nature they need design to start them off.
Isn't that just God in the Gaps again? We can't explain something with science, so we throw out Occam's Razor and assume God (under another name)?
Seems to me the proper scientific response to not knowing who some parts of organisms came about is "that's interesting, let's find out more". Not "well we can't explain it now, it must be God".
I've seen a good demonstration of how stuff though to be irreducibly complex like the eye may well not be. A critter with light sensitive skin, another with the skin in a pit, a pit with a blob of mucus, the blob having a covering and so on.
I wouldn't give up on finding a explanation that doesn't need God just yet.
Many mating rituals are about the prospective mates proving they are stronger, healthier, etc. and the ability to pick a good mate can itself be a genetic trait. Since it provides a survival advantage this becomes a sort of positive feedback loop. A species gets better at selecting better mates, in other words gets better a getting better.
Of course, it can go too far, to the point that the trait used to select a mate develops to the point it becomes a liability.
In general, if a computer simulation doesn't throw up result that match with the real world, I'd look at the simulation first, then the theories. It may well be it is making assumptions or simplification in an area that is actually important.
IE6 is slightly faster than FireFox on some things, but it is pretty close, and loses out on script speed. IE5 is faster, but does less stuff (speed to render CSS is going to be less when you ignore half of it).
In any case, IE isn't close to being "head and shoulders" faster. Opera is actually faster than both on windows. It is faster than Safari on most test on the Mac too.
There are areas where closed source software is better than open source, but the browser sure as hell ain't it. Open source browsers won't be everybody's favourites, but technically they are right up their.
I know this is/. where we all hate the evil Right Wing News/Liberal Media (delete as appropriate) but really. Blogs, in general, are already way more suspect than TV news, the random writings of random people?
Now specific blogs may be generally considered trustworthy becuase of the writers reputation, but that won't change if we see more commercial blogs like this.
Slashdot Mirror
That rather makes the parents point though. The flu virus was something evolved to attack humans already. So when it, evolved to attack humans, met humans without an immune system that had experienced it before and was ready to fight it, proved lethal.
Anything on Mars hasn't been evolving to attack humans, so won't have the advantage of the flu virus. If there isn't any multi-celluar life on Mars, the single cellular stuff probably isn't geared to attacking it at all.
It could by sheer random chance be able to attack us in a way the immune system couldn't cope with, but the odds don't seem to high.
There is lots of things fundamentalists hate, but only a very, very tiny proportion of them actually comit violence.
Can't see this being any different.
If you don't like it, just stick to the regular search. Nothing about making maps/froogle/gmail/movies/desktop stops the search engine doing one thing well.
Now Google results are getting clogged up with spam, but that is a separate issue. The quality of the main search can go down or up completely independent of other search types they do. Nor would pulling people of other things and putting them on the main search necessarily make things better.
You can get high quality whole albums for little cost and very easily. Much easier than on p2p.
Or... er... so I hear.
You've lost most of the advantage of consoles though.
They just work. You don't have to install and OS, you don't have to worry about cards and spec because they are all the same. PCs vary way too much.
They aren't PCs. They are a small box (well, maybe not the XBox ;) ) that lives under the TV by the DVD player. You don't need keyboards and monitors, you sit in a big comfy chair and just need the controller and TV.
I can't see a gaming OS for a PC winning over console games. PCs are always going to me much more hassle to get working with all the different specs they could have.
Go look at Google maps and Gmail. You can do some really good stuff now with Javascript, particularly as you can make a request back to the server with it and update part of the page without a reload.
Like any web tech it can be abused, but if you are a half decent developer the reason you are putting in JavaScript is to make the app a better experience for the user.
Maybe you want a world of basic pages and lots orf reloads, but most user seem not to.
I live in the UK, and have worked in the US. My parents live in France.
It seems to me European news is much more global than US news. Sure, the US new reports the really big things, but in general it reports a lot less about the rest of the world. There is a big area between the massive things like the tsunami, and trival stuff that never gets coverage.
Now, it may be becuase Americans on average care less about the rest of the world. Or maybe they care less becuase they know less, becuase they are shown less. Hard to know.
We are making loads of progress, at least in sceintific and technological terms. The rate of progress in the last hundred years is probably faster than at any other time in human history, and shows no sign of slowing down.
What is more, I don't see any indications scientists and engineers have forgotten the natural world. We haven't exaclty had walking robots long, and people have certainly been looking to nature, the very fact we are building walking robots is proof.
In short, I think your whole post is pretty much bunk.
Well, one advantage is it can easily navigate places built by humans for bipeds. Robots in factories designed for them is one thing, but would you redesign you house just for a domestic robot?
I think you can make microsoft a trusted site, so it will run the stuff there but no elsewhere.
Well, apart from all the exploits that fool IE in to thinking www.scumware.com is a trusted stite to ;)
An API is just a spec though. Doesn't that mean that any implementation of any API that wasn't the first implementation of that API is just a spec?
But doesn't the school already track them? They take attendence, they should know where they are already.
Kids grow up now with the expectation that as they get older they will have more freedoms and privacy. Do you really think having RFID badges while in school will make them think it is OK to be tracked all their lives? Or will it be another freedom they look forward to (at least outside work)
If your kid is going to die, it'll be for a good reason which you can't and probably shouldn't be able to foresee or prevent.
Wow, just, wow. My mum taught at a school where one kid stabbed another. Did he die for "good reason"? It certainly could have been foreseen and prevented (although not by RFID tags for sure).
Does you anecdotal experience trump mine?
Not every kid breaking the rules is some special creative individual who needs space to flower. Kids can be nasty, mean, badly socialised, violent, destructive and self-destructive. Some are just inexperienced. We expect children's parents to control and supervise them to a degree. Schools take on that responsibility, and also have many more kids per adult and have to protect them from each other. One disruptive kid can ruin things for the whole class.
Now you certainly have to balance protection with freedom, too much of either is going to cause problems. If you have hundreds of kids in the same building, too much freedom will be anarchy (and not in a good way). Too much protection will stifle them.
When you make the rules, you have to take into account some kids will push past. That doesn't mean the rules are bad (they could be, but it doesn't follow automatically), the point is that enough kids will follow enough rules that some teaching can happen.
Now it sounds like you school sucked badly, but like some kids are bad, some schools are good, and some kids want to learn. I don't just mean good academically, but good in that most kids want to be there.
Sure, it's never cool to like school, but some people want to learn. Maybe just hoping it will get them a better job, or maybe they just like learning. I used to love science and learning how stuff worked, and though I could, and did, teach myself stuff outside there is one thing about many teachers. They know how to teach, they can impart knowledge at lot more effectively than most other means. Sure some suck, and some seem to hate kids and you wonder why they are there.
Just because you have been through the school system and done well doesn't mean you have become obedient to authority and confirming. University was full of people who were the opposite, and they had all had to do pretty well at school to get there.
It seems to me you had a pretty bad expirence of school, and it's given you a very skewed view on the subject. Although certainly questions should be asked about why it was so bad, and could something have been done differently.
Once everyone is used to this kind of Big Brother handling, its easy enough to extend it into "the real world".
I am so sick of hearing this on Slashdot.
Point one, kids already have "big brother" handling in schools. That's because we accept that there are different rules for them, because they are not competent to look after themselves yet.
Nobody complains about that. Nobody complains about all the limits we put on kids that don't go on adults. Kids grow up expecting to have more freedoms when they are older, so I don't buy for a second the "they will be used to it" argument.
And right now, in the real world, I'm sitting here with an RFID ID badge that lets me in the building and opens the doors. Like being at school, I don't have the same expectations at work as life in general. Companies can monitor you all sorts of ways on their property while you are working for them.
I can't see the old slippery slope argument holding up though. If I really don't like the RFID tags at work I can quit. Parents can take their kids to other schools, or collectively elect a new school board. It is a massive step from that to some government mandated system that applies all the time. It isn't a slipper slope as gaping ravine.
I know in the UK schools get money per pupil, so unpopular schools lose pupils and funds. The downside is schools in small communities end up closing down, despite large protests by the parents.
So now the government a parents are out of line again. You trade one problem for another.
I think it is an immensely weak argument to take this one case and try and use it as a general argument against socialism. The parents can exert a lot of control over the school if they choose. Then again, I hardy equate having a public school system with socialism, the word seems to have a practically different meaning in Europe. Here even the right wing parties are not against public health and schools, as it would be political suicide. What do you know, responding to the will of the people.
If they are too apathetic to do that, then they can't really care that much about it. In that case, the school isn't really so out of step after all.
For the record, I think business and government are both pretty lousy at responding to public demand. Business do seem better at managing public perception of them though.
Same thing goes for standards compliance -- back when HTML4 and CSS were in their infancy, Microsoft chose to support them, but did a crappy job at it. This set the precedent that now since developers had designed sites around these quirks, THEY COULDN'T FIX THEM.
Yes they can, because the web is different from many application areas in that you don't know what client the user has (except in an intranet). So if you used bad HTML/CSS to get what you wanted, it's going to look wrong on standard complaint browsers. When IE was the only game in town it didn't matter so much, but with more popularity of things like FireFox this is an issue for developers anyway, even if IE isn't updated.
Not to mention IE6, and other browsers, have a compliant and quirks mode. In the quirks mode it emulates the old quirks the developers used. So they could at least fix the bloody bugs in the supposedly standards compliant mode.
Some legitimate programs may inadvertently use security holes in the browser. Closing them up will break compatibility.
But isn't security their new watchword? They were happy to break computability with apps for XP SP2 they did insecure things.
Using a security hole to do something is like using an undocumented API. You are unlikely to do it without realising, and it is your own fault if something later breaks it.
The Danish government can't just block aquisitions. In the EU you would have to have an investigation, and prove that the resulting company would have too much control over the market.
Also, if you are a public company you have legal obligations to your sahreholders. CEOs rarely own their companies, small businesses aside, trashing it during a hissy fit would almost certainly be illegal.
Of course the main reason it is wrong it is immoral. Firing people as leverage on their goverment, when it doesn't actually help you patent sutff anyway (stuff developed outside the US can be pateneted there). There are lots of things you can do with things you own or control, but becuase you can do it doesn't mean you should.
Then buy a different phone. Honesty, nothing stops you getting a cheap phone which doesn't play MP3. OK even basic phones probably have a couple of games on them or something these days, but you can just not play them.
I have a basic mobile phone, and a separate MP3 player, and I'm happy. Clearly though there is a market for integrated devices as well. Nothing wrong with people having choice.
Why? What harm does it do? I have no problems with a site putting up a techincal barrier to deep links (and you can do it without that info). It is doing nothing and saying to people, you can't link becuase we say so.
As for web standards, you must be kidding. Sure, things are better, and often you can check by object for JavaScript/DHTML which is better anyway. All the pages that didn't would break though, and sometimes browsers have nasty quirks and the best thing to do is try and spot them.
If you put up a sign in a public place and said to people, you don't have a right to read it, how seriously would they take you?
You don't have a right to the contents of someone's website, in the sense they can certainly not put the contents up on the web.
You can also put technical restrictions on how it can be seen. Indeed, if you don't want the general public to see it, you really ought to.
If you don't though, you are really putting it into a public space. Now, you stil own copyright on your site, people don't have a right to take it. But look at it? Sure.
Now, I don't think any country has a law saying people can read stuff in a public space, but rather it would come under those rights you have becuase nobody says you can't.
It isn't so much people don't like it, it just isn't helpful. Scripture doesn't prove anything, because it there isn't any particular reason to assume just because something is written there it is true.
I'm quite interested in the history of the Bible, and the more I find out about it, the less reason I have to believe it could possibly be the word of anything but men. It's a fascinating mix of myth, history, cultural identity and much of its content determined by what at the time was current politics.
And why should I take the the Bible over the writings of any other religion? Why take Christian myths over Islamic, Hindu or ancient Greece?
So no, a fascinating read though it is, I think the Bible just tells as a lot about man. That doesn't rule God out, but makes it rather useless to support arguments about God pretty much anywhere where everyone involved doesn't agree on its content being true.
I don't think experiments like the one in the article will ever show as much about evolution vs ID, as by their nature they need design to start them off.
Isn't that just God in the Gaps again? We can't explain something with science, so we throw out Occam's Razor and assume God (under another name)?
Seems to me the proper scientific response to not knowing who some parts of organisms came about is "that's interesting, let's find out more". Not "well we can't explain it now, it must be God".
I've seen a good demonstration of how stuff though to be irreducibly complex like the eye may well not be. A critter with light sensitive skin, another with the skin in a pit, a pit with a blob of mucus, the blob having a covering and so on.
I wouldn't give up on finding a explanation that doesn't need God just yet.
Many mating rituals are about the prospective mates proving they are stronger, healthier, etc. and the ability to pick a good mate can itself be a genetic trait. Since it provides a survival advantage this becomes a sort of positive feedback loop. A species gets better at selecting better mates, in other words gets better a getting better.
Of course, it can go too far, to the point that the trait used to select a mate develops to the point it becomes a liability.
In general, if a computer simulation doesn't throw up result that match with the real world, I'd look at the simulation first, then the theories. It may well be it is making assumptions or simplification in an area that is actually important.
You didn't RTFA right?
IE6 is slightly faster than FireFox on some things, but it is pretty close, and loses out on script speed. IE5 is faster, but does less stuff (speed to render CSS is going to be less when you ignore half of it).
In any case, IE isn't close to being "head and shoulders" faster. Opera is actually faster than both on windows. It is faster than Safari on most test on the Mac too.
There are areas where closed source software is better than open source, but the browser sure as hell ain't it. Open source browsers won't be everybody's favourites, but technically they are right up their.
I know this is /. where we all hate the evil Right Wing News/Liberal Media (delete as appropriate) but really. Blogs, in general, are already way more suspect than TV news, the random writings of random people?
Now specific blogs may be generally considered trustworthy becuase of the writers reputation, but that won't change if we see more commercial blogs like this.