I tried checking the site of the stat-accumulating company quoted in the salon article, WebSideStory, and couldn't find what they consider a usage statistic.
I'm a fan of Moz's pop-up disabling abilities, but if this company uses TOTAL requests, then every other browser has an artificially inflated total.
Like when I use IE, I send out requests via pop-ups all the time and each can, in turn, make more requests. With Moz, I don't make any such requests.
With this in mind, to a particular site I can tally '1' visit with Moz and '1+x' visits with IE (x>=0).
That's the easy way to track general browser use, but since Moz doesn't conform to this general rule, hopefully they have adjusted the numbers accordingly. Any idea how it's done?
but do you think someone actively went around correcting the spellings of words? Or do you think the words' spellings changed because people repeatedly spelled them the easy/wrong way?
From the propaganda I was presented in American schooling, I understood it to be that certain individuals after the conclusion of the Rev war decided to make some distinction in the language and further separate the new nation. They were only able to change minor aspects for practical reasons (you can't get an entire population to agree to change their language).
Searched/. for "gecko" and showed me that this is old news (June 2000) found here.
3 of the 5 'related articles' submitted by posters there are old enough to be broken (cnn/msnbc/EurekAlert). The two that work (and expose how old the story REALLY is) are this and this. The dates for these are June 8th 2000 and June 7th 2000.
It looks like nothing has changed since then wrt the research. About the only thing I see different is that Spiderman wasn't in fashion 2 years ago. Seems like hype instead of real news. I guess it's a slow day if every news-organization thinks it's ready for re-print.
The third world is called the third world for good reason. Their governments suck.
AFAIK, the term "Third World" comes from the US-USSR cold war with global influence being one of the main goals of both powers. There were the First and Second Worlds (the order depends on who was talking - each would say that they were First) with groups such as NATO, Warsaw Pact, etc. Members of each World would be fully backed by their corresponding super-power.
Then there were the outside nations that found it profitable to not be aligned either way, making them the Third World. India is an example often cited in high school classrooms.
Once the USSR fell apart there was no real comparison between the two "worlds", but the moniker was already entrenched and already associated with foriegn-aid dependent governments.
On another note, you say: Just look at the godawful mess in Africa. You'd think the continent where man grew from would be able to get it right after a few thousand years.
Last I heard, lots of civilizations used Ancient Egypt as the definition of successful (Egypt is in Africa) wrt monuments, knowledge centers, governmental organization, large populace, longevity, etc. (especially when compared to previous attempts). Basically, things had been working within your "few thousand years" timeframe. It's just lately that things are messed up, in general.
I found the story informative the first time I read it on slashdot. Or was that the second time. Maybe there are more, but I think 2 examples is enough to illustrate my point. Would be nice to have a repeated news item mention previous ones in the editor's comments (nice of michael for doing it in the 1st link above).
Btw, I don't see a problem if the news item was covered by other organizations at an earlier time because there may be some new/.-related angle. However, if/. covered it earlier, they should at least mention it.
Your ignorance is charming assuming that
you're still in elementary or secondary school. If you're older than that, then it's not so charming.
Ignorance is not a bad thing as many assume. Withholding knowledge from those ignorant is far worse than the generally assumed evil associated with being ignorant.
I am interested in the problem posed in this thread, but instead of a simple link to a site that focuses on it, I see arrogance.
By not providing any further insight to the matter, your post could just as easily be the output of a random-flamebait generator. The odd thing about this is that the lack of details seems to be very inconsistent with your typical posts.
Gotta agree, but engineers/scientists sometimes go overboard with their endeavours and fail to see the impact it may have on humanity. Extreme examples are often cited to help illustrate the problem, such as the A-bomb in which the work continued even after the Nazis were defeated (probably none of them were interested in using it on the Japanese considering that many were European).
Honestly, I can see it in me sometimes when I'm really into a project and start exhibiting insomnia or skip meals. You start to lose sight of anything other than the task at hand or the project in general.
....
After some more thought on this, I seem to remember that a lot of those physicist involved in the Manhattan project were very cultural and heavily into "humanities". In that case, it seems that society will still have mad scientist types, whether they've been enlightened to the human existence or not.
Re:OFFTOPIC Re:Why 4 fingers and a thumb?
on
Funky Robotic Hand
·
· Score: 1
First: your post smells of a troll.
Second: yes, the idea came from a book: "Blind Watchmaker", I think is the title. I can't recommend the book since I never read it through.
Third: for me, 6 years a bit long to have just finished something. As mentioned above, I didn't even finish.
Fourth: it seems implied that all posts on/. are made to impress someone to some degree. This place is plagued with trolls and "first" posts.
Fifth: I had seen the question posted more than once (Is the human hand the best model?) in this and figured it needed response and detail, which I was able to provide.
Sixth:
lets go play hide and go fuck your self.
I think it goes, "Dismissal: Why don't you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself". I'd recommend using that one since the person saying it distances themselves. In your example, "lets" implies that you want to fuck myself.
I wonder if they chose this configuration because it was the best (has evolution gotten it exactly right already?) or because it's familiar.
It has to be that they just went with what is familiar. Just because something evolved, or is in the process of evolution, doesn't mean that it's the best.
I greatly appreciate that you're questioning whether the humans anatomy is imperfect. There are a lot of examples of where evolution has helped but, by following the path of evolution, cannot be perfected.
The best example I can think of is the human eye. You think we see pretty well, huh? If you look at the retinal cell layering as seen here you can plainly see that light sensing cells are slightly obscured by the neural cells. Those neurons (labeled ganglion cells in the image) have to eventually lead out of the eyeball, which is the reason we have a blind spot in each eye. We would see images much better if the neural cells were BEHIND the light sensing cells, but this can NEVER occur by simply evolving from what we already possess. It would take a revolution in eye development for that to happen. All mammals have this road block (I'm not sure about the nautilus and other odd creatures with non-lens eyesight). The site linked above also lists other reasons why we don't have full potential of our eyesight (sharper images), but AFAIK those have the potential of being perfected through evolution.
Most people use the 'remember address' feature in all/most email software. On a web-based email service, like Hotmail or Yahoo, that information is stored by them. Those addresses are essentially good ones, as opposed to scanning the inboxes containing potential spam (forged headers).
Why does no one think of this?
For example, if a big email provider does sell account names, they could make even more $$ if they look up the addressbooks of each user. Then they would have access to > 20x the number of accounts that they could sell, most of which would not be their own users.
This raises another problem. The idea of opting-in, is okay ONLY if you submitted the info to the other party AND they inform you of their practices. In the scenario above, just SENDING AN EMAIL to an acccount of this big email provider may (in their warped thinking) be construed as opting-in to their marketting. The filtering that the company can use is their OWN USERS (you) when filtering out the spam and storing (on their servers) the 'friendly' email addresses.
The companies can be doing this and honestly say that they don't read your emails. You're the one opting-in your friend's email addresses through your provider's opt-in (save address) form! If you're really nuts about this, good luck trying to get friends to stop this practice.
Also, there are those that save more than just the names and accounts. They give you the opportunity to store your friend's info. Hotmail asks for the following:
Quickname
First, last names
Email addresses: personal, work, other
Phone #s: personal, business, mobile, pager, fax, other
snail mail: personal, business
birthday
website
The potential is there, and unless you have lazy or paranoid friends, then that personal info about you is stored somewhere, available to the highest bidder. Basically, once companies realize this potential (if they haven't already), no one is safe.
The funny part is that the phone number looks legit. Would be funnier if it WAS that type of lawyer. And what about, "Decided to hop your neighbor's fence for a swim in their pool and drown?" (that one bends the rules of the 'attractive nuisance' laws).
I've found that the most annoying part of the spam I receive is forged headers. By simple inspection, most of them are forged. The way I see it, much of it could be eliminated by adopting a standard which uses semi-signed emails. It doesn't have to be complicated either:
Server 'A' (origin) sends to server 'B' (destination)
'A' keeps record of the signature and the destination.
If the signature/destination entry doesn't get accessed (response) within X minutes, then the sender at 'A' will get the familiar error message.
If 'A' does not have the signature on record, then 'B' dumps the email.
I've seen email services that provide signature-checks (hushmail, for one), but that's overkill for this example. Just some random number that gets put into the header and logged with destination at the origin. Delete the entry after some time since last access or when destination requests verification.
Also, this could be done at certain locations along an email's path, not necessarily at all of them. The verification requests would be a small price to pay wrt to traffic (limited qty of bytes per request/response) when compared to the multiple-k sized spam I tend to get.
Tracking emails would be much easier. Which brings up the disadvantage. The only disadvantage I can see is the inherent lack of anonymity, but most of this audience seems to be less concerned with that property of SMTP. If you're using un-encrypted email (most users) then you're not concerned with Big Bro or anonymity and this idea would most likely be embraced by most users.
I've heard bits and pieces of this idea before, but I haven't seen a complete construction.
>$0.000000000000001 for every keystroke In case anyone was wondering, assuming you leave a book lying on the keyboard and a repeat rate of 20 characters per second, that works out to one cent every 1584.4 years.
It's actually worse than you say. You're off by a factor of 10: 15,854 years %
20keys/sec * 60sec/min * 60min/hr * 24 hrs/day * 365 days/year = 630,720,000 keystrokes/year. 1.0E-15 * 6.3072E8 = 6.3072E-7 $s/year We're looking for %, so use 6.3072E-5 instead. (6.3072E-5)^-1 = 15,854.896 years %.
Of course, that number is just an appox and is a bit off anyway due to the leap years and other adjustments done every so often, but it's still almost 16.0 thousand years, as opposed to 1.6 thousand.
The problem illustrated by the article seems to be two-fold:
-One: The USPTO has to change the way they award patents/tradmarks. Claims such as the ones we've been seeing recently will piss off enough people that legislative action will be inevitable. Spam will have it's day once enough congressmen see an incentive to approach the subject properly (positive reaction) or they get targetted themselves (negative reaction). Either way, the issue gets the attention from decision makers. So you know, I'd honestly prefer the first method. -Two: Less obvious an answer is that the software industry expanded too fast. Companies are pressured to delivery products without much/any testing. The speculative stock values of dot-coms fell apart and agitated investors pressure the companies to do whatever to resurrect their portfolios. It's human nature to want something more when it's taken away. Getting more on topic, the extreme speculation that was seen by all a couple years ago found it's way into the business models of the same companies through questionable patentand trademark moves (I can't think of a copyright example just now wrt computers, but there are tons of suspicious claims in the music industry).
Then there's the issue of people who jump on the bandwagon. I've run into those who use some net jargon and offer to design a site for me or friends. The first question I ask: "What's the HTML/http stand for?" <10% know the answer. Too many people claiming to know anything.
"There is no problem with technology. Technology is neither good nor bad, it is just the application of science." So WRT your subject line, we're really talking about the application of the application of science.
I would like to assert that technology is BOTH good AND bad. I can't think of one technology that is exclusive either way. New technology will need time to expose both extremes.
"There was nothing bad about the Germans inventing the rocket during WW2. The problem was they used the rocket to boost warheads towards London." Point one: the Germans didn't invent the rocket. Ancient asia had the solid fuel rocket, 1926 USA is credited with 1st liquid fuel rocket. Point two: the Germans DID invent the warhead-equiped high-altitude rocket (V2 - see above link) that happened to use liquid fuel pioneered in USA.
The application of the technology is essential to the moral judgement. I can find some examples that initially seem VERY evil but, given a different application of the technology produces something very good. The example you provided with the V2 you labeled as bad. Considering that the same technology (delivery system of a payload via liquid-propelled rocket) allows for space travel and moon/Mars exploration, we can see that the application of the technology is what can be deemed good/bad. Therefore I agree that the technology itself cannot be judged.
A more commonly experienced example is lockpicking tools. They're bad if possessed by a thief, while good when carried by the locksmith when you locked your key inside.
I'll go one more: nuclear weapons. We are all exposed to the negative aspects, which I realize are severe. However, what options will we have if we spot a huge asteroid on collision with Earth in time?
The reason we focus on the technology is because of the idiots and lunatics that may have access to the technology (releasing the "bad" potential of the technology).
Overall, what's interesting to me is that technology is inspired by conflict. Man: versus man (automatic firearms); versus nature (farm tools); versus boredom (synthetic hallucinogens); versus time (time efficiency); etc.
> besides, you're printing everything from the 116th and 118th element to the end of the string. try %c instead.
Correct on the %c, however if I recall correctly, I tried something similar to >>>printf("%s\n",string[116]); <<< in some code I wrote and I was getting Null Pointer related results for the char array (and I was referencing an element that exists prior to a '\0' within the array). It was quite unexpected, so I still remember the incident. I'm pretty sure that a simple example will prove problematic.
By the way, the 116th element would actually be string[115].
TV remotes were originally designed to assist the viewer from having to watch commercials. Why else would someone feel the need to instantly change the channel if there were so few (ABC/CBS/NBC/?) in the 1940's/50's?
Zenith advertised this appeal, as seen on this site, but more specifically in this picture.
It seems logical that if entertainment companies are opposed to the 'skip-commercial' feature offered by any product, then they must be real pissed with the popularity of the TV remote seeing as how the consumer exerts some limited power through the remote.
Only thing that allowed the existence of remotes is that people were buying them and therefore supporting the manufacturers.
Imagine a world without TV remotes. The industry has to deal with it, and are currently trying to stop any more similar products which the consumer can enjoy.
You can even say that since the consumers of TV service already have the ability to skip commercials (specifically by instantly switching channels via remote) and the industry has adapted to this ability, then they should adapt to the technology once again.
To this end, the solution I've heard is to incorporate ads within the programs with product placement. It's done quite regularly in movies and doesn't have to be obvious (ie. "Wayne's World II" where they're sporting Pepsi stuff compared to "Blade Runner" with background Coca-Cola advertisement).
Control of information is a big cause for concern. This pbs.org page goes into one famous example of a media (newspaper) big-shot, William Herst.
The best paragraph is the following:
Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., remembers his father asking Hearst why he preferred concentrating on newspapers, with their limited, regional appeal, rather than spending more energy on motion pictures and their worldwide audience. Fairbanks recalls Hearst's reply: "I thought of it, but I decided against it. Because you can crush a man with journalism, and you can't with motion pictures."
All you need is one person in power with a vendetta, and people who were interested in lower costs will change priorities.
Slashdot Mirror
I tried checking the site of the stat-accumulating company quoted in the salon article, WebSideStory, and couldn't find what they consider a usage statistic.
I'm a fan of Moz's pop-up disabling abilities, but if this company uses TOTAL requests, then every other browser has an artificially inflated total.
Like when I use IE, I send out requests via pop-ups all the time and each can, in turn, make more requests. With Moz, I don't make any such requests.
With this in mind, to a particular site I can tally '1' visit with Moz and '1+x' visits with IE (x>=0).
That's the easy way to track general browser use, but since Moz doesn't conform to this general rule, hopefully they have adjusted the numbers accordingly. Any idea how it's done?
but do you think someone actively went around correcting the spellings of words? Or do you think the words' spellings changed because people repeatedly spelled them the easy/wrong way?
From the propaganda I was presented in American schooling, I understood it to be that certain individuals after the conclusion of the Rev war decided to make some distinction in the language and further separate the new nation. They were only able to change minor aspects for practical reasons (you can't get an entire population to agree to change their language).
I first noticed this on cnn's frontpage.
/. for "gecko" and showed me that this is old news (June 2000) found here.
Searched
3 of the 5 'related articles' submitted by posters there are old enough to be broken (cnn/msnbc/EurekAlert). The two that work (and expose how old the story REALLY is) are this and this. The dates for these are June 8th 2000 and June 7th 2000.
It looks like nothing has changed since then wrt the research. About the only thing I see different is that Spiderman wasn't in fashion 2 years ago. Seems like hype instead of real news. I guess it's a slow day if every news-organization thinks it's ready for re-print.
The third world is called the third world for good reason. Their governments suck.
AFAIK, the term "Third World" comes from the US-USSR cold war with global influence being one of the main goals of both powers. There were the First and Second Worlds (the order depends on who was talking - each would say that they were First) with groups such as NATO, Warsaw Pact, etc. Members of each World would be fully backed by their corresponding super-power.
Then there were the outside nations that found it profitable to not be aligned either way, making them the Third World. India is an example often cited in high school classrooms.
Once the USSR fell apart there was no real comparison between the two "worlds", but the moniker was already entrenched and already associated with foriegn-aid dependent governments.
On another note, you say: Just look at the godawful mess in Africa. You'd think the continent where man grew from would be able to get it right after a few thousand years.
Last I heard, lots of civilizations used Ancient Egypt as the definition of successful (Egypt is in Africa) wrt monuments, knowledge centers, governmental organization, large populace, longevity, etc. (especially when compared to previous attempts). Basically, things had been working within your "few thousand years" timeframe. It's just lately that things are messed up, in general.
I found the story informative the first time I read it on slashdot. Or was that the second time. Maybe there are more, but I think 2 examples is enough to illustrate my point. Would be nice to have a repeated news item mention previous ones in the editor's comments (nice of michael for doing it in the 1st link above).
/.-related angle. However, if /. covered it earlier, they should at least mention it.
Btw, I don't see a problem if the news item was covered by other organizations at an earlier time because there may be some new
THANK YOU!
Almost every post here is about the Spam angle and not the original angle: the author "is founder and president of a political e-marketing firm" .
Very few seem to apply any scrutiny anymore. I missed it.
Well done!
the other clauses are there as a buffer so that no one bothers to read all the way down to #7.
And, of course, no one bothers to note that there is no #5 either. But I'm being too picky...
..., i could recycle it. But what in the hell am i supposed to do with this trash folder?
/dev/null and the bits will be ready for reuse by more spammers. Sometimes it seems almost like you can never win.
Easy, put it in
Oh, I get it. You mean the folder itself. That's funnier than I originally thought (the entire folder - with the trash).
Your ignorance is charming assuming that you're still in elementary or secondary school. If you're older than that, then it's not so charming.
Ignorance is not a bad thing as many assume. Withholding knowledge from those ignorant is far worse than the generally assumed evil associated with being ignorant.
I am interested in the problem posed in this thread, but instead of a simple link to a site that focuses on it, I see arrogance.
By not providing any further insight to the matter, your post could just as easily be the output of a random-flamebait generator. The odd thing about this is that the lack of details seems to be very inconsistent with your typical posts.
Gotta agree, but engineers/scientists sometimes go overboard with their endeavours and fail to see the impact it may have on humanity. Extreme examples are often cited to help illustrate the problem, such as the A-bomb in which the work continued even after the Nazis were defeated (probably none of them were interested in using it on the Japanese considering that many were European).
....
Honestly, I can see it in me sometimes when I'm really into a project and start exhibiting insomnia or skip meals. You start to lose sight of anything other than the task at hand or the project in general.
After some more thought on this, I seem to remember that a lot of those physicist involved in the Manhattan project were very cultural and heavily into "humanities". In that case, it seems that society will still have mad scientist types, whether they've been enlightened to the human existence or not.
First: your post smells of a troll.
/. are made to impress someone to some degree. This place is plagued with trolls and "first" posts.
Second: yes, the idea came from a book: "Blind Watchmaker", I think is the title. I can't recommend the book since I never read it through.
Third: for me, 6 years a bit long to have just finished something. As mentioned above, I didn't even finish.
Fourth: it seems implied that all posts on
Fifth: I had seen the question posted more than once (Is the human hand the best model?) in this and figured it needed response and detail, which I was able to provide.
Sixth:
lets go play hide and go fuck your self.
I think it goes, "Dismissal: Why don't you go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself". I'd recommend using that one since the person saying it distances themselves. In your example, "lets" implies that you want to fuck myself.
I wonder if they chose this configuration because it was the best (has evolution gotten it exactly right already?) or because it's familiar.
It has to be that they just went with what is familiar. Just because something evolved, or is in the process of evolution, doesn't mean that it's the best.
I greatly appreciate that you're questioning whether the humans anatomy is imperfect. There are a lot of examples of where evolution has helped but, by following the path of evolution, cannot be perfected.
The best example I can think of is the human eye. You think we see pretty well, huh? If you look at the retinal cell layering as seen here you can plainly see that light sensing cells are slightly obscured by the neural cells. Those neurons (labeled ganglion cells in the image) have to eventually lead out of the eyeball, which is the reason we have a blind spot in each eye. We would see images much better if the neural cells were BEHIND the light sensing cells, but this can NEVER occur by simply evolving from what we already possess. It would take a revolution in eye development for that to happen. All mammals have this road block (I'm not sure about the nautilus and other odd creatures with non-lens eyesight). The site linked above also lists other reasons why we don't have full potential of our eyesight (sharper images), but AFAIK those have the potential of being perfected through evolution.
Why does no one think of this?
For example, if a big email provider does sell account names, they could make even more $$ if they look up the addressbooks of each user. Then they would have access to > 20x the number of accounts that they could sell, most of which would not be their own users.
This raises another problem. The idea of opting-in, is okay ONLY if you submitted the info to the other party AND they inform you of their practices. In the scenario above, just SENDING AN EMAIL to an acccount of this big email provider may (in their warped thinking) be construed as opting-in to their marketting. The filtering that the company can use is their OWN USERS (you) when filtering out the spam and storing (on their servers) the 'friendly' email addresses.
The companies can be doing this and honestly say that they don't read your emails. You're the one opting-in your friend's email addresses through your provider's opt-in (save address) form! If you're really nuts about this, good luck trying to get friends to stop this practice.
Also, there are those that save more than just the names and accounts. They give you the opportunity to store your friend's info. Hotmail asks for the following:
- Quickname
- First, last names
- Email addresses: personal, work, other
- Phone #s: personal, business, mobile, pager, fax, other
- snail mail: personal, business
- birthday
- website
The potential is there, and unless you have lazy or paranoid friends, then that personal info about you is stored somewhere, available to the highest bidder. Basically, once companies realize this potential (if they haven't already), no one is safe.I've found that the most annoying part of the spam I receive is forged headers. By simple inspection, most of them are forged. The way I see it, much of it could be eliminated by adopting a standard which uses semi-signed emails.
It doesn't have to be complicated either:
- Server 'A' (origin) sends to server 'B' (destination)
- 'A' keeps record of the signature and the destination.
- If the signature/destination entry doesn't get accessed (response) within X minutes, then the sender at 'A' will get the familiar error message.
- If 'A' does not have the signature on record, then 'B' dumps the email.
I've seen email services that provide signature-checks (hushmail, for one), but that's overkill for this example. Just some random number that gets put into the header and logged with destination at the origin. Delete the entry after some time since last access or when destination requests verification.Also, this could be done at certain locations along an email's path, not necessarily at all of them. The verification requests would be a small price to pay wrt to traffic (limited qty of bytes per request/response) when compared to the multiple-k sized spam I tend to get.
Tracking emails would be much easier. Which brings up the disadvantage. The only disadvantage I can see is the inherent lack of anonymity, but most of this audience seems to be less concerned with that property of SMTP. If you're using un-encrypted email (most users) then you're not concerned with Big Bro or anonymity and this idea would most likely be embraced by most users.
I've heard bits and pieces of this idea before, but I haven't seen a complete construction.
>$0.000000000000001 for every keystroke
In case anyone was wondering, assuming you leave a book lying on the keyboard and a repeat rate of 20 characters per second, that works out to one cent every 1584.4 years.
It's actually worse than you say. You're off by a factor of 10: 15,854 years %
20keys/sec * 60sec/min * 60min/hr * 24 hrs/day * 365 days/year = 630,720,000 keystrokes/year.
1.0E-15 * 6.3072E8 = 6.3072E-7 $s/year
We're looking for %, so use 6.3072E-5 instead.
(6.3072E-5)^-1 = 15,854.896 years %.
Of course, that number is just an appox and is a bit off anyway due to the leap years and other adjustments done every so often, but it's still almost 16.0 thousand years, as opposed to 1.6 thousand.
The problem illustrated by the article seems to be two-fold:
-One: The USPTO has to change the way they award patents/tradmarks. Claims such as the ones we've been seeing recently will piss off enough people that legislative action will be inevitable. Spam will have it's day once enough congressmen see an incentive to approach the subject properly (positive reaction) or they get targetted themselves (negative reaction). Either way, the issue gets the attention from decision makers. So you know, I'd honestly prefer the first method.
-Two: Less obvious an answer is that the software industry expanded too fast. Companies are pressured to delivery products without much/any testing. The speculative stock values of dot-coms fell apart and agitated investors pressure the companies to do whatever to resurrect their portfolios. It's human nature to want something more when it's taken away. Getting more on topic, the extreme speculation that was seen by all a couple years ago found it's way into the business models of the same companies through questionable patentand trademark moves (I can't think of a copyright example just now wrt computers, but there are tons of suspicious claims in the music industry).
Then there's the issue of people who jump on the bandwagon. I've run into those who use some net jargon and offer to design a site for me or friends. The first question I ask: "What's the HTML/http stand for?" <10% know the answer. Too many people claiming to know anything.
"There is no problem with technology. Technology is neither good nor bad, it is just the application of science."
So WRT your subject line, we're really talking about the application of the application of science.
I would like to assert that technology is BOTH good AND bad. I can't think of one technology that is exclusive either way. New technology will need time to expose both extremes.
"There was nothing bad about the Germans inventing the rocket during WW2. The problem was they used the rocket to boost warheads towards London."
Point one: the Germans didn't invent the rocket. Ancient asia had the solid fuel rocket, 1926 USA is credited with 1st liquid fuel rocket.
Point two: the Germans DID invent the warhead-equiped high-altitude rocket (V2 - see above link) that happened to use liquid fuel pioneered in USA.
The application of the technology is essential to the moral judgement. I can find some examples that initially seem VERY evil but, given a different application of the technology produces something very good. The example you provided with the V2 you labeled as bad. Considering that the same technology (delivery system of a payload via liquid-propelled rocket) allows for space travel and moon/Mars exploration, we can see that the application of the technology is what can be deemed good/bad. Therefore I agree that the technology itself cannot be judged.
A more commonly experienced example is lockpicking tools. They're bad if possessed by a thief, while good when carried by the locksmith when you locked your key inside.
I'll go one more: nuclear weapons. We are all exposed to the negative aspects, which I realize are severe. However, what options will we have if we spot a huge asteroid on collision with Earth in time?
The reason we focus on the technology is because of the idiots and lunatics that may have access to the technology (releasing the "bad" potential of the technology).
Overall, what's interesting to me is that technology is inspired by conflict. Man: versus man (automatic firearms); versus nature (farm tools); versus boredom (synthetic hallucinogens); versus time (time efficiency); etc.
> besides, you're printing everything from the 116th and 118th element to the end of the string. try %c instead.
Correct on the %c, however if I recall correctly, I tried something similar to
>>>printf("%s\n",string[116]); <<<
in some code I wrote and I was getting Null Pointer related results for the char array (and I was referencing an element that exists prior to a '\0' within the array). It was quite unexpected, so I still remember the incident. I'm pretty sure that a simple example will prove problematic.
By the way, the 116th element would actually be string[115].
Amusing, eh? The irony of it all.
TV remotes were originally designed to assist the viewer from having to watch commercials. Why else would someone feel the need to instantly change the channel if there were so few (ABC/CBS/NBC/?) in the 1940's/50's?
Zenith advertised this appeal, as seen on this site, but more specifically in this picture.
It seems logical that if entertainment companies are opposed to the 'skip-commercial' feature offered by any product, then they must be real pissed with the popularity of the TV remote seeing as how the consumer exerts some limited power through the remote.
Only thing that allowed the existence of remotes is that people were buying them and therefore supporting the manufacturers.
Imagine a world without TV remotes. The industry has to deal with it, and are currently trying to stop any more similar products which the consumer can enjoy.
You can even say that since the consumers of TV service already have the ability to skip commercials (specifically by instantly switching channels via remote) and the industry has adapted to this ability, then they should adapt to the technology once again.
To this end, the solution I've heard is to incorporate ads within the programs with product placement. It's done quite regularly in movies and doesn't have to be obvious (ie. "Wayne's World II" where they're sporting Pepsi stuff compared to "Blade Runner" with background Coca-Cola advertisement).
Control of information is a big cause for concern. This pbs.org page goes into one famous example of a media (newspaper) big-shot, William Herst. The best paragraph is the following: Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., remembers his father asking Hearst why he preferred concentrating on newspapers, with their limited, regional appeal, rather than spending more energy on motion pictures and their worldwide audience. Fairbanks recalls Hearst's reply: "I thought of it, but I decided against it. Because you can crush a man with journalism, and you can't with motion pictures." All you need is one person in power with a vendetta, and people who were interested in lower costs will change priorities.