I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.
I'm still using MS Office 97 (sans Access) for most of my work. I still have a valid license for it, it does everything I need, and I'm still occasionally discovering some feature I've never looked into before (and every once in a while I find one of those "new" features is worth mastering). All in all, MS Office 97 is a top of the line product, quite rich in features, and much less burdened with crapchrome than more recent office suites.
When OpenOffice matured, I gained an excellent tool for converting newer MS Office formats to the MS Office 97 formats. That has removed the only serious problem I was encountering with MS Office 97. It also gives me an easier migration path to Linux, if and when the time comes to do that. I began using OpenOffice to backport new MS Office formats about 3 years ago.
BTW, I had MS Office 2000 and I've currently got MS Office 2003 available at work and I'm no stranger to them. In fact, I've got a minor reputation for being an Office guru-- I'm occasionally consulted about problems in Excel, Word, or complex document development. More often than not, showing the user how to avoid one of the gee-whizz features in the newer office suite finesses the problem, makes for a happy user, and enhances my guru reputation.
So I'm a very happy MS Office 97 user. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc, etc.
Mars always had dual rulership of Aries and Scorpio, just as Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, Venus rules Taurus and Libra, Jupiter rules Sagittarius and Pisces, and Saturn rules Capricorn and Aquarius.
Here's how the rulerships lay out from solstice to solstice:
Moo -- Can | Leo -- Sun
Mer -- Gem | Vir -- Mer
Ven -- Tau | Lib -- Ven
Mar -- Ari | Sco -- Mar
Jup -- Pis | Sag -- Jup
Sat -- Aqu | Cap -- Sat
The other astrological planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas Athena, Chiron, etc) are sometimes useful adjuncts for the modern astrologer, but good insight can be found when working with just these seven "visible" planets (Sun and Moon have always been planets in astrology).
Re:Blog First, Then Scientific Journals.
on
Dark Matter Exists
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Funny, I always figured the announcement of experimental confirmation of dark matter would first be published in a scientific journal
they tried it on a number of the lab personnel and it didn't give any of them withdrawal symptoms.
These early drug studies were limited by a very poor understanding of the nature of addictive behavior. Almost certainly the lab personnel did exhibit the signs and symptoms of physical withdrawal from the opiate, but these weren't recognized as such. Opiate withdrawal symptoms make one feel grumpier and more irritable, and have some signs like a mild flu, and that's it. Of itself, the physical withdrawal from opiates is usually not sufficiently nasty to cause drug-seeking behavior (addiction).
The more severe problem with the opiates is the psychological dependency that can arise in many people. So far as I know, the mechanisms of this aren't well understood as yet. But it does seem that people who are happy at home and facing satisfying challenges in their work are not as susceptible to drug-induced euphoria as, say, someone with limited education and a bleak future.
I think it would be more accurate to say that heroin was prescribed for patients with intractable pain that could not be relieved by morphine.
You are perpetrating a lie.
One of the arguments given for the use of heroin was because it could cure "morphinism" and it provided a way of treating severe pain without risk of "morphinism".
Ditto meperadine (Demerol) and hydromorphone (Dilaudid). Sometimes it seems that the only difference between the tremendously profitable illegal drug trade and the tremendously profitable legal drug trade in the USA is that the first one is less dishonest in its sales pitches.
Perhaps you have done this already: check with your CEO and grant writers about asking Numera to donate a license and service agreement to Track-It as a charitable contribution.
I withdraw that argument. The barycenter will approach the Earth's surface at a much slower rate than what I had thought in my pre-caffeine, early morning state: the current rate is around 0.02 inches per year. If that remains fairly constant, it will take more than 3 billion years for the barycenter to reach the Earth's surface.
But that isn't the only argument for regarding the Earth - Moon to be a binary planet, and it was actually one of the weaker ones. It seemed at the time to be the simplest to present within the limitations of a Slashdot comment.
A more telling argument is that the Moon's influence on the Earth's orbit about its primary is observable and significant. An even more telling argument is that many Earth processes cannot be understood without factoring in the tidal influences of the Moon.
It will happen in a few million years, not billion. Google the math:
distance of barycenter from center of Earth: 2,900 miles
radius of Earth: 3,960 miles
distance of barycenter from Earth's surface: 1,060 miles
same, expressed in inches: 67,161,600 inches
speed of lunar creep away from Earth: 1.6 inches / year
Time until the barycenter is on the surface: 41,976,000 years.
That is pretty dang short in the context of astronomy. Or even in the context of geology.
I think it would be truly short-sighted (I use that word deliberately) for astronomers to decide that the Earth and Moon are not a binary planet today but will become one next week (in astronomical time).
The Earth and Moon are a binary planet, have been so for a long time, and will continue to be for quite a while. It would be good if astronomers gave up their traditional notions about this and publicly recognized the truth, because only until then will the geologists and evolutionary biologists begin to take the Moon's influence into account in their own areas.
It is very likely that no human has ever thrown any artifact farther than the Voyagers. But are these also the fastest artifacts humans have ever produced? 1 million miles per day is about 11.6 miles per second, so I'm thinking these are the fastest things ever built on Earth?
But the barycenter isn't located outside the Earth though?
That depends on what you mean by "outside". If the barycenter was located in the atmospheric envelope, would that be far enough "outside"?
Currently the Earth - Moon barycenter is located far outside of the Earth's core, in the upper mantle. When the Full Moon is directly over your head, the barycenter is located about 1/3 of the distance between your feet and the center of the Earth. But that is only for a brief moment: relative to your feet, the barycenter is whizzing by underneath you at about 1,000 mph. I bet there's a little tectonic stress associated with that.
And what if the barycenter is located "outside" at some future time, even though it isn't there now? The Moon is slowly spinning away from the Earth, so at some future point the barycenter will be "outside" the Earth no matter how "outside" is defined. Does it make sense to say that the Earth - Moon pair are going to become a double planet then, but are something else now?
Also by the definition since Charon would be a planet... wouldn't the moon need to be its own planet?
The Moon should be considered a planet: Earth - Moon functions as a double planet (barycenter far removed from the center of mass of either one; orbits of either one around the Sun are significantly distorted by the other; impossible to understand the features and history of either without taking into account the tidal influence caused by the other).
And the 9580723409875 moons of Staurn/Jupiter etc?
None of the above logic applies to these other cases. These satellites have no significant effect on their primaries.
I'm pretty sure that once it is generally recognized that the Earth - Moon is a double planet, we'll see some insights into plate tectonics and biological history that are currently out of scope.
I don't object to copyright law in its original sense.
I do object to the legalized abuse of copyright law that was implemented by the US Congress over the last century, under intensive lobbying by recording businesses, the Disney Studios, and other corporations, and culminating in the DMCA and the current mess. Copyright law no longer serves its original purpose of encouraging artists to be creative; it has devolved into a tool for assuring a steady revenue flow for certain corporations, many of whom have never produced any tangible goods.
The unlicensed copying that is going on these days is symptomatic of this congressional failure to protect the intent of the original copyright law. The law has gone bad; it needs to be fixed by Congress or by the courts. It no longer serves its intended purpose and in fact it gets in the way of the creative and evolutionary growth of today's societies and cultures as they attempt to capitalize on the maturing internet and related technologies. We are seeing one segment of industry attempting to maximize its wealth through methods that limit the greater potential wealth of the entire society that is its host. This is corporate parasytism.
One way of fixing the whole mess would be a simple change in copyright law: make it that copyright can only be established by the flesh and blood artist(s) who create the artwork, and that the copyright can then be transferred only to other flesh and blood individuals. Prohibit any corporation or institution from owning any copyright.
We have other laws that work this way. For instance, even though a corporation is a legal individual, a corporation cannot get a driver's license; it has to hire drivers. A corporation cannot become a Certified Nursing Assistant; hospitals have to hire CNAs. A corporation cannot earn a Ph.D., or an M.D., or pass the bar and practice law. So there is already a strong basis in law for recognizing that some activities are uniquely human. So why not agitate to have the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of human creativity be limited in the same way to only flesh and blood human beings?
However, you state that the sample size for the men of "700 is quite small (too small for accuracy)". Please cite your authority on this. Without knowing the specifics of the survey design, it is not possible for me to determine, with the techniques I know, whether the minimum sample size should be 70, 700, or 7,000.
If I wanted to attack the assertions made in TFA, I would point out that TFA does not describe the survey techniques in sufficient detail, so it is impossible to determine what population(s) were actually being sampled. If those details were provided, then I would attack the methods of inference that were used to generalize the results from the sampled subset to the population as a whole. It is almost always possible to mount an effective attack on that basis.
While I would certainly look at sample size, I doubt that I would ever mention it in my attack. If I could actually demonstrate that a given sample size was too low for the purpose of the survey, I would definitely be able to demonstrate other fatal problems with the survey design that would be much easier to argue in a convincing way.
If ad-sense is its major source of money, and it keeps the underlying numbers pretty well buried, could we be looking at another Enron?
To my knowledge, Enron never produced anything of marketable value. It was essentially a mercantile operation that got increasingly further away from trading in actual goods to trading in promises of future deliveries. That has always been a bubbly area.
OTOH, Google's underlying success is based on a kind of entrepreneural manufacture: they were the first to develop a comercially successful automated page-ranked search engine, and they have demonstrated an ability to keep churning out significant firsts of commercial value, like the Web 2.0 technology behind Google Maps and Google Earth, etc. Their business model is very similar to Microsoft of 10 years ago, or Borland, Word Perfect, or Lotus of 20 years ago. It has strong parallels with the early Ford Motor Company, the early McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, Fulton's steamboat company, etc.
There are good reasons not to buy Google stock as a long term investment right now, but to my mind these reasons have to do with its current high visibility and the likelihood that its stock is temporarily inflated by speculators. It looks like a company that has strong fundamentals and very strong growth potential, so once the current hoo-hoo-harrah settles down, it will probably be as sound an investment as IBM, Ford Motor Company, or International Harvester.
Remember, this is free investment "advice" from Slashdot, and it is worth every penny you've paid for it!
As far as the archaeological record is concerned, thrown weapons came a long time after the first stone tools
That is an interesting statement.
Have you really studied the archeological record, or even the records of archeologists, and come to your conclusion? Or is it that you are attempting to stonewall a discussion that for some reason bothers your sensibilities?
Yeah, we all carry that image of Thog lifting that first great club high in the air as he daringly runs at his opponent to give him a good thumping. An image of Thog well out of reach while he tries to bean the other guy with a barrage of stones just doesn't make as good a movie scene, does it? Especially when you consider the other stuff Thog was likely to be throwing.
[Note to new moderators: Label this one "flamebait" and the GP I also wrote as "troll" and you might not be far off the mark.]
Of course I'm just making it up as I go along. Who am I to violate the theme initiated by TFA??
As to the relationship of problem solving to brain size, I strongly disagree with your assertion of a need for a bigger, heavier brain for problem solving, at least in the narrow fields of eye-limb coordination and trajectory analysis that we are talking about. Watch a flock of martins doing their dive and swoop feeding dance on a buggy summer evening, and tell me that their collision avoidance and bug interception trajectory solving software requires brains that are orders of magnitude heavier than their bodies. Once again it isn't the size of your organ but how you use it that will give you the procreative edge... (Get your mind out of the gutter-- I'm talking brain, not that other important organ.)
As to the relative advantage of learning to shake fruit from a tree, you seem to be forgetting that it doesn't matter how many calories per fruit, or how much competition there might be from non-human fruit theives. All that matters is whether the fruit-shaker gains some procreative advantage over others in his group who either don't figure out how to shake the branches or who sit around criticising the intelligence of the branch-shaker. The guy who realizes that shaking fruit down upon the gal(s) of his choice could get him where he wants to go, and the gal who realizes that shaking fruit down upon her kids could keep them happily out of her hair, are both raising the evolutionary bar.
[Note to new moderators: label this one, and the GP I also wrote, as "Troll".]
Yeah, I read the article too. I thought the argument was weak, but perhaps there is more that wasn't disclosed in this lay article.
My own thoughts about binoccular vision, grasping, and eye-hand coordination are along these lines:
Shaking a branch yields fruit that otherwise is unobtainable and the behavior has a definite evolutionary edge. There's need for some visual problem solving development to do this: shaking which branch that I can see will yield that bunch of fruit that I can't see when I've actually got hold of the branch isn't perhaps an obvious thing to an early primate species. I suspect most current primates make use of the concept though.
Using a stick to shake branches that are otherwise unreachable seems like an Albert moment. Those evolved ones who could recognize the possibilities and repeat the action would leave their unevolved cousins in the evolutionary dust.
Throwing a stick at branches that were otherwise beyond reach would seem to follow naturally.
Generalizing from that to throwing sticks at critters who are trying to steal the fruit so carefully knocked fromt the tree, and generalizing further to throwing rocks at said critters, seems like another Albert moment. Cue Monolith and symphonic surge. Animal protein... yum!
Now the early primate has evolved into a very unique species-- the only one I'm aware of who has developed the art of throwing things at targets as a weapon. Clubs are good of course (cue Monolith to appear briefly in distant background) but the real edge is having the eye-hand coordination to hurl a beanball at a tasty looking ungulate (and defend his kill by thumping competitive scavengers a good one from a relatively safe distance).
Now we're talking about a protohuman who is distinct from every other species we know of because he uses a certain kind of abstract thinking such that he is constantly using whatever comes to hand in all kinds of useful ways, often far removed from any direct cause-effect logic. Multiple Albert moments. Levers. Pulleys. Paddlewheel steamboats.
The rest follows. For a rock-throwing species, dealing with the trajectories of rocket science are manifest destiny.
I'm not sure where the snakes come in. Maybe snakes were considered evil because they are so blinking hard to hit with a rock. OTOH, this evolutionary scenario captures even the concept of diplomacy that our species regards so highly: who was it that said "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' while looking for a rock?"
Clinton was impeached because a powerful clique within the Washington beltway thought that he just had to be culpable for something illegal, somewhere along the line. After spending a couple of years and more than $50 million on an incredible investigation, the Monica Lewinski episode was all they could come up with.
Lying about the blow job wasn't the cause of Clinton's impeachment. It was simply the only excuse for impeachment that the Lord High Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr could find.
How can an article whose content says the earlier article was bogus be a dupe of the earlier article?
How can the initial announcement of a freely available tool be a dupe of the announcement of something that is not for public release?
Conclusion: there are a lot idjits on slashdot who have learned to waggle their fingers on the keyboard and therefore think they are clever. Oh so clever.
Slashdot has become the proving ground for kids who wanna grow up to be one of the million monkeys...
Microsoft's marketing department has even less incentive than usual to repair this PowerPoint bug, or for that matter, other bugs in MS Office. Not with sales of the new version of Office just over the horizon. Since Marketing has always been the dominant department of Microsoft, I expect that the compahy will exhibit even more footdragging than usual in getting these bugs fixed.
But OpenOffice.org is not driven by the same motivations. It appears that pride of workmanship, rather than sales revenue, is the dominant driver of OOo.
How well does Impress run existing PowerPoint presentations?
Well, this kind of new defensive weapon is always rolled out in several phases.
First phase is characterized by an upsurge in Northrup's market cap. That's just begun. All Aboard!
Second phase is characterized by initial installations and mild cost overruns (not to exceed 250% of estimated costs). Given the current Administration in Washington, that is almost certainly going to start before Nov 2008.
The next phase will see something "unexpected" happen, that will have the nickname "laser chaff" (possibly other nicknames, depending on how the decoys are actually implemented by the nasty, clever blackhats). Somebody's gonna die.
Then Northrup's market cap will drop again.
The trick to mastering this new technology is appropriate monitoring of potential terrorists' phone calls and email so you can know when to tell your cronies that it is time to trim their portfolios of Northrup stock.
The whole thing does point out the critical need for improving and expanding Homeland Security's capabilities for monitoring email, phone conversations, and the like. When it comes to protecting stock market portfolios of the rich and famous, we can't be too careful.
Slashdot Mirror
I guarentee that Office 2007 will come with twice the amount of that garbage in it.
I'm still using MS Office 97 (sans Access) for most of my work. I still have a valid license for it, it does everything I need, and I'm still occasionally discovering some feature I've never looked into before (and every once in a while I find one of those "new" features is worth mastering). All in all, MS Office 97 is a top of the line product, quite rich in features, and much less burdened with crapchrome than more recent office suites.
When OpenOffice matured, I gained an excellent tool for converting newer MS Office formats to the MS Office 97 formats. That has removed the only serious problem I was encountering with MS Office 97. It also gives me an easier migration path to Linux, if and when the time comes to do that. I began using OpenOffice to backport new MS Office formats about 3 years ago.
BTW, I had MS Office 2000 and I've currently got MS Office 2003 available at work and I'm no stranger to them. In fact, I've got a minor reputation for being an Office guru-- I'm occasionally consulted about problems in Excel, Word, or complex document development. More often than not, showing the user how to avoid one of the gee-whizz features in the newer office suite finesses the problem, makes for a happy user, and enhances my guru reputation.
So I'm a very happy MS Office 97 user. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, etc, etc.
Mars always had dual rulership of Aries and Scorpio, just as Mercury rules Gemini and Virgo, Venus rules Taurus and Libra, Jupiter rules Sagittarius and Pisces, and Saturn rules Capricorn and Aquarius.
Here's how the rulerships lay out from solstice to solstice:
Mer -- Gem | Vir -- Mer
Ven -- Tau | Lib -- Ven
Mar -- Ari | Sco -- Mar
Jup -- Pis | Sag -- Jup
Sat -- Aqu | Cap -- Sat
The other astrological planets (Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas Athena, Chiron, etc) are sometimes useful adjuncts for the modern astrologer, but good insight can be found when working with just these seven "visible" planets (Sun and Moon have always been planets in astrology).
Funny, I always figured the announcement of experimental confirmation of dark matter would first be published in a scientific journal
that thinking is SO twentieth century...
they tried it on a number of the lab personnel and it didn't give any of them withdrawal symptoms.
These early drug studies were limited by a very poor understanding of the nature of addictive behavior. Almost certainly the lab personnel did exhibit the signs and symptoms of physical withdrawal from the opiate, but these weren't recognized as such. Opiate withdrawal symptoms make one feel grumpier and more irritable, and have some signs like a mild flu, and that's it. Of itself, the physical withdrawal from opiates is usually not sufficiently nasty to cause drug-seeking behavior (addiction).
The more severe problem with the opiates is the psychological dependency that can arise in many people. So far as I know, the mechanisms of this aren't well understood as yet. But it does seem that people who are happy at home and facing satisfying challenges in their work are not as susceptible to drug-induced euphoria as, say, someone with limited education and a bleak future.
Google this: addiction dependence habituation. It is a complex field, and not easily amenable to scientific study.
I think it would be more accurate to say that heroin was prescribed for patients with intractable pain that could not be relieved by morphine.
You are perpetrating a lie.
One of the arguments given for the use of heroin was because it could cure "morphinism" and it provided a way of treating severe pain without risk of "morphinism".
Ditto meperadine (Demerol) and hydromorphone (Dilaudid). Sometimes it seems that the only difference between the tremendously profitable illegal drug trade and the tremendously profitable legal drug trade in the USA is that the first one is less dishonest in its sales pitches.
Perhaps you have done this already: check with your CEO and grant writers about asking Numera to donate a license and service agreement to Track-It as a charitable contribution.
I withdraw that argument. The barycenter will approach the Earth's surface at a much slower rate than what I had thought in my pre-caffeine, early morning state: the current rate is around 0.02 inches per year. If that remains fairly constant, it will take more than 3 billion years for the barycenter to reach the Earth's surface.
But that isn't the only argument for regarding the Earth - Moon to be a binary planet, and it was actually one of the weaker ones. It seemed at the time to be the simplest to present within the limitations of a Slashdot comment.
A more telling argument is that the Moon's influence on the Earth's orbit about its primary is observable and significant. An even more telling argument is that many Earth processes cannot be understood without factoring in the tidal influences of the Moon.
It will happen in a few million years, not billion. Google the math:
distance of barycenter from center of Earth: 2,900 miles
radius of Earth: 3,960 miles
distance of barycenter from Earth's surface: 1,060 miles
same, expressed in inches: 67,161,600 inches
speed of lunar creep away from Earth: 1.6 inches / year
Time until the barycenter is on the surface: 41,976,000 years.
That is pretty dang short in the context of astronomy. Or even in the context of geology. I think it would be truly short-sighted (I use that word deliberately) for astronomers to decide that the Earth and Moon are not a binary planet today but will become one next week (in astronomical time).
The Earth and Moon are a binary planet, have been so for a long time, and will continue to be for quite a while. It would be good if astronomers gave up their traditional notions about this and publicly recognized the truth, because only until then will the geologists and evolutionary biologists begin to take the Moon's influence into account in their own areas.
It is very likely that no human has ever thrown any artifact farther than the Voyagers. But are these also the fastest artifacts humans have ever produced? 1 million miles per day is about 11.6 miles per second, so I'm thinking these are the fastest things ever built on Earth?
But the barycenter isn't located outside the Earth though?
That depends on what you mean by "outside". If the barycenter was located in the atmospheric envelope, would that be far enough "outside"?
Currently the Earth - Moon barycenter is located far outside of the Earth's core, in the upper mantle. When the Full Moon is directly over your head, the barycenter is located about 1/3 of the distance between your feet and the center of the Earth. But that is only for a brief moment: relative to your feet, the barycenter is whizzing by underneath you at about 1,000 mph. I bet there's a little tectonic stress associated with that.
And what if the barycenter is located "outside" at some future time, even though it isn't there now? The Moon is slowly spinning away from the Earth, so at some future point the barycenter will be "outside" the Earth no matter how "outside" is defined. Does it make sense to say that the Earth - Moon pair are going to become a double planet then, but are something else now?
Also by the definition since Charon would be a planet... wouldn't the moon need to be its own planet?
The Moon should be considered a planet: Earth - Moon functions as a double planet (barycenter far removed from the center of mass of either one; orbits of either one around the Sun are significantly distorted by the other; impossible to understand the features and history of either without taking into account the tidal influence caused by the other).
And the 9580723409875 moons of Staurn/Jupiter etc?
None of the above logic applies to these other cases. These satellites have no significant effect on their primaries.
I'm pretty sure that once it is generally recognized that the Earth - Moon is a double planet, we'll see some insights into plate tectonics and biological history that are currently out of scope.
I don't object to copyright law in its original sense.
I do object to the legalized abuse of copyright law that was implemented by the US Congress over the last century, under intensive lobbying by recording businesses, the Disney Studios, and other corporations, and culminating in the DMCA and the current mess. Copyright law no longer serves its original purpose of encouraging artists to be creative; it has devolved into a tool for assuring a steady revenue flow for certain corporations, many of whom have never produced any tangible goods.
The unlicensed copying that is going on these days is symptomatic of this congressional failure to protect the intent of the original copyright law. The law has gone bad; it needs to be fixed by Congress or by the courts. It no longer serves its intended purpose and in fact it gets in the way of the creative and evolutionary growth of today's societies and cultures as they attempt to capitalize on the maturing internet and related technologies. We are seeing one segment of industry attempting to maximize its wealth through methods that limit the greater potential wealth of the entire society that is its host. This is corporate parasytism.
One way of fixing the whole mess would be a simple change in copyright law: make it that copyright can only be established by the flesh and blood artist(s) who create the artwork, and that the copyright can then be transferred only to other flesh and blood individuals. Prohibit any corporation or institution from owning any copyright.
We have other laws that work this way. For instance, even though a corporation is a legal individual, a corporation cannot get a driver's license; it has to hire drivers. A corporation cannot become a Certified Nursing Assistant; hospitals have to hire CNAs. A corporation cannot earn a Ph.D., or an M.D., or pass the bar and practice law. So there is already a strong basis in law for recognizing that some activities are uniquely human. So why not agitate to have the rights, responsibilities, and privileges of human creativity be limited in the same way to only flesh and blood human beings?
You make some very good points.
However, you state that the sample size for the men of "700 is quite small (too small for accuracy)". Please cite your authority on this. Without knowing the specifics of the survey design, it is not possible for me to determine, with the techniques I know, whether the minimum sample size should be 70, 700, or 7,000.
If I wanted to attack the assertions made in TFA, I would point out that TFA does not describe the survey techniques in sufficient detail, so it is impossible to determine what population(s) were actually being sampled. If those details were provided, then I would attack the methods of inference that were used to generalize the results from the sampled subset to the population as a whole. It is almost always possible to mount an effective attack on that basis.
While I would certainly look at sample size, I doubt that I would ever mention it in my attack. If I could actually demonstrate that a given sample size was too low for the purpose of the survey, I would definitely be able to demonstrate other fatal problems with the survey design that would be much easier to argue in a convincing way.
As Poet Laureate Robert Frost already put it:
We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
[Thanks to vikingpower for the formula of expression.]
If ad-sense is its major source of money, and it keeps the underlying numbers pretty well buried, could we be looking at another Enron?
To my knowledge, Enron never produced anything of marketable value. It was essentially a mercantile operation that got increasingly further away from trading in actual goods to trading in promises of future deliveries. That has always been a bubbly area.
OTOH, Google's underlying success is based on a kind of entrepreneural manufacture: they were the first to develop a comercially successful automated page-ranked search engine, and they have demonstrated an ability to keep churning out significant firsts of commercial value, like the Web 2.0 technology behind Google Maps and Google Earth, etc. Their business model is very similar to Microsoft of 10 years ago, or Borland, Word Perfect, or Lotus of 20 years ago. It has strong parallels with the early Ford Motor Company, the early McCormick Harvesting Machine Company, Fulton's steamboat company, etc.
There are good reasons not to buy Google stock as a long term investment right now, but to my mind these reasons have to do with its current high visibility and the likelihood that its stock is temporarily inflated by speculators. It looks like a company that has strong fundamentals and very strong growth potential, so once the current hoo-hoo-harrah settles down, it will probably be as sound an investment as IBM, Ford Motor Company, or International Harvester.
Remember, this is free investment "advice" from Slashdot, and it is worth every penny you've paid for it!
BTW, I like your sig.
As far as the archaeological record is concerned, thrown weapons came a long time after the first stone tools
That is an interesting statement.
Have you really studied the archeological record, or even the records of archeologists, and come to your conclusion? Or is it that you are attempting to stonewall a discussion that for some reason bothers your sensibilities?
Yeah, we all carry that image of Thog lifting that first great club high in the air as he daringly runs at his opponent to give him a good thumping. An image of Thog well out of reach while he tries to bean the other guy with a barrage of stones just doesn't make as good a movie scene, does it? Especially when you consider the other stuff Thog was likely to be throwing.
[Note to new moderators: Label this one "flamebait" and the GP I also wrote as "troll" and you might not be far off the mark.]
Of course I'm just making it up as I go along. Who am I to violate the theme initiated by TFA??
As to the relationship of problem solving to brain size, I strongly disagree with your assertion of a need for a bigger, heavier brain for problem solving, at least in the narrow fields of eye-limb coordination and trajectory analysis that we are talking about. Watch a flock of martins doing their dive and swoop feeding dance on a buggy summer evening, and tell me that their collision avoidance and bug interception trajectory solving software requires brains that are orders of magnitude heavier than their bodies. Once again it isn't the size of your organ but how you use it that will give you the procreative edge... (Get your mind out of the gutter-- I'm talking brain, not that other important organ.)
As to the relative advantage of learning to shake fruit from a tree, you seem to be forgetting that it doesn't matter how many calories per fruit, or how much competition there might be from non-human fruit theives. All that matters is whether the fruit-shaker gains some procreative advantage over others in his group who either don't figure out how to shake the branches or who sit around criticising the intelligence of the branch-shaker. The guy who realizes that shaking fruit down upon the gal(s) of his choice could get him where he wants to go, and the gal who realizes that shaking fruit down upon her kids could keep them happily out of her hair, are both raising the evolutionary bar.
[Note to new moderators: label this one, and the GP I also wrote, as "Troll".]
Yeah, I read the article too. I thought the argument was weak, but perhaps there is more that wasn't disclosed in this lay article.
My own thoughts about binoccular vision, grasping, and eye-hand coordination are along these lines:
I'm not sure where the snakes come in. Maybe snakes were considered evil because they are so blinking hard to hit with a rock. OTOH, this evolutionary scenario captures even the concept of diplomacy that our species regards so highly: who was it that said "Diplomacy is the art of saying 'nice doggy' while looking for a rock?"
Clinton was impeached because a powerful clique within the Washington beltway thought that he just had to be culpable for something illegal, somewhere along the line. After spending a couple of years and more than $50 million on an incredible investigation, the Monica Lewinski episode was all they could come up with.
Lying about the blow job wasn't the cause of Clinton's impeachment. It was simply the only excuse for impeachment that the Lord High Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr could find.
Pshaw.
(Always wanted to say that. Wonder what it sounds like?)
You can buy anything online these days, including low number slashdot IDs, ibetcha.
And anyway I'm living proof that the mind of a toddler can exist in an aging, decrepit body.
How can an article whose content says the earlier article was bogus be a dupe of the earlier article?
How can the initial announcement of a freely available tool be a dupe of the announcement of something that is not for public release?
Conclusion: there are a lot idjits on slashdot who have learned to waggle their fingers on the keyboard and therefore think they are clever. Oh so clever.
Slashdot has become the proving ground for kids who wanna grow up to be one of the million monkeys...
Since you bring up the economic issues...
Microsoft's marketing department has even less incentive than usual to repair this PowerPoint bug, or for that matter, other bugs in MS Office. Not with sales of the new version of Office just over the horizon. Since Marketing has always been the dominant department of Microsoft, I expect that the compahy will exhibit even more footdragging than usual in getting these bugs fixed.
But OpenOffice.org is not driven by the same motivations. It appears that pride of workmanship, rather than sales revenue, is the dominant driver of OOo.
How well does Impress run existing PowerPoint presentations?
Well, this kind of new defensive weapon is always rolled out in several phases.
First phase is characterized by an upsurge in Northrup's market cap. That's just begun. All Aboard!
Second phase is characterized by initial installations and mild cost overruns (not to exceed 250% of estimated costs). Given the current Administration in Washington, that is almost certainly going to start before Nov 2008.
The next phase will see something "unexpected" happen, that will have the nickname "laser chaff" (possibly other nicknames, depending on how the decoys are actually implemented by the nasty, clever blackhats). Somebody's gonna die.
Then Northrup's market cap will drop again.
The trick to mastering this new technology is appropriate monitoring of potential terrorists' phone calls and email so you can know when to tell your cronies that it is time to trim their portfolios of Northrup stock.
The whole thing does point out the critical need for improving and expanding Homeland Security's capabilities for monitoring email, phone conversations, and the like. When it comes to protecting stock market portfolios of the rich and famous, we can't be too careful.