Contrary to popular belief, not all things that are newer are better.
I mean, you don't see people clamoring over current violins like someone will over a Stratvarius. Not too many people would complain if you swapped out their Madonna poster with a Rembrant. Even the Porsche 911 hasn't radically changed over the years.
Certainly, not every old item is a good item, but time acts as a filter for real world junk. The other old violins with poor sound were passed down to whomever would have them, the worst being totally destroyed due to neglect and time. The lesser paintings are the ones that get lost in the trash over time. Even today, the lesser cars tend to disappear quickly too; just try to find a pristine example of a Yugo, but funny how it's not impossible to find a pristine Mercedes 190.
So it's not suprising to have current keyboards compared to the Model M. After all, it's not like they're comparing it to any 1984 keyboard. Model M's were designed in a competitive market, and IBM poured a lot of time and money into making the keyboard more "user enjoyable", intuitive, and accessible to those who can type really, really fast.
Now, I eagerly await the day I hear a keyboard review that can honestly state, "It's better than my 1984 Model M." But, given the current state of keyboard research, and the money being invested in cheaper production methods instead of improving the user experience, I doubt that phrase will be true in this lifetime.
I just wonder why I can't get a buckling spring keyboard that comes with a USB connection. Adapters are available, but I don't want to always rely on two connections (one to the computer, one to the adapter) when only one is necessary.
Are you arguing that we knew more about science in the 80's than we do today?
Have you any measurable evidence to indicate that the assumptions presented today about the Earth's atmosphere is wrong?
Do you really think that "What if" is a reasonable method of rebutting findings that have been scrutinized and honed under the process of the scientific method?
To illustrate, what if all the atoms of the world were really made up of chocolate?
Sunspots are the favorite scapegoat of all attention diverters. They even have been attributed to sofware malfunction.
And don't prop up your hopes for the planet's future on a bet. I mean, more money is at stake in the next Superbowl outcome, and about half of that money is backed by suckers.
Linus does use copyright to protect his work, but he effectively cancels the undesirable portions of copyright by providing a very liberal no-cost license.
Normally I wouldn't point out a fish to a fisherman, but since this is Slashdot, I'm sure someone would try to point this out to me:)
No Linux is open for modification and distrubution, but if you fubar it elegantly enough, Linus believes that you should bear the full burden of your new creation. That includes naming it something that doesn't throw mud on his product.
Linus never felt that he needed to regulate the product more closely, that is until he nearly lost the right to call his product Linux. Note that he didn't resort to copyright or patent to protect his work, he decided that it was only the name than needed protection, so he used trademark.
That's right, Linus could have lost the ability to use the name of his own product. So he resorted to the only legal technique designed to protect it's name. As a requirement for that protection, he MUST defend that trademark.
Linux Mark Institute used to get it's money from a select group of deep pocketed individuals. Well, the sugar daddys have grown up and decided that they can't scale with the adminstrative needs of overseeing how trademark laws differ in other coutnries. Thier solution is to distribute the burden on the people who PROFIT from the name. Usually they are asking for a less than 1% licensing fee.
And now they are evil? I'm seriously beginning to believe that any process which involves oxidation is probably evil to someone out there.
The kernel became the critical component in the GNU collection of software. Mostly because it was missing, and missing for many, many years.
HURD missed it's release date by a decade. Without Linux there's little liklihood that GNU would be relevant, because there's just not enough people buying perfectly good copies of UNIX and replacing all of the userland software and development tool chains with GNU software.
Yes, a lot of the code comes from GNU, and Stallman is trying to ride the coattails of the Linux wave. It's about making sure his organization is still relevant and a leader in open source software.
Which is silly, because his organization is a leader in open source software by virtue of it's large size and diversity of projects. That is, it has that title by merit. As far as I can recall, he never asked us to call some of the platforms I worked on GNU/Digital UNIX, or GNU/Tru64, or GNU/HPUX. The only reason he's jumping on Linux is because it provides an easy target for cheap-shot advertisement.
Aside from that, there's little historical precedent to do what he is asking for. Many pieces of engineering are named after the one critical component that is essential for it's operation. It's evern sillier when you're attaching a conflicting brand name and you're not the creator of the critical component. For example:
(the only reason the last one isn't odd is because you've been told via countless articles and advertisements that it isn't)
Stallman has done some wonderful things for computing, but now his tactics are hurting him just as much as they used to help him. It's sad to see him demanding equal air time in the name of a product. He should just require (as others do) that it mention somewhere in the materials that it uses GNU software.
If he just managed his project well, and got HURD out of the door, the need for a LINUX would probably have been met. Instead, GNU mostly lives as an add-on to other people's products. It's a shame that Stallman desires a "social license" that requires inclusion of his trademark in other people's trademark.
People are astounded when I mention that I have relatives that have caught Dengue Fever. A (mostly) disease free society makes most people think that diseases are things that only exist somewhere else. You know, like in jungles in third world countries.
Americans do immunise thier children, it's almost impossible to admit your child to any school without immunization records.
However, not all people in the US grew up here. I'd wager that there's some HB1 visa workers at Microsoft, as there are in most large companies. I'll imagine that they probably had a requirement to provide some sort of vaccination papers upon entry to the country, but imagine that it's not being enforced or people can forge the documentation when the vaccine is expensive or unattainable. And then there's no regulation (even on paper) covering vaccination in illegal immigrants.
Also the vaccine isn't 100% effective, and if it's like other vaccinations, it probably provides less protection over time. Tetanous only is effective for about 10 years, when was your last tetanous shot?
Look, it's not an incentive that's needed, it's a better measuring stick.
IQ has be fraught with difficulties from it's inception. It is anything but an intelligence quotient. It is more of a measure of whether you are in the appropriate grade level, or if you should be advanced / held back. That said, it makes some horrible assumptions. Some people have attempted to correct the assumptions over time, but others probably show that the test is fundamentally flawed.
It was designed using the grade school system as it's data pool. Today, it is not unheard of for someone to have 16 years of education, yet no attempt has been made to monitor it's usefulness past the lower grades.
Because of it's orgins, if you weren't doing well in school, you were labeled as less intelligent. If you were doing well, you were labed as more intelligent. So far, no problem; however, that label would then be used to justify you strong / poor achievement, strengthening your expectations to do well / poorly. Foreigners and women were not doing well in education at the time. Foreigners underperformed due to language difficulties, while women underperformed due to social pressures; the legacy of some Brittish scientists (Newton included) having pushed the idea that education intefered with childbirth and happy mothering: the God intended place of women. (Please, no flames, this is historical opinion of others, not my opinion: See the struggles of Ada Lovelace for some references).
Once the scoring system was in place, the other abuses of the system followed naturally. Elite clubs of the "enlightened" formed under the new banner of IQ. Unsuprisingly, they didn't really have a different constitution of the elite clubs of decades before, but there was a new interest in expressing how intelligent they all were.
Justification of the underservice of the "lesser" crowd was sometimes overt, sometimes unintentional, but always backed by this IQ yardstick which provided a convienent justification for rationalizing that the underpriviledged wouldn't have done much anyway.
People made intense efforts to prove the IQs of deceased family members in an attempt to "prove" family lineage of intelligence. Attempts were made to justify royalty under such a basis. Coorelations were done with skin color, age, race, etc. People felt it might be a good indicator of hiring preferences. Eventually the measurement became impossibly confused with future potential.
The flaws start to be exposed when you realize that measurement isn't constant. Retake an IQ exam, and your score improves (on average). Why is that? Are you suddenly more inclined to have a better or worse life? Are you suddenly less or more intelligent than you were a few hours ago? If we all continually take IQ exams for a period of three months, will the world population be more intelligent?
Where are the studies that track individuals to see if their potential as measured in an IQ exam was realized? If IQ is such a good measure, why are there other exams that are required for entry to Universities, I mean, you could just submit your IQ test you took back in the 3rd grade, right? Basically, IQ fails to enter the halls of science because it's not falsifiable, but is kept alive by politics because it's convienient.
The original IQ formula:
IQ = (grade school level you would be average be in) / (grade school level you are in) * 100
Note that no attempt was ever made to determine if you could function without the information you would not be exposed to should you skip grades. Nor was there an effort to determine if you could function without the information you would not be exposed to should you not advance to the upper grades. However, the first use of IQ was to justify the accelerated promotion of students through the school system, and the retardation of students in their current grade.
Finally, this assumes that all grade school levels are somehow standardized, that there's no significant differences bet
If that's the calculator interface, I'm really worried about the calendar interface.
I mean, if I draw the first of the month in the wrong weekday column, will the pen assume I meant a different year, or will it just bomb out with some unuseful error, forcing me to get out another sheet of "special" ie. expensive paper?
I see very limited uses for this technology, because it seems to remove one of the most useful aspects of computing, the ability to quickly organize and reference pre-existing information. If this was transformable into a PDA type application, I'd say it was a revolutionary technology product. But if I have to write out someone's name to look them up in my PIM, then it limits me to only storing names I will remember, which is sort of self-defeating.
Yes, I imagine you could shift it into a search mode, and just start writing the first letters of a name, but who wants to listen through a list of all of the people who's last name begins with the letter "S"? And, the ability to search off of other indexes will require more special "jotting" of search criteria which won't be in a natural language, and will be limited by the voice interface playback.
And we haven't even started on the noise pollution issues. A room of these things talking would allow eavesdropping, distract you from you're pen's output, etc.
Remember the mini-robot craze of the late 80's. I mean, most of those "robots" were no different than the bumper car toys of the early 80's. Drive forward, bump into something, pull back and to the left, drive forward again. Close inspection revealed that they were the bumper car toys of the 80's with a "robot" plastic shell on top.
Take your kids hiking. Nature provides far more than you can pack into an electronic gadget. But to appreciate nature, you'll have to teach them something about it. Just like listening to music, or browsing an art gallery, reading computer code, or working on a car, hiking is much more interesting and fun when it is coupled with domain specific education.
Not a troll; however, this is an irritating yet POLITE request.
I mean, most people don't even use the word "please", and certainly don't provide rationalization based on logical premises which are founded in fact.
It's a flaw in slashcode that there's not a appropriate forum for "meta-issues", meaning that the only method of talking about articles is to clutter up the commentary with thousands of requests for spellchecking, proper grammar, duplicate filtering, and everything else that has nothing to do with the article, but a bit to do with the system.
I know it's not trivial to add in an extra feature (even if you can get everyone to agree it is needed) but a separate thread for corrections would keep editors from having these manner of requests from gunking up the article commentary threads.
Perhaps, as a bootstrap, you could emulate Groklaw's "Corrections here please" thread, but the obvious place to put it would certainly distress the "first post" crowd.
Just some thoughts, and please, don't mod it into oblivion, unless you really want to send a particular message to your readers.
Brinks won't call the police first. If so, they'd be shutdown by the city due to fines for excessive false alarms. Brinks sends a car to your house with a non-police security officer. If that officer decides that the police are needed, then Brinks calls the police.
There are penalties for presenting non-emergency situations as emergencies to the police. Usually the police are lenient in enforcing these, but if you have a company creating hundreds to thousands of false-positives a day, the police are going to fine them out of business.
Fire departaments are a bit more flexible, as they are promoters of automatic fire detection systems. These systems save them work since early response greatly limits the amount of fire they have to extinguish.
As far as the hostage statement goes, I didn't realize you were wanted so badly by terrorist organizations.:)
With this robot, theoretically you can see what is happening, and make the determination to call the police immediately. It's no different than a camera monitoring system, except it's a portable camera. The downside is that you might be caught in a meeting or purposefully ignoring your cell phone for a number of other reasons. Also, 911 calls from your cell phone might confuse 911 operators, who normally would send police to your location, not your house's location.
Which still leaves the question, can they ransack your house before the police arrive?
It doesn't really matter if you use the ps3 to play your BluRay DVDs.
That's one million more BluRay DVD readers being produced to the two hundered thousand HD-DVD players being produced for the XBox 360. In manufacturing, those numbers make BluRay decoding chips and other required componentry commodity items, compared to the almost-commodity HD-DVD components.
So I expect that after ps3 sales slow down, fab plants will be able to supply every BluRay drive system with cheaper parts. That could generate a huge market for cheap BluRay players. If HD-DVD doesn't take off before the ps3 sales evens out, it is unlikely that it will ever be able to recover.
There's some very appealing ideas that really are bad ones.
I remember reading of O'Reilly presentations with titles like "Design as you go!", emploring the virtures of not planning out anything about your software, just throwing a bunch of coders at it and let the architecture "take care of itself".
Five years later I received (part time) the pleasure of trying to assimilate the twice abandoned project that was the flagship product being developed under this plan. It wasn't bad, but it was Java instilled with all of that good'ole Basic spagetti. Add to that a dev team that was at a standstill because fixing any major thing meant they'd have to take a crack a re-architecting.
If they were really on to something, it would have been interesting, but I guess they were really just trying to pitch their product. Had they advocated unit testing, some sort of code review, or any other quality practice, perhaps they would have had something. Instead it was literally, "embrace the anarchy" which ruled the message of that day.
It is important to remember that not all ideas are of equal quality. It's easy to forget when you're having a NASA Astronaut being followed up by a Flatlander in the name of blance.
Oro was my biochemistry professor, although I believe that now he's probably either too old to teach, or dead.
He was a fascinating guy who really could hold a class's attention. And well, his knoweldge of biochemistry was just... stunning. Not only did he manage to keep all of this information in his head well into an age where others would be retired, he was lively in his discourse, injecting in personal anectdotes of times when he rubbed elbows with others we were reading about in our textbooks.
But don't confuse his cogenial demeanor with his being an easy teacher, he was tough, just in a friendly way.
I could tell that it was from the same "organization" without even performing the whois.
Get used to reading weasel, and phrases like "We only exercise the trademark rights that Linux has authorized us to represent" read a lot like "We don't have any right to represent Linux because otherwise we would state up front exactly what Linux has authorized us to do."
Lawyers never beat around the bush when they are on the winning side.
Look, you Mom isn't going to know that there's another desktop unless you tell her. She will just know her desktop.
My mother-in-law wanted a computer to surf the internet. I built a cheap linux box, indicating that she was getting "cutting edge technology" far superior to Windows. She asked me (proof of how far Microsoft's advertising budget has reached) if it was harder to use than Windows. My response was, "No, but if you learn something and then change, a lot of people focus on the steps being different instead of focusing on the underlying thing they want to do."
Within a few weeks she knew more about KDE than I did. I guess I skimped on actually reading most of the end user documentation.
Spatial navigation can be turned on or off via a configuration setting. AFAIK Gnome doesn't have anyone providing a "just this distro" feature set.
That said, after all the hype about how annoying / frustrating spatial navigation could be. I was very disappointed to find out that many were making a huge fuss about almost nothing.
I suggest you try it for a couple of weeks, odds are you will not be infuriated, but then again, odds are you will not be awestruck. If you don't like it, get familiar with the config setting to toggle it and off.
Perhaps shareholders see themselves as part of humanity and are more interested in making the world a better place to live than in earning a few extra dollars.
But that's probably a delusion, after all, with that extra $4, you can go out and buy yourself a better world, right? Well, mabye with $4,000? $4,000,000? $4,000,000,000? How much does a better planet to live on cost?
Perhaps now you'll see why a shareholder should be concerned if the company they partially own is abusing other people.
I wonder if you'd feel the same way if China made the same offer to Smith and Wesson, or Colt. How about Lockheed Martin or Raytheon? Dow Chemical?
Trying to make money isn't justfication for every action, even when companies need the money desperately to stay in business. If it were, hit men would incorporate and KILCO (pun intended) would be listed on the NYSE.
Advances are only discovered, and support may make more discoveries possible, but they don't change the way the body works.
Adult stem cell research is very mature, and there is some understanding as to what can be done (and cannot be done) with adult stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells provide a new tool for all of the treatements where adult stem cells are not effective. Harvesting them does not kill the embryo, rather it reogranizes it into cells that are injected into someone else. Consider it a transplant, but on the cellular level.
Different tools perform differently. That's why you don't reach for a screwdriver to loosen a nut. Arguements that we shouldn't even touch a tool hardly makes us better mechanics (or physicians).
PS. Your government has no issue with killing people, that's why police officers carry guns. It does have an issue with killing embryos. Think about it, by being born the government's less concerned about keeping you alive.
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Contrary to popular belief, not all things that are newer are better.
I mean, you don't see people clamoring over current violins like someone will over a Stratvarius. Not too many people would complain if you swapped out their Madonna poster with a Rembrant. Even the Porsche 911 hasn't radically changed over the years.
Certainly, not every old item is a good item, but time acts as a filter for real world junk. The other old violins with poor sound were passed down to whomever would have them, the worst being totally destroyed due to neglect and time. The lesser paintings are the ones that get lost in the trash over time. Even today, the lesser cars tend to disappear quickly too; just try to find a pristine example of a Yugo, but funny how it's not impossible to find a pristine Mercedes 190.
So it's not suprising to have current keyboards compared to the Model M. After all, it's not like they're comparing it to any 1984 keyboard. Model M's were designed in a competitive market, and IBM poured a lot of time and money into making the keyboard more "user enjoyable", intuitive, and accessible to those who can type really, really fast.
Now, I eagerly await the day I hear a keyboard review that can honestly state, "It's better than my 1984 Model M." But, given the current state of keyboard research, and the money being invested in cheaper production methods instead of improving the user experience, I doubt that phrase will be true in this lifetime.
I just wonder why I can't get a buckling spring keyboard that comes with a USB connection. Adapters are available, but I don't want to always rely on two connections (one to the computer, one to the adapter) when only one is necessary.
That's like the secret, developmental, ipod vi. Flip it over to set it in playlist / album / track selection mode, flip it back to play the song.
The project was canceled after user testing when an untrained tester tried to flip it off.
The only trick is submitting the application for removal after you've been placed on the Darwin Awards list.
Are you arguing that we knew more about science in the 80's than we do today?
Have you any measurable evidence to indicate that the assumptions presented today about the Earth's atmosphere is wrong?
Do you really think that "What if" is a reasonable method of rebutting findings that have been scrutinized and honed under the process of the scientific method?
To illustrate, what if all the atoms of the world were really made up of chocolate?
Please don't blame this on sunspots.
Sunspots are the favorite scapegoat of all attention diverters. They even have been attributed to sofware malfunction.
And don't prop up your hopes for the planet's future on a bet. I mean, more money is at stake in the next Superbowl outcome, and about half of that money is backed by suckers.
Err... Sorry for the inaccuracy.
:)
Linus does use copyright to protect his work, but he effectively cancels the undesirable portions of copyright by providing a very liberal no-cost license.
Normally I wouldn't point out a fish to a fisherman, but since this is Slashdot, I'm sure someone would try to point this out to me
No Linux is open for modification and distrubution, but if you fubar it elegantly enough, Linus believes that you should bear the full burden of your new creation. That includes naming it something that doesn't throw mud on his product.
Linus never felt that he needed to regulate the product more closely, that is until he nearly lost the right to call his product Linux. Note that he didn't resort to copyright or patent to protect his work, he decided that it was only the name than needed protection, so he used trademark.
That's right, Linus could have lost the ability to use the name of his own product. So he resorted to the only legal technique designed to protect it's name. As a requirement for that protection, he MUST defend that trademark.
Linux Mark Institute used to get it's money from a select group of deep pocketed individuals. Well, the sugar daddys have grown up and decided that they can't scale with the adminstrative needs of overseeing how trademark laws differ in other coutnries. Thier solution is to distribute the burden on the people who PROFIT from the name. Usually they are asking for a less than 1% licensing fee.
And now they are evil? I'm seriously beginning to believe that any process which involves oxidation is probably evil to someone out there.
The kernel became the critical component in the GNU collection of software. Mostly because it was missing, and missing for many, many years.
HURD missed it's release date by a decade. Without Linux there's little liklihood that GNU would be relevant, because there's just not enough people buying perfectly good copies of UNIX and replacing all of the userland software and development tool chains with GNU software.
This is not the word you are looking for.
(hand waves)
This is not the word we are looking for.
The word you are looking for is professionalisim.
The word we are looking for is professionalisim.
Move along.
Move along.
Yes, a lot of the code comes from GNU, and Stallman is trying to ride the coattails of the Linux wave. It's about making sure his organization is still relevant and a leader in open source software.
Which is silly, because his organization is a leader in open source software by virtue of it's large size and diversity of projects. That is, it has that title by merit. As far as I can recall, he never asked us to call some of the platforms I worked on GNU/Digital UNIX, or GNU/Tru64, or GNU/HPUX. The only reason he's jumping on Linux is because it provides an easy target for cheap-shot advertisement.
Aside from that, there's little historical precedent to do what he is asking for. Many pieces of engineering are named after the one critical component that is essential for it's operation. It's evern sillier when you're attaching a conflicting brand name and you're not the creator of the critical component. For example:
Nuclear Reactor (not IBM/Nuclear Reactor)
Jet Aeroplane (not Goodyear/Jet Airplane)
Steam Engine (not Taco Bell/Steam Engine)
Computer Keyboard (not BOSE/Computer Keyboard)
Textbook (not Kelloggs/Textbook)
Linux Kernel (not GNU/Linux Kernel)
It's an even odder arrangement when adding two different brands in the same marketplace.
Kellogs/Quaker Oats
General Mills/Betty Crocker Biquick
Lexmark/HP printer
GNU/RedHat
GNU/SuSE
GNU/Linux
(the only reason the last one isn't odd is because you've been told via countless articles and advertisements that it isn't)
Stallman has done some wonderful things for computing, but now his tactics are hurting him just as much as they used to help him. It's sad to see him demanding equal air time in the name of a product. He should just require (as others do) that it mention somewhere in the materials that it uses GNU software.
If he just managed his project well, and got HURD out of the door, the need for a LINUX would probably have been met. Instead, GNU mostly lives as an add-on to other people's products. It's a shame that Stallman desires a "social license" that requires inclusion of his trademark in other people's trademark.
Like my Bridestone/BOSE/Pontiac Grand AM?
People are astounded when I mention that I have relatives that have caught Dengue Fever. A (mostly) disease free society makes most people think that diseases are things that only exist somewhere else. You know, like in jungles in third world countries.
Americans do immunise thier children, it's almost impossible to admit your child to any school without immunization records.
However, not all people in the US grew up here. I'd wager that there's some HB1 visa workers at Microsoft, as there are in most large companies. I'll imagine that they probably had a requirement to provide some sort of vaccination papers upon entry to the country, but imagine that it's not being enforced or people can forge the documentation when the vaccine is expensive or unattainable. And then there's no regulation (even on paper) covering vaccination in illegal immigrants.
Also the vaccine isn't 100% effective, and if it's like other vaccinations, it probably provides less protection over time. Tetanous only is effective for about 10 years, when was your last tetanous shot?
Look, it's not an incentive that's needed, it's a better measuring stick.
IQ has be fraught with difficulties from it's inception. It is anything but an intelligence quotient. It is more of a measure of whether you are in the appropriate grade level, or if you should be advanced / held back. That said, it makes some horrible assumptions. Some people have attempted to correct the assumptions over time, but others probably show that the test is fundamentally flawed.
It was designed using the grade school system as it's data pool. Today, it is not unheard of for someone to have 16 years of education, yet no attempt has been made to monitor it's usefulness past the lower grades.
Because of it's orgins, if you weren't doing well in school, you were labeled as less intelligent. If you were doing well, you were labed as more intelligent. So far, no problem; however, that label would then be used to justify you strong / poor achievement, strengthening your expectations to do well / poorly. Foreigners and women were not doing well in education at the time. Foreigners underperformed due to language difficulties, while women underperformed due to social pressures; the legacy of some Brittish scientists (Newton included) having pushed the idea that education intefered with childbirth and happy mothering: the God intended place of women. (Please, no flames, this is historical opinion of others, not my opinion: See the struggles of Ada Lovelace for some references).
Once the scoring system was in place, the other abuses of the system followed naturally. Elite clubs of the "enlightened" formed under the new banner of IQ. Unsuprisingly, they didn't really have a different constitution of the elite clubs of decades before, but there was a new interest in expressing how intelligent they all were.
Justification of the underservice of the "lesser" crowd was sometimes overt, sometimes unintentional, but always backed by this IQ yardstick which provided a convienent justification for rationalizing that the underpriviledged wouldn't have done much anyway.
People made intense efforts to prove the IQs of deceased family members in an attempt to "prove" family lineage of intelligence. Attempts were made to justify royalty under such a basis. Coorelations were done with skin color, age, race, etc. People felt it might be a good indicator of hiring preferences. Eventually the measurement became impossibly confused with future potential.
The flaws start to be exposed when you realize that measurement isn't constant. Retake an IQ exam, and your score improves (on average). Why is that? Are you suddenly more inclined to have a better or worse life? Are you suddenly less or more intelligent than you were a few hours ago? If we all continually take IQ exams for a period of three months, will the world population be more intelligent?
Where are the studies that track individuals to see if their potential as measured in an IQ exam was realized? If IQ is such a good measure, why are there other exams that are required for entry to Universities, I mean, you could just submit your IQ test you took back in the 3rd grade, right? Basically, IQ fails to enter the halls of science because it's not falsifiable, but is kept alive by politics because it's convienient.
The original IQ formula:
IQ = (grade school level you would be average be in) / (grade school level you are in) * 100
Note that no attempt was ever made to determine if you could function without the information you would not be exposed to should you skip grades. Nor was there an effort to determine if you could function without the information you would not be exposed to should you not advance to the upper grades. However, the first use of IQ was to justify the accelerated promotion of students through the school system, and the retardation of students in their current grade.
Finally, this assumes that all grade school levels are somehow standardized, that there's no significant differences bet
If that's the calculator interface, I'm really worried about the calendar interface.
I mean, if I draw the first of the month in the wrong weekday column, will the pen assume I meant a different year, or will it just bomb out with some unuseful error, forcing me to get out another sheet of "special" ie. expensive paper?
I see very limited uses for this technology, because it seems to remove one of the most useful aspects of computing, the ability to quickly organize and reference pre-existing information. If this was transformable into a PDA type application, I'd say it was a revolutionary technology product. But if I have to write out someone's name to look them up in my PIM, then it limits me to only storing names I will remember, which is sort of self-defeating.
Yes, I imagine you could shift it into a search mode, and just start writing the first letters of a name, but who wants to listen through a list of all of the people who's last name begins with the letter "S"? And, the ability to search off of other indexes will require more special "jotting" of search criteria which won't be in a natural language, and will be limited by the voice interface playback.
And we haven't even started on the noise pollution issues. A room of these things talking would allow eavesdropping, distract you from you're pen's output, etc.
There's a huge market for electronic junk.
Remember the mini-robot craze of the late 80's. I mean, most of those "robots" were no different than the bumper car toys of the early 80's. Drive forward, bump into something, pull back and to the left, drive forward again. Close inspection revealed that they were the bumper car toys of the 80's with a "robot" plastic shell on top.
Take your kids hiking. Nature provides far more than you can pack into an electronic gadget. But to appreciate nature, you'll have to teach them something about it. Just like listening to music, or browsing an art gallery, reading computer code, or working on a car, hiking is much more interesting and fun when it is coupled with domain specific education.
Not a troll; however, this is an irritating yet POLITE request.
I mean, most people don't even use the word "please", and certainly don't provide rationalization based on logical premises which are founded in fact.
It's a flaw in slashcode that there's not a appropriate forum for "meta-issues", meaning that the only method of talking about articles is to clutter up the commentary with thousands of requests for spellchecking, proper grammar, duplicate filtering, and everything else that has nothing to do with the article, but a bit to do with the system.
I know it's not trivial to add in an extra feature (even if you can get everyone to agree it is needed) but a separate thread for corrections would keep editors from having these manner of requests from gunking up the article commentary threads.
Perhaps, as a bootstrap, you could emulate Groklaw's "Corrections here please" thread, but the obvious place to put it would certainly distress the "first post" crowd.
Just some thoughts, and please, don't mod it into oblivion, unless you really want to send a particular message to your readers.
You totally need to read up on your company.
:)
Brinks won't call the police first. If so, they'd be shutdown by the city due to fines for excessive false alarms. Brinks sends a car to your house with a non-police security officer. If that officer decides that the police are needed, then Brinks calls the police.
There are penalties for presenting non-emergency situations as emergencies to the police. Usually the police are lenient in enforcing these, but if you have a company creating hundreds to thousands of false-positives a day, the police are going to fine them out of business.
Fire departaments are a bit more flexible, as they are promoters of automatic fire detection systems. These systems save them work since early response greatly limits the amount of fire they have to extinguish.
As far as the hostage statement goes, I didn't realize you were wanted so badly by terrorist organizations.
With this robot, theoretically you can see what is happening, and make the determination to call the police immediately. It's no different than a camera monitoring system, except it's a portable camera. The downside is that you might be caught in a meeting or purposefully ignoring your cell phone for a number of other reasons. Also, 911 calls from your cell phone might confuse 911 operators, who normally would send police to your location, not your house's location.
Which still leaves the question, can they ransack your house before the police arrive?
It doesn't really matter if you use the ps3 to play your BluRay DVDs.
That's one million more BluRay DVD readers being produced to the two hundered thousand HD-DVD players being produced for the XBox 360. In manufacturing, those numbers make BluRay decoding chips and other required componentry commodity items, compared to the almost-commodity HD-DVD components.
So I expect that after ps3 sales slow down, fab plants will be able to supply every BluRay drive system with cheaper parts. That could generate a huge market for cheap BluRay players. If HD-DVD doesn't take off before the ps3 sales evens out, it is unlikely that it will ever be able to recover.
There's some very appealing ideas that really are bad ones.
I remember reading of O'Reilly presentations with titles like "Design as you go!", emploring the virtures of not planning out anything about your software, just throwing a bunch of coders at it and let the architecture "take care of itself".
Five years later I received (part time) the pleasure of trying to assimilate the twice abandoned project that was the flagship product being developed under this plan. It wasn't bad, but it was Java instilled with all of that good'ole Basic spagetti. Add to that a dev team that was at a standstill because fixing any major thing meant they'd have to take a crack a re-architecting.
If they were really on to something, it would have been interesting, but I guess they were really just trying to pitch their product. Had they advocated unit testing, some sort of code review, or any other quality practice, perhaps they would have had something. Instead it was literally, "embrace the anarchy" which ruled the message of that day.
It is important to remember that not all ideas are of equal quality. It's easy to forget when you're having a NASA Astronaut being followed up by a Flatlander in the name of blance.
Oro was my biochemistry professor, although I believe that now he's probably either too old to teach, or dead.
He was a fascinating guy who really could hold a class's attention. And well, his knoweldge of biochemistry was just... stunning. Not only did he manage to keep all of this information in his head well into an age where others would be retired, he was lively in his discourse, injecting in personal anectdotes of times when he rubbed elbows with others we were reading about in our textbooks.
But don't confuse his cogenial demeanor with his being an easy teacher, he was tough, just in a friendly way.
Funny,
I could tell that it was from the same "organization" without even performing the whois.
Get used to reading weasel, and phrases like "We only exercise the trademark rights that Linux has authorized us to represent" read a lot like "We don't have any right to represent Linux because otherwise we would state up front exactly what Linux has authorized us to do."
Lawyers never beat around the bush when they are on the winning side.
Ahhh... The joys of passing the "Mom" test.
Look, you Mom isn't going to know that there's another desktop unless you tell her. She will just know her desktop.
My mother-in-law wanted a computer to surf the internet. I built a cheap linux box, indicating that she was getting "cutting edge technology" far superior to Windows. She asked me (proof of how far Microsoft's advertising budget has reached) if it was harder to use than Windows. My response was, "No, but if you learn something and then change, a lot of people focus on the steps being different instead of focusing on the underlying thing they want to do."
Within a few weeks she knew more about KDE than I did. I guess I skimped on actually reading most of the end user documentation.
Spatial navigation can be turned on or off via a configuration setting. AFAIK Gnome doesn't have anyone providing a "just this distro" feature set.
That said, after all the hype about how annoying / frustrating spatial navigation could be. I was very disappointed to find out that many were making a huge fuss about almost nothing.
I suggest you try it for a couple of weeks, odds are you will not be infuriated, but then again, odds are you will not be awestruck. If you don't like it, get familiar with the config setting to toggle it and off.
Perhaps shareholders see themselves as part of humanity and are more interested in making the world a better place to live than in earning a few extra dollars.
But that's probably a delusion, after all, with that extra $4, you can go out and buy yourself a better world, right? Well, mabye with $4,000? $4,000,000? $4,000,000,000? How much does a better planet to live on cost?
Perhaps now you'll see why a shareholder should be concerned if the company they partially own is abusing other people.
I wonder if you'd feel the same way if China made the same offer to Smith and Wesson, or Colt. How about Lockheed Martin or Raytheon? Dow Chemical?
Trying to make money isn't justfication for every action, even when companies need the money desperately to stay in business. If it were, hit men would incorporate and KILCO (pun intended) would be listed on the NYSE.
Advances are only discovered, and support may make more discoveries possible, but they don't change the way the body works.
Adult stem cell research is very mature, and there is some understanding as to what can be done (and cannot be done) with adult stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells provide a new tool for all of the treatements where adult stem cells are not effective. Harvesting them does not kill the embryo, rather it reogranizes it into cells that are injected into someone else. Consider it a transplant, but on the cellular level.
Different tools perform differently. That's why you don't reach for a screwdriver to loosen a nut. Arguements that we shouldn't even touch a tool hardly makes us better mechanics (or physicians).
PS. Your government has no issue with killing people, that's why police officers carry guns. It does have an issue with killing embryos. Think about it, by being born the government's less concerned about keeping you alive.