A white lab coat does not make you a super-people, a god, infallible, incapable of being wrong, or corrupt, or bribe-able, or blackmail-able, or otherwise influenced adversely.
Yes and scientist know that very well, which is why science isn't build around authorities, but around such things as peer review and reproducibility. And more importantly, science is self correcting. If you find an reproducible experiment that conflicts with existing theories, the theories get extended or replaced with better ones.
Science simply is not a believe, it is a process to weed out the good hypothesis from the bad ones.
Why again do we need another slow optical disc medium?
Because we currently don't have a removable media that is cheap and large for backup. Blurays are still more expensive then USB HDDs and DVD+R per gigabyte and even if they would be cheap, they just are not large enough to backup even a single partition of your 1TB drive. DVD+R are still the cheapest storage available, but they are so small, that they are just useless for backup.
So cheap and big would be something new, especially when they manage get anywhere near the 25TB mark. As that's a mark that even HDDs are still far away from getting close to and Flash will have a hard time getting near that as well. They might of course get there one day, but that day might be 10 years off, a time frame in which this new disc type could become ready as well.
When B5 pulled the "OMG alien angels!" crap, I stopped watching.
You sadly missed one of the best sci-fi shows around. The whole angel business is explained quit reasonably in that the Vorlons manipulated the humans to see the Vorlons as angels, other aliens saw them not as angels but as something else that they would consider good. Not sure if humans from a different part of the world saw some differently as well, but that is really getting nitpick. The point is simply that Vorlons programmed into the race that they wanted to be perceived as something good and I don't need a atheist character proclaiming that he saw Carl Sagan with a jetpack to get that point.
That was a season finale, and I stopped watching again when I realized that all of that had failed to kill the guy.
It didn't fail to kill him, its just that he got resurrected later on. Its all explained in the show.
B5 is one of the very few shows which was planed from the start to the end before they started filming the thing. So there is no "make shit up as we go"-style story writing and mystery building, pretty much all mysteries that get build up get explained later on.
There really is not much of a religious theme in B5, at least not in the Christian sense of the word, its basically the same as you get in Childhood's End from Arthur C Clarke or in Stargate with the whole ascension stuff.
A user certainly should not have to care, or even deal, with case-sensitivity.
At which point does the user ever have to care about case-sensitivity? You can search case-insensitive on a case-sensitive file system without any issue and when you want to open a file, you just click an icon anyway. It really doesn't make a difference for the average user. The only area that I have seen where it does make a difference is when it comes to programming, people on Windows often end up messing up their #include directives with incorrect case, which then causes trouble on Unix systems, but its easily fixable.
They certainly won't understand the difference between ThisFile.TXT and thisfile.txt. If they see both, they'll wonder why they have two copies of the same file.
While having.TXT mixed with.txt is annoying, as it looks ugly and inconsistent, case-insensitivity doesn't solve that, quite the opposite, it caused it in the first place. If everything would be case-sensitive app developers would simply take a bit more care to write proper file extension instead of mixing case. About it causing confusion, I completly disagree. I would say the exact opposite is true: Not allowing files with the same name is a case of low-level implementation details leaking into the users space and thus causing confusion. In a modern GUI the files "Bob.txt" and "Bob.txt" could be clearly differentiated by not only being two separate icons, but also having different file size, content, thumbnails and other meta data. My Blog can handle just fine having two articles with the same title, why can't my file system? This of course might cause a little trouble for text based interfaces, as the filename is the unique identifier of the file, unlike in a GUI where you could have a hidden unique id for the file, but its not an unsolvable problem.
It goes far beyond just the OS. With Flash for example you can get a list of all the fonts the user has installed. If you ever installed some custom fonts, chances are you are close to 100% uniquely identifiable. You can also trace which pages the user has visited with some dirty CSS tricks (load an image in a:visited {}, track that, and you know if the user has visited the link).
I seriously doubt that most users are away of that trickery on how much information it is really giving away.
As someone who's been gaming for 20+ years, there's never been a better time to be gaming.
That's only the case if you are fine with an endless series of sequels. If you want to see something new every now and then your are kind of out of luck today when it comes to mainstream titles. What is especially shocking is that many of those franchises have been around for a good 5 to 10 years and sometimes even longer. Instead of moving on, every franchise is milked to the extreme and even when you find something fresh, you be sure as hell that it will be recycled for years to come.
Now given, sequels are nothing new, they have been happening even 20 years ago, but 20 years ago I couldn't name you a single title that had a "4" or "5" in its title, today on the other side they make up a good portion of the top titles.
When you want realism, you shouldn't look at Need for Speed, which kind of abandoned all attempts at realism right after the first part. If you want hardcore realism check out rFactor, GTR, Life for Speed or iRacing.
The problem with todays gaming market is often not that the games one wants don't exist, but that they all happen far away from mainstream gaming, so they are easy to miss.
Then you are still having the old sidebar, which could be hidden, the new one can't. See old vs new. Googles new features don't show up for everybody instantly, it always takes a few days.
The problem is that Wolfram Alpha can't even do the simple things for which is has all the data it needs. For example I can't ask it for movies with a given set of actors. On top of that their stupid image-only results aren't even hyperlinked, so I can't even click on an actor to get more information.
Having a powerful search engine for pop culture things could certainly be fun, but Wolfram Alpha just doesn't even get close. Now given, it wasn't build for pop culture, but for science, but it should still be able to answer simple questions for which is has the data.
Yep, one thing I find a little surprising is that we already see those "question answering" features (as broken as they might be), while I haven't yet seen a search engine that lets you search for "things" instead of "words".
When I search for "Saturn" I want the search engine to be able to tell the difference between Saturn the car, Saturn the planet, Saturn the gaming console and all the other Saturn that might be out there. One can often accomplish that manually by being a bit more specific (i.e. Sega Saturn instead of just Saturn), but sometimes its close to impossible to do that. With games for example it can be extremely hard to narrow down the search to a specific system, as every gaming site out there has all the systems listen in the navbar and thus will trigger even when the side itself has nothing to do with the system.
And lets not forget the Gutenberg Bible, with all those fluffy birds and decorations, who's supposed to concentrate on reading the text?
If one day all books come in highly interactive forms and every child has an iPad, I might start to worry, but at the moment almost no child has an iPad and fully interactive books are a rarity compared to normal books.
The fact that the parent was labeled a troll only confirms the pattern I've witnessed, even in Scientifically-minded communities like/., of shouting down or censoring skeptics.
If you want to play skeptic, you have to show evidence. If you want to go agaist the scientific consensus, you have to show lots of evidence. The average Joe Shmu climate change denier has none, instead he just repeats the points that have already been debunked over and over again. Its no surprise that scientists are getting annoyed by that, especially when those wrong points are used to make political decisions.
As an adamant supporter of the Scientific method, I'm very disappointed that asking for baseline data and manipulation algorithms has been met with stonewalling and name calling.
The data is available and to this day there has been no proof of manipulation. Its exactly these kinds of lies that hinder an honest debate.
Proponents of AGW are asking for societies to completely revise their infrastructures and policies.
On a smaller scale they did it before with the ozone hole and guess what, it fucking worked.
Rather than continuing to escalate the rhetoric, climatologists need to return to their core data and analysis methods to present their cases in a fair and rational manner.
They have and it obviously didn't work.
Here a little thought experiment: Lets assume for a moment that climate change is complete and utter nonsense, how would you expect the world to look like? I for one would expect there to be a large group of climate scientists opposing the climate change theories and quite a bit of data showing that it isn't happening. How would the world look when climate change is right? I would expect huge industries, whose business depends on polluting the earth, to oppose the scientific evidence and lots and lots of FUD in the debate aimed at discrediting the scientists.
Somehow the situation today looks a hell of a lot more then the later one, then the first.
The prices of DVD-R (~0.046/GB) at least are getting pretty damn close to the prices of HDDs (~0.065/GB), especially when you factor in the cost of the DVD drive. With Bluray it might look a little different, but should still be quite close. Optical media just hasn't increased in space as much as other technologies.
Now of course solid state is a whole different business and prices are still more then an order of magnitude away from the price of HDDs.
You put an executable on a Windows system and it's immediately executable by anyone.
So can you in Linux, thats what "chmod +x" is for. And even when you use a noexec mount (which no desktop distri I now does), people can still just use one of the dozens of scripting languages that you find on every random Linux out there.
The only security advantage Linux has over Windows, is that on Linux (or at least the major distros) you have a central repository of all software. On Windows you don't. So on Windows even something simple as searching for a driver leads you across a ton of dubious webpages whoes authority you cannot verify, while on Linux stuff just works with what comes from the repository.
Of course every now and then you might not find what you are searching for in a repository, but these days that doesn't happen all to often, my/usr/local/ has been virtually empty for years.
True science accepts challenges either as corrections to a theory or as test of validity.
Yes, but that's a very different thing than what is happening with large parts of the anti-AGW crowd, which is using logical falsifies or outright lies as arguments, not data. This thing seems to be turning out just like the whole evolution mess, where one side has mountains of data, theories and predictions that explain the world around us and the other side has "God did it". The problem here is not that "God did it" couldn't be right, but that there is no evidence for it. The answer there simply has to be to ignore the side with no evidence, not to welcome the challenge it provides, as you can't argue with a person that isn't seeking truth or listening to reason. Back to climate science it doesn't look all that much different. I have heard lots and lots about flaws in the research and how it was presented, most of those claims either turn out to be false, misinterpretation of the data or just lies. What I don't see much at all is proper research from the anti-AGW crowd, where are the climate models that predict how things will change in the future? That tell us what the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are and all that stuff? Claiming "global warming isn't happening" simply isn't a theory, it doesn't allow you to make predictions or tell you anything meaningful. It might not be wrong, but without understanding why it might be right, its just a rather useless claim.
When the possible consequences of our doing could be catastrophic and we don't know exactly where we are heading, just continue doing what we are doing or even speeding that up doesn't exactly sound like the cleverest thing to do.
Re:Is there a point?
on
Zen Coding
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's not a format, its just special syntax that you type into your editor that will get expanded to the full regular HTML. It's just there to save you typing, not replace.html files.
Except that his "lie" has been independently reproduced and been confirmed. Let me cite guardian.co.uk:
What counts in science, however, is not a single study. It is whether its finding can be replicated by others. Here Mann has been on a winning streak. Upwards of a dozen studies, using different statistical techniques or different combinations of proxy records, have produced reconstructions broadly similar to the original hockey stick. These reconstructions all have a hockey stick shaft and blade. While the shaft is not always as flat as Mann's version, it is present. Almost all support the main claim in the IPCC summary: that the 1990s was then probably the warmest decade for 1000 years.
The only time when using == with floats should be ok, is when comparing it to zero and only then if the zero comes from a direct assignment, instead of a calculation, i.e.:
float x = 0.0f; if (x == 0.0f) {/* do stuff */ }
But even then its bad practice, as its abusing 0.0f as magic number, which should be avoided if possible.
Slashdot Mirror
A white lab coat does not make you a super-people, a god, infallible, incapable of being wrong, or corrupt, or bribe-able, or blackmail-able, or otherwise influenced adversely.
Yes and scientist know that very well, which is why science isn't build around authorities, but around such things as peer review and reproducibility. And more importantly, science is self correcting. If you find an reproducible experiment that conflicts with existing theories, the theories get extended or replaced with better ones.
Science simply is not a believe, it is a process to weed out the good hypothesis from the bad ones.
Why again do we need another slow optical disc medium?
Because we currently don't have a removable media that is cheap and large for backup. Blurays are still more expensive then USB HDDs and DVD+R per gigabyte and even if they would be cheap, they just are not large enough to backup even a single partition of your 1TB drive. DVD+R are still the cheapest storage available, but they are so small, that they are just useless for backup.
So cheap and big would be something new, especially when they manage get anywhere near the 25TB mark. As that's a mark that even HDDs are still far away from getting close to and Flash will have a hard time getting near that as well. They might of course get there one day, but that day might be 10 years off, a time frame in which this new disc type could become ready as well.
When B5 pulled the "OMG alien angels!" crap, I stopped watching.
You sadly missed one of the best sci-fi shows around. The whole angel business is explained quit reasonably in that the Vorlons manipulated the humans to see the Vorlons as angels, other aliens saw them not as angels but as something else that they would consider good. Not sure if humans from a different part of the world saw some differently as well, but that is really getting nitpick. The point is simply that Vorlons programmed into the race that they wanted to be perceived as something good and I don't need a atheist character proclaiming that he saw Carl Sagan with a jetpack to get that point.
That was a season finale, and I stopped watching again when I realized that all of that had failed to kill the guy.
It didn't fail to kill him, its just that he got resurrected later on. Its all explained in the show.
B5 is one of the very few shows which was planed from the start to the end before they started filming the thing. So there is no "make shit up as we go"-style story writing and mystery building, pretty much all mysteries that get build up get explained later on.
There really is not much of a religious theme in B5, at least not in the Christian sense of the word, its basically the same as you get in Childhood's End from Arthur C Clarke or in Stargate with the whole ascension stuff.
A user certainly should not have to care, or even deal, with case-sensitivity.
At which point does the user ever have to care about case-sensitivity? You can search case-insensitive on a case-sensitive file system without any issue and when you want to open a file, you just click an icon anyway. It really doesn't make a difference for the average user. The only area that I have seen where it does make a difference is when it comes to programming, people on Windows often end up messing up their #include directives with incorrect case, which then causes trouble on Unix systems, but its easily fixable.
They certainly won't understand the difference between ThisFile.TXT and thisfile.txt. If they see both, they'll wonder why they have two copies of the same file.
While having .TXT mixed with .txt is annoying, as it looks ugly and inconsistent, case-insensitivity doesn't solve that, quite the opposite, it caused it in the first place. If everything would be case-sensitive app developers would simply take a bit more care to write proper file extension instead of mixing case. About it causing confusion, I completly disagree. I would say the exact opposite is true: Not allowing files with the same name is a case of low-level implementation details leaking into the users space and thus causing confusion. In a modern GUI the files "Bob.txt" and "Bob.txt" could be clearly differentiated by not only being two separate icons, but also having different file size, content, thumbnails and other meta data. My Blog can handle just fine having two articles with the same title, why can't my file system? This of course might cause a little trouble for text based interfaces, as the filename is the unique identifier of the file, unlike in a GUI where you could have a hidden unique id for the file, but its not an unsolvable problem.
Might refer to this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuXR0F6ZQzc
It goes far beyond just the OS. With Flash for example you can get a list of all the fonts the user has installed. If you ever installed some custom fonts, chances are you are close to 100% uniquely identifiable. You can also trace which pages the user has visited with some dirty CSS tricks (load an image in a:visited {}, track that, and you know if the user has visited the link).
I seriously doubt that most users are away of that trickery on how much information it is really giving away.
As someone who's been gaming for 20+ years, there's never been a better time to be gaming.
That's only the case if you are fine with an endless series of sequels. If you want to see something new every now and then your are kind of out of luck today when it comes to mainstream titles. What is especially shocking is that many of those franchises have been around for a good 5 to 10 years and sometimes even longer. Instead of moving on, every franchise is milked to the extreme and even when you find something fresh, you be sure as hell that it will be recycled for years to come.
Now given, sequels are nothing new, they have been happening even 20 years ago, but 20 years ago I couldn't name you a single title that had a "4" or "5" in its title, today on the other side they make up a good portion of the top titles.
When you want realism, you shouldn't look at Need for Speed, which kind of abandoned all attempts at realism right after the first part. If you want hardcore realism check out rFactor, GTR, Life for Speed or iRacing.
The problem with todays gaming market is often not that the games one wants don't exist, but that they all happen far away from mainstream gaming, so they are easy to miss.
Then you are still having the old sidebar, which could be hidden, the new one can't. See old vs
new. Googles new features don't show up for everybody instantly, it always takes a few days.
The problem is that Wolfram Alpha can't even do the simple things for which is has all the data it needs. For example I can't ask it for movies with a given set of actors. On top of that their stupid image-only results aren't even hyperlinked, so I can't even click on an actor to get more information.
Having a powerful search engine for pop culture things could certainly be fun, but Wolfram Alpha just doesn't even get close. Now given, it wasn't build for pop culture, but for science, but it should still be able to answer simple questions for which is has the data.
Yep, one thing I find a little surprising is that we already see those "question answering" features (as broken as they might be), while I haven't yet seen a search engine that lets you search for "things" instead of "words".
When I search for "Saturn" I want the search engine to be able to tell the difference between Saturn the car, Saturn the planet, Saturn the gaming console and all the other Saturn that might be out there. One can often accomplish that manually by being a bit more specific (i.e. Sega Saturn instead of just Saturn), but sometimes its close to impossible to do that. With games for example it can be extremely hard to narrow down the search to a specific system, as every gaming site out there has all the systems listen in the navbar and thus will trigger even when the side itself has nothing to do with the system.
Can you point out any insecure parts in that system?
Only haven given it a quick look: It sounds like they have given up on anonymity, thus every vote can be traced back to the voter.
And lets not forget the Gutenberg Bible, with all those fluffy birds and decorations, who's supposed to concentrate on reading the text?
If one day all books come in highly interactive forms and every child has an iPad, I might start to worry, but at the moment almost no child has an iPad and fully interactive books are a rarity compared to normal books.
Why should there be one for IP theft?
Why should we restrict freedom when there is no harm?
The fact that the parent was labeled a troll only confirms the pattern I've witnessed, even in Scientifically-minded communities like /., of shouting down or censoring skeptics.
If you want to play skeptic, you have to show evidence. If you want to go agaist the scientific consensus, you have to show lots of evidence. The average Joe Shmu climate change denier has none, instead he just repeats the points that have already been debunked over and over again. Its no surprise that scientists are getting annoyed by that, especially when those wrong points are used to make political decisions.
As an adamant supporter of the Scientific method, I'm very disappointed that asking for baseline data and manipulation algorithms has been met with stonewalling and name calling.
The data is available and to this day there has been no proof of manipulation. Its exactly these kinds of lies that hinder an honest debate.
Proponents of AGW are asking for societies to completely revise their infrastructures and policies.
On a smaller scale they did it before with the ozone hole and guess what, it fucking worked.
Rather than continuing to escalate the rhetoric, climatologists need to return to their core data and analysis methods to present their cases in a fair and rational manner.
They have and it obviously didn't work.
Here a little thought experiment: Lets assume for a moment that climate change is complete and utter nonsense, how would you expect the world to look like? I for one would expect there to be a large group of climate scientists opposing the climate change theories and quite a bit of data showing that it isn't happening. How would the world look when climate change is right? I would expect huge industries, whose business depends on polluting the earth, to oppose the scientific evidence and lots and lots of FUD in the debate aimed at discrediting the scientists.
Somehow the situation today looks a hell of a lot more then the later one, then the first.
The prices of DVD-R (~0.046/GB) at least are getting pretty damn close to the prices of HDDs (~0.065/GB), especially when you factor in the cost of the DVD drive. With Bluray it might look a little different, but should still be quite close. Optical media just hasn't increased in space as much as other technologies.
Now of course solid state is a whole different business and prices are still more then an order of magnitude away from the price of HDDs.
You also have a mandatory two year warranty in the EU, which will add a bit to the price.
You put an executable on a Windows system and it's immediately executable by anyone.
So can you in Linux, thats what "chmod +x" is for. And even when you use a noexec mount (which no desktop distri I now does), people can still just use one of the dozens of scripting languages that you find on every random Linux out there.
The only security advantage Linux has over Windows, is that on Linux (or at least the major distros) you have a central repository of all software. On Windows you don't. So on Windows even something simple as searching for a driver leads you across a ton of dubious webpages whoes authority you cannot verify, while on Linux stuff just works with what comes from the repository.
Of course every now and then you might not find what you are searching for in a repository, but these days that doesn't happen all to often, my /usr/local/ has been virtually empty for years.
You could always just pay and not download all the games, as each game is a separate download.
True science accepts challenges either as corrections to a theory or as test of validity.
Yes, but that's a very different thing than what is happening with large parts of the anti-AGW crowd, which is using logical falsifies or outright lies as arguments, not data. This thing seems to be turning out just like the whole evolution mess, where one side has mountains of data, theories and predictions that explain the world around us and the other side has "God did it". The problem here is not that "God did it" couldn't be right, but that there is no evidence for it. The answer there simply has to be to ignore the side with no evidence, not to welcome the challenge it provides, as you can't argue with a person that isn't seeking truth or listening to reason. Back to climate science it doesn't look all that much different. I have heard lots and lots about flaws in the research and how it was presented, most of those claims either turn out to be false, misinterpretation of the data or just lies. What I don't see much at all is proper research from the anti-AGW crowd, where are the climate models that predict how things will change in the future? That tell us what the safe levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are and all that stuff? Claiming "global warming isn't happening" simply isn't a theory, it doesn't allow you to make predictions or tell you anything meaningful. It might not be wrong, but without understanding why it might be right, its just a rather useless claim.
When the possible consequences of our doing could be catastrophic and we don't know exactly where we are heading, just continue doing what we are doing or even speeding that up doesn't exactly sound like the cleverest thing to do.
I don't know - can you point me to one of them?
http://www.skepticalscience.com/broken-hockey-stick.htm
It's not a format, its just special syntax that you type into your editor that will get expanded to the full regular HTML. It's just there to save you typing, not replace .html files.
Except that his "lie" has been independently reproduced and been confirmed. Let me cite guardian.co.uk:
Then why exactly did the US attack Iraq?
The C++ FAQ can be quite an eye opener in that regard:
Why is cos(x) != cos(y) even though x == y?
The only time when using == with floats should be ok, is when comparing it to zero and only then if the zero comes from a direct assignment, instead of a calculation, i.e.:
float x = 0.0f; /* do stuff */ }
if (x == 0.0f) {
But even then its bad practice, as its abusing 0.0f as magic number, which should be avoided if possible.