The problem is awareness. Joe and Jane user don't know and don't want to know about Firefox. They don't care about something that geeks get a hardon over. But once they hear about the great new features of IE 7, they will ask "How can I get this wonderful new product?" The answer will be, "Pay $500+/- or install Firefox!"
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
on
IE7 Bugs and Reviews
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Other posters have noted that IE7 will only run on XP SP2 and Vista. I think this will ultimately benefit firefox.
I think the general computer-using public have soured on 'the latest and greatest' from Microsoft. The UI is basically unchanged since Windows 95 -- all that the consumer sees is less crashing. So I don't think that a ton of people will rush out to buy Vista or even try to get to XP SP2. They're happy with Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, XP SP1, etc.
Now, when IE 7 comes along, and those people start asking "How can I get that?" the answer will be "Spend money and upgrade, or get Firefox."
Do all of these spacefaring craft differ from their expected trajectories by the same factor? If so, it seems that that would mean there is some as-yet unknown, pervasive force that exerts itself more-or-less evenly in the area that these craft have traveled.
If the difference of their expected trajectories have no commonality, it would seem to mean either some new force is affecting the craft differently, or each craft has its own mechanical explanation as to why they aren't staying the course.
Do *none* of these craft follow the expected trajectory? If not, then we really can't be sure whether this is a collection of mechanical issues or various effects of the unknown force. If one or two craft followed course perfectly, I would be inclined to say that the rest have mechanical issues knocking them off course.
Depression is not a biologically-based disorder. For *severe* depression, yes, but for any other type of depression, there is no PET scan or any kind of thing that would tell you definately, 'this person has depression'.
The difference is that depression, like a lot of other mental illnesses, is not diagnosed like diabetes -- you can't take a blood test and have it come out positive for depression. We don't have a good theory as to what exactly it is, what causes it, or even how it happens. The best we have is "it has something to do with the level of serotonin in the brain" because drugs that affect serotonin levels cause changes in mood.
Depression is different because you can be depressed because of something that happened. The brain is different because we think with it, just like the heart is different because it pumps blood, and the liver is different because is cleans blood, etc.
The difference is we have no objective way of knowing if someone is depressed because their mind is reacting reasonably to their environment, or if their brain is not working properly. The matter is complicated further because trauma can permanently change brain function later in life.
If we have a solid block chip, it's going to get very hot on the inside. Could they design some kind of fractal chip to create a reasonable trade-off between interconnection and surface space so that we could blow air over more of the chip?
For most links, a single references is all that's needed. However, for a site like Wikipedia, a lot of links take you to a disambiguation page, which links to different entries for different meanings of a word.
Also, for a reference site like Wikipedia, where there are a lot of links sprinkled throughout an article, would it be nice to have links to
Palace and
Westminster included in the link to
Palace of Westminster?
If spam is a problem, the best action to take is working towards the creation and adoption of a system that prevents spam. (Yes, I know that the new system will have its own exploits. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it. ) If you decide that the proper response to a spammer is to DDOS, how much time and effort are you going to exert DDOSing spammers? Wouldn't that energy be much better spent working on a system that doesn't have spam exploits?
If you do decide to go vigilante and DDOS them, how do you know you have the right person/server? What if they DDOS you back? What if they hack your network and use it for spamming, thus incurring DDOS attacks on your network? I would be very careful fighting slimy characters with slimy techniques -- they might decide they *really* don't like you and gang up on you! XP XP XP
I heard on the Al Franken Show that, since this is a federal crime, there is no chance of parole, but there is a chance of reduction of the sentence by 15% for good behavior.
Remember that modern states depend on people living their day-to-day lives, not protesting in the streets. It might be difficult to have an armed rebellion these days, but governments are regularly overthrown and leaders are ousted in Central and South America by street protests that shut down cities (and yes, sometimes by military coups).
Revolutions need not be violent. They can happen by civil disobedience.
I'm not saying that the system is perfect, or that it will last forever. But if we do have total global disarmament, and someone breaks the pact and ushers in a new round of arms races, then everyone is starting from scratch. Which means that there are less weapons altogether, and presumably less destructive weapons, whic means less destruction and loss of life.
Like I said above, global disarmament will not guarantee world peace. The point of global disarmament is that war, when it will occur next, will be less destructive and cause less loss of life, both military and civilian. We already go through cycles of war, disarmament, militarization, war, ad nasuem. The more we disarm in between, the less violent and destructive war will be. If everyone can agree to totally disarm in between, I think that is the ideal situation. I don't think we'll have a situation with anyone getting caught with their pants down, given human nature -- people are suspicous of their neighbors, and world leaders tend to be paranoid.
"For the level of disarming you are talking about, a drug gang could setup a basic metal-shop in the desert and build a few tanks, then drive into a local town and declare themselves dictators. It's not like the construction of these weapons is a big secret, nor would be hard to recreate in secret with modern tools and materials."
Yes, but for a large army of men with rifles, it wouldn't be hard to disable a few tanks. They control a local town -- so what? Blockade the town and don't let any food in. The new dictators won't be very popular with the locals, and they certainly won't be first in line for diminishing food rations. This kind of group could never mount any serious prolonged challenge to territorial soveriegnty.
My point is, to mount any serious, nation-state level war, you have to build *a lot* of war machines, and building that would rouse a lot of suspicion from unarmed neighbors. Simply, you couldn't do it without others becoming aware, and then the ruse is over.
In the case of pre-WWII Germany, most of Europe turned a blind eye if they weren't actively co-operating with them. In the past, we didn't have the record keeping or communications capability to track war-making ability. But now we do. Look at how Colin Powell made his case at the UN that Iraq had WMD (flawed as it was). He cited incoming raw materials, production facilities, employees, satellite photos, etc. As soon as a country stops communicating and allowing others to inspect their facilities, other countries will repsond.
Otherwise, you have this small-scale, NGO/terrorism group warmaking -- which can be fought with large armies with rifles. If national security consisted of
civilian police as first responders and primary intelligence units
strong national and international intelligence on terrorist groups
an army of soldiers with rifles, smart communications technology such as GPS and chat rooms, and transport vehicles capable of rapid mobilization
that would be sufficient to respond to these type of small scale terrorist threats.
So when the next Hitler starts up a weapons factory, all of the other nations in the world (remember, this is a *global* disarmament) become suspicious of these factories that they aren't allowed to inspect anymore, or can't figure out where all these raw materials shipped in are going, and then they either demand inspections and investigations, or else start economic sanctions and being building arms themselves.
This is in fact similar to situations we live in now. We have treaties with several nations where we mutually agree to allow others to inspect our war-making capacity, while we can inspect theirs. As long as you have open agreements, with paper trails and inspections, all sides have an incentive to stay disarmed. The difference with global disarmament is that every country in the world is taking part, and *everybody* wants to make sure that nobody else gets the upper hand on them.
Human beings will always have conflicts, from person-to-person level to the nation-state level.
However, we have developed different mechanisms for sorting them out, from courts and arbitration to fisticuffs and nuclear war.
Personally, I think everyone on the planet would benefit from global demilitarization. Now, this isn't some hippie-dippy "peace and love" idea. It's based on nation states agreeing to disclose their war-making endeavors and execute simultaneous destruction of such programs and capacities.
Of course, there will still be the need for knives and guns for tool use and huting, and personal arms for policing. But if everyone disarmed simultaneously, we wouldn't need dedicated war equipment such as attack aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, nuclear missles, etc.
Nations and terrorist organizations can still use dual-purpose equipment to make attacks on others, ala 9-11 where commercial airliners were used as missles, or when Timothy McVeigh use a fertilizer truck bomb. However, this is already a threat now and conventional weaponry isn't terribly useful -- the most useful tools against this kind of terrorism are good intelligence and police work.
Global demilitarization would not usher in world peace, but it would make wars less violent and deadly.
I've been reading through a lot of the posts here, and I think even some/people/ are still confused. What exactly is the difference between 0 and none? From what I gleaned, the article seems to claim that Alex used the term 'none' in a way that seems to imply an understanding of the mathematical concept of 0.
Is 'none,' as in "How many oranges are here?" "None," the same as 0?
The article also claims that Alex also used the term 'none' to describe 'no difference' -- essentially thinking outside the box of a stacked question. When presented with two identical objects and asked "what's the difference?" he replied, "None," presumably as in "there is no difference."
I'll bet that there are some properties of 0 that you aren't unaware of, and probably some other properties of 0 that you, or any other human, will never understand.
Does that mean that your understanding of 0 is a collection of 'silly person tricks'? What is your complete set of criteria for demonstrating comprehension of 0?
"The fossil evidence is pretty clear: Neanderthals had bigger brains than homo sapiens. In the human line, bigger almost always means smarter where brains are concerned."
This is definitely untrue. For instance, look at pygmies. They stand about 4-1/2 foot tall, with proportional brain sizes, yet they are as intelligent as any other human being. Brain structure determines intelligence, not size. We have no fossil evidence of the soft tissue structure of the neanderthal brain, so we don't know how complex or specialized it was.
"As for the 'evidence' presented from digs, the proponents generally tend to gloss over several key influencing factors. Here's a few:
a) Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than human ones. This was a necessity imposed by the requirement that they gather most of their food in the form of meat. Larger human tribes could afford to have individuals specialize in non-survival activities; Neanderthals could not. Simple economics, although the apologists don't seem to be able to grasp this one."
Elsewhere you cite the fact that there are only 2 digs of Neanderthal sites. How would you know the above is true based only on two digs?
"b) Hunting is much more energy and time intensive than gathering. Neanderthals collected 90% of their calories through hunting, while humans only collected 10% of their calories this way. Humans, on the whole, spent a great deal less time collecting food. That means more free time for other non-essential activities like making pretty beads. Again, pretty obvious when you think about it."
Again, with only two sites, how would you know this?
"c) Neanderthal tools were no less effective than human tools for their environment and the way they collected food. Some have tried to make this claim, but there isn't a single shred of evidence that proves that this is the case. Neanderthals didn't change their tools because they didn't NEED to change their tools - unlike migratory homo sapiens. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And they didn't have a whole lot of time to innovate anyway (see b above)."
Please cite a source where anyone tried to use Neanderthal tools to make camp. Anthropologists do these kinds of experiments all the time. I'm sorry, it's apparent to anyone who's ever used a tool that there's *always* a better tool for the job. Maybe Neanderthals had the mental capacity to make better tools, but not the fine motor co-ordination. But I don't buy your argument that Neanderthals had the best tool ever.
"d) There are only two decent Neanderthal sites excavated to date. Hardly representative. Because Neanderthals lived in much smaller groups their 'footprint' means less chance of finding a representative sample of their living conditions. We don't have anything close to such a sample, so making assumptions based upon those sites is not only unscientific, it's ludicrous."
1. You just made two such 'ludicrous' assumptions above, based on only two sites.
2. There are plenty more Neanderthal sites than two. A simple google search turned up this map on the first page of results. From the site: "The map suggests that specialized hunting was practiced at 17-18 Mousterian sites. The record could simply reflect which animals were most numerous or vulnerable in a particular environment, but heavy concentrations on a single animal are likely to be due to some degree of human choice.
This map is a much simplified summary of the available evidence. Not every Mousterian site is shown, but the black dots give some idea of the main centers of settlement in the early Ice Age. For further details, see Gábori 1976. Les Civilisations du Paléolithique Moyen Entre Les Alpes et L'Oural, Akadéamiai Kiadó, Budapest pp. 197-206."
Hm. With one minute of searching one google, I found a source that references 17
You can make the argument that traditional music is just a remix of notes on a piano on guitar, etc. If this is true, then all music is a remix.
Have you listen to many remixes? Many so called 'remixes' are very different than the original -- often times dance club remixes have a totally different rhythm and melody track, while using only a small vocal or instrumental track in key places. I think this is at least as create as making music by remixing the 88 paino keys.
No, a lion will chase off a leopard trying to steal his lunch, and the leopard will run off. Niether party wants to fight. Fighting another predator is an extremely risky and dangerous undertaking; even if you can easily beat the other party, there is a strong chance that they will injure you. Remember, animals don't have hospitals and can't rely on others, even of their own kind, to take care of them. A small injury can be a death sentence, if the animal is unable to take care of itself.
Humans, on another level, organize hunting parties with sneak hit-and-run attacks, and can launch relatively riskless attacks with weapons such as clubs, spears, and arrows, compared to fighting with teeth or claws.
If Neanderthals repeatedly steal lunches or otherwise become a nuisance, I don't think it would take much for a human to stand up in front of the group and say "These neanderthals are a problem. As long as they are around, they will pose a threat to us. We need to take care of the problem once and for all! Who is with me? If you're not with me, you're with them, and you're a big pussy, too. "
"Of course, we probably killed a few Neanderthals directly as well, but it wasn't much different from the way one animal kills another."
You mean like for food? Chimpanzees and wolves have been observed carrying out extermination campaigns. I think it's unlikely that we hunted neaderthals for food, but more likely that we saw them and their offspring as a threat, and murdered every last one of them.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is awareness. Joe and Jane user don't know and don't want to know about Firefox. They don't care about something that geeks get a hardon over. But once they hear about the great new features of IE 7, they will ask "How can I get this wonderful new product?" The answer will be, "Pay $500+/- or install Firefox!"
I think the general computer-using public have soured on 'the latest and greatest' from Microsoft. The UI is basically unchanged since Windows 95 -- all that the consumer sees is less crashing. So I don't think that a ton of people will rush out to buy Vista or even try to get to XP SP2. They're happy with Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, XP SP1, etc.
Now, when IE 7 comes along, and those people start asking "How can I get that?" the answer will be "Spend money and upgrade, or get Firefox."
If the difference of their expected trajectories have no commonality, it would seem to mean either some new force is affecting the craft differently, or each craft has its own mechanical explanation as to why they aren't staying the course.
Do *none* of these craft follow the expected trajectory? If not, then we really can't be sure whether this is a collection of mechanical issues or various effects of the unknown force. If one or two craft followed course perfectly, I would be inclined to say that the rest have mechanical issues knocking them off course.
...for robot insurance?
I saw it was a PDF right away.
Will this office also go after violations of GPL and other open-source licenses?
Depression is not a biologically-based disorder. For *severe* depression, yes, but for any other type of depression, there is no PET scan or any kind of thing that would tell you definately, 'this person has depression'.
Depression is different because you can be depressed because of something that happened. The brain is different because we think with it, just like the heart is different because it pumps blood, and the liver is different because is cleans blood, etc.
The difference is we have no objective way of knowing if someone is depressed because their mind is reacting reasonably to their environment, or if their brain is not working properly. The matter is complicated further because trauma can permanently change brain function later in life.
If we have a solid block chip, it's going to get very hot on the inside. Could they design some kind of fractal chip to create a reasonable trade-off between interconnection and surface space so that we could blow air over more of the chip?
Also, for a reference site like Wikipedia, where there are a lot of links sprinkled throughout an article, would it be nice to have links to Palace and Westminster included in the link to Palace of Westminster?
If you do decide to go vigilante and DDOS them, how do you know you have the right person/server? What if they DDOS you back? What if they hack your network and use it for spamming, thus incurring DDOS attacks on your network? I would be very careful fighting slimy characters with slimy techniques -- they might decide they *really* don't like you and gang up on you! XP XP XP
But wait, that would be the perfect cover for terrorist who *really are* plotting something.
OTOH, this would be *perfect* training for a strike team trying to catch a mystery perosn in a public transit system.
I heard on the Al Franken Show that, since this is a federal crime, there is no chance of parole, but there is a chance of reduction of the sentence by 15% for good behavior.
Revolutions need not be violent. They can happen by civil disobedience.
Hm, you have a very good counter-argument. I'll be mulling this over for a long time.
Like I said above, global disarmament will not guarantee world peace. The point of global disarmament is that war, when it will occur next, will be less destructive and cause less loss of life, both military and civilian. We already go through cycles of war, disarmament, militarization, war, ad nasuem. The more we disarm in between, the less violent and destructive war will be. If everyone can agree to totally disarm in between, I think that is the ideal situation. I don't think we'll have a situation with anyone getting caught with their pants down, given human nature -- people are suspicous of their neighbors, and world leaders tend to be paranoid.
Yes, but for a large army of men with rifles, it wouldn't be hard to disable a few tanks. They control a local town -- so what? Blockade the town and don't let any food in. The new dictators won't be very popular with the locals, and they certainly won't be first in line for diminishing food rations. This kind of group could never mount any serious prolonged challenge to territorial soveriegnty.
My point is, to mount any serious, nation-state level war, you have to build *a lot* of war machines, and building that would rouse a lot of suspicion from unarmed neighbors. Simply, you couldn't do it without others becoming aware, and then the ruse is over.
In the case of pre-WWII Germany, most of Europe turned a blind eye if they weren't actively co-operating with them. In the past, we didn't have the record keeping or communications capability to track war-making ability. But now we do. Look at how Colin Powell made his case at the UN that Iraq had WMD (flawed as it was). He cited incoming raw materials, production facilities, employees, satellite photos, etc. As soon as a country stops communicating and allowing others to inspect their facilities, other countries will repsond.
Otherwise, you have this small-scale, NGO/terrorism group warmaking -- which can be fought with large armies with rifles. If national security consisted of
- civilian police as first responders and primary intelligence units
- strong national and international intelligence on terrorist groups
- an army of soldiers with rifles, smart communications technology such as GPS and chat rooms, and transport vehicles capable of rapid mobilization
that would be sufficient to respond to these type of small scale terrorist threats.This is in fact similar to situations we live in now. We have treaties with several nations where we mutually agree to allow others to inspect our war-making capacity, while we can inspect theirs. As long as you have open agreements, with paper trails and inspections, all sides have an incentive to stay disarmed. The difference with global disarmament is that every country in the world is taking part, and *everybody* wants to make sure that nobody else gets the upper hand on them.
However, we have developed different mechanisms for sorting them out, from courts and arbitration to fisticuffs and nuclear war.
Personally, I think everyone on the planet would benefit from global demilitarization. Now, this isn't some hippie-dippy "peace and love" idea. It's based on nation states agreeing to disclose their war-making endeavors and execute simultaneous destruction of such programs and capacities.
Of course, there will still be the need for knives and guns for tool use and huting, and personal arms for policing. But if everyone disarmed simultaneously, we wouldn't need dedicated war equipment such as attack aircraft, aircraft carriers, tanks, nuclear missles, etc.
Nations and terrorist organizations can still use dual-purpose equipment to make attacks on others, ala 9-11 where commercial airliners were used as missles, or when Timothy McVeigh use a fertilizer truck bomb. However, this is already a threat now and conventional weaponry isn't terribly useful -- the most useful tools against this kind of terrorism are good intelligence and police work.
Global demilitarization would not usher in world peace, but it would make wars less violent and deadly.
Is 'none,' as in "How many oranges are here?" "None," the same as 0?
The article also claims that Alex also used the term 'none' to describe 'no difference' -- essentially thinking outside the box of a stacked question. When presented with two identical objects and asked "what's the difference?" he replied, "None," presumably as in "there is no difference."
Does that mean that your understanding of 0 is a collection of 'silly person tricks'? What is your complete set of criteria for demonstrating comprehension of 0?
This is definitely untrue. For instance, look at pygmies. They stand about 4-1/2 foot tall, with proportional brain sizes, yet they are as intelligent as any other human being. Brain structure determines intelligence, not size. We have no fossil evidence of the soft tissue structure of the neanderthal brain, so we don't know how complex or specialized it was.
"As for the 'evidence' presented from digs, the proponents generally tend to gloss over several key influencing factors. Here's a few:
a) Neanderthal tribes were much smaller than human ones. This was a necessity imposed by the requirement that they gather most of their food in the form of meat. Larger human tribes could afford to have individuals specialize in non-survival activities; Neanderthals could not. Simple economics, although the apologists don't seem to be able to grasp this one."
Elsewhere you cite the fact that there are only 2 digs of Neanderthal sites. How would you know the above is true based only on two digs?
"b) Hunting is much more energy and time intensive than gathering. Neanderthals collected 90% of their calories through hunting, while humans only collected 10% of their calories this way. Humans, on the whole, spent a great deal less time collecting food. That means more free time for other non-essential activities like making pretty beads. Again, pretty obvious when you think about it."
Again, with only two sites, how would you know this?
"c) Neanderthal tools were no less effective than human tools for their environment and the way they collected food. Some have tried to make this claim, but there isn't a single shred of evidence that proves that this is the case. Neanderthals didn't change their tools because they didn't NEED to change their tools - unlike migratory homo sapiens. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". And they didn't have a whole lot of time to innovate anyway (see b above)."
Please cite a source where anyone tried to use Neanderthal tools to make camp. Anthropologists do these kinds of experiments all the time. I'm sorry, it's apparent to anyone who's ever used a tool that there's *always* a better tool for the job. Maybe Neanderthals had the mental capacity to make better tools, but not the fine motor co-ordination. But I don't buy your argument that Neanderthals had the best tool ever.
"d) There are only two decent Neanderthal sites excavated to date. Hardly representative. Because Neanderthals lived in much smaller groups their 'footprint' means less chance of finding a representative sample of their living conditions. We don't have anything close to such a sample, so making assumptions based upon those sites is not only unscientific, it's ludicrous."
1. You just made two such 'ludicrous' assumptions above, based on only two sites.
2. There are plenty more Neanderthal sites than two. A simple google search turned up this map on the first page of results. From the site: "The map suggests that specialized hunting was practiced at 17-18 Mousterian sites. The record could simply reflect which animals were most numerous or vulnerable in a particular environment, but heavy concentrations on a single animal are likely to be due to some degree of human choice.
This map is a much simplified summary of the available evidence. Not every Mousterian site is shown, but the black dots give some idea of the main centers of settlement in the early Ice Age. For further details, see Gábori 1976. Les Civilisations du Paléolithique Moyen Entre Les Alpes et L'Oural, Akadéamiai Kiadó, Budapest pp. 197-206."
Hm. With one minute of searching one google, I found a source that references 17
Have you listen to many remixes? Many so called 'remixes' are very different than the original -- often times dance club remixes have a totally different rhythm and melody track, while using only a small vocal or instrumental track in key places. I think this is at least as create as making music by remixing the 88 paino keys.
Humans, on another level, organize hunting parties with sneak hit-and-run attacks, and can launch relatively riskless attacks with weapons such as clubs, spears, and arrows, compared to fighting with teeth or claws.
If Neanderthals repeatedly steal lunches or otherwise become a nuisance, I don't think it would take much for a human to stand up in front of the group and say "These neanderthals are a problem. As long as they are around, they will pose a threat to us. We need to take care of the problem once and for all! Who is with me? If you're not with me, you're with them, and you're a big pussy, too. "
You mean like for food? Chimpanzees and wolves have been observed carrying out extermination campaigns. I think it's unlikely that we hunted neaderthals for food, but more likely that we saw them and their offspring as a threat, and murdered every last one of them.