This can be at least partly mitigated by labeling the bogus fields such that a human can easily identify them as bogus. Heck, you could defeat a number of spambots without JavaScript, just by including a single text field with a randomly-generated name and the label "leave this blank". (Or, for 1-to-10 satisfaction surveys, a single line somewhere in the middle with the label "select 7 for this one"; this lets you identify people who weren't actually reading the questions, and adjust their weighting as you see fit.)
More precisely, the new definition does not attempt to classify extra-solar bodies as either planets or not-planets. It starts out like this (emphasis mine):
The IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
"I want room service! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered like they do at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo."
This would fail if the Republican primary requires you to have been registered as a Republican for at least X period of time, where X > time between now and the Florida Republican primary.
This reference confirms that the Florida Republican primary does have some such requirement, but does not specify the value of X. Anyone know what that value is?
Presumably this is why e.g. Wikipedia offers things like "I release this to the public domain; if that doesn't work for some reason, then I grant anyone the right to use this in any way".
Out of curiosity, does anyone know the reasoning behind the no-public-domain law?
Re:Things like this are easy to fix.
on
Google's Evil NDA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As I see it, the crucial clause here is "except with the advanced review and written approval of Google". This makes the difference between "cannot mention them ever" and "must run it by Google first".
To the extent that TFA says "cannot mention them ever", TFA is wrong.
If you think that Google will be evil and refuse to approve reasonable mentions, then you need to make a separate case for that.
I don't think its a good idea to have any apps. 'claiming to be' or 'suggesting' anything dealing with system resource privileges. If I have a text editor, how is it supposed to 'know' that user A is only permitted to modify use A's files while the same text editor in the hands of the admin can twiddle bits in anything.
Figuring out the Right Thing To Do (tm) for the admin is a non-trivial task, but otherwise a standardized system of suggestions (roll-your-own solutions will never build up critical mass, sorry) could help reduce the number of prompts, thus reducing the tendency to blindly click Allow all the time. You'd get a UAC-style "foo.scr claims to be a screen saver, allow?" prompt once when the app starts (possibly with an "always grant screen-saver privileges to this program" option), and thereafter you wouldn't be bothered with more prompts unless the program tried to do something else that screen-saver privileges alone don't allow it to do. If you get one of those prompts, or if you get "foo.scr claims to be an admin utility" when you first run it, then you should start getting suspicious.
fixedearth.com is similar, although it seems this guy has at least *tried* to do some research.
"Less barking mad than Gene Ray" is not much of a defense.
His research is shoehorned through an agenda of religious literalism, thus full of blind spots. For instance, he tries to write off parallax as due to the diameter of the earth, rather than the diameter of its orbit, thus nearby stars are about four orders of magnitude closer than mainstream science claims - but this fails to account for parallax observations made from the same location relative to the earth's surface, or for the period of oscillation being half a year rather than half a day. And if I can think of these things during a casual half-hour of web surfing, then he should damn well have thought of and addressed them during however many years he's sunk into this nonsense.
Bonus points for also screwing up his translational history (according to one critic cited by Wikipedia), and mega bonus points for pointing fingers at an alleged anti-Christian conspiracy.
I do agree with what I skimmed of his "non-Christians are not automatically going to hell" essay (there isn't any science in it for him to screw up).
Oh yes, and the "change what direction you're looking" feature is disorienting, because (1) both the map and the control jump 90 or 180 degrees all at once, and (2) the picture-in-picture street map doesn't jump. Google Earth's smooth rotary slider is way better, and maybe the 3-D thing I didn't try is similar.
try local.live.com and see their 45 degree photo shots and navigation. It's better.
I did, and no it isn't! Yeah, the 45-degree photo shots look neat, but:
Every time you do a new search, it covers nearly half the map with a "You must log in to save searches" dialog, requiring another click to close it.
If photo shots aren't available, it puts up another dialog about that - not nearly as tall, but wide enough that you have to scroll to see the close button.
Photo shots are only available at a couple of really-close-up resolutions.
While viewing photo shots, the zoom slider pops out a picture-in-picture street map, covering up some more of the map. You can click the right edge to minimize it, but it's so thin that I didn't spot it at first.
Being able to minimize the zoom slider is a nice touch, but not that big a deal because the zoom slider only covers a small area anyway.
There's no hybrid mode. Granted, hybrid mode would be trickier with 45-degree shots than overhead shots.
Scrolling is less smooth.
I didn't try the 3-D thing.
In general, I find the Google Maps approach (you can view photos at any zoom level but you may get some "sorry, no data at this zoom level" blocks) more intuitive and otherwise comfortable.
If you want to point to specific things which a company (or a person) does which is immoral for some specific reason, that's fine. But pretending that it's immoral to be as successful as possible by maximizing profits is irrational. So far, ALL you've done is assert that maximizing profit is irrational. Doing specific things such as cheating people or deceiving people or not honoring agreements can reasonably be criticized as immoral, and I would agree completely about such things. But profit is many times the result of doing what's right, NOT doing what's wrong.
If "maximizing" is an absolute, if you do everything possible to increase profit, then that list of things will generally include some immoral acts somewhere or other. Another way I heard it expressed is that the mandate of businesses nowadays is less often "make a profit" and more often "make as much profit as possible"; the latter is apt to bull its way into some sort of unethical territory or other.
Slashdot Mirror
This can be at least partly mitigated by labeling the bogus fields such that a human can easily identify them as bogus. Heck, you could defeat a number of spambots without JavaScript, just by including a single text field with a randomly-generated name and the label "leave this blank". (Or, for 1-to-10 satisfaction surveys, a single line somewhere in the middle with the label "select 7 for this one"; this lets you identify people who weren't actually reading the questions, and adjust their weighting as you see fit.)
Ahem. :)
More precisely, the new definition does not attempt to classify extra-solar bodies as either planets or not-planets. It starts out like this (emphasis mine):
The IAU's working group on extra-solar planets does offer a working definition, subject to change. See Wikipedia for more details. See also rogue planets.
"I want room service! I want the club sandwich, I want the cold Mexican beer, I want a $10,000-a-night hooker! I want my shirts laundered like they do at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo."
Either way, we don't want to pay them, because then how many other packs of assholes would try the same stunt?
"Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute."
I thought Henry van Statten did!
On the other hand,
life can be an endless parade of
transsexual quilting bees
aboard a cruise ship to Disney World
if only we let it!!
That was my first take on it, yeah.
"Dude, what the fuck is wrong with German people?"
This would fail if the Republican primary requires you to have been registered as a Republican for at least X period of time, where X > time between now and the Florida Republican primary.
This reference confirms that the Florida Republican primary does have some such requirement, but does not specify the value of X. Anyone know what that value is?
Presumably this is why e.g. Wikipedia offers things like "I release this to the public domain; if that doesn't work for some reason, then I grant anyone the right to use this in any way".
Out of curiosity, does anyone know the reasoning behind the no-public-domain law?
As I see it, the crucial clause here is "except with the advanced review and written approval of Google". This makes the difference between "cannot mention them ever" and "must run it by Google first".
To the extent that TFA says "cannot mention them ever", TFA is wrong.
If you think that Google will be evil and refuse to approve reasonable mentions, then you need to make a separate case for that.
Broken link, here's a working one
Oh yes, and the "change what direction you're looking" feature is disorienting, because (1) both the map and the control jump 90 or 180 degrees all at once, and (2) the picture-in-picture street map doesn't jump. Google Earth's smooth rotary slider is way better, and maybe the 3-D thing I didn't try is similar.
Okay, having it retain your last view in a cookie is also a nice touch.
I did, and no it isn't! Yeah, the 45-degree photo shots look neat, but:
In general, I find the Google Maps approach (you can view photos at any zoom level but you may get some "sorry, no data at this zoom level" blocks) more intuitive and otherwise comfortable.
Yeah, I confirmed it on XP Pro SP2. (homelinux.net is a separate server, haven't tested it there.)
YESYESYESYESYESYES
Obligatory Wikipedia link
That's not what the GP was looking for.
:: Google Moon : Google Earch
moon.google.com : maps.google.com
Does this clear things up?
If "maximizing" is an absolute, if you do everything possible to increase profit, then that list of things will generally include some immoral acts somewhere or other. Another way I heard it expressed is that the mandate of businesses nowadays is less often "make a profit" and more often "make as much profit as possible"; the latter is apt to bull its way into some sort of unethical territory or other.