You assume that there is some sort of central authority, or maybe a knowledge-base for evolution.
The knowledge base is called DNA. In this context, it's a simple memory-store. It only remembers past successes, while past failures are forgotten. So, it remembers things that worked. Not a single "central" authority by any means, but it does constitute a knowledge base.
Not quite. DNA is an information store that wire screens don't have. If the wire screens evolved to be like that through some kind of selection process that could preserve information gained via past attempts, then the comparison might be a little more apt.
A better comparison would be to that of computer simulated neural networks that are capable of "learning" (accumulating and applying information) through selection. And in fact, they are usually referred to as "artificial intelligence."
On the other hand, if "intelligence" is "the ability to aquire and apply information," then evolution is "intelligent." Consequently, the term "intelligent design" doesn't really differentiate the way its proponents claim, since that is a description equally consistent with evolution. What evolution is not is self aware, but it is an intelligent (information accumulating & applying) mechanism of design.
ID proponents prefer to just let you assume that "intelligence" includes "self-awareness", because intelligent processes can readily be identified in nature, but the self-awareness of such processes cannot. By arging in favor of a characteristic that is consistent with evolution, but claiming it is not, it is far easier to come up with supportive evidence. Anthropromorphising further plays into their hands, suggesting that otherwise undemonstrable self-awareness.
And mecha as well, but does anyone else wonder about the physics of these things? Some big-target loudly clomping mecha storms around without even the slightest indication of any kind of shock-absorption in the legs (jarring the terrain, instead), and I'd think the CPU power wasted simply on keeping these things stable enough to not fall over would be pretty inefficient, battery-wise.
I mean, get real, wouldn't real humanoid battling robots like those suggested in the cartoons just get taken to the cleaners by some low-slung more stable and efficient vehicle? Why the insistence on it being so humanoid, which might be argued is useful at the scale factor of real humans, but when scaled up X5 or X10 get really unweildy in a hurry?
The computer is far too important to businesses, governments and organizations to leave it to Cretaceous market-protecting tyrants, and more and more people are becoming acutely aware of it.
The real fear should be what is going to happen when these tyrants mutate and start looking for ways to work within Open Source system. Do you really want Microsoft contributing source code to anything?
And I don't mean 2x, 4x... Early silent films were shot at a wide variety of frame rates, as many were hand-cranked or there was a need to be thrifty with film. With a DVD, you're stuck with what whoever converted it thought, which isn't guaranteed to be correct. I recently bought a DVD of the Fritz Lang film, "Woman in the Moon" (Kino Video) which was a nice image transfer, but the playback seems quite fast to me. Problem is, playback speed of the old silents is somewhat subjective, and silents tend to get short-shrift in the market because it's too special-interest.
I've heard of mail-order processors who will digitize more directly from the film itself. Ideally they would scan each frame individually (and at staggeringly high resolution) like Warner Brothers is doing. But I doubt that any processor catering to home movies is nearly that advanced.
Even if they were, it'd look far worse than even a mediocre scan of a 35mm or 70mm movie. The most expensive transfer equipment available, used on an 8mm is only going to show you just how crappy 8mm resolution is compared with 35mm.
I think it might be pretty amazing to find out what we can't easily access, even that which is published on the net. A simple example: you can't differentiate "net" from ".net" on google, and net is an extremely common word so it is next to useless as a qualifier if your searching for info on the ".net" equivalent to anything common. Or try searching for the smiley face: ":-)". While those may be trivial and uninteresting specific examples, they illustrate at least one area where "you can't find it through Google". There's entire categories of things you can't find on Google, sometimes not because it's not indexed at all, but because you find too much and the needed qualifier isn't alphabetic.
Some areas have gotten better, a search for "furniture polish" does return different results than "polish furniture" (even when both are unquoted in the search), and I seem to remember having gotten stuck on one like that before. Quotes don't always do the trick because sometimes you don't expect the words to be near each other on the desired pages.
Certainly we've come a long way, but it still can, and should, get even better.
Ya gotta LOVE these things MS is doing. They're getting scared and such knee-jerk actions are clear evidence of it. I wholeheartedly WELCOME new ways that make it even more painful to run Windows on PCs. Every new frustration means more users that will transition to Linux, FreeBSD or the Mac or something else. Hooray for MS paranoia! Windows, if you can believe it, is becoming even less "free" (as in freedom) all the while Linux becomes more "free."
Apparently, it will be a considerably larger amount of kicking and screaming before MS gets dragged into the Open future than it took to drag them into the Internet, and frankly, that's a good thing. When you should worry is when MS finally gets around to realizing that they will have to get seriously in on the Open bandwagon themselves or lose out completely. The longer we can forestall that eventuality, the better, IMHO...
If IE would refuse to handle broken code, the site admins creating it would realize it more quickly and fix the darn things rather than go on blissly thinking it's working for everyone..
Not only that, it can paint Microsoft into a corner as well-- if zillions of pages are dependent on microsoft's handling of certain broken sequences, even Microsoft can't modify their browser in certain ways that would change that behaviour without zillions of people screaming about it and blaiming MS for breaking the browser...
The core problem we are dealing with here is quite simple. It is the erosion of something, though not of moral values (often claimed as such). What it's an erosion of, is respect for the law.
But unfortunately for the lawgivers and enforcers, it's an erosion that is completely understandable and predictable. In this new information society, it has become considerably more difficult, (read: virtually impossible) to hide government conflict-of-interest from the populace. The public has become more and more aware of corporate influence on government, agencies like the FDA, EPA and many others that are supposed to oversee industries that they are in fact, completely manipulated by, elections that give individuals the choice between two corporate shills that are only able to differentiate themselves to the people on how to deal with external threats, hoping it will distract us from the incessant internal abuses their parties are mostly responsible for.
Government and corporate abuse abounds, and except for a few cases is rewarded far more often than punished. You REALLY have to mess up big time to ever get caught doing something you shouldn't have in the corporate environment-- there's so many good places to hide the funny business-- and the Cayman Islands actually isn't a bad place to visit, too bad you never really even have to go there. Backed by corporate money, committing massive mistakes and abuses, governments are putting the squeeze on the people but are too greedy to care or too in denial to realize, that many of those people have become well aware of it.
So rather than face the real problem, corporations and government make it worse by attempting to deal with the disrespect for the laws by passing more laws which simply fosters even more disrespect.
Until a government pandering to corporations cleans up its act, it will never regain the lost respect of the populace. The more of them it tries to lock up or otherwise penalize, the less respect they garner. As usual, business entities like the MPAA and RIAA are being short-term smart and long-term foolish, making their stockholders feel they are working on the piracy problem, and using it as an excuse to further take advantage of their creative talent, while at the same time actually making it worse for all of them over the long term (someone else will be CEO/Chairman/Pres by that time, so what do I care...).
Given all that, why should someone feel even the slightest bit guilty about copying digital transmissions? Hasn't the line been now crossed well over selective prosecution and become selective persecution in the MPAA tirades? Well of course it has. Sure, generally two wrongs don't make a right, but when you keep being taken advantage of left and right even when you do the right things, it's pretty natural to lose faith in ideals such as that, and welcome the subtle ways to fight back.
Only problem with charging $300 is they then will expect it to actually work when you're done. We are talking Windows here, aren't we? I no longer use my PC booting under Windows anymore when I want to connect to the Net, I dual boot to Linux because it's impossible to patch Windows secure, and new viruses come out faster than McAffee and Symantec can update their virus definitions. As far as I'm concerned, Windows is in meltdown, and should only be approached when in a clean room and wearing a radiation suit...
Charge 'em $1000 and then go out and buy 'em a Mac...
My own trick for jerking control back from an ill-mannered page that refuses to "stop loading" via the Stop button, is to set the browser's Home Page to somewhere on my local disk (or about:blank, but a local file is more of a sure thing), then I use the Home button as an emergency stop/escape hatch.
The page I most often run into this is news.google.com, which is my home page. And the reason I most often run into this there, is because FF insists on loading "home" when doing a "New Window" which is a bogus assumption-- I never want to do that so I immediately hit STOP and get to watch it have no effect. IE is smarter in the New Window regard, duping the current window, which is far more likely to be what I'm after. I think it was Netscape that used to use blank (it's been a long time, so I don't recall) which was also a better choice than HOME...
Good idea about configuring HOME as a STOP. The HOME page in FF is pretty useless as anything but a blank anyway, for the reasons I just stated above...
And that essentially, is their problem. Unfortunately for them, what they actually have iscustomers, and customers aren't dumb-as-a-stick which is what consumer breaks down to.
What's rather funny, when you think about it every time they label us as consumers they are labelling themselves as well-- as just producers. Just as stick-dumb as consumers. Customers on the other hand, must be met with entities of a little more intelligence, salesmen (remember, I'm comparing it with producers here), marketeers, somewhat intelligent service entities of some kind.
Sure, it's far easier to produce for a consumer than it is to sell to a customer. But if what you have is customers, producers make pretty lousy salesmen.
The move away from the command line was a move backwards IMHO. Modern UIs are optimized for novice users at the expense of more expert users. Proponents of these new UIs were ignorant of or simply ignored the following:
Most users have 10 fingers, not just 1 or 2 (or 11 or 12, either). Some are even touch-typists so giving them additional buttons and devices that take their hands away from home position introduces notable inefficiencies. The mouse is good for drawing and other visual operations, but many people don't use their computer for that purpose and trying to use a modern graphics UI without a mouse is practically impossible.
Type-ahead was a useful feature that we've lost-- yet the original reason for it remains (computers can often be slower than humans). In fact, most UIs now seem to think they know more about what the user wants to do than the user does, even while the user is in the middle of typing something into an input box-- focus is OFTEN stolen while typing, even by the same application (Firefox for example, does it routinely to great annoyance-- try typing into an input box while a page is loading). The user now has to synchronize with the computer, a clearly undesirable characteristic that has no type-ahead equivalent feature to help compensate for.
Most "novice" users don't stay novices forever, so features that trade away expert efficiencies for newbie ease-of-use are misguided. Especially now that we no longer have a need to convince novices that computers are useful tools, as we did in the early days. Weakening the power of the interface is not a good tradeoff for a decent education.
Graphic UIs need the following features to be considered "improved" as far as I'm concerned:
The user is KING. The UI should NOT ALLOW applications to steal input focus while the user is typing. PERIOD. FOR ANY REASON. It should be ABSOLUTELY ENFORCED in the UI. Popup messages are OK, as long as they don't steal focus or cover up the input box in question. The UI should be able to intelligently determine when a user is done with his input-- or at least until there is a sufficient (probably adjustable) pause. Also, ANY APPLICATION SHOULD HAVE AN EASY MEANS OF INSTANTLY KILLING IT, EVEN WHILE IT'S BEING LOADED. Maybe I should say ESPECIALLY while it's being loaded. I can't think of how many times I've mis-aimed the mouse selection and caused some application to start up that takes minutes to load. I'm getting pretty darn quick at pulling up the Windows task manager and killing tasks, though even that often isn't quick enough as sometimes it's simply a matter of windows taking forever to load a huge binary and it's still loading, so the task doesn't yet show up in the task manager-- UNACCEPTABLE. And with Linux, even if I have a command-line window handy where I can do a ps and a kill, it's not as easy as the old ctrl-\ or ctrl-c that will instantly stop a process even during startup (and a ctrl-z job control equivalent would be a useful graphic UI thing, too!)
Have you noticed I'm impatient with computers-- well, that is MY RIGHT as a USER. I DON'T wait for a computer to do STUPID THINGS that it shouldn't be doing-- I've been known to just hit the hard reset on the CPU when booting is a more intelligent thing for it to be doing than the ridiculous thrashing around trying to load junk I don't want is going on. I can put up with lousy aesthetics as long as they're not wasting my time as well. Does it risk trashing drives and losing data? Quite possibly, but I'm prepared for that as I backup often-- not because I need to but because I can see how badly many of the UIs work. I wouldn't even NEED to do this if the UI didn't cover up OS-level control over processes-- but when it does, the RESET button is the only control you have over runaway GUI processes and I'm not afraid to use it. Maybe what I really need is an always-running keep-focus-where-I-set-it and instantly-kill-any-process utility. Now there's an idea, hmmm...
Evolution and guidance are mutually exclusive terms. Development based on guidance is not evolution, as evolutionary development is by definition a process that does not involve guidance.
No, as a matter of fact, evolutionary natural selection is guidance. The core difference between ID and Evolution is that ID proposes that the guidance is self-aware though they don't usually single out that aspect of it, as that is not what any of the data they use in argument for ID shows, even where ID proponents interpretation of it is accurate.
The term intelligent does not have to include self-aware, as natural selection can itself be seen as an intelligent and a design process. American Heritage defines "intelligent" as "the ability to aquire and apply knowledge" among other definitions, which is an accurate description of a mechanistic DNA selected by natural selection. And virtually none of the ID arguments are inconsistent with a purely mechanistic definition of intelligence or design, NONE of their arguments, even if accurate interpretations of data (which many are not), actually require the intelligence to be self-aware. But they neglect to mention that particular detail as it undermines the religious case they are trying to make. In doing so, they reveal the religious, unscientific nature of their motivations.
Ultimately, this will force ID propoents into the corner of claiming that since the mechanical intelligence of "artificial intelligence" was constructed by self-aware programmers, that the mere existence of a mechanistic intelligent design process in nature would require some form of self-aware designer, and we're back to the same tired old unsupportable creationist "watchmaker" argument (which is indeed all the ID argument is, merely in an new form). By then though, it'll be even harder to ignore the fact that randomness filtered by various arbitrary selection processes can produce a reduction in randomness and thereby produce structure (all of which can be realtively trivially demonstrated by mathematical simulation). This fact alone lets the hot air out of the ID argument, as if self-awareness is not a requirement of the "intelligence" or "design" of the ID theory, most if its proponents will lose any interest in it.
These sorts of consumer products are what will REALLY show the non-technical consumers the benefits of open source in their pocket devices. They will soon come to see that once they buy the product it does not remain static, but will adapt as user groups form that contain techies motivated to extend the products capabilities. As more and more consumers realize the advantages, the market for open-source based devices will increase, and hopefully open-source will become an important sales feature.
Companies will then compete with more flexible hardware, attempting to leave some room for unplanned enhancements or variations, in an effort to help the product gain a life of its own and sales take off accordingly...
And the result should be a series of amazing and unusual applications as devices are adapted to unexpected and imaginative uses.
Especially once USB peer-to-peer enhancments become more widespread (or Firewire), eliminating the need for a "computer" to drive them, and digital cameras can then connect directly to media players, etc., a lot of new "field" applications may arise from open-source pocket devices.
Anyone seen a Linux-based digital camera yet? I could think of quite a few features I'd like to homebrew onto one of those...
Bridging to the public internet from corpnet was also prohibited for obvious reasons.
I presume you mean the obvious reason that Windows is simply too insecure...
And as one other poster said-- if Microsoft can't make their systems secure enough when they're bridged to the internet, how can they expect us to?
That reason has also become all too obvious to me-- the MS04-011 security fix that came out which then caused the followup 841382 on W2kPro, followed by McAfee claiming that the W32/RBOT-FP worm that hit some systems at work which wasn't caught by their program was "not a virus" but "a Windows upgrade issue" were the last straws for me-- I now boot Linux when I want to surf the web, and only boot Windows when I'm not on the web (and make sure my modem is turned OFF). It's taken a lot of stress out of life...
My proxy filter disables such javaisms...
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Which I consider a GOOD THING(TM).
Anything that's operating on my keystrokes (or on my computer, for that matter) while I'm typing is a BAD THING(TM). Especially things that steal input focus. Can you tell? I really miss the typeahead feature we used to have before the GUI days, at which point we all regressed from 10-finger organisms to 1-finger ones (ever seen a mouse that gives you more than one arrow?)
The absolute WORST flavor of this "anticipatory" typing feature is the Unix shell used by SCO that tries to guess the directory I mistyped when doing a "cd"-- as invariably, by the time I notice it's promted me for the variation, I've already entered most of the keystrokes to correct the problem and find out they've been gobbled up by the "Is this what you meant?" input prompt...
On the other hand, has Google finally fixed something that NEEDS fixing-- disabling the "esc-key-deletes-all-your-text" in large textboxes (at least, in IE)? It can be disabled pretty easily in javascript (and should be, as there's no UNDO and anyone who uses "vi" will invariably hit it). I've added it to my proxyfilter, but I still get hit by it when I'm using someone elses computer...
What I'd really like to see is better browser features that will impose USER configured constraints on web pages rather than the other way around-- not just "no popups", but a comprehensive "disallow this Java or Javascript feature, or radically alter it" or "use this editing paradigm in textareas"-- stuff that will make life difficult for page designers rather than all this stuff for page designers to make life difficult for users...
There should be some feature in slashcode to remind people who inevitably try to post this that as soon as someone can fake your fingerprint or retinal scan, you are forked for life because you can never change those things.
Sure you can-- just record someone else's like was done to you, and use that...
So, if someone finds your paper, all they have to do is try guessing simple words like "bank," "ebay," etc., or bruteforce a batch of dictionary words...
Yeah, and I'll wager a goodly portion of employees keep it on a post-it note stuck to the front of their monitor or under their keyboard.
Get real-- one critical characteristic of a truly secure password is that no human being knows what it is. Any security system that is dependent on user behavior is seriously flawed.
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You assume that there is some sort of central authority, or maybe a knowledge-base for evolution.
The knowledge base is called DNA. In this context, it's a simple memory-store. It only remembers past successes, while past failures are forgotten. So, it remembers things that worked. Not a single "central" authority by any means, but it does constitute a knowledge base.
Not quite. DNA is an information store that wire screens don't have. If the wire screens evolved to be like that through some kind of selection process that could preserve information gained via past attempts, then the comparison might be a little more apt.
A better comparison would be to that of computer simulated neural networks that are capable of "learning" (accumulating and applying information) through selection. And in fact, they are usually referred to as "artificial intelligence."
On the other hand, if "intelligence" is "the ability to aquire and apply information," then evolution is "intelligent." Consequently, the term "intelligent design" doesn't really differentiate the way its proponents claim, since that is a description equally consistent with evolution. What evolution is not is self aware, but it is an intelligent (information accumulating & applying) mechanism of design.
ID proponents prefer to just let you assume that "intelligence" includes "self-awareness", because intelligent processes can readily be identified in nature, but the self-awareness of such processes cannot. By arging in favor of a characteristic that is consistent with evolution, but claiming it is not, it is far easier to come up with supportive evidence. Anthropromorphising further plays into their hands, suggesting that otherwise undemonstrable self-awareness.
And mecha as well, but does anyone else wonder about the physics of these things? Some big-target loudly clomping mecha storms around without even the slightest indication of any kind of shock-absorption in the legs (jarring the terrain, instead), and I'd think the CPU power wasted simply on keeping these things stable enough to not fall over would be pretty inefficient, battery-wise.
I mean, get real, wouldn't real humanoid battling robots like those suggested in the cartoons just get taken to the cleaners by some low-slung more stable and efficient vehicle? Why the insistence on it being so humanoid, which might be argued is useful at the scale factor of real humans, but when scaled up X5 or X10 get really unweildy in a hurry?
that is killing off the dinosaurs...
The computer is far too important to businesses, governments and organizations to leave it to Cretaceous market-protecting tyrants, and more and more people are becoming acutely aware of it.
The real fear should be what is going to happen when these tyrants mutate and start looking for ways to work within Open Source system. Do you really want Microsoft contributing source code to anything?
And I don't mean 2x, 4x... Early silent films were shot at a wide variety of frame rates, as many were hand-cranked or there was a need to be thrifty with film. With a DVD, you're stuck with what whoever converted it thought, which isn't guaranteed to be correct. I recently bought a DVD of the Fritz Lang film, "Woman in the Moon" (Kino Video) which was a nice image transfer, but the playback seems quite fast to me. Problem is, playback speed of the old silents is somewhat subjective, and silents tend to get short-shrift in the market because it's too special-interest.
I've heard of mail-order processors who will digitize more directly from the film itself. Ideally they would scan each frame individually (and at staggeringly high resolution) like Warner Brothers is doing. But I doubt that any processor catering to home movies is nearly that advanced.
Even if they were, it'd look far worse than even a mediocre scan of a 35mm or 70mm movie. The most expensive transfer equipment available, used on an 8mm is only going to show you just how crappy 8mm resolution is compared with 35mm.
I think it might be pretty amazing to find out what we can't easily access, even that which is published on the net. A simple example: you can't differentiate "net" from ".net" on google, and net is an extremely common word so it is next to useless as a qualifier if your searching for info on the ".net" equivalent to anything common. Or try searching for the smiley face: ":-)". While those may be trivial and uninteresting specific examples, they illustrate at least one area where "you can't find it through Google". There's entire categories of things you can't find on Google, sometimes not because it's not indexed at all, but because you find too much and the needed qualifier isn't alphabetic.
Some areas have gotten better, a search for "furniture polish" does return different results than "polish furniture" (even when both are unquoted in the search), and I seem to remember having gotten stuck on one like that before. Quotes don't always do the trick because sometimes you don't expect the words to be near each other on the desired pages.
Certainly we've come a long way, but it still can, and should, get even better.
Ya gotta LOVE these things MS is doing. They're getting scared and such knee-jerk actions are clear evidence of it. I wholeheartedly WELCOME new ways that make it even more painful to run Windows on PCs. Every new frustration means more users that will transition to Linux, FreeBSD or the Mac or something else. Hooray for MS paranoia! Windows, if you can believe it, is becoming even less "free" (as in freedom) all the while Linux becomes more "free."
Apparently, it will be a considerably larger amount of kicking and screaming before MS gets dragged into the Open future than it took to drag them into the Internet, and frankly, that's a good thing. When you should worry is when MS finally gets around to realizing that they will have to get seriously in on the Open bandwagon themselves or lose out completely. The longer we can forestall that eventuality, the better, IMHO...
If IE would refuse to handle broken code, the site admins creating it would realize it more quickly and fix the darn things rather than go on blissly thinking it's working for everyone..
Not only that, it can paint Microsoft into a corner as well-- if zillions of pages are dependent on microsoft's handling of certain broken sequences, even Microsoft can't modify their browser in certain ways that would change that behaviour without zillions of people screaming about it and blaiming MS for breaking the browser...
The core problem we are dealing with here is quite simple. It is the erosion of something, though not of moral values (often claimed as such). What it's an erosion of, is respect for the law.
But unfortunately for the lawgivers and enforcers, it's an erosion that is completely understandable and predictable. In this new information society, it has become considerably more difficult, (read: virtually impossible) to hide government conflict-of-interest from the populace. The public has become more and more aware of corporate influence on government, agencies like the FDA, EPA and many others that are supposed to oversee industries that they are in fact, completely manipulated by, elections that give individuals the choice between two corporate shills that are only able to differentiate themselves to the people on how to deal with external threats, hoping it will distract us from the incessant internal abuses their parties are mostly responsible for.
Government and corporate abuse abounds, and except for a few cases is rewarded far more often than punished. You REALLY have to mess up big time to ever get caught doing something you shouldn't have in the corporate environment-- there's so many good places to hide the funny business-- and the Cayman Islands actually isn't a bad place to visit, too bad you never really even have to go there. Backed by corporate money, committing massive mistakes and abuses, governments are putting the squeeze on the people but are too greedy to care or too in denial to realize, that many of those people have become well aware of it.
So rather than face the real problem, corporations and government make it worse by attempting to deal with the disrespect for the laws by passing more laws which simply fosters even more disrespect.
Until a government pandering to corporations cleans up its act, it will never regain the lost respect of the populace. The more of them it tries to lock up or otherwise penalize, the less respect they garner. As usual, business entities like the MPAA and RIAA are being short-term smart and long-term foolish, making their stockholders feel they are working on the piracy problem, and using it as an excuse to further take advantage of their creative talent, while at the same time actually making it worse for all of them over the long term (someone else will be CEO/Chairman/Pres by that time, so what do I care...).
Given all that, why should someone feel even the slightest bit guilty about copying digital transmissions? Hasn't the line been now crossed well over selective prosecution and become selective persecution in the MPAA tirades? Well of course it has. Sure, generally two wrongs don't make a right, but when you keep being taken advantage of left and right even when you do the right things, it's pretty natural to lose faith in ideals such as that, and welcome the subtle ways to fight back.
Only problem with charging $300 is they then will expect it to actually work when you're done. We are talking Windows here, aren't we? I no longer use my PC booting under Windows anymore when I want to connect to the Net, I dual boot to Linux because it's impossible to patch Windows secure, and new viruses come out faster than McAffee and Symantec can update their virus definitions. As far as I'm concerned, Windows is in meltdown, and should only be approached when in a clean room and wearing a radiation suit...
Charge 'em $1000 and then go out and buy 'em a Mac...
performance...
So why is anybody surprised that their label is so familiar?
My own trick for jerking control back from an ill-mannered page that refuses to "stop loading" via the Stop button, is to set the browser's Home Page to somewhere on my local disk (or about:blank, but a local file is more of a sure thing), then I use the Home button as an emergency stop/escape hatch.
The page I most often run into this is news.google.com, which is my home page. And the reason I most often run into this there, is because FF insists on loading "home" when doing a "New Window" which is a bogus assumption-- I never want to do that so I immediately hit STOP and get to watch it have no effect. IE is smarter in the New Window regard, duping the current window, which is far more likely to be what I'm after. I think it was Netscape that used to use blank (it's been a long time, so I don't recall) which was also a better choice than HOME...
Good idea about configuring HOME as a STOP. The HOME page in FF is pretty useless as anything but a blank anyway, for the reasons I just stated above...
Does the STOP button actually stop an in-process page load?
And that essentially, is their problem. Unfortunately for them, what they actually have is customers, and customers aren't dumb-as-a-stick which is what consumer breaks down to.
What's rather funny, when you think about it every time they label us as consumers they are labelling themselves as well-- as just producers. Just as stick-dumb as consumers. Customers on the other hand, must be met with entities of a little more intelligence, salesmen (remember, I'm comparing it with producers here), marketeers, somewhat intelligent service entities of some kind.
Sure, it's far easier to produce for a consumer than it is to sell to a customer. But if what you have is customers, producers make pretty lousy salesmen.
The move away from the command line was a move backwards IMHO. Modern UIs are optimized for novice users at the expense of more expert users. Proponents of these new UIs were ignorant of or simply ignored the following:
Most users have 10 fingers, not just 1 or 2 (or 11 or 12, either). Some are even touch-typists so giving them additional buttons and devices that take their hands away from home position introduces notable inefficiencies. The mouse is good for drawing and other visual operations, but many people don't use their computer for that purpose and trying to use a modern graphics UI without a mouse is practically impossible.
Type-ahead was a useful feature that we've lost-- yet the original reason for it remains (computers can often be slower than humans). In fact, most UIs now seem to think they know more about what the user wants to do than the user does, even while the user is in the middle of typing something into an input box-- focus is OFTEN stolen while typing, even by the same application (Firefox for example, does it routinely to great annoyance-- try typing into an input box while a page is loading). The user now has to synchronize with the computer, a clearly undesirable characteristic that has no type-ahead equivalent feature to help compensate for.
Most "novice" users don't stay novices forever, so features that trade away expert efficiencies for newbie ease-of-use are misguided. Especially now that we no longer have a need to convince novices that computers are useful tools, as we did in the early days. Weakening the power of the interface is not a good tradeoff for a decent education.
Graphic UIs need the following features to be considered "improved" as far as I'm concerned:
The user is KING. The UI should NOT ALLOW applications to steal input focus while the user is typing. PERIOD. FOR ANY REASON. It should be ABSOLUTELY ENFORCED in the UI. Popup messages are OK, as long as they don't steal focus or cover up the input box in question. The UI should be able to intelligently determine when a user is done with his input-- or at least until there is a sufficient (probably adjustable) pause. Also, ANY APPLICATION SHOULD HAVE AN EASY MEANS OF INSTANTLY KILLING IT, EVEN WHILE IT'S BEING LOADED. Maybe I should say ESPECIALLY while it's being loaded. I can't think of how many times I've mis-aimed the mouse selection and caused some application to start up that takes minutes to load. I'm getting pretty darn quick at pulling up the Windows task manager and killing tasks, though even that often isn't quick enough as sometimes it's simply a matter of windows taking forever to load a huge binary and it's still loading, so the task doesn't yet show up in the task manager-- UNACCEPTABLE. And with Linux, even if I have a command-line window handy where I can do a ps and a kill, it's not as easy as the old ctrl-\ or ctrl-c that will instantly stop a process even during startup (and a ctrl-z job control equivalent would be a useful graphic UI thing, too!)
Have you noticed I'm impatient with computers-- well, that is MY RIGHT as a USER. I DON'T wait for a computer to do STUPID THINGS that it shouldn't be doing-- I've been known to just hit the hard reset on the CPU when booting is a more intelligent thing for it to be doing than the ridiculous thrashing around trying to load junk I don't want is going on. I can put up with lousy aesthetics as long as they're not wasting my time as well. Does it risk trashing drives and losing data? Quite possibly, but I'm prepared for that as I backup often-- not because I need to but because I can see how badly many of the UIs work. I wouldn't even NEED to do this if the UI didn't cover up OS-level control over processes-- but when it does, the RESET button is the only control you have over runaway GUI processes and I'm not afraid to use it. Maybe what I really need is an always-running keep-focus-where-I-set-it and instantly-kill-any-process utility. Now there's an idea, hmmm...
And
Evolution and guidance are mutually exclusive terms. Development based on guidance is not evolution, as evolutionary development is by definition a process that does not involve guidance.
No, as a matter of fact, evolutionary natural selection is guidance. The core difference between ID and Evolution is that ID proposes that the guidance is self-aware though they don't usually single out that aspect of it, as that is not what any of the data they use in argument for ID shows, even where ID proponents interpretation of it is accurate.
The term intelligent does not have to include self-aware, as natural selection can itself be seen as an intelligent and a design process. American Heritage defines "intelligent" as "the ability to aquire and apply knowledge" among other definitions, which is an accurate description of a mechanistic DNA selected by natural selection. And virtually none of the ID arguments are inconsistent with a purely mechanistic definition of intelligence or design, NONE of their arguments, even if accurate interpretations of data (which many are not), actually require the intelligence to be self-aware. But they neglect to mention that particular detail as it undermines the religious case they are trying to make. In doing so, they reveal the religious, unscientific nature of their motivations.
Ultimately, this will force ID propoents into the corner of claiming that since the mechanical intelligence of "artificial intelligence" was constructed by self-aware programmers, that the mere existence of a mechanistic intelligent design process in nature would require some form of self-aware designer, and we're back to the same tired old unsupportable creationist "watchmaker" argument (which is indeed all the ID argument is, merely in an new form). By then though, it'll be even harder to ignore the fact that randomness filtered by various arbitrary selection processes can produce a reduction in randomness and thereby produce structure (all of which can be realtively trivially demonstrated by mathematical simulation). This fact alone lets the hot air out of the ID argument, as if self-awareness is not a requirement of the "intelligence" or "design" of the ID theory, most if its proponents will lose any interest in it.
These sorts of consumer products are what will REALLY show the non-technical consumers the benefits of open source in their pocket devices. They will soon come to see that once they buy the product it does not remain static, but will adapt as user groups form that contain techies motivated to extend the products capabilities. As more and more consumers realize the advantages, the market for open-source based devices will increase, and hopefully open-source will become an important sales feature.
Companies will then compete with more flexible hardware, attempting to leave some room for unplanned enhancements or variations, in an effort to help the product gain a life of its own and sales take off accordingly...
And the result should be a series of amazing and unusual applications as devices are adapted to unexpected and imaginative uses.
Especially once USB peer-to-peer enhancments become more widespread (or Firewire), eliminating the need for a "computer" to drive them, and digital cameras can then connect directly to media players, etc., a lot of new "field" applications may arise from open-source pocket devices.
Anyone seen a Linux-based digital camera yet? I could think of quite a few features I'd like to homebrew onto one of those...
Bridging to the public internet from corpnet was also prohibited for obvious reasons.
I presume you mean the obvious reason that Windows is simply too insecure...
And as one other poster said-- if Microsoft can't make their systems secure enough when they're bridged to the internet, how can they expect us to?
That reason has also become all too obvious to me-- the MS04-011 security fix that came out which then caused the followup 841382 on W2kPro, followed by McAfee claiming that the W32/RBOT-FP worm that hit some systems at work which wasn't caught by their program was "not a virus" but "a Windows upgrade issue" were the last straws for me-- I now boot Linux when I want to surf the web, and only boot Windows when I'm not on the web (and make sure my modem is turned OFF). It's taken a lot of stress out of life...
Which I consider a GOOD THING(TM).
Anything that's operating on my keystrokes (or on my computer, for that matter) while I'm typing is a BAD THING(TM). Especially things that steal input focus. Can you tell? I really miss the typeahead feature we used to have before the GUI days, at which point we all regressed from 10-finger organisms to 1-finger ones (ever seen a mouse that gives you more than one arrow?)
The absolute WORST flavor of this "anticipatory" typing feature is the Unix shell used by SCO that tries to guess the directory I mistyped when doing a "cd"-- as invariably, by the time I notice it's promted me for the variation, I've already entered most of the keystrokes to correct the problem and find out they've been gobbled up by the "Is this what you meant?" input prompt...
On the other hand, has Google finally fixed something that NEEDS fixing-- disabling the "esc-key-deletes-all-your-text" in large textboxes (at least, in IE)? It can be disabled pretty easily in javascript (and should be, as there's no UNDO and anyone who uses "vi" will invariably hit it). I've added it to my proxyfilter, but I still get hit by it when I'm using someone elses computer...
What I'd really like to see is better browser features that will impose USER configured constraints on web pages rather than the other way around-- not just "no popups", but a comprehensive "disallow this Java or Javascript feature, or radically alter it" or "use this editing paradigm in textareas"-- stuff that will make life difficult for page designers rather than all this stuff for page designers to make life difficult for users...
There should be some feature in slashcode to remind people who inevitably try to post this that as soon as someone can fake your fingerprint or retinal scan, you are forked for life because you can never change those things.
Sure you can-- just record someone else's like was done to you, and use that...
So, if someone finds your paper, all they have to do is try guessing simple words like "bank," "ebay," etc., or bruteforce a batch of dictionary words...
Yeah, and I'll wager a goodly portion of employees keep it on a post-it note stuck to the front of their monitor or under their keyboard.
Get real-- one critical characteristic of a truly secure password is that no human being knows what it is. Any security system that is dependent on user behavior is seriously flawed.