"Fighting Poverty" -- yeah, by lending money to governments whose officials then waste it/parcel it out to cronies/squirrel it away in offshore accounts,
and then future generations of those nations' poor can be enslaved as these debtor nations go grovelling back to the World Bank to get more loans just to pay the INTEREST on what they got before. That's fighting poverty, all right!
>any studies that link games to real life violence
Of course. Here is one of several I found easily using Google, but there are many more.
But isn't this like asking whether there are studies linking smoking to ill health?
If you've ever played video games, the effect is so obvious that the only people who need to have a "study" are those who profit from selling the games and want to try to convince people they're harmless.
Q: If I spend hours a day breathing toxic chemicals, will it affect my lungs?
Q: If I spend hours a day looking at porn, will it affect my attitude toward women?
Q: If I spend hours a day practicing killing people on a video screen, will it make me more violent?
Q: If I spend hours a day bathing in urine, will it affect my skin?
Q: If I spend hours a day watching Eddie Murphy comedy routines, will it affect my vocabulary?
Aren't the answers to these and many similar questions obvious?
>How many businesses really want their web sites to market to people still using 56K?
You don't run a business, do you? The answer is that businesses want their web sites to generate revenue by giving clients and potential clients information that leads to a purchase.
Ask any business owner "do you want to lower your sales by filtering out potential clients who use 56K dial-up?"
What do you think they'll say? "Sure, go ahead, I want to lower my revenue." No, they'll say just the opposite. That's not how the question is presented when the web designer shows how cool the Flash looks on a local connection, though.
On a serious note, couldn't there be voluntary membership in a ratings organization
rather than just a few oligopolists? The scheme I've been trying to cook up is one where the readers
would all pay a set rate, contributing to a pool; then the pool would be split among the
content providers according to how often their content was accessed, as measured by some trusted mechanism.
That trusted rating system is what I don't know how to solve, but I still believe it's possible to construct.
This is great. Now when a newspaper publishes information from some
officialwho
declines to benamed,
the news people who publish the reports can be forced to name their sources and voila!
We'll have just a little more truth.
What? You say the White House will block any such truth-telling? Whatever makes you say that?
I am so tired of reading news based on sources that "decline to be named", speak "on condition of anonymity", or any of those phrases.
It really means that either the reporter or the source, or both, are cowards, liars, or lawbreakers. If you have something to say, SAY IT! Use your free speech! Otherwise, be quiet!
Cheap entertainment? Are you nuts? At $8.50 per person?
And the vast majority of the material the studios market to my kids is absolutely unacceptable. I wouldn't let them see a lot of it at all, even if it was free.
Cheap entertainment would be under $5 per person. Otherwise I'm better off buying a DVD for $14.95.
We almost never go to the movies any more. It just costs too much.
The CEO doesn't manage individual day-to-day efforts. So no, he doesn't need detailed technical knowledge.
What the CEO of a software or electronics company does need, beyond competency at managing a business in general, is foreknowledge of what the company is going to be doing in the future and how current efforts dovetail with that.
In short, he needs to establish priorities for the company as a whole and allocate resources to individual units and drive their efforts. A great CEO will assemble knowledge of where the market is going (not only his own market, but related ones) and be generating ideas for the products his company will be producing to meet those opportunities. Also terminating/selling/cancelling product lines whose life is coming to an end. It's OK to keep selling the same soap in different packaging for decades, but in the computer field, no company can rest.
The CEO can do these things himself, or share the responsibility with his execs, or gather ideas and information from throughout the company, but the one thing the CEO needs to do is to see that it gets done.
Without these development activities, the company will falter either by offering the wrong products, or offering one line of product that succeeds and then has no future.
I think this is what got HP to where it was before Carly came in. It didn't wait until the company was in crisis to develop new products, the way that many others do (e.g. Iomega).
Actually it doesn't work for ATMs either. There's a hack that's been reported locally where someone sets up a reader/screen/button panel over the top of an ATM faceplate. They read the card, record the PIN (that YOU entered), and says there's a problem with the account.
Then they can replicate your card and they have your PIN.
This is why I don't like SSI. There is no end to the number of clever hacks people will dream up, and I don't want to have to trust that ALL of my service providers have correctly thought about, designed, and implemented their security measures. At least now, if my Amazon ID gets cracked wide open, it doesn't affect my ability to talk to my bank.
And like any intelligent person, I may choose to read the NYT online by supplying my password on a public terminal, where I would never use one to talk to my bank.
In the past I've focused my thoughts primarily on techniques, but reading this article, it occurred to me that the most important part of using steganography is using it the right way, and constructing the right cover -- not necessarily the technique itself.
Using statistical methods, most steganography can be broken either now or in the near future if the steganalyst can spend a lot of time and computing resources on each candidate bit collection, and if you're hiding a lot of bits in each collection. The consequence: don't hide very many bits, and widen the search space by hiding your trees in a forest of significant size, so that the amount of CPU the analyst can use on any particular tree is low.
Key exchange is a great candidate for steganography. And to make sure the population of innocuous bit collections around yours is high, find a place where a lot of people around you are dealing in large quantities of bits: music collections at a university, or spam messages on an e-mail relay.
Single sign-on is attractive but will be horrible in practice.
Why? Because to implement it, all the services you use will have to be party to the same system and process the same set of keys.
Imagine that you use the same card or biometric to check out library books, start your car, eat at the university cafeteria, buy food, see a doctor, get cash, talk to your bank, buy on Amazon, and everything else.
Convenient, sure. But judging by the way banks and government agencies have massively screwed up the security aspects of their current online offerings, I CANNOT believe that they'll get the single sign-on process right.
What will happen is that:
1. When any one provider screws up or is broken into, thieves and/or the general public will be able to peruse your access history and key info at will.
2. The marketing will be frightening, as industry consolidation continues and corporations use your activity to sell things to you. The level of marketing now is deafening, but after all these databases are tied together, it will be unendurable.
3. The last dregs of our privacy will drain away inexorably. Kids won't notice because they'll never know what privacy was...but us older folks will be very sad.
This license has to change with the times. It can never reach a final state,
because its primary usefulness is in resisting co-opting attacks on OSS projects by
rich vested interests, and those vested interests
are the ones who control the legal system. The law changes rapidly, and as long as it does, this license will have to change with it.
Even ignoring the online banking is getting to be difficult.
I recently opened a new account and they told me "oh, by the way, online banking is free! All you have to do is XYZ to start using it." It turns out my account was already open to all comers if they happened to know my account number and part of my SSN. So I was FORCED to at least set a password. No, I haven't yet written a letter to the bank, because I don't think it will really do any good.
Eventually, as banks find higher profit in not providing physical branches, most people will be forced to do their banking online. In ten years I think we'll find there's not much choice. We'll actually have to pay extra fees NOT to do it that way.
There's a difference between an IMMIGRANT and an H1B HOLDER. An immigrant is immigrating, that is, coming for the long term to build a life and a legacy in America.
An H1B holder is here for the money, or perhaps is an intending immigrant who is lying to the immigration service. Neither of these deserves the respect that we should, and do, have for the many immigrants who have come and are coming to build America.
And as for contributing financially, I fail to see how someone who works in America and sends substantial sums back to a foreign country to support relatives there (whether it's India or any other country) is "contributing" as much as an American citizen whose funds stay in US banks and pay for goods in the US economy.
I have to say I have many great friends who are H1B visa holders. Without exception they are hardworking, admirable people whom I hold in high regard. But don't try to tell me their presence doesn't affect the ability of Americans to find jobs. That's a crock. All the ones I know are doing the work of two US citizens because of the slave-like hours they work, and they have no choice because being fired is catastrophic.
The H1B is grossly misused. It's misused by companies who want cheap labor without outsourcing overseas, and it's misused in labor statistics to show how it's supposedly "difficult" to find IT workers. It's not hard to find an experienced, skilled person and work with them for a few months to get them up to speed in a specialty. But that would require loyalty, on both sides, and Corporate America just isn't into that any more.
Jaded? Yeah, you bet. Only job I've ever been fired from was one whose management was given over to a team of Indians. And it wasn't the quality of my work that was at issue, nor my ability to work with foreign nationals. Both of those are my strong points. No, it was a quest to find slots for their friends in India, waiting to land in the US.
I was tired of it almost immediately after it was first used. Those basketball players acted like assholes, exactly the kind of American travelers to foreign countries that make me cringe (I also am American).
To this day, when I hear the phrase "Dream Team", I think "collection of idiots who should go back where they came from and crawl under a rock."
You're talking as though you're producing widgets.
But if you're producing code, raising your productivity by a marginal amount is almost certainly self-defeating after some point,
because you're producing bugs along with the code. Eventually you're producing more bugs than anything else, and it'll take you or someone else more time than you gained to go back and fix the bugs.
Everyone's tolerance level is different, but the effect is the same. Even PHB's that know this fact seem to forget about it when crunch time comes.
Another poster mentioned that Best Buy, like many other corporations, have changed their sales and marketing practices to such an extent that we now negotiate for electronics, rather than simply purchasing them.
The price is no longer fixed: it depends on coupons you may hold, on a competitor's advertising circular you may have seen, your willingness to buy insurance^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hextended warranty coverage, your willingness to divulge information in order to claim a rebate.
What Best Buy and other corporations haven't figured out is that we, the buying public, don't have any sympathy for them. They've set the rules, and we will take them for everything we can get.
It would be different if it was a single owner.
When I buy from a family-owned business down the street, I'm not going to cheat him; I will even pay more than the going rate, because I like the person and I like how the business is run.
But when I buy from a corporation, the gloves are off. If they offer a half-price deal and forget to specify a limit -- fill the shopping cart! About 5 years ago, I figured out that they are trying to TAKE EVERY PENNY THEY CAN GET FROM ME, so I don't feel the slightest pang of conscience when doing the same back.
I'm not talking about stealing. I'm only saying that, when dealing with Circuit City or Best Buy or Dell or WalMart or Safeway or ToysRUs or Home Depot or anyone else, the megastores have lost all pretense of actually caring about their customers. It isn't even slightly dishonest to gouge them if they let you do it -- because they're gouging you with every means at their disposal. Try it -- you'll find you enjoy the challenge of sticking it to them!
(And yes, I'm sure I'm the devil incarnate for some stores I shop in.)
>part of a larger trend of religious conservatives fighting tooth and nail against intellectualism in general. And that is what's killing our schools.
I don't think it's the evolution debate that's killing our schools. I think it's the entrenched education lobby. Have you talked to a teenager lately?
Forget biology, I'd like to see average students who can do basic algebra or discuss English literature in proper English. "Intellectualism" is so far out of their ballpark I'm not even hoping for it.
> The problem with this view (Omphalism) is that it's unfalsifiable.
Much the same can be said of evolution. The only thing that could possibly falsify evolution is God himself, appearing and saying "look, it was me all along."
Evolution is, by definition, whatever it was that happened as long as it doesn't include God. As we learn more about the evolutionary process, we modify our notion of what "evolution" is. Much of this work is scientific, but unfortunately much is not.
Science cannot rationally accept the view that God created life, the universe, and everything, since there is no apparent observable proof of His existence and operation. So a mechanism, "evolution", is postulated to explain it.
Some rabid evolutionists will immediately say "but it is observable! It is happening right now!" (Rabid Christians say the same thing about God's working.) The big question revolves around speciation. Not micro vs. macro, terms which have no agreed definition. It's clear that local adaptation occurs, and we have lots of data on those processes, but it's not at all clear HOW SPECIATION WORKS. It has never been observed.
The debate will be over when someone can describe a new species, past or present. We'll need to know its name AND THAT OF ITS PREDECESSOR, with a reasonable explanation of what's different in their DNA and externally observable characteristics, and why those differences make the descendant a new species. A new color of tomato won't cut it. I'm really hoping to see this in my lifetime. If evolution occurs at all, I think there's a good chance someone will observe it in the next few decades.
I've been reading for years, waiting for someone to record a past or current speciation event, but what I have found is that neither side needs any evidence; they both take their position by faith. Evolutionists don't need proof because the only alternative is creationism; Creationists deny evolution, despite whatever circumstantial evidence we find in isolated fossils, clinging to the need for a God.
p.s. I didn't much like the article. It said: (a) worms have light-sensitive cells in their brains, and so do vertebrates. (b) vertebrates have eyes that have something in common with the light-sensitive cells -- not clear what. (c) we therefore can put to rest any controversy about how human eyes arrived with their breathtaking complexity. (You lost me there -- seems I missed several steps on the way to this conclusion.)
I'd love to see a lecture series where they'd take a one-hour lecture from someone who knows what they're talking about, like Feynman or Knuth, and expand it with well-shot illustrations, commentary, and explanations for those who aren't in the field.
A continuous channel full of such things would hold my interest, and my anticipation, like nothing they've got anywhere right now.
Note my examples: both current topics and historically significant figures and subjects would be equally welcome. It would be cheap, too, and far more likely to glue me to the TV than, say, COPS or M*A*S*H reruns.
I think my demographic is just too small, though. Otherwise it would already be there -- it would be so cheap to do a good job of it, and there's so much potential material available.
I suspect they need source material that not only draws advertisers but spawns action figures and other marketable materials, and pi-mesons and sorting algorithms just don't fit the bill.
Because the only reason not to use solar power is the cost of the devices.
If I could get even 10% efficiency, an array the size of my house rooftop would generate 10kilowatts on a sunny day.
Not enough to make it worth laying out tens of thousands of dollars for a solar array, but if you could make the same array for, say, $1000, I'd buy one this weekend.
The efficiency doesn't matter much if the materials are cheap and renewable. Efficiency only matters if the arrays are very expensive, as with semiconductor solar cells.
In addition to LTSP and Lumix, discussed above, LinuxMagic makes Linux thin client products. I have never used them but a good friend who is a sysadmin tells me they are a solid product. If you're looking for something a little more turnkey that you can buy off the shelf, this might be the way to go.
Your ideal environment would be something that you can manage centrally, that will allow you to add clients effortlessly and at minimal incremental cost, and let some or all of your client machines work even when the boot server is nonfunctional. It's an interesting challenge, and you should find a number of solutions that will let you support many user activities without spending all your time managing the systems.
Instead of copying to secondary storage, I wonder if Apple (or anyone) has done any work on copying temporarily to RAM?
If a DVD holds under 5GB of data, and you are only watching DVD on a machine that has, say, 512 MB RAM, shouldn't it be able to play the entire DVD by reading, say, 5-minute chunks into memory and then playing them back with the disc stopped?
This would be a big win for battery life, and this special case would probably happen frequently enough to allow for it.
The major advantage you didn't mention is that stored procedures let you abstract your database schema from the programmatic logic that accesses it.
You may have many disparate applications (both web-based and non-web-based) in various languages which all access the database, and if you always do it via stored procedures, then you can change your schema without upsetting the application code.
This is extremely powerful, especially if you have a DBA, but even if you don't your developers can much more easily audit who is doing what.
For instance, say someone needs to add a column to table T; how to know whether there's logic somewhere that will get broken? You have to search for the table name T in all your application code.
If you use stored procedures exclusively, then you can know unambiguously what the effect of the change will be. You can ask questions like "does anyone actually use column C for anything?", or "if we change the datatype of column C, what code will be affected?"
You don't necessarily need a skilled stored proc coder -- after all, if your developers are writing their own queries anyway, wrapping them in a stored proc is not hard. If you need complex logic in the DB layer, someone's going to have to learn to do so regardless of whether stored procedures are used.
That secondary article ignores the most important point: efficiency.
Attaching a million vehicles to the grid is far less efficient (and less clean) than using large, stationary plants.
Our problem isn't that we don't have enough generators. Our problem is that we don't have enough fuel and we have to import it.
The article describes a non-solution to a non-problem.
I do WISH people would figure this out en masse.
You can alter your car's gas mileage significantly (like 10%-30% depending on the car)
by altering your driving habits. Being light on the throttle is safer, saves you money, and reduces the need for oil imports.
People who are heavy on the throttle are saying one or all of the following:
"I will continue my dependence on people who hate me and want to kill me."
"I don't care about my own safety or the safety of others."
"I have more money than I need."
"Getting to work 30 seconds faster is worth all of the above."
All of which translate to "I am the most important person in the world, and no one is going to tell me what to do."
It took me about 20 years of driving to get past these attitudes myself...basically I think it was the first war in Iraq that did it. What is everyone else waiting for?
Slashdot Mirror
"Fighting Poverty" -- yeah, by lending money to governments whose officials then waste it/parcel it out to cronies/squirrel it away in offshore accounts, and then future generations of those nations' poor can be enslaved as these debtor nations go grovelling back to the World Bank to get more loans just to pay the INTEREST on what they got before. That's fighting poverty, all right!
Of course. Here is one of several I found easily using Google, but there are many more.
But isn't this like asking whether there are studies linking smoking to ill health? If you've ever played video games, the effect is so obvious that the only people who need to have a "study" are those who profit from selling the games and want to try to convince people they're harmless.
Q: If I spend hours a day breathing toxic chemicals, will it affect my lungs?
Q: If I spend hours a day looking at porn, will it affect my attitude toward women?
Q: If I spend hours a day practicing killing people on a video screen, will it make me more violent?
Q: If I spend hours a day bathing in urine, will it affect my skin?
Q: If I spend hours a day watching Eddie Murphy comedy routines, will it affect my vocabulary?
Aren't the answers to these and many similar questions obvious?
You don't run a business, do you? The answer is that businesses want their web sites to generate revenue by giving clients and potential clients information that leads to a purchase. Ask any business owner "do you want to lower your sales by filtering out potential clients who use 56K dial-up?" What do you think they'll say? "Sure, go ahead, I want to lower my revenue." No, they'll say just the opposite. That's not how the question is presented when the web designer shows how cool the Flash looks on a local connection, though.
On a serious note, couldn't there be voluntary membership in a ratings organization rather than just a few oligopolists? The scheme I've been trying to cook up is one where the readers would all pay a set rate, contributing to a pool; then the pool would be split among the content providers according to how often their content was accessed, as measured by some trusted mechanism. That trusted rating system is what I don't know how to solve, but I still believe it's possible to construct.
What? You say the White House will block any such truth-telling? Whatever makes you say that?
I am so tired of reading news based on sources that "decline to be named", speak "on condition of anonymity", or any of those phrases. It really means that either the reporter or the source, or both, are cowards, liars, or lawbreakers. If you have something to say, SAY IT! Use your free speech! Otherwise, be quiet!
Cheap entertainment? Are you nuts? At $8.50 per person? And the vast majority of the material the studios market to my kids is absolutely unacceptable. I wouldn't let them see a lot of it at all, even if it was free.
Cheap entertainment would be under $5 per person. Otherwise I'm better off buying a DVD for $14.95.
We almost never go to the movies any more. It just costs too much.
The CEO can do these things himself, or share the responsibility with his execs, or gather ideas and information from throughout the company, but the one thing the CEO needs to do is to see that it gets done. Without these development activities, the company will falter either by offering the wrong products, or offering one line of product that succeeds and then has no future.
I think this is what got HP to where it was before Carly came in. It didn't wait until the company was in crisis to develop new products, the way that many others do (e.g. Iomega).
Actually it doesn't work for ATMs either. There's a hack that's been reported locally where someone sets up a reader/screen/button panel over the top of an ATM faceplate. They read the card, record the PIN (that YOU entered), and says there's a problem with the account. Then they can replicate your card and they have your PIN.
This is why I don't like SSI. There is no end to the number of clever hacks people will dream up, and I don't want to have to trust that ALL of my service providers have correctly thought about, designed, and implemented their security measures. At least now, if my Amazon ID gets cracked wide open, it doesn't affect my ability to talk to my bank. And like any intelligent person, I may choose to read the NYT online by supplying my password on a public terminal, where I would never use one to talk to my bank.
Using statistical methods, most steganography can be broken either now or in the near future if the steganalyst can spend a lot of time and computing resources on each candidate bit collection, and if you're hiding a lot of bits in each collection. The consequence: don't hide very many bits, and widen the search space by hiding your trees in a forest of significant size, so that the amount of CPU the analyst can use on any particular tree is low.
Key exchange is a great candidate for steganography. And to make sure the population of innocuous bit collections around yours is high, find a place where a lot of people around you are dealing in large quantities of bits: music collections at a university, or spam messages on an e-mail relay.
Single sign-on is attractive but will be horrible in practice. Why? Because to implement it, all the services you use will have to be party to the same system and process the same set of keys. Imagine that you use the same card or biometric to check out library books, start your car, eat at the university cafeteria, buy food, see a doctor, get cash, talk to your bank, buy on Amazon, and everything else. Convenient, sure. But judging by the way banks and government agencies have massively screwed up the security aspects of their current online offerings, I CANNOT believe that they'll get the single sign-on process right.
What will happen is that:
1. When any one provider screws up or is broken into, thieves and/or the general public will be able to peruse your access history and key info at will.
2. The marketing will be frightening, as industry consolidation continues and corporations use your activity to sell things to you. The level of marketing now is deafening, but after all these databases are tied together, it will be unendurable.
3. The last dregs of our privacy will drain away inexorably. Kids won't notice because they'll never know what privacy was...but us older folks will be very sad.
This license has to change with the times. It can never reach a final state, because its primary usefulness is in resisting co-opting attacks on OSS projects by rich vested interests, and those vested interests are the ones who control the legal system. The law changes rapidly, and as long as it does, this license will have to change with it.
I recently opened a new account and they told me "oh, by the way, online banking is free! All you have to do is XYZ to start using it." It turns out my account was already open to all comers if they happened to know my account number and part of my SSN. So I was FORCED to at least set a password. No, I haven't yet written a letter to the bank, because I don't think it will really do any good.
Eventually, as banks find higher profit in not providing physical branches, most people will be forced to do their banking online. In ten years I think we'll find there's not much choice. We'll actually have to pay extra fees NOT to do it that way.
And as for contributing financially, I fail to see how someone who works in America and sends substantial sums back to a foreign country to support relatives there (whether it's India or any other country) is "contributing" as much as an American citizen whose funds stay in US banks and pay for goods in the US economy.
I have to say I have many great friends who are H1B visa holders. Without exception they are hardworking, admirable people whom I hold in high regard. But don't try to tell me their presence doesn't affect the ability of Americans to find jobs. That's a crock. All the ones I know are doing the work of two US citizens because of the slave-like hours they work, and they have no choice because being fired is catastrophic.
The H1B is grossly misused. It's misused by companies who want cheap labor without outsourcing overseas, and it's misused in labor statistics to show how it's supposedly "difficult" to find IT workers. It's not hard to find an experienced, skilled person and work with them for a few months to get them up to speed in a specialty. But that would require loyalty, on both sides, and Corporate America just isn't into that any more.
Jaded? Yeah, you bet. Only job I've ever been fired from was one whose management was given over to a team of Indians. And it wasn't the quality of my work that was at issue, nor my ability to work with foreign nationals. Both of those are my strong points. No, it was a quest to find slots for their friends in India, waiting to land in the US.
To this day, when I hear the phrase "Dream Team", I think "collection of idiots who should go back where they came from and crawl under a rock."
Everyone's tolerance level is different, but the effect is the same. Even PHB's that know this fact seem to forget about it when crunch time comes.
What Best Buy and other corporations haven't figured out is that we, the buying public, don't have any sympathy for them. They've set the rules, and we will take them for everything we can get.
It would be different if it was a single owner. When I buy from a family-owned business down the street, I'm not going to cheat him; I will even pay more than the going rate, because I like the person and I like how the business is run. But when I buy from a corporation, the gloves are off. If they offer a half-price deal and forget to specify a limit -- fill the shopping cart! About 5 years ago, I figured out that they are trying to TAKE EVERY PENNY THEY CAN GET FROM ME, so I don't feel the slightest pang of conscience when doing the same back.
I'm not talking about stealing. I'm only saying that, when dealing with Circuit City or Best Buy or Dell or WalMart or Safeway or ToysRUs or Home Depot or anyone else, the megastores have lost all pretense of actually caring about their customers. It isn't even slightly dishonest to gouge them if they let you do it -- because they're gouging you with every means at their disposal. Try it -- you'll find you enjoy the challenge of sticking it to them!
(And yes, I'm sure I'm the devil incarnate for some stores I shop in.)
I don't think it's the evolution debate that's killing our schools. I think it's the entrenched education lobby. Have you talked to a teenager lately? Forget biology, I'd like to see average students who can do basic algebra or discuss English literature in proper English. "Intellectualism" is so far out of their ballpark I'm not even hoping for it.
Much the same can be said of evolution. The only thing that could possibly falsify evolution is God himself, appearing and saying "look, it was me all along."
Evolution is, by definition, whatever it was that happened as long as it doesn't include God. As we learn more about the evolutionary process, we modify our notion of what "evolution" is. Much of this work is scientific, but unfortunately much is not.
Science cannot rationally accept the view that God created life, the universe, and everything, since there is no apparent observable proof of His existence and operation. So a mechanism, "evolution", is postulated to explain it.
Some rabid evolutionists will immediately say "but it is observable! It is happening right now!" (Rabid Christians say the same thing about God's working.) The big question revolves around speciation. Not micro vs. macro, terms which have no agreed definition. It's clear that local adaptation occurs, and we have lots of data on those processes, but it's not at all clear HOW SPECIATION WORKS. It has never been observed.
The debate will be over when someone can describe a new species, past or present. We'll need to know its name AND THAT OF ITS PREDECESSOR, with a reasonable explanation of what's different in their DNA and externally observable characteristics, and why those differences make the descendant a new species. A new color of tomato won't cut it. I'm really hoping to see this in my lifetime. If evolution occurs at all, I think there's a good chance someone will observe it in the next few decades.
I've been reading for years, waiting for someone to record a past or current speciation event, but what I have found is that neither side needs any evidence; they both take their position by faith. Evolutionists don't need proof because the only alternative is creationism; Creationists deny evolution, despite whatever circumstantial evidence we find in isolated fossils, clinging to the need for a God.
p.s. I didn't much like the article. It said: (a) worms have light-sensitive cells in their brains, and so do vertebrates. (b) vertebrates have eyes that have something in common with the light-sensitive cells -- not clear what. (c) we therefore can put to rest any controversy about how human eyes arrived with their breathtaking complexity. (You lost me there -- seems I missed several steps on the way to this conclusion.)
Note my examples: both current topics and historically significant figures and subjects would be equally welcome. It would be cheap, too, and far more likely to glue me to the TV than, say, COPS or M*A*S*H reruns.
I think my demographic is just too small, though. Otherwise it would already be there -- it would be so cheap to do a good job of it, and there's so much potential material available. I suspect they need source material that not only draws advertisers but spawns action figures and other marketable materials, and pi-mesons and sorting algorithms just don't fit the bill.
The efficiency doesn't matter much if the materials are cheap and renewable. Efficiency only matters if the arrays are very expensive, as with semiconductor solar cells.
Your ideal environment would be something that you can manage centrally, that will allow you to add clients effortlessly and at minimal incremental cost, and let some or all of your client machines work even when the boot server is nonfunctional. It's an interesting challenge, and you should find a number of solutions that will let you support many user activities without spending all your time managing the systems.
This would be a big win for battery life, and this special case would probably happen frequently enough to allow for it.
This is extremely powerful, especially if you have a DBA, but even if you don't your developers can much more easily audit who is doing what.
For instance, say someone needs to add a column to table T; how to know whether there's logic somewhere that will get broken? You have to search for the table name T in all your application code. If you use stored procedures exclusively, then you can know unambiguously what the effect of the change will be. You can ask questions like "does anyone actually use column C for anything?", or "if we change the datatype of column C, what code will be affected?"
You don't necessarily need a skilled stored proc coder -- after all, if your developers are writing their own queries anyway, wrapping them in a stored proc is not hard. If you need complex logic in the DB layer, someone's going to have to learn to do so regardless of whether stored procedures are used.
The article describes a non-solution to a non-problem.
People who are heavy on the throttle are saying one or all of the following:
"I will continue my dependence on people who hate me and want to kill me."
"I don't care about my own safety or the safety of others."
"I have more money than I need."
"Getting to work 30 seconds faster is worth all of the above."
All of which translate to "I am the most important person in the world, and no one is going to tell me what to do." It took me about 20 years of driving to get past these attitudes myself...basically I think it was the first war in Iraq that did it. What is everyone else waiting for?