I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision.
Agreed, the is what he is talking about, but was it not always thus?
When Mendel was laying the foundations of Genetics, the idea of DNA was unknown. He was working at the edge of knowledge, with no possible way forward. He described WHAT happened but could not even approach the HOW.
Now, DNA pretty much defines Genetics as a science. We understand the HOW somewhat better. At least we know where to look.
There must be more questions that we aren't even beginning to answer. WHY, for one (Why dna, Why here) WHERE for another. Did DNA originate here? If we find life on mars, will it have DNA? Or will it be totally different?
"To the best of our knowledge, the original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times."
The flying car should not be a problem. The only reason why we do not have it yet is not because of technical difficulties. We can hardly manage driving a car in two dimensions. Try to add an extra dimension for the movement of your flying car and see what happens. Think about the traffic control systems. Think what we have to have instead of traffic lights (That some people still do not pay any attention to). When you have worked out that, then come up with a flying car
So it should not be a problem, but then you promptly list a small handful of reasons why it is a problem.
Everything you've mentioned applies to the people driving it. I agree, the human element is the central weakness, and relying on humans to follow the rules is pointless, we can't even get you to turn on your spell checker.
But Google can make a driver-less car that works in two dimensions on a surface street bristling with moving targets and zero inter-target communication, and lots of stationary objects to hit. Such computer control would be actually easier in the air, where everything would be computer controlled, no stationary barriers, and everything would communicate with everything else.
So lets hand-waive away the control and navigation problems that are mostly human induced, and hand them off to the computer.
That STILL leaves a huge mountain to climb with regard to equipment durability, and failure proofing. Cars today are amazingly durable and reliable. Still, would you want to be flying in one of them? Or have them flying over your house? If only one in 10,000 or 100,000 flights ended in the engine stopping the results would be disastrous. What does fly gets rigorous maintenance and inspections by highly trained people. Not shade tree mechanics and burger flippers apprenticing as mechanics.
scenario 2 is less bandwidth, not more, because you'd be serving the same image either way
Not necessarily.
Most web designers use a thumbnail or a medium resolution photo on the web page. They do this so that the web paints fast. But they also know that most people do not click for the high-res image. This saves them bandwidth, often enough to serve the entire page in less total transmitted data than if they always sent the big images.
So you may well not be serving the same image either way, especially if you have a clue about web design.
But with google finding and showing the large ones, it could become more expensive.
In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.
If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.
This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches. Even if you don't serve that photo normally on your web pages, but simply provide a button or thumbnail to click for the small percentage of viewers that want to see the high-res.
Most visitors don't click the high-rez button or thumbnail. The few that do, don't matter. Until Google indexes it, then all bets are off.
Some (failed) web designers only put the high-rez image in, then shrink it into a box via the html IMG tag. (Then they wonder why people complain that their web loads slowly). These guys would see very little difference in this case, unless of course Google sees a surge of searches that just happen to find your Nattily Portman collection.
Lots of sites put hi-rez images on file, and link to them via a thumb nail. The majority of visitors don't request the hi-rez images, at least not all of them.
But posting a link to a high-rez image can get your bandwidth slammed, serving images, but nobody requesting the web pages. Especially if its porn, or happens to hit the search topic of the moment. Without the ability to serve ads, these websites make no money.
Of course, if the complainers had an actual clue, they could just put a robots.txt file in their image storage, which Google seems to honor.
Question: What advice can you offer to help the readers, and thus the comment posters, to strike a balance? Can there be some kind of 'kumbaya manifesto' to skip the quarreling and get to the matter at hand? Climate change, dark matter, even human colonization need well-tempered minds, of all persuasions. How do we get there?
Answer Adding A collapse Thread button in Slashcode would do wonders.
It only takes an astute reader seeing 5 or 6 posts before they realize that the current replay chain has gone hopelessly off the rails, with no hope of recovery. It seems that so may stories on slashdot are hijacked in this way, more so than back in the day.... We need a tool to tell these kids to get off our lawn. Failing that, give us a "Honey I shrunk the Kids" button, so they disappear into the grass.
Good grief. Christianity does not believe that "magic" defines the world. Christianity has believed since ancient times that the world operates according to strict laws that are immutable, and it names the underlying, latent principle that runs throughout those laws "God."
But if these strict laws are immutable, what is the point of "praying for something" which "Christians" are wont to do for something as trivial as a football game, or as unlikely as world peace?
If God is only a latent principle of laws, immutable ones at that, prayer would seem to be beseeching these immutable laws to change themselves.
Try writing software for a car.... We ship modules that are never updated (ROM parts anyone?)
Hmmm, that's not my experience. Both my prior car and my current car had software updates over their life, the new car within 5 months of delivery as required by a recall. Its still riddled with bugs that are obvious, and grousing to the dealer is of no use, because the software is out of their hands. If I install after-market software, my warranty is void on the entire vehicle.
Some XMPP clients are starting to add video, but for some reason, the world is rushing towards the browser for everything. I think its because a generation has grown up knowing nothing but web development tools, and have no technical skills outside of that area. It was easy to get into simple web page development, and progress step by step to greater and greater levels of complexity, using additional technologies to server pages in ever more complex ways, asp java, ruby, xml, php, etc.
Don't get me wrong, that's not a knock. But it does leave us with an entire generation that only knows how to do things under the control of a web server to a web browser. Since the only tool they know is a hammer, they tend to look at every problem as if it were a nail. As a result the stand alone XMPP clients are a dying breed.
Yeah - when the user tells the browser where to go.
Its always worked this way. You may tell the browser where you want it to go, but the web page returns content that fetches other content from other sites. (ads, page parts, images, etc) You don't need java script to see this happen. Step into your browser's control panel and turn off Java Script. You barely notice a difference in page presentation.
Its hard to tell if you're kidding or not, but on the off chance you aren't, web browsers have been opening sockets to arbitrary end points since the day they were invented.
Other than finding each other to start the conversation, I agree. The one thing Skype still has going for it is the directory services.
More to the point it will open up the ability to write skype-like apps for many website, forums, etc.
The security and privacy aspect that skype used to provide has been eroded since Microsoft took ownership, and started routing all calls through their own servers, and refusing to answer questions about monitoring. (One half suspects that Microsoft's ownership was government funded).
Description seems apocryphal, and the camera had nothing to do with it. Presumably, you are a law abiding driver and would have stopped for the red light even without the camera being there. Since you say he kept going, I presume he backed up and went around, through the red light and was probably ticketed. You could recover the damages by getting a subpoena for that camera shot.
I like it. P-Droid a good start, if Android built that in by default it would be great. The UI could be a bit cleaner, but I like it.
But still ROOT is required to install, so that rules out the vast majority of potential users. You shouldn't have to void your warranty to do the equivalent with your phone.
I shouldn't have to forego Maps just to prevent some other app from transmitting my position to advertisers. I shouldn't have to disable functionality I paid for, just to prevent some unwanted use of my location!
I should have a dashboard (just like the FTC suggested) that allows me to use my GPS the way I want, and not the way the app writer decided.
The seduction that these devices offer to too strong for people to give them up and not use them.
Given that, I see nothing wrong with the FTC recommending that consumers at least know when they are surrendering their location data, and have the option of turning that off in some game or social networking app, while still being able to use the Map application.
I only wish this suggestion came from the FCC as well, since the FTC, is more or less toothless.
If the FBI needs a warrant to put a GPS tracker on my car, I don't see any reason why AT&T or Google should be able to give my location away to some tin-star sheriff without a warrant, or worse yet, to JCPenny or Starbucks just because I walked by the store.
This is already done by Android and works perfectly.
Nah, it really doesn't do it in any meaningful way, and doesn't provide the level of fine grained control that is needed.
Sure, you get notification when you install an app that i uses this data, and can access that data, for this or that reason.
But you are never provided any indication when the app decides to use the data for some other reason. There is nothing in Android that prevents this.
Example: You install an email app. Obviously it needs to access your contacts to send email to them. It says it has to access the web, maybe to serve ads (because its a free app). You might never be told that the app might decide to upload all your contacts to some web site. You have no way of knowing when it does this, and no way to prevent it.
Andorid needs a finer grained control, one that says, you can't access my address book. Or you can't connect to any website, except this list (in the example above it would be some ad server). The user should be able to turn off some of the permissions at will. EVEN if doing so makes the app FAIL.
Right now, we get a Take-it-or-Leave-it list of permissions, most of which are poorly understood. Most people click right through these, failing to notice that the Game they just installed wanted to access their address book. Once they click thru that, they are never asked again. There is no way to know it happened.
Permissions should be select-able per app, even after its been installed. There should be a easy way to review which apps can access which bits of sensitive data, and turn it on or off.
Id rather the twitter app fail than have it tweeting my 13 year old daughter's location without her or my knowledge.
He makes no sensible assertion of "taking the atmosphere into account". It it totally not believable in ANY context. But I suppose if you grew up watching Star Trek you might be forgiven if your science education suffered as a result.
You can't achieve propulsion with a prop at a pressure altitude of 35KM AGL.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the argument that the author is trying to make is that the scope of new work is more tightly focussed than before. There have been relatively few new 'fundamental' discoveries in physics, compared to refinements and increasing precision.
Agreed, the is what he is talking about, but was it not always thus?
When Mendel was laying the foundations of Genetics, the idea of DNA was unknown.
He was working at the edge of knowledge, with no possible way forward.
He described WHAT happened but could not even approach the HOW.
Now, DNA pretty much defines Genetics as a science. We understand the HOW somewhat better.
At least we know where to look.
There must be more questions that we aren't even beginning to answer. WHY, for one (Why dna, Why here)
WHERE for another. Did DNA originate here? If we find life on mars, will it have DNA?
Or will it be totally different?
"To the best of our knowledge, the original chemicals chosen by known life do not constitute a unique set; other choices could have been made, and maybe were made if life started elsewhere many times."
Paul Davies.
Lots left to do.
Science doesn't know everything. Science Knows it doesn't know everything. Otherwise, they'd Stop!.
The flying car should not be a problem. The only reason why we do not have it yet is not because of technical difficulties. We can hardly manage driving a car in two dimensions. Try to add an extra dimension for the movement of your flying car and see what happens. Think about the traffic control systems. Think what we have to have instead of traffic lights (That some people still do not pay any attention to). When you have worked out that, then come up with a flying car
So it should not be a problem, but then you promptly list a small handful of reasons why it is a problem.
Everything you've mentioned applies to the people driving it. I agree, the human element is the central weakness, and relying on humans to follow the rules is pointless, we can't even get you to turn on your spell checker.
But Google can make a driver-less car that works in two dimensions on a surface street bristling with moving targets and zero inter-target communication, and lots of stationary objects to hit. Such computer control would be actually easier in the air, where everything would be computer controlled, no stationary barriers, and everything would communicate with everything else.
So lets hand-waive away the control and navigation problems that are mostly human induced, and hand them off to the computer.
That STILL leaves a huge mountain to climb with regard to equipment durability, and failure proofing. Cars today are amazingly durable and reliable.
Still, would you want to be flying in one of them? Or have them flying over your house? If only one in 10,000 or 100,000 flights ended in the engine
stopping the results would be disastrous. What does fly gets rigorous maintenance and inspections by highly trained people. Not shade tree mechanics
and burger flippers apprenticing as mechanics.
scenario 2 is less bandwidth, not more, because you'd be serving the same image either way
Not necessarily.
Most web designers use a thumbnail or a medium resolution photo on the web page. They do this so that the web paints fast.
But they also know that most people do not click for the high-res image. This saves them bandwidth, often enough to
serve the entire page in less total transmitted data than if they always sent the big images.
So you may well not be serving the same image either way, especially if you have a clue about web design.
But with google finding and showing the large ones, it could become more expensive.
Well at least it now works on Android. The prior version was just about impossible to use on Android.
Yeah, they want you to go their payment page and sign up for unlimited access.
In fact, it causes reduced bandwidth usage because you don't have to download some stupid ad-filled (and possibly malware-infested) web page that you don't want to see, the way the old image search did.
If they don't like it, block any requests with a Google referrer string.
This has been answered in the branch above. You can easily exceed your hosted bandwidth quota (with zero ad-generated revenue) by having a high-rez photo from your site pop up in a google image search, especially in a situation where something you have on file becames the topic of a high number of searches.
Even if you don't serve that photo normally on your web pages, but simply provide a button or thumbnail to click for the small percentage of viewers that want to see the high-res.
Most visitors don't click the high-rez button or thumbnail. The few that do, don't matter. Until Google indexes it, then all bets are off.
Some (failed) web designers only put the high-rez image in, then shrink it into a box via the html IMG tag. (Then they wonder why people complain that their web loads slowly). These guys would see very little difference in this case, unless of course Google sees a surge of searches that just happen to find your Nattily Portman collection.
Lots of sites put hi-rez images on file, and link to them via a thumb nail.
The majority of visitors don't request the hi-rez images, at least not all of them.
But posting a link to a high-rez image can get your bandwidth slammed, serving images, but nobody requesting the web pages. Especially if its porn, or happens to hit the search topic of the moment. Without the ability to serve ads, these websites make no money.
Of course, if the complainers had an actual clue, they could just put a robots.txt file in their image storage, which Google seems to honor.
Question: What advice can you offer to help the readers, and thus the comment posters, to strike a balance? Can there be some kind of 'kumbaya manifesto' to skip the quarreling and get to the matter at hand? Climate change, dark matter, even human colonization need well-tempered minds, of all persuasions. How do we get there?
Answer
Adding A collapse Thread button in Slashcode would do wonders.
It only takes an astute reader seeing 5 or 6 posts before they realize that the current replay chain has gone hopelessly off the rails, with no hope of recovery.
It seems that so may stories on slashdot are hijacked in this way, more so than back in the day.... We need a tool to tell these kids to get off our lawn.
Failing that, give us a "Honey I shrunk the Kids" button, so they disappear into the grass.
Good grief. Christianity does not believe that "magic" defines the world. Christianity has believed since ancient times that the world operates according to strict laws that are immutable, and it names the underlying, latent principle that runs throughout those laws "God."
But if these strict laws are immutable, what is the point of "praying for something" which "Christians" are wont to do for something as trivial as a football game, or as unlikely as world peace?
If God is only a latent principle of laws, immutable ones at that, prayer would seem to be beseeching these immutable laws to change themselves.
Cli mode? It wanted me to install Wine. Toss.
Funny, I'm posting this with Firefox and Java Script turned off.
Works fine. In fact I dare say its a little bit faster.
Try writing software for a car. ... We ship modules that are never updated (ROM parts anyone?)
Hmmm, that's not my experience.
Both my prior car and my current car had software updates over their life, the new car within 5 months of delivery as required by a recall. Its still riddled with bugs that are obvious, and grousing to the dealer is of no use, because the software is out of their hands. If I install after-market software, my warranty is void on the entire vehicle.
Some XMPP clients are starting to add video, but for some reason, the world is rushing towards the browser for everything.
I think its because a generation has grown up knowing nothing but web development tools, and have no technical skills outside of that area. It was easy to get into simple web page development, and progress step by step to greater and greater levels of complexity, using additional technologies to server pages in ever more complex ways, asp java, ruby, xml, php, etc.
Don't get me wrong, that's not a knock.
But it does leave us with an entire generation that only knows how to do things under the control of a web server to a web browser. Since the only tool they know is a hammer, they tend to look at every problem as if it were a nail. As a result the stand alone XMPP clients are a dying breed.
Yeah - when the user tells the browser where to go.
Its always worked this way. You may tell the browser where you want it to go, but the web page returns content that fetches other content from other sites. (ads, page parts, images, etc) You don't need java script to see this happen. Step into your browser's control panel and turn off Java Script. You barely notice a difference in page presentation.
Its hard to tell if you're kidding or not, but on the off chance you aren't, web browsers have been opening sockets to arbitrary end points since the day they were invented.
Other than finding each other to start the conversation, I agree. The one thing Skype still has going for it is the directory services.
More to the point it will open up the ability to write skype-like apps for many website, forums, etc.
The security and privacy aspect that skype used to provide has been eroded since Microsoft took ownership, and started routing all calls through their own servers, and refusing to answer questions about monitoring. (One half suspects that Microsoft's ownership was government funded).
Egg and One Tweet doesn't necessarily mean inactive. Just a listener.
I know several people who use EOT accounts to follow breaking news, and maybe a sports team or two, but never ever add to the din of pointless babble.
Description seems apocryphal, and the camera had nothing to do with it. Presumably, you are a law abiding driver and would have stopped for the red light even without the camera being there. Since you say he kept going, I presume he backed up and went around, through the red light and was probably ticketed. You could recover the damages by getting a subpoena for that camera shot.
I like it. P-Droid a good start, if Android built that in by default it would be great. The UI could be a bit cleaner, but I like it.
But still ROOT is required to install, so that rules out the vast majority of potential users. You shouldn't have to void your
warranty to do the equivalent with your phone.
Or I could encourage the government I elected to force them to play by my rules.
Its not THEIR device, its MINE.
I shouldn't have to forego Maps just to prevent some other app from transmitting my position to advertisers.
I shouldn't have to disable functionality I paid for, just to prevent some unwanted use of my location!
I should have a dashboard (just like the FTC suggested) that allows me to use my GPS the way I want, and not the way the app writer decided.
The seduction that these devices offer to too strong for people to give them up and not use them.
Given that, I see nothing wrong with the FTC recommending that consumers at least know when they are surrendering their location data, and have the option of turning that off in some game or social networking app, while still being able to use the Map application.
I only wish this suggestion came from the FCC as well, since the FTC, is more or less toothless.
If the FBI needs a warrant to put a GPS tracker on my car, I don't see any reason why AT&T or Google should be able to give my location away to some tin-star sheriff without a warrant, or worse yet, to JCPenny or Starbucks just because I walked by the store.
or are you, in true slashdotter style, just being paranoid?
Says the guy posting as Anonymous Coward ... ;-p
This is already done by Android and works perfectly.
Nah, it really doesn't do it in any meaningful way, and doesn't provide the level of fine grained control that is needed.
Sure, you get notification when you install an app that i uses this data, and can access that data, for this or that reason.
But you are never provided any indication when the app decides to use the data for some other reason. There is nothing in
Android that prevents this.
Example: You install an email app. Obviously it needs to access your contacts to send email to them.
It says it has to access the web, maybe to serve ads (because its a free app). You might never be told that the app might
decide to upload all your contacts to some web site. You have no way of knowing when it does this, and no way to
prevent it.
Andorid needs a finer grained control, one that says, you can't access my address book. Or you can't connect to
any website, except this list (in the example above it would be some ad server). The user should be able to turn off
some of the permissions at will. EVEN if doing so makes the app FAIL.
Right now, we get a Take-it-or-Leave-it list of permissions, most of which are poorly understood. Most people click right
through these, failing to notice that the Game they just installed wanted to access their address book. Once they
click thru that, they are never asked again. There is no way to know it happened.
Permissions should be select-able per app, even after its been installed.
There should be a easy way to review which apps can access which bits of sensitive data, and turn it on or off.
Id rather the twitter app fail than have it tweeting my 13 year old daughter's location without her or my knowledge.
He makes no sensible assertion of "taking the atmosphere into account". It it totally not believable in ANY context.
But I suppose if you grew up watching Star Trek you might be forgiven if your science education suffered as a result.
You can't achieve propulsion with a prop at a pressure altitude of 35KM AGL.