Perhaps all driver license tests should include a multitasking reaction time test. The person would have to listen to and correctly answer questions about driving (i.e., a voice response version of the written part of the driver's test) while taking a simulated driving test that checks reaction time and the ability to multitask. You would have to both drive safely AND verbally answer the questions correctly. Those who pass both halves of the test get a license to use a cellphone whilst driving and those that don't don't.
Retaking this test every 10 years would help deal with any age-related cognitive declines.
Thank you for feeding the fire with reasoning, not vitriol.
Both sides try very hard to ignore the things that give them fits.
Agreed! Some scientists can be just as foaming-at-the-mouth dogmatic as the worst fundie. Some people joke that some fields of science advance one funeral at a time.
If I'm weak for believing that somehow we are more than the sum of our physical parts then so be it.
Of course we are more than the sum of our parts. That is one of the key elements of understanding both evolution and biology. It's not the sum, but the interactions between the parts that make a bag of chemicals into a living creature. Where we differ is in what makes us more than the sum of our parts. Some invoke a god, others point to the power of simple interactions between simple components to create a complex whole.
Many very smart people believe that the argument from contingency poses a real logical need for some type of unmoved, first mover.
This is a very tricky epistemological problem. At some level science really can't say anything about the contingency of the origin of the universe because it has yet to find a way to get outside the universe. We currently have a sample size of one of universes and no way to perform unbiased experiments. For all we know there are an infinitude of universes out there (or not). If there are other randomly created universes, then most are probably lifeless. Because a lifeless universe as no observer to tally its existence, nobody knows how often random chance created a sterile universe. Sitting inside our universe we have a very biased view.
Perhaps a god or gods did start the big bang (although it begs the question of "who"or what created these gods). Regardless of origin I suspect that much of science is moving toward a position that those original unmoved movers (if any) had nothing to do with the creation after that big bang. It appears more and more likely that any universe with the same physic laws and constants as our's would quickly create galaxies, suns, planets, and life. In that regard, the more we understand about evolution, chemistry, physics, etc., the less we need any gods (except perhaps for the initial instant of the big bang).
Do not fault me for filling that blank with Yaweh.
At one level I truly do respect this. If your faith helps you understand the world, then that's a wonderful thing. But at another level I greatly fear this. Science is a mechanism for filling in the blanks. What makes science so powerful (better than most religions) is its ability to adapt, accept criticism, and change. Science continually tries to create new knowledge, test it, and either accept or reject it. It's not a perfect process by any means, but it does advance. In contrast many scientists see religion as to static and too dogmatic.
The core problem, at least from the scientist's point of view is the gulf between science and faith on how blanks should be filled. On the one side, the essence of science is to question what fills in the blanks. On the other side, the essence of faith is to NOT question what fills in the blanks. Faith's refusal to question itself and refute prior filled blanks bothers many scientists.
OK, so... why do fundamentalists get so worked up over this evolution thing?..... Evolution is the hammer......
The problem is that evolution is not like a tool. Instead it is a self-propelled dynamic that needs no outside maker/creator etc. The prerequisites for evolution (differential reproduction of heritable variation) is both basic and abundant in all biological systems of all levels of complexity (it even applies to "nonliving" prebiotic chemical systems such as RNA soups and lipid mycelles). The point is that even the simplest bacteria has all the tools it needs to make itself a different species given enough time.
That is what upsets the religious. Evolution doesn't need any gods.
The U.S. FTC ID Theft website suggests putting a "fraud alert" on your credit reporting files if you think you are or could be a victim of identity theft (e.g., your wallet was stolen, data breached, mail pilfered, phished, etc.). In theory it alerts companies not to open new accounts in your name without further verification (a potential minor hassle).
Given all the data floating around out there and the lack of data theft reporting laws, one can argue that everyone "could" be a victim. I've heard that some people put in a fraud alert on their files just in case.
Anyone know of any serious downsides to using fraud alert as a routine ID theft security measure?
Looking for possible patterns in large volumes of data is dangerous because of the high chance that random data will fit some of the myriad patterns tried. If you test data against a thousand possible patterns, then about 50 of them will be found to be present at a statistical significance level of 5% (even if the data is 100% random). "Cancer clusters" are an excellent example of this -- if you slice a dice a population enough different ways you are bound to find some geographic/demographic/ethnographic subgroup with a very high chance of some cancer.
Its better to either have a a priori hypothesis to look for one specific, pre-defined pattern in a mound data than to see if any pattern is in the data. Or, if one insists on looking for many patterns, then the standards for statistical significance must be correspondingly higher.
Check scanners -- sorry, we can't accept checks today either
ATMs -- cash only. Oh, you can't get any cash???
Customer service (VOIP to offshore call centers) -- Just call customer services to report the problem....
Oh and then there the airlines (no flights today because the screens are down), factories (no parts from suppliers), UPS (we don't know where your package is), etc. The U.S economy, even the bricks-and-mortar part is heavily net-dependent. The lights may stay on, but a good chunk of commerce would slow or halt.
I just got a new Motorola v360 phone. It came with a 64 MB Trans Flash memory card and a USB cable. Just plugging the phone into a USB port automatically mounts the Flash card on the desktop.
I can only hope that this database has good metadata on which code fragments contain/don't contain various common species of exploits (buffer overflow, stack overflow, mal-formed input vulnerabilities, etc.). It would be nice to know which code fragments have all the needed input/size checking needed to be safe for exposure to the outside world and which are "for internal use only."
I don't mean to troll, but I wonder if Negreponte and crew have any experimental evidence that these laptops will actually help. Have they done any studies in which they gave laptops (of any price) to one set of villages and didn't give laptops to some similar set of other villages? Given the contentious issue of whether computers really help in U.S. classrooms, I wonder if they will help in developing nations.
Rational (i.e. non-empirical) arguments for the plausibility of improvement are not sufficient. For example I saw very nice properly randomized study about giving textbooks to African school children. Children with textbooks did no better than children without textbooks. That is to say, textbooks were a waste of money. The failure was ascribed to the textbooks use of English, but who knows if that was really the cause.
On the other hand, I can see a higher chance of positve change by providing laptops for farmers and small businesses -- especially if the laptops provide access to market data, aid management, or foster B2B commerce. Improving the productivity of small farms, factories, and distributors would raise wages and living standards. This has clearly occurred in the developed world although it takes decades for businesses to really change their processes to get the most out of computers. Helping 3rd-world businesses may not have the same level of charitable karma as aiding school children, but it might provide a greater reduction in poverty.
It would be very sad to see this effort fail because of unfounded assumptions about the impact of laptops on school children.
With 4 MB Flash and 16 MB RAM, this box exceeds the basic resources of many early GUI machines. What stops an enterprising hacker from writing a "Word Processor" for this thing? It could render the interface in HTML (perhaps with a bit of Javascript for highly interactive functions) and use something like a GMail account for persistent storage if one doesn't want to let the Linksys read/write to a PC's filesystem.
What if Google create AV for the web -- filtering websites and pages that contain embedded viruses, trojans, or malware. Any website with malware, trojans, or other nasties would lose its favorable pagerank or even disappear from searches where the user has asked for "safe" pages.
Google may not be able to stop fast moving threats because they don't reanalyze pages that often (unless they offered a proxy service), but they could stop corporate-sponsored malware by advertisers and less ethical site providers.
If high speed optical interconnects become common, they could make brick-based PCs with stackable components. Unlike current stackable HDs, the HD brick would need no cables or external power brick as top and bottom surface of each brick would carry power and data.
Different Lego-like knoblets on top and bottom of each brick would correspond to different interconnect functions (one or more knoblets each for +5 VDC, +3.3 VDC, Optical-PCI, Optical-ATA, etc.). Aligned vent holes throughout the stack would allow the base PSU brick to pull cooling air from the other bricks. Adding a new video card or HD would be as simple as snapping the card to the top of the PC.
Vision is not like a literal pixel image. Rather the brain heavily processes retinal data to create more of a 3-D visual model (like a VRML file). It doesn't take much to accidentally or intentionally screw with the model (i.e., visual illusions, witness tampering, hallucinations, etc.).
The point is that people see what they THINK they see, not what the retina records.
The Prisoner was great because of the disorienting plot lines and characters - it was seldom clear why #6 was there, what they wanted him to do, or how they were manipulating him. Half the time he seemed to be getting away with some little bit of rebellion only to find that he was doing exactly what they wanted him to do.
I can understand that they may not be able to reuse the old setting, but I hope that they can recreate some place for the "Prison" that has a similar feel of idyllic ordinariness to contrast with the surreal psychological drama.
I always organize my files by project. I remember seeing the file system of a friend at work. He had carefully segregated all his files by type. He had a folder full of word processing files (separate folders for each word processors that the company routinely used at the time), another for spreadsheets, another for MATLAB files, another for graphics, etc.
My friend had basically created a Type Manager-like approach. I thought it was crazy because the engineering projects that we did used multiple files of multiple types. On his system the files of any given project were scattered across all these type-based of folders.
My point is that Type Managers can be very useful if a given activity only uses one application or type of file (e.g., rip/mix/burn/listen with music). But when the activity spans multiple types it drives the user back to using a general file manager. In such situations, existing Type Managers fragment the user's access to files and become a hinderance if the project's files are scattered across an email client, a photo manager, a sound file manager, etc.
I'm sure that Chinese officials are taking one look at Microsoft's threat to withdraw from Korea and realizing that they don't want China to depend on such a capricious foreign vendor.
What will happen when China stops using Windows and also becomes the leading maker and buyer of PCs? Companies that do business with China (and most do) will see less and less advantages in staying 100% Windows and less and less likely to buy Microsoft's nonstandard applications.
Being an ISP is a commodity service -- reliable-enough delivery of IP packets for the lowest possible cost. ISPs really don't care if the packets contain worms, porn, Nazi hate speech, spyware, spam, telco-bypassing VOIP, plans for a nuclear warhead, phishing, DDoS attacks, or the latest Hollywood movie. As long as the customer pays for the bandwidth they consume, sends in the money, and does NOT call tech support, the ISP is happy.
The problem is that others (governments, issue groups, consumers, companies, etc.) have complaints about the contents of these packets. Whether we on/. consider these complaints to be legitimate or not is beside the point. Someone will be pushed to decide what can and cannot go on the Internet. ISPs won't take this job as it only raises their costs and raises the ire of customers -- a lose-lose proposition. Instead, that someone will, inevitably, be some government someplace.
The sooner the people of/. educate governing bodies on the legitimate and beneficial uses of disputed communications and content, the better.
If Google can tell how people react to a site, then it could use the data to affect pagerank. Sites that people bail from would lose pagerank and sites that people stay in and explore would gain page rank. Of course, Google would need some scheme for filtering out scam data where an SEO tries to make their site look interesting or make a competitor site look uninteresting by faking the behavior of visitors.
If the total cost of the hybrid + gas is greater than the cost of a non-hybrid + gas, then its possible that the hybrid isn't "better for the environment". Every dollar of economic activity comes with an environmental cost. If you buy a $30,000 vehicle, you are indirectly responsible for the environmental damage done by all the suppliers and employees needed to create that vehicle -- the more expensive the vehicle, the greater the up-front damage to the environment.
Hybrids might be better or might be worse for the environment in the long run. It just depends on which is worse for the environment -- manufacturing the more complex power train of the hybrid versus the extra gas burned in a non hybrid.
Creating 3-D games won't be that hard. All the game software needs to do is render each frame twice with a slightly different POV corresponding to the right and left eye. The only downside is that frame rates for the game will probably almost half what they are for the mono version (assuming that rendering is a significant chunk of the total CPU/GPU processing budget).
In the olden days, we didn't even have words. It was 8086, 8087, 80286, 80287, etc. No Optiums or Penturons back then.
Trademark issues drove Intel to make up processor names -- Intel couldn't stop competitors from selling non-Intel 80486 chips because chip numbering was a generic identification scheme in the electronics industry.
Is there really a difference between adding a second to the clock or subtracting a second in the software that uses the clock? Anyone who wants to convert an accurate clock signal (in whatever time-base) into an accurate physical parameter (e.g., the Earth's physical or angular location in space) is going to use software. Diddling a constant in the code or in a set-up file would just as easily change from solar time or earth time or whatever time-base one wants to use.
The only semi-compelling argument that I can think of is that solar time might be more stable -- the rate of change of the Earth's rotation rate isn't a constant (varies during the year and solar cycle) so the Earth-time leap second process occurs with some irregularity.
I've often wondered if non-users of product X can sue the maker of product X if said product causes a major disruption of the internet.
If someone creates a worm that exploits a negligent design flaw in Sony's DRM or Microsoft Windows, then couldn't the affected sue Sony or Microsoft? This would include non-users of these products whose internet usage was disrupted. And as someone who does NOT use DRMed Sony CDs or Microsoft Windows, I have NOT agreed to these company's EULAs with all their legalese of limited liability. Thus non-users may have more rights to sue than users of these products.
Many of the rioters live in areas with 30% unemployment. French labor laws make labor expensive (high wages, 35 hour work week, long vacations) and risky -- if you can't easily fire someone, you're going to think twice about hiring them.
France may be a worker's paradise, but only if you if have a job.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps all driver license tests should include a multitasking reaction time test. The person would have to listen to and correctly answer questions about driving (i.e., a voice response version of the written part of the driver's test) while taking a simulated driving test that checks reaction time and the ability to multitask. You would have to both drive safely AND verbally answer the questions correctly. Those who pass both halves of the test get a license to use a cellphone whilst driving and those that don't don't. Retaking this test every 10 years would help deal with any age-related cognitive declines.
Thank you for feeding the fire with reasoning, not vitriol.
Both sides try very hard to ignore the things that give them fits.
Agreed! Some scientists can be just as foaming-at-the-mouth dogmatic as the worst fundie. Some people joke that some fields of science advance one funeral at a time.
If I'm weak for believing that somehow we are more than the sum of our physical parts then so be it.
Of course we are more than the sum of our parts. That is one of the key elements of understanding both evolution and biology. It's not the sum, but the interactions between the parts that make a bag of chemicals into a living creature. Where we differ is in what makes us more than the sum of our parts. Some invoke a god, others point to the power of simple interactions between simple components to create a complex whole.
Many very smart people believe that the argument from contingency poses a real logical need for some type of unmoved, first mover.
This is a very tricky epistemological problem. At some level science really can't say anything about the contingency of the origin of the universe because it has yet to find a way to get outside the universe. We currently have a sample size of one of universes and no way to perform unbiased experiments. For all we know there are an infinitude of universes out there (or not). If there are other randomly created universes, then most are probably lifeless. Because a lifeless universe as no observer to tally its existence, nobody knows how often random chance created a sterile universe. Sitting inside our universe we have a very biased view.
Perhaps a god or gods did start the big bang (although it begs the question of "who"or what created these gods). Regardless of origin I suspect that much of science is moving toward a position that those original unmoved movers (if any) had nothing to do with the creation after that big bang. It appears more and more likely that any universe with the same physic laws and constants as our's would quickly create galaxies, suns, planets, and life. In that regard, the more we understand about evolution, chemistry, physics, etc., the less we need any gods (except perhaps for the initial instant of the big bang).
Do not fault me for filling that blank with Yaweh.
At one level I truly do respect this. If your faith helps you understand the world, then that's a wonderful thing. But at another level I greatly fear this. Science is a mechanism for filling in the blanks. What makes science so powerful (better than most religions) is its ability to adapt, accept criticism, and change. Science continually tries to create new knowledge, test it, and either accept or reject it. It's not a perfect process by any means, but it does advance. In contrast many scientists see religion as to static and too dogmatic.
The core problem, at least from the scientist's point of view is the gulf between science and faith on how blanks should be filled. On the one side, the essence of science is to question what fills in the blanks. On the other side, the essence of faith is to NOT question what fills in the blanks. Faith's refusal to question itself and refute prior filled blanks bothers many scientists.
The problem is that evolution is not like a tool. Instead it is a self-propelled dynamic that needs no outside maker/creator etc. The prerequisites for evolution (differential reproduction of heritable variation) is both basic and abundant in all biological systems of all levels of complexity (it even applies to "nonliving" prebiotic chemical systems such as RNA soups and lipid mycelles). The point is that even the simplest bacteria has all the tools it needs to make itself a different species given enough time.
That is what upsets the religious. Evolution doesn't need any gods.
Given all the data floating around out there and the lack of data theft reporting laws, one can argue that everyone "could" be a victim. I've heard that some people put in a fraud alert on their files just in case.
Anyone know of any serious downsides to using fraud alert as a routine ID theft security measure?
Its better to either have a a priori hypothesis to look for one specific, pre-defined pattern in a mound data than to see if any pattern is in the data. Or, if one insists on looking for many patterns, then the standards for statistical significance must be correspondingly higher.
Oh and then there the airlines (no flights today because the screens are down), factories (no parts from suppliers), UPS (we don't know where your package is), etc. The U.S economy, even the bricks-and-mortar part is heavily net-dependent. The lights may stay on, but a good chunk of commerce would slow or halt.
Next up is cellsnuffling.
I can only hope that this database has good metadata on which code fragments contain/don't contain various common species of exploits (buffer overflow, stack overflow, mal-formed input vulnerabilities, etc.). It would be nice to know which code fragments have all the needed input/size checking needed to be safe for exposure to the outside world and which are "for internal use only."
Rational (i.e. non-empirical) arguments for the plausibility of improvement are not sufficient. For example I saw very nice properly randomized study about giving textbooks to African school children. Children with textbooks did no better than children without textbooks. That is to say, textbooks were a waste of money. The failure was ascribed to the textbooks use of English, but who knows if that was really the cause.
On the other hand, I can see a higher chance of positve change by providing laptops for farmers and small businesses -- especially if the laptops provide access to market data, aid management, or foster B2B commerce. Improving the productivity of small farms, factories, and distributors would raise wages and living standards. This has clearly occurred in the developed world although it takes decades for businesses to really change their processes to get the most out of computers. Helping 3rd-world businesses may not have the same level of charitable karma as aiding school children, but it might provide a greater reduction in poverty.
It would be very sad to see this effort fail because of unfounded assumptions about the impact of laptops on school children.
With 4 MB Flash and 16 MB RAM, this box exceeds the basic resources of many early GUI machines. What stops an enterprising hacker from writing a "Word Processor" for this thing? It could render the interface in HTML (perhaps with a bit of Javascript for highly interactive functions) and use something like a GMail account for persistent storage if one doesn't want to let the Linksys read/write to a PC's filesystem.
Google may not be able to stop fast moving threats because they don't reanalyze pages that often (unless they offered a proxy service), but they could stop corporate-sponsored malware by advertisers and less ethical site providers.
Different Lego-like knoblets on top and bottom of each brick would correspond to different interconnect functions (one or more knoblets each for +5 VDC, +3.3 VDC, Optical-PCI, Optical-ATA, etc.). Aligned vent holes throughout the stack would allow the base PSU brick to pull cooling air from the other bricks. Adding a new video card or HD would be as simple as snapping the card to the top of the PC.
The point is that people see what they THINK they see, not what the retina records.
I can understand that they may not be able to reuse the old setting, but I hope that they can recreate some place for the "Prison" that has a similar feel of idyllic ordinariness to contrast with the surreal psychological drama.
My friend had basically created a Type Manager-like approach. I thought it was crazy because the engineering projects that we did used multiple files of multiple types. On his system the files of any given project were scattered across all these type-based of folders.
My point is that Type Managers can be very useful if a given activity only uses one application or type of file (e.g., rip/mix/burn/listen with music). But when the activity spans multiple types it drives the user back to using a general file manager. In such situations, existing Type Managers fragment the user's access to files and become a hinderance if the project's files are scattered across an email client, a photo manager, a sound file manager, etc.
What will happen when China stops using Windows and also becomes the leading maker and buyer of PCs? Companies that do business with China (and most do) will see less and less advantages in staying 100% Windows and less and less likely to buy Microsoft's nonstandard applications.
The problem is that others (governments, issue groups, consumers, companies, etc.) have complaints about the contents of these packets. Whether we on /. consider these complaints to be legitimate or not is beside the point. Someone will be pushed to decide what can and cannot go on the Internet. ISPs won't take this job as it only raises their costs and raises the ire of customers -- a lose-lose proposition. Instead, that someone will, inevitably, be some government someplace.
The sooner the people of /. educate governing bodies on the legitimate and beneficial uses of disputed communications and content, the better.
I don't even want to think what Unix would have been like if it had been created by Finns or Hawaiians.
If Google can tell how people react to a site, then it could use the data to affect pagerank. Sites that people bail from would lose pagerank and sites that people stay in and explore would gain page rank. Of course, Google would need some scheme for filtering out scam data where an SEO tries to make their site look interesting or make a competitor site look uninteresting by faking the behavior of visitors.
Hybrids might be better or might be worse for the environment in the long run. It just depends on which is worse for the environment -- manufacturing the more complex power train of the hybrid versus the extra gas burned in a non hybrid.
Creating 3-D games won't be that hard. All the game software needs to do is render each frame twice with a slightly different POV corresponding to the right and left eye. The only downside is that frame rates for the game will probably almost half what they are for the mono version (assuming that rendering is a significant chunk of the total CPU/GPU processing budget).
Trademark issues drove Intel to make up processor names -- Intel couldn't stop competitors from selling non-Intel 80486 chips because chip numbering was a generic identification scheme in the electronics industry.
The only semi-compelling argument that I can think of is that solar time might be more stable -- the rate of change of the Earth's rotation rate isn't a constant (varies during the year and solar cycle) so the Earth-time leap second process occurs with some irregularity.
If someone creates a worm that exploits a negligent design flaw in Sony's DRM or Microsoft Windows, then couldn't the affected sue Sony or Microsoft? This would include non-users of these products whose internet usage was disrupted. And as someone who does NOT use DRMed Sony CDs or Microsoft Windows, I have NOT agreed to these company's EULAs with all their legalese of limited liability. Thus non-users may have more rights to sue than users of these products.
IANAL. Any thoughts?
France may be a worker's paradise, but only if you if have a job.