Court: Search enginge spamming by HTML Metatag is against buisiness regulations
Listing several hundred metatags like in a dictionary wihtout any connection to a web page would lead to manipulation of search enginges and is against buisiness regulations of 1 of "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb" (Law against unfair competition). This was decided by the Landgericht Essen (District Court?) in a now-published decision. [...]
In the arguments of the court, this usage of search keywords leads to search engines bringing those pages to top and being visited by users more frequently. When using hundreds of dictionary-like words, that even with trying didn't show any connection to the goods and services presented in a page, the hoster can't be after presenting his offer optimally. This would only leave the conclusion that the weaknesses of search engines are taken advantage of to gain an advantage in competition.
This wouldn't apply to any use of Meta Tags according to the judges. A competitor would have to endure a web page with keywords that are in connection to the offer of the hoster in a wide sense. The same applies to the use of names, Geschäftsbezeichnungen [?] or labels, if those are "part of commercial links on the web page", to make business with commercial partners possible. [...]
The abbreviated parts are rather internal to Germany and not of interest for this discussion.
Friends of mine screwed that retired 386 to the wall for decoration purposes (they have a wall full of hardware, but this was the only thing which still worked before it was screwed on). Then they sticked in RAM, a HD, a screen and a power supply and tried to boot it. Which it did, amazingly.
They have solved the problem of natural language processing and of proving assumptions about programs, all at once, and without me noticing. Great that we have Slashdot, i would have missed that without.
A passage - I think its from "the Psychedelic Experience" - which I think fits the situation
Choose someone willing to listen to you sing the same song over and over again, offkey with broken lyrics. Someone you won't mind seeing you, and who won't themselves mind seeing you, drool, or laugh, or cry, or piss your pants with fear, or talk to God. Someone who will hold your hand while you take a shit to keep you from falling in and getting flushed down the drain. Someone, perhaps, a little stronger than you physically.
Definitely, someone who has tripped before, more than once. Someone who has stories to tell -- and things they won't say. Someone who seems to take it all seriously, but still has a sense of fun.
Definitely, someone with some degree of compassion and, gosh darn it, Wisdom.
Definitely, someone who won't leave you by yourself, even for a second.
If you choose someone you might get sexual with, be sure they will accept a clumsy, giggling fool as a lover, and that they won't be offended if you can't perform or forget to. Someone that can keep cool and keep you cool if you get pushy.
If you find anyone who meets all these criteria, consider marriage. Try to be worthy.
"Nasa was invented essentially to invent big rockets which can carry really bad bombs to soviet russia. After starting to threaten them, they will spend so much money on building big bad rockets that they cannot have a sensible space program and we can pretend it's all about scientific competition."
At least that's how I understand the whole story. The little wonder in there is that a Soviet "Science" (read: things that won't kill anyone directly) Space programm existed at budget levels orders of magnitude below the US-american...
The Pens for Graphic Tablets (W*c*m et al.) already are unique - every one has an ID which is read out every time you use it (you can make the linux drivers for the W*c*m ones print it out). Plus, as far as I know, the pen is the cheap part of the System - The pen is like an euro or some in cost (after all, it's just an antenna and a really simple IC - and, I didn't say it wouldn't cost more when you'd buy one), the expensive part is the sensors in the tablet.
Mac is not perfect, but X is far from perfect. I suppose you just don't get the point. Interfaces should be unified, that is, work the same every time. X is antiunified, every X app can do what they like. This is what they do, and the result is clearly visible. If you don't notice, because you had the balls to bite your way through and then memorize every stupidity of every interface every time you use any program, fine, you're not a quiche eater.
It just doesn't make you seem understanding the message, what would be the point of communication.
Main Problem in the whole X C&P issue (there are others, yes) is the blatant lack for unification. Actually, there are as many kinds of C&P handling as there are programs, and there is no non-empty cut of the features. As people have noted, Mark Left - Click Middle works often, as do other Features, but sometimes, they do not (Try Matlab [yes i know, it's not FOSS, but hey, i do live in the real world], Emacs and XTerm at the same time...). The lack is simple and obvious: there is no such thing as abstraction of the "Copy" and "Paste" commands (as it should - after all that's one of the big points of GUI...), so that the user could go and put it on any key he likes. This is the one big problem that X C&P has.
Oh and then is the confusion about different copy buffers. I just assume that whoever came up with this was just smoking crack.
X is hell. Every single day working with X, i get reminded to how X was written: a quick hack to do remote debugging. We all deserve better, and we all could code for a better UI system. All you X zealots, go and try a mac for a week, then come back and we can talk...
Just a short addendum... I phoned with the secretary of a MEP today, and the result was:
The "pro" guys are the Commision and the Council, both of whom aren't voted directly. The Commission members are voted by the Parliament and the Council members are sent by the Member states Administrations (2 Counselors for each large state and 1 for the smaller ones, IIRC).
The MEP secretary was very sure that the Parliament would never pass such a bad Software Patent law.
Whom shall I vote? The guys which lied to me about what they would do, or the other guys, which didn't lie to me yet? The only thing I can be sure of is, that whomever I vote, they will lie and turn for the people with the money.
This is SO frustrating and SUCH a shame for democracy.
Sometimes you can't eat as much as you want to vomit... (Manchmal kann man nicht soviel Essen wie man Kotzen möchte)
Pakistan Company: Look, I've written a program similar to one that costs $500 in the US and 1000 Euro in the EU. Lets give it away for free and charge for maintanance and installation which are the main points of income anyway.
EU Citizen: ----, they want to charge me 1000 for a broken program thats free in Pakistan? Let's hope they get service to europe quickly... Oh damn, there's these ------ patent laws.
EU Citizen has now the choice of a) voting someone who abandons software patents [probably impossible in the case they get real] b) living somewhere where the government is not as much of a bunch of stupid jerks [impossible]
100 Years later. Braindrain and Emigration have taken place.
PK Company: Look, I've written that program... It's so hot that Microsoft - you remember, these guys from the USA [laughter] - asked for a beta version. They're fighting with another company over who gets to patent the innovations for NAFTA and EU [laughter again].
I think the most important features for debugging are interactivity (sure, any program is in some way, but there's a difference whether you have to do a 30 second build and rerun or if you can just interact where the error happened at any time - scripting languages can do this sometimes) and clear implementation (read: referential transparency)
By far the neatest debugging possibilities I've seen is part of the Oz development suite... It can do things like: Lazy Display (your debugger won't get stuck long times on long lists, but you can unfold the whole list if you want), Thread Display, handling values still to be calculated, it even displays the evolution of any statement... Its a really powerful toy.
And, no, Java did not invent stack Traces (or Exceptions). Really.
Actually, they are pretty much unique. Usually, in such examinations, they measure the noble gases, since they won't react away with the surrounding rock. Lets assume the measurement is 0.1% Accurate, which would be a conservative estimate. Lets further assume that we completely rule out concentrations above 10%. Now we take 1e-2 (0.1%*10 = chance of measurements being alike) to the power of 4 (radon isnt stable, and lets say that one of the noble gases isnt suitable for our examination in some way), that leaves you with a chance of 1e-8 for two measurments to be alike. Thats about a lottery win.
Indeed, for a truly reliable program, you had to run a proven (in the case of the first reliable program ever: manually proven) prover on a machine that never fails (which is pretty hard, considering things like Alpha Radiation in Silicon, but let's just assume we use a [manually, since we don't have a running proof system] proven processor manufactured out of isotope-clean, non-radiating material).
This sounds pretty far off. But you can fudge in some places, like, run the prover a few times on different, failure-prone hardwares, that would reduce the chance of a non-detected hardware error to acceptable levels (you could go exponentially low, say, to 1:10^1000 with a few different hardwares).
The software part is already solved... Just take a look at Coq. It's a manually proven core with proven logics on top. Besides, it can do Extraction by the Howard-Curry-Isomorphism if you do the proof the right way. So, in fact, if you want, you can do a computer-assisted, correct proof.
If you want, you can also do a brute-force algorithm which will certainly find the (correct, manually checkable) proof if there is one, the only problem is that the Problem "prove X" is NP (of course.) and undecideable, so that the running time can be arbitarly long, and might be infinite without a way to know if it is or not. This renders the possibility pretty useless.
Some Problems have been proven by computer, mostly combinatory ones involving a mind numbing amount of similar subcases. Canonical Example here is the Proof for the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken.
Apparently you really don't know;)
A failing fusion reactor would not pose much more threat than a working one, since the amount of fuel is really small (grams as opposed to kilograms in a fission reactor) and the reaction would stop immediately.
The problem with fusion is that the reactor walls are irradiated with lots of neutrons, which causes them to get radioactive themselves and also would alter their mechanical properties. So youre not stuck with radiactive fuel leftovers but with radioactive reactor leftovers. What would be better in a reactor in a useful power range is to be determined yet. Oh, and because of the mechanical properties, you'll have to change them really often, like, once a year or something. There are ways to reduce this problem, with materials that react better to neutrons than others, but as far as I know, this only makes the radiation appear somewhere else.
Also, at the moment, fusion reactors are sci-fi. Yes, there are experiments that achieve fusion, but for now its a few seconds at best. And miles from break-even point, and even more miles from suistained reaction.
Generall discussion here.
Just as a footnote, do not try to build your own breeder.
This is completely untrue. The human eye can distinguish just about 1000 colors (with big differences between subjects) when there is contrasts between the colored Fields (as in, you see two seperate colored test cards). The ability to detect contrasts is far higher though, so that when there's blending of colors, more colors are needed to come to satisfactory results. As anyone owning a Computer can see, 3x5 bits of color is a little few (but usually acceptable) and 3x8 is plenty.
This is still too many bits though, since the eye doesn't percieve in R G and B channels. The L*A*B color space represents actual perception far better. Thinking of Color the RGB way and not the continuous spectrum way again is an obvious mistake that noone has a practical solution for yet.
As another poster pointed out, a great deal of realism comes from motion which looks artificial except when motion-captured. Obviously, work is to be done here.
Also, the methods used in rendering currently should not be expected to give realistic results since they oversimplify what happens. Real skin is, for example, partially transparent and should be rendered volumetrically.
Just wait a few decades and you'll see realistic skin out of your computer. And this won't have to do with new overkill 128 Bit graphic boards.
I'm pretty sure that at least in single cases (and with cooperation of the network owner) it is possible to turn on the phone's microphone remotely and transmit everything heard. Though, probably, quality would be negilible;)
I can't imagine that this is possible in a switched off phone because it wont receive anything. But again, it is imaginable to install a malware remotely that just pretends to switch off the phone but lets it active.
I know this, but I think even in these apparently completely transparent films the transparencies are in the 90% range. The eye is pretty insensitive to brightness changes, but in a mars rover, 10% loss would probably be inacceptable
Concerning charged particles...
on
Mars Rovers Update
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
You can't blow them off with opposite charge easily.
These particles stick to the (non-conducting) surface probably because of Influence. If the surface would be conducting they wouldn't stick because they would get discharged. This is similar to the dust particles that adhere to CRT screens, just here its the screen thats charged (by constant electron bombardement) and the dust particles get influenced.
The fact that the surface is non-conducting will also hinder you bringing any kind of charge to it. Another problem is that the charge might be randomly generated and so half positive and half negative, so you could only blow off half of the dust.
There is a possibility of making transparent surfaces conducting (coating them with metal films), but this reduces transparency quite a bit, and I suppose the mechanical properties of a metal film are far inferior to whatever they used (you want this surface to be hard).
In German there's a word: "Schadenfreude". It designates the kind of joy you experience upon witnessing some else getting hurt, or rather: hurting himself.
Probably you won't know the word, but I'm pretty sure you know the emotion.
Apparently you're percieving this condition in a wrong way. The article is not about decisions, what these people have is similar to a compulsive/obsessive disorder or a dependency. They may even know that what they're doing is erratic, but they can't stop their behavior.
This is even more problematic as the web is homogenous (you can't filter out the "health" part, as you can't with the "sex" part, which is a problem too, sometimes) and everywhere (at work, at internet cafes).
The single "good" approach I ever saw to this kind of problems is to have a supervisor/counselor/therapist who confidentally controls what web pages you're looking at via a browser plugin and talks about that with you. Of course that won't help with the basic condition, but it can be a help to find back to normal web use.
I think this is going to be a major issue among the forms of computer misuse.
I think both parent posters are just right, functional programming is a great way to encounter problems, and excel spreadsheets are too.
The big advantage of FP is its clearness and rigidness. To an experiences functional Programmer, its exactly clear what a piece of Haskell Code means, since the code is half general functions that are easy to understand (map, zip, fold et.al.) and half problem-specific functions that are about as easy. The solution is built from simple bricks everywhere, other than in imperative Programming.
Another thing is, we're talking about functions aren't we? And shouldnt the First Class Citizens of our Language be functions then?
Besides, Functional Programs are very much easier to prove, and thats a thing that will be very important in some time in the future (or so I pray... or everyone in IT buisiness will go nuts over the giant pile of bugs that accumulates). For a little introduction into the theory behind this check this document about The Curry Howard isomorphism (at the very Bottom of the page). Besides, this is a fundamental link between programming and philosophy (intuitionistic reasoning)
"Excel" type spreadsheets are very useful too, maybe not for everyday programming but for short and programs intended for quick use by non-programming coworkers. In fact Excel is the one Program that tells me that not everyone in Microsoft can be a moron.
This 'rule' is pretty much fixed, as photochemical reactions in the eye are responsible for it which have fixed wavelength sensitivities. But as others have pointed out, the stuff in the eyes and lens filter a bit of the light, too.
But, in fact, there are mutated humans who have differences in some of the substances responsible for seeing. Some have altered pigments (this is the most common case, and most commonly, this results in 'red' and 'green' absorption maxima getting closer, rendering the individual 'red-green blind' - usually not that much of a hindrance, but I had a friend who couldn't make out mushrooms clearly visible to me on a lawn because of that) There are also conditions where one type of cells is completely missing, this may be really bad for the people affected. Think of not seeing a red traffic light.
Colorblindness usually affects men (more than 9 of 10 cases are men, IIRC) because the red/green color seeing substances are encoded in the X Chromosome. If one is broken in a female, then she has another one as a backup, which men don't have.
I have never heard of "superhumans" though who can see ultraviolet or something, besides the constant rumours about "tetrachromates", that's women (because of the X chromosome) who have four types of "color cells" (all would be seeing in the normal "visible range" though). But there's not much evidence about this, so take it with a grain fo salt.
Slashdot Mirror
Court: Search enginge spamming by HTML Metatag is against buisiness regulations
Listing several hundred metatags like in a dictionary wihtout any connection to a web page would lead to manipulation of search enginges and is against buisiness regulations of 1 of "Gesetz gegen den unlauteren Wettbewerb" (Law against unfair competition). This was decided by the Landgericht Essen (District Court?) in a now-published decision. [...]
In the arguments of the court, this usage of search keywords leads to search engines bringing those pages to top and being visited by users more frequently. When using hundreds of dictionary-like words, that even with trying didn't show any connection to the goods and services presented in a page, the hoster can't be after presenting his offer optimally. This would only leave the conclusion that the weaknesses of search engines are taken advantage of to gain an advantage in competition.
This wouldn't apply to any use of Meta Tags according to the judges. A competitor would have to endure a web page with keywords that are in connection to the offer of the hoster in a wide sense. The same applies to the use of names, Geschäftsbezeichnungen [?] or labels, if those are "part of commercial links on the web page", to make business with commercial partners possible.
[...]
The abbreviated parts are rather internal to Germany and not of interest for this discussion.
Friends of mine screwed that retired 386 to the wall for decoration purposes (they have a wall full of hardware, but this was the only thing which still worked before it was screwed on). Then they sticked in RAM, a HD, a screen and a power supply and tried to boot it. Which it did, amazingly.
There's nothing to be seen here, move on...
A passage - I think its from "the Psychedelic Experience" - which I think fits the situation Choose someone willing to listen to you sing the same song over and over again, offkey with broken lyrics. Someone you won't mind seeing you, and who won't themselves mind seeing you, drool, or laugh, or cry, or piss your pants with fear, or talk to God. Someone who will hold your hand while you take a shit to keep you from falling in and getting flushed down the drain. Someone, perhaps, a little stronger than you physically. Definitely, someone who has tripped before, more than once. Someone who has stories to tell -- and things they won't say. Someone who seems to take it all seriously, but still has a sense of fun. Definitely, someone with some degree of compassion and, gosh darn it, Wisdom. Definitely, someone who won't leave you by yourself, even for a second. If you choose someone you might get sexual with, be sure they will accept a clumsy, giggling fool as a lover, and that they won't be offended if you can't perform or forget to. Someone that can keep cool and keep you cool if you get pushy. If you find anyone who meets all these criteria, consider marriage. Try to be worthy.
I guess that sentence expands to:
"Nasa was invented essentially to invent big rockets which can carry really bad bombs to soviet russia. After starting to threaten them, they will spend so much money on building big bad rockets that they cannot have a sensible space program and we can pretend it's all about scientific competition."
At least that's how I understand the whole story. The little wonder in there is that a Soviet "Science" (read: things that won't kill anyone directly) Space programm existed at budget levels orders of magnitude below the US-american...
Christian Huygens was Dutch, i would pronounce it Guttural, with a "schwa" (or a slight diphtong) after the H, and without an audible g.
As in "Hechens" with guttural, voiceless ch. English doesn't make this sound.
Sorry for not being profound enough with IPA and IPA Ascii...
The Pens for Graphic Tablets (W*c*m et al.) already are unique - every one has an ID which is read out every time you use it (you can make the linux drivers for the W*c*m ones print it out). Plus, as far as I know, the pen is the cheap part of the System - The pen is like an euro or some in cost (after all, it's just an antenna and a really simple IC - and, I didn't say it wouldn't cost more when you'd buy one), the expensive part is the sensors in the tablet.
Mac is not perfect, but X is far from perfect. I suppose you just don't get the point. Interfaces should be unified, that is, work the same every time. X is antiunified, every X app can do what they like. This is what they do, and the result is clearly visible. If you don't notice, because you had the balls to bite your way through and then memorize every stupidity of every interface every time you use any program, fine, you're not a quiche eater.
It just doesn't make you seem understanding the message, what would be the point of communication.
Main Problem in the whole X C&P issue (there are others, yes) is the blatant lack for unification. Actually, there are as many kinds of C&P handling as there are programs, and there is no non-empty cut of the features. As people have noted, Mark Left - Click Middle works often, as do other Features, but sometimes, they do not (Try Matlab [yes i know, it's not FOSS, but hey, i do live in the real world], Emacs and XTerm at the same time...). The lack is simple and obvious: there is no such thing as abstraction of the "Copy" and "Paste" commands (as it should - after all that's one of the big points of GUI...), so that the user could go and put it on any key he likes. This is the one big problem that X C&P has.
Oh and then is the confusion about different copy buffers. I just assume that whoever came up with this was just smoking crack.
X is hell. Every single day working with X, i get reminded to how X was written: a quick hack to do remote debugging. We all deserve better, and we all could code for a better UI system. All you X zealots, go and try a mac for a week, then come back and we can talk...
Just a short addendum... I phoned with the secretary of a MEP today, and the result was:
The "pro" guys are the Commision and the Council, both of whom aren't voted directly. The Commission members are voted by the Parliament and the Council members are sent by the Member states Administrations (2 Counselors for each large state and 1 for the smaller ones, IIRC).
The MEP secretary was very sure that the Parliament would never pass such a bad Software Patent law.
Let's hope he's right...
Whom shall I vote? The guys which lied to me about what they would do, or the other guys, which didn't lie to me yet? The only thing I can be sure of is, that whomever I vote, they will lie and turn for the people with the money.
This is SO frustrating and SUCH a shame for democracy.
Sometimes you can't eat as much as you want to vomit... (Manchmal kann man nicht soviel Essen wie man Kotzen möchte)
Pakistan Company: Look, I've written a program similar to one that costs $500 in the US and 1000 Euro in the EU. Lets give it away for free and charge for maintanance and installation which are the main points of income anyway.
EU Citizen: ----, they want to charge me 1000 for a broken program thats free in Pakistan? Let's hope they get service to europe quickly... Oh damn, there's these ------ patent laws.
EU Citizen has now the choice of a) voting someone who abandons software patents [probably impossible in the case they get real] b) living somewhere where the government is not as much of a bunch of stupid jerks [impossible]
100 Years later. Braindrain and Emigration have taken place.
PK Company: Look, I've written that program... It's so hot that Microsoft - you remember, these guys from the USA [laughter] - asked for a beta version. They're fighting with another company over who gets to patent the innovations for NAFTA and EU [laughter again].
EU Company: How do you spell cow manure?
By far the neatest debugging possibilities I've seen is part of the Oz development suite... It can do things like: Lazy Display (your debugger won't get stuck long times on long lists, but you can unfold the whole list if you want), Thread Display, handling values still to be calculated, it even displays the evolution of any statement... Its a really powerful toy.
And, no, Java did not invent stack Traces (or Exceptions). Really.
Good Luck.
This sounds pretty far off. But you can fudge in some places, like, run the prover a few times on different, failure-prone hardwares, that would reduce the chance of a non-detected hardware error to acceptable levels (you could go exponentially low, say, to 1:10^1000 with a few different hardwares).
The software part is already solved... Just take a look at Coq. It's a manually proven core with proven logics on top. Besides, it can do Extraction by the Howard-Curry-Isomorphism if you do the proof the right way. So, in fact, if you want, you can do a computer-assisted, correct proof.
If you want, you can also do a brute-force algorithm which will certainly find the (correct, manually checkable) proof if there is one, the only problem is that the Problem "prove X" is NP (of course .) and undecideable, so that the running time can be arbitarly long, and might be infinite without a way to know if it is or not. This renders the possibility pretty useless.
Some Problems have been proven by computer, mostly combinatory ones involving a mind numbing amount of similar subcases. Canonical Example here is the Proof for the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken.
I'd say, they mean, aluminium oxide glass (amorphous AlO) doped with a tiny fraction rare earth salts. Many solid substance lasers use rare earthes today, YAG (Yttrium Aluminium Granat [sp?]) for example.
Apparently you really don't know ;)
A failing fusion reactor would not pose much more threat than a working one, since the amount of fuel is really small (grams as opposed to kilograms in a fission reactor) and the reaction would stop immediately.
The problem with fusion is that the reactor walls are irradiated with lots of neutrons, which causes them to get radioactive themselves and also would alter their mechanical properties. So youre not stuck with radiactive fuel leftovers but with radioactive reactor leftovers. What would be better in a reactor in a useful power range is to be determined yet. Oh, and because of the mechanical properties, you'll have to change them really often, like, once a year or something. There are ways to reduce this problem, with materials that react better to neutrons than others, but as far as I know, this only makes the radiation appear somewhere else.
Also, at the moment, fusion reactors are sci-fi. Yes, there are experiments that achieve fusion, but for now its a few seconds at best. And miles from break-even point, and even more miles from suistained reaction.
Generall discussion here.
Just as a footnote, do not try to build your own breeder.
This is completely untrue. The human eye can distinguish just about 1000 colors (with big differences between subjects) when there is contrasts between the colored Fields (as in, you see two seperate colored test cards). The ability to detect contrasts is far higher though, so that when there's blending of colors, more colors are needed to come to satisfactory results. As anyone owning a Computer can see, 3x5 bits of color is a little few (but usually acceptable) and 3x8 is plenty.
This is still too many bits though, since the eye doesn't percieve in R G and B channels. The L*A*B color space represents actual perception far better. Thinking of Color the RGB way and not the continuous spectrum way again is an obvious mistake that noone has a practical solution for yet.
As another poster pointed out, a great deal of realism comes from motion which looks artificial except when motion-captured. Obviously, work is to be done here.
Also, the methods used in rendering currently should not be expected to give realistic results since they oversimplify what happens. Real skin is, for example, partially transparent and should be rendered volumetrically.
Just wait a few decades and you'll see realistic skin out of your computer. And this won't have to do with new overkill 128 Bit graphic boards.
I'm pretty sure that at least in single cases (and with cooperation of the network owner) it is possible to turn on the phone's microphone remotely and transmit everything heard. Though, probably, quality would be negilible ;)
I can't imagine that this is possible in a switched off phone because it wont receive anything. But again, it is imaginable to install a malware remotely that just pretends to switch off the phone but lets it active.
I know this, but I think even in these apparently completely transparent films the transparencies are in the 90% range. The eye is pretty insensitive to brightness changes, but in a mars rover, 10% loss would probably be inacceptable
You can't blow them off with opposite charge easily. These particles stick to the (non-conducting) surface probably because of Influence. If the surface would be conducting they wouldn't stick because they would get discharged. This is similar to the dust particles that adhere to CRT screens, just here its the screen thats charged (by constant electron bombardement) and the dust particles get influenced. The fact that the surface is non-conducting will also hinder you bringing any kind of charge to it. Another problem is that the charge might be randomly generated and so half positive and half negative, so you could only blow off half of the dust. There is a possibility of making transparent surfaces conducting (coating them with metal films), but this reduces transparency quite a bit, and I suppose the mechanical properties of a metal film are far inferior to whatever they used (you want this surface to be hard).
Probably you won't know the word, but I'm pretty sure you know the emotion.
Apparently you're percieving this condition in a wrong way. The article is not about decisions, what these people have is similar to a compulsive/obsessive disorder or a dependency. They may even know that what they're doing is erratic, but they can't stop their behavior.
This is even more problematic as the web is homogenous (you can't filter out the "health" part, as you can't with the "sex" part, which is a problem too, sometimes) and everywhere (at work, at internet cafes).
The single "good" approach I ever saw to this kind of problems is to have a supervisor/counselor/therapist who confidentally controls what web pages you're looking at via a browser plugin and talks about that with you. Of course that won't help with the basic condition, but it can be a help to find back to normal web use.
I think this is going to be a major issue among the forms of computer misuse.
The big advantage of FP is its clearness and rigidness. To an experiences functional Programmer, its exactly clear what a piece of Haskell Code means, since the code is half general functions that are easy to understand (map, zip, fold et.al.) and half problem-specific functions that are about as easy. The solution is built from simple bricks everywhere, other than in imperative Programming.
Another thing is, we're talking about functions aren't we? And shouldnt the First Class Citizens of our Language be functions then?
Besides, Functional Programs are very much easier to prove, and thats a thing that will be very important in some time in the future (or so I pray... or everyone in IT buisiness will go nuts over the giant pile of bugs that accumulates). For a little introduction into the theory behind this check this document about The Curry Howard isomorphism (at the very Bottom of the page). Besides, this is a fundamental link between programming and philosophy (intuitionistic reasoning)
"Excel" type spreadsheets are very useful too, maybe not for everyday programming but for short and programs intended for quick use by non-programming coworkers. In fact Excel is the one Program that tells me that not everyone in Microsoft can be a moron.
But, in fact, there are mutated humans who have differences in some of the substances responsible for seeing. Some have altered pigments (this is the most common case, and most commonly, this results in 'red' and 'green' absorption maxima getting closer, rendering the individual 'red-green blind' - usually not that much of a hindrance, but I had a friend who couldn't make out mushrooms clearly visible to me on a lawn because of that) There are also conditions where one type of cells is completely missing, this may be really bad for the people affected. Think of not seeing a red traffic light.
Colorblindness usually affects men (more than 9 of 10 cases are men, IIRC) because the red/green color seeing substances are encoded in the X Chromosome. If one is broken in a female, then she has another one as a backup, which men don't have.
I have never heard of "superhumans" though who can see ultraviolet or something, besides the constant rumours about "tetrachromates", that's women (because of the X chromosome) who have four types of "color cells" (all would be seeing in the normal "visible range" though). But there's not much evidence about this, so take it with a grain fo salt.
Color blindness - example images and details
Tetrachromates