Want a tip on when a stock is going to move? Monitor the number of times your users send email to one another containing the stock's symbol in the message. When the number goes up, activity is sure to follow.
That steers us into an ugly subject, because then what eventually happens is that smart people only mate with other smart people, which by definition introduces a new species, doesn't it?
That there are people who possess attributes that yield superior results isn't in dispute, nor that their can be groupings of such people.
I think we have to remember that when we're talking about the human race, the people you see making movies or running dotcoms aren't what we're talking about. We're talking about the people on line at the DMV.
It's a pretty diverse group, and barring medical reasons, all get fed, all get to reproduce. Indeed, IIRC the higher your education, the less children you end up having.
Natural selection must not only mean that the possession of some combination of attributes confers both survival and the opportunity to procreate, the absence of those attributes must mean the opposite.
Beyond diseases that are passed through the genes, what such attributes exists for humans? Especially as it relates to brain development? I can't see it.
We're looking for some attribute of the human brain that permits one group of people to survive and reproduce, an attribute which those who are without die/don't have babies. Given civilization, what could that possibly be?
In other words, the lethality of stupidity is rapidly decreasing. I know we have to consider the scale of time here, but I'm assuming that for as long as human beings survive, so does civilization (and again assuming that such civilization doesn't get into eugenics or anything like that.)
They don't know it necessarily makes people smarter, but it's hard to think what else it might be.
Deference to authority perhaps? The gene that enables groupthink, which, today seems to be sending us into the abyss but thousands of years ago meant the difference between one tribe surviving another?
The whole business with the alleles and DRD4, I don't know anything about that. I just found the way that the conclusion was stated here to be clumsy. Rather than talk about the brain still evolving, a more accurate headline might be "Path of human brain's evolution identified".
The coverage evolution has received of late has been spooky. I'm seeing all kinds of signs that the MSM is trying to accommodate "intelligent design", an agenda that is served by implying that human evolution was thought to have stopped somehow.
Now that I'm looking at it again, maybe it is another case of bad reporting.
First off, it's hard to see *any* species as being in anything other than a state of evolution. To suggest otherwise implies a superficial understand of what evolution is about.
That being said, it's conceivable that we're at the point where the human brain is the exception to the above. After all, what has been the driving force behind the evolution of the brain? Big-brained people surviving and succeeding in reproduction where little-brained people fail.
This isn't really happening anymore. Yes, smart people still trump over stupid people in most aspects of life, but stupid people still reproduce. Civilization has removed the engine through which drives the evolution of the species.
I can't believe how often highly educated people will pontificate on this subject, and get it wrong. Yes, usually the media is to blame -- science reporting is notoriously bad -- but that does not appear to be the case here.
Ironic that they should be so wrong on this of all subjects. -- You didn't know.
"We're fundamentally opposed to DRM. We think it's a dead end for society," Greve said, adding all software should be free to use and that artists could be paid for their films and music by a general 'taxation' on Internet connections.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the kind of freedom being espoused here necessitate doing away with WiFi? I mean, how can you tax the connection if it's available to anyone, anonymously, at any time?
I'm a big fan of the GPL, and of course I'm opposed to software patents, but to divine from the two the need to tax everybody for everything just smacks of totalitarianism. Who then decides how this money gets doled out to the artists, for one thing? And how does this model work for movies, when they cost millions of dollars to produce? I just don't see it. -- You didn't know.
For instance, everyone who identifies BillG as the wellspring of all evil forgets how scared we all were of IBM back in the day. Now IBM is seen with much favor in the community. It wouldn't be that way were it not for Microsoft.
So really, it isn't Google's turn to be villain, it's Microsoft's turn to be the good guys.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of their cost-benefit analysis.
I'm simply pointing out that the reason they reached this conclusion wasn't because they were using StarOffice, but because everybody else was using Microsoft Office.
The costs were in getting StarOffice to work with Microsoft Office. The article makes it sound like it's the fault of StarOffice. It isn't. It's Microsoft who throws up the barriers to prevent OSS from working with their software, not the other way around.
If everybody else were using StarOffice, no way would they be switching to Microsoft Office. -- Why didn't you know?
The other 95% were using Microsoft Office. So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office.
You know, it's crazy giving cops tools like Microsoft Office or StarOffice in the first place. 99.99% of people who use word processors don't get past the part where you hit keys and watch text appear on the screen. Oh yeah, and open and save documents. That's all they ever do.
I'd bet real money that the textarea element in a browser like Firefox provides all the text-editing functionality that these people need, especially if you add spell correct via JavaScript. Hit submit and there's your save function, to a central server that can be accessed from any department. Click a link and there's your file open functionality. Amazing!
You can even do forms! LOL
Why aren't they using a system like this? Because some idiot somewhere equates more-expensive with easier-to-use. It's the oldest story in IT, and it's always a tragedy. -- Why didn't you know?
Being that it's a relatively compact island, I wonder if any consideration was given to a series of satellites in low-Earth orbit.
Many satellites, all in one orbit that takes each satellite across the nation along the long axis (i.e., north-to-south) should provide continuous coverage with very low latency.
Given the importance of VoIP it would seem that latency isn't something you can so easily get rid of. -- Why didn't you know?
We criticize terrorists for choosing violence over speech to make their point. Then we take away their ability to speak.
Even from a tactical point-of-view this doesn't make sense. They cite one web site as offering technical instruction on how to commit terror, OK, but what about the rest which undoubtedly contain information authorities could be using to predict and prevent future attacks?
Do they actually think that this will hurt their recruitment efforts? That some guy who is already of the mind to commit suicide for the cause is going to change his mind when his browser gives him a 404?
How is it in this most important of issues we see the least intelligent people making all of the decisions for us? -- Why didn't you know?
Do they keep making money the way things are going? Sure they do. But there won't be any growth, worse, Linux/*BSD continue to act like ducks pecking them to death.
So if they're lucky, their stock price stays where it is.
For Gates, everything is about growth. Making money hand over fist isn't enough. He's done that already.
Microsoft's role shouldn't be in improving the OS, it should be in creating the infrastructure necessary to allow the umpteen-zillion Windows developers out there to improve the OS instead.
I don't know how many of you have contributed to an OSS project, but, at least for those projects that are well-established the process can be a lot of work and not a little bit intimidating. Some progress has been made on the tool front to make it easier but it still takes way too much effort to get a patch mainstreamed on the really big projects.
What Microsoft should do is open up their software, and invest their money in more programmers, but not to do coding, to act as support for the rest of us who do the coding.
Make it so that if I find a bug, all I have to do is fix it and submit a patch. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the one opportunity they have that I don't see Linux/*BSD ever possessing. The kind of work necessary to support large projects is the very last thing most of us want to do. Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore.
They'd still make gobs of money. Ever browse their help wanted section? Sometimes it seems as if half the listings there are for build engineers. Guys whose only job it is to build Windows and all the other projects. Casual/notive users are never going to attempt this on their own (Gentoo/LFS users notwithstanding), and you'd be crazy to accept builds from third-parties given the complexity we're talking about and the potential for malware.
It's the best thing Microsoft could do right now. Which is why they won't do it. It's like what they say about generals always fighting the last war. Gates and Ballmer got where they are by hewing to a specific ideology. They're not changing their minds in this lifetime or the next, even if its clear that that ideology is antiquated and obsolete. -- Why didn't you know?
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
Now, if you want to talk about butterflies and evolution, then answer for me how it is that butterflies could have evolved in the first place. You're talking about a two-stage organism here, one stage does nothing but eat, the other stage does nothing but procreate. Which came first?
If it was the caterpillar, how is it that it suddenly figures out how to create a cocoon, lay dormant for a winter, then emerge as a completely different creature? They obviously had the means for procreation on their own, so why bother becoming a butterfly?
If it was the butterfly, why even bother with the caterpillar stage? If you can already fly around and stuff, why bother crawling?
People cite all these other examples trying to bring down evolution, and to me they never succeed, it's obvious to me for instance how eyes evolved. But caterpillars turning into butterflies still boggles my mind. -- Why didn't you know?
It was a "desktop calculator" my dad had. The cool thing about it was it's companion, the HP-9100B, which was a plotter.
I had never really bothered with math until my dad outgrew the system and let me set it up in my room, where I went 24/7 on it. I mostly did spherical trig stuff, and spent an inordinate amount of time with platonic solids. It bugged me immensely that dodecahedrons couldn't be cleanly arranged together in anything but a vertical stack.
Your display on this thing was four registers. That's it. You'd program it in machine code by entering in numbers to specify the operations and their operands. My next machine was a handheld programmable calculator, the HP-41C. There you could only view one register at a time, BUT you had an LCD alphanumeric display so programming was more like assembler.
I always thought it was a great tool to learn programming on since you were forced to keep the whole program in your head while writing it. And you could do some fairly sophisticated stuff too as there was quite a bit of memory (4K?)
It's amazing how far we've come, and yet, it sometimes seems as if we've barely moved at all. The other day I had to kick out some Python to tackle a math problem I remember having worked out on the HP-41C two-and-a-half decades ago. Maybe I got it done quicker in Python... but did I have as much fun doing it?
Absent the trend in placing new and more onerous restrictions on where, when and how many people are allowed to peaceably assemble, I might agree with you.
It's only logical. Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated, which means that future efforts on the part of the citizenry to protest the increasingly hateful policies of this government will become more and more confrontational, and which in turn sees the government resorting to ever more punitive policies in response.
Prediction: the ray-gun is on the streets in America in time for the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I can't wait to hear what they consider to be acceptable levels of casualties as the result of using this thing on people.
The thing I regret most in this life is that of all the science fiction movies I loved watching as I grew up, Soylent Green ends up being the one that most closely depicts the future.
If you really want to keep 911 available, your solution is to invest this money into lots of wireless nodes instead, all with battery-backup, so that EVERYBODY has access regardless of the circumstance.
No Alanis Morissette. No Marilyn Manson. No Billie Holiday.
Damn man, if it's OK to not have any music, I can support Mac OS X and Linux too! Come on over to nokilli's download service, where you can listen to silence in your choice of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA or the very popular, highly compressed, zero-byte file format. -- Why didn't you know?
Without any user intervention whatsoever, up comes a full usable desktop environment complete with browser, which is the only application many users even need.
Installation to the HD can be as simple as putting an image of the CD onto the HD. Helps make things load faster, and you get to do things like save bookmarks, etc.
And if ever the installation gets foobared, the user has the piece of mind of knowing that all she/he has to do is boot from the CD again, and start the process all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the charge that /. is always whoring for Google isn't justified, i.e., Google unveils maps.google.com or whatever.
But not today. This is an all-new low.
--
You didn't know.
Want a tip on when a stock is going to move? Monitor the number of times your users send email to one another containing the stock's symbol in the message. When the number goes up, activity is sure to follow.
But they wouldn't do that, right? Because...
Because...
Exactly.
--
You didn't know.
That steers us into an ugly subject, because then what eventually happens is that smart people only mate with other smart people, which by definition introduces a new species, doesn't it?
That there are people who possess attributes that yield superior results isn't in dispute, nor that their can be groupings of such people.
I think we have to remember that when we're talking about the human race, the people you see making movies or running dotcoms aren't what we're talking about. We're talking about the people on line at the DMV.
It's a pretty diverse group, and barring medical reasons, all get fed, all get to reproduce. Indeed, IIRC the higher your education, the less children you end up having.
Natural selection must not only mean that the possession of some combination of attributes confers both survival and the opportunity to procreate, the absence of those attributes must mean the opposite.
Beyond diseases that are passed through the genes, what such attributes exists for humans? Especially as it relates to brain development? I can't see it.
We're looking for some attribute of the human brain that permits one group of people to survive and reproduce, an attribute which those who are without die/don't have babies. Given civilization, what could that possibly be?
In other words, the lethality of stupidity is rapidly decreasing. I know we have to consider the scale of time here, but I'm assuming that for as long as human beings survive, so does civilization (and again assuming that such civilization doesn't get into eugenics or anything like that.)
The whole business with the alleles and DRD4, I don't know anything about that. I just found the way that the conclusion was stated here to be clumsy. Rather than talk about the brain still evolving, a more accurate headline might be "Path of human brain's evolution identified".
The coverage evolution has received of late has been spooky. I'm seeing all kinds of signs that the MSM is trying to accommodate "intelligent design", an agenda that is served by implying that human evolution was thought to have stopped somehow.
Now that I'm looking at it again, maybe it is another case of bad reporting.
First off, it's hard to see *any* species as being in anything other than a state of evolution. To suggest otherwise implies a superficial understand of what evolution is about.
That being said, it's conceivable that we're at the point where the human brain is the exception to the above. After all, what has been the driving force behind the evolution of the brain? Big-brained people surviving and succeeding in reproduction where little-brained people fail.
This isn't really happening anymore. Yes, smart people still trump over stupid people in most aspects of life, but stupid people still reproduce. Civilization has removed the engine through which drives the evolution of the species.
I can't believe how often highly educated people will pontificate on this subject, and get it wrong. Yes, usually the media is to blame -- science reporting is notoriously bad -- but that does not appear to be the case here.
Ironic that they should be so wrong on this of all subjects.
--
You didn't know.
I'm a big fan of the GPL, and of course I'm opposed to software patents, but to divine from the two the need to tax everybody for everything just smacks of totalitarianism. Who then decides how this money gets doled out to the artists, for one thing? And how does this model work for movies, when they cost millions of dollars to produce? I just don't see it.
--
You didn't know.
I entered Pluto Nium as my name, but when I check the site to make sure they've got me on the list it isn't there.
For some reason they don't want us to know Pluto Nium is on-board.
--
You didn't know.
Do not try to understand the point -- that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth.
What truth?
There is no point.
--
You didn't know.
For instance, everyone who identifies BillG as the wellspring of all evil forgets how scared we all were of IBM back in the day. Now IBM is seen with much favor in the community. It wouldn't be that way were it not for Microsoft.
So really, it isn't Google's turn to be villain, it's Microsoft's turn to be the good guys.
Hrm, did I really just say that?
--
You didn't know.
I'm not disputing the accuracy of their cost-benefit analysis.
I'm simply pointing out that the reason they reached this conclusion wasn't because they were using StarOffice, but because everybody else was using Microsoft Office.
The costs were in getting StarOffice to work with Microsoft Office. The article makes it sound like it's the fault of StarOffice. It isn't. It's Microsoft who throws up the barriers to prevent OSS from working with their software, not the other way around.
If everybody else were using StarOffice, no way would they be switching to Microsoft Office.
--
Why didn't you know?
The other 95% were using Microsoft Office. So that answers why they were having so much trouble with StarOffice. They weren't. They were having trouble working with everybody else using Microsoft Office.
You know, it's crazy giving cops tools like Microsoft Office or StarOffice in the first place. 99.99% of people who use word processors don't get past the part where you hit keys and watch text appear on the screen. Oh yeah, and open and save documents. That's all they ever do.
I'd bet real money that the textarea element in a browser like Firefox provides all the text-editing functionality that these people need, especially if you add spell correct via JavaScript. Hit submit and there's your save function, to a central server that can be accessed from any department. Click a link and there's your file open functionality. Amazing!
You can even do forms! LOL
Why aren't they using a system like this? Because some idiot somewhere equates more-expensive with easier-to-use. It's the oldest story in IT, and it's always a tragedy.
--
Why didn't you know?
Being that it's a relatively compact island, I wonder if any consideration was given to a series of satellites in low-Earth orbit.
Many satellites, all in one orbit that takes each satellite across the nation along the long axis (i.e., north-to-south) should provide continuous coverage with very low latency.
Given the importance of VoIP it would seem that latency isn't something you can so easily get rid of.
--
Why didn't you know?
We criticize terrorists for choosing violence over speech to make their point. Then we take away their ability to speak.
Even from a tactical point-of-view this doesn't make sense. They cite one web site as offering technical instruction on how to commit terror, OK, but what about the rest which undoubtedly contain information authorities could be using to predict and prevent future attacks?
Do they actually think that this will hurt their recruitment efforts? That some guy who is already of the mind to commit suicide for the cause is going to change his mind when his browser gives him a 404?
How is it in this most important of issues we see the least intelligent people making all of the decisions for us?
--
Why didn't you know?
Where in the world are you finding any evidence to claim that their current ideology is antiquated and obselete?
Here.
Do they keep making money the way things are going? Sure they do. But there won't be any growth, worse, Linux/*BSD continue to act like ducks pecking them to death.
So if they're lucky, their stock price stays where it is.
For Gates, everything is about growth. Making money hand over fist isn't enough. He's done that already.
Microsoft's role shouldn't be in improving the OS, it should be in creating the infrastructure necessary to allow the umpteen-zillion Windows developers out there to improve the OS instead.
I don't know how many of you have contributed to an OSS project, but, at least for those projects that are well-established the process can be a lot of work and not a little bit intimidating. Some progress has been made on the tool front to make it easier but it still takes way too much effort to get a patch mainstreamed on the really big projects.
What Microsoft should do is open up their software, and invest their money in more programmers, but not to do coding, to act as support for the rest of us who do the coding.
Make it so that if I find a bug, all I have to do is fix it and submit a patch. That's it. Nothing more. Nothing less.
This is the one opportunity they have that I don't see Linux/*BSD ever possessing. The kind of work necessary to support large projects is the very last thing most of us want to do. Sourceforge is littered with the remains of OSS projects that were fun to code and get working, but that nobody wants to maintain anymore.
They'd still make gobs of money. Ever browse their help wanted section? Sometimes it seems as if half the listings there are for build engineers. Guys whose only job it is to build Windows and all the other projects. Casual/notive users are never going to attempt this on their own (Gentoo/LFS users notwithstanding), and you'd be crazy to accept builds from third-parties given the complexity we're talking about and the potential for malware.
It's the best thing Microsoft could do right now. Which is why they won't do it. It's like what they say about generals always fighting the last war. Gates and Ballmer got where they are by hewing to a specific ideology. They're not changing their minds in this lifetime or the next, even if its clear that that ideology is antiquated and obsolete.
--
Why didn't you know?
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
Now, if you want to talk about butterflies and evolution, then answer for me how it is that butterflies could have evolved in the first place. You're talking about a two-stage organism here, one stage does nothing but eat, the other stage does nothing but procreate. Which came first?
If it was the caterpillar, how is it that it suddenly figures out how to create a cocoon, lay dormant for a winter, then emerge as a completely different creature? They obviously had the means for procreation on their own, so why bother becoming a butterfly?
If it was the butterfly, why even bother with the caterpillar stage? If you can already fly around and stuff, why bother crawling?
People cite all these other examples trying to bring down evolution, and to me they never succeed, it's obvious to me for instance how eyes evolved. But caterpillars turning into butterflies still boggles my mind.
--
Why didn't you know?
It was a "desktop calculator" my dad had. The cool thing about it was it's companion, the HP-9100B, which was a plotter.
I had never really bothered with math until my dad outgrew the system and let me set it up in my room, where I went 24/7 on it. I mostly did spherical trig stuff, and spent an inordinate amount of time with platonic solids. It bugged me immensely that dodecahedrons couldn't be cleanly arranged together in anything but a vertical stack.
Your display on this thing was four registers. That's it. You'd program it in machine code by entering in numbers to specify the operations and their operands. My next machine was a handheld programmable calculator, the HP-41C. There you could only view one register at a time, BUT you had an LCD alphanumeric display so programming was more like assembler.
I always thought it was a great tool to learn programming on since you were forced to keep the whole program in your head while writing it. And you could do some fairly sophisticated stuff too as there was quite a bit of memory (4K?)
It's amazing how far we've come, and yet, it sometimes seems as if we've barely moved at all. The other day I had to kick out some Python to tackle a math problem I remember having worked out on the HP-41C two-and-a-half decades ago. Maybe I got it done quicker in Python... but did I have as much fun doing it?
Indeed.
Absent the trend in placing new and more onerous restrictions on where, when and how many people are allowed to peaceably assemble, I might agree with you.
It's only logical. Our right to peaceably assemble is in the process of being eviscerated, which means that future efforts on the part of the citizenry to protest the increasingly hateful policies of this government will become more and more confrontational, and which in turn sees the government resorting to ever more punitive policies in response.
Prediction: the ray-gun is on the streets in America in time for the 2008 Republican National Convention.
I can't wait to hear what they consider to be acceptable levels of casualties as the result of using this thing on people.
The thing I regret most in this life is that of all the science fiction movies I loved watching as I grew up, Soylent Green ends up being the one that most closely depicts the future.
(I'd rather take my chances on the Nostromo.)
--
Why didn't you know?
...given the migration to Wifi, that is.
If you really want to keep 911 available, your solution is to invest this money into lots of wireless nodes instead, all with battery-backup, so that EVERYBODY has access regardless of the circumstance.
--
Why didn't you know?
No Alanis Morissette. No Marilyn Manson. No Billie Holiday.
Damn man, if it's OK to not have any music, I can support Mac OS X and Linux too! Come on over to nokilli's download service, where you can listen to silence in your choice of MP3, Ogg Vorbis, WMA or the very popular, highly compressed, zero-byte file format.
--
Why didn't you know?
Have you used a LiveCD recently?
Without any user intervention whatsoever, up comes a full usable desktop environment complete with browser, which is the only application many users even need.
Installation to the HD can be as simple as putting an image of the CD onto the HD. Helps make things load faster, and you get to do things like save bookmarks, etc.
And if ever the installation gets foobared, the user has the piece of mind of knowing that all she/he has to do is boot from the CD again, and start the process all over again.