Well, the problem is that most of the time when such conversations occur in communities like here on/., the supporters of evolution do not respond that way. They argue that science should be taken without question, and if you don't your nothing more than a fringe right winger who is trying to dumb down America. Religion can get away with pretending to be science for as long as science pretends to be religion. If you really want to get rid of things like "Intelligent Design", embrace skepticism, even when made against things you hold dear. Yes, we may end up with a few quirky theories on things like the origin of life, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Most legitimate theories start out as crackpot, so having fringe groups work on theories that oppose mainstream science is in fact necessary.
Which is within their rights as privately owned companies. If instead of a popular video game series we were talking about a neo-Nazi propaganda game, would people still be complaining? Yes, they have the right to make the game, but then other companies have the right to not license it. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want and force others to accept it, it means you get to say whatever you want and let the rest of the world evaluate it.
In places like Europe and the Middle East, this kind of thing is often prohibited by the government. But in the US, where our freedom of speech laws are so strong that we are willing to allow Nazis to march in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, that responsibility is left to the people and private enterprise. And they often do a pretty decent job, as indicated by this story.
I know I'll get modded down by this, but I think my karma can take it...
This was written right after the tsunami hit. It is clearly implied that it, like most other disasters, are in no way natural and all our fault for messing up the climate. The same thing happens with all disasters, like the Darfur quote in the ggp or the claims that global warming caused Katrina (despite virtually every meteorologists insistence that it was part of a natural cycle of powerful hurricane seasons). Environmentalists exploit the massive killings for their own political purposes, even when they are obviously unrelated. And the result is that left wing environmentalists are ruining the credibility of legitimate scientists.
No, it works just fine in firefox (why are you assuming everything on the web only works with IE?) and you can sign up for free. And even if they did charge, how would that make it incompatible with free software? There are many business models out there than involve free (both in terms of beer and speech, to borrow a hackneyed expression) software and paid for services. You already have to pay for a TV tuner, so its not exactly like you can set up a MythTV box for free anyways.
Yeah, unfortunately those of us who don't live on one of the planet's most volcanic islands don't have quite as many options when it comes to sources of energy. But then we have a few advantages as well, like a distinct lack of lava in our backyards.
Yeah, but they don't mind you using hydroelectric power (assuming it doesn't involve damning up a river), wind power (assuming it doesn't involve tall windmills that can kill birds), or solar power (assuming it wouldn't involve paving over acres of wildlife). Ok, I might have made up that last one, but I guarantee you they will complain once they see how big solar panels need to be to provide a viable amount of power.
I'm a bit skeptical of that claim. I find it highly unlikely that everyone who works at Dell has a unique enough name that they can keep the exact same format for each employee. And as to Michael Dell's email changing whenever someone figures it out... have these guys heard of spam filters? Even if that didn't work, get a secretary or someone to filter out the real email from the bogus ones sent by random members of the media or naive employees who think that if email their CEO they may be more likely to get a raise. It shouldn't be very difficult for them to filter out the emails he doesn't want to have to read from the real ones.
You mean aside from the servers that run much of our infrastructure?
And if you look at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge results, 5 cars finished the race which certainly lasted a substantial amount of time.
And our current space drones perform their mission critical functions (such as landing) on their own, as it would take way too long for human beings to communicate with them.
Yes, we still need some work before we can have robotic colonists, but perhaps you don't understand the concept of future technologies. Just because you are pissed off you don't have a robot maid like Rosie doesn't mean any future work is "quasi-religious" in nature.
"If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices."
Ok, lets assume you are right and forget rocketry, jet engines, modern materials, genetics\biotechnology, nuclear fission and fusion (and no, they had not figured those out back then, Einstein's theory of relativity had just hit the shelves two years earlier), nanotechnology and all that other fun stuff we have discovered over the past 100 years are really make believe.
That one you concede that has been invented (computational devices) is a biggie. In fact, it may well be the key to the future of our species. Eventually our 'children' may not be human at all, but artificial machines that can live independently. They would be outside of this limited lifespan we have been given (assuming of course they are not all produced by the Tyrell corporation), and thus the main argument presented in this paper (that it takes too long to get to other planets) is moot. Its not that hard to send a machine out into interstellar space, in fact we have already done so with Voyager. And the idea that we wouldn't want to because we would not live long enough to be affected by the future robot civilizations on alien worlds is pretty silly when you consider all the efforts humans have made in attempts to have some part of them outlive their lifespans.
Lets put aside the obvious question as to how worse hurricane predictions would lead to suppressed climate change knowledge for now...
Many prominent meteorologists (as opposed to climatologists) are critics of global warming alarmists, primarily concerning their claims that recent hurricane seasons are evidence of global warming (and not just a natural cycle of strong hurricane seasons that has come and gone since we first had the technology to monitor the storms). Wouldn't that mean that this vast right wing conspiracy you are imagining would want to reward the meteorologists by increasing their funding?
Schizophrenia is just one of many psychological conditions that involve delusions. And while a schizophrenic may well be able to put their mind to a relatively simple task like solving a puzzle, their episodes generally are not of the long, carefully planned out, and coldly executed type.
Uh, the federal report basically claims the laws are too confusing and educators and other officials need to be educated as to what they are allowed to do. In fact it pretty much concludes that the existing laws are sufficient, we just have to do a better job at clarifying them. It also has additional recommendations, such as making it easier for students to seek help and reducing the stigma of mental health problems.
The state report (initialized by Democrat governor Tim Kaine) appears to be recommending changes to the existing mental health system in the Commonwealth that would have made it easier to track patients (though its not yet complete).
From the psychiatrist reports I've heard (which, admittedly, have only been from talking head doctors on the news), he was certainly delusional but he was not schizophrenic. The shooting was too well planned to be something that was done by a schizo. Which basically means he would have been even more difficult to diagnose prior to last April.
But that certainly does not mean there is nothing that could have been done. In our society, we usually have physical exams by a doctor once a year, and dental exams twice a year. But how often do people (normal people, who have not yet shown any symptoms of a problem) get a psychiatric checkup? Suicide is a leading cause of death for teenagers, and the parents of most of the kids who commit it almost always say they didn't see it coming, yet we assume kids are ok unless we see visible signs that there is something wrong. And since there is a stigma in our society against mental disorders, most people suffering them hide it. The best way to reduce future events like this would be to have all kids receive normal psychiatric exams just like physical, at least until they get to college. Hopefully that will catch enough of these kids before they progress to the point where they will do something and maybe even reduce the stigma associated with visiting a psychiatrist.
No, iTunes came about in 2001. The music store came out later, but the application had already been out for some time.
And your graph clearly show (well not clearly, since its a logarithmic graph, which really isn't appropriate in this context. Just because you can draw a line between two data points on a logarithmic graph doesn't mean its exponential growth, it merely means you can draw a line between any two data points on a graph) sales picked up after the music store came out.
"Actually, properly developed AJAX-like applications should function better in these circumstances. "
Except 99.9% of the web applications developed are not developed 'properly'.
"We already know that there will be a capability for these applications to access the address book and initiate calls (at least, I believe that's what Jobs said)."
Now I'm really curious how this will work. Will just browsing to a web site allow it to automatically call some 1-900 number?
Hell thats the only reason I can think of (other than because you think it makes you look cool) to get a mp3 player with relatively poor sound quality, few supported file types, a short battery life (both short term charge time and long term life of the battery), few features, etc. But despite all those shortcomings, it integrates easily with the popular music service. And thats what propelled it to where it is.
Yeah, all firefox users have to worry about are 'major' bugs like keyloggers getting installed or malicious content getting inserted into legitimate pages. I mean who really cares if some random hacker can get access to all my keystrokes. I feel so much safer now that the powers that be decided not to designate the firefox vulnerabilities with the arbitrary label 'critical'.
I think you are confused. The fact that he doesn't buy into absurd fads isn't 'trolling', its common sense. Unfortunately thats rare in web users nowadays, so I can certainly see how you are too unfamiliar with the concept to recognize it.
...not to mention those really cool advertisements that cover the page with a trailer for the next Disney movie, fun scripts written by 15 year olds who don't understand the concept of memory management and cause the browser to blow up after a few hours sitting on the page, and those really useful scripts that disable right clicking on a web page!
In all seriousness, I use noscript, and I don't miss out on anything I don't want to miss. This is because it is easy to mark a script as trusted and allow it to run. Just simply click on the little button on the corner and choose "allow slashdot.org" (sorry, hell will freeze over before I do the same for doubleclick or google-analytics). And as far as those pages written by 15 year olds, well I don't really care if I miss out on whatever neat tricks they have written. In this day and age, running arbitrary scripts from sources you do not trust is no different than downloading and running arbitrary executable programs from sources you do not trust. In fact, that is pretty much exactly what you are doing.
Yes, that could work if mp3 was a lossless compression format. Unfortunately it is not, so requiring the software to detect inaudible cues that the silence was actually recorded won't work. Hence why applications that try your technique (such as the iRiver software mentioned in the link I gave) are still inaccurate, despite your objections.
No, I don't just mean your strategy would break albums where artists put several minutes of silence before a hidden track. There are many times where one song will fade into silence before the next song starts. Other times when one song ends, there is a pause for a few seconds for dramatic effect before the next song starts. If you just truncate any ending silent sections (I believe the iRiver tried that), these will be lost and the two songs will be mashed together. For more information, you can check this page on gapless digital music.
"That's nonsense. It can be and frequently is implemented in the software. The format doesn't need any support for that. Want gapless output? Trim any silent portion of the last frame."
Nope, wouldn't work. Many tracks have intentional silent portions, and an plain old mp3 does not indicate which silent part is supposed to be there and which was added during the encoding. Gapless doesn't mean to simply go from one song to the next without any silence in between, it means playing the songs the way they are recorded on the album. You know, the way the artist intended it to be heard.
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Well, the problem is that most of the time when such conversations occur in communities like here on /., the supporters of evolution do not respond that way. They argue that science should be taken without question, and if you don't your nothing more than a fringe right winger who is trying to dumb down America. Religion can get away with pretending to be science for as long as science pretends to be religion. If you really want to get rid of things like "Intelligent Design", embrace skepticism, even when made against things you hold dear. Yes, we may end up with a few quirky theories on things like the origin of life, but thats not necessarily a bad thing. Most legitimate theories start out as crackpot, so having fringe groups work on theories that oppose mainstream science is in fact necessary.
Which is within their rights as privately owned companies. If instead of a popular video game series we were talking about a neo-Nazi propaganda game, would people still be complaining? Yes, they have the right to make the game, but then other companies have the right to not license it. Freedom of speech doesn't mean you get to say whatever you want and force others to accept it, it means you get to say whatever you want and let the rest of the world evaluate it.
In places like Europe and the Middle East, this kind of thing is often prohibited by the government. But in the US, where our freedom of speech laws are so strong that we are willing to allow Nazis to march in heavily Jewish neighborhoods, that responsibility is left to the people and private enterprise. And they often do a pretty decent job, as indicated by this story.
I know I'll get modded down by this, but I think my karma can take it...
This was written right after the tsunami hit. It is clearly implied that it, like most other disasters, are in no way natural and all our fault for messing up the climate. The same thing happens with all disasters, like the Darfur quote in the ggp or the claims that global warming caused Katrina (despite virtually every meteorologists insistence that it was part of a natural cycle of powerful hurricane seasons). Environmentalists exploit the massive killings for their own political purposes, even when they are obviously unrelated. And the result is that left wing environmentalists are ruining the credibility of legitimate scientists.
Though there are others who are not kidding when they blame earthquakes and tsunamis on global warming.
No, it works just fine in firefox (why are you assuming everything on the web only works with IE?) and you can sign up for free. And even if they did charge, how would that make it incompatible with free software? There are many business models out there than involve free (both in terms of beer and speech, to borrow a hackneyed expression) software and paid for services. You already have to pay for a TV tuner, so its not exactly like you can set up a MythTV box for free anyways.
Yeah, unfortunately those of us who don't live on one of the planet's most volcanic islands don't have quite as many options when it comes to sources of energy. But then we have a few advantages as well, like a distinct lack of lava in our backyards.
Yeah, but they don't mind you using hydroelectric power (assuming it doesn't involve damning up a river), wind power (assuming it doesn't involve tall windmills that can kill birds), or solar power (assuming it wouldn't involve paving over acres of wildlife). Ok, I might have made up that last one, but I guarantee you they will complain once they see how big solar panels need to be to provide a viable amount of power.
I'm a bit skeptical of that claim. I find it highly unlikely that everyone who works at Dell has a unique enough name that they can keep the exact same format for each employee. And as to Michael Dell's email changing whenever someone figures it out... have these guys heard of spam filters? Even if that didn't work, get a secretary or someone to filter out the real email from the bogus ones sent by random members of the media or naive employees who think that if email their CEO they may be more likely to get a raise. It shouldn't be very difficult for them to filter out the emails he doesn't want to have to read from the real ones.
You mean aside from the servers that run much of our infrastructure?
And if you look at the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge results, 5 cars finished the race which certainly lasted a substantial amount of time.
And our current space drones perform their mission critical functions (such as landing) on their own, as it would take way too long for human beings to communicate with them.
Yes, we still need some work before we can have robotic colonists, but perhaps you don't understand the concept of future technologies. Just because you are pissed off you don't have a robot maid like Rosie doesn't mean any future work is "quasi-religious" in nature.
"If you took an educated man from 1907 and brought him to 2007, he'd be able to understand just about everything we have except for our computational devices."
Ok, lets assume you are right and forget rocketry, jet engines, modern materials, genetics\biotechnology, nuclear fission and fusion (and no, they had not figured those out back then, Einstein's theory of relativity had just hit the shelves two years earlier), nanotechnology and all that other fun stuff we have discovered over the past 100 years are really make believe.
That one you concede that has been invented (computational devices) is a biggie. In fact, it may well be the key to the future of our species. Eventually our 'children' may not be human at all, but artificial machines that can live independently. They would be outside of this limited lifespan we have been given (assuming of course they are not all produced by the Tyrell corporation), and thus the main argument presented in this paper (that it takes too long to get to other planets) is moot. Its not that hard to send a machine out into interstellar space, in fact we have already done so with Voyager. And the idea that we wouldn't want to because we would not live long enough to be affected by the future robot civilizations on alien worlds is pretty silly when you consider all the efforts humans have made in attempts to have some part of them outlive their lifespans.
Lets put aside the obvious question as to how worse hurricane predictions would lead to suppressed climate change knowledge for now...
Many prominent meteorologists (as opposed to climatologists) are critics of global warming alarmists, primarily concerning their claims that recent hurricane seasons are evidence of global warming (and not just a natural cycle of strong hurricane seasons that has come and gone since we first had the technology to monitor the storms). Wouldn't that mean that this vast right wing conspiracy you are imagining would want to reward the meteorologists by increasing their funding?
Schizophrenia is just one of many psychological conditions that involve delusions. And while a schizophrenic may well be able to put their mind to a relatively simple task like solving a puzzle, their episodes generally are not of the long, carefully planned out, and coldly executed type.
Uh, the federal report basically claims the laws are too confusing and educators and other officials need to be educated as to what they are allowed to do. In fact it pretty much concludes that the existing laws are sufficient, we just have to do a better job at clarifying them. It also has additional recommendations, such as making it easier for students to seek help and reducing the stigma of mental health problems.
The state report (initialized by Democrat governor Tim Kaine) appears to be recommending changes to the existing mental health system in the Commonwealth that would have made it easier to track patients (though its not yet complete).
From the psychiatrist reports I've heard (which, admittedly, have only been from talking head doctors on the news), he was certainly delusional but he was not schizophrenic. The shooting was too well planned to be something that was done by a schizo. Which basically means he would have been even more difficult to diagnose prior to last April.
But that certainly does not mean there is nothing that could have been done. In our society, we usually have physical exams by a doctor once a year, and dental exams twice a year. But how often do people (normal people, who have not yet shown any symptoms of a problem) get a psychiatric checkup? Suicide is a leading cause of death for teenagers, and the parents of most of the kids who commit it almost always say they didn't see it coming, yet we assume kids are ok unless we see visible signs that there is something wrong. And since there is a stigma in our society against mental disorders, most people suffering them hide it. The best way to reduce future events like this would be to have all kids receive normal psychiatric exams just like physical, at least until they get to college. Hopefully that will catch enough of these kids before they progress to the point where they will do something and maybe even reduce the stigma associated with visiting a psychiatrist.
No, iTunes came about in 2001. The music store came out later, but the application had already been out for some time.
And your graph clearly show (well not clearly, since its a logarithmic graph, which really isn't appropriate in this context. Just because you can draw a line between two data points on a logarithmic graph doesn't mean its exponential growth, it merely means you can draw a line between any two data points on a graph) sales picked up after the music store came out.
"Actually, properly developed AJAX-like applications should function better in these circumstances. "
Except 99.9% of the web applications developed are not developed 'properly'.
"We already know that there will be a capability for these applications to access the address book and initiate calls (at least, I believe that's what Jobs said)."
Now I'm really curious how this will work. Will just browsing to a web site allow it to automatically call some 1-900 number?
"What is the iPod's "killer app"?"
Easy, iTunes.
Hell thats the only reason I can think of (other than because you think it makes you look cool) to get a mp3 player with relatively poor sound quality, few supported file types, a short battery life (both short term charge time and long term life of the battery), few features, etc. But despite all those shortcomings, it integrates easily with the popular music service. And thats what propelled it to where it is.
...or they could have canceled it and instead shown a Terrance and Phillip special!
Actually I was referring the 'AJAX-y' bit, but neither Javascript nor CSS is the absurd fad, its how they (like any technology) are used and abused.
Yeah, all firefox users have to worry about are 'major' bugs like keyloggers getting installed or malicious content getting inserted into legitimate pages. I mean who really cares if some random hacker can get access to all my keystrokes. I feel so much safer now that the powers that be decided not to designate the firefox vulnerabilities with the arbitrary label 'critical'.
I think you are confused. The fact that he doesn't buy into absurd fads isn't 'trolling', its common sense. Unfortunately thats rare in web users nowadays, so I can certainly see how you are too unfamiliar with the concept to recognize it.
...not to mention those really cool advertisements that cover the page with a trailer for the next Disney movie, fun scripts written by 15 year olds who don't understand the concept of memory management and cause the browser to blow up after a few hours sitting on the page, and those really useful scripts that disable right clicking on a web page!
In all seriousness, I use noscript, and I don't miss out on anything I don't want to miss. This is because it is easy to mark a script as trusted and allow it to run. Just simply click on the little button on the corner and choose "allow slashdot.org" (sorry, hell will freeze over before I do the same for doubleclick or google-analytics). And as far as those pages written by 15 year olds, well I don't really care if I miss out on whatever neat tricks they have written. In this day and age, running arbitrary scripts from sources you do not trust is no different than downloading and running arbitrary executable programs from sources you do not trust. In fact, that is pretty much exactly what you are doing.
Yes, that could work if mp3 was a lossless compression format. Unfortunately it is not, so requiring the software to detect inaudible cues that the silence was actually recorded won't work. Hence why applications that try your technique (such as the iRiver software mentioned in the link I gave) are still inaccurate, despite your objections.
No, I don't just mean your strategy would break albums where artists put several minutes of silence before a hidden track. There are many times where one song will fade into silence before the next song starts. Other times when one song ends, there is a pause for a few seconds for dramatic effect before the next song starts. If you just truncate any ending silent sections (I believe the iRiver tried that), these will be lost and the two songs will be mashed together. For more information, you can check this page on gapless digital music.
"That's nonsense. It can be and frequently is implemented in the software. The format doesn't need any support for that. Want gapless output? Trim any silent portion of the last frame."
Nope, wouldn't work. Many tracks have intentional silent portions, and an plain old mp3 does not indicate which silent part is supposed to be there and which was added during the encoding. Gapless doesn't mean to simply go from one song to the next without any silence in between, it means playing the songs the way they are recorded on the album. You know, the way the artist intended it to be heard.