It has always seemed to me that there should be computer epoch time...
Computer time always counts in the number of SI seconds since the Epoch, which is 0:00:00, January 1, 1970 UTC.
...and then you should have a conversion from that epoch into a time that make sense for the user.
And that's UTC for those who live in England. Leap second is used because an earth day is not exactly 86400 SI seconds. The goal is to keep the daily drift within +/- 0.5 seconds, but you have to update a computer for the leap table often. There is one leap second pretty much every year.
A leap year (actually the leap day, February 29) is to synchronize earth days with the orbit around sun, which is not exactly 365 earth days.
Chinese seem to be very intelligent and capable, but not as concerned about cheating to get what they want... Maybe you can shed some light on why this seems to be the case. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we're generally around Christian values, while those things are not as emphasized in China?
If you believe this, then you should be very concerned that the American society is becoming increasing secular, including the secular Christians: those who don't read the bible, don't pray, don't go to church, only testify God in their mouth when they curse, don't live Christian values, and still claim they are Christians. Also, you should know that Christianity is spreading like wild-fire in China, via underground house churches.
The Chinese people *liberally* copy everything they want from DVDs to Windows Vista to entire companies. They do it because they CAN and they have no moral code whatsoever to think "this isn't mine, maybe I shouldn't take it".
If you lived in China, you'd know it's more convenient to buy illegal DVDs off the street than where they sell legal copies, much like how downloading mp3s and movies is more convenient than purchasing it. If you want to discuss about piracy, read my latest journal entry here and comment or critique it.
You can't steal companies. You can imitate their product or business model, but companies are made of the people and the culture that makes it unique. You can't steal that. That's all Baidu can do to Google: Baidu needs to constantly sabotage Google in order to retain their market share, and that totally won't work in the long run. Of course, Google has other inherent weaknesses that needs to be addressed as well, like lack of awareness of the cultural context, which is the primary reason why Google is lagging behind in the Japanese and Korean markets where Google is not sabotaged.
I've had Chinese people steal money, intellectual property, motorcycles and more from me just because of a stupid, chilish "what's yours is mine" mentality. I am so sick and tired of them copying from us and other countries and then sticking their nose up in the air thinking they are 100% right.
I've had money, intellectual property, and other personal properties stolen from me on the soil of freedom of the United States of America. What's your point? Greed and coveting is universal.
China is nothing more than a country filled with arrogant, ignorant, dishonorable, thieving, impolite children. I hope they get their ass handed to them someday soon.
Funny that's how I feel about some Americans. I guess we should call it a draw. I should mention that I'm honestly trying to start a living here in the U.S., but anti-Chinese, white-superiority sentiment like yours is constantly making me have a second thought. It's people like you who give me a hard time explaining to my nice American friends when they ask me if I want to stay in the U.S.; I don't want to hurt their feelings.
In the Chinese net culture, full-text being copied and pasted is a compliment, showing popularity of the work. You always find the work of popular online novelists "mirrored" on multiple websites. People usually acknowledge the author but does not always provide a URL reference. Plagiarism, or more specifically, defrauding the reader of authorship of the work, usually isn't the motivation.
This copy and paste culture can be traced to two historical reasons: (1) before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying. This is what student used to do in school. By the time you finished school, you would have copied a number of literature works by hand. And (2), private, unregulated hand-copying is the only way literature can survive over several oppressive emperors.
The former practice can still be seen prevalent in many CJK education system nowadays, where students are asked to manually copy some text on a regular basis as a part of the learning process. The latter reason still applies today as well; you'd see full-text of an article posted on an online BBS forum only to be taken down later by the authority, and someone posts the full-text again on another BBS forum.
In addition, copyright and authorship are separate issues. Interestingly, the British first invented copyright in order to allow the royalty to regulate printing of books (i.e. for censorship). Copyright granted the print shop a license to print a work. Without a license it would be illegal. Copyright was not invented to protect authorship.
In conclusion, it is not that the Chinese does not respect authorship. Copyright is simply unsuitable under the historical and cultural context. This seems to chime with the notion that real man upload his code on FTP and let everyone else mirror it, as said by some Linus dude.
I can't believe more people modded the parent with interesting than informative. Unlike other posts that rants about bugs in C#, it is informative. TFA says:
As we detect obstacles in each frame, we store the ones we detect. As the car moves, we call an update function on each of the obstacles that we know about, to update their position in relation to the car. Obviously, once we pass an obstacle, we don't need keep it in memory, so everything 10 feet behind the car got deleted..... Though we thought we had cleared all references to old entries in the list, because the objects were still registered as subscribers to an event, they were never getting deleted.
In essence, they really have two obstacles lists, one of which---the event subscriber list---is a mirror of the one being updated by stereo vision. Whoever wrote the code didn't decide correctly what to do about the mirror.
If we have a stethoscope for the minds of various characters involved at different time, it could be like this:
Unpaid college intern who worked on that book uncredited, "Shit, I spent too much time playing Bejeweled and IM with friends, and I have this essay to finish by 4pm. Maybe I'll take a little peek at what Wikipedia has to say about this."
George Orwel, "Well done, my lowly minion intern. Looks like a fine essay to me. I'll incorporate it into my book."
John Wiley and Sons, "Well done, my lowly minion author. Looks like a fine book to us. We will publish it."
A year later...
Ydorb, "What the heck? They copied my Wikipedia article!"
Slashdot, "What the heck? They copied someone's Wikipedia article!"
John Wiley and Sons to George Orwel, "What the heck, you copied someone's Wikipedia article?"
George Orwel, "Shit, I got sabotaged by one of my lowly minions. How can I ever admit this."
John Wiley and Sons, "Shit, we got sabotaged by one of my authors. How can we ever admit this?"
Meanwhile, the unpaid intern who work uncredited has returned to school, still addicted to Bejeweled, and still submitting Wikipedia articles for his homework assignment.
I've been Googling around, and I've yet to find a convincing reason to use PulseAudio over jackd. Why reinvent the wheel? Jackd has network transparency (see NetJack). People say jackd is for professional audio, and PulseAudio is for desktop user. I don't see a reason why jackd cannot be made for desktop users. After all, CoreAudio framework on Mac OS X works for both desktop and professional audio. I've also used jackd just to listen to music or watch movies. What are the GNOME people thinking?
Using RFID for surveillance purpose... I think this is an opportunity for early-in-life training for the smart young adults on how to evade surveillance. As someone points out, RFID makes skipping classes ever easier: just ask a friend to bring your school uniform (or cut off the RFID from your clothes), and you don't have to be physically present. You can become invisible by dislodging your own RFID tag. You can do a lot of pranks using programmable RFID tags. You can steal a teacher's RFID code (without the teacher even noticing it) and then replay the code in order to gain access to teacher's office. You can blackmail somebody's lunch money by threatening to make his RFID "enter" a girl's locker room. This is all just to exploit the unenforceable assumption that RFID is physically associated with the person it represents.
When I was in high school, the magnetic strip on the student ID card was only used to check out books from the library (of course the ID has to match the bearer). They were never used to take attendance. RFID is better than magnetic strip in the sense that RFID avoids wear, so you don't need to replace your ID if you used it often. Using RFID for anything more is going to make school administration a nightmare. RFID is not meant to conduct surveillance or provide access control.
What I have problems with is how they use technology for unintended purpose (or for a false promise), and then have to make up draconian rules to deter tempering with technology. The deterrence for tempering with technology is devastating to the future of these young adults. The should have never used broken technology in the first place.
You misunderstood my point. They can fake e-mail from anybody, which nobody should care except when they actually come on-site. The first question is "who invited you here?" Then the security guard or receptionist would look up the name from a directory, call the person, confirming that the visitor is here, then hand the responsibility over to the host. The only assumption I make is that the host would be fully accountable for his visitor's action. This includes finding a watch-person if the host is not available.
This is what should have happened with TraceSecurity. They would send out a fake e-mail from the higher-up a week in advance announcing that pest control is coming. People could ignore it, assuming that somebody is taking care of it. When TraceSecurity comes, someone will stop them and ask who is responsible for their visit. TraceSecurity gives out the name of the CEO who authorized the security audit. Someone calls the CEO or his secretary and confirms the visit. Then the policy kicks in: the CEO himself must either be present and escort TraceSecurity folks, or he must appoint someone to do that. If nobody shows up, the security guard or receptionist holds them at the entrance until somebody does. The best thing that could happen is that the CEO or someone appointed by the CEO watches TraceSecurity folks put blank CD-ROMs and their stickers on the server.
If someone simply sends TraceSecurity on their merry way to the server room assuming the senior executive is "blissfully ignorant," then the company has serious leadership problems, and server room is just one thing that can go wrong. But I don't think many companies are like that, so this wouldn't be the reason TraceSecurity is able to penetrate successfully.
I think the most likely and the most devastating situation is when somebody tries to make the best local judgment with good intention that backfires. When pest control shows up for an appointment but you don't let them in, it could cost the company money for a missed appointment. You decide to save money for the company by letting them in regardless if that violating the policy. This typically happens in a corporate culture that values "trust" and "doing someone a favor" as an integral part of the company. These values are what make a society thrive but are also the most vulnerable to social engineering.
the second thing they prove is that the security staff is also underpaid and understaffed. Sorry but my first shot is to ask what company they are from, then google it to find the phone number. I never call the number given by the person or on their badge or paperwork.
It probably wouldn't be very difficult to setup a rogue website. Since TraceSecurity bothered to prepare for the operation a week in advance, even printing a custom designed magnetic plaque to brand their rented car, there is ample time for Google to pick up the website. It doesn't have to be the highest page ranked for pest control because you'll be searching for the company's name.
Visitors should never be left unattended, but it is often impractical to deposit an employee for watching whenever there is a visitor. Notice there is a difference when the visit is solicited: there is someone inside the company who initiated the visit, so let him be responsible. In the case of a legitimate visit by pest control, someone inside the company must have called them over, so it is also his job to attend the pest control or at least appoint someone to attend them. There should be some way inside the company to figure out who is the host of a visitor, then make the host accountable.
The portal page is different; Example I track about 100 stocks from 3 exchanges, that's manual input. Another example; I have to figure out which cookie/url-that-gets-blocked I need to let in. I've done it a couple of times and its a pain.
Your examples of monopoly apply no matter which portal you switch to. If you switch away from Google and never use them again, you'd still run into the same problems. I think Google even makes it easier to switch away, by e.g. offering the ability to download your e-mail and blog archive.
I think the proper solution to address your problems is that you shouldn't be using portals.
But of course if you were already in for life, you can't get additional time.
You can have multiple counts of life sentence and several counts of 25 year imprisonment. It can add to your time, but you won't live long enough to earn presidential pardons to get out alive, or live long enough to serve the sentence.
He voiced his viewpoint too much in this thread (24+ comments). I don't plan to follow suit, so this is the last comment you'll ever hear from me. Moderation systems like what Slashdot and Wikipedia use are invented with good intentions, but they can be abused as long as people have the incentive to do so---gaining status (come on, people, this is not MMORPG). I don't see how pointing out this possibility is unjustified and inappropriate.
Don't bother wasting your energy arguing with that guy (Ta_bu_shi_da_yu). I don't see how his posts are informative or insightful but he was modded up nonetheless. The moderator skipped posts like yours that points out critical observations. If he's not a karma whore, he apparently knows how to game the system to gain status. When it comes to debate about the privileged few and the masses like you and me, how can he be sympathetic about the masses?
I whole heartedly agree with you. That's the many mistakes I personally made when I did the IT for a college radio station. Fortunately it was only a hobby, but unfortunately it led to a bitter end. It could have been the most wonderful years of my life.
It was a few years later until I realize that a lot of jobs, especially IT, is entirely about servitude. This includes taking the blame when it wasn't your fault. IT enables other people to get their job done, but you should keep your hands off from their vision.
All of you said above makes sense if we are all amoeba. An evolutionary tree hierarchy implies asexual reproduction. Breeding creates a graph that violates tree structure. In practice, Izzy and Fred, or even Greg and Chuck, could have created another snapshot of code. The tree model is flawed. The tree model implies that there can only be one origin of species, but there could be multiple origins. Due to the sheer number of combinatorics, there is no way you can tell what the distinct origins are, not even the number of origins. Maybe that's what caused the illusion of single origin theory.
In other words, the fact that humans and chimpanzee share 95% DNA could suggest early cross-breeding of two or more closely-related species. There could have been more variety of species than we have today. After natural selection eliminated most of them, the remaining species are no longer close enough to cross-breed.
Very large sequences (hundreds of thousands of sequences) of nearly exactly matching code/DNA in two programs/species certainly supports the assertion that the two had the same original source.
Basically, the marker that signals the end of the chromosome gets corrupted. The fact that this scrambling occurred isn't that rare - the amazing part of this is that the organism that this mutation produced was likely better adapted than the original one.
where I explained this in detail, including several references. Very often, mutations cause defective organisms, but not in all cases.
Citing YouTube? That's classic. The wustl.edu reference is better, but it did not claim in any way whether merged genes can make the specie better adapted. Why don't you try to find a few papers from Google Scholar?
I'll tell you why talkorigin is hogwash. It's not peer reviewed, and their citations are poorly chosen to support claims that weren't in the citation! Like what you did! It's run by athetism fundamentalists to attack whoever disagrees with them. They're on the same bearing as scientologists.
Did you know the same light-sensitive compounds that power the eye of a jellyfish are also present in your eye? And the striking similarities in the embryonic development of genetically related species (and even not-so-closely related ones).
That's what programmers call "code reuse." Did you know that Windows and Mac OS X share some BSD code? Mac OS X certainly did not evolve from Windows or vice versa, but if you only empirically observe the source code without knowledge of the development process, this is the conclusion you would end up making. No, Mac OS X isn't a BSD derivative either.
And that humans have one less chromosome than our ape ancestors, which was recently found to happen because two chromosomes merged into during the development of homo sapiens.
I would be interested to read more about how two chromosomes can merge in the reproduction process. Doesn't it usually cause deficiency like color blindness? Are we, then, actually inferior to the ape ancestors?
Or maybe homo sapient genomes are simply intelligently revised to be smaller and more efficient?
Evolution predicts and fits with all of our current knowledge about life on earth, even if it manages to offend your religious sensibilities. Anyone who doesn't believe this has not looked honestly at the current scientific evidence, for example as laid out here: http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/
Please, talkorigins is hogwash, and they counter straw-man argument with more straw-man arguments. Keep it out of the discussion for courtesy.
Theorists got interested in String Theory when they observed that two events far apart can affect each other, but there is no obvious connection. A third party (scientist) can't observe the connection directly, only by observing the two events, as if there is a tunnel between them. Imagine you can only see cars going in from one end of a tunnel and coming out from the other, and you wonder what happens in between. They figure they must still be attached, not observably, but in other non-observable dimensions. They even think that observable connections between two particles can be modeled as if the observation is not available, for example: gravity, electro-magnetic forces, nuclear forces and other stuff. The math seems to work out on paper, but you have to take the extra dimensions on faith because you can't observe them.
This is where String Theory starts sounding like a religion.
I'm not disagreeing with what you said about God and music, but vibration is just an analogy used by String Theorists to describe the theory in order to make it sound more relevant to the physical world. Every mathematic function on real numbers can be described either as a curve or vibration. What is a curve in the time domain becomes a vibration in the frequency domain and vice versa. It is well-known that these two domains can be mapped one-to-one and onto by Fourier Transform. In other words, you can make up anything in math and call it a vibration.
String Theory is just some theorist's wet dream. You don't want to syncretize your faith with String Theory.
This concludes my one minute explanation of String Theory.
These two observations are perfectly compatible. On one hand, having no ethics means you don't think about the consequence your action could bring to others. This results in reckless behavior leading to criminal charges. Being "basically honest," or simply naive, means you don't realize how someone else's action could affect you. This results in not adequately protecting yourself leading to becoming a victim of crime. It just looks like society as a whole is becoming disintegrated.
This article is definitely poorly written. However, it's title is the worst. Without reading the title, it says pretty much everyone agrees and has known:
Someone thinks that Apple should use Leopard to undermine Vista's market share, but that's not what Apple wants.
Apple delayed Leopard for iPhone, which is a better strategy for Apple.
The delay does not cause consumers to become disinterested in Leopard.
There is nothing wrong with the delayed Leopard release.
I think the author probably meant "Debunking Whether Leopard's Delay is a Serious Mistake" for title. Even so, this is hardly any news.
I agree with what you said. The same technique also works to evade the great firewall of China.
The mentioning of OpenSSL also implies that HTTP should go over TLS whenever possible, as long as you trust the website for properly handling your data. That means websites should provide an HTTPS version. There is a problem, though. Many websites on the web are name-based virtual hosts. SSL doesn't work on them because you have to exchange the certificate, which is site specific, before sending the Host header that decides which site you want.
Unless the congress explicitly asked, "is Yahoo!'s cooperation in this investigation going to cause a chilling effect for freedom of speech in China?" and their answer is "No," then Yahoo has not lied. There is no inherent tie in a subpoena for "divulging state secret" with "the nature of investigation." In fact, precisely because "divulging state secret" is such a vague charge against anyone the Chinese government doesn't like, there is no way to tell the nature of investigation other than "I guess he pissed someone off in the Chinese government," so the most appropriate answer would be "I don't know."
Slashdot Mirror
I hate to reply to myself but, with a leap hour instead, you can update the leap hour time table as often as you update your OS, which is 600 years.
Computer time always counts in the number of SI seconds since the Epoch, which is 0:00:00, January 1, 1970 UTC.
And that's UTC for those who live in England. Leap second is used because an earth day is not exactly 86400 SI seconds. The goal is to keep the daily drift within +/- 0.5 seconds, but you have to update a computer for the leap table often. There is one leap second pretty much every year.
A leap year (actually the leap day, February 29) is to synchronize earth days with the orbit around sun, which is not exactly 365 earth days.
If you believe this, then you should be very concerned that the American society is becoming increasing secular, including the secular Christians: those who don't read the bible, don't pray, don't go to church, only testify God in their mouth when they curse, don't live Christian values, and still claim they are Christians. Also, you should know that Christianity is spreading like wild-fire in China, via underground house churches.
If you lived in China, you'd know it's more convenient to buy illegal DVDs off the street than where they sell legal copies, much like how downloading mp3s and movies is more convenient than purchasing it. If you want to discuss about piracy, read my latest journal entry here and comment or critique it.
You can't steal companies. You can imitate their product or business model, but companies are made of the people and the culture that makes it unique. You can't steal that. That's all Baidu can do to Google: Baidu needs to constantly sabotage Google in order to retain their market share, and that totally won't work in the long run. Of course, Google has other inherent weaknesses that needs to be addressed as well, like lack of awareness of the cultural context, which is the primary reason why Google is lagging behind in the Japanese and Korean markets where Google is not sabotaged.
I've had money, intellectual property, and other personal properties stolen from me on the soil of freedom of the United States of America. What's your point? Greed and coveting is universal.
Funny that's how I feel about some Americans. I guess we should call it a draw. I should mention that I'm honestly trying to start a living here in the U.S., but anti-Chinese, white-superiority sentiment like yours is constantly making me have a second thought. It's people like you who give me a hard time explaining to my nice American friends when they ask me if I want to stay in the U.S.; I don't want to hurt their feelings.
In the Chinese net culture, full-text being copied and pasted is a compliment, showing popularity of the work. You always find the work of popular online novelists "mirrored" on multiple websites. People usually acknowledge the author but does not always provide a URL reference. Plagiarism, or more specifically, defrauding the reader of authorship of the work, usually isn't the motivation.
This copy and paste culture can be traced to two historical reasons: (1) before printing press was invented, literature was only distributed by unregulated hand-copying. This is what student used to do in school. By the time you finished school, you would have copied a number of literature works by hand. And (2), private, unregulated hand-copying is the only way literature can survive over several oppressive emperors.
The former practice can still be seen prevalent in many CJK education system nowadays, where students are asked to manually copy some text on a regular basis as a part of the learning process. The latter reason still applies today as well; you'd see full-text of an article posted on an online BBS forum only to be taken down later by the authority, and someone posts the full-text again on another BBS forum.
In addition, copyright and authorship are separate issues. Interestingly, the British first invented copyright in order to allow the royalty to regulate printing of books (i.e. for censorship). Copyright granted the print shop a license to print a work. Without a license it would be illegal. Copyright was not invented to protect authorship.
In conclusion, it is not that the Chinese does not respect authorship. Copyright is simply unsuitable under the historical and cultural context. This seems to chime with the notion that real man upload his code on FTP and let everyone else mirror it, as said by some Linus dude.
I can't believe more people modded the parent with interesting than informative. Unlike other posts that rants about bugs in C#, it is informative. TFA says:
In essence, they really have two obstacles lists, one of which---the event subscriber list---is a mirror of the one being updated by stereo vision. Whoever wrote the code didn't decide correctly what to do about the mirror.
If we have a stethoscope for the minds of various characters involved at different time, it could be like this:
A year later...
I've been Googling around, and I've yet to find a convincing reason to use PulseAudio over jackd. Why reinvent the wheel? Jackd has network transparency (see NetJack). People say jackd is for professional audio, and PulseAudio is for desktop user. I don't see a reason why jackd cannot be made for desktop users. After all, CoreAudio framework on Mac OS X works for both desktop and professional audio. I've also used jackd just to listen to music or watch movies. What are the GNOME people thinking?
Using RFID for surveillance purpose... I think this is an opportunity for early-in-life training for the smart young adults on how to evade surveillance. As someone points out, RFID makes skipping classes ever easier: just ask a friend to bring your school uniform (or cut off the RFID from your clothes), and you don't have to be physically present. You can become invisible by dislodging your own RFID tag. You can do a lot of pranks using programmable RFID tags. You can steal a teacher's RFID code (without the teacher even noticing it) and then replay the code in order to gain access to teacher's office. You can blackmail somebody's lunch money by threatening to make his RFID "enter" a girl's locker room. This is all just to exploit the unenforceable assumption that RFID is physically associated with the person it represents.
When I was in high school, the magnetic strip on the student ID card was only used to check out books from the library (of course the ID has to match the bearer). They were never used to take attendance. RFID is better than magnetic strip in the sense that RFID avoids wear, so you don't need to replace your ID if you used it often. Using RFID for anything more is going to make school administration a nightmare. RFID is not meant to conduct surveillance or provide access control.
What I have problems with is how they use technology for unintended purpose (or for a false promise), and then have to make up draconian rules to deter tempering with technology. The deterrence for tempering with technology is devastating to the future of these young adults. The should have never used broken technology in the first place.
You misunderstood my point. They can fake e-mail from anybody, which nobody should care except when they actually come on-site. The first question is "who invited you here?" Then the security guard or receptionist would look up the name from a directory, call the person, confirming that the visitor is here, then hand the responsibility over to the host. The only assumption I make is that the host would be fully accountable for his visitor's action. This includes finding a watch-person if the host is not available.
This is what should have happened with TraceSecurity. They would send out a fake e-mail from the higher-up a week in advance announcing that pest control is coming. People could ignore it, assuming that somebody is taking care of it. When TraceSecurity comes, someone will stop them and ask who is responsible for their visit. TraceSecurity gives out the name of the CEO who authorized the security audit. Someone calls the CEO or his secretary and confirms the visit. Then the policy kicks in: the CEO himself must either be present and escort TraceSecurity folks, or he must appoint someone to do that. If nobody shows up, the security guard or receptionist holds them at the entrance until somebody does. The best thing that could happen is that the CEO or someone appointed by the CEO watches TraceSecurity folks put blank CD-ROMs and their stickers on the server.
If someone simply sends TraceSecurity on their merry way to the server room assuming the senior executive is "blissfully ignorant," then the company has serious leadership problems, and server room is just one thing that can go wrong. But I don't think many companies are like that, so this wouldn't be the reason TraceSecurity is able to penetrate successfully.
I think the most likely and the most devastating situation is when somebody tries to make the best local judgment with good intention that backfires. When pest control shows up for an appointment but you don't let them in, it could cost the company money for a missed appointment. You decide to save money for the company by letting them in regardless if that violating the policy. This typically happens in a corporate culture that values "trust" and "doing someone a favor" as an integral part of the company. These values are what make a society thrive but are also the most vulnerable to social engineering.
It probably wouldn't be very difficult to setup a rogue website. Since TraceSecurity bothered to prepare for the operation a week in advance, even printing a custom designed magnetic plaque to brand their rented car, there is ample time for Google to pick up the website. It doesn't have to be the highest page ranked for pest control because you'll be searching for the company's name.
Visitors should never be left unattended, but it is often impractical to deposit an employee for watching whenever there is a visitor. Notice there is a difference when the visit is solicited: there is someone inside the company who initiated the visit, so let him be responsible. In the case of a legitimate visit by pest control, someone inside the company must have called them over, so it is also his job to attend the pest control or at least appoint someone to attend them. There should be some way inside the company to figure out who is the host of a visitor, then make the host accountable.
Your examples of monopoly apply no matter which portal you switch to. If you switch away from Google and never use them again, you'd still run into the same problems. I think Google even makes it easier to switch away, by e.g. offering the ability to download your e-mail and blog archive.
I think the proper solution to address your problems is that you shouldn't be using portals.
He voiced his viewpoint too much in this thread (24+ comments). I don't plan to follow suit, so this is the last comment you'll ever hear from me. Moderation systems like what Slashdot and Wikipedia use are invented with good intentions, but they can be abused as long as people have the incentive to do so---gaining status (come on, people, this is not MMORPG). I don't see how pointing out this possibility is unjustified and inappropriate.
Don't bother wasting your energy arguing with that guy (Ta_bu_shi_da_yu). I don't see how his posts are informative or insightful but he was modded up nonetheless. The moderator skipped posts like yours that points out critical observations. If he's not a karma whore, he apparently knows how to game the system to gain status. When it comes to debate about the privileged few and the masses like you and me, how can he be sympathetic about the masses?
I whole heartedly agree with you. That's the many mistakes I personally made when I did the IT for a college radio station. Fortunately it was only a hobby, but unfortunately it led to a bitter end. It could have been the most wonderful years of my life.
It was a few years later until I realize that a lot of jobs, especially IT, is entirely about servitude. This includes taking the blame when it wasn't your fault. IT enables other people to get their job done, but you should keep your hands off from their vision.
All of you said above makes sense if we are all amoeba. An evolutionary tree hierarchy implies asexual reproduction. Breeding creates a graph that violates tree structure. In practice, Izzy and Fred, or even Greg and Chuck, could have created another snapshot of code. The tree model is flawed. The tree model implies that there can only be one origin of species, but there could be multiple origins. Due to the sheer number of combinatorics, there is no way you can tell what the distinct origins are, not even the number of origins. Maybe that's what caused the illusion of single origin theory.
In other words, the fact that humans and chimpanzee share 95% DNA could suggest early cross-breeding of two or more closely-related species. There could have been more variety of species than we have today. After natural selection eliminated most of them, the remaining species are no longer close enough to cross-breed.
Citing YouTube? That's classic. The wustl.edu reference is better, but it did not claim in any way whether merged genes can make the specie better adapted. Why don't you try to find a few papers from Google Scholar?
I'll tell you why talkorigin is hogwash. It's not peer reviewed, and their citations are poorly chosen to support claims that weren't in the citation! Like what you did! It's run by athetism fundamentalists to attack whoever disagrees with them. They're on the same bearing as scientologists.
Theorists got interested in String Theory when they observed that two events far apart can affect each other, but there is no obvious connection. A third party (scientist) can't observe the connection directly, only by observing the two events, as if there is a tunnel between them. Imagine you can only see cars going in from one end of a tunnel and coming out from the other, and you wonder what happens in between. They figure they must still be attached, not observably, but in other non-observable dimensions. They even think that observable connections between two particles can be modeled as if the observation is not available, for example: gravity, electro-magnetic forces, nuclear forces and other stuff. The math seems to work out on paper, but you have to take the extra dimensions on faith because you can't observe them.
This is where String Theory starts sounding like a religion.
I'm not disagreeing with what you said about God and music, but vibration is just an analogy used by String Theorists to describe the theory in order to make it sound more relevant to the physical world. Every mathematic function on real numbers can be described either as a curve or vibration. What is a curve in the time domain becomes a vibration in the frequency domain and vice versa. It is well-known that these two domains can be mapped one-to-one and onto by Fourier Transform. In other words, you can make up anything in math and call it a vibration.
String Theory is just some theorist's wet dream. You don't want to syncretize your faith with String Theory.
This concludes my one minute explanation of String Theory.
These two observations are perfectly compatible. On one hand, having no ethics means you don't think about the consequence your action could bring to others. This results in reckless behavior leading to criminal charges. Being "basically honest," or simply naive, means you don't realize how someone else's action could affect you. This results in not adequately protecting yourself leading to becoming a victim of crime. It just looks like society as a whole is becoming disintegrated.
This article is definitely poorly written. However, it's title is the worst. Without reading the title, it says pretty much everyone agrees and has known:
I think the author probably meant "Debunking Whether Leopard's Delay is a Serious Mistake" for title. Even so, this is hardly any news.
I agree with what you said. The same technique also works to evade the great firewall of China.
The mentioning of OpenSSL also implies that HTTP should go over TLS whenever possible, as long as you trust the website for properly handling your data. That means websites should provide an HTTPS version. There is a problem, though. Many websites on the web are name-based virtual hosts. SSL doesn't work on them because you have to exchange the certificate, which is site specific, before sending the Host header that decides which site you want.
Unless the congress explicitly asked, "is Yahoo!'s cooperation in this investigation going to cause a chilling effect for freedom of speech in China?" and their answer is "No," then Yahoo has not lied. There is no inherent tie in a subpoena for "divulging state secret" with "the nature of investigation." In fact, precisely because "divulging state secret" is such a vague charge against anyone the Chinese government doesn't like, there is no way to tell the nature of investigation other than "I guess he pissed someone off in the Chinese government," so the most appropriate answer would be "I don't know."