I have used "effect" as both a noun and a verb for the majority of my life, in both the written and spoken word. I am not alone. I am aware of the affect/effect distinction that is made in scholarly circles, and occasionally use it, but I more often fall back on the simple rule that effect can be both a noun and a verb.
"The effects of an earthquake can effect large numbers of people."
This sentence makes sense to me. It makes sense to others. I use "effect" in this way. I am not the only one. The only time this has ever become a problem is when I use it in the written word and even then only by people who insist I do things "correctly". The "correct" form however, offers no justification for itself other than its own inertia. Whither evolution?
To deny that effect is a verb is to deny the usage of the word in the written and spoken english of millions of people. People speak this way. They write this way too. Why is it wrong? Some people seem to think it is right and proper to correct improper usage of english. These same people of course hold the definition of proper english to be the form which they speak and write. Waving around Oxford dictionaries and the opinions of scholars who have been dead for eighty years apparently constitutes a stronger position than speaking and writing in the same way as millions of other people.
So be it. I can't change the way that I speak or write as easily as others can find "errors" in my dialect or my composition. It's essentially an uphill struggle against people who refuse to accept change, and stand haughtily by their own version of things. For those interested in other opinions, I'll link to a piece on Issac Asimov and Richard Feynman on spelling and grammar reform. It's interesting reading for people whose minds are still open.
Wrong. It is only that incompetence in IT is much harder to cover up than in those professions. When IT systems fail, they can fail spectacularly and effect wide numbers of people. An incompetent IT persons mistake will cause an essential server or the like to fail. If they're not competent to fix it promptly, it will show.
Inversely, when a lawyer, accountant, sales, HR person, etc screws up, the screw up will not be noticed as much unless it reaches epic proportions. It's easier to mask a mistake in these fields, and with the softer ones, e.g. PR, their metrics are so fuzzy that the difference between competence and incompetence is blurry anyway. Plus they are trained in buzz speak which they blurt out like a frighted squid spurts out ink to mask their escape.
YouTube is a private company and, thankfully, has just as much right to pick and choose what you're allowed to say in it's "home" as you do.
It's a private company offering a public utility, namely hosting videos online. To deny this fact is to deny the rise of importance of the internet and user created content. Webhosts pretend their sites are public commons when it suits them, i.e. when attracting users, but then turn around and claim they are really private property when they want to have things their own way.
It's exactly, not analogously, like someone who owns a park in a city and allows people in for free to walk around, take their kids and generally treat the place like a public park indeed. He even makes money by renting out lots in the park to vendors and the like. Then this same owner will turn around when someone in the park displeases him and claim that since it is private property he can evict who he likes. Of course, he is careful to do this long after his park has been established as a de facto public one.
In an age where private companies are more and more taking over services that used to be the onus of governments, how far should we allow this to go? Should roads and schools and airspace be the demesnes of private companies who treat it as public property for almost everyone, but deny use of these facilities to any they take umbrage towards? When youtube and sites like it end up replacing TV stations, aired over public airwaves, as our main form of mass media will we still allow them to do whatever they please while pretending that they provide the same service?
How much claim can you really have to property if you allow the world and his wife to avail of it anytime day or night and without supervision or contract? Can you really continue to claim ownership of something you've left run wild? In real estate there is the concept of Adverse Possession. Maybe we should have something similar for online webspace.
Freedom of Speech means freedom for everyone. Yes this includes and is not restricted to; Terrorists, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, stalkers, bomb makers, nazis and holocaust deniers.
I do not have to apologise for saying these people have a right to speak. You need to apologise for suggesting that they should not have that right.
If you want rights for some and not for others, go live in Saudi Arabia or China or Russia. But of you right rights for all the people, then you need to stand up for those rights no matter who they are taken from.
Lets face it. Pornography has been around since the dawn of the internet and in all that time not one browser, newsreader or email client ever offered a "privacy mode" until recently. We're talking since BBS days here. Yes there are some people who would like to spin, or frame, these features as "porn mode". But this is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit what is an important, appropriate and yes disruptive new innovation.
And what has spurred this innovation? What necessity has been the mother of this invention? Porn? No. Thing far more unsettling than that. Phishers, fraudsters, malware have all played their part. People need more protection nowadays. But most of the reasons for privacy features can be summed up in one word.
Marketers.
Modern marketers are utterly relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever. They are are with enormous databases, and the desire to fill them with as much data as they can lay their hands on. Tracking users and their habits online, and assaulting them with advertisements based on that data has become an industry in itself. Every social networking website, every online newspaper, every site that has any ability to track its users whatsoever is piping that data straight to an eager marketing department which presumably has some method concocted to throw ads back at users who would rather be left alone.
This is international information collection on an unprecedented scale in human history. To be sure, as of now this is only a practice of private enterprise, the current databases are disorganized and incompatible. But this is a new industry, essentially only a decade or so old. What will happen when its methods, theories and processes standardize? How dangerous will those databases be then?
Google is not blameless in this either. Remember that the company makes its money not on searches, but on advertisements that it offers on its search pages and on other sites. That company is tracking probably the majority of web user by now, and any site that you go to that is affiliated with Google (this includes Slashdot), dutifully makes sure that your presence their and what you are doing is made known to Seattle, so that they may better know your habits. You think they'll just sit on all that juicy marketing data till the end of time and forever "Do No Evil"? Get real. They are a private company and will do whatever they like as long as it is legal. Watch it happen.
So go ahead, call it a "porn" feature, but the reality is that those browsing for porn will probably not even bother to turn it on. It will only be used by those who understand just how dangerous so much personal data in private hands can be.
Make no mistake, this is a disruptive technology. Marketers will not like it. Webmasters will not like it. Google will not like it. So expect substantial mudslinging surrounding this issue in the months to come.
You know, act like the responsible person that you want to be seen as.
Conformity does not demonstrate responsibility, or maturity. In fact, neither do temperance or restraint. I had a rant ready, but instead I decided to link to this insightful XKCD comic on this very matter.
NO! This is an Outrage!! This is blasphemy!! Any honest fool knows that the best way to provide education,a or anything else for that matter, is to allow the unregulated invisible hand of the free market to solve everything. The magic of the markets can do it all, as long as they are unfettered by big government socialists! This project is Economic Terrorism!!
This is unfair government competition in an otherwise productive and creative industry. Just look at the high quality and low costs of textbooks and courses currently on offer! Just look at the amount of engineers graduating from our universities! The free market has brought us prosperity, happiness and profit and can bring us so much more if only the government would cut more taxes and.......what?... they what?...when?...how much?.............
Pay No Attention The Trillion Dollar Nationalization Project Behind The Curtain. The Market Will Continue To Solve All. This Is Simply A Temporary Accounting Measure. I Repeat. The Magic Of The Market Is Absolute!
I for one am upset and disappointed that the water bears did not gruesomely bulge to engorged proportions and then loudly(physics be damned) and spectacularly explode in a sanguineous shower of viscera, all while screaming "QUAAAIDD!!!". I think the experimenters could have done better.
What. Exactly. Is your problem? You can Turn off Idle in your user preferences. Idle stories make it to the front page once a week. An Idle sidebox might appear every few page refreshes on the right side of the screen.
No one is forcing you to come here. The section is called "IDLE". Once again, what is your problem, specifically.
Sure, people can dislike Idle, but frankly, I see no legitimate reason for the level of complaint I see in the comments and tags sections of any Idle story I happen to saunter over to.
In my opinion, most people complaining about Idle are probably haughty type geeks who have a very superior view of Slashdot and the "Slashdot culture". They feel this place is the geek equivalent of a "Gentlemen's Club".
Well guess what. It's is the equivalent of a Gentlemen's Club. And arseing away time on trivialities is 90% of what such clubs are about. So be glad that Slashdot keeps such activities to an appropriate minimum.
Somehow I just don't see that faring well with Joe Average...
Joe Average is indeed in a market for lemons. But you find that very often, when buying something like a laptop, he might try and ask for advice from Average Slashdotter.
Most people know at least one geek. Most Slashdotters are probably their friends' and extended families' "go to guy", for tech issues. And lets not forget IT departments and professional buyers, etc. Every geek knows battery lives are 1-1.5 hours for laptops everywhere, and if they see a 10 hour claim, they will call it out. That damages Joe Average's, and indeed Average Slashdotter's, confidence in the product, no matter how many go faster stripes they put on the casing.
This will have an effect, because right now laptop makers are not just exaggerating or stretching the truth. They are outright lying and telling great big obvious whoppers at that. Even Joe Average gets wise eventually.
Only if the parties maligned actually deny the claims made by those sources.
This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, anonymous sources can help uncover serious abuses, i.e. Watergate. On the other, journalists can and do simply make stuff up and attribute it to these "sources". I recall the case of one American journalist, whose name(ironically) escapes me at the moment, who was caught extorting his victim. He was essentially threatening to publish stories that while they would be damaging to the victim, would not create any legal "liability" for his publication. I'm sure anonymous sources are abused in this way.
Personally, I think that given the low standing of journalism as a profession, anonymous sources are at this time completely without credibility. Nowadays, the default assumption that must be made about any journalist and news story is that they are a spin doctor spinning a story the way their employer pays them to. Under such high G-forces, the delicate anonymous sources collapse under their own weight.
Excellent suggestion! Perhaps this is happening anyway to people who allow themselves to be easily defrauded, but I would certainly be in favor of extending it to "spam gourmets". I think something like this is both fair and practical, and indeed feasible.
Bottom line, this is an endless loop, and if anyone has any REAL suggestions on how to get rid of spammers, or how to force companies to stop hiding them and their domains, I'd love to hear it.
1. Make all advertisement, solicitation, marketing, etc , etc via email illegal. No exceptions. 2. Institute a mass anti-spam campaign across the media, educating people about what to expect and what to do. 3. Prosecute spammers. 4. Prosecute people who buy from spammers.
Personally, I think step 4 is the option that will have the most effect. The more people who are responding to spam that get jail the better.
...Google becomes the premier private security company.....
Screw that. Google becomes the world's premier private investigator company is a far more likely, and lucrative option for the company. They already know just about everything about just about everyone, and now they can track your face too. Plus, they've got their own satellite!
Google is looking more and more like the NSA in Enemy of the State. Where the hell did this company come from?!
Indeed. The first time I had a Big Daddy come after me, something happened that I had never before experienced by playing a mere computer game: I ran and hid (in the game) not to avoid the annoyance of having my character get killed and having to respawn or reload, but just out of simple raw terror.
Big Daddies are about as frightening as a rampaging Panda. Yes, you know its dangerous, but terrifying? I don't think my brain ever made that connection. Besides, with the nearest Vita-Chamber only a stones throw away, what's my real cause for concern anyway. It's not like the game will ever actually, you know, become difficult or anything.
If you want terror, pick up Resident Evil 3. If you want a challenge, buy Gears of War.
These studies are usually more dubious, and of less value than an average humanities paper. Should we really be calling them science?
Junk Science is a problem. A big problem. The media loves these trite little findings, but dubious correlations based on statistical quackery, and experimental fecklessness will ultimately drag the standing of science further and further into the gutter. Maybe that's not the case for this particular study.... But I doubt it!
There are far worthier projects that professionals could be spending their time and money on. Maybe they won't get your study featured next to the horoscopes and crosswords in every daily rag across the globe, but they will be of benefit to the progress of humanity. If this means that you as a scientist will actually have to do some real work investigating genomes of pathogens or plants instead of interviewing people about their feelings and feeding their swab data into a matlab script, then my heart bleeds for you.
While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.
I could be wrong, but based on the summary, I think the mobile telcoms firms are every bit as complacent as I suspect.
Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message....
No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.
Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.
But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.
Things like accents, graves and umlauts will probably suffer the same fate. I remember meeting a young Sweedish office worker about problems with database inputs. Basically, customer names(the customers were also Sweedish) would often be missing umlauts on their "o"'s and the like. It emerged that the office worker inputting the names had no idea how to make an unlauted "o". The guy was a trained typist, from Sweeden, and he didn't know how to type letters of his own language using a Qwerty keyboard on an ASCII based PC. He wasn't alone.
These problems have emerged because computers were developed and are still being developed by english speakers and writers, for english speakers and writers. The computer industry was and is still centered in and on America, and other nations and speakers usually have to work around this. Rampant incompatibilities, lack of hardware support and a lack of resources and interest in the problem have lead to people, and governments, taking the easier option and just modifying their written languages to fit QWERTY and ASCII.
The Irish government in fact already did this for the Irish language as far back as 1948, in a sweeping spelling reform which moved the entire language from Gaelic script to the Latin alphabet. The move was so total that most Irish people (who admittedly don't speak irish very much anyway) do not even know that irish was ever written in anything other than latin script. This is probably a portent for the eventual fate of every other european written language, particularly smaller ones. They will change to fit ASCII/QWERTY, not the other way around.
So in short, no, SMS is not going to change. It's not going to support other characters and languages. Ever. And telephone companies are simply going to expect others to adapt their own written word to existing systems instead. The trouble is, while this may work for european languages, it is NOT going to work for Chinese and related languages. There are literally thousands of Chinese characters, and without them, speakers from different parts of the country will not be able to communicate at all as their spoken languages are in fact mutually unintelligible.
While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.
Given the choice, I prefer a paper source over an internet link nine times out of ten. A good book, properly indexed, is almost always superior to someones personal page or site on a topic. There are exceptions, but overall books offer better presentations. The physical format of a book is also easier on the eyes, and more accessible than a computer monitor.
Hyperlinks are all very well for wiki-trips, but wiki-trips are really more for general knowledge learning. The question of the credibility of information on the internet also refuses to go away. Everyone by now has encountered information on wikipedia they know to be wrong or misleading. The same goes for websites. I don't mean to say that books and printed materials intrinsically have more credibility. But it's usually higher for them, though not by an order of magnitude.
If you want specific, detailed information and training on a topic, you need to read a book.
Galactic clusters do not appear to have enough mass to account for their speeds. Similarly, Galactic rotation curves flatten out as if galaxies were shaped spherical balls, even though we can see they are discs. The very first thing that astronomers reached for to explain these phenomena was as yet unseen, or "dark" matter.
Personally (I am a lay person astronomically), I think Dark Matter raises more questions than it answers. While I acknowledge the effort, time and rigor that many astrophysicists have put into studying these phenomena, I still feel that dark matter, a substance which is invisible, intangible, and undetectable expect through its gravitational effects is too far of a step for physics to take without more evidence. I feel as a theory, dark matter is only a stepping stone on the way to a better explanation for what we are observing.
I think the theory has fed off its own inertia. While "Dark Matter" was proposed in the 1930's by Zwicky, he meant it only in the classical sense, i.e. dust, dim stars, etc. The dark matter we hear about today seems to be a product of the 1970s, and is I think a result of the influx of particle physicists into the discipline of cosmology beginning in that period. The particle physics community has had a history of success using assumptions and models that are counterintuitive and often bizarre. The idea we hear most of today of more "exotic" and inscrutable dark matter stems I think from this camp.
The proposal of alternative theories has also ironically lead to wider acceptance of dark matter. By proposing alternatives, sides and factions were created, as will always happen among groups of people when topics are in dispute. When a theory like MOND fails in a particular case, this has the effect of strengthening confidence in the Dark Matter model, even though it should do nothing of the sort. Only sold predictions which emerge from a model should inspire confidence in it, and despite all the fanfare, we have no way of measuring dark matter, even indirectly. The distribution of the dark matter "halos" or spheres, is still an unknown, and some galaxies do not appear to need dark matter at all.
All that said, Feynman's rebuttal still applies. The laws of nature do not have to be philosophically pleasing to us. The universe does not exist for our mental gratification. It can be as strange as it wants to be, and if we don't like it, that's out tough luck. So if dark matter makes predictions, and they fit the data we see, then it is a good model no matter how strange its premises.
All that said, at this time I would bet on a better theory emerging at some later date. Exotic matter, while it may work in subatomic circles, will not I think stand up to scrutiny in the macroscopic domain.
You need to be careful about applying mathematics. Typically a mathematical model will have assumptions from which predictions can be made. The trouble is the instant you make your assumptions, the predictions become locked in. They are predetermined, even though you may not have discovered them yet. And of course if your assumptions are wrong, or inaccurate, your predictions are not going to match the real world very well. You can't massage the data or your results to get around this. Once your assumptions are made, mathematics leave no room for debate. Ever.
What this means of course is that it is often complete folly to apply mathematics to complex human interactions. Any assumptions you make will be totally inadequate to fully encompass any large organization and its members, and as a result, your predictions will probably be erroneous. Proceeding to apply your derived results to people will lead to unsatisfactory results and unexpected effects.
The Adam Curtis documentary The Trap, discusses the problems in reducing industries, outputs and people to numbers. Basically the numbers, which are more or less wrong, force people to conform to them, and you end up breaking existing systems completely or else converting them into an inefficient version of themselves, all the while thinking (and being told by the numbers) that your systems are improving.
The power of a mathematical model and its caveats, are in fact best described by Douglas Adams' fictional supercomputer Deep Thought. Deep Thought could indeed provide the answer to Life the Universe and Everything(42), and it was perfectly correct. But it wasn't any good because no one knew the correct Question to ask in the first place.
Mathematics will give you answers, and they will be right. But you had better be sure that you asked the right questions before you act on them.
Slashdot Mirror
Off topic, but I'll reply anyway.
I have used "effect" as both a noun and a verb for the majority of my life, in both the written and spoken word. I am not alone. I am aware of the affect/effect distinction that is made in scholarly circles, and occasionally use it, but I more often fall back on the simple rule that effect can be both a noun and a verb.
"The effects of an earthquake can effect large numbers of people."
This sentence makes sense to me. It makes sense to others. I use "effect" in this way. I am not the only one. The only time this has ever become a problem is when I use it in the written word and even then only by people who insist I do things "correctly". The "correct" form however, offers no justification for itself other than its own inertia. Whither evolution?
To deny that effect is a verb is to deny the usage of the word in the written and spoken english of millions of people. People speak this way. They write this way too. Why is it wrong? Some people seem to think it is right and proper to correct improper usage of english. These same people of course hold the definition of proper english to be the form which they speak and write. Waving around Oxford dictionaries and the opinions of scholars who have been dead for eighty years apparently constitutes a stronger position than speaking and writing in the same way as millions of other people.
So be it. I can't change the way that I speak or write as easily as others can find "errors" in my dialect or my composition. It's essentially an uphill struggle against people who refuse to accept change, and stand haughtily by their own version of things. For those interested in other opinions, I'll link to a piece on Issac Asimov and Richard Feynman on spelling and grammar reform. It's interesting reading for people whose minds are still open.
What is the difference between an Apple and a Pear?! You have Ten seconds to answer! Go!
Wrong. It is only that incompetence in IT is much harder to cover up than in those professions. When IT systems fail, they can fail spectacularly and effect wide numbers of people. An incompetent IT persons mistake will cause an essential server or the like to fail. If they're not competent to fix it promptly, it will show.
Inversely, when a lawyer, accountant, sales, HR person, etc screws up, the screw up will not be noticed as much unless it reaches epic proportions. It's easier to mask a mistake in these fields, and with the softer ones, e.g. PR, their metrics are so fuzzy that the difference between competence and incompetence is blurry anyway. Plus they are trained in buzz speak which they blurt out like a frighted squid spurts out ink to mask their escape.
It's a private company offering a public utility, namely hosting videos online. To deny this fact is to deny the rise of importance of the internet and user created content. Webhosts pretend their sites are public commons when it suits them, i.e. when attracting users, but then turn around and claim they are really private property when they want to have things their own way.
It's exactly, not analogously, like someone who owns a park in a city and allows people in for free to walk around, take their kids and generally treat the place like a public park indeed. He even makes money by renting out lots in the park to vendors and the like. Then this same owner will turn around when someone in the park displeases him and claim that since it is private property he can evict who he likes. Of course, he is careful to do this long after his park has been established as a de facto public one.
In an age where private companies are more and more taking over services that used to be the onus of governments, how far should we allow this to go? Should roads and schools and airspace be the demesnes of private companies who treat it as public property for almost everyone, but deny use of these facilities to any they take umbrage towards? When youtube and sites like it end up replacing TV stations, aired over public airwaves, as our main form of mass media will we still allow them to do whatever they please while pretending that they provide the same service?
How much claim can you really have to property if you allow the world and his wife to avail of it anytime day or night and without supervision or contract? Can you really continue to claim ownership of something you've left run wild? In real estate there is the concept of Adverse Possession. Maybe we should have something similar for online webspace.
Freedom of Speech means freedom for everyone. Yes this includes and is not restricted to; Terrorists, murderers, rapists, pedophiles, stalkers, bomb makers, nazis and holocaust deniers.
I do not have to apologise for saying these people have a right to speak. You need to apologise for suggesting that they should not have that right.
If you want rights for some and not for others, go live in Saudi Arabia or China or Russia. But of you right rights for all the people, then you need to stand up for those rights no matter who they are taken from.
Lets face it. Pornography has been around since the dawn of the internet and in all that time not one browser, newsreader or email client ever offered a "privacy mode" until recently. We're talking since BBS days here. Yes there are some people who would like to spin, or frame, these features as "porn mode". But this is a fairly transparent attempt to discredit what is an important, appropriate and yes disruptive new innovation.
And what has spurred this innovation? What necessity has been the mother of this invention? Porn? No. Thing far more unsettling than that. Phishers, fraudsters, malware have all played their part. People need more protection nowadays. But most of the reasons for privacy features can be summed up in one word.
Marketers.
Modern marketers are utterly relentless, completely amoral and without any scruple whatsoever. They are are with enormous databases, and the desire to fill them with as much data as they can lay their hands on. Tracking users and their habits online, and assaulting them with advertisements based on that data has become an industry in itself. Every social networking website, every online newspaper, every site that has any ability to track its users whatsoever is piping that data straight to an eager marketing department which presumably has some method concocted to throw ads back at users who would rather be left alone.
This is international information collection on an unprecedented scale in human history. To be sure, as of now this is only a practice of private enterprise, the current databases are disorganized and incompatible. But this is a new industry, essentially only a decade or so old. What will happen when its methods, theories and processes standardize? How dangerous will those databases be then?
Google is not blameless in this either. Remember that the company makes its money not on searches, but on advertisements that it offers on its search pages and on other sites. That company is tracking probably the majority of web user by now, and any site that you go to that is affiliated with Google (this includes Slashdot), dutifully makes sure that your presence their and what you are doing is made known to Seattle, so that they may better know your habits. You think they'll just sit on all that juicy marketing data till the end of time and forever "Do No Evil"? Get real. They are a private company and will do whatever they like as long as it is legal. Watch it happen.
So go ahead, call it a "porn" feature, but the reality is that those browsing for porn will probably not even bother to turn it on. It will only be used by those who understand just how dangerous so much personal data in private hands can be.
Make no mistake, this is a disruptive technology. Marketers will not like it. Webmasters will not like it. Google will not like it. So expect substantial mudslinging surrounding this issue in the months to come.
Conformity does not demonstrate responsibility, or maturity. In fact, neither do temperance or restraint. I had a rant ready, but instead I decided to link to this insightful XKCD comic on this very matter.
NO! This is an Outrage!! This is blasphemy!! Any honest fool knows that the best way to provide education,a or anything else for that matter, is to allow the unregulated invisible hand of the free market to solve everything. The magic of the markets can do it all, as long as they are unfettered by big government socialists! This project is Economic Terrorism!!
This is unfair government competition in an otherwise productive and creative industry. Just look at the high quality and low costs of textbooks and courses currently on offer! Just look at the amount of engineers graduating from our universities! The free market has brought us prosperity, happiness and profit and can bring us so much more if only the government would cut more taxes and ... ....what?... they what?...when?...how much?..... ........
Pay No Attention The Trillion Dollar Nationalization Project Behind The Curtain. The Market Will Continue To Solve All. This Is Simply A Temporary Accounting Measure. I Repeat. The Magic Of The Market Is Absolute!
But it looks bad on his rap sheet to the scientologists embedded in public sphere who are needed to help him get into that office.
I for one am upset and disappointed that the water bears did not gruesomely bulge to engorged proportions and then loudly(physics be damned) and spectacularly explode in a sanguineous shower of viscera, all while screaming "QUAAAIDD!!!". I think the experimenters could have done better.
What. Exactly. Is your problem? You can Turn off Idle in your user preferences. Idle stories make it to the front page once a week. An Idle sidebox might appear every few page refreshes on the right side of the screen.
No one is forcing you to come here. The section is called "IDLE". Once again, what is your problem, specifically.
Sure, people can dislike Idle, but frankly, I see no legitimate reason for the level of complaint I see in the comments and tags sections of any Idle story I happen to saunter over to.
In my opinion, most people complaining about Idle are probably haughty type geeks who have a very superior view of Slashdot and the "Slashdot culture". They feel this place is the geek equivalent of a "Gentlemen's Club".
Well guess what. It's is the equivalent of a Gentlemen's Club. And arseing away time on trivialities is 90% of what such clubs are about. So be glad that Slashdot keeps such activities to an appropriate minimum.
It's called framing and it is making public debate in western society increasingly difficult.
Joe Average is indeed in a market for lemons. But you find that very often, when buying something like a laptop, he might try and ask for advice from Average Slashdotter.
Most people know at least one geek. Most Slashdotters are probably their friends' and extended families' "go to guy", for tech issues. And lets not forget IT departments and professional buyers, etc. Every geek knows battery lives are 1-1.5 hours for laptops everywhere, and if they see a 10 hour claim, they will call it out. That damages Joe Average's, and indeed Average Slashdotter's, confidence in the product, no matter how many go faster stripes they put on the casing.
This will have an effect, because right now laptop makers are not just exaggerating or stretching the truth. They are outright lying and telling great big obvious whoppers at that. Even Joe Average gets wise eventually.
Only if the parties maligned actually deny the claims made by those sources.
This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, anonymous sources can help uncover serious abuses, i.e. Watergate. On the other, journalists can and do simply make stuff up and attribute it to these "sources". I recall the case of one American journalist, whose name(ironically) escapes me at the moment, who was caught extorting his victim. He was essentially threatening to publish stories that while they would be damaging to the victim, would not create any legal "liability" for his publication. I'm sure anonymous sources are abused in this way.
Personally, I think that given the low standing of journalism as a profession, anonymous sources are at this time completely without credibility. Nowadays, the default assumption that must be made about any journalist and news story is that they are a spin doctor spinning a story the way their employer pays them to. Under such high G-forces, the delicate anonymous sources collapse under their own weight.
$mv body /dev/null /dev/null :32 /dev/null -> /dev/hills
$ls -l
lrw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 3 2004-01-02
Whoops!
Excellent suggestion! Perhaps this is happening anyway to people who allow themselves to be easily defrauded, but I would certainly be in favor of extending it to "spam gourmets". I think something like this is both fair and practical, and indeed feasible.
1. Make all advertisement, solicitation, marketing, etc , etc via email illegal. No exceptions.
2. Institute a mass anti-spam campaign across the media, educating people about what to expect and what to do.
3. Prosecute spammers.
4. Prosecute people who buy from spammers.
Personally, I think step 4 is the option that will have the most effect. The more people who are responding to spam that get jail the better.
Screw that. Google becomes the world's premier private investigator company is a far more likely, and lucrative option for the company. They already know just about everything about just about everyone, and now they can track your face too. Plus, they've got their own satellite!
Google is looking more and more like the NSA in Enemy of the State. Where the hell did this company come from?!
Big Daddies are about as frightening as a rampaging Panda. Yes, you know its dangerous, but terrifying? I don't think my brain ever made that connection. Besides, with the nearest Vita-Chamber only a stones throw away, what's my real cause for concern anyway. It's not like the game will ever actually, you know, become difficult or anything.
If you want terror, pick up Resident Evil 3. If you want a challenge, buy Gears of War.
These studies are usually more dubious, and of less value than an average humanities paper. Should we really be calling them science?
Junk Science is a problem. A big problem. The media loves these trite little findings, but dubious correlations based on statistical quackery, and experimental fecklessness will ultimately drag the standing of science further and further into the gutter. Maybe that's not the case for this particular study.... But I doubt it!
There are far worthier projects that professionals could be spending their time and money on. Maybe they won't get your study featured next to the horoscopes and crosswords in every daily rag across the globe, but they will be of benefit to the progress of humanity. If this means that you as a scientist will actually have to do some real work investigating genomes of pathogens or plants instead of interviewing people about their feelings and feeding their swab data into a matlab script, then my heart bleeds for you.
While an SMS service exists in China, I was speaking from the point of view of sending and receiving SMS messages to and from China. I doubt that the existing networks or handsets are compatible with each other, and the main reason for the lack of connectivity with Chinese or other networks is that the telcoms companies have not bothered to invest in the necessary upgrades. Given that international SMS text messages still cost a pretty penny, there is likely little demand for them to do so at this time.
I could be wrong, but based on the summary, I think the mobile telcoms firms are every bit as complacent as I suspect.
No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.
Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.
But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.
Things like accents, graves and umlauts will probably suffer the same fate. I remember meeting a young Sweedish office worker about problems with database inputs. Basically, customer names(the customers were also Sweedish) would often be missing umlauts on their "o"'s and the like. It emerged that the office worker inputting the names had no idea how to make an unlauted "o". The guy was a trained typist, from Sweeden, and he didn't know how to type letters of his own language using a Qwerty keyboard on an ASCII based PC. He wasn't alone.
These problems have emerged because computers were developed and are still being developed by english speakers and writers, for english speakers and writers. The computer industry was and is still centered in and on America, and other nations and speakers usually have to work around this. Rampant incompatibilities, lack of hardware support and a lack of resources and interest in the problem have lead to people, and governments, taking the easier option and just modifying their written languages to fit QWERTY and ASCII.
The Irish government in fact already did this for the Irish language as far back as 1948, in a sweeping spelling reform which moved the entire language from Gaelic script to the Latin alphabet. The move was so total that most Irish people (who admittedly don't speak irish very much anyway) do not even know that irish was ever written in anything other than latin script. This is probably a portent for the eventual fate of every other european written language, particularly smaller ones. They will change to fit ASCII/QWERTY, not the other way around.
So in short, no, SMS is not going to change. It's not going to support other characters and languages. Ever. And telephone companies are simply going to expect others to adapt their own written word to existing systems instead. The trouble is, while this may work for european languages, it is NOT going to work for Chinese and related languages. There are literally thousands of Chinese characters, and without them, speakers from different parts of the country will not be able to communicate at all as their spoken languages are in fact mutually unintelligible.
While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.
Given the choice, I prefer a paper source over an internet link nine times out of ten. A good book, properly indexed, is almost always superior to someones personal page or site on a topic. There are exceptions, but overall books offer better presentations. The physical format of a book is also easier on the eyes, and more accessible than a computer monitor.
Hyperlinks are all very well for wiki-trips, but wiki-trips are really more for general knowledge learning. The question of the credibility of information on the internet also refuses to go away. Everyone by now has encountered information on wikipedia they know to be wrong or misleading. The same goes for websites. I don't mean to say that books and printed materials intrinsically have more credibility. But it's usually higher for them, though not by an order of magnitude.
If you want specific, detailed information and training on a topic, you need to read a book.
Galactic clusters do not appear to have enough mass to account for their speeds. Similarly, Galactic rotation curves flatten out as if galaxies were shaped spherical balls, even though we can see they are discs. The very first thing that astronomers reached for to explain these phenomena was as yet unseen, or "dark" matter.
Personally (I am a lay person astronomically), I think Dark Matter raises more questions than it answers. While I acknowledge the effort, time and rigor that many astrophysicists have put into studying these phenomena, I still feel that dark matter, a substance which is invisible, intangible, and undetectable expect through its gravitational effects is too far of a step for physics to take without more evidence. I feel as a theory, dark matter is only a stepping stone on the way to a better explanation for what we are observing.
I think the theory has fed off its own inertia. While "Dark Matter" was proposed in the 1930's by Zwicky, he meant it only in the classical sense, i.e. dust, dim stars, etc. The dark matter we hear about today seems to be a product of the 1970s, and is I think a result of the influx of particle physicists into the discipline of cosmology beginning in that period. The particle physics community has had a history of success using assumptions and models that are counterintuitive and often bizarre. The idea we hear most of today of more "exotic" and inscrutable dark matter stems I think from this camp.
The proposal of alternative theories has also ironically lead to wider acceptance of dark matter. By proposing alternatives, sides and factions were created, as will always happen among groups of people when topics are in dispute. When a theory like MOND fails in a particular case, this has the effect of strengthening confidence in the Dark Matter model, even though it should do nothing of the sort. Only sold predictions which emerge from a model should inspire confidence in it, and despite all the fanfare, we have no way of measuring dark matter, even indirectly. The distribution of the dark matter "halos" or spheres, is still an unknown, and some galaxies do not appear to need dark matter at all.
All that said, Feynman's rebuttal still applies. The laws of nature do not have to be philosophically pleasing to us. The universe does not exist for our mental gratification. It can be as strange as it wants to be, and if we don't like it, that's out tough luck. So if dark matter makes predictions, and they fit the data we see, then it is a good model no matter how strange its premises.
All that said, at this time I would bet on a better theory emerging at some later date. Exotic matter, while it may work in subatomic circles, will not I think stand up to scrutiny in the macroscopic domain.
You need to be careful about applying mathematics. Typically a mathematical model will have assumptions from which predictions can be made. The trouble is the instant you make your assumptions, the predictions become locked in. They are predetermined, even though you may not have discovered them yet. And of course if your assumptions are wrong, or inaccurate, your predictions are not going to match the real world very well. You can't massage the data or your results to get around this. Once your assumptions are made, mathematics leave no room for debate. Ever.
What this means of course is that it is often complete folly to apply mathematics to complex human interactions. Any assumptions you make will be totally inadequate to fully encompass any large organization and its members, and as a result, your predictions will probably be erroneous. Proceeding to apply your derived results to people will lead to unsatisfactory results and unexpected effects.
The Adam Curtis documentary The Trap, discusses the problems in reducing industries, outputs and people to numbers. Basically the numbers, which are more or less wrong, force people to conform to them, and you end up breaking existing systems completely or else converting them into an inefficient version of themselves, all the while thinking (and being told by the numbers) that your systems are improving.
The power of a mathematical model and its caveats, are in fact best described by Douglas Adams' fictional supercomputer Deep Thought. Deep Thought could indeed provide the answer to Life the Universe and Everything(42), and it was perfectly correct. But it wasn't any good because no one knew the correct Question to ask in the first place.
Mathematics will give you answers, and they will be right. But you had better be sure that you asked the right questions before you act on them.