I've lived three quarters of my live above the arctic cirle, and I sure can testify that any kind of change in the sleep pattern was highly disruptive of the productivity. Not only because of working an hour later / waking up an hour earlier, but also because of missed buses, appointments, classes, etc.. There was always someone who forgot to set their watch, and so there was always a few people who either missed classes completely or had to wait around the corridor for the others to arrive. Keep It Simple, Stupid!
Now maybe your society at large thinks that is unacceptable behaviour, but the vast majority of males on earth think it is the most natural thing in the world. Almost every fight finishes with two men who now understand that they are powerful and deserving of respect, and subsequently treat each other such.
Count me out. First, this is probably the most common way to mistake respect for fear. Second, would you actually beat up everyone not showing you respect? How about the lippy bus driver, the disco bouncer, or the French waiter? Third, every time anyone says the equivalent to "everybody involved thinks the same as me", the bullshit bells are ringing, loud and clear.
This is where technology can be most wisely spent, where it will have the greatest benefit, and where kids will actually learn about computers.
How do you mean? At my school, they had a few (old) computers, but the pupils never got to use them. The teachers were totally clueless, and none of them cared for computer education. So, for computers in schools to be a success, you need to have:
Lots of computers (standing behind someone's back is not going to teach you anything)
New teacher programmes, to teach them the how and why they should teach CS
On-site support until teachers have knowledge and time to troubleshoot
"Bullet-proof" hardware
At home, the computer is available 24/7, and you have to answer to your parents if something breaks. Besides, who ever learned more about computers from school than from home?
Shameless self-promotion follows: If you want easier access to your bookmarks than at del.icio.us, you might want to try the del.icio.us illogical interface.
If you want to test it before logging in with your own username, you can try mine, "engmark".
In the UK (and I think most of Europe) it's a lot different.
I'm a Norwegian, and I've been living in middle Europe for over a year now. I use my cards on average probably 2.5 times per week, and I've never been asked by the cashier to hand the card over after sliding it.
The way they add sites to their index is through links from other sites -- almost never by using their own form.
And this surprizes you? Ranking by referrals is the way Google became popular in the first place, and indexing by referrals ensure that any page with a link from the "Google pool" will be included. That means millions of us don't ever have to know about this form. The form is for those with a new (or small) page, which is not being linked to from anywhere.
I've pointed out cases of completely obvious cloaking and spamming to them, and never received a reply. The spam sites I reported were not removed for over a year, and then most probably due to algorithm changes, not because anyone paid attention to my reports.
Wow. Google doesn't answer you personally, thanking you for your effort in trying to keep the web safe. And they have the imprudence to use your information to make better algorithms instead of just putting the site in their blacklist, where it would be for ever and ever, to punish the Evil Bastards(TM) that tried to fool you. Even if they change their site, they have done a terrible thing, and should not be let into the company of the sheep when the next spider comes by.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but this is just plain stupid.
For XForms you already have a Flash viewer and a server-side XForms to HTML + JavaScript implementation. There are lots more, but those are the only two I've tested which implement a good deal of the standard and are good-looking..
/me too, but only after developing a highly interactive XForms document the last few weeks at work. It's available at CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@isscvs.cern.ch:/local/r eps/moi for anyone interested in checking out a working example. Note that you need J2SE v 1.4.2_07 for install.bat to work...
How do we know for sure that current and future Office XML documents will always validate against the schemas? With e.g. MS Word's history of internal format incompatibility and extremely messy handling of large documents, who wants to bet that all Office 2003 files conform to the schemas?
And what if a bug is found to create non-validating documents which can still be displayed in MS Office? "Oh, we'll fix it for Word 2014." It'll be hack hell for OOo.
Eventually, we will have quantum computers capable of brute-forcing even quantum encryption...
IIRC from The Code Book, you can have basically unbreakable crypto-algorithms. The clue is to make the key as long as the message (thereby wasting 50% bandwidth, but what the heck). Then, if the key is properly randomized, any attempt to decrypt it will result in _all_ messages of that size, which basically means that for most purposes, decryption will not result in any useful information.
Does this imply that reasonable steps should be taken by gun manufactures to prevents guns from being used for crimes?
Nope, because just as with guns, if you outlaw P2P programs only criminals will have them. And you don't want the crackhead down the street having a bigger stack of DVDs than you do, right...?
The Semantic web seems to require a lot of extra complexity without much "bang for my buck". If I build a page normally, all my needs are already met.
How about the needs of the people actually using the page? If you don't care about the viewers, why bother putting it on the web?
I definitely would NOT want people being able to find information on my site without going through my standard user interface. I WANT them to come in through the front door and ask for it.
That sounds just like the kind of site I get pissed off at, when being redirected to the main page after finding the page I really want via Google. Forcing visitors to jump through hoops has never been popular.
Now you have to trust people to A) actually know what they're doing and set things up properly, which is a long shot at best, and B) not try to game the system somehow.
As a web developer, you probably already know what kinds of ugly designs there are out there. And yet, by some kind of magic, there are companies which create searchable indexes of these pages, and it just works. One of the benefits of this technology I expect to see in search engines shortly, is the possibility of semantic searches. How would you go about, today, looking for a bike magazine called "Encyclopedia" (I've tried)? Or research resultat relevant to your latest blog entry? Or the cheapest direct or indirect first class return ticket from London to New Delhi departing between one hour from now and 9 a.m. Thursday, with return between three and five days later, no smoking all the way?
There's no objective reason why we need fancy pants graphics in any software. There's no objective reason we need high quality, drive space/CPU/Memory eating, audio/video.
Oyh! I need a talking, vertex shaded, bump mapped Clippy. And I want it to sound like he's looking above my shoulder. Doesn't everyone?
The sticker made no reference to any religious beliefs, and only cautioned the reader to take the material with a grain of salt. This is *always* good advice: people should never blindly accept any theory as fact.
If you want to be pragmatic, you'd have to say that nothing is fact, because nothing can be proven with absolute certainty. In real life, "fact" can be measured by how much you believe in it, what you think (or have registered) that a large part of the population believes, or by any other means you like.
What actually is fact, nobody can decide. And here's my point: Maybe evolution is fact, within a reasonable limit of quirks. Nobody will ever know, because nobody has seen the whole Earth since it "started" until today. But there's no way to be sure that evolution is not fact.
Slashdot Mirror
I've lived three quarters of my live above the arctic cirle, and I sure can testify that any kind of change in the sleep pattern was highly disruptive of the productivity. Not only because of working an hour later / waking up an hour earlier, but also because of missed buses, appointments, classes, etc.. There was always someone who forgot to set their watch, and so there was always a few people who either missed classes completely or had to wait around the corridor for the others to arrive. Keep It Simple, Stupid!
*slapping my forehead* Just swallowed bait, hook, and sinker. Now where did I put that "Troll" sticker...?
Now maybe your society at large thinks that is unacceptable behaviour, but the vast majority of males on earth think it is the most natural thing in the world. Almost every fight finishes with two men who now understand that they are powerful and deserving of respect, and subsequently treat each other such.
Count me out. First, this is probably the most common way to mistake respect for fear. Second, would you actually beat up everyone not showing you respect? How about the lippy bus driver, the disco bouncer, or the French waiter? Third, every time anyone says the equivalent to "everybody involved thinks the same as me", the bullshit bells are ringing, loud and clear.
The fact that its impossible to make it uncopyable without making it unlistenable won't stop them from trying.
They're already doing this. Haven't you seen the latest MTV Top 20?
I heard those were really hard to get hold of... ;-)
This is where technology can be most wisely spent, where it will have the greatest benefit, and where kids will actually learn about computers.
How do you mean? At my school, they had a few (old) computers, but the pupils never got to use them. The teachers were totally clueless, and none of them cared for computer education. So, for computers in schools to be a success, you need to have:
At home, the computer is available 24/7, and you have to answer to your parents if something breaks. Besides, who ever learned more about computers from school than from home?
Hey, I didn't know you had a Slashdot Readers' High over there...
Shameless self-promotion follows: If you want easier access to your bookmarks than at del.icio.us, you might want to try the del.icio.us illogical interface.
If you want to test it before logging in with your own username, you can try mine, "engmark".
In the UK (and I think most of Europe) it's a lot different.
I'm a Norwegian, and I've been living in middle Europe for over a year now. I use my cards on average probably 2.5 times per week, and I've never been asked by the cashier to hand the card over after sliding it.
Obviously you haven't discovered BitTorrent yet...
And this surprizes you? Ranking by referrals is the way Google became popular in the first place, and indexing by referrals ensure that any page with a link from the "Google pool" will be included. That means millions of us don't ever have to know about this form. The form is for those with a new (or small) page, which is not being linked to from anywhere.
Wow. Google doesn't answer you personally, thanking you for your effort in trying to keep the web safe. And they have the imprudence to use your information to make better algorithms instead of just putting the site in their blacklist, where it would be for ever and ever, to punish the Evil Bastards(TM) that tried to fool you. Even if they change their site, they have done a terrible thing, and should not be let into the company of the sheep when the next spider comes by.
Sorry for the sarcasm, but this is just plain stupid.
Then how about the Mozilla XForms initiative?
Also, when examining Chiba closer, it seems JavaScript is only relied on for slider and calender controls.
For XForms you already have a Flash viewer and a server-side XForms to HTML + JavaScript implementation. There are lots more, but those are the only two I've tested which implement a good deal of the standard and are good-looking..
/me too, but only after developing a highly interactive XForms document the last few weeks at work. It's available at CVSROOT=:pserver:anonymous@isscvs.cern.ch:/local/r eps/moi for anyone interested in checking out a working example. Note that you need J2SE v 1.4.2_07 for install.bat to work...
It could be very interesting to know how much is used for non-military R&D, and compare that to the rest of the world...
Dude, this joke is getting old. ...did I just say that?
Could be interesting to see the new Unicode ROT-(10^13)-1 or something...
How do we know for sure that current and future Office XML documents will always validate against the schemas? With e.g. MS Word's history of internal format incompatibility and extremely messy handling of large documents, who wants to bet that all Office 2003 files conform to the schemas?
And what if a bug is found to create non-validating documents which can still be displayed in MS Office? "Oh, we'll fix it for Word 2014." It'll be hack hell for OOo.
That's my birthday! No, seriously!
IIRC from The Code Book, you can have basically unbreakable crypto-algorithms. The clue is to make the key as long as the message (thereby wasting 50% bandwidth, but what the heck). Then, if the key is properly randomized, any attempt to decrypt it will result in _all_ messages of that size, which basically means that for most purposes, decryption will not result in any useful information.
Nope, because just as with guns, if you outlaw P2P programs only criminals will have them. And you don't want the crackhead down the street having a bigger stack of DVDs than you do, right...?
Sorry, I had to.
Imagine the upcoming slashvertisements for Intel:
"Your primary source for sauna equipment"
"Your next water heater runs Linux!"
"Fusion inside"
How about the needs of the people actually using the page? If you don't care about the viewers, why bother putting it on the web?
That sounds just like the kind of site I get pissed off at, when being redirected to the main page after finding the page I really want via Google. Forcing visitors to jump through hoops has never been popular.
As a web developer, you probably already know what kinds of ugly designs there are out there. And yet, by some kind of magic, there are companies which create searchable indexes of these pages, and it just works. One of the benefits of this technology I expect to see in search engines shortly, is the possibility of semantic searches. How would you go about, today, looking for a bike magazine called "Encyclopedia" (I've tried)? Or research resultat relevant to your latest blog entry? Or the cheapest direct or indirect first class return ticket from London to New Delhi departing between one hour from now and 9 a.m. Thursday, with return between three and five days later, no smoking all the way?
If you want to be pragmatic, you'd have to say that nothing is fact, because nothing can be proven with absolute certainty. In real life, "fact" can be measured by how much you believe in it, what you think (or have registered) that a large part of the population believes, or by any other means you like.
What actually is fact, nobody can decide. And here's my point: Maybe evolution is fact, within a reasonable limit of quirks. Nobody will ever know, because nobody has seen the whole Earth since it "started" until today. But there's no way to be sure that evolution is not fact.