I've read the article and all the posts, and I still can't figure out what MS is trying to achieve. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here is my summation of the service:
You pay 60 dollars per year (5 bucks a month). You get 2 gigs of online storage. You can send 20mb attachments. You get MS Outlook Live.
The online storage and attachment size are legitimate services, (which will also be offered at 20/year without the Outlook live). But MS Outlook is (at least it was) a product, not a service. It is a tool that can be used to access a service, but it's not the service itself. Analogously, a telephone is a tool to use one's telephone service, but we don't pay yearly subscriptions for the phones themselves.
1) How long does it take for an exploit to be fixed (FF v IE)? 2) Is upgrading to repair a security flaw in the browser free/inexpensive for the user? Or are upgrades limited in an attempt to force the user to buy something else from the maker of the browser?
Well, I am most certainly not a math person! I do tend to think of math solely as equations.
I do, however, have two comments/observations about the example with the monks:
Firstly, you said the researchers were largely right. This tells me that they weren't always right. Now, as a scientist, I know that models don't predict accurately 100% of the time, but because of the preconception that mathmatics is a field of absolutes (of which I am guilty), I think it's worth pointing out.
Secondly, even though I grant that a mathmatical model doesn't need to use equations, how can you create a model to predict whether two people are optimal for each other, when each person uses a unique set of characteristics to gauge this? It's not like you could set one characteristic like the monk example, although you probably could use a similar method to predict which couples would REMAIN couples in 6 months, a year, 2 years.
Thanks for the response though. These sort of discussions are why I stick around here.:-)
How do you quantify a personality?
on
Mathematics and Sex
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I think that personal relationships and emotions are really far too complicated to match up to a mathmatical equation. Once we like someone, are we really willing to give that person up just in case "someone better" might come along? If we do give them up did we ever really like them in the first place? I would say that finding the optimal person is a pointless exercise in the first place, and that expecting someone to be our optimal partner just sets us up for failure when they fail (in our eyes) to live up to such optimal-ness. A more rational approach is finding someone we like enough to deal with their sub-optimal nature. I suppose this could be quantitated, but how do you do this when we each gauge a person's worth by a different set of values?
I love my husband very much (we'll be married a year on the 3rd of January) but I didn't marry him because he was the most attractive, and I didn't marry him because he was perfect (he is neither). I married him because I liked him enough to deal with his weirdness. And he married me because he liked me enough to deal with mine. But neither of us can quantitate WHY we like each other. Frankly, if we could, it would worry me.
At this juncture my husband would like to say that he really married me because he says I'm going to be a world famous (read wealthy) cardiologist some day, and that when that day comes, he can quit his job, build a state of the art gaming system, and play computer games all day for the rest of his life. Dream on, honey.
In short, and because it's getting late, I'd just like to say that I think the concept personal relationships can be defined by an algorithm is a load of dingos kidneys, and I'll leave it at that.
You know, guys, this whole thing really isn't funny. Okay it's a little funny from the sheer surrealness of it all, but still it ultimately damages the internet as a whole. Look at the Wikipedia editing wars, and some of the posts here - the worst of human nature in evidence.
And when we lash out at this sort of lunacy, we reinforce that lunacy. I would say "ignore him and maybe he'll go away" except I don't think that will work.
It's frustrating, but part of the nature of the internet is that it's harder to make someone go away by ignoring him. Even if everyone else on the internet did ignore him, he'd still be able to create the illusion of popularity and support the same way he does now: multiple websites, emails, identities. It doesn't seem to matter to him, how many of his supporters are fictional, and this leads us to the crux of the matter:
How can the internet as a community continue to function effectively without a way to combat this type of behavior, and the damage it causes? Public opinion has no effect - a user can create his own publich opinion. Invective doesn't work. Is the internet doomed to a slow slide into anarchy?
There was a poll last week on what would kill the internet - patent law won, but ultimately I think that users will kill the internet, because we can effect change in our laws, but we cannot effect change in a person's behavior, even when that behavior is detrimental to the community.
That's very odd, because Firefox and Thunderbird integrate seamlessly on my laptop running XP Home. Links from different programs all open in Firefox, and the Firefox email button triggers a drop down menu that lets me chose to read my mail or compose a message. Mailto links also open Thunderbird. And the only extension I have is Adblock.
I even impressed my dad over Thanksgiving by showing him how you can run Firefox from a USB drive.
A calendar would be nice, but I just wish I could sync my Thunderbird address book with my PDA - it's tiresome to update two different address books, so I don't do it. Then I find myself without an email or a phone number when I need it.
Could it be possible to add either of these with extensions? I'm afraid I don't know much about programming.
The definition of Cancer is "Any of various malignant neoplasms characterized by the proliferation of anaplastic cells that tend to invade surrounding tissue and metastasize to new body sites." (Dictionary.com)
The definition of anaplastic is " Of or characterized by cells that have become less differentiated." (Also Dictionary.com)
An embryo is actually the direct antithesis of a "cancerous growth" because it is composed of cells that are actively becoming MORE differentiated, not less.
Furthermore, I did a quick PubMed search on miscarriage rates in the first trimester, but couldn't find a paper on the topic. I didn't go in depth, but I also ran a Google search and at Discovery Health, Miscarriage Facts I found that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynocologists places the miscarriage rate over all 3 trimesters at 15-20%, with most of those occuring during the first trimester.
I recommend you double check your facts, and leave out your invective.
"Saying the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the French is the understatement of the year. Japan invaded China to open World War II and killed nearly 30 million Chinese people."
But saying that the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the Irish IS a fair comparison - maybe not in the numbers of those killed, but certainly in the hatred behind it. (And the Irish were part of the original analogy, making the France = Korea, not China.)
How can you forget the classic toy Legos? I spent three years stealing my brother's Pirate legos to create the perfect Final Fantasy 2(e) airship. Not to mention the hours that my brother and I spent creating castles and keeps and little lego armies, (and some really pretty cool prisons, especially when those lego skeletons showed up). We set them up on big pieces of plywood on either side of the staircase up into the attic, and put a narrow strip of plywood over the stairs for a bridge, and conducted campaigns.
But he quickly got too cool to play with either Legos or his sister.
"Second, iTunes is one if the good guys, we don't wanna kill that!"
Competition will be good for iTunes. If iTunes is one of the good guys, competition should help it stay that way. If it's not a good guy, well... the last thing we need is for iTunes to become the next IE.
"It is said that children who grow up in families with two native languages are better at learning new languages. In the context of this article, I wonder how that works out -- in the sense that I wonder how it makes it easy for these children to learn new languages."
I think it depends on how well you learn your native language. My husband is fluent in both Spanish and English, and he's a decent translator, if you nag (not that I'm experienced with this) but his vocabulary stinks, because English was more important to learn.
My mother learned German because she wanted to know what her parents were saying, but she's not fluent anymore.
But I'm terrible with languages, because I never had to learn a second one as a child. I'm actually fairly decent READING Spanish now, but I can't speak it at all. (I can sing in Spanish, oddly enough, but not speak). It doens't help that my hubby laughs whenever I try to pronounce something, and I'm physiologically incapable of trilling my r's. (That bit from the Sabrina movie -- doesn't work.)
"Why, in five years' time, I'll bet we have... a good three or four registrants!" How many postal systems are there in the world? Surely no more than 200 or so. Even at 100% saturation, this will still be a void wasteland."
You forget, the.post TDL is open to stamp collectors too. I be that'll increase the number of registrants by oh say... one.
(PS - Any nominees for suckers to advertise on that sole stamp collectors site?)
If human life is worth preserving, then all human life must be worth preserving. Experimentation, to advance our knowledge and attempt to cure disease, is necessary and should continue, but with caution, with direction, and with utmost respect for human life.
I also know that an embryo is an undeveloped human life, but I don't think greater development is a pertinent reason to assign greater value to one's life. And I maintain that killing one to possibly save another is not right.
Actually (and this is my inherent geekiness displaying itself) it makes me think of the Babylon 5 episode (1st season) Deathwalker, and the immortality serum...
No, they even exist on Slashdot. And not as anonymous cowards either.
Speaking as one from inside the scientific community, a lot of researchers have their own "pet" ideas on cures for the disease du jour, and these ideas don't always have the strongest link to reality. When these ideas have made their way into human subject studies, people have died, even though it the concept worked PERFECTLY in mouse and rat models. And that should underline how little we actually understand the big picture of human physiology.
I believe that the goal of medicine should be to preserve human life. This is why I study to be a doctor, this is why my goal is to be a physician scientist. However I do not see how this goal may be adhered to by killing lives in their beginning, or worse, creating lives only to destroy them.
The Nuremberg Code (available here) states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is "absolutely essential". The disregard some scientists have for this, purely in the name of science, disturbs me greatly.
There's no way this can be as good as playing the actual board game, because you miss out on the family dynamics of game play, such as watching your mom chuck the dice at your dad, or one's husband deliberately putting the thief on your only stone hex, and then somehow drawing the only stone card in your hand, as if he could see where it was... Not that I speak from experience or anything. No, not me...
Somethings are just meant to be played in the actual world.
Slashdot Mirror
I've read the article and all the posts, and I still can't figure out what MS is trying to achieve. Correct me if I'm wrong, but here is my summation of the service:
You pay 60 dollars per year (5 bucks a month).
You get 2 gigs of online storage.
You can send 20mb attachments.
You get MS Outlook Live.
The online storage and attachment size are legitimate services, (which will also be offered at 20/year without the Outlook live). But MS Outlook is (at least it was) a product, not a service. It is a tool that can be used to access a service, but it's not the service itself. Analogously, a telephone is a tool to use one's telephone service, but we don't pay yearly subscriptions for the phones themselves.
1) How long does it take for an exploit to be fixed (FF v IE)?
2) Is upgrading to repair a security flaw in the browser free/inexpensive for the user? Or are upgrades limited in an attempt to force the user to buy something else from the maker of the browser?
Well, I am most certainly not a math person! I do tend to think of math solely as equations.
:-)
I do, however, have two comments/observations about the example with the monks:
Firstly, you said the researchers were largely right. This tells me that they weren't always right. Now, as a scientist, I know that models don't predict accurately 100% of the time, but because of the preconception that mathmatics is a field of absolutes (of which I am guilty), I think it's worth pointing out.
Secondly, even though I grant that a mathmatical model doesn't need to use equations, how can you create a model to predict whether two people are optimal for each other, when each person uses a unique set of characteristics to gauge this? It's not like you could set one characteristic like the monk example, although you probably could use a similar method to predict which couples would REMAIN couples in 6 months, a year, 2 years.
Thanks for the response though. These sort of discussions are why I stick around here.
I think that personal relationships and emotions are really far too complicated to match up to a mathmatical equation. Once we like someone, are we really willing to give that person up just in case "someone better" might come along? If we do give them up did we ever really like them in the first place? I would say that finding the optimal person is a pointless exercise in the first place, and that expecting someone to be our optimal partner just sets us up for failure when they fail (in our eyes) to live up to such optimal-ness. A more rational approach is finding someone we like enough to deal with their sub-optimal nature. I suppose this could be quantitated, but how do you do this when we each gauge a person's worth by a different set of values?
I love my husband very much (we'll be married a year on the 3rd of January) but I didn't marry him because he was the most attractive, and I didn't marry him because he was perfect (he is neither). I married him because I liked him enough to deal with his weirdness. And he married me because he liked me enough to deal with mine. But neither of us can quantitate WHY we like each other. Frankly, if we could, it would worry me.
At this juncture my husband would like to say that he really married me because he says I'm going to be a world famous (read wealthy) cardiologist some day, and that when that day comes, he can quit his job, build a state of the art gaming system, and play computer games all day for the rest of his life.
Dream on, honey.
In short, and because it's getting late, I'd just like to say that I think the concept personal relationships can be defined by an algorithm is a load of dingos kidneys, and I'll leave it at that.
This DRM business is insane. Surely there's a way to verify that a song is a legit copy without this brand-incompatability nonsense.
This is why I prefer audiobooks. Nobody apparently gives a damn about them, and in a pinch, you can always record them yourself.
May I inquire why it should matter who you bought the music from as long as you own it?
You know, guys, this whole thing really isn't funny. Okay it's a little funny from the sheer surrealness of it all, but still it ultimately damages the internet as a whole. Look at the Wikipedia editing wars, and some of the posts here - the worst of human nature in evidence.
And when we lash out at this sort of lunacy, we reinforce that lunacy. I would say "ignore him and maybe he'll go away" except I don't think that will work.
It's frustrating, but part of the nature of the internet is that it's harder to make someone go away by ignoring him. Even if everyone else on the internet did ignore him, he'd still be able to create the illusion of popularity and support the same way he does now: multiple websites, emails, identities. It doesn't seem to matter to him, how many of his supporters are fictional, and this leads us to the crux of the matter:
How can the internet as a community continue to function effectively without a way to combat this type of behavior, and the damage it causes? Public opinion has no effect - a user can create his own publich opinion. Invective doesn't work. Is the internet doomed to a slow slide into anarchy?
There was a poll last week on what would kill the internet - patent law won, but ultimately I think that users will kill the internet, because we can effect change in our laws, but we cannot effect change in a person's behavior, even when that behavior is detrimental to the community.
A cracker/black hat hacker is someone who breaks into networks with a malevolent intent, or anyone accused of cyber crime.
Conversely, a white hat hacker is someone who breaks security for altruistic purposes.
I think DDOSing spammers is altruistic, but there's an argument for malevolent intent, so there needs to be a third category: Vigilante Crackers.
Kind of like the Batmen of the net.
This explains a great deal, thank you. I'm afraid I don't know very much about Linux.
That's very odd, because Firefox and Thunderbird integrate seamlessly on my laptop running XP Home. Links from different programs all open in Firefox, and the Firefox email button triggers a drop down menu that lets me chose to read my mail or compose a message. Mailto links also open Thunderbird. And the only extension I have is Adblock.
I even impressed my dad over Thanksgiving by showing him how you can run Firefox from a USB drive.
A calendar would be nice, but I just wish I could sync my Thunderbird address book with my PDA - it's tiresome to update two different address books, so I don't do it. Then I find myself without an email or a phone number when I need it.
Could it be possible to add either of these with extensions? I'm afraid I don't know much about programming.
The definition of Cancer is "Any of various malignant neoplasms characterized by the proliferation of anaplastic cells that tend to invade surrounding tissue and metastasize to new body sites." (Dictionary.com)
The definition of anaplastic is " Of or characterized by cells that have become less differentiated." (Also Dictionary.com)
An embryo is actually the direct antithesis of a "cancerous growth" because it is composed of cells that are actively becoming MORE differentiated, not less.
Furthermore, I did a quick PubMed search on miscarriage rates in the first trimester, but couldn't find a paper on the topic. I didn't go in depth, but I also ran a Google search and at Discovery Health, Miscarriage Facts I found that the American College of Obstetrics and Gynocologists places the miscarriage rate over all 3 trimesters at 15-20%, with most of those occuring during the first trimester.
I recommend you double check your facts, and leave out your invective.
"Saying the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the French is the understatement of the year. Japan invaded China to open World War II and killed nearly 30 million Chinese people."
But saying that the Japanese and Chinese are like the English and the Irish IS a fair comparison - maybe not in the numbers of those killed, but certainly in the hatred behind it. (And the Irish were part of the original analogy, making the France = Korea, not China.)
How can you forget the classic toy Legos? I spent three years stealing my brother's Pirate legos to create the perfect Final Fantasy 2(e) airship. Not to mention the hours that my brother and I spent creating castles and keeps and little lego armies, (and some really pretty cool prisons, especially when those lego skeletons showed up). We set them up on big pieces of plywood on either side of the staircase up into the attic, and put a narrow strip of plywood over the stairs for a bridge, and conducted campaigns.
But he quickly got too cool to play with either Legos or his sister.
"Second, iTunes is one if the good guys, we don't wanna kill that!"
Competition will be good for iTunes. If iTunes is one of the good guys, competition should help it stay that way. If it's not a good guy, well... the last thing we need is for iTunes to become the next IE.
"It is said that children who grow up in families with two native languages are better at learning new languages. In the context of this article, I wonder how that works out -- in the sense that I wonder how it makes it easy for these children to learn new languages."
I think it depends on how well you learn your native language. My husband is fluent in both Spanish and English, and he's a decent translator, if you nag (not that I'm experienced with this) but his vocabulary stinks, because English was more important to learn.
My mother learned German because she wanted to know what her parents were saying, but she's not fluent anymore.
But I'm terrible with languages, because I never had to learn a second one as a child. I'm actually fairly decent READING Spanish now, but I can't speak it at all. (I can sing in Spanish, oddly enough, but not speak). It doens't help that my hubby laughs whenever I try to pronounce something, and I'm physiologically incapable of trilling my r's. (That bit from the Sabrina movie -- doesn't work.)
"Given how entrenched Micro$oft's clutches are into the US Government, a security guide for Windows based systems would be even more useful. "
But virtually impossible.
This should read "I bet", not "I be". My internal spellchecker must be damaged...
"Why, in five years' time, I'll bet we have... a good three or four registrants!" How many postal systems are there in the world? Surely no more than 200 or so. Even at 100% saturation, this will still be a void wasteland."
.post TDL is open to stamp collectors too. I be that'll increase the number of registrants by oh say... one.
You forget, the
(PS - Any nominees for suckers to advertise on that sole stamp collectors site?)
Since when did /. start using M$ servers??
If human life is worth preserving, then all human life must be worth preserving. Experimentation, to advance our knowledge and attempt to cure disease, is necessary and should continue, but with caution, with direction, and with utmost respect for human life.
I also know that an embryo is an undeveloped human life, but I don't think greater development is a pertinent reason to assign greater value to one's life. And I maintain that killing one to possibly save another is not right.
Actually (and this is my inherent geekiness displaying itself) it makes me think of the Babylon 5 episode (1st season) Deathwalker, and the immortality serum...
No, they even exist on Slashdot. And not as anonymous cowards either.
Speaking as one from inside the scientific community, a lot of researchers have their own "pet" ideas on cures for the disease du jour, and these ideas don't always have the strongest link to reality. When these ideas have made their way into human subject studies, people have died, even though it the concept worked PERFECTLY in mouse and rat models. And that should underline how little we actually understand the big picture of human physiology.
I believe that the goal of medicine should be to preserve human life. This is why I study to be a doctor, this is why my goal is to be a physician scientist. However I do not see how this goal may be adhered to by killing lives in their beginning, or worse, creating lives only to destroy them.
The Nuremberg Code (available here) states that the voluntary consent of the human subject is "absolutely essential". The disregard some scientists have for this, purely in the name of science, disturbs me greatly.
There's no way this can be as good as playing the actual board game, because you miss out on the family dynamics of game play, such as watching your mom chuck the dice at your dad, or one's husband deliberately putting the thief on your only stone hex, and then somehow drawing the only stone card in your hand, as if he could see where it was... Not that I speak from experience or anything. No, not me...
Somethings are just meant to be played in the actual world.
...it's an excellent way to identify B-Arkers.