I use Firefox on Linux and it does not now, nor has it ever, done any such thing.
I am afraid you are deluding yourself; Google has been tracking your clicks in every page of search results for over six years now.
Your OS has no role in the HTML that Google sends you. It's the javascript Google provides you with, and which you have been faithfully executing all these years, that tracks the clicks. Fuller details here (I also provided this link in a previous post).
Blocking javascript on Google will stop the tracking -- then it won't call the "window.clk" function --, but nothing else will stop it. Of course, blocking javascript will also bar you from using Gmail, Google Docs,...
The onmousedown bit calls a JavaScript function to do that.
Fuller details and explanation here. Apparently Google's been doing it since 2003.
The "Customise Google" Firefox extension includes options for stripping click tracking from Google search results, but I don't think it works; even with the extension active, search pages still include the onmousedown="return clk(this.href,"... code.
The joke's a lot older than that. I heard it regularly - in almost that exact form - before Gaiman adopted it. He's a clever masher-upper, but don't give him credit for what he didn't write. Ultimately it seems to come from:
Let Nature, and let Art do what they please,
When all's done, Life is an Incurable Disease.
if they are seeing this far into the "past", they have to be looking in one direction right? I assume that the Big Bang started at one point.
The sibling post gives a perfectly good analogy to explain this, but you probably already knew it. Another way of putting it that I sometimes find helpful: the Big Bang didn't happen at such-and-such a location, which can be plotted as X, Y, Z coordinates. The Big Bang happened everywhere. It's just that Everywhere was really really really tiny back then.
-- I hate sitting in those cramped seats listening to the little kids crying behind me --
Let me introduce you to the best travelling companion I have ever had: noise-cancelling headphones. Most - all? - brands and models come with attachments to plug into airline sockets too (though I wouldn't be surprised if US airlines have different sockets to stop people doing that; but even without anything playing through them, headphones like these help a LOT).
Not once in my 15+ years of using web browsers have I thought to myself "Man, this *browser* sure is slow."
I've had mostly the same experience, but we've probably made sure to be using decent hardware all that time as well. A year or two ago, on a low-end netbook, I found trying to open a Slashdot discussion with the new interface in Firefox 2 to be agonising. One of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu Netbook Edition was specifically so as to get Firefox 3.
In fact maybe that's the way to illustrate how important JS speed is: try opening a Slashdot or Digg discussion page in Firefox 1 or 2... and have a fire extinguisher nearby for when your CPU starts to melt.
Yeah, Ptolomey had no respect for the law either, first he nicked Egypt from the Pharohs and then he had an army of scribes copy all the scrolls he could find and stuffed them in his so called "library" of Alexandria. Eratosthenes and other authors tried to sue but lawyers hadn't been invented so he was SOL.
Actually the Alexandrians were more in the habit of swiping the physical originals. There's one notorious case where the Mouseion borrowed the Athenian state copies of some of their top tragic playwrights -- Sophokles and the like --, and sent an enormous sum of money as a deposit to ensure the safety and return of the originals after they'd copied them. However, Alexandria was very very rich, so they could afford to lose the deposit; Athens only got the copies back. That would be harmless enough these days, since it's not too hard now to ensure that information is copied 100% faithfully; but in those days you'd be very lucky to get even two 9s of accuracy in the reproduction. There's another story about Mark Antony effectively disestablishing one of the larger other libraries, the one at Pergamon, and bestowing its collection on Alexandria, but the source for that isn't very reliable.
(Incidentally, Eratosthenes was one of the head librarians at Alexandria, so he would have been the one being sued. Sorry to spoil the joke. But not very, because it wasn't that funny.)
I can say with some authority that any structure built in a tectonically active region that cannot safely handle a 3.4 magnitude earthquake was built improperly.
Well, it depends on how deep the quake is. If it's of any depth at all, you're not going to notice a 3.4 quake even if you're standing on the epicentre. But if a 3.4 quake were to happen, say, 20 km underfoot, you might have issues. In many ways the perceptual scale is a more useful human measure.
Sure blueray has some nice features... I don't really need... I'll upgrade in a few years...
Quoth webheaded:
... kicking and screaming... There is no LIMIT to the amount of shit you'll complain about... the higher version gives you shit fits... what kind of moron...
Compare and contrast: which of these two is complaining and having shit fits?
Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin.
Ablative is a case, not a tense. "Tense" refers to verbs and their temporal aspect (i.e. whether a verb is past, present, future, etc.).
Only some Latin prepositions take the ablative.
"With" isn't a Latin preposition, it's an English preposition. English prepositions don't take an ablative. English doesn't have an ablative.
(Prepositions did take other cases in Old English, but OE wið took the dative, not the ablative.)
If you do want to treat "with" as though it's in Latin too, then you'd better treat the whole verb phrase "come up with" as being in Latin. The Latin for "come up with" would be something like pervenire ad, and that would take the accusative.
The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.
They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.
Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural can be either di or, less often, dei.
In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.
Self-censorship is a basic skill of being civilised. Civilised people don't go around gratuitously insulting others and encouraging hostility without good reason. To equate self-control with government prohibitions on what people are allowed to say or write is, shall we say, ingenuous.
If the definition of vulgarity relies purely upon a social collective, then it's natural, and reasonable, for violations of such a collective to recursively deteriorate social structure.
I basically agree with that. However, while words like "fuck" can indeed get you into trouble in an educational institution, four-letter words are not the ones that really send the shit flying towards the fan. The most dangerous words are the everyday words that are too accurate for comfort, words like "impolite", "bureaucracy", and "dogmatic" (not that these are the precise words that got me into trouble). Words that identify social problems are much more dangerous than words that are considered to be social problems.
How do you SNEAK something into a law?... If the system is set up in such a way that people can put in new constraints without anyone noticing it, I'd say thats pretty broken.
One quote for you:
"It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?"
-- Jo Moore, Labour Party spin doctor, September 11, 2001
The key is distraction. (Note that Moore's advice was followed to the letter.) As far as I'm aware US politicians have several further methods in addition to distraction: such as pork, or the way that the PATRIOT Act was handled (voting on laws before anyone has time to read them).
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
Agree 100%. In the last term I've migrated from using slideshows (I won't say "PowerPoint", because I have never used it; my slide presentations were always 4:3-sized PDFs) to using just chalk and a blackboard.
The main reason was that I had come to realise that students never actually listened to me; they were too busy copying down stuff from the slides, even though they were also available on Blackboard (shudder) or Google Groups (slightly smaller shudder). There was also the fact that I was sick and tired of explaining headings; I wanted to see what it was like to organise a lecture as a talk presented to a moderately-informed group of people, rather than as an explication of bullet points. I wanted to see if my having to write stuff up on the board would keep my spoken words more closely in touch with the text, and keep the students' attention more closely in step with both.
The results were overwhelmingly positive, on both counts. The students loved it; and they actually listened to the things I had to say, rather than only reading the things I had written years earlier. I have found my preferred teaching style. I'll never use slideshows again, except for presenting illustrative images and diagrammes. And I'm now turning that series of lectures into a book. (If you're worried that in future years I'll simply re-read the same lectures from the book, don't -- I'll never be giving the lectures again, as I'm being laid off.)
Even so it is important to realise that it's a personal thing, and what works well with one teacher will not work well with another. For me, I want the students to be listening to what I say more than watching what's on the screen; at the same time I'll keep writing stuff on the board, because I know that some students process visually-presented text much better than they process the spoken word. I also want visually-presented text to underline the spoken words, rather than have the spoken words serving merely as footnotes to the slides.
So this approach works for me. But some of my colleagues swear by PowerPoint; and how could I say with certainty that that's wrong, for them?
Do we have anything as good as Beethoven symphonies yet?
What about even approximating Wagner, or Bruckner?
I'd already moderated here, but I have to comment: this is just willful blindness. Of twentieth-century orchestral/"high art" composers, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and Strauss were all at least on a par with Bruckner (and better than Wagner), and Shostakovich's symphonies were as important as Beethoven's and at least as good as Schubert's.
I'm not very widely versed in orchestral music written since the 1970s -- other than soundtracks, which are usually crap (with notable exceptions). But in my own home town there's Gareth Farr's stuff, which is not half bad; for organ music Naji Hakim is among my favourite composers (and, for my money, the best organ composer since Bach); choral music fans go wild over Taverner, Pärt, and Whitacre; and I'm sure there are plenty of American fans of Elliott Carter's music (I can't stand the stuff, but then I can't stand Wagner either).
I pause for a moment to note that Stravinsky's second "version" of Petrushka -- "composed" in 1947 -- was "composed" for the express purpose of extending its copyright in the USA, since the actual composition dated to 1911 and was therefore going to become public domain sooner than Stravinsky wanted.
Slashdot Mirror
I did look at the url properties. It was the plain url
Yes, the a href=... bit is a plaintext url. But what do you think the onmousedown="return clk( ... bit does?
Answer: it calls a "window.clk" function, which sends a message to Google to tell them that you clicked on such-and-such a link.
It's not a redirect; it's sneakier. Bing and Ask do exactly the same.
Addendum: if it's any comfort, Bing and Ask do exactly the same: in Bing search results, the code for a link to Slashdot is:
<a href="http://slashdot.org/index.pl" onmousedown="return si_T('&ID=SERP,140.1')"><strong>Slashdot</strong>: News for nerds, stuff that matters</a>
In Ask it's:
<a id="r0_t" href="http://slashdot.org/" onmousedown="return fp(this,{en:'te',io:'0',b:'a001',tp:'d',ec:'1',ex:'tsrc%3Dvnru'},'false',0)" class="L4" target="_blank" ><b>Slashdot</b> Stories (10)</a>
Yahoo and AltaVista are more obvious because they change the URL. Google, Bing, and Ask, track every click too; they're just better at hiding it.
I use Firefox on Linux and it does not now, nor has it ever, done any such thing.
I am afraid you are deluding yourself; Google has been tracking your clicks in every page of search results for over six years now.
Your OS has no role in the HTML that Google sends you. It's the javascript Google provides you with, and which you have been faithfully executing all these years, that tracks the clicks. Fuller details here (I also provided this link in a previous post).
Blocking javascript on Google will stop the tracking -- then it won't call the "window.clk" function --, but nothing else will stop it. Of course, blocking javascript will also bar you from using Gmail, Google Docs, ...
The onmousedown bit calls a JavaScript function to do that.
Fuller details and explanation here. Apparently Google's been doing it since 2003.
The "Customise Google" Firefox extension includes options for stripping click tracking from Google search results, but I don't think it works; even with the extension active, search pages still include the onmousedown="return clk(this.href,"... code.
The joke's a lot older than that. I heard it regularly - in almost that exact form - before Gaiman adopted it. He's a clever masher-upper, but don't give him credit for what he didn't write. Ultimately it seems to come from:
Let Nature, and let Art do what they please,
When all's done, Life is an Incurable Disease.
-- Abraham Cowley (1618-1667), To Dr. Scarborough
if they are seeing this far into the "past", they have to be looking in one direction right? I assume that the Big Bang started at one point.
The sibling post gives a perfectly good analogy to explain this, but you probably already knew it. Another way of putting it that I sometimes find helpful: the Big Bang didn't happen at such-and-such a location, which can be plotted as X, Y, Z coordinates. The Big Bang happened everywhere. It's just that Everywhere was really really really tiny back then.
-- I hate sitting in those cramped seats listening to the little kids crying behind me --
Let me introduce you to the best travelling companion I have ever had: noise-cancelling headphones. Most - all? - brands and models come with attachments to plug into airline sockets too (though I wouldn't be surprised if US airlines have different sockets to stop people doing that; but even without anything playing through them, headphones like these help a LOT).
Not once in my 15+ years of using web browsers have I thought to myself "Man, this *browser* sure is slow."
I've had mostly the same experience, but we've probably made sure to be using decent hardware all that time as well. A year or two ago, on a low-end netbook, I found trying to open a Slashdot discussion with the new interface in Firefox 2 to be agonising. One of the reasons I switched to Ubuntu Netbook Edition was specifically so as to get Firefox 3.
In fact maybe that's the way to illustrate how important JS speed is: try opening a Slashdot or Digg discussion page in Firefox 1 or 2 ... and have a fire extinguisher nearby for when your CPU starts to melt.
Yeah, Ptolomey had no respect for the law either, first he nicked Egypt from the Pharohs and then he had an army of scribes copy all the scrolls he could find and stuffed them in his so called "library" of Alexandria. Eratosthenes and other authors tried to sue but lawyers hadn't been invented so he was SOL.
Actually the Alexandrians were more in the habit of swiping the physical originals. There's one notorious case where the Mouseion borrowed the Athenian state copies of some of their top tragic playwrights -- Sophokles and the like --, and sent an enormous sum of money as a deposit to ensure the safety and return of the originals after they'd copied them. However, Alexandria was very very rich, so they could afford to lose the deposit; Athens only got the copies back. That would be harmless enough these days, since it's not too hard now to ensure that information is copied 100% faithfully; but in those days you'd be very lucky to get even two 9s of accuracy in the reproduction. There's another story about Mark Antony effectively disestablishing one of the larger other libraries, the one at Pergamon, and bestowing its collection on Alexandria, but the source for that isn't very reliable.
(Incidentally, Eratosthenes was one of the head librarians at Alexandria, so he would have been the one being sued. Sorry to spoil the joke. But not very, because it wasn't that funny.)
I can say with some authority that any structure built in a tectonically active region that cannot safely handle a 3.4 magnitude earthquake was built improperly.
Well, it depends on how deep the quake is. If it's of any depth at all, you're not going to notice a 3.4 quake even if you're standing on the epicentre. But if a 3.4 quake were to happen, say, 20 km underfoot, you might have issues. In many ways the perceptual scale is a more useful human measure.
So now MS is patenting Game theory. What netx, algebra ?
Ones and zeroes, obviously.
(Incidentally, notice the date -- getting on for twelve years old now, and still appropriate.)
The HitlerHitler
Well, it's better than Vista.
Posting to remove erroneous moderation.
I think your signature may undermine your attempt to use this new rule.
Quoth Dyinobal:
Sure blueray has some nice features ... I don't really need ... I'll upgrade in a few years ...
Quoth webheaded:
... kicking and screaming ... There is no LIMIT to the amount of shit you'll complain about ... the higher version gives you shit fits ... what kind of moron ...
Compare and contrast: which of these two is complaining and having shit fits?
A live dissection is also known as a vivisection. It is derived from the Latin term meaning, to cut life: “Vivis” (life) and “Sectus” (to cut).
<pedant>
vivus "alive" => vivi-
seco "to cut" => sectio(n)-
</pedant>
(The words you give aren't exactly incorrect, they're just a weird choice of forms)
Of course, if you really insist on the Latin being correct, then in his sentence it should be dis ex machina, since prepositions take the ablative tense in Latin.
In reality, that's retarded.
Yes.
The correct plural form of deus ex machina is deii ex machina, not deus ex machinas. OMG, they dont seem to teach anything in Latin classes these days.
They sure don't! The only Latin plurals that have -ii are the ones where there's already an -i- in the word, like radius => radii.
Deus, as it happens, is one of the very very few irregular nouns in Latin, and the plural can be either di or, less often, dei.
In answer to the sibling AC who asked if di ex machina wouldn't imply a whole bunch of gods hanging from a single crane: the answer is no. In Latin that kind of construction is distributive, i.e. the usual implication is that there's one machina for every deus.
Self-censorship is still censorship
Self-censorship is a basic skill of being civilised. Civilised people don't go around gratuitously insulting others and encouraging hostility without good reason. To equate self-control with government prohibitions on what people are allowed to say or write is, shall we say, ingenuous.
If the definition of vulgarity relies purely upon a social collective, then it's natural, and reasonable, for violations of such a collective to recursively deteriorate social structure.
I basically agree with that. However, while words like "fuck" can indeed get you into trouble in an educational institution, four-letter words are not the ones that really send the shit flying towards the fan. The most dangerous words are the everyday words that are too accurate for comfort, words like "impolite", "bureaucracy", and "dogmatic" (not that these are the precise words that got me into trouble). Words that identify social problems are much more dangerous than words that are considered to be social problems.
How do you SNEAK something into a law? ... If the system is set up in such a way that people can put in new constraints without anyone noticing it, I'd say thats pretty broken.
One quote for you:
"It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors' expenses?"
-- Jo Moore, Labour Party spin doctor, September 11, 2001
The key is distraction. (Note that Moore's advice was followed to the letter.) As far as I'm aware US politicians have several further methods in addition to distraction: such as pork, or the way that the PATRIOT Act was handled (voting on laws before anyone has time to read them).
That reminds me, I never did get around to finishing Psychonauts ...
... which, incidentally, has just recently become available on GOG (i.e. DRM-free), priced at 10 USD.
PowerPoint, Whiteboards, Chalk, etc are just tools. Professors have been good and bad at implementing tools since the beginning of time.
Agree 100%. In the last term I've migrated from using slideshows (I won't say "PowerPoint", because I have never used it; my slide presentations were always 4:3-sized PDFs) to using just chalk and a blackboard.
The main reason was that I had come to realise that students never actually listened to me; they were too busy copying down stuff from the slides, even though they were also available on Blackboard (shudder) or Google Groups (slightly smaller shudder). There was also the fact that I was sick and tired of explaining headings; I wanted to see what it was like to organise a lecture as a talk presented to a moderately-informed group of people, rather than as an explication of bullet points. I wanted to see if my having to write stuff up on the board would keep my spoken words more closely in touch with the text, and keep the students' attention more closely in step with both.
The results were overwhelmingly positive, on both counts. The students loved it; and they actually listened to the things I had to say, rather than only reading the things I had written years earlier. I have found my preferred teaching style. I'll never use slideshows again, except for presenting illustrative images and diagrammes. And I'm now turning that series of lectures into a book. (If you're worried that in future years I'll simply re-read the same lectures from the book, don't -- I'll never be giving the lectures again, as I'm being laid off.)
Even so it is important to realise that it's a personal thing, and what works well with one teacher will not work well with another. For me, I want the students to be listening to what I say more than watching what's on the screen; at the same time I'll keep writing stuff on the board, because I know that some students process visually-presented text much better than they process the spoken word. I also want visually-presented text to underline the spoken words, rather than have the spoken words serving merely as footnotes to the slides.
So this approach works for me. But some of my colleagues swear by PowerPoint; and how could I say with certainty that that's wrong, for them?
Do we have anything as good as Beethoven symphonies yet?
What about even approximating Wagner, or Bruckner?
I'd already moderated here, but I have to comment: this is just willful blindness. Of twentieth-century orchestral/"high art" composers, Vaughan Williams, Stravinsky, and Strauss were all at least on a par with Bruckner (and better than Wagner), and Shostakovich's symphonies were as important as Beethoven's and at least as good as Schubert's.
I'm not very widely versed in orchestral music written since the 1970s -- other than soundtracks, which are usually crap (with notable exceptions). But in my own home town there's Gareth Farr's stuff, which is not half bad; for organ music Naji Hakim is among my favourite composers (and, for my money, the best organ composer since Bach); choral music fans go wild over Taverner, Pärt, and Whitacre; and I'm sure there are plenty of American fans of Elliott Carter's music (I can't stand the stuff, but then I can't stand Wagner either).
I pause for a moment to note that Stravinsky's second "version" of Petrushka -- "composed" in 1947 -- was "composed" for the express purpose of extending its copyright in the USA, since the actual composition dated to 1911 and was therefore going to become public domain sooner than Stravinsky wanted.
I was wondering what the hell the Boy Scouts of America had to do with software.
Ah yes. Those noble little ... bastions of democracy.
... we seem to have a convention here tonight? (I would like to state that I am not now and never have been ...)