Can I just point out how offensive that moniker is? I think you'll find that most opponents of the Creationist/Intelligent-Design movement are not fervent supporters of the theory of evolution, so much as supporters of science. Therefore they are scientists
If this were a debate over whether one scientific theory has more substance than another then it would just be business-as-usual, and most of us could happily sit back and wait for further evidence and research to divine a dominant theory. However, this is not a battle about theories but about ideoligies. The whole basis of modern science is that any theory is open to interrogation and disproof, and is only accepted as long as it makes more logical sense than anything else - it is, if anything, an exercise in lack of faith.
ID is founded on pursuing evidence of a theory which only makes sense when the whole body of scientifically sound knowledge is considered worthless, even though there is a much better-fitting and better-supported theory available - and this practice is the opposite of science.
People are "bigoted" against ID because it is anti-science, not because it is anti-evolution.
And, in a similar fashion, you were modded down because you're an idiot with a bag full of opinions and nothing by way of supported rhetoric. Your post was anti-debate, not anti-"Darwinist".
Absolutely - they're solving nothing with these half-measures. They need to do it properly and tattoo barcodes on the backs of their hands! Head-count would be a doddle then.
This is a trial. For the financial and human-rights costs involved, the benefits of this system are near-zero. Hopefully the "Leave Them Kids Alone" group will find their protests unnecessary when the bottom-line becomes clear.
You're forgetting Pratchett's Law of Mob Rule: the intelligence of a mob is equal to the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob.
More interesting are the waves set up by the harmonics of the Atlantic Ocean. There's a particular length (I forget exactly, but it's something close to 100 metres) that nautical engineers will never, ever build their ships to be, because they would get torn apart in the middle of the Atlantic by the simple harmonic motion of these waves.
No. The waves move far too slowly to be useful in this regard, and given that they're immense gravity-waves some 5 miles apart, the plane would probably feel like a paper-boat caught in the wake of a super-tanker.
I agree in principle - although I speak with little authority as Bioshock has sat on my desk uninstalled for about 3 weeks now while a suck the marrow from the Orange Box.
What I will say is that, having seen what GOOD developers can add to a game post-release (see above), and having seen what the non-professional mod communities can add unaided (again, see all the HL2 mods out there - SourceForts, Dystopia and all the ones that everyone's heard of), it's a bit pathetic to see such a big boy in the genre get watered down by a developer with no real balls or ambition after the release.
If this is all he's suggesting, he should really consider just fucking off and leaving it to the people who want to add something new and free to the title, instead of this chargeable, incremental, half-arsed approach.
If you're not going to do it right, give it to someone who will.
I get a fair bit of solicited and genuine email, and a moderate amount of spam. Thunderbird's and Gmail's filters seem to do almost all the filtering perfectly these days, but even checking the size of my inbox against my junk-boxes, I have to say that I'm getting nothing like 95%. Not even 50%.
Anecdotally, I don't think mine is an unusual scenario, which causes me to wonder: how many people are getting 96-100% spam, in order for this average to hold true? I mean, are there folks out there being inundated with a daily 100%-spam diet, just on the off-chance that they get a spot of lean steak one day?
Poor bastards.
Re:The Environment?
on
Blog Action Day
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Again with "effects" instead of "affects"?
Syntax aside, while I understand your POV, I have to disagree. The house-on-fire would be the wars, yes. The destabilisation of our environment, on the other hand, is the raging forest-fire that is about to engulf your house and your town.
If the world's natural resources - fossil fuels AND agriculturally viable land-area - continue to deplete, the wars you're seeing now will someday be remembered fondly for their relative civility and restraint. When whole nations start competing aggressively for scarce resources in an effort to maintain their dominance or their way of life, the cracks in our currently-civilised facade will split right open.
Seriously, in the long run, it's a MUCH bigger issue.
Ever since it became possible to identify the source IP-range of edits, I daresay there has been a decrease in people vandalising entries to boost their own/affiliates' references, and to discredit their competitors'/enemies' entries.
That loss of anonymity would cut down a lot of the spurious traffic, as would the reduction in the number and intensity of edit-wars (since there would be less need for editors to re-establish legitimate fact.)
Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.
Although it wasn't addressed in the article (dammit), it has often been suggested that some on-disk monitoring and allocation mechanism will prevent areas from burning-out, or from being used if they do burn out. (This will be a particular issue for page/swap/scratch-files)
Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years, the technology only has to be good enough to meet that standard before it becomes as technically viable as HDDs.
Given its other advantages over existing HDDs (even hybrids), I imagine that it will be considered viable - especially in laptops - long before it reaches that level of robustness.
Can I just say, it's about time they brought out a version that could compare with existing low-end laptop drives in terms of capacity. If you ask me, that's what was really holding back the big-spenders from buying into this tech.
I love this map, but even at full-size there's a lot of detail that you can't make out, which frustrates the hell out of me. I was also annoyed by the fact that the little peninsular west of the Bay Of Trolls isn't allocated to b3ta... Still, a staggering and witty undertaking, worthy of much praise.
I actually asked Randall if I could have the image at a higher resolution so I could project it onto my wall and trace it out, with all the little names that you can't make out. He hasn't replied yet...:-(
You're probably right; I guess I'm just anticipating the crapflood of kids who want to know when it'll ramp up their frame-rate (which, of course, it won't). It doesn't help that the story is vague enough to give that very impression, and knowing how many people love to RTFPhysorgA...
Maybe I'm just getting old, but there seem to be an awful lot more Ritalin-kids on/. these days. Maybe I'll emigrate to worsethanfailure.com.
This work is for RFICs (communication chips), not your 10-Core Hyperon or whatever. More importantly, what they're doing is indirectly modelling the correlation between various electrical properties of the micro-components in order to optimise design stability prior to manufacture. This has no direct impact on the manufacturing process, but does impact on more fabrication-robust design.
Ultimately this will have a limited impact on your desktop's Giggerhurts, somewhere way down the line, but it's nothing you'll notice and, for most of us, nothing we'll really understand. Unless the mathematical basis of chip-fab optimisation is your field, this isn't going to mean much.
By using these custom URI protocol names, software developers are trying to make lives easier for their customers.
The article also states that this is a "hacker's dream and a programmer's nightmare".
When a similar problem kicked off with the firefox:// protocol in IE all anyone could say was "Why the hell would anyone use this?" The answer seemed to be along the lines of "Nobody does - it was a stupid thing to include in the first place."
Sounds like the same problem to me - and unnecessary and unsuitable solution to a non-existent problem causing far worse problems. As the proverb goes: if it ain't broke, don't start shoe-horning new and unsecured protocol-handling into the registry.
Slashdot Mirror
If this were a debate over whether one scientific theory has more substance than another then it would just be business-as-usual, and most of us could happily sit back and wait for further evidence and research to divine a dominant theory. However, this is not a battle about theories but about ideoligies. The whole basis of modern science is that any theory is open to interrogation and disproof, and is only accepted as long as it makes more logical sense than anything else - it is, if anything, an exercise in lack of faith.
ID is founded on pursuing evidence of a theory which only makes sense when the whole body of scientifically sound knowledge is considered worthless, even though there is a much better-fitting and better-supported theory available - and this practice is the opposite of science.
People are "bigoted" against ID because it is anti-science, not because it is anti-evolution.
And, in a similar fashion, you were modded down because you're an idiot with a bag full of opinions and nothing by way of supported rhetoric. Your post was anti-debate, not anti-"Darwinist".
My kids vacuum up food all the time. And if they don't have hollow bones, I dunno where it goes.
Absolutely - they're solving nothing with these half-measures. They need to do it properly and tattoo barcodes on the backs of their hands! Head-count would be a doddle then.
This is a trial. For the financial and human-rights costs involved, the benefits of this system are near-zero. Hopefully the "Leave Them Kids Alone" group will find their protests unnecessary when the bottom-line becomes clear.
Apparently they're really upset that Linux won't sell to them...
You're forgetting Pratchett's Law of Mob Rule: the intelligence of a mob is equal to the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the number of people in the mob.
More interesting are the waves set up by the harmonics of the Atlantic Ocean. There's a particular length (I forget exactly, but it's something close to 100 metres) that nautical engineers will never, ever build their ships to be, because they would get torn apart in the middle of the Atlantic by the simple harmonic motion of these waves.
No. The waves move far too slowly to be useful in this regard, and given that they're immense gravity-waves some 5 miles apart, the plane would probably feel like a paper-boat caught in the wake of a super-tanker.
The little yacht dithering about in the water under the impact of these waves is, somehow, very endearing. I keep wanting to give it a saucer of milk.
What I will say is that, having seen what GOOD developers can add to a game post-release (see above), and having seen what the non-professional mod communities can add unaided (again, see all the HL2 mods out there - SourceForts, Dystopia and all the ones that everyone's heard of), it's a bit pathetic to see such a big boy in the genre get watered down by a developer with no real balls or ambition after the release.
If this is all he's suggesting, he should really consider just fucking off and leaving it to the people who want to add something new and free to the title, instead of this chargeable, incremental, half-arsed approach.
If you're not going to do it right, give it to someone who will.
Depends. Do you teach her?
Anecdotally, I don't think mine is an unusual scenario, which causes me to wonder: how many people are getting 96-100% spam, in order for this average to hold true? I mean, are there folks out there being inundated with a daily 100%-spam diet, just on the off-chance that they get a spot of lean steak one day?
Poor bastards.
Syntax aside, while I understand your POV, I have to disagree. The house-on-fire would be the wars, yes. The destabilisation of our environment, on the other hand, is the raging forest-fire that is about to engulf your house and your town.
If the world's natural resources - fossil fuels AND agriculturally viable land-area - continue to deplete, the wars you're seeing now will someday be remembered fondly for their relative civility and restraint. When whole nations start competing aggressively for scarce resources in an effort to maintain their dominance or their way of life, the cracks in our currently-civilised facade will split right open.
Seriously, in the long run, it's a MUCH bigger issue.
You just can't see them.
That loss of anonymity would cut down a lot of the spurious traffic, as would the reduction in the number and intensity of edit-wars (since there would be less need for editors to re-establish legitimate fact.)
- Flash used to have a limit of about 500,000 read/writes. That limit has since been surpassed. I gather it can exceed 1 million now, though Wikipedia still says the former.
- Although it wasn't addressed in the article (dammit), it has often been suggested that some on-disk monitoring and allocation mechanism will prevent areas from burning-out, or from being used if they do burn out. (This will be a particular issue for page/swap/scratch-files)
- Given that hard drives usually have a MTBF of something like 3-5 years, the technology only has to be good enough to meet that standard before it becomes as technically viable as HDDs.
- Given its other advantages over existing HDDs (even hybrids), I imagine that it will be considered viable - especially in laptops - long before it reaches that level of robustness.
Can I just say, it's about time they brought out a version that could compare with existing low-end laptop drives in terms of capacity. If you ask me, that's what was really holding back the big-spenders from buying into this tech.I thought that was a Web 2.0 startup.
"That's no moon..."
I love this map, but even at full-size there's a lot of detail that you can't make out, which frustrates the hell out of me. I was also annoyed by the fact that the little peninsular west of the Bay Of Trolls isn't allocated to b3ta... Still, a staggering and witty undertaking, worthy of much praise.
I actually asked Randall if I could have the image at a higher resolution so I could project it onto my wall and trace it out, with all the little names that you can't make out. He hasn't replied yet... :-(
I mean, their practices may be similar, but that's an unfortunately telling ambiguity.
He who lives by the sword, dies by the questionable business model.
Maybe I'm just getting old, but there seem to be an awful lot more Ritalin-kids on /. these days. Maybe I'll emigrate to worsethanfailure.com.
Ultimately this will have a limited impact on your desktop's Giggerhurts, somewhere way down the line, but it's nothing you'll notice and, for most of us, nothing we'll really understand. Unless the mathematical basis of chip-fab optimisation is your field, this isn't going to mean much.
You installed Gentoo in less than 48 hours? Christ, how times change...
When a similar problem kicked off with the firefox:// protocol in IE all anyone could say was "Why the hell would anyone use this?" The answer seemed to be along the lines of "Nobody does - it was a stupid thing to include in the first place."
Sounds like the same problem to me - and unnecessary and unsuitable solution to a non-existent problem causing far worse problems. As the proverb goes: if it ain't broke, don't start shoe-horning new and unsecured protocol-handling into the registry.