By the way, calling environmentalism a religion is a disservice to low-emissions engineers and environmental scientists everywhere.
First, what is religion? I'll go with Wikipedia here:
Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth. Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals are often traditionally associated with the core belief, and these may have some overlap with concepts in secular philosophy. Religion can also be described as a way of life.
There is a difference between concern for the environment and Environmentalism. Look at the "-ism" suffix and compare it to other ism's: communism puts the commune first, utilitarianism puts utility first, libertarianism puts liberty first, rationalism puts rationality first, Catholicism puts the Catholic religion first - need I go on? Environmentalism places the environment first, above everything else.
People with concern for the environment believe that human existence (and possibly progress) does not necessarily involve widespread ecological destruction. These people are your engineers and scientists. They work for the benefit of humanity and attempt to minimize damage to the environment. Also, people who see Earth as a means to human survival and are thus worried that global warming will kill us all are not strict Environmentalists. They just care about the environment because they care about the survival of humanity (or, more likely, themselves). These people can be considered humanists, as they put humanity first.
Environmentalism, in contrast, places the environment above any other goal in the decision-making process. For them, the Earth is not good because we live on it, the Earth is just intrinsically good. While many Environmentalists believe that human existence/progress and care for the environment are not mutually exclusive, humanity takes a back seat when push comes to shove. There is no provable, scientific reason to put Earth first. There are many scientific reasons to care for the environment when you put humanity as a first goal, but the decision to believe in whatever supreme being is just as arbitrary and unexplainable as the decision to put the Earth first.
Microsoft? There are people who use MSN for searching? Name two.
My mother and my father. Their homepage is still the default one Microsoft gave them, and they don't want to switch to Google or Firefox. MSN is effectively the default search on Windows computers.
YEAH! Why the fuck does Micro$oft charge $600 for software? It probably costs about $5 to make, if you include the box and all the printed material. And don't get me started on such companies like Adobe or Autodesk, who can charge over $2000 for what amounts to a single DVD!
Okay, seriously now. These CDs cost money because they cost money to make. The cost isn't just in the printing, but the whole god damn production. You have to hire a producer, audio engineers, album designers. You must rent time in a recording studio, buy instruments, and (the most important) make enough money so that you can live decently. Maybe $16 is too high. When I buy bands from small bands not signed to a big label, they might cost $9 to $12.
Actually, a lot of people who constantly go to Starbucks do it because it's the cool thing to do. They do it because it's what everyone else is doing since they don't want to be left out. Starbucks is more about "brand" than coffee anymore.
Not totally true. If it was the only reason, my 56 year-old mother wouldn't go to Starbucks every morning before work. Just like with chain stores or fast-food restaurants, the consistency is what matters, not the quality of either the product or the brand. We all know that Starbucks will serve the same, mediocre (not awful, but not great) cup of coffee whenever and wherever you want in under 5 minutes. Same with me: I go to local places when I'm at home, but when I'm out of town and with no locals, I eat at chains.
And back on topic, good job to Starbucks for responding appropriately. They didn't launch a faux-grassroots campaign, they didn't try and discredit Oxfam as a whole. They simply rebutted the attacks from the same medium they were launched.
How exactly is this supposed to create a rift between the retail drones who sell hardware and the Geek Squad who fixes it? They are two different branches of the company.
This isn't a story. Stop selling ad space in our stories, OSTG. You've got them everywhere else.
I've been saying this from the beginning, but Blu-Ray will be the winner of the HD format war simply because it has a cooler name. HDDVD is hard to say and sounds like obscure computer nerd bullshit. Blu-ray on the other hand sounds like a devastating weapon that has fallen into enemy hands, putting the world at risk and now needs to be saved by a commando soldier who was recently kicked out of the army for disobeying orders and saving a village of orphans, but now is the world's only hope to avoid sure destruction. Coming to theaters near you, this July 4th.
First off, the parent poster was obviously being sarcastic. That is what the little emoticon at the end of the post signifies. Second, US military hegemony is unmatched, especially at the point at which the US military spends more in a year than all the other nations in the world combined. Also, nuclear weapons. The US is the only nation who keeps thousands of nukes well-maintained and has an fleet of AEGIS-style cruisers capable of shooting enemy nukes down.
My wife growls at me for the time I watch playing wow but I'm able to have a conversation with her and watch tv at the same time (my tv and PC are in the same room).
Why is it (generally in the minds of non-gamers) that time spent with the TV is somehow "better" than time spent gaming?
Because TV is part of a shared cultural experience. In today's middle-America, you're missing out on some essential water cooler conversations if you didn't watch the latest episode of Lost, Grey's Anatomy, or $SPORTS_EVENT.
Have you ever talked to anyone who totally and completely does not believe in evolution? Ask them to explain what they think evolution is. Many people I have talked to said that evolution was something more like an instant morph, something you might see on a Sci-Fi show. Seriously, one guy thought that the theory of evolution said that whenever a particle of radiation hit the DNA, it mutated and spread like a virus throughout the body, turning your ordinary monkey into a human. If that is all you knew about evolution, would you support it? Hell no!
Most of these people have been falsely educated. Their pastors and teachers use absurd straw man agruments like the one I said above, and they don't know any better. They are all probably having the inverse discussion as us: "Can you believe that a majority of Americans think that crazy evolution theory is plausable? Absurd!
The solution: don't form prejudices and write all these people off as wacky fundamentalists. Instead, educate them about what the theory really is (and why gravity is also "just a theory" - Christ, I hate that retort).
Until Vista actually comes out, these comments amount to not much more than so many farts in a steady breeze.
Vista betas have been out for quite some time now. You can even find reviews of Vista on major tech/hardware review sites. Betas are always feature complete. No good software developer adds new stuff to a beta; they only fix what is there. Apple can compare their OS to Vista in terms of features. However, if they were talking about stability or support, it would be as fair as you claim.
The woman is in one of the silly sciences, and almost all of what she says can be discounted, but this was interesting:
What? From the article:
A clinical psychologist, Orzack is founder and coordinator of Computer Addiction Services at McLean Hospital in Newton, Mass., and is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
I don't even think that needs explaining, but I'll do it anyway: Clinical psychologists are probably the most pragmatic people in the social sciences (what you call the silly sciences). Her work has absolutly nothing to do with Freudian psychoanalysis (there was nothing in there about gaming addictions meaning that you want to have sex with you mother and kill your father), but instead on the scientific method.
I think complaining to the police about children playing in a tree should be considered "anti-social"...
Read the damn article. The kids weren't playing in a tree, they were tearing down a tree (that wasn't their own, by the way) so that they could build a fort. There is a difference. One is an act of play which demands a "Hey, kids, get off my lawn!" while the other is an action you'd probably call the cops about. If some neighborhood kids came over to my house and started ripping branches off one of my trees, I'd have to be in a good mood just to call the police - I'd probably go out there myself and raise hell at 'em. Wouldn't you do the same? What if they started ripping the siding off your house so they could make a fort? Or stole pieces of your fence? Even if you were in the best of spirits, I'm sure you wouldn't laugh it off, saying, "Oh, those kids are quite crazy these days, aren't they Ingrid?"
I don't know about you, but when I was twelve, I sure as hell knew better than to destroy something that didn't belong to me. I knew that if I did, there would be punishments. I would have to pay for what I took/destroyed, and probably would get punishment for it. Was the punishment too severe? Perhaps. But stop trying to paint these kids as angels who the police violently traumatized for no particular reason. They were "stripping every branch from it" so they could build their "den."
The only thing "64x" in there is the FSAA... Not the cards. From TFA:
The summary should say x64, instead of 64x. x64 is the amount of lanes (a measure of bandwidth - 1 lane = 250 MB/sec) the board can carry to the bus. The early PCI-E graphics were limited by lanes - one card ran at x16, but there wasn't enough bandwidth in the chipset for two cards, so an SLI setup had to run cards at x8 each, halfing the bandwidth. Newer chipsets can handle two sets of x16, meaning 32 total lanes for graphics. For this article, it means that there are four cards (albeit in two slots - it's the same thing with the dual core processors), each running at full x16 bandwidth. Considering that the number reaches 16 GB/sec, it is something to get a little excited about. Although not too much.
Why pay intrest when you dont have to and realize that you do not neet to buy all the toys now.
No. If the question was, "My uncle died and I got $30,000 in inheritance," then yes, loans should be paid off. However, this person has maybe a thousand dollars in a bank, and such a payment won't even make a dent. Also, almost every student loan I've heard of doesn't begin to accrue interest until you graduate. Because of this, paying off your student loans is only one step better than putting your money under your bed, assuming a constant rate of inflation.
Instead, don't invest your money, at least all of it. Budget some of your money (and time) on things you enjoy. Don't spend your life savings on heroin, but simply get out there and have fun. Go to live music shows, drink appropriate amounts of alcohol, buy nice things for your significant other, or whatever else you enjoy. Buy the new console system or TV with your roommates, if you like playing games or watching TV. When you are working full time, you won't be able to enjoy them as much. Keep some money in case of emergencies, but my advice is to go through college as a selective miser: don't pay as much for things you can skimp on (food, books, rent) so that you can really enjoy the things that make life worth living.
Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data?
So you think Nature (the journal TFA said it was published in) is some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscription? It is probably the most well known academic journal in existence, at least to the non-academic. And even if you are too poor to buy a subscription, I'm almost positive that every public library subscribes to Nature.
Minors cannot enter into contracts. Seems like a rather stunning flaw in thier business model.
Wrong. Minors can enter into contracts, but they also have the right to nullify any contract as long as they are still under the legal age. So for anyone who is making a contract with a minor, it is worse than worthless, because while the minor can get out of it at any time, that same luxury is not given to whoever signed the contract with a minor. Of course, if two minors sign a contract with each other, then either of them can break it.
I think the FTC took into account the fact that it cost over $25 million to pull the game from the shelves and re-release it as an AO game - a cost which Take Two had to pay in full. This was probably their most expensive publicity stunt ever.
From the article:
Although Take-Two was not fined, the company will be subject to civil penalties of $11,000 per violation going forward. As was pointed out when the FTC first announced the settlement back in June, Take-Two got what essentially amounted to a slap on the wrist. The "Hot Coffee" scandal certainly cost the company, however. The removal of San Andreas from most retailers' shelves followed by a re-rating of the title resulted in a loss of nearly $25 million.
Hopefully then they will also implement a good set of password rules and enforce them to protect themselves from future problems. Where I work they require 3 out of the 4 rules to be met such as mixed case, numbers and special characters... of course they also make us change our password every 30 days so i've discovered that people have taken to doing things like Asdf1234 and then when the password requires changing changing it to Asdf2345... Doh.
I am really curious how you know exactly what your users are setting their passwords to. When properly hashed, Asdf1234 should look completely different from Asdf2345. Either your company is having users submit new passwords over plaintext to admins who manually change them, your users share their passwords when asked, or your system uses a very weak hash that you can break. All of these scenarios are dangerous from a security standpoint. You shouldn't ever be able to find out a user's password, even if you have root access.
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of wikipedia because of its less-than-authoritative nature
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of any encyclopedia or other tertiary source because of its less-than-scholarly nature.
Seriously, the reason that Wikipedia should not be used in your college-level paper is the same reason Brittanica shouldn't: it just isn't scholarly to glean reference material from a multitude of reference sources if you are trying to reach an independant conclusion. If you are in college, you should be trying to do your own thinking, and this means looking mostly at primary sources and possibly at secondary sources if they are particularly unique in their viewpoints (or if you are analyzing/critiquing them).
Let me give an example: If my professor asked me to write a paper on Nietzsche's philosophy, and I only cited The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy throughout my paper, I wouldn't expect to make a good grade. Heck, even citing from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wouldn't exactly be the best, because what I should be doing is reading the original text and making my own conclusions from there.
The issue isn't with the integrity of Wikipedia, nor is it with the dynamic nature of the system. The problem is that you aren't really learning how to research if you have to rely on enyclopedias. Having to spend hours in the library (not the library's website or database) combing through records trying to find that one source you need is an part integral of being an academican, assuming your discipline is more than 30 years old.
"Sounds intriguing, but one has to wonder if it will be plagued by internecine feuding, punditry, and political manipulation" How unlike the home life of our dear Queen.
That is the whole point. Give politics its own wiki so it won't be on the Wikipedia. It doesn't matter if this new wiki turns into a wasteland of mud, as long as the main site stays clean.
Another reason that HD-DVD might fail is that the general public doesn't realize that there's a difference between "DVD player" and "HD-DVD player." The medium of content delivery didn't make a visual change such as the change from vinyl to CD, from 8-track to cassette, or even when comparing VHS and Beta.
The change from vinal to CD or 8-track to cassette was radically different in magnitude than the DVD to HD-DVD or BlueRay. Not only are the disks the exact same size and shape, but there are many opportunities for backwards and forwards compatibility. You can't stick a CD on your record player, nor could you stick an 8-track in your cassette deck. You can stick a DVD into your HD-DVD player.
Drugs are no substitute for reading a lot, tinkering, listening to others and keeping classifying things with respect to what you already know. Learning is a very long-term process, certainly little understood, and no drug can kick you on that time scale.
Some things aren't about learning. In fact, most of what is called learning (in both high school and college) now consists of brute memorization of facts and the ability to replicate a certain process or technique across multiple sets of data. Also, these drugs don't simply make you "smarter." They mainly make it so that you are able to work on a given process for hours and hours at a time. I have taken an extended-release ADD drug and then worked on a paper for literally seven hours straight. I then took a bathroom and food break and worked for five more hours. What would have taken at least twenty hours over the course of a week was distilled into one all-nighter. Was the paper any better than if I had done it the "normal way"? Probably not. But it wasn't any worse.
does anyone think those people care a lick about price per watt (as this is a green party thing)?
Our nation is one of conviences, not of caring if our grandchildren have conviences.
You are obviously not running a server farm composed of hundreds or thousands of CPUs running at full load 24x7. Not only do you have to power those procs, but you have to cool them as well. For almost any server, the cost in energy over five years is going to be more expensive than the chip itself. Energy requirements are calculated into the cost of upgrading - a company might go for a more expensive proc which saves energy in the end. I'm also going to guess that you've never been in a corporate environment, where shaving pennies off costs is the stuff of promotions (because multiplied across time and scale, it really adds up).
See the Boston Tea Party and the American War of Independence.
What the hell? The American War for Independence was started and financed by business interests. In fact, it is one of the few revolutions in history which was supported by the bourgeois. (Maybe that is why it has been one of the only successful revolutions...) All the founding fathers owned businesses and were invested in commerce. John Hancock, for example, was one of the wealthiest trader in the colonies.
If you look at all the reasons the colonists had for revolution, they were mostly economic. Increased taxes, shutting down the port of Boston, forcing businesses to jump through expensive, bureaucratic hurtles (incorporation articles, stamp act, etc), creating a tribute system which made British governors wealthy, compelling shopkeepers and inns to feed and house the British army, forbidding non-British (that is, cheaper) goods to be imported into the colonies, and a whole slew of laws all helped the British companies at the expense of the colonial businesses.
Slashdot Mirror
By the way, calling environmentalism a religion is a disservice to low-emissions engineers and environmental scientists everywhere.
First, what is religion? I'll go with Wikipedia here:
Religion is often described as a communal system for the coherence of belief focusing on a system of thought, unseen being, person, or object, that is considered to be supernatural, sacred, divine, or of the highest truth. Moral codes, practices, values, institutions, traditions, and rituals are often traditionally associated with the core belief, and these may have some overlap with concepts in secular philosophy. Religion can also be described as a way of life.
There is a difference between concern for the environment and Environmentalism. Look at the "-ism" suffix and compare it to other ism's: communism puts the commune first, utilitarianism puts utility first, libertarianism puts liberty first, rationalism puts rationality first, Catholicism puts the Catholic religion first - need I go on? Environmentalism places the environment first, above everything else.
People with concern for the environment believe that human existence (and possibly progress) does not necessarily involve widespread ecological destruction. These people are your engineers and scientists. They work for the benefit of humanity and attempt to minimize damage to the environment. Also, people who see Earth as a means to human survival and are thus worried that global warming will kill us all are not strict Environmentalists. They just care about the environment because they care about the survival of humanity (or, more likely, themselves). These people can be considered humanists, as they put humanity first.
Environmentalism, in contrast, places the environment above any other goal in the decision-making process. For them, the Earth is not good because we live on it, the Earth is just intrinsically good. While many Environmentalists believe that human existence/progress and care for the environment are not mutually exclusive, humanity takes a back seat when push comes to shove. There is no provable, scientific reason to put Earth first. There are many scientific reasons to care for the environment when you put humanity as a first goal, but the decision to believe in whatever supreme being is just as arbitrary and unexplainable as the decision to put the Earth first.
Microsoft? There are people who use MSN for searching? Name two.
My mother and my father. Their homepage is still the default one Microsoft gave them, and they don't want to switch to Google or Firefox. MSN is effectively the default search on Windows computers.
YEAH! Why the fuck does Micro$oft charge $600 for software? It probably costs about $5 to make, if you include the box and all the printed material. And don't get me started on such companies like Adobe or Autodesk, who can charge over $2000 for what amounts to a single DVD!
Okay, seriously now. These CDs cost money because they cost money to make. The cost isn't just in the printing, but the whole god damn production. You have to hire a producer, audio engineers, album designers. You must rent time in a recording studio, buy instruments, and (the most important) make enough money so that you can live decently. Maybe $16 is too high. When I buy bands from small bands not signed to a big label, they might cost $9 to $12.
Actually, a lot of people who constantly go to Starbucks do it because it's the cool thing to do. They do it because it's what everyone else is doing since they don't want to be left out. Starbucks is more about "brand" than coffee anymore.
Not totally true. If it was the only reason, my 56 year-old mother wouldn't go to Starbucks every morning before work. Just like with chain stores or fast-food restaurants, the consistency is what matters, not the quality of either the product or the brand. We all know that Starbucks will serve the same, mediocre (not awful, but not great) cup of coffee whenever and wherever you want in under 5 minutes. Same with me: I go to local places when I'm at home, but when I'm out of town and with no locals, I eat at chains.
And back on topic, good job to Starbucks for responding appropriately. They didn't launch a faux-grassroots campaign, they didn't try and discredit Oxfam as a whole. They simply rebutted the attacks from the same medium they were launched.
How exactly is this supposed to create a rift between the retail drones who sell hardware and the Geek Squad who fixes it? They are two different branches of the company.
This isn't a story. Stop selling ad space in our stories, OSTG. You've got them everywhere else.
I've been saying this from the beginning, but Blu-Ray will be the winner of the HD format war simply because it has a cooler name. HDDVD is hard to say and sounds like obscure computer nerd bullshit. Blu-ray on the other hand sounds like a devastating weapon that has fallen into enemy hands, putting the world at risk and now needs to be saved by a commando soldier who was recently kicked out of the army for disobeying orders and saving a village of orphans, but now is the world's only hope to avoid sure destruction. Coming to theaters near you, this July 4th.
No. VHS vs. Betamax proves you wrong on that one.
First off, the parent poster was obviously being sarcastic. That is what the little emoticon at the end of the post signifies. Second, US military hegemony is unmatched, especially at the point at which the US military spends more in a year than all the other nations in the world combined. Also, nuclear weapons. The US is the only nation who keeps thousands of nukes well-maintained and has an fleet of AEGIS-style cruisers capable of shooting enemy nukes down.
My wife growls at me for the time I watch playing wow but I'm able to have a conversation with her and watch tv at the same time (my tv and PC are in the same room). Why is it (generally in the minds of non-gamers) that time spent with the TV is somehow "better" than time spent gaming?
Because TV is part of a shared cultural experience. In today's middle-America, you're missing out on some essential water cooler conversations if you didn't watch the latest episode of Lost, Grey's Anatomy, or $SPORTS_EVENT.
Have you ever talked to anyone who totally and completely does not believe in evolution? Ask them to explain what they think evolution is. Many people I have talked to said that evolution was something more like an instant morph, something you might see on a Sci-Fi show. Seriously, one guy thought that the theory of evolution said that whenever a particle of radiation hit the DNA, it mutated and spread like a virus throughout the body, turning your ordinary monkey into a human. If that is all you knew about evolution, would you support it? Hell no!
Most of these people have been falsely educated. Their pastors and teachers use absurd straw man agruments like the one I said above, and they don't know any better. They are all probably having the inverse discussion as us: "Can you believe that a majority of Americans think that crazy evolution theory is plausable? Absurd!
The solution: don't form prejudices and write all these people off as wacky fundamentalists. Instead, educate them about what the theory really is (and why gravity is also "just a theory" - Christ, I hate that retort).
Until Vista actually comes out, these comments amount to not much more than so many farts in a steady breeze.
Vista betas have been out for quite some time now. You can even find reviews of Vista on major tech/hardware review sites. Betas are always feature complete. No good software developer adds new stuff to a beta; they only fix what is there. Apple can compare their OS to Vista in terms of features. However, if they were talking about stability or support, it would be as fair as you claim.
The woman is in one of the silly sciences, and almost all of what she says can be discounted, but this was interesting:
What? From the article:
A clinical psychologist, Orzack is founder and coordinator of Computer Addiction Services at McLean Hospital in Newton, Mass., and is also an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
I don't even think that needs explaining, but I'll do it anyway: Clinical psychologists are probably the most pragmatic people in the social sciences (what you call the silly sciences). Her work has absolutly nothing to do with Freudian psychoanalysis (there was nothing in there about gaming addictions meaning that you want to have sex with you mother and kill your father), but instead on the scientific method.
I think complaining to the police about children playing in a tree should be considered "anti-social"...
Read the damn article. The kids weren't playing in a tree, they were tearing down a tree (that wasn't their own, by the way) so that they could build a fort. There is a difference. One is an act of play which demands a "Hey, kids, get off my lawn!" while the other is an action you'd probably call the cops about. If some neighborhood kids came over to my house and started ripping branches off one of my trees, I'd have to be in a good mood just to call the police - I'd probably go out there myself and raise hell at 'em. Wouldn't you do the same? What if they started ripping the siding off your house so they could make a fort? Or stole pieces of your fence? Even if you were in the best of spirits, I'm sure you wouldn't laugh it off, saying, "Oh, those kids are quite crazy these days, aren't they Ingrid?"
I don't know about you, but when I was twelve, I sure as hell knew better than to destroy something that didn't belong to me. I knew that if I did, there would be punishments. I would have to pay for what I took/destroyed, and probably would get punishment for it. Was the punishment too severe? Perhaps. But stop trying to paint these kids as angels who the police violently traumatized for no particular reason. They were "stripping every branch from it" so they could build their "den."
The only thing "64x" in there is the FSAA... Not the cards. From TFA:
The summary should say x64, instead of 64x. x64 is the amount of lanes (a measure of bandwidth - 1 lane = 250 MB/sec) the board can carry to the bus. The early PCI-E graphics were limited by lanes - one card ran at x16, but there wasn't enough bandwidth in the chipset for two cards, so an SLI setup had to run cards at x8 each, halfing the bandwidth. Newer chipsets can handle two sets of x16, meaning 32 total lanes for graphics. For this article, it means that there are four cards (albeit in two slots - it's the same thing with the dual core processors), each running at full x16 bandwidth. Considering that the number reaches 16 GB/sec, it is something to get a little excited about. Although not too much.
Why pay intrest when you dont have to and realize that you do not neet to buy all the toys now.
No. If the question was, "My uncle died and I got $30,000 in inheritance," then yes, loans should be paid off. However, this person has maybe a thousand dollars in a bank, and such a payment won't even make a dent. Also, almost every student loan I've heard of doesn't begin to accrue interest until you graduate. Because of this, paying off your student loans is only one step better than putting your money under your bed, assuming a constant rate of inflation.
Instead, don't invest your money, at least all of it. Budget some of your money (and time) on things you enjoy. Don't spend your life savings on heroin, but simply get out there and have fun. Go to live music shows, drink appropriate amounts of alcohol, buy nice things for your significant other, or whatever else you enjoy. Buy the new console system or TV with your roommates, if you like playing games or watching TV. When you are working full time, you won't be able to enjoy them as much. Keep some money in case of emergencies, but my advice is to go through college as a selective miser: don't pay as much for things you can skimp on (food, books, rent) so that you can really enjoy the things that make life worth living.
Why do these articles never EVER tell anything meaningful - like for example the strenght and orientation of the field they used with some simple data tables and statistics? Who has access to some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscrition to get the raw data?
So you think Nature (the journal TFA said it was published in) is some weird specialist journal with a 1000USD subscription? It is probably the most well known academic journal in existence, at least to the non-academic. And even if you are too poor to buy a subscription, I'm almost positive that every public library subscribes to Nature.
Minors cannot enter into contracts. Seems like a rather stunning flaw in thier business model.
Wrong. Minors can enter into contracts, but they also have the right to nullify any contract as long as they are still under the legal age. So for anyone who is making a contract with a minor, it is worse than worthless, because while the minor can get out of it at any time, that same luxury is not given to whoever signed the contract with a minor. Of course, if two minors sign a contract with each other, then either of them can break it.
From the article:
Hopefully then they will also implement a good set of password rules and enforce them to protect themselves from future problems. Where I work they require 3 out of the 4 rules to be met such as mixed case, numbers and special characters... of course they also make us change our password every 30 days so i've discovered that people have taken to doing things like Asdf1234 and then when the password requires changing changing it to Asdf2345... Doh.
I am really curious how you know exactly what your users are setting their passwords to. When properly hashed, Asdf1234 should look completely different from Asdf2345. Either your company is having users submit new passwords over plaintext to admins who manually change them, your users share their passwords when asked, or your system uses a very weak hash that you can break. All of these scenarios are dangerous from a security standpoint. You shouldn't ever be able to find out a user's password, even if you have root access.
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of wikipedia because of its less-than-authoritative nature
I know at my university, professors frown on (and sometimes penalize) the use of any encyclopedia or other tertiary source because of its less-than-scholarly nature.
Seriously, the reason that Wikipedia should not be used in your college-level paper is the same reason Brittanica shouldn't: it just isn't scholarly to glean reference material from a multitude of reference sources if you are trying to reach an independant conclusion. If you are in college, you should be trying to do your own thinking, and this means looking mostly at primary sources and possibly at secondary sources if they are particularly unique in their viewpoints (or if you are analyzing/critiquing them).
Let me give an example: If my professor asked me to write a paper on Nietzsche's philosophy, and I only cited The Complete Idiot's Guide to Philosophy throughout my paper, I wouldn't expect to make a good grade. Heck, even citing from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy wouldn't exactly be the best, because what I should be doing is reading the original text and making my own conclusions from there.
The issue isn't with the integrity of Wikipedia, nor is it with the dynamic nature of the system. The problem is that you aren't really learning how to research if you have to rely on enyclopedias. Having to spend hours in the library (not the library's website or database) combing through records trying to find that one source you need is an part integral of being an academican, assuming your discipline is more than 30 years old.
"Sounds intriguing, but one has to wonder if it will be plagued by internecine feuding, punditry, and political manipulation" How unlike the home life of our dear Queen.
That is the whole point. Give politics its own wiki so it won't be on the Wikipedia. It doesn't matter if this new wiki turns into a wasteland of mud, as long as the main site stays clean.
Why would the government need to use encryption unless they had something to hide? Remember, only terrorists have a need for encryption.
Another reason that HD-DVD might fail is that the general public doesn't realize that there's a difference between "DVD player" and "HD-DVD player." The medium of content delivery didn't make a visual change such as the change from vinyl to CD, from 8-track to cassette, or even when comparing VHS and Beta.
The change from vinal to CD or 8-track to cassette was radically different in magnitude than the DVD to HD-DVD or BlueRay. Not only are the disks the exact same size and shape, but there are many opportunities for backwards and forwards compatibility. You can't stick a CD on your record player, nor could you stick an 8-track in your cassette deck. You can stick a DVD into your HD-DVD player.
Drugs are no substitute for reading a lot, tinkering, listening to others and keeping classifying things with respect to what you already know. Learning is a very long-term process, certainly little understood, and no drug can kick you on that time scale.
Some things aren't about learning. In fact, most of what is called learning (in both high school and college) now consists of brute memorization of facts and the ability to replicate a certain process or technique across multiple sets of data. Also, these drugs don't simply make you "smarter." They mainly make it so that you are able to work on a given process for hours and hours at a time. I have taken an extended-release ADD drug and then worked on a paper for literally seven hours straight. I then took a bathroom and food break and worked for five more hours. What would have taken at least twenty hours over the course of a week was distilled into one all-nighter. Was the paper any better than if I had done it the "normal way"? Probably not. But it wasn't any worse.
does anyone think those people care a lick about price per watt (as this is a green party thing)?
Our nation is one of conviences, not of caring if our grandchildren have conviences.
You are obviously not running a server farm composed of hundreds or thousands of CPUs running at full load 24x7. Not only do you have to power those procs, but you have to cool them as well. For almost any server, the cost in energy over five years is going to be more expensive than the chip itself. Energy requirements are calculated into the cost of upgrading - a company might go for a more expensive proc which saves energy in the end. I'm also going to guess that you've never been in a corporate environment, where shaving pennies off costs is the stuff of promotions (because multiplied across time and scale, it really adds up).
See the Boston Tea Party and the American War of Independence.
What the hell? The American War for Independence was started and financed by business interests. In fact, it is one of the few revolutions in history which was supported by the bourgeois. (Maybe that is why it has been one of the only successful revolutions...) All the founding fathers owned businesses and were invested in commerce. John Hancock, for example, was one of the wealthiest trader in the colonies.
If you look at all the reasons the colonists had for revolution, they were mostly economic. Increased taxes, shutting down the port of Boston, forcing businesses to jump through expensive, bureaucratic hurtles (incorporation articles, stamp act, etc), creating a tribute system which made British governors wealthy, compelling shopkeepers and inns to feed and house the British army, forbidding non-British (that is, cheaper) goods to be imported into the colonies, and a whole slew of laws all helped the British companies at the expense of the colonial businesses.