Actually, this only makes it worse. I can't quote the exact numbers and I'm not yet a full member of the internet community and therefore reluctant to pull them out of my ass.
However, without quoting actual numbers, I do know that recent studies over here have shown that shipping has only increased. People buy a lot of stuff online and when buying online, they tend to ignore where it's being shipped -from-. They just look at the price. I know I buy most of my books in the US, even though I live in Europe. I did so before the dollar went bust and right now it's even better. With the current dollar, I even consider buying hardware in the US, which I often bought in France or Germany before (I live in the Netherlands).
The Netherlands are among the few European countries that have an internet penetration similar to the US, so I would assume that the US is seeing the same thing. You no longer shop in your own town or state, but have it shipped to you from anywhere, as long as the price is right.
Also, on the point of mail: if you're suggesting email is merely a replacement for traditional mail you must be kidding. All that snail mail was good for, even before email, was formal communication (it still is, with signatures and whatnot) and some fringe stuff like pen pals. Other communication was handled over the phone, fax (remember the fax?) or telex (probably don't remember this then). I get about as much or maybe even more paper junkmail as compared to 20 years ago. Bills still reach me by mail and when I get a contract or business order, they still want to see my signature and so it's mail again.
Email hasn't made a dent in mail. If any type of indirectly related business has boomed since the introduction of the internet, it's physical transport.
What users "should" know is completely irrelevant. (not even touching on the fact that it's only what you happen to think they should know, no exactly popular opinion, but that's not the issue here)
If they "should" know, but don't, the shit is still going to hit the fan. Sadly, we software engineers have to consider what a user is likely to know and build from there. Which is exactly what these Storm authors have done and what these blogging software designers should have done.
And yes, I think the designers -should- have and I feel justified in saying so, since the responsibility lies with the designers here. Just writing a nice little bit in the license agreement is not enough to wave that responsibility in my book. Maybe legally so, but not morally.
Thanks the to lousy construction and poor grammar of this sentence:
Why on earth companies that cater to a predominantly English speaking country off-shore their support to ESL countries where the people that can read & speak English DO NOT understand the vernacular, expressions, idioms and vocal inflexions are driving me nuts.
I had to read it twice to catch the actual error. ".. is driving me nuts." is probably what you were trying to say, but perhaps you're from Oregon? If not, perhaps I should start a rant about how I shouldn't have my time wasted on/. by people who can't even construct a proper sentence? Or would that just be plain silly, not unlike the point you're trying to make?
The things the United States (and the world) is capable of, given the will and dedication of its people, is simply astounding. Gives me hope at the same time I despair as how it has been squandered by the present administration.
I don't know which is more depressing: the knowledge that mankind can't do great things, or the knowledge that we can, but don't and waste our time and resources making other people's lives miserable over oil and heroin.
Even if ETI's developed around roughly the same time we did (through an act of God or a result of evolution, you pick one), the farther they are away from us, the longer they have to have been around for us to be able to see them.
If an ETI is sitting at more than 200 lightyears from our planet, it'll be damn hard for them to see us right now, since we weren't exactly emiting anything worthwhile into the space around us, over 200 years ago. Same applies to us, for every lightyear in distance, the ETI has to have been around for an extra year and we don't have any proof that advanced cultures like our own last any more than a few thousand years anyway.
Maybe intelligence is just a quick and bright flash on the cosmological timescale that occurs on some types of planets from time to time, rapidly consuming what's there and then extinguishing itself. The fact that we don't see any space-faring ETI's would then simply mean that the universe, sofar, hasn't succeeded in producing any ETI that's been able to leave its star.
... all that really counts is survival. And at the current rate, it seems this underevolved species is on the fast track to getting those overevolved monkeys extinct.
And like many others have pointed out in other words: the need for a species to make a lot of genetic adaptations only reflects its mental or cultural inability to move out of a threatening environment or come up with an alternative solution to the problems in it.
Thrown chairs aside, since this part of the discussion is oooobviously going to turn into a Global Warming flamefest, I'll just ask you to consider the following.
Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecies aside, since this part of the discussion is oooobviously going to turn into a netiquette flamefest, I'll just as you to consider the following: you, sir, are a troll, flamebait and just got voted "most likely to bring up nazi's in a few posts".
... because our generation ended up fine. Or did it? Why does the OP assume that our generation suffered no ill effects from playing violent videogames in the first place?
If you didn't suffer, that doesn't mean less intelligent, more impressionable or less stable kidds didn't. Even if statistics don't show a conclusive result, that doesn't prove anything (mind you: doesn't prove -anything-; I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying you can't say it isn't).
In the end, you face the same problem your parents did. And just doing the same things your parents did isn't always the best choice, even if you ended up fine as a result of their choices. If you fail to see that though, it doesn't really matter what you're told here, because whatever your kid ends up like is probably going to be chance and genes anyway.
I used to love semantic Web 5.1, but I'm sorry to say it can't even handle the simplest Word. I wonder who will make the Web Perfect? We need a Novell idea, I think.
Yeah, because your money will still have the same value it has today, once we all know the world is gonna end in two weeks.
I don't know, but I expect you better get looting and pillaging with the rest of them, or hiding in the hills, praying to your preferred deity.
I recommend Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, it's a great read and on topic in this case. Fiction of course, but a hell of a lot closer to the truth as I see it than parent.
If everyone had autism, it wouldn't be called a disease.
Now, this may sound completely tautological to you, but it's not exactly like saying: "If everyone had the flu, it wouldn't be called a disease."
The flu is caused by a viral infection, cancer is cells messing up their programming, most diseases can be traced back to some alien influence on the human body, or some system breaking down.
Autism isn't like that. Autism is "a mental disorder characterized by inability to engage in normal social interactions and intense self-absorption, and usually accompanied by other symptoms such as language dysfunctions and repetitive behavior."
What exactly causes autism is unknown but it seems to me like unfair labeling of people that have specific social characteristics that just happen to deviate from the norm. It's like saying geniuses have "geniality syndrome" and calling friendly people "altruistic disorder patients". No need to make everything outside the ordinary a medical matter, let alone try and 'cure' it.
How about making the OLPC available to the public at double the price it costs the people in third world countries. I'm sure a lot of folks would still like to get their hands on a simple PC or complicated toy like this for $200 and feel good about themselves in the knowledge that they just bought themselves -and- a kid in a third world country a PC.
.. but for professional and business ethical reasons. Although the story does expose a very sorry state of affairs, I really don't see what this Bill-bashing article is doing on Slashdot.
It's exactly this type of "news" that makes Slashdot lose all its credibility when criticizing Windows, Microsoft, Gates or Ballmer.
Frankly, I'm not too worried about that. I'd worry myself about them being able to do anything useful with it in the first place.
It doesn't say a whole lot about how they plan to actually parse this information (that's not exactly in a standard format) or how that will translate into something that'll make sense for searching.
Ofcourse they might be using techniques that have been around for ages, for analyzing corpi and inferring contextual information. Picking WikiPedia to do this is just a clever way to attract attention to a project that's not all that new afterall.
I'm not saying we won't be seeing results before long, but I doubt these guys will beat others to the punch just because they use WikiPedia as base material.
Are we really going to pretend we didn't know technology like this was coming? Are we going to act all heated with righteous indignation about something that researchers have been chasing after for decades?
Everybody knew about it and expected this technology to be perfected sooner or later (and for now it seems that it's still a bit later). So, if you were that worried about someone being able to Flickr and Google your personal relationships together, you should have thought twice about putting your entire life up for digital scrutiny in the first place.
The privacy problem isn't with this technology, it's with people who put their personal life on the biggest computer network ever, freely accessible to all and then expect it to be private.
They need to get their head examined and by the looks of it, that's exactly what they'll get.
A lot of Slashdotters are American and the term isn't really used in the USA, probably since prostitution is illegal in most parts of the country (excepting Nevada but not Las Vegas city). So terms that "legitimize" it are less likely to be used.
I'd say that a country with a porn industry with the size of the US' has a great need for a term like sex worker. Not to mention strip clubs, lap dancers, etc. None of those are illegal wholesale.
Isn't the whole point of beta-testing to get more testdata from a broad userbase and use the feedback to improve and finish your product? How is this news? Has the state of affairs in gameland deteriorated to a point where a developer actually doing something with beta-tester feedback is news?
Players in online gaming seem to be forgetting that a beta-test is not a free trial, a cheap way to play games or a sneak preview. Although a beta can be useful to try a game for free, doesn't usually cost anything (and if it does, companies deserve punishment) and will give you an early look at a game, all of that is not the point.
I'm well aware that that a lot of developers -seem- deaf to the feedback of their userbase, but honestly: a lot of this feedback consists of all sorts of unreasonable, unbalancing or simply impossible demands and gripes. That still leaves some, or perhaps quite a few depending on your point of view, developers that need to start paying attention. But I honestly doubt the OP has something news-worthy here.
You have to wonder though: do you really want to go through the entire process of booting every single time (once or a couple of times every day, probably) just so Windows can see new hardware when you install it (on or a couple of times every month, perhaps)?
Loading the boot image and failing (for whatever reason) should simply result in a boot and after new drivers have been installed, the generation of a new boot image. I'm using the word 'simply' too lightly though. I'm well aware that replacing some hardware may make it hard for Windows to detect that something has changed at all, at least before it is too late.
In the end, it's not just Microsoft's fault here, even though we want it to be soooo badly. It's the 'fault' of the collected hardware manufacturers and perhaps originally IBM (remember IBM compatible) for getting us on a track where modifying your hardware changes your system to the core. Had our PCs been equipped with a more intelligently designed (and probably more complex) BIOS, OSes like Windows might have an easier time detecting changes and implementing quick boots like the one suggested here.
If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
Does it matter? Even if it is a natural cycle of some sort: if it is going to hurt us big time, we should look into our options for preventing it. Let's be fair here, we're not looking into it because 'this isn't natural', we're looking into it because it might hurt us humans.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
The BBC isn't looking for repressed evidence of a lack of global warming -caused by greenhouse gases-. It's looking for repressed evidence of a lack of global warming (period coming up).
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done?
That's sort of the whole point, isn't it? If 'it is real', that would mean there's definitive proof for a causal relationship between our actions and their effects (or rather, a lack of proof of the opposite). That implies there's also some proof of the actual correlation, be it positive or negative.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
I'd leave out the 'leave earth' for practical purposes. Though some of us may, some 6 billion plus probably won't. And I doubt 'saving mankind as such' will be quite enough for whoever gets left behind with their offspring.
Looks to me like the US can't even win a war in Iraq. Moot point whether they'd be able to beat the world. If a few 100,000 (at the very, very most) terrorists fighting a guerrilla war can keep half a million US soldiers occupied and kill a few thousand of them, one should shudder to think what 'the World' could do to the US.
Not talking nukes ofcourse. The US can still go 'angry kid kicking your sand castle' and decide to blow us all back into the Stone Age if a war becomes too tough to win.
A quick read thru the article reveals not a problem with Linux, but with the idiots trying to manage the deployment without knowing what they were doing.
Yeah, good going, keep calling these people idiots. That'll help Linux take over the world. It's not these so-called idiots that are the problem. It's the people that think they should call them that and their lack of effort to help them that will ultimately kill Linux if we let it happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, this only makes it worse. I can't quote the exact numbers and I'm not yet a full member of the internet community and therefore reluctant to pull them out of my ass.
However, without quoting actual numbers, I do know that recent studies over here have shown that shipping has only increased. People buy a lot of stuff online and when buying online, they tend to ignore where it's being shipped -from-. They just look at the price. I know I buy most of my books in the US, even though I live in Europe. I did so before the dollar went bust and right now it's even better. With the current dollar, I even consider buying hardware in the US, which I often bought in France or Germany before (I live in the Netherlands).
The Netherlands are among the few European countries that have an internet penetration similar to the US, so I would assume that the US is seeing the same thing. You no longer shop in your own town or state, but have it shipped to you from anywhere, as long as the price is right.
Also, on the point of mail: if you're suggesting email is merely a replacement for traditional mail you must be kidding. All that snail mail was good for, even before email, was formal communication (it still is, with signatures and whatnot) and some fringe stuff like pen pals. Other communication was handled over the phone, fax (remember the fax?) or telex (probably don't remember this then). I get about as much or maybe even more paper junkmail as compared to 20 years ago. Bills still reach me by mail and when I get a contract or business order, they still want to see my signature and so it's mail again.
Email hasn't made a dent in mail. If any type of indirectly related business has boomed since the introduction of the internet, it's physical transport.
What users "should" know is completely irrelevant. (not even touching on the fact that it's only what you happen to think they should know, no exactly popular opinion, but that's not the issue here)
If they "should" know, but don't, the shit is still going to hit the fan. Sadly, we software engineers have to consider what a user is likely to know and build from there. Which is exactly what these Storm authors have done and what these blogging software designers should have done.
And yes, I think the designers -should- have and I feel justified in saying so, since the responsibility lies with the designers here. Just writing a nice little bit in the license agreement is not enough to wave that responsibility in my book. Maybe legally so, but not morally.
Thanks the to lousy construction and poor grammar of this sentence:
Why on earth companies that cater to a predominantly English speaking country off-shore their support to ESL countries where the people that can read & speak English DO NOT understand the vernacular, expressions, idioms and vocal inflexions are driving me nuts.I had to read it twice to catch the actual error. ".. is driving me nuts." is probably what you were trying to say, but perhaps you're from Oregon? If not, perhaps I should start a rant about how I shouldn't have my time wasted on /. by people who can't even construct a proper sentence? Or would that just be plain silly, not unlike the point you're trying to make?
I don't know which is more depressing: the knowledge that mankind can't do great things, or the knowledge that we can, but don't and waste our time and resources making other people's lives miserable over oil and heroin.
Even if ETI's developed around roughly the same time we did (through an act of God or a result of evolution, you pick one), the farther they are away from us, the longer they have to have been around for us to be able to see them.
If an ETI is sitting at more than 200 lightyears from our planet, it'll be damn hard for them to see us right now, since we weren't exactly emiting anything worthwhile into the space around us, over 200 years ago. Same applies to us, for every lightyear in distance, the ETI has to have been around for an extra year and we don't have any proof that advanced cultures like our own last any more than a few thousand years anyway.
Maybe intelligence is just a quick and bright flash on the cosmological timescale that occurs on some types of planets from time to time, rapidly consuming what's there and then extinguishing itself. The fact that we don't see any space-faring ETI's would then simply mean that the universe, sofar, hasn't succeeded in producing any ETI that's been able to leave its star.
... all that really counts is survival. And at the current rate, it seems this underevolved species is on the fast track to getting those overevolved monkeys extinct.
And like many others have pointed out in other words: the need for a species to make a lot of genetic adaptations only reflects its mental or cultural inability to move out of a threatening environment or come up with an alternative solution to the problems in it.
Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Self-fulfilling prophecies aside, since this part of the discussion is oooobviously going to turn into a netiquette flamefest, I'll just as you to consider the following: you, sir, are a troll, flamebait and just got voted "most likely to bring up nazi's in a few posts".
... because our generation ended up fine. Or did it? Why does the OP assume that our generation suffered no ill effects from playing violent videogames in the first place?
If you didn't suffer, that doesn't mean less intelligent, more impressionable or less stable kidds didn't. Even if statistics don't show a conclusive result, that doesn't prove anything (mind you: doesn't prove -anything-; I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying you can't say it isn't).
In the end, you face the same problem your parents did. And just doing the same things your parents did isn't always the best choice, even if you ended up fine as a result of their choices. If you fail to see that though, it doesn't really matter what you're told here, because whatever your kid ends up like is probably going to be chance and genes anyway.
Good thing you are here to remind us that it's Edith Mary Tolkien (born Bratt).
Oh no, wait, you didn't...
I used to love semantic Web 5.1, but I'm sorry to say it can't even handle the simplest Word. I wonder who will make the Web Perfect? We need a Novell idea, I think.
Yeah, because your money will still have the same value it has today, once we all know the world is gonna end in two weeks.
I don't know, but I expect you better get looting and pillaging with the rest of them, or hiding in the hills, praying to your preferred deity.
I recommend Lucifer's Hammer by Niven and Pournelle, it's a great read and on topic in this case. Fiction of course, but a hell of a lot closer to the truth as I see it than parent.
A "me too" post gets moderated "informative"?..
A mere example of something already eloquently explained by a parent poster seems hardly informative.
If everyone had autism, it wouldn't be called a disease.
Now, this may sound completely tautological to you, but it's not exactly like saying: "If everyone had the flu, it wouldn't be called a disease."
The flu is caused by a viral infection, cancer is cells messing up their programming, most diseases can be traced back to some alien influence on the human body, or some system breaking down.
Autism isn't like that. Autism is "a mental disorder characterized by inability to engage in normal social interactions and intense self-absorption, and usually accompanied by other symptoms such as language dysfunctions and repetitive behavior."
What exactly causes autism is unknown but it seems to me like unfair labeling of people that have specific social characteristics that just happen to deviate from the norm. It's like saying geniuses have "geniality syndrome" and calling friendly people "altruistic disorder patients". No need to make everything outside the ordinary a medical matter, let alone try and 'cure' it.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a truck filled with data cassettes.
How about making the OLPC available to the public at double the price it costs the people in third world countries. I'm sure a lot of folks would still like to get their hands on a simple PC or complicated toy like this for $200 and feel good about themselves in the knowledge that they just bought themselves -and- a kid in a third world country a PC.
.. but for professional and business ethical reasons. Although the story does expose a very sorry state of affairs, I really don't see what this Bill-bashing article is doing on Slashdot.
It's exactly this type of "news" that makes Slashdot lose all its credibility when criticizing Windows, Microsoft, Gates or Ballmer.
Frankly, I'm not too worried about that. I'd worry myself about them being able to do anything useful with it in the first place.
It doesn't say a whole lot about how they plan to actually parse this information (that's not exactly in a standard format) or how that will translate into something that'll make sense for searching.
Ofcourse they might be using techniques that have been around for ages, for analyzing corpi and inferring contextual information. Picking WikiPedia to do this is just a clever way to attract attention to a project that's not all that new afterall.
I'm not saying we won't be seeing results before long, but I doubt these guys will beat others to the punch just because they use WikiPedia as base material.
Are we really going to pretend we didn't know technology like this was coming? Are we going to act all heated with righteous indignation about something that researchers have been chasing after for decades?
Everybody knew about it and expected this technology to be perfected sooner or later (and for now it seems that it's still a bit later). So, if you were that worried about someone being able to Flickr and Google your personal relationships together, you should have thought twice about putting your entire life up for digital scrutiny in the first place.
The privacy problem isn't with this technology, it's with people who put their personal life on the biggest computer network ever, freely accessible to all and then expect it to be private.
They need to get their head examined and by the looks of it, that's exactly what they'll get.
I'd say that a country with a porn industry with the size of the US' has a great need for a term like sex worker. Not to mention strip clubs, lap dancers, etc. None of those are illegal wholesale.
... that most of the MySpace users (kids, students, etc.) are tomorrow's corporate drones and the corporate drones of today are on their way out.
Looks like we'll see some improvement in password strength in corporate environments over the next couple of years.
Isn't the whole point of beta-testing to get more testdata from a broad userbase and use the feedback to improve and finish your product? How is this news? Has the state of affairs in gameland deteriorated to a point where a developer actually doing something with beta-tester feedback is news?
Players in online gaming seem to be forgetting that a beta-test is not a free trial, a cheap way to play games or a sneak preview. Although a beta can be useful to try a game for free, doesn't usually cost anything (and if it does, companies deserve punishment) and will give you an early look at a game, all of that is not the point.
I'm well aware that that a lot of developers -seem- deaf to the feedback of their userbase, but honestly: a lot of this feedback consists of all sorts of unreasonable, unbalancing or simply impossible demands and gripes. That still leaves some, or perhaps quite a few depending on your point of view, developers that need to start paying attention. But I honestly doubt the OP has something news-worthy here.
You have to wonder though: do you really want to go through the entire process of booting every single time (once or a couple of times every day, probably) just so Windows can see new hardware when you install it (on or a couple of times every month, perhaps)?
Loading the boot image and failing (for whatever reason) should simply result in a boot and after new drivers have been installed, the generation of a new boot image. I'm using the word 'simply' too lightly though. I'm well aware that replacing some hardware may make it hard for Windows to detect that something has changed at all, at least before it is too late.
In the end, it's not just Microsoft's fault here, even though we want it to be soooo badly. It's the 'fault' of the collected hardware manufacturers and perhaps originally IBM (remember IBM compatible) for getting us on a track where modifying your hardware changes your system to the core. Had our PCs been equipped with a more intelligently designed (and probably more complex) BIOS, OSes like Windows might have an easier time detecting changes and implementing quick boots like the one suggested here.
Does it matter? Even if it is a natural cycle of some sort: if it is going to hurt us big time, we should look into our options for preventing it. Let's be fair here, we're not looking into it because 'this isn't natural', we're looking into it because it might hurt us humans.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)The BBC isn't looking for repressed evidence of a lack of global warming -caused by greenhouse gases-. It's looking for repressed evidence of a lack of global warming (period coming up).
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done?That's sort of the whole point, isn't it? If 'it is real', that would mean there's definitive proof for a causal relationship between our actions and their effects (or rather, a lack of proof of the opposite). That implies there's also some proof of the actual correlation, be it positive or negative.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).I'd leave out the 'leave earth' for practical purposes. Though some of us may, some 6 billion plus probably won't. And I doubt 'saving mankind as such' will be quite enough for whoever gets left behind with their offspring.
Looks to me like the US can't even win a war in Iraq. Moot point whether they'd be able to beat the world. If a few 100,000 (at the very, very most) terrorists fighting a guerrilla war can keep half a million US soldiers occupied and kill a few thousand of them, one should shudder to think what 'the World' could do to the US.
Not talking nukes ofcourse. The US can still go 'angry kid kicking your sand castle' and decide to blow us all back into the Stone Age if a war becomes too tough to win.
Yeah, good going, keep calling these people idiots. That'll help Linux take over the world. It's not these so-called idiots that are the problem. It's the people that think they should call them that and their lack of effort to help them that will ultimately kill Linux if we let it happen.