Be careful. Some people think you should legislate certain behaviors, like violent video games. That's a pretty slippery slope you're on there.
Don't I know it. But didn't someone conclude in a recent study that violent games don't instigate violent behavior? Thing is, I think they were looking at more controlled games, not actual virtual worlds like SL. Who knows where the psychological line is with these things?
As for the little girls "sluttin' it up" in the local mall, yeah, I notice that. Makes me sick too, but I don't blame the kids. It's really the parents and the media. More the parents, because they ultimately have the greatest degree of influence on their children - assuming they choose to exercise it in a reasonable manner. I've heard all the horror stories about the preacher's daughter going bonkers once she realizes she's old enough to do what she wants, and wanting to try everything dear old dad said was "evil" while she was growing up - pretty good recipe for someone in trouble.
And like I said, I really don't know what the right solution is, I just know (well, I believe very strongly) that ignoring behavior that potentially endangers young children is probably asking for trouble, only it's the young children that wind up collecting it. Does refusing to ignore such behavoir mean making it illegal? Maybe not, but I can't think of any reasonable alternatives yet. Certainly not a black and white issue in this case.
So, if there's no actual child involved, how is it kiddie porn?
Good argument, but by that logic, drawn or painted images would be legal.
I have 2 young children, so I'm fighting a bias here to stay open minded in the interest of personal freedom, but I'm having a tough time seeing it as acceptable, allowable, or legal.
And I do agree that government (everywhere, not just the US) should learn to stay out of our sex lives. It's nobody's business what fantasies people have, and it's nobody's business who sleeps with who, but it is everyone's business when someone becomes a danger - especially to children. This means restricting certain behaviors, preferably by way of cultural norms, but if necessary, by legislation.
I don't know what the correct solution here is, but I don't think ignoring this stuff is part of any kind of solution.
Well, yeah. I think I actually said that the Constitution is supposed to protect our rights, not grant them to us.
The Constitution is supposed to protect our rights by limiting the powers the government can exercise. Unfortunately the one thing that was not expressly forbidden to the government is the power to change the damn thing. Initially, of course, they used that power to clarify a few beneficial protections, but now, with the age of the chickenhawk, they're being used to expand the powers of the government and restrict the rights of the people.
Wait, that's on the verge of running OT. To tie it back to the track, it's corporate funding that makes it possible for government to write up the spin and buy the votes needed to do just that. In return, government is starting to present citizenship rights to corporations.
Wasn't there some wackjob conspiracy theorist back in the early '80s that said the government was conspiring with large corporations to turn people into second class citizens and corporations into first class citizens? Hmm. Doesn't sound so wacked if you spend all day reading this stuff then tilt your head just right and squint, eh?
... is that everyone assumes that companies have First Amendment rights. Isn't the Constitution (and all subsequent Amendments) intended to protect the rights of the individual citizens? Corporations seem to claim corporate law when it suits them, and constitutional law when they want a little more leeway.
I know companies are supposed to have protections - in fact the must have some protections, but any time a company uses citizenship protections to claim the right to violate a real citizens right to protection from illegal search and seizure, something is wrong. In fact, any time a company is seen as having protections that supersede any individuals, something is very wrong.
This doesn't mean that Verizon should absolutely refuse any and all cooperation with the government - quite the contrary, but they should at least demand due process. That's a responsibility they take when they accept our custom. For my part, any indication they've handed my info over, they'd better have some very specific, rock solid warrants on record. As it is, I'm inclined to drop all their services at earliest opportunity. Too bad, they actually have the best offerings in my area, thought they're a bit on the costly side.
Why would anyone keep the telnet port open anyway? SSH is so much more secure (if set up properly) and is just as easy to use. In fact, I find it easier for some tasks.
Hasn't telnet been the source of many dozens of *nix vulnerabilities in the past? From the synopsis, it sounds like this bug is only there because nobody is working on the telnet codebase anymore - it is likened to the Linux exploit from '94. For my own part, the first thing I do when setting up a *nix system is disable the daemon, and the second is to make sure the firewall blocks the port in all directions.
This is not to say this shouldn't be reported, but I think it is more an example why telnet can realistically be considered obsolete technology, and should always, ALWAYS be disabled by default. It's not Windows, after all.
Re:Ok, I have had enough of this "HER" Stuff
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No, they're just continuing to labor under the assumption that a lot of technical males get overly excited that there might be real girls out there that actually know what things like "grep", "floppy", and "hard drive" really mean.
Either that or they think writing "her" will eventually lead to more geeks encouraging their daughters to take up technical careers.
Of course, that's not to say there aren't already some very geeky girls out there...
First off, several OSes don't make sense on a business laptop. They do make sense on a development machine, if development is being done on multiple platforms, even if they are different versions of Windows.
- Most laptops will still be bought by businesses.
Not necessarily true. Wireless broadband is becoming more and more mainstream, and while 2007 won't see it come to the fore, it will certainly see it increase in availability. What do you do if you have wireless access on a wide pipe with no leash? You take it down to the coffee shop, to the park, or wherever. Kinda hard to do with a desktop.
Aside from that, businesses will start seeing more security risks associated with laptop ownership - they're too easy to lift from unsuspecting suits. I see them all too often left on the table at Starbucks, while someone's gone back up to get another latte. I think that's a lot less likely if the person has $3,000 of their own money invested in that hardware. For that reason, companies are going to be a lot more wary of handing out laptops to folks that don't have to take them out of the office.
More and more laptops are going to be purchased as portable gaming machines and digital wallets - for personal use. Particularly since many people who don't currently have desktops at home, don't actually have desks either.
With more and more single folks start moving in to their own places with limited space, they're going to want to be able to shove their digital life out of the way for some quiet time with the significant other.
The long and short of it is that it's not just about price anymore when you're shopping for yourself.
How much credence can you give someone who ran Windows ME and didn't bother to downgrade to Windows 98 because ME was crappier and slower than 98 with no added benefit.
Whoops! Forgot all about ME. Who hasn't (or at least tried)? I never ran it. It was such a blatant repackaging of a stripped down, destabilized Win98 that I never even considered it.
For that matter, now you mention it, I haven't run CE either. Not sure why, probably just never got 'round to it.
Games are yet another reason I'm looking forward to my MacBook Pro. Aside from the usual practice of running Windows in a VM, I can also keep an installation to boot directly to for gaming. While it may someday be possible to boot MacOSX in a VM on Windows, it won't give you ideal performance for gaming. With a MacBook Pro, you can easily boot to Windows to play a Windows game instead of running Windows in a VM. Same for Linux - NWN is supported in Linux, though at present, I play it on FreeBSD in compatibility mode. NWN2 is not likely to be supported on Linux, and may take some time to be supported on Mac.
As for the VM shell with OSes on a key-fob, that story's been going round since VMWare hit the scene ages ago. I don't think it will be any time soon, and even then, I don't think it will be exactly that scenario. It's more likely that the system will come with a higher speed interface (like Firewire 800 or something yet unspecified) and will be able to boot from these ports by default. USB thumbdrives - or their equivalent, will have much higher capacity, and will be able to hold an entire OS.
The hangup here will be the filesystem. There are dozens out there, and unfortunately, the Fat32 filesystem is typically considered the default, even though it is much less efficient and much less reliable than others out there. It's likely that an encrypted filesystem will be used for a second thumbdrive, which will hold a persons home directory, or at least their default document dump (resumes, photos, web bookmarks, email, contacts, etc). With any luck, someone will figure out how to make this work for all the available OSes, so I can read mail in Windows, Ubuntu, Knoppix, or MacOSX. It's pretty straightforward (if time consuming) to get a single home directory to work for most of the *nix OSes. If someone finds a way to automate this, and extend it to include Windows and MacOSX, that person will have stumbled onto something worth paying for.
My ideal system would be just such a monster. High end power in the CPU and Video arenas with enough RAM to handle the most intense development and gaming tasks, and plenty of very high speed external storage interfaces. Ideally, this would include pluggable solid state drives in the 80Gig range, so you wouldn't have to worry about banging the thumbdrive on the airplane seat and hosing your port. Buy a drive for each OS, maybe one for games, and there you go. This machine would have to be able to run MacOSX, Windows, and pretty much any OSS platform I wanted.
Right now, this is pretty much done, with the exception that the pluggable drives are actually hard drives, not solid state, Home directories are generally OS specific by design, and these machines don't run MacOSX. If Apple were to put out a notebook that let you shift hard drives that easily, I'd bet they'd be past the 20% mark in no time. They'd probably hit the 30% mark within a year, especially if they were to knock prices down (just a tad).
I'm not an OS hound at all, I've used Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (Every version since 3.1 - except '98) and finally, MacOSX. FreeBSD has always been a favorite, and I've always lamented the fact that there weren't more paying jobs that focused on the *BSDs.
I've developed (for my bread and butter) on 5 flavors of Unix (not including Linux or any *BSD), and am currently doing so on Windows.
Now, that doesn't make me an expert on any one of these platforms, and certainly doesn't make me privy to any special information, but it seems to me that the changes Apple has made in just the last couple years are huge gains. You can now do anything with MacOSX that you could once only do on Windows - and a great many of them are considerably easier with OSX.
The change to an Intel architecture has opened the way to VM development, which essentially puts Apple ahead of MS in terms of feature availability - while MS has added video and photo management features to Vista that are suspiciously similar to iPhoto and iDVD, they still don't have anything like GarageBand or Sherlock (which, by the way, is an AWESOME app). This is the point where MS will start to lose, unless they stop playing the "Me Too" game, using Apple as their R&D lab and start playing to their strengths. MS is still ahead in the hardware game, though with Apple's shift to Intel, this is a somewhat slimmer lead. Vista has been labeled a MacOSX wannabe (without the stability) by a number of sources, some of which are typically pro-MS. MS needs to get their own R&D and design teams, and start making their UI more flexible - and stable. Until they start focusing on flexibility, stability, and (more effectively) on security, they'll continue to struggle to stay just one step ahead.
I think this will be the year the balance starts to tip. I don't know if it will stay tipped, or if it will tip to anything near equivalence, much less anywhere near the level Apple actually deserves for all their hard work and creative innovation, but it will tip.
And BTW, I've been waiting for the new year myself to upgrade to a Macbook Pro, simply for the "extras" that Apple does so much better, and the VMs, which will finally let me have the OS of my choice on a laptop. Of course, storage for all these VMs will now become something of a hassle (WinXP, Vista, Ubuntu, Knoppix, FreeBSD, etc.)...
Before anyone suggests you can still get those OSes on a VM in Windows, keep in mind, you can't get MacOSX on a VM in Windows yet. Even so, I happen to like the look and feel of the Apple notebooks better than pretty much anything I've seen from Dell, Gateway, or any of the other big PC makers.
The Ring was Slytherin's, but book 6 also mentions the cup that belonged to Hufflepuff. It is known that Voldemort (Tom Riddle at the time) had access to it. It seemed important to him to have an artifact from each of the house founders to use as a horcrux. Dumbledore stated his opposition to having Riddle in the school in any capacity other than as a student specifically because he didn't want him to have access to the Gryffindor sword. He seemed particularly concerned with it.
Also, I do remember the locket being mentioned in book 4 - I recalled it after it was mentioned in a previous post that is. If it shows up in the next movie, I'll be convinced the Locket isn't destroyed yet. As an aside, it would be an easy target for the cutting room floor, but as a horcrux, it would be a sacred part of the story.
The idea of a horcrux being mentioned in each book is interesting too. I have to admit it seems a little more likely that the last horcrux is Harry now, but I still think there's something else to it.
I really don't think it will necessarily be both or neither dying in the last book. The prophecy says "Either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives." Think about the difference between surviving and living. Up till the first book, Harry wasn't really living, he was surviving. That Voldemort was in the same boat goes without saying. Neither will really be able to live while the other survives, so one has to stop surviving. I think Harry will kill Voldemort (I had forgotten that the prophecy does actually say one must die at the hand of the other).
I agree about the quandary Snape was faced with. I think all the information will be available to put him in the clear, but I don't think it will ever be generally known.
I suspect Legilimency will come back into play too. I was thinking that Harry has to learn to close his mind off very effectively if he hopes to go up against Voldemort. He did very poorly against Snape because of it, and it's been mentioned that Voldemort is a very good Legilimens. Harry only came out alive in book 4 because the dueling wands caught Voldemort off guard - he had no way of knowing that could happen, he couldn't have known Harry's wand was his own wand's brother. Next time, in addition to being able to protect himself, he'll have to be able to pull information out of an opponent, and one who's also very good at defending themselves. He did catch Snape off guard during lessons, so it's possible he has a special gift there - possibly courtesy of Voldemort himself.
What I'm really curious about is the power he has that Voldemort doesn't. Perhaps Love? That's been put up as the great magic that protected Harry in the first place, and now he's trying to break up with Ginny to protect her - I don't think he's going to get away with it, because that has Harry denying the one thing he has in his favor. Not to mention, Ginny has a gift with the curse of the bogeys. Not a girl you wanna tick off.
Great! Now I'm gonna have to go back and reread the whole series AGAIN before I can go on to the last one!:)
I'll bet there are half a dozen other clues in there I haven't noticed. I know the house Harry inherited from Sirius is important, and I suspect it will reappear in the next book (probably early on, since Harry comes of age and can leave the Dursley home), but what else is there (besides the amulet) that's important? I doubt Kreacher will be cooperative, but so long as Harry's careful enough about telling him what to do, the worst he can do is keep the amulet hidden - which would obviously be bad enough.
"Many anti-MS fanboys complain that Vista is nothing more than XP with a new coat, but anyone with an open mind realizes this is absolutely not the case."
Yeah, anyone familiar with Mac OSX will tell you it's not a new coat, it's a knockoff of Apple's old coat.
It's not for nothing that everyone says the MS R&D lab is called Apple.
I know, some MS Fanboy is going to mark this a troll, but there are a lot of people out there saying essentially the same thing. Including both "experts" featured in a recent slashdot analysis of the two OSes.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing for MS, especially seeing as how Apple is so much better at aesthetics. Now they've got a real backend, it's hardly a surprise they're gaining market share and shedding the "toy computer" rap.
Still, next thing you know, those "Get a Mac" ads will have PC dressing up like Mac. Now that would be amusing.
Now, this doesn't mean I won't be touching Vista. All my development takes place on XP these days, and I've no doubt we'll be moving to Vista eventually. Once I upgrade to a MacBook Pro, I'll probably even buy a copy to run under Parallels.
Harry being the final horcrux is an interesting theory, but I don't think it's just the scar. If he is the last horcrux, I find it likely that Voldemort would have retrieved it from him with the blood he used to regain physical shape. There isn't much we learned about them in book 6, but I suspect they can be used in just such a manner.
I seriously doubt Longbottom is the true chosen one. After all, Voldemort chose Harry. That isn't to say Neville won't be an important figure in the end. He has as much reason to hate Voldemort and the Death Eaters as anyone - more than most, and though he doesn't exactly emanate courage, he's proven more than once that he does posess it in reasonable supply.
does this title sound like something out of Lemony Snickets "A Series of Unfortunate Events" series? Sure it's not an alliteration, but "The Deathly Hallows"? - perhaps if it had been "The Horrible Hallows"...
I expected something more associative though, like all the previous titles have been.
Perhaps it simply refers to the location of the final showdown?
I have to disagree. Dumbledore is arguably an indispensable character, but the fact that he showed up in a painting in the Headmaster's (Headmistress', that is) office is fairly convincing evidence that he's really dead.
Aside from that, past evidence has made it fairly clear that Dumbledore wouldn't be one to run away from death. - "To the well-ordered mind, death is merely the next great adventure" (paraphrased).
That doesn't mean he's gone. Remember the painting. That gives us the "Obi Wan" factor. He probably won't speak much directly to Harry - he not being a Hogwarts Headmaster, but he's there, and the painting may well know everything he knew prior to his death - hence the "out" for Snape.
And I don't think Snape is going to take over Dumbledore's position as the behind the scenes "leader" in any way. He's a spy, working for the downfall of Voldemort, of course, but he's the "Bad Guy, working for Good". He'll do what needs to be done to bring down V, even if it means taking out any number of good or bad players in the process (so long as one of them isn't Snape - or Harry). I also suspect Snape took an Unbreakable Vow with Dumbledore to make sure he was willing to do anything including kill Dumbledore.
Snape knows he can't kill Voldemort (yet, Trelawney's prophecy doesn't say Harry will kill him, just that neither can survive while the other lives), though he may or may not know why - nobody knows at this point exactly how much Dumbledore - or Regulus Black (Sirius' brother, probably the one that destroyed the amulet Dumbledore risked his life to get just before his death), would have told Snape.
A couple things I think may come into play in this last book are a couple seemingly minor details mentioned throughout the previous books:
Harry's eyes - Everyone seems to dwell on the fact he has his mothers eyes. I don't know how, but I think it's important.
Voldemort's means of return - in Goblet of Fire, Voldemort uses Harry's blood to overcome the magic protection instilled by Lilly's sacrifice. When Harry mentions this to Dumbledore, his expression suggest an almost victorious feeling, and his response (I don't remember the exact wording) suggests that there may have been a trap of some kind in there. There's also the fact that Pettigrew brought harm to Harry after Harry saved his life in Prizoner of Azkaban. Pettigrew owes Harry a serious debt, and he violated it. That's gonna come back on him hard.
If it was up to Apple, they would be still on slow powerpc chips but it was the competition in the PC world that finally made them see the light.
Actually, I was under the impression that Big Blue wanted out of the PowerPC Chip market, and refused to continue the partnership with Apple. Not that I'm not glad this happened, fact is IBM is better at different things. Desktop and notebook CPUs aren't even on their top 10 list of strong points. Intel has made much better CPUs for home systems for a long time.
While I don't think it's likely in the near(ish) future, Apple now has a lot more bargaining power with respect to CPU makers. I sincerely doubt AMD would turn their nose up at Steve if he were to suggest a closer look at the next gen AMD CPU, which is supposed to get beyond the Intel in a number of areas. Still, I suspect that with all the work being done (and not just by Apple) to make the Mac a much more versatile machine, we'll start seeing more decent games for the Apple. Now that Apple is finally shedding the "toy computer" rap, they might stop avoiding the game market like the plague. Moving into that market alone would certainly have a positive effect on their bottom line. Gods know their systems are excellent with pretty much every multimedia task that might apply to a really kick-ass, up-all-night, mainlining-espresso-all-weekend game.
I also think Apple's market share will continue a high pace growth. whether this is because they're stealing share from Dell, Gateway, and others, or because the market is growing beyond their collective ability to supply is up in the air.
Now, so as not to be totally off topic, I love my PowerBook, and hope to upgrade to a MacBook in Q1, but I don't hate Microsoft either (anymore). I always keep at least 1 Windows machine at home, though it's usually only 1 machine. My reasons for not particularly liking them are pretty much those already stated by other posters - i.e. monopolistic practices - forcing the demise of a number of excellent products by bringing huge FUD campaigns to bear just seems wrong; then there's their habitual "embrace and extend" policies toward perfectly serviceable or perfectly good standards, often making the internet a virtual aftermath of the Tower of Babel. I also have problems with the stranglehold they've kept on PC manufacturers for so long, and to an great extent still hold, resulting in my owning half a dozen licenses for various Windows operating systems that were never installed. Now I know I can get them to give that money back, but as everyone knows it's a losing battle. if I were to consider the time spent to get this money back, I'd be lucky to make out as well as a high school kid at McDonalds - and that's to get MY OWN FREAKIN' MONEY BACK! Now if I could get them to compensate me for the time I lost trying to get my money back, then I'd be OK with it.
I don't hate Microsoft, but I do think they're a real pain in the ass sometimes.
A really fast 40G drive would be great to use as the filesystem root, plus swap space; your porn and other documents could all be kept on another (large, slow) drive. I've thought a lot about doing something like this right now using SCSI disks.
(3) Used to describe material which is deserving of (or will be subjected to) the degree of intense speculation and overeager viewing normally reserved for high quality pornography.
Which of course, is not necessarily porn, right? Right?:) I was talking about pics of great big... tracts of land. Yeah, landscapes.
But yeah, it does help to 'segregate' data this way. It's trivial to do at setup for any of the *nix OSes - if you're a moderately competent SysAdmin, and since MacOSX is build on FreeBSD, I assume it's the same. If you're at least moderately competent, you can even convert an existing system to such a layout, if you're very careful. Spot on about Windows though. It can be done but it's a pain - you have to be careful everytime you install something.
I don't think the "one-size-fits-all" mentality really has much of a hold with storage. You can still buy drives from 80G and up, so it's really the end user that applies this in the form of "more is better". What I'd like to see is if this can be made faster than RAM - though it might require an architectural change in the bus, it would allow an intelligent system to block off the memory it needs when a process starts, and not worry so much about running out of RAM. If I've got a 500G drive for my gaming system, it would be easier to load images directly to the GPU without first pulling them into RAM. GPU/CPU caches might become less critical.
Well, I seriously doubt these things will provide a 500X speed improvement. It'll simply move the bottleneck.
Even if this tech can be turned into solid state drives in the next 10 years, with 500X the performance of current drive tech, how many of you have never seen your CPU pegged?
What about the rendering for that new game?
Just because one component of your system is boosted by a huge factor, doesn't mean you'll see any improvement at all. It's very likely that games available in 10 years will have much higher HW requirements anyway, and the FSB, CPU, and/or GPU will be the bottlenecks, not the HD.
Unless the cost is a HUGE savings, I don't see too many people giving up their space.
After all, how much pr0n can you store on a 40G drive?
Yeah, yeah, yeah; and it'll be delivered by flying car, when?
Uh, 10 years? Well, probably not by flying car, but the article did predict a possible market release of 2015, which is really only 8 or 9 years.
If I get your point though, I agree. My perception tells me that storage is really falling behind Moore's Law. Perhaps I'm not seeing all the angles though.
Not that I really need TB storage, but I think Solid State drives in the 100G - 200G range for notebooks, and up to 400G for desktops could have been around by now if all the focus weren't with faster, smarter chips to keep up with the exponentially increasing WinBloat requirements. Granted, the platter drives have been getting smaller and faster, possibly in line with Mr. Moore, but persistent storage in general has done relatively poorly.
The onset of the USB key is probably the best advance in the solid state branch for some time. It kicked off the Shuffle from Apple, and eventually the Nano, amongst others. But those haven't focused on actual Hard Drive Replacement applications of the tech. Just on new ways to market it and adding shiny new bells and (particularly) whistles.
Solid state application in this area has obviously had its issues, like the current leakage below a certain die size, and the mfg costs as mentioned in TFA, but this is exactly the kind of thing Moore predicted would be overcome faster and faster. We've been on platter drives for what, 20 years, now? How long have solid state drives been around, maybe 8 or 10? Look how much farther the platters have come - we've gone from spending $800 for 80M drives to spending $70 for 250G (potential rotten memory alert), with access times and transfer rates (read and write) being so much faster in new drives, that it's almost laughable to compare the two.
Solid state drives have all but petered out of existence until the last 2 or 3 years. What you can get today is much the same price for much the same product as you would have seen 10 years ago.
Now, if they could just manage to get this phase tech to market by 2015 as predicted in the article, maybe this technology could get back on track.
Possibly. If I had to give up a 360G platter drive to put in a 120G phase drive, I'd probably do it - so long as the cost favored the phase drive.
I'd probably still keep the platter drive for secondary storage and put the OS and critical apps/servers/whatever on the phase drive though.
I wouldn't pay twice as much for a drive with half the head room though - even if it is 500X faster. That kind of speed (and especially power consumption) may be a big deal for notebooks, but if density is really a problem, the notebooks would probably have to give up a lot more headroom - relatively speaking. We're finally seeing 200G notebook drives, but keep in mind they're tiny compared to your standard laptop drive. If the new phase drives can store the same or more data in the same space, then yeah, I definitely see the end of the platter drive in mainstream use - once the supply outweighs the demand enough to make it financially realistic. If they can put no more than 30G in a notebook drive, then I think it'll take a couple product generations for that to happen.
Natural selection is a primary facet of evolution. They go hand in hand in every species except Homo Erectus. Natural selection narrows the focus of the gene pool, and the species changes its form, focus, and/or appearance in some (often small) way.
This is ridiculous. This is exactly what evolution is - and always has been - all about.
This is survival of the fittest at its most obvious. Keep in mind that the word "fittest" does not apply to the quickest or strongest, but the members of the species that are the "fittest" for the environment they live in. This only become obvious to us "short time observers" when the environment changes abruptly, as demonstrated in the article.
The lizards in question undoubtedly carried some tendencies toward both long and short legs. Chances are actually pretty good the average length of a lizards legs was somewhere in the middle of the extremes. The habits of these lizards would have kept them together for the purpose of procreation, and would have shaped the general habits of the species.
When you introduce predators that cannot climb or otherwise access prey in the trees, but are quick enough to chase down even the fastest of those on ground, it stands to reason that natural selection is going to increase the proportion of offspring to short legged lizards - or more accurately, those that carried the physical ability to effectively adapt their lives to a more arboreal style. Those that could not function at all, or as effectively in the trees would have fallen out of the gene pool, so to speak.
Behavior is not the initiator of evolution, it is merely a facilitator, and a secondary one at that. It is entirely possible that some of these lizards were climbing trees long before the predators were introduced, but probably came to the ground to mate and procreate. The introduction of predation is the external pressure that either induced or enhanced this behavior. Without the predation, these behaviors would not have become the norm, and would not have resulted in evolution.
On the other hand, it is possible that such a change could have been induced not by predation, but by a shift in food supply. Imagine that the insects the anoles fed on lived both high in the trees and low to the ground for decades, even centuries. Then, rather than the introduction of a near-ground predator, imagine that some change in the foliage virtually eliminates the prey insects habitat at the ground level. The anoles can still feed, but only if they chase their food to the trees. You see the same change in the genetic pool, but you may also see a split. This isn't instigated by a change in behavior, it's facilitated by a change in behavior that is instigated by a change in environment. Big difference. The ability to change behavior based on the environment is what allows evolutionary changes, not what causes them.
On the other hand, it is very likely that these evolutionary changes would not be possible if the species were capable of including those unable to physically adapt. Look at the Human race for instance. There are millions of people that are physically incapable of managing a harsh environment where they would be required to work physically very hard or perish. We as humans tend to see it as our responsibility to help each other for the good of the species (cloaked in some moral code or other, of course). This may hinder (some might say "degrade") the improvement of the species, but that's getting into moral issues all its own. Personally, I see this as probably the only example of behavior affecting evolution without an external force. It has allowed those with abilities toward more intellectual innovation to flourish, and often procreate. Or at least to affect the direction others' offspring take in their development. We often see people who have made outstanding advances in science reach old age without children, but they often inspire others to reach farther still. One could argue that this has shifted humanity into a behavioral evolutionary mode. One could also argue that this is a good or a bad thing, or that it will be the key to the survival or downfall of the human race.
Regardless, behavior is certainly not the instigator of evolution in lizards.
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Be careful. Some people think you should legislate certain behaviors, like violent video games. That's a pretty slippery slope you're on there.
Don't I know it. But didn't someone conclude in a recent study that violent games don't instigate violent behavior? Thing is, I think they were looking at more controlled games, not actual virtual worlds like SL. Who knows where the psychological line is with these things?
As for the little girls "sluttin' it up" in the local mall, yeah, I notice that. Makes me sick too, but I don't blame the kids. It's really the parents and the media. More the parents, because they ultimately have the greatest degree of influence on their children - assuming they choose to exercise it in a reasonable manner. I've heard all the horror stories about the preacher's daughter going bonkers once she realizes she's old enough to do what she wants, and wanting to try everything dear old dad said was "evil" while she was growing up - pretty good recipe for someone in trouble.
And like I said, I really don't know what the right solution is, I just know (well, I believe very strongly) that ignoring behavior that potentially endangers young children is probably asking for trouble, only it's the young children that wind up collecting it. Does refusing to ignore such behavoir mean making it illegal? Maybe not, but I can't think of any reasonable alternatives yet. Certainly not a black and white issue in this case.
So, if there's no actual child involved, how is it kiddie porn?
Good argument, but by that logic, drawn or painted images would be legal.
I have 2 young children, so I'm fighting a bias here to stay open minded in the interest of personal freedom, but I'm having a tough time seeing it as acceptable, allowable, or legal.
And I do agree that government (everywhere, not just the US) should learn to stay out of our sex lives. It's nobody's business what fantasies people have, and it's nobody's business who sleeps with who, but it is everyone's business when someone becomes a danger - especially to children. This means restricting certain behaviors, preferably by way of cultural norms, but if necessary, by legislation.
I don't know what the correct solution here is, but I don't think ignoring this stuff is part of any kind of solution.
Well, yeah. I think I actually said that the Constitution is supposed to protect our rights, not grant them to us.
The Constitution is supposed to protect our rights by limiting the powers the government can exercise. Unfortunately the one thing that was not expressly forbidden to the government is the power to change the damn thing. Initially, of course, they used that power to clarify a few beneficial protections, but now, with the age of the chickenhawk, they're being used to expand the powers of the government and restrict the rights of the people.
Wait, that's on the verge of running OT. To tie it back to the track, it's corporate funding that makes it possible for government to write up the spin and buy the votes needed to do just that. In return, government is starting to present citizenship rights to corporations.
Wasn't there some wackjob conspiracy theorist back in the early '80s that said the government was conspiring with large corporations to turn people into second class citizens and corporations into first class citizens? Hmm. Doesn't sound so wacked if you spend all day reading this stuff then tilt your head just right and squint, eh?
I'm assuming you mean 1984?
But yeah, I see your point.
... is that everyone assumes that companies have First Amendment rights. Isn't the Constitution (and all subsequent Amendments) intended to protect the rights of the individual citizens? Corporations seem to claim corporate law when it suits them, and constitutional law when they want a little more leeway.
I know companies are supposed to have protections - in fact the must have some protections, but any time a company uses citizenship protections to claim the right to violate a real citizens right to protection from illegal search and seizure, something is wrong. In fact, any time a company is seen as having protections that supersede any individuals, something is very wrong.
This doesn't mean that Verizon should absolutely refuse any and all cooperation with the government - quite the contrary, but they should at least demand due process. That's a responsibility they take when they accept our custom. For my part, any indication they've handed my info over, they'd better have some very specific, rock solid warrants on record. As it is, I'm inclined to drop all their services at earliest opportunity. Too bad, they actually have the best offerings in my area, thought they're a bit on the costly side.
Why would anyone keep the telnet port open anyway? SSH is so much more secure (if set up properly) and is just as easy to use. In fact, I find it easier for some tasks.
Hasn't telnet been the source of many dozens of *nix vulnerabilities in the past? From the synopsis, it sounds like this bug is only there because nobody is working on the telnet codebase anymore - it is likened to the Linux exploit from '94. For my own part, the first thing I do when setting up a *nix system is disable the daemon, and the second is to make sure the firewall blocks the port in all directions.
This is not to say this shouldn't be reported, but I think it is more an example why telnet can realistically be considered obsolete technology, and should always, ALWAYS be disabled by default. It's not Windows, after all.
No, they're just continuing to labor under the assumption that a lot of technical males get overly excited that there might be real girls out there that actually know what things like "grep", "floppy", and "hard drive" really mean.
...
Either that or they think writing "her" will eventually lead to more geeks encouraging their daughters to take up technical careers.
Of course, that's not to say there aren't already some very geeky girls out there
Not necessarily true. Wireless broadband is becoming more and more mainstream, and while 2007 won't see it come to the fore, it will certainly see it increase in availability. What do you do if you have wireless access on a wide pipe with no leash? You take it down to the coffee shop, to the park, or wherever. Kinda hard to do with a desktop.
Aside from that, businesses will start seeing more security risks associated with laptop ownership - they're too easy to lift from unsuspecting suits. I see them all too often left on the table at Starbucks, while someone's gone back up to get another latte. I think that's a lot less likely if the person has $3,000 of their own money invested in that hardware. For that reason, companies are going to be a lot more wary of handing out laptops to folks that don't have to take them out of the office.
More and more laptops are going to be purchased as portable gaming machines and digital wallets - for personal use. Particularly since many people who don't currently have desktops at home, don't actually have desks either. With more and more single folks start moving in to their own places with limited space, they're going to want to be able to shove their digital life out of the way for some quiet time with the significant other.
The long and short of it is that it's not just about price anymore when you're shopping for yourself.
For that matter, now you mention it, I haven't run CE either. Not sure why, probably just never got 'round to it.
Games are yet another reason I'm looking forward to my MacBook Pro. Aside from the usual practice of running Windows in a VM, I can also keep an installation to boot directly to for gaming. While it may someday be possible to boot MacOSX in a VM on Windows, it won't give you ideal performance for gaming. With a MacBook Pro, you can easily boot to Windows to play a Windows game instead of running Windows in a VM. Same for Linux - NWN is supported in Linux, though at present, I play it on FreeBSD in compatibility mode. NWN2 is not likely to be supported on Linux, and may take some time to be supported on Mac.
As for the VM shell with OSes on a key-fob, that story's been going round since VMWare hit the scene ages ago. I don't think it will be any time soon, and even then, I don't think it will be exactly that scenario. It's more likely that the system will come with a higher speed interface (like Firewire 800 or something yet unspecified) and will be able to boot from these ports by default. USB thumbdrives - or their equivalent, will have much higher capacity, and will be able to hold an entire OS.
The hangup here will be the filesystem. There are dozens out there, and unfortunately, the Fat32 filesystem is typically considered the default, even though it is much less efficient and much less reliable than others out there. It's likely that an encrypted filesystem will be used for a second thumbdrive, which will hold a persons home directory, or at least their default document dump (resumes, photos, web bookmarks, email, contacts, etc). With any luck, someone will figure out how to make this work for all the available OSes, so I can read mail in Windows, Ubuntu, Knoppix, or MacOSX. It's pretty straightforward (if time consuming) to get a single home directory to work for most of the *nix OSes. If someone finds a way to automate this, and extend it to include Windows and MacOSX, that person will have stumbled onto something worth paying for.
My ideal system would be just such a monster. High end power in the CPU and Video arenas with enough RAM to handle the most intense development and gaming tasks, and plenty of very high speed external storage interfaces. Ideally, this would include pluggable solid state drives in the 80Gig range, so you wouldn't have to worry about banging the thumbdrive on the airplane seat and hosing your port. Buy a drive for each OS, maybe one for games, and there you go. This machine would have to be able to run MacOSX, Windows, and pretty much any OSS platform I wanted.
Right now, this is pretty much done, with the exception that the pluggable drives are actually hard drives, not solid state, Home directories are generally OS specific by design, and these machines don't run MacOSX. If Apple were to put out a notebook that let you shift hard drives that easily, I'd bet they'd be past the 20% mark in no time. They'd probably hit the 30% mark within a year, especially if they were to knock prices down (just a tad).
Actually, I'd be surprised if it was only 20%.
...
I'm not an OS hound at all, I've used Linux, FreeBSD, Windows (Every version since 3.1 - except '98) and finally, MacOSX. FreeBSD has always been a favorite, and I've always lamented the fact that there weren't more paying jobs that focused on the *BSDs.
I've developed (for my bread and butter) on 5 flavors of Unix (not including Linux or any *BSD), and am currently doing so on Windows.
Now, that doesn't make me an expert on any one of these platforms, and certainly doesn't make me privy to any special information, but it seems to me that the changes Apple has made in just the last couple years are huge gains. You can now do anything with MacOSX that you could once only do on Windows - and a great many of them are considerably easier with OSX.
The change to an Intel architecture has opened the way to VM development, which essentially puts Apple ahead of MS in terms of feature availability - while MS has added video and photo management features to Vista that are suspiciously similar to iPhoto and iDVD, they still don't have anything like GarageBand or Sherlock (which, by the way, is an AWESOME app). This is the point where MS will start to lose, unless they stop playing the "Me Too" game, using Apple as their R&D lab and start playing to their strengths. MS is still ahead in the hardware game, though with Apple's shift to Intel, this is a somewhat slimmer lead. Vista has been labeled a MacOSX wannabe (without the stability) by a number of sources, some of which are typically pro-MS. MS needs to get their own R&D and design teams, and start making their UI more flexible - and stable. Until they start focusing on flexibility, stability, and (more effectively) on security, they'll continue to struggle to stay just one step ahead.
I think this will be the year the balance starts to tip. I don't know if it will stay tipped, or if it will tip to anything near equivalence, much less anywhere near the level Apple actually deserves for all their hard work and creative innovation, but it will tip.
And BTW, I've been waiting for the new year myself to upgrade to a Macbook Pro, simply for the "extras" that Apple does so much better, and the VMs, which will finally let me have the OS of my choice on a laptop. Of course, storage for all these VMs will now become something of a hassle (WinXP, Vista, Ubuntu, Knoppix, FreeBSD, etc.)
Before anyone suggests you can still get those OSes on a VM in Windows, keep in mind, you can't get MacOSX on a VM in Windows yet. Even so, I happen to like the look and feel of the Apple notebooks better than pretty much anything I've seen from Dell, Gateway, or any of the other big PC makers.
The Ring was Slytherin's, but book 6 also mentions the cup that belonged to Hufflepuff. It is known that Voldemort (Tom Riddle at the time) had access to it. It seemed important to him to have an artifact from each of the house founders to use as a horcrux. Dumbledore stated his opposition to having Riddle in the school in any capacity other than as a student specifically because he didn't want him to have access to the Gryffindor sword. He seemed particularly concerned with it.
Also, I do remember the locket being mentioned in book 4 - I recalled it after it was mentioned in a previous post that is. If it shows up in the next movie, I'll be convinced the Locket isn't destroyed yet. As an aside, it would be an easy target for the cutting room floor, but as a horcrux, it would be a sacred part of the story.
The idea of a horcrux being mentioned in each book is interesting too. I have to admit it seems a little more likely that the last horcrux is Harry now, but I still think there's something else to it.
I really don't think it will necessarily be both or neither dying in the last book. The prophecy says "Either must die at the hand of the other, for neither can live while the other survives." Think about the difference between surviving and living. Up till the first book, Harry wasn't really living, he was surviving. That Voldemort was in the same boat goes without saying. Neither will really be able to live while the other survives, so one has to stop surviving. I think Harry will kill Voldemort (I had forgotten that the prophecy does actually say one must die at the hand of the other).
I agree about the quandary Snape was faced with. I think all the information will be available to put him in the clear, but I don't think it will ever be generally known.
I suspect Legilimency will come back into play too. I was thinking that Harry has to learn to close his mind off very effectively if he hopes to go up against Voldemort. He did very poorly against Snape because of it, and it's been mentioned that Voldemort is a very good Legilimens. Harry only came out alive in book 4 because the dueling wands caught Voldemort off guard - he had no way of knowing that could happen, he couldn't have known Harry's wand was his own wand's brother. Next time, in addition to being able to protect himself, he'll have to be able to pull information out of an opponent, and one who's also very good at defending themselves. He did catch Snape off guard during lessons, so it's possible he has a special gift there - possibly courtesy of Voldemort himself.
What I'm really curious about is the power he has that Voldemort doesn't. Perhaps Love? That's been put up as the great magic that protected Harry in the first place, and now he's trying to break up with Ginny to protect her - I don't think he's going to get away with it, because that has Harry denying the one thing he has in his favor. Not to mention, Ginny has a gift with the curse of the bogeys. Not a girl you wanna tick off.
I missed that.
:)
Great! Now I'm gonna have to go back and reread the whole series AGAIN before I can go on to the last one!
I'll bet there are half a dozen other clues in there I haven't noticed. I know the house Harry inherited from Sirius is important, and I suspect it will reappear in the next book (probably early on, since Harry comes of age and can leave the Dursley home), but what else is there (besides the amulet) that's important? I doubt Kreacher will be cooperative, but so long as Harry's careful enough about telling him what to do, the worst he can do is keep the amulet hidden - which would obviously be bad enough.
It's not for nothing that everyone says the MS R&D lab is called Apple.
I know, some MS Fanboy is going to mark this a troll, but there are a lot of people out there saying essentially the same thing. Including both "experts" featured in a recent slashdot analysis of the two OSes.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing for MS, especially seeing as how Apple is so much better at aesthetics. Now they've got a real backend, it's hardly a surprise they're gaining market share and shedding the "toy computer" rap.
Still, next thing you know, those "Get a Mac" ads will have PC dressing up like Mac. Now that would be amusing.
Now, this doesn't mean I won't be touching Vista. All my development takes place on XP these days, and I've no doubt we'll be moving to Vista eventually. Once I upgrade to a MacBook Pro, I'll probably even buy a copy to run under Parallels.
Wouldn't it be a hoot if JK turned out to be a Pratchett fan?
Harry being the final horcrux is an interesting theory, but I don't think it's just the scar. If he is the last horcrux, I find it likely that Voldemort would have retrieved it from him with the blood he used to regain physical shape. There isn't much we learned about them in book 6, but I suspect they can be used in just such a manner.
I seriously doubt Longbottom is the true chosen one. After all, Voldemort chose Harry. That isn't to say Neville won't be an important figure in the end. He has as much reason to hate Voldemort and the Death Eaters as anyone - more than most, and though he doesn't exactly emanate courage, he's proven more than once that he does posess it in reasonable supply.
does this title sound like something out of Lemony Snickets "A Series of Unfortunate Events" series? Sure it's not an alliteration, but "The Deathly Hallows"? - perhaps if it had been "The Horrible Hallows" ...
I expected something more associative though, like all the previous titles have been.
Perhaps it simply refers to the location of the final showdown?
I have to disagree. Dumbledore is arguably an indispensable character, but the fact that he showed up in a painting in the Headmaster's (Headmistress', that is) office is fairly convincing evidence that he's really dead.
Aside from that, past evidence has made it fairly clear that Dumbledore wouldn't be one to run away from death. - "To the well-ordered mind, death is merely the next great adventure" (paraphrased).
That doesn't mean he's gone. Remember the painting. That gives us the "Obi Wan" factor. He probably won't speak much directly to Harry - he not being a Hogwarts Headmaster, but he's there, and the painting may well know everything he knew prior to his death - hence the "out" for Snape.
And I don't think Snape is going to take over Dumbledore's position as the behind the scenes "leader" in any way. He's a spy, working for the downfall of Voldemort, of course, but he's the "Bad Guy, working for Good". He'll do what needs to be done to bring down V, even if it means taking out any number of good or bad players in the process (so long as one of them isn't Snape - or Harry). I also suspect Snape took an Unbreakable Vow with Dumbledore to make sure he was willing to do anything including kill Dumbledore.
Snape knows he can't kill Voldemort (yet, Trelawney's prophecy doesn't say Harry will kill him, just that neither can survive while the other lives), though he may or may not know why - nobody knows at this point exactly how much Dumbledore - or Regulus Black (Sirius' brother, probably the one that destroyed the amulet Dumbledore risked his life to get just before his death), would have told Snape.
A couple things I think may come into play in this last book are a couple seemingly minor details mentioned throughout the previous books:
Harry's eyes - Everyone seems to dwell on the fact he has his mothers eyes. I don't know how, but I think it's important.
Voldemort's means of return - in Goblet of Fire, Voldemort uses Harry's blood to overcome the magic protection instilled by Lilly's sacrifice. When Harry mentions this to Dumbledore, his expression suggest an almost victorious feeling, and his response (I don't remember the exact wording) suggests that there may have been a trap of some kind in there. There's also the fact that Pettigrew brought harm to Harry after Harry saved his life in Prizoner of Azkaban. Pettigrew owes Harry a serious debt, and he violated it. That's gonna come back on him hard.
Can't wait.
While I don't think it's likely in the near(ish) future, Apple now has a lot more bargaining power with respect to CPU makers. I sincerely doubt AMD would turn their nose up at Steve if he were to suggest a closer look at the next gen AMD CPU, which is supposed to get beyond the Intel in a number of areas. Still, I suspect that with all the work being done (and not just by Apple) to make the Mac a much more versatile machine, we'll start seeing more decent games for the Apple. Now that Apple is finally shedding the "toy computer" rap, they might stop avoiding the game market like the plague. Moving into that market alone would certainly have a positive effect on their bottom line. Gods know their systems are excellent with pretty much every multimedia task that might apply to a really kick-ass, up-all-night, mainlining-espresso-all-weekend game.
I also think Apple's market share will continue a high pace growth. whether this is because they're stealing share from Dell, Gateway, and others, or because the market is growing beyond their collective ability to supply is up in the air.
Now, so as not to be totally off topic, I love my PowerBook, and hope to upgrade to a MacBook in Q1, but I don't hate Microsoft either (anymore). I always keep at least 1 Windows machine at home, though it's usually only 1 machine. My reasons for not particularly liking them are pretty much those already stated by other posters - i.e. monopolistic practices - forcing the demise of a number of excellent products by bringing huge FUD campaigns to bear just seems wrong; then there's their habitual "embrace and extend" policies toward perfectly serviceable or perfectly good standards, often making the internet a virtual aftermath of the Tower of Babel. I also have problems with the stranglehold they've kept on PC manufacturers for so long, and to an great extent still hold, resulting in my owning half a dozen licenses for various Windows operating systems that were never installed. Now I know I can get them to give that money back, but as everyone knows it's a losing battle. if I were to consider the time spent to get this money back, I'd be lucky to make out as well as a high school kid at McDonalds - and that's to get MY OWN FREAKIN' MONEY BACK! Now if I could get them to compensate me for the time I lost trying to get my money back, then I'd be OK with it.
I don't hate Microsoft, but I do think they're a real pain in the ass sometimes.
I was talking about pr0n: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=pr
But yeah, it does help to 'segregate' data this way. It's trivial to do at setup for any of the *nix OSes - if you're a moderately competent SysAdmin, and since MacOSX is build on FreeBSD, I assume it's the same. If you're at least moderately competent, you can even convert an existing system to such a layout, if you're very careful. Spot on about Windows though. It can be done but it's a pain - you have to be careful everytime you install something.
I don't think the "one-size-fits-all" mentality really has much of a hold with storage. You can still buy drives from 80G and up, so it's really the end user that applies this in the form of "more is better". What I'd like to see is if this can be made faster than RAM - though it might require an architectural change in the bus, it would allow an intelligent system to block off the memory it needs when a process starts, and not worry so much about running out of RAM. If I've got a 500G drive for my gaming system, it would be easier to load images directly to the GPU without first pulling them into RAM. GPU/CPU caches might become less critical.
Well, I seriously doubt these things will provide a 500X speed improvement. It'll simply move the bottleneck.
Even if this tech can be turned into solid state drives in the next 10 years, with 500X the performance of current drive tech, how many of you have never seen your CPU pegged?
What about the rendering for that new game?
Just because one component of your system is boosted by a huge factor, doesn't mean you'll see any improvement at all. It's very likely that games available in 10 years will have much higher HW requirements anyway, and the FSB, CPU, and/or GPU will be the bottlenecks, not the HD.
Unless the cost is a HUGE savings, I don't see too many people giving up their space.
After all, how much pr0n can you store on a 40G drive?
If I get your point though, I agree. My perception tells me that storage is really falling behind Moore's Law. Perhaps I'm not seeing all the angles though.
Not that I really need TB storage, but I think Solid State drives in the 100G - 200G range for notebooks, and up to 400G for desktops could have been around by now if all the focus weren't with faster, smarter chips to keep up with the exponentially increasing WinBloat requirements. Granted, the platter drives have been getting smaller and faster, possibly in line with Mr. Moore, but persistent storage in general has done relatively poorly.
The onset of the USB key is probably the best advance in the solid state branch for some time. It kicked off the Shuffle from Apple, and eventually the Nano, amongst others. But those haven't focused on actual Hard Drive Replacement applications of the tech. Just on new ways to market it and adding shiny new bells and (particularly) whistles.
Solid state application in this area has obviously had its issues, like the current leakage below a certain die size, and the mfg costs as mentioned in TFA, but this is exactly the kind of thing Moore predicted would be overcome faster and faster. We've been on platter drives for what, 20 years, now? How long have solid state drives been around, maybe 8 or 10? Look how much farther the platters have come - we've gone from spending $800 for 80M drives to spending $70 for 250G (potential rotten memory alert), with access times and transfer rates (read and write) being so much faster in new drives, that it's almost laughable to compare the two.
Solid state drives have all but petered out of existence until the last 2 or 3 years. What you can get today is much the same price for much the same product as you would have seen 10 years ago.
Now, if they could just manage to get this phase tech to market by 2015 as predicted in the article, maybe this technology could get back on track.
Possibly. If I had to give up a 360G platter drive to put in a 120G phase drive, I'd probably do it - so long as the cost favored the phase drive.
I'd probably still keep the platter drive for secondary storage and put the OS and critical apps/servers/whatever on the phase drive though.
I wouldn't pay twice as much for a drive with half the head room though - even if it is 500X faster. That kind of speed (and especially power consumption) may be a big deal for notebooks, but if density is really a problem, the notebooks would probably have to give up a lot more headroom - relatively speaking. We're finally seeing 200G notebook drives, but keep in mind they're tiny compared to your standard laptop drive. If the new phase drives can store the same or more data in the same space, then yeah, I definitely see the end of the platter drive in mainstream use - once the supply outweighs the demand enough to make it financially realistic. If they can put no more than 30G in a notebook drive, then I think it'll take a couple product generations for that to happen.
What is the storage density, and will it still be feasible when this finally comes to market in 10 years?
The difference being what?
Natural selection is a primary facet of evolution. They go hand in hand in every species except Homo Erectus. Natural selection narrows the focus of the gene pool, and the species changes its form, focus, and/or appearance in some (often small) way.
This is ridiculous. This is exactly what evolution is - and always has been - all about.
This is survival of the fittest at its most obvious. Keep in mind that the word "fittest" does not apply to the quickest or strongest, but the members of the species that are the "fittest" for the environment they live in. This only become obvious to us "short time observers" when the environment changes abruptly, as demonstrated in the article.
The lizards in question undoubtedly carried some tendencies toward both long and short legs. Chances are actually pretty good the average length of a lizards legs was somewhere in the middle of the extremes. The habits of these lizards would have kept them together for the purpose of procreation, and would have shaped the general habits of the species.
When you introduce predators that cannot climb or otherwise access prey in the trees, but are quick enough to chase down even the fastest of those on ground, it stands to reason that natural selection is going to increase the proportion of offspring to short legged lizards - or more accurately, those that carried the physical ability to effectively adapt their lives to a more arboreal style. Those that could not function at all, or as effectively in the trees would have fallen out of the gene pool, so to speak.
Behavior is not the initiator of evolution, it is merely a facilitator, and a secondary one at that. It is entirely possible that some of these lizards were climbing trees long before the predators were introduced, but probably came to the ground to mate and procreate. The introduction of predation is the external pressure that either induced or enhanced this behavior. Without the predation, these behaviors would not have become the norm, and would not have resulted in evolution.
On the other hand, it is possible that such a change could have been induced not by predation, but by a shift in food supply. Imagine that the insects the anoles fed on lived both high in the trees and low to the ground for decades, even centuries. Then, rather than the introduction of a near-ground predator, imagine that some change in the foliage virtually eliminates the prey insects habitat at the ground level. The anoles can still feed, but only if they chase their food to the trees. You see the same change in the genetic pool, but you may also see a split. This isn't instigated by a change in behavior, it's facilitated by a change in behavior that is instigated by a change in environment. Big difference. The ability to change behavior based on the environment is what allows evolutionary changes, not what causes them.
On the other hand, it is very likely that these evolutionary changes would not be possible if the species were capable of including those unable to physically adapt. Look at the Human race for instance. There are millions of people that are physically incapable of managing a harsh environment where they would be required to work physically very hard or perish. We as humans tend to see it as our responsibility to help each other for the good of the species (cloaked in some moral code or other, of course). This may hinder (some might say "degrade") the improvement of the species, but that's getting into moral issues all its own. Personally, I see this as probably the only example of behavior affecting evolution without an external force. It has allowed those with abilities toward more intellectual innovation to flourish, and often procreate. Or at least to affect the direction others' offspring take in their development. We often see people who have made outstanding advances in science reach old age without children, but they often inspire others to reach farther still. One could argue that this has shifted humanity into a behavioral evolutionary mode. One could also argue that this is a good or a bad thing, or that it will be the key to the survival or downfall of the human race.
Regardless, behavior is certainly not the instigator of evolution in lizards.