The electronic components are only safer than the mechanical ones if they are implemented properly and redundantly.
That a single component failure in a fairly hostile environment can force a crash is not encouraging.
And even Star-Trek has "manual overrides":D
What's with the irrational Google hating?
Can we at least find legitimate reasons to get upset?
I feel like every day on/.has turned into April 1st. I never know which stories are terrifically blown out of proportion, terribly written, or just straight up lies (ie this article). Maybe we should actually read TFA before ranting about it? Or putting it on the front page...:( CmdrTaco....
As others have said, the proposed change is not even to add your entire IP, just the bit that gives your general area. And they have your IP as soon as you use TCP anyway. Welcome to Internet.
Minor events at a molecular level occur at a fairly static rate. This does not conflict with the stuttering macro-evolutionary model, since the probability of any random change having any effect is low, and given that there is such an effect, the probability that it is positive approaches zero. The "rapid" evolution people look at is the very rare occurrence of an extremely beneficial trait, or (more likely) the very rapid changing of selective pressures.
In the case of an extremely beneficial trait, the ability of a creature to propagate the change (and out compete genetic rivals) explains the limited number generations required for near complete saturation of a population with the trait.
In the case of a rapid change in selective pressure, traits which were once unimportant (and therefore partially present in a population) can suddenly become extremely beneficial or extremely detrimental.
One such example of rapid change in selective pressure can be seen in the Peppered moth, which evolved to be much darker when the industrial revolution of England coated trees with soot.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
My girlfriend has a Mac because it is easy to use. She figured it out. (Except now she needs WinXP for law exam software)
Her parents have a Mac because it is "easy to use". They still cannot use it.
My coworker has a Mac because it is shiny and cool, and he is clueless about computers, and he has money to blow.
I'm not saying everyone who owns a Mac is like my coworker, but I would venture to guess that anyone excited about a non-tactile-keyboard-bearing (read: awful mistake), as-yet-unannounced "tablet" falls not to far from him. It is more about being "hip" than about being able to do anything (ie actually typing over 30 words/s).
There are certainly people who buy a nice car because it handles well, but most of them are just trying to display their status.
Maybe not you, but what about the guy down the road?
Making special exceptions just because you do X Y or Z, or don't do A B or C does not make sense. Good rules always err towards over-protection.
Not to mention the fact that the information is probably cached locally, and how does anyone outside your business know what you do and do not do with OWA or anything else? Or what you might do in three months when you decide to switch services.
Whenever I hear (usually reported somewhere) that google is pushing something, or they've added new features/options, I'm surprised even though I used it almost exclusively.
This is exactly what I love about Google, and exactly why I have used facebook.com only twice this year.
Every time I log in to facebook.com all of the menus have changed... And some "features" have been added to make ninja-zombie-robots spam me with 100 more things on an icon-driven list of drivel. I just want my damned friends list and some photos. bring back thefacebook.com!
Sadly with the 945GC chipset you are not even using less power. A cheap AMD machine on a 760G motherboard runs at less than 30 watts, while some of these 945GC atom boards idle in the 30-35 watt area.
I agree on the family time, though. The a Regor build might keep you too busy. This is one of the Atom's "features".
Perhaps the average user is getting better at optimizing their searching? To be honest I usually click on one of the first three results if I am am looking for a single source of high-level information. Exactly what I am looking for tends to pop up right away because of the keywords I use.
Many of us are painfully aware of the poor choice or search terms some of our friends/family use. Perhaps people are wising up, and this study actually shows promise for increased search efficiency.
As for changing the search term... If I can see clearly that what I typed is returning a large number of unwanted results I will often append to remove a popular eroneous subject or narrow my search. That does not seem a falacy, but this study makes it sound like changing search terms is.
Sadly the experiments to which you were referring were not nearly as successful as everyone remembers. Even psychology textbooks often teach (incorrectly) that the participants had their vision flip after wearing inverted goggles for a long enough period.
While the participants scores did improve on ability tests over time, they reported that it was due to adaptation to an inverted image, and not the image actually appearing to be right-side-up.
As for switching to sepia-tone and different color spectrums might feel something akin to wearing tinted sunglasses. To incorporate any part of the EM spectrum which is not normally visible you would need to shift/stretch the visible spectrum over a smaller area of your percieved spectrum to make room for new wavelengths (i.e. you shift everything up so that something that looks red is emiting infrared radiation while objects that others percieve as red now look yellow or orange).
You might eventually adjust to the point of functionality, but everything might look strange after switching back. And you will have terrible taste in clothing.
You only have to read a slashdot story on Climate Change (and the amount of time posters call it "global warming"
If you would read TFA you would notice that the researcher being interviewed "measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming"... Sorry to knock you off your horse and all, but this article is about the supression of information concerning global warming (and not the broader sense of "climate change" to which you appear to be referring). All posts about global warming are on topic.
Seems that if you wanted to sell this miracle cure for degeneration of mental functioning then you would give everyone a score which makes them feel slow and senile...
I believe you misunderstood what the other fellow was saying about Google having a backup of all information.
The point of their backup is not to prodect some goof from deleting his thesis paper. It is to prevent the loss of 'live' data which you currently have in your inbox. If some fraction of their GMail users (or god forbid, all of them) were to lose your inboxes you can be sure that there would be a large handful of angry people and the potential for costly litigation. Not to mention that employees would likely lose data too.
Unfortunately, if what i remember from my neuroscience coursework is correct, this sort of thing would not be applicable to regeneration of mylin sheaths, since they are generated by a 'wrapping' of the axon by seperate glial cells.
This method of treatment seems more intended for guided regrowth (ever read about the experiment where they switched up a frog's optic tectum?). I recall seeing cross-sections of monkey brains after limited exposure to Ecstacy and the long term affects on seratonin-producing cells. They were nearly all killed off after exposure, and seven years later had regrown to some degree. The problem with the regenerated cells was that the axons were a mess: they did not go anywhere in particular.
This treatment sounds like it is a method for guided regrowth given that new cells will be generated on the propper surface. It therefore does not seem to be suitable for MS treatment.
In fact I don't think it would be great for anything short of direct trauma. If the peptides are forming a latice then they need to be in a very specific environment (in this case open CSF). Of course direct trauma is exactly what you get in an open surgery, so for those applications this may be ideal...
On a side note: They don't discuss how well the animals vision was regenerated. For all we know it is limited to very rudamentary light/dark detection. TFA refers to a "functional return of vision".
Most of the time the findings of things like this are greatly hyped by the media. Of the articles I have read with prior knowledge to experimental results I have yet to see a truly accurate description of the shortfalls of the results.
How does anyone have a patent on "rumble technology"? How in gods name does that not qualify as past art? I had a light-up, sound emitting, rumbling lazer-gun toy as a kid. I suppose they travelled to the future and stole the technology?
Please. Its a lopsided electric motor. I'm pretty sure Tesla made plenty of those a long time ago.
The text in quotes is actually meant as an example of possible truths, not as a quote from the article. It does not claim to be a quote from the article, nor does the origional post actually speak of TFA at all.
How would you have written the hypothetical response? "Stuff like '90% of all hardware-related problems come from loose connectors'" Seems perfectly clear to me, but how would you have improved it? Perhaps you should be criticizing the grammar rather than the accuracy.
"unattractive to consumers who will be disappointed by their 'limited range of programs'"
Oops! Looks like someone forgot who these laptops are for! It can be found at the group's website (the big words on the front page).
This laptop is not being designed for "consumers" who are used to having all of their pay-for-use windows software. It is meant for people who wouldn't be able to choose commercial programs to begin with. That said, you can be sure that once users of these devices become comfortable with them a whole heap of software will fill any shortcomings of the default software.
When the group licenses the laptop for other companies to make it comercially available in developed nations you can bet that more clutter will be included. Hell, there will probably be a distributor of $300 windows versions of the thing.
Myself? I just want the hand crank and the black-and-white screen. The rest of it can go to hell.
If we create self-aware viruses (imagine the irony if these are the first real AI), would it be wrong to continue to mindlessly delete them? Would they deserve a trial?:)
University of Kansas uses the acronym "UK"... This was slightly confusing during football season, but I figured our school must have been playing a team from the USA. In the title of science article, however, I sure as hell don't assume Kansas origion.
While I am a great fan of diplomacy, I must say that I doubt an online version would be incredibly entertaining. The fun of diplomacy is the intense human interaction. The ability to convince someone that you are telling the truth and that something is in their best interest (whether or not either is true) would obfuscated by a lack of personal presence.
That said, I strongly recommend that every who has not give Diplomacy a go. You can read rules online and print out maps, so it will only cost you time. The best part of the game is that absolutely nothing is left to luck (beyond which nation you start as). Risk always annoyed me because you could lose a huge number of men on an unfortunate set of rolls. If you can mastermind a way to overcome your foes, you know it was not thanks to luck. Correctly anticipating the movements of your enemies and swiftly defeating them is incredibly gratifying.
Hell, I can't find a standard sized remote 1/5 of the time I want it. Does the idea of a tiny remote scare anyone else? A couch has 10^5 times the number of places for one of these bad boys to hide.
Perhaps Apple will plan ahead and assume the user will lose the remote and put a god damned set of directional arrows on the unit itself. It seems like once a month I encounter a remoteless DVD player with no means of navigation on the main unit. When the first option on the DVD menu is not play it turns into a hell of a time.
... running WoW with Wine? Wouldn't the Warden be checking the processes run by Wine, and not find macros etc running in your standard linux environment?
Slashdot Mirror
Or update your f*ing browser.
The electronic components are only safer than the mechanical ones if they are implemented properly and redundantly. That a single component failure in a fairly hostile environment can force a crash is not encouraging. And even Star-Trek has "manual overrides" :D
Why didn't they just use the built-in M$ encryption? Oh wait.
What's with the irrational Google hating?
/.has turned into April 1st. I never know which stories are terrifically blown out of proportion, terribly written, or just straight up lies (ie this article). Maybe we should actually read TFA before ranting about it? Or putting it on the front page... :( CmdrTaco....
Can we at least find legitimate reasons to get upset?
I feel like every day on
As others have said, the proposed change is not even to add your entire IP, just the bit that gives your general area. And they have your IP as soon as you use TCP anyway. Welcome to Internet.
...
There is nothing wrong with genetic theory.
Minor events at a molecular level occur at a fairly static rate. This does not conflict with the stuttering macro-evolutionary model, since the probability of any random change having any effect is low, and given that there is such an effect, the probability that it is positive approaches zero. The "rapid" evolution people look at is the very rare occurrence of an extremely beneficial trait, or (more likely) the very rapid changing of selective pressures.
In the case of an extremely beneficial trait, the ability of a creature to propagate the change (and out compete genetic rivals) explains the limited number generations required for near complete saturation of a population with the trait.
In the case of a rapid change in selective pressure, traits which were once unimportant (and therefore partially present in a population) can suddenly become extremely beneficial or extremely detrimental.
One such example of rapid change in selective pressure can be seen in the Peppered moth, which evolved to be much darker when the industrial revolution of England coated trees with soot. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
My girlfriend has a Mac because it is easy to use. She figured it out. (Except now she needs WinXP for law exam software) Her parents have a Mac because it is "easy to use". They still cannot use it.
My coworker has a Mac because it is shiny and cool, and he is clueless about computers, and he has money to blow.
I'm not saying everyone who owns a Mac is like my coworker, but I would venture to guess that anyone excited about a non-tactile-keyboard-bearing (read: awful mistake), as-yet-unannounced "tablet" falls not to far from him. It is more about being "hip" than about being able to do anything (ie actually typing over 30 words/s).
There are certainly people who buy a nice car because it handles well, but most of them are just trying to display their status.
Maybe not you, but what about the guy down the road? Making special exceptions just because you do X Y or Z, or don't do A B or C does not make sense. Good rules always err towards over-protection. Not to mention the fact that the information is probably cached locally, and how does anyone outside your business know what you do and do not do with OWA or anything else? Or what you might do in three months when you decide to switch services.
Whenever I hear (usually reported somewhere) that google is pushing something, or they've added new features/options, I'm surprised even though I used it almost exclusively.
This is exactly what I love about Google, and exactly why I have used facebook.com only twice this year. Every time I log in to facebook.com all of the menus have changed... And some "features" have been added to make ninja-zombie-robots spam me with 100 more things on an icon-driven list of drivel. I just want my damned friends list and some photos. bring back thefacebook.com!
Sadly with the 945GC chipset you are not even using less power. A cheap AMD machine on a 760G motherboard runs at less than 30 watts, while some of these 945GC atom boards idle in the 30-35 watt area. I agree on the family time, though. The a Regor build might keep you too busy. This is one of the Atom's "features".
We should be multiplying by the signum function and averaging that... /g[k]
g[k] = f[k] * sgn(f[k])
|/f[k]| =
RMS is just silly.
It would be easier to compute in a 2s compliment system too, eh?
Perhaps the average user is getting better at optimizing their searching? To be honest I usually click on one of the first three results if I am am looking for a single source of high-level information. Exactly what I am looking for tends to pop up right away because of the keywords I use.
Many of us are painfully aware of the poor choice or search terms some of our friends/family use. Perhaps people are wising up, and this study actually shows promise for increased search efficiency.
As for changing the search term... If I can see clearly that what I typed is returning a large number of unwanted results I will often append to remove a popular eroneous subject or narrow my search. That does not seem a falacy, but this study makes it sound like changing search terms is.
Sadly the experiments to which you were referring were not nearly as successful as everyone remembers. Even psychology textbooks often teach (incorrectly) that the participants had their vision flip after wearing inverted goggles for a long enough period.
:)m l
While the participants scores did improve on ability tests over time, they reported that it was due to adaptation to an inverted image, and not the image actually appearing to be right-side-up.
Don't trust my word though, dig around
For one particular write-up try this (do a page search for "inverting"):
http://faculty.smu.edu/bthompso/spatialcontent.ht
As for switching to sepia-tone and different color spectrums might feel something akin to wearing tinted sunglasses. To incorporate any part of the EM spectrum which is not normally visible you would need to shift/stretch the visible spectrum over a smaller area of your percieved spectrum to make room for new wavelengths (i.e. you shift everything up so that something that looks red is emiting infrared radiation while objects that others percieve as red now look yellow or orange).
You might eventually adjust to the point of functionality, but everything might look strange after switching back. And you will have terrible taste in clothing.
You only have to read a slashdot story on Climate Change (and the amount of time posters call it "global warming"
If you would read TFA you would notice that the researcher being interviewed "measures greenhouse gases linked to global warming"... Sorry to knock you off your horse and all, but this article is about the supression of information concerning global warming (and not the broader sense of "climate change" to which you appear to be referring). All posts about global warming are on topic.
Seems that if you wanted to sell this miracle cure for degeneration of mental functioning then you would give everyone a score which makes them feel slow and senile...
WDM? We need to do something about this Al Ca'tel before they do something drastic. This calls for a preemptive strike.
I believe you misunderstood what the other fellow was saying about Google having a backup of all information.
The point of their backup is not to prodect some goof from deleting his thesis paper. It is to prevent the loss of 'live' data which you currently have in your inbox. If some fraction of their GMail users (or god forbid, all of them) were to lose your inboxes you can be sure that there would be a large handful of angry people and the potential for costly litigation. Not to mention that employees would likely lose data too.
Unfortunately, if what i remember from my neuroscience coursework is correct, this sort of thing would not be applicable to regeneration of mylin sheaths, since they are generated by a 'wrapping' of the axon by seperate glial cells.
This method of treatment seems more intended for guided regrowth (ever read about the experiment where they switched up a frog's optic tectum?).
I recall seeing cross-sections of monkey brains after limited exposure to Ecstacy and the long term affects on seratonin-producing cells. They were nearly all killed off after exposure, and seven years later had regrown to some degree. The problem with the regenerated cells was that the axons were a mess: they did not go anywhere in particular.
This treatment sounds like it is a method for guided regrowth given that new cells will be generated on the propper surface. It therefore does not seem to be suitable for MS treatment.
In fact I don't think it would be great for anything short of direct trauma. If the peptides are forming a latice then they need to be in a very specific environment (in this case open CSF). Of course direct trauma is exactly what you get in an open surgery, so for those applications this may be ideal...
On a side note: They don't discuss how well the animals vision was regenerated. For all we know it is limited to very rudamentary light/dark detection. TFA refers to a "functional return of vision".
Most of the time the findings of things like this are greatly hyped by the media. Of the articles I have read with prior knowledge to experimental results I have yet to see a truly accurate description of the shortfalls of the results.
How does anyone have a patent on "rumble technology"? How in gods name does that not qualify as past art? I had a light-up, sound emitting, rumbling lazer-gun toy as a kid. I suppose they travelled to the future and stole the technology?
Please. Its a lopsided electric motor. I'm pretty sure Tesla made plenty of those a long time ago.
The text in quotes is actually meant as an example of possible truths, not as a quote from the article. It does not claim to be a quote from the article, nor does the origional post actually speak of TFA at all.
How would you have written the hypothetical response? "Stuff like '90% of all hardware-related problems come from loose connectors'" Seems perfectly clear to me, but how would you have improved it? Perhaps you should be criticizing the grammar rather than the accuracy.
"unattractive to consumers who will be disappointed by their 'limited range of programs'"
Oops! Looks like someone forgot who these laptops are for! It can be found at the group's website (the big words on the front page).
This laptop is not being designed for "consumers" who are used to having all of their pay-for-use windows software. It is meant for people who wouldn't be able to choose commercial programs to begin with. That said, you can be sure that once users of these devices become comfortable with them a whole heap of software will fill any shortcomings of the default software.
When the group licenses the laptop for other companies to make it comercially available in developed nations you can bet that more clutter will be included. Hell, there will probably be a distributor of $300 windows versions of the thing.
Myself? I just want the hand crank and the black-and-white screen. The rest of it can go to hell.
If we create self-aware viruses (imagine the irony if these are the first real AI), would it be wrong to continue to mindlessly delete them? Would they deserve a trial? :)
University of Kansas uses the acronym "UK"... This was slightly confusing during football season, but I figured our school must have been playing a team from the USA. In the title of science article, however, I sure as hell don't assume Kansas origion.
While I am a great fan of diplomacy, I must say that I doubt an online version would be incredibly entertaining. The fun of diplomacy is the intense human interaction. The ability to convince someone that you are telling the truth and that something is in their best interest (whether or not either is true) would obfuscated by a lack of personal presence.
That said, I strongly recommend that every who has not give Diplomacy a go. You can read rules online and print out maps, so it will only cost you time. The best part of the game is that absolutely nothing is left to luck (beyond which nation you start as). Risk always annoyed me because you could lose a huge number of men on an unfortunate set of rolls. If you can mastermind a way to overcome your foes, you know it was not thanks to luck. Correctly anticipating the movements of your enemies and swiftly defeating them is incredibly gratifying.
Hell, I can't find a standard sized remote 1/5 of the time I want it. Does the idea of a tiny remote scare anyone else? A couch has 10^5 times the number of places for one of these bad boys to hide.
Perhaps Apple will plan ahead and assume the user will lose the remote and put a god damned set of directional arrows on the unit itself. It seems like once a month I encounter a remoteless DVD player with no means of navigation on the main unit. When the first option on the DVD menu is not play it turns into a hell of a time.
... running WoW with Wine? Wouldn't the Warden be checking the processes run by Wine, and not find macros etc running in your standard linux environment?
Then you wouldn't have to sell your soul to Sony.