Yep. To me, and probably many others who are exposed to human-computer interactivity issues, accessibility has a particular definition including:
Accessibility refers to ensuring that Content is accessible, ie. ensuring that Content can be navigated and read by everyone, regardless of location, experience, or the type of computer technology used.
The original text format is obviously tailor-made for accessibility. The HTML format will make the data more useful (perhaps even more usable?) for those people who have an HTML browser, but will make it inaccessible for some users.
Overall it's a really poor choice of wording in the Slashdot title and summary. But then again, Slashdot and many of its visitors seem to get the terms accessible, usable and useful totally wrong while they chide others for misusing hacking and cracking.;-(
Most people just want to put things like their photo album online...
Like I said right the beginning of my origianl post:
most webpages are not static documents, they incorporate interactivity.
The premise of my argument is that most webpages are not photo albums, but stuff like blogs accompanied by polls and discussions, or small e-commerce websites, etc. These require some simple interaction that is hard or impossible to implement right now. Example: as a casual author I want to implement a popup calendar so visitors can pick a date easily (their birthdate? desired delivery date?) This would be done readily if there were modal dialogs, but without these the casual authors can't easily implement pickable calendars, any pickable calendar is a kludge at best. That's quite a shame.
You seem to be turning this from "it should be easy for anybody to put up a website" to "it should be easy for anybody to create advanced software available through the web".
No, you seem to be turning this from "it should be easy for anybody to put up a website with simple interaction" to "websites are either static or advanced software." A lot of websites are somewhere between totally static and advanced front-ends to enterprise applications. That is the problem with the current web standards, they cater to the static webpages and miss the boat entirely.
you argue that you want to merge content, presentation and behaviour into one mega-language,...
Not at all. I'd like to have two languages, one that offers simple interactivity for novice authors, and one that is more complex and allows programmers to create more complete interactive sites. The basic interaction language should provide stuff like modal dialogs, menus and combo entry fields, stuff that are sorely missing from the current web standards.
Actually, Javascript is the mega-language that you're talking about. It's not easy to use for novice authors. Usually they just copy and paste pieces of code, make minor changes and hope it works. There should be an easier-to-use language that novice authors can actually grok completely without taking programming courses. Javascript/ECMAScript tries to cater to both the novice author and the programmer and fails doing either well, as expected.
In order for standards to work, they must implement all the necessary features and allow users to follow the standards easily.
XHTML, CSS, SVG are OK for document presentation, but most webpages are not static documents, they incorporate interactivity. The aforementioned standards do little for interactivity, so authors turn towards Flash, ActiveX. And no, Javascript doesn't help, Javascript is a pile of shit that's too simplistic for programmers and too complicated for non-programmers.
A successful web standard must incorporate one well-defined and easy-to-use language to implement basic GUI elements and operations. It must also implement one other well-defined and complete language to implement more complicated programming tasks that may be needed for complex web pages. These two standard languages are missing.
A successful web standard must also be easy to support by IDEs geared towards non-programming authors. XHTML and CSS are great, but few web authoring tools generate code in these languages in a manner consistent with their original intent. Same goes with Javascripting (or what should be replacing it). Standards must be usable by IDEs.
If you want to avoid a single-company web, you must have everything availale: Standards that are complete and usable (i.e. easy to understand by non-programmers), Several web browsers that implement complete standards, Several IDEs that allow authoring by non-programmers.
And if you think web-authoring should be the sole domain of highly-skilled programmers, think again. It's that attitude that lets MS take everything over. MS will create products that are usable by casual authors and these authors will use MS products only and flood the web with MS-only documents.
I hope all of the above. Choice is good, and as long as they interoperate, I believe it would be fantastic to have several "leaders" each with its own look and feel catering to a different class of users.
"While I agree that the story itself was sensationalized..."
Actually, the story itself is pretty level-headed, it's the summary posted on Slashdot that is sensationalistic (I believe that's what you meant when you said "sensationalized" but I just want to make it very clear). The article says:
"About 80 percent of the organisms they found in the flaky scum were in the same genetic families as those known to infect wounds or cause problems for people with AIDS, cancer or other immune system disorders."
But the submitter cut the sentence when quoting, removing the qualification and making it look like the organisms found affect everybody and not just a specific group of people.
Another quote to show the article is quite reasonable:
"Kelly and Pace emphasized that the bacteria they found on their shower curtains normally don't cause problems for humans. "We don't want to freak people out, because we're really only talking about immune-compromised people," Kelley said"
The good thing is, now when someone is diagnosed with a deficiency in their immune system, they can be advised to use glass shower doors.
... I understand first-hand how frustrating it can be to get useful, realistic requirements from our customers...
I'm not sure if you meant this to sound the way it does, but you've pointed out my pet peeve:
The customer is not the proper person to write the specs. Specs must be written by a skilled analyst who can observe and communicate with the customers in a manner to determine what is required.
I've seen too many projects go down the drain because they were completely useless. They were completely useless because the specs described a system that was useless to the customer. Because the specs were written by the customer. Because the project manager simply asked the customer "what do you want this system to do?"
Customers are usually qualified to do their job, not to write specs for software system. It's the project manager's responsibilty to hire a qualified requirements gatherer (a lot of times a usability engineer is good for this) who will spend a lot of time with the customer, interviewing them, observing them work with their current methods, etc. There is much more to this than collecting specs written by the customer and putting them in a standard format.
Requirements written by the right person will make a project much more successful, requirements written by the wrong person will definitely ruin the project.
Or: in any generation of humans, some will want to send someone else out while they stay home and watch the movie, while others will want to go out themselves. So in every generation, the latter group will design stuff dreaming of being the ones who will go out, or at least knowing that someone in the future will... Until in some generation, we'll really have the capability and some humans from that era will want to go out and colonize space themselves.
So we design things in a way that'll let humans go out and explore space, because we figure some of the humans in the future will want to do that. It may not be the most logical thing to do, but it's the emotionally good thing to do, just like climbing a mountain.
If humans went, it would be close to front page stuff most days they were away from earth.
I doubt this very much. The problem is the general public and the Western media have a short attention span. They will get on a frenzy at the beginning and then lose interest over time. Case in point: the space shuttles. The first few shuttle trips were followed with lots of fanfare and attention, then as they got into the routine, they were all but ignored. Shuttles went up anyway, with humans aboard, but unless they were doing something extraordinary like the first EVA to fix the Hubble, they barely made it to the evening news.
Humans or robots, the first trips to Mars will be closely followed for the first few days, then as they hit routine, the media will change their attention to the next sensation. You can only do so many spots for "today the astronauts got up, did complicated experiments that will take 2 months to analyze, went to bed."
For many of us yes it does matter, a ton. I'd like to explore the universe myself for the same reason that I like to climb a mountain myself, instead of sending a robot up there. I don't want to go to an Imax theater and watch footage from some robot's explorations, I want to shoot the footage myself. Granted, it's not for everybody, but it's still for a lot of us.
The central library in Vancouver has the following combo setup:
(1) Lots of machines scattered throughout the building, you login with your card number (passworded) and you get 1 hour max per day to use it. The cool thing is the machine reboots after each session so you know you're not saddled by any malware from the previous user. I have no idea for how long the session logs are kept.
(2) About 20 machines in one spot that are free-for-all (no login required), with the recommendation to not use for more than 30 minutes if others are waiting. These machines tend to stay up for some time, but you can always reboot them yourself.
(3) You can use any of these machines + lots of others to access the library catalog. You don't need to login to access the catalog (unless using a machine from group 1).
BTW, I've used computers in many libraries throughout North America, and while they all ran Windows, the system was so restricted in what you could do that it didn't really showcase anything about the OS. And every one of them always gave the choice between IE and Netscape/Mozilla and sometimes Lynx.
So? What are you saying? Because for some people the sound will still be off, it shouldn't be sync'd for everybody else? Am I missing something? Even if the processors are faster, you'll still get your delay for your setup.
And this solves the syncing problem now, so we can enjoy digital TV now. There is no point in denying ourselves something that works now while we wait for a more elegant solution later.
I wonder how practical this is while it's still connected to the grid. AFAIK solar panels are costly to manufacture, producing as much pollution as they would prevent otherwise, so they're best used where access to the power grid is unavailable. This way you can justify their use by saving on grid connectivity. This isn't the case here, so it's cool as an experiment but not very practical.
That may be a Good Thing. As others have mentioned, if this feature becomes accessible then half the passengers will be annoying the other half with their non-stop cellphone conversations. But if the cost is high enough, only those who really need it will use it (pretty much the way it is with the current seatback phones except you can take calls too).
Back when I used to get junk snail mail, it cost me time to sort out the junk mail from the real mail. It was even worse because while regular mail usually came in standard-sized envelopes, the junk mail came in all shapes and forms, and I had to check carefully to make sure a legitimate mail wasn't hiding in the folds of a useless flyer. And after sorting, I still had to take more time to dispose of the junk mail.
Also, junk email can be removed with a couple of clicks, but junk snail mail gives you paper-cuts (ouch).
Here in Vancouver, I got the postpeople to put a "no junk mail" marker on both my home and post-office mailboxes, as a result I don't get any of the flyer-type junk mail. Also in credit applications, I always report the lowest income I can get away with to discourage direct-marketing mailings. That and asking everybody for no direct-marketing contacts cuts my junk mail down to almost zero.
Interestingly, when I asked USPS to put a "no junk mail" marker on my American post-office box, they laughed at me.
If the airlines give you free RFID tags, you'll just get new ones with every trip and dump them afterwards, adding to the pile of trash in the world. If you pay for a pair of RFID tags, you're much more likely to keep them and reuse them.
Besides, the airlines won't give you anything for free, they'll just add the cost to your ticket price.
In 2000 the European Parliament "approved a directive that shifts responsibility for the environmental impact of a vehicle over its entire life cycle--from design to disposal--squarely onto the manufacturers' shoulders. Some requirements--a near-ban on the use of toxic heavy metals, and mandated recycling rates of 80% and 85% for cars going on the market after 2006 and 2015, respectively--are far-reaching but feasible."
Another story about BMW's efforts. There are lots more.
The problem I see here is that these folks are trying to apply new tech in an old-fashioned way: they want to tag luggage with RFIDs the same way they used to tag them with barcodes. This makes it more expensive and doesn't resolve the old issue of what happens when the tag is torn off. Better way:
The travellers buy their own RFID tags, each with a unique number. The tag is theirs to keep, throw away or trade as desired. When travelling, they put one tag in each piece of luggage, get the luggage scanned at check-in and go from there. When they recover their luggage at the airport, they can put the tag in a protective sleeve to prevent further scanning.
The cool thing about this, there is no continuous cost to the airlines, no waste of material: the tag can be reused. It'll make it actually cheaper to operate. Of course, the RFID tag should be optional (at least for the short-term) or really cheap to buy right at the check-in coutner.
One theory I've read is that global warming (increased overall temperature on Earth) will entail an increase in the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere. This will cause more extreme weather: snowstorms in summer, droughts in winter, bigger hurricanes, etc. It will also throw a lot of established systems out of whack, make hot places hotter and cold places colder, and as RevMike has stated, totally change the climate in some places.
So yeah, it's plausible that some global warming periods threw the system so out of whack that it flipped over into an ice age. The problem right now is that we don't have a complete model of Earth. We don't know exactly what's causing the current rise in overall temperatures, and we don't know how that'll affect future changes.
Re:Earth simulator (supercompuer)
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The Earth simulator is not about predicting local short-term weather. That is way too dependent on random events to be easily predictable. The Earth simulator is about predicting the overall trend in weather patterns over years and decades. The goal is to find out, e.g., if we double the amount of CO2 over the next 10 years, will the average annual rainfall on the Mediterranean coast increase, decrease or stay the same? (and I mean, not the annual rainfall for 2017, but the average amount for the 2010s.)
Long-term weather patterns (i.e. spanning years) can be modeled, eventually, because there are not too many variables. The reason it hasn't been done yet is that not all the formulas have been defined. To determine how variables affect the weather, we need formulas, and to define the formulas we need lots of measurements, especially historical ones. The lack of formulas is also why nobody knows for sure if there will be a global warming and if it will be man-made or natural.
Perhaps not diagnostics per se, but a method of regular checkup as a precursor to diagnostics. Right now, people usually know they have cancer when it starts to hurt. But if this method was non-invasive and easy enough to administer, you could get yourself scanned regularly and if something showed up you'd go see a doctor for further checks. It may generate some false positives, but it may also catch some cancers a lot sooner.
"Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
I'd say quite the opposite. Those who listen to randomly shuffled playlists have the added mental capacity to deal with unexpected sequences of events.
Personally, I started listening to songs randomly when I downloaded a ton of songs from mp3.com and ripped to CDs based on type of music. The problem is I use a cheapo DVD player for playback and it can only play the songs in either alphabetical order or randomly. Alphabetical order doesn't make much sense, so I choose random and I find that I like the diversity it generates.
I think a lot of the TV viewing habits come simply from the "water-cooler" effect. At work or at the pub, we hear our peers talking about this and that show and we feel the need to watch the same shows in order to not get left out, same goes with movies etc. One way to watch less TV is to hang out with people who watch less of it too.
One is the type of technology being patented. We're seeing more and more patents on procedures (business, medical, software etc). Procedures can be described in terms broad enough to cover situations that didn't even exist when the patent was filed, and it's hard to know what term will be too broad tomorrow: "computer network" was specific enough 15 years ago but too vague 5 years later.
Two is the way patents are used today. The goal of a patent was to allow the inventor to license and sell their technology through partners without fearing the loss of ownership (my favorite example is Dolby noise-reduction). But today, many US patents have become no more than instruments of litigation. They're not there to let the inventor find partners, but to let the patent owner shoot down their competitors.
An open-source patent office may fix the first problem by declining all procedural patents, but that's better solved by reforming the patent office's charter. It won't fix the second problem because it can't predict how the inventor will use a legitimate patent.
Slashdot Mirror
The original text format is obviously tailor-made for accessibility. The HTML format will make the data more useful (perhaps even more usable?) for those people who have an HTML browser, but will make it inaccessible for some users.
Overall it's a really poor choice of wording in the Slashdot title and summary. But then again, Slashdot and many of its visitors seem to get the terms accessible, usable and useful totally wrong while they chide others for misusing hacking and cracking.
Like I said right the beginning of my origianl post:
The premise of my argument is that most webpages are not photo albums, but stuff like blogs accompanied by polls and discussions, or small e-commerce websites, etc. These require some simple interaction that is hard or impossible to implement right now. Example: as a casual author I want to implement a popup calendar so visitors can pick a date easily (their birthdate? desired delivery date?) This would be done readily if there were modal dialogs, but without these the casual authors can't easily implement pickable calendars, any pickable calendar is a kludge at best. That's quite a shame.
You seem to be turning this from "it should be easy for anybody to put up a website" to "it should be easy for anybody to create advanced software available through the web".
No, you seem to be turning this from "it should be easy for anybody to put up a website with simple interaction" to "websites are either static or advanced software." A lot of websites are somewhere between totally static and advanced front-ends to enterprise applications. That is the problem with the current web standards, they cater to the static webpages and miss the boat entirely.
you argue that you want to merge content, presentation and behaviour into one mega-language,...
Not at all. I'd like to have two languages, one that offers simple interactivity for novice authors, and one that is more complex and allows programmers to create more complete interactive sites. The basic interaction language should provide stuff like modal dialogs, menus and combo entry fields, stuff that are sorely missing from the current web standards.
Actually, Javascript is the mega-language that you're talking about. It's not easy to use for novice authors. Usually they just copy and paste pieces of code, make minor changes and hope it works. There should be an easier-to-use language that novice authors can actually grok completely without taking programming courses. Javascript/ECMAScript tries to cater to both the novice author and the programmer and fails doing either well, as expected.
In order for standards to work, they must implement all the necessary features and allow users to follow the standards easily.
XHTML, CSS, SVG are OK for document presentation, but most webpages are not static documents, they incorporate interactivity. The aforementioned standards do little for interactivity, so authors turn towards Flash, ActiveX. And no, Javascript doesn't help, Javascript is a pile of shit that's too simplistic for programmers and too complicated for non-programmers.
A successful web standard must incorporate one well-defined and easy-to-use language to implement basic GUI elements and operations. It must also implement one other well-defined and complete language to implement more complicated programming tasks that may be needed for complex web pages. These two standard languages are missing.
A successful web standard must also be easy to support by IDEs geared towards non-programming authors. XHTML and CSS are great, but few web authoring tools generate code in these languages in a manner consistent with their original intent. Same goes with Javascripting (or what should be replacing it). Standards must be usable by IDEs.
If you want to avoid a single-company web, you must have everything availale: Standards that are complete and usable (i.e. easy to understand by non-programmers), Several web browsers that implement complete standards, Several IDEs that allow authoring by non-programmers.
And if you think web-authoring should be the sole domain of highly-skilled programmers, think again. It's that attitude that lets MS take everything over. MS will create products that are usable by casual authors and these authors will use MS products only and flood the web with MS-only documents.
I hope all of the above. Choice is good, and as long as they interoperate, I believe it would be fantastic to have several "leaders" each with its own look and feel catering to a different class of users.
Actually, the story itself is pretty level-headed, it's the summary posted on Slashdot that is sensationalistic (I believe that's what you meant when you said "sensationalized" but I just want to make it very clear). The article says:
But the submitter cut the sentence when quoting, removing the qualification and making it look like the organisms found affect everybody and not just a specific group of people.
Another quote to show the article is quite reasonable:
The good thing is, now when someone is diagnosed with a deficiency in their immune system, they can be advised to use glass shower doors.
... I understand first-hand how frustrating it can be to get useful, realistic requirements from our customers...
I'm not sure if you meant this to sound the way it does, but you've pointed out my pet peeve:
The customer is not the proper person to write the specs. Specs must be written by a skilled analyst who can observe and communicate with the customers in a manner to determine what is required.
I've seen too many projects go down the drain because they were completely useless. They were completely useless because the specs described a system that was useless to the customer. Because the specs were written by the customer. Because the project manager simply asked the customer "what do you want this system to do?"
Customers are usually qualified to do their job, not to write specs for software system. It's the project manager's responsibilty to hire a qualified requirements gatherer (a lot of times a usability engineer is good for this) who will spend a lot of time with the customer, interviewing them, observing them work with their current methods, etc. There is much more to this than collecting specs written by the customer and putting them in a standard format.
Requirements written by the right person will make a project much more successful, requirements written by the wrong person will definitely ruin the project.
Or: in any generation of humans, some will want to send someone else out while they stay home and watch the movie, while others will want to go out themselves. So in every generation, the latter group will design stuff dreaming of being the ones who will go out, or at least knowing that someone in the future will... Until in some generation, we'll really have the capability and some humans from that era will want to go out and colonize space themselves.
So we design things in a way that'll let humans go out and explore space, because we figure some of the humans in the future will want to do that. It may not be the most logical thing to do, but it's the emotionally good thing to do, just like climbing a mountain.
If humans went, it would be close to front page stuff most days they were away from earth.
I doubt this very much. The problem is the general public and the Western media have a short attention span. They will get on a frenzy at the beginning and then lose interest over time. Case in point: the space shuttles. The first few shuttle trips were followed with lots of fanfare and attention, then as they got into the routine, they were all but ignored. Shuttles went up anyway, with humans aboard, but unless they were doing something extraordinary like the first EVA to fix the Hubble, they barely made it to the evening news.
Humans or robots, the first trips to Mars will be closely followed for the first few days, then as they hit routine, the media will change their attention to the next sensation. You can only do so many spots for "today the astronauts got up, did complicated experiments that will take 2 months to analyze, went to bed."
For many of us yes it does matter, a ton. I'd like to explore the universe myself for the same reason that I like to climb a mountain myself, instead of sending a robot up there. I don't want to go to an Imax theater and watch footage from some robot's explorations, I want to shoot the footage myself. Granted, it's not for everybody, but it's still for a lot of us.
The central library in Vancouver has the following combo setup:
(1) Lots of machines scattered throughout the building, you login with your card number (passworded) and you get 1 hour max per day to use it. The cool thing is the machine reboots after each session so you know you're not saddled by any malware from the previous user. I have no idea for how long the session logs are kept.
(2) About 20 machines in one spot that are free-for-all (no login required), with the recommendation to not use for more than 30 minutes if others are waiting. These machines tend to stay up for some time, but you can always reboot them yourself.
(3) You can use any of these machines + lots of others to access the library catalog. You don't need to login to access the catalog (unless using a machine from group 1).
BTW, I've used computers in many libraries throughout North America, and while they all ran Windows, the system was so restricted in what you could do that it didn't really showcase anything about the OS. And every one of them always gave the choice between IE and Netscape/Mozilla and sometimes Lynx.
So? What are you saying? Because for some people the sound will still be off, it shouldn't be sync'd for everybody else? Am I missing something? Even if the processors are faster, you'll still get your delay for your setup.
And this solves the syncing problem now, so we can enjoy digital TV now. There is no point in denying ourselves something that works now while we wait for a more elegant solution later.
I wonder how practical this is while it's still connected to the grid. AFAIK solar panels are costly to manufacture, producing as much pollution as they would prevent otherwise, so they're best used where access to the power grid is unavailable. This way you can justify their use by saving on grid connectivity. This isn't the case here, so it's cool as an experiment but not very practical.
That may be a Good Thing. As others have mentioned, if this feature becomes accessible then half the passengers will be annoying the other half with their non-stop cellphone conversations. But if the cost is high enough, only those who really need it will use it (pretty much the way it is with the current seatback phones except you can take calls too).
Back when I used to get junk snail mail, it cost me time to sort out the junk mail from the real mail. It was even worse because while regular mail usually came in standard-sized envelopes, the junk mail came in all shapes and forms, and I had to check carefully to make sure a legitimate mail wasn't hiding in the folds of a useless flyer. And after sorting, I still had to take more time to dispose of the junk mail.
Also, junk email can be removed with a couple of clicks, but junk snail mail gives you paper-cuts (ouch).
Here in Vancouver, I got the postpeople to put a "no junk mail" marker on both my home and post-office mailboxes, as a result I don't get any of the flyer-type junk mail. Also in credit applications, I always report the lowest income I can get away with to discourage direct-marketing mailings. That and asking everybody for no direct-marketing contacts cuts my junk mail down to almost zero.
Interestingly, when I asked USPS to put a "no junk mail" marker on my American post-office box, they laughed at me.
If the airlines give you free RFID tags, you'll just get new ones with every trip and dump them afterwards, adding to the pile of trash in the world. If you pay for a pair of RFID tags, you're much more likely to keep them and reuse them.
Besides, the airlines won't give you anything for free, they'll just add the cost to your ticket price.
Looks like the European Community has already put the wheels in motion for this:
In 2000 the European Parliament "approved a directive that shifts responsibility for the environmental impact of a vehicle over its entire life cycle--from design to disposal--squarely onto the manufacturers' shoulders. Some requirements--a near-ban on the use of toxic heavy metals, and mandated recycling rates of 80% and 85% for cars going on the market after 2006 and 2015, respectively--are far-reaching but feasible."
Another story about BMW's efforts. There are lots more.
The problem I see here is that these folks are trying to apply new tech in an old-fashioned way: they want to tag luggage with RFIDs the same way they used to tag them with barcodes. This makes it more expensive and doesn't resolve the old issue of what happens when the tag is torn off. Better way:
The travellers buy their own RFID tags, each with a unique number. The tag is theirs to keep, throw away or trade as desired. When travelling, they put one tag in each piece of luggage, get the luggage scanned at check-in and go from there. When they recover their luggage at the airport, they can put the tag in a protective sleeve to prevent further scanning.
The cool thing about this, there is no continuous cost to the airlines, no waste of material: the tag can be reused. It'll make it actually cheaper to operate. Of course, the RFID tag should be optional (at least for the short-term) or really cheap to buy right at the check-in coutner.
One theory I've read is that global warming (increased overall temperature on Earth) will entail an increase in the amount of energy stored in the atmosphere. This will cause more extreme weather: snowstorms in summer, droughts in winter, bigger hurricanes, etc. It will also throw a lot of established systems out of whack, make hot places hotter and cold places colder, and as RevMike has stated, totally change the climate in some places.
So yeah, it's plausible that some global warming periods threw the system so out of whack that it flipped over into an ice age. The problem right now is that we don't have a complete model of Earth. We don't know exactly what's causing the current rise in overall temperatures, and we don't know how that'll affect future changes.
The Earth simulator is not about predicting local short-term weather. That is way too dependent on random events to be easily predictable. The Earth simulator is about predicting the overall trend in weather patterns over years and decades. The goal is to find out, e.g., if we double the amount of CO2 over the next 10 years, will the average annual rainfall on the Mediterranean coast increase, decrease or stay the same? (and I mean, not the annual rainfall for 2017, but the average amount for the 2010s.)
Long-term weather patterns (i.e. spanning years) can be modeled, eventually, because there are not too many variables. The reason it hasn't been done yet is that not all the formulas have been defined. To determine how variables affect the weather, we need formulas, and to define the formulas we need lots of measurements, especially historical ones. The lack of formulas is also why nobody knows for sure if there will be a global warming and if it will be man-made or natural.
Perhaps not diagnostics per se, but a method of regular checkup as a precursor to diagnostics. Right now, people usually know they have cancer when it starts to hurt. But if this method was non-invasive and easy enough to administer, you could get yourself scanned regularly and if something showed up you'd go see a doctor for further checks. It may generate some false positives, but it may also catch some cancers a lot sooner.
"Kellaris said random shuffle likely appeals to the MTV generation -- kids with short attention spans who are likely "brain damaged."
I'd say quite the opposite. Those who listen to randomly shuffled playlists have the added mental capacity to deal with unexpected sequences of events.
Personally, I started listening to songs randomly when I downloaded a ton of songs from mp3.com and ripped to CDs based on type of music. The problem is I use a cheapo DVD player for playback and it can only play the songs in either alphabetical order or randomly. Alphabetical order doesn't make much sense, so I choose random and I find that I like the diversity it generates.
I think a lot of the TV viewing habits come simply from the "water-cooler" effect. At work or at the pub, we hear our peers talking about this and that show and we feel the need to watch the same shows in order to not get left out, same goes with movies etc. One way to watch less TV is to hang out with people who watch less of it too.
There are two problems here.
One is the type of technology being patented. We're seeing more and more patents on procedures (business, medical, software etc). Procedures can be described in terms broad enough to cover situations that didn't even exist when the patent was filed, and it's hard to know what term will be too broad tomorrow: "computer network" was specific enough 15 years ago but too vague 5 years later.
Two is the way patents are used today. The goal of a patent was to allow the inventor to license and sell their technology through partners without fearing the loss of ownership (my favorite example is Dolby noise-reduction). But today, many US patents have become no more than instruments of litigation. They're not there to let the inventor find partners, but to let the patent owner shoot down their competitors.
An open-source patent office may fix the first problem by declining all procedural patents, but that's better solved by reforming the patent office's charter. It won't fix the second problem because it can't predict how the inventor will use a legitimate patent.