...research that does not yield immediate or forseeable applications seem to be frowned upon by many businesses nowadays. But then again, it's difficult to say what exactly HP is keeping him for. HP isn't exactly where you'd turn for innovation nowadays.
He was already at Apple. He'll probably go to Google.
If Google's searching algorithm gets better, fewer people would have to reword their query, thus resulting in fewer overall searches.
Another factor is what users are searching for, and why. If I wanted a quick definition or synonym, I'd use dictionary.com or thesaurus.com, respectively. If I wanted to quickly search for factual information about a particular subject, I might use wikipedia's search instead of google. If I wanted to search for movie listings, I'd use yahoo. If I wanted to search for movie information, I'd use IMDB.
So perhaps google's percentage is down. But its raw numbers might not necessarily reflect this.
This is a good point, and rather ironic, if you really think about it. China, one of the most undemocratic superpowers in the world, will soon be the last bastion of content freedom. To my knowledge, only the import DVD players from China sold over the gray market offers unlimited changes to the player's DVD region as a feature.
Knowing how NAT's work, this is unlikely. NAT's, or routers as people like to call them, work by mascarading as a normal computer to the external network. They basically assume the IP of the DHCP-registered computer and uses ports to forward the right packets to the right device in the internal network. The catch is that the internal device must initiate the connection, since NAT's wouldn't know which device to forward packets with random or closed ports to.
One way of monitoring for NAT's might be to use packet analysis, and look for some of the more common subnets that are defined for internal use (192.168.x.x being the most common). Certain badly-configured applications will send out the internal IP for the other machine to reply to. But that requires going through every packet, and is generally not feasible.
MAC address checking would largely prevent outsiders from hooking their computer into your network. But it won't prevent existing users from plugging in, say, a NAT.
Posting lower statistics might not be a bad thing. This way, Microsoft won't have any incentive to try to out-innovate IE. While competition is good, when M$ gets serious, there won't be any. Biting off sizeable chunks of Microsoft's monopoly will at least curb their attempts to influence hardware manufacturers.
The premise is intriguing enough. Since Hollywood's all into remakes these days, it wouldn't be a bad idea to give it a shot once it gets into the public domain. Oh wait, that'll be in another 30 years...
Technical issues with circumvention aside (DRM by its very nature cannot guarantee this), there are still a few issues with this idea other than the ones you've noted.
Let's start with the basics. The first premise is that works that are under copyright actually belong to society, and the creators are the ones who are given the privilege to exclusively copy their work by society (the laws). There are no rights to read, watch, or listen. These things cannot be granted by any body or organization as much as the ability to think cannot be granted. This is what your proposal attempts to do. If, for example, the private key has to be issued every time (which I assume, because if it gets "downloaded" somehow into every piece of equipment permanently, then there'll be nothing stopping you from pulling the key out from, let's say an unauthorized piece of equipment), then at any time, this third party can prevent any person from performing these actions of reading, watching, and listening. Imagine your VCR scanning your room, recognizing three people more than you're "authorized" to show to, and immediately stopping your tape. Morally, such a system should not be allowed to exist, not just because this heralds the start of a totalitarian society, but also because this is against the very principles of freedom (DRM is Digital Rights Management, not Draconian Rights to Media).
Now, I think my arguments against the merits of this system should be clear, having heard the moral argument first. Again, the point of failure of this system is the third party whom you've placed your private key into escrow. In essence, the consumer must rely upon the nobility of those who keep their private keys. When this third party becomes unfriendly, the system becomes unfriendly. When the third party becomes malicious, the system becomes malicious. Essentially, there must be some way for the end user to ensure the reliability of this escrow service provider. What drives this is competition. But eventually, all free markets naturally consolidate into monopolies. This is because all businesses know that cooperation is better than competition (remember A Beautiful Mind?), hence all the laws against such practices, though no one seems to care about the MPAA. This third party, or organization of third parties would be more powerful than the content producers (the MPAA) and the content consumers (you and me) combined. And organization more powerful than the MPAA...well, we all know how these turn out.
Finally, I'd like to point out just some of the technical issues. Again, circumvention aside, if the private key is associated with the machine, malicious hardware can easily defeat the system. However, if the private key is as I've described up two paragraphs, then this requires constant contact with the third party. Constant contact isn't always possible, or even feasible. Not every place can have such access. Remote locations, above the stratosphere, deep underground or under the sea, etc. For such instances, the private key would have to be downloaded to the player, permanently. But again, attaching the private key to the player won't work, as we've established up top in my post.
I am as much for copyright as any sane content producer (I am producing content right now, and I have and will produce much more content that's covered by copyrights). I don't agree with the extremists who say copyright should be done away with, though I respect the choices of producers who choose not to copyright their works, or choose not to enforce their copyrights. However, copyright should not be more than what it is (or was), which is essentially the equivalent to what patents are for tangible objects but for ideas.
This begs the question. How does this technology know who you are, and how does it know that you're you. How does a computer differenciate between you loaning something to somebody (a DVD) and making a copy for that person (your ideal DRM would provent you not from making the copy, which would get in the way of people looking to back things up, but prevent your friend from playing your DVD).
Perhaps your solution is biometrics. But what if you got into a horrible accident and lost that particular part of your body? Your eyes? Your face was disfigured? You lost your fingerprints, fingers, or even the whole arm?
So what about a unique PGP key? What if you lose or forget it? Do you stop being you? Do you now have no right to any of your stuff because you cannot be identified?
Any way you cut it, DRM will be intrusive to somebody. And if you justify its existence by saying that person isn't likely to be you, then I think that's a very selfish way of looking at things, and completely inappropriate for application to the rest of the world.
The book in question is called the White Pages. It's what the Yellow Pages are to businesses, but for residences. It's produced by your local telephone company (still remember those, all you broadband subscribers?).
Of course, it's not hard to get your name and number delisted from one of these. However, the telephone company still has all your residential information.
Now here's something worth modding up (if only I could *hint hint*;) ), unlike the great-grandparent, whose brief post seem to indicate no knowledge of the Judith Miller incident or the Patriot Act.
For clarification purposes (not a direct reply to parent), Judith Miller was jailed not because she did something she shouldn't have--namely expose Valerie Plame's identity--and in fact, actually was not the person who wrote the Time (magazine) article that publicised the name. She went to jail because she refused to reveal her anonymous sources in front of a grand jury. Now, she likely knew about Plame's identity from the same source or was somehow otherwise tied to the case, which was why she was asked to testify. However, the grounds for which she was jailed was completely unrelated to the revealing of Plame's identity.
Furthermore, victims of the Patriot Act are not necessarily jailed, and if they are, they probably are disappeared, not made into famous stars by the news media. Either way, the Patriot Act doesn't have anything to do with the actual disappearing. However, powers granted by the Patriot Act would most likely be applied to candidates for this disappearing.
Quite frankly, that one, you have knowledge of this information and two, that you can post this information to a public forum where anyone--not just people within the United States, but anyone in the world with a piece of electronic equipment capable of accessing the internet--can read it and gain the same information means that the information is likely to be incomplete.
To say it another way, there's only one organization whose members are exclusively CIA agents. Can you guess which one that is?
Unfortunately, for most people, it's about the bottom line: $$$. Productivity is key. While Windows has the danger of having all sorts of spyware, most people will look at a Linux command line and immediately feel overwhelmed. Shock and awe, while nice for birthday presents, isn't good when the user just wants to get something done with as little hassle as possible.
Short-term interests always take people's attention over long-term interests. What you describe are long-term. Contribution to a monopoly, contracting virii, susceptability to being locked in--none of these are immediate problems, and as you could probably find out just by looking at today's society, people generally don't care about things that don't pose any sort of immediate threat.
The issue with Linux adoption mainly isn't about how to get users with your view to adopt. Most of them already have, for the reasons you've stated. The Next Big Thing(TM) for Linux will be for the smarter user (one who can complete a windows installation without any assistance) to start adopting it, and they won't until Linux offers more than just long-term benefits over Windows.
Make a program with a GUI that opens up LaTeX files and has a button named "Convert to JPEG." Have the program run the bash script at the click of the button. You might want to add things like a save-to directory, batch-conversion, quick preview, etc. afterwards, but that's basically the answer to your question.
That is, after all, the purpose of a GUI.
Now, you might have wanted to ask how a GUI would help write the bash script. Well, it won't. But writing the bash script requires a whole different level of knowledge and expertise, and the people who write scripts aren't the ones who'd be using the GUI. However, if you do have a GUI front-end to your script, you'd probably attract a lot more users.
Wireless card drivers aren't just a pain for Linux. I have an IOGear GWP512 and the drivers that came included with it definitely do not work with my Win2K install. I suspect Windows has determined on its own (wrongly) what kind of wireless card I have, and won't accept any changes I make to the card's drivers.
The difference, I would say, is that drivers will always be a potential problem on Windows, especially for old hardware. On Linux, it doesn't have to be. Not that Linux is necessarily better in terms of drivers, but that its open source nature means in the long run, it can certainly be.
Linux and most other unixes just sort of dump text related to the problem right to the screen. The screen is usually black or dark gray for readability issues.
There's a BSoD screensaver in linux that displays an unrecoverable error screen from a random system. It hasn't been updated with the RSoD yet, but it'll only be a matter of time.
Science is knowledge based on controlled observation, and the scientific process is the method by which we acquire science--or the knowledge.
For most things, the scientific process works. We affirm the existence of gravity because whenever we drop something, it falls to the ground. We assert that some energy will become unuseable after being transferred or transformed because this is what everyone has observed, whether directly or indirectly.
We should never forget that science is transitive. That is, the findings of science are usually broken down into several categories, namely, Laws, Theories, and Hypotheses. Laws are most unlikely to be untrue, then theories, then hypotheses, which are nothing more than educated guesses. I'm sure a lot of religious zealots and scientific nuts will have a field day with this, but nothing is absolutely certain in science. Everything is validated, but the amount of validation and the variety of situations that cause validation determine in which category a particular piece of knowledge belongs. Thus, all of science can eventually fall out of grace, so to speak, due to new evidence. I don't imply that all of science will be contradicted eventually, only that such a possibility exists.
That having been said, errors in science is natural. Science is self-correcting by nature, as in its purest form, it is completely academic. However, because it is supposed to be completely academic (knowledge for and only for the purpose of knowledge), in our ever-increasing society of agendas and positions, pure science has largely gone the way of the dinosaurs. It should not be surprising that a large number of studies have been or will be contradicted. In fact, 33% is likely only the tip of the iceberg. However, that particular assertion of mine requires going into what we can know and what percentage of total knowledge is that likely to be, and the answer to this question is as vague as the subject of the question. But it's still good food for thought.
There is more. The article is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in regards to clinical studies. Unlike physics and chemistry, clinical studies are based on humans. As any good physician knows the human body is both extremely similar and diverse.
Its similarities are very general in nature. For example, the basic prerequisites for living are generally known, but never enumerated in its entirety in one sentence (because there are so many parts of the human body). The differences, now, are very specific. That is, my aorta is not the same diameter as yours. I have a little more of a certain hormone or protein, giving me slight advantages and slight disadvantages in survival.
This is largely the problem with modern medical science, and with studies--or scientific experiments if you will--in this area. As you might have noticed, our medical science has been getting increasingly detailed. Scientific knowledge has gone from the organs to the cells to the organelles now to the proteins. The problem is, even at the cells stage, the variations in human physiology are so significant that no study can take all the variables into account. For example, I might be able to absorb more oxygen out of the air than you. So even if my lungs are largely blocked by mucus, I might still be able to breathe normally. Yet, medical studies will probably include me as having asthma even though my blood stream receives the same amount of oxygen as a "normal" person would without a partially blocked trachea.
No, this doesn't necessarily happen--it depends on what the researcher is looking for, and whether the researcher is looking at the right things. What exactly the right things are no one really knows. Everyone has only whatever they know and believe to determine this, and that in an of itself becomes a subjective part of medical science--indeed, any science for that matter.
This brings me to another issue in modern medical science. Every
The item in question is the floppy disk, not the floppy dick. I know the characters are close together and all, and slashdot fp items haven't been edited so well lately, but there is a significant--if subtle--difference that might not be apparent to all slashdot readers at first sight.
For one, though the expression "marry your computer" has long since been widely used with regards to geeks, putting your floppy dick into a floppy disk drive will be assuredly painful and result in the loss of both.
I'd like to see real benchmarks before considering such an assertion. Just because Firefox seems to open at the same speed whether emulated or not doesn't imply anything. PPC Firefox could be somewhere around 100 ms slower emulated and still seem like it is just as fast as running non-emulated.
And when I say benchmarks, I don't mean synthetic, my memory bandwidth is greater than yours type. I mean actual number crunching, for optimized and unoptimized code.
I know, a lot more goes into how fast something will run. Bus speeds notwithstanding, there's also HDD I/O times, memory latency, etc.
What's interesting is that while most animal minds can think "there are no predators," it's a completely separate thing to think "there are zero predators." Zero is a quantification of none, and it's a step that, as the articles said, took us humans quite some time to figure out.
At the moment, it seems that the only conclusion we can draw from the experiment is that the parrot knows a new way to represent the concept of "none." And while this is quite a feat in teaching, it isn't quite as impressive a feat as actually teaching the concept of zero to an animal whose intelligence supposedly can only grasp the concept of none.
Knowledge of zero heralds the beginning of numeral systems. It might be a good test for such knowledge.
For the most part, layout is really a small factor in the scheme of things. Putting the more common letters in the home position tends to reduce finger travel distance, but that just means any problems would happen later. On the other hand, something like having good posture could reduce or eliminate the chances of the problem entirely.
What I find interesting is that pianists tend to not have RSI or carpal tunnel, even though their repertoire might primarily be Chopin. They do get arthritis, though that's usually from age and a matter of nutrition. But for a pianist, posture is extremely important in producing the right sounds. Wrist and forearm strength is necessary for dynamics. As well, having excellent control of their strength is very important. Of all these things, I think both the posture, and the way power generation is spread throughout the arm accounts for why pianists aren't as prone to RSI.
Power isn't really something we are in control of, as no one really wants their keyboard to be the length of an upright, or even close. I doubt anyone would like their keyboards to type like a piano either. The largest discouragement would be the necessari investment in developing agility and strength in their hands just to type up a 2-page essay.
As I mentioned before, posture is something we are fully in control of. And for those of us who are physically lazy (read: those of us who sit on our asses all day:) ), the importance of constant posture reminderss should not be understated. But for the forgetful, there are always special keyboards that force the wrist and fingers into their respective natural positions. As a bonus, they also sometimes place control keys (alt, shift, space, etc.) in more natural positions, though by no means would such a small change require learning a whole new keyboard layout.
Of course, if the special keyboards are too expensive, just type using only one or two fingers. That moves most of the stress to the forearms though perhaps at the cost of speed.
Bittorrent and its OSS clients.
Exception or the rule? Allow to name a few others:
DC++
Emule
Virtualdub
Xvid
For what they do, these things are very successful. Their target purpose is not as popular as something like Mozilla or Linux. Yet, they excel and dominate their respective niches.
I think the popularity of the software niche determines whether there's corporate financial backing, not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
...research that does not yield immediate or forseeable applications seem to be frowned upon by many businesses nowadays. But then again, it's difficult to say what exactly HP is keeping him for. HP isn't exactly where you'd turn for innovation nowadays.
He was already at Apple. He'll probably go to Google.
If Google's searching algorithm gets better, fewer people would have to reword their query, thus resulting in fewer overall searches.
Another factor is what users are searching for, and why. If I wanted a quick definition or synonym, I'd use dictionary.com or thesaurus.com, respectively. If I wanted to quickly search for factual information about a particular subject, I might use wikipedia's search instead of google. If I wanted to search for movie listings, I'd use yahoo. If I wanted to search for movie information, I'd use IMDB.
So perhaps google's percentage is down. But its raw numbers might not necessarily reflect this.
Only China can help us!
This is a good point, and rather ironic, if you really think about it. China, one of the most undemocratic superpowers in the world, will soon be the last bastion of content freedom. To my knowledge, only the import DVD players from China sold over the gray market offers unlimited changes to the player's DVD region as a feature.
Knowing how NAT's work, this is unlikely. NAT's, or routers as people like to call them, work by mascarading as a normal computer to the external network. They basically assume the IP of the DHCP-registered computer and uses ports to forward the right packets to the right device in the internal network. The catch is that the internal device must initiate the connection, since NAT's wouldn't know which device to forward packets with random or closed ports to.
One way of monitoring for NAT's might be to use packet analysis, and look for some of the more common subnets that are defined for internal use (192.168.x.x being the most common). Certain badly-configured applications will send out the internal IP for the other machine to reply to. But that requires going through every packet, and is generally not feasible.
Don't forget that MAC addresses can be faked.
MAC address checking would largely prevent outsiders from hooking their computer into your network. But it won't prevent existing users from plugging in, say, a NAT.
Posting lower statistics might not be a bad thing. This way, Microsoft won't have any incentive to try to out-innovate IE. While competition is good, when M$ gets serious, there won't be any. Biting off sizeable chunks of Microsoft's monopoly will at least curb their attempts to influence hardware manufacturers.
The premise is intriguing enough. Since Hollywood's all into remakes these days, it wouldn't be a bad idea to give it a shot once it gets into the public domain. Oh wait, that'll be in another 30 years...
Technical issues with circumvention aside (DRM by its very nature cannot guarantee this), there are still a few issues with this idea other than the ones you've noted.
Let's start with the basics. The first premise is that works that are under copyright actually belong to society, and the creators are the ones who are given the privilege to exclusively copy their work by society (the laws). There are no rights to read, watch, or listen. These things cannot be granted by any body or organization as much as the ability to think cannot be granted. This is what your proposal attempts to do. If, for example, the private key has to be issued every time (which I assume, because if it gets "downloaded" somehow into every piece of equipment permanently, then there'll be nothing stopping you from pulling the key out from, let's say an unauthorized piece of equipment), then at any time, this third party can prevent any person from performing these actions of reading, watching, and listening. Imagine your VCR scanning your room, recognizing three people more than you're "authorized" to show to, and immediately stopping your tape. Morally, such a system should not be allowed to exist, not just because this heralds the start of a totalitarian society, but also because this is against the very principles of freedom (DRM is Digital Rights Management, not Draconian Rights to Media).
Now, I think my arguments against the merits of this system should be clear, having heard the moral argument first. Again, the point of failure of this system is the third party whom you've placed your private key into escrow. In essence, the consumer must rely upon the nobility of those who keep their private keys. When this third party becomes unfriendly, the system becomes unfriendly. When the third party becomes malicious, the system becomes malicious. Essentially, there must be some way for the end user to ensure the reliability of this escrow service provider. What drives this is competition. But eventually, all free markets naturally consolidate into monopolies. This is because all businesses know that cooperation is better than competition (remember A Beautiful Mind?), hence all the laws against such practices, though no one seems to care about the MPAA. This third party, or organization of third parties would be more powerful than the content producers (the MPAA) and the content consumers (you and me) combined. And organization more powerful than the MPAA...well, we all know how these turn out.
Finally, I'd like to point out just some of the technical issues. Again, circumvention aside, if the private key is associated with the machine, malicious hardware can easily defeat the system. However, if the private key is as I've described up two paragraphs, then this requires constant contact with the third party. Constant contact isn't always possible, or even feasible. Not every place can have such access. Remote locations, above the stratosphere, deep underground or under the sea, etc. For such instances, the private key would have to be downloaded to the player, permanently. But again, attaching the private key to the player won't work, as we've established up top in my post.
I am as much for copyright as any sane content producer (I am producing content right now, and I have and will produce much more content that's covered by copyrights). I don't agree with the extremists who say copyright should be done away with, though I respect the choices of producers who choose not to copyright their works, or choose not to enforce their copyrights. However, copyright should not be more than what it is (or was), which is essentially the equivalent to what patents are for tangible objects but for ideas.
I'm surprised this wasn't modded funny just for that one statement.
It was for this statement.
This begs the question. How does this technology know who you are, and how does it know that you're you. How does a computer differenciate between you loaning something to somebody (a DVD) and making a copy for that person (your ideal DRM would provent you not from making the copy, which would get in the way of people looking to back things up, but prevent your friend from playing your DVD).
Perhaps your solution is biometrics. But what if you got into a horrible accident and lost that particular part of your body? Your eyes? Your face was disfigured? You lost your fingerprints, fingers, or even the whole arm?
So what about a unique PGP key? What if you lose or forget it? Do you stop being you? Do you now have no right to any of your stuff because you cannot be identified?
Any way you cut it, DRM will be intrusive to somebody. And if you justify its existence by saying that person isn't likely to be you, then I think that's a very selfish way of looking at things, and completely inappropriate for application to the rest of the world.
Mods: This is not funny. This is insightful.
The book in question is called the White Pages. It's what the Yellow Pages are to businesses, but for residences. It's produced by your local telephone company (still remember those, all you broadband subscribers?).
Of course, it's not hard to get your name and number delisted from one of these. However, the telephone company still has all your residential information.
Now here's something worth modding up (if only I could *hint hint* ;) ), unlike the great-grandparent, whose brief post seem to indicate no knowledge of the Judith Miller incident or the Patriot Act.
For clarification purposes (not a direct reply to parent), Judith Miller was jailed not because she did something she shouldn't have--namely expose Valerie Plame's identity--and in fact, actually was not the person who wrote the Time (magazine) article that publicised the name. She went to jail because she refused to reveal her anonymous sources in front of a grand jury. Now, she likely knew about Plame's identity from the same source or was somehow otherwise tied to the case, which was why she was asked to testify. However, the grounds for which she was jailed was completely unrelated to the revealing of Plame's identity.
Furthermore, victims of the Patriot Act are not necessarily jailed, and if they are, they probably are disappeared, not made into famous stars by the news media. Either way, the Patriot Act doesn't have anything to do with the actual disappearing. However, powers granted by the Patriot Act would most likely be applied to candidates for this disappearing.
Quite frankly, that one, you have knowledge of this information and two, that you can post this information to a public forum where anyone--not just people within the United States, but anyone in the world with a piece of electronic equipment capable of accessing the internet--can read it and gain the same information means that the information is likely to be incomplete.
To say it another way, there's only one organization whose members are exclusively CIA agents. Can you guess which one that is?
How do you think I stumbled upon this?
Unfortunately, for most people, it's about the bottom line: $$$. Productivity is key. While Windows has the danger of having all sorts of spyware, most people will look at a Linux command line and immediately feel overwhelmed. Shock and awe, while nice for birthday presents, isn't good when the user just wants to get something done with as little hassle as possible.
Short-term interests always take people's attention over long-term interests. What you describe are long-term. Contribution to a monopoly, contracting virii, susceptability to being locked in--none of these are immediate problems, and as you could probably find out just by looking at today's society, people generally don't care about things that don't pose any sort of immediate threat.
The issue with Linux adoption mainly isn't about how to get users with your view to adopt. Most of them already have, for the reasons you've stated. The Next Big Thing(TM) for Linux will be for the smarter user (one who can complete a windows installation without any assistance) to start adopting it, and they won't until Linux offers more than just long-term benefits over Windows.
Make a program with a GUI that opens up LaTeX files and has a button named "Convert to JPEG." Have the program run the bash script at the click of the button. You might want to add things like a save-to directory, batch-conversion, quick preview, etc. afterwards, but that's basically the answer to your question.
That is, after all, the purpose of a GUI.
Now, you might have wanted to ask how a GUI would help write the bash script. Well, it won't. But writing the bash script requires a whole different level of knowledge and expertise, and the people who write scripts aren't the ones who'd be using the GUI. However, if you do have a GUI front-end to your script, you'd probably attract a lot more users.
Wireless card drivers aren't just a pain for Linux. I have an IOGear GWP512 and the drivers that came included with it definitely do not work with my Win2K install. I suspect Windows has determined on its own (wrongly) what kind of wireless card I have, and won't accept any changes I make to the card's drivers.
The difference, I would say, is that drivers will always be a potential problem on Windows, especially for old hardware. On Linux, it doesn't have to be. Not that Linux is necessarily better in terms of drivers, but that its open source nature means in the long run, it can certainly be.
Linux and most other unixes just sort of dump text related to the problem right to the screen. The screen is usually black or dark gray for readability issues.
There's a BSoD screensaver in linux that displays an unrecoverable error screen from a random system. It hasn't been updated with the RSoD yet, but it'll only be a matter of time.
I find it interesting that you bring this up.
Science is knowledge based on controlled observation, and the scientific process is the method by which we acquire science--or the knowledge.
For most things, the scientific process works. We affirm the existence of gravity because whenever we drop something, it falls to the ground. We assert that some energy will become unuseable after being transferred or transformed because this is what everyone has observed, whether directly or indirectly.
We should never forget that science is transitive. That is, the findings of science are usually broken down into several categories, namely, Laws, Theories, and Hypotheses. Laws are most unlikely to be untrue, then theories, then hypotheses, which are nothing more than educated guesses. I'm sure a lot of religious zealots and scientific nuts will have a field day with this, but nothing is absolutely certain in science. Everything is validated, but the amount of validation and the variety of situations that cause validation determine in which category a particular piece of knowledge belongs. Thus, all of science can eventually fall out of grace, so to speak, due to new evidence. I don't imply that all of science will be contradicted eventually, only that such a possibility exists.
That having been said, errors in science is natural. Science is self-correcting by nature, as in its purest form, it is completely academic. However, because it is supposed to be completely academic (knowledge for and only for the purpose of knowledge), in our ever-increasing society of agendas and positions, pure science has largely gone the way of the dinosaurs. It should not be surprising that a large number of studies have been or will be contradicted. In fact, 33% is likely only the tip of the iceberg. However, that particular assertion of mine requires going into what we can know and what percentage of total knowledge is that likely to be, and the answer to this question is as vague as the subject of the question. But it's still good food for thought.
There is more. The article is published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, in regards to clinical studies. Unlike physics and chemistry, clinical studies are based on humans. As any good physician knows the human body is both extremely similar and diverse.
Its similarities are very general in nature. For example, the basic prerequisites for living are generally known, but never enumerated in its entirety in one sentence (because there are so many parts of the human body). The differences, now, are very specific. That is, my aorta is not the same diameter as yours. I have a little more of a certain hormone or protein, giving me slight advantages and slight disadvantages in survival.
This is largely the problem with modern medical science, and with studies--or scientific experiments if you will--in this area. As you might have noticed, our medical science has been getting increasingly detailed. Scientific knowledge has gone from the organs to the cells to the organelles now to the proteins. The problem is, even at the cells stage, the variations in human physiology are so significant that no study can take all the variables into account. For example, I might be able to absorb more oxygen out of the air than you. So even if my lungs are largely blocked by mucus, I might still be able to breathe normally. Yet, medical studies will probably include me as having asthma even though my blood stream receives the same amount of oxygen as a "normal" person would without a partially blocked trachea.
No, this doesn't necessarily happen--it depends on what the researcher is looking for, and whether the researcher is looking at the right things. What exactly the right things are no one really knows. Everyone has only whatever they know and believe to determine this, and that in an of itself becomes a subjective part of medical science--indeed, any science for that matter.
This brings me to another issue in modern medical science. Every
The item in question is the floppy disk, not the floppy dick. I know the characters are close together and all, and slashdot fp items haven't been edited so well lately, but there is a significant--if subtle--difference that might not be apparent to all slashdot readers at first sight. For one, though the expression "marry your computer" has long since been widely used with regards to geeks, putting your floppy dick into a floppy disk drive will be assuredly painful and result in the loss of both.
I'd like to see real benchmarks before considering such an assertion. Just because Firefox seems to open at the same speed whether emulated or not doesn't imply anything. PPC Firefox could be somewhere around 100 ms slower emulated and still seem like it is just as fast as running non-emulated.
And when I say benchmarks, I don't mean synthetic, my memory bandwidth is greater than yours type. I mean actual number crunching, for optimized and unoptimized code.
I know, a lot more goes into how fast something will run. Bus speeds notwithstanding, there's also HDD I/O times, memory latency, etc.
Currently it is estimated for a 70% chance of launch on Wednesday, with the chances lowering later in the week. Is that a fact or prediction?
What's interesting is that while most animal minds can think "there are no predators," it's a completely separate thing to think "there are zero predators." Zero is a quantification of none, and it's a step that, as the articles said, took us humans quite some time to figure out. At the moment, it seems that the only conclusion we can draw from the experiment is that the parrot knows a new way to represent the concept of "none." And while this is quite a feat in teaching, it isn't quite as impressive a feat as actually teaching the concept of zero to an animal whose intelligence supposedly can only grasp the concept of none. Knowledge of zero heralds the beginning of numeral systems. It might be a good test for such knowledge.
For the most part, layout is really a small factor in the scheme of things. Putting the more common letters in the home position tends to reduce finger travel distance, but that just means any problems would happen later. On the other hand, something like having good posture could reduce or eliminate the chances of the problem entirely.
:) ), the importance of constant posture reminderss should not be understated. But for the forgetful, there are always special keyboards that force the wrist and fingers into their respective natural positions. As a bonus, they also sometimes place control keys (alt, shift, space, etc.) in more natural positions, though by no means would such a small change require learning a whole new keyboard layout.
What I find interesting is that pianists tend to not have RSI or carpal tunnel, even though their repertoire might primarily be Chopin. They do get arthritis, though that's usually from age and a matter of nutrition. But for a pianist, posture is extremely important in producing the right sounds. Wrist and forearm strength is necessary for dynamics. As well, having excellent control of their strength is very important. Of all these things, I think both the posture, and the way power generation is spread throughout the arm accounts for why pianists aren't as prone to RSI.
Power isn't really something we are in control of, as no one really wants their keyboard to be the length of an upright, or even close. I doubt anyone would like their keyboards to type like a piano either. The largest discouragement would be the necessari investment in developing agility and strength in their hands just to type up a 2-page essay.
As I mentioned before, posture is something we are fully in control of. And for those of us who are physically lazy (read: those of us who sit on our asses all day
Of course, if the special keyboards are too expensive, just type using only one or two fingers. That moves most of the stress to the forearms though perhaps at the cost of speed.
Bittorrent and its OSS clients. Exception or the rule? Allow to name a few others: DC++ Emule Virtualdub Xvid For what they do, these things are very successful. Their target purpose is not as popular as something like Mozilla or Linux. Yet, they excel and dominate their respective niches. I think the popularity of the software niche determines whether there's corporate financial backing, not the other way around.