It's amazing the power corporations have, isn't it? I mean, look how they have systematically expanded work hours, reduced health and safety regulations, put more children to work, and ramped up their pollution over the last 100 years. If only there were some way to force corporations to advertise truthfully, label accurately, and honor the contracts they enter into.
And the political system is obviously corrupt. It's the only plausible explanation for how a candidate gets elected whom I dislike.
If only we changed the entire system of public and private enterprise, the world would finally be the way it should be--exactly how I want it!
I don't think so. The evolutionary biologists I know focus very specifically on the chemistry and mathematics of genes. I think it would be at least as accurate to refer to modern evolutionary science as "Mendelian." Natural selection, as Darwin conceived it, is quite limited and vague compared to the state of the science today.
So put together your own study and include all the people you know should have been in the first one. We'll wait here.
The argument all along has been that the scientists with the most to gain from government action -- through grants or regulation or whatever -- are the ones most likely to agree on anthropogenic climate change.
Who's been making this argument, specifically? Because I've never actually heard it made by anyone, I've only heard people like you vaguely cite it.
It's a cute story but it's fundamentally untrue. I live near Washington DC and I can assure you that there is absolutely no shortage of mosquitos around here in the summer.
The U.S. does not have a malaria problem because it is an easily treatable or preventable disease, and we are rich enough to afford the drugs. It is a major problem in 3rd world countries because they cannot afford enough drugs to get below the epidemic tipping point. So they use pesticides (including DDT) to try to suppress the carriers instead, because that is a much cheaper approach. Unfortunately it is also less effective.
That is exactly the sort of detailed feedback I was looking for, and it gives me some things to check out and test on the Joomla sites we've stood up for testing. Thanks.
I'm not married to a PHP CMS, but we often have more work to do than time or staff to do it, so it's important for us to get a CMS for which it's easy to find capable, professional consultant support. So far the best options along those lines seem to be Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.
In the time it will take you to learn to use Joomla to it's maximum, you'll have learned Perl or PHP(or Python, if you must) yourself, gotten a decent understanding of a certain brand of SQL and made a site custom tailored to you needs, as well as pick up an invaluable skill or two while doing it.
This sounds fun but it's not a good idea for me professionally. I lead an internal corporate Web team and while there's no doubt in my mind that we could create a CMS from scratch, every hour we spend coding that up would be an hour we are not executing a communication strategy. We try to avoid reinventing wheels. So we use existing CMS systems and spend our time doing original design, original content, and occasional technical tweaks or extensions when we can't find a product to do what we want. Sometimes we come to a conclusion that we just have to write something ourselves to be effective. But that's getting more and more rare as open source and low-cost software continue to improve. Thanks.
The site will be almost entirely content. It will need to be updated by non-technical staff, specifically uploading PDFs, creating new pages, and applying tags from a set taxonomy. It will need to handle user accounts and control access permissions down to the page level. This doesn't seem to call for much more than a standard CMS.
We do not want to spend a lot of money on a license. We want a system that we can host and for which we can easily outsource work (no vendor lock-in). We want a system that we can customize pretty easily; bonus if there is a large community creating extensions. We want a system that is proven stable under millions of page views/month.
Today I can converse directly with someone on the other side of the globe, I can fly thousands of miles in a few hours, I can see what's happening in other countries, I can move at 100mph, etc. To a person 1000 years ago these are magical abilities.
But no human needs to manage 1000 years of change or even 100 years of change. We only need to manage about 60-70 years of change at the absolute most, and I would argue it's more like 30. That's because about every 30 years a new generation grows up among technology that their parents did not have as kids.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" scenario assumes that culture will not keep up with technology, but it always does. Not long after machines are created that think like people, a generation of children will grow up in a world where machines think like people. And like always, their parents and grandparents will not understand how they will manage life, but they will. Because it's the only world they'll know.
Long perspective creates singularities in both directions--like standing on a long straight stretch of road, which appears to narrow to a point in both directions, beyond which we cannot see. They are apparent, but not real, singularities.
The whole "when does life begin" campaign is kind of a red herring, because really the issue is about legal rights. Even if everyone agrees that a 1-month fetus is a full citizen, the most the law could do is compel separation from the mother. How would that work out for a 1-month fetus?
In 1996 I was a geology major living in a house with a bunch of geo and other science majors. Needless to say we threw a pretty big party on the night of October 23, 1996. I mean, c'mon, how often does the Earth turn 6,000??
I bought a Macbook Pro with some apprehension about the screen but it has worked out fine. After my experience I have to think that some of the hating is people not giving it a chance over time.
I thought I was very clever for planning to take the glass out of my new Macbook Pro and take it to a glass company nearby, who could bake on an antiglare coating. I was quite disappointed when the ifixit.com disassembly guide ended with the note that the glass is not a removable part...
Matte displays are a terrible hack to solve the problem of reflections. All they do is smear out the reflection to where it's less noticeable, killing sharpness and contrast in the process. They only reason they are used on laptops is that they are cheap.
The ideal solution is a plain glass screen with an antiglare coating. This does not smear out the reflection but actually suppresses it. Contrast is better maintained and sharpness is not affected. This is what every professional-grade CRT monitor has had for years. It is analogous to the multi-coating used on camera lenses to suppress internal reflections. (ever hear of a "matte" camera lens?)
Apple does not even need to switch out the bezels. I would happily have paid $100 more to simply have an antiglare coating on the glass screen cover on my 15" Macbook Pro. I like the machine ok without it (see http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1107919&cid=26656749) but it would be better with it.
I build Web sites for a living (some design and some coding) and I am a serious amateur photographer, and I bought one of the new Macbook Pros in early December. I was concerned about the glossy display, especially after playing with one in the local Apple store. But I loved everything else about it so I figured I would give it a chance for a week or two. I'm coming from an iBook G4 (personal machine) and I have a Dell Latitude laptop from my employer, both with matte screens.
I have been very pleasantly surprised at how little I notice the Macbook's glossiness. When I open the machine from sleep I see a perfect reflection of myself, but it disappears completely once the screen comes on. For one thing, the depth of focus seems different enough; if I turn the screen brightness way down I can pick out my reflection, but unless I'm trying to, it drops out of focus. The other aspect is that the backlight is so much brighter than either of my other laptops. Even in a bright sunlight room, turning up the backlight all the way overpowers most reflections.
If I'm sitting directly in sunlight with a light shirt on, there's a noticeable reflection, especially if I've got something dark on the screen. But I actually tested the other laptops under the same conditions, and although the reflection was more diffuse, it was just as distracting. I could not do any serious work with any of the 3 machines in that situation. A laptop is just not going to work in all situations. I'm confident that if I end up outside or in a coffee shop or something, this laptop will work just as well as any other.
Aside from the screen it is the best laptop I've ever used...great combination of very solid feel and cool features. The multitouch trackpad seemed sort of gimmicky at first but it is actually very handy. It makes a lot of sense to just push down wherever your finger ends up...it's a much more "tactile" approach...more of a mental connection between the pointer and the fingertip. And the gesture for Expose is even handier than F9-F11.
I like working on this machine so much I've started leaving my Dell at the office and using LogMeIn.com to work from home on the Macbook.
No to both. I think I see where you're going with this though; I remember an article speculating that perhaps one reason we still have our appendix is that it serves as a "reserve" for GI bacteria to repopulate the system if it gets cleaned out. I still have my appendix though, so maybe it's not a perfect solution. Or maybe GI bacteria is not the real reason I have more problems now.
A couple years ago I got very, very sick--nastiness coming out of both ends to the point of hospitalization for dehydration. It took a week for my abdominal muscles to get over the soreness from the heaving. Before that sickness, I had a very tolerant digestive system--spicy, rich, or strange foods did not bother me at all. Since the sickness, certain foods upset my digestive system, causing gas, bloating, etc. And it's weirdly specific--I used to love Progresso canned soup, but since the sickness any Progresso soup with chicken in it gives me terrible gas.
This article is really interesting because I was just speculating the other day with my wife about this--that maybe my sickness cleaned out my GI system so thoroughly that I've lost certain gut bacteria that I had collected over the course of my life, and thus I'm not able to digest certain foods as easily as I once could.
The various forms of government themselves exists because people looked for creative ways to solve a problem. Don't create a false dichotomy; government is just another applied human solution like a written language or a bridge or a fork.
The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change.
Who are these people? Can you list their names? Was Susan Solomon an author of the "Limits to Growth"?
When solving problems I think it's important to be specific. Like--what exactly is Susan Solomon saying, and why specifically do you believe she is wrong? Do you have more to offer than just vague hand-waving?
It's funny how problems seem to solve themselves from the perspective of people who had nothing to do with the solution. "New technology" does not just create itself. Genetically engineered drought-tolerant crops are just one example of a "new technology" that was developed specifically in response to concerns over our ability to feed ourselves.
I have every hope that unforeseen new technology will help mitigate problems like global warming. That doesn't mean it makes sense to disregard the warnings. In fact the warnings help people decide where to focus their new technology efforts.
We know from Apple statements that they were working on the iPhone for at least 2 years prior to the public release. They bought Fingerworks in mid-2005, and Fingerworks was founded in 1998 based on multi-touch research done before that in graduate school. This is probably one reason that Jeff has been careful to point out that his work is not necessarily patentable. But that does not mean that Apple's technology is not patentable. If it came to a court case Apple would just need to be able to prove their IP predates other similar developments, like Jeff's. Since they bought IP from Fingerworks that might be true.
Hell, Apple's the one that bought out FingerWorks, the original patent holder for lots of other multi-touch tech, but wasn't really getting anywhere in their implementation.
Without those patents, would Apple have bothered to buy Fingerworks? Or would they have just used all of the Fingerworks ideas and built the iPhone anyway?
Patents exist in part to protect the small from the large. Without patent rights we'd probably still have the iPhone, but the Fingerworks guys would have gotten nothing in return for their pioneering work. By your line of thinking, we could say that Fingerworks was retarding innovation since they weren't getting anywhere in the market, while Apple had a good use in mind for the IP.
Property rights--intellectual or otherwise--are always somewhat inconvenient to business. But we protect them anyway since without them there is not much point to being in business in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
It's amazing the power corporations have, isn't it? I mean, look how they have systematically expanded work hours, reduced health and safety regulations, put more children to work, and ramped up their pollution over the last 100 years. If only there were some way to force corporations to advertise truthfully, label accurately, and honor the contracts they enter into.
And the political system is obviously corrupt. It's the only plausible explanation for how a candidate gets elected whom I dislike.
If only we changed the entire system of public and private enterprise, the world would finally be the way it should be--exactly how I want it!
I don't think so. The evolutionary biologists I know focus very specifically on the chemistry and mathematics of genes. I think it would be at least as accurate to refer to modern evolutionary science as "Mendelian." Natural selection, as Darwin conceived it, is quite limited and vague compared to the state of the science today.
So put together your own study and include all the people you know should have been in the first one. We'll wait here.
The argument all along has been that the scientists with the most to gain from government action -- through grants or regulation or whatever -- are the ones most likely to agree on anthropogenic climate change.
Who's been making this argument, specifically? Because I've never actually heard it made by anyone, I've only heard people like you vaguely cite it.
It's a cute story but it's fundamentally untrue. I live near Washington DC and I can assure you that there is absolutely no shortage of mosquitos around here in the summer.
The U.S. does not have a malaria problem because it is an easily treatable or preventable disease, and we are rich enough to afford the drugs. It is a major problem in 3rd world countries because they cannot afford enough drugs to get below the epidemic tipping point. So they use pesticides (including DDT) to try to suppress the carriers instead, because that is a much cheaper approach. Unfortunately it is also less effective.
Noscript is like putting a lock on every cabinet, doorknob, drawer, and shelf. You're constantly needing your keys for every little thing.
That is exactly the sort of detailed feedback I was looking for, and it gives me some things to check out and test on the Joomla sites we've stood up for testing. Thanks.
I'm not married to a PHP CMS, but we often have more work to do than time or staff to do it, so it's important for us to get a CMS for which it's easy to find capable, professional consultant support. So far the best options along those lines seem to be Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.
In the time it will take you to learn to use Joomla to it's maximum, you'll have learned Perl or PHP(or Python, if you must) yourself, gotten a decent understanding of a certain brand of SQL and made a site custom tailored to you needs, as well as pick up an invaluable skill or two while doing it.
This sounds fun but it's not a good idea for me professionally. I lead an internal corporate Web team and while there's no doubt in my mind that we could create a CMS from scratch, every hour we spend coding that up would be an hour we are not executing a communication strategy. We try to avoid reinventing wheels. So we use existing CMS systems and spend our time doing original design, original content, and occasional technical tweaks or extensions when we can't find a product to do what we want. Sometimes we come to a conclusion that we just have to write something ourselves to be effective. But that's getting more and more rare as open source and low-cost software continue to improve. Thanks.
The site will be almost entirely content. It will need to be updated by non-technical staff, specifically uploading PDFs, creating new pages, and applying tags from a set taxonomy. It will need to handle user accounts and control access permissions down to the page level. This doesn't seem to call for much more than a standard CMS.
We do not want to spend a lot of money on a license. We want a system that we can host and for which we can easily outsource work (no vendor lock-in). We want a system that we can customize pretty easily; bonus if there is a large community creating extensions. We want a system that is proven stable under millions of page views/month.
Hope that helps, any feedback appreciated.
Can either of you provide more details on this? I'm considering Joomla for a pretty substantial site. Preferred alternatives? (Drupal?)
Today I can converse directly with someone on the other side of the globe, I can fly thousands of miles in a few hours, I can see what's happening in other countries, I can move at 100mph, etc. To a person 1000 years ago these are magical abilities.
But no human needs to manage 1000 years of change or even 100 years of change. We only need to manage about 60-70 years of change at the absolute most, and I would argue it's more like 30. That's because about every 30 years a new generation grows up among technology that their parents did not have as kids.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" scenario assumes that culture will not keep up with technology, but it always does. Not long after machines are created that think like people, a generation of children will grow up in a world where machines think like people. And like always, their parents and grandparents will not understand how they will manage life, but they will. Because it's the only world they'll know.
Long perspective creates singularities in both directions--like standing on a long straight stretch of road, which appears to narrow to a point in both directions, beyond which we cannot see. They are apparent, but not real, singularities.
The whole "when does life begin" campaign is kind of a red herring, because really the issue is about legal rights. Even if everyone agrees that a 1-month fetus is a full citizen, the most the law could do is compel separation from the mother. How would that work out for a 1-month fetus?
In 1996 I was a geology major living in a house with a bunch of geo and other science majors. Needless to say we threw a pretty big party on the night of October 23, 1996. I mean, c'mon, how often does the Earth turn 6,000??
Well clearly he wasn't "eenveencible".
I bought a Macbook Pro with some apprehension about the screen but it has worked out fine. After my experience I have to think that some of the hating is people not giving it a chance over time.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1107919&cid=26656749
I thought I was very clever for planning to take the glass out of my new Macbook Pro and take it to a glass company nearby, who could bake on an antiglare coating. I was quite disappointed when the ifixit.com disassembly guide ended with the note that the glass is not a removable part...
Matte displays are a terrible hack to solve the problem of reflections. All they do is smear out the reflection to where it's less noticeable, killing sharpness and contrast in the process. They only reason they are used on laptops is that they are cheap.
The ideal solution is a plain glass screen with an antiglare coating. This does not smear out the reflection but actually suppresses it. Contrast is better maintained and sharpness is not affected. This is what every professional-grade CRT monitor has had for years. It is analogous to the multi-coating used on camera lenses to suppress internal reflections. (ever hear of a "matte" camera lens?)
Apple does not even need to switch out the bezels. I would happily have paid $100 more to simply have an antiglare coating on the glass screen cover on my 15" Macbook Pro. I like the machine ok without it (see http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1107919&cid=26656749) but it would be better with it.
I build Web sites for a living (some design and some coding) and I am a serious amateur photographer, and I bought one of the new Macbook Pros in early December. I was concerned about the glossy display, especially after playing with one in the local Apple store. But I loved everything else about it so I figured I would give it a chance for a week or two. I'm coming from an iBook G4 (personal machine) and I have a Dell Latitude laptop from my employer, both with matte screens.
I have been very pleasantly surprised at how little I notice the Macbook's glossiness. When I open the machine from sleep I see a perfect reflection of myself, but it disappears completely once the screen comes on. For one thing, the depth of focus seems different enough; if I turn the screen brightness way down I can pick out my reflection, but unless I'm trying to, it drops out of focus. The other aspect is that the backlight is so much brighter than either of my other laptops. Even in a bright sunlight room, turning up the backlight all the way overpowers most reflections.
If I'm sitting directly in sunlight with a light shirt on, there's a noticeable reflection, especially if I've got something dark on the screen. But I actually tested the other laptops under the same conditions, and although the reflection was more diffuse, it was just as distracting. I could not do any serious work with any of the 3 machines in that situation. A laptop is just not going to work in all situations. I'm confident that if I end up outside or in a coffee shop or something, this laptop will work just as well as any other.
Aside from the screen it is the best laptop I've ever used...great combination of very solid feel and cool features. The multitouch trackpad seemed sort of gimmicky at first but it is actually very handy. It makes a lot of sense to just push down wherever your finger ends up...it's a much more "tactile" approach...more of a mental connection between the pointer and the fingertip. And the gesture for Expose is even handier than F9-F11.
I like working on this machine so much I've started leaving my Dell at the office and using LogMeIn.com to work from home on the Macbook.
No to both. I think I see where you're going with this though; I remember an article speculating that perhaps one reason we still have our appendix is that it serves as a "reserve" for GI bacteria to repopulate the system if it gets cleaned out. I still have my appendix though, so maybe it's not a perfect solution. Or maybe GI bacteria is not the real reason I have more problems now.
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1106471&cid=26635287
A couple years ago I got very, very sick--nastiness coming out of both ends to the point of hospitalization for dehydration. It took a week for my abdominal muscles to get over the soreness from the heaving. Before that sickness, I had a very tolerant digestive system--spicy, rich, or strange foods did not bother me at all. Since the sickness, certain foods upset my digestive system, causing gas, bloating, etc. And it's weirdly specific--I used to love Progresso canned soup, but since the sickness any Progresso soup with chicken in it gives me terrible gas.
This article is really interesting because I was just speculating the other day with my wife about this--that maybe my sickness cleaned out my GI system so thoroughly that I've lost certain gut bacteria that I had collected over the course of my life, and thus I'm not able to digest certain foods as easily as I once could.
The various forms of government themselves exists because people looked for creative ways to solve a problem. Don't create a false dichotomy; government is just another applied human solution like a written language or a bridge or a fork.
The same people who predicted mass starvation in the 70s are now predicting massive climate change.
Who are these people? Can you list their names? Was Susan Solomon an author of the "Limits to Growth"?
When solving problems I think it's important to be specific. Like--what exactly is Susan Solomon saying, and why specifically do you believe she is wrong? Do you have more to offer than just vague hand-waving?
It's funny how problems seem to solve themselves from the perspective of people who had nothing to do with the solution. "New technology" does not just create itself. Genetically engineered drought-tolerant crops are just one example of a "new technology" that was developed specifically in response to concerns over our ability to feed ourselves.
I have every hope that unforeseen new technology will help mitigate problems like global warming. That doesn't mean it makes sense to disregard the warnings. In fact the warnings help people decide where to focus their new technology efforts.
Minority Report was a fictional movie. I don't think imaginary technology counts as prior art in the U.S.
We know from Apple statements that they were working on the iPhone for at least 2 years prior to the public release. They bought Fingerworks in mid-2005, and Fingerworks was founded in 1998 based on multi-touch research done before that in graduate school. This is probably one reason that Jeff has been careful to point out that his work is not necessarily patentable. But that does not mean that Apple's technology is not patentable. If it came to a court case Apple would just need to be able to prove their IP predates other similar developments, like Jeff's. Since they bought IP from Fingerworks that might be true.
Hell, Apple's the one that bought out FingerWorks, the original patent holder for lots of other multi-touch tech, but wasn't really getting anywhere in their implementation.
Without those patents, would Apple have bothered to buy Fingerworks? Or would they have just used all of the Fingerworks ideas and built the iPhone anyway?
Patents exist in part to protect the small from the large. Without patent rights we'd probably still have the iPhone, but the Fingerworks guys would have gotten nothing in return for their pioneering work. By your line of thinking, we could say that Fingerworks was retarding innovation since they weren't getting anywhere in the market, while Apple had a good use in mind for the IP.
Property rights--intellectual or otherwise--are always somewhat inconvenient to business. But we protect them anyway since without them there is not much point to being in business in the first place.