Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a bunch of people adopt racially neutral avatars and see whether, being unable to see skin color, they do or don't group themselves socially along racial lines?
That might help to shed some light on whether group association depends more on actual skin color perceptions, or on perceived cultural differences.
As things like Android phones emerge, I wonder if there will be ways to hack around stuff like absurd SMS costs? Like:
Write a program to run on the phone at each end
Have it send a text message as a "call" with a code that tells the other phone to "pick up" silently and receive a text message encoded as voice (like the old modems)
Profit!
The idea of getting IP-over-voice despite the carriers' rules strikes me as hilarious, even though it would be obscenely slow for anything bigger than text messages.
I'm sure next time they'll say "this time, its different, the world is really going to end this time".
And... maybe it will?
I'm not a doomsayer, but a new threat is, well, new. Maybe the space elevator or the wormhole generator WILL kill us where the particle accelerator failed. We just have to calculate the risks again and maybe try it.
Right, but the reason THIS would be interesting (to me) is that it would reduce the current monopoly of IE and hopefully make standards-based web development easier.
The day i can use wikipedias own search instead of having to google to find stuff inside wikipedia, ill think about it.
If the search algorithms themselves are open source, why is their current suckiness not an argument in favor of helping to improve them? (Assuming you like the idea of open search.)
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
Well, it can be. If they're trying to capture users who think about their browser choice already, well, most of those people already ditched IE for FireFox or something else.
However, Google could put Chrome on the Google home page and get a lot of oblivious IE users to take notice.
While possibly unfair, that would be VERY interesting to see.
It may be old news, but I just listened to a podcast interview with Jimmy Wales today. He has started Wikia Search, meant to be a free-as-in-speech search engine, with publicly-available web crawls generated by distributed computing using Grub. The algorithms, he said, should be open too.
I have to admit that I'm practically a Google fanboi, but since owning search pretty much means owning the internet, I really like this idea. If you're uncomfortable with Google's power, why not try to help Wikia Search?
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera. Do we really need a new browser? Moreover, do we really need yet another partial implementation of the web standards?
I for one, do not want to code and test for another browser.
I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Also, the more open source browsers we have, the more transparent those implementations become - further fueling the standards conversation.
Maybe one day soon IE will be the only browser that major sites DON'T work on. And then it will have to conform.
(Like most Slashdotters, I, too, think everyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid. I'm just trying to determine if I should flame you or clamor for you to be modded up.)
Designers with formal design background know that that list is all you really need.
No. Do a Google search for "School of Design." Look at their websites and portfolios. See how many of them use only the web-safe fonts in their work. (Hint: zero.)
No, you shouldn't use a handwritten script font for paragraph content, even if you could. But the idea that nothing on a page (including headlines) should be anything but the standard web fonts is ludicrous. Currently, headlines are often images to get around that limitation.
More font options would mean the headlines would still look nice, they could be more accessible and scalable, and that you could still look at everything in Arial if you wanted to.
The web is about "give people freedom and let the best browsers/sites/designs emerge," not "limit people to X choices because I know what's best."
Hardly. He often called himself the Son of Man; he never called himself the Son of God... You have no idea what John says about him. All you have is something that is supposed to have been written by John.
So even though you don't trust that "the gospel of John" records what Jesus said, you're still arguing based on the quotes it gives? Let's look at some of them.
How about John 5?
18For this reason the Jews tried all the harder to kill him; not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal with God... (snip) 24"I tell you the truth, whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and will not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life. 25I tell you the truth, a time is coming and has now come when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.
Ah, that's just figurative though, right? Oh wait:
28"Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice 29and come out--those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.
Hmmmm, that sounds suspiciously literal. Then there's John 8:58, where Jesus claims to have preceeded Abraham, using the "I Am" phraseology of God at the burning bush:
"I tell you the truth," Jesus answered, "before Abraham was born, I am!"
Those who opposed Jesus certainly seemed to understand very clearly what these sort of statements meant. For example, John 10:33:
"We are not stoning you for any of these," replied the Jews, "but for blasphemy, because you, a mere man, claim to be God."
I don't have the time or resources right now to argue about which books were included in the current Bible, or the reliability of the manuscripts behind them, and honestly it's not a subject I'm very well-versed in. But to say that Jesus never said He was God is, I think, not an honest readings of the texts we have.
Just because you think you understand the Bible doesn't mean you have the authority to judge which interpretations are patronising or otherwise.
The men who were closest to Jesus spent the rest of their lives preaching that he claimed to be, and was, God incarnate. All the disciples except John and Judas were killed for refusing to stop preaching that message. Any motivation for personal gain would clearly be negated by the threat of death. (I know you can give examples of people who died for crazy things, but 10 guys preaching the same message is a stretch.)
Is it patronizing to think that I understand Jesus' words better than the men who knew him personally and died defending that knowledge? Absolutely. It's like saying you understand Socrates better than Plato did, or Jefferson better than Washington did.
When people say "Jesus didn't mean X" when clearly his disciples believed he did mean X, that's both patronizing and arrogant. You can believe that Jesus was wrong, but don't say you understood him better than John. I trust what John says about him more than what anybody living today says about him.
That's a good point, which I hadn't thought of. I wonder if we could overcome that by having a standard plug interface which detects the amount of current needed and delivers only that?
Anyone who treats the Bible as anything other than a work of fiction is missing the point of Christ...Try to live your life by Christ's example by all means, but for God's sake [sic] don't actually claim he was the incarnation of a personal deity.
Let me get this straight: you think that 1) Christ is someone whose life we should emulate, and 2) all the accounts we have about that life are unreliable?
How, precisely, can we follow the example of someone we know nothing about?
And if the accounts about him ARE accurate, He claimed to have the authority to forgive sins, to call the dead forth from their graves, and plenty of other statements that would be lunacy coming from a mere mortal.
I wouldn't want to follow the example of someone who said stuff like that unless I thought it were true. (Which I do.) You can't have it both ways.
You know, maybe instead of some "charging pad" we just need a universal adapter, something rectangular, maybe, that could be used to charge things.
Yeah, I hate how half the cell phones out there need a unique charger. The cell industry seems to be moving towards standard plug sizes like micro USB. It would be great if ALL gadgets used the same power input jack.
If that was the case, you could build a little "charging closet" into the wall of a bedroom with a half dozen standard charging plugs in it. Gadgets could come and go, but you'd charge them all the same way.
Step on a CD with your boots on, it's probably garbage. Run a cassette over with a truck, tape any broken sections back together and re-spool it, that thing's fine. When it comes to longevity, CDs are the worst idea yet.
Yeah, because I'm always running over my music collection with a truck.
Want longevity? How about the ability to quickly rip a perfect digital copy and make as many backups as you like? I think that's a pretty good idea.
I don't know about you, but my CDs ARE backups. And they're safely stored in my closet. Unlike my tapes, which I threw away, after they wore out from use.
Great idea. And it seems to me that academic writing is more about prestige than money, anyway. I would think that a university would love to brag about how much its professors contributed to the textbooks that their rivals are using.
Finally, there should be a great "public good" argument in favor of this. Universities get a lot of public funding and many have huge treasure chests built up. If they help to create great textbooks that are FREELY available to public schools, that would be be a clear public service to justify taxpayer support.
I'm not sure why people are so down on Nokia. I purposely bought a Nokia phone this time because mine have always had good reception, customizable menus, and have worked well. (This model finally lets me back up my contacts via USB, too.)
I work in the cell phone industry and carried an HTC Touch for work for a while. It could do a lot more than my Nokia, but it was big and slow and the reception was poor. Too many "smart phones" are lousy at the "phone" part, and mediocre on the "smart."
Printing an e-book (legal or illegal) is more expensive; printer cartridges are as expensive and the quality is nowhere near a real textbook.
Who says you have to print it yourself? When I was in school, some professors assigned course packets that you could pick up at a local printer. They were pretty cheap and looked fine. If a whole class went in together and had them printed in bulk, that would probably drive the price down further.
Of course these were black and white packets. But if you have a field where color images are really necessary - like anatomy diagrams - you could have a supplemental online site, or have just those few pages printed in color.
What I hated about buying the $200 book was that the next semester, I could not usually sell it for anywhere near the same price, and often the course that uses it would not be offered or would change editions of the book. I lost a lot of money on textbooks. All for some 300-page color glossy monstrosity of a history text that would have been fine in black and white.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't it be more interesting to have a bunch of people adopt racially neutral avatars and see whether, being unable to see skin color, they do or don't group themselves socially along racial lines?
That might help to shed some light on whether group association depends more on actual skin color perceptions, or on perceived cultural differences.
Exactly. People who watch the news all day going BUY SELL BUY SELL are just asking to lose money on mistakes like this.
As things like Android phones emerge, I wonder if there will be ways to hack around stuff like absurd SMS costs? Like:
The idea of getting IP-over-voice despite the carriers' rules strikes me as hilarious, even though it would be obscenely slow for anything bigger than text messages.
And... maybe it will?
I'm not a doomsayer, but a new threat is, well, new. Maybe the space elevator or the wormhole generator WILL kill us where the particle accelerator failed. We just have to calculate the risks again and maybe try it.
I'm just sayin'.
I, for one, take all marketing messages at face value.
I don't know what's up with you guys.
Right, but the reason THIS would be interesting (to me) is that it would reduce the current monopoly of IE and hopefully make standards-based web development easier.
If the search algorithms themselves are open source, why is their current suckiness not an argument in favor of helping to improve them? (Assuming you like the idea of open search.)
Well, it can be. If they're trying to capture users who think about their browser choice already, well, most of those people already ditched IE for FireFox or something else.
However, Google could put Chrome on the Google home page and get a lot of oblivious IE users to take notice.
While possibly unfair, that would be VERY interesting to see.
It may be old news, but I just listened to a podcast interview with Jimmy Wales today. He has started Wikia Search, meant to be a free-as-in-speech search engine, with publicly-available web crawls generated by distributed computing using Grub. The algorithms, he said, should be open too.
I have to admit that I'm practically a Google fanboi, but since owning search pretty much means owning the internet, I really like this idea. If you're uncomfortable with Google's power, why not try to help Wikia Search?
I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Also, the more open source browsers we have, the more transparent those implementations become - further fueling the standards conversation.
Maybe one day soon IE will be the only browser that major sites DON'T work on. And then it will have to conform.
...how does it relate to the price of oil?
(That is the criteria for a news story these days, right?)
Who, exactly, is the "stupid lobby?"
(Like most Slashdotters, I, too, think everyone who doesn't agree with me is stupid. I'm just trying to determine if I should flame you or clamor for you to be modded up.)
Hoorah for the reasoned debates of Slashdot!
No. Do a Google search for "School of Design." Look at their websites and portfolios. See how many of them use only the web-safe fonts in their work. (Hint: zero.)
No, you shouldn't use a handwritten script font for paragraph content, even if you could. But the idea that nothing on a page (including headlines) should be anything but the standard web fonts is ludicrous. Currently, headlines are often images to get around that limitation.
More font options would mean the headlines would still look nice, they could be more accessible and scalable, and that you could still look at everything in Arial if you wanted to.
The web is about "give people freedom and let the best browsers/sites/designs emerge," not "limit people to X choices because I know what's best."
Game the search results on the candidates. Especially for sites in the swing states.
So even though you don't trust that "the gospel of John" records what Jesus said, you're still arguing based on the quotes it gives? Let's look at some of them.
How about John 5?
Ah, that's just figurative though, right? Oh wait:
Hmmmm, that sounds suspiciously literal. Then there's John 8:58, where Jesus claims to have preceeded Abraham, using the "I Am" phraseology of God at the burning bush:
Those who opposed Jesus certainly seemed to understand very clearly what these sort of statements meant. For example, John 10:33:
I don't have the time or resources right now to argue about which books were included in the current Bible, or the reliability of the manuscripts behind them, and honestly it's not a subject I'm very well-versed in. But to say that Jesus never said He was God is, I think, not an honest readings of the texts we have.
The men who were closest to Jesus spent the rest of their lives preaching that he claimed to be, and was, God incarnate. All the disciples except John and Judas were killed for refusing to stop preaching that message. Any motivation for personal gain would clearly be negated by the threat of death. (I know you can give examples of people who died for crazy things, but 10 guys preaching the same message is a stretch.)
Is it patronizing to think that I understand Jesus' words better than the men who knew him personally and died defending that knowledge? Absolutely. It's like saying you understand Socrates better than Plato did, or Jefferson better than Washington did.
When people say "Jesus didn't mean X" when clearly his disciples believed he did mean X, that's both patronizing and arrogant. You can believe that Jesus was wrong, but don't say you understood him better than John. I trust what John says about him more than what anybody living today says about him.
That's a good point, which I hadn't thought of. I wonder if we could overcome that by having a standard plug interface which detects the amount of current needed and delivers only that?
Better that than patronizing re-interpretations.
Let me get this straight: you think that 1) Christ is someone whose life we should emulate, and 2) all the accounts we have about that life are unreliable?
How, precisely, can we follow the example of someone we know nothing about?
And if the accounts about him ARE accurate, He claimed to have the authority to forgive sins, to call the dead forth from their graves, and plenty of other statements that would be lunacy coming from a mere mortal.
I wouldn't want to follow the example of someone who said stuff like that unless I thought it were true. (Which I do.) You can't have it both ways.
Yeah, I hate how half the cell phones out there need a unique charger. The cell industry seems to be moving towards standard plug sizes like micro USB. It would be great if ALL gadgets used the same power input jack.
If that was the case, you could build a little "charging closet" into the wall of a bedroom with a half dozen standard charging plugs in it. Gadgets could come and go, but you'd charge them all the same way.
Yeah, because I'm always running over my music collection with a truck.
Want longevity? How about the ability to quickly rip a perfect digital copy and make as many backups as you like? I think that's a pretty good idea.
I don't know about you, but my CDs ARE backups. And they're safely stored in my closet. Unlike my tapes, which I threw away, after they wore out from use.
Great idea. And it seems to me that academic writing is more about prestige than money, anyway. I would think that a university would love to brag about how much its professors contributed to the textbooks that their rivals are using.
Finally, there should be a great "public good" argument in favor of this. Universities get a lot of public funding and many have huge treasure chests built up. If they help to create great textbooks that are FREELY available to public schools, that would be be a clear public service to justify taxpayer support.
To your comment, sir, I would like to respond with a hearty "LOL." (I have restrained myself from ROF.)
I'm not sure why people are so down on Nokia. I purposely bought a Nokia phone this time because mine have always had good reception, customizable menus, and have worked well. (This model finally lets me back up my contacts via USB, too.)
I work in the cell phone industry and carried an HTC Touch for work for a while. It could do a lot more than my Nokia, but it was big and slow and the reception was poor. Too many "smart phones" are lousy at the "phone" part, and mediocre on the "smart."
Who says you have to print it yourself? When I was in school, some professors assigned course packets that you could pick up at a local printer. They were pretty cheap and looked fine. If a whole class went in together and had them printed in bulk, that would probably drive the price down further.
Of course these were black and white packets. But if you have a field where color images are really necessary - like anatomy diagrams - you could have a supplemental online site, or have just those few pages printed in color.
What I hated about buying the $200 book was that the next semester, I could not usually sell it for anywhere near the same price, and often the course that uses it would not be offered or would change editions of the book. I lost a lot of money on textbooks. All for some 300-page color glossy monstrosity of a history text that would have been fine in black and white.