Well do you want people poking around your accounts even if they are not giving information that will lead to identity thief.
Whether I want it to happen or not and whether it amounts to a crime or not are two entirely different questions. As also is, if a crime was committed, who specifically committed it?
From what I can tell this guy just decremented and/or incremented URLs and the server sent him the information. If there was a crime committed, it would seem to have been commmitted by whomever had responsibility for setting up that server and protecting the information on it.
Just because someone *wrote* that he committed a crime, and someone else repeated it, does not mean it is true. I would like to see it explained exactly what crime he committed here. It appears all he did was increment and decrement urls. A system that calls that a crime would be criminally insane.
Greenland was colonized during a period of global warmth. That it is why it was named that way.
Medieval warm period wasnt necessarily a period of global warmth. It may have been a period of north-atlantic warmth. Other areas were cooler. This is one of the many areas where the situation is just flat out more complicated than any popular treatment would lead one to believe. Very often one area will be cooler and another hotter and it's bugger-all difficult to properly sort it out and demonstrate a *global* trend without going to a very long time-scale.
And it wasnt named that because it was actually green - it wasnt. It was named that because Ericsson had previously found it very difficult to attract settlers for his previous development, Iceland, because even though it was in fact quite green at the time, it just sounded cold and barren. So he chose a more attractive name for his second development in the interest of marketing.
The climate was not influenced then by Scandinavians driving gas guzzling, CO2 belching SUV's.
Certainly true.
Man is not powerful enough to change the earth's climate to any "significant" degree.
Whether or not this is true is far from a settled question. Mans actions influence the environment and vice versa and always have. How much is "significant?" There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected. However in the broader picture, of course, the natural forces that have driven climate change since long before humans evolved are still at work and dwarf anything we can do or likely will be able to do anytime soon.
I think the climate change scare is just another way for politicians to steal our hard earned money.
I think there is a grain of truth in that, but you drastically oversimplify.
Not at all. Source code shows precisely how calculations were carried out.
When you have an algorithm, for instance, that produces the 'hockey stick' even when fed random numbers, that is positive proof that the numbers have been cooked - manipulated in order to produce the predetermined outcome. That isnt science.
A CD that was produced in response to a FOIA request which was ultimately denied after a court battle was nonetheless leaked. It is on wikileaks last I checked. Plenty of proof of professional misconduct there, including source code.
According to TFA(or at least one of the many I've read on this subject so far), the tools are of a style used by pre-humans 700,000 years or so ago
Acheulian industry, yes. It was used by H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalis, as well as H. sapiens, from nearly 2 million years ago right up to modern times.
As to the rest of it, what does it matter whether they came from Greece or from Africa.
Au contraire, it matters a great deal. If they came from Greece it would be, as I said, no surprise, just confirmation of current analysis. If they came directly from Africa that would be truly shocking however, since it would be a blue-water crossing rather than a chain of island hops.
They think based on the evidence(the style of the tools, the known populations at that time) that it's more likely Africa, but it doesn't really matter.
That's just the thing, the article certainly makes it sound that way, only it doesnt even hint at any evidence that might actually indicate that.
I suspect the author was confused, or just wanted to write something dramatic.
Yes 20 miles is a lot less impressive than 200, but it's still sea travel. It's still taking enough people to build a population 20 miles over the sea. To get from mainland Greece they'd have to do it several times. Even under those circumstances it's a hell of a lot more than we thought people at that time were capable of.
It would have been a multigenerational expansion rather than a single voyage. A group moves to the first island in the chain, then some years later when that one grows crowded a group splits out and colonises the next, and so on. This is the way H. erectus colonised much of the planet and the way H. sapiens did it again later as well. It really isnt any more or less than is to be expected.
Sure, if you can smuggle the mathematical concept of infinity in you can always get absurd results.:)
But in reality these are indeed as you say 'the real deal' - stones dont knapp themselves. If you ever get a chance to see how things things were made up close you will understand why. It's quite a fascinating - and painstaking - craft.
I'm still thinking the article is melodramatic fluff though. It's not at all surprising to see these things on Crete with such a date. We know archaic homonids made them, we know they spread out all along the coastlines 'beachcombing' just as our own ancestors did a little later. And island-hopping to Crete during a glacial maximum should have been well within their capabilities - other large mammals were doing it too, the hippos I already mentioned, elephants, even deer made that crossing at various points.
To the untrained eye that is all they would appear, sure. I dont think the troll moderation was entirely fair - I would bet that a lot of readers looked at the photo at the top of that page and thought the same thing.
But, look for instance at the second piece from the right at the top of the story. Look at the top-left edge. See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone, that is a hand-axe or "chopper" which has been intelligently worked and shaped for a purpose.
The article is pretty crappy though (as is expected with "science reporting" unfortunately.) The commentary regarding early human sea-crossing capabilities is a bit... well... warped. Even though there is a throwaway mention of non-modern humans it is given no context and the rest of the text appears quite ignorant of it. The fourth paragraph is one big facepalm. It implies several times that this find somehow indicates a 200-mile crossing from Africa, when it does nothing of the sort. Given the loose dating (prior to 130kya by geological strata) it would seem quite likely that the ancient population who made these tools crossed at or near a glacial maximum, when sea levels were much lower than today, making for much less open sea even if they did come directly from the African coast. And, at least from what I can see, there is no reason whatsoever to think they came from that direction anyway. More likely they came in over much shorter distances from the north, at a time when sea levels were low and the voyage would have been very short. If the dating comes in as early as some of the quotes indicate, this could even have been at the same time that the hippopotamus made the same journey.
Last time I used gnome it would do most of that, but only by left-clicking and finding the right preferences panel. And I found when I screwed around with it enough to make it very useful the panel often died.
It's basically the same as Windown, but with the bar on the top instead of the bottom.
It's sort of an aside, but you do realise that you can put "that bar" on top or sides in windows? I personally always place it on a side, as this makes much more efficient use of screen space, since computer monitors are normally wider than they are tall, but most often used to display virtual-paper whose dimensions skew in the opposite direction, so placing it on the side puts it in otherwise unused space while placing it to the top or the bottom either reduces the space available for your work. Most linux systems can be tweaked to do the same, although many taskbar apps make it much harder than it should be for some reason - this is one area where Windows really is friendlier - just click on a blank section of the bar and drag. I havent used Gnome in a long time and I am guessing that is what Ubuntu is using - it would be very like Gnome to make this difficult or impossible, but in KDE it's only a little harder than in Windows.
Read both specs. Given two independent developers who have to implement entirely from the spec, they are for more likely to produce interoperable implementations if they use OOXML than if they use ODF.
Incorrect. Section after section of the OOXML spec give insufficient information for implementation.
Microsoft's OOXML, while sure to be empirically more interoperable with most users due to the pervasity of Microsoft Office
Actually that is not correct. Most Microsoft Office implementations found "in the wild" are *less* interoperable with the new MS Office than with Open Office.
Are they really charging *more* for the same service if you bring your own phone?
That is utterly insane BS, although about what I would expect from my past dealings with US mobile phone companies. Why in the hell do people put up with that?
It sounds like windows 7 is improved, but only very slightly, relative the atrocious behaviour of XP. But you are right, you didnt really follow directions so the cases arent quite the same.
From a quick google search it appears that somewhere there is a panel that allows you to "turn off" WMP and IE, but it sounds like all this actually does is prevent the normal GUI for them from preloading. Basically what "removing access" does in XP. The whole thing is still there as is obvious every time I get out certain install disks. Even though IE is supposed to be disabled, it pops right up at an invisible request from a poorly behaved program every time.
If Win7 is allowing another media player to take the top spot in the explorer context menu that is a very small improvement though.
Speaking of Media Player, here's an interesting little thing I noticed.
(This is on XP Pro, if you are running newer Windows try whatever the equivelant would be and report the results by all means.)
Install VLC. Disable access to the Windows Media Player. (The closest you can get to actually uninstalling it - add remove programs - set program access and defaults - custom - scroll down to windows media player - uncheck "enable access to this program.) Make sure VLC is set as the default and access is allowed instead.
Now insert a DVD. Pull up "my computer" and double-click the DVD (or right click and choose the first option, and this is assuming like me you have exterminated "autoplay" already - if not you probably get to skip everything but inserting the DVD.
Up comes Windows Media Player, which proceeds to steal focus, ignore all input, and phone home before finally deciding something is missing and popping up another focus-stealing window to inform you it isnt actually capable of playing the DVD anyway.
That remove access button doesnt work any better for windows media player than it does for IE now does it?
Now go back and right click the DVD again, scroll down the list, you arent looking for 'play' but 'play with VLC.' So not only is the program still accessible, it remains the default shell option even after supposedly being disabled.
I have been using MS products since the early 80s and I never expected "innovation" out of them. It's not lack of "innovation" that makes me less than a fan - it's three decades of this sort of "innovation" - innovative ways to arrogantly turn my own computer against me.
and an ineffective government is bad no matter where you sit on the political spectrum
Totally incorrect. For anyone not situated very close indeed to the sitting government on the 'political spectrum' an ineffective government is better than an effective one. The capacity for governments to do good is quite limited, their capacity to do evil is unfortunately not.
You could make the moral argument but it would be mistaken.
I know a lot of eyes will roll but this is exactly the sort of situation where one can see, if one will look, just how critically important good semantic hygiene and objective morality are important to society. If "copyright" were a basic human right then these objections would absolutely be valid, the moral argument solid, and the legal change would be ultimately ill advised and damaging to the species as a whole in the long run.
However since the first is not true - since "copyright" is not a basic human right nor a pure derivative of such - none of the rest follows.
Firefox/Mozilla guys live in some imaginary World where you maintain/install/update thousands of desktops/laptops just like a home user, clicking "firefox.exe" installer.
Yeah, sad but true. This is why Debian had to ditch firefox after all.
Maybe people running Windows in large organisations should switch to debian and iceweasel instead of trying to wrestle. In fact that sounds like an excellent idea!
Alternatively, it is quite possible to roll a customised firefox/windows setup as well. A "large organisation" should surely have someone on staff that can accomplish such a simple task.
Pesonally, I think he doesn't have a GF because he's the type of geek who thinks of explaining why he doesn't have a GF with the Drake equation
If you RTFA you will find out he DID find a girlfriend after writing the paper. Been with her for 6 months now. Some women do find brains sexy - and a subset of those are NOT zombie freaks. Strange but true.
The "average woman" is going to be a lot older than he is, particularly in the UK. (Worldwide, this may not be the case, in the third world it definitely is not the case, but in the UK? I dont know the figure but I would bet it's nearly 50.) So probably well over 50% of women in the UK are not attractive to him simply because they are too much older than he is, and another significant percentage are going to be too young as well. Figure perhaps (this isnt even a BOTEC just a rough guess, feel free to jump back in with real stats) 10% of UK women are in his age range, if he finds 50% of THOSE women attractive, that's still only 5% of the female population.
You could look them up, but since you can't bothered... Meteors large enough to survive transit through the Earth's atmosphere and leave a recognizable crater about once every ten thousand years across the entire surface of the earth.
Ok, so using your numbers this should have happened a minimum of 250k/10k=25 times since modern humans first appeared. Plenty of chance for at least one of those impacts to be observed.
[Remainder of your post snipped, as it's nothing but smoke blowing bullshit. Given the quantities you emit, it's unsurprising you are no longer able to discern the difference between smoke and science.]
An excellent all-purpose rebuttal when you have no rebuttal eh? I bet you use it a lot.
I do believe *you* are the one blowing smoke, on both issues. First you complain about the lack of numbers but give none yourself.
Humans have been in Australia for somewhere between 40 and 80k years, first off. You didnt give any numbers yourself but you appear to be underestimating that time period. Beyond that, you seem to be conceptualising the history of the various Aboriginal peoples as being limited to the time since arrival on the continent - which is a tremendous misconception. Those people existed long before that time, at various stages of a very long migration which took them from Africa along the southern coast of asia, through the malay archipelago, and so on. The true and complete history of those people is precisely the same length as that of any other people, as we all come from the same roots, in all likelihood the time period involved is no less than a quarter of a million years. They could have learned to associate craters with "falling stars" in Africa, in Australia, or at any point in between. It is no less unlikely for this association to have been made by Australians than by Europeans.
Furthermore when you claim that dropping a pebble into water does not make the same shape, you are just wrong. You either havent done the experiment yourself, or you lack the perceptual focus to catch it, but the same shape is formed, for a fraction of a second.
You can't displace coal use by making your appliances more efficient.
This assertion requires evidence. On the face it is nonsensical. If I replace an essential appliance that uses 2kwh with one that does the same job but uses 1kwh, assuming that my electrical supply is 100% coal-fired, I have reduced demand for coal proportionately. If not why not?
Slashdot Mirror
By what authority do they "review" the site? Seriously. It's none of their business what's on the site.
Whether I want it to happen or not and whether it amounts to a crime or not are two entirely different questions. As also is, if a crime was committed, who specifically committed it?
From what I can tell this guy just decremented and/or incremented URLs and the server sent him the information. If there was a crime committed, it would seem to have been commmitted by whomever had responsibility for setting up that server and protecting the information on it.
That is a bald assertion however.
Just because someone *wrote* that he committed a crime, and someone else repeated it, does not mean it is true. I would like to see it explained exactly what crime he committed here. It appears all he did was increment and decrement urls. A system that calls that a crime would be criminally insane.
Medieval warm period wasnt necessarily a period of global warmth. It may have been a period of north-atlantic warmth. Other areas were cooler. This is one of the many areas where the situation is just flat out more complicated than any popular treatment would lead one to believe. Very often one area will be cooler and another hotter and it's bugger-all difficult to properly sort it out and demonstrate a *global* trend without going to a very long time-scale.
And it wasnt named that because it was actually green - it wasnt. It was named that because Ericsson had previously found it very difficult to attract settlers for his previous development, Iceland, because even though it was in fact quite green at the time, it just sounded cold and barren. So he chose a more attractive name for his second development in the interest of marketing.
Certainly true.
Whether or not this is true is far from a settled question. Mans actions influence the environment and vice versa and always have. How much is "significant?" There is some very interesting research that indicates even the tens of thousands of years of farming prior to the industrial revolution may have altered global climate significantly enough to be detected. However in the broader picture, of course, the natural forces that have driven climate change since long before humans evolved are still at work and dwarf anything we can do or likely will be able to do anytime soon.
I think there is a grain of truth in that, but you drastically oversimplify.
Not at all. Source code shows precisely how calculations were carried out.
When you have an algorithm, for instance, that produces the 'hockey stick' even when fed random numbers, that is positive proof that the numbers have been cooked - manipulated in order to produce the predetermined outcome. That isnt science.
A CD that was produced in response to a FOIA request which was ultimately denied after a court battle was nonetheless leaked. It is on wikileaks last I checked. Plenty of proof of professional misconduct there, including source code.
Acheulian industry, yes. It was used by H. erectus, H. ergaster, H. neanderthalis, as well as H. sapiens, from nearly 2 million years ago right up to modern times.
Au contraire, it matters a great deal. If they came from Greece it would be, as I said, no surprise, just confirmation of current analysis. If they came directly from Africa that would be truly shocking however, since it would be a blue-water crossing rather than a chain of island hops.
That's just the thing, the article certainly makes it sound that way, only it doesnt even hint at any evidence that might actually indicate that.
I suspect the author was confused, or just wanted to write something dramatic.
It would have been a multigenerational expansion rather than a single voyage. A group moves to the first island in the chain, then some years later when that one grows crowded a group splits out and colonises the next, and so on. This is the way H. erectus colonised much of the planet and the way H. sapiens did it again later as well. It really isnt any more or less than is to be expected.
Sure, if you can smuggle the mathematical concept of infinity in you can always get absurd results. :)
But in reality these are indeed as you say 'the real deal' - stones dont knapp themselves. If you ever get a chance to see how things things were made up close you will understand why. It's quite a fascinating - and painstaking - craft.
I'm still thinking the article is melodramatic fluff though. It's not at all surprising to see these things on Crete with such a date. We know archaic homonids made them, we know they spread out all along the coastlines 'beachcombing' just as our own ancestors did a little later. And island-hopping to Crete during a glacial maximum should have been well within their capabilities - other large mammals were doing it too, the hippos I already mentioned, elephants, even deer made that crossing at various points.
To the untrained eye that is all they would appear, sure. I dont think the troll moderation was entirely fair - I would bet that a lot of readers looked at the photo at the top of that page and thought the same thing.
But, look for instance at the second piece from the right at the top of the story. Look at the top-left edge. See those repeated scallops that define the edge? That is not a naturally occuring stone, that is a hand-axe or "chopper" which has been intelligently worked and shaped for a purpose.
The article is pretty crappy though (as is expected with "science reporting" unfortunately.) The commentary regarding early human sea-crossing capabilities is a bit... well... warped. Even though there is a throwaway mention of non-modern humans it is given no context and the rest of the text appears quite ignorant of it. The fourth paragraph is one big facepalm. It implies several times that this find somehow indicates a 200-mile crossing from Africa, when it does nothing of the sort. Given the loose dating (prior to 130kya by geological strata) it would seem quite likely that the ancient population who made these tools crossed at or near a glacial maximum, when sea levels were much lower than today, making for much less open sea even if they did come directly from the African coast. And, at least from what I can see, there is no reason whatsoever to think they came from that direction anyway. More likely they came in over much shorter distances from the north, at a time when sea levels were low and the voyage would have been very short. If the dating comes in as early as some of the quotes indicate, this could even have been at the same time that the hippopotamus made the same journey.
Last time I used gnome it would do most of that, but only by left-clicking and finding the right preferences panel. And I found when I screwed around with it enough to make it very useful the panel often died.
It's sort of an aside, but you do realise that you can put "that bar" on top or sides in windows? I personally always place it on a side, as this makes much more efficient use of screen space, since computer monitors are normally wider than they are tall, but most often used to display virtual-paper whose dimensions skew in the opposite direction, so placing it on the side puts it in otherwise unused space while placing it to the top or the bottom either reduces the space available for your work. Most linux systems can be tweaked to do the same, although many taskbar apps make it much harder than it should be for some reason - this is one area where Windows really is friendlier - just click on a blank section of the bar and drag. I havent used Gnome in a long time and I am guessing that is what Ubuntu is using - it would be very like Gnome to make this difficult or impossible, but in KDE it's only a little harder than in Windows.
Real geeks dont support browsers, they support html.
Incorrect. Section after section of the OOXML spec give insufficient information for implementation.
Actually that is not correct. Most Microsoft Office implementations found "in the wild" are *less* interoperable with the new MS Office than with Open Office.
Are they really charging *more* for the same service if you bring your own phone?
That is utterly insane BS, although about what I would expect from my past dealings with US mobile phone companies. Why in the hell do people put up with that?
It sounds like windows 7 is improved, but only very slightly, relative the atrocious behaviour of XP. But you are right, you didnt really follow directions so the cases arent quite the same.
From a quick google search it appears that somewhere there is a panel that allows you to "turn off" WMP and IE, but it sounds like all this actually does is prevent the normal GUI for them from preloading. Basically what "removing access" does in XP. The whole thing is still there as is obvious every time I get out certain install disks. Even though IE is supposed to be disabled, it pops right up at an invisible request from a poorly behaved program every time.
If Win7 is allowing another media player to take the top spot in the explorer context menu that is a very small improvement though.
Speaking of Media Player, here's an interesting little thing I noticed.
(This is on XP Pro, if you are running newer Windows try whatever the equivelant would be and report the results by all means.)
Install VLC. Disable access to the Windows Media Player. (The closest you can get to actually uninstalling it - add remove programs - set program access and defaults - custom - scroll down to windows media player - uncheck "enable access to this program.) Make sure VLC is set as the default and access is allowed instead.
Now insert a DVD. Pull up "my computer" and double-click the DVD (or right click and choose the first option, and this is assuming like me you have exterminated "autoplay" already - if not you probably get to skip everything but inserting the DVD.
Up comes Windows Media Player, which proceeds to steal focus, ignore all input, and phone home before finally deciding something is missing and popping up another focus-stealing window to inform you it isnt actually capable of playing the DVD anyway.
That remove access button doesnt work any better for windows media player than it does for IE now does it?
Now go back and right click the DVD again, scroll down the list, you arent looking for 'play' but 'play with VLC.' So not only is the program still accessible, it remains the default shell option even after supposedly being disabled.
I have been using MS products since the early 80s and I never expected "innovation" out of them. It's not lack of "innovation" that makes me less than a fan - it's three decades of this sort of "innovation" - innovative ways to arrogantly turn my own computer against me.
Totally incorrect. For anyone not situated very close indeed to the sitting government on the 'political spectrum' an ineffective government is better than an effective one. The capacity for governments to do good is quite limited, their capacity to do evil is unfortunately not.
You could make the moral argument but it would be mistaken.
I know a lot of eyes will roll but this is exactly the sort of situation where one can see, if one will look, just how critically important good semantic hygiene and objective morality are important to society. If "copyright" were a basic human right then these objections would absolutely be valid, the moral argument solid, and the legal change would be ultimately ill advised and damaging to the species as a whole in the long run.
However since the first is not true - since "copyright" is not a basic human right nor a pure derivative of such - none of the rest follows.
Yeah, sad but true. This is why Debian had to ditch firefox after all.
Maybe people running Windows in large organisations should switch to debian and iceweasel instead of trying to wrestle. In fact that sounds like an excellent idea!
Alternatively, it is quite possible to roll a customised firefox/windows setup as well. A "large organisation" should surely have someone on staff that can accomplish such a simple task.
If you RTFA you will find out he DID find a girlfriend after writing the paper. Been with her for 6 months now. Some women do find brains sexy - and a subset of those are NOT zombie freaks. Strange but true.
The "average woman" is going to be a lot older than he is, particularly in the UK. (Worldwide, this may not be the case, in the third world it definitely is not the case, but in the UK? I dont know the figure but I would bet it's nearly 50.) So probably well over 50% of women in the UK are not attractive to him simply because they are too much older than he is, and another significant percentage are going to be too young as well. Figure perhaps (this isnt even a BOTEC just a rough guess, feel free to jump back in with real stats) 10% of UK women are in his age range, if he finds 50% of THOSE women attractive, that's still only 5% of the female population.
Ok, so using your numbers this should have happened a minimum of 250k/10k=25 times since modern humans first appeared. Plenty of chance for at least one of those impacts to be observed.
An excellent all-purpose rebuttal when you have no rebuttal eh? I bet you use it a lot.
I do believe *you* are the one blowing smoke, on both issues. First you complain about the lack of numbers but give none yourself.
Humans have been in Australia for somewhere between 40 and 80k years, first off. You didnt give any numbers yourself but you appear to be underestimating that time period. Beyond that, you seem to be conceptualising the history of the various Aboriginal peoples as being limited to the time since arrival on the continent - which is a tremendous misconception. Those people existed long before that time, at various stages of a very long migration which took them from Africa along the southern coast of asia, through the malay archipelago, and so on. The true and complete history of those people is precisely the same length as that of any other people, as we all come from the same roots, in all likelihood the time period involved is no less than a quarter of a million years. They could have learned to associate craters with "falling stars" in Africa, in Australia, or at any point in between. It is no less unlikely for this association to have been made by Australians than by Europeans.
Furthermore when you claim that dropping a pebble into water does not make the same shape, you are just wrong. You either havent done the experiment yourself, or you lack the perceptual focus to catch it, but the same shape is formed, for a fraction of a second.
This assertion requires evidence. On the face it is nonsensical. If I replace an essential appliance that uses 2kwh with one that does the same job but uses 1kwh, assuming that my electrical supply is 100% coal-fired, I have reduced demand for coal proportionately. If not why not?