I have another theory for this. Perhaps, when the ground is wet, there's a mud layer slightly beneath the surface that becomes fluid. Then, tidal foces make the surface to move up and down creating waves. The waves migh be very low amplitude (a few cm could be enough) and low speed/frequency, but enough to make the rocks slowly slide on the dry (or slightly moist) surface. Does it sound plausible?
That's true and correct. But that isn't about SCIENCE. It is about people's beliefs on science. It is not an integral part of science, it is not necessary for science, and it is actually detrimental to real science.
It is like talking about the belief that science is fun. It is totally irrelevant to the fact that science works, science can be useful to make accurate predictions and science gives a pretty accurate description of the universe. Wether you beleive in it or not.
The only real "proof" you need to confirm that science works is that of basic logic: if you make an assumption that will yeld, by any logical process, a specific result, and the result is confirmed, as well as any possible result from applying the same principle as specified to other cases, then it is confirmed.
Science makes predictions. So does faith.
In almost every single case (from trillions of cases) science gets them right. In the cases where it's not, the rules of science are revised and science is advanced.
In almost every single case, predictions made by faith that are testable are confirmed wrong (end of the world, faith healing, history of the universe, you name it). When the predictions are confirmed wrong, THE PREDICTIONS are revised. Faith is stil considered perfect and infallible.
WHO created the universe? You are assuming SOMEBODY created the universe. If you do not assume that (which is a weird assumption if you think about it) then there's no need to ask that question, the question is pointless. If you ask HOW was the universe created (which IS a reasonable question) both religion and science have provided answers. But the answers by science are logical, can be tested to a certain extent and are converging to a specific explanation (though, of course, the more we research, the more we know about the answer and that means that some of the details of our prior understanding might become invalidated). Religion, on the other hand, offers responses that have been PROVEN wrong (like the universe being created five thousand years ago), are inconsistent (even within the same religions) and incoherent (how can light from a star a million light years away have been created five thousand years away). Getting answers from religion is asking the wrong questions to the wrong people.
I do not get all this.
If we were talking about something with a small sample of events (like flying to space) we could say something like "we are not having as many accidents as the current conditions should lead to, so we are just being lucky" and make a fuss about having to change something.
But there are about a hundred thousand flights EACH DAY, so the rate of accidents we see must be, to a minuscule margin of error, what the current conditions warrant.
So saying "we are having too many close calls" is silly if we are not having more accidents than what we are willing to accept. The number of close calls is irrelevant when we have a well measured number of accidents to measure risk.
And while the ideal accident rate is zero, I'm not willing to pay even 10% more for my tickets to reduce my chances of dying in a plane crash by one thousandth of a percent point (approximately the current chances). And I've lost one friend to a plane crash, so I know it CAN happen. But the chances are so small that it is clearly an acceptable risk.
Of course, we need to do what's possible to reduce exceptiosn due to negligence (most accidents are caused by that) but talking about revamping the system or implementing expensive changes based on this is just plain stupid.
There's a simpler solution to "the lawyer problem".
(suing) Lawyers must share the losses as much as they share the winnings in a trial.
It should work like this:
A lawyer, when dealing with a customer to initiate a lawsuit, must decide on one of two payment methods. One is fixed income, with no sharing of the proceeds in case of winning. The other one is sharing the winnings as well as the losses if the suit is lost.
That way nobody is going to initiate a suit if not quite certain they are going to win (as they have to pay for the lawyers a fixed fee). And lawyers are not going to accept lawsuits that have a low probability of being won, because if they lose they'll have to pay for the trial, the other party's lawyers and all other expenses out of their own pockets.
Outcome: dissapearance of frivolous lawsuits, dissapearance of ambulance chasers, reduction of the burden on the justice and a happier living for all of us (other than for the lawyers, most of which would have to find decent jobs).
The wrath of God almighty will fall upon you, and you will burn in hell for all the eternity for posting that!!!
I know it because I read it in an old book.
Even more, why would anyone consider that $4800 is an acceptable bill for a data connection done from any country?
Any cellphone is restricted in the bandwidth it can actually use. It will never use as much bandwidth as the lamest broadband connection. Buy a broadband connection in the UK, stard downloading from the US as much data as you can and at the end of the month you have paid probably one hundredth of $4800. At this day and age all traffic is data, and most is international. International data traffic is a cheap commodity, and at current rates $4800 will buy you about 1TB of international traffic. It is not as if the telephone is using an international wireless transmittion. It is just connecting to the nearest useable antenna and from there it's all land transmission.
International roaming data and call rates are outrageously abusive. The same call done in one direction or the other have 100x differences, when the data transit and cost are the same.
Yes, the providers have the legal right to charge whatever they want, but nowadays it can be considered deceptive advertising that their international roam rates are not advertised up front with their standard rates. And since their cost differential is almost nul, charging what their charge for voluntary or accidental communications is abusive, only surpassed by most hotel phone charges.
OK, arent you getting things a bit out of perspective? I mean, what's the wose Microsoft ever made? Bundling some software components? Defining pricing for some products based on the purchase of other products? Not caring about the compatibility of some competitor products?
All those things are in fact legal and regularly (I'd say systematically) done by the other companies you love and admire. The only reason they've been condemned for doing something illegal (actually, they never got a firm conviction, but that shouldn't be a relevant point) is because they've been successful to the point of reaching a monopoly. And you can't claim they are a monopoly because they did that illegal (or even unethical) stuff, because the stuff they did is only wrong ONCE you are a monopoly.
I think comparing minor business misbehavior (yes, minor, it wasn't some accounting scandal, it wasn't stealing trade secrets, and it wasn't tax evasion or anything like that) to war atrocities and genocide is really, really stupid. Unfair pricing, bundling and anticompetitive product design are all bad things and the company was fairly punished because of that (with the results the users are suffering now every day) but they are all things that pale in comparison to the average corporate behavior.
PS: the market had been stagnant by 1995? 1990-1995 was the most explosive period in the PC business. I think you were looking at some other market.
You might be right about the second point, but where does it say that the product was sold "to resist attacks by malicious third parties"?
Are car manufacturers liable when a well equipped specialist thief is able to steal a car?
If a product is sold as absolutely crook resistant, then the company should be liable. AFAIK neither Microsoft nor any other software manufacturer promises that.
THe fact that the language is evolving doesn't make any common distortion of the language right.
Virii was not even right in Latin, so what would be the reason to create an irregular declination of a word without any reason other than trying to look cool?
> If market share is any indication to being pwned; then why isn't Apache attacked more that IIS?
Actually it is. Look into any defacement reporting site (such as zone-h.org) and look at the numbers. They vary every day, but ion average about 60% of the defacements are for linux boxes. So there you have.
What I don't get is how do they expect to differentiate between a call made by the driver and a call made by a passenger. Or they are expecting to forbid passengers talking on the phone? While they are at that they could forbid people talking at all while on cars, as talk could be distracting.
Despite that completely crucial point that absolutely disqualifies this technology, it might be true that talking on the phone while driving, even with a hands free, might be distracting. But I doubt the effect is bigger than people rushing because they need to make a phone call, people accelerating to be less time in a car where they are not productive or people getting distracted by phones ringing without being picked up.
And they DO get hacked. According to most popular defacement sites, most sites hacked are running Linux, not Windows. And the difference is usually bigger than the ratio of installed bases.
But as personal machines, they are a vast minority and not worth investing in hacking, XP being a much better target. I think that's what the comment referred to.
Uh... no. You are not payin gthe right to use it. In theory, they demand taxes for the services they perform on behalf of that land (access, security, sanitation, etc.). In practice, they ask you for money just because they can. Neither implies you don't own your land.
If a bully steals your lunch money does it mean you don't own your toys at home?
Now, seriously, I find this a great idea: why have all sports to be sponsored by corporations? Individual sponsoring could be a good alternative.
I don't see the relatioship with Linux though. It would be more like Linux if the community designed the vehicle and even left all the innovations open for the other competitors to benefit from them (as long as they also keep their designs open). But this is not the case. It is a traditional "closed source" car, only that it is sponsored by the public in a more direct way than the traditional publicity model.
The other alternative is a more nationalist focus to sports competitions. I would really like it if in sports like Formula One teams stopped using a chassis from one country, an engine from another, tires from yet another and drivers from wherever is left. It would be much more exciting to see a competition between the Italia team, the France team, the British team, Americans and so on. Sponsorship could come from governments, citizens and even companies related to those countries.
> The difference between "life of the author + 70 years" and "forever" is basically irrelevant.
Only for mediocre content.
The works of Behetoven and Mozart are free now and that's a great thing, even if more than 70 byears have passed from their deaths.
While SoftGrid does not run in Windows 98, I must say it is an awesome solution for application packaging and deployment.
Not only it takes care of installation (by not installing applications at all) and deployment (by streaming in real time the needed content, though scheduled streaming is also an option) but keeps each application in its own virtualized environment preventing compatibility problems and reducing the need for app compatibility testing.
A must try for large environments but might also be of value for smaller shops.
Also, even if the amount of mercury in the room had been a problem (and I doubt so, millions of ligthbulbs break every year and the number of related mercury poisoning events is negligible), wet cleaning or, at worst, replacing the carpet, would have reduced the amount of mercury to an acceptable level.
This is FUD at its best.
You don't work with large companies, do you? It is very common in the corporate world to have applications ten, twenty or even thirty years old that are somehow critical (or at least important) for the business. In some cases these old applications have no source code available and very little documentation, but they "just work". Just try to tell Joe in accounting that you are going to have to shut down his XYZ application because you are moving to a new processor platform. And yes, you could keep it running on the older hardware while you implement newer software on newer platforms, but that brings two problems: 1) spares 2) heterogeneity (supporting an heterogeneous environment is much more difficult than supporting a homogeneous environmen) In addition to that, virtualization is much easier to do without having to do processor emulation, and that's where the world is moving. But I still think we could have dual mode processors that have 100% native mode performance with x86 code and on top of that a separate new architecture processor, that can very easily switch from one mode to the other and that can interoperate both without trouble.
And that would be if all the costs on Microsoft were assigned to Windows, but Windows is about 20% of their income, so instead of $7000 it would be more like $1500. And I would be surprised if actual legal costs for car companies were lower than $1500 for a 35K car.
What an odd recall of history you have. Novell never partnered with Microsoft (until last month). They were enemies from day one. I know, I used to work for a Novell distributor at the time, and Microsoft was no friend from the start. It was a competitor, and a strong one that almost got us ruined, but that wasn't because any partnering issues (actually it might have been, them having more and stronger partners than Novell made it a difficult fight).
Microsoft stopped supporting Alpha after three years of almost zero sales. No one complained, not even DEC, because the NT aplha machines were less than 1% of the market. And the percentage was dwindling. Same thing for PowerPC.
MS developed support for Alpha and PowerPC because there was the expectation that supporting other CPUs besides Intel would lead to aproliferation of faster and more powerful CPUs, but Microsoft made a mistake there: not being NT a run time compile platform (like Java and.Net are), applications, tools and drivers from third parties needed to be compiled, packaged, tested and distributed for each platform. That made the experience on these platforms suck. I had two Alpha servers at my company for running email, and they were powerful but a nightmare to support. When the time came to upgrade them we switched to Intel even if Alpha was still available (PowerPC was not). There was no point for Microsoft to keep supporting a platform that wasn't working and that was actually hurting the ISV market by making porduct development (particularly testing) more expensive, especially for smaller players that are the strongest factor supporting the Windows market.
And they learned that lesson, with.Net they made the hardware irrelevant (but not the OS, as Java attempted to do). While no new CPUs are entering the market that don't have x86 compatiility, it will be possible if.Net becomes the prevalent development factor for a long time.
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What's your point? If we avoid 200 such Tsunamis we can afford a new war?
I have another theory for this.
Perhaps, when the ground is wet, there's a mud layer slightly beneath the surface that becomes fluid. Then, tidal foces make the surface to move up and down creating waves. The waves migh be very low amplitude (a few cm could be enough) and low speed/frequency, but enough to make the rocks slowly slide on the dry (or slightly moist) surface.
Does it sound plausible?
That's true and correct. But that isn't about SCIENCE. It is about people's beliefs on science. It is not an integral part of science, it is not necessary for science, and it is actually detrimental to real science. It is like talking about the belief that science is fun. It is totally irrelevant to the fact that science works, science can be useful to make accurate predictions and science gives a pretty accurate description of the universe. Wether you beleive in it or not.
The only real "proof" you need to confirm that science works is that of basic logic: if you make an assumption that will yeld, by any logical process, a specific result, and the result is confirmed, as well as any possible result from applying the same principle as specified to other cases, then it is confirmed. Science makes predictions. So does faith. In almost every single case (from trillions of cases) science gets them right. In the cases where it's not, the rules of science are revised and science is advanced. In almost every single case, predictions made by faith that are testable are confirmed wrong (end of the world, faith healing, history of the universe, you name it). When the predictions are confirmed wrong, THE PREDICTIONS are revised. Faith is stil considered perfect and infallible.
WHO created the universe? You are assuming SOMEBODY created the universe.
If you do not assume that (which is a weird assumption if you think about it) then there's no need to ask that question, the question is pointless.
If you ask HOW was the universe created (which IS a reasonable question) both religion and science have provided answers. But the answers by science are logical, can be tested to a certain extent and are converging to a specific explanation (though, of course, the more we research, the more we know about the answer and that means that some of the details of our prior understanding might become invalidated).
Religion, on the other hand, offers responses that have been PROVEN wrong (like the universe being created five thousand years ago), are inconsistent (even within the same religions) and incoherent (how can light from a star a million light years away have been created five thousand years away).
Getting answers from religion is asking the wrong questions to the wrong people.
I do not get all this. If we were talking about something with a small sample of events (like flying to space) we could say something like "we are not having as many accidents as the current conditions should lead to, so we are just being lucky" and make a fuss about having to change something. But there are about a hundred thousand flights EACH DAY, so the rate of accidents we see must be, to a minuscule margin of error, what the current conditions warrant. So saying "we are having too many close calls" is silly if we are not having more accidents than what we are willing to accept. The number of close calls is irrelevant when we have a well measured number of accidents to measure risk. And while the ideal accident rate is zero, I'm not willing to pay even 10% more for my tickets to reduce my chances of dying in a plane crash by one thousandth of a percent point (approximately the current chances). And I've lost one friend to a plane crash, so I know it CAN happen. But the chances are so small that it is clearly an acceptable risk. Of course, we need to do what's possible to reduce exceptiosn due to negligence (most accidents are caused by that) but talking about revamping the system or implementing expensive changes based on this is just plain stupid.
There's a simpler solution to "the lawyer problem". (suing) Lawyers must share the losses as much as they share the winnings in a trial. It should work like this: A lawyer, when dealing with a customer to initiate a lawsuit, must decide on one of two payment methods. One is fixed income, with no sharing of the proceeds in case of winning. The other one is sharing the winnings as well as the losses if the suit is lost. That way nobody is going to initiate a suit if not quite certain they are going to win (as they have to pay for the lawyers a fixed fee). And lawyers are not going to accept lawsuits that have a low probability of being won, because if they lose they'll have to pay for the trial, the other party's lawyers and all other expenses out of their own pockets. Outcome: dissapearance of frivolous lawsuits, dissapearance of ambulance chasers, reduction of the burden on the justice and a happier living for all of us (other than for the lawyers, most of which would have to find decent jobs).
The wrath of God almighty will fall upon you, and you will burn in hell for all the eternity for posting that!!! I know it because I read it in an old book.
Even more, why would anyone consider that $4800 is an acceptable bill for a data connection done from any country? Any cellphone is restricted in the bandwidth it can actually use. It will never use as much bandwidth as the lamest broadband connection. Buy a broadband connection in the UK, stard downloading from the US as much data as you can and at the end of the month you have paid probably one hundredth of $4800. At this day and age all traffic is data, and most is international. International data traffic is a cheap commodity, and at current rates $4800 will buy you about 1TB of international traffic. It is not as if the telephone is using an international wireless transmittion. It is just connecting to the nearest useable antenna and from there it's all land transmission. International roaming data and call rates are outrageously abusive. The same call done in one direction or the other have 100x differences, when the data transit and cost are the same. Yes, the providers have the legal right to charge whatever they want, but nowadays it can be considered deceptive advertising that their international roam rates are not advertised up front with their standard rates. And since their cost differential is almost nul, charging what their charge for voluntary or accidental communications is abusive, only surpassed by most hotel phone charges.
The game was pretty good.
OK, arent you getting things a bit out of perspective? I mean, what's the wose Microsoft ever made? Bundling some software components? Defining pricing for some products based on the purchase of other products? Not caring about the compatibility of some competitor products? All those things are in fact legal and regularly (I'd say systematically) done by the other companies you love and admire. The only reason they've been condemned for doing something illegal (actually, they never got a firm conviction, but that shouldn't be a relevant point) is because they've been successful to the point of reaching a monopoly. And you can't claim they are a monopoly because they did that illegal (or even unethical) stuff, because the stuff they did is only wrong ONCE you are a monopoly. I think comparing minor business misbehavior (yes, minor, it wasn't some accounting scandal, it wasn't stealing trade secrets, and it wasn't tax evasion or anything like that) to war atrocities and genocide is really, really stupid. Unfair pricing, bundling and anticompetitive product design are all bad things and the company was fairly punished because of that (with the results the users are suffering now every day) but they are all things that pale in comparison to the average corporate behavior. PS: the market had been stagnant by 1995? 1990-1995 was the most explosive period in the PC business. I think you were looking at some other market.
What patent violations are you talking about?
You might be right about the second point, but where does it say that the product was sold "to resist attacks by malicious third parties"? Are car manufacturers liable when a well equipped specialist thief is able to steal a car? If a product is sold as absolutely crook resistant, then the company should be liable. AFAIK neither Microsoft nor any other software manufacturer promises that.
THe fact that the language is evolving doesn't make any common distortion of the language right. Virii was not even right in Latin, so what would be the reason to create an irregular declination of a word without any reason other than trying to look cool?
> If market share is any indication to being pwned; then why isn't Apache attacked more that IIS? Actually it is. Look into any defacement reporting site (such as zone-h.org) and look at the numbers. They vary every day, but ion average about 60% of the defacements are for linux boxes. So there you have.
What I don't get is how do they expect to differentiate between a call made by the driver and a call made by a passenger. Or they are expecting to forbid passengers talking on the phone? While they are at that they could forbid people talking at all while on cars, as talk could be distracting. Despite that completely crucial point that absolutely disqualifies this technology, it might be true that talking on the phone while driving, even with a hands free, might be distracting. But I doubt the effect is bigger than people rushing because they need to make a phone call, people accelerating to be less time in a car where they are not productive or people getting distracted by phones ringing without being picked up.
And they DO get hacked. According to most popular defacement sites, most sites hacked are running Linux, not Windows. And the difference is usually bigger than the ratio of installed bases. But as personal machines, they are a vast minority and not worth investing in hacking, XP being a much better target. I think that's what the comment referred to.
Uh... no. You are not payin gthe right to use it. In theory, they demand taxes for the services they perform on behalf of that land (access, security, sanitation, etc.). In practice, they ask you for money just because they can. Neither implies you don't own your land. If a bully steals your lunch money does it mean you don't own your toys at home?
Now, seriously, I find this a great idea: why have all sports to be sponsored by corporations? Individual sponsoring could be a good alternative. I don't see the relatioship with Linux though. It would be more like Linux if the community designed the vehicle and even left all the innovations open for the other competitors to benefit from them (as long as they also keep their designs open). But this is not the case. It is a traditional "closed source" car, only that it is sponsored by the public in a more direct way than the traditional publicity model. The other alternative is a more nationalist focus to sports competitions. I would really like it if in sports like Formula One teams stopped using a chassis from one country, an engine from another, tires from yet another and drivers from wherever is left. It would be much more exciting to see a competition between the Italia team, the France team, the British team, Americans and so on. Sponsorship could come from governments, citizens and even companies related to those countries.
> The difference between "life of the author + 70 years" and "forever" is basically irrelevant. Only for mediocre content. The works of Behetoven and Mozart are free now and that's a great thing, even if more than 70 byears have passed from their deaths.
While SoftGrid does not run in Windows 98, I must say it is an awesome solution for application packaging and deployment. Not only it takes care of installation (by not installing applications at all) and deployment (by streaming in real time the needed content, though scheduled streaming is also an option) but keeps each application in its own virtualized environment preventing compatibility problems and reducing the need for app compatibility testing. A must try for large environments but might also be of value for smaller shops.
Also, even if the amount of mercury in the room had been a problem (and I doubt so, millions of ligthbulbs break every year and the number of related mercury poisoning events is negligible), wet cleaning or, at worst, replacing the carpet, would have reduced the amount of mercury to an acceptable level. This is FUD at its best.
You don't work with large companies, do you?
It is very common in the corporate world to have applications ten, twenty or even thirty years old that are somehow critical (or at least important) for the business.
In some cases these old applications have no source code available and very little documentation, but they "just work". Just try to tell Joe in accounting that you are going to have to shut down his XYZ application because you are moving to a new processor platform.
And yes, you could keep it running on the older hardware while you implement newer software on newer platforms, but that brings two problems:
1) spares
2) heterogeneity (supporting an heterogeneous environment is much more difficult than supporting a homogeneous environmen)
In addition to that, virtualization is much easier to do without having to do processor emulation, and that's where the world is moving.
But I still think we could have dual mode processors that have 100% native mode performance with x86 code and on top of that a separate new architecture processor, that can very easily switch from one mode to the other and that can interoperate both without trouble.
And that would be if all the costs on Microsoft were assigned to Windows, but Windows is about 20% of their income, so instead of $7000 it would be more like $1500. And I would be surprised if actual legal costs for car companies were lower than $1500 for a 35K car.
What an odd recall of history you have. Novell never partnered with Microsoft (until last month). They were enemies from day one. I know, I used to work for a Novell distributor at the time, and Microsoft was no friend from the start. It was a competitor, and a strong one that almost got us ruined, but that wasn't because any partnering issues (actually it might have been, them having more and stronger partners than Novell made it a difficult fight). Microsoft stopped supporting Alpha after three years of almost zero sales. No one complained, not even DEC, because the NT aplha machines were less than 1% of the market. And the percentage was dwindling. Same thing for PowerPC. MS developed support for Alpha and PowerPC because there was the expectation that supporting other CPUs besides Intel would lead to aproliferation of faster and more powerful CPUs, but Microsoft made a mistake there: not being NT a run time compile platform (like Java and .Net are), applications, tools and drivers from third parties needed to be compiled, packaged, tested and distributed for each platform. That made the experience on these platforms suck. I had two Alpha servers at my company for running email, and they were powerful but a nightmare to support. When the time came to upgrade them we switched to Intel even if Alpha was still available (PowerPC was not). There was no point for Microsoft to keep supporting a platform that wasn't working and that was actually hurting the ISV market by making porduct development (particularly testing) more expensive, especially for smaller players that are the strongest factor supporting the Windows market.
And they learned that lesson, with .Net they made the hardware irrelevant (but not the OS, as Java attempted to do). While no new CPUs are entering the market that don't have x86 compatiility, it will be possible if .Net becomes the prevalent development factor for a long time.