The better solution is to teach the vehicle to see and hear, though those words won't mean quite the same to a device that can access GPS, radio, and other forms of information not available to human senses.
Every time some *#!head cuts me off in traffic, changes lanes without signaling or generally acts like they're the only ones on the road, I make a little prayer that someday we'll be smart enough to let our cars drive for us. Not all the time; certainly "manual" will still have its uses, but at least in congested freeway settings it makes far more sense to get hot-headed, slow-reacting humans off the steering wheel.
Sure, security is good. But so is accountability. If RFID is *that* broken, it demands public scrutiny.
So, the problem is not that they are incapable of making such an episode, but their cowing corporate overlords would rather they do not, for fear of losing funding.
To which I say, fooey!
Perhaps the MB team could do some side work, *not* an official episode, totally on their own, *without pay* (at least none from the boss), and just post the results to YouTube?
For extra credit, they could get Buster to help. Sure, he's usually around when things have to fall from a great height - so sorry, thrill-seekers, there'd be no smooshing of limbs this time around - but it would be poetic to have him carrying the card, showing that any dummy can get hacked.
Hell, I'd even pitch in a little to help it get made, just out of principle.
I suggest Devo, or perhaps Wierd Al. He puts on one helluva show.;)
Seriously, let's step outside the proverbial box for a moment. Does it have to be a metal? How 'bout carbon? Am not suggesting you have the means to make a ring of buckyballs, but perhaps a layer of man-made diamond over another - perhaps recyclable - material?
Great, now they *want* you to spoof like they do. You can even get paid!
Too bad that about a year and a half ago, MST3K took legal action to force a name change of six year old Austin comedy group Mr. Sinus Theater, a trio who went around to area movie houses spoofing bad films.
Mr. Sinus was (and, now as the duo Master Pancake Theater, remains) a treat to experience. The name may have been a little similar, so yes, it's obvious where they got the initial inspiration. But there all similarities cease.
The performances were live, for one thing, with the guys sitting off to the side of the screen, mics in hand, riffing off the movie and each other. They certainly talked beforehand about what they'd say, but nothing like a written script was used. No silhouettes were visible at the bottom of the screen. There was no pretending one of the characters was a robot. (They weren't even characters, just voices piped into the sound system.) They never produced a TV show, or recorded their performances for purposes of reproduction.
One could argue (if one were silly and wanted to waste a lot of time belaboring the obvious) that, applying their own logic to themselves, MST3K itself should be shut down, as they infringe upon the act of viewers worldwide who talk back to the movie.
Sure would be nice if FireFox end users could cause to pop up on every developer's screen an annoying message to to FIX THE IDIOTIC CERT PROBLEM in v3.
I know, it was supposed to improve security. But though there are scads of legitimate uses for a self-signed cert, that's not the point.
The real point is that I'm the one actually using the browser, and if I want to let someone in the door whether or not their cert came from FF's built-in whitelist, it's MY decision, not that of some policy committee over at Mozilla.
Anyone who prefers FireFox and runs multiple domains from the same IP (i.e., shared or VPS hosting) has lost their ability to securely access their control panel, at least without hassle. (BTW, TB's virtual id extension would work well here, hint, hint)
The worst thing about the bug - actually, not so much of a bug as a behavioral flaw - is that the option is still there to have the self-signed cert permanently added. Unfortunately, FF doesn't want to listen to that little checkmark.
All in all, v3 is a great improvement. Memory footprint is down, speed is up. Unfortunately, the self-signed cert problem will do more to hurt FF than folks not upgrading from v2.
At that age and earlier my favorite books were not skiffy, but collections: Aesop, the Brothers Grim, Hans Christian Anderson, and the tales of Greek Mythology. They taught me a lot.
While Starship Troopers was an adult novel, Heinlein for many years alternated between juveniles & "grown up" books, writing one of each kind in turn.
Starman Jones, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Podakyne of Mars were all Juvies. Asimov had the Lucky Starr novels.
If the kids are already avid readers, though, they probably have the comprehension to deal with more adult works. Sounds like they may be beyond Paddington.
On the flip side, just because a book is geared toward younger humans doesn't automatically make it light-hearted. Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and Roald Dahl's Charley and the Chocolate Factory have their grim moments, though they were both great writers. I'd recommend anything by them.
Writer James Blish collected all the original Star Trek episodes in written form; they're good harmless adventure with known characters and storylines.
Going slightly outside skiffy tales, I'd heartily recommend Lewis Carol. If they have heads for math you might want to try Flatland by Edwin Abbot, a Victorian era novel about a two-dimensional man visited by a 3-D human.
Whatever happens, know you're lucky. You've got kids who read.
Who's to say such selection is not just evolution further physically strengthening the species?
Of course, physical strength is not the only factor in survival.
On the flip side, who might have been denied existence had such a practice been available in earlier times?
(Srinivasa Ramanujan, Eva Peron, Blaise Pascal, Bill Hicks, Stephen Hawking, Ada Lovelace, Lou Gherig; the list is quite long...)
Alas, that list could also come to include anyone who has ever died of drug overdose, as one could argue that such an inclination is a genetic deficiency. That's where this practice would start to get slippery.
If you further extended that concept to merely include predilection for addiction, we'd potentially lose George Carlin & George Bush, two humans who for better or worse have had an undeniable effect on modern society (and one of whom probably never thought he'd be mentioned in the company of the other.)
One thing is sure: As humans became capable of doing something, they (or at least some of them) usually do, no matter what others may have to say about it.
Any argument against such selection has at its roots a faith-based belief in Spirit. Only those who have such belief will be harmed here, as their belief also entails another entity (or entities) controlling their existence.
The bottom line is such behavior may make us hardier, but only in the physical sense. It will also certainly change our future, just as does every human action.
AFAIK, v2 will not automatically upgrade itself to v3, or even alert the user that v3 is available.
Mozilla should consider pushing an update to v2 which would allow this.
Believe it or not, many, many surfers out there (and 'puter users in general) don't keep up with news, and for various reasons find manual upgrades not to be worth the bother.
The easier Mozilla makes it on Joe User to get to v3, the better off it and they will be in the long run.
Have to wonder how much effort the West Virginia Assessor has expended making sure people pay extra for public information, effort which is ultimately paid for by the good citizens of that state.
One would think the reduced cost from not printing & storing hard copies of information (some of which will certainly out of date before being purchased) would more than offset the relatively meager revenue generated by selling paper copies, vs. a 1-time scan & download link from the state's web space.
Instead of worrying about keeping up with last year's budget, a better solution would be to work a little PR magic & get a piece of those savings allocated toward offsetting the lowered revenue from printing & selling paper maps.
Am not a biologist by trade, but had always thought evolution was at its root a random process. It has the potential to try anything, but known survival traits will always be favored.
We do understand the mechanism by which a trait will become dominant; reproduction of that built-in behavior to offspring. What we don't understand is how such dominance prevents other, competing traits from becoming active.
In the Science Daily excerpt, they mentioned long-necked giraffes, and how if evolution was random we would also see those of the short-necked variety.
This logic does not follow. We would see short-necked giraffes only if their survival let them reproduce. As they would tend not to - being unable to reach the leaves at the top of the tall trees, thus denying them the energy required to either attract a mate or carry offspring to term - this hitherto unknown mechanism would not favor that trait becoming dominant, though like the activities of a good pack rat, the DNA which would allow this trait to exist may continue to be stored, and passed - unused - on to future generations.
Thus, evolution hedges its bets. It may come to pass someday that the short-necked giraffe was more easily able to survive than their long-necked counterparts. Perhaps all trees become shorter. Perhaps some form of brittle bone disease kills the ones with longer necks, and they change their neck length and diet in order to survive. Perhaps they enter into a symbiotic relationship with some other creature that digs up food and leaves it on the ground. Who knows what the future will bring. But should conditions change, the potential for such a trait, still dormant within the species, may emerge to dominance.
This is not meant to introduce any talk of "design" into evolution, but the fact is our understanding of the system remains in the realm of how traits are passed on, not why.
Having never "upgraded" to.Net, I'm still quite happy with Visual Studio Enterprise v6, though it's rarely used these days. Did manage to purchase Office 2003 for a good price a few years ago, and am satisfied with that as well. (It was an upgrade to a copy of Office 2000 Premium I'd won at an MS event some time ago, along with a pretty useless Compaq PDA, circa '99, that ran the old version of WinPE. It's in a box somewhere...)
Were I to be on the latest & greatest version of Office when they do finally slice VBA out of it, would miss the language only as it relates to Excel; those two in combination are a very, very handy set of tools.
But these days it's all about the web, anyway. My 'doze box runs Apache, MySQL & PHP, and there's a testing folder, so between virtual domains & the hosts file I can pretty much accomplish anything I used to with Excel / VBA. Sure, I don't get the same instant gratification, and true, debugging is a little more tricky, but on the plus side it's helped me to better learn the PHP language.
(I finally forced myself off my favorite text editor, and do use Eclipse for PHP coding these days, but mainly for the project views, and code folding. Haven't really gotten into debugging with it. I actually like having to have a good grasp of the code in my head, as opposed to relying on breakpoints & instant watches...)
I still maintain, having started - at least as far as MS platforms go - with their DOS based Professional Development System v7 back in the late 80's, the IDE they rolled out with Visual Basic was one of the best things MS has ever produced, and it was a great move on their part to port part of it to Office.
But, they made it so easy to debug you could get lazy.
These days, there are a couple of Excel / VBA apps I still routinely use, only because I haven't converted them to a web-based approach; but I hardly ever compile VB code through the Studio anymore. Still, I don't regret for one minute having upgraded to newer versions over the years - so long as the upgrades were actually useful.
IMHO, the real reason MS is dropping VBA is not because the platform is past its prime, rather that they can't figure out how to secure their operating system. (Just look at their latest attempt. If Vista were a car it would be recalled before you could say "Shoddy Software").
It's always been a two-edged sword. Yes, you could totally automate your system. Yes, you could totally obliterate someone else's system.
Not being the destructive sort, I found the power VBA offered to greatly assist me in performing the heavy lifting you sometimes need when weeding though large amounts of data. Others have different motivations, and have used the tool accordingly.
In any event, so long as I'm happy to stick with the older COM versions of MS apps, don't think Redmond's idiotic dismissal of a great platform will really affect my daily life. So long as Office 2003 continues to run on my 'doze box (and why shouldn't it, by the time I dump XP it'll probably be in favor of Linux anyway), VBA isn't going anywhere. I don't use it as much these days, but it's still handy to have around.
Sounds like Ford's lawyers could stand to read Richard Stallman's recent essay on how many folks are confused by this newfangled term "Intellectual Property" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html)
One not-so-extreme extrapolation of their viewpoint would get any city with traffic cameras into trouble. As soon as they introduced the photo of a speeding motorist as evidence, they would be violating copyright, according to Ford.
Lastly, there is quite a difference between copyright, which is granted automatically upon creation of the work, and trademark, which applies to specific images, artwork or other expressions, and must be registered on an item-by-item basis.
One wonders if Ford has taken the trouble (and suffered the expense) of registering each and every single vehicle they have ever produced with the USPTO.
I've read a lot of skiffy over the years, and one of the big themes is that fear will get you into trouble.
The idea that an alien race would attack us just for knowing we're here is ludicrous, implying that they'd be just as racist as our puppy-aged civilization currently acts. By the time you evolve the ability to leave your planetary nest, you're not just a critter anymore. Either you've grown up enough to feel secure in yourself & your abilities, or you're still no better than a cowering animal. Both your technical skills & decisions with regards to other life forms will reflect accordingly.
To paraphrase Issac Asimov, there are only a few ways to get there from here. Either the aliens can:
Travel faster than Einstein thinks we should be able to.
Live a very long time on their way over.
Sleep through the trip.
If it's the first possibility, then almost certainly they've grown up enough to be friends by nature, not foe. After all, if you had the power to traverse the stars in an instant, what would be your motivation to enslave or destroy a new-found group of potential friends or trading partners? It would be a lot simpler to just stay home & build your own punching bag.
Options 2 & 3 require a great deal more commitment on the part of the travelers. They don't even know us, why would they want to spend several lifetimes visiting an unknown entity just so they - or their subsequent offspring - could destroy them?
The idea that they'd just throw rocks from their home to ours is equally absurd. The technological skill such an undertaking would require simply does not mesh with the mindset of an entire race deciding to shoot first, ask questions later.
It's much more likely that there are scads of intelligent life forms out there, but just as we don't engage in philosophical discussions with a 2-year old, they are - if even currently aware of our existence - waiting for us to grow up a bit before trying to chat.
And if there are galactic bullies out there, just waiting for that next fight to pick, what do we think we could do about it? In the long run it's healthier to accept the risk that such bullies may exist, and continue with our normal, curious ways, rather than spending our entire lives in hiding.
There was a very funny Austin Texas comedy group called Mr. Sinus Theatre, an obvious omage to your creation, but different enough that they stood on their own.
Like the spaceship crew, they roasted really bad movies with running commentary, but that was about the only similarity. For one thing, they were live, and made no effort to dress up in costumes or appear as anything but human. They didn't even appear on the screen, using mikes off to the side feeding into the P.A.
The 3-man group would perform at a local theater (sometimes "on the road" as well; I saw them roast "Xanadu" at a roller rink, and afterwards we all went in to skate for a bit).
Just curious why MST3K felt it necessary to legally force them to change their name?
Currently, only Safari supports color management (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.), so they either need to include their own browser or work with *all* vendors (no bets here, but the former will probably win out).
I just can't imagine scanning in an 8x10 at 600dpi 32 bit color & then expecting it to render online. We'd be looking at a several hundred meg image here.
Perhaps Adobe's online suite will come with plane fare to Japan where there's *real* broadband...
One of the great social programs of the last century was the Rural Electrification Initiative. Vast resources were employed to string wire to outlying areas.
Granted, even by the 1970's, we were still not quite at 100%, but that's not the point here.
If you have electricity, you already have wire run to your house, and the technology exists to pass broadband-speed data on that wire.
Sorry, this isn't really an answer, more a polemic on the idea that's it's just too expensive to get broadband out to everyone in our country.
It should be obvious, the laptop manufacturer fears that by having *nix installed, you'll actually be able to use the machine, thereby more quickly wearing out the hinges...
Sorry to hear about this idiotic policy of which you've run afoul. Here in the States we have some watchdog groups: A government entity called the Federal Trade Commission, a business entity called the Better Business Bureau, and others depending on the industry. Perhaps it is time to contact your analog of these groups (should they exist). Do it in writing. Nothing may come of it, but at least your complaint will be recorded, and you'll know that the manufacturer will get a nasty letter from the watchdog(s) as well as yourself.
Alternatively, if you're the litigious type, sue them, and make them explain in court how the operating system can possibly affect hardware which has no interaction with any code.
You could also use the most excellent SourceForge app CloneZilla to back up your laptop, restore the MS partition & try again with a different clerk (which would be a lot easier than re-loading 'doze with a dual-boot scenario, walking into the store with the MS partition running in standby so they can see it's still the original OS, then saying you need the hard drive while it's under repair). Long shot, but may work.
The first childhood books I read over & over (mom taught me to read at 4) were collections: Aesop, the Brother's Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson. All morality tales, but giving great lessons if you cared to take them in.
Later I took up science fiction (real skiffy, not dragons & whatnot) which fed my appetite for what might be possible, and more importantly kept me reading.
Along the way I picked up Roald Dahl, Madeline L'Engle, and many other wonderful writers.
Being dragged along as "chaperone" for my teen-aged aunt to go see a movie with her boyfriend (I was then seven) led me to 2001. Not understanding the movie, I looked for the book, which had not yet been written (it was created as a screenplay, not converted from any earlier novel). Instead found The City & The Stars, set a half million years in the future, and in which the first chapter mentions a machine that was totally electronic, with "no moving parts." Reading about such a distant time at such an early age has definitely warped my sense of time.
In high school, my trig teacher turned me on to "Flatland" by Edwin Abbot. Written in the mid 1860's, it definitely has a Victorian slant to it (it's a 2-d world, where the more segments you have the higher in society you are. So isosceles triangles are workers, squares middle-class, circles priests. Of course all women are lines...), but is still a story against discrimination. Again, it kept me thinking, and reading. Another one that teacher recommended was "Innumeracy" by John Allen Paulos. Whether or not you're a math student, it's very informative & entertaining.
For general essays on almost any subject under the sun, Issac Asimov can't be beat. His non-fiction works are just as well-written and interesting as his scads of skiffy tales. Beginning his professional career as a chemist, he had a knack for explaining even the most complex subject in an easy to understand style.
As everyone's tastes vary, some will turn to reading fiction, some historical accounts, some textbooks. Even if some of your students don't write as much, the important thing is to keep reading. It stimulates the mind, and adds to the store of self-knowledge that helps make everyone unique.
Encouraging and incorporating a science-based slant into your student's writing will be trickier. Alas, some will not be interested in writing at all, and that's not something you can really force. The best you can do is show them some science or math, ask them to show how they feel about what they've read, and what it makes them think about, and wait for results.
You could also enlist the student's aid by involving them in choosing a book that the entire class will read. Giving them a part in the selecting process will help keep them interested in the project. The choices can come from a book that a particular student has already discovered, something you may have run across or heard about; anywhere, really.
The site whyfirefoxisblocked.com appears to be owned by a Danny Carlton (dannycarlton.net).
Interesting that Mr. Carlton's own home site does not block firefox.
Less interesting is his reasoning, that ignoring ads equals stealing.
So I'm tooling down the highway, and avert my gaze from the latest obnoxious billboard as I pass. Have I just stolen from the billboard owner, and the advertiser?
The claim is ludicrous. The only "right" the web owners have in this context is that of free speech. They can put up any ad they want to, but I as a viewer am under no obligation to pay attention to it, and am perfectly within my rights to use any tool at my disposal to assist me. (As a species, we are, after all, really big on tool use.)
On the flip side, the web owners are welcome to try and come up with better tools of their own that get their ads through to my eyeballs.
The claim that demographics show FireFox users are a "small percentage" is outright wrong. True, the latest numbers show it to be behind IE - if you count 6 & 7 together. It's about 2 percent behind 6, and nearly 15 ahead of 7. Netscape, Opera & Safari combined are less 20% of FireFox.
I personally use noscript, not adblock, but as I'm the one looking at the site, it's my decision to ignore some parts and not others, so don't have a problem with the concept of either addon.
The only way not viewing ads could possibly be construed as stealing would be if it were a pay site, that required login credentials, and said credentials were bypassed or forged.
So far as his supporting quote by Judge Posner, I seem to recall one of the big inducements for going to cable (when first hearing of it in the 70's) was that, as a PAID service, there would be no commercials. Yes, I shell out a good deal of money every month for access to the shows I like, and have no qualms whatsoever about having the DVR skip through commercials.
Unless Cisco makes a couple of changes on their end, this could spell trouble for the 'home' level consumer.
Went round 'n round with them after purchasing an A/B/G laptop WIFI card (AIR-CB21AG). Had misplaced the disk, went to the site to re-d/l the drivers.
What's this, I need a service contract just to access the download area? For a $125 part? This ain't no Catalyst we're talking about!
To be fair, they do have some very high dollar equipment, and for that class of hardware I do understand the need for a service contract. What I couldn't get them to see was that this item, though it had the Cisco name & logo on it, just wasn't in the same league. Had it been labeled "LinkSys", I could have gotten the drivers without any difficulty.
After some months of yakking back & forth via email (by which time I'd found the disk, but was now thoroughly peeved at their inflexible and to-my-mind idiotic stance), I get a message saying "We'd like to discuss this further, please leave a phone number where you can be reached..."
Sure thing, here you go...
Funny thing is, I never got that call.
When it's time to upgrade the firmware, one has to wonder what the service contract will run for a $50 home router...
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Sensors in the road is *so* twentieth century. ;)
The better solution is to teach the vehicle to see and hear, though those words won't mean quite the same to a device that can access GPS, radio, and other forms of information not available to human senses.
Every time some *#!head cuts me off in traffic, changes lanes without signaling or generally acts like they're the only ones on the road, I make a little prayer that someday we'll be smart enough to let our cars drive for us. Not all the time; certainly "manual" will still have its uses, but at least in congested freeway settings it makes far more sense to get hot-headed, slow-reacting humans off the steering wheel.
Sure, security is good. But so is accountability. If RFID is *that* broken, it demands public scrutiny.
So, the problem is not that they are incapable of making such an episode, but their cowing corporate overlords would rather they do not, for fear of losing funding.
To which I say, fooey!
Perhaps the MB team could do some side work, *not* an official episode, totally on their own, *without pay* (at least none from the boss), and just post the results to YouTube?
For extra credit, they could get Buster to help. Sure, he's usually around when things have to fall from a great height - so sorry, thrill-seekers, there'd be no smooshing of limbs this time around - but it would be poetic to have him carrying the card, showing that any dummy can get hacked.
Hell, I'd even pitch in a little to help it get made, just out of principle.
I suggest Devo, or perhaps Wierd Al. He puts on one helluva show. ;)
Seriously, let's step outside the proverbial box for a moment. Does it have to be a metal? How 'bout carbon? Am not suggesting you have the means to make a ring of buckyballs, but perhaps a layer of man-made diamond over another - perhaps recyclable - material?
BTW, congratulations!
Great, now they *want* you to spoof like they do. You can even get paid!
Too bad that about a year and a half ago, MST3K took legal action to force a name change of six year old Austin comedy group Mr. Sinus Theater, a trio who went around to area movie houses spoofing bad films.
Mr. Sinus was (and, now as the duo Master Pancake Theater, remains) a treat to experience. The name may have been a little similar, so yes, it's obvious where they got the initial inspiration. But there all similarities cease.
The performances were live, for one thing, with the guys sitting off to the side of the screen, mics in hand, riffing off the movie and each other. They certainly talked beforehand about what they'd say, but nothing like a written script was used. No silhouettes were visible at the bottom of the screen. There was no pretending one of the characters was a robot. (They weren't even characters, just voices piped into the sound system.) They never produced a TV show, or recorded their performances for purposes of reproduction.
One could argue (if one were silly and wanted to waste a lot of time belaboring the obvious) that, applying their own logic to themselves, MST3K itself should be shut down, as they infringe upon the act of viewers worldwide who talk back to the movie.
Sure would be nice if FireFox end users could cause to pop up on every developer's screen an annoying message to to FIX THE IDIOTIC CERT PROBLEM in v3.
I know, it was supposed to improve security. But though there are scads of legitimate uses for a self-signed cert, that's not the point.
The real point is that I'm the one actually using the browser, and if I want to let someone in the door whether or not their cert came from FF's built-in whitelist, it's MY decision, not that of some policy committee over at Mozilla.
Anyone who prefers FireFox and runs multiple domains from the same IP (i.e., shared or VPS hosting) has lost their ability to securely access their control panel, at least without hassle. (BTW, TB's virtual id extension would work well here, hint, hint)
The worst thing about the bug - actually, not so much of a bug as a behavioral flaw - is that the option is still there to have the self-signed cert permanently added. Unfortunately, FF doesn't want to listen to that little checkmark.
All in all, v3 is a great improvement. Memory footprint is down, speed is up. Unfortunately, the self-signed cert problem will do more to hurt FF than folks not upgrading from v2.
At that age and earlier my favorite books were not skiffy, but collections: Aesop, the Brothers Grim, Hans Christian Anderson, and the tales of Greek Mythology. They taught me a lot.
While Starship Troopers was an adult novel, Heinlein for many years alternated between juveniles & "grown up" books, writing one of each kind in turn.
Starman Jones, Have Space Suit, Will Travel, Podakyne of Mars were all Juvies. Asimov had the Lucky Starr novels.
If the kids are already avid readers, though, they probably have the comprehension to deal with more adult works. Sounds like they may be beyond Paddington.
On the flip side, just because a book is geared toward younger humans doesn't automatically make it light-hearted. Madeline L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time and Roald Dahl's Charley and the Chocolate Factory have their grim moments, though they were both great writers. I'd recommend anything by them.
Writer James Blish collected all the original Star Trek episodes in written form; they're good harmless adventure with known characters and storylines.
Going slightly outside skiffy tales, I'd heartily recommend Lewis Carol. If they have heads for math you might want to try Flatland by Edwin Abbot, a Victorian era novel about a two-dimensional man visited by a 3-D human.
Whatever happens, know you're lucky. You've got kids who read.
Who's to say such selection is not just evolution further physically strengthening the species?
Of course, physical strength is not the only factor in survival.
On the flip side, who might have been denied existence had such a practice been available in earlier times?
(Srinivasa Ramanujan, Eva Peron, Blaise Pascal, Bill Hicks, Stephen Hawking, Ada Lovelace, Lou Gherig; the list is quite long...)
Alas, that list could also come to include anyone who has ever died of drug overdose, as one could argue that such an inclination is a genetic deficiency. That's where this practice would start to get slippery.
If you further extended that concept to merely include predilection for addiction, we'd potentially lose George Carlin & George Bush, two humans who for better or worse have had an undeniable effect on modern society (and one of whom probably never thought he'd be mentioned in the company of the other.)
One thing is sure: As humans became capable of doing something, they (or at least some of them) usually do, no matter what others may have to say about it.
Any argument against such selection has at its roots a faith-based belief in Spirit. Only those who have such belief will be harmed here, as their belief also entails another entity (or entities) controlling their existence.
The bottom line is such behavior may make us hardier, but only in the physical sense. It will also certainly change our future, just as does every human action.
AFAIK, v2 will not automatically upgrade itself to v3, or even alert the user that v3 is available.
Mozilla should consider pushing an update to v2 which would allow this.
Believe it or not, many, many surfers out there (and 'puter users in general) don't keep up with news, and for various reasons find manual upgrades not to be worth the bother.
The easier Mozilla makes it on Joe User to get to v3, the better off it and they will be in the long run.
If it ever comes out, I'd give OpenMoko a try...
Have to wonder how much effort the West Virginia Assessor has expended making sure people pay extra for public information, effort which is ultimately paid for by the good citizens of that state.
One would think the reduced cost from not printing & storing hard copies of information (some of which will certainly out of date before being purchased) would more than offset the relatively meager revenue generated by selling paper copies, vs. a 1-time scan & download link from the state's web space.
Instead of worrying about keeping up with last year's budget, a better solution would be to work a little PR magic & get a piece of those savings allocated toward offsetting the lowered revenue from printing & selling paper maps.
Am not a biologist by trade, but had always thought evolution was at its root a random process. It has the potential to try anything, but known survival traits will always be favored.
We do understand the mechanism by which a trait will become dominant; reproduction of that built-in behavior to offspring. What we don't understand is how such dominance prevents other, competing traits from becoming active.
In the Science Daily excerpt, they mentioned long-necked giraffes, and how if evolution was random we would also see those of the short-necked variety.
This logic does not follow. We would see short-necked giraffes only if their survival let them reproduce. As they would tend not to - being unable to reach the leaves at the top of the tall trees, thus denying them the energy required to either attract a mate or carry offspring to term - this hitherto unknown mechanism would not favor that trait becoming dominant, though like the activities of a good pack rat, the DNA which would allow this trait to exist may continue to be stored, and passed - unused - on to future generations.
Thus, evolution hedges its bets. It may come to pass someday that the short-necked giraffe was more easily able to survive than their long-necked counterparts. Perhaps all trees become shorter. Perhaps some form of brittle bone disease kills the ones with longer necks, and they change their neck length and diet in order to survive. Perhaps they enter into a symbiotic relationship with some other creature that digs up food and leaves it on the ground. Who knows what the future will bring. But should conditions change, the potential for such a trait, still dormant within the species, may emerge to dominance.
This is not meant to introduce any talk of "design" into evolution, but the fact is our understanding of the system remains in the realm of how traits are passed on, not why.
Having never "upgraded" to .Net, I'm still quite happy with Visual Studio Enterprise v6, though it's rarely used these days. Did manage to purchase Office 2003 for a good price a few years ago, and am satisfied with that as well. (It was an upgrade to a copy of Office 2000 Premium I'd won at an MS event some time ago, along with a pretty useless Compaq PDA, circa '99, that ran the old version of WinPE. It's in a box somewhere...)
Were I to be on the latest & greatest version of Office when they do finally slice VBA out of it, would miss the language only as it relates to Excel; those two in combination are a very, very handy set of tools.
But these days it's all about the web, anyway. My 'doze box runs Apache, MySQL & PHP, and there's a testing folder, so between virtual domains & the hosts file I can pretty much accomplish anything I used to with Excel / VBA. Sure, I don't get the same instant gratification, and true, debugging is a little more tricky, but on the plus side it's helped me to better learn the PHP language.
(I finally forced myself off my favorite text editor, and do use Eclipse for PHP coding these days, but mainly for the project views, and code folding. Haven't really gotten into debugging with it. I actually like having to have a good grasp of the code in my head, as opposed to relying on breakpoints & instant watches...)
I still maintain, having started - at least as far as MS platforms go - with their DOS based Professional Development System v7 back in the late 80's, the IDE they rolled out with Visual Basic was one of the best things MS has ever produced, and it was a great move on their part to port part of it to Office.
But, they made it so easy to debug you could get lazy.
These days, there are a couple of Excel / VBA apps I still routinely use, only because I haven't converted them to a web-based approach; but I hardly ever compile VB code through the Studio anymore. Still, I don't regret for one minute having upgraded to newer versions over the years - so long as the upgrades were actually useful.
IMHO, the real reason MS is dropping VBA is not because the platform is past its prime, rather that they can't figure out how to secure their operating system. (Just look at their latest attempt. If Vista were a car it would be recalled before you could say "Shoddy Software").
It's always been a two-edged sword. Yes, you could totally automate your system. Yes, you could totally obliterate someone else's system.
Not being the destructive sort, I found the power VBA offered to greatly assist me in performing the heavy lifting you sometimes need when weeding though large amounts of data. Others have different motivations, and have used the tool accordingly.
In any event, so long as I'm happy to stick with the older COM versions of MS apps, don't think Redmond's idiotic dismissal of a great platform will really affect my daily life. So long as Office 2003 continues to run on my 'doze box (and why shouldn't it, by the time I dump XP it'll probably be in favor of Linux anyway), VBA isn't going anywhere. I don't use it as much these days, but it's still handy to have around.
Sometimes, upgrades are really downgrades.
Sounds like Ford's lawyers could stand to read Richard Stallman's recent essay on how many folks are confused by this newfangled term "Intellectual Property" (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html)
One not-so-extreme extrapolation of their viewpoint would get any city with traffic cameras into trouble. As soon as they introduced the photo of a speeding motorist as evidence, they would be violating copyright, according to Ford.
Lastly, there is quite a difference between copyright, which is granted automatically upon creation of the work, and trademark, which applies to specific images, artwork or other expressions, and must be registered on an item-by-item basis.
One wonders if Ford has taken the trouble (and suffered the expense) of registering each and every single vehicle they have ever produced with the USPTO.
The idea that an alien race would attack us just for knowing we're here is ludicrous, implying that they'd be just as racist as our puppy-aged civilization currently acts. By the time you evolve the ability to leave your planetary nest, you're not just a critter anymore. Either you've grown up enough to feel secure in yourself & your abilities, or you're still no better than a cowering animal. Both your technical skills & decisions with regards to other life forms will reflect accordingly.
To paraphrase Issac Asimov, there are only a few ways to get there from here. Either the aliens can:
- Travel faster than Einstein thinks we should be able to.
- Live a very long time on their way over.
- Sleep through the trip.
If it's the first possibility, then almost certainly they've grown up enough to be friends by nature, not foe. After all, if you had the power to traverse the stars in an instant, what would be your motivation to enslave or destroy a new-found group of potential friends or trading partners? It would be a lot simpler to just stay home & build your own punching bag.Options 2 & 3 require a great deal more commitment on the part of the travelers. They don't even know us, why would they want to spend several lifetimes visiting an unknown entity just so they - or their subsequent offspring - could destroy them?
The idea that they'd just throw rocks from their home to ours is equally absurd. The technological skill such an undertaking would require simply does not mesh with the mindset of an entire race deciding to shoot first, ask questions later.
It's much more likely that there are scads of intelligent life forms out there, but just as we don't engage in philosophical discussions with a 2-year old, they are - if even currently aware of our existence - waiting for us to grow up a bit before trying to chat.
And if there are galactic bullies out there, just waiting for that next fight to pick, what do we think we could do about it? In the long run it's healthier to accept the risk that such bullies may exist, and continue with our normal, curious ways, rather than spending our entire lives in hiding.
There was a very funny Austin Texas comedy group called Mr. Sinus Theatre, an obvious omage to your creation, but different enough that they stood on their own.
Like the spaceship crew, they roasted really bad movies with running commentary, but that was about the only similarity. For one thing, they were live, and made no effort to dress up in costumes or appear as anything but human. They didn't even appear on the screen, using mikes off to the side feeding into the P.A.
The 3-man group would perform at a local theater (sometimes "on the road" as well; I saw them roast "Xanadu" at a roller rink, and afterwards we all went in to skate for a bit).
Just curious why MST3K felt it necessary to legally force them to change their name?
Thank you!
Moving PhotoShop online presents two problems:
Currently, only Safari supports color management (sRGB, Adobe RGB, etc.), so they either need to include their own browser or work with *all* vendors (no bets here, but the former will probably win out).
I just can't imagine scanning in an 8x10 at 600dpi 32 bit color & then expecting it to render online. We'd be looking at a several hundred meg image here.
Perhaps Adobe's online suite will come with plane fare to Japan where there's *real* broadband...
By this logic I would need to purchase one copy of every album I own for each CD player where the music may conceivably be used.
So, let's see...
Car, check
Living Room, check
Bedroom, check
Den, check
Other car, check
Workroom, check
Oh, wait, they're not all Sony's. Does that mean I need to purchase new CD players as well?
And what happens if I take an album I've purchased to a party at someone else's house?
As the guys from that Irish Ale TV commercial would say: Brilliant!
You have lights, right?
One of the great social programs of the last century was the Rural Electrification Initiative. Vast resources were employed to string wire to outlying areas.
Granted, even by the 1970's, we were still not quite at 100%, but that's not the point here.
If you have electricity, you already have wire run to your house, and the technology exists to pass broadband-speed data on that wire.
Sorry, this isn't really an answer, more a polemic on the idea that's it's just too expensive to get broadband out to everyone in our country.
We did it once, we can certainly do it again.
Make your main machine a laptop, and take it with you to work every day.
Your next problem will be dealing with his request for a substantial increase in allowance...
It should be obvious, the laptop manufacturer fears that by having *nix installed, you'll actually be able to use the machine, thereby more quickly wearing out the hinges...
Sorry to hear about this idiotic policy of which you've run afoul. Here in the States we have some watchdog groups: A government entity called the Federal Trade Commission, a business entity called the Better Business Bureau, and others depending on the industry. Perhaps it is time to contact your analog of these groups (should they exist). Do it in writing. Nothing may come of it, but at least your complaint will be recorded, and you'll know that the manufacturer will get a nasty letter from the watchdog(s) as well as yourself.
Alternatively, if you're the litigious type, sue them, and make them explain in court how the operating system can possibly affect hardware which has no interaction with any code.
You could also use the most excellent SourceForge app CloneZilla to back up your laptop, restore the MS partition & try again with a different clerk (which would be a lot easier than re-loading 'doze with a dual-boot scenario, walking into the store with the MS partition running in standby so they can see it's still the original OS, then saying you need the hard drive while it's under repair). Long shot, but may work.
Good luck!
The first childhood books I read over & over (mom taught me to read at 4) were collections: Aesop, the Brother's Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson. All morality tales, but giving great lessons if you cared to take them in.
Later I took up science fiction (real skiffy, not dragons & whatnot) which fed my appetite for what might be possible, and more importantly kept me reading.
Along the way I picked up Roald Dahl, Madeline L'Engle, and many other wonderful writers.
Being dragged along as "chaperone" for my teen-aged aunt to go see a movie with her boyfriend (I was then seven) led me to 2001. Not understanding the movie, I looked for the book, which had not yet been written (it was created as a screenplay, not converted from any earlier novel). Instead found The City & The Stars, set a half million years in the future, and in which the first chapter mentions a machine that was totally electronic, with "no moving parts." Reading about such a distant time at such an early age has definitely warped my sense of time.
In high school, my trig teacher turned me on to "Flatland" by Edwin Abbot. Written in the mid 1860's, it definitely has a Victorian slant to it (it's a 2-d world, where the more segments you have the higher in society you are. So isosceles triangles are workers, squares middle-class, circles priests. Of course all women are lines...), but is still a story against discrimination. Again, it kept me thinking, and reading. Another one that teacher recommended was "Innumeracy" by John Allen Paulos. Whether or not you're a math student, it's very informative & entertaining.
For general essays on almost any subject under the sun, Issac Asimov can't be beat. His non-fiction works are just as well-written and interesting as his scads of skiffy tales. Beginning his professional career as a chemist, he had a knack for explaining even the most complex subject in an easy to understand style.
As everyone's tastes vary, some will turn to reading fiction, some historical accounts, some textbooks. Even if some of your students don't write as much, the important thing is to keep reading. It stimulates the mind, and adds to the store of self-knowledge that helps make everyone unique.
Encouraging and incorporating a science-based slant into your student's writing will be trickier. Alas, some will not be interested in writing at all, and that's not something you can really force. The best you can do is show them some science or math, ask them to show how they feel about what they've read, and what it makes them think about, and wait for results.
You could also enlist the student's aid by involving them in choosing a book that the entire class will read. Giving them a part in the selecting process will help keep them interested in the project. The choices can come from a book that a particular student has already discovered, something you may have run across or heard about; anywhere, really.
Good luck!
There is one resource above all which will help in your trek towards management:
Children.
The more the merrier, but with each acquisition there is an inverse ratio of experience to leftover energy for your own agenda.
Good luck!
The site whyfirefoxisblocked.com appears to be owned by a Danny Carlton (dannycarlton.net).
Interesting that Mr. Carlton's own home site does not block firefox.
Less interesting is his reasoning, that ignoring ads equals stealing.
So I'm tooling down the highway, and avert my gaze from the latest obnoxious billboard as I pass. Have I just stolen from the billboard owner, and the advertiser?
The claim is ludicrous. The only "right" the web owners have in this context is that of free speech. They can put up any ad they want to, but I as a viewer am under no obligation to pay attention to it, and am perfectly within my rights to use any tool at my disposal to assist me. (As a species, we are, after all, really big on tool use.)
On the flip side, the web owners are welcome to try and come up with better tools of their own that get their ads through to my eyeballs.
The claim that demographics show FireFox users are a "small percentage" is outright wrong. True, the latest numbers show it to be behind IE - if you count 6 & 7 together. It's about 2 percent behind 6, and nearly 15 ahead of 7. Netscape, Opera & Safari combined are less 20% of FireFox.
I personally use noscript, not adblock, but as I'm the one looking at the site, it's my decision to ignore some parts and not others, so don't have a problem with the concept of either addon.
The only way not viewing ads could possibly be construed as stealing would be if it were a pay site, that required login credentials, and said credentials were bypassed or forged.
So far as his supporting quote by Judge Posner, I seem to recall one of the big inducements for going to cable (when first hearing of it in the 70's) was that, as a PAID service, there would be no commercials. Yes, I shell out a good deal of money every month for access to the shows I like, and have no qualms whatsoever about having the DVR skip through commercials.
Hmmm, a cross-continental backup system, set on college campuses.
Sounds like something the defense department might be interested in.
Wonder what they'll call it?
Unless Cisco makes a couple of changes on their end, this could spell trouble for the 'home' level consumer.
Went round 'n round with them after purchasing an A/B/G laptop WIFI card (AIR-CB21AG). Had misplaced the disk, went to the site to re-d/l the drivers.
What's this, I need a service contract just to access the download area? For a $125 part? This ain't no Catalyst we're talking about!
To be fair, they do have some very high dollar equipment, and for that class of hardware I do understand the need for a service contract. What I couldn't get them to see was that this item, though it had the Cisco name & logo on it, just wasn't in the same league. Had it been labeled "LinkSys", I could have gotten the drivers without any difficulty.
After some months of yakking back & forth via email (by which time I'd found the disk, but was now thoroughly peeved at their inflexible and to-my-mind idiotic stance), I get a message saying "We'd like to discuss this further, please leave a phone number where you can be reached..."
Sure thing, here you go...
Funny thing is, I never got that call.
When it's time to upgrade the firmware, one has to wonder what the service contract will run for a $50 home router...