Exactly. Since when did this start being considered "underhanded"? If this is underhanded, then it is also underhanded to track any of the activity of any logged-in user on a website. Legitimate businesses use that tracking information to better serve their customers. Let's not get confused. Spam is wrong, but it's not necessarily wrong to use a method that is also used by spammers.
There are going to be cases where you wish you had a phone book, just like there are going to be cases where you wish there was a phone booth on the corner. Most of the time it's not needed, so it goes the way of the dodo. As it should, really.
I guess your definition of "a large portion of the population" is different from mine. I'll let you know when my mom, my niece and the local bakery are all using Second Life.
A little more perspective: In the heyday of AOL, the web was just starting out, and the AOL user base was very small compared to Facebook today. AOL was an ISP for which people had to pay, and there was no penalty for moving to a different ISP as they became available.
I'm not saying Facebook will never be replaced, but as the web matures the bigger players become truly huge and harder to dislodge. And change starts to slow down.
I think the question of whether and when Facebook will be supplanted by the Next Hot Social Think (tm) is interesting.
A LOT of people use Facebook A LOT. They depend on it. Businesses increasingly use it too -- a Facebook page is seen as an essential part of marketing and customer management now. In other words, it's not just a hot social thing; it's an integral part of online life for a large portion of the population. Someone could create a new hot social thing right now that is 10 times better than Facebook, and it would still probably take a long time for it to replace Facebook, because most people are perfectly happy with Facebook, and because you can't change your social network as easily as you can change your search engine. Maybe that's what's really bugging Google.
God can mean so many different things to different people, but whenever someone hears the word "God" they think it refers to the particular god that they believe in, or at least the most popular conception of god in their culture. In this case, most people are thinking of the Christian god. But I think Hawking's idea of god is modeled on that of Einstein, who emphasized that when he spoke of god he was not referring to a personal god, such as the Christian god.
In any case, regardless of the how the summary and TFA are framing it, the quote in the article says that Hawking simply thinks that God is not necessary to explain the big bang. That is not to say that God doesn't exist. That's a pretty simple and uncontroversial statement, or it should be.
That's my theory as well. Keepass allows you to set up a pattern for generating passwords, and it's pretty easy to design a pattern that results in passwords that are easy to remember. I use Keepass to generate and store a new password for everything. Obviously I don't remember every password, but at least I can look at it and hold it in my head for a few minutes if I need to.
My guess: it appears to be made primary to hover over a particular area, so it spends a lot of its time circling, which could possibly be made more efficient with asymmetry.
I agree with this, mostly. I think I am lucky to live in an area that has very good schools, but I think that a mistake that people often make is to assume it is the schools responsibility to educate their children. During one back to school night, one of the parents asked a question I thought was truly bizarre. They asked if, when their children have trouble with their homework, they should help them. This was 3rd grade! It was an honest question, but the very idea that the learning process was so rigid that any involvement of a parent could be detrimental showed a pretty warped idea of education.
But, I think it's also a mistake to assume that it is the parents' responsibility to educate their children. In fact, it is the child's responsibility. The more that parents and teachers can foster a sense of responsibility in children for their own education, the more the children will learn, and the more creative they will be.
I was amazed this week as my daughter told me all about the various varieties of butterflies near our house. I didn't know what they were called, but she had been taking out library books about butterflies and, in her spare time, drawing them and writing down facts about them. That's a natural thirst for learning. Part of my job is just not getting in the way.
Nowhere in the notice does it say that you MUST use one of the supported browsers. It says, "If you are using a browser that we don't support, you may not be able to access our site or you may not have the same level of performance as if you were using a supported browser." I'd be willing to bet that the site will work fine in Chrome. Why don't they list Chrome? Because they don't test with Chrome ("Supported browsers are browsers that we consistently use and test with our site"). Why don't they test with Chrome? Because every additional browser that must be tested with adds time to development and QA. You could argue that Chrome has enough users for them to invest the time to test with it, but if they are testing with Safari, they are probably fine with Chrome anyway. It's a simple matter of resources and I, frankly, don't see much wrong with it. I'm speaking both as a web developer and a Chase customer.
This is way off the topic of cumulative voting, but anyway...
I'm a (mostly) liberal, and I'm not that scared of Palin. My own theory is that the smart republicans recognize that she is unelectable, but that she is a great lightening rod for controversy that will allow them to come in in 2012 and provide their own Palin alternative. When the time comes, she will be thrown under the bus in favor of a fresh face with, preferably, little public history.
Then again, I've been wrong too many times to count:-)
I would second Picasa. The facial recognition is very good and makes going through a lot of photos pretty fast -- I don't think that information is stored in the image file itself though.
Geotagging in Picasa is pretty good too, but it also connects easily to Google Earth for geotagging, which makes it even easier.
Einstein was also famously distrustful of quantum mechanics because he was convinced that God "does not throw dice". Did he allow his particular conception of God to cloud his scientific judgment?
it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 1
I think it's true that great books ask questions. Milan Kundera said, "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything..." I've always loved that quote.
The problem is that Lost left so many meaningless questions unanswered. Questions of fact and chronology and motive -- those are the kinds of questions that are meant to be answered in the course of telling a story. The questions that Kundera was talking about were questions that Lost, in the end, actually tried to answer -- questions of love and fulfillment, spirituality, etc. Meaning of life stuff. At the end we are told that all of these people are at peace because they have found friendship and true love on a deserted island (okay, not so deserted). Yeah, right.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the early episodes of Lost, which seemed like a clever puzzle to be solved. By this season, I knew there was no clever solution, and so I wasn't really disappointed by the finale. But the last few episodes have seemed especially pointless, with everyone running around and huffing and puffing and changing alliances and looking really serious. It was, to quote another great writer, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Re:Was Not Impressed at All
on
Lost Ends
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
That's not really fair. Twin Peaks made A LOT more sense.
It depends on what your options are, but if you have one big room and have to fit several developers in there, then what you might want to do is just buy separate desks for each developer and let them work out where they put them, at what angle, with or without cubicle walls, etc. If they really want to arrange it in a circle, they can do that. I have worked in spaces like that and it worked out very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is particular about the exact position of my desk -- aren't most good developers a bit anal? If you try to design it too much, you're going to get it wrong.
I thought mounted entertainment systems were killed by portable $100 DVD players already...
Um, yeah. Thanks for stating the obvious for me.
When we bought our Sienna in 2004, we had one child and another on the way. The salesmen told us we "need" the dvd entertainment system. We didn't really think we did, and besides had seen cheap portable DVD players at Cosco. Even back then it was easy to see that we could buy two portable DVD players for less than the price of the integrated system.
Anyway, it's 2010, and we never bought the DVD players, and our kids are just fine on long car rides.
A lot of people are saying that the guy that found the phone should really have turned it into the police, and that would make sense if he found it on the street. But he found it in a bar, which surely has a lost and found box of some sort. If you really wanted to get the phone back to its owner, why wouldn't you give it to the bartender in case someone comes looking for it?
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. Since when did this start being considered "underhanded"? If this is underhanded, then it is also underhanded to track any of the activity of any logged-in user on a website. Legitimate businesses use that tracking information to better serve their customers. Let's not get confused. Spam is wrong, but it's not necessarily wrong to use a method that is also used by spammers.
There are going to be cases where you wish you had a phone book, just like there are going to be cases where you wish there was a phone booth on the corner. Most of the time it's not needed, so it goes the way of the dodo. As it should, really.
I guess your definition of "a large portion of the population" is different from mine. I'll let you know when my mom, my niece and the local bakery are all using Second Life.
A little more perspective:
In the heyday of AOL, the web was just starting out, and the AOL user base was very small compared to Facebook today. AOL was an ISP for which people had to pay, and there was no penalty for moving to a different ISP as they became available.
I'm not saying Facebook will never be replaced, but as the web matures the bigger players become truly huge and harder to dislodge. And change starts to slow down.
I think the question of whether and when Facebook will be supplanted by the Next Hot Social Think (tm) is interesting.
A LOT of people use Facebook A LOT. They depend on it. Businesses increasingly use it too -- a Facebook page is seen as an essential part of marketing and customer management now. In other words, it's not just a hot social thing; it's an integral part of online life for a large portion of the population. Someone could create a new hot social thing right now that is 10 times better than Facebook, and it would still probably take a long time for it to replace Facebook, because most people are perfectly happy with Facebook, and because you can't change your social network as easily as you can change your search engine. Maybe that's what's really bugging Google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_button
in a browser that further entrenches the same overblown social media sites that I'm sick of hearing about.
Suggested reading:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/improving-javascript-performance-with-jagermonkey/
Okay, yes, I'm one of those people that get all of these mixed up. Time to remedy that:
http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/questions/britain.html
I'm not sure where the line is exactly, but when employees joke about their company motto being "Do Evil", they've probably crossed it.
God can mean so many different things to different people, but whenever someone hears the word "God" they think it refers to the particular god that they believe in, or at least the most popular conception of god in their culture. In this case, most people are thinking of the Christian god. But I think Hawking's idea of god is modeled on that of Einstein, who emphasized that when he spoke of god he was not referring to a personal god, such as the Christian god.
In any case, regardless of the how the summary and TFA are framing it, the quote in the article says that Hawking simply thinks that God is not necessary to explain the big bang. That is not to say that God doesn't exist. That's a pretty simple and uncontroversial statement, or it should be.
That's my theory as well. Keepass allows you to set up a pattern for generating passwords, and it's pretty easy to design a pattern that results in passwords that are easy to remember. I use Keepass to generate and store a new password for everything. Obviously I don't remember every password, but at least I can look at it and hold it in my head for a few minutes if I need to.
It does appear to be somewhat asymmetrical, unless there's some kind of optical illusion going on (hi-res image available here: http://www.qinetiq.com/home/newsroom/news_releases_homepage/2010/3rd_quarter/zephyr_2010.Par.22482.File.tmp/Zephyr%202010%20launch.JPG)
My guess: it appears to be made primary to hover over a particular area, so it spends a lot of its time circling, which could possibly be made more efficient with asymmetry.
I agree with this, mostly. I think I am lucky to live in an area that has very good schools, but I think that a mistake that people often make is to assume it is the schools responsibility to educate their children. During one back to school night, one of the parents asked a question I thought was truly bizarre. They asked if, when their children have trouble with their homework, they should help them. This was 3rd grade! It was an honest question, but the very idea that the learning process was so rigid that any involvement of a parent could be detrimental showed a pretty warped idea of education.
But, I think it's also a mistake to assume that it is the parents' responsibility to educate their children. In fact, it is the child's responsibility. The more that parents and teachers can foster a sense of responsibility in children for their own education, the more the children will learn, and the more creative they will be.
I was amazed this week as my daughter told me all about the various varieties of butterflies near our house. I didn't know what they were called, but she had been taking out library books about butterflies and, in her spare time, drawing them and writing down facts about them. That's a natural thirst for learning. Part of my job is just not getting in the way.
Reminds me of something Robert Frost said: "Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down."
Nowhere in the notice does it say that you MUST use one of the supported browsers. It says, "If you are using a browser that we don't support, you may not be able to access our site or you may not have the same level of performance as if you were using a supported browser." I'd be willing to bet that the site will work fine in Chrome. Why don't they list Chrome? Because they don't test with Chrome ("Supported browsers are browsers that we consistently use and test with our site"). Why don't they test with Chrome? Because every additional browser that must be tested with adds time to development and QA. You could argue that Chrome has enough users for them to invest the time to test with it, but if they are testing with Safari, they are probably fine with Chrome anyway. It's a simple matter of resources and I, frankly, don't see much wrong with it. I'm speaking both as a web developer and a Chase customer.
Too true. I never have signed up for an account with Chase, but my Visa card and my mortgage are now both with Chase.
This is way off the topic of cumulative voting, but anyway ...
I'm a (mostly) liberal, and I'm not that scared of Palin. My own theory is that the smart republicans recognize that she is unelectable, but that she is a great lightening rod for controversy that will allow them to come in in 2012 and provide their own Palin alternative. When the time comes, she will be thrown under the bus in favor of a fresh face with, preferably, little public history.
Then again, I've been wrong too many times to count :-)
I would second Picasa. The facial recognition is very good and makes going through a lot of photos pretty fast -- I don't think that information is stored in the image file itself though.
Geotagging in Picasa is pretty good too, but it also connects easily to Google Earth for geotagging, which makes it even easier.
Einstein was also famously distrustful of quantum mechanics because he was convinced that God "does not throw dice". Did he allow his particular conception of God to cloud his scientific judgment?
Stephen Hawking picked up the question in a lecture:
http://www.hawking.org.uk/index.php/lectures/64
it seems that even God is bound by the Uncertainty Principle, and can not know both the position, and the speed, of a particle. So God does play dice with the universe. All the evidence points to him being an inveterate gambler, who throws the dice on every possible occasion.
I think it's true that great books ask questions. Milan Kundera said, "The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything..." I've always loved that quote.
The problem is that Lost left so many meaningless questions unanswered. Questions of fact and chronology and motive -- those are the kinds of questions that are meant to be answered in the course of telling a story. The questions that Kundera was talking about were questions that Lost, in the end, actually tried to answer -- questions of love and fulfillment, spirituality, etc. Meaning of life stuff. At the end we are told that all of these people are at peace because they have found friendship and true love on a deserted island (okay, not so deserted). Yeah, right.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the early episodes of Lost, which seemed like a clever puzzle to be solved. By this season, I knew there was no clever solution, and so I wasn't really disappointed by the finale. But the last few episodes have seemed especially pointless, with everyone running around and huffing and puffing and changing alliances and looking really serious. It was, to quote another great writer, "full of sound and fury,
signifying nothing."
That's not really fair. Twin Peaks made A LOT more sense.
It depends on what your options are, but if you have one big room and have to fit several developers in there, then what you might want to do is just buy separate desks for each developer and let them work out where they put them, at what angle, with or without cubicle walls, etc. If they really want to arrange it in a circle, they can do that. I have worked in spaces like that and it worked out very well. I'm sure I'm not the only one who is particular about the exact position of my desk -- aren't most good developers a bit anal? If you try to design it too much, you're going to get it wrong.
I thought mounted entertainment systems were killed by portable $100 DVD players already...
Um, yeah. Thanks for stating the obvious for me.
When we bought our Sienna in 2004, we had one child and another on the way. The salesmen told us we "need" the dvd entertainment system. We didn't really think we did, and besides had seen cheap portable DVD players at Cosco. Even back then it was easy to see that we could buy two portable DVD players for less than the price of the integrated system.
Anyway, it's 2010, and we never bought the DVD players, and our kids are just fine on long car rides.
A lot of people are saying that the guy that found the phone should really have turned it into the police, and that would make sense if he found it on the street. But he found it in a bar, which surely has a lost and found box of some sort. If you really wanted to get the phone back to its owner, why wouldn't you give it to the bartender in case someone comes looking for it?