It will also be interesting to see if free textbooks ever really get going in languages other than English. If they do, then it could really start being cost-effective to distribute them to kids on a computer rather than by dead trees.
It's not a question of "when"; in many towns in third world nations, a room with a bunch of old PCs and CD-ROM drives in it is the library, and there is a lot of open content available for them.
VoIP is usually filtered out by the mobile phone providers, as it would severely lower their revenue if everybody used VoIP over GSM or 3G. So no chance for that.
Filtering is what mobile providers are doing right now. Open platforms are the antidote to that. And, in the end, it's also good for mobile providers. In any case, given that several providers offer unlimited nationwide calling already, I doubt VoIP is a significant long term concern to providers.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
It's a misconception that Linux is somehow in a race with Microsoft about features or innovation. In fact, this feature, like just about every supposed "innovation" in Vista is already supported by Linux. The reason you don't hear about it much is because it's actually not very useful.
The way features get into Windows is that some Microsoft engineer thinks he has a bright idea, convinces management, and then it gets shipped and marketed, and then it's supported for years to come; all of that is largely independent of whether the feature is useful or not
The way features get into Linux is that some people implement something, users start using it, distributions notice that the feature is being used and pick it up. The Linux process makes it much more likely that stuff that's in the distributions is stuff people actually want.
I'm not trying to troll, honest. But injecting something brand new into your body before anyone knows exactly what it does is fantastically dangerous.
No, it is not. If it were, people wouldn't get so upset about this case. Subjects getting seriously hurt by this kind of initial safety test is quite unusual.
The reason why things went so badly wrong in this case is because (1) this is a new class of drugs for which current safety protocols don't work well, and (2) multiple people involved in the test seem to have been careless.
Still, IMHO the company should help these poor people out even though they don't legally have to. I'm sure the reason why they're not isn't greed so much as a fear of litigation. If they pay them any money, that looks like an admission of guilt.
I think there's a good chance that both companies (Parexel and TeGenero) will be found negligent in court.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people. They don't do this on purpose.
But they do benefit from taking significant risks with test subjects' lives.
The drug companies should be doing as much as possible to assure the safety of the drug before the test, but not everything can be forseen. This is why we do testing in the first place.
Drug testing does have inherent risks. But people didn't get hurt by TGN1412 because of inherent risks of drug testing, they got hurt because the tests were designed and carried out irresponsibly.
Your reasoning is so full of holes that it just isn't worth responding to it.
In any case, Windows, Gnome, and KDE also apply the same principle and put lots of important UI elements around the edges of the screen (KDE even lets you enable Mac-style menus). So, the Mac just doesn't have an advantage there.
There are three major holes in that: (1) nobody has shown that Fitt's law works here, (2) even if it does, nobody has shown that the Mac design optimizes performance under Fitt's law, and (3) nobody has shown that optimizing this aspect of the UI leads to better usability.
The fact that this work keeps getting cited as an example of how Apple goes about designing UIs only shows how shoddy and unprincipled their work actually is.
But my point was that I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination... and put in my 40 hours for a salary like everyone else...
Well, isn't it nice that you manage to make ends meet with just 40 hours/week. Minimum wage earners don't have that luxury, they often have to work two jobs.
The very fact that you're having the time to post to Slashdot or play video games and post to Transgaming shows that you're completely out of touch with social realities.
and for now am living mostly paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, and chances are high that's your own fault.
They are taking my bread money when they want things they didn't work for... and instead use the government to take my money from me and give it to them (maybe not directly...).
You still haven't explained how minimum wage earners "want things they didn't work for" or how it's your money they're supposedly getting.
People are trying to make ends meet and working hard, and when the government tried to find a solution for helping them without raising taxes, you start whining about it. I think you're a jerk.
The article is so full of logical holes that the author would get a failing grade in a college essay.
He makes various implicit claims about how Macs supposedly have better "performance", better support for media, are a better platform, and how Apple has executed better on its strategies. He doesn't support any of those claims with facts or arguments.
As it is, the whole article is a marketing piece for Apple, not any kind of analysis.
The mac will be (slightly) more expensive, a *lot* easier to use,
Usability is something that can be measured and quantified. Where has anybody ever demonstrated that the Mac is actually easier to use than Windows, KDE, or Gnome?
Who knows how the algorithm they implemented works.
Pretty much everybody knows how the algorithm works because pretty much everybody is using the same speech recognition algorithms. There are even some open source implementations that you can get that use roughly the same algorithms.
We already have a nice balance: government agencies can intercept voice communications at the endpoints, where they are (by necessity) analog. It has about the right amount of overhead: you need to physically bug the place or the phone.
The problem with trying to break encrypted messages is that it just can't be done: the government never knows whether they got it, and, on the other hand, such laws are likely primarily going to be used for harrassing people.
It's obvious he's been a part of a team, and it's also obvious something went wrong with the team. Looks like he didn't get his way / ideas implemented. Let's look at the biggr picture though, that of PHP, the project. Should it's success depend on a single person's views? There's other developers and even creators of the Zend engine.. so they should be able to steer things forward.
What makes you think he was the odd one out in the team? Maybe his views represented the majority, but he was just the only one willing to draw the consequences. Or maybe his reasons are completely different. It's pointless to try and guess the reasons and state of the project from such limited information.
By that standard, no scientist in any field can "prove" anything [...] Meanwhile, those of us who rely on data collected by observations made to the best of our abilities, and rigorous theories representing the state of current knowledge, will go on doing our best to understand the world around us.
People do do that to the best of their abilities, but that's not good enough. There has been a revolution in the mathematics of deriving theory from observation, and working physicists just haven't figured it out yet. It will probably several generations of physicists until experimental physics changes from its haphazard 19th century approach to a rigorous, mathematical approach.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
Because many of the old observations are likely also consistent with MECOs.
You see, when people say that an experiment is "testing the theory of black holes" or "testing the theory of general relativity", and the experiment is consistent with the theory, that experiment doesn't just provide evidence for the theory it was designed for, but also for a (potentially infinite) number of unstated theories.
Once there are two important alternative theories (MECOs and black holes), then people come up specifically with experiments to distinguish them.
(The whole thing is very 19th century and haphazard, but it's still how physicists work.)
Slashdot Mirror
It will also be interesting to see if free textbooks ever really get going in languages other than English. If they do, then it could really start being cost-effective to distribute them to kids on a computer rather than by dead trees.
It's not a question of "when"; in many towns in third world nations, a room with a bunch of old PCs and CD-ROM drives in it is the library, and there is a lot of open content available for them.
VoIP is usually filtered out by the mobile phone providers, as it would severely lower their revenue if everybody used VoIP over GSM or 3G. So no chance for that.
Filtering is what mobile providers are doing right now. Open platforms are the antidote to that. And, in the end, it's also good for mobile providers. In any case, given that several providers offer unlimited nationwide calling already, I doubt VoIP is a significant long term concern to providers.
If this was a Linux feature you can be certain it would be tooted as the best thing ever.
It's a misconception that Linux is somehow in a race with Microsoft about features or innovation. In fact, this feature, like just about every supposed "innovation" in Vista is already supported by Linux. The reason you don't hear about it much is because it's actually not very useful.
The way features get into Windows is that some Microsoft engineer thinks he has a bright idea, convinces management, and then it gets shipped and marketed, and then it's supported for years to come; all of that is largely independent of whether the feature is useful or not
The way features get into Linux is that some people implement something, users start using it, distributions notice that the feature is being used and pick it up. The Linux process makes it much more likely that stuff that's in the distributions is stuff people actually want.
This was an awesome feature in VMS,
Actually, it was a bad feature in VMS as well, which is why no other mainstream OS has implemented it since.
Closed platforms make it hard to do these things, often try to tie me to their own proprietary desktop offerings, and try to hold my data hostage.
I'm not trying to troll, honest. But injecting something brand new into your body before anyone knows exactly what it does is fantastically dangerous.
No, it is not. If it were, people wouldn't get so upset about this case. Subjects getting seriously hurt by this kind of initial safety test is quite unusual.
The reason why things went so badly wrong in this case is because (1) this is a new class of drugs for which current safety protocols don't work well, and (2) multiple people involved in the test seem to have been careless.
Still, IMHO the company should help these poor people out even though they don't legally have to. I'm sure the reason why they're not isn't greed so much as a fear of litigation. If they pay them any money, that looks like an admission of guilt.
I think there's a good chance that both companies (Parexel and TeGenero) will be found negligent in court.
The drug companies don't get any bennefit from producing drugs that kill people. They don't do this on purpose.
But they do benefit from taking significant risks with test subjects' lives.
The drug companies should be doing as much as possible to assure the safety of the drug before the test, but not everything can be forseen. This is why we do testing in the first place.
Drug testing does have inherent risks. But people didn't get hurt by TGN1412 because of inherent risks of drug testing, they got hurt because the tests were designed and carried out irresponsibly.
Their forensic examiner concluded that since all the keys were accounted for, there was no way the engine could have been started,
And if not all the keys had been accounted for, the insurance company would have refused to pay because the guy was careless with his keys.
I hope the victim will be able to recover both his loss and penalties from the insurance company.
Your reasoning is so full of holes that it just isn't worth responding to it.
In any case, Windows, Gnome, and KDE also apply the same principle and put lots of important UI elements around the edges of the screen (KDE even lets you enable Mac-style menus). So, the Mac just doesn't have an advantage there.
There are three major holes in that: (1) nobody has shown that Fitt's law works here, (2) even if it does, nobody has shown that the Mac design optimizes performance under Fitt's law, and (3) nobody has shown that optimizing this aspect of the UI leads to better usability.
The fact that this work keeps getting cited as an example of how Apple goes about designing UIs only shows how shoddy and unprincipled their work actually is.
You just keep reiterating why you think it's plausible, but plausiblity isn't the same as evidence.
So: where is the evidence?
Countless articles in scientific journals in the field of Human Factors.
Like which ones? I've been looking for them; I can't find them.
But my point was that I'm not rich by any stretch of the imagination... and put in my 40 hours for a salary like everyone else...
Well, isn't it nice that you manage to make ends meet with just 40 hours/week. Minimum wage earners don't have that luxury, they often have to work two jobs.
The very fact that you're having the time to post to Slashdot or play video games and post to Transgaming shows that you're completely out of touch with social realities.
and for now am living mostly paycheck to paycheck.
Yeah, and chances are high that's your own fault.
They are taking my bread money when they want things they didn't work for... and instead use the government to take my money from me and give it to them (maybe not directly...).
You still haven't explained how minimum wage earners "want things they didn't work for" or how it's your money they're supposedly getting.
People are trying to make ends meet and working hard, and when the government tried to find a solution for helping them without raising taxes, you start whining about it. I think you're a jerk.
The article is so full of logical holes that the author would get a failing grade in a college essay.
He makes various implicit claims about how Macs supposedly have better "performance", better support for media, are a better platform, and how Apple has executed better on its strategies. He doesn't support any of those claims with facts or arguments.
As it is, the whole article is a marketing piece for Apple, not any kind of analysis.
The mac will be (slightly) more expensive, a *lot* easier to use,
Usability is something that can be measured and quantified. Where has anybody ever demonstrated that the Mac is actually easier to use than Windows, KDE, or Gnome?
Who knows how the algorithm they implemented works.
Pretty much everybody knows how the algorithm works because pretty much everybody is using the same speech recognition algorithms. There are even some open source implementations that you can get that use roughly the same algorithms.
Out of the thousands of papers published on this subject every year, Roland Piquepaille picks this one.
I am speaking as one of the working class...
Do you harvest peaches? Do you weld steel? Do you clean toilets?
If you're working in the software industry, media, anything like that, you're, by definition, not "working class".
This is hardly "letting them eat cake"... it's more like "quit taking my bread money!".
How in the world are the 30 million minimum wage recipients "taking your bread money"?
Historically, your attitude has been expressed more succinctly by royalty as "There's a bread shortage? Let them eat cake".
EOM
We already have a nice balance: government agencies can intercept voice communications at the endpoints, where they are (by necessity) analog. It has about the right amount of overhead: you need to physically bug the place or the phone.
The problem with trying to break encrypted messages is that it just can't be done: the government never knows whether they got it, and, on the other hand, such laws are likely primarily going to be used for harrassing people.
It's obvious he's been a part of a team, and it's also obvious something went wrong with the team. Looks like he didn't get his way / ideas implemented. Let's look at the biggr picture though, that of PHP, the project. Should it's success depend on a single person's views? There's other developers and even creators of the Zend engine.. so they should be able to steer things forward.
What makes you think he was the odd one out in the team? Maybe his views represented the majority, but he was just the only one willing to draw the consequences. Or maybe his reasons are completely different. It's pointless to try and guess the reasons and state of the project from such limited information.
If you think those "stormouts" only happen with 15 year olds, you don't have a lot of experience. They happen at every level in every organization.
By that standard, no scientist in any field can "prove" anything [...] Meanwhile, those of us who rely on data collected by observations made to the best of our abilities, and rigorous theories representing the state of current knowledge, will go on doing our best to understand the world around us.
People do do that to the best of their abilities, but that's not good enough. There has been a revolution in the mathematics of deriving theory from observation, and working physicists just haven't figured it out yet. It will probably several generations of physicists until experimental physics changes from its haphazard 19th century approach to a rigorous, mathematical approach.
All good and fine. But if we have decades of good work with black holes and we've appeared to find quite a few of them, then why would we be throwing them away with just one possible MECO sighting?
Because many of the old observations are likely also consistent with MECOs.
You see, when people say that an experiment is "testing the theory of black holes" or "testing the theory of general relativity", and the experiment is consistent with the theory, that experiment doesn't just provide evidence for the theory it was designed for, but also for a (potentially infinite) number of unstated theories.
Once there are two important alternative theories (MECOs and black holes), then people come up specifically with experiments to distinguish them.
(The whole thing is very 19th century and haphazard, but it's still how physicists work.)