Rovian politics, while effective in the indecisive political climate of the 2000 Presidental Election, have proven to be ineffective and to a degree even harmful to John McCain's campaign.
A big part of Rovian political strategy during election season is to construct many locally focused and aired negative attack ads. People in Ohio will most likely see television ads about Obama's gaffe on Coal, while in Connecticut I have been bombarded with ads from the "Let Freedom Ring" foundation, mostly consisting of a scary ass looking old white guy telling the camera in a "straight-faced" manner that Obama plans to weaken our military through cutting spending, which will in turn be a sign of weakness to our enemies overseas. (Connecticut is very concerned about safety.)
The problem with these tactics , outside of being dirty , underhanded, and culturally divisive, is that technology and communication has evolved to an extent that undermines the effectiveness of specifically targeting one area for a negative ad as the negative ad tends to migrate beyond their "target area" , mostly through the Internet. I know a lot of people who are Independents that were completely turned off by McCain's campaign just because they saw an ad on YouTube that was aired in another part of the country that just so happened to decry something about Obama that they either completely supported or were undecided/sympathetic to. In other words, what is poison to some, is innocuous to others, and outrage presented out of just context can really turn people away.
Obama has managed to circumvent these tactics by running a campaign of an opposite nature: instead of airing negative local ads about the opposing candidate, they air positive ads nationwide about their candidate. Instead of pushing robo calls and getting a few dedicated partisans to furiously dial their base , they are getting people to go door to door and ask them to vote, even if they do not necessarily support Obama. And- above all- Obama ran a fifty-state campaign. Don't underestimate the collateral effect that a fifty-state campaign can have. By going into every state, people are more likely to believe you when you tell them that you actually care about them - and not just their swing state status. If this convinces even a few of the swing states, it will have done its job.
Because the Elections in America are financed with the following assumption in mind: That not every eligible American will vote on Election Day.
Not only is this assumption flawed in principle because elections should be financed to allow all people to vote easily regardless of likely turnout percentages, it also seems to be flawed on a mechanical level. However, don't fear - people who wait in the long lines may have water and hot chocolate delivered to them by Obama's "comfort teams" - groups of volunteers who don't campaign or canvas but focus on keeping people in that ballot line. He really did think of nearly everything.
I should have clarified my statement - it was typed in haste. I meant to say "the symbols are chosen to provide succinct methods to discuss complex subjects, rather than to obfuscate the meaning of what they are trying to discuss."
I agree with you. Some math concepts really are abstract. My use of "but" was in error.
I believe a lot of the symbols and obtuse/esoteric dialogue is not really meant to preserve an elitist clique (although being a math minor I think I can sympathetic with your sentiment - at times to me it felt like that, but mostly when I didn't understand something or got a bad grade on an exam, which happens to even the brightest sometimes), because lets be honest, even the best math professors don't make huge gobs of money; but they are simply presented as they are , without explanation, for sake of brevity and clarity. The abstractions are useful because they provide succinct methods to discuss complex subjects, but they aren't useful because they obfuscate the meaning of what they are trying to discuss.
That being said, I really like this idea. It would be nice to have a easily accessed database containing all of proven mathematics. A "mathematics wiki" would let you click on a symbol you might not know, and take you to an explanation for that symbol.
That being said, there really is no substitute for a good math teacher.
No. I'm only a math minor/computer science major, but from my limited understanding on the subject (as it was related to me by one of my smarter professors), Godel showed that Russell's system could not encompass all true statements. The problem (simplistically) lies in what is *demonstrably true* and what is *provably true*. In particular, Godel showed that Russell's system would have problems with things that are demonstrably true, or what you might call "self-evident truths" in philosophy.
The system proposed however, might find things that are true that people haven't thought about proving yet. I'm sure a mathematician could come along and give a more complete answer.
I was just thinking to myself that the name might have a large part in jQuery's current popularity. Imagine the following conversation:
Boss: So what did you pick for the website?
You: mooTools.
Boss: moo- what? Is that related to the flaming fox, thundering bird or that blasted penguin?
You: Er..not directly..
Boss: Out of my office! Bring me back acronyms or combinations of characters of the english alphabet with common words! Cute animals are not an element of success!
On the speed front: that isn't sufficient enough of a reason, and here's why:
The benchmarks are based on DOM selector tests. The code for the benchmark is not provided, so we don't really know in what manner he selected DOM elements, or if he even used the elements after selecting them. For instance: mooTools may be slower in picking a DOM element the first time, but part of the reason why it is slower is because it automatically extends the element to be of object type Element (with all functions associated - which is extremely convenient because you often want to operate on the element after selecting it) unless you tell it not to. There is a chance that he didn't tell mooTools to not extend the object. In addition, mooTools also adds the element to Hash object of all elements that are already extended - so you don't have to extend it twice. If he selected DOM elements twice in his benchmark, or had another benchmark that only focused on selecting elements twice, MT might be faster.
MT in this benchmark is in beta - its stable now. I'd like to see another benchmark with varied tests (see above) across more browsers to properly come to the conclusion that MS picked jQuery for speed. I'm assuming here that most people at MS are smart enough to understand the above.
If they picked jQuery for speed, why didn't they pick dojo for speed?
On the "extendable/modular" front: I don't feel this is sufficient either, and here's why:
MT is just as extendable as jQuery. It is also just as modular as jQuery. Both are similar in terms of size, depending on your options. (Your mileage may vary.)
Prototype is fairly extendable, although in its recent incarnation , it can hardly be called "lightweight while being extendable" - see Scriptaculous.
By definition, javascript is a prototypical inheritance language, automatically lending extendability or modularity to nearly any framework. Thats the beauty of JS.
MT and jQuery, in my opinion, are the best two frameworks available today for javascript developers - and I would like to say personally that I don't know anything about dojo, so unfortunately I have left it out of consideration. However, from my understanding, jQuery has more educational resources available both online and in print. Why? I don't really have the answer to that question. It could be that people who are inclined to write books about the subject like jQuery's style of coding more (although I like mooTools more), or perhaps it could be that jQuery is more "javascript-oriented", while mooTools tries to make javascript "object-class-oriented".
One point I will concede is that jQuery allows multiple versions of itself to be instantiated on the same page, while mooTools really does not - although you can instantiate versions of mooTools in iframes and get away with it. However, personally, I prefer mooTools' approach. Having more than one version of a framework on a webpage - to me - is a maintainence nightmare, although I'm *positive* it sounds *delightful* to buisness people. Hence, I believe these two reasons (multiple instantiations, publications) are why jQuery was picked.
Overall, though, I'm not miffed. jQuery is my second-favorite framework, and I don't develop much.NET anyway.
I used to work at a high-end guitar store in the Northeast, and my boss put his entire store inventory (that he owned) on Ebay. The reason was simple enough: his inventory was pretty unique, expensive, and collectable, so he felt he needed to reach a global audience to have the best potential to move his gear.
He stopped accepting PayPal for international bidders after an incident in which a international scam artist purchased an item online and reversed the purchase the day it was shipped out the door. Unfortunately, PayPal offers no insurance to the seller in international transactions. So PayPal is a no go for him.
Credit cards are also a problem. He has been burned before. While credit companies and credit card processing companies generally protect you more than PayPal, it can still complicate international small-scale business. In order to verify that the person is not using a stolen credit card, he has to call up the credit agency in its respective country and verify that the shipping address and billing address are the same. Interestingly enough, some banks (particularly in the UK) will flat out refuse to give you this information - even a simple yes or no response when you give them the address you have is against their policy. Also interestingly enough, this service is not automated for international transactions , although it is for US transactions. Now imagine doing this many, many times a day, especially if you sell cheaper items, lets say in the 10-20 dollar range. Also keep in mind that the more times you give a customer an indication of distrust (such as calling them at their residence to confirm other information or ask the bank to release information), the greater your chance to drop the sale becomes.
I'd estimate that roughly 80% of his international transactions over eBay were done via check, money order, or direct money wire, because these methods of payment were convenient while also fairly risk-and-hassle-free. Without this option, I don't see him making as many sales overall, especially in today's market, where the US economy is floundering and the majority of his sales come from overseas. Nearly 3 out of every 5 guitars we shipped last year went overseas, despite high shipping rates, and many of them went to England. Nearly 4 out of 5 of every 1000+ plus item went overseas.
Now, of course, many of you are probably saying "Well now, why didn't he just start a website?". He did. The problem is this: eBay just has too much exposure to let go of. He will probably keep his eBay store, but mostly because advertising through Google or anywhere else is just so damn expensive. He used to pour 500 dollars a month into AdWords. Guess where that got him? Nowhere. Analytics even said so. But when the customers contact him through Ebay, ethically he has to complete the sale through Ebay (or lose his merchant account). If he is restrained to completing the sales through Ebay, he will probably make less sales because for him credit card is now the only option (pay on pickup doesn't really make sense internationally), and his business and Ebay will both suffer. But if he behaves unethically by taking those contacts and processes them through his own website , Ebay still loses and there is the potential of him losing his account and exposure, along with the additional "untrusty" flag that comes along with telling a customer you are going to "bend the rules".
Titian is often considered the master of "old school realism". In the end, however, realism gave way to Van Gogh, Impressionism, and alternative "representations" - which ultimately culminated in abstract art, and afterwards, representation became mixed. Indeed , the choice of representation became art itself.
It is similar to how we had a realistic push in gaming for a few years, and then suddenly cel shading became very popular. I don't think we have come full circle yet, however.
You don't have to go 10,000 years back (as a previous poster stated) to see where this gene might be disadvantageous. Try a mere 120(ish). I read a artistic biography about Paul Gauguin in my Psychoanalytic Approach to Art class (it was one of those classes that I took just to call 'bulls$hit' but ended up learning something) and he described at great length the sexual practices of the people of Mataiea village.
Essentially, the people of the village were grouped into four "sections". You had:
the fertile, productive males, who were deemed capable of producing offspring.
the fertile, productive females, who were deemed capable of producing offspring. Note that more women were considered capable by fraction when compared to the men.
the males and females who were NOT considered capable of producing offspring, either because of a) behavior or b) physical problems. Gauguin, when he landed in Tahiti, was considered a member of this group because his actions were deemed incredibly effeminate. (I guess the wig , clothing, and makeup didn't help much.)
the old.
Every night, a particular woman was selected (or several), and the able, fertile males - for lack of a better expression in a public forum - "had at her." All at once.
The idea behind this was that this would ensure that the woman would be impregnated after a time, and that the most fertile male sperm would "compete" for the egg, ensuring that it was the most fit to be born. Also, the men would never know which children were explicitly theirs - and the women would never know who the real father was - so the community as a whole would raise the child.
To (most) Western standards, this is pretty gross. To Gauguin, it was fascinating. However, you could see how a "monogamy gene" would not be advantageous in such a circumstance. The book - and Gauguin's writings - seemed to indicate that more 'sensitive' men , who may possess this gene, were thrown in the third group because they were not considered true "men". (Homosexuals were also in this group, for the record.)
Also, in closing, I'd like to point out that this society landed itself absolutely nowhere. Most successful empires/expansions of human civilization relied on monogamous culture - after all, you needed an heir to hand a crown to, and the wars between siblings were already bad enough without having to choose which *mother* produced the rightful heir. (Although, that happened regardless).
There certainly doesn't seem to be any impetus to make more compact, efficient programs.
Especially not within MS as concerns IE RAM useage, considering that:
Windows XP (32-bit) has a MAX RAM cap (about 4gb if you push it).
Windows Vista/XP 64-bit have considerably larger (depends on configuration) MAX RAM caps.
As the article points out, running IE8/Windows XP on a machine with 1gb RAM (I consider that the norm for home users) uses more than half of the available memory. This might push people to upgrade hardware and software configurations - especially as IE8 becomes a standard. No one in the technical community wants this to happen, but everyone in the web development community knows that IE8 testing will become default procedure.
Microsoft would really like people to upgrade from 32-bit XP to 64-bit or Vista. So would hardware vendors.
Microsoft would rather "err" on the side of caution (more memory) then "break" their programs through process optimization.
Microsoft, to some degree, has abandoned the browser war, declaring itself victor. Why do you think they lag with standards? Answer: "We don't have to care, because people will use our browsers and developers will have to incorporate our proprietary fixes (a la IE6 PNG fix) anyway."
As far as other software companies are concerned, I think you have two camps. One camp is large (includes Microsoft), and sides with hardware vendors, and has deep ties with these vendors, and they tend to press "Use all the resources you can". Then you have the traditional, "Optimal is always better" camp, which is much smaller and usually focused on creating programs that will run across all hardware-old and new. Most of these companies don't have deep ties with hardware vendors- and I think the ties with the hardware vendors are mostly to blame for bloatware/pork-ware.
The new young Turks of Right Wing talk haven't been humor oriented, they've been revenge oriented. So people like O'Reilly and Hannity come across as hate-filled trolls without anything resembling a sense of humor. This is all to the good, because people with no sense of humor make perfect straight men victims for satirists.
For the most part, but there are a few noteable examples. Jay Severin comes to mind. I'm liberal, and honestly, I think the guy is really funny. It's all about the delivery.
Surely with so many (especially young) people being 'web first' with not just their buying habits, but now in terms of what they do in their spair time, we'd expect more of them to want to get a career in it?"
I think the person who summarized this article is confusing the popularly (poorly) used generalization of the word "IT" with the industry definition.
Spelling mistakes aside, IT really has little to do with 'web first' outside of providing the beast for web applications to run on. If you really want to think 'web first', you would probably get yourself into web application development, which tends to be more creatively oriented than IT , although I won't eschew the fact that some IT engineering feats require a great deal of creativity. In my mind, computer science grads who entered the field because of a "web first" mentality are more likely to enter that field than IT.
I wonder what the statistics are for people graduating with web application specializations? May be a little too early to have that kind of data at hand...
True, this all is quite a problem, but for every problem, there's a solution. For every surveillance method, there's some talented kid out there figuring a way to circumvent it.
One of the geekier recipients of these laptops will engineer a way around this BS...and then he'll share that info with his less-geeky friends. The government will have considerably less control than it thinks it does.
And in the end, isn't that what OLPC is all about?
That sounds like half of a dictionary definition, or a reworded dictionary definition. Which dictionary did you get that from?
"Cost" and "Operation" in and of themselves have no capacity for practical use and are thus not applications. Being an attribute of an object which has greater practical use because of the presence of said attribute does not make that attribute an application. That's like saying the colors "Orange" or "Yellow" are applications because when Orange and Yellow clothing are worn at night, they (the articles of clothing) are being used practically.
Apparently the word "Application" has been broadened to mean "quality attributes" on a relative level when abbreviated, meaning that "low cost" and "ease of operation" (both being high quality) are "Killer Applications".
I guess you could *see* how this word slip happened, being that "killer applications" are often considered "quality attributes" when marketing operating systems, mobile devices, or software/hardware packages.
[/logic]
Oh, woe is you, English Language, woe is you. Torn to shreds by marketers and businessmen. Somewhere, George Orwell is crying.
[/poetic]
I'm fine with some marketing terminology abstraction, but I'd like to say , "Hey Guy! Get a dictionary!". He could have just said "killer selling points".
When solving a word problem, one must find the mathematical expression that best expresses the question. You've got the wrong one.
You're making the argument that what really matters is the total number of malicious sites in each domain, not the fraction of sites within a domain that are malicious.
Clearly, however, the fraction is the more important metric. Consider a silly analogy:
There are 100 violent criminals in my local jail out of a total population of 200. There are 1000 violent criminals running free in Hawaii out of a total population of 1 million. When choosing a safer place for a vacation, by your logic, I'd pick my jail, since the total number of offenders is lower. 50% of my fellows would be violent criminals. By my logic, I'd pick Hawaii, where there would be more criminals, but they'd only make up 0.1% of the people around me. I prefer my odds.
I really don't think that either conclusion - either the GP or the P, is entirely correct, at least in terms of "what does this report mean for the general populace".
To the post I reply to: you correctly rebuffed your parent post to a degree, but, when choosing an analogy to determine the importance of a metric, you should probably make sure that the analogy you choose shares similar logical interrelationships among its components to the problem you are analyzing, especially with regards to the logical steps you make along the way within the analogy to arrive at a conclusion also contained in the analogy which would then correspond to a reasonable assumption outside of the analogy.
The problem with your solution based on your choice of odds is that you made an analytic oversimplification at the point you state "When choosing a safer place for vacation."
Here is where you were right in your rebuff: if I was to follow a link from an email or website, and it ended in ".cn" or ".hk" , I should be more wary because my chances of encountering something malicious on that webpage are higher, based on established researched ratios.
You admitted your analogy was a little silly, and here is where it could have been a little more complex: concerning security as a whole, you may not necessarily be able to "choose a safer place to vacation" here. When you are attempting to block SPAM, E-mailed malware, or automated bot-nets, *quantity* matters more than ratio. If you set your email filters to aggressively filter all.cn email, but then less aggressively filter.ru email, you would potentially be letting in more spam, assuming that aggressive filters may also destroy legitimate communication and you wouldn't use the highest level on all domains. Concerning botnets, these malicious computers are not necessarily in China or Russia, and the computers they compromise could easily be off these domains, so when it comes to getting rid of these computers or uprooting these nets, pure numbers do matter, because the numbers may lead to a picture of an estimate of "compromised computers based off IP".
I think it would be interesting if MacAfee found out which Domain Registrars were granting domain names to IP addresses outside of the country that the domain name was requested for more than others. Then we would have some real information we could do something with. This just shows us which domain names are easy to get, and not necessarily because of the laws of a country (someone posted about Hong Kong having strict requirements), but the ease of Domain Registrars to simply register an "offshore IP" with a country-based domain either because of: the architecture of the technology itself and the difficulty of securing it; the lack of delegation of authority to a government or commercial body to monitor domain registry ensuring that IP's are located within their listed country domain; the willingness of some Domain Registrars to register domains outside of a country recklessly (either aware or unaware of their bad indentions) to make money; or potentially, all three of the previously listed hypotheses.
The web as a platform is open and expanding. Windows as a platform is stagnating and closed. Which do you want to be invested in for the next 10 years?
Goooood point. This is where Yahoo has a lot of value that others seem to not be noticing - web application development. They possess a highly trained staff capable of engineering web frameworks and are ready to use them. Yahoo has YUI , as an example (this is the most ready-to-tongue for me). They also have many different operational websites with a wide variety of functionality. They have essentially "done it all". Sure, Yahoo Video! isn't as popular as YouTube, but Yahoo has *done* it. That can be everything in (anything) application development. Consider the possibility that Yahoo (if you consider it as a singular entity) never made Yahoo Video! or Yahoo Mail for the *singular purpose* of becoming the center of the webmail/web video revolution, but hedged its bets by justifying the maneuver as "practice" preparing for a "web application revolution", and you might begin to understand.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't really have much in the way of non-proprietary web development technology (OK, Atlas) that operates easily underneath other browsers or operating systems. IE7 is the *worst* browser to develop for, without any question, and developers don't want to develop on it if given a choice. With a new JavaScript engine on the way for Android and Safari (and it might make it onto other browsers as well), consider the fact that Microsoft has nearly abandoned Javascript for other proprietary technologies it owns (IE7 was not much of an improvement over IE6 in terms of its JavaScript Engine as there are still memory leaks all over the place, compared to FireFox, Opera, and Safari which all run JavaScript beautifully in comparison) - and that JavaScript, while initially spurned, is becoming more popular as the "mistakes" in the language are ironed out through practice, revision and extremely well written frameworks (it is also standardized unlike Flash or Silverlight), and you begin to understand why Microsoft would want Yahoo.
You also begin to understand why Yahoo's board is so confident that they don't need - or want - to deal with Microsoft. People still use their search engine - and they may regain some of that market - but that isn't where their real bet is. They are betting on the web browser becoming a viable application platform , one that people will increasingly turn to. Who will companies turn to when they need a web application that will run across any operating system, any recent browser, without any add-ons, plug-ins or extra installation? Why write something that will only work on one operating system, when you can write it to work with a medium (browser)? That was the idea of Java - it never really took off on the client side, but Yahoo, Google, and others are banking that it will, and soon. Why worry about host computer configuration? Hell, why worry about an Operating System? Imagine an operating system that is just a browser. We already have things like this. Imagine these things being absolutely everywhere, and used by nearly everyone.
The answer to the question "How do you beat a company with a near-monopoly on Operating Systems?", is "Remove the Operating System". It's something that Netscape , Sun, and other companies past and present have dreamed of for a long time.
So who will these new companies turn to to develop their web application? Most likely, Google , Yahoo, or the people over at Facebook. They are moving on from the search engine/social networking game. They are all positioned to become HUGE web software companies.
Bingo. I agree completely. This has nothing to do with piracy or YouTube's involvement in piracy - it all comes down to Viacom's unwillingness to hire people to watch hours and hours of video. Human auditing is the *only* way to truly identify copyrighted material as such. Everything else is just a stream of urine in a gale force wind.
This is a big case in determining the extent and exact nature of the DMCA. If You Tube/Google come out on top here, the onus of copyright enforcement will fall (more) squarely on the copyright holder regardless of the means of distribution, encryption, or presentation, for better or worse.
As a joking note, aren't there a lot of kids who don't have a job that Viacom could pay oh , say, 8-10-15 dollars an hour to work from home and flag inappropriate material? I mean, I guess this involves a whole secondary system of checking to see if these kids are actually working or not, (and they might be "snitches"), but to me , although I have not run the numbers (and would love to see statistics on how many videos are uploaded to You Tube daily), it seems as if doing this would be much cheaper than throwing a cadre of lawyers at the problem. And, hell, the price of gas IS pretty high nowadays...
This is only a partial solution. The real solution is for sites using AJAX to get away from this habit of requiring hundreds of kilobytes of scrip just to visit the home page. Couldn't you design a modular AJAX system that would bring in functions as they are needed?
It exists. It's called mooTools. The Javascript programmer can decide which functions/objects/classes he needs on any individual web page and download a packed version of the library that only suits their particular needs.
That way, someone visiting just a couple pages wouldn't have to download the entire library. Have each function in it's own file, and then when an AJAX call is done, make it smart enough to figure out which functions need to be downloaded to run the resulting Javascript.
That requires a lot of individual transactions. Another reason why a lot of libraries are all included in one file is because they fundamentally change the nature of Javascript - usually by overwriting or extending native code. This is usually for the better, but requires that certain core files all be downloaded at the same time.
The problem with Google hosting everything, is that everybody has to use the versions that Google has posted, and that you can't do any custom modifications to the components. I think that what Google is doing would help. But the solution is far from optimal.
Not true at all. You can modify any existing code that Google gave you by extending/implementing the objects or creating another object from an existing object. Javascript is a prototypical inheritance language. It is very easy to modify the code even if you don't have direct access to the "source". It would actually make it *easier* to modify because the user would have already downloaded the "big chunk" , and would not need to download the "big chunk plus your modifications", they would only need to download the modifications.
Being a Javascript programmer myself, I was wondering which post to reply to. I guess this one suits. There are a lot of issues I'd like to tackle, here.
Yeah, but what if Google decides that nobody is using these -- or they can't legally host them for whatever reason -- or they just decide that they don't want to do this anymore?
Then you go back to including a script tag in your header of your HTML document. All of these frameworks are free. They will likely remain free even though some are sponsored (mooTools). The speed improvement exists, but is moderate-to-minimal, since a packed full-inclusion library of mooTools runs you about 32kb. That's 32kb the user wont need to download again and again, but its just 32kb.
Think broader. What happens when:
* Google decides to wrap more than just the promised functionality into it? For example, maybe "display a button" turns into "display a button and report usage stats"?
Even if the code is compressed and obfuscated, this "wrapped functionality" would become *glaringly* obvious to any javascript programmer using Firebug. The news would most likely spread like wildfire. Especially on/.
The only thing they could track without really being monitored are which IP addresses are requesting the mooTools.js (for example) file. They could measure its popularity, but not *necessarily* what sites they are visiting. Granted- I haven't looked at the API yet, but if its just a.js file hosted on a Google server, there isn't really too much they can monitor that they don't already. Analytics provides them with *tons* more information. To be honest, this just seems like a professional courtesy.
There is a key point here I hope was visible - JavaScript is totally Load on Delivery, Executed Client Side. They can't really sneak much past you , and any efforts to do so would still remain visible in some way (you would see NET traffic).
* Google gets hacked and malicious Javascript is included?
Interesting, but I haven't seen Google hacked yet - not saying it can't happen, but I've not seen it. There is more of a chance of someone intercepting the expected.js file and then passing a different one- however, keep in mind that if you are doing *anything* that requires any level of security what so ever in JS, well, you have other, deeper fundamental problems.
But, yes- you're right. This is a scary new dependency. For a company full of PhD geniuses supposedly Doing No Evil, nobody at Google seems to understand how dangerous they are to the health of the web. In fact, I'd suggest they do, and they don't care- because they seem hell-bent on making everything on the web touch/use/rely upon Google in some way. This is no exception.
A lot of folks don't even realize how Google is slowly weaning open-source projects into relying on them, too (with Google Summer of Code.)
It is a dependency, but its not that scary. Open source projects have always been, for better or worse, more or less reliant on outside momentum to keep them going. Joomla has conferences (that you have to pay to see), MySQL is powered by Sun, Ubuntu has pay-for-support. The fact that Google is willing to pay for kids to work on open source projects of their choosing (and granted, Google's selection), is not necessarily a form of control above and beyond the influence of capital. If I had millions of dollars, I would probably donate to open source projects myself - and they may be ones of my choosing - but I probably couldn't consider myself controlling them as much as helping them grow.
This is really nothing more than a professional courtesy offered by Google. They are right - its dumb for everyone to download the same files over and over again.
Furthermore, someone made a post earlier talking about JS programmers needing to learn how to use "modularity". We
Regardless of what they say publicly, my guess is that they are probably seeking the information not just to keep tabs on the merchants, but to keep a better lock on consumers. A lot of consumer capital goes through small business owners, that might be the people you buy groceries, liquor, cigarettes, sandwiches, meals, etc from. You do have to report how much money you earn every year, but you *don't* have to report what you spend it on (unless you write it off or it meets other specific criteria). I'll get to why that is important, later.
They can retrieve this information because from what I have gathered, they are proposing to withhold the actual receipts of sale, and the receipts would contain information regarding the two parties involved in the transaction -when, where, how much, and possibly why.
Granted, they are only proposing to hold 28% of these receipts, so this would by no means be a comprehensive or continuous record of consumer activity, but it could be used in a red-flag "Monte-carlo" algorithm-type approach - pick a few of the receipts, try to look for a few fishy ones by passing them through a filter, and then investigate (audit) any receipts that match that criteria.
For example, certain things don't need to be reported to the government when sold to an independent merchant (or even a larger business). If the seller makes a profit on the sale (assuming the seller doesn't own a small business or the sale is not related to his business), that profit is essentially invisible to the government. While in some cases this profit is taxable or not taxable (depending on what you sell) this law would make those profits visible, and would make the taxable things visible and thus enforceable. It would give an argument in Congress for those currently nontaxable profits to become taxable through an "ease of enforcement" arguement.
That being said, I don't really think the government needs to tax more than it already can and does, unless I start to see some dramatic increase in what I get out of my government, and honestly, we have other things we could be spending our money on. I'm really not worried about a business owner taking a few friends out to dinner and writing it off on his business card as an expesnse - I'm more worried about millions of dollars lost in other places.
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Rovian politics, while effective in the indecisive political climate of the 2000 Presidental Election, have proven to be ineffective and to a degree even harmful to John McCain's campaign.
A big part of Rovian political strategy during election season is to construct many locally focused and aired negative attack ads. People in Ohio will most likely see television ads about Obama's gaffe on Coal, while in Connecticut I have been bombarded with ads from the "Let Freedom Ring" foundation, mostly consisting of a scary ass looking old white guy telling the camera in a "straight-faced" manner that Obama plans to weaken our military through cutting spending, which will in turn be a sign of weakness to our enemies overseas. (Connecticut is very concerned about safety.)
The problem with these tactics , outside of being dirty , underhanded, and culturally divisive, is that technology and communication has evolved to an extent that undermines the effectiveness of specifically targeting one area for a negative ad as the negative ad tends to migrate beyond their "target area" , mostly through the Internet. I know a lot of people who are Independents that were completely turned off by McCain's campaign just because they saw an ad on YouTube that was aired in another part of the country that just so happened to decry something about Obama that they either completely supported or were undecided/sympathetic to. In other words, what is poison to some, is innocuous to others, and outrage presented out of just context can really turn people away.
Obama has managed to circumvent these tactics by running a campaign of an opposite nature: instead of airing negative local ads about the opposing candidate, they air positive ads nationwide about their candidate. Instead of pushing robo calls and getting a few dedicated partisans to furiously dial their base , they are getting people to go door to door and ask them to vote, even if they do not necessarily support Obama. And- above all- Obama ran a fifty-state campaign. Don't underestimate the collateral effect that a fifty-state campaign can have. By going into every state, people are more likely to believe you when you tell them that you actually care about them - and not just their swing state status. If this convinces even a few of the swing states, it will have done its job.
Because the Elections in America are financed with the following assumption in mind: That not every eligible American will vote on Election Day.
Not only is this assumption flawed in principle because elections should be financed to allow all people to vote easily regardless of likely turnout percentages, it also seems to be flawed on a mechanical level. However, don't fear - people who wait in the long lines may have water and hot chocolate delivered to them by Obama's "comfort teams" - groups of volunteers who don't campaign or canvas but focus on keeping people in that ballot line. He really did think of nearly everything.
I should have clarified my statement - it was typed in haste. I meant to say "the symbols are chosen to provide succinct methods to discuss complex subjects, rather than to obfuscate the meaning of what they are trying to discuss."
I agree with you. Some math concepts really are abstract. My use of "but" was in error.
I believe a lot of the symbols and obtuse/esoteric dialogue is not really meant to preserve an elitist clique (although being a math minor I think I can sympathetic with your sentiment - at times to me it felt like that, but mostly when I didn't understand something or got a bad grade on an exam, which happens to even the brightest sometimes), because lets be honest, even the best math professors don't make huge gobs of money; but they are simply presented as they are , without explanation, for sake of brevity and clarity. The abstractions are useful because they provide succinct methods to discuss complex subjects, but they aren't useful because they obfuscate the meaning of what they are trying to discuss.
That being said, I really like this idea. It would be nice to have a easily accessed database containing all of proven mathematics. A "mathematics wiki" would let you click on a symbol you might not know, and take you to an explanation for that symbol.
That being said, there really is no substitute for a good math teacher.
No. I'm only a math minor/computer science major, but from my limited understanding on the subject (as it was related to me by one of my smarter professors), Godel showed that Russell's system could not encompass all true statements. The problem (simplistically) lies in what is *demonstrably true* and what is *provably true*. In particular, Godel showed that Russell's system would have problems with things that are demonstrably true, or what you might call "self-evident truths" in philosophy.
The system proposed however, might find things that are true that people haven't thought about proving yet. I'm sure a mathematician could come along and give a more complete answer.
I was just thinking to myself that the name might have a large part in jQuery's current popularity. Imagine the following conversation:
Boss: So what did you pick for the website?
You: mooTools.
Boss: moo- what? Is that related to the flaming fox, thundering bird or that blasted penguin?
You: Er..not directly..
Boss: Out of my office! Bring me back acronyms or combinations of characters of the english alphabet with common words! Cute animals are not an element of success!
Wow. You like graphs, don't you ? ;) That's a good one - it illustrates one of my suspicions nicely.
On the speed front: that isn't sufficient enough of a reason, and here's why:
On the "extendable/modular" front: I don't feel this is sufficient either, and here's why:
MT and jQuery, in my opinion, are the best two frameworks available today for javascript developers - and I would like to say personally that I don't know anything about dojo, so unfortunately I have left it out of consideration. However, from my understanding, jQuery has more educational resources available both online and in print. Why? I don't really have the answer to that question. It could be that people who are inclined to write books about the subject like jQuery's style of coding more (although I like mooTools more), or perhaps it could be that jQuery is more "javascript-oriented", while mooTools tries to make javascript "object-class-oriented".
.NET anyway.
One point I will concede is that jQuery allows multiple versions of itself to be instantiated on the same page, while mooTools really does not - although you can instantiate versions of mooTools in iframes and get away with it. However, personally, I prefer mooTools' approach. Having more than one version of a framework on a webpage - to me - is a maintainence nightmare, although I'm *positive* it sounds *delightful* to buisness people. Hence, I believe these two reasons (multiple instantiations, publications) are why jQuery was picked.
Overall, though, I'm not miffed. jQuery is my second-favorite framework, and I don't develop much
I used to work at a high-end guitar store in the Northeast, and my boss put his entire store inventory (that he owned) on Ebay. The reason was simple enough: his inventory was pretty unique, expensive, and collectable, so he felt he needed to reach a global audience to have the best potential to move his gear.
He stopped accepting PayPal for international bidders after an incident in which a international scam artist purchased an item online and reversed the purchase the day it was shipped out the door. Unfortunately, PayPal offers no insurance to the seller in international transactions. So PayPal is a no go for him.
Credit cards are also a problem. He has been burned before. While credit companies and credit card processing companies generally protect you more than PayPal, it can still complicate international small-scale business. In order to verify that the person is not using a stolen credit card, he has to call up the credit agency in its respective country and verify that the shipping address and billing address are the same. Interestingly enough, some banks (particularly in the UK) will flat out refuse to give you this information - even a simple yes or no response when you give them the address you have is against their policy. Also interestingly enough, this service is not automated for international transactions , although it is for US transactions. Now imagine doing this many, many times a day, especially if you sell cheaper items, lets say in the 10-20 dollar range. Also keep in mind that the more times you give a customer an indication of distrust (such as calling them at their residence to confirm other information or ask the bank to release information), the greater your chance to drop the sale becomes.
I'd estimate that roughly 80% of his international transactions over eBay were done via check, money order, or direct money wire, because these methods of payment were convenient while also fairly risk-and-hassle-free. Without this option, I don't see him making as many sales overall, especially in today's market, where the US economy is floundering and the majority of his sales come from overseas. Nearly 3 out of every 5 guitars we shipped last year went overseas, despite high shipping rates, and many of them went to England. Nearly 4 out of 5 of every 1000+ plus item went overseas.
Now, of course, many of you are probably saying "Well now, why didn't he just start a website?". He did. The problem is this: eBay just has too much exposure to let go of. He will probably keep his eBay store, but mostly because advertising through Google or anywhere else is just so damn expensive. He used to pour 500 dollars a month into AdWords. Guess where that got him? Nowhere. Analytics even said so. But when the customers contact him through Ebay, ethically he has to complete the sale through Ebay (or lose his merchant account). If he is restrained to completing the sales through Ebay, he will probably make less sales because for him credit card is now the only option (pay on pickup doesn't really make sense internationally), and his business and Ebay will both suffer. But if he behaves unethically by taking those contacts and processes them through his own website , Ebay still loses and there is the potential of him losing his account and exposure, along with the additional "untrusty" flag that comes along with telling a customer you are going to "bend the rules".
I don't see how this can be a win for Ebay.
Titian is often considered the master of "old school realism". In the end, however, realism gave way to Van Gogh, Impressionism, and alternative "representations" - which ultimately culminated in abstract art, and afterwards, representation became mixed. Indeed , the choice of representation became art itself. It is similar to how we had a realistic push in gaming for a few years, and then suddenly cel shading became very popular. I don't think we have come full circle yet, however.
Yes- but when you speak in terms of long-term stability of those expansions, most of them fall flat.
You don't have to go 10,000 years back (as a previous poster stated) to see where this gene might be disadvantageous. Try a mere 120(ish). I read a artistic biography about Paul Gauguin in my Psychoanalytic Approach to Art class (it was one of those classes that I took just to call 'bulls$hit' but ended up learning something) and he described at great length the sexual practices of the people of Mataiea village.
Essentially, the people of the village were grouped into four "sections". You had:
Every night, a particular woman was selected (or several), and the able, fertile males - for lack of a better expression in a public forum - "had at her." All at once.
The idea behind this was that this would ensure that the woman would be impregnated after a time, and that the most fertile male sperm would "compete" for the egg, ensuring that it was the most fit to be born. Also, the men would never know which children were explicitly theirs - and the women would never know who the real father was - so the community as a whole would raise the child.
To (most) Western standards, this is pretty gross. To Gauguin, it was fascinating. However, you could see how a "monogamy gene" would not be advantageous in such a circumstance. The book - and Gauguin's writings - seemed to indicate that more 'sensitive' men , who may possess this gene, were thrown in the third group because they were not considered true "men". (Homosexuals were also in this group, for the record.)
Also, in closing, I'd like to point out that this society landed itself absolutely nowhere. Most successful empires/expansions of human civilization relied on monogamous culture - after all, you needed an heir to hand a crown to, and the wars between siblings were already bad enough without having to choose which *mother* produced the rightful heir. (Although, that happened regardless).
There certainly doesn't seem to be any impetus to make more compact, efficient programs.
Especially not within MS as concerns IE RAM useage, considering that:
As far as other software companies are concerned, I think you have two camps. One camp is large (includes Microsoft), and sides with hardware vendors, and has deep ties with these vendors, and they tend to press "Use all the resources you can". Then you have the traditional, "Optimal is always better" camp, which is much smaller and usually focused on creating programs that will run across all hardware-old and new. Most of these companies don't have deep ties with hardware vendors- and I think the ties with the hardware vendors are mostly to blame for bloatware/pork-ware.
There are of course, exceptions.
For the most part, but there are a few noteable examples. Jay Severin comes to mind. I'm liberal, and honestly, I think the guy is really funny. It's all about the delivery.
I think the person who summarized this article is confusing the popularly (poorly) used generalization of the word "IT" with the industry definition.
Spelling mistakes aside, IT really has little to do with 'web first' outside of providing the beast for web applications to run on. If you really want to think 'web first', you would probably get yourself into web application development, which tends to be more creatively oriented than IT , although I won't eschew the fact that some IT engineering feats require a great deal of creativity. In my mind, computer science grads who entered the field because of a "web first" mentality are more likely to enter that field than IT.
I wonder what the statistics are for people graduating with web application specializations? May be a little too early to have that kind of data at hand...
That sounds like half of a dictionary definition, or a reworded dictionary definition. Which dictionary did you get that from?
"Cost" and "Operation" in and of themselves have no capacity for practical use and are thus not applications. Being an attribute of an object which has greater practical use because of the presence of said attribute does not make that attribute an application. That's like saying the colors "Orange" or "Yellow" are applications because when Orange and Yellow clothing are worn at night, they (the articles of clothing) are being used practically.
Apparently the word "Application" has been broadened to mean "quality attributes" on a relative level when abbreviated, meaning that "low cost" and "ease of operation" (both being high quality) are "Killer Applications". I guess you could *see* how this word slip happened, being that "killer applications" are often considered "quality attributes" when marketing operating systems, mobile devices, or software/hardware packages.
[/logic]
Oh, woe is you, English Language, woe is you. Torn to shreds by marketers and businessmen. Somewhere, George Orwell is crying.
[/poetic]
I'm fine with some marketing terminology abstraction, but I'd like to say , "Hey Guy! Get a dictionary!". He could have just said "killer selling points".
Are killer apps?
I know Microsoft has a stable release of the latter, with good market penetration. Maybe ACER can edge in on the market for the former.
I really don't think that either conclusion - either the GP or the P, is entirely correct, at least in terms of "what does this report mean for the general populace".
To the post I reply to: you correctly rebuffed your parent post to a degree, but, when choosing an analogy to determine the importance of a metric, you should probably make sure that the analogy you choose shares similar logical interrelationships among its components to the problem you are analyzing, especially with regards to the logical steps you make along the way within the analogy to arrive at a conclusion also contained in the analogy which would then correspond to a reasonable assumption outside of the analogy.
The problem with your solution based on your choice of odds is that you made an analytic oversimplification at the point you state "When choosing a safer place for vacation."
Here is where you were right in your rebuff: if I was to follow a link from an email or website, and it ended in ".cn" or ".hk" , I should be more wary because my chances of encountering something malicious on that webpage are higher, based on established researched ratios.
You admitted your analogy was a little silly, and here is where it could have been a little more complex: concerning security as a whole, you may not necessarily be able to "choose a safer place to vacation" here. When you are attempting to block SPAM, E-mailed malware, or automated bot-nets, *quantity* matters more than ratio. If you set your email filters to aggressively filter all
I think it would be interesting if MacAfee found out which Domain Registrars were granting domain names to IP addresses outside of the country that the domain name was requested for more than others. Then we would have some real information we could do something with. This just shows us which domain names are easy to get, and not necessarily because of the laws of a country (someone posted about Hong Kong having strict requirements), but the ease of Domain Registrars to simply register an "offshore IP" with a country-based domain either because of: the architecture of the technology itself and the difficulty of securing it; the lack of delegation of authority to a government or commercial body to monitor domain registry ensuring that IP's are located within their listed country domain; the willingness of some Domain Registrars to register domains outside of a country recklessly (either aware or unaware of their bad indentions) to make money; or potentially, all three of the previously listed hypotheses.
Goooood point. This is where Yahoo has a lot of value that others seem to not be noticing - web application development. They possess a highly trained staff capable of engineering web frameworks and are ready to use them. Yahoo has YUI , as an example (this is the most ready-to-tongue for me). They also have many different operational websites with a wide variety of functionality. They have essentially "done it all". Sure, Yahoo Video! isn't as popular as YouTube, but Yahoo has *done* it. That can be everything in (anything) application development. Consider the possibility that Yahoo (if you consider it as a singular entity) never made Yahoo Video! or Yahoo Mail for the *singular purpose* of becoming the center of the webmail/web video revolution, but hedged its bets by justifying the maneuver as "practice" preparing for a "web application revolution", and you might begin to understand.
Microsoft, on the other hand, doesn't really have much in the way of non-proprietary web development technology (OK, Atlas) that operates easily underneath other browsers or operating systems. IE7 is the *worst* browser to develop for, without any question, and developers don't want to develop on it if given a choice. With a new JavaScript engine on the way for Android and Safari (and it might make it onto other browsers as well), consider the fact that Microsoft has nearly abandoned Javascript for other proprietary technologies it owns (IE7 was not much of an improvement over IE6 in terms of its JavaScript Engine as there are still memory leaks all over the place, compared to FireFox, Opera, and Safari which all run JavaScript beautifully in comparison) - and that JavaScript, while initially spurned, is becoming more popular as the "mistakes" in the language are ironed out through practice, revision and extremely well written frameworks (it is also standardized unlike Flash or Silverlight), and you begin to understand why Microsoft would want Yahoo.
You also begin to understand why Yahoo's board is so confident that they don't need - or want - to deal with Microsoft. People still use their search engine - and they may regain some of that market - but that isn't where their real bet is. They are betting on the web browser becoming a viable application platform , one that people will increasingly turn to. Who will companies turn to when they need a web application that will run across any operating system, any recent browser, without any add-ons, plug-ins or extra installation? Why write something that will only work on one operating system, when you can write it to work with a medium (browser)? That was the idea of Java - it never really took off on the client side, but Yahoo, Google, and others are banking that it will, and soon. Why worry about host computer configuration? Hell, why worry about an Operating System? Imagine an operating system that is just a browser. We already have things like this. Imagine these things being absolutely everywhere, and used by nearly everyone.
The answer to the question "How do you beat a company with a near-monopoly on Operating Systems?", is "Remove the Operating System". It's something that Netscape , Sun, and other companies past and present have dreamed of for a long time.
So who will these new companies turn to to develop their web application? Most likely, Google , Yahoo, or the people over at Facebook. They are moving on from the search engine/social networking game. They are all positioned to become HUGE web software companies.Bingo. I agree completely. This has nothing to do with piracy or YouTube's involvement in piracy - it all comes down to Viacom's unwillingness to hire people to watch hours and hours of video. Human auditing is the *only* way to truly identify copyrighted material as such. Everything else is just a stream of urine in a gale force wind.
This is a big case in determining the extent and exact nature of the DMCA. If You Tube/Google come out on top here, the onus of copyright enforcement will fall (more) squarely on the copyright holder regardless of the means of distribution, encryption, or presentation, for better or worse.
As a joking note, aren't there a lot of kids who don't have a job that Viacom could pay oh , say, 8-10-15 dollars an hour to work from home and flag inappropriate material? I mean, I guess this involves a whole secondary system of checking to see if these kids are actually working or not, (and they might be "snitches"), but to me , although I have not run the numbers (and would love to see statistics on how many videos are uploaded to You Tube daily), it seems as if doing this would be much cheaper than throwing a cadre of lawyers at the problem. And, hell, the price of gas IS pretty high nowadays...
Then you go back to including a script tag in your header of your HTML document. All of these frameworks are free. They will likely remain free even though some are sponsored (mooTools). The speed improvement exists, but is moderate-to-minimal, since a packed full-inclusion library of mooTools runs you about 32kb. That's 32kb the user wont need to download again and again, but its just 32kb.
Even if the code is compressed and obfuscated, this "wrapped functionality" would become *glaringly* obvious to any javascript programmer using Firebug. The news would most likely spread like wildfire. Especially on /.
The only thing they could track without really being monitored are which IP addresses are requesting the mooTools.js (for example) file. They could measure its popularity, but not *necessarily* what sites they are visiting. Granted- I haven't looked at the API yet, but if its just a .js file hosted on a Google server, there isn't really too much they can monitor that they don't already. Analytics provides them with *tons* more information. To be honest, this just seems like a professional courtesy.
There is a key point here I hope was visible - JavaScript is totally Load on Delivery, Executed Client Side. They can't really sneak much past you , and any efforts to do so would still remain visible in some way (you would see NET traffic).
Interesting, but I haven't seen Google hacked yet - not saying it can't happen, but I've not seen it. There is more of a chance of someone intercepting the expected .js file and then passing a different one- however, keep in mind that if you are doing *anything* that requires any level of security what so ever in JS, well, you have other, deeper fundamental problems.
It is a dependency, but its not that scary. Open source projects have always been, for better or worse, more or less reliant on outside momentum to keep them going. Joomla has conferences (that you have to pay to see), MySQL is powered by Sun, Ubuntu has pay-for-support. The fact that Google is willing to pay for kids to work on open source projects of their choosing (and granted, Google's selection), is not necessarily a form of control above and beyond the influence of capital. If I had millions of dollars, I would probably donate to open source projects myself - and they may be ones of my choosing - but I probably couldn't consider myself controlling them as much as helping them grow.
This is really nothing more than a professional courtesy offered by Google. They are right - its dumb for everyone to download the same files over and over again.
Furthermore, someone made a post earlier talking about JS programmers needing to learn how to use "modularity". We
Regardless of what they say publicly, my guess is that they are probably seeking the information not just to keep tabs on the merchants, but to keep a better lock on consumers. A lot of consumer capital goes through small business owners, that might be the people you buy groceries, liquor, cigarettes, sandwiches, meals, etc from. You do have to report how much money you earn every year, but you *don't* have to report what you spend it on (unless you write it off or it meets other specific criteria). I'll get to why that is important, later.
They can retrieve this information because from what I have gathered, they are proposing to withhold the actual receipts of sale, and the receipts would contain information regarding the two parties involved in the transaction -when, where, how much, and possibly why.
Granted, they are only proposing to hold 28% of these receipts, so this would by no means be a comprehensive or continuous record of consumer activity, but it could be used in a red-flag "Monte-carlo" algorithm-type approach - pick a few of the receipts, try to look for a few fishy ones by passing them through a filter, and then investigate (audit) any receipts that match that criteria.
For example, certain things don't need to be reported to the government when sold to an independent merchant (or even a larger business). If the seller makes a profit on the sale (assuming the seller doesn't own a small business or the sale is not related to his business), that profit is essentially invisible to the government. While in some cases this profit is taxable or not taxable (depending on what you sell) this law would make those profits visible, and would make the taxable things visible and thus enforceable. It would give an argument in Congress for those currently nontaxable profits to become taxable through an "ease of enforcement" arguement.
That being said, I don't really think the government needs to tax more than it already can and does, unless I start to see some dramatic increase in what I get out of my government, and honestly, we have other things we could be spending our money on. I'm really not worried about a business owner taking a few friends out to dinner and writing it off on his business card as an expesnse - I'm more worried about millions of dollars lost in other places.