No. Completely wrong. Because we're never going to get human rights "figured out". We'll never have the final correct answers for human rights or for anything else in society - society is always in flux and our ideas of the best solutions to problems are constantly changing. It's hard enough to get two people to agree on the solutions, let alone everyone in the world. The "perfect" solutions to problems are concepts we strive towards, they aren't attainable goals.
Imagine if men had said we won't give women the vote until we've got a perfect system in place for ourselves? Makes the flaw a bit more apparent.
Nah, if you want one in 20 years time you'll just download the molecular structure from a file-sharing network and manufacture it in your nanobot oven. Or play with it in your virtual world without the bother of making a real one. (I'm half serious)
My feeling is that the Zune is, and will be, iconic, but only to a subset of geeks who see it as a heroic, laughable, lovable, failure. The closest collectable item I can think of to this is the Sinclair C5 which is worth a bomb now - but there weren't ever many of them made. There's tons of Zunes. If you really think the Zune will be worth something in the future then wait until the price hits rock-bottom on eBay or as an end-of-line in the stores, then buy one. Don't buy a full price one now.
people are still thinking within the sandbox and not realising that the real risk is what we have not yet thought of.
Those are the "unknown unknowns", as Rumsfeld put it, and I'm wary of going down that path because it encourages a culture of fear and paranoia. The problem here isn't something we haven't thought of, it's plain as day - identity theft. This Home Office spokesman either doesn't see that and is completely unsuitable for his job, or he knows there is something wrong but won't admit it, and is completely unsuitable for his job.
"We are going to provide cheap or free tools that let buyers create games for Windows and Xbox 360."
...but that's the language of commitment and definites. He's in marketing, so he doesn't ever want to say anything definite in case the company changes its multi-headed mind, hence "focused on" instead of "going to". And no, you're not the only one who's sick of PR language.
If it bugs you that much, you could try writing a Firefox plug-in to convert marketspeak to plain English. Here's a few to get you started;
are slashdotters really this lazy?....wait dont answer that.
Too late.
It's nothing to do with being lazy. It's a case of having to know the answer to know there is even a question. The reference is obscure and many people will not have heard of it, and you can refer people to the source without being a smarmy git.
For "boring and unoriginal" I read "uncluttered and familiar". People who want to accomplish a task on a computer don't want an interface they have to learn to use from scratch. If the point of the OLPC is to help children to learn to program, then an interface they have to explore to use and can tweak by a little coding is a good thing. But for most people an OS like OS X is just fine, thank you. Really, what was the point of the last sentence in the summary if not Mac bashing?
Sometimes information doesn't have to be presented with a neat and comprehensive list of counter arguments.
Why was that modded Funny? There is a tendency by the media to counter any viewpoint with one diametrically opposed to it - no matter how far-out and looney. And it doesn't bring balance, it creates Springer-like slanging matches.
However, the BBC is right to investigate the other side of the Global Warming argument, but it has to be careful how it presents its findings. I just dread they'll produce a special like "The REAL Truth Behind Global Warming - The Facts The So-Called-Scientists Didn't Want You To Hear."
I send an initial email to you. I'm not on the white list. Your email client writes back to me. You're not on my white list. So I never get your challenge.
The handshake email would be a of a standard form so a compatible email client would always respond to it with a handshake reply, and it would be human-readable so people without a compatible email client could also respond to it. A handshake email - being a response - would only ever come from someone you had already sent an email to, so a handshake email coming from someone you had never emailed would be deleted. So the scenario goes:
You send an email to me. You're not on the whitelist. My email client sends you a standard handshake email. Your email client sees it is a handshake email and replies to it with a handshake reply. My email client gets your handshake reply, puts your initial email in my inbox and deletes the handshake emails.
The secondary issue with this is that it would be trivial to write a spam sending program to listen for replies, and reply back.
All this is meant to do is eliminate forged email addresses, which most spam has. For a spam sending program to respond to this it would have to be at a real email address, which cuts down the amount of email addresses you need to block and makes it harder for spammers to hide.
Exactly how would this work with online newsletters
Well, newsletters would have to implement the handshake-auto-reply thingy, but the person signing up for the newsletter should really add the email to their whitelist themselves.
Yes, the idea does require all automated email-senders to use the system, but not human senders. If neither person has the system, everything is as now. If the sender has it but the recipient does not, everything is as now. If the sender doesn't have it and the recipient does, the sender gets an email back asking for a reply to be added to their whitelist, which only ever happens once. If both have the system, neither person sees it in action.
How about an email client which does this: An email from someone not in your whitelist gets put in a holding folder and an automated reply is sent back (with a unique number as the subject) asking for just a reply to that email. When the reply arrives the handshake emails are deleted and the original email appears in your inbox.
This would mean all email from forged addresses would never be seen. The handshake emails could be automated by the mail clients (get Microsoft to implement it and you've got a standard) so mailing lists could implement it, but it would still work for people with an older email client that didn't automate it.
I've been through the same thing here in the UK. Mental health care is pretty damned poor everywhere simply because to give effective treatment you need to have either experienced the condition yourself or have an incredible amount of empathy with your patient - without that understanding the only care a doctor can give is to follow a procedure in a book.
Rather than gripe though, here's something useful. From my experience and from talking to others, the best way to fight depression is to exercise. I haven't met anyone it doesn't work for. Running is something you don't need to be happy or alert to start doing, the only difficult thing about it is getting over your embarrassment (or fear) of being seen as a "jogger".
We do, everyone here on Slashdot. The problem is not that we don't care but that we know we are almost powerless to do anything about it. We know that voting doesn't make anything better, that demonstrations are ignored, that databases of our information (including our DNA) continue to be built and merged and shared, and that resistance is futile.
I do say almost powerless - if everyone here dedicated all their free time to educating the public about the invasion of our privacy, to starting political campaigns, t-shirt printing, stickers, web sites, leafleting, then we could probably make a difference. Maybe Slashdot needs a sister site dedicated to political action to direct all the outrage we feel here instead of just bitching about it. Maybe there should be petitions attached to each story. I don't know what the answer is, but there are a lot of us who care and we're not doing anything to make the situation better.
The thing is, we're the ones who understand the problem so we're the ones the public expects to stand up for them, and if we don't do it, who will?
world's longest running science fiction show... revived in 2005 after 16 years off the screen.
That's the equivalent of running a marathon but stopping halfway through for a couple of pints at the pub, and it has nothing at all to do with the qualities that made Doctor Who great. Not everything in life needs a prize; we know Dr Who's good already.
The problem is that the word "breakthrough" has more than one meaning.
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A military offensive that penetrates an enemy's lines of defense.
3. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology. (From www.answers.com)
Press release writers can legitimately use the word to mean the first definition (a solution to a problem), while implying the third (emotive, hyperbolic) definition even if it doesn't actually mean it. As such, it is a very useful word to make your company look like it is leaping ahead of the competition and deserving of funding, whereas a press release which sticks to practical unemotive language and doesn't "big-up" the company is wasting an opportunity to generate interest and investment.
No wonder it's an overused word - it makes your company money.
Slashdot Mirror
No. Completely wrong. Because we're never going to get human rights "figured out". We'll never have the final correct answers for human rights or for anything else in society - society is always in flux and our ideas of the best solutions to problems are constantly changing. It's hard enough to get two people to agree on the solutions, let alone everyone in the world. The "perfect" solutions to problems are concepts we strive towards, they aren't attainable goals.
Imagine if men had said we won't give women the vote until we've got a perfect system in place for ourselves? Makes the flaw a bit more apparent.
Also the word "cloning" has that nicely sinister sound to it - crazy scientists and their two-headed cows, the word "Attack", etc.
Nah, if you want one in 20 years time you'll just download the molecular structure from a file-sharing network and manufacture it in your nanobot oven. Or play with it in your virtual world without the bother of making a real one. (I'm half serious)
My feeling is that the Zune is, and will be, iconic, but only to a subset of geeks who see it as a heroic, laughable, lovable, failure. The closest collectable item I can think of to this is the Sinclair C5 which is worth a bomb now - but there weren't ever many of them made. There's tons of Zunes. If you really think the Zune will be worth something in the future then wait until the price hits rock-bottom on eBay or as an end-of-line in the stores, then buy one. Don't buy a full price one now.
You're right. He could have said...
...but that's the language of commitment and definites. He's in marketing, so he doesn't ever want to say anything definite in case the company changes its multi-headed mind, hence "focused on" instead of "going to". And no, you're not the only one who's sick of PR language.
"We are going to provide cheap or free tools that let buyers create games for Windows and Xbox 360."
If it bugs you that much, you could try writing a Firefox plug-in to convert marketspeak to plain English. Here's a few to get you started;
"focused on" becomes ""
"great" becomes ""
"absolutely" becomes ""
"platforms" becomes ""
It's nothing to do with being lazy. It's a case of having to know the answer to know there is even a question. The reference is obscure and many people will not have heard of it, and you can refer people to the source without being a smarmy git.
I'm new here, aren't I?
Surely you mean iLuminous.
Anyway, how about a weekly round-up of Apple rumours rather than individual stories?
For "boring and unoriginal" I read "uncluttered and familiar". People who want to accomplish a task on a computer don't want an interface they have to learn to use from scratch. If the point of the OLPC is to help children to learn to program, then an interface they have to explore to use and can tweak by a little coding is a good thing. But for most people an OS like OS X is just fine, thank you. Really, what was the point of the last sentence in the summary if not Mac bashing?
See this Slashdot article from 2004 for more:
How Journalists Distort Science with Balance
However, the BBC is right to investigate the other side of the Global Warming argument, but it has to be careful how it presents its findings. I just dread they'll produce a special like "The REAL Truth Behind Global Warming - The Facts The So-Called-Scientists Didn't Want You To Hear."
I demand a recount!
Thanks for that. Knowing what it's called now, I found a good summary of the pros and cons hereo nse.html
http://www.templetons.com/brad/spam/challengeresp
You send an email to me. You're not on the whitelist. My email client sends you a standard handshake email. Your email client sees it is a handshake email and replies to it with a handshake reply. My email client gets your handshake reply, puts your initial email in my inbox and deletes the handshake emails.
All this is meant to do is eliminate forged email addresses, which most spam has. For a spam sending program to respond to this it would have to be at a real email address, which cuts down the amount of email addresses you need to block and makes it harder for spammers to hide.
Well, newsletters would have to implement the handshake-auto-reply thingy, but the person signing up for the newsletter should really add the email to their whitelist themselves.
Yes, the idea does require all automated email-senders to use the system, but not human senders. If neither person has the system, everything is as now. If the sender has it but the recipient does not, everything is as now. If the sender doesn't have it and the recipient does, the sender gets an email back asking for a reply to be added to their whitelist, which only ever happens once. If both have the system, neither person sees it in action.
How about an email client which does this: An email from someone not in your whitelist gets put in a holding folder and an automated reply is sent back (with a unique number as the subject) asking for just a reply to that email. When the reply arrives the handshake emails are deleted and the original email appears in your inbox.
This would mean all email from forged addresses would never be seen. The handshake emails could be automated by the mail clients (get Microsoft to implement it and you've got a standard) so mailing lists could implement it, but it would still work for people with an older email client that didn't automate it.
Why won't this work?
I've been through the same thing here in the UK. Mental health care is pretty damned poor everywhere simply because to give effective treatment you need to have either experienced the condition yourself or have an incredible amount of empathy with your patient - without that understanding the only care a doctor can give is to follow a procedure in a book.
Rather than gripe though, here's something useful. From my experience and from talking to others, the best way to fight depression is to exercise. I haven't met anyone it doesn't work for. Running is something you don't need to be happy or alert to start doing, the only difficult thing about it is getting over your embarrassment (or fear) of being seen as a "jogger".
We do, everyone here on Slashdot. The problem is not that we don't care but that we know we are almost powerless to do anything about it. We know that voting doesn't make anything better, that demonstrations are ignored, that databases of our information (including our DNA) continue to be built and merged and shared, and that resistance is futile.
I do say almost powerless - if everyone here dedicated all their free time to educating the public about the invasion of our privacy, to starting political campaigns, t-shirt printing, stickers, web sites, leafleting, then we could probably make a difference. Maybe Slashdot needs a sister site dedicated to political action to direct all the outrage we feel here instead of just bitching about it. Maybe there should be petitions attached to each story. I don't know what the answer is, but there are a lot of us who care and we're not doing anything to make the situation better.
The thing is, we're the ones who understand the problem so we're the ones the public expects to stand up for them, and if we don't do it, who will?
Yes, but you don't get a prize for it.
You're just itching for an excuse to wear your tinfoil hat, aren't you?
The problem is that the word "breakthrough" has more than one meaning.
1. An act of overcoming or penetrating an obstacle or restriction.
2. A military offensive that penetrates an enemy's lines of defense.
3. A major achievement or success that permits further progress, as in technology.
(From www.answers.com)
Press release writers can legitimately use the word to mean the first definition (a solution to a problem), while implying the third (emotive, hyperbolic) definition even if it doesn't actually mean it. As such, it is a very useful word to make your company look like it is leaping ahead of the competition and deserving of funding, whereas a press release which sticks to practical unemotive language and doesn't "big-up" the company is wasting an opportunity to generate interest and investment.
No wonder it's an overused word - it makes your company money.
No no, the space shuttle blows. ( -5 horribly insensitive)