By that logic, any company that wins a government contract (e.g Lockheed Martin) can be sued by another potential contractor (e.g Northrup Grumman). Clearly the government can enrich any private corporation in exchange for services and products, based on its needs, yes? One would be more worried about the government enriching failed CEO's with multi-million dollar goodbye packages out of honest taxpayer money, but that's another story.
I hope Google says no, or at least manages this wisely. If the government invades the "promoted content" section with propaganda, especially to US-based IPs, it will not be a good thing.
Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies. Nobody, however, has ever been able to 'enforce' these things, which is what the Chinese don't get. If you are in a Free(TM) country, consider yourself lucky.
By the end of the book, the message seemed to be to live life, have fun, and not sweat how much you're getting laid. But that may be my interpretation of it.
I always find it amusing how geeks, of all people, need books and insightful posts like this one to get the point across. Of all the people who should be able to understand evolution, the reasons behind things like lust, reproduction(the pointlessness of it), egos and so on, one would expect the bright folks in science to be really on the ball there. Who gives a shit about the "super model"? Sheesh.
But I guess that's where "geeks" and "nerds" come apart as stereotypes. "Geeks" are can be fit, social, and intelligent in picking the person they're going to invest emotions in, which is why they tend to have far more stress free and long lasting relationships than the average dumb blonde and her jock.
Most of your post is very logically laid out, and I admire much of the way Israel's society was set up and how it advanced as a nation, but your initial premise is something very hard to agree with:
And plenty of Arabs (and every other culture) live in Israel. The point of the Israelis is that Jews needed (historically - um, just look it up) a place where they can go live without being slaughtered for being Jewish. Enough of the world agreed with that proposition to actually set it up that way half a century ago.
And there were plenty of Jews living in Arab lands before Israel. It is the creation of a state explicitly to house a particular race of people for whatever historical reason, that begets all problems. It doesn't matter that Israel was forced to accept a percentage of non-Jews in its territory, due largely to its inability to drive them out. Do you think Israel would have allowed a non-Jewish majority to rule its democracy? In fact, only with the gradual and secular changes that overcame Israeli politics, did these Arabs become anything more than second rate citizens. There was a policy of different colored licensed plates until 10 years ago or so. Come on.
Anyway this is besides the point: the fact remains that the Arabs, who had nothing to do with the troubles the Jews had faced in a distant part of the world, at the hands of different people with different ideologies, those arabs were faced with an influx of people who wanted to form a state and control their most coveted and holy of places, in which they had lived as Jews, Christians and Muslims for many long centuries. Only when somebody manages to come up with a solution in which this is NOT the case - and muslims get their part of Jerusalem and a state for the displaced people who have suffered these 60 years, will there be a convincing force for the secular palestinians who dont want a doomsday with the Jews. You can't carpet bomb a people into accepting racial/religious oppression.
The only reason Judaism isn't as active on the conversion issue is because of the clear tendency towards racism in the old testament. Even today the ashkenazi and sephardi divisions persist. And the people who are "chosen", in the central theme of the faith, do not have to worry so much about the goyyim, who largely don't matter, and are inferior in the most literal of ways. I have spent the earlier part of my life learning about all these faiths, in depth, individually. What you have to understand is that you are talking about books written millenia ago. Do not try to make any of them appear civilized or rational, because they are not. The Torah contains some of the most sickening passages of bloodshed and massacre in the entire biblical history - the God of the new testament is actually known to be more 'merciful'.
There is no rationality in the tales of religion. The muslim fanatics can kill in the name of religious hegemony, and the jewish nutjobs can kill in the name of their superiority and their divine rights and chosen blood.
Ask yourself why the more religious right wing Jews are the ones who are warmongering, disgusting war criminals, whereas the secular ones have always called for peace. Who killed Isaac Rabin? It wasn't those terrible muslims, was it? Who lives in the settlements that are built on the blood and land of innocent people? Have you not heard the words of the civilized, secular SPECIAL FORCES divisions - the finest men and women in Israel- that refused to serve in the IDF and published widely read letters? Do you think you know more about these wars and this mess than they do? All religions contain ugliness, because like the other poster said, it's part of evolution - without it they don't survive. There wouldn't be a single practising jew today if 'disbelieving' had no consequences.
"All Israelites will have a part in the future world . . . The Goyim, at the end of the world will be handed over to the angel Duma and sent down to hell." --Zohar, Shemoth, Toldoth Noah, Lekh-Lekha
Don't forget to read the section on scripture. And don't take this as an attack on one faith - this is a reminder of what they all are, or rather, what they NEED to be.
Excuse me for not reading the summary, but doesn't this all sound like fertile ground for very very bad jokes? Why hasn't anyone made them so far? I am shocked, and cannot believe slashdot humor is improving so quickly. Something must be wrong.
Middle-east peace is impossible. Both sides can point to genocidal passages in the others' scripture
That's basically it, isn't it. Religions in particular, and active ideologies (that seek to recruit followers) in general, are destructive towards those who don't comply. It's part of the vileness of those who invented them, whether out of involuntary insanity, or careful planning, to include these ideas - this unconditional feeling of enmity towards all others who don't follow their version of The One Way - along with all the 'nice' teachings that play on the human instinct to worship, and to breed the notion that those Others share those same feelings of enmity, and that this is how things must be. This is how the deity wishes it. If that were not the case, the religions wouldn't be convincing enough when taken literally, which is how they are meant to be taken, as per the earliest and most revered followers. If you are right, then They are wrong, and must be fought, and killed and silenced, and subdued, either now or in some later foretold battle.
If there was no religion, many good things would disappear from the world. Many wonderful values would cease to exist. But the world would be a whole lot more peaceful, at least in this day and age.
I said the Oracle in the park, not the dude replying to your post. Jeeze. Some savior you are.
On topic: I actually recommend reading the fascinating article, which sounds like it was taken right out of a B movie plot. Lots of criminals and informers and the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. What I really want to know, however, is why they weren't able to track him down as soon as he set up this new card-exchange website. I mean, the whole article seems to be focused on the idea of the FBI tracing him through others who got caught and interrogated and through the informers who infiltrated the business, but I couldn't understand why somebody with servers in his apartment in San Fran can't be tracked down directly. Earlier the article mentions he used evasion techniques like doing the actual hacking/cracking from hotel rooms where he sniped wifis (I thought I was the only one who did this while in college!) but later the dude sets up his own freakin website. Where exactly is the 'mystery'? They shuttered other websites and made arrests, why not him?
The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
It's never that simple, clearly, because there is another factor called "trust". If you let in too many false positives, you lose the trust hierarchy and are pushed out of business by the other (more stringent) competitors. Who will put the government out of business when their sloppiness leads to disasters(as it uniformly has when dealing with security)? We trust the government locally because federal/state docs are produced with other federal/state documentation - we have 'faith' in the authentication mechanisms that have been in place before digital technology(though they can also be fooled of course). In fact, online trust is such a hard freakin problem, that I imagine the only way to provide decent answers is the continued commercial activity and competition in the field.
A prerequisite for free market practices, in the modern world, is peace. They should be able to sell their goods at our ports, and we at theirs, but the public declaration of enmity kind of gets in the way.
Interestingly enough, the era of medieval empires 1500 ago had many instances of merchants being allowed to trade through political borders without harm. People would trade with their foes one day and face them on the battlefield in the next. I still marvel at the stories of Saladin feasting with the crusader commanders the nights before they fight. Human beings are bizarre.
Interesting topic. Slashdot handles the issue you are facing by issuing the karma-bonus bump to users with an id (and a good history, by some measure of 'good') as opposed to the "anonymous" cowards. Karma here is a good idea because it is the antecedent of default visibility.
Now consider this: Brian Gordon may or may not be his real name, but what does it matter? If this was not a casual forum, you may have wished to go out and investigate this source of information more fully by looking at his credentials..etc, but in the end of the day this is not a place where we are to be held accountable by any authority. If we are a continuous nuisance, we simply lose karma (and visibility). That's all. Other than that, this is a social outlet. Let there be other places on the internet where people need to be identified by who they are, but here it is almost irrelevant. Your user id provides identification and a posting history, and that kind of defines you as an entity. Who you are in real life is not necessarily a matter of interest.
Head over to flickr, for example, and an entirely different system is in place. People almost invariably identify themselves with at least a first name if they are active. They are more 'real' there, even though they STILL rarely provide full contact details (they are still detached from the meato-sphere). You can see someone's photograph, hundreds of them, their daily life spilled bare in front of you, but you don't know their full name. Pretty fascinating, eh? Those who want to do business with the photos are inevitably forced to give their info out, but otherwise you are just an avatar.
Anonymity is necessary for information exchange because as much as science needs verification of origin, free speech needs obfuscation of origin. It's always been that way.
Since I've already discussed alcohol, which is more potent as a problem and a substance than there is no need to consider the others you've mentioned. Anything that can be consumed in a non-harmful way by society should not be banned. Things which lead to abuse by a crushing majority of the users, with possible side effects on society, should simply not be available.
Have you ever tried coca tea, or chewing on coca leaves? It is a stimulant, yes, and the natives did it to give themselves energy to work without food, but you clearly don't understand the effects of cocaine in comparison. The manufacturing of cocaine requires HUGE concentrations. People who use these drugs are not interested in making them weaker due to your sensibility. They are interested in the effects, and don't give a shit about what you think, or what harm it may cause society in general (read: usually their families). So frankly, it's a good thing that completely destructive and entirely negative things like cocaine are banned. I don't want to live in a world where frightening drugs made by adding kerosene and acetone to herbal stimulants are sold in the supermarket. Remember that your tax money goes to treat the idiots and in many cases fix the damage they cause. It's bad enough with alchohol and the damage THAT causes every year, but at least that comes in a spectrum of usage traits. Strong drugs don't.
Look, do you think I would be using FF3 if I could not (after allowing the program to adapt it's counts/indices) find google.com or any other website with relative ease within a week of using the thing? Of course it doesn't rank everything right out of the box..it's a complex piece of software. Initially you will get the "mess". But now when I type "goo" I get both google.com and gmail and maps.google.com and all the things that I typically use. Just because it doesn't restrict itself to domain names doesn't mean it's not very well implemented or incredibly useful. In fact, there will be many cases where the domain is hosted on something nonsensical but the page *title* is easy to remember, and you might not get it via a quick websearch because it's ranked so low by google. Like a web portal for your university. If you didn't lose your patience with it so quickly and you let it learn your preferences you wouldn't know how to live without it now. But each to his own.
But it doesn't! You can always be dick and type the whole URL out, it won't stop you. It probably just sets a variable "userIsSadistic" or something. Jeeze.
I don't understand how you don't appreciate the feature (which I think is the most beneficial addition to browser tech since tabs), but you can simply rid your computer of browsing history and that should do it. It forms queries from what you type, and I haven't checked but it looks like it has an index of those queries as well, stored somewhere under it's installation folder (it adapts to your choices so it must store query history).
Seriously though, take off the tin foil hat and try it out. It's awesome. I don't know why it took them so long to figure out that human beings are not meant to remember URL strings or type them verbatim in a casual environment. In fact, maybe the next step should be adapting the google search bar to suggest pages you haven't even visited yet(as opposed to auto-complete, which comes up with query suggestions), based on the query/segment you are typing. It shouldn't be too hard to tune. That way, google can mind read both your searches and your URLs! Yay! *gulp*
Anyway, you can always install another bare bones browser for any shady activity you want to engage in.
You've never really slashdotted until you've dived head first into the 5th page of comments on a story whose title you read only half of, and the subject of which does not interest you in the least. Then you will find, as your tired eyes browse, in a lively offtopic thread, surrounded by song and laughter, words to tickle your mind and taunt your intellect. And you will post. And you will say: I have been on slashdot today.
Not really. Unless it is sentient and is able to control it's patterns of thought in certain ways, it will not be capable of addressing the same lines of creativity no matter how "fast" the algorithm runs or how detached it is from other chores. There will be a set of functions that will lie outside its ability. Cats may be aware of themselves at a very primitive level, but reflecting on their own thoughts (which is crucial) seems a little far fetched. Certain apes, maybe. Or Dolphins. Heck, even they may be restricted somewhat in the reflective/understanding scheme of things. The topic is still shrouded in mystery.
Also realize that a major problem with this sentience business is how to keep it going. Lots of sci-fi (and academic) work work simply ignores the fact that a lot of what we do is fueled by emotions. It is quite possible that a sentient being without emotional drive could just stop thinking, or keep thinking the same things, even if you instill a memory in it. Why would it want to consider its environment, or humans controlling it, or the world, or any other concept? We may be able to think 'purely' sitting in an office, concentrating on some idea, but the necessities of life are what got us there to begin with, as well as some pleasure or desire to to obtain some knowledge..etc. If we didn't have that, if we didn't want to live because of all the drives we've evolved, I assure you suicide rates would hit the roof, and very little of what we can come up with/understand/achieve would have been as is. It's hard to replicate that in a machine.
That is always good advice, but remember, at that age it is difficult to see the value of science. It is difficult to understand, even for college seniors in technical majors (math, natural sciences, comp.sci..etc), the immense benefit of being someone who understands how the world works. It usually takes a little sit-back and thinking to come to grips with the fact that you are proving things about the very nature of logic itself, or modelling the universe at levels the human mind did not really evolve to deal with. Anybody capable of doing science(esp at a high level), and enjoying this incredible meaningfulness and understanding (read:enlightenment) that comes as a result.. those people should be at least encouraged to pursue it. No harm could come from an honest suggestion. She may owe him so much for it later.
Grad students interning usually get paid 20-25 an hour, depending on the company (I interned last summer). I know google interns make more (about 6k a month) so really it depends on the location, industry, company.. so on. Not all 'tech jobs' are the same, obviously. If a research lab is trying to hire the guy and pay him 12 bucks/hour he should shoot them in the face. It doesn't hurt to make the summer internship an enjoyable and gainful experience as well as something to put on a resume. My internship was one of the happiest few months of my life. It wouldnt have been possible (renting a car..etc) without decent pay.
Slashdot Mirror
By that logic, any company that wins a government contract (e.g Lockheed Martin) can be sued by another potential contractor (e.g Northrup Grumman). Clearly the government can enrich any private corporation in exchange for services and products, based on its needs, yes? One would be more worried about the government enriching failed CEO's with multi-million dollar goodbye packages out of honest taxpayer money, but that's another story.
I hope Google says no, or at least manages this wisely. If the government invades the "promoted content" section with propaganda, especially to US-based IPs, it will not be a good thing.
Modesty and sexual conservatism, which are not unique to the Chinese culture, but rather understood and appreciated by almost all [organized] societies. Nobody, however, has ever been able to 'enforce' these things, which is what the Chinese don't get. If you are in a Free(TM) country, consider yourself lucky.
It will never be "RIP" - the rebirth of the iGod has oft been foretold.
Off-topic: can anybody imagine Steve Jobs with long hair and a serious beard? I can't.
By the end of the book, the message seemed to be to live life, have fun, and not sweat how much you're getting laid. But that may be my interpretation of it.
I always find it amusing how geeks, of all people, need books and insightful posts like this one to get the point across. Of all the people who should be able to understand evolution, the reasons behind things like lust, reproduction(the pointlessness of it), egos and so on, one would expect the bright folks in science to be really on the ball there. Who gives a shit about the "super model"? Sheesh.
But I guess that's where "geeks" and "nerds" come apart as stereotypes. "Geeks" are can be fit, social, and intelligent in picking the person they're going to invest emotions in, which is why they tend to have far more stress free and long lasting relationships than the average dumb blonde and her jock.
Most of your post is very logically laid out, and I admire much of the way Israel's society was set up and how it advanced as a nation, but your initial premise is something very hard to agree with:
And plenty of Arabs (and every other culture) live in Israel. The point of the Israelis is that Jews needed (historically - um, just look it up) a place where they can go live without being slaughtered for being Jewish. Enough of the world agreed with that proposition to actually set it up that way half a century ago.
And there were plenty of Jews living in Arab lands before Israel. It is the creation of a state explicitly to house a particular race of people for whatever historical reason, that begets all problems. It doesn't matter that Israel was forced to accept a percentage of non-Jews in its territory, due largely to its inability to drive them out. Do you think Israel would have allowed a non-Jewish majority to rule its democracy? In fact, only with the gradual and secular changes that overcame Israeli politics, did these Arabs become anything more than second rate citizens. There was a policy of different colored licensed plates until 10 years ago or so. Come on.
Anyway this is besides the point: the fact remains that the Arabs, who had nothing to do with the troubles the Jews had faced in a distant part of the world, at the hands of different people with different ideologies, those arabs were faced with an influx of people who wanted to form a state and control their most coveted and holy of places, in which they had lived as Jews, Christians and Muslims for many long centuries. Only when somebody manages to come up with a solution in which this is NOT the case - and muslims get their part of Jerusalem and a state for the displaced people who have suffered these 60 years, will there be a convincing force for the secular palestinians who dont want a doomsday with the Jews. You can't carpet bomb a people into accepting racial/religious oppression.
The only reason Judaism isn't as active on the conversion issue is because of the clear tendency towards racism in the old testament. Even today the ashkenazi and sephardi divisions persist. And the people who are "chosen", in the central theme of the faith, do not have to worry so much about the goyyim, who largely don't matter, and are inferior in the most literal of ways. I have spent the earlier part of my life learning about all these faiths, in depth, individually. What you have to understand is that you are talking about books written millenia ago. Do not try to make any of them appear civilized or rational, because they are not. The Torah contains some of the most sickening passages of bloodshed and massacre in the entire biblical history - the God of the new testament is actually known to be more 'merciful'.
There is no rationality in the tales of religion. The muslim fanatics can kill in the name of religious hegemony, and the jewish nutjobs can kill in the name of their superiority and their divine rights and chosen blood.
Ask yourself why the more religious right wing Jews are the ones who are warmongering, disgusting war criminals, whereas the secular ones have always called for peace. Who killed Isaac Rabin? It wasn't those terrible muslims, was it? Who lives in the settlements that are built on the blood and land of innocent people? Have you not heard the words of the civilized, secular SPECIAL FORCES divisions - the finest men and women in Israel- that refused to serve in the IDF and published widely read letters? Do you think you know more about these wars and this mess than they do? All religions contain ugliness, because like the other poster said, it's part of evolution - without it they don't survive. There wouldn't be a single practising jew today if 'disbelieving' had no consequences.
"All Israelites will have a part in the future world . . . The Goyim, at the end of the world will be handed over to the angel Duma and sent down to hell."
--Zohar, Shemoth, Toldoth Noah, Lekh-Lekha
That's religion for you.
A quick search on how the jewish faith and racial mindset affects politics will give you things like this, and if you go read for yourself you will find much more. Some examples:
http://www.rense.com/general42/morej.htm
http://opposingdigits.com/forums/about2072.html
Don't forget to read the section on scripture. And don't take this as an attack on one faith - this is a reminder of what they all are, or rather, what they NEED to be.
Excuse me for not reading the summary, but doesn't this all sound like fertile ground for very very bad jokes? Why hasn't anyone made them so far? I am shocked, and cannot believe slashdot humor is improving so quickly. Something must be wrong.
Middle-east peace is impossible. Both sides can point to genocidal passages in the others' scripture
That's basically it, isn't it. Religions in particular, and active ideologies (that seek to recruit followers) in general, are destructive towards those who don't comply. It's part of the vileness of those who invented them, whether out of involuntary insanity, or careful planning, to include these ideas - this unconditional feeling of enmity towards all others who don't follow their version of The One Way - along with all the 'nice' teachings that play on the human instinct to worship, and to breed the notion that those Others share those same feelings of enmity, and that this is how things must be. This is how the deity wishes it. If that were not the case, the religions wouldn't be convincing enough when taken literally, which is how they are meant to be taken, as per the earliest and most revered followers. If you are right, then They are wrong, and must be fought, and killed and silenced, and subdued, either now or in some later foretold battle.
If there was no religion, many good things would disappear from the world. Many wonderful values would cease to exist. But the world would be a whole lot more peaceful, at least in this day and age.
Do I take the red pill, or the blue pill?
I said the Oracle in the park, not the dude replying to your post. Jeeze. Some savior you are.
On topic: I actually recommend reading the fascinating article, which sounds like it was taken right out of a B movie plot. Lots of criminals and informers and the same mistakes being repeated over and over again. What I really want to know, however, is why they weren't able to track him down as soon as he set up this new card-exchange website. I mean, the whole article seems to be focused on the idea of the FBI tracing him through others who got caught and interrogated and through the informers who infiltrated the business, but I couldn't understand why somebody with servers in his apartment in San Fran can't be tracked down directly. Earlier the article mentions he used evasion techniques like doing the actual hacking/cracking from hotel rooms where he sniped wifis (I thought I was the only one who did this while in college!) but later the dude sets up his own freakin website. Where exactly is the 'mystery'? They shuttered other websites and made arrests, why not him?
That must be because you're The One, and you are here to save us. Talk you the Oracle in the park - she might tell you what you need to know.
The more stringent their policy, the more applicants they reject, and the less money they make. It is simple math, they have to make it as easy to get an SSL certificate as possible or go under. (The bond rating industry suffers from a different, but somewhat similar conflict of interest, actually)
It's never that simple, clearly, because there is another factor called "trust". If you let in too many false positives, you lose the trust hierarchy and are pushed out of business by the other (more stringent) competitors. Who will put the government out of business when their sloppiness leads to disasters(as it uniformly has when dealing with security)? We trust the government locally because federal/state docs are produced with other federal/state documentation - we have 'faith' in the authentication mechanisms that have been in place before digital technology(though they can also be fooled of course). In fact, online trust is such a hard freakin problem, that I imagine the only way to provide decent answers is the continued commercial activity and competition in the field.
Why not, we all know she's a dirty old woman anyway: http://bash.org/?111338
A prerequisite for free market practices, in the modern world, is peace. They should be able to sell their goods at our ports, and we at theirs, but the public declaration of enmity kind of gets in the way.
Interestingly enough, the era of medieval empires 1500 ago had many instances of merchants being allowed to trade through political borders without harm. People would trade with their foes one day and face them on the battlefield in the next. I still marvel at the stories of Saladin feasting with the crusader commanders the nights before they fight. Human beings are bizarre.
Interesting topic. Slashdot handles the issue you are facing by issuing the karma-bonus bump to users with an id (and a good history, by some measure of 'good') as opposed to the "anonymous" cowards. Karma here is a good idea because it is the antecedent of default visibility.
Now consider this: Brian Gordon may or may not be his real name, but what does it matter? If this was not a casual forum, you may have wished to go out and investigate this source of information more fully by looking at his credentials..etc, but in the end of the day this is not a place where we are to be held accountable by any authority. If we are a continuous nuisance, we simply lose karma (and visibility). That's all. Other than that, this is a social outlet. Let there be other places on the internet where people need to be identified by who they are, but here it is almost irrelevant. Your user id provides identification and a posting history, and that kind of defines you as an entity. Who you are in real life is not necessarily a matter of interest.
Head over to flickr, for example, and an entirely different system is in place. People almost invariably identify themselves with at least a first name if they are active. They are more 'real' there, even though they STILL rarely provide full contact details (they are still detached from the meato-sphere). You can see someone's photograph, hundreds of them, their daily life spilled bare in front of you, but you don't know their full name. Pretty fascinating, eh? Those who want to do business with the photos are inevitably forced to give their info out, but otherwise you are just an avatar.
Anonymity is necessary for information exchange because as much as science needs verification of origin, free speech needs obfuscation of origin. It's always been that way.
Since I've already discussed alcohol, which is more potent as a problem and a substance than there is no need to consider the others you've mentioned. Anything that can be consumed in a non-harmful way by society should not be banned. Things which lead to abuse by a crushing majority of the users, with possible side effects on society, should simply not be available.
Have you ever tried coca tea, or chewing on coca leaves? It is a stimulant, yes, and the natives did it to give themselves energy to work without food, but you clearly don't understand the effects of cocaine in comparison. The manufacturing of cocaine requires HUGE concentrations. People who use these drugs are not interested in making them weaker due to your sensibility. They are interested in the effects, and don't give a shit about what you think, or what harm it may cause society in general (read: usually their families). So frankly, it's a good thing that completely destructive and entirely negative things like cocaine are banned. I don't want to live in a world where frightening drugs made by adding kerosene and acetone to herbal stimulants are sold in the supermarket. Remember that your tax money goes to treat the idiots and in many cases fix the damage they cause. It's bad enough with alchohol and the damage THAT causes every year, but at least that comes in a spectrum of usage traits. Strong drugs don't.
Look, do you think I would be using FF3 if I could not (after allowing the program to adapt it's counts/indices) find google.com or any other website with relative ease within a week of using the thing? Of course it doesn't rank everything right out of the box..it's a complex piece of software. Initially you will get the "mess". But now when I type "goo" I get both google.com and gmail and maps.google.com and all the things that I typically use. Just because it doesn't restrict itself to domain names doesn't mean it's not very well implemented or incredibly useful. In fact, there will be many cases where the domain is hosted on something nonsensical but the page *title* is easy to remember, and you might not get it via a quick websearch because it's ranked so low by google. Like a web portal for your university. If you didn't lose your patience with it so quickly and you let it learn your preferences you wouldn't know how to live without it now. But each to his own.
But it doesn't! You can always be dick and type the whole URL out, it won't stop you. It probably just sets a variable "userIsSadistic" or something. Jeeze.
I don't understand how you don't appreciate the feature (which I think is the most beneficial addition to browser tech since tabs), but you can simply rid your computer of browsing history and that should do it. It forms queries from what you type, and I haven't checked but it looks like it has an index of those queries as well, stored somewhere under it's installation folder (it adapts to your choices so it must store query history).
Seriously though, take off the tin foil hat and try it out. It's awesome. I don't know why it took them so long to figure out that human beings are not meant to remember URL strings or type them verbatim in a casual environment. In fact, maybe the next step should be adapting the google search bar to suggest pages you haven't even visited yet(as opposed to auto-complete, which comes up with query suggestions), based on the query/segment you are typing. It shouldn't be too hard to tune. That way, google can mind read both your searches and your URLs! Yay! *gulp*
Anyway, you can always install another bare bones browser for any shady activity you want to engage in.
I'm afraid to tell you that in this house we are not going to obey the laws of thermod.. oh crap.
This is "Quantum Entaglement meets Kurt Godel". If you can understand anything, including the flash ads, they would have to withdraw the paper :)
You've never really slashdotted until you've dived head first into the 5th page of comments on a story whose title you read only half of, and the subject of which does not interest you in the least. Then you will find, as your tired eyes browse, in a lively offtopic thread, surrounded by song and laughter, words to tickle your mind and taunt your intellect. And you will post. And you will say: I have been on slashdot today.
Not really. Unless it is sentient and is able to control it's patterns of thought in certain ways, it will not be capable of addressing the same lines of creativity no matter how "fast" the algorithm runs or how detached it is from other chores. There will be a set of functions that will lie outside its ability. Cats may be aware of themselves at a very primitive level, but reflecting on their own thoughts (which is crucial) seems a little far fetched. Certain apes, maybe. Or Dolphins. Heck, even they may be restricted somewhat in the reflective/understanding scheme of things. The topic is still shrouded in mystery.
Also realize that a major problem with this sentience business is how to keep it going. Lots of sci-fi (and academic) work work simply ignores the fact that a lot of what we do is fueled by emotions. It is quite possible that a sentient being without emotional drive could just stop thinking, or keep thinking the same things, even if you instill a memory in it. Why would it want to consider its environment, or humans controlling it, or the world, or any other concept? We may be able to think 'purely' sitting in an office, concentrating on some idea, but the necessities of life are what got us there to begin with, as well as some pleasure or desire to to obtain some knowledge..etc. If we didn't have that, if we didn't want to live because of all the drives we've evolved, I assure you suicide rates would hit the roof, and very little of what we can come up with/understand/achieve would have been as is. It's hard to replicate that in a machine.
That is always good advice, but remember, at that age it is difficult to see the value of science. It is difficult to understand, even for college seniors in technical majors (math, natural sciences, comp.sci..etc), the immense benefit of being someone who understands how the world works. It usually takes a little sit-back and thinking to come to grips with the fact that you are proving things about the very nature of logic itself, or modelling the universe at levels the human mind did not really evolve to deal with. Anybody capable of doing science(esp at a high level), and enjoying this incredible meaningfulness and understanding (read:enlightenment) that comes as a result.. those people should be at least encouraged to pursue it. No harm could come from an honest suggestion. She may owe him so much for it later.
Grad students interning usually get paid 20-25 an hour, depending on the company (I interned last summer). I know google interns make more (about 6k a month) so really it depends on the location, industry, company.. so on. Not all 'tech jobs' are the same, obviously. If a research lab is trying to hire the guy and pay him 12 bucks/hour he should shoot them in the face. It doesn't hurt to make the summer internship an enjoyable and gainful experience as well as something to put on a resume. My internship was one of the happiest few months of my life. It wouldnt have been possible (renting a car..etc) without decent pay.