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I wish that were true, but "less" is used interchangeably and, in language, common use trumps abstract rules. It's not entirely incorrect either -- less has been used with countables for as long as modern English has existed, and only later did someone try to create a distinction.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl...

[swims back and forth] "click." TFA here I come. Don't tell anyone.
[opens and closes mouth] Oh Gawd, it's Engadget [enables golly gee-whiz filter]
"...dropped to 8 seconds in 2013 -- about one second less than a goldfish"
Now that's... Huh? Sorry, I missed that. [eats a bubble]
"Thankfully, it's not all bad. While tech is hurting attention spans overall, it also..."
Yeah something good right? Not in the mood for good news. I'll click on something blue.
Oh it's the actual study! "Click". [swims back and forth] Oops, advertising.microsoft.com? Hello.
It's about Canadians. [spits out bubble] That's nice. What a nice couple.
[something something] "and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention"
Glad I'm a goldfish then. We're still not at the research report yet. "Click." Oops, a dialog.
"Download the Canadian attention spans research report (2.0M)
Download the infographic (173K)"
Now why would I just want to get the infographic...? Oh!
I get it! THIS IS the attention span test! "Click: the report"
[plays on bubble Ferris wheel as PDF loads]
That woman is either taking a picture or is trying to scroll text by moving the computer up and down.
She had to stand up to scroll to the top of the page. License plate "71"?. Hmmm. [scroll]
"Think digital is killing attention spans? Think again."
I read this twice, so my opinion is back to what it originally was.
[yadda yadda] "Good news! It's not as bad as you think."
[continuous sirens in the distance] Tornado warning! [rain/branches beat on window]
Maybe it IS as bad as I think. [wind shrieks] Confound this nuisance. [lightning strikes!]
[Power goes out] [minutes pass] [sirens stop] [power comes on]
"AMI BIOS" "Select profile" "Welcome" "starting wlnotify.dll"
[sleeps with eyes wide open CLICK HERE FOR IMPORTANT INFO ]
[open browser] [access slashdot] "Welcome to AT&T (The Fucking Modem)" What the fuck.
[looks at lights] DSL not up. It's NAT-ting my browser traffic to itself. F'king UVERSE.
"Click to run diagnostics." Okay. Click. "Enter modem access code." FUCK.
[fortunately fishbowl is next to modem and curvature magnifies tiny sticker] [enters 10 digit number]
"Ethernet/DSL/PTM: Pass Authentication:Fail" Their computer rebooting after 10 minutes?
I thought nothing was slower than XP. [5 minutes pass] [reload] "Authentication: Pass"
[tabs remembered by voodoo magick] First thing that's gone right. [glances up]
MUSICAL SOUNDTRACK BEGINS FUCK! OH NOOOOOOOOES!
(every icon next to every browser tab has been replaced by an AT&T DEATHSTAR logo.
the only reason this is not in all caps is slashdot's lameness filter. shhhh. don't wake up the lameness filter)
On no, AT&T Is in my mind. I can feel it. Do I have NATty favicon corruption?
[warily, with nervous dread} "192.168.1.254/favicon.ico" [ENTER] [hideous 32x32 AT&T icon fills screen]
[exit viewer] NOO! What brain-dead thweep would serve favicon from a NAT-redirected router?
[slaps Firefox around] It's all your fault! I should downgrade you to 1992! Favicon support!
[AT&T logo still icon on all tabbed sites] THAT LOGO, it keeps winking and blinking at me! I'm insane!
[thrashes about, bumps on glass] Do we have a potion for this? Yesss. A potion [rustles about in bubble castle]
[opens js console]
var fS = Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/favicon-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsIFaviconService);
[squeak] (have old js console it always squeaks)
fS.expireAllFavicons(); [squeak]
[whoosh!] [all icons missing] Already, an

In the USA, this would likely require a constitutional amendment, it is widely held that the Fifth Amendment "Right Against Self-Incrimination" protects the right not to divulge an encryption key.

If you had read the article you link to (and I just did) you'd see that it does not conclude the same thing you do. Instead the article points out that it is far from a settled question on whether or not a defendant or suspect can be compelled to decrypt files. The Supreme Court has yet to deal with that issue directly, and the Circuit Courts of Appeal that have considered the issue have adopted a standard in which the government must first show they know the location and existence of encrypted data. If they've seized a suspect's phone, they certainly can know these two things, so the Fifth Amendment, under that analysis, would offer no real protection.

I just read the entire article and the author forgot one other solution: the British solution Instead of putting the burden on app developers to include backdoors, or on Google to block apps that don't, put the burden on end users to turn over their keys to police when asked. I'm not saying I like this solution, but it is a solution the author of the article didn't consider. If you make the sentence for non-cooperation long enough, it doesn't really matter if the police find what they're looking for: they can just lock you up for not handing over the keys.

In the USA, this would likely require a constitutional amendment, it is widely held that the Fifth Amendment "Right Against Self-Incrimination" protects the right not to divulge an encryption key.

And rape rates in some other 1st-world countries are HUGELY higher--but nobody here cares apparently: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wi...

The numbers may say so, but they comprise only official data. In more advanced countries, the case must be that less rapes go unreported, so the figures may be closer to reality, while not so in the US. Consider the Japan rates, which are among the lowest, while having a strong culture of sexual harassment, (it's the same culture that created things like RapeLay): http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1525/as.2007.47.5.811?uid=3737664&uid=2&uid=4&sid=21106029734881; http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1373&context=jil;http://ijo.sagepub.com/content/45/3/278.short.

Linguistics has two branches. One branch is descriptive linguistics which studies how language is used. The other is proscriptive, who describes how a language should be used. This divide is covered pretty often by language log (worth reading pretty often).

This article is just someone discovering descriptive linguistics for the first time and ecstatic that their prejudgments are backed up by a branch of something that sounds like a science. Congratulations. "Science" has "proved" that there are no standards for language and all those teachers that marked up your papers with red pens were just being mean.

There is no One True English, but there sure as hell is a Don't Sound Like a Moron English. Like it or not, people hear more than just what you say. They also hear how you say it, and they tend to figure out who you are, or at least, who you are similar to.

Same goes with clothes. People know who you are just by looking at you. They may be wrong occasionally, and you can feel smug for subverting their expectations, but it is a tool that is right most of the time, and it seems to be wired very deeply into us, so no one is going to stop doing it.

You can whine all you want about how unfair it is, but if you want your ideas heard, your best bet is to sound (and look) like someone worth listening to.

Sony's bread and butter isn't electronics though; it is insurance !?

* http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05...

While they made some pretty bone headed decisions in the past, i.e. flooding the market with too many TV's that consumers don't give a crap about, pouring billions of R&D into the PS3, and have never really recovered from Apple envy, they are slowly turning the Titanic around.

When a company is so big that they end up suing themselves they aren't going to disappear overnight.

Whether or not "they" can be used with a singular antecedent is up for debate. Unfortunately, the imaginary PC police keep trying to promote he/she and other awkwardisms for a problem that's been solved for over 200 years. Sourced blog entry on the subject.

Either way, I'll continue using "they" as a singular gender neutral pronoun, and if anyone has a problem with that they can go to heck.

Are you kidding? Let's have a little survey of Plotkin's work:

September 2013: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/...

November 2014: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/...

I also notice from the bottom of the page that his foundation support is shrinking for some reason. But I guess the US Army is always good for a few sheckels. They love this shit.

Seriously though, haven't biologists doing sociological extrapolation via Prisoner's Dilemma been discredited enough yet? I know academics have to eat, but really... Biomathematics is too serious a science to be misused in this way.

Are you kidding? Let's have a little survey of Plotkin's work:

September 2013: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/...

November 2014: http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/...

I also notice from the bottom of the page that his foundation support is shrinking for some reason. But I guess the US Army is always good for a few sheckels. They love this shit.

Seriously though, haven't biologists doing sociological extrapolation via Prisoner's Dilemma been discredited enough yet? I know academics have to eat, but really... Biomathematics is too serious a science to be misused in this way.

Here you go: reference on Inuit words for snow myth.

Wise men speak because they have something to say; Fools because they have to say something. -Plato

But ACs still haven't learned to just fucking google clever aphorisms before they post them.

HINT: Plato didn't speak English, so the likelihood of him coming up with a cute turn of phrase like that in Classical Greek, and then having it translate to something so erudite in English is... small.

If you break language into four tasks: speaking, listening, reading and writing, then speaking is by far the easiest.

I'd say that depends on what you consider "reading and writing". For Westerners, Mandarin is difficult to speak and listen to because of the tones--it takes a lot of practice for them to pronounce the tones properly, and also a lot of practice to distinguish the tones. Reading and writing is difficult because of the large number of characters that need to be memorized. However, if you're allowed to have computer assistance, reading and writing becomes much easier; I'd say easier than speaking and listening. You can easily look up a word in an online dictionary, and when typing, the IME will present you a list of possible characters, and you choose the one you want. The latter is a huge simplification, since you don't have to remember exactly how to write a character; you just need to have a general idea of what it looks like, and the IME will take care of the details. This is even affecting the current generation of Chinese people... it's not uncommon for even a college-educated person to draw a blank on how to hand-write a character: "Character Amnesia"

http://www.mobileread.com/ --- forum for books where the members create nicely formatted books, and are willing to fix errors when reported
http://www.gutenberg.org/ --- mass-produced books by the masses --- getting errors fixed is a bit more difficult, but can be made to happen

http://onlinebooks.library.upe... --- The Online Books Page, John Mark Ockerbloom's attempt to list all freely available electronic versions of printed texts.

http://www.ling.upenn.edu/~jas...

using wooden 'cradles' shaped like circle segments, 'wrapped' around each end of the block making them a lot easier to roll than the proposition in this article.

So now we can pronounce it, we ought to write a volcano chantey, the way some people did for Eyjafjallajökull.

Some meta-analysis of the actual study, along with some examination of how the media has generally thoroughly misrepresented the study, is available at Language Log.

Thus Component 1 (23.6% of test variance) was significantly heritable — h2 = 0.538. The symbol h2 is used to denote "narrow-sense heritability", which is the ratio between the variance due to average effects of alleles, and the phenotypic variance as a whole:

$$h^2 = \frac{Var(A)}{Var(P)}$$

In other words, about half of the variance in a PCA component accounting for about a quarter of the variance in test results was accounted for by genetic variation.

Component 3 (10.8% of test variance) was also significantly heritable, with h2 = 0.335. Thus about a third of the variance in a PCA component accounting for about a tenth of the variance in test results was accounted for by genetic variation.

The genetic relationships of components 2 (11.7 of test-score variance) and 4 (8.2% of test-score variance) were not statistically significant.

A quarter plus a tenth of the test results were shown to be related at all (not in whole, but at all) to heritable traits. The grand total overall was just under 16% (a half of a quarter, plus a third of a tenth).

Now, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't describe 16% as "largely". I'd describe 16% as "partly", or "mildly", or "somewhat". But of course, reporters for Nat'l Geo and The Independent and the like aren't big on math.

It's still an interesting and intriguing study, of course, but so grossly misreported that it boggles the mind. We need a better grade of chimpanzee writing science articles for the general public! :D

MapPoint? Wasn't it the service that plotted a route between two cities in Norway by taking the long, two-day and over 1600 mile scenic route, instead of the more direct 500 mile trip it was if going the other way around?

Well, yes it was!

Wait, are you one of those economists that are the subject of this article?

The figures I found indicate the US by 1876 still hadn't produced the same cotton it had in 1860: http://www.sailsinc.org/durfee...

Note also how you cleverly cite a figure from 1850 to 1870, which includes the Civil War. Most of the "doubling" took place before 1860, thanks to the (enforced) productivity of slaves.

From http://www.history.upenn.edu/e...:

Our scaffolding is built on the solid foundation of over 600 thousand daily cotton picking observations drawn
from the archives of over 110 slave plantations. We show that in the 60 years preceding the Civil War the
average amount of cotton picked per slave in a day increased about four-fold.

That productivity was not matched by post-war cotton producers. Capitalism is best when it is immoral and doesn't respect unalienable rights.

Somehow the name "Mike Szczys", like so many Slavic or Welsh names, reminds me of an old article in The Onion titled "Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia".

For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.

Certificate warnings freak you out? Try this link instead, now with matching wildcard, calmer seas and less mogul.

For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.

Certificate warnings freak you out? Try this link instead, now with matching wildcard, calmer seas and less mogul.

"Arrrr.... fix yar name 'R' while you may, maties!!"

I may not have the belly for Deep Statistics but I do know abut Internet Search noise levels. I remember trying to do research on WebDAV (believe me, there is such a thing) only to discover that folks discussing it invariably refer to it as 'dav'. Because saying "Distributed Authoring [and] Versioning" out loud makes you spit out your toothpick. Any attempt to search 'webdav' yielded only the sterile official pages, and attempts to search on 'dav' with other keywords brought up conversations from the community of Disabled American Veterans who also use the term in casual conversation, and have said an awful lot over the years. They occupied 'dav' first.

Now you may think you can pull off a 'C' where Google seems to pick off relevant results if you combine it with any computery term, but it was not always so. It has taken an incredible saturation of C, and perhaps some special coded cases on Google's part, for this to come about.

The success of Perl is due in some part to the ability of confused people to obtain help and advice about it merely by searching on its unique spelling.

So the best way to push this R language is with a refit of the name. Go with the pirate theme, it will sell many more T-shirts than those of silly camels and pearls. But stake out a bit of Keyword Real Estate that presently has a relatively low population density.

Google search result estimate counts, descending order,
r --- 2,730,000,000
ar --- 656,000,000
arr --- 24,400,000
arrrrrrrr --- 3,060,000
arrrr --- 876,000
aarr --- 638,000
arrr --- 536,000
arrrrr --- 405,000
aaarrrrr --- 267,000
arrrrrr --- 205,000
arrrrrrr --- 129,000
aarrr --- 107,000
aarrrr --- 107,000
aaarrr --- 56,600
aaarrr --- 56,600
arrrrrrrrr --- 52,400

Adding arrrs is not enough since talking like a pirate is typically accomplished with a single 'a', so ar+ space is pretty well populated up to ar{5}, it looks like best ratio is around a{3}r{3}. But even choosing the less-optimum and easier to type a{2}r{3} by using 'aarrr' instead of 'r' you have improved the signal to noise ratio by a factor of twenty-five thousand.

Push the name change firmly and decisively. This means that if anyone mentions 'R' there should be immediate responses that ask, "What AARRR you talking about?" This will inject the proper searchable term into the discussion while it reminds the poster of the name change.

For an interesting 9 minute lecture that might help sell you on this idea, listen here.

I don't believe Carmack has any equity in ZeniMax. Him leaving iD seals the deal that ZeniMax can't claim any ownership.

Ironically, you *can* sue yourself, absurd as that is. The full details can be found here:

http://knowledge.wharton.upenn...

Yup, that's always a good laugh when a company is so big it ends up suing itself !

* Sony vs. Sony

"There is no consumer electronics industry without content, and there is no content industry without devices to play it on."

In 1970 the tuition for the University of Pennsylvania was about 4000 including boarding, books and misc fees. That's about 25k by today's dollars.
 
  Minimum wage was $1.60 in 1970. At that rate a student would have to work 50 hours a week year round to get that 4000. And that's pre-tax....
 
Care to tell me again how a student could pay his own full ride at Northeastern with just a summer job?
 
Sounds like we have a major myth as to what it took students to put themselves through school a few decades ago.
 
I seriously urge you not to just make up some dipshit and dismiss me. Please do your own research. I'd be glad if you did. There are just way too many facts and figures thrown about with no justification and when you stop and look into them you'll find that you've been buying a lie and spreading that lie. It doesn't help any of us.

So you tax the farm based on its value... Hmm, so what is that farm really worth?

Farms are taxed as property all the time. It's based on something called an "assessment". You might want to look it up. It's not complicated.

Income is a number, you can tax the number, the number is really not in dispute, you earn what you earn.

You haven't done taxes, have you? Most filings are riddled with inaccuracies due to all the complexities.

This has bad, terrible, horrible idea written all over it.

Gee, thanks Mr. Buffett. All the objections you have raised are addressed pretty clearly in this paper. It's fair, workable, can be revenue neutral, provides the right incentives instead of the wrong ones, and would clear out a lot of complexity and reduce cheating.

Funnily enough that's a recent thing. Shakespeare used "Their"/"They" to mean "His/her" without any problems. Even used it when the gender was known, and a specific person was refered to. See here for a discussion.

Given the lack of situations where it's likely to be misleading to use "The{y/ir}" instead of "His/her", and given it's not making it more difficult to express a concept (unlike, say, recent redefinitions of "literally" or "decimate"), and especially given this was the original definition of the word before some proto-grammar-nazi redefined it, I have no objection to they/their becoming valid for both single and plural references.

I actually follow the latest neurological events and studies.And it is a myth. There is no demarcation among gender in how the brain works.
Ragini Verma is a mathematician. She that study is outside her expertise, and she isn't a neurologist.

The study come down to an interpretation of radiologist pictures. It's a horrible 'study' and , at best, might indicate more studying be required.

http://www.uphs.upenn.edu/news...

Never, ever, link a science study to me you don't understand or haven't read. I will hand you your ass on a Bayesian platter.

" I have yet to really meet any of these people, but they must be absolutely everywhere"
good for you. I have seen it in teachers, I've seen it in religious circles, I've seen it in the media. Frankly. you must just not be paying attention. I didn't use to then my daughter started having issues at school. I went to talk to her teachers, and a couple of them said those specific words. Then I started paying closer attention. Obviously looking for something means you will find it, so I am very careful to take note when it's something that can be interpreted the way I see it, or actually words that are said.

"That somehow men and women only populate the fields of interests and careers they do, because of big meanies imposing sexist and genderist constructs upon them during their formative years?"
Let me be clear on what I am saying. I'll try to use small words, since you are bent on twisting what I say:

There is a myth that girls and boys are hard wired in different and specific ways. We need to stop with that myth becasue it removes options from kids. If a kid is told repeatedly they are able to do certain kinds of work, and they are also getting the confirmation from adults, they are far less likely to take up those fields.

And yes, this happens to boys as well. As a person anecdote(yeah yeah) I took archery and self defense in high school instead of baseball and football. I was told by teachers that self defense and archery are for girls, and boy play football and baseball. I took it anyways, but almost every other boy ended up dropping it and changing .

I see this still happening in PE, and culinary courses at my sons high school. It's pretty blantent,

Actually yes, the FISA court is ultimately responsible to the Supreme Court, just like other courts. There is an intelligence review court that is designated for the appeals process, and the Supreme Court is over that.

Data Sec. & Privacy Law 6:67 (2013)

In 1978, Congress passed the original version of FISA, which for the first time established a procedure by which the executive branch was required to seek authorization to conduct foreign surveillance activities. 4 FISA also created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISA Court of Review). 5 These courts are staffed by federal court judges appointed by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and the decisions of the FISA Court of Review are reviewable by the U.S. Supreme Court.

New knowledge needs time to connect to everything you already know, but once it is acquired you have a better understanding than someone younger with a fresher mind who memorizes with ease. At least I like to believe that. There has to be an upside. And I just found this:

As adults age, their performance on many psychometric tests changes systematically, a finding that is widely taken to reveal that cognitive information-processing capacities decline across adulthood. Contrary to this, we suggest that older adults’ changing performance reflects memory search demands, which escalate as experience grows. A series of simulations show how the performance patterns observed across adulthood emerge naturally in learning models as they acquire knowledge. The simulations correctly identify greater variation in the cognitive performance of older adults, and successfully predict that older adults will show greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences in the properties of test stimuli than younger adults. Our results indicate that older adults’ performance on cognitive tests reflects the predictable consequences of learning on information-processing, and not cognitive decline. We consider the implications of this for our scientific and cultural understanding of aging. -- Ramscar &al: The Myth of Cognitive Decline: Non-Linear Dynamics of Lifelong Learning (PDF) , via languagelog

Next time it takes you double the time to learn something, consider yourself blessed!

Today I read something that made me doubt my decision to go back to university as a math freshman two years ago (I'm in my mid 40s). It's a quote by the inventor of the Pinyin romanization system for Chinese, Professor Zhou Youguang, who turned 108 today, as recorded by Victor Mair:

He tells me that one of his secrets of longevity is to sleep whenever he feels like it and get up and work whenever he feels like doing so. [ languagelog ]

I deeply believe that to be true. And all the more I hate this irrational university system that makes people get up before dawn. In every lecture there's someone dozing off, and this has nothing to do with the lecture being boring or people's partying habits. It's the enormous workload and the stupid time schedules that make people sleep-deprived, and that cannot be good neither for our health nor for our cognitive capacity. Believe me, this affects the kiddies as much as us oldsters. Or even more.

If I were to follow this hunch I'd go back to taking moocs. But that would feel like quitting. Also I don't trust my self-discipline enough, I think I need some external pressure.

Top 3430 science fiction or fantasy books , as voted by USENET.
pseudopodium.com/HellsBibliophiles/top100ftp.txt

Top 1,000,876 books freely available on the web onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu

Sony sued Sony once before. Actually it was their recording label that went after the SCEA. You can read about it here. http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/sony-vs-sony/

Also keep in mind that Sony stripped out the ability to run Yellow Dog Linux from the PS3 via firmware update. It was ultimately to prevent rooting of the box and running pirated content or some such.

The way I see it, Sony is a schizophrenic company that not only shoots its own foot, but that of their customers as well. They can't be trusted.

1) If you're having your backups that close why not just put another drive in your computer and sync to that?
2) Buffalo NAS
3) Apple Airport Time Capsule
4) If you want a cheap hackable solution: Raspberry Pi NAS
5) Any other NAS

Probably the challenging bit is how you will sync to the storage. Here are some options for that:
1) Rsync
2) "Owncloud
3) Unison

You'll probably need to wrap a bit of scripting around it.

Having worked for a Springer journal as a managing editor, I can tell you that they do not incur substantial expense

Mark Lieberman, a linguist and advocate for open access publishing, disagrees:

There are some non-trivial anti-open-access arguments. For example, there are non-zero costs associated with editing and managing a journal, which are on the order of $1,000 per published paper.
...
I've gotten versions of this order-of-magnitude number from several different types of sources, ranging from Matt Cockerill at BioMedCentral to Steven Bird at ACL. There remains a fair amount of labor beyond basic editorial and refereeing activities: copy editing, format hacking, permissions clearance, web site administration, bookkeeping, general secretarial and administrative functions. If you can get all of that done by volunteers -- or if you don't do it at all -- then the costs obviously go down. But note that we're not talking about a lot of money -- for a small journal, it's far below the cost of hiring even one professional employee.

Here's an example where I know some of the details. In 2012, Computational Linguistics published about 24 articles -- at $1000 each, that would be $24,000. In fact, through 2010 the ACL paid MIT Press $45-50k per year for copyediting, proofreading, typesetting, web hosting, marketing, handling of rights & permissions. In 2011, MIT Press introduced a LaTeX-aware copy editor, and reduced their changes to about $28k/year. In addition to these costs, there used to be a part time editorial assistant, typically a grad student, who was paid $15k/year. I believe that in 2011 that position was eliminated in favor of the OJS web-based manuscript management system; but not all journals can count on their editor being able or willing to install and maintain such a software package on a volunteer basis. So the out-of-pocket costs in 2012 were either $28k or $43k, which in either case is greater than 24*$1k. (In fact, CL does not charge author fees, but rather funds the enterprise from membership dues.)

24 articles/year seems like a small number to me, but even a journal that published ten times that number of articles would still end up with costs of $100/article under this system. You don't need to charge a lot per download to pay for that (assuming >1 person wants to read each article), but if you give them away for free you need to find the money somewhere else.

Over at Language Log, Prof. Mark Liberman gives an annoyed critique of this study.

It's a deeply flawed study. Basically, it's cherry-picking with a vengeance. There's a good discussion at Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=7715

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.

Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.

Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.

Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Science journalism from the news desk isn't so hot I would I agree however I beg to differ with your summation - when you look at their output when taken as a whole (non just science stories) I would rate them well above the average. The picture is similar here in Australia with the ABC. Though I would say that in both instances standards have fallen somewhat in the last 20 years they are still head and shoulders above the for-profit newagencies.

Whilst I appreciate the concern many have with a government funded mouthpiece I think that the proof is is the pudding and (in the english speaking world at least) publicly funded broadcasters consistently do a better job than thier for-profit peers because unfortunately when it comes to informing the public the profit motive seems only able to provide a race to the bottom.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

On the other hand, an institution that is regularly criticized by folks like Dr. Ben Goldacre of http://www.badscience.net/ and Prof. Mark Liberman of Language Log for the incredibly poor quality of their science reporting may not be the source you really want to trust on this or any other topic.

- Bad Science's BBC category
- Enhance Breast Size by 80%
- Parrot Telepathy at the BBC
- More Junk Science from the BBC
- It's Always Silly Season in the BBC Science Section

Granted, few general-purpose new sources are particularly good when it comes to their coverage of science, but the BBC does have a bit of a reputation for being above average--a reputation which seems to be rather undeserved, as far as I can tell.

Are you sure it wasn't the government buying them up to donate them to certain Slavic-speaking countries?

Syncing files like this is a mess.

Agreed, for what the OP is trying to accomplish, but by itself, syncing files is not at all a mess if you can and do use Unison here: http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/unison/

I agree that a VCS is the best choice, as suggested above. If, for some reason, you don't want to use that (eg: too many binary files grow you repo too much), unison is a great choice. It uses rsync to sync files, and keeps track of which files where modified on which side.

The obvious "Use Version control/Git" is actually and improvement of your methods.
Here is an actual to the point answer to your question about software. A requirement of real time-sync was mention.

There is Synkron (has a scheduler) , OneSync (has real time sync), and Unison (uses rsync).

All are open source and free. Have fun.