You've posted nearly the exact same comment on every space-related/. story for the last several months. Do you have anything at all to contribute to the debate, or are you here solely to throw insults around?
Difference being that your project won't crash if you accidentally type Drosophila.
When the project involves large amounts of code, it very well might. And there are, at a guess, hundreds of thousands of lines of code scattered across thousands of projects that have "Drosophila" or some abbreviation for it, referring to D. melanogaster specifically, built in.
The split follows a core principle of nomenclature: when you have to fork the project, do it in a way that means the fewest number of species are affected.
And normally that makes sense, but when one particular species that's affected has the unique importance to the field that D. melanogaster has, blind adherence to principle starts to look like a really bad idea.
It will be called "Drosophila" until the last of the old geezers who worked with it in college dies off... that means you.
Heh. I expect to have at least thirty years of working life ahead of me, and many of my colleagues are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. Don't count us geezers out of this battle yet, sonny!
Yes, thanks for that post. The use of the word "bribe" seems calculated to imply that paying kids for their performance in school is somehow sleazy or immoral, which is absurd given that almost everyone pushing this viewpoint expects payment for their performance at work. The idea that good grades should be their own reward sounds fine and noble, but it has no connection to reality, and most kids figure this out pretty fast.
Well, my parents paid me too, with similar results to phantomfive's -- and it didn't have anything to do with my autodidacticism, since I already had that trait. I would (and still do) read obsessively about any subject that interested me. What getting paid for grades taught me was how to study things that didn't interest me, which is, let's face it, most of what any kid has to learn in school.
They key difference is that while for one particular company to hire only people from certain schools may be stupid and discriminatory, it's not a conspiracy between multiple companies -- the latter being pretty much the definition of a trust, and what anti-trust laws are designed to prevent. The former harms only one company, and the employees of that company; the latter harms everyone in the industry.
Drosophila melanogaster is THE species - and the only species - that scientists have simply decided to coalesce around and study in comprehensive detail.
Well, that's not quite true; it's one of a number of designated "model organisms" which are being studied in this way. But it's undeniably one of the most important. And yeah, Microsoft changing the name of Windows is a pretty good analogy.
Well, the people who are most affected in this case are biologists for whom "Drosophila" as shorthand for "Drosophila melanogaster" is as embedded in the vocabulary as "blue" is for "the color of the sky on a clear day" -- it's a really fundamental change in the language, and not one to which we'll react well. And the fact that the word is also embedded in a hell of a lot of data and code makes it a computational problem as well as a human one.
A lot of people are comparing this to Pluto's demotion, but it's really not the same. When astronomers mean "Pluto," they say (I assume) "Pluto" and not "the ninth planet from the Sun," and they pretty much always have.
From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next.
This is one of the most breathtakingly wrong statements I think I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's quite a trick to pull off. Um, congratulations, I guess.
The problem is the sheer volume of literature, data, and code that refers to Drosophila melanogaster specifically -- or just to "Drosophila" where it's understood from context that it's D. melanogaster that's being referred to, since it's one of the designated model organisms. I'm currently working on a fly genomics problem, and when I say "I'm working with Drosophila data," everyone knows what I mean.
This is a change roughly equivalent to the C standards committee deciding that the reserved word "for" will be replaced with "of". Could it be done? Yes. Would it be a good idea? You decide on your own answer to that one.
It's not a matter of belief. Scientific literacy requires an understanding of the evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming that all living things currently on Earth, including humans, evolved from earlier forms. Any person who is not aware of the evidence is scientifically illiterate, and any person who, when confronted with the evidence, refuses to accept it, is irrational. "Belief" doesn't enter into it... unless you're talking about the relgious beliefs which seem to have a remarkable ability to make people act irrationally on this particular matter.
I know what you're getting at with your last sentence. If you want to push the "science is a religion" meme, go ahead, but if you're going to do that, you really should get rid of the fruits of rational scientific thinking... such as your computer, and just pray really hard that your posts will appear on Slashdot. Be sure to let us know how that works out for you.
The problem is that any question on any survey could conceivably contradict someone's religious beliefs. If a survey designed to measure the scientific literacy of the general public find that large numbers of people choose religious beliefs over factual knowledge, that is a valuable datum indicating that scientific illiteracy is alarmingly high.
It's like asking in a classics survey whether "Prometheus shaped man out of mud to be brought to life by Athena". No, I would have to answer I don't believe that. Does that mean I am not literate in Greek mythology?
False analogy. Being literate in mythology does not require that one consider the myths under study to be evidence about the way the world works -- in fact, the very word "mythology" rather implies the opposite.
queue is 1:a braid of hair usually word hanging at the back of the head. 2:a waiting line especially of persons or vehicles. 3 A:a sequence of messages or jobs held in temporary storage awaiting transmission or processing. B: a data structure that consists of a list of records such that records are added at one end removed from the other. cue is 1:half a farthing. 2:the spelled form of the letter q.
All of which is true, and none of which has to do with the correct use of the word "cue." Just out of curiosity, which of the definitions you quote do you think makes "queue" correct in this situation?
So you look forward to the Barbarians destroying civilization and a fall in the to dark ages that lasts for centuries? Because if you look at history that is what happens when the great empires fell in the past.
That's what happened when the Roman empire fell, and it's a tribute to Rome's importance and hold over our imaginations that it is still the first example that comes to everyone's mind when we talk about the rise and fall of empires.
It's not what happened when the Spanish empire fell, or the French, or the British -- because there was always another empire-in-waiting to pick up the reins of power. Guess which are the fourth and fifth countries on that list?
Personally, no, I'm not looking forward to it. But when you see your country repeating the exact same mistakes that brought down empires of the past, it's hard not to expect the same result.
"Far-called, our navies melt away; on dune and headland sinks the fire..."
One thing I will agree with her on (if true) is that if the kid was stupid enough to leave his account logged in on her computer then he got what he deserved.
If you leave your door unlocked when you go to work, you don't deserve to get burglarized, and anyone who enters your house and takes your stuff is still guilty of a crime.
Who has gone to prison (in the US) for not securing data, pre the standards being discussed in the article?
Before the standards were in place? Nobody, of course. Which is why the standards were put in place!
If you think the standards are unrealistic, or don't achieve their objectives, or could be implemented better... fine, those are all valid points. But TFA doesn't address that at all. The point of HIPAA, PCI-DSS et al. is to ensure that corporations which deal with sensitive personal data take appropriate care with that data. Apparently some people in the exceutive suite are whining that they have to spend too much money protecting other people's information, because even though having the data is absolutely necessary to running their business, protecting it takes too much time and money. Well, cry me a river.
What you say is true, but has nothing to do with what's being discussed in TFA. Read it again -- they're very cleverly conflating the "compliance vs. actual security" issue, which is a real and valid concern, with the "stupid Feds are making us spend money on protecting worthless crap like individual credit and medical records instead of the IP that makes us money!" whine, which should be dismissed immediately by any rational person.
An important correction: if data which falls under regulation is not kept according to the regulation people go to prison. If following the regulation decreases the security of the data, no problem.
Fair enough, and if you can show that following HIPAA regulations makes personal medical data less secure, go for it. But the article doesn't address this point at all. They're talking solely about the relative value of corporate IP vs. data such as medical and credit information which is covered by regulation, and making the (absurd, to most people with a brain) argument that because the first is more valuable to the corporation than the second, corporations should spend their security dollars accordingly. In the absence of regulation, of course, this is exactly what would happen; the laws which specify harsh penalties for non-compliance are an entirely appropriate correction to this tendency.
We the People have decided that certain types of compliance are relevant to certain businesses. If you don't like it, lobby to change the laws. You probably won't have a whole lot of luck convincing people that protecting personal medical data is in the same class as some absurd requirement like "wear a clown suit to work," though.
There are two different objectives here, with (at least) two different processes. The first of these objectives is securing corporate assets. The second is securing sensitive individual information about people with whom the corporation does business. Security processes should ideally serve both objectives, but if that's impossible, then one process (or set of processes) has to be given prioroty over the other. As a customer of, say, Amex or Cigna, I care a whole hell of a lot more about the second objective than the first, so it doesn't displease me at all that the processes related to that objective are well-funded.
If a company's IP is insecure, it may, possibly, lose some money. If data which falls under regulation is insecure, people go to prison. This is exactly as it should be, and so the "imbalance" is entirely appropriate.
I suppose the folks at Forrester Research think that IP protection is more important than protecting, say, personal medical information. Fortunately, most people in the world are sane enough to disagree.
See my reply to the previous answer to my comment; the workarounds you describe are effective, but they shouldn't be necessary. One of the main things that distinguishes a good language from a bad one, IMNSGDHO, is that the former doesn't make you feel like you're fighting the language to get things done.
Ah, pay me no attention, youngdev -- I'm just a grumpy old man, one of the get-off-my-lawn crowd that is supposedly the only group of people using Java these days.;)
And no, I don't use Notepad for development. Or for anything. Dear God. I may be old (by/. standards, anyhow) but I'm not senile.
Namespaces are useful, and custom namespaces cut down on a lot of the clutter in Java, but they shouldn't be necessary for basic functionality. The way I see it (YMMV, of course) K&R C provides pretty much the functionality that any language should have as part of the core language spec; if I can do something in n characters in C but it takes me 10n characters to do it in some newer and supposedly better language, I'm hard-pressed to consider that an improvement.
what if she used her private email to send email with sensitive company info to a competitor? They have the right to monitor all data sent over their networks and any computer they own.
Any employee who is under suspicion for doing that kind of thing shouldn't have access to sensitive data at all -- or should be an ex-employee if there's proof. And the kind of paranoid workplace where it's assumed that everyone is stealing data is not a place you want to work.
Slashdot Mirror
You've posted nearly the exact same comment on every space-related /. story for the last several months. Do you have anything at all to contribute to the debate, or are you here solely to throw insults around?
First off, the media was all over Bush for most of the 8 years.
Dear God, you really believe that, don't you?
Difference being that your project won't crash if you accidentally type Drosophila.
When the project involves large amounts of code, it very well might. And there are, at a guess, hundreds of thousands of lines of code scattered across thousands of projects that have "Drosophila" or some abbreviation for it, referring to D. melanogaster specifically, built in.
The split follows a core principle of nomenclature: when you have to fork the project, do it in a way that means the fewest number of species are affected.
And normally that makes sense, but when one particular species that's affected has the unique importance to the field that D. melanogaster has, blind adherence to principle starts to look like a really bad idea.
It will be called "Drosophila" until the last of the old geezers who worked with it in college dies off ... that means you.
Heh. I expect to have at least thirty years of working life ahead of me, and many of my colleagues are ten or fifteen years younger than I am. Don't count us geezers out of this battle yet, sonny!
Yes, thanks for that post. The use of the word "bribe" seems calculated to imply that paying kids for their performance in school is somehow sleazy or immoral, which is absurd given that almost everyone pushing this viewpoint expects payment for their performance at work. The idea that good grades should be their own reward sounds fine and noble, but it has no connection to reality, and most kids figure this out pretty fast.
Well, my parents paid me too, with similar results to phantomfive's -- and it didn't have anything to do with my autodidacticism, since I already had that trait. I would (and still do) read obsessively about any subject that interested me. What getting paid for grades taught me was how to study things that didn't interest me, which is, let's face it, most of what any kid has to learn in school.
They key difference is that while for one particular company to hire only people from certain schools may be stupid and discriminatory, it's not a conspiracy between multiple companies -- the latter being pretty much the definition of a trust, and what anti-trust laws are designed to prevent. The former harms only one company, and the employees of that company; the latter harms everyone in the industry.
Drosophila melanogaster is THE species - and the only species - that scientists have simply decided to coalesce around and study in comprehensive detail.
Well, that's not quite true; it's one of a number of designated "model organisms" which are being studied in this way. But it's undeniably one of the most important. And yeah, Microsoft changing the name of Windows is a pretty good analogy.
I see no possible way this can end well.
Well, the people who are most affected in this case are biologists for whom "Drosophila" as shorthand for "Drosophila melanogaster" is as embedded in the vocabulary as "blue" is for "the color of the sky on a clear day" -- it's a really fundamental change in the language, and not one to which we'll react well. And the fact that the word is also embedded in a hell of a lot of data and code makes it a computational problem as well as a human one.
A lot of people are comparing this to Pluto's demotion, but it's really not the same. When astronomers mean "Pluto," they say (I assume) "Pluto" and not "the ninth planet from the Sun," and they pretty much always have.
From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next.
This is one of the most breathtakingly wrong statements I think I've ever read on Slashdot. And that's quite a trick to pull off. Um, congratulations, I guess.
The problem is the sheer volume of literature, data, and code that refers to Drosophila melanogaster specifically -- or just to "Drosophila" where it's understood from context that it's D. melanogaster that's being referred to, since it's one of the designated model organisms. I'm currently working on a fly genomics problem, and when I say "I'm working with Drosophila data," everyone knows what I mean.
This is a change roughly equivalent to the C standards committee deciding that the reserved word "for" will be replaced with "of". Could it be done? Yes. Would it be a good idea? You decide on your own answer to that one.
It's not a matter of belief. Scientific literacy requires an understanding of the evidence, and the evidence is overwhelming that all living things currently on Earth, including humans, evolved from earlier forms. Any person who is not aware of the evidence is scientifically illiterate, and any person who, when confronted with the evidence, refuses to accept it, is irrational. "Belief" doesn't enter into it ... unless you're talking about the relgious beliefs which seem to have a remarkable ability to make people act irrationally on this particular matter.
I know what you're getting at with your last sentence. If you want to push the "science is a religion" meme, go ahead, but if you're going to do that, you really should get rid of the fruits of rational scientific thinking ... such as your computer, and just pray really hard that your posts will appear on Slashdot. Be sure to let us know how that works out for you.
The problem is that any question on any survey could conceivably contradict someone's religious beliefs. If a survey designed to measure the scientific literacy of the general public find that large numbers of people choose religious beliefs over factual knowledge, that is a valuable datum indicating that scientific illiteracy is alarmingly high.
It's like asking in a classics survey whether "Prometheus shaped man out of mud to be brought to life by Athena". No, I would have to answer I don't believe that. Does that mean I am not literate in Greek mythology?
False analogy. Being literate in mythology does not require that one consider the myths under study to be evidence about the way the world works -- in fact, the very word "mythology" rather implies the opposite.
queue is 1:a braid of hair usually word hanging at the back of the head. 2:a waiting line especially of persons or vehicles. 3 A :a sequence of messages or jobs held in temporary storage awaiting transmission or processing. B: a data structure that consists of a list of records such that records are added at one end removed from the other. cue is 1:half a farthing. 2:the spelled form of the letter q.
All of which is true, and none of which has to do with the correct use of the word "cue." Just out of curiosity, which of the definitions you quote do you think makes "queue" correct in this situation?
So you look forward to the Barbarians destroying civilization and a fall in the to dark ages that lasts for centuries?
Because if you look at history that is what happens when the great empires fell in the past.
That's what happened when the Roman empire fell, and it's a tribute to Rome's importance and hold over our imaginations that it is still the first example that comes to everyone's mind when we talk about the rise and fall of empires.
It's not what happened when the Spanish empire fell, or the French, or the British -- because there was always another empire-in-waiting to pick up the reins of power. Guess which are the fourth and fifth countries on that list?
Personally, no, I'm not looking forward to it. But when you see your country repeating the exact same mistakes that brought down empires of the past, it's hard not to expect the same result.
"Far-called, our navies melt away; on dune and headland sinks the fire ..."
You evaluate them against the "one-mississippi, two-mississippi" method, which as everyone knows is the gold standard for counting seconds.
One thing I will agree with her on (if true) is that if the kid was stupid enough to leave his account logged in on her computer then he got what he deserved.
If you leave your door unlocked when you go to work, you don't deserve to get burglarized, and anyone who enters your house and takes your stuff is still guilty of a crime.
Who has gone to prison (in the US) for not securing data, pre the standards being discussed in the article?
Before the standards were in place? Nobody, of course. Which is why the standards were put in place!
If you think the standards are unrealistic, or don't achieve their objectives, or could be implemented better ... fine, those are all valid points. But TFA doesn't address that at all. The point of HIPAA, PCI-DSS et al. is to ensure that corporations which deal with sensitive personal data take appropriate care with that data. Apparently some people in the exceutive suite are whining that they have to spend too much money protecting other people's information, because even though having the data is absolutely necessary to running their business, protecting it takes too much time and money. Well, cry me a river.
What you say is true, but has nothing to do with what's being discussed in TFA. Read it again -- they're very cleverly conflating the "compliance vs. actual security" issue, which is a real and valid concern, with the "stupid Feds are making us spend money on protecting worthless crap like individual credit and medical records instead of the IP that makes us money!" whine, which should be dismissed immediately by any rational person.
An important correction: if data which falls under regulation is not kept according to the regulation people go to prison. If following the regulation decreases the security of the data, no problem.
Fair enough, and if you can show that following HIPAA regulations makes personal medical data less secure, go for it. But the article doesn't address this point at all. They're talking solely about the relative value of corporate IP vs. data such as medical and credit information which is covered by regulation, and making the (absurd, to most people with a brain) argument that because the first is more valuable to the corporation than the second, corporations should spend their security dollars accordingly. In the absence of regulation, of course, this is exactly what would happen; the laws which specify harsh penalties for non-compliance are an entirely appropriate correction to this tendency.
We the People have decided that certain types of compliance are relevant to certain businesses. If you don't like it, lobby to change the laws. You probably won't have a whole lot of luck convincing people that protecting personal medical data is in the same class as some absurd requirement like "wear a clown suit to work," though.
There are two different objectives here, with (at least) two different processes. The first of these objectives is securing corporate assets. The second is securing sensitive individual information about people with whom the corporation does business. Security processes should ideally serve both objectives, but if that's impossible, then one process (or set of processes) has to be given prioroty over the other. As a customer of, say, Amex or Cigna, I care a whole hell of a lot more about the second objective than the first, so it doesn't displease me at all that the processes related to that objective are well-funded.
If a company's IP is insecure, it may, possibly, lose some money. If data which falls under regulation is insecure, people go to prison. This is exactly as it should be, and so the "imbalance" is entirely appropriate.
I suppose the folks at Forrester Research think that IP protection is more important than protecting, say, personal medical information. Fortunately, most people in the world are sane enough to disagree.
See my reply to the previous answer to my comment; the workarounds you describe are effective, but they shouldn't be necessary. One of the main things that distinguishes a good language from a bad one, IMNSGDHO, is that the former doesn't make you feel like you're fighting the language to get things done.
Ah, pay me no attention, youngdev -- I'm just a grumpy old man, one of the get-off-my-lawn crowd that is supposedly the only group of people using Java these days. ;)
And no, I don't use Notepad for development. Or for anything. Dear God. I may be old (by /. standards, anyhow) but I'm not senile.
Namespaces are useful, and custom namespaces cut down on a lot of the clutter in Java, but they shouldn't be necessary for basic functionality. The way I see it (YMMV, of course) K&R C provides pretty much the functionality that any language should have as part of the core language spec; if I can do something in n characters in C but it takes me 10n characters to do it in some newer and supposedly better language, I'm hard-pressed to consider that an improvement.
what if she used her private email to send email with sensitive company info to a competitor? They have the right to monitor all data sent over their networks and any computer they own.
Any employee who is under suspicion for doing that kind of thing shouldn't have access to sensitive data at all -- or should be an ex-employee if there's proof. And the kind of paranoid workplace where it's assumed that everyone is stealing data is not a place you want to work.