Yes, but what parts of the mind are different by culture, and which are different by genetics, and which are completely the same for all humans? This is the crucial "nature vs. nurture" debate, and nature's taking another blow.
Someone is always the last to finish a race. That doesn't mean they're inherently bad runners.
Despite its cultural biases, America also has several advantages over other countries for use in studies. The biggest advantage is that American test subjects are close to American researchers. TFA calls for researchers to just recognize this bias, and account for it in later research.
The US is completely fractured... To try to come to conclusions with that - and I haven't read the article, but I'll wager it's a very small sample size - is ludicrous.
You're simultaneously completely missing the point of TFA, and yet hitting it dead on. According to TFA, not only aren't Americans uniformly distributed, but the whole world isn't, in ways that haven't been considered before. Certain assumptions, like having a perception based on interpreting straight lines in a 3D context, turn out to only be valid among a Western population who, for example, grew up with straight walls. The researchers in TFA aren't saying that Americans are particularly bad study subjects, but rather that even basic perceptions long thought to be universal are really influenced by culture.
The article isn't actually about the Western world, or how Americans are "bad study subjects". Rather, the research TFA talks about is indications that Western assumptions about cognition are based on Western culture, rather than biological design*. In essence, the researchers acknowledge that some of the basic fundamental ideas of perception may not be so fundamental.
It really has nothing to do with Americans being inherently bad study subjects. Rather, it accuses the field of anthropology of focusing too heavily on a single (though changing) culture throughout its history. In other words, sampling bias exists.
* "Design" In the "structure and function" sense, not the "somebody intentionally built this" sense.
A conclusion I apparently forgot to type: There are reasons to consider NoSQL solutions, and even some circumstances in which to actually use them. They are a tool, just as RDBMSs are, and like all tools should be used only when and where appropriate.
The 1980s are over. You can cut the mullet, turn down the Michael Jackson album, and ease up on formal verification of your applications.
While a program's adherence to rules is indeed important, another factor that's important in the reality of modern development is that we're often working in a system whose rules are not yet defined. A core tenet of RDBMS development is that the model is sacrosanct. You don't make ad-hoc tables, you don't duplicate data for ease, and you don't change primary keys a few years into operation. While relations are indeed the mathematically sound design, they do not meet reality very well. One aspect, as you mentioned, is the inability to compute relations at the scales some applications demand. Another aspect is the inability to change as quickly as managers change the project's specifications.
This is the other sound reason to consider a NoSQL solution: if the application's computation requirements are expected to change drastically in unexpected ways as the project matures. This is not to say that the project should begin without a good amount of planning, but rather that a particular model, while suitable early on, might make later questions far more difficult to solve. If this is likely to happen, such as with a new technique for solving several different problems, then a NoSQL store (with its lax design requirements) may make the overall development process more efficient than using a traditional RDBMS, and the compromise on integrity may very well be within the tolerances of the application.
This is not the sort of consideration a computer scientist would dare. It trades the purity of math for a bit of human ease. This is the realm of software engineers.
And no, you don't have to convince the government, you have to convince the agent you are facing.
The agent is an agent of the government, and has superiors. Their decisions can be overridden.
The agents stated (according to the report) "It's just paperwork, it doesn't matter". Yet when he fails to sign it when expected, suddenly it DOES matter? You can't have it both ways.
The exact value on the paperwork doesn't matter, but the paperwork being filled out and signed does matter.
Once the paperwork is signed, and taken away, there is nobody to attest to the protest that it is incorrect.
The person who can attest to the protest is Mr. Arrington himself. If he signs the paper with a slightly-off value, and is questioned about it later, he can simply explain that the value was already filled in, and his instructions were that the precision wasn't important. Surely there is some other paperwork attesting to the boat's value that can be referred to, and can be produced later. With an acknowledgement of the error and an attempt to correct it, the questioning agent has no reason to suspect further discrepancies.
You say "it is only needed for statistical purposes", yet what are the penalties for it being incorrect?... confiscation? Tax evasion investigation/charges?
Actually being charged with anything or having anything permanently confiscated would require a judgement of criminal intent, and that's again where attitude is influential. Using fighting tactics looking for an easy way to "win" is a pretty good indicator that you have something else you're hiding... that's when you'll get more investigations.
Then there must be a definition for how exact "exact" must be, and how big a difference is considered "not exact".
Laws are not computer programs. Laws describe the standards for what a society normally considers fair, but they can't describe the abnormal circumstances that sometimes apply. That's what the judicial branch is for.
If the law says that the customs form must be filled out, then it is up to the individual to fulfill that law to a degree which they think is fair. If the DHS disagrees, the law has procedures to be followed to resolve the dispute. If someone thinks their particular case is abnormal enough that the law shouldn't apply (or should apply differently), they can sue.
That's how every other law works. If a police officer sees someone speeding, they aren't required to enforce the speed limit - they can use judgement to determine whether the speed is a risk to society. If a contract is agreed upon by two parties, and both decide to ignore it, then there is no legal problem. Laws should not prescribe behavior, but rather describe what behavior the society expects.
It's a customs declaration, same as everybody fills out when entering the country with something valuable. You tell the government you have it and that you bought it, and you state its approximate value in USD. The government doesn't want to know its value in florins, or rubles, or Canadian dollars. The value does not have to be exact, as it's only needed for statistical purposes. Even if knowingly misrepresented, I have yet to meet a government agency that is unwilling to correct paperwork after the fact.
I expect that much everybody the DHS agent deals with understands this, and doesn't care enough to make a big deal of it. When some guy starts insisting that the government should rebuild its procedures to compute value using a foreign currency, the agent smiled cheerfully, explained that the boat can't be released without the proper paperwork, and likely tried to restrain the laughter at the guy who thinks the world should bend to his will.
Well, Mr. Arrington, congratulations. Your high moral standards and obsession with accurate reporting have inconvenienced your government and cost you a few weeks' time with your precious new boat while new papers are filed. At least you can post your story online and get some sympathy from faceless strangers.
Anecdotally, I just received notice from the IRS that I've just finished an audit for 2010. I had rounded a few numbers on my 1040, and they didn't get third-party papers corroborating a deduction, and they thought I was worthy of closer scrutiny. Fixing it took a few hours on the phone, a trip to my accountant, and a signed letter attesting that I really did do what I said I did. Apparently I'll soon be getting a second refund check.
The government is not out to get you, the hapless individual. The government is out to get all the other assholes who screw over the system, and you just happen to have aroused suspicion. Once you're under suspicion, you have two options. You can be offended and return the offense, approaching every interaction as though you were going to battle, or you can convince the government that you're not the criminal they're looking for, but merely someone who deviated a bit too far from their expectations. The latter's really not that hard, and can help to stretch the bounds of their expectations.
Exactly this. I'm a fan of Doctor Grumpy, who's made his opinions pretty clear. There's always some doctor willing to testify that some test was obviously needed to find some rare condition with no visible symptoms. Those "unnecessary" tests are indeed necessary - not for the patient's safety, but for the doctor's.
This isn't a particularly big deal. The "IP address isn't a person" argument has been brought up in cases before, but it's just never mattered. In previous cases I've read about, there was other evidence, such as the infringing material being found on the defendant's computer, or usernames related to the person's real name.
Similarly, a gun registration doesn't mean the owner's automatically responsible for any crimes, but it does certainly put the owner under suspicion, and may be probable cause for a more thorough search.
Welcome to Slashdot, where all technology is considered final with the first proof-of-concept demo. All further refinements to cooling, structure, manufacturing, efficiency, and/or any other limitation of the prototype system are completely obvious and not worthy of any praise.
I see no reason it couldn't print without a support, since the pen itself must supply the force to extrude the plastic. Actually drawing something meaningful would be far more difficult, since you'd be fighting gravity the whole time. Take one up to a convenient space station, and that slight inertia of the already-extruded mass might just be enough to allow further detail to be printed.
That link is exactly what I came to post. It's clearly overkill, but overkill is the perfect tool to show someone that they are hopelessly outclassed and they should seriously reconsider their actions.
My understanding is that the rules for model aircraft would apply, which pretty much make the model aircraft operator liable for a large portion of the damage.
Disclaimer: I got a little involved in the model aircraft community for a while, but never deep enough to personally deal with liability. Input from those more knowledgeable is appreciated.
Look, I know you're trying to be insightful and all, but this is Slashdot. We don't let silly facts get in the way of our unbridled hatred of all things Gub'mint!
It's a patent on storing files. Sure, it has some improvements that nobody's really used before that solve particular problems in a particular field, but I totally saw something similar sketched on the back of an envelope at my cousin's house in 1957, so this is blatantly obvious. I don't need to read the silly lawyer-speak claims to see that this patent is obviously just for storing files on a computer, in a distributed way. Heck, at my office building we have several rooms of filing cabinets, with several drawers each. If that isn't distributed, I don't know what is!
</PainfullyTrueSarcasm>
More seriously, yep. Knowing a thing or two about how Google stores data, this looks like a means to keep their GFS size needs under control. As each chunk is modified (but normally such chunks aren't able to be deleted), it can be given a whole new path, allowing a separate process to simply delete blocks that haven't been modified in a long time.
Splatting TIFF images is a complicated matter. They're more than just mundane dumps of pixel data. In addition to just storing the image data itself, they can hold many kinds of metadata, be compressed in many ways, and all encoded in either big-endian or little-endian byte order. Any of those features might trigger vulnerable code in a parser, which might allow a buffer overflow or other vulnerability. This is similar to problems with every other complex format out there, (in)famously including JPEG and TrueType, to name a few.
From reading TFA, it looks like the server itself is vulnerable because it processes the TIFF fully before it's re-encoded to be sent to the mobile devices. There are twovulnerabilities, both of which are buffer overflows.
Write a clear description of the problem, make an effort to understand the codebase you're complaining about, and figure out the right way to approach the problem that would fix the bug. Write it in plain English, then ask that someone implement it is proper well-written C/C++. That takes care of half of the debugging work, and shows that you're actually interested in seeing the problem resolved, rather than just reporting that odd thing you saw that one time.
My point is that if you make it easier to fix the bugs, they're more likely to be fixed. Bitching about having so many bugs doesn't help. To revisit the analogy to the tragedy of the commons, a park that's routinely plagued with litter can be made cleaner by donating time to clean it, or perhaps donating the money to buy several trash cans (and the crew to empty them)... but writing to a newspaper about how ugly the park is doesn't actually help solve the problem.
Business is still the big market. No manager wants to risk their big presentation on having not-quite-perfect compatibility, so everyone making really important documents wants Microsoft Office. That means everyone else in the company needs Microsoft Office too, so they're all compatible and nobody's at risk of being "the guy who broke it".
As long as businesses send documents, they'll want their precious real-deal software to work on them. That lock-in is Microsoft's cash cow. Sure, the minor differences like a slightly-different word wrap are trivial to casual users, but enterprise users are picky about such things... and Microsoft will happily continue to tweak features to keep LibreOffice one step behind.
Once everyone needs Office, then everyone needs Windows, too. If they need a tablet, they need Surface. Once they're on Windows, they need Windows Server to manage everything, and that means they need Exchange and Lync for collaboration. Sure, there's alternatives, but the Microsoft reps will be quick to point out how much more difficult the integration is. With much-vaunted "compatibility" as the bait, Office is just one part of Microsoft's vicious hook.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but this is not a question of geography, but rather one of politics...
God bless the United Earth of America!
Any consoles? Including Pong?
Yes, but what parts of the mind are different by culture, and which are different by genetics, and which are completely the same for all humans? This is the crucial "nature vs. nurture" debate, and nature's taking another blow.
Someone is always the last to finish a race. That doesn't mean they're inherently bad runners.
Despite its cultural biases, America also has several advantages over other countries for use in studies. The biggest advantage is that American test subjects are close to American researchers. TFA calls for researchers to just recognize this bias, and account for it in later research.
The US is completely fractured ... To try to come to conclusions with that - and I haven't read the article, but I'll wager it's a very small sample size - is ludicrous.
You're simultaneously completely missing the point of TFA, and yet hitting it dead on. According to TFA, not only aren't Americans uniformly distributed, but the whole world isn't, in ways that haven't been considered before. Certain assumptions, like having a perception based on interpreting straight lines in a 3D context, turn out to only be valid among a Western population who, for example, grew up with straight walls. The researchers in TFA aren't saying that Americans are particularly bad study subjects, but rather that even basic perceptions long thought to be universal are really influenced by culture.
The article isn't actually about the Western world, or how Americans are "bad study subjects". Rather, the research TFA talks about is indications that Western assumptions about cognition are based on Western culture, rather than biological design*. In essence, the researchers acknowledge that some of the basic fundamental ideas of perception may not be so fundamental.
It really has nothing to do with Americans being inherently bad study subjects. Rather, it accuses the field of anthropology of focusing too heavily on a single (though changing) culture throughout its history. In other words, sampling bias exists.
* "Design" In the "structure and function" sense, not the "somebody intentionally built this" sense.
...but it's so much more fun to rant about the Big Bad Government doing everything wrong, and how one simple change can fix everything...
A conclusion I apparently forgot to type: There are reasons to consider NoSQL solutions, and even some circumstances in which to actually use them. They are a tool, just as RDBMSs are, and like all tools should be used only when and where appropriate.
The 1980s are over. You can cut the mullet, turn down the Michael Jackson album, and ease up on formal verification of your applications.
While a program's adherence to rules is indeed important, another factor that's important in the reality of modern development is that we're often working in a system whose rules are not yet defined. A core tenet of RDBMS development is that the model is sacrosanct. You don't make ad-hoc tables, you don't duplicate data for ease, and you don't change primary keys a few years into operation. While relations are indeed the mathematically sound design, they do not meet reality very well. One aspect, as you mentioned, is the inability to compute relations at the scales some applications demand. Another aspect is the inability to change as quickly as managers change the project's specifications.
This is the other sound reason to consider a NoSQL solution: if the application's computation requirements are expected to change drastically in unexpected ways as the project matures. This is not to say that the project should begin without a good amount of planning, but rather that a particular model, while suitable early on, might make later questions far more difficult to solve. If this is likely to happen, such as with a new technique for solving several different problems, then a NoSQL store (with its lax design requirements) may make the overall development process more efficient than using a traditional RDBMS, and the compromise on integrity may very well be within the tolerances of the application.
This is not the sort of consideration a computer scientist would dare. It trades the purity of math for a bit of human ease. This is the realm of software engineers.
All hail Kurt Gödel!
And no, you don't have to convince the government, you have to convince the agent you are facing.
The agent is an agent of the government, and has superiors. Their decisions can be overridden.
The agents stated (according to the report) "It's just paperwork, it doesn't matter". Yet when he fails to sign it when expected, suddenly it DOES matter? You can't have it both ways.
The exact value on the paperwork doesn't matter, but the paperwork being filled out and signed does matter.
Once the paperwork is signed, and taken away, there is nobody to attest to the protest that it is incorrect.
The person who can attest to the protest is Mr. Arrington himself. If he signs the paper with a slightly-off value, and is questioned about it later, he can simply explain that the value was already filled in, and his instructions were that the precision wasn't important. Surely there is some other paperwork attesting to the boat's value that can be referred to, and can be produced later. With an acknowledgement of the error and an attempt to correct it, the questioning agent has no reason to suspect further discrepancies.
You say "it is only needed for statistical purposes", yet what are the penalties for it being incorrect? ... confiscation? Tax evasion investigation/charges?
Actually being charged with anything or having anything permanently confiscated would require a judgement of criminal intent, and that's again where attitude is influential. Using fighting tactics looking for an easy way to "win" is a pretty good indicator that you have something else you're hiding... that's when you'll get more investigations.
...then why are you working with only one agent, if they're not working toward the truth?
Then there must be a definition for how exact "exact" must be, and how big a difference is considered "not exact".
Laws are not computer programs. Laws describe the standards for what a society normally considers fair, but they can't describe the abnormal circumstances that sometimes apply. That's what the judicial branch is for.
If the law says that the customs form must be filled out, then it is up to the individual to fulfill that law to a degree which they think is fair. If the DHS disagrees, the law has procedures to be followed to resolve the dispute. If someone thinks their particular case is abnormal enough that the law shouldn't apply (or should apply differently), they can sue.
That's how every other law works. If a police officer sees someone speeding, they aren't required to enforce the speed limit - they can use judgement to determine whether the speed is a risk to society. If a contract is agreed upon by two parties, and both decide to ignore it, then there is no legal problem. Laws should not prescribe behavior, but rather describe what behavior the society expects.
It's a customs declaration, same as everybody fills out when entering the country with something valuable. You tell the government you have it and that you bought it, and you state its approximate value in USD. The government doesn't want to know its value in florins, or rubles, or Canadian dollars. The value does not have to be exact, as it's only needed for statistical purposes. Even if knowingly misrepresented, I have yet to meet a government agency that is unwilling to correct paperwork after the fact.
I expect that much everybody the DHS agent deals with understands this, and doesn't care enough to make a big deal of it. When some guy starts insisting that the government should rebuild its procedures to compute value using a foreign currency, the agent smiled cheerfully, explained that the boat can't be released without the proper paperwork, and likely tried to restrain the laughter at the guy who thinks the world should bend to his will.
Well, Mr. Arrington, congratulations. Your high moral standards and obsession with accurate reporting have inconvenienced your government and cost you a few weeks' time with your precious new boat while new papers are filed. At least you can post your story online and get some sympathy from faceless strangers.
Anecdotally, I just received notice from the IRS that I've just finished an audit for 2010. I had rounded a few numbers on my 1040, and they didn't get third-party papers corroborating a deduction, and they thought I was worthy of closer scrutiny. Fixing it took a few hours on the phone, a trip to my accountant, and a signed letter attesting that I really did do what I said I did. Apparently I'll soon be getting a second refund check.
The government is not out to get you, the hapless individual. The government is out to get all the other assholes who screw over the system, and you just happen to have aroused suspicion. Once you're under suspicion, you have two options. You can be offended and return the offense, approaching every interaction as though you were going to battle, or you can convince the government that you're not the criminal they're looking for, but merely someone who deviated a bit too far from their expectations. The latter's really not that hard, and can help to stretch the bounds of their expectations.
#2's not quite right. Really, robots are the future of almost everything.
Exactly this. I'm a fan of Doctor Grumpy, who's made his opinions pretty clear. There's always some doctor willing to testify that some test was obviously needed to find some rare condition with no visible symptoms. Those "unnecessary" tests are indeed necessary - not for the patient's safety, but for the doctor's.
This isn't a particularly big deal. The "IP address isn't a person" argument has been brought up in cases before, but it's just never mattered. In previous cases I've read about, there was other evidence, such as the infringing material being found on the defendant's computer, or usernames related to the person's real name.
Similarly, a gun registration doesn't mean the owner's automatically responsible for any crimes, but it does certainly put the owner under suspicion, and may be probable cause for a more thorough search.
Welcome to Slashdot, where all technology is considered final with the first proof-of-concept demo. All further refinements to cooling, structure, manufacturing, efficiency, and/or any other limitation of the prototype system are completely obvious and not worthy of any praise.
I see no reason it couldn't print without a support, since the pen itself must supply the force to extrude the plastic. Actually drawing something meaningful would be far more difficult, since you'd be fighting gravity the whole time. Take one up to a convenient space station, and that slight inertia of the already-extruded mass might just be enough to allow further detail to be printed.
You can do some neat stuff with hot glue. ABS, being a bit stronger of course, would support some unique work of its own.
That link is exactly what I came to post. It's clearly overkill, but overkill is the perfect tool to show someone that they are hopelessly outclassed and they should seriously reconsider their actions.
My understanding is that the rules for model aircraft would apply, which pretty much make the model aircraft operator liable for a large portion of the damage.
Disclaimer: I got a little involved in the model aircraft community for a while, but never deep enough to personally deal with liability. Input from those more knowledgeable is appreciated.
Look, I know you're trying to be insightful and all, but this is Slashdot. We don't let silly facts get in the way of our unbridled hatred of all things Gub'mint!
It's a patent on storing files. Sure, it has some improvements that nobody's really used before that solve particular problems in a particular field, but I totally saw something similar sketched on the back of an envelope at my cousin's house in 1957, so this is blatantly obvious. I don't need to read the silly lawyer-speak claims to see that this patent is obviously just for storing files on a computer, in a distributed way. Heck, at my office building we have several rooms of filing cabinets, with several drawers each. If that isn't distributed, I don't know what is!
</PainfullyTrueSarcasm>
More seriously, yep. Knowing a thing or two about how Google stores data, this looks like a means to keep their GFS size needs under control. As each chunk is modified (but normally such chunks aren't able to be deleted), it can be given a whole new path, allowing a separate process to simply delete blocks that haven't been modified in a long time.
Splatting TIFF images is a complicated matter. They're more than just mundane dumps of pixel data. In addition to just storing the image data itself, they can hold many kinds of metadata, be compressed in many ways, and all encoded in either big-endian or little-endian byte order. Any of those features might trigger vulnerable code in a parser, which might allow a buffer overflow or other vulnerability. This is similar to problems with every other complex format out there, (in)famously including JPEG and TrueType, to name a few.
From reading TFA, it looks like the server itself is vulnerable because it processes the TIFF fully before it's re-encoded to be sent to the mobile devices. There are two vulnerabilities, both of which are buffer overflows.
...so don't write good C/C++.
Write a clear description of the problem, make an effort to understand the codebase you're complaining about, and figure out the right way to approach the problem that would fix the bug. Write it in plain English, then ask that someone implement it is proper well-written C/C++. That takes care of half of the debugging work, and shows that you're actually interested in seeing the problem resolved, rather than just reporting that odd thing you saw that one time.
My point is that if you make it easier to fix the bugs, they're more likely to be fixed. Bitching about having so many bugs doesn't help. To revisit the analogy to the tragedy of the commons, a park that's routinely plagued with litter can be made cleaner by donating time to clean it, or perhaps donating the money to buy several trash cans (and the crew to empty them)... but writing to a newspaper about how ugly the park is doesn't actually help solve the problem.
Business is still the big market. No manager wants to risk their big presentation on having not-quite-perfect compatibility, so everyone making really important documents wants Microsoft Office. That means everyone else in the company needs Microsoft Office too, so they're all compatible and nobody's at risk of being "the guy who broke it".
As long as businesses send documents, they'll want their precious real-deal software to work on them. That lock-in is Microsoft's cash cow. Sure, the minor differences like a slightly-different word wrap are trivial to casual users, but enterprise users are picky about such things... and Microsoft will happily continue to tweak features to keep LibreOffice one step behind.
Once everyone needs Office, then everyone needs Windows, too. If they need a tablet, they need Surface. Once they're on Windows, they need Windows Server to manage everything, and that means they need Exchange and Lync for collaboration. Sure, there's alternatives, but the Microsoft reps will be quick to point out how much more difficult the integration is. With much-vaunted "compatibility" as the bait, Office is just one part of Microsoft's vicious hook.