I once went to the supermarket with a friend of mine, who happens to be a black woman. They checked her credit card signature against the signature on the card very carefully. I commented "they never do that with me" and she just nodded.
Essentially, they're using racial profiling as their primary technique, the signature check is just a backup. If you never see them check the signature, the odds are good that you're a white male (and if you're hanging around slashdot...).
Anyway, there's your answer. Q: What will it take to get them to check your credit card signature?
A: Be a black woman.
Last time I tried the Perl YAML module I could generate a pathological perl data structure (strings designed to look suspiciously like bits of YAML) and corrupt the output sufficiently that it didn't parse back into the same data structure.
This was a bit over a year ago.
I'm sorry, but I'm just not interested in using a format where I can't rely on it being clean enough to even pass printable text cleanly through a conversion and back again. Get back to me when you've got a format which isn't a crock of shit.
Interesting complaint. You've filed a bug report, right?
The way that I do this? Well, I've been using mh in some form or another since the mid-80s (currently emacs MH-E is my front end). So all of my mail is in the form of lots of little files with numeric names (and I run reiserfs because it's good at dealing with lots of small files).
There are some mildly irritating things about this message format, e.g. if I've got a back up version of ~/Mail/BOZOTECH, I can't just restore it to the directory, because the numeric file names are arbitrary and reused often (e.g. an old version of "~/Mail/BOZOTECH/1666" would get backed up on top of a new one).
But then, as is often pointed out, with MH format, small errors will only destory individual messages instead of big stashes in a single mbox...
And this format is simple enough that file system tools like find/grep work very well with it.
You can write your own custom tools by sticking together mh commands in shell scripts (I still refile mail that way rather than using procmail...
I like being able to clean-up a folder full of mail after it's arrived, rather than having to do it all when the mail is coming in).
One of these days I'm going to experiment with indexing it all with swish-e,
maybe play with slyphweed claws as a front-end,
see if there's a way I can switch to maildir format, and so on...
I realize that this answer is completely unhelpful, but then the given question was a little silly ("how do *you* do this?").
So it is fair to say both that people are understandably alarmed, and that they are still exaggerating the risk. Why? Experts seem to agree that Americans find it harder than most people to evaluate risks accurately. Lawsuits, labels on coffee cups ("Warning: the beverage you are about to enjoy is extremely hot"), even political pronouncements all often suggest it is possible to avoid danger altogether.
My point here is how did a claim like this, without supporting evidence of any kind, slip through the editing process?
It would be better if they had a reference to the expert opinion they're talking about, but do you actually disagree about the main point? They do list some observations to support the main point.
Also, the article you've linked to does go on to talk about Kip Viscusi of Harvard, and it doesn't
take a lot of thought to conclude that if you wanted to know where they're coming from you should look up some of Viscusi's publications.
For example:
# Viscusi, W. Kip. Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk (New York: Oxford University Press Hard cover ed. 1992).
This doesn't look like the best-written Economist article I've ever seen, but it's not quite that egregious either. Maybe you need a better "experts say" example.
The trick is to pause before each article long enough to recollect what has been going on there, then skim the article to see what's changed. Do NOT get bogged down in reading every word.
I used to use a "table of contents" driven strategy. I'd read through the contents carefully and mark the articles that I thought I should read with a rough ranking of how important they are to me (1, 2, 3). If I had no idea at all what the article was about, I'd make an effort to bump it up in priority. Before reading something I'd consult my rankings, and then cross off an article after it was read.
It is true that trying to read it cover to cover would pretty much kill my free-reading time for a week (and in those days, I had 1.5 hours a day of train commuting).
The Economist, based in the U.K., but with a larger readership in the U.S. than the U.K., will surprise Americans with being off the left-right one-dimensional continuum that dominates U.S. politics.
... that dominates a lot of thought about U.S. politics. Sure. (What the political scene is really about is probably different).
They might be characterized most closely as libertarian.
For instance, their free market views have led them to put forth the idea that illicit drugs ought to be legalized.
Note that they've written favorably not only of
F/OSS but also of other such "liberal" causes as drug
legalization, and have (finally) started to look skeptically
on Bush's foreign adventurism.
Yeah, finally. During the run up to the Iraq invasion, they
were out there beating the drum just as loud as most of the other
English-speaking media outlet, most of which could use
lessons from Jimbo Wales in neutrality.
The Economist is quite good -- certainly in comparison to
the American news weeklies -- but certainly not perfect.
I'm less enthusiastic about them than I used to be.
I think they should stop trying to play the influence game
and stick to reporting.
They've certainly got points in their favor:
What little tech reporting they do is usually quite
good. I once compared their coverage of something to the
New Scientist, and the Economist was both more objective and
more detailed (this was concerning one of the twists and
turns of the global warming saga).
They write about places outside the United States as
though they really exist. And they don't just stick to the
places the US has invaded or wants to invade.
The whole "how right are they?" question is even sillier
in this case than usual. They're British. They've got a
different set of prejudices compared to American
conservatives, e.g. they're essentially anti-gun rights.
This is a basic critical thinking concept: if you make an assertion, it is your job to provide evidence to back that assertion. Otherwise you are just expressing your opinion.
There's another interesting principle: don't expect people to spoon-feed you. If you haven't made an effort to learn something about a subject, maybe it's not their problem to bring you up to speed.
Just a suggestion, if you're interested in this subject, you might read this story that was posted on slashdot recently....
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=463588
The OSI issues press releases from time to time, and provides a formalized, if redundant, list of Open Source licenses.
From my personal point of view, *this* is the most valuable thing OSI does. If I come across some oddball license, I don't need to sort through the legalese, I can just check if it's OSI approved.
In the long run, however, making the case for open source software to the corporate world could indeed turn out to be *extremely* valuable. There is no way for us to know definitely what would have happened with or without OSI in existence, but take "IBM" as an example. If OSI helped get them to embrace open source, we all owe OSI quite a bit. If OSI, throughout the entire history of it's existance convinces one company on the scale of IBM to make a comment to OS as large as they have, then there efforts will have been justified.
Which is not to say that I have anything against the Free Software Foundation... it's not either/or as far as I'm concerned. It's a one-two punch, to nail both the idealistic and the practical.
I just wish for once all the idiots who will inevitably spout their
mouth would just shut up.
No, no. Half of my karma is from posts replying to
those guys. Someone says something stupid about
RMS, I step in and point out that they're not fit
to tie his shoelaces, and bang it's plus 5, insightful.
Wikipedia gets 24.8 "submissions" (edits) per minute. This is several orders of magnitude higher than the linux kernel. Your comparison is specious. -- A Wikipedia Admin
earthforce_1 wrote:
True, but kernel source code needs much more rigorous inspection and testing for functionality, side effects, and security issues. I don't know how long it takes to validate and accept even a trivial patch, but I suspect it can be masured in man-days.
First of all, a lot -- though not all -- of the testing of a kernel patch can be automated. If it doesn't compile, if it breaks a regression test, it's out.
Secondly, do you have any idea how long it can take to throughly review a wikipedia edit?
Here's an example: I wrote an article about Richard Hell, and then someone came by and tacked on a nearly illiterate sentence about him shooting heroin with Dee Dee Ramone. Now what, do I just
delete it? But maybe it's true. Isn't it irrelevant? Well, it's irrelevant to me, but social circles are often important in arts scenes
(e.g. who was having lunch at the Algonquin?). I ended up spending at least a "man-day" researching trivia about who was shooting heroin with who in the late-70s New York punk scene.
High-tech is no different from any other industry (what do you know of that really works, the way high-tech "doesn't"?),
Is that a serious question?
Flashlights: Maglites were a great improvement over the competition back in the 90s, and the new
led flashlights are a great improvement on maglights.
Pocket knives: Swiss Army knives pretty much kicked the ass of the junky knives you used to see around when I was a kid -- they offer a huge range of choice, and they all pretty much work as good or better than you'd expect. Their main competition seems to be the Leatherman line, which are also quite excellent, and offer a slightly different range of features.
Coffee makers: with very few exceptions I've encountered, home coffee making technology seems to be continually improving. I'm currently using a model with themos insulation built into the coffee pot that does a great job of preserving the coffee for a long period of time, compared to the older models. Similarly, home coffee grinders also seem to "just work".
Some forms of sports equipment, e.g. climbing equipment, works tremendously well, particularly the camming gadgets that started to come out in the 80s. (This is in contrast to downhill ski
technology, which as far as I can tell is a bullshit market with phony -- or nearly phony -- innovations every year. Though on the other hand,
it's not like the skis don't work well as skis, and there have been some real improvements in ski bindings).
I might list any number of commodities -- if you buy a box of salt, it really and truly is salt, and acts just like you expect it to -- those count as low tech, don't they?
Now on the other hand, there's are many pieces of consumer technology that are sold in spite of a positive absence of anything resembling quality -- SUVs come to mind, which people persist in thinking are "safer" though they're definitely not -- but there are also many examples where quality has won out in the marketplace.
Have you ever talked to anyone who has worked for Intel? You probably wouldn't be saying this if you'd ever worked their yourself (phrases like
"meat-grinder" and "big brother" are pretty common
from people who have).
It's amazing that Intel has held on to it's lead for as long as it has, considering how poorly it treats it's employees.
My impression is that the best people in the business are now working for AMD, because no one with any self-respect wants to work for Intel.
Okay, so everyone understands that blogs suck because, for example, they're full of lots of empty, rambling chatter about the obvious -- much
like this particular discussion about how much they suck, yes?
So what's the next step? What would be better than
blogs? Figure that out, and then go out and build it.
My suggestion: think about the wikipedia, think about factcheck.org, and think about seti-online,
and start connecting the dots.
Well, I bet this will teach them not to
skip advertising in PCMag. Don't skimp on
the payola if you want a good review.
(Disclaimer: This is just a knee-jerk cynical joke. I have
no first hand knowledge that HP and Apple have
declined PCMag advertising. And as Linux Magazine
has been good enough to explain to us, advertising
money never influences a responsible news source. I'm sure that PCMag
is not dominated by multiple pages of Dell ads.)
"The killer feature for me is searching. I hate the wasted real estate in Firefox from having a separate location and search box, and ease of use is dramatically better in Mozilla than in Firefox. In Mozilla, I just hit Ctrl-L, type my search commands, hit up arrow and enter. I haven't found any way of achieving the same thing in Firefox, and I hate the small size of the box I'm given to enter my search terms."
Exactly. I just hate the separate search box. After a couple of months using Firefox every day,
Since the wasted real-estate complaint seems pretty common, I thought I'd mention one of the things that I like about firefox: the littlefox theme makes all the buttons to the left of the location window a lot smaller. That's a bit of wasted real estate that I've always disliked about Mozilla -- if you try and use a narrow browser window, your location window nearly completely disappears. On a small screen you can get stuck with no location window whatsoever...
If someone combined the negative modern theme with littlefox, that would probably get me to do a switch to firefox. As it is I continue to use Mozilla largely just because I'm used to it, and there's no reason to deal with even a small amount of UI disorientation in a switch to firefox.
Another thing I like about firefox though: the sidebar in mozilla is always popping open on me,
even though I'd rather it had never existed in the first place... Everytime I do an Alt-"page down" by
mistake I've got to do an F9 to make it go away,
and it took *years* of being irritated by this
before I finally did the research to learn about
the F9 trick. (I've tried filing bug reports,
but the developer *likes* this behavior, because
it encourages people to learn about what Alt-"page
down" does...)
One big complaint about firefox: subjectively, I don't see any performance improvement. It's the same old slightly sluggish but useable red-lizard speed, as far as I can tell. What's the point of using a "stripped down" version of something if you don't get any performance boost?
The subject is apropo of nothing really, it
just seems to be everyone's favorite phrase
today so I thought I'd throw it in.
Anyway, if you read the article, I suspect you'll
find it really, really, dull, largely a compendium
of the astoundingly obvious.
I can't say I was expecting much though: why
would you expect someone who worked on IE design
to know anything much about browser UIs?
As is typical of Microsoft blockbuster projects,
IE was a knock-off of something else, and whatever
little improvements they may have made in
the browser interface, they certainly weren't
the reason that so many people adopted IE.
On the other hand, he does recommend reading
Ted Nelson's "Literary Machines", so I can't
be too hard on him. If you're interested in
thinking about hypertext concepts forget about
bickering about what little tweaks you want to
see in Bookmark handling, and go read some
Ted Nelson.
(But if you really want to talk about Bookmark
handling ideas: the real trouble with searching
your bookmarks for something is that Google will
find it off of the net again faster, and if you're
wrong and it's not in your bookmarks, you'll have
to go googling anyway, so why not just start with
google? So what I think you want is a generalized
"Search" feature, that gives priority to hits from
your bookmarks -- and perhaps your harddrive, eh? -- and
then appends a list of google hits afterwards.)
Whoa, Some Guy on Slashdot has spoken,
forget about Tim Berners-Lee.
There is no way people are
going to continue to maintain older out
of date versions of the their sites
because W3C says so.
Right! Not when Some Guy on Slashdot
tells them not to.
Information becomes out of
date. If I leave up websites for
computer parts which I sold 5 years ago
I will continue to get requests for that
hardware.
I have an idea: why don't you put a
*date* on your web page, and when you
discontinue the part, mark the page
"Discontinued" at the top, and change
the headers to tell robots to stop
spidering the page.
Of course that would only make sense if
you thought that some of your customers
might want to know something about
products that they bought from you a few
years back. Why would you want to
engage in any sort of product support
for a product you're not selling any
more, eh? You got the suckers money
already, why not let them know what you
think of them. "But that's obsolete!
Time to *upgrade*, Ha, Ha."
It needs to be taken
down. Websites are dynamic and change
frequently and to expect them to
maintain all the old links is just
unrealistic.
And google groups is a public archive of
information that might reasonably be
expected to have a static, unchanging
scheme of indexing. This information
*has* *not* *changed*. They've just
decided to move it all around and throw
the old links away.
So, do you propose going back to Roman numerals then?
Yes you're right, we owe so much to the noble Roman programmers who insisted on revising the numerical system.
By the way, do you favor abandoning English in
favor of Lojban? (And why are we wasting so much
energy on software localization? Everyone should just learn the same language! Duh. Why isn't there an ISO standard for that?)
How about hieroglyphics? Do you prefer that over phoneticals?
No, I don't, but then I'm not a Macintosh user.
I'll take it as a given that you prefer Imperial units over metric.
There's a much bigger problem with the MM/DD/YY format. Namely, people who aren't American will misunderstand you.
Well goddamn it, when are they going to get a clue
and join the empire?
(Actually, if I'm worried about ambiguity, I just
use the full name of the month.)
Also, it's not just computers that are more able to sort the ISO format. Sorting stacks of paper labeled with dates in the ISO format is visibly faster than sorting papers labeled with other date formats.
Well perhaps. But if you're spending a lot of time sorting papers with dates on them, you're not living right.
If you do continuous save, or any kind of automatic backup saving, you
basically need to always save to a fresh file and keep the previous
file hanging around until you're sure your new save was successful.
This is, of course, the way gnu emacs has worked for
a long time now. No one here is seriously suggesting
that a "continuous save" feature is impossible to
implement, are they?
Slashdot Mirror
Essentially, they're using racial profiling as their primary technique, the signature check is just a backup. If you never see them check the signature, the odds are good that you're a white male (and if you're hanging around slashdot...).
Anyway, there's your answer. Q: What will it take to get them to check your credit card signature? A: Be a black woman.
There are some mildly irritating things about this message format, e.g. if I've got a back up version of ~/Mail/BOZOTECH, I can't just restore it to the directory, because the numeric file names are arbitrary and reused often (e.g. an old version of "~/Mail/BOZOTECH/1666" would get backed up on top of a new one).
But then, as is often pointed out, with MH format, small errors will only destory individual messages instead of big stashes in a single mbox...
And this format is simple enough that file system tools like find/grep work very well with it. You can write your own custom tools by sticking together mh commands in shell scripts (I still refile mail that way rather than using procmail... I like being able to clean-up a folder full of mail after it's arrived, rather than having to do it all when the mail is coming in).
One of these days I'm going to experiment with indexing it all with swish-e, maybe play with slyphweed claws as a front-end, see if there's a way I can switch to maildir format, and so on...
I realize that this answer is completely unhelpful, but then the given question was a little silly ("how do *you* do this?").
Also, the article you've linked to does go on to talk about Kip Viscusi of Harvard, and it doesn't take a lot of thought to conclude that if you wanted to know where they're coming from you should look up some of Viscusi's publications. For example:
This doesn't look like the best-written Economist article I've ever seen, but it's not quite that egregious either. Maybe you need a better "experts say" example.
It is true that trying to read it cover to cover would pretty much kill my free-reading time for a week (and in those days, I had 1.5 hours a day of train commuting).
Yeah, finally. During the run up to the Iraq invasion, they were out there beating the drum just as loud as most of the other English-speaking media outlet, most of which could use lessons from Jimbo Wales in neutrality.
The Economist is quite good -- certainly in comparison to the American news weeklies -- but certainly not perfect. I'm less enthusiastic about them than I used to be. I think they should stop trying to play the influence game and stick to reporting.
They've certainly got points in their favor:
The whole "how right are they?" question is even sillier in this case than usual. They're British. They've got a different set of prejudices compared to American conservatives, e.g. they're essentially anti-gun rights.
Just a suggestion, if you're interested in this subject, you might read this story that was posted on slashdot recently.... http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=463588
Oh, wait. That's what we're commenting on.
In the long run, however, making the case for open source software to the corporate world could indeed turn out to be *extremely* valuable. There is no way for us to know definitely what would have happened with or without OSI in existence, but take "IBM" as an example. If OSI helped get them to embrace open source, we all owe OSI quite a bit. If OSI, throughout the entire history of it's existance convinces one company on the scale of IBM to make a comment to OS as large as they have, then there efforts will have been justified.
Which is not to say that I have anything against the Free Software Foundation... it's not either/or as far as I'm concerned. It's a one-two punch, to nail both the idealistic and the practical.
Secondly, do you have any idea how long it can take to throughly review a wikipedia edit? Here's an example: I wrote an article about Richard Hell, and then someone came by and tacked on a nearly illiterate sentence about him shooting heroin with Dee Dee Ramone. Now what, do I just delete it? But maybe it's true. Isn't it irrelevant? Well, it's irrelevant to me, but social circles are often important in arts scenes (e.g. who was having lunch at the Algonquin?). I ended up spending at least a "man-day" researching trivia about who was shooting heroin with who in the late-70s New York punk scene.
Flashlights: Maglites were a great improvement over the competition back in the 90s, and the new led flashlights are a great improvement on maglights.
Pocket knives: Swiss Army knives pretty much kicked the ass of the junky knives you used to see around when I was a kid -- they offer a huge range of choice, and they all pretty much work as good or better than you'd expect. Their main competition seems to be the Leatherman line, which are also quite excellent, and offer a slightly different range of features.
Coffee makers: with very few exceptions I've encountered, home coffee making technology seems to be continually improving. I'm currently using a model with themos insulation built into the coffee pot that does a great job of preserving the coffee for a long period of time, compared to the older models. Similarly, home coffee grinders also seem to "just work".
Some forms of sports equipment, e.g. climbing equipment, works tremendously well, particularly the camming gadgets that started to come out in the 80s. (This is in contrast to downhill ski technology, which as far as I can tell is a bullshit market with phony -- or nearly phony -- innovations every year. Though on the other hand, it's not like the skis don't work well as skis, and there have been some real improvements in ski bindings).
I might list any number of commodities -- if you buy a box of salt, it really and truly is salt, and acts just like you expect it to -- those count as low tech, don't they?
Now on the other hand, there's are many pieces of consumer technology that are sold in spite of a positive absence of anything resembling quality -- SUVs come to mind, which people persist in thinking are "safer" though they're definitely not -- but there are also many examples where quality has won out in the marketplace.
It's amazing that Intel has held on to it's lead for as long as it has, considering how poorly it treats it's employees.
My impression is that the best people in the business are now working for AMD, because no one with any self-respect wants to work for Intel.
So what's the next step? What would be better than blogs? Figure that out, and then go out and build it.
My suggestion: think about the wikipedia, think about factcheck.org, and think about seti-online, and start connecting the dots.
How about a flash documentary about how the tiny company, Macromedia, succeeding in co-opting the web in ways Microsoft could only dream of?
(Disclaimer: This is just a knee-jerk cynical joke. I have no first hand knowledge that HP and Apple have declined PCMag advertising. And as Linux Magazine has been good enough to explain to us, advertising money never influences a responsible news source. I'm sure that PCMag is not dominated by multiple pages of Dell ads.)
If someone combined the negative modern theme with littlefox, that would probably get me to do a switch to firefox. As it is I continue to use Mozilla largely just because I'm used to it, and there's no reason to deal with even a small amount of UI disorientation in a switch to firefox.
Another thing I like about firefox though: the sidebar in mozilla is always popping open on me, even though I'd rather it had never existed in the first place... Everytime I do an Alt-"page down" by mistake I've got to do an F9 to make it go away, and it took *years* of being irritated by this before I finally did the research to learn about the F9 trick. (I've tried filing bug reports, but the developer *likes* this behavior, because it encourages people to learn about what Alt-"page down" does...)
One big complaint about firefox: subjectively, I don't see any performance improvement. It's the same old slightly sluggish but useable red-lizard speed, as far as I can tell. What's the point of using a "stripped down" version of something if you don't get any performance boost?
Anyway, if you read the article, I suspect you'll find it really, really, dull, largely a compendium of the astoundingly obvious.
I can't say I was expecting much though: why would you expect someone who worked on IE design to know anything much about browser UIs? As is typical of Microsoft blockbuster projects, IE was a knock-off of something else, and whatever little improvements they may have made in the browser interface, they certainly weren't the reason that so many people adopted IE.
On the other hand, he does recommend reading Ted Nelson's "Literary Machines", so I can't be too hard on him. If you're interested in thinking about hypertext concepts forget about bickering about what little tweaks you want to see in Bookmark handling, and go read some Ted Nelson.
(But if you really want to talk about Bookmark handling ideas: the real trouble with searching your bookmarks for something is that Google will find it off of the net again faster, and if you're wrong and it's not in your bookmarks, you'll have to go googling anyway, so why not just start with google? So what I think you want is a generalized "Search" feature, that gives priority to hits from your bookmarks -- and perhaps your harddrive, eh? -- and then appends a list of google hits afterwards.)
Of course that would only make sense if you thought that some of your customers might want to know something about products that they bought from you a few years back. Why would you want to engage in any sort of product support for a product you're not selling any more, eh? You got the suckers money already, why not let them know what you think of them. "But that's obsolete! Time to *upgrade*, Ha, Ha."
And google groups is a public archive of information that might reasonably be expected to have a static, unchanging scheme of indexing. This information *has* *not* *changed*. They've just decided to move it all around and throw the old links away.By the way, do you favor abandoning English in favor of Lojban? (And why are we wasting so much energy on software localization? Everyone should just learn the same language! Duh. Why isn't there an ISO standard for that?)
No, I don't, but then I'm not a Macintosh user. Pass me a deciliter of beer, mate!How about lying while talking on a cell phone while driving an SUV with six kids playing soccer in the back while someone is doing an MRI measurement?
(Actually, if I'm worried about ambiguity, I just use the full name of the month.)
Well perhaps. But if you're spending a lot of time sorting papers with dates on them, you're not living right.