I agree about Alexander Cockburn - although Claud, the progenitor, goes down in history as the guy who said, "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied". Sound advice.
The news biz is failing, and their jobs drying up, so journalism degrees are becoming worthless.
Our economic and business system is increasingly shooting itself in the foot - perhaps I should say cutting its own throat. We are told about the marvellous benefits of free-enterprise, free-market capitalism and the competition it engenders. Unfortunately, capitalists and entrepreneurs hate competition and do their level best to eliminate it: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all exemplars of the trend.
As regards journalism, smaller companies have been bought up or driven out of business, with most of the media notoriously falling into the hands of six corporations. http://www.morriscreative.com/... And those huge corporations have very definite opinions about what news and view they want people to read. (Many of them are heavily involved with the federal government, so they act more like echo chambers than critical reporters).
At the same time, vested interests are seeding the media with 'techniques of persuasion', i.e., propaganda.
I find it hard to agree that this is a new problem, because vested interests have been doing this since the dawn of recorded history. (Indeed, one could probably find prehistoric cave art that basically says, "Zog is a mastodon's arse" or "Zog for War Leader!")
The remedy is well known and simple. Education, intelligent choice, and critical faculties.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education". - John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
Even with vast masses of garbage, cant and downright lies smeared across the Web, intelligent and astute readers should be able to find a small subset of sources that are usually accurate, or at least try hard to be. I know I have.
It's no shock then that journalistic standards are plummeting. Honesty and integrity in the news are getting harder to find.
One has to take into account what the vested interests are, what kind of information they wish to distort or conceal, and how much they are willing to pay. It's often said that Wikipedia is not a reliable source; but I have found it admirable for topics such as history, mathematics, and science. It's only when the subject becomes controversial - politics, religion, celebrities, sport, etc. - that money is applied and disinformation created. The same is broadly true of the mainstream media. I plan to watch Wimbledon on BBC TV, and I am not worried that Andy Murray's scores will be exaggerated or his opponents slandered. Most of the MSM's output is reasonably unbiased, but there are hot spots such as international politics.
I find plenty of honesty and integrity, but I have had to seek it out. Some journalists and organizations always seem consistent, rarely contradict themselves or each other, and never say anything I personally know to be untrue. Ralph Nader; John Pilger; Seymour Hersh; Paul Craig Roberts; Robert Parry; Gilbert Doctorow; Brian Cloughley; The Saker; Gareth Porter; Glenn Greenwald; Noam Chomsky; Andrew Napolitano; Robert Fisk; to a degree, anyone called Cockburn; Dave Lindorff; Fred Reed; Kevin Jack Perry; Ellen Brown... the list goes on and on and on.
If anyone is interested, try Counterpunch as a start. Maybe half of the material is thin, dubious or sometimes even cranky. Never mind; as Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap - so fifty-fift
queue n noun 1 chiefly British a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed. ØComputing a list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order. 2 archaic a plait of hair worn at the back of the head. n verb (queues, queuing or queueing, queued) chiefly British wait in a queue. ØComputing arrange in a queue.
ORIGIN
C16 (as a heraldic term denoting an animal's tail): from French, based on Latin cauda 'tail'; cf. cue2.
I think he was talking about soviet-style "plan economy" (does not work), and that may indeed have been easier to implement than playing chess.
Precisely my point! The Soviet leaders may have believed that economic planning is a great deal easier than it really is. Otherwise they would never have attempted to make plans for a system that even our Western "free enterprise capitalist" system has been getting badly wrong of late.
As for not being "a world-class expert at strong AI", he was speaking in the 1960s when there was no AI (strong or weak) and hence no experts in it.
These issues are very deep and potentiall deceptive. Even the cleverest of people can get hopelessly misled.
In Genna Sosonko's excellent book "Russian Silhouettes", a series of in-depth sketches of great chess players whom Sosonko knew personally, there is a very instructive anecdote about Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, multiple world champion and considered the "father" of the mighty Soviet School of Chess.
As well as being a superb chess player - although an amateur by modern standards, as he strictly limited the time he devoted to the game - Botvinnik's "day job" was electrical engineering. He launched projects to study the potential of computers for a wide range of important types of work. Sosonko tells the following instructive story.
[Botvvinik declared that] "... to write a program for managing the economy is easier than for chess, because chess is a two-sided game, antagonistic. The players hinder each other, and the devil knows what that means, whereas in economics that is not the case, and everything is simpler".
It's not so often that one catches a world-class expert in such an utterly mistaken declaration. Today in 2017 computers play chess better than any human, but the problem of managing the economy is still not understood at all. And until it is understood, it cannot be programmed.
"When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.'"
Whereas broadcast TV - in particular, scores of additional channels on top of the scores of already existing channels - are not "in the nature of convenience or luxury"?
Oh, I forgot - reaching all American citizens with continual advertising is essential to the health of the nation. Silly moi.
I don't think "con artist" is name calling; it is just shorthand to describe his business habits to date.
That's an accurate description of virtually all American politicians. Trump, the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama... go back as far as you like. (Lincoln may have been honest).
But the people who killed them are. And they are ISIS - the terrorist crew whom Colonel Qadafi's column was on the way to deal with when the West decided to blow them away and send Libya back to the Stone Age.
Now they are busy killing, torturing and destroying in Syria.
Putin's singular goal is the elevation of the Russian state with him as its head. Because he's an autocrat that makes western liberalism an existential threat. Anything he can do to discredit western liberalism helps him - if he can convince enough people that american elections are rigged then he can say to his own citizens that real democracy doesn't exist, that the grass is not greener on the other side and so they should be content with his great leadership.
And because we don't have any idea who you are, or what your aims are, we should simply accept at face value your claim to know exactly what Mr Putin thinks and feels.
So in the "normal" cases you get a bit better, but in the exceptional cases, things get a bit worse.
That remark reminded me vividly of Frank Herbert's comment (in "The Dragon in the Sea"/"Under Pressure") that "there is no such thing as a small accident on a submarine". I suspect that "a bit worse" is a huge understatement (except in the sense that each of us can only die once).
Frank Herbert wrote Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune as a unit. Indeed, the last two books were finished (though not published) before the first. The other books were more or less pot-boilers - or, at most, sequels written in response to demand.
Many readers were shocked and disappointed by the undoing of the apparently omnipotent Paul Atreides. But that was Herbert's idea all along - to undermine the idea of the supreme hero. See Tim O'Reilly's biography of Herbert for details.
Although it's not yet understood what would be the full effects of higher CO2 levels. Clearly that would stimulate further plant growth, which would emit more oxygen...
"The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."
Hmmmm, quite a lot of CO2. Probably more than needed for "other technical applications" - besides which, what will be done with it after those "applications" are complete?
Anyone need 10 Gigatonnes of CO2? How many big tanks would it take to store? Or will it be cleverly stored underground, somewhere we can be absolutely sure it will never suddenly re-emerge into the atmosphere?
But come on fellas, this is the US government! I mean, the Pentagon lost $6 trillion down the back of a sofa - did anyone complain about that? The Fed spent over $16 trillion of the taxpayers' money to bail out the banks in 2008, and no one was even charged with wrongdoing.
Basic tax arithmetic: there are (about) 333 million Americans, so $1 billion is (about) $3 apiece - or about $8 per taxpayer. And $1 trillion is (about) $3000 apiece - or $8000 per taxpayer.
"Today, the average household with credit card debt has balances totaling $16,748, and the average household with any kind of debt owes $134,643, including mortgages". https://www.nerdwallet.com/blo...
So why worry about the odd trillion here or there? It's government of the people, by the people, for the people - so you gotta love it!
"The article describes a Russian soldier in the Ukraine pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife".
Blown right away. There are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. And if there were, they would be too busy fighting off the crazed Ukrainian soldiers and Nazi battalions to do a lot of social media.
Why do you assume that no updates should ever be applied?
I am not assuming that, and I did not say (or imply) that I do.
What I did say was that an operating system (and applications) that need continual large-scale patching - as Windows, Office, etc. obviously do - is shoddily constructed in the first place. Just like a skyscraper that always has repair crews clambering around it on scaffolding, replacing bits that have fallen off.
Updates may be required - or at least desirable - to add new features, or to alter existing features in the light of new requirements. That's fine. Note, however, that some (or even most) users may safely choose to decline such updates because they don't need the new features.
Microsoft issues blizzards of "security" patches all the time, because latent security vulnerabilities exist in its software. That, in turn, is because security was way down the list of priorities when the software was written. (At a guess, the top priorities were number and shininess of features and time to market).
So, in conclusion, I agree with the final words of your comment: the number of patches and tests are certainly different across different OSs. That is because some OSs are inherently more secure and better-written than others. And I recommend using those that are better-written and more secure.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks! Mine is a Glenmorangie.
I agree about Alexander Cockburn - although Claud, the progenitor, goes down in history as the guy who said, "Never believe anything until it's been officially denied". Sound advice.
Andrew Cockburn's book "Kill Chain" is excellent.
The news biz is failing, and their jobs drying up, so journalism degrees are becoming worthless.
Our economic and business system is increasingly shooting itself in the foot - perhaps I should say cutting its own throat. We are told about the marvellous benefits of free-enterprise, free-market capitalism and the competition it engenders. Unfortunately, capitalists and entrepreneurs hate competition and do their level best to eliminate it: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Twitter are all exemplars of the trend.
As regards journalism, smaller companies have been bought up or driven out of business, with most of the media notoriously falling into the hands of six corporations. http://www.morriscreative.com/... And those huge corporations have very definite opinions about what news and view they want people to read. (Many of them are heavily involved with the federal government, so they act more like echo chambers than critical reporters).
At the same time, vested interests are seeding the media with 'techniques of persuasion', i.e., propaganda.
I find it hard to agree that this is a new problem, because vested interests have been doing this since the dawn of recorded history. (Indeed, one could probably find prehistoric cave art that basically says, "Zog is a mastodon's arse" or "Zog for War Leader!")
The remedy is well known and simple. Education, intelligent choice, and critical faculties.
"Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education".
- John Alexander Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Oxford University, 1914.
Even with vast masses of garbage, cant and downright lies smeared across the Web, intelligent and astute readers should be able to find a small subset of sources that are usually accurate, or at least try hard to be. I know I have.
It's no shock then that journalistic standards are plummeting. Honesty and integrity in the news are getting harder to find.
One has to take into account what the vested interests are, what kind of information they wish to distort or conceal, and how much they are willing to pay. It's often said that Wikipedia is not a reliable source; but I have found it admirable for topics such as history, mathematics, and science. It's only when the subject becomes controversial - politics, religion, celebrities, sport, etc. - that money is applied and disinformation created. The same is broadly true of the mainstream media. I plan to watch Wimbledon on BBC TV, and I am not worried that Andy Murray's scores will be exaggerated or his opponents slandered. Most of the MSM's output is reasonably unbiased, but there are hot spots such as international politics.
I find plenty of honesty and integrity, but I have had to seek it out. Some journalists and organizations always seem consistent, rarely contradict themselves or each other, and never say anything I personally know to be untrue. Ralph Nader; John Pilger; Seymour Hersh; Paul Craig Roberts; Robert Parry; Gilbert Doctorow; Brian Cloughley; The Saker; Gareth Porter; Glenn Greenwald; Noam Chomsky; Andrew Napolitano; Robert Fisk; to a degree, anyone called Cockburn; Dave Lindorff; Fred Reed; Kevin Jack Perry; Ellen Brown... the list goes on and on and on.
If anyone is interested, try Counterpunch as a start. Maybe half of the material is thin, dubious or sometimes even cranky. Never mind; as Theodore Sturgeon said, 90 percent of everything is crap - so fifty-fift
queue
n noun
1 chiefly British a line or sequence of people or vehicles awaiting their turn to be attended to or to proceed. ØComputing a list of data items, commands, etc., stored so as to be retrievable in a definite order.
2 archaic a plait of hair worn at the back of the head.
n verb (queues, queuing or queueing, queued) chiefly British wait in a queue. ØComputing arrange in a queue.
ORIGIN
C16 (as a heraldic term denoting an animal's tail): from French, based on Latin cauda 'tail'; cf. cue2.
Hahahahahahahahahahaha!
Please mod parent up to 5 for "Funny". The Grauniad isn't credible about anything - but especially topics that involve numbers, logic, or science.
I think he was talking about soviet-style "plan economy" (does not work), and that may indeed have been easier to implement than playing chess.
Precisely my point! The Soviet leaders may have believed that economic planning is a great deal easier than it really is. Otherwise they would never have attempted to make plans for a system that even our Western "free enterprise capitalist" system has been getting badly wrong of late.
As for not being "a world-class expert at strong AI", he was speaking in the 1960s when there was no AI (strong or weak) and hence no experts in it.
Sorry, I typed the parent too fast and made at least two typos. I'd correct them if I could.
These issues are very deep and potentiall deceptive. Even the cleverest of people can get hopelessly misled.
In Genna Sosonko's excellent book "Russian Silhouettes", a series of in-depth sketches of great chess players whom Sosonko knew personally, there is a very instructive anecdote about Mikhail Moiseyevich Botvinnik, multiple world champion and considered the "father" of the mighty Soviet School of Chess.
As well as being a superb chess player - although an amateur by modern standards, as he strictly limited the time he devoted to the game - Botvinnik's "day job" was electrical engineering. He launched projects to study the potential of computers for a wide range of important types of work. Sosonko tells the following instructive story.
[Botvvinik declared that] "... to write a program for managing the economy is easier than for chess, because chess is a two-sided game, antagonistic. The players hinder each other, and the devil knows what that means, whereas in economics that is not the case, and everything is simpler".
It's not so often that one catches a world-class expert in such an utterly mistaken declaration. Today in 2017 computers play chess better than any human, but the problem of managing the economy is still not understood at all. And until it is understood, it cannot be programmed.
No, I suppose most of them were killed.
"When AT&T wanted to start developing cellular in 1947, the FCC rejected the idea, believing that spectrum could be best used by other services that were not 'in the nature of convenience or luxury.'"
Whereas broadcast TV - in particular, scores of additional channels on top of the scores of already existing channels - are not "in the nature of convenience or luxury"?
Oh, I forgot - reaching all American citizens with continual advertising is essential to the health of the nation. Silly moi.
I don't think "con artist" is name calling; it is just shorthand to describe his business habits to date.
That's an accurate description of virtually all American politicians. Trump, the Clintons, the Bushes, Obama... go back as far as you like. (Lincoln may have been honest).
The people who died in Bengazi are not laughing.
But the people who killed them are. And they are ISIS - the terrorist crew whom Colonel Qadafi's column was on the way to deal with when the West decided to blow them away and send Libya back to the Stone Age.
Now they are busy killing, torturing and destroying in Syria.
Yay Yay USA! We came, we saw, millions died.
Putin's singular goal is the elevation of the Russian state with him as its head. Because he's an autocrat that makes western liberalism an existential threat. Anything he can do to discredit western liberalism helps him - if he can convince enough people that american elections are rigged then he can say to his own citizens that real democracy doesn't exist, that the grass is not greener on the other side and so they should be content with his great leadership.
And because we don't have any idea who you are, or what your aims are, we should simply accept at face value your claim to know exactly what Mr Putin thinks and feels.
Why is it you say you don't find ELIZA to be that effective as a program?
I like it, I like it.
So in the "normal" cases you get a bit better, but in the exceptional cases, things get a bit worse.
That remark reminded me vividly of Frank Herbert's comment (in "The Dragon in the Sea"/"Under Pressure") that "there is no such thing as a small accident on a submarine". I suspect that "a bit worse" is a huge understatement (except in the sense that each of us can only die once).
Oh good. In the past there have been incidents when the computers apparently took over an aircraft and locked out the pilots.
http://www.smh.com.au/good-wee...
Now there won't be any pilots to be locked out, so the aircraft can just destroy itself in its own preferred way.
Mrs May's logic is impeccable.
"Why do they attack us?"
"Because they hate us for our freedoms".
"Simple, then: we'll abolish our freedoms, so then they won't hate us any more".
Q.E.D.
Frank Herbert wrote Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune as a unit. Indeed, the last two books were finished (though not published) before the first. The other books were more or less pot-boilers - or, at most, sequels written in response to demand.
Many readers were shocked and disappointed by the undoing of the apparently omnipotent Paul Atreides. But that was Herbert's idea all along - to undermine the idea of the supreme hero. See Tim O'Reilly's biography of Herbert for details.
Although it's not yet understood what would be the full effects of higher CO2 levels. Clearly that would stimulate further plant growth, which would emit more oxygen...
"The water vapor can be separated quite easily, leaving almost pure CO2, which can be stored or used in other technical applications."
Hmmmm, quite a lot of CO2. Probably more than needed for "other technical applications" - besides which, what will be done with it after those "applications" are complete?
Anyone need 10 Gigatonnes of CO2? How many big tanks would it take to store? Or will it be cleverly stored underground, somewhere we can be absolutely sure it will never suddenly re-emerge into the atmosphere?
Google decided, a couple years ago, to basically go that same route... and probably for the same reasons. It's all about lock-in.
Or, as far as I'm concerned, lock-out. Because if Google tries to lock us in to Chrome, I will simply not use Chrome.
The result is a partition of the Web into two segments: 99.9% go on using the Web, while 0.01% can lock themselves into Chrome (if they wish).
Big companies don't want to fix anything. They want good numbers for their shareholders. Selling stuff to "fix the problems" is their core business.
They also love to steal other people's ideas - often freely donated to the world - to boost their profits.
Then they complain, loudly and bitterly, that the ideas aren't perfectly tailored to their thieving business models.
... pretty soon you're talking real money.
But come on fellas, this is the US government! I mean, the Pentagon lost $6 trillion down the back of a sofa - did anyone complain about that? The Fed spent over $16 trillion of the taxpayers' money to bail out the banks in 2008, and no one was even charged with wrongdoing.
Basic tax arithmetic: there are (about) 333 million Americans, so $1 billion is (about) $3 apiece - or about $8 per taxpayer. And $1 trillion is (about) $3000 apiece - or $8000 per taxpayer.
"Today, the average household with credit card debt has balances totaling $16,748, and the average household with any kind of debt owes $134,643, including mortgages". https://www.nerdwallet.com/blo...
So why worry about the odd trillion here or there? It's government of the people, by the people, for the people - so you gotta love it!
"The article describes a Russian soldier in the Ukraine pretending to be a 42-year-old American housewife".
Blown right away. There are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. And if there were, they would be too busy fighting off the crazed Ukrainian soldiers and Nazi battalions to do a lot of social media.
You've obviously never worked enterprise IT.
It sounds to me as if you have never worked for Microsoft. Because...
You don't roll-out new versions of anything until they're thoroughly tested...
They do.
Why do you assume that no updates should ever be applied?
I am not assuming that, and I did not say (or imply) that I do.
What I did say was that an operating system (and applications) that need continual large-scale patching - as Windows, Office, etc. obviously do - is shoddily constructed in the first place. Just like a skyscraper that always has repair crews clambering around it on scaffolding, replacing bits that have fallen off.
Updates may be required - or at least desirable - to add new features, or to alter existing features in the light of new requirements. That's fine. Note, however, that some (or even most) users may safely choose to decline such updates because they don't need the new features.
Microsoft issues blizzards of "security" patches all the time, because latent security vulnerabilities exist in its software. That, in turn, is because security was way down the list of priorities when the software was written. (At a guess, the top priorities were number and shininess of features and time to market).
So, in conclusion, I agree with the final words of your comment: the number of patches and tests are certainly different across different OSs. That is because some OSs are inherently more secure and better-written than others. And I recommend using those that are better-written and more secure.