When I was a child, my family lived in the Tokyo area for a while. The first couple of years we were there, we lived in a suburban area that was pretty crowded, albeit with mostly low-rise residential and commercial properties.
Our rental house sat about halfway up a fairly steep hill, at the bottom of which was an open-air market crowded with noodle vendors and the like. When I was five, there was a pretty intense typhoon. As I recall, it rained continuously for three days - and I mean it just bucketed down to the point where it was difficult to see the houses across the one-and-a-half-lane street.
The fourth day was clear, bright, and almost cloudless, so I finally got to go outside again. I wanted to visit the marketplace, but I couldn't, because the bottom of the hill was submerged under about 10 feet of water.
So, local severe flooding is nothing new for Japan - although I have no doubt it's getting worse - and addressing it via infrastructure improvements is certainly non-trivial in a nation whose population is almost entirely urban nowadays.
(BTW - I also experienced my first major earthquake in that house. It had to have been at least a 6.5, because it lasted at least half a minute. But that's a story for another time... )
Greatly dislike how this article frames opinion as fact. It keeps saying "Villeneuve does this", or "Villeneuve wanted that", but gives no source for the claims. To me, it's clear this article is just a shitty, deceptive, self-righteous way of stating one's personal observations.
I'm not going to suggesting this article is just the inevitable mainstream contrarianism when something is widely beloved, but I'm having a hard time not pulling the trigger on saying it...
Disclaimer: I have not yet seen the movie.
However, taking TFS entirely in the context of itself, I could not more completely agree with your objection to TFS. What's even worse is that TFA is uncredited. It's clearly an editorial (i.e. - "opinion") piece, but there is no attribution to an individual writer to be found.
In journalistic terms - and I hesitate to use that appellation here - it's a staff piece. Which is to say it represents the organizational opinion of Motherboard as an editorial entity, despite the fact that it's obviously one person's opinion. In other words, it's a review, not a news item, and, IMnsHO, it's a craven example of journalistic cowardice at its most distasteful.
Yes, I get that taking a giant dump on the movie's raison d'être is inevitably going to attract major flamage. That's intrinsic to film criticism - you accept that people are going to react negatively when you publish a critical review of a major motion picture, especially one that's a sequel to a universally praised and admired cult classic which set standards for every subsequent offering in the distopian future genre. Hiding behind a corporate facade is therefore a blatant act of fundamental cowardice on the part of the author, whoever he/she is.
Here's the only appropriate punishment: black-hole Motherboard. Don't visit their website (or, for that matter, any website owned by vice.com), don't click on their links, don't leave comments on their articles, or do anything else that would increase their advertising revenue. Because, folks, that, in the end, is what this is all about:
Clickbait.
So don't fall for it. Just leave them in splendid isolation to wonder, "Where'd everybody go... ?"
TFS quotes the "Coalition for Responsible Sharing" thusly:
Sending large numbers of takedown notices on an ongoing basis will prove highly disruptive to the research community.
Translation: "If we have to send takedown notices directly to all the AUTHORS of these papers to which we claim copyright, we risk making them so resentful of us that they'll finally be sufficiently motivated to stop letting us publish their work. We can't risk killing our golden geese, so we want the courts to close down the site they're using to share their own papers, instead.
b. I'm an unashamed nerd. I'm also a night owl, I burn, rather than tan, and I suffer from "moderate" osteoarthritis. And I'm of northern European extraction (Irish, Welsh, and Prussian to be precise). For all those reasons, this interests me.
I'll bet you a shiny, new quarter I'm not alone, either...
ptaff (who has a really low/. ID number) thundered:
Cloudflare must die. It's the ultimate cross-site tracking MITM — worse than ads and pixel beacons because there's no way around it — and its CAPTCHA mechanism makes Tor browsing a PITA.
Can't sat as I've run into any CAPTCHA challenges using TOR. Then again, I only use TOR to access TPB when some media company is paying Indian hackers to DDoS it on the non-TOR web, so what would I know?
OTOH, I had to deal with CAPTCHAs all the freakin' time when one or another shitbag bot herder was hiding behind VPNUnlimited's San Francisco proxy. I entirely understood, though. If Cloudphlegm hadn't made life difficult for VPNUnlimited's other customers (like me, for instance), they wouldn't have had much incentive to identify and ban the bot herder...
a remarkably mature market where nobody but Samsung and Apple makes any money
Motorola makes money. Huawei makes money.
You're correct, of course. Three things to keep in mind, though:
a. This is tech journalism - a field wherein hacks, shills, and nincompoops are ubiquitous, and responsible, professional, actual journalists are thin on the ground.
b. The "article" in question is a "think piece", which is journalese for "my opinion disguised as a news story" (which is approximately the same thing as a column - "my opinion", only without the disguise).
c. Even the most prestigious news publications largely dispense with fact-checking these days. (It's an expense which makes no quantifiable contribution to the bottom line, so it's ipso facto dispensable, when the organization in question is run by MBAs.)
Besides, everyone's entitled to their own "alternative facts" these days, remember... ?
The key capture here comes down to this pair of sentences (especially the second one):
ICANN also distributed software to automatically pull down and install the new KSK. Some ISPs opted to use this software, which apparently had some bugs and failed to download and install the new KSK, in some situations.
Instead of "lazy ISPs", as the headline misleadingly states, it sure appears to me that the party actually responsible for the failure of the KSK update rollout is ICANN itself.
Or is there some aspect of, "Some ISPs opted to use this software, which apparently had some bugs and failed to download and install the new KSK," that I'm misapprehending... ?
It's the epitome of a first world problem, of course, but to me, it's similar to the hump on the back of the last iPhone case. That is, I'm wondering why someone near the top didn't take a look at that and say "Damn, that's kind of ugly. Apple isn't supposed to release ugly products - especially not flagship products. Let's back up and figure out something else here." Apple has always been known for a company that, whatever else they do, has always been known for its strong sense of aesthetics. It's just surprising to see that slipping a bit, at least in my view.
When Steve Jobs was in charge, he WAS Apple's "strong sense of aesthetics". He was an abusive asshole, but he was an asshole with vision, and he had the power to ensure that no Apple product was released until he, personally, was satisfied with its design. So he did. And, despite his tantrums and vicious criticism of their work, the people he hired to turn his ideas into products that met his standards worshipped the guy - because, in the end, he drove them to craft things that were both functional and beautiful... and that, in a number of cases, actually introduced and created markets for whole new categories of high-tech products. (Think iPod and iPhone here.)
The guy who's in charge now is a supply-chain manager - basically a glorified bean counter. He has all the vision and sense of aesthetics you'd expect from an accountant, but he was at least self-aware enough to recognize his own shortcomings in that regard, and hand the product design task over to Jony Ivie, who's an actual design professional.
In business there's a thing called a "key man problem". Apple had it in spades. Now that key man is gone, and Jony Ivie, for all his undeniable talent, is neither aesthetic visionary enough, nor implacable tyrant enough to replace him...
For those who haven't seen it before, the phrase "bete noire" is from the French language. "Noire" means "black", as in the color. "Bete" means "penis".
Mmm... no. You're correct about the definition of "noire" and profoundly incorrect regarding the word "bête":
When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?
The link in the ad does not take you "directly" to the website for which you were searching. Instead, it takes you there by a roundabout route. Here's the URL for the ad that the search string "procter and gamble" generates:
Note that the url in question begins with "https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk". That's a call to googleadservices.com, which is google's central advertising hub, alerting it that a pagead has been clicked.
The next bit is "&ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw&ohost=www.google.com", which tells googleadservices to employ the script at "ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw", and that the request is originating from google.com. The "ai=" part might mean "advertising insight", or "artificial intelligence", or even "acknowledge immediately". I dunno - you'd have to ask one of google's advertising engine programmers (and they a are notoriously closed-mouth crew).
The "&cid=CAESEeD2JLJzL1dBgUZFbmBGP-fz" string which follows is clearly an identifier for the "client ID", or the Universe really is entirely devoid of meaning or logic. (YMMV. Or, y'know, not.)
That, in turn, is followed by "&sig=AOD64_3I39rwK0_DYxkNqTS1PJcvi8-iYg", which is pretty obviously a digital signature, probably included to prevent clickjackers from gaming google's revenue stream - or because google just likes to admire its own signature. (My own bet would be on security, rather than self-regard, btw.)
Finally, we have "&q=&ved=0ahUKEwi42ZGrkavWAhVoxlQKHWkNCfwQ0QwIJQ", followed by "&adurl=", the first part of which looks like a query string to me, with the last bit pointing to a null value. My guess is that, absent an actual value for "&adurl=", it causes the AI to redirect your browser to the client's default URL, per their contract with googleadservices. (Again, contents are packed by weight, not volume, and some settling may occur during shipping.)
Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".
This is *really* cool science, but "paradigm shifting" may be a touch over the top--this isn't the first paper or study to come to the conclusion that Toxo plays a role in neurological disorders, and there are labs around the globe that have been working on this topic for years.
and those are just the top three scholarly articles for a google search for "toxplasmosis rat behavior". The parent page for each of those articles links to other, related studies, as well - but the Bermoy, Webster, and Macdonald study from 2000 appears to be the first. So, no, not exactly ground-breaking, and definitely not a paradigm changer, either.
Anybody remember Stanley Prusiner (hint: he won pretty much every award there is to win in medicine - including the Nobel - for his work establishing the existence, transmissibility, and neurodegenerative impact of prions)? Remember how respected authorities in medicine laughed at him... ?
Well Robert Jordan dropped dead before he finished The Wheel of Time, and it got finished anyway (and IMHO the last couple of books are better, but then I like Brandon Sanderson's writing). What annoyed me the most is that while he was still alive (and with WOT unfinished) he started writing prequels! Very annoying, but then I don't think he knew how to finish off his own series, if that is the case then even bigger kudos to Sanderson.
Which is all very well and good - except the Culture novels aren't a series in the sense that there's a master story arc. Although there are references to the Idirian War from the first one, Consider Phlebus, the subsequent books are each stand-alone stories (except for Player of Games, which is a collection of novelletes). The only thing that connects them is that each one involves Special Circumstances, the Culture's version of the CIA.
Because of his writing method - all his first drafts were written longhand, on legal pads - Banks left behind no notes or outlines for additional books. What he wrote during his life is all we have.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm exceedingly grateful that Banks shared this planet with me - and that he gave me and everyone else the gift of so much wonderful writing.
I like a lot of his non-SF fiction, too, btw. There are some that are weaker than others - The Steep Approach to Garbadale springs to mind in that regard - but they're all very different from each other, and I like that a great deal. And, hey, he did write one of the best rock'n'roll novels of all time: Espedair Street.
I just started reading Iain M. Banks' final Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata. I'd been putting it off since he announced his cancer diagnosis and impending death, because... well, because there just weren't going to be any more of them. Ever. And that was just unbearably sad to me.
But now that my own health has become so problematic, I realized that I might very well wind up depriving myself of what was pretty much guaranteed to be a great read by one of my all-time SF authors. So, what the hell.
It's very entertaining, btw. There's lots of Shipmind snarkiness, a plucky, if reluctant heroine, more than a touch of the old ultra-violence, and an impenetrable fog of murky political machinations on the part of a race on the verge of Subliming, all set to the constant backbeat of Banks' impish sense of humor. (I think the whole concept of the Antagonistic Undecagon - a cumbersome musical instrument which follows the four-armed heroine around, despite her best efforts to lose it - is hilarious, especially because I'm trying to teach myself to play violin, at the moment.)
I'd give it two thumbs way up, if I wasn't so busy typing right now...
Tell me a phone that doesn't have Facebook pre-installed, and you can't delete it.
Well, there's the Nexus 6, for instance. Mine - which I bought new - didn't come with Facebook pre-installed. And it still doesn't have it, because Mark Zuckerberg's data-stalking machine can fuck ALL the way off, as far as I'm concerned.
(Note that I do use FB on my desktop machine - but I use NoScript's ABE to disable facebook.com and facebook.net scripts from running anywhere else but FB itself. Nor do I permit 3rd-party cookies. And I use Better Privacy to dispose of data BLOBs. I never permit my browser to disclose my location. Oh, and I also employ VPNUnlimited's browser extension to close off the data leakage that data miners would use to fingerprint me, if I let them.)
I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.
As it turns out, I had a Harlan moment, too.
It was at the Worldcon in St. Louis in 1969. The Heidelberg delegation threw a raging party to celebrate their city being picked as the host for the next Worldcon. Bathtub full of beer - good beer, not that Annhauser-Busch crap - genuine Absinthe, heavy on the wormwood, Goldschlager before that became a frat-boy thing, schnapps for days. It was pretty well-attended, as you might imagine, including by the underaged yours truly, and a good time was had by all...
... until Harlan showed up.
Now this was pretty much the peak of Harlan's fame. He had just won the Hugo for his short story The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, A Boy and His Dog (which had won a Hugo the previous year) was being made into a movie, based on his own screenplay, Dangerous Visions had won two years earlier (and thereby established his cred as an editor and anthologist), and The City on the Edge of Forever had taken the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation the previous year. All of that undoubtedly went to his head - as did, I suspect, a certain quantity of Bolivian marching powder, and an undoubtedly significant dosage of alcohol, as well.
So he was definitely feeling his oats when he rolled into the party with a fawning hottie on each arm. I was sitting on the floor, doing a pretty credible job of holding up the wall as they entered, close enough for me to visually confirm that neither woman was burdened by underclothing. (Ah, miniskirts - how I miss you!). Anyway, as Harlan stood there in his $800 suit, chin outthrust, clearly reveling in his status as lord of all he surveyed, and only slightly unsteady on his feet, a teenage girl with bad skin, braces, glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, a white cardigan, and a poodle skirt appeared in front of him, trembling in awe at the glory of his physical presence in the same room, a copy of Dangerous Visions clutched to her bosom.
"Oh, Mr. Ellison," she gushed, "I just love your work! I've read everything you've written. Would you please do me the honor of signing my copy of Dangerous Visions?"
Himself inspected her as if she were a particularly unappetizing invertebrate he'd discovered squirming under under a freshly-lifted rock.
"You," he announced, "are a worthless, little piece of shit. I'm here to enjoy myself, not sign autographs for the likes of you. Go the fuck away. And stay the fuck away."
That was my first lesson in why it's a bad idea to meet your heroes. That poor, dumpy girl reacted as if Harlan had punched her in the face, physically recoling from his casual viciousness; the very picture of profound public humiliation. Clutching herself in emotional pain, she scurried away, tears cataracting down her crumpled face, and vanished into the depths of the Germans' suite.
Just for a moment, I considered jumping to my feet and confronting the little prick on her behalf - but I was 17, and seriously stoned, and he was Harlan fucking Ellison... and the moment passed.
it was years before I began to forgive Harlan for that act of narcissistic cruelty. Only when I learned that he had given the late, great Theodore Sturgeon free lodging in his Mad Hatter's mansion in the L.A. hills, and paid his medical bills during his final illness did I finally, grudgingly concede that he might - just might - have some semblance of a human heart hiding within that puffin chest.
Maybe.
But I've never forgotten the way he deliberately, publicly stabbed a teenaged girl in the heart for no defensible reason. And I'm utterly certain that she has never forgotten it, either...
Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre.
-1 Disagree
As an SF writer, Pournelle was, at best, a hack. Were it not for Larry Niven, he'd be known only for his Byte column. As a writer of fiction, his prose was pedestrian, his characters one-dimensional, and his philosophy repugnant.
He was also an intolerant, alchoholic narcissist.
I know I'm going to attract a lot of hate for the above, but hear me out before you downmod me.
At an SF convention in the Bay Area, he was on a panel discussing the Reagan Star Wars initiative - and pretty strident in his advocacy of it. After the panel discussion concluded, one of the attendees approached him to engage him in debate about the program. The guy made it clear that he disagreed with Pournelle about the initiative's technical feasibility, was concerned by its projected cost, and felt that it would decrease geopolitical stability. He made his points calmly and respectfully, and he stood his ground, despite Pournelle calling him a Communist and a traitor. When he pointed out that ad hominems didn't address his factual arguments, Pournelle sucker-punched him.
I was there. I witnessed it. And whatever respect I might have had for Jerry Pournelle permanently vanished the moment he resorted to violence to silence someone who presented zero physical threat, merely because he didn't like what the man had to say.
That action is of a piece with the facsistic philosophy he espoused via his fantasy doppelganger John Christian Falkenberg, and is best exemplified by Falkenberg's "final solution" to the problem of overpopulation of the planet Hadley by involuntarily-transported convict-colonists. Falkenberg conspires to trap them in the capitol city's stadium, then orders his troopers to murder literally thousands of them - and Pournelle presents this act of mass murder with a straight face as somehow necessary, noble, and right.
It's an absolutely classic example of narcissist wish-fulfillment: treating the lives people of whose political views and power he disapproves as subhuman, and therefore legitimate targets of genocide... all for the "greater good", of course. And, because Falkenberg has the "strength" to murder thousands whose only crime is that he considers them surplus population, Pournelle presents this despicable atrocity as admirable and praiseworthy.
It turned my stomach when I read it in Analog as a 20-something, and it still revolts me today.
It was clear to me then that Pournelle desperately wanted to be Gordon R. Dickson and the Falkenberg chronicles was his attempt to re-imagine the Childe Cycle from a far-right perspective - and minus all that nauseating, limp-wristed, left-wing compassion and humanity with which Dickson insisted on spoiling his narrative. Humanity and compassion had no place in Pournelle's philosophy. To him they were unnecessary distractions that should ruthlessly be dispensed with, along with the undeserving hordes of subhuman trash.
What makes Pournelle's fiction particualrly dull is that he constantly indulged himself in polemical justifications for his principal characters' psychopathic actions by constructing antagonists who were uniformly, relentlessly unidimensional caricatures, rather than characters. No one who disagreed with what he presented as ideologically-correct attitudes, strategies, and philosophies displays ANY characteristics other than unwavering venality and profound physical cowardice. (Well, okay, I'll concede that some of them also exhibit ham-fisted duplicity, as well.) They barely even aspire to the status of straw men, much less fully-realized, three-dimensional characters complete with depth, nuance, and complexity. They are, without exception, not so much cartoons as stick figures.
Of course, the same can fairly be said of Pournelle's protagonists, so that's
Y'know, given that TFS states that 209,000 credit card numbers were compromised, I tend to think that the whole "potentially exposing the data of 143 million customers" hyperventilation is an invention of TFA's author, and that the actual number of customers whose data was exposed was 209,000 or fewer (because of the 182,000 customers' dispute data specifically mentioned thereafter, and assuming that 27,000 of those customers had two credit cards listed in their dispute files).
... except Game of Thrones. And Fargo. And Better Call Saul. And Orphan Black (although, to be strictly fair, that one's over now - just like The Sopranos, and Rome, and Penny Dreadful, and Babylon 5.). And House of Cards. And Mr. Robot. And The Venture Bros. And Archer. And Master of None. And Documentary Now! And... oh... lots of other programs nobody watches.
But you're right. There hasn't been anything worth watching since TV was invented by whoever it was that invented it. And there never will be...
I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother?
Sorry, but that's absolutely incorrect.
While Christian monasteries did, in fact, collect and preserve many ancient texts, they are FAR from our only source for such materials. Just to name three off the top of my head, there are caches such as the Dead Sea scrolls, middens such as the famous one at Oxyrhynchus, and Islamic libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. all of which preserved Greek and Roman Latin texts, exemplars of which were absent from European Christian collections.
You don't seem to actually know what you're talking about...
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a child, my family lived in the Tokyo area for a while. The first couple of years we were there, we lived in a suburban area that was pretty crowded, albeit with mostly low-rise residential and commercial properties.
Our rental house sat about halfway up a fairly steep hill, at the bottom of which was an open-air market crowded with noodle vendors and the like. When I was five, there was a pretty intense typhoon. As I recall, it rained continuously for three days - and I mean it just bucketed down to the point where it was difficult to see the houses across the one-and-a-half-lane street.
The fourth day was clear, bright, and almost cloudless, so I finally got to go outside again. I wanted to visit the marketplace, but I couldn't, because the bottom of the hill was submerged under about 10 feet of water.
So, local severe flooding is nothing new for Japan - although I have no doubt it's getting worse - and addressing it via infrastructure improvements is certainly non-trivial in a nation whose population is almost entirely urban nowadays.
(BTW - I also experienced my first major earthquake in that house. It had to have been at least a 6.5, because it lasted at least half a minute. But that's a story for another time ... )
Fortyseven opined:
Greatly dislike how this article frames opinion as fact. It keeps saying "Villeneuve does this", or "Villeneuve wanted that", but gives no source for the claims. To me, it's clear this article is just a shitty, deceptive, self-righteous way of stating one's personal observations.
I'm not going to suggesting this article is just the inevitable mainstream contrarianism when something is widely beloved, but I'm having a hard time not pulling the trigger on saying it...
Disclaimer: I have not yet seen the movie.
However, taking TFS entirely in the context of itself, I could not more completely agree with your objection to TFS. What's even worse is that TFA is uncredited. It's clearly an editorial (i.e. - "opinion") piece, but there is no attribution to an individual writer to be found.
In journalistic terms - and I hesitate to use that appellation here - it's a staff piece. Which is to say it represents the organizational opinion of Motherboard as an editorial entity, despite the fact that it's obviously one person's opinion. In other words, it's a review, not a news item, and, IMnsHO, it's a craven example of journalistic cowardice at its most distasteful.
Yes, I get that taking a giant dump on the movie's raison d'être is inevitably going to attract major flamage. That's intrinsic to film criticism - you accept that people are going to react negatively when you publish a critical review of a major motion picture, especially one that's a sequel to a universally praised and admired cult classic which set standards for every subsequent offering in the distopian future genre. Hiding behind a corporate facade is therefore a blatant act of fundamental cowardice on the part of the author, whoever he/she is.
Here's the only appropriate punishment: black-hole Motherboard. Don't visit their website (or, for that matter, any website owned by vice.com), don't click on their links, don't leave comments on their articles, or do anything else that would increase their advertising revenue. Because, folks, that, in the end, is what this is all about:
Clickbait.
So don't fall for it. Just leave them in splendid isolation to wonder, "Where'd everybody go ... ?"
TFS quotes the "Coalition for Responsible Sharing" thusly:
Sending large numbers of takedown notices on an ongoing basis will prove highly disruptive to the research community.
Translation: "If we have to send takedown notices directly to all the AUTHORS of these papers to which we claim copyright, we risk making them so resentful of us that they'll finally be sufficiently motivated to stop letting us publish their work. We can't risk killing our golden geese, so we want the courts to close down the site they're using to share their own papers, instead.
Because, profit ...
jcr snorted:
This is nothing even close to /. material.
Oh really?
a. /. supposedly is "News for nerds."
b. I'm an unashamed nerd. I'm also a night owl, I burn, rather than tan, and I suffer from "moderate" osteoarthritis. And I'm of northern European extraction (Irish, Welsh, and Prussian to be precise). For all those reasons, this interests me.
I'll bet you a shiny, new quarter I'm not alone, either ...
ptaff (who has a really low /. ID number) thundered:
Cloudflare must die. It's the ultimate cross-site tracking MITM — worse than ads and pixel beacons because there's no way around it — and its CAPTCHA mechanism makes Tor browsing a PITA.
Can't sat as I've run into any CAPTCHA challenges using TOR. Then again, I only use TOR to access TPB when some media company is paying Indian hackers to DDoS it on the non-TOR web, so what would I know?
OTOH, I had to deal with CAPTCHAs all the freakin' time when one or another shitbag bot herder was hiding behind VPNUnlimited's San Francisco proxy. I entirely understood, though. If Cloudphlegm hadn't made life difficult for VPNUnlimited's other customers (like me, for instance), they wouldn't have had much incentive to identify and ban the bot herder ...
PopeRatzo snorted:
Motorola makes money. Huawei makes money.
You're correct, of course. Three things to keep in mind, though:
a. This is tech journalism - a field wherein hacks, shills, and nincompoops are ubiquitous, and responsible, professional, actual journalists are thin on the ground.
b. The "article" in question is a "think piece", which is journalese for "my opinion disguised as a news story" (which is approximately the same thing as a column - "my opinion", only without the disguise).
c. Even the most prestigious news publications largely dispense with fact-checking these days. (It's an expense which makes no quantifiable contribution to the bottom line, so it's ipso facto dispensable, when the organization in question is run by MBAs.)
Besides, everyone's entitled to their own "alternative facts" these days, remember ... ?
The key capture here comes down to this pair of sentences (especially the second one):
ICANN also distributed software to automatically pull down and install the new KSK. Some ISPs opted to use this software, which apparently had some bugs and failed to download and install the new KSK, in some situations.
Instead of "lazy ISPs", as the headline misleadingly states, it sure appears to me that the party actually responsible for the failure of the KSK update rollout is ICANN itself.
Or is there some aspect of, "Some ISPs opted to use this software, which apparently had some bugs and failed to download and install the new KSK," that I'm misapprehending ... ?
(Added emphasis mine, of course.)
Dutch Gun observed:
It's the epitome of a first world problem, of course, but to me, it's similar to the hump on the back of the last iPhone case. That is, I'm wondering why someone near the top didn't take a look at that and say "Damn, that's kind of ugly. Apple isn't supposed to release ugly products - especially not flagship products. Let's back up and figure out something else here." Apple has always been known for a company that, whatever else they do, has always been known for its strong sense of aesthetics. It's just surprising to see that slipping a bit, at least in my view.
When Steve Jobs was in charge, he WAS Apple's "strong sense of aesthetics". He was an abusive asshole, but he was an asshole with vision, and he had the power to ensure that no Apple product was released until he, personally, was satisfied with its design. So he did. And, despite his tantrums and vicious criticism of their work, the people he hired to turn his ideas into products that met his standards worshipped the guy - because, in the end, he drove them to craft things that were both functional and beautiful ... and that, in a number of cases, actually introduced and created markets for whole new categories of high-tech products. (Think iPod and iPhone here.)
The guy who's in charge now is a supply-chain manager - basically a glorified bean counter. He has all the vision and sense of aesthetics you'd expect from an accountant, but he was at least self-aware enough to recognize his own shortcomings in that regard, and hand the product design task over to Jony Ivie, who's an actual design professional.
In business there's a thing called a "key man problem". Apple had it in spades. Now that key man is gone, and Jony Ivie, for all his undeniable talent, is neither aesthetic visionary enough, nor implacable tyrant enough to replace him ...
I observed:
Not exactly news, then ...
prompting code_monkey_steve to respond:
"If it's news to us, it's news to you."
The thing is, though, I read this story on Phys.org back in (wait for it) August.
So, it's not exactly news - to me ...
Not exactly news, then ...
blithely misspoke:
For those who haven't seen it before, the phrase "bete noire" is from the French language. "Noire" means "black", as in the color. "Bete" means "penis".
Mmm ... no. You're correct about the definition of "noire" and profoundly incorrect regarding the word "bête":
Here's one source's definition of "bête".
As you can see, it best translates to English as "beast". Nor is the above the only authority for that definition.
It may well be that "bête" is also a French slang term for penis, but that is not its primary meaning ...
slashdot_commentator commented:
Gravitational wave??? That's a freaking lame excuse for slashdot to go down!
First it went down. Then it went up ...
jetkust wondered:
When you search for a company or website on google there is an advertisement for it right above the search result taking you directly to the web site you were looking for. I always click on the search result because clicking on an ad is just weird to me, even though they both likely take me to the same spot. But what is the point of buying an ad like this if they are already trying to get to your site in the first place? Why convince someone to do something they are already doing? Are they afraid another company is going to buy the search ad and someone is going to randomly click on another website instead of the one they were specifically looking for?
The link in the ad does not take you "directly" to the website for which you were searching. Instead, it takes you there by a roundabout route. Here's the URL for the ad that the search string "procter and gamble" generates:
https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk?sa=L&ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw&ohost=www.google.com&cid=CAESEeD2JLJzL1dBgUZFbmBGP-fz&sig=AOD64_3I39rwK0_DYxkNqTS1PJcvi8-iYg&q=&ved=0ahUKEwi42ZGrkavWAhVoxlQKHWkNCfwQ0QwIJQ&adurl=
Note that the url in question begins with "https://www.googleadservices.com/pagead/aclk". That's a call to googleadservices.com, which is google's central advertising hub, alerting it that a pagead has been clicked.
The next bit is "&ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw&ohost=www.google.com", which tells googleadservices to employ the script at "ai=DChcSEwing5erkavWAhUCl34KHRC6B2kYABAAGgJwYw", and that the request is originating from google.com. The "ai=" part might mean "advertising insight", or "artificial intelligence", or even "acknowledge immediately". I dunno - you'd have to ask one of google's advertising engine programmers (and they a are notoriously closed-mouth crew).
The "&cid=CAESEeD2JLJzL1dBgUZFbmBGP-fz" string which follows is clearly an identifier for the "client ID", or the Universe really is entirely devoid of meaning or logic. (YMMV. Or, y'know, not.)
That, in turn, is followed by "&sig=AOD64_3I39rwK0_DYxkNqTS1PJcvi8-iYg", which is pretty obviously a digital signature, probably included to prevent clickjackers from gaming google's revenue stream - or because google just likes to admire its own signature. (My own bet would be on security, rather than self-regard, btw.)
Finally, we have "&q=&ved=0ahUKEwi42ZGrkavWAhVoxlQKHWkNCfwQ0QwIJQ", followed by "&adurl=", the first part of which looks like a query string to me, with the last bit pointing to a null value. My guess is that, absent an actual value for "&adurl=", it causes the AI to redirect your browser to the client's default URL, per their contract with googleadservices. (Again, contents are packed by weight, not volume, and some settling may occur during shipping.)
Contrast all that with the non-ad link that the search string "procter and gamble" generates, which is simply "http://us.pg.com/".
In other words, "It's all about the Benjamins."
You're welcome ...
American AC in Paris noted:
This is *really* cool science, but "paradigm shifting" may be a touch over the top--this isn't the first paper or study to come to the conclusion that Toxo plays a role in neurological disorders, and there are labs around the globe that have been working on this topic for years.
Yep:
and those are just the top three scholarly articles for a google search for "toxplasmosis rat behavior". The parent page for each of those articles links to other, related studies, as well - but the Bermoy, Webster, and Macdonald study from 2000 appears to be the first. So, no, not exactly ground-breaking, and definitely not a paradigm changer, either.
Anybody remember Stanley Prusiner (hint: he won pretty much every award there is to win in medicine - including the Nobel - for his work establishing the existence, transmissibility, and neurodegenerative impact of prions)? Remember how respected authorities in medicine laughed at him ... ?
LordWabbit2 observed:
Well Robert Jordan dropped dead before he finished The Wheel of Time, and it got finished anyway (and IMHO the last couple of books are better, but then I like Brandon Sanderson's writing). What annoyed me the most is that while he was still alive (and with WOT unfinished) he started writing prequels! Very annoying, but then I don't think he knew how to finish off his own series, if that is the case then even bigger kudos to Sanderson.
Which is all very well and good - except the Culture novels aren't a series in the sense that there's a master story arc. Although there are references to the Idirian War from the first one, Consider Phlebus, the subsequent books are each stand-alone stories (except for Player of Games, which is a collection of novelletes). The only thing that connects them is that each one involves Special Circumstances, the Culture's version of the CIA.
Because of his writing method - all his first drafts were written longhand, on legal pads - Banks left behind no notes or outlines for additional books. What he wrote during his life is all we have.
Not that I'm complaining, mind you. I'm exceedingly grateful that Banks shared this planet with me - and that he gave me and everyone else the gift of so much wonderful writing.
I like a lot of his non-SF fiction, too, btw. There are some that are weaker than others - The Steep Approach to Garbadale springs to mind in that regard - but they're all very different from each other, and I like that a great deal. And, hey, he did write one of the best rock'n'roll novels of all time: Espedair Street.
I recommend it ...
I just started reading Iain M. Banks' final Culture novel The Hydrogen Sonata. I'd been putting it off since he announced his cancer diagnosis and impending death, because ... well, because there just weren't going to be any more of them. Ever. And that was just unbearably sad to me.
But now that my own health has become so problematic, I realized that I might very well wind up depriving myself of what was pretty much guaranteed to be a great read by one of my all-time SF authors. So, what the hell.
It's very entertaining, btw. There's lots of Shipmind snarkiness, a plucky, if reluctant heroine, more than a touch of the old ultra-violence, and an impenetrable fog of murky political machinations on the part of a race on the verge of Subliming, all set to the constant backbeat of Banks' impish sense of humor. (I think the whole concept of the Antagonistic Undecagon - a cumbersome musical instrument which follows the four-armed heroine around, despite her best efforts to lose it - is hilarious, especially because I'm trying to teach myself to play violin, at the moment.)
I'd give it two thumbs way up, if I wasn't so busy typing right now ...
Snotnose challenged:
Tell me a phone that doesn't have Facebook pre-installed, and you can't delete it.
Well, there's the Nexus 6, for instance. Mine - which I bought new - didn't come with Facebook pre-installed. And it still doesn't have it, because Mark Zuckerberg's data-stalking machine can fuck ALL the way off, as far as I'm concerned.
(Note that I do use FB on my desktop machine - but I use NoScript's ABE to disable facebook.com and facebook.net scripts from running anywhere else but FB itself. Nor do I permit 3rd-party cookies. And I use Better Privacy to dispose of data BLOBs. I never permit my browser to disclose my location. Oh, and I also employ VPNUnlimited's browser extension to close off the data leakage that data miners would use to fingerprint me, if I let them.)
But, you were saying ... ?
slaker observed:
I really wish this were modded up. I've been active in various parts of literary SF fandom for a some time and while I can't say I have had any direct interaction with him, I've heard more Jerry Pournelle horror stories than any two other writers, even when one of them is Harlan Ellison.
As it turns out, I had a Harlan moment, too.
It was at the Worldcon in St. Louis in 1969. The Heidelberg delegation threw a raging party to celebrate their city being picked as the host for the next Worldcon. Bathtub full of beer - good beer, not that Annhauser-Busch crap - genuine Absinthe, heavy on the wormwood, Goldschlager before that became a frat-boy thing, schnapps for days. It was pretty well-attended, as you might imagine, including by the underaged yours truly, and a good time was had by all ...
... until Harlan showed up.
Now this was pretty much the peak of Harlan's fame. He had just won the Hugo for his short story The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, A Boy and His Dog (which had won a Hugo the previous year) was being made into a movie, based on his own screenplay, Dangerous Visions had won two years earlier (and thereby established his cred as an editor and anthologist), and The City on the Edge of Forever had taken the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation the previous year. All of that undoubtedly went to his head - as did, I suspect, a certain quantity of Bolivian marching powder, and an undoubtedly significant dosage of alcohol, as well.
So he was definitely feeling his oats when he rolled into the party with a fawning hottie on each arm. I was sitting on the floor, doing a pretty credible job of holding up the wall as they entered, close enough for me to visually confirm that neither woman was burdened by underclothing. (Ah, miniskirts - how I miss you!). Anyway, as Harlan stood there in his $800 suit, chin outthrust, clearly reveling in his status as lord of all he surveyed, and only slightly unsteady on his feet, a teenage girl with bad skin, braces, glasses with Coke-bottle lenses, a white cardigan, and a poodle skirt appeared in front of him, trembling in awe at the glory of his physical presence in the same room, a copy of Dangerous Visions clutched to her bosom.
"Oh, Mr. Ellison," she gushed, "I just love your work! I've read everything you've written. Would you please do me the honor of signing my copy of Dangerous Visions?"
Himself inspected her as if she were a particularly unappetizing invertebrate he'd discovered squirming under under a freshly-lifted rock.
"You," he announced, "are a worthless, little piece of shit. I'm here to enjoy myself, not sign autographs for the likes of you. Go the fuck away. And stay the fuck away."
That was my first lesson in why it's a bad idea to meet your heroes. That poor, dumpy girl reacted as if Harlan had punched her in the face, physically recoling from his casual viciousness; the very picture of profound public humiliation. Clutching herself in emotional pain, she scurried away, tears cataracting down her crumpled face, and vanished into the depths of the Germans' suite.
Just for a moment, I considered jumping to my feet and confronting the little prick on her behalf - but I was 17, and seriously stoned, and he was Harlan fucking Ellison ... and the moment passed.
it was years before I began to forgive Harlan for that act of narcissistic cruelty. Only when I learned that he had given the late, great Theodore Sturgeon free lodging in his Mad Hatter's mansion in the L.A. hills, and paid his medical bills during his final illness did I finally, grudgingly concede that he might - just might - have some semblance of a human heart hiding within that puffin chest.
Maybe.
But I've never forgotten the way he deliberately, publicly stabbed a teenaged girl in the heart for no defensible reason. And I'm utterly certain that she has never forgotten it, either ...
mykepredko enthused:
Take a look in the Sci-Fi section of Amazon or a local bookstore. Mr. Pournelle made some terrific contributions to the genre.
-1 Disagree
As an SF writer, Pournelle was, at best, a hack. Were it not for Larry Niven, he'd be known only for his Byte column. As a writer of fiction, his prose was pedestrian, his characters one-dimensional, and his philosophy repugnant.
He was also an intolerant, alchoholic narcissist.
I know I'm going to attract a lot of hate for the above, but hear me out before you downmod me.
At an SF convention in the Bay Area, he was on a panel discussing the Reagan Star Wars initiative - and pretty strident in his advocacy of it. After the panel discussion concluded, one of the attendees approached him to engage him in debate about the program. The guy made it clear that he disagreed with Pournelle about the initiative's technical feasibility, was concerned by its projected cost, and felt that it would decrease geopolitical stability. He made his points calmly and respectfully, and he stood his ground, despite Pournelle calling him a Communist and a traitor. When he pointed out that ad hominems didn't address his factual arguments, Pournelle sucker-punched him.
I was there. I witnessed it. And whatever respect I might have had for Jerry Pournelle permanently vanished the moment he resorted to violence to silence someone who presented zero physical threat, merely because he didn't like what the man had to say.
That action is of a piece with the facsistic philosophy he espoused via his fantasy doppelganger John Christian Falkenberg, and is best exemplified by Falkenberg's "final solution" to the problem of overpopulation of the planet Hadley by involuntarily-transported convict-colonists. Falkenberg conspires to trap them in the capitol city's stadium, then orders his troopers to murder literally thousands of them - and Pournelle presents this act of mass murder with a straight face as somehow necessary, noble, and right.
It's an absolutely classic example of narcissist wish-fulfillment: treating the lives people of whose political views and power he disapproves as subhuman, and therefore legitimate targets of genocide ... all for the "greater good", of course. And, because Falkenberg has the "strength" to murder thousands whose only crime is that he considers them surplus population, Pournelle presents this despicable atrocity as admirable and praiseworthy.
It turned my stomach when I read it in Analog as a 20-something, and it still revolts me today.
It was clear to me then that Pournelle desperately wanted to be Gordon R. Dickson and the Falkenberg chronicles was his attempt to re-imagine the Childe Cycle from a far-right perspective - and minus all that nauseating, limp-wristed, left-wing compassion and humanity with which Dickson insisted on spoiling his narrative. Humanity and compassion had no place in Pournelle's philosophy. To him they were unnecessary distractions that should ruthlessly be dispensed with, along with the undeserving hordes of subhuman trash.
What makes Pournelle's fiction particualrly dull is that he constantly indulged himself in polemical justifications for his principal characters' psychopathic actions by constructing antagonists who were uniformly, relentlessly unidimensional caricatures, rather than characters. No one who disagreed with what he presented as ideologically-correct attitudes, strategies, and philosophies displays ANY characteristics other than unwavering venality and profound physical cowardice. (Well, okay, I'll concede that some of them also exhibit ham-fisted duplicity, as well.) They barely even aspire to the status of straw men, much less fully-realized, three-dimensional characters complete with depth, nuance, and complexity. They are, without exception, not so much cartoons as stick figures.
Of course, the same can fairly be said of Pournelle's protagonists, so that's
RockDoctor commented:
I refer the honourable gentleman to my comment three messages upthread.
Agreed!
Y'know, given that TFS states that 209,000 credit card numbers were compromised, I tend to think that the whole "potentially exposing the data of 143 million customers" hyperventilation is an invention of TFA's author, and that the actual number of customers whose data was exposed was 209,000 or fewer (because of the 182,000 customers' dispute data specifically mentioned thereafter, and assuming that 27,000 of those customers had two credit cards listed in their dispute files).
I'm just sayin' ...
NicknameUnavailable predicted:,/p>
More likely it will be an excuse to give everyone chips.
I like the wavy kind ...
bobbied snorted:
There is still nothing worth watching on...
Yeah, nothing to see here ...
... except Game of Thrones. And Fargo. And Better Call Saul. And Orphan Black (although, to be strictly fair, that one's over now - just like The Sopranos, and Rome, and Penny Dreadful, and Babylon 5.). And House of Cards. And Mr. Robot. And The Venture Bros. And Archer. And Master of None. And Documentary Now! And ... oh ... lots of other programs nobody watches.
But you're right. There hasn't been anything worth watching since TV was invented by whoever it was that invented it. And there never will be ...
JoshuaZ claimed:,/p>
I suppose one could point out to the person who is making comments about Christianity that in fact Christianity was responsible for the preservation of many texts from other religions and cultures and that of what we have of classical Greek and Roman literature is due purely to the preservation by monks, but why bother?
Sorry, but that's absolutely incorrect.
While Christian monasteries did, in fact, collect and preserve many ancient texts, they are FAR from our only source for such materials. Just to name three off the top of my head, there are caches such as the Dead Sea scrolls, middens such as the famous one at Oxyrhynchus, and Islamic libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. all of which preserved Greek and Roman Latin texts, exemplars of which were absent from European Christian collections.
You don't seem to actually know what you're talking about ...
bugs2squash explained:
It's not another language, it's just scribes writing random things over the old text a million times to obscure what was originally there.
Somebody mod parent +1 Funny, please ... !