But the deployment of 'morally gray' forms of high-tech crowd control [...] creates a new purpose for
these relatively easily assembled devices.
No, it creates a new purpose for the second amendment to the US constitution.
Until a few people die to demonstrate that we won't put up with casual torture via tasers, sound
cannons, pain rays, and what-have-you, the police will continue to use such technologies on the populace
for increasingly trivial reasons. We've already seen them go from "nonlethal defense" to promoting
"compliance" to merely enforcing obsequious levels of civility... And now, merely to clear the streets in
blatant violation of another of our rights (the first).
Can't say I have the balls to put myself in the firing line, but I predict another "Kent State" within the next
few years.
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
How on earth do you expect the average cyclist to travel at 45mph?!
I don't. I expect them to stay off such roads and stick to nice slow residential back roads.
It is perfectly legal for a cyclist to travel at 5mph
"Legal" doesn't make it any less obnoxious.
if you can't cope with that situation calmly and safely, then you shouldn't be driving.
I can revile someone without it negating my ability to "cope" with the situation. But every additional
situation that drivers need to cope with increases the odds of them having hit the one-too-many
level.
Now, you can defend your right to go 20 under the speed limit (though highways do have posted,
if rarely enforced, minimums), but I would ask you to seriously (and not even hostily, just as a point of fact)
consider your position as a biker... A 150lbs lump of meat on top of a 2d trapezoid with wheels, vs a 3000lbs partially
armored 110KW mobile power plant. Liability and theoretical ability to "cope" aside, if for no other
reason than self-preservation, who do you think "wins" when one or both parties fail their saving throw in that
matchup?
Re:And yet they do nothing to discourage the car
on
The Fresca Rebellion
·
· Score: 5, Informative
I've heard tons of stories from cyclists in the US detailing how people in vehicles purposely
drive as close as possible to them, cut them off, throw things at them etc.
First, I agree with you in spirit... I fully believe that the US having such poor pedestrian and cycling
accommodations largely ties in with the current obesity epidemic (though I would point out that the latter
doesn't exist solely as a US phenomenon).
That said, you have to understand that American cyclists, for the most part, ride like complete
assholes. Despite a legal obligation to obey the exact same rules of the road as cars, they completely
ignore 99% of those rules. They don't feel a need to obey speed limits (in either direction - They'll
blow through a 15mph zone as fast as their bike can go, and they'll crawl along in a 45mph zone as though
on a leisurely ride in the park). They routinely ignore traffic signals, running red lights and stop signs
whenever convenient. They make no strong distinction between "road", "median", and "sidewalk", using whichever
will get them to their destination quickest (ie, they'll pass a half mile line of cars in the right shoulder,
only to proceed to run the light at the intersection all those cars have waited for). I've actually had my
mirror clipped by a cyclist trying to squeeze up to a light between two lanes of traffic (and the bastard
had the nerve to try to accuse me of queuing up at the light too close to the other lane!).
Now, as with any generalization, this doesn't hold true of all cyclists. But I've seen a hell of a lot
more of them behaving as I describe above, than I have obeying traffic laws. When you wonder why Americans
generally hold cyclists in low regard, you now have your answer.
I could accept the same argument for just about anything else, but a liquid?
Evolutionarily, our bodies "expect" exactly one substance to enter our bodies when we drink - Water. And water has no
calories.
That does segue into one of my own objections to the topic, however...
"there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods"...
Well, yeah! I started drinking diet soda (despite a preference for real sugared sodas) primarily because I don't
prefer the sugared version enough to give up literally one meal a day to offset the calories. What next, will they regulate
going to the gym because of "concerns" that people might actually exercise solely so they can have an extra serving of dessert
after dinner?
I don't eat more as a result of diet sodas... I just don't have to eat less.
Instead of people choosing their foods based on preference, we'll have politicians
picking our foods based on how much money is contributed to their campaigns!
Clearly, then, we need to ensure Food Neutrality to prevent exactly that problem!
Y'know, I have one major point against ideas like this (okay, I have a lot of points against it, but one that
really bothers me, as beyond my personal control)...
What counts as a "strike"?
I know the obvious smartass response of "anything the RIAA/MPAA wants", but in practice... Let's even say, for
the sake of argument, that "they" can 100% reliably detect when I download something copyrighted. We then have a
problem in that everything (in the past 75 or so years, varying a bit by country) has a copyright on it. When I
visit the totally legit New York Times website, I have downloaded copyrighted material. When I buy a song on iTunes, I have
downloaded copyrighted material.
So now we need the qualifier of "unauthorized", which becomes much more subjective. Who can authorize me?
If I have Trent Reznor in my office and he tells me to grab a copy of his latest unreleased album off Kazaa, then
I have "authorization" from the artist himself. Yet my ISP has no way of knowing that.
Okay, too unrealisitc? How about MySpace, which Ms. "Can't even write her own anti-piracy rant and has to steal it"
Allen used to great effect to promote her own career... Any moron can upload tracks there, even under
the band's name (if the band didn't already think to make an account). How can the ISP ever know which
count as legit and which don't? For that matter, how can we know the difference?
So yeah, I have a problem with effectively taking away my primary means of communication with the rest of the
world, by force of a law that I can't accurately know whether or not I've violated.
Call it overly dramatic, but I don't think the courts realize yet that for anyone under 40, depriving them of
internet access amounts to a "dead to our entire peer group" sentence. Just wait, we will see people
going on mass killing sprees over this.
And how many browsers users could practically choose from back then?
Because "years ahead" doesn't in any way imply... Oh, I dunno, no comparable alternatives, regardless of whether talking
about 1994 or today?
If you came out with anything literally (as opposed to the "marketing-speak-BS" version of the same phrase)
"years ahead of the competition", you would by definition have no other products to choose from in that market.
If someone came out with a real human-brain-quality AI package that runs on your home PC tomorrow, would you complain that
it didn't count as "successful" because Dragon Naturally Speaking didn't present enough of a market challenge to it?
Since TFA says the study looked at 52 million children over 12 years, it sounds fairly reasonable to
suggest that error bars are relatively small w.r.t atleast the primary max an min.
With an n of 52 million, those charts do include error bars - They fall about +/- a thousandth of a pixel
around each plotted point. The pixels themselves just cover the error bars.
As for the Y-offset... Yes, you can use that to dishonestly highlight minor difference. When you have such small
differences in your dependent variable, however, as long as you make the Y axis entirely clear to the reader, it
merely serves to save the viewer a trip to find a magnifying glass.
Basically, if you had a series that showed some degree of noisy periodicity and you zoomed/cropped in on one
section that appears to prove your point, it counts as dishonest. When you have virtually no error and a trend
that looks like cookie-cutter copies from year to year - I'd love to see the p values for this, but I'd bet it would
require scientific notation to realistically print (ie, on the order of p <= 10^-12).
No, it's the other way around. You proved GP's point. Netscape had no competition until IE5.
It was either Netscape, or AOL
You realize, of course, that MSIE had a v1.0? Which debuted a mere 8 months after Netscape v1.0?
Netscape almost instantly destroyed Mosaic and everything else that came before it, and held their
position for five years, despite Microsoft doing their damnedest to overthrow them for over four of
those years.
If somebody shipped a browser as crash-prone as Netscape was today, it wouldn't matter if it was three years
ahead of the competition. People would play with it for a bit, and then use something stable.
Um, no, you just disproved your own point.
Netscape did deliver a browser years ahead of the competition... And in all its crash-prone, flawed
glory, people loved it. It took the web from a geeky novelty to a mainstream phenomenon. Not until
MSIE 5 came out, a full five years after the first version of Netscape Navigator, did Netscape finally fall
below 50% usage.
So the moral here? Beating your competition matters more than elegance - But having a viable business plan
matters even more.;)
Ever flown through Ireland, not even as a final destination? It's worse than any American customs stop I've been through.
Um, yeah - About three months ago, actually. We got off our plane, followed the signs around this amazingly convoluted set of hallways
to the passport-check area, only to find...
No one there.
Waited about five minutes, figuring someone had gone to the bathroom, and didn't see a single uniformed person (got passed by
plenty of people walking right on through without even pausing, though).
So, we walked through and onto our connecting flight.
Granted, we went from one "secure" area to another, so I really didn't see the need to go through customs at all, but literally, we
merely walked past an unattended desk. Simple as that.
Firewire would have been officially dead years ago if the claims of USB 2.0 were true.
Firewire did die years ago, despite the by-no-means-insignificant shortcomings of USB2.
Yes, I have a number of devices around the house with firewire ports... Two PCs, a laptop, an external
HDD, my phone, a digital camcorder... I even have a cable or two by which I could connect them. But everything[*] I
might ever want to connect to my computer has a USB port, and one hydra-ended connector means I never need to
search for a cable.
As for speed, comparable. CPU overhead, comparable (FW fans will defend it as having a lower
overhead, but that holds true only if you don't mind uncorrected packet loss... Great for streaming
audio/video, deplorable for any form of reliable data transfer such as an HDD).
* - The one exception to the above, the digital camcorder I mentioned only supports firewire for video out. And it
doesn't support error correction. Let me tell you, trying to get artifact-free video off that thing makes
a root canal sound fun. Best way I found, dump it (at least) twice, scan for broken packets, and then (manually) splice together
unbroken runs from the two dumps. Serious PITA - Thanks for yet another piece of crap, Sony.
Um, how did his claim count as fraud? He made (at least) 3.2 million selling his "program". So surely others could manage
the claimed "six figures" doing the same thing, no? Thus, no fraud. His system worked, simple as that.
Granted, the end-product may (or may not - He may have said nothing more complex than "sell everything and bury your cash in
the back yard") have violated a law or two, but he didn't actually sell the "asset protection" service, he sold educational material
on how to hide assets. And he didn't really even do that, according to the FTC, he sold lessons on how
to sell educational material on how to hide assets.
Seriously, how many layers of indirection do you have to toss in before it stops counting as a crime?
If I convince you to pay me $20 to tell you where you can find bomb-making instructions, then send you
off to the library after you pay up... Have I committed a crime?
No, it is not simply like charging him to buy the lock that had been missing. If you
entered someone's home uninvited and deliberately or accidentally caused substantial cost
and damage to the homeowner, you should be liable for your actions.
I know, right?
Like last week, these kids walked uninvited across my lawn, and caused substantial damage to a number of blades of grass!
And then to add insult to injury, their damned irresponsible parents just couldn't grasp their liability to pony up
for the slab, four walls, roof, and two garage doors to "repair" the space their crotch-fruit just casually trespassed
across!
Sure, some scofflaws would point out that I didn't have a whole garage there to start with, so why should
they have to pay for the rest? But hey, I had the good solid dirt underneath a future-garage, at least.
I think the last one is very important: I want to know whether I'm eating Greek feta or other "white cheese"
Why? Feta I'll admit makes a bad example for my stance, because what most Americans think of as feta
has almost nothing to do with its namesake (hell, most commercial ones use cow milk). But in my area, I know
of a number of local cheesemakers who produce sheepsmilk feta every bit as "real" as anything you'd get from
Greece. If the same product, why does the "where" matter?
Or to reduce the problem to the level of absurdity, if a Greek cheesemaker moved to the US, imported his small
flock of sheep, fed them imported Greek grasses, and made cheese from their milk using the same starter culture
his family has kept for generations... Why does that not count as "feta" in every meaningful sense of the name?
And before you call this unrealistic, with the exception of importing the grasses, most of the regionally-named
products we could discuss in this context came from very similar situations - An immigrant makes a food from
his culture, calls it by the correct name, and finds a market exists for it in his new country.
If you feel like this, you should have no problem with only Champagne region sparkling wines
being called Champagne - you can just choose any sparkling wine that you prefer and ignore the
name. For those of us who like to make the distinction, it's good to have the power of the EU
on our side.
If always as simple and descriptive an alternative as "sparkling wine" existed, we might not
have this discussion (Though I still see no compelling reason not to call it "champagne" unless
it actually materially differs).
With other products, however, this gets a whole lot trickier. Simple example, cheddar vs
gloucester (or really just about any hard aged cow-milk cheeses). Describe those
in three or fewer words that unambiguously convey the contents, as distinct from every other
similar hard aged cow-milk cheese. I couldn't do it, and consider myself something of a connoisseur
(sorry, "a person of discriminating taste" - Wouldn't want to usurp a label from some unknown region
of France) of them.
Sort of like how the labels on cigarettes have made them.
Perhaps not the best example of a warning-label success story... In Canada they started putting grisly
pictures of various smoking-related diseases on the packs, and people collected the damned things
like kids with Pokemon cards.
Warning labels for the most part just annoy people, precisely because of their
ubiquity, and for the stupidest of reasons. Yes, I want to know when normal use of a
product will turn my bones into jello. I really don't care, however, if making Californian
rats eat/drink/breathe nothing else for six months gave them erectile disfunction.
You sound like a programmer who is completely ignorant of how legal systems work.
He sounds like a programmer who has seen how the legal system works.
Laws aren't written like "if photo.is_manipulated() then display_disclaimer() end".
Nope, you have that 100% true - Because that would give a nice, easy, objective test of guilt.
Instead, the law will describe 200 different varieties of manipulation, which the advertising
industry will neatly get around ("Well, it didn't explicitly ban radioactive waste to give the
subject a healthy glow"), while semi-pro photographers fear for their freedom if they
dare to sell a decent shot to a local paper. It will include zero funding for enforcement but
allow police to charge high-end cameras with a crime and thereby keep them. It will accidentally
outlaw Gimp (but of course they'd never enforce that, wink-wink-nudge-nudge) but not
Photoshop because of some obscure detail in their JPEG compression
implementations. And finally, just for good measure, it will provide 50 billion dollars to
build stronger levees in Nevada (or the French equivalent, I suppose).
This sounds suspiciously like a whining threat, rather than a fact.
Threat, fact, whatever you want to call it, doesn't much matter.
If a company/executive/manager/teamleader treats their employees like crap, those employees
will consider their options. For any halfway-decent employees, their options will
include "get the hell out of Dodge" (no pun on Nissan from TFA intended).
Sure, only the best-of-the-best can walk on a moment's notice and pick their job of choice the
next day, but all but the worst-of-the-worst can start seriously looking and find something else
within a few months.
How does the author know what fraction of admins leave in a situation like this?
I don't think he intended it as a statement of hard statistics, just mentioning a basic attribute
of human behavior - People will only put up with so much.
As an aside, I would point out that the options open to those actually trapped in their
jobs should appeal even less to any company - Sloppy work because they just don't care;
Deliberately reduced output (though nothing bad enough to outright fire someone over); Perhaps
even going so far as to deliberately sabotage projects in a way no one could ever "blame"
them for (in most IT-related fields, we have options to do exactly that literally dozens of times
per day, most untraceable and almost always excusable as legitimate oversight). Having someone
tell you to go fuck yourself and walk out counts as the best option (short of actually
treating people like people rather than as interchangeable robots which exist solely to do your
bidding), in most cases.
I would not mind seeing where Slashdot stands on that issue
I can't speak for all of Slashdot, but I expect I share the opinion of most Slashdotters...
If someone can make a product identical to that from a given region (within the range of tolerances
exhibited by that region itself), then they should have every right to call a spade a spade.
Feta, bourbon, scotch, champagne, whatever. The end product matters, not the location.
Now, in some cases, the location has historically determined the quality of the product, for
various reasons... Scotch,
for example, just doesn't turn out right without the cool wet summers and extremely mild winters
that the Northern UK gets; Many French cheeses depend on the fungal spores and/or bacteria naturally present in
the soil there. Modern technology can often correct for such reasons, however - Again with Scotch, the
Japanese have nearly perfected a way of artificially controlling the environment that gives a
product well within the range of "real" Scotch whiskey.
So basically... Results matter. Names don't, beyond letting me know what the package contains.
And "where" does not count as part of "what".
Problem: Kids don't wear watches. Don't wear them, don'y have them, don't want them, don't need them.
Solution: All cellphones include GPS functionality built-in. Kids do want cellphones, and a good number already have them.
And, many cell carriers even have services that allow parents to locate children on their plans.
/ must not rant about idiot helicopter parents, must not rant about idiot helicopter parents, must not rant about idiot helicopter parents...
Dark matter and dark energy aren't just theories that a bunch of arrogant pricks pulled out of their asses.
Ummm, actually...
We have absolutely no direct evidence of either.
We have numerous alternative theories that explain, without resorting to saying the universe
consists of 96% invisible voodoo, various anomalies such as gravitational rotation and the implied
anisotropy of the CMB.
Keep in mind that until last week, we had no direct evidence of something so basic to
modern physics as the Bohr model; before that, we had "hooked" atoms dating back to (at least)
Epicurus. Theories come and go, and without reproducible, experimental evidence, we have at best a
model that fits the data - NOT, as far too many people seem to believe, a necessarily accurate
description of objective reality.
I find it amazing that people who haven't even bothered to study the data or the reason for hypotheses like dark
matter feel the need to make ass backwards comments about people who've literally dedicated their lives to it.
The GP said no such thing. He merely hypothesized, and not without some basis in fact, that a dead fish
may well still have neural activity. Keep in mind, for several hours after death-of-the-whole (depending on
the cause, of course), the vast majority of cells in the body still work just fine.
Now, if he had said something like "how do we know gravel doesn't have neural impulses", I would agree with your
position; but we so poorly understand "death" that your ridicule reflects worse on you than on your target.
Yeah - It makes a hardlink to the file in question rather than actually copying it.
This takes advantage of the normal behavior of rsync (unless you explicitly tell it otherwise), where
it writes to a temporary file before moving that file in place of the original - Which in the case
of a hardlink, breaks the link rather than overwriting the original file.
So you effectively end up with a "snapshot" of any files that did change, and no wasted
space (beyond the inode entry) for those that didn't (you can prove this to yourself fairly
quickly, if you have doubts).
Incidentally, I agree that using FS-level differential snapshotting provides a much more elegant
solution... But personally, I've had problems with LVM, and ZFS doesn't come stock on any older
Linux distros (and that I know of, none of the rest that do come standard support snapshotting).
EXT2 has supported hardlinks back into the days of antiquity, however, so the "cp -al" trick will
work on just about any Linux box you touch.
You may want to check out rdiff-backup also. It produces a mirror like rsync, and uses a similar algorithm,
but keeps reverse binary diffs in a separate directory so you can restore to previous states.
Seriously people, learn the tools you have available on any stock Linux system.
Even assuming you run a much older system with an FS that doesn't support
online snapshotting... "cp -al <source> <destination>". Period.
Don't use rsync to make backups. Because you don't just want to backup against spontaneous combustion - inevitably, there
will be accidental deletions and the like occurring in your studio.
rsync actually includes an option to make hardlinked snapshots as part of the syncing process, nowadays.
Personally, I don't trust it and always do that part manually, then let rsync do what it does best... But
yeah, even "vanilla" rsync contains exactly the functionality you mention.
First of all, I love linux. Use it for my own file servers, and media machines, and routers, and pretty much everything
except desktops.
That said...
For your task, I would probably just build an exact duplicate of the "real" machine and sync them nightly. Always keep in mind that
if you have no way to quickly recover from a disaster, you don't actually have a backup.
That said, and if possible, I would also build the "backup" machine with more storage than the "real" machine. As someone
else pointed out, you'll probably discover within a few days that your food-chain-superiors have no concept of "redundancy"
vs "backup" vs "I can arbitrarily roll my files back to any second in the past 28 years". Having at least nightly snapshotting,
unless your entire dataset changes rapidly, won't eat much extra disk space but will make you sleep ever so much better.
Slashdot Mirror
But the deployment of 'morally gray' forms of high-tech crowd control [...] creates a new purpose for these relatively easily assembled devices.
No, it creates a new purpose for the second amendment to the US constitution.
Until a few people die to demonstrate that we won't put up with casual torture via tasers, sound cannons, pain rays, and what-have-you, the police will continue to use such technologies on the populace for increasingly trivial reasons. We've already seen them go from "nonlethal defense" to promoting "compliance" to merely enforcing obsequious levels of civility... And now, merely to clear the streets in blatant violation of another of our rights (the first).
Can't say I have the balls to put myself in the firing line, but I predict another "Kent State" within the next few years.
How on earth do you expect the average cyclist to travel at 45mph?!
I don't. I expect them to stay off such roads and stick to nice slow residential back roads.
It is perfectly legal for a cyclist to travel at 5mph
"Legal" doesn't make it any less obnoxious.
if you can't cope with that situation calmly and safely, then you shouldn't be driving.
I can revile someone without it negating my ability to "cope" with the situation. But every additional situation that drivers need to cope with increases the odds of them having hit the one-too-many level.
Now, you can defend your right to go 20 under the speed limit (though highways do have posted, if rarely enforced, minimums), but I would ask you to seriously (and not even hostily, just as a point of fact) consider your position as a biker... A 150lbs lump of meat on top of a 2d trapezoid with wheels, vs a 3000lbs partially armored 110KW mobile power plant. Liability and theoretical ability to "cope" aside, if for no other reason than self-preservation, who do you think "wins" when one or both parties fail their saving throw in that matchup?
I've heard tons of stories from cyclists in the US detailing how people in vehicles purposely drive as close as possible to them, cut them off, throw things at them etc.
First, I agree with you in spirit... I fully believe that the US having such poor pedestrian and cycling accommodations largely ties in with the current obesity epidemic (though I would point out that the latter doesn't exist solely as a US phenomenon).
That said, you have to understand that American cyclists, for the most part, ride like complete assholes. Despite a legal obligation to obey the exact same rules of the road as cars, they completely ignore 99% of those rules. They don't feel a need to obey speed limits (in either direction - They'll blow through a 15mph zone as fast as their bike can go, and they'll crawl along in a 45mph zone as though on a leisurely ride in the park). They routinely ignore traffic signals, running red lights and stop signs whenever convenient. They make no strong distinction between "road", "median", and "sidewalk", using whichever will get them to their destination quickest (ie, they'll pass a half mile line of cars in the right shoulder, only to proceed to run the light at the intersection all those cars have waited for). I've actually had my mirror clipped by a cyclist trying to squeeze up to a light between two lanes of traffic (and the bastard had the nerve to try to accuse me of queuing up at the light too close to the other lane!).
Now, as with any generalization, this doesn't hold true of all cyclists. But I've seen a hell of a lot more of them behaving as I describe above, than I have obeying traffic laws. When you wonder why Americans generally hold cyclists in low regard, you now have your answer.
Diet sodas make your body expect energy.
Why?
I could accept the same argument for just about anything else, but a liquid?
Evolutionarily, our bodies "expect" exactly one substance to enter our bodies when we drink - Water. And water has no calories.
That does segue into one of my own objections to the topic, however...
"there are concerns that diet beverages may increase calorie consumption by justifying consumption of other caloric foods"...
Well, yeah! I started drinking diet soda (despite a preference for real sugared sodas) primarily because I don't prefer the sugared version enough to give up literally one meal a day to offset the calories. What next, will they regulate going to the gym because of "concerns" that people might actually exercise solely so they can have an extra serving of dessert after dinner?
I don't eat more as a result of diet sodas... I just don't have to eat less.
Instead of people choosing their foods based on preference, we'll have politicians picking our foods based on how much money is contributed to their campaigns!
Clearly, then, we need to ensure Food Neutrality to prevent exactly that problem!
Y'know, I have one major point against ideas like this (okay, I have a lot of points against it, but one that really bothers me, as beyond my personal control)...
What counts as a "strike"?
I know the obvious smartass response of "anything the RIAA/MPAA wants", but in practice... Let's even say, for the sake of argument, that "they" can 100% reliably detect when I download something copyrighted. We then have a problem in that everything (in the past 75 or so years, varying a bit by country) has a copyright on it. When I visit the totally legit New York Times website, I have downloaded copyrighted material. When I buy a song on iTunes, I have downloaded copyrighted material.
So now we need the qualifier of "unauthorized", which becomes much more subjective. Who can authorize me? If I have Trent Reznor in my office and he tells me to grab a copy of his latest unreleased album off Kazaa, then I have "authorization" from the artist himself. Yet my ISP has no way of knowing that.
Okay, too unrealisitc? How about MySpace, which Ms. "Can't even write her own anti-piracy rant and has to steal it" Allen used to great effect to promote her own career... Any moron can upload tracks there, even under the band's name (if the band didn't already think to make an account). How can the ISP ever know which count as legit and which don't? For that matter, how can we know the difference?
So yeah, I have a problem with effectively taking away my primary means of communication with the rest of the world, by force of a law that I can't accurately know whether or not I've violated.
Call it overly dramatic, but I don't think the courts realize yet that for anyone under 40, depriving them of internet access amounts to a "dead to our entire peer group" sentence. Just wait, we will see people going on mass killing sprees over this.
And how many browsers users could practically choose from back then?
Because "years ahead" doesn't in any way imply... Oh, I dunno, no comparable alternatives, regardless of whether talking about 1994 or today?
If you came out with anything literally (as opposed to the "marketing-speak-BS" version of the same phrase) "years ahead of the competition", you would by definition have no other products to choose from in that market.
If someone came out with a real human-brain-quality AI package that runs on your home PC tomorrow, would you complain that it didn't count as "successful" because Dragon Naturally Speaking didn't present enough of a market challenge to it?
Since TFA says the study looked at 52 million children over 12 years, it sounds fairly reasonable to suggest that error bars are relatively small w.r.t atleast the primary max an min.
With an n of 52 million, those charts do include error bars - They fall about +/- a thousandth of a pixel around each plotted point. The pixels themselves just cover the error bars.
As for the Y-offset... Yes, you can use that to dishonestly highlight minor difference. When you have such small differences in your dependent variable, however, as long as you make the Y axis entirely clear to the reader, it merely serves to save the viewer a trip to find a magnifying glass.
Basically, if you had a series that showed some degree of noisy periodicity and you zoomed/cropped in on one section that appears to prove your point, it counts as dishonest. When you have virtually no error and a trend that looks like cookie-cutter copies from year to year - I'd love to see the p values for this, but I'd bet it would require scientific notation to realistically print (ie, on the order of p <= 10^-12).
No, it's the other way around. You proved GP's point. Netscape had no competition until IE5. It was either Netscape, or AOL
You realize, of course, that MSIE had a v1.0? Which debuted a mere 8 months after Netscape v1.0?
Netscape almost instantly destroyed Mosaic and everything else that came before it, and held their position for five years, despite Microsoft doing their damnedest to overthrow them for over four of those years.
If somebody shipped a browser as crash-prone as Netscape was today, it wouldn't matter if it was three years ahead of the competition. People would play with it for a bit, and then use something stable.
;)
Um, no, you just disproved your own point.
Netscape did deliver a browser years ahead of the competition... And in all its crash-prone, flawed glory, people loved it. It took the web from a geeky novelty to a mainstream phenomenon. Not until MSIE 5 came out, a full five years after the first version of Netscape Navigator, did Netscape finally fall below 50% usage.
So the moral here? Beating your competition matters more than elegance - But having a viable business plan matters even more.
Ever flown through Ireland, not even as a final destination? It's worse than any American customs stop I've been through.
Um, yeah - About three months ago, actually. We got off our plane, followed the signs around this amazingly convoluted set of hallways to the passport-check area, only to find...
No one there.
Waited about five minutes, figuring someone had gone to the bathroom, and didn't see a single uniformed person (got passed by plenty of people walking right on through without even pausing, though).
So, we walked through and onto our connecting flight.
Granted, we went from one "secure" area to another, so I really didn't see the need to go through customs at all, but literally, we merely walked past an unattended desk. Simple as that.
Firewire would have been officially dead years ago if the claims of USB 2.0 were true.
Firewire did die years ago, despite the by-no-means-insignificant shortcomings of USB2.
Yes, I have a number of devices around the house with firewire ports... Two PCs, a laptop, an external HDD, my phone, a digital camcorder... I even have a cable or two by which I could connect them. But everything[*] I might ever want to connect to my computer has a USB port, and one hydra-ended connector means I never need to search for a cable.
As for speed, comparable. CPU overhead, comparable (FW fans will defend it as having a lower overhead, but that holds true only if you don't mind uncorrected packet loss... Great for streaming audio/video, deplorable for any form of reliable data transfer such as an HDD).
* - The one exception to the above, the digital camcorder I mentioned only supports firewire for video out. And it doesn't support error correction. Let me tell you, trying to get artifact-free video off that thing makes a root canal sound fun. Best way I found, dump it (at least) twice, scan for broken packets, and then (manually) splice together unbroken runs from the two dumps. Serious PITA - Thanks for yet another piece of crap, Sony.
Um, how did his claim count as fraud? He made (at least) 3.2 million selling his "program". So surely others could manage the claimed "six figures" doing the same thing, no? Thus, no fraud. His system worked, simple as that.
Granted, the end-product may (or may not - He may have said nothing more complex than "sell everything and bury your cash in the back yard") have violated a law or two, but he didn't actually sell the "asset protection" service, he sold educational material on how to hide assets. And he didn't really even do that, according to the FTC, he sold lessons on how to sell educational material on how to hide assets.
Seriously, how many layers of indirection do you have to toss in before it stops counting as a crime? If I convince you to pay me $20 to tell you where you can find bomb-making instructions, then send you off to the library after you pay up... Have I committed a crime?
No, it is not simply like charging him to buy the lock that had been missing. If you entered someone's home uninvited and deliberately or accidentally caused substantial cost and damage to the homeowner, you should be liable for your actions.
I know, right?
Like last week, these kids walked uninvited across my lawn, and caused substantial damage to a number of blades of grass! And then to add insult to injury, their damned irresponsible parents just couldn't grasp their liability to pony up for the slab, four walls, roof, and two garage doors to "repair" the space their crotch-fruit just casually trespassed across!
Sure, some scofflaws would point out that I didn't have a whole garage there to start with, so why should they have to pay for the rest? But hey, I had the good solid dirt underneath a future-garage, at least.
I think the last one is very important: I want to know whether I'm eating Greek feta or other "white cheese"
Why? Feta I'll admit makes a bad example for my stance, because what most Americans think of as feta has almost nothing to do with its namesake (hell, most commercial ones use cow milk). But in my area, I know of a number of local cheesemakers who produce sheepsmilk feta every bit as "real" as anything you'd get from Greece. If the same product, why does the "where" matter?
Or to reduce the problem to the level of absurdity, if a Greek cheesemaker moved to the US, imported his small flock of sheep, fed them imported Greek grasses, and made cheese from their milk using the same starter culture his family has kept for generations... Why does that not count as "feta" in every meaningful sense of the name? And before you call this unrealistic, with the exception of importing the grasses, most of the regionally-named products we could discuss in this context came from very similar situations - An immigrant makes a food from his culture, calls it by the correct name, and finds a market exists for it in his new country.
If you feel like this, you should have no problem with only Champagne region sparkling wines being called Champagne - you can just choose any sparkling wine that you prefer and ignore the name. For those of us who like to make the distinction, it's good to have the power of the EU on our side.
If always as simple and descriptive an alternative as "sparkling wine" existed, we might not have this discussion (Though I still see no compelling reason not to call it "champagne" unless it actually materially differs). With other products, however, this gets a whole lot trickier. Simple example, cheddar vs gloucester (or really just about any hard aged cow-milk cheeses). Describe those in three or fewer words that unambiguously convey the contents, as distinct from every other similar hard aged cow-milk cheese. I couldn't do it, and consider myself something of a connoisseur (sorry, "a person of discriminating taste" - Wouldn't want to usurp a label from some unknown region of France) of them.
Sort of like how the labels on cigarettes have made them.
Perhaps not the best example of a warning-label success story... In Canada they started putting grisly pictures of various smoking-related diseases on the packs, and people collected the damned things like kids with Pokemon cards.
Warning labels for the most part just annoy people, precisely because of their ubiquity, and for the stupidest of reasons. Yes, I want to know when normal use of a product will turn my bones into jello. I really don't care, however, if making Californian rats eat/drink/breathe nothing else for six months gave them erectile disfunction.
You sound like a programmer who is completely ignorant of how legal systems work.
He sounds like a programmer who has seen how the legal system works.
Laws aren't written like "if photo.is_manipulated() then display_disclaimer() end".
Nope, you have that 100% true - Because that would give a nice, easy, objective test of guilt.
Instead, the law will describe 200 different varieties of manipulation, which the advertising industry will neatly get around ("Well, it didn't explicitly ban radioactive waste to give the subject a healthy glow"), while semi-pro photographers fear for their freedom if they dare to sell a decent shot to a local paper. It will include zero funding for enforcement but allow police to charge high-end cameras with a crime and thereby keep them. It will accidentally outlaw Gimp (but of course they'd never enforce that, wink-wink-nudge-nudge) but not Photoshop because of some obscure detail in their JPEG compression implementations. And finally, just for good measure, it will provide 50 billion dollars to build stronger levees in Nevada (or the French equivalent, I suppose).
And I wish I meant this as hyperbole...
This sounds suspiciously like a whining threat, rather than a fact.
Threat, fact, whatever you want to call it, doesn't much matter. If a company/executive/manager/teamleader treats their employees like crap, those employees will consider their options. For any halfway-decent employees, their options will include "get the hell out of Dodge" (no pun on Nissan from TFA intended).
Sure, only the best-of-the-best can walk on a moment's notice and pick their job of choice the next day, but all but the worst-of-the-worst can start seriously looking and find something else within a few months.
How does the author know what fraction of admins leave in a situation like this?
I don't think he intended it as a statement of hard statistics, just mentioning a basic attribute of human behavior - People will only put up with so much.
As an aside, I would point out that the options open to those actually trapped in their jobs should appeal even less to any company - Sloppy work because they just don't care; Deliberately reduced output (though nothing bad enough to outright fire someone over); Perhaps even going so far as to deliberately sabotage projects in a way no one could ever "blame" them for (in most IT-related fields, we have options to do exactly that literally dozens of times per day, most untraceable and almost always excusable as legitimate oversight). Having someone tell you to go fuck yourself and walk out counts as the best option (short of actually treating people like people rather than as interchangeable robots which exist solely to do your bidding), in most cases.
I would not mind seeing where Slashdot stands on that issue
I can't speak for all of Slashdot, but I expect I share the opinion of most Slashdotters...
If someone can make a product identical to that from a given region (within the range of tolerances exhibited by that region itself), then they should have every right to call a spade a spade.
Feta, bourbon, scotch, champagne, whatever. The end product matters, not the location.
Now, in some cases, the location has historically determined the quality of the product, for various reasons... Scotch, for example, just doesn't turn out right without the cool wet summers and extremely mild winters that the Northern UK gets; Many French cheeses depend on the fungal spores and/or bacteria naturally present in the soil there. Modern technology can often correct for such reasons, however - Again with Scotch, the Japanese have nearly perfected a way of artificially controlling the environment that gives a product well within the range of "real" Scotch whiskey.
So basically... Results matter. Names don't, beyond letting me know what the package contains. And "where" does not count as part of "what".
Problem: Kids don't wear watches. Don't wear them, don'y have them, don't want them, don't need them.
Solution: All cellphones include GPS functionality built-in. Kids do want cellphones, and a good number already have them. And, many cell carriers even have services that allow parents to locate children on their plans.
/ must not rant about idiot helicopter parents, must not rant about idiot helicopter parents, must not rant about idiot helicopter parents...
Dark matter and dark energy aren't just theories that a bunch of arrogant pricks pulled out of their asses.
Ummm, actually...
We have absolutely no direct evidence of either.
We have numerous alternative theories that explain, without resorting to saying the universe consists of 96% invisible voodoo, various anomalies such as gravitational rotation and the implied anisotropy of the CMB.
Keep in mind that until last week, we had no direct evidence of something so basic to modern physics as the Bohr model; before that, we had "hooked" atoms dating back to (at least) Epicurus. Theories come and go, and without reproducible, experimental evidence, we have at best a model that fits the data - NOT, as far too many people seem to believe, a necessarily accurate description of objective reality.
I find it amazing that people who haven't even bothered to study the data or the reason for hypotheses like dark matter feel the need to make ass backwards comments about people who've literally dedicated their lives to it.
The GP said no such thing. He merely hypothesized, and not without some basis in fact, that a dead fish may well still have neural activity. Keep in mind, for several hours after death-of-the-whole (depending on the cause, of course), the vast majority of cells in the body still work just fine.
Now, if he had said something like "how do we know gravel doesn't have neural impulses", I would agree with your position; but we so poorly understand "death" that your ridicule reflects worse on you than on your target.
Do you know what -l does?
Yeah - It makes a hardlink to the file in question rather than actually copying it.
This takes advantage of the normal behavior of rsync (unless you explicitly tell it otherwise), where it writes to a temporary file before moving that file in place of the original - Which in the case of a hardlink, breaks the link rather than overwriting the original file.
So you effectively end up with a "snapshot" of any files that did change, and no wasted space (beyond the inode entry) for those that didn't (you can prove this to yourself fairly quickly, if you have doubts).
Incidentally, I agree that using FS-level differential snapshotting provides a much more elegant solution... But personally, I've had problems with LVM, and ZFS doesn't come stock on any older Linux distros (and that I know of, none of the rest that do come standard support snapshotting). EXT2 has supported hardlinks back into the days of antiquity, however, so the "cp -al" trick will work on just about any Linux box you touch.
You may want to check out rdiff-backup also. It produces a mirror like rsync, and uses a similar algorithm, but keeps reverse binary diffs in a separate directory so you can restore to previous states.
Seriously people, learn the tools you have available on any stock Linux system.
Even assuming you run a much older system with an FS that doesn't support online snapshotting... "cp -al <source> <destination>". Period.
Don't use rsync to make backups. Because you don't just want to backup against spontaneous combustion - inevitably, there will be accidental deletions and the like occurring in your studio.
rsync actually includes an option to make hardlinked snapshots as part of the syncing process, nowadays.
Personally, I don't trust it and always do that part manually, then let rsync do what it does best... But yeah, even "vanilla" rsync contains exactly the functionality you mention.
What solution would you use?
First of all, I love linux. Use it for my own file servers, and media machines, and routers, and pretty much everything except desktops.
That said...
For your task, I would probably just build an exact duplicate of the "real" machine and sync them nightly. Always keep in mind that if you have no way to quickly recover from a disaster, you don't actually have a backup.
That said, and if possible, I would also build the "backup" machine with more storage than the "real" machine. As someone else pointed out, you'll probably discover within a few days that your food-chain-superiors have no concept of "redundancy" vs "backup" vs "I can arbitrarily roll my files back to any second in the past 28 years". Having at least nightly snapshotting, unless your entire dataset changes rapidly, won't eat much extra disk space but will make you sleep ever so much better.