Describing it as "only three animals" is a bit misleading. The articles on the study clearly said that there were 14 species of parrot seen visibly dancing. So there must have been at least 14 animals (plus at least one elephant), not just three. In fact, there were multiple dancers in a number of the species.
We might note that the species count was somewhat limited by what the researchers could find videos of, mostly on youtube. We don't have any idea how many other parrot species might dance. But a reasonable conjecture is that dancing might be a primitive behavior in the parrot family. It'll be interesting to see if they can find evidence for or against this.
Also, I've seen videos of wild chimps engaging in what can only be called dancing. Lots of banging rocks and sticks, and moving around rhythmically to the beat. It wouldn't be too surprising if dancing were common to the group of "higher apes" that includes us humans.
There was a proposed hypothesis recently from some biologists, to the effect that dancing evolved in humans and some other animals as a mating activity do demo the dancer's physical coordination to prospective mates. The main question here is why would any animal adopt a behavior that uses up energy for no apparent benefit. But if either sex is selecting mates on the basis of their apparent coordination, this would easily explain the behavior. After all, would you rather have a klutzy mate that trips over rocks and fallen branches, or one that picks them up, turns them into a rhythm section, and dances around to the noise? Which genes would you rather pass on to your offspring?
I do wonder what the other dancing parrot species were. We have cockatiels in our house, and many 'tiel owners describe the males reacting to music with rhythmic head bobbing similar to what Snowball does on those videos. But I've never seen them do the footwork. Instead, what they do is improvise a high (descant) harmony to the music. We've had several musical gatherings at our house, with people sitting around playing music, with a male cockatiel in the midst of it all (typically sitting on a music stand), singing along. It's interesting to watch the (human) musicians' reactions as they realize that the little guy isn't just matching their rhythm; he's also singing in the same key.
The general explanation here is that female cockatiels are the kind of girl who goes off with the band members after the dance. If a male 'tiel wants a chance with the chicks, he'd better develop a large repertoire, or learn to improvise well.
what part of 10 year old equipment didn't you understand? What part of Win NT and win 2K makes you think the hardware can even run anything newer?
My immediate thought on reading this was to think of the 10-year-old machine upstairs that's doing just find running a 2-year-old OS release and software to make it a gateway, firewall, and server machine. Of course, it isn't running the MS Windows that it came with. It's original owner found that it was no longer powerful enough to handle the latest Windows "features", and gave it to me. I installed a then-current linux on it, a release that was much newer than Win NT or 2K, and it's been running just fine since then.
This is a common source of very usable hardware for a lot of linux users. We magnanimously offer to take old, slow machines off the hands of Windows users who need something more powerful. The smaller, faster programs that come with linux usually work pretty well on all that obsolete hardware. We do often install bigger disks, of course, and sometimes we get a bit more memory, depending on the apps we want to run. (A caching DNS server can use as much memory as the motherboard will accept.) But we don't complain much about old hardware; old hardware has been pretty good to us.;-)
Actually, there's an older case in the nearby university lab where my mail email lives. The lab has a gateway/firewall/nameserver machine that's at least 15 years old. Yup; it's an old Intel box, originally created to run Windows. But over 90% of its life has been as a FreeBSD server system. Its plenty big and fast enough for that task. It would be hopeless for any current Windows release, or even for Win 2K, but it would probably run just fine with any of the current *BSD releases, or with a current linux.
That doesn't work very well any more. Most small devices now come with wireless comm capabilities, bluetooth or IR or wifi or CDMA or.... These are generally not obviously "network" connections to non-experts, and many don't have any visible external signs that they're included or working.
This was one of the things that has been learned by the people studying the problems with electronic voting equipment in recent elections. The people in charge will insist that the machines not be networked, but they don't seem to understand that wireless networking connections are possible. So some of the machines that "weren't networked" had running IR and/or bluetooth installed and enabled, and people were able to use these to access the machines from across the room and modify their data.
Also, you and I know that wifi and bluetooth are or can be network connections. But your boss probably doesn't know this. They aren't visible and don't have wires, so they can't be "connections", now can they? And why would any medical administrators expect that a computer infection could spread through the air without any physical contact?;-)
That may be, but it could also be that for research purposes, there's usually no strong reason to distinguish between different kinds of stem cells. The "embryonic" classification is primarily political and religious, after all. It's true that some stem cells are partially differentiated, presumably to match their local environment. But many of the research results so far have muddied the distinction. Rather than having two or three types of stem cell (embryonic, adult, maybe cord), we actually have a growing number of kinds with subtly different properties. And it seems likely that most of them can be persuaded to develop into any sort of cell, though it may take a bit of persuading if they developed in a different part of the body from where they've been transplanted.
Part of the problem is that the media and politicians are the ones debating the topic, and they've developed their own terminology that no longer much matches what researchers are finding. But this is an old story in scientific research, where the popular terminology often long outlives its scientific usefulness.
There is clearly enough gravitational pull from the galactic centre to keep the milky way together, despite its spin...
Actually, it's known that galaxies sometimes evict some of their members via gravitational interaction. Treating a galaxy as a single mass at its center is only useful for calculations between galaxies some distance from each other. When dealing with the internal dynamics of galaxies, you can't model galaxies as point objects. You have to treat them as collections of objects, each with its own mass and motion vector, if you want your model to be at all useful. This can take a lot of processing power.
Thus, our solar system doesn't really orbit the center of our galaxy. Rather, it just sorta ambles along its current path, with gravitational interaction with each of the other individual masses (stars, dust clouds, black holes, etc.) in the rest of the galaxy. The other things nearby are likely to have larger effects than that clump of stars and the black hole down in the center. Individual stars like ours have somewhat irregular "orbits" over time.
Our sun's path does curve into an orbit of sorts, since the mean mass is off to the left side of our path. But the orbits of stars around the galaxy are nowhere near as regular and predictable as the orbits of the planets in our solar system. Over the more that 200 million years that it takes us to make one trip around the galaxy, there will be a lot of passing stars and massive clouds on slightly different paths, and their gravity will slightly change our path.
In any case, to get a realistic model, it's better to treat a galaxy as a gaggle of separate objects, each following its own path independently of the others. That path is affected by the gravity of all the others, so you get wobbly, irregular orbits around the center of mass. But that center really isn't a physical "thing" in its own right; it's merely the average of the jumble of smaller masses in the general vicinity. This is something very different from our solar system, where over 99% of the mass is concentrated in the object at the center. (And even there, it turns out that the center of mass of our solar system isn't actually within the sun.)
A couple of years ago, there was an astronomy news story about the discovery that our nearest spiral-galaxy neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, has two large black holes (with masses of several million sols) in its core. This explained some of the anomalies in that galaxy's shape, which isn't quite as flat or symmetrical as you'd expect a big spiral to be. The suggested explanation is a merger with another galaxy that probably happened several billion years ago, long enough that the resulting mess has settled down into what at first glance looks like a single normal spiral galaxy.
This isn't at all unusual, though. There are lots of galactic collisions visible in space. There was a fun one a few days ago on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Stories on them generally explain that few if any of the stars collide, because they're too far apart. The dust and gas clouds do collide, and the result is a period of star formation. In many cases, simulations show that the galaxies merge, typically producing an elliptical galaxy if both were large and had different orientations. In the Andromeda case, they were probably roughly coplanar, so the merger just produced a slightly bigger spiral.
Another recent story is about calculations showing that the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are on a collision course, and will collide in several billion years. The result may look a lot like the above picture to astronomers in other nearby galaxies.
Astronomers have also found the remnants of several smaller galaxies that our Milky Way has gobbled up. They were generally disrupted, but most of the stars from a single such galaxy now have similar orbits, so each appears as a loose "stream" of stars with a thickening that corresponds to the core of the original small galaxy. It's likely that each such smaller galaxy contributed one or more "medium" black holes (with a few thousand solar masses) to our galaxy.
Anyway, this story isn't especially surprising to anyone who follows atronomy news.
The political appointee in the White House who plans $300,000 photo ops involving Air Force One, F-16s, and major landmarks... he seems to be worth keeping an eye on.
Heh. He seems to have been as surprised by that fun story as the rest of us.
Part of the problem here is that our government (and a few others) are sufficiently big and complex that no single leader, no matter how good he might be, can keep an eye on all the bizarre activities going on in there. So while you're keeping an eye on him, you might also pick out a few government agencies and keep your other eye on them, too. Tell us if you find anything "interesting", because we'll be busy watching some of the others.
Maybe I'll add a link to one of the better reactions to that incident that has appeared so far. It all started from an editor's suggestion that "the White House staffers could've gotten better results - for a lot less money - from the comforts of their own D.C. offices using a program like Photoshop." There's still time to contribute to the effort...
... add up ALL the various possible dangers, and the odds of it happening in a given year...odds of getting hit by lighting, 1:22 million. Odds of being in a car accident 1:50,000, etc, etc...I suspect that once you compiled a comprehensive list, you'd end up being nearly certain you'll die in the next year.
A few years back, I read an interesting article whose authors pretty much did just that, and wrote about the conclusions. One of their more interesting ways of expressing the results of the study was: Suppose that medical science found a way to eliminate aging, so that we all stayed permanently in the state of health of a person in their 20s, and only died of things at the rate that 25-year-olds died of them. How much would this increase our expected lifespan? The answer turned out to be about 15 years.
It put an interesting perspective on a lot of the hype around various medical scare stories. Yes, we do get older and feebler, and it'd be nice if we could fix that. But such medical advances by themselves wouldn't actually increase our lifespan by much. To do that, we have to fix the zillions of (mostly unlikely) things that would keep killing us off at a low rate.
I don't think black holes were on their list of dangers, though. And what we know of the history our planet tells us that asteroid impacts are a more significant danger.
I have never heard of ANYONE who opposed adult stem cell research.
Neither have I. But I've heard a lot of people who oppose "stem cell research". And when I've been able to ask them, I've generally found that they 1) viewed the extra word as noise that wasn't relevant to the topic, 2) reacted to me a troublemaker for bringing up such inconsequential details, and 3) didn't actually know what a stem cell might be.
Do I a bit of that attitude in the discussion here?
Consider, if you will, roads.... this would make the internet a public service more than a paid for service,...
It's not really all that different. Consider that in most places, a large part of the funding for road maintenance comes from fuel taxes, which are really direct user fees that are proportional to how much you use the roads (and how efficient your vehicle is;-).
The subscription fees charged by ISPs run by local governments or set up as a government-assisted "nonprofit" co-op aren't really anything new. As with roads, electricity, water, sewers, etc., we're seeing that the big comm companies fundamentally want to supply service only where it's highly profitable, and will use the political system to achieve a monopoly position rather than competing in a "market". This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a small knowledge of the history of such services. And it should come as no surprise that a local government or a government-supported co-op might be a better system for customers in smaller towns or rural areas.
But people ARE allowed to build their own network if they want to. It's called a Co-Op. If the local townspeople want to start a community ISP, they can do so in the PRIVATE sector by forming a Co-Op that anyone in the community can join by buying shares....
Well, yeah; anyone can form a co-op. But to build a network, you have to run the wires, and that is a local monopoly controlled by your friendly local government. Having a co-op isn't very useful if you can't run your wires.
There is wi-fi, of course, but that's legally limited to a low power with an effective range that's less than a city block, and it has only a few channels. So that approach isn't very useful.
It'd be interesting to read about an area where the government didn't impose any sort of controls on communication channels. Do you know of one? I know that such things existed a century or so back, before the technology had been much developed. But as soon as any comm hardware became very useful, it became obvious that government controls were needed. Otherwise the broadcaster with the most powerful transmitter would swamp all the lower-powered stations, you'd get a rat' nest of wires over the streets with poles every few feet, and so on.
So how can one build a comm co-op of any sort without government involvement? Where is it legal to run your wires without the government guys stepping in and saying you can't do that without a permit? Inquiring minds want to know.;-)
... that nobody has yet suggested googling for "Siberian pipeline explosion" to answer this question.
It's widely believed in much of the world that the US government has long been the prime mover in "cyber warfare". Whether this is true or not, fact is that people believe it, and this is a significant part of the rest of the world's attitude towards the US dominance of the Internet. You might have noticed that there have been moves afoot in a lot of the world to end this dominance and install networking equipment that is beyond the (easy) reach of the US government.
(OTOH, I've found that most people everywhere on the Net are quite friendly towards individual Americans, as long as you don't give the impression of having any sort of official position. Or maybe it's just me...;-)
1. What makes you think they don't already have a backdoor into every copy of Windows shipped?
In effect, this has been freely admitted by Microsoft, and we've discussed it several times here on slashdot. It came up a month or so back in a story about someone who found that, even with all the automatic update stuff turned off, some "system" updates happen in Vista anyway. Turning off all the auto-update stuff doesn't stop these updates from happening. In the discussion, it has come out that this has been true since at least the early releases of XP.
In various security-related forums, it has been pointed out that this "feature" is a classical backdoor. It allows anyone with the right connections inside Microsoft to get their software installed in any machine via the automatic update mechanism. If you think that the security folks in various government agencies (in the US and other countries) don't know about this, you're rather naive. After all, it has been discussed here and in several other public net forums.
This is also a good thing to bring up when someone makes the claim that all other OSs are just as vulnerable as MS Windows. With linux and the *BSDs, we have the source available (and we can compile them ourselves if we like), so we can (and do) examine the code for such things. We can be reasonably sure that, when backdoors have been slipped into these open-source systems (and it has happened), the fact has become public very quickly and there were fixes available. With MS Windows, we don't have the source (though some agencies in the US and PRC governments have it), so we can't examine the code or recompile it. And when the stories come out about the automatic downloading of new software by Windows, Microsoft isn't even apologetic. Those backdoors are there intentionally; they're not going away; you and I have no defense against them.
Except to not use Microsoft products, of course.
(Actually, it has been pointed out that you can make MS Windows secure, but one of the requirements is that you never connect it to any kind of network. This includes removing hardware such as wifi, bluetooth, IR, USB, etc. devices;-)
We might also point out that, as has been mentioned in several/. discussions lately, Windows has been doing automatic updates to parts of the system for several years now (at least since XP). This can't be turned off by the system settings that purportedly control updating. This means that any recent Windows box that's connected to the network can be exchanging files with various "back home" machines without your knowledge. If it's not doing this now, the software to do it might be installed by tomorrow. Microsoft has openly admitted to this, in the form of explaining to us why it's for our own good.
So if there's a Windows box involved, the default assumption should be that any files accessible from that machine are available to Microsoft, to do with as they like, if it is ever connected to a network. Note that this includes wifi, bluetooth and IR connectivity.
Back in the early 1980s, I worked on a few IBM mainframes (as a unix guru, believe it or not;-), and we demoed that this was true for all the main IBM OSs back then. I haven't had to deal with one of those monsters for a while, but my assumption would be that you might be able to secure them from outside users but not from IBM. I've worked on a couple of projects that can be summarized as cracking all of IBM's data formats so that the data can be extracted and transferred to other non-IBM systems without IBM's permission. This was done for some companies that were getting very serious about security issues, and realized that the data on their mainframe was in effect "owned" by IBM, to do with as they like.
An interesting part of this discussion is that if you look into hospitals, you'll see that almost all the things recognizable as "computers" are running Microsoft software. There are also a good number of IBM mainframes. So much for pretenses about security and privacy. We can talk all we like about such things, but it means little to the true owners of those machines.
Are the hospitals going to build a private network for record transfers? Probably not, instead they'll use the internet that everyone else uses.
Yup. And one useful fact is that on the Internet, you don't need every company to implement their own idea of what a secure link is. You can just fire up VPN, and it'll fully encrypt all the data between two Internet-connected systems no matter where they are.
Of course, we could still benefit from VPN software that's a bit more reliable and easier for a person who's not a security guru to use correctly. But that's slowly happening. 10 years ago, using VPN pretty much required an expert; now there are packages on the most common systems that hide most of the cruft from the user.
My wife works for another Massachusetts medical agency (which one isn't relevant here), and she does most of her work from home now, with both her desktop (Mac) and laptop (Vista) tied to the office via VPN. It's mostly pretty smooth now, except that she can't get either machine to print files from the work systems. But she found that they can write files to a USB memory card, and if she then unplugs the USB gadget and plugs it back in, they can print from it. Heh.
(We wonder if the problem is intentional, so that employees can't print out the contents of the databases on their home machines. And we did sorta giggle when we found how stupid the workaround was. So she can make hard copy of things to be printed, and if they come out good on paper, she shreds the test copies and sends email saying the jobs are ready to be printed. So we no longer buy peat moss for our garden now.;-)
Even though his history probably makes asthma much more likely than pneumonia, if they treated him for asthma without ruling out pneumonia, and he ended up dying, they would be liable for his death.
Maybe that hints at a viable approach. What we need is a well-publicized case like this in which the patient dies. The inquest turns up the fact that the correct diagnosis and prescriptions were all in the medical database, but the doctors and nurses ignored that and treated the patient for what they were guessing was the problem. The family sues, gets a multi-million-dollar settlement. The media gets wind of the story and tells everyone about it. The hospitals (and insurance companies) start triple-checking to make sure that every doctor and nurse has read every patient's database info. This probably saves a lot of time that has been wasted in repeated collection of the data from the patient.
Of course, making that info actually accessible and comprehensible to medical people (as opposed to the IT people who did the database and software design) will take a bit longer.
I've worked on a few medical data projects, and one thing that has struck me was the great lengths taken to make sure that I had no contact whatsoever with actual doctors or nurses. Any software developer knows what the results will be if they are denied communication with the users. You get software that makes perfect sense to a software developer, but is incomprehensible to anyone else. It typically takes several rounds of "beta" testing to overcome this problem, and to rebuild the user-interface stuff so that the real users can actually use it.
But so far, medical people's time is too valuable to waste playing with beta software...
I can't help but feel while reading 'The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me' that the problems encountered actually had very little to do with the electronic record system at all. It seemed more like an incompetent system was in place as a whole. The data model didn't seem to do anything wrong, it was the people using it, or not using it.
But failure to take into account real-life human behavior is a major design failure all by itself. Yes, people often try to excuse a bad design by invoking "human failure". The response to this should be that if it can't be used correctly by real people, especially those worn out by an 18-hour shift, the failure wasn't in the humans at all. The computer part was very badly designed for the conditions it must operate in.
We have centuries of development in a field called "ergonomics". The computer software field generally isn't aware of this term or the concepts behind it. But there is a lot known about designing systems so that people can use them correctly. Maybe we should require that the designers of medical systems be at least familiar with the concept. Or we could get really radical, and start quietly hinting that medical software designers actually have training in ergonomics.
Yeah, yeah, I know; the big software companies would never go along with it. But it's worth at least considering. We shouldn't excuse the software designers by blaming the medical people for their inability to use the software correctly.
[T]he VA is run entirely by the government. What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate.
Once again it's probably worthwhile to note that this was a major part of the motivation behind the original ARPAnet project which grew into the Internet. The US Dept of Defense was trying to deal with a growing problem. They were collecting all sorts of fancy electronic gadgets that generated and consumed data, but most of them would only talk to other gadgets from the same vendor. It was clear that this wasn't an accident. Every vendor wanted a to be the sole supplier, and one way they all saw to do this was via proprietary data formats.
The ARPA gang's solution was to build what they called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), whose job was to talk to a proprietary gadget in its native language, translate the gadget's messages into a standard format, and transmit that to another IMP, which would translate it into the native language of another recipient gadget. They knew from long experience that their vendors wouldn't cooperate with this, and would do everything in their power to sabotage the ability of other vendors' gadgets with their own. So the ARPA people farmed out the task of building the IMPs to people who had a history of successful communication with their competitors, the people in academia.
That was about 40 years ago. Now, with four more decades of experience, we can clearly see that the problem hasn't gone away. There is no prospect that gadgets or data systems built by different corporations will ever interoperate sanely. Private companies have a strong motive to sabotage such communication whenever they can get away with it. So, as in the past, the only way we can get useful medical data systems is the same was we've done it with the Internet. We need government-run projects to develop and enforce the standards. Building the low-level gadgets can be a job for the corporate world. But if we ever want to be able to use the data for any meaningful purpose, we must make sure that the corporate world can't control it.
Actually, of course, we have no guarantee that government agencies will do the job right, either. There's no shortage of incompatible data formats in government databases. Unless the job is handled by people as competent as ARPA was back in the 1960s and 70s, it'll still be a huge, expensive failure. Sorta like the medical data systems we have now, which were mostly developed in-house at hospitals, and even the nonprofit hospitals have a poor record of interoperability. (Yes, I've worked on some of their systems, and it's not a pretty sight.) So we should be watching how the governments deal with the problem, and be quick to criticise the crappy standards that we know they'll design.
Otherwise we'll end up with medical records based on a standard similar to the Avian Carrier Protocol, but it won't have been published on April 1. You should also read the wikipedia article to read of a real implementation. But most managers in both corporate and government circles don't have a sense of humor good enough to prevent such things from becoming actual standards.
Called Internet Explorer by Microsoft. Remember when this used to be so easy?
Yeah, back when only the first release of IE was out. Since then, it hasn't been easy even if you're just developing for IE, since every release of IE has had gratuitous inconsistencies with the previous release. Of course, to Microsoft, the current release is always the "standard", and previous releases are obsolete, so everyone is expected to change their sites accordingly. However, if you're working for a company whose management uses Windows, you have a problem: Every manager considers the version of Windows and IE on their machine to be "the Standard" for everything. So if your software or web site or whatever doesn't work as each manager expects on his/her screen, you've screwed it up and you're expected to fix it so it works right. And when they upgrade to a newer system, they're upset with you because your stuff no longer works on their "standard" system the same way it did yesterday.
But I guess that's how everything works everywhere. It doesn't help that much to make your stuff match the official published standards, because the management wherever you work always has a jumbled mixture of releases of whatever systems they've "standardized" on.
I have seen some fairly impressive web sites that "solve" this via extensive testing to determine the exact release of which OS and browser a client is using, and if it's one of the systems in use by one of the developers' bosses, delivers HTML+whatever that produces whatever that boss wants to see on the screen. What this does on non-bosses' screens is irrelevant, of course, since the developers aren't judged by that.
Of course, making your stuff match standards everywhere except on one or two bosses' screens is fairly straightforward, and hardly needs a text explaining how to do it. The trick is making your stuff match the "standard" of several bosses' systems, while also working fairly well on visitors' machines.
Computers have gotten ridiculously fast compared during the last 20 years, and still they seem slow to many of us. Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
A few years back, Henry Petroski said it fairly elegantly:
The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry.
There's really not much more to it than that. Consider that, when new hardware comes out, the people with the first crack at it are the programmers in various software development companies around the world. Their natural reaction to faster hardware and/or cheaper memory is to use it to make their software flashier. They continue this until the users won't use the software because it's too slow, at which point they back off a bit and wait for the next hardware upgrade. So the software that users get is continuously adjusted to use all the cpu and memory that's available.
And, of course, a major reason for it all is seen in reviews like we've just read. The headline uses the word "Slick", and the emphasis is on that slickness. Actual functionality isn't mentioned, because it's not interesting to the reviewer. What's interesting is "Oooh, Pretty!" When reviews and sales are dependent on this, we should expect that the software developers would push for glitz.
This isn't "crappy programming"; it's fairly sophisticated programming to give the customers what they repeatedly say they want. If you don't want your computers perpetually bogged down to support a "slick" GUI, you should be saying publicly that you like something else.
Copyright seems to have an indefinite life these days...
True, but this isn't really anything new. A few centuries back, before modern printing presses and before the fiction that copyright is to encourage creators, it was common for rulers to give (more often, sell) exclusive publication rights to a single local copy shop. This was especially important for the major books such as the Bible and Koran. The age of the text didn't matter; the rulers wanted to make sure that 1) only an authorized translation was produced, and 2) the supply was limited so that the hoi polloi couldn't read the texts themselves.
This isn't all that different in principal from what modern "publishers" like those TV companies are trying to do. They want to be the sole supplier of the information, partly so that you'll have to buy their service and watch their ads if you want to see the information. In both cases, the motive has nothing to do with creativity; it's all about control of the information that the masses have access to, and their "right" to collect money for access to the information.
There was a clear example of this back around 1220, which you can read about in various books on the Mongol "invasion" of Europe. Their first expedition was exploratory, and they took along a small military force mostly for protection from the bandits that they knew infested the far West. Those soldiers fought a lot of defensive battles, because the reports that preceded them described a flock of demonic killers who were ravaging the countryside, and local rulers sent troops to attack them. The main reason for this, it seems, was that Genghis (not yet Khan) & buddies also took along a troop of Korean printers. The Koreans had a mobile print shop set up in their wagons, and as they travelled, they printed and sold cheap editions of whatever was popular locally. This was mostly Korans in central Asia, and Bibles further west. This was a direct threat to the western rulers' control over their own populations, which was based in part on control over the local production of religious and other texts. The response was a campaign to paint the Mongols as demonic visitors intent on killing everyone in their path. By then, of course, the real intent was to depose the demonic western rulers (and replace them with a modern, enlightened form of government;-). They did succeed in establishing a much cheaper printing industry (and religious freedom) in the areas that they conquered. But the eastern printing technology was embargoed in western Europe, and it took several more centuries for it to be developed by Gutenberg et al in the 1400s.
The use of copyright to control access to information is an old story. And from the start, copyright was applied to texts centuries or even millennia old.
As if anyone in the government puts in 100% effort. The 10% figure sounds right, though.
Actually, the OP didn't get the old joke quite right. There are actually two versions, the simpler is: The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time; the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
There's also the expanded (asymptotic) version: The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time; the next 9% takes the next 90% of the time; the next 0.9% takes the next 90% of the time,....
This is a canonical comment when discussing any sort of organizational schedules. It's not just governments; the same phenomenon has been copiously documented in the corporate development environment. It's not how governments work; it's how groups of humans work.
In the U.S., you live under more federal, state, county and city laws than you could read in your lifetime.
Take that paranoia and trade it in for some common sense, you fucking loon. You can walk down the street without consulting 17 lawyers.
Heh. I've read a number of articles by some of those 17 lawyers explaining in detail why, in most of the US (and probably most other countries), it is technically impossible to not be in violation of some law. There are a number of web sites with collections of weird laws that help in this.
Just one of many examples from a city where I once lived: Someone pointed out that there was a rather general ordinance forbidding the possession of "gambling devices". It wasn't to specific about what constituted such a device, but the journalists had a bit of fun imagining. For instance, do you have any coins or currency in your pocket? If so, are you familiar with any of the various gambling games that are played with coins or by comparison of the serial numbers on paper money? Those games may be silly, and mostly children's games, but they are obviously "gambling", so if you have any money in your pocket, you're can be arrested under that law. If not, well, you can read the "vagrancy" laws. Not being in possession of money is, in most places, ipso facto evidence of vagrancy, for which you can be arrested and held in jail.
Now, granted, most of us aren't going to be arrested for such "violations". These are what are commonly called "nuisance laws". That is, if you're making a nuisance of yourself to the people in charge, they can make themselves a nuisance to you by arresting you, holding you overnight, running you out of town, whatever. Such laws are typically designed with the intent of application against someone who they want to arrest and hold but who hasn't committed any serious offense.
Here in Massachusetts, someone recently discovered that there's a law still on the books that requires all adult men to carry a firearm when they go to church on Sunday. I'd known about the similar law in Georgia ("for protection from the savage Indians"), and it wasn't really that much of a surprise to find that Massachusetts once passed a similar law. The media here also had a bit of fun a few years ago when they discovered that Boston still had a law that forbids Indians from being within the city limits after sundown. (It's not clear whether this applies to Indians from India, or just the native kind.;-)
I'm sure others here can contribute some fun laws (typically pairs of laws) in their community that you (or perhaps some special others) can't avoid violating. It's a rare jurisdiction where such laws don't exist, especially since old laws rarely get repealed.
Anyone here have a favorite "weird laws" site? Extra points for lists of laws that you can't avoid violating.
Slashdot Mirror
Describing it as "only three animals" is a bit misleading. The articles on the study clearly said that there were 14 species of parrot seen visibly dancing. So there must have been at least 14 animals (plus at least one elephant), not just three. In fact, there were multiple dancers in a number of the species.
We might note that the species count was somewhat limited by what the researchers could find videos of, mostly on youtube. We don't have any idea how many other parrot species might dance. But a reasonable conjecture is that dancing might be a primitive behavior in the parrot family. It'll be interesting to see if they can find evidence for or against this.
Also, I've seen videos of wild chimps engaging in what can only be called dancing. Lots of banging rocks and sticks, and moving around rhythmically to the beat. It wouldn't be too surprising if dancing were common to the group of "higher apes" that includes us humans.
There was a proposed hypothesis recently from some biologists, to the effect that dancing evolved in humans and some other animals as a mating activity do demo the dancer's physical coordination to prospective mates. The main question here is why would any animal adopt a behavior that uses up energy for no apparent benefit. But if either sex is selecting mates on the basis of their apparent coordination, this would easily explain the behavior. After all, would you rather have a klutzy mate that trips over rocks and fallen branches, or one that picks them up, turns them into a rhythm section, and dances around to the noise? Which genes would you rather pass on to your offspring?
I do wonder what the other dancing parrot species were. We have cockatiels in our house, and many 'tiel owners describe the males reacting to music with rhythmic head bobbing similar to what Snowball does on those videos. But I've never seen them do the footwork. Instead, what they do is improvise a high (descant) harmony to the music. We've had several musical gatherings at our house, with people sitting around playing music, with a male cockatiel in the midst of it all (typically sitting on a music stand), singing along. It's interesting to watch the (human) musicians' reactions as they realize that the little guy isn't just matching their rhythm; he's also singing in the same key.
The general explanation here is that female cockatiels are the kind of girl who goes off with the band members after the dance. If a male 'tiel wants a chance with the chicks, he'd better develop a large repertoire, or learn to improvise well.
what part of 10 year old equipment didn't you understand? What part of Win NT and win 2K makes you think the hardware can even run anything newer?
My immediate thought on reading this was to think of the 10-year-old machine upstairs that's doing just find running a 2-year-old OS release and software to make it a gateway, firewall, and server machine. Of course, it isn't running the MS Windows that it came with. It's original owner found that it was no longer powerful enough to handle the latest Windows "features", and gave it to me. I installed a then-current linux on it, a release that was much newer than Win NT or 2K, and it's been running just fine since then.
This is a common source of very usable hardware for a lot of linux users. We magnanimously offer to take old, slow machines off the hands of Windows users who need something more powerful. The smaller, faster programs that come with linux usually work pretty well on all that obsolete hardware. We do often install bigger disks, of course, and sometimes we get a bit more memory, depending on the apps we want to run. (A caching DNS server can use as much memory as the motherboard will accept.) But we don't complain much about old hardware; old hardware has been pretty good to us. ;-)
Actually, there's an older case in the nearby university lab where my mail email lives. The lab has a gateway/firewall/nameserver machine that's at least 15 years old. Yup; it's an old Intel box, originally created to run Windows. But over 90% of its life has been as a FreeBSD server system. Its plenty big and fast enough for that task. It would be hopeless for any current Windows release, or even for Win 2K, but it would probably run just fine with any of the current *BSD releases, or with a current linux.
Physical separation people. It's the ONLY way.
That doesn't work very well any more. Most small devices now come with wireless comm capabilities, bluetooth or IR or wifi or CDMA or .... These are generally not obviously "network" connections to non-experts, and many don't have any visible external signs that they're included or working.
This was one of the things that has been learned by the people studying the problems with electronic voting equipment in recent elections. The people in charge will insist that the machines not be networked, but they don't seem to understand that wireless networking connections are possible. So some of the machines that "weren't networked" had running IR and/or bluetooth installed and enabled, and people were able to use these to access the machines from across the room and modify their data.
Also, you and I know that wifi and bluetooth are or can be network connections. But your boss probably doesn't know this. They aren't visible and don't have wires, so they can't be "connections", now can they? And why would any medical administrators expect that a computer infection could spread through the air without any physical contact? ;-)
That may be, but it could also be that for research purposes, there's usually no strong reason to distinguish between different kinds of stem cells. The "embryonic" classification is primarily political and religious, after all. It's true that some stem cells are partially differentiated, presumably to match their local environment. But many of the research results so far have muddied the distinction. Rather than having two or three types of stem cell (embryonic, adult, maybe cord), we actually have a growing number of kinds with subtly different properties. And it seems likely that most of them can be persuaded to develop into any sort of cell, though it may take a bit of persuading if they developed in a different part of the body from where they've been transplanted.
Part of the problem is that the media and politicians are the ones debating the topic, and they've developed their own terminology that no longer much matches what researchers are finding. But this is an old story in scientific research, where the popular terminology often long outlives its scientific usefulness.
There is clearly enough gravitational pull from the galactic centre to keep the milky way together, despite its spin ...
Actually, it's known that galaxies sometimes evict some of their members via gravitational interaction. Treating a galaxy as a single mass at its center is only useful for calculations between galaxies some distance from each other. When dealing with the internal dynamics of galaxies, you can't model galaxies as point objects. You have to treat them as collections of objects, each with its own mass and motion vector, if you want your model to be at all useful. This can take a lot of processing power.
Thus, our solar system doesn't really orbit the center of our galaxy. Rather, it just sorta ambles along its current path, with gravitational interaction with each of the other individual masses (stars, dust clouds, black holes, etc.) in the rest of the galaxy. The other things nearby are likely to have larger effects than that clump of stars and the black hole down in the center. Individual stars like ours have somewhat irregular "orbits" over time.
Our sun's path does curve into an orbit of sorts, since the mean mass is off to the left side of our path. But the orbits of stars around the galaxy are nowhere near as regular and predictable as the orbits of the planets in our solar system. Over the more that 200 million years that it takes us to make one trip around the galaxy, there will be a lot of passing stars and massive clouds on slightly different paths, and their gravity will slightly change our path.
In any case, to get a realistic model, it's better to treat a galaxy as a gaggle of separate objects, each following its own path independently of the others. That path is affected by the gravity of all the others, so you get wobbly, irregular orbits around the center of mass. But that center really isn't a physical "thing" in its own right; it's merely the average of the jumble of smaller masses in the general vicinity. This is something very different from our solar system, where over 99% of the mass is concentrated in the object at the center. (And even there, it turns out that the center of mass of our solar system isn't actually within the sun.)
A couple of years ago, there was an astronomy news story about the discovery that our nearest spiral-galaxy neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy, has two large black holes (with masses of several million sols) in its core. This explained some of the anomalies in that galaxy's shape, which isn't quite as flat or symmetrical as you'd expect a big spiral to be. The suggested explanation is a merger with another galaxy that probably happened several billion years ago, long enough that the resulting mess has settled down into what at first glance looks like a single normal spiral galaxy.
This isn't at all unusual, though. There are lots of galactic collisions visible in space. There was a fun one a few days ago on the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. Stories on them generally explain that few if any of the stars collide, because they're too far apart. The dust and gas clouds do collide, and the result is a period of star formation. In many cases, simulations show that the galaxies merge, typically producing an elliptical galaxy if both were large and had different orientations. In the Andromeda case, they were probably roughly coplanar, so the merger just produced a slightly bigger spiral.
Another recent story is about calculations showing that the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies are on a collision course, and will collide in several billion years. The result may look a lot like the above picture to astronomers in other nearby galaxies.
Astronomers have also found the remnants of several smaller galaxies that our Milky Way has gobbled up. They were generally disrupted, but most of the stars from a single such galaxy now have similar orbits, so each appears as a loose "stream" of stars with a thickening that corresponds to the core of the original small galaxy. It's likely that each such smaller galaxy contributed one or more "medium" black holes (with a few thousand solar masses) to our galaxy.
Anyway, this story isn't especially surprising to anyone who follows atronomy news.
The political appointee in the White House who plans $300,000 photo ops involving Air Force One, F-16s, and major landmarks... he seems to be worth keeping an eye on.
Heh. He seems to have been as surprised by that fun story as the rest of us.
Part of the problem here is that our government (and a few others) are sufficiently big and complex that no single leader, no matter how good he might be, can keep an eye on all the bizarre activities going on in there. So while you're keeping an eye on him, you might also pick out a few government agencies and keep your other eye on them, too. Tell us if you find anything "interesting", because we'll be busy watching some of the others.
Maybe I'll add a link to one of the better reactions to that incident that has appeared so far. It all started from an editor's suggestion that "the White House staffers could've gotten better results - for a lot less money - from the comforts of their own D.C. offices using a program like Photoshop." There's still time to contribute to the effort ...
... add up ALL the various possible dangers, and the odds of it happening in a given year...odds of getting hit by lighting, 1:22 million. Odds of being in a car accident 1:50,000, etc, etc...I suspect that once you compiled a comprehensive list, you'd end up being nearly certain you'll die in the next year.
A few years back, I read an interesting article whose authors pretty much did just that, and wrote about the conclusions. One of their more interesting ways of expressing the results of the study was: Suppose that medical science found a way to eliminate aging, so that we all stayed permanently in the state of health of a person in their 20s, and only died of things at the rate that 25-year-olds died of them. How much would this increase our expected lifespan? The answer turned out to be about 15 years.
It put an interesting perspective on a lot of the hype around various medical scare stories. Yes, we do get older and feebler, and it'd be nice if we could fix that. But such medical advances by themselves wouldn't actually increase our lifespan by much. To do that, we have to fix the zillions of (mostly unlikely) things that would keep killing us off at a low rate.
I don't think black holes were on their list of dangers, though. And what we know of the history our planet tells us that asteroid impacts are a more significant danger.
I have never heard of ANYONE who opposed adult stem cell research.
Neither have I. But I've heard a lot of people who oppose "stem cell research". And when I've been able to ask them, I've generally found that they 1) viewed the extra word as noise that wasn't relevant to the topic, 2) reacted to me a troublemaker for bringing up such inconsequential details, and 3) didn't actually know what a stem cell might be.
Do I a bit of that attitude in the discussion here?
They dont make much from us clicking on the ads either.
Wait -- Slashdot has ads? Why can't I see them?
Am I missing something?
Consider, if you will, roads. ... this would make the internet a public service more than a paid for service, ...
It's not really all that different. Consider that in most places, a large part of the funding for road maintenance comes from fuel taxes, which are really direct user fees that are proportional to how much you use the roads (and how efficient your vehicle is ;-).
The subscription fees charged by ISPs run by local governments or set up as a government-assisted "nonprofit" co-op aren't really anything new. As with roads, electricity, water, sewers, etc., we're seeing that the big comm companies fundamentally want to supply service only where it's highly profitable, and will use the political system to achieve a monopoly position rather than competing in a "market". This should come as no surprise to anyone with even a small knowledge of the history of such services. And it should come as no surprise that a local government or a government-supported co-op might be a better system for customers in smaller towns or rural areas.
But people ARE allowed to build their own network if they want to. It's called a Co-Op. If the local townspeople want to start a community ISP, they can do so in the PRIVATE sector by forming a Co-Op that anyone in the community can join by buying shares. ...
Well, yeah; anyone can form a co-op. But to build a network, you have to run the wires, and that is a local monopoly controlled by your friendly local government. Having a co-op isn't very useful if you can't run your wires.
There is wi-fi, of course, but that's legally limited to a low power with an effective range that's less than a city block, and it has only a few channels. So that approach isn't very useful.
It'd be interesting to read about an area where the government didn't impose any sort of controls on communication channels. Do you know of one? I know that such things existed a century or so back, before the technology had been much developed. But as soon as any comm hardware became very useful, it became obvious that government controls were needed. Otherwise the broadcaster with the most powerful transmitter would swamp all the lower-powered stations, you'd get a rat' nest of wires over the streets with poles every few feet, and so on.
So how can one build a comm co-op of any sort without government involvement? Where is it legal to run your wires without the government guys stepping in and saying you can't do that without a permit? Inquiring minds want to know. ;-)
... that nobody has yet suggested googling for "Siberian pipeline explosion" to answer this question.
It's widely believed in much of the world that the US government has long been the prime mover in "cyber warfare". Whether this is true or not, fact is that people believe it, and this is a significant part of the rest of the world's attitude towards the US dominance of the Internet. You might have noticed that there have been moves afoot in a lot of the world to end this dominance and install networking equipment that is beyond the (easy) reach of the US government.
(OTOH, I've found that most people everywhere on the Net are quite friendly towards individual Americans, as long as you don't give the impression of having any sort of official position. Or maybe it's just me ... ;-)
1. What makes you think they don't already have a backdoor into every copy of Windows shipped?
In effect, this has been freely admitted by Microsoft, and we've discussed it several times here on slashdot. It came up a month or so back in a story about someone who found that, even with all the automatic update stuff turned off, some "system" updates happen in Vista anyway. Turning off all the auto-update stuff doesn't stop these updates from happening. In the discussion, it has come out that this has been true since at least the early releases of XP.
In various security-related forums, it has been pointed out that this "feature" is a classical backdoor. It allows anyone with the right connections inside Microsoft to get their software installed in any machine via the automatic update mechanism. If you think that the security folks in various government agencies (in the US and other countries) don't know about this, you're rather naive. After all, it has been discussed here and in several other public net forums.
This is also a good thing to bring up when someone makes the claim that all other OSs are just as vulnerable as MS Windows. With linux and the *BSDs, we have the source available (and we can compile them ourselves if we like), so we can (and do) examine the code for such things. We can be reasonably sure that, when backdoors have been slipped into these open-source systems (and it has happened), the fact has become public very quickly and there were fixes available. With MS Windows, we don't have the source (though some agencies in the US and PRC governments have it), so we can't examine the code or recompile it. And when the stories come out about the automatic downloading of new software by Windows, Microsoft isn't even apologetic. Those backdoors are there intentionally; they're not going away; you and I have no defense against them.
Except to not use Microsoft products, of course.
(Actually, it has been pointed out that you can make MS Windows secure, but one of the requirements is that you never connect it to any kind of network. This includes removing hardware such as wifi, bluetooth, IR, USB, etc. devices ;-)
We might also point out that, as has been mentioned in several /. discussions lately, Windows has been doing automatic updates to parts of the system for several years now (at least since XP). This can't be turned off by the system settings that purportedly control updating. This means that any recent Windows box that's connected to the network can be exchanging files with various "back home" machines without your knowledge. If it's not doing this now, the software to do it might be installed by tomorrow. Microsoft has openly admitted to this, in the form of explaining to us why it's for our own good.
So if there's a Windows box involved, the default assumption should be that any files accessible from that machine are available to Microsoft, to do with as they like, if it is ever connected to a network. Note that this includes wifi, bluetooth and IR connectivity.
Back in the early 1980s, I worked on a few IBM mainframes (as a unix guru, believe it or not ;-), and we demoed that this was true for all the main IBM OSs back then. I haven't had to deal with one of those monsters for a while, but my assumption would be that you might be able to secure them from outside users but not from IBM. I've worked on a couple of projects that can be summarized as cracking all of IBM's data formats so that the data can be extracted and transferred to other non-IBM systems without IBM's permission. This was done for some companies that were getting very serious about security issues, and realized that the data on their mainframe was in effect "owned" by IBM, to do with as they like.
An interesting part of this discussion is that if you look into hospitals, you'll see that almost all the things recognizable as "computers" are running Microsoft software. There are also a good number of IBM mainframes. So much for pretenses about security and privacy. We can talk all we like about such things, but it means little to the true owners of those machines.
Are the hospitals going to build a private network for record transfers? Probably not, instead they'll use the internet that everyone else uses.
Yup. And one useful fact is that on the Internet, you don't need every company to implement their own idea of what a secure link is. You can just fire up VPN, and it'll fully encrypt all the data between two Internet-connected systems no matter where they are.
Of course, we could still benefit from VPN software that's a bit more reliable and easier for a person who's not a security guru to use correctly. But that's slowly happening. 10 years ago, using VPN pretty much required an expert; now there are packages on the most common systems that hide most of the cruft from the user.
My wife works for another Massachusetts medical agency (which one isn't relevant here), and she does most of her work from home now, with both her desktop (Mac) and laptop (Vista) tied to the office via VPN. It's mostly pretty smooth now, except that she can't get either machine to print files from the work systems. But she found that they can write files to a USB memory card, and if she then unplugs the USB gadget and plugs it back in, they can print from it. Heh.
(We wonder if the problem is intentional, so that employees can't print out the contents of the databases on their home machines. And we did sorta giggle when we found how stupid the workaround was. So she can make hard copy of things to be printed, and if they come out good on paper, she shreds the test copies and sends email saying the jobs are ready to be printed. So we no longer buy peat moss for our garden now. ;-)
Even though his history probably makes asthma much more likely than pneumonia, if they treated him for asthma without ruling out pneumonia, and he ended up dying, they would be liable for his death.
Maybe that hints at a viable approach. What we need is a well-publicized case like this in which the patient dies. The inquest turns up the fact that the correct diagnosis and prescriptions were all in the medical database, but the doctors and nurses ignored that and treated the patient for what they were guessing was the problem. The family sues, gets a multi-million-dollar settlement. The media gets wind of the story and tells everyone about it. The hospitals (and insurance companies) start triple-checking to make sure that every doctor and nurse has read every patient's database info. This probably saves a lot of time that has been wasted in repeated collection of the data from the patient.
Of course, making that info actually accessible and comprehensible to medical people (as opposed to the IT people who did the database and software design) will take a bit longer.
I've worked on a few medical data projects, and one thing that has struck me was the great lengths taken to make sure that I had no contact whatsoever with actual doctors or nurses. Any software developer knows what the results will be if they are denied communication with the users. You get software that makes perfect sense to a software developer, but is incomprehensible to anyone else. It typically takes several rounds of "beta" testing to overcome this problem, and to rebuild the user-interface stuff so that the real users can actually use it.
But so far, medical people's time is too valuable to waste playing with beta software ...
I can't help but feel while reading 'The Data Model That Nearly Killed Me' that the problems encountered actually had very little to do with the electronic record system at all. It seemed more like an incompetent system was in place as a whole. The data model didn't seem to do anything wrong, it was the people using it, or not using it.
But failure to take into account real-life human behavior is a major design failure all by itself. Yes, people often try to excuse a bad design by invoking "human failure". The response to this should be that if it can't be used correctly by real people, especially those worn out by an 18-hour shift, the failure wasn't in the humans at all. The computer part was very badly designed for the conditions it must operate in.
We have centuries of development in a field called "ergonomics". The computer software field generally isn't aware of this term or the concepts behind it. But there is a lot known about designing systems so that people can use them correctly. Maybe we should require that the designers of medical systems be at least familiar with the concept. Or we could get really radical, and start quietly hinting that medical software designers actually have training in ergonomics.
Yeah, yeah, I know; the big software companies would never go along with it. But it's worth at least considering. We shouldn't excuse the software designers by blaming the medical people for their inability to use the software correctly.
[T]he VA is run entirely by the government. What the rest of the US is going to wind up with is a huge train wreck of competing standards and products by proprietary vendors who don't want to interoperate.
Once again it's probably worthwhile to note that this was a major part of the motivation behind the original ARPAnet project which grew into the Internet. The US Dept of Defense was trying to deal with a growing problem. They were collecting all sorts of fancy electronic gadgets that generated and consumed data, but most of them would only talk to other gadgets from the same vendor. It was clear that this wasn't an accident. Every vendor wanted a to be the sole supplier, and one way they all saw to do this was via proprietary data formats.
The ARPA gang's solution was to build what they called Interface Message Processors (IMPs), whose job was to talk to a proprietary gadget in its native language, translate the gadget's messages into a standard format, and transmit that to another IMP, which would translate it into the native language of another recipient gadget. They knew from long experience that their vendors wouldn't cooperate with this, and would do everything in their power to sabotage the ability of other vendors' gadgets with their own. So the ARPA people farmed out the task of building the IMPs to people who had a history of successful communication with their competitors, the people in academia.
That was about 40 years ago. Now, with four more decades of experience, we can clearly see that the problem hasn't gone away. There is no prospect that gadgets or data systems built by different corporations will ever interoperate sanely. Private companies have a strong motive to sabotage such communication whenever they can get away with it. So, as in the past, the only way we can get useful medical data systems is the same was we've done it with the Internet. We need government-run projects to develop and enforce the standards. Building the low-level gadgets can be a job for the corporate world. But if we ever want to be able to use the data for any meaningful purpose, we must make sure that the corporate world can't control it.
Actually, of course, we have no guarantee that government agencies will do the job right, either. There's no shortage of incompatible data formats in government databases. Unless the job is handled by people as competent as ARPA was back in the 1960s and 70s, it'll still be a huge, expensive failure. Sorta like the medical data systems we have now, which were mostly developed in-house at hospitals, and even the nonprofit hospitals have a poor record of interoperability. (Yes, I've worked on some of their systems, and it's not a pretty sight.) So we should be watching how the governments deal with the problem, and be quick to criticise the crappy standards that we know they'll design.
Otherwise we'll end up with medical records based on a standard similar to the Avian Carrier Protocol, but it won't have been published on April 1. You should also read the wikipedia article to read of a real implementation. But most managers in both corporate and government circles don't have a sense of humor good enough to prevent such things from becoming actual standards.
Called Internet Explorer by Microsoft. Remember when this used to be so easy?
Yeah, back when only the first release of IE was out. Since then, it hasn't been easy even if you're just developing for IE, since every release of IE has had gratuitous inconsistencies with the previous release. Of course, to Microsoft, the current release is always the "standard", and previous releases are obsolete, so everyone is expected to change their sites accordingly. However, if you're working for a company whose management uses Windows, you have a problem: Every manager considers the version of Windows and IE on their machine to be "the Standard" for everything. So if your software or web site or whatever doesn't work as each manager expects on his/her screen, you've screwed it up and you're expected to fix it so it works right. And when they upgrade to a newer system, they're upset with you because your stuff no longer works on their "standard" system the same way it did yesterday.
But I guess that's how everything works everywhere. It doesn't help that much to make your stuff match the official published standards, because the management wherever you work always has a jumbled mixture of releases of whatever systems they've "standardized" on.
I have seen some fairly impressive web sites that "solve" this via extensive testing to determine the exact release of which OS and browser a client is using, and if it's one of the systems in use by one of the developers' bosses, delivers HTML+whatever that produces whatever that boss wants to see on the screen. What this does on non-bosses' screens is irrelevant, of course, since the developers aren't judged by that.
Of course, making your stuff match standards everywhere except on one or two bosses' screens is fairly straightforward, and hardly needs a text explaining how to do it. The trick is making your stuff match the "standard" of several bosses' systems, while also working fairly well on visitors' machines.
Computers have gotten ridiculously fast compared during the last 20 years, and still they seem slow to many of us. Is that just the result of crappy programming, or is there more to it?
A few years back, Henry Petroski said it fairly elegantly:
There's really not much more to it than that. Consider that, when new hardware comes out, the people with the first crack at it are the programmers in various software development companies around the world. Their natural reaction to faster hardware and/or cheaper memory is to use it to make their software flashier. They continue this until the users won't use the software because it's too slow, at which point they back off a bit and wait for the next hardware upgrade. So the software that users get is continuously adjusted to use all the cpu and memory that's available.
And, of course, a major reason for it all is seen in reviews like we've just read. The headline uses the word "Slick", and the emphasis is on that slickness. Actual functionality isn't mentioned, because it's not interesting to the reviewer. What's interesting is "Oooh, Pretty!" When reviews and sales are dependent on this, we should expect that the software developers would push for glitz.
This isn't "crappy programming"; it's fairly sophisticated programming to give the customers what they repeatedly say they want. If you don't want your computers perpetually bogged down to support a "slick" GUI, you should be saying publicly that you like something else.
Copyright seems to have an indefinite life these days...
True, but this isn't really anything new. A few centuries back, before modern printing presses and before the fiction that copyright is to encourage creators, it was common for rulers to give (more often, sell) exclusive publication rights to a single local copy shop. This was especially important for the major books such as the Bible and Koran. The age of the text didn't matter; the rulers wanted to make sure that 1) only an authorized translation was produced, and 2) the supply was limited so that the hoi polloi couldn't read the texts themselves.
This isn't all that different in principal from what modern "publishers" like those TV companies are trying to do. They want to be the sole supplier of the information, partly so that you'll have to buy their service and watch their ads if you want to see the information. In both cases, the motive has nothing to do with creativity; it's all about control of the information that the masses have access to, and their "right" to collect money for access to the information.
There was a clear example of this back around 1220, which you can read about in various books on the Mongol "invasion" of Europe. Their first expedition was exploratory, and they took along a small military force mostly for protection from the bandits that they knew infested the far West. Those soldiers fought a lot of defensive battles, because the reports that preceded them described a flock of demonic killers who were ravaging the countryside, and local rulers sent troops to attack them. The main reason for this, it seems, was that Genghis (not yet Khan) & buddies also took along a troop of Korean printers. The Koreans had a mobile print shop set up in their wagons, and as they travelled, they printed and sold cheap editions of whatever was popular locally. This was mostly Korans in central Asia, and Bibles further west. This was a direct threat to the western rulers' control over their own populations, which was based in part on control over the local production of religious and other texts. The response was a campaign to paint the Mongols as demonic visitors intent on killing everyone in their path. By then, of course, the real intent was to depose the demonic western rulers (and replace them with a modern, enlightened form of government ;-). They did succeed in establishing a much cheaper printing industry (and religious freedom) in the areas that they conquered. But the eastern printing technology was embargoed in western Europe, and it took several more centuries for it to be developed by Gutenberg et al in the 1400s.
The use of copyright to control access to information is an old story. And from the start, copyright was applied to texts centuries or even millennia old.
As if anyone in the government puts in 100% effort. The 10% figure sounds right, though.
Actually, the OP didn't get the old joke quite right. There are actually two versions, the simpler is: The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time; the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
There's also the expanded (asymptotic) version: The first 90% of the job takes the first 90% of the time; the next 9% takes the next 90% of the time; the next 0.9% takes the next 90% of the time, ....
This is a canonical comment when discussing any sort of organizational schedules. It's not just governments; the same phenomenon has been copiously documented in the corporate development environment. It's not how governments work; it's how groups of humans work.
Heh. I've read a number of articles by some of those 17 lawyers explaining in detail why, in most of the US (and probably most other countries), it is technically impossible to not be in violation of some law. There are a number of web sites with collections of weird laws that help in this.
Just one of many examples from a city where I once lived: Someone pointed out that there was a rather general ordinance forbidding the possession of "gambling devices". It wasn't to specific about what constituted such a device, but the journalists had a bit of fun imagining. For instance, do you have any coins or currency in your pocket? If so, are you familiar with any of the various gambling games that are played with coins or by comparison of the serial numbers on paper money? Those games may be silly, and mostly children's games, but they are obviously "gambling", so if you have any money in your pocket, you're can be arrested under that law. If not, well, you can read the "vagrancy" laws. Not being in possession of money is, in most places, ipso facto evidence of vagrancy, for which you can be arrested and held in jail.
Now, granted, most of us aren't going to be arrested for such "violations". These are what are commonly called "nuisance laws". That is, if you're making a nuisance of yourself to the people in charge, they can make themselves a nuisance to you by arresting you, holding you overnight, running you out of town, whatever. Such laws are typically designed with the intent of application against someone who they want to arrest and hold but who hasn't committed any serious offense.
Here in Massachusetts, someone recently discovered that there's a law still on the books that requires all adult men to carry a firearm when they go to church on Sunday. I'd known about the similar law in Georgia ("for protection from the savage Indians"), and it wasn't really that much of a surprise to find that Massachusetts once passed a similar law. The media here also had a bit of fun a few years ago when they discovered that Boston still had a law that forbids Indians from being within the city limits after sundown. (It's not clear whether this applies to Indians from India, or just the native kind. ;-)
I'm sure others here can contribute some fun laws (typically pairs of laws) in their community that you (or perhaps some special others) can't avoid violating. It's a rare jurisdiction where such laws don't exist, especially since old laws rarely get repealed.
Anyone here have a favorite "weird laws" site? Extra points for lists of laws that you can't avoid violating.
Don't forget the war on poverty....
That was my favorite. Especially the part where it ended quickly, as poor people all over the US started asking where they could go to surrender.
Now if we could figure out an equally clever response to all the other bogus "wars" on abstract concepts.