In google search and you will see that google profits from linking people to illegal content in much the same way.
I can vouch for that. I've found that the fastest way to find a torrent is to simply google it. That works a lot better than using any of the torrent sites' search functions, in my experience.
TPB hosted the.torrent files of anything, including many popular linux distros.
Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? We all know, from the many professional analyses done by the top people in the computing industry's market leader(s), that linux is a socialist (i.e., communist) conspiracy to undermine the leadership position of those very market leaders. That's gotta be illegal, right? At least here in the US. I even read a report that linux was actually built in one of those Socialist Scandinavian countries.
So when will we be reading about TPB being taken to court for aiding and abetting the distribution of linux and other so-called "free" software?
(Hmmm... This might be too subtle for the/. moderators. Maybe I need a smiley here? Nah...)
It's the same way the cell phone companies do it: you have to guess how many minutes you're going to use ahead of time, then get shorted for what you don't use and pay huge overages for when you exceed you're initial guess. Let's get back to the electric utility model where you are charged for exactly what you use, and if anything, you get lower off-peak rates.
But there's one major problem with these metaphors: With the phone, and to a somewhat lesser extent with electricity, consumers can measure their usage. I can use my watch to keep track of how much time I spend on the phone (and try to get the rest of the family to do the same; yeah, right;-). I can buy meters that measure the electrical consumption of various gadgets, or the whole house if I like.
But with the Internet, most consumers have no way at all of measuring their byte count. The ISP can make up any numbers they like, and most people have no way at all of knowing whether the numbers are accurate, or if the ISP is just making them up.
Now consider the major ongoing scandal in the US about major corporations playing fast and loose with just about everything, and the constant reminders that corporations are in business to make a profit. Why would any mere "consumer" trust them at all? Their business is to extract money from us, by any legal means, and they seem proud of that fact. Anyone who disagrees with that purpose is a Socialist or Communist, y'know. So why would we be happy with a charging mechanism that lets them make up numbers, and charge us proportionally to those numbers?
It doesn't seem likely that American consumers are going to trust their ISP (or banks or employers or realtors or used car dealers or...) any time soon. So the only stable Internet charging scheme has to be one that's based on numbers that the customers can verify independently. This basically means wall-clock time, since only a tiny population of geeks has a chance of measuring anything else that's "digital" (a concept that is a total mystery to the other 99% of the population).
A far more interesting idea is bacteria actually generate some vitamins and nutrients for our bodies...
This has been pretty well understood for decades. Part of medical training covers watching for and treating the side effects of a lot of antibiotics, which can kill of beneficial bacteria within the digestive system. There are a number of deficiency diseases that often follow antibiotic treatments. Our intestinal bacteria produce several vitamins, and are important in digesting some foods such as most fats. If those bacteria die off, a patient needs special care until their population is built up again.
I've seen the idea covered in a number of biology texts. This includes things like species whose young get their intestinal bacteria by eating their adults' feces. This behavior is especially common in species that eat leaves, which are poor in nutrients and high in indigestible cellulose. Animals that eat leaves depend on bacteria to break down the cellulose and process it into smaller, more soluble molecules, and maintaining a good population of those bacteria is crucial to survival. This is true of most grazing animals, termites, etc.
One clear example I read about was a species of tropical lizard whose adults are only found in the jungle canopy, but the young are seen climbing down to the ground occasionally. What they were doing down there, field researchers found, was searching for and eating the droppings of the adults.
Nature does a lot of things that aren't very, uh, palatable to us humans.
Actually, if you ask around among biologists, they'll probably mostly tell you that the default conjecture should be that homosexuality in a portion of the population is probably adaptive. The main clue is that homosexual activity is common in almost all primates, and in quite a lot of other social species. Observers conclude that it's part of the social bonding that holds groups together. Of course, this is mostly just a hypothesis, too, and not a lot of studies have been done to try to get supporting or debunking evidence.
The idea that it's not adaptive because it wouldn't often be inherited is clearly wrong. There are a lot of species, e.g. bees, ants and termites, in which over 99% of the population in non-reproductive, and this doesn't seem to interfere with their survival at all. Many species of ants are much more "successful" than we humans are, by any measure of success that you care to use, despite the fact that almost all of a hive produce no offspring at all.
In general, you can google for "kin selection" for lots of information on the biological theories behind various kinds of behavior that appear maladaptive to naive viewers. There's no problem at all with the idea that not reproducing is maladaptive. If your behavior helps others in your social group to survive and produce offspring, your genes may well thrive even if you have no offspring. This isn't anything radical or abstruse; it's Bio-101 material. Bees and ants are just extreme examples of it; it probably happens in all social species. (Otherwise, why would a species even be social?)
All that's needed for homosexuality to be adaptive is that the gay folks' behavior is somehow to the advantage of a few of their kin, on the average. It's not at all difficult to imagine scenarios in which this could be true.
It could be interesting to read of studies that managed to do real tests of such things. But such things might be too politically hot to get funding, in the US or in a lot of other countries.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/1/349 provides an in depth study.... you'll find that children raised in such contexts are normal, normal, normal across the board. they quote study after study after study looking for problems and finding none, none, none and none.
Yeah, but you should know that those are all negative results, and such results are rarely even published. When they are, they are firmly ignored by society, because why would you bother with a report that (quite literally) shows "nothing".;-)
It is interesting that this study's results were actually published by what appears to be a bona-fide publishing organization. But that probably won't do much to persuade people who don't want to hear negative results.
[C]ould it be that _ALL_ UNIX admins spend most their time in a terminal, be it putty, gnome-terminal, or Terminal, and gnome-terminal sucks so much ass people would rather use a NonFree(tm) system just for a better terminal emulator?
Yeah, I sorta do that. One of the main reasons is that I've found that an OSX Terminal is one of the few that can actually allow me to edit text that's in a mixture of languages, because it works better than others I've tried with UTF-8 encoded text. TextEdit also works pretty well for non-Western languages, though as an editor it's sorta clumsy.
Granted, it still has a problem with occasionally deciding that Russian text is all double-width characters, and cursor tracking for Hebrew and Arabic is quite weird. But if there's a way to do it on my linux boxes, I haven't stumbled across it yet. Most of the terminal-window apps seem to draw Hebrew and Arabic left-to-right, and mostly they only display the isolated forms of Arabic letters. We have a long way to go...
If there's something that works as well as the Mac's Terminal, let me know. And yes, I've looked into doing it myself, but so far the charset/font stuff on both linux and OSX are pretty much brick walls. Asking questions in various forums mostly gets no response at all, with "RTFM, n00b!" being a close second (without clues for where to find TFM, of course).
(It'd also be nice to have linux apps that're functionally like the Mac's Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer, though it's easy to think of a number of ways that those could be improved. But I guess we're still in the days of convincing the vendors that they need to support western European languages. Non-European languages are still beneath their notice, even if they do get all their hardware from east Asia.;-)
Sounds familiar. I've been working lately with a couple of fellows in management positions who's a "web master/developer/etc" whose method of producing a web page is to create it in MS Word, and telling Word to export it as HTML.
One of my jobs has been to write the code that takes their junk HTML, strips out around 99% of it so that it renders properly on browsers other than IE, and putting that in the real web site. The "developers" don't know how to actually put a page online, of course; that's Someone Else's Job. I'm not exaggerating with that 99%, either. For example, just stripping out the redundant <font> tags typically reduces their files to less than half their original size. Dropping the nested <div> tags (many without attributes) cuts out another 10% to 20%. And so on.
A fun part that I'm looking into now is that a lot of their pages are a jumbled mixture of encodings. Windows-1251 and -1252, Mac Roman, UTF-8, plus several others, all jumbled together with no encoding= attributes anywhere. It seems that Word and IE have some undocumented scheme that makes it easy for someone with no concept of encodings to do this so that it displays the same in both Word and IE, and of course it's then "correct". But it's fun considering how you'd make such pages understandable by the visually impaired, for example.
A couple of times I've harassed them a bit by sending him text in Chinese or Arabic that needs to be part of some page. But usually this falls somewhat flat, because when it renders as mojibake on his screen, they don't see anything wrong with it, and I tend to get pages back that have the same bytes flagged as Windows-1251 or ISO 8859-1. Somehow this doesn't make for very good pages for Asian or Middle-Eastern clients. It's especially funny when this happens with German or French text, with their marked letters converted to gibberish by encoding problems. You'd think that a person claiming web development expertise could at least handle the major European languages.
I don't think I'll mention what I call them in private. I'm just glad they're not my bosses, and others seem to appreciate my ability to make their stuff actually work (mostly). And I'm not sure what to call myself, either, when I'm working in such a rôle.
(Now to see if/. handles that last work correctly...;)
You can't fault them entirely for that. Bills tend to be exorbitantly long and detailed (we're talking hundreds of pages)....
Sure we can.;-)
Congress's rules and procedures weren't imposed on them by some super-powerful outside force. They set up the rules themselves, and they don't seem to be interested in fixing the problems. The only people you can possibly blame are the (past and present) members of Congress. And the most likely theory explaining why they don't fix the problems is that the majority approve of the way it now works.
Of course, it isn't the fault of any one single Congressman (or woman). It's what's called a "system problem". And it's a good illustration of the saying that "when responsibility is divided, nobody is responsible".
It might be interesting if a few Congressmen stood up to it, and declared that they won't vote for a bill because they don't understand it. Granted, people would mock them for it. But then imagine the fun when pundits tried explaining to the public why the bill was simple. The ensuing public debate would make it clear that nobody at all understands what the bill would really do, and people would slowly start defending the Congressman.
But I don't expect such a thing to ever happen. As many people have explained, most members of Congress (and their corporate supporters) profit financially from the current mess, so they have a good incentive to make sure it continues.
Or the name "Mississippi", which has all sorts of fanciful stories and flowery translations, but most likely is just derived from a Chippewa (Ojibwa) phrase meaning "big river". There are place names like that all over. This is especially true in East Asia, where there are lots of place names that sound like proper names but are actually simple descriptive phrases. Esoteric-sounding names like Beijing ("north capital"), Tokyo ("east capital"), and Shanghai ("on the ocean").
Indeed, and it's even more fun to do that sort of thing "in translation".
Thus, just a few days ago I was involved in a discussion elsewhere that involved the "Huang Ho river" in China. Among other things, I mentioned that the proper transliteration now that pinyin is the official standard would be "Huang He" (or even better, "Huang2 He2"). But I didn't mention that "he2" is Mandarin for "river", so "Huang Ho river" means "Yellow River river". I just went along with the phrase as if there were nothing odd about it, since nobody else in the discussion seemed to know even that much Mandarin.
I also recently visited the wikipedia page for the Alhambra World Heritage Site. I enjoyed the way the article starts with "The Alhambra...", in blatant defiance of the fact that that initial "Al" is Arabic for "the". There are lots of place names around the world that include a definite article, so there's lots of opportunities for this particular sort of in-joke. I wouldn't be surprised if that article was written by someone like me that knew full well what he/she was writing.
I also had a bit of fun in another recent discussion writing something about "the Mauna Loa mountaintop", and liked the fact that nobody else seemed to know (or care) that "mauna" is Hawaiian for "mountain". (Jeez; everyone should know that much Hawaiian, right?;-)
English has a number of cases like this built in. Thus, in England, you'll see occasional references to the Avon River or the River Avon (of which there are four in England and two in Scotland;-). Avon is, of course, the English (mi)speling of the Welsh word "afon", which means "river", but I suppose that few non-Welsh English know that. I just looked up the wikipedia page for that name, and it starts right off telling the reader what the name means.
There are Departments of Redundancy Departments alive and well in a lot of countries...
If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
Quite possibly it was written with exactly that intent. We've been often reminded by nearly everyone studying Congress that most proposed laws aren't written by the legislators at all; they're usually written by "consultants" who are part of the lobbying setup and are paid by the corporations interested in the laws. It has come out repeatedly that most members of Congress haven't even read the laws that they vote on. They usually have only read the summaries, which are written for public PR.
So it's quite likely that whoever worked out the exact wording of the law was in the pay of one or more companies who wanted exactly what the story is about. They probably discussed it behind the scenes, until they were fairly sure that the wording would allow their employers to take advantage of the law in this fashion.
It's how things are done. And it's hardly any secret. It's been written about more times than we can probably count.
(Actually, none of this precludes the possibility of a Congressman understanding the issue. The point is that usually they don't bother themselves over such details. That's for their underlings to handle.)
We live in a society where 'corporate selection' fosters public companies who mindlessly take the action which most increases value for their shareholders.
Are they not legally obliged to do so?
Not at all. That's a bit of propaganda foisted by the "corporate profits are all that's important" crowd, but it has very little actual basis in law.
If there were such a legal requirement, you wouldn't see corporations supporting things like your local Little League, or any other charities. That would be money that could have gone to dividends. But you don't find shareholders suing companies to force them to stop supporting local charities, because even their own lawyers would laugh at the suggestion.
There are laws concerning outright corporate fraud in their stock dealings. But this is something very different from saying that corporations must maximize their dividends at every opportunity.
A common counterexample to this myth is what's often expressed as "good will". This is something that nobody can measure precisely, but companies do try to improve their public image, sometimes at great price. They don't get sued for doing so even when the financial value of that good will isn't precisely measurable by their accountants.
I don't know about that. The ruling elite in every part of the world throughout history have maintained their control over their society by fearmongering.
Why bother with local, specialized cases when you can acknowledge a general pattern of human social behavior?
Al Gore, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of them have just been using the main tool for getting a society to follow their leaders.
Sounds familiar. One job I had at DEC needed to use SLIP connections, and they also wanted to make PPP an option. I played around with their SLIP driver for a month or more, and couldn't make it work right. We called in several "experts", and they couldn't make it work either. So one day, I printed out the RFCs for both SLIP and PPP, and took them home for bedtime reading. The next morning I started coding a SLIP, and by noon, I had a demo of a version that passed all our tests and worked fine with all the remote sites that we had available at the time. People were really impressed. But frankly, it was easy, and I don't know how their packaged driver could have failed to badly. I couldn't get its source, though, so I was never able to find out.
A couple of weeks later, I also wrote a PPP driver directly from the RFC, but that was more complicated and took a whole day. I wasn't able to test it as thoroughly, though, because at the time we didn't have many remote test machines that could do PPP.
Anyway, this was a good example where writing a completely new driver took more than an order of magnitude less time than we'd already wasted trying to get the existing one to work. It did help that the official spec was available at the "cost" of a few minutes of downloading. Actually, what was really unusual about the RFCs was that they contained all the information that I needed to implement the protocols. It's really rare to find such good specs anywhere. The Internet's specs are generally much better than what you can get for just about anything else, at least in the computer biz. It's yet another example of the inverse relation between price and quality in much of the computer field.
So can you (or anyone outside Apple) prove that? How would we know (as opposed to believe) that what they tell us is true.
After all, not all of OS X or its apps are open source. If your Mac is connected to the Internet, some of the closed-source portions could be doing unannounced updates. And if you look for packet traffic, you tend to find it, because of all the apps (e.g. web browsers with pages that do auto-refresh) that generate low-level traffic when "idle". It's not easy to determine whether any of those packets are the closed-source software downloading and installing stuff.
Check out RFC 208 to see how addressing was actually done in the old days.
6 bits of IMP (essentially the network address) 2 bits of host
Heh. I remember reading several versions of the debates leading up to an expansion of packet fields some years later. The stories generally describe it as a debate between the "conservatives" who thought a small host field would suffice, and the "radicals" who advocated a larger size for when the Net would be a lot bigger than the conservatives expected. Finally, the story goes, the radicals won out - and they went with a full 8-bit host number.
That's not the end of the story, of course, because it hasn't ended yet. For years now we've been debating the wisdom of going to IPv6, with a 128-bit host address. But so far it's the conservatives who have won, arguing that we're doing just fine with a 32-bit address, switching over would be a huge expense, the larger addresses just mean larger packets and thus slower data throughput, and all the other reasons we've read here and in other tech forums.
People do have a way of putting off upgrades until the old system is falling apart from the overload. Even then, they prefer all sorts of kludgy ad-hoc patches to the current system, rather than moving to a cleanly-designed higher-capacity system.
I particularly liked the description of his visit to Bangalore -- it goes to the heart of why we do open source.
For those who didn't read TFA, this refers to "... as part of the visit I was introduced to a student who had built a fairly complex software system. Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He simply said, "I downloaded the R.F.C.'s and read them.""
There are a lot of stories like this. The one I like to tell is about a number of projects that I worked on, where part of my job was making our software work over the OSI protocols. What happened repeatedly was that the ISO specs weren't available for downloading, so we had to buy a printed copy. This inevitably entailed making out a purchase order, getting it approved by the Right People, sending it off, and waiting for the arrival of the package.
In the meantime, we'd work on what we could, which was the IP-based part of the code. This entailed going to an online archive and downloading the relevant FTPs, typically a matter of a few minutes, with no signatures required by anyone. By the time the ISO docs arrived a few weeks later, we'd have the IP version written, debugged, and stuck into the libraries for the use of other developers or customers. Then we could start working on the ISO code.
The result, of course, was that everyone would end up going with the IP-based stuff, since it appeared first and was the code that was thoroughly tested. It also helped a lot that the Internet had lots of forums (mostly email at first) where one could ask dumb questions and get actual answers from others who had already stumbled around and found the answers (and wanted to show off their superior knowledge). Such forums never developed for ISO, at least not anywhere we could generally find quickly.
In this case, the proper term isn't really "open source"; it's "open publication". This is what has made modern science the success that it is, and it's much of what put the Internet ahead of its competitors. Many people argued that several other networking schemes were better technically. This claim has been made for both DECnet and ISO, and they may be right. But it doesn't matter; IP/UDP/TCP/... was good enough, and its specs were published openly. This meant that anyone could quickly grab them and start coding; you did't need permission from anyone to read and use them.
Of course, "open source" is based on the same idea. If you make your information easily available to everyone, they can build on your ideas. This gives your ideas dominance over other "for sale" or "by permission only" ideas, even if someone else's hidden ideas happen to be slightly better.
I've always wondered whether DECnet was as good as its proponents claimed. But even when I worked as a contractor at DEC, I wasn't allowed access to the DECnet specs, so I guess I'll never know. I'm of mixed mind over ISO, which I learned a little about. Some parts are probably better than IP, and others aren't, but without widespread deployment we'll probably never really know how ISO would work with a billion users.
... the chances of it ever progressing past your reply of "we ARE the organization you're reporting on" is microscopic and doomed to failure.
I wouldn't bet on that. The "Intellectual Property" people are slowly ending "That was my story" as a workable legal defense.
Thus, for a few decades now we've had the situation where a musicians can be sued for performing their own work, because the fine print of one of their recording contracts gave ownership of that work to the recording company. Similarly, many published writers can be sued for plagiarizing from an earlier work of their own, because that text is owned by the publisher. In such cases, the publishing corporations could demand such contracts, because the alternative was that the creators' work would not be distributed at all.
To make the issue even more fun, dig around in the contracts that ISPs require with their customers. Many ISPs forbid running your own web server, but offer space on their server as part of the service - and the contract's fine print says that anything you put on the ISPs server is owned by the ISP. Sometimes they allow you to run your own server, but the contract says that any data passing through their server is owned by the ISP. So everything on your blog may be owned by your ISP, which in turn has the right to sell the content as they wish, e.g. to AP. There have been a few skirmishes over this, and a few years ago msn.com was forced to customer outrage to stop using things like images of their customers' children in advertising. But the courts haven't yet much dealt with this, so we don't know what the actual law may be. It's possible that such contract terms will be held unconscionable by the courts, but this hasn't happened yet (except maybe in a few very local courts).
There is a battle going on behind the scenes over the attempts of major publishers (such as AP in this story) to block individual distribution of "content" via the Internet. The intent is to restore the previous regime, in which a few corporations controlled the distribution media and individuals had to hand the rights of their creations to the corporations if they wanted something distributed. Saying that this is doomed to failure on the Internet is rather naive. Legislatures are highly susceptible to "persuasion" (via campaign contributions, aka bribes) by corporations to support such things, and we can see in the history of both text and music that the laws and courts tend to favor the ownership of such things by the big publishers. There's no reason to believe that the courts won't go along with it in the case of material distributed via the Internet, as they have done in the past with hard-copy publishing.
Just yesterday we had a/. story about the question of how one can make an "invention" public domain, to guarantee that nobody else can patent it and sue both the users and the original inventor for infringement. This is a serious kind of question, and doing everything correctly so that you can't be sued by a powerful corporation for using your own work is a difficult legal problem. It's especially problematic for people who just put their own words online in a blog or forum like this one, and don't thing of taking legal steps to preserve their right to their own words. Yes,/. states explicitly that its contributors (you and I) own the copyright to our own words. Most other sites don't. And your ISP may own your words on/. because your copyright transfers automatically to your ISP on the way out. This appears to be a situation that is open to a great many legal actions, which will make money for a lot of lawyers, but which may not settle the issues at all for a great many years.
How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?
Ooh, ooh; I know! That would be my web site!
Actually, I'm more or less in charge of several web sites for several small organizations whose names or activities aren't very relevant here, because they're typical of zillions of orgs with an online presence. I fell into this because I understand how the Internet works, and most of the people in the organizations don't (and don't want to). They just want to type up their stories, and let the electronic magic be handled by someone else.
What's interesting about this to me is that it presents an interesting scenario: Suppose one of my sites has the same information as an AP news story about the site or the organization behind it. It sounds like, when we report the same news about ourselves, we would be in violation of AP's ownership of that information. So we could be sued by AP for reporting information about ourselves that AP has found, slightly reworded, and reported.
This situation isn't hypothetical. AP has had local news stories about some of these organizations. They may have got the information via interviews, or they may have got it from the orgs' blogs; we really don't know. In the past, we've provided the information, because people in organizations often want their activities to be publicised.
What we're wondering is: If we blog about our activities, and AP picks up the info and reports it, are they saying that we have to pay AP to have the same information on our own web site? If we've blogged about it and AP reports it, is AP saying that we must remove the information from our blogs?
It sure sounds like this is what they're aiming for.
This was an unlikely scenario back in the days of printed news, or even with broadcast news, since the news creators were rarely in a position to do the distribution, printing or delivery of the news. But the Internet has ended this division. News creators can now simply type up a few sentences and hand them over to their web server. Distribution and delivery to readers is handled by the web server without further human activity (or the death of trees;-). Readers get the info from the original sources if they want. We can cross-link our sites to help people with similar interests find what they want. Google can help people find the right articles on our sites.
So are we really going to give the big news corporations complete ownership over all information about our organizations, to (mis)report as they see fit? Or can we little guys continue to report our own activities on our own web sites without harrassment from the news corporations' lawyers?
Here's another ground breaking study, APAP doesn't cure a cough. Neither does ibuprofen. Give me grant money to prove it, please.
Ah, but here's where our current system has a problem. If you have the right credentials, you probably can get grant money to do the tests - from the drug companies. Their contract will give them "editorial" (i.e., veto) power over publishing the results. And negative (or no-effect) results rarely get published. In the few cases that publication is allowed, the media (including the scientific media) generally considers "no results" conclusions to be uninteresting and not news. And the companies' marketing departments have worked out ways of making even no-effect results sound like praise. "Our product is as effective at half the dose of our competitors" is quite true, after all, when they're all placebos.
What I found interesting about this story is that they're actually publicizing and acting on no-effect results of studies. This is something rather unusual in medical research. Not to say that it has never happened, of course, but it's a lot harder to find such stories than it is to find "miraculous new treatment" stories, in both the medical and the public news.
I don't expect it to continue. There are too many profitable products at stake.
It looks like none my Mac, Ubuntu, or Debian system is infected.
Funny thing is that I don't even have any anti-virus software installed on any of them. Just the usual software that's designed to not automatically run any code from the outside without getting my permission.
I wonder what sort of systems are getting infected. Anyone have any idea?
So where can we buy batteries that are better than 99.9% efficient?
This is using the usual definition of "efficiency" in batteries, of course: the ratio of output power to input power (measured over a period of time). I have a suspicion that whoever was making that claim is using some other definition, but I have no idea what their definition might be. Anyone know?
I've recently seen a number of media reports claiming efficiencies greater than 100% for a number of commercial gadgets. I've wondered what the patent office accepted these claims.
(Maybe I should read more of TFA. Maybe they give their definition somewhere in a footnote or something. Anyone know?;-)
Hmmm... I was puzzled by this, because I "knew" that slashdot.org/users.pl was the URL for that tab. But when I went to the tab, it had slashdot.org/~jc42/comments instead. WTF? How did it get changed? It's that was in the FF bookmark, too. Guess I'll have to change it back. Or maybe bookmark both of them, and check occasionally to see if either of them has changed. The user.pl page is definitely easier to read.
Actually, my comment yesterday on the dark-blue-on-bluegreen text in the "logo" bar across the top of the screen seems to have gotten a result. First I noticed that the main slashdot.org page now has the background in tan, which contrasts nicely with the dark-blue text (to my eyes). So I checked my users.pl page, and sho 'nuf; the text at the top is now white on the bluegreen background, which is probably readable by nearly everyone.
Complaining about idiocies in a UI does sometimes lead to improvements. All too often, complaining on a public forum is the only thing that works.
But I'd still prefer that they not force the colors at all, as several friends who are colorblind have suggested. If they can't be arsed to do that, some more config options to set the colors on a per-id basis would help those with visual problems. And if they can't be nice enough to do that, they're going to get complaints until they stumble across a universally-readable color scheme. And when they forget about that and revert to illegibility (for some eyes on some screens), they'll start getting complaints again until they revert to something that works.
But they could save themselves and their readers some time and effort by just deleting all the color attributes. Then each reader could set them to something that works for their eyes on their screen. Yeah, I know; I'm dreaming. But if we don't mention it, the turkeys will continue to think that everyone's happy with their pretty design.
I have pretty good eyes myself, but I have a number of visually-impaired friends, and I've done a bit of work on UI issues for such people. A lot is known about it. But we do have a problem on the Web, in that most people building web pages are contemptuous of people with "nonstandard" eyes. They also tend to be contemptuous of readers with small screens, but that's starting to change, as tiny computers like the iPhone and the google phone take off. That's a rapidly growing market, and anyone unwilling to accommodate them is likely to find their hit counts tapering off.
(My wife loves her iPhone, and grumbles loudly about idiot sites that don't work on it.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
In google search and you will see that google profits from linking people to illegal content in much the same way.
I can vouch for that. I've found that the fastest way to find a torrent is to simply google it. That works a lot better than using any of the torrent sites' search functions, in my experience.
TPB hosted the .torrent files of anything, including many popular linux distros.
Well, that about sums it up, doesn't it? We all know, from the many professional analyses done by the top people in the computing industry's market leader(s), that linux is a socialist (i.e., communist) conspiracy to undermine the leadership position of those very market leaders. That's gotta be illegal, right? At least here in the US. I even read a report that linux was actually built in one of those Socialist Scandinavian countries.
So when will we be reading about TPB being taken to court for aiding and abetting the distribution of linux and other so-called "free" software?
(Hmmm ... This might be too subtle for the /. moderators. Maybe I need a smiley here? Nah ...)
It's the same way the cell phone companies do it: you have to guess how many minutes you're going to use ahead of time, then get shorted for what you don't use and pay huge overages for when you exceed you're initial guess. Let's get back to the electric utility model where you are charged for exactly what you use, and if anything, you get lower off-peak rates.
But there's one major problem with these metaphors: With the phone, and to a somewhat lesser extent with electricity, consumers can measure their usage. I can use my watch to keep track of how much time I spend on the phone (and try to get the rest of the family to do the same; yeah, right ;-). I can buy meters that measure the electrical consumption of various gadgets, or the whole house if I like.
But with the Internet, most consumers have no way at all of measuring their byte count. The ISP can make up any numbers they like, and most people have no way at all of knowing whether the numbers are accurate, or if the ISP is just making them up.
Now consider the major ongoing scandal in the US about major corporations playing fast and loose with just about everything, and the constant reminders that corporations are in business to make a profit. Why would any mere "consumer" trust them at all? Their business is to extract money from us, by any legal means, and they seem proud of that fact. Anyone who disagrees with that purpose is a Socialist or Communist, y'know. So why would we be happy with a charging mechanism that lets them make up numbers, and charge us proportionally to those numbers?
It doesn't seem likely that American consumers are going to trust their ISP (or banks or employers or realtors or used car dealers or ...) any time soon. So the only stable Internet charging scheme has to be one that's based on numbers that the customers can verify independently. This basically means wall-clock time, since only a tiny population of geeks has a chance of measuring anything else that's "digital" (a concept that is a total mystery to the other 99% of the population).
A far more interesting idea is bacteria actually generate some vitamins and nutrients for our bodies...
This has been pretty well understood for decades. Part of medical training covers watching for and treating the side effects of a lot of antibiotics, which can kill of beneficial bacteria within the digestive system. There are a number of deficiency diseases that often follow antibiotic treatments. Our intestinal bacteria produce several vitamins, and are important in digesting some foods such as most fats. If those bacteria die off, a patient needs special care until their population is built up again.
I've seen the idea covered in a number of biology texts. This includes things like species whose young get their intestinal bacteria by eating their adults' feces. This behavior is especially common in species that eat leaves, which are poor in nutrients and high in indigestible cellulose. Animals that eat leaves depend on bacteria to break down the cellulose and process it into smaller, more soluble molecules, and maintaining a good population of those bacteria is crucial to survival. This is true of most grazing animals, termites, etc.
One clear example I read about was a species of tropical lizard whose adults are only found in the jungle canopy, but the young are seen climbing down to the ground occasionally. What they were doing down there, field researchers found, was searching for and eating the droppings of the adults.
Nature does a lot of things that aren't very, uh, palatable to us humans.
Actually, if you ask around among biologists, they'll probably mostly tell you that the default conjecture should be that homosexuality in a portion of the population is probably adaptive. The main clue is that homosexual activity is common in almost all primates, and in quite a lot of other social species. Observers conclude that it's part of the social bonding that holds groups together. Of course, this is mostly just a hypothesis, too, and not a lot of studies have been done to try to get supporting or debunking evidence.
The idea that it's not adaptive because it wouldn't often be inherited is clearly wrong. There are a lot of species, e.g. bees, ants and termites, in which over 99% of the population in non-reproductive, and this doesn't seem to interfere with their survival at all. Many species of ants are much more "successful" than we humans are, by any measure of success that you care to use, despite the fact that almost all of a hive produce no offspring at all.
In general, you can google for "kin selection" for lots of information on the biological theories behind various kinds of behavior that appear maladaptive to naive viewers. There's no problem at all with the idea that not reproducing is maladaptive. If your behavior helps others in your social group to survive and produce offspring, your genes may well thrive even if you have no offspring. This isn't anything radical or abstruse; it's Bio-101 material. Bees and ants are just extreme examples of it; it probably happens in all social species. (Otherwise, why would a species even be social?)
All that's needed for homosexuality to be adaptive is that the gay folks' behavior is somehow to the advantage of a few of their kin, on the average. It's not at all difficult to imagine scenarios in which this could be true.
It could be interesting to read of studies that managed to do real tests of such things. But such things might be too politically hot to get funding, in the US or in a lot of other countries.
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/content/full/118/1/349 provides an in depth study. ... you'll find that children raised in such contexts are normal, normal, normal across the board. they quote study after study after study looking for problems and finding none, none, none and none.
Yeah, but you should know that those are all negative results, and such results are rarely even published. When they are, they are firmly ignored by society, because why would you bother with a report that (quite literally) shows "nothing". ;-)
It is interesting that this study's results were actually published by what appears to be a bona-fide publishing organization. But that probably won't do much to persuade people who don't want to hear negative results.
[C]ould it be that _ALL_ UNIX admins spend most their time in a terminal, be it putty, gnome-terminal, or Terminal, and gnome-terminal sucks so much ass people would rather use a NonFree(tm) system just for a better terminal emulator?
Yeah, I sorta do that. One of the main reasons is that I've found that an OSX Terminal is one of the few that can actually allow me to edit text that's in a mixture of languages, because it works better than others I've tried with UTF-8 encoded text. TextEdit also works pretty well for non-Western languages, though as an editor it's sorta clumsy.
Granted, it still has a problem with occasionally deciding that Russian text is all double-width characters, and cursor tracking for Hebrew and Arabic is quite weird. But if there's a way to do it on my linux boxes, I haven't stumbled across it yet. Most of the terminal-window apps seem to draw Hebrew and Arabic left-to-right, and mostly they only display the isolated forms of Arabic letters. We have a long way to go ...
If there's something that works as well as the Mac's Terminal, let me know. And yes, I've looked into doing it myself, but so far the charset/font stuff on both linux and OSX are pretty much brick walls. Asking questions in various forums mostly gets no response at all, with "RTFM, n00b!" being a close second (without clues for where to find TFM, of course).
(It'd also be nice to have linux apps that're functionally like the Mac's Character Palette and Keyboard Viewer, though it's easy to think of a number of ways that those could be improved. But I guess we're still in the days of convincing the vendors that they need to support western European languages. Non-European languages are still beneath their notice, even if they do get all their hardware from east Asia. ;-)
Lots of people can "do HTML" - in Dreamweaver.
Sounds familiar. I've been working lately with a couple of fellows in management positions who's a "web master/developer/etc" whose method of producing a web page is to create it in MS Word, and telling Word to export it as HTML.
One of my jobs has been to write the code that takes their junk HTML, strips out around 99% of it so that it renders properly on browsers other than IE, and putting that in the real web site. The "developers" don't know how to actually put a page online, of course; that's Someone Else's Job. I'm not exaggerating with that 99%, either. For example, just stripping out the redundant <font> tags typically reduces their files to less than half their original size. Dropping the nested <div> tags (many without attributes) cuts out another 10% to 20%. And so on.
A fun part that I'm looking into now is that a lot of their pages are a jumbled mixture of encodings. Windows-1251 and -1252, Mac Roman, UTF-8, plus several others, all jumbled together with no encoding= attributes anywhere. It seems that Word and IE have some undocumented scheme that makes it easy for someone with no concept of encodings to do this so that it displays the same in both Word and IE, and of course it's then "correct". But it's fun considering how you'd make such pages understandable by the visually impaired, for example.
A couple of times I've harassed them a bit by sending him text in Chinese or Arabic that needs to be part of some page. But usually this falls somewhat flat, because when it renders as mojibake on his screen, they don't see anything wrong with it, and I tend to get pages back that have the same bytes flagged as Windows-1251 or ISO 8859-1. Somehow this doesn't make for very good pages for Asian or Middle-Eastern clients. It's especially funny when this happens with German or French text, with their marked letters converted to gibberish by encoding problems. You'd think that a person claiming web development expertise could at least handle the major European languages.
I don't think I'll mention what I call them in private. I'm just glad they're not my bosses, and others seem to appreciate my ability to make their stuff actually work (mostly). And I'm not sure what to call myself, either, when I'm working in such a rôle.
(Now to see if /. handles that last work correctly ... ;)
You can't fault them entirely for that. Bills tend to be exorbitantly long and detailed (we're talking hundreds of pages). ...
Sure we can. ;-)
Congress's rules and procedures weren't imposed on them by some super-powerful outside force. They set up the rules themselves, and they don't seem to be interested in fixing the problems. The only people you can possibly blame are the (past and present) members of Congress. And the most likely theory explaining why they don't fix the problems is that the majority approve of the way it now works.
Of course, it isn't the fault of any one single Congressman (or woman). It's what's called a "system problem". And it's a good illustration of the saying that "when responsibility is divided, nobody is responsible".
It might be interesting if a few Congressmen stood up to it, and declared that they won't vote for a bill because they don't understand it. Granted, people would mock them for it. But then imagine the fun when pundits tried explaining to the public why the bill was simple. The ensuing public debate would make it clear that nobody at all understands what the bill would really do, and people would slowly start defending the Congressman.
But I don't expect such a thing to ever happen. As many people have explained, most members of Congress (and their corporate supporters) profit financially from the current mess, so they have a good incentive to make sure it continues.
Or the name "Mississippi", which has all sorts of fanciful stories and flowery translations, but most likely is just derived from a Chippewa (Ojibwa) phrase meaning "big river". There are place names like that all over. This is especially true in East Asia, where there are lots of place names that sound like proper names but are actually simple descriptive phrases. Esoteric-sounding names like Beijing ("north capital"), Tokyo ("east capital"), and Shanghai ("on the ocean").
This is sorta OT now, of course ...
Indeed, and it's even more fun to do that sort of thing "in translation".
Thus, just a few days ago I was involved in a discussion elsewhere that involved the "Huang Ho river" in China. Among other things, I mentioned that the proper transliteration now that pinyin is the official standard would be "Huang He" (or even better, "Huang2 He2"). But I didn't mention that "he2" is Mandarin for "river", so "Huang Ho river" means "Yellow River river". I just went along with the phrase as if there were nothing odd about it, since nobody else in the discussion seemed to know even that much Mandarin.
I also recently visited the wikipedia page for the Alhambra World Heritage Site. I enjoyed the way the article starts with "The Alhambra ...", in blatant defiance of the fact that that initial "Al" is Arabic for "the". There are lots of place names around the world that include a definite article, so there's lots of opportunities for this particular sort of in-joke. I wouldn't be surprised if that article was written by someone like me that knew full well what he/she was writing.
I also had a bit of fun in another recent discussion writing something about "the Mauna Loa mountaintop", and liked the fact that nobody else seemed to know (or care) that "mauna" is Hawaiian for "mountain". (Jeez; everyone should know that much Hawaiian, right? ;-)
English has a number of cases like this built in. Thus, in England, you'll see occasional references to the Avon River or the River Avon (of which there are four in England and two in Scotland ;-). Avon is, of course, the English (mi)speling of the Welsh word "afon", which means "river", but I suppose that few non-Welsh English know that. I just looked up the wikipedia page for that name, and it starts right off telling the reader what the name means.
There are Departments of Redundancy Departments alive and well in a lot of countries ...
If the paper companies sue, they would get laughed at or scolded by the judges as this is an obvious and evil perversion of the intent of the law.
Quite possibly it was written with exactly that intent. We've been often reminded by nearly everyone studying Congress that most proposed laws aren't written by the legislators at all; they're usually written by "consultants" who are part of the lobbying setup and are paid by the corporations interested in the laws. It has come out repeatedly that most members of Congress haven't even read the laws that they vote on. They usually have only read the summaries, which are written for public PR.
So it's quite likely that whoever worked out the exact wording of the law was in the pay of one or more companies who wanted exactly what the story is about. They probably discussed it behind the scenes, until they were fairly sure that the wording would allow their employers to take advantage of the law in this fashion.
It's how things are done. And it's hardly any secret. It's been written about more times than we can probably count.
(Actually, none of this precludes the possibility of a Congressman understanding the issue. The point is that usually they don't bother themselves over such details. That's for their underlings to handle.)
Not at all. That's a bit of propaganda foisted by the "corporate profits are all that's important" crowd, but it has very little actual basis in law.
If there were such a legal requirement, you wouldn't see corporations supporting things like your local Little League, or any other charities. That would be money that could have gone to dividends. But you don't find shareholders suing companies to force them to stop supporting local charities, because even their own lawyers would laugh at the suggestion.
There are laws concerning outright corporate fraud in their stock dealings. But this is something very different from saying that corporations must maximize their dividends at every opportunity.
A common counterexample to this myth is what's often expressed as "good will". This is something that nobody can measure precisely, but companies do try to improve their public image, sometimes at great price. They don't get sued for doing so even when the financial value of that good will isn't precisely measurable by their accountants.
Why bother with local, specialized cases when you can acknowledge a general pattern of human social behavior?
Al Gore, George Bush, Dick Cheney, and the rest of them have just been using the main tool for getting a society to follow their leaders.
Sounds familiar. One job I had at DEC needed to use SLIP connections, and they also wanted to make PPP an option. I played around with their SLIP driver for a month or more, and couldn't make it work right. We called in several "experts", and they couldn't make it work either. So one day, I printed out the RFCs for both SLIP and PPP, and took them home for bedtime reading. The next morning I started coding a SLIP, and by noon, I had a demo of a version that passed all our tests and worked fine with all the remote sites that we had available at the time. People were really impressed. But frankly, it was easy, and I don't know how their packaged driver could have failed to badly. I couldn't get its source, though, so I was never able to find out.
A couple of weeks later, I also wrote a PPP driver directly from the RFC, but that was more complicated and took a whole day. I wasn't able to test it as thoroughly, though, because at the time we didn't have many remote test machines that could do PPP.
Anyway, this was a good example where writing a completely new driver took more than an order of magnitude less time than we'd already wasted trying to get the existing one to work. It did help that the official spec was available at the "cost" of a few minutes of downloading. Actually, what was really unusual about the RFCs was that they contained all the information that I needed to implement the protocols. It's really rare to find such good specs anywhere. The Internet's specs are generally much better than what you can get for just about anything else, at least in the computer biz. It's yet another example of the inverse relation between price and quality in much of the computer field.
Software updates on OS X always ask the user.
So can you (or anyone outside Apple) prove that? How would we know (as opposed to believe) that what they tell us is true.
After all, not all of OS X or its apps are open source. If your Mac is connected to the Internet, some of the closed-source portions could be doing unannounced updates. And if you look for packet traffic, you tend to find it, because of all the apps (e.g. web browsers with pages that do auto-refresh) that generate low-level traffic when "idle". It's not easy to determine whether any of those packets are the closed-source software downloading and installing stuff.
Really, how would we know for sure?
Check out RFC 208 to see how addressing was actually done in the old days.
6 bits of IMP (essentially the network address)
2 bits of host
Heh. I remember reading several versions of the debates leading up to an expansion of packet fields some years later. The stories generally describe it as a debate between the "conservatives" who thought a small host field would suffice, and the "radicals" who advocated a larger size for when the Net would be a lot bigger than the conservatives expected. Finally, the story goes, the radicals won out - and they went with a full 8-bit host number.
That's not the end of the story, of course, because it hasn't ended yet. For years now we've been debating the wisdom of going to IPv6, with a 128-bit host address. But so far it's the conservatives who have won, arguing that we're doing just fine with a 32-bit address, switching over would be a huge expense, the larger addresses just mean larger packets and thus slower data throughput, and all the other reasons we've read here and in other tech forums.
People do have a way of putting off upgrades until the old system is falling apart from the overload. Even then, they prefer all sorts of kludgy ad-hoc patches to the current system, rather than moving to a cleanly-designed higher-capacity system.
I particularly liked the description of his visit to Bangalore -- it goes to the heart of why we do open source.
For those who didn't read TFA, this refers to "... as part of the visit I was introduced to a student who had built a fairly complex software system. Impressed, I asked where he had learned to do so much. He simply said, "I downloaded the R.F.C.'s and read them.""
There are a lot of stories like this. The one I like to tell is about a number of projects that I worked on, where part of my job was making our software work over the OSI protocols. What happened repeatedly was that the ISO specs weren't available for downloading, so we had to buy a printed copy. This inevitably entailed making out a purchase order, getting it approved by the Right People, sending it off, and waiting for the arrival of the package.
In the meantime, we'd work on what we could, which was the IP-based part of the code. This entailed going to an online archive and downloading the relevant FTPs, typically a matter of a few minutes, with no signatures required by anyone. By the time the ISO docs arrived a few weeks later, we'd have the IP version written, debugged, and stuck into the libraries for the use of other developers or customers. Then we could start working on the ISO code.
The result, of course, was that everyone would end up going with the IP-based stuff, since it appeared first and was the code that was thoroughly tested. It also helped a lot that the Internet had lots of forums (mostly email at first) where one could ask dumb questions and get actual answers from others who had already stumbled around and found the answers (and wanted to show off their superior knowledge). Such forums never developed for ISO, at least not anywhere we could generally find quickly.
In this case, the proper term isn't really "open source"; it's "open publication". This is what has made modern science the success that it is, and it's much of what put the Internet ahead of its competitors. Many people argued that several other networking schemes were better technically. This claim has been made for both DECnet and ISO, and they may be right. But it doesn't matter; IP/UDP/TCP/... was good enough, and its specs were published openly. This meant that anyone could quickly grab them and start coding; you did't need permission from anyone to read and use them.
Of course, "open source" is based on the same idea. If you make your information easily available to everyone, they can build on your ideas. This gives your ideas dominance over other "for sale" or "by permission only" ideas, even if someone else's hidden ideas happen to be slightly better.
I've always wondered whether DECnet was as good as its proponents claimed. But even when I worked as a contractor at DEC, I wasn't allowed access to the DECnet specs, so I guess I'll never know. I'm of mixed mind over ISO, which I learned a little about. Some parts are probably better than IP, and others aren't, but without widespread deployment we'll probably never really know how ISO would work with a billion users.
I wouldn't bet on that. The "Intellectual Property" people are slowly ending "That was my story" as a workable legal defense.
Thus, for a few decades now we've had the situation where a musicians can be sued for performing their own work, because the fine print of one of their recording contracts gave ownership of that work to the recording company. Similarly, many published writers can be sued for plagiarizing from an earlier work of their own, because that text is owned by the publisher. In such cases, the publishing corporations could demand such contracts, because the alternative was that the creators' work would not be distributed at all.
To make the issue even more fun, dig around in the contracts that ISPs require with their customers. Many ISPs forbid running your own web server, but offer space on their server as part of the service - and the contract's fine print says that anything you put on the ISPs server is owned by the ISP. Sometimes they allow you to run your own server, but the contract says that any data passing through their server is owned by the ISP. So everything on your blog may be owned by your ISP, which in turn has the right to sell the content as they wish, e.g. to AP. There have been a few skirmishes over this, and a few years ago msn.com was forced to customer outrage to stop using things like images of their customers' children in advertising. But the courts haven't yet much dealt with this, so we don't know what the actual law may be. It's possible that such contract terms will be held unconscionable by the courts, but this hasn't happened yet (except maybe in a few very local courts).
There is a battle going on behind the scenes over the attempts of major publishers (such as AP in this story) to block individual distribution of "content" via the Internet. The intent is to restore the previous regime, in which a few corporations controlled the distribution media and individuals had to hand the rights of their creations to the corporations if they wanted something distributed. Saying that this is doomed to failure on the Internet is rather naive. Legislatures are highly susceptible to "persuasion" (via campaign contributions, aka bribes) by corporations to support such things, and we can see in the history of both text and music that the laws and courts tend to favor the ownership of such things by the big publishers. There's no reason to believe that the courts won't go along with it in the case of material distributed via the Internet, as they have done in the past with hard-copy publishing.
Just yesterday we had a /. story about the question of how one can make an "invention" public domain, to guarantee that nobody else can patent it and sue both the users and the original inventor for infringement. This is a serious kind of question, and doing everything correctly so that you can't be sued by a powerful corporation for using your own work is a difficult legal problem. It's especially problematic for people who just put their own words online in a blog or forum like this one, and don't thing of taking legal steps to preserve their right to their own words. Yes, /. states explicitly that its contributors (you and I) own the copyright to our own words. Most other sites don't. And your ISP may own your words on /. because your copyright transfers automatically to your ISP on the way out. This appears to be a situation that is open to a great many legal actions, which will make money for a lot of lawyers, but which may not settle the issues at all for a great many years.
How many sites get tons of hits but no actual profits?
Ooh, ooh; I know! That would be my web site!
Actually, I'm more or less in charge of several web sites for several small organizations whose names or activities aren't very relevant here, because they're typical of zillions of orgs with an online presence. I fell into this because I understand how the Internet works, and most of the people in the organizations don't (and don't want to). They just want to type up their stories, and let the electronic magic be handled by someone else.
What's interesting about this to me is that it presents an interesting scenario: Suppose one of my sites has the same information as an AP news story about the site or the organization behind it. It sounds like, when we report the same news about ourselves, we would be in violation of AP's ownership of that information. So we could be sued by AP for reporting information about ourselves that AP has found, slightly reworded, and reported.
This situation isn't hypothetical. AP has had local news stories about some of these organizations. They may have got the information via interviews, or they may have got it from the orgs' blogs; we really don't know. In the past, we've provided the information, because people in organizations often want their activities to be publicised.
What we're wondering is: If we blog about our activities, and AP picks up the info and reports it, are they saying that we have to pay AP to have the same information on our own web site? If we've blogged about it and AP reports it, is AP saying that we must remove the information from our blogs?
It sure sounds like this is what they're aiming for.
This was an unlikely scenario back in the days of printed news, or even with broadcast news, since the news creators were rarely in a position to do the distribution, printing or delivery of the news. But the Internet has ended this division. News creators can now simply type up a few sentences and hand them over to their web server. Distribution and delivery to readers is handled by the web server without further human activity (or the death of trees ;-). Readers get the info from the original sources if they want. We can cross-link our sites to help people with similar interests find what they want. Google can help people find the right articles on our sites.
So are we really going to give the big news corporations complete ownership over all information about our organizations, to (mis)report as they see fit? Or can we little guys continue to report our own activities on our own web sites without harrassment from the news corporations' lawyers?
Here's another ground breaking study, APAP doesn't cure a cough. Neither does ibuprofen. Give me grant money to prove it, please.
Ah, but here's where our current system has a problem. If you have the right credentials, you probably can get grant money to do the tests - from the drug companies. Their contract will give them "editorial" (i.e., veto) power over publishing the results. And negative (or no-effect) results rarely get published. In the few cases that publication is allowed, the media (including the scientific media) generally considers "no results" conclusions to be uninteresting and not news. And the companies' marketing departments have worked out ways of making even no-effect results sound like praise. "Our product is as effective at half the dose of our competitors" is quite true, after all, when they're all placebos.
What I found interesting about this story is that they're actually publicizing and acting on no-effect results of studies. This is something rather unusual in medical research. Not to say that it has never happened, of course, but it's a lot harder to find such stories than it is to find "miraculous new treatment" stories, in both the medical and the public news.
I don't expect it to continue. There are too many profitable products at stake.
Yeah, you're right. But compiling a linux kernel is easier than some of the things that I see her attempting to do with Windows. ;-)
It looks like none my Mac, Ubuntu, or Debian system is infected.
Funny thing is that I don't even have any anti-virus software installed on any of them. Just the usual software that's designed to not automatically run any code from the outside without getting my permission.
I wonder what sort of systems are getting infected. Anyone have any idea?
So where can we buy batteries that are better than 99.9% efficient?
This is using the usual definition of "efficiency" in batteries, of course: the ratio of output power to input power (measured over a period of time). I have a suspicion that whoever was making that claim is using some other definition, but I have no idea what their definition might be. Anyone know?
I've recently seen a number of media reports claiming efficiencies greater than 100% for a number of commercial gadgets. I've wondered what the patent office accepted these claims.
(Maybe I should read more of TFA. Maybe they give their definition somewhere in a footnote or something. Anyone know? ;-)
Hmmm ... I was puzzled by this, because I "knew" that slashdot.org/users.pl was the URL for that tab. But when I went to the tab, it had slashdot.org/~jc42/comments instead. WTF? How did it get changed? It's that was in the FF bookmark, too. Guess I'll have to change it back. Or maybe bookmark both of them, and check occasionally to see if either of them has changed. The user.pl page is definitely easier to read.
Actually, my comment yesterday on the dark-blue-on-bluegreen text in the "logo" bar across the top of the screen seems to have gotten a result. First I noticed that the main slashdot.org page now has the background in tan, which contrasts nicely with the dark-blue text (to my eyes). So I checked my users.pl page, and sho 'nuf; the text at the top is now white on the bluegreen background, which is probably readable by nearly everyone.
Complaining about idiocies in a UI does sometimes lead to improvements. All too often, complaining on a public forum is the only thing that works.
But I'd still prefer that they not force the colors at all, as several friends who are colorblind have suggested. If they can't be arsed to do that, some more config options to set the colors on a per-id basis would help those with visual problems. And if they can't be nice enough to do that, they're going to get complaints until they stumble across a universally-readable color scheme. And when they forget about that and revert to illegibility (for some eyes on some screens), they'll start getting complaints again until they revert to something that works.
But they could save themselves and their readers some time and effort by just deleting all the color attributes. Then each reader could set them to something that works for their eyes on their screen. Yeah, I know; I'm dreaming. But if we don't mention it, the turkeys will continue to think that everyone's happy with their pretty design.
I have pretty good eyes myself, but I have a number of visually-impaired friends, and I've done a bit of work on UI issues for such people. A lot is known about it. But we do have a problem on the Web, in that most people building web pages are contemptuous of people with "nonstandard" eyes. They also tend to be contemptuous of readers with small screens, but that's starting to change, as tiny computers like the iPhone and the google phone take off. That's a rapidly growing market, and anyone unwilling to accommodate them is likely to find their hit counts tapering off.
(My wife loves her iPhone, and grumbles loudly about idiot sites that don't work on it. ;-)