Ridiculous? As a pilot I don't want people's toys flying around in my airspace. Hit a plane and there's a real chance you'll kill someone.
If you're a pilot who's "airspace" includes a volume in which a fireworks display is scheduled, please informs us of that fact, because I don't think I'd ever want to be a passenger in a plane controlled by a pilot like you. The possibility that your plane might hit a drone would be the least of my worries.;-)
Read about the new ridiculous rules the FAA imposed about drones...
Until some moron flys one into the path of a commercial airliner, small plane, or helicopter, and people die - than it's "why isn't the FAA doing something about this?"
Rules won't stop someone from doing that because it's obviously intended to try to hurt someone. I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.
Wait; there were jet aircraft flying through the fireworks display's volume? How did the drone miss getting a picture of that? That'd have been really fun to watch, especially when the fireworks started hitting the airplane.
(Given that there was a fireworks display going on in that airspace at the time, I'm kinda doubtful that there were any pilots in the area who weren't well aware of them. And I also sorta doubt that there were any children running around under the fireworks. That's usually strongly discouraged at fireworks displays, and this one was over water.;-)
Well, yeah, but except for reproduction, most of the differences are essentially trivial. The differences we see are primarily of social origin, not genetic. It is often pointed out that the differences within each sex have a much greater variance than the differences between the sexes. Male and female humans are much more similar to each other than they are to individuals of the same sex in the closest related species (the "great apes" such as chimps, bonobos and gorillas.
Their is a physical muscle mass difference between the genders to the point that all competitive sports are segregated on purpose to not allow a unfair competitive advantage.
It has been often pointed out that the top North American and European female athletes in many sports currently have better performance statistics than the top males in the same sport 50 or so years ago. This supports the claim that the differences are primarily of social origin, not genetic.
There's a useful example of the difficulty of using sports to excuse sexism: American basketball gives a strong advantage to taller players. This is why the pro teams are all male (and now mostly black;-). But it also excludes 99% of the male population along with 100% of the females. The sensible thing would be to do like the boxing sport has done: Establish height-specific basketball leagues. This would enlarge the sport, and give us some very good players who now can't play on the pro teams at all. And it would likely show a familiar pattern: After some years, we'd have female basketball players who are as good as their male counterparts of the same height. (This idea isn't at all original with me; others have also suggested it. But the sports "industry" ignores it.;-)
Both male and female brains have the same parts but after being exposed to a different mix of chemicals are wired differently which result in obvious behavioral differences both conscious and not.
Again, aside from questions involving sexuality, there is little if any evidence that these differences are genetic and not social. Human societies tend to impose radical differences in education from birth. If you want to claim that the observed mental differences are genetic and not social, you can't just make the claim without explaining why they can't be the result of social conditions. And again, the larger variance within each sex than the difference between the sexes argues that the observable differences are only slightly genetic, and mostly caused by different socialization and education.
No, it's more like "why is ~50% of the country not pursuing IT?"
Nah; it's more like 99%. The majority of young men are also not very interested in becoming computer geeks.
The problem is that young women are being systematically discouraged from even trying to be part of the 1%. This is, of course, not restricted to just CS/IT topics.
... wait to see if this increases the number of women taking these courses and going into CS. If it does then that suggests that women are interested and just needed the right environment or some encouragement. If it doesn't we can conclude that they just are not interested because of genetics or whatever.
Sorry, but women aren't interested or not interested in CS, or any other topic. A woman might be interested, and another woman might not be interested. But implying that women as a class are or aren't interested is sexist in the extreme.
No matter what we do, many women will never be interested in such geeky stuff, just as many men aren't. To be successful, we should introduce any subject to young people in general, and encourage those who find it interesting, regardless of their sexual organs (which really have little to do with their mental abilities;-). And for the others, find subjects that they find interesting and encourage them to follow those.
(Of course, to function well in modern society, we should try to instill a bit of understanding of a lot of topics in any young people able to understand them. But that's a different topic than finding those who can go deeply into a specific topic.)
The word "slave" originates from the Slavic people and the centuries of oppression and humiliation which we suffered through. I demand that you all stop using it immediately. Also I want reparations.
Yeah, and that's actually an example of another common source of "names for neighbors". In the Slavic languages, the root "slav-'" means "glory". So the Slavs actually refer to themselves as the Glorious People. The other people nearby took the reasonable approach of "Let's call them what they call themselves". In several of the nearby societies, the people who called themselves "Slav" were mostly the ones taken as slaves, so the name took on that meaning in the Slavs' neighbors' languages.
This is a fairly common process for producing names-for-neighbors that are insults.
So, the logical question is -- if we are required to change the name of a sports team for referring to the "red skins," shouldn't we also be having a discussion about changing the name of the state Oklahoma?
Because Oklahoma is not normally considered a pejorative. "Redskin" or "injun" usually are.
That's because English-speaking people generally have no idea what "Oklahoma" originally meant.
Going down this path could lead to a lot of problems, though, since the terms in most languages for their neighbors would have to be discarded and replaced by something less offensive to the people described.
Thus, some of my ancestors are Welsh, but they don't call themselves that in the Welsh language, they use forms of the word "Cymru" to refer to their own people. "Welsh" is an old Germanic/Anglo-Saxon word that means "strange" or "foreign" (and still means that in German).
For that matter, the German language has no word similar to "German"; they refer to themselves with various forms of the word "deutsch" (which is related to "teuton" and bsically just means "people"). But my favorite such term is the Russians' word for Germans: "Nemets". Anyone who has taken first-year Russian understands the derivation of this term: it means "no-mind". It's hardly even phonetically reduced; it's just the word "ne" (negative prefix) plus the word "mets" (mind). (The 'n' and 'm' are soft, FWIW.;-)
While it's hard to be more insulting than that, such names for neighbors are quite common around the world. Often the words go back so far that only a few historians understand the insulting origins. (But the Russian term can't be whitewashed; its meaning is clear to even a beginning student of the language.)
Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.
Funny you should use that phrase, because "Ignorant", "Redneck", and "Honky" all are valid Trademarks according to the USPTO.
'Zat true? I'm aware of several trademarks that include the phrase "Honky Tonk", and a quick google check verifies them. But I don't seem to find a trademark on just "Honky". Of course, I'm not very clear on how to use the USPTO's system, so maybe I'm missing something. Can you point us to the evidence that "Honky" by itself is a valid US trademark? (Maybe you can also teach us a bit on how to successfully look such things up.;-)
There was also the recent kerfuffle over someone using the term "niggardly", which some people (mis)interpret as derived from "nigger". That was even stupider than this story.
If this is the case then there would be nothing wrong with a team named the Niggers, Kykes, Wops, Spicks, Wetbacks, or Honkies.offensive.
Well, considering that among themselves, US dark-skinned folks do routinely refer to each other as "nigger". It'sonly considered an insult when a paleskin uses the term.
So maybe we'll see a team formed by (mostly) black players called "The <town> Niggers". It could be fun seeing the reaction to that.
As a USian of mixed ancestry, including an Ojibwa great-grandmother, I have a bit of trouble seeing how a team calling itself "Redskins" is disparaging. Even if they mostly don't have Native-American ancestry, it's still hard to see an insult in the name. So far, I haven't read an explanation of this supposed "disparagement".
I also wonder what people who have a twin think of the Minnesota Twins. Is there anyone out there who's a twin, and feels insulted by this?
I fail to see how the joke is disparaging to Catholics.
As a Catholic, I fail to see the disparagement myself.;)
Thx for the explanation though.
It's presumably because the finches called "cardinals" are notable for the males being mostly bright red. Catholic Cardinals' formal dress is bright red, and the birds were in fact named after the Catholic dudes who wear similar colors for official occasions.
Granted, this is a rather tenuous connection, and it's not obvious how there's any disparagement to either the birds or the priests in the names. It's just a mental connection based on a superficial color similarity.
But some people can infer disparagement from almost anything you say.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem. They can certainly do it. It took less than 20 years after the US Clean Air Act to get air pollution under control.
Doing this with tariffs might be more difficult than US, EU and UN administrators might think. The Chinese management system (government + industry) has a documented history of faked economic reports. This is due in part to the general practice of promoting/demoting managers based on the production figures from their own areas of control, with little or no independent auditing of the data. The fishing example was documented by outside researchers about 15 years ago, but as the (rather well done "neutral" phrasing of the) wikipedia article hints, the catch figures still show numbers that are discounted as "probably mostly fictional" by the FAO and various other international organizations and researchers.
It can be rather difficult for outsiders to collect verifiable data on economically or politically important subjects within China. The same problem will arise with the proposed tariffs. They will presumably be based on available data on emissions, which will mostly come from within China, and will be produced by people whose jobs and pay levels rely on their organizations producing the "right" data. There will be little or no truly independent auditing of the data; auditors will also be similarly rewarded or punished based on the acceptability of their reports to the higher-ups. As with the fishing industry, the pollution-emission data could show decreasing levels while the actual numbers are increasing, and this could continue for decades.
Collecting data on the pollution from outside will be attempted, of course, but China is a big chunk of territory, and there are practical limits to the accuracy of data data collection from outside that territory. Most of the monitoring will have to be done from orbit, and while that's improving, there are still many ways that interested parties can confuse the issue. Just read the ongoing political debates over climate change/warming to get a feel for how easy it is for interested parties to confuse and mislead our political and industrial leaders.
Someone wanted to deliver content via webserver and then sue people who received this delivery as violating copyright?
Amazing.
They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.
I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?
Like I charge you per-copy for reading my paper, and I count the ink that rubs off on your hand as a copy. Also the reflection in your glasses.
And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.
Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.
Well, I'd just ask them to email the document. Then if some "federal agency" demand the documents, they can simply email them to that federal agency. Saves everyone time, and everyone's got what they want.
Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.
But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.
Why do you guys keep bringing your constitution when you clearly don't have one. It's just a piece of paper that nobody high up cares about.
Hey, you got all your facts wrong.
First, we still do have the US Constitution. It's kept at the National Archives. To quote from their web site: "The National Archives Building is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, with entrances on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. Please Note: The Rotunda entrance, which includes the Exhibit Hall, is on Constitution Avenue." You can go there and see it in its display case.
Second, it's not a piece of paper; it was written on parchment.
Next time, try to get your facts right.;-)
(How much of it is in effect any more isn't clear. We do pretty much know that all those parts that limit what the government can do are, uh, "inoperative" at the moment. Yeah, that's the word. But it's still useful for social-control purposes, so we keep it around.)
First, if anyone can get to your "shit-ton of data" you are not doing it right
Then my company is doing it right...Not even the employees can access their own data.
Heh. That doesn't even mean you're safe. I recall a project back in the late 1980s, when I was part of a team hired by a big company (who shall remain unnamed so you'll suspect it was your company;-). We'd had a few discussions with "top management" who'd hired us, about their problems with the DP department. Their computer folks effectively owned the data, and all access was mediated by the DP department. There was a lot of information that was there, but management couldn't get at it, because the DP folks feigned an inability to provide it.
One evening, a bunch of us decided to stay around after hours. We went to work on their big (IBM of course) mainframe, and in the morning, we demoed to management that we could read any file on their machine. Our demo included a few reports we'd printed out that got wide-eyed reactions. We'd given them access to all of their own data, and they were very happy with us. We stuck around and provided them with a lot more reports ("over the dead bodies" of some of the DP department;-).
Some time later, we discussed in private the question of what we should tell the IBM folks about what we'd done. Our decision was essentially "Nah; they'll just block our current clients' access to their own data and give control back to the DP priesthood. And we have other customers who'll pay us to similarly break into their own data."
The fact that your own employees can't access their own data doesn't necessarily mean it's safe from outsiders.
(We never did discuss with them the implication that other outsiders might as easily access their data, if they happened to know the things we did. In the late 1980s, managers at corporate computer installations generally had no concept of a "network" other than as a way to connect remote terminals to the mainframe. There's no way we could have got them to understand the wider implications of the security holes we knew about and exploited for their benefit. It's not obvious that most of today's "management" class has such understanding, either. The current story pretty much demos the extent that understanding.;-)
Open source != free beer.
In fact, being "gratis" is not a requirement for being open source.
Open source is, amongst more familiar aspects, about stuff like accountability.
Indeed, and this is also an excellent example of where we can use the canonical/. automotive simile: There is a long tradition of government agencies (and some corporations) requiring that all purchased vehicles come with complete shop manuals. This is a direct parallel to requiring the source code for software. In both cases, such a requirement makes it possible for the purchasing organization to set up their own repair shop to fix the products when something fails. It also allows the purchaser to make their own mods to handle their special needs.
Many US states (and a good number of other countries) require that shop manuals be available for all vehicles sold in their jurisdiction, not just to the government. This is done to guarantee that independent auto shops can exist, and the vendor can't have a monopoly on repairs and spare parts. The same argument applies to software. With open source, you can hire local independent software contractors to debug (and/or extend) purchased software. Without this, both government agencies and private purchasers are at the mercy of the vendor when problems or special needs arise.
Of course, we can expect to hear from the usual corporate shills (paid or ideologically motivated;-), pushing their usual misleading claims. But note that nobody much ever claims that open-source software is bug-free. The argument is that, when bugs are discovered, people not working for the vendor can study the code and fix the code. And they can also publicize bugs and fixes, unlike what happens all too often when dealing with secret, proprietary software. This also applies to both software and vehicles.
Shouldn't they be concentrating on turning Americans into decent people instead?
Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.
But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.
... , but "just keep clicking menu and submenu and sub-submenu items at random and eventually you'll get there" is not really a good user interface strategy. (although it seems to be a very common user interface strategy).
It's not just common; it's the standard approach that's pretty much hard-wired into the entire GUI approach. And the designers are openly proud of the fact that they did it this way. And if you managed to memorize the location of something important in the menu tree, chances are that one of those "upgrades" that you clicked on has moved it to someplace else by now. If you don't like this, you can use the CLI approach, except that most "consumer" computer systems have done a good job of hiding that from their users. We're all too stupid to understand something without pretty pictures, y'know.;-)
I guess so; Revere, Glosta and P-town are all rather different from the town I live in - and from each other. But then, so are the towns to the west and south of this town, which are among the wealthiest in the state.
(Hmm... It occurs to me that you might have been making a joke. Well, the funniest jokes are often the ones that have a strong reality component.;-)
You don't shop much do you? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find any household items not made in China?
I didn't find it hard at all in my household (in a western suburb of Boston). I easily found items manufactured in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Japan. Oh, and a couple of items from Scandinavia, too. Not much made in the US, though.
Actually, my wife makes a lot of her own clothes, partly as a hobby, but mostly out of disappointment about the crap sold in local clothing stores. She has been complaining about the slow loss of the local fabric stores. Buying online doesn't work well, because you can't feel the material before ordering it. And most of her favorite fabrics do come from outside the US, though I don't think many are from China. But the "manufacturing" is done very locally, upstairs.;-)
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Ridiculous? As a pilot I don't want people's toys flying around in my airspace. Hit a plane and there's a real chance you'll kill someone.
If you're a pilot who's "airspace" includes a volume in which a fireworks display is scheduled, please informs us of that fact, because I don't think I'd ever want to be a passenger in a plane controlled by a pilot like you. The possibility that your plane might hit a drone would be the least of my worries. ;-)
Read about the new ridiculous rules the FAA imposed about drones...
Until some moron flys one into the path of a commercial airliner, small plane, or helicopter, and people die - than it's "why isn't the FAA doing something about this?"
Rules won't stop someone from doing that because it's obviously intended to try to hurt someone. I say try because in a battle between a jet engine with the power to push 400 tons of steel into the sky VS a drone I'm going to put my money on the jet engine lasting long enough for them to turn around and land again.
Wait; there were jet aircraft flying through the fireworks display's volume? How did the drone miss getting a picture of that? That'd have been really fun to watch, especially when the fireworks started hitting the airplane.
(Given that there was a fireworks display going on in that airspace at the time, I'm kinda doubtful that there were any pilots in the area who weren't well aware of them. And I also sorta doubt that there were any children running around under the fireworks. That's usually strongly discouraged at fireworks displays, and this one was over water. ;-)
We are a species that has sexual dimorphism.
Well, yeah, but except for reproduction, most of the differences are essentially trivial. The differences we see are primarily of social origin, not genetic. It is often pointed out that the differences within each sex have a much greater variance than the differences between the sexes. Male and female humans are much more similar to each other than they are to individuals of the same sex in the closest related species (the "great apes" such as chimps, bonobos and gorillas.
Their is a physical muscle mass difference between the genders to the point that all competitive sports are segregated on purpose to not allow a unfair competitive advantage.
It has been often pointed out that the top North American and European female athletes in many sports currently have better performance statistics than the top males in the same sport 50 or so years ago. This supports the claim that the differences are primarily of social origin, not genetic.
There's a useful example of the difficulty of using sports to excuse sexism: American basketball gives a strong advantage to taller players. This is why the pro teams are all male (and now mostly black ;-). But it also excludes 99% of the male population along with 100% of the females. The sensible thing would be to do like the boxing sport has done: Establish height-specific basketball leagues. This would enlarge the sport, and give us some very good players who now can't play on the pro teams at all. And it would likely show a familiar pattern: After some years, we'd have female basketball players who are as good as their male counterparts of the same height. (This idea isn't at all original with me; others have also suggested it. But the sports "industry" ignores it. ;-)
Both male and female brains have the same parts but after being exposed to a different mix of chemicals are wired differently which result in obvious behavioral differences both conscious and not.
Again, aside from questions involving sexuality, there is little if any evidence that these differences are genetic and not social. Human societies tend to impose radical differences in education from birth. If you want to claim that the observed mental differences are genetic and not social, you can't just make the claim without explaining why they can't be the result of social conditions. And again, the larger variance within each sex than the difference between the sexes argues that the observable differences are only slightly genetic, and mostly caused by different socialization and education.
No, it's more like "why is ~50% of the country not pursuing IT?"
Nah; it's more like 99%. The majority of young men are also not very interested in becoming computer geeks.
The problem is that young women are being systematically discouraged from even trying to be part of the 1%. This is, of course, not restricted to just CS/IT topics.
... wait to see if this increases the number of women taking these courses and going into CS. If it does then that suggests that women are interested and just needed the right environment or some encouragement. If it doesn't we can conclude that they just are not interested because of genetics or whatever.
Sorry, but women aren't interested or not interested in CS, or any other topic. A woman might be interested, and another woman might not be interested. But implying that women as a class are or aren't interested is sexist in the extreme.
No matter what we do, many women will never be interested in such geeky stuff, just as many men aren't. To be successful, we should introduce any subject to young people in general, and encourage those who find it interesting, regardless of their sexual organs (which really have little to do with their mental abilities ;-). And for the others, find subjects that they find interesting and encourage them to follow those.
(Of course, to function well in modern society, we should try to instill a bit of understanding of a lot of topics in any young people able to understand them. But that's a different topic than finding those who can go deeply into a specific topic.)
The word "slave" originates from the Slavic people and the centuries of oppression and humiliation which we suffered through. I demand that you all stop using it immediately. Also I want reparations.
Yeah, and that's actually an example of another common source of "names for neighbors". In the Slavic languages, the root "slav-'" means "glory". So the Slavs actually refer to themselves as the Glorious People. The other people nearby took the reasonable approach of "Let's call them what they call themselves". In several of the nearby societies, the people who called themselves "Slav" were mostly the ones taken as slaves, so the name took on that meaning in the Slavs' neighbors' languages.
This is a fairly common process for producing names-for-neighbors that are insults.
So, the logical question is -- if we are required to change the name of a sports team for referring to the "red skins," shouldn't we also be having a discussion about changing the name of the state Oklahoma?
Because Oklahoma is not normally considered a pejorative. "Redskin" or "injun" usually are.
That's because English-speaking people generally have no idea what "Oklahoma" originally meant.
Going down this path could lead to a lot of problems, though, since the terms in most languages for their neighbors would have to be discarded and replaced by something less offensive to the people described.
Thus, some of my ancestors are Welsh, but they don't call themselves that in the Welsh language, they use forms of the word "Cymru" to refer to their own people. "Welsh" is an old Germanic/Anglo-Saxon word that means "strange" or "foreign" (and still means that in German).
For that matter, the German language has no word similar to "German"; they refer to themselves with various forms of the word "deutsch" (which is related to "teuton" and bsically just means "people"). But my favorite such term is the Russians' word for Germans: "Nemets". Anyone who has taken first-year Russian understands the derivation of this term: it means "no-mind". It's hardly even phonetically reduced; it's just the word "ne" (negative prefix) plus the word "mets" (mind). (The 'n' and 'm' are soft, FWIW. ;-)
While it's hard to be more insulting than that, such names for neighbors are quite common around the world. Often the words go back so far that only a few historians understand the insulting origins. (But the Russian term can't be whitewashed; its meaning is clear to even a beginning student of the language.)
Imagine the fuss if we had to replace all such names that have insulting origins.
You Ignorant Redneck Honkies.
Funny you should use that phrase, because "Ignorant", "Redneck", and "Honky" all are valid Trademarks according to the USPTO.
'Zat true? I'm aware of several trademarks that include the phrase "Honky Tonk", and a quick google check verifies them. But I don't seem to find a trademark on just "Honky". Of course, I'm not very clear on how to use the USPTO's system, so maybe I'm missing something. Can you point us to the evidence that "Honky" by itself is a valid US trademark? (Maybe you can also teach us a bit on how to successfully look such things up. ;-)
There was also the recent kerfuffle over someone using the term "niggardly", which some people (mis)interpret as derived from "nigger". That was even stupider than this story.
If this is the case then there would be nothing wrong with a team named the Niggers, Kykes, Wops, Spicks, Wetbacks, or Honkies.offensive.
Well, considering that among themselves, US dark-skinned folks do routinely refer to each other as "nigger". It'sonly considered an insult when a paleskin uses the term.
So maybe we'll see a team formed by (mostly) black players called "The <town> Niggers". It could be fun seeing the reaction to that.
As a USian of mixed ancestry, including an Ojibwa great-grandmother, I have a bit of trouble seeing how a team calling itself "Redskins" is disparaging. Even if they mostly don't have Native-American ancestry, it's still hard to see an insult in the name. So far, I haven't read an explanation of this supposed "disparagement".
I also wonder what people who have a twin think of the Minnesota Twins. Is there anyone out there who's a twin, and feels insulted by this?
I fail to see how the joke is disparaging to Catholics.
As a Catholic, I fail to see the disparagement myself. ;)
Thx for the explanation though.
It's presumably because the finches called "cardinals" are notable for the males being mostly bright red. Catholic Cardinals' formal dress is bright red, and the birds were in fact named after the Catholic dudes who wear similar colors for official occasions.
Granted, this is a rather tenuous connection, and it's not obvious how there's any disparagement to either the birds or the priests in the names. It's just a mental connection based on a superficial color similarity.
But some people can infer disparagement from almost anything you say.
Android is Linux, dumbass.
Yeah, but crippled by a crappy GUI designed for a 3" screen and hands that can't touch type or use a pencil.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem. They can certainly do it. It took less than 20 years after the US Clean Air Act to get air pollution under control.
Doing this with tariffs might be more difficult than US, EU and UN administrators might think. The Chinese management system (government + industry) has a documented history of faked economic reports. This is due in part to the general practice of promoting/demoting managers based on the production figures from their own areas of control, with little or no independent auditing of the data. The fishing example was documented by outside researchers about 15 years ago, but as the (rather well done "neutral" phrasing of the) wikipedia article hints, the catch figures still show numbers that are discounted as "probably mostly fictional" by the FAO and various other international organizations and researchers.
It can be rather difficult for outsiders to collect verifiable data on economically or politically important subjects within China. The same problem will arise with the proposed tariffs. They will presumably be based on available data on emissions, which will mostly come from within China, and will be produced by people whose jobs and pay levels rely on their organizations producing the "right" data. There will be little or no truly independent auditing of the data; auditors will also be similarly rewarded or punished based on the acceptability of their reports to the higher-ups. As with the fishing industry, the pollution-emission data could show decreasing levels while the actual numbers are increasing, and this could continue for decades.
Collecting data on the pollution from outside will be attempted, of course, but China is a big chunk of territory, and there are practical limits to the accuracy of data data collection from outside that territory. Most of the monitoring will have to be done from orbit, and while that's improving, there are still many ways that interested parties can confuse the issue. Just read the ongoing political debates over climate change/warming to get a feel for how easy it is for interested parties to confuse and mislead our political and industrial leaders.
Someone wanted to deliver content via webserver and then sue people who received this delivery as violating copyright?
Amazing.
They seem to be saying that, in addition to displaying the content on your screen, your browser also writes a copy into its cache, and that's two copies.
I wonder what they'd say of, say, a RAID1 file system, which makes two copies of the cached page, on two different disks. Would that mean two violations of the copyright? And if, after sending it from the screen to your eyes, the information in your brain is a third violation?
Like I charge you per-copy for reading my paper, and I count the ink that rubs off on your hand as a copy. Also the reflection in your glasses.
And there's also the copy from short-term to long-term memory that occurs in your brain when you read an article and actually remember it the next day. Soon they'll be quizzing readers about last-weeks news, and every correct answer means they can charge for the extra copy in your long-term memory.
Lest you think this is a joke, remember that companies did try to claim that computer backups are legally "copies" that must be paid for to be legal.
Actually, I'm surprised they didn't handle it this way from the start. That way the "private citizen" wouldn't even know that another department had "seized" their documents.
But maybe I've just been working on the Internet too long. I tend to be surprised when someone wants to deal with hard copy.
Just another example of the "open administration"!
All Your Doors are Open to US.
Then perhaps you should insist your government follow the damned thing to the letter like it's suppose to.
We're eagerly awaiting your detailed instructions on how we might do this.
Why do you guys keep bringing your constitution when you clearly don't have one. It's just a piece of paper that nobody high up cares about.
Hey, you got all your facts wrong.
First, we still do have the US Constitution. It's kept at the National Archives. To quote from their web site: "The National Archives Building is located between Seventh and Ninth Streets, NW, with entrances on Pennsylvania and Constitution Avenues. Please Note: The Rotunda entrance, which includes the Exhibit Hall, is on Constitution Avenue." You can go there and see it in its display case.
Second, it's not a piece of paper; it was written on parchment.
Next time, try to get your facts right. ;-)
(How much of it is in effect any more isn't clear. We do pretty much know that all those parts that limit what the government can do are, uh, "inoperative" at the moment. Yeah, that's the word. But it's still useful for social-control purposes, so we keep it around.)
First, if anyone can get to your "shit-ton of data" you are not doing it right
Then my company is doing it right...Not even the employees can access their own data.
Heh. That doesn't even mean you're safe. I recall a project back in the late 1980s, when I was part of a team hired by a big company (who shall remain unnamed so you'll suspect it was your company ;-). We'd had a few discussions with "top management" who'd hired us, about their problems with the DP department. Their computer folks effectively owned the data, and all access was mediated by the DP department. There was a lot of information that was there, but management couldn't get at it, because the DP folks feigned an inability to provide it.
One evening, a bunch of us decided to stay around after hours. We went to work on their big (IBM of course) mainframe, and in the morning, we demoed to management that we could read any file on their machine. Our demo included a few reports we'd printed out that got wide-eyed reactions. We'd given them access to all of their own data, and they were very happy with us. We stuck around and provided them with a lot more reports ("over the dead bodies" of some of the DP department ;-).
Some time later, we discussed in private the question of what we should tell the IBM folks about what we'd done. Our decision was essentially "Nah; they'll just block our current clients' access to their own data and give control back to the DP priesthood. And we have other customers who'll pay us to similarly break into their own data."
The fact that your own employees can't access their own data doesn't necessarily mean it's safe from outsiders.
(We never did discuss with them the implication that other outsiders might as easily access their data, if they happened to know the things we did. In the late 1980s, managers at corporate computer installations generally had no concept of a "network" other than as a way to connect remote terminals to the mainframe. There's no way we could have got them to understand the wider implications of the security holes we knew about and exploited for their benefit. It's not obvious that most of today's "management" class has such understanding, either. The current story pretty much demos the extent that understanding. ;-)
Open source != free beer. In fact, being "gratis" is not a requirement for being open source. Open source is, amongst more familiar aspects, about stuff like accountability.
Indeed, and this is also an excellent example of where we can use the canonical /. automotive simile: There is a long tradition of government agencies (and some corporations) requiring that all purchased vehicles come with complete shop manuals. This is a direct parallel to requiring the source code for software. In both cases, such a requirement makes it possible for the purchasing organization to set up their own repair shop to fix the products when something fails. It also allows the purchaser to make their own mods to handle their special needs.
Many US states (and a good number of other countries) require that shop manuals be available for all vehicles sold in their jurisdiction, not just to the government. This is done to guarantee that independent auto shops can exist, and the vendor can't have a monopoly on repairs and spare parts. The same argument applies to software. With open source, you can hire local independent software contractors to debug (and/or extend) purchased software. Without this, both government agencies and private purchasers are at the mercy of the vendor when problems or special needs arise.
Of course, we can expect to hear from the usual corporate shills (paid or ideologically motivated ;-), pushing their usual misleading claims. But note that nobody much ever claims that open-source software is bug-free. The argument is that, when bugs are discovered, people not working for the vendor can study the code and fix the code. And they can also publicize bugs and fixes, unlike what happens all too often when dealing with secret, proprietary software. This also applies to both software and vehicles.
The next project will attempt to bring back the sabre-tooth cat.
Shouldn't they be concentrating on turning Americans into decent people instead?
Nah; they don't have any fossil DNA from humans or other critters known to be decent.
But we can look forward to Americans who are furry and have an extra layer of fat. And this can be exported to any other part of the world where there's a market for such people.
... , but "just keep clicking menu and submenu and sub-submenu items at random and eventually you'll get there" is not really a good user interface strategy. (although it seems to be a very common user interface strategy).
It's not just common; it's the standard approach that's pretty much hard-wired into the entire GUI approach. And the designers are openly proud of the fact that they did it this way. And if you managed to memorize the location of something important in the menu tree, chances are that one of those "upgrades" that you clicked on has moved it to someplace else by now. If you don't like this, you can use the CLI approach, except that most "consumer" computer systems have done a good job of hiding that from their users. We're all too stupid to understand something without pretty pictures, y'know. ;-)
(in a western suburb of Boston)
As opposed to those eastern suburbs of Boston.
I guess so; Revere, Glosta and P-town are all rather different from the town I live in - and from each other. But then, so are the towns to the west and south of this town, which are among the wealthiest in the state.
(Hmm ... It occurs to me that you might have been making a joke. Well, the funniest jokes are often the ones that have a strong reality component. ;-)
You don't shop much do you? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find any household items not made in China?
I didn't find it hard at all in my household (in a western suburb of Boston). I easily found items manufactured in places like Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and even Japan. Oh, and a couple of items from Scandinavia, too. Not much made in the US, though.
Actually, my wife makes a lot of her own clothes, partly as a hobby, but mostly out of disappointment about the crap sold in local clothing stores. She has been complaining about the slow loss of the local fabric stores. Buying online doesn't work well, because you can't feel the material before ordering it. And most of her favorite fabrics do come from outside the US, though I don't think many are from China. But the "manufacturing" is done very locally, upstairs. ;-)