It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Or, as I like to express it: If you're talented in math, why would ever even consider working in the US school system? You'd be working for people who hold you in contempt and don't pay you very well. And you can easily earn 2 or 3 times as much in industry. Hell, you can even do better financially (and have a more fun lifestyle) by going into academia.
It's obvious why US kids aren't learning math. Hardly anyone with any math ability will seriously consider teaching in the school system as it is. So math is mostly taught by teachers with very little knowledge of the subject matter.
t's not about blame. The union prevents change. It's simply fact.
And conservatives, by definition, prevent change....
That might have been true a century or so back, when the term "conservative" was understood to mean someone who wanted to conserve the social order. But in modern America, the people who call themselves "conservative" are mostly radical reformers who want to replace the centuries-old culture of individual freedom with an authoritarian religious system.
In the current American school systems, conservatives are mostly heard from when they are pushing to block science teaching. They have had a fair amount of success. Thus, if you look at high-school and lower biology texts from the 1940s and 1950s, you'll usually see a section on evolution. Today, few biology texts below the college level even mention the topic, from fear of the "conservative" religious people in the community. Thus, the conservatives in this case have forced a change that resulted in lower quality education.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
Well, that's part of the story, but not nearly the whole story.
It's fairly clear that much of the problems with good science/math education in the US comes from outside, in the form of the religious objections to certain parts of the subject matter. This affects not just biology teachers, but all science teachers, as science in general is suspect to "people of faith".
This is actually quite reasonable, as science and math both depend on rejecting "faith", and saying "prove it". (Yeah, I know; that's an egregious oversimplification. But in the context of the current discussion, you really can't go into much more detail, because you'll be shouted down if you try.;-)
So we have two sources of problems: the unions and the religious fundamentalists, and the commercial folks. Wait; I'll start over...
Hmm... When I ask apt-get to install the ttf-arphic-uming font, it tells me "ttf-arphic-uming is already the newest version."
So that's not what's going wrong. One funny thing is that the wrong glyphs are actually the glyphs for another character that's nearby. The difference in the code values isn't always the same, but in the couple dozen chars I've found where the wrong glyph is displayed, the one displayed has never been more than 8 away. This would probably be a clue for someone who knows the code well, but to the rest of us, it's just bizarre, especially since there's no obvious pattern to the chars that are rendered with the wrong glyph. And what is display has always been a valid Chinese glyph; just not the one for that code point.
Anyway, I have seen a number of comments that ubuntu is the best system so far for displaying multi-language text. But it's far from perfect.
Oops; I just realized that it's really unicode.org, not unicode.com, of course.;-) To be more specific, the URL is "http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html". Type in 2EA88 and press the Lookup button, to see if your browser can display the char correctly. I'd be most interested in ubuntu systems that display it correctly. Something's wrong here, and I'm not finding any useful clues.
(I wonder if there's a way to ask firefox or other browsers "What font are you using to render the selected text?" And no, looking at the source won't necessarily answer that question. It won't for that page.)
They chose Ubuntu. Maybe they just like it better? I think you can factor cost of out the equation.
There might have been other motivations. For example wikimedia does lots of stuff in mixtures of languages, and probably uses UTF-8 encoding for (nearly) everything. I've been trying to get a good feel for how different distros (and OSs) actually handle mixed-language UTF-8-encoded text. It's been slow going. Everyone claims to support it. But it never takes long to find serious problems.
The biggest problem is how to persuade printer model X to sanely render text in non-Western languages. Suppose you have a text that's a mixture of Russian, Arabic and Chinese; can you get all (or any) of your printers to print it correctly? If so, can you point to a HOWTO file describing how you did it?
Ubuntu does have a bit of a reputation for being pretty good at this. But right now, I have a firefox window showing the page at unicode.com for the char U+2EA8. The "Your Browser" box shows a completely different glyph than the "The Unicode Standard" box. When I copy the character into an xterm window, it also displays the wrong glyph, so it's not just firefox. Tests with various apps show that some display the correct glyph, some show the incorrect glyph. I asked on ubuntuforums about this about a week ago, and there were no replies. Meanwhile, I've found a couple dozen other codes that produce the wrong glyph, but I haven't found any clues.
This isn't to pick on ubuntu; it just happens to show a problem on my screen right now. I've had lots of geekish "fun" copying some of my files around to various other machines, including several linux distros, a FreeBSD machine, a couple of Mac OSXs, and even a Windows machine, and watching all of them garble some parts of the text. Most of them don't even display all the Kangxi radicals correctly, if you can imagine.
And watching all of their printers garble the printed output. I think this might be why the OLPC project hasn't yet included any printer support.
And I won't even go into what happens with file names that contain non-ASCII characters.;-)
1) provide source code for product x to Beijing 2) get product x accredited 3) add nefarious functions to source code, re-compile, surreptitiously update product 4) ??? 5) profit!
Yeah, that's why for ages the security folks have been saying that you don't just insist on having the source for any software that you buy; you also compile it yourself, using compilers and libraries that you've built the same way.
Building an actual secure system can be a bit time consuming, of course. But if you run any code that you didn't compile yourself (after having your staff hackers study it), it should be assumed to contain hidden code that does unknown things in addition to what the sales people told you it would do. Otherwise, your security measures are just "security theater".
It probably does set some sort of record for "old news" here. Have we had any other stories that were in high-school textbooks several decades earlier?
Nah; you're not imagining it. If you use google maps' "Terrain" button, and zoom out so you can see all of eastern Africa, the Rift Zone is fairly obvious. Any decent topographic map should show it fairly clearly. Most of Africa is fairly old terrain, with the mountain ranges worn down. But the Rift Zone is new volcanic terrain, and is really irregular and jumbled.
It's interesting to contemplate that this is where most of the early human fossils have been found. It's the main territory where our species originated.
Repeat after me boys and girls "GET requests shouldn't change anything on the server".
Nonsense. Every GET request changes something on the server. It adds a line to the server log. So you're banning all GET requests.
Actually, I think I know what you meant to say. But the above statement is so over-simplified and dumbed down that it's just wrong. If my boss were to seriously attempt to enforce such a dumb rule, I'd be updating my resume really fast.
Unfortunately, the correct guideline needs to be a bit more complex. Thus, I have a lookup page that invokes a CGI program which produces its own log file (for error checking) and also writes some intermediate files of extracted data in a tmp directory. These files stay around for a few hours, and I use them all the time for debugging and auditing. This is materially more than a server-log entry, and it's also totally harmless. But creating files certainly qualifies as changing things on the server, so by the above rule, it would be banned in a GET. Again, the rule is wrong.
Try explaining the concept of evolution to humans still banging rocks together to get fire, and see what you get.
Actually, you might find it pretty easy to get the idea across.
"Suppose you were to eat all the larger of your sheep and cattle, and keep only the smaller for breeding. How large would your grandchildren's animals likely be? Or suppose you eat only the smallest ones and keep the largest for breeding; what would the results be in a few years?"
Substitute dogs or turnips or sunflowers or strawberries any other edible crop, and the example works just as well.
I've actually asked questions like this of anti-evolution people. They always understand, and agree that selecting for size or other desirable feature would have the expect results after a few years of breeding. Their problem is that they don't understand that this is how "evolution" works. They usually have some idea that "evolution" means only that humans are descended from monkeys, or some equally silly caricature. They have never read (or maybe listened to) an accurate description of evolution. And they're usually offended when I point out that they've just agreed with the basic concept behind evolution. They "know" that evolution is against their religion, and they know that selective breeding obviously works, so they aren't going to listen to any explanation that might show that they don't understand the issue.
Actually, there is a serious proposal floating around to do some extensive drilling in the Chicxulub impact structure on the north Yucatan shore. There's good evidence that this was where the object hit that ended the Cretaceous Era and the lives of 90% of land animals alive then, including most of the dinosaurs. The object was probably on the order of 10 km in diameter, and there's a good chance that a lot of it is still down there. The area hasn't had major geological activity since then, so the geologists would certainly be able to identify the "foreign" material if they managed to bring any of it up.
And did the Earth always have an atmosphere?
Yes. The Earth is far too big to ever have been airless. The real question is why the Earth's atmosphere is so thin. It should be like Venus's atmosphere, much denser and warmer than it is now, though cooler than Venus's atmosphere for obvious reasons. The answer to this is known to astronomers. Anyone here know?
It is difficult to disprove if you have never been more than 5 miles from your village, but in the end, yeah, the idea becomes untenable. More subtle is to hypothesize that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Not easy to disprove, but possible even in 1800.
Actually, the Earth's size and shape were measured to fairly good accuracy about 2000 years before that. Whether this could be done from your village does depend on just where your village is.
A few years ago, I read (and solved) an interesting puzzle: Standing in just one place, measure the size of the Earth. The puzzle writer remarked that this could be done using equipment available to ancient Roman engineers, to an accuracy of under 1%.
If nobody else posts the solution, maybe I will in a few days.
A partial clue, and interesting part of the history, is that sailors everywhere have understood the Earth's shape since prehistory. If you're on a body of water with a horizon, you can't miss the way that things on land disappear from the bottom up as you sail away from them, and appear from the top down as you approach them. After a rather short time sailing, you can "see" the curvature of the water's surface. And after you've sailed around a bit more, you understand that bodies of water everywhere have a curvature that's consistent with being the surface of a sphere. Maybe medieval theologians didn't understand this, but the guys down at the docks did.
The only question is just how big it is. And it turns out that you don't need to use your boat to measure this, or travel hundreds of miles across a desert like that old Greek guy did. With some fairly common measuring equipment, and a bit of arithmetic, you can do the measuring yourself standing in one place.
Where and how do you do this? (And where did I run across the puzzle? I've forgotten.)
Even if you could prove that humans made up God, that wouldn't prove God's non-existence.
And any number of science's theorists (e.g., Karl Popper) have pointed out that scientific methodology rarely if ever actually proves anything at all. So any time you see someone talking about proof, you know they're not talking about science.
Science doesn't prove; it only disproves. Scientific testing methods are generally aimed at a double negative: Find a test that, if it produces one or more specific results, will disprove your hypothesis. If the test doesn't produce one of those specific results, the hypothesis has been tested but not disproved. Further testing is needed.
An accepted scientific theory is a hypothesis that has passed sufficiently many such tests that the researchers decide that the hypothesis is good enough to be tentatively accepted. But it hasn't been proved; it has only passed a lot of tests by failing to be disproved.
This is, of course, far to subtle a distinction to be understood by most religious people.
It also partly explains why scientists generally shrug off religious attempts to "disprove" evolution. If anyone were to come up with a test that actually does this, scientists would in fact be very interested. But the religious folks are generally not good enough scientists to come up with valid tests. Scientists who read their "disproofs" generally just shrug and go on to something else, because the holes in a disproof are usually so obvious that they're not even worth commenting on.
Also, most scientists would casually agree that they haven't disproved the existence of any god. But then, they understand why there's no real point in trying. Unless someone comes up with some really interesting new evidence, scientists will continue dismissing such things as untestable. And if you can't test something, there are no scientific comments to be made about it at all.
If there is a god, he/she/it/they has/have done a remarkably good job of covering up any evidence.
Can't the samarium and neodymium stay stuck together from space to earth?
Certainly. That's used routinely to determine the age of meteorites.
But once they land on Earth, they are quite easily identified as meteorites, not rocks that formed inside the Earth. Passage through the atmosphere and and impact with the ground leaves a lot of scars. There's not much chance that a geologist would mistake an embedded chunk of meteorite with locally-formed rocks.
Lord, if you see a drowning man, you throw him a rope, not the latest copy of Road and Track magazine.....
Well, yeah, but to make the metaphor fit most of Africa (and many other parts of the world), you have to do a bit more. After all, he was probably drowning because the local gang of thugs tied him up and tossed him in the water. If you just pull him back to shore and walk away, in an hour he'll be back in the water, drowning again. You just wasted your time and effort, and didn't help at all.
And in such cases, the best way to prevent future drownings is information. You should help the locals document and expose the thugs who are running things. You should help the locals communicate with each other, and you should help them find defenses.
Otherwise, the drownings will just continue.
The history of first-world aid to poor regions is mostly a history of dismal failure. Food and medical aid are short-term stopgaps that mostly raise the survival and birth rates, so after a generation there are more people starving and dying young. More food and medical aid of will not fix the problems; it will just continue to maximize the number of suffering people.
So some people are trying a different approach: Help the people get access to the information they need to find ways out of their bad situation. Let someone else continue the stopgap aid, but also try to give the people ideas and knowledge that the local thugs have been blocking for all of history.
Maybe it'll help; maybe it won't. Maybe the local thugs will just take over the electronics and block access to the outside. But access to information is unlikely to make things worse, as food/medical aid alone does. And we already have examples of cases where such access has materially improved things. It's worth trying in Africa, too.
... some company had enough money to fund a lobbyist to push for this to help them in the future since they use FOSS in their product.
Or perhaps some of the security guys got through to them, and hit them with the rather old observation that if you have any security concerns, you don't run any software unless you have all its source. And you've compiled it yourself.
It's sorta bizarre that this would even be a question with the military. Would they buy a vehicle or weapon with "no user-serviceable parts"? They generally don't accept any equipment other than computers without complete shop diagrams for it, and specs for all the spare parts. Why on earth have they ever accepted software without the equivalent, its source code (and detailed specs for all the libraries used)?
Of course, there is are two obvious possible explanations: The people involved in the procurement are totally incompetent. Or they're on the take. Is there any other possibility?
Yeah; that's a great WTF classic. My favorite part was at the end, when the neural net produced the gem:
The pig go. Go is to the fountain. The pig put foot. Grunt. Foot in what? ketchup. The dove fly. Fly is in sky. The dove drop something. The something on the pig. The pig disgusting. The pig rattle. Rattle with dove. The dove angry. The pig leave. The dove produce. Produce is chicken wing. With wing bark. No Quack.
The blog then asks "Rather Zen, isn't it?" In fact, even with my meagre knowledge of Mandarin, I can see that if you were to do a word-for-word translation to Chinese characters (perhaps leaving out "the" most of the time, since Chinese languages don't much use such articles), the result is fairly good Mandarin, and sounds very Zen.
We might conjecture that this is where the Zen masters got their start. Back around 1200 AD, when those Korean guys were building the world's first small, efficient, transportable printing presses, some other nearby hacker monks were experimenting with early uses of electricity. They built the first programmable computers, and being scholarly types, started writing programs to do philosophical calculations. The hardware was lost to history, but the resulting philosophy wasn't.
Christians who take the time to read both the Bible and the Koran frequently have no trouble taking the harsher parts of the Koran at face value but find no end of excuses why the Bible's crazier passages (shellfish, anyone?) are not to be read literally.
Heh. I've occasionally had a bit of fun with some Believers by asking if they eat shrimp or clams. If they do, I'll ask if they eat crickets or grasshoppers. Invariably, they say they don't, usually with a bit of disgust. Next I show them the biblical passages saying that shellfish, crustaceae, etc. aren't to be eaten. And I also show them the passages (there are two of them) that explicitly except crickets, locusts, grasshoppers, and related insects, saying that they are to be eaten.
This produces no end of hilarious confusion. But I keep taunting them with things like "You eat shrimp and not grasshoppers, and you call yourself a believer in the bible? And you expect me to recognize your moral superiority?"
OK; it's cheap fun. But it can be fun at times.
(The passage saying that if a man dies, and has brothers, a brother is required to marry his widow is also a good one. Look up any of the fun satires asking questions of Dr. Laura, for more ideas along this line.;-)
I have no intention of ever linking to their site.
(Actually, this isn't hypothetical. I've been asked by the claimed owners of a couple sites to remove links to their sites from mine. I did so, and added them to my DoNotLink file as a reminder. I think I'll add Jones Day to the file. If they don't want publicity, I'm happy to comply.)
If all the google apps turn out to be open source (which it sounded like they were going to do) then that'd be even easier.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. I've looked at a few small devices like this that had linux internally, and found that they were missing something important: a way to actually talk to the linux hiding inside via the usual CLI interface. If you can't enter things like ls or mv (or scp;-) commands, you are limited to what the installed tools let you do. If there's no access to any shell, it's fairly easy for them to make it impossible to even find out what's hidden inside, much less diagnose and fix problems by tweaking the software.
So far, I haven't read any useful comments on this. Is the underlying system actually visible and accessible, or is it only accessible by someone with special equipment and knowledge of the backdoor? Or is the "open" nature couched in weasel words that sound nice but hide the gotchas that would block my attempts to use it as a computer with a small screen?
I've been burned by this sort of stuff before, and I don't think I'll be giving them any money until they convince me that I'll really be allowed the access that they seem to be saying I'll have. And yes, I have been using linux for 15 years, and unix for 30 years, since the days of 24x80 dumb terminals. Telling me that something isn't allowed because most users wouldn't know how to use it is not at all convincing to me; it just says that you don't want people like me developing software for your system.
And I do have some apps that I've tried to get working on several other smartphones (and failed due to blocking of access to the internal system). If I can be convinced that this gadget will actually allow me to develop my stuff reasonably, I'll be very interested. But my default assumption now is that google and T-Mobile will team up to take my money and then block my access to internals somehow. I'm not too interested in playing time-wasting games with "jailbreak" tools and the inevitable constant reinstalls that this usually entails. I'm interested in a real pocket-sized computer with network access that I can program like my other linux/unix systems. So far, the coverage doesn't convince me that this gadget supplies that.
"We don't do cures," he said, "the money's in treatments".
That sounds like a joke, but there are constant reminders that it may not be. For example, I've read a number of explanations of why most pharmaceutical companies no longer develop or sell vaccines. The problem with a vaccine is that you give a patient one or two shots, and they are cured permanently (or for a very long time), and you never see them again. It's a lot more profitable to sell them drugs that are less effective than this.
A few months ago I read a quote from a top honcho in some drug firm, observing that there are single drugs that produce more income than the total from all the world's vaccines combined. This was mentioned as an explanation of why his company didn't produce vaccines.
It reminds me of comments I've heard from several satirists, explaining that the main thing that makes their job difficult is that people in the real world keep outdoing the wildest satire that they can think up.
A second piece of hardware is a really good idea if it's possible to get. You can apply system updates first to the test environment to make sure it will work before putting them on the production server.
Uh, you missed the point that I already had the test setup. In fact, the machine in question was a copy of what was being set up in the production environment. I got one of the first delivered machines for development use, and the others went to the "production" area. So I already had what you suggest. I was just trying to avoid wasting company resources on another test machine that I didn't need (and which would have wasted some of my time configging and adminning).
Also, it's nice having a complete set of hardware as a backup in case you have some critical component on the production hardware fail that you can't immediately replace. Maybe this guy was clueless, but he had the right idea. Now you have 'educated' yourself out of a proper setup.
Well, it's nice to have shiny toys, but the chances of hardware failure during the few months of development were slim. If it happened, I could have borrowed one of the production machines in a matter of minutes. Again, it was a waste of time and money to order another machine. And it nearly happened because the managers thought "server" referred to hardware, while as a software developer, I though "server" referred to a program. I could (and did) start multiple test servers with only a bit of work setting them up to use different port numbers.
This struck me as a simple example of poor communication due to language differences. (And we all spoke fluent English.;-)
There is always there is always the flip side course for 99.99% of other non-software businesses, which is far more justified as a MBA course.
That was my reaction, too. It sounds like this prof is talking to the <1% of MBA students whose goal is to manage commercial software development. I'd wonder whether any of the students have such a narrow goal. For the overwhelming majority, the effect might be to enlighten them about the anti-customer attitude of many big software developers. The end result could easily be beneficial to the Open Source crowd, and possibly even good for the more ethical of the proprietary software developers.
It's sounds sorta like the effects of a course that teaches about marketing scams, shoddy product development, dishonest accounting, security exploits, etc. Many people like to learn about such things, so that they can defend themselves against them. It's possible that a few of this prof's students will end up managing the development of shoddy software, and will want to know how to market it successfully (and fight off more ethical software vendors). But most of the students won't be in that line of work, and will mostly take away a better understanding of how shoddy most commercial software really is.
And they might even learn to recognize the symptoms of shoddy software. The phrase "open source" is one of the useful ideas here. After all, if a software company won't let you look at their source code, what might be in it that they don't want you to see? This is a serious question for any sort of product, not just software, and the hiding of internal details should always be a big red flag that you could see inside, you might not like what you see.
Whether this will benefit the better software companies may be difficult to determine, though. The history of the computer biz doesn't give one any great hope. IBM and Microsoft are still with us, after several decades.
Slashdot Mirror
It's that our nation's schools are run by a bunch of bozos who pay teachers on the basis of seniority instead of performance, bozos who disparage being elite academically, but celebrate athletic elitism, and frankly that among the ranks of our teachers are some of the dumbest people in our society.
Or, as I like to express it: If you're talented in math, why would ever even consider working in the US school system? You'd be working for people who hold you in contempt and don't pay you very well. And you can easily earn 2 or 3 times as much in industry. Hell, you can even do better financially (and have a more fun lifestyle) by going into academia.
It's obvious why US kids aren't learning math. Hardly anyone with any math ability will seriously consider teaching in the school system as it is. So math is mostly taught by teachers with very little knowledge of the subject matter.
That might have been true a century or so back, when the term "conservative" was understood to mean someone who wanted to conserve the social order. But in modern America, the people who call themselves "conservative" are mostly radical reformers who want to replace the centuries-old culture of individual freedom with an authoritarian religious system.
In the current American school systems, conservatives are mostly heard from when they are pushing to block science teaching. They have had a fair amount of success. Thus, if you look at high-school and lower biology texts from the 1940s and 1950s, you'll usually see a section on evolution. Today, few biology texts below the college level even mention the topic, from fear of the "conservative" religious people in the community. Thus, the conservatives in this case have forced a change that resulted in lower quality education.
No change can happen though. It is disallowed by the union.
Well, that's part of the story, but not nearly the whole story.
It's fairly clear that much of the problems with good science/math education in the US comes from outside, in the form of the religious objections to certain parts of the subject matter. This affects not just biology teachers, but all science teachers, as science in general is suspect to "people of faith".
This is actually quite reasonable, as science and math both depend on rejecting "faith", and saying "prove it". (Yeah, I know; that's an egregious oversimplification. But in the context of the current discussion, you really can't go into much more detail, because you'll be shouted down if you try. ;-)
So we have two sources of problems: the unions and the religious fundamentalists, and the commercial folks. Wait; I'll start over ...
Hmm... When I ask apt-get to install the ttf-arphic-uming font, it tells me "ttf-arphic-uming is already the newest version."
So that's not what's going wrong. One funny thing is that the wrong glyphs are actually the glyphs for another character that's nearby. The difference in the code values isn't always the same, but in the couple dozen chars I've found where the wrong glyph is displayed, the one displayed has never been more than 8 away. This would probably be a clue for someone who knows the code well, but to the rest of us, it's just bizarre, especially since there's no obvious pattern to the chars that are rendered with the wrong glyph. And what is display has always been a valid Chinese glyph; just not the one for that code point.
Anyway, I have seen a number of comments that ubuntu is the best system so far for displaying multi-language text. But it's far from perfect.
UN ... # Could lead to a tyranny of the majority, what if a block of countries wanted censorship?
The rest of the Internet would just route around it.
Oops; I just realized that it's really unicode.org, not unicode.com, of course. ;-) To be more specific, the URL is "http://www.unicode.org/charts/unihan.html". Type in 2EA88 and press the Lookup button, to see if your browser can display the char correctly. I'd be most interested in ubuntu systems that display it correctly. Something's wrong here, and I'm not finding any useful clues.
(I wonder if there's a way to ask firefox or other browsers "What font are you using to render the selected text?" And no, looking at the source won't necessarily answer that question. It won't for that page.)
They chose Ubuntu. Maybe they just like it better? I think you can factor cost of out the equation.
There might have been other motivations. For example wikimedia does lots of stuff in mixtures of languages, and probably uses UTF-8 encoding for (nearly) everything. I've been trying to get a good feel for how different distros (and OSs) actually handle mixed-language UTF-8-encoded text. It's been slow going. Everyone claims to support it. But it never takes long to find serious problems.
The biggest problem is how to persuade printer model X to sanely render text in non-Western languages. Suppose you have a text that's a mixture of Russian, Arabic and Chinese; can you get all (or any) of your printers to print it correctly? If so, can you point to a HOWTO file describing how you did it?
Ubuntu does have a bit of a reputation for being pretty good at this. But right now, I have a firefox window showing the page at unicode.com for the char U+2EA8. The "Your Browser" box shows a completely different glyph than the "The Unicode Standard" box. When I copy the character into an xterm window, it also displays the wrong glyph, so it's not just firefox. Tests with various apps show that some display the correct glyph, some show the incorrect glyph. I asked on ubuntuforums about this about a week ago, and there were no replies. Meanwhile, I've found a couple dozen other codes that produce the wrong glyph, but I haven't found any clues.
This isn't to pick on ubuntu; it just happens to show a problem on my screen right now. I've had lots of geekish "fun" copying some of my files around to various other machines, including several linux distros, a FreeBSD machine, a couple of Mac OSXs, and even a Windows machine, and watching all of them garble some parts of the text. Most of them don't even display all the Kangxi radicals correctly, if you can imagine.
And watching all of their printers garble the printed output. I think this might be why the OLPC project hasn't yet included any printer support.
And I won't even go into what happens with file names that contain non-ASCII characters. ;-)
1) provide source code for product x to Beijing
2) get product x accredited
3) add nefarious functions to source code, re-compile, surreptitiously update product
4) ???
5) profit!
Yeah, that's why for ages the security folks have been saying that you don't just insist on having the source for any software that you buy; you also compile it yourself, using compilers and libraries that you've built the same way.
Building an actual secure system can be a bit time consuming, of course. But if you run any code that you didn't compile yourself (after having your staff hackers study it), it should be assumed to contain hidden code that does unknown things in addition to what the sales people told you it would do. Otherwise, your security measures are just "security theater".
How exactly is this newsworthy?
A /. editor just heard of it.
It probably does set some sort of record for "old news" here. Have we had any other stories that were in high-school textbooks several decades earlier?
Nah; you're not imagining it. If you use google maps' "Terrain" button, and zoom out so you can see all of eastern Africa, the Rift Zone is fairly obvious. Any decent topographic map should show it fairly clearly. Most of Africa is fairly old terrain, with the mountain ranges worn down. But the Rift Zone is new volcanic terrain, and is really irregular and jumbled.
It's interesting to contemplate that this is where most of the early human fossils have been found. It's the main territory where our species originated.
Repeat after me boys and girls "GET requests shouldn't change anything on the server".
Nonsense. Every GET request changes something on the server. It adds a line to the server log. So you're banning all GET requests.
Actually, I think I know what you meant to say. But the above statement is so over-simplified and dumbed down that it's just wrong. If my boss were to seriously attempt to enforce such a dumb rule, I'd be updating my resume really fast.
Unfortunately, the correct guideline needs to be a bit more complex. Thus, I have a lookup page that invokes a CGI program which produces its own log file (for error checking) and also writes some intermediate files of extracted data in a tmp directory. These files stay around for a few hours, and I use them all the time for debugging and auditing. This is materially more than a server-log entry, and it's also totally harmless. But creating files certainly qualifies as changing things on the server, so by the above rule, it would be banned in a GET. Again, the rule is wrong.
Try explaining the concept of evolution to humans still banging rocks together to get fire, and see what you get.
Actually, you might find it pretty easy to get the idea across.
"Suppose you were to eat all the larger of your sheep and cattle, and keep only the smaller for breeding. How large would your grandchildren's animals likely be? Or suppose you eat only the smallest ones and keep the largest for breeding; what would the results be in a few years?"
Substitute dogs or turnips or sunflowers or strawberries any other edible crop, and the example works just as well.
I've actually asked questions like this of anti-evolution people. They always understand, and agree that selecting for size or other desirable feature would have the expect results after a few years of breeding. Their problem is that they don't understand that this is how "evolution" works. They usually have some idea that "evolution" means only that humans are descended from monkeys, or some equally silly caricature. They have never read (or maybe listened to) an accurate description of evolution. And they're usually offended when I point out that they've just agreed with the basic concept behind evolution. They "know" that evolution is against their religion, and they know that selective breeding obviously works, so they aren't going to listen to any explanation that might show that they don't understand the issue.
What if the meteorite was rather big?
Actually, there is a serious proposal floating around to do some extensive drilling in the Chicxulub impact structure on the north Yucatan shore. There's good evidence that this was where the object hit that ended the Cretaceous Era and the lives of 90% of land animals alive then, including most of the dinosaurs. The object was probably on the order of 10 km in diameter, and there's a good chance that a lot of it is still down there. The area hasn't had major geological activity since then, so the geologists would certainly be able to identify the "foreign" material if they managed to bring any of it up.
And did the Earth always have an atmosphere?
Yes. The Earth is far too big to ever have been airless. The real question is why the Earth's atmosphere is so thin. It should be like Venus's atmosphere, much denser and warmer than it is now, though cooler than Venus's atmosphere for obvious reasons. The answer to this is known to astronomers. Anyone here know?
It is difficult to disprove if you have never been more than 5 miles from your village, but in the end, yeah, the idea becomes untenable. More subtle is to hypothesize that the Earth is a perfect sphere. Not easy to disprove, but possible even in 1800.
Actually, the Earth's size and shape were measured to fairly good accuracy about 2000 years before that. Whether this could be done from your village does depend on just where your village is.
A few years ago, I read (and solved) an interesting puzzle: Standing in just one place, measure the size of the Earth. The puzzle writer remarked that this could be done using equipment available to ancient Roman engineers, to an accuracy of under 1%.
If nobody else posts the solution, maybe I will in a few days.
A partial clue, and interesting part of the history, is that sailors everywhere have understood the Earth's shape since prehistory. If you're on a body of water with a horizon, you can't miss the way that things on land disappear from the bottom up as you sail away from them, and appear from the top down as you approach them. After a rather short time sailing, you can "see" the curvature of the water's surface. And after you've sailed around a bit more, you understand that bodies of water everywhere have a curvature that's consistent with being the surface of a sphere. Maybe medieval theologians didn't understand this, but the guys down at the docks did.
The only question is just how big it is. And it turns out that you don't need to use your boat to measure this, or travel hundreds of miles across a desert like that old Greek guy did. With some fairly common measuring equipment, and a bit of arithmetic, you can do the measuring yourself standing in one place.
Where and how do you do this? (And where did I run across the puzzle? I've forgotten.)
Even if you could prove that humans made up God, that wouldn't prove God's non-existence.
And any number of science's theorists (e.g., Karl Popper) have pointed out that scientific methodology rarely if ever actually proves anything at all. So any time you see someone talking about proof, you know they're not talking about science.
Science doesn't prove; it only disproves. Scientific testing methods are generally aimed at a double negative: Find a test that, if it produces one or more specific results, will disprove your hypothesis. If the test doesn't produce one of those specific results, the hypothesis has been tested but not disproved. Further testing is needed.
An accepted scientific theory is a hypothesis that has passed sufficiently many such tests that the researchers decide that the hypothesis is good enough to be tentatively accepted. But it hasn't been proved; it has only passed a lot of tests by failing to be disproved.
This is, of course, far to subtle a distinction to be understood by most religious people.
It also partly explains why scientists generally shrug off religious attempts to "disprove" evolution. If anyone were to come up with a test that actually does this, scientists would in fact be very interested. But the religious folks are generally not good enough scientists to come up with valid tests. Scientists who read their "disproofs" generally just shrug and go on to something else, because the holes in a disproof are usually so obvious that they're not even worth commenting on.
Also, most scientists would casually agree that they haven't disproved the existence of any god. But then, they understand why there's no real point in trying. Unless someone comes up with some really interesting new evidence, scientists will continue dismissing such things as untestable. And if you can't test something, there are no scientific comments to be made about it at all.
If there is a god, he/she/it/they has/have done a remarkably good job of covering up any evidence.
Can't the samarium and neodymium stay stuck together from space to earth?
Certainly. That's used routinely to determine the age of meteorites.
But once they land on Earth, they are quite easily identified as meteorites, not rocks that formed inside the Earth. Passage through the atmosphere and and impact with the ground leaves a lot of scars. There's not much chance that a geologist would mistake an embedded chunk of meteorite with locally-formed rocks.
Lord, if you see a drowning man, you throw him a rope, not the latest copy of Road and Track magazine.....
Well, yeah, but to make the metaphor fit most of Africa (and many other parts of the world), you have to do a bit more. After all, he was probably drowning because the local gang of thugs tied him up and tossed him in the water. If you just pull him back to shore and walk away, in an hour he'll be back in the water, drowning again. You just wasted your time and effort, and didn't help at all.
And in such cases, the best way to prevent future drownings is information. You should help the locals document and expose the thugs who are running things. You should help the locals communicate with each other, and you should help them find defenses.
Otherwise, the drownings will just continue.
The history of first-world aid to poor regions is mostly a history of dismal failure. Food and medical aid are short-term stopgaps that mostly raise the survival and birth rates, so after a generation there are more people starving and dying young. More food and medical aid of will not fix the problems; it will just continue to maximize the number of suffering people.
So some people are trying a different approach: Help the people get access to the information they need to find ways out of their bad situation. Let someone else continue the stopgap aid, but also try to give the people ideas and knowledge that the local thugs have been blocking for all of history.
Maybe it'll help; maybe it won't. Maybe the local thugs will just take over the electronics and block access to the outside. But access to information is unlikely to make things worse, as food/medical aid alone does. And we already have examples of cases where such access has materially improved things. It's worth trying in Africa, too.
... some company had enough money to fund a lobbyist to push for this to help them in the future since they use FOSS in their product.
Or perhaps some of the security guys got through to them, and hit them with the rather old observation that if you have any security concerns, you don't run any software unless you have all its source. And you've compiled it yourself.
It's sorta bizarre that this would even be a question with the military. Would they buy a vehicle or weapon with "no user-serviceable parts"? They generally don't accept any equipment other than computers without complete shop diagrams for it, and specs for all the spare parts. Why on earth have they ever accepted software without the equivalent, its source code (and detailed specs for all the libraries used)?
Of course, there is are two obvious possible explanations: The people involved in the procurement are totally incompetent. Or they're on the take. Is there any other possibility?
Yeah; that's a great WTF classic. My favorite part was at the end, when the neural net produced the gem:
The blog then asks "Rather Zen, isn't it?" In fact, even with my meagre knowledge of Mandarin, I can see that if you were to do a word-for-word translation to Chinese characters (perhaps leaving out "the" most of the time, since Chinese languages don't much use such articles), the result is fairly good Mandarin, and sounds very Zen.
We might conjecture that this is where the Zen masters got their start. Back around 1200 AD, when those Korean guys were building the world's first small, efficient, transportable printing presses, some other nearby hacker monks were experimenting with early uses of electricity. They built the first programmable computers, and being scholarly types, started writing programs to do philosophical calculations. The hardware was lost to history, but the resulting philosophy wasn't.
Ya think?
Christians who take the time to read both the Bible and the Koran frequently have no trouble taking the harsher parts of the Koran at face value but find no end of excuses why the Bible's crazier passages (shellfish, anyone?) are not to be read literally.
Heh. I've occasionally had a bit of fun with some Believers by asking if they eat shrimp or clams. If they do, I'll ask if they eat crickets or grasshoppers. Invariably, they say they don't, usually with a bit of disgust. Next I show them the biblical passages saying that shellfish, crustaceae, etc. aren't to be eaten. And I also show them the passages (there are two of them) that explicitly except crickets, locusts, grasshoppers, and related insects, saying that they are to be eaten.
This produces no end of hilarious confusion. But I keep taunting them with things like "You eat shrimp and not grasshoppers, and you call yourself a believer in the bible? And you expect me to recognize your moral superiority?"
OK; it's cheap fun. But it can be fun at times.
(The passage saying that if a man dies, and has brothers, a brother is required to marry his widow is also a good one. Look up any of the fun satires asking questions of Dr. Laura, for more ideas along this line. ;-)
I have no intention of ever linking to their site.
(Actually, this isn't hypothetical. I've been asked by the claimed owners of a couple sites to remove links to their sites from mine. I did so, and added them to my DoNotLink file as a reminder. I think I'll add Jones Day to the file. If they don't want publicity, I'm happy to comply.)
If all the google apps turn out to be open source (which it sounded like they were going to do) then that'd be even easier.
Well, maybe, but maybe not. I've looked at a few small devices like this that had linux internally, and found that they were missing something important: a way to actually talk to the linux hiding inside via the usual CLI interface. If you can't enter things like ls or mv (or scp ;-) commands, you are limited to what the installed tools let you do. If there's no access to any shell, it's fairly easy for them to make it impossible to even find out what's hidden inside, much less diagnose and fix problems by tweaking the software.
So far, I haven't read any useful comments on this. Is the underlying system actually visible and accessible, or is it only accessible by someone with special equipment and knowledge of the backdoor? Or is the "open" nature couched in weasel words that sound nice but hide the gotchas that would block my attempts to use it as a computer with a small screen?
I've been burned by this sort of stuff before, and I don't think I'll be giving them any money until they convince me that I'll really be allowed the access that they seem to be saying I'll have. And yes, I have been using linux for 15 years, and unix for 30 years, since the days of 24x80 dumb terminals. Telling me that something isn't allowed because most users wouldn't know how to use it is not at all convincing to me; it just says that you don't want people like me developing software for your system.
And I do have some apps that I've tried to get working on several other smartphones (and failed due to blocking of access to the internal system). If I can be convinced that this gadget will actually allow me to develop my stuff reasonably, I'll be very interested. But my default assumption now is that google and T-Mobile will team up to take my money and then block my access to internals somehow. I'm not too interested in playing time-wasting games with "jailbreak" tools and the inevitable constant reinstalls that this usually entails. I'm interested in a real pocket-sized computer with network access that I can program like my other linux/unix systems. So far, the coverage doesn't convince me that this gadget supplies that.
"We don't do cures," he said, "the money's in treatments".
That sounds like a joke, but there are constant reminders that it may not be. For example, I've read a number of explanations of why most pharmaceutical companies no longer develop or sell vaccines. The problem with a vaccine is that you give a patient one or two shots, and they are cured permanently (or for a very long time), and you never see them again. It's a lot more profitable to sell them drugs that are less effective than this.
A few months ago I read a quote from a top honcho in some drug firm, observing that there are single drugs that produce more income than the total from all the world's vaccines combined. This was mentioned as an explanation of why his company didn't produce vaccines.
It reminds me of comments I've heard from several satirists, explaining that the main thing that makes their job difficult is that people in the real world keep outdoing the wildest satire that they can think up.
A second piece of hardware is a really good idea if it's possible to get. You can apply system updates first to the test environment to make sure it will work before putting them on the production server.
Uh, you missed the point that I already had the test setup. In fact, the machine in question was a copy of what was being set up in the production environment. I got one of the first delivered machines for development use, and the others went to the "production" area. So I already had what you suggest. I was just trying to avoid wasting company resources on another test machine that I didn't need (and which would have wasted some of my time configging and adminning).
Also, it's nice having a complete set of hardware as a backup in case you have some critical component on the production hardware fail that you can't immediately replace. Maybe this guy was clueless, but he had the right idea. Now you have 'educated' yourself out of a proper setup.
Well, it's nice to have shiny toys, but the chances of hardware failure during the few months of development were slim. If it happened, I could have borrowed one of the production machines in a matter of minutes. Again, it was a waste of time and money to order another machine. And it nearly happened because the managers thought "server" referred to hardware, while as a software developer, I though "server" referred to a program. I could (and did) start multiple test servers with only a bit of work setting them up to use different port numbers.
This struck me as a simple example of poor communication due to language differences. (And we all spoke fluent English. ;-)
There is always there is always the flip side course for 99.99% of other non-software businesses, which is far more justified as a MBA course.
That was my reaction, too. It sounds like this prof is talking to the <1% of MBA students whose goal is to manage commercial software development. I'd wonder whether any of the students have such a narrow goal. For the overwhelming majority, the effect might be to enlighten them about the anti-customer attitude of many big software developers. The end result could easily be beneficial to the Open Source crowd, and possibly even good for the more ethical of the proprietary software developers.
It's sounds sorta like the effects of a course that teaches about marketing scams, shoddy product development, dishonest accounting, security exploits, etc. Many people like to learn about such things, so that they can defend themselves against them. It's possible that a few of this prof's students will end up managing the development of shoddy software, and will want to know how to market it successfully (and fight off more ethical software vendors). But most of the students won't be in that line of work, and will mostly take away a better understanding of how shoddy most commercial software really is.
And they might even learn to recognize the symptoms of shoddy software. The phrase "open source" is one of the useful ideas here. After all, if a software company won't let you look at their source code, what might be in it that they don't want you to see? This is a serious question for any sort of product, not just software, and the hiding of internal details should always be a big red flag that you could see inside, you might not like what you see.
Whether this will benefit the better software companies may be difficult to determine, though. The history of the computer biz doesn't give one any great hope. IBM and Microsoft are still with us, after several decades.