Someone once pointed out that under the "making available" theory, most men with a wife or girlfriend could easily be charged with involvement in prostitution. After all, if a man leaves his woman home alone or lets her go out in public by herself, she could very easily make herself sexually available to any passing man.
This isn't entirely hypothetical, of course; there are some parts of the world where men do take this attitude.
Somehow, I think I'd rather not have such legal theories adopted where I live. I think my wife would agree.
I've also noticed that we often have tools like knives lying on our kitchen counters. Those knives have often been out, and even used, when we have visitors. Kitchen knives could be used to kill people. So are we "making available" dangerous weapons when we give visitors such easy access to our kitchen knives? (Sometimes we've even put steak knives on the table, knowingly and with the intention that they be used.;-)
It's more like your temperature will fluctuate over periods of hours like 98.401, 98.737, 99.013, 98.632.... Any digits past the second are meaningless medically. They're probably also bogus technically, unless you've left the thermometer in exactly the same position the whole time (and insulated it from air contact if it's near the skin).
That 6 in 98.6F is a textbook example of false precision. And it doesn't even come from averaging any measurements; it's an artifact of converting 37C to Fahrenheit. A much more meaningful estimate of normal human body temperature is 37C plus or minus a degree. If you convert that to F, 98.0 and 99.5 are both within the "normal" range.
I've read half the thread now, and you're the first post that halfway resembled being on topic, although unintentionally so.
It wasn't entirely unintentional, though it was mostly in reaction to the silliness that followed the summary that just said "70 degrees" without mentioning a scale. I was also sorta tempted to mention that there were probably error bars of several degrees in the researchers' measurements of leaf temperatures, for fairly obvious reasons. Bogus excess precision is a constant complaint that many scientists have with the media, and this topic is rife with it.
We've had a lot of hints that many plants have the ability to somewhat control the temperature of various parts. Here in New England, a common spring "flower" is the skunk cabbage, whose flowering structure has an internal temperature in the mid 30's (Celsius), when the ground and are are still both barely above freezing. Out on the Midwestern prairies, there's the "compass plant", a kind of sunflower whose large leaves are oriented north-south, and the standard explanation is that it's to absorb sunlight in the early morning and late afternoon, while avoiding a heat buildup from the mid-day sun. And so on.
But measuring the internal temperature of a leaf is a bit tricky, and we've only had tools to do it for a couple of decades. It's interesting to read of research showing that some plants have evolved ways of controlling their leaf temperatures to within a few degrees of an optimum temperature.
I'll bet that a lot more research is needed on this topic (and might be supported by the obvious horticultural implications of the knowledge). We can expect to hear more about it in a few years.
Anyway, this whole disagreement over what units to use is pointless and infantile; just use standard scientific units internally and change the units in the end user software based on user preference.
Well, yeah, but it's entertaining to a lot of tech geeks.;-)
And if you post something in an international tech-oriented forum using idiosyncratic units used only in your country, you gotta expect that people will mock you. In this case, it seems that most people did the mocking not by being nasty, but by (trying) to be funny about it. I'd say that in this case, the/. crowd has responded quite appropriately to a rather silly gaffe. It's a lot more entertaining than the usual outburst of insults.
So how do I get the units in/. articles like this automagically translated to what I'd like? Seriously, if there's a way to do it, I'd like to know. I can conceive of ways to do it, but it'd either require me giving appropriate locale-type info to/. (which I don't see in the preferences stuff), or using javascript on my local browser (which I have disabled via NoScripts in firefox). And, to my knowledge, the HTML sent by/. doesn't do this sort of unit translation.
I could write the code to do the translation, of course, but I don't know how (or if it's even possible) to tell FF to run my code as a filter on every/. message. Is there a way to do this?
I'm a physicist and spend all my professional time working in m/s/kg units, but outside of that, what does it matter? We changed over the easier things, but the bit that's left (espcially feet/inches) don't justify the amount it would cost us to retool everything to use metric.
Hmm... I've long since decided the opposite. America is the one place in the world where I have to have two sets of nearly every tool and measuring device. Life would be simpler if I could dispense with one or the other. In some cases, I've done so. Thus, I haven't owned an American-made car since the early 1970s, so I only need metric auto tools. I've let the old ones rust, or I've given them away. (Cue the jokes about the difficulty of finding good metric pliers, crescent wrenches, etc. in the US.;-)
I do have a number of measuring tools that combine both English and metric, so I don't need duplicate tools there. But the combined tools are sometimes awkward. Thus the tape measures have English on one edge and metric on the other, and this is sometimes a hassle if I want to hook the little hook over something too far away to reach and unroll the tape to take a measurement. Half the time, the units that I want to use are on the "wrong" edge. This isn't a huge deal, of course, but sometimes being off by a mm means a bit of hassle cutting things to fit smoothly.
It isn't something that I'm a fanatic about, but I'm aware that being forced to use a mixture of two incommensurate measuring systems produces lots of little niggling inefficiencies and minor errors that could be avoided if everything used the same units. It's more annoying than serious, and its one more ongoing illustration of the clumsy "Who cares?" attitude of much of our society.
(But it's probably not nearly as serious as the sheer insanity of our spelling "system".;-)
I think you mean 70 Kelvin, the Kelvin scale does not use degrees.
Actually, it does, but it uses the Celsius degree. The term "Kelvin" unit is defined as "degrees Celsius above absolute zero". So a phrase like "70 degrees Kelvin" expands to "70 degrees degrees Kelvin above absolute zero". This isn't so much wrong as silly (at least to someone who knows the definition).
It's the same sort of error as saying "PIN number", which expands to "Personal Identification Number number". It's easy to understand why someone who doesn't understand the term might say something like this. But in both cases, saying such things just makes you sound ignorant of the term's meaning.
There are lots of technical terms what are used incorrectly in this fashion. Maybe others will post their favorites...
Since when was normal body temp 96F? Google-sama tell me it's 98.6F.
Except that that.6 is bogus precision. The "normal" core temperature of a healthy human body varies by a degree or two over the course of a day without any harm. Attempts to calculate an average temperature of a crowd of humans will turn out different in the third decimal place depending on which humans and which measuring tools you use.
The conventional 98.6F temperature comes from converting 37C to Fahrenheit. The 37C temperature is also "plus or minus a degree or so", but it doesn't have fake precision from a third digit.
98F and 99F are completely normal temperatures for a human body, and are no cause for medical alarm. The.6 is a meaningless artifact of conversion from Celsius.
96F would produce a mildly worried look on your doctor's face, though it wouldn't result in a panic.
Similarly, I once registered 101 point something on a doctor's thermometer, and he just asked me what I'd been doing in the previous hour. I told him that I'd been playing tennis and had a hot shower. He just nodded, and went on to other things, since I'd explained the slightly elevated temperature. He did take my temperature again 10 or 15 minutes later, and when it was lower, he ignored it.
Yah; analogies only work if you don't look at them too closely. But sometimes, an analogy is the only way to get the concept across to people who don't understand the technology.
It's not the same as an open door. It's an open door and a person standing next to it with a bullhorn saying, anyone can come in.
Actually, a better analogy would be the sort of door that a lot of stores have, which opens automatically when a person (or a large dog) approaches. That's clearly an invitation to enter, and it is intended as such. Making it a crime is just bizarre.
I can see a lot of slashdotters saying "Why would a store allow that? People will just enter and steal stuff." I'd consider this more of a reflection on the writer's anti-social or criminal intentions. Most people, when faced with an automatic door (or even a plain door) on a store will consider it an invitation to come in. Nobody would expect to be charged with criminal trespass or theft for just walking through an open door.
No wait, this is Slashdot... Does anyone have a car analogy?
Sure do; a much better one than the previous reply.
A couple of blocks from me, there is a short (3 blocks) street which it turns out isn't owned by the city. It's owned by the people who live along it. This happens hereabouts sometimes. The street connects to four city streets, has normal-looking street signs, and there are no "No Trespassing" signs anywhere. I lived here several years before I learned that that one street isn't a public way.
So when I drive on that street, am I committing criminal trespass?
I'd expect that the answer is "Of course not! Who'd be stupid enough to charge you for driving on an open street?"
The answer to that seems to be "A lot of people on slashdot. The same ones who think that using an open wi-fi access point without passwords or encryption is a criminal act."
I'm sorta glad that the people posting here don't (mostly) work for law enforcement. I'd be constantly arrested and charged with crimes that I couldn't have known I was committing.
My wife and I both have wireless laptops. I have a Mac Powerbook, she has a Vista laptop (which she hates;-), and we also have an OLPC SO. All of them occasionally connect to the several open neighborhood wi-fi APs. She doesn't notice this, but I do, because I occasionally do things like sshing to one of my home linux boxes. If my Mac or OLPC has connected to a neighbor's wi-fi from the patio, I'll get "No route to 192.168.1.17", and know immediately what the problem is. (She'd be baffled, but she doesn't use ssh, and her VPN to work works ok via the neighbors' APs.)
According to many people here, we are criminals. I consider this nonsense. A bunch of us in the neighborhood run open wi-fi access points as an act of friendliness toward each other and visitors. The wi-fi part of the spectrum is officially supposed to be open and usable by anyone, just like the public road system. Considering us criminals seems anti-social and obstructionist in the extreme.
When I was in nursery school, I was taught that nice kids share their toys. It seems that some people here never learned that lesson. I wonder if they learned any of the other useful social lessons that people have tried to teach them.
But that's another analogy for another discussion...
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?
Why would it matter whether you believe someone might have a motive? I don't understand why people might commit all sorts of crimes, because I'd never do that. But some people commit those crimes anyway. Lots of people have motives to frame others for crimes.
In any case, on to methods. I have a demo on my web site of how to do "preloading" in javascript. Is javascript enabled in your browser? If so, my demo shows how I can create a web page that quietly downloads images from arbitrary URLs, without showing them to you. This may be used to load those images into your browser's cache. It has valid uses, such as to speed up subsequent downloading of other pages from my site which use those images. But I can just as easily fill your browser's cache with porn. Unless you know how to scan your browser's cache (or have the sense to purge it frequently), you'll never know what I've done to you. My code (actually my web server) also tells me your IP address, which I can use to send the authorities in to examine your browser's cache.
I'd be willing to testify in court how easy this is. And give the court a copy of my code (though they could easily download it from my web site;-).
And yes, I usually do browse with scripting disabled. This was typed into a Firefox 3.0 window, which has the NoScripts extension installed. My demo code won't work against me.
..some 60 year old grandma that does little more than surf the web will end up fixated on being "incompatable" with "all of her word docs".
Huh? If all she does is surf the web, most of her files will be in HTML (or GIF or JPEG or PDF or MP3) format. Where would she get the Word docs? Yeah, there are a few here and there on the web, but not very many. Most people who run web sites, even if they believe the claim that 90% of the people use Windows, still don't want to lock out 10% of their potential customers, so they convert things like.doc files to.htm or.pdf files before putting them online.
If all you're using the Internet for is web and email, you have no strong motive to favor any particular sort of computer system. They all do web surfing and email pretty well these days.
And if you run across a file that doesn't look right on your screen, you can always forward it to your gmail account, where there's software that can convert it to a standard format. (That's mostly what I use my gmail account for.;-)
No doubt. But the Firefox gang is trying to make FF into the world's most popular browser. To do that, they really should make installing easy for dumbasses like me. If they only cater to 1337 geeks like you, then they'll restrict their user base to only 133t g33xxorz.
Actually, I did successfully start FF from within the "firefox" directory that the tar.bz2 file unpacked. It took me a while to figure out why it kept starting up iceweasel 2.0..., even after I turned off the x bits in the iceweasel binary, but eventually it ran. The obvious step of linking the firefox and firefox-bin files to my ~/bin directory didn't work, though, because when started from there, it couldn't find the files it wanted. It probably wants some sort of search-path variable set to point to that directory, but I don't know what that variable's called. Maybe I can dig it out of the firefox script.
But this doesn't strike me as the sort of thing you'd want to present to Joe Sixpack as a hoop to jump through to get it working. If FF is to be the browser for the linux-using masses (;-), it really needs an installer that's a bit easier to use. Either a "click me to install" button, or a drag-and-drop thingy. I didn't see any sign of either.
I won't argue that, but PDF operability should be number one on the dev team's list in my opinion.
Well, maybe you won't, but I will.;-) Or if they do, we should insist that they give us a way to turn it off and use an external program for PDFs, like they do now.
On the Mac Powerbook that I'm typing this to, both the Safari and Opera browsers open PDF inside a browser window. This means that nearly half the vertical screen space is taken up by all the header/footer boilerplate from both the browsers and Acrobat. I can't get a whole page on the screen at a font size that's legible. When I find myself faced with downloading a PDF, I've learned to copy the URL to Firefox or Seamonkey, which have the courtesy to open it in a separate window. I can even use Preview instead of Acrobat, and get a bit more vertical space for the page.
And, rendering PDFs in Safari and Opera is slooooow. To see why, just try opening the same page in Acrobat. The first page takes forever. The second might be faster, but then you have the problem that you'd be adding Acrobat's memory requirement to the browser's memory requirement permanently. Safari and Opera grow huge permanently when a PDF is opened, even after you close the tab that it was in. Maybe they'll fix this some day, but then all PDFs will probably be slow to open. Firefox's approach of opening a subprocess is better. You can just kill the subprocess, and the memory is freed up for reuse.
It was nice of them to make firefox smaller and leaner. Fattening it up with a cancerous elephant like Acrobat isn't what we need. OSX is a multiprogramming system, after all. It can run parallel processes just fine. Displaying PDF files is a good use of this ability.
Yeah, I did that. It's now a few hours later, and I have the firefox-3.0.tar.bz2 file on the disk. Now does anyone know how to install the thing?;-)
It worked just fine on my Mac Powerbook, installed simply (after reminding me to kill the old one that I used to download the new one;-). I'm typing this on the Mac with Firefox, and it identifies itself as "version 3.0".
But all my attempts to find the installer (or copy the right files) on my linux box have hit dead ends. The tar.bz2 file does unpack into a "firefox" directory, and that contains nothing with "install" in its name, but there's a README.txt file. That tells me to go to http://getfirefox.com/releases/ for info in installing, etc. I did that; it bounced me to a page that led me to the.../firefox/3.0/releasenotes/# page, which shows me a list of things to do. After the Downloading link, there's an Installing link, and I think I've got there, so I click it. It gives me a bit of legal boilerplate starting with "Please note that installing Firefox 3 will overwrite your ixisting installation...". And that's all.
WTF? Has anyone successfully installed the linux version? If so, what am I missing?
Maybe they're trying to discourage us linux users from bothering them with bugs right away? Maybe the plan was to trick us into downloading it, to up the download count, and then baffle us with misdirection for a day or week or so...
Or maybe I'm just being dumb and missing something obvious.
(BTW, what's Ark? It popped up once, but I can't even tell whether it's an installer, much less how to get it to do anything sensible.;-)
Actually, claiming copyright on "the" isn't the most extreme. The prize has long belonged to AT&T, who back in the 1980s claimed copyright ownership of a blank line. Google for "/bin/true ATT copyright" to read about it, and see several versions of the program. I once posted this program in its entirety on a newsgroup, and publicly challenged AT&T to sue me for copyright infringement. Funny thing; I didn't hear from their lawyers. But maybe they lost track of me in their effort to prosecute all the others who did the same thing.
Of course, it obviously resulted from use of a program that went through everything in their library and added a copyright notice. The program didn't include a test to verify that there was actually non-blank text in each file, because it didn't occur to the programmer that there are languages in which an empty file is a valid program. I'd guess that the current AP kerfuffle is something similarly clueless. But this one was probably done by humans, not by a dumb little script, so it's even funnier.
Probably not. The usual definitions of "plagiarism" include presenting someone else's words as your own. It seems fairly clear from the descriptions that the supposed violations were presented as quotes.
Thus, my above quote is your exact words, but it isn't plagiarism. I've used one of slashdot's conventional typographical techniques to label it as a quote. I haven't named the source, because I'm trusting that/. will provide the usual link back to the original article. All this should protect me from any charge of plagiarism.
The more interesting aspect of this is the AP's appeal to the nature of the Internet. As others have pointed out, there's a problem with merely providing a link. The content linked to can disappear, or even worse, it can change after I create a link to it. If I link to your page and comment on it, you can change your text to make me into a liar. My only protection against this is to copy the important part of your site's text to my own page, to preserve it for readers. This isn't true for print publication, where the hard copy will linger and can be found as evidence if the author later claims to have written something else. But anything on the Internet is transitory, and can disappear instantly or morph into something very different.
It's interesting that the AP seems to object to both "deep" linking and extensive quotes. But these are both needed on the Internet if one is to do a decent job of summarizing or commenting on what others have published. So AP is inherently objecting to the most accurate way of "publishing" news and commentary on the Internet.
Maybe what they really want is that nobody should be allowed to "publish" on the Internet except them, and analysis of their reports should be forbidden. It wouldn't be surprising if this is what they really want, but somehow I suspect that they aren't going to get it.
That nytimes article started with a comment that (if true) has interesting implications:
The Associated Press... said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright.
So the AP has decided that defining "fair use" and what is copyrightable isn't a question for Congress or the courts. The AP is going to decide for itself what can be copyrighted and what can't.
If this is true, I think I'll follow the same approach. I'm going to copyright the word "the", which I've used several times in this article. If I see an AP article using "the" without my permission, I'll send them a DMCA takedown notice. If they persist, I'll take them to court. Part of my evidence against them is their declaration that they have the right to decide the minimum that's copyrightable and they can enforce their definition. If they can decide that, then so can I.
Now I do realize that the nytimes could have misquoted them. Anyone know exactly what the AP actually said?
Of course, if you quote their exact statement here, they'll probably charge you with copyright violation. OTOH, if you merely provide a link to it, they'll change it after the fact, once they realize the import of what they said.
So is Streambox preparing a lawsuit against Real Networks for what is now clearly a case of "restraint of trade" against a competitor? RN's motive was clearly not to stop "ripping", but to kill a competitor to their own ripping tool that wasn't yet ready for the market.
I wonder how Streambox could do with a claim that RN has ripped off their product design? Perhaps they could apply for a patent on their software, then charge RN with patent violation.
All sorts of possibilities come to mind. Of course, the "system" does have a way of siding with the biggest corporation. But it would be fun to see a bit of turnaround here, if there's any way it could be done.
I think this is a stereotype like any other. You can't say that one group of people always does something in a given way.
Sure you can, at least here in the US where we have a First Amendment that protects free speech.;-)
You can say anything you like about anyone. That's what free speech is all about, y'know. Of course, if it's slanderous, you might find yourself in civil court and paying for damages. But this is only likely if you're slandering an individual. Slandering whole groups of people at once is quite safe, as illustrated by TFA. The author has gotten publicity for her idiotic comments about males, but there's no chance she'll be prosecuted.
Of course thse landmarks tend to be a bit more static and longer lasting than the red Ford van and the crazy homeless guy - I've been given directins like that before.
One of the standard jokes here in the Boston (Massachusetts, USA) area is about getting directions from a native Bostonian, including things like "turn right where X used to be", where X is something that long-time residents will know about. I'd lived here only about a month when I first got directions like this. It was from a man, FWIW; I've since gotten equally bad directions from both men and women.
I've learned to try to get an actual address, but it's surprising how difficult that can be. Nowadays street addresses are especially useful, since I have a GPS gadget that understands them. But it can still be very difficult to extract addresses from the natives, even for places like their own house where you'd think they'd know the address.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone once pointed out that under the "making available" theory, most men with a wife or girlfriend could easily be charged with involvement in prostitution. After all, if a man leaves his woman home alone or lets her go out in public by herself, she could very easily make herself sexually available to any passing man.
This isn't entirely hypothetical, of course; there are some parts of the world where men do take this attitude.
Somehow, I think I'd rather not have such legal theories adopted where I live. I think my wife would agree.
I've also noticed that we often have tools like knives lying on our kitchen counters. Those knives have often been out, and even used, when we have visitors. Kitchen knives could be used to kill people. So are we "making available" dangerous weapons when we give visitors such easy access to our kitchen knives? (Sometimes we've even put steak knives on the table, knowingly and with the intention that they be used. ;-)
It's more like your temperature will fluctuate over periods of hours like 98.401, 98.737, 99.013, 98.632 .... Any digits past the second are meaningless medically. They're probably also bogus technically, unless you've left the thermometer in exactly the same position the whole time (and insulated it from air contact if it's near the skin).
That 6 in 98.6F is a textbook example of false precision. And it doesn't even come from averaging any measurements; it's an artifact of converting 37C to Fahrenheit. A much more meaningful estimate of normal human body temperature is 37C plus or minus a degree. If you convert that to F, 98.0 and 99.5 are both within the "normal" range.
I've read half the thread now, and you're the first post that halfway resembled being on topic, although unintentionally so.
It wasn't entirely unintentional, though it was mostly in reaction to the silliness that followed the summary that just said "70 degrees" without mentioning a scale. I was also sorta tempted to mention that there were probably error bars of several degrees in the researchers' measurements of leaf temperatures, for fairly obvious reasons. Bogus excess precision is a constant complaint that many scientists have with the media, and this topic is rife with it.
We've had a lot of hints that many plants have the ability to somewhat control the temperature of various parts. Here in New England, a common spring "flower" is the skunk cabbage, whose flowering structure has an internal temperature in the mid 30's (Celsius), when the ground and are are still both barely above freezing. Out on the Midwestern prairies, there's the "compass plant", a kind of sunflower whose large leaves are oriented north-south, and the standard explanation is that it's to absorb sunlight in the early morning and late afternoon, while avoiding a heat buildup from the mid-day sun. And so on.
But measuring the internal temperature of a leaf is a bit tricky, and we've only had tools to do it for a couple of decades. It's interesting to read of research showing that some plants have evolved ways of controlling their leaf temperatures to within a few degrees of an optimum temperature.
I'll bet that a lot more research is needed on this topic (and might be supported by the obvious horticultural implications of the knowledge). We can expect to hear more about it in a few years.
Anyway, this whole disagreement over what units to use is pointless and infantile; just use standard scientific units internally and change the units in the end user software based on user preference.
Well, yeah, but it's entertaining to a lot of tech geeks. ;-)
And if you post something in an international tech-oriented forum using idiosyncratic units used only in your country, you gotta expect that people will mock you. In this case, it seems that most people did the mocking not by being nasty, but by (trying) to be funny about it. I'd say that in this case, the /. crowd has responded quite appropriately to a rather silly gaffe. It's a lot more entertaining than the usual outburst of insults.
So how do I get the units in /. articles like this automagically translated to what I'd like? Seriously, if there's a way to do it, I'd like to know. I can conceive of ways to do it, but it'd either require me giving appropriate locale-type info to /. (which I don't see in the preferences stuff), or using javascript on my local browser (which I have disabled via NoScripts in firefox). And, to my knowledge, the HTML sent by /. doesn't do this sort of unit translation.
I could write the code to do the translation, of course, but I don't know how (or if it's even possible) to tell FF to run my code as a filter on every /. message. Is there a way to do this?
I'm a physicist and spend all my professional time working in m/s/kg units, but outside of that, what does it matter? We changed over the easier things, but the bit that's left (espcially feet/inches) don't justify the amount it would cost us to retool everything to use metric.
Hmm ... I've long since decided the opposite. America is the one place in the world where I have to have two sets of nearly every tool and measuring device. Life would be simpler if I could dispense with one or the other. In some cases, I've done so. Thus, I haven't owned an American-made car since the early 1970s, so I only need metric auto tools. I've let the old ones rust, or I've given them away. (Cue the jokes about the difficulty of finding good metric pliers, crescent wrenches, etc. in the US. ;-)
I do have a number of measuring tools that combine both English and metric, so I don't need duplicate tools there. But the combined tools are sometimes awkward. Thus the tape measures have English on one edge and metric on the other, and this is sometimes a hassle if I want to hook the little hook over something too far away to reach and unroll the tape to take a measurement. Half the time, the units that I want to use are on the "wrong" edge. This isn't a huge deal, of course, but sometimes being off by a mm means a bit of hassle cutting things to fit smoothly.
It isn't something that I'm a fanatic about, but I'm aware that being forced to use a mixture of two incommensurate measuring systems produces lots of little niggling inefficiencies and minor errors that could be avoided if everything used the same units. It's more annoying than serious, and its one more ongoing illustration of the clumsy "Who cares?" attitude of much of our society.
(But it's probably not nearly as serious as the sheer insanity of our spelling "system". ;-)
I think you mean 70 Kelvin, the Kelvin scale does not use degrees.
Actually, it does, but it uses the Celsius degree. The term "Kelvin" unit is defined as "degrees Celsius above absolute zero". So a phrase like "70 degrees Kelvin" expands to "70 degrees degrees Kelvin above absolute zero". This isn't so much wrong as silly (at least to someone who knows the definition).
It's the same sort of error as saying "PIN number", which expands to "Personal Identification Number number". It's easy to understand why someone who doesn't understand the term might say something like this. But in both cases, saying such things just makes you sound ignorant of the term's meaning.
There are lots of technical terms what are used incorrectly in this fashion. Maybe others will post their favorites ...
Since when was normal body temp 96F? Google-sama tell me it's 98.6F.
.6 is bogus precision. The "normal" core temperature of a healthy human body varies by a degree or two over the course of a day without any harm. Attempts to calculate an average temperature of a crowd of humans will turn out different in the third decimal place depending on which humans and which measuring tools you use.
.6 is a meaningless artifact of conversion from Celsius.
Except that that
The conventional 98.6F temperature comes from converting 37C to Fahrenheit. The 37C temperature is also "plus or minus a degree or so", but it doesn't have fake precision from a third digit.
98F and 99F are completely normal temperatures for a human body, and are no cause for medical alarm. The
96F would produce a mildly worried look on your doctor's face, though it wouldn't result in a panic.
Similarly, I once registered 101 point something on a doctor's thermometer, and he just asked me what I'd been doing in the previous hour. I told him that I'd been playing tennis and had a hot shower. He just nodded, and went on to other things, since I'd explained the slightly elevated temperature. He did take my temperature again 10 or 15 minutes later, and when it was lower, he ignored it.
Yah; analogies only work if you don't look at them too closely. But sometimes, an analogy is the only way to get the concept across to people who don't understand the technology.
It's not the same as an open door. It's an open door and a person standing next to it with a bullhorn saying, anyone can come in.
Actually, a better analogy would be the sort of door that a lot of stores have, which opens automatically when a person (or a large dog) approaches. That's clearly an invitation to enter, and it is intended as such. Making it a crime is just bizarre.
I can see a lot of slashdotters saying "Why would a store allow that? People will just enter and steal stuff." I'd consider this more of a reflection on the writer's anti-social or criminal intentions. Most people, when faced with an automatic door (or even a plain door) on a store will consider it an invitation to come in. Nobody would expect to be charged with criminal trespass or theft for just walking through an open door.
No wait, this is Slashdot... Does anyone have a car analogy?
;-), and we also have an OLPC SO. All of them occasionally connect to the several open neighborhood wi-fi APs. She doesn't notice this, but I do, because I occasionally do things like sshing to one of my home linux boxes. If my Mac or OLPC has connected to a neighbor's wi-fi from the patio, I'll get "No route to 192.168.1.17", and know immediately what the problem is. (She'd be baffled, but she doesn't use ssh, and her VPN to work works ok via the neighbors' APs.)
...
Sure do; a much better one than the previous reply.
A couple of blocks from me, there is a short (3 blocks) street which it turns out isn't owned by the city. It's owned by the people who live along it. This happens hereabouts sometimes. The street connects to four city streets, has normal-looking street signs, and there are no "No Trespassing" signs anywhere. I lived here several years before I learned that that one street isn't a public way.
So when I drive on that street, am I committing criminal trespass?
I'd expect that the answer is "Of course not! Who'd be stupid enough to charge you for driving on an open street?"
The answer to that seems to be "A lot of people on slashdot. The same ones who think that using an open wi-fi access point without passwords or encryption is a criminal act."
I'm sorta glad that the people posting here don't (mostly) work for law enforcement. I'd be constantly arrested and charged with crimes that I couldn't have known I was committing.
My wife and I both have wireless laptops. I have a Mac Powerbook, she has a Vista laptop (which she hates
According to many people here, we are criminals. I consider this nonsense. A bunch of us in the neighborhood run open wi-fi access points as an act of friendliness toward each other and visitors. The wi-fi part of the spectrum is officially supposed to be open and usable by anyone, just like the public road system. Considering us criminals seems anti-social and obstructionist in the extreme.
When I was in nursery school, I was taught that nice kids share their toys. It seems that some people here never learned that lesson. I wonder if they learned any of the other useful social lessons that people have tried to teach them.
But that's another analogy for another discussion
Personally, I'm skeptical about the idea of malware that secretly downloads and hides kiddie porn--why would the malware developer do that?
;-).
Why would it matter whether you believe someone might have a motive? I don't understand why people might commit all sorts of crimes, because I'd never do that. But some people commit those crimes anyway. Lots of people have motives to frame others for crimes.
In any case, on to methods. I have a demo on my web site of how to do "preloading" in javascript. Is javascript enabled in your browser? If so, my demo shows how I can create a web page that quietly downloads images from arbitrary URLs, without showing them to you. This may be used to load those images into your browser's cache. It has valid uses, such as to speed up subsequent downloading of other pages from my site which use those images. But I can just as easily fill your browser's cache with porn. Unless you know how to scan your browser's cache (or have the sense to purge it frequently), you'll never know what I've done to you. My code (actually my web server) also tells me your IP address, which I can use to send the authorities in to examine your browser's cache.
I'd be willing to testify in court how easy this is. And give the court a copy of my code (though they could easily download it from my web site
And yes, I usually do browse with scripting disabled. This was typed into a Firefox 3.0 window, which has the NoScripts extension installed. My demo code won't work against me.
..some 60 year old grandma that does little more than surf the web will end up fixated on being "incompatable" with "all of her word docs".
.doc files to .htm or .pdf files before putting them online.
;-)
Huh? If all she does is surf the web, most of her files will be in HTML (or GIF or JPEG or PDF or MP3) format. Where would she get the Word docs? Yeah, there are a few here and there on the web, but not very many. Most people who run web sites, even if they believe the claim that 90% of the people use Windows, still don't want to lock out 10% of their potential customers, so they convert things like
If all you're using the Internet for is web and email, you have no strong motive to favor any particular sort of computer system. They all do web surfing and email pretty well these days.
And if you run across a file that doesn't look right on your screen, you can always forward it to your gmail account, where there's software that can convert it to a standard format. (That's mostly what I use my gmail account for.
I wish people would stop calling China "communist," since it is not.
Look at it this way: China is Communist in the same sense that America is Christian.
The leaders of both nations use the name, but they pretty much violate all the principles behind the name.
Of course, they're not the only country for which this is true.
It's because you're a dumbass.
No doubt. But the Firefox gang is trying to make FF into the world's most popular browser. To do that, they really should make installing easy for dumbasses like me. If they only cater to 1337 geeks like you, then they'll restrict their user base to only 133t g33xxorz.
Actually, I did successfully start FF from within the "firefox" directory that the tar.bz2 file unpacked. It took me a while to figure out why it kept starting up iceweasel 2.0..., even after I turned off the x bits in the iceweasel binary, but eventually it ran. The obvious step of linking the firefox and firefox-bin files to my ~/bin directory didn't work, though, because when started from there, it couldn't find the files it wanted. It probably wants some sort of search-path variable set to point to that directory, but I don't know what that variable's called. Maybe I can dig it out of the firefox script.
But this doesn't strike me as the sort of thing you'd want to present to Joe Sixpack as a hoop to jump through to get it working. If FF is to be the browser for the linux-using masses (;-), it really needs an installer that's a bit easier to use. Either a "click me to install" button, or a drag-and-drop thingy. I didn't see any sign of either.
I won't argue that, but PDF operability should be number one on the dev team's list in my opinion.
;-) Or if they do, we should insist that they give us a way to turn it off and use an external program for PDFs, like they do now.
Well, maybe you won't, but I will.
On the Mac Powerbook that I'm typing this to, both the Safari and Opera browsers open PDF inside a browser window. This means that nearly half the vertical screen space is taken up by all the header/footer boilerplate from both the browsers and Acrobat. I can't get a whole page on the screen at a font size that's legible. When I find myself faced with downloading a PDF, I've learned to copy the URL to Firefox or Seamonkey, which have the courtesy to open it in a separate window. I can even use Preview instead of Acrobat, and get a bit more vertical space for the page.
And, rendering PDFs in Safari and Opera is slooooow. To see why, just try opening the same page in Acrobat. The first page takes forever. The second might be faster, but then you have the problem that you'd be adding Acrobat's memory requirement to the browser's memory requirement permanently. Safari and Opera grow huge permanently when a PDF is opened, even after you close the tab that it was in. Maybe they'll fix this some day, but then all PDFs will probably be slow to open. Firefox's approach of opening a subprocess is better. You can just kill the subprocess, and the memory is freed up for reuse.
It was nice of them to make firefox smaller and leaner. Fattening it up with a cancerous elephant like Acrobat isn't what we need. OSX is a multiprogramming system, after all. It can run parallel processes just fine. Displaying PDF files is a good use of this ability.
I'll put off the Linux version for a couple hours
;-)
;-). I'm typing this on the Mac with Firefox, and it identifies itself as "version 3.0".
.../firefox/3.0/releasenotes/# page, which shows me a list of things to do. After the Downloading link, there's an Installing link, and I think I've got there, so I click it. It gives me a bit of legal boilerplate starting with "Please note that installing Firefox 3 will overwrite your ixisting installation ...". And that's all.
...
;-)
Yeah, I did that. It's now a few hours later, and I have the firefox-3.0.tar.bz2 file on the disk. Now does anyone know how to install the thing?
It worked just fine on my Mac Powerbook, installed simply (after reminding me to kill the old one that I used to download the new one
But all my attempts to find the installer (or copy the right files) on my linux box have hit dead ends. The tar.bz2 file does unpack into a "firefox" directory, and that contains nothing with "install" in its name, but there's a README.txt file. That tells me to go to http://getfirefox.com/releases/ for info in installing, etc. I did that; it bounced me to a page that led me to the
WTF? Has anyone successfully installed the linux version? If so, what am I missing?
Maybe they're trying to discourage us linux users from bothering them with bugs right away? Maybe the plan was to trick us into downloading it, to up the download count, and then baffle us with misdirection for a day or week or so
Or maybe I'm just being dumb and missing something obvious.
(BTW, what's Ark? It popped up once, but I can't even tell whether it's an installer, much less how to get it to do anything sensible.
Yah; that was the point.
Actually, claiming copyright on "the" isn't the most extreme. The prize has long belonged to AT&T, who back in the 1980s claimed copyright ownership of a blank line. Google for "/bin/true ATT copyright" to read about it, and see several versions of the program. I once posted this program in its entirety on a newsgroup, and publicly challenged AT&T to sue me for copyright infringement. Funny thing; I didn't hear from their lawyers. But maybe they lost track of me in their effort to prosecute all the others who did the same thing.
Of course, it obviously resulted from use of a program that went through everything in their library and added a copyright notice. The program didn't include a test to verify that there was actually non-blank text in each file, because it didn't occur to the programmer that there are languages in which an empty file is a valid program. I'd guess that the current AP kerfuffle is something similarly clueless. But this one was probably done by humans, not by a dumb little script, so it's even funnier.
It would be considered plagiarism.
/. will provide the usual link back to the original article. All this should protect me from any charge of plagiarism.
Probably not. The usual definitions of "plagiarism" include presenting someone else's words as your own. It seems fairly clear from the descriptions that the supposed violations were presented as quotes.
Thus, my above quote is your exact words, but it isn't plagiarism. I've used one of slashdot's conventional typographical techniques to label it as a quote. I haven't named the source, because I'm trusting that
The more interesting aspect of this is the AP's appeal to the nature of the Internet. As others have pointed out, there's a problem with merely providing a link. The content linked to can disappear, or even worse, it can change after I create a link to it. If I link to your page and comment on it, you can change your text to make me into a liar. My only protection against this is to copy the important part of your site's text to my own page, to preserve it for readers. This isn't true for print publication, where the hard copy will linger and can be found as evidence if the author later claims to have written something else. But anything on the Internet is transitory, and can disappear instantly or morph into something very different.
It's interesting that the AP seems to object to both "deep" linking and extensive quotes. But these are both needed on the Internet if one is to do a decent job of summarizing or commenting on what others have published. So AP is inherently objecting to the most accurate way of "publishing" news and commentary on the Internet.
Maybe what they really want is that nobody should be allowed to "publish" on the Internet except them, and analysis of their reports should be forbidden. It wouldn't be surprising if this is what they really want, but somehow I suspect that they aren't going to get it.
That nytimes article started with a comment that (if true) has interesting implications:
... said that it will, for the first time, attempt to define clear standards as to how much of its articles and broadcasts bloggers and Web sites can excerpt without infringing on The A.P.'s copyright.
The Associated Press
So the AP has decided that defining "fair use" and what is copyrightable isn't a question for Congress or the courts. The AP is going to decide for itself what can be copyrighted and what can't.
If this is true, I think I'll follow the same approach. I'm going to copyright the word "the", which I've used several times in this article. If I see an AP article using "the" without my permission, I'll send them a DMCA takedown notice. If they persist, I'll take them to court. Part of my evidence against them is their declaration that they have the right to decide the minimum that's copyrightable and they can enforce their definition. If they can decide that, then so can I.
Now I do realize that the nytimes could have misquoted them. Anyone know exactly what the AP actually said?
Of course, if you quote their exact statement here, they'll probably charge you with copyright violation. OTOH, if you merely provide a link to it, they'll change it after the fact, once they realize the import of what they said.
Or maybe "If I want to mail you a check, what should I write on the envelope?" ;-)
So is Streambox preparing a lawsuit against Real Networks for what is now clearly a case of "restraint of trade" against a competitor? RN's motive was clearly not to stop "ripping", but to kill a competitor to their own ripping tool that wasn't yet ready for the market.
I wonder how Streambox could do with a claim that RN has ripped off their product design? Perhaps they could apply for a patent on their software, then charge RN with patent violation.
All sorts of possibilities come to mind. Of course, the "system" does have a way of siding with the biggest corporation. But it would be fun to see a bit of turnaround here, if there's any way it could be done.
I'm a gay man, and I've been told that my code is unusually clear.
;-)
Oh, no; now you've told all the men here that if they write clear code, people will think they're gay.
Just think of the effect this will have on code quality.
I think this is a stereotype like any other. You can't say that one group of people always does something in a given way.
;-)
Sure you can, at least here in the US where we have a First Amendment that protects free speech.
You can say anything you like about anyone. That's what free speech is all about, y'know. Of course, if it's slanderous, you might find yourself in civil court and paying for damages. But this is only likely if you're slandering an individual. Slandering whole groups of people at once is quite safe, as illustrated by TFA. The author has gotten publicity for her idiotic comments about males, but there's no chance she'll be prosecuted.
Of course thse landmarks tend to be a bit more static and longer lasting than the red Ford van and the crazy homeless guy - I've been given directins like that before.
One of the standard jokes here in the Boston (Massachusetts, USA) area is about getting directions from a native Bostonian, including things like "turn right where X used to be", where X is something that long-time residents will know about. I'd lived here only about a month when I first got directions like this. It was from a man, FWIW; I've since gotten equally bad directions from both men and women.
I've learned to try to get an actual address, but it's surprising how difficult that can be. Nowadays street addresses are especially useful, since I have a GPS gadget that understands them. But it can still be very difficult to extract addresses from the natives, even for places like their own house where you'd think they'd know the address.
Hmm ... I can see the ad slogan: It keeps going and going, so you'll keep coming and coming.
Maybe I oughta copyright the slogan before they try to use it (if they haven't already).