I've had land-line phones for around 4 decades now, in a number of different towns in several states, and I've never had one that even got close to 99% uptime, much less 99.999%. Lost connections and connections so bad as to be unusable have always been expected problems that you "just live with" everywhere I've lived. And this is in the US, where people make the absurd claim of near-perfect uptime for land lines.
As for cell phones, how is a customer supposed to go about "choosing" a reliable one? Where I live, they all have about the same poor reliability, and the same crappy contracts. My only "choice" is to not have a cell phone. So the vaunted "market" can't choose among them and can't get any messages at all across to them. In my experience, this is in fact how "the market" usually works.
So what planet do you live on where things work better? Can I move there? (Do you have an oxygen atmosphere that I can breathe?;-)
Hmmm... This didn't make sense until I realized that, to the cellular providers, "content" includes ads, while to most users, "content" is everything except the ads. With this understanding, it makes sense that the cellular providers would want to keep firefox out, because firefox allows customers to block content (i.e., ads), and the cellular provider loses income from the content (ad) providers.
More generally, of course, the cellular providers want to be the one deciding which content to block, not the customers. Firefox and the other mozilla browsers allows customers to block undesirable content (ads), thus taking control away from the cellular provider.
It all makes sense to me, in a rather cynical way.
Just wanted to make a point about one of my pet hates; that is, americans always putting a country's name after the place name. E.G. Paris, France, or Rome, Italy, as if there was another more famous populous Rome or Paris somewhere.
Funny, I've often found myself asking questions on mailing lists due to the omission of the country name from an announcement of an event. Thus, recently on a dance-related list, I asked whether the events in Manchester a Dublin were in New Hampshire, or in England and Ireland. To a resident of the Boston area, all four of these towns are well known, and the particular announcements made sense for the New Hampshire towns as well as those towns over across the Pond.
For that matter, I once read an announcement of an event in Boston, and it turned out to be the Boston in the UK, not far from Cambridge -- which is another familiar place name both here and there. People in the UK tend to assume that everyone knows the names of towns in their country, but in fact their Boston is not the one most people will assume when they see the name.
Adding the country name doesn't take many extra bytes, and it alleviates the need for followup messages asking which of the various places by that name was meant. We should all get used to the idea that on the Internet, you always include the country name, even if it's perfectly obvious to you which country you're writing about.
For example, if I have a personal site on my home machine, and I put up pictures and a few stories from our recent vacation, does that make my site a news site?
Will I be regulated as a news organization if I let the world know what members of my family (including the cockatiels and the conure) have been doing recently?
There are good historic reasons to worry about such things...
These researchers had better watch out; what they're doing sounds exactly like the physical mechanism of "electronic paper". The patent enforcers are gonna be all over them when the news gets out about what they're doing. After all, patents were invented to block exactly this sort of "derivative work" based on someone else's earlier inventions.
And if you don't give companies the options of patents to protect their developments, you can immediately say goodbye to all open standards and scientific sharing.
Actually, this has pretty much always been true for corporations, who have generally "contributed" to standards by trying to capture them, and have rarely published what little actual scientific research they have done. Scientific process depends heavily on open publication and building on others' results, "standing on the shoulders of giants" as Isaac Newton said. This is why most scientific advancement has historically come out of academia and government-sponsored research organizations. Research inside corporations is usually a dead end, because the results are kept private, or are patented to prevent others from building on them (aka "patent infringement"). Scientists in corporate labs are constantly frustrated by seeing their results locked up and unavailable to their colleagues for the usual scientific testing and extending of results.
There are some apparent exceptions that illustrate the point. Consider Bell Labs, which until the breakup of Ma Bell was a major research institute. It was (and is) owned by a private corporation, right? Uh, not exactly. During its heyday, Bell Labs was in fact owned by a corporation whose profits came almost entirely from a government-imposed monopoly, and whose management was firmly regulated by government agencies. In reality, Ma Bell was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US government, acting (and regulated) entirely as a government agency. After the breakup, when all the "Baby Bells" became real private corporations, Bell Labs also quickly went dark and hasn't contributed much to the store of public knowledge since then.
(Well, OK; they have contributed Plan 9 and UTF-8, but the world has firmly ignored the former and is being dragged kicking and screaming into use of the latter.;-)
More generally, all patents stifle progress. Wishful thinking and propaganda aside, patents have very rarely been used to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts", as the US Constitution says. The primary use of patents has always been to block other developers from extending and improving patented ideas until the patent runs out.
Histories of the topic have described many cases in which a patent holder made little if any further progress or income from an invention until after the patent ran out, due to the time and money cost of defending the patent. It's also fairly common for uses of a patent to be blocked by the need to use other people's patented ideas in any practical product. The determination of all the patent holders to claim the lion's share of the profit can effectively prevent anyone from selling anything.
If the patent system imposed an automatic license like the "mechanical license" of the copyright system, perhaps these problems could be avoided and patents would actually be usable and profitable to most patent holders. But nobody seems to be proposing this.
One question not addressed by evolution as origin of man is why all humans alive appear to have descended from a single man [wikipedia.org] and a single woman [wikipedia.org].
Ah, but most people badly misunderstand that. In its obvious, naive interpretation, the statement is absurd and false on its face. Reason: If you collect all the variants (alleles) of our genes, the result is far more than what can be contained within the cells of a single human, or even two humans. So the modern variations in humankind must have originated in more than just one male and one female.
Of course, some of those alleles would have originated after the "creation" of our single male and single female. But once you admit to this approach, you're on the downhill slide, because if you examine the full variety, it turns out you need a lot of people in a lot of separate populations to explain the modern diversity. And from what we know of the rate of mutation, you need many, many thousands of years, far more than any sacred texts would allow for.
Now, there is some weak evidence behind the hypothesis of a genetic "bottleneck" some tens of thousands of years in the past. But this wasn't likely just a single pair of humans. People doing the math have estimated a minimal population of 10,000 or so humans was required to produce the modern genetic diversity.
But even that is a "theoretical" minimum. More likely, when and if the bottleneck happened, it was spread out over centuries or millennia. And the population was probably significantly larger, including a lot of people who left no genetic trace in their descendants (but are still our ancestors).
Also, if you read those wikipedia articles, you'll see that they're talking about the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. These are less that 1% of our DNA. The rest of our DNA had to come from somewhere. This complicates the story by orders of magnitude. It's likely that every polymorphism in every allele of every gene originated in a different ancestor. We're talking about more than 100,000 individuals here, probably a lot more.
On a related topic, there was a calculation some years back that the modern population of Europe has as ancestors everyone in the first-century Roman Empire (or at least everyone who left descendants). There was a similar calculation that there's a 50% chance that there's someone in Europe who isn't a descendant of Charlemagne. The latter calculation obvious has to exclude recent immigrants and their children - though maybe not if they came from northern Africa or the Middle East.
Science can tell you the how of the universe's workings, but it cannot ever tell you why, because why cannot be proven through experiment.
Actually, if you talk to (college level here in the US;-) biology teachers, they are likely to explain that that a major part of the job of the low-level courses is getting students to stop talking in terms of purpose. Biologists have learned that when you argue from purpose, your results are inevitably wrong. Modern scientific terminology quite consciously and carefully avoids dealing with "why", because most listeners interpret that as purpose rather than mechanism.
Typical example: Beginning students are likely to explain that giraffes grow long necks to reach and eat tree leaves. This is totally wrong, of course. Giraffes don't decide to grow long necks for any purpose, any more than you decided when you were young to grow your neck short (so as to be unable to eat leaves from trees;-). They don't grow long necks to do anything. Their necks grow long because their DNA drives a long, complicated series of development pathways that results in long necks. The reason (not purpose) is that their ancestors with longer necks were able to reach and eat more leaves, making them healthier and able to produce more offspring, who inherited the genes for longer necks. This produced a slow shift in gene frequencies over the ages, resulting in the modern critter we call a giraffe which is very good at stripping leaves from trees. But the DNA doesn't do this to produce long necks (or to eat leaves). DNA has no mind or goals; it merely is, and interacts mindlessly with other chemical compounds. The selection process that changes gene frequencies is equally mindless and purposeless.
Students are expected to understand this after a few years, and to be comfortable with technical terminology that doesn't imply purpose. Otherwise, they are gently encouraged to find another major, as they are unlikely to be successful in a biological subject area.
Those that show distress at the thought of a mindless, purposeless, uncaring universe are likely to be guided into a religious major. They'll be happier there, really. Unfortunately, they also stand a chance of being able to do a lot of damage to society, as some of them will become religious leaders with significant numbers of followers.
The Bible says that God created the world in 7 days (rested on the 7th), but does not define what a day is.
Neither does it define "god", "to create", "world", nor "rest".
And to be more precise, we should note that the bible didn't use any of those words. That part of the bible was originally written in Hebrew, not English. The English is a recent translation. In some parts, it's not even a very good translation, as anyone who can read the original will tell you. And we do have a number of different translations, many of which differ significantly in various passages.
English uses many of these words in several different senses. Consider the familiar phrase "in my day". Any native English speaker knows what this means, and it sure doesn't mean a 24-hour period of time. At the other end of the scale, "day" often means the time that the sun is above the horizon, as opposed to "night", and in some parts of the world right now that's only a few hours per 24-hour rotation of the Earth. You'll find similar multiple meanings in Hebrew, and in most other languages. And there's the ongoing translator's problem: the classical Hebrew meanings of many words don't always line up too well with any modern English words.
If you're going to do a fine lexical analysis of a piece of text, it only makes sense to do it in the original language. And you are severely limited there by our knowledge of the original language, which for classical Hebrew isn't really all that good. But arguing the fine points of the meaning of passages in an English bible is fundamentally silly, and should be rejected outright by anyone with any interest in the text.
Not that this is going to convince any religious person of anything.
Some scientists even suspect that Earth's initial life form may have come from an asteroid, and evolved initially outside the Solar System. Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory.
Actually, it's pretty easy to make a rational argument against both as theories. Simply point out that both are technically just conjectures, i.e., interesting possibilities that we haven't tested yet (mostly because we don't know how to). To a rational being, the inability to test an idea would mean that you shouldn't believe it. Instead, you add it to the list of interesting conjectures that you should look into testing when you have the time. Only an irrational religious person would believe something without any supporting evidence.
The panspermia conjecture that life originated outside our solar system is potentially testable, but we can't do it yet because we can't travel out to where we might find the evidence. The God conjecture doesn't seem to have any possibility of testing, at least not for a god of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim type that can perform miracles to fake (or erase) any evidence; if there is such a God, science is probably permanently unable to deal with it.
(This argument assumes the scientific use of theory, which basically means an explanation that has been tested and has passed all the tests that we currently know how to do. If you use a different definition of "theory", such as the media's definition that is synonymous with "guess", then you probably shouldn't bother yourself with this conversation.)
I didn't realise/. had started posting links to things the submitter happened to find amusing today.
Then you haven't been paying very good attention. I've been reading/. for several years now, and when I first stumbled across it, there were articles labelled "It's funny, laugh!". Go back and look in the archives. The editors here have always had a sense of humor.
Of course, you can always filter out the humor, if you prefer. Several others have explained how to do it, so I won't repeat their explanations.
It's far better if the ISP:s work on trying to handle and catch the really malicious behavior that occurs on the net instead of being the arm of the RIAA or MPAA.
Well, maybe, but look at it from the ISP's viewpoint: It's safe to help the **AA track down and prosecute children, grannies and college kids. But if you go after the real criminal types, they're likely to DDOS your servers or send someone around to use your kneecaps for target practice. It's quite understandable that ISPs would be a bit shy of tackling actual criminals.
Also, the law-enforcement crowd seems to be a lot more interested in chasing downloaders or political whistleblowers than they are in dealing with real criminals. If you're trying to run an ISP, would you rather be cooperating with the police or going it alone against the guys that the cops can't be bothered with?
It's always easier to go after the easy cases; it's a lot more difficult to deal with the difficult cases. (Hmmm... I don't seem to find this tautology in my collection of clever sayings; could I have stumbled onto something original?;-)
As computer standard go, POSIX is actually pretty well written. Much of this is due to them actually responding to criticisms such as the WEIRDNIX ideas by revising the standard appropriately. They got a lot of points with developers for their inviting criticism and then actually listening when criticism flooded in. Who'd'a thunk a standards body would actually do such a thing?
It's also true that MS has improved their POSIX library over the years. Rather than viewing their initial release from the common "MS is evil" theory, it really looked more like the result of the usual corporate pressure on developers to get a minimally acceptable release out the door as quickly as possible. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Microsoft; I've seen it on every project I've ever worked on. But MS's stuff is often more visible than other companies', so it gets attention when it causes problems.
Also, MS does have a bit of a history of sticking with an initial release and not funding improvements until sufficiently many customers were complaining sufficiently loudly. Consider IE as just one well-known example. Again, this is hardly anything unique to that one company. But we programmers do tend to notice when a company with the clout of MS is touting their support of a standard, while in our labs we see a product that requires an inordinate number of #ifdefs in our code.
So you're saying that the POSIX standard was badly written?
No; you don't understand - the POSIX committee put out the request for WEIRDNIX implementations. They understood that it's difficult to get such things right, so they invited the crowd of unix hackers to examine their standard and find the things that hadn't been phrased quite right. They used the WEIRDNIX things that people sent them, to improve the standard.
Of course, like most standards, they still didn't manage to describe it all in a completely unambiguous manner. That's hardly possible in as messy a language as English. Microsoft found lots more little ambiguities that they missed, and took advantage of them to make the NT POSIX library as awful as they could (while still technically following the standard).
It did lead to a fair amount of abstruse, tongue-in-cheek geek humor.
Oh, and here I was thinking the name "UNG" was just them foreshadowing their user's responses,...
Me, too, but my immediate thought was that where I'd seen "UNG" before was in porn comics, where it was used for the sounds from the female participants.
That POSIX layer isn't. It's POSIX only in name,...
Actually, the proper term is WEIRDNIX.
For those not familiar with the term, WEIRDNIX was the POSIX crew's term for a hypothetical implementation that was technically compliant with all the POSIX standard, but implemented everything in the worst possible way. The idea was to find bugs in the POSIX standard that would allow implementers to claim compliance while violating the intent of the standard.
Mostly, people just sent in specs for a component that followed the standard but would in some way sabotage software that expected the obvious behavior. When NT came out, there were a number of discussions of its POSIX implementation, and a lot of people explained it by saying that Microsoft had done a full implementation of WEIRDNIX. Hardly anyone's POSIX software would run sanely on NT, and that was a simple, elegant explanation of why.
Is there any reason to expect things to be different this time around?
Except that's not pornographic. I guess it wouldn't stop the CoS though.
That reminds me of a couple years back, when in one year Yahoo three times killed off their own breast-cancer support-group mailing list. Talking about breasts is porn, y'know, and we can't let impressionable children read about them. (It might be interesting to collect a list of examples of this sort of blocking.)
The problem here isn't limited to computer software. I was a student at the U of Wisconsin back in the late 60s, when there was an attempt to rescind the state's ban on birth-control pills. The problem was that even talking in public about birth control was legally considered pornographic, so the supporters of the bill couldn't get the media to broadcast or publish any of their material. People who tried distributing birth-control literature were arrested and charged with distributing porn. I recall the computer geeks calling this a bug in the legal system, and there didn't seem to be any way to debug the problem. It lasted until the US Supreme Court invalidated such laws. If they hadn't done this, we'd probably still have these laws on the books.
Once censorship becomes legal, it can be very difficult to do anything to fight it. Talking in public against the censorship also becomes illegal, as that would put illegal ideas into young minds.
Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.
Or, as in the case of telephones, it can take a century or more. Here in the US, the telephone monopolies were allowed to exclude "foreign" devices until -- when was it, the 1980s or so? When the FCC finally relented and allowed users to attach non-phone-company equipment, there was the huge explosion of new and useful devices. A lot of this development could have happened many decades earlier, but the phone companies were allowed to block it, so it didn't happen. We actually had telephone service for about a century before anyone but the phone companies was permitted to sell and use phone equipment.
This situation now exists with cell phones, and the result has been similar, with all us software developers locked out and only telco-supplied ("locked") devices allowed. The result is similar, with what could have been a huge expansion of the wireless internet blocked and only the short-range wifi permitted (and most of that locked by passwords).
One possible path of development is an internet fully locked down by the ISPs, with no further independent development permitted for the next century. This is what happened with the telephone system. We shouldn't dismiss the possibility that it will happen with the internet, too.
5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."
We should probably note (and point out to the participants in the hearing) that in most of the US, the customers are in no position to care, because they aren't permitted any choice. Most of us have only one ISP available, and if we don't like that one, well, we can just move -- to another address where there's only one ISP. The monopoly is enforced by law, and encouraged by the FCC. Even when there are two ISPs permitted, they are a duopoly, with a "gentlemen's agreement" to offer customers the same services at the same price, and thus functionally indistinguishable from a monopoly.
It's funny to hear the media (even NPR) refer to "the Market" in reports on the hearings. But no market is permitted by law. We take what the mon/duopoly deigns to offer us, and we have no say in what is offered.
What we need is for people to start objecting loudly to such disingenuous ralk about "the Market", and point out that we aren't permitted a market in communications. Maybe it would get some attention if, every time some talking head talked about this supposed market, we pointed out to them that there is no market, by law, so their talk is all nonsense.
It's also funny to hear them talk about "managing" and "balancing" network traffic. Well, I suppose forging end-of-connection packets to kill a transfer is a sort of "managing". Maybe we should start talking of sending in hit men to "manage" Comcast. Ya think that would get their attention?
For the record, propellers actually function very much like wings but in a different configuration.
You're right, of course. And sails work the same way; they're really just an airfoil turned on end to produce horizontal "lift". This is part of the conventional explanation ("Sailing for Dummies") of why it is that a sailboat's highest speed is at right angles to the wind.
And it's also fun to explain to people with no understanding of such things that penguins wings really function the same as other birds' wings; they're just a lot smaller because a penguin "flies" through a fluid about 100,000 times denser than the fluid that most birds fly in, so a penguin doesn't need nearly as much wing surface area.
Yeah, birds are good at flying. But we've only been at it for about a century, while they've been flying for around 150 million years. Give our engineers another thousand years or so, and we'll probably be a lot better at it.
OTOH, as others have pointed out, what we want from our flying machines is a lot different from what birds want. We have relatively little interest in machines that can incubate eggs, land on tree branches, and communicate by singing. Birds have little interest in carrying hundreds of (or even one) human-size passengers. So our flight cababilities will probably never be very similar to any bird's.
....We don't know when those plovers started this migration, but it was some millions of years in the past......
You sentence it contradictory. First you state we don't know and then you say we do know that it was millions of years in the past.
So where's the contradiction? We don't know exactly when they started, but we know it wasn't last year. It could have been at any point in the history of the Emperor Seamount / Hawaiian island chain, which extends back quite a few million years. But since we have no fossil evidence (that I know of) of the history of plovers, we can't say much more than the vague "millions of years ago".
Yeah, that's vague, as most paleontological statements usually are, but there's no contradiction. There's just a large error bar.
Most conjectures about the past or the future usually have statements of uncertainty. It also "could have been" that a designer programmed these abilities right at the start.
Yeah; one of my favorite theories is that the universe was actually created only 5 minutes ago, complete with the fossil record and all our memories. Your any my memories of writing those earlier messages are totally fake. Read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe for further details.;-)
I will leave you with an example to ponder next time you begin to wonder just how magnificent is the organic machine that we are. Consider the simple act of throwing a baseball over home plate. You know what the target is, you know its proximal distance and size. Your arm moves back, and then begins to move forward, the fingers grip the ball just so, and in the arc of your arm, suddenly the fingers release to ball to send it on its way to the target. If you are just an average Joe the ball gets very close to the target, perhaps even hitting it. The ball does not travel particularly fast, but it hits the target. Now stop and think of the code you would have to write to accomplish that same task, using a mechanical device, the number of sensor inputs, the speed regulation, the distance measuring, all the calculations required to get a little ball to be thrown just like a human would to hit a simple target that is what, 60 feet away?
Some biologists have seriously proposed this scenario as a major part of the evolution of the human brain. And they've added to the specs the detail that the time window for release of the ball is under a millisecond. The idea is that it took nature a fair amount of "programming", i.e., a lot of brain cells and a lot of fine tuning to get it right.
Of course, it wasn't paleo-baseball players that nature was working with. It was hunters on the plains of east Africa. With practice, a human can use projectiles like rocks and sharpened sticks to stun or kill small prey at distances of 50 or 60 meters. This takes exactly the same sort of abilities that a pro baseball pitcher has. It gave our ancestors the ability to kill and eat critters that could easily outrun us, but couldn't outrun the incoming projectile. Catching dinner this way required a significant brain and fine-tuned sensors, plus years of training to get good at it. Over millennia, we developed a large brain and an extended childhood with a desire to "play" by throwing things at targets.
So the idea is that that pitcher standing on the mound is displaying many of the capabilities that made us the top predator on the planet.
Slashdot Mirror
I've had land-line phones for around 4 decades now, in a number of different towns in several states, and I've never had one that even got close to 99% uptime, much less 99.999%. Lost connections and connections so bad as to be unusable have always been expected problems that you "just live with" everywhere I've lived. And this is in the US, where people make the absurd claim of near-perfect uptime for land lines.
;-)
As for cell phones, how is a customer supposed to go about "choosing" a reliable one? Where I live, they all have about the same poor reliability, and the same crappy contracts. My only "choice" is to not have a cell phone. So the vaunted "market" can't choose among them and can't get any messages at all across to them. In my experience, this is in fact how "the market" usually works.
So what planet do you live on where things work better? Can I move there? (Do you have an oxygen atmosphere that I can breathe?
Hmmm ... This didn't make sense until I realized that, to the cellular providers, "content" includes ads, while to most users, "content" is everything except the ads. With this understanding, it makes sense that the cellular providers would want to keep firefox out, because firefox allows customers to block content (i.e., ads), and the cellular provider loses income from the content (ad) providers.
More generally, of course, the cellular providers want to be the one deciding which content to block, not the customers. Firefox and the other mozilla browsers allows customers to block undesirable content (ads), thus taking control away from the cellular provider.
It all makes sense to me, in a rather cynical way.
Just wanted to make a point about one of my pet hates; that is, americans always putting a country's name after the place name. E.G. Paris, France, or Rome, Italy, as if there was another more famous populous Rome or Paris somewhere.
Funny, I've often found myself asking questions on mailing lists due to the omission of the country name from an announcement of an event. Thus, recently on a dance-related list, I asked whether the events in Manchester a Dublin were in New Hampshire, or in England and Ireland. To a resident of the Boston area, all four of these towns are well known, and the particular announcements made sense for the New Hampshire towns as well as those towns over across the Pond.
For that matter, I once read an announcement of an event in Boston, and it turned out to be the Boston in the UK, not far from Cambridge -- which is another familiar place name both here and there. People in the UK tend to assume that everyone knows the names of towns in their country, but in fact their Boston is not the one most people will assume when they see the name.
Adding the country name doesn't take many extra bytes, and it alleviates the need for followup messages asking which of the various places by that name was meant. We should all get used to the idea that on the Internet, you always include the country name, even if it's perfectly obvious to you which country you're writing about.
What is the definition of a "news site"?
...
For example, if I have a personal site on my home machine, and I put up pictures and a few stories from our recent vacation, does that make my site a news site?
Will I be regulated as a news organization if I let the world know what members of my family (including the cockatiels and the conure) have been doing recently?
There are good historic reasons to worry about such things
These researchers had better watch out; what they're doing sounds exactly like the physical mechanism of "electronic paper". The patent enforcers are gonna be all over them when the news gets out about what they're doing. After all, patents were invented to block exactly this sort of "derivative work" based on someone else's earlier inventions.
And if you don't give companies the options of patents to protect their developments, you can immediately say goodbye to all open standards and scientific sharing.
;-)
Actually, this has pretty much always been true for corporations, who have generally "contributed" to standards by trying to capture them, and have rarely published what little actual scientific research they have done. Scientific process depends heavily on open publication and building on others' results, "standing on the shoulders of giants" as Isaac Newton said. This is why most scientific advancement has historically come out of academia and government-sponsored research organizations. Research inside corporations is usually a dead end, because the results are kept private, or are patented to prevent others from building on them (aka "patent infringement"). Scientists in corporate labs are constantly frustrated by seeing their results locked up and unavailable to their colleagues for the usual scientific testing and extending of results.
There are some apparent exceptions that illustrate the point. Consider Bell Labs, which until the breakup of Ma Bell was a major research institute. It was (and is) owned by a private corporation, right? Uh, not exactly. During its heyday, Bell Labs was in fact owned by a corporation whose profits came almost entirely from a government-imposed monopoly, and whose management was firmly regulated by government agencies. In reality, Ma Bell was a wholly-owned subsidiary of the US government, acting (and regulated) entirely as a government agency. After the breakup, when all the "Baby Bells" became real private corporations, Bell Labs also quickly went dark and hasn't contributed much to the store of public knowledge since then.
(Well, OK; they have contributed Plan 9 and UTF-8, but the world has firmly ignored the former and is being dragged kicking and screaming into use of the latter.
Software patents however stifle progress.
More generally, all patents stifle progress. Wishful thinking and propaganda aside, patents have very rarely been used to "To promote the progress of science and useful arts", as the US Constitution says. The primary use of patents has always been to block other developers from extending and improving patented ideas until the patent runs out.
Histories of the topic have described many cases in which a patent holder made little if any further progress or income from an invention until after the patent ran out, due to the time and money cost of defending the patent. It's also fairly common for uses of a patent to be blocked by the need to use other people's patented ideas in any practical product. The determination of all the patent holders to claim the lion's share of the profit can effectively prevent anyone from selling anything.
If the patent system imposed an automatic license like the "mechanical license" of the copyright system, perhaps these problems could be avoided and patents would actually be usable and profitable to most patent holders. But nobody seems to be proposing this.
So does this mean that slashdot has graduated to MainStream Media status? Rob and Taco now qualify as professional journalists?
What's the Web coming to?
One question not addressed by evolution as origin of man is why all humans alive appear to have descended from a single man [wikipedia.org] and a single woman [wikipedia.org].
Ah, but most people badly misunderstand that. In its obvious, naive interpretation, the statement is absurd and false on its face. Reason: If you collect all the variants (alleles) of our genes, the result is far more than what can be contained within the cells of a single human, or even two humans. So the modern variations in humankind must have originated in more than just one male and one female.
Of course, some of those alleles would have originated after the "creation" of our single male and single female. But once you admit to this approach, you're on the downhill slide, because if you examine the full variety, it turns out you need a lot of people in a lot of separate populations to explain the modern diversity. And from what we know of the rate of mutation, you need many, many thousands of years, far more than any sacred texts would allow for.
Now, there is some weak evidence behind the hypothesis of a genetic "bottleneck" some tens of thousands of years in the past. But this wasn't likely just a single pair of humans. People doing the math have estimated a minimal population of 10,000 or so humans was required to produce the modern genetic diversity.
But even that is a "theoretical" minimum. More likely, when and if the bottleneck happened, it was spread out over centuries or millennia. And the population was probably significantly larger, including a lot of people who left no genetic trace in their descendants (but are still our ancestors).
Also, if you read those wikipedia articles, you'll see that they're talking about the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA. These are less that 1% of our DNA. The rest of our DNA had to come from somewhere. This complicates the story by orders of magnitude. It's likely that every polymorphism in every allele of every gene originated in a different ancestor. We're talking about more than 100,000 individuals here, probably a lot more.
On a related topic, there was a calculation some years back that the modern population of Europe has as ancestors everyone in the first-century Roman Empire (or at least everyone who left descendants). There was a similar calculation that there's a 50% chance that there's someone in Europe who isn't a descendant of Charlemagne. The latter calculation obvious has to exclude recent immigrants and their children - though maybe not if they came from northern Africa or the Middle East.
Science can tell you the how of the universe's workings, but it cannot ever tell you why, because why cannot be proven through experiment.
;-) biology teachers, they are likely to explain that that a major part of the job of the low-level courses is getting students to stop talking in terms of purpose. Biologists have learned that when you argue from purpose, your results are inevitably wrong. Modern scientific terminology quite consciously and carefully avoids dealing with "why", because most listeners interpret that as purpose rather than mechanism.
;-). They don't grow long necks to do anything. Their necks grow long because their DNA drives a long, complicated series of development pathways that results in long necks. The reason (not purpose) is that their ancestors with longer necks were able to reach and eat more leaves, making them healthier and able to produce more offspring, who inherited the genes for longer necks. This produced a slow shift in gene frequencies over the ages, resulting in the modern critter we call a giraffe which is very good at stripping leaves from trees. But the DNA doesn't do this to produce long necks (or to eat leaves). DNA has no mind or goals; it merely is, and interacts mindlessly with other chemical compounds. The selection process that changes gene frequencies is equally mindless and purposeless.
Actually, if you talk to (college level here in the US
Typical example: Beginning students are likely to explain that giraffes grow long necks to reach and eat tree leaves. This is totally wrong, of course. Giraffes don't decide to grow long necks for any purpose, any more than you decided when you were young to grow your neck short (so as to be unable to eat leaves from trees
Students are expected to understand this after a few years, and to be comfortable with technical terminology that doesn't imply purpose. Otherwise, they are gently encouraged to find another major, as they are unlikely to be successful in a biological subject area.
Those that show distress at the thought of a mindless, purposeless, uncaring universe are likely to be guided into a religious major. They'll be happier there, really. Unfortunately, they also stand a chance of being able to do a lot of damage to society, as some of them will become religious leaders with significant numbers of followers.
And to be more precise, we should note that the bible didn't use any of those words. That part of the bible was originally written in Hebrew, not English. The English is a recent translation. In some parts, it's not even a very good translation, as anyone who can read the original will tell you. And we do have a number of different translations, many of which differ significantly in various passages.
English uses many of these words in several different senses. Consider the familiar phrase "in my day". Any native English speaker knows what this means, and it sure doesn't mean a 24-hour period of time. At the other end of the scale, "day" often means the time that the sun is above the horizon, as opposed to "night", and in some parts of the world right now that's only a few hours per 24-hour rotation of the Earth. You'll find similar multiple meanings in Hebrew, and in most other languages. And there's the ongoing translator's problem: the classical Hebrew meanings of many words don't always line up too well with any modern English words.
If you're going to do a fine lexical analysis of a piece of text, it only makes sense to do it in the original language. And you are severely limited there by our knowledge of the original language, which for classical Hebrew isn't really all that good. But arguing the fine points of the meaning of passages in an English bible is fundamentally silly, and should be rejected outright by anyone with any interest in the text.
Not that this is going to convince any religious person of anything.
Some scientists even suspect that Earth's initial life form may have come from an asteroid, and evolved initially outside the Solar System. Others, more religious than me, suspect God had a hand in it, and I have trouble rationally arguing against that theory.
Actually, it's pretty easy to make a rational argument against both as theories. Simply point out that both are technically just conjectures, i.e., interesting possibilities that we haven't tested yet (mostly because we don't know how to). To a rational being, the inability to test an idea would mean that you shouldn't believe it. Instead, you add it to the list of interesting conjectures that you should look into testing when you have the time. Only an irrational religious person would believe something without any supporting evidence.
The panspermia conjecture that life originated outside our solar system is potentially testable, but we can't do it yet because we can't travel out to where we might find the evidence. The God conjecture doesn't seem to have any possibility of testing, at least not for a god of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim type that can perform miracles to fake (or erase) any evidence; if there is such a God, science is probably permanently unable to deal with it.
(This argument assumes the scientific use of theory, which basically means an explanation that has been tested and has passed all the tests that we currently know how to do. If you use a different definition of "theory", such as the media's definition that is synonymous with "guess", then you probably shouldn't bother yourself with this conversation.)
I didn't realise /. had started posting links to things the submitter happened to find amusing today.
/. for several years now, and when I first stumbled across it, there were articles labelled "It's funny, laugh!". Go back and look in the archives. The editors here have always had a sense of humor.
Then you haven't been paying very good attention. I've been reading
Of course, you can always filter out the humor, if you prefer. Several others have explained how to do it, so I won't repeat their explanations.
It's far better if the ISP:s work on trying to handle and catch the really malicious behavior that occurs on the net instead of being the arm of the RIAA or MPAA.
... I don't seem to find this tautology in my collection of clever sayings; could I have stumbled onto something original? ;-)
Well, maybe, but look at it from the ISP's viewpoint: It's safe to help the **AA track down and prosecute children, grannies and college kids. But if you go after the real criminal types, they're likely to DDOS your servers or send someone around to use your kneecaps for target practice. It's quite understandable that ISPs would be a bit shy of tackling actual criminals.
Also, the law-enforcement crowd seems to be a lot more interested in chasing downloaders or political whistleblowers than they are in dealing with real criminals. If you're trying to run an ISP, would you rather be cooperating with the police or going it alone against the guys that the cops can't be bothered with?
It's always easier to go after the easy cases; it's a lot more difficult to deal with the difficult cases. (Hmmm
As computer standard go, POSIX is actually pretty well written. Much of this is due to them actually responding to criticisms such as the WEIRDNIX ideas by revising the standard appropriately. They got a lot of points with developers for their inviting criticism and then actually listening when criticism flooded in. Who'd'a thunk a standards body would actually do such a thing?
It's also true that MS has improved their POSIX library over the years. Rather than viewing their initial release from the common "MS is evil" theory, it really looked more like the result of the usual corporate pressure on developers to get a minimally acceptable release out the door as quickly as possible. This phenomenon is hardly unique to Microsoft; I've seen it on every project I've ever worked on. But MS's stuff is often more visible than other companies', so it gets attention when it causes problems.
Also, MS does have a bit of a history of sticking with an initial release and not funding improvements until sufficiently many customers were complaining sufficiently loudly. Consider IE as just one well-known example. Again, this is hardly anything unique to that one company. But we programmers do tend to notice when a company with the clout of MS is touting their support of a standard, while in our labs we see a product that requires an inordinate number of #ifdefs in our code.
So you're saying that the POSIX standard was badly written?
No; you don't understand - the POSIX committee put out the request for WEIRDNIX implementations. They understood that it's difficult to get such things right, so they invited the crowd of unix hackers to examine their standard and find the things that hadn't been phrased quite right. They used the WEIRDNIX things that people sent them, to improve the standard.
Of course, like most standards, they still didn't manage to describe it all in a completely unambiguous manner. That's hardly possible in as messy a language as English. Microsoft found lots more little ambiguities that they missed, and took advantage of them to make the NT POSIX library as awful as they could (while still technically following the standard).
It did lead to a fair amount of abstruse, tongue-in-cheek geek humor.
Oh, and here I was thinking the name "UNG" was just them foreshadowing their user's responses, ...
Me, too, but my immediate thought was that where I'd seen "UNG" before was in porn comics, where it was used for the sounds from the female participants.
That POSIX layer isn't. It's POSIX only in name, ...
Actually, the proper term is WEIRDNIX.
For those not familiar with the term, WEIRDNIX was the POSIX crew's term for a hypothetical implementation that was technically compliant with all the POSIX standard, but implemented everything in the worst possible way. The idea was to find bugs in the POSIX standard that would allow implementers to claim compliance while violating the intent of the standard.
Mostly, people just sent in specs for a component that followed the standard but would in some way sabotage software that expected the obvious behavior. When NT came out, there were a number of discussions of its POSIX implementation, and a lot of people explained it by saying that Microsoft had done a full implementation of WEIRDNIX. Hardly anyone's POSIX software would run sanely on NT, and that was a simple, elegant explanation of why.
Is there any reason to expect things to be different this time around?
Except that's not pornographic. I guess it wouldn't stop the CoS though.
That reminds me of a couple years back, when in one year Yahoo three times killed off their own breast-cancer support-group mailing list. Talking about breasts is porn, y'know, and we can't let impressionable children read about them. (It might be interesting to collect a list of examples of this sort of blocking.)
The problem here isn't limited to computer software. I was a student at the U of Wisconsin back in the late 60s, when there was an attempt to rescind the state's ban on birth-control pills. The problem was that even talking in public about birth control was legally considered pornographic, so the supporters of the bill couldn't get the media to broadcast or publish any of their material. People who tried distributing birth-control literature were arrested and charged with distributing porn. I recall the computer geeks calling this a bug in the legal system, and there didn't seem to be any way to debug the problem. It lasted until the US Supreme Court invalidated such laws. If they hadn't done this, we'd probably still have these laws on the books.
Once censorship becomes legal, it can be very difficult to do anything to fight it. Talking in public against the censorship also becomes illegal, as that would put illegal ideas into young minds.
Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.
Or, as in the case of telephones, it can take a century or more. Here in the US, the telephone monopolies were allowed to exclude "foreign" devices until -- when was it, the 1980s or so? When the FCC finally relented and allowed users to attach non-phone-company equipment, there was the huge explosion of new and useful devices. A lot of this development could have happened many decades earlier, but the phone companies were allowed to block it, so it didn't happen. We actually had telephone service for about a century before anyone but the phone companies was permitted to sell and use phone equipment.
This situation now exists with cell phones, and the result has been similar, with all us software developers locked out and only telco-supplied ("locked") devices allowed. The result is similar, with what could have been a huge expansion of the wireless internet blocked and only the short-range wifi permitted (and most of that locked by passwords).
One possible path of development is an internet fully locked down by the ISPs, with no further independent development permitted for the next century. This is what happened with the telephone system. We shouldn't dismiss the possibility that it will happen with the internet, too.
5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."
We should probably note (and point out to the participants in the hearing) that in most of the US, the customers are in no position to care, because they aren't permitted any choice. Most of us have only one ISP available, and if we don't like that one, well, we can just move -- to another address where there's only one ISP. The monopoly is enforced by law, and encouraged by the FCC. Even when there are two ISPs permitted, they are a duopoly, with a "gentlemen's agreement" to offer customers the same services at the same price, and thus functionally indistinguishable from a monopoly.
It's funny to hear the media (even NPR) refer to "the Market" in reports on the hearings. But no market is permitted by law. We take what the mon/duopoly deigns to offer us, and we have no say in what is offered.
What we need is for people to start objecting loudly to such disingenuous ralk about "the Market", and point out that we aren't permitted a market in communications. Maybe it would get some attention if, every time some talking head talked about this supposed market, we pointed out to them that there is no market, by law, so their talk is all nonsense.
It's also funny to hear them talk about "managing" and "balancing" network traffic. Well, I suppose forging end-of-connection packets to kill a transfer is a sort of "managing". Maybe we should start talking of sending in hit men to "manage" Comcast. Ya think that would get their attention?
For the record, propellers actually function very much like wings but in a different configuration.
You're right, of course. And sails work the same way; they're really just an airfoil turned on end to produce horizontal "lift". This is part of the conventional explanation ("Sailing for Dummies") of why it is that a sailboat's highest speed is at right angles to the wind.
And it's also fun to explain to people with no understanding of such things that penguins wings really function the same as other birds' wings; they're just a lot smaller because a penguin "flies" through a fluid about 100,000 times denser than the fluid that most birds fly in, so a penguin doesn't need nearly as much wing surface area.
Yeah, birds are good at flying. But we've only been at it for about a century, while they've been flying for around 150 million years. Give our engineers another thousand years or so, and we'll probably be a lot better at it.
OTOH, as others have pointed out, what we want from our flying machines is a lot different from what birds want. We have relatively little interest in machines that can incubate eggs, land on tree branches, and communicate by singing. Birds have little interest in carrying hundreds of (or even one) human-size passengers. So our flight cababilities will probably never be very similar to any bird's.
....We don't know when those plovers started this migration, but it was some millions of years in the past......
;-)
You sentence it contradictory. First you state we don't know and then you say we do know that it was millions of years in the past.
So where's the contradiction? We don't know exactly when they started, but we know it wasn't last year. It could have been at any point in the history of the Emperor Seamount / Hawaiian island chain, which extends back quite a few million years. But since we have no fossil evidence (that I know of) of the history of plovers, we can't say much more than the vague "millions of years ago".
Yeah, that's vague, as most paleontological statements usually are, but there's no contradiction. There's just a large error bar.
Most conjectures about the past or the future usually have statements of uncertainty. It also "could have been" that a designer programmed these abilities right at the start.
Yeah; one of my favorite theories is that the universe was actually created only 5 minutes ago, complete with the fossil record and all our memories. Your any my memories of writing those earlier messages are totally fake. Read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe for further details.
I will leave you with an example to ponder next time you begin to wonder just how magnificent is the organic machine that we are. Consider the simple act of throwing a baseball over home plate. You know what the target is, you know its proximal distance and size. Your arm moves back, and then begins to move forward, the fingers grip the ball just so, and in the arc of your arm, suddenly the fingers release to ball to send it on its way to the target. If you are just an average Joe the ball gets very close to the target, perhaps even hitting it. The ball does not travel particularly fast, but it hits the target. Now stop and think of the code you would have to write to accomplish that same task, using a mechanical device, the number of sensor inputs, the speed regulation, the distance measuring, all the calculations required to get a little ball to be thrown just like a human would to hit a simple target that is what, 60 feet away?
Some biologists have seriously proposed this scenario as a major part of the evolution of the human brain. And they've added to the specs the detail that the time window for release of the ball is under a millisecond. The idea is that it took nature a fair amount of "programming", i.e., a lot of brain cells and a lot of fine tuning to get it right.
Of course, it wasn't paleo-baseball players that nature was working with. It was hunters on the plains of east Africa. With practice, a human can use projectiles like rocks and sharpened sticks to stun or kill small prey at distances of 50 or 60 meters. This takes exactly the same sort of abilities that a pro baseball pitcher has. It gave our ancestors the ability to kill and eat critters that could easily outrun us, but couldn't outrun the incoming projectile. Catching dinner this way required a significant brain and fine-tuned sensors, plus years of training to get good at it. Over millennia, we developed a large brain and an extended childhood with a desire to "play" by throwing things at targets.
So the idea is that that pitcher standing on the mound is displaying many of the capabilities that made us the top predator on the planet.