Hmmm; that seems to be a TV show. Sorry, we canceled our cable service several years ago. We found that the only thing we used it for was watching old movies, and Netflix is better for that. TV news is a joke, and not a very funny joke. At the time, both of the local cable services only supplied Internet if you also pay for the TV channels, so speakeasy DSL turned out to be a lot cheaper. (It also had the advantage of taking control of the line away from Verizon, and gave us good Customer Support for the first time ever, but that's a different rant.;-)
Anyway, I don't have any idea what the public image of that fictional law firm might be, so the joke just whooshed by over my head.
And the 1906 disaster [in San Francisco] was caused by lack of modern building codes and fire protection as much as anything else.
I disagree. It was caused by an earthquake.
In some fields of discourse, there is a traditional distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. A proximate cause is the immediate event that triggered a disaster. Ultimate causes are the earlier conditions that allowed the immediate event to trigger a disaster.
In this case, the 1906 earthquake was the proximate cause of the disastrous fires. The ultimate causes were the shoddy buildings and infrastructure, which in turn were permitted by the lack of building codes and the "anything goes" frontier nature of the local government.
The earlier disastrous Chicago fire had a different proximate cause but the same ultimate causes.
And note that ultimate causes usually are plural. In languages like English that have definite articles, a common logical fallacy is to talk about "the cause" rather than "a cause" or "the causes". For most large civic disasters like these, "the cause" is usually misleading, because there are a long list of conditions that help turn what might have been a minor fire into a conflagration. California has seen a lot of these lately, with their large disastrous brushfires. These have a list of ultimate causes, starting with the climate, and ending with a buildup of dry-plant fuel from landscaping plus failure to properly thin and remove plant material.
OTOH, here in Boston, one of the largest historical disasters had a single identifiable cause, which sounds like something that the Onion's writers would make up, but actually happened and killed at least 21 people (and several horses). And one could argue in this case that the proximate cause was the tank bursting, while there were several ultimate cause such as poor construction of the tank, poor testing and maintenance, warm temperature, fermentation, etc. But the proximate/ultimate terminology doesn't apply well in this case, because all of those causes can be grouped as a single "poor construction and maintenance" cause.
I can on one hand understand that there is some need for procedures and chain of evidence, but there can be really tough side-effects.
Think of yourself as the defendant. Would you want a court to accept evidence against you that didn't have a legally verifiable chain of evidence?
To put it another way, would you want a court to accept evidence against you that the prosecution could have created with a text editor?
I have seen people fired on the basis of evidence that the sysadmin admitted (during private bragging) he had faked. And yes, I was really sorry that I didn't have a tape recorder in my pocket at the moment.
More colloquially one could describe forensics as merely data gathering evidence
s/colloquial/incorrect/g
Nah; don't bother. Those two terms are generally considered synonyms.
(Of course, they aren't really. That is, it's possible to be incorrect without being colloquial. What that substitution really does is lose information, since "colloquial" is a proper subset of "incorrect".;-)
In this case, the characters [English "py" and Russian chars that look like "py" are exactly the same.
Actually, in Unicode they are not the same. The Russian TLD we're talking about looks like the English ".py", but that is encoded in Unicode as the hex chars 70 79. The Russian (Cyrillic) chars are encoded as hex 0440 0443, or in UTF-8 as D1 80 D1 83. At the bit level, which is what a DNS server or browser sees, they are totally different character strings. Their glyphs look the same, but they are different bit strings.
If you understand a bit of Russian, you might enjoy the wikipedia article on what is sometimes called Volapuk encoding. (And note the omission of the umlaut over the 'u'.;-) Russians have long been playing fast and loose with computer encodings of their language. Not surprising, considering the total disregard that the American-dominated computer industry has had for language that use non-Roman alphabets, plus of course the typical Russian sense of humor. Some of the links in this article lead to truly hilarious examples of Russian written with ASCII characters.
[I]sn't China censoring the living daylights out of the internet already? Is it really that far of a reach to say that they'd like to create their very own version of the internet, that they 100% control?
True. But consider the viewpoint of much of the world: The Internet is currently controlled in great part by the US government. Maybe not totally, of course, but close enough to make for good arguments for Doing Something About It.
As an example of the US's power, consider the incident last year when the US government succeeded in ordering Swedish police to raid the piratburan.se site and cart off their computers. The charge was violation of US copyright laws. It was agreed by everyone that the site wasn't in violation of Swedish law, while the Swedish police's actions were illegal. But this didn't matter; when it comes to Internet activity, the US government can and does give orders to agencies of other supposedly "independent" governments.
I'd think that a lot of the world has to be getting very nervous about this sort of US control.
And the fact is that anyone can set up their own root DNS servers. I've helped do it on a couple of projects, where we wanted an DNS setup with our own.local domain that was visible only inside our organization. It's actually quite easy, and very useful to anyone who wants a semi-isolated chunk of the Internet for some purpose. Our purpose was software testing, and the motive was to create a few domains that weren't visible outside our labs. But in fact anyone with an internal DNS server can easily do the same thing. And there are several open-source DNS servers available.
Unless the US government gives up on its recent arrogance toward the rest of the world (which is very unlikely within the next year or so;-), I'd think that people all over the world have to be thinking of ways to declare network independence. Yeah, it's a bad idea for everyone. But the only way to prevent it is for the Internet authorities to become truly international and not beholden to any single government, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen soon, either.
The other 95% of the world isn't likely to tolerate many more actions like what was done to piratburan.se before they take action. Any geek that has ever set up a local DNS server can tell them how to do it. And tweaking a server's code to allow UTF-8 URLs is essentially a beginner-level programming job.
XML with tags in Mandarin Chinese shows up now and then.
Yeah; a few months ago I got involved in testing "i18n" stuff on a bunch of machines. One sample file is a multi-lingual dictionary, with wildly different writing systems for each language. Just for fun, I decided to write some CSS, and for each language, I used class names in that language's alphabet. Thus the Chinese fields used CSS class names that were Chinese characters. I tested it against the dozen browsers on this Mac, 8 browsers on my linux box, plus IE and FF on a XP and Vista Windows machines. I was impressed by the fact that it worked just fine on all of them.
Not that this should be a surprise. The text was encoded as UTF-8, of course, and most software doesn't actually need to be modified to handle this. If the chars in the range 0x80 to 0xFF are treated as unknown "letters" and just carried along as unanalyzed words, it everything should work for everything except code that is concerned with actual rendering of the glyphs. Problems usually arise only if code tries to do something "intelligent" with chars that have the high bit set.
I have wondered whether this success means that the programmers who implemented CSS have been too dumb to even consider non-ASCII character sets, or they were smart enough to realize that they didn't need to do anything to make UTF-8 (and the ISO 8859-* encodings, for that matter) work correctly. If it's the former, I hope they don't try to get smart about i18n and mess things up as a result.
IMO, the folks who decree Web standards should just declare UTF-8 the standard encoding for everything inside URLs. Implementing it is essentially trivial, except for rendering, which mostly just takes some rather big tables. (And memory is getting cheap, right? Right?;-)
The only real problem, as mentioned above, is things like the Cyrillic.py suffix (the first two letters of the Russian spelling of "Russian") looks in most fonts exactly like the Roman ".py" suffix for Paraguay. But this is nothing new. We have that problem in ASCII. Try distinguishing "0" from "O" in most fonts. Then consider "1", "l" and "I" in any sans-serif font. Actually, "1" and "l" look identical in the serif font I'm using here. I keep seeing examples where "modem" and "modern" look alike, as to "clear" and "dear" in many fonts. I'm sure you can make up lots of other examples. The spam and phishing crowds use this as one of their tools for getting past most filters.
Frankly, I think it'd be fun watching the Net tackle this problem seriously, rather than pretending that it's just a problem with Cyrillic and using it as an excuse to block full internationalization of the Web. Not being able to spell non-English names right is a growing annoyance.
I'm still confused as to why him being a Muslim would be such a bad thing if it were true?
Because he's running for president, and to a large part of the American population, all Muslims are jihadists, suicide bombers, and generally evil.
Funny thing is that there's a minority population that has reacted to the events of September 2001 rather differently. One change over the past couple decades has been the accessibility via the Internet of information that wasn't easily available earlier. I remember looking for information on Islam back in the 80s, out of general historical curiosity, and finding that very little was easily available. There was almost nothing in local libraries or bookstores, even here in Boston with its flock of universities. Now, it only takes seconds or minutes to locate more expert information online than you could read in a lifetime. It's easy to find detailed data on any Muslim sect you can name (and also all the misinformation about them;-). News from Muslim countries is easily available online, from local sources. They almost all publish in English and French as well as their local language. And, at least for now, the big companies and the government have stopped their attempts to block access to sites like aljazeera.com (or aljazeera.net, which has their elegant logo;-).
My wife and I are your typical American mongrels, with families from all over. Her family has a few Arabic-sounding names several generations back, and in Sept 2001, she decided it was time to tackle learning Arabic. She hadn't bothered earlier, because it had been just too difficult. But she quickly found good online sites, and is now routinely reading a number of Middle-Eastern news sources in Arabic rather than English. Some of her friends have been puzzled by this (especially as she claims to be an atheist;-). But it's interesting that they tend to listen now when she goes into excruciating detail about how the local people see various news stories. And she'd be much more likely to vote for a moderate Muslim candidate than someone like Romney or Huckabee.
I know a lot of people with similar attitudes. But, of course, they aren't typical of the majority of Americans, who do mostly view Muslims as evil. Those "Obama's a Muslim" claims are aimed at that sort of ignorance. People who are knowledgeable on the topic wouldn't be effected, of course, because they'd consider it irrelevant as long as he's the Kennedy type who wouldn't try to impose his religion on the rest of us.
Some time back the National Lampoon ran a fun article by O'Rourke that was a list of insulting descriptions of various ethnic groups. One group was Canadians, who were described as being "like white Americans, but even more boring".
I think we should expect more from our politicians - like being honest and sane.
Except that one of the "bugs" in a democratic system is that it rewards politicians for dishonesty. The people tend to vote for the candidate that claims to support things that the people want. But a completely honest candidate has a disadvantage to a good liar who studies the people and tells them what they want to hear.
Historically, the main tool against such dishonesty has been a free press. When we had good investigative journalists, the candidates' actual action were often exposed. At other times, the media was in bed with the leading candidates, deceptive campaign claims went unreported, and people were suckered into voting for the dishonest candidates.
I'll let other fill in the names in the above over-simplified historical analysis. Well, maybe one good example might be far enough in the past that few people have an emotional reaction now: In 1964, we in the US saw the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns. A big part of Johnson's campaign ads were built on the idea that Goldwater was a warmonger, who among other things would lead us into a war in Vietnam. You can still find the infamous daisy/atomic-bomb ad online. Johnson won, of course - and he promptly started ramping up US forces in Vietnam. If you can dig up the old media coverage, you'll find here and there some of the evidence that this was Johnson's real intent. But the mass media mostly broadcast Johnson's ads uncritically, and the general population saw him as a peacemaker. Four years later, of course, this no longer worked, and Johnson lost to Nixon (who talked about ending the war, and then promptly escalated it once he was in office).
I'll avoid continuing the story with the 2000 election.
But it could be useful to find a good, permanent solution to the problem of the advantage to dishonesty in democratic elections.
Mass famine? We grow enough food to feed the world, let alone ourselves. Get real.
A good number of historians have point out that, according to all their evidence, this is true and has always been true. In studying the historical food shortages and famines, the conclusion seems to be that there was always plenty of food, but people starved because they couldn't get the food. This was sometimes due to poor distribution technology, but it was mostly due to the effects of the powerful people who controlled the distribution system. That is, people starve to death due to the actions of other people, not because there's no food.
One of the best-documented textbook cases was the Irish "potato famine" in the middle 1800s. There is copious historic documentation showing that during this time, Ireland exported a lot of food to England. But the Irish peasants who grew the food couldn't afford to buy it themselves. This was entirely due to the social order that kept them effectively in a state of slavery to the landowners. Similar situations have been documented in many other parts of the world, especially China and India. And, of course, the Soviet Union back in the 1930s when Stalin starved the Ukranian population into submission, and somewhere around 10 million of them died.
An interesting side issue has come up here in a couple of the OLPC discussions. Inevitably, people say that the poor parts of the world don't need laptops; they need food. Other people have pointed out that this has always been a problem, and food aid programs haven't done much good. The problem really is that the local power structure is keeping those people poor and starving. One approach that just may work is to break this stranglehold via education and communication, which is what the OLPC project is trying to supply. It's a lot harder to oppress educated people.
But this is just one experimental approach which may or may not work. In some areas, the power structure will probably wise up and block such attempts to end their control. And people will remain poor, ignorant and starving in a world of plenty. This might be part of what's going on in Nigeria right now with the LANCOR story.
Q: Should you place the period inside or outside quotation marks? A: Inside.
Actually, the correct answer is "It depends on which publisher's guidelines you're following." (or '".';-)
In the UK, most publishers put periods outside the final quotes. In the US, most publishers put periods inside the quotes. In both countries, there are a few exceptions. If you're trying to simulate Nigerian phishing spam, you'd probably want to go with the UK convention.
Also, some publishers have different rules for periods and question marks, which often makes sense. Sometimes it helps to use two punctuation marks:
1. Did he really say "They weren't there."? 2. Did he really ask "Were they there?"? 3. He really did ask "Were they there?".
This convention makes it clear which of the two nested sentences is a question and which is a statement. To my knowledge, no publisher recommends a period both inside and outside the final quote.
[One of my favorite t-shirts in my closet is the one that reads "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" And to people who try to answer it, I like to say "Actually, the correct answer starts with 'It depends...'. And the t-shirt does omit the quotes around 'anal retentive'.;-]
Have you played with an OLPC yet? These machines are very clearly designed for children, not adults. Nobody with adult size hands could touch type on the keyboard.
Hey, it's much larger than a BlackBerry's keyboard, and look at all the adults that seem to love those.;-)
Actually, I have an OLPC sitting on my desk. My hands aren't tiny, and I can (just barely) do the standard touch typing. It was tricky at first, but I'm rapidly getting better at it.
Now if I could just figure out how the browser's bookmark feature works...
My initial reaction was "What the hell, you theiving bastard stealing technology from a non-profit organization"...
So have you read the news that the patent in question is owned by the OLPC project? The report that she's stealing something seems to be pure calumny. If anything, she's working on developing the parallel retail marketing that so many people have been suggesting. And if successful, her company will be paying license royalties to the OLPC project.
Does anyone know differently? It'd be interesting to get some more accurate information than what we've read here so far.
The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers.
This makes a lot of sense. Negroponte and the others have been repeatedly emphasizing to their critics that they're not a computer vendor; they're an educational organization. Negroponte is a professor at MIT, not a corporate CEO. They haven't (to my knowledge) come right out and said it, but I expect that they're hoping for some startup companies that can take away the pressure to market this thing. This seems to be exactly what's happening in this case. The patent is staying with the OLPC crowd, and presumably they're happy to license it to someone who wants to work on commercial sales (and give back part of their profits as license fees).
If the OLPC crowd had gone with commercial sales, it would have just bogged them down by sucking them full time into marketing and support. The educational project would have fallen by the wayside in the rush for profits. And they'd have had no public support in their inevitable battle with Intel and Microsoft. This way, they can continue with their educational goals, and let others fight the market battle with the giant monopolists. And if it takes off commercially, maybe they can get a share of the profits.
Look at what intel and Microsoft have already tried to do to the OLPC. Do you think they'd stand back and let anyone else have a go?
Also, Intel and Microsoft are making some good money on their laptops, which have a fairly high markup (almost as large as Apple's;-). They are probably looking with horror on the prospect of what an OLPC-like machine will do to their bottom line.
It could be interesting to read about what pressures Intel and MS have been able to put on other vendors to block the sale of machines like the OLPC. Anyone have any good info on the topic?
Note that the OLPC's source code is all available online. Anyone with the investment capital could buy similar hardware, install the same software, and (with maybe a bit more memory or a disk) include piles of free software for adults. They should be able to match the $399 price pretty easily.
How long can the big guys block this? And how exactly are they blocking it?
... it is certainly creating a new market. That's cool, but it won't change desktop or laptops.
We've been playing with a couple of them here at home for a week now, and I'd predict you're wrong. It has a number of things that could really shake up the market.
One thing is their mesh network. I remember some time back reading a bunch of the original design docs for the original ARPAnet back in the 1960s. There were diagrams of all sorts of military equipment talking to each other wirelessly, without any central "access points" that would be targets. An important part of the requirements was that if there existed a data path between gadgets A and B, the intermediate machines would forward the packets.
It's been forty years, and the commercial Internet has never provided this. They insist on keeping control of communication by requiring that all customer products relay through access-point hardware, so that customers can be tracked and billed for everything.
But now, finally the OLPC project has implemented what the DoD wanted 40 years ago, and fully wireless network that has no single chokepoints of failure, with all the "leaf" nodes cooperating to get the packets through without relying on special-purpose relay machines.
And the code is FOSS. So no company has any excuse for not picking it up and including it in their next upgrade.
Our experience here at home is that it works far better than the couple of commercial APs that we've tried. Right now we have an Apple Airport Extreme. Twice today it went into its occasional mode of fading in and out rapidly. Our wireless Powerbooks essentially had no usable wifi for the duration, about half an hour each time. But funny thing - the OLPCs kept right on working, using our Airport without problems when the Macs couldn't get a connection. The OLPCs also work fine with a neighbor's Linksys AP. We verified that we could carry one OLPC 100 yards away, and the second one 200 yards away, and they both had full wifi access (though the Mac didn't).
Once the news of this gets out, it'll be interesting to see Apple and the commercial comm companies (Verizon in our neighborhood) come up with PR to explain why their wifi works so much worse than the OLPC's.
I'd happily pay $200 for an XO, I'd pay $250 if I had to, and I might (after a few beers) splurge $300 on one. But $400 for one device? Never going to happen.
But apparently lots of people would. If you look at the actual price of things like an iPhone or BlackBerry, i.e. how much of your 2-year contract is for the PDA, you'll find that they are selling for well over $400, and selling quite well. And, as various others have pointed out, the OLPC really is just a slightly larger PDA with a handle. And it's a much better PDA than most (if not all) of the others on the market. Especially if you're 10 years old.;-)
If that's so, then why are so few FOSS applications widely adopted?
If you refuse to adopt FOSS code, note that one of the first things you'll have to do is remove all the TCP/IP and other Internet protocol code from your machines. It was all developed on government-funded projects back in the 1970s and 80s, and it was all published as open, freely-downloadable code. Also, throw out your web browser, unless you're using Mosaic. That was the innovative one, and it was free, open source. The authors of the other browsers made their own cosmetic "innovations" to appear different, but their basic functionality was just a clone of Mosaic.
Somehow, the claim that the Internet and the Web weren't innovative is, well, astonishing to read. Claiming that they haven't been widely adopted is equally astonishing. If that code, all of it FOSS, wasn't innovative, what could be? And don't try to claim that it was "popular" things like IE that were innovative. That's just silly; IE (and Firefox and...) added new gimmicks, of course, but those were piffling innovations compared to the first browser.
Wouldn't such an advanced civilization be indistinguishable from the Abrahamic God, who observes and participates but never reveals Himself?
Nah; we've found that we can talk openly about the "anthropologists" visiting Earth to study its civilization. And you can talk about us all you like. Who's gonna believe you? Do you really want to be considered one of those nutcases that believe in visiting aliens?
It's sorta like that "Abrahamic God", y'know. Actually, he was one of the first wave of anthropological visitors, soon after the regular visit of a robotic probe found that an intelligent species had evolved on this planet. He did reveal himself to lots of people. Look at the results: The "rational" humans today totally discount all those uncorroborated reports. Rightly so, of course, since humans routinely make up all sorts of fantasies about revelations, visitations, etc. The real ones just disappear into the fog of fantasy.
It's always that way with a new intelligent species. They always think they're unique in the universe. So a member of a physically-similar species can easily pass as a local from the next valley. As they develop, you may have to pretend to be from somewhere remote on the planet. But they never believe you're from much farther away than the edges of their conceptual world.
This usually turns out to be good for our studies. The visitors can walk freely among the natives, and can subtly guide them toward membership in the galactic civilization. It does usually take millenia for this to happen. But that's ok; we really want each new species to bring their own outlook and capabilities, and overtly directing their development would just make them subservient.
We really don't want to be welcomed as overlords...
Typical radio transmissions virtually disappear well short of a single light year. And by "virtually" I mean our own giant radio antennas wouldn't hear them.
Not true at all. Back in 1978, Science published an article on the topic. Its title was "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth". If you're not a subscriber, you can find several copies of it online, as well as several other articles that cite it and do further analysis. The authors studied what could be learned about our planet by an astronomer with our level of technology (as of 1978) living on a planet within the sphere of roughly 50 light-years that our broadcasts had reached. They assumed that no program content could be deciphered by the remote astronomer, and only the Earth's changing spectrum over time could be measured.
Their conclusions were fairly impressive. They started by explaining the nature of the received signals, and how those could be used to determine our planet's orbit, its day length, the orbit of our large moon, and the rough temperature zone in which we live.
They went on to point out that our radio broadcasts are mostly done with hardware that puts its energy into a narrow frequency band, and mostly horizontal to the surface, so that from a remote viewpoint each broadcast station would appear briefly and fade. That is, the radio spectrum received from the Earth would come mostly from the limb, and not from the disk. This could be used to draw a map of the broadcast stations. The Doppler shift of each station as it appears 12 hours apart on opposite sides would give the station's latitude, the time would give its longitude. The resulting distribution would show that there are two different kinds of surface on our planet, and we live mostly on one of them (and mostly along the boundaries). Knowing the planet's temperature zone would tell the astronomers that we're on a water world, and our stations are on land.
As the stations' frequencies drift over the year, it would become clear that we are diurnal, and also active during the evening, but not active between midnight and dawn. Further analysis of the signals would show the use of several different kinds of hardware, and these are distributed in patches over the planet. This shows our ability to organize on a large scale, but not on a planetary scale. The use of the same broadcast hardware in different areas would show our ability to form distant alliances between our "nations".
Anyway, the article was an interesting illustration of what our broadcasts have been telling to any distant astronomers with technology as good as ours. They left it to the readers' imagination what could be deduced by more advanced astronomers. And, of course, our signals have propagated another 30 light years since then.
But you've got to wonder why some other super advanced civilization didn't move some stars around to circle themselves or something and make it really obvious where they lived.
Because they don't consider where someone lives to be especially important. You don't know or care where I live, right? The important thing is the ability to communicate, and they do that simply by having the ubiquitous robot probes install gateways to the galactic network wherever they come across a world that has advanced sufficiently to have its own local network.
If you haven't noticed them on our network, that simply demonstrates that you're not very observant. And some of them here have pretty low user ids.
Of course, there is a fairly strict policy of not saying things that explicitly identify oneself as non-human. It's funny how few humans are totally unwilling to even consider that someone else may not be just like them.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is it that after all this technology, prosperity and advancement we still haven't developed the 3rd world?
...
Because we like having a lot of poor people around who will work for us at low wages.
Oh; that was a rhetorical question, wasn't it. Forget I said anything
No; who are they?
...
;-)
Oh, yeah; I can ask google
Hmmm; that seems to be a TV show. Sorry, we canceled our cable service several years ago. We found that the only thing we used it for was watching old movies, and Netflix is better for that. TV news is a joke, and not a very funny joke. At the time, both of the local cable services only supplied Internet if you also pay for the TV channels, so speakeasy DSL turned out to be a lot cheaper. (It also had the advantage of taking control of the line away from Verizon, and gave us good Customer Support for the first time ever, but that's a different rant.
Anyway, I don't have any idea what the public image of that fictional law firm might be, so the joke just whooshed by over my head.
In some fields of discourse, there is a traditional distinction between proximate and ultimate causes. A proximate cause is the immediate event that triggered a disaster. Ultimate causes are the earlier conditions that allowed the immediate event to trigger a disaster.
In this case, the 1906 earthquake was the proximate cause of the disastrous fires. The ultimate causes were the shoddy buildings and infrastructure, which in turn were permitted by the lack of building codes and the "anything goes" frontier nature of the local government.
The earlier disastrous Chicago fire had a different proximate cause but the same ultimate causes.
And note that ultimate causes usually are plural. In languages like English that have definite articles, a common logical fallacy is to talk about "the cause" rather than "a cause" or "the causes". For most large civic disasters like these, "the cause" is usually misleading, because there are a long list of conditions that help turn what might have been a minor fire into a conflagration. California has seen a lot of these lately, with their large disastrous brushfires. These have a list of ultimate causes, starting with the climate, and ending with a buildup of dry-plant fuel from landscaping plus failure to properly thin and remove plant material.
OTOH, here in Boston, one of the largest historical disasters had a single identifiable cause, which sounds like something that the Onion's writers would make up, but actually happened and killed at least 21 people (and several horses). And one could argue in this case that the proximate cause was the tank bursting, while there were several ultimate cause such as poor construction of the tank, poor testing and maintenance, warm temperature, fermentation, etc. But the proximate/ultimate terminology doesn't apply well in this case, because all of those causes can be grouped as a single "poor construction and maintenance" cause.
I can on one hand understand that there is some need for procedures and chain of evidence, but there can be really tough side-effects.
Think of yourself as the defendant. Would you want a court to accept evidence against you that didn't have a legally verifiable chain of evidence?
To put it another way, would you want a court to accept evidence against you that the prosecution could have created with a text editor?
I have seen people fired on the basis of evidence that the sysadmin admitted (during private bragging) he had faked. And yes, I was really sorry that I didn't have a tape recorder in my pocket at the moment.
Nah; don't bother. Those two terms are generally considered synonyms.
(Of course, they aren't really. That is, it's possible to be incorrect without being colloquial. What that substitution really does is lose information, since "colloquial" is a proper subset of "incorrect".
In this case, the characters [English "py" and Russian chars that look like "py" are exactly the same.
;-) Russians have long been playing fast and loose with computer encodings of their language. Not surprising, considering the total disregard that the American-dominated computer industry has had for language that use non-Roman alphabets, plus of course the typical Russian sense of humor. Some of the links in this article lead to truly hilarious examples of Russian written with ASCII characters.
...
Actually, in Unicode they are not the same. The Russian TLD we're talking about looks like the English ".py", but that is encoded in Unicode as the hex chars 70 79. The Russian (Cyrillic) chars are encoded as hex 0440 0443, or in UTF-8 as D1 80 D1 83. At the bit level, which is what a DNS server or browser sees, they are totally different character strings. Their glyphs look the same, but they are different bit strings.
If you understand a bit of Russian, you might enjoy the wikipedia article on what is sometimes called Volapuk encoding. (And note the omission of the umlaut over the 'u'.
The wikipedia Mojibake article is also worth reading.
And note that, unlike slashdot, wikipedia has no problems with mixing languages and writing systems within a single article. Hint, hint
[I]sn't China censoring the living daylights out of the internet already? Is it really that far of a reach to say that they'd like to create their very own version of the internet, that they 100% control?
.local domain that was visible only inside our organization. It's actually quite easy, and very useful to anyone who wants a semi-isolated chunk of the Internet for some purpose. Our purpose was software testing, and the motive was to create a few domains that weren't visible outside our labs. But in fact anyone with an internal DNS server can easily do the same thing. And there are several open-source DNS servers available.
;-), I'd think that people all over the world have to be thinking of ways to declare network independence. Yeah, it's a bad idea for everyone. But the only way to prevent it is for the Internet authorities to become truly international and not beholden to any single government, and it doesn't look like that's going to happen soon, either.
True. But consider the viewpoint of much of the world: The Internet is currently controlled in great part by the US government. Maybe not totally, of course, but close enough to make for good arguments for Doing Something About It.
As an example of the US's power, consider the incident last year when the US government succeeded in ordering Swedish police to raid the piratburan.se site and cart off their computers. The charge was violation of US copyright laws. It was agreed by everyone that the site wasn't in violation of Swedish law, while the Swedish police's actions were illegal. But this didn't matter; when it comes to Internet activity, the US government can and does give orders to agencies of other supposedly "independent" governments.
I'd think that a lot of the world has to be getting very nervous about this sort of US control.
And the fact is that anyone can set up their own root DNS servers. I've helped do it on a couple of projects, where we wanted an DNS setup with our own
Unless the US government gives up on its recent arrogance toward the rest of the world (which is very unlikely within the next year or so
The other 95% of the world isn't likely to tolerate many more actions like what was done to piratburan.se before they take action. Any geek that has ever set up a local DNS server can tell them how to do it. And tweaking a server's code to allow UTF-8 URLs is essentially a beginner-level programming job.
XML with tags in Mandarin Chinese shows up now and then.
;-)
.py suffix (the first two letters of the Russian spelling of "Russian") looks in most fonts exactly like the Roman ".py" suffix for Paraguay. But this is nothing new. We have that problem in ASCII. Try distinguishing "0" from "O" in most fonts. Then consider "1", "l" and "I" in any sans-serif font. Actually, "1" and "l" look identical in the serif font I'm using here. I keep seeing examples where "modem" and "modern" look alike, as to "clear" and "dear" in many fonts. I'm sure you can make up lots of other examples. The spam and phishing crowds use this as one of their tools for getting past most filters.
Yeah; a few months ago I got involved in testing "i18n" stuff on a bunch of machines. One sample file is a multi-lingual dictionary, with wildly different writing systems for each language. Just for fun, I decided to write some CSS, and for each language, I used class names in that language's alphabet. Thus the Chinese fields used CSS class names that were Chinese characters. I tested it against the dozen browsers on this Mac, 8 browsers on my linux box, plus IE and FF on a XP and Vista Windows machines. I was impressed by the fact that it worked just fine on all of them.
Not that this should be a surprise. The text was encoded as UTF-8, of course, and most software doesn't actually need to be modified to handle this. If the chars in the range 0x80 to 0xFF are treated as unknown "letters" and just carried along as unanalyzed words, it everything should work for everything except code that is concerned with actual rendering of the glyphs. Problems usually arise only if code tries to do something "intelligent" with chars that have the high bit set.
I have wondered whether this success means that the programmers who implemented CSS have been too dumb to even consider non-ASCII character sets, or they were smart enough to realize that they didn't need to do anything to make UTF-8 (and the ISO 8859-* encodings, for that matter) work correctly. If it's the former, I hope they don't try to get smart about i18n and mess things up as a result.
IMO, the folks who decree Web standards should just declare UTF-8 the standard encoding for everything inside URLs. Implementing it is essentially trivial, except for rendering, which mostly just takes some rather big tables. (And memory is getting cheap, right? Right?
The only real problem, as mentioned above, is things like the Cyrillic
Frankly, I think it'd be fun watching the Net tackle this problem seriously, rather than pretending that it's just a problem with Cyrillic and using it as an excuse to block full internationalization of the Web. Not being able to spell non-English names right is a growing annoyance.
WARNING: A satirical, humorous post begins here. ... Finally, I also changed my mind about something else: sanity. ...
...
So I read your post expecting to laugh, but where's the joke? It all sounded much more rational and sane than the OT political rants that preceded it.
Oh, well, back to the political rants
I'm still confused as to why him being a Muslim would be such a bad thing if it were true?
;-). News from Muslim countries is easily available online, from local sources. They almost all publish in English and French as well as their local language. And, at least for now, the big companies and the government have stopped their attempts to block access to sites like aljazeera.com (or aljazeera.net, which has their elegant logo ;-).
;-). But it's interesting that they tend to listen now when she goes into excruciating detail about how the local people see various news stories. And she'd be much more likely to vote for a moderate Muslim candidate than someone like Romney or Huckabee.
Because he's running for president, and to a large part of the American population, all Muslims are jihadists, suicide bombers, and generally evil.
Funny thing is that there's a minority population that has reacted to the events of September 2001 rather differently. One change over the past couple decades has been the accessibility via the Internet of information that wasn't easily available earlier. I remember looking for information on Islam back in the 80s, out of general historical curiosity, and finding that very little was easily available. There was almost nothing in local libraries or bookstores, even here in Boston with its flock of universities. Now, it only takes seconds or minutes to locate more expert information online than you could read in a lifetime. It's easy to find detailed data on any Muslim sect you can name (and also all the misinformation about them
My wife and I are your typical American mongrels, with families from all over. Her family has a few Arabic-sounding names several generations back, and in Sept 2001, she decided it was time to tackle learning Arabic. She hadn't bothered earlier, because it had been just too difficult. But she quickly found good online sites, and is now routinely reading a number of Middle-Eastern news sources in Arabic rather than English. Some of her friends have been puzzled by this (especially as she claims to be an atheist
I know a lot of people with similar attitudes. But, of course, they aren't typical of the majority of Americans, who do mostly view Muslims as evil. Those "Obama's a Muslim" claims are aimed at that sort of ignorance. People who are knowledgeable on the topic wouldn't be effected, of course, because they'd consider it irrelevant as long as he's the Kennedy type who wouldn't try to impose his religion on the rest of us.
Some time back the National Lampoon ran a fun article by O'Rourke that was a list of insulting descriptions of various ethnic groups. One group was Canadians, who were described as being "like white Americans, but even more boring".
I think we should expect more from our politicians - like being honest and sane.
Except that one of the "bugs" in a democratic system is that it rewards politicians for dishonesty. The people tend to vote for the candidate that claims to support things that the people want. But a completely honest candidate has a disadvantage to a good liar who studies the people and tells them what they want to hear.
Historically, the main tool against such dishonesty has been a free press. When we had good investigative journalists, the candidates' actual action were often exposed. At other times, the media was in bed with the leading candidates, deceptive campaign claims went unreported, and people were suckered into voting for the dishonest candidates.
I'll let other fill in the names in the above over-simplified historical analysis. Well, maybe one good example might be far enough in the past that few people have an emotional reaction now: In 1964, we in the US saw the Johnson and Goldwater campaigns. A big part of Johnson's campaign ads were built on the idea that Goldwater was a warmonger, who among other things would lead us into a war in Vietnam. You can still find the infamous daisy/atomic-bomb ad online. Johnson won, of course - and he promptly started ramping up US forces in Vietnam. If you can dig up the old media coverage, you'll find here and there some of the evidence that this was Johnson's real intent. But the mass media mostly broadcast Johnson's ads uncritically, and the general population saw him as a peacemaker. Four years later, of course, this no longer worked, and Johnson lost to Nixon (who talked about ending the war, and then promptly escalated it once he was in office).
I'll avoid continuing the story with the 2000 election.
But it could be useful to find a good, permanent solution to the problem of the advantage to dishonesty in democratic elections.
Mass famine? We grow enough food to feed the world, let alone ourselves. Get real.
A good number of historians have point out that, according to all their evidence, this is true and has always been true. In studying the historical food shortages and famines, the conclusion seems to be that there was always plenty of food, but people starved because they couldn't get the food. This was sometimes due to poor distribution technology, but it was mostly due to the effects of the powerful people who controlled the distribution system. That is, people starve to death due to the actions of other people, not because there's no food.
One of the best-documented textbook cases was the Irish "potato famine" in the middle 1800s. There is copious historic documentation showing that during this time, Ireland exported a lot of food to England. But the Irish peasants who grew the food couldn't afford to buy it themselves. This was entirely due to the social order that kept them effectively in a state of slavery to the landowners. Similar situations have been documented in many other parts of the world, especially China and India. And, of course, the Soviet Union back in the 1930s when Stalin starved the Ukranian population into submission, and somewhere around 10 million of them died.
An interesting side issue has come up here in a couple of the OLPC discussions. Inevitably, people say that the poor parts of the world don't need laptops; they need food. Other people have pointed out that this has always been a problem, and food aid programs haven't done much good. The problem really is that the local power structure is keeping those people poor and starving. One approach that just may work is to break this stranglehold via education and communication, which is what the OLPC project is trying to supply. It's a lot harder to oppress educated people.
But this is just one experimental approach which may or may not work. In some areas, the power structure will probably wise up and block such attempts to end their control. And people will remain poor, ignorant and starving in a world of plenty. This might be part of what's going on in Nigeria right now with the LANCOR story.
Q: Should you place the period inside or outside quotation marks?
;-)
...'. And the t-shirt does omit the quotes around 'anal retentive'. ;-]
A: Inside.
Actually, the correct answer is "It depends on which publisher's guidelines you're following." (or '".'
In the UK, most publishers put periods outside the final quotes. In the US, most publishers put periods inside the quotes. In both countries, there are a few exceptions. If you're trying to simulate Nigerian phishing spam, you'd probably want to go with the UK convention.
Also, some publishers have different rules for periods and question marks, which often makes sense. Sometimes it helps to use two punctuation marks:
1. Did he really say "They weren't there."?
2. Did he really ask "Were they there?"?
3. He really did ask "Were they there?".
This convention makes it clear which of the two nested sentences is a question and which is a statement. To my knowledge, no publisher recommends a period both inside and outside the final quote.
[One of my favorite t-shirts in my closet is the one that reads "Does anal retentive have a hyphen?" And to people who try to answer it, I like to say "Actually, the correct answer starts with 'It depends
Have you played with an OLPC yet? These machines are very clearly designed for children, not adults. Nobody with adult size hands could touch type on the keyboard.
;-)
...
Hey, it's much larger than a BlackBerry's keyboard, and look at all the adults that seem to love those.
Actually, I have an OLPC sitting on my desk. My hands aren't tiny, and I can (just barely) do the standard touch typing. It was tricky at first, but I'm rapidly getting better at it.
Now if I could just figure out how the browser's bookmark feature works
My initial reaction was "What the hell, you theiving bastard stealing technology from a non-profit organization" ...
So have you read the news that the patent in question is owned by the OLPC project? The report that she's stealing something seems to be pure calumny. If anything, she's working on developing the parallel retail marketing that so many people have been suggesting. And if successful, her company will be paying license royalties to the OLPC project.
Does anyone know differently? It'd be interesting to get some more accurate information than what we've read here so far.
The general reason given for ending G1G1 was that it was a strain on the OLPC volunteers.
This makes a lot of sense. Negroponte and the others have been repeatedly emphasizing to their critics that they're not a computer vendor; they're an educational organization. Negroponte is a professor at MIT, not a corporate CEO. They haven't (to my knowledge) come right out and said it, but I expect that they're hoping for some startup companies that can take away the pressure to market this thing. This seems to be exactly what's happening in this case. The patent is staying with the OLPC crowd, and presumably they're happy to license it to someone who wants to work on commercial sales (and give back part of their profits as license fees).
If the OLPC crowd had gone with commercial sales, it would have just bogged them down by sucking them full time into marketing and support. The educational project would have fallen by the wayside in the rush for profits. And they'd have had no public support in their inevitable battle with Intel and Microsoft. This way, they can continue with their educational goals, and let others fight the market battle with the giant monopolists. And if it takes off commercially, maybe they can get a share of the profits.
Look at what intel and Microsoft have already tried to do to the OLPC. Do you think they'd stand back and let anyone else have a go?
;-). They are probably looking with horror on the prospect of what an OLPC-like machine will do to their bottom line.
Also, Intel and Microsoft are making some good money on their laptops, which have a fairly high markup (almost as large as Apple's
It could be interesting to read about what pressures Intel and MS have been able to put on other vendors to block the sale of machines like the OLPC. Anyone have any good info on the topic?
Note that the OLPC's source code is all available online. Anyone with the investment capital could buy similar hardware, install the same software, and (with maybe a bit more memory or a disk) include piles of free software for adults. They should be able to match the $399 price pretty easily.
How long can the big guys block this? And how exactly are they blocking it?
... it is certainly creating a new market. That's cool, but it won't change desktop or laptops.
...
We've been playing with a couple of them here at home for a week now, and I'd predict you're wrong. It has a number of things that could really shake up the market.
One thing is their mesh network. I remember some time back reading a bunch of the original design docs for the original ARPAnet back in the 1960s. There were diagrams of all sorts of military equipment talking to each other wirelessly, without any central "access points" that would be targets. An important part of the requirements was that if there existed a data path between gadgets A and B, the intermediate machines would forward the packets.
It's been forty years, and the commercial Internet has never provided this. They insist on keeping control of communication by requiring that all customer products relay through access-point hardware, so that customers can be tracked and billed for everything.
But now, finally the OLPC project has implemented what the DoD wanted 40 years ago, and fully wireless network that has no single chokepoints of failure, with all the "leaf" nodes cooperating to get the packets through without relying on special-purpose relay machines.
And the code is FOSS. So no company has any excuse for not picking it up and including it in their next upgrade.
Our experience here at home is that it works far better than the couple of commercial APs that we've tried. Right now we have an Apple Airport Extreme. Twice today it went into its occasional mode of fading in and out rapidly. Our wireless Powerbooks essentially had no usable wifi for the duration, about half an hour each time. But funny thing - the OLPCs kept right on working, using our Airport without problems when the Macs couldn't get a connection. The OLPCs also work fine with a neighbor's Linksys AP. We verified that we could carry one OLPC 100 yards away, and the second one 200 yards away, and they both had full wifi access (though the Mac didn't).
Once the news of this gets out, it'll be interesting to see Apple and the commercial comm companies (Verizon in our neighborhood) come up with PR to explain why their wifi works so much worse than the OLPC's.
Stay tuned
I'd happily pay $200 for an XO, I'd pay $250 if I had to, and I might (after a few beers) splurge $300 on one. But $400 for one device? Never going to happen.
;-)
But apparently lots of people would. If you look at the actual price of things like an iPhone or BlackBerry, i.e. how much of your 2-year contract is for the PDA, you'll find that they are selling for well over $400, and selling quite well. And, as various others have pointed out, the OLPC really is just a slightly larger PDA with a handle. And it's a much better PDA than most (if not all) of the others on the market. Especially if you're 10 years old.
If that's so, then why are so few FOSS applications widely adopted?
...) added new gimmicks, of course, but those were piffling innovations compared to the first browser.
If you refuse to adopt FOSS code, note that one of the first things you'll have to do is remove all the TCP/IP and other Internet protocol code from your machines. It was all developed on government-funded projects back in the 1970s and 80s, and it was all published as open, freely-downloadable code. Also, throw out your web browser, unless you're using Mosaic. That was the innovative one, and it was free, open source. The authors of the other browsers made their own cosmetic "innovations" to appear different, but their basic functionality was just a clone of Mosaic.
Somehow, the claim that the Internet and the Web weren't innovative is, well, astonishing to read. Claiming that they haven't been widely adopted is equally astonishing. If that code, all of it FOSS, wasn't innovative, what could be? And don't try to claim that it was "popular" things like IE that were innovative. That's just silly; IE (and Firefox and
... limited to some $21 million a year.
If you use the RIAA's estimates of the value of a copyrighted song, this would amount to somewhere between 3 and 4 CDs.
So really, of how much value could this be to the folks of Antigua?
Wouldn't such an advanced civilization be indistinguishable from the Abrahamic God, who observes and participates but never reveals Himself?
...
Nah; we've found that we can talk openly about the "anthropologists" visiting Earth to study its civilization. And you can talk about us all you like. Who's gonna believe you? Do you really want to be considered one of those nutcases that believe in visiting aliens?
It's sorta like that "Abrahamic God", y'know. Actually, he was one of the first wave of anthropological visitors, soon after the regular visit of a robotic probe found that an intelligent species had evolved on this planet. He did reveal himself to lots of people. Look at the results: The "rational" humans today totally discount all those uncorroborated reports. Rightly so, of course, since humans routinely make up all sorts of fantasies about revelations, visitations, etc. The real ones just disappear into the fog of fantasy.
It's always that way with a new intelligent species. They always think they're unique in the universe. So a member of a physically-similar species can easily pass as a local from the next valley. As they develop, you may have to pretend to be from somewhere remote on the planet. But they never believe you're from much farther away than the edges of their conceptual world.
This usually turns out to be good for our studies. The visitors can walk freely among the natives, and can subtly guide them toward membership in the galactic civilization. It does usually take millenia for this to happen. But that's ok; we really want each new species to bring their own outlook and capabilities, and overtly directing their development would just make them subservient.
We really don't want to be welcomed as overlords
Typical radio transmissions virtually disappear well short of a single light year. And by "virtually" I mean our own giant radio antennas wouldn't hear them.
Not true at all. Back in 1978, Science published an article on the topic. Its title was "Eavesdropping: The Radio Signature of the Earth". If you're not a subscriber, you can find several copies of it online, as well as several other articles that cite it and do further analysis. The authors studied what could be learned about our planet by an astronomer with our level of technology (as of 1978) living on a planet within the sphere of roughly 50 light-years that our broadcasts had reached. They assumed that no program content could be deciphered by the remote astronomer, and only the Earth's changing spectrum over time could be measured.
Their conclusions were fairly impressive. They started by explaining the nature of the received signals, and how those could be used to determine our planet's orbit, its day length, the orbit of our large moon, and the rough temperature zone in which we live.
They went on to point out that our radio broadcasts are mostly done with hardware that puts its energy into a narrow frequency band, and mostly horizontal to the surface, so that from a remote viewpoint each broadcast station would appear briefly and fade. That is, the radio spectrum received from the Earth would come mostly from the limb, and not from the disk. This could be used to draw a map of the broadcast stations. The Doppler shift of each station as it appears 12 hours apart on opposite sides would give the station's latitude, the time would give its longitude. The resulting distribution would show that there are two different kinds of surface on our planet, and we live mostly on one of them (and mostly along the boundaries). Knowing the planet's temperature zone would tell the astronomers that we're on a water world, and our stations are on land.
As the stations' frequencies drift over the year, it would become clear that we are diurnal, and also active during the evening, but not active between midnight and dawn. Further analysis of the signals would show the use of several different kinds of hardware, and these are distributed in patches over the planet. This shows our ability to organize on a large scale, but not on a planetary scale. The use of the same broadcast hardware in different areas would show our ability to form distant alliances between our "nations".
Anyway, the article was an interesting illustration of what our broadcasts have been telling to any distant astronomers with technology as good as ours. They left it to the readers' imagination what could be deduced by more advanced astronomers. And, of course, our signals have propagated another 30 light years since then.
But you've got to wonder why some other super advanced civilization didn't move some stars around to circle themselves or something and make it really obvious where they lived.
Because they don't consider where someone lives to be especially important. You don't know or care where I live, right? The important thing is the ability to communicate, and they do that simply by having the ubiquitous robot probes install gateways to the galactic network wherever they come across a world that has advanced sufficiently to have its own local network.
If you haven't noticed them on our network, that simply demonstrates that you're not very observant. And some of them here have pretty low user ids.
Of course, there is a fairly strict policy of not saying things that explicitly identify oneself as non-human. It's funny how few humans are totally unwilling to even consider that someone else may not be just like them.