Think of a random proper noun that's got multiple usages. Now think of a usage that you have heard for it before. (My thought was "Alice", followed by "Alice in Wonderland").... You probably found the thing you wanted, or an article that points you to it in a single link. Now imagine the same, except that *every single example of that proper noun in existence is included*. That's way too much stuff to easily search through it.
Actually, it's not; it's just called "google" rather than "wikipedia".
But you'll have to dig through more than one page of links to find one of the pages that you're looking for. Or you can cut it down by including more than just the one noun.
... bird eats jalapeño seeds, flies away, gets a case of the runs a few miles later. No seeds move further faster than spicy ones. But why would animals, after millions of years, keep eating these seeds?
Actually, some biologists came up with some good data on this a few years ago. The first point that's being missed is that birds eat peppers, but mammals (except for humans) rarely do. And it turns out there's a simple explanation: The active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, attacks the skin's "heat" sensory cells of mammals, but not of birds. It seems that some time in the past N million years, the ancestor of peppers stumbled onto a way of distinguishing the heat sensors of birds and mammals, and targets just mammals. Birds find capsaicin a somewhat tasty spice, but it doesn't produce the flood of "HOT!!!" signals in their nerves that mammals get.
The obvious question is: Why is this adaptive to peppers? Part of the answer is a misconception in the above quote: Birds don't really get "the runs" from peppers. Birds have a short, fast digestive system. This is an adaptation to flight, for which you want to save every gram of mass that you can. For birds, food in the digestive tract rapidly reaches the point where it takes more energy to fly it around than the food contains. So birds' digestive system attacks the food hard and fast, extracts the energy-containing stuff that are easy to break down, and quickly disposes of the remains. Pretty much everything that a bird eats is shoved out the other end within one to two hours. So you might say that birds always have "the runs", no matter what they eat.
Part of this is that plant-eating mammals tend to chew their food well, and then put it through a long digestive process that extracts the maximum nutrition. Our food gets ground fine, and often takes two days for the trip through our intestines. This destroys all but the best-armored seeds. Seeds of peppers and their relatives (tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, etc.) are very often killed and digested. Birds just chop their food coarsely, grind it up in their gizzard, and drop it out quickly. Leathery pepper (and tomato and...) seeds mostly survive this. So to a pepper, a bird is a good seed transport mechanism, while a mammal is a seed-eater. Distinguishing birds from mammals and scaring away the mammals is a good survival tactic for a fruit-bearing plant, if they can find a way to do it. Peppers found a way.
Anyway, this is now the conventional explanation of what's going on with peppers. There is a nice irony here: Peppers are native to South America, and until a few thousand years ago, they only lived there and in tropical North America. Now they live all over the planet. And they were spread to other continents by a mammal, us humans.
This has happened mostly because we're an unusual sort mammal. We don't just pick peppers and chew them up. We pick them, cut them up, separate out the seeds, and mix the tasty part with other food. This dilutes the capsaicin, making it into a spice that lots of humans like. The usual sort of human food, lightly spiced with hot pepper, is probably about as spicy to us as the raw pepper is to a bird. So we like it.
And as a result, we either dispose of a lot of pepper seeds, or we plant them in our gardens. We're an excellent seed-dispersal mechanism for peppers. I have four pots of them sitting on window sills right now. Last week, they were outside, but we finally got a light frost hereabouts (Boston), so I brought them in a few days ago. Now my main problem with them is protecting them from our cockatiels and conure, who find them very tasty.
Microsoft requires that every computer that might have its software installed in the school registered. In exchange Microsoft offers an 80% discount on everything. I can't believe people are complaining about the nuances of Microsoft's school discounts. They offer seats of office for $7!!
OTOH, most linux distros also offer a license that permits installing the software on as many machines as you have, and the price is $0.;-)
(You can also install OpenOffice everywhere for the same low, low price.)
Why would you buy something that you can get for 20% off, when you can get something else with the same capabilities at a 100% discount?
Really; where do they get their educators these days? No wonder the kids are graduating without being able to do simple arithmetic, if the school administrators are dumb enough to fall for Microsoft marketing.
Students shouldn't have to learn vi in order to type out a book report,... The computer is a tool, something to make things easier,... we don't need to understand how a car works to use it,... Switching to *nix just to expose people to the internals of a computer OS isn't necessarily doing them any favours.
This is a rather odd argument to come from a physicist. WTF are you doing studying the low-level working of the universe? You don't need to understand the universe. You just need to use it as a tool. Let some nerdy fellow of in some lab worry about the universe; go live your life in ignorance of such things.
I mean, consider that we're talking about the UK's school system here. The whole purpose of a school system is to teach their students about stuff. Arguing that "students don't need to understand anything, they just need to use it" is arguing against the very reason that school systems exist.
This is an argument that one expects to hear in a corporate/industrial setting, where management usually just wants people to blindly do one job, and not waste time learning about anything but the one widget that they're responsible for. In a school setting, however, it's a profoundly wrong-headed approach.
In today's world, a person really needs to know more than the bare minimum to get by in the world. It helps a lot if you understand a bit about how a car or stove or plumbing system or computer or government (or universe;-) actually works. And it's the job of the schools to impart understanding to the students. If they don't do this, why do we even bother having schools?
Well, yes; I know all that theory. But you didn't even attempt to answer my question: Where in the world can I find and study a real-world example in a free market in telecoms? I'm curious about what actually happens when such a free market is created, but I've never been able to read about one. Where are they? Or are they a closely-guarded secret?
Shouldn't market forces be allowed to decide whether or not the public wants their internet and mobile communications blocked or censored? btw I know that in some areas carriers have a total monopoly over internet access, but still...
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any place in the world where the comm companies aren't regulated and kept to a small number (often 1) by the government? I don't think I've ever heard of such a place, unless you count International Waters. Even there, you aren't exactly "free" to do as you wish, as people are routinely arrested on land for things they've done at sea. And from International Waters, it's sorta difficult to supply a connection to most customers' homes.
So where is this place where anyone can string up their own phone lines or coax cables anywhere they like, broadcast on any frequency at any power, and sell their comm services to anyone without any government interference?
Unless such things are legal, any claim of a "market" in communication should be treated as merely facetious misdirection.
Here in the US, there isn't now and never has been a "market" in communications. The very earliest telegraph lines required the government's use of eminent domain to enable the stringing of lines, and usually only one company was allowed to do this in any particular corridor. The earliest wireless radio stations immediately resulted in regulation and licensing of frequency use and broadcast power. Telephone systems were regulated from the earliest years, and were almost always a legal monopoly nearly everywhere. The Internet was created and built by the US government's Dept of Defense; the private telecom companies only got involved recently after they found that it could be profitable, and nearly everywhere there is strict government control over who can supply Internet connectivity. You and I can't do any of these things legally.
I think the bittorrent folks need to come up with a revision to their software that includes, in the datastream, a peer-to-peer message, properly encrypted, that tells the other peer, in effect: "this stream IS continuing, it has NOT been terminated, regardless of what you may receive to the contrary - any status message you receive that is NOT properly authenticated through encryption is bogus, so continue the transfer".
Since the very early days of computer communiciation, the security guys have been telling us "Secure communication is only possible if the entire conversation is encrypted end-to-end by the high-level software." They've usually been talking about keeping the conversation private, but this applies equally well to cases where an opponent is trying to sabotage the conversation, as Comcast is doing.
To my knowledge, there's nothing in the IP (or TCP or UDP) headers that would identify a conversation as bittorrent. If the packets' contents are all encrypted, it's not likely that an ISP could sabotage the conversation, other than by sabotaging all your traffic. Anyone know a way to identify a fully-encrypted bittorent packet stream?
More generally, this sort of thing should encourage us to move toward encrypting everything. This has already happened with a lot of major apps. Thus, telnet and rsh are all but gone on unix/linux systems, replaced by ssh. Similarly, file-transfer packages like ftp and rcp have been supplanted by scp, and rsync routinely uses ssl to encrypt its traffic. Most browsers and web servers support "https"; we just have to persuade people to use it more. VoIP can be encrypted by many of the packages that use it. (Can it be identified as VoIP if encrypted?)
We have reached a rather sad state, in which major corporations feel that it's OK for them to knowingly sabotage their customers who are using the product as it was designed to be used. But it does seem that we have a lot of renegade telecom corporations who do engage in such sabotage against their customers. So we should be working on defenses.
It does seem fairly obvious that we can't expect much help from any government here, since most governments (including the US) actively cooperate with the renegade telecom companies. So it looks like a situation where we should be calling on the "hacker" population to work on the universal encryption that we need.
Of course, we could just go to IPv6, right? Nah; that'll never happen.;-)
So a government sanctioned monopoly ( or at least a monopoly the government doesn't hive a shit about trying to break up ) can be allowed to control communications, while simultaneously being obliged to provide information to the government under "National Security" concerns?
Yes, this is how things have been going in the US for some time now. You see, the folks in power have figured out something important: Those protections in the Constitution only apply to government organizations. The courts have upheld the idea that private corporations aren't required to obey the Constitution, because they're not government agencies, and the Constitution clearly only limits what government agencies can do.
The idea now is to "privatize" everything. That way, the Constitution's protections will be moot, because everything will be done by corporations, not government agencies, and when dealing with a corporation, you have no rights.
We've seen exactly this point argued here in/. over and over. We've been told repeatedly that corporations have only one duty: to maximize their profit and thus payouts to shareholders. This is another way of saying that they aren't, and shouldn't be required to follow any laws (aka government regulation). And this argument is usually made in situations where what's being discussed would be illegal if a government agency did it.
The current topic is a case of this. The government has First Amendment limits to how much it can control "speech", which to any rational reader would include information that people transfer electronically by any means, although when the Constitution was written, there was no such thing as electronic transfer of information. You and I clearly have a legal right to download a torrent of an ISO of last week's release of the latest ubuntu. But the First Amendment starts with "Congress shall make no law...", so it clearly only limits the government. Private corporations are not so limited, and can legally enforce whatever rules they like limiting the information transferred via their hardware.
So in the US, things like free speech and freedom of the press are essentially irrelevant now. The government can't limit them, but the government no longer much deals with them. It's more and more in the hands of unregulated corporations, and they have the right to do whatever they like with the data being trucked down their tubes. In particular, while the government may have no right to record your use of comm lines, the telecom companies do have this right, and they also have the right to hand over the information they gather to any government agencies that are interested. If they don't like us downloading those ISOs, they have the legal right to interfere with our downloads.
The only way out of this loophole is a constitutional amendment that extends the Bill of Rights to private corporations. This isn't likely to happen any time soon.
1. What is the time the GPS device averages over? On the devices I've seen it updates about every second. Unless you have a REALLY nice car you're not going to go from 65 to 90 and back down for long enough to average 65 over that kind of time.
It's "interesting" to read about GPS records being used in court. A couple years back, after getting a GPS gadget that mostly lives in one or the other of our cars, I discovered the records it had been keeping. Before zeroing them, I looked through them, and was a bit bemused to see that I had been recorded driving at speeds of up to 350 mph. Somehow, I was bit dubious that our cars had ever reached this speed.
Anyway, I started watching, and occasionally saw more "interesting" behavior from the GPS thingy. My favorite one was the day that I was driving south on a local street, and noticed that it showed me about a block north of where I was, and moving north. Then it suddenly jumped to the correct position. I quickly hit the button that changed it to the screen with all its numbers. In addition to the numeric coordinates, it said that it was moving south at over 200 mph. After a few seconds, its speed dropped to the same as the car's speedometer. But its records would have shown a sudden U-turn and acceleration to over 200 mph.
It might be interesting to present such evidence in a courtroom. For example, if the prosecution were to subpoena the GPS records as evidence, it could be fun to watch the reaction of the judge and jury when the GPS reported the above incident. If the GPS data showed a list of such maneuvers, would they conclude that I was a really reckless stunt driver?
The idea that a judge or jury might believe GPS records is even more scary than the idea that they'd automatically accept the testimony of a state employee who is being paid to give out speeding tickets, and whose job performance won't look so good if he doesn't give out any tickets.
They have traffic laws in Massachusetts? When did that happen?
Yeah; it happened a long time ago. And they've figured out ways to make them as difficult to follow as possible. When I moved to Mass. back in the 80s, I was tipped off by someone about a cute example. One of the questions on the written driver's license exam is about the meaning of the signs you see all over in suburbia and the countryside, saying "Thickly Settled". Any idea what this sign might mean?
What it is, is a speed limit sign. It means that, contrary to whatever speed limit sign you might have seen 50 or 100 feet back, the speed limit is now 35 mph. But there's no other clue that the speed limit might have changed. They take a point off the exam if you don't answer this one correctly, and they ticket you in lots of small towns if you keep driving at the speed you saw on that speed limit sign farther back.
There are a bunch of similar uses of non-standard signage, in ways that don't give readers a clue about what they're legally telling you. But I suppose this isn't a practice that's unique to Massachusetts. Tricking visitors into unknowingly violating local traffic laws is a popular means of "revenue enhancement" in lots of places.
I see nothing in there that answers my questions. First, it's not a link to a page on a verizon site. And there's no occurrence of strings like "server", "ssh", "vpn", or anything dealing with such topics. And there's no mention of how long such agreements might be valid for, so by the time you get your service installed, they could have disavowed anything in any agreement you've read.
And there's one very good reason for this. Walk into any retail store (in the US) that sells computers and look at what's for sale. MS Windows. Usually nothing else. This isn't an accident. If, say, Chrysler had been able to block retail outlets from selling any cars but theirs, we know what would be the most "popular" kind of car. If grocery stores sold nothing but Post breakfast cereals, guess what most people would eat for breakfast.
Granted, some of the retail stores once sold Apple computers. They were usually hidden away in a corner, and the staff couldn't tell you anything about them, except in the rare case of a sales person who had bought one himself. This was so bad that Apple eventually threw up their hands, and built their own retail chain, at huge expense.
Try going into a retail store and try to talk them into selling you a linux box. They'll treat you like you're from Mars, even if you're actually from a company that assembles computers and installs linux on them. They simply won't discuss it with you.
It's easy to be the most "popular" product if you can prevent your competitors from ever appearing in stores.
Maybe eventually online sales will dominate over retail outlets. But we're nowhere near that stage yet.
Some years ago, around 1980 if I remember right there was a paper published reporting evidence for a ring system around the Earth in the past. They were doing a study of past climates, analyzing fossils laid down at various sites. They reported a period of roughly a million years during which the fossil evidence at all the sites showed normal summers but the tropical sites showed very cool winters and extinction of plants that weren't cold tolerant. The most likely explanation for a world-side pattern like this is a ring system, which shades the tropics while the sun is over the other hemisphere.
The reported time interval was around 30 or 40 million years ago. A quick google check turned up one summary with some references. (And my 1980 guess was pretty accurate.;-)
Others have pointed out that the K-T impact 65 million years ago almost certainly produced at least a small ring system, but as far as I've read, no direct evidence of it has been reported.
Since April of 2007, Verizon Wireless has voluntarily ceased cutting off customers based on their data usage and no longer prohibits common internet uses.
Really? Their residential service now allows web and email servers? And ssh and vpn servers? And they guarantee that these will still be allowed 1 or 5 or 24 months from now? Got a link to a Verizon doc that promises this?
Well, there ya go. Verizon's CS people make it very clear that they only supply service to people running MS Windows. You're obvious a one of those weird linux hippies, and we don't need people like you in our neighborhood or on our network.
Really. I've helped some friends solve some problems with their Verizon internet link, and when we called CS, it quickly became clear that unless we had a Windows box on our end of the link, there was nothing they could do to help us. If it wasn't in their scripts, they simply didn't understand anything we said. (Even the few with an American accent.;-)
es, a business has a right to at least attempt to make a profit. They shouldn't be required to sell money-losing products.
Which part of FALSE ADVERTISING don't you understand?
Hey, what part of "make a profit" don't you understand, fella?
If this sort of decision is upheld on appeal, such a ban could easily mean the end of lots of companies, especially the biggest ones. How many do you think could sell their stuff at all without false advertising?
Anyway, we have Freedom of Speech in the US, right? What does this mean if we're not allowed to lie to our gullible customers? After all, anyone can tell the truth. The ability to tell a lie and get away with it is what freedom is all about.
Jeez; some people have no idea about how business works...
(Consult Steven Colbert for much more information on this subject.)
Somebody had done a study on the impact of cow farts on greenhouse gasses once,...
Actually, although cow farts are great for humorous comments on the issue, it's been known for some time that cattle produce most of their greenhouse gasses (methane and CO2) from their front end. The methane mostly comes from their complex stomaches, which are marvelous digesters for plant material, but also produce significant quantities of methane as a byproduct. Their large intestines do produce methane, as do ours, but in lesser quantities.
Another fun story on the topic was the study a few years ago that identified the other major source of atmospheric methane: termites. They also digest cellulose, using bacteria similar to those in cattle, and they produce lots of CO2 and CH4 as byproducts, too. They're small, but you wouldn't believe how many termites there are in the world. Imagine a trillion little termites, each continuously burping and farting while chomping their way through wood and other plant material. Try not to grin at the thought.
It turns out that large grazing animals and termites each produce roughly 1/3 of the atmospheric methane, and the remaining third is from zillions of small sources. Human agriculture and industry are high on the list, but a very distant third to ungulates and termites.
As for CO2, though, all animals produce it by necessity, proportional to their metabolism. But we've been augmenting this by mining the planet's storehouses of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas) and burning it. The amount is pretty well understood, and easily explains the roughly 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last couple centuries (primarily the last half century). Production and consumption of CO2 was more or less balanced until recently, but we've radically upped the production without doing much to increase CO2 consumption. It really doesn't take great genius to understand what this might lead to. It just takes a lot of scientific sleuthing to document the details to the level that we've done in recent decades.
Will they let the chinese show up? Or maybe the Japanese?
Well, it'll pretty much have to be done outside the US, now that anyone in the country playing around with amateur rocketry is automatically classified as a ("suspected") terrorist and sent off to some other country for "interrogation". But it doesn't have to be Chinese or Japanese; it could be Canadians or Mexicans. (Or maybe Iraqis or Iranians.;-)
While I'm NOT in the US, some day (soon?) this may be offered here.
In quite a lot of places in the world, better service is already available at a lower price.
Note that, as others have already pointed out, the number is 20 megaBITS up/down, not 20 megaBYTES. Most other ISPs use MB to mean "megabyte", so you must divide the Mb (megabit) rate by something between 8 and 10 to make a comparison, depending on how you count overhead.
We're talking about 2 to 3 MB up/down, and better speeds than that at a lower price are common in many other technically-advanced parts of the world.
(Take this as an invitation to others to brag about their local rates.;-)
(And we can also have a flame war over who's "technically advanced".;-)
Actually, the most commonly-used format, by a large margin, is ABC. It's a rather basic, plain-text notation, without without much in the way of fancy formatting. OTOH, it's fairly easy to read it directly. There's lots of mostly free software for it, and there are somewhat over 300,000 pieces of music online at about 350 ABC sites now. This is a couple orders of magnitude more than for lilypond, which is probably the closest competitor.
Those of us who have been using ABC for the past decade or so are mostly cheering on the purveyors of the other open music formats, like lilypond, rosegarden, Music[X]ML, etc. They are coming online slowly, and are all well worth investigating. All of them are good prospects for solving the interchange problems posed by the various proprietary music formatting packages.
Transcribing out-of-copyright editions of old music into any of these and putting them online would be a worthwhile project for anyone who wants to make a real contribution to our access to music.
So how could I use 20 Mb "up" if I'm not permitted to run a server? I can't think of many things on my machine (other than bittorrent;-) that could even start to use such a capacity.
Take a good look at the TOS for this $65/month "internet service". It's not that at all; it's "browser and email service". Pretty much everything else is forbidden.
If you want true "internet service" (including the right to run any apps you like on your own machine), the best price I can find is about $200/month. If anyone knows better, can you provide a link to the appropriate verizon.com page?
... you'll probably find different behaviours from a caching and SEO viewpoint. PATH_INFO queries look more static, will be cached more aggressively, may rank better (because they are expected to be the same or similar on subsequent views),...
Yeah; I ran across a caching gateway like that a while ago, while trying to debug some seriously wrong web behavior. The problem turned out to be, to simplify it somewhat, an app that was querying a remote server with a URL like http://some.where.com/foo/first to initialize access to some serial data, followed by URLs like http://some.where.com/foo/next to step through the data. The idiotic caching mechanism was intercepting these GETs of identical URLs, and replying to them from its cache. It totally shot down the app. We had to play politics, including threats to sue for violations of contracts, to get it working. It turned out that we had no leverage over the people running the caching gateway box, and we had to "persuade" the people running the server to implement a different access mechanism that accepted a long string of differently-spelled "next" requests, in order to defeated the cache.
It can be impressive how easy it sometimes is to throw a monkey wrench into a simple, reliable mechanism, and force people to implement clumsy kludgery to trick the system in behaving sanely. This case was especially annoying, because we knew that the cache code was carefully caching our requests and the replies, filling its disk with data that would never be used again within the lifetime of the cache.
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
You might believe that, but it'd be wrong. That ? is only needed if you want to pass more than one parameter to a CGI program. From the start, the CGI standard has specified that any junk after the program's pathname is passed to the program as a CGI environment variable called "PATH_INFO". Note the last-updated date on that document.
So back in 1995, if you used a URL like "http://example.com/cgi/srch/SomeJunk", and the server had an executable called "cgi/srch, the srch program would be run, and its environment would include a PATH_INFO variable with contents "/SomeJunk". It would do as it liked with that string. If it were a search program, as you might guess from the name "srch", it would presumably search for the string "SomeJunk" in whatever database it uses. The / here is used merely as a terminator for the file's pathname, to separate it from the next field. It could be various other non-alphanumeric chars, though / and ? would be the recommended chars for obvious reasons.
The ? char is a different mechanism, implemented by the server, which parses the trailing data and converts it into a list of parameters in the programs standard input stream. It's handy, but not needed if the program only wants one parameter. The PATH_INFO mechanism is more powerful, since it allows for arbitrary data, but the program must then do all the parsing itself.
Atleast Amazon can't patent THOSE methods now, since I've published them:) Amazon seems to make a living patenting obvious ideas, makes you wonder why they never patent anything REALLY original.
Actually, they probably can patent the things that you built years ago. Then they can sue you for violating their patent, and it'll be up to you to prove that you had the idea first. I hope you have kept enough evidence to convince the court, and enough money to pay your lawyers.
Fact is, the US Patent Office no longer does any serious patent examination. The huge expansion of patentable ideas back in the 1990s, plus dropping the need for a working demo, plus the decreases in Patent Office funding, means that they now pretty much just rubber-stamp patent applications and let the courts sort it out.
Slashdot Mirror
Think of a random proper noun that's got multiple usages. Now think of a usage that you have heard for it before. (My thought was "Alice", followed by "Alice in Wonderland"). ...
You probably found the thing you wanted, or an article that points you to it in a single link.
Now imagine the same, except that *every single example of that proper noun in existence is included*.
That's way too much stuff to easily search through it.
Actually, it's not; it's just called "google" rather than "wikipedia".
But you'll have to dig through more than one page of links to find one of the pages that you're looking for. Or you can cut it down by including more than just the one noun.
... bird eats jalapeño seeds, flies away, gets a case of the runs a few miles later. No seeds move further faster than spicy ones. But why would animals, after millions of years, keep eating these seeds?
...) seeds mostly survive this. So to a pepper, a bird is a good seed transport mechanism, while a mammal is a seed-eater. Distinguishing birds from mammals and scaring away the mammals is a good survival tactic for a fruit-bearing plant, if they can find a way to do it. Peppers found a way.
Actually, some biologists came up with some good data on this a few years ago. The first point that's being missed is that birds eat peppers, but mammals (except for humans) rarely do. And it turns out there's a simple explanation: The active ingredient in hot peppers, capsaicin, attacks the skin's "heat" sensory cells of mammals, but not of birds. It seems that some time in the past N million years, the ancestor of peppers stumbled onto a way of distinguishing the heat sensors of birds and mammals, and targets just mammals. Birds find capsaicin a somewhat tasty spice, but it doesn't produce the flood of "HOT!!!" signals in their nerves that mammals get.
The obvious question is: Why is this adaptive to peppers? Part of the answer is a misconception in the above quote: Birds don't really get "the runs" from peppers. Birds have a short, fast digestive system. This is an adaptation to flight, for which you want to save every gram of mass that you can. For birds, food in the digestive tract rapidly reaches the point where it takes more energy to fly it around than the food contains. So birds' digestive system attacks the food hard and fast, extracts the energy-containing stuff that are easy to break down, and quickly disposes of the remains. Pretty much everything that a bird eats is shoved out the other end within one to two hours. So you might say that birds always have "the runs", no matter what they eat.
Part of this is that plant-eating mammals tend to chew their food well, and then put it through a long digestive process that extracts the maximum nutrition. Our food gets ground fine, and often takes two days for the trip through our intestines. This destroys all but the best-armored seeds. Seeds of peppers and their relatives (tomatoes, eggplants, tomatillos, etc.) are very often killed and digested. Birds just chop their food coarsely, grind it up in their gizzard, and drop it out quickly. Leathery pepper (and tomato and
Anyway, this is now the conventional explanation of what's going on with peppers. There is a nice irony here: Peppers are native to South America, and until a few thousand years ago, they only lived there and in tropical North America. Now they live all over the planet. And they were spread to other continents by a mammal, us humans.
This has happened mostly because we're an unusual sort mammal. We don't just pick peppers and chew them up. We pick them, cut them up, separate out the seeds, and mix the tasty part with other food. This dilutes the capsaicin, making it into a spice that lots of humans like. The usual sort of human food, lightly spiced with hot pepper, is probably about as spicy to us as the raw pepper is to a bird. So we like it.
And as a result, we either dispose of a lot of pepper seeds, or we plant them in our gardens. We're an excellent seed-dispersal mechanism for peppers. I have four pots of them sitting on window sills right now. Last week, they were outside, but we finally got a light frost hereabouts (Boston), so I brought them in a few days ago. Now my main problem with them is protecting them from our cockatiels and conure, who find them very tasty.
Microsoft requires that every computer that might have its software installed in the school registered.
;-)
In exchange Microsoft offers an 80% discount on everything.
I can't believe people are complaining about the nuances of Microsoft's school discounts. They offer seats of office for $7!!
OTOH, most linux distros also offer a license that permits installing the software on as many machines as you have, and the price is $0.
(You can also install OpenOffice everywhere for the same low, low price.)
Why would you buy something that you can get for 20% off, when you can get something else with the same capabilities at a 100% discount?
Really; where do they get their educators these days? No wonder the kids are graduating without being able to do simple arithmetic, if the school administrators are dumb enough to fall for Microsoft marketing.
Students shouldn't have to learn vi in order to type out a book report, ... The computer is a tool, something to make things easier, ... we don't need to understand how a car works to use it, ... Switching to *nix just to expose people to the internals of a computer OS isn't necessarily doing them any favours.
;-) actually works. And it's the job of the schools to impart understanding to the students. If they don't do this, why do we even bother having schools?
This is a rather odd argument to come from a physicist. WTF are you doing studying the low-level working of the universe? You don't need to understand the universe. You just need to use it as a tool. Let some nerdy fellow of in some lab worry about the universe; go live your life in ignorance of such things.
I mean, consider that we're talking about the UK's school system here. The whole purpose of a school system is to teach their students about stuff. Arguing that "students don't need to understand anything, they just need to use it" is arguing against the very reason that school systems exist.
This is an argument that one expects to hear in a corporate/industrial setting, where management usually just wants people to blindly do one job, and not waste time learning about anything but the one widget that they're responsible for. In a school setting, however, it's a profoundly wrong-headed approach.
In today's world, a person really needs to know more than the bare minimum to get by in the world. It helps a lot if you understand a bit about how a car or stove or plumbing system or computer or government (or universe
Well, yes; I know all that theory. But you didn't even attempt to answer my question: Where in the world can I find and study a real-world example in a free market in telecoms? I'm curious about what actually happens when such a free market is created, but I've never been able to read about one. Where are they? Or are they a closely-guarded secret?
Shouldn't market forces be allowed to decide whether
...
or not the public wants their internet and mobile
communications blocked or censored?
btw I know that in some areas carriers have a total
monopoly over internet access, but still...
Just out of curiosity, does anyone know of any place in the world where the comm companies aren't regulated and kept to a small number (often 1) by the government? I don't think I've ever heard of such a place, unless you count International Waters. Even there, you aren't exactly "free" to do as you wish, as people are routinely arrested on land for things they've done at sea. And from International Waters, it's sorta difficult to supply a connection to most customers' homes.
So where is this place where anyone can string up their own phone lines or coax cables anywhere they like, broadcast on any frequency at any power, and sell their comm services to anyone without any government interference?
Unless such things are legal, any claim of a "market" in communication should be treated as merely facetious misdirection.
Here in the US, there isn't now and never has been a "market" in communications. The very earliest telegraph lines required the government's use of eminent domain to enable the stringing of lines, and usually only one company was allowed to do this in any particular corridor. The earliest wireless radio stations immediately resulted in regulation and licensing of frequency use and broadcast power. Telephone systems were regulated from the earliest years, and were almost always a legal monopoly nearly everywhere. The Internet was created and built by the US government's Dept of Defense; the private telecom companies only got involved recently after they found that it could be profitable, and nearly everywhere there is strict government control over who can supply Internet connectivity. You and I can't do any of these things legally.
So tell us about this telecom "market" thing
I think the bittorrent folks need to come up with a revision to their software that includes, in the datastream, a peer-to-peer message, properly encrypted, that tells the other peer, in effect: "this stream IS continuing, it has NOT been terminated, regardless of what you may receive to the contrary - any status message you receive that is NOT properly authenticated through encryption is bogus, so continue the transfer".
;-)
Since the very early days of computer communiciation, the security guys have been telling us "Secure communication is only possible if the entire conversation is encrypted end-to-end by the high-level software." They've usually been talking about keeping the conversation private, but this applies equally well to cases where an opponent is trying to sabotage the conversation, as Comcast is doing.
To my knowledge, there's nothing in the IP (or TCP or UDP) headers that would identify a conversation as bittorrent. If the packets' contents are all encrypted, it's not likely that an ISP could sabotage the conversation, other than by sabotaging all your traffic. Anyone know a way to identify a fully-encrypted bittorent packet stream?
More generally, this sort of thing should encourage us to move toward encrypting everything. This has already happened with a lot of major apps. Thus, telnet and rsh are all but gone on unix/linux systems, replaced by ssh. Similarly, file-transfer packages like ftp and rcp have been supplanted by scp, and rsync routinely uses ssl to encrypt its traffic. Most browsers and web servers support "https"; we just have to persuade people to use it more. VoIP can be encrypted by many of the packages that use it. (Can it be identified as VoIP if encrypted?)
We have reached a rather sad state, in which major corporations feel that it's OK for them to knowingly sabotage their customers who are using the product as it was designed to be used. But it does seem that we have a lot of renegade telecom corporations who do engage in such sabotage against their customers. So we should be working on defenses.
It does seem fairly obvious that we can't expect much help from any government here, since most governments (including the US) actively cooperate with the renegade telecom companies. So it looks like a situation where we should be calling on the "hacker" population to work on the universal encryption that we need.
Of course, we could just go to IPv6, right? Nah; that'll never happen.
So a government sanctioned monopoly ( or at least a monopoly the government doesn't hive a shit about trying to break up ) can be allowed to control communications, while simultaneously being obliged to provide information to the government under "National Security" concerns?
/. over and over. We've been told repeatedly that corporations have only one duty: to maximize their profit and thus payouts to shareholders. This is another way of saying that they aren't, and shouldn't be required to follow any laws (aka government regulation). And this argument is usually made in situations where what's being discussed would be illegal if a government agency did it.
...", so it clearly only limits the government. Private corporations are not so limited, and can legally enforce whatever rules they like limiting the information transferred via their hardware.
Yes, this is how things have been going in the US for some time now. You see, the folks in power have figured out something important: Those protections in the Constitution only apply to government organizations. The courts have upheld the idea that private corporations aren't required to obey the Constitution, because they're not government agencies, and the Constitution clearly only limits what government agencies can do.
The idea now is to "privatize" everything. That way, the Constitution's protections will be moot, because everything will be done by corporations, not government agencies, and when dealing with a corporation, you have no rights.
We've seen exactly this point argued here in
The current topic is a case of this. The government has First Amendment limits to how much it can control "speech", which to any rational reader would include information that people transfer electronically by any means, although when the Constitution was written, there was no such thing as electronic transfer of information. You and I clearly have a legal right to download a torrent of an ISO of last week's release of the latest ubuntu. But the First Amendment starts with "Congress shall make no law
So in the US, things like free speech and freedom of the press are essentially irrelevant now. The government can't limit them, but the government no longer much deals with them. It's more and more in the hands of unregulated corporations, and they have the right to do whatever they like with the data being trucked down their tubes. In particular, while the government may have no right to record your use of comm lines, the telecom companies do have this right, and they also have the right to hand over the information they gather to any government agencies that are interested. If they don't like us downloading those ISOs, they have the legal right to interfere with our downloads.
The only way out of this loophole is a constitutional amendment that extends the Bill of Rights to private corporations. This isn't likely to happen any time soon.
1. What is the time the GPS device averages over? On the devices I've seen it updates about every second. Unless you have a REALLY nice car you're not going to go from 65 to 90 and back down for long enough to average 65 over that kind of time.
It's "interesting" to read about GPS records being used in court. A couple years back, after getting a GPS gadget that mostly lives in one or the other of our cars, I discovered the records it had been keeping. Before zeroing them, I looked through them, and was a bit bemused to see that I had been recorded driving at speeds of up to 350 mph. Somehow, I was bit dubious that our cars had ever reached this speed.
Anyway, I started watching, and occasionally saw more "interesting" behavior from the GPS thingy. My favorite one was the day that I was driving south on a local street, and noticed that it showed me about a block north of where I was, and moving north. Then it suddenly jumped to the correct position. I quickly hit the button that changed it to the screen with all its numbers. In addition to the numeric coordinates, it said that it was moving south at over 200 mph. After a few seconds, its speed dropped to the same as the car's speedometer. But its records would have shown a sudden U-turn and acceleration to over 200 mph.
It might be interesting to present such evidence in a courtroom. For example, if the prosecution were to subpoena the GPS records as evidence, it could be fun to watch the reaction of the judge and jury when the GPS reported the above incident. If the GPS data showed a list of such maneuvers, would they conclude that I was a really reckless stunt driver?
The idea that a judge or jury might believe GPS records is even more scary than the idea that they'd automatically accept the testimony of a state employee who is being paid to give out speeding tickets, and whose job performance won't look so good if he doesn't give out any tickets.
They have traffic laws in Massachusetts? When did that happen?
Yeah; it happened a long time ago. And they've figured out ways to make them as difficult to follow as possible. When I moved to Mass. back in the 80s, I was tipped off by someone about a cute example. One of the questions on the written driver's license exam is about the meaning of the signs you see all over in suburbia and the countryside, saying "Thickly Settled". Any idea what this sign might mean?
What it is, is a speed limit sign. It means that, contrary to whatever speed limit sign you might have seen 50 or 100 feet back, the speed limit is now 35 mph. But there's no other clue that the speed limit might have changed. They take a point off the exam if you don't answer this one correctly, and they ticket you in lots of small towns if you keep driving at the speed you saw on that speed limit sign farther back.
There are a bunch of similar uses of non-standard signage, in ways that don't give readers a clue about what they're legally telling you. But I suppose this isn't a practice that's unique to Massachusetts. Tricking visitors into unknowingly violating local traffic laws is a popular means of "revenue enhancement" in lots of places.
take a look at http://www.oag.state.ny.us/press/2007/oct/oct23a_07.html
I see nothing in there that answers my questions. First, it's not a link to a page on a verizon site. And there's no occurrence of strings like "server", "ssh", "vpn", or anything dealing with such topics. And there's no mention of how long such agreements might be valid for, so by the time you get your service installed, they could have disavowed anything in any agreement you've read.
There is only ONE popular OS. Windows.
And there's one very good reason for this. Walk into any retail store (in the US) that sells computers and look at what's for sale. MS Windows. Usually nothing else. This isn't an accident. If, say, Chrysler had been able to block retail outlets from selling any cars but theirs, we know what would be the most "popular" kind of car. If grocery stores sold nothing but Post breakfast cereals, guess what most people would eat for breakfast.
Granted, some of the retail stores once sold Apple computers. They were usually hidden away in a corner, and the staff couldn't tell you anything about them, except in the rare case of a sales person who had bought one himself. This was so bad that Apple eventually threw up their hands, and built their own retail chain, at huge expense.
Try going into a retail store and try to talk them into selling you a linux box. They'll treat you like you're from Mars, even if you're actually from a company that assembles computers and installs linux on them. They simply won't discuss it with you.
It's easy to be the most "popular" product if you can prevent your competitors from ever appearing in stores.
Maybe eventually online sales will dominate over retail outlets. But we're nowhere near that stage yet.
Some years ago, around 1980 if I remember right there was a paper published reporting evidence for a ring system around the Earth in the past. They were doing a study of past climates, analyzing fossils laid down at various sites. They reported a period of roughly a million years during which the fossil evidence at all the sites showed normal summers but the tropical sites showed very cool winters and extinction of plants that weren't cold tolerant. The most likely explanation for a world-side pattern like this is a ring system, which shades the tropics while the sun is over the other hemisphere.
;-)
The reported time interval was around 30 or 40 million years ago. A quick google check turned up one summary with some references. (And my 1980 guess was pretty accurate.
Others have pointed out that the K-T impact 65 million years ago almost certainly produced at least a small ring system, but as far as I've read, no direct evidence of it has been reported.
Since April of 2007, Verizon Wireless has voluntarily ceased cutting off customers based on their data usage and no longer prohibits common internet uses.
Really? Their residential service now allows web and email servers? And ssh and vpn servers? And they guarantee that these will still be allowed 1 or 5 or 24 months from now? Got a link to a Verizon doc that promises this?
Mandriva 2008.0 ISO - 4.7 GB.
;-)
Well, there ya go. Verizon's CS people make it very clear that they only supply service to people running MS Windows. You're obvious a one of those weird linux hippies, and we don't need people like you in our neighborhood or on our network.
Really. I've helped some friends solve some problems with their Verizon internet link, and when we called CS, it quickly became clear that unless we had a Windows box on our end of the link, there was nothing they could do to help us. If it wasn't in their scripts, they simply didn't understand anything we said. (Even the few with an American accent.
Hey, what part of "make a profit" don't you understand, fella?
If this sort of decision is upheld on appeal, such a ban could easily mean the end of lots of companies, especially the biggest ones. How many do you think could sell their stuff at all without false advertising?
Anyway, we have Freedom of Speech in the US, right? What does this mean if we're not allowed to lie to our gullible customers? After all, anyone can tell the truth. The ability to tell a lie and get away with it is what freedom is all about.
Jeez; some people have no idea about how business works
(Consult Steven Colbert for much more information on this subject.)
Somebody had done a study on the impact of cow farts on greenhouse gasses once, ...
Actually, although cow farts are great for humorous comments on the issue, it's been known for some time that cattle produce most of their greenhouse gasses (methane and CO2) from their front end. The methane mostly comes from their complex stomaches, which are marvelous digesters for plant material, but also produce significant quantities of methane as a byproduct. Their large intestines do produce methane, as do ours, but in lesser quantities.
Another fun story on the topic was the study a few years ago that identified the other major source of atmospheric methane: termites. They also digest cellulose, using bacteria similar to those in cattle, and they produce lots of CO2 and CH4 as byproducts, too. They're small, but you wouldn't believe how many termites there are in the world. Imagine a trillion little termites, each continuously burping and farting while chomping their way through wood and other plant material. Try not to grin at the thought.
It turns out that large grazing animals and termites each produce roughly 1/3 of the atmospheric methane, and the remaining third is from zillions of small sources. Human agriculture and industry are high on the list, but a very distant third to ungulates and termites.
As for CO2, though, all animals produce it by necessity, proportional to their metabolism. But we've been augmenting this by mining the planet's storehouses of hydrocarbons (coal, oil, natural gas) and burning it. The amount is pretty well understood, and easily explains the roughly 50% increase in atmospheric CO2 over the last couple centuries (primarily the last half century). Production and consumption of CO2 was more or less balanced until recently, but we've radically upped the production without doing much to increase CO2 consumption. It really doesn't take great genius to understand what this might lead to. It just takes a lot of scientific sleuthing to document the details to the level that we've done in recent decades.
Will they let the chinese show up? Or maybe the Japanese?
;-)
Well, it'll pretty much have to be done outside the US, now that anyone in the country playing around with amateur rocketry is automatically classified as a ("suspected") terrorist and sent off to some other country for "interrogation". But it doesn't have to be Chinese or Japanese; it could be Canadians or Mexicans. (Or maybe Iraqis or Iranians.
While I'm NOT in the US, some day (soon?) this may be offered here.
;-)
;-)
In quite a lot of places in the world, better service is already available at a lower price.
Note that, as others have already pointed out, the number is 20 megaBITS up/down, not 20 megaBYTES. Most other ISPs use MB to mean "megabyte", so you must divide the Mb (megabit) rate by something between 8 and 10 to make a comparison, depending on how you count overhead.
We're talking about 2 to 3 MB up/down, and better speeds than that at a lower price are common in many other technically-advanced parts of the world.
(Take this as an invitation to others to brag about their local rates.
(And we can also have a flame war over who's "technically advanced".
Hey, this is Microsoft we're talking about. When have they ever worried about accuracy in anything they did?
the most commonly used format is lilypond, ...
Actually, the most commonly-used format, by a large margin, is ABC. It's a rather basic, plain-text notation, without without much in the way of fancy formatting. OTOH, it's fairly easy to read it directly. There's lots of mostly free software for it, and there are somewhat over 300,000 pieces of music online at about 350 ABC sites now. This is a couple orders of magnitude more than for lilypond, which is probably the closest competitor.
Those of us who have been using ABC for the past decade or so are mostly cheering on the purveyors of the other open music formats, like lilypond, rosegarden, Music[X]ML, etc. They are coming online slowly, and are all well worth investigating. All of them are good prospects for solving the interchange problems posed by the various proprietary music formatting packages.
Transcribing out-of-copyright editions of old music into any of these and putting them online would be a worthwhile project for anyone who wants to make a real contribution to our access to music.
So how could I use 20 Mb "up" if I'm not permitted to run a server? I can't think of many things on my machine (other than bittorrent ;-) that could even start to use such a capacity.
Take a good look at the TOS for this $65/month "internet service". It's not that at all; it's "browser and email service". Pretty much everything else is forbidden.
If you want true "internet service" (including the right to run any apps you like on your own machine), the best price I can find is about $200/month. If anyone knows better, can you provide a link to the appropriate verizon.com page?
... you'll probably find different behaviours from a caching and SEO viewpoint. PATH_INFO queries look more static, will be cached more aggressively, may rank better (because they are expected to be the same or similar on subsequent views), ...
Yeah; I ran across a caching gateway like that a while ago, while trying to debug some seriously wrong web behavior. The problem turned out to be, to simplify it somewhat, an app that was querying a remote server with a URL like http://some.where.com/foo/first to initialize access to some serial data, followed by URLs like http://some.where.com/foo/next to step through the data. The idiotic caching mechanism was intercepting these GETs of identical URLs, and replying to them from its cache. It totally shot down the app. We
had to play politics, including threats to sue for violations of contracts, to get it working. It turned out that we had no leverage over the people running the caching gateway box, and we had to "persuade" the people running the server to implement a different access mechanism that accepted a long string of differently-spelled "next" requests, in order to defeated the cache.
It can be impressive how easy it sometimes is to throw a monkey wrench into a simple, reliable mechanism, and force people to implement clumsy kludgery to trick the system in behaving sanely. This case was especially annoying, because we knew that the cache code was carefully caching our requests and the replies, filling its disk with data that would never be used again within the lifetime of the cache.
But this is a bit OT in this thread.
Given that I believe most early applications had to have it after a ? and the straight text is a fairly new thing, they might have done it early enough to be the first to do it.
You might believe that, but it'd be wrong. That ? is only needed if you want to pass more than one parameter to a CGI program. From the start, the CGI standard has specified that any junk after the program's pathname is passed to the program as a CGI environment variable called "PATH_INFO". Note the last-updated date on that document.
So back in 1995, if you used a URL like "http://example.com/cgi/srch/SomeJunk", and the server had an executable called "cgi/srch, the srch program would be run, and its environment would include a PATH_INFO variable with contents "/SomeJunk". It would do as it liked with that string. If it were a search program, as you might guess from the name "srch", it would presumably search for the string "SomeJunk" in whatever database it uses. The / here is used merely as a terminator for the file's pathname, to separate it from the next field. It could be various other non-alphanumeric chars, though / and ? would be the recommended chars for obvious reasons.
The ? char is a different mechanism, implemented by the server, which parses the trailing data and converts it into a list of parameters in the programs standard input stream. It's handy, but not needed if the program only wants one parameter. The PATH_INFO mechanism is more powerful, since it allows for arbitrary data, but the program must then do all the parsing itself.
Atleast Amazon can't patent THOSE methods now, since I've published them :) Amazon seems to make a living patenting obvious ideas, makes you wonder why they never patent anything REALLY original.
Actually, they probably can patent the things that you built years ago. Then they can sue you for violating their patent, and it'll be up to you to prove that you had the idea first. I hope you have kept enough evidence to convince the court, and enough money to pay your lawyers.
Fact is, the US Patent Office no longer does any serious patent examination. The huge expansion of patentable ideas back in the 1990s, plus dropping the need for a working demo, plus the decreases in Patent Office funding, means that they now pretty much just rubber-stamp patent applications and let the courts sort it out.