Unless we were arguing the same point. In which case it's nice to argue anthropology on slashdot!;)
Well, yeah, but the problem is that most people here (and elsewhere) are effectively arguing against a "strawman" scenario that nobody actually supports, and people are missing the real point of the dispute.
Nobody seriously argues that the human species originated anywhere but Africa. The evidence of that is overwhelming, and evidence of humans elsewhere on the planet is fairly recent (geologically speaking;-). It's obvious from the evidence that humans spread out from Africa, though exactly when depends on which fossils you accept as "human". It's better to say that "hominids" arose in Africa and spread from there.
The actual question being debated is whether all modern human genes originated in Africa and spread to the rest of the world, or whether some small number of alleles of a few genes appeared elsewhere and spread from there.
The problem with the sort of argument being made here is that it doesn't help to show that some specific set of genes arose in Africa. This says nothing at all about the possibility that some other alleles appeared elsewhere.
Since mutations are very close to random, the default assumption should be that mutations arose in all populations at a rate proportional to the size of each population. But note that this says nothing about where any specific mutation happened. To settle the argument would require finding proof that either 1) some specific allele(s) first appeared in a specific area outside of Africa and spread from there, or 2) finding proof that all alleles of all genes first appeared in Africa. So far, we haven't actually pinpointed the origin of even one allele of one gene. So arguing about it is basically silly.
(Actually, we do know the exact origin of a few recent mutations. Unfortunately, they are for things like haemophilia, and aren't likely to spread to the rest of the species.;-)
I just released JoeLinux - me and my 2 buddies use it,...
This reminds me again of the thought that has popped into my head the last N times this red herring pops up somewhere.
What someone should do it make a web site that has all the linux software that they can get their hands on, and pages that let you configure your own "distro" with just the stuff you want. A few scripts could collect it all, build a.iso file for you, and you could download it and burn it. Or you could pay them to burn you the CDs or DVD. Or maybe you could just install from across the Net. And maybe if you registered, you could have your distro saved.
When the word gets around and people start using it, we could start seeing complaints about the thousands and thousands of linux "distros", which obviously makes it totally unusable by ordinary people.
To use the worn-out auto metaphor, it'd be like how being able to order your car with the colors and other options you like makes it so difficult for ordinary people to figure out what they want their new car to look like.
I wonder why nobody has built a web site like this? Or maybe they have, and I just haven't noticed.
If you're the kind of person who finds it impossible to enjoy any movie if you know how it ends, I would suggest either seeing every movie on opening night or learning to live with disappointment.
In the case of the Harry Potter books, this doesn't seem to be as important as the media and marketers would have you believe. The books are so well written that many people have reported rereading them several times, getting more out of them each time. This wouldn't be true if the "ending" were all that important.
Harry seems to be one of those cases where many readers rush through a book the first time, and enjoy the "rush". Then they reread it again at leisure, to pick up the details (and premonitions) that they missed the first time.
Lots of people are predicting that Harry Potter is destined for "classic" status. For this to happen, knowing the ending can't be too important. The trip must be more important than the destination. After all, everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet ends, right. (For those who don't: They die. As in many of Shakespeare's works.;-)
SA was turned off years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and wasn't even re-enabled during or after them. SA has only since ever been used in isolated locations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
You do realize that you just contradicted yourself. You apparently agree that the DoD can enable SA for part of the set of satellites.
Also, that "in isolated locations" sounds like FUD. It's well-known that the GPS system doesn't do bidirectional conversations. Rather, the GPS satellites constantly broadcast their position and their clock's time to all receivers that can see them. A GPS satellite isn't "in" a ground location like Afghanistan or Iraq; it is in orbit. If a satellite starts sending out invalid numbers, every receiver for which that satellite is above the horizon will receive those numbers. This can't be restricted to an area like a small country.
The only thing silly is you believing that if SA is re-enabled for a location, Galileo won't be degraded either.
That's a good point, and I hope that people writing software to talk to Galileo will consider it. Galileo is owned by "Europe", which almost certainly means that NATO will have a strong influence on its design and operation. NATO is rather dominated by the US. Anyone who doesn't understand the implications is a fool.
Of course, this is just a stronger form of the more general warning: Galileo, like GPS, is a bunch of computers in orbit, subject to the usual effects of cosmic radiation, and running software developed by a bunch of different competing companies and government bureaucracies. Yes, it'll be a valuable addition to our world's navigation capabilities. But anyone who totally trusts it is a fool.
And, of course, we all know that the population running our corporations and governments has a significant "fool" component. Thus, we've already seen reports of commercial navigation for shipping and airlines that is effectively dependent on GPS, because the crews have gotten too rusty with other kinds of navigation to use it effectively in an emergency. This isn't yet true for all of them, but we are slowly moving to a world that depends totally on GPS (and Galileo and maybe GLONASS) for all navigation. So we should be having serious discussions of how to keep this world safe despite the actions of corporate and government bureaucracies.
Actually, citizens haven't had globally downgraded signals since May 1st, 2000.
In the past year, I've seen this sort of behavior while driving around in the lowlands of the Boston suburbs. Not off by 100 miles, but I've seen my GPS position off by 15 to 20 miles, for periods of 10 or 15 minutes. In one case, we even had three different brands of GPS receivers, and they all showed approximately the same error.
I don't know the explanation, of course; I'm just reporting some irreproducible observations of my own eyes.
If I was going to make some hardware, would I want it to use the EU system, the US system, or both? By using both you gain redundancy, reliability, and even accuracy.
Yeah; it's good to see that there are actually some sensible people in decision-making positions in some companies. Using both systems might mean an extra antenna, and will certainly mean somewhat more software. But the result should be much more reliable.
And when the US DoD decides to reactivate the "Selective Availability" (using the code that's there but turned off right now), we can hope that the programmers have the sense to write code that believes the Galileo data when the two systems disagree. If they do this, then the DoD's error-producing code will look even sillier than it does now.
Actually, I can see them requesting occasional tests in which the GPS's errors are activated briefly. This would be a good way to test the correctness of code to deal with the errors. And smart programmers would record the data from various satellites during the test, for use in testing during normal periods. It's always good to have test data that simulates realistic failure-mode conditions.
At least in closed source they have to build their own instead of being able to rip off the code or design. Yep - because locking away source code has stopped the likes of Microsoft so many times in the past.
Yah; I've long wondered why people would say such things. It seems fairly obvious that with secret, proprietary code, it would be fairly easy to rip off lots of open-source code without anyone ever knowing. You'd want to make a few tweaks, of course, so that obscure corner behavior (and bugs) would be slightly different. But from my experience with corporate software development, I'd expect that there is lots of stolen open-source stuff out there.
I've even had fun on a couple of projects convincing the management that maybe such unethical behavior really isn't right. Arguing ethics isn't the approach, of course; your argument has to be based on "What happens if you get caught? Do you want the authors of that open-source software owning your product?"
Persuading them that they really oughta share their improvements with the authors is even harder. You'd think that "It's for your own good in the long run" would work, but it's hard to demo this when "the long run" means anything after the current fiscal quarter.
What is "innate fear"? I would suggest that in fact, no such thing exists. Instead, virtually all fear is learned.
To remove the emotion-laden human element, I'd mention that anyone who had kittens and puppies in their house will immediately think of examples of innate fear.
When kittens are first introduced to dogs of any sort, they almost always go instantly into a fear response. They arch their back, their back fur stand up, they hiss, and they attack the dog with their claws. They don't show this reaction to humans, or to much of anything else; it's a dog-specific instinctive response that happens at the first encounter with a dog.
Puppies, on the other hand, usually react to cats with curiosity, as they react to just about everything. When the cat attacks, puppies are surprised and don't quite know how to handle it. ("Why do they hate me?" comes to mind.;-) Dogs have to learn about cats; cats don't have to learn about dogs because they have hard-wired reactions to things that smell "doggy".
Humans do differ from most other mammals in having much weaker instincts, and depend on learning for most of their knowledge. This is part of what has made us the dominant creature on the planet. But it's silly to claim that humans don't have any innate responses. If that were true, we couldn't ever learn anything, because learning is a behavior, and some part of it must be innate. Computer people refer to this as a "bootstrap problem". You have to have some innate behavior, else you can't ever have any behavior.
Others have mentioned a number of innate human behaviors (other than learning about their environment), so I won't bother.
Why would you change a dictionary based on the miss[sic]-use of the word by corrupt politicians?
Perhaps because you want your dictionary to explain to people whose English isn't very good the various ways that the word is actually used, especially by politicians.
Can you imagine if we did that for everything politicians lied or campaigned about?
Yes; it would enable people without very good English to understand what those politicians are really saying. This would include a lot of people whose native language is English.
A number of minor dictionary makers have done exactly this sort of thing. The most famous is Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", published a little over a century ago. It's fun reading, especially since so many of his definitions still apply. Steven Colbert does something similar with his "the Word" segment, with all the verbal irony of his "conservative" persona in full play.
(And isn't it fun to answer rhetorical questions as if they were actual questions?;-)
For fuck sake people, everyone you dislike is NOT a terrorist.
Well, not under the original definition, perhaps. We might identify that definition as "terrorist1", something like:
terrorist1, n. A person carrying out attacks on a civilian population with the purpose of inducing a state of terror in the population, in order to put pressure on their government to change policies.
But if you look for the term in current English texts, you'll find it mostly used in the US and UK, and the definition has clearly changed. Some (but not all) of the recent activities of the US and UK government do satisfy the above terrorist1 definition. Consider the "Shock and Awe" slogan during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is a clear statement of an intent to invoke terror of American firepower in the minds of the civilian population, and the purpose was a takeover of the local government, so it is clear that "terrorist1" applies to the people who used this slogan.
However, hardly anyone in the US or UK media would agree, and they never apply the term "terrorist" to their own government's actions. If you study current usage, you'll find that there is now a new "terrorist2" definition. This usage may be explained in most cases as:
terrorist2, n. Someone that the speaker/writer strongly dislikes; typically used with the purpose of inducing a similar dislike in listeners/readers.
Now, most English dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Their purpose is to aid readers trying to understand texts written in English, rather than to inform readers about some "correct" usage. So we can expect that English dictionaries will soon have an entry something like:
terrorist, n. 1) obs. A person carrying out attacks on a civilian population with the purpose of inducing a state of terror in the population, in order to put pressure on their government to change policies. 2) Someone that the speaker/writer strongly dislikes; typically used with the purpose of inducing a similar dislike in listeners/readers.
I'd expect that many of the dictionary makers already have such a definition prepared for their next issue.
It's an unfortunate artifact of human languages that correctly understanding words often depends on knowledge of when and where the words were used. Many words change their meaning over a time span of a few decades. We are seeing just one of thousands of examples here.
We might also note that most dictionaries published in the US call themselves dictionaries of "the American language", not "English", and have done so for quite a long time.
Re:I would agree back then, but not today.
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Patents Don't Pay
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The first step towards fixing the patent system should be to actually enforce the existing rules, then we can see what actually needs to be changed.
Not likely. At least in the US, a big part of the problem has been that the radical expansion of what can be patented (without working models required) has been accompanied by decreasing funding for the Patent Office. It's part of the current "conservative" trend, which opposes government spending for anything except the military.
Enforcing the current patent laws would be extremely expensive. It would also take a long time to implement, too, because you can't just go out and hire patent examiners with expertise in things like computer software. Such experts don't exist, and training the people required would take many years. But this is moot, because the Patent Office couldn't hire them anyway, due to lack of funding.
The only approach that now works is that the Patent Office does minimal examination, and approves most patents. Then it's up to the courts to decide which are valid. This leads to the situation of patents written in legalese, since patents now need to be readable by lawyers and judges, but not by engineers. This also leads to potentially more infringements, of course, which is the main purpose of patents now.
Enforcing the current rules is an interesting dream, but there's no way it can happen in the US, giving current funding restrictions and prospects for future funding. Similar evolutions of the patent system seem to be happening in other parts of the world, too.
Yeah, I know; you'd think that the term "fraud" would apply. But I've never heard or read about any publisher ever being convicted and fined for a false copyright claim. Anyone know of a case where this happened?
If convictions and fines don't ever happen, it's "legal" in the obvious practical sense. And publishers certainly seem to have no fear of prosecution. If you look at editions of old literature or music, you almost always see copyright claims, with no hint that it might be only a copyright on that particular physical rendition of the material. Publishers almost always claim "copyright" with no qualifications. Sometimes not even a date.
Myself, I'd like to see a publisher prosecuted for fraud for such claims. It might be a useful precedent, to convince them that maybe they shouldn't lie so much about what they claim to own.
What I'd do with this wonderful example is observe that it contains the literal string "Hello World!" which is its sole rigid output. Clearly we need a new feature: The program should be able to substitute a person's (or organization's) name for the "World" substring. If properly done, this can at least double the amount of code.
And when that's working, I'd suggest adding to its power and flexibility by making it possible to pass a login id or possibly an email address to the code, and have it look up the name in any of several places. Extending the code to do a network "whois" can easily turn it into a major work of art, incomprehensible to all but a few Chosen who have been initiated into the Mysteries.
As far as I know we're not talking about formatting.
On every project I've ever worked on, when ideas like code standards or "readability" are brought up, it has always meant formatting. Always. After 40 some years of programming, I've yet to see an exception.
Funny thing is that the resulting management-decreed code standards always make the code harder to read. This is mostly for the trivial reason that such standards always introduce many line feeds and sillinesses like lines that contain only a brace, decreasing the number of lines visible in an edit window and forcing much waste of time scrolling up and down. There are other ways of making the code less readable, but stringing the code out vertically is the most common and most effective.
I suppose you could say that a chunk of code that zig-zags down the screen, one or two tokens per line, is "pretty", as an abstract artsy sort of wallpaper. But to a programmer trying to understand it, it's pretty ugly.
On a number of projects, I've written little reformatting programs, one to put code into the "standard" format for the project, and several others to put it into more compact formats that various programmers prefer. That way, the managers get to see "pretty" code that they like (but don't bother actually reading), while the programmers can put it into forms that they find more readable.
We could all ostensibly be blackmailed into committing crimes: "do this thing, or we'll kill you/your wife/your kids/your pets". That still doesn't give the FBI a legitimate interest in spying on me.
Actually, that's "extortion", not "blackmail". Different crime.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky. But when you go to court, it can sometimes be important to get the charges right.
Why are people afraid of running open source software? It's not like you are going to get sued just for running GIMP.
Actually, the main goal of the anti-OSS FUD campaign is to convince people of exactly this possibility. If you read that "Why Is Indemnification Important?" paragraph critically, you'll see that its entire point is to insinuate that people are being sued for using open-source software. While the text never actually states this, that's how most people will understand it. Such misleading calumnies against your competitors is a very old marketing tactic.
Anyone who actually reads the GPL (any version) will see that the only thing it actually does is to tell you that you can use the software as you like without fear of being sued. The only restriction is that you can't turn around and sell the software without including the same license. So it has to be at least as legally safe as any proprietary software, which usually comes with usage restrictions that you can easily violate.
But most managers in most companies have never read any version of the GPL, mostly because they've never heard of the GPL. They have no idea what this "Open Source" brand might be, except that they suspect that it doesn't come from IBM or Microsoft. This makes them the natural prey for marketers whose primary intent is to prevent people from buying a quality product that costs less than whatever the marketers are marketing.
And there's a long precedent in the computer biz for using fear of lawsuits as a marketing ploy. Since at least the 1960s there have been saying that "Nobody ever got fired [sued] for buying IBM." Often this is preceded by "It may be crap, but...." Since at least the 1990s, the same saying has been used with Microsoft for IBM. We're just seeing this old anti-small-vendor marketing ploy used again.
[T]he entire GPL movement was because Stallman was to Lazy to walk up a flight of stares to see if his document printed or not.
You're not the first to make such an observation. One of Larry Wall's most famous remarks is that the chief virtues of a good programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. He used this to explain a lot of his design of the perl programming language, for example, which appeals to exactly this sort of person. By Larry's standards, and lots of other evidence, RMS is indeed a very good programmer.;-)
Neo1912324, running OpenMoko, released just for developers... What does it do? It's got advanced features running on Linux and is unlocked. Normal people will see absolutely nothing in that phone,...
Y'know; I was thinking similar thoughts. I've been looking at the openmoko stuff for some time, and one thing I can't actually answer: If I were to buy one now, could I actually use it as a cell phone? Or is that one of the apps that I'd have to write myself? I keep thinking this question is answered somewhere, but I can't find anything that actually says.
Also, if I bought one and tried to use it instead of my current (t-mobile) GSM phone, could I also actually get to the internet from it? Or would I find that t-mobile blocks it, and I'd have to get some expensive new service to use it?
I'd be interested in building some software for it. But I'm sorta curious about whether I could actually start writing my own network apps right now, using my current cell-phone contract. Or would I have to write the low-level comms stuff (which could be fun, too), and sign up for some new contract? Or would I maybe find that I can't actually use it with any cell-phone system in the US?
Maybe I should wander around at random in their web site some more; eventually I might stumble across answers to the most basic questions.
Yes; I've found - and read - the FAQ. It doesn't seem to answer such questions. So I've remained in the "wait and watch" state of curiosity until the answers pop up somewhere.;-)
It's not clear to me if the local Verizon guys will let me keep copper for my phones. They may, they may not. I've heard stories about it going both ways.
You might want to find a better way to express what you want. Go look for the "gotcha" story above by neildiamond (610251). He got Verizon to agree to leave the copper wires, and they did. But they removed anything that wasn't a copper wire, including the stuff back at the office that made it useful.
You want more than just the "copper"; you want a phone line that you can, for example, plug a phone into and call 911, and it'll work. If you aren't careful, the phone company folks will use weasel words to make you believe they're leaving your old phone line intact, when they have no intention of ever allowing it to work again. They don't care about the copper wires inside your house; they just don't want to ever supply that sort of service to you again.
Then a year later, they'll up the rate for your FIOS line by 50% or more, because they're a legal monopoly with no need to negotiate with you any more, and no regulatory requirement that they allow a CLEC to supply your IP service over FIOS.
Maybe it's because I'm in the US, where vendors have never heard of any language but English, but there's a major problem I've been trying to solve: My wife and I have a bunch of files in languages like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. When we try to print them, they come out gibberish (the technical term is mojibake). Most of the time, most software can't even display them correctly on the screen. Or some of the chars are correct and others aren't. Or, with Arabic, only the isolate forms of the characters are shown, which is pretty unreadable. We've even had gibberish printed for simple Russian, which is especially puzzling considering that there's nothing at all tricky about their alphabet.
Anyway, I've been trying to research this, and found lots of sites talking around the problem, but nowhere have I yet found anything like a HOWTO that explains just how to make it work with any OS. And we have this problem on linux, OSX, and Windows (XT for now).
Since linux, especially ubuntu, is an "international" OS, you'd think that we could find an answer on the ubuntu sites, but no luck so far. And you'd think thatgoogle could locate solutions, but the obvious keywords return millions of hits that seem totally off the topic.
Funny thing is that, on linux or OSX, a window terminal and the vi[m] editor seem to display all these non-English files just fine. This proves that I've got all the fonts installed so that at least one program can find them. And several browsers (firefox, opera, safari) seem to display them correctly, only messing up when I try to send a page to a printer.
Is this just a problem in the US? Is the rest of the world intentionally hiding the simple solutions from us, while happily printing all their non-English files with no problems? Is there some way to make this "just work" (as the Mac people like to claim even when it fails spectacularly)?
This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that a person is isolated in a room with a complex instruction manual, and that person receives cards with Chinese characters. Using the instruction manual, the person translates the characters into English. The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chinese translation.
And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this scenario. For a lot of fun examples of the results, visit engrish.com and wander around a bit. You'll quickly find a lot of example of the results of word-by-word translation. In the case of east Asian writing, translating individual characters without understanding that there are multi-character words can lead to especially humorous results. But even some of the "correct" translations are hilarious. And sometimes, of course, you just can't tell what was meant unless you can read the original.
The reason that computerized translation has been "5 years away" for so many decades is that the job requires intelligence and understanding. Doing it mechanically as a text-substitution process simply doesn't work very well. But it's a good source of humor.
(Reports are that the Chinese government is preparing for their upcoming Olympics by replacing a lot of multilingual signs with better translations. This has led to complaints that they are taking a lot of the fun out of trying to find your way around in Beijing.;-)
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So, he admits being wrong? Nooo, that's not how human beings behave, stop it!
The conclusion is obvious: He's not a human. He's a visiting alien trying to pass for human. But we caught him by his non-human behavior!
Unless we were arguing the same point. In which case it's nice to argue anthropology on slashdot! ;)
;-). It's obvious from the evidence that humans spread out from Africa, though exactly when depends on which fossils you accept as "human". It's better to say that "hominids" arose in Africa and spread from there.
;-)
Well, yeah, but the problem is that most people here (and elsewhere) are effectively arguing against a "strawman" scenario that nobody actually supports, and people are missing the real point of the dispute.
Nobody seriously argues that the human species originated anywhere but Africa. The evidence of that is overwhelming, and evidence of humans elsewhere on the planet is fairly recent (geologically speaking
The actual question being debated is whether all modern human genes originated in Africa and spread to the rest of the world, or whether some small number of alleles of a few genes appeared elsewhere and spread from there.
The problem with the sort of argument being made here is that it doesn't help to show that some specific set of genes arose in Africa. This says nothing at all about the possibility that some other alleles appeared elsewhere.
Since mutations are very close to random, the default assumption should be that mutations arose in all populations at a rate proportional to the size of each population. But note that this says nothing about where any specific mutation happened. To settle the argument would require finding proof that either 1) some specific allele(s) first appeared in a specific area outside of Africa and spread from there, or 2) finding proof that all alleles of all genes first appeared in Africa. So far, we haven't actually pinpointed the origin of even one allele of one gene. So arguing about it is basically silly.
(Actually, we do know the exact origin of a few recent mutations. Unfortunately, they are for things like haemophilia, and aren't likely to spread to the rest of the species.
I just released JoeLinux - me and my 2 buddies use it, ...
.iso file for you, and you could download it and burn it. Or you could pay them to burn you the CDs or DVD. Or maybe you could just install from across the Net. And maybe if you registered, you could have your distro saved.
This reminds me again of the thought that has popped into my head the last N times this red herring pops up somewhere.
What someone should do it make a web site that has all the linux software that they can get their hands on, and pages that let you configure your own "distro" with just the stuff you want. A few scripts could collect it all, build a
When the word gets around and people start using it, we could start seeing complaints about the thousands and thousands of linux "distros", which obviously makes it totally unusable by ordinary people.
To use the worn-out auto metaphor, it'd be like how being able to order your car with the colors and other options you like makes it so difficult for ordinary people to figure out what they want their new car to look like.
I wonder why nobody has built a web site like this? Or maybe they have, and I just haven't noticed.
If you're the kind of person who finds it impossible to enjoy any movie if you know how it ends, I would suggest either seeing every movie on opening night or learning to live with disappointment.
;-)
In the case of the Harry Potter books, this doesn't seem to be as important as the media and marketers would have you believe. The books are so well written that many people have reported rereading them several times, getting more out of them each time. This wouldn't be true if the "ending" were all that important.
Harry seems to be one of those cases where many readers rush through a book the first time, and enjoy the "rush". Then they reread it again at leisure, to pick up the details (and premonitions) that they missed the first time.
Lots of people are predicting that Harry Potter is destined for "classic" status. For this to happen, knowing the ending can't be too important. The trip must be more important than the destination. After all, everyone knows how Romeo and Juliet ends, right. (For those who don't: They die. As in many of Shakespeare's works.
Shit, man, I'm making a spoiler-filled sandwich board and wearing it to the midnight release at B&N.
Make several of them, with incompatible spoilers, and switch back and forth every few minutes.
SA was turned off years before the 9/11 terrorist attacks and wasn't even re-enabled during or after them. SA has only since ever been used in isolated locations such as Afghanistan and Iraq.
You do realize that you just contradicted yourself. You apparently agree that the DoD can enable SA for part of the set of satellites.
Also, that "in isolated locations" sounds like FUD. It's well-known that the GPS system doesn't do bidirectional conversations. Rather, the GPS satellites constantly broadcast their position and their clock's time to all receivers that can see them. A GPS satellite isn't "in" a ground location like Afghanistan or Iraq; it is in orbit. If a satellite starts sending out invalid numbers, every receiver for which that satellite is above the horizon will receive those numbers. This can't be restricted to an area like a small country.
The only thing silly is you believing that if SA is re-enabled for a location, Galileo won't be degraded either.
That's a good point, and I hope that people writing software to talk to Galileo will consider it. Galileo is owned by "Europe", which almost certainly means that NATO will have a strong influence on its design and operation. NATO is rather dominated by the US. Anyone who doesn't understand the implications is a fool.
Of course, this is just a stronger form of the more general warning: Galileo, like GPS, is a bunch of computers in orbit, subject to the usual effects of cosmic radiation, and running software developed by a bunch of different competing companies and government bureaucracies. Yes, it'll be a valuable addition to our world's navigation capabilities. But anyone who totally trusts it is a fool.
And, of course, we all know that the population running our corporations and governments has a significant "fool" component. Thus, we've already seen reports of commercial navigation for shipping and airlines that is effectively dependent on GPS, because the crews have gotten too rusty with other kinds of navigation to use it effectively in an emergency. This isn't yet true for all of them, but we are slowly moving to a world that depends totally on GPS (and Galileo and maybe GLONASS) for all navigation. So we should be having serious discussions of how to keep this world safe despite the actions of corporate and government bureaucracies.
Actually, citizens haven't had globally downgraded signals since May 1st, 2000.
In the past year, I've seen this sort of behavior while driving around in the lowlands of the Boston suburbs. Not off by 100 miles, but I've seen my GPS position off by 15 to 20 miles, for periods of 10 or 15 minutes. In one case, we even had three different brands of GPS receivers, and they all showed approximately the same error.
I don't know the explanation, of course; I'm just reporting some irreproducible observations of my own eyes.
If I was going to make some hardware, would I want it to use the EU system, the US system, or both? By using both you gain redundancy, reliability, and even accuracy.
Yeah; it's good to see that there are actually some sensible people in decision-making positions in some companies. Using both systems might mean an extra antenna, and will certainly mean somewhat more software. But the result should be much more reliable.
And when the US DoD decides to reactivate the "Selective Availability" (using the code that's there but turned off right now), we can hope that the programmers have the sense to write code that believes the Galileo data when the two systems disagree. If they do this, then the DoD's error-producing code will look even sillier than it does now.
Actually, I can see them requesting occasional tests in which the GPS's errors are activated briefly. This would be a good way to test the correctness of code to deal with the errors. And smart programmers would record the data from various satellites during the test, for use in testing during normal periods. It's always good to have test data that simulates realistic failure-mode conditions.
At least in closed source they have to build their own instead of being able to rip off the code or design.
Yep - because locking away source code has stopped the likes of Microsoft so many times in the past.
Yah; I've long wondered why people would say such things. It seems fairly obvious that with secret, proprietary code, it would be fairly easy to rip off lots of open-source code without anyone ever knowing. You'd want to make a few tweaks, of course, so that obscure corner behavior (and bugs) would be slightly different. But from my experience with corporate software development, I'd expect that there is lots of stolen open-source stuff out there.
I've even had fun on a couple of projects convincing the management that maybe such unethical behavior really isn't right. Arguing ethics isn't the approach, of course; your argument has to be based on "What happens if you get caught? Do you want the authors of that open-source software owning your product?"
Persuading them that they really oughta share their improvements with the authors is even harder. You'd think that "It's for your own good in the long run" would work, but it's hard to demo this when "the long run" means anything after the current fiscal quarter.
What is "innate fear"? I would suggest that in fact, no such thing exists. Instead, virtually all fear is learned.
;-) Dogs have to learn about cats; cats don't have to learn about dogs because they have hard-wired reactions to things that smell "doggy".
To remove the emotion-laden human element, I'd mention that anyone who had kittens and puppies in their house will immediately think of examples of innate fear.
When kittens are first introduced to dogs of any sort, they almost always go instantly into a fear response. They arch their back, their back fur stand up, they hiss, and they attack the dog with their claws. They don't show this reaction to humans, or to much of anything else; it's a dog-specific instinctive response that happens at the first encounter with a dog.
Puppies, on the other hand, usually react to cats with curiosity, as they react to just about everything. When the cat attacks, puppies are surprised and don't quite know how to handle it. ("Why do they hate me?" comes to mind.
Humans do differ from most other mammals in having much weaker instincts, and depend on learning for most of their knowledge. This is part of what has made us the dominant creature on the planet. But it's silly to claim that humans don't have any innate responses. If that were true, we couldn't ever learn anything, because learning is a behavior, and some part of it must be innate. Computer people refer to this as a "bootstrap problem". You have to have some innate behavior, else you can't ever have any behavior.
Others have mentioned a number of innate human behaviors (other than learning about their environment), so I won't bother.
Why would you change a dictionary based on the miss[sic]-use of the word by corrupt politicians?
;-)
Perhaps because you want your dictionary to explain to people whose English isn't very good the various ways that the word is actually used, especially by politicians.
Can you imagine if we did that for everything politicians lied or campaigned about?
Yes; it would enable people without very good English to understand what those politicians are really saying. This would include a lot of people whose native language is English.
A number of minor dictionary makers have done exactly this sort of thing. The most famous is Ambrose Bierce's "Devil's Dictionary", published a little over a century ago. It's fun reading, especially since so many of his definitions still apply. Steven Colbert does something similar with his "the Word" segment, with all the verbal irony of his "conservative" persona in full play.
(And isn't it fun to answer rhetorical questions as if they were actual questions?
For fuck sake people, everyone you dislike is NOT a terrorist.
Well, not under the original definition, perhaps. We might identify that definition as "terrorist1", something like:
terrorist1, n. A person carrying out attacks on a civilian population with the purpose of inducing a state of terror in the population, in order to put pressure on their government to change policies.
But if you look for the term in current English texts, you'll find it mostly used in the US and UK, and the definition has clearly changed. Some (but not all) of the recent activities of the US and UK government do satisfy the above terrorist1 definition. Consider the "Shock and Awe" slogan during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. This is a clear statement of an intent to invoke terror of American firepower in the minds of the civilian population, and the purpose was a takeover of the local government, so it is clear that "terrorist1" applies to the people who used this slogan.
However, hardly anyone in the US or UK media would agree, and they never apply the term "terrorist" to their own government's actions. If you study current usage, you'll find that there is now a new "terrorist2" definition. This usage may be explained in most cases as:
terrorist2, n. Someone that the speaker/writer strongly dislikes; typically used with the purpose of inducing a similar dislike in listeners/readers.
Now, most English dictionaries are descriptive rather than prescriptive. Their purpose is to aid readers trying to understand texts written in English, rather than to inform readers about some "correct" usage. So we can expect that English dictionaries will soon have an entry something like:
terrorist, n. 1) obs. A person carrying out attacks on a civilian population with the purpose of inducing a state of terror in the population, in order to put pressure on their government to change policies. 2) Someone that the speaker/writer strongly dislikes; typically used with the purpose of inducing a similar dislike in listeners/readers.
I'd expect that many of the dictionary makers already have such a definition prepared for their next issue.
It's an unfortunate artifact of human languages that correctly understanding words often depends on knowledge of when and where the words were used. Many words change their meaning over a time span of a few decades. We are seeing just one of thousands of examples here.
We might also note that most dictionaries published in the US call themselves dictionaries of "the American language", not "English", and have done so for quite a long time.
The first step towards fixing the patent system should be to actually enforce the existing rules, then we can see what actually needs to be changed.
Not likely. At least in the US, a big part of the problem has been that the radical expansion of what can be patented (without working models required) has been accompanied by decreasing funding for the Patent Office. It's part of the current "conservative" trend, which opposes government spending for anything except the military.
Enforcing the current patent laws would be extremely expensive. It would also take a long time to implement, too, because you can't just go out and hire patent examiners with expertise in things like computer software. Such experts don't exist, and training the people required would take many years. But this is moot, because the Patent Office couldn't hire them anyway, due to lack of funding.
The only approach that now works is that the Patent Office does minimal examination, and approves most patents. Then it's up to the courts to decide which are valid. This leads to the situation of patents written in legalese, since patents now need to be readable by lawyers and judges, but not by engineers. This also leads to potentially more infringements, of course, which is the main purpose of patents now.
Enforcing the current rules is an interesting dream, but there's no way it can happen in the US, giving current funding restrictions and prospects for future funding. Similar evolutions of the patent system seem to be happening in other parts of the world, too.
Yeah, I know; you'd think that the term "fraud" would apply. But I've never heard or read about any publisher ever being convicted and fined for a false copyright claim. Anyone know of a case where this happened?
If convictions and fines don't ever happen, it's "legal" in the obvious practical sense. And publishers certainly seem to have no fear of prosecution. If you look at editions of old literature or music, you almost always see copyright claims, with no hint that it might be only a copyright on that particular physical rendition of the material. Publishers almost always claim "copyright" with no qualifications. Sometimes not even a date.
Myself, I'd like to see a publisher prosecuted for fraud for such claims. It might be a useful precedent, to convince them that maybe they shouldn't lie so much about what they claim to own.
What I'd do with this wonderful example is observe that it contains the literal string "Hello World!" which is its sole rigid output. Clearly we need a new feature: The program should be able to substitute a person's (or organization's) name for the "World" substring. If properly done, this can at least double the amount of code.
And when that's working, I'd suggest adding to its power and flexibility by making it possible to pass a login id or possibly an email address to the code, and have it look up the name in any of several places. Extending the code to do a network "whois" can easily turn it into a major work of art, incomprehensible to all but a few Chosen who have been initiated into the Mysteries.
As far as I know we're not talking about formatting.
On every project I've ever worked on, when ideas like code standards or "readability" are brought up, it has always meant formatting. Always. After 40 some years of programming, I've yet to see an exception.
Funny thing is that the resulting management-decreed code standards always make the code harder to read. This is mostly for the trivial reason that such standards always introduce many line feeds and sillinesses like lines that contain only a brace, decreasing the number of lines visible in an edit window and forcing much waste of time scrolling up and down. There are other ways of making the code less readable, but stringing the code out vertically is the most common and most effective.
I suppose you could say that a chunk of code that zig-zags down the screen, one or two tokens per line, is "pretty", as an abstract artsy sort of wallpaper. But to a programmer trying to understand it, it's pretty ugly.
On a number of projects, I've written little reformatting programs, one to put code into the "standard" format for the project, and several others to put it into more compact formats that various programmers prefer. That way, the managers get to see "pretty" code that they like (but don't bother actually reading), while the programmers can put it into forms that they find more readable.
We could all ostensibly be blackmailed into committing crimes: "do this thing, or we'll kill you/your wife/your kids/your pets". That still doesn't give the FBI a legitimate interest in spying on me.
Actually, that's "extortion", not "blackmail". Different crime.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky, picky. But when you go to court, it can sometimes be important to get the charges right.
Why are people afraid of running open source software? It's not like you are going to get sued just for running GIMP.
...." Since at least the 1990s, the same saying has been used with Microsoft for IBM. We're just seeing this old anti-small-vendor marketing ploy used again.
Actually, the main goal of the anti-OSS FUD campaign is to convince people of exactly this possibility. If you read that "Why Is Indemnification Important?" paragraph critically, you'll see that its entire point is to insinuate that people are being sued for using open-source software. While the text never actually states this, that's how most people will understand it. Such misleading calumnies against your competitors is a very old marketing tactic.
Anyone who actually reads the GPL (any version) will see that the only thing it actually does is to tell you that you can use the software as you like without fear of being sued. The only restriction is that you can't turn around and sell the software without including the same license. So it has to be at least as legally safe as any proprietary software, which usually comes with usage restrictions that you can easily violate.
But most managers in most companies have never read any version of the GPL, mostly because they've never heard of the GPL. They have no idea what this "Open Source" brand might be, except that they suspect that it doesn't come from IBM or Microsoft. This makes them the natural prey for marketers whose primary intent is to prevent people from buying a quality product that costs less than whatever the marketers are marketing.
And there's a long precedent in the computer biz for using fear of lawsuits as a marketing ploy. Since at least the 1960s there have been saying that "Nobody ever got fired [sued] for buying IBM." Often this is preceded by "It may be crap, but
[T]he entire GPL movement was because Stallman was to Lazy to walk up a flight of stares to see if his document printed or not.
;-)
You're not the first to make such an observation. One of Larry Wall's most famous remarks is that the chief virtues of a good programmer are laziness, impatience and hubris. He used this to explain a lot of his design of the perl programming language, for example, which appeals to exactly this sort of person. By Larry's standards, and lots of other evidence, RMS is indeed a very good programmer.
The simple fact is that the vast majority of blogs are heavily biased, poorly researched opinionated editorials.
And this differs from the typical "in-depth article" how?
Are books better than book reviews?
Are apples better than oranges?
Neo1912324, running OpenMoko, released just for developers ... What does it do? It's got advanced features running on Linux and is unlocked. ...
;-)
Normal people will see absolutely nothing in that phone,
Y'know; I was thinking similar thoughts. I've been looking at the openmoko stuff for some time, and one thing I can't actually answer: If I were to buy one now, could I actually use it as a cell phone? Or is that one of the apps that I'd have to write myself? I keep thinking this question is answered somewhere, but I can't find anything that actually says.
Also, if I bought one and tried to use it instead of my current (t-mobile) GSM phone, could I also actually get to the internet from it? Or would I find that t-mobile blocks it, and I'd have to get some expensive new service to use it?
I'd be interested in building some software for it. But I'm sorta curious about whether I could actually start writing my own network apps right now, using my current cell-phone contract. Or would I have to write the low-level comms stuff (which could be fun, too), and sign up for some new contract? Or would I maybe find that I can't actually use it with any cell-phone system in the US?
Maybe I should wander around at random in their web site some more; eventually I might stumble across answers to the most basic questions.
Yes; I've found - and read - the FAQ. It doesn't seem to answer such questions. So I've remained in the "wait and watch" state of curiosity until the answers pop up somewhere.
It's not clear to me if the local Verizon guys will let me keep copper for my phones. They may, they may not. I've heard stories about it going both ways.
You might want to find a better way to express what you want. Go look for the "gotcha" story above by neildiamond (610251). He got Verizon to agree to leave the copper wires, and they did. But they removed anything that wasn't a copper wire, including the stuff back at the office that made it useful.
You want more than just the "copper"; you want a phone line that you can, for example, plug a phone into and call 911, and it'll work. If you aren't careful, the phone company folks will use weasel words to make you believe they're leaving your old phone line intact, when they have no intention of ever allowing it to work again. They don't care about the copper wires inside your house; they just don't want to ever supply that sort of service to you again.
Then a year later, they'll up the rate for your FIOS line by 50% or more, because they're a legal monopoly with no need to negotiate with you any more, and no regulatory requirement that they allow a CLEC to supply your IP service over FIOS.
Maybe it's because I'm in the US, where vendors have never heard of any language but English, but there's a major problem I've been trying to solve: My wife and I have a bunch of files in languages like Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, etc. When we try to print them, they come out gibberish (the technical term is mojibake). Most of the time, most software can't even display them correctly on the screen. Or some of the chars are correct and others aren't. Or, with Arabic, only the isolate forms of the characters are shown, which is pretty unreadable. We've even had gibberish printed for simple Russian, which is especially puzzling considering that there's nothing at all tricky about their alphabet.
...
Anyway, I've been trying to research this, and found lots of sites talking around the problem, but nowhere have I yet found anything like a HOWTO that explains just how to make it work with any OS. And we have this problem on linux, OSX, and Windows (XT for now).
Since linux, especially ubuntu, is an "international" OS, you'd think that we could find an answer on the ubuntu sites, but no luck so far. And you'd think thatgoogle could locate solutions, but the obvious keywords return millions of hits that seem totally off the topic.
Funny thing is that, on linux or OSX, a window terminal and the vi[m] editor seem to display all these non-English files just fine. This proves that I've got all the fonts installed so that at least one program can find them. And several browsers (firefox, opera, safari) seem to display them correctly, only messing up when I try to send a page to a printer.
Is this just a problem in the US? Is the rest of the world intentionally hiding the simple solutions from us, while happily printing all their non-English files with no problems? Is there some way to make this "just work" (as the Mac people like to claim even when it fails spectacularly)?
Inquiring minds want to know
This sort of reminds me of the the Chinese Room Argument. The gist is that a person is isolated in a room with a complex instruction manual, and that person receives cards with Chinese characters. Using the instruction manual, the person translates the characters into English. The argument is that the person in the room doesn't really understand Chinese. He's executing instructions that lead to a Chinese translation.
;-)
And just about anyone who knows more than one language understands the fallacy behind this scenario. For a lot of fun examples of the results, visit engrish.com and wander around a bit. You'll quickly find a lot of example of the results of word-by-word translation. In the case of east Asian writing, translating individual characters without understanding that there are multi-character words can lead to especially humorous results. But even some of the "correct" translations are hilarious. And sometimes, of course, you just can't tell what was meant unless you can read the original.
The reason that computerized translation has been "5 years away" for so many decades is that the job requires intelligence and understanding. Doing it mechanically as a text-substitution process simply doesn't work very well. But it's a good source of humor.
(Reports are that the Chinese government is preparing for their upcoming Olympics by replacing a lot of multilingual signs with better translations. This has led to complaints that they are taking a lot of the fun out of trying to find your way around in Beijing.