[C]olonization is not merely possible, but inevitable -- and even, as Hawking has said, vital for the survival of the species. So, who's right -- Hawking or Stross?
Just thought that someone should point out that the universe (or Ma Nature or whatever) doesn't seem to care whether we survive or not. Even if such colonization is vital to our survival, that doesn't mean that it's possible. Most of the species that have lived on this planet are now extinct, and it's entirely possible that some day we will join this majority.
This sort of argument reminds me of several managers I've known who have, in effect, declared that upgrading the speed of light is vital to some project. For example, here in Boston it's about 16 light microseconds to San Francisco. I once listened to a manager estimate that in N years, we'd be able to send messages across the country in under a microsecond. He said this with a straight face, as far as the listening techies could tell. If your project depends on this, there's a good chance that your project will fail.
Expecting the universe to guarantee your project's success (or your survival) by making something possible is, simply stated, arrogant in the extreme. The universe doesn't have to do any such thing.
As a web developer myself, I try dillagently to kill off any XSS attacks by writing good secure code,...
As a web user myself, I try diligently to kill off any XSS attacks by turning off all client-side scripting, using NoScript, etc.
Unfortunately, I'm also a web developer, and I need to test my stuff against all the common browsers. So I have to occasionally use browsers (you know which ones I'm talking about) that don't allow user control of all client-side scripting.
In a sane world, there would be no such browsers. We don't live in that world, unfortunately. But for my personal browsing, I can use only the sane browsers.
Someone predisposed to it can get addicted to anything that produces a reward.
And, of course, that's just a rephrasing of the widely-understood definition:
Addiction: n. Something that someone enjoys and does frequently.
The tendency to describe enjoyment as "addiction" is well known here in the US, and is often attributed to our Puritan heritage. And the fact that such a diagnosis can be very profitable to the people making the diagnosis goes right along with the practice.
In reality, maybe what we have here is a sick society. That's about what you would conclude from a society that has a founding document supporting "pursuit of happiness", but which tries to diagnose and cure such pursuits when then become common. But I suppose there's not much profit to be made from diagnosing a society, so we won't hear much about it.
I like to explain that I'm a carnivore, of ecological grounds. After all, if you want a balanced ecology, you need a small population of carnivores to eat the vegetarians and keep their population in check. This gets me some funny looks, but so far nobody has tried to argue against me.
I keep hoping that some day someone will ask me who keeps the carnivore population in check, but this hasn't happened yet.
(I suppose one answer might be like the old one about "It's turtles all the way down." In a food pyramid, it's carnivores all the way up, past the first couple of trophic levels.;-)
Genes can recognize siblings. They've developed all sorts of interesting ways to do it.
Probably not actual siblings, of course; they're more likely just measuring the similarity of surface antigens. I'd predict that, if you were to find two plants (of the same species) from well-separated locations that happen to have the same antigens, they'd also tolerate each other.
Actually, in a number of animal species, the opposite has been documented. There are a number of animals that preferentially choose mates with different surface (or scent) antigens than their own. This has been interpreted as a means of avoiding inbreeding and maximizing genetic mixing. It would be interesting to find plants that have evolved a mechanism to do this.
I bet that they don't have one! There is no MS Office formats specification there is just only one implementation in software and that is it.
Nah; I'd bet that they have a typical corporate software development environment. There's not just a spec for everything; there are several conflicting specs for most of their software. And the programmers generally ignore the specs, because they understand quite well that they'd better work on what their management wants (this week), if they want to keep their jobs. So they pay attention to the informal change orders in memos from management, and if it conflicts with a spec, well, customers will never see the spec, and their management doesn't understand it, so who cares?
Of course, I do keep hearing glowing reports from supposed MS insiders saying how much better MS is than anyone else. But even minimal experience with their products quickly debunks these claims. So the explanation pretty much has to be the usual corporate culture snafu. Ergo, there are specs, which are highly touted internally by management, but which aren't followed.
I think it's the wrong approach to equip the memeory cards they use with wifi. The devices themselves should have wifi capabilities, and I do see this coming in the near future.
In a sane world, you'd be right. But in the world we live in, most small devices such as phones and cameras are "locked" by their vendors and can't be made to work sensibly with any remote device not approved by the vendor. This isn't about to change soon.
However, many of those devices now accept SD cards as memory devices. This makes for a method of remote access that the vendors can't lock out: The SD card itself communicates with remote devices, without the knowledge of the phone, camera, etc. This makes it possible for independent software developers to add capabilities in a way that the device's vendor can't block.
Even if the devices do all get wifi capability soon, we'll likely find that, as with cell phones, the builtin wifi is "locked" as usual and can only talk to the vendor's servers. This will mean that there will still be a market for wifi-enabled memory cards, to do an end run around device vendors' blocking.
This goes right along with the original reason for the why the original ARPAnet was developed (and evolved into our Internet). The US military was fed up with the ways that vendors of electronic comm gear blocked communication with competitors' gear. They funded development of what at first was an independent "IMP" box that plugged into other gadgets and translated their protocols to/from a device-independent protocol (that evolved into TCP/IP). Eventually this scheme migrated inside the devices, especially computers that had the power to run the protocols.
But all along, the Internet has needed ways to plug devices into gadgets (often routers or gateways) that implement TCP/IP, because the vendors haven't seen fit to allow general IP traffic. This is what we see right now in the telephone market. The industry has converted almost entirely to VoIP internally for wired links, but is doing all they can to block end-to-end VoIP so that they can charge monopoly prices for their specialized gear. And the cell-phone market is even more blatant, supplying IP to phones but locking out access via any but their own servers and disallowing VoIP services.
We can expect that most wifi-enabled cameras will fit this pattern, and won't allow general TCP/IP connections. But this article demos that the Internet approach still works here, in the form of a plugin "memory" device that implements a general IP connection on the side. This approach has worked for 40 years, and it's still needed due to the obstructionism of manufacturers and vendors. There's no reason to believe that this situation will change any time soon, so wifi-SD cards may have a long life ahead.
Maybe instead of posting to Flickr, it actually sends your pictures to a server someone that the company selling the card controls, at which point they forward it...
This isn't a new concern. I'm remembering the kerfuffle a few years back, when customers discovered that msn.com was using material (mostly images) from customers' web sites. When challenged, MSN pointed out that the EULA explicitly stated that any files uploaded to there servers were the property of MSN. After a bit of publicity, they backed down. But in the followup, it was pointed out that 1) the language was still in the EULA, and 2) many other ISPs have similar language in their EULAs.
So before buying one of these, we might want to find out whether the card automatically sends the pictures to the vendor's servers any time it was within range of a usable wifi access point? And would this constitute assigning copyright to the vendor?
This isn't a hypothetical legal situation; it's the actual legal situation with a lot of "private" network use right now. At least, it is until the courts settle the question of whether such EULA terms are enforceable.
| especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost.
A WiFi SD card would not get lost because it would never leave the camera!
Indeed. In my experience, the problem is that USB cables get lost. It seems that nearly every new USB device requires a cable with a unique non-computer-end plug. I have over a dozen USB cables, and most of them fit only one gadget.
Some time back, the USB cable for my Olympus camera hid itself away somewhere for over a month. Looking around on the internet, I found that replacements were only available from Olympus - and the local dealers didn't have them. I ordered one over the Net, and it took a couple weeks to get here. And, of course, a couple days after it arrived, the original cable reappeared.
I'd guess that a wifi-SD card wouldn't have this problem, precisely because it would never leave the camera. The 1-GB SD card in the camera hasn't been removed since I got it.
This seems like a real winner to me. I could forget about yet another unique cable that's easy to misplace. Presumably the wireless would be slower, but when you add in the search time for the cable, it would probably be a lot faster.
In addition to the Black Sea, there's good archaeological and geological evidence that the Red Sea was also dry at the last glacial maximum. Then, some ten thousand years ago (give or take a few thousand), rising sea levels broke through the "land bridge" (i.e., natural dam) at the southern end, and the Indian Ocean flooded the whole thing, possibly in only a few days.
Both of these floods due to rising sea level have been proposed as the origin of the flood myths in the Middle East. Both of these ideas might be correct.
Also, the entire Mediterranean was once a dry below-sea-level area, due to Spain and Africa bumping up against each other. But this wasn't caused by an ice age, and it didn't cause any flood myths, because it was about 5 million years ago, long before humans existed (or the world was created, if you prefer;-). There have been serious proposals to rebuild the dam out of concrete. The result would be that the level of the Mediterranean would slowly fall, giving the countries along its shores more land. After a century or so, the level would be low enough that the dam would become a huge power source. So far, nobody has decided to fund it. There would be a lot of technical hurdles, too, including the problem of migrating all the seaports downhill as the water level fell. And the dam would have to be thick enough to withstand anything any army or navy (or terrorists) could throw at it.
The Bering Sea and several of the straits in Indonesia were also dry during the last ice age. But those always had ocean on both sides, so the re-flooding was slow, and took centuries, so there were few flood myths produced as a side effect.
another important causal link is a belief in conspiracies by powerful elites: evil atheist Darwinists conspiring to promote evolution and suppress creationism,...
Actually, there is a conspiracy; it's usually called "science".;-)
Of course, scientists usually don't waste much time trying to suppress creationism or any other of the many pseudo-sciences. The usual approach is to just ignore such ideas, as they aren't "science" until someone comes up with an effective way to test them.
However, in the few cases where believers in a pseudo-science push to suppress teaching of science, a small number of scientists will often take it on themselves to speak out in public. This generally doesn't qualify as "oppression", since it usually just amounts to speaking and writing on the topic in non-technical language. But believers in pseudo-sciences usually do make claims of oppression against anyone who uses scientific arguments against them.
Science is a funny sort of conspiracy, though, since it's usually done right out in the open, with no secrecy at all. And scientists usually spend more time attacking each others' ideas than they do talking about their enemies. In particular, the creationists make a big deal of the minor debates among biologists over details of the evolutionary process. A lot of these debates are due to the general belief among scientists that no theory should ever go unchallenged, not even as successful a theory as Darwin's. But the creationists are mostly an annoyance in these debates, since they are constantly wasting everyone's time by injecting non-scientific arguments into the discussion.
Not all creationists are antisemitic, but there is a causal link between these beliefs. The bible is the absolute truth to these people, and the bible says the jews killed their Saviour. It's not even a stretch.
Actually, it's a huge stretch, because the bible doesn't say that at all. It says that Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers. Granted, there was a crowd cheering them on, and given the location, we would expect that most of them were Jewish. But the crowd likely also included Romans, Greeks, and assorted other visitors to the area who were there to witness a colorful local entertainment event.
A realistic interpretation of the text would be that the Imperial Roman oppressors had arrested someone they believed to be a local resistance leader, gave him a show trial before a kangaroo court, and executed him as a public spectacle to show the local riff-raff how their rulers dealt with people with ideas like his. Or maybe they didn't know or care about his ideas; they just needed an occasional example made to keep the locals in line.
In reality, it was the local Jews, including Jesus, who were the victims of the Romans.
Not that this means much to most religious people. They don't usually bother reading their own religious texts well enough to understand what the texts actually say.
So are you against all fiction books, cartoons and television?
[T]he producers and consumers of Bugs Bunny, James Bond, and Star Wars don't promote those things as being real and don't attempt to substitute events depicted therein for science.
One of the best recent comments on the topic was this comic and the next one. It's similar to the older observation that, just as the Bible proves God's (or Jesus') existence, Superman Comics proves Superman's existence.
Whether it's a movie or a religion that's false, neither of them are really harming you, personally... I wouldn't think.
Ask Salman Rushdie about that.
Heh; yeah. Or, here in Massachusetts, we like to refer people to the museums up in Salem that document some pertinent events a couple of centuries back that you might have heard of.
Religious believers aren't responsible for all of the evil in history, but they're responsible for a large portion of it. "It's God's will" gives you permission to do pretty much anything you want.
If the iPhone plans on taking on the Crackberry, then it's GOT to be useful for business. The thing that makes the Crackberry sell like crazy is that it syncs seamlessly with most business email systems.
Hmmm... I just got rid of a BB that I've used for a couple of years, and which was purchased on a business-related account. My experience was that the BB was supremely unuseful for my job.
The first problem was that the people I worked for included a number of security experts. Their only comment about MS's Enterprise Server and Outlook was "No way!" They also vetoed my gmail account. They weren't interested in email that would allow a competitor to harvest our messages and use them for their own purposes. (However, they did approve the use of my mit.edu email account.;-)
The big problem, however, was that the got the BB because they wanted our team to develop software for it that would access a number of our (mostly medical) databases remotely. The model BB that I got had the right specs for the job. But after a year or so of beating our heads against a wall, we gave up on it (and most other phones, too). Eventually, while talking to a Cingular support drone about an unrelated problem, I found the reason: They didn't support those features on that model. Huh? The specs say it would work. "But we don't support it." I.e., they had disabled those features, and then sold us the phone contract anyway, knowing full well that it wouldn't do what we'd bought it for. Grr... But none of the phones that others got actually had any better success.
I'm now trying to get my hands on a linux-based phone, such as the openmoko gadget; maybe it'll actually allow us to develop our own software and use the phone system to let the guys in the emergency vehicles get at the data they need.
There was a bit of discussion of the iPhone when it was announced. But the discussion ended when "no user software development" was explained. Just this week, we've heard that Apple seems to be relenting a bit on this. But I wonder if this is just a ruse to get us to buy it, and then we'll find that we're again facing a brick wall when we try to get the info we need to make our apps work.
My advice is that we should concentrate on the linux-based phones. There's a good chance that one of them, probably the openmoko gang, will actually support our attempts to make software that literally "runs anywhere", or at least anywhere there's cell-phone service. We know we can develop the software; the question is whether the phone companies will let us use the gadget wherever we happen to be.
We sure wish the wifi people had had a bit more success with supplying widespread wireless net access. Either that, or the cell phones had cooperated with attempts by riff-raff like us to develop software that used their systems. Some lives could have been saved...
The internet does have one advantage over Real Life [RL] when it comes to bullying and other aggressive types: You can usually just not reply. With a lot of software, you can "killfile" them, and then they never bother you again (or at least not until they learn how to get a new login id;-).
It's difficult for a bully to do physical damage to someone via the internet; the most they can do is waste your time as you hit the Delete key.
I've even used this approach here on/., in the occasional cases where a reply has contained threats. But when I casually ignored them and didn't reply at all (and/or flagged them as a foe), I never heard from them again. This doesn't work so well in RL.
Actually nothing has been 'proven' with regards to the beginning of the Universe. Everything is still theory,...
Maybe you mean "hypothesis". There has been precious little real testing of any of these supposed "theories", for fairly obvious reasons, and tests are usually required for something to be accepted as "theory" in scientific circles. They're all good for science-fiction writers, but I'd also guess that when we eventually find a way to test them systematically, we'll find that we need to think up a few more hypotheses to explain all the resulting data. This discussion seems like the bare beginning of real scientific work.
I heard the article when NPR first broadcast it last week, and the main thing I noticed was that both speakers were fairly reasonable about acknowledging the others' point, and admitting that much more research is needed before we can claim we actually know anything. They both seemed to view it as more of a fun game than a real scientific topic.
If you want a nearly-inexhaustible supply of characters, the Chinese have the answer!
Of course, they do have a few examples of characters that are easy to confuse. For example, compare Unicode chars 5E02 and 5DFF. Those really are different characters, with different pronunciations and meanings. They even have different stroke counts.
But even with a 24x46 char size, there's a limit to the number of distinct glyphs you can draw (and there are more recognized Chinese characters than that;-).
I close it because of all of the things that I have accidentally dropped in the toilet because I left it up.
Around our house, we have a good reason to keep toilet lids closed. Due to my wife's allergies to nearly everything furry (except me;-), we have four small parrots, who sometimes fly around the house looking for things to get into. I've been thinking of putting up signs in the bathrooms for visitors quoting the advice in many "How to care for your pet parrot" books:
The most common cause of accidental death of pet birds is drowning in toilets. Please close the lid when you're done.
Sounds reasonable. I'd guess that many publishers try to pick a standard such as TeX and find software to convert other formats to that. But this has to be difficult for undocumented formats like MS Word. MS isn't exactly cooperative about documenting the internal details of their formats.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!:)
We "won" the war when we took over the Iraqi government. Years ago.
I've found it interesting that a number of military people have pointed this out. What we're fighting now isn't technically a "war", it's an "occupation". You need rather different tactics for an occupation than for a war. In a war, you can go in with guns blazing, kill lots of people, and "win". In an occupation, behaving that way toward your subjects tends to get exactly the sort of response that we're seeing in Iraq. And it's not like military historians are unaware of this sort of thing. We do have thousands of historic wars and occupations that can be studied, after all.
I do recall hearing the same sort of comments from military sources back in the early days of the Vietnam "war". It was pointed out that the US actually had "won", in the sense that they controlled the South Vietnam puppet government. The big question was whether the US would be able to hold onto its conquest. A number of historians suggested that the answer was "Probably not", mostly due to the misuse of war strategies to fight what was really an occupation.
I am more offended by the oft-repeated initial claims that the US knew where the Iraqi WMDs and WMD development equipment were when they are nowhere to be found, eventually Bush had to admit that nothing has been found to back his claims.
While Bush may not have known where the WMDs were, he knew they were there, because he and Cheney had the receipts.
(I don't take credit for this one. This was a common joke back in 2003.;-)
And so it seems to have been abused, but I don't think there's any stopping it now.
Actually, when it comes to "intelligence", when was it ever any different?
You don't need to see the (mostly secret, of course) intelligence reports to understand how bad they have been all along. Just look at US government foreign policy at any time in the past, and you'll quickly get a good feeling for just how badly they misunderstood most of the people they were dealing with in the rest of the world. If the intelligence agencies had ever been doing their job well, it would have been quite obvious from the US government's improved interactions with the rest of the world.
Of course, the Bush gang is more blatant about it than most. They've made it clear from the start they their policies would be privatization and secrecy. Anyone who was paying attention understood exactly what they meant by this. Surprise that corruption might be involved is mostly a sign of naïveté.
Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".
What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?
I'm assuming that they haven't actually converted to non-MS (or non-IBM) systems. That would be just too bizarre to believe. Do you think that they've actually noticed that non-MS systems can usually read files from 20 years ago without problems? Is this some sign of a pending movement in which more organizations will actually start standing up to the Market Leader?
Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.
Manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that can circumvent security measures is verboten, which means that some security scanning tools might become illegal.
Not just security scanning tools. The above description applies to the su and sudo commands on unix-like systems, so presumably they will be removed from distros sold (or downloaded) in Germany.
It also seems obvious that any programming language would qualify, since "software that can circumvent security measures" must be written in some language, making a compiler or interpreter into a circumvention enabling tool.
I'd think it would be pretty easy for someone to work up a test case in which they have used such verboten software on their own machine. A use of su should be an especially trivial basis for such a case, since what it does is disable all unix security measures. So maybe some sysadmin could arrange to be arrested and charged with disabling security via su on a work machine in order to install new software in a system library. It would be then shown in court how this law makes it illegal to install software on any of the company's computers. Even a judge should be able to understand the absurdity of this situation.
Slashdot Mirror
[C]olonization is not merely possible, but inevitable -- and even, as Hawking has said, vital for the survival of the species. So, who's right -- Hawking or Stross?
Just thought that someone should point out that the universe (or Ma Nature or whatever) doesn't seem to care whether we survive or not. Even if such colonization is vital to our survival, that doesn't mean that it's possible. Most of the species that have lived on this planet are now extinct, and it's entirely possible that some day we will join this majority.
This sort of argument reminds me of several managers I've known who have, in effect, declared that upgrading the speed of light is vital to some project. For example, here in Boston it's about 16 light microseconds to San Francisco. I once listened to a manager estimate that in N years, we'd be able to send messages across the country in under a microsecond. He said this with a straight face, as far as the listening techies could tell. If your project depends on this, there's a good chance that your project will fail.
Expecting the universe to guarantee your project's success (or your survival) by making something possible is, simply stated, arrogant in the extreme. The universe doesn't have to do any such thing.
As a web developer myself, I try dillagently to kill off any XSS attacks by writing good secure code, ...
As a web user myself, I try diligently to kill off any XSS attacks by turning off all client-side scripting, using NoScript, etc.
Unfortunately, I'm also a web developer, and I need to test my stuff against all the common browsers. So I have to occasionally use browsers (you know which ones I'm talking about) that don't allow user control of all client-side scripting.
In a sane world, there would be no such browsers. We don't live in that world, unfortunately. But for my personal browsing, I can use only the sane browsers.
Someone predisposed to it can get addicted to anything that produces a reward.
And, of course, that's just a rephrasing of the widely-understood definition:
Addiction: n. Something that someone enjoys and does frequently.
The tendency to describe enjoyment as "addiction" is well known here in the US, and is often attributed to our Puritan heritage. And the fact that such a diagnosis can be very profitable to the people making the diagnosis goes right along with the practice.
In reality, maybe what we have here is a sick society. That's about what you would conclude from a society that has a founding document supporting "pursuit of happiness", but which tries to diagnose and cure such pursuits when then become common. But I suppose there's not much profit to be made from diagnosing a society, so we won't hear much about it.
I like to explain that I'm a carnivore, of ecological grounds. After all, if you want a balanced ecology, you need a small population of carnivores to eat the vegetarians and keep their population in check. This gets me some funny looks, but so far nobody has tried to argue against me.
;-)
I keep hoping that some day someone will ask me who keeps the carnivore population in check, but this hasn't happened yet.
(I suppose one answer might be like the old one about "It's turtles all the way down." In a food pyramid, it's carnivores all the way up, past the first couple of trophic levels.
Genes can recognize siblings. They've developed all sorts of interesting ways to do it.
Probably not actual siblings, of course; they're more likely just measuring the similarity of surface antigens. I'd predict that, if you were to find two plants (of the same species) from well-separated locations that happen to have the same antigens, they'd also tolerate each other.
Actually, in a number of animal species, the opposite has been documented. There are a number of animals that preferentially choose mates with different surface (or scent) antigens than their own. This has been interpreted as a means of avoiding inbreeding and maximizing genetic mixing. It would be interesting to find plants that have evolved a mechanism to do this.
I bet that they don't have one! There is no MS Office formats specification there is just only one implementation in software and that is it.
Nah; I'd bet that they have a typical corporate software development environment. There's not just a spec for everything; there are several conflicting specs for most of their software. And the programmers generally ignore the specs, because they understand quite well that they'd better work on what their management wants (this week), if they want to keep their jobs. So they pay attention to the informal change orders in memos from management, and if it conflicts with a spec, well, customers will never see the spec, and their management doesn't understand it, so who cares?
Of course, I do keep hearing glowing reports from supposed MS insiders saying how much better MS is than anyone else. But even minimal experience with their products quickly debunks these claims. So the explanation pretty much has to be the usual corporate culture snafu. Ergo, there are specs, which are highly touted internally by management, but which aren't followed.
I think it's the wrong approach to equip the memeory cards they use with wifi. The devices themselves should have wifi capabilities, and I do see this coming in the near future.
In a sane world, you'd be right. But in the world we live in, most small devices such as phones and cameras are "locked" by their vendors and can't be made to work sensibly with any remote device not approved by the vendor. This isn't about to change soon.
However, many of those devices now accept SD cards as memory devices. This makes for a method of remote access that the vendors can't lock out: The SD card itself communicates with remote devices, without the knowledge of the phone, camera, etc. This makes it possible for independent software developers to add capabilities in a way that the device's vendor can't block.
Even if the devices do all get wifi capability soon, we'll likely find that, as with cell phones, the builtin wifi is "locked" as usual and can only talk to the vendor's servers. This will mean that there will still be a market for wifi-enabled memory cards, to do an end run around device vendors' blocking.
This goes right along with the original reason for the why the original ARPAnet was developed (and evolved into our Internet). The US military was fed up with the ways that vendors of electronic comm gear blocked communication with competitors' gear. They funded development of what at first was an independent "IMP" box that plugged into other gadgets and translated their protocols to/from a device-independent protocol (that evolved into TCP/IP). Eventually this scheme migrated inside the devices, especially computers that had the power to run the protocols.
But all along, the Internet has needed ways to plug devices into gadgets (often routers or gateways) that implement TCP/IP, because the vendors haven't seen fit to allow general IP traffic. This is what we see right now in the telephone market. The industry has converted almost entirely to VoIP internally for wired links, but is doing all they can to block end-to-end VoIP so that they can charge monopoly prices for their specialized gear. And the cell-phone market is even more blatant, supplying IP to phones but locking out access via any but their own servers and disallowing VoIP services.
We can expect that most wifi-enabled cameras will fit this pattern, and won't allow general TCP/IP connections. But this article demos that the Internet approach still works here, in the form of a plugin "memory" device that implements a general IP connection on the side. This approach has worked for 40 years, and it's still needed due to the obstructionism of manufacturers and vendors. There's no reason to believe that this situation will change any time soon, so wifi-SD cards may have a long life ahead.
Maybe instead of posting to Flickr, it actually sends your pictures to a server someone that the company selling the card controls, at which point they forward it ...
This isn't a new concern. I'm remembering the kerfuffle a few years back, when customers discovered that msn.com was using material (mostly images) from customers' web sites. When challenged, MSN pointed out that the EULA explicitly stated that any files uploaded to there servers were the property of MSN. After a bit of publicity, they backed down. But in the followup, it was pointed out that 1) the language was still in the EULA, and 2) many other ISPs have similar language in their EULAs.
So before buying one of these, we might want to find out whether the card automatically sends the pictures to the vendor's servers any time it was within range of a usable wifi access point? And would this constitute assigning copyright to the vendor?
This isn't a hypothetical legal situation; it's the actual legal situation with a lot of "private" network use right now. At least, it is until the courts settle the question of whether such EULA terms are enforceable.
| especially given how prone SD cards are to getting lost.
A WiFi SD card would not get lost because it would never leave the camera!
Indeed. In my experience, the problem is that USB cables get lost. It seems that nearly every new USB device requires a cable with a unique non-computer-end plug. I have over a dozen USB cables, and most of them fit only one gadget.
Some time back, the USB cable for my Olympus camera hid itself away somewhere for over a month. Looking around on the internet, I found that replacements were only available from Olympus - and the local dealers didn't have them. I ordered one over the Net, and it took a couple weeks to get here. And, of course, a couple days after it arrived, the original cable reappeared.
I'd guess that a wifi-SD card wouldn't have this problem, precisely because it would never leave the camera. The 1-GB SD card in the camera hasn't been removed since I got it.
This seems like a real winner to me. I could forget about yet another unique cable that's easy to misplace. Presumably the wireless would be slower, but when you add in the search time for the cable, it would probably be a lot faster.
In addition to the Black Sea, there's good archaeological and geological evidence that the Red Sea was also dry at the last glacial maximum. Then, some ten thousand years ago (give or take a few thousand), rising sea levels broke through the "land bridge" (i.e., natural dam) at the southern end, and the Indian Ocean flooded the whole thing, possibly in only a few days.
;-). There have been serious proposals to rebuild the dam out of concrete. The result would be that the level of the Mediterranean would slowly fall, giving the countries along its shores more land. After a century or so, the level would be low enough that the dam would become a huge power source. So far, nobody has decided to fund it. There would be a lot of technical hurdles, too, including the problem of migrating all the seaports downhill as the water level fell. And the dam would have to be thick enough to withstand anything any army or navy (or terrorists) could throw at it.
Both of these floods due to rising sea level have been proposed as the origin of the flood myths in the Middle East. Both of these ideas might be correct.
Also, the entire Mediterranean was once a dry below-sea-level area, due to Spain and Africa bumping up against each other. But this wasn't caused by an ice age, and it didn't cause any flood myths, because it was about 5 million years ago, long before humans existed (or the world was created, if you prefer
The Bering Sea and several of the straits in Indonesia were also dry during the last ice age. But those always had ocean on both sides, so the re-flooding was slow, and took centuries, so there were few flood myths produced as a side effect.
another important causal link is a belief in conspiracies by powerful elites: evil atheist Darwinists conspiring to promote evolution and suppress creationism, ...
;-)
...
Actually, there is a conspiracy; it's usually called "science".
Of course, scientists usually don't waste much time trying to suppress creationism or any other of the many pseudo-sciences. The usual approach is to just ignore such ideas, as they aren't "science" until someone comes up with an effective way to test them.
However, in the few cases where believers in a pseudo-science push to suppress teaching of science, a small number of scientists will often take it on themselves to speak out in public. This generally doesn't qualify as "oppression", since it usually just amounts to speaking and writing on the topic in non-technical language. But believers in pseudo-sciences usually do make claims of oppression against anyone who uses scientific arguments against them.
Science is a funny sort of conspiracy, though, since it's usually done right out in the open, with no secrecy at all. And scientists usually spend more time attacking each others' ideas than they do talking about their enemies. In particular, the creationists make a big deal of the minor debates among biologists over details of the evolutionary process. A lot of these debates are due to the general belief among scientists that no theory should ever go unchallenged, not even as successful a theory as Darwin's. But the creationists are mostly an annoyance in these debates, since they are constantly wasting everyone's time by injecting non-scientific arguments into the discussion.
Anyway, back to conspiring
Not all creationists are antisemitic, but there is a causal link between these beliefs. The bible is the absolute truth to these people, and the bible says the jews killed their Saviour. It's not even a stretch.
Actually, it's a huge stretch, because the bible doesn't say that at all. It says that Jesus was killed by Roman soldiers. Granted, there was a crowd cheering them on, and given the location, we would expect that most of them were Jewish. But the crowd likely also included Romans, Greeks, and assorted other visitors to the area who were there to witness a colorful local entertainment event.
A realistic interpretation of the text would be that the Imperial Roman oppressors had arrested someone they believed to be a local resistance leader, gave him a show trial before a kangaroo court, and executed him as a public spectacle to show the local riff-raff how their rulers dealt with people with ideas like his. Or maybe they didn't know or care about his ideas; they just needed an occasional example made to keep the locals in line.
In reality, it was the local Jews, including Jesus, who were the victims of the Romans.
Not that this means much to most religious people. They don't usually bother reading their own religious texts well enough to understand what the texts actually say.
So are you against all fiction books, cartoons and television?
[T]he producers and consumers of Bugs Bunny, James Bond, and Star Wars don't promote those things as being real and don't attempt to substitute events depicted therein for science.
One of the best recent comments on the topic was this comic and the next one. It's similar to the older observation that, just as the Bible proves God's (or Jesus') existence, Superman Comics proves Superman's existence.
Whether it's a movie or a religion that's false, neither of them are really harming you, personally... I wouldn't think.
Ask Salman Rushdie about that.
Heh; yeah. Or, here in Massachusetts, we like to refer people to the museums up in Salem that document some pertinent events a couple of centuries back that you might have heard of.
Religious believers aren't responsible for all of the evil in history, but they're responsible for a large portion of it. "It's God's will" gives you permission to do pretty much anything you want.
If the iPhone plans on taking on the Crackberry, then it's GOT to be useful for business. The thing that makes the Crackberry sell like crazy is that it syncs seamlessly with most business email systems.
... I just got rid of a BB that I've used for a couple of years, and which was purchased on a business-related account. My experience was that the BB was supremely unuseful for my job.
;-)
... But none of the phones that others got actually had any better success.
...
Hmmm
The first problem was that the people I worked for included a number of security experts. Their only comment about MS's Enterprise Server and Outlook was "No way!" They also vetoed my gmail account. They weren't interested in email that would allow a competitor to harvest our messages and use them for their own purposes. (However, they did approve the use of my mit.edu email account.
The big problem, however, was that the got the BB because they wanted our team to develop software for it that would access a number of our (mostly medical) databases remotely. The model BB that I got had the right specs for the job. But after a year or so of beating our heads against a wall, we gave up on it (and most other phones, too). Eventually, while talking to a Cingular support drone about an unrelated problem, I found the reason: They didn't support those features on that model. Huh? The specs say it would work. "But we don't support it." I.e., they had disabled those features, and then sold us the phone contract anyway, knowing full well that it wouldn't do what we'd bought it for. Grr
I'm now trying to get my hands on a linux-based phone, such as the openmoko gadget; maybe it'll actually allow us to develop our own software and use the phone system to let the guys in the emergency vehicles get at the data they need.
There was a bit of discussion of the iPhone when it was announced. But the discussion ended when "no user software development" was explained. Just this week, we've heard that Apple seems to be relenting a bit on this. But I wonder if this is just a ruse to get us to buy it, and then we'll find that we're again facing a brick wall when we try to get the info we need to make our apps work.
My advice is that we should concentrate on the linux-based phones. There's a good chance that one of them, probably the openmoko gang, will actually support our attempts to make software that literally "runs anywhere", or at least anywhere there's cell-phone service. We know we can develop the software; the question is whether the phone companies will let us use the gadget wherever we happen to be.
We sure wish the wifi people had had a bit more success with supplying widespread wireless net access. Either that, or the cell phones had cooperated with attempts by riff-raff like us to develop software that used their systems. Some lives could have been saved
Sounds just like my upbringing.
;-).
/., in the occasional cases where a reply has contained threats. But when I casually ignored them and didn't reply at all (and/or flagged them as a foe), I never heard from them again. This doesn't work so well in RL.
The internet does have one advantage over Real Life [RL] when it comes to bullying and other aggressive types: You can usually just not reply. With a lot of software, you can "killfile" them, and then they never bother you again (or at least not until they learn how to get a new login id
It's difficult for a bully to do physical damage to someone via the internet; the most they can do is waste your time as you hit the Delete key.
I've even used this approach here on
This resolution says, "We in the senate are stupid, and we think you are even more stupid, because we think we can manipulate you to get votes."
;-)
And for most of the people involved, they're right on both counts.
Actually nothing has been 'proven' with regards to the beginning of the Universe. Everything is still theory, ...
Maybe you mean "hypothesis". There has been precious little real testing of any of these supposed "theories", for fairly obvious reasons, and tests are usually required for something to be accepted as "theory" in scientific circles. They're all good for science-fiction writers, but I'd also guess that when we eventually find a way to test them systematically, we'll find that we need to think up a few more hypotheses to explain all the resulting data. This discussion seems like the bare beginning of real scientific work.
I heard the article when NPR first broadcast it last week, and the main thing I noticed was that both speakers were fairly reasonable about acknowledging the others' point, and admitting that much more research is needed before we can claim we actually know anything. They both seemed to view it as more of a fun game than a real scientific topic.
If you want a nearly-inexhaustible supply of characters, the Chinese have the answer!
;-).
Of course, they do have a few examples of characters that are easy to confuse. For example, compare Unicode chars 5E02 and 5DFF. Those really are different characters, with different pronunciations and meanings. They even have different stroke counts.
But even with a 24x46 char size, there's a limit to the number of distinct glyphs you can draw (and there are more recognized Chinese characters than that
I close it because of all of the things that I have accidentally dropped in the toilet because I left it up.
;-), we have four small parrots, who sometimes fly around the house looking for things to get into. I've been thinking of putting up signs in the bathrooms for visitors quoting the advice in many "How to care for your pet parrot" books:
Around our house, we have a good reason to keep toilet lids closed. Due to my wife's allergies to nearly everything furry (except me
The most common cause of accidental death of pet birds is drowning in toilets. Please close the lid when you're done.
This pretty much decides the issue here.
Sounds reasonable. I'd guess that many publishers try to pick a standard such as TeX and find software to convert other formats to that. But this has to be difficult for undocumented formats like MS Word. MS isn't exactly cooperative about documenting the internal details of their formats.
:)
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Sorry; I can't find anything to correct.
Its a damned war, the only goal is to win.
We "won" the war when we took over the Iraqi government. Years ago.
I've found it interesting that a number of military people have pointed this out. What we're fighting now isn't technically a "war", it's an "occupation". You need rather different tactics for an occupation than for a war. In a war, you can go in with guns blazing, kill lots of people, and "win". In an occupation, behaving that way toward your subjects tends to get exactly the sort of response that we're seeing in Iraq. And it's not like military historians are unaware of this sort of thing. We do have thousands of historic wars and occupations that can be studied, after all.
I do recall hearing the same sort of comments from military sources back in the early days of the Vietnam "war". It was pointed out that the US actually had "won", in the sense that they controlled the South Vietnam puppet government. The big question was whether the US would be able to hold onto its conquest. A number of historians suggested that the answer was "Probably not", mostly due to the misuse of war strategies to fight what was really an occupation.
I am more offended by the oft-repeated initial claims that the US knew where the Iraqi WMDs and WMD development equipment were when they are nowhere to be found, eventually Bush had to admit that nothing has been found to back his claims.
;-)
While Bush may not have known where the WMDs were, he knew they were there, because he and Cheney had the receipts.
(I don't take credit for this one. This was a common joke back in 2003.
And so it seems to have been abused, but I don't think there's any stopping it now.
Actually, when it comes to "intelligence", when was it ever any different?
You don't need to see the (mostly secret, of course) intelligence reports to understand how bad they have been all along. Just look at US government foreign policy at any time in the past, and you'll quickly get a good feeling for just how badly they misunderstood most of the people they were dealing with in the rest of the world. If the intelligence agencies had ever been doing their job well, it would have been quite obvious from the US government's improved interactions with the rest of the world.
Of course, the Bush gang is more blatant about it than most. They've made it clear from the start they their policies would be privatization and secrecy. Anyone who was paying attention understood exactly what they meant by this. Surprise that corruption might be involved is mostly a sign of naïveté.
Microsoft has been pushing "upgrades" that break files from earlier releases for a couple decades now, and I've never heard of a publisher (or any other organization) standing up to them before like this. Generally, they just go along meekly, since "that's what computers are like, y'know".
What do you think might have given some of the publishers a backbone?
I'm assuming that they haven't actually converted to non-MS (or non-IBM) systems. That would be just too bizarre to believe. Do you think that they've actually noticed that non-MS systems can usually read files from 20 years ago without problems? Is this some sign of a pending movement in which more organizations will actually start standing up to the Market Leader?
Nah; it can't be. Something very strange must be going on behind the scene.
From TFA:
Manufacturing, programming, installing, or spreading software that can circumvent security measures is verboten, which means that some security scanning tools might become illegal.
Not just security scanning tools. The above description applies to the su and sudo commands on unix-like systems, so presumably they will be removed from distros sold (or downloaded) in Germany.
It also seems obvious that any programming language would qualify, since "software that can circumvent security measures" must be written in some language, making a compiler or interpreter into a circumvention enabling tool.
I'd think it would be pretty easy for someone to work up a test case in which they have used such verboten software on their own machine. A use of su should be an especially trivial basis for such a case, since what it does is disable all unix security measures. So maybe some sysadmin could arrange to be arrested and charged with disabling security via su on a work machine in order to install new software in a system library. It would be then shown in court how this law makes it illegal to install software on any of the company's computers. Even a judge should be able to understand the absurdity of this situation.