Actually, "cabbage palm" is the common name for at least five species. On the US East Coast, it usually refers to Sabal palmetto. In the case of this species, the name comes from the fact that the soft, central part of the bud is harvested and eaten as a vegetable, and has an internal structure much like a cabbage. I'd guess this is true of the other cabbage palms, too.
The potted plants I saw (in a nursery west of Boston) looked like this species, but I didn't examine them closely. I just thought "How about that?" and went on. I think that several of the other cabbage palm species are for sale in the US, too.
Coconut palms would be a lot more fun, but I suppose it's still a few years before they'll survive this far north.
I hate Massachusetts winters. And how cool would it be to pick coconuts in my back yard?
Hey, last Saturday I was at Russell's Garden Center (on Route 20 in Wayland), and noticed that they had potted palm trees for sale. They weren't coconut palms. It didn't look at the label, but they looked like baby cabbage palms.
Your wish may come true sooner than you think. Of course, by then most of the Massachusetts coast, including all the Cape, will be under water. I wonder if they'll be able to build levees around Boston that keep it dry? Considering how well this worked for New Orleans, I wouldn't bet on it.
What article to meant was that "Of all the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans, the great majority was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750." I admit that it was very badly stated, but anyone with the slightest reading comprehension would understand that they were talking about portions of human emissions.
Hmmm... I happen to know the actual numbers off the top of my head, and when I read the original statement, my instant reaction was "Hey, that's not right at all." I re-read it, trying to find some way to read it so that it was correct, and I couldn't. It was clearly a claim that humans have doubled the amount of atmospheric CO2.
IMO, you should state the truth (with the qualification that in such discussions, there's no need to bother with more than two places accuracy;-). That statement was simply incorrect, since in the past few centuries atmospheric CO2 has only risen about 25%, from roughly 300 ppm to about 380 ppm now, and nothing more than that difference should be considered of human origin.
A human-caused 25% rise in CO2 is enough of a story, especially since the rise is obviously continuing. There's no need to exaggerate the change by a factor of four. It merely discredits you to people who happen to know the numbers, and makes you an easy target for those who want to deny that there's a problem.
Firing them because they had a different idealology is fine, their job is to work for the president.
Oh, man; you really put it out there. That's about the most corrupt statement I've seen in a long time.
People in the Justice Department should not be working for the president, or any other politician. That's about the worst setup you could possibly imagine. It totally eliminates any meaning to the word "Justice".
I'd ask for an apology for such a remark, but I expect that someone who would say such a thing is beyond salvation.
Granted, a lot of people think such things. But they usually have the good sense not to announce such thoughts in public.
[T]he Republican party in the 2004 elections here in SC actually sent out operatives to polling places at all the state's black colleges (Benedict, SC State, etc.) to keep students from voting (because, technically, they could only vote in their parents districts, since college doesn't count as "residency").
In 1979, the Supreme Court declared that students could vote in either their "home" (i.e., parents') district or the school district, whichever they declared as their "residence".
This decision had significant effect in a lot of college towns, where the town governments changed from conservative, anti-student to much more representative of the population in the 1980 elections. I remember this pretty well, because I was a student in Madison, Wisconsin at the time. Before this, the city had a government run by student-baiting right-wing conservatives. They were replaced by a "left-wing, hippy, communist" gang that really improved things in general, and who got re-elected overwhelmingly in subsequent elections because of the good job they did (while assiduously baiting the right-wingers at every opportunity;-).
Of course, politicos still try to persuade students that they have to vote "at home", but this has no basis in law. It's purely an attempt to discourage students from voting where they live most of the year.
You can find a good number of descriptions of this Supreme Court decision by googling for the obvious keywords.
> Bill Gates will get Bush to start dropping bombs.
Who knows? It does not seem entirely impossible.
To see some good precedents, look up the history of the phrase "banana republic". The US government has a long, sordid history of using military power to enforce business monopolies of American companies. The US government's complicity in building the dominance of IBM and Microsoft isn't a new story at all.
Of course, they're not the only government to do such things. Here in the Boston area, people are generally familiar with the role such monopolies had in the start of our own Revolution.
The South Slavic languages do seem to be a popular example among linguists, mostly because they're an extreme example of a continuum of dialects without any natural language boundaries, while speakers far enough apart are clearly speaking different languages. So the officially recognized languages are defined by politics.
Actually, my favorite definition of "language" is that a language is a dialect with its own army. This tends to explain things better than those silly linguistic definitions, which are merely logical.
But if you want to see a real mess of dialects and languages, with terminology that's equally messed up, look at Chinese. It's really odd to hear the media talk about the "Chinese language", which would be a lot like the "European language". To be more precise, it would be more like considering all the Romance languages just dialects of Latin. So the French, Portuguese and Romanians all speak the same language, right? And by the same criteria, the Poles, Russians and Croatians all speak the same language.
I do sorta like the Nostratic hypothesis. And I get the impression that every linguist expects that the Indo-European, Finno-Ugaritic, and Semitic languages really are distant relatives, with a common ancestor 8 or 10 thousand years back. But at that distance, there aren't many hard, solid facts to work with. So we can have lots of fun talking about it without worrying about anyone proving us wrong.
It's too bad that we didn't invent recording equipment 10,000 years ago. Or, if you prefer the really far-out "theories", we did, but the recordings were lost, maybe in the Flood or when the big library in Alexandria was burned.
Actually, the Finnish/Estonian pair, along with the Spanish/Portuguese pair, is used in linguistic texts to illustrate one of the technical problems of the standard definition of "language" and "dialect": Two dialects are the same language if the speakers can understand each other (perhaps with difficulty) without any special language study. In both of these pairs, speakers of the "smaller" language (Estonian and Portuguese) can generally understand the other language without much difficulty, while speakers of the "larger" language (Finnish, Spanish) generally can't understand the other. So by the definition, Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, while Finnish is a separate language from Estonian, and similarly for Portuguese/Spanish. This is clearly absurd, so we need to work on the definition a bit. Either that or casually accept that the real world is too messy to be clearly compartmentalized like this.
(I've seen this compared with the similar problem that biologists have with the term "species". By the standard inter-fertility definition, for example, domestic dogs are the same species as wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals are different species from the domestic dog. Also, lions are the same species as tigers, but tigers are a different species from lions. The explanations are similar to the above, and produce a similar absurdity.)
But Estonian isn't close to Russian at all. Estonian isn't even an Indo-European language. It's a Finno-Ugaritic language, and despite a couple centuries of work, linguists haven't yet successfully connected the two language families.
Actually, the asymmetric relation of Estonian and Portuguese to their majority neighbor languages is pretty much a result of the same process: If you compare a few utterances in both cases, you'll quickly see that Estonian and Portuguese have gone through a simplification process similar to French, in which many sounds have been lost, mostly at the ends of words. It's difficult to understand your language with a lot of dropouts, so the Finns and Spaniards have problems making sense of Estonian and Portuguese. But if someone else is speaking your language with a lot of additional "nonsense" sounds added in, it's easy to ignore the "noise". So to an Estonian, Finnish is mostly Estonian with a bunch of added noise that can be ignored. This sort of sound loss has happened in a lot of what used to be dialects, and is a common way for a new language to split off from its ancestor.
I've read claims that this was what first separated Old English into a new language. 1000 years ago, it was really just a West German dialect, and the people on both sides of the Channel could mostly understand each other. Then the people in Britain started dropping most of the inflectional endings on nouns and all of them on adjectives, using a stricter word order instead. This made the language on the island mostly incomprehensible to people on the mainland. Then the Great Vowel Shift came along and finished the job...
(Yeah; this is a bit of an over-simplification. So?;-)
Well, IPv4 itself was a fairly intelligent design a quarter century ago. But then it started to accumulate cruft like NAT, which seems to have been designed by a gang of chimps banging on keyboards, giving us the growing mess of today's Internet where my machine and yours can't connect to each other because they're both behind NATted firewalls. As a result, I have to email friends individual copies of my nifty pictures of my vacation, pet conure, and the cute baby cardinal that just showed up at the bird feeder with his parents. With the original IPv4 design, I could just put the pics online and email the URL, and with IPv6 I could do that (if and when all our ISPs permit IPv6). But for now, it means lots of gigantic email messages to people who mostly won't even bother to open half the attachments.
We are starting to get more useful apps that require that end-user systems have public addresses and be allowed to accept incoming connections. As the Joe Six-Packs and Aunt Millies of the world learn of these apps and "need" them, we'll see the death of ISPs blocking end-to-end connections. But IPv4 can't handle this, mostly due to its meagre address space. So we will need to migrate to IPv6 to handle the customer demand, even from the great masses who have no idea what a TCP port is.
And we'll get better security than the joke that is NAT as a side benefit.
Back in the 1960s, when I first ran across some "speed reading" texts in school, one of the comments they had was the explanation of why newspapers have traditionally had multiple narrow columns on each page. This is because the publishers discovered long ago that 1) their most loyal readers are people who want to read the news quickly and get on with things, and 2) people can read narrow columns faster than wide text. The reason is that, below a certain width, good readers don't scan back and forth across the text; they focus only on the middle of the line and scan vertically. The critical columns width is easy to determine: Just format several pages with columns of different widths (or different widths on a single page), and watch their eyes as they read. You can easily see the left-right eye jitter on wider columns.
I've also seen a few comments about how this lesson has been lost on the Web. Not only are most Web docs formatted to have a single column of text; most also force a wide column. Even slashdot does it, for no obvious reason. If I resize this window to be narrower, below about 700 pixels the text stops being redrawn, and a horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom. So even if I know that it's easier to read a narrow text, it does me no good, because the/. admins in their wisdom have decided to disallow narrow text.
Anyway, these people are merely rediscovering something that the publishing industry and reading instructors have known and understood for centuries.
But I do sorta like their syntactic indentation style. As someone else said, it's a lot like Doctor Seuss.
Actually, it's also an attack on, for instance, slashdot. Consider that under US and most other law, everything you "publish" here is copyrighted by you./. even tells us this up front. And almost nothing here is encrypted or protected by any other DRM mechanism. So if these guys win, their next target will be everyone putting anything on the Web without DRM.
Myself, I wonder if the DMCA could be applied to hard copy publications. If so, these guys might also start suing every publisher for not using a product of theirs to encrypt and "protect" books and magazines.
But maybe we should keep quiet about this. It might give the dead-tree publishers an idea...
The phone displayed is the FIC Neo1973 and was designed as part of the OpenMoko open phone project.
Yeah, I noticed that right off. I wonder which will be easiest for us developers to get our hands on and write software for? I've been wanting one since I first read of the openmoko project 6 or 8 months ago, but so far I don't yet have one.
Maybe we should all send messages to both projects asking for a phone and promising to write for whichever one gets to us first.
Of course, we might also add the qualification that we want not just the phone, but docs and prototypes of a few simple, working programs that talk to other programs across the Net. I recently gave up on a blackberry as a lost cause; an employer paid for it a couple years ago, but I was never able to get anything non-trivial working on it. (Maybe I'm an idiot, of course, but I'm able to write things quickly for other platforms, so that can't be the only problem.;-) This does, however, illustrate the dangers of accepting a phone that requires a 2-year contract with a cell-phone company who has no motive to help you get your software working on it.
They should just declare that all primaries more than a month before the national convention shall be treated as irrelevant to the party.
We need some way of stopping this gradual escalation of primaries to earlier and earlier dates. We're rapidly reaching the stage where primaries will be held more than four years before the election.
Actually, are there any laws stating that parties have to honor the results of primaries? Is there a reason that a party shouldn't just tell the most idiotic state governments to go to hell, and refuse to seat their delegates?
(For that matter, is there a reason that the voters shouldn't tell the parties to go to that same hell?;-)
The real fault lies at the heart of the problem, the people who make software don't listen to their users - for whatever reasons.
In most of the software projects that I've worked on in the past several decades, I have usually not been permitted to communicate with users. And this is rarely an accident; it is usually an explicit, conscious management policy.
Given that the software development industry works this way, I really don't think I can be blamed for not doing something that management tries so hard to prevent me from doing.
OTOH, in my spare time, I've worked on a few open-source projects, things that I got involved in because I want them myself. In those, I've communicated with a lot of users, and I've often turned them into beta testers for my attempts to implement what they want. I think the results of this have been much better than in most commercial software. But I'd guess that most software managers would disagree. And part of their reason would be that the results have usually been "ugly". I.e., they are simple, bare UIs, with no eye candy at all. I have a couple of "ugly" web sites that produce a slow stream of nice letters from people who tell me how useful they are. But they're like the google main page, bare and uninteresting to look at. That is, exactly the sort of thing that would get redesigned to be more "user friendly" on almost any software project.
Bottom line on all this: I refuse to take the blame for what, in my experience, is foisted on the commercial software world by management that generally wants exactly the sort of products that we're complaining about, puts strong barriers in the way of developer-user communication, and punishes developers who have the gall to communicate directly with the end users.
Once you're logged in, it should all be through https 'til you log out again.
Uh, you missed the main point. "Once you're logged in" isn't good enough. Unless the login page (the whole page) is sent to you securely via https, what looks to you like a login page could be sending your login info in the clear to that Man in the Middle. He'll then use the info to drain your account.
You need to make sure that the login session itself is secured in its entirety. If security starts only "once you're logged in", you've potentially lost everything.
Abandoning it because no one else can maintain ReiserFS is a legitimate reason, but I'm certain that someone will be able to figure it out and maintain it. However, I would think that a name change would be in the works.
The appropriate comment is probably:
"It's time for a fork."
We could probably just call it "RFS", and publicly claim that the "R" stands for something else that starts with 'r'.
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
Actually, in the case of Newton, we have something rather similar to consider. It's not as spectacular as murder, but in scientific circles, it could be considered as damning: Newton wrote a lot on theological topics. I've read excerpts from a few of these writing, and they're - well, "godawful" is probably the appropriate term.
However, physicists have taken the right approach: Ignore the silliness of Newton's theology, and pay attention to the accuracy and insight of his scientific writings. They do lament the time he wasted on such junk that could have been productive, but they generally understand that it has little bearing on the status of his scientific work.
Of course, people generally aren't willing to take such an enlightened, easygoing approach. This is why so many writers adopt pseudonyms. Typically they'll use each pseudonym for a specific topic, and try to avoid giving readers (and editors;-) clues about their wide range of topics.
A lot of scientists and engineers have led less than exemplary private lives. If we want good science and technology, we're probably better off ignoring such things. Of course, if someone ends up in jail, it's something that's not easy to ignore, as it tends to interfere with ongoing R&D.
(If you want an example of how attention to private lives can go badly wrong, read the sad story of Alan Turing's life. This is a good illustration of why we might be better off if our lives stay private, especially from government investigators. We could likely have gotten much more good mathematics from this fellow if he had been treated better.)
You are 100% correct, it is the consumers fault that this is the state of affairs. If you care enough to think that this is wrong, then you should care enough to not support that magazine at all.
Hmm... It doesn't seem to be working. There are thousands of magazines that I don't subscribe to, but they just keep on publishing their advertiser-influenced stuff.
What am I doing wrong?
For that matter, I don't subscribe to PC World, and as others have concluded (via the usual post-hoc method), this seems to have led to their increasing the ad control of content. Does this maybe mean that if I subscribe, they'll change their policy?
The Theory of Capitalism can be a little hard to follow at times...
I was recently talking to a visiting Swede who is a carpenter and house builder. He commented that most Scandinavian houses are now being put together without nails. They use screws everywhere. He did observe that, although screws cost 2-3 times as much as nails, you only need about half as many because of their superior strength, so the material cost isn't much higher. But they do take longer, making the labor costs higher.
He also made an observation that I'd already known: The Swedish brand Husqvarna literally means "house quality". Swedes consider the American phrase "industrial quality" bizarre, because corporations are controlled by bean counters who invariably choose short-term cost savings over long-term quality, and business construction tends to be cheap and shoddy. But for his own home, a Swede doesn't want to spend his hard-earned kronor on cheap, shoddy stuff; he (or as often she) is willing to spend the money for something that's sturdy and will last. So "house quality" means the best stuff.
This especially applies to houses. If repairs or changes are wanted in a house, a Swede would expect that you can take the existing structure apart without doing any damage, and then reassemble it with possible changes. You can't do this if nails were used in the construction. So they pay the price for screw assembly.
I've read comments that the same thing has happened in Japan. There, it's common for new home construction to use commercial "pre-fab" panels, and they are assembled with bolts and/or screws. In this case, it's actually a lot cheaper than the primitive board-by-board methods of much of the rest of the world, and the resulting quality is a lot higher. The Asian companies that make the construction panels have tried to sell here in the US, but it turns out to be illegal almost everywhere due to local building codes.
They'd have problems if they wanted to install timber framed walls if they didn't have a hammer though.
Nah; they'd just have to put it together with screws. That's a bit more expensive during construction, but it produces a superior result. And it can be taken apart for maintenance or repairs without damaging the wood. It's cheaper in the long run (which isn't an argument that's meaningful to most organizations run by humans;-).
I certainly hope someone in the government is aware of this situation. Heaven knows, the current Administration has allowed this threat from our educational system go completely unchecked for far too long...
They ASKED HIM for a price because they wanted to take over the site he had built.
See, this is something that we need to publicize. If someone makes you an offer for your site (or domain name), or if they even ask you for a price, you should always totally stonewall them and refuse to answer. Never, ever mention a number. Don't even admit that you'd be willing to give it up.
We see in this discussion how it goes: If you act in good faith, and make the mistake of mentioning a number, you will immediately be classified as a "cybersquatter" who is "only in it for the money". This will be used as an excuse to take the results of your work away from you, you won't get paid anything, and you'll be made to look like the bad guy by nearly everyone. Nearly everyone will side with the big guys trying to take over your site, as they have done here.
So anyone reading this, remember: Don't respond at all to any offers, if you want to keep your web site. If you respond, you'll lose everything with no compensation. This is the way that the Web works these days.
We should spread the word on this at every opportunity. This isn't nearly the first time that such things have happened.
I think it is interesting that we see "report cards" that give government agencies low grades on security, but publicly-owned corporations get a pass.
I'd suspect that this is mostly because info about government security problems is often available, while corporations (public or private) are generally very secretive about such problems. Journalists have a tendency to report news when they have information, and not report when they don't have information. People conclude that there are problems in government agencies, but not in corporations. But the correct conclusion is usually "We don't know whether the corporate world has these problems, because we can't get information from them."
Maybe a better approach would be to surmise that, if an organization of any sort is hiding information, this means that it has something going on that it doesn't want us to know.
(Applying this to the Bush Administration rapidly leads to a high degree of suspicion.;-)
That's because moderate sun and sunbeds DO cause cancer. In many western countries skin cancer is the most common form of diagnosed cancer and the major cause cited is DNA damage caused by UV light.
A number of people have reported trying to research the literature while writing articles on the topic, and found that they had a lot of difficulty finding any actual scientific studies of this "fact". They ended up concluding that maybe sunlight causes skin cancer; maybe it doesn't; they couldn't find any real science on the topic.
If you have references to actual scientific studies verifying this "well-known" link, it might be interesting to read them.
A couple years ago, I did stumble across a paper (in Science IIRC) that described exposing shaved mice to levels of UV thousands of time greater than what was possible from solar exposure, and seeing a small increase in melanoma. I haven't found anything else. But then, I don't have subscriptions to all the publications in which such studies might be published, so I don't know.
Anyone have the references, perhaps with abstracts of the results?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that "duck" looks about as much like Tux as Tux looks like a penguin.
;-)
(To start with, penguins all have narrow, dagger-like beaks.
Actually, "cabbage palm" is the common name for at least five species. On the US East Coast, it usually refers to Sabal palmetto. In the case of this species, the name comes from the fact that the soft, central part of the bud is harvested and eaten as a vegetable, and has an internal structure much like a cabbage. I'd guess this is true of the other cabbage palms, too.
The potted plants I saw (in a nursery west of Boston) looked like this species, but I didn't examine them closely. I just thought "How about that?" and went on. I think that several of the other cabbage palm species are for sale in the US, too.
Coconut palms would be a lot more fun, but I suppose it's still a few years before they'll survive this far north.
I hate Massachusetts winters. And how cool would it be to pick coconuts in my back yard?
Hey, last Saturday I was at Russell's Garden Center (on Route 20 in Wayland), and noticed that they had potted palm trees for sale. They weren't coconut palms. It didn't look at the label, but they looked like baby cabbage palms.
Your wish may come true sooner than you think. Of course, by then most of the Massachusetts coast, including all the Cape, will be under water. I wonder if they'll be able to build levees around Boston that keep it dry? Considering how well this worked for New Orleans, I wouldn't bet on it.
What article to meant was that "Of all the carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere by humans, the great majority was put there by the developed world, with the US alone responsible for an estimated quarter of emissions since 1750." I admit that it was very badly stated, but anyone with the slightest reading comprehension would understand that they were talking about portions of human emissions.
... I happen to know the actual numbers off the top of my head, and when I read the original statement, my instant reaction was "Hey, that's not right at all." I re-read it, trying to find some way to read it so that it was correct, and I couldn't. It was clearly a claim that humans have doubled the amount of atmospheric CO2.
;-). That statement was simply incorrect, since in the past few centuries atmospheric CO2 has only risen about 25%, from roughly 300 ppm to about 380 ppm now, and nothing more than that difference should be considered of human origin.
Hmmm
IMO, you should state the truth (with the qualification that in such discussions, there's no need to bother with more than two places accuracy
A human-caused 25% rise in CO2 is enough of a story, especially since the rise is obviously continuing. There's no need to exaggerate the change by a factor of four. It merely discredits you to people who happen to know the numbers, and makes you an easy target for those who want to deny that there's a problem.
Firing them because they had a different idealology is fine, their job is to work for the president.
Oh, man; you really put it out there. That's about the most corrupt statement I've seen in a long time.
People in the Justice Department should not be working for the president, or any other politician. That's about the worst setup you could possibly imagine. It totally eliminates any meaning to the word "Justice".
I'd ask for an apology for such a remark, but I expect that someone who would say such a thing is beyond salvation.
Granted, a lot of people think such things. But they usually have the good sense not to announce such thoughts in public.
[T]he Republican party in the 2004 elections here in SC actually sent out operatives to polling places at all the state's black colleges (Benedict, SC State, etc.) to keep students from voting (because, technically, they could only vote in their parents districts, since college doesn't count as "residency").
;-).
In 1979, the Supreme Court declared that students could vote in either their "home" (i.e., parents') district or the school district, whichever they declared as their "residence".
This decision had significant effect in a lot of college towns, where the town governments changed from conservative, anti-student to much more representative of the population in the 1980 elections. I remember this pretty well, because I was a student in Madison, Wisconsin at the time. Before this, the city had a government run by student-baiting right-wing conservatives. They were replaced by a "left-wing, hippy, communist" gang that really improved things in general, and who got re-elected overwhelmingly in subsequent elections because of the good job they did (while assiduously baiting the right-wingers at every opportunity
Of course, politicos still try to persuade students that they have to vote "at home", but this has no basis in law. It's purely an attempt to discourage students from voting where they live most of the year.
You can find a good number of descriptions of this Supreme Court decision by googling for the obvious keywords.
> Bill Gates will get Bush to start dropping bombs.
Who knows? It does not seem entirely impossible.
To see some good precedents, look up the history of the phrase "banana republic". The US government has a long, sordid history of using military power to enforce business monopolies of American companies. The US government's complicity in building the dominance of IBM and Microsoft isn't a new story at all.
Of course, they're not the only government to do such things. Here in the Boston area, people are generally familiar with the role such monopolies had in the start of our own Revolution.
The South Slavic languages do seem to be a popular example among linguists, mostly because they're an extreme example of a continuum of dialects without any natural language boundaries, while speakers far enough apart are clearly speaking different languages. So the officially recognized languages are defined by politics.
Actually, my favorite definition of "language" is that a language is a dialect with its own army. This tends to explain things better than those silly linguistic definitions, which are merely logical.
But if you want to see a real mess of dialects and languages, with terminology that's equally messed up, look at Chinese. It's really odd to hear the media talk about the "Chinese language", which would be a lot like the "European language". To be more precise, it would be more like considering all the Romance languages just dialects of Latin. So the French, Portuguese and Romanians all speak the same language, right? And by the same criteria, the Poles, Russians and Croatians all speak the same language.
I do sorta like the Nostratic hypothesis. And I get the impression that every linguist expects that the Indo-European, Finno-Ugaritic, and Semitic languages really are distant relatives, with a common ancestor 8 or 10 thousand years back. But at that distance, there aren't many hard, solid facts to work with. So we can have lots of fun talking about it without worrying about anyone proving us wrong.
It's too bad that we didn't invent recording equipment 10,000 years ago. Or, if you prefer the really far-out "theories", we did, but the recordings were lost, maybe in the Flood or when the big library in Alexandria was burned.
Actually, the Finnish/Estonian pair, along with the Spanish/Portuguese pair, is used in linguistic texts to illustrate one of the technical problems of the standard definition of "language" and "dialect": Two dialects are the same language if the speakers can understand each other (perhaps with difficulty) without any special language study. In both of these pairs, speakers of the "smaller" language (Estonian and Portuguese) can generally understand the other language without much difficulty, while speakers of the "larger" language (Finnish, Spanish) generally can't understand the other. So by the definition, Estonian is a dialect of Finnish, while Finnish is a separate language from Estonian, and similarly for Portuguese/Spanish. This is clearly absurd, so we need to work on the definition a bit. Either that or casually accept that the real world is too messy to be clearly compartmentalized like this.
...
;-)
(I've seen this compared with the similar problem that biologists have with the term "species". By the standard inter-fertility definition, for example, domestic dogs are the same species as wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals are different species from the domestic dog. Also, lions are the same species as tigers, but tigers are a different species from lions. The explanations are similar to the above, and produce a similar absurdity.)
But Estonian isn't close to Russian at all. Estonian isn't even an Indo-European language. It's a Finno-Ugaritic language, and despite a couple centuries of work, linguists haven't yet successfully connected the two language families.
Actually, the asymmetric relation of Estonian and Portuguese to their majority neighbor languages is pretty much a result of the same process: If you compare a few utterances in both cases, you'll quickly see that Estonian and Portuguese have gone through a simplification process similar to French, in which many sounds have been lost, mostly at the ends of words. It's difficult to understand your language with a lot of dropouts, so the Finns and Spaniards have problems making sense of Estonian and Portuguese. But if someone else is speaking your language with a lot of additional "nonsense" sounds added in, it's easy to ignore the "noise". So to an Estonian, Finnish is mostly Estonian with a bunch of added noise that can be ignored. This sort of sound loss has happened in a lot of what used to be dialects, and is a common way for a new language to split off from its ancestor.
I've read claims that this was what first separated Old English into a new language. 1000 years ago, it was really just a West German dialect, and the people on both sides of the Channel could mostly understand each other. Then the people in Britain started dropping most of the inflectional endings on nouns and all of them on adjectives, using a stricter word order instead. This made the language on the island mostly incomprehensible to people on the mainland. Then the Great Vowel Shift came along and finished the job
(Yeah; this is a bit of an over-simplification. So?
That IPv4 is not intelligently designed?
...
Well, IPv4 itself was a fairly intelligent design a quarter century ago. But then it started to accumulate cruft like NAT, which seems to have been designed by a gang of chimps banging on keyboards, giving us the growing mess of today's Internet where my machine and yours can't connect to each other because they're both behind NATted firewalls. As a result, I have to email friends individual copies of my nifty pictures of my vacation, pet conure, and the cute baby cardinal that just showed up at the bird feeder with his parents. With the original IPv4 design, I could just put the pics online and email the URL, and with IPv6 I could do that (if and when all our ISPs permit IPv6). But for now, it means lots of gigantic email messages to people who mostly won't even bother to open half the attachments.
We are starting to get more useful apps that require that end-user systems have public addresses and be allowed to accept incoming connections. As the Joe Six-Packs and Aunt Millies of the world learn of these apps and "need" them, we'll see the death of ISPs blocking end-to-end connections. But IPv4 can't handle this, mostly due to its meagre address space. So we will need to migrate to IPv6 to handle the customer demand, even from the great masses who have no idea what a TCP port is.
And we'll get better security than the joke that is NAT as a side benefit.
Not that IPv6 security is perfect, of course
Back in the 1960s, when I first ran across some "speed reading" texts in school, one of the comments they had was the explanation of why newspapers have traditionally had multiple narrow columns on each page. This is because the publishers discovered long ago that 1) their most loyal readers are people who want to read the news quickly and get on with things, and 2) people can read narrow columns faster than wide text. The reason is that, below a certain width, good readers don't scan back and forth across the text; they focus only on the middle of the line and scan vertically. The critical columns width is easy to determine: Just format several pages with columns of different widths (or different widths on a single page), and watch their eyes as they read. You can easily see the left-right eye jitter on wider columns.
/. admins in their wisdom have decided to disallow narrow text.
I've also seen a few comments about how this lesson has been lost on the Web. Not only are most Web docs formatted to have a single column of text; most also force a wide column. Even slashdot does it, for no obvious reason. If I resize this window to be narrower, below about 700 pixels the text stops being redrawn, and a horizontal scroll bar appears at the bottom. So even if I know that it's easier to read a narrow text, it does me no good, because the
Anyway, these people are merely rediscovering something that the publishing industry and reading instructors have known and understood for centuries.
But I do sorta like their syntactic indentation style. As someone else said, it's a lot like Doctor Seuss.
Actually, it's also an attack on, for instance, slashdot. Consider that under US and most other law, everything you "publish" here is copyrighted by you. /. even tells us this up front. And almost nothing here is encrypted or protected by any other DRM mechanism. So if these guys win, their next target will be everyone putting anything on the Web without DRM.
...
Myself, I wonder if the DMCA could be applied to hard copy publications. If so, these guys might also start suing every publisher for not using a product of theirs to encrypt and "protect" books and magazines.
But maybe we should keep quiet about this. It might give the dead-tree publishers an idea
The phone displayed is the FIC Neo1973 and was designed as part of the OpenMoko open phone project.
;-) This does, however, illustrate the dangers of accepting a phone that requires a 2-year contract with a cell-phone company who has no motive to help you get your software working on it.
Yeah, I noticed that right off. I wonder which will be easiest for us developers to get our hands on and write software for? I've been wanting one since I first read of the openmoko project 6 or 8 months ago, but so far I don't yet have one.
Maybe we should all send messages to both projects asking for a phone and promising to write for whichever one gets to us first.
Of course, we might also add the qualification that we want not just the phone, but docs and prototypes of a few simple, working programs that talk to other programs across the Net. I recently gave up on a blackberry as a lost cause; an employer paid for it a couple years ago, but I was never able to get anything non-trivial working on it. (Maybe I'm an idiot, of course, but I'm able to write things quickly for other platforms, so that can't be the only problem.
They should just declare that all primaries more than a month before the national convention shall be treated as irrelevant to the party.
;-)
We need some way of stopping this gradual escalation of primaries to earlier and earlier dates. We're rapidly reaching the stage where primaries will be held more than four years before the election.
Actually, are there any laws stating that parties have to honor the results of primaries? Is there a reason that a party shouldn't just tell the most idiotic state governments to go to hell, and refuse to seat their delegates?
(For that matter, is there a reason that the voters shouldn't tell the parties to go to that same hell?
The real fault lies at the heart of the problem, the people who make software don't listen to their users - for whatever reasons.
In most of the software projects that I've worked on in the past several decades, I have usually not been permitted to communicate with users. And this is rarely an accident; it is usually an explicit, conscious management policy.
Given that the software development industry works this way, I really don't think I can be blamed for not doing something that management tries so hard to prevent me from doing.
OTOH, in my spare time, I've worked on a few open-source projects, things that I got involved in because I want them myself. In those, I've communicated with a lot of users, and I've often turned them into beta testers for my attempts to implement what they want. I think the results of this have been much better than in most commercial software. But I'd guess that most software managers would disagree. And part of their reason would be that the results have usually been "ugly". I.e., they are simple, bare UIs, with no eye candy at all. I have a couple of "ugly" web sites that produce a slow stream of nice letters from people who tell me how useful they are. But they're like the google main page, bare and uninteresting to look at. That is, exactly the sort of thing that would get redesigned to be more "user friendly" on almost any software project.
Bottom line on all this: I refuse to take the blame for what, in my experience, is foisted on the commercial software world by management that generally wants exactly the sort of products that we're complaining about, puts strong barriers in the way of developer-user communication, and punishes developers who have the gall to communicate directly with the end users.
Once you're logged in, it should all be through https 'til you log out again.
Uh, you missed the main point. "Once you're logged in" isn't good enough. Unless the login page (the whole page) is sent to you securely via https, what looks to you like a login page could be sending your login info in the clear to that Man in the Middle. He'll then use the info to drain your account.
You need to make sure that the login session itself is secured in its entirety. If security starts only "once you're logged in", you've potentially lost everything.
Abandoning it because no one else can maintain ReiserFS is a legitimate reason, but I'm certain that someone will be able to figure it out and maintain it. However, I would think that a name change would be in the works.
The appropriate comment is probably:
"It's time for a fork."
We could probably just call it "RFS", and publicly claim that the "R" stands for something else that starts with 'r'.
Wow, how delightfully shallow! If we found out that Newton murdered someone we should all drop newtonian physics!
;-) clues about their wide range of topics.
Actually, in the case of Newton, we have something rather similar to consider. It's not as spectacular as murder, but in scientific circles, it could be considered as damning: Newton wrote a lot on theological topics. I've read excerpts from a few of these writing, and they're - well, "godawful" is probably the appropriate term.
However, physicists have taken the right approach: Ignore the silliness of Newton's theology, and pay attention to the accuracy and insight of his scientific writings. They do lament the time he wasted on such junk that could have been productive, but they generally understand that it has little bearing on the status of his scientific work.
Of course, people generally aren't willing to take such an enlightened, easygoing approach. This is why so many writers adopt pseudonyms. Typically they'll use each pseudonym for a specific topic, and try to avoid giving readers (and editors
A lot of scientists and engineers have led less than exemplary private lives. If we want good science and technology, we're probably better off ignoring such things. Of course, if someone ends up in jail, it's something that's not easy to ignore, as it tends to interfere with ongoing R&D.
(If you want an example of how attention to private lives can go badly wrong, read the sad story of Alan Turing's life. This is a good illustration of why we might be better off if our lives stay private, especially from government investigators. We could likely have gotten much more good mathematics from this fellow if he had been treated better.)
You are 100% correct, it is the consumers fault that this is the state of affairs. If you care enough to think that this is wrong, then you should care enough to not support that magazine at all.
... It doesn't seem to be working. There are thousands of magazines that I don't subscribe to, but they just keep on publishing their advertiser-influenced stuff.
...
Hmm
What am I doing wrong?
For that matter, I don't subscribe to PC World, and as others have concluded (via the usual post-hoc method), this seems to have led to their increasing the ad control of content. Does this maybe mean that if I subscribe, they'll change their policy?
The Theory of Capitalism can be a little hard to follow at times
I was recently talking to a visiting Swede who is a carpenter and house builder. He commented that most Scandinavian houses are now being put together without nails. They use screws everywhere. He did observe that, although screws cost 2-3 times as much as nails, you only need about half as many because of their superior strength, so the material cost isn't much higher. But they do take longer, making the labor costs higher.
He also made an observation that I'd already known: The Swedish brand Husqvarna literally means "house quality". Swedes consider the American phrase "industrial quality" bizarre, because corporations are controlled by bean counters who invariably choose short-term cost savings over long-term quality, and business construction tends to be cheap and shoddy. But for his own home, a Swede doesn't want to spend his hard-earned kronor on cheap, shoddy stuff; he (or as often she) is willing to spend the money for something that's sturdy and will last. So "house quality" means the best stuff.
This especially applies to houses. If repairs or changes are wanted in a house, a Swede would expect that you can take the existing structure apart without doing any damage, and then reassemble it with possible changes. You can't do this if nails were used in the construction. So they pay the price for screw assembly.
I've read comments that the same thing has happened in Japan. There, it's common for new home construction to use commercial "pre-fab" panels, and they are assembled with bolts and/or screws. In this case, it's actually a lot cheaper than the primitive board-by-board methods of much of the rest of the world, and the resulting quality is a lot higher. The Asian companies that make the construction panels have tried to sell here in the US, but it turns out to be illegal almost everywhere due to local building codes.
They'd have problems if they wanted to install timber framed walls if they didn't have a hammer though.
;-).
Nah; they'd just have to put it together with screws. That's a bit more expensive during construction, but it produces a superior result. And it can be taken apart for maintenance or repairs without damaging the wood. It's cheaper in the long run (which isn't an argument that's meaningful to most organizations run by humans
I certainly hope someone in the government is aware of this situation. Heaven knows, the current Administration has allowed this threat from our educational system go completely unchecked for far too long...
;-)
There; fixed that for you.
They ASKED HIM for a price because they wanted to take over the site he had built.
See, this is something that we need to publicize. If someone makes you an offer for your site (or domain name), or if they even ask you for a price, you should always totally stonewall them and refuse to answer. Never, ever mention a number. Don't even admit that you'd be willing to give it up.
We see in this discussion how it goes: If you act in good faith, and make the mistake of mentioning a number, you will immediately be classified as a "cybersquatter" who is "only in it for the money". This will be used as an excuse to take the results of your work away from you, you won't get paid anything, and you'll be made to look like the bad guy by nearly everyone. Nearly everyone will side with the big guys trying to take over your site, as they have done here.
So anyone reading this, remember: Don't respond at all to any offers, if you want to keep your web site. If you respond, you'll lose everything with no compensation. This is the way that the Web works these days.
We should spread the word on this at every opportunity. This isn't nearly the first time that such things have happened.
I think it is interesting that we see "report cards" that give government agencies low grades on security, but publicly-owned corporations get a pass.
;-)
I'd suspect that this is mostly because info about government security problems is often available, while corporations (public or private) are generally very secretive about such problems. Journalists have a tendency to report news when they have information, and not report when they don't have information. People conclude that there are problems in government agencies, but not in corporations. But the correct conclusion is usually "We don't know whether the corporate world has these problems, because we can't get information from them."
Maybe a better approach would be to surmise that, if an organization of any sort is hiding information, this means that it has something going on that it doesn't want us to know.
(Applying this to the Bush Administration rapidly leads to a high degree of suspicion.
That's because moderate sun and sunbeds DO cause cancer. In many western countries skin cancer is the most common form of diagnosed cancer and the major cause cited is DNA damage caused by UV light.
A number of people have reported trying to research the literature while writing articles on the topic, and found that they had a lot of difficulty finding any actual scientific studies of this "fact". They ended up concluding that maybe sunlight causes skin cancer; maybe it doesn't; they couldn't find any real science on the topic.
If you have references to actual scientific studies verifying this "well-known" link, it might be interesting to read them.
A couple years ago, I did stumble across a paper (in Science IIRC) that described exposing shaved mice to levels of UV thousands of time greater than what was possible from solar exposure, and seeing a small increase in melanoma. I haven't found anything else. But then, I don't have subscriptions to all the publications in which such studies might be published, so I don't know.
Anyone have the references, perhaps with abstracts of the results?