[I]n the general publics' mind it going to be like "Oh, he's not a scientist - he is merely a researcher."
That would be right in line with the public's use of the phrase "just a theory" as a dismissive put-down of a guess, contrary to the scientific use of "theory" for the best-supported explanations.
Actually, my favorite example is the media's use of "quantum leap" to mean "a really huge change", when to physicists a quantum change is the smallest change possible. A while ago, I read about a company's "quantum leap in profits", and my immediate thought was to wonder why an annual profit that changed by $0.01 was a news story.
There's nothing much we can do to control the public's (or the media's) misuse of scientific terminology. All we can do is demand that technical people use their own fields' terminology correctly.
Actually, her annoyance makes a bit of sense, when you read the explanation that she was researching Crohn's Disease, not cancer. Her research involved producing Crohn's-like inflammation in the cell cultures and testing compounds for their effect on the inflammation. She was using cancer cell lines because they live in vitro longer than normal cells. It makes sense that she would at first be annoyed when her cultures died instead of just having the level of inflammation change.
Such things are not at all uncommon in biological research, of course. One of the ongoing difficulties is recognizing that a "failed" experiment might have some significance for something that you weren't studying (and is usually outside your expertise).
Actually curing a condition instead of just treating the symptoms could get you sued or worse.
Heh. I've heard comments from drug-company people effectively admitting this. The most common seems to be the explanations from a number of companies for why they've stopped making vaccines. The problem is that vaccines aren't profitable. You sell one or two doses to a customer, the customer is cured, and you get no repeat business. They don't seem to see anything questionable in this explanation.
When I first heard this idea years ago, I thought it was a sick attempt at a joke. Eventually I learned that it isn't actually a joke at all; it's how companies act.
It does remind me of the ongoing complaint from many professional comedians: Satire is a very difficult sort of humor to do well, because no matter how crazy your satire is, the real world soon undercuts your joke by doing something even crazier. In particular, they complain that politicians keep saying and doing things that they'd never have dared to put into their satire. I've also heard them making similar complaints about the management of big corporations. Scott Adams (Dilbert) has made such complaints, for instance. (But he also observes that he will never run out of material, because management keeps coming up with ever more insane actions that readers send to him.)
If people are just trying to find a newspaper's home page, then Google removing their ability to do that via Google would, certainly, undermine Google's credibility with end users. If I search for "New York Times", I expect to find the NYT's website....
Maybe what google should do is inform the user of the problem. Instead of the usual excerpt showing your search terms, they could say something like:
X's main page There is a relevant page at X, but X doesn't allow us to show you their text. So we've just provide a link to X's main page, and you can try their search tool to find the page. Good luck.
This might get across to X's management that they've shot themselves in the feet.
I store the contents of the New York Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal daily. But then, I'm a serious data hoarder.
You don't have to be a serious data hoarder to do this. Many of us do the same, merely by using a browser to access their web sites. The browser does the caching, whether we're consciously aware of it or not.
I do wonder if we're going to soon hear of a lawsuit about this caching of copyrighted material by browsers. It's a stupid idea, of course, but that never stopped many lawyers or overzealous prosecutors.
Similarly, I often wonder when the "copying is piracy" crowd discovers the unix "cp" command. Just think of all the copyright violations that this little program has enabled.
Yeah, that worked out so well for the flat-earth types.
First off, this is incorrect. Scientists have known that the Earth was round since they first applied geometry to the heavens. The Greeks determined its circumference very accurately, and it was widely recognized as a fact by the Greek scientific community....
Good summary. It's probably worth pointing out that, in addition to scientists and engineers, there's a third occupation that has long understood the world's shape: sailors.
If you spend any time sailing around on a body of water big enough to have a horizon, you figure it out fairly quickly. As you sail away from a place, things disappear from the bottom up, with the hilltops the last things to go. As you approach a place, things appear from the top down. First you see mountain tops, then lower hills, then the tops of trees and buildings, and finally the shoreline as you get very close. This happens no matter what direction you're sailing. It doesn't take a genius to integrate this into an understanding that you're sailing around on the surface of a sphere.
This doesn't give you the Earth's size, of course, only its shape. But there was a cute puzzle in Scientific American years ago: Using only technology available to the ancient Greek and Roman engineers, and standing in one place, measure the size of the Earth. The answer is surprisingly simple (though you do need to know a bit about the measuring tools available to those engineers). If nobody else answers it in a few days (and I don't forget about it;-), maybe I'll post the answer.
The technique of using two wells (or two gnomons) at different latitudes is also an elegant solution, but it requires travel. The same measuring equipment could have given the size to someone standing still in the vicinity of Alexandria.
Currently, the concept of "Solely Man-Made Global Warming" is not independently verifiable!
You might want to work on rephrasing that. The word "Solely" there is instantly seen by many readers as a strawman indicator. That is, it flags an argument based on attacking a parody of the opponent's claims.
In this case, few if any scientists make the claim that the observed global warming trend is solely due to human activity. Rather, they are studying the phenomenon, and trying to estimate just how much of it is due to human activity. The "dispute" in scientific circles deals with the estimates of this number, which various researchers (or their models) have estimated to be from 50% to 115%. Most seem to be in the 80% - 100% range, with error bars of several percent.
And, of course, that's only dealing with the recent warming. There has been an understanding for some time that "global warming" has been a fact of life on our planet for billions of years. The physicists tell us that the equilibrium temperature of the Earth is about 278K (5C). Several decades of measurement from satellites have established that the Earth's actual mean temperature is about 295K (22C). The 17-degree difference is well understood to be almost entirely from our "greenhouse" atmosphere that acts as a heat buffer. It lets in sunlight easily but impedes the escape of heat, resulting in an equilibrium temperature higher than expected of a rocky planet in our orbit around our sun.
But the political battle doesn't deal with this; it's about the marginal change over the past century or so. In the recent 2 or 3 decades, the mean temperature has been rising quite rapidly (by historical standards), and scientists have been studying the phenomenon. There is fairly good agreement from the research that most of this recent warming is due almost entirely to human activity. The mechanisms are by now fairly well understood. The exact fraction is in dispute, yes. But the dispute isn't whether the fraction is zero or nonzero. The dispute is over how close to 100% the fraction is.
However, few scientists would seriously argue that the warming is "solely" of human cause. That baseline 22-degree warming clearly goes at least a billion of years, and can't be caused by human activity. Humans can only be responsible for the warming above that baseline. So far, that's only about a degree (plus or minus).
[TFA] points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time".
So Microsoft's standard approach of writing software that confuses users and doesn't work very well is telling the public that this is what all DRM is like. We see this all the time, for example with viruses which are invariably reported as infecting "computers", not just "Microsoft computers". Similarly, the difficulty of learning to use the little beasts is a property of "computers", not of any particular brand.
It reminds me of the old saying: "Nobody is all bad. They can always serve as a bad example."
In this case, though, MS could well be doing us a service. By convincing the gullible public that "DRM is confusing and doesn't work very well", they are inadvertently helping in the fight against DRM everywhere. Even if someone will come up with DRM that works (for some value of "works"), it won't be used, because it won't run on Windows (and on non-MS systems, the crypto geeks will break it within hours of release). Most users will just accept that MS's DRM is what DRM is like, and will oppose its use anywhere as a result.
Of course, one could argue that a correct implementation of DRM is probably intractable. This is mostly because determining which "fair use" rules apply wherever the use might live is a seriously difficult AI problem. It can't actually be determined by a human-level intelligence, as demonstrated by the need to ask the courts rather than just reading the law books. So we need an AI that's much more intelligent than any team of human lawyers, and has deep understanding of all the "IP" laws of every jurisdiction in the world. Of multiple jurisdictions, actually, when Net transactions are considered. We won't likely see this level of AI in our lifetimes.
Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
Well, I don't know where you live, but here in the US the reason is called the First Ammendment, which includes this idea called "Free Speech". Authors, singers, actors, etc. have the right to say any damned thing they want because there's nothing in the US Constitution saying that the First Ammendment doesn't apply to them.
Probably the reason that such people are allowed to exercise their First Ammendment rights is the fear that, if we give in to the temptation to silence such idiots, the next thing will be that we'll be included in the group that's silenced. There are reasons (learnable by reading a bit of history) that this is widely considered a bad idea in general. Many of us have learned that it's better to allow the idiots to continue speaking, since the alternative is allowing the government to silence us all. It's a lot easier to sort out the fluff and dross than it is to find the smart things that have been hidden from us.
Anyway, some of these folks are entertaining. I mean, I've found all the hoopla around the Dixie Chicks' political comments tremendously funny to read about. I got a big laugh when I read of their big award a few days ago. Lots of us think that such entertainment is valuable in and of itself.
Michael Crighton can be quite entertaining. Now if only someone could find a way to make Al Gore entertaining...
I do not see any problems with them being able to charge and arm and a leg for the treatment, after all, if you do not pay the arm and the leg, you will lose both arms, both legs, the torso and the head to the disease.
Well, people do have a history of being upset with someone who says "Your money or your life.";-)
We might chalk it up to basic human irrationality. After all, there are several popular economic theories that explain to us why the companies' behavior is rational. And we all know that we're going to die anyway. What does it matter to the universe (or the economy) if you or I die today or 20 years from now? Not much, really, unless you or I is a major celebrity. But still, people irrationally insist on wanting to live longer, and they even more irrationally insist on not becoming homeless paupers in order to stay alive.
Dunno how we can get people to behave rationally, though. Let us know if you figure out how.
It's nice to think that, but I don't *entirely* agree with it. Microsoft is an easy target, given the insanely large user-base. However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
I'd agree. It's very convenient to have Windows users using Windows. That makes it very easy for people running web sites, email servers, etc. to spot them. If they were to switch to linux (or even OSX) and bring their anti-security practices with them, we'd have to have software that tested all incoming requests for symptoms of a botnet. With Windows users on Windows, we can just test for requests with header info that implies a Windows source. That way, it's only Windows users who are slowed down, and we can give faster service to users coming from better-designed systems.
But this idyllic situation may end soon. It looks like there might soon be masses of Ubuntu users scattered around the world, mostly every bit as oblivious to security as Windows users. So this might be a new botnet source that we'll have to build defenses against.
We'll see. For now, we should really just encourage the more intelligent and/or thoughtful Windows users to switch to better systems. It's handy to be able to easily identify the most dangerous ones with such simple tests.
Not to mention you'd probably indent the code in any other language, python just gets rid of the extra braces.
Yeah, but once you screw up the indents in a whole file of Python source, you're not going to think that this is such a great thing. See, if you accidentally flatten out the indents of Python code, you have no clue where blocks used to begin and end.
Yeah; I've seen quite a bit of this problem from my experiments with python. Usually, it comes about when trying to exchange code via email. Lots of email software plays fast and loose with white space, not to mention the nasty problems caused by line wrapping. Getting python code safely through via email can be a real challenge. Undoing the damage for more than a few lines of code can give you a headache. It's a lot easier with languages that don't use white space syntactically; you just feed it to a "prettyprinter" and it's good again.
Of course, the real solution would be to round up all the idiots who write email software that munges the format of the text, take them out back, and work them over a bit. I've found that rational argument doesn't work with this crowd. They seem to think that it's perfectly acceptable for email software to "improve" the text by rewriting white space, and nothing you can say convinces them otherwise. Even more recalcitrant are the folks who like to convert email between plain text and HTML.
It doesn't even work to just put files in a web directory and tell people to download them. They usually do this with a browser, and lots of browsers will rewrite white space (especially tabs) and do line wrapping in with text/plain and <pre> parts of HTML files, and there's no way to prevent this.
In a few cases, the only way we've found to prevent irrecoverable damage to python code is to encrypt the text with some simple tool like uuencode, and decrypt it at the receiving end. It's a PITA for what should be a simple file copy, but it works.
With (nearly) fully-parenthesized languages like C and perl, most such damage is usually easy to undo. With python, it can be nearly impossible, because the block structure is simply gone.
Of course, this is only a problem if you're trying to share code with others. As a language for in-house, unshared code that never has to be transmitted to anyone else, python is probably fine.
Well, that didn't work too well. When it asked for args to "perl Makefile.PL", I gave it INSTALL_BASE=~, and then when it got around to running the command, it said:
'INSTALL_BASE' is not a known MakeMaker parameter name.
It then proceeded to attempt installing in the system libraries, and failed again because I wasn't root.
I'd looked into XML::Simple some time back, and gave up because I couldn't successfully install it. So again I went through IBM's install instructions, starting with that "perl -MCPAN" command, which of course told me at the start that I already had a ~/.cpan directory. Anyway, it seemed to be going ok until the "make install", which ended with:
Running make install Warning: You do not have permissions to install into/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/mach at/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ExtUtils/Inst all.pm line 114. mkdir/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/XML: Permission denied at/usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.8.8/ExtUtils/Inst all.pm line 176 *** Error code 13
Stop in/u/guests/jc/.cpan/build/XML-Simple-2.16./usr/bin/make install -- NOT OK
You may have to su to root to install the package
I don't have root access on the machine I was using, which is where my main web site is. So this looks like brick wall. I'll dig around a bit more to see if there's a way to install the thing as a non-su user. But as before, I'll probably fail. A brief look at the install stuff shows that it's quite an impressive horror.
I'm a bit leery of installing it on a machine where I do have root access. The incomprehensibility of the install code, plus the fact that it comes from IBM (which may be a bit better than MS, but does have a bit of history;-) makes me very nervous about trusting something that wants the root password on my machine.
Or do you actually believe the real journalists would have given a damn if they hadn't come for them too?
I get the impression that most "real journalists" see the Net as just one more medium. Many are working on the Net now, and most see it as part of their future. And many are aware that in the early days of radio and then television, the same sort of thing happened. They had to fight in court to establish that using radio or TV didn't disable their journalistic credentials. It took court action to establish that all the previous laws about "freedom of the press" applied to journalists whose words were sent out via radio waves rather than ink on paper. The current battle to extend this to digital packets isn't materially any different.
Those who tout the greatness of their nation seldom contribute to it.
Heh. So true. That's right up there with "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Or, as Mark Twain observed, it's often the first.
Maybe they'll think twice before trampling the rights of others next time.
Or, to put it another way, this sets an important precedent.
One of the ongoing problems the legal system has is that, once a computer is involved, all precedent goes out the window, and all legal precedent is null and void and needs to be re-established. A lot of legal procedings can be explained once you understand this.
This case illustrates this rule by showing that a "blogger" isn't considered a "journalist", presumably because they use a computer and the Net to publish rather than a printing press. The judge's decision sets the important precedent that a journalist who publishes online is indeed a "journalist", and the involvement of computers and the Net doesn't negate that.
Of course, there's the qualification that this was done by a California court, so courts outside that jurisdiction will continue with the premise that the involvement of a computer invalidates all precedent. We can hope that Apple decides to appeal this to a Federal court, and that court decides similarly that a blogger can indeed be a journalist.
The manufacturers need to stop selling PCs with Windows preinstalled on one big partition. They need to pre-partition the drives for an OS partition and a data partition.... The software manufacturers need to follow suit -...
Part of the problem is that none of the manufacturers (or vendors) need any of this. It's the customers that need such things. Manufacturers and vendors only need to make money by selling at a good enough markup to make a profit. Things like security are the customers' problems.
Until we find a way to fix this, sales of shoddy, insecure systems will continue because they're more profitable that better-designed systems.
Windows was NEVER a multiuser system and the layout of the system proves it.
Funny thing: I've been making a similar argument in some other fora since I got a Mac Powerbook a few years ago. Actually, my wife and I both use it. And we keep stumbling across all sorts of things where a "preferences" change or an install of a new tool done by one of us affects the other. All sorts of things that other unix-based systems install in $HOME are stored in global places by Mac software. Very often, we can't even find where things are stored, and when we do, it's often in an undocumented binary file. But it's fairly obvious that the Mac developers have rarely tested on multi-user machines. So it's not just a Microsoft problem. Having unix as the OS doesn't make a system multi-user unless the developers are careful to practice proper separation of privileges and such. And it's always easier to hard-code a pathname than it is to extract HOME from the environment and prepend it to the file name.
The people who are making those decisions continue to want to have the voting machines due to all of the evidence showing how unsecure/not-tamper-proof these things really are.
There; fixed it for you.
If you think the politicos making the purchase decisions are ignorant of the documented problems, you're incredibly naive.
Roads are a public good. You benefit from them whether you use them or not.
And people are slowly coming to realize that the same is true for information. A well-informed citizenry is a public good. You benefit from easy access to information whether or not you choose to be well-informed. If the people around you are well-informed, you benefit by having a society that works better. If the people around you can be kept ignorant, all of you can be victimized by the people who are keeping you ignorant.
We can see this rather clearly by comparing different countries' access to information with how well those countries run. The places where it's best to live all have one noticable thing in common: They're all places where the population is educated and has access to good information.
... the invention of a network protocol doesn't mean you automatically have some inspirational insight into the future governance of something which affects the daily lives of people worldwide.
Actually, there's a fairly obvious argument saying that the invention of such a protocol does imply such an insight.
We can see the natural state of a network without global "regulation" (i.e., standards) by looking at networking equipment invented by manufacturers. We call these LANs now, because they're only workable on a very local level. The reason is that no two of them can interoperate. Corporations don't communicate with their competitors, and they intentionally build equipment that won't talk to their competitors' equipment. The only way to get a world-wide network is to have some sort of governing body that can decree and enforce standards. Otherwise, all you get is a lot of non-cooperating, small-scale networks.
You can see the difficulty especially well with the cell-phone system. That has the potential to be a universally-accessible world-wide wireless comm system. But it hasn't much happened, because governments (especially the US government) allow the companies to control their own networks. Their natural behavior is to restrict their networks to "locked" equipment that you must buy from them, and which can't communicate well with the competition even when it's the same brand of phone. They also take great pains to prevent us independent software developers from building anything on their networks, because they don't want anything on their network that doesn't directly result in income to them.
There was a great deal of insight in the creation of the Internet. Especially impressive is the way that they found to use the limited, proprietary systems, by encapsulating them and building a higher-level layer of software that hid all the low-level incompatibilities. This is the primary value of the IP protocol. And they made all their specs and most of the code freely available to all developers, which produced the explosion of user applications of the past couple decades.
It took insight to appreciate that the commercial world would never do such a thing, so they needed an approach that could use commercial products while insulating the proprietary details from applications. The result was a system that actually encourages communication between unlike hardware from different manufacturers, something that those manufacturers still try to block when they can.
And it's amazing all this happened while the internet was unregulated. Imagne what would of happened if it had been regulated.
Have you heard of the IAB (Internet Activities Board), or ICANN. Or the RFCs, which are the standards for Internet communications? If these aren't government regulation, what would qualify?
The Internet exists because of the regulation (aka standards) that has been enforced with a reasonable amount of evenhandedness on all communicating parties. Without that, we'd still have the cacophony of incompatible, proprietary standards that you see in LANs, with every company implementing their own "standard" that's intentionally incompatible with competitors' "standards".
Remember that the Internet was created by a U.S. government agency (ARPA, now DARPA). The corporate world has jumped on it and is trying to claim it, but very few of them had much to do with its development. Most of them tried to thrown monkey wrenches into the works whenever they thought they saw ways to lock out competitors by sneaking in proprietary stuff.
If I bought one of these things, how would I persuade a US cell-phone company to let me use it? This has sorta been a major barrier in the past. Our cell-phone companies here generally only permit their own locked-down phones, and do everything they can to prevent software developers like me from adding our own stuff to the phone. If I had a guarantee that I could actually use the thing as a cell phone (voice + data), I'd jump into the development right away. But I don't see any clues so far as to how I'd go about making sure that it would actually be usable where I live.
Slashdot Mirror
[I]n the general publics' mind it going to be like "Oh, he's not a scientist - he is merely a researcher."
That would be right in line with the public's use of the phrase "just a theory" as a dismissive put-down of a guess, contrary to the scientific use of "theory" for the best-supported explanations.
Actually, my favorite example is the media's use of "quantum leap" to mean "a really huge change", when to physicists a quantum change is the smallest change possible. A while ago, I read about a company's "quantum leap in profits", and my immediate thought was to wonder why an annual profit that changed by $0.01 was a news story.
There's nothing much we can do to control the public's (or the media's) misuse of scientific terminology. All we can do is demand that technical people use their own fields' terminology correctly.
Actually, her annoyance makes a bit of sense, when you read the explanation that she was researching Crohn's Disease, not cancer. Her research involved producing Crohn's-like inflammation in the cell cultures and testing compounds for their effect on the inflammation. She was using cancer cell lines because they live in vitro longer than normal cells. It makes sense that she would at first be annoyed when her cultures died instead of just having the level of inflammation change.
Such things are not at all uncommon in biological research, of course. One of the ongoing difficulties is recognizing that a "failed" experiment might have some significance for something that you weren't studying (and is usually outside your expertise).
Actually curing a condition instead of just treating the symptoms could get you sued or worse.
Heh. I've heard comments from drug-company people effectively admitting this. The most common seems to be the explanations from a number of companies for why they've stopped making vaccines. The problem is that vaccines aren't profitable. You sell one or two doses to a customer, the customer is cured, and you get no repeat business. They don't seem to see anything questionable in this explanation.
When I first heard this idea years ago, I thought it was a sick attempt at a joke. Eventually I learned that it isn't actually a joke at all; it's how companies act.
It does remind me of the ongoing complaint from many professional comedians: Satire is a very difficult sort of humor to do well, because no matter how crazy your satire is, the real world soon undercuts your joke by doing something even crazier. In particular, they complain that politicians keep saying and doing things that they'd never have dared to put into their satire. I've also heard them making similar complaints about the management of big corporations. Scott Adams (Dilbert) has made such complaints, for instance. (But he also observes that he will never run out of material, because management keeps coming up with ever more insane actions that readers send to him.)
If people are just trying to find a newspaper's home page, then Google removing their ability to do that via Google would, certainly, undermine Google's credibility with end users. If I search for "New York Times", I expect to find the NYT's website. ...
Maybe what google should do is inform the user of the problem. Instead of the usual excerpt showing your search terms, they could say something like:
X's main page
There is a relevant page at X, but X doesn't allow us to show you their text. So we've just provide a link to X's main page, and you can try their search tool to find the page. Good luck.
This might get across to X's management that they've shot themselves in the feet.
I store the contents of the New York Times, the Economist and the Wall Street Journal daily. But then, I'm a serious data hoarder.
You don't have to be a serious data hoarder to do this. Many of us do the same, merely by using a browser to access their web sites. The browser does the caching, whether we're consciously aware of it or not.
I do wonder if we're going to soon hear of a lawsuit about this caching of copyrighted material by browsers. It's a stupid idea, of course, but that never stopped many lawyers or overzealous prosecutors.
Similarly, I often wonder when the "copying is piracy" crowd discovers the unix "cp" command. Just think of all the copyright violations that this little program has enabled.
Heh. I think you're onto something.
Yeah, that worked out so well for the flat-earth types.
...
;-), maybe I'll post the answer.
First off, this is incorrect. Scientists have known that the Earth was round since they first applied geometry to the heavens. The Greeks determined its circumference very accurately, and it was widely recognized as a fact by the Greek scientific community.
Good summary. It's probably worth pointing out that, in addition to scientists and engineers, there's a third occupation that has long understood the world's shape: sailors.
If you spend any time sailing around on a body of water big enough to have a horizon, you figure it out fairly quickly. As you sail away from a place, things disappear from the bottom up, with the hilltops the last things to go. As you approach a place, things appear from the top down. First you see mountain tops, then lower hills, then the tops of trees and buildings, and finally the shoreline as you get very close. This happens no matter what direction you're sailing. It doesn't take a genius to integrate this into an understanding that you're sailing around on the surface of a sphere.
This doesn't give you the Earth's size, of course, only its shape. But there was a cute puzzle in Scientific American years ago: Using only technology available to the ancient Greek and Roman engineers, and standing in one place, measure the size of the Earth. The answer is surprisingly simple (though you do need to know a bit about the measuring tools available to those engineers). If nobody else answers it in a few days (and I don't forget about it
The technique of using two wells (or two gnomons) at different latitudes is also an elegant solution, but it requires travel. The same measuring equipment could have given the size to someone standing still in the vicinity of Alexandria.
Currently, the concept of "Solely Man-Made Global Warming" is not independently verifiable!
You might want to work on rephrasing that. The word "Solely" there is instantly seen by many readers as a strawman indicator. That is, it flags an argument based on attacking a parody of the opponent's claims.
In this case, few if any scientists make the claim that the observed global warming trend is solely due to human activity. Rather, they are studying the phenomenon, and trying to estimate just how much of it is due to human activity. The "dispute" in scientific circles deals with the estimates of this number, which various researchers (or their models) have estimated to be from 50% to 115%. Most seem to be in the 80% - 100% range, with error bars of several percent.
And, of course, that's only dealing with the recent warming. There has been an understanding for some time that "global warming" has been a fact of life on our planet for billions of years. The physicists tell us that the equilibrium temperature of the Earth is about 278K (5C). Several decades of measurement from satellites have established that the Earth's actual mean temperature is about 295K (22C). The 17-degree difference is well understood to be almost entirely from our "greenhouse" atmosphere that acts as a heat buffer. It lets in sunlight easily but impedes the escape of heat, resulting in an equilibrium temperature higher than expected of a rocky planet in our orbit around our sun.
But the political battle doesn't deal with this; it's about the marginal change over the past century or so. In the recent 2 or 3 decades, the mean temperature has been rising quite rapidly (by historical standards), and scientists have been studying the phenomenon. There is fairly good agreement from the research that most of this recent warming is due almost entirely to human activity. The mechanisms are by now fairly well understood. The exact fraction is in dispute, yes. But the dispute isn't whether the fraction is zero or nonzero. The dispute is over how close to 100% the fraction is.
However, few scientists would seriously argue that the warming is "solely" of human cause. That baseline 22-degree warming clearly goes at least a billion of years, and can't be caused by human activity. Humans can only be responsible for the warming above that baseline. So far, that's only about a degree (plus or minus).
[TFA] points out that consumers are getting confused and that the Microsoft DRM "doesn't work half the time".
...
So Microsoft's standard approach of writing software that confuses users and doesn't work very well is telling the public that this is what all DRM is like. We see this all the time, for example with viruses which are invariably reported as infecting "computers", not just "Microsoft computers". Similarly, the difficulty of learning to use the little beasts is a property of "computers", not of any particular brand.
It reminds me of the old saying: "Nobody is all bad. They can always serve as a bad example."
In this case, though, MS could well be doing us a service. By convincing the gullible public that "DRM is confusing and doesn't work very well", they are inadvertently helping in the fight against DRM everywhere. Even if someone will come up with DRM that works (for some value of "works"), it won't be used, because it won't run on Windows (and on non-MS systems, the crypto geeks will break it within hours of release). Most users will just accept that MS's DRM is what DRM is like, and will oppose its use anywhere as a result.
Of course, one could argue that a correct implementation of DRM is probably intractable. This is mostly because determining which "fair use" rules apply wherever the use might live is a seriously difficult AI problem. It can't actually be determined by a human-level intelligence, as demonstrated by the need to ask the courts rather than just reading the law books. So we need an AI that's much more intelligent than any team of human lawyers, and has deep understanding of all the "IP" laws of every jurisdiction in the world. Of multiple jurisdictions, actually, when Net transactions are considered. We won't likely see this level of AI in our lifetimes.
Discuss amongst yourselves
Why is it that authors, singers, actors, etc feel the need to get political? Are we enveloped in a society where it is expected that if you have any leverage, you push your beliefs on other people?
...
Well, I don't know where you live, but here in the US the reason is called the First Ammendment, which includes this idea called "Free Speech". Authors, singers, actors, etc. have the right to say any damned thing they want because there's nothing in the US Constitution saying that the First Ammendment doesn't apply to them.
Probably the reason that such people are allowed to exercise their First Ammendment rights is the fear that, if we give in to the temptation to silence such idiots, the next thing will be that we'll be included in the group that's silenced. There are reasons (learnable by reading a bit of history) that this is widely considered a bad idea in general. Many of us have learned that it's better to allow the idiots to continue speaking, since the alternative is allowing the government to silence us all. It's a lot easier to sort out the fluff and dross than it is to find the smart things that have been hidden from us.
Anyway, some of these folks are entertaining. I mean, I've found all the hoopla around the Dixie Chicks' political comments tremendously funny to read about. I got a big laugh when I read of their big award a few days ago. Lots of us think that such entertainment is valuable in and of itself.
Michael Crighton can be quite entertaining. Now if only someone could find a way to make Al Gore entertaining
I do not see any problems with them being able to charge and arm and a leg for the treatment, after all, if you do not pay the arm and the leg, you will lose both arms, both legs, the torso and the head to the disease.
;-)
Well, people do have a history of being upset with someone who says "Your money or your life."
We might chalk it up to basic human irrationality. After all, there are several popular economic theories that explain to us why the companies' behavior is rational. And we all know that we're going to die anyway. What does it matter to the universe (or the economy) if you or I die today or 20 years from now? Not much, really, unless you or I is a major celebrity. But still, people irrationally insist on wanting to live longer, and they even more irrationally insist on not becoming homeless paupers in order to stay alive.
Dunno how we can get people to behave rationally, though. Let us know if you figure out how.
They even cure world hunger.
Really? How many calories are in one of those things?
It's nice to think that, but I don't *entirely* agree with it.
;-) with this? Nah ...)
Microsoft is an easy target, given the insanely large user-base. However, if those users suddenly switched to Linux, it's doubtful that their practices would stop - they'd still install whichever distribution looked the best, installed 134 unneeded services and enabled them all by default, open unsafe attachments, and never update their computer.
I'd agree. It's very convenient to have Windows users using Windows. That makes it very easy for people running web sites, email servers, etc. to spot them. If they were to switch to linux (or even OSX) and bring their anti-security practices with them, we'd have to have software that tested all incoming requests for symptoms of a botnet. With Windows users on Windows, we can just test for requests with header info that implies a Windows source. That way, it's only Windows users who are slowed down, and we can give faster service to users coming from better-designed systems.
But this idyllic situation may end soon. It looks like there might soon be masses of Ubuntu users scattered around the world, mostly every bit as oblivious to security as Windows users. So this might be a new botnet source that we'll have to build defenses against.
We'll see. For now, we should really just encourage the more intelligent and/or thoughtful Windows users to switch to better systems. It's handy to be able to easily identify the most dangerous ones with such simple tests.
(Lessee; do I want a
Not to mention you'd probably indent the code in any other language, python just gets rid of the extra braces.
Yeah, but once you screw up the indents in a whole file of Python source, you're not going to think that this is such a great thing. See, if you accidentally flatten out the indents of Python code, you have no clue where blocks used to begin and end.
Yeah; I've seen quite a bit of this problem from my experiments with python. Usually, it comes about when trying to exchange code via email. Lots of email software plays fast and loose with white space, not to mention the nasty problems caused by line wrapping. Getting python code safely through via email can be a real challenge. Undoing the damage for more than a few lines of code can give you a headache. It's a lot easier with languages that don't use white space syntactically; you just feed it to a "prettyprinter" and it's good again.
Of course, the real solution would be to round up all the idiots who write email software that munges the format of the text, take them out back, and work them over a bit. I've found that rational argument doesn't work with this crowd. They seem to think that it's perfectly acceptable for email software to "improve" the text by rewriting white space, and nothing you can say convinces them otherwise. Even more recalcitrant are the folks who like to convert email between plain text and HTML.
It doesn't even work to just put files in a web directory and tell people to download them. They usually do this with a browser, and lots of browsers will rewrite white space (especially tabs) and do line wrapping in with text/plain and <pre> parts of HTML files, and there's no way to prevent this.
In a few cases, the only way we've found to prevent irrecoverable damage to python code is to encrypt the text with some simple tool like uuencode, and decrypt it at the receiving end. It's a PITA for what should be a simple file copy, but it works.
With (nearly) fully-parenthesized languages like C and perl, most such damage is usually easy to undo. With python, it can be nearly impossible, because the block structure is simply gone.
Of course, this is only a problem if you're trying to share code with others. As a language for in-house, unshared code that never has to be transmitted to anyone else, python is probably fine.
I wonder what's going on here?
I'm a bit leery of installing it on a machine where I do have root access. The incomprehensibility of the install code, plus the fact that it comes from IBM (which may be a bit better than MS, but does have a bit of history
Or do you actually believe the real journalists would have given a damn if they hadn't come for them too?
I get the impression that most "real journalists" see the Net as just one more medium. Many are working on the Net now, and most see it as part of their future. And many are aware that in the early days of radio and then television, the same sort of thing happened. They had to fight in court to establish that using radio or TV didn't disable their journalistic credentials. It took court action to establish that all the previous laws about "freedom of the press" applied to journalists whose words were sent out via radio waves rather than ink on paper. The current battle to extend this to digital packets isn't materially any different.
Those who tout the greatness of their nation seldom contribute to it.
Heh. So true. That's right up there with "Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel." Or, as Mark Twain observed, it's often the first.
Maybe they'll think twice before trampling the rights of others next time.
Or, to put it another way, this sets an important precedent.
One of the ongoing problems the legal system has is that, once a computer is involved, all precedent goes out the window, and all legal precedent is null and void and needs to be re-established. A lot of legal procedings can be explained once you understand this.
This case illustrates this rule by showing that a "blogger" isn't considered a "journalist", presumably because they use a computer and the Net to publish rather than a printing press. The judge's decision sets the important precedent that a journalist who publishes online is indeed a "journalist", and the involvement of computers and the Net doesn't negate that.
Of course, there's the qualification that this was done by a California court, so courts outside that jurisdiction will continue with the premise that the involvement of a computer invalidates all precedent. We can hope that Apple decides to appeal this to a Federal court, and that court decides similarly that a blogger can indeed be a journalist.
The manufacturers need to stop selling PCs with Windows preinstalled on one big partition. They need to pre-partition the drives for an OS partition and a data partition. ... The software manufacturers need to follow suit - ...
Part of the problem is that none of the manufacturers (or vendors) need any of this. It's the customers that need such things. Manufacturers and vendors only need to make money by selling at a good enough markup to make a profit. Things like security are the customers' problems.
Until we find a way to fix this, sales of shoddy, insecure systems will continue because they're more profitable that better-designed systems.
Windows was NEVER a multiuser system and the layout of the system proves it.
Funny thing: I've been making a similar argument in some other fora since I got a Mac Powerbook a few years ago. Actually, my wife and I both use it. And we keep stumbling across all sorts of things where a "preferences" change or an install of a new tool done by one of us affects the other. All sorts of things that other unix-based systems install in $HOME are stored in global places by Mac software. Very often, we can't even find where things are stored, and when we do, it's often in an undocumented binary file. But it's fairly obvious that the Mac developers have rarely tested on multi-user machines. So it's not just a Microsoft problem. Having unix as the OS doesn't make a system multi-user unless the developers are careful to practice proper separation of privileges and such. And it's always easier to hard-code a pathname than it is to extract HOME from the environment and prepend it to the file name.
The people who are making those decisions continue to want to have the voting machines due to all of the evidence showing how unsecure/not-tamper-proof these things really are.
There; fixed it for you.
If you think the politicos making the purchase decisions are ignorant of the documented problems, you're incredibly naive.
If someone has a valuable insight in one area, that doesn't mean they are universally insightful. They can easily get another problem totally wrong.
I should know, I've often solved one problem quickly, and totally failed to solve another.
Roads are a public good. You benefit from them whether you use them or not.
And people are slowly coming to realize that the same is true for information. A well-informed citizenry is a public good. You benefit from easy access to information whether or not you choose to be well-informed. If the people around you are well-informed, you benefit by having a society that works better. If the people around you can be kept ignorant, all of you can be victimized by the people who are keeping you ignorant.
We can see this rather clearly by comparing different countries' access to information with how well those countries run. The places where it's best to live all have one noticable thing in common: They're all places where the population is educated and has access to good information.
... the invention of a network protocol doesn't mean you automatically have some inspirational insight into the future governance of something which affects the daily lives of people worldwide.
Actually, there's a fairly obvious argument saying that the invention of such a protocol does imply such an insight.
We can see the natural state of a network without global "regulation" (i.e., standards) by looking at networking equipment invented by manufacturers. We call these LANs now, because they're only workable on a very local level. The reason is that no two of them can interoperate. Corporations don't communicate with their competitors, and they intentionally build equipment that won't talk to their competitors' equipment. The only way to get a world-wide network is to have some sort of governing body that can decree and enforce standards. Otherwise, all you get is a lot of non-cooperating, small-scale networks.
You can see the difficulty especially well with the cell-phone system. That has the potential to be a universally-accessible world-wide wireless comm system. But it hasn't much happened, because governments (especially the US government) allow the companies to control their own networks. Their natural behavior is to restrict their networks to "locked" equipment that you must buy from them, and which can't communicate well with the competition even when it's the same brand of phone. They also take great pains to prevent us independent software developers from building anything on their networks, because they don't want anything on their network that doesn't directly result in income to them.
There was a great deal of insight in the creation of the Internet. Especially impressive is the way that they found to use the limited, proprietary systems, by encapsulating them and building a higher-level layer of software that hid all the low-level incompatibilities. This is the primary value of the IP protocol. And they made all their specs and most of the code freely available to all developers, which produced the explosion of user applications of the past couple decades.
It took insight to appreciate that the commercial world would never do such a thing, so they needed an approach that could use commercial products while insulating the proprietary details from applications. The result was a system that actually encourages communication between unlike hardware from different manufacturers, something that those manufacturers still try to block when they can.
We should give credit where credit is due here.
And it's amazing all this happened while the internet was unregulated. Imagne what would of happened if it had been regulated.
Have you heard of the IAB (Internet Activities Board), or ICANN. Or the RFCs, which are the standards for Internet communications? If these aren't government regulation, what would qualify?
The Internet exists because of the regulation (aka standards) that has been enforced with a reasonable amount of evenhandedness on all communicating parties. Without that, we'd still have the cacophony of incompatible, proprietary standards that you see in LANs, with every company implementing their own "standard" that's intentionally incompatible with competitors' "standards".
Remember that the Internet was created by a U.S. government agency (ARPA, now DARPA). The corporate world has jumped on it and is trying to claim it, but very few of them had much to do with its development. Most of them tried to thrown monkey wrenches into the works whenever they thought they saw ways to lock out competitors by sneaking in proprietary stuff.
If I bought one of these things, how would I persuade a US cell-phone company to let me use it? This has sorta been a major barrier in the past. Our cell-phone companies here generally only permit their own locked-down phones, and do everything they can to prevent software developers like me from adding our own stuff to the phone. If I had a guarantee that I could actually use the thing as a cell phone (voice + data), I'd jump into the development right away. But I don't see any clues so far as to how I'd go about making sure that it would actually be usable where I live.