It seems to me that what their "pledge" is saying is that if I develop any software on a Novell system and distribute it (by giving it away or selling it), Microsoft will prosecute me. My only defense is to make sure that I haven't had access to any Microsoft stuff. So obviously I should just refuse to develop anything on a Novell system. I should just stick to systems for which the OS and libraries are all GPL'd.
Is this the basic import of this story?
If so, it seems that Novell has just signed their own death warrant.
In any case, until I get a reliable (i.e., from a knowledgeable lawyer), I probably won't be using anything from Novell in the future.
[B]y what definition are birds dinosaurs? They're descended from dinosaurs, but if that's your only criterion then we're all single-celled organisms. Do biologists put birds and dinosaurs in the same genera?
No, a genus is too low-level for that split. It's at the "class" level.
You can find a current zoological classification at wikipedia. Look about 1/3 of the way down, "Class Aves (birds)". Starting at the superorder level, the classification is Dinosauria -> Saurischia -> Theropoda -> Aves.
The corresponding class-level term for humans is "Mammalia", though some might argue that "Eutheria" might correspond more closely to "Aves".
There is, of course, an ongoing discussion about most biological classifications. We can expect a few small modifications in how the birds are classified, as more fossil finds clarify their early history, but it is fairly clear now that birds are theropod dinosaurs. The wikipedia article has links to a number of other authorities on the general topic.
As Asimov once said, the challenge is not to predict the automobile but the parking problem. Lots of people predicted some of the social consequences of the 'Net, but I don't think anyone predicted spam.
Well, I distinctly remember, back in the early 1980s, reading mailing-list and usenet threads where this was discussed. Of course, it hadn't been labelled "spam" yet; people just referred to it as either "marketing" or "politics". There were quite a few predictions that once these people discovered the Net, they would quickly and permanently tie up most of the capacity, swamping most practical uses.
Of course, such ideas were mostly just ignored by the geek population that was most of the users. If we discussed it at all, it didn't get much deeper than "We'll solve that problem when it arises".
I'd say that the real problem isn't that nobody predicts what will happen. With enough monkeys^Wgeeks typing, it's probably that someone will make accurate guesses (or predictions if you prefer). The real problem is that we don't take advantage of this. The rational thing to do would be to go back to the archives and do a study to determine the accuracy of past predictions. Then we should pay attention to the predictions of those that have mostly been right in the past.
But I hardly ever see any signs of this. Rather, we go back and list the failed predictions, and publicly mock the people (especially celebrities) whose predictions didn't work out. That's a lot of fun, true, but it doesn't help us find the true prophets. If they even exist.
Part of the problem, of course, is recognizing the accurate predictions. The failure to predict "spam" illustrates this problem. If you dig around for predictions of "spam", you won't find any. The true prophets didn't predict the future terminology; they just predicted the future in words that made sense at the time. Recognizing matches in such cases can't be done by comparing keywords; it requires software that actually understands the semantics of what it's comparing. We don't seem to be very close to that yet.
Weird new behavior in all the threads I open: There are none of the usual "Reply" links with messages. But the floating "547 Comments" box has "Top" and "Reply" links. If I click that "Reply" link, as I did for this message, I get the usual reply page, and if you can read this, it works. But all the usual info, including the Subject, is blank.
Now to verify that the Submit button works...
(I also wonder if there's a place in/. to discuss such things. I've looked, but if it's there, I don't recognize it. And I'm probably giving away my true geekiness by admitting to an interest in such things.;-)
We have an even more extreme example in our house. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet birds. In particular, we share our house with four small parrots, including two cockatiels, a Bourke's parakeet, and a blue-crowned conure.
There has been a lot of scientific study of parrots, partly because of their anomalous intelligence (which combined with their sociability makes them good pets, leading to more research). The biggest puzzle is why a group of animals that are entirely plant-eating would be so intelligent. Intelligence is usually found in predators, for fairly obvious reasons. Intelligence is more useful if your food is mobile and you have to catch it. Parrots are seed and fruit eaters, but are about as intelligent as our cats and dogs, so there's a biological puzzle to solve.
Some of the studies have turned up something less mysterious: Birds in general have less mass than mammals with similar characteristics. They even have smaller cells, with about half as much DNA per cell as most mammals, and other material similarly trimmed down. This is generally explained by the fact that flying produces extreme selection pressure to save weight. Our DNA is about 2% of our mass. That doesn't sound like much, but to a flying critter, saving 1% of your weight is enough to give you a survival advantage. Trimming 5% or 10% of your weight gives you a huge advantage over competitors and predators. So birds do everything with less mass.
In particular, birds generally match the intelligence of mammals with much larger brains. Our cockatiels weigh in at about 85 and 95 grams (around 3 ounces). Their pea-sized brains have problem-solving abilities comparable to cats and dogs with much bigger brains.
A funny example: You know the sort of venetian blinds with the weights on the cords that are pieces of plastic with a hole in the top. You put the cord through the hole and tie a knot to hold it in place. Well, our female cockatiel figured them out. She lands next to one, lifts the weight with a foot, shoves the cord downward, and fusses with the knot until she loosens it. Then she unties the knot, pulls the cord up through the hole, and flies off with the weight. Most of our blinds are lacking their weights, and we find them hidden in all sorts of odd places. Exposing and untying a hidden knot like this is a rather sophisticated problem that few animals can solve. Her brain probably weighs less than a gram, but she figured this out.
It's obvious that there's something other than brain size at work here. There's no chance that untying such weighted cords would be instinctive in cockatiels; it has to be an example of intelligent problem solving.
Neanderthal chick and ancient guy? Or ancient chick and neanderthal guy?
Probably mostly the latter. The Neandertals were large, "robust" humans, mostly as an adaptation to the cold ice-age climate. The Cro-Magnon Africans were "gracile", smaller and rather slender, to go with their tropical origins.
It's normal in primates that females are attracted to larger males and males are attracted to smaller females. So the most common pairing would have been between a big, burly Neandertal fellow and a smaller, slender Cro-Magnon female.
This has been pointed out as an explanation for why the recent analysis of partially-preserved Neandertal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) showed no unusual genetic material. It appeared to be modern European. Your mtDNA is inherited from your mother. The most likely interbreeding would have produced offspring with Cro-Magnon mtDNA.
Not that this proves or disproves anything at all. It's just a comment on the statistically most likely interbreeding. So far, the evidence about Neandertal x Cro-Magnon interbreeding is pretty feeble. People are drawing conclusions from far too little evidence.
[I]t seems far more likely that larger brained homo-sapiens would fair better competing against a rival homonid, and therefore persist on, while dumber homo-sapiens would die out. that would make far more sense to me than a larger brain resulting from inter-breeding with an obviously inferior sub-specie.
It's not obvious that Homo neanderthalensis was inferior to the Cro Magnon invaders from Africa. Consider that they had survived the ice age in a part of the world that at the time was mostly glaciers and tundra. They probably had a lot of adaptations to that harsh environment.
What's more likely is that the two populations had different mutations related to intelligence. Interbreeding would have combined their genes and the climate would have weeded out the stupider of the hybrids, leaving a population with the beneficial alleles from both groups.
A number of scientists have observed that the artistic depictions of the Neandertals tend to make them look primitive and "brutish", but this is mostly just artistic license. Some have commented that if you were to bring a typical Neandertal fellow forward in your time machine, give him a shave and haircut, dress him in modern clothes, and drop him down anywhere in Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. He would be somewhat of a physical outlier in modern-day Europe, but he wouldn't stand out. His physical features are individually common in the modern population.
He wouldn't speak a modern language, of course, and that would probably lead many people to infer that he must be of below-average intelligence. But they'd probably be wrong.
I can already see the racists all over the planet rejoice, after all now it's clear that the white man has to be superior, having the bigger brain.
Yeah, but racists have always made such claims, even without evidence. How racists will (mis)use scientific findings isn't a good reason to suppress or ignore research. But the findings should be explained better than this rather feeble article did, so that reasonable people can understand.
Food for thought: The largest brain ever measured belonged to an imbecile.
Also, elephants and whales have bigger brains than humans. Brain size is obviously part of the story, and we don't see animals the size of mice or sparrows that are as smart as humans. But there's a 2:1 range in brain size among humans, and that range has been pretty clearly shown to be poorly correlated with intelligence. Size is only one of many factors, and this study is talking about a non-size factor of some sort.
If this particular allele really originated among the Neandertals, a better explanation would be that it produced a small benefit in the Neandertal population that had it. They met up with some Cro Magnons that had other small mutations that led to slightly better intelligence. The two populations interbred, giving what breeders call "hybrid vigor", in this case offspring with all the beneficial alleles and somewhat higher intelligence than either parent population. They then spread their genes around through their descendants.
30,000 years is easily enough time for a beneficial gene to spread through the entire human population. But it's not obvious from the article that they really know where this allele originated, other than that it came from western Eurasia. It could have been a new mutation in the Cro Magnon population. Or it could have been an older Neandertal allele. I wonder if they actually have evidence?
... if the only thing to come out of the House in the next two years is a bunch of investigations and impeachment hearings.
Impeachments are handled by the Senate, not the House. It's highly unlikely that we could get the 2/3 vote required for impeachment proceedings in the Senate.
It looks like Bush will (in a legal sense) get away with everything he's done, without even a threat of punishment. The Democrats can drag their feet and obstruct things a bit more easily, but there's really no way they can take any positive actions.
Of course, if you believe that "government is best which governs least", you'll applaud all this.
I'm fairly conservative and probably *should* be registered Republican. Except of course that both parties are fairly conservative now anyway.
Oh, I dunno about that. The basic, dictionary definition of "conservative" means the desire to "conserve", i.e., to maintain the current system in most ways. A conservative would want to keep things stable, and only make changes after thorough discussion makes it clear that the changes are desirable and almost everyone supports the changes.
In that sense, only the Democrats (and maybe the Greens) qualify as "conservative". The Republican party is now controlled by radical reformers. Their stated goals are overthrow of the past century's slow social and political evolution, replacing it with a centrally-controlled, authoritarian system. Their public policy is that government should do little to help people; people should help themselves. The only valid government operations are law enforcement and the military. And the executive branch is exempt from the Constitution and any laws passed by Congress.
If you think that the Bush crowd are conservatives, either you are using a very different definition of that word than you'll find in any dictionary, or you simply haven't been paying attention to their actions. They may sound like conservatives, but their actions are radical reforms of the current (rapidly becoming past) system.
In fact, if we can build a fully electronic system that is reliable and accountable, we can rid ourselves of that electoral collage crap that we deal with today.
Um, no; it'll take a Constitutinal ammendment. Electronics has nothing to do with it. We could have had a popular vote for president all along, with paper or lever machines or any of the other votings mechanisms. But we didn't, because the Electoral College is in the US Constitution. Until this is ammended, a popular vote for president is illegal in the US.
The closest we could come to it is to eliminate the per-state winner-take-all system that most states use. That's actually just a tradition; it has no legal basis. In fact, a few states divide their electoral votes according to the popular vote. If all states did this, it would be close to a popular vote. But again, note that this has nothing to do with electronics. We could have done it from the start. But tradition can have a powerful hold on a system.
One obvious question: Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions? Anyone know? Is there any chance that we could end up in court if we interoperate with it?
Yeah, it does now, since we've switched to speakeasy's VoIP service.;-)
Actually, the last time we had Verizon phone service was several years ago, and after several months of highly unreliable phone service (including whole days when we didn't get a dial tone), we first switched to VoIP from the cable service. We slowly came to realize that we weren't watching TV at all any more. The internet and NetFlicks had replaced it almost entirely, except for the Daily Show (which is online now). We tried to terminate our cable service, and found that we couldn't do that without losing our internet service. So we did a bit of study, and found that speakeasy could supply us with a DSL connection over the same wire that Verizon says can't support DSL.
So we now have speakeasy DSL over Covad through a wire owned by Verizon. Verizon themselves wouldn't supply the service, and their local reputation for even basic phone service has gotten worse with time.
We're hoping that the evil "government regulation" doesn't stop, which would mean that Verizon could kick off ISPs like speakeasy, and we'd have to get internet and phone through them or the cable company. We wouldn't be able to run a home web server (because Verizon doesn't allow servers). I wouldn't be able to get support from someone who understands unix systems (or any computer in most cases;-). And so on. As near as we can tell, it's only government regulation that gives us either a real internet connection or good phone service. People stuck with only Verizon service get neither.
And this is also an example of why it's wrong to treat all "government" as the same. Verizon's lock on our phone line, and their ability to get away with such crappy "service" is because they're a local monopoly. That monopoly is enforced primarily by the local (cite and state) governments. The reason that speakeasy can step in and supply good services over a Verizon line is that they are regulated by the federal government, not by the state or city, and the feds have these complicated rules that currently require monopolies like Verizon to sell service to companies like speakeasy. Well, it really is more complex than that, of course. But it's basically true that different levels of government are having very different effects on the kind of service we're permitted here, and this results in better service than what the one local monopoly provides to their customers.
And everyone hereabouts hates Verizon, like they've always hated The Phone Company (whatever it's called this year). And most people except the doctrinaire political extremists just laugh when you describe the phone company as a private company. Most of us understand that that's a bit of legal fiction, for the purpose of removing the phone company from any sort of local democratic controls, while leaving them with government-like power over their domain of operation.
For instance, another way Verizon is more like a private company than a government is that they don't have to implement the First Ammendment. (Just trying to get back on topic there.;-)
Summary of article: New research supports the idea that certain rocks found where there were glaciers 600 million years ago were, at that time, near the equator, so there must have been glaciers around the world.
Good summary. It does remind me of a cute geographical trivia question that I ran across a few years ago: Can you name the two places where there are currently glaciers on the equator?
After a bit of thought, most people think of Ecuador, though they usually can't name the mountain. But they are usually stumped by the second place. A few people do guess the right continent, but then name the wrong mountain.
Anyway, there are right now two places where glacial remains are being created right on the equator. But that doesn't mean the entire world is glaciated.
But if you want to visit those spots, you'd better do so soon. Those glaciers are retreating fast, and predictions are that they'll be gone in a decade or two.
Verizon is not a private enterprise in any meaningful way. It has more shareholders than some nations have citizens. As this matter proves, it holds power to silence entire web forums not owned by it. It is, for all intents an purposes, a nation-equivalent entity. It should be treated as one.
Actually, in my neighborhood there's a more direct argument. There's a phone line coming into my house. That line is owned by Verizon, and no other company can use it, even with my permission. But the clincher is: No other company can legally run another "phone line" to my house, even with my permission. In this neighborhood, Verizon has all the legal power of a government agency in dealings with phone lines. They determine how my phone service works, and if I don't like it, I can just not use my phone line. Or move somewhere outside their legal jurisdiction.
I don't see any significant way that they differ from a government agency.
I've seen two cases where most of the audience in a theater started shouting "Fire!".
In one, the movie had a scene where a fire started in the background, but the main characters weren't noticing it. Someone hollered out "Fire!", and instantly everyone else did the same. Then everyone laughed.
In the other case, a character in the movie pulled a gun and aimed at the Bad Guy, and the audience started shouting "Fire!" pretty much spontaneously. He didn't, though, resulting in a chorus of "Aw!" and "Damn!" and other disappointed sounds.
The "fire in a theater" thing is really overplayed sometimes.
Since life evolved long before 300 million years ago, we are left to assume that it somehow survived in the oceans...
But note that, until about 600 million years ago, life on Earth was entirely single cells, mostly bacteria. The last "snowball" period seems to have ended roughly 600 million years ago, and that's about the date of the first multi-cellular fossils. All the living things you can see around you (without a microscope) have evolved since that last great glaciation.
So the actual question is "How did all those bacteria survice in the snowball?" This isn't nearly as mysterious as survival of larger organisms would have been. Bacterial spores can survive nearly anything except extreme heat. And "extreme" means temperatures well above 100C. Today, there are bacteria living kilometers deep in the rocks of the Earth's crust.
Because there's only like 5 billion people in the world that have no access the wikipedia.
Probably. But this means there's like 1 billion people who do have access to wikipedia. This is orders of magnitude above the accessibility of almost any non-electronic document. It would be difficult to find more than a handful of documents that even 100,000 people could lay their hands on in a matter of seconds. Most such documents would be things like the Bible and the Koran. A few would be like the New York (and London) Times, but only very recent issues; a 50-year-old issue might only be accessible to a few tens of people.
Of course, one growing problem with electronic records is the question of how long they will last. Studies of backup media have not been encouraging. And, like many readers here, I have a collection of backups from my computing career, most of which are not physically readable due to technology change. Several of my tapes can't now be read without spending large sums of money for an old tape drive and the computer system to do job. In a few more decades, they'll only be readable by a few of the major spy agencies on their multi-million-dollar read-anything hardware.
I have wondered whether reading old backup media might end up a real money-maker for spy agencies, some time in the not-too-distant future. I can see them setting up public subsidiaries that spam us with ads for recovering our old email, pictures, and other files that can't be read by our new computers.
For the record, Diebold has only been in the election machine business since 2001.
True, perhaps, but also slightly misleading. Diebold got into the election business by buying up a few small companies that had been around for a few years before that.
In cases of corporate buyouts, it's fairly normal to give the purchaser both credit and blame for previous actions of the purchased company. The bigger company bought the smaller for reasons, and it's highly likely that those reasons include wanting to take over the smaller company's products and sell them as their own.
In previous discussions of this topic, several people have wondered why Diebold's banking equipment (especially their ATM machines) seem to have pretty good security and auditability, while their voting machines don't. The conventional answer is that their voting-machine division was a separate, recently-purchased company that hasn't been integrated into Diebold's management structure yet. Such things do take time, especially when the technical and legal requirements are so different.
Of course, there's also an obvious comspiracy theory at work here. We seem to have a fair amount of evidence that Diebold's management is not exactly a neutral participant in the electoral process. The "poster-child" for this is the letter that their CEO sent to Ohio Republican voters in 2004, promising to help deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George Bush. Maybe they did this successfully; maybe they didn't. Since the equipment apparently wasn't auditable, we can't ever know. But such things do tend to make people a bit suspicious.
I really don't get it.... Are the board of directors giving their daughters to the Bush family for consumption or something?
No, they're doing something much simpler and more direct: They're giving their customers (the guys running the local elections) something they want. Namely, the individuals on the election commissions see the equipment as providing a way to untraceably modify the outcome of the election in their precincts. Of course, they can't all do this successfully, but any good salesman will know how to convince each of them that they can.
Note that Diebold doesn't sell to the voters. They sell to the local government bodies that run the elections. This is an important distinction. Voters don't decide how elections are run; election commissions do. (Have you ever been permitted to vote on how your local elections are run?;-)
And note that I haven't mentioned any specific political party. Election corruption is a truly "bipartisan" phenomenon. Lately, the US Republicans have been somewhat blatant and over-the-top with their "whatever it takes to win" approach. But it's hard to find any political group anywhere that hasn't taken advantage of opportunities to subvert elections.
Anyone who thinks that their favorite party doesn't want to control election outcomes is a fool, and also a natural customer of companies like Diebold.
They just require that if you publish the results, you have to also publish how you conducted it.
Uh, read the EULA passage again. You can only publish if MS has received your methods and results, and approved them. They don't say what their criteria are for approval. They could refuse to approve anything that's unfavorable, and they'd be within the terms of the EULA.
Again, as others have pointed out, this isn't actually anything new. MS EULAs have had restrictions like this, with various wording, for some years.
They basically say "You can't publish any benchmarks without our approval, and we don't have to give our approval" expressed in various kinds of legalese.
Heh. Some years ago, when I was in college, a friend asked me to keep some stuff in my apartment over the summer. This included a TV set. By the end of the summer, I had to face the fact that I qualified as truly weird, when I realized that I'd never plugged it in. (I didn't own one myself.)
Closer to the present, we'd had cable TV here because my wife liked it for news and old movies. Back around the time of the 2004 elections, she noticed that since she'd subscribed to Netflicks, she hadn't watched any movies on TV; she'd just popped the DVD in her Mac and watched it there. And the only "news" either of us had watched on TV was the Daily Show. So we asked "Why are we spending all this money for something that we're no longer using?"
We tried to terminate the TV. But the cable company (RCN) told us that if we did that, we'd also lose our Internet. Hmmm... We did a bit of study, and found that we could get speakeasy at our house. So we kicked out the cable company, switched to speakeasy DSL over the (silent) phone line, and we've been happy since then for much less money.
It was annoying that the comedycentral.com web site was so totally screwy, and didn't even work on her Windows box with IE, much less our Macs and linux boxes with a dozen browsers apiece. But they seem to have just redone their site, and it now seems to work everywhere. Now we don't have to go scrounging for Daily Show and Colbert Report clips on random blog sites.
I can't think of any remaining reason to pay for TV service. But then, I never could; it was just my wife's addiction to old movies that made us subscribe.
Actually, 5 years ago I did watch some interesting TV news - the 9/11 live coverage. I was really impressed by it, for one reason: Although it was obviously a total surprise to the US government, and they had no idea who'd done it, it was obvious who was going to be given credit/blame. Within the first hour, the TV stations were all chanting "Osama bin Laden... Osama bin Laden...". This memory has helped explain a lot of what has happened since then, including the fact that the US government seems to have so little interest in actually finding the guy and bringing him to trial. His lawyers would probably make very public fools of the US prosecutors...
Other than that bit of indirect inference, I don't know of anything worthwhile that I'm missing by not having TV service these days.
(I wonder if this little observation will trigger a political flame fest here?;-)
For myself, I had no inkling of Comedy Central's news commentary until I bumped across Jon Stewart's commentary on Internet Tubes.
Yeah, that was fun. But do you realize how out of it you appear to be?
Back before the 2004 US elections, one of the most fun political stories was about several surveys that turned up the apparent fact that the people most likely to correctly answer questions about the candidates' policies and records were not those that watched TV news, but rather those that watched the Daily Show. It was fun to watch the MSM (MainStream Media) news folks try to spin their way out of that one. Since then, there have been a few similar results reported about news in general. The news industry is in sorry shape these days, and there's no sign they're getting any better.
So if you're not following the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, you're missing the main media source of good, reliable news.
(Of course, if you know how to read, you have much better sources of news. But that excludes most of the American population, who primarily get their "news" from TV. And those are the people voting in the "sole remaining super-power". Just think what this means for the world as a whole. We're all in sorry shape.)
I just noticed yesterday that comedycentral.com has redone their entire web site, so that it now actually works. I even got several of my browsers to give me URLs for their clips.
So it's now not necessary to have them on sites like youtube. They finally wised up and realized that their idiotic site mis-design was driving people away to the copycat sites, and losing them all the eyes that they were obviously trying to get looking at their ads.
This is a disappointment in some circles, actually. Namely, the web-software testing crowd is disappointed. It used to be that if you wanted an example of a recalcitrant site that did nearly everything in the worst possible way, you just typed in "comedycentral.com" and voila! More worst-case test material than you could ever hope to find anywhere else.
But that's all gone now. We testers will have to go back to collecting awful examples on a piecemeal basis, and hosting them on our own sites. Maybe we can get a discussion going of the old idea of having a test site explicitly for holding examples of everything wrong that has ever been found on any other site.
Do you think the comedycentral.com folks would donate a snapshot of their old site as the seed material for such a test site?
(It was especially fun to point out that the comedycentral.com ads all worked, while the "content" didn't. This was conclusive proof that they did know exactly what they were doing, and the fact that the "content" didn't work other than sporadically wasn't an accident at all.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It seems to me that what their "pledge" is saying is that if I develop any software on a Novell system and distribute it (by giving it away or selling it), Microsoft will prosecute me. My only defense is to make sure that I haven't had access to any Microsoft stuff. So obviously I should just refuse to develop anything on a Novell system. I should just stick to systems for which the OS and libraries are all GPL'd.
Is this the basic import of this story?
If so, it seems that Novell has just signed their own death warrant.
In any case, until I get a reliable (i.e., from a knowledgeable lawyer), I probably won't be using anything from Novell in the future.
[B]y what definition are birds dinosaurs? They're descended from dinosaurs, but if that's your only criterion then we're all single-celled organisms. Do biologists put birds and dinosaurs in the same genera?
No, a genus is too low-level for that split. It's at the "class" level.
You can find a current zoological classification at wikipedia. Look about 1/3 of the way down, "Class Aves (birds)". Starting at the superorder level, the classification is Dinosauria -> Saurischia -> Theropoda -> Aves.
The corresponding class-level term for humans is "Mammalia", though some might argue that "Eutheria" might correspond more closely to "Aves".
There is, of course, an ongoing discussion about most biological classifications. We can expect a few small modifications in how the birds are classified, as more fossil finds clarify their early history, but it is fairly clear now that birds are theropod dinosaurs. The wikipedia article has links to a number of other authorities on the general topic.
As Asimov once said, the challenge is not to predict the automobile but the parking problem. Lots of people predicted some of the social consequences of the 'Net, but I don't think anyone predicted spam.
Well, I distinctly remember, back in the early 1980s, reading mailing-list and usenet threads where this was discussed. Of course, it hadn't been labelled "spam" yet; people just referred to it as either "marketing" or "politics". There were quite a few predictions that once these people discovered the Net, they would quickly and permanently tie up most of the capacity, swamping most practical uses.
Of course, such ideas were mostly just ignored by the geek population that was most of the users. If we discussed it at all, it didn't get much deeper than "We'll solve that problem when it arises".
I'd say that the real problem isn't that nobody predicts what will happen. With enough monkeys^Wgeeks typing, it's probably that someone will make accurate guesses (or predictions if you prefer). The real problem is that we don't take advantage of this. The rational thing to do would be to go back to the archives and do a study to determine the accuracy of past predictions. Then we should pay attention to the predictions of those that have mostly been right in the past.
But I hardly ever see any signs of this. Rather, we go back and list the failed predictions, and publicly mock the people (especially celebrities) whose predictions didn't work out. That's a lot of fun, true, but it doesn't help us find the true prophets. If they even exist.
Part of the problem, of course, is recognizing the accurate predictions. The failure to predict "spam" illustrates this problem. If you dig around for predictions of "spam", you won't find any. The true prophets didn't predict the future terminology; they just predicted the future in words that made sense at the time. Recognizing matches in such cases can't be done by comparing keywords; it requires software that actually understands the semantics of what it's comparing. We don't seem to be very close to that yet.
Weird new behavior in all the threads I open: There are none of the usual "Reply" links with messages. But the floating "547 Comments" box has "Top" and "Reply" links. If I click that "Reply" link, as I did for this message, I get the usual reply page, and if you can read this, it works. But all the usual info, including the Subject, is blank.
...
/. to discuss such things. I've looked, but if it's there, I don't recognize it. And I'm probably giving away my true geekiness by admitting to an interest in such things. ;-)
Now to verify that the Submit button works
(I also wonder if there's a place in
size doesn't really matter much does it?
We have an even more extreme example in our house. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet birds. In particular, we share our house with four small parrots, including two cockatiels, a Bourke's parakeet, and a blue-crowned conure.
There has been a lot of scientific study of parrots, partly because of their anomalous intelligence (which combined with their sociability makes them good pets, leading to more research). The biggest puzzle is why a group of animals that are entirely plant-eating would be so intelligent. Intelligence is usually found in predators, for fairly obvious reasons. Intelligence is more useful if your food is mobile and you have to catch it. Parrots are seed and fruit eaters, but are about as intelligent as our cats and dogs, so there's a biological puzzle to solve.
Some of the studies have turned up something less mysterious: Birds in general have less mass than mammals with similar characteristics. They even have smaller cells, with about half as much DNA per cell as most mammals, and other material similarly trimmed down. This is generally explained by the fact that flying produces extreme selection pressure to save weight. Our DNA is about 2% of our mass. That doesn't sound like much, but to a flying critter, saving 1% of your weight is enough to give you a survival advantage. Trimming 5% or 10% of your weight gives you a huge advantage over competitors and predators. So birds do everything with less mass.
In particular, birds generally match the intelligence of mammals with much larger brains. Our cockatiels weigh in at about 85 and 95 grams (around 3 ounces). Their pea-sized brains have problem-solving abilities comparable to cats and dogs with much bigger brains.
A funny example: You know the sort of venetian blinds with the weights on the cords that are pieces of plastic with a hole in the top. You put the cord through the hole and tie a knot to hold it in place. Well, our female cockatiel figured them out. She lands next to one, lifts the weight with a foot, shoves the cord downward, and fusses with the knot until she loosens it. Then she unties the knot, pulls the cord up through the hole, and flies off with the weight. Most of our blinds are lacking their weights, and we find them hidden in all sorts of odd places. Exposing and untying a hidden knot like this is a rather sophisticated problem that few animals can solve. Her brain probably weighs less than a gram, but she figured this out.
It's obvious that there's something other than brain size at work here. There's no chance that untying such weighted cords would be instinctive in cockatiels; it has to be an example of intelligent problem solving.
Neanderthal chick and ancient guy? Or ancient chick and neanderthal guy?
Probably mostly the latter. The Neandertals were large, "robust" humans, mostly as an adaptation to the cold ice-age climate. The Cro-Magnon Africans were "gracile", smaller and rather slender, to go with their tropical origins.
It's normal in primates that females are attracted to larger males and males are attracted to smaller females. So the most common pairing would have been between a big, burly Neandertal fellow and a smaller, slender Cro-Magnon female.
This has been pointed out as an explanation for why the recent analysis of partially-preserved Neandertal mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) showed no unusual genetic material. It appeared to be modern European. Your mtDNA is inherited from your mother. The most likely interbreeding would have produced offspring with Cro-Magnon mtDNA.
Not that this proves or disproves anything at all. It's just a comment on the statistically most likely interbreeding. So far, the evidence about Neandertal x Cro-Magnon interbreeding is pretty feeble. People are drawing conclusions from far too little evidence.
[I]t seems far more likely that larger brained homo-sapiens would fair better competing against a rival homonid, and therefore persist on, while dumber homo-sapiens would die out. that would make far more sense to me than a larger brain resulting from inter-breeding with an obviously inferior sub-specie.
It's not obvious that Homo neanderthalensis was inferior to the Cro Magnon invaders from Africa. Consider that they had survived the ice age in a part of the world that at the time was mostly glaciers and tundra. They probably had a lot of adaptations to that harsh environment.
What's more likely is that the two populations had different mutations related to intelligence. Interbreeding would have combined their genes and the climate would have weeded out the stupider of the hybrids, leaving a population with the beneficial alleles from both groups.
A number of scientists have observed that the artistic depictions of the Neandertals tend to make them look primitive and "brutish", but this is mostly just artistic license. Some have commented that if you were to bring a typical Neandertal fellow forward in your time machine, give him a shave and haircut, dress him in modern clothes, and drop him down anywhere in Europe, nobody would give him a second glance. He would be somewhat of a physical outlier in modern-day Europe, but he wouldn't stand out. His physical features are individually common in the modern population.
He wouldn't speak a modern language, of course, and that would probably lead many people to infer that he must be of below-average intelligence. But they'd probably be wrong.
I can already see the racists all over the planet rejoice, after all now it's clear that the white man has to be superior, having the bigger brain.
Yeah, but racists have always made such claims, even without evidence. How racists will (mis)use scientific findings isn't a good reason to suppress or ignore research. But the findings should be explained better than this rather feeble article did, so that reasonable people can understand.
Food for thought: The largest brain ever measured belonged to an imbecile.
Also, elephants and whales have bigger brains than humans. Brain size is obviously part of the story, and we don't see animals the size of mice or sparrows that are as smart as humans. But there's a 2:1 range in brain size among humans, and that range has been pretty clearly shown to be poorly correlated with intelligence. Size is only one of many factors, and this study is talking about a non-size factor of some sort.
If this particular allele really originated among the Neandertals, a better explanation would be that it produced a small benefit in the Neandertal population that had it. They met up with some Cro Magnons that had other small mutations that led to slightly better intelligence. The two populations interbred, giving what breeders call "hybrid vigor", in this case offspring with all the beneficial alleles and somewhat higher intelligence than either parent population. They then spread their genes around through their descendants.
30,000 years is easily enough time for a beneficial gene to spread through the entire human population. But it's not obvious from the article that they really know where this allele originated, other than that it came from western Eurasia. It could have been a new mutation in the Cro Magnon population. Or it could have been an older Neandertal allele. I wonder if they actually have evidence?
... if the only thing to come out of the House in the next two years is a bunch of investigations and impeachment hearings.
Impeachments are handled by the Senate, not the House. It's highly unlikely that we could get the 2/3 vote required for impeachment proceedings in the Senate.
It looks like Bush will (in a legal sense) get away with everything he's done, without even a threat of punishment. The Democrats can drag their feet and obstruct things a bit more easily, but there's really no way they can take any positive actions.
Of course, if you believe that "government is best which governs least", you'll applaud all this.
I'm fairly conservative and probably *should* be registered Republican. Except of course that both parties are fairly conservative now anyway.
Oh, I dunno about that. The basic, dictionary definition of "conservative" means the desire to "conserve", i.e., to maintain the current system in most ways. A conservative would want to keep things stable, and only make changes after thorough discussion makes it clear that the changes are desirable and almost everyone supports the changes.
In that sense, only the Democrats (and maybe the Greens) qualify as "conservative". The Republican party is now controlled by radical reformers. Their stated goals are overthrow of the past century's slow social and political evolution, replacing it with a centrally-controlled, authoritarian system. Their public policy is that government should do little to help people; people should help themselves. The only valid government operations are law enforcement and the military. And the executive branch is exempt from the Constitution and any laws passed by Congress.
If you think that the Bush crowd are conservatives, either you are using a very different definition of that word than you'll find in any dictionary, or you simply haven't been paying attention to their actions. They may sound like conservatives, but their actions are radical reforms of the current (rapidly becoming past) system.
In fact, if we can build a fully electronic system that is reliable and accountable, we can rid ourselves of that electoral collage crap that we deal with today.
Um, no; it'll take a Constitutinal ammendment. Electronics has nothing to do with it. We could have had a popular vote for president all along, with paper or lever machines or any of the other votings mechanisms. But we didn't, because the Electoral College is in the US Constitution. Until this is ammended, a popular vote for president is illegal in the US.
The closest we could come to it is to eliminate the per-state winner-take-all system that most states use. That's actually just a tradition; it has no legal basis. In fact, a few states divide their electoral votes according to the popular vote. If all states did this, it would be close to a popular vote. But again, note that this has nothing to do with electronics. We could have done it from the start. But tradition can have a powerful hold on a system.
One obvious question: Will Vista really use IPv6, or an "extended" IPv6-like protocol with patented MS extensions? Anyone know? Is there any chance that we could end up in court if we interoperate with it?
Your phone works.
;-)
;-). And so on. As near as we can tell, it's only government regulation that gives us either a real internet connection or good phone service. People stuck with only Verizon service get neither.
;-)
Yeah, it does now, since we've switched to speakeasy's VoIP service.
Actually, the last time we had Verizon phone service was several years ago, and after several months of highly unreliable phone service (including whole days when we didn't get a dial tone), we first switched to VoIP from the cable service. We slowly came to realize that we weren't watching TV at all any more. The internet and NetFlicks had replaced it almost entirely, except for the Daily Show (which is online now). We tried to terminate our cable service, and found that we couldn't do that without losing our internet service. So we did a bit of study, and found that speakeasy could supply us with a DSL connection over the same wire that Verizon says can't support DSL.
So we now have speakeasy DSL over Covad through a wire owned by Verizon. Verizon themselves wouldn't supply the service, and their local reputation for even basic phone service has gotten worse with time.
We're hoping that the evil "government regulation" doesn't stop, which would mean that Verizon could kick off ISPs like speakeasy, and we'd have to get internet and phone through them or the cable company. We wouldn't be able to run a home web server (because Verizon doesn't allow servers). I wouldn't be able to get support from someone who understands unix systems (or any computer in most cases
And this is also an example of why it's wrong to treat all "government" as the same. Verizon's lock on our phone line, and their ability to get away with such crappy "service" is because they're a local monopoly. That monopoly is enforced primarily by the local (cite and state) governments. The reason that speakeasy can step in and supply good services over a Verizon line is that they are regulated by the federal government, not by the state or city, and the feds have these complicated rules that currently require monopolies like Verizon to sell service to companies like speakeasy. Well, it really is more complex than that, of course. But it's basically true that different levels of government are having very different effects on the kind of service we're permitted here, and this results in better service than what the one local monopoly provides to their customers.
And everyone hereabouts hates Verizon, like they've always hated The Phone Company (whatever it's called this year). And most people except the doctrinaire political extremists just laugh when you describe the phone company as a private company. Most of us understand that that's a bit of legal fiction, for the purpose of removing the phone company from any sort of local democratic controls, while leaving them with government-like power over their domain of operation.
For instance, another way Verizon is more like a private company than a government is that they don't have to implement the First Ammendment. (Just trying to get back on topic there.
Summary of article: New research supports the idea that certain rocks found where there were glaciers 600 million years ago were, at that time, near the equator, so there must have been glaciers around the world.
Good summary. It does remind me of a cute geographical trivia question that I ran across a few years ago: Can you name the two places where there are currently glaciers on the equator?
After a bit of thought, most people think of Ecuador, though they usually can't name the mountain. But they are usually stumped by the second place. A few people do guess the right continent, but then name the wrong mountain.
Anyway, there are right now two places where glacial remains are being created right on the equator. But that doesn't mean the entire world is glaciated.
But if you want to visit those spots, you'd better do so soon. Those glaciers are retreating fast, and predictions are that they'll be gone in a decade or two.
Verizon is not a private enterprise in any meaningful way. It has more shareholders than some nations have citizens. As this matter proves, it holds power to silence entire web forums not owned by it. It is, for all intents an purposes, a nation-equivalent entity. It should be treated as one.
Actually, in my neighborhood there's a more direct argument. There's a phone line coming into my house. That line is owned by Verizon, and no other company can use it, even with my permission. But the clincher is: No other company can legally run another "phone line" to my house, even with my permission. In this neighborhood, Verizon has all the legal power of a government agency in dealings with phone lines. They determine how my phone service works, and if I don't like it, I can just not use my phone line. Or move somewhere outside their legal jurisdiction.
I don't see any significant way that they differ from a government agency.
I've seen two cases where most of the audience in a theater started shouting "Fire!".
In one, the movie had a scene where a fire started in the background, but the main characters weren't noticing it. Someone hollered out "Fire!", and instantly everyone else did the same. Then everyone laughed.
In the other case, a character in the movie pulled a gun and aimed at the Bad Guy, and the audience started shouting "Fire!" pretty much spontaneously. He didn't, though, resulting in a chorus of "Aw!" and "Damn!" and other disappointed sounds.
The "fire in a theater" thing is really overplayed sometimes.
Since life evolved long before 300 million years ago, we are left to assume that it somehow survived in the oceans...
But note that, until about 600 million years ago, life on Earth was entirely single cells, mostly bacteria. The last "snowball" period seems to have ended roughly 600 million years ago, and that's about the date of the first multi-cellular fossils. All the living things you can see around you (without a microscope) have evolved since that last great glaciation.
So the actual question is "How did all those bacteria survice in the snowball?" This isn't nearly as mysterious as survival of larger organisms would have been. Bacterial spores can survive nearly anything except extreme heat. And "extreme" means temperatures well above 100C. Today, there are bacteria living kilometers deep in the rocks of the Earth's crust.
Because there's only like 5 billion people in the world that have no access the wikipedia.
Probably. But this means there's like 1 billion people who do have access to wikipedia. This is orders of magnitude above the accessibility of almost any non-electronic document. It would be difficult to find more than a handful of documents that even 100,000 people could lay their hands on in a matter of seconds. Most such documents would be things like the Bible and the Koran. A few would be like the New York (and London) Times, but only very recent issues; a 50-year-old issue might only be accessible to a few tens of people.
Of course, one growing problem with electronic records is the question of how long they will last. Studies of backup media have not been encouraging. And, like many readers here, I have a collection of backups from my computing career, most of which are not physically readable due to technology change. Several of my tapes can't now be read without spending large sums of money for an old tape drive and the computer system to do job. In a few more decades, they'll only be readable by a few of the major spy agencies on their multi-million-dollar read-anything hardware.
I have wondered whether reading old backup media might end up a real money-maker for spy agencies, some time in the not-too-distant future. I can see them setting up public subsidiaries that spam us with ads for recovering our old email, pictures, and other files that can't be read by our new computers.
For the record, Diebold has only been in the election machine business since 2001.
True, perhaps, but also slightly misleading. Diebold got into the election business by buying up a few small companies that had been around for a few years before that.
In cases of corporate buyouts, it's fairly normal to give the purchaser both credit and blame for previous actions of the purchased company. The bigger company bought the smaller for reasons, and it's highly likely that those reasons include wanting to take over the smaller company's products and sell them as their own.
In previous discussions of this topic, several people have wondered why Diebold's banking equipment (especially their ATM machines) seem to have pretty good security and auditability, while their voting machines don't. The conventional answer is that their voting-machine division was a separate, recently-purchased company that hasn't been integrated into Diebold's management structure yet. Such things do take time, especially when the technical and legal requirements are so different.
Of course, there's also an obvious comspiracy theory at work here. We seem to have a fair amount of evidence that Diebold's management is not exactly a neutral participant in the electoral process. The "poster-child" for this is the letter that their CEO sent to Ohio Republican voters in 2004, promising to help deliver Ohio's electoral votes to George Bush. Maybe they did this successfully; maybe they didn't. Since the equipment apparently wasn't auditable, we can't ever know. But such things do tend to make people a bit suspicious.
I really don't get it. ... Are the board of directors giving their daughters to the Bush family for consumption or something?
;-)
No, they're doing something much simpler and more direct: They're giving their customers (the guys running the local elections) something they want. Namely, the individuals on the election commissions see the equipment as providing a way to untraceably modify the outcome of the election in their precincts. Of course, they can't all do this successfully, but any good salesman will know how to convince each of them that they can.
Note that Diebold doesn't sell to the voters. They sell to the local government bodies that run the elections. This is an important distinction. Voters don't decide how elections are run; election commissions do. (Have you ever been permitted to vote on how your local elections are run?
And note that I haven't mentioned any specific political party. Election corruption is a truly "bipartisan" phenomenon. Lately, the US Republicans have been somewhat blatant and over-the-top with their "whatever it takes to win" approach. But it's hard to find any political group anywhere that hasn't taken advantage of opportunities to subvert elections.
Anyone who thinks that their favorite party doesn't want to control election outcomes is a fool, and also a natural customer of companies like Diebold.
On a related topic, on the way home a while ago I noticed a flock of pigs overhead, migrating southward.
They just require that if you publish the results, you have to also publish how you conducted it.
Uh, read the EULA passage again. You can only publish if MS has received your methods and results, and approved them. They don't say what their criteria are for approval. They could refuse to approve anything that's unfavorable, and they'd be within the terms of the EULA.
Again, as others have pointed out, this isn't actually anything new. MS EULAs have had restrictions like this, with various wording, for some years.
They basically say "You can't publish any benchmarks without our approval, and we don't have to give our approval" expressed in various kinds of legalese.
Did I mention that I barely watch television? :P
... We did a bit of study, and found that we could get speakeasy at our house. So we kicked out the cable company, switched to speakeasy DSL over the (silent) phone line, and we've been happy since then for much less money.
... Osama bin Laden ...". This memory has helped explain a lot of what has happened since then, including the fact that the US government seems to have so little interest in actually finding the guy and bringing him to trial. His lawyers would probably make very public fools of the US prosecutors ...
;-)
Heh. Some years ago, when I was in college, a friend asked me to keep some stuff in my apartment over the summer. This included a TV set. By the end of the summer, I had to face the fact that I qualified as truly weird, when I realized that I'd never plugged it in. (I didn't own one myself.)
Closer to the present, we'd had cable TV here because my wife liked it for news and old movies. Back around the time of the 2004 elections, she noticed that since she'd subscribed to Netflicks, she hadn't watched any movies on TV; she'd just popped the DVD in her Mac and watched it there. And the only "news" either of us had watched on TV was the Daily Show. So we asked "Why are we spending all this money for something that we're no longer using?"
We tried to terminate the TV. But the cable company (RCN) told us that if we did that, we'd also lose our Internet. Hmmm
It was annoying that the comedycentral.com web site was so totally screwy, and didn't even work on her Windows box with IE, much less our Macs and linux boxes with a dozen browsers apiece. But they seem to have just redone their site, and it now seems to work everywhere. Now we don't have to go scrounging for Daily Show and Colbert Report clips on random blog sites.
I can't think of any remaining reason to pay for TV service. But then, I never could; it was just my wife's addiction to old movies that made us subscribe.
Actually, 5 years ago I did watch some interesting TV news - the 9/11 live coverage. I was really impressed by it, for one reason: Although it was obviously a total surprise to the US government, and they had no idea who'd done it, it was obvious who was going to be given credit/blame. Within the first hour, the TV stations were all chanting "Osama bin Laden
Other than that bit of indirect inference, I don't know of anything worthwhile that I'm missing by not having TV service these days.
(I wonder if this little observation will trigger a political flame fest here?
For myself, I had no inkling of Comedy Central's news commentary until I bumped across Jon Stewart's commentary on Internet Tubes.
Yeah, that was fun. But do you realize how out of it you appear to be?
Back before the 2004 US elections, one of the most fun political stories was about several surveys that turned up the apparent fact that the people most likely to correctly answer questions about the candidates' policies and records were not those that watched TV news, but rather those that watched the Daily Show. It was fun to watch the MSM (MainStream Media) news folks try to spin their way out of that one. Since then, there have been a few similar results reported about news in general. The news industry is in sorry shape these days, and there's no sign they're getting any better.
So if you're not following the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, you're missing the main media source of good, reliable news.
(Of course, if you know how to read, you have much better sources of news. But that excludes most of the American population, who primarily get their "news" from TV. And those are the people voting in the "sole remaining super-power". Just think what this means for the world as a whole. We're all in sorry shape.)
I just noticed yesterday that comedycentral.com has redone their entire web site, so that it now actually works. I even got several of my browsers to give me URLs for their clips.
;-)
So it's now not necessary to have them on sites like youtube. They finally wised up and realized that their idiotic site mis-design was driving people away to the copycat sites, and losing them all the eyes that they were obviously trying to get looking at their ads.
This is a disappointment in some circles, actually. Namely, the web-software testing crowd is disappointed. It used to be that if you wanted an example of a recalcitrant site that did nearly everything in the worst possible way, you just typed in "comedycentral.com" and voila! More worst-case test material than you could ever hope to find anywhere else.
But that's all gone now. We testers will have to go back to collecting awful examples on a piecemeal basis, and hosting them on our own sites. Maybe we can get a discussion going of the old idea of having a test site explicitly for holding examples of everything wrong that has ever been found on any other site.
Do you think the comedycentral.com folks would donate a snapshot of their old site as the seed material for such a test site?
(It was especially fun to point out that the comedycentral.com ads all worked, while the "content" didn't. This was conclusive proof that they did know exactly what they were doing, and the fact that the "content" didn't work other than sporadically wasn't an accident at all.