If I was made responsible for running that net/service I'd ask for a security policy established by management and make sure that we followed up on it's use.
Hmmm... If you were to require a policy established by the management of your typical political organization, the policy would be stated so that a programmer could code the cracker directly from the policy statement.
"All passwords must be the login name followed by a hyphen and the user's driver's license number. Failure to follow this rule will result in termination of computer privileges." Users' names and numbers would of course be accessible to a program via the wide-open online organizational database. [Just a hypothetical example, I hope.]
Actually, you'd more likely get a requirement that all passwords be 4 digits. "It works for banks; it should be plenty secure for us."
You'd be a lot better off if you left the policy to a committee of members who actually understand computer security issues.
Of course it's unconstitutional but will the supreme court ACTUALLY overturn it? Remember George "the constitutional is just a godamn piece of paper" Bush has appointed 2 supreme court justices.
One fun thing about this quote is that, once again, he got his facts wrong. The US Constitution was written on parchment, not paper. Parchment is, of course, a variety of leather, typically (but not always) sheepskin. It isn't paper at all, which is made of plant fibers.
To confuse things, there's a fake parchment made these days called "parchment paper". This is paper that superficially looks like parchment, but it isn't parchment. Commercial copies of the US Constitution are often printed on parchment paper. Real parchment is rather expensive.
I wonder if Dubya has been told about his gaffe? Would he know (or care) about such irrelevant differences?
I also wonder if parchment would work in your typical laser printer...
One thing I wonder is: Why isn't this covered by libel laws? Ordinarily, if someone with a grudge against me states in writing something about me that isn't true, I can sue them for libel. I'd think this fellow would just talk to a lawyer, who would walk him through the process of filing a libel suit against the registry. If he can demonstrate that people have done nasty things to him (or his son) because of this listing, I'd think he might be in line for one of those multi-million-$$$ settlements. In this case, he'd deserve it, since the state registry has in effect destroyed his life.
Why is a public registry like this immune to the libel laws?
Do you still think that "Science is not a democracy" and that "Facts, definitions and terms are not up for a vote." or was that just a troll?
Huh? I've been mentioning cases of scientific voting. E.g., I've written messages about the zoological vote a couple decades ago that reclassified birds as dinosaurs. I also recently mentioned the decision that Brontosaurus should be officially kept as a synonym for Apatosaurus (rather than declaring Brontosaurus not a valid genus). In general, I've argued that much of science has historically operated in a (semi-)democratic fashion, though I don't think that's the primary intent of most scientists. Rather, there's an understanding that democratic methods can be useful in cross-checking results and deciding things like terminology and classification. Often "consensus" is a better term, of course, but that's a form of democracy, sometimes called a "super-majority".
And, of course, facts are not really amenable to democracy. You can vote on what you want to say, and on what rules you want to follow. But voting on facts can be frustrating, because the universe stubbornly refuses to go along with the majority's decision. Jailing a natural phenomenon for a violation just doesn't work too well. Attempts of any sort to suppress scientific facts have generally failed, though sometimes it takes a century or two.
OTOH, I am one of the people who have used the phrase "silly season" in connection with the IAU's definition of "planet". It is a terminological issue, so it's open to democratic decision making. But there's the remaining question of whether anyone at all will take it seriously, especially the astronomers who point out that it's never been a technical term, and they don't much need a term that's so vague as to include both Mercury and Jupiter (but not Ganymede or Titan).
It's sort of the flip side of the process that has led various legislatures to consider laws about the value of pi. Contrary to popular urban myth, none of these seem to have actually voted on pi's value. But the fact that some politicians would submit such a bill other than as a joke is sufficient. It's fun to read about the attempts by other politicians to convince a majority that they were being made to look like damned fools, and the bill should just be quietly tabled.
And there was the story of the Swiss town a few centuries ago that was being threatened by a glacier. So they passed a law forbidding the entry of glaciers into the town. The glacier stopped, and slowly retreated. They had voted at the end of what we now call the Little Ice Age. Maybe their vote was what ended it. Ya think?
[C]ould the Jupiter/Sun combo support something like Pluto or Luna at Jupiter's Trojan points?
Yup. I've read a few times that you need at least a 50:1 mass ration of the objects (taken pairwise) to get a stable 3-body "Trojan" orbit. The Sun:Jupiter and Jupiter:Earth mass rations are both much greater than 50:1. So if you could pick up Jupiter and drop it into Earth's orbit 60 degrees ahead or behind us, the resulting orbits would be stable, and Earth wouldn't really be affected.
Of course, this would perturb the orbits of Venus and Mars. So we move them to Jupiter's other Trojan point, and make Mars/Venus a close pair like Pluto/Charon. If you'd done this 4 billion years ago, the histories of Venus and Mars would be very different. Both might harbor life now, and we'd have a more interesting Solar System to explore. Jupiter's four big satellites would also be in the liquid-water zone, so they'd also probably be interesting.
The asteroid belt probably wouldn't exist. Doing something about that is left as an exercise for the reader, as is figuring out how to define "planet" in that system.
Definitions for the scientific method, pick one or give me yours.
One important quibble is with the frequent use of the phrase "the scientific method". The English word "the" implies uniqueness. But there isn't one scientific method; there are lots of scientific methods.
My favorite example for explaining this: Most people think that "the scientific method" means the sort of lab experiment that you were taught about in school, and which is heavily used by scientists like physicists and chemists. But if this is "the scientific method", then astronomy isn't a science. Astronomers hardly ever do any experiments at all, for obvious reasons.
Now, astronomy is generally accepted as one of the hardest of the hard sciences (in both senses of "hard"). So there's gotta be something wrong with this definition of "the scientific method". What's wrong, of course, is that astronomy is what's called an "observational science". Such scientific fields use quite different methods than "experimental science". Biological fields are an interesting mixture, in that they have been doing scientific experiments for centuries, but much of their research isn't amenable to experimentation, and observational methods are required.
If you insist that I pick just one definition of "the scientific method", my response is that you don't understand "scientific methodology". I refuse to single out just one as the only acceptable method. I'd rather use whatever methods are most appropriate to the data that I'm able to collect.
Of course, we can have a bit of fun with some of the fringe sciences, since some methods of investigation are a lot more reliable than others. Historians, for example, are just barely learning to use scientific methods. And for an especially silly example, there's my degree in Computer Science.;-)
A scientific method is really just any method that is known to give reliable results. There are lots of such methods (and even more that aren't reliable, such as faith in an authority).
[M]uch of the argument to keep Pluto as a planet hinges around nostalgia, and "keeping the textbooks the same." How is that science? Things change; science marches on.
Actually, there is some scientific precedent for this. For example, a few years back zoologists figured out that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were the same species. Apatosaurus was the older term, so it was decreed the official name. There was a minor outcry, because the Brontosaurus was the favorite dinosaur of so many people. So the decision was made to accept Brontosaurus as a synonym of Apatosaurus.
This definition was basically a bit of silly PR. But it did have one technical effect: It meant that Brontosaurus couldn't be re-used to name a new dinosaur species. This is reasonable, since so many older texts use the term. And it was good from a scientific field that can be rather abstruse at times.
Astronomers have pointed out that "planet" has never really been a technical term. So it definition doesn't mean much to them. They'll continue to talk about "objects" and "bodies", and give specs to more precisely say what sort of thing they're talking about.
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit and operating at the lowest forms of the intellectual discourse (semantics and sophistry... voting on definitions.. oh jesus).
Except that scientific organizations like the IAU have often decided terminology by vote. It's a well-established scientific tradition. As in this case, it is often preceded by quite a bit of discussion. Usually the vote doesn't happen until it's fairly clear that there is a concensus. But even then, there is usually some further discussion after the vote, including groups that try to demonstrate why the decision was wrong.
The oddest part of this is the way it's reported as a redefinition. But "planet" never actually had a technical definition. It's not a technical term, really; it's mostly a media and school textbook (and astrology;-) term. It's not clear why the IAU ever bothered. Was there some sort of PR crisis that necessitated such a definition? Or is this just a "silly season" news story?
Well, yes, we are losing atmosphere. But the amount lost to the solar wind is so small that it'd take billions of years to blow it all away. Losses and gains to other processes (geological and biological) turn out to be orders of magnitude higher. The ground under us contains a lot of oxygen, water, carbon, and other useful stuff. And there's the recent proposal that our air and water is replentished by impacts with "microcomets", little iceballs of a kilogram or so that enter the atmosphere at some unknown rate and evaporate before they hit the ground. We could have a slow net gain of atmosphere. We really don't know how all the processes balance out, just that on a timespan of a few million years, the atmosphere is fairly stable.
But the loss to the solar wind can actually be calibrated fairly accurately by astronomers. Compared to the Earth as a whole, it's trivial. But when you look at it as a bacterial "space plan", it doesn't look so trivial. A trillion bacterial spores is an insignificant mass to the planet, but could be highly significant to life in the galaxy.
Bacteria don't have a space program. Therefore, they're fucked when the Sun expands. We're not.
Don't bet on this.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, there were a number of papers written by astronomers about the Earth's "dust tail", equivalent to a comet's tail, and made of particles of the outer atmosphere blown off by the solar wind. This was of some significance for long exposures in the part of the sky behind the tail.
The studies showed that the Earth's dust tail is mostly gases, but also includes small dust particles, including particles the size of bacterial spores. Further study showed that the upper atmosphere does in fact have a small number of such particles, including bacterial spores. More studies showed that many bacterial spores can survive conditions in space for a rather long time.
So the Earth is spewing a tail of gases, dust and bacterial spores into interplanetary space. The solar wind blows this outward. A small amount hits the outer planets (and "dwarf planets";-), but most of it escapes the Solar System.
This has probably been going on for 3 to 4 billion years. The Earth makes an orbit of the galaxy in about 220 million years. So we've made a dozen or more circuits of the galaxy, broadcasting bacterial spores the whole time. Calculations show that these spores by now have totally permeated the galaxy, and may have reached the Magellanic clouds, but probably not more distant galaxies.
There's a certain amount of conjecture here, of course. We don't actually know that bacterial spores are viable for the millions of years that it would take to reach other star systems. Few of them would ever encounter another planet where they could wake up and start living again. But over a few billion years, with a few billion spores per year (not much mass, really), small chances add up.
Some have suggested that this could be how life reached Earth. Google for the "panspermia" hypothesis for more information. There could well be other planets in the galaxy that are similarly broadcasting bacterial spores. Some of them could have been doing it for 12 billion years or so.
It's interesting to think about. Over billions of years, the Earth may not be as isolated as we might like to believe.
One of the standard tasks of teachers of biology courses is to disabuse the students of such notions. "Higher" and "lower" are value judgements that are biologically meaningless. Such terms might be appropriate in a religious context, but in a biological context they merely indicate cluelessness.
The "lowest" creatures on Earth have just as long an evolutionary history as ours, and are about as well-adapted to their niches as we are to ours. Single-celled organisms may be slightly better adapted, since they mostly have a shorter breeding cycle than we do. But given the universality of changing conditions, this generally doesn't mean a whole lot. The default assumption should be that most species are about equally well adapted to their niche. It takes evidence of special conditions to invalidate this.
Let's just say that "council-rule" there was just a facade, an empty pretense just like "People's Republic of China" or "German Democratic Republic" or such. Basically if a country has to put words like those in its name, that's your cue that it isn't.
But just swap from english to mandarin, because its the most spoken language in the world. Deal?
Heh; good suggestion. That confuses the issue nicely.
This does tie in something that's probably relevant to this discussion, but I haven't read yet: We've heard a lot about the Great Firewall of China, and the Chinese censoring of google.com. So what's the story with wikipedia? Does the GFoC similarly censor en.wikipedia.org? How about zh.wikipedia.org (the Mandarin-language wikipedia)? (I originaly wrote "" there instead of "Mandarin-language", but the preview didn't display it right, and there probably won't be anything between those quotes for most readers, either.;-)
This isn't a trivial question. One of the reasons for English's dominance in technical subjects is its openness and lack of official control. Government censorship in any language's wikipedia will probably work mostly to kill it and persuade citizens to work on their English instead.
Some years back, I read an interesting comment from a French researcher. He explained why he published entirely in English. He observed that an important part of scientific research is discussing and developing good, scientific terminology. The French language has an official Government-controlled language bureau that has the power to force publishers to use its decrees on French-language usage. This means that, in French, scentific terminology is controlled by an organization of non-scientists who don't understand the scientific issues. In contrast, the English language has no legal governing body, and each scientific field is free to work out its own terminology without outside interference. If he and a few colleagues feel the need for a new term, or a modification to the definition of an old term, it can be done in private or online or in journals, with no legal threats from outsiders. This is critically important in any scientific field. So, much as he loves the French language, he publishes his scientific work in English.
Political issues aside, this will affect any language that has any sort of legal body with control over language issues. The very existence of such a body can effectively discourage the language's use in any technical arenas.
I noticed that the IAU just defined "planet", but not "planète". Or "" for that matter.
(Damn! That doesn't display, either. I meant "huò xng". And the vowel disapeared in the second of those words. Can't/. handle simple utf-8? It looked fine in my browser's window, but it comes back from/. with chars missing. Well, I'll submit it, and try reading it via other browsers. Maybe this will lead to enlightenment.;-)
Basically, think of it this way: let's say that someone wanted to build an, I don't know, ammonium nitrate factory right in the middle of your town. In a western democracy the city or state council could say, basically, "whoa, guys, that factory stinks of ammonia to high heavens. Put a filter on it. NOW." Or they could say that since that thing is explosive in case of a fire, please kindly build it outside the town.
Some years back, my wife and I made at trip back to her family's home town, St. Joseph, Missouri. She decided to take me on a tour of a section of town where her family had lived until back in the 1950s. It is now a small ghost town, with the houses abandoned and falling apart. Hardly anything grows there. What happened? A cement plant was built on the other side of the main street past the neighborhood. The people who lived there quickly realized, as they found a constant thin white dust layer everywhere no matter how much they cleaned, that they had a choice: Move out, or die of silicosis in a few years. The city council was deaf to the problem. The plant Brings Jobs. And the plant's owners had some good ties with the local Powers that ran the council and who were the only ones that could get on the ballot. There was never the slightest chance of the neighborhood fighting the plant.
When I was in high school in the Seattle area, one of my good friends was a fellow whose family moved there after living for a few years in a small town in southern Idaho. They left because because of repeated vandalism to their property, and the last year they were there, he had spent most of the year in a hospital, recovering from beatings by a gang of local kids who had nearly killed him. Their crime? His father was a Baptist minister. The town was Mormon (and almost certainly still is). The police wouldn't discuss the attacks, and the town government was totally deaf.
Small-town America is all too often run feudally, by a small established gang that runs things their way, and if you don't like it, you'd just better get out of town. Here and there, there probably are a few of the idyllic small-town scenes that Hollywood writes about. But all too often, the truth is something very different. Holding the American town-council system of government as some paragon of good government shows a profoud lack of understanding of the reality.
Some sociologists have presented this (in various words) as one of the main reasons for the slow abandonment of small towns across the country. I know too many people who are quite happy to live in the vicinity of a large city, and have no intention of ever going "back home" for other than brief visits; they often mention their dislike of the entrenched ruling "clique" as a reason. OTOH, I have some good friends who live in a small rural town in southern New Hampshire, and they think the town is run well, although they're not part of the local clique.
I've also read some interesting papers that contrasted the US and Russian political systems, asking why it is that at the local levels the Russian system works so much better than the American, while at higher levels it's reversed. I haven't seen many signs that Political Science is at all scientific, so I'm not sure that I trust any of the analyses (and recent Russian history is a good example of the pitfalls of applying a pseudo-scientific political theory to real government). But I find it interesting that people studying the topic would express the differences in such terms.
Not understanding each other is basically a vicious circle, as violence goes. There'll be plenty of self-serving manipulators on both sides willing to translate only the conveniently belicose parts of what the others say.
Or, in many cases, they mistranslate things for propaganda purposes
Here in the US, we've seen this a lot recently with the Arabic term "jihad", almost always explained as meaning "religious war". But in fact it's just a common Arabic word that means "struggle". It is only occasionally properly translated as war of any kind.
A comment I read about this a while ago included a passage quoting an Arab woman saying that her jihad was with weight loss. If you believe that jihad means religious way, this is bizarre, and sounds like some strange sort of humor. If you understand even a bit of Arabic, you know that it's not bizarre, and she just said that losing weight has been a struggle for her.
But American journalists routinely don't translate "jihad", and explain the word as "religious war", even in cases where they must have known that this wasn't what was meant. After all, if you can understand what the speaker said well enough to give a translation, you must know that failing to translate this one word is extremely miseading. But most Americans don't know any Arabic words except maybe "Allah", so the deceit works.
This trick of leaving one word untranslated is an old propaganda device. Another blatant historic example is the Cold War practice of leaving the Russian term "soviet" (better transliterated as "sovyet") untranslated. The word just means "council", and is an ordinary Russian word. But translating it correctly didn't serve the translators' propaganda purposes. If they'd written about the dangers of "the council system" rather than "the Soviet system" (a common phrase at the time), all the people here in New England would have wondered what's so dangerous about the town councils that run local government in most of the area's small towns. Are our local towns dominated by communists? This wouldn't do, of course, so they left the term untranslated, making Russians into the victims of this evil, unknown "Soviet" system of government that was somehow different from governments anywhere else. Again, anyone with a small knowledge of Russian knows the actual meaning of the term. But few Americans know any Russian except maybe "nyet", so the deceit works.
Of course, anyone interested in this sort of thing will be suspicious of any such untranslated term. It's almost always a tipoff that some propaganda trick is being used. The best defense against this sort of trick is having a bunch of people around who know a bit about the other language. Even better, if you don't want to be taken in by such tricks, you should learn a bit of the language yourself.
(And Arabic has a very cool writing system; you'd think that geeks would find it a lot of fun, as well as a nice challenge to their 31337 text-hacking skillz.;-)
An obvious observation here is that however they decide such a question, the decision is profoundly anti-education. Anyone with the slightest interest in education would start by rejecting the dichotomy that the only choices are Microsoft and linux. And deciding on only one means that you have no intention of allowing your students to get a real education in the subject.
Any actual educator would want their students to become familiar with many different kinds of computers. They would have a bias against Microsoft, of course, because MS systems don't permit the students to study much of the system's innards. Apple would also be fairly low on the list, since their software's inner workings are somewhat more accessible to students, but not as accessible as most of the alternatives. The list of accessible systems would rate linux highly, of course, but not a lot better than the various *BSD systems or OpenVMS. Or OpenDOS, for that matter. And the iTron system should be on the list, as the world's major open real-time system.
OTOH, I suppose those Americans and Europeans worried about a takeover of the computer industry would applaud this decision. A cohort of students who grow up knowing only linux would be nearly as damaging to India's computer industry as if they knew only MS Windows. OK; not that damaging, but damaging enough.
Of course, enough schools in America and Europe are MS-only right now that we can look forward to a general loss of dominance in computing, as schools graduate students who think that computer expertise consists of knowing how to make Word docs and Powerpoint presentations.
A real educator would more likely reject them all, and set their students to the task of building their own computer system, following the precedents of Tannenbaum and Torvalds (and the Berkeley gang). They'd have a lab with a few of each available system, for showing what has been done and asking "How could we do it better?" But they'd put the emphasis on learning by doing.
But having only linux in a school makes about as much sense as, say, having only Honda in the auto (driving and shop) classes. OTOH, having only Microsoft computers would be like having only drivers' ed classes using Honda; the "shop" classes would only read about cars but would never be permitted to open up an engine compartment or remove a dashboard.
Except they are not determining a scientific fact. They are pounding out a scientific classification. Classifications should and are decided by majority.
Yup; that's the way it's usually done. Most scientific fields have an international organization for deciding classification and terminology issues, and changes are usually made after the members vote in favor of the changes.
Of course, this is typically done rather differently from the typical political vote. There is a general consensus among scientists that you shouldn't change such things without good reason. So any changes in classification are typically preceded by years of discussion and presentation of evidence in scientific papers. When the voting actually happens, it's usually more along the lines of "Is the evidence good enough to justify discarding precedent and renaming these things?"
A famous one (among biologists) happened a quarter century or so back, when the big convention of zoologists voted to reclassify the Aves (birds) as a suborder of the Dinosauria. This had actually been discussed for more than 150 years, but since birds don't fossilize well and there were few avian fossils to study, the general consensus was "We don't have enough evidence yet." But in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot more evidence was dug up, and the consensus became "Yeah; it's rather convincing; let's do it." Funny thing is that the media still hasn't heard about that vote; they still talk seriously about the extinction of the dinosaurs. And biologists have a bit of fun looking puzzled, and saying "What do you mean? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There's one sitting on that branch over there."
The IAU's vote on the definition of "planet" was a bit unusual. This was partly because the term is millennia old, but there has never been a scientific definition at all. So they weren't changing the definition of a scientific term; they were attempting to write a scientific definition of a common-speech term. Much of the scientific dispute was based on the fact that many astronomers considered it pointless, and thus unprofessional. That is, the real question wasn't so much how "planet" should be defined, but rather whether there's good reason to officially define it at all.
People are just unfamiliar with the concept of namespace. I have no trouble in accepting that Pluto is a planet in the mainstream namespace and it is or isn't (I'm waiting until the dust settles and we get a decision) in the scientific namespace.
Another exemple of people not groking namespaces is the "it's just a theory" rethoric. Theory does not mean the same thing for scientists.
My favorite example of this is "quantum". A while back, I read a story about a company that had just had a "quantum leap" in income. My immediate thought was "It's news that their income went up by $0.01?" But, of course, the "leap" gave away that this was media speak, not physics speak. A physicist would have said "quantum jump", and it would have meant a change by one cent. But there are two different namespaces here. In the mass media, "quantum" means "a huge amount", while in physics it means "the smallest amount physically possible". Unless you understand that in these two namespaces the meanings of "quantum" are close to opposites, you can't understand what they're saying. In this case it's easier than usual, since people use either "jump" or "leap" to tell you which namespace they're using. Usually you don't get such a nice clue.
And, as others have pointed out repeatedly, "planet" really isn't a technical term in astronomy or astrophysics, so it has never needed a technical definition. It originated more in astrology than in astronomy, and originally included the sun and moon (but not the Earth). Astronomers mostly use it when talking to the media. So the "technical" question really is more along the lines of "When we're talking to non-scientists, which solar-system bodies do we refer to as planets?"
The term "dwarf planet"is sorta funny, because it acknowledges that Pluto can still be called a planet, but with a qualifier saying that it's significantly smaller than a real planet. This goes along with the phrase "minor planet" for objects like Ceres, Juno and Vesta, which astronomers usually call "asteroids".
Then there was the recommendation a while back from another IAU committee, to the effect that "planet" never be used without a qualifier. It's just too vague a term. Even with the media you really shouldn't be grouping Jupiter and Mercury into the same class. Scientists really shouldn't be that imprecise, not even when talking to journalists.
does anyone know of such small, low powered boxes with four distinct ethernet interfaces? one for outside, one for inside, one for dmz and one for wireless.
For that matter, suppose I wanted to do that with a BSD or linux box. Anyone have good suggestions for 4-port ethernet cards? (Or maybe 2 2-port cards, though these days I'd guess it might work just as well if it only used a single card slot.)
It can be hard to know which vendor's PR to most believe.
Do that again and see if it goes to 666 (!!!). I expect that it would stay at 665. As such, your experiment hasn't proved anything yet.
I tried it when it was at 99%, and you guessed right. It stayed at 99%. So I unplugged it again, let it sit for a minute or so until it dropped to 98%, plugged it in, hit CMD-R to update the data - and it still said 665.
So I guess I don't know what it's counting. Both times I tried the experiment (unplug, wait for it to drop by 1%, plug in, CMD-R). Both were in the same "charge cycle" (i.e., the charge hadn't yet reached 100%. One time was counted; one wasn't.
Something I noticed that might mean something: The first test was with the power adapter's cute little light in the plug in its orange state, which it usually does when charging. The second time, it was green. Mostly this means that it's fully charged, but it seems to turn green before the charge icon reaches 100%. Presumably this is somehow significant, but the info I can find was obviously written for idiots, and doesn't actually impart any wisdom on the topic. I'm also mildly curious about the fact that it seems to do this with a 2-wire connector; I suppose that could be determined by voltage level or current draw, but I don't know.
Which does remind me that I had yet another PB power adapter flake out and die just yesterday. The plug's light started dimming irregularly, then it flickered a few times, then it went out. I unplugged it, plugged it back in, and it went bright green again - for a few minutes. Then it repeated the light show, and after that, it didn't come back. I have a "Kill a Watt" toy that tells me it's drawing no power now, though I do hear a faint bzzt when I plug it in. It's only about 3 months old.
I think a 'cycle count' is more a case of how many times the charger has been plugged in more than fully charge/discharge cycles
I verified that. I had my PB plugged in, the little battery icon said 94%, and the System Info window said the Cycle Count was 664. I unplugged the charger, waited about a minute until the icon dropped to 93%, and plugged it back in. The Cycle Count went to 665. So it's counting times it's plugged in, not charge cycles.
Slashdot Mirror
If I was made responsible for running that net/service I'd ask for a security policy established by management and make sure that we followed up on it's use.
... If you were to require a policy established by the management of your typical political organization, the policy would be stated so that a programmer could code the cracker directly from the policy statement.
Hmmm
"All passwords must be the login name followed by a hyphen and the user's driver's license number. Failure to follow this rule will result in termination of computer privileges." Users' names and numbers would of course be accessible to a program via the wide-open online organizational database. [Just a hypothetical example, I hope.]
Actually, you'd more likely get a requirement that all passwords be 4 digits. "It works for banks; it should be plenty secure for us."
You'd be a lot better off if you left the policy to a committee of members who actually understand computer security issues.
Of course it's unconstitutional but will the supreme court ACTUALLY overturn it? Remember George "the constitutional is just a godamn piece of paper" Bush has appointed 2 supreme court justices.
...
One fun thing about this quote is that, once again, he got his facts wrong. The US Constitution was written on parchment, not paper. Parchment is, of course, a variety of leather, typically (but not always) sheepskin. It isn't paper at all, which is made of plant fibers.
To confuse things, there's a fake parchment made these days called "parchment paper". This is paper that superficially looks like parchment, but it isn't parchment. Commercial copies of the US Constitution are often printed on parchment paper. Real parchment is rather expensive.
I wonder if Dubya has been told about his gaffe? Would he know (or care) about such irrelevant differences?
I also wonder if parchment would work in your typical laser printer
One thing I wonder is: Why isn't this covered by libel laws? Ordinarily, if someone with a grudge against me states in writing something about me that isn't true, I can sue them for libel. I'd think this fellow would just talk to a lawyer, who would walk him through the process of filing a libel suit against the registry. If he can demonstrate that people have done nasty things to him (or his son) because of this listing, I'd think he might be in line for one of those multi-million-$$$ settlements. In this case, he'd deserve it, since the state registry has in effect destroyed his life.
Why is a public registry like this immune to the libel laws?
Do you still think that "Science is not a democracy" and that "Facts, definitions and terms are not up for a vote." or was that just a troll?
Huh? I've been mentioning cases of scientific voting. E.g., I've written messages about the zoological vote a couple decades ago that reclassified birds as dinosaurs. I also recently mentioned the decision that Brontosaurus should be officially kept as a synonym for Apatosaurus (rather than declaring Brontosaurus not a valid genus). In general, I've argued that much of science has historically operated in a (semi-)democratic fashion, though I don't think that's the primary intent of most scientists. Rather, there's an understanding that democratic methods can be useful in cross-checking results and deciding things like terminology and classification. Often "consensus" is a better term, of course, but that's a form of democracy, sometimes called a "super-majority".
And, of course, facts are not really amenable to democracy. You can vote on what you want to say, and on what rules you want to follow. But voting on facts can be frustrating, because the universe stubbornly refuses to go along with the majority's decision. Jailing a natural phenomenon for a violation just doesn't work too well. Attempts of any sort to suppress scientific facts have generally failed, though sometimes it takes a century or two.
OTOH, I am one of the people who have used the phrase "silly season" in connection with the IAU's definition of "planet". It is a terminological issue, so it's open to democratic decision making. But there's the remaining question of whether anyone at all will take it seriously, especially the astronomers who point out that it's never been a technical term, and they don't much need a term that's so vague as to include both Mercury and Jupiter (but not Ganymede or Titan).
It's sort of the flip side of the process that has led various legislatures to consider laws about the value of pi. Contrary to popular urban myth, none of these seem to have actually voted on pi's value. But the fact that some politicians would submit such a bill other than as a joke is sufficient. It's fun to read about the attempts by other politicians to convince a majority that they were being made to look like damned fools, and the bill should just be quietly tabled.
And there was the story of the Swiss town a few centuries ago that was being threatened by a glacier. So they passed a law forbidding the entry of glaciers into the town. The glacier stopped, and slowly retreated. They had voted at the end of what we now call the Little Ice Age. Maybe their vote was what ended it. Ya think?
[C]ould the Jupiter/Sun combo support something like Pluto or Luna at Jupiter's Trojan points?
Yup. I've read a few times that you need at least a 50:1 mass ration of the objects (taken pairwise) to get a stable 3-body "Trojan" orbit. The Sun:Jupiter and Jupiter:Earth mass rations are both much greater than 50:1. So if you could pick up Jupiter and drop it into Earth's orbit 60 degrees ahead or behind us, the resulting orbits would be stable, and Earth wouldn't really be affected.
Of course, this would perturb the orbits of Venus and Mars. So we move them to Jupiter's other Trojan point, and make Mars/Venus a close pair like Pluto/Charon. If you'd done this 4 billion years ago, the histories of Venus and Mars would be very different. Both might harbor life now, and we'd have a more interesting Solar System to explore. Jupiter's four big satellites would also be in the liquid-water zone, so they'd also probably be interesting.
The asteroid belt probably wouldn't exist. Doing something about that is left as an exercise for the reader, as is figuring out how to define "planet" in that system.
Well, to a paleontologist, "a few years back" is practically yesterday.
Excellent summary (for slashdot)! I hope someone mods you up. I can't, because you're replying to my message ;-)
Definitions for the scientific method, pick one or give me yours.
;-)
One important quibble is with the frequent use of the phrase "the scientific method". The English word "the" implies uniqueness. But there isn't one scientific method; there are lots of scientific methods.
My favorite example for explaining this: Most people think that "the scientific method" means the sort of lab experiment that you were taught about in school, and which is heavily used by scientists like physicists and chemists. But if this is "the scientific method", then astronomy isn't a science. Astronomers hardly ever do any experiments at all, for obvious reasons.
Now, astronomy is generally accepted as one of the hardest of the hard sciences (in both senses of "hard"). So there's gotta be something wrong with this definition of "the scientific method". What's wrong, of course, is that astronomy is what's called an "observational science". Such scientific fields use quite different methods than "experimental science". Biological fields are an interesting mixture, in that they have been doing scientific experiments for centuries, but much of their research isn't amenable to experimentation, and observational methods are required.
If you insist that I pick just one definition of "the scientific method", my response is that you don't understand "scientific methodology". I refuse to single out just one as the only acceptable method. I'd rather use whatever methods are most appropriate to the data that I'm able to collect.
Of course, we can have a bit of fun with some of the fringe sciences, since some methods of investigation are a lot more reliable than others. Historians, for example, are just barely learning to use scientific methods. And for an especially silly example, there's my degree in Computer Science.
A scientific method is really just any method that is known to give reliable results. There are lots of such methods (and even more that aren't reliable, such as faith in an authority).
[M]uch of the argument to keep Pluto as a planet hinges around nostalgia, and "keeping the textbooks the same." How is that science? Things change; science marches on.
Actually, there is some scientific precedent for this. For example, a few years back zoologists figured out that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were the same species. Apatosaurus was the older term, so it was decreed the official name. There was a minor outcry, because the Brontosaurus was the favorite dinosaur of so many people. So the decision was made to accept Brontosaurus as a synonym of Apatosaurus.
This definition was basically a bit of silly PR. But it did have one technical effect: It meant that Brontosaurus couldn't be re-used to name a new dinosaur species. This is reasonable, since so many older texts use the term. And it was good from a scientific field that can be rather abstruse at times.
Astronomers have pointed out that "planet" has never really been a technical term. So it definition doesn't mean much to them. They'll continue to talk about "objects" and "bodies", and give specs to more precisely say what sort of thing they're talking about.
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit and operating at the lowest forms of the intellectual discourse (semantics and sophistry... voting on definitions.. oh jesus).
;-) term. It's not clear why the IAU ever bothered. Was there some sort of PR crisis that necessitated such a definition? Or is this just a "silly season" news story?
Except that scientific organizations like the IAU have often decided terminology by vote. It's a well-established scientific tradition. As in this case, it is often preceded by quite a bit of discussion. Usually the vote doesn't happen until it's fairly clear that there is a concensus. But even then, there is usually some further discussion after the vote, including groups that try to demonstrate why the decision was wrong.
The oddest part of this is the way it's reported as a redefinition. But "planet" never actually had a technical definition. It's not a technical term, really; it's mostly a media and school textbook (and astrology
Well, yes, we are losing atmosphere. But the amount lost to the solar wind is so small that it'd take billions of years to blow it all away. Losses and gains to other processes (geological and biological) turn out to be orders of magnitude higher. The ground under us contains a lot of oxygen, water, carbon, and other useful stuff. And there's the recent proposal that our air and water is replentished by impacts with "microcomets", little iceballs of a kilogram or so that enter the atmosphere at some unknown rate and evaporate before they hit the ground. We could have a slow net gain of atmosphere. We really don't know how all the processes balance out, just that on a timespan of a few million years, the atmosphere is fairly stable.
But the loss to the solar wind can actually be calibrated fairly accurately by astronomers. Compared to the Earth as a whole, it's trivial. But when you look at it as a bacterial "space plan", it doesn't look so trivial. A trillion bacterial spores is an insignificant mass to the planet, but could be highly significant to life in the galaxy.
Bacteria don't have a space program. Therefore, they're fucked when the Sun expands. We're not.
;-), but most of it escapes the Solar System.
Don't bet on this.
Back in the 1960s and 70s, there were a number of papers written by astronomers about the Earth's "dust tail", equivalent to a comet's tail, and made of particles of the outer atmosphere blown off by the solar wind. This was of some significance for long exposures in the part of the sky behind the tail.
The studies showed that the Earth's dust tail is mostly gases, but also includes small dust particles, including particles the size of bacterial spores. Further study showed that the upper atmosphere does in fact have a small number of such particles, including bacterial spores. More studies showed that many bacterial spores can survive conditions in space for a rather long time.
So the Earth is spewing a tail of gases, dust and bacterial spores into interplanetary space. The solar wind blows this outward. A small amount hits the outer planets (and "dwarf planets"
This has probably been going on for 3 to 4 billion years. The Earth makes an orbit of the galaxy in about 220 million years. So we've made a dozen or more circuits of the galaxy, broadcasting bacterial spores the whole time. Calculations show that these spores by now have totally permeated the galaxy, and may have reached the Magellanic clouds, but probably not more distant galaxies.
There's a certain amount of conjecture here, of course. We don't actually know that bacterial spores are viable for the millions of years that it would take to reach other star systems. Few of them would ever encounter another planet where they could wake up and start living again. But over a few billion years, with a few billion spores per year (not much mass, really), small chances add up.
Some have suggested that this could be how life reached Earth. Google for the "panspermia" hypothesis for more information. There could well be other planets in the galaxy that are similarly broadcasting bacterial spores. Some of them could have been doing it for 12 billion years or so.
It's interesting to think about. Over billions of years, the Earth may not be as isolated as we might like to believe.
They are certainly more highly evolved.
One of the standard tasks of teachers of biology courses is to disabuse the students of such notions. "Higher" and "lower" are value judgements that are biologically meaningless. Such terms might be appropriate in a religious context, but in a biological context they merely indicate cluelessness.
The "lowest" creatures on Earth have just as long an evolutionary history as ours, and are about as well-adapted to their niches as we are to ours. Single-celled organisms may be slightly better adapted, since they mostly have a shorter breeding cycle than we do. But given the universality of changing conditions, this generally doesn't mean a whole lot. The default assumption should be that most species are about equally well adapted to their niche. It takes evidence of special conditions to invalidate this.
Let's just say that "council-rule" there was just a facade, an empty pretense just like "People's Republic of China" or "German Democratic Republic" or such. Basically if a country has to put words like those in its name, that's your cue that it isn't.
...
Yeah, sorta like the United States
But just swap from english to mandarin, because its the most spoken language in the world. Deal?
;-)
/. handle simple utf-8? It looked fine in my browser's window, but it comes back from /. with chars missing. Well, I'll submit it, and try reading it via other browsers. Maybe this will lead to enlightenment. ;-)
Heh; good suggestion. That confuses the issue nicely.
This does tie in something that's probably relevant to this discussion, but I haven't read yet: We've heard a lot about the Great Firewall of China, and the Chinese censoring of google.com. So what's the story with wikipedia? Does the GFoC similarly censor en.wikipedia.org? How about zh.wikipedia.org (the Mandarin-language wikipedia)? (I originaly wrote "" there instead of "Mandarin-language", but the preview didn't display it right, and there probably won't be anything between those quotes for most readers, either.
This isn't a trivial question. One of the reasons for English's dominance in technical subjects is its openness and lack of official control. Government censorship in any language's wikipedia will probably work mostly to kill it and persuade citizens to work on their English instead.
Some years back, I read an interesting comment from a French researcher. He explained why he published entirely in English. He observed that an important part of scientific research is discussing and developing good, scientific terminology. The French language has an official Government-controlled language bureau that has the power to force publishers to use its decrees on French-language usage. This means that, in French, scentific terminology is controlled by an organization of non-scientists who don't understand the scientific issues. In contrast, the English language has no legal governing body, and each scientific field is free to work out its own terminology without outside interference. If he and a few colleagues feel the need for a new term, or a modification to the definition of an old term, it can be done in private or online or in journals, with no legal threats from outsiders. This is critically important in any scientific field. So, much as he loves the French language, he publishes his scientific work in English.
Political issues aside, this will affect any language that has any sort of legal body with control over language issues. The very existence of such a body can effectively discourage the language's use in any technical arenas.
I noticed that the IAU just defined "planet", but not "planète". Or "" for that matter.
(Damn! That doesn't display, either. I meant "huò xng". And the vowel disapeared in the second of those words. Can't
Basically, think of it this way: let's say that someone wanted to build an, I don't know, ammonium nitrate factory right in the middle of your town. In a western democracy the city or state council could say, basically, "whoa, guys, that factory stinks of ammonia to high heavens. Put a filter on it. NOW." Or they could say that since that thing is explosive in case of a fire, please kindly build it outside the town.
Some years back, my wife and I made at trip back to her family's home town, St. Joseph, Missouri. She decided to take me on a tour of a section of town where her family had lived until back in the 1950s. It is now a small ghost town, with the houses abandoned and falling apart. Hardly anything grows there. What happened? A cement plant was built on the other side of the main street past the neighborhood. The people who lived there quickly realized, as they found a constant thin white dust layer everywhere no matter how much they cleaned, that they had a choice: Move out, or die of silicosis in a few years. The city council was deaf to the problem. The plant Brings Jobs. And the plant's owners had some good ties with the local Powers that ran the council and who were the only ones that could get on the ballot. There was never the slightest chance of the neighborhood fighting the plant.
When I was in high school in the Seattle area, one of my good friends was a fellow whose family moved there after living for a few years in a small town in southern Idaho. They left because because of repeated vandalism to their property, and the last year they were there, he had spent most of the year in a hospital, recovering from beatings by a gang of local kids who had nearly killed him. Their crime? His father was a Baptist minister. The town was Mormon (and almost certainly still is). The police wouldn't discuss the attacks, and the town government was totally deaf.
Small-town America is all too often run feudally, by a small established gang that runs things their way, and if you don't like it, you'd just better get out of town. Here and there, there probably are a few of the idyllic small-town scenes that Hollywood writes about. But all too often, the truth is something very different. Holding the American town-council system of government as some paragon of good government shows a profoud lack of understanding of the reality.
Some sociologists have presented this (in various words) as one of the main reasons for the slow abandonment of small towns across the country. I know too many people who are quite happy to live in the vicinity of a large city, and have no intention of ever going "back home" for other than brief visits; they often mention their dislike of the entrenched ruling "clique" as a reason. OTOH, I have some good friends who live in a small rural town in southern New Hampshire, and they think the town is run well, although they're not part of the local clique.
I've also read some interesting papers that contrasted the US and Russian political systems, asking why it is that at the local levels the Russian system works so much better than the American, while at higher levels it's reversed. I haven't seen many signs that Political Science is at all scientific, so I'm not sure that I trust any of the analyses (and recent Russian history is a good example of the pitfalls of applying a pseudo-scientific political theory to real government). But I find it interesting that people studying the topic would express the differences in such terms.
Not understanding each other is basically a vicious circle, as violence goes. There'll be plenty of self-serving manipulators on both sides willing to translate only the conveniently belicose parts of what the others say.
;-)
Or, in many cases, they mistranslate things for propaganda purposes
Here in the US, we've seen this a lot recently with the Arabic term "jihad", almost always explained as meaning "religious war". But in fact it's just a common Arabic word that means "struggle". It is only occasionally properly translated as war of any kind.
A comment I read about this a while ago included a passage quoting an Arab woman saying that her jihad was with weight loss. If you believe that jihad means religious way, this is bizarre, and sounds like some strange sort of humor. If you understand even a bit of Arabic, you know that it's not bizarre, and she just said that losing weight has been a struggle for her.
But American journalists routinely don't translate "jihad", and explain the word as "religious war", even in cases where they must have known that this wasn't what was meant. After all, if you can understand what the speaker said well enough to give a translation, you must know that failing to translate this one word is extremely miseading. But most Americans don't know any Arabic words except maybe "Allah", so the deceit works.
This trick of leaving one word untranslated is an old propaganda device. Another blatant historic example is the Cold War practice of leaving the Russian term "soviet" (better transliterated as "sovyet") untranslated. The word just means "council", and is an ordinary Russian word. But translating it correctly didn't serve the translators' propaganda purposes. If they'd written about the dangers of "the council system" rather than "the Soviet system" (a common phrase at the time), all the people here in New England would have wondered what's so dangerous about the town councils that run local government in most of the area's small towns. Are our local towns dominated by communists? This wouldn't do, of course, so they left the term untranslated, making Russians into the victims of this evil, unknown "Soviet" system of government that was somehow different from governments anywhere else. Again, anyone with a small knowledge of Russian knows the actual meaning of the term. But few Americans know any Russian except maybe "nyet", so the deceit works.
Of course, anyone interested in this sort of thing will be suspicious of any such untranslated term. It's almost always a tipoff that some propaganda trick is being used. The best defense against this sort of trick is having a bunch of people around who know a bit about the other language. Even better, if you don't want to be taken in by such tricks, you should learn a bit of the language yourself.
(And Arabic has a very cool writing system; you'd think that geeks would find it a lot of fun, as well as a nice challenge to their 31337 text-hacking skillz.
An obvious observation here is that however they decide such a question, the decision is profoundly anti-education. Anyone with the slightest interest in education would start by rejecting the dichotomy that the only choices are Microsoft and linux. And deciding on only one means that you have no intention of allowing your students to get a real education in the subject.
Any actual educator would want their students to become familiar with many different kinds of computers. They would have a bias against Microsoft, of course, because MS systems don't permit the students to study much of the system's innards. Apple would also be fairly low on the list, since their software's inner workings are somewhat more accessible to students, but not as accessible as most of the alternatives. The list of accessible systems would rate linux highly, of course, but not a lot better than the various *BSD systems or OpenVMS. Or OpenDOS, for that matter. And the iTron system should be on the list, as the world's major open real-time system.
OTOH, I suppose those Americans and Europeans worried about a takeover of the computer industry would applaud this decision. A cohort of students who grow up knowing only linux would be nearly as damaging to India's computer industry as if they knew only MS Windows. OK; not that damaging, but damaging enough.
Of course, enough schools in America and Europe are MS-only right now that we can look forward to a general loss of dominance in computing, as schools graduate students who think that computer expertise consists of knowing how to make Word docs and Powerpoint presentations.
A real educator would more likely reject them all, and set their students to the task of building their own computer system, following the precedents of Tannenbaum and Torvalds (and the Berkeley gang). They'd have a lab with a few of each available system, for showing what has been done and asking "How could we do it better?" But they'd put the emphasis on learning by doing.
But having only linux in a school makes about as much sense as, say, having only Honda in the auto (driving and shop) classes. OTOH, having only Microsoft computers would be like having only drivers' ed classes using Honda; the "shop" classes would only read about cars but would never be permitted to open up an engine compartment or remove a dashboard.
Sorry; that's not a real education program.
What's with the idea that you should associate your bed with only sex and sleep?
You people have no imagination or creativity. Both can be done just about anywhere.
As can using your laptop, though that would help if wifi were more ubiquitous.
Except they are not determining a scientific fact. They are pounding out a scientific classification. Classifications should and are decided by majority.
Yup; that's the way it's usually done. Most scientific fields have an international organization for deciding classification and terminology issues, and changes are usually made after the members vote in favor of the changes.
Of course, this is typically done rather differently from the typical political vote. There is a general consensus among scientists that you shouldn't change such things without good reason. So any changes in classification are typically preceded by years of discussion and presentation of evidence in scientific papers. When the voting actually happens, it's usually more along the lines of "Is the evidence good enough to justify discarding precedent and renaming these things?"
A famous one (among biologists) happened a quarter century or so back, when the big convention of zoologists voted to reclassify the Aves (birds) as a suborder of the Dinosauria. This had actually been discussed for more than 150 years, but since birds don't fossilize well and there were few avian fossils to study, the general consensus was "We don't have enough evidence yet." But in the 1960s and 1970s, a lot more evidence was dug up, and the consensus became "Yeah; it's rather convincing; let's do it." Funny thing is that the media still hasn't heard about that vote; they still talk seriously about the extinction of the dinosaurs. And biologists have a bit of fun looking puzzled, and saying "What do you mean? Dinosaurs aren't extinct. There's one sitting on that branch over there."
The IAU's vote on the definition of "planet" was a bit unusual. This was partly because the term is millennia old, but there has never been a scientific definition at all. So they weren't changing the definition of a scientific term; they were attempting to write a scientific definition of a common-speech term. Much of the scientific dispute was based on the fact that many astronomers considered it pointless, and thus unprofessional. That is, the real question wasn't so much how "planet" should be defined, but rather whether there's good reason to officially define it at all.
People are just unfamiliar with the concept of namespace. I have no trouble in accepting that Pluto is a planet in the mainstream namespace and it is or isn't (I'm waiting until the dust settles and we get a decision) in the scientific namespace.
Another exemple of people not groking namespaces is the "it's just a theory" rethoric. Theory does not mean the same thing for scientists.
My favorite example of this is "quantum". A while back, I read a story about a company that had just had a "quantum leap" in income. My immediate thought was "It's news that their income went up by $0.01?" But, of course, the "leap" gave away that this was media speak, not physics speak. A physicist would have said "quantum jump", and it would have meant a change by one cent. But there are two different namespaces here. In the mass media, "quantum" means "a huge amount", while in physics it means "the smallest amount physically possible". Unless you understand that in these two namespaces the meanings of "quantum" are close to opposites, you can't understand what they're saying. In this case it's easier than usual, since people use either "jump" or "leap" to tell you which namespace they're using. Usually you don't get such a nice clue.
And, as others have pointed out repeatedly, "planet" really isn't a technical term in astronomy or astrophysics, so it has never needed a technical definition. It originated more in astrology than in astronomy, and originally included the sun and moon (but not the Earth). Astronomers mostly use it when talking to the media. So the "technical" question really is more along the lines of "When we're talking to non-scientists, which solar-system bodies do we refer to as planets?"
The term "dwarf planet"is sorta funny, because it acknowledges that Pluto can still be called a planet, but with a qualifier saying that it's significantly smaller than a real planet. This goes along with the phrase "minor planet" for objects like Ceres, Juno and Vesta, which astronomers usually call "asteroids".
Then there was the recommendation a while back from another IAU committee, to the effect that "planet" never be used without a qualifier. It's just too vague a term. Even with the media you really shouldn't be grouping Jupiter and Mercury into the same class. Scientists really shouldn't be that imprecise, not even when talking to journalists.
does anyone know of such small, low powered boxes with four distinct ethernet interfaces?
one for outside, one for inside, one for dmz and one for wireless.
For that matter, suppose I wanted to do that with a BSD or linux box. Anyone have good suggestions for 4-port ethernet cards? (Or maybe 2 2-port cards, though these days I'd guess it might work just as well if it only used a single card slot.)
It can be hard to know which vendor's PR to most believe.
Do that again and see if it goes to 666 (!!!). I expect that it would stay at 665. As such, your experiment hasn't proved anything yet.
I tried it when it was at 99%, and you guessed right. It stayed at 99%. So I unplugged it again, let it sit for a minute or so until it dropped to 98%, plugged it in, hit CMD-R to update the data - and it still said 665.
So I guess I don't know what it's counting. Both times I tried the experiment (unplug, wait for it to drop by 1%, plug in, CMD-R). Both were in the same "charge cycle" (i.e., the charge hadn't yet reached 100%. One time was counted; one wasn't.
Something I noticed that might mean something: The first test was with the power adapter's cute little light in the plug in its orange state, which it usually does when charging. The second time, it was green. Mostly this means that it's fully charged, but it seems to turn green before the charge icon reaches 100%. Presumably this is somehow significant, but the info I can find was obviously written for idiots, and doesn't actually impart any wisdom on the topic. I'm also mildly curious about the fact that it seems to do this with a 2-wire connector; I suppose that could be determined by voltage level or current draw, but I don't know.
Which does remind me that I had yet another PB power adapter flake out and die just yesterday. The plug's light started dimming irregularly, then it flickered a few times, then it went out. I unplugged it, plugged it back in, and it went bright green again - for a few minutes. Then it repeated the light show, and after that, it didn't come back. I have a "Kill a Watt" toy that tells me it's drawing no power now, though I do hear a faint bzzt when I plug it in. It's only about 3 months old.
Those power adapters sure are fragile.
Cycle Count: 140
I think a 'cycle count' is more a case of how many times the charger has been plugged in more than fully charge/discharge cycles
I verified that. I had my PB plugged in, the little battery icon said 94%, and the System Info window said the Cycle Count was 664. I unplugged the charger, waited about a minute until the icon dropped to 93%, and plugged it back in. The Cycle Count went to 665. So it's counting times it's plugged in, not charge cycles.
Ah, so this could be called "Asperger's humor" then.
Sounds good to me. I'll look for opportunities to use the term.