Actually the word "Planet" comes from the (greek?) word for "Wanderer", which were named so because they moved around the sky. The nine planets were defined as: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto
The first sentence is correct (and the term is from Greek), but the second isn't. The original planets were: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in the order used by Ptolemy. The rest weren't known when the term was coined, though there is evidence that Uranus had been spotted by a few navigators and astrologers (and the term "astronomer" wouldn't be coined for many centuries).
The current list of nine planets wasn't around until the 1920s, when Pluto was discovered.
Greek was in use long before modern astronomy developed, and most of the Western world's oldest astronomical texts were written in Greek. (This isn't surprising considering that they were the West's main seagoing people for a few thousand years.)
Check the wikipedia entry for "planet" for some good history.
... to use a company's service, you agree to their terms, otherwise, you simply don't use the service. It really is that simple.
Actually, it's a fair bit more complex than that. (What legal subject isn't?)
There have been many court decisions that have declared parts of companies' TOS, EULAs and even contracts to be void and unenforcable. The fact that something is in the fine print (which might be carefully hidden in a web site, and/or changed after the fact) is of little legal import. Ask just about any lawyer, and be prepared for a long, boring lecture on the complexities of the topic. Corporate lawyers can make a lot of income from court cases over which clauses are legally enforceable.
In particular, while a company may have the techical ability to collect data about you, that doesn't mean they have the legal right to collect that data. And there might be legal limits to how they can use the data. The details differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, of course, so you'll have to consult with a local lawyer to determine the limits where you live. And cross-jurisdictional situations like the Internet are still very fuzzy parts of the law. But saying that you agree to any damned thing in a company's fine print when you use their services just shows a profound lack of understanding of the legalities of the situation. Lawyers make a lot of income...
In particular, there are libel laws almost everywhere. And the fact that something you wrote about me is true is not necessarily a defense; true-but-misleading information can be libelous. To use the fun example from the AOL fuss: Releasing information that I did a lot of searches for ways of killing people could well be libelous if you neglect to include the fact that I'm a novelist doing research for a murder mystery that I'm writing. Now, that one could probably be cleared up quickly, unless you really were libelling me maliciously. But if I'm a detective working for the local police, releasing my search data to the public in a way that identifies me could get the company in some serious legal trouble. (Of course, in that case, I hope I wouldn't be so dumb as to be using AOL.;-)
If you think that they actually can't, you're hopelessly naive.
When you search the internet with a search site, you are using a private or publicly owned companies services. You don't see the difference there?
Yup. There's a very important difference: You and I can sue AOL, Verizon, and other corporations who release such information about us. But good luck trying to sue the government. Their lawyers will just show up in court, say "National Security", and the case will disappear.
Now, since The Gov't Cant Spy On Us, how can the permit THEIR CREATION to do something they can't?
But that's the whole point of a "corporation". It's why they were invented. A corporation is a legal entity whose original and primary function is to insulate its officers from prosecution for their actions. In the UK, corporations still often have "Ltd." at the end of their names. That's an abbreviation of "Limited", and in full stands for "limited liability". This makes it clear why the corporation exists.
If a government can't do something, that's exactly why they would establish a corporation to do it.
Thus, the US government can't legally prevent you from speaking or publishing your thoughts. But they can establish corporations that control the communication media, and those corporations, being private, can control what you can say or publish via "their" media. Your ISP, for example, can enforce a "no servers" rule to prevent you from putting your thoughts online, because the ISP is legally a private corporation, and is thus exemt from the First Ammendment that would make such a rule illegal for a public ISP.
As the most extreme case of this, we've had a few reports recently about the large portions of the Iraq "war" that is being contracted out to private corporations. This is widely understood as a way of having teams that can carry out actions that would be very illegal if government troops did them.
>ZZZT! Wrong! The artist does not get paid their royalty >on a CD that someone rips instead of actually buying. It >doesn't get any simpler than that.
Nor does he get any if I borrow it to listen or if he gives me it when he no longer wants it or if I go over to his house to listen to it...
Nor does the artist usually get any money from commercial sales of CDs.
People have been pointing out for some time that, unless an album sells about 1.5 million copies, the musicians usually receive no royalties at all. All the money goes to "expenses", such as the execs' salaries and bonuses, RIIA dues, etc.
If you make a copy instead of buying your own, you might be taking money out of the pocket of the recording industry execs, but you're not hurting the artists. Unless it's one of a handful of top hits, those artists don't get any money from the sales.
What you should ask yourself is why all those artists keep producing, when they aren't the ones who profit from it. People keep telling us that we need these extreme copyright laws to encourage the artists. If this were true, and the artists aren't getting any royalties, they should all stop producing, right? Why don't they?
The US government must think that Americans are lazy, brainless sheep who will shut out even the most obvious evidence that criminals are running the country.
Try finding some of the writings of Leo Strauss, who is one of the neocons' major theoreticians. He argues the above explicitly. The citizenry are too stupid to be capable of any sort of self-government. They need to be led by their betters, the people who understand the world and how to run it.
This is the basic approach of the Bush crowd.
As for democratic elections, George Bush senior perhaps said it best: "Whatever it takes to win." He said that openly, without shame. The idea is that, once you've won, it doesn't matter how you won. You are in charge, and can run things the way you like.
True. He was the fellow who publicly agreed with Jerry Falwell that the 9/11 attackers were doing "God's work" in punishing Americans for their secularism. I've never heard any of the neocons interpret things in this fashion.
But I'm not sure I'd call him a conservative. He's not in any sense trying to conserve anything. His goal is an American theocracy (preferably with him in charge). And if we secularists don't convert to worship his God, we'll deserve to die, as did those in the WTC that day.
We should pay attention to what he says and writes. He has a lot of followers who think like he does.
What I like to do is remind people of George Bush's post-9/11 comment to the effect that "You're with us or you're with the terrorists".
Since I didn't vote for him, I have to draw the conclusion that he and his gang consider me a terrorist. Could he have said this any more clearly? So any time he says anything about what he'd like to do to terrorists, he's talking about what he'd like to do to me.
Is there any reason I should conclude differently?
It's not hard to imagine what other people in other countries were thinking when they heard this comment, especially the ones who might have made anti-Bush comments in the past.
Long ago, in a discussion forum far away, I brought up the Onion's clever response to the idea of linking with their headline "Kevin Bacon linked to Osama bin Laden". This led to someone defining a "bin-Laden number" similar to the "Bacon number", the number of in-same-movie hops that it takes to get from person X t Osama.
It turned out that both George Bushes have a bi-Laden number of 1. They've both appeared in movies with him. The movies are documentaries, of course, and none of these three had ever actually volunteered to be in those movies.
But it can be fun to toss off in a conversation that George Bush has a one-hop link to Al Qaeda's famous leader.
(More importantly, it's interesting to look into the Bush family's Saudi connections. Not too surprising for oil men, of course, but interesting in light of their Mideast politics.)
Does anyone else remember back in the day when the United States was a government of the people, by the people and for the people?
No, I don't remember that. I do remember lots of use of that phrase as political propaganda, but I don't remember a time when the US government wasn't obviously controlled by the richest people and biggest companies.
Maybe I'm just not old enough. When exactly was that time?
claim that a two-digit percentage of Macs were infected with spyware
Actually, with most definitions of "spyware" that I've seen, this is an easy claim to support. If you examine the definitions carefully, and think of the recent stories such as AOL's release of customer search history, you'll find that a browser with cookies enabled qualifies as "spyware". Cookies can be (and are) used to track clients' histories. And many browsers start life with cookies enabled by default. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is what this claim was based on, and 10% or more Macs have at least one browser running with all cookies enabled.
Sometimes you can use a suitably loose definition to condemn just about anything.
(My favorite example is the admissions I've seen that military security people sometimes count pings from outside MILNET as "attacks".;-)
Heh, funny. But Consumer Reports does have a bit of a history of being sued by companies after serious problems with products were published by CR. CR also has a history of easily winning the few cases that actually go to court. Actually, the companies usually drop charges, after CR makes it clear that they'd be happy to demonstrate the problems in court. CR also often publishes their communications with such companies, which is not really good for sales.
It could be fun to watch an anti-virus software company face CR in court. It would be at least as entertaining as the SCO soap opera. Maybe/. readers should be contacting the companies and encouraging them to sue CR. Think of all the/. articles that this could generate.
You downplay the importance of laziness. I, too, am incredibly lazy. Given two ways of achieving the same result, I will pick the easier one.
Those of us who use the perl language are well acquainted with Larry Wall's frequent comment that the two main attributes of a good programmer are hubris and laziness.
Hubris causes you to think that you're so good that you can tackle any problem. So you tackle the ones that scare other people, and you solve a good number of them. (The rest you don't give up on, you just put them aside for your future spare time. And maybe you lament that life isn't long enough to solve all the interesting problems.)
Laziness causes you to spend part of your time learning about new tools. This means that when tackling a task, you have more than one tool for the task, and you know them well enough to make a judgement as to which will get the job done most easily. You know from experience that investing a small amount of time in learning new tools pays off in huge time savings later on. You can polish off a job and be off working on a hobby, while others are still working hard trying to apply their small toolkit to the problem.
Of course, if you're being paid by the hour, this can be a problem. On several occasions, I've startled managers by tackling something that a team had spent months on, and making something that worked within a few hours. If you do this, you can make enemies because you made them look like fools, you only get paid for a few hours, while they got paid hundreds of times as much for failing.
So the truly lazy find ways of covering up how fast they did something, and pad it out with more study of new tools that might be useful some day.
You'd think that managers would understand and encourage this, but I haven't met any such yet.;-)
When will modern web designers learn to make pages that can be read comfortably at any resolution, no matter how low.
Well, considering that HTML was designed to work this way from the start, and web developers insist on spending a great deal of time defeating this and forcing web pages to have large sizes, I'd way the answer is "Never."
Any web developer that intends to make their pages usable on small screens (or by vision-impaired clients) knows how easy it is, and is already doing it. The remainder have no intention of making their site work on your device.
I've worked on a number of projects where the management decreed an exact size for pages, typically a size that they thought looked good on their screen. Making pages work for smaller screens resulted in severe criticism, and we had to modify the pages so their size was fixed to the "standard". So I'd say that sites like this aren't an accident due to ignorance of how the Web works. They are intentionally designed not to work on your screen.
Why does the new slashdot style force a minimum size and refuse to wrap in smaller windows? Anyone know if this was a conscious design decision?
That's true, but it's more fun to think that we're living on one of a pair of "binary" planets.;-)
And it seems like, if Mercury and Pluto are planets, Luna oughta be, too.
For astronomical purposes, the suggestion that a qualifier is always needed is probably a good one. Terms like "planet" and "moon" are just too vague and fuzzy to be very useful in any technical discussion. Saying "airless planet" is a bit more precise, since it obviously excludes Earth and Mars, but it would be more useful if it included Luna and Ganymede. It's not obvious to me what the best phrase would be that includes Venus, Earth, Mars and Titan. "Planets with thin atmosphere" seems a bit wordy, but we'd want something that excludes Uranus and Neptune. Sci-fi afficionados might suggest "Earth-like planet", but since any Earth critter would die in minutes on Venus or Titan, that doesn't seem like a good phrase.
Well, give the astronomers another 20 or 50 years, and maybe they'll decide. The decision might be that it's silly, and they should never discuss the issue in public.
Well, yeah, but those definitions aren't too useful to astronomers. The main reason that "X orbits Y" isn't really a property of X, except that it implies that X is smaller than Y. Most of the useful terms describe properties of an object itself. There are uses for relationship terms like "orbits". But usually it's more useful to just define the relationship and then say that object X has relation R to object Y. There's relatively little value for a term that just means "X is in relation R to something that I'm not naming".
This is why astronomers have preferred "planet" to mean something like "a body big enough to be spheroidal due to self-gravity". That's a property of the body itself. What it orbits isn't.
By similar reasoning, saying "X is a moon" isn't very useful. "X is a moon of Y" is useful, but "X orbits Y" says the same thing, has two fewer syllables, and doesn't need a special term.
Explained a different way: Most people would agree that Mercury and Earth are planets, while Luna and Titan are moons. But Mercury is more like Luna than it is like Earth, and Titan is more like Earth than it is like Luna. So in these cases, both the terms "planet" and "moon" give us a wrong classification.
Not that these matter much. As astronomers have pointed out, they mostly say "body" and give detailed specs. The star/nonstar distinction is useful, but most other coarse classifications aren't. This whole thing is basically a media "dispute".
Out of curiosity, I checked around the home office (four keyboards + two laptops), and a few of the old ones down in the basement. All have two such keys. One is at the lower right of PC-style keyboards, part of the numeric keypad. The other is the usual "Return" key, though only a few say "Return". Most have that bent-arrow icon, but a few say "Return" instead. Most also say "Enter" in a small font at the upper left.
When I checked on my linux boxes (the only ones where I know how to do this), they did send separate input events to the software. The Return/bent-arrow key sends Return (Press and Release) events. The Enter key sends KP_Enter events. So they are distinguishable to the software. All the text software that I tested translated them both to "newline", LF on the linux box.
Our two Mac Powerbooks also have two such keys: One is labelled "return" in the usual place, with "enter" in a smaller font at the top right of the key. The other is labelled "enter" and is the 2nd key to the right of the space bar. Again, all the software seems to map both of them to a "newline", LF since this is OSX.
So all of our keyboards have both a Return and an Enter key, though the Return keys are sometimes labelled with that bent-arrow icon instead of "return". And I haven't found any software that treats them differently.
Actually, I typed that on my Mac Powerbook, and I don't think I've ever used its Enter key. Is there some Mac software that distinguishes it from the Return key (which for some reason also says "enter" in small letters at the upper right)? Simple tests show that the few apps that I tried all treat them identically.
The PC-style keyboard on my linux box also has separate Return and Enter keys. I'm not sure if they all do, but mine does. Again, they seem to act identically in a few apps that I tried.
And the keys don't really send CR or LF chars. They send more complex codes that the input software maps to those ASCII chars. Or to other things, depending on what software gets the input. If you're running X Windows, for example, you get a keyboard input event, which gives your program a keycode. If you don't intercept this event yourself, your software might map the keycode to a CR or an LF, or it might interpret the keycode directly. There are tables of these keycodes somewhere. You could use them, for example, to distinguish a Shift-Left-Down from a Shift-Right-Down input event, if you wanted the shift keys to behave differently. This isn't likely, but you probably will distinguish the Shift-Left-Down and Shift-Left-Up events.
The main reason for all this is to define different keyboard mappings for different languages. Otherwise, how would you ever input Chinese to your computer? There are more than a billion people who might like to do that, y'know.
So what software distinguishes the Return and Enter keys, when both are present?
I did somewhere read a comment that both Pluto and Charon have orbits that are partially curved away from the sun. Considering their distances from the sun and each other, this isn't surprising. Maybe you could google for it, but it might take a few tries to get the right keywords.
Anyway, it seems that both Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon are useful as counter-examples to naive definitions of "moon". With Earth/Luna, both have totally concave orbits wrt the sun (so they're a binary planet pair), but their barycenter is inside the Earth (so they're a planet/moon pair). Pluto/Charon reverse both of these criteria.
A better approach might be that of the IAU committee some time back, who suggested that "planet" never be used without a qualifier. This would allow those who think that Luna, Titan and Pluto are planets to call them planets, with appropriate qualifiers. People who don't think so could just call them something else. Thus Luna and Titan can also be called moons without serious challenge, and Pluto/Charon can be classified as the innermost KBOs.
Thus, with the difference between "planets" and "moons" away, the classification that matters is: * pieces of rock (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos, Europa,...)
Actually, for practical purposes, you should probably split this class into two: with and without a significant atmosphere. By "significant" you'd probably mean "has weather" in some sense.
This would put Venus, Titan, Earth, Mars and Triton in a separate class (ordered by decreasing atmospheric density). Their difference from the gas giants would be that their central rock is most of their volume, while the gas giants are mostly gas.
There is some evidence that Pluto has an atmosphere during its closest approach to the sun, and it might have weather that modifies the surface, but we don't really know yet. Io would probably be excluded, though, since its "atmosphere" is really volcanic outgassing, not an atmosphere in the usual sense.
And one of the often-used definitions of "planet" is that it has to be big enough to be spheroidal from self-gravity. Phobos and Deimos wouldn't qualify, though Ceres, Mimas and Charon would.
But it's all of little interest to actual astronomers, who need terms quite a bit more precise than "planet". Mostly they just say "body" and give its measurements and orbit.
Which centre of gravity do you use in this definition? (obviously the Sun's, probably for practical reasons)
Uh, it's not obvious at all; it's just wrong. The point was that we (and everything else in the Solar System) orbits the center of mass of the Solar System, not the sun. And, in fact, this center of mass is not inside the sun. It's basically very close to the center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. It's inside Mercury's orbit, but it's outside the sun.
If you use the sun's center in your calculations, all your orbits will come out wrong. And not just subtly wrong over millions of years; you'll be significantly off within a year.
(Actually, your orbits for UB313 and Sedna will probably be fairly accurate for a century or two.;-)
The correct question for: "Tbe first operating sytem written in a high level language" was: "What was MULTICS?"
And we should note that K&R have told us that it's incorrect to write "unix" in all caps, because it's not an acronym of any sort. It's a bit of word play. Their system was a scaled-down version of MULTICS, so they called it "unix". They couldn't do all of MULTICS, mostly because the machines they were using didn't have the virtual-memory hardware that it required. They did the best they could with the limited hardware. (And they apologized for not including memory-mapped files, again because the hardware made this impossible. But just imagine all the kludgery that could have been avoided if unix had has this from the start.)
The C Programming Language openly states that C isn't really a high level language...
Yep; it was intended as a portable assembly language. It was intentionally kept close to assembly language, because of the low-level tasks that they needed to code. I've occasionally had fun with the partisans of claimed "high level" languages by pointing out that their language was isomorphic to a subset of C, and since C is merely a structured assembly language, theirs must be, too. This argument does not endear me to those languages' partisans. Ever since I learned Snobol and Prolog 30 years ago, I've longed for some truly high-level languages. But I keep getting things like C++ and PHP.
Of course, the first truly high level language was Trebecktran, used to write the OS for me, the Trebecktron 9000!
Welcome to slashdot. It's about time we had a true AI here. We haven't always done so well with the flock of natural intelligences.
However, you can tell science is threatened because they scream to the heavens (pun intended) whenever someone wants to even mention in the classroom that there are alternate theories to evolution.
That's because they then trot out some crap about Creationism and pretend it's a theory instead of Dogma. Keep it in religious studies.
In my experience, the response usually isn't a "scream to the heavens" at all. It's rather an annoyed dismissal. And I ran across a good explanation of this some time back.
The suggestion was to imagine a similar "debate" in a school's language classes. The French teachers objected to the classes that taught German syntax and vocabulary. They argued that French syntax and vocabulary was just as valid as German, and the German teachers shouldn't be so biased. The German (and Spanish and Russian and Mandarin and...) classes should all teach French syntax as an alternative. Meanwhile, the German (and Spanish and...) teachers were also demanding that the French classes give German syntax and vocabulary equal time, since they were equally good.
The result, of course, would be the total inability to teach any lanuage. To teach French, you need to concentrate on French syntax and vocabulary. This isn't saying that German or Russian are "wrong". It's just that in a class about subject X, you should teach X, and leave subject Y for classes in Y.
Similarly, science classes should teach science. This isn't saying that reading or math or French are "wrong". It's just that you don't have that many hours, and you should stick to your subject.
Subjects like Intelligent Design aren't science. They are interesting for historical reasons, and have a place in classes on topics like history, theology, etc. A class titles History of Ideas should definitely go over ID.
But a biology class shouldn't be teaching ID, for the same reason that it shouldn't be teaching French grammar or the history of the Peloponesian Wars. Classes should stick to their subject matter, and leave other material for other more relevant classes.
If scientific evidence ever appears for Intelligent Design, this would change, of course. But so far, this hasn't happened, so ID doesn't qualify for a science class.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually the word "Planet" comes from the (greek?) word for "Wanderer", which were named so because they moved around the sky. The nine planets were defined as: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto
The first sentence is correct (and the term is from Greek), but the second isn't. The original planets were: Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, in the order used by Ptolemy. The rest weren't known when the term was coined, though there is evidence that Uranus had been spotted by a few navigators and astrologers (and the term "astronomer" wouldn't be coined for many centuries).
The current list of nine planets wasn't around until the 1920s, when Pluto was discovered.
Greek was in use long before modern astronomy developed, and most of the Western world's oldest astronomical texts were written in Greek. (This isn't surprising considering that they were the West's main seagoing people for a few thousand years.)
Check the wikipedia entry for "planet" for some good history.
... to use a company's service, you agree to their terms, otherwise, you simply don't use the service. It really is that simple.
...
;-)
Actually, it's a fair bit more complex than that. (What legal subject isn't?)
There have been many court decisions that have declared parts of companies' TOS, EULAs and even contracts to be void and unenforcable. The fact that something is in the fine print (which might be carefully hidden in a web site, and/or changed after the fact) is of little legal import. Ask just about any lawyer, and be prepared for a long, boring lecture on the complexities of the topic. Corporate lawyers can make a lot of income from court cases over which clauses are legally enforceable.
In particular, while a company may have the techical ability to collect data about you, that doesn't mean they have the legal right to collect that data. And there might be legal limits to how they can use the data. The details differs from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, of course, so you'll have to consult with a local lawyer to determine the limits where you live. And cross-jurisdictional situations like the Internet are still very fuzzy parts of the law. But saying that you agree to any damned thing in a company's fine print when you use their services just shows a profound lack of understanding of the legalities of the situation. Lawyers make a lot of income
In particular, there are libel laws almost everywhere. And the fact that something you wrote about me is true is not necessarily a defense; true-but-misleading information can be libelous. To use the fun example from the AOL fuss: Releasing information that I did a lot of searches for ways of killing people could well be libelous if you neglect to include the fact that I'm a novelist doing research for a murder mystery that I'm writing. Now, that one could probably be cleared up quickly, unless you really were libelling me maliciously. But if I'm a detective working for the local police, releasing my search data to the public in a way that identifies me could get the company in some serious legal trouble. (Of course, in that case, I hope I wouldn't be so dumb as to be using AOL.
The GOVERNMENT can't search.
;-)
Sure, they can. They just can't do it legally.
If you think that they actually can't, you're hopelessly naive.
When you search the internet with a search site, you are using a private or publicly owned companies services. You don't see the difference there?
Yup. There's a very important difference: You and I can sue AOL, Verizon, and other corporations who release such information about us. But good luck trying to sue the government. Their lawyers will just show up in court, say "National Security", and the case will disappear.
Now, since The Gov't Cant Spy On Us, how can the permit THEIR CREATION to do something they can't?
But that's the whole point of a "corporation". It's why they were invented. A corporation is a legal entity whose original and primary function is to insulate its officers from prosecution for their actions. In the UK, corporations still often have "Ltd." at the end of their names. That's an abbreviation of "Limited", and in full stands for "limited liability". This makes it clear why the corporation exists.
If a government can't do something, that's exactly why they would establish a corporation to do it.
Thus, the US government can't legally prevent you from speaking or publishing your thoughts. But they can establish corporations that control the communication media, and those corporations, being private, can control what you can say or publish via "their" media. Your ISP, for example, can enforce a "no servers" rule to prevent you from putting your thoughts online, because the ISP is legally a private corporation, and is thus exemt from the First Ammendment that would make such a rule illegal for a public ISP.
As the most extreme case of this, we've had a few reports recently about the large portions of the Iraq "war" that is being contracted out to private corporations. This is widely understood as a way of having teams that can carry out actions that would be very illegal if government troops did them.
>ZZZT! Wrong! The artist does not get paid their royalty
...
>on a CD that someone rips instead of actually buying. It
>doesn't get any simpler than that.
Nor does he get any if I borrow it to listen or if he gives me it when he no longer wants it or if I go over to his house to listen to it
Nor does the artist usually get any money from commercial sales of CDs.
People have been pointing out for some time that, unless an album sells about 1.5 million copies, the musicians usually receive no royalties at all. All the money goes to "expenses", such as the execs' salaries and bonuses, RIIA dues, etc.
If you make a copy instead of buying your own, you might be taking money out of the pocket of the recording industry execs, but you're not hurting the artists. Unless it's one of a handful of top hits, those artists don't get any money from the sales.
What you should ask yourself is why all those artists keep producing, when they aren't the ones who profit from it. People keep telling us that we need these extreme copyright laws to encourage the artists. If this were true, and the artists aren't getting any royalties, they should all stop producing, right? Why don't they?
Something's not quite right with these arguments.
The US government must think that Americans are lazy, brainless sheep who will shut out even the most obvious evidence that criminals are running the country.
Try finding some of the writings of Leo Strauss, who is one of the neocons' major theoreticians. He argues the above explicitly. The citizenry are too stupid to be capable of any sort of self-government. They need to be led by their betters, the people who understand the world and how to run it.
This is the basic approach of the Bush crowd.
As for democratic elections, George Bush senior perhaps said it best: "Whatever it takes to win." He said that openly, without shame. The idea is that, once you've won, it doesn't matter how you won. You are in charge, and can run things the way you like.
Pat Buchanan != Neocon. He is a conservative...
True. He was the fellow who publicly agreed with Jerry Falwell that the 9/11 attackers were doing "God's work" in punishing Americans for their secularism. I've never heard any of the neocons interpret things in this fashion.
But I'm not sure I'd call him a conservative. He's not in any sense trying to conserve anything. His goal is an American theocracy (preferably with him in charge). And if we secularists don't convert to worship his God, we'll deserve to die, as did those in the WTC that day.
We should pay attention to what he says and writes. He has a lot of followers who think like he does.
What I like to do is remind people of George Bush's post-9/11 comment to the effect that "You're with us or you're with the terrorists".
Since I didn't vote for him, I have to draw the conclusion that he and his gang consider me a terrorist. Could he have said this any more clearly? So any time he says anything about what he'd like to do to terrorists, he's talking about what he'd like to do to me.
Is there any reason I should conclude differently?
It's not hard to imagine what other people in other countries were thinking when they heard this comment, especially the ones who might have made anti-Bush comments in the past.
The U.S. Government has known links to Al Quaeda.
Long ago, in a discussion forum far away, I brought up the Onion's clever response to the idea of linking with their headline "Kevin Bacon linked to Osama bin Laden". This led to someone defining a "bin-Laden number" similar to the "Bacon number", the number of in-same-movie hops that it takes to get from person X t Osama.
It turned out that both George Bushes have a bi-Laden number of 1. They've both appeared in movies with him. The movies are documentaries, of course, and none of these three had ever actually volunteered to be in those movies.
But it can be fun to toss off in a conversation that George Bush has a one-hop link to Al Qaeda's famous leader.
(More importantly, it's interesting to look into the Bush family's Saudi connections. Not too surprising for oil men, of course, but interesting in light of their Mideast politics.)
Does anyone else remember back in the day when the United States was a government of the people, by the people and for the people?
No, I don't remember that. I do remember lots of use of that phrase as political propaganda, but I don't remember a time when the US government wasn't obviously controlled by the richest people and biggest companies.
Maybe I'm just not old enough. When exactly was that time?
claim that a two-digit percentage of Macs were infected with spyware
;-)
Actually, with most definitions of "spyware" that I've seen, this is an easy claim to support. If you examine the definitions carefully, and think of the recent stories such as AOL's release of customer search history, you'll find that a browser with cookies enabled qualifies as "spyware". Cookies can be (and are) used to track clients' histories. And many browsers start life with cookies enabled by default. I wouldn't be at all surprised if this is what this claim was based on, and 10% or more Macs have at least one browser running with all cookies enabled.
Sometimes you can use a suitably loose definition to condemn just about anything.
(My favorite example is the admissions I've seen that military security people sometimes count pings from outside MILNET as "attacks".
Heh, funny. But Consumer Reports does have a bit of a history of being sued by companies after serious problems with products were published by CR. CR also has a history of easily winning the few cases that actually go to court. Actually, the companies usually drop charges, after CR makes it clear that they'd be happy to demonstrate the problems in court. CR also often publishes their communications with such companies, which is not really good for sales.
/. readers should be contacting the companies and encouraging them to sue CR. Think of all the /. articles that this could generate.
It could be fun to watch an anti-virus software company face CR in court. It would be at least as entertaining as the SCO soap opera. Maybe
Testing security only emboldens the terrorists!
And think of all the furry kittens that would die!
Yeah, but think of all the hairy software that's dying out there every day!
You downplay the importance of laziness. I, too, am incredibly lazy. Given two ways of achieving the same result, I will pick the easier one.
;-)
Those of us who use the perl language are well acquainted with Larry Wall's frequent comment that the two main attributes of a good programmer are hubris and laziness.
Hubris causes you to think that you're so good that you can tackle any problem. So you tackle the ones that scare other people, and you solve a good number of them. (The rest you don't give up on, you just put them aside for your future spare time. And maybe you lament that life isn't long enough to solve all the interesting problems.)
Laziness causes you to spend part of your time learning about new tools. This means that when tackling a task, you have more than one tool for the task, and you know them well enough to make a judgement as to which will get the job done most easily. You know from experience that investing a small amount of time in learning new tools pays off in huge time savings later on. You can polish off a job and be off working on a hobby, while others are still working hard trying to apply their small toolkit to the problem.
Of course, if you're being paid by the hour, this can be a problem. On several occasions, I've startled managers by tackling something that a team had spent months on, and making something that worked within a few hours. If you do this, you can make enemies because you made them look like fools, you only get paid for a few hours, while they got paid hundreds of times as much for failing.
So the truly lazy find ways of covering up how fast they did something, and pad it out with more study of new tools that might be useful some day.
You'd think that managers would understand and encourage this, but I haven't met any such yet.
When will modern web designers learn to make pages that can be read comfortably at any resolution, no matter how low.
Well, considering that HTML was designed to work this way from the start, and web developers insist on spending a great deal of time defeating this and forcing web pages to have large sizes, I'd way the answer is "Never."
Any web developer that intends to make their pages usable on small screens (or by vision-impaired clients) knows how easy it is, and is already doing it. The remainder have no intention of making their site work on your device.
I've worked on a number of projects where the management decreed an exact size for pages, typically a size that they thought looked good on their screen. Making pages work for smaller screens resulted in severe criticism, and we had to modify the pages so their size was fixed to the "standard". So I'd say that sites like this aren't an accident due to ignorance of how the Web works. They are intentionally designed not to work on your screen.
Why does the new slashdot style force a minimum size and refuse to wrap in smaller windows? Anyone know if this was a conscious design decision?
Yeah, but you could make an equally good case that slashdot is a "portal".
/. is gaining on itself.
So much for that false dichotomy. Or maybe
That's true, but it's more fun to think that we're living on one of a pair of "binary" planets. ;-)
And it seems like, if Mercury and Pluto are planets, Luna oughta be, too.
For astronomical purposes, the suggestion that a qualifier is always needed is probably a good one. Terms like "planet" and "moon" are just too vague and fuzzy to be very useful in any technical discussion. Saying "airless planet" is a bit more precise, since it obviously excludes Earth and Mars, but it would be more useful if it included Luna and Ganymede. It's not obvious to me what the best phrase would be that includes Venus, Earth, Mars and Titan. "Planets with thin atmosphere" seems a bit wordy, but we'd want something that excludes Uranus and Neptune. Sci-fi afficionados might suggest "Earth-like planet", but since any Earth critter would die in minutes on Venus or Titan, that doesn't seem like a good phrase.
Well, give the astronomers another 20 or 50 years, and maybe they'll decide. The decision might be that it's silly, and they should never discuss the issue in public.
Well, yeah, but those definitions aren't too useful to astronomers. The main reason that "X orbits Y" isn't really a property of X, except that it implies that X is smaller than Y. Most of the useful terms describe properties of an object itself. There are uses for relationship terms like "orbits". But usually it's more useful to just define the relationship and then say that object X has relation R to object Y. There's relatively little value for a term that just means "X is in relation R to something that I'm not naming".
This is why astronomers have preferred "planet" to mean something like "a body big enough to be spheroidal due to self-gravity". That's a property of the body itself. What it orbits isn't.
By similar reasoning, saying "X is a moon" isn't very useful. "X is a moon of Y" is useful, but "X orbits Y" says the same thing, has two fewer syllables, and doesn't need a special term.
Explained a different way: Most people would agree that Mercury and Earth are planets, while Luna and Titan are moons. But Mercury is more like Luna than it is like Earth, and Titan is more like Earth than it is like Luna. So in these cases, both the terms "planet" and "moon" give us a wrong classification.
Not that these matter much. As astronomers have pointed out, they mostly say "body" and give detailed specs. The star/nonstar distinction is useful, but most other coarse classifications aren't. This whole thing is basically a media "dispute".
Out of curiosity, I checked around the home office (four keyboards + two laptops), and a few of the old ones down in the basement. All have two such keys. One is at the lower right of PC-style keyboards, part of the numeric keypad. The other is the usual "Return" key, though only a few say "Return". Most have that bent-arrow icon, but a few say "Return" instead. Most also say "Enter" in a small font at the upper left.
When I checked on my linux boxes (the only ones where I know how to do this), they did send separate input events to the software. The Return/bent-arrow key sends Return (Press and Release) events. The Enter key sends KP_Enter events. So they are distinguishable to the software. All the text software that I tested translated them both to "newline", LF on the linux box.
Our two Mac Powerbooks also have two such keys: One is labelled "return" in the usual place, with "enter" in a smaller font at the top right of the key. The other is labelled "enter" and is the 2nd key to the right of the space bar. Again, all the software seems to map both of them to a "newline", LF since this is OSX.
So all of our keyboards have both a Return and an Enter key, though the Return keys are sometimes labelled with that bent-arrow icon instead of "return". And I haven't found any software that treats them differently.
Actually, I typed that on my Mac Powerbook, and I don't think I've ever used its Enter key. Is there some Mac software that distinguishes it from the Return key (which for some reason also says "enter" in small letters at the upper right)? Simple tests show that the few apps that I tried all treat them identically.
The PC-style keyboard on my linux box also has separate Return and Enter keys. I'm not sure if they all do, but mine does. Again, they seem to act identically in a few apps that I tried.
And the keys don't really send CR or LF chars. They send more complex codes that the input software maps to those ASCII chars. Or to other things, depending on what software gets the input. If you're running X Windows, for example, you get a keyboard input event, which gives your program a keycode. If you don't intercept this event yourself, your software might map the keycode to a CR or an LF, or it might interpret the keycode directly. There are tables of these keycodes somewhere. You could use them, for example, to distinguish a Shift-Left-Down from a Shift-Right-Down input event, if you wanted the shift keys to behave differently. This isn't likely, but you probably will distinguish the Shift-Left-Down and Shift-Left-Up events.
The main reason for all this is to define different keyboard mappings for different languages. Otherwise, how would you ever input Chinese to your computer? There are more than a billion people who might like to do that, y'know.
So what software distinguishes the Return and Enter keys, when both are present?
I did somewhere read a comment that both Pluto and Charon have orbits that are partially curved away from the sun. Considering their distances from the sun and each other, this isn't surprising. Maybe you could google for it, but it might take a few tries to get the right keywords.
Anyway, it seems that both Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon are useful as counter-examples to naive definitions of "moon". With Earth/Luna, both have totally concave orbits wrt the sun (so they're a binary planet pair), but their barycenter is inside the Earth (so they're a planet/moon pair). Pluto/Charon reverse both of these criteria.
A better approach might be that of the IAU committee some time back, who suggested that "planet" never be used without a qualifier. This would allow those who think that Luna, Titan and Pluto are planets to call them planets, with appropriate qualifiers. People who don't think so could just call them something else. Thus Luna and Titan can also be called moons without serious challenge, and Pluto/Charon can be classified as the innermost KBOs.
Thus, with the difference between "planets" and "moons" away, the classification that matters is: ...)
* pieces of rock (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Moon, Mars, Phobos, Deimos, Europa,
Actually, for practical purposes, you should probably split this class into two: with and without a significant atmosphere. By "significant" you'd probably mean "has weather" in some sense.
This would put Venus, Titan, Earth, Mars and Triton in a separate class (ordered by decreasing atmospheric density). Their difference from the gas giants would be that their central rock is most of their volume, while the gas giants are mostly gas.
There is some evidence that Pluto has an atmosphere during its closest approach to the sun, and it might have weather that modifies the surface, but we don't really know yet. Io would probably be excluded, though, since its "atmosphere" is really volcanic outgassing, not an atmosphere in the usual sense.
And one of the often-used definitions of "planet" is that it has to be big enough to be spheroidal from self-gravity. Phobos and Deimos wouldn't qualify, though Ceres, Mimas and Charon would.
But it's all of little interest to actual astronomers, who need terms quite a bit more precise than "planet". Mostly they just say "body" and give its measurements and orbit.
Which centre of gravity do you use in this definition? (obviously the Sun's, probably for practical reasons)
;-)
Uh, it's not obvious at all; it's just wrong. The point was that we (and everything else in the Solar System) orbits the center of mass of the Solar System, not the sun. And, in fact, this center of mass is not inside the sun. It's basically very close to the center of mass of the sun and Jupiter. It's inside Mercury's orbit, but it's outside the sun.
If you use the sun's center in your calculations, all your orbits will come out wrong. And not just subtly wrong over millions of years; you'll be significantly off within a year.
(Actually, your orbits for UB313 and Sedna will probably be fairly accurate for a century or two.
The correct question for: "Tbe first operating sytem written in a high level language" was: "What was MULTICS?"
...
And we should note that K&R have told us that it's incorrect to write "unix" in all caps, because it's not an acronym of any sort. It's a bit of word play. Their system was a scaled-down version of MULTICS, so they called it "unix". They couldn't do all of MULTICS, mostly because the machines they were using didn't have the virtual-memory hardware that it required. They did the best they could with the limited hardware. (And they apologized for not including memory-mapped files, again because the hardware made this impossible. But just imagine all the kludgery that could have been avoided if unix had has this from the start.)
The C Programming Language openly states that C isn't really a high level language
Yep; it was intended as a portable assembly language. It was intentionally kept close to assembly language, because of the low-level tasks that they needed to code. I've occasionally had fun with the partisans of claimed "high level" languages by pointing out that their language was isomorphic to a subset of C, and since C is merely a structured assembly language, theirs must be, too. This argument does not endear me to those languages' partisans. Ever since I learned Snobol and Prolog 30 years ago, I've longed for some truly high-level languages. But I keep getting things like C++ and PHP.
Of course, the first truly high level language was Trebecktran, used to write the OS for me, the Trebecktron 9000!
Welcome to slashdot. It's about time we had a true AI here. We haven't always done so well with the flock of natural intelligences.
However, you can tell science is threatened because they scream to the heavens (pun intended) whenever someone wants to even mention in the classroom that there are alternate theories to evolution.
...) classes should all teach French syntax as an alternative. Meanwhile, the German (and Spanish and ...) teachers were also demanding that the French classes give German syntax and vocabulary equal time, since they were equally good.
That's because they then trot out some crap about Creationism and pretend it's a theory instead of Dogma. Keep it in religious studies.
In my experience, the response usually isn't a "scream to the heavens" at all. It's rather an annoyed dismissal. And I ran across a good explanation of this some time back.
The suggestion was to imagine a similar "debate" in a school's language classes. The French teachers objected to the classes that taught German syntax and vocabulary. They argued that French syntax and vocabulary was just as valid as German, and the German teachers shouldn't be so biased. The German (and Spanish and Russian and Mandarin and
The result, of course, would be the total inability to teach any lanuage. To teach French, you need to concentrate on French syntax and vocabulary. This isn't saying that German or Russian are "wrong". It's just that in a class about subject X, you should teach X, and leave subject Y for classes in Y.
Similarly, science classes should teach science. This isn't saying that reading or math or French are "wrong". It's just that you don't have that many hours, and you should stick to your subject.
Subjects like Intelligent Design aren't science. They are interesting for historical reasons, and have a place in classes on topics like history, theology, etc. A class titles History of Ideas should definitely go over ID.
But a biology class shouldn't be teaching ID, for the same reason that it shouldn't be teaching French grammar or the history of the Peloponesian Wars. Classes should stick to their subject matter, and leave other material for other more relevant classes.
If scientific evidence ever appears for Intelligent Design, this would change, of course. But so far, this hasn't happened, so ID doesn't qualify for a science class.