Actually, if you dig up the earliest docs on the Internet (ARPAnet), you'll find a lot of drawings of the intended use of the system. Most of them were totally wireless.
Remember that the ARPAnet was a military project. The intent was electronic communication in battlefield conditions. You can't run wires between your tanks, planes, ships, and troops.
More to the point, the suposedly-new "mesh" idea is just a rebranding of the original design. It was expected that people would not only be cutting your wires, but they'd also be bombing your communication hubs. The packet-routing system was expected to be dynamic, so that as routers died or came online, the routine software would reroute packets automatically.
This is a pretty good model for a flock of OLPC gadgets, any of which may run out of power or be shut down when someone eats dinner, goes to bed, etc. The original intent was that as long as a path exists between two machines, the routing software will find the path and deliver the packets. And this isn't a new idea; it was the intent back in the 1960s.
It would be interesting and amusing if a bunch of wild-eyed academics could once again implement a military design to provide a useful resource for a large part of the world when the commercial world believes it isn't worth doing. The commercial Internet does think that wi-fi is a feeble technology, good only for the last few meters. And they don't like customer-owned networks. So we can't trust the commercial world to solve the comm problems outside major urban areas. It will have to be done by people who have a motive other than commercial profit.
When I was born, a short time ago by God's standards, I was also totally ignorant and without reference points. Yet I and many others just as limited have managed to learn, and most of us understand quite well the dangers inherent in the technology. (The rest seem to go into politics.;-)
Also, if God had set up a basic scientific education program, the little band of at most a million or so ancient Hebrews wouldn't have had the resources to use it to destroy (or conquer) the world in any meaningful sense. That would require significant infrastructure, including lots of geological exploration to find the ores, refining and manufacturing plants, a transportation system to support it, and a power distribution system to run it all. This would have taken generations, and their schools would have been full of students from all the neighboring groups. The result would have been a distributed industrial revolution much like what happened in Europe over the past 300 years or so. Yeah, those Hebrews might have ended up dominating the technology, but they wouldn't have been the only ones using it. They'd have ended up sharing the world with at least the Phoenicians and Greeks.
Actually, there have been sci-fi novels about alternate time lines in which the scientific/industrial revolution happened way back then. The idea has been thoroughly hashed out in some circles.
Also, to explain how the world was created, God wouldn't have had to teach modern quantum physics. A much simpler story, similar to what's in our high-school science classes, would have sufficed for the purposes of a book (B'reshit, aka Genesis) of a few thousand words. If that story really came from God, there's no excuse for it not being much more accurate than it was.
A much more credible explanation is that God told His people "I'm not telling; figure it out yourself." God was hoping that they'd examine his handiwork, figure it all out, and show that God had done a good enough job that they would eventually become worthwhile companions, ending His cosmic loneliness. Instead, the humans made up their Just-So Stories, God was sorely disappointed, and He hasn't wanted to talk to us about it ever since.
Well, I hope they put up both the original Greek and a translation. Then those of us with the interest can use it to polish up their classical Greek, and read what Archimedes actually wrote.
When the information was shared with man on how the universe and world was created, who among us could understand genetics, quantum physics, superstring theory and a host of things we still don't know about?
Most of us, actually. All the evidence is that humans 5000 or 40000 years ago were every bit as intelligent as we are today. They were merely ignorant, not stupid. If God had wanted them to understand, He could very well have set up a few courses in physics and explained how it all really works. Many of those ignorant shepherds could have understood it. If God gave the Genesis creation myth to people, then God was knowingly keeping them ignorant of the truth.
God probably couldn't have explained genetics or quantum physics to a class of chickens, sheep or horses, but He certainly could have explained it to his favorite humans. At least to a small crowd of the geekier ones.
More to the point, his example is plain wrong. If your idea of vision is limited to what you can see with your eyes in the sunlight, you are excluding a great deal of useful (and sometimes beautiful) things in this world.
An example that's rapidly becoming more familiar to a lot of people: If you visit weather sites like weather.gov, you'll see IR "false color" images of the planet that are much more informative than the visual images. For one thing, the IR works on the nighttime half of the planet. But mostly, it gives you a visual image of cloud temperature, which is more important than the mostly-white visual color.
Scientific imaging can be very effective at showing things that aren't visible to the unaided eye. Lewis might object, but it's his loss.
I'd say that the Genesis accounts won't change, even in the face of huge scientific changes. What will change is our perception of it.
Actually, probably not. The perception of the Genesis creation story used to be that it was God's Revealed Truth. Scientific research has change this; now it's viewed as just one of many charming creation myths of a primitive society, with a few ignorant religious nuts still insisting that it's Truth. This situation probably won't change in the future.
If you find there isn't enough software for Linux, you haven't browsed your repositories.
An experiment that I've tried with lots of Windows users: When they tell me that app X isn't available for anything but Windows, I simply ask them how many other systems they've checked. Invariably the answer is "None."
Fact is that lots of apps are routinely released for a number of different platforms (and not just the "big three", Windows, OSX and linux, but often several others). But the human mind for some reason finds it easy read "X runs on Y" as "X only runs on Y". This is especially true if you're a Y fanboy, of course, but it's even true of people who say that they hate Y and wish their software was available for other platforms.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to enjoy being "trapped" and unable to investigate any alternatives.
(Funny case: I have a father-in-law who was similarly "trapped" by Cadillac. He worked for years in hotel management, and wouldn't even consider any other brand of auto. He had an image to maintain. Then he retired to the family farm, and has since learned that there are a lot of very practical vehicles that simply don't come with the Caddy logo.;-)
but really, do they expect everyone to have eletricity? I hope their sending Solar Panels as well.
Assuming this is the same project mentioned in last month's Wired magazine, the laptops can be recharged using (among other things) physical labor (i.e. pulling a string, similar to how you start a lawnmower).
One thing the OLPC people have written is that they gave up on the original design with a builtin hand-cranked charger. They realized that many of the young children they're planning for just don't have arm strength or coordination to use such a crank. So they went with a rechargeable battery, with several kinds of external chargers available depending on the environment. One possibility is a muscle-powered dynamo that could be operated by an older child to recharge the younger ones' laptops. Another is a solar charger. Or the usual transformer dongle for places where there's electricity. But usually you'd only need one such charger for N laptops.
In most cases, these gadgets will need an infrastructure that includes more than power. To be really useful for the intended purposes, they're working on a "mesh" wireless network, but somewhere in the area a flock of laptops will need to be able to reach a machine with an Internet connection. This implies a server machine of some sort that can talk to the laptops and also to whatever Net link is available locally. There are a lot of ways this connectivity could happen, and it generally implies a job for at least one person tending the local server/router/gateway. Probably whatever kids have the best local "nerd" reputations.
Yeah; that's a good one. And I've seen it used in a linguistics class as an example of the bogosity of the English grammar that is taught in our schools.
Fact is that English doesn't have true word classes like verb, noun or adjective. You can't look at most English words in isolation and state their word class. Rather, we have words with a basic meaning, and "word class" is a function of a position in a grammatical construct. That sentence is of the form Adj+Verb+NP, where NP stands for "Noun Phrase". Any English word with an action or relation in its meaning can be plugged into the Verb slot, and any word with a "substantive" (thing or property) meaning can be plugged into the Noun slot. Unlike many other languages, no formal change of the words is needed to explicitly mark them as a verb and noun. There are a few relics, mostly words that can only be adjectives or adverbs, but this is generally true of most root words. So, logically speaking, it doesn't make sense to say that an English word is a verb or noun; it only makes sense to say that, in a given utterance, certain words are acting as a verb and noun.
This is why the ongoing rants about verbing nouns and nouning verbs is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. I've recently read rants on the use of "host", "school" and "party" as verbs. But that's how English grammar works. If you think that a word "is" a verb or noun in isolation and shouldn't be misused as the other word class, you're part of the population that has been suckered into applying Latin grammar to English.
Some linguists like to use this bit of grammar to argue that English is no longer an Indo-European language. Its grammar of invariant words plugged into a word-order-based syntax is much more similar to the Chinese languages than to the strongly-inflected IE languages. Of course, French and Spanish are also far along the same path, and they are descendants of Latin.
So maybe we need an official proclamation that evicts English, French and Spanish from the Indo-European family. There's probably no other family that would have them, though, so they'd just have to set up house as a new, independent family. Some linguists have semi-seriously argued for reclassifying English as a language isolate that constitutes its own family.
Do you read Slashdot much? That is one of the most common issues around here; between "your" and "you're", and "there", "their", and "they're"...
Over on Dave Barry's blog, the regulars have developed a conventional way of unsubtly making fun of this sort of mispeling (which should always be mispelt in spelling discussions;-).
They just include parenthesized alternatives in their (not they're or there) comment, to make it clear that they're (not their or there) not making a mistake. Occasionally someone parodies this practice by constructing sentences with lots of homonyms, and flagging all of them this way. Thus they'll write "use (not ewes, youse or yews)", and other similar funnies.
Maybe we should start doing that here (not hear), as a way (not weigh) of tweaking the poor (not pour) spellers.
I've always considered that an absurd example of the absurdity of avoiding ending sentences with prepositions.
That was probably the point. Answering an absurdity with a parody is a rather common mode of humor.
Actually, the proscriptive grammarians attemts to ban "ending a sentence with a preposition" is mostly an example of the problems of trying to impose the grammar of one language on another. This pseudo-rule came about because Latin didn't do that sort of thing. But in all the Germanic languages, includin English, it's normal syntax.
Those little words aren't actually prepositions, though they are mostly derived from prepositions. If you study German, you'll find them described as "separable prefixes". Others call them "adverbial particles". They are grammatically like adverbs, but are more strongly associated with the verb.
Attempting to eradicate such constructs is as silly in English (or German or Dutch or Swedish) as would be, for example, trying to eradicate the spoken question mark in Finnish or Mandarin because English doesn't form questions that way.
It is a bit odd that our school systems are still teaching what is really a parody of Latin grammar in our English classes. They should consult with a few linguists who understand the subject, and teach actual English grammar. That would make a lot more sense to the students, and would probably be a lot more effective at getting compliance. When you teach something that the students know is wrong, the main effect is to instill disrespect for the teaching.
Hmmm... I don't seem to have put any "prepositions" at the ends of my sentences. Well, that's something that I can easily take care of...
(We might note that "take care of" is just a compound verb that really should be written without spaces. It's part of a small class of such verbs that includes "take leave of" and "take note of". So that sentences is just an example of placing the verb at the end of a subordinate clause. Replace "take care of" with "fix" to see this more clearly.)
We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.
That's why we read/. and all the other fine online tech-news sites.
Really, this is hardly a new problem. Print journalism has long had high-quality sources of scientific and other tech news, though most of them are now online. The fact that 99% of the general public, including the mainstream media (MSM), were unaware of them didn't change the fact that good information was available to anyone at all interested. We've had weekly publications like Science and Nature for more than a century, and note that both are much fatter than Time or Newsweek.
We do have a bit of a problem with the commercial consolidation in the MSM, which naturally goes with reducing costs by dumbing down. But anyone with access to a computer and the Net can easily spend their entire day reading good quality tech news. And that's probably where we'll find the next Hunter Thompson.
Or maybe (s)he's already here, blogging away. Anyone got any nominations?
I don't particularly relish the idea of having to take MS's word for what's happening down in kernel or having theirs being the only powerful security/utility products availble.
Prorammers have long understood that, especially at the kernel level, the only way to understand what's happening down there is to study the source code (and, in some cases, the machine code that it compiles to). Anything else is at best a summary, and at worst a parody of what's really going on.
Face it, with a binary-only kernel, the only way to understand kernel issues and write powerful (or even effective) security products is to have access to the kernel internals. If you don't have that, you are locked out, and your products can never compete with those written by people with inside knowledge.
Without access to the source, the code in there could be doing anything at all, and you have no defense against it whatsoever.
We might note that this is a gratuitous mis-use of the term "robust", which is a well-known technical term in anthropology. It has nothing to do with state of health. It's basically a measure of bodily weight relative to height.
Thus, the Neandert[h]al (sub)species was "robust", the invading Cro Magnon people were "gracile". In common English speech, more common terms might be "stocky" versus "slender".
Ordinarily this wouldn't matter. But we're dealing with a topic in which the technical terminology is relevant. Using the technical term in some vernacular sense is understandable, but it's misleading. And it's likely to lead to dismissal by people knowedgeable in the subject.
You'd think that we'd want to avoid this in a forum that consciously targets "nerds" and "geeks" (two more technical terms that the public uses very differently).
Well, maybe. But there are a number of examples where it turns out to be very useful to treat a collection of physically disconnected objects as an object. The most common example in astronomy is probably a galaxy, which in many respects acts like a single, organized "object", despite the fact that it's actually trillions of separate objects loosely bound by gravity. And we usually treat our Solar System as an object (which contains four smaller objects of similar structure).
My favorite example is biological. We have no trouble viewing colonial organisms like a sponge or a coral head or a Portuguese Man-o-War as a single "object", even as a single "individual". But biologists have found that treating a hive of bees or ants (or any eusocial creatures) as a single "individual" helps greatly in understanding them. True, these individuals have a lot of physically disconnected bodies. But they are bound by effective communication systems, mostly chemical, partly visual and auditory, and they really do behave as a single colonial individual.
This mostly just illustrates that our definitions of "individual" and "object" might need a bit of work. And the best definition might vary somewhat depending on your field of study.
We know pretty well that treating the "Gaia" concept as a real individual is mostly just silly. But that's at the high extreme; a single animal such as a human certainly is an "individual" although we arose from what was originally a colonial collection of single-cell organisms 600 million years or so back. Somewhere in this continuum we find borderline cases like ants, bees, termites, and mole rats, which are borderline cases that confound our definitions.
But the universe doesn't have to file things according to our definitions. Rather, it's up to us to find concepts that work, and give them names that work.
It's likely that, for astronomers, it will turn out useful to treat this collection of galaxies and assorted other stuff as a gravitationally bound "object". Or maybe, like the recent discussion of the term "planet", astronomers might decide that this was a bad idea and will revise the terminoloy appropriately.
I think they'd have been better off calling it a "structure". But IANAA.
It doesn't make sense because before the 1994 FCC regulation, one could receive anything that came through the air, if you had equipment capable of it.
One of the fun aspects in this case is that you and I do have equipment that can receive cell-phone and wi-fi signals - our bodies. Now, granted, the reception is rather weak, and contrary to the ongoing scaremongering, really doesn't amount to more that raising our body temperature a few millidegrees.
But I've found it fairly easy to demo that such "reception" is happening. I find a spot where my cell phone reports an intermediate-level signal, hold the phone close to my body, and turn around slowly. Usually, there is a visible drop in signal strength at one point, which is where the human body is between the phone and the nearby relay. By turning back and forth, you can demo that this is repeatable.
One of the problem with wi-fi (and cordless phones) is that there's spectrum overlap. But the fun part is asking the question: How do I prevent my own (not my phone's; my body's) reception of any of these signals? Do I switch to wearing a hazmat suit (with a tinfoil layer) at all times?
This is somewhat absurd, of course. But it does illustrate one of the basic problems with laws that outlaw receiving signals broadcast (or narrowcast) by someone else's equipment. How can I even know I'm doing it? And if I want to obey the law, how can I block the signals before they reach my body or my electronic toys?
Another fun part is to consider the old comments about people who receive things like radio stations (or cell-phone conversations) in their dentures or other medical prostheses. Are they violating the law? Can they be prosecuted? If so, how can they prevent this and guarantee that they won't violate the law?
Fact is that our bodies are being penetrated by low-power radio signals most of the time. And in many parts of the world, this is another entry in the growing list of explanations why it's not actually possible to be a law-abiding citizen. No matter what you do, you are almost always in violation of one or more laws.
Claiming that inviting someone to use your wireles (via an open AP), and then providing a DHCP address upon request, somehow does not imply permission to actually, you know, use the network is the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.
Well, now; I don't think the legal system would necessarily agree with this. There are legal words for this sort of behavior. A very general term is "fraud". A more specific term is "entrapment". Making an offer and then prosecuting someone for accepting generally falls under such terms.
Thus, if I set up what looks like a store of some sort, with what looks like a sales display in the window, and price tags on the goods, and an open door, I can't charge you with trespass when you enter. Claiming that it's not a store, but a private residence will get you nowhere in court. You have fraudulently enticed people to enter what looks to a "reasonable man" as a commercial store. You are the criminal, not the supposed trespasser.
Similarly, putting something on a web site and then charging someone with copyright violation (or "theft" or "piracy" as we often read here) is something that the courts will eventually just treat as fraud and entrapment on your part, once lawyers and judges get over the idea that the term "computer" overrides legal precedent.
And setting up an open wireless access point with an internet connection will eventually be treated by the courts the same way. Otherwise I can set up all sorts of entrapments and enrich myself at the expense of anyone who sees the "open door" and walks through it. It'd be a pretty dumb judge that didn't imagine himself as my future victim unless he applies traditional case law and decides in favor of the defendant (and probably fines the plaintiff) in such cases.
In any case, consider the variant of the Golden Rule: What sort of society would you like to live in? I'd like to be able to use wireless anywhere that it's available. If we use the legal system to harass people to create or use open wireless access, we're working against that ideal. We want to encourage this sort of thing, not discourage it. To do so, we must not only encourage the nice people who set up open access points; we must also discourage the jerks that set up open access in order to harass people who use it.
Said: "How to recognize speech" Understood: "How to wreck a nice beach"
That's one of my favorites. It's right up there with the popular pair:
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
The first pair is a problem in phoneme recognition, of course, while the second is a problem in parsing. And there's also the observation that "Time flies like an arrow" has a valid second parsing, with "Time" the verb and the topic one of how to determine the velocity of travelling objects. So even if you've got all the phonemes right, you can still face some serious problem extracting the meaning. And we haven't even considered homonyms yet...
I expect in 300+ years when Star Trek is set, our AI will beat the piss out of Star Trek AI. Hell, the computer has been around for only a little over 50 years. A little over 100 years ago we had just first discovered electricity and flight.
Well, maybe. But we invented microscopes around 300 years ago, and discovered microorganisms immediately thereafter. The understanding that some bacteria were involved in diseases followed quickly. But it was nearly 300 years before we successfully eradicated a disease (smallpox). Today, we're still battling new diseases, and we don't have anything like a general solution to all diseases. We have a few antibiotics that effect more than one disease, but we haven't made much progress in solving the problem of the development of resistance to our antibiotics. Hell, we can't even convince the general public that it's the evolutionary process at work here, and we've understood that for around 150 years.
I wouldn't predict any general solution to a complex problem like voice recognition in a mere 300 years. Maybe we will. But our history of general solutions to other complex biological problems is not encouraging. Neither is the history of our first 50 years of AI, despite the constant hype and Hollywood movies claiming that AI is just around the corner.
Footnote: Microsoft was a monopolistic, backwards company that started the PC revolution.
They don't deserve credit for starting the "PC revolution". The credit properly belongs to the hundreds of little startups and hobbyists, the whole CP/M crowd and others like Amiga. Microsoft was a subcontractor to a giant monopoly (IBM) that stepped in after the little guys demoed there was a market, and took over that market. They succeeded mostly because of a marketing budget greater than the budgets of all the little companies combined.
And there's a good argument that, by marketing PC/DOS rather than CP/M, they set back the PC revolution by 5 to 10 years, the time it took for PC/DOS to match the capabilities of CP/M when IBM started their PC marketing campaign.
Sorry; that's the way "the Market" works in the computer field. Small, independent developers make something new and start selling it; the big companies then step in and take over the market through traditional monopoly strategies.
It's likely that we're now going to hear people crediting Microsoft for starting the "voice recognition" revolution by inventing the new idea that computers can understand speech. Marketing can redefine history like that.
(Whereas we computer geeks know that Al Gore invented speech recognition.;-)
There are thousands of distinct English accents and pronounciation variations.
Aw, c'mon; how many English dialects pronounce "mom" and "aunt" similarly?
Even to someone who's worked with voice recognition, that mistake simply isn't credible. If the software were anywhere near usable, it wouldn't confuse those words from anyone, especially not in a low-noise, no-echo demo.
This is a "No excuses" situation. That demo was simply a dismal failure due to some major bug(s).
Of course, the speech recognition field has a long history of staying in such a state forever. It's hard to find a product that, even with extensive training, doesn't produce howlers like this.
Slashdot Mirror
Wi-fi is a last-meter solution, ...
Actually, if you dig up the earliest docs on the Internet (ARPAnet), you'll find a lot of drawings of the intended use of the system. Most of them were totally wireless.
Remember that the ARPAnet was a military project. The intent was electronic communication in battlefield conditions. You can't run wires between your tanks, planes, ships, and troops.
More to the point, the suposedly-new "mesh" idea is just a rebranding of the original design. It was expected that people would not only be cutting your wires, but they'd also be bombing your communication hubs. The packet-routing system was expected to be dynamic, so that as routers died or came online, the routine software would reroute packets automatically.
This is a pretty good model for a flock of OLPC gadgets, any of which may run out of power or be shut down when someone eats dinner, goes to bed, etc. The original intent was that as long as a path exists between two machines, the routing software will find the path and deliver the packets. And this isn't a new idea; it was the intent back in the 1960s.
It would be interesting and amusing if a bunch of wild-eyed academics could once again implement a military design to provide a useful resource for a large part of the world when the commercial world believes it isn't worth doing. The commercial Internet does think that wi-fi is a feeble technology, good only for the last few meters. And they don't like customer-owned networks. So we can't trust the commercial world to solve the comm problems outside major urban areas. It will have to be done by people who have a motive other than commercial profit.
When I was born, a short time ago by God's standards, I was also totally ignorant and without reference points. Yet I and many others just as limited have managed to learn, and most of us understand quite well the dangers inherent in the technology. (The rest seem to go into politics. ;-)
Also, if God had set up a basic scientific education program, the little band of at most a million or so ancient Hebrews wouldn't have had the resources to use it to destroy (or conquer) the world in any meaningful sense. That would require significant infrastructure, including lots of geological exploration to find the ores, refining and manufacturing plants, a transportation system to support it, and a power distribution system to run it all. This would have taken generations, and their schools would have been full of students from all the neighboring groups. The result would have been a distributed industrial revolution much like what happened in Europe over the past 300 years or so. Yeah, those Hebrews might have ended up dominating the technology, but they wouldn't have been the only ones using it. They'd have ended up sharing the world with at least the Phoenicians and Greeks.
Actually, there have been sci-fi novels about alternate time lines in which the scientific/industrial revolution happened way back then. The idea has been thoroughly hashed out in some circles.
Also, to explain how the world was created, God wouldn't have had to teach modern quantum physics. A much simpler story, similar to what's in our high-school science classes, would have sufficed for the purposes of a book (B'reshit, aka Genesis) of a few thousand words. If that story really came from God, there's no excuse for it not being much more accurate than it was.
A much more credible explanation is that God told His people "I'm not telling; figure it out yourself." God was hoping that they'd examine his handiwork, figure it all out, and show that God had done a good enough job that they would eventually become worthwhile companions, ending His cosmic loneliness. Instead, the humans made up their Just-So Stories, God was sorely disappointed, and He hasn't wanted to talk to us about it ever since.
Well, I hope they put up both the original Greek and a translation. Then those of us with the interest can use it to polish up their classical Greek, and read what Archimedes actually wrote.
When the information was shared with man on how the universe and world was created, who among us could understand genetics, quantum physics, superstring theory and a host of things we still don't know about?
Most of us, actually. All the evidence is that humans 5000 or 40000 years ago were every bit as intelligent as we are today. They were merely ignorant, not stupid. If God had wanted them to understand, He could very well have set up a few courses in physics and explained how it all really works. Many of those ignorant shepherds could have understood it. If God gave the Genesis creation myth to people, then God was knowingly keeping them ignorant of the truth.
God probably couldn't have explained genetics or quantum physics to a class of chickens, sheep or horses, but He certainly could have explained it to his favorite humans. At least to a small crowd of the geekier ones.
Who cares what C.S. Lewis thinks?
More to the point, his example is plain wrong. If your idea of vision is limited to what you can see with your eyes in the sunlight, you are excluding a great deal of useful (and sometimes beautiful) things in this world.
An example that's rapidly becoming more familiar to a lot of people: If you visit weather sites like weather.gov, you'll see IR "false color" images of the planet that are much more informative than the visual images. For one thing, the IR works on the nighttime half of the planet. But mostly, it gives you a visual image of cloud temperature, which is more important than the mostly-white visual color.
Scientific imaging can be very effective at showing things that aren't visible to the unaided eye. Lewis might object, but it's his loss.
I'd say that the Genesis accounts won't change, even in the face of huge scientific changes. What will change is our perception of it.
Actually, probably not. The perception of the Genesis creation story used to be that it was God's Revealed Truth. Scientific research has change this; now it's viewed as just one of many charming creation myths of a primitive society, with a few ignorant religious nuts still insisting that it's Truth. This situation probably won't change in the future.
The Catholic Church recognizes and supports "The Theory of Evolution", and has repeated condemed "The Hypothesis of Intelligent Design".
... I think I see why they don't do that.
Condemnation isn't the right approach. The right way is to calmly explain why ID is wrong.
Of course, it's wrong because it's a hypothesis that can't be tested.
Hmmm
If you find there isn't enough software for Linux, you haven't browsed your repositories.
;-)
An experiment that I've tried with lots of Windows users: When they tell me that app X isn't available for anything but Windows, I simply ask them how many other systems they've checked. Invariably the answer is "None."
Fact is that lots of apps are routinely released for a number of different platforms (and not just the "big three", Windows, OSX and linux, but often several others). But the human mind for some reason finds it easy read "X runs on Y" as "X only runs on Y". This is especially true if you're a Y fanboy, of course, but it's even true of people who say that they hate Y and wish their software was available for other platforms.
For some reason, a lot of people seem to enjoy being "trapped" and unable to investigate any alternatives.
(Funny case: I have a father-in-law who was similarly "trapped" by Cadillac. He worked for years in hotel management, and wouldn't even consider any other brand of auto. He had an image to maintain. Then he retired to the family farm, and has since learned that there are a lot of very practical vehicles that simply don't come with the Caddy logo.
Cartoonist Carl Moore just published what might be the best comment so far on the topic.
but really, do they expect everyone to have eletricity? I hope their sending Solar Panels as well.
Assuming this is the same project mentioned in last month's Wired magazine, the laptops can be recharged using (among other things) physical labor (i.e. pulling a string, similar to how you start a lawnmower).
One thing the OLPC people have written is that they gave up on the original design with a builtin hand-cranked charger. They realized that many of the young children they're planning for just don't have arm strength or coordination to use such a crank. So they went with a rechargeable battery, with several kinds of external chargers available depending on the environment. One possibility is a muscle-powered dynamo that could be operated by an older child to recharge the younger ones' laptops. Another is a solar charger. Or the usual transformer dongle for places where there's electricity. But usually you'd only need one such charger for N laptops.
In most cases, these gadgets will need an infrastructure that includes more than power. To be really useful for the intended purposes, they're working on a "mesh" wireless network, but somewhere in the area a flock of laptops will need to be able to reach a machine with an Internet connection. This implies a server machine of some sort that can talk to the laptops and also to whatever Net link is available locally. There are a lot of ways this connectivity could happen, and it generally implies a job for at least one person tending the local server/router/gateway. Probably whatever kids have the best local "nerd" reputations.
And my all time favorite:
Never verb a noun.
Yeah; that's a good one. And I've seen it used in a linguistics class as an example of the bogosity of the English grammar that is taught in our schools.
Fact is that English doesn't have true word classes like verb, noun or adjective. You can't look at most English words in isolation and state their word class. Rather, we have words with a basic meaning, and "word class" is a function of a position in a grammatical construct. That sentence is of the form Adj+Verb+NP, where NP stands for "Noun Phrase". Any English word with an action or relation in its meaning can be plugged into the Verb slot, and any word with a "substantive" (thing or property) meaning can be plugged into the Noun slot. Unlike many other languages, no formal change of the words is needed to explicitly mark them as a verb and noun. There are a few relics, mostly words that can only be adjectives or adverbs, but this is generally true of most root words. So, logically speaking, it doesn't make sense to say that an English word is a verb or noun; it only makes sense to say that, in a given utterance, certain words are acting as a verb and noun.
This is why the ongoing rants about verbing nouns and nouning verbs is, linguistically speaking, nonsense. I've recently read rants on the use of "host", "school" and "party" as verbs. But that's how English grammar works. If you think that a word "is" a verb or noun in isolation and shouldn't be misused as the other word class, you're part of the population that has been suckered into applying Latin grammar to English.
Some linguists like to use this bit of grammar to argue that English is no longer an Indo-European language. Its grammar of invariant words plugged into a word-order-based syntax is much more similar to the Chinese languages than to the strongly-inflected IE languages. Of course, French and Spanish are also far along the same path, and they are descendants of Latin.
So maybe we need an official proclamation that evicts English, French and Spanish from the Indo-European family. There's probably no other family that would have them, though, so they'd just have to set up house as a new, independent family. Some linguists have semi-seriously argued for reclassifying English as a language isolate that constitutes its own family.
Teachers say that one should strive to never split infinitives, ...
I've seen a few lists of rules like that, written so that each rule violates itself. One of my favorites is:
Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
Anyone else got a favorite?
Do you read Slashdot much? That is one of the most common issues around here; between "your" and "you're", and "there", "their", and "they're"...
;-).
Over on Dave Barry's blog, the regulars have developed a conventional way of unsubtly making fun of this sort of mispeling (which should always be mispelt in spelling discussions
They just include parenthesized alternatives in their (not they're or there) comment, to make it clear that they're (not their or there) not making a mistake. Occasionally someone parodies this practice by constructing sentences with lots of homonyms, and flagging all of them this way. Thus they'll write "use (not ewes, youse or yews)", and other similar funnies.
Maybe we should start doing that here (not hear), as a way (not weigh) of tweaking the poor (not pour) spellers.
I've always considered that an absurd example of the absurdity of avoiding ending sentences with prepositions.
... I don't seem to have put any "prepositions" at the ends of my sentences. Well, that's something that I can easily take care of ...
That was probably the point. Answering an absurdity with a parody is a rather common mode of humor.
Actually, the proscriptive grammarians attemts to ban "ending a sentence with a preposition" is mostly an example of the problems of trying to impose the grammar of one language on another. This pseudo-rule came about because Latin didn't do that sort of thing. But in all the Germanic languages, includin English, it's normal syntax.
Those little words aren't actually prepositions, though they are mostly derived from prepositions. If you study German, you'll find them described as "separable prefixes". Others call them "adverbial particles". They are grammatically like adverbs, but are more strongly associated with the verb.
Attempting to eradicate such constructs is as silly in English (or German or Dutch or Swedish) as would be, for example, trying to eradicate the spoken question mark in Finnish or Mandarin because English doesn't form questions that way.
It is a bit odd that our school systems are still teaching what is really a parody of Latin grammar in our English classes. They should consult with a few linguists who understand the subject, and teach actual English grammar. That would make a lot more sense to the students, and would probably be a lot more effective at getting compliance. When you teach something that the students know is wrong, the main effect is to instill disrespect for the teaching.
Hmmm
(We might note that "take care of" is just a compound verb that really should be written without spaces. It's part of a small class of such verbs that includes "take leave of" and "take note of". So that sentences is just an example of placing the verb at the end of a subordinate clause. Replace "take care of" with "fix" to see this more clearly.)
We don't have a new Bangs or Thompson yet because pop culture today is primarily a technology story. And we don't know how to write about technology.
/. and all the other fine online tech-news sites.
That's why we read
Really, this is hardly a new problem. Print journalism has long had high-quality sources of scientific and other tech news, though most of them are now online. The fact that 99% of the general public, including the mainstream media (MSM), were unaware of them didn't change the fact that good information was available to anyone at all interested. We've had weekly publications like Science and Nature for more than a century, and note that both are much fatter than Time or Newsweek.
We do have a bit of a problem with the commercial consolidation in the MSM, which naturally goes with reducing costs by dumbing down. But anyone with access to a computer and the Net can easily spend their entire day reading good quality tech news. And that's probably where we'll find the next Hunter Thompson.
Or maybe (s)he's already here, blogging away. Anyone got any nominations?
I don't particularly relish the idea of having to take MS's word for what's happening down in kernel or having theirs being the only powerful security/utility products availble.
Prorammers have long understood that, especially at the kernel level, the only way to understand what's happening down there is to study the source code (and, in some cases, the machine code that it compiles to). Anything else is at best a summary, and at worst a parody of what's really going on.
Face it, with a binary-only kernel, the only way to understand kernel issues and write powerful (or even effective) security products is to have access to the kernel internals. If you don't have that, you are locked out, and your products can never compete with those written by people with inside knowledge.
Without access to the source, the code in there could be doing anything at all, and you have no defense against it whatsoever.
We might note that this is a gratuitous mis-use of the term "robust", which is a well-known technical term in anthropology. It has nothing to do with state of health. It's basically a measure of bodily weight relative to height.
Thus, the Neandert[h]al (sub)species was "robust", the invading Cro Magnon people were "gracile". In common English speech, more common terms might be "stocky" versus "slender".
Ordinarily this wouldn't matter. But we're dealing with a topic in which the technical terminology is relevant. Using the technical term in some vernacular sense is understandable, but it's misleading. And it's likely to lead to dismissal by people knowedgeable in the subject.
You'd think that we'd want to avoid this in a forum that consciously targets "nerds" and "geeks" (two more technical terms that the public uses very differently).
Well, maybe. But there are a number of examples where it turns out to be very useful to treat a collection of physically disconnected objects as an object. The most common example in astronomy is probably a galaxy, which in many respects acts like a single, organized "object", despite the fact that it's actually trillions of separate objects loosely bound by gravity. And we usually treat our Solar System as an object (which contains four smaller objects of similar structure).
My favorite example is biological. We have no trouble viewing colonial organisms like a sponge or a coral head or a Portuguese Man-o-War as a single "object", even as a single "individual". But biologists have found that treating a hive of bees or ants (or any eusocial creatures) as a single "individual" helps greatly in understanding them. True, these individuals have a lot of physically disconnected bodies. But they are bound by effective communication systems, mostly chemical, partly visual and auditory, and they really do behave as a single colonial individual.
This mostly just illustrates that our definitions of "individual" and "object" might need a bit of work. And the best definition might vary somewhat depending on your field of study.
We know pretty well that treating the "Gaia" concept as a real individual is mostly just silly. But that's at the high extreme; a single animal such as a human certainly is an "individual" although we arose from what was originally a colonial collection of single-cell organisms 600 million years or so back. Somewhere in this continuum we find borderline cases like ants, bees, termites, and mole rats, which are borderline cases that confound our definitions.
But the universe doesn't have to file things according to our definitions. Rather, it's up to us to find concepts that work, and give them names that work.
It's likely that, for astronomers, it will turn out useful to treat this collection of galaxies and assorted other stuff as a gravitationally bound "object". Or maybe, like the recent discussion of the term "planet", astronomers might decide that this was a bad idea and will revise the terminoloy appropriately.
I think they'd have been better off calling it a "structure". But IANAA.
It doesn't make sense because before the 1994 FCC regulation, one could receive anything that came through the air, if you had equipment capable of it.
One of the fun aspects in this case is that you and I do have equipment that can receive cell-phone and wi-fi signals - our bodies. Now, granted, the reception is rather weak, and contrary to the ongoing scaremongering, really doesn't amount to more that raising our body temperature a few millidegrees.
But I've found it fairly easy to demo that such "reception" is happening. I find a spot where my cell phone reports an intermediate-level signal, hold the phone close to my body, and turn around slowly. Usually, there is a visible drop in signal strength at one point, which is where the human body is between the phone and the nearby relay. By turning back and forth, you can demo that this is repeatable.
One of the problem with wi-fi (and cordless phones) is that there's spectrum overlap. But the fun part is asking the question: How do I prevent my own (not my phone's; my body's) reception of any of these signals? Do I switch to wearing a hazmat suit (with a tinfoil layer) at all times?
This is somewhat absurd, of course. But it does illustrate one of the basic problems with laws that outlaw receiving signals broadcast (or narrowcast) by someone else's equipment. How can I even know I'm doing it? And if I want to obey the law, how can I block the signals before they reach my body or my electronic toys?
Another fun part is to consider the old comments about people who receive things like radio stations (or cell-phone conversations) in their dentures or other medical prostheses. Are they violating the law? Can they be prosecuted? If so, how can they prevent this and guarantee that they won't violate the law?
Fact is that our bodies are being penetrated by low-power radio signals most of the time. And in many parts of the world, this is another entry in the growing list of explanations why it's not actually possible to be a law-abiding citizen. No matter what you do, you are almost always in violation of one or more laws.
Claiming that inviting someone to use your wireles (via an open AP), and then providing a DHCP address upon request, somehow does not imply permission to actually, you know, use the network is the dumbest thing I've heard in a while.
Well, now; I don't think the legal system would necessarily agree with this. There are legal words for this sort of behavior. A very general term is "fraud". A more specific term is "entrapment". Making an offer and then prosecuting someone for accepting generally falls under such terms.
Thus, if I set up what looks like a store of some sort, with what looks like a sales display in the window, and price tags on the goods, and an open door, I can't charge you with trespass when you enter. Claiming that it's not a store, but a private residence will get you nowhere in court. You have fraudulently enticed people to enter what looks to a "reasonable man" as a commercial store. You are the criminal, not the supposed trespasser.
Similarly, putting something on a web site and then charging someone with copyright violation (or "theft" or "piracy" as we often read here) is something that the courts will eventually just treat as fraud and entrapment on your part, once lawyers and judges get over the idea that the term "computer" overrides legal precedent.
And setting up an open wireless access point with an internet connection will eventually be treated by the courts the same way. Otherwise I can set up all sorts of entrapments and enrich myself at the expense of anyone who sees the "open door" and walks through it. It'd be a pretty dumb judge that didn't imagine himself as my future victim unless he applies traditional case law and decides in favor of the defendant (and probably fines the plaintiff) in such cases.
In any case, consider the variant of the Golden Rule: What sort of society would you like to live in? I'd like to be able to use wireless anywhere that it's available. If we use the legal system to harass people to create or use open wireless access, we're working against that ideal. We want to encourage this sort of thing, not discourage it. To do so, we must not only encourage the nice people who set up open access points; we must also discourage the jerks that set up open access in order to harass people who use it.
Said: "How to recognize speech"
...
Understood: "How to wreck a nice beach"
That's one of my favorites. It's right up there with the popular pair:
Time flies like an arrow.
Fruit flies like a banana.
The first pair is a problem in phoneme recognition, of course, while the second is a problem in parsing. And there's also the observation that "Time flies like an arrow" has a valid second parsing, with "Time" the verb and the topic one of how to determine the velocity of travelling objects. So even if you've got all the phonemes right, you can still face some serious problem extracting the meaning. And we haven't even considered homonyms yet
I expect in 300+ years when Star Trek is set, our AI will beat the piss out of Star Trek AI. Hell, the computer has been around for only a little over 50 years. A little over 100 years ago we had just first discovered electricity and flight.
Well, maybe. But we invented microscopes around 300 years ago, and discovered microorganisms immediately thereafter. The understanding that some bacteria were involved in diseases followed quickly. But it was nearly 300 years before we successfully eradicated a disease (smallpox). Today, we're still battling new diseases, and we don't have anything like a general solution to all diseases. We have a few antibiotics that effect more than one disease, but we haven't made much progress in solving the problem of the development of resistance to our antibiotics. Hell, we can't even convince the general public that it's the evolutionary process at work here, and we've understood that for around 150 years.
I wouldn't predict any general solution to a complex problem like voice recognition in a mere 300 years. Maybe we will. But our history of general solutions to other complex biological problems is not encouraging. Neither is the history of our first 50 years of AI, despite the constant hype and Hollywood movies claiming that AI is just around the corner.
If history is any guide, in 300 years, we'll still be reading predictions that accurate speech recognition is 10-20 years away.
Footnote: Microsoft was a monopolistic, backwards company that started the PC revolution.
;-)
They don't deserve credit for starting the "PC revolution". The credit properly belongs to the hundreds of little startups and hobbyists, the whole CP/M crowd and others like Amiga. Microsoft was a subcontractor to a giant monopoly (IBM) that stepped in after the little guys demoed there was a market, and took over that market. They succeeded mostly because of a marketing budget greater than the budgets of all the little companies combined.
And there's a good argument that, by marketing PC/DOS rather than CP/M, they set back the PC revolution by 5 to 10 years, the time it took for PC/DOS to match the capabilities of CP/M when IBM started their PC marketing campaign.
Sorry; that's the way "the Market" works in the computer field. Small, independent developers make something new and start selling it; the big companies then step in and take over the market through traditional monopoly strategies.
It's likely that we're now going to hear people crediting Microsoft for starting the "voice recognition" revolution by inventing the new idea that computers can understand speech. Marketing can redefine history like that.
(Whereas we computer geeks know that Al Gore invented speech recognition.
There are thousands of distinct English accents and pronounciation variations.
...
Aw, c'mon; how many English dialects pronounce "mom" and "aunt" similarly?
Even to someone who's worked with voice recognition, that mistake simply isn't credible. If the software were anywhere near usable, it wouldn't confuse those words from anyone, especially not in a low-noise, no-echo demo.
This is a "No excuses" situation. That demo was simply a dismal failure due to some major bug(s).
Of course, the speech recognition field has a long history of staying in such a state forever. It's hard to find a product that, even with extensive training, doesn't produce howlers like this.
I did like the "killer" part