Communism is actually the ideal system until you add the human factor.
To counter all the obvious negative comments, I'll just add that we do in fact have observed case studies showing that communism can and does work fine for many societies.
Problem is that these are studies of the societies of bees, ants and termites. For those species, communism has been very successful. For humans, it hasn't been quite so successful.
This sort of "eusocial" organization has even evolved in mammals. Google for "naked mole rat" for an example involving some cute critters.
It would probably take some significant modification of our psychology to get such a social order to work in us humans. We'd have to change so that we are willing to give up most of our control of our lives (including reproducing) for the good of society. This doesn't seem too likely in the foreseeable future.
Could everybody please tattoo this on their penis so they'd be seeing it a couple times a day: "correlation does not imply, suggest, hint at causation in any way, shape or form".
Hmmm... That might not help the few females here. Do geek girls have boyfriends? If so, I guess they could tattoo their penises.
Anyway, fact is that correlation does hint at causation. Problem is that the causation could go either direction, and there are usually a number of other factors innvolved. All too often, both of the correlated quantities are caused by some third factor. In this case, the (negative) correlation is between coffee consumption and liver cirrhosis. Reporting this as a relation between caffeine and alcohol consumption is unwarranted, as those are only two of hundreds of chemical compounds that might be the real story. And the effect might be due to something different (such as a gene or a chronic medical condition) that's also correlated with both coffee and alcohol consumption.
This is why, as the old joke goes, the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further research is needed...."
Scientists use correlation studies all the time. It's a quick way to determine that "something is going on here" that should be investigated.
But yea, the media's way of hyping a correlation as a causation is generally not very helpful. It's a radical over-simplification of a story whose details aren't yet known. In this case, there's probably some sort of causation, but we don't know what it is. It may involve caffeine, but we shouldn't assume that yet.
Most of our current towns and structures, especially our emblematic ones, are built on the coast.
Some years back, I ran across a quantified version of this claim from some demographer whose name I've forgotten. He commented that if you measured out a 100-km strip along the shores of the oceans and any lakes and rivers to be "navigable" enough to support commercial traffic, you would have about 5% of the world's land, and about 90% of its humans. He also observed that in most places, the densly-inhabited strip is narrower than 100 km, but that's a convenient width that includes most of the suburbs in major urban areas.
Another place I've seen this idea is in discussions of how the Americas were first colonized. There has been a lot of talk about the Bering "land bridge" at the height of the last ice age. But some people point out that this is unimportant. All our evidence is that humans have always lived near water and used it. We have remains of boats (and houses on stilts) from more than 20,000 years ago. From the tops of the hills at the east end of Siberia, you can see the hills over in Alaska. So it's obvious how humans crossed that barrier: On some nice day, they rowed and/or sailed their boats across. Then then went back and told the others that the land over there wasn't inhabited and there were lots of animals to eat. This should always be the default assumption for how humans got anywhere. If you disagree, you need to present evidence that that particular group of humans didn't use boats.
(Actually, there have been groups of humans known who didn't use boats. But they always lived next to another group that did. We're one of the most aquatic primates.;-)
"If you haven't heard of a university, it's likely that it's because little research has come out of it of note." I laughed out loud here, honestly.
Me too, though perhaps for a different reason.
There are a lot of fields of study in which there is significant research going on that is unknown to most of the field, because most of the papers are published in a local journal, in the local language. This is especially true in Japan and China. The research only becomes "public" when it is published in a Western language, usually English these days.
I've seen a number of list of the "best" universities published in the US. Very often, I subsequently come across the observation that the universities at the top are all teaching in English. When I mention this to people, the reaction can often be summarized as "There are universities that don't teach in English?"
I think this is the main reason behind claims that the US has most of the top universities. You're reading something written by an American, and most Americans are blissfully unaware of anything that isn't reported in English.
There are exceptions. I had a math prof whose specialty had a number of important people at one university in Romania, and they published all their preliminary papers in their local journal, in Romanian. So he learned Romanian, to read their papers. ("It's easy if you already read French, as any educated person must.")
I also worked for several years as the computer guru for a bunch of biologists, several of which learned to read Japanese for the same reason. There are evolutionary biologists studying Mandarin because of the important work coming out of China. But you don't find many Americans outside academia who would do such a thing.
(Of course, the calligraphy itself could be a reason to study those languages.;-)
There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
Good point, which gets lost in most discussions like this.
For some reason, most people will read a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" and think it said "No country but America has a top university."
This is mostly a sign of the abject level of the teaching of basic logic at schools around the world. In America, too, because most Americans will misread things in the same way.
What I've always found especially curious is the mismatch of the American higher-education system with the open and blatant anti-education attitude of much of the American public. It's not just George Bush; signs of education and intelligence are carefully hidden by most American politicians, because they understand that this would be a major flaw to a huge fraction of the voters.
Meanwhile, people make jokes about how education is now America's major export industry. Funny how a country can make and export something that they don't like to use at home.
Easy, but not as easy as it should be. Login, click on your id at the upper left. When that page appears, click on the Homepage link. This will bring up a page of settings. Check the Simple Design and Low Bandwidth widgets. Maybe look over the other settings. Push the Save button at the bottom.
Also, if you're using mozilla or firefox or seamonkey, you can tell it to ignore images from slashdot.org, which gets rid of most of the eye candy and some of the ads. There seems to be no information in any of/.'s imagery, so you won't miss anything. You can also find your browser's color and font config stuff, and tell it to override pages' colors and fonts and use yours.
Now you have a readable, plain-text edition of/.. The only remaining problem is the ads, but turning off all that noise is a longer essay. It helps a lot to find a way of blocking flash and javascript, and other "active" stuff with whatever browser you're using.
[W]hat exactly is the point of calling something a planet in the first place?
Actually, this has a fairly clear historical answer. That "in the first place" presumably refers to when the term "planet" was coined, 2000 or so years ago. At that time, there were no telescoped, and astronomers (astrologers?) were limited to what they could see with their eyes. Most of the thousands of things in the skies were observably in fixed positions in the "firmament", to which they were presumably firmly attached. But there were seven exceptions, the things that we English speakers call the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (and Uranus in a few areas of exceptionally clear skies, but Europeans didn't know about it). These were called "wanderers", or "planeta" in Greek.
This model of the universe was soundly trashed a few hundred years back, and you might note that we've already had a major modification of the original list of 7 planets. The Sun and Moon were removed from the list, and the Earth was added. Some astronomers object, pointing out that the Earth/Moon pair is better described as a pair of planets sharing an orbit and swappin the lead position every few weeks, but this idea has had little impact on the media or public (and most astronomers consider it nit picking).
The problem we have now is a lot like what caused this redefinition. We now have proof of planet-like objects orbiting other stars. So the definition "large spherical body in orbit around the Sun" is now an anacronism, sorta like talking about stars attached to the firmament. This definition must be thrown out, or the word is techically pointless.
Our problem is that we still have a large population that has been taught for a century that there are exactly 9 planets, and bodies like Ganymede or Titan don't qualify because they don't orbit the sun. Well, this doesn't work any more. Either that "orbits the Sun" must be thrown out, or the term "planet" must be discarded.
Of course, there's always another possibility: Astronomers can adopt a new technical definition, but the media and general public will ignore it. There is a lot of precedent for this. Thus, the physicists' definition of "quantum" (the smallest possible quantity of something) and the media's definition (a huge quantity of something) are nearly antonyms. To biologists, a "bug" is a member of a species in the order Hemiptera, while to the rest of us it's anything small and unpleasant (such as a bacterium or a mistake in computer software or a hidden microphone). To us computer geeks, a "hacker" is a highly-respected expert in a subject, while to the media a "hacker" is a criminal. And so on.
I'll predict that this is what will happen. This IAU committee will decree a new technical definition, but the media will continue to misuse the term like it misuses so many other technical terms. And we'll continue to debate the topic here every few weeks, mostly ignoring the new official astronomical definition.
With a commercial (i.e., proprietary) router, if there's a security hole, there's nothing I can do about it. I probably won't even learn that it exists unless I can spot the symptoms of an intruder myself. And I certainly can't fix the problem; I have to beg and plead with the vendor who probably doesn't care about my problems.
OTOH, with my linux router/firewall, there's a long history of rapid reporting and fixing of security holes, typically before an exploit appears in the wild. I can take matters into my own hands if I like, by downloading the code and fixing it myself. And in case you're interested, yes, I have.
If your reaction is "There's no way I could do that", well, you could always hire me (or someone like me) to do the job. That would probably be faster and more effective than asking the vendor, unless you're a huge corporation with a lot of clout.
Is it sheer coincidence that both mozilla.org and Microsoft announced the end of such support in their browsers only a day apart?
Sounds to me like they're both just being sensible. OTOH, a bunch of dedicated W98 users can always grab the firefox source and do their own back-port of new releases. This is hardly feasible with IE.
Actually, they've explained that the crank was removed mostly because they've come to understand that young children often don't have the power (or perseverence or coordination) in their arms to make it work well. A plug-in foot-powered charger would work better. But the emphasis is on an external battery charger, so that assorted power sources (commercial, solar, whatever) can all be used.
A separate crank-powered charger is still a possibility. If cranked by a larger person, it could charge several of the laptops at once. So we'll see communities with a bunch of burly teenagers with Popeye arms.
Is that like Gunfight at the OK Corral or Deliverance (Dueling Banjos)?
Heh. It reminds me of the first time I tried building a dual-boot machine by installing linux on a Windows box. I ran linux for a few weeks, then one day had to do some testing against Windows, so I booted it up. When I tried going back to linux, I couldn't get it to boot. It turned out that Windows had made the linux partition non-bootable.
My investigation found a paragraph hidden in the machine's paperwork where they said that they did this, and that they had the right to write to any partition on the disk. When I got linux running again, the first thing I had it do was a mkfs on the Windows partition. That problem never happened again. I'd learned my lesson, and I've never allowed Windows on another of my machines. An OS that ruthlessly guns down others on sight (and brags about it in public) isn't welcome in these parts.
So Windows got in the first blow in the duel, but it died in the ensuing shootout.
Where do we find this sort of data that excludes "parked" and other fake domain names? Or maybe statistics that just go by IP address + port, so a machine with 10 million names will only be counted once?
It does seem to me that Microsoft could take over the Netcraft Survey much more easily. They should just register a few million randomly-generated domain names, and park them on a single server somewhere. They could swamp apache's Netcraft total for far less money than what they've already spent making a minimally-secure server. This would be a much faster and cheaper way of buying the eyes of managers who think that such graphs are significant.
So, for those of us with a bit of understanding of numbers, is there a site that does a Netcraft-like survey, but counts only real machines with real servers talking to real clients? (For that matter, is there a reliable way to collect such data without being spoofed?)
But you're right - you don't have to follow the law. You can still expect to be held accountable for not doing so, though, even if you disagree with it.
It is perhaps worth pointing out once again that in many legal systems there are versions of what in English is called "Judicial Review". This is a term for a judge deciding whether a law is legal.
Generally for a judge to do this requires that a court case exists, which means that if you want a judge to declare a law invalid, you must publicly violate the law and be charged with violating it. Otherwise there's usually no way to get a court case, and no judge can examine the law's validity.
In such legal systems, violating a law can be considered a public service, because if you win, you have overturned the legislature's attempt to impose an illegal law on the population.
The ultimate example of this, of course, is when a law is declared unconstitutional. Legislatures pass laws that are contrary to their Constitution all the time. Without judicial review of laws, a Constitution is just a piece of paper, with no meaning at all. It's only meaningful if it can be used to overturn laws that conflict with something in the Constitution. And this is only possible if someone violates the law and is hauled into court.
The claim that you have to follow a law is essentially a statement that you don't believe in judicial review. You believe that it's ok for a legislature to pass unconstitutional laws, and you must obey laws even if they're illegal.
Note that you don't need any appeal to higher-order concept such as ethics to understand this. All you need is to understand that, for a Constitution to have any value, people must be able to challenge a law's validity rather than blindly obeying it.
The concept of judicial review was a major advance in legal understanding (and ethics). The next major advance will probably be when some society institutes a form of "blameless challenge" to a law, which will force a judicial review without the danger of punishment if you lose.
The way I see it, this is yet another reason to pirate media instead of buying it.
Hey, you're missing a potential income source.
Consider the scenario: I download a track from iTunes to my Mac, and play it. While playing it, the computer must copy it from disk to memory, of course, and then out to the sound card. But a quick search shows that nothing resembling a license to do this has appeared on my computer. So I file suit against Apple for tricking me (an innocent, trusting customer) into violating this new Act of Congress, thus exposing me to the prosect of fines and/or jail time. Meanwhile, millions of trusting Microsoft customers (they exist, really) are doing the same thing when they learn how they've been tricked.
This isn't the first time that Congress (or other legislatures) have passed laws against the internal copying that is required for a computer to work. We really should be looking for ways to get across to the idiots who write such laws that all this really does is show to the world that they're idiots.
So how would one outside academia get experience with IPv6? I've seen lots of hype about it, and some low-level specs. But I've never seen anything that tells me the details of things like to get an address for a machine, how to do IPv6 routing, etc.
Funny thing is that my Mac Powerbook has both an "inet" and an "inet6" address on its wireless port. It gets the IPv4 address from the Airport's DHCP server, but I have no idea where that IPv6 address came from. It doesn't seem very useful, either, because my gateway (linux) box doesn't have any IPv6 addresses, so I'd guess that it doesn't know how to route IPv6 packets. I have accounts on a couple of other machines with IPv6 addresses, but I wouldn't know how to use those addresses to get anything done.
So where can I read all about the nitty-gritty details, enough to join the crowd?
... to the question of what's a "planet" is the suggestion that we define it as one of the 9 objects that orbit our sun and are listed in American grade-school science texts.
This would settle the question forever, since it would immediately follow from the definition that there can't be any more planets anywhere in the universe.
Those troube-making astronomers would just have to invent a new term for similar objects elsewhere in the universe. Or in our solar system, for that matter. It's about time they did that anyway, because why do you need a term that includes both Jupiter and Pluto, but which excludes Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Charon?
One reason for such a definition is that the whole basis of the discussion seems to be that a lot of people seem to have a strong objection to calling anything else a "planet", and their sole reason seems to be that they don't like the idea that their grade-school science text might have been wrong.
Also, it might be nice to make up a shorter term than "planemo". That has three syllables, which is more than your typical journalist or politician can handle.
What I'd like to know is how to turn off the damned fixed-width thing that forces me to now read/. in a window that's 2/3 the width of my screen. Or constantly scroll left and right to read the lines that run past the right edge.
Anyone know how to tell various browsers to ignore width= attributes? Sure would be useful in cases like this.
[A]pparently "Carrier-Grade" refers to telecommunications carriers, which can typically accept no more than 30 seconds to 5 minutes of downtime per year...
Well, if we measure this in a way comparable to the way that phone companies measure uptime, it'll mean measuring the time that the OS responds to pings. A machine that is a total zombie, with no processes making any progress, will be considered "up" if you can ping it from a nearby machine.
After all, we are all familiar with phone systems that give a dial tone (i.e., is "up") but can't make calls, or makes them but doesn't transmit sound in one direction, or has so much noise that the speech is unintelligible. But none of these problems are considered "downtime"; the most common definition of "up" is providing a dial tone within N seconds.
Since a recent upgrade, my wife's Mac Powerbook has repeatedly gotten into a state that it doesn't respond do any input except mouse motion. We can show it's alive by movingg the mouse and watching the pointer move on the screen. But button clicks or keyboard input have no effect. I can ping it from another machine, but I can't telnet or ssh to it. The on-screen clock changes once a minute. I'm sure that Apple would consider this to be "uptime" for OS X, along the lines of the phone companies' way of measuring their 6-nines "uptime". And when we finally give up and reboot it, that's not considered "downtime" either, since it was done intentionally by the user.
Something very similar happened on my RH linux box a year or so back. But I can't replicate it.
You want a Linux designed to blow up and destroy ships?
Even if we get this capability in linux, it'll be ridiculed for being years behind Windows. (That's one of about 1.4 million online pages about this incident.)
It's sorta like the constant chant that linux "isn't ready for the desktop" because it doesn't treat its users as horribly as Windows does. Similarly, linux can't be considered "battlefield ready" until it can duplicate the disasters that the military has come to expect from their software.
[T]here are enough of us geeks to code up the proper secure behavior... Then it's just a matter of waiting for everybody to update their email client (i.e. 5-10 years,...)
Actually, some of us geeks did a lot of it 15 or 20 years ago. Lotta good it did us all. Most of the email users are using Microsoft email software, and clearly will never upgrade to anything without the MS imprimatur, so our work was pretty much in vain.
So how about some of the geeks here mention the more-secure email packages you've worked on, and when. This should give us a good idea of just how hopeless it is to expect everybody to adopt it.
(Either that or nobody will ever notice this message or reply to it.;-)
One of the bits of real humor in this disaster was when several of our favorite fundamentalist pundits tried to say that this was God punishing New Orleans for its sins. They shut up fast when people started asking publicly why God didn't punish the French Quarter (which is above sea level and wasn't flooded).
In fact, the French Quarter was the first part of NO that was back up and running its old, sinful businesses. But we're in another hurricane season now; maybe God will take a second shot...
The reason [for the New Orleans disaster] is irrelevant. The fact that someone still went ahead and did it as per a thought-out design still makes it an engineering mistake.
Not really. The failed levees were designed and built much earlier, before a lot of subsidence occurred. This subsidence was understood, but the levees could have been augmented.
In particular, the Army Corps of Engineers had done many through studies over the years. The had just recently submitted a long report to Congress describing the needed maintenance, and requesting funding to do the job.
Congress turned down most of the funding, so the maintenance wasn't done. They did this with full knowledge of the consequences. The only thing they didn't know beforehand was the date of the storm.
The levees as originally built would have (and in fact had) withstood a storm of Katrina's strength. But that was many years earlier. Levees require maintenance, and have to be raised as the land subsides. The funding for this was turned down by politicians in posession of a full engineering report.
It was't an engineering disaster at all; it was a political management disaster.
Slashdot Mirror
Communism is actually the ideal system until you add the human factor.
To counter all the obvious negative comments, I'll just add that we do in fact have observed case studies showing that communism can and does work fine for many societies.
Problem is that these are studies of the societies of bees, ants and termites. For those species, communism has been very successful. For humans, it hasn't been quite so successful.
This sort of "eusocial" organization has even evolved in mammals. Google for "naked mole rat" for an example involving some cute critters.
It would probably take some significant modification of our psychology to get such a social order to work in us humans. We'd have to change so that we are willing to give up most of our control of our lives (including reproducing) for the good of society. This doesn't seem too likely in the foreseeable future.
Could everybody please tattoo this on their penis so they'd be seeing it a couple times a day: "correlation does not imply, suggest, hint at causation in any way, shape or form".
... That might not help the few females here. Do geek girls have boyfriends? If so, I guess they could tattoo their penises.
...."
Hmmm
Anyway, fact is that correlation does hint at causation. Problem is that the causation could go either direction, and there are usually a number of other factors innvolved. All too often, both of the correlated quantities are caused by some third factor. In this case, the (negative) correlation is between coffee consumption and liver cirrhosis. Reporting this as a relation between caffeine and alcohol consumption is unwarranted, as those are only two of hundreds of chemical compounds that might be the real story. And the effect might be due to something different (such as a gene or a chronic medical condition) that's also correlated with both coffee and alcohol consumption.
This is why, as the old joke goes, the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that starts with "Further research is needed
Scientists use correlation studies all the time. It's a quick way to determine that "something is going on here" that should be investigated.
But yea, the media's way of hyping a correlation as a causation is generally not very helpful. It's a radical over-simplification of a story whose details aren't yet known. In this case, there's probably some sort of causation, but we don't know what it is. It may involve caffeine, but we shouldn't assume that yet.
Most of our current towns and structures, especially our emblematic ones, are built on the coast.
;-)
Some years back, I ran across a quantified version of this claim from some demographer whose name I've forgotten. He commented that if you measured out a 100-km strip along the shores of the oceans and any lakes and rivers to be "navigable" enough to support commercial traffic, you would have about 5% of the world's land, and about 90% of its humans. He also observed that in most places, the densly-inhabited strip is narrower than 100 km, but that's a convenient width that includes most of the suburbs in major urban areas.
Another place I've seen this idea is in discussions of how the Americas were first colonized. There has been a lot of talk about the Bering "land bridge" at the height of the last ice age. But some people point out that this is unimportant. All our evidence is that humans have always lived near water and used it. We have remains of boats (and houses on stilts) from more than 20,000 years ago. From the tops of the hills at the east end of Siberia, you can see the hills over in Alaska. So it's obvious how humans crossed that barrier: On some nice day, they rowed and/or sailed their boats across. Then then went back and told the others that the land over there wasn't inhabited and there were lots of animals to eat. This should always be the default assumption for how humans got anywhere. If you disagree, you need to present evidence that that particular group of humans didn't use boats.
(Actually, there have been groups of humans known who didn't use boats. But they always lived next to another group that did. We're one of the most aquatic primates.
"If you haven't heard of a university, it's likely that it's because little research has come out of it of note." I laughed out loud here, honestly.
;-)
Me too, though perhaps for a different reason.
There are a lot of fields of study in which there is significant research going on that is unknown to most of the field, because most of the papers are published in a local journal, in the local language. This is especially true in Japan and China. The research only becomes "public" when it is published in a Western language, usually English these days.
I've seen a number of list of the "best" universities published in the US. Very often, I subsequently come across the observation that the universities at the top are all teaching in English. When I mention this to people, the reaction can often be summarized as "There are universities that don't teach in English?"
I think this is the main reason behind claims that the US has most of the top universities. You're reading something written by an American, and most Americans are blissfully unaware of anything that isn't reported in English.
There are exceptions. I had a math prof whose specialty had a number of important people at one university in Romania, and they published all their preliminary papers in their local journal, in Romanian. So he learned Romanian, to read their papers. ("It's easy if you already read French, as any educated person must.")
I also worked for several years as the computer guru for a bunch of biologists, several of which learned to read Japanese for the same reason. There are evolutionary biologists studying Mandarin because of the important work coming out of China. But you don't find many Americans outside academia who would do such a thing.
(Of course, the calligraphy itself could be a reason to study those languages.
PS. the article uses america Not USA...
Yeah; I noticed that. I had to keep reminding myself that he could have been referring to any of those other countries with "America" in their names.
He should have just written "United States" (or "US"). That way there wouldn't have been any such confusion.
There are top universities around the world, but if you write down all the "tier 1" universities in a particular discipline, more than half of them will be in America.
Good point, which gets lost in most discussions like this.
For some reason, most people will read a sentence like "America has many of the world's top universities" and think it said "No country but America has a top university."
This is mostly a sign of the abject level of the teaching of basic logic at schools around the world. In America, too, because most Americans will misread things in the same way.
What I've always found especially curious is the mismatch of the American higher-education system with the open and blatant anti-education attitude of much of the American public. It's not just George Bush; signs of education and intelligence are carefully hidden by most American politicians, because they understand that this would be a major flaw to a huge fraction of the voters.
Meanwhile, people make jokes about how education is now America's major export industry. Funny how a country can make and export something that they don't like to use at home.
How do I change this new butt-ugly Slashdot GUI?
/.'s imagery, so you won't miss anything. You can also find your browser's color and font config stuff, and tell it to override pages' colors and fonts and use yours.
/.. The only remaining problem is the ads, but turning off all that noise is a longer essay. It helps a lot to find a way of blocking flash and javascript, and other "active" stuff with whatever browser you're using.
...
Easy, but not as easy as it should be. Login, click on your id at the upper left. When that page appears, click on the Homepage link. This will bring up a page of settings. Check the Simple Design and Low Bandwidth widgets. Maybe look over the other settings. Push the Save button at the bottom.
Also, if you're using mozilla or firefox or seamonkey, you can tell it to ignore images from slashdot.org, which gets rid of most of the eye candy and some of the ads. There seems to be no information in any of
Now you have a readable, plain-text edition of
Now back to the topic
[W]hat exactly is the point of calling something a planet in the first place?
Actually, this has a fairly clear historical answer. That "in the first place" presumably refers to when the term "planet" was coined, 2000 or so years ago. At that time, there were no telescoped, and astronomers (astrologers?) were limited to what they could see with their eyes. Most of the thousands of things in the skies were observably in fixed positions in the "firmament", to which they were presumably firmly attached. But there were seven exceptions, the things that we English speakers call the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn (and Uranus in a few areas of exceptionally clear skies, but Europeans didn't know about it). These were called "wanderers", or "planeta" in Greek.
This model of the universe was soundly trashed a few hundred years back, and you might note that we've already had a major modification of the original list of 7 planets. The Sun and Moon were removed from the list, and the Earth was added. Some astronomers object, pointing out that the Earth/Moon pair is better described as a pair of planets sharing an orbit and swappin the lead position every few weeks, but this idea has had little impact on the media or public (and most astronomers consider it nit picking).
The problem we have now is a lot like what caused this redefinition. We now have proof of planet-like objects orbiting other stars. So the definition "large spherical body in orbit around the Sun" is now an anacronism, sorta like talking about stars attached to the firmament. This definition must be thrown out, or the word is techically pointless.
Our problem is that we still have a large population that has been taught for a century that there are exactly 9 planets, and bodies like Ganymede or Titan don't qualify because they don't orbit the sun. Well, this doesn't work any more. Either that "orbits the Sun" must be thrown out, or the term "planet" must be discarded.
Of course, there's always another possibility: Astronomers can adopt a new technical definition, but the media and general public will ignore it. There is a lot of precedent for this. Thus, the physicists' definition of "quantum" (the smallest possible quantity of something) and the media's definition (a huge quantity of something) are nearly antonyms. To biologists, a "bug" is a member of a species in the order Hemiptera, while to the rest of us it's anything small and unpleasant (such as a bacterium or a mistake in computer software or a hidden microphone). To us computer geeks, a "hacker" is a highly-respected expert in a subject, while to the media a "hacker" is a criminal. And so on.
I'll predict that this is what will happen. This IAU committee will decree a new technical definition, but the media will continue to misuse the term like it misuses so many other technical terms. And we'll continue to debate the topic here every few weeks, mostly ignoring the new official astronomical definition.
Now, this is pretty much a troll, I'm afraid.
My reaction exactly.
With a commercial (i.e., proprietary) router, if there's a security hole, there's nothing I can do about it. I probably won't even learn that it exists unless I can spot the symptoms of an intruder myself. And I certainly can't fix the problem; I have to beg and plead with the vendor who probably doesn't care about my problems.
OTOH, with my linux router/firewall, there's a long history of rapid reporting and fixing of security holes, typically before an exploit appears in the wild. I can take matters into my own hands if I like, by downloading the code and fixing it myself. And in case you're interested, yes, I have.
If your reaction is "There's no way I could do that", well, you could always hire me (or someone like me) to do the job. That would probably be faster and more effective than asking the vendor, unless you're a huge corporation with a lot of clout.
Note that we just had a story about firefox dropping support for Windows 9*.
Is it sheer coincidence that both mozilla.org and Microsoft announced the end of such support in their browsers only a day apart?
Sounds to me like they're both just being sensible. OTOH, a bunch of dedicated W98 users can always grab the firefox source and do their own back-port of new releases. This is hardly feasible with IE.
Actually, they've explained that the crank was removed mostly because they've come to understand that young children often don't have the power (or perseverence or coordination) in their arms to make it work well. A plug-in foot-powered charger would work better. But the emphasis is on an external battery charger, so that assorted power sources (commercial, solar, whatever) can all be used.
A separate crank-powered charger is still a possibility. If cranked by a larger person, it could charge several of the laptops at once. So we'll see communities with a bunch of burly teenagers with Popeye arms.
Heh. It reminds me of the first time I tried building a dual-boot machine by installing linux on a Windows box. I ran linux for a few weeks, then one day had to do some testing against Windows, so I booted it up. When I tried going back to linux, I couldn't get it to boot. It turned out that Windows had made the linux partition non-bootable.
My investigation found a paragraph hidden in the machine's paperwork where they said that they did this, and that they had the right to write to any partition on the disk. When I got linux running again, the first thing I had it do was a mkfs on the Windows partition. That problem never happened again. I'd learned my lesson, and I've never allowed Windows on another of my machines. An OS that ruthlessly guns down others on sight (and brags about it in public) isn't welcome in these parts.
So Windows got in the first blow in the duel, but it died in the ensuing shootout.
Well, enough of that metaphor
Where do we find this sort of data that excludes "parked" and other fake domain names? Or maybe statistics that just go by IP address + port, so a machine with 10 million names will only be counted once?
It does seem to me that Microsoft could take over the Netcraft Survey much more easily. They should just register a few million randomly-generated domain names, and park them on a single server somewhere. They could swamp apache's Netcraft total for far less money than what they've already spent making a minimally-secure server. This would be a much faster and cheaper way of buying the eyes of managers who think that such graphs are significant.
So, for those of us with a bit of understanding of numbers, is there a site that does a Netcraft-like survey, but counts only real machines with real servers talking to real clients? (For that matter, is there a reliable way to collect such data without being spoofed?)
But you're right - you don't have to follow the law. You can still expect to be held accountable for not doing so, though, even if you disagree with it.
It is perhaps worth pointing out once again that in many legal systems there are versions of what in English is called "Judicial Review". This is a term for a judge deciding whether a law is legal.
Generally for a judge to do this requires that a court case exists, which means that if you want a judge to declare a law invalid, you must publicly violate the law and be charged with violating it. Otherwise there's usually no way to get a court case, and no judge can examine the law's validity.
In such legal systems, violating a law can be considered a public service, because if you win, you have overturned the legislature's attempt to impose an illegal law on the population.
The ultimate example of this, of course, is when a law is declared unconstitutional. Legislatures pass laws that are contrary to their Constitution all the time. Without judicial review of laws, a Constitution is just a piece of paper, with no meaning at all. It's only meaningful if it can be used to overturn laws that conflict with something in the Constitution. And this is only possible if someone violates the law and is hauled into court.
The claim that you have to follow a law is essentially a statement that you don't believe in judicial review. You believe that it's ok for a legislature to pass unconstitutional laws, and you must obey laws even if they're illegal.
Note that you don't need any appeal to higher-order concept such as ethics to understand this. All you need is to understand that, for a Constitution to have any value, people must be able to challenge a law's validity rather than blindly obeying it.
The concept of judicial review was a major advance in legal understanding (and ethics). The next major advance will probably be when some society institutes a form of "blameless challenge" to a law, which will force a judicial review without the danger of punishment if you lose.
The way I see it, this is yet another reason to pirate media instead of buying it.
Hey, you're missing a potential income source.
Consider the scenario: I download a track from iTunes to my Mac, and play it. While playing it, the computer must copy it from disk to memory, of course, and then out to the sound card. But a quick search shows that nothing resembling a license to do this has appeared on my computer. So I file suit against Apple for tricking me (an innocent, trusting customer) into violating this new Act of Congress, thus exposing me to the prosect of fines and/or jail time. Meanwhile, millions of trusting Microsoft customers (they exist, really) are doing the same thing when they learn how they've been tricked.
This isn't the first time that Congress (or other legislatures) have passed laws against the internal copying that is required for a computer to work. We really should be looking for ways to get across to the idiots who write such laws that all this really does is show to the world that they're idiots.
So how would one outside academia get experience with IPv6? I've seen lots of hype about it, and some low-level specs. But I've never seen anything that tells me the details of things like to get an address for a machine, how to do IPv6 routing, etc.
Funny thing is that my Mac Powerbook has both an "inet" and an "inet6" address on its wireless port. It gets the IPv4 address from the Airport's DHCP server, but I have no idea where that IPv6 address came from. It doesn't seem very useful, either, because my gateway (linux) box doesn't have any IPv6 addresses, so I'd guess that it doesn't know how to route IPv6 packets. I have accounts on a couple of other machines with IPv6 addresses, but I wouldn't know how to use those addresses to get anything done.
So where can I read all about the nitty-gritty details, enough to join the crowd?
... to the question of what's a "planet" is the suggestion that we define it as one of the 9 objects that orbit our sun and are listed in American grade-school science texts.
This would settle the question forever, since it would immediately follow from the definition that there can't be any more planets anywhere in the universe.
Those troube-making astronomers would just have to invent a new term for similar objects elsewhere in the universe. Or in our solar system, for that matter. It's about time they did that anyway, because why do you need a term that includes both Jupiter and Pluto, but which excludes Luna, Ganymede, Titan and Charon?
One reason for such a definition is that the whole basis of the discussion seems to be that a lot of people seem to have a strong objection to calling anything else a "planet", and their sole reason seems to be that they don't like the idea that their grade-school science text might have been wrong.
Also, it might be nice to make up a shorter term than "planemo". That has three syllables, which is more than your typical journalist or politician can handle.
Time to hack the CSS and use a local style sheet.
/. redesign was actually a plot to force us to all learn enough CSS to override the damage.
The
Seconded.
/. in a window that's 2/3 the width of my screen. Or constantly scroll left and right to read the lines that run past the right edge.
What I'd like to know is how to turn off the damned fixed-width thing that forces me to now read
Anyone know how to tell various browsers to ignore width= attributes? Sure would be useful in cases like this.
[A]pparently "Carrier-Grade" refers to telecommunications carriers, which can typically accept no more than 30 seconds to 5 minutes of downtime per year ...
Well, if we measure this in a way comparable to the way that phone companies measure uptime, it'll mean measuring the time that the OS responds to pings. A machine that is a total zombie, with no processes making any progress, will be considered "up" if you can ping it from a nearby machine.
After all, we are all familiar with phone systems that give a dial tone (i.e., is "up") but can't make calls, or makes them but doesn't transmit sound in one direction, or has so much noise that the speech is unintelligible. But none of these problems are considered "downtime"; the most common definition of "up" is providing a dial tone within N seconds.
Since a recent upgrade, my wife's Mac Powerbook has repeatedly gotten into a state that it doesn't respond do any input except mouse motion. We can show it's alive by movingg the mouse and watching the pointer move on the screen. But button clicks or keyboard input have no effect. I can ping it from another machine, but I can't telnet or ssh to it. The on-screen clock changes once a minute. I'm sure that Apple would consider this to be "uptime" for OS X, along the lines of the phone companies' way of measuring their 6-nines "uptime". And when we finally give up and reboot it, that's not considered "downtime" either, since it was done intentionally by the user.
Something very similar happened on my RH linux box a year or so back. But I can't replicate it.
You want a Linux designed to blow up and destroy ships?
Even if we get this capability in linux, it'll be ridiculed for being years behind Windows. (That's one of about 1.4 million online pages about this incident.)
It's sorta like the constant chant that linux "isn't ready for the desktop" because it doesn't treat its users as horribly as Windows does. Similarly, linux can't be considered "battlefield ready" until it can duplicate the disasters that the military has come to expect from their software.
Well, my first thought was "Hey, linux isn't just for toasters anymore; now they're putting it into air conditioners."
I do wonder how long it'll be before Carrier sends them a C&D letter.
[T]here are enough of us geeks to code up the proper secure behavior ... Then it's just a matter of waiting for everybody to update their email client (i.e. 5-10 years, ...)
;-)
Actually, some of us geeks did a lot of it 15 or 20 years ago. Lotta good it did us all. Most of the email users are using Microsoft email software, and clearly will never upgrade to anything without the MS imprimatur, so our work was pretty much in vain.
So how about some of the geeks here mention the more-secure email packages you've worked on, and when. This should give us a good idea of just how hopeless it is to expect everybody to adopt it.
(Either that or nobody will ever notice this message or reply to it.
One of the bits of real humor in this disaster was when several of our favorite fundamentalist pundits tried to say that this was God punishing New Orleans for its sins. They shut up fast when people started asking publicly why God didn't punish the French Quarter (which is above sea level and wasn't flooded).
...
In fact, the French Quarter was the first part of NO that was back up and running its old, sinful businesses. But we're in another hurricane season now; maybe God will take a second shot
The reason [for the New Orleans disaster] is irrelevant. The fact that someone still went ahead and did it as per a thought-out design still makes it an engineering mistake.
Not really. The failed levees were designed and built much earlier, before a lot of subsidence occurred. This subsidence was understood, but the levees could have been augmented.
In particular, the Army Corps of Engineers had done many through studies over the years. The had just recently submitted a long report to Congress describing the needed maintenance, and requesting funding to do the job.
Congress turned down most of the funding, so the maintenance wasn't done. They did this with full knowledge of the consequences. The only thing they didn't know beforehand was the date of the storm.
The levees as originally built would have (and in fact had) withstood a storm of Katrina's strength. But that was many years earlier. Levees require maintenance, and have to be raised as the land subsides. The funding for this was turned down by politicians in posession of a full engineering report.
It was't an engineering disaster at all; it was a political management disaster.