It's worse when there are many passwords to remember...
My password file (which is a "hidden file" on a couple of web sites that I use;-) currently has 108 passwords. There are very few duplicates. Not because of any policy of mine, but because the rules for passwords are different on most of the sites. At least most of them don't require monthly changes, or I'd be doing 5 or so changes every workday.
When admins complain, I just tell them that it's their own policies that force me to do this. There's no way I'm going to remember a hundred or more different passwords; I have no choice but to record them somewhere. And since I need them while working from an assortment of places around the Net, I obviously have to put them somewhere that I can get at them from anywhere.
And no, I won't keep them in my wallet. That would mean that a single pickpocket could destroy my life. No way I'd be that foolish.
At least nearly everywhere I work allows the use of ssh. This pretty much minimizes the chance that some ISP worker can intercept my passwords. Or that a link over an AT&T long line will send a copy to a US government agency. If a site won't allow ssh/ssl, I just don't use that site in any way that requires password access. I've resigned from a few jobs because of this.
Maybe some day the idiots running the various pieces of the Net won't force such measures on me, and I can use a single Something That I Know nearly everywhere. But right now, we're getting farther from that every day.
The best use for C++ I've seen is Pure-C-With-Smart-Structures.
Yup; most of the (rather few) good, readable C++ code I've seen is basically written like that. Most of it compiles fine under a plain C compiler; there are just a few structs that have been written as classes to take advantage of some of the OO capabilities in an elegant fashion.
Mostly, though, the best explanation I've seen for the widespread disastrous nature of C++ projects is the comment that C++ is a "write-only language". Usually nobody other than the original coders can ever modify a chunk of code without introducing all sorts of bizarre, unexpected side effects.
And, as is so often the case, this isn't really a property of the language. It's more a result of the programming culture that has developed, which puts a premium on a highly-obfuscated coding style. Why this happened is a bit of a puzzle, because you'd expect that C++ would be an offshoot of C, but the cultures are radically different. If you want to see a C-like programming culture, you should look at perl or python. The C++ culture is more like Cobol or PL/I, bizarre at that may seem when you just look at the languages.
OTOH, I've seen a few very simple and elegant small C++ programs. So go figure.
To quote, 'quite frankly, fund terrorism activities,' according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
For the benefit of readers outside the US, we should perhaps note that in American political speech, "frankly" is a code word meaning that what follows is an intentional lie. The phrase "quite frankly" means it's a damned lie.
It's sorta the Washington equivalent of "wink, wink; nudge, nudge" for you Monty Python fans.
Not all Christian churches go for the abomination business.
Indeed. Here in the US, the UU (Unitarian-Universalist) and UCC (United Church of Christ) are both openly welcoming to and supportive of homosexuals. Many American Episcopal (i.e., Anglican) churches are also gay-friendly, though the official policy may not make much of a big deal of this, so if you like Catholic-style ritual, this might be the church for you.
At the other extreme, some Christian sects have been openly hostile to even "straight" sex. They often use Paul's comment in his first letter to the Corinthians (7:9), "But if they have not continency, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. (ASV)" This passage is often interpreted to say that a true Christian would lead a celibate life; only the weak ones give in to sexual desires.
Taken to the obvious extreme, this had led to some sects (such as the Shakers) dying out because they didn't have children to indoctrinate and they weren't able to attract enough converts to keep the church going. OTOH, some monastic orders have lasted quite a long time despite an official ban on all sex.
It's fairly clear that with Christianity, you can pick your church based on its policies, and you can find a fairly wide range of policies. With the UUs, you don't even have to accept the whole package of beliefs, though you might not be too happy there if you don't accept their basic doctrine of tolerance of diversity.
... the percentage of intelligent people out there is FAR FAR lower than that.
Yeah, but note that the OP said "intellectually curious", not "intelligent". The two are unrelated (and orthogonal) properties.
A mouse or sparrow can be intellectually curious. But curiosity doesn't guarantee that they can understand what they encounter.
You can find a lot of people whose curiosity leads them into astrology or religion or a thousand other things that intelligence would lead them to sniff at, discard, then continue looking for something more worthwhile.
So how does netcraft make money by omitting the active-sites data? Is Microsoft paying them to not publish this data?
That might make sense. How else could it be worthwhile to publish the wrong set of numbers?
Google actively works to defeat sites that try to game their rankings. I'd think that netcraft would want to do the same. After all, to them a "parked" domain is little other than an attempt to bias the site statistics. Those aren't actually sites at all; they are just fictional names that don't refer to anything.
Maybe we should be publicising the fact that netcraft's data includes fake sites that exist in part to bias netcraft's statistics.
There's a theory going that parked domains are the best use for an IIS server.
If you want to serve actual content, it makes a lot more sense to pick a server that's simple to set up and run, and that isn't subject to all the malware that infects Microsoft products. But if your PHB insists on using IIS, there might be a few things that it's good for.
Domain parking is about as respectable as phishing or spam.
Maybe, but it's occasionally understandable. Look at whitehouse.org and whitehouse.com, and compare them with whitehouse.gov for an example. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to register a domain "close" to yours.
I mean, imagine how embarrassed those first two sites must be to be sharing a name with the likes of Gerge Bush and his gang!
But this is somewhat a minimal comment, because if you're going to register typo variants of your site's name, it would make a bit more sense to just make them all point to your address.
And on the third hand, domains like bushisaliar.gov or hillaryisawhore.org might be better off just registered and parked so they don't work at all. (And no, I haven't checked to see if those exist.;-)
One of the unfortunate facts of life.net is that you sometimes have to think of such things.
Netcraft should not be counting parked domains at all. It should be counting sites that actually have valid content.
They used to do this, making a distinction between "all domains" and "active domains". But their current Web server Survey doesn't seem to have the active-doomain data or graphs any more.
I wonder why they dropped them? I'd always thought that this was the interesting data, not the total that included inactive or parked sites.
Actually, the two data sets were usually not all that different. Usually apache had a larger and IIS had a smaller percent in the active-domains data than in the all-domains data, but the difference was only a few points. For OS data, this relationship was reversed for linux and MS. This primarily implies that large multi-site servers tend to run linux, but again the numbers weren't really all that different.
I wonder if we should be complaining to netcraft, and see if they put the active-site data back...
[W]hy would T-Rex need such a formidable jaw if it was only scavenging and not killing?
Others have mentioned modern lions, and that could be a partial answer to this question.
Field researchers studying lions have reported that, in many areas, they rarely find instances of lions killing their own prey. Rather, lions mostly steal the prey of smaller predators like hyenas and wild dogs. If you're as big as a lion, that can be an easier way of making a living than hunting and bringing down your own prey. This seems to be especially true of lions in a "pride", typically a group of females plus one male. Individuals (mostly males) need to do more hunting because one lion can't intimidate a pack of canines as easily.
The main problem with such a bandit lifestyle is that you have to be bigger and tougher than your victims. T. rex certainly fits this description.
But we really don't seem to have enough evidence to resolve this question. And, like lions, T. rex may well have used both stategies. If you detect a kill by a smaller predator, you move in and steal a meal. If not, you try to kill your own meal.
But this could be why T. rex had such huge jaws, not for killing prey, but for fighting other smaller predators.
The public opening of such a technology that is not ready to accept millions of sessions does not make sense.
Sure, it does./. isn't their typical customer. Most places will have only a handful of people who have any clue as to what this is all about. The managers that their sales people talk to aren't about to waste time testing it themselves; they'll assign it to one or two IT people, who will try it out and write a report.
They might get a few more people from a report like this at yahoo or msn, but there, most people's reaction would basically be "It's from Sun? Who cares? Tell me about it when Microsoft has it."/. is one of a very small number of fora where you'd get a significant number of techies who would read and decide to try it out. They probably just got hit by a thousand times more responses than they've gotten from any previous PR attempt. And it'll probably never happen again. Well, at least not until the/. dup of this story in a week or two.
I am, however, surprised that nothing like this has shown up in America yet. Granted, it's impossible to ban e-mail servers in America
Huh? What parallel universe are you writing from? In the world I live in, almost all American ISPs have a clear "no servers allowed" in their TOS. They can and do terminate your service for starting an email or web server.
Lest anyone try to argue that "This isn't the government", I'll also point out that in most of the US, there is only one legal ISP, and you have to buy their service on their terms if you want Internet access. This monopoly is enforced by the government. So the ISP is really just a pseudo-private arm of the government. It's basically a ruse so that the ISP can enforce restrictions that the government couldn't (mostly because of the Bill of Rights).
The primary effect of the "no servers" rule is that your email can't be delivered by a direct connection to the destination, the way Internet mail was designed to work. You have to send email to an ISP's server, and the recipient's machine then has to connect and pull the email down. Meanwhile, there's a time window when your email is on the ISP's server, where they can do anything with it they like.
Similarly, you are forbidden to run your own web server, so if you want to have a web site, you have to put your files on another (corporate-owned) machine, preferably your ISPs. Again, this isn't just so they can charge you extra; it's also so that your files will sit on their machines, where they can do as they like with them.
A couple of years ago, there was a good fuss when msn.com subscribers discovered that msn was extracting files (mostly pictures) from customers' web sites and using them commercially. Their response was to point to their EULA, which stated that all files on their servers were the property of msn.
It's not really obvious that the US is any better than China in this regard. The main difference is the ruse of pretending that the legal-monopoly ISPs are "private" and "not government". Yeah, right.
And we've just been reading the story about how AT&T shares all their customers' traffic with the NSA, without even a pretense of a court order...
If I write an email to my wife asking her to invite the neighbors over for dinner, how does that qualify as interstate commerce?
Well, you must not be very familiar with the way that the (commercial) email system works. Even if the source and destination were within the same building, your email message could easily have crossed several state (and possibly national) boundaries.
To start with, the DNS request to locate the destination quite likely involved an access to a root- or second-level server, and it was probably in another state.
Also, unless both ends are unix-type systems and are running their own email servers (forbidden by most ISPs in the US but still done sometimes), your email probably went to your ISP's email server, which is likely to be in another state. Then it went to your wife's ISP's email server, which is likely in yet another state (unless you have the same ISP).
Look at the list of Received: lines in your email headers sometimes. You might be surprised where your messages are travelling. It's a lot worse than all the jokes about "I went to Chicago but my luggage went to Paris." A message from St. Louis to Chicago could easily go via a machine in Hong Kong.
And every one of those Received: lines represents a machine that could have cached a copy of your message for later perusal by "national security" software.
When I hit the Submit button, this message will probably go through a router in New York, though I'm in a suburb of Boston. I know this because I've traced some of the paths through my ISP (speakeasy.net). This is true even if the destination is in the Boston area, or even in the same town.
Funny thing: I tried a number of my recent google searches with lastgoogle, and I'd say that the matches were every bit as good as those on the first page. In fact, a lot of them were dups.
So much for their vaunted page ranking.
(Of course, my sample wasn't exactly statistically significant. But that shouldn't matter here on/.;-)
... this "study" isn't from a neutral third party...
How could there be any neutral parties in this issue? The DMCA is a potential threat to anyone who does anything with digital media, and we're going to be forced to go all digital rather soon.
Just this morning I read through yet another discussion in yet another newsgroup started by a fellow who was trying to copy his own hand-made 8mm video tapes to DVDs, but was being blocked by equipment that declared that a copy would be a copyright violation. This seems to be a growing nightmare for users who try to comply with the new!, improved! technology.
It's fairly common in such discussions for someone to warn that merely attempting to debug such problems can be a DMCA violation. Figuring out how to get your old home movies transferred from film to disk despite the DRM components has the potential of landing you in a federal prison.
If you're a user of digital audio or video technology, you are not a "neutral third party". Anything you do can make you a felon under federal law.
Well, maybe American experience with such laws can be a good lesson to the rest of the world.
Anyone who knows how to look at their mail software's records has known this for years. And hotmail.com has problems nearly as bad as yahoo.com. Sending email to either typically involves trying to contact the first server in the mxlist, waiting for a timeout, trying the second server, waiting for a timeout, etc. For both of them, most of their listed servers accept connections, but simply don't respond (at least within the 120-sec timeout that I use).
This has been true for some years now. I'd expect that the people running both systems know all about it, but don't see any need to fix it.
Every problem that is commonly attributed to "overpopulation" is actually a problem of having too little money.
So the solution should be simple: Every government should print a lot more money and hand it out to their population.
In the advanced countries, of course, there's no need to print any money, as it can be done electronically. The government can just order all banks to add a large sum to the balance of every account. There's not even a need for an actual decree of any sort, since the government can just sent an electronic deposit to every account. Some people don't have bank accounts, but this is easily solved by an order that every bank must give an account to any new customer, and the government will make a large initial deposit automatically when a bank notifies them of a new account. The banks should be happy to comply, as it would greatly increase their business.
I wonder why nobody in any government has seen this, and realized how easy it would be? Maybe they are all as stupid as people say they are. Or they're intentionally trying to keep people poor.
Actually, your explanation is a special case of the parent theory. After all,"Gene Fairy" is just one of the 2 million names of God. You've merely been more specific with one of God's names and one mechanism of DNA code reuse.
So I'd say that the parent theory, being vague and unspecific, is more likely to be correct than yours, which names some of the specifics. The Gene Fairy's Loom theory could conceivably be falsified by finding evidence of DNA that couldn't be produced by a "loom" sort of mechanism, but this wouldn't falsify the vaguer theory of "code reuse".
It's sorta similar to the occasional observation that part of why Charles Darwin was able to be correct was that his theory wasn't all that detailed. He described a general "natural selection" mechanism, but at the time nobody knew anything about details like genes or DNA. This makes it more difficult to challenge Darwin than it is to challenge the many modern versions of his grand theory. A lot of mechanisms could have existed to implement inheritance. We now know a lot about the mechanisms, so our current theories can be challenged at a level of detail that wasn't possible 150 years ago. And even if you can invalidate a low-level detail based on modern evidence, that usually doesn't say anything about Darwin's high-level "natural selection" mechanism.
I think you're right that Darwin wasn't all that concerned with the fossil record. The histories of the Beagle voyage describe him developing his theory based on what he saw in the living creatures, especially at Gallapagos, but also in parts of South America. And it took him some years after the trip to gather all the facts together into a coherent whole. The tie-in with fossils was mostly done by others afterwards, as they tried to test his theory.
And I don't think that Gould tried to say that Darwin's theory was based on fossils. Rather, he was making the fact/theory distinction, and mentioned a number of people who had described the evolutionary process before Darwin. They were writing about the inferred historical progression that was by then visible in the fossil record (though not as well as it is today), but their attempts to explain it weren't very accurate. The point was that Darwin didn't invent the concept of evolution; that was already around as a (sketchily) observed historical fact. What he did was come up with a new theory to explain it, and he was the one whose theory has held up best.
I've also read a few comments lamenting the way that Mendel's work on plant genetics was mostly unknown during his lifetime. He could have contributed useful data to the biological debate, if he hadn't been off working by himself. But it's not the only case of work in an obscure place (like a monastery in Bohemia) being ignored.
It is somewhat interesting that these two major early contributors to genetics and evolutionary biology had their early training in theology.
... I think you severely underestimate the corrosive effects of Intelligent Design. ID isn't intended to create an honest debate about evolution, it is intended to deceive laypeople...
True, and we should be pointing out that this isn't just a religious or political topic. It is having some unfortunate effects on the world.
One example: For more than a decade now, we've had a growing malaria epidemic in the tropics. The reason is fairly clear: The irresponsible overuse of pesticides has caused both the disease organism and its mosquito vectors to evolve resistance. A lot of pesticides that were effective against them a few decades ago are now almost completely worthless.
This is a clear case of evolution in action, and it happened because people were kept ignorant of the evolutionary process. Medical people have long known of the long-term dangers of over-use of antibiotics and pesticides, and they tend to be conservative of the use of such things. But most of the world's farmers have never been taught about the problem, and this lack of education can be laid directly at the feet of religious people who actively try to suppress the teaching of evolution.
Here in the US, there has recently been a huge growth in the sales of "antibacterial" hand soaps. This horrifies a lot of medical people, because a constant low level of an antibiotic is the best way to force rapid evolution of resistance. Such resistance is becoming a widespread problem in hospitals. If you are using antibacterial soap, you are breeding resistant strains of bacteria in your own body, and when you go to a hospital, you'll take them with you.
Most Americans have no idea of this, and think that anything that kills bacteria is automatically good. Again, we have the religious anti-evolution people to thank for this situation.
Evolution isn't just a fun academic theory. It's an important part of how our world works. Ignorance of it has led to the 100 million or so deaths each year from malaria and the loss of effectiveness of many antibiotics in medical settings, and it will lead to the epidemics that we'll be reading about (and dying from) in the not-so-distant future.
And this ignorance is primarily the fault of the religious nuts who intimidate educators and block teaching the subject.
God put all those fossils there just to test us...
I've seen a more developed version of this theory:
God put all those fossils there because He wants us to believe in the evolutionary process that He so painstakingly faked. So if we don't believe in evolution, we are violating God's will.
All you non-believers will be punished for your disbelief...
Stephen Jay Gould made a similar comment in one of his many books, but he expressed it differently: He distinguished between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.
One of his points was that the fact of evolution was well understood by the time that Charles Darwin was born. The fossil record had been discovered and studied enough that it was clear to all but the religious nuts that it documented a long history, and that history showed a distinctive pattern of creatures changing their form over time. Geologists had worked out rough dating methods and knew (to within a factor of 2 or so) the ages of many strata. The big question was "How?"
In scientific terminology, a theory is an explanation of observed facts. The theory of evolution by natural selection was Darwin's proposed explanation of the facts in the fossil record. There were a number of other theories before and after his "Origin of Species", but they have all pretty much been debunked by the evidence.
Not that there isn't a lot of work yet to be done on the theory. Darwin's theory was remarkably vague on the details. It was really little more than a sketch of a real theory, with the details to be filled in by further research.
We're still working on that. Thus, in Darwin's day, there was no understanding of DNA. There's a lot of work to be done in explaining how behaviors like cooperation and altruism can arise. And google for "viral transduction" to read about an important exception to the reproductive isolation of species.
OTOH, maybe tomorrow the FSM (or the IPU) will appear to us all and explain how He (She) did it.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
It's worse when there are many passwords to remember ...
;-) currently has 108 passwords. There are very few duplicates. Not because of any policy of mine, but because the rules for passwords are different on most of the sites. At least most of them don't require monthly changes, or I'd be doing 5 or so changes every workday.
My password file (which is a "hidden file" on a couple of web sites that I use
When admins complain, I just tell them that it's their own policies that force me to do this. There's no way I'm going to remember a hundred or more different passwords; I have no choice but to record them somewhere. And since I need them while working from an assortment of places around the Net, I obviously have to put them somewhere that I can get at them from anywhere.
And no, I won't keep them in my wallet. That would mean that a single pickpocket could destroy my life. No way I'd be that foolish.
At least nearly everywhere I work allows the use of ssh. This pretty much minimizes the chance that some ISP worker can intercept my passwords. Or that a link over an AT&T long line will send a copy to a US government agency. If a site won't allow ssh/ssl, I just don't use that site in any way that requires password access. I've resigned from a few jobs because of this.
Maybe some day the idiots running the various pieces of the Net won't force such measures on me, and I can use a single Something That I Know nearly everywhere. But right now, we're getting farther from that every day.
The best use for C++ I've seen is Pure-C-With-Smart-Structures.
Yup; most of the (rather few) good, readable C++ code I've seen is basically written like that. Most of it compiles fine under a plain C compiler; there are just a few structs that have been written as classes to take advantage of some of the OO capabilities in an elegant fashion.
Mostly, though, the best explanation I've seen for the widespread disastrous nature of C++ projects is the comment that C++ is a "write-only language". Usually nobody other than the original coders can ever modify a chunk of code without introducing all sorts of bizarre, unexpected side effects.
And, as is so often the case, this isn't really a property of the language. It's more a result of the programming culture that has developed, which puts a premium on a highly-obfuscated coding style. Why this happened is a bit of a puzzle, because you'd expect that C++ would be an offshoot of C, but the cultures are radically different. If you want to see a C-like programming culture, you should look at perl or python. The C++ culture is more like Cobol or PL/I, bizarre at that may seem when you just look at the languages.
OTOH, I've seen a few very simple and elegant small C++ programs. So go figure.
To quote, 'quite frankly, fund terrorism activities,' according to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales
For the benefit of readers outside the US, we should perhaps note that in American political speech, "frankly" is a code word meaning that what follows is an intentional lie. The phrase "quite frankly" means it's a damned lie.
It's sorta the Washington equivalent of "wink, wink; nudge, nudge" for you Monty Python fans.
But then I have a sense of humor.
You might want to look into getting one someday.
Ah, but don't you know that a sense of humor isn't a choice? It's inborn.
(I've heard that a lot of people claim that a sense of humor is learned, but have you ever tried teaching someone to have one?)
Not all Christian churches go for the abomination business.
Indeed. Here in the US, the UU (Unitarian-Universalist) and UCC (United Church of Christ) are both openly welcoming to and supportive of homosexuals. Many American Episcopal (i.e., Anglican) churches are also gay-friendly, though the official policy may not make much of a big deal of this, so if you like Catholic-style ritual, this might be the church for you.
At the other extreme, some Christian sects have been openly hostile to even "straight" sex. They often use Paul's comment in his first letter to the Corinthians (7:9), "But if they have not continency, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn. (ASV)" This passage is often interpreted to say that a true Christian would lead a celibate life; only the weak ones give in to sexual desires.
Taken to the obvious extreme, this had led to some sects (such as the Shakers) dying out because they didn't have children to indoctrinate and they weren't able to attract enough converts to keep the church going. OTOH, some monastic orders have lasted quite a long time despite an official ban on all sex.
It's fairly clear that with Christianity, you can pick your church based on its policies, and you can find a fairly wide range of policies. With the UUs, you don't even have to accept the whole package of beliefs, though you might not be too happy there if you don't accept their basic doctrine of tolerance of diversity.
... the percentage of intelligent people out there is FAR FAR lower than that.
Yeah, but note that the OP said "intellectually curious", not "intelligent". The two are unrelated (and orthogonal) properties.
A mouse or sparrow can be intellectually curious. But curiosity doesn't guarantee that they can understand what they encounter.
You can find a lot of people whose curiosity leads them into astrology or religion or a thousand other things that intelligence would lead them to sniff at, discard, then continue looking for something more worthwhile.
As usual, when logic fails, follow the money.
So how does netcraft make money by omitting the active-sites data? Is Microsoft paying them to not publish this data?
That might make sense. How else could it be worthwhile to publish the wrong set of numbers?
Google actively works to defeat sites that try to game their rankings. I'd think that netcraft would want to do the same. After all, to them a "parked" domain is little other than an attempt to bias the site statistics. Those aren't actually sites at all; they are just fictional names that don't refer to anything.
Maybe we should be publicising the fact that netcraft's data includes fake sites that exist in part to bias netcraft's statistics.
There's a theory going that parked domains are the best use for an IIS server.
If you want to serve actual content, it makes a lot more sense to pick a server that's simple to set up and run, and that isn't subject to all the malware that infects Microsoft products. But if your PHB insists on using IIS, there might be a few things that it's good for.
Domain parking is about as respectable as phishing or spam.
;-)
Maybe, but it's occasionally understandable. Look at whitehouse.org and whitehouse.com, and compare them with whitehouse.gov for an example. Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to register a domain "close" to yours.
I mean, imagine how embarrassed those first two sites must be to be sharing a name with the likes of Gerge Bush and his gang!
But this is somewhat a minimal comment, because if you're going to register typo variants of your site's name, it would make a bit more sense to just make them all point to your address.
And on the third hand, domains like bushisaliar.gov or hillaryisawhore.org might be better off just registered and parked so they don't work at all. (And no, I haven't checked to see if those exist.
One of the unfortunate facts of life.net is that you sometimes have to think of such things.
Netcraft should not be counting parked domains at all. It should be counting sites that actually have valid content.
...
They used to do this, making a distinction between "all domains" and "active domains". But their current Web server Survey doesn't seem to have the active-doomain data or graphs any more.
I wonder why they dropped them? I'd always thought that this was the interesting data, not the total that included inactive or parked sites.
Actually, the two data sets were usually not all that different. Usually apache had a larger and IIS had a smaller percent in the active-domains data than in the all-domains data, but the difference was only a few points. For OS data, this relationship was reversed for linux and MS. This primarily implies that large multi-site servers tend to run linux, but again the numbers weren't really all that different.
I wonder if we should be complaining to netcraft, and see if they put the active-site data back
[W]hy would T-Rex need such a formidable jaw if it was only scavenging and not killing?
Others have mentioned modern lions, and that could be a partial answer to this question.
Field researchers studying lions have reported that, in many areas, they rarely find instances of lions killing their own prey. Rather, lions mostly steal the prey of smaller predators like hyenas and wild dogs. If you're as big as a lion, that can be an easier way of making a living than hunting and bringing down your own prey. This seems to be especially true of lions in a "pride", typically a group of females plus one male. Individuals (mostly males) need to do more hunting because one lion can't intimidate a pack of canines as easily.
The main problem with such a bandit lifestyle is that you have to be bigger and tougher than your victims. T. rex certainly fits this description.
But we really don't seem to have enough evidence to resolve this question. And, like lions, T. rex may well have used both stategies. If you detect a kill by a smaller predator, you move in and steal a meal. If not, you try to kill your own meal.
But this could be why T. rex had such huge jaws, not for killing prey, but for fighting other smaller predators.
The public opening of such a technology that is not ready to accept millions of sessions does not make sense.
/. isn't their typical customer. Most places will have only a handful of people who have any clue as to what this is all about. The managers that their sales people talk to aren't about to waste time testing it themselves; they'll assign it to one or two IT people, who will try it out and write a report.
/. is one of a very small number of fora where you'd get a significant number of techies who would read and decide to try it out. They probably just got hit by a thousand times more responses than they've gotten from any previous PR attempt. And it'll probably never happen again. Well, at least not until the /. dup of this story in a week or two.
Sure, it does.
They might get a few more people from a report like this at yahoo or msn, but there, most people's reaction would basically be "It's from Sun? Who cares? Tell me about it when Microsoft has it."
I am, however, surprised that nothing like this has shown up in America yet. Granted, it's impossible to ban e-mail servers in America
...
Huh? What parallel universe are you writing from? In the world I live in, almost all American ISPs have a clear "no servers allowed" in their TOS. They can and do terminate your service for starting an email or web server.
Lest anyone try to argue that "This isn't the government", I'll also point out that in most of the US, there is only one legal ISP, and you have to buy their service on their terms if you want Internet access. This monopoly is enforced by the government. So the ISP is really just a pseudo-private arm of the government. It's basically a ruse so that the ISP can enforce restrictions that the government couldn't (mostly because of the Bill of Rights).
The primary effect of the "no servers" rule is that your email can't be delivered by a direct connection to the destination, the way Internet mail was designed to work. You have to send email to an ISP's server, and the recipient's machine then has to connect and pull the email down. Meanwhile, there's a time window when your email is on the ISP's server, where they can do anything with it they like.
Similarly, you are forbidden to run your own web server, so if you want to have a web site, you have to put your files on another (corporate-owned) machine, preferably your ISPs. Again, this isn't just so they can charge you extra; it's also so that your files will sit on their machines, where they can do as they like with them.
A couple of years ago, there was a good fuss when msn.com subscribers discovered that msn was extracting files (mostly pictures) from customers' web sites and using them commercially. Their response was to point to their EULA, which stated that all files on their servers were the property of msn.
It's not really obvious that the US is any better than China in this regard. The main difference is the ruse of pretending that the legal-monopoly ISPs are "private" and "not government". Yeah, right.
And we've just been reading the story about how AT&T shares all their customers' traffic with the NSA, without even a pretense of a court order
If I write an email to my wife asking her to invite the neighbors over for dinner, how does that qualify as interstate commerce?
Well, you must not be very familiar with the way that the (commercial) email system works. Even if the source and destination were within the same building, your email message could easily have crossed several state (and possibly national) boundaries.
To start with, the DNS request to locate the destination quite likely involved an access to a root- or second-level server, and it was probably in another state.
Also, unless both ends are unix-type systems and are running their own email servers (forbidden by most ISPs in the US but still done sometimes), your email probably went to your ISP's email server, which is likely to be in another state. Then it went to your wife's ISP's email server, which is likely in yet another state (unless you have the same ISP).
Look at the list of Received: lines in your email headers sometimes. You might be surprised where your messages are travelling. It's a lot worse than all the jokes about "I went to Chicago but my luggage went to Paris." A message from St. Louis to Chicago could easily go via a machine in Hong Kong.
And every one of those Received: lines represents a machine that could have cached a copy of your message for later perusal by "national security" software.
When I hit the Submit button, this message will probably go through a router in New York, though I'm in a suburb of Boston. I know this because I've traced some of the paths through my ISP (speakeasy.net). This is true even if the destination is in the Boston area, or even in the same town.
Hey, at least you know the difference between money and wealth; most people don't seem to. ;-)
Funny thing: I tried a number of my recent google searches with lastgoogle, and I'd say that the matches were every bit as good as those on the first page. In fact, a lot of them were dups.
/. ;-)
So much for their vaunted page ranking.
(Of course, my sample wasn't exactly statistically significant. But that shouldn't matter here on
No, I didn't forget; I was just making the guess that the tongue-in-cheek nature was so blatantly obvious that nobody could possibly miss it.
;-)
And it wasn't sarcasm; it was satire. There's a difference.
But maybe I was overestimating the intelligence of the readers in this purportedly "geek" forum.
I won't forget this time:
... this "study" isn't from a neutral third party ...
How could there be any neutral parties in this issue? The DMCA is a potential threat to anyone who does anything with digital media, and we're going to be forced to go all digital rather soon.
Just this morning I read through yet another discussion in yet another newsgroup started by a fellow who was trying to copy his own hand-made 8mm video tapes to DVDs, but was being blocked by equipment that declared that a copy would be a copyright violation. This seems to be a growing nightmare for users who try to comply with the new!, improved! technology.
It's fairly common in such discussions for someone to warn that merely attempting to debug such problems can be a DMCA violation. Figuring out how to get your old home movies transferred from film to disk despite the DRM components has the potential of landing you in a federal prison.
If you're a user of digital audio or video technology, you are not a "neutral third party". Anything you do can make you a felon under federal law.
Well, maybe American experience with such laws can be a good lesson to the rest of the world.
Anyone who knows how to look at their mail software's records has known this for years. And hotmail.com has problems nearly as bad as yahoo.com. Sending email to either typically involves trying to contact the first server in the mxlist, waiting for a timeout, trying the second server, waiting for a timeout, etc. For both of them, most of their listed servers accept connections, but simply don't respond (at least within the 120-sec timeout that I use).
This has been true for some years now. I'd expect that the people running both systems know all about it, but don't see any need to fix it.
Every problem that is commonly attributed to "overpopulation" is actually a problem of having too little money.
So the solution should be simple: Every government should print a lot more money and hand it out to their population.
In the advanced countries, of course, there's no need to print any money, as it can be done electronically. The government can just order all banks to add a large sum to the balance of every account. There's not even a need for an actual decree of any sort, since the government can just sent an electronic deposit to every account. Some people don't have bank accounts, but this is easily solved by an order that every bank must give an account to any new customer, and the government will make a large initial deposit automatically when a bank notifies them of a new account. The banks should be happy to comply, as it would greatly increase their business.
I wonder why nobody in any government has seen this, and realized how easy it would be? Maybe they are all as stupid as people say they are. Or they're intentionally trying to keep people poor.
Actually, your explanation is a special case of the parent theory. After all,"Gene Fairy" is just one of the 2 million names of God. You've merely been more specific with one of God's names and one mechanism of DNA code reuse.
So I'd say that the parent theory, being vague and unspecific, is more likely to be correct than yours, which names some of the specifics. The Gene Fairy's Loom theory could conceivably be falsified by finding evidence of DNA that couldn't be produced by a "loom" sort of mechanism, but this wouldn't falsify the vaguer theory of "code reuse".
It's sorta similar to the occasional observation that part of why Charles Darwin was able to be correct was that his theory wasn't all that detailed. He described a general "natural selection" mechanism, but at the time nobody knew anything about details like genes or DNA. This makes it more difficult to challenge Darwin than it is to challenge the many modern versions of his grand theory. A lot of mechanisms could have existed to implement inheritance. We now know a lot about the mechanisms, so our current theories can be challenged at a level of detail that wasn't possible 150 years ago. And even if you can invalidate a low-level detail based on modern evidence, that usually doesn't say anything about Darwin's high-level "natural selection" mechanism.
I think you're right that Darwin wasn't all that concerned with the fossil record. The histories of the Beagle voyage describe him developing his theory based on what he saw in the living creatures, especially at Gallapagos, but also in parts of South America. And it took him some years after the trip to gather all the facts together into a coherent whole. The tie-in with fossils was mostly done by others afterwards, as they tried to test his theory.
And I don't think that Gould tried to say that Darwin's theory was based on fossils. Rather, he was making the fact/theory distinction, and mentioned a number of people who had described the evolutionary process before Darwin. They were writing about the inferred historical progression that was by then visible in the fossil record (though not as well as it is today), but their attempts to explain it weren't very accurate. The point was that Darwin didn't invent the concept of evolution; that was already around as a (sketchily) observed historical fact. What he did was come up with a new theory to explain it, and he was the one whose theory has held up best.
I've also read a few comments lamenting the way that Mendel's work on plant genetics was mostly unknown during his lifetime. He could have contributed useful data to the biological debate, if he hadn't been off working by himself. But it's not the only case of work in an obscure place (like a monastery in Bohemia) being ignored.
It is somewhat interesting that these two major early contributors to genetics and evolutionary biology had their early training in theology.
... I think you severely underestimate the corrosive effects of Intelligent Design. ID isn't intended to create an honest debate about evolution, it is intended to deceive laypeople ...
True, and we should be pointing out that this isn't just a religious or political topic. It is having some unfortunate effects on the world.
One example: For more than a decade now, we've had a growing malaria epidemic in the tropics. The reason is fairly clear: The irresponsible overuse of pesticides has caused both the disease organism and its mosquito vectors to evolve resistance. A lot of pesticides that were effective against them a few decades ago are now almost completely worthless.
This is a clear case of evolution in action, and it happened because people were kept ignorant of the evolutionary process. Medical people have long known of the long-term dangers of over-use of antibiotics and pesticides, and they tend to be conservative of the use of such things. But most of the world's farmers have never been taught about the problem, and this lack of education can be laid directly at the feet of religious people who actively try to suppress the teaching of evolution.
Here in the US, there has recently been a huge growth in the sales of "antibacterial" hand soaps. This horrifies a lot of medical people, because a constant low level of an antibiotic is the best way to force rapid evolution of resistance. Such resistance is becoming a widespread problem in hospitals. If you are using antibacterial soap, you are breeding resistant strains of bacteria in your own body, and when you go to a hospital, you'll take them with you.
Most Americans have no idea of this, and think that anything that kills bacteria is automatically good. Again, we have the religious anti-evolution people to thank for this situation.
Evolution isn't just a fun academic theory. It's an important part of how our world works. Ignorance of it has led to the 100 million or so deaths each year from malaria and the loss of effectiveness of many antibiotics in medical settings, and it will lead to the epidemics that we'll be reading about (and dying from) in the not-so-distant future.
And this ignorance is primarily the fault of the religious nuts who intimidate educators and block teaching the subject.
God put all those fossils there just to test us...
...
I've seen a more developed version of this theory:
God put all those fossils there because He wants us to believe in the evolutionary process that He so painstakingly faked. So if we don't believe in evolution, we are violating God's will.
All you non-believers will be punished for your disbelief
Evolution is a theory. It's also a fact. :)
;-)
Stephen Jay Gould made a similar comment in one of his many books, but he expressed it differently: He distinguished between the fact of evolution and the theory of evolution.
One of his points was that the fact of evolution was well understood by the time that Charles Darwin was born. The fossil record had been discovered and studied enough that it was clear to all but the religious nuts that it documented a long history, and that history showed a distinctive pattern of creatures changing their form over time. Geologists had worked out rough dating methods and knew (to within a factor of 2 or so) the ages of many strata. The big question was "How?"
In scientific terminology, a theory is an explanation of observed facts. The theory of evolution by natural selection was Darwin's proposed explanation of the facts in the fossil record. There were a number of other theories before and after his "Origin of Species", but they have all pretty much been debunked by the evidence.
Not that there isn't a lot of work yet to be done on the theory. Darwin's theory was remarkably vague on the details. It was really little more than a sketch of a real theory, with the details to be filled in by further research.
We're still working on that. Thus, in Darwin's day, there was no understanding of DNA. There's a lot of work to be done in explaining how behaviors like cooperation and altruism can arise. And google for "viral transduction" to read about an important exception to the reproductive isolation of species.
OTOH, maybe tomorrow the FSM (or the IPU) will appear to us all and explain how He (She) did it.