What part on non-Lenovo (or earlier non-IBM) laptop is not replaceable? Every laptop I've owned that has had something break I've been able to find a replacement part for it.
Just a reminder that the topic here is the possibility of backdoors being built into the hardware and/or software. So replacing something that breaks includes replacing any builtin backdoor with the latest, upgraded version. When dealing with such security issues, the operable mantra is always "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Saying that no backdoor has been demonstrated is not evidence that there is no backdoor. To satisfy even the minimally-competent security folks, they need a way of verifying that no backdoor exists.
Various people have already pointed out that "Made in USA" has slowly come to be read as a security warning in many parts of the world. This story isn't materially different from the Stuxnet story, or the Siberian pipeline explosion story. Yeah, we're talking about "Made in China" now, but the issue isn't materially different.
People are slowly waking up to the fact that computers are no longer just geek (and accountant;-) toys; they are are now part of our infrastructure. Lives depend on the little things. If you want your electronic gadgets accepted in security-critical situations (e.g., hospitals or airplanes or autos), you will be expected to supply access to all the inner workings, down to the lowest level, so that the analysts can verify that you haven't slipped in something extra that you haven't told anyone about.
And security problems may not be the result of intentional tweaking. Remember all the fun we had reading and making up jokes about the Pentium floating-point problems? A computer processor that doesn't know how to do basic arithmetic properly is a serious "security" problem, too. If your life depends on the correct arithmetic in a hospital's equipment (or your future car's drive-by-wire controller), you should probably try to ensure that the geeks can get at it and verify that it knows how to do basic calculations correctly. We have good evidence that the manufacturers can't be relied on to get even such basic stuff right.
Actually, I've read a number of similar stories, dealing with both the original ARPAnet and the origins of unix at Bell Labs. What they all have in common is the problem of dealing with incompatible gadgetry that use different data/message formats, with a solution that involved connecting the incompatible stuff to a computer running software that acted as a translator. Acting as a remote terminal was part of about half the stories, and translating file formats was often involved..
I get the impression that the general incompatible of electronic stuff, especially computers, was a common complain in the years around 1970. That was a time when computers were spreading rapidly, and smaller computers were coming out that were cheap enough that they could be the center of a small lab rather than in an organization-wide computer center. So it was feasible for people to consider uses that wouldn't be permitted in the batch-oriented computer centers of the time. Using a computer as a "middle-man" between stuff that couldn't quite communicate was likely a widespread application of such smaller computers.
It's too bad that a lot of this was so poorly documented, so that often all we have is after-the-fact anecdotes from a lot of different sources. But the people involved probably just thought they were working on personal annoyances with their equipment, not inventing important new things or fomenting some sort of revolution.;-)
Security equipment manufacturers are notorious for using proprietary equipment or file formats to limit interoperability with the competition's systems,...
You should have written "All manufacturers are notorious for using proprietary equipment or file formats to limit interoperability with the competition's systems." This problem has been with us from the start of the industrial age, and possibly earlier.
This was one of the primary reasons why, back in the 1960s, the US military's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, now DARPA) created the R&D project that led to the ARPAnet, which evolved into the Internet. The military folks were using more and more electronic gadgetry, and had learned that it was impossible to write military specs so precisely that manufacturers couldn't find subtle ambiguities and create data formats that were incompatible with their competitors. The manufacturers' reps always used the same argument: "If you'd bought only our stuff, you wouldn't have problems of incompatibility."
So they faced the fact that such incompatibilities are a permanent fact of life, and developed a solution: They'd plug electronic gadgets into those newfangled "computer" thingies, where they could write software that would decode a gadget's signals and data formats, translate them to a standard format, and transmit them to another computer with attached proprietary gadgets, where the software would translate the standard formats into their manufacturers' formats. This allowed remote military sites to use whatever equipment they had on hand (which hadn't been destroyed by some enemy;-), and it could communicate with other equipment anywhere else that they could send the standard-format data.
This has always applied to "obsolete" equipment, too. Manufacturers want customers to continually upgrade to the latest stuff, and encourage this by making the current stuff unable to communicate with stuff more than N releases old. But if you still have the software that talked to the old models, you can use it and the ARPA/Internet system to communicate with the newer models, using the same translation-to/from-standard scheme.
It can be amusing to read comments implying that this sort of incompatibility is something new. It's not only not new; it was one of the prime motives for the development that led to the Internet and its protocols half a century ago. Without it, hardly any electronic gadgets would be able to communicate with anything not from the same manufacturer (and "upgraded" fairly recently).
If you investigate, you may be surprised to learn how much of the Internet's infrastructure is running on ancient PCs that will no longer run MS Windows (or DOS;-). I've helped build a number of "server centers" that were made up mostly of free PCs whose previous owners just wanted to dump them. It's now 10 or 15 (or 20) years later, and the server software is still sitting there running just fine, talking to any equipment that it can physically exchange bits with. It's all open-source software, so the software is easy to upgrade indefinitely. The vendors aren't very happy with us, though.;-)
I've also worked on a number of software projects that can be summarized as "cracking" a company's data, typically from old backups, and sending it to modern computers in formats that they understand. This hasn't been for law-enforcement or military agencies; it has been for the companies themselves who find that their old data is either unreadable or misinterpreted by current IBM/Microsoft software. It's an old story...
And to steer back to the original topic, the same comments apply to whatever digital media you may have. If you want your family photos or videos usable 20 or 50 or 100 years from now, you should be translating them to (preferably several of) the current standard formats. Keep multiple copies of each.
Ah, you beat me to it! Actually, I was going to suggest Monty Python, or the Meat Puppets. But I suppose that, since the topic is porn, Missionary Position might be the most appropriate.
Urban legend, and almost entirely a moral panic spread by various media sources. At least, that is what I found by googling that!
Yeah, that's what they want you to believe. In reality, all of your friends (male and female) are regularly attending such parties, and having a great time. But they (and the rest of us here on/.) don't want people like you to have that kind of fun, so we've put all those comments in the Usual Places online to convince you that they're myths.
Actually, the "curvature" of space-time really is a case of better precision in astronomical measurement turning up an anomaly that didn't match Newton's equations. The main ("textbook") example was, of course, the orbit of Mercury, whose anomalous precession was published by Le Verrier in 1859, more than a century after Newton's death in 1727. Newton and his colleagues couldn't have dealt with this anomaly, because their equipment couldn't measure it accurately. They actually did measure an anomaly in Mercury's orbital precession, and explained it as an effect of the other planets, primarily Jupiter and Saturn.
Einstein's new (improved!) equations successfully explained Le Verrier's anomaly. But this really does qualify as a refinement of Newton's mechanics, since most of the data that demonstrated the anomaly was collected after Newton died.
Actually, it has long seemed to me that someone back in Newton's time, or even Galileo's, could have observed the deflection of stars' positions near the sun during total eclipses. That would have been a good hint that something funny was going on near the surface of the sun. It seems that Newton's mechanics do predict light curving near the sun, but predict only half the actual deflection. I've never read of anyone mentioning this before the 19th century. Anyone know about this?
(One of my favorite bits of astronomical history is that Newton actually "disproved" Copernicus claim that the Earth orbits the sun. He showed that the Earth doesn't orbit the sun at all; both of them actually orbit what we now call the barycenter of the solar system, i.e., the center of mass of the entire solar system, and that barycenter is usually outside the sun. This is mostly fun because, while technically true, it's basically silly, since the barycenter is rather close to the sun, and there's no other massive body anywhere near it. But the observational error here is in the third decimal place, so it's reasonable that Copernicus would see the sun as the center of it all back in the early 1500s. So Newton didn't really show that Copernicus was wrong; he showed that Copernicus's data didn't have enough precision to pinpoint what the Earth actually orbited.)
Supplements? Fuggedaboutit. I don't think my Dad took anything except Vitamin Beer until his 60s. By then, what's the point? Money blown on that shit is money that could have been spent on healthy fun.
Heh. It's well-documented that (moderate) consumption of beer and/or wine is correlated with a longer lifespan. Since this was verified by a number of studies back in the 1960s and 1970s, a great many of the "further research is needed" studies have been done, and quite a lot of them have supported the conjecture that much of the benefit comes from the vitamins produced by the yeast. This is used to explain why, for instance, people who consume the same amount of ethanol in distilled form as the beer/wine drinkers seem to get only about half the benefit. Distilled beverages don't have all those B vitamins that are the yeast's waste products.
My wife has worked as a medical data analyst for some decades, and she has had fun bringing home yet another study that explains yet another biochemical benefit of consuming the waste products of yeasts. And we have a running joke about how we probably won't live as long as we should, due to our low consumption of alcoholic beverages.
Vitamin Beer may be a bit of humor, but it has more than a grain of truth to it. Beer, especially a good, unfiltered "craft" beer, does qualify as a vitamin supplement delivery system. Similarly for good, minimally-processed wines, for much the same reasons. Or mead, or pulque, or any of the various other yeast-fermented drinkables consumed around the world.
I am on Atkins diet. Basically I am eating only meat. (Almost) No vegetable, no fruits, no bread, no rice, no sweets. YES YES I know this diet will horrify some people and yes I know it is not very healthy....
A few years back, Consumer Reports published a study of diets (complete with their usual ratings table;-). One of their conclusions was that the Atkins diet was the one with the best long-term results, but they did say that this was mostly because people were generally able to follow it longer than other diets. They also recommended talking to a nutritionist about it, to make sure you get the vitamins and other micro-nutrients that you need, some of which aren't plentiful in most meat.
The "not very healthy" qualification applies to most weight-loss diets for pretty much the same reasons. Humans are obligatory omnivores, and if we exclude some kinds of food from our diets, we easily end up with deficiency diseases. This is sometimes expressed by saying that the best diet is "eat less and exercise more".;-) Except that that only works if the starting diet that you eat less of is sufficiently omnivorous. It won't work if you just eat less of the fast/junk food that put you in the shape you're in. So in general, talking to a nutritionist is probably still good advice (if you can find a good one;-).
Even Einstein said he hoped people would one day prove him wrong -- being proven wrong means progress. It means a better understanding of the universe. Scientists, real ones, don't mind being wrong, or mistaken.
It's often worthwhile to point out that Einstein didn't "prove Newton wrong", and the progress that Einstein was hoping for will probably also not prove him wrong. Rather, he showed that Newton's equations were approximations, good to 10 or 15 decimal places in "ordinary" situations here on Earth, but not good enough to explain some of the boundary cases that had already been observed by 1900. So far, all attempts to find exceptions to Einstein's equations have failed; i.e., observed results agree with his equations to as many places as we can measure, but this doesn't mean someone won't find situations where his equations are wrong in the 237th decimal place.
Calling this sort of progress "proving X wrong" is rather a stretch of the usual meaning of "wrong" in English. Scientists and engineers tend to understand this. That's why Newton's equations are still taught and widely used. They work quite well for most physical calculations dealing with the vicinity of the surface of our planet. Einstein's equations would give more than 20 places of accuracy, true, but if your instruments can't measure your material that precisely, you're merely spending a lot more compute time to get results no better than Newton's.
This isn't nitpicking. It's pointing out that "wrong" is usually the wrong (;-) term for what typically happens in scientific research. It's actually rather rare for any research to show that a predecessor's work (if truly scientific and not fraudulent) is wrong. Rather, as with Newton and Einstein, the usual result is finding obscure edge cases where more precise measurement is now possible, leading to the conclusion that an accepted theory is actually an approximation. So, rather than an entirely new theory, what happens is that a revision of the old theory is developed. It typically has more complex equations that require more compute time. As a result, the old "approximate" equations may still be used in situations where they are known to be "good enough".
This is probably what will eventually happen with Einstein's equations. The media will be full of "Einstein proven wrong!!!" headlines, but physicists and engineers will continue to teach and use his equations for "normal" situations such as outside a black hole or after the first 10^-33 seconds of the Big Bang.
Similar comments apply to many other scientific fields. Thus, you can find lots of "Darwin proven wrong!!!" claims from our friends the creationists. But the actual story is usually about an interesting special case that Darwin never dealt with. Sometimes it's about something that he wrote about, made conjectures, but didn't actually study. So again, he wasn't shown wrong; he was merely shown to be a pioneer who didn't map the entire landscape in infinite detail.
Medical research is full of studies showing the limitations of previous research, often clarifying earlier results or showing that the reality is more complex than thought. But this often doesn't mean that the previous studies were wrong; rather that they were approximations or special cases. (Well, except for the ones that were outright fraudulent, which is not surprising in a field where profit margins drive a lot of the "research".;-)
Driving drunk, Why didnt they arrest the individual? why have a law if its not enforced uniformly?
It's to use against someone that you want to harrass, of course. This is hardly a secret anywhere.
Here in the US, it's often mentioned that young non-white males typically have an arrest record by the time they're 18. The conventional explanation is that when young white guys commit such offenses, they're typically released after a "talking to", and sometimes the phrase "scared straight" is used to describe the approach. They aren't (officially) arrested, and no police records usually result. With non-whites, the first offense typically results in an arrest. The fellow will often be released without formal charges, after a similar "talking to", but the police typically keep a record of his arrest.
Similar situations may be found in most places where humans live. It's how we do things, for the most part.
2. Why is it so important for gay men to get out into the woods with little boys?>
Why is it so important for men to get out into the woods with little boys?
Ah; it's the old "All gays are child molesters" trope yet again.
Actually, you should ask "Why is it so important for self-described "straight" men to get out into the woods with little boys.";-)
After all, the Boy Scouts haven't banned all gay men, only the ones who are open and honest ("out of the closet") about their predilections. They accept closeted gays as Scout leaders.
(We might also repeat the oft-noted observation that "homosexual" and "child molester" aren't synonyms. They probably aren't even correlated. There are child-molesting straight people, and gays who don't find pre-puberty children sexually attractive. If your motive is to protect the children from molestation, excluding gays has little if anything to do with such goals.)
But the main point here is that the Boy Scouts have in fact only excluded people who admit to being gay, while not paying nearly as much attention to people who claim to be straight.
As for police, the problem is that police investigations reveal irrelevant private information. That's something we've just got to accept if we want the police to do anything at all. However, we don't have to let the police collect irrelevant private information when that isn't part of an investigation of a crime. In other words, the ratio of criminals caught to private information collected is too low.
There's also the general problem of "false positives", which have been notoriously common in previous security-related data collection. This was especially common in the "Red Scare" investigations of the 1950s to 1980s.
Back in the 1970s, there was an example that got a bit of coverage in the scientific press. There was a researcher (in Detroit as I recall) who had applied for lots of federal grants, and had been turned down for all of them with no explanation. Eventually, via the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act), he eventually found the explanation.
It seems that earlier, his teenage son had been using his car frequently to visit his girlfriend in another part of town. Some agencies looking for "subversives" listed a local group that held meetings occasionally in the same block. When the meetings were scheduled, the investigators visited the block, and wrote down all the license-plate numbers. They compared these with the registry, and the owners of all the cars who didn't live in the area were listed as suspected members of the group. So the father was listed as a suspected subversive, and that information was given to funding agencies.
Presumably the investigators didn't notice that his car was there on lots of other days, because they didn't do their scans on non-meeting evenings. This is one good way to get a false positive.
I never read any followups to this story. It's unlikely he had any legal recourse, since failing to give grant money so someone on the basis of false data about them isn't exactly a crime.
Those who use the "we have nothing to hide" argument should probably consider stories like this. Political investigative agencies have a long, sordid history of such false positives, and they've ruined a lot of lives as a result, while typically catching few "true positivies" in their nets.
I wonder if it would be possible to set up a list of such stories, for the education of the general population. It could be useful to impress on people that, no matter how much of a "good citizen" they consider themselves, they can easily be victimized in this way.
The number of "100 year" weather events in the past decode or so has sorta turned into a running joke for comedians. At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
Why would you need to sync your phone to the station to get it to work, let's just send unencrypted communication all over the place.
We should be careful in just encouraging encrypted communication, because the usual interpretations of this provide no security at all, and were rejected back in the ARPAnet days of the 1960s by the security advisers.
The usual interpretation of "encrypted communication", of course, is the frequent suggestion that "the Internet" itself should do encryption. This is especially suggested by people who've figured out that the average user doesn't stand much of a chance of doing it right, with modern comm software.
But having "the Internet" do the encryption actually means that the encryption is done by your comm supplier, i.e. your ISP or phone company. What this means is that your comm supplier is the one who also does the decryption, so they have complete access to everything. The recent stories about the close ties between government security agencies and the comm companies show that this would be no security at all.
What was decided back in the 1960s, and what anyone with a basic understanding of security will agree with, is that the low-level comm stuff shouldn't be burdened with any security measures. They are simply a waste of cpu time, since they make your messages accessible to the people who run the low-level comm stuff. The low-level stuff should therefore be tasked simply with getting the bits across as fast as possible. To qualify as secure, any encryption must be handled by the two end-points in a conversation.
Note that this doesn't mean that the (human) end users need to be the ones doing the encryption. What it means is that the encryption software must be running on the piece of hardware that they're using, not by anything further away in the connection.
Of course, then you have the next problem, of preventing spy software from being installed on the hardware at either end. But that's a different issue.
The primary understanding is that we should insist that "encrypted communication" be done only end-to-end. Anything else inherently makes your info available to whoever owns the hardware that's running the encryption software. (And it makes the whole comm system run slower, since encryption software does use cpu time, and if it's not in the end systems, it's 100% a waste of that cpu time.)
The major use-level issue is whether we can create encryption software that runs in the users' gadgets, and which the users can actually use correctly, and which won't be compromised by builtin backdoors such as keyloggers that were installed by the comm companies.
..., no one is labeled as having a condition until a confirmatory test with higher specificity is positive. I can't speak to how terrorists are labeled, but please don't drag medicine down into that morass.
Here in the US, we're still suffering from a case of just such labeling around 20 years ago. That was when we started seeing widespread suggestions that people should avoid being tested for AIDS. The explanations was that the first two widespread tests had false positive rates of about 10% and 5%. The actual incidence at the time was somewhere around 1 per million. So, it was explained, if the entire US population were given the first test, it would catch around 300 people with AIDS, and would also finger 30 million people with a false positive, which would be a disaster for most of them.
Now, it was probably true that the medical people wouldn't take any of the positives seriously, but would just note it in their records, and proceed with the second test, which would find maybe 30 more true positives and 1.5 million false positives. They would then do further tests. But this didn't matter to most of us.
The problem was that all these positives went into a record system that wasn't at all secure, and there were no legal repercussions against people like employers and insurance agencies who found out about the positives. As a result, there was a growing epidemic of job losses, insurance cancellations, etc. Those false positives followed people around, and many of them are still suffering from the results although they never had the disease.
True, this isn't the fault of the medical system. But being "put on a list" has a history of meaning the end of employment and all sorts of other punishments for the rest of one's life. Look up the history of the "Red Scare" of the 1940s through the 1970s for details and many examples.
The only real answer is to impose serious legal penalties on companies, agencies, and others who act up on such positive tests without verifying their validity. So far, the US has very little in place to do this, for either false medical reports or false terrorism reports. So any of us can easily become a victim of a false positive, regardless of our actual status.
(I was tempted to add "unless we're rich and powerful enough", but the story of Ted Kennedy being blocked at an airport because he was on a no-fly list says that that might not even protect you.;-)
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise.
It's no longer "recent" by media standards, but the (second;-) attack on the World Trade Center is an excellent example. Much of the news coverage of the event is still available online, and if you dig it up and look at it, you'll see that several things stand out. One is that the US authorities were totally taken by surprise, and didn't have any idea what was happening until after the second tower was hit. However, it became clear in the first several hours that they'd decided who to blame. The reports from everywhere were full of "Al Qaeda" and "Osama bin Laden" (often badly mispronounced;-), despite the obvious fact that they couldn't have collected the evidence in such a short time.
Over the following weeks and months, it also became clear that their ignorance was pretty much self-imposed. They had been warned about the specific perps by various other countries' security folks, and chose to ignore the information. This was in part due to a serious shortage of Arabic-speaking translators in the US military/security agencies. This was in turn due to their mistreatment of Arabic speakers, which the US has millions of. If you look into this, you'd probably also conclude that anyone fluent in Arabic would have to be really stupid (or suicidal) to volunteer for a translator job in those agencies.
The most parsimonious theory explaining this is that the US government isn't particularly interested in finding and blocking terrorists; they are mostly interested in using such things as a way of instilling fear in the general population. With this understanding, the government's "anti-terrorist" activities make a lot of sense.
(And, of course, treating the US government as some sort of unified, monolithic entity is a major mistake. There are lots of people in various government agencies who understand the situation pretty well. But they're generally not the ones in charge. Or if they are, they also understand that it's all to their own personal benefit. Or they keep quiet because they understand how "whistle blowers" are treated, and don't want that to happen to them. But we may hear from them after they retire.;-)
Yeah; I was thinking that seven million lines of COBOL is what? Maybe 5 lines of perl? 8 lines of python?
Someone was right about COBOL variable names often being all the documentation you need. That may be right, considering that your typical COBOL variable name pretty much qualifies as a line of code all by itself. Of course, most of each name is assorted illegible acronyms and "Hungarian" style attribute indicators that are different for every program, and thus meaningless to anyone other than the original coders.
An only slightly greater stretch of the idea is the claim that has come out in the US's gun legislation, to the effect that a large majority of the deaths from gunshot wounds are due to suicide.
I wonder how many more interesting examples we can produce showing that most dangers come from "insiders".
Hopefully those exploits are used against our enemies and not against us, but that's probably just a silly hope.
What enemy? China? Don't make me laugh.
Nah; anyone who has been following security-related news stories for at least a few years understands that the primary enemy of any government is its own citizens. They're nearby, where they can vote against you, take you to court, or shoot at you. None of these threats are easily available to people in other countries.
Just dig into the histories of the related US agencies (e.g., HUAC or the FBI or even the CIA) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. How many external "enemies" -- or domestic "subversives" -- did they ever catch and prosecute? Pretty close to none at all. How many citizens did they attack and serious injure (either their reputation, finances, or physical well-being)? Lots and lots of them.
This story is only news to someone who isn't familiar with the long, documented history of such activities. Fact is, your government considers you more of a threat than pretty much anyone outside its borders. This is especially true if you're involved in any activity that threatens the income (especially under-the-counter income) of anyone in your government.
... how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?"
Isn't that what "bug" means in the software field? After all, an error in software that doesn't affect anything relevant to users rarely (if ever) gets listed as a "bug". Bug reports are always the result of software getting something wrong in a way that a user notices. If the affect were beneficial, I sorta doubt that many users would report it.
A funny aspect to this is that, according to lots of linguistic studies, pretty much all language changes can be summarized as "simplifications", usually removing something from speech, but this never actually results in a simpler language. Typically it introduces irregularities.
A simple example in English: 1000 years ago, Old English had pretty much all the complex plurals that you find in German. In Early Modern English, this was "simplified" by settling on the "-s" plural as the default. However, most common nouns retained their original plural forms. So rather than having a short list of plurals, depending on word class, we now have a single regular plural, plus hundreds of "irregular" plurals for the common nouns that must simply be memorized by someone trying to learn English.
There are many similar examples in all documented languages. Some part of the language is "simplified", but this causes problems because that part of the language no longer interfaces to its surroundings in the same way, and common utterances may survive the change unaltered.
But this all means we don't have to worry about our language "devolving into a series of gutteral sounds". The descendants of English will be just as complex as modern English. They'll just be different from our speech in more and more ways, as time passes.
A fun example is the recent spreading of the "uptalk" syntax, which is documented to have originated in my native dialect (the Pacific Northwest), and is slowly infecting the speech of young people all over North America. The textbooks have failed to come to terms with it, because the have traditionally ignored the tonal component of spoken English, and the textbook writers have no terminology to explain it. But it may be a a semi-permanent part of spoken American English now, adding to the syntactic complexity and invalidating part of the language's written form (the question mark). It'll be interesting to see how the "grammar Nazis" and instructional writers come to terms with such changes over time.
(Of course, their usual approach is to ignore the actual language, and publish bogus "rules" that have little if any relation to the actual language.;-)
So you didn't bother reading the snopes article, did you?;-)
If you had, you'd have read that the "war chariot" is basically bunk. The truth is much more prosaic: "... what traveled on roads were mostly wheeled conveyances, pulled by beasts of burden (primarily horses), carrying passengers and goods", and "Horse-drawn vehicles, whether they were chariots or carts or carriages, all served similar functions, so practical considerations (e.g., the speed at which horses could travel, the amount of weight horses could pull, the number and arrangement of horses that could be controlled by a single driver) required that they be relatively similar in size as well. "
They pretty much dismiss the usual Hollywood version of the story, while expanding on the above to explain why the ruts in early roads led to a "natural" wheel separation for horse-drawn vehicles, and builders everywhere made new vehicles to fit the ruts in existing roads, leading to a stable "gauge" that was very nearly the same everywhere.
But yeah, war chariots weren't a very important part of this. Carts carrying goods to markets were the most important part, and the norm there was carts pulled by a horse team that was two horses wide (by N horses long). That's what produced the standard-width tracks.
Due to my searches for weaponry, vegas trips, and yoga mats Adsense thinks I'm gay.
Similarly, my wife's interest in old movies and a few other "cultural" things seems to have convinced AdSense, Netflix, Amazon and others that she's a gay male. I'm not sure what they think I am, and maybe I don't want to know.
An even funnier confusion started years ago, when she was a student at a local university, and a friend of hers who was from Russian discovered that she was pregnant. The husband was still in Russia, and wasn't here when it was time for the birth, so my wife went along to the hospital to help her deal with the bureaucratic types there (and as an occasional translator). She soon discovered that the hospital had put her name down as the "father" of the child, when she started getting ads for new-baby products. This has followed her since then, although the friend and her son have long since returned to Russia. Two decades later, she still occasionally gets junk mail implying that she has a son. (She has two grandsons, but no sons.)
So she's a gay male who is the father of a Russian baby. And I'm married to her (which is legal here in Massachusetts;-).
This tells us a lot about the credibility of "ad targeting".;-)
Hmmm... The only instance of "Subways" that by browser (firefox) can find here is that one in your post. And now probably the two in my post.;-)
So where are these "ads" that supposedly exist on slashdot? Curious readers want to know...
Actually, some years back I got a nice email from someone (or something) at/. say that, due to my karma from the mod system, I would no longer receive ads. I was surprised by this, since I hadn't ever noticed ads here. Maybe it's because I have had Adblock installed since it first came out. I dunno, but it was interesting to see that the/. gang "rewards" people who do a reasonable job of posting and modding by not sending them ads. I didn't tell them that it wasn't necessary, since I wasn't seeing their ads anyway. And I suppose this could be a reasonable approach toward building a web site of reasonably high quality. (Not that everything here qualifies, of course.;-)
And I have occasionally had a bit of geekish fun "tweaking"/.'s mod system. I'm still trying for a funny+insightful+troll mod, but I've never got it. All 3 of the 2-item mods, yes, but never all three for the same post. It's a real challenge, since it's so difficult to guess what someone with mod points will consider trolling. And there's the other problem, that posts intended as funny are so often modded insightful, and vice versa.
But probably none of this has anything to do with ad targetting. (Should that have 2 or 3 t's? Now that'll probably produce a real flame war...;-)
It seems to me that one of the most compelling arguments against the status quo of our IP law is how it ephemerizes most works by preventing their circulation and their movement from one format to another. If the owner of the distribution rights of the works is uninterested in moving a work, say, from a vinyl record to a CD, then the only way to find the work on CD is to break the law--even if the person interested would be willing to spend money for the work.... What this effectively means is that only the most popular (or most lucrative) works make the format transition for any new format.
Except that this isn't really true for the last such transition, to online MP3s. Those can be created very easily by the musicians themselves (or by a techie friend). I've been involved in a lot of those, which are typically handed out free, just hoping for listeners.
What often happens then is that various listeners post comments on the recordings, saying what they liked and didn't like. After a while, a group has collected many such comments, and decides to get together and re-record some of them, incorporating some of the critics' suggestions (but never all of them;-). They typically make a somewhat higher-quality recording the second time. Then they put it online and wait for the comments to trickle in.
In several cases, they start getting questions of the form "Where/When can we buy your album?" After a while, they take this seriously, and sit down with their recording techies to create the tracks -- which they also post online.
This stage generally gets replies, which lead to re-recording a few of the tracks, but usually not all of them. Then they announce their first "album" to their collection of fans.
As various people suggested back in the 1990s when this approach started to develop, this tends to lead to fewer albums than before, but the ones produced are much higher quality. And since listener feedback was incorporated for all but the first recordings, the results tend to be tracks that appeal to all listeners (who like that sort of music).
The exclusion of the big distribution corporations is just one of the benefits of this scheme. Of course, eventually we may have distributors who cooperate with this approach. But it's unlikely that the current distribution corporations will be part of the resulting system, since their business plan is based on controlling what is distributed and claiming the lion's share of the income.
Anyway, it's all very interesting, but we'll have to stick around a few more decades and see how it works out. The Big Guys are starting to wise up, and they have the legislative clout to buy laws that outlaw such "independent" distribution. We can all hope they fail, but history says that such failure isn't guaranteed, and it's always possible that they'll find ways to claim the income from the independent "content producers", even for things that they'd never have approved on their own.
Slashdot Mirror
What part on non-Lenovo (or earlier non-IBM) laptop is not replaceable? Every laptop I've owned that has had something break I've been able to find a replacement part for it.
Just a reminder that the topic here is the possibility of backdoors being built into the hardware and/or software. So replacing something that breaks includes replacing any builtin backdoor with the latest, upgraded version. When dealing with such security issues, the operable mantra is always "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Saying that no backdoor has been demonstrated is not evidence that there is no backdoor. To satisfy even the minimally-competent security folks, they need a way of verifying that no backdoor exists.
Various people have already pointed out that "Made in USA" has slowly come to be read as a security warning in many parts of the world. This story isn't materially different from the Stuxnet story, or the Siberian pipeline explosion story. Yeah, we're talking about "Made in China" now, but the issue isn't materially different.
People are slowly waking up to the fact that computers are no longer just geek (and accountant ;-) toys; they are are now part of our infrastructure. Lives depend on the little things. If you want your electronic gadgets accepted in security-critical situations (e.g., hospitals or airplanes or autos), you will be expected to supply access to all the inner workings, down to the lowest level, so that the analysts can verify that you haven't slipped in something extra that you haven't told anyone about.
And security problems may not be the result of intentional tweaking. Remember all the fun we had reading and making up jokes about the Pentium floating-point problems? A computer processor that doesn't know how to do basic arithmetic properly is a serious "security" problem, too. If your life depends on the correct arithmetic in a hospital's equipment (or your future car's drive-by-wire controller), you should probably try to ensure that the geeks can get at it and verify that it knows how to do basic calculations correctly. We have good evidence that the manufacturers can't be relied on to get even such basic stuff right.
Actually, I've read a number of similar stories, dealing with both the original ARPAnet and the origins of unix at Bell Labs. What they all have in common is the problem of dealing with incompatible gadgetry that use different data/message formats, with a solution that involved connecting the incompatible stuff to a computer running software that acted as a translator. Acting as a remote terminal was part of about half the stories, and translating file formats was often involved..
I get the impression that the general incompatible of electronic stuff, especially computers, was a common complain in the years around 1970. That was a time when computers were spreading rapidly, and smaller computers were coming out that were cheap enough that they could be the center of a small lab rather than in an organization-wide computer center. So it was feasible for people to consider uses that wouldn't be permitted in the batch-oriented computer centers of the time. Using a computer as a "middle-man" between stuff that couldn't quite communicate was likely a widespread application of such smaller computers.
It's too bad that a lot of this was so poorly documented, so that often all we have is after-the-fact anecdotes from a lot of different sources. But the people involved probably just thought they were working on personal annoyances with their equipment, not inventing important new things or fomenting some sort of revolution. ;-)
Security equipment manufacturers are notorious for using proprietary equipment or file formats to limit interoperability with the competition's systems, ...
You should have written " All manufacturers are notorious for using proprietary equipment or file formats to limit interoperability with the competition's systems." This problem has been with us from the start of the industrial age, and possibly earlier.
This was one of the primary reasons why, back in the 1960s, the US military's ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency, now DARPA) created the R&D project that led to the ARPAnet, which evolved into the Internet. The military folks were using more and more electronic gadgetry, and had learned that it was impossible to write military specs so precisely that manufacturers couldn't find subtle ambiguities and create data formats that were incompatible with their competitors. The manufacturers' reps always used the same argument: "If you'd bought only our stuff, you wouldn't have problems of incompatibility."
So they faced the fact that such incompatibilities are a permanent fact of life, and developed a solution: They'd plug electronic gadgets into those newfangled "computer" thingies, where they could write software that would decode a gadget's signals and data formats, translate them to a standard format, and transmit them to another computer with attached proprietary gadgets, where the software would translate the standard formats into their manufacturers' formats. This allowed remote military sites to use whatever equipment they had on hand (which hadn't been destroyed by some enemy ;-), and it could communicate with other equipment anywhere else that they could send the standard-format data.
This has always applied to "obsolete" equipment, too. Manufacturers want customers to continually upgrade to the latest stuff, and encourage this by making the current stuff unable to communicate with stuff more than N releases old. But if you still have the software that talked to the old models, you can use it and the ARPA/Internet system to communicate with the newer models, using the same translation-to/from-standard scheme.
It can be amusing to read comments implying that this sort of incompatibility is something new. It's not only not new; it was one of the prime motives for the development that led to the Internet and its protocols half a century ago. Without it, hardly any electronic gadgets would be able to communicate with anything not from the same manufacturer (and "upgraded" fairly recently).
If you investigate, you may be surprised to learn how much of the Internet's infrastructure is running on ancient PCs that will no longer run MS Windows (or DOS ;-). I've helped build a number of "server centers" that were made up mostly of free PCs whose previous owners just wanted to dump them. It's now 10 or 15 (or 20) years later, and the server software is still sitting there running just fine, talking to any equipment that it can physically exchange bits with. It's all open-source software, so the software is easy to upgrade indefinitely. The vendors aren't very happy with us, though. ;-)
I've also worked on a number of software projects that can be summarized as "cracking" a company's data, typically from old backups, and sending it to modern computers in formats that they understand. This hasn't been for law-enforcement or military agencies; it has been for the companies themselves who find that their old data is either unreadable or misinterpreted by current IBM/Microsoft software. It's an old story ...
And to steer back to the original topic, the same comments apply to whatever digital media you may have. If you want your family photos or videos usable 20 or 50 or 100 years from now, you should be translating them to (preferably several of) the current standard formats. Keep multiple copies of each.
geeze if you're gonna be properly snarky, just send him here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP
Ah, you beat me to it! Actually, I was going to suggest Monty Python, or the Meat Puppets. But I suppose that, since the topic is porn, Missionary Position might be the most appropriate.
google for "Rainbow Parties" as an example.
Urban legend, and almost entirely a moral panic spread by various media sources. At least, that is what I found by googling that!
Yeah, that's what they want you to believe. In reality, all of your friends (male and female) are regularly attending such parties, and having a great time. But they (and the rest of us here on /.) don't want people like you to have that kind of fun, so we've put all those comments in the Usual Places online to convince you that they're myths.
Actually, the "curvature" of space-time really is a case of better precision in astronomical measurement turning up an anomaly that didn't match Newton's equations. The main ("textbook") example was, of course, the orbit of Mercury, whose anomalous precession was published by Le Verrier in 1859, more than a century after Newton's death in 1727. Newton and his colleagues couldn't have dealt with this anomaly, because their equipment couldn't measure it accurately. They actually did measure an anomaly in Mercury's orbital precession, and explained it as an effect of the other planets, primarily Jupiter and Saturn.
Einstein's new (improved!) equations successfully explained Le Verrier's anomaly. But this really does qualify as a refinement of Newton's mechanics, since most of the data that demonstrated the anomaly was collected after Newton died.
Actually, it has long seemed to me that someone back in Newton's time, or even Galileo's, could have observed the deflection of stars' positions near the sun during total eclipses. That would have been a good hint that something funny was going on near the surface of the sun. It seems that Newton's mechanics do predict light curving near the sun, but predict only half the actual deflection. I've never read of anyone mentioning this before the 19th century. Anyone know about this?
(One of my favorite bits of astronomical history is that Newton actually "disproved" Copernicus claim that the Earth orbits the sun. He showed that the Earth doesn't orbit the sun at all; both of them actually orbit what we now call the barycenter of the solar system, i.e., the center of mass of the entire solar system, and that barycenter is usually outside the sun. This is mostly fun because, while technically true, it's basically silly, since the barycenter is rather close to the sun, and there's no other massive body anywhere near it. But the observational error here is in the third decimal place, so it's reasonable that Copernicus would see the sun as the center of it all back in the early 1500s. So Newton didn't really show that Copernicus was wrong; he showed that Copernicus's data didn't have enough precision to pinpoint what the Earth actually orbited.)
Supplements? Fuggedaboutit. I don't think my Dad took anything except Vitamin Beer until his 60s. By then, what's the point? Money blown on that shit is money that could have been spent on healthy fun.
Heh. It's well-documented that (moderate) consumption of beer and/or wine is correlated with a longer lifespan. Since this was verified by a number of studies back in the 1960s and 1970s, a great many of the "further research is needed" studies have been done, and quite a lot of them have supported the conjecture that much of the benefit comes from the vitamins produced by the yeast. This is used to explain why, for instance, people who consume the same amount of ethanol in distilled form as the beer/wine drinkers seem to get only about half the benefit. Distilled beverages don't have all those B vitamins that are the yeast's waste products.
My wife has worked as a medical data analyst for some decades, and she has had fun bringing home yet another study that explains yet another biochemical benefit of consuming the waste products of yeasts. And we have a running joke about how we probably won't live as long as we should, due to our low consumption of alcoholic beverages.
Vitamin Beer may be a bit of humor, but it has more than a grain of truth to it. Beer, especially a good, unfiltered "craft" beer, does qualify as a vitamin supplement delivery system. Similarly for good, minimally-processed wines, for much the same reasons. Or mead, or pulque, or any of the various other yeast-fermented drinkables consumed around the world.
I am on Atkins diet. Basically I am eating only meat. (Almost) No vegetable, no fruits, no bread, no rice, no sweets. YES YES I know this diet will horrify some people and yes I know it is not very healthy. ...
A few years back, Consumer Reports published a study of diets (complete with their usual ratings table ;-). One of their conclusions was that the Atkins diet was the one with the best long-term results, but they did say that this was mostly because people were generally able to follow it longer than other diets. They also recommended talking to a nutritionist about it, to make sure you get the vitamins and other micro-nutrients that you need, some of which aren't plentiful in most meat.
The "not very healthy" qualification applies to most weight-loss diets for pretty much the same reasons. Humans are obligatory omnivores, and if we exclude some kinds of food from our diets, we easily end up with deficiency diseases. This is sometimes expressed by saying that the best diet is "eat less and exercise more". ;-) Except that that only works if the starting diet that you eat less of is sufficiently omnivorous. It won't work if you just eat less of the fast/junk food that put you in the shape you're in. So in general, talking to a nutritionist is probably still good advice (if you can find a good one ;-).
Even Einstein said he hoped people would one day prove him wrong -- being proven wrong means progress. It means a better understanding of the universe. Scientists, real ones, don't mind being wrong, or mistaken.
It's often worthwhile to point out that Einstein didn't "prove Newton wrong", and the progress that Einstein was hoping for will probably also not prove him wrong. Rather, he showed that Newton's equations were approximations, good to 10 or 15 decimal places in "ordinary" situations here on Earth, but not good enough to explain some of the boundary cases that had already been observed by 1900. So far, all attempts to find exceptions to Einstein's equations have failed; i.e., observed results agree with his equations to as many places as we can measure, but this doesn't mean someone won't find situations where his equations are wrong in the 237th decimal place.
Calling this sort of progress "proving X wrong" is rather a stretch of the usual meaning of "wrong" in English. Scientists and engineers tend to understand this. That's why Newton's equations are still taught and widely used. They work quite well for most physical calculations dealing with the vicinity of the surface of our planet. Einstein's equations would give more than 20 places of accuracy, true, but if your instruments can't measure your material that precisely, you're merely spending a lot more compute time to get results no better than Newton's.
This isn't nitpicking. It's pointing out that "wrong" is usually the wrong (;-) term for what typically happens in scientific research. It's actually rather rare for any research to show that a predecessor's work (if truly scientific and not fraudulent) is wrong. Rather, as with Newton and Einstein, the usual result is finding obscure edge cases where more precise measurement is now possible, leading to the conclusion that an accepted theory is actually an approximation. So, rather than an entirely new theory, what happens is that a revision of the old theory is developed. It typically has more complex equations that require more compute time. As a result, the old "approximate" equations may still be used in situations where they are known to be "good enough".
This is probably what will eventually happen with Einstein's equations. The media will be full of "Einstein proven wrong!!!" headlines, but physicists and engineers will continue to teach and use his equations for "normal" situations such as outside a black hole or after the first 10^-33 seconds of the Big Bang.
Similar comments apply to many other scientific fields. Thus, you can find lots of "Darwin proven wrong!!!" claims from our friends the creationists. But the actual story is usually about an interesting special case that Darwin never dealt with. Sometimes it's about something that he wrote about, made conjectures, but didn't actually study. So again, he wasn't shown wrong; he was merely shown to be a pioneer who didn't map the entire landscape in infinite detail.
Medical research is full of studies showing the limitations of previous research, often clarifying earlier results or showing that the reality is more complex than thought. But this often doesn't mean that the previous studies were wrong; rather that they were approximations or special cases. (Well, except for the ones that were outright fraudulent, which is not surprising in a field where profit margins drive a lot of the "research". ;-)
Driving drunk, Why didnt they arrest the individual? why have a law if its not enforced uniformly?
It's to use against someone that you want to harrass, of course. This is hardly a secret anywhere.
Here in the US, it's often mentioned that young non-white males typically have an arrest record by the time they're 18. The conventional explanation is that when young white guys commit such offenses, they're typically released after a "talking to", and sometimes the phrase "scared straight" is used to describe the approach. They aren't (officially) arrested, and no police records usually result. With non-whites, the first offense typically results in an arrest. The fellow will often be released without formal charges, after a similar "talking to", but the police typically keep a record of his arrest.
Similar situations may be found in most places where humans live. It's how we do things, for the most part.
2. Why is it so important for gay men to get out into the woods with little boys?>
Why is it so important for men to get out into the woods with little boys?
Ah; it's the old "All gays are child molesters" trope yet again.
Actually, you should ask "Why is it so important for self-described "straight" men to get out into the woods with little boys." ;-)
After all, the Boy Scouts haven't banned all gay men, only the ones who are open and honest ("out of the closet") about their predilections. They accept closeted gays as Scout leaders.
(We might also repeat the oft-noted observation that "homosexual" and "child molester" aren't synonyms. They probably aren't even correlated. There are child-molesting straight people, and gays who don't find pre-puberty children sexually attractive. If your motive is to protect the children from molestation, excluding gays has little if anything to do with such goals.)
But the main point here is that the Boy Scouts have in fact only excluded people who admit to being gay, while not paying nearly as much attention to people who claim to be straight.
As for police, the problem is that police investigations reveal irrelevant private information. That's something we've just got to accept if we want the police to do anything at all. However, we don't have to let the police collect irrelevant private information when that isn't part of an investigation of a crime. In other words, the ratio of criminals caught to private information collected is too low.
There's also the general problem of "false positives", which have been notoriously common in previous security-related data collection. This was especially common in the "Red Scare" investigations of the 1950s to 1980s.
Back in the 1970s, there was an example that got a bit of coverage in the scientific press. There was a researcher (in Detroit as I recall) who had applied for lots of federal grants, and had been turned down for all of them with no explanation. Eventually, via the FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act), he eventually found the explanation.
It seems that earlier, his teenage son had been using his car frequently to visit his girlfriend in another part of town. Some agencies looking for "subversives" listed a local group that held meetings occasionally in the same block. When the meetings were scheduled, the investigators visited the block, and wrote down all the license-plate numbers. They compared these with the registry, and the owners of all the cars who didn't live in the area were listed as suspected members of the group. So the father was listed as a suspected subversive, and that information was given to funding agencies.
Presumably the investigators didn't notice that his car was there on lots of other days, because they didn't do their scans on non-meeting evenings. This is one good way to get a false positive.
I never read any followups to this story. It's unlikely he had any legal recourse, since failing to give grant money so someone on the basis of false data about them isn't exactly a crime.
Those who use the "we have nothing to hide" argument should probably consider stories like this. Political investigative agencies have a long, sordid history of such false positives, and they've ruined a lot of lives as a result, while typically catching few "true positivies" in their nets.
I wonder if it would be possible to set up a list of such stories, for the education of the general population. It could be useful to impress on people that, no matter how much of a "good citizen" they consider themselves, they can easily be victimized in this way.
The number of "100 year" weather events in the past decode or so has sorta turned into a running joke for comedians. At some point, you should probably decide that either the previous methods of estimating such things were wrong, or the weather patterns have changed in recent years.
Why would you need to sync your phone to the station to get it to work, let's just send unencrypted communication all over the place.
We should be careful in just encouraging encrypted communication, because the usual interpretations of this provide no security at all, and were rejected back in the ARPAnet days of the 1960s by the security advisers.
The usual interpretation of "encrypted communication", of course, is the frequent suggestion that "the Internet" itself should do encryption. This is especially suggested by people who've figured out that the average user doesn't stand much of a chance of doing it right, with modern comm software.
But having "the Internet" do the encryption actually means that the encryption is done by your comm supplier, i.e. your ISP or phone company. What this means is that your comm supplier is the one who also does the decryption, so they have complete access to everything. The recent stories about the close ties between government security agencies and the comm companies show that this would be no security at all.
What was decided back in the 1960s, and what anyone with a basic understanding of security will agree with, is that the low-level comm stuff shouldn't be burdened with any security measures. They are simply a waste of cpu time, since they make your messages accessible to the people who run the low-level comm stuff. The low-level stuff should therefore be tasked simply with getting the bits across as fast as possible. To qualify as secure, any encryption must be handled by the two end-points in a conversation.
Note that this doesn't mean that the (human) end users need to be the ones doing the encryption. What it means is that the encryption software must be running on the piece of hardware that they're using, not by anything further away in the connection.
Of course, then you have the next problem, of preventing spy software from being installed on the hardware at either end. But that's a different issue.
The primary understanding is that we should insist that "encrypted communication" be done only end-to-end. Anything else inherently makes your info available to whoever owns the hardware that's running the encryption software. (And it makes the whole comm system run slower, since encryption software does use cpu time, and if it's not in the end systems, it's 100% a waste of that cpu time.)
The major use-level issue is whether we can create encryption software that runs in the users' gadgets, and which the users can actually use correctly, and which won't be compromised by builtin backdoors such as keyloggers that were installed by the comm companies.
..., no one is labeled as having a condition until a confirmatory test with higher specificity is positive. I can't speak to how terrorists are labeled, but please don't drag medicine down into that morass.
Here in the US, we're still suffering from a case of just such labeling around 20 years ago. That was when we started seeing widespread suggestions that people should avoid being tested for AIDS. The explanations was that the first two widespread tests had false positive rates of about 10% and 5%. The actual incidence at the time was somewhere around 1 per million. So, it was explained, if the entire US population were given the first test, it would catch around 300 people with AIDS, and would also finger 30 million people with a false positive, which would be a disaster for most of them.
Now, it was probably true that the medical people wouldn't take any of the positives seriously, but would just note it in their records, and proceed with the second test, which would find maybe 30 more true positives and 1.5 million false positives. They would then do further tests. But this didn't matter to most of us.
The problem was that all these positives went into a record system that wasn't at all secure, and there were no legal repercussions against people like employers and insurance agencies who found out about the positives. As a result, there was a growing epidemic of job losses, insurance cancellations, etc. Those false positives followed people around, and many of them are still suffering from the results although they never had the disease.
True, this isn't the fault of the medical system. But being "put on a list" has a history of meaning the end of employment and all sorts of other punishments for the rest of one's life. Look up the history of the "Red Scare" of the 1940s through the 1970s for details and many examples.
The only real answer is to impose serious legal penalties on companies, agencies, and others who act up on such positive tests without verifying their validity. So far, the US has very little in place to do this, for either false medical reports or false terrorism reports. So any of us can easily become a victim of a false positive, regardless of our actual status.
(I was tempted to add "unless we're rich and powerful enough", but the story of Ted Kennedy being blocked at an airport because he was on a no-fly list says that that might not even protect you. ;-)
Let us not fool ourselves that the US (or any other) government is actually likely to prevent all (or any) acts of terrorism with these efforts. We have recent proof otherwise.
It's no longer "recent" by media standards, but the (second ;-) attack on the World Trade Center is an excellent example. Much of the news coverage of the event is still available online, and if you dig it up and look at it, you'll see that several things stand out. One is that the US authorities were totally taken by surprise, and didn't have any idea what was happening until after the second tower was hit. However, it became clear in the first several hours that they'd decided who to blame. The reports from everywhere were full of "Al Qaeda" and "Osama bin Laden" (often badly mispronounced ;-), despite the obvious fact that they couldn't have collected the evidence in such a short time.
Over the following weeks and months, it also became clear that their ignorance was pretty much self-imposed. They had been warned about the specific perps by various other countries' security folks, and chose to ignore the information. This was in part due to a serious shortage of Arabic-speaking translators in the US military/security agencies. This was in turn due to their mistreatment of Arabic speakers, which the US has millions of. If you look into this, you'd probably also conclude that anyone fluent in Arabic would have to be really stupid (or suicidal) to volunteer for a translator job in those agencies.
The most parsimonious theory explaining this is that the US government isn't particularly interested in finding and blocking terrorists; they are mostly interested in using such things as a way of instilling fear in the general population. With this understanding, the government's "anti-terrorist" activities make a lot of sense.
(And, of course, treating the US government as some sort of unified, monolithic entity is a major mistake. There are lots of people in various government agencies who understand the situation pretty well. But they're generally not the ones in charge. Or if they are, they also understand that it's all to their own personal benefit. Or they keep quiet because they understand how "whistle blowers" are treated, and don't want that to happen to them. But we may hear from them after they retire. ;-)
Yeah; I was thinking that seven million lines of COBOL is what? Maybe 5 lines of perl? 8 lines of python?
Someone was right about COBOL variable names often being all the documentation you need. That may be right, considering that your typical COBOL variable name pretty much qualifies as a line of code all by itself. Of course, most of each name is assorted illegible acronyms and "Hungarian" style attribute indicators that are different for every program, and thus meaningless to anyone other than the original coders.
Heh; I think you've got the idea. ;-)
An only slightly greater stretch of the idea is the claim that has come out in the US's gun legislation, to the effect that a large majority of the deaths from gunshot wounds are due to suicide.
I wonder how many more interesting examples we can produce showing that most dangers come from "insiders".
Hopefully those exploits are used against our enemies and not against us, but that's probably just a silly hope.
What enemy? China? Don't make me laugh.
Nah; anyone who has been following security-related news stories for at least a few years understands that the primary enemy of any government is its own citizens. They're nearby, where they can vote against you, take you to court, or shoot at you. None of these threats are easily available to people in other countries.
Just dig into the histories of the related US agencies (e.g., HUAC or the FBI or even the CIA) in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. How many external "enemies" -- or domestic "subversives" -- did they ever catch and prosecute? Pretty close to none at all. How many citizens did they attack and serious injure (either their reputation, finances, or physical well-being)? Lots and lots of them.
This story is only news to someone who isn't familiar with the long, documented history of such activities. Fact is, your government considers you more of a threat than pretty much anyone outside its borders. This is especially true if you're involved in any activity that threatens the income (especially under-the-counter income) of anyone in your government.
... how many of us consider the potential for bugs in ordinary software to adversely affect those that use it?"
Isn't that what "bug" means in the software field? After all, an error in software that doesn't affect anything relevant to users rarely (if ever) gets listed as a "bug". Bug reports are always the result of software getting something wrong in a way that a user notices. If the affect were beneficial, I sorta doubt that many users would report it.
A funny aspect to this is that, according to lots of linguistic studies, pretty much all language changes can be summarized as "simplifications", usually removing something from speech, but this never actually results in a simpler language. Typically it introduces irregularities.
A simple example in English: 1000 years ago, Old English had pretty much all the complex plurals that you find in German. In Early Modern English, this was "simplified" by settling on the "-s" plural as the default. However, most common nouns retained their original plural forms. So rather than having a short list of plurals, depending on word class, we now have a single regular plural, plus hundreds of "irregular" plurals for the common nouns that must simply be memorized by someone trying to learn English.
There are many similar examples in all documented languages. Some part of the language is "simplified", but this causes problems because that part of the language no longer interfaces to its surroundings in the same way, and common utterances may survive the change unaltered.
But this all means we don't have to worry about our language "devolving into a series of gutteral sounds". The descendants of English will be just as complex as modern English. They'll just be different from our speech in more and more ways, as time passes.
A fun example is the recent spreading of the "uptalk" syntax, which is documented to have originated in my native dialect (the Pacific Northwest), and is slowly infecting the speech of young people all over North America. The textbooks have failed to come to terms with it, because the have traditionally ignored the tonal component of spoken English, and the textbook writers have no terminology to explain it. But it may be a a semi-permanent part of spoken American English now, adding to the syntactic complexity and invalidating part of the language's written form (the question mark). It'll be interesting to see how the "grammar Nazis" and instructional writers come to terms with such changes over time.
(Of course, their usual approach is to ignore the actual language, and publish bogus "rules" that have little if any relation to the actual language. ;-)
So you didn't bother reading the snopes article, did you? ;-)
If you had, you'd have read that the "war chariot" is basically bunk. The truth is much more prosaic: "... what traveled on roads were mostly wheeled conveyances, pulled by beasts of burden (primarily horses), carrying passengers and goods", and "Horse-drawn vehicles, whether they were chariots or carts or carriages, all served similar functions, so practical considerations (e.g., the speed at which horses could travel, the amount of weight horses could pull, the number and arrangement of horses that could be controlled by a single driver) required that they be relatively similar in size as well. "
They pretty much dismiss the usual Hollywood version of the story, while expanding on the above to explain why the ruts in early roads led to a "natural" wheel separation for horse-drawn vehicles, and builders everywhere made new vehicles to fit the ruts in existing roads, leading to a stable "gauge" that was very nearly the same everywhere.
But yeah, war chariots weren't a very important part of this. Carts carrying goods to markets were the most important part, and the norm there was carts pulled by a horse team that was two horses wide (by N horses long). That's what produced the standard-width tracks.
Due to my searches for weaponry, vegas trips, and yoga mats Adsense thinks I'm gay.
Similarly, my wife's interest in old movies and a few other "cultural" things seems to have convinced AdSense, Netflix, Amazon and others that she's a gay male. I'm not sure what they think I am, and maybe I don't want to know.
An even funnier confusion started years ago, when she was a student at a local university, and a friend of hers who was from Russian discovered that she was pregnant. The husband was still in Russia, and wasn't here when it was time for the birth, so my wife went along to the hospital to help her deal with the bureaucratic types there (and as an occasional translator). She soon discovered that the hospital had put her name down as the "father" of the child, when she started getting ads for new-baby products. This has followed her since then, although the friend and her son have long since returned to Russia. Two decades later, she still occasionally gets junk mail implying that she has a son. (She has two grandsons, but no sons.)
So she's a gay male who is the father of a Russian baby. And I'm married to her (which is legal here in Massachusetts ;-).
This tells us a lot about the credibility of "ad targeting". ;-)
Look at xkcd, not an ad on the site...
See this link?
You can get the Subways comic as a poster!
That's an ad. Them posters ain't free.
Hmmm ... The only instance of "Subways" that by browser (firefox) can find here is that one in your post. And now probably the two in my post. ;-)
So where are these "ads" that supposedly exist on slashdot? Curious readers want to know ...
Actually, some years back I got a nice email from someone (or something) at /. say that, due to my karma from the mod system, I would no longer receive ads. I was surprised by this, since I hadn't ever noticed ads here. Maybe it's because I have had Adblock installed since it first came out. I dunno, but it was interesting to see that the /. gang "rewards" people who do a reasonable job of posting and modding by not sending them ads. I didn't tell them that it wasn't necessary, since I wasn't seeing their ads anyway. And I suppose this could be a reasonable approach toward building a web site of reasonably high quality. (Not that everything here qualifies, of course. ;-)
And I have occasionally had a bit of geekish fun "tweaking" /.'s mod system. I'm still trying for a funny+insightful+troll mod, but I've never got it. All 3 of the 2-item mods, yes, but never all three for the same post. It's a real challenge, since it's so difficult to guess what someone with mod points will consider trolling. And there's the other problem, that posts intended as funny are so often modded insightful, and vice versa.
But probably none of this has anything to do with ad targetting. (Should that have 2 or 3 t's? Now that'll probably produce a real flame war ... ;-)
It seems to me that one of the most compelling arguments against the status quo of our IP law is how it ephemerizes most works by preventing their circulation and their movement from one format to another. If the owner of the distribution rights of the works is uninterested in moving a work, say, from a vinyl record to a CD, then the only way to find the work on CD is to break the law--even if the person interested would be willing to spend money for the work. ... What this effectively means is that only the most popular (or most lucrative) works make the format transition for any new format.
Except that this isn't really true for the last such transition, to online MP3s. Those can be created very easily by the musicians themselves (or by a techie friend). I've been involved in a lot of those, which are typically handed out free, just hoping for listeners.
What often happens then is that various listeners post comments on the recordings, saying what they liked and didn't like. After a while, a group has collected many such comments, and decides to get together and re-record some of them, incorporating some of the critics' suggestions (but never all of them ;-). They typically make a somewhat higher-quality recording the second time. Then they put it online and wait for the comments to trickle in.
In several cases, they start getting questions of the form "Where/When can we buy your album?" After a while, they take this seriously, and sit down with their recording techies to create the tracks -- which they also post online.
This stage generally gets replies, which lead to re-recording a few of the tracks, but usually not all of them. Then they announce their first "album" to their collection of fans.
As various people suggested back in the 1990s when this approach started to develop, this tends to lead to fewer albums than before, but the ones produced are much higher quality. And since listener feedback was incorporated for all but the first recordings, the results tend to be tracks that appeal to all listeners (who like that sort of music).
The exclusion of the big distribution corporations is just one of the benefits of this scheme. Of course, eventually we may have distributors who cooperate with this approach. But it's unlikely that the current distribution corporations will be part of the resulting system, since their business plan is based on controlling what is distributed and claiming the lion's share of the income.
Anyway, it's all very interesting, but we'll have to stick around a few more decades and see how it works out. The Big Guys are starting to wise up, and they have the legislative clout to buy laws that outlaw such "independent" distribution. We can all hope they fail, but history says that such failure isn't guaranteed, and it's always possible that they'll find ways to claim the income from the independent "content producers", even for things that they'd never have approved on their own.