Actually, I'd guess that 18 of those pictures are copyright by Walt Disney Inc. So anyone in Germany who downloads the page is risking a 36-year prison term.
Unless, of course, you have written permission from Walt Disney Inc to copy those picture. You do always get written permission before you download any web page, don't you?
The NASA picture is probably safe, since they give permission to use their images for noncommercial purposes.
The picture of the statue of Walt and Mickey is probably copyright by whoever took the picture, so unless it was taken by a Disney employee, it's probably safe. But we can look forward to the day that taking pictures of a statue like this is a violation of copyright. We've already had a few motions in this direction from the owners of a few public works of art.
Google, by their own terms of service, can't sell your personal data to anyone else. And if they start doing stupid things with it, I'll stop using their services and that'll be that.
Well, maybe, but they'll still have all your stuff that you put on their machines. And they'll do what they like with it. They're a "public" corporation now, answerable to their shareholders rather than to their customers.
Of course, if you put it on your own privately-owned web site, google's bots will eventually find it, and it'll be in their cache.
Let's face it; if you put something on the Web, people can download it. They then have a copy, to do with as they wish. You can only stop them if you have the money to hire a lot more lawyers than they do. If you don't like this, you shouldn't put it on the Web.
Something weird happened when I hit the Preview button, which produced a preview page, but when I submitted it, I was told that I'd already submitted the message. So I found it, and sure enough, it was a bit garbled and truncated. So I cut the link out and put it above, where it might work better.
Now let's see what the Preview button does...
OK; that seems to have worked. Now I'll hit Submit...
Just for this purpose, a special variety of pepper has been developed. So the horticulturalists are ahead of the medical people this time.
You can also find this pepper is several catalogs. Google for "peter pepper" to find some sources online. The eBay photos are among the best, but those peppers were selected for the photo. In reality, the plant produces a lot of rather distorted and strangely-shaped pepers. Only a few look as phallic as those samples.
Another thing some people do is to mix the shredded paper into their compost bin. It's as good as peat moss, and there have been a few studies showing that the bio effects of the ink are insignificant.
Some years ago, when I was in college, I lived in a 4-apartment building that had a coal furnace, but it would also burn paper. We put all our waste paper, including lots of computer output, into the furnace. It saved a significant amount in fuel costs. But the paper didn't burn as long as coal. A full load of coal would burn for two days, as I recall, but paper had to be refilled every day. The ash was about the same with both.
There's gotta be other good uses for paper that you don't want to send to the dump.
[M]aybe it's time for biologists to stop spending time in labs, on boats, and in the forest; and instead, go to Laos and Korea and wander around in markets...since that seems to be the most productive way of finding stuff worth studying.
Actually, biologists doing such field research often do hire locals and use them as expert consultants. It usually turns out that the locals know and correctly distinguish most of the species in their vicinity, while only occasional merging closely-related species. They can usually also tell you a lot about a species' habitat (and culinary uses;-). This speeds up the work considerably.
Of course, the locals usually won't know much about the scientific record. So it still takes a bit of work to decide whether a critter is something new, or a local variety of something already documented. But even there, you'll sometimes find a bright local kid that finds the topic interesting, and you can start him (or her) on the path toward becoming part of the next generation of scientists.
One of the interesting "living fossils" is the Metasequoia, known from fossils, but believed to have been extinct for tens of millions of years. The only known living sequoia species were the two in North America. Then, back in the 1940s, a single stand was discovered in western China. Botanists mailed seeds to other botanists, and now there are millions of them living all over the world.
A metasequoia isn't tiny. A full-grown individual is one of the largest living things on Earth. Here in Boston, Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has a stand of them, and at about 55 years old, they're already spectacular trees. By the time they're mature, in a thousand years or so, they'll tower over everything in their vicinity.
Of course, this is a case of a species not being "known to science" because it's sole remaining habitat was so remote and inaccesible to most scientists. There could well be more such unknown large species.
Several nurseries around here sell metasequoias. I've been thinking of getting one and planting it in the front yard, as a gift to residents a few millenia in the future. I figure it'd be at least 200 years before it started pushing the house aside.
Well, that might be very nice to someone who understands it, but I can't make head nor tail of it. I did stumble across it once while exploring the menus, but since I don't see any clues, I wouldn't have the nerve to start tweaking. I'd probably just turn Opera into a zombie.
Hmmm... I found the window, but I can't make any sense of it at all. I tried poking around a bit, and even found a menu with Opera.app, so I selected it. It showed me something, but I have no idea what it might do or how to use it. I'd be afraid to touch it, because I'd probably just break something and have no idea what.
So is it documented somewhere? Providing a control that's not at all self-explanatory isn't really very helful. Even a button saying "Help" that pops up a window to the docs would be helpful, but I don't see anything like that.
My main reaction is "WTF is all this about?" How do I learn to use it?
I personally don't like Opera and never use it, even though I picked up a free key when they were giving them away.
Since I do a lot of web testing, I have a collection of all the browsers I can get my hands on. I find that, though Opera is probably better (smaller, faster, uses less cpu and memory when idling), I don't use it a lot, either.
The reason is that its controls are different from all the other browers. A semi-standard has arisen for how you do common browser operations. Most of these are totally arbitrary. Thus, CTL-N (or CMD-N on the Mac) opens a new window; CTL-T opens a new tab. Except for Opera, where different keys are used. This means that I have to have a crib-sheet to remind me of how to do thing with Opera. Still, when I'm testing something in several browser windows, I'm always typing the wrong thing in the Opera window, saying "Damn!", undoing the damage, checking the crib sheet, and then doing it right.
Maybe Opera's key mapping is better once you learn it, but I can't tell. It just seems gratuitously different. What they should do (all of them) is set up a keyboard-mapping config window, so that we can tweak the mappings. This would make them all easier to use, since you and I could put our most common operations where they're easiest to reach. And we could make Opera's controls the same, so we could really see how it compares with the others.
Maybe some day they'll do it. For now, at least for those of us who use multiple browsers for whatever reason, Opera is the odd one that's moderately confusing, and this discourages people like me from using it extensively.
Access to it anywhere you have an internet connection.
Well, my pocket calendar on paper is accessible in places where there's no internet connection. Here in the US, that's still over 99% of the landscape.
I've tried a number of PDA calendars. I've never seen one that comes close to the power of a paper calendar. Hell; I've never seen one that lets me schedule an event that wraps around past midnight (though I hope by now some do). And every one I've used has lost events. Some have even lost my entire calendar.
And phones are by an order of magnitude the slowest, clumsiest, most frustrating input devices ever built.
If you're at a public workstation and it won't do https, you should assume that someone removed this capability for a reason - and that reason is to steal your data via a nearby gateway. Walk away and find another one. Otherwise, you'll find that they now have access to everything you accessed while you were there.
Of course, if you're just looking at online news or blogs or porn, you don't have much to hide, and an http-only public workstation is probably safe enough. Just be sure to leave a pretty picture on the screen for the next user.
A few years back, I worked on a project that used ClearCase, and the management really wanted us to use it to record the full history of our projects. The group I was working with decided to take them literally.
After about a week, we found that we were each able to fill our workstations' disks with the compiles we did. The ClearCase setup saved all our.o and executable files, see...
If was fun watching them actually install a second disk on most workstations the first time this happened (and we all showed that the disks were 99% full of ClearCase files recording the week's work. Then, by the end of the next day, the new disks were full, and we announced that our progress was blocked until we could get more disks.
It actually took a couple weeks of meetings (and no progres on the project) before they faced the fact that "You can't delete your files" was not a tenable rule. They simply couldn't afford the petabytes of disk that the project was projected to require under their "save everything" rule.
So finally we were able to start deleting the 99% of our files that couldn't possibly be of any use to anyone, and only save the interesting source files. I don't think most of the management ever did understood what "source" and "binary" files referred to.
Anyway, yeah; if an employer wants to pay for the disk space, I'll happily save all my files for their later study. But somehow, I suspect that they're not gonna get much for their investment. They'll be much better off if they let me be the judge of which 99% of my files can be safely discarded.
If this court does go along with a "save all files" rule, it could be a very interesting precedent. It'll take more than a couple weeks of meetings to get such a court ruling overturned. In the meantime, some disk manufacturers might be doing a lot of business.
Everyone has always acted like water in the universe was scarce and Earth had some special circumstances that allowed liquid water to exist.
That belief has always puzzled me.
Let's see now; H is the most common element in the universe, and the current estimates for other elements have O in third place. So H and O atoms stand a very good chance of meeting each other nearly everywhere, to form HO. HO in turn is highly likely to bump into another H after a short trajectory. There's also a good possibility of that O bumping into an H2 molecule, since much of the universe's H outside stars is in the form of molecules.
Astronomers will tell you that water is one of the most common chemical compounds in the universe. It takes special conditions, mostly plasmas inside stars, to avoid having a lot of water on hand.
Current estimates are that most of the satellites of the gas giants, as well as Pluto and Charon, are around 50% water.
Of course, at the 70K equilibrium temperature around Saturn, you'd expect water to be mostly a rather hard mineral. It doesn't even sublimate at that temperature.
So for Enceladus to have liquid water, even temporarily, implies that there's a heat source somewhere inside. That's the interesting part of this story.
If I copy a piece of software from you, you still have the original. You lose exclusivity over that software -- but that would be a form of artificial scarcity, which is absolutely not welcome in the Age of Plenty.
And this is exactly what a lot of people find objectionable about Open Source. "It's not enough that I have something; what makes me happy is knowing that I have it and you don't."
Sorta like the old comment that it's not enough that I succeed; to be happy, I must also know that others have failed.
There are a lot of people like that in this world.
I've read all sorts of contradictory stuff about GPL 3, and they can't possibly all be true. It'd be nice to read a calm, clear explanation of what it really does, and how it's different from earlier versions.
I suppose that such an explanation should go over all the various FUD stuff and explain why each specific claim is wrong (or partially right or whatever).
In any case, it seems that if I own the copyright on something, I should have the right to release it with extra permissions beyond the law's defaults. Much of the FUD seems to be based on the premise that there's something wrong with me giving away something that I own. What's so immoral, anti-social, or religious about giving someone a gift?
That's been suggested by any number of people. But it's not obvious how one could ever get a Supreme Court test. Even if your lawyer managed to appeal your case that far, they could just turn it down without comment. The media probably wouldn't even notice.
f you follow that through, mankind is likely to get less healthy, and less intelligent.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that evolutionary "fitness" doesn't mean intelligent. Amoebas and mosquitoes can be quite fit for their niche without anything that we would call "intelligence".
Lots of people have pointed out that the sort of intelligence seen in humans hasn't actually been shown to be a survival characteristic. The fossil record shows lots of species that were apparently successful, as shown by their large numbers for a while, and then suddenly disappeared. There's no clear reason to believe that this can't happen to us.
We might make the argument that we have the knowledge to take control of our future. We probably do have such knowledge, or are getting close. But our societies are still run by organizations (governments, corporations, religions, etc) that show very few signs of intelligent behavior. In the world's dominant country, the US, control is in the hands of a clique that's willfuly ignorant openly antagonistic to rationality and intelligence, and showing progressively more belligerence toward the rest of the world.
Human societies have "shot themselves in the feet" before, and could do it again, often knowing full well what they were doing. Around 1600 years ago, Europe threw out centuries of development and handed control to a religion that ruthlessly suppressed learning for more than a millenium. If we do that today, it could easily be fatal to the species, and all signs are that the US has been moving in that direction for 20 years or so.
So I wouldn't place any bets on our intelligence being a real survival characteristic. We might well have been better off sticking with stone-age technology, which wasn't capable of forcing a global catastrophe.
Stick around and find out. With a sufficiently detached point of view, it could be rather entertaining...
1) Compulsory service is little more than legalized slavery
Actually, this is enshrined in the US Constitution. The 13th Ammendment states:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Some people have tried to argue that this wasn't intended to block military conscription. But historians have the public debates from before this was passed in 1865, and it's clear that the phrase "involuntary servitude" was included in part to outlaw military conscription. There was widespread outrage at Lincoln's draft during the Civil War. "Our parents and grandparents came here to escape conscription in European wars, dammit!" Many Americans wanted a guarantee that this would never happen again.
During the Vietnam War, I read a number of articles that explained how many well-to-do Americans had escaped the draft. The tactic was to have the family lawyer send a letter to the draft board stating that the conscripted young man would not be going, and his defense would be the 13th Ammendment. The draft board would investigate. If they were convinced that the family had the ability to appeal to the Supreme Court (and a law company's letterhead helped a lot here), the young man's draft papers would be quietly "misfiled".
Part of the story was that the government doesn't want a Supreme Court test, because the 13th Ammendment would almost certainly be upheld. They especially didn't want such a case to get the attention of the mass media. Of course, if the draft board judged that your family didn't have the time and money for a major legal battle like this, you'd just spend years in jail while it dragged out, until they quietly dropped charges and sent you on your way with a warning.
It is interesting that this topic has been discussed quite openly in (some parts of) the American press, but there is so little public understanding of it. I've found that lawyers tend to say "Oh, yeah; everyone knows that" and then move on to something else. But you do have to do a bit of hunting to find anything on the topic. The mainstream media never seems to mention it.
there's a reason why the US did get rid of a general draft after 73...
2) Professional soldiers don't want to share a foxhole with a stoner who really doesn't want to be there and will turn tail at the first gunshot, leaving the soldier without backup.
During the Vietnam war, one of the more interesting perspectives that I read came from a number of historians, who made the more general observation that you can use conscripts during a defensive war, but they're usually disastrous during a war of aggression.
The explanation is generally along the same lines as the above comment. People are willing to fight for their home, even if you define "home" rather generously as the whole country. People will grumble about conscription, but they'll go along because they understand the need to defend their home, family and friends.
But Vietnam was a pure war of conquest. The entire motive was that US leaders wanted to control who was running Vietnam. They wanted the "communists" out of power, and "communist" basically meant anyone they didn't like. In such wars, conscripts tend to see themselves as captives and slaves of the elite, and are unwilling to risk their own lives so that some unrelated politicians can rule over foreigners. Conscripts are at best a neutral obstruction that waste your troops' time. More often they'll actively try to sabotage the war so they can get somewhere that nobody is shooting at them.
It was interesting to hear this from historians with no obvious political bias. Of course, the US government wanted to save face, and believed their own propaganda that they were trying to help the Vietnamese, so they ignored this sort of warning as long as they could. The evidence seems to be that the historians' warning were rather accurate.
You have to wonder if this applies somewhat to the Iraq war. The US is sending in National Guard personnel, who signed up for national defense but not foreign conquest. And the "stop-loss" program is holding people past their terms of service, which amounts to a form of involuntary conscription. This isn't as blatant as an outright draft, of course. But it' still a case of pressing people into service that they didn't volunteer for, and the motive is to control another country. You'd expect that the historians' warnings would apply to some degree.
I'm abstracting my database code so I'm not dependant on any one vendor. Why would you code any other way?
Because when I'm working for a commercial operation, I'm always under strong pressure to get it working on exactly one system as quickly as possible. Management always views abstracting and portability as academic nonsense that's just a waste of time. If they learn that I'm doing it, I'm in trouble for blocking on-time delivery of the product.
Of course, when it turns out that very few customers have systems exactly like our one or (rarely) two lab systems, they want the "bugs" fixed as soon as possible. They never understand that these aren't bugs at all, but were designed-in features due to the refusal to permit proper abstraction. But again, if you try making such "long-term" arguments, you are in trouble for wasting time and interfering with bug fixes.
Of course, I've often built things with an eye to what happens after delivery, and I often sneak in whatever abstractions and portability that I can manage. But I'm always aware that I'm doing something that my bosses would never understand or aprove.
OTOH, when I'm working on free/open-source stuff, I do usually try to Do It Right. I don't have any boss looking at a delivery date that came from Marketing, so I can get away with doing it right. And I'm working on something because I want to use it. I want to keep using it 10 years from now, and I don't want to have to rewrite it for every new situation. But in commercial settings, it's rare to have any view past this quarter's sales.
mysql plays the (imo somewhat dirty trick) of putting thier client access libs under the gpl so anyone who wants to use them in a propietry app has to pay
I understand how you might not like that, but to me, that is exactly how you make money by giving something away. ie: if a developer wants to release his software for free, no problem. If he wants to close his source then he SHOULD pay, which funds the free mysql for everyone.
Indeed, and this isn't something new or unusual.
Thus, in the music biz, it's fairly common to publish your compositions openly, with a copyright notice. Then, if someone wants to use your tune or lyrics in some money-making creation such as a recording or movie, you can get royalties. Many composers have made significant money from royalties, while allowing the general public to use their work freely.
With music, this is a good idea. People like music that's familiar, and your work is much more likely to be used by other musicians if it's familiar. So giving your creations away and encouraging other musicians to use them is a good (and very traditional) business plan.
What's odd is that software people don't seem to understand this, despite the fact that most of them (that I know) are also musicians.
Of course, music-industry management has never much understood this, either. It's perfectly obvious that music becomes popular first, when it is given out free (broadcast), and only then does it become profitable. But the music industry has a long history of management attempts to block all schemes for free and open distribution. Pointing out to them that they're trying to "kill the goose that lays golden eggs" never has any effect; they always want to block that initial free distribution that has led to big sales so often in the past.
And here we see that the software business is run by people just as determined to shoot at their own feet as is the music business.
Right off we have the canonical conflation of Open Source and Free (as in speech) software. So everyone should start jumping on this and point out that they mean different (and orthoganal) Good Things.
All "open" means, really, is that users are permitted to read the source. This is valuable, because it allows analysis, giving us more bug reports. But in itself, "open" doesn't mean that you are permitted to fork the code. It doesn't give you any rights to do anything with the code not allowed by your local copyright laws. And in much of the world, that pretty much means you can look but you can't touch. Example: With Microsoft's "Open Source", you can read it only after signing an NDA, and then you can't even talk about it with anyone without MS's permission. You can't legally modify it at all.
OTOH, "free" means that you are permitted to modify the code and use it however you like. You can fix bugs, or make a fork if the owner isn't doing the job right (for whatever your definition of "right" may be). But again, "free" doesn't quite suffice in most cases, because if you can't get at the source code, most of that freedom is moot. Example: a number of linux device drivers are "free" in the sense that you can use them with any linux system you have, without getting a per-machine license. But you can't get the source, only the binary. So one could contain a backdoor to the kernel, and you'd likely never know. You certainly can't fix it even if you discover its existence.
TFA only seems to talk about "open" software. The author probably can't be bothered to deal with this critical bit of terminology. But we should be pointing out at every opportunity that, unless it's legally both "open" (readable) and "free" (modifiable), the code really can't be modified, fixed, or forked by anyone but the owner.
So we should be writing critical comments about anything that confuses or conflates these two terms. We should be repeatedly pointing out that without both "open" and "free", we don't get any of the claimed benefits of either.
I don't think we can make accurate claims about a specific event that happened a few billion years ago - even with the wealth of genetic evidence we have today.... I'm talking about an event in our deep past that will probably always be beyond reach.
Well, maybe, maybe not.
But one thing is certain: If you refuse to speculate, hypothesize, or test ideas, then it will certainly always be beyond your reach.
And if it turns out not beyond our reach, someone other than you will solve the puzzle.
The history of science is full of example of things that were far beyond the reach of one generation, but a later generation was able to get the evidence. We've had several such "impossible" successes in the last couple of decades.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I'd guess that 18 of those pictures are copyright by Walt Disney Inc. So anyone in Germany who downloads the page is risking a 36-year prison term.
Unless, of course, you have written permission from Walt Disney Inc to copy those picture. You do always get written permission before you download any web page, don't you?
The NASA picture is probably safe, since they give permission to use their images for noncommercial purposes.
The picture of the statue of Walt and Mickey is probably copyright by whoever took the picture, so unless it was taken by a Disney employee, it's probably safe. But we can look forward to the day that taking pictures of a statue like this is a violation of copyright. We've already had a few motions in this direction from the owners of a few public works of art.
Google, by their own terms of service, can't sell your personal data to anyone else. And if they start doing stupid things with it, I'll stop using their services and that'll be that.
Well, maybe, but they'll still have all your stuff that you put on their machines. And they'll do what they like with it. They're a "public" corporation now, answerable to their shareholders rather than to their customers.
Of course, if you put it on your own privately-owned web site, google's bots will eventually find it, and it'll be in their cache.
Let's face it; if you put something on the Web, people can download it. They then have a copy, to do with as they wish. You can only stop them if you have the money to hire a lot more lawyers than they do. If you don't like this, you shouldn't put it on the Web.
Oops; here's the special link to that variety of pepper.
...
...
Something weird happened when I hit the Preview button, which produced a preview page, but when I submitted it, I was told that I'd already submitted the message. So I found it, and sure enough, it was a bit garbled and truncated. So I cut the link out and put it above, where it might work better.
Now let's see what the Preview button does
OK; that seems to have worked. Now I'll hit Submit
Just for this purpose, a special variety of pepper has been developed. So the horticulturalists are ahead of the medical people this time. You can also find this pepper is several catalogs. Google for "peter pepper" to find some sources online. The eBay photos are among the best, but those peppers were selected for the photo. In reality, the plant produces a lot of rather distorted and strangely-shaped pepers. Only a few look as phallic as those samples.
Another thing some people do is to mix the shredded paper into their compost bin. It's as good as peat moss, and there have been a few studies showing that the bio effects of the ink are insignificant.
Some years ago, when I was in college, I lived in a 4-apartment building that had a coal furnace, but it would also burn paper. We put all our waste paper, including lots of computer output, into the furnace. It saved a significant amount in fuel costs. But the paper didn't burn as long as coal. A full load of coal would burn for two days, as I recall, but paper had to be refilled every day. The ash was about the same with both.
There's gotta be other good uses for paper that you don't want to send to the dump.
[M]aybe it's time for biologists to stop spending time in labs, on boats, and in the forest; and instead, go to Laos and Korea and wander around in markets...since that seems to be the most productive way of finding stuff worth studying.
;-). This speeds up the work considerably.
Actually, biologists doing such field research often do hire locals and use them as expert consultants. It usually turns out that the locals know and correctly distinguish most of the species in their vicinity, while only occasional merging closely-related species. They can usually also tell you a lot about a species' habitat (and culinary uses
Of course, the locals usually won't know much about the scientific record. So it still takes a bit of work to decide whether a critter is something new, or a local variety of something already documented. But even there, you'll sometimes find a bright local kid that finds the topic interesting, and you can start him (or her) on the path toward becoming part of the next generation of scientists.
Yeah, but sometimes size isn't everything ...
One of the interesting "living fossils" is the Metasequoia, known from fossils, but believed to have been extinct for tens of millions of years. The only known living sequoia species were the two in North America. Then, back in the 1940s, a single stand was discovered in western China. Botanists mailed seeds to other botanists, and now there are millions of them living all over the world.
A metasequoia isn't tiny. A full-grown individual is one of the largest living things on Earth. Here in Boston, Harvard's Arnold Arboretum has a stand of them, and at about 55 years old, they're already spectacular trees. By the time they're mature, in a thousand years or so, they'll tower over everything in their vicinity.
Of course, this is a case of a species not being "known to science" because it's sole remaining habitat was so remote and inaccesible to most scientists. There could well be more such unknown large species.
Several nurseries around here sell metasequoias. I've been thinking of getting one and planting it in the front yard, as a gift to residents a few millenia in the future. I figure it'd be at least 200 years before it started pushing the house aside.
Well, that might be very nice to someone who understands it, but I can't make head nor tail of it. I did stumble across it once while exploring the menus, but since I don't see any clues, I wouldn't have the nerve to start tweaking. I'd probably just turn Opera into a zombie.
Is it documented somewhere?
Hmmm ... I found the window, but I can't make any sense of it at all. I tried poking around a bit, and even found a menu with Opera.app, so I selected it. It showed me something, but I have no idea what it might do or how to use it. I'd be afraid to touch it, because I'd probably just break something and have no idea what.
So is it documented somewhere? Providing a control that's not at all self-explanatory isn't really very helful. Even a button saying "Help" that pops up a window to the docs would be helpful, but I don't see anything like that.
My main reaction is "WTF is all this about?" How do I learn to use it?
I personally don't like Opera and never use it, even though I picked up a free key when they were giving them away.
Since I do a lot of web testing, I have a collection of all the browsers I can get my hands on. I find that, though Opera is probably better (smaller, faster, uses less cpu and memory when idling), I don't use it a lot, either.
The reason is that its controls are different from all the other browers. A semi-standard has arisen for how you do common browser operations. Most of these are totally arbitrary. Thus, CTL-N (or CMD-N on the Mac) opens a new window; CTL-T opens a new tab. Except for Opera, where different keys are used. This means that I have to have a crib-sheet to remind me of how to do thing with Opera. Still, when I'm testing something in several browser windows, I'm always typing the wrong thing in the Opera window, saying "Damn!", undoing the damage, checking the crib sheet, and then doing it right.
Maybe Opera's key mapping is better once you learn it, but I can't tell. It just seems gratuitously different. What they should do (all of them) is set up a keyboard-mapping config window, so that we can tweak the mappings. This would make them all easier to use, since you and I could put our most common operations where they're easiest to reach. And we could make Opera's controls the same, so we could really see how it compares with the others.
Maybe some day they'll do it. For now, at least for those of us who use multiple browsers for whatever reason, Opera is the odd one that's moderately confusing, and this discourages people like me from using it extensively.
Access to it anywhere you have an internet connection.
Well, my pocket calendar on paper is accessible in places where there's no internet connection. Here in the US, that's still over 99% of the landscape.
I've tried a number of PDA calendars. I've never seen one that comes close to the power of a paper calendar. Hell; I've never seen one that lets me schedule an event that wraps around past midnight (though I hope by now some do). And every one I've used has lost events. Some have even lost my entire calendar.
And phones are by an order of magnitude the slowest, clumsiest, most frustrating input devices ever built.
Don't access [Online Service that requires a password] from public places?
Good rule. Back when I got my gmail invite, the first thing I tried was to connect to https://mail.google.com/ instead of http://mail.google.com./ It worked just fine.
If you're at a public workstation and it won't do https, you should assume that someone removed this capability for a reason - and that reason is to steal your data via a nearby gateway. Walk away and find another one. Otherwise, you'll find that they now have access to everything you accessed while you were there.
Of course, if you're just looking at online news or blogs or porn, you don't have much to hide, and an http-only public workstation is probably safe enough. Just be sure to leave a pretty picture on the screen for the next user.
A few years back, I worked on a project that used ClearCase, and the management really wanted us to use it to record the full history of our projects. The group I was working with decided to take them literally.
.o and executable files, see ...
After about a week, we found that we were each able to fill our workstations' disks with the compiles we did. The ClearCase setup saved all our
If was fun watching them actually install a second disk on most workstations the first time this happened (and we all showed that the disks were 99% full of ClearCase files recording the week's work. Then, by the end of the next day, the new disks were full, and we announced that our progress was blocked until we could get more disks.
It actually took a couple weeks of meetings (and no progres on the project) before they faced the fact that "You can't delete your files" was not a tenable rule. They simply couldn't afford the petabytes of disk that the project was projected to require under their "save everything" rule.
So finally we were able to start deleting the 99% of our files that couldn't possibly be of any use to anyone, and only save the interesting source files. I don't think most of the management ever did understood what "source" and "binary" files referred to.
Anyway, yeah; if an employer wants to pay for the disk space, I'll happily save all my files for their later study. But somehow, I suspect that they're not gonna get much for their investment. They'll be much better off if they let me be the judge of which 99% of my files can be safely discarded.
If this court does go along with a "save all files" rule, it could be a very interesting precedent. It'll take more than a couple weeks of meetings to get such a court ruling overturned. In the meantime, some disk manufacturers might be doing a lot of business.
Everyone has always acted like water in the universe was scarce and Earth had some special circumstances that allowed liquid water to exist.
That belief has always puzzled me.
Let's see now; H is the most common element in the universe, and the current estimates for other elements have O in third place. So H and O atoms stand a very good chance of meeting each other nearly everywhere, to form HO. HO in turn is highly likely to bump into another H after a short trajectory. There's also a good possibility of that O bumping into an H2 molecule, since much of the universe's H outside stars is in the form of molecules.
Astronomers will tell you that water is one of the most common chemical compounds in the universe. It takes special conditions, mostly plasmas inside stars, to avoid having a lot of water on hand.
Current estimates are that most of the satellites of the gas giants, as well as Pluto and Charon, are around 50% water.
Of course, at the 70K equilibrium temperature around Saturn, you'd expect water to be mostly a rather hard mineral. It doesn't even sublimate at that temperature.
So for Enceladus to have liquid water, even temporarily, implies that there's a heat source somewhere inside. That's the interesting part of this story.
If I copy a piece of software from you, you still have the original. You lose exclusivity over that software -- but that would be a form of artificial scarcity, which is absolutely not welcome in the Age of Plenty.
And this is exactly what a lot of people find objectionable about Open Source. "It's not enough that I have something; what makes me happy is knowing that I have it and you don't."
Sorta like the old comment that it's not enough that I succeed; to be happy, I must also know that others have failed.
There are a lot of people like that in this world.
I've read all sorts of contradictory stuff about GPL 3, and they can't possibly all be true. It'd be nice to read a calm, clear explanation of what it really does, and how it's different from earlier versions.
I suppose that such an explanation should go over all the various FUD stuff and explain why each specific claim is wrong (or partially right or whatever).
In any case, it seems that if I own the copyright on something, I should have the right to release it with extra permissions beyond the law's defaults. Much of the FUD seems to be based on the premise that there's something wrong with me giving away something that I own. What's so immoral, anti-social, or religious about giving someone a gift?
... someday soon you'll be able to find that their web ite lists machines that come with linux instead of (or in addition to) Windows Professional?
I just checked again, and couldn't find the char string "linux" in any of their product pages. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough?
That's been suggested by any number of people. But it's not obvious how one could ever get a Supreme Court test. Even if your lawyer managed to appeal your case that far, they could just turn it down without comment. The media probably wouldn't even notice.
f you follow that through, mankind is likely to get less healthy, and less intelligent.
...
It's perhaps worth pointing out that evolutionary "fitness" doesn't mean intelligent. Amoebas and mosquitoes can be quite fit for their niche without anything that we would call "intelligence".
Lots of people have pointed out that the sort of intelligence seen in humans hasn't actually been shown to be a survival characteristic. The fossil record shows lots of species that were apparently successful, as shown by their large numbers for a while, and then suddenly disappeared. There's no clear reason to believe that this can't happen to us.
We might make the argument that we have the knowledge to take control of our future. We probably do have such knowledge, or are getting close. But our societies are still run by organizations (governments, corporations, religions, etc) that show very few signs of intelligent behavior. In the world's dominant country, the US, control is in the hands of a clique that's willfuly ignorant openly antagonistic to rationality and intelligence, and showing progressively more belligerence toward the rest of the world.
Human societies have "shot themselves in the feet" before, and could do it again, often knowing full well what they were doing. Around 1600 years ago, Europe threw out centuries of development and handed control to a religion that ruthlessly suppressed learning for more than a millenium. If we do that today, it could easily be fatal to the species, and all signs are that the US has been moving in that direction for 20 years or so.
So I wouldn't place any bets on our intelligence being a real survival characteristic. We might well have been better off sticking with stone-age technology, which wasn't capable of forcing a global catastrophe.
Stick around and find out. With a sufficiently detached point of view, it could be rather entertaining
1) Compulsory service is little more than legalized slavery
Actually, this is enshrined in the US Constitution. The 13th Ammendment states:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Some people have tried to argue that this wasn't intended to block military conscription. But historians have the public debates from before this was passed in 1865, and it's clear that the phrase "involuntary servitude" was included in part to outlaw military conscription. There was widespread outrage at Lincoln's draft during the Civil War. "Our parents and grandparents came here to escape conscription in European wars, dammit!" Many Americans wanted a guarantee that this would never happen again.
During the Vietnam War, I read a number of articles that explained how many well-to-do Americans had escaped the draft. The tactic was to have the family lawyer send a letter to the draft board stating that the conscripted young man would not be going, and his defense would be the 13th Ammendment. The draft board would investigate. If they were convinced that the family had the ability to appeal to the Supreme Court (and a law company's letterhead helped a lot here), the young man's draft papers would be quietly "misfiled".
Part of the story was that the government doesn't want a Supreme Court test, because the 13th Ammendment would almost certainly be upheld. They especially didn't want such a case to get the attention of the mass media. Of course, if the draft board judged that your family didn't have the time and money for a major legal battle like this, you'd just spend years in jail while it dragged out, until they quietly dropped charges and sent you on your way with a warning.
It is interesting that this topic has been discussed quite openly in (some parts of) the American press, but there is so little public understanding of it. I've found that lawyers tend to say "Oh, yeah; everyone knows that" and then move on to something else. But you do have to do a bit of hunting to find anything on the topic. The mainstream media never seems to mention it.
there's a reason why the US did get rid of a general draft after 73 ...
2) Professional soldiers don't want to share a foxhole with a stoner who really doesn't want to be there and will turn tail at the first gunshot, leaving the soldier without backup.
During the Vietnam war, one of the more interesting perspectives that I read came from a number of historians, who made the more general observation that you can use conscripts during a defensive war, but they're usually disastrous during a war of aggression.
The explanation is generally along the same lines as the above comment. People are willing to fight for their home, even if you define "home" rather generously as the whole country. People will grumble about conscription, but they'll go along because they understand the need to defend their home, family and friends.
But Vietnam was a pure war of conquest. The entire motive was that US leaders wanted to control who was running Vietnam. They wanted the "communists" out of power, and "communist" basically meant anyone they didn't like. In such wars, conscripts tend to see themselves as captives and slaves of the elite, and are unwilling to risk their own lives so that some unrelated politicians can rule over foreigners. Conscripts are at best a neutral obstruction that waste your troops' time. More often they'll actively try to sabotage the war so they can get somewhere that nobody is shooting at them.
It was interesting to hear this from historians with no obvious political bias. Of course, the US government wanted to save face, and believed their own propaganda that they were trying to help the Vietnamese, so they ignored this sort of warning as long as they could. The evidence seems to be that the historians' warning were rather accurate.
You have to wonder if this applies somewhat to the Iraq war. The US is sending in National Guard personnel, who signed up for national defense but not foreign conquest. And the "stop-loss" program is holding people past their terms of service, which amounts to a form of involuntary conscription. This isn't as blatant as an outright draft, of course. But it' still a case of pressing people into service that they didn't volunteer for, and the motive is to control another country. You'd expect that the historians' warnings would apply to some degree.
I'm abstracting my database code so I'm not dependant on any one vendor. Why would you code any other way?
;-)
Because when I'm working for a commercial operation, I'm always under strong pressure to get it working on exactly one system as quickly as possible. Management always views abstracting and portability as academic nonsense that's just a waste of time. If they learn that I'm doing it, I'm in trouble for blocking on-time delivery of the product.
Of course, when it turns out that very few customers have systems exactly like our one or (rarely) two lab systems, they want the "bugs" fixed as soon as possible. They never understand that these aren't bugs at all, but were designed-in features due to the refusal to permit proper abstraction. But again, if you try making such "long-term" arguments, you are in trouble for wasting time and interfering with bug fixes.
Of course, I've often built things with an eye to what happens after delivery, and I often sneak in whatever abstractions and portability that I can manage. But I'm always aware that I'm doing something that my bosses would never understand or aprove.
OTOH, when I'm working on free/open-source stuff, I do usually try to Do It Right. I don't have any boss looking at a delivery date that came from Marketing, so I can get away with doing it right. And I'm working on something because I want to use it. I want to keep using it 10 years from now, and I don't want to have to rewrite it for every new situation. But in commercial settings, it's rare to have any view past this quarter's sales.
(Only half of a
mysql plays the (imo somewhat dirty trick) of putting thier client access libs under the gpl so anyone who wants to use them in a propietry app has to pay
I understand how you might not like that, but to me, that is exactly how you make money by giving something away. ie: if a developer wants to release his software for free, no problem. If he wants to close his source then he SHOULD pay, which funds the free mysql for everyone.
Indeed, and this isn't something new or unusual.
Thus, in the music biz, it's fairly common to publish your compositions openly, with a copyright notice. Then, if someone wants to use your tune or lyrics in some money-making creation such as a recording or movie, you can get royalties. Many composers have made significant money from royalties, while allowing the general public to use their work freely.
With music, this is a good idea. People like music that's familiar, and your work is much more likely to be used by other musicians if it's familiar. So giving your creations away and encouraging other musicians to use them is a good (and very traditional) business plan.
What's odd is that software people don't seem to understand this, despite the fact that most of them (that I know) are also musicians.
Of course, music-industry management has never much understood this, either. It's perfectly obvious that music becomes popular first, when it is given out free (broadcast), and only then does it become profitable. But the music industry has a long history of management attempts to block all schemes for free and open distribution. Pointing out to them that they're trying to "kill the goose that lays golden eggs" never has any effect; they always want to block that initial free distribution that has led to big sales so often in the past.
And here we see that the software business is run by people just as determined to shoot at their own feet as is the music business.
Right off we have the canonical conflation of Open Source and Free (as in speech) software. So everyone should start jumping on this and point out that they mean different (and orthoganal) Good Things.
All "open" means, really, is that users are permitted to read the source. This is valuable, because it allows analysis, giving us more bug reports. But in itself, "open" doesn't mean that you are permitted to fork the code. It doesn't give you any rights to do anything with the code not allowed by your local copyright laws. And in much of the world, that pretty much means you can look but you can't touch. Example: With Microsoft's "Open Source", you can read it only after signing an NDA, and then you can't even talk about it with anyone without MS's permission. You can't legally modify it at all.
OTOH, "free" means that you are permitted to modify the code and use it however you like. You can fix bugs, or make a fork if the owner isn't doing the job right (for whatever your definition of "right" may be). But again, "free" doesn't quite suffice in most cases, because if you can't get at the source code, most of that freedom is moot. Example: a number of linux device drivers are "free" in the sense that you can use them with any linux system you have, without getting a per-machine license. But you can't get the source, only the binary. So one could contain a backdoor to the kernel, and you'd likely never know. You certainly can't fix it even if you discover its existence.
TFA only seems to talk about "open" software. The author probably can't be bothered to deal with this critical bit of terminology. But we should be pointing out at every opportunity that, unless it's legally both "open" (readable) and "free" (modifiable), the code really can't be modified, fixed, or forked by anyone but the owner.
So we should be writing critical comments about anything that confuses or conflates these two terms. We should be repeatedly pointing out that without both "open" and "free", we don't get any of the claimed benefits of either.
I don't think we can make accurate claims about a specific event that happened a few billion years ago - even with the wealth of genetic evidence we have today. ... I'm talking about an event in our deep past that will probably always be beyond reach.
Well, maybe, maybe not.
But one thing is certain: If you refuse to speculate, hypothesize, or test ideas, then it will certainly always be beyond your reach.
And if it turns out not beyond our reach, someone other than you will solve the puzzle.
The history of science is full of example of things that were far beyond the reach of one generation, but a later generation was able to get the evidence. We've had several such "impossible" successes in the last couple of decades.