Delegating fundamental business processes (e.g., customer billing) to third parties seems to be a popular with all sorts of companies as a means of obfuscating procedures and dodging responsibility for mistakes. I call bullshit on all of it!
Well, yes and no. If you look into the issue of online billing, you'll find that it's quite baffling to anyone but a computer geek. You can't exchange currency via a web site. Checks aren't much better; they mostly lead to prospective customers moving on to another site. You pretty much have to use third parties like credit cards or PayPal. Most non-geeks don't stand a chance of correctly implementing credit-card purchases. Most small businesses have to relegate online billing and sales to someone who understands how to implement it correctly, i.e., so that you get your money and scamsters can't raid your bank account.
This is part of why google's ads have been so popular. You can set it up in minutes, and there don't seem to be reports of their users being ripped off. It takes a bit of geekery, enough to know how to copy a bit of HTML into a web page correctly. Even this defeats some prospective small-business people, of course, and they have to hand it to a "third party" (brother-in-la, nephew, etc.).
Until someone invents a way to transfer money online reliably without a third party, most online commerce will require a third party. Yes, this can be done dishonestly, to put a legal barrier between the company and the customer. But mostly it's done because it's the only way most non-geek business people can safely do it.
And those third parties are in an excellent position to profit while leaving both the business and the customer without their money. This is especially true for international sales, where there is little if any legal oversight.
[W]ould anything with product activation be considered Spyware?
Probably not. Part of the definition of "spy" is secrecy.
Thus, if I identify myself to you and ask you some questions, nobody would accuse me of spying. To spy on someone generally means that they don't know about what you're doing.
The term "spyware" implies more than that it's software. This term implies secretly collecting information.
So if a software installer asks your permission to register you, this really wouldn't qualify as anything with "spy" in its name.
The single most important thing to remember about the Earth, and geology and climatology in general is that things happen very slowly.
Generally true. But a number of studies have produced data implying that the onset of ice ages is often fairly quick, a few decades or a century. Masses of ice are fairly stable, though, so warming typically happens at a much slower pace, taking millenia to rise to pre-ice-age levels.
Of course, such results are generally considered somewhat inconclusive, and further research is needed to verify the time interval of various changes by different methods. But your money should be on the conjecture that warming trends are usually much slower than cooling trends.
It sure would be useful to have temperature data for a few million years. Maybe we should prevail on our religious friends to ask God for the data. Presumably He has the data. Right? Maybe one of His underlings would have the time to collect the numbers from the heavenly archives and post them somewhere...
(I think we should start appending "theory" to every vaguely scientific-sounding phrase. That'd soon end that particular bit of terminological silliness.;-)
He didn't say that they fail at the same rate; he said the the correlation coefficient for size was near zero. This probably means that they have isolated all other factors.
Ah, someone else who knows minimal statistics.;-)
What the study did, as I recall, was your basic multiple regression, using decades of data that they managed to collect on lots of businesses. There were dozens of measurable characteristics, and some of them had coefficients (positive or negative) that were significantly different from zero. The company's size was not one of those characteristics.
I also recall that one of the quantities was a company's age, which had a significant positive correlation with longevity. Probably no surprise, and also not very informative. This just means that the company is doing something right, but doesn't give you a clue what that something (or several somethings) might be.
Actually, the most interesting part of the results was that there wasn't any single measurable characteristic that accounted for a large part of the longevity. To survive a long time seems to require doing a lot of things right, and keeping them right for a long time. But this probably shouldn't come as a surprise, either.
Also, their equations could only account for about half the variance in longevity. The other half is probably things that can't be measured easily. Thus, if a significant factor is relationships with local political and/or mob powers, chances are that no economist can actually get the data.
Note that in 2004, Microsoft suddenly became one of the top contributors to the Republican party. By some coincidence, the Justice Dept's prosecution of Microsoft was settled shortly after the election, on terms highly favorable to Microsoft. The terms included indemnifying them for some kinds of future prosecution. How would you ever include things like this in a regression study?
Any sysadmin could read your e-mail, and you would never know about it.
I've had a number of jobs where I was one of several people who were responsible for keeping the email flowing. One thing I learned early on was that it's difficult to not read at least part of the content of message while trying to diagnose a delivery failure.
My policy has been to gently bring this to the attention of the sender and/or recipient, especially when a message was obviously not job-related. I'd let them know that I had no problem with this, unless it became a load on the system, and I only saw their messages because I was fixing an email problem. But I'd make sure they understood that anyone with admin privileges can read any message, and some of them might not be as liberal about it as I was.
It might be good to publicise this more widely. Metaphors aside, email really doesn't have anything that corresponds to snail-mail's envelope. Anyone working on the email system can read any message if they want. Even the honest ones will accidentally read parts of messages at times, when there are problems.
I also like to remind users of the incident a few years back, when msn.com as caught extracting things (mostly images) from customers' email and web files, and using them commercially. Their policy was that any file on an msn.com machine was the property of MSN, to do with as they like. They publicly apologized and said they'd stop, but there's no reason to believe they (or any ISP) are behaving any differently today.
Heh. Considering the Bush administration's past attempts to attribute terrorism to citizens of Niger, and all the email that most of us get from thereabouts, we can assume that we're all going to be on the list of suspects.
What? Niger and Nigeria are different countries? Are you sure? Do you think that Bush's people know?
(Also, I've gotten some amazing offers from correspondents in Spain, and because of the ETA gang, that's considered a terrorist country.;-)
A Ferrari is faster than a Volkswagen, but it costs more.
Not a good comparison re computer systems. If autos were like computers, the Ferrari would be both faster and cheaper than the VW (and would use less fuel). But most businessmen would still insist that the company fleet be VWs. In fact, they'd order a fleet of VW Golf convertibles to handle heavy shipping, and complain that they can't get a Golf with the capacity of a semi-trailer, while ignoring the suggestion that they talk to a truck dealer.
Come on. Which is more likely to be in business in five years, Home Depot, or Joe's Contractor Shack?
Actually, 8 or 10 years ago I read a study by some economist (whose name I've forgotten) that tackled exactly this topic. It was a large "data dredging" study to determine what company characteristics were correlated with longevity.
One of the study's results, which the authors admitted was a bit of a surprise to them, was that the correlation coefficient for company size was zero. Size wasn't useful in predicting how long a company would last.
So Home Depot and Joe's Contractor Shack are equally likely to have disappeared five years from now.
Look back 10 or 20 years, and ask yourself what people back then would have thought if you'd predicted the imminent disapearance of Pan Am or Digital or any of the other giant corporations that are no longer with us. Then ask yourself how confident you are that familiar names like Home Depot or Compaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHP or IBM or Microsoft will still be around in 5 or 10 years.
If I were in any position of power at Apple, I wouldn't suggest buying out Apple Records. Rather, I'd send them a modest proposal: a "merger", treating them as equals. I'd say that I like their music and their past business model, but that model is going to be really challenged by the coming all-electronic distribution system. So instead, as Apple's new Music Division, their job would be to pioneer the new future. They'd sign up lots of new startup bands, whose music would be distributed by iTunes. Each band would get $.50 of every $.99 track sold, and would get a.Mac account. A band would be expected to run a web site, a weblog, and the obvious email account, and maybe a wiki. There would be a strong emphasis on communicating with fans. They'd get help as they need it, but they'd be expected to be the pioneers. They'd especially be expected to talk to Apple software developers about new software ideas.
Most of the bands would never go anywhere, but this wouldn't matter, because startup and support costs for a band would be low. Within a year or two, they'd have most of the hot new bands, and those bands would be making more money than anyone signed to a traditional distributor.
In 20 years, this Apple^2 company could control the pop/rock/whatever-it's-called-then music market.
Maybe the rest of us should stop worring about the RIAA and start worrying about the coming Apple^2 monopoly...
The ISPs will simply throttle anything encrypted unless it pays extra, or something similar.
This has also been suggested as the result of our government's desire to make sure that we're not dealing with terrorists (or other bogeyman of the week).
My thought is that what they really want is 1) to intercept my online banking, to get all my magic numbers, and 2) to intercept my work-related ssh or VPN links. In both cases, their intent is to sell the information to other interested parties.
There are many reasons for encrypted links. And for decades, the bottom-line solution to most network security problems has been end-to-end encryption.
For ann ISP to block telecommuting and electronic banking, on the excuse that it might be P2P stuff, is utterly unacceptable. And, in most cases, the likely explanation isn't economics; it's that they want to intercept my data and make commercial use of it.
Keep in mind that the Islamic countries of the middle east were once at the pinnacle of science and reason, but now have become theocracies besieged on all sides by modernity. Europe's "Dark Ages" under Christian theocracy put a lid on science for a millenium. Any good arguments why it couldn't happen again?
It would be materially more difficult to pull it off now.
When Rome and the Caliphs respectively killed off their science, they had a strong advantage: Knowledge in permanent form was difficult and expensive to produce. Only a few texts could be carved in stone; essentially historical markers. You had to have a flock of scribes recopying the documents every couple of generations. Only a few such operations could exist, and it was easy for them to be controlled by a central authority.
Then the Western world learned about printing, and it's been downhill for central control of knowledge ever since. By a couple centuries ago, it was possible to have a couple-person print shop, printing and disemminating anything at all with little control by the rulers. The rulers invented this thing called "copyright" to attempt to keep printing under control, but it was never all that effective as a tool of suppression.
Nowadays, it's even worse for those who would control knowledge. We have a worldwide network that allows anyone to easily and cheaply cache any sort of text, and make it available in seconds to the rest of the world. Copyright works (somewhat) for artistic control, but is a total failure at controlling facts and knowledge.
Governments as oppressive as China's are learning that they need the Net if they are to compete in the world's economy. They're doing their best to filter and censor it, but they're also learning that it's not really possible any more.
The US governmet even learned this, when they tried and failed to restrict American access to local sources of Middle-Eastern news such as aljazeera.com, and all the other sites that are in both Arabic and English. A few years back, the image of all Moslems as bomb-throwing fanatics could be used; now enough of us have gone online and checked that even George Bush had to publicly declare Islam a "peaceful religion". So many of us had read the imams' decrees against the killing of innocent bystanders that even Dubya had to face the fact that the propaganda didn't quite work anymore, except among the totally ignorant.
Yeah; the fanatics might gain control again. But they have a powerful enemy, in the form of an information system that easily gets out the truth along with the lies, and which is not easily controlled by anyone.
Ah; someone finally gave that a "funny" mod. That "insightful" mod struck me as bizarre. I mean; it's such an obvious wisecrack; WTF is insightful about it?
Now I just need a third "troll" mod to make my day complete...
(I keep trying for all three, but I haven't succeeded yet.)
Well, I'd guess that if your German grandfather were to comment that he thought that Jews were OK for the most part, a lot of peole would read this the same way.
Granted, taken literally, this sort of statement is simply true. Most Jews, Italians, Russian, Germans, or even Republicans are basically decent people. And all groups have a minority of baddies. Sometimes the baddies gain political power.
But this sort of phrasing does tend to trigger a "read between the lines" reaction in a lot of people. Sorta like saying "Some of my best friends are <group>." You might mean this as a simple, literal statement. But this sort of comment is usually a disclaimer of bigotry, and is all too often voiced as an attempt to sound unbiased. It's often followed by ", but..." plus a bigoted statement. (The OP didn't do that in this case, though.)
If you don't want people to (mis)interpret such statements, it's a good idea to learn to recognize them and find a less easily-misconstrued way of phrasing them.
Myself, I'd prefer to object to "I think science needs to be left alone for the most part." Rather, I'd point out that the reason that science has been such a success is that scientists have rarely left each other alone. Instead, they have formalized and institutionalized ways of attacking each others' ideas, in a manner that usually doesn't lead to personal animosity. But, unlike how it's being done at NASA, the scientific approach is to attack an idea in the open, not suppress it by political means.
[H]ow accurate do you think the global temperature measurments were from WWI and before?
Probably less accurate than todays, but less accurate than the forecast for tomorrow.;-) Climate averages are a lot easier to measure than short-term weather. There's a long list of techniques for estimating average temperatures in the past. Thus, if there are glaciers on nearby mountains, they do a good job of averaging ver several years. Dates of lakes freezing give you a good idea of mean winter temperatures.
I saw a cute example some years back, in which mean annual temperatures in one area were derived from graveyard records of frost depth, which the gravediggers had methodically recorded. More enerally, soil averages temeratures over a longer time as you dig deeper, and sometimes you have ways of getting that data.
But it's a good point. Temperature records from before 1900 should always be suspect, and you should require several independent estimates before believing them.
Want to know what was the most visited sites by our network in 2005 besides Google? MoveOn.org & the Drudge Report.
Heh. Like a lot of news junkies, I have both of these in my standard set of tabs. And as someone who writes a lot of code that generates HTML, I've investigated this sort of thing.
There's a simple reason for such high hit counts. If you look at the source to drudgereport.com's main page, you'll see the tag \<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="200">. This tells your browser to refresh the page every 200 seconds. So if you have a page of tabs, one for drudgereport.com, your browser will fetch a new copy 462 times per day, whether you're there watching or not. Similarly for most of the high-traffic news and blog sites. Look at the HTML source from nytimes.com, for example; it has content="900".
I've asked on a number of fora how to get various browsers to ignore this auto-refresh. The general answer is: You can't. None of the common browsers seems to have a config option that controls auto-refresh. Not even firefox. If you're behind a firewall with an HTTP proxy, you can install software there that will filter HTML files and strip out this META tag. That's far beyond the capability of 99% of the web's users, so it doesn't much happen.
So the "real" hit counts at such sites are lower by a couple of orders of magnitude.
As has been said before, of course the Big Bang is a theory. The question is whether it should be called as such.
Maybe this would be a good idea. What could be useful here is a bit of public education. In particular, part of the problem is that to the general American public, "theory" is a synonym for "guess". The give-away is the frequent use of the phrase "just a theory". The religious people are taking advantage of this.
But if writers were to persistently use "theory" in its scientific sense, with occasional explanations of its scientific meaning, we might overcome this strategy. Maybe we could get across to the public that "scientific theory" has a fairly precise meaning, and it doesn't mean "guess".
Then we could just respond to such things by saying, for instance, that the Big Bang is a theory, but Inteligent Design isn't (because it hasn't passed the required scientific tests).
We could follow this by other examples, such as the Theory of Gravity, which is a theory. But what physicists call String Theory really isn't a theory yet; it should really be called "the String Conjecture" (or maybe hypothesis).
Imagine the fun of trying to get the religious folks to explain why they want a belief to be called "theory", and not "hypothesis" or "conjecture".
OK; maybe it would just be boring, and not all that much fun. But we really should be insisting that, if someone wants a belief to be considered "theory" in a scientific setting, they must first do the sort of tests that are required of scientific theories.
No, of course not, but that's not the issue at hand.
We're not talking about "science" versus "religion". We're talking about specific sorts of science versus American Christian fundamentalists. These definitely are mutually exclusive. These religious people have the arrogance to make specific claims that scientists have shown to be incorrect. The religious extremists have sufficient political power in the US that they can supress the scientific findings that can't be reconciled with their religious beliefs.
The fact that most religious people aren't doing this isn't germane to the issue. The issue is the actions of American religious fundamental extremists, and the fact that they are successfully suppressing the reporting of scientific results in organizations like NASA and NOAA.
Actually, there's more going on here than a religious debate. A major part of the suppression of people like NASA's James Hansen is that his results on climate change are not welcome to many of the Bush administration's business supporters. The politicians know that they can't fight such things on their merits, but they can use political pressure to keep the information from the American people. And part of the story is that the corporate crowd has rather cynically recruited the religious fundies to help fight the battle by confusing the issue with religion.
BTW, a few days ago, NPR's On Point radio show finally had an interview with Dr Hansen. It's an interesting listen. He was fairly clear about the situation, in a rather low-key manner.
You could go to a church, be married in the eyes of god and never file a certificate.
Indeed, and in every US state there are ministers, priests, rabbis and/or imams who are willing to perform same-sex marriages. If their religious sect doesn't permit it, they do it anyway; they just don't tell their superiors.
In pretty much every case, I've heard them say that the state may not recognize the marriage, but God is watching and recognizes it.
The only real issue in the gay-marriage debate is whether the government shall recognize the marriage.
This is mostly why this WoW issue is so bizarre and humorous. Who cares whether the gang running the game approves of some real-world relationship?
Actually, considering the nature of the game, you'd think they'd have the sense to approve of all sorts of "unusual" relationships. It would just add to the fun, no matter what your personal real-world ideology.
I do sorta wonder what the ideologues think God's opinion might be about a relationship between two characters in a fantasy world.
We could create an army with self-routing radio communications. But it'd be expensive as all hell.
It would only be expensive to develop. That requires a bunch of smart programmers who are willing to go against the commercial grain. But it's really just a SMoP (Small Matter of Programming. Once implemented, the hardware wouldn't be materially more expensive than the ad-hoc mess that is currently in use.
The real barrier has been the same all along: Commercial suppliers have a strong incentive to try to block communication with the competitor's equipment. This was a large part of why ARPAnet was funded in the first place. And commercial obstructionism still has the upper hand.
To get a truly capable comm system that works with all vendors' equipment and is resiliant to equipment failures (e.g., from a missile strike, an ISP's QoS tactics or a government's censorship) requires some smart programmers who aren't in the pay of any of the vendors.
But once implemented, software can be replicated almost for free.
And slashdot screwed up your second comment, too.;-)
Meanwhile, I note that slashdot sends out its pages with <meta... charset=iso-8859-1"> in the header. So the mangling of that '£' is especially strange. Being in the UK, I'd guess that your default charset is also 8859-1, so there really shouldn't have been a problem. Let's see if my use of the pound symboll gets mangled similarly.
A few days ago, we had a bit of a discussion of the Chinese google. There were a few messages where it would have been very useful to include some Chinese characters. For example, in explaining the difference between the spellings "Tiananmen" and "Tienanmen", which correspond to slightly different Chinese text.
You'd think that by now we'd be able to include all the different UniCode charsets in a text list this. Different slashdot contributors are going to have different charsets, and I don't see anything in this "Post Comment" page that lets me specify a charset.
I wonder if there's a tag in XHTML that overrides the document's charset declaration, and declares a different charset for a section. I haven't read of one, but then I don't know all of XHTML. There could very well be an elegant solution to this that would allow the inclusion of a fragment of Chinese or Arabic or Mongolian or Mayan or whatever.
OTOH, slashdot does seriously restrict the HTML that is allowed. I can see the list a few lines lower. Unless you can name a new charset in a <div> tag, there's probably no way to Do It Right.
[I]t used to be that only the military could fark up my garage door opener. Now everybody will be able to.
Heh.
However, to put it in perspective, we should note that this is directly in line with the original design, back when the Internet was called ARPAnet.
The funding came entirely from the US Dept of Defense, and if you dig up the early ARPAnet docs, you'll find lots of diagrams of military scenarios, with everything communicating via wireless links. This makes sense, of course, because you really can't tie together tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc. with wires.
If you read the docs, you'll find that there was a strong emphasis on automatic reconfiguration, as the enemy shot down your comm equipment. Routes were to be reconfigured dynamically. The network was to use whatever comm equipment was available. It was to use whatever frequencies were usable to get the data through.
But primarily, as things got shot down, everything was supposed to constantly monitor the electronic environment, and dynamically reconfigure itself so that it kept working.
Now it's four decades later, and people are coming up with the same ideas, and pushing them as something new. Except now the "enemy" is the FCC and the corporations that want to control their part of the spectrum and block access to the competitors' equipment.
Maybe some day we'll actually get what was conceived back in the 1960's.
Um; they don't own those; they're only renting. Ownership of humans was made illegal back in the 1860s.
As Microsoft has been learning lately, any of their employees can walk out the door at any time.
Of course, if they seriously work on keeping their people happy (PhD or not), the story might be different. Reports are that they're doing this, so far.
Slashdot Mirror
Delegating fundamental business processes (e.g., customer billing) to third parties seems to be a popular with all sorts of companies as a means of obfuscating procedures and dodging responsibility for mistakes. I call bullshit on all of it!
Well, yes and no. If you look into the issue of online billing, you'll find that it's quite baffling to anyone but a computer geek. You can't exchange currency via a web site. Checks aren't much better; they mostly lead to prospective customers moving on to another site. You pretty much have to use third parties like credit cards or PayPal. Most non-geeks don't stand a chance of correctly implementing credit-card purchases. Most small businesses have to relegate online billing and sales to someone who understands how to implement it correctly, i.e., so that you get your money and scamsters can't raid your bank account.
This is part of why google's ads have been so popular. You can set it up in minutes, and there don't seem to be reports of their users being ripped off. It takes a bit of geekery, enough to know how to copy a bit of HTML into a web page correctly. Even this defeats some prospective small-business people, of course, and they have to hand it to a "third party" (brother-in-la, nephew, etc.).
Until someone invents a way to transfer money online reliably without a third party, most online commerce will require a third party. Yes, this can be done dishonestly, to put a legal barrier between the company and the customer. But mostly it's done because it's the only way most non-geek business people can safely do it.
And those third parties are in an excellent position to profit while leaving both the business and the customer without their money. This is especially true for international sales, where there is little if any legal oversight.
[W]ould anything with product activation be considered Spyware?
Probably not. Part of the definition of "spy" is secrecy.
Thus, if I identify myself to you and ask you some questions, nobody would accuse me of spying. To spy on someone generally means that they don't know about what you're doing.
The term "spyware" implies more than that it's software. This term implies secretly collecting information.
So if a software installer asks your permission to register you, this really wouldn't qualify as anything with "spy" in its name.
The single most important thing to remember about the Earth, and geology and climatology in general is that things happen very slowly.
...
Generally true. But a number of studies have produced data implying that the onset of ice ages is often fairly quick, a few decades or a century. Masses of ice are fairly stable, though, so warming typically happens at a much slower pace, taking millenia to rise to pre-ice-age levels.
Of course, such results are generally considered somewhat inconclusive, and further research is needed to verify the time interval of various changes by different methods. But your money should be on the conjecture that warming trends are usually much slower than cooling trends.
It sure would be useful to have temperature data for a few million years. Maybe we should prevail on our religious friends to ask God for the data. Presumably He has the data. Right? Maybe one of His underlings would have the time to collect the numbers from the heavenly archives and post them somewhere
It's "Global Climate Change",
;-)
Shouldn't that be "Global Climate Change Theory"?
(I think we should start appending "theory" to every vaguely scientific-sounding phrase. That'd soon end that particular bit of terminological silliness.
He didn't say that they fail at the same rate; he said the the correlation coefficient for size was near zero. This probably means that they have isolated all other factors.
;-)
...
Ah, someone else who knows minimal statistics.
What the study did, as I recall, was your basic multiple regression, using decades of data that they managed to collect on lots of businesses. There were dozens of measurable characteristics, and some of them had coefficients (positive or negative) that were significantly different from zero. The company's size was not one of those characteristics.
I also recall that one of the quantities was a company's age, which had a significant positive correlation with longevity. Probably no surprise, and also not very informative. This just means that the company is doing something right, but doesn't give you a clue what that something (or several somethings) might be.
Actually, the most interesting part of the results was that there wasn't any single measurable characteristic that accounted for a large part of the longevity. To survive a long time seems to require doing a lot of things right, and keeping them right for a long time. But this probably shouldn't come as a surprise, either.
Also, their equations could only account for about half the variance in longevity. The other half is probably things that can't be measured easily. Thus, if a significant factor is relationships with local political and/or mob powers, chances are that no economist can actually get the data.
Note that in 2004, Microsoft suddenly became one of the top contributors to the Republican party. By some coincidence, the Justice Dept's prosecution of Microsoft was settled shortly after the election, on terms highly favorable to Microsoft. The terms included indemnifying them for some kinds of future prosecution. How would you ever include things like this in a regression study?
I wonder if this study could still be found
Any sysadmin could read your e-mail, and you would never know about it.
I've had a number of jobs where I was one of several people who were responsible for keeping the email flowing. One thing I learned early on was that it's difficult to not read at least part of the content of message while trying to diagnose a delivery failure.
My policy has been to gently bring this to the attention of the sender and/or recipient, especially when a message was obviously not job-related. I'd let them know that I had no problem with this, unless it became a load on the system, and I only saw their messages because I was fixing an email problem. But I'd make sure they understood that anyone with admin privileges can read any message, and some of them might not be as liberal about it as I was.
It might be good to publicise this more widely. Metaphors aside, email really doesn't have anything that corresponds to snail-mail's envelope. Anyone working on the email system can read any message if they want. Even the honest ones will accidentally read parts of messages at times, when there are problems.
I also like to remind users of the incident a few years back, when msn.com as caught extracting things (mostly images) from customers' email and web files, and using them commercially. Their policy was that any file on an msn.com machine was the property of MSN, to do with as they like. They publicly apologized and said they'd stop, but there's no reason to believe they (or any ISP) are behaving any differently today.
Heh. Considering the Bush administration's past attempts to attribute terrorism to citizens of Niger, and all the email that most of us get from thereabouts, we can assume that we're all going to be on the list of suspects.
;-)
What? Niger and Nigeria are different countries? Are you sure? Do you think that Bush's people know?
(Also, I've gotten some amazing offers from correspondents in Spain, and because of the ETA gang, that's considered a terrorist country.
A Ferrari is faster than a Volkswagen, but it costs more.
Not a good comparison re computer systems. If autos were like computers, the Ferrari would be both faster and cheaper than the VW (and would use less fuel). But most businessmen would still insist that the company fleet be VWs. In fact, they'd order a fleet of VW Golf convertibles to handle heavy shipping, and complain that they can't get a Golf with the capacity of a semi-trailer, while ignoring the suggestion that they talk to a truck dealer.
Aren't similes and metaphors fun?
Come on. Which is more likely to be in business in five years, Home Depot, or Joe's Contractor Shack?
Actually, 8 or 10 years ago I read a study by some economist (whose name I've forgotten) that tackled exactly this topic. It was a large "data dredging" study to determine what company characteristics were correlated with longevity.
One of the study's results, which the authors admitted was a bit of a surprise to them, was that the correlation coefficient for company size was zero. Size wasn't useful in predicting how long a company would last.
So Home Depot and Joe's Contractor Shack are equally likely to have disappeared five years from now.
Look back 10 or 20 years, and ask yourself what people back then would have thought if you'd predicted the imminent disapearance of Pan Am or Digital or any of the other giant corporations that are no longer with us. Then ask yourself how confident you are that familiar names like Home Depot or Compaq^H^H^H^H^H^HHP or IBM or Microsoft will still be around in 5 or 10 years.
Actually, I like the pair:
A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged.
A liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.
Gives you a better perspective on a black-and-white world.
If I were in any position of power at Apple, I wouldn't suggest buying out Apple Records. Rather, I'd send them a modest proposal: a "merger", treating them as equals. I'd say that I like their music and their past business model, but that model is going to be really challenged by the coming all-electronic distribution system. So instead, as Apple's new Music Division, their job would be to pioneer the new future. They'd sign up lots of new startup bands, whose music would be distributed by iTunes. Each band would get $.50 of every $.99 track sold, and would get a .Mac account. A band would be expected to run a web site, a weblog, and the obvious email account, and maybe a wiki. There would be a strong emphasis on communicating with fans. They'd get help as they need it, but they'd be expected to be the pioneers. They'd especially be expected to talk to Apple software developers about new software ideas.
...
Most of the bands would never go anywhere, but this wouldn't matter, because startup and support costs for a band would be low. Within a year or two, they'd have most of the hot new bands, and those bands would be making more money than anyone signed to a traditional distributor.
In 20 years, this Apple^2 company could control the pop/rock/whatever-it's-called-then music market.
Maybe the rest of us should stop worring about the RIAA and start worrying about the coming Apple^2 monopoly
The ISPs will simply throttle anything encrypted unless it pays extra, or something similar.
This has also been suggested as the result of our government's desire to make sure that we're not dealing with terrorists (or other bogeyman of the week).
My thought is that what they really want is 1) to intercept my online banking, to get all my magic numbers, and 2) to intercept my work-related ssh or VPN links. In both cases, their intent is to sell the information to other interested parties.
There are many reasons for encrypted links. And for decades, the bottom-line solution to most network security problems has been end-to-end encryption.
For ann ISP to block telecommuting and electronic banking, on the excuse that it might be P2P stuff, is utterly unacceptable. And, in most cases, the likely explanation isn't economics; it's that they want to intercept my data and make commercial use of it.
Keep in mind that the Islamic countries of the middle east were once at the pinnacle of science and reason, but now have become theocracies besieged on all sides by modernity. Europe's "Dark Ages" under Christian theocracy put a lid on science for a millenium. Any good arguments why it couldn't happen again?
It would be materially more difficult to pull it off now.
When Rome and the Caliphs respectively killed off their science, they had a strong advantage: Knowledge in permanent form was difficult and expensive to produce. Only a few texts could be carved in stone; essentially historical markers. You had to have a flock of scribes recopying the documents every couple of generations. Only a few such operations could exist, and it was easy for them to be controlled by a central authority.
Then the Western world learned about printing, and it's been downhill for central control of knowledge ever since. By a couple centuries ago, it was possible to have a couple-person print shop, printing and disemminating anything at all with little control by the rulers. The rulers invented this thing called "copyright" to attempt to keep printing under control, but it was never all that effective as a tool of suppression.
Nowadays, it's even worse for those who would control knowledge. We have a worldwide network that allows anyone to easily and cheaply cache any sort of text, and make it available in seconds to the rest of the world. Copyright works (somewhat) for artistic control, but is a total failure at controlling facts and knowledge.
Governments as oppressive as China's are learning that they need the Net if they are to compete in the world's economy. They're doing their best to filter and censor it, but they're also learning that it's not really possible any more.
The US governmet even learned this, when they tried and failed to restrict American access to local sources of Middle-Eastern news such as aljazeera.com, and all the other sites that are in both Arabic and English. A few years back, the image of all Moslems as bomb-throwing fanatics could be used; now enough of us have gone online and checked that even George Bush had to publicly declare Islam a "peaceful religion". So many of us had read the imams' decrees against the killing of innocent bystanders that even Dubya had to face the fact that the propaganda didn't quite work anymore, except among the totally ignorant.
Yeah; the fanatics might gain control again. But they have a powerful enemy, in the form of an information system that easily gets out the truth along with the lies, and which is not easily controlled by anyone.
We just need to keep it that way.
Ah; someone finally gave that a "funny" mod. That "insightful" mod struck me as bizarre. I mean; it's such an obvious wisecrack; WTF is insightful about it?
...
Now I just need a third "troll" mod to make my day complete
(I keep trying for all three, but I haven't succeeded yet.)
Well, I'd guess that if your German grandfather were to comment that he thought that Jews were OK for the most part, a lot of peole would read this the same way.
..." plus a bigoted statement. (The OP didn't do that in this case, though.)
Granted, taken literally, this sort of statement is simply true. Most Jews, Italians, Russian, Germans, or even Republicans are basically decent people. And all groups have a minority of baddies. Sometimes the baddies gain political power.
But this sort of phrasing does tend to trigger a "read between the lines" reaction in a lot of people. Sorta like saying "Some of my best friends are <group>." You might mean this as a simple, literal statement. But this sort of comment is usually a disclaimer of bigotry, and is all too often voiced as an attempt to sound unbiased. It's often followed by ", but
If you don't want people to (mis)interpret such statements, it's a good idea to learn to recognize them and find a less easily-misconstrued way of phrasing them.
Myself, I'd prefer to object to "I think science needs to be left alone for the most part." Rather, I'd point out that the reason that science has been such a success is that scientists have rarely left each other alone. Instead, they have formalized and institutionalized ways of attacking each others' ideas, in a manner that usually doesn't lead to personal animosity. But, unlike how it's being done at NASA, the scientific approach is to attack an idea in the open, not suppress it by political means.
[H]ow accurate do you think the global temperature measurments were from WWI and before?
;-) Climate averages are a lot easier to measure than short-term weather. There's a long list of techniques for estimating average temperatures in the past. Thus, if there are glaciers on nearby mountains, they do a good job of averaging ver several years. Dates of lakes freezing give you a good idea of mean winter temperatures.
Probably less accurate than todays, but less accurate than the forecast for tomorrow.
I saw a cute example some years back, in which mean annual temperatures in one area were derived from graveyard records of frost depth, which the gravediggers had methodically recorded. More enerally, soil averages temeratures over a longer time as you dig deeper, and sometimes you have ways of getting that data.
But it's a good point. Temperature records from before 1900 should always be suspect, and you should require several independent estimates before believing them.
Want to know what was the most visited sites by our network in 2005 besides Google? MoveOn.org & the Drudge Report.
Heh. Like a lot of news junkies, I have both of these in my standard set of tabs. And as someone who writes a lot of code that generates HTML, I've investigated this sort of thing.
There's a simple reason for such high hit counts. If you look at the source to drudgereport.com's main page, you'll see the tag \<META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh" content="200">. This tells your browser to refresh the page every 200 seconds. So if you have a page of tabs, one for drudgereport.com, your browser will fetch a new copy 462 times per day, whether you're there watching or not. Similarly for most of the high-traffic news and blog sites. Look at the HTML source from nytimes.com, for example; it has content="900".
I've asked on a number of fora how to get various browsers to ignore this auto-refresh. The general answer is: You can't. None of the common browsers seems to have a config option that controls auto-refresh. Not even firefox. If you're behind a firewall with an HTTP proxy, you can install software there that will filter HTML files and strip out this META tag. That's far beyond the capability of 99% of the web's users, so it doesn't much happen.
So the "real" hit counts at such sites are lower by a couple of orders of magnitude.
As has been said before, of course the Big Bang is a theory. The question is whether it should be called as such.
Maybe this would be a good idea. What could be useful here is a bit of public education. In particular, part of the problem is that to the general American public, "theory" is a synonym for "guess". The give-away is the frequent use of the phrase "just a theory". The religious people are taking advantage of this.
But if writers were to persistently use "theory" in its scientific sense, with occasional explanations of its scientific meaning, we might overcome this strategy. Maybe we could get across to the public that "scientific theory" has a fairly precise meaning, and it doesn't mean "guess".
Then we could just respond to such things by saying, for instance, that the Big Bang is a theory, but Inteligent Design isn't (because it hasn't passed the required scientific tests).
We could follow this by other examples, such as the Theory of Gravity, which is a theory. But what physicists call String Theory really isn't a theory yet; it should really be called "the String Conjecture" (or maybe hypothesis).
Imagine the fun of trying to get the religious folks to explain why they want a belief to be called "theory", and not "hypothesis" or "conjecture".
OK; maybe it would just be boring, and not all that much fun. But we really should be insisting that, if someone wants a belief to be considered "theory" in a scientific setting, they must first do the sort of tests that are required of scientific theories.
This is awesome. A large powerful nation giving itself a lobotomy.
Actually, that happened back in November 2000. There was followup surgery in 2004.
At present, prognosis for recovery isn't good.
Science and religion are not mutaully exclusive.
No, of course not, but that's not the issue at hand.
We're not talking about "science" versus "religion". We're talking about specific sorts of science versus American Christian fundamentalists. These definitely are mutually exclusive. These religious people have the arrogance to make specific claims that scientists have shown to be incorrect. The religious extremists have sufficient political power in the US that they can supress the scientific findings that can't be reconciled with their religious beliefs.
The fact that most religious people aren't doing this isn't germane to the issue. The issue is the actions of American religious fundamental extremists, and the fact that they are successfully suppressing the reporting of scientific results in organizations like NASA and NOAA.
Actually, there's more going on here than a religious debate. A major part of the suppression of people like NASA's James Hansen is that his results on climate change are not welcome to many of the Bush administration's business supporters. The politicians know that they can't fight such things on their merits, but they can use political pressure to keep the information from the American people. And part of the story is that the corporate crowd has rather cynically recruited the religious fundies to help fight the battle by confusing the issue with religion.
BTW, a few days ago, NPR's On Point radio show finally had an interview with Dr Hansen. It's an interesting listen. He was fairly clear about the situation, in a rather low-key manner.
You could go to a church, be married in the eyes of god and never file a certificate.
Indeed, and in every US state there are ministers, priests, rabbis and/or imams who are willing to perform same-sex marriages. If their religious sect doesn't permit it, they do it anyway; they just don't tell their superiors.
In pretty much every case, I've heard them say that the state may not recognize the marriage, but God is watching and recognizes it.
The only real issue in the gay-marriage debate is whether the government shall recognize the marriage.
This is mostly why this WoW issue is so bizarre and humorous. Who cares whether the gang running the game approves of some real-world relationship?
Actually, considering the nature of the game, you'd think they'd have the sense to approve of all sorts of "unusual" relationships. It would just add to the fun, no matter what your personal real-world ideology.
I do sorta wonder what the ideologues think God's opinion might be about a relationship between two characters in a fantasy world.
We could create an army with self-routing radio communications. But it'd be expensive as all hell.
It would only be expensive to develop. That requires a bunch of smart programmers who are willing to go against the commercial grain. But it's really just a SMoP (Small Matter of Programming. Once implemented, the hardware wouldn't be materially more expensive than the ad-hoc mess that is currently in use.
The real barrier has been the same all along: Commercial suppliers have a strong incentive to try to block communication with the competitor's equipment. This was a large part of why ARPAnet was funded in the first place. And commercial obstructionism still has the upper hand.
To get a truly capable comm system that works with all vendors' equipment and is resiliant to equipment failures (e.g., from a missile strike, an ISP's QoS tactics or a government's censorship) requires some smart programmers who aren't in the pay of any of the vendors.
But once implemented, software can be replicated almost for free.
And slashdot screwed up your second comment, too. ;-)
... charset=iso-8859-1"> in the header. So the mangling of that '£' is especially strange. Being in the UK, I'd guess that your default charset is also 8859-1, so there really shouldn't have been a problem. Let's see if my use of the pound symboll gets mangled similarly.
Meanwhile, I note that slashdot sends out its pages with <meta
A few days ago, we had a bit of a discussion of the Chinese google. There were a few messages where it would have been very useful to include some Chinese characters. For example, in explaining the difference between the spellings "Tiananmen" and "Tienanmen", which correspond to slightly different Chinese text.
You'd think that by now we'd be able to include all the different UniCode charsets in a text list this. Different slashdot contributors are going to have different charsets, and I don't see anything in this "Post Comment" page that lets me specify a charset.
I wonder if there's a tag in XHTML that overrides the document's charset declaration, and declares a different charset for a section. I haven't read of one, but then I don't know all of XHTML. There could very well be an elegant solution to this that would allow the inclusion of a fragment of Chinese or Arabic or Mongolian or Mayan or whatever.
OTOH, slashdot does seriously restrict the HTML that is allowed. I can see the list a few lines lower. Unless you can name a new charset in a <div> tag, there's probably no way to Do It Right.
What I wanna see is the CSS that creates the "handwritten" notes with arrows pointing into the code.
(I'd be really impressed if they actually did that via CSS. But I'm prepared to be disappointed.)
[I]t used to be that only the military could fark up my garage door opener. Now everybody will be able to.
Heh.
However, to put it in perspective, we should note that this is directly in line with the original design, back when the Internet was called ARPAnet.
The funding came entirely from the US Dept of Defense, and if you dig up the early ARPAnet docs, you'll find lots of diagrams of military scenarios, with everything communicating via wireless links. This makes sense, of course, because you really can't tie together tanks, jet fighters, aircraft carriers, etc. with wires.
If you read the docs, you'll find that there was a strong emphasis on automatic reconfiguration, as the enemy shot down your comm equipment. Routes were to be reconfigured dynamically. The network was to use whatever comm equipment was available. It was to use whatever frequencies were usable to get the data through.
But primarily, as things got shot down, everything was supposed to constantly monitor the electronic environment, and dynamically reconfigure itself so that it kept working.
Now it's four decades later, and people are coming up with the same ideas, and pushing them as something new. Except now the "enemy" is the FCC and the corporations that want to control their part of the spectrum and block access to the competitors' equipment.
Maybe some day we'll actually get what was conceived back in the 1960's.
They have basically no meaningful assets.
They've got 5000 PhDs.
Um; they don't own those; they're only renting. Ownership of humans was made illegal back in the 1860s.
As Microsoft has been learning lately, any of their employees can walk out the door at any time.
Of course, if they seriously work on keeping their people happy (PhD or not), the story might be different. Reports are that they're doing this, so far.
But management policies can change fast.