In recent years, I've read a number of comments from people in the publishing industry that mention a statistic: The average published book is read by four people. The contexts of the quote is usually that this is considered a problem, and Something Should Be Done About It.
One way to understand this is to think of the books that you own. How many of your books have been read by three or more other people? Probably none, right? So where does this supposed average of four come from? Right again - libraries. The publishing industry generally considers libraries to be a serious problem. Libraries pay for a book only once, and then they let anyone read the book. All those readers should have bought their own copy. If publishers can make this happen, they think it will quadruple their income.
One of the things going on with DRM is that publishers see a solution to their problem, in the form of software that will prevent anyone other than the purchaser from reading a book. The intent is to prevent public libraries from doing what they're doing. They're also looking at the possibility of making you pay a second time if you want to reread a book.
Most publishers aren't in business to educate their readers or to contribute to our culture. They are in business to make money. If they can't make money from a book, they have no reason to let you read it. They certainly don't want you to read a book for free.
So if you think libraries are an important part of our culture, you should also be thinking about ways to preserve public access to their content. Publishers think they will soon be able to end such public access. They'll probably succeed, unless steps are taken to preserve access.
(Of course, here in the US, most of the population hasn't been inside a library in years.;-)
Actually, it was secular physicians and the modern science of embryology which showed that the embryo is alive from its earlier moments,...
As are ova and sperm cells. They are independently-living creatures. Human ova and sperm cells contain human DNA, so they are living humans.
If you insist that embryos are living human beings, you should be consistent and also insist that ova and sperm cells are also living human beings.
Of course, there are a few practical problems with such a claim, not the least of which is the huge imbalance in our production of ova and sperm cells.
It is their network, why shouldn't they be able to do with it what they want?
Because that wire coming into my house is not just owned by Verizon; the government says that it's illegal for me to pay someone else to install a phone line. I have to pay Verizon if I want to use a comm line. I can't go to the competition, because the (local) government has made it illegal for me to do so.
Actually, locally we are also permitted to get cable from Comcast. Whoop-de-do. For all practical reasons, it's still every bit as much a monopoly. It's pretty clear that they have "gentlemen's agreements" in place that give me no say at all in the services that I'm permitted.
The government is deeply involved in Verizon's business, by giving them a legal monopoly on traffic in that line to my house. It makes perfect sense to me that the government should also tell them how much I'm going to pay, and which services they must allow me to access via that line. I have at least a small say in the government's policies; I have no say at all in Verizon's policies.
I'd like to access the entire Internet. Verizon would like me to only access sites and services that they approve (usually because some sites are paying them for good access). I object to this, just as I'd object if the government were to decree that I can only drive a GM auto on the road past my house, or that I can only bring home food or clothes from WalMart. They don't (yet) enforce such monopolies on the use of roads; I can buy any brand auto I like and transport any (legal) material in fits into that auto. But our comm lines aren't nearly as open as our roads.
If I am only permitted to get a comm line from Verizon, it strikes me as highly objectionable that the government would permit Verizon to determine what services I can use on that line.
Nah; you could be working for any of the zillion startup companies that were subcontracting a lot of the equipment and some of the software. Thus, BB&N existed before 1980. I didn't work for them, but after I left the university in 1978, I worked for a string of other small companies that had T1 links and ARPA/Internet. (The terminology was in transition and a bit confused at times).
One of the things I found fun was the ongoing discussion of the legality of email. Lots of people were pointing out that this wasn't part of their funding contract, and really looked like a serious violation of the contract, since it was soaking up a lot of developer and admin time. But, of course, the DoD folks found it so useful that they didn't mention the topic. When someone brought the topic up in meetings, it tended to fade out after someone (often the ARPA rep) mentioned geese and golden eggs.
1978 was also a historic year in one sense: I remember reading a report from AT&T saying that computer use of their circuits had passed human voice use. Not all of this was ARPA/Internet, of course; there were a dozen competing single-vendor, proprietary networks. But to the few of us who noticed, it was an interesting sign of where things were headed. And there was really only one general-purpose networking package that could be used by all developers without charge, so there were already predictions of who would win when the shake-out happened.
Yeah; I have too. But you should understand that this is exactly what the big news sources are fighting. We're supposed to visit only their sites. We're not supposed to be told that there are 938 others reporting the story. And we're certainly not supposed to visit those and get alternate takes on the story.
This isn't about keeping us away from news sites. It's to block our tool for easily finding other news sources than the big ones. In particular, we're not supposed to go directly to the local source of a story; we're supposed to get it filtered by a very few big news sources.
But the time is ending when a handful of people could control our access to news and make sure that we read only an acceptable version of a story.
Sure, you can say the same thing about unix (at least in the US, where we have a First Ammendment that says you can;-). But one of my points was that in public fora like mailing lists, newsgroups, etc, the unix crowd may also use the "Clueless n00b!" taunts, but they also tend to include actual clues, such as the commands to type to get things done. I've skimmed over many explanations of what those cryptic strings at the start of "ls -l"'s output means, and how to use the chmod command to change the permissions. I've never seen this with Windows.
Also, I just walked over to my wife's NT box to check out the permissions. I fired up the My Computer tool, and looked around in a few folders. No sign anywhere of anything that looked like permissions. I thought that maybe they were being suppressed, so I opened the Folder Options window. Under View there's an Advanced Settings panel that contains a list of file proerties, with checkboxes next to them. Sure, enough, some were checked, and others weren't. So I looked for something that sounded like permissions. Nothing. Not a clue that there's such a thing as file permissions. There's an entry dealing with "protected operating system files", but that's all.
I did a bit of exploring of other tools oon the desktop and under the Start menu. Nowhere could I find anything that even mentioned file permissions, or any similar phrase. As far as I can tell, NT doesn't have file permissions, other than some sort of protection for "system" files.
When I do a similar bit of exploring on her Mac, within 30 seconds I had a Finder window showing a detailed listing of a directory. Clicking CMD-I ("Information") on a file popped up a window with "Ownership & Permissions" at the bottom, and it was obvious how to make changes. I'd prefer to do it with chmod, but it was trivial to find a way to do it with the GUI.
Maybe such things exist in Windows. But, unlike unix, linux, and Mac systems, with Windows there seems to be a concerted attempt in both the UI and in discussion fora to keep the users uninformed on the topic. I don't consider myself more than minimally knowledgeable about Windows. But I know it better than most Windows users that I know, and I understand why they're as ignorant about its security as I am.
Huh? I always thought that God loves the crustaceae, and wants to protect them. Why else would He forbid that we semi-carnivorous humans kill and eat them?
Another fun thing is to continue reading after those biblical verses. A bit further on, in both cases, there are explicit exceptions for locusts, crickets and grasshoppers. Those all exlicitly listed as kosher for human consumption. But I've never seen any Jews or Christians eating them, despite God's advice that they're good.
Religious people sometimes are not very good at following their own holy book's advice.
Well, American newspapers have mostly spelled it "Tienanmen" all along. I had to carefully compare the two spelling to spot the difference from "Tiananmen", and I was surprised to see that one labelled as correct.
Of course, Roman-alphabet spelling of Chinese has a long history of variants. I'd think that, if they are serious about censoring google in China, they should do a careful study of all the spelling systems in use, and block all of the variants.
Of course, they'll also end up blocking a lot more stuff than they really want, since the different systems often map different words to the same spelling. This would make google and other search sites a lot less useful.
And this in turn has economic implications, as the internet is rapidly becoming the world's primary information source. Any government that seriously censors internet searches will find that it is also seriously crippling the functioning of their own economy.
Ultimately, this sort of thing is doomed. Here in the US, "protecting the children" from sex education ("pornograhy") has been the traditional excuse for crippling the internet. But this is now primarily done with a wink and a nudge, just well enough to satisfy the fundamentalists, since anyone with a clue understands that you really can't block a curious kid's access to information any more. Any sensible people don't really want to; they just want to keep it low key, so the fundies don't start bombing the data centers.
We're already hearing comments from China that the government's actual policy is visibly moving in the same direction. They're saying that people pretty much feel free to do as they like, as long as they don't openly challenge the ruling clique. People now know and discuss all sorts of things that they shouldn't; as long as they don't openly act on their knowledge, it's all cool. Much like the mandarins of old.
Until Windows gets all of the clueless application developers to follow their "security model" and rewrites all of their legacy code (.wmf file processing anyone) to also follow their security model, Windows will be hopelessly insecure.
Heh. Good luck with that.
The problem is really deeper that just "clueless application developers". The more basic problem is that this is the usual way of approaching the problem: Insult the developers and users, and while insulting them, don't give any clues that might educate them.
Way back when I first ran across unix, one of the very first things I read was a clear, detailed explanation of how the security worked. It made sense with only a few minutes of reading, and it has made sense ever since. In most computer fora (including this one), when questions come up, you tend to see simple "here's how you do it" replies.
With Windows, this isn't at all true. Thus, my wife uses Windows at work, mostly NT now, and has a home Windows box for that reason. (She hates it. And she loves her Mac, but that's a different topic.;-) She has years of experience with Windows, and although I'm professionally a unix/linux geek, I've ported things to DOS/Windows over the years. Neither of us has a clue about how Windows security works. I've asked her about it; she really doesn't know anything at all. There's this mysterious "admin" stuff that she has to use occasionally. But when NT was introduced at work, she never read anything at all about its security. She can't tell me where to find documentation on the topic. It's clear that nobody at work sees such education as anything important.
If you look through the comments here, you'll see a lot of the problem: There are many comments along the lines of "You're a clueless idiot; if you did it right, you wouldn't have problems." Note that that sentence contains no clues. There's nothing there, or in any of the replies that I've read here, that gives a clueless Windows user or developer any information about how to do Windows security right. There aren't even any hyperlinks to documents on the topic.
This seems to be the usual story. The impression is that either people are pretending to Windows security expertise, but can't explain it, or (more likely) they see no reason that the rest of us should bother our pretty little heads with such arcanae. We should be content with insults and exhortations to Do It Right, but we don't need any detailed information on the topic. We should just use the apps that are handed to us, and not waste valuable time worrying about things that aren't part of our job description.
So we shouldn't be surprised that Windows users remain clueless. They aren't being presented with the needed clues. Just with the usual insults. We can expect this situation to continue, because, as at my wife's place of work, educating users about their computers' inner workings just isn't part of the Windows culture. (But insulting them for their cluelessness is.;-)
Imagine a Unix program that required you to be root to run it. It wouldn't be very well received.
Hmmm... I seem to recall this command called "passwd" that has always required root permission, and users seem to accept it without complaint.
Of course, this just leads into a discussion of the confused nature of the phrasing "a Unix program that required you to be root to run it". Strictly speaking, passwd doesn't require that I "be root", since that's a nonsensical phrase. I'm not a computer login; I'm a human typing at a keyboard. I can't "be root" in the usual English meanings of that phrase. And passwd can't actually know that I'm a human; it can only know a few bits of information about how I'm logged in.
If "be root" was intended to mean that I must be logged in as root, of course passwd doesn't require that - but neither does any other program. The only requirement is that passwd somehow have root permissions when it runs. To be more precise, it doesn't check my login id (though it could); it checks that its euid is zero. There are several ways this can happen. The most common uses the setuid mechanism, which doesn't require that the user know the root password. For other uses of passwd, such as changing a different user's password, you do need to type the root password, but you still aren't required to "be root", i.e., you need not be logged in as root.
Anyway, the phrase "required you to be root" is a bit vague and fuzzy, and hints at poor understanding of how elevated permissions are usually handled on unix systems. Whatever did you mean by it?
There's an old observation that you can tell a unix user's expertise by how often they use root permissions. Unix expertise and use of root permissions are inversely related. Only novices log in as root; experts almost never do so. They've arranged things so that they don't need to. And vendors have been figuring out how to extend this down to novice levels, with proper initial setup and better install schemes.
Although Windows has adopted some more effective security measures, a major difference with unixoid systems remains: novice Windows users still learn that they have to run with admin privileges for things to work right. Unix/linux systems mostly come configured now so that this is rarely necessary, and new users learn to use elevated privilege only when something complains about permissions. Thus, there are now lots of Mac users who are accustomed to unix, and you don't see them running routinely with root permission. Nearly everything works fine without any special privileges.
Well, except for the cute blurbs at the beginning and end.
I wrote it maybe 10 years ago, as a fun retort to some creationist rant. I just googled for it, and found a couple dozen copies. It's sorta fun to see it copied around like this, though I suppose it's not one of history's great cases of plagiarism.
I'd never heard of the Penis Owners Club. That's fun, too, but it's not obvious why they'd publish a copy of this.
I keep thinking of updating it, in the light of the last decade's advances in understanding now that we have so many DNA maps, and the recent stories of the first footage of live giannt squids in their habitat.
Maybe I should set aside some time to Just Do It...
... customers of ISPs pay for the internet - not VersizonNet(TM), SBCNet(TM), etcetear.
And it's perhaps worthwhile to point out once again that the Internet wasn't built by big telecom corporations. It was developed almost entirely with US government funding, mostly from the Defense Department. Their funding went mostly to academia and a lot of small startup companies, because they understod very well that the big corporations were unwilling to develop the sort of network they wanted.
It's really another case of innovation coming from small developers with government funding; when it's successful, the big corporations sweep in take control of something profitable that they didn't have to pay for.
Of course, the big telecoms are as powerful as they are because the government helped set up their legal monopolies. But "the government" isn't monolithic; it's made up of lots of semi-independent organizations that mostly don't know what the others are doing. Your local government agency that gives a specific telecom giant control of that one wire coming into your house is not the same government agency that funded all those geeks to create the Internet. Those agencies' goals were and are rather different.
This governmental disorganization is the main thing that let the Internet appear in the 1970s and 1980s. Without it, the DoD would have funded AT&T to build the ARPAnet, and we'd still have a total comms monopoly. So we should concentrate on the benefits of this disorganization, and encourage extending it into the private economy. Then we might have a bit of competition, and the corporations will have to give us better service for our money.
I'm tired of this guy being in office and I'm ready to split the country in half and move if my half has to have him as president. I'd be happy to give the religious right their own country and leaders because I don't want them in my life.
Sorry; it doesn't work that way. Religious people have a long history of being rather dangerous to their neighbors. If we split the US into a Christian half and a secular half, the religous folks' main project would be "converting" the immoral secular state. They wouldn't do it peacefully.
Read a bit of history. A religious state next door does not make you safe. We're much better off with a big social mess, with people of all types. Then we stand a chance of keeping the religious groups divided and fighting each other, and it's less likely that they'll come after you.
Heh; I suspect that they aren't likely to accept a lesson from the likes of me. From the reports, al Qaeda's management is even more technically incompetent than NASA's. Yeah, they've pulled of a number of attacks. But much of their success depends partly on their enemies' bungling.
In any case, I'd guess that lots of people have already pointed this out to them. I get this image of bin Laden et al slapping their heads, and saying "Why didn't we think of that? We coulda made millions, all for the glory of Allah."
Whatcha wanna bet that they already have people talking to the various "stock" librarians about how to best get their future footage into the archives? Of course, they could already be well along this path. It's not like they'd be bragging about it in public.
But this isn't anything new, or especially suspect. It should be noted that, when large buildings are destroyed, it is routine to have camera crews on site to film the whole thing. The demolition companies make money on this, and much of their routine safety precautions are to make the film crews safe. The footage is also useful for legal reasons, so that in case a bystander is injured, they have a record of their precautions. But the main reason is that Hollywood pays good money for footage of buildings being destroyed.
No fuss is made of this, and it's not at all a secret. You can find articles on the topic quite easily. But they're mostly rather technical, of more interest to movie geeks than to the general public.
Airplanes are 100x safer than a car. You are riding a container of explosive fuel and remember you are sitting on top of the explosives.
A few months ago, I ran across an interesting article describing how movie makers create those explosions that you always see in auto and plane crashes.
Their problem is that the fuels used in autos and airplanes just aren't explosive. It takes some rather complex and precisely-times equipment to create the tiny "explosions" that power an internal-combustion engine. Even then, engineers will object that those are just very rapidly-spreading fires inside a container, so that pressure builds up in the cylinder. But there's no explosion in any techical sense of the term. To get an explosion, you need to ignite all the fuel at once, and the fuel doesn't contain enough oxygen. In a crash, there's no way to mix the fuel with air thoroughly enough to get an explosion.
What they do in the movies is create the explosions through special effects, and usually add them to the scene after the fact. There are quite a lot of movies where this is done cheaply, so if you watch the scene closely, you'll see that the explosion often happens slightly before the crash. Often the flying pieces and fireball obviously come from behind the vehicle.
This is done for dramatic reasons, of course. A real crash just doesn't have anything spectacular about it. There's a crunch, things stop quickly, and everything is all dented. In a few cases, the fuel tank is ruptured, and if it touches something hot (usually the exhaust pipe), you get flames. But no explosion.
In the case of those spectacular photos of the World Trade Center with the huge fireball, you can see just by looking at them that it wasn't an explosion. If it were, you'd see signs of the blast. The fireball has obviously been there for several seconds, long enough for sound waves to reach the ground, but there's no visible blast effect on the nearby smoke, which is drifting in a slow breeze. There's nothing like flying glass or other debris that you'd expect in an explosion. There is debris visible, falling nearly straight downward. It's an impressive fireball, with falling pieces of building and plane, but sorry, there wasn't really an explosion. It was two impacts with falling debris, followed by the fires that destroyed the buildings.
In reading about the work needed to produce explosions in movie crashes, it occurs to me that al Qaeda missed something in this caper: They should have had the sense to have camera crews on site to record the whole thing, with lots of closeups from various angles. They could sell the footage to movie studios. This could have been a good source of funding for future efforts. I guess this shows that they just aren't very good business men.
A number of sci-fi writers have thought about life in stars, both ordinary stars and neutron stars. It'd be interesting to know if such life exists. There's not much evidence yet, though.
Another idea for complexity that could support life was in Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud", published in the 1950s. This one starts with astronomers spotting a dense molecular cloud (a Bok globule) approaching the solar system, on a direct line to the sun. Rather than passing through the solar system, it starts ejecting high-speed globs of gas, slows down, and settles in a disc around the sun. It turns out that the cloud itself is a living, intelligent creature that has just stopped by for a meal of sunlight and assorted solar-wind components. When some scientists manage to make contact with it, the cloud is surprised to learn that something so small as a planet is capable of supporting intelligent life. It's a good read, and is still available.
Then, of course, there are those who point out that an ovum or sperm is a living creature, every bit as alive as any adult. So obviously anyone who knowingly prevents fertilization is causing the death of a human. Abstention from sex is a form of negligent homicide.
So everyone join in singing "Every sperm is sacred...".
(I haven't yet read of how God intended us to handle the obvious mathematical problem here.)
How do we know there aren't certain forms of life for which -220C is like a warm, hunky-dory bath?
Actually, there are some good (but not conclusive) chemical reasons. Some of them came out in the recent discussions of why Titan might support life.
Now, -220C is abut 53K, which is pretty cold. Titan is about 94K, which doesn't sound much warmer to us, but it's actually nearly twice as "warm". At 94K, methane is a liquid, and it's also a solvent. It behaves much like water, though it's a non-polar molecule, so any biochemistry would be different from ours. In particular, methane is good at dissolving organic (i.e., carbon-chain based) compounds.
At 53K, methane is a solid.
All this is significant because it's reasonable to assume that complex life requires complex chemistry. At low temperatures, the only way known to do this is with carbon chains (though there has been speculation that at higher temperatures than ours, silicon could perform a similar role). And for biochemistry to work, most of the biochemicals should be in a liquid matrix, so they can move around and interact easily.
So a planet at 53K wouldn't be a very likely place to find complex chemicals with compex interactions. Everything interesting would be solid. At 94K, it's possible, with methane as the solvent substrate. At our body temperature, 310K, methane is a gas, but water is a liquid and a good solvent, so biochemistry works for us.
But you're right that this is all speculation, based on the only kind of life that we know. Science-fiction writers have contemplated life at other temperatures, but we have yet to find evidence of any.
A few years back, Robert Forward wrote a sci-fi novel, Camelot 30K, which is about the discovery of life on a Pluto-like planet in the Kuiper belt. The title comes from its ambient temperature, 30K, and the social order which is medieval. Being a good physicist, he explains at one point that the living creatures are all "warm blooded", with body temperatures arund 90K. This is so that their body fluids remain liquid. It turns out that they inhabit many of the Kuiper-belt planets, and have an interesting means of dispersal. Presumably they evolved a bit closer in, long ago, on a planet with temperatures somewhat higher. This may sound like a stretch, but our body temperature is about 30K above our planet's mean temperature.
Anyway, maybe some day we'll know more about what is possible. Maybe, as Forward imagined, we'll find out when we visit the outer reaches of our solar system. Or maybe not.
Most of the media attention to possible life is basically silly, and based on little more than speculation. If you want to be entertained by speculation without evidence, you're better off reading science fiction.
[I]f they are truly telling people that search results are being omitted and the reason they are being omitted, then I think this is the bet they could hope to accomplish.
I'm wondering what the Disney/Pixar - Apple relation is going to work out.
Right now Disney/Pixar and Apple reps are discussing with John Negroponte the design of the new children's computer, the cMac, with a price of $100. It will be powered by a hand crank, have builtin wireless networking, and instead of a glowing apple-with-a-bite-missing will have a glowing Mickey Mouse head.
They're also talking to google about bringing up a worldwide wireless system for delivering content (entertaiment, education) on demand to all the world's children.
Meanwhile, their lawyer lobbyists will be making "deals" with governments everywhere that will guarantee their perpetual control of the rights to everything delivered by their system, regardless of who made it.
Not any more, they're not. They're a hard-core capitalistic oligarchy. But they understand that by continuing to mouth Communist rhetoric, their enemies stay all outraged and irrational, attacking the rhetoric while ignoring most of what the Chinese government is actually up to.
Lots of people are falling for the ruse.
OTOH, here and there you can read dispassionate analyses of what's actually going on over there. It's hardly communism any more; it's a rather different sort of authoritarianism. It's a lot like the earlier Chinese system before Mao, but less insular. It's having some significant successes, from the ruling class's viewpoint, while the rest of the world is distracted and misdirected by the rhetoric.
Whether it's more or less evil than Communism was isn't clear yet.
Yeah, and this "anti-circumvention" thing is something rather new. It's really a scheme to legalize fraud by sellers.
It used to be that, if you bought a book or music (printed or recorded), there was no question about your right to read the book or play the music. Now, I can sell you a book or music in electronic form, and if you succeed in reading the book or playing the music, I can sue you. This is an entirely different use of "copyright". It really has nothing to do with you copying anything; its purpose is that it allows me to fraudulently sell you something that I've purposely made difficult to use, and prosecute you if you succeed in using it anyway.
But I was really reacting to the "secret copyright" idea. This isn't really a new problem. We've long had a problem that you can't always discover whether something is copyrighted, or who owns the copyright. I commented on asking a few music publishers about this, and verifying that they know what they're doing. They are intentionally keeping their copyright secret. This is clear when they say "All you have to do is buy a copy of everything we've ever published and search through it all."
Part of the interesting thing about this copyright secrecy is that we now have the ability to solve it. This has come out quite clearly from the threat by publishers to prosecute google and other search sites if they index the full text of publications. This would allow anyone to determine exactly where a given passage has been published. But the publishers are using copyright law to block this. They are knowingly preventing us from discovering who owns the copyright to a text or music passage. They want to keep knowledge of copyright secret, presumably so they can sue us when we unknowingly violate their secret copyright.
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In recent years, I've read a number of comments from people in the publishing industry that mention a statistic: The average published book is read by four people. The contexts of the quote is usually that this is considered a problem, and Something Should Be Done About It.
;-)
One way to understand this is to think of the books that you own. How many of your books have been read by three or more other people? Probably none, right? So where does this supposed average of four come from? Right again - libraries. The publishing industry generally considers libraries to be a serious problem. Libraries pay for a book only once, and then they let anyone read the book. All those readers should have bought their own copy. If publishers can make this happen, they think it will quadruple their income.
One of the things going on with DRM is that publishers see a solution to their problem, in the form of software that will prevent anyone other than the purchaser from reading a book. The intent is to prevent public libraries from doing what they're doing. They're also looking at the possibility of making you pay a second time if you want to reread a book.
Most publishers aren't in business to educate their readers or to contribute to our culture. They are in business to make money. If they can't make money from a book, they have no reason to let you read it. They certainly don't want you to read a book for free.
So if you think libraries are an important part of our culture, you should also be thinking about ways to preserve public access to their content. Publishers think they will soon be able to end such public access. They'll probably succeed, unless steps are taken to preserve access.
(Of course, here in the US, most of the population hasn't been inside a library in years.
A bacterium is capable of pondering the philisophical underpinnings of the concept of self-awareness?
Pish-posh...9/10 kids at the high school that I went to couldn't do that.
Heh. Reminds me of the old Jewish joke: When do Jews think that life begins? When the embryo gets its medical or law degree.
(Actually, the common Jewish rule is 40 days after conception, for reasons far too complex to go into here. But I like the joke better.)
Actually, it was secular physicians and the modern science of embryology which showed that the embryo is alive from its earlier moments, ...
As are ova and sperm cells. They are independently-living creatures. Human ova and sperm cells contain human DNA, so they are living humans.
If you insist that embryos are living human beings, you should be consistent and also insist that ova and sperm cells are also living human beings.
Of course, there are a few practical problems with such a claim, not the least of which is the huge imbalance in our production of ova and sperm cells.
It is their network, why shouldn't they be able to do with it what they want?
Because that wire coming into my house is not just owned by Verizon; the government says that it's illegal for me to pay someone else to install a phone line. I have to pay Verizon if I want to use a comm line. I can't go to the competition, because the (local) government has made it illegal for me to do so.
Actually, locally we are also permitted to get cable from Comcast. Whoop-de-do. For all practical reasons, it's still every bit as much a monopoly. It's pretty clear that they have "gentlemen's agreements" in place that give me no say at all in the services that I'm permitted.
The government is deeply involved in Verizon's business, by giving them a legal monopoly on traffic in that line to my house. It makes perfect sense to me that the government should also tell them how much I'm going to pay, and which services they must allow me to access via that line. I have at least a small say in the government's policies; I have no say at all in Verizon's policies.
I'd like to access the entire Internet. Verizon would like me to only access sites and services that they approve (usually because some sites are paying them for good access). I object to this, just as I'd object if the government were to decree that I can only drive a GM auto on the road past my house, or that I can only bring home food or clothes from WalMart. They don't (yet) enforce such monopolies on the use of roads; I can buy any brand auto I like and transport any (legal) material in fits into that auto. But our comm lines aren't nearly as open as our roads.
If I am only permitted to get a comm line from Verizon, it strikes me as highly objectionable that the government would permit Verizon to determine what services I can use on that line.
Nah; you could be working for any of the zillion startup companies that were subcontracting a lot of the equipment and some of the software. Thus, BB&N existed before 1980. I didn't work for them, but after I left the university in 1978, I worked for a string of other small companies that had T1 links and ARPA/Internet. (The terminology was in transition and a bit confused at times).
One of the things I found fun was the ongoing discussion of the legality of email. Lots of people were pointing out that this wasn't part of their funding contract, and really looked like a serious violation of the contract, since it was soaking up a lot of developer and admin time. But, of course, the DoD folks found it so useful that they didn't mention the topic. When someone brought the topic up in meetings, it tended to fade out after someone (often the ARPA rep) mentioned geese and golden eggs.
1978 was also a historic year in one sense: I remember reading a report from AT&T saying that computer use of their circuits had passed human voice use. Not all of this was ARPA/Internet, of course; there were a dozen competing single-vendor, proprietary networks. But to the few of us who noticed, it was an interesting sign of where things were headed. And there was really only one general-purpose networking package that could be used by all developers without charge, so there were already predictions of who would win when the shake-out happened.
What do you think people did before email access was first available to Joe Geek in the early 90s?
;-)
Huh? If you didn't have email by 1980, you hardly qualify as a "geek".
(OK; younger geeks can qualify, if they started using email as soon as they were permitted to put their little hands on a computer.
Yeah; I have too. But you should understand that this is exactly what the big news sources are fighting. We're supposed to visit only their sites. We're not supposed to be told that there are 938 others reporting the story. And we're certainly not supposed to visit those and get alternate takes on the story.
This isn't about keeping us away from news sites. It's to block our tool for easily finding other news sources than the big ones. In particular, we're not supposed to go directly to the local source of a story; we're supposed to get it filtered by a very few big news sources.
But the time is ending when a handful of people could control our access to news and make sure that we read only an acceptable version of a story.
Sure, you can say the same thing about unix (at least in the US, where we have a First Ammendment that says you can ;-). But one of my points was that in public fora like mailing lists, newsgroups, etc, the unix crowd may also use the "Clueless n00b!" taunts, but they also tend to include actual clues, such as the commands to type to get things done. I've skimmed over many explanations of what those cryptic strings at the start of "ls -l"'s output means, and how to use the chmod command to change the permissions. I've never seen this with Windows.
Also, I just walked over to my wife's NT box to check out the permissions. I fired up the My Computer tool, and looked around in a few folders. No sign anywhere of anything that looked like permissions. I thought that maybe they were being suppressed, so I opened the Folder Options window. Under View there's an Advanced Settings panel that contains a list of file proerties, with checkboxes next to them. Sure, enough, some were checked, and others weren't. So I looked for something that sounded like permissions. Nothing. Not a clue that there's such a thing as file permissions. There's an entry dealing with "protected operating system files", but that's all.
I did a bit of exploring of other tools oon the desktop and under the Start menu. Nowhere could I find anything that even mentioned file permissions, or any similar phrase. As far as I can tell, NT doesn't have file permissions, other than some sort of protection for "system" files.
When I do a similar bit of exploring on her Mac, within 30 seconds I had a Finder window showing a detailed listing of a directory. Clicking CMD-I ("Information") on a file popped up a window with "Ownership & Permissions" at the bottom, and it was obvious how to make changes. I'd prefer to do it with chmod, but it was trivial to find a way to do it with the GUI.
Maybe such things exist in Windows. But, unlike unix, linux, and Mac systems, with Windows there seems to be a concerted attempt in both the UI and in discussion fora to keep the users uninformed on the topic. I don't consider myself more than minimally knowledgeable about Windows. But I know it better than most Windows users that I know, and I understand why they're as ignorant about its security as I am.
Huh? I always thought that God loves the crustaceae, and wants to protect them. Why else would He forbid that we semi-carnivorous humans kill and eat them?
Another fun thing is to continue reading after those biblical verses. A bit further on, in both cases, there are explicit exceptions for locusts, crickets and grasshoppers. Those all exlicitly listed as kosher for human consumption. But I've never seen any Jews or Christians eating them, despite God's advice that they're good.
Religious people sometimes are not very good at following their own holy book's advice.
Well, American newspapers have mostly spelled it "Tienanmen" all along. I had to carefully compare the two spelling to spot the difference from "Tiananmen", and I was surprised to see that one labelled as correct.
Of course, Roman-alphabet spelling of Chinese has a long history of variants. I'd think that, if they are serious about censoring google in China, they should do a careful study of all the spelling systems in use, and block all of the variants.
Of course, they'll also end up blocking a lot more stuff than they really want, since the different systems often map different words to the same spelling. This would make google and other search sites a lot less useful.
And this in turn has economic implications, as the internet is rapidly becoming the world's primary information source. Any government that seriously censors internet searches will find that it is also seriously crippling the functioning of their own economy.
Ultimately, this sort of thing is doomed. Here in the US, "protecting the children" from sex education ("pornograhy") has been the traditional excuse for crippling the internet. But this is now primarily done with a wink and a nudge, just well enough to satisfy the fundamentalists, since anyone with a clue understands that you really can't block a curious kid's access to information any more. Any sensible people don't really want to; they just want to keep it low key, so the fundies don't start bombing the data centers.
We're already hearing comments from China that the government's actual policy is visibly moving in the same direction. They're saying that people pretty much feel free to do as they like, as long as they don't openly challenge the ruling clique. People now know and discuss all sorts of things that they shouldn't; as long as they don't openly act on their knowledge, it's all cool. Much like the mandarins of old.
Much like the situation in the US with pr0n.
I do hope you two were not taking that post too seriously...
Do you know the phrase "Ha, ha; only serious"?
Until Windows gets all of the clueless application developers to follow their "security model" and rewrites all of their legacy code (.wmf file processing anyone) to also follow their security model, Windows will be hopelessly insecure.
;-) She has years of experience with Windows, and although I'm professionally a unix/linux geek, I've ported things to DOS/Windows over the years. Neither of us has a clue about how Windows security works. I've asked her about it; she really doesn't know anything at all. There's this mysterious "admin" stuff that she has to use occasionally. But when NT was introduced at work, she never read anything at all about its security. She can't tell me where to find documentation on the topic. It's clear that nobody at work sees such education as anything important.
;-)
Heh. Good luck with that.
The problem is really deeper that just "clueless application developers". The more basic problem is that this is the usual way of approaching the problem: Insult the developers and users, and while insulting them, don't give any clues that might educate them.
Way back when I first ran across unix, one of the very first things I read was a clear, detailed explanation of how the security worked. It made sense with only a few minutes of reading, and it has made sense ever since. In most computer fora (including this one), when questions come up, you tend to see simple "here's how you do it" replies.
With Windows, this isn't at all true. Thus, my wife uses Windows at work, mostly NT now, and has a home Windows box for that reason. (She hates it. And she loves her Mac, but that's a different topic.
If you look through the comments here, you'll see a lot of the problem: There are many comments along the lines of "You're a clueless idiot; if you did it right, you wouldn't have problems." Note that that sentence contains no clues. There's nothing there, or in any of the replies that I've read here, that gives a clueless Windows user or developer any information about how to do Windows security right. There aren't even any hyperlinks to documents on the topic.
This seems to be the usual story. The impression is that either people are pretending to Windows security expertise, but can't explain it, or (more likely) they see no reason that the rest of us should bother our pretty little heads with such arcanae. We should be content with insults and exhortations to Do It Right, but we don't need any detailed information on the topic. We should just use the apps that are handed to us, and not waste valuable time worrying about things that aren't part of our job description.
So we shouldn't be surprised that Windows users remain clueless. They aren't being presented with the needed clues. Just with the usual insults. We can expect this situation to continue, because, as at my wife's place of work, educating users about their computers' inner workings just isn't part of the Windows culture. (But insulting them for their cluelessness is.
Imagine a Unix program that required you to be root to run it. It wouldn't be very well received.
... I seem to recall this command called "passwd" that has always required root permission, and users seem to accept it without complaint.
Hmmm
Of course, this just leads into a discussion of the confused nature of the phrasing "a Unix program that required you to be root to run it". Strictly speaking, passwd doesn't require that I "be root", since that's a nonsensical phrase. I'm not a computer login; I'm a human typing at a keyboard. I can't "be root" in the usual English meanings of that phrase. And passwd can't actually know that I'm a human; it can only know a few bits of information about how I'm logged in.
If "be root" was intended to mean that I must be logged in as root, of course passwd doesn't require that - but neither does any other program. The only requirement is that passwd somehow have root permissions when it runs. To be more precise, it doesn't check my login id (though it could); it checks that its euid is zero. There are several ways this can happen. The most common uses the setuid mechanism, which doesn't require that the user know the root password. For other uses of passwd, such as changing a different user's password, you do need to type the root password, but you still aren't required to "be root", i.e., you need not be logged in as root.
Anyway, the phrase "required you to be root" is a bit vague and fuzzy, and hints at poor understanding of how elevated permissions are usually handled on unix systems. Whatever did you mean by it?
There's an old observation that you can tell a unix user's expertise by how often they use root permissions. Unix expertise and use of root permissions are inversely related. Only novices log in as root; experts almost never do so. They've arranged things so that they don't need to. And vendors have been figuring out how to extend this down to novice levels, with proper initial setup and better install schemes.
Although Windows has adopted some more effective security measures, a major difference with unixoid systems remains: novice Windows users still learn that they have to run with admin privileges for things to work right. Unix/linux systems mostly come configured now so that this is rarely necessary, and new users learn to use elevated privilege only when something complains about permissions. Thus, there are now lots of Mac users who are accustomed to unix, and you don't see them running routinely with root permission. Nearly everything works fine without any special privileges.
Hey, that's my essay! ;-)
...
Well, except for the cute blurbs at the beginning and end.
I wrote it maybe 10 years ago, as a fun retort to some creationist rant. I just googled for it, and found a couple dozen copies. It's sorta fun to see it copied around like this, though I suppose it's not one of history's great cases of plagiarism.
I'd never heard of the Penis Owners Club. That's fun, too, but it's not obvious why they'd publish a copy of this.
I keep thinking of updating it, in the light of the last decade's advances in understanding now that we have so many DNA maps, and the recent stories of the first footage of live giannt squids in their habitat.
Maybe I should set aside some time to Just Do It
... customers of ISPs pay for the internet - not VersizonNet(TM), SBCNet(TM), etcetear.
And it's perhaps worthwhile to point out once again that the Internet wasn't built by big telecom corporations. It was developed almost entirely with US government funding, mostly from the Defense Department. Their funding went mostly to academia and a lot of small startup companies, because they understod very well that the big corporations were unwilling to develop the sort of network they wanted.
It's really another case of innovation coming from small developers with government funding; when it's successful, the big corporations sweep in take control of something profitable that they didn't have to pay for.
Of course, the big telecoms are as powerful as they are because the government helped set up their legal monopolies. But "the government" isn't monolithic; it's made up of lots of semi-independent organizations that mostly don't know what the others are doing. Your local government agency that gives a specific telecom giant control of that one wire coming into your house is not the same government agency that funded all those geeks to create the Internet. Those agencies' goals were and are rather different.
This governmental disorganization is the main thing that let the Internet appear in the 1970s and 1980s. Without it, the DoD would have funded AT&T to build the ARPAnet, and we'd still have a total comms monopoly. So we should concentrate on the benefits of this disorganization, and encourage extending it into the private economy. Then we might have a bit of competition, and the corporations will have to give us better service for our money.
I'm tired of this guy being in office and I'm ready to split the country in half and move if my half has to have him as president. I'd be happy to give the religious right their own country and leaders because I don't want them in my life.
Sorry; it doesn't work that way. Religious people have a long history of being rather dangerous to their neighbors. If we split the US into a Christian half and a secular half, the religous folks' main project would be "converting" the immoral secular state. They wouldn't do it peacefully.
Read a bit of history. A religious state next door does not make you safe. We're much better off with a big social mess, with people of all types. Then we stand a chance of keeping the religious groups divided and fighting each other, and it's less likely that they'll come after you.
Heh; I suspect that they aren't likely to accept a lesson from the likes of me. From the reports, al Qaeda's management is even more technically incompetent than NASA's. Yeah, they've pulled of a number of attacks. But much of their success depends partly on their enemies' bungling.
In any case, I'd guess that lots of people have already pointed this out to them. I get this image of bin Laden et al slapping their heads, and saying "Why didn't we think of that? We coulda made millions, all for the glory of Allah."
Whatcha wanna bet that they already have people talking to the various "stock" librarians about how to best get their future footage into the archives? Of course, they could already be well along this path. It's not like they'd be bragging about it in public.
But this isn't anything new, or especially suspect. It should be noted that, when large buildings are destroyed, it is routine to have camera crews on site to film the whole thing. The demolition companies make money on this, and much of their routine safety precautions are to make the film crews safe. The footage is also useful for legal reasons, so that in case a bystander is injured, they have a record of their precautions. But the main reason is that Hollywood pays good money for footage of buildings being destroyed.
No fuss is made of this, and it's not at all a secret. You can find articles on the topic quite easily. But they're mostly rather technical, of more interest to movie geeks than to the general public.
Airplanes are 100x safer than a car. You are riding a container of explosive fuel and remember you are sitting on top of the explosives.
A few months ago, I ran across an interesting article describing how movie makers create those explosions that you always see in auto and plane crashes.
Their problem is that the fuels used in autos and airplanes just aren't explosive. It takes some rather complex and precisely-times equipment to create the tiny "explosions" that power an internal-combustion engine. Even then, engineers will object that those are just very rapidly-spreading fires inside a container, so that pressure builds up in the cylinder. But there's no explosion in any techical sense of the term. To get an explosion, you need to ignite all the fuel at once, and the fuel doesn't contain enough oxygen. In a crash, there's no way to mix the fuel with air thoroughly enough to get an explosion.
What they do in the movies is create the explosions through special effects, and usually add them to the scene after the fact. There are quite a lot of movies where this is done cheaply, so if you watch the scene closely, you'll see that the explosion often happens slightly before the crash. Often the flying pieces and fireball obviously come from behind the vehicle.
This is done for dramatic reasons, of course. A real crash just doesn't have anything spectacular about it. There's a crunch, things stop quickly, and everything is all dented. In a few cases, the fuel tank is ruptured, and if it touches something hot (usually the exhaust pipe), you get flames. But no explosion.
In the case of those spectacular photos of the World Trade Center with the huge fireball, you can see just by looking at them that it wasn't an explosion. If it were, you'd see signs of the blast. The fireball has obviously been there for several seconds, long enough for sound waves to reach the ground, but there's no visible blast effect on the nearby smoke, which is drifting in a slow breeze. There's nothing like flying glass or other debris that you'd expect in an explosion. There is debris visible, falling nearly straight downward. It's an impressive fireball, with falling pieces of building and plane, but sorry, there wasn't really an explosion. It was two impacts with falling debris, followed by the fires that destroyed the buildings.
In reading about the work needed to produce explosions in movie crashes, it occurs to me that al Qaeda missed something in this caper: They should have had the sense to have camera crews on site to record the whole thing, with lots of closeups from various angles. They could sell the footage to movie studios. This could have been a good source of funding for future efforts. I guess this shows that they just aren't very good business men.
A number of sci-fi writers have thought about life in stars, both ordinary stars and neutron stars. It'd be interesting to know if such life exists. There's not much evidence yet, though.
Another idea for complexity that could support life was in Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud", published in the 1950s. This one starts with astronomers spotting a dense molecular cloud (a Bok globule) approaching the solar system, on a direct line to the sun. Rather than passing through the solar system, it starts ejecting high-speed globs of gas, slows down, and settles in a disc around the sun. It turns out that the cloud itself is a living, intelligent creature that has just stopped by for a meal of sunlight and assorted solar-wind components. When some scientists manage to make contact with it, the cloud is surprised to learn that something so small as a planet is capable of supporting intelligent life. It's a good read, and is still available.
Then, of course, there are those who point out that an ovum or sperm is a living creature, every bit as alive as any adult. So obviously anyone who knowingly prevents fertilization is causing the death of a human. Abstention from sex is a form of negligent homicide.
...".
So everyone join in singing "Every sperm is sacred
(I haven't yet read of how God intended us to handle the obvious mathematical problem here.)
How do we know there aren't certain forms of life for which -220C is like a warm, hunky-dory bath?
Actually, there are some good (but not conclusive) chemical reasons. Some of them came out in the recent discussions of why Titan might support life.
Now, -220C is abut 53K, which is pretty cold. Titan is about 94K, which doesn't sound much warmer to us, but it's actually nearly twice as "warm". At 94K, methane is a liquid, and it's also a solvent. It behaves much like water, though it's a non-polar molecule, so any biochemistry would be different from ours. In particular, methane is good at dissolving organic (i.e., carbon-chain based) compounds.
At 53K, methane is a solid.
All this is significant because it's reasonable to assume that complex life requires complex chemistry. At low temperatures, the only way known to do this is with carbon chains (though there has been speculation that at higher temperatures than ours, silicon could perform a similar role). And for biochemistry to work, most of the biochemicals should be in a liquid matrix, so they can move around and interact easily.
So a planet at 53K wouldn't be a very likely place to find complex chemicals with compex interactions. Everything interesting would be solid. At 94K, it's possible, with methane as the solvent substrate. At our body temperature, 310K, methane is a gas, but water is a liquid and a good solvent, so biochemistry works for us.
But you're right that this is all speculation, based on the only kind of life that we know. Science-fiction writers have contemplated life at other temperatures, but we have yet to find evidence of any.
A few years back, Robert Forward wrote a sci-fi novel, Camelot 30K, which is about the discovery of life on a Pluto-like planet in the Kuiper belt. The title comes from its ambient temperature, 30K, and the social order which is medieval. Being a good physicist, he explains at one point that the living creatures are all "warm blooded", with body temperatures arund 90K. This is so that their body fluids remain liquid. It turns out that they inhabit many of the Kuiper-belt planets, and have an interesting means of dispersal. Presumably they evolved a bit closer in, long ago, on a planet with temperatures somewhat higher. This may sound like a stretch, but our body temperature is about 30K above our planet's mean temperature.
Anyway, maybe some day we'll know more about what is possible. Maybe, as Forward imagined, we'll find out when we visit the outer reaches of our solar system. Or maybe not.
Most of the media attention to possible life is basically silly, and based on little more than speculation. If you want to be entertained by speculation without evidence, you're better off reading science fiction.
[I]f they are truly telling people that search results are being omitted and the reason they are being omitted, then I think this is the bet they could hope to accomplish.
Yeah; I can see it now:
In order to show you only permitted results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 3 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.
I'm wondering what the Disney/Pixar - Apple relation is going to work out.
Right now Disney/Pixar and Apple reps are discussing with John Negroponte the design of the new children's computer, the cMac, with a price of $100. It will be powered by a hand crank, have builtin wireless networking, and instead of a glowing apple-with-a-bite-missing will have a glowing Mickey Mouse head.
They're also talking to google about bringing up a worldwide wireless system for delivering content (entertaiment, education) on demand to all the world's children.
Meanwhile, their lawyer lobbyists will be making "deals" with governments everywhere that will guarantee their perpetual control of the rights to everything delivered by their system, regardless of who made it.
Remember, you heard it here first.
China is a communist country.
Not any more, they're not. They're a hard-core capitalistic oligarchy. But they understand that by continuing to mouth Communist rhetoric, their enemies stay all outraged and irrational, attacking the rhetoric while ignoring most of what the Chinese government is actually up to.
Lots of people are falling for the ruse.
OTOH, here and there you can read dispassionate analyses of what's actually going on over there. It's hardly communism any more; it's a rather different sort of authoritarianism. It's a lot like the earlier Chinese system before Mao, but less insular. It's having some significant successes, from the ruling class's viewpoint, while the rest of the world is distracted and misdirected by the rhetoric.
Whether it's more or less evil than Communism was isn't clear yet.
Yeah, and this "anti-circumvention" thing is something rather new. It's really a scheme to legalize fraud by sellers.
It used to be that, if you bought a book or music (printed or recorded), there was no question about your right to read the book or play the music. Now, I can sell you a book or music in electronic form, and if you succeed in reading the book or playing the music, I can sue you. This is an entirely different use of "copyright". It really has nothing to do with you copying anything; its purpose is that it allows me to fraudulently sell you something that I've purposely made difficult to use, and prosecute you if you succeed in using it anyway.
But I was really reacting to the "secret copyright" idea. This isn't really a new problem. We've long had a problem that you can't always discover whether something is copyrighted, or who owns the copyright. I commented on asking a few music publishers about this, and verifying that they know what they're doing. They are intentionally keeping their copyright secret. This is clear when they say "All you have to do is buy a copy of everything we've ever published and search through it all."
Part of the interesting thing about this copyright secrecy is that we now have the ability to solve it. This has come out quite clearly from the threat by publishers to prosecute google and other search sites if they index the full text of publications. This would allow anyone to determine exactly where a given passage has been published. But the publishers are using copyright law to block this. They are knowingly preventing us from discovering who owns the copyright to a text or music passage. They want to keep knowledge of copyright secret, presumably so they can sue us when we unknowingly violate their secret copyright.
There's a lot to be cynical about here.