If you look into the history of the concept of a "corporation", you'll find that it was developed for exactly this purpose. The idea is that if it's illegal for a person to do something, you can create a corporation consisting of several people, together they do the thing that would be illegal for any of them to do, and if there's a legal challenge, they can just say "Hey, I didn't do it; the corporation did." The legal system can punish the corporation if so desired, but the corporation doesn't pass the punishment along to its employees. This is referred to as "limited liability", and it's the primary reason that corporations were invented. It insulates the corporation's owners from legal liability.
... The "Office of Foreign Assets Control" is bound to return the guy's money, if they have it. "Unreasonable... seizure" is prohibited by the US constitution (amendment #4). It might not happen soon, but unless a court orders otherwise, they can't keep the money. 'Detaining' someone's property can be a problem. I can see it, clearly. Why can't you?
Probably because Venmo is handled by a private corporation (and a flock of banks), and the US Constitution is generally considered by the legal system to apply only to the US government. Corporations can legally do lots of things that the government can't, such as enforce religions, ban unacceptable speech, etc., etc.
There are laws again theft that do apply to corporations, and Venmo may be charged under such laws. But corporations commit thefts like this all the time, and they often get away with it.
(Actually, if Venmo were a government agency, they'd probably drag the suspected terrorist off to a holding cell for a bit of "enhanced interrogation". So maybe the victim should be glad they're only stealing his money.;-)
C'mon; everyone accepts "nevertheless" and "nevermore" as single words; "nevermind" is an obvious next entry in that particular list.
Of course, the peevers have to object to anything they didn't learn by 5th grade, including some things that have been part of the language for centuries. (Lately, people have been objecting to usages that date back to published works of Shakespeare.;-)
To veer slightly in an on-topic direction, such usages might be considered simple cases of text compression to minimize the physical resources needed to communicate them. We can expect lots of compression in data sent back by the proposed probes, including text-message-style features in any textual parts of the data. And when published, we'll see the usual objections from the peevers about the probes' failure to use "standard English".
If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway."
Or a speaker of Russian, Thai, Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Armenian or one of the many other languages that are not written with a Latin-based alphabet.
Or English or Spanish or Esperanto, which are written with a Latin-based alphabet.;-)
There has been more than a bit of linguistic study of the effectiveness of alphabetic and other writing systems, often dealing with the differences between what can be expressed verbally an in writing. None of our writing systems come very close to matching what can be expressed verbally (though the Unicode phonetic alphabet comes close for many languages).
In one linguistics course I took in college, the prof had a nice demo of the differences between written and spoken English (which he classified as different languages rather than dialects, due to the fact that native speakers have to spend years learning the written "dialect"). He gave us some short sentences, had spoke them with different intonations, and had us discuss the meanings of the utterances. The "winner" was the sentence "They're here." The class came up with 15 readings for which all the native speakers agreed on the meaning, plus a few more that speakers of the same English dialect agreed on but which differed in the different dialects known by classmates. He explained that spoken English is in fact a highly tonal language, with a minimum of 4 tone levels (pitches) and up to 3 tones for some vowels if you want to fully represent it in writing. Length markers are also needed for both vowels and some consonants, but that's a different topic. Linguists have ways of representing such things, but common written English doesn't. And a phonetic system is needed for the phonemes, so that for instance both readings of "read" (present, past) can be distinguished.
So no, you can't use any human language's Latin-based alphabetic representation to fully express the spoken language. OTOH, there are examples in most languages where things can be expressed clearly in writing that are very difficult to communicate by speaking. Many technical subjects have clear examples of this, especially subjects with a mathematical component. In particular, software developers often prefer to communicate via email, because it's so difficult to clearly express your ideas verbally in a way that won't be misunderstood. And there are running jokes going back to pre-computer times about the communication difficulties that groups of techies have when they don't have a blackboard (or whiteboard) to write on.
Excellent example. I read it first on a FF window on a Macbook Pro, where it looked like an o with umlaut followed by a latin capital Y. But I copied it to the "Characters" viewer, which showed me that the first characters was in fact a "LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH". Even enlarging the FF window by several bumps didn't make it look like an eth. So it in fact displayed as a visibly different character in two apps on the same screen on the same computer.
Edit after viewing the Preview: That eth character is displayed by the Preview as a capital letter A with a tilde. But the new edit panel still displays it as an eth that looks more like an o-umlaut, even at a larger font size than I like to use. So it's even more messed up by even this app (Firefox) on this screen on this computer. I wonder what it looks like on other people's screens.
The emojis currently defined by Unicode are beyond hopeless as communication aids. Now if there were only some reliable way to use the ASCII emojis without them being mapped to the little icons on the receiving end. But I guess we've moved on past the stage where emojis are useful for actual communication purposes. The flakey implementations by the major eGadget vendors have reduced them to just artsy decorations with no reliable interpretation.
The rest of the world is slowly "extending" their alphabetic writing systems to a mess that's every bit as poor at actual communication as the mess that is Chinese writing.;-)
It's quite sad that in the United States of America, of all places, this is now a legitimate and very real concern. What in the hell happened to this country?
Lessee, I seem to remember that there's a name for the logical error of thinking that the first time you notice something was the first time it ever happened.... Maybe I should try to dig the term out again and post it here...
No, it's pretty much rejected by sanctimonious leftists with axes to grind.
And also by the sanctimonious language pedants (that others have mentioned) who've been trying to impose their bizarre syntax ideas from other languages on English, rather than the normal (Germanic) syntax that the rest of the native-speaking population uses.;-)
Actually, the folks who follow the online linguistic forums do get a bit of fun out of mocking the latest attempts by the "peevers" (as they're generally known in such circles) to miscorrect someone else's normal English. And sometimes such things can lead to useful bits of educational material for those interested in how English and related languages actually work.
(The general theory is that most of the bogus syntax rules that the pedants have been foisting arose historically from the time when "educated" people knew and used Latin and/or Greek. Those were "real" languages, while English was a lower-class argot from that obscure island to the northwest of the real Europe. When English became a major language and the older status languages were phased out, it became useful to try to standardize the language somewhat. But the self-appointed experts in the subject knew that Latin and Greek were the only languages with real syntaxes, so they tried to impose their rules on English. It hasn't worked, of course, but that hasn't stopped them.
The other growing source of entertainment on such forums is the large body of bizarre English that is being collected all over the world. There's some really funny stuff there, and trying to understand how the translations came about can lead to insights about the differences between human languages. But that's an entire different topic that isn't really relevant here.
Well, to my knowledge, I don't actually have any porn on my android gadget. (My Macbook has a much larger screen.;-) But I'd expect that those who do, would find it interesting and useful to know how much of their porn apps' traffic and battery usage is from the ads. The marketers do have a way on inserting their stuff into all sorts of places where it isn't welcome. They're probably even worse than the porn vendors that way.
In any case, the question is general: How do we reliably find out what stuff in our gadget is using the battery and/or bandwidth? To be useful, the software supplying such information should work for whatever apps we have installed, especially those that came with our gadget. The suppliers of the gadgets don't seem very interested in helping us. In particular, Google and Apple are the two major suppliers of "smart phone" software, and neither seems very trustworthy when it comes to learning just what their gadgets are actually doing.
Somehow, with all the attention that the spread of portable Internet-enabled gadgetry, the Internet community seems to have been taken by surprise by the way that the corporate world views it not as a source of information, but rather as a new method for distributing marketing to their mark(et)s.
It's widely believed that ads have taken over (from porn;-) as the main traffic on the Web. This is rather significant if even close to true, it's likely one of the main reasons that our handy little portable gadgets (that many of us hardly ever actually use as phones) run so slowly and eat up so much bandwidth.
But a problem with even discussing this is that, as far as I've found, there's no reliable app available to actually measure our bandwidth use, classify it, and tell us what's eating it up. I do know that my android gadget is often running warm, eating batter and bandwidth, when it's just sitting "idle" in my pocket.
Yeah, I know; part of that is the tracking software.;-) But whatever; I can't really say with any authority what's causing its activity. The one thing I can actually see is apps that stay running in the background, and the gadget's power usage app does report that "innocent" apps like mail/message readers and web browsers are using battery when "nothing is happening". Investigating does often show that some of their windows contain video ads that are running. The power-usage app does let me kill apps, but that's not very useful in measuring the source of the power/bandwidth usage.
So is there a good way to actually measure the traffic, classify it, etc., so we can actually determine what's really eating up the battery and bandwidth? Are there good google keywords to learn about it? There are a few good unix/linux tools for examining network traffic, but I haven't found them for android, ios, etc. Anyone know what they might be, and how we might verify that they're not just trojans?
(And yes, I'm also aware that the marketers are going to read this and be major sources of replies that try to reassure us without answering anything. Maybe we can moderate them down?;-)
Hereabouts, in the Boston area, they're all called Moaning People, since in the local dialect, "morning", "mourning" and "moaning" are homophones. (And the rumors about where they "pahk theyah cahs" is actually quite wrong, since if you pahk yoah cah theya, the Hahvahd police will tow it away.)
Trolls have always been an integral part of slashdot, and part of the "uncensored" appeal of the site. "First they came for the trolls..."
Yeah; one of the things I've been trying for: I've gotten troll+insightful, troll+informative, troll+funny, and funny+insightful+informative mods over the years, but I've never managed to get a troll+funny+(insightful|informative), no matter how hard I try. Part of it is starting off at level 2, so I have to get exactly 1 of each to succeed. Evicting trolls would totally end this (admittedly pointless) goal. OTOH, if the max rating were raised above 5, I'd stand a better chance of success. I've seen others manage it, so I know it's possible.
(I think I've figured out how to write "insightful" and "informative" messages that get me a "troll" mod from the overly serious or doctrinaire. But I haven't really figured out how to offend the humor-impaired while getting the humor across while talking seriously. It's sorta like trying to juggle one too many balls.;-)
Personally, what I see i:
2. The comments. Every single thread devolves into many, many political bullshit rants. Democrat idiots, Republican assholes, liberal, conservative, Socialist, Communist, Fundies blah blah......
#1 you can maybe fix
#2 not so much
One of the aspects of this that I've actually seen some partial results for: The current thread layout tends to make it difficult to get beyond the first or sometimes second reply's threads, which fill up many screens, and it's hard to wade through it all to find the non-BS sections of the message trees. It could be a lot more useful if the Nth top-level replies were easier to find, and then also look at the 2nd-level replies to each. I don't think I've seen any really great solutions to this, though I've seen a few that seem to work a bit better than what/. does. Anyway, the problem can be seen in a lot of discussions by starting at the bottom, and noting that most of the messages there have few ratings or replies, meaning that hardly anyone has read them.
Of course, it's possible that something like this is available in the New! Improved!/. UI, and I just haven't recognized it. If so, maybe some more documentation is in order. It's also possible that just adding several more selectable numbers in addition to rating, depth, karma, etc., and provide some easily-accessible config settings so we can tweak them all until we
each find a setting combo that we like.
I don't want to toot the site's horn too much, but have you looked at other communities on the internet lately? Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization. If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
Heh. Remind me of the comments I've seen in assorted places, to the effect that the intelligence of any group of humans is an inverse function of the number of members.
There's dispute about just what the inverse function is. This might be settled, in a sense, by the easy observation that the large body of internet groups show wide variation in visible intelligence, and it's fairly easy to show that this variation is very poorly correlated with a group's size. The conclusion is that there's not just one inverse function between population size and intelligence, there are many such functions.
This opens up what could be an interesting research proposal: Can we collect enough detailed data on populations, including not just their sizes and apparent intelligences, but various other quanitites that might be measurable (and which the groups' leaders will tell us)? If so, maybe we can infer useful information about why some online groups have the intelligence levels that they do.
Or maybe it's all just a hopeless mess. The value of the current IQ tests gives us little hope. But we do have something they don't: many petabytes of comments on all topics by billions of humans, most of it backed up so that repeated access is possible.
OK; it probably really is a hopeless mess. But think of how useful it could be if we could give discussion leaders useful guidelines for improving the intelligence of discussion groups. OK, with things like politics and religion, they'd just use it to drive the level down, but for most other subject, it could lead to an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.
names, email and phone numbers of all NASA employees are public, and on the web at people.nasa.gov. tens of thousands of em, free for the taking. There's also an x.500 directory.
Perhaps, but the US "security" system doesn't consider the fact that info is openly published to be a reason not to classify the info as "secret".
There was a fun report some time back, about the US Dept of Defense funding a couple of academic researchers to study what could be learned about US military forces solely from publicly-available published sources. They spent some months collecting publications, wrote up their report, sent it to the DoD -- and within a couple of days it had a Secret classification.;-)
Everyone who read the story got a good laugh, of course, but it does serve as an example of the logic behind the security classification system. It's also a useful counter-example of the old "If you've done nothing illegal, you have nothing to fear" mantra. In the US, it certainly can be illegal to be in possession of information that a government agency has published openly. It can even be illegal to know that it's illegal to have some information. (Google "FISA warrant" for some examples.;-)
Yup; and that's certainly 'leet perl; it looks like line noise.;-)
But we might dispute the comment that it'd take 300 lines of C. 300 lines of readable, well-formatted C, perhaps, but C can be made nearly as cryptic and compact as perl. It's mainly things like pattern matching and table manipulation and such where C requires the use of libraries to be so succinct. For basic bit/number crunching, perl isn't really much more compact than C.
I wonder if the Obscure C folks have tackled this problem. Maybe I should google it...
AFAIK, in US English, the punctuation should be inside the quotation marks, while in British English (and Norwegian, yay) the punctuation should be outside.
Also, all programming languages would put such commas outside the quotes, unless you want each quoted string to contain the comma as its final character, but then you'd need another comma after the quotes to have the correct syntax for a list of quoted strings that each end in commas.
Of course, programming languages are required to follow sensible and logical rules, unlike English, where the rules are just made up on the fly by anyone with access to a pen or keyboard (or touch screen, for the last couple of decades).
Even back in the 70s, the idea that commas belonged inside quotations always seemed a bit bizarre to me. Except, of course, when the speaker actually did an end-of-clause pause at that point, in which case the comma would be the printed representation of what was actually said.
But even then, I understood that there's no logic or reason behind most of the English syntax rules that people make up and try to enforce.
pgp encryption was classified as munitions so that they could limit its export
Hey, I've still got my t-shirt with the 3-line perl implementation of pgp, and the explanation on the back that it's legally a "munition". I still wear it once or twice a year to some inappropriate event where I know there'll be lots of them furriner types.;-)
(So far I've never been arrested for wearing it to public events, and none of my acquaintances who also have one have been arrested either. I've been disappointed to not be able to follow the fun that would follow if they actually tried to punish someone for wearing such dangerous t-shirts.)
Many people would say that most CEOs of big companies are incompetent. This is true, of course, partly because being competent isn't part of the job description.;-)
One of my fun corporate competence stories is about how I got a (US) 617 area code for my cell phone, which is the area including Boston and a few of its suburbs. I got it while living in Waltham, 10 miles west and in the 781 area. When I got my first cell phone, and used my then land-line phone to get help setting it up, the CS fellow I talked to couldn't find Waltham on a map. After a bit of futzing, which got us nowhere, he asked if it was near Cambridge. I said that it was; you just drive west through Watertown or Belmont, and you'll reach Waltham. So he asked if a Cambridge area code would work, and I told him it'd be fine. (Actually, it's sorta the "status" area code in the metro area, FWIW.)
Now, you'd think that a phone company's database would know about a city of 60,000 people. I guess not, and this tells you a lot about the competence of that company's DB and CS folks. I won't name the company, to avoid publicly shaming them any more than others already have. You'd recognize their name, though.
In my experience, this is about typical for lots of big corporations.
Now there's no-one else for these sites to get their mapping from
Well, there's OpenStreetMap, which all third-parties should be using since, as TFA proves, using the Google Maps API is not safe.
Indeed, and it's nice of the/. editors to send us all this reminder of the fact that you shouldn't ever build anything that depends on a "service" provided by just one company. They can and sometimes do terminate such services, often without notice, or modify them so what you're using them for no longer works. And they tend to get access to all the info about your stuff, to use as they like.
In particular, any organization that depends on a company's service is run by fools. You might be able to use services like "the Cloud" as a sort of backup, if you don't mind the company seeing the contents of all your files. But you must plan for the day when the company you're using cuts you off. The only real way to do this is to make sure that you have (and control your copies of) all the hardware and software needed to keep it running. If you don't, you can be put out of business at any time, with little or no warning.
Personally, I hope that/. keeps posting the occasional stories along this line. It's clear that a lot of people don't understand it. Reminding people of such pitfalls is a public service, and it's useful to have such stories publicised when they happen. (And maybe this will get a few more people involved with openstreetmap. They could use a few more features.;-)
He's not the first to discover the uses of the commercial shipping companies like Fedex, etc. At least since the mid 90s, people have been doing just that. Part of it was in response to all the airport security that was being developed using poorly-paid, and thus unqualified examiners. The other part was the airlines' growing limits on "excess" baggage, plus their tendency to fly your luggage to some place remote from where they were flying you. People reported that handing it over to the package-shipping people to deliver to your destination did an end run around the airlines' lost luggage issue and the government's incompetent security theater. And the cost was often less than what the airlines would charge for the excess luggage. Others read those reports, tried it, found that it worked, and switched to the same process. And on arrival, they had just the one carry-on bag, didn't have to deal with the airlines' slow luggage-delivery schemes, and could just grab a ride to wherever they were headed, where their luggage, equipment, etc. would be waiting for them.
The airlines should just say the hell with it, convert the bottom of the plane to a second deck of seats, and subcontract the luggage delivery with the folks who know how to do it right. Lots of the frequent-traveller crowd does it that way already.
Slashdot Mirror
(Cynics would say the wars further benefit the corporations.)
Cynics and accountants. ;-)
If you look into the history of the concept of a "corporation", you'll find that it was developed for exactly this purpose. The idea is that if it's illegal for a person to do something, you can create a corporation consisting of several people, together they do the thing that would be illegal for any of them to do, and if there's a legal challenge, they can just say "Hey, I didn't do it; the corporation did." The legal system can punish the corporation if so desired, but the corporation doesn't pass the punishment along to its employees. This is referred to as "limited liability", and it's the primary reason that corporations were invented. It insulates the corporation's owners from legal liability.
... The "Office of Foreign Assets Control" is bound to return the guy's money, if they have it. "Unreasonable ... seizure" is prohibited by the US constitution (amendment #4). It might not happen soon, but unless a court orders otherwise, they can't keep the money. 'Detaining' someone's property can be a problem. I can see it, clearly. Why can't you?
Probably because Venmo is handled by a private corporation (and a flock of banks), and the US Constitution is generally considered by the legal system to apply only to the US government. Corporations can legally do lots of things that the government can't, such as enforce religions, ban unacceptable speech, etc., etc.
There are laws again theft that do apply to corporations, and Venmo may be charged under such laws. But corporations commit thefts like this all the time, and they often get away with it.
(Actually, if Venmo were a government agency, they'd probably drag the suspected terrorist off to a holding cell for a bit of "enhanced interrogation". So maybe the victim should be glad they're only stealing his money. ;-)
"Never mind" is two words.
C'mon; everyone accepts "nevertheless" and "nevermore" as single words; "nevermind" is an obvious next entry in that particular list.
Of course, the peevers have to object to anything they didn't learn by 5th grade, including some things that have been part of the language for centuries. (Lately, people have been objecting to usages that date back to published works of Shakespeare. ;-)
To veer slightly in an on-topic direction, such usages might be considered simple cases of text compression to minimize the physical resources needed to communicate them. We can expect lots of compression in data sent back by the proposed probes, including text-message-style features in any textual parts of the data. And when published, we'll see the usual objections from the peevers about the probes' failure to use "standard English".
I've known a number of people in their 20s who would qualify as "senile". ;-)
Actually, /. should replace all mod options with emojis!
Facebook is way ahead of us with that. (And the ambiguities of their emoji mod levels fit right in with this topic.)
If you can't express yourself with pure text, you are an idiot anyway."
Or a speaker of Russian, Thai, Arabic, Cambodian, Chinese, Armenian or one of the many other languages that are not written with a Latin-based alphabet.
Or English or Spanish or Esperanto, which are written with a Latin-based alphabet. ;-)
There has been more than a bit of linguistic study of the effectiveness of alphabetic and other writing systems, often dealing with the differences between what can be expressed verbally an in writing. None of our writing systems come very close to matching what can be expressed verbally (though the Unicode phonetic alphabet comes close for many languages).
In one linguistics course I took in college, the prof had a nice demo of the differences between written and spoken English (which he classified as different languages rather than dialects, due to the fact that native speakers have to spend years learning the written "dialect"). He gave us some short sentences, had spoke them with different intonations, and had us discuss the meanings of the utterances. The "winner" was the sentence "They're here." The class came up with 15 readings for which all the native speakers agreed on the meaning, plus a few more that speakers of the same English dialect agreed on but which differed in the different dialects known by classmates. He explained that spoken English is in fact a highly tonal language, with a minimum of 4 tone levels (pitches) and up to 3 tones for some vowels if you want to fully represent it in writing. Length markers are also needed for both vowels and some consonants, but that's a different topic. Linguists have ways of representing such things, but common written English doesn't. And a phonetic system is needed for the phonemes, so that for instance both readings of "read" (present, past) can be distinguished.
So no, you can't use any human language's Latin-based alphabetic representation to fully express the spoken language. OTOH, there are examples in most languages where things can be expressed clearly in writing that are very difficult to communicate by speaking. Many technical subjects have clear examples of this, especially subjects with a mathematical component. In particular, software developers often prefer to communicate via email, because it's so difficult to clearly express your ideas verbally in a way that won't be misunderstood. And there are running jokes going back to pre-computer times about the communication difficulties that groups of techies have when they don't have a blackboard (or whiteboard) to write on.
ÃY
Excellent example. I read it first on a FF window on a Macbook Pro, where it looked like an o with umlaut followed by a latin capital Y. But I copied it to the "Characters" viewer, which showed me that the first characters was in fact a "LATIN SMALL LETTER ETH". Even enlarging the FF window by several bumps didn't make it look like an eth. So it in fact displayed as a visibly different character in two apps on the same screen on the same computer.
Edit after viewing the Preview: That eth character is displayed by the Preview as a capital letter A with a tilde. But the new edit panel still displays it as an eth that looks more like an o-umlaut, even at a larger font size than I like to use. So it's even more messed up by even this app (Firefox) on this screen on this computer. I wonder what it looks like on other people's screens.
The emojis currently defined by Unicode are beyond hopeless as communication aids. Now if there were only some reliable way to use the ASCII emojis without them being mapped to the little icons on the receiving end. But I guess we've moved on past the stage where emojis are useful for actual communication purposes. The flakey implementations by the major eGadget vendors have reduced them to just artsy decorations with no reliable interpretation.
The rest of the world is slowly "extending" their alphabetic writing systems to a mess that's every bit as poor at actual communication as the mess that is Chinese writing. ;-)
It's quite sad that in the United States of America, of all places, this is now a legitimate and very real concern. What in the hell happened to this country?
Lessee, I seem to remember that there's a name for the logical error of thinking that the first time you notice something was the first time it ever happened. ... Maybe I should try to dig the term out again and post it here ...
If you outlaw good cryptography, then only outlaws will have good cryptography
Hmmm ... The usual version says "... only outlaws will have secrets". But both versions work.
(Actually, both are wrong; they should say "... only outlaws and governments will have ...". ;-)
No, it's pretty much rejected by sanctimonious leftists with axes to grind.
And also by the sanctimonious language pedants (that others have mentioned) who've been trying to impose their bizarre syntax ideas from other languages on English, rather than the normal (Germanic) syntax that the rest of the native-speaking population uses. ;-)
Actually, the folks who follow the online linguistic forums do get a bit of fun out of mocking the latest attempts by the "peevers" (as they're generally known in such circles) to miscorrect someone else's normal English. And sometimes such things can lead to useful bits of educational material for those interested in how English and related languages actually work.
(The general theory is that most of the bogus syntax rules that the pedants have been foisting arose historically from the time when "educated" people knew and used Latin and/or Greek. Those were "real" languages, while English was a lower-class argot from that obscure island to the northwest of the real Europe. When English became a major language and the older status languages were phased out, it became useful to try to standardize the language somewhat. But the self-appointed experts in the subject knew that Latin and Greek were the only languages with real syntaxes, so they tried to impose their rules on English. It hasn't worked, of course, but that hasn't stopped them.
The other growing source of entertainment on such forums is the large body of bizarre English that is being collected all over the world. There's some really funny stuff there, and trying to understand how the translations came about can lead to insights about the differences between human languages. But that's an entire different topic that isn't really relevant here.
How do you categorize the porn ads?
Well, to my knowledge, I don't actually have any porn on my android gadget. (My Macbook has a much larger screen. ;-) But I'd expect that those who do, would find it interesting and useful to know how much of their porn apps' traffic and battery usage is from the ads. The marketers do have a way on inserting their stuff into all sorts of places where it isn't welcome. They're probably even worse than the porn vendors that way.
In any case, the question is general: How do we reliably find out what stuff in our gadget is using the battery and/or bandwidth? To be useful, the software supplying such information should work for whatever apps we have installed, especially those that came with our gadget. The suppliers of the gadgets don't seem very interested in helping us. In particular, Google and Apple are the two major suppliers of "smart phone" software, and neither seems very trustworthy when it comes to learning just what their gadgets are actually doing.
Somehow, with all the attention that the spread of portable Internet-enabled gadgetry, the Internet community seems to have been taken by surprise by the way that the corporate world views it not as a source of information, but rather as a new method for distributing marketing to their mark(et)s.
It's widely believed that ads have taken over (from porn ;-) as the main traffic on the Web. This is rather significant if even close to true, it's likely one of the main reasons that our handy little portable gadgets (that many of us hardly ever actually use as phones) run so slowly and eat up so much bandwidth.
But a problem with even discussing this is that, as far as I've found, there's no reliable app available to actually measure our bandwidth use, classify it, and tell us what's eating it up. I do know that my android gadget is often running warm, eating batter and bandwidth, when it's just sitting "idle" in my pocket.
Yeah, I know; part of that is the tracking software. ;-) But whatever; I can't really say with any authority what's causing its activity. The one thing I can actually see is apps that stay running in the background, and the gadget's power usage app does report that "innocent" apps like mail/message readers and web browsers are using battery when "nothing is happening". Investigating does often show that some of their windows contain video ads that are running. The power-usage app does let me kill apps, but that's not very useful in measuring the source of the power/bandwidth usage.
So is there a good way to actually measure the traffic, classify it, etc., so we can actually determine what's really eating up the battery and bandwidth? Are there good google keywords to learn about it? There are a few good unix/linux tools for examining network traffic, but I haven't found them for android, ios, etc. Anyone know what they might be, and how we might verify that they're not just trojans?
(And yes, I'm also aware that the marketers are going to read this and be major sources of replies that try to reassure us without answering anything. Maybe we can moderate them down? ;-)
Hereabouts, in the Boston area, they're all called Moaning People, since in the local dialect, "morning", "mourning" and "moaning" are homophones. (And the rumors about where they "pahk theyah cahs" is actually quite wrong, since if you pahk yoah cah theya, the Hahvahd police will tow it away.)
(I wonder how many others noticed.)
Trolls have always been an integral part of slashdot, and part of the "uncensored" appeal of the site. "First they came for the trolls ..."
Yeah; one of the things I've been trying for: I've gotten troll+insightful, troll+informative, troll+funny, and funny+insightful+informative mods over the years, but I've never managed to get a troll+funny+(insightful|informative), no matter how hard I try. Part of it is starting off at level 2, so I have to get exactly 1 of each to succeed. Evicting trolls would totally end this (admittedly pointless) goal. OTOH, if the max rating were raised above 5, I'd stand a better chance of success. I've seen others manage it, so I know it's possible.
(I think I've figured out how to write "insightful" and "informative" messages that get me a "troll" mod from the overly serious or doctrinaire. But I haven't really figured out how to offend the humor-impaired while getting the humor across while talking seriously. It's sorta like trying to juggle one too many balls. ;-)
Personally, what I see i: 2. The comments. Every single thread devolves into many, many political bullshit rants. Democrat idiots, Republican assholes, liberal, conservative, Socialist, Communist, Fundies blah blah...... #1 you can maybe fix #2 not so much
One of the aspects of this that I've actually seen some partial results for: The current thread layout tends to make it difficult to get beyond the first or sometimes second reply's threads, which fill up many screens, and it's hard to wade through it all to find the non-BS sections of the message trees. It could be a lot more useful if the Nth top-level replies were easier to find, and then also look at the 2nd-level replies to each. I don't think I've seen any really great solutions to this, though I've seen a few that seem to work a bit better than what /. does. Anyway, the problem can be seen in a lot of discussions by starting at the bottom, and noting that most of the messages there have few ratings or replies, meaning that hardly anyone has read them.
Of course, it's possible that something like this is available in the New! Improved! /. UI, and I just haven't recognized it. If so, maybe some more documentation is in order. It's also possible that just adding several more selectable numbers in addition to rating, depth, karma, etc., and provide some easily-accessible config settings so we can tweak them all until we
each find a setting combo that we like.
I don't want to toot the site's horn too much, but have you looked at other communities on the internet lately? Slashdot might not be objectively good, but compared to plenty of other places it may as well be the pinnacle of internet civilization. If there were honestly something better in a general sense, there would be far fewer people here.
Heh. Remind me of the comments I've seen in assorted places, to the effect that the intelligence of any group of humans is an inverse function of the number of members.
There's dispute about just what the inverse function is. This might be settled, in a sense, by the easy observation that the large body of internet groups show wide variation in visible intelligence, and it's fairly easy to show that this variation is very poorly correlated with a group's size. The conclusion is that there's not just one inverse function between population size and intelligence, there are many such functions.
This opens up what could be an interesting research proposal: Can we collect enough detailed data on populations, including not just their sizes and apparent intelligences, but various other quanitites that might be measurable (and which the groups' leaders will tell us)? If so, maybe we can infer useful information about why some online groups have the intelligence levels that they do.
Or maybe it's all just a hopeless mess. The value of the current IQ tests gives us little hope. But we do have something they don't: many petabytes of comments on all topics by billions of humans, most of it backed up so that repeated access is possible.
OK; it probably really is a hopeless mess. But think of how useful it could be if we could give discussion leaders useful guidelines for improving the intelligence of discussion groups. OK, with things like politics and religion, they'd just use it to drive the level down, but for most other subject, it could lead to an improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio.
names, email and phone numbers of all NASA employees are public, and on the web at people.nasa.gov. tens of thousands of em, free for the taking. There's also an x.500 directory.
Perhaps, but the US "security" system doesn't consider the fact that info is openly published to be a reason not to classify the info as "secret".
There was a fun report some time back, about the US Dept of Defense funding a couple of academic researchers to study what could be learned about US military forces solely from publicly-available published sources. They spent some months collecting publications, wrote up their report, sent it to the DoD -- and within a couple of days it had a Secret classification. ;-)
Everyone who read the story got a good laugh, of course, but it does serve as an example of the logic behind the security classification system. It's also a useful counter-example of the old "If you've done nothing illegal, you have nothing to fear" mantra. In the US, it certainly can be illegal to be in possession of information that a government agency has published openly. It can even be illegal to know that it's illegal to have some information. (Google "FISA warrant" for some examples. ;-)
Yup; and that's certainly 'leet perl; it looks like line noise. ;-)
But we might dispute the comment that it'd take 300 lines of C. 300 lines of readable, well-formatted C, perhaps, but C can be made nearly as cryptic and compact as perl. It's mainly things like pattern matching and table manipulation and such where C requires the use of libraries to be so succinct. For basic bit/number crunching, perl isn't really much more compact than C.
I wonder if the Obscure C folks have tackled this problem. Maybe I should google it ...
AFAIK, in US English, the punctuation should be inside the quotation marks, while in British English (and Norwegian, yay) the punctuation should be outside.
Also, all programming languages would put such commas outside the quotes, unless you want each quoted string to contain the comma as its final character, but then you'd need another comma after the quotes to have the correct syntax for a list of quoted strings that each end in commas.
Of course, programming languages are required to follow sensible and logical rules, unlike English, where the rules are just made up on the fly by anyone with access to a pen or keyboard (or touch screen, for the last couple of decades).
Even back in the 70s, the idea that commas belonged inside quotations always seemed a bit bizarre to me. Except, of course, when the speaker actually did an end-of-clause pause at that point, in which case the comma would be the printed representation of what was actually said.
But even then, I understood that there's no logic or reason behind most of the English syntax rules that people make up and try to enforce.
pgp encryption was classified as munitions so that they could limit its export
Hey, I've still got my t-shirt with the 3-line perl implementation of pgp, and the explanation on the back that it's legally a "munition". I still wear it once or twice a year to some inappropriate event where I know there'll be lots of them furriner types. ;-)
(So far I've never been arrested for wearing it to public events, and none of my acquaintances who also have one have been arrested either. I've been disappointed to not be able to follow the fun that would follow if they actually tried to punish someone for wearing such dangerous t-shirts.)
Many people would say that most CEOs of big companies are incompetent. This is true, of course, partly because being competent isn't part of the job description. ;-)
One of my fun corporate competence stories is about how I got a (US) 617 area code for my cell phone, which is the area including Boston and a few of its suburbs. I got it while living in Waltham, 10 miles west and in the 781 area. When I got my first cell phone, and used my then land-line phone to get help setting it up, the CS fellow I talked to couldn't find Waltham on a map. After a bit of futzing, which got us nowhere, he asked if it was near Cambridge. I said that it was; you just drive west through Watertown or Belmont, and you'll reach Waltham. So he asked if a Cambridge area code would work, and I told him it'd be fine. (Actually, it's sorta the "status" area code in the metro area, FWIW.)
Now, you'd think that a phone company's database would know about a city of 60,000 people. I guess not, and this tells you a lot about the competence of that company's DB and CS folks. I won't name the company, to avoid publicly shaming them any more than others already have. You'd recognize their name, though.
In my experience, this is about typical for lots of big corporations.
Well, there's OpenStreetMap, which all third-parties should be using since, as TFA proves, using the Google Maps API is not safe.
Indeed, and it's nice of the /. editors to send us all this reminder of the fact that you shouldn't ever build anything that depends on a "service" provided by just one company. They can and sometimes do terminate such services, often without notice, or modify them so what you're using them for no longer works. And they tend to get access to all the info about your stuff, to use as they like.
In particular, any organization that depends on a company's service is run by fools. You might be able to use services like "the Cloud" as a sort of backup, if you don't mind the company seeing the contents of all your files. But you must plan for the day when the company you're using cuts you off. The only real way to do this is to make sure that you have (and control your copies of) all the hardware and software needed to keep it running. If you don't, you can be put out of business at any time, with little or no warning.
Personally, I hope that /. keeps posting the occasional stories along this line. It's clear that a lot of people don't understand it. Reminding people of such pitfalls is a public service, and it's useful to have such stories publicised when they happen. (And maybe this will get a few more people involved with openstreetmap. They could use a few more features. ;-)
He's not the first to discover the uses of the commercial shipping companies like Fedex, etc. At least since the mid 90s, people have been doing just that. Part of it was in response to all the airport security that was being developed using poorly-paid, and thus unqualified examiners. The other part was the airlines' growing limits on "excess" baggage, plus their tendency to fly your luggage to some place remote from where they were flying you. People reported that handing it over to the package-shipping people to deliver to your destination did an end run around the airlines' lost luggage issue and the government's incompetent security theater. And the cost was often less than what the airlines would charge for the excess luggage. Others read those reports, tried it, found that it worked, and switched to the same process. And on arrival, they had just the one carry-on bag, didn't have to deal with the airlines' slow luggage-delivery schemes, and could just grab a ride to wherever they were headed, where their luggage, equipment, etc. would be waiting for them.
The airlines should just say the hell with it, convert the bottom of the plane to a second deck of seats, and subcontract the luggage delivery with the folks who know how to do it right. Lots of the frequent-traveller crowd does it that way already.