yeah it is MS, but the problem exists with any proprietary technology. The company doesn't need to be borg-like, just closed.
Exactly right. One of my favorite examples: Some years ago, I worked on a series of projects at a company where the development teams were more or less divided between those that used Sun workstations and those that used Apollos. There was an ongoing discussion of the merits of both. The main argument of the Apollo developers was that you got roughly twice the computing power for a given price with Apollo. Sun was "overpriced and underpowered".
But Sun slowly won out. What would happen on any project is that you'd be debugging your stuff, and inevitably you'd be led into a system library routine that didn't behave like you expected. With Apollo, when you called Customer Support, the answer was usually "That's proprietary. We can't tell you." Brick wall. You're on your own, and all you can do is start guessing.
When this happened with Sun, we usually didn't even contact Sun's CS. We asked on one or more of the Sun newsgroups and mailing lists. Within a few hours, we'd usually have an answer. More often than not, the answer came from a Sun engineer. It often came with a chunk of the source, with an offer to send more source if we needed.
As a result, the Sun developers had working, sellable products much sooner than the Apollo developers. Having a product that works is always better than having a product that doesn't work, even if the price is a bit higher. The company slowly scaled down its use of Apollos. This may have had something to do with why Apollo no longer exists (though www.apollo.com still exists - try it;-).
Since then, of course, Sun has slowly taken its systems more and more proprietary. But that's OK, because linux has since arisen to fill Sun's old niche. Same argument: With Sun, you inevitably hit the "We can't tell you - it's proprietary" brick wall. With linux, you have all the source you want, plus a world-wide flock of linux hackers who love to show off their expertise by answering your dumb questions.
The fun thing in this case is that linux and other open-source software now comes with a license that pretty much prevents anyone from ever closing off access. So it's a lot safer bet for a platform than anything proprietary, no matter how open a company may appear right now.
Of course, the *BSD systems are about as good in this respect. One might argue that linux is now sufficiently successful that it could use a bit more competition. Maybe we should be pushing the BSDs a bit more loudly. Those people who don't like choice might object, but we'd probably all be better off for it.
And I wonder how OS X fits into all this? I have a Mac Powerbook, but I've found it much more difficult and time consuming to find reliable low-level information about its innards than with linux. It's only partly for proprietary reasons. Usually it's the "Don't worry your little head about it; it Just Works" attitude. This is very frustrating when you have decades of C hacking behind you, and you're trying to get some low-level code to just work the way you want it to. Instead of a brick wall, you're beating your head against a very soft, fuzzy wall.
In any case, I'd think that a reasonable software rule now would be: Don't build your product on any platform unless you have all the source. This is now feasible; you get full source with linux and the *BSD systems. So why use a platform that doesn't provide full source?
And if you don't understand why you need full source, you aren't competent to make business decisions about software development. Hand the decision over to someone who understands. Hire them if you need to. Otherwise, you're risking your business on a foundation of quicksand.
Well, analog camera has one big advantage over digital camera: independent of power.
Digital cameras have one big advantage over analog cameras: independence of developing labs.
My wife and I, despite being thorough computer geeks, had put off buying a digital camera. Then, 5 or so years ago, her mother came to live with us for what turned out to be the last couple years of her life. Shortly before she died, we took her on a trip to the old home town over in the next state. We took along a camera, and filled it with pictures. It turned out to be the last roll of film with her.
When we got home, we sent it off to a developing lab - and a few days later got back a package of someone else's pictures. We took them back to the retail place, explained the problem, and gave them back the pictures to deliver to the right people.
We never got our pictures or film back. We eventually got some "free" replacement film.
Soon after that we got a digital camera. It's a bit late for my wife's mother, of course. But now we can "develop" the pictures ourselves. We can back them up on CDs (and try to remember to read them back in 10 years or so, to copy to a new CD;-). We don't depend on some commercial strangers who'll just say "Sorry about that" and offer to replace the film for free.
We can also make our own porn, without sharing it with the guys at the lab. Actually we haven't done that yet, I'm sorry to report, unless you consider some nude pictures of a new grandson or niece to be porn (as some people apparently do). But I suspect that this is part of the appeal of digital cameras.
Anyone else with stories of what persuaded them to go digital?
(2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;...
This sounds like it's saying that the phone/cable companies can no longer do port blocking, and can't kick you off for running a server.
The main reason I subscribe to speakeasy is that they promise to not block ports, and they encourage you to run servers. Most ISPs, including almost all phone/cable companies, have a TOS that makes it illegal to run your own servers. They also block at least ports 25 and 80. You have to relay email through their servers, and you can't legally run a web server at all.
It'll be interesting to see if this is enforced. Of course, if say Verizon or Comcast terminated your access because you run a web server, they could still just say "Yeah, it may be illegal. You're welcome to take us to court. In 5 or ten years, if you win, you'll get your access back. BTW, you'd better have a good team of lawyers."
I also wonder what that "needs of law enforcement" means? Do we all have to provide a standard backdoor to our system, accessible to any law enforcement agency (and anyone else who knows the access protocol)?
While I'd like to think that the FCC has the interests of us "consumers" at heart, I'm not really sure that this is their motive here. Not if they're acting to kill off the ISPs that provide unfettered access, handing total control over to the companies that have historically blocked full access, and saying "Trust us".
I'd agree that the information about me wants to be free. And I want it to remain imprisoned in those cold, heartless commercial databases.
Where's the inconsistency there?
Conflict, yes; inconsistency, no.
But I figure I'll probably lose. The data is in the hands of a large, random crowd of programmers and managers who have a poor record so far. They are generally sloppy about security, use the least-secure computer systems available, use 4-digit passwords and send them across the Net unencrypted, and leave backup tapes accessible to anyone with a few hundred bucks for a bribe.
So in the long run, it's hopeless. That information is in a feeble prison and will eventually stumble out. It has already happened to millions of people; it's only a matter of time until it happens to the rest of us.
For all we know, the path of evolution was a foreseeable consequence of some seed state arranged by an omnipotent or near omnipotent intelligent designer.
Or, more likely, the young, pristine planet Earth was visited 4.5 billion years ago by a crew of aliens, who studied the new Solar System for a while, and then flew away. They left behind a pile of garbage that was full of assorted bacteria.
The rest is history (literally).
Several good SF stories have been written based on the artifacts they left behind to monitor the system. Some of them are still operational and sending data...
The scientific method cannot test whether or not a past event occured.
Actually, there are a number of cases where scientists have done just that.
I went to college in eastern Washington state, which has some rather unusual geology. It's incredibly torn up, with irregular dry canyons cutting through flat terrain; long, narrow, parallel hills that from the air look like the sand ripples in a stream bed; rocks of all sizes scattered at random across the terrain, and so on. In the early 20th century, an interesting conjecture was proposed to explain the topography: There had been a massive flood covering much of the Columbia basin some time in the distant past. This had obvious ramifications for the religious folk, of course. But did it happen?
Over the century, a lot of geological data was collected. Eventually the data made it clear to geolgists that the conjecture was exactly right. Back in the ice age, glaciers blocked valleys to the east, and a large lake formed in the Rockies, called Lake Missoula, which was roughly the size of current Lake Erie. At one point, as the glaciers retreated, an opening in one valley appeared, and the lake drained in maybe two weeks. The water took a lot of ice and rocks with it, carved deep and irregular channels across the basin, left huge house-sized boulders scattered across the landscape, and eventually drained out through the Columbia Gorge.
This was probably before humans were in the area; if there were any there at the time, very few would have survived.
It's a real-world example of a historic event that started as a weak conjecture, and was verified by a process of scientific data collection.
The Thera/Santorini eruption is a similar story of an event that had a major effect on Middle-Eastern history around 3500 years ago. It was proposed a few decades ago, and a bit of geological and archaeological work over some years verified the event.
There are a good number of (pre)historical events that have been verified by scientific data collection.
The biblical flood is still an open question. It probably corresponds to a real event, but this hasn't been scientifically verified. It may never be, if the evidence has suffered enough damage.
Of course, the biggest "event" in the fossil/geological record is the appearance and evolution of the Earth's biosphere. That has been verified far past any reasonable doubt by scientific methods. (So only unreasonable doubt remains.;-) We don't have evidence of how it started, and probably never will. But the development of multicellular forms over the past 600 million years has left more than enough evidence to show what happened, although a lot of the details have been erased.
When I was in high school, there were several teachers who tried to introduce non-Christian ideas in various classes, mostly the "history of civilization" sort, but also in a few science classes taught by teachers who thought that the history of ideas was important.
This produced outraged responses from the "good Christian" folk in the community, and such ideas were reluctantly shelved.
All I ever remember being taught about such things can be summarized as trivialized parodies of the real thing. We're seeing one effect of this now in the US, as malicious parodies of Islamic thought are loudly described by media and politicians, and accepted by much of the population as the real thing.
As a good illustration of this, try asking scientists what they think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find that most have read it, and really enjoyed it. And they'll especially tell you how much they liked the scene of the rebuilding of the Earth, including laying down the fossil beds to fake the planet's history.
Myself, I think that if ID is forced into science classes, tHHGttG should be one of the primary texts.
There are also some good SF novels that have used various other creation myths. Maybe we should be pushing those other myths as alternatives, since they're every bit as scientifically credible as the Christian myth. At least teach the myths for which we have some good literature for the students to read.
Anyone want to suggest some other good textbooks? I suppose 2001 belongs on the list. What else?
what makes it so interesting is the notice at the bottom of the page:
In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.
What strikes me as odd here is that google has a straightforward way of handling such things without the need of legal threats.
First, they honor robots.txt files. If you have something you don't want them to scan or cache, but you want it online, just put the appropriate entry in your robots.txt file.
Second, they have web pages that deal with this topic. You can get things removed from the google cache by filling in an online form. It takes a few days, but this is a lot faster than going through a legal firm.
I've used this a couple of times, for various reasons. Sometimes the data was obsolete or otherwise incorrect, and the replacement web pages didn't all have the same names as the original, so I used their method for purging the unwanted pages quickly. In one case, a file with people's names and phone numbers leaked out, and we wanted them off the web quickly. Google was very cooperative in every case. In a couple of cases, they cached large intermediate "temp" files, and we didn't want to waste time helping people who discovered them and didn't understand the nature of the data.
Anyway, I've found google to be cooperative when I find that they've scanned and cached something that we accidentally made too public. So it seems rather silly to resort to legal actions when there's a much simpler "technical" approach that works quickly.
It's especially annoying to discover that google has a several-years-old version of an open-source program of yours, and people are downloading it from the google cache because (perhaps due to a name change) they can't find it on your site. Then, when it doesn't work because of an old bug or missing feature, they contact you to try to get you to fix it. This just wastes everyone's time. It's nice that google gives you a way to undo this sort of problem.
This recently happened to me with an early version of a program that I wrote over 20 years ago...
s a result, to protect our registered Cisco.com users, we're taking the proactive step of resetting Cisco.com passwords
Proactive resetting? Can someone explain me what this actually means?
It probably means that they're setting all the passwords to a single string, or if they're a tiny bit more sophisticated, to a simple function of the user id. This is to make it easy for all of us to log in to any of their accounts.
Of course, "reset" is common industry jargon for "set to zero". So maybe they mean that they're setting all passwords to the null string, or maybe to "0" or "zero".
They wouldn't be stupid enough to store the passwords, right?
You're new to this business, right?;-)
(The industry is full of security errors that were quite well understood 20 or 30 years ago. The fact that something is well-documented in "the literature" doesn't mean that it's known or used inside major corporations.)
[T]he ruling only enforces a company's right to protect its image by limiting off-duty fraternization "while in uniform"
But I work in IT; grungy jeans and t-shirt with obscure and/or surrealistic slogan is my uniform. It's how the people in suits recognize me at at work as being part of the IT dept.
So when dressed this way, I can no longer drink beer or discuss all the idiocies of the computers decreed by (MIS)management?
... this document that's lying around, which included the text:
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech... or the right of the people peaceably to assemble....
Anyone here recognize this text? What's the probablility that, after John Roberts is confirmed, the Supreme Court won't apply it to this NLRB regulation?
And, lest people object that this wasn't intended to cover beer after work, I'll mention the well-known quote from one of the Founding Fathers (Ben Franklin), that "Beer is the proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy."
Ah, but the Obfuscated Perl Contest merely illustrates that we perl hackers have achieved the level of enlightenment of our masters, the C programmers.
One might even argue that the perl crowd has surpassed their teachers. After all, when the Obfuscated Perl Contest was first organized, they realized that it was the initial element in a list, and named it the Zeroeth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest. In this manner, they avoided the logical mistake of the ioccc crowd, whose contests are numbered starting at 1.
There are some mistakes that, once made, can never be corrected. This was a valuable lesson in the need for analysis and design before one sets forth on a task.
I do believe that the Obfuscated C programmers are duly proud of their offspring.
However, I don't believe that any self-respecing C or perl programmer would feel insulted if called a "ne'r-do -well", not even if you had spelled it correctly.
Heh. The so-called "security" was probably little more than hiding the data behind an index.html file. That suffices to hide the data from prying eyes and search bots, until you're ready to publish. This is standard practice in most research.
Then you send the URL to colleagues, and they can fetch the data at their leisure. It remains hidden unless someone puts a link on their web site or posts it to a newsgroup or archived mailing list. That's probably how google found it, and the "hackers" found the link from google.
This happens all the time, and doesn't usually get anyone all uptight over security violations. Except for people who are clueless about how researchers use the Web. If exposure of the URL is a problem you just rename the hidden directory.
In this case, the researchers have said that they contacted others for help in analyzing the object and its orbit. So they sent email with the hidden URL, and an unknown number of other astronomers and grad students went to work on the data. Nothing at all unusual; that's how it's done.
I'd classify the reporters with security concerns in the same bin as the people who consider pings to be hacker attacks.
... Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules...
Actually, astronomical organizations (AAS, etc.) generally haven't officially defined "planet". It's considered somewhat of a sloppy, media term, not a technical term. Real astronomers tend to use more specific terms, of which there are many.
After all, what's the astronomical value of a term that includes Pluto, Earth, and Jupiter, but excludes objects like Luna, Titan and Ganymede? (And Charon?;-)
Another problem is that the usual lay definitions include orbiting the sun (or another star). But, strictly speaking, this isn't a property of the body itself. Rather, it's a relationship between two or more bodies. If you were to remove Titan from Saturn and put it into an orbit about the sun, you wouldn't actually be changing Titan itself. You'd be merely rearranging the real estate of the Solar System a bit.
There have been suggestions to restrict "planet" to objects large enough that their self-gravity forces them into a spherical or sperhoidal form. But this encounters lay/media objections, because Luna, Ganymede, Titan, Pluto and Charon all become planets. For some reason, people object to the idea that there may be several dozen planets in the Solar System, or that a "moon" may also be a "planet".
OTOH, some astronomers argue that Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon should be classified as double planets, not as planets with large moons.
Well, yeah; most schools (other than the smallest) are incorporated.
It's usually not mentioned much, mostly because it's not exactly relevant in a typical discussion of education or research. If you ask, you'll probably get an answer of the form "Yes, of course. Why?"
Many sites put up nasty messages based on your browser, look at www.raveshack.com,...
Heh. I tried a few browsers on my Mac, including IE, and got back either redirection loops or insults to my choice of OS (and some weird comments insulting Netscape, even when I used Camino or Safari;-).
But then I tried it using a little perl web-test program that I wrote. I first told it to send no ID string. I got back a big, complicated page without any visible insults, and full of lots of info about the site, links to other pages, etc. The page looks like mostly normal HTML, with a bit of JS and CSS at the start. I haven't fed it to a real browser yet, but it sure looks like it would work fine.
So the solution is obvious: Use a browsr that can handle sending no ID string. Can your favorite browser do that? If not, submit a bug report, and mention raveshack.com as an illustration of why you need it.
OTOH, I suppose if very many of us used this approach to get past their filtering, they'd eventually get wise and add an "else" case to their browser tests.
And on the third hand, from the page they sent, I don't think I'm very interested in what they have to show me. Getting it to render correctly probably isn't worth the browser. So they'd probably be just as happy that I go away.
The more browsers there are, the more work for web developers.
Not in my experience. I've written lots of code to produce lots of web pages, and I routinely try them in every browser I can get my hands on (including several PDA browsers). In my experience, my code only really needs to distinguish two cases: IE and everything else.
And even this usually isn't technically necessary. Without the tests, the HTML that I generate will "work" everywhere, in the obvious sense that what's on the screen is usable (though not necessarily exactly the same to the pixel) with any browser.
Usually the reason for the test is that the people I'm working for insist that it do something very precisely defined and very peculiar on IE. That's what they use, and they want things exact to the pixel. They don't know or care what it looks like in other browsers, because they don't have any other on their desk, and will never see anything but the rendering with their version of IE.
So my code can send standard, general-purpose HTML to all browsers except IE. Silly things like WIDTH= attributes can be dropped, allowing the browser to resize things to fit the actual window. But special code is needed for IE, to make it look "right" on the boss's screen.
In my experience, that's what the so-called "real world" is actually like.
Of course, after everything is working and approved, I can often silently make the code default for no IE test, making the pages even work with an IE window that's not the same size as the boss's screen. The boss never looks at it again, and doesn't notice that it now works better on his other employees' screens than it did before when his silly demands were still enabled.
The "real world" can be a funny place sometimes.
(I'm not kidding here; I really have been told things like "The window must be exactly 800 pixels wide". There are many managers around that think this is a good way to specify things.;-)
So when is IE going to stop identifying itself with a string that starts with "Mozilla"?
I've also sorta wondered: Isn't "Mozilla" a registered trademark? Is it actually legal for IE to identify itself this way? Not that any of us would really want to take Microsoft to court, y'know, but this does seem to be a somewhat dubious practice.
That was the Albigensian Crusade, right? Lessee, who was fighting whom in that one?
Of course, variants of that slogan are usually attributed to a group by its opponents, while members of the group will publicly deny ever speaking or hearing it.
One interesting case: It was widely reported as a bit of extreme black humor from American troops in Vietnam. In this situation, it usually came from those troops, and it was generally spoken in ironic mode. But listeners probably didn't always understand this, especially if English wasn't their native language. I've heard the sentence from Viet vets, always spoken in a tone that made it clear the speaker's view of the people who behaved that way.
There is a conjecture that the Patent Office has been quietly adopting such a policy. After all, what can you do when they pile on a huge work load and decrease your hiring budget?
Actually, what the Patent Office should do is adopt a variant of an old approach used back in the Crusades:
Approve them all, and let the courts sort them out.
It would be cheap and effective. At least from the Patent Office's underfunded point of view. And if the country isn't going to pay them enough to do their job right, why should they care what this policy does to the country's economic welfare?
(For those who don't know their medieval history, the Crusader slogan I'm parodying is "Kill them all and let God sort them out." It's an early version of kicking the decision upstairs.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
yeah it is MS, but the problem exists with any proprietary technology. The company doesn't need to be borg-like, just closed.
;-).
Exactly right. One of my favorite examples: Some years ago, I worked on a series of projects at a company where the development teams were more or less divided between those that used Sun workstations and those that used Apollos. There was an ongoing discussion of the merits of both. The main argument of the Apollo developers was that you got roughly twice the computing power for a given price with Apollo. Sun was "overpriced and underpowered".
But Sun slowly won out. What would happen on any project is that you'd be debugging your stuff, and inevitably you'd be led into a system library routine that didn't behave like you expected. With Apollo, when you called Customer Support, the answer was usually "That's proprietary. We can't tell you." Brick wall. You're on your own, and all you can do is start guessing.
When this happened with Sun, we usually didn't even contact Sun's CS. We asked on one or more of the Sun newsgroups and mailing lists. Within a few hours, we'd usually have an answer. More often than not, the answer came from a Sun engineer. It often came with a chunk of the source, with an offer to send more source if we needed.
As a result, the Sun developers had working, sellable products much sooner than the Apollo developers. Having a product that works is always better than having a product that doesn't work, even if the price is a bit higher. The company slowly scaled down its use of Apollos. This may have had something to do with why Apollo no longer exists (though www.apollo.com still exists - try it
Since then, of course, Sun has slowly taken its systems more and more proprietary. But that's OK, because linux has since arisen to fill Sun's old niche. Same argument: With Sun, you inevitably hit the "We can't tell you - it's proprietary" brick wall. With linux, you have all the source you want, plus a world-wide flock of linux hackers who love to show off their expertise by answering your dumb questions.
The fun thing in this case is that linux and other open-source software now comes with a license that pretty much prevents anyone from ever closing off access. So it's a lot safer bet for a platform than anything proprietary, no matter how open a company may appear right now.
Of course, the *BSD systems are about as good in this respect. One might argue that linux is now sufficiently successful that it could use a bit more competition. Maybe we should be pushing the BSDs a bit more loudly. Those people who don't like choice might object, but we'd probably all be better off for it.
And I wonder how OS X fits into all this? I have a Mac Powerbook, but I've found it much more difficult and time consuming to find reliable low-level information about its innards than with linux. It's only partly for proprietary reasons. Usually it's the "Don't worry your little head about it; it Just Works" attitude. This is very frustrating when you have decades of C hacking behind you, and you're trying to get some low-level code to just work the way you want it to. Instead of a brick wall, you're beating your head against a very soft, fuzzy wall.
In any case, I'd think that a reasonable software rule now would be: Don't build your product on any platform unless you have all the source. This is now feasible; you get full source with linux and the *BSD systems. So why use a platform that doesn't provide full source?
And if you don't understand why you need full source, you aren't competent to make business decisions about software development. Hand the decision over to someone who understands. Hire them if you need to. Otherwise, you're risking your business on a foundation of quicksand.
Hmmm ... That URL gets a 404. Did they pull it? Or was the URL wrong?
Well, analog camera has one big advantage over digital camera: independent of power.
;-). We don't depend on some commercial strangers who'll just say "Sorry about that" and offer to replace the film for free.
Digital cameras have one big advantage over analog cameras: independence of developing labs.
My wife and I, despite being thorough computer geeks, had put off buying a digital camera. Then, 5 or so years ago, her mother came to live with us for what turned out to be the last couple years of her life. Shortly before she died, we took her on a trip to the old home town over in the next state. We took along a camera, and filled it with pictures. It turned out to be the last roll of film with her.
When we got home, we sent it off to a developing lab - and a few days later got back a package of someone else's pictures. We took them back to the retail place, explained the problem, and gave them back the pictures to deliver to the right people.
We never got our pictures or film back. We eventually got some "free" replacement film.
Soon after that we got a digital camera. It's a bit late for my wife's mother, of course. But now we can "develop" the pictures ourselves. We can back them up on CDs (and try to remember to read them back in 10 years or so, to copy to a new CD
We can also make our own porn, without sharing it with the guys at the lab. Actually we haven't done that yet, I'm sorry to report, unless you consider some nude pictures of a new grandson or niece to be porn (as some people apparently do). But I suspect that this is part of the appeal of digital cameras.
Anyone else with stories of what persuaded them to go digital?
Phone companies have no right to whine they have to share the wires.
Maybe not, but they do have the right to bribe the government to do things their way.
Of course, these days "bribe" is often spelled "campaign contribution".
One thing I notice in the FCC's release:
...
(2) consumers are entitled to run applications and services of their choice, subject to the needs of law enforcement;
This sounds like it's saying that the phone/cable companies can no longer do port blocking, and can't kick you off for running a server.
The main reason I subscribe to speakeasy is that they promise to not block ports, and they encourage you to run servers. Most ISPs, including almost all phone/cable companies, have a TOS that makes it illegal to run your own servers. They also block at least ports 25 and 80. You have to relay email through their servers, and you can't legally run a web server at all.
It'll be interesting to see if this is enforced. Of course, if say Verizon or Comcast terminated your access because you run a web server, they could still just say "Yeah, it may be illegal. You're welcome to take us to court. In 5 or ten years, if you win, you'll get your access back. BTW, you'd better have a good team of lawyers."
I also wonder what that "needs of law enforcement" means? Do we all have to provide a standard backdoor to our system, accessible to any law enforcement agency (and anyone else who knows the access protocol)?
While I'd like to think that the FCC has the interests of us "consumers" at heart, I'm not really sure that this is their motive here. Not if they're acting to kill off the ISPs that provide unfettered access, handing total control over to the companies that have historically blocked full access, and saying "Trust us".
Then there's the old Jewish joke, to the effect that abortion should be legal until the fetus graduates from Law or Medical School.
Actually, I've heard variants of this joke from other ethnic groups. But it seems most common in Jewish circles.
I'd agree that the information about me wants to be free. And I want it to remain imprisoned in those cold, heartless commercial databases.
Where's the inconsistency there?
Conflict, yes; inconsistency, no.
But I figure I'll probably lose. The data is in the hands of a large, random crowd of programmers and managers who have a poor record so far. They are generally sloppy about security, use the least-secure computer systems available, use 4-digit passwords and send them across the Net unencrypted, and leave backup tapes accessible to anyone with a few hundred bucks for a bribe.
So in the long run, it's hopeless. That information is in a feeble prison and will eventually stumble out. It has already happened to millions of people; it's only a matter of time until it happens to the rest of us.
For all we know, the path of evolution was a foreseeable consequence of some seed state arranged by an omnipotent or near omnipotent intelligent designer.
...
Or, more likely, the young, pristine planet Earth was visited 4.5 billion years ago by a crew of aliens, who studied the new Solar System for a while, and then flew away. They left behind a pile of garbage that was full of assorted bacteria.
The rest is history (literally).
Several good SF stories have been written based on the artifacts they left behind to monitor the system. Some of them are still operational and sending data
The scientific method cannot test whether or not a past event occured.
;-) We don't have evidence of how it started, and probably never will. But the development of multicellular forms over the past 600 million years has left more than enough evidence to show what happened, although a lot of the details have been erased.
Actually, there are a number of cases where scientists have done just that.
I went to college in eastern Washington state, which has some rather unusual geology. It's incredibly torn up, with irregular dry canyons cutting through flat terrain; long, narrow, parallel hills that from the air look like the sand ripples in a stream bed; rocks of all sizes scattered at random across the terrain, and so on. In the early 20th century, an interesting conjecture was proposed to explain the topography: There had been a massive flood covering much of the Columbia basin some time in the distant past. This had obvious ramifications for the religious folk, of course. But did it happen?
Over the century, a lot of geological data was collected. Eventually the data made it clear to geolgists that the conjecture was exactly right. Back in the ice age, glaciers blocked valleys to the east, and a large lake formed in the Rockies, called Lake Missoula, which was roughly the size of current Lake Erie. At one point, as the glaciers retreated, an opening in one valley appeared, and the lake drained in maybe two weeks. The water took a lot of ice and rocks with it, carved deep and irregular channels across the basin, left huge house-sized boulders scattered across the landscape, and eventually drained out through the Columbia Gorge.
This was probably before humans were in the area; if there were any there at the time, very few would have survived.
It's a real-world example of a historic event that started as a weak conjecture, and was verified by a process of scientific data collection.
The Thera/Santorini eruption is a similar story of an event that had a major effect on Middle-Eastern history around 3500 years ago. It was proposed a few decades ago, and a bit of geological and archaeological work over some years verified the event.
There are a good number of (pre)historical events that have been verified by scientific data collection.
The biblical flood is still an open question. It probably corresponds to a real event, but this hasn't been scientifically verified. It may never be, if the evidence has suffered enough damage.
Of course, the biggest "event" in the fossil/geological record is the appearance and evolution of the Earth's biosphere. That has been verified far past any reasonable doubt by scientific methods. (So only unreasonable doubt remains.
When I was in high school, there were several teachers who tried to introduce non-Christian ideas in various classes, mostly the "history of civilization" sort, but also in a few science classes taught by teachers who thought that the history of ideas was important.
This produced outraged responses from the "good Christian" folk in the community, and such ideas were reluctantly shelved.
All I ever remember being taught about such things can be summarized as trivialized parodies of the real thing. We're seeing one effect of this now in the US, as malicious parodies of Islamic thought are loudly described by media and politicians, and accepted by much of the population as the real thing.
As a good illustration of this, try asking scientists what they think of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. You'll find that most have read it, and really enjoyed it. And they'll especially tell you how much they liked the scene of the rebuilding of the Earth, including laying down the fossil beds to fake the planet's history.
Myself, I think that if ID is forced into science classes, tHHGttG should be one of the primary texts.
There are also some good SF novels that have used various other creation myths. Maybe we should be pushing those other myths as alternatives, since they're every bit as scientifically credible as the Christian myth. At least teach the myths for which we have some good literature for the students to read.
Anyone want to suggest some other good textbooks? I suppose 2001 belongs on the list. What else?
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=kaza a&spell=1
...
what makes it so interesting is the notice at the bottom of the page:
In response to a complaint we received under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint for these removed results.
What strikes me as odd here is that google has a straightforward way of handling such things without the need of legal threats.
First, they honor robots.txt files. If you have something you don't want them to scan or cache, but you want it online, just put the appropriate entry in your robots.txt file.
Second, they have web pages that deal with this topic. You can get things removed from the google cache by filling in an online form. It takes a few days, but this is a lot faster than going through a legal firm.
I've used this a couple of times, for various reasons. Sometimes the data was obsolete or otherwise incorrect, and the replacement web pages didn't all have the same names as the original, so I used their method for purging the unwanted pages quickly. In one case, a file with people's names and phone numbers leaked out, and we wanted them off the web quickly. Google was very cooperative in every case. In a couple of cases, they cached large intermediate "temp" files, and we didn't want to waste time helping people who discovered them and didn't understand the nature of the data.
Anyway, I've found google to be cooperative when I find that they've scanned and cached something that we accidentally made too public. So it seems rather silly to resort to legal actions when there's a much simpler "technical" approach that works quickly.
It's especially annoying to discover that google has a several-years-old version of an open-source program of yours, and people are downloading it from the google cache because (perhaps due to a name change) they can't find it on your site. Then, when it doesn't work because of an old bug or missing feature, they contact you to try to get you to fix it. This just wastes everyone's time. It's nice that google gives you a way to undo this sort of problem.
This recently happened to me with an early version of a program that I wrote over 20 years ago
'Untold'? Is that the latest for 'unknown' ?
Nah; it means "We know but we're not telling."
s a result, to protect our registered Cisco.com users, we're taking the proactive step of resetting Cisco.com passwords
Proactive resetting? Can someone explain me what this actually means?
It probably means that they're setting all the passwords to a single string, or if they're a tiny bit more sophisticated, to a simple function of the user id. This is to make it easy for all of us to log in to any of their accounts.
Of course, "reset" is common industry jargon for "set to zero". So maybe they mean that they're setting all passwords to the null string, or maybe to "0" or "zero".
Ya think?
They wouldn't be stupid enough to store the passwords, right?
;-)
You're new to this business, right?
(The industry is full of security errors that were quite well understood 20 or 30 years ago. The fact that something is well-documented in "the literature" doesn't mean that it's known or used inside major corporations.)
[T]he ruling only enforces a company's right to protect its image by limiting off-duty fraternization "while in uniform"
But I work in IT; grungy jeans and t-shirt with obscure and/or surrealistic slogan is my uniform. It's how the people in suits recognize me at at work as being part of the IT dept.
So when dressed this way, I can no longer drink beer or discuss all the idiocies of the computers decreed by (MIS)management?
Congress shall make no law
Anyone here recognize this text? What's the probablility that, after John Roberts is confirmed, the Supreme Court won't apply it to this NLRB regulation?
And, lest people object that this wasn't intended to cover beer after work, I'll mention the well-known quote from one of the Founding Fathers (Ben Franklin), that "Beer is the proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy."
Ah, but the Obfuscated Perl Contest merely illustrates that we perl hackers have achieved the level of enlightenment of our masters, the C programmers.
One might even argue that the perl crowd has surpassed their teachers. After all, when the Obfuscated Perl Contest was first organized, they realized that it was the initial element in a list, and named it the Zeroeth Annual Obfuscated Perl Contest. In this manner, they avoided the logical mistake of the ioccc crowd, whose contests are numbered starting at 1.
There are some mistakes that, once made, can never be corrected. This was a valuable lesson in the need for analysis and design before one sets forth on a task.
I do believe that the Obfuscated C programmers are duly proud of their offspring.
However, I don't believe that any self-respecing C or perl programmer would feel insulted if called a "ne'r-do -well", not even if you had spelled it correctly.
hackers gained access to the secure server
Shouldn't that be the not-so-secure server?
Heh. The so-called "security" was probably little more than hiding the data behind an index.html file. That suffices to hide the data from prying eyes and search bots, until you're ready to publish. This is standard practice in most research.
Then you send the URL to colleagues, and they can fetch the data at their leisure. It remains hidden unless someone puts a link on their web site or posts it to a newsgroup or archived mailing list. That's probably how google found it, and the "hackers" found the link from google.
This happens all the time, and doesn't usually get anyone all uptight over security violations. Except for people who are clueless about how researchers use the Web. If exposure of the URL is a problem you just rename the hidden directory.
In this case, the researchers have said that they contacted others for help in analyzing the object and its orbit. So they sent email with the hidden URL, and an unknown number of other astronomers and grad students went to work on the data. Nothing at all unusual; that's how it's done.
I'd classify the reporters with security concerns in the same bin as the people who consider pings to be hacker attacks.
... Pluto is only considered a planet because it was grandfathered into the current (confusing and not entirely adhered to) rules ...
;-)
Actually, astronomical organizations (AAS, etc.) generally haven't officially defined "planet". It's considered somewhat of a sloppy, media term, not a technical term. Real astronomers tend to use more specific terms, of which there are many.
After all, what's the astronomical value of a term that includes Pluto, Earth, and Jupiter, but excludes objects like Luna, Titan and Ganymede? (And Charon?
Another problem is that the usual lay definitions include orbiting the sun (or another star). But, strictly speaking, this isn't a property of the body itself. Rather, it's a relationship between two or more bodies. If you were to remove Titan from Saturn and put it into an orbit about the sun, you wouldn't actually be changing Titan itself. You'd be merely rearranging the real estate of the Solar System a bit.
There have been suggestions to restrict "planet" to objects large enough that their self-gravity forces them into a spherical or sperhoidal form. But this encounters lay/media objections, because Luna, Ganymede, Titan, Pluto and Charon all become planets. For some reason, people object to the idea that there may be several dozen planets in the Solar System, or that a "moon" may also be a "planet".
OTOH, some astronomers argue that Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon should be classified as double planets, not as planets with large moons.
It's easier to just not define the term at all.
Well, yeah; most schools (other than the smallest) are incorporated.
It's usually not mentioned much, mostly because it's not exactly relevant in a typical discussion of education or research. If you ask, you'll probably get an answer of the form "Yes, of course. Why?"
Many sites put up nasty messages based on your browser, look at www.raveshack.com, ...
;-).
Heh. I tried a few browsers on my Mac, including IE, and got back either redirection loops or insults to my choice of OS (and some weird comments insulting Netscape, even when I used Camino or Safari
But then I tried it using a little perl web-test program that I wrote. I first told it to send no ID string. I got back a big, complicated page without any visible insults, and full of lots of info about the site, links to other pages, etc. The page looks like mostly normal HTML, with a bit of JS and CSS at the start. I haven't fed it to a real browser yet, but it sure looks like it would work fine.
So the solution is obvious: Use a browsr that can handle sending no ID string. Can your favorite browser do that? If not, submit a bug report, and mention raveshack.com as an illustration of why you need it.
OTOH, I suppose if very many of us used this approach to get past their filtering, they'd eventually get wise and add an "else" case to their browser tests.
And on the third hand, from the page they sent, I don't think I'm very interested in what they have to show me. Getting it to render correctly probably isn't worth the browser. So they'd probably be just as happy that I go away.
The more browsers there are, the more work for web developers.
;-)
Not in my experience. I've written lots of code to produce lots of web pages, and I routinely try them in every browser I can get my hands on (including several PDA browsers). In my experience, my code only really needs to distinguish two cases: IE and everything else.
And even this usually isn't technically necessary. Without the tests, the HTML that I generate will "work" everywhere, in the obvious sense that what's on the screen is usable (though not necessarily exactly the same to the pixel) with any browser.
Usually the reason for the test is that the people I'm working for insist that it do something very precisely defined and very peculiar on IE. That's what they use, and they want things exact to the pixel. They don't know or care what it looks like in other browsers, because they don't have any other on their desk, and will never see anything but the rendering with their version of IE.
So my code can send standard, general-purpose HTML to all browsers except IE. Silly things like WIDTH= attributes can be dropped, allowing the browser to resize things to fit the actual window. But special code is needed for IE, to make it look "right" on the boss's screen.
In my experience, that's what the so-called "real world" is actually like.
Of course, after everything is working and approved, I can often silently make the code default for no IE test, making the pages even work with an IE window that's not the same size as the boss's screen. The boss never looks at it again, and doesn't notice that it now works better on his other employees' screens than it did before when his silly demands were still enabled.
The "real world" can be a funny place sometimes.
(I'm not kidding here; I really have been told things like "The window must be exactly 800 pixels wide". There are many managers around that think this is a good way to specify things.
So when is IE going to stop identifying itself with a string that starts with "Mozilla"?
I've also sorta wondered: Isn't "Mozilla" a registered trademark? Is it actually legal for IE to identify itself this way? Not that any of us would really want to take Microsoft to court, y'know, but this does seem to be a somewhat dubious practice.
That was the Albigensian Crusade, right? Lessee, who was fighting whom in that one?
Of course, variants of that slogan are usually attributed to a group by its opponents, while members of the group will publicly deny ever speaking or hearing it.
One interesting case: It was widely reported as a bit of extreme black humor from American troops in Vietnam. In this situation, it usually came from those troops, and it was generally spoken in ironic mode. But listeners probably didn't always understand this, especially if English wasn't their native language. I've heard the sentence from Viet vets, always spoken in a tone that made it clear the speaker's view of the people who behaved that way.
There is a conjecture that the Patent Office has been quietly adopting such a policy. After all, what can you do when they pile on a huge work load and decrease your hiring budget?
Actually, what the Patent Office should do is adopt a variant of an old approach used back in the Crusades:
;-)
Approve them all, and let the courts sort them out.
It would be cheap and effective. At least from the Patent Office's underfunded point of view. And if the country isn't going to pay them enough to do their job right, why should they care what this policy does to the country's economic welfare?
(For those who don't know their medieval history, the Crusader slogan I'm parodying is "Kill them all and let God sort them out." It's an early version of kicking the decision upstairs.