OTOH neanderthal mithocondrial DNA is sampled and found to be singificantly different from Homo Sapiens'. That means we have no neanderthal grandmothers, which makes interbreeding theory *very* unlikely.
Actually, all it would mean is that none of us HS types have a maternal line that goes back to a Neandertal. We could easily have HN ancestors, but with a male anywhere along the line of descent, the mtDNA would be HS, not HN.
One of the thing I found impressive about TFA is that the author didn't make the usual media mistake of treating the mtDNA studies as very significant. Most news stories, even many in the scientific press, treat the mismatch between the few HN mtDNA samples and our mtDNA as meaning there couldn't have been interbreeding. This merely shows a lack of understanding what mtDNA is. And even if there had been a close match, it still wouldn't have been very significant.
It's still entirely possible that we have neandertal genes in, say, chromosomes 7, 13, and 21. None of the few DNA studies so far could detect (or reject) this possibility.
Maybe when we have a few dozen sizable sample of Neandertal DNA sequenced, we can say something a bit more meaningful. Even then, though, we'll still have the possibility that those few individuals left no modern descendants, while others are among our ancestors.
A related explanation is: There really isn't any such thing as "scientific proof", and anyone who uses this phrase can be assumed to not understand science. Scientific methods are pretty much all methods of disproof.
The way it works is: You have a lot of observations. You make up a bunch of guesses (hypotheses) about what's going on. You try to think of ways of disproving all of them. Experiments are a common method; further observations are another. Some of your attempts will come up with further facts that are inconsistent with some of your explanations, so you discard them (or tweak them to survive the tests). The explanations that survive lots of tests are called "theories". But they haven't been proved; they have just survived attempts to disprove them.
Anyway, I often think of this whenever people like creationists talk about "scientific proof". By uttering such a phrase, they have just discredited themselves.
They're missing some good wordplay here. If they package the WIENUX distro together with WINE, to run Windows apps, the resulting package should obviously be called WEINUX.
There's gotta be a bunch more good English/Deutsch puns in there...
Evolution isn't really that scientific either, you can't reproduce it under lab conditions because of the timeframes involved.
Actually, lots of evolutionary lab experiments have been published.
It's true that your typical grant doesn give you time to do evolutionary experiments on primates or other large critters with a long reproductive cycle. But, for example, a lot of bacteria and yeasts will reproduce every 20 minutes or so under good conditions. You can do interesting evolutionary experiments on such species in under a month.
At a slightly larger size, there are multicellular species with a 1- to 2-week reproductive cycle. Drosophila and Arabidopsis for example. You can do evolutionary experiments on them in a year or two. The literature is full of articles on the topic.
The claim that evolution takes too long is simply incorrect. It may be true for large animals. But most scientific research is done with small, fast-living species, because everything works faster with them. Only when you want to apply results to the large, slow species (like us) do you finally do experiments with them. By then, of course, you usually have your theories pretty well worked out, except for the fine species-specific details.
Also, the couple of centuries of evolutionary thought have provided us with innumerable real-life examples that happened before our eyes, in only a few of our generations. Antibiotic resistance, for instance.
My favorite example is that, all over North America, dandelions have adapted to lawnmowers. They used to (and in wild areas still do) have flowers on tall stems to get above the competition to where pollinators can see them. In most urban areas, their flowers are now on short stems that are below most mower blades. Then, when as the seeds form, the stem elongates, and at the next mowing the mower helps distribute the seeds.
You really can't argue that people intentionally selected dandelions for this behavior. It's "natural selection" at its finest (and funniest). A new "predator" appeared that preferably ate tall flowers. This produced selection pressure for short-stemmed flowers. But the fruit is still long-stemmed, because you want the predator to eat those.
So maybe the Martians should be complaining, if the change brings Tempel-1 closer to Mars. Of course, at that rate, it's still quite a few thousands of years before it threatens Mars.
Its occasional not-so-close encounters with Jupiter effect its orbit a lot more. That's why the astronomers lost it back in the 1800's after tracking it for several orbits.
Well, I dunno about that. During part of our little trip this afternoon, we drove along a local street which for about 3 blocks runs parallel to I95 (the main circumferential highway around Boston). The Garmin GPS gadget showed us jumping back and forth between the street and the highway. The speed limit on one is 25mph; on the other it's 55mph. I wonder what behavior we'd expect from a car partly controlled by this GPS tool. If we had been on the highway, part of the time it would have wanted to slow us down to 25mph, which would frankly be rather dangerous on that stretch.
I've often seen it showing its position as on the next street over. Given the advertised accuracies of GPS, I'd guess this is typical. It's not that big a deal; when you've had a bit of experience with it you can easily correct mentally (and laugh a little).
But I'm not sure I'd want its input to influence the car's controls. Parallel roadways can have very different driving conditions.
This afternoon my wife and I took a trip to a town maybe 20 miles from where we live (in a suburb west of Boston). She drove, and I havigated using out Garmin 3600, which is a cool PalmOS gadget with GPS added. It shows where you are on the map, finds routes, gas station, restaurants, and so on. It can also show you your location, heading and speed.
But GPS isn't all that accurate. This gadget routinely shows a 10-meter or so error estimate. Sometimes 30m or more. I often watched our position at a small scale as we approached turns. It showed things like: As we approached one stop light, moved to the left lane and stopped at the light, it showed us turning left, driving down the street a block or so, then turning around and coming back, passing through the intersection going the other direction. All the while, we were stopped at the light.
At times, I watched our position/speed. It would occasionally show us going from 40mph to 90mph to 10mph over the space of a few seconds. At other times it would match the spedometer very closely. Now, our car does have good acceleration; it's a Mini Cooper. But it doesn't really go from 0 to 80mph in under a second.
I can imagine if this were tied in to an automatic ticket-writing system. While we were stuck in downtown traffic, it would write us up a ticket for suddenly accelerating to 80mph for 5.7 seconds.
I can also imagine the effects of tying it into the car's controls. While sitting at a light, it would suddenly see us going 110mph, and would downshift and then go into reverse to get us back under the speed limit, causing us to "rear-end" the car behind us.
Yeah, in my experience with GPS, this all sounds like a really good idea.
(But we like the Garmin toy, really we do. Partly because it's a really useful navigation device. Partly because it makes us laugh a lot.)
... but the fact is, the USA built it, and under the USA it has florished and grown.
More accurately, the US government (mostly the Defense Department) funded the early development. But we're talking 1960's here. During the 1970's, the ARPAnet spread fairly rapidly to a number of other countries. Canada, the UK and Scandinavia stand out, but they weren't the only ones. By 1980, most major universities everywhere had IP connectivity, at least to a few tech departments. There were also thousands of corporate IP hookups, in dozens of countries, for all the obvious reasons.
The "flourished and grown" phase really applies to the 1980's and 1990's, and by then the Internet was quite international. Granted, the US has always had a dominant role, but this isn't the same as "control", especially in the 1980's when most of those Americans were academics.
To a great degree, I'd guess that the current worries about US domination has a lot to do with the political situation. The US government is now in the hands of a crowd that calls the rest of the world "irrelevant" and has a policy of attacking others based not on what they've done, but on what they might do some time in the future. Imagine yourself on the receiving end of such policies, and you'll understand why people want to free the Internet (and anything else) from US control.
Of course, it's a bit late, as the US doesn't really control it anyway. There are lots of root servers outside the US, originally for practical speed reasons. The Internet needs lots of DNS servers to work well. If the US (government or corporations) should start suppressing information in DNS servers, that will be treated like any other packet loss. The rest of the Internet will notice quickly, and will route around the loss. Americans will respond the same way, and include foreign server addresses in their search lists.
The best approach would be to continue working on a fully distributed DNS system that can't be controlled by anyone. If Americans (or Chinese) want to think they control it, let them. But keep working on redundancies that will route around any "control" that translates to loss of data.
... turned up a good article on the topic of alternative DNS root servers. It turns out that several are alive and well, and serving the communities that use them.
No surprise, actually, if you know anything about how the Internet works. And it's quite possible that some of these may eventually become mainstream servers.
Good point. And to be a bit more direct, we might point out that it doesn't actually matter all that much who runs "the DNS Root Servers".
After all, the Internet itself (at the network level) doesn't use DNS; it routes entirely on address with no concern for any symbolic names that might be associated with the addresses. If some gang of users wants to set up their own name-to-address mapping scheme, who's to stop them? Who's to even know they're doing it? And how could it impact the current DNS system at all?
In fact, I've taken part in a couple of setups that did this. The purpose was testing some new software, and we didn't want to impact anyone else. So we set up our own set of DNS servers (partly with our own experimental software), and put their addresses in the resolv.conf files of our test setup. It worked just fine. We could debug our software without affecting anyone else at all. When we got it working, we tied it into the public Internet, but I see no reason that we had to do this. We could have kept using it indefinitely as our private DNS system if we'd liked.
I've seen a few claims that there are parts of the Internet that are using their own DNS servers for various reasons. I haven't really investigated, because it's not actually all that interesting an idea. If you understand the Internet at all, you just shrug, say "Why not?" and go about your business.
So, instead of pretending that the US or any other government has total control over "the" DNS system, why don't we discuss the actual alternatives? This would include pointing out that anyone who doesn't like ICANN or the US government or whatever can easily do an end run around them and set up their own DNS system.
In a sense, many countries have already done this. The national domains (.us,.uk,.fr,.to,...) are generally run by an agency of the country's government, and has total control over the names in their domain. Except for.us, the US government has no power over them. If someone tries to change the root servers to deflect them, it's not hard to set up a few new root servers and point your own resolv.conf files somewhere that uses them.
So why all the flamage, when independent DNS servers are so easy?
Am I missing something? Did the independent servers in our test setups do something subtly wrong that we didn't see? Is there some international law against this?
Heh. Contrary to the earlier "sheeple" metaphor, I like to use the evolutionary example of ants.
Now, you may think that ants are insignificant. But their total biomass is much greater than that of humans. And we don't control them. They go on about their little lives blissfully unaware of us. They have almost no brain, and blindly follow instructions from a "hive" mind that also has little intelligence. Most aren't ever allowed to reproduce; those who do are imprisoned for their entire life in one underground room.
But they've been around a lot longer than humans. They represent more of the biosphere than we do. We can't do much about them except maybe stick our finger in the path of one or kill a few. The rest don't notice, and just go about their lives.
The meteor is the GPL. You cannot do business as usual...
Actually, if you want a better metaphor, the meteor should be compared with the growing problem of "malware" for Microsoft. This is starting to have an impact much more like that of the K/T meteor. And now that organized crime has jumped on the bandwagon and started doing identity theft in addition to the usual scams, the writing may be on the wall (to appropriate a metaphor that our religious friends might recognize).
This is a growing disaster for anyone marketing proprietary software. The only real solutions to problems like this require that the code be open and accessible to everyone (i.e., to competent programmers). As long as the code is hidden, most of us can't know about the coming problems or sensibly prepare for them. With open, analyzable source, we can find the problems and block them before they happen. But Microsoft so far is firm in their insistence that their code is not available to the public. For very good reason, it seems.
The GPL helps, but it is a legal document, and depends on government enforcement. It can be overwhelmed by the usual process of corporate bribery. It's valuable, but by itself, it can't protect us against corruption in the law-enforcement mechanism. The "settlement" in the case against MS is pretty good proof that the US Dept of Justice is now thoroughly corrupted at the highest levels, and can't be depended on to enforce little things like the GPL. Microsoft has made it clear that their attack on the GPL will be political, not legal, and they stand a good chance of winning with that approach.
Our main weapon is to push for the sort of openness that exists in most engineering areas. If you use a bolt or a resistor in your product, you can expect to get an exact spec giving full details on their capabilities. Nobody would build a building, bridge, or vehicle without detailed specs for every component. In most cases, it's illegal to hide the specs for such things.
The major exception to this is software. For some insane reason, we have accepted that the exact details of software's behavior may be hidden from customers by making the code secret. More and more, we are finding situations where people's property and funds, and sometimes their lives, depend on correctly-functioning software. But the software is hidden and unverifiable.
This isn't a tenable situation any more. And we just may have the disaster that proves it: the loss to "commercial interests" of databases containing financial and credit data for millions of people. This is directly attributable to the secrecy of the financial software. And that's attributable in great part to Microsoft's success.
It can't last. If it does, we are facing a total economic meltdown, as all the money that's just a number in a database goes "poof".
(Hmm... Will this get "Funny" or "Flamebait" ratings? Or both?;-)
Why just pin it on Dubya? Did you think it didn't go on before and won't go on afterwords?
Actually, there's a lot of data about this available online. One of the big changes at Microsoft in 2004 was a huge increase in campaign contributions. They went from being an insignificant source of campaign funds to one of the largest contributors.
While they contributed to a lot of campaigns, most of their contributions are fairly well documented as having gone to the Bush/Cheney campaign funds, either directly or indirectly via such routes as PACs. They were one of Bush's largest contributors.
It wasn't long after the election, of course, before the Justice Department caved and essentially gave Microsoft a free pass for their past and future transgressions. This has been widely understood as payoff, of course.
But all it really means is that Microsoft has faced up to the way that large organizations like governments (and many megacorporations) work. They have moved to a "marketing" approach that's better for this market than what has worked so well with the non-technical public. A true cynic would call this a rational marketing decision.
So, for comparison with the linux builders, has anyone found detailed specs for this Sun laptop? I browsed around the sun.com site and couldn't find much actual info, or a place to order it.
Maybe it's just too new and their web-site folks don't know about it yet?
I'd like to know how it compares with, say, the emperorlinux laptops.
Judge: Well, I had to decide for acquittal in the Miller case.
Colleague: Why? I thought the prosecution had 5 witnesses that swore they saw him do it.
Judge: Yes, but the defense had 50 witnesses who swore they didn't see him do it.
You see a lot of this sort of "logic" in our "fair and balanced" media these days. It's especially popular in articles on the topic of global warming (which many people here in New England think is a fine idea;-).
No, actually what happened is: When the "Oprah" hack was described by the Opera people, lots of Oprah's fans sent email asking where they could get this browser. So they made a release of Opera with the "Oprah" id as default, and sold a several hundred thousand copies to her fans.
This was so successful that they tried the idea for a few other celebrities. After the US election, they tried a release with "Dubya" as the id, but it was a flop. Market research showed that this was because most of George's fans don't know what a computer or a browser is, and couldn't read most pages anyway due to the widespread dependence on text for much of the content.
Reports are that US government is trying to get the Norwegian government to force Opera to hand over sales data for the "Osama" release. But the data is all in Arabic, so most US agencies don't have anyone on staff that could read it.
[Wouldn't it be fun if some of these were actually true?;-]
One problem with this issue: After reading it for a while (and chuckling a lot), I noticed that my cpu usage was pegged at 100%, mostly by mozilla-bin. I went on the usual test hunt, closing down tabs until the cpu usage dropped. It was the new Onion tab. I opened it again in a new tab, and the cpu went to 100% again. So I don't have the Onion tab open any more.
Sure wish there were some systematic way to discover quickly which web page is doing this sort of thing and why. It would be even better if all the cpu-hogging features could be turned off, and turned on briefly just for a page (or site) that needs them.
Yes, I do have things like flashblock and prefbar installed. I set images to just one loop. I keep java and javascript turned off unless I need them for one page. Those things help a lot. But there are still things that can gobble all your cpu and can't be stopped except by killing the tab (or window or browser).
So you've been reading The Onion since the "first season" then? You realize that was in 1988, right? You're from Madison, you went to the UW and have been around since the beginning, huh?
There are a number of us here who have read it from the beginning. In my case, I did go to the UW. But I left town in 1978. The reason that I read the Onion from the start was that my daughter was at the UW in 1988, and she was a staff photographer for the Onion. She sent me a free subscription. Everyone I knew loved it, and was duly impressed by my having a kid on the Onion staff.
One of her main jobs was the Drunk of the Week, which sadly didn't make it to the web site. She and a few others would tour State Street on Friday and Saturday nights, looking for the most disgusting drunk they could find. They'd take pictures, give the drunk a free Onion t-shirt, and publish the best picture in the next issue. "It's a nasty job, but someone's gotta do it." "What I do for a bit of comedy!" And so on.
I think anyone with half a brain understands that such an operation can't always be 100% on. But they hit the target often enough to qualify as a major training ground for our future comedy writers.
It is too bad that not all of their earlier stuff is online. I've often wished I'd saved several articles. For example, the one after the big New Guinea tsunami some years back. They interviewed God, who told them that He had His reasons for all those innocent deaths; humans would never understand; we shouldn't presume to question Him. They also quoted believers, who were sure that God had His reasons, though we don't understand them. I keep running across things so similar to this that it no longer seems like parody to me. Sure wish I could find a copy...
if Firefox can operate successfully without misidentifying itself why does Opera need to do so?
Because, as was discussed here recently, there have been sites (mostly owned by Microsoft) that actively sabotage pages sent to Opera users, by using CSS that cause the content to be garbled. It was shown that only requests with "Opera" in the ID string had this problem. (Changing it to "Oprah" made the pages display properly.;-)
I haven't (yet) read about this being done to firefox. Anyone know if it's happening anywhere? I wouldn't be surprised; I just haven't heard about it.
There certainly are pages that are only delivered to clients that identify themselves as "IE". I've seen such pages, and verified that an IE ID is needed to get them. I have a little perl web-page tester that has an ID-string command-line arg for exactly this reason.
Now, if this were due to bugs, or were otherwise inadvertent, you'd expect it to effect all browsers equally. But it doesn't. So far, the only cases I've seen are pages that require an IE browser ID. I've never seen a page that requires some other browser's ID. I'm not saying they don't exist; I've just never stumbled across them. This tells you exactly why you might want your browser to masquerade as IE from time to time.
I've read that IE identifies itself as "Mozilla/4.0 " because there were some pages that required the Mozilla ID to function properly. Maybe this is true. I've never seen such pages, but I suppose they could exist.
Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer
And Internet Explorer is configured by default to identify itself as "Mozilla/4.0...".;-)
Yeah; I know what the rest of the ID string looks like. I've spent some time writing code to grovel through the server's access_log files and try to figure out what software is sending what percent of the requests. So I know the lengths that browser makers have gone to make this job difficult for us network programmers. And incidentally, they also make it easy for PR people to report highly inaccurate numbers for browser usage, if they wish to do so.
In any case, Opera isn't the only browser that has a menu of ID strings. Lynx did this years ago, in response to sites that explicity blocked lynx requests. One of my test toys is a blackberry running WebViewer, and when you install it, one of the first things it does is ask you whether it should identify itself as Internet Explorer.
But for Opera to misidentify itself by default is a bit suspect. Are there any other browsers other than IE and Opera that do this, without asking the user?
Except that God isn't imaginary.... I've had an imaginary friend, and it's not at all the same thing.
Heh; yeah. In my experience, there's a big difference. Imaginary friends talk to you and answer your questions.
Also, when you're done with an imaginary friend, you can dismiss them and they don't get pissed at you. You can replace them with new imaginary friends, without any fuss or bother. Just try that with the God of your choice.
Not, not dead yet. Just dying. Or maybe just fading somewhat.
It might be interesting to see a poll on this. I'd guess that some people are like me, and see no need for a watch. Others are like you, and live/work in an environment where a watch is still useful.
I suppose it's likely that watches will never die off entirely. Sales might just settle asymptotically to a non-zero level that's significantly lower than the peak a decade or so back.
Sorta like horses in the early 1900's. I've read a number of articles about the slow reintroduction of work horses over the last 25 or 30 years. It seems that people are figuring out that there are still some jobs where horses are better than existing machinery, and there doesn't seem to be any real incentive to try to develop a mechanical replacement. After all, they're strong, sure-footed, and have significant intelligence. And people like working with them.
Of course, we might eventually be making similar remarks about the small remnant human worker population...
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OTOH neanderthal mithocondrial DNA is sampled and found to be singificantly different from Homo Sapiens'. That means we have no neanderthal grandmothers, which makes interbreeding theory *very* unlikely.
Actually, all it would mean is that none of us HS types have a maternal line that goes back to a Neandertal. We could easily have HN ancestors, but with a male anywhere along the line of descent, the mtDNA would be HS, not HN.
One of the thing I found impressive about TFA is that the author didn't make the usual media mistake of treating the mtDNA studies as very significant. Most news stories, even many in the scientific press, treat the mismatch between the few HN mtDNA samples and our mtDNA as meaning there couldn't have been interbreeding. This merely shows a lack of understanding what mtDNA is. And even if there had been a close match, it still wouldn't have been very significant.
It's still entirely possible that we have neandertal genes in, say, chromosomes 7, 13, and 21. None of the few DNA studies so far could detect (or reject) this possibility.
Maybe when we have a few dozen sizable sample of Neandertal DNA sequenced, we can say something a bit more meaningful. Even then, though, we'll still have the possibility that those few individuals left no modern descendants, while others are among our ancestors.
A related explanation is: There really isn't any such thing as "scientific proof", and anyone who uses this phrase can be assumed to not understand science. Scientific methods are pretty much all methods of disproof.
The way it works is: You have a lot of observations. You make up a bunch of guesses (hypotheses) about what's going on. You try to think of ways of disproving all of them. Experiments are a common method; further observations are another. Some of your attempts will come up with further facts that are inconsistent with some of your explanations, so you discard them (or tweak them to survive the tests). The explanations that survive lots of tests are called "theories". But they haven't been proved; they have just survived attempts to disprove them.
Anyway, I often think of this whenever people like creationists talk about "scientific proof". By uttering such a phrase, they have just discredited themselves.
It is called "WIENUX", not "WEINUX", ...
...
They're missing some good wordplay here. If they package the WIENUX distro together with WINE, to run Windows apps, the resulting package should obviously be called WEINUX.
There's gotta be a bunch more good English/Deutsch puns in there
Then there are the followers of the IPU (invisible Pink Unicorn).
...
If google hits are any indication, the IPU has a much larger following (498,000) than the FSM (88,200). And she's a lot cuter (though invisible).
There's gotta be a bunch of others
Evolution isn't really that scientific either, you can't reproduce it under lab conditions because of the timeframes involved.
Actually, lots of evolutionary lab experiments have been published.
It's true that your typical grant doesn give you time to do evolutionary experiments on primates or other large critters with a long reproductive cycle. But, for example, a lot of bacteria and yeasts will reproduce every 20 minutes or so under good conditions. You can do interesting evolutionary experiments on such species in under a month.
At a slightly larger size, there are multicellular species with a 1- to 2-week reproductive cycle. Drosophila and Arabidopsis for example. You can do evolutionary experiments on them in a year or two. The literature is full of articles on the topic.
The claim that evolution takes too long is simply incorrect. It may be true for large animals. But most scientific research is done with small, fast-living species, because everything works faster with them. Only when you want to apply results to the large, slow species (like us) do you finally do experiments with them. By then, of course, you usually have your theories pretty well worked out, except for the fine species-specific details.
Also, the couple of centuries of evolutionary thought have provided us with innumerable real-life examples that happened before our eyes, in only a few of our generations. Antibiotic resistance, for instance.
My favorite example is that, all over North America, dandelions have adapted to lawnmowers. They used to (and in wild areas still do) have flowers on tall stems to get above the competition to where pollinators can see them. In most urban areas, their flowers are now on short stems that are below most mower blades. Then, when as the seeds form, the stem elongates, and at the next mowing the mower helps distribute the seeds.
You really can't argue that people intentionally selected dandelions for this behavior. It's "natural selection" at its finest (and funniest). A new "predator" appeared that preferably ate tall flowers. This produced selection pressure for short-stemmed flowers. But the fruit is still long-stemmed, because you want the predator to eat those.
Just mention Bush, religion, or supporting overthrowing a murdering dictator in Iraq and watch the sparks fly.
You get modded down just as fast if you mention Gore, atheism, or Bush's many lies.
That's because this is news for nerds. Those go to news for wonks. Third door down the hall, on the right.
It should be a mile off course in 510 years...
So maybe the Martians should be complaining, if the change brings Tempel-1 closer to Mars. Of course, at that rate, it's still quite a few thousands of years before it threatens Mars.
Its occasional not-so-close encounters with Jupiter effect its orbit a lot more. That's why the astronomers lost it back in the 1800's after tracking it for several orbits.
Well, I dunno about that. During part of our little trip this afternoon, we drove along a local street which for about 3 blocks runs parallel to I95 (the main circumferential highway around Boston). The Garmin GPS gadget showed us jumping back and forth between the street and the highway. The speed limit on one is 25mph; on the other it's 55mph. I wonder what behavior we'd expect from a car partly controlled by this GPS tool. If we had been on the highway, part of the time it would have wanted to slow us down to 25mph, which would frankly be rather dangerous on that stretch.
I've often seen it showing its position as on the next street over. Given the advertised accuracies of GPS, I'd guess this is typical. It's not that big a deal; when you've had a bit of experience with it you can easily correct mentally (and laugh a little).
But I'm not sure I'd want its input to influence the car's controls. Parallel roadways can have very different driving conditions.
This afternoon my wife and I took a trip to a town maybe 20 miles from where we live (in a suburb west of Boston). She drove, and I havigated using out Garmin 3600, which is a cool PalmOS gadget with GPS added. It shows where you are on the map, finds routes, gas station, restaurants, and so on. It can also show you your location, heading and speed.
But GPS isn't all that accurate. This gadget routinely shows a 10-meter or so error estimate. Sometimes 30m or more. I often watched our position at a small scale as we approached turns. It showed things like: As we approached one stop light, moved to the left lane and stopped at the light, it showed us turning left, driving down the street a block or so, then turning around and coming back, passing through the intersection going the other direction. All the while, we were stopped at the light.
At times, I watched our position/speed. It would occasionally show us going from 40mph to 90mph to 10mph over the space of a few seconds. At other times it would match the spedometer very closely. Now, our car does have good acceleration; it's a Mini Cooper. But it doesn't really go from 0 to 80mph in under a second.
I can imagine if this were tied in to an automatic ticket-writing system. While we were stuck in downtown traffic, it would write us up a ticket for suddenly accelerating to 80mph for 5.7 seconds.
I can also imagine the effects of tying it into the car's controls. While sitting at a light, it would suddenly see us going 110mph, and would downshift and then go into reverse to get us back under the speed limit, causing us to "rear-end" the car behind us.
Yeah, in my experience with GPS, this all sounds like a really good idea.
(But we like the Garmin toy, really we do. Partly because it's a really useful navigation device. Partly because it makes us laugh a lot.)
... but the fact is, the USA built it, and under the USA it has florished and grown.
More accurately, the US government (mostly the Defense Department) funded the early development. But we're talking 1960's here. During the 1970's, the ARPAnet spread fairly rapidly to a number of other countries. Canada, the UK and Scandinavia stand out, but they weren't the only ones. By 1980, most major universities everywhere had IP connectivity, at least to a few tech departments. There were also thousands of corporate IP hookups, in dozens of countries, for all the obvious reasons.
The "flourished and grown" phase really applies to the 1980's and 1990's, and by then the Internet was quite international. Granted, the US has always had a dominant role, but this isn't the same as "control", especially in the 1980's when most of those Americans were academics.
To a great degree, I'd guess that the current worries about US domination has a lot to do with the political situation. The US government is now in the hands of a crowd that calls the rest of the world "irrelevant" and has a policy of attacking others based not on what they've done, but on what they might do some time in the future. Imagine yourself on the receiving end of such policies, and you'll understand why people want to free the Internet (and anything else) from US control.
Of course, it's a bit late, as the US doesn't really control it anyway. There are lots of root servers outside the US, originally for practical speed reasons. The Internet needs lots of DNS servers to work well. If the US (government or corporations) should start suppressing information in DNS servers, that will be treated like any other packet loss. The rest of the Internet will notice quickly, and will route around the loss. Americans will respond the same way, and include foreign server addresses in their search lists.
The best approach would be to continue working on a fully distributed DNS system that can't be controlled by anyone. If Americans (or Chinese) want to think they control it, let them. But keep working on redundancies that will route around any "control" that translates to loss of data.
... turned up a good article on the topic of alternative DNS root servers. It turns out that several are alive and well, and serving the communities that use them.
No surprise, actually, if you know anything about how the Internet works. And it's quite possible that some of these may eventually become mainstream servers.
Root DNS != DNS Registry
.uk, .fr, .to, ...) are generally run by an agency of the country's government, and has total control over the names in their domain. Except for .us, the US government has no power over them. If someone tries to change the root servers to deflect them, it's not hard to set up a few new root servers and point your own resolv.conf files somewhere that uses them.
Good point. And to be a bit more direct, we might point out that it doesn't actually matter all that much who runs "the DNS Root Servers".
After all, the Internet itself (at the network level) doesn't use DNS; it routes entirely on address with no concern for any symbolic names that might be associated with the addresses. If some gang of users wants to set up their own name-to-address mapping scheme, who's to stop them? Who's to even know they're doing it? And how could it impact the current DNS system at all?
In fact, I've taken part in a couple of setups that did this. The purpose was testing some new software, and we didn't want to impact anyone else. So we set up our own set of DNS servers (partly with our own experimental software), and put their addresses in the resolv.conf files of our test setup. It worked just fine. We could debug our software without affecting anyone else at all. When we got it working, we tied it into the public Internet, but I see no reason that we had to do this. We could have kept using it indefinitely as our private DNS system if we'd liked.
I've seen a few claims that there are parts of the Internet that are using their own DNS servers for various reasons. I haven't really investigated, because it's not actually all that interesting an idea. If you understand the Internet at all, you just shrug, say "Why not?" and go about your business.
So, instead of pretending that the US or any other government has total control over "the" DNS system, why don't we discuss the actual alternatives? This would include pointing out that anyone who doesn't like ICANN or the US government or whatever can easily do an end run around them and set up their own DNS system.
In a sense, many countries have already done this. The national domains (.us,
So why all the flamage, when independent DNS servers are so easy?
Am I missing something? Did the independent servers in our test setups do something subtly wrong that we didn't see? Is there some international law against this?
Heh. Contrary to the earlier "sheeple" metaphor, I like to use the evolutionary example of ants.
Now, you may think that ants are insignificant. But their total biomass is much greater than that of humans. And we don't control them. They go on about their little lives blissfully unaware of us. They have almost no brain, and blindly follow instructions from a "hive" mind that also has little intelligence. Most aren't ever allowed to reproduce; those who do are imprisoned for their entire life in one underground room.
But they've been around a lot longer than humans. They represent more of the biosphere than we do. We can't do much about them except maybe stick our finger in the path of one or kill a few. The rest don't notice, and just go about their lives.
Sound familiar?
OK, when did Bill Gates ever do good and make money at the same time?
Hey, there's gotta be a few cases. Nobody, not even billg, is perfect.
Granted, I don't know of any cases, but I expect that his PR people could pull out a few.
The meteor is the GPL. You cannot do business as usual ...
... Will this get "Funny" or "Flamebait" ratings? Or both? ;-)
Actually, if you want a better metaphor, the meteor should be compared with the growing problem of "malware" for Microsoft. This is starting to have an impact much more like that of the K/T meteor. And now that organized crime has jumped on the bandwagon and started doing identity theft in addition to the usual scams, the writing may be on the wall (to appropriate a metaphor that our religious friends might recognize).
This is a growing disaster for anyone marketing proprietary software. The only real solutions to problems like this require that the code be open and accessible to everyone (i.e., to competent programmers). As long as the code is hidden, most of us can't know about the coming problems or sensibly prepare for them. With open, analyzable source, we can find the problems and block them before they happen. But Microsoft so far is firm in their insistence that their code is not available to the public. For very good reason, it seems.
The GPL helps, but it is a legal document, and depends on government enforcement. It can be overwhelmed by the usual process of corporate bribery. It's valuable, but by itself, it can't protect us against corruption in the law-enforcement mechanism. The "settlement" in the case against MS is pretty good proof that the US Dept of Justice is now thoroughly corrupted at the highest levels, and can't be depended on to enforce little things like the GPL. Microsoft has made it clear that their attack on the GPL will be political, not legal, and they stand a good chance of winning with that approach.
Our main weapon is to push for the sort of openness that exists in most engineering areas. If you use a bolt or a resistor in your product, you can expect to get an exact spec giving full details on their capabilities. Nobody would build a building, bridge, or vehicle without detailed specs for every component. In most cases, it's illegal to hide the specs for such things.
The major exception to this is software. For some insane reason, we have accepted that the exact details of software's behavior may be hidden from customers by making the code secret. More and more, we are finding situations where people's property and funds, and sometimes their lives, depend on correctly-functioning software. But the software is hidden and unverifiable.
This isn't a tenable situation any more. And we just may have the disaster that proves it: the loss to "commercial interests" of databases containing financial and credit data for millions of people. This is directly attributable to the secrecy of the financial software. And that's attributable in great part to Microsoft's success.
It can't last. If it does, we are facing a total economic meltdown, as all the money that's just a number in a database goes "poof".
(Hmm
Why just pin it on Dubya? Did you think it didn't go on before and won't go on afterwords?
Actually, there's a lot of data about this available online. One of the big changes at Microsoft in 2004 was a huge increase in campaign contributions. They went from being an insignificant source of campaign funds to one of the largest contributors.
While they contributed to a lot of campaigns, most of their contributions are fairly well documented as having gone to the Bush/Cheney campaign funds, either directly or indirectly via such routes as PACs. They were one of Bush's largest contributors.
It wasn't long after the election, of course, before the Justice Department caved and essentially gave Microsoft a free pass for their past and future transgressions. This has been widely understood as payoff, of course.
But all it really means is that Microsoft has faced up to the way that large organizations like governments (and many megacorporations) work. They have moved to a "marketing" approach that's better for this market than what has worked so well with the non-technical public. A true cynic would call this a rational marketing decision.
So, for comparison with the linux builders, has anyone found detailed specs for this Sun laptop? I browsed around the sun.com site and couldn't find much actual info, or a place to order it.
Maybe it's just too new and their web-site folks don't know about it yet?
I'd like to know how it compares with, say, the emperorlinux laptops.
You see a lot of this sort of "logic" in our "fair and balanced" media these days. It's especially popular in articles on the topic of global warming (which many people here in New England think is a fine idea
No, actually what happened is: When the "Oprah" hack was described by the Opera people, lots of Oprah's fans sent email asking where they could get this browser. So they made a release of Opera with the "Oprah" id as default, and sold a several hundred thousand copies to her fans.
;-]
This was so successful that they tried the idea for a few other celebrities. After the US election, they tried a release with "Dubya" as the id, but it was a flop. Market research showed that this was because most of George's fans don't know what a computer or a browser is, and couldn't read most pages anyway due to the widespread dependence on text for much of the content.
Reports are that US government is trying to get the Norwegian government to force Opera to hand over sales data for the "Osama" release. But the data is all in Arabic, so most US agencies don't have anyone on staff that could read it.
[Wouldn't it be fun if some of these were actually true?
One problem with this issue: After reading it for a while (and chuckling a lot), I noticed that my cpu usage was pegged at 100%, mostly by mozilla-bin. I went on the usual test hunt, closing down tabs until the cpu usage dropped. It was the new Onion tab. I opened it again in a new tab, and the cpu went to 100% again. So I don't have the Onion tab open any more.
Sure wish there were some systematic way to discover quickly which web page is doing this sort of thing and why. It would be even better if all the cpu-hogging features could be turned off, and turned on briefly just for a page (or site) that needs them.
Yes, I do have things like flashblock and prefbar installed. I set images to just one loop. I keep java and javascript turned off unless I need them for one page. Those things help a lot. But there are still things that can gobble all your cpu and can't be stopped except by killing the tab (or window or browser).
So you've been reading The Onion since the "first season" then? You realize that was in 1988, right? You're from Madison, you went to the UW and have been around since the beginning, huh?
...
There are a number of us here who have read it from the beginning. In my case, I did go to the UW. But I left town in 1978. The reason that I read the Onion from the start was that my daughter was at the UW in 1988, and she was a staff photographer for the Onion. She sent me a free subscription. Everyone I knew loved it, and was duly impressed by my having a kid on the Onion staff.
One of her main jobs was the Drunk of the Week, which sadly didn't make it to the web site. She and a few others would tour State Street on Friday and Saturday nights, looking for the most disgusting drunk they could find. They'd take pictures, give the drunk a free Onion t-shirt, and publish the best picture in the next issue. "It's a nasty job, but someone's gotta do it." "What I do for a bit of comedy!" And so on.
I think anyone with half a brain understands that such an operation can't always be 100% on. But they hit the target often enough to qualify as a major training ground for our future comedy writers.
It is too bad that not all of their earlier stuff is online. I've often wished I'd saved several articles. For example, the one after the big New Guinea tsunami some years back. They interviewed God, who told them that He had His reasons for all those innocent deaths; humans would never understand; we shouldn't presume to question Him. They also quoted believers, who were sure that God had His reasons, though we don't understand them. I keep running across things so similar to this that it no longer seems like parody to me. Sure wish I could find a copy
if Firefox can operate successfully without misidentifying itself why does Opera need to do so?
;-)
Because, as was discussed here recently, there have been sites (mostly owned by Microsoft) that actively sabotage pages sent to Opera users, by using CSS that cause the content to be garbled. It was shown that only requests with "Opera" in the ID string had this problem. (Changing it to "Oprah" made the pages display properly.
I haven't (yet) read about this being done to firefox. Anyone know if it's happening anywhere? I wouldn't be surprised; I just haven't heard about it.
There certainly are pages that are only delivered to clients that identify themselves as "IE". I've seen such pages, and verified that an IE ID is needed to get them. I have a little perl web-page tester that has an ID-string command-line arg for exactly this reason.
Now, if this were due to bugs, or were otherwise inadvertent, you'd expect it to effect all browsers equally. But it doesn't. So far, the only cases I've seen are pages that require an IE browser ID. I've never seen a page that requires some other browser's ID. I'm not saying they don't exist; I've just never stumbled across them. This tells you exactly why you might want your browser to masquerade as IE from time to time.
I've read that IE identifies itself as "Mozilla/4.0 " because there were some pages that required the Mozilla ID to function properly. Maybe this is true. I've never seen such pages, but I suppose they could exist.
Opera is configured by default to identify itself as Internet Explorer
...". ;-)
And Internet Explorer is configured by default to identify itself as "Mozilla/4.0
Yeah; I know what the rest of the ID string looks like. I've spent some time writing code to grovel through the server's access_log files and try to figure out what software is sending what percent of the requests. So I know the lengths that browser makers have gone to make this job difficult for us network programmers. And incidentally, they also make it easy for PR people to report highly inaccurate numbers for browser usage, if they wish to do so.
In any case, Opera isn't the only browser that has a menu of ID strings. Lynx did this years ago, in response to sites that explicity blocked lynx requests. One of my test toys is a blackberry running WebViewer, and when you install it, one of the first things it does is ask you whether it should identify itself as Internet Explorer.
But for Opera to misidentify itself by default is a bit suspect. Are there any other browsers other than IE and Opera that do this, without asking the user?
Except that God isn't imaginary. ...
I've had an imaginary friend, and it's not at all the same thing.
Heh; yeah. In my experience, there's a big difference.
Imaginary friends talk to you and answer your questions.
Also, when you're done with an imaginary friend, you can
dismiss them and they don't get pissed at you. You can
replace them with new imaginary friends, without any fuss
or bother. Just try that with the God of your choice.
Not, not dead yet. Just dying. Or maybe just fading somewhat.
...
It might be interesting to see a poll on this. I'd guess that some people are like me, and see no need for a watch. Others are like you, and live/work in an environment where a watch is still useful.
I suppose it's likely that watches will never die off entirely. Sales might just settle asymptotically to a non-zero level that's significantly lower than the peak a decade or so back.
Sorta like horses in the early 1900's. I've read a number of articles about the slow reintroduction of work horses over the last 25 or 30 years. It seems that people are figuring out that there are still some jobs where horses are better than existing machinery, and there doesn't seem to be any real incentive to try to develop a mechanical replacement. After all, they're strong, sure-footed, and have significant intelligence. And people like working with them.
Of course, we might eventually be making similar remarks about the small remnant human worker population