Actually, in this case it was silly to have any official recognition of the Swedish word "ogooglebar", just as it would be somewhat silly to consider whether "ungoogleable" should be recognized as an English word. Both words are formed by adding standard prefixes to the base word. Thus, "o-" + "google" + "-bar" is a standard Swedish construction, just as "un-" + "google" + "-able" is in English. Most dictionaries don't bother listing such words, since a moderately competent speaker of the language will know those prefixes and will construct such words routinely.
And note that, contrary to what some people have said, this wasn't done by a Swedish dictionary maker; it was a language "standards" committee. It is rather pointless (and silly) for such a committee to waste time with such questions. The "o-" and "-bar" affixes are already part of standard Swedish, and that's really all they should be concerned with. They might be concerned with whether "google" is listed as a verb in their list, but there's really little point in listing words constructed with standard affixes, unless the result has an idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from its component morphemes.
So that the served content is for IE6-8... [which doesn't work with IE11]
Part of the fun here is that IE has "spoofed" FF and the other Mozilla browsers all along, by including "Mozilla" in most forms of its User-Agent string. I see this all the time, when I test my web sites against various versions of IE. This has always been a minor problem for web developers, since it's easy for software to misunderstand such things. You might think you've got a test that successfully distinguishes real Mozilla-type browsers from IE, but then MS releases a version with a tweaked User-Agent string that your RE doesn't parse quite right, and your code sends the wrong style of HTML to the browser.
I've occasionally wondered why the Mozilla gang hasn't charged MS with trademark infringement for such monkey-wrench tactics. After all, if I were to start providing a browser whose default User-Agent string included the "MSIE" token, MS's lawyers would be all over me. But they use their main competitor's brand name with impunity. If the Mozilla crowd weren't such nice guys as to allow this, life might be a bit easy for web developers everywhere.
Actually, quite a lot of browsers provide a list of User-Agent strings, and let a user choose one. This is probably legal, and is occasionally useful, especially to developers. But it's annoying and a waste of developers' time when vendors are allowed to install a lying User-Agent string as the default. It would improve matters for a lot of us it this were legally considered consumer fraud, trademark infringement, or whatever other legal terms apply.
Suffer? This just creates more billable hours. I'm not sure what line of work you're in, but the phrase "more work for you" isn't exactly a bad thing (as long as it's paid for!)
In economics circles, this would be considered a case of the "Broken Window Fallacy". That's the term for the belief that descructive acts (e.g., breaking windows) adds to the economy because it creates sales of replacement parts and employment for the workers that fix the damage. This is wrong, of course, because it doesn't add to the total wealth; it only shuffles money around while decreasing the total wealth. Time spent repairing damage is time lost that could have been used to create new stuff.
The concept applies in the software business, too. Real social wealth is created when someone builds software that delivers useful new capabilities. The Web as a whole is a good example of this. But software that simply does something in an incompatible way doesn't add to wealth; it merely increases the labor required to do a given job. That's a reversal of the usual "wealth" benefit of computing, which is based on the idea of replacing human labor with the activity of mechanical gadgetry, freeing human time to do more interesting things.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of history saying that people easily fall for the Broken Window Fallacy in most of its forms. In particular, manufacturers routinely "innovate" by intentionally making things that aren't quite compatible with their competitors' equipment. This is a serious drag on advances in the "Human Condition", since it's invariably a sinkhole of human time, trying to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of all the incompatibilities. We have adopted computers because they've freed up our time, not because we want to spend more time doing things that could be done quickly.
Microsoft has a well-understood history of throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery (to use another form of the metaphor), but they're far from the only ones. Pretty much any corporation with the economic clout will do the same thing, as they attempt to lock customers into their brands.
That doesn't mean you're not using an OS. Unless you run bare-metal code, you are using an OS.
I'd wonder whether the writer is one of those people who are (mis)using "OS" to mean "everything but the UI". I've asked about such usage on this and various other forums, and I've been soundly berated for implying that the "OS" is a low-level thing, somehow related to (and/or defined by) the hardware's "System Call" opcode or some dumb thing like that.
There seems to be a significant crowd that has repurposed the concept of an Operating System to include not only the stuff behind the low-level system-call interface (e.g., libc.a or libc.so), but also all the link libraries, interpreters, and sometimes even the system runtime libraries. You know, all that geeky stuff inside a computer that no normal person would want to be suspected of understanding.
The result, of course, is an orders-of-magnitude change in the size of what's considered an OS. It's sorta like the common use of the physicists' term "quantum" to mean not just the smallest change that can occur to the smallest particles, but also any change of any magnitude, often very large.
Linguistic history shows that you really can't fight such takeovers and trashing of technical terms by the general public. The public will ignore you, and continue to (mis)use your technical terms as they see fit. The only choices are to either accept that a term's meaning is different in a technical context than in general speech, or to abandon the term and move to a new one. There's a temptation to go with the double-definition approach, which leads to poor communication of the sort we're seeing here. But switching to a new term has the problem that younger technical people will slowly lose the ability to understand your field's older documents.
I was wondering what sort of Chinese name "Kylin" is. It doesn't match Mandarin spelling patterns. Anyone know what the characters are? And how a Mandarin speaker might pronounce it?
During the transition period, the Pentagon will murder whoever the CIA asks them to, and vice versa, and it will be impossible to pin blame on either of them.
There have been explanations for a while (including from various professional comedians;-) that the real issue in this story is that the DoD is rather upset that for the past few years the CIA has had a higher kill count than the military. Since the military considers killing people with impunity to be their job classification, it's understandable that they might be a bit upset by this young upstart outperforming them.
Of course, if the result is that they both claim credit for all kills, it won't fix the problem at all.
What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!
Yeah, that would be consistent with no Neanderthal mtDNA being present in modern humans. But there's a more likely scenario that would explain it than who's "welcome".
Consider that in all current humans societies (and in primates in general), the standard of "beauty" is large and muscular for males, but smaller and agile for females. Then look at the general form of the Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons.
In one case, you have a big, towering hulk of a Neanderthal man facing a slight, graceful Cro Magnon female. Aside from any question of skin color, they're both looking at their idea of a really sexy person of the other sex. In the other case, you have a big, chunky, dominant-looking Neanderthal female facing a slender, graceful Cro Magnon man smaller than her. Neither of them sees their image of a great sex partner.
So, questions of societal acceptance might be interesting, but the real question of sexual attraction would favor the male Neanderthal with the female Cro Magnon. They'd both want to violate their social group's prejudices to get together and, uh, enjoy each other's company. And their children would have Cro Magnon mtDNA.
Yeah, both are basically silly misunderstandings of the well-documented phylogenetic tree. We didn't evolve from monkeys; living monkeys are a separate branch, or rather two, the New World and Old World monkeys, with us apes a third branch of the primate tree.
Similarly, the most likely explanation of what happened to the Neanderthals is that they interbred with the Cro Magnon invaders, and we're the descendants of the hybrids. Actually, it's likely that there was little gene flow back into Africa, and it's just the non-African branches of the human tree that have Neanderthal genes, but we'll have to wait a while to really verify (or disprove) that conjecture.
This is a sort of logical failure that we humans seem to be prone to. Another similar example came out a few years ago, when DNA studies led to the conclusion that roughly 20-25% the US population has "Native American" ancestry. It's pretty much the same story, with the documented history of slaughter and plagues wiping out the "natives", while on the sidelines the invaders were quietly hooking up with the natives and producing little hybrid babies.
Similarly, it's well understood that the "swarthy" appearance of the Mediterranean-zone Europeans is due to interbreeding with the large number of black African slaves brought into the Roman Empire. 2000 years has been enough to average out the genes locally, while the population is still somewhat visually distinct from the people farther north who haven't yet had time to fully join in the mingling. Give the Europeans another 10,000 years, and that merger will be complete, too.
Actually, my favorite such genetic-mixture story was the report some years back that researchers had verified earlier estimates of the mixing of the American black slave population, to the point that since around 1980 - give or take a decade - more than half of the American population has black African ancestry. I had a friend in college back then who looked pure, stereotypical Irish, with red hair, freckles, etc., but she liked to tell people that she was legally black. Her family had verified that she was 1/32 African, and in many US states, that would legally make her "colored". I'm about as pale as she was, though I'm 1/8 Ojibwa (my father's father's mother). I'd guess from the recent studies that I'm probably also about 4% Neanderthal, but the records to prove that seem to have been misplaced.;-)
Anyway, it's rare that one group of humans has wiped out another. What we really do is interbreed. Yeah, we fight and kill each other occasionally, but we do that within groups, too. But that's short-term, and in the long run, the hybrids win.
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free...
Yeah, right; they give it away "for free" in the same sense of the old ads of the form "Buy X get Y free". Even a typical 7-year-old understands the bogosity of such an "offer". For most of us, Adroid similarly comes "free" when you pay for the device that it runs on.
The original justification for ads packaged with "content" was with broadcast TV, when there was no practical way to charge for reception. But nowadays, the telecom mono/duopolies that control most of the public's access have found ways to enforce bundles, so we really do pay for our gadget, the software, and the reception in a single "service contract". So the original justification for the ads is gone. But the suppliers now feel it's their natural right to include ads in everything, regardless of the fact that customers are being charged for the gadgetry and the reception on a monthly basis.
Of course, this is in the US, where the telecom companies can legally bundle the gadgetry into the service contract, and charge you for the ads by including their bandwidth in your "usage" total. YMMV in other countries, which have implemented various other schemes.
Yeah, if required to place a bet, almost any astronomer would bet on Proxima Centauri being in orbit around Alpha Cen. But still, it's always good to put up pro forma objections pointing out that coincidences do happen, and the numbers really aren't in.
OTOH, this should be distinguished from the popular know-nothing approach, e.g. the climate-change deniers or the whole religious anti-evolution thing, that are based on willful ignorance of the data.
The Proxima Cen story is more like the ongoing scientific challenges to the Chicxulub impact being the cause of the K-T disaster that "wiped out the dinosaurs", or the challenges to the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs (so that impact didn't actually wipe out the dinosaurs, only around 99% of them;-). Those are both real scientific inferences based on fossil and geological data that has significant error bars. In all three cases, even the most skeptical scientists tend to agree that the accepted explanation is probably correct. But still, we really could use some more detailed evidence before putting all our money (and/or belief systems) behind them.
And, as the standard joke goes, saying "Further research is needed" is useful when talking to funding agencies. We don't want people to think that our favorite scientific topics are all researched out and are fully understood. If we do that, we'll lose our livelihoods, and the fun we have refining the data, always hoping we'll turn up still more puzzles that need funding for research.
(I do like to tell people that the two people in our household are outnumbered by the three dinosaurs that live here - two cockatiels and a conure. They're really cute little flying dinosaurs, not at all like the big, scary ones that are extinct. Except that the conure does have a rather scary beak, so we warn visitors not to stick their fingers too close to her. She trusts us, but doesn't trust strangers, and she could do some serious damage to a human hand.;-)
A number of astronomers have pointed out that Proxima Centauri's exact distance and vector aren't known precisely. So, while it's generally thought that the star is likely in orbit around the Alpha Cen pair, the error bars on all the number include the possibility that it's just an interloper that will eventually go its own way.
It can be hard to get precise numbers for a dim object that's not very close to any other objects. It would be easier if there were some smaller objects close to Proxima Cen, but so far none have been found.
There are also a handful of other stars that share the proper motion of Alpha Cen, and it has been proposed that they all originated in a single star cluster.
A quick check shows that all of this is mentioned in the wikipedia page for Proxima Centauri.
I think if it is the center of a planetary system, then it is a star.
This is a nice example of why you need to be careful in how you define things. With the above definition, our own sun isn't a "star" (most of the time).
Isaac Newton was one of the people who pointed this out. The objects in our solar system actually orbit the barycenter of the system, the technical name for what is often called the center of mass (or more weirdly, the center of gravity). Because most of the solar system's mass outside the sun is Jupiter, and because Jupiter is far enough away from the sun, the barycenter of the solar system is usually outside the sun. Not far outside, true, but outside the visible "surface" of the sun. It's only inside the sun when most of the other big planets are on the other side from Jupiter.
So, technically speaking, Earth and the other planets don't actually orbit the sun; they orbit the barycenter, which is (usually) outside the sun. The sun itself also orbits the same barycenter, in a very close orbit. And a few humorous remarks have been made based on the fact that Newton actually demonstrated that the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun.
We probably need a better definition of the term "star" than "has planets". That also causes a different problem: It's a circular definition, since the common definition of a "planet" includes orbiting a star. So one might decide that Jupiter is a star, and at least its four major moons instantly become planets, which then is used in the definition of "star" to prove that Jupiter is indeed a star.
There's a lot of humor in the way such terms are being defined by various (mostly non-astronomical) parties. Maybe we should go back to the definition that a star is an astronomical thing that undergoes sustained nuclear fusion. Ya think that'd work?
(We do have to carefully word it so that the experimental fusion projects in Earthly labs don't qualify as stars.;-)
We can't work out how to do #1 [survive indefinitely in space using only available resources] with our current "spaceship", and that's in nice stable orbit around a star with a preexisting life support system.
Nah; we know pretty well how to do that on such a large "spaceship". It's just that we've given the controls to businessmen and religious leaders. The former have a "moral" objection to any strategy other than short-term personal gain, while the latter are "morally" opposed to limits on population growth, and both oppose teaching the general population what we know about how biological systems work. But all have to do is kick them out of their controlling positions and replace them with people who want things to be stable in the long term.
Or, more likely than either of our analyses, the writer doesn't understand the difference between to/too/two homophones, considers them the same "word", and just typed the one with the fewest keystrokes. This is common for people who aren't strongly literate, and mostly use the spoken language. After all, what sense does it make to add an apostrophe or a final 'e' to "your"? They're/Their/There just silent letters that don't add any meaning, right?
It's common in the linguistic forums to take examples like this (though you/you're is no longer considered an especially interesting case), and try to figure out how the writer might have gotten it wrong. This is useful if you're trying to figure out how a language really works. In lots of subject areas, observed failures are often good clues to the inner workings of whatever you're studying. Common failures in language use are good clues to the inner workings of the human mind.
In real life, human languages aren't used only by automata that always follow an explicit set of rules; they are used primarily by fallible humans who learned their language inductively, and typically have a wide variety of (mis)understandings of how their communication system works. Or doesn't work, in many situations. And some of the failures can be entertaining.
(And I'm disappointed that nobody commented on my mispelling of "misspell" in my earlier post. I've been doing that for some time, and it occasionally gets some fun discussions going. But I suspect that most people don't even notice.;-)
Just about any research university provides you with the opportunity to do some serious learning. MIT merely does not *also* provide the opportunity to "fuck around".
Oh, I dunno; recently I was one of the musicians at one of MIT's regular evening dance sessions. They have a number of these, with different types of dancing, on different evenings. Some of them, like this one, are free to students (and you get PhysEd credit if you sign the attendance sheets at some minim number of them). I've noticed at these dances, the crowd is typically smaller after the break that's about 2/3 of the way through the evening, and I've also noticed people wandering off during the breaks, usually in pairs.
So I'd say that MIT is in fact providing (and paying for) their students' opportunities to "fuck around", in both the metaphorical and literal meanings of that phrase.
I sat in on some of the discussions some years back, when MIT was instituting this practice. One part of it was that the admin reps told the groups that to qualify for support, they had to go to weekly events, rather than the biweekly or monthly schedules they had had. And they had to provide a break with "refreshments", to encourage social interaction rather than just "learn, learn, learn". So the admins' intent was a social event of the sort traditionally used for male-female contact, thinly disguised as a learning event.
This isn't unusual at colleges and universities, of course. Part of the function of such institutions has always been for people to find mates. The MIT administration understands this as well as their counterparts at other schools do, and encourages it with funding, space and PhysEd credit.
(Disclaimer: Pay no attention to the fact that my main email address ends with ".mit.edu".;-)
MIT had and has one of the best social scenes. Don't believe him.
Hey, Shhh! You aren't supposed to let the rest of the world know that. You're trying to mess up one of the best-cultivated stereotypes that we have going.
Of course, here on/. people are supposed to be part of the "nerd" crowd, so it such occasional slipups might be ok. But we should remember that there are also "normal" people who read the discussions here, not to mention all the corporate sockpuppets who hang around to post their thinly-disguised marketing stuff. So we really should keep up the image that we're all wearing pocket protectors and thick glasses, and don't know how to act around the females of the species.
(When I've been on the MIT campus lately, there have always been lots of women visible everywhere. But they would probably mostly insist that they're also socially-awkward geeks, too. Ya gotta keep up the stereotype, to keep the Normals out.;-)
He spelled "you're" wrong. That's spelling, not grammar.
Actually, he didn't spell "you're" at all; he correctly spelled the wrong word ("your"). That's a case of using the wrong word, not mispeling a word. So it really is primarily a grammatical problem, not a spelling problem. The writer was probably confused partly by the fact that "your better" is a phrase that is used in English in similar contexts. OTOH, spelling "off" as "of" almost certainly was a spelling error.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky.;-) But I also hang out in a few linguistics forums, where people often have fun mocking the language "peevers". There's a lot of nonsense written about mistakes and misusages in English, and a fair percent of the nonsense is based on not understanding English grammar. This in turn derives from the fact that most of grammar taught in our schools is actually warped Latin grammar, misapplied to a Germanic language whose syntax isn't very similar to Latin's.
I once had a linguistics course in college, on the subject of grammars, where after a semester of studying examples of grammars of lots of obscure minor languages, the prof suggested we do a similar "field study" of English, and hand in our analyses of that language's grammatical system. It was fun listening to the students' discussions, after they'd realized how English grammar really works, and how wrong the grammatical stuff they'd learned as kids really was.
Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing.
Yeah; that's a common attitude. More often, the job is to take what management has ordered, because they think that's what the customers want, and find some way to implement it to meet the management requirements.
For example, years ago when MS-DOS was still widely used and MS-Windows was new, I was involved on an "embedded" project that was "required" to run on MS-DOS. I had a critical part of the task, making the startup code work (and also the shutdown that got a DOS prompt back on the screen). What my startup code did was:
1. Call the initializers for all the app's packages,
2. Overwrite the interrupt table to point to our interrupt handlers,
3. "Return" DOS's space to our free-space list,
4. Call the start routine for the app.
There was also a reboot routine called from various parts of our code, to "exit back to DOS". This was called by a routine that handled a CTL-ALT-DEL keyin, for example. Testing showed that this did satisfy the requirement that our app "runs on DOS".
Since then, whenever I run across discussions like this one, I wonder whether the engineers have had to find equally "interesting" ways of making it look to managers and customers like the code runs on the claimed OS. But mostly, I've learned that this is often the sort of kludgery required to satisfy the requirements of management, marketing, and/or customers who think they understand how the engineering should work.
Of course, nowadays memory is a lot cheaper and available in GB-size chunks, so it may not be necessary to use the OS's memory. Just caching the OS's interrupt table, leaving the OS in memory, then restoring the interrupt table and exiting can do the job. But you still might want to try to guarantee that none of your app's routines overwrite any of the OS's "unused" memory, and that could be difficult to enforce if you have smart developers.
(And why am I tempted to add a "5.... Profit." to that list?;-)
Yeah; that sort of behavior has been reported in lots of social species. If a leader of a pack/flock does something, the others tend to imitate them. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet parrots, and they do the same sort of imitation of us. Chickens aren't quite as social (or intelligent) as dogs or parrots, but they are social, and you're the leader of their flock, so it's no surprise hearing that they follow your lead like that. They don't have to understand why you're doing it; they just join in as members of the flock.
Nothing in the summary suggests wolves domesticated humans. It doesn't suggest that they caused us to somehow adapt....
In any case, such ideas have been tossed around in biological circles for some decades. A common explanation is more neutral: Humans and our domestic animals "co-evolved". While we were adopting the animals (and plants), and controlling their mating to produce offspring more to our liking, we were also subject to similar selection pressures that favored the survival of the people who had captive, domesticated critters. The humans that survived best were the ones who were more "socialized", and willing to live in small communities that included our non-human companions. This gave us a more reliable food supply than hunting and gathering did.
It's easy to summarize this as our domestic species domesticating us. But that's really a case of over-simplifying the situation. And dogs are one of the few species that can be said to truly "understand" humans. With the others, the understanding is mostly on the human side of the relationship. Part of our "domestication" is that we can easily learn to understand another species' communications. We have a complex language-learning ability, and we have "empathy" that lets us get partly inside the minds of other critters. And some of us are better at this than others, as you'd expect in any evolutionary scenario.
A special case of this adaptation scenario has popped up recently: It's generally thought that Europeans conquered the rest of the world (to some extent;-) because of their better armaments. The counter-argument is that the data supports a different explanation: It was European diseases that devastated so many other societies, not European weapons (which really weren't much better than other people's weapons). There's good evidence that most of the major European diseases originated as crossovers from domesticated animals. This caused all the many plagues in European history, and left them with somewhat better disease resistance than the rest of humanity had.
So when Europeans showed up elsewhere, the result was plagues that weakened those societies, making them easy prey for European conquerors and settlers. This whole argument is based on data saying that Europeans had more domestic species than other human societies, giving them more endemic diseases that they could pass on to the rest of the world.
In any case, these are mostly "just-so" stories, plausible but not totally accepted in scientific circles until more data is collected.
I once had some neighbors with a dog that did that. He saw them digging these regularly-space holes in the garden, so he started digging similar holes with similar spacing. They then put tomatoes in those holes, so they could tell friends about how their dog helped with the gardening.
Lots of dogs can figure out things that simple.
It might be fun to try to collect data on how often such things happen. I'd guess that not that many dogs actually contribute usefully to such tasks, but you'd probably turn up a small percent that do.
i think you meant tree ape; not beach ape. or maybe savannah ape.
Or maybe all of the above.;-)
It's pretty well understood among the anthropology and archaeology crowd that humans are among the most aquatic primates. Most evidence of our ancestors comes from the remains of our habitations, which occur mostly along ancient shorelines. I've seen the comment that if you draw a border 100 km from all the shores of oceans, major lakes and "navigable" rivers, you get around 5% of the planet's land area, but over 90% of its human population. Humans like living near bodies of water, and we are one of the few primates that regularly swim.
There's nothing especially odd about this, other than the fact that our closest relatives are all tropical forest critters. But we adapted to a radically different lifestyle than theirs, and we did pretty well as a result.
One of the areas where this topic has come up is in the question about how humans crossed from Siberia to North America. The most common textbook explanation is the ice-age "land bridge" caused by the lower sea level. But others have suggested that this isn't needed, since humans were building rafts and small boats long before that, and the short hop across the Bering Strait would have been no barrier at all to humans of 30,000 years ago. They'd have just crossed it in their boats. Then they'd have gone back a few times each year to visit friends and family, while the settlements on the eastern shore grew. So the real question is when humans first reached the eastern shores of Siberia; they'd have been in Alaska only a few years after that, no matter what the sea level was.
A dog raised in Spain probably understands Spanish better than you.
That's not an exaggeration. Dog trainers will tell you that a typical dog can learn around 200 or so words, and can handle the syntax of 2- to 4-word sentences. An untrained dog supposedly learns 50 to 100 words of its humans' language. Most people who didn't grow up hearing Spanish won't have a vocabulary that big.
Disclaimer: While my family didn't speak Spanish, the areas in the western US where we lived had people who did, and I hung out with some of their kids, so I probably understand Spanish better than the typical dog in Spain. But maybe not all that much better.;-)
There was a hospital or nursing school, I believe, that wanting to target gay males for nurses. They advertised on Facebook a special number that was only targeted to the gay males on facebook but the advertisement didn't mention that. When an applicant called the number for an interview, they immediately knew he was gay.
Similarly, my wife subscribed to Netflix for some years, and likes to tell people that based on their advertising, they obviously had her classified as a gay male. This wasn't really surprising, considering her taste in (mostly old) movies. I've also wondered whether they knew about me, and whether I'm in their records also as a gay male. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they say.;-)
Corporate and government info-gathering efforts are somewhat known for making this sort of inference. The biggest screwups are often when they fail to distinguish people with the same (or sometimes just similar) names. Perhaps the funniest example of this in recent years was when Massachusetts' senator Ted Kennedy ran into problems on a commercial flight because the airport workers had his name on a list of suspected terrorists, and didn't recognize his name as belonging to a well-known senator.
Kennedy correctly commented that if he had this trouble, how are average Americans going to get treated? Of course, we've read a lot about that over the past decade.
...... if thats the case then all of the Linux users are in trouble oh wait no they arent that's because java has been a part of linux for years now...
Well, I know that various linux-based systems have included java in their libraries for years. But I'm not aware of any version of linux (i.e., the kernel OS) that includes java code, and that's what "has been a part of linux" would mean. But maybe I've missed something. Can you name a few linux releases in which linux itself (i.e., the kernel OS) contains java?
I wouldn't imagine that including java or other proprietary languages in a distro would be any sort of threat. I could just ignore such languages, and maybe not use library things that are written in them, if I can even determine that. We can see this idea in the widespread inclusion of PDF software in distros of most systems, not just linux. But you don't find PDF (or PDF-munging routines) in the kernel, to my knowledge.
(Of course, I wouldn't actually be surprised to find that MS and Apple have incorporated PDF tools into their kernels. They're run by people who don't understand the concept, and will use any scheme available to lure users into their "walled gardens".;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, in this case it was silly to have any official recognition of the Swedish word "ogooglebar", just as it would be somewhat silly to consider whether "ungoogleable" should be recognized as an English word. Both words are formed by adding standard prefixes to the base word. Thus, "o-" + "google" + "-bar" is a standard Swedish construction, just as "un-" + "google" + "-able" is in English. Most dictionaries don't bother listing such words, since a moderately competent speaker of the language will know those prefixes and will construct such words routinely.
And note that, contrary to what some people have said, this wasn't done by a Swedish dictionary maker; it was a language "standards" committee. It is rather pointless (and silly) for such a committee to waste time with such questions. The "o-" and "-bar" affixes are already part of standard Swedish, and that's really all they should be concerned with. They might be concerned with whether "google" is listed as a verb in their list, but there's really little point in listing words constructed with standard affixes, unless the result has an idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from its component morphemes.
spoof the user agent back to MSIE
So that the served content is for IE6-8 ... [which doesn't work with IE11]
Part of the fun here is that IE has "spoofed" FF and the other Mozilla browsers all along, by including "Mozilla" in most forms of its User-Agent string. I see this all the time, when I test my web sites against various versions of IE. This has always been a minor problem for web developers, since it's easy for software to misunderstand such things. You might think you've got a test that successfully distinguishes real Mozilla-type browsers from IE, but then MS releases a version with a tweaked User-Agent string that your RE doesn't parse quite right, and your code sends the wrong style of HTML to the browser.
I've occasionally wondered why the Mozilla gang hasn't charged MS with trademark infringement for such monkey-wrench tactics. After all, if I were to start providing a browser whose default User-Agent string included the "MSIE" token, MS's lawyers would be all over me. But they use their main competitor's brand name with impunity. If the Mozilla crowd weren't such nice guys as to allow this, life might be a bit easy for web developers everywhere.
Actually, quite a lot of browsers provide a list of User-Agent strings, and let a user choose one. This is probably legal, and is occasionally useful, especially to developers. But it's annoying and a waste of developers' time when vendors are allowed to install a lying User-Agent string as the default. It would improve matters for a lot of us it this were legally considered consumer fraud, trademark infringement, or whatever other legal terms apply.
Suffer? This just creates more billable hours. I'm not sure what line of work you're in, but the phrase "more work for you" isn't exactly a bad thing (as long as it's paid for!)
In economics circles, this would be considered a case of the "Broken Window Fallacy". That's the term for the belief that descructive acts (e.g., breaking windows) adds to the economy because it creates sales of replacement parts and employment for the workers that fix the damage. This is wrong, of course, because it doesn't add to the total wealth; it only shuffles money around while decreasing the total wealth. Time spent repairing damage is time lost that could have been used to create new stuff.
The concept applies in the software business, too. Real social wealth is created when someone builds software that delivers useful new capabilities. The Web as a whole is a good example of this. But software that simply does something in an incompatible way doesn't add to wealth; it merely increases the labor required to do a given job. That's a reversal of the usual "wealth" benefit of computing, which is based on the idea of replacing human labor with the activity of mechanical gadgetry, freeing human time to do more interesting things.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of history saying that people easily fall for the Broken Window Fallacy in most of its forms. In particular, manufacturers routinely "innovate" by intentionally making things that aren't quite compatible with their competitors' equipment. This is a serious drag on advances in the "Human Condition", since it's invariably a sinkhole of human time, trying to deal with the messiness and unpredictability of all the incompatibilities. We have adopted computers because they've freed up our time, not because we want to spend more time doing things that could be done quickly.
Microsoft has a well-understood history of throwing monkey wrenches into the machinery (to use another form of the metaphor), but they're far from the only ones. Pretty much any corporation with the economic clout will do the same thing, as they attempt to lock customers into their brands.
That doesn't mean you're not using an OS. Unless you run bare-metal code, you are using an OS.
I'd wonder whether the writer is one of those people who are (mis)using "OS" to mean "everything but the UI". I've asked about such usage on this and various other forums, and I've been soundly berated for implying that the "OS" is a low-level thing, somehow related to (and/or defined by) the hardware's "System Call" opcode or some dumb thing like that.
There seems to be a significant crowd that has repurposed the concept of an Operating System to include not only the stuff behind the low-level system-call interface (e.g., libc.a or libc.so), but also all the link libraries, interpreters, and sometimes even the system runtime libraries. You know, all that geeky stuff inside a computer that no normal person would want to be suspected of understanding.
The result, of course, is an orders-of-magnitude change in the size of what's considered an OS. It's sorta like the common use of the physicists' term "quantum" to mean not just the smallest change that can occur to the smallest particles, but also any change of any magnitude, often very large.
Linguistic history shows that you really can't fight such takeovers and trashing of technical terms by the general public. The public will ignore you, and continue to (mis)use your technical terms as they see fit. The only choices are to either accept that a term's meaning is different in a technical context than in general speech, or to abandon the term and move to a new one. There's a temptation to go with the double-definition approach, which leads to poor communication of the sort we're seeing here. But switching to a new term has the problem that younger technical people will slowly lose the ability to understand your field's older documents.
I was wondering what sort of Chinese name "Kylin" is. It doesn't match Mandarin spelling patterns. Anyone know what the characters are? And how a Mandarin speaker might pronounce it?
During the transition period, the Pentagon will murder whoever the CIA asks them to, and vice versa, and it will be impossible to pin blame on either of them.
There have been explanations for a while (including from various professional comedians ;-) that the real issue in this story is that the DoD is rather upset that for the past few years the CIA has had a higher kill count than the military. Since the military considers killing people with impunity to be their job classification, it's understandable that they might be a bit upset by this young upstart outperforming them.
Of course, if the result is that they both claim credit for all kills, it won't fix the problem at all.
Isn't bureaucratic competitiveness wonderful?
What?! The evidence is consistent with Neanderthal men being welcome in Anatomically Modern Human society, but not Neanderthal women!
Yeah, that would be consistent with no Neanderthal mtDNA being present in modern humans. But there's a more likely scenario that would explain it than who's "welcome".
Consider that in all current humans societies (and in primates in general), the standard of "beauty" is large and muscular for males, but smaller and agile for females. Then look at the general form of the Neanderthals and the Cro Magnons.
In one case, you have a big, towering hulk of a Neanderthal man facing a slight, graceful Cro Magnon female. Aside from any question of skin color, they're both looking at their idea of a really sexy person of the other sex. In the other case, you have a big, chunky, dominant-looking Neanderthal female facing a slender, graceful Cro Magnon man smaller than her. Neither of them sees their image of a great sex partner.
So, questions of societal acceptance might be interesting, but the real question of sexual attraction would favor the male Neanderthal with the female Cro Magnon. They'd both want to violate their social group's prejudices to get together and, uh, enjoy each other's company. And their children would have Cro Magnon mtDNA.
That sounds as crazy as we came from a Monkey.
Yeah, both are basically silly misunderstandings of the well-documented phylogenetic tree. We didn't evolve from monkeys; living monkeys are a separate branch, or rather two, the New World and Old World monkeys, with us apes a third branch of the primate tree.
Similarly, the most likely explanation of what happened to the Neanderthals is that they interbred with the Cro Magnon invaders, and we're the descendants of the hybrids. Actually, it's likely that there was little gene flow back into Africa, and it's just the non-African branches of the human tree that have Neanderthal genes, but we'll have to wait a while to really verify (or disprove) that conjecture.
This is a sort of logical failure that we humans seem to be prone to. Another similar example came out a few years ago, when DNA studies led to the conclusion that roughly 20-25% the US population has "Native American" ancestry. It's pretty much the same story, with the documented history of slaughter and plagues wiping out the "natives", while on the sidelines the invaders were quietly hooking up with the natives and producing little hybrid babies.
Similarly, it's well understood that the "swarthy" appearance of the Mediterranean-zone Europeans is due to interbreeding with the large number of black African slaves brought into the Roman Empire. 2000 years has been enough to average out the genes locally, while the population is still somewhat visually distinct from the people farther north who haven't yet had time to fully join in the mingling. Give the Europeans another 10,000 years, and that merger will be complete, too.
Actually, my favorite such genetic-mixture story was the report some years back that researchers had verified earlier estimates of the mixing of the American black slave population, to the point that since around 1980 - give or take a decade - more than half of the American population has black African ancestry. I had a friend in college back then who looked pure, stereotypical Irish, with red hair, freckles, etc., but she liked to tell people that she was legally black. Her family had verified that she was 1/32 African, and in many US states, that would legally make her "colored". I'm about as pale as she was, though I'm 1/8 Ojibwa (my father's father's mother). I'd guess from the recent studies that I'm probably also about 4% Neanderthal, but the records to prove that seem to have been misplaced. ;-)
Anyway, it's rare that one group of humans has wiped out another. What we really do is interbreed. Yeah, we fight and kill each other occasionally, but we do that within groups, too. But that's short-term, and in the long run, the hybrids win.
Google, an advertising/marketing company, puts out an OS for phones and tablets and gives it away for free ...
Yeah, right; they give it away "for free" in the same sense of the old ads of the form "Buy X get Y free". Even a typical 7-year-old understands the bogosity of such an "offer". For most of us, Adroid similarly comes "free" when you pay for the device that it runs on.
The original justification for ads packaged with "content" was with broadcast TV, when there was no practical way to charge for reception. But nowadays, the telecom mono/duopolies that control most of the public's access have found ways to enforce bundles, so we really do pay for our gadget, the software, and the reception in a single "service contract". So the original justification for the ads is gone. But the suppliers now feel it's their natural right to include ads in everything, regardless of the fact that customers are being charged for the gadgetry and the reception on a monthly basis.
Of course, this is in the US, where the telecom companies can legally bundle the gadgetry into the service contract, and charge you for the ads by including their bandwidth in your "usage" total. YMMV in other countries, which have implemented various other schemes.
Yeah, if required to place a bet, almost any astronomer would bet on Proxima Centauri being in orbit around Alpha Cen. But still, it's always good to put up pro forma objections pointing out that coincidences do happen, and the numbers really aren't in.
OTOH, this should be distinguished from the popular know-nothing approach, e.g. the climate-change deniers or the whole religious anti-evolution thing, that are based on willful ignorance of the data.
The Proxima Cen story is more like the ongoing scientific challenges to the Chicxulub impact being the cause of the K-T disaster that "wiped out the dinosaurs", or the challenges to the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs (so that impact didn't actually wipe out the dinosaurs, only around 99% of them ;-). Those are both real scientific inferences based on fossil and geological data that has significant error bars. In all three cases, even the most skeptical scientists tend to agree that the accepted explanation is probably correct. But still, we really could use some more detailed evidence before putting all our money (and/or belief systems) behind them.
And, as the standard joke goes, saying "Further research is needed" is useful when talking to funding agencies. We don't want people to think that our favorite scientific topics are all researched out and are fully understood. If we do that, we'll lose our livelihoods, and the fun we have refining the data, always hoping we'll turn up still more puzzles that need funding for research.
(I do like to tell people that the two people in our household are outnumbered by the three dinosaurs that live here - two cockatiels and a conure. They're really cute little flying dinosaurs, not at all like the big, scary ones that are extinct. Except that the conure does have a rather scary beak, so we warn visitors not to stick their fingers too close to her. She trusts us, but doesn't trust strangers, and she could do some serious damage to a human hand. ;-)
A number of astronomers have pointed out that Proxima Centauri's exact distance and vector aren't known precisely. So, while it's generally thought that the star is likely in orbit around the Alpha Cen pair, the error bars on all the number include the possibility that it's just an interloper that will eventually go its own way.
It can be hard to get precise numbers for a dim object that's not very close to any other objects. It would be easier if there were some smaller objects close to Proxima Cen, but so far none have been found.
There are also a handful of other stars that share the proper motion of Alpha Cen, and it has been proposed that they all originated in a single star cluster.
A quick check shows that all of this is mentioned in the wikipedia page for Proxima Centauri.
I think if it is the center of a planetary system, then it is a star.
This is a nice example of why you need to be careful in how you define things. With the above definition, our own sun isn't a "star" (most of the time).
Isaac Newton was one of the people who pointed this out. The objects in our solar system actually orbit the barycenter of the system, the technical name for what is often called the center of mass (or more weirdly, the center of gravity). Because most of the solar system's mass outside the sun is Jupiter, and because Jupiter is far enough away from the sun, the barycenter of the solar system is usually outside the sun. Not far outside, true, but outside the visible "surface" of the sun. It's only inside the sun when most of the other big planets are on the other side from Jupiter.
So, technically speaking, Earth and the other planets don't actually orbit the sun; they orbit the barycenter, which is (usually) outside the sun. The sun itself also orbits the same barycenter, in a very close orbit. And a few humorous remarks have been made based on the fact that Newton actually demonstrated that the Earth doesn't revolve around the sun.
We probably need a better definition of the term "star" than "has planets". That also causes a different problem: It's a circular definition, since the common definition of a "planet" includes orbiting a star. So one might decide that Jupiter is a star, and at least its four major moons instantly become planets, which then is used in the definition of "star" to prove that Jupiter is indeed a star.
There's a lot of humor in the way such terms are being defined by various (mostly non-astronomical) parties. Maybe we should go back to the definition that a star is an astronomical thing that undergoes sustained nuclear fusion. Ya think that'd work?
(We do have to carefully word it so that the experimental fusion projects in Earthly labs don't qualify as stars. ;-)
We can't work out how to do #1 [survive indefinitely in space using only available resources] with our current "spaceship", and that's in nice stable orbit around a star with a preexisting life support system.
Nah; we know pretty well how to do that on such a large "spaceship". It's just that we've given the controls to businessmen and religious leaders. The former have a "moral" objection to any strategy other than short-term personal gain, while the latter are "morally" opposed to limits on population growth, and both oppose teaching the general population what we know about how biological systems work. But all have to do is kick them out of their controlling positions and replace them with people who want things to be stable in the long term.
Stick around a while, and see if it happens ...
Or, more likely than either of our analyses, the writer doesn't understand the difference between to/too/two homophones, considers them the same "word", and just typed the one with the fewest keystrokes. This is common for people who aren't strongly literate, and mostly use the spoken language. After all, what sense does it make to add an apostrophe or a final 'e' to "your"? They're/Their/There just silent letters that don't add any meaning, right?
It's common in the linguistic forums to take examples like this (though you/you're is no longer considered an especially interesting case), and try to figure out how the writer might have gotten it wrong. This is useful if you're trying to figure out how a language really works. In lots of subject areas, observed failures are often good clues to the inner workings of whatever you're studying. Common failures in language use are good clues to the inner workings of the human mind.
In real life, human languages aren't used only by automata that always follow an explicit set of rules; they are used primarily by fallible humans who learned their language inductively, and typically have a wide variety of (mis)understandings of how their communication system works. Or doesn't work, in many situations. And some of the failures can be entertaining.
(And I'm disappointed that nobody commented on my mispelling of "misspell" in my earlier post. I've been doing that for some time, and it occasionally gets some fun discussions going. But I suspect that most people don't even notice. ;-)
Just about any research university provides you with the opportunity to do some serious learning. MIT merely does not *also* provide the opportunity to "fuck around".
Oh, I dunno; recently I was one of the musicians at one of MIT's regular evening dance sessions. They have a number of these, with different types of dancing, on different evenings. Some of them, like this one, are free to students (and you get PhysEd credit if you sign the attendance sheets at some minim number of them). I've noticed at these dances, the crowd is typically smaller after the break that's about 2/3 of the way through the evening, and I've also noticed people wandering off during the breaks, usually in pairs.
So I'd say that MIT is in fact providing (and paying for) their students' opportunities to "fuck around", in both the metaphorical and literal meanings of that phrase.
I sat in on some of the discussions some years back, when MIT was instituting this practice. One part of it was that the admin reps told the groups that to qualify for support, they had to go to weekly events, rather than the biweekly or monthly schedules they had had. And they had to provide a break with "refreshments", to encourage social interaction rather than just "learn, learn, learn". So the admins' intent was a social event of the sort traditionally used for male-female contact, thinly disguised as a learning event.
This isn't unusual at colleges and universities, of course. Part of the function of such institutions has always been for people to find mates. The MIT administration understands this as well as their counterparts at other schools do, and encourages it with funding, space and PhysEd credit.
(Disclaimer: Pay no attention to the fact that my main email address ends with ".mit.edu". ;-)
MIT had and has one of the best social scenes. Don't believe him.
Hey, Shhh! You aren't supposed to let the rest of the world know that. You're trying to mess up one of the best-cultivated stereotypes that we have going.
Of course, here on /. people are supposed to be part of the "nerd" crowd, so it such occasional slipups might be ok. But we should remember that there are also "normal" people who read the discussions here, not to mention all the corporate sockpuppets who hang around to post their thinly-disguised marketing stuff. So we really should keep up the image that we're all wearing pocket protectors and thick glasses, and don't know how to act around the females of the species.
(When I've been on the MIT campus lately, there have always been lots of women visible everywhere. But they would probably mostly insist that they're also socially-awkward geeks, too. Ya gotta keep up the stereotype, to keep the Normals out. ;-)
He spelled "you're" wrong. That's spelling, not grammar.
Actually, he didn't spell "you're" at all; he correctly spelled the wrong word ("your"). That's a case of using the wrong word, not mispeling a word. So it really is primarily a grammatical problem, not a spelling problem. The writer was probably confused partly by the fact that "your better" is a phrase that is used in English in similar contexts. OTOH, spelling "off" as "of" almost certainly was a spelling error.
Yeah, I know; picky, picky. ;-) But I also hang out in a few linguistics forums, where people often have fun mocking the language "peevers". There's a lot of nonsense written about mistakes and misusages in English, and a fair percent of the nonsense is based on not understanding English grammar. This in turn derives from the fact that most of grammar taught in our schools is actually warped Latin grammar, misapplied to a Germanic language whose syntax isn't very similar to Latin's.
I once had a linguistics course in college, on the subject of grammars, where after a semester of studying examples of grammars of lots of obscure minor languages, the prof suggested we do a similar "field study" of English, and hand in our analyses of that language's grammatical system. It was fun listening to the students' discussions, after they'd realized how English grammar really works, and how wrong the grammatical stuff they'd learned as kids really was.
Engineering's job is to make what marketing want work, not argue about whether the market wants the right thing.
Yeah; that's a common attitude. More often, the job is to take what management has ordered, because they think that's what the customers want, and find some way to implement it to meet the management requirements.
For example, years ago when MS-DOS was still widely used and MS-Windows was new, I was involved on an "embedded" project that was "required" to run on MS-DOS. I had a critical part of the task, making the startup code work (and also the shutdown that got a DOS prompt back on the screen). What my startup code did was:
1. Call the initializers for all the app's packages,
2. Overwrite the interrupt table to point to our interrupt handlers,
3. "Return" DOS's space to our free-space list,
4. Call the start routine for the app.
There was also a reboot routine called from various parts of our code, to "exit back to DOS". This was called by a routine that handled a CTL-ALT-DEL keyin, for example. Testing showed that this did satisfy the requirement that our app "runs on DOS".
Since then, whenever I run across discussions like this one, I wonder whether the engineers have had to find equally "interesting" ways of making it look to managers and customers like the code runs on the claimed OS. But mostly, I've learned that this is often the sort of kludgery required to satisfy the requirements of management, marketing, and/or customers who think they understand how the engineering should work.
Of course, nowadays memory is a lot cheaper and available in GB-size chunks, so it may not be necessary to use the OS's memory. Just caching the OS's interrupt table, leaving the OS in memory, then restoring the interrupt table and exiting can do the job. But you still might want to try to guarantee that none of your app's routines overwrite any of the OS's "unused" memory, and that could be difficult to enforce if you have smart developers.
(And why am I tempted to add a "5. ... Profit." to that list? ;-)
Yeah; that sort of behavior has been reported in lots of social species. If a leader of a pack/flock does something, the others tend to imitate them. Due to my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet parrots, and they do the same sort of imitation of us. Chickens aren't quite as social (or intelligent) as dogs or parrots, but they are social, and you're the leader of their flock, so it's no surprise hearing that they follow your lead like that. They don't have to understand why you're doing it; they just join in as members of the flock.
Nothing in the summary suggests wolves domesticated humans. It doesn't suggest that they caused us to somehow adapt. ...
In any case, such ideas have been tossed around in biological circles for some decades. A common explanation is more neutral: Humans and our domestic animals "co-evolved". While we were adopting the animals (and plants), and controlling their mating to produce offspring more to our liking, we were also subject to similar selection pressures that favored the survival of the people who had captive, domesticated critters. The humans that survived best were the ones who were more "socialized", and willing to live in small communities that included our non-human companions. This gave us a more reliable food supply than hunting and gathering did.
It's easy to summarize this as our domestic species domesticating us. But that's really a case of over-simplifying the situation. And dogs are one of the few species that can be said to truly "understand" humans. With the others, the understanding is mostly on the human side of the relationship. Part of our "domestication" is that we can easily learn to understand another species' communications. We have a complex language-learning ability, and we have "empathy" that lets us get partly inside the minds of other critters. And some of us are better at this than others, as you'd expect in any evolutionary scenario.
A special case of this adaptation scenario has popped up recently: It's generally thought that Europeans conquered the rest of the world (to some extent ;-) because of their better armaments. The counter-argument is that the data supports a different explanation: It was European diseases that devastated so many other societies, not European weapons (which really weren't much better than other people's weapons). There's good evidence that most of the major European diseases originated as crossovers from domesticated animals. This caused all the many plagues in European history, and left them with somewhat better disease resistance than the rest of humanity had.
So when Europeans showed up elsewhere, the result was plagues that weakened those societies, making them easy prey for European conquerors and settlers. This whole argument is based on data saying that Europeans had more domestic species than other human societies, giving them more endemic diseases that they could pass on to the rest of the world.
In any case, these are mostly "just-so" stories, plausible but not totally accepted in scientific circles until more data is collected.
... my dog loves to plant tomatoes in the spring.
I once had some neighbors with a dog that did that. He saw them digging these regularly-space holes in the garden, so he started digging similar holes with similar spacing. They then put tomatoes in those holes, so they could tell friends about how their dog helped with the gardening.
Lots of dogs can figure out things that simple.
It might be fun to try to collect data on how often such things happen. I'd guess that not that many dogs actually contribute usefully to such tasks, but you'd probably turn up a small percent that do.
i think you meant tree ape; not beach ape. or maybe savannah ape.
Or maybe all of the above. ;-)
It's pretty well understood among the anthropology and archaeology crowd that humans are among the most aquatic primates. Most evidence of our ancestors comes from the remains of our habitations, which occur mostly along ancient shorelines. I've seen the comment that if you draw a border 100 km from all the shores of oceans, major lakes and "navigable" rivers, you get around 5% of the planet's land area, but over 90% of its human population. Humans like living near bodies of water, and we are one of the few primates that regularly swim.
There's nothing especially odd about this, other than the fact that our closest relatives are all tropical forest critters. But we adapted to a radically different lifestyle than theirs, and we did pretty well as a result.
One of the areas where this topic has come up is in the question about how humans crossed from Siberia to North America. The most common textbook explanation is the ice-age "land bridge" caused by the lower sea level. But others have suggested that this isn't needed, since humans were building rafts and small boats long before that, and the short hop across the Bering Strait would have been no barrier at all to humans of 30,000 years ago. They'd have just crossed it in their boats. Then they'd have gone back a few times each year to visit friends and family, while the settlements on the eastern shore grew. So the real question is when humans first reached the eastern shores of Siberia; they'd have been in Alaska only a few years after that, no matter what the sea level was.
A dog raised in Spain probably understands Spanish better than you.
That's not an exaggeration. Dog trainers will tell you that a typical dog can learn around 200 or so words, and can handle the syntax of 2- to 4-word sentences. An untrained dog supposedly learns 50 to 100 words of its humans' language. Most people who didn't grow up hearing Spanish won't have a vocabulary that big.
Disclaimer: While my family didn't speak Spanish, the areas in the western US where we lived had people who did, and I hung out with some of their kids, so I probably understand Spanish better than the typical dog in Spain. But maybe not all that much better. ;-)
There was a hospital or nursing school, I believe, that wanting to target gay males for nurses. They advertised on Facebook a special number that was only targeted to the gay males on facebook but the advertisement didn't mention that. When an applicant called the number for an interview, they immediately knew he was gay.
Similarly, my wife subscribed to Netflix for some years, and likes to tell people that based on their advertising, they obviously had her classified as a gay male. This wasn't really surprising, considering her taste in (mostly old) movies. I've also wondered whether they knew about me, and whether I'm in their records also as a gay male. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as they say. ;-)
Corporate and government info-gathering efforts are somewhat known for making this sort of inference. The biggest screwups are often when they fail to distinguish people with the same (or sometimes just similar) names. Perhaps the funniest example of this in recent years was when Massachusetts' senator Ted Kennedy ran into problems on a commercial flight because the airport workers had his name on a list of suspected terrorists, and didn't recognize his name as belonging to a well-known senator.
Kennedy correctly commented that if he had this trouble, how are average Americans going to get treated? Of course, we've read a lot about that over the past decade.
... ... if thats the case then all of the Linux users are in trouble oh wait no they arent that's because java has been a part of linux for years now ...
Well, I know that various linux-based systems have included java in their libraries for years. But I'm not aware of any version of linux (i.e., the kernel OS) that includes java code, and that's what "has been a part of linux" would mean. But maybe I've missed something. Can you name a few linux releases in which linux itself (i.e., the kernel OS) contains java?
I wouldn't imagine that including java or other proprietary languages in a distro would be any sort of threat. I could just ignore such languages, and maybe not use library things that are written in them, if I can even determine that. We can see this idea in the widespread inclusion of PDF software in distros of most systems, not just linux. But you don't find PDF (or PDF-munging routines) in the kernel, to my knowledge.
(Of course, I wouldn't actually be surprised to find that MS and Apple have incorporated PDF tools into their kernels. They're run by people who don't understand the concept, and will use any scheme available to lure users into their "walled gardens". ;-)