Ah, but people don't notice the alien tourists at all, because they're the ones who are really quite. Plus, when they do speak, they've learned the local language.;-)
It seems to me that we have an awful tough time communicating with relatively intellegent creatures even when we've lived side by side for generations and understand each others' environment.
Recently I ran across an interesting observation from a zoologist that might be relevant here. He mentioned that we humans have an interesting characteristic that's highly unusual: We engage in more symbiotic relations than any other known species. Most of them we call "domestication", of course. But his point was that not only have we modified all those species; we were modified in the process. He simply called this characteristic "empathy", and defined it as the ability to understand the behavior of and communicate with other species.
We think we're not very good at it, but in fact we're better than anything else we know on Earth. The limits are mostly imposed by the other species. And it can take a bit of work and experience.
Now take an animal slightly more different from us, perhaps a reptile. Look that sucker in the eye and there is no real connection. Who the hell knows what he's thinking.
This is true because you haven't worked at it. People who raise animals can get to understand those animals quite well. One example I've heard from a number of people is horses. To most people these days, horses are dull, uncommunicative animals. But to people who live with them, they are interesting and communicative animals. Their language isn't human, and they can't really understand our language. But we're unusual; We can learn theirs. We can communicate on their terms.
I ran across an interesting personal example a year or so back. Someone was writing about birds, and described them as "alien". Their body language is so different from ours, according to this writer, that to human eyes they seem incomprehensible and impossible to communicate with.
My reaction was "Huh? I know birds that are every bit as expressive as most people, and they communicate easily. What's the mystery about avian body language?" But this was explained by the above zoologist's comments: Due to my wife's allergies to nearly everything furry, I've for several decades shared a house with a number of birds. They're mostly small parrots, which are social animals. This means that they have a lot of social signals, both visual and aural. Birds have individual control over feathers, and social birds can have at least as many facial expressions as we humans with our bare faces. They are 'alien" in the sense that they aren't close relatives, and their signals are utterly different from ours. But we have an empathy adaptation; we can learn their signals. Funny thing about parrots is that they can learn our aural signals easily, but they don't learn our visual signals. But to a person who has lived with them, a parrot's thoughts are written all over its feathers.
This carries over to other social birds fairly easily. Some time ago, while walking with a group down a street, one guy made a comment about some pigeons fighting. I looked around, saw lots of pigeons, but none were fighting. He pointed at some pigeons, and my reaction was "Huh? They're not fighting." It was obvious to me that one bird was a nearly-grown baby who was demanding food from a parent. The parent equally obviously wanted to wean the baby. To me, and to any other pigeon, their signals to each other were clear, and fairly similar to what I'd seen in our birds. The "fight" was the adult trying to fend off the baby. To the other guy, none of this was obvious, and it was just an aggressive interaction.
I had a friend in junior high who had a pet tarantula. It rode around on his shoulder. The two of them could obviously communicate, though it was a mystery to the rest of us. He would play with the critter in ways that none of the rest of us would dare. He did admit that the spider wasn't really all that smart, just smart enough that they could tell each other a few things. But talk about an alien
Part of the cure, as you say, is to learn a more precise use of language. Part of it is also to recognize when, even when a sentence may not say something literally false ("Evolution is a theory."), it was crafted in order to mislead. (And not necessarily intentionally--people mislead themselves this way too.)
Yeah; remember those biology-book stickers in Georgia about evolution being "a theory, not a fact" that should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered"? One thing I liked about the fuss was the suggestions, mostly from scientists, that such stickers should be put on all textbooks. After all, this is not just a good suggestion when dealing with evolutionary theory; it's a good idea when dealing with anything in any textbook. It would be especially useful if applied to religion. But I suspect this isn't what the religious folks want.
I do remember an interesting unintentional use of Darwinism, in a Sunday-school lesson back when I was in junior high and was being sent to a nearby Southern Baptist church. There were the usual railings about Darwinism and similar secularities. Then one day the teacher illustrated some point (just which one I've forgotten) with an anecdote about a farmer picking out his largest potatoes for sale, and keeping the small ones for planting. Needless to say, after a few years, the farmer's fields were producing only small potatoes.
I was shocked. This was Darwinism in its pure form. And it was being taught by a Southern Baptist sunday-school teacher. Was he secretly a scientist on a mission to subvert Baptist teachings? I kept quiet, but started asking question to try to ferret out the man's actual beliefs. He was honestly against Darwinism, and was one of the local campaigners against such things in the biology texts. He honestly didn't understand that his potato example was exactly what Darwin was writing about. The farmer wasn't consciously selecting for small potatoes; his selection of the larger for sale had an inadvertent side effect of leaving the smaller to produce the next generation. This wasn't intentional, so it was "natural selection" (by what the potatoes would consider a predator). The result was what Darwin's theory predicted.
This was a good lesson in the depth of understanding among some of the religious people. They can and do argue against something and then turn around and use it for their own purposes. But I couldn't call it hypocrisy. It was really just pure ignorance. They had no concept about what Darwinism was all about; they just knew the name and knew that it was heretical.
... the Arab terrorists who carpet bomb countries and torch down villages.
Funny thing: If you've been paying close attention to news from Iraq, you've noticed a lot of Arabic names among the American military people. This shouldn't be a surprise. The military badly needs people who can speak Arabic and have some understanding of the culture. They have language training, of course, but there's an obvious fast path for someone who joins already speaking the local language.
The common estimate is that there are around 6 million Arab-Americans, with all the usual qualifications about such numbers. A lot of them have volunteered. Why is no mystery. One might wonder about their sanity, but their motivation is fairly obvious.
Most people I've seen using the term "intelligent design" seem to be referring to something that *is* at odds with science, and I think that's how the original poster meant it: "they would just like the teaching of evolution to acknowledge that it is not a proven fact, and that there are other schools of thought,...
One useful response to this is to refer them to Karl Popper, in particular his explanation that scientific methods never "prove" anything. Proof is a mathematical concept, not scientific. Scientific methods are pretty much all methods of disproof. People devise lots of hypotheses that attempt to explain observations. Then they try to disprove all those hypotheses. The last hypothesis left standing is called a "theory". It survives until more hypotheses come along, and one of them is better than the old theory at withstanding attacks.
And, of course, the old creationism/ID hypothesis doesn't even qualify for entry in the contest, because nobody can think of a way to test it. A scientific hypothesis must be testable (aka "disprovable" or 'falsifiable"). There is no test that could disprove ID, in any possible universe, because God could always intervene with a miracle.
This does get suggested as an inherent limit to science. If there really is a God that created it all, 6000 years or 5 minutes ago, complete with fake geology and fossils, there's no way that scientific methods could test this. God has already faked all the evidence to give whatever results He wants, and can always produce another miracle if we happen to catch Him in a mistake. Science is defenseless against fraud perpetrated by an omnipotent being.
Of course, this is merely an explanation of why such theories don't belong in a science setting. Maybe in another subject. But scientists have already admitted their total failure to deal with God. So God doesn't properly belong in discussions of science.
OTOH, if it was all done by advance aliens who are less than gods, maybe we'll catch some of their mistakes and get the goods on them. This hasn't happened yet, but if it did, lots of scientists would be very interested. Most scientists support the SETI project, for just this sort of reason.
Would you also have your science teacher say that the heliocentric theory of the solar system is "just a theory",
Certainly. Part of science education should be teaching basic terminology. In this case, part of the lesson would be that anyone who uses the phrase "just a theory" is almost certainly not a scientist. This illustrates one of many cases where scientists give a word a rather precise meaning, while in general speech the word is vague and fuzzy. In this case, you want to teach the students that, to a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has been thoroughly tested and is generally accepted as valid. Saying "just a theory" doesn't make sense in scientific circles, because a theory is the best-supported sort of idea of all. Something can be "just a conjecture" or "just a hypothesis", but not "just a theory".
... and that there are other schools of thought, including the "epicycle" theory?
Yeah, I remember getting this in science classes. The history of ideas should be part of the subject. It's important to teach that science changes as we learn new things. Just where epicycles should go is open to debate. It's probably best taught as an idea that was an attempt to explain the complex orbits of heavenly bodies, but which failed for several reasons. One reason was that it wasn't really testable, since no mechanism for the epicycles could be observed. Another problem was that its predictive ability wasn't good. As equipment became better, it was invariably found that the epicycle theory failed at each new level of precision. Newer and smaller cycles-on-cycles were needed, and the relative sizes of the cycles couldn't be predicted by the theory. It was complex and ad hoc, and wasn't really a proper "theory" in the scientific sense.
Then Newton came along with a radically different theory. His equations were simpler, and their predictions kept working when new, more-precise equipment became available. Eventually, a couple centuries later, people eventually found small errors in Newton's equations, most notably in the orbit of Mercury. And that's when you get to Einstein.
In any case, this is all useful as an illustration of a major difference between science and religion: Scientific theories are always open to revision or replacement. Epicycles were tossed entirely when a better theory came along. Newton's mechanics weren't actually replaced. They were found to be a simplified approximation of Einstein's mechanics, good enough for many purposes, but inaccurate in extreme conditions.
It's also common to explain to students that, although we know the earth revolves around the Sun, we still often use a coordinate system with the Earth as a fixed central object. For most purposes, this is a better approach when you're dealing with travel near the Earth's surface. To someone in an auto, boat or airplane, the Earth's rotation and orbit are unnecessary complications that can be ignored under most circumstances. So, as with the Newton/Einstein difference, we use an Earth-centric or Sun-centric coordinate system, depending on which gives the best results for our immediate purposes.
All of this is useful in getting across the idea that scientific theories are the ones that work well. Of course, that takes a bit of defining, but that should be part of the curriculum.
It's also worth pointing out that we do know of cases of "intelligent design" in living creatures. We call it "breeding", and farmers have been doing it for around 10,000 years. We can also explain how, even if we didn't know about this (for example, we were a visiting alien observer), we could rigorously show that some of the plants and animals on Earth were designed (i.e., knowingly and intentionally modified) by humans. And in doing this, we would also show why it's unlikely that Earth life as a whole had an intelligent designer. The evidence is there, and it's pretty strong.
In all I thought the committee's conclusions seemed reasonable, pragmatic, and scientific, without being strongly prejudiced for or against the "cold fusion" effect. However, in the media (such as this article) the final report has been painted with much broader strokes.
The media does want to portray it as a possible new energy source. They're interested in useful science, not just interesting science. One of the possibilities is that "cold fusion" is something real but not very useful.
For a parallel, consider the old claim that "bumblebees can't fly", which you still hear now and then. What this really meant, of course, was that the equations used by aeronautical engineers couldn't explain how bumblebees developed lift. They don't use "aerodynamic lift", and no other mechanism was fully understood. Then, a couple of decades ago, someone decided to investigate the topic. They figured out pretty quickly how bumblebees develop lift, and it was by a totally different mechanism than birds or airplanes use. It's understood fairly well now.
The important part for the current topic is that the lift-generating method used by small insects doesn't scale. It depends on treating air as a collection of particles, and at larger scales air acts like a fluid rather than particles. It's very powerful for a gnat, but its effect falls off quickly with size, and doesn't work for an object much bigger than a large insect. So we can't use it in our airplanes or helicopters.
There were a few breathless reports about this in the media at first, about scientists discovering a new kind of flight, and speculating about it resulting in much more efficient flying machines. But this coverage died quickly, as the news got through that it's useless for lifting a creature much bigger than a gram. It's interesting to scientists, but not to the media, because it's not useful (so far) to us large animals.
Similarly, it's possible that "cold fusion" is something that only works on a microscopic scale, and can't be scaled up to human size. Maybe it only happens in tiny bubbles, but too many bubbles disrupt the fluid medium. If so, it may be of interest to the nanotech crowd. But it's difficult for media folks to get their minds around something like this.
There have been proposals to make tiny flying machines that fly like insects. It could be interesting if a bee-size machine, powered by "bubble fusion", could house a camera and a network link...
I know a person who got a ticket for having a loud stereo, which pales in comparison to the sound of a Harley
Maybe this is the solution. Have a loud stereo system on the bike that's looping an MP3 of a Harley. Then they'll hear you coming, and you won't get ticketed.
try that lovely default Search box in the upper right corner.
What\'s that? The very upper-right corner is of course in the title bar. With firefox, what's there is the little oval thingy that disables/enables the various icon bars. With safari, there's nothing at all at the right end of the title bar. Don't know why they're different.
Perhaps you mean the upper-right not including the title bar. With both firefox and safari, the upper-rightmost thing there is the right end of the location bar. Firefox has a little triangle symbol that invokes the history popup; safari has nothing at the right end of the location bar.
So what's this about a lovely blue G? I don't see anything that fits that description. How might I get it?
Of course, I'd rather not have it take space from the location bar, which is too short as it it. Can I somehow get a blue G somewhere else? In the title bar, maybe, which is wasted screen space? Or in the firefox PrefBar? I don't see it listed in the PrefBar options.
I suspect that both firefox and safari are showing you something different than they're showing me.
OK; I tried that. I emptied the location bar, typed in "foo" (without the quote", and hit Return. The little wheel spun briefly, and it toook me to www.foofighter.com. No sign of google anywhere.
What am I doing wrong? Is there some shortcut to get google?
This was with firefox. With a new safari window, entering "foo" took me to www.fool.com.
I think what's happening in both cases is that it chose the first thing in the history list that started with "foo". Whatever; neither browser called google.
Well, to a lot of us old-timers, if IBM disagrees with you, you must be right! IBM is the epitome of evil corporatehood, their recent semi-support for linux notwithstanding.
I'm a static-type proponent. Dynamically typed languages make me barf.:)
I've used both a lot. I'm a dynamic-type proponent. Anal-compulsive things like types are one of the things that computers are really good at handling. We shouldn't take the computer's job away by giving it to an inferior creature like a human. As a mere human, I'd rather do the things I'm good at, and let the computer take care of the things it's good at.
Now, you may enjoy simulating a computer, and I won't tell you that you shouldn't live your life this way. But some of us would rather spend our limited time on this Earth actually solving problems rather than typing minutiae that are better handled by a computer.;-)
... the one thing that could possibly draw Linux and MacOS users back to Windows.
Yeah; it's a big distributed OS. Who says that Windows isn't scalable?;-)
And its "design" will be even more random and shoddy than Windows. MS will be proud of it. For that matter, how do we know this isn't being done by MS themselves? It would be a good way to trick the world into adopting a network OS on the sly.
It will, just not on the computer you're using right now:-)
One place the unix timestamp has made it into literature is in Vernor Vinge's "Deep" books: A Fire Upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky. In the latter, there are a number of uses of a "day" onboard their starship that is 100,000 seconds long, and was based on a semi-mythical OS on early computers 8,000 years earlier, back before humans left their original planet and spread out into the galaxy. They routinely use kiloseconds as the main division of the day.
The size of the second count isn't a problem, of course, because nobody builds 32-bit computers then. If fact, we probably won't be making them by the time the second count reaches 2^32. I wonder how many old 32-bit machines will still be operational by then?
(Probably a lot of them, and they'll all still be running Fortran and Cobol programs.;-)
Are there any good F/OSS implementations of VB out there for customers to migrate to?
Maybe it's time to once again mention an old suggestion: We need a law that any software that isn't supported automatically becomes public domain.
If this were the law, MS would just publish a link to the source code. Then, as with netscape, a mozilla-like team would take it over and run with it. They'd set up a vb6.org web site where you'd submit bug reports and get patches. People would start contributing useful stuff. Life would be a lot better for VB programmers.
But the product is End-of-Life. They won't get any continued development, i.e., there isn't going to be any new version of Classic VB.
Rephrased: It's finally stable. You won't have to go through a new debug cycle every 6 months after some forced upgrade has broken half your in-house apps. Sounds like a win for anyone doing VB6 development.
I've recently worked for people who are refusing to upgrade their W98 boxes for exactly this reason. They view a fixed set of known bugs as superior to a changing set of unknown bugs.
Hmmm... I've been impressed by the wild innacuracy of Amazon's guesses about my tastes. I've ordered lots of things from them. But when I look at their recommendations, my reaction is often "Why the @#*%$ would they think I'd be likely to buy that?"
They have a looooong way to go before their guesses are accurate.
(Of course, it may have something to do with my eclectic tastes. I recently ordered 3 CDs: one of traditional Quebecoise accordion and fiddle music, one of Chinese pipa music, and one a Grateful Dead album. I wonder if this crashed any of their software?;-)
Y'know, I keep seeing comments like this, but I don't see it in my safari or firefox windows. I opened a clean window for each and poked around, and nowhere could I find a mention of google other than in the history list. I looked through the menus, and the only references to google were in the lists of open windows. I a dug through Preferences, and found no mention of google anywhere.
So where is google "preinstalled" in these browsers?
Am I missing something?
(Quite likely; browsers are complex beasts, and most of their features are undocumented.;-)
Actually, there are some scalability problems with linux.
For example, try compiling the kernel and standard libs with a C compiler whose bytes are 32 bits, shorts are 128 bits, ints are 256 bits, and longs are 512 bits, and whose disk drives have 1-GB sectors. I guarantee you're gonna run into 2 or 3 problems directly related to those numbers. Well, OK, they'll mostly be in handling communications with 8-bit devices and systems with a 64KB limit to packets and such. But in this networked world, those are scalability problems.
And let's face it, in a few years you're gonna need a machine with those specs just to boot the latest Windows, or to start KDE or Gnome.;-)
Correct. And the explanation goes even deeper than that.
Thus, to the south of the USA is a country that officially calls itself "Estados Unidos Mexicanos", or the United Mexican States. But everyone calls it "Mexico".
Similarly, the largest country in South America is officially called "Republica Federativa do Brasil", but we usually just say "Brasil" (or "Brazil").
In Europe, there's a big country whose official name is "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", usually translated as "Federal Republic of Germany"; it is almost always called "Deutschland" or "Germany".
Shortening "United States of America" to just "America" fits exactly the pattern used with other countries. As with Deutschland/Germany, Brasil and Mexico, "America" is unambiguous, because there's no other country with that word in its name. Everyone understands when you drop the bureaucratic beginning of the official name and just use the unique portion.
What's bizarre is that people keep objecting to this use of "America", while not objecting to the similar shortening of other countries' names.
But the AOL TOS actually states that by "posting Content on an AIM Product", you "grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium".
In other words, AOL claims the copyright to anything you send using "an AIM Product". You have no right to use even your own words, and AOL can do with your words as they like. You can't save or send a friend a copy of an IM discussion that you were a part of, because this violates AOL's rights as stated above. But AOL can take your words, extract as they like, and do as they wish with your words, including using them for commercial purposes.
This doesn't sound at all like they're after legal protection for AIM products. It sounds like they are claiming that they own anything that anyone sends using an AIM product.
If this isn't the meaning of the above text, what does it mean?
The tweaks to the terms of service will be made in the section titled "Content You Post" and will explicitly exclude user-to-user chat sessions from the privacy rights an AIM user gives up to AOL.
Amidst all this talk of privacy, people seem to be missing the significant copyright issue in this story. AOL is claiming that they own all the rights, i.e., they own the copyright, for anything "posted" to a discussion.
So if you copy a brief exchange in an AOL discussion, and send the exchange to someone else (or post it elsewhere), you have violated AOL's claimed copyright for that text.
Ordinarily, public discussions are, well, public. If you're using AOL, this may not be true. You may have no right to keep a copy of a discussion or to share it with anyone else. As soon as you post a message, it becomes AOL's property, and you have no right to use it at all.
This isn't the first time that this sort of thing has happened. Remember a year or two back, when MSN customers discovered that MSN was extracting things from customer email (mostly images) and using them in advertising? MSN claimed that they could do this legally, because their TOS stated clearly that any data stored on an msn.com machine was MSN's property.
There was a big fuss, and MSN seems to have backed off. But this sort of claim on customers' messages has yet to be tested in court, and many corporations are including such clauses in their contracts. This may be legal in the US and other countries. If so, you may not own the copyright to your own messages. Sending a message may constitute assigning the copyright to the message service (AOL in this case).
OTOH, if you think the file-sharing issue is fun, wait until AOL starts firing off C&D letters to people who make copies of their own IM discussions...
Sorry; the DMCA protects big corporations from criminals like you and me. It doesn't protect you and me from big corporations that decode our communications.
Not unless you have a few spare millions of bucks to spend on a decade-long series of court cases.
I'd already read a number of the stories about this at news.google.com, and very few of them mention any change to the TOS. Rather, they spin it as a customer "misunderstanding" of AOL's privacy rules. They've said that AOL is merely "clarifying" the rules, with no mention of any changes.
OTOH, there is now one story listed, from p2pnet.net, that uses the word "modify". So maybe the real story will be reported by a few tech news sources, while the general media will report it as a misunderstanding that is being clarified.
So why would a reader have known to google for "XMLHTTP"? I checked (;-), and your message was the first one in this discussion to mention that string of bytes. Chiding someone for not googling for a term that hasn't appeared in the discussion is a bit... "inappropriate" is about the only polite term I can think of. (I can think of other less polite terms.)
Now, if you'd just mentioned "XMLHTTP" and suggested googling for it, I'd have considered the message appropriate for the discussion. I'd never seen that particular acronym, and I suspect that lots of/. readers haven't, either. Interesting stuff...
Which is why I've always used strong encryption to IM my friends.
That's fine if you're trying to protect the content of your IMs.
But the main thing they're interested in at the moment is your address info.
I worked recently on a project that involved software in assorted computers using either email, IM or VM (whichever worked) to people's cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, whatever. It was a medical app, actually. Automatic reminders to doctors and patients, messages from portable health monitors to hospital computers, etc. Useful stuff.
An interesting thing happened with IM. With most sorts of cell phones, for our computers to send an IM required sending email to an email-IM gateway. This seems like a reasonable approach, but we quickly discovered a serious problem: The phones we were using for testing quickly started getting IM spam and telemarketer calls.
When I complained about this, I learned about an interesting gotcha in the phone contracts. Most of them include (heavily promoted) promises that they will never sell their subscribers' info. That sounds nice, until they explain that in our case, the sender wasn't a customer, and they can legally use a non-customer's messages however they like.
So if I or my computer send you an IM, your phone company can legally harvest both of our addresses in their gateway. The message came from a non-customer; your contract is irrelevant. If you reply to me, my ISP (or phone company) can legally harvest your message, because you're not a customer. Both companies can do as they like with the address info without violating any contract, because there was no contract with the sender.
I have in my posession a couple of spam messages inviting me to attend conferences on the commercial uses of harvested IM messages. Yes, they really did have the chutzpa to send me an invitation to learn how to do unto others what they've just done unto me (and some very angry medical folks). I didn't go...
It just sounds like AOL has taken this one small step further: Their contract says they can harvest info from messages between customers. This is really the only thing new; they can already do this if the sender isn't a customer.
So when people start chanting "contract law" in this topic, you might remind them that contract law doesn't apply when there's no contract. If they look puzzled as to why you said that, describe the above scenario to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but people don't notice the alien tourists at all, because they're the ones who are really quite. Plus, when they do speak, they've learned the local language. ;-)
It seems to me that we have an awful tough time communicating with relatively intellegent creatures even when we've lived side by side for generations and understand each others' environment.
Recently I ran across an interesting observation from a zoologist that might be relevant here. He mentioned that we humans have an interesting characteristic that's highly unusual: We engage in more symbiotic relations than any other known species. Most of them we call "domestication", of course. But his point was that not only have we modified all those species; we were modified in the process. He simply called this characteristic "empathy", and defined it as the ability to understand the behavior of and communicate with other species.
We think we're not very good at it, but in fact we're better than anything else we know on Earth. The limits are mostly imposed by the other species. And it can take a bit of work and experience.
Now take an animal slightly more different from us, perhaps a reptile. Look that sucker in the eye and there is no real connection. Who the hell knows what he's thinking.
This is true because you haven't worked at it. People who raise animals can get to understand those animals quite well. One example I've heard from a number of people is horses. To most people these days, horses are dull, uncommunicative animals. But to people who live with them, they are interesting and communicative animals. Their language isn't human, and they can't really understand our language. But we're unusual; We can learn theirs. We can communicate on their terms.
I ran across an interesting personal example a year or so back. Someone was writing about birds, and described them as "alien". Their body language is so different from ours, according to this writer, that to human eyes they seem incomprehensible and impossible to communicate with.
My reaction was "Huh? I know birds that are every bit as expressive as most people, and they communicate easily. What's the mystery about avian body language?" But this was explained by the above zoologist's comments: Due to my wife's allergies to nearly everything furry, I've for several decades shared a house with a number of birds. They're mostly small parrots, which are social animals. This means that they have a lot of social signals, both visual and aural. Birds have individual control over feathers, and social birds can have at least as many facial expressions as we humans with our bare faces. They are 'alien" in the sense that they aren't close relatives, and their signals are utterly different from ours. But we have an empathy adaptation; we can learn their signals. Funny thing about parrots is that they can learn our aural signals easily, but they don't learn our visual signals. But to a person who has lived with them, a parrot's thoughts are written all over its feathers.
This carries over to other social birds fairly easily. Some time ago, while walking with a group down a street, one guy made a comment about some pigeons fighting. I looked around, saw lots of pigeons, but none were fighting. He pointed at some pigeons, and my reaction was "Huh? They're not fighting." It was obvious to me that one bird was a nearly-grown baby who was demanding food from a parent. The parent equally obviously wanted to wean the baby. To me, and to any other pigeon, their signals to each other were clear, and fairly similar to what I'd seen in our birds. The "fight" was the adult trying to fend off the baby. To the other guy, none of this was obvious, and it was just an aggressive interaction.
I had a friend in junior high who had a pet tarantula. It rode around on his shoulder. The two of them could obviously communicate, though it was a mystery to the rest of us. He would play with the critter in ways that none of the rest of us would dare. He did admit that the spider wasn't really all that smart, just smart enough that they could tell each other a few things. But talk about an alien
Part of the cure, as you say, is to learn a more precise use of language. Part of it is also to recognize when, even when a sentence may not say something literally false ("Evolution is a theory."), it was crafted in order to mislead. (And not necessarily intentionally--people mislead themselves this way too.)
Yeah; remember those biology-book stickers in Georgia about evolution being "a theory, not a fact" that should be "approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered"? One thing I liked about the fuss was the suggestions, mostly from scientists, that such stickers should be put on all textbooks. After all, this is not just a good suggestion when dealing with evolutionary theory; it's a good idea when dealing with anything in any textbook. It would be especially useful if applied to religion. But I suspect this isn't what the religious folks want.
I do remember an interesting unintentional use of Darwinism, in a Sunday-school lesson back when I was in junior high and was being sent to a nearby Southern Baptist church. There were the usual railings about Darwinism and similar secularities. Then one day the teacher illustrated some point (just which one I've forgotten) with an anecdote about a farmer picking out his largest potatoes for sale, and keeping the small ones for planting. Needless to say, after a few years, the farmer's fields were producing only small potatoes.
I was shocked. This was Darwinism in its pure form. And it was being taught by a Southern Baptist sunday-school teacher. Was he secretly a scientist on a mission to subvert Baptist teachings? I kept quiet, but started asking question to try to ferret out the man's actual beliefs. He was honestly against Darwinism, and was one of the local campaigners against such things in the biology texts. He honestly didn't understand that his potato example was exactly what Darwin was writing about. The farmer wasn't consciously selecting for small potatoes; his selection of the larger for sale had an inadvertent side effect of leaving the smaller to produce the next generation. This wasn't intentional, so it was "natural selection" (by what the potatoes would consider a predator). The result was what Darwin's theory predicted.
This was a good lesson in the depth of understanding among some of the religious people. They can and do argue against something and then turn around and use it for their own purposes. But I couldn't call it hypocrisy. It was really just pure ignorance. They had no concept about what Darwinism was all about; they just knew the name and knew that it was heretical.
... the Arab terrorists who carpet bomb countries and torch down villages.
Funny thing: If you've been paying close attention to news from Iraq, you've noticed a lot of Arabic names among the American military people. This shouldn't be a surprise. The military badly needs people who can speak Arabic and have some understanding of the culture. They have language training, of course, but there's an obvious fast path for someone who joins already speaking the local language.
The common estimate is that there are around 6 million Arab-Americans, with all the usual qualifications about such numbers. A lot of them have volunteered. Why is no mystery. One might wonder about their sanity, but their motivation is fairly obvious.
Most people I've seen using the term "intelligent design" seem to be referring to something that *is* at odds with science, and I think that's how the original poster meant it: "they would just like the teaching of evolution to acknowledge that it is not a proven fact, and that there are other schools of thought, ...
One useful response to this is to refer them to Karl Popper, in particular his explanation that scientific methods never "prove" anything. Proof is a mathematical concept, not scientific. Scientific methods are pretty much all methods of disproof. People devise lots of hypotheses that attempt to explain observations. Then they try to disprove all those hypotheses. The last hypothesis left standing is called a "theory". It survives until more hypotheses come along, and one of them is better than the old theory at withstanding attacks.
And, of course, the old creationism/ID hypothesis doesn't even qualify for entry in the contest, because nobody can think of a way to test it. A scientific hypothesis must be testable (aka "disprovable" or 'falsifiable"). There is no test that could disprove ID, in any possible universe, because God could always intervene with a miracle.
This does get suggested as an inherent limit to science. If there really is a God that created it all, 6000 years or 5 minutes ago, complete with fake geology and fossils, there's no way that scientific methods could test this. God has already faked all the evidence to give whatever results He wants, and can always produce another miracle if we happen to catch Him in a mistake. Science is defenseless against fraud perpetrated by an omnipotent being.
Of course, this is merely an explanation of why such theories don't belong in a science setting. Maybe in another subject. But scientists have already admitted their total failure to deal with God. So God doesn't properly belong in discussions of science.
OTOH, if it was all done by advance aliens who are less than gods, maybe we'll catch some of their mistakes and get the goods on them. This hasn't happened yet, but if it did, lots of scientists would be very interested. Most scientists support the SETI project, for just this sort of reason.
Certainly. Part of science education should be teaching basic terminology. In this case, part of the lesson would be that anyone who uses the phrase "just a theory" is almost certainly not a scientist. This illustrates one of many cases where scientists give a word a rather precise meaning, while in general speech the word is vague and fuzzy. In this case, you want to teach the students that, to a scientist, a "theory" is a hypothesis that has been thoroughly tested and is generally accepted as valid. Saying "just a theory" doesn't make sense in scientific circles, because a theory is the best-supported sort of idea of all. Something can be "just a conjecture" or "just a hypothesis", but not "just a theory".
Yeah, I remember getting this in science classes. The history of ideas should be part of the subject. It's important to teach that science changes as we learn new things. Just where epicycles should go is open to debate. It's probably best taught as an idea that was an attempt to explain the complex orbits of heavenly bodies, but which failed for several reasons. One reason was that it wasn't really testable, since no mechanism for the epicycles could be observed. Another problem was that its predictive ability wasn't good. As equipment became better, it was invariably found that the epicycle theory failed at each new level of precision. Newer and smaller cycles-on-cycles were needed, and the relative sizes of the cycles couldn't be predicted by the theory. It was complex and ad hoc, and wasn't really a proper "theory" in the scientific sense.
Then Newton came along with a radically different theory. His equations were simpler, and their predictions kept working when new, more-precise equipment became available. Eventually, a couple centuries later, people eventually found small errors in Newton's equations, most notably in the orbit of Mercury. And that's when you get to Einstein.
In any case, this is all useful as an illustration of a major difference between science and religion: Scientific theories are always open to revision or replacement. Epicycles were tossed entirely when a better theory came along. Newton's mechanics weren't actually replaced. They were found to be a simplified approximation of Einstein's mechanics, good enough for many purposes, but inaccurate in extreme conditions.
It's also common to explain to students that, although we know the earth revolves around the Sun, we still often use a coordinate system with the Earth as a fixed central object. For most purposes, this is a better approach when you're dealing with travel near the Earth's surface. To someone in an auto, boat or airplane, the Earth's rotation and orbit are unnecessary complications that can be ignored under most circumstances. So, as with the Newton/Einstein difference, we use an Earth-centric or Sun-centric coordinate system, depending on which gives the best results for our immediate purposes.
All of this is useful in getting across the idea that scientific theories are the ones that work well. Of course, that takes a bit of defining, but that should be part of the curriculum.
It's also worth pointing out that we do know of cases of "intelligent design" in living creatures. We call it "breeding", and farmers have been doing it for around 10,000 years. We can also explain how, even if we didn't know about this (for example, we were a visiting alien observer), we could rigorously show that some of the plants and animals on Earth were designed (i.e., knowingly and intentionally modified) by humans. And in doing this, we would also show why it's unlikely that Earth life as a whole had an intelligent designer. The evidence is there, and it's pretty strong.
Of course, there's always the possibilit
In all I thought the committee's conclusions seemed reasonable, pragmatic, and scientific, without being strongly prejudiced for or against the "cold fusion" effect. However, in the media (such as this article) the final report has been painted with much broader strokes.
...
The media does want to portray it as a possible new energy source. They're interested in useful science, not just interesting science. One of the possibilities is that "cold fusion" is something real but not very useful.
For a parallel, consider the old claim that "bumblebees can't fly", which you still hear now and then. What this really meant, of course, was that the equations used by aeronautical engineers couldn't explain how bumblebees developed lift. They don't use "aerodynamic lift", and no other mechanism was fully understood. Then, a couple of decades ago, someone decided to investigate the topic. They figured out pretty quickly how bumblebees develop lift, and it was by a totally different mechanism than birds or airplanes use. It's understood fairly well now.
The important part for the current topic is that the lift-generating method used by small insects doesn't scale. It depends on treating air as a collection of particles, and at larger scales air acts like a fluid rather than particles. It's very powerful for a gnat, but its effect falls off quickly with size, and doesn't work for an object much bigger than a large insect. So we can't use it in our airplanes or helicopters.
There were a few breathless reports about this in the media at first, about scientists discovering a new kind of flight, and speculating about it resulting in much more efficient flying machines. But this coverage died quickly, as the news got through that it's useless for lifting a creature much bigger than a gram. It's interesting to scientists, but not to the media, because it's not useful (so far) to us large animals.
Similarly, it's possible that "cold fusion" is something that only works on a microscopic scale, and can't be scaled up to human size. Maybe it only happens in tiny bubbles, but too many bubbles disrupt the fluid medium. If so, it may be of interest to the nanotech crowd. But it's difficult for media folks to get their minds around something like this.
There have been proposals to make tiny flying machines that fly like insects. It could be interesting if a bee-size machine, powered by "bubble fusion", could house a camera and a network link
I know a person who got a ticket for having a loud stereo, which pales in comparison to the sound of a Harley
Maybe this is the solution. Have a loud stereo system on the bike that's looping an MP3 of a Harley. Then they'll hear you coming, and you won't get ticketed.
try that lovely default Search box in the upper right corner.
What\'s that? The very upper-right corner is of course in the title bar. With firefox, what's there is the little oval thingy that disables/enables the various icon bars. With safari, there's nothing at all at the right end of the title bar. Don't know why they're different.
Perhaps you mean the upper-right not including the title bar. With both firefox and safari, the upper-rightmost thing there is the right end of the location bar. Firefox has a little triangle symbol that invokes the history popup; safari has nothing at the right end of the location bar.
So what's this about a lovely blue G? I don't see anything that fits that description. How might I get it?
Of course, I'd rather not have it take space from the location bar, which is too short as it it. Can I somehow get a blue G somewhere else? In the title bar, maybe, which is wasted screen space? Or in the firefox PrefBar? I don't see it listed in the PrefBar options.
I suspect that both firefox and safari are showing you something different than they're showing me.
OK; I tried that. I emptied the location bar, typed in "foo" (without the quote", and hit Return.
The little wheel spun briefly, and it toook me to www.foofighter.com. No sign of google anywhere.
What am I doing wrong? Is there some shortcut to get google?
This was with firefox. With a new safari window, entering "foo" took me to www.fool.com.
I think what's happening in both cases is that it chose the first thing in the history list that started with "foo". Whatever; neither browser called google.
It seems that IBM disagrees with you (as do I).
:)
;-)
Well, to a lot of us old-timers, if IBM disagrees with you, you must be right! IBM is the epitome of evil corporatehood, their recent semi-support for linux notwithstanding.
I'm a static-type proponent. Dynamically typed languages make me barf.
I've used both a lot. I'm a dynamic-type proponent. Anal-compulsive things like types are one of the things that computers are really good at handling. We shouldn't take the computer's job away by giving it to an inferior creature like a human. As a mere human, I'd rather do the things I'm good at, and let the computer take care of the things it's good at.
Now, you may enjoy simulating a computer, and I won't tell you that you shouldn't live your life this way. But some of us would rather spend our limited time on this Earth actually solving problems rather than typing minutiae that are better handled by a computer.
... the one thing that could possibly draw Linux and MacOS users back to Windows.
;-)
Yeah; it's a big distributed OS. Who says that Windows isn't scalable?
And its "design" will be even more random and shoddy than Windows. MS will be proud of it. For that matter, how do we know this isn't being done by MS themselves? It would be a good way to trick the world into adopting a network OS on the sly.
Am I paranoid enough yet?
It will, just not on the computer you're using right now :-)
;-)
One place the unix timestamp has made it into literature is in Vernor Vinge's "Deep" books: A Fire Upon the Deep, and A Deepness in the Sky. In the latter, there are a number of uses of a "day" onboard their starship that is 100,000 seconds long, and was based on a semi-mythical OS on early computers 8,000 years earlier, back before humans left their original planet and spread out into the galaxy. They routinely use kiloseconds as the main division of the day.
The size of the second count isn't a problem, of course, because nobody builds 32-bit computers then. If fact, we probably won't be making them by the time the second count reaches 2^32. I wonder how many old 32-bit machines will still be operational by then?
(Probably a lot of them, and they'll all still be running Fortran and Cobol programs.
Are there any good F/OSS implementations of VB out there for customers to migrate to?
...
Maybe it's time to once again mention an old suggestion: We need a law that any software that isn't supported automatically becomes public domain.
If this were the law, MS would just publish a link to the source code. Then, as with netscape, a mozilla-like team would take it over and run with it. They'd set up a vb6.org web site where you'd submit bug reports and get patches. People would start contributing useful stuff. Life would be a lot better for VB programmers.
Write your representative
But the product is End-of-Life. They won't get any continued development, i.e., there isn't going to be any new version of Classic VB.
Rephrased: It's finally stable. You won't have to go through a new debug cycle every 6 months after some forced upgrade has broken half your in-house apps. Sounds like a win for anyone doing VB6 development.
I've recently worked for people who are refusing to upgrade their W98 boxes for exactly this reason. They view a fixed set of known bugs as superior to a changing set of unknown bugs.
Hmmm ... I've been impressed by the wild innacuracy of Amazon's guesses about my tastes. I've ordered lots of things from them. But when I look at their recommendations, my reaction is often "Why the @#*%$ would they think I'd be likely to buy that?"
;-)
They have a looooong way to go before their guesses are accurate.
(Of course, it may have something to do with my eclectic tastes. I recently ordered 3 CDs: one of traditional Quebecoise accordion and fiddle music, one of Chinese pipa music, and one a Grateful Dead album. I wonder if this crashed any of their software?
Google is preinstalled in Safari and Firefox!
;-)
Y'know, I keep seeing comments like this, but I don't see it in my safari or firefox windows. I opened a clean window for each and poked around, and nowhere could I find a mention of google other than in the history list. I looked through the menus, and the only references to google were in the lists of open windows. I a dug through Preferences, and found no mention of google anywhere.
So where is google "preinstalled" in these browsers?
Am I missing something?
(Quite likely; browsers are complex beasts, and most of their features are undocumented.
Actually, there are some scalability problems with linux.
;-)
For example, try compiling the kernel and standard libs with a C compiler whose bytes are 32 bits, shorts are 128 bits, ints are 256 bits, and longs are 512 bits, and whose disk drives have 1-GB sectors. I guarantee you're gonna run into 2 or 3 problems directly related to those numbers. Well, OK, they'll mostly be in handling communications with 8-bit devices and systems with a 64KB limit to packets and such. But in this networked world, those are scalability problems.
And let's face it, in a few years you're gonna need a machine with those specs just to boot the latest Windows, or to start KDE or Gnome.
Correct. And the explanation goes even deeper than that.
Thus, to the south of the USA is a country that officially calls itself "Estados Unidos Mexicanos", or the United Mexican States. But everyone calls it "Mexico".
Similarly, the largest country in South America is officially called "Republica Federativa do Brasil", but we usually just say "Brasil" (or "Brazil").
In Europe, there's a big country whose official name is "Bundesrepublik Deutschland", usually translated as "Federal Republic of Germany"; it is almost always called "Deutschland" or "Germany".
Shortening "United States of America" to just "America" fits exactly the pattern used with other countries. As with Deutschland/Germany, Brasil and Mexico, "America" is unambiguous, because there's no other country with that word in its name. Everyone understands when you drop the bureaucratic beginning of the official name and just use the unique portion.
What's bizarre is that people keep objecting to this use of "America", while not objecting to the similar shortening of other countries' names.
But the AOL TOS actually states that by "posting Content on an AIM Product", you "grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium".
In other words, AOL claims the copyright to anything you send using "an AIM Product". You have no right to use even your own words, and AOL can do with your words as they like. You can't save or send a friend a copy of an IM discussion that you were a part of, because this violates AOL's rights as stated above. But AOL can take your words, extract as they like, and do as they wish with your words, including using them for commercial purposes.
This doesn't sound at all like they're after legal protection for AIM products. It sounds like they are claiming that they own anything that anyone sends using an AIM product.
If this isn't the meaning of the above text, what does it mean?
The tweaks to the terms of service will be made in the section titled "Content You Post" and will explicitly exclude user-to-user chat sessions from the privacy rights an AIM user gives up to AOL.
...
Amidst all this talk of privacy, people seem to be missing the significant copyright issue in this story. AOL is claiming that they own all the rights, i.e., they own the copyright, for anything "posted" to a discussion.
So if you copy a brief exchange in an AOL discussion, and send the exchange to someone else (or post it elsewhere), you have violated AOL's claimed copyright for that text.
Ordinarily, public discussions are, well, public. If you're using AOL, this may not be true. You may have no right to keep a copy of a discussion or to share it with anyone else. As soon as you post a message, it becomes AOL's property, and you have no right to use it at all.
This isn't the first time that this sort of thing has happened. Remember a year or two back, when MSN customers discovered that MSN was extracting things from customer email (mostly images) and using them in advertising? MSN claimed that they could do this legally, because their TOS stated clearly that any data stored on an msn.com machine was MSN's property.
There was a big fuss, and MSN seems to have backed off. But this sort of claim on customers' messages has yet to be tested in court, and many corporations are including such clauses in their contracts. This may be legal in the US and other countries. If so, you may not own the copyright to your own messages. Sending a message may constitute assigning the copyright to the message service (AOL in this case).
OTOH, if you think the file-sharing issue is fun, wait until AOL starts firing off C&D letters to people who make copies of their own IM discussions
Sorry; the DMCA protects big corporations from criminals like you and me. It doesn't protect you and me from big corporations that decode our communications.
Not unless you have a few spare millions of bucks to spend on a decade-long series of court cases.
I'd already read a number of the stories about this at news.google.com, and very few of them mention any change to the TOS. Rather, they spin it as a customer "misunderstanding" of AOL's privacy rules. They've said that AOL is merely "clarifying" the rules, with no mention of any changes.
OTOH, there is now one story listed, from p2pnet.net, that uses the word "modify". So maybe the real story will be reported by a few tech news sources, while the general media will report it as a misunderstanding that is being clarified.
So why would a reader have known to google for "XMLHTTP"? I checked (;-), and your message was the first one in this discussion to mention that string of bytes. Chiding someone for not googling for a term that hasn't appeared in the discussion is a bit ... "inappropriate" is about the only polite term I can think of. (I can think of other less polite terms.)
/. readers haven't, either. Interesting stuff ...
Now, if you'd just mentioned "XMLHTTP" and suggested googling for it, I'd have considered the message appropriate for the discussion. I'd never seen that particular acronym, and I suspect that lots of
Which is why I've always used strong encryption to IM my friends.
...
That's fine if you're trying to protect the content of your IMs.
But the main thing they're interested in at the moment is your address info.
I worked recently on a project that involved software in assorted computers using either email, IM or VM (whichever worked) to people's cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, whatever. It was a medical app, actually. Automatic reminders to doctors and patients, messages from portable health monitors to hospital computers, etc. Useful stuff.
An interesting thing happened with IM. With most sorts of cell phones, for our computers to send an IM required sending email to an email-IM gateway. This seems like a reasonable approach, but we quickly discovered a serious problem: The phones we were using for testing quickly started getting IM spam and telemarketer calls.
When I complained about this, I learned about an interesting gotcha in the phone contracts. Most of them include (heavily promoted) promises that they will never sell their subscribers' info. That sounds nice, until they explain that in our case, the sender wasn't a customer, and they can legally use a non-customer's messages however they like.
So if I or my computer send you an IM, your phone company can legally harvest both of our addresses in their gateway. The message came from a non-customer; your contract is irrelevant. If you reply to me, my ISP (or phone company) can legally harvest your message, because you're not a customer. Both companies can do as they like with the address info without violating any contract, because there was no contract with the sender.
I have in my posession a couple of spam messages inviting me to attend conferences on the commercial uses of harvested IM messages. Yes, they really did have the chutzpa to send me an invitation to learn how to do unto others what they've just done unto me (and some very angry medical folks). I didn't go
It just sounds like AOL has taken this one small step further: Their contract says they can harvest info from messages between customers. This is really the only thing new; they can already do this if the sender isn't a customer.
So when people start chanting "contract law" in this topic, you might remind them that contract law doesn't apply when there's no contract. If they look puzzled as to why you said that, describe the above scenario to them.