Yeah but, see, the low-tech solution has been available for centuries, it hasn't happened, and there's no sign that it will within our lifetime. So we might as well give the high-tech folks a chance. Maybe they (we;-) can solve some problems that could have been solved in a simpler manner but weren't.
Here in the US, it's easy to get a feel for why you won't see English signs in Japan outside the few tourist areas any time soon. Just ask people what they think of the idea of putting up Japanese signs all over the US, requiring Japanese menus in restaurants, etc. Most Americans will react as if you're joking. The few that take you seriously will be mostly the English-only extremists who will launch into a rant about the dangers of allowing foreigners and immigrants to speak their own native languages. The majority, many of whom are rather friendly and helpful to anyone who looks lost, will still not take such suggestions seriously.
In the US, there are multi-lingual signs in a few tourist areas, mostly on the coasts. But most of the country is inaccessible unless you have a minimal competency in English. This isn't going to change.
A reasonable person would understand why the same situation exists in other parts of the world. In most places like Japan, where everyone speaks the common language, there's little incentive to cater to people who don't know that language.
Well, yeah; and a 1-meter rock that hit your house would be a disaser for you.
Also, meteorites and asteroids differ a lot in composition. A few are basically chunks of metal alloy. Those might not break up in the atmosphere, and a 5-meter chunk of iron-nickel would do serious damage to a neighborhood.
But most of them do shatter when they hit the atmosphere, and produce a rain of small rocks over a wide area. There was that case in China a few years back, when a several-meter rock rained pebbles (some around 30 cm or so) across a farm area. It didn't actually do much damage; there were a lot of pictures of holes punched into fields. No buildings or animals were damaged. A lot of the stones were dug up and sent to researchers or museums.
A number of small meteors have hit houses, too. There was even a house somewhere in Connecticut that was hit by two, a few decades apart. They were 10-cm rocks, and the repair bill was small. One of them landed next to a woman sitting on a couch. She must have felt a bit nervous.
The Tunguska event has generally been estimated as a several-thousand-year impact (though it wasn't actually an impact). But another one could happen tomorrow, and it could be over a city. That may be what it'll take to wake people up to the danger.
Yeah. A couple years ago, I ran across an article that contained a graph of object size versus frequency of entering the Earth's atmosphere. The 1-per-day frequency was for objects of about 3 meters diameter.
Several objects of this thing's size enter our atmosphere each week. Most of them disintegrate in the atmostphere. A few have pieces that hit the ground, though they're usually rather small by the time they (or the pieces) hit.
To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across. Of course, one of those may hit us next week. Or 10,000 years from now. (Or both.;-)
"From what I've seen, VERY few people actually use the GIMP for anything other than the occasional experiment to see if it has stopped sucking yet."
Breathless awaiting how you were able to see the way the world uses the Gimp.
Well, antiMStroll seems to have been looking over my shoulder.;-)
I've installed a lot of versions of gimp, and I have a couple of books sitting on my shelf. But I've never been able to get it to do what I want to any image.
Yeah, I can make all sorts of fancy changes. Then I look at them and wonder "Why the f*** did it do that?" The changes are rarely what I expected or wanted. And when I undo and try it again, very often the result is something different (which also doesn't make sense).
Now, you could say that gimp is obviously intended for someone who's less of an 1d10t than I am. I have got this response from newsgroups and mailing lists when I asked dumb questions. And I'd have to agree, which is why I give up on it.
Actually, I suspect that I probably am smart enough to use it. The problem is that I'm ignorant. And the docs don't seem to explain much. They use lots of idiosyncratic technical terms that might be very accurate, but they haven't been defined anywhere that I can find. In most tech writing classes, the docs would get a big F for this. The result is that I have a vague, fuzzy idea of what gimp's capabilities are, but I have no idea how to correctly get it to do much of anything except destroy images with unintended transformations.
I've seen enough to suspect that gimp is the powerful tool that I'm looking for. Now if I could only find a way to understand how to use it to do what I want...
Is anyone working on a real tutorial? One that doesn't assume that you've already been using gimp for years and already understand all the terminology?
Ah; that explains it! You'd have to be in some non-rational state of mind to think you could just walk into the appropriate office and inform them that you are their new database administrator.
(Though if you could, it might be a good solution to lots of DB problems such as those discussed in this article.;-)
However, the fact that, for example, Russian uses the name "second" for Tuesday, indicates that some nations regard Monday as the first day.
And, of course, all the C and perl programmers here will tell you that Sunday is the zeroth day of the week.
Re:Sounds like a nut - more like a hoax
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New Calendar Proposal
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Well, I've read a number of explanations that the Roman-era ("Julian") calendar was viewed as a cycle, with no truly standardized starting point. But 2000 years ago, the spring equinox was widely treated as the start of a new year. Due to the Earth's precession, that was early in March around then (and the 26,000-year precession cycle would have brought it back to March first in another 24,000 years;-). So to most people, september was the 7th month. Then, some time later, other people decided to treat January as the first month, for no clear reason.
But no matter; the Julian/Gregorian calendar has always been a jumbled mess of historical revisions. (Unlike most other calendars.;-) And the system in this article really isn't a whole lot better.
I've long liked the Mayan system. Number the years from some prehistoric date. Within a year, number the days starting from 0. Yes, they had a symbol for zero, and it looked a lot like ours. After 365 or 366 days, reset the day counter to zero and bump the year counter.
Actually, the astronomical "Julian day" is essentially this system, except it just counts days (with fractional days instead of hours and minutes), but no true year number. You can do a divide to get the year, of course.
Then, of course, there's the unix (and VMS) timestamp, which just counts seconds. This is one of the most practical approaches if you're trying to write software to keep track of time. Once you've got all your software using the second count as its internal representation, life becomes a lot simpler. You can write library routines to translate to whatever display format your users like, while keeping time arithmetic simple for the software.
Of course, we're going to have to make sure all our software is compiled for a 64-bit second counter some time within the next two decades. But that's starting to happen now, well ahead of schedule. Actually, it should be a signed 64-bit integer, so we can use it to unambiguously represent the pre-1970 portion of human history.
Most people here should already have a registration with NYT...
Yeah; same here. Actually, it's my wife's account, but we have several computers behind our firewall, and they really can't tell who is using which one at any given time.;-)
The real problem with all the news sites that want registration is the time it takes to deal with it. My file of online ids now has 62 entries, mostly from web sites that require gratuitous registration. I'd include the NYT in the "gratuitous" list, but not amazon.com, which actually gives me some useful time-saving goodies in exchange for registering.
One of my frustrations for several years has been following washingtonpost.com links and hitting their registration page. I've registered any number of times, and repeatedly all this ever got me was back to the registration page. Finally, last week, it worked, and I can actually read their articles now. (My wife succeeded at about the same time.) In this case, it was a huge time waste for no apparent reason.
It's interesting that news.google.com still doesn't require any sort of registration, though it has grown into one of the most useful news sources in the world.
In any case, maintaining that slowly-growing file of registrations is a PITA. They all have different rules for ids and passwords, so I can't use the same strings for all of them. And it wastes my time. But I suppose that doesn't matter to them, since it's not their time being wasted (except for the people who support the reggistration DBs).
I have found that this is one thing that the blogs are useful for. They rarely require registration, and they routinely publish the significant paragraphs from major stories. Maybe soon I'll be able to cut back on my registrations, and just subscribe to the few sites that I find are full of truly useful information.
Of course, in the political arena, the truly useful sites are likely to remain free and open. The primary actors want to get their story out, after all. The main problem here is that they keep changing. Right now, there are a number of very interesting sites in the Middle East that are in English and other major languages, and give "observer" info about what's really happening in their neighborhoods. Some have disappeared when the writers died...
What we need, as TFA says, is to get rid of the dark alleys on the Internet. Our trusted government agents need to be assured of access to every possible communication over the Internet.
An even more interesting idea is that this could work, if it is also applied to the government.
Suppose that government secrecy were outlawed, and all meetings (especially the "casual" ones) involving any government employee were recorded and available permanently on the Internet.
Of course, there would be far too much information there for effective monitoring by the public. But this isn't any different from the government's current databases. What it would do is give us a way to find out after the fact what the government folks have been up to.
The problem, the argument goes, is that the government can monitor us, but we can't monitor them. But consider the implications if we could.
Of course, most people would just be interested in things like the videos of the Clinton-Lewinsky "meetings".
You might also look at the whitespace programming language. It's a fun example of a kind of steganography, in which the actual text is encoded in the white space, and printable characters are comments.
It would be pretty easy to combine the two. Encode your message in white space, generate a spam message, replace the white stuff in the message with the spaces and tabs of your encoded message, and send it to a few thousand recipients that include the real recipient.
The recipient would have the problem of discovering the real message among the zillions of real spams. Solving this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Amazon.com does a pretty fucking good job of offering me other books I "might be interested in."
Well, I personally find myself often breaking out in laughter at some of the things they suggest for me. Granted, some of their suggestions are good. But others are truly bizarre, and I find myself wondering why they would link me to that.
Now, with amazon.com, I can just chuckle and go on to what I'm looking for. But when it comes to government investigators, such things aren't funny. You can end up in jail indefinitely without trial because of your "associations". Or, more subtly, you can be put on lists and locked out of things like potential good jobs because of the suspicion that you are linked to someone or something that the current administration doesn't like. And those links will be generated by software that's probably even flakier than amazon's.
Example: Some years back, when my wife was in grad school, she made friends with a Russian woman who was there (Boston University) on a scholarship. The woman discovered she was pregnant soon after coming to the school, and when delivery time came, my wife was handy and gave her a ride to the hospital. Even more fun, after the birth, my wife helped out a bit by doing things like picking up the baby pictures - and paying with a credit card.
Ever since then, we've been getting junk-mail catalogs for baby/children things, and the catalogs have followed the child's age. We mostly think this is funny, as do most of the people we tell about it.
But we are aware that there's a potential problem here. The databases show that we have a close personal connection to this Russian woman. Today that doesn't mean much. 30 years ago, it would have put us on some seriously-bad government lists. 20 years from now, who knows? Especially when you consider that, when the kid reaches 18 years, he will have a choice of which citizenship he wants to claim. Depending on how things go in Russia, he could well make the rational decision to be an American. Naturally, we'd welcome him and help him, though the clique in the White House then might not.
An even funnier part of the story is that we learned a year or so after the birth that the people at the hospital apparently had a bit of confusion. Since the mother was accompanied by another woman rather than a man, they put my wife's name in the "father/husband" slot. Her name could be a man's name, though it's usually female. And Boston-area medical people are known for their helpfulness towards people in "non-traditional" family arrangements. We've told some of our gay friends about this, and they think it's hilarious that my wife is "father to a Russian baby".
But we do have grounds to be nervous about what might happen when, say, Pat Robertson becomes president, and sets up a program to purge the nation of gays. Will the database say that we're part of the problem? I'd guess that they say this right now, though our current leader merely wants to prevent gays from getting married or insured, and isn't talking about jailing or killing them. And even if they figure out that the birth certificate is wrong, investigations would show that we do have gay friends.
If you look at the history of US government subversive lists, there's good grounds for worry here. Right now, we may think it's all funny. And it gives us lots of cred in "liberal" (and gay;-) circles. But we're both computer geeks, and know well how screwy databases can be. We've both worked on them and experienced the frustration of keeping the data sane. We understand how hopeless it is to expect government or corporate databases to contain only valid information. And we're following stories like this one...
Yeah; this may eventually be the only actual distinction. We'll have rights because we're human; machines won't because they're not.
An illustration that I ran across years ago: Back in 1800, it was obvious to everyone that the ability to do arithmetic calculations such as multiplication was a sign of intelligence. Only humans could do it, and we obviously used our intelligence to do it.
Then someone invented a mechanical calculator. Did the machine get classified as intelligent? Of course not. We demoted such calculations from being a sign of intelligence to being merely a mechanical operation.
Similarly if you look at the things that the AI people were so proud of back in the early 60's, such as complex list manipulation or symbolic lookup tables, they are pretty much all now just routine software engineering practices, and aren't considered signs of any sort of machine intelligence. We're seeing this happen with neural nets, now that a few are starting to actually be useful for real-world problems.
So the obvious prediction is that we will never consider machines intelligent or deserving of respect or "rights". Anything that programmers make them do will be demoted from "intelligence" to "mechanical" (or whatever we're calling it that decade), and the machines will still be just machines legally.
Eventually, we'll have machines able to mimic all of our mental processes. They won't be considered intelligent. just machines.
Hey, did you read the stories earlier this year about the restaurant somewhere in China that serves rat as its specialty-of-the-house?
In the interviews, the proprietor did say that they use only farm-raised rats, not city rats.
Actually, the only reason for not eating rats is that people think they're ugly and repulsive. But some of the domesticated strains are sorta cute, so I suppose they'd be edible. And people eat lots of other rodents, especially rabbits. The guinea pig is a rodent that people in South America domesticated as a food animal.
It is sorta bizarre that people only want to eat attractive animals. Wouldn't it make more sense to kill and eat critters that aren't attractive?
Re:Definition Leads to Regulation?
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FTC Defines Spam
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There have been some fun reports from people who have replied to spam from Chinese servers by sending back a message thanking them for their support of Falun Gong. It seems that the Chinese government has filters looking for messages that use those two words...
Of course, this doesn't work for servers in Taiwan, and I've noticed that that's where most of my Chinese spam comes from, for some reason.
Hmmm... Lately I've been receiving a lot of spam that starts with a joke. Sometimes they're pretty good jokes, though usually I've heard them (having read rec.humor.funny since before it was on a web site;-).
I can see them arguing that this directly addresses my interests, based on my long-term reading of r.h.f and Dave Barry, and the couple dozen online cartoons that I have bookmarked.
Actually, the official classification now has the reptiles, mammals and dinosaurs as three separate branches of the vertebrate tree. The old idea that dinosaurs were reptiles has pretty much been discarded, and they were given their own branch. Among other things, it seems that the oldest fossils of the three groups are about the same age. I've seen claims that the oldest is a mammal fossil, though this may be wrong by now. The fossil record really isn't good enough to resolve evolutionary timings in many such cases, and biologists decided it was better to just admit that we don't know. Also, there are systematic differences between reptiles and dinosaurs that imply that neither is an ancestor of the other.
Needless to say, all this may change again, if someone finds the right fossils. And there's a continuing debate about just how the crocodilians fit in; they're sufficiently different from other reptiles that some biologists have argued for a separate classification. (But this debate is low key, as there isn't enough fossil evidence.)
Of course, it'll take a few more decades for this to filter through to the media and below-college textbooks (if they are even allowed to discuss the topic). For that matter, it's been a couple of decades now since the birds were officially reclassified as a suborder of the dinosaurs, but people still talk as if the dinosaurs were all wiped out. Nope; you can find them perched on trees and buildings all around the world. It's true that the large dinosaurs were wiped out, but the large mammals also disappeared 65 million years ago.
We have fun with some people by talking about the four dinosaurs that share our home. The list includes a blue-crowned conure, two cockatiels, and a Bourke's parakeet. They're cute little monsters. But not much like the Jurassic Park critters.;-)
As the guy wrote, it may now be illegal in America to look at most of the Web. Unless a site has given you explicit permission to read it, merely following a link to a site and looking at any page may make you a criminal.
The point of the article was that, under current US case law, such a GET from a publicly-accessible web/ftp site may well be illegal. It seems that all SCO needs is a notice anywhere on their site denying access, for it to fall under the CFAA.
For a hypothetical example, consider the goatse.cx site, but with a link at the top of the main page to a TOS page, and a sentence saying you shouldn't look at the picture until you've agreed to the TOS. Some prosecutor decides to take them to court on an obscenity charge. The goatse lawyers counter-sue under the CFAA. In court, they present the server log entries as evidence that the plaintiff did do a GET on the home page, but didn't do a GET on the TOS page. The plaintiff is therefore in violation of the TOS, the CFAA applies, and the conclusive evidence is their knowledge of the image below the link to the TOS page without having agreed to the TOS.
But it's not insane, as some have said. Rather, it's an invitation to entrapment. If your intent is to harrass someone or bankrupt them with legal fees, it might be just the legal situation that you want.
Presumably this was what Congress intended when they passed the bill, since it's generally not possible to determine what your access rights may be on a web site, short of examining every page on the site. But if you do that, you have ipso facto violated any access restrictions for the pages that you visited.
... the recent US election pretty much ended civilization as we know it.
Not really, but our troops are working on it. Stay tuned...
This does remind me of the story about someone asking Gandhi what he thought about Western Civilization. He reportedly said he thought it would be a good idea.
I'm not sure when/where the idea of a food chain with a bottom and a top arose but it's poppycock.
Good point. We might note that a little over 500 years ago, Europe was hit by a new disease that wiped out roughly half of the population - and kept doing it every few generation until resistance was evolved. Being the top predator didn't protect the Europeans at all.
It doesn't take much imagination to consider a disease slightly more virulent. In these days of rapid transportation, it could easily be all over the world before it's discovered. The history of AIDS (a rather wimpy disease) shows that the religious folks still have sufficient power to block effectively fighting a new disease. So this may well be what does us in.
(anyone out there know if Great Whites have any natural predators besides humans?)
Well, I've always liked the giant squid. They kill whales and large sharks. Their habitat is most of the 3/4 of the planet that we don't much use. There have been some fun arguments that this planet was actually made as a habitat for the giant squid (on the 7th day of creation, of course). We're here to control the larger predators that bother the giant squid, but we don't kill the giant squid themselves (just their smaller relatives).
But the true masters of our world are bacteria. They were here soon after the planet cooled, and they'll be here until it gets too hot, no matter what we do. They're continuously colonizing at least the rest of our solar system, according to astronomers who have analyzed the Earth's "dust tail" and reported that it contains bacterial spores. And there's an interesting argument that they have been escaping to the rest of the galaxy for at least 3 billion years.
Of course, we don't have a lot of direct data on this topic yet...
Dinosaur's were huge and highly specialized for their environment
True of the huge dinos that are the media image. But at least a half dozen dinosaur species survived the big crash, roughly the same number as for mammals. They were all in the branch that we now call "birds", of course. They weren't big or specialized. The best modern equivalent would probably be something like a crow, one of the ultimate "generalist" species. The surviving mammals were all more or less like rats and shrews, of course. In the next such disaster, it'll be mostly species like those that survive.
Humans are generalists, of course. But in a similar disaster, we'd probably be at a disadvantage to crows and rats. This is mostly because of our size, which will be a problem in a world with a shortage of food. But our brain does give us an advantage, so maybe we'd survive.
Anyway, another asteroid impact will happen. Maybe next week, maybe 100 million years from now, but it's coming. Astronomers know of around 1000 rocks with sizes > 1 km in Earth-crossing orbits, and reasonable estimates are another 500-1000 more exist. That's actually not very many, and chances of an impact in any one year are quite small. But some of them are going to hit our planet some time in the future.
Corporate blogging isn't very new. Of course, it's often called "astroturfing".
OTOH, some companies' web sites include user-feedback pages that are a form of blog. Some of these can be very useful if you're using the company's products. But you could argue that this is something different from what the phrase "corporate blog" implies. If such a forum is useful, it probably isn't actually controlled by the corporation. The corporation merely supplies the web space and software to support the discussion.
As a very special case, lots of ISPs supply Usenet, and they almost always create a set of newsgroups dealing with the ISP itself. This really is a form of blog, and can be a very practical approach. Again, this dates from the early days of ISPs.
Proof has been constantly cited since the 70s and yet all the dire predictions have come to naught.
True perhaps for parts of the mass media, but not at all for scientists.
Most of the climate models have been predicting that, under even the most extreme industrial-output scenarios, the Antarctic ice cap will last for many centuries. The Arctic ice should last at least a few centuries, though in the past decade its thinning has accelerated past what most of the models predicted, and it may only last another century now.
But it doesn't take melting of all polar ice to get a disaster. Estimates are that Antarctic melting could raise the oceans by at least 60-80 meters. Even a 10-meter rise would flood out most coastal cities, and that would be disaster enough for most people.
Some models show Antarctic ice producing a drop in sea levels. The explanation is simple: Antarctica is basically a high, cold desert. Precipitation is very low, and the ice cap exists basically because the little snow that falls never melts. Most climate models predict that rising temperatures will increase evaporation, and thus will increase precipitation in most areas. If Antarctica sees an increase of precipitation but stays below freezing, its glaciers will start growing in thickness. But the models are rather weak in this area, and you'd have problems finding any climatologist willing to put money on this outcome.
Note also most of the Arctic ice is sea ice, so its melting won't raise ocean levels by much. Only the ice on land (Greenland, Antarctica and many smaller islands) will do that. The Greenland ice corresponds to about a 5-meter rise in sea level, and it is melting fairly quickly now.
You can see one (moderately conservative) estimate at this USGS page. Google can find more, though it takes a bit of digging. (And you'll learn a lot about the science in the process.)
My favorite example of a "disaster" from warming is the impending loss of one of my favorite geography trivia questions: What are the two places in the world where there are glaciers on the equator? Most people guess one place fairly quickly. (They usually say Mt Kilamanjaro rather than Mt Kenya/Kirinyaga, but that's close enough.) They usually don't get the other place for some reason. Anyway, current predictions are that the glaciers in both of these places will be gone in 2 or 3 decades. So you'd better visit them while you still can.
President George W. Bush disagrees with this. Therefore more study is needed.
It sounds like he has read the well-known advice to scientists that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end which begins "Further research is needed...".
Let's see; there's gotta be a name for humor based on stating something that's true. Anyone know the right term for this?
Of course, GWB does have somewhat of a history of supporting something publicly then, behind the scene, blocking the funding. It's not clear that his administration will push for funding of climate studies that are highly likely to give the wrong results.
I found and installed flashblock. It seems to do a good job of blocking. Unfortunately, the "click to see the flash content" doesn't seem to work. Now, it tells me that the flash plugin doesn't exist. It does exist, of course, and about:plugins shows it, but it still tells me that it doesn't exist.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem.
;-) can solve some problems that could have been solved in a simpler manner but weren't.
Yeah but, see, the low-tech solution has been available for centuries, it hasn't happened, and there's no sign that it will within our lifetime. So we might as well give the high-tech folks a chance. Maybe they (we
Here in the US, it's easy to get a feel for why you won't see English signs in Japan outside the few tourist areas any time soon. Just ask people what they think of the idea of putting up Japanese signs all over the US, requiring Japanese menus in restaurants, etc. Most Americans will react as if you're joking. The few that take you seriously will be mostly the English-only extremists who will launch into a rant about the dangers of allowing foreigners and immigrants to speak their own native languages. The majority, many of whom are rather friendly and helpful to anyone who looks lost, will still not take such suggestions seriously.
In the US, there are multi-lingual signs in a few tourist areas, mostly on the coasts. But most of the country is inaccessible unless you have a minimal competency in English. This isn't going to change.
A reasonable person would understand why the same situation exists in other parts of the world. In most places like Japan, where everyone speaks the common language, there's little incentive to cater to people who don't know that language.
Well, yeah; and a 1-meter rock that hit your house would be a disaser for you.
Also, meteorites and asteroids differ a lot in composition. A few are basically chunks of metal alloy. Those might not break up in the atmosphere, and a 5-meter chunk of iron-nickel would do serious damage to a neighborhood.
But most of them do shatter when they hit the atmosphere, and produce a rain of small rocks over a wide area. There was that case in China a few years back, when a several-meter rock rained pebbles (some around 30 cm or so) across a farm area. It didn't actually do much damage; there were a lot of pictures of holes punched into fields. No buildings or animals were damaged. A lot of the stones were dug up and sent to researchers or museums.
A number of small meteors have hit houses, too. There was even a house somewhere in Connecticut that was hit by two, a few decades apart. They were 10-cm rocks, and the repair bill was small. One of them landed next to a woman sitting on a couch. She must have felt a bit nervous.
The Tunguska event has generally been estimated as a several-thousand-year impact (though it wasn't actually an impact). But another one could happen tomorrow, and it could be over a city. That may be what it'll take to wake people up to the danger.
Yeah. A couple years ago, I ran across an article that contained a graph of object size versus frequency of entering the Earth's atmosphere. The 1-per-day frequency was for objects of about 3 meters diameter.
;-)
Several objects of this thing's size enter our atmosphere each week. Most of them disintegrate in the atmostphere. A few have pieces that hit the ground, though they're usually rather small by the time they (or the pieces) hit.
To do serious damage, we'll need a rock at least a few hundred meters across. Of course, one of those may hit us next week. Or 10,000 years from now. (Or both.
I wonder if I could find that graph again?
"From what I've seen, VERY few people actually use the GIMP for anything other than the occasional experiment to see if it has stopped sucking yet."
;-)
...
Breathless awaiting how you were able to see the way the world uses the Gimp.
Well, antiMStroll seems to have been looking over my shoulder.
I've installed a lot of versions of gimp, and I have a couple of books sitting on my shelf. But I've never been able to get it to do what I want to any image.
Yeah, I can make all sorts of fancy changes. Then I look at them and wonder "Why the f*** did it do that?" The changes are rarely what I expected or wanted. And when I undo and try it again, very often the result is something different (which also doesn't make sense).
Now, you could say that gimp is obviously intended for someone who's less of an 1d10t than I am. I have got this response from newsgroups and mailing lists when I asked dumb questions. And I'd have to agree, which is why I give up on it.
Actually, I suspect that I probably am smart enough to use it. The problem is that I'm ignorant. And the docs don't seem to explain much. They use lots of idiosyncratic technical terms that might be very accurate, but they haven't been defined anywhere that I can find. In most tech writing classes, the docs would get a big F for this. The result is that I have a vague, fuzzy idea of what gimp's capabilities are, but I have no idea how to correctly get it to do much of anything except destroy images with unintended transformations.
I've seen enough to suspect that gimp is the powerful tool that I'm looking for. Now if I could only find a way to understand how to use it to do what I want
Is anyone working on a real tutorial? One that doesn't assume that you've already been using gimp for years and already understand all the terminology?
Ah; that explains it! You'd have to be in some non-rational state of mind to think you could just walk into the appropriate office and inform them that you are their new database administrator.
;-)
(Though if you could, it might be a good solution to lots of DB problems such as those discussed in this article.
However, the fact that, for example, Russian uses the name "second" for Tuesday, indicates that some nations regard Monday as the first day.
And, of course, all the C and perl programmers here will tell you that Sunday is the zeroth day of the week.
Well, I've read a number of explanations that the Roman-era ("Julian") calendar was viewed as a cycle, with no truly standardized starting point. But 2000 years ago, the spring equinox was widely treated as the start of a new year. Due to the Earth's precession, that was early in March around then (and the 26,000-year precession cycle would have brought it back to March first in another 24,000 years ;-). So to most people, september was the 7th month. Then, some time later, other people decided to treat January as the first month, for no clear reason.
;-) And the system in this article really isn't a whole lot better.
But no matter; the Julian/Gregorian calendar has always been a jumbled mess of historical revisions. (Unlike most other calendars.
I've long liked the Mayan system. Number the years from some prehistoric date. Within a year, number the days starting from 0. Yes, they had a symbol for zero, and it looked a lot like ours. After 365 or 366 days, reset the day counter to zero and bump the year counter.
Actually, the astronomical "Julian day" is essentially this system, except it just counts days (with fractional days instead of hours and minutes), but no true year number. You can do a divide to get the year, of course.
Then, of course, there's the unix (and VMS) timestamp, which just counts seconds. This is one of the most practical approaches if you're trying to write software to keep track of time. Once you've got all your software using the second count as its internal representation, life becomes a lot simpler. You can write library routines to translate to whatever display format your users like, while keeping time arithmetic simple for the software.
Of course, we're going to have to make sure all our software is compiled for a 64-bit second counter some time within the next two decades. But that's starting to happen now, well ahead of schedule. Actually, it should be a signed 64-bit integer, so we can use it to unambiguously represent the pre-1970 portion of human history.
Most people here should already have a registration with NYT ...
;-)
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Yeah; same here. Actually, it's my wife's account, but we have several computers behind our firewall, and they really can't tell who is using which one at any given time.
The real problem with all the news sites that want registration is the time it takes to deal with it. My file of online ids now has 62 entries, mostly from web sites that require gratuitous registration. I'd include the NYT in the "gratuitous" list, but not amazon.com, which actually gives me some useful time-saving goodies in exchange for registering.
One of my frustrations for several years has been following washingtonpost.com links and hitting their registration page. I've registered any number of times, and repeatedly all this ever got me was back to the registration page. Finally, last week, it worked, and I can actually read their articles now. (My wife succeeded at about the same time.) In this case, it was a huge time waste for no apparent reason.
It's interesting that news.google.com still doesn't require any sort of registration, though it has grown into one of the most useful news sources in the world.
In any case, maintaining that slowly-growing file of registrations is a PITA. They all have different rules for ids and passwords, so I can't use the same strings for all of them. And it wastes my time. But I suppose that doesn't matter to them, since it's not their time being wasted (except for the people who support the reggistration DBs).
I have found that this is one thing that the blogs are useful for. They rarely require registration, and they routinely publish the significant paragraphs from major stories. Maybe soon I'll be able to cut back on my registrations, and just subscribe to the few sites that I find are full of truly useful information.
Of course, in the political arena, the truly useful sites are likely to remain free and open. The primary actors want to get their story out, after all. The main problem here is that they keep changing. Right now, there are a number of very interesting sites in the Middle East that are in English and other major languages, and give "observer" info about what's really happening in their neighborhoods. Some have disappeared when the writers died
What we need, as TFA says, is to get rid of the dark alleys on the Internet. Our trusted government agents need to be assured of access to every possible communication over the Internet.
An even more interesting idea is that this could work, if it is also applied to the government.
Suppose that government secrecy were outlawed, and all meetings (especially the "casual" ones) involving any government employee were recorded and available permanently on the Internet.
Of course, there would be far too much information there for effective monitoring by the public. But this isn't any different from the government's current databases. What it would do is give us a way to find out after the fact what the government folks have been up to.
The problem, the argument goes, is that the government can monitor us, but we can't monitor them. But consider the implications if we could.
Of course, most people would just be interested in things like the videos of the Clinton-Lewinsky "meetings".
Yeah, spammimic is a fun tool.
You might also look at the whitespace programming language. It's a fun example of a kind of steganography, in which the actual text is encoded in the white space, and printable characters are comments.
It would be pretty easy to combine the two. Encode your message in white space, generate a spam message, replace the white stuff in the message with the spaces and tabs of your encoded message, and send it to a few thousand recipients that include the real recipient.
The recipient would have the problem of discovering the real message among the zillions of real spams. Solving this is left as an exercise for the reader.
Amazon.com does a pretty fucking good job of offering me other books I "might be interested in."
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Well, I personally find myself often breaking out in laughter at some of the things they suggest for me. Granted, some of their suggestions are good. But others are truly bizarre, and I find myself wondering why they would link me to that.
Now, with amazon.com, I can just chuckle and go on to what I'm looking for. But when it comes to government investigators, such things aren't funny. You can end up in jail indefinitely without trial because of your "associations". Or, more subtly, you can be put on lists and locked out of things like potential good jobs because of the suspicion that you are linked to someone or something that the current administration doesn't like. And those links will be generated by software that's probably even flakier than amazon's.
Example: Some years back, when my wife was in grad school, she made friends with a Russian woman who was there (Boston University) on a scholarship. The woman discovered she was pregnant soon after coming to the school, and when delivery time came, my wife was handy and gave her a ride to the hospital. Even more fun, after the birth, my wife helped out a bit by doing things like picking up the baby pictures - and paying with a credit card.
Ever since then, we've been getting junk-mail catalogs for baby/children things, and the catalogs have followed the child's age. We mostly think this is funny, as do most of the people we tell about it.
But we are aware that there's a potential problem here. The databases show that we have a close personal connection to this Russian woman. Today that doesn't mean much. 30 years ago, it would have put us on some seriously-bad government lists. 20 years from now, who knows? Especially when you consider that, when the kid reaches 18 years, he will have a choice of which citizenship he wants to claim. Depending on how things go in Russia, he could well make the rational decision to be an American. Naturally, we'd welcome him and help him, though the clique in the White House then might not.
An even funnier part of the story is that we learned a year or so after the birth that the people at the hospital apparently had a bit of confusion. Since the mother was accompanied by another woman rather than a man, they put my wife's name in the "father/husband" slot. Her name could be a man's name, though it's usually female. And Boston-area medical people are known for their helpfulness towards people in "non-traditional" family arrangements. We've told some of our gay friends about this, and they think it's hilarious that my wife is "father to a Russian baby".
But we do have grounds to be nervous about what might happen when, say, Pat Robertson becomes president, and sets up a program to purge the nation of gays. Will the database say that we're part of the problem? I'd guess that they say this right now, though our current leader merely wants to prevent gays from getting married or insured, and isn't talking about jailing or killing them. And even if they figure out that the birth certificate is wrong, investigations would show that we do have gay friends.
If you look at the history of US government subversive lists, there's good grounds for worry here. Right now, we may think it's all funny. And it gives us lots of cred in "liberal" (and gay;-) circles. But we're both computer geeks, and know well how screwy databases can be. We've both worked on them and experienced the frustration of keeping the data sane. We understand how hopeless it is to expect government or corporate databases to contain only valid information. And we're following stories like this one
Yeah; this may eventually be the only actual distinction. We'll have rights because we're human; machines won't because they're not.
An illustration that I ran across years ago: Back in 1800, it was obvious to everyone that the ability to do arithmetic calculations such as multiplication was a sign of intelligence. Only humans could do it, and we obviously used our intelligence to do it.
Then someone invented a mechanical calculator. Did the machine get classified as intelligent? Of course not. We demoted such calculations from being a sign of intelligence to being merely a mechanical operation.
Similarly if you look at the things that the AI people were so proud of back in the early 60's, such as complex list manipulation or symbolic lookup tables, they are pretty much all now just routine software engineering practices, and aren't considered signs of any sort of machine intelligence. We're seeing this happen with neural nets, now that a few are starting to actually be useful for real-world problems.
So the obvious prediction is that we will never consider machines intelligent or deserving of respect or "rights". Anything that programmers make them do will be demoted from "intelligence" to "mechanical" (or whatever we're calling it that decade), and the machines will still be just machines legally.
Eventually, we'll have machines able to mimic all of our mental processes. They won't be considered intelligent. just machines.
Hey, did you read the stories earlier this year about the restaurant somewhere in China that serves rat as its specialty-of-the-house?
In the interviews, the proprietor did say that they use only farm-raised rats, not city rats.
Actually, the only reason for not eating rats is that people think they're ugly and repulsive. But some of the domesticated strains are sorta cute, so I suppose they'd be edible. And people eat lots of other rodents, especially rabbits. The guinea pig is a rodent that people in South America domesticated as a food animal.
It is sorta bizarre that people only want to eat attractive animals. Wouldn't it make more sense to kill and eat critters that aren't attractive?
There have been some fun reports from people who have replied to spam from Chinese servers by sending back a message thanking them for their support of Falun Gong. It seems that the Chinese government has filters looking for messages that use those two words ...
Of course, this doesn't work for servers in Taiwan, and I've noticed that that's where most of my Chinese spam comes from, for some reason.
Hmmm ... Lately I've been receiving a lot of spam that starts with a joke. Sometimes they're pretty good jokes, though usually I've heard them (having read rec.humor.funny since before it was on a web site ;-).
I can see them arguing that this directly addresses my interests, based on my long-term reading of r.h.f and Dave Barry, and the couple dozen online cartoons that I have bookmarked.
But I'd still consider them spam.
Actually, the official classification now has the reptiles, mammals and dinosaurs as three separate branches of the vertebrate tree. The old idea that dinosaurs were reptiles has pretty much been discarded, and they were given their own branch. Among other things, it seems that the oldest fossils of the three groups are about the same age. I've seen claims that the oldest is a mammal fossil, though this may be wrong by now. The fossil record really isn't good enough to resolve evolutionary timings in many such cases, and biologists decided it was better to just admit that we don't know. Also, there are systematic differences between reptiles and dinosaurs that imply that neither is an ancestor of the other.
;-)
Needless to say, all this may change again, if someone finds the right fossils. And there's a continuing debate about just how the crocodilians fit in; they're sufficiently different from other reptiles that some biologists have argued for a separate classification. (But this debate is low key, as there isn't enough fossil evidence.)
Of course, it'll take a few more decades for this to filter through to the media and below-college textbooks (if they are even allowed to discuss the topic). For that matter, it's been a couple of decades now since the birds were officially reclassified as a suborder of the dinosaurs, but people still talk as if the dinosaurs were all wiped out. Nope; you can find them perched on trees and buildings all around the world. It's true that the large dinosaurs were wiped out, but the large mammals also disappeared 65 million years ago.
We have fun with some people by talking about the four dinosaurs that share our home. The list includes a blue-crowned conure, two cockatiels, and a Bourke's parakeet. They're cute little monsters. But not much like the Jurassic Park critters.
Heh; yeah; jjust like that.
As the guy wrote, it may now be illegal in America to look at most of the Web. Unless a site has given you explicit permission to read it, merely following a link to a site and looking at any page may make you a criminal.
The point of the article was that, under current US case law, such a GET from a publicly-accessible web/ftp site may well be illegal. It seems that all SCO needs is a notice anywhere on their site denying access, for it to fall under the CFAA.
For a hypothetical example, consider the goatse.cx site, but with a link at the top of the main page to a TOS page, and a sentence saying you shouldn't look at the picture until you've agreed to the TOS. Some prosecutor decides to take them to court on an obscenity charge. The goatse lawyers counter-sue under the CFAA. In court, they present the server log entries as evidence that the plaintiff did do a GET on the home page, but didn't do a GET on the TOS page. The plaintiff is therefore in violation of the TOS, the CFAA applies, and the conclusive evidence is their knowledge of the image below the link to the TOS page without having agreed to the TOS.
But it's not insane, as some have said. Rather, it's an invitation to entrapment. If your intent is to harrass someone or bankrupt them with legal fees, it might be just the legal situation that you want.
Presumably this was what Congress intended when they passed the bill, since it's generally not possible to determine what your access rights may be on a web site, short of examining every page on the site. But if you do that, you have ipso facto violated any access restrictions for the pages that you visited.
... the recent US election pretty much ended civilization as we know it.
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Not really, but our troops are working on it. Stay tuned
This does remind me of the story about someone asking Gandhi what he thought about Western Civilization. He reportedly said he thought it would be a good idea.
I'm not sure when/where the idea of a food chain with a bottom and a top arose but it's poppycock.
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Good point. We might note that a little over 500 years ago, Europe was hit by a new disease that wiped out roughly half of the population - and kept doing it every few generation until resistance was evolved. Being the top predator didn't protect the Europeans at all.
It doesn't take much imagination to consider a disease slightly more virulent. In these days of rapid transportation, it could easily be all over the world before it's discovered. The history of AIDS (a rather wimpy disease) shows that the religious folks still have sufficient power to block effectively fighting a new disease. So this may well be what does us in.
(anyone out there know if Great Whites have any natural predators besides humans?)
Well, I've always liked the giant squid. They kill whales and large sharks. Their habitat is most of the 3/4 of the planet that we don't much use. There have been some fun arguments that this planet was actually made as a habitat for the giant squid (on the 7th day of creation, of course). We're here to control the larger predators that bother the giant squid, but we don't kill the giant squid themselves (just their smaller relatives).
But the true masters of our world are bacteria. They were here soon after the planet cooled, and they'll be here until it gets too hot, no matter what we do. They're continuously colonizing at least the rest of our solar system, according to astronomers who have analyzed the Earth's "dust tail" and reported that it contains bacterial spores. And there's an interesting argument that they have been escaping to the rest of the galaxy for at least 3 billion years.
Of course, we don't have a lot of direct data on this topic yet
Dinosaur's were huge and highly specialized for their environment
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True of the huge dinos that are the media image. But at least a half dozen dinosaur species survived the big crash, roughly the same number as for mammals. They were all in the branch that we now call "birds", of course. They weren't big or specialized. The best modern equivalent would probably be something like a crow, one of the ultimate "generalist" species. The surviving mammals were all more or less like rats and shrews, of course. In the next such disaster, it'll be mostly species like those that survive.
Humans are generalists, of course. But in a similar disaster, we'd probably be at a disadvantage to crows and rats. This is mostly because of our size, which will be a problem in a world with a shortage of food. But our brain does give us an advantage, so maybe we'd survive.
Anyway, another asteroid impact will happen. Maybe next week, maybe 100 million years from now, but it's coming. Astronomers know of around 1000 rocks with sizes > 1 km in Earth-crossing orbits, and reasonable estimates are another 500-1000 more exist. That's actually not very many, and chances of an impact in any one year are quite small. But some of them are going to hit our planet some time in the future.
Maybe some of us will be alive to see it
Corporate blogging isn't very new. Of course, it's often called "astroturfing".
OTOH, some companies' web sites include user-feedback pages that are a form of blog. Some of these can be very useful if you're using the company's products. But you could argue that this is something different from what the phrase "corporate blog" implies. If such a forum is useful, it probably isn't actually controlled by the corporation. The corporation merely supplies the web space and software to support the discussion.
As a very special case, lots of ISPs supply Usenet, and they almost always create a set of newsgroups dealing with the ISP itself. This really is a form of blog, and can be a very practical approach. Again, this dates from the early days of ISPs.
Proof has been constantly cited since the 70s and yet all the dire predictions have come to naught.
True perhaps for parts of the mass media, but not at all for scientists.
Most of the climate models have been predicting that, under even the most extreme industrial-output scenarios, the Antarctic ice cap will last for many centuries. The Arctic ice should last at least a few centuries, though in the past decade its thinning has accelerated past what most of the models predicted, and it may only last another century now.
But it doesn't take melting of all polar ice to get a disaster. Estimates are that Antarctic melting could raise the oceans by at least 60-80 meters. Even a 10-meter rise would flood out most coastal cities, and that would be disaster enough for most people.
Some models show Antarctic ice producing a drop in sea levels. The explanation is simple: Antarctica is basically a high, cold desert. Precipitation is very low, and the ice cap exists basically because the little snow that falls never melts. Most climate models predict that rising temperatures will increase evaporation, and thus will increase precipitation in most areas. If Antarctica sees an increase of precipitation but stays below freezing, its glaciers will start growing in thickness. But the models are rather weak in this area, and you'd have problems finding any climatologist willing to put money on this outcome.
Note also most of the Arctic ice is sea ice, so its melting won't raise ocean levels by much. Only the ice on land (Greenland, Antarctica and many smaller islands) will do that. The Greenland ice corresponds to about a 5-meter rise in sea level, and it is melting fairly quickly now.
You can see one (moderately conservative) estimate at this USGS page. Google can find more, though it takes a bit of digging. (And you'll learn a lot about the science in the process.)
My favorite example of a "disaster" from warming is the impending loss of one of my favorite geography trivia questions: What are the two places in the world where there are glaciers on the equator? Most people guess one place fairly quickly. (They usually say Mt Kilamanjaro rather than Mt Kenya/Kirinyaga, but that's close enough.) They usually don't get the other place for some reason. Anyway, current predictions are that the glaciers in both of these places will be gone in 2 or 3 decades. So you'd better visit them while you still can.
President George W. Bush disagrees with this. Therefore more study is needed.
...".
It sounds like he has read the well-known advice to scientists that the most important part of any scientific paper is the paragraph near the end which begins "Further research is needed
Let's see; there's gotta be a name for humor based on stating something that's true. Anyone know the right term for this?
Of course, GWB does have somewhat of a history of supporting something publicly then, behind the scene, blocking the funding. It's not clear that his administration will push for funding of climate studies that are highly likely to give the wrong results.
I found and installed flashblock. It seems to do a good job of blocking. Unfortunately, the "click to see the flash content" doesn't seem to work. Now, it tells me that the flash plugin doesn't exist. It does exist, of course, and about:plugins shows it, but it still tells me that it doesn't exist.