"Send from my iPad" and "Sent from my iPhone"
These sigs are all just shameless advertising.
Yeah, but they're put there by the software, and most users don't know that they're being sent, and wouldn't have a clue about turning them off.
My wife has an iPhone, and is reasonably computer-literate, but she didn't know whether her email from the phone included that ad. We did a test, and sure enough, it was in what I received, though she never saw it on her screen. She doesn't know how to turn it off, but I've challenged her to try to find out.;-)
(Actually, she rarely uses the iPhone's email app; she just uses the gmail app. She can read that from anywhere, on any computer.)
... I've just started a contract at a very small company.... Reply all works just fine for what we need.
You've probably fingered an important part of the problem. In a small organization, where people know each other and are cooperative, reply-all can easily work just fine. The occasional "Oops!" moment is an occasion for good humor, not something that drags down productivity. What you described is exactly what reply-all was designed for.
But in organizations with more than a few hundred people, it can easily escalate out of control. This is especially true when there are many levels of management, since it's normal for managers to see the length of their collected lists of email addresses as a measure of their importance, and mere workers can easily be afraid to fight the problem by asking to be taken off lists. It's difficult to fight anyway, since the reply-to mechanism typically has no way for people to opt out.
In a rational world, they'd use a set of mailing lists. But that would take more rationality than you find in the management of most corporations. And it would mean paying someone to manage the mailing lists, to keep them working right.
Something like: Are you sure you want to send to 2047 people?
An even better approach would be for the software to present each of those 2047 recipients to the sender in a popup asking "Do you want to send this to ______?", with the "No" button selected by default. So they have to press the "Yes" button 2047 times. Actually, making "Yes" the default would even be useful, if managers insist on it, since they'd still have to hit Return 2047 times.
Years ago, when email was first rising to the business world's consciousness, and I saw a company ask us (a software house that had supplied their email package) if we could do this. I had the fun of implementing it (a 15-minute job), and I saw a lot of "THANK YOU!!!!" messages from the client's people. I've never understood why later email packages didn't pick up on this simple idea. The software is always harrassing users with such verification popups; why not use them in a case where it will actually affect company productivity?;-)
This is about a political/governmental entity, where such things are not called kickbacks; they're called campaign contributions.
(At least that's how it works here in the US, where the courts have fully legalized it. And I've seen a bit of evidence that similar phrases -- translated into the local language of course -- are rapidly being (re)introduced in many other parts of the world. So you need to update your terminology.;-)
It should be noted that "Sandy Island" is a fairly common place name. Try feeding it to google maps; it'll find lots of them. The closest one to where I live (a western suburb of Boston, Massachusetts) is in Hopkinton, just west of I-495's exit 21, about in the middle of Lake Maspenock. From the aerial photo, it looks like a small local park with a swimming beach (probably artificial). It's reachable via Hayward St, which looks to be connected to the "island" by a short causeway. Maybe I should drive there and get a few photos.
Google also returns a web site for Sandy Island, South Carolina, a small island amidst the marshland inland from the state's barrier islands. It has a small African-American community, and is reachable only by boat.
There are hundreds of other Sandy Islands scattered around the world. You might have problems finding them all, though, since they're usually so named in the local language.;-)
Or someone read "12m" to mean "12 miles" rather than "12 meters". Errors of such magnitude have been made occasionally. Of course, they typically get exposed pretty quickly, everyone laughs, a correction is made, and life goes on. Except when it doesn't, because some person or piece of automatic navigation equipment believes the erroneous unit.
It's not really the same at all. A subpoena would usually just give the school officials a copy of her Facebook activity, which they could then only read. With a password, those school officials can also pass as her on Facebook, post comments in her name, edit her contact info, etc.
I'd expect that those officials are very well aware of this. Of course, they'll probably have an employee do the dirty work, so they can honestly testify that they haven't impersonated her.
You'd have to be pretty naive to think that they're not contemplating this.
Of course, it could be interesting if they did this and didn't cover their tracks well enough. Her lawyer could have a bit of fun in court saying that, due to the judge's order, nothing in her Facebook account can now be considered her activity. It could be fun sitting in on a court session where this is debated...
... if you don't like a service there are dozens of alternatives around the globe to choose from....
Yeah, you're right; if someone doesn't like the ISP that has an agreement with your local government to be the sole permitted supplier for your internet, you can just up and move to somewhere that there's an ISP that you like. Then, when they change their policies entirely next month (as their TOS says they have the right to do), you can pick another ISP that you like, and move to its turf.
It's all very free and open. Well, at least if you stay within the national boundaries of wherever you currently live. There are serious consequences to just "up and moving" across national borders nearly everywhere in the world.
Perhaps it might help to point out that people are using "skeptic" with two rather different meanings in this discussion. The word means something different in common English than it does in technical/scientific English.
In common speech, a "skeptic" is someone who actively disbelieves something. And note that in common speech, "disbelieves" and "doesn't believe" are synonyms.
In technical English, neither of these is true. A skeptic is rather someone who believes that something should be challenged, even if there's pretty good evidence that it's true. There is a lot of scientific history showing the value of challenging accepted theory, and challenges sometimes turn up important exceptions or qualifications. The poster child for this is Einstein's Relativity, which was based on experimenters testing Newton's theories/equations/mechanics, uncovering a number of exceptions. Newton's mechanics are still taught in schools, with the qualification that they're only approximations that are useful under "ordinary" (here on Earth) conditions, but at high speeds or accelerations become inaccurate. Similarly, even the most "devout" believers in climate change will agree that a lot of further research is needed, and our understanding of climate is still rather limited. So there's a lot of room for skepticism withing the field of climatology, if skepticism is taken in its scientific sense of "needing further research" to improve the accuracy of the equations.
The "disbelieves" vs. "doesn't believe" dichotomy is also important. In common speech, everything is typically either true or false. But scientists live in a world where a lot of things are in an "unknown" state. Disbelieving something therefore doesn't mean that you believe it's false. To a scientist, disbelief means that you don't think we know all the facts, and further testing is needed before we accept something as "theory". It's not uncommon for a scientist to express disbelief in even their own results, and insist that further research is needed. (Funding organizations are very familiar with this phenomomenon.;-)
One of the clear cases of a long-lasting state of disbelief was back in the 1980s, when as a result of recent paleontological discoveries, birds were finally reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs. This wasn't a new idea; it was suggested back in the 19th century by none other than Charles Darwin, as well as by numerous colleagues. The similarities between those newly-discovered dinosaur fossils and bird skeletons couldn't be missed, and the discovery of the few Archeopteryx fossils in Germany just added to the suspicion that they were close relatives. But until the 1970s, no further ancient bird fossils were found. So scientists said "Yeah, it looks like a real possibility, but we need a lot more evidence." Most biologists expected that it would be found true, but they remained officially skeptics until more evidence turned up. Then Mao died, China opened up to field research, and several beds of ancient avian fossils were found there. After a few decades and a few thousand more avian fossils, the skeptics finally said "Yeah; we've got the evidence now", and what everyone suspected all along was made official theory. But this followed more than a century of skepticism on the part of most biologists.
Also, note that some biologists continue to express skepticism about the bird-dinosaur link. It's mostly of a pro-forma nature, but it's generally considered proper if done scientifically. Compared to other kinds of critters, birds still have a very sketchy fossil record. Their thin bones just don't fossilize well. So various biologists continue to challenge the details of the classification, with the hope that funding will be found to collect the evidence. Thus, recent DNA studies have verified that the ratites are birds and not a separate branch of dinosaurs. Other studies have shown that cockatiels really are close relatives of cockatoos, and not an independent early bra
Hey, I see you got moderated funny+flamebait+insightful. Congratulations! I've been trying for that (possibly with informative rather than insightful) for years, and I've never succeeded. I'm really envious.;-)
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
It might be interesting to read about a comparative study of bullying in private vs. public schools. I've had friends who went to both, and from that small sample, I'd guess that there's not a lot of significance to the public/private labels. It depends on the people running the school.
I got sent entirely to public schools. But I also learned at an early age to make friends with the school's authorities, and mention the bullying topic to them when there were opportunities. There were usually adults around who were interested, and wanted to help protect the kids. On several occasions, I and a few other kids worked with the cooperative adults to "entrap" some of the bullies, by enticing them into physical attacks when there were adult witnesses in a position to watch. There were interesting effects when they then reported the incidents to the bullies' parents and to the local legal authorities.
But this doesn't always work. As others have mentioned, sometimes there are no adults in a school who care, and sometimes they're even bullies and/or molesters themselves. It can be sorta difficult for a child to handle such situations successfully.
I did have one friend who ran into this in a private academy, where the local legal authorities were even unwilling to get involved with the school. After a couple of years, his parents understood the problem, pulled him out, and he did a lot better in the local public school.
(British readers should swap the terms "public" and "private" in this discussion. It's an interesting different between the dialects of English.;-)
Haha way to exemplify the dude's point. "Creationism" and "Climate change" aren't religious or political issues. They're just anti-evidence ignorance....
Yup, and that in turn is tied to the widespread anti-intellectualism in the US. Or, as I heard it when I was a kid, the widespread dislike of "book learnin'". And it's not always just an abstract (or religious) argument.
I recall an incident when I was a teenager. Due to the dry summers where we lived (a suburb of Seattle), my dad installed some rain barrels below the house's downspouts, and the water was used to water the lawn and gardens. Partway through the summer, I noticed the little "wigglers" in the barrels. So I mentioned to my parents that we had mosquito larvae, and we might want to do something to get rid of them. Their reaction was "What???" They'd never heard of mosquito larvae, and it sounded like a technical term to them. They knew what mosquitos were, but didn't believe for a second that the little wigglers had anything to do with mosquitos. They demanded that I tell them where I'd learned such a stupid idea. They accused me of learning it from books, and when I admitted it. They firmly ordered me to shut up about it, and not to touch the barrels. So our yard became a breeding area for local mosquitos.
Of course, I had a fleeting temptation to report them to the local health authorities. But I didn't, because I understood quite well what it would to do my "family life". And the little critters continued to breed in our yard.
This isn't an abstract problem. Here in New England, we now have a problem with eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), which is carried by mosquitos. Worldwide, many of the worst diseases are spread by the local mosquitos. The above story was a clear case where the locals' anti-intellectualism was a clear danger to public health. I'd suggest that if you do surveys of the topic here in New England, you'll find a part of the population that is similarly maintaining the mosquito population and similarly rejecting the stupid intellectual idea that they are doing so. Anti-intellectualism is alive and flourishing in the US.
Evolution and climate change can be dismissed as remote in time and unimportant intellectual exercises. But EEE is a present danger, and it's being aided and abetted by the intentional ignorance of a part of the population. Similarly, medical people have been prevented from eradicating several diseases (e.g. measles and polio) by the know-nothingism in several parts of the world dominated by religious people. You can argue all you like that it's not the religious doctrines that are at fault, but that doesn't change the fact that very often the religion is used as an excuse by the powerful to impose ignorance on the population.
Venice was a first-world country. Now you can swim in its streets.
Yeah, except that Venice has a long history of abandoning the bottom floors of their buildings and building upwards, as they slowly sink into the muck that underlies the city. Doing this with a few landmark cathedrals won't be easy, but the rest of the buildings can be handled by filling the basements and canal bottoms with rocks, and adding the new floor at the top that they've been talking about for decades.
For the rest of us without such a local history, it probably won't be so easy. How easily can the New Yorkers abandon their cars and subways, and switch to gondolas?;-)
Who gives a crap about whether it is "natural" anymore?...
Maybe we should all care. After all, if it's "natural", that means that despite all our efforts, the climate is ignoring us and there's nothing we can do about it. But if it's primarily "anthropogenic" (human-caused), then we have the power to overcome the natural forces and make the climate do what we want. If we can figure out what we want.
The anti-AGW crowd are essentially fatalists, criticising us for believing that we can take control of the climate. And a good part of the reason that scientists have come out to warn us all of what their data shows we're doing to the planet is that the scientists understand that we now actually do have the ability (knowledge and technology) to control the climate. We're in fact doing it. The problem is that there's nobody at the steering wheel. And the Deniers are trying to keep it that way.
Of course, climate is something that's mostly a global phenomenon. Trying to control it at a local level, even for such giant localities as the US, Russia, China, etc., is doomed to failure. We can only control the climate at a global level, and on a rather slow time scale. But humans aren't good at organizing on a global scale. We're not even very good at organizing small states, much less an entire planet. So we can expect the problems to continue, our climate zooming around wildly, with nobody at the wheel.
We should be pointing out that, with stories like this, saying "100% match" does not mean that they tested 100% of his DNA, and it all matched. What it means is that they tested an unknown fraction of his DNA, probably much less that 1% of it, and that tiny portion matched.
Media reporting of statistical results like this are generally guilty of exaggerating the "percent match" by orders of magnitude. They may know that the testing wasn't of 100% of the evidence, and in such cases, phrasing such as what's in this summary is used knowing full well that it will be misinterpreted by most readers. (I almost typed "100% of readers" there.;-) In many cases, the reporters have so little understanding of statistics and DNA testing that they probably thought that all the DNA was tested, and it all matched. They're just incompetent to report on the topic. But that doesn't prevent them from reporting, and their words get repeated with very rarely any questions about their accuracy.
LOL facebook is for middle aged women to check every 15 seconds for new pixs...
Maybe, but if so, this doesn't make sense. I know lots of middle-aged women, and I doubt if any of them would be offended by the cartoon in question. Small dots for the nipples in a cartoon outline of breasts is not anything I'd expect to offend any woman, except maybe the most inhibited sort of religious fundie types, and usually not even them.
How in the world could anyone at facebook thought this cartoon would offend (or sexually excite;-) anyone except a real extremist?
And no, I don't think it was done by software without human help. We're talking about an image of a cartoon here. If the software is able to recognize a curved line with a dot somewhere inside, it would be giving false positives to half the images posted. The censorship has to have been OK'd by a human.
Maybe they were just "tweaking" the system, by OK'ing an image that, under the most extreme interpretation just happened to fit one of the more absurd of FB's censorship rules, with the hope that this sort of controversy would result. Enforcing some extreme "letter of the law" can sometimes be an effective way to get the "law" changed.
Sorry; I don't have any gold for sale right now. But I may be able to offer you a good price on a bridge in New York (only slightly damaged by Sandy).
Actually, the gold business has an amusing case of how screwed-up the "American" (aka English aka Imperial) system of measurement is. An old children's riddle is "What weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?" Kids will often say that gold is heavier, in which case the questioner taunts them with the answer that both weigh a pound.
But this isn't actually correct. Gold (and a few other precious metals) are weighed with a "pound" that is only 12 ounces, rather than the 16-ounce pound that's used for most other commodities. So a pound of gold only weighs 3/4 as much as a pound of feathers or bricks or tomatoes or beef.
Ya gotta appreciate the sheer insanity of the people who developed a measuring system with things like this.
Then there's the fact that a "fluid ounce" isn't even the same sort of measuring unit as a plain "ounce". One is a measure of weight; the other is a measure of volume. Can you say which is which without looking it up? Most Americans can't, not even the ones who support this measurement so-called "system".
Except the genetics testers have verified that most of the genetic diversity of humans is found in Africa; Caucasians and Asians (including native Americans and Australian Abos) are inbred twigs of the genetic tree in comparison.
So "African" includes a large number of branches of the Homo sapiens species, and interbreeding between the various African branches is as much "impure" as when they mix with Caucasians or Asians.
Actually, it's not even that simple. Thus, Europeans were much less diverse than they are now roughly 2500 years ago. But the Romans and Arabs brought a large number of black Africans north as slaves over the centuries, producing a Mediterranean population that is noticeable darker than the populations farther north. This amounts to a second African "invasion" of Europe, after the Cro-Magnon invasion around 30,000 years ago. It significantly increased the genetic diversity of Europe (which led to hybrid vigor that may well have helped trigger the European conquest of the rest of the world 500 years ago).
It's probably easier to simply observe that we're all one species, and the subspecies variations are mostly superficial in the literal meaning of that term. After all, it's mostly skin-deep differences that we're talking about.
We are a very amorous species and will mate with anything regardless of race, color, or creed.
I was going to add species but then realized it really shoud be kingdom.
I was going to agree with you, but then I realized that just this afternoon, I helped two of my potted hot pepper plants pollinate each other. They have to come inside for the winter, because despite global warming, it's still not warm enough here in New England for them to survive a winter, and there aren't any good pollinators inside the house. Anyway, it occurs to me that one might very well classify my dabbing their flowers with a Q-tip to transport their pollen to each other could be considered an inter-species sexual three-way, and they're a different kingdom than I am.
Of course, I didn't get much sexual gratification from the act. I'll just get some nice spiciness in my food in a month or two. Or maybe our pet parrots will get it first. The little darlings did strip one of the peppers of all but one of its fruit just last week. That one (all of 12 cm tall) is now in a place behind a bigger plant that the birds probably won't notice.
Hmmm... What's the chance that the geeks hereabout will classify that as inter-kingdom oral sex?
I just wish we could go metric, like the rest of the fucking world.
Back in the 1980s, there was a fun NPR (National Public Radio) article on the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric". As part of the article, they explained what this really meant.
Actually, there have been two major historic changes in US law that could be called "going metric". The first was in the 1840s, when Congress passed a law saying in effect that no contract could be declared in breach if either party used metric measurements. This effectively made the metric system legal for all commercial and legal purposes. It didn't require the use of metric units, but then, very few countries have ever done that. What typically happens is that the government declares the metric system legal, and most businesses switch to it for convenience in dealing with the rest of the world. In the US, this didn't happen, mostly because the US has long been a relatively isolated "market", with only a few percent of its trade with foreign businesses. So until most suppliers used metric units, it wasn't in a business's interest to do so.
The change in the 1880s was different. What happened then was that the US's standards bureau (NIST nowadays, but it changes its name every few decades) decided it was time to do their periodic update of all measurement standards. Most government standards bodies do this, because their primary reason for existence is to say "If you use the unit X, you must use the following definition, or you'll be legally guilty of fraud". They rarely decree that you must must use unit X; their job is rather to maintain and publish the legal definitions of all units of measurement, typically using the currently best definition that their engineers know of.
In the 1880s, the US's standards bureau decided that the metric system's units, as defined in Paris, had become the highest-precision and most reliable units. So they published a new definition of all American units in terms of metric units. This meant, for example, that the legal definition of the inch in the US became 2.56 cm. That's not an approximation with more digits; it's exact because the standards bureau says so. This meant that the metric system was legally the basis of American units of measurement, and we were officially "on the metric system". It's an "extended" metric system, of course, with both centimeters and inches, grams and ounces, etc., but the metric units became the basic units at that time, and all non-metric units were redefined in metric terms.
And American business continued to use its traditional units of measurement, though they were now all defined as multiples of metric units. Again, there was no reason to convert until all your other related businesses converted.
But the change is happening, slowly. I've found that, with time, it's more and more convenient to use metric tools. I don't buy measuring tapes or rulers unless they have cm and mm markings in addition to those clumsy foot/inch markings. Some recent improvements in our house were mostly done using the metric markings on the tools. And I've noticed that most things sold in hardware stores with "American" units are actually made with metric measurements; the American units are actually just approximations. If you like to tinker with your car, it's been years since you needed any non-metric tools in the US, unless you have a pre-1980 "vintage" car.
What's pushing the change is the fact that American commerce is slowly becoming more and more international. As more things are imported, or have imported components, their measurements are round numbers in metric units and "weird" numbers in American units. And, as others have observed, US schools more and more teach metric first, with the "weird" units an afterthought. This is slowly having the desired effect of pushing the country toward uniformity with the rest of the world.
But, as with England and Canada, we'll probably use
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.
Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.
There is no difference in the legally required accountability when you use someone else's code. If you do this at all, you need to keep good records, or you are opening yourself and your products to serious legal problems. The GPL may "invite" this by making the code easily available, but GPL'd code is copyrighted, and is legally no different from proprietary code in regards to ownership.
Criticising someone because they make their code easy to copy, use, and build on is a rather bizarre sort of negativism. Do you really think it's better that you not be allowed access to the code at all, or that you be charged for non-commercial, personal use?
An honest person would consider it normal to keep track of what usage they make of other people's work, and would give proper credit to their sources. They would consider keeping proper records of such usage just a normal part of creating something new, not an unnecessary burden. Complaining about the need for something that's ethically required is a fairly clear statement of one's character.;-)
(Yes, I do normally work from copies of all software that I "borrow" from someone else, and archive the originals. There are good technical reasons for doing this, in addition to the ethical obligation. I don't consider it a burden at all. And I've often found it useful during debugging. Sometimes the result is that I send bug reports back to the original authors, who usually thank me. And I've similarly thanked people for such info about code that I've made available to the public.;-)
If you're trying to develop a commercial product, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
I think you mean: If you're trying to develop a commercial product by stealing others' code and claiming it's your own, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
GPL code has no legal problems that aren't much larger if you base your work on someone else's proprietary code. GPL merely legalizes your "stealing", but says you must then permit others to "steal" your code as well. With proprietary code, anything you do with it is illegal.
Not that this matters much to the users, who mostly don't ever write any code, much less attempt to sell it.
(There's a long tradition in technical circles of taking insults and turning them into technical jargon. And there's the old saying that copying from one person is plagiarism, but copying from many is research.;-)
You're fools for not protecting your cities, even after they've seen storms and destruction over and over again in the extremely short history of the USA. The kind of foolishness that only Americans can come up with.
Don't know much about the rest of the world's history, do you?;-)
Such shortsightedness is hardly unique to Americans.
Slashdot Mirror
"Send from my iPad" and "Sent from my iPhone" These sigs are all just shameless advertising.
Yeah, but they're put there by the software, and most users don't know that they're being sent, and wouldn't have a clue about turning them off.
My wife has an iPhone, and is reasonably computer-literate, but she didn't know whether her email from the phone included that ad. We did a test, and sure enough, it was in what I received, though she never saw it on her screen. She doesn't know how to turn it off, but I've challenged her to try to find out. ;-)
(Actually, she rarely uses the iPhone's email app; she just uses the gmail app. She can read that from anywhere, on any computer.)
... I've just started a contract at a very small company. ... Reply all works just fine for what we need.
You've probably fingered an important part of the problem. In a small organization, where people know each other and are cooperative, reply-all can easily work just fine. The occasional "Oops!" moment is an occasion for good humor, not something that drags down productivity. What you described is exactly what reply-all was designed for.
But in organizations with more than a few hundred people, it can easily escalate out of control. This is especially true when there are many levels of management, since it's normal for managers to see the length of their collected lists of email addresses as a measure of their importance, and mere workers can easily be afraid to fight the problem by asking to be taken off lists. It's difficult to fight anyway, since the reply-to mechanism typically has no way for people to opt out.
In a rational world, they'd use a set of mailing lists. But that would take more rationality than you find in the management of most corporations. And it would mean paying someone to manage the mailing lists, to keep them working right.
Something like: Are you sure you want to send to 2047 people?
An even better approach would be for the software to present each of those 2047 recipients to the sender in a popup asking "Do you want to send this to ______?", with the "No" button selected by default. So they have to press the "Yes" button 2047 times. Actually, making "Yes" the default would even be useful, if managers insist on it, since they'd still have to hit Return 2047 times.
Years ago, when email was first rising to the business world's consciousness, and I saw a company ask us (a software house that had supplied their email package) if we could do this. I had the fun of implementing it (a 15-minute job), and I saw a lot of "THANK YOU!!!!" messages from the client's people. I've never understood why later email packages didn't pick up on this simple idea. The software is always harrassing users with such verification popups; why not use them in a case where it will actually affect company productivity? ;-)
..and of course It Can't Kick Back.
This is about a political/governmental entity, where such things are not called kickbacks; they're called campaign contributions.
(At least that's how it works here in the US, where the courts have fully legalized it. And I've seen a bit of evidence that similar phrases -- translated into the local language of course -- are rapidly being (re)introduced in many other parts of the world. So you need to update your terminology. ;-)
It should be noted that "Sandy Island" is a fairly common place name. Try feeding it to google maps; it'll find lots of them. The closest one to where I live (a western suburb of Boston, Massachusetts) is in Hopkinton, just west of I-495's exit 21, about in the middle of Lake Maspenock. From the aerial photo, it looks like a small local park with a swimming beach (probably artificial). It's reachable via Hayward St, which looks to be connected to the "island" by a short causeway. Maybe I should drive there and get a few photos.
Google also returns a web site for Sandy Island, South Carolina, a small island amidst the marshland inland from the state's barrier islands. It has a small African-American community, and is reachable only by boat.
There are hundreds of other Sandy Islands scattered around the world. You might have problems finding them all, though, since they're usually so named in the local language. ;-)
Or someone read "12m" to mean "12 miles" rather than "12 meters". Errors of such magnitude have been made occasionally. Of course, they typically get exposed pretty quickly, everyone laughs, a correction is made, and life goes on. Except when it doesn't, because some person or piece of automatic navigation equipment believes the erroneous unit.
It's not really the same at all. A subpoena would usually just give the school officials a copy of her Facebook activity, which they could then only read. With a password, those school officials can also pass as her on Facebook, post comments in her name, edit her contact info, etc.
I'd expect that those officials are very well aware of this. Of course, they'll probably have an employee do the dirty work, so they can honestly testify that they haven't impersonated her.
You'd have to be pretty naive to think that they're not contemplating this.
Of course, it could be interesting if they did this and didn't cover their tracks well enough. Her lawyer could have a bit of fun in court saying that, due to the judge's order, nothing in her Facebook account can now be considered her activity. It could be fun sitting in on a court session where this is debated ...
... if you don't like a service there are dozens of alternatives around the globe to choose from. ...
Yeah, you're right; if someone doesn't like the ISP that has an agreement with your local government to be the sole permitted supplier for your internet, you can just up and move to somewhere that there's an ISP that you like. Then, when they change their policies entirely next month (as their TOS says they have the right to do), you can pick another ISP that you like, and move to its turf.
It's all very free and open. Well, at least if you stay within the national boundaries of wherever you currently live. There are serious consequences to just "up and moving" across national borders nearly everywhere in the world.
This is what you're talking about, right?
Perhaps it might help to point out that people are using "skeptic" with two rather different meanings in this discussion. The word means something different in common English than it does in technical/scientific English.
In common speech, a "skeptic" is someone who actively disbelieves something. And note that in common speech, "disbelieves" and "doesn't believe" are synonyms.
In technical English, neither of these is true. A skeptic is rather someone who believes that something should be challenged, even if there's pretty good evidence that it's true. There is a lot of scientific history showing the value of challenging accepted theory, and challenges sometimes turn up important exceptions or qualifications. The poster child for this is Einstein's Relativity, which was based on experimenters testing Newton's theories/equations/mechanics, uncovering a number of exceptions. Newton's mechanics are still taught in schools, with the qualification that they're only approximations that are useful under "ordinary" (here on Earth) conditions, but at high speeds or accelerations become inaccurate. Similarly, even the most "devout" believers in climate change will agree that a lot of further research is needed, and our understanding of climate is still rather limited. So there's a lot of room for skepticism withing the field of climatology, if skepticism is taken in its scientific sense of "needing further research" to improve the accuracy of the equations.
The "disbelieves" vs. "doesn't believe" dichotomy is also important. In common speech, everything is typically either true or false. But scientists live in a world where a lot of things are in an "unknown" state. Disbelieving something therefore doesn't mean that you believe it's false. To a scientist, disbelief means that you don't think we know all the facts, and further testing is needed before we accept something as "theory". It's not uncommon for a scientist to express disbelief in even their own results, and insist that further research is needed. (Funding organizations are very familiar with this phenomomenon. ;-)
One of the clear cases of a long-lasting state of disbelief was back in the 1980s, when as a result of recent paleontological discoveries, birds were finally reclassified as a branch of the dinosaurs. This wasn't a new idea; it was suggested back in the 19th century by none other than Charles Darwin, as well as by numerous colleagues. The similarities between those newly-discovered dinosaur fossils and bird skeletons couldn't be missed, and the discovery of the few Archeopteryx fossils in Germany just added to the suspicion that they were close relatives. But until the 1970s, no further ancient bird fossils were found. So scientists said "Yeah, it looks like a real possibility, but we need a lot more evidence." Most biologists expected that it would be found true, but they remained officially skeptics until more evidence turned up. Then Mao died, China opened up to field research, and several beds of ancient avian fossils were found there. After a few decades and a few thousand more avian fossils, the skeptics finally said "Yeah; we've got the evidence now", and what everyone suspected all along was made official theory. But this followed more than a century of skepticism on the part of most biologists.
Also, note that some biologists continue to express skepticism about the bird-dinosaur link. It's mostly of a pro-forma nature, but it's generally considered proper if done scientifically. Compared to other kinds of critters, birds still have a very sketchy fossil record. Their thin bones just don't fossilize well. So various biologists continue to challenge the details of the classification, with the hope that funding will be found to collect the evidence. Thus, recent DNA studies have verified that the ratites are birds and not a separate branch of dinosaurs. Other studies have shown that cockatiels really are close relatives of cockatoos, and not an independent early bra
Hey, I see you got moderated funny+flamebait+insightful. Congratulations! I've been trying for that (possibly with informative rather than insightful) for years, and I've never succeeded. I'm really envious. ;-)
I will say this, I definitely received less bullying at a private school than I believe I would've at the local public school. I never felt like I should underperform in order to fit in better or to avoid bullying.
It might be interesting to read about a comparative study of bullying in private vs. public schools. I've had friends who went to both, and from that small sample, I'd guess that there's not a lot of significance to the public/private labels. It depends on the people running the school.
I got sent entirely to public schools. But I also learned at an early age to make friends with the school's authorities, and mention the bullying topic to them when there were opportunities. There were usually adults around who were interested, and wanted to help protect the kids. On several occasions, I and a few other kids worked with the cooperative adults to "entrap" some of the bullies, by enticing them into physical attacks when there were adult witnesses in a position to watch. There were interesting effects when they then reported the incidents to the bullies' parents and to the local legal authorities.
But this doesn't always work. As others have mentioned, sometimes there are no adults in a school who care, and sometimes they're even bullies and/or molesters themselves. It can be sorta difficult for a child to handle such situations successfully.
I did have one friend who ran into this in a private academy, where the local legal authorities were even unwilling to get involved with the school. After a couple of years, his parents understood the problem, pulled him out, and he did a lot better in the local public school.
(British readers should swap the terms "public" and "private" in this discussion. It's an interesting different between the dialects of English. ;-)
Haha way to exemplify the dude's point. "Creationism" and "Climate change" aren't religious or political issues. They're just anti-evidence ignorance. ...
Yup, and that in turn is tied to the widespread anti-intellectualism in the US. Or, as I heard it when I was a kid, the widespread dislike of "book learnin'". And it's not always just an abstract (or religious) argument.
I recall an incident when I was a teenager. Due to the dry summers where we lived (a suburb of Seattle), my dad installed some rain barrels below the house's downspouts, and the water was used to water the lawn and gardens. Partway through the summer, I noticed the little "wigglers" in the barrels. So I mentioned to my parents that we had mosquito larvae, and we might want to do something to get rid of them. Their reaction was "What???" They'd never heard of mosquito larvae, and it sounded like a technical term to them. They knew what mosquitos were, but didn't believe for a second that the little wigglers had anything to do with mosquitos. They demanded that I tell them where I'd learned such a stupid idea. They accused me of learning it from books, and when I admitted it. They firmly ordered me to shut up about it, and not to touch the barrels. So our yard became a breeding area for local mosquitos.
Of course, I had a fleeting temptation to report them to the local health authorities. But I didn't, because I understood quite well what it would to do my "family life". And the little critters continued to breed in our yard.
This isn't an abstract problem. Here in New England, we now have a problem with eastern equine encephalitis (EEE), which is carried by mosquitos. Worldwide, many of the worst diseases are spread by the local mosquitos. The above story was a clear case where the locals' anti-intellectualism was a clear danger to public health. I'd suggest that if you do surveys of the topic here in New England, you'll find a part of the population that is similarly maintaining the mosquito population and similarly rejecting the stupid intellectual idea that they are doing so. Anti-intellectualism is alive and flourishing in the US.
Evolution and climate change can be dismissed as remote in time and unimportant intellectual exercises. But EEE is a present danger, and it's being aided and abetted by the intentional ignorance of a part of the population. Similarly, medical people have been prevented from eradicating several diseases (e.g. measles and polio) by the know-nothingism in several parts of the world dominated by religious people. You can argue all you like that it's not the religious doctrines that are at fault, but that doesn't change the fact that very often the religion is used as an excuse by the powerful to impose ignorance on the population.
Venice was a first-world country. Now you can swim in its streets.
Yeah, except that Venice has a long history of abandoning the bottom floors of their buildings and building upwards, as they slowly sink into the muck that underlies the city. Doing this with a few landmark cathedrals won't be easy, but the rest of the buildings can be handled by filling the basements and canal bottoms with rocks, and adding the new floor at the top that they've been talking about for decades.
For the rest of us without such a local history, it probably won't be so easy. How easily can the New Yorkers abandon their cars and subways, and switch to gondolas? ;-)
Who gives a crap about whether it is "natural" anymore? ...
Maybe we should all care. After all, if it's "natural", that means that despite all our efforts, the climate is ignoring us and there's nothing we can do about it. But if it's primarily "anthropogenic" (human-caused), then we have the power to overcome the natural forces and make the climate do what we want. If we can figure out what we want.
The anti-AGW crowd are essentially fatalists, criticising us for believing that we can take control of the climate. And a good part of the reason that scientists have come out to warn us all of what their data shows we're doing to the planet is that the scientists understand that we now actually do have the ability (knowledge and technology) to control the climate. We're in fact doing it. The problem is that there's nobody at the steering wheel. And the Deniers are trying to keep it that way.
Of course, climate is something that's mostly a global phenomenon. Trying to control it at a local level, even for such giant localities as the US, Russia, China, etc., is doomed to failure. We can only control the climate at a global level, and on a rather slow time scale. But humans aren't good at organizing on a global scale. We're not even very good at organizing small states, much less an entire planet. So we can expect the problems to continue, our climate zooming around wildly, with nobody at the wheel.
We should be pointing out that, with stories like this, saying "100% match" does not mean that they tested 100% of his DNA, and it all matched. What it means is that they tested an unknown fraction of his DNA, probably much less that 1% of it, and that tiny portion matched.
Media reporting of statistical results like this are generally guilty of exaggerating the "percent match" by orders of magnitude. They may know that the testing wasn't of 100% of the evidence, and in such cases, phrasing such as what's in this summary is used knowing full well that it will be misinterpreted by most readers. (I almost typed "100% of readers" there. ;-) In many cases, the reporters have so little understanding of statistics and DNA testing that they probably thought that all the DNA was tested, and it all matched. They're just incompetent to report on the topic. But that doesn't prevent them from reporting, and their words get repeated with very rarely any questions about their accuracy.
LOL facebook is for middle aged women to check every 15 seconds for new pixs ...
Maybe, but if so, this doesn't make sense. I know lots of middle-aged women, and I doubt if any of them would be offended by the cartoon in question. Small dots for the nipples in a cartoon outline of breasts is not anything I'd expect to offend any woman, except maybe the most inhibited sort of religious fundie types, and usually not even them.
How in the world could anyone at facebook thought this cartoon would offend (or sexually excite ;-) anyone except a real extremist?
And no, I don't think it was done by software without human help. We're talking about an image of a cartoon here. If the software is able to recognize a curved line with a dot somewhere inside, it would be giving false positives to half the images posted. The censorship has to have been OK'd by a human.
Maybe they were just "tweaking" the system, by OK'ing an image that, under the most extreme interpretation just happened to fit one of the more absurd of FB's censorship rules, with the hope that this sort of controversy would result. Enforcing some extreme "letter of the law" can sometimes be an effective way to get the "law" changed.
Sorry; I don't have any gold for sale right now. But I may be able to offer you a good price on a bridge in New York (only slightly damaged by Sandy).
Actually, the gold business has an amusing case of how screwed-up the "American" (aka English aka Imperial) system of measurement is. An old children's riddle is "What weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers?" Kids will often say that gold is heavier, in which case the questioner taunts them with the answer that both weigh a pound.
But this isn't actually correct. Gold (and a few other precious metals) are weighed with a "pound" that is only 12 ounces, rather than the 16-ounce pound that's used for most other commodities. So a pound of gold only weighs 3/4 as much as a pound of feathers or bricks or tomatoes or beef.
Ya gotta appreciate the sheer insanity of the people who developed a measuring system with things like this.
Then there's the fact that a "fluid ounce" isn't even the same sort of measuring unit as a plain "ounce". One is a measure of weight; the other is a measure of volume. Can you say which is which without looking it up? Most Americans can't, not even the ones who support this measurement so-called "system".
Hey, my post got an "informative insightful flamebait" mod! That's the first time I've got such an awesome moderation!.
Now I only need to get the ultimate mod, which of course also includes "funny". I've been trying for that combo for years, to no avail. ;-)
The only purebloods left are Africans.
Except the genetics testers have verified that most of the genetic diversity of humans is found in Africa; Caucasians and Asians (including native Americans and Australian Abos) are inbred twigs of the genetic tree in comparison.
So "African" includes a large number of branches of the Homo sapiens species, and interbreeding between the various African branches is as much "impure" as when they mix with Caucasians or Asians.
Actually, it's not even that simple. Thus, Europeans were much less diverse than they are now roughly 2500 years ago. But the Romans and Arabs brought a large number of black Africans north as slaves over the centuries, producing a Mediterranean population that is noticeable darker than the populations farther north. This amounts to a second African "invasion" of Europe, after the Cro-Magnon invasion around 30,000 years ago. It significantly increased the genetic diversity of Europe (which led to hybrid vigor that may well have helped trigger the European conquest of the rest of the world 500 years ago).
It's probably easier to simply observe that we're all one species, and the subspecies variations are mostly superficial in the literal meaning of that term. After all, it's mostly skin-deep differences that we're talking about.
We are a very amorous species and will mate with anything regardless of race, color, or creed.
I was going to add species but then realized it really shoud be kingdom.
I was going to agree with you, but then I realized that just this afternoon, I helped two of my potted hot pepper plants pollinate each other. They have to come inside for the winter, because despite global warming, it's still not warm enough here in New England for them to survive a winter, and there aren't any good pollinators inside the house. Anyway, it occurs to me that one might very well classify my dabbing their flowers with a Q-tip to transport their pollen to each other could be considered an inter-species sexual three-way, and they're a different kingdom than I am.
Of course, I didn't get much sexual gratification from the act. I'll just get some nice spiciness in my food in a month or two. Or maybe our pet parrots will get it first. The little darlings did strip one of the peppers of all but one of its fruit just last week. That one (all of 12 cm tall) is now in a place behind a bigger plant that the birds probably won't notice.
Hmmm ... What's the chance that the geeks hereabout will classify that as inter-kingdom oral sex?
I just wish we could go metric, like the rest of the fucking world.
Back in the 1980s, there was a fun NPR (National Public Radio) article on the non-celebration of the 100th anniversary of the US "going metric". As part of the article, they explained what this really meant.
Actually, there have been two major historic changes in US law that could be called "going metric". The first was in the 1840s, when Congress passed a law saying in effect that no contract could be declared in breach if either party used metric measurements. This effectively made the metric system legal for all commercial and legal purposes. It didn't require the use of metric units, but then, very few countries have ever done that. What typically happens is that the government declares the metric system legal, and most businesses switch to it for convenience in dealing with the rest of the world. In the US, this didn't happen, mostly because the US has long been a relatively isolated "market", with only a few percent of its trade with foreign businesses. So until most suppliers used metric units, it wasn't in a business's interest to do so.
The change in the 1880s was different. What happened then was that the US's standards bureau (NIST nowadays, but it changes its name every few decades) decided it was time to do their periodic update of all measurement standards. Most government standards bodies do this, because their primary reason for existence is to say "If you use the unit X, you must use the following definition, or you'll be legally guilty of fraud". They rarely decree that you must must use unit X; their job is rather to maintain and publish the legal definitions of all units of measurement, typically using the currently best definition that their engineers know of.
In the 1880s, the US's standards bureau decided that the metric system's units, as defined in Paris, had become the highest-precision and most reliable units. So they published a new definition of all American units in terms of metric units. This meant, for example, that the legal definition of the inch in the US became 2.56 cm. That's not an approximation with more digits; it's exact because the standards bureau says so. This meant that the metric system was legally the basis of American units of measurement, and we were officially "on the metric system". It's an "extended" metric system, of course, with both centimeters and inches, grams and ounces, etc., but the metric units became the basic units at that time, and all non-metric units were redefined in metric terms.
And American business continued to use its traditional units of measurement, though they were now all defined as multiples of metric units. Again, there was no reason to convert until all your other related businesses converted.
But the change is happening, slowly. I've found that, with time, it's more and more convenient to use metric tools. I don't buy measuring tapes or rulers unless they have cm and mm markings in addition to those clumsy foot/inch markings. Some recent improvements in our house were mostly done using the metric markings on the tools. And I've noticed that most things sold in hardware stores with "American" units are actually made with metric measurements; the American units are actually just approximations. If you like to tinker with your car, it's been years since you needed any non-metric tools in the US, unless you have a pre-1980 "vintage" car.
What's pushing the change is the fact that American commerce is slowly becoming more and more international. As more things are imported, or have imported components, their measurements are round numbers in metric units and "weird" numbers in American units. And, as others have observed, US schools more and more teach metric first, with the "weird" units an afterthought. This is slowly having the desired effect of pushing the country toward uniformity with the rest of the world.
But, as with England and Canada, we'll probably use
When your license imposes the overhead costs of a bunch of source archive management, bookkeeping, and so on, it creates incentives to plagiarize for people working on projects that do not turn a profit or for startups.
Once again, we might note that this isn't a property of the GPL; it's just as true for proprietary code. The only real difference is that GPL'd code is usually published openly and comes with a license that lets anyone use the code for free, while you typically have to pay for a license to use proprietary code -- if you can even get a license to use the code.
There is no difference in the legally required accountability when you use someone else's code. If you do this at all, you need to keep good records, or you are opening yourself and your products to serious legal problems. The GPL may "invite" this by making the code easily available, but GPL'd code is copyrighted, and is legally no different from proprietary code in regards to ownership.
Criticising someone because they make their code easy to copy, use, and build on is a rather bizarre sort of negativism. Do you really think it's better that you not be allowed access to the code at all, or that you be charged for non-commercial, personal use?
An honest person would consider it normal to keep track of what usage they make of other people's work, and would give proper credit to their sources. They would consider keeping proper records of such usage just a normal part of creating something new, not an unnecessary burden. Complaining about the need for something that's ethically required is a fairly clear statement of one's character. ;-)
(Yes, I do normally work from copies of all software that I "borrow" from someone else, and archive the originals. There are good technical reasons for doing this, in addition to the ethical obligation. I don't consider it a burden at all. And I've often found it useful during debugging. Sometimes the result is that I send bug reports back to the original authors, who usually thank me. And I've similarly thanked people for such info about code that I've made available to the public. ;-)
If you're trying to develop a commercial product, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
I think you mean: If you're trying to develop a commercial product by stealing others' code and claiming it's your own, best make sure it has no GPL code in it.
GPL code has no legal problems that aren't much larger if you base your work on someone else's proprietary code. GPL merely legalizes your "stealing", but says you must then permit others to "steal" your code as well. With proprietary code, anything you do with it is illegal.
Not that this matters much to the users, who mostly don't ever write any code, much less attempt to sell it.
(There's a long tradition in technical circles of taking insults and turning them into technical jargon. And there's the old saying that copying from one person is plagiarism, but copying from many is research. ;-)
You're fools for not protecting your cities, even after they've seen storms and destruction over and over again in the extremely short history of the USA. The kind of foolishness that only Americans can come up with.
Don't know much about the rest of the world's history, do you? ;-)
Such shortsightedness is hardly unique to Americans.
And Godzilla has destroyed Tokyo how many times? NY only once.
Yeah; New York has much better control of its movie makers; Tokyo has never managed to get the infestation under control.