Decades ago we "knew" that civilization was causing a new ice age.
Maybe a few people "knew" that. But the concensus among scientists was otherwise.
I grew up in the 50's and 60's in the Seattle area, and one thing that was mentioned there is discussions of the topic was that in the Pacific Northwest (roughly British Columbia south to Oregon), the glaciers in the Cascades had been growing for most of the century. This was generally recognized as an anomaly, since nearly everywhere else in the world, the data showed an overall slow warming trend. At the time, none of this was explained, though the general warming was usually attributed in part to human activity.
Since then, we've learned a lot more about climate. Well, scientists have; most of the rest of the world hasn't learned much at all. And the cooling in the Pacific Northwest has ended. I visited there last year, for the first time in about 30 years, and one of the shocks was seeing the iconic Mount Rainier, whose glaciers are much smaller than what they were back around 1970. I also visited the mountain, including Sunrise, which used to be a short trek to the nearest glacier. Now the glaciers are miles away, and there are sizable trees growing around the lodge. This really got the idea across that things were changing.
Of course, if it were just that one area, it wouldn't mean much. But it's the same story in most of the world now. And this wasn't a surprise. It was what climate scientists were describing back then. They just didn't predict that the change would be so fast.
But they are having fun studying and explaining it. The large population with economic and/or religious reasons not to believe it are a bit annoying, but this isn't anything new. The powers that be have never paid any attention to suggestions that they might be doing something with long-term detrimental consequences, even when those consequences are staring them in the face.
Tokyo is sheltered from the sea in an inlet. NYC sticks right out into the Atlantic seaboard. What they do in Tokyo won't work in NYC.
Oh, I dunno about that. I have two Google Maps windows on my screen right now, one of the New York area, the other of the Tokyo area, at the same scale. True, the details are different, but overall they don't seem to be very different in their exposure to the nearby oceans.
If anything, it looks like New York is better protected, especially Manhattan Island. It's at the north end of the 8-mile-lond Upper Bay, which has a rather narrow (~1 mile) opening into the Lower Bay, which in turn has a couple of barrier islands and a lot of continental shelf between Manhattan and the deep ocean.
Tokyo is on the much larger Tokyo Bay, which is rather serpentine, and connected to the Inland Sea by the Uraga channel, around 6 miles wide. But the city area is near the eastern end of the Inland Sea, with no significant continental shelf. So if anything, Tokyo is more exposed, by the closeness of the open ocean and deep water, with wider channels to the central city area.
But overall, they don't look all that different. And Tokyo has the extra problem of being in an active volcanic zone, while New York's geological underpinnings are much older and stabler.
I'd guess that, all things considered, New York's geological, hydrographic and meteorological environment is somewhat safer than Tokyo's, though probably not by much. The general cost of protecting them isn't really all that different.
The difference is that the Japanese are well aware of the dangers inherent in their natural environment, while New Yorkers are either oblivious or arrogantly sure that God/Nature/whatever is on their side. The Japanese weren't all that surprised by the recent epic earthquake and tsunami. New Yorkers seem surprised and offended that the natural world could do something catastrophic to them.
... if after this you see any lawyers alleging breach of patent, kill the[m].
And you can do this without even worrying about violating a "business method" patent. After all, there is prior art going back centuries. Thus, in Henry VI Part 2, the character Dick says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That dates to 1591, which should be old enough that it's now public domain.
"We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average"
So if there are, say, only 0.1 suits per patent, a startup trying to market their own smartphone will only have to win 25,000 court cases, and they'll then be free to sell it on the "Open Market".
It may not be immediately obvious to all readers how this qualifies as promoting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the phrase goes.
... [Nate Silver] debunked the 'Bradley Effect' years ago.
Perhaps. But not in as funny a way as the explanation of the wins by Obama in 2008, and by Kennedy way back in 1960.
Before the 1960 election, lots of pundits said he couldn't win, because there were millions of Americans who would never vote for a Catholic. After he won, investigations turned up the explanation that there were in fact millions of voters who would never vote for a Catholic, but they were also people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So his being a Catholic didn't actually lose him any votes.
The same explanation has been proposed for Obama's wins. For those who can't figure it out, the explanation is: Yes, there are millions of Americans who would never vote for a black man (or woman). But they are mostly people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So being a black candidate running as a Democrat doesn't lose you hardly any votes.
I'm not sure whether the people making this argument are pulling our legs or not. But if you have a sense of humor about such matters, you may find it funny.
I also have friends who claim that they're sufficiently anti-PC that they'll tell pollsters outrageous things like "I won't vote for him because he's _____" (fill in the blank. They do this even when they are planning to vote for him, because they enjoy playing with pollsters' minds. Well, at least they claim to say things like this to pollsters.
I've never done this, because I've never actually been called by a pollster. Maybe they look at my info, and decide I'm not an appropriate random person for their questions...
The expression is couldn't care less. Learn to use your language properly.
In political discussions, that's about as likely as is valid statistical math. ("We have a sample of one. That's good enough for a trend.";-)
Face it; you've long since lost that battle. Nobody but the language peevers and a few linguists care at all about such trivia. English is as full of idioms ("phrase whose actual meaning can't be determined from the meanings of its component words") as any other human language. This has been true since before it was called "English", and it'll be true even when that name is no longer used for its descendants.
A few years back, I experimented with a lot of editors (and terminal emulators), when I got seriously involved in i18n (internationalization) efforts. I was at that time unable to find any editor that handled UTF-8 encoding as sanely as vim, so I've stuck with that. It'd be interesting to know if there are other editors that do a good job with mixed writing systems these days. Others have to have worked on it, but I haven't found time to repeat my investigations (which were a really frustrating time sink).
I also tested out a lot of terminal emulators. I'd long preferred xterm, because of all its nice features (except for its confused, inconsistent command line args;-), but I gave up on it when I found myself dealing with some documents that mixed English, Chinese and Arabic writing. I found that xterm could do Chinese in only a few font sizes, and Arabic in only a few font sizes -- and the lists didn't overlap. Also, xterm sometimes insisted on showing Arabic and Hebrew text left-to-right. I couldn't find a font size that would correctly display a page with both Chinese and Arabic text. Of course, most others couldn't handle one or the other of these alone, and most were really crappy for right-to-left writing. But the linux and apple "Terminal" terminal emulators could both handle the job, so I've been using those.
I'm still looking for a way to remotely edit such mixed-writing docs remotely over an ssh link, without it occasionally going insane and forcing me to do a "kill -9" on the terminal process to recover. Again, the linux and apple terminals seem to do the best job of this, but they both sometimes go insane for no obvious reason; killing them and repeating the operations in a new terminal window usually "fixes" the problem.
It's been a couple of decades now since Ken solved our charset problems. Why is it taking so long to produce versions of things like editors and text display "terminal" windows that do it right?
Maybe moving to a "browser as OS" approach is what is needed. This also seems insane, but if the rest of the software world continues to show such contempt for languages other than those that the author(s) speak/read/write, maybe we don't have much choice.
Still, locally I find that vim does a fairly good job with mixed-writing documents. The main problem seems to be the awkwardness of switching between keyboards for non-Latin writing, and the need for ASCII chars for vim commands. If someone has solved this problem, it'd be interesting to read about.
So basically Google wanted to... add a feature which let Google keep track of where every iOS user is. I can understand why Apple wants to make their own maps in the long run.
Actually, Google's map apps have had this "tracking" for years, and they've been very open about it. We've discussed the fact here before. This tracking is the basis of the Google traffic reports. The folks at Google have explained from the start that this feature gets its traffic info primarily from the cell phones running Google map apps, which uses the GPS data not only to show you where you are on the map, but to report to their traffic-control database where your phone is and how fast it's moving. This info is summarized, and sent to the other phones' mapping software to color the roads green, yellow or red. (And you can turn off this "tracking" by exiting the Maps program.;-)
One of their frustrations right at the start was that, although the Google Maps app was on the iPhones, for several years Apple blocked this "tracking", so iPhones were in effect leeching off the Google (Android) traffic info without contributing to it. Eventually Apple relented, and allowed the iPhone population to add to the traffic info, significantly improving the coverage and accuracy of the data.
This is a nice example of a "social good". The best traffic reporting system would obviously collect data from all moving GPS gadgets and make it available to all such gadgets. If individual vendors create "walled gardens" and only allow their gadgetry to communicate with their traffic system, then we get a flock of partial-coverage, low-quality traffic reports.
Apple has once again chosen to take this route, by splitting off from the (currently) best such system. If they had our interests at heart, they'd instead be pushing for a common traffic-reporting database shared and supported by all the vendors. Google's approach here could be described as pushing for such a shared, public database, though their holding part of the API private is an example of them trying to limit the capabilities of competitors.
Thus, Google isn't acting entirely in the public interest here. But they're a lot closer to it than Apple, who are clearly pushing for the "walled garden" approach, to the detriment of everyone except their shareholders. In contrast, Google does make their map API available to the public, no matter which gadget you're using.
If the "public" had any sense, we'd be demanding that these companies pool their traffic-reporting resources into a single publicly-accessible system. But the public (at least here in the US;-) clearly has no sense at all in this matter.
If you like hot peppers, they're an excellent crop for anyone with a sunny window. Some of the tastiest are sold as "decorative" peppers. This term doesn't mean that they're not worth eating; it comes from the fact that peppers like full sun, but many good hot peppers are from small plants that get shaded out in a garden by other, bigger plants. So you grow them in pots that can be put on any sunny level spot, like a porch or patio or window sill. When they get covered with flowers plus green, white, orange, purple and red fruit, they're very decorative. Like sweet peppers, they're edible at any color stage, though the ripest tend to be the hottest. The green or white ones are less hot, but this lets the other non-hot pepper flavors come through.
One problem in our household is that, due to my wife's allergies to most furry critters, we share the house with three small parrots. Like most birds, they love hot peppers, and strip them off the plants when we're not watching. So when we take the peppers indoors for the winter, we have to put them in a few sunny windows that the birds can't easily access.
Like tomatoes, peppers like rich soil and lots of water. So give them some compost if you can, don't let them dry out, and you'll have some very pretty, edible crops in a few months. You can use the seeds in any hot pepper that you like, but if you use a store-bought pepper's seeds, you'll have no idea how big the plant will be. So it's better to just ask for a few peppers from someone who's already growing them. Just plant a few of the seeds in each pot, put them in a sunny spot, and keep them watered.
it wouldn't be hard to simply encrypt the transmissions. In today's society this seems like a no-brainer.
Yeah; I'd say that "no-brainer" is a pretty good description of most current management attitudes towards data privacy.
And, to try to avert the usual political stuff, we might observe that it's a good description for both corporate and government management of privacy issues. We don't need privacy (unless we have something to hide;-), but they try hard to keep their behind-the-scenes activities secret from their customers or citizens or whatever they call us.
But I know this won't be much good; we'll inevitably be reading lots of assertions that this is a problem specific to government agencies or private corporations. Or churches or the Boy Scouts or...;-)
Yeah, though it is interesting to contemplate the 3rd alternative: giving a tiny push in the right direction for a long time. Competent engineers can tell you when that'll work. Of course, it does require having the foresight to start pushing a long time before you're face-to-face with a disaster. And people working in large organizations don't have a good history of displaying such foresight.
Various people have observed that we don't need to keep asteroids a long distance away from Earth. In fact, it could be a good show to change a big rock's orbit just enough that it skims the planet's upper atmosphere. Everyone would turn out to watch it, and it'd get across to the population that there are some Dangerous Things Out There that we'll eventually have to face. Right now, it's mostly just the techies (and the sci-fi fans) who take the problem seriously.
It'll be interesting to see if there's any Streisand Effect (google it) from this feeble attempt to suppress the document.
We've all read and heard a lot of opinion on this topic, and there's precious little that passes as Scientific Method in the field of economics. It could be interesting to read criticisms (negative or positive) from actual scientists and statisticians about this document.
Why is Canada such a third-world country when it comes to internet and TV? There is no excuse for these monopolies!
Sure, there is. It's because you (collectively) voted for the politicians who created and maintain the regulatory system that created the mono/duopolies and protects their profits.
It's similar to the setup here down south in the US, with similar results.
The telling part: saying that Obama, Roberts, Sotomayer, Breyer, Ginsberg, Kagan... declared the Federal Govt can force you to buy anything... automatic weapons. I bet you have plenty of guns and ammo...
Actually, I have "bought" a number of automatic weapons in my lifetime, though I don't actually "have" any of them. That is, I paid for them, but the military and police have them. You don't even need to know what country I live in, since that's a universal.
The Google+ app for Android has had this capability for some time now.
Hey, I didn't know about that. I'll have to try it and see how well it works. Thanks for the tipoff.
(Now if we could get quality photos from a phone camera. But that's mostly a hardware problem. They're probably good enough for some purposes. I started to type "decent photos", and realized that that's not what a lot of people are looking for, so I changed "decent" to "quality".;-)
No, he doesn't. They (the hosting company) are the ones who have the needs here. Our informant's only actual "need" is to move to a host with better security. They have shown that they won't/can't provide it, so he should move on.
Sadly (for the rest of their customers), US laws on the subject say that he'd be risking his time and money and possibly freedom if he were to report their incompetence to anyone. In the US, computer security has become a "shoot the messenger" arena, which unfortunately for all of us means that people who know about security problems generally keep quiet about the topic. Or they find ways to monetize their knowledge, though that tends to be rather risky in the long run.
Sometimes the best approach is to just quietly walk away.
That's the issue. On the other hand, dropping paint on the asteroid provides thrust as if powered by a solar panel the size of the painted area, so paintballs > simple rocket.
Well, maybe so, but there's another problem that nobody seems to have faced. Most of those asteroids are rotating, and they all have surfaces that are irregular at every scale. Unless you have very precise topo maps of the asteroid, down to the sub-millimeter scale, you won't be able to precisely calculae the direction of thrust of the paint splotches. And once a splotch is there, if its position is off by even a few cm, it's likely to produce a thrust in a different direction than you wanted.
A rocket that lands and produces thrust would at least be controllable by turning it on and off at different point in the rock's rotation. That's a lot more control than you could get with paint splotches.
If you want to use light pressure, I'd think you'd be far better off going with a flock of little light sails, which would land scattered over the asteroid's surface. Then you could send commands to precisely control which of the little sails are reflecting sunlight, and you'd actually be able to (slowly) make changes in the asteroid's orbit. That would probably be a lot more effective than paintballs or rocket motors.
What am I missing about the paintballs that would make their "thrust" effect predictable and controllable? Without that, they might just steer the asteroid right into your house. Is there some paint that I don't know about, whose color we can control remotely from millions of km away?
Yeah; what this really shows is that our "smart phone" technology is still too limited. The way they should work is that as soon as the photo is taken, it's sent wirelessly to an archive. Perhaps to the owner's home or work computer; perhaps to some "cloud" server. Then the victim can smilingly comply with the cops' order, and delete the photos.
The case I'm expecting to read about soon is when this happens, the photos have been quickly uploaded to the victim's facebook account, and all of his/her friends are watching them. Maybe the phone's microphone will be on, too, so the verbal interaction with the cops will also go directly online.
If this hasn't happened already, it's an indictment of the "walled garden" nature of the cell phone systems. It's easily within the capability of our current phones and the cell-phone system. If it's not happening, it's because the phone companies have blocked the software that enables such scenarios.
(And yes, I did work with a group that implemented just such an "app" a couple of years back. The company that leased us the smart phone -- which shall be unnamed here so you'll suspect it's the company that supplied your phone -- blocked supplying the app to their customers. What's especially upsetting is that our app was designed as a tool for medical emergency people, not for law-enforcement purposes, and they really didn't want us supplying apps that gave medical people quick image transfer between an emergency site and their hospital. But it applies in this mall-cop story, too.;-)
One could argues that it is illegal to see [child porn] in the first place.
You might want to be careful with that. We've already had stories of people being charged with "child porn" by undressing a child, e.g. to change its diaper. It's very easy for child-porn laws to be used against anyone who has a child, at least if they want to keep that child reasonably clean and healthy.
There has been a bit of humor in the past based on such examples of laws that outlaw much more than what the legislators thought they were trying to forbid.
(You may treat this as an invitation to submit your favorite example of such overly-broad laws.;-)
The Golden Rule: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.
I thought the golden rule was that it's not gay if it's in a three-way.
Nah; the Golden Rule is "He who has the gold makes the rules."
This is the real motto of both of the US's major political parties. And the Supreme Court has given the green light to those with the most gold; they can now anonymously "donate" as much as they like to any candidate they like.
Yeah; I'm familiar with a lot of those examples of humans eating insects. But, as far as I've read, it's still true that most humans don't eat insects much. That is, even in places where insects are routinely eaten, they don't seem to actually make up very much of the local human diet. Are there any groups of people who get more than, say, 10% of their calories (or protein) from insect? If so, it could be interesting to read about them.
It's sorta similar to how one could observe that humans "don't eat hot peppers much". Yes, some societies consume a lot of them, as you know if you've ever eaten Mexican or Vietnamese food. But hot peppers are a relatively small fraction (by weight, not flavor) of the diet in those countries, so the "not much" part is still true. It's just a very noticeable small part.
The general conjecture for how the Bible ended up recommending eating one group of insects is based on the fact that the Orthopterans are important agricultural pests in the area where the Bible originated (and in many other parts) of the world), and the main pest species are actually large enough to be worthwhile for humans to gather. During the typical "plague of locusts", one could easily dash out into a field and grab enough of the little critters to make a nutritious, high-protein meal. Whether the local human population could actually make a significant dent in the locust swarm isn't clear, but they could do their small part (along with the gulls, pigeons, crows, lizards, etc.) in cutting back on the crop damage.
Slashdot Mirror
Decades ago we "knew" that civilization was causing a new ice age.
Maybe a few people "knew" that. But the concensus among scientists was otherwise.
I grew up in the 50's and 60's in the Seattle area, and one thing that was mentioned there is discussions of the topic was that in the Pacific Northwest (roughly British Columbia south to Oregon), the glaciers in the Cascades had been growing for most of the century. This was generally recognized as an anomaly, since nearly everywhere else in the world, the data showed an overall slow warming trend. At the time, none of this was explained, though the general warming was usually attributed in part to human activity.
Since then, we've learned a lot more about climate. Well, scientists have; most of the rest of the world hasn't learned much at all. And the cooling in the Pacific Northwest has ended. I visited there last year, for the first time in about 30 years, and one of the shocks was seeing the iconic Mount Rainier, whose glaciers are much smaller than what they were back around 1970. I also visited the mountain, including Sunrise, which used to be a short trek to the nearest glacier. Now the glaciers are miles away, and there are sizable trees growing around the lodge. This really got the idea across that things were changing.
Of course, if it were just that one area, it wouldn't mean much. But it's the same story in most of the world now. And this wasn't a surprise. It was what climate scientists were describing back then. They just didn't predict that the change would be so fast.
But they are having fun studying and explaining it. The large population with economic and/or religious reasons not to believe it are a bit annoying, but this isn't anything new. The powers that be have never paid any attention to suggestions that they might be doing something with long-term detrimental consequences, even when those consequences are staring them in the face.
Tokyo is sheltered from the sea in an inlet. NYC sticks right out into the Atlantic seaboard. What they do in Tokyo won't work in NYC.
Oh, I dunno about that. I have two Google Maps windows on my screen right now, one of the New York area, the other of the Tokyo area, at the same scale. True, the details are different, but overall they don't seem to be very different in their exposure to the nearby oceans.
If anything, it looks like New York is better protected, especially Manhattan Island. It's at the north end of the 8-mile-lond Upper Bay, which has a rather narrow (~1 mile) opening into the Lower Bay, which in turn has a couple of barrier islands and a lot of continental shelf between Manhattan and the deep ocean.
Tokyo is on the much larger Tokyo Bay, which is rather serpentine, and connected to the Inland Sea by the Uraga channel, around 6 miles wide. But the city area is near the eastern end of the Inland Sea, with no significant continental shelf. So if anything, Tokyo is more exposed, by the closeness of the open ocean and deep water, with wider channels to the central city area.
But overall, they don't look all that different. And Tokyo has the extra problem of being in an active volcanic zone, while New York's geological underpinnings are much older and stabler.
I'd guess that, all things considered, New York's geological, hydrographic and meteorological environment is somewhat safer than Tokyo's, though probably not by much. The general cost of protecting them isn't really all that different.
The difference is that the Japanese are well aware of the dangers inherent in their natural environment, while New Yorkers are either oblivious or arrogantly sure that God/Nature/whatever is on their side. The Japanese weren't all that surprised by the recent epic earthquake and tsunami. New Yorkers seem surprised and offended that the natural world could do something catastrophic to them.
Actually, I'm pretty sure he meant, "hungry, man-eating beasts". Now do all of you see the importance of a comma?
Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
... if after this you see any lawyers alleging breach of patent, kill the[m].
And you can do this without even worrying about violating a "business method" patent. After all, there is prior art going back centuries. Thus, in Henry VI Part 2, the character Dick says "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." That dates to 1591, which should be old enough that it's now public domain.
"We are actually witnessing fewer patent suits per patent issued today than the historical average"
So if there are, say, only 0.1 suits per patent, a startup trying to market their own smartphone will only have to win 25,000 court cases, and they'll then be free to sell it on the "Open Market".
It may not be immediately obvious to all readers how this qualifies as promoting the "Progress of Science and useful Arts", as the phrase goes.
... [Nate Silver] debunked the 'Bradley Effect' years ago.
Perhaps. But not in as funny a way as the explanation of the wins by Obama in 2008, and by Kennedy way back in 1960.
Before the 1960 election, lots of pundits said he couldn't win, because there were millions of Americans who would never vote for a Catholic. After he won, investigations turned up the explanation that there were in fact millions of voters who would never vote for a Catholic, but they were also people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So his being a Catholic didn't actually lose him any votes.
The same explanation has been proposed for Obama's wins. For those who can't figure it out, the explanation is: Yes, there are millions of Americans who would never vote for a black man (or woman). But they are mostly people who would also never vote for a Democrat. So being a black candidate running as a Democrat doesn't lose you hardly any votes.
I'm not sure whether the people making this argument are pulling our legs or not. But if you have a sense of humor about such matters, you may find it funny.
I also have friends who claim that they're sufficiently anti-PC that they'll tell pollsters outrageous things like "I won't vote for him because he's _____" (fill in the blank. They do this even when they are planning to vote for him, because they enjoy playing with pollsters' minds. Well, at least they claim to say things like this to pollsters.
I've never done this, because I've never actually been called by a pollster. Maybe they look at my info, and decide I'm not an appropriate random person for their questions ...
The expression is couldn't care less. Learn to use your language properly.
In political discussions, that's about as likely as is valid statistical math. ("We have a sample of one. That's good enough for a trend." ;-)
Face it; you've long since lost that battle. Nobody but the language peevers and a few linguists care at all about such trivia. English is as full of idioms ("phrase whose actual meaning can't be determined from the meanings of its component words") as any other human language. This has been true since before it was called "English", and it'll be true even when that name is no longer used for its descendants.
A few years back, I experimented with a lot of editors (and terminal emulators), when I got seriously involved in i18n (internationalization) efforts. I was at that time unable to find any editor that handled UTF-8 encoding as sanely as vim, so I've stuck with that. It'd be interesting to know if there are other editors that do a good job with mixed writing systems these days. Others have to have worked on it, but I haven't found time to repeat my investigations (which were a really frustrating time sink).
I also tested out a lot of terminal emulators. I'd long preferred xterm, because of all its nice features (except for its confused, inconsistent command line args ;-), but I gave up on it when I found myself dealing with some documents that mixed English, Chinese and Arabic writing. I found that xterm could do Chinese in only a few font sizes, and Arabic in only a few font sizes -- and the lists didn't overlap. Also, xterm sometimes insisted on showing Arabic and Hebrew text left-to-right. I couldn't find a font size that would correctly display a page with both Chinese and Arabic text. Of course, most others couldn't handle one or the other of these alone, and most were really crappy for right-to-left writing. But the linux and apple "Terminal" terminal emulators could both handle the job, so I've been using those.
I'm still looking for a way to remotely edit such mixed-writing docs remotely over an ssh link, without it occasionally going insane and forcing me to do a "kill -9" on the terminal process to recover. Again, the linux and apple terminals seem to do the best job of this, but they both sometimes go insane for no obvious reason; killing them and repeating the operations in a new terminal window usually "fixes" the problem.
It's been a couple of decades now since Ken solved our charset problems. Why is it taking so long to produce versions of things like editors and text display "terminal" windows that do it right?
Maybe moving to a "browser as OS" approach is what is needed. This also seems insane, but if the rest of the software world continues to show such contempt for languages other than those that the author(s) speak/read/write, maybe we don't have much choice.
Still, locally I find that vim does a fairly good job with mixed-writing documents. The main problem seems to be the awkwardness of switching between keyboards for non-Latin writing, and the need for ASCII chars for vim commands. If someone has solved this problem, it'd be interesting to read about.
emacs is hidelously over-complicated. emacs is also terribly overfeatured and violates the UNIX philosphy of "do one thing, do it well".
I much prefer to express it with the old comment that emacs is a great operating system; too bad it comes with such a crappy editor.
I've forgotten who originated that one. Of course, you see all sorts of variants, insulting its editor in as many ways as you can imagine.
So basically Google wanted to ... add a feature which let Google keep track of where every iOS user is. I can understand why Apple wants to make their own maps in the long run.
Actually, Google's map apps have had this "tracking" for years, and they've been very open about it. We've discussed the fact here before. This tracking is the basis of the Google traffic reports. The folks at Google have explained from the start that this feature gets its traffic info primarily from the cell phones running Google map apps, which uses the GPS data not only to show you where you are on the map, but to report to their traffic-control database where your phone is and how fast it's moving. This info is summarized, and sent to the other phones' mapping software to color the roads green, yellow or red. (And you can turn off this "tracking" by exiting the Maps program. ;-)
One of their frustrations right at the start was that, although the Google Maps app was on the iPhones, for several years Apple blocked this "tracking", so iPhones were in effect leeching off the Google (Android) traffic info without contributing to it. Eventually Apple relented, and allowed the iPhone population to add to the traffic info, significantly improving the coverage and accuracy of the data.
This is a nice example of a "social good". The best traffic reporting system would obviously collect data from all moving GPS gadgets and make it available to all such gadgets. If individual vendors create "walled gardens" and only allow their gadgetry to communicate with their traffic system, then we get a flock of partial-coverage, low-quality traffic reports.
Apple has once again chosen to take this route, by splitting off from the (currently) best such system. If they had our interests at heart, they'd instead be pushing for a common traffic-reporting database shared and supported by all the vendors. Google's approach here could be described as pushing for such a shared, public database, though their holding part of the API private is an example of them trying to limit the capabilities of competitors.
Thus, Google isn't acting entirely in the public interest here. But they're a lot closer to it than Apple, who are clearly pushing for the "walled garden" approach, to the detriment of everyone except their shareholders. In contrast, Google does make their map API available to the public, no matter which gadget you're using.
If the "public" had any sense, we'd be demanding that these companies pool their traffic-reporting resources into a single publicly-accessible system. But the public (at least here in the US ;-) clearly has no sense at all in this matter.
If you like hot peppers, they're an excellent crop for anyone with a sunny window. Some of the tastiest are sold as "decorative" peppers. This term doesn't mean that they're not worth eating; it comes from the fact that peppers like full sun, but many good hot peppers are from small plants that get shaded out in a garden by other, bigger plants. So you grow them in pots that can be put on any sunny level spot, like a porch or patio or window sill. When they get covered with flowers plus green, white, orange, purple and red fruit, they're very decorative. Like sweet peppers, they're edible at any color stage, though the ripest tend to be the hottest. The green or white ones are less hot, but this lets the other non-hot pepper flavors come through.
One problem in our household is that, due to my wife's allergies to most furry critters, we share the house with three small parrots. Like most birds, they love hot peppers, and strip them off the plants when we're not watching. So when we take the peppers indoors for the winter, we have to put them in a few sunny windows that the birds can't easily access.
Like tomatoes, peppers like rich soil and lots of water. So give them some compost if you can, don't let them dry out, and you'll have some very pretty, edible crops in a few months. You can use the seeds in any hot pepper that you like, but if you use a store-bought pepper's seeds, you'll have no idea how big the plant will be. So it's better to just ask for a few peppers from someone who's already growing them. Just plant a few of the seeds in each pot, put them in a sunny spot, and keep them watered.
it wouldn't be hard to simply encrypt the transmissions. In today's society this seems like a no-brainer.
Yeah; I'd say that "no-brainer" is a pretty good description of most current management attitudes towards data privacy.
And, to try to avert the usual political stuff, we might observe that it's a good description for both corporate and government management of privacy issues. We don't need privacy (unless we have something to hide ;-), but they try hard to keep their behind-the-scenes activities secret from their customers or citizens or whatever they call us.
But I know this won't be much good; we'll inevitably be reading lots of assertions that this is a problem specific to government agencies or private corporations. Or churches or the Boy Scouts or ... ;-)
Yeah, though it is interesting to contemplate the 3rd alternative: giving a tiny push in the right direction for a long time. Competent engineers can tell you when that'll work. Of course, it does require having the foresight to start pushing a long time before you're face-to-face with a disaster. And people working in large organizations don't have a good history of displaying such foresight.
Various people have observed that we don't need to keep asteroids a long distance away from Earth. In fact, it could be a good show to change a big rock's orbit just enough that it skims the planet's upper atmosphere. Everyone would turn out to watch it, and it'd get across to the population that there are some Dangerous Things Out There that we'll eventually have to face. Right now, it's mostly just the techies (and the sci-fi fans) who take the problem seriously.
It'll be interesting to see if there's any Streisand Effect (google it) from this feeble attempt to suppress the document.
We've all read and heard a lot of opinion on this topic, and there's precious little that passes as Scientific Method in the field of economics. It could be interesting to read criticisms (negative or positive) from actual scientists and statisticians about this document.
Why is Canada such a third-world country when it comes to internet and TV? There is no excuse for these monopolies!
Sure, there is. It's because you (collectively) voted for the politicians who created and maintain the regulatory system that created the mono/duopolies and protects their profits.
It's similar to the setup here down south in the US, with similar results.
The telling part: saying that Obama, Roberts, Sotomayer, Breyer, Ginsberg, Kagan ... declared the Federal Govt can force you to buy anything ... automatic weapons. I bet you have plenty of guns and ammo ...
Actually, I have "bought" a number of automatic weapons in my lifetime, though I don't actually "have" any of them. That is, I paid for them, but the military and police have them. You don't even need to know what country I live in, since that's a universal.
How much of that is porn, I wonder.
Actually, only about half. The other half is lolcats.
The Google+ app for Android has had this capability for some time now.
Hey, I didn't know about that. I'll have to try it and see how well it works. Thanks for the tipoff.
(Now if we could get quality photos from a phone camera. But that's mostly a hardware problem. They're probably good enough for some purposes. I started to type "decent photos", and realized that that's not what a lot of people are looking for, so I changed "decent" to "quality". ;-)
You meed to tell them, ...
No, he doesn't. They (the hosting company) are the ones who have the needs here. Our informant's only actual "need" is to move to a host with better security. They have shown that they won't/can't provide it, so he should move on.
Sadly (for the rest of their customers), US laws on the subject say that he'd be risking his time and money and possibly freedom if he were to report their incompetence to anyone. In the US, computer security has become a "shoot the messenger" arena, which unfortunately for all of us means that people who know about security problems generally keep quiet about the topic. Or they find ways to monetize their knowledge, though that tends to be rather risky in the long run.
Sometimes the best approach is to just quietly walk away.
That's the issue. On the other hand, dropping paint on the asteroid provides thrust as if powered by a solar panel the size of the painted area, so paintballs > simple rocket.
Well, maybe so, but there's another problem that nobody seems to have faced. Most of those asteroids are rotating, and they all have surfaces that are irregular at every scale. Unless you have very precise topo maps of the asteroid, down to the sub-millimeter scale, you won't be able to precisely calculae the direction of thrust of the paint splotches. And once a splotch is there, if its position is off by even a few cm, it's likely to produce a thrust in a different direction than you wanted.
A rocket that lands and produces thrust would at least be controllable by turning it on and off at different point in the rock's rotation. That's a lot more control than you could get with paint splotches.
If you want to use light pressure, I'd think you'd be far better off going with a flock of little light sails, which would land scattered over the asteroid's surface. Then you could send commands to precisely control which of the little sails are reflecting sunlight, and you'd actually be able to (slowly) make changes in the asteroid's orbit. That would probably be a lot more effective than paintballs or rocket motors.
What am I missing about the paintballs that would make their "thrust" effect predictable and controllable? Without that, they might just steer the asteroid right into your house. Is there some paint that I don't know about, whose color we can control remotely from millions of km away?
Yeah; what this really shows is that our "smart phone" technology is still too limited. The way they should work is that as soon as the photo is taken, it's sent wirelessly to an archive. Perhaps to the owner's home or work computer; perhaps to some "cloud" server. Then the victim can smilingly comply with the cops' order, and delete the photos.
The case I'm expecting to read about soon is when this happens, the photos have been quickly uploaded to the victim's facebook account, and all of his/her friends are watching them. Maybe the phone's microphone will be on, too, so the verbal interaction with the cops will also go directly online.
If this hasn't happened already, it's an indictment of the "walled garden" nature of the cell phone systems. It's easily within the capability of our current phones and the cell-phone system. If it's not happening, it's because the phone companies have blocked the software that enables such scenarios.
(And yes, I did work with a group that implemented just such an "app" a couple of years back. The company that leased us the smart phone -- which shall be unnamed here so you'll suspect it's the company that supplied your phone -- blocked supplying the app to their customers. What's especially upsetting is that our app was designed as a tool for medical emergency people, not for law-enforcement purposes, and they really didn't want us supplying apps that gave medical people quick image transfer between an emergency site and their hospital. But it applies in this mall-cop story, too. ;-)
One could argues that it is illegal to see [child porn] in the first place.
You might want to be careful with that. We've already had stories of people being charged with "child porn" by undressing a child, e.g. to change its diaper. It's very easy for child-porn laws to be used against anyone who has a child, at least if they want to keep that child reasonably clean and healthy.
There has been a bit of humor in the past based on such examples of laws that outlaw much more than what the legislators thought they were trying to forbid.
(You may treat this as an invitation to submit your favorite example of such overly-broad laws. ;-)
Security guards don't get to make it up as they go.
Um; you appear to be wrong, since they did just that and the "authorities" are reportedly backing their actions.
A law is a law only if it's enforced. Otherwise, it's just social propaganda to convince you that the supposed laws are meaningful.
The Golden Rule: One should treat others as one would like others to treat oneself.
I thought the golden rule was that it's not gay if it's in a three-way.
Nah; the Golden Rule is "He who has the gold makes the rules."
This is the real motto of both of the US's major political parties. And the Supreme Court has given the green light to those with the most gold; they can now anonymously "donate" as much as they like to any candidate they like.
Yeah; I'm familiar with a lot of those examples of humans eating insects. But, as far as I've read, it's still true that most humans don't eat insects much. That is, even in places where insects are routinely eaten, they don't seem to actually make up very much of the local human diet. Are there any groups of people who get more than, say, 10% of their calories (or protein) from insect? If so, it could be interesting to read about them.
It's sorta similar to how one could observe that humans "don't eat hot peppers much". Yes, some societies consume a lot of them, as you know if you've ever eaten Mexican or Vietnamese food. But hot peppers are a relatively small fraction (by weight, not flavor) of the diet in those countries, so the "not much" part is still true. It's just a very noticeable small part.
The general conjecture for how the Bible ended up recommending eating one group of insects is based on the fact that the Orthopterans are important agricultural pests in the area where the Bible originated (and in many other parts) of the world), and the main pest species are actually large enough to be worthwhile for humans to gather. During the typical "plague of locusts", one could easily dash out into a field and grab enough of the little critters to make a nutritious, high-protein meal. Whether the local human population could actually make a significant dent in the locust swarm isn't clear, but they could do their small part (along with the gulls, pigeons, crows, lizards, etc.) in cutting back on the crop damage.