Hmmm... Yet again,/. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly.;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process....
Nope, while correct Greek survives the Preview process into further editing, it does seem to disappear entirely when you post it.
Hmmm... Yet again,/. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly.;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process....
Wrong attitude. The use of an ad blocker which defines "acceptable" ads sends a clear message on what we can tolerate, and quite frankly I'm quite happy to tolerate ads that are not obtrusive, animated, or include any multimedia other than text or even a very small static picture.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
If you're using a wireless gadget, chances are that most of your bandwidth is taken up by those ads. And actually, just blocking them may not help your bandwidth much, because by the time your software figures out that a given download is an ad, all it can do is not display the ad. But its byte count has been added to your account by your ISP/cell provider. So you're paying for it whether or not you actually see it.
At least, that's the way it mostly works here in the US. Yes, if it's from a known ad server, it's possible to block its address and not download it at all. But advertisers are getting pretty good at avoiding this, setting it up so that if your software blocks by address, it'll block the content you want along with the ads that come via the same server.
Most people, however, seem to think they (along with whoever they're cutting off) only need enough following distance to brake when the car immediately in front of them starts braking.
I don't really care for simply ticketing tailgaters. I'd much rather see them jailed, their licenses revoked, and their cars confiscated - a bit like what is done to extortionists, if and when the law catches up with them.
I've read a few things about this, and noticed that they don't seem to address a common problem: In high-traffic conditions, if you try to leave a "recommended" safe distance from the vehicle in front of you, what happens is that the drivers in adjacent lanes see that large gap, and fill it. Then you slow down to get far enough behind them, and that space gets filled in. Before long, you're driving at half the speed limit, people behind you are honking like crazy, and the ones that passing you are giving you the finger.;-)
This is, of course, the opposite of tailgating. Some of us do try to keep a (relatively) safe distance, but other drivers make that impossible. So far, I haven't read of any solutions to this problem. Do you have a link to a solution?
(Yeah, I know; just don't drive in high-traffic conditions. That doesn't always work, either. Google traffic does help a lot now, but often there are no alternate routes that are any better.;-)
... You didn't do it on purpose, but that search is now tied to your IP address in Google's servers. If you were logged into a Gmail or Google account at the time, all indications point to you personally running that search. And the NSA has a copy of everything for good measure.
Making it illegal to simply visit a link is a Bad Idea(TM)!!! Or conversely, one that's going to be very fun for black hats to play with.
Or bored kids with time on their hands. Or anyone who decides they don't like you or thinks you need to be punished for something you said.
Meta redirects, pop ups, even browser pre-caching could look like a "visit".
Yup. Maybe what we should do is start seriously promoting the idea of pre-loading, and get people familiar with this capability. We could work toward filling everyone's browser caches with copies of not just ISIS pages, but also pages from all other web sites that our governments disapprove of.
We should emphasize that there's no real need to ever actually show these cached copies of pages to the users, unless they actually ask for them. Just the fact that they've been download (and noted by their ISPs) is sufficient to convict them after all. We could catch all sorts of people, innocent and otherwise.
Perhaps if a few cases like this were publicised, and we explained to the confused journalists just how easy it is to frame people this way, we could have an effect.
In any case, any HTML developer should be familiar with the concept. It has a major valid use, after all: It can significantly speed up the speed of a lot of web sites. Any developers not familiar with the tools to do it just aren't doing their jobs right.
My first impression of the windswept bucolic views of Scotland is,
"Why aren't there any fucking trees?"
Was Alba always barren of flora or did cutting down the forests in ancient times for firewood change the landscape forever into eroded coastal dunes where nothing will grow?
Actually, it's a long, complex story. 1000 or so years ago, Scotland was mostly forested. At the other end, the Highland Clearances in the 1700s and 1800s didn't just force most of the people out; the major intent was to clear the land for sheep farming, which had become a good income source for the landowners with the development of modern cloth-production techniques. This led to the conversion of most of the countryside to grazing land, eliminating most of the remaining trees.
But that was merely the last blow. Before that, the forests had been heavily mined for wood for shipbuilding, and for producing charcoal to power the growing factories.
It didn't help that Scotland (and Ireland) was on the edge of the tree-supporting area, with the tree line roughly along the northwestern coasts. This meant that the forests were naturally rather slow-growing, and the tree species weren't the largest. So it was easy to over-harvest them if there was any sort of profit from the wood or a more profitable use of a tree-free land area.
Do a bit of googling; you can find lots of info on the history scattered around the internet. Similar things also happened in Scandiavia, so you might look for histories of forestry there as well. But the people there were mostly along the coastlines, and the center had much taller mountains, so the forests survived a lot better than in the British Isles.
The summary is that the treeless scenery of much of Scotland isn't at all natural; it's directly attributed to human "management" of the land. There's plenty of evidence that it would have been mostly forest without its human population, at least for the past 5000 or more years as the last Ice Age slowly faded out..
The plaintiff would need to show that Warner knew or should have known that the copyright was expired. Then the contract might be thrown out by a judge for being fraudulent.
The "smoking gun" in the whole thing was the copy of the original publication that Warner presented to the court. It has a smudged-out piece of text that they claimed no knowledge of. Someone found a copy of the book in a library, and the text wasn't smudged out. It was the original copyright information.
Ya can look it up... (Try googling "Happy Birthday smudge".;-)
Remember that the original was intended for young children. It wasn't supposed to be a great work of musical art; it was intended to be something that a 5-year-old could easily learn to sing.
Yes! Down with copyright! Musicians and writers should never be paid!
Most of them never have been paid. Copyright as interpreted by the courts in the US and many other countries is basically a tool for the publishing and recording industries to insist that the creators sign the copyright over to them, otherwise their newly-created works will never be seen or heard by the public. Once an artist signs the "standard" contracts, they have no further rights over their creative works, and only get paid the minimum that their corporate masters decide will keep them producing.
Of course, the internet has made some inroads on that. I know a number of musicians who are making more from their personal web site than they'd ever get from a recording-industry contract. But the legalities surrounding this are a bit tricky, and lots of artists get tricked into signing away the rights to their output anyway.
(I've had fun pointing out the statement in many ISP and other "hosting" companies contracts saying that anything copied to their machines become the property of the company. ISPs routinely ban and block web servers on customers' sites, and generously offer to host the web site on the company's machine. Then, when a musician or writer produces a best seller, the ISP can step in and claim the income for themselves, since the artist agreed to the contract that transfers the copyright to the ISP. The ISPs can make it rather tricky to avoid this gotcha.)
It's okay, the New Horizons team still calls it a planet.
And we might also note that, by conventional English syntax, "dwarf planet" means a kind of planet, one somewhat smaller than average. Somehow, a lot of people don't seem to understand English syntax well enough to figure that out.;-)
Of course, we don't have a good enough sample yet to say what size an average planet (without modifiers) might look like.
Why does it seem that most "alien" planets have a single climate everywhere? That doesn't even seem possible in any real (~spherical) world. In our solar system, not even Mars has the same climate everywhere; it has ice caps, and plateaus with visibly different weather than the lowlands. Actual aliens that are physically compatible with humans would be expected to live on planets with variability similar to ours, with visible climate changes every few hundred km or so.
Granted, you might expect a single climate if only one spot on a planet is involved in the plot. But usually there's travel on the planet, and usually it's about the same (usually desert or jungle) in all the scenes.
Of course, there are few exceptions that are more realistics.
Why should machines use UTC at all?
We have a time standard that doesn't use leap seconds - Atomic Time (TAI). We can convert between the two fairly easily.
So why not instead push for software to use TAI in place of UTC, and then convert for output or whatever?
Yup; down at the lowest ("OS") level, that's exactly what's done, on all computer system except MS's DOS/Windows (and who among us actually know what those systems do internally?;-)
If you examine a unix or unix-like OS like linux's source code, you'll find that it has and uses the second counter that the time(3) function return, and has no need for anything above that. There are various user-level library routines that convert the time() value to assorted human-readable formats. Leap seconds are a feature of user-level code, not of the underlying system.
I've seen any number of cases where a project attempts to deal with time via higher-level data formats than the simple second counter. All have eventually failed, and reverted to the second counter, which just keeps ticking along and leaves the conversion to complex time/date "display" formats to Someone Else.
The one remaining problem is all the date formats that can't be reliably converted back to seconds. I keep running across dates like 10/8/12, for which it's utterly impossible to decide which field is the year, which is the day, and the other one must be the month. This often goes along with a time format that doesn't bother to include the time zone (or whether DST is in effect;-). But this is a social problem, not a technical one. The programmers understand that such formats aren't usable by the software, or even by humans in the near future.
(Actually, I've seen some hints that a "formatted" time is in use inside Macs, perhaps in OS X itself, or in a very low-level library. This would explain some time anomalies that have been observed in a few apps. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd done something like this, to go along with the way the kernel munges file names so that strcmp() says the name in the directory is not equal to the name passed to open() when the file was created, thus breaking a lot of software developed on other systems. Maybe some day it'll be found and fixed. Or maybe not.)
Snowden isn't accused of a sex crime as Assange is, and that ultimately is the only difference really that I can see....
Wonder why not? You'd think it'd be just as easy to find (and fund) a few women to accuse Snowden of sexual assault. It's not like US prosecutors have never used such tactics in the past.
One conjecture is that the US government keeps thinking it can get an assassin in to take him out, but that's turning out to be a bit trickier in Russia than it was in Pakistan or a few other countries we might list. Maybe the judicious thing would be to abandon that approach, and revert to the tried-and-true sex accusations. Of course, given their history, the Russian leaders might just lol at such an approach.
Remember that these are the same people arguing against the Universe having a creator....
Nah; they've just found that the "creator" worked at what we consider the (heat) death of the universe, and the creation has run backward since then. We don't remember something until the universe reaches the event we're trying to remember, and then it sends a description of the event forward along your time line. This transmission has a significant error rate, of course.
Does that clear it all up? If not, wait a bit, and someone farther back will send a more detailed explanation. Of course, since it'll be traveling longer, there'll be more dropped bits, so we may not be able to make as much sense of it.
My understanding is that a lot of scientific work are funded via public money, yet the copyright gets assigned to private entities. In the context of copying vs. 'taking', their behavior is closer to 'taking' than what the researchers are doing. Simply because they prevent access to it by others.
If viewed as a public "investment", limiting access to the knowledge actually reduces the "payback" by not spreading the findings to anyone who wants it. This in turn probably lowers overall quality by having fewer (and perhaps less qualified) people examining the findings....
A number of historians have made a similar argument. The idea is that the "scientific method" is hardly new, and can't account for the rapid development of modern technology over the past few centuries. We have plenty of evidence that the scientific approach has been widely understood since prehistory, everywhere in the world. But new knowledge has generally been closely held by small "guilds" that keep it secret, so the only knowledge is what's in the mind of the current members of a small group. The result is loss of information over generations, and widespread rediscovery of the same results in different societies.
The important thing that happened in Europe a few centuries back was the concept of open publication. The result of this was what Isaac Newton characterized as "standing on the shoulders of giants". By this he meant the passing of information in a print form, to anyone able and willing to read it, learn from it, and go on to new discoveries rather than laboriously rediscovering what others had known years before.
The copyright system is a throwback to the old method of closely-held information that others can't build on, and sometimes can't even learn. Maybe it wasn't meant that way, but that's what 20th-century changes in copyright law has turned it into. Anything we can do to defeat it and revert to an open-publication system is for the good of all of us. (This includes those who are using it to block medical advancement that could have produced treatment for whatever eventually kills them.)
So if you're one of those reading this story and thinking "OMGWTFBBQ that so unfaaaaair make it illeeeeegal now OMG," then do us all a favor and don't expose yourself to contract negotiations with 800lb gorillas like Oracle. There are grownups for that work.
Nah; you don't need a (human) grownup; you need a bigger, more aggressive gorilla. If you don't have one, the grownups in your organization should have the good sense not to try doing the job themselves. The sort of battles that gorillas engage in are not the sort that even the "best" human would want to tackle. Humans won out over gorillas not by being more powerful, but by being more intelligent. If you fight them on their own terms, you lose (no matter which species you are;-).
On one hand, you can try to prevent abuses of personal genome data by having all kinds of laws to try to keep people's genome data private. On the other hand, you can make it illegal to abuse people on the basis of their genome data.
...
This isn't a new idea. I've run across a number of explanations of a decades-old bunch of statistics: Scandinavia has contributed medical information extracted from health databases far out of proportion to the size of their populations or the number of medical researchers. The explanation seems to be that, rather than making medical data secret, they decided to make it fairly open (especially to medical and biological researchers), and passed laws with serious punishment for "abusing" the information. It's not perfect, of course, but the large fines levied against a number of companies for things like discriminating in hiring on the basis of medical records or DNA have resulted in general acquiescence to having personal data in the databases. As a result, researchers can do all sorts of statistical studies on the data, publish the results, use the results to get funding for more research, etc., etc. People don't cooperate as much in the rest of the world due to the widespread attempts to keep the data private.
Attempting to keep medical data secret really just means a secret "market" for the information, and a lot of difficulty proving who was responsible for the sorts of abuses we see in a lot of the rest of the world. People understand this, so it should be no surprise that they might not want their personal medical information in the databases.
Information is important if you want to live a long, healthy life. If we make the information secret, it'll mostly be used by those with the clout to get it for their own financial (and/or political) purposes. If we share it, the chances are good that it'll be used to diagnose and control or cure medical problems that you may have in the future.
If there's anything the Jews are gifted at, it's nepotism.
I've had a good number of Asian friends who've claimed that they're better at it than the Jews.
(Actually, you mostly hear this claim from people in the "Chinese diaspora" population, who like to point out that this population has a social role in Asia very similar to the Jews, Gypsies and Greek in Europe, and the Arabs in southern Asia. They're historically a population of merchants who've lived in shoreline "ghetto" enclaves outside of China proper, and they've faced all the same sorts of prejudice and discrimination as a result. So it's not surprising that they'd have a lot of similar "social support" traditions.)
The Internet was built from the ground up with fault-tolerant collaboration at the heart. It never occurred to the well meaning scientists and engineers that some of the users would be out and out assholes.
Huh? The design and implementation of the Internet, and its predecessor the ARPAnet, was done with roughly 99% military funding. The fault tolerance was there from the start, because the military explicitly wanted a comm system that would survive constant attack by enemies under battle conditions. The scientists and engineers involved understood this quite well, and testing by implementing and running "cyberattack" software was routine from the very early days.
Saying that such attacks "never occurred to the well meaning scientists and engineers" not only shows ignorance of how the Internet came to be, but also dismisses the hard work of a lot of the people who created it. I worked on a number of test suites back in the 1980s that could be (and sometimes explicitly were) characterized as "attack" packages. This was neither a joke nor an accusation; it was a simple description of how the test suites worked. Stress testing and testing-to-destruction is an old concept in most kinds of engineering, and the ARPA/Internet was no exception.
One of the real problems is that the commercial Internet is managed by companies that have a strong motive to save money by cutting back on "unnecessary" things like testing and redundancy (so that the saved money can be redirected to managers' bonuses, of course;-). But this was actually understood quite well by the military funders. It's part of why the design didn't include low-level security, but emphasized redundancy and a "just deliver the bits undamaged" approach. It was understood that the only meaningful security is the type called "end-to-end", where the participants in a conversations are the ones that provide and manage the security. If you rely on the suppliers of the low-level equipment, they'll always take shortcuts that make the security worthless. That's pretty much exactly how the Internet works, and always will.
Nah; the "cyber-" prefix is useful. It's a clear clue that the writer/speaker is relatively clueless about all that interwebs stuff, and only knows a few techie-sounding terms that they use to sound like they know something. Banning the use of such linguistic clues would merely make it a bit more difficult to recognize cluelessness, since we'd have to actually read their comments to decide that they're not worth reading.
It's similar to the use of "hacker", which is another scare term, but it's useful as a clue that the writer is relatively clueless about computer-security issues.
The (mis)use of such terms is also a useful clue to those of us who are trying to find the people who need some educating about technical issues. But that's a different topic, so we should start a new thread if we want to talk about it.
[...]the H1-B system is totally broken and is being used to help decimate the American middle class.
Dec.i.mate: kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
As long as it's only one in ten, I'm kind of OK with this. Also, I'm kind of OK with the idea that such punishment is actually deserved, since it implies 90% "good apples" and 10% "bad apples", which, if you've ever worked a middle class job, is very easy to credit as an underestimation.
Except you're a couple of millennia out of date with that definition. I decided to check with a few online dictionaries before commenting. Most of them give a definition much like that of the Cambridge dictionary:
[T]o kill a large number of something, or to reduce something severely: Populations of endangered animals have been decimated.
Some do also give the original Latin "kill 1/10th of" definition, but they generally make it clear that that was the Latin meaning, not the modern English meaning. Some even say that it's considered poor form in English to bother specifying the fraction eliminated, on the grounds that it's redundant for people who understand the word and confusing for those who don't.
I'm so fucking tired of people pretending there is only one definition for the word "decimate".
Heh; another victim of the "etymology is destiny" doctrine (as one linguist - whose name I've forgotten - called it a few years back).
Yup, in Latin, "decimate" meant to kill every 10th man. In modern English, it means to destroy a significant but unspecified portion of a set. How large depends on the speaker/writer, who usually can't be bothered to give the fraction.
It's yet another case of English raiding another language for useful words, and mangling both their pronunciations and their meanings to the point that speakers of the original languages wouldn't recognize either the sound or the meaning.
But if you want to continue using English, you should recognize this general problem, and take it into account. You'll understand that, while the original sound and meaning of a word in the source language is of historic interest, it's nearly useless in decoding the usage in English.
How about theonion.onion? Would that be a meta-site for faking fake news, and hiding the people that are thus releasing actual valid information disguised as satire? Sounds like a useful site for the world's whistle blowers...
(The folks over at theonion.com have been known to "complain" about all the dummies who post their stories as factual new reports. Maybe we could help them out here.)
Slashdot Mirror
So he spelled it ""? ;-)
Hmmm ... Yet again, /. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly. ;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process ....
Nope, while correct Greek survives the Preview process into further editing, it does seem to disappear entirely when you post it.
Issac Asimov. And he knew how to spell Eureka.
So he spelled it ""? ;-)
Hmmm ... Yet again, /. messes up anything not in the English alphabet. Funny things is that the editing panel shows my reply correctly, with the (classical) Greek spelling of the word between the quotes. But the Preview just shows two adjacent quotes, with the Greek characters omitted.
Sure would be nice if we could discuss "foreign" words, especially in spelling and etymology messages, and have them show up spelled correctly. ;-)
I think I'll post this with the original Greek word there, and see what appears in the edit panel after it's been through the posting process ....
Wrong attitude. The use of an ad blocker which defines "acceptable" ads sends a clear message on what we can tolerate, and quite frankly I'm quite happy to tolerate ads that are not obtrusive, animated, or include any multimedia other than text or even a very small static picture.
What I don't want is a world where I have to make a micro payment to every bloody page I visit.
If you're using a wireless gadget, chances are that most of your bandwidth is taken up by those ads. And actually, just blocking them may not help your bandwidth much, because by the time your software figures out that a given download is an ad, all it can do is not display the ad. But its byte count has been added to your account by your ISP/cell provider. So you're paying for it whether or not you actually see it.
At least, that's the way it mostly works here in the US. Yes, if it's from a known ad server, it's possible to block its address and not download it at all. But advertisers are getting pretty good at avoiding this, setting it up so that if your software blocks by address, it'll block the content you want along with the ads that come via the same server.
Most people, however, seem to think they (along with whoever they're cutting off) only need enough following distance to brake when the car immediately in front of them starts braking.
I don't really care for simply ticketing tailgaters. I'd much rather see them jailed, their licenses revoked, and their cars confiscated - a bit like what is done to extortionists, if and when the law catches up with them.
I've read a few things about this, and noticed that they don't seem to address a common problem: In high-traffic conditions, if you try to leave a "recommended" safe distance from the vehicle in front of you, what happens is that the drivers in adjacent lanes see that large gap, and fill it. Then you slow down to get far enough behind them, and that space gets filled in. Before long, you're driving at half the speed limit, people behind you are honking like crazy, and the ones that passing you are giving you the finger. ;-)
This is, of course, the opposite of tailgating. Some of us do try to keep a (relatively) safe distance, but other drivers make that impossible. So far, I haven't read of any solutions to this problem. Do you have a link to a solution?
(Yeah, I know; just don't drive in high-traffic conditions. That doesn't always work, either. Google traffic does help a lot now, but often there are no alternate routes that are any better. ;-)
... You didn't do it on purpose, but that search is now tied to your IP address in Google's servers. If you were logged into a Gmail or Google account at the time, all indications point to you personally running that search. And the NSA has a copy of everything for good measure.
Making it illegal to simply visit a link is a Bad Idea(TM)!!! Or conversely, one that's going to be very fun for black hats to play with.
Or bored kids with time on their hands. Or anyone who decides they don't like you or thinks you need to be punished for something you said.
Posner's so ultra-liberal that Reagan appointed him to the federal court.
Makes sense. After all, to the current Republican leadership, Reagan was a liberal president.
Meta redirects, pop ups, even browser pre-caching could look like a "visit".
Yup. Maybe what we should do is start seriously promoting the idea of pre-loading, and get people familiar with this capability. We could work toward filling everyone's browser caches with copies of not just ISIS pages, but also pages from all other web sites that our governments disapprove of.
We should emphasize that there's no real need to ever actually show these cached copies of pages to the users, unless they actually ask for them. Just the fact that they've been download (and noted by their ISPs) is sufficient to convict them after all. We could catch all sorts of people, innocent and otherwise.
Perhaps if a few cases like this were publicised, and we explained to the confused journalists just how easy it is to frame people this way, we could have an effect.
In any case, any HTML developer should be familiar with the concept. It has a major valid use, after all: It can significantly speed up the speed of a lot of web sites. Any developers not familiar with the tools to do it just aren't doing their jobs right.
My first impression of the windswept bucolic views of Scotland is,
"Why aren't there any fucking trees?"
Was Alba always barren of flora or did cutting down the forests in ancient times for firewood change the landscape forever into eroded coastal dunes where nothing will grow?
Actually, it's a long, complex story. 1000 or so years ago, Scotland was mostly forested. At the other end, the Highland Clearances in the 1700s and 1800s didn't just force most of the people out; the major intent was to clear the land for sheep farming, which had become a good income source for the landowners with the development of modern cloth-production techniques. This led to the conversion of most of the countryside to grazing land, eliminating most of the remaining trees.
But that was merely the last blow. Before that, the forests had been heavily mined for wood for shipbuilding, and for producing charcoal to power the growing factories.
It didn't help that Scotland (and Ireland) was on the edge of the tree-supporting area, with the tree line roughly along the northwestern coasts. This meant that the forests were naturally rather slow-growing, and the tree species weren't the largest. So it was easy to over-harvest them if there was any sort of profit from the wood or a more profitable use of a tree-free land area.
Do a bit of googling; you can find lots of info on the history scattered around the internet. Similar things also happened in Scandiavia, so you might look for histories of forestry there as well. But the people there were mostly along the coastlines, and the center had much taller mountains, so the forests survived a lot better than in the British Isles.
The summary is that the treeless scenery of much of Scotland isn't at all natural; it's directly attributed to human "management" of the land. There's plenty of evidence that it would have been mostly forest without its human population, at least for the past 5000 or more years as the last Ice Age slowly faded out..
The plaintiff would need to show that Warner knew or should have known that the copyright was expired. Then the contract might be thrown out by a judge for being fraudulent.
The "smoking gun" in the whole thing was the copy of the original publication that Warner presented to the court. It has a smudged-out piece of text that they claimed no knowledge of. Someone found a copy of the book in a library, and the text wasn't smudged out. It was the original copyright information.
Ya can look it up ... (Try googling "Happy Birthday smudge" .;-)
Are they that much worse than the original?
Remember that the original was intended for young children. It wasn't supposed to be a great work of musical art; it was intended to be something that a 5-year-old could easily learn to sing.
Yes! Down with copyright! Musicians and writers should never be paid!
Most of them never have been paid. Copyright as interpreted by the courts in the US and many other countries is basically a tool for the publishing and recording industries to insist that the creators sign the copyright over to them, otherwise their newly-created works will never be seen or heard by the public. Once an artist signs the "standard" contracts, they have no further rights over their creative works, and only get paid the minimum that their corporate masters decide will keep them producing.
Of course, the internet has made some inroads on that. I know a number of musicians who are making more from their personal web site than they'd ever get from a recording-industry contract. But the legalities surrounding this are a bit tricky, and lots of artists get tricked into signing away the rights to their output anyway.
(I've had fun pointing out the statement in many ISP and other "hosting" companies contracts saying that anything copied to their machines become the property of the company. ISPs routinely ban and block web servers on customers' sites, and generously offer to host the web site on the company's machine. Then, when a musician or writer produces a best seller, the ISP can step in and claim the income for themselves, since the artist agreed to the contract that transfers the copyright to the ISP. The ISPs can make it rather tricky to avoid this gotcha.)
It's okay, the New Horizons team still calls it a planet.
And we might also note that, by conventional English syntax, "dwarf planet" means a kind of planet, one somewhat smaller than average. Somehow, a lot of people don't seem to understand English syntax well enough to figure that out. ;-)
Of course, we don't have a good enough sample yet to say what size an average planet (without modifiers) might look like.
Why does it seem that most "alien" planets have a single climate everywhere? That doesn't even seem possible in any real (~spherical) world. In our solar system, not even Mars has the same climate everywhere; it has ice caps, and plateaus with visibly different weather than the lowlands. Actual aliens that are physically compatible with humans would be expected to live on planets with variability similar to ours, with visible climate changes every few hundred km or so. Granted, you might expect a single climate if only one spot on a planet is involved in the plot. But usually there's travel on the planet, and usually it's about the same (usually desert or jungle) in all the scenes. Of course, there are few exceptions that are more realistics.
Why should machines use UTC at all? We have a time standard that doesn't use leap seconds - Atomic Time (TAI). We can convert between the two fairly easily. So why not instead push for software to use TAI in place of UTC, and then convert for output or whatever?
Yup; down at the lowest ("OS") level, that's exactly what's done, on all computer system except MS's DOS/Windows (and who among us actually know what those systems do internally? ;-)
If you examine a unix or unix-like OS like linux's source code, you'll find that it has and uses the second counter that the time(3) function return, and has no need for anything above that. There are various user-level library routines that convert the time() value to assorted human-readable formats. Leap seconds are a feature of user-level code, not of the underlying system.
I've seen any number of cases where a project attempts to deal with time via higher-level data formats than the simple second counter. All have eventually failed, and reverted to the second counter, which just keeps ticking along and leaves the conversion to complex time/date "display" formats to Someone Else.
The one remaining problem is all the date formats that can't be reliably converted back to seconds. I keep running across dates like 10/8/12, for which it's utterly impossible to decide which field is the year, which is the day, and the other one must be the month. This often goes along with a time format that doesn't bother to include the time zone (or whether DST is in effect;-). But this is a social problem, not a technical one. The programmers understand that such formats aren't usable by the software, or even by humans in the near future.
(Actually, I've seen some hints that a "formatted" time is in use inside Macs, perhaps in OS X itself, or in a very low-level library. This would explain some time anomalies that have been observed in a few apps. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd done something like this, to go along with the way the kernel munges file names so that strcmp() says the name in the directory is not equal to the name passed to open() when the file was created, thus breaking a lot of software developed on other systems. Maybe some day it'll be found and fixed. Or maybe not.)
Snowden isn't accused of a sex crime as Assange is, and that ultimately is the only difference really that I can see. ...
Wonder why not? You'd think it'd be just as easy to find (and fund) a few women to accuse Snowden of sexual assault. It's not like US prosecutors have never used such tactics in the past.
One conjecture is that the US government keeps thinking it can get an assassin in to take him out, but that's turning out to be a bit trickier in Russia than it was in Pakistan or a few other countries we might list. Maybe the judicious thing would be to abandon that approach, and revert to the tried-and-true sex accusations. Of course, given their history, the Russian leaders might just lol at such an approach.
Remember that these are the same people arguing against the Universe having a creator....
Nah; they've just found that the "creator" worked at what we consider the (heat) death of the universe, and the creation has run backward since then. We don't remember something until the universe reaches the event we're trying to remember, and then it sends a description of the event forward along your time line. This transmission has a significant error rate, of course.
Does that clear it all up? If not, wait a bit, and someone farther back will send a more detailed explanation. Of course, since it'll be traveling longer, there'll be more dropped bits, so we may not be able to make as much sense of it.
My understanding is that a lot of scientific work are funded via public money, yet the copyright gets assigned to private entities. In the context of copying vs. 'taking', their behavior is closer to 'taking' than what the researchers are doing. Simply because they prevent access to it by others.
If viewed as a public "investment", limiting access to the knowledge actually reduces the "payback" by not spreading the findings to anyone who wants it. This in turn probably lowers overall quality by having fewer (and perhaps less qualified) people examining the findings. ...
A number of historians have made a similar argument. The idea is that the "scientific method" is hardly new, and can't account for the rapid development of modern technology over the past few centuries. We have plenty of evidence that the scientific approach has been widely understood since prehistory, everywhere in the world. But new knowledge has generally been closely held by small "guilds" that keep it secret, so the only knowledge is what's in the mind of the current members of a small group. The result is loss of information over generations, and widespread rediscovery of the same results in different societies.
The important thing that happened in Europe a few centuries back was the concept of open publication. The result of this was what Isaac Newton characterized as "standing on the shoulders of giants". By this he meant the passing of information in a print form, to anyone able and willing to read it, learn from it, and go on to new discoveries rather than laboriously rediscovering what others had known years before.
The copyright system is a throwback to the old method of closely-held information that others can't build on, and sometimes can't even learn. Maybe it wasn't meant that way, but that's what 20th-century changes in copyright law has turned it into. Anything we can do to defeat it and revert to an open-publication system is for the good of all of us. (This includes those who are using it to block medical advancement that could have produced treatment for whatever eventually kills them.)
So if you're one of those reading this story and thinking "OMGWTFBBQ that so unfaaaaair make it illeeeeegal now OMG," then do us all a favor and don't expose yourself to contract negotiations with 800lb gorillas like Oracle. There are grownups for that work.
Nah; you don't need a (human) grownup; you need a bigger, more aggressive gorilla. If you don't have one, the grownups in your organization should have the good sense not to try doing the job themselves. The sort of battles that gorillas engage in are not the sort that even the "best" human would want to tackle. Humans won out over gorillas not by being more powerful, but by being more intelligent. If you fight them on their own terms, you lose (no matter which species you are ;-).
...
On one hand, you can try to prevent abuses of personal genome data by having all kinds of laws to try to keep people's genome data private. On the other hand, you can make it illegal to abuse people on the basis of their genome data.
This isn't a new idea. I've run across a number of explanations of a decades-old bunch of statistics: Scandinavia has contributed medical information extracted from health databases far out of proportion to the size of their populations or the number of medical researchers. The explanation seems to be that, rather than making medical data secret, they decided to make it fairly open (especially to medical and biological researchers), and passed laws with serious punishment for "abusing" the information. It's not perfect, of course, but the large fines levied against a number of companies for things like discriminating in hiring on the basis of medical records or DNA have resulted in general acquiescence to having personal data in the databases. As a result, researchers can do all sorts of statistical studies on the data, publish the results, use the results to get funding for more research, etc., etc. People don't cooperate as much in the rest of the world due to the widespread attempts to keep the data private.
Attempting to keep medical data secret really just means a secret "market" for the information, and a lot of difficulty proving who was responsible for the sorts of abuses we see in a lot of the rest of the world. People understand this, so it should be no surprise that they might not want their personal medical information in the databases.
Information is important if you want to live a long, healthy life. If we make the information secret, it'll mostly be used by those with the clout to get it for their own financial (and/or political) purposes. If we share it, the chances are good that it'll be used to diagnose and control or cure medical problems that you may have in the future.
If there's anything the Jews are gifted at, it's nepotism.
I've had a good number of Asian friends who've claimed that they're better at it than the Jews.
(Actually, you mostly hear this claim from people in the "Chinese diaspora" population, who like to point out that this population has a social role in Asia very similar to the Jews, Gypsies and Greek in Europe, and the Arabs in southern Asia. They're historically a population of merchants who've lived in shoreline "ghetto" enclaves outside of China proper, and they've faced all the same sorts of prejudice and discrimination as a result. So it's not surprising that they'd have a lot of similar "social support" traditions.)
The Internet was built from the ground up with fault-tolerant collaboration at the heart. It never occurred to the well meaning scientists and engineers that some of the users would be out and out assholes.
Huh? The design and implementation of the Internet, and its predecessor the ARPAnet, was done with roughly 99% military funding. The fault tolerance was there from the start, because the military explicitly wanted a comm system that would survive constant attack by enemies under battle conditions. The scientists and engineers involved understood this quite well, and testing by implementing and running "cyberattack" software was routine from the very early days.
Saying that such attacks "never occurred to the well meaning scientists and engineers" not only shows ignorance of how the Internet came to be, but also dismisses the hard work of a lot of the people who created it. I worked on a number of test suites back in the 1980s that could be (and sometimes explicitly were) characterized as "attack" packages. This was neither a joke nor an accusation; it was a simple description of how the test suites worked. Stress testing and testing-to-destruction is an old concept in most kinds of engineering, and the ARPA/Internet was no exception.
One of the real problems is that the commercial Internet is managed by companies that have a strong motive to save money by cutting back on "unnecessary" things like testing and redundancy (so that the saved money can be redirected to managers' bonuses, of course ;-). But this was actually understood quite well by the military funders. It's part of why the design didn't include low-level security, but emphasized redundancy and a "just deliver the bits undamaged" approach. It was understood that the only meaningful security is the type called "end-to-end", where the participants in a conversations are the ones that provide and manage the security. If you rely on the suppliers of the low-level equipment, they'll always take shortcuts that make the security worthless. That's pretty much exactly how the Internet works, and always will.
Nah; the "cyber-" prefix is useful. It's a clear clue that the writer/speaker is relatively clueless about all that interwebs stuff, and only knows a few techie-sounding terms that they use to sound like they know something. Banning the use of such linguistic clues would merely make it a bit more difficult to recognize cluelessness, since we'd have to actually read their comments to decide that they're not worth reading.
It's similar to the use of "hacker", which is another scare term, but it's useful as a clue that the writer is relatively clueless about computer-security issues.
The (mis)use of such terms is also a useful clue to those of us who are trying to find the people who need some educating about technical issues. But that's a different topic, so we should start a new thread if we want to talk about it.
[...]the H1-B system is totally broken and is being used to help decimate the American middle class.
Dec.i.mate: kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group.
As long as it's only one in ten, I'm kind of OK with this. Also, I'm kind of OK with the idea that such punishment is actually deserved, since it implies 90% "good apples" and 10% "bad apples", which, if you've ever worked a middle class job, is very easy to credit as an underestimation.
Except you're a couple of millennia out of date with that definition. I decided to check with a few online dictionaries before commenting. Most of them give a definition much like that of the Cambridge dictionary: [T]o kill a large number of something, or to reduce something severely: Populations of endangered animals have been decimated.
Some do also give the original Latin "kill 1/10th of" definition, but they generally make it clear that that was the Latin meaning, not the modern English meaning. Some even say that it's considered poor form in English to bother specifying the fraction eliminated, on the grounds that it's redundant for people who understand the word and confusing for those who don't.
**rolls eyes**
I'm so fucking tired of people pretending there is only one definition for the word "decimate".
Heh; another victim of the "etymology is destiny" doctrine (as one linguist - whose name I've forgotten - called it a few years back).
Yup, in Latin, "decimate" meant to kill every 10th man. In modern English, it means to destroy a significant but unspecified portion of a set. How large depends on the speaker/writer, who usually can't be bothered to give the fraction.
It's yet another case of English raiding another language for useful words, and mangling both their pronunciations and their meanings to the point that speakers of the original languages wouldn't recognize either the sound or the meaning.
But if you want to continue using English, you should recognize this general problem, and take it into account. You'll understand that, while the original sound and meaning of a word in the source language is of historic interest, it's nearly useless in decoding the usage in English.
How about theonion.onion? Would that be a meta-site for faking fake news, and hiding the people that are thus releasing actual valid information disguised as satire? Sounds like a useful site for the world's whistle blowers ...
(The folks over at theonion.com have been known to "complain" about all the dummies who post their stories as factual new reports. Maybe we could help them out here.)