The fact that 99% of the world thinks that the cloud is safe doesn't make it so.
So do you have a few good references for this claim? Most of the people I know seem to think that "the Cloud" means giving over all your personal data to a faceless, distant corporation. Of course, I don't know anywhere near 99% of the world, or even 1%, and I wouldn't claim that my small population of acquaintances is anywhere near a random sample.
Still, I've occasionally asked friends and strangers something like "Would you copy all your personal data, account numbers, passwords, etc., to a Cloud server?", and the general response can be summarized as "How stupid do you think I am?";-)
why cant we finally send a clock/time sync signal over the power lines for everybody?
Actually, we've been doing that for nearly a century now.;-)
Of course, what all the electrical grids have supplied is the 50- or 60-cycle AC current. But for a long time, they have adjusted this to get an exact 24*60*60*[50,60] cycle count at the end of every day. They've done this by working with the physicists and astronomers, who developed equipment that could measure time accurately enough for their purposes.
Mostly, figuring out which cycle corresponded to midnight was something that the electric companies left as an exercise for the customer's engineers. But by 1920 or so, this wasn't much of a challenge to the typical electrical engineer.
When I worked on some medical devices in the past I was surprised at some of the stuff dealing with time.... are some reasons for this. The software base may have been around from before network connectivity was common,...
Wow; they must have started really early, before electronic computers even existed.;-)
There have been broadcast time signals for more than a century now. The earliest were telegraph signals, accurate to only about a second, which is plenty good enough for the current topic. Starting in the 1920s, there were radio time signals, accurate to better than a second. At roughly the same time, the electric grids in Europe and North America became good enough that their 50- or 60-cycle "signals" were usually accurate to better than a second per day. The earliest electronic computers were more than a decade later.
Anyone who implements their own organization's time "standard" is merely ignorant, and is almost certainly doing it wrong.
I've worked as a software developer for several organizations like that. I remember one, only about 10 years ago, where the managers eventually "accused" me of sneaking in accesses to the "universal time system", which they didn't understand or trust. It turned out that the main reason for their suspicion was that they kept insisting that their software do everything in local time (in a company spread across several time zones). They'd heard that software based on local time always has bugs in a multi-time-zone environment. They'd seen that my code worked correctly on all their machines. They inferred the obvious. But I hid the evidence sufficiently well that they were never able to prove anything.;-) Part of what we were working on was medical computing equipment...
The problem isn't that we don't know how to solve these problems. The problem is that we allow our organizations be run by people who have contempt for the technical solutions that came from "computer geeks" outside their organization. The medical industry in particular is controlled by people who have no intention of allowing outsiders to tell them how to run their systems. Until they've developed their own time system independently, they won't trust it.
Some people here in the US have suggested that there's a good reason for the two different meanings of the "NIH" initialism.
Irregardless isn't a word. Thought you should know. kthxbai.
Flammable
Inflammable means flammable...
Welcome to the English language.
Yup, and from both linguistic and information-theory viewpoints, there are good reasons for such things. The so-called "natural languages" were developed by populations of people working in environments that were often noisy. So our languages all have a great deal of redundancy built in, to increase the chance that a listener will correctly interpret a message.
In the case of [in]flammable, one is derived from "flame", while the other is derived from "inflame". These do have slightly different meanings, but for most purposes, the difference isn't important. The reason that, historically, "inflammable" was more common was probably because it's less likely than "flammable" to be mistaken for a different word. It has two extra phonemes, giving the listener slightly more information about which word it is.
Similarly, objections to "irregardless" tend to be based on the pointlessness of the "ir-" prefix, which merely duplicates the negation of the "-less" suffix. But this gives the listener more information, decreasing the chance that a listener will miss the negative part. Such multiple negative tend to be used because they improve communication when the environment isn't noiseless.
There are problems caused by the anti-redundancy crowd in English. Consider the common word "can't". In this word, the negative part is reduced to the single/t/ phoneme. This brief burst of sound tends to be lost at the ends of words, so "can't" is often misheard as "can" if there's even the smallest amount of noise. This problem can be fixed by repeating the negative, as in "I can't see nothing", but the grammar nazis object to that. If you use their suggest "anything" for "nothing", you get "I can't see anything", which is easily misheard as "I can see anything", restoring the original problem.
In any case, there's probably little we can do to fend off the dummies who are intent on eliminating redundancies from English. But we can ignore them, and continue to speak redundantly when we want to be understood. And we can occasionally point out the information-theory reasons that they are wrong.
Well, there is one particular satellite that has been well known to cause sea levels to rise quite significantly,...
Well, yes, but not globally.
Perhaps not, but that's because it's only one satellite that can only be above one point on the Earth's surface at any given time. We've sent up thousands of smaller satellites that are scattered widely throughout a large spherical volume. When those little satellites' mass was below the Earth's surface, it pulled downward on the water; now that their mass is up above in a spherical arrangement, they're pulling up on the water from all directions. So clearly they are the cause of the slow rise in sea level worldwide.
Hey, you know that you're going to be reading variants of this argument from all over the interwebs now that the secret is out. So just remember that you read it here first.;-)
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic...
How so? Every eclipse (solar or lunar) happens when it's night for half of the Earth. I watched this eclipse (via two live Internet feeds) when it was completely dark outside here in Boston.
In a similar vein, I've on several occasions amazed people by pointing out the moon that was visible in the daytime sky. It's curious that some people don't notice this until you trick them into looking at it.
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
The first problem would be finding a way to give all those ballistic nukes the ability to achieve escape velocity...
Then you'd have to deal with the second problem, cancelling each nuke's orbital momentum (around the sun). The people who do the various probes have explained that the most difficult problem was the recent probe that's now orbiting Mercury. Reaching Mercury, or even worse, the sun, requires dumping most of the momentum that your craft inherits from the Earth, and doing that directly takes a huge amount of fuel. The current Mercury orbiter took several years to get there, because they saved fuel by using the orbital "slingshot" approach of making numerous passes past other planets (mostly Earth and Mercury) in such a way that those planets "stole" momentum from the probe. The math for this is a bit tricky, and I'm not about to try posting it here. (But google can find it for you, if you're interested.;-)
If you want to get rid of all our nukes, a far better approach would be to extract the fissile material and recycle it as power-plant rods. That would also have the benefit of converting part of it into valuable isotopes for medical and scientific uses.
OTOH, if you really wanted to waste it by tossing it into the sun, the sun wouldn't even notice such a trivial amount of added matter. The radioactivity would be trivial compared to what the sun (basically a huge runaway fusion reactor) is producing every second.
... who's to say which version of English _is_ the correct one?
To the casual observer, the answer to this question seems to be "Pretty much everyone.";-)
In English, "correct" generally means "whatever silly 'rules' someone has taught me". We have no official standards body for the language, after all, which you'd think would mean that there is no such thing as "standard English". But the reality is that anyone and everyone feels not just permitted, but required to make up rules about the language and criticise others for violating them.
Historically, most of the well-known rules for English seem to have originated as Latin rules, imposed on English by people who thought that Latin was the perfect language, and any language that worked even slightly differently was wrong, wrong, wrong. But lately, we've heard from people who seem to have just made up rules, and critcised people who weren't even violating them. Thus, we have the common advice that "passive" is wrong, but it's clear that most people who criticise its use have no idea what "passive voice" even means.
We also have fun things like spelling "reforms" promulgated by different semi-official government or educational bodies in various English-speaking countries, without bothering to check with similar organizations in other English-speaking countries. Thus, the spell-checker in this version of FF underlines my use of "criticised" above as an error, although it's the "standard" spelling in various countries. So you can't win this game.
But it keeps us entertained. And, let's face it, verbally attacking others for poor spelling or grammar is a lot better than killing them for various real or imagined trespasses or threats.
He does have a narrow point - old radios had buttons that physically pushed in, and only one could be in at a time. A rather complicated mechanical linkage accomplished this
Others have mentioned blenders and cassette players as gadgets that have had (and often still do have) such mechanical buttons.
I have an accordion with a similar set of 7 buttons that select subsets of the 3 sets of reeds behind the keyboard. As with the others, if push one button, the button that was previously down pops up. I've taken the plate off and looked at the mechanical linkage that implements this, and I wouldn't call it "rather complicated". I found it instantly understandable, and actually a bit trivial. I'd imagine that the linkages inside a lot of these other gadgets are also fairly simple. If you have a friend with an accordion, you might ask to see how it works. Usually all you have to do is turn a couple of thumbscrews to remove the cover.
But we probably don't want to suggest "accordion button". That would confuse the people who know that "accordion" refers to the bellows, and computers rarely have bellows.;-)
You're right, of course. I do try to keep in the back of my mind that any news story that I read should be prefixed with "This reporter claims...", but it's easy to forget that qualification and think that the reporter is telling the truth about what the article's subject actually said.
And I suppose that we could really use occasional reminders that, in cases like this where there's a political (or religious or artistic or...) component to the story, there may be a high probability that the reporter is lying to us readers. So keep up the good work, and continue to remind us that/. summaries sometimes are outright lies.
/. may in general be more reliable than the MSM, but achieving that level of reliability isn't very challenging.;-)
"The MAC asserts that improved camera technology yields improved security as though the connection between the two is so strong that no proof is required."
My immediate thought was "What is 'no proof is required' a euphemism for?"
Probably something along the lines of "We have no supporting evidence, and decided not to bother testing it, because the results might come out wrong for our marketing, so we're going with the 'obvious to anyone but a real dummy' approach."
What else could they be trying to hide with such a comment?
I have heard/read a number of other comments about official harrassment over violations of the rules for the French language. Whatever is going on seems to be a lot more serious than the problems in the English-speaking world with the gang of "prescriptivists" constantly peeving about violations of the supposed rules of English grammar or spelling. In English, we mostly just laugh at such things. We can also read comments from linguists about how wrong the prescriptivist gang usually is, and laugh more. But at least this one researcher claimed that the interference in French is a lot more serious, enough so to justify becoming fluent in another language for publication purposes.
Actually, it might be interesting to investigate this some more. Maybe I'll try asking about it on a couple of linguistic forums. There are a number of major languages with an official arbiter for correct speech/writing. It could be an interesting linguistics project to document the relative effectiveness of this in different languages.
what about just basic shapes, like a filled circle for save, a filled square for copy, an open square for paste, etc.
Or we could just replace them by the Chinese characters for the concepts. Then, in a short time, over half of humanity would have a common icon for all the concepts. I'm sure we could ask the Chinese manufacturers what icons they use.
(Of course, the "NIH Syndrome" does come into effect here. Nobody really expects the world to agree on a common set of icons, even in cases where we already have an icon for a concept that's shared by over 1/4 of our species. We haven't even got the entire world to agree on what a stop sign looks like.;-)
You know, those aren't the only icons that nobody has any idea of the meaning anymore. Those 26 icons were also once created from real world metaphors, and nobody has any idea of their old meaning anymore:
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Heh. You're quite wrong about that. Try asking google about "Latin alphabet" (or "English alphabet" if you want to do one more click), and a bit of clicking on the obvious links to predecessor languages will quickly track down the origins of most of those icons (actually glyphs). Some of them such as J and W, were invented as modifications of the Latin letters for languages that had more sounds. But most have an origin in Phoenician writing, augmented by letters from a few other languages.
Thus, the 'A' started life as a Phoenician letter rotated maybe 140 degrees counter-clockwise, in which form you can see the face and two horns of the bull ('alif in most Semitic languages) that it represented. The letter actually referred to the glottal stop, which is treated as a separate consonant in the Semitic languages, but the Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the first vowel sound in the word.
Similarly, the history of each of our letters is quite well known. Most of them did start off as a pictograph, but many centuries of borrowing and fancy writing by scribes modified them so they hardly resemble the original icons. Sometimes the history is a bit weird. For example, Phoenician had a letter that looks much like our W, but they are unrelated. The Phoenician w represented a "sh" sound, and was the ancestor of the similar letters inthe Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets. But the English W originated as "VV", which was used centuries ago because Latin didn't have the needed letter. Eventually the two Vs were run together, to make our modern W (which we call "double U" due to another rather silly historic misunderstanding).
Anyway, if you were to say that the original meanings of the English letters is unknown to nearly all modern people, you'd be quite correct. But saying that nobody knows this information is quite wrong. You can even find it in wikipedia, if you care to dig a bit. But it's not very useful information, so you should only go looking for it if you find the topic interesting.
... and I see that the link in that message doesn't work from the/. page. Here's the link copied from a browser window where it worked: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise". Funny thing is that it displays correctly in my firefox window, but comes out here with the UTF-8 values in hex. Let's see if it works...
Which, oddly enough, is partly why it is so successful. English is the 'open source' of languages. Anybody can 'edit' it, adding new terms, letting others fall out of usage. It adopts features from every other languages shamelessly, squeezing them in anyplace where they kinda make sense. It is an example of the 'bazaar' method of design. It will never be pure, never by clean, never be well-structured, but it will continue to muddle through.
Some years ago, I read an interesting take on this by a French researcher. He explained why he publishes all his papers in English rather than in French, although French is his native language.
His explanation was a more detailed version of the above quote. He commented that if he were to publish in French, he would be subject to the Académie française, which has full legal control over the French language. They could criticise his (mis)use of words and block publication or force recall of his papers.
But, he observed, an important part of any scientific field of researchers is the need for the participants to work out precise terminology to describe what they are learning. If a word for a new concept is needed, they must find or invent a word, else they can't discuss the concept in the rigorous manner required by successful science. The Académie can (and does) block this process.
But, he continued, the English language has no such legal authority. Researchers publishing in English can invent new terms, borrow them from another language, or propose a more precise definition of an existing word to be used within their field. In English, they can discuss terminology openly, and can agree among themselves on the precise definition of a word to be used within their field.
His argument was that this process isn't optional; successful science requires it. If researchers don't have control over the precise definitions used in their specialty, they can't produce valid scientific publication. In French this is not allowed. In English, it is allowed, because there is no legal control over use of the language (except in the field of law itself, of course;-). So he and his colleagues publish in English.
The fact that it's the language with the most readers in the world (many of whom can't speak it well) is a further argument in English's favor. But the important fact about English is that there is no legal body in any English-using country with the power to control researcher's use of their own field's jargon. So, despite all its obvious faults, English is the preferred technical language nearly everywhere.
Now if we could only get the English-using media to stop garbling the meanings of technical terms...
(But that would probably require some sort of official Académie Anglaise, so we're probably better off with all the corruption of our technical terms by the ignorant.;-)
so all those snobs above you shitting on any non 1080P device as nothing but "poor people's crap" need to wake up and smell reality because thin and light and easy to carry is the way of the present not to mention the future and most folks like me would rather have excellent battery life than some huge ass screen, which is what desktops are for.
And if you look at the history of the computer industry since the 1950s, you'll find that the top sales have always been with the smallest machines. Yes, if you can get more capability (memory, pixels, disk space, cpu speed), people will go for it - but only if the resulting machine isn't any bigger. If you want to make bets on computer technology (i.e., are an "investor"), you've always put your money on the smallest machines. Right now, you're betting on tablets and smartphones, and looking for the next marketing terms for the even smaller machines that'll follow.
Of course, now that pixel size is reaching the limit of the human eye's resolution, you're wondering how they can shrink it any farther without losing the information content that people want. Stay tuned, and we'll find out.
we need is a more "amateur" web, where people only do the work in your first step, maybe also do the second step (test on one or more other (non-IE) browsers) which only takes a minute or two, and then say they're done -- simply blowing off the question of whether or not the site looks perfect on IE.
What we really need is to learn to strongly resist the idea that a page need look perfect on any browser. This is a "drop-dead" requirement that can't be achieved. Even if you think you've done it for one browser, the next upgrade (which is probably being installed by some of your clients right now) will shoot down your perfection. And the developers of commercial browsers (e.g. IE) have taken great pains to ensure that you can't succeed. They want walled gardens, and they're building them. The concept of "perfection" in web pages is one of their tools. The only way to win this game is not to play it.
Since the start of the Web, the main function of HTML has been to make documents that are usable as widely as possible, despite the huge differences in displays, window systems, input devices, etc. The right way to test pages is to verify the usability of a page on a wide range of devices, now including handhelds. Web designers that design a "perfect" page and insist that it look the same everywhere are missing the main point of it all. The vendors are guaranteeing that you can't do this, no matter what your design.
If your page insists on a "perfect" display of the page, it will simply fail on display and/or window systems that don't permit your page's requirements. So aim for "functional" instead, with design aesthetics a distant second, and you'll produce much more usable pages.
This may require educating your boss(es) about the nature of your "market". But they should be used to this. After all, consider the canonical auto analogy: What would you think of a boss who thought that a single model car can be built that will satisfy all customers? That's just dumb, right?
Well, yeah, but note that they're not "scientists"; they're publishers.;-)
I can assure you, from personal contacts, that at least some actual social scientists thought it was hilarious. As did many other kinds of scientists, of course.
Not that this means much. I've forgotten who said it, but someone has observed that "All we learn from history is that people don't learn from history." Hmmm... Google's not much help here. It turns up over 36,000 matches for that sentence, but the first several pages don't seem to contain any attributions.
OTOH, Newton's famous "on the shoulders of giants" comment is well known and also widely attributed to him. And it's not difficult to find lists of similar comments by his predecessors. This is a fairly clear statement that sometimes people actually do learn from history, though Newton probably said it mostly as a form of humility.
... and Twitter's terms of service, which says that users' tweets belong to them...
What I'd wonder is: I may be just a matter of time until someone sends a twitter, and and repeats the comment in some other public forum... and Twitter sues them for copyright infringement.
After all, Twitter does claim to own your tweets. If this has any meaning at all, it means that they own the copyright. So if you repeat your own tweet somewhere else, you have violated the copyright that you assigned to Twitter when you signed up for an account.
This isn't a hypothetical situation. There have been lots of cases of writers and musicians being charged with copyright infringement by publishers when they use their own creation without permission. This is exactly why publishers include such terms in contracts. They want all the income from our creations, and don't want us going off and creating something similar for other employers.
There was a related case a few years back, when msn.com was caught using images from customers' web sites in their ads. When called on it, their management replied that the TOS stated clearly that any files stored on their servers became the property of msn.com, and they had the legal right to use their own property in their advertising.
I'd guess that Twitter included such a clause for the same reasons, and they're on the lookout for profitable ways to use all the text that they now own. Shaking down people for copyright infringement could be one way.
{parent tells of rewriting java into perl, then complains about non-understandable code}
Note that the non-understandable code was attributed to the programming "community", not to the language itself. Java is a rather well-designed language, and it's fairly easy to write clear, understandable code in java. But, as others have observed, it's quite easy to write incomprehensible, obfuscated code in any language. The java community has pushed for incomprehensibility, as have the development communities in a number of other languages.
The "obfuscated" contests for various languages are fun to study. But, at the other extreme, there are often some very good examples of highly-readable code in most languages. Blaming the language is usually wrong; it's the community of programmers that determines such things.
OTOH, if you google "esoteric programming language", you can have a lot of fun with the concept. Intercal is just the start of the fun. Look up the Brainfuck language for a horrid example. But my favorite is Whitespace.
For the benefit of those who missed the pun, we might mention that Donald Knuth does play organ, and has at least one in his home.
(I hope I waited long enough to post this that most readers who know anything about his personal life have already got a laugh out of the parent's post.;-)
Well, maybe not. But I know a lot of programmers who adopted a "Bye-bye Java", approach when Oracle bought out Sun. This merely tells them that they made the right decision.
I've worked on a number of java-based projects in the past, but I don't expect that I ever will again. The few java programs in my personal collection have all been translated to perl or python, picking up a few improvements in the process. As a mere individual human, I don't think I can afford the prospect of taking on Oracle in court, so I've disposed of all the java code that I used to have.
It probably doesn't matter much. Java has long since surpassed even Cobol in the "bureaucratese" style required by most organizations using it, and is slowly approaching JPL's level of opacity. It's time we abandoned it for languages whose user communities still permit relatively clear, understandable code.
Or not, if what you're being paid for is writing code that's not understandable by mere humans. But I seem to have wandered away from that camp.
Heh. We all can have fun mocking the "social science" sort.
But there's the perspective of the old wise crack, attributed to various singers (Louis Armstrong, Bill Broonzy, et al.) when asked if what he was singing was folk music: "I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.".
Similarly, all known science is done by gangs of humans, so it is inherently a social construct. Various historians of science have elaborated on this, by explaining that the scientific method has been rediscovered many times in many societies, but only one of them has developed a successful "science". The reason is that, in all the others, scientific methods have been developed by very small groups of people, typically in a "guild" or sorts, who hold the information very close and don't share it or their methods with outsiders. Eventually a small group dies out, and their knowledge dies with them.
The founders of modern, Western "science" developed not because they also discovered scientific methodology. Rather, their success was from their process of open publication. This enabled the "standing on the shoulder of giants" phenomenon, as Isaac Newton put it. But even that quip wasn't original with him; he just found a more elegant and memorable way of expressing it than his predecessors. It was published, so we remember it. With open publication of methods and results, Western science became a social construct that slowly spread to a large population. With that population, plus all the published material from previous generations, it all snowballed into the world-changing system that we see today.
No single human could have ever done this. It required a social system, with massive sharing of information. Calling it a "social construct" is merely an elegant way of saying all this. It's why modern science has been so more successful than previous local, personal development of knowledge. It's also much of what gave a small, local population on the western fringe of a continent so much control over the rest of the world.
As the biologists have been telling us, the dominant species tend to be the social ones. And it's their social behavior that makes them win over their less-social relatives. We see this within our own species with the sub-population that developed the social construct that we call "science".
Of course, I wouldn't deny the fun we had when Alan Sokal managed his publication feat. That was hilarious. Nobody says that social things are always correct. The history of science is full of mistakes and dead ends. Open publication means that society can learn from them, and not repeat them.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that 99% of the world thinks that the cloud is safe doesn't make it so.
So do you have a few good references for this claim? Most of the people I know seem to think that "the Cloud" means giving over all your personal data to a faceless, distant corporation. Of course, I don't know anywhere near 99% of the world, or even 1%, and I wouldn't claim that my small population of acquaintances is anywhere near a random sample.
Still, I've occasionally asked friends and strangers something like "Would you copy all your personal data, account numbers, passwords, etc., to a Cloud server?", and the general response can be summarized as "How stupid do you think I am?" ;-)
why cant we finally send a clock/time sync signal over the power lines for everybody?
Actually, we've been doing that for nearly a century now. ;-)
Of course, what all the electrical grids have supplied is the 50- or 60-cycle AC current. But for a long time, they have adjusted this to get an exact 24*60*60*[50,60] cycle count at the end of every day. They've done this by working with the physicists and astronomers, who developed equipment that could measure time accurately enough for their purposes.
Mostly, figuring out which cycle corresponded to midnight was something that the electric companies left as an exercise for the customer's engineers. But by 1920 or so, this wasn't much of a challenge to the typical electrical engineer.
When I worked on some medical devices in the past I was surprised at some of the stuff dealing with time. ... are some reasons for this. The software base may have been around from before network connectivity was common, ...
Wow; they must have started really early, before electronic computers even existed. ;-)
There have been broadcast time signals for more than a century now. The earliest were telegraph signals, accurate to only about a second, which is plenty good enough for the current topic. Starting in the 1920s, there were radio time signals, accurate to better than a second. At roughly the same time, the electric grids in Europe and North America became good enough that their 50- or 60-cycle "signals" were usually accurate to better than a second per day. The earliest electronic computers were more than a decade later.
Anyone who implements their own organization's time "standard" is merely ignorant, and is almost certainly doing it wrong.
I've worked as a software developer for several organizations like that. I remember one, only about 10 years ago, where the managers eventually "accused" me of sneaking in accesses to the "universal time system", which they didn't understand or trust. It turned out that the main reason for their suspicion was that they kept insisting that their software do everything in local time (in a company spread across several time zones). They'd heard that software based on local time always has bugs in a multi-time-zone environment. They'd seen that my code worked correctly on all their machines. They inferred the obvious. But I hid the evidence sufficiently well that they were never able to prove anything. ;-) Part of what we were working on was medical computing equipment ...
The problem isn't that we don't know how to solve these problems. The problem is that we allow our organizations be run by people who have contempt for the technical solutions that came from "computer geeks" outside their organization. The medical industry in particular is controlled by people who have no intention of allowing outsiders to tell them how to run their systems. Until they've developed their own time system independently, they won't trust it.
Some people here in the US have suggested that there's a good reason for the two different meanings of the "NIH" initialism.
Irregardless isn't a word. Thought you should know. kthxbai.
Flammable ...
Inflammable means flammable
Welcome to the English language.
Yup, and from both linguistic and information-theory viewpoints, there are good reasons for such things. The so-called "natural languages" were developed by populations of people working in environments that were often noisy. So our languages all have a great deal of redundancy built in, to increase the chance that a listener will correctly interpret a message.
In the case of [in]flammable, one is derived from "flame", while the other is derived from "inflame". These do have slightly different meanings, but for most purposes, the difference isn't important. The reason that, historically, "inflammable" was more common was probably because it's less likely than "flammable" to be mistaken for a different word. It has two extra phonemes, giving the listener slightly more information about which word it is.
Similarly, objections to "irregardless" tend to be based on the pointlessness of the "ir-" prefix, which merely duplicates the negation of the "-less" suffix. But this gives the listener more information, decreasing the chance that a listener will miss the negative part. Such multiple negative tend to be used because they improve communication when the environment isn't noiseless.
There are problems caused by the anti-redundancy crowd in English. Consider the common word "can't". In this word, the negative part is reduced to the single /t/ phoneme. This brief burst of sound tends to be lost at the ends of words, so "can't" is often misheard as "can" if there's even the smallest amount of noise. This problem can be fixed by repeating the negative, as in "I can't see nothing", but the grammar nazis object to that. If you use their suggest "anything" for "nothing", you get "I can't see anything", which is easily misheard as "I can see anything", restoring the original problem.
In any case, there's probably little we can do to fend off the dummies who are intent on eliminating redundancies from English. But we can ignore them, and continue to speak redundantly when we want to be understood. And we can occasionally point out the information-theory reasons that they are wrong.
Well, there is one particular satellite that has been well known to cause sea levels to rise quite significantly, ...
Well, yes, but not globally.
Perhaps not, but that's because it's only one satellite that can only be above one point on the Earth's surface at any given time. We've sent up thousands of smaller satellites that are scattered widely throughout a large spherical volume. When those little satellites' mass was below the Earth's surface, it pulled downward on the water; now that their mass is up above in a spherical arrangement, they're pulling up on the water from all directions. So clearly they are the cause of the slow rise in sea level worldwide.
Hey, you know that you're going to be reading variants of this argument from all over the interwebs now that the secret is out. So just remember that you read it here first. ;-)
Solar eclipse during night time? Now, this is literally fantastic ...
How so? Every eclipse (solar or lunar) happens when it's night for half of the Earth. I watched this eclipse (via two live Internet feeds) when it was completely dark outside here in Boston.
In a similar vein, I've on several occasions amazed people by pointing out the moon that was visible in the daytime sky. It's curious that some people don't notice this until you trick them into looking at it.
If every country on Earth fired all of their nukes into the sun, what would be the reaction?
The first problem would be finding a way to give all those ballistic nukes the ability to achieve escape velocity...
Then you'd have to deal with the second problem, cancelling each nuke's orbital momentum (around the sun). The people who do the various probes have explained that the most difficult problem was the recent probe that's now orbiting Mercury. Reaching Mercury, or even worse, the sun, requires dumping most of the momentum that your craft inherits from the Earth, and doing that directly takes a huge amount of fuel. The current Mercury orbiter took several years to get there, because they saved fuel by using the orbital "slingshot" approach of making numerous passes past other planets (mostly Earth and Mercury) in such a way that those planets "stole" momentum from the probe. The math for this is a bit tricky, and I'm not about to try posting it here. (But google can find it for you, if you're interested. ;-)
If you want to get rid of all our nukes, a far better approach would be to extract the fissile material and recycle it as power-plant rods. That would also have the benefit of converting part of it into valuable isotopes for medical and scientific uses.
OTOH, if you really wanted to waste it by tossing it into the sun, the sun wouldn't even notice such a trivial amount of added matter. The radioactivity would be trivial compared to what the sun (basically a huge runaway fusion reactor) is producing every second.
... who's to say which version of English _is_ the correct one?
To the casual observer, the answer to this question seems to be "Pretty much everyone." ;-)
In English, "correct" generally means "whatever silly 'rules' someone has taught me". We have no official standards body for the language, after all, which you'd think would mean that there is no such thing as "standard English". But the reality is that anyone and everyone feels not just permitted, but required to make up rules about the language and criticise others for violating them.
Historically, most of the well-known rules for English seem to have originated as Latin rules, imposed on English by people who thought that Latin was the perfect language, and any language that worked even slightly differently was wrong, wrong, wrong. But lately, we've heard from people who seem to have just made up rules, and critcised people who weren't even violating them. Thus, we have the common advice that "passive" is wrong, but it's clear that most people who criticise its use have no idea what "passive voice" even means.
We also have fun things like spelling "reforms" promulgated by different semi-official government or educational bodies in various English-speaking countries, without bothering to check with similar organizations in other English-speaking countries. Thus, the spell-checker in this version of FF underlines my use of "criticised" above as an error, although it's the "standard" spelling in various countries. So you can't win this game.
But it keeps us entertained. And, let's face it, verbally attacking others for poor spelling or grammar is a lot better than killing them for various real or imagined trespasses or threats.
He does have a narrow point - old radios had buttons that physically pushed in, and only one could be in at a time. A rather complicated mechanical linkage accomplished this
Others have mentioned blenders and cassette players as gadgets that have had (and often still do have) such mechanical buttons.
I have an accordion with a similar set of 7 buttons that select subsets of the 3 sets of reeds behind the keyboard. As with the others, if push one button, the button that was previously down pops up. I've taken the plate off and looked at the mechanical linkage that implements this, and I wouldn't call it "rather complicated". I found it instantly understandable, and actually a bit trivial. I'd imagine that the linkages inside a lot of these other gadgets are also fairly simple. If you have a friend with an accordion, you might ask to see how it works. Usually all you have to do is turn a couple of thumbscrews to remove the cover.
But we probably don't want to suggest "accordion button". That would confuse the people who know that "accordion" refers to the bellows, and computers rarely have bellows. ;-)
Yeah, sorta like how most people mean "figuratively" when they say "literally". ;-)
You're right, of course. I do try to keep in the back of my mind that any news story that I read should be prefixed with "This reporter claims ...", but it's easy to forget that qualification and think that the reporter is telling the truth about what the article's subject actually said.
And I suppose that we could really use occasional reminders that, in cases like this where there's a political (or religious or artistic or ...) component to the story, there may be a high probability that the reporter is lying to us readers. So keep up the good work, and continue to remind us that /. summaries sometimes are outright lies.
"The MAC asserts that improved camera technology yields improved security as though the connection between the two is so strong that no proof is required."
My immediate thought was "What is 'no proof is required' a euphemism for?"
Probably something along the lines of "We have no supporting evidence, and decided not to bother testing it, because the results might come out wrong for our marketing, so we're going with the 'obvious to anyone but a real dummy' approach."
What else could they be trying to hide with such a comment?
Actually, it wasn't my statement that may have been "tanked"; it was the explanation of the French researcher (whose name I've long since forgotten). He claimed that, in fact, the Académie can and does interfere with technical groups like his developing their own "jargon" that violates the Académie's rules for the French language.
It's possible that the mechanism at work is management accepting complaints from the Académie and imposing the restrictions on groups attempting to develop their own technical jargon. I don't actually know, not being a French citizen (and never having the gall to attempt publishing anything in French myself ;-).
I have heard/read a number of other comments about official harrassment over violations of the rules for the French language. Whatever is going on seems to be a lot more serious than the problems in the English-speaking world with the gang of "prescriptivists" constantly peeving about violations of the supposed rules of English grammar or spelling. In English, we mostly just laugh at such things. We can also read comments from linguists about how wrong the prescriptivist gang usually is, and laugh more. But at least this one researcher claimed that the interference in French is a lot more serious, enough so to justify becoming fluent in another language for publication purposes.
Actually, it might be interesting to investigate this some more. Maybe I'll try asking about it on a couple of linguistic forums. There are a number of major languages with an official arbiter for correct speech/writing. It could be an interesting linguistics project to document the relative effectiveness of this in different languages.
But in English, we have the opposite problem. ;-)
what about just basic shapes, like a filled circle for save, a filled square for copy, an open square for paste, etc.
Or we could just replace them by the Chinese characters for the concepts. Then, in a short time, over half of humanity would have a common icon for all the concepts. I'm sure we could ask the Chinese manufacturers what icons they use.
(Of course, the "NIH Syndrome" does come into effect here. Nobody really expects the world to agree on a common set of icons, even in cases where we already have an icon for a concept that's shared by over 1/4 of our species. We haven't even got the entire world to agree on what a stop sign looks like. ;-)
You know, those aren't the only icons that nobody has any idea of the meaning anymore. Those 26 icons were also once created from real world metaphors, and nobody has any idea of their old meaning anymore: ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Heh. You're quite wrong about that. Try asking google about "Latin alphabet" (or "English alphabet" if you want to do one more click), and a bit of clicking on the obvious links to predecessor languages will quickly track down the origins of most of those icons (actually glyphs). Some of them such as J and W, were invented as modifications of the Latin letters for languages that had more sounds. But most have an origin in Phoenician writing, augmented by letters from a few other languages.
Thus, the 'A' started life as a Phoenician letter rotated maybe 140 degrees counter-clockwise, in which form you can see the face and two horns of the bull ('alif in most Semitic languages) that it represented. The letter actually referred to the glottal stop, which is treated as a separate consonant in the Semitic languages, but the Greeks reinterpreted it to mean the first vowel sound in the word.
Similarly, the history of each of our letters is quite well known. Most of them did start off as a pictograph, but many centuries of borrowing and fancy writing by scribes modified them so they hardly resemble the original icons. Sometimes the history is a bit weird. For example, Phoenician had a letter that looks much like our W, but they are unrelated. The Phoenician w represented a "sh" sound, and was the ancestor of the similar letters inthe Hebrew and Cyrillic alphabets. But the English W originated as "VV", which was used centuries ago because Latin didn't have the needed letter. Eventually the two Vs were run together, to make our modern W (which we call "double U" due to another rather silly historic misunderstanding).
Anyway, if you were to say that the original meanings of the English letters is unknown to nearly all modern people, you'd be quite correct. But saying that nobody knows this information is quite wrong. You can even find it in wikipedia, if you care to dig a bit. But it's not very useful information, so you should only go looking for it if you find the topic interesting.
... and I see that the link in that message doesn't work from the /. page. Here's the link copied from a browser window where it worked: "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_fran%C3%A7aise". Funny thing is that it displays correctly in my firefox window, but comes out here with the UTF-8 values in hex. Let's see if it works ...
Experts agree... the English language is fucked.
Which, oddly enough, is partly why it is so successful. English is the 'open source' of languages. Anybody can 'edit' it, adding new terms, letting others fall out of usage. It adopts features from every other languages shamelessly, squeezing them in anyplace where they kinda make sense. It is an example of the 'bazaar' method of design. It will never be pure, never by clean, never be well-structured, but it will continue to muddle through.
Some years ago, I read an interesting take on this by a French researcher. He explained why he publishes all his papers in English rather than in French, although French is his native language.
His explanation was a more detailed version of the above quote. He commented that if he were to publish in French, he would be subject to the Académie française, which has full legal control over the French language. They could criticise his (mis)use of words and block publication or force recall of his papers.
But, he observed, an important part of any scientific field of researchers is the need for the participants to work out precise terminology to describe what they are learning. If a word for a new concept is needed, they must find or invent a word, else they can't discuss the concept in the rigorous manner required by successful science. The Académie can (and does) block this process.
But, he continued, the English language has no such legal authority. Researchers publishing in English can invent new terms, borrow them from another language, or propose a more precise definition of an existing word to be used within their field. In English, they can discuss terminology openly, and can agree among themselves on the precise definition of a word to be used within their field.
His argument was that this process isn't optional; successful science requires it. If researchers don't have control over the precise definitions used in their specialty, they can't produce valid scientific publication. In French this is not allowed. In English, it is allowed, because there is no legal control over use of the language (except in the field of law itself, of course ;-). So he and his colleagues publish in English.
The fact that it's the language with the most readers in the world (many of whom can't speak it well) is a further argument in English's favor. But the important fact about English is that there is no legal body in any English-using country with the power to control researcher's use of their own field's jargon. So, despite all its obvious faults, English is the preferred technical language nearly everywhere.
Now if we could only get the English-using media to stop garbling the meanings of technical terms ...
(But that would probably require some sort of official Académie Anglaise, so we're probably better off with all the corruption of our technical terms by the ignorant. ;-)
so all those snobs above you shitting on any non 1080P device as nothing but "poor people's crap" need to wake up and smell reality because thin and light and easy to carry is the way of the present not to mention the future and most folks like me would rather have excellent battery life than some huge ass screen, which is what desktops are for.
And if you look at the history of the computer industry since the 1950s, you'll find that the top sales have always been with the smallest machines. Yes, if you can get more capability (memory, pixels, disk space, cpu speed), people will go for it - but only if the resulting machine isn't any bigger. If you want to make bets on computer technology (i.e., are an "investor"), you've always put your money on the smallest machines. Right now, you're betting on tablets and smartphones, and looking for the next marketing terms for the even smaller machines that'll follow.
Of course, now that pixel size is reaching the limit of the human eye's resolution, you're wondering how they can shrink it any farther without losing the information content that people want. Stay tuned, and we'll find out.
we need is a more "amateur" web, where people only do the work in your first step, maybe also do the second step (test on one or more other (non-IE) browsers) which only takes a minute or two, and then say they're done -- simply blowing off the question of whether or not the site looks perfect on IE.
What we really need is to learn to strongly resist the idea that a page need look perfect on any browser. This is a "drop-dead" requirement that can't be achieved. Even if you think you've done it for one browser, the next upgrade (which is probably being installed by some of your clients right now) will shoot down your perfection. And the developers of commercial browsers (e.g. IE) have taken great pains to ensure that you can't succeed. They want walled gardens, and they're building them. The concept of "perfection" in web pages is one of their tools. The only way to win this game is not to play it.
Since the start of the Web, the main function of HTML has been to make documents that are usable as widely as possible, despite the huge differences in displays, window systems, input devices, etc. The right way to test pages is to verify the usability of a page on a wide range of devices, now including handhelds. Web designers that design a "perfect" page and insist that it look the same everywhere are missing the main point of it all. The vendors are guaranteeing that you can't do this, no matter what your design.
If your page insists on a "perfect" display of the page, it will simply fail on display and/or window systems that don't permit your page's requirements. So aim for "functional" instead, with design aesthetics a distant second, and you'll produce much more usable pages.
This may require educating your boss(es) about the nature of your "market". But they should be used to this. After all, consider the canonical auto analogy: What would you think of a boss who thought that a single model car can be built that will satisfy all customers? That's just dumb, right?
Well, yeah, but note that they're not "scientists"; they're publishers. ;-)
I can assure you, from personal contacts, that at least some actual social scientists thought it was hilarious. As did many other kinds of scientists, of course.
Not that this means much. I've forgotten who said it, but someone has observed that "All we learn from history is that people don't learn from history." Hmmm ... Google's not much help here. It turns up over 36,000 matches for that sentence, but the first several pages don't seem to contain any attributions.
OTOH, Newton's famous "on the shoulders of giants" comment is well known and also widely attributed to him. And it's not difficult to find lists of similar comments by his predecessors. This is a fairly clear statement that sometimes people actually do learn from history, though Newton probably said it mostly as a form of humility.
... and Twitter's terms of service, which says that users' tweets belong to them ...
What I'd wonder is: I may be just a matter of time until someone sends a twitter, and and repeats the comment in some other public forum ... and Twitter sues them for copyright infringement.
After all, Twitter does claim to own your tweets. If this has any meaning at all, it means that they own the copyright. So if you repeat your own tweet somewhere else, you have violated the copyright that you assigned to Twitter when you signed up for an account.
This isn't a hypothetical situation. There have been lots of cases of writers and musicians being charged with copyright infringement by publishers when they use their own creation without permission. This is exactly why publishers include such terms in contracts. They want all the income from our creations, and don't want us going off and creating something similar for other employers.
There was a related case a few years back, when msn.com was caught using images from customers' web sites in their ads. When called on it, their management replied that the TOS stated clearly that any files stored on their servers became the property of msn.com, and they had the legal right to use their own property in their advertising.
I'd guess that Twitter included such a clause for the same reasons, and they're on the lookout for profitable ways to use all the text that they now own. Shaking down people for copyright infringement could be one way.
{parent tells of rewriting java into perl, then complains about non-understandable code}
Note that the non-understandable code was attributed to the programming "community", not to the language itself. Java is a rather well-designed language, and it's fairly easy to write clear, understandable code in java. But, as others have observed, it's quite easy to write incomprehensible, obfuscated code in any language. The java community has pushed for incomprehensibility, as have the development communities in a number of other languages.
The "obfuscated" contests for various languages are fun to study. But, at the other extreme, there are often some very good examples of highly-readable code in most languages. Blaming the language is usually wrong; it's the community of programmers that determines such things.
OTOH, if you google "esoteric programming language", you can have a lot of fun with the concept. Intercal is just the start of the fun. Look up the Brainfuck language for a horrid example. But my favorite is Whitespace.
For the benefit of those who missed the pun, we might mention that Donald Knuth does play organ, and has at least one in his home.
(I hope I waited long enough to post this that most readers who know anything about his personal life have already got a laugh out of the parent's post. ;-)
Internet
Well, maybe not. But I know a lot of programmers who adopted a "Bye-bye Java", approach when Oracle bought out Sun. This merely tells them that they made the right decision.
I've worked on a number of java-based projects in the past, but I don't expect that I ever will again. The few java programs in my personal collection have all been translated to perl or python, picking up a few improvements in the process. As a mere individual human, I don't think I can afford the prospect of taking on Oracle in court, so I've disposed of all the java code that I used to have.
It probably doesn't matter much. Java has long since surpassed even Cobol in the "bureaucratese" style required by most organizations using it, and is slowly approaching JPL's level of opacity. It's time we abandoned it for languages whose user communities still permit relatively clear, understandable code.
Or not, if what you're being paid for is writing code that's not understandable by mere humans. But I seem to have wandered away from that camp.
Heh. We all can have fun mocking the "social science" sort.
But there's the perspective of the old wise crack, attributed to various singers (Louis Armstrong, Bill Broonzy, et al.) when asked if what he was singing was folk music: "I ain't never heard a horse sing a song.".
Similarly, all known science is done by gangs of humans, so it is inherently a social construct. Various historians of science have elaborated on this, by explaining that the scientific method has been rediscovered many times in many societies, but only one of them has developed a successful "science". The reason is that, in all the others, scientific methods have been developed by very small groups of people, typically in a "guild" or sorts, who hold the information very close and don't share it or their methods with outsiders. Eventually a small group dies out, and their knowledge dies with them.
The founders of modern, Western "science" developed not because they also discovered scientific methodology. Rather, their success was from their process of open publication. This enabled the "standing on the shoulder of giants" phenomenon, as Isaac Newton put it. But even that quip wasn't original with him; he just found a more elegant and memorable way of expressing it than his predecessors. It was published, so we remember it. With open publication of methods and results, Western science became a social construct that slowly spread to a large population. With that population, plus all the published material from previous generations, it all snowballed into the world-changing system that we see today.
No single human could have ever done this. It required a social system, with massive sharing of information. Calling it a "social construct" is merely an elegant way of saying all this. It's why modern science has been so more successful than previous local, personal development of knowledge. It's also much of what gave a small, local population on the western fringe of a continent so much control over the rest of the world.
As the biologists have been telling us, the dominant species tend to be the social ones. And it's their social behavior that makes them win over their less-social relatives. We see this within our own species with the sub-population that developed the social construct that we call "science".
Of course, I wouldn't deny the fun we had when Alan Sokal managed his publication feat. That was hilarious. Nobody says that social things are always correct. The history of science is full of mistakes and dead ends. Open publication means that society can learn from them, and not repeat them.