Yup; that's from the lyrics of one of the best-known of Tom Lehrer's songs. It's a great song that's well worth reviving from time to time.
There's also an old saying: If you steal from one writer, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many writers, it's research.
It sounds like TFA is about a clear case of the latter. Scholarly history says that if they give proper attribution to their many sources, what they're doing is open and honest scholarship. But you'd expect publishers and their IP lawyers to disagree, since that interpretation interferes with their livelihood.
So in the US we have a right wing that will oppose any science finding that...
You can follow that with just about anything that scientists find, and you'll usually be correct.;-)
About the only exceptions are scientific findings that can be immediately turned into products (and the scientists hand over all legal rights to the corporation). But that doesn't happen too often; scientific results typically take years to productize, and often require combining with other results to be useful. The US right wing is strongly business oriented, so it typically doesn't recognize any science-product connection that doesn't happen within a single fiscal year.
Sure, we have. One of the best explanations I've seen was in this xkcd discussion. Scan down to the two images separated by the text "but this, is a dinosaur:. It's a great illustration of the current understanding of the relation between birds, dinosaurs, and their relatives. The text above the images explains it.
Of course, 10 years from now we may have a slightly modified understanding. But this illustrates why we are all quite familiar with modern dinosaurs.
Actually, I have one sitting on my shoulder at the moment. She's a blue-crowned (or sharp-tailed, if you prefer) conure. I have a nice photo of her head that I use as an avatar on some forums, but/. doesn't seem to implement those. She's almost as cute as the feathered dinosaur in the above link. But she has a rather serious beak that we have to keep warning visitors about. She's small and cute, but she could do a lot of damage to your hand if you try to pick her up and she doesn't trust you.
Nah; I think what you mean is that we should hope that the original post was a joke, but it's not logically possible to determine that from the words alone. So you may decide that the writer was serious or joking, but you stand a good chance of being wrong whichever you pick. That's what Poe's Law is all about. Written English leaves out a lot of tonal information that's in spoken English, and there's not much we can do about it.
Yeah, Arizona is sorta known for excluding people. But it's not obvious how they can prosecute all us for "trolling" their population without extraditing us into their courts. So they seem to have a problem here.
To really confuse them, we need some Mexicans who'll volunteer to troll some Arizonans.;-)
As for rejecting DST as Arizona does, that's actually fairly easy. UT is legal everywhere; just use it. Actually, I know a couple of people who keep their watches set to UT. I no longer wear a watch (since there are far too many clocks visible nearly everywhere, including my cell phone), but I have my digital cameras' clocks set to UT, to simplify dealing with time zones. Since the files and/or the photo software don't seem to bother displaying the time zone, it can get very confusing once the photos are inside one or more computers. But this way, I know the correct time for every photo; I just need to check what time zone that was (and whether DST was in effect then;-), and subtract the offset. People who have done much "network" software development tend to settle on UT as a way of keeping themselves sane. I just remember that my "home" zone has noon at 17:00, midnight is 05:00, and everything works out from there.
My wife does occasionally get annoyed at the 24-hour UT time at the upper-right corners of my computer screens...
Granted, his flight wasn't all that long. But there have been recent developments saying that this was going to happen Real Soon Now. Of course, in addition to flapping his arms (not all that fast), he does have a somewhat more complex set of "sleeves" than your typical shirt. And his flight is a lot more like a condor than a hummingbird, but what would you expect when the wings are attached to such a heavy critter as a human, which lacks proper flight muscles?
Anyway, they may be coming to a sporting store near you in the next couple of years. Or maybe you'll find them on Amazon...
Actually, there's a very real chance that everyone with a/. account may on a watch list.;-)
If you don't think this is a real possibility, look back at your high-school years. The government is 99% run by the "popular" group that you'll remember showed such contempt for geeks and nerds like you and me. This site is explicitly run for those geeks and nerds. So what would you expect the government's attitude towards the posters and account-holders here would be? Think about that for a while.
The local TV quite often mistranslates "billion" when they talk about the US national debt.:)... Should fire those guys and hire someone who actually knows English, anyway.
Except that English-language dictionaries don't agree on the meanings of any number words above "million". And there is no official standards body for the English language. Some other languages have such a body, notably French, but not English. And hiring people who pick one of a list of inconsistent definitions and declare it their "standard" is the process that led us to the morass that is the English-language "common speech".
As others have pointed out, scientific/engineering/LaTeX notation is the only actual working solution. But most of the media's editors know that this will scare most of their readers, so they edit it into words that don't have precise meanings.
... Then we can slowly push them towards 10^{12}, which lets us type 10^121x without ambiguity. A few years down the road we could all be happily writing and reading LaTeX in news articles and do our bit against the dumbing-down of the internet...
Well, lotsa luck with that plan. I'd guess that, for the mass media, it'll always be understood that any number with more than 3 digits (or any non-digit chars) will baffle 90% of their readers. So the editors with rewrite them in words that aren't well defined, but don't scare the huge majority of their readers.
Of course, this is/., so we can probably reduce that 90% to 80%.;-)
(And WTF does "quintillion" mean, anyway? What standards body defines such terms? No, dictionaries aren't standards bodies, and they don't all agree on such terms above "million". They don't even agree on which terms are defined, much less what they mean.;-)
But note that the government isn't claiming that the servers in question do contain child pornography; they're claiming that the servers may contain child pornography. It other words, they don't know (or care) whether there's any porn there; they want the servers down to prevent the porn from being put there in the future.
There's lots of precedent for this sort of "pre-emptive strike" against enemies for which you have no evidence of wrongdoing. The most blatant case was back when the Bush gang was pushing for their war against Iraq. After investigators shot down all of the claims about secret "weapons of mass destruction", and the various other claims that were floated, the US government finally used the argument that couldn't be disproved: We have to attack Iraq, because they may develop WMDs in the future. You could practically hear the gasps around the world, as people realized that, unless you're blind, deaf and quadriplegic, this argument can be used against you. The US government had effectively declared war on the entire world, starting with Iraq.
And it worked. Their critics shut up, the US sent in its forces, and the rest is history. And the US government has occasionally reminded us all that this approach is now its policy. It doesn't matter whether we have evidence against you. If you may commit an act that we don't like, that's sufficient grounds to attack you now.
This argument in this court case is just one more reminder that this is now US policy. And it won't be used only against foreigners; US citizens and corporations are also subject to pre-emptive attacks if we don't yet have any evidence against them, as has been done in this court case.
Of course, the US government isn't the only one to use this approach. History is full of pre-emptive strikes that have been justified in the same manner. We humans are easily persuaded that unknown outsiders are dangerous and must be disabled before they act against us. It usually doesn't take any evidence at all that the outsiders are planning something; just the idea that they may do something we don't like is enough to send us into action.
Anyway, if you have a server online, you might consider that it's possible that you may have child porn on your server at some future time. Can you prove that this isn't possible?
Software engineers at least in my country are also liable, just like regular engineers. In fact they are regular engineers. Software developers not so much.
Of course, software "engineers" typically face some barriers that don't exist in older fields of engineering. Can you imagine a civil engineer designing a bridge, and being told that all of the specs for the low-level parts are "proprietary" trade secrets that aren't available. He'd have to design using steel, concrete, and other materials without being allowed to specify their exact properties. And he'd be liable for the bridge's structural soundness despite this secrecy. Civil engineers long ago made sure that they had available all the data on the materials they used.
But with software, we consider it normal that the low-level stuff (the OS, device drivers, runtime libraries, etc.) are binary "blobs" whose details and exact capabilities are intentionally hidden by the vendor. The software builders aren't permitted access to the details of these things that they must use. But the software builders are considered responsible for "bugs" nonetheless.
Actually, this situation is much of why software developers work only on a "time and materials" basis, since without reliable knowledge of the required tools' and materials' characteristics, it's not possible to even make estimates of development time. We know that all sorts of things will be buggy, because the code uses library or OS features that aren't properly documented and can't be examined. But we can't know beforehand how the various "materials" will behave when called by our code.
It is somewhat interesting to see the ongoing criticism of software developers not being "real engineers", especially from management that insists on using closed, proprietary platforms. This situation can be summarized as "We aren't about to pay for real engineering, but we'll criticize the developers for not doing real engineering. There's a lot of cynicism in software circles because of this.
There is the prospect that, as more and more of our infrastructure comes to depend on the growing software component, this situation will change, and we'll be able to require the low-level information that real engineering requires. We are rapidly reaching the point where people's lives do depend on software. Your next car will almost certain contain one or more computers, whose failure could very well leave you dead. This is how we got the needed information available in other fields of engineering. "You want me to guarantee that bridge's safety? Very well; you'll make sure that I have the exact specs for all the materials. And if some component fails under use, you'll very well sue the manufacturer for fraud, not me. And you'll pay for inspections and maintenance that I specify, or you've violated our contract."
But software is far from such a situation these days. It's mostly shoddy, because the builders are required to make it shoddy, by intentionally keeping them ignorant of the required details of most of the low-level materials.
Even today blacks are only, what, 15% of population in USA?
Actually, you can have a bit of fun with that (if you're into picky logic and legalism) by asking what the definition of "black" is.
Thus, a number of US states used to use the "one drop" definition: If you have any black African ancestor anywhere in your family tree, you're legally a Negro. This was notoriously used in the 1800s in a number of cases in which a widow's inheritance was claimed by her husband's family by presenting evidence that she had an African ancestor N generations back, and was thus Negro and legally unable to marry in the state. This voided her marriage and her inheritance rights. This was likely fraudulent in many cases, but the courts tended to accept such claims.
I had a friend in college who like to tell people that she was black. She had very pale skin, freckles, blue eyes, and reddish-blond hair. She looked as pure, stereotypical Irish or Scottish as one can imagine. But she said her family tree included a "Negro" 5 generations back, so she was 1/32 black, and would still be legally black in a few states such as Mississippi. She seemed to enjoy making claims on her "black heritage" (and was in fact a real jazz fan;-).
Back around 1980, some American demographers published the claim that sometime around then (plus or minus a decade or so), the American population reached the point that over 50% of the population has black-African ancestry. Of course, most are like her, with no discernible "black" features", because that ancestry was too far back to be significant. Some recent DNA testing has given support to this claim, though of course with very large error bars.
Of course, all humans ultimately have African ancestry. For Europeans, this was mostly recently from the wave of immigration that started about 40,000 years ago, with the Cro Magnon people. They lost their dark coloring with time, because it wasn't adaptive in the cool, cloudy climate of ice-age Europe. But they are still genetically difficult to distinguish from some of the related populations of central Africa.
Anyway, that 15% estimate is mostly based on people who self-identify as "black" (or whatever term they prefer this month). It's a reasonable number for social purposes. But it doesn't mean much genetically.
therein lies the real charm of how this story is worded: the celebration is in favour of the publication of a description, not the discovery.
And this is normal in the reporting of scientific "discoveries", for a rather common reason: The story is about a years-long process, and there really wasn't a single "Eureka!" moment when it all became clear. Rather, the people involved gathered evidence by means of a lot of experimenting and measuring. Slowly, the picture began to emerge. Hardly anything has a specific date. But the publication of the result does have a date.
As others have explained here, an important part of the story was the X-ray imaging done by Rosalind Russell. But, while she had a good part of DNA's structure worked out, she explicitly rejected the double-helix when a student assistant suggested it, and was a bit secretive about her interpretation of her work. The (unnamed;-) student took some of her results down the hall to Watson and Crick, who did some more analysis, and slowly came to the same double-helix model.
Actually, as they all understood (and most later writers don't), the double-helix shape was basically an irrelevant outcome of DNA's internal interactions; the important part was the encoding of linear strings of little chunks of information, and the two parallel complementary strands that allowed for easy copying. But that understanding came somewhat later, when the information-theory people got ahold of it.
So it's not surprising that news people and historians should pick the date of publication to calculate anniversaries (another irrelevancy that's an accidental result of our planet's exact orbit around one particular star;-). That's a date that they can pin down. The dates of the many steps leading to it can't generally be determined with much accuracy.
Clearly, the writer's intent was to convey an of the magnitude of the number.
Well, sure, but this is/., which fancies itself a technically-oriented news site. In this context, calling a finite number "near infinite" merely makes the writer look dumb. You'd expect such metaphorical usage in the mass media. But lots of us here expect this site to be more accurate. Looks like we were wrong about that.
Maybe we should just start talking about building a successor to slashdot. Then we can let this site continue on its dumbing-down path. This wouldn't be the first time that the technologically literate have abandoned a site (or a publication) on such grounds.
Maybe someone is already working on this. Anyone have a good candidate?
Well, yeah; the idea was to challenge the "best" in that old joke. That the US "democracy" is for sale to the highest bidders is rather well understood these days. The Supreme Court just made it official.
One of the constant strains in geek humor is to take things obviously intended as humorous, interpret the words literally, and try to generate still more (often rather black) humor from the results.
There's also an ongoing tongue-in-cheek disagreement over whether the US is evolving into a plutocracy or a kleptocracy or some other sort of *-ocracy. There's a lot of potential for fake-serious discussion possible in that topic, based on the style of the language peevery that we see so much of here. Telling someone that they've used the wrong word is so much better than just calling them a dummy...
How can you defend someone who's claimed the right to kill an american citizen without trial, without a hearing, anywhere in the world.
How can you defend someone who's claimed the right to kill anyone without trial, without a hearing, anywhere in the world.
I mean, honestly, do you really want to be telling the rest of the world that it's only American citizens who deserve "due process" before being killed by the US government? And Obama does seem to be rather proud of his troops' midnight raid that killed one somewhat infamous non-citizen, then dumped his body at sea. This action, plus the favorable response it got from much of the US population, has pretty much ended any pretense the US has for being the civilized, law-and-order country that it has long claimed to be.
(Now if I could only figure out someway to turn this into an April Fools story...;-)
That's a good old joke, but unfortunately, it hasn't been true for some time now. By any measure of how "good" a democratic government is, there are many other countries that score higher on the metric than does the US these days.
The was a recent huge drop in the "quality" of democracy in the US when the Supreme Court legalized unlimited, and largely undocumented campaign spending by corporations a few years back. Before that, we saw the the head of one of the main manufacturers of electronic voting equipment tell the voters in one state (Ohio) that he would deliver their state to the Republicans - and he delivered. And on and on.
If you're a mere citizen, without the wealth or connections to funnel millions of dollars to Congressional campaigns, your vote no longer counts for much at all. The available data says that in Congressional elections, the candidate with the largest campaign budget wins about 90% of the time in the House, and 80% of the time in the Senate. (This statistic was "revealed" yet again this afternoon in an NPR article.) You and I don't matter any more.
The TSA is just one of the very visible bits of evidence for how far the American democratic system has fallen. Yeah, maybe a large majority of passengers think the TSA is worthless. Do you really think this means that our "democratic" government will curtail or cancel its activities during our lifetime? Do you think you'll ever be permitted to vote on the TSA?
And Mohammed Atta, the leader of the World Trade Center attack team, had a degree in architecture. I've seen this factoid used to explain that the attack wasn't actually an act of terrorism; it was an act of artistic criticism. Atta was destroying what he and many others considered the ugliest blot on the New York City skyline.
en that the standard of infringement is three consecutive notes,...
That is not the 'standard of infringement'. Don't spread misinformation AC. It really doesn't help.
Right; the actual standard seems to be one note.;-)
The textbook example of this is the infamous copyright on "Happy Birthday". It seems that the defense in some court cases has attempted to argue that the tune is simply the rather older song "Good Morning to All", with different words. The prosecution's counter-argument is that they changed not just the lyrics, but the tune. In particular, they used two pickup notes for "Happy" rather than the single original pickup note for "Good", and this suffices to make it a new musical creation that has its own copyright.
So far, I haven't actually found any clear explanation of whether any court has actually taken this argument into account in making a decision. Media accounts of court cases can be annoyingly vague. But it's at least interesting that copyright lawyers would think doubling a pickup note is sufficient to produce a new copyright.
I have seen (and passed on) the suggestion to musicians that they should make sure they only play a single pickup note when accompanying this song. That way, they can reasonably argue that they were actually playing "Good Morning to All", which is out of copyright. It's just that the singers ("Amateurs!") are so musically illiterate that they don't hear the difference.
There's a lot of absurdity going around on this topic.
men will find deeply defend what they think must be true, despite all evidences.
Upton Sinclair put it in a rather elegant manner:
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on not understanding it.
It has become fairly clear from the evidence that the climate change is being strongly pushed by human economic (industrial and agricultural) activity. A small population of people have a strong financial interest in continuing the current practices. We have lots of history saying that in such situations, the people profiting from an activity will prevent change until the disaster actually occurs. Then they'll take their riches and move on, leaving the disaster for the rest of the population to deal with.
Something that has been missed in most of the "discussions": The fact that human activity is forcing these changes means that humans now have the ability with our technology to control our climate, at least on a coarse world-wide level. We have the technical ability to shove the climate in whatever direction we prefer. But we aren't doing this. We're still leaving our major institutions in the hands of people who are personally profiting from the current climate pushing. Whatever direction this might be is less important than the fact that continuing is leading to problems that we are now capable of preventing. We just need the social and political will to do so.
Doesn't it mostly depend on what definition is being used this month?
One of the ongoing problems with both medical and economic statistics is that the definitions of what's being measured changes on a time scale of a year or four. This confounds attempts to measure changes over time, since the statistics for constant things are often changing.
Here in the US, one of the ongoing examples is the changing definitions of "unemployment". This was made clear back during the Reagan years, when the military was changed from ignored to "employed". This lowered the unemployment rate by roughly 1% (and varied a lot by state). It also meant that unemployment rates before and after that change were incommensurable.
This is an old, and ongoing story. Both the political and marketing people like to change definitions periodically, so they can use the resulting statistical "changes" in their propaganda.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup; that's from the lyrics of one of the best-known of Tom Lehrer's songs. It's a great song that's well worth reviving from time to time.
There's also an old saying: If you steal from one writer, it's plagiarism; if you steal from many writers, it's research.
It sounds like TFA is about a clear case of the latter. Scholarly history says that if they give proper attribution to their many sources, what they're doing is open and honest scholarship. But you'd expect publishers and their IP lawyers to disagree, since that interpretation interferes with their livelihood.
What could possibly go wrong here? ...
So in the US we have a right wing that will oppose any science finding that ...
You can follow that with just about anything that scientists find, and you'll usually be correct. ;-)
About the only exceptions are scientific findings that can be immediately turned into products (and the scientists hand over all legal rights to the corporation). But that doesn't happen too often; scientific results typically take years to productize, and often require combining with other results to be useful. The US right wing is strongly business oriented, so it typically doesn't recognize any science-product connection that doesn't happen within a single fiscal year.
(Yes, I wish I were joking. ;-)
OK, what happens when you use Godwin Law in a Poe's Law comment? Did the Universe just end?
Yes, but it was immediately replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
(1 mod point for identifying the literary source. 2 points for extending the joke. ;-)
Nobody has ever seen a real dinosaur.
Sure, we have. One of the best explanations I've seen was in this xkcd discussion. Scan down to the two images separated by the text "but this, is a dinosaur:. It's a great illustration of the current understanding of the relation between birds, dinosaurs, and their relatives. The text above the images explains it.
Of course, 10 years from now we may have a slightly modified understanding. But this illustrates why we are all quite familiar with modern dinosaurs.
Actually, I have one sitting on my shoulder at the moment. She's a blue-crowned (or sharp-tailed, if you prefer) conure. I have a nice photo of her head that I use as an avatar on some forums, but /. doesn't seem to implement those. She's almost as cute as the feathered dinosaur in the above link. But she has a rather serious beak that we have to keep warning visitors about. She's small and cute, but she could do a lot of damage to your hand if you try to pick her up and she doesn't trust you.
Nah; I think what you mean is that we should hope that the original post was a joke, but it's not logically possible to determine that from the words alone. So you may decide that the writer was serious or joking, but you stand a good chance of being wrong whichever you pick. That's what Poe's Law is all about. Written English leaves out a lot of tonal information that's in spoken English, and there's not much we can do about it.
Except use smileys. ;-)
Yeah, Arizona is sorta known for excluding people. But it's not obvious how they can prosecute all us for "trolling" their population without extraditing us into their courts. So they seem to have a problem here.
To really confuse them, we need some Mexicans who'll volunteer to troll some Arizonans. ;-)
As for rejecting DST as Arizona does, that's actually fairly easy. UT is legal everywhere; just use it. Actually, I know a couple of people who keep their watches set to UT. I no longer wear a watch (since there are far too many clocks visible nearly everywhere, including my cell phone), but I have my digital cameras' clocks set to UT, to simplify dealing with time zones. Since the files and/or the photo software don't seem to bother displaying the time zone, it can get very confusing once the photos are inside one or more computers. But this way, I know the correct time for every photo; I just need to check what time zone that was (and whether DST was in effect then ;-), and subtract the offset. People who have done much "network" software development tend to settle on UT as a way of keeping themselves sane. I just remember that my "home" zone has noon at 17:00, midnight is 05:00, and everything works out from there.
My wife does occasionally get annoyed at the 24-hour UT time at the upper-right corners of my computer screens ...
I "may" be able to fly by flapping my arms really fast.
Unless you are something other than human, no... no, you may not.
Well, I wouldn't be so sure about that. ;-)
Granted, his flight wasn't all that long. But there have been recent developments saying that this was going to happen Real Soon Now. Of course, in addition to flapping his arms (not all that fast), he does have a somewhat more complex set of "sleeves" than your typical shirt. And his flight is a lot more like a condor than a hummingbird, but what would you expect when the wings are attached to such a heavy critter as a human, which lacks proper flight muscles?
Anyway, they may be coming to a sporting store near you in the next couple of years. Or maybe you'll find them on Amazon ...
So how effective will they likely be at extraditing the other 99.9999% of the world to Arizona for prosecution?
Actually, there's a very real chance that everyone with a /. account may on a watch list. ;-)
If you don't think this is a real possibility, look back at your high-school years. The government is 99% run by the "popular" group that you'll remember showed such contempt for geeks and nerds like you and me. This site is explicitly run for those geeks and nerds. So what would you expect the government's attitude towards the posters and account-holders here would be? Think about that for a while.
The local TV quite often mistranslates "billion" when they talk about the US national debt. :) ... Should fire those guys and hire someone who actually knows English, anyway.
Except that English-language dictionaries don't agree on the meanings of any number words above "million". And there is no official standards body for the English language. Some other languages have such a body, notably French, but not English. And hiring people who pick one of a list of inconsistent definitions and declare it their "standard" is the process that led us to the morass that is the English-language "common speech".
As others have pointed out, scientific/engineering/LaTeX notation is the only actual working solution. But most of the media's editors know that this will scare most of their readers, so they edit it into words that don't have precise meanings.
... Then we can slowly push them towards 10^{12}, which lets us type 10^121x without ambiguity. A few years down the road we could all be happily writing and reading LaTeX in news articles and do our bit against the dumbing-down of the internet...
Well, lotsa luck with that plan. I'd guess that, for the mass media, it'll always be understood that any number with more than 3 digits (or any non-digit chars) will baffle 90% of their readers. So the editors with rewrite them in words that aren't well defined, but don't scare the huge majority of their readers.
Of course, this is /., so we can probably reduce that 90% to 80%. ;-)
(And WTF does "quintillion" mean, anyway? What standards body defines such terms? No, dictionaries aren't standards bodies, and they don't all agree on such terms above "million". They don't even agree on which terms are defined, much less what they mean. ;-)
But note that the government isn't claiming that the servers in question do contain child pornography; they're claiming that the servers may contain child pornography. It other words, they don't know (or care) whether there's any porn there; they want the servers down to prevent the porn from being put there in the future.
There's lots of precedent for this sort of "pre-emptive strike" against enemies for which you have no evidence of wrongdoing. The most blatant case was back when the Bush gang was pushing for their war against Iraq. After investigators shot down all of the claims about secret "weapons of mass destruction", and the various other claims that were floated, the US government finally used the argument that couldn't be disproved: We have to attack Iraq, because they may develop WMDs in the future. You could practically hear the gasps around the world, as people realized that, unless you're blind, deaf and quadriplegic, this argument can be used against you. The US government had effectively declared war on the entire world, starting with Iraq.
And it worked. Their critics shut up, the US sent in its forces, and the rest is history. And the US government has occasionally reminded us all that this approach is now its policy. It doesn't matter whether we have evidence against you. If you may commit an act that we don't like, that's sufficient grounds to attack you now.
This argument in this court case is just one more reminder that this is now US policy. And it won't be used only against foreigners; US citizens and corporations are also subject to pre-emptive attacks if we don't yet have any evidence against them, as has been done in this court case.
Of course, the US government isn't the only one to use this approach. History is full of pre-emptive strikes that have been justified in the same manner. We humans are easily persuaded that unknown outsiders are dangerous and must be disabled before they act against us. It usually doesn't take any evidence at all that the outsiders are planning something; just the idea that they may do something we don't like is enough to send us into action.
Anyway, if you have a server online, you might consider that it's possible that you may have child porn on your server at some future time. Can you prove that this isn't possible?
Software engineers at least in my country are also liable, just like regular engineers. In fact they are regular engineers. Software developers not so much.
Of course, software "engineers" typically face some barriers that don't exist in older fields of engineering. Can you imagine a civil engineer designing a bridge, and being told that all of the specs for the low-level parts are "proprietary" trade secrets that aren't available. He'd have to design using steel, concrete, and other materials without being allowed to specify their exact properties. And he'd be liable for the bridge's structural soundness despite this secrecy. Civil engineers long ago made sure that they had available all the data on the materials they used.
But with software, we consider it normal that the low-level stuff (the OS, device drivers, runtime libraries, etc.) are binary "blobs" whose details and exact capabilities are intentionally hidden by the vendor. The software builders aren't permitted access to the details of these things that they must use. But the software builders are considered responsible for "bugs" nonetheless.
Actually, this situation is much of why software developers work only on a "time and materials" basis, since without reliable knowledge of the required tools' and materials' characteristics, it's not possible to even make estimates of development time. We know that all sorts of things will be buggy, because the code uses library or OS features that aren't properly documented and can't be examined. But we can't know beforehand how the various "materials" will behave when called by our code.
It is somewhat interesting to see the ongoing criticism of software developers not being "real engineers", especially from management that insists on using closed, proprietary platforms. This situation can be summarized as "We aren't about to pay for real engineering, but we'll criticize the developers for not doing real engineering. There's a lot of cynicism in software circles because of this.
There is the prospect that, as more and more of our infrastructure comes to depend on the growing software component, this situation will change, and we'll be able to require the low-level information that real engineering requires. We are rapidly reaching the point where people's lives do depend on software. Your next car will almost certain contain one or more computers, whose failure could very well leave you dead. This is how we got the needed information available in other fields of engineering. "You want me to guarantee that bridge's safety? Very well; you'll make sure that I have the exact specs for all the materials. And if some component fails under use, you'll very well sue the manufacturer for fraud, not me. And you'll pay for inspections and maintenance that I specify, or you've violated our contract."
But software is far from such a situation these days. It's mostly shoddy, because the builders are required to make it shoddy, by intentionally keeping them ignorant of the required details of most of the low-level materials.
Even today blacks are only, what, 15% of population in USA?
Actually, you can have a bit of fun with that (if you're into picky logic and legalism) by asking what the definition of "black" is.
Thus, a number of US states used to use the "one drop" definition: If you have any black African ancestor anywhere in your family tree, you're legally a Negro. This was notoriously used in the 1800s in a number of cases in which a widow's inheritance was claimed by her husband's family by presenting evidence that she had an African ancestor N generations back, and was thus Negro and legally unable to marry in the state. This voided her marriage and her inheritance rights. This was likely fraudulent in many cases, but the courts tended to accept such claims.
I had a friend in college who like to tell people that she was black. She had very pale skin, freckles, blue eyes, and reddish-blond hair. She looked as pure, stereotypical Irish or Scottish as one can imagine. But she said her family tree included a "Negro" 5 generations back, so she was 1/32 black, and would still be legally black in a few states such as Mississippi. She seemed to enjoy making claims on her "black heritage" (and was in fact a real jazz fan ;-).
Back around 1980, some American demographers published the claim that sometime around then (plus or minus a decade or so), the American population reached the point that over 50% of the population has black-African ancestry. Of course, most are like her, with no discernible "black" features", because that ancestry was too far back to be significant. Some recent DNA testing has given support to this claim, though of course with very large error bars.
Of course, all humans ultimately have African ancestry. For Europeans, this was mostly recently from the wave of immigration that started about 40,000 years ago, with the Cro Magnon people. They lost their dark coloring with time, because it wasn't adaptive in the cool, cloudy climate of ice-age Europe. But they are still genetically difficult to distinguish from some of the related populations of central Africa.
Anyway, that 15% estimate is mostly based on people who self-identify as "black" (or whatever term they prefer this month). It's a reasonable number for social purposes. But it doesn't mean much genetically.
therein lies the real charm of how this story is worded: the celebration is in favour of the publication of a description, not the discovery.
And this is normal in the reporting of scientific "discoveries", for a rather common reason: The story is about a years-long process, and there really wasn't a single "Eureka!" moment when it all became clear. Rather, the people involved gathered evidence by means of a lot of experimenting and measuring. Slowly, the picture began to emerge. Hardly anything has a specific date. But the publication of the result does have a date.
As others have explained here, an important part of the story was the X-ray imaging done by Rosalind Russell. But, while she had a good part of DNA's structure worked out, she explicitly rejected the double-helix when a student assistant suggested it, and was a bit secretive about her interpretation of her work. The (unnamed ;-) student took some of her results down the hall to Watson and Crick, who did some more analysis, and slowly came to the same double-helix model.
Actually, as they all understood (and most later writers don't), the double-helix shape was basically an irrelevant outcome of DNA's internal interactions; the important part was the encoding of linear strings of little chunks of information, and the two parallel complementary strands that allowed for easy copying. But that understanding came somewhat later, when the information-theory people got ahold of it.
So it's not surprising that news people and historians should pick the date of publication to calculate anniversaries (another irrelevancy that's an accidental result of our planet's exact orbit around one particular star ;-). That's a date that they can pin down. The dates of the many steps leading to it can't generally be determined with much accuracy.
Clearly, the writer's intent was to convey an of the magnitude of the number.
Well, sure, but this is /., which fancies itself a technically-oriented news site. In this context, calling a finite number "near infinite" merely makes the writer look dumb. You'd expect such metaphorical usage in the mass media. But lots of us here expect this site to be more accurate. Looks like we were wrong about that.
Maybe we should just start talking about building a successor to slashdot. Then we can let this site continue on its dumbing-down path. This wouldn't be the first time that the technologically literate have abandoned a site (or a publication) on such grounds.
Maybe someone is already working on this. Anyone have a good candidate?
Well, yeah; the idea was to challenge the "best" in that old joke. That the US "democracy" is for sale to the highest bidders is rather well understood these days. The Supreme Court just made it official.
One of the constant strains in geek humor is to take things obviously intended as humorous, interpret the words literally, and try to generate still more (often rather black) humor from the results.
There's also an ongoing tongue-in-cheek disagreement over whether the US is evolving into a plutocracy or a kleptocracy or some other sort of *-ocracy. There's a lot of potential for fake-serious discussion possible in that topic, based on the style of the language peevery that we see so much of here. Telling someone that they've used the wrong word is so much better than just calling them a dummy ...
How can you defend someone who's claimed the right to kill an american citizen without trial, without a hearing, anywhere in the world.
How can you defend someone who's claimed the right to kill anyone without trial, without a hearing, anywhere in the world.
I mean, honestly, do you really want to be telling the rest of the world that it's only American citizens who deserve "due process" before being killed by the US government? And Obama does seem to be rather proud of his troops' midnight raid that killed one somewhat infamous non-citizen, then dumped his body at sea. This action, plus the favorable response it got from much of the US population, has pretty much ended any pretense the US has for being the civilized, law-and-order country that it has long claimed to be.
(Now if I could only figure out someway to turn this into an April Fools story ... ;-)
We've got the best democracy money can buy ;-)
That's a good old joke, but unfortunately, it hasn't been true for some time now. By any measure of how "good" a democratic government is, there are many other countries that score higher on the metric than does the US these days.
The was a recent huge drop in the "quality" of democracy in the US when the Supreme Court legalized unlimited, and largely undocumented campaign spending by corporations a few years back. Before that, we saw the the head of one of the main manufacturers of electronic voting equipment tell the voters in one state (Ohio) that he would deliver their state to the Republicans - and he delivered. And on and on.
If you're a mere citizen, without the wealth or connections to funnel millions of dollars to Congressional campaigns, your vote no longer counts for much at all. The available data says that in Congressional elections, the candidate with the largest campaign budget wins about 90% of the time in the House, and 80% of the time in the Senate. (This statistic was "revealed" yet again this afternoon in an NPR article.) You and I don't matter any more.
The TSA is just one of the very visible bits of evidence for how far the American democratic system has fallen. Yeah, maybe a large majority of passengers think the TSA is worthless. Do you really think this means that our "democratic" government will curtail or cancel its activities during our lifetime? Do you think you'll ever be permitted to vote on the TSA?
And Mohammed Atta, the leader of the World Trade Center attack team, had a degree in architecture. I've seen this factoid used to explain that the attack wasn't actually an act of terrorism; it was an act of artistic criticism. Atta was destroying what he and many others considered the ugliest blot on the New York City skyline.
[Google's] motto never talks about doing evil or not.
Right; they're just doing evil; they're not being evil.
I'm sure there's a real distinction hidden in there somewhere ...
en that the standard of infringement is three consecutive notes, ...
That is not the 'standard of infringement'. Don't spread misinformation AC. It really doesn't help.
Right; the actual standard seems to be one note. ;-)
The textbook example of this is the infamous copyright on "Happy Birthday". It seems that the defense in some court cases has attempted to argue that the tune is simply the rather older song "Good Morning to All", with different words. The prosecution's counter-argument is that they changed not just the lyrics, but the tune. In particular, they used two pickup notes for "Happy" rather than the single original pickup note for "Good", and this suffices to make it a new musical creation that has its own copyright.
So far, I haven't actually found any clear explanation of whether any court has actually taken this argument into account in making a decision. Media accounts of court cases can be annoyingly vague. But it's at least interesting that copyright lawyers would think doubling a pickup note is sufficient to produce a new copyright.
I have seen (and passed on) the suggestion to musicians that they should make sure they only play a single pickup note when accompanying this song. That way, they can reasonably argue that they were actually playing "Good Morning to All", which is out of copyright. It's just that the singers ("Amateurs!") are so musically illiterate that they don't hear the difference.
There's a lot of absurdity going around on this topic.
men will find deeply defend what they think must be true, despite all evidences.
Upton Sinclair put it in a rather elegant manner:
It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his income depends on not understanding it.
It has become fairly clear from the evidence that the climate change is being strongly pushed by human economic (industrial and agricultural) activity. A small population of people have a strong financial interest in continuing the current practices. We have lots of history saying that in such situations, the people profiting from an activity will prevent change until the disaster actually occurs. Then they'll take their riches and move on, leaving the disaster for the rest of the population to deal with.
Something that has been missed in most of the "discussions": The fact that human activity is forcing these changes means that humans now have the ability with our technology to control our climate, at least on a coarse world-wide level. We have the technical ability to shove the climate in whatever direction we prefer. But we aren't doing this. We're still leaving our major institutions in the hands of people who are personally profiting from the current climate pushing. Whatever direction this might be is less important than the fact that continuing is leading to problems that we are now capable of preventing. We just need the social and political will to do so.
Doesn't it mostly depend on what definition is being used this month?
One of the ongoing problems with both medical and economic statistics is that the definitions of what's being measured changes on a time scale of a year or four. This confounds attempts to measure changes over time, since the statistics for constant things are often changing.
Here in the US, one of the ongoing examples is the changing definitions of "unemployment". This was made clear back during the Reagan years, when the military was changed from ignored to "employed". This lowered the unemployment rate by roughly 1% (and varied a lot by state). It also meant that unemployment rates before and after that change were incommensurable.
This is an old, and ongoing story. Both the political and marketing people like to change definitions periodically, so they can use the resulting statistical "changes" in their propaganda.