If corporations don't care about their own security why is it so important to the US government?
Perhaps because the US government makes a pretense of representing us, the citizens. And poor corporate computer security threatens us, especially since it makes our bank accounts vulnerable to criminals who can exploit the poor security. So it's not surprising that our representatives in Congress might be starting to get the message that there's a problem that's threatening their voters. And, being Congress, they do what the Constitution says is their role: They declare war.
Yes, this makes no sense at all. But nobody ever accused the US Congress of being full of people with sense.
Solving the problem might require abandoning the "war" metaphor. Declaring this a "war" is a way of allowing the authorities to ignore insignificant (to them) things like legality and morality. The inevitable result, which we're already seeing, is offending a lot of the population by the overreaction and "scorched earth" tactics. Taking down sites without any semblance of due process is guaranteed to hurt a lot of innocent bystanders, and as with real wars, this just turns the population against you.
This is much like the "war on drugs". Even those of us who don't abuse (or even use) illegal drugs are still very likely to be offended by the atrocities committed by the warriors. Taking people's cars, homes, and sometimes lives without any sort of trial is both wrong and counterproductive, but it's what the "war" metaphor leads to.
There's also a major problem with the media's expropriation of the term "hacker", which was originally a term of high praise for a technical expert, retargetting (;-) it as a term for an anti-social criminal. This tends to get the message across that people with technical expertise in software security are considered suspect by the media and the general population. You want these people on your side. Characterizing them as criminals isn't the best way to make this happen.
As long as we have a "war against hackers", I'd expect the problems to get worse. That phrase itself is pretty much a guarantee that the problems won't be approached in a reasonable fashion. It also guarantees that lots of innocent bystanders will be hit by the warlike measures. Even worse, people who could have helped you will be classified as hackers and, uh, "discouraged" from helping find the solutions.
I'm reminded of the time, back in the 1960s, when a "War on Poverty" was declared here in the US. That one ended rather quickly, as lots of poor people started publicly asking where they could go to surrender. But it's not obvious that the large population of software "hackers" will take this approach. If I happened to be a software expert with some expertise in computer security, where would I go to surrender?
Let's just hope that this treatment doesn't end up with a new type of cancer cell that doesn't have the over-expressed CD47.
That's probably already true for some kinds of cancer. One of the problems with the media's coverage of cancer is that they tend to talk about it as if it were a single disease. But it's actually a catch-all term for a list of probably thousands of different diseases that have a common symptom of uncontrolled cell growth. It's pretty well understood that what works with cancer X generally can't be expected to work with cancer Y.
It's funny that people have this confusion, when for example flu is generally understood by most people as the same sort of thing, a name for hundreds of similar diseases, each caused by a single strain of virus. Part of the reason that people understand this is that the anti-flu vaccines produced each year are identified as being "for" a specific strain, and they won't protect you from other strains.
It would help understand a new "cancer cure" if we understood that it probably affects only some subset (possibly small) of all the different kinds of cancer. But if you read TFS, you don't see many hint of this, and TFA isn't all that much more specific. Of course, the researchers probably thought that by listing the cancers that they'd used in testing, they were implicitly saying "We don't know how it will affect any cancers other than these." But that message obviously hasn't gotten out to the media people who have been breathlessly reporting "a new cure for cancer" as if it were a single silver bullet that would kill all cancers. It's an old story, though, and you see the same response to many earlier "cancer cures".
Actually, it's quite "debatable". There are a lot of grammatical and spelling style guides. Nearly every publisher has one. They don't all agree on this particular detail (or many others).
Those of us who grew up in the UK were mostly taught the rule that periods go outside the quotes. But it turns out that the "rule" is more complex than that. Some UK publishers follow the usual rule for that part of the world, but a few have an in-house rule putting periods inside the quotes. Meanwhile, over across the Pond, most American publishers put periods inside quotes, but a few have house rules requiring that periods be outside quotes.
It's like the old joke: A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure. If you think there's a "correct" placement of punctuation when a sentence ends with a quote, you probably learned your rule from one book. You should be careful to avoid reading other books on the topic, because you'll be surprised and upset to find that some of them don't agree with your first punctuation-grammar book.
Actually, I've seen a few "geek" discussions of the topic, which usually settles on the rule that the punctuation belongs inside the quotes if it's logically part of the quote, and outside the quotes if it belongs to the larger statement that contains the quote. The usual example is when a statement quotes a question. The most logical punctuation then is a question mark before the final quote, and a period after. Simple example:
He asked me "What time is it?".
Of course, hardly anyone ever does that. I doubt that any publishers include this situation in their rules, but it'd be interesting to find one that does.
The reason that geeks might like this is that almost all programming language work that way. Consider the generic example:
print "Hello, world!";
This command prints the '!', since it's part of the quoted string. It doesn't print the semicolon or the quotes, because they're not part of the quoted string. This is simple and logical, and it's not surprising that people who've been required to learn this logic might also apply it to the chaos that is English spelling and grammar.
(It is also fun to point out that there is no official English rule on such topics, for the simple reason that the English language has no official organization with the legal ability to impose such rules. The closest we can come is publishers' stylebooks and grade-school English textbooks, none of which have any official legal standing anywhere in the world.;-)
... it's a matter of facebook targeting being able to infer your orientation based on the information you provide (friends, locations, likes, un-friendings, etc)
Though, as the earlier "85% accuracy" claimed in identifying homosexuals indicates, such things tend to have a rather high false-positive rate. Judging people on the basis of such statistics is prone to an equally high failure rate.
One example I've seen a lot of is the ads that "target" my wife. She like to tell people that all the online ad people have decided that she's a gay male. I can testify that she's neither. But she first noticed the pattern some years ago, after she started subscribing to Netflix, and it quickly became obvious that their recommendations for movies were very obviously aimed at gay males. She consulted a few gay male (and female) friends, and verified this. Since then, various websites that target their ads have also tended in the same direction. Youtube, Facebook, and Google Ads in general keep showing her things that really fit the stereotype of gay males. We have wondered whether this is just because she follows Andrew Sullivan's and Perez Hilton's blogs, but those by themselves probably don't really explain the pattern.
So far, she just has a sense of humor about it all. It's entertaining enough that she doesn't try to block the ads; she just glances at them occasionally to see if the pattern is changing. And she gets a kick out of telling her friends, acquaintances and co-workers about it.
Actually, I think it's partly just that the advertising industry still has a long ways to go before it can do successful targeting. Thus, I run a web site hosted on a machine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dealing with a rather technical topic which isn't important here. What's interesting about it is that I tried Google Ads for a couple of years. I and various users were amused to see that Google's idea of a "targeted" ad to the site's visitors was rental and real-estate agents in Cambridge. I can guarantee that the site's users generally don't plan to visit, much less move to Cambridge. If anything, they're much more likely to carefully avoid moving into the middle of a major urban area. Questions to Google's support folks got no responses at all, and I'm no longer running the ads, which hardly ever got any clicks. When I asked the users, many replied that they'd never seen any ad there that they found at all relevant to their interests. Tagging the site's pages with lots of relevant keywords didn't help.
So neither I nor my wife is very impressed with Google's (or Facebooks's or Netflix's or...) vaunted "targeting" ability. Maybe with a few more decades of experience, they can get a bit better at it. Or maybe they'll still have a 15% false-positive rate at identifying gays. And a 99.9% false-positive rate at prospective Cambridge residents. (I do know one guy in our user list who moved there, as an MIT student.;-)
... our stand-alone GPS has the option to either orient the map in direction of travel or orient the map towards North. The latter is bloody confusing and not preferred.
That seems to vary from person to person. I have a GPS gadget that also has that option. I tried the "up is forward" scheme for a while, and found it confusing, so I switched back to "up is north", which I personally find much easier to understand. This is probably related to my wife's observation that I almost always seem to know which direction I'm going, and she doesn't understand how I do that. I don't either, but at least I don't try to impose my preferred method on others who don't have an innate sense of direction.
There are a number of other such sensual differences among people. Among musicians, for example, some people hear the absolute pitch of notes ("perfect pitch"), while others don't, but hear musical intervals well ("relative pitch"). There's a long-running debate over which is better. Perfect pitch means you can pick up your instrument and join in without needing to ask (or experiment to determine) the key. But people like that tend to be really confused if someone plays something in a "wrong" key; the relative-pitch people don't hear anything unusual about this, and often routinely play things in whatever key is best for the others. This can come in really handy if you're backing up singers.
The best conclusion is that there are advantages and disadvantages to either approach, and you should learn to take advantage of whichever works for you. I'd consider a GPS that only does "up is forward" to be a crappy, annoying product, and I wouldn't buy it. And in general, I'd want one that implements both schemes, for situations where I'd like someone else to use it (e.g. as the navigator while I drive).
Actually, the idea of a passenger doing the navigating is one of the best ways of shooting down all the schemes such as this one. A good GPS system is one that the navigator can easily jigger to match their preferred way of doing things (including things like changing font size for different visual acuities), and then change them again quickly when someone else takes over the navigation task. We should be pushing for GPS gadgets that are good at this, with many modes of operation that are easy to change, and not for limitations that decrease their usefulness.
(I recently was driving with a passenger from China who wasn't very good at English. I quickly changed my Garmin Nüvi to speak Mandarin, handed it to him, and the trip went well. I left it that way for a few days afterward, to get more familiar with Mandarin direction words, but this really annoyed my wife when she used the car for something. So she got even by setting it to speak Arabic. Then I changed it to Dutch, just for fun. But not all of its settings are so easy to find and change.;-)
Ah, yes, the famous Mbuttachusetts Insbreastute of Technology. It's too bad that there's no offensive word buried in "technology", giving MIT a trifecta of censorable names. Most of the MIT crowd enjoys this sort of word game, and are happy with how easy it is to offend the puritanical types.
Of course, none of these are quite as good (i.e., bad) as Svaginahorpe over in England.
...capsaicin is apparently the peppers defense against mammals eating the fruit, since they do not spread the seed as optimally for the plant. Birds do not sense it,...
Actually, a lot of birds do taste capsaicin - and actively like it. We have a blue-crowned conure who likes peppers in general, especially the seeds, but tends to eat only a little of a sweet pepper. But give her a hot pepper of any sort, and she devours it, then goes looking for more. So at least for this species, hot peppers are a real delicacy.
Conures are native to South America, which is also where hot peppers evolved, so this could explain the good match. Parrots from other continents might not be adapted to hot peppers, and might not taste the capsaicin so well. Thus, our cockatiels (native to Australia) also like peppers of any sort, but don't absolutely love the hot ones like the conure does. They'll usually eat one, and then go on to something else for variety.
For example, ISPs could simply block... cryptographic protocols... under the guise of defensive countermeasures...
In simpler words, they want to block our use of encrypted login names, account numbers and passwords.
It might be interesting to know how the major banks are lobbying in this case. If the public comes to understand that their account information can be harvested by their ISP and other companies that provide the "wires", smart people will simply stop using electronic banking.
The companies pushing for such clauses certainly understand what clauses like the above mean, and they've included it so that they can block encryption of our login info. It would take a real dummy to fail to understand why they want this.
It always baffles me that scientists are doing expensive research on something obvious.
Because things that are "obvious" very often turn out to be wrong.
Of course, sometimes they turn out to be right, and then people criticize the researchers for testing something that "everyone knows". But when so many previous studies showed that something that "everyone knows" isn't actually true, it adds to the evidence that to know what's actually true, you need to do carefully-controlled scientific studies of everything, no matter how obvious it might be. Otherwise, some of those things that are "obvious" but false can kill you.
In the general field of human health, it's not at all difficult to find examples in any society at any time of beliefs that are obvious but wrong. Lots of these are documented in various history texts.
.[W]hy do human females go through menopause in their late forties? That's unique to humans among mammals (and elephants, which live 70 years in the wild).
You can discover something interesting if you do a bit of googling on the topic of menopause: Nearly everyone either claims that menopause is unique to humans, or it happens only in some species X and humans. But different writers mention different species Xs that share this feature with us.
Now, they can't all be right about this. Consider the reports on the recent study that found menopause in guppies. (Yes, really; google for "menopause guppies".) Others report menopause in other primates, e.g. gorillas. It has been found in at least two very different whale species. And so on.
There's one obvious hypothesis to explain what's going on here: The people writing about menopause generally haven't bothered to do any study of the literature at all. They write "[Species X and] humans are the only species that experience menopause", when what they actually mean is "[Species X and] humans are the only species that I know of that experience menopause". But they don't consider the claim to be worth even a few minutes of googling to verify, much less a time-consuming search of scientific literature.
It's likely that the paucity of data on the topic is simply because it has hardly ever been actually studied in any scientific fashion. It's possible that most (female) animals experience menopause if they live long enough, but in the wild most of them don't live long enough for casual human observers to know whether they are still capable of reproducing. I've probably seen a few million wild animals (half of them sparrows;-), but I've rarely verified that any of them are capable of reproducing. This is probably also true of most scientific field workers, except for a tiny minority that have a special interest in the topic. If some of those critters are past reproductive age, we'd never know.
Anyway, this looks like a case where we should ask "How do you know that?" It'll generally turn out that the writer doesn't actually know it; they just believe it without any supporting evidence.
And no, finding others making the same claim doesn't count as evidence. Given that "menopause exists in only 1 or 2 species" can be debunked within minutes by googling, it is clearly a case where the "common knowledge" is simply wrong. But we have no idea how wrong it is. Maybe the handful of species known to experience menopause are the whole set. But I wouldn't bet any money on this, considering the paucity of actual research. It's equally likely that it's a general phenomenon that goes unnoticed because it's difficult to observe the non-occurrence of a behavior.
The version I learned goes something like "Oh say can you see / any bedbugs on me? / If you do, take a few / 'cause I caught them from you." or slight variants on that. I did a quick google check for "Oh, say, can you see any bedbugs on me...", and it said there are about 1590 matches right now.
But "Star-Spangled Banner parody" has over a million google hits, including a Snoop Dogg (apparently not actually by him). A quick glance shows parodies of all sorts. Some aren't true parodies, though, since all they use is the melody, with unrelated words. Sorta like how the anthem uses the melody of To Anacreon in Heaven, but has totally unrelated words, so it's not really a parody, either.
There is an old tradition of recycling tunes to fit new lyrics with the same meter. This is institutionalized in the hymnal business, in the "metrical index" pages that give a hymn tune's metrical structure so that it can easily be matched to poems that will fit.
Just yesterday, I heard the Blind Boys of Alabama's rendition of Amazing Grace, sung to the tune of House of the Rising Sun (though as I recall, that recombination was discovered by another singer, but I've forgotten who).
That's pretty funny, though ultimately not too important. A more worrisome case was when people tried setting up a breast-cancers support group at Yahoo Groups. They reported doing this three times in one year, and every time, yahoo's software killed it because its name was "indecent". They eventually got yahoo's people to correct the bug, though, and if you check, you'll find that there are now several yahoo groups with "breast" and "cancer" in their names.
It was a bit disappointing that yahoo didn't fix the problem after the first time.
Yeah; they're caused by exactly the same bug. I don't know why "clbuttic" became the standard example, since there are lots of others that are just as funny. It makes sense that a common, ordinary word would be chosen, of course, since Svaginahorpe wouldn't have been common enough to become quickly known.
I've always like the example of the US Consbreastution, but that also wouldn't have been so common. The string "ass" is quite common in English words. There were lots of organizations with "Association" in their names, that tuned into "Buttociation". And so on.
The melody is trivially different from the US national anthem, but quite recognizable. That page includes the lyrics, which might be a bit difficult for most people to follow otherwise.
It's actually not at all unusual for national anthems to be based on older songs, especially "folk" songs that everyone in the culture knows. One of my favorite examples is the Israeli anthem, which uses the melody of an old eastern-European Jewish song that is in turn based on one of the ur-melodies found all over Europe. With about half as many notes (and in major), we know it in English as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.;-) But people in any European country can probably tell us their local name for it. In eastern areas, it tends to be in minor, as is the Israeli version. I know a nice Finnish shottish tune that's a minor-mode variant of the same melody.
Yeah; in English we have a similar quotation, about the law forbidding both the rich and poor to sleep on park benches. (Though this may be, like much of the English language, just borrowed from some other language.;-)
France has been one of the most outrageous violators of it's own principles for a long time now whenever it comes to Muslims.
Some years back, I heard an elegant explanation of this from a friend of my wife's. At the time, they were both students at a nearby university, and the friend was a woman from France. My wife asked her why nearly everyone in France is a Catholic. Her reply was "That's because once every few of decades, we all go on a rampage and kill everyone who isn't a Catholic and doesn't have the sense to get out of France in time."
She also observed that the last example of this was back in the 1930s and 40s, when France joined in the then-popular task of wiping out their Jewish population. It's been a lot of decades since then, so it's about time for France to start the next slaughter. There aren't enough Jews in France now to bother with (and the Huguenots are totally extinct there now;-), so they'll have to find a new group of victims. She suggested that the Muslims were the obvious next target, since their numbers were growing. (And they dress funny, so they're easy to spot.)
This was all told in a completely matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if it were something that everyone should know about France. So, according to her, the problem isn't that those people are Muslims; the problem is that they're not Catholics.
It might be interesting to hear from other French people on this topic...
I hope the next massive trojan, doesn't start "visiting" these websites, and of course, it won't infect congressmen or even the president's computer.
Well, I'm a bit surprised that it hasn't already happened. Or maybe it has, and just hasn't been publicised. The basic technique was documented in the late 1990s. Google for "javascript preload". It's pretty well documented, and useful for legit purposes. Its main use is for a site to download its images to your cache while you're reading their main page(s), so those images will already be there when you go to other pages that use them. This can materially speed up a site's apparent response time. But it's easy to abuse.
When I read about it way back then, I did a bit of experimenting, and found that it was quite easy to fill the browser cache of anyone (who had javascript enabled) with any images or other files that I wanted them to have, from any other site on the Web. Unless they know to look through their cache, they'd never see those files and would never know they were there. In my tests, I used assorted innocuous-looking images (with only an occasonal "artsy" image of nekkid wimmin;-). But it was pretty obvious that the technique could as easily be used to fill their disks with stuff that would get them fired or fined or jailed.
I still have my code, so I just tested it on a few of the current browsers. It still works just fine, as long as JS is turned on. And google reports that "javascript preload" gets more than 3 million hits, with some on the first page saying things like "How to Preload an Image", so presumably other programmers are using these JS features, too.
And, lest you think I'm some sort of ï½ber-hacker (who even knows that that word contains an umlaut;-), I won't tell you where to find my demo. I'll just suggest you talk to any web-programmer friends you may have, and ask them to try it. You may be surprised at how quickly they get it working. Or they may show you that they already have it working on their sites. They're likely to say "Hey, every JS programmer knows that!"
And I don't believe that Congress or the President are immune. Can you imagine them running with scripting disabled? Their only immunity is that they can prevent the investigative agencies from examining their browser caches, or if some investigator does so, they can have him fired.
The only actual defense is turning off all scripting. Anything that downloads code and runs it on your machine is an easy entry path for such malware, especially when it's using popular JS features that are there to speed up your web access.
Sarkozy's proposal would be a good way for his minions to frame their opponents by tricking them into downloading lots of illegal stuff. Probably the only way to fight it would be to organize a project to fill his colleagues' disks with files of the sort that they want to make punishable by law. And up above, I told any interested readers how to find instructions on doing that. (I wonder if they're available in French?;-)
If I asked a potential employee for their personal passwords and they handed them over, they most certainly wouldn't get the job.
I was wondering if any employers would respond that way. I suppose the sensible ones would, and the majority wouldn't.
If I'm ever asked this, I'll probably just ask them what they intend to do in my name after they've logged in as me. And when I get home, I'd be mailing my resume around to other likely employers.
Of course, most places I've worked, I've used workstations for which the IT folks have the root password. I've made it clear on occasion that I understand that the IT folks can easily impersonate me. In several cases, a bit of hilarity has ensued, as the management types verified that what I'd said was correct, and figured out the implications. In one case, my boss gave me my workstation's root password, and suggested that I change it. When the IT folks came by, I referred them to him, and never heard about it again.
Sometimes a company's internal politics can involve some subtle behind-the-scenes exchanges like this.
Its hard to believe you think that is real.
Considering that the Canadian flag is the only one "in the wind".
Yeah, we tend to expect that photos are 'shopped these days. But there's also something a bit funny about the upper edge of the Canadian flag in that photo. It's like there's something along that edge that is keeping the flag in place. I've seen flags displayed like that, so they'll be spread out even when there's no wind.
Of course, that "funny" edge to the flag could also be faked by an expert in photo editing. It's hard to know what to believe, these days.
It has already been mentioned that the tune is rather similar to the actual Kazakhstan anthem, but with "nonstandard" lyrics.
It might be especially fun if the anthem-trolling did the same, using the basic national-anthem medley, but with more "interesting" lyrings.
In the case of the US, I can hear a choir singing the well-known (among American school-kids) lyrics: "Oh, say, can you see / any bedbugs on me...".
It'd be fun to make a collection of all the national anthems, with variant lyrics like this. It would, of course, be online, so various sporting events would likely find it and use it as their source.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
If corporations don't care about their own security why is it so important to the US government?
Perhaps because the US government makes a pretense of representing us, the citizens. And poor corporate computer security threatens us, especially since it makes our bank accounts vulnerable to criminals who can exploit the poor security. So it's not surprising that our representatives in Congress might be starting to get the message that there's a problem that's threatening their voters. And, being Congress, they do what the Constitution says is their role: They declare war.
Yes, this makes no sense at all. But nobody ever accused the US Congress of being full of people with sense.
Solving the problem might require abandoning the "war" metaphor. Declaring this a "war" is a way of allowing the authorities to ignore insignificant (to them) things like legality and morality. The inevitable result, which we're already seeing, is offending a lot of the population by the overreaction and "scorched earth" tactics. Taking down sites without any semblance of due process is guaranteed to hurt a lot of innocent bystanders, and as with real wars, this just turns the population against you.
This is much like the "war on drugs". Even those of us who don't abuse (or even use) illegal drugs are still very likely to be offended by the atrocities committed by the warriors. Taking people's cars, homes, and sometimes lives without any sort of trial is both wrong and counterproductive, but it's what the "war" metaphor leads to.
There's also a major problem with the media's expropriation of the term "hacker", which was originally a term of high praise for a technical expert, retargetting (;-) it as a term for an anti-social criminal. This tends to get the message across that people with technical expertise in software security are considered suspect by the media and the general population. You want these people on your side. Characterizing them as criminals isn't the best way to make this happen.
As long as we have a "war against hackers", I'd expect the problems to get worse. That phrase itself is pretty much a guarantee that the problems won't be approached in a reasonable fashion. It also guarantees that lots of innocent bystanders will be hit by the warlike measures. Even worse, people who could have helped you will be classified as hackers and, uh, "discouraged" from helping find the solutions.
I'm reminded of the time, back in the 1960s, when a "War on Poverty" was declared here in the US. That one ended rather quickly, as lots of poor people started publicly asking where they could go to surrender. But it's not obvious that the large population of software "hackers" will take this approach. If I happened to be a software expert with some expertise in computer security, where would I go to surrender?
Let's just hope that this treatment doesn't end up with a new type of cancer cell that doesn't have the over-expressed CD47.
That's probably already true for some kinds of cancer. One of the problems with the media's coverage of cancer is that they tend to talk about it as if it were a single disease. But it's actually a catch-all term for a list of probably thousands of different diseases that have a common symptom of uncontrolled cell growth. It's pretty well understood that what works with cancer X generally can't be expected to work with cancer Y.
It's funny that people have this confusion, when for example flu is generally understood by most people as the same sort of thing, a name for hundreds of similar diseases, each caused by a single strain of virus. Part of the reason that people understand this is that the anti-flu vaccines produced each year are identified as being "for" a specific strain, and they won't protect you from other strains.
It would help understand a new "cancer cure" if we understood that it probably affects only some subset (possibly small) of all the different kinds of cancer. But if you read TFS, you don't see many hint of this, and TFA isn't all that much more specific. Of course, the researchers probably thought that by listing the cancers that they'd used in testing, they were implicitly saying "We don't know how it will affect any cancers other than these." But that message obviously hasn't gotten out to the media people who have been breathlessly reporting "a new cure for cancer" as if it were a single silver bullet that would kill all cancers. It's an old story, though, and you see the same response to many earlier "cancer cures".
It is not debatable that it is the rule.
Actually, it's quite "debatable". There are a lot of grammatical and spelling style guides. Nearly every publisher has one. They don't all agree on this particular detail (or many others).
Those of us who grew up in the UK were mostly taught the rule that periods go outside the quotes. But it turns out that the "rule" is more complex than that. Some UK publishers follow the usual rule for that part of the world, but a few have an in-house rule putting periods inside the quotes. Meanwhile, over across the Pond, most American publishers put periods inside quotes, but a few have house rules requiring that periods be outside quotes.
It's like the old joke: A man with a watch knows what time it is; a man with two watches is never sure. If you think there's a "correct" placement of punctuation when a sentence ends with a quote, you probably learned your rule from one book. You should be careful to avoid reading other books on the topic, because you'll be surprised and upset to find that some of them don't agree with your first punctuation-grammar book.
Actually, I've seen a few "geek" discussions of the topic, which usually settles on the rule that the punctuation belongs inside the quotes if it's logically part of the quote, and outside the quotes if it belongs to the larger statement that contains the quote. The usual example is when a statement quotes a question. The most logical punctuation then is a question mark before the final quote, and a period after. Simple example:
He asked me "What time is it?".
Of course, hardly anyone ever does that. I doubt that any publishers include this situation in their rules, but it'd be interesting to find one that does.
The reason that geeks might like this is that almost all programming language work that way. Consider the generic example:
print "Hello, world!";
This command prints the '!', since it's part of the quoted string. It doesn't print the semicolon or the quotes, because they're not part of the quoted string. This is simple and logical, and it's not surprising that people who've been required to learn this logic might also apply it to the chaos that is English spelling and grammar.
(It is also fun to point out that there is no official English rule on such topics, for the simple reason that the English language has no official organization with the legal ability to impose such rules. The closest we can come is publishers' stylebooks and grade-school English textbooks, none of which have any official legal standing anywhere in the world. ;-)
... it's a matter of facebook targeting being able to infer your orientation based on the information you provide (friends, locations, likes, un-friendings, etc)
Though, as the earlier "85% accuracy" claimed in identifying homosexuals indicates, such things tend to have a rather high false-positive rate. Judging people on the basis of such statistics is prone to an equally high failure rate.
One example I've seen a lot of is the ads that "target" my wife. She like to tell people that all the online ad people have decided that she's a gay male. I can testify that she's neither. But she first noticed the pattern some years ago, after she started subscribing to Netflix, and it quickly became obvious that their recommendations for movies were very obviously aimed at gay males. She consulted a few gay male (and female) friends, and verified this. Since then, various websites that target their ads have also tended in the same direction. Youtube, Facebook, and Google Ads in general keep showing her things that really fit the stereotype of gay males. We have wondered whether this is just because she follows Andrew Sullivan's and Perez Hilton's blogs, but those by themselves probably don't really explain the pattern.
So far, she just has a sense of humor about it all. It's entertaining enough that she doesn't try to block the ads; she just glances at them occasionally to see if the pattern is changing. And she gets a kick out of telling her friends, acquaintances and co-workers about it.
Actually, I think it's partly just that the advertising industry still has a long ways to go before it can do successful targeting. Thus, I run a web site hosted on a machine in Cambridge, Massachusetts, dealing with a rather technical topic which isn't important here. What's interesting about it is that I tried Google Ads for a couple of years. I and various users were amused to see that Google's idea of a "targeted" ad to the site's visitors was rental and real-estate agents in Cambridge. I can guarantee that the site's users generally don't plan to visit, much less move to Cambridge. If anything, they're much more likely to carefully avoid moving into the middle of a major urban area. Questions to Google's support folks got no responses at all, and I'm no longer running the ads, which hardly ever got any clicks. When I asked the users, many replied that they'd never seen any ad there that they found at all relevant to their interests. Tagging the site's pages with lots of relevant keywords didn't help.
So neither I nor my wife is very impressed with Google's (or Facebooks's or Netflix's or ...) vaunted "targeting" ability. Maybe with a few more decades of experience, they can get a bit better at it. Or maybe they'll still have a 15% false-positive rate at identifying gays. And a 99.9% false-positive rate at prospective Cambridge residents. (I do know one guy in our user list who moved there, as an MIT student. ;-)
... our stand-alone GPS has the option to either orient the map in direction of travel or orient the map towards North. The latter is bloody confusing and not preferred.
That seems to vary from person to person. I have a GPS gadget that also has that option. I tried the "up is forward" scheme for a while, and found it confusing, so I switched back to "up is north", which I personally find much easier to understand. This is probably related to my wife's observation that I almost always seem to know which direction I'm going, and she doesn't understand how I do that. I don't either, but at least I don't try to impose my preferred method on others who don't have an innate sense of direction.
There are a number of other such sensual differences among people. Among musicians, for example, some people hear the absolute pitch of notes ("perfect pitch"), while others don't, but hear musical intervals well ("relative pitch"). There's a long-running debate over which is better. Perfect pitch means you can pick up your instrument and join in without needing to ask (or experiment to determine) the key. But people like that tend to be really confused if someone plays something in a "wrong" key; the relative-pitch people don't hear anything unusual about this, and often routinely play things in whatever key is best for the others. This can come in really handy if you're backing up singers.
The best conclusion is that there are advantages and disadvantages to either approach, and you should learn to take advantage of whichever works for you. I'd consider a GPS that only does "up is forward" to be a crappy, annoying product, and I wouldn't buy it. And in general, I'd want one that implements both schemes, for situations where I'd like someone else to use it (e.g. as the navigator while I drive).
Actually, the idea of a passenger doing the navigating is one of the best ways of shooting down all the schemes such as this one. A good GPS system is one that the navigator can easily jigger to match their preferred way of doing things (including things like changing font size for different visual acuities), and then change them again quickly when someone else takes over the navigation task. We should be pushing for GPS gadgets that are good at this, with many modes of operation that are easy to change, and not for limitations that decrease their usefulness.
(I recently was driving with a passenger from China who wasn't very good at English. I quickly changed my Garmin Nüvi to speak Mandarin, handed it to him, and the trip went well. I left it that way for a few days afterward, to get more familiar with Mandarin direction words, but this really annoyed my wife when she used the car for something. So she got even by setting it to speak Arabic. Then I changed it to Dutch, just for fun. But not all of its settings are so easy to find and change. ;-)
Ah, yes, the famous Mbuttachusetts Insbreastute of Technology. It's too bad that there's no offensive word buried in "technology", giving MIT a trifecta of censorable names. Most of the MIT crowd enjoys this sort of word game, and are happy with how easy it is to offend the puritanical types.
Of course, none of these are quite as good (i.e., bad) as Svaginahorpe over in England.
...capsaicin is apparently the peppers defense against mammals eating the fruit, since they do not spread the seed as optimally for the plant. Birds do not sense it,...
Actually, a lot of birds do taste capsaicin - and actively like it. We have a blue-crowned conure who likes peppers in general, especially the seeds, but tends to eat only a little of a sweet pepper. But give her a hot pepper of any sort, and she devours it, then goes looking for more. So at least for this species, hot peppers are a real delicacy.
Conures are native to South America, which is also where hot peppers evolved, so this could explain the good match. Parrots from other continents might not be adapted to hot peppers, and might not taste the capsaicin so well. Thus, our cockatiels (native to Australia) also like peppers of any sort, but don't absolutely love the hot ones like the conure does. They'll usually eat one, and then go on to something else for variety.
For example, ISPs could simply block ... cryptographic protocols... under the guise of defensive countermeasures ...
In simpler words, they want to block our use of encrypted login names, account numbers and passwords.
It might be interesting to know how the major banks are lobbying in this case. If the public comes to understand that their account information can be harvested by their ISP and other companies that provide the "wires", smart people will simply stop using electronic banking.
The companies pushing for such clauses certainly understand what clauses like the above mean, and they've included it so that they can block encryption of our login info. It would take a real dummy to fail to understand why they want this.
Aux enfants de la tequilla, l'heure de boire est arrivée...
That's hilarious! Where are the rest of the lyrics? I tried googling it, and got no match.
(But I have heard a number of other good parodies of la Marseillaise. For some reason, at least half of them have to do with drinking. ;-)
It always baffles me that scientists are doing expensive research on something obvious.
Because things that are "obvious" very often turn out to be wrong.
Of course, sometimes they turn out to be right, and then people criticize the researchers for testing something that "everyone knows". But when so many previous studies showed that something that "everyone knows" isn't actually true, it adds to the evidence that to know what's actually true, you need to do carefully-controlled scientific studies of everything, no matter how obvious it might be. Otherwise, some of those things that are "obvious" but false can kill you.
In the general field of human health, it's not at all difficult to find examples in any society at any time of beliefs that are obvious but wrong. Lots of these are documented in various history texts.
I'll let someone else list a few examples ...
.[W]hy do human females go through menopause in their late forties? That's unique to humans among mammals (and elephants, which live 70 years in the wild).
You can discover something interesting if you do a bit of googling on the topic of menopause: Nearly everyone either claims that menopause is unique to humans, or it happens only in some species X and humans. But different writers mention different species Xs that share this feature with us.
Now, they can't all be right about this. Consider the reports on the recent study that found menopause in guppies. (Yes, really; google for "menopause guppies".) Others report menopause in other primates, e.g. gorillas. It has been found in at least two very different whale species. And so on.
There's one obvious hypothesis to explain what's going on here: The people writing about menopause generally haven't bothered to do any study of the literature at all. They write "[Species X and] humans are the only species that experience menopause", when what they actually mean is "[Species X and] humans are the only species that I know of that experience menopause". But they don't consider the claim to be worth even a few minutes of googling to verify, much less a time-consuming search of scientific literature.
It's likely that the paucity of data on the topic is simply because it has hardly ever been actually studied in any scientific fashion. It's possible that most (female) animals experience menopause if they live long enough, but in the wild most of them don't live long enough for casual human observers to know whether they are still capable of reproducing. I've probably seen a few million wild animals (half of them sparrows ;-), but I've rarely verified that any of them are capable of reproducing. This is probably also true of most scientific field workers, except for a tiny minority that have a special interest in the topic. If some of those critters are past reproductive age, we'd never know.
Anyway, this looks like a case where we should ask "How do you know that?" It'll generally turn out that the writer doesn't actually know it; they just believe it without any supporting evidence.
And no, finding others making the same claim doesn't count as evidence. Given that "menopause exists in only 1 or 2 species" can be debunked within minutes by googling, it is clearly a case where the "common knowledge" is simply wrong. But we have no idea how wrong it is. Maybe the handful of species known to experience menopause are the whole set. But I wouldn't bet any money on this, considering the paucity of actual research. It's equally likely that it's a general phenomenon that goes unnoticed because it's difficult to observe the non-occurrence of a behavior.
The version I learned goes something like "Oh say can you see / any bedbugs on me? / If you do, take a few / 'cause I caught them from you." or slight variants on that. I did a quick google check for "Oh, say, can you see any bedbugs on me ...", and it said there are about 1590 matches right now.
But "Star-Spangled Banner parody" has over a million google hits, including a Snoop Dogg (apparently not actually by him). A quick glance shows parodies of all sorts. Some aren't true parodies, though, since all they use is the melody, with unrelated words. Sorta like how the anthem uses the melody of To Anacreon in Heaven, but has totally unrelated words, so it's not really a parody, either.
There is an old tradition of recycling tunes to fit new lyrics with the same meter. This is institutionalized in the hymnal business, in the "metrical index" pages that give a hymn tune's metrical structure so that it can easily be matched to poems that will fit.
Just yesterday, I heard the Blind Boys of Alabama's rendition of Amazing Grace, sung to the tune of House of the Rising Sun (though as I recall, that recombination was discovered by another singer, but I've forgotten who).
That's pretty funny, though ultimately not too important. A more worrisome case was when people tried setting up a breast-cancers support group at Yahoo Groups. They reported doing this three times in one year, and every time, yahoo's software killed it because its name was "indecent". They eventually got yahoo's people to correct the bug, though, and if you check, you'll find that there are now several yahoo groups with "breast" and "cancer" in their names.
It was a bit disappointing that yahoo didn't fix the problem after the first time.
Yeah; they're caused by exactly the same bug. I don't know why "clbuttic" became the standard example, since there are lots of others that are just as funny. It makes sense that a common, ordinary word would be chosen, of course, since Svaginahorpe wouldn't have been common enough to become quickly known.
I've always like the example of the US Consbreastution, but that also wouldn't have been so common. The string "ass" is quite common in English words. There were lots of organizations with "Association" in their names, that tuned into "Buttociation". And so on.
... censorware tends to break in interesting ways, even when it's not by design.
In web development circles this is known as the "clbuttic mistake". ;-)
Google it.
There's a rousing version of To Anacreon in Heaven at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqyQO3xhNx0.
The melody is trivially different from the US national anthem, but quite recognizable. That page includes the lyrics, which might be a bit difficult for most people to follow otherwise.
It's actually not at all unusual for national anthems to be based on older songs, especially "folk" songs that everyone in the culture knows. One of my favorite examples is the Israeli anthem, which uses the melody of an old eastern-European Jewish song that is in turn based on one of the ur-melodies found all over Europe. With about half as many notes (and in major), we know it in English as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. ;-) But people in any European country can probably tell us their local name for it. In eastern areas, it tends to be in minor, as is the Israeli version. I know a nice Finnish shottish tune that's a minor-mode variant of the same melody.
Yeah; in English we have a similar quotation, about the law forbidding both the rich and poor to sleep on park benches. (Though this may be, like much of the English language, just borrowed from some other language. ;-)
France has been one of the most outrageous violators of it's own principles for a long time now whenever it comes to Muslims.
Some years back, I heard an elegant explanation of this from a friend of my wife's. At the time, they were both students at a nearby university, and the friend was a woman from France. My wife asked her why nearly everyone in France is a Catholic. Her reply was "That's because once every few of decades, we all go on a rampage and kill everyone who isn't a Catholic and doesn't have the sense to get out of France in time."
She also observed that the last example of this was back in the 1930s and 40s, when France joined in the then-popular task of wiping out their Jewish population. It's been a lot of decades since then, so it's about time for France to start the next slaughter. There aren't enough Jews in France now to bother with (and the Huguenots are totally extinct there now ;-), so they'll have to find a new group of victims. She suggested that the Muslims were the obvious next target, since their numbers were growing. (And they dress funny, so they're easy to spot.)
This was all told in a completely matter-of-fact tone of voice, as if it were something that everyone should know about France. So, according to her, the problem isn't that those people are Muslims; the problem is that they're not Catholics.
It might be interesting to hear from other French people on this topic ...
I hope the next massive trojan, doesn't start "visiting" these websites, and of course, it won't infect congressmen or even the president's computer.
Well, I'm a bit surprised that it hasn't already happened. Or maybe it has, and just hasn't been publicised. The basic technique was documented in the late 1990s. Google for "javascript preload". It's pretty well documented, and useful for legit purposes. Its main use is for a site to download its images to your cache while you're reading their main page(s), so those images will already be there when you go to other pages that use them. This can materially speed up a site's apparent response time. But it's easy to abuse.
When I read about it way back then, I did a bit of experimenting, and found that it was quite easy to fill the browser cache of anyone (who had javascript enabled) with any images or other files that I wanted them to have, from any other site on the Web. Unless they know to look through their cache, they'd never see those files and would never know they were there. In my tests, I used assorted innocuous-looking images (with only an occasonal "artsy" image of nekkid wimmin ;-). But it was pretty obvious that the technique could as easily be used to fill their disks with stuff that would get them fired or fined or jailed.
I still have my code, so I just tested it on a few of the current browsers. It still works just fine, as long as JS is turned on. And google reports that "javascript preload" gets more than 3 million hits, with some on the first page saying things like "How to Preload an Image", so presumably other programmers are using these JS features, too.
And, lest you think I'm some sort of ï½ber-hacker (who even knows that that word contains an umlaut ;-), I won't tell you where to find my demo. I'll just suggest you talk to any web-programmer friends you may have, and ask them to try it. You may be surprised at how quickly they get it working. Or they may show you that they already have it working on their sites. They're likely to say "Hey, every JS programmer knows that!"
And I don't believe that Congress or the President are immune. Can you imagine them running with scripting disabled? Their only immunity is that they can prevent the investigative agencies from examining their browser caches, or if some investigator does so, they can have him fired.
The only actual defense is turning off all scripting. Anything that downloads code and runs it on your machine is an easy entry path for such malware, especially when it's using popular JS features that are there to speed up your web access.
Sarkozy's proposal would be a good way for his minions to frame their opponents by tricking them into downloading lots of illegal stuff. Probably the only way to fight it would be to organize a project to fill his colleagues' disks with files of the sort that they want to make punishable by law. And up above, I told any interested readers how to find instructions on doing that. (I wonder if they're available in French? ;-)
The FBI has a massive kiddie porn vault?
So what's the URL?
If I asked a potential employee for their personal passwords and they handed them over, they most certainly wouldn't get the job.
I was wondering if any employers would respond that way. I suppose the sensible ones would, and the majority wouldn't.
If I'm ever asked this, I'll probably just ask them what they intend to do in my name after they've logged in as me. And when I get home, I'd be mailing my resume around to other likely employers.
Of course, most places I've worked, I've used workstations for which the IT folks have the root password. I've made it clear on occasion that I understand that the IT folks can easily impersonate me. In several cases, a bit of hilarity has ensued, as the management types verified that what I'd said was correct, and figured out the implications. In one case, my boss gave me my workstation's root password, and suggested that I change it. When the IT folks came by, I referred them to him, and never heard about it again.
Sometimes a company's internal politics can involve some subtle behind-the-scenes exchanges like this.
Most Americans wouldn't notice the difference.
Its hard to believe you think that is real. Considering that the Canadian flag is the only one "in the wind".
Yeah, we tend to expect that photos are 'shopped these days. But there's also something a bit funny about the upper edge of the Canadian flag in that photo. It's like there's something along that edge that is keeping the flag in place. I've seen flags displayed like that, so they'll be spread out even when there's no wind.
Of course, that "funny" edge to the flag could also be faked by an expert in photo editing. It's hard to know what to believe, these days.
It has already been mentioned that the tune is rather similar to the actual Kazakhstan anthem, but with "nonstandard" lyrics.
It might be especially fun if the anthem-trolling did the same, using the basic national-anthem medley, but with more "interesting" lyrings.
In the case of the US, I can hear a choir singing the well-known (among American school-kids) lyrics: "Oh, say, can you see / any bedbugs on me ...".
It'd be fun to make a collection of all the national anthems, with variant lyrics like this. It would, of course, be online, so various sporting events would likely find it and use it as their source. ;-)