Will advanced civilizations one day find our remains and conclude we were cave dwellers?
That's already a reasonably common observation in our current civilization (which sometimes characterizes itself as "advanced"). I've seen any number of descriptions of houses as artificial caves. This especially applies to houses made of brick or concrete materials, which are really just artificial stones. If you're living in an area that's mostly flat terrain, making your own mini-hills with a door in the side can be very practical. And we even make "hive" dwelling, which we call apartment building.
Recently, there have been a number of articles published about the old middle-eastern house construction, that amounts to thick (1 meter or so) outer walls, typically of cheap mud-hay mixtures, covered with a layer of stucco for a harder, waterproof outer shell. The thicker the walls are, the better insulation they provide, and the more stable the internal temperature is. There are old and new "hacienda" style houses in the southwestern US built like this (and fakes that are made with thin stucco-covered walls that don't work nearly as well). It's not unusual for people to observe that this type of house is really an artificial hill constructed around a "cave".
It's not much of a stretch to call most of our houses "cave dwellings". The difference is mostly a matter of terminology, not function. Pretending that we're "modern" is all well and good, but does somewhat mask the fact that the connections between our dwellings and our ancestors' caves is fairly clear once you get past the pretense that they're something totally different.
Use of words like 'are' is jarring when used with singulars such as 'use'.
Don't be so sensitive. I had to stop and think a few seconds to figure out what could possibly be wrong with that usage. The use of "use" in this case is clearly a noun describing an activity, and such words aren't obviously singular or plural, though one could also say "uses" in this case. I didn't notice the number mismatch until it was pointed out, and I'm a native speaker. What I noticed first was the omission of the definite article, but "the" is optional in this case. It's just that my native dialect would say "The use of...", as I did above.
Similarly for the original: I didn't consciously notice the word "impactful" until someone complained about it, and then my main reaction was "Why would someone be bothered by such a simply-constructed word? English uses suffixes." Yeah, it's not a word I see every day, but it's not like anyone fluent in English should have a problem understanding it. About the only thing you can sensibly say about it is something like "Hey, suffixes are useful."
(And I just know that someone is going to make a snarky comment about my use of the word "useful" in this discusion. Maybe I should have typed "OK" instead.;-)
Heh. It's fun to watch an ignorant bit of "peevery" shot down by an entry in a well-known dictionary. Not that dictionary makers consider themselves arbiters of correctness, of course, but lots of people insist on believing them to fill that role.
In this case, it's actually a bit unusual to find such an entry, since "impactful" is a simple combination of a common English substantial (a common term for words that are both noun and adjective, and in this case also verb) plus a common suffix. Dictionaries tend to omit such normal combinations unless they have some idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from the parts, and that doesn't apply to this case. OTOH, if it's an unabridged dictionary, such routine combinations are likely to be included, and disk space is getting so cheap that all online dictionaries are becoming unabridged.
But the real fun is watching people look silly by objecting to a perfectly cromulent bit of affixation like this. We here at/. tend to pride ourselves in our education and literacy, but there are constant reminders that the linguistically ignorant are about as common here as in the rest of the English-speaking world.
(And when I decided to ask google to "define:peevery", I was entertained by the fact that most of matches are for the phrase "pee very", typically followed by words like "often" or "badly". I also discovered the peevery.com web site, which is a lot of fun.;-)
Or, even more likely, Gates said something vaguely like that that was actually true, and people distorted it into the now-famous "640 should be enough" pseudo-quote.
That sort of distortion happens all the time, and is a major source of our "urban myths".
Another good example of this is the well-known (in the US) attribution to Al Gore the claim that he "invented the Internet". That's a rewriting of something vaguely similar that he said in answer to a question, which was actually true. But it's not nearly as concise (or funny) as the misquote, and it's not as useful to his political enemies. Politics in particular is full of this sort of distorted, out-of-context "quotation", but it occurs in all parts of human society.
Itâ(TM)s easy to see Brittanica going web-only as a story of âoeWikipedia wins, because open beats closed,â...
Yeah, but it does apply to this story. Except it's Encarta that Wikipedia killed rather than Britannica. As the authors point out, Wikipedia couldn't have killed Britannica, because (print) Britannica went bankrupt five years before Wikipedia was born. The current Britannica isn't the same company.
Encarta was a more subtle case of this phenomenon, though. It really died because it cost money and only ran on one platform. If you already had a Windows box, you might spring for the $100 that Encarta cost, because it was a pretty good product. But once Wikipedia got going, by 2005 or so, Encarta was facing a competitor that was free in both the "free beer" and the "free speech" sense, and accessible from any browser. Wikipedia was rapidly becoming the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, it could be used from any kind of computer (and now from our cell phones), and it cost nothing to use over the cost of your computer and your Internet access. Also, if you found an error or important omission, you could fix it.
How could a private, proprietary package compete with that? Microsoft wasn't about to open Encarta and let just any idiot edit it (and it probably would have been a disaster if they had, considering all their enemies;-).
Yes, "open" was only a part of the story. But Wikipedia's openness is what made them the biggest player in the game, since it gave them a million or so (unpaid) contributors. It's also part of what has kept their quality at roughly the same level as the proprietary encyclopedias, since they are inherently subject to vandalism along with editing by dummies. It's been interesting to see them do well enough to match the business world's best error rates despite this.
It does seem that the inherent accuracy of encyclopedias has a limit, presumably because they're edited by humans. Given this, it's probably no surprise that the one that's biggest, instantly accessible anywhere, and free would turn out to be the winner. But when Wikipedia started, we didn't know that it would match the quality level of the "professionally" produced products.
(And I suspect that the "instantly accessible everywhere" is the main reason that Wikipedia has done so well. If Britannica or Encarta had had that feature, Wikipedia may have never come into existence. Or maybe it would have; we'll never know, because all its competitors were behind paywalls.)
Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
Or, more often and more to the point, they're where you start when you don't know anything about a subject, but want to learn.
It has been often pointed out that the most valuable part of a wikipedia entry is the References section. Even those are usually not primary sources, of course, but they usually go into details that are inappropriate for an "encyclopedia" entry. And wikipedia has been relatively good at policing this section, so that readers can quickly get deeper into a topic.
I've occasionally wondered how often teachers who would mark down for a wikipedia (or Britannica) reference fail to notice that all a student did was a bit of paraphrasing, plus copying a subset of the Reference section from the wikipedia entry.;-)
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out?
Yeah; I've played with it a bit, and I can't make much sense of the zooming. My last attempt was with Safari on this Macbook Pro. When I use the 2-finger "expand" thing, it does what I expect at first, but after about a second, it rescales everything to undo the zooming. So things move around, but they won't stay at a different size.
Several attempts to zoom the timeline widget all had some effects, but not what I expected, and I don't understand why what I did had those results.
Maybe with a bit more experimenting, it'll start to make some sense. I wonder if they have a document on the UI's effects anywhere. I think they're inventing a new way of zooming and moving around in their stuff, and it's different from any of the UI effects that I've learned on other systems.
Thanks for the further example. That isn't in my native dialect; I'd have said "I should've thought o' that" instead. I's a fun example of something that should be instantly understandable to any native speaker, but doesn't quite follow any of the "standard" spelling conventions. Some dialects also string together contractions, e.g., "I shouldn't've...", though I don't think I would. These contractions don't even have standard spellings, as far as I know, though they should also be understandable to a native speaker.
What I like is getting both a "funny" and a "flamebait" mod for my post. This is probably a case of Poe's Law at work, and it is fun to trigger it in such a transparent fashion. I even included;-), and the tongue-in-cheek part was still missed.
Since I first got a flamebait+funny mod several years ago, I've been trying for that plus "insightful" or "informative", but I've never got all three together. Maybe this time...
sworn statement means "if later it is discovered that I was lying, then I'm committing a crime".
Yeah, so what you should do instead is tell the police that there's a phone at a specific location that's sending out unlicensed copies of copyrighted works. They'll believe that without any evidence or sworn statement, go retrieve the phone without a warrant, and charge the owner of the house or car with criminal infringement.
At least that seems to be how such things work these days. Depriving someone of valuable real property like a smartphone isn't a crime worth bothering with; sending a friend a copy of something that someone wrote but doesn't want made public is a serious criminal offense.
(But good luck getting the stolen phone back in either case.;-)
"the story would of read something like"
This makes no sense.
The writer obviously speaks a somewhat different dialect of English than you do. Here's a translation to a somewhat more widely-known dialect:
"The story would have read somewhat like..."
Anyone have translations to other dialects? Some people have rather limited understanding of English, and can read only a few dialects; we should be nice and help them out in cases like this.;-)
Is this a trend?
High profile employees bashing their own employers over company ethics and purpose...
We can only hope.
We read far too much here from the "Governments are always evil; corporations are always pure and good" crowd. In reality, since they're both run by humans, they tend to have roughly the same amounts of good and evil. And if either is allowed secrecy, the good part has a real disadvantage.
... Exchange isn't an "email" application--it is a group productivity application that includes email, group calendaring and scheduling, tasks, and collaboration.
Reminds me of the old engineering rule of thumb, to the effect that the more (fewer) tasks a tool is designed to do, the worse (better) it does each of them.
This sort of design is a major reason that computers have their public reputation of being difficult, clumsy, recalcitrant tools that so often don't do quite what you want. But there's strong pressure on developers to add features to every program, until every tool looks like a large "Swiss army knife".
Exchange isn't the only tool with this design. One of the favorite example among geeks is emacs, which is sometimes jokingly described as a good operating system that has a clumsy, hard-to-use editor hidden inside.
The situation with respect to training has been deteriorating for many years and there's one underlying reason. Employees have a habit of taking the training, then moving elsewhere to a better paid job, because they can.
And because the employees understand quite well that their employer has no loyalty to them. This is especially true in the IT world, where once a project is nearing completion (as if that ever actually happens;-), managers don't see any more need for those geeky IT types, and lay them off. This is a great way to make sure that your employees have no loyalty to the company, and just go with whoever pays them well for an interesting next project.
And, of course, it's usually the most talented/smartest employees who jump ship first, both because they can and because they know that the managers of the current company don't particularly like them. The ones left behind are the ones who couldn't find a new job.
It's an old, old story. You'd think that management experts would have solutions to it after all these centuries. And actually, they do, but short-term profit trumps the long-term benefits of having a team that know each other and can work together effectively.
"Imagine we lived in a world where we used the letter h to represent âoeone halfâ, and had no separate notation for 2h. We would then observe that h is ubiquitous in mathematics. In fact, 2h is the multiplicative identity, so how can one doubt the importance of h? All mathematicians and geeks agree, h is where itâ(TM)s at.
To further stretch this to the breaking point, we might also observe that English, like nearly all other human languages, has a word for 1/2: "half". We use it a lot. Of course, we also have the word "whole", which we also use. But I'd guess offhand that I use "half" more than I use "whole". This is probably because in most phrases, you can just omit "whole", just as you can omit "1 *" in mathematical expressions. Thus, a recipe will call for a "teaspoon" of something, not a "whole teaspoon", and similarly for other uses. But with half of a unit, you need to write "half" or "1/2".
Anyway, we could have a bit of fun arguing that this property of human languages implies that it would be more "natural" for a human mind to have words/symbols for both 1/2 and 1. I wonder why mathematicians don't do this?
Maybe it's for reasons similar to why our languages usually have a word for exclusive-or but not for inclusive-or. But mathematicians (and most computer languages) reverse this, defining "or" to mean inclusive-or, and either not having or rarely using the exclusive-or word/operator. Similarly, they use 1 a lot, 1/2 not so often, unlike common speech.
In any case, tongue-in-cheek technical "debates" like this can be fun, especially when some of the participants take it so seriously. It's almost as much fun as the repeated discussions about the meaning of "planet".;-)
I actually had math teachers in middle school who claimed as much, and refused to understand the term "transcendental number".
nevermind trascendental, did he ever hear about irrational?
He/they would probably object strongly to the idea of teaching their student something that's irrational.;-)
(Yeah, I remember teachers like that. I also remember when I was in high school, decided that math was interesting, and read all the school's math texts over a semester. When I went to the math teachers asking for more, they all told me that I "wasn't ready" for more advanced math. So I went to some college kids I knew, and borrowed math books from them. Sometimes the teachers function primarily as a barrier to their students' education.)
(And the story of how pi and other numbers came to be called "irrational" is amusing. Look it up some time.)
I am of the opinion that Usenet was a lot more usable for this than any webforum I've ever come across.
Yeah; I've argued that in a number of discussions, usually triggered by someone saying that usenet has been made obsolete by Web forums. My usual observation is that, with usenet, I can use a single reader to read any forum, and most usenet readers implement tree-structured discussions. Web forums, in contrast, are mostly unique. Everyone of them has a different user interface, so you have to spend a lot of time with each, learning how to navigate it. If you're trying to read more than a handful of forums, you have to remember all of their UI, and try not to confuse them. You end up spending most of your time trying to figure out how to the current forum does X, where X is something that's fairly simple, but the UI doesn't give you any clear clues.
A good example right now: About a year ago, I decided it was time to learn HTML5. The docs are, of course, rather sketchy, and there are zillions of them, mostly very introductory. If you want to learn how to do X in HTML5, good luck googling for it and finding the answer in the millions of hits. So you look for HTML5 forums - and discover that there are hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand. Most get traffic only once or twice a month, and most of the replies come from the same user id, which is presumably the "moderator". Most questions go unanswered, because the few people who might know the answer can't waste time digging through hundreds of UI-incompatible forums looking for questions to answer.
This is becoming the norm with Web forums, at least for any popular topic. Any dummy can set up their own forum -- and most of them do. Then dummies like you and me can't make any sense of the results.
Nuclear is by far the most heavily subsidised and expensive energy source we have.
Actually, there's a reason for this. Various people who've dug up the numbers have commented that in the US and many other countries, even if all the material, engineering and construction salaries were zero, a nuclear power plant would still be "uneconomic". The reason is that the paperwork required by the government costs more than the total construction costs of any other kind of power plant. Most of this paperwork is imposed by politicians responding to public fear of the word "nuclear", and most of the actual work is done by flocks of drones who never see more than their tiny piece of the puzzle, so for the most part, it's all just pure expense with no safety impact. It's sorta like the anti-terrorism "security theater" stuff: expensive and ineffective, but required to quiet public fears.
So if we are to have the safest current varieties of power plants, they need to be heavily subsidized to make up for the required bureaucratic paper load.
I've occasionally wondered whether we should just burn the paperwork to generate power. Of course, a lot of it is now computerized, but you'd be surprised how much of that is turned into hard copy and stored forever in archives. Those archives could provide a lot of power.
OTOH, historians centuries in the future might find our massive government archives a valuable source of data about our current insanities...
Go do 100 bad things to one person --- don't greet them, borrow their stuff without returning, invade their personal space...
Except that if you're married to that person, that doesn't work. Yeah, you can fail to greet them. But you can't very well borrow their stuff without returning it, or if you do, they probably won't even notice, since you share your living space. And you're expected to regularly invade each other's personal space; that's what sex is all about, after all.
Some years ago, probably around 1990, I read a report on some experiments done in Europe to test the feasibility of the new do-it-yourself checkout systems that were becoming available to stores. They introduced them in assorted stores in various towns and cities in several countries, and collected data on the honesty of the people using them.
As one might expect, they reported wide variations in the honesty in various locations. The most interesting result that they reported was from two French-speaking communities only a few km from each other, one in Switzerland and one in France. The reported that the Swiss customers were almost completely honest, with fewer "losses" than with live cashiers in the same store. In the nearby French town, they rapidly shut down the test because most of the customers "robbed us blind", as they expressed it.
They reported that, as a result of the tests, they proceeded to install the new checkout equipment in many places in Switzerland, with a corresponding reduction in overhead and lowering of prices. In most of France, they didn't implement this, because they got so many similar results in other French locations. (I think they said that the customers were more honest in northern France, but I don't remember the details.)
I didn't any Scandinavian locations in their test list. Maybe they didn't have any outlets there, and didn't test there. Where and how such tests are done can depend a lot on where the sponsors are doing business (and what sort of orders they have from management;-). And results can vary over fairly short distances, regardless of whether there's a border involved. As I recall, the French/Swiss border was the only one that they singled out as significant.
For a test person to fill in "sample data" is evidence that (a) these things don't work, or (b) the test person was either incompetent or unethical (and neither of these is acceptable in an industry related to the security of the public like law enforcement).
Well, maybe. But it's well known in the software industry that a large percentage of users of most software will handle "fill in the form" situations by copying the examples in the manual. When you talk to those users, they usually think that the manual was telling them that those were the correct values, so of course they used them. If they make up their own values, chances are they'll get them wrong, but if they use what the manual says, it has to be right, doesn't it?
I was tempted to end that with a;-), but unfortunately, it's not that much of a joke. What it is, really, is usually an example of how atrocious most of our documentation is. In a few cases of the above, I've checked the "manual", and found that their actions were actually a very reasonable interpretation of what the manual said to do. It's often quite easy to read many examples as "Here's exactly how you should do it." For users who aren't geeks and don't understand half (or more) of the jargon, it can be very difficult to determine what parts of the text you need to copy exactly, and what parts are variable character strings to be filled in with appropriate data. Often the documentation just uses different fonts for literal and variable text, but the fonts aren't consistent, and it's difficult for a user facing a failing system to stop and locate the section saying what those fonts mean in that document. And most of them don't understand that fonts are being used this way, because they don't even know what a "font" is.
So in my experience, the cops in question could easily be total non-geeks who are intimidated by that strange and mysterious computer stuff, and honestly think that the documentation they used was telling them exactly what data to fill in when presented with those forms.
Or they could have just been lazy, knew what they were doing, and thought that they could get away with it. It's hard to know from what we've been told. Maybe the courts will sort it out a deliver an appropriate punishment to the guilty. But I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. That's not how our "justice" system usually works. Criminals working "inside the system" are rarely punished. The best we can usually hope for is what has been reported here: The victims of the police misbehavior have been set free (but not compensated for their time).
They didn't follow procedure, that's a command issue - reprimand those in charge, correct the procedure, move forward.
Actually, knowingly falsifying evidence is a felony in most jurisdictions, so they really should get more than just a reprimand. I'd wonder whether the victims of this could successfully sue over things like slander, lost income, etc. Probably not, because it's difficult to sue the police for "doing their job".
Also, just reprimanding them and "moving forward" doesn't do anything to fix the more general problem that produces such injustices: Usually, the police are rewarded for catching suspects. If the people are actually guilty, so much the better, but that's less important than catching someone and handing them over to the courts. If the courts declare them not guilty, there are hardly ever any repercussions to the police, who are deemed to have "done their job" when they bring the suspect in.
In the long run, the only way to prevent such atrocities on the part of the police in the future is to work for permanent "openness" in the police force. This could have been prevented, as others have observed, by having independent technicians checking the equipment calibration. Similarly, cross-checks are possible for many other kinds of evidence collection, and they should be done.
Yes, this will make law enforcement more expensive. But the alternative is what we have now: You and I can be nabbed and accused of a crime based on faulty or faked evidence, and we will likely be convicted on bad evidence. And even in cases like this, where the problem was caught, the actual criminals (the police) usually won't be punished. This is not what a sensible person would consider a good law enforcement system; it's just a relatively cheap one that catches and convicts the wrong person some nonzero percent of the time.
(We might also institute laws like, e.g., treating confiscating things like cameras as ipso facto evidence of criminal behavior. In a sensible world, the activity of the police would always be recorded, and kept indefinitely any time there is any "interesting" activity in the record. A sensible society would reward people for recording evidence of police misbehavior. After all, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is an ancient observation about the problem.)
"incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people"
Not sure why it took "research" to understand this. I thought everyone knew this.
Nah; it's more likely that they're actually competent scientists, who understand that things that "everyone knows" are usually wrong. So they go through the effort of applying scientific methods, which usually weeds out the things that everyone "knows" that aren't actually true. This does have the occasional PR disadvantage that you end up verifying that a common belief is actually true, leading to others ridiculing your apparent waste of time. But in the long run, the successes of scientific methods have slowly led to a world that it better than the old world of people just accepting things on authority or because they "sound right" without bothering to test them.
Perhaps with time we might even build on this study, and discover effective ways of weeding out the mediocre from positions of power. We do know that, to a lot of people, it's "obvious" how to do this, but history tells us that the obvious methods don't seem to work well. They tend to give us even more malevolent oligarchies than the modern democratic systems produce. Maybe there's no way to fix this, but it's possible that methods will be discovered (and verified;-), and even incorporated into our political and management systems. But, as the saying goes, further research is needed. That research will occasionally verify that something we know is correct. But not as often as we might like.
Actually, I do have lynx on all my machines, and it's one of the browsers that I test against fairly often. It's one of the useful tools for verifying that pages are accessible to the visually impaired. I've also found it useful in some discussions to mention that on several projects, I've been explicitly order to not test against lynx, or any other tools for the disabled. A lot of management has open contempt for people with physical disabilities, at least here in the US.
Oh, wait... Hmmm; this is a Safari window. I wonder how Safari users rank.
Maybe I should switch to one of my Chrome or Firefox windows, then I might get it right.
It might be interesting if we could get data on users that run multiple browsers. I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes, though I've previously found some that I didn't know I had, so I'm not sure how many more their might be. Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
Anyway, it could be interesting if people showed different math abilities when using different browsers. It'd imply that the differences are due to interference from the browsers' UIs, and not inherent in the individual users. I wonder how this study handle such possibilities. We already have good evidence that the programming language you use can help or hinder various sorts of reasoning ability, depending on the way they implement various capabilities. It wouldn't be too surprising if different browsers' UIs affected the ability of users to perform some mental operations. So we don't really know whether this study was comparing the users' math abilities, or the browsers' interference with their users' abilities.
Where is the logic in an automotive manufacture making the braking or acceleration functions remotely controlled?...
Actually, the logic is quite simple, from a manufacturer's viewpoint. In much of the world, including the US, it's illegal (for about the past half century, depending on country) to make the mechanical parts a "black box" that can only be repaired by manufacturer-approved mechanics. But those laws don't apply to computerized equipment. So anything that can be computerized becomes a part that you must take to the dealer's shop for repairs. They'll tell you what's wrong, and how much you'll have to pay to get your car back in a usable condition. This means huge profits for the authorized dealers.
In another decade or so, new cars will be completely computer-controlled, independent auto mechanics will be out of business, and you'll be paying a lot more to keep your car running than you do now.
Check back in 10 years to see how much of a prophet I am.;-)
(Actually, this isn't my prophecy at all. Lots of others have predicted the same thing. The auto makers aren't trying to deny it.)
Slashdot Mirror
Will advanced civilizations one day find our remains and conclude we were cave dwellers?
That's already a reasonably common observation in our current civilization (which sometimes characterizes itself as "advanced"). I've seen any number of descriptions of houses as artificial caves. This especially applies to houses made of brick or concrete materials, which are really just artificial stones. If you're living in an area that's mostly flat terrain, making your own mini-hills with a door in the side can be very practical. And we even make "hive" dwelling, which we call apartment building.
Recently, there have been a number of articles published about the old middle-eastern house construction, that amounts to thick (1 meter or so) outer walls, typically of cheap mud-hay mixtures, covered with a layer of stucco for a harder, waterproof outer shell. The thicker the walls are, the better insulation they provide, and the more stable the internal temperature is. There are old and new "hacienda" style houses in the southwestern US built like this (and fakes that are made with thin stucco-covered walls that don't work nearly as well). It's not unusual for people to observe that this type of house is really an artificial hill constructed around a "cave".
It's not much of a stretch to call most of our houses "cave dwellings". The difference is mostly a matter of terminology, not function. Pretending that we're "modern" is all well and good, but does somewhat mask the fact that the connections between our dwellings and our ancestors' caves is fairly clear once you get past the pretense that they're something totally different.
Use of such words are jarring
Use of words like 'are' is jarring when used with singulars such as 'use'.
Don't be so sensitive. I had to stop and think a few seconds to figure out what could possibly be wrong with that usage. The use of "use" in this case is clearly a noun describing an activity, and such words aren't obviously singular or plural, though one could also say "uses" in this case. I didn't notice the number mismatch until it was pointed out, and I'm a native speaker. What I noticed first was the omission of the definite article, but "the" is optional in this case. It's just that my native dialect would say "The use of ...", as I did above.
Similarly for the original: I didn't consciously notice the word "impactful" until someone complained about it, and then my main reaction was "Why would someone be bothered by such a simply-constructed word? English uses suffixes." Yeah, it's not a word I see every day, but it's not like anyone fluent in English should have a problem understanding it. About the only thing you can sensibly say about it is something like "Hey, suffixes are useful."
(And I just know that someone is going to make a snarky comment about my use of the word "useful" in this discusion. Maybe I should have typed "OK" instead. ;-)
Heh. It's fun to watch an ignorant bit of "peevery" shot down by an entry in a well-known dictionary. Not that dictionary makers consider themselves arbiters of correctness, of course, but lots of people insist on believing them to fill that role.
In this case, it's actually a bit unusual to find such an entry, since "impactful" is a simple combination of a common English substantial (a common term for words that are both noun and adjective, and in this case also verb) plus a common suffix. Dictionaries tend to omit such normal combinations unless they have some idiomatic meaning that can't be deduced from the parts, and that doesn't apply to this case. OTOH, if it's an unabridged dictionary, such routine combinations are likely to be included, and disk space is getting so cheap that all online dictionaries are becoming unabridged.
But the real fun is watching people look silly by objecting to a perfectly cromulent bit of affixation like this. We here at /. tend to pride ourselves in our education and literacy, but there are constant reminders that the linguistically ignorant are about as common here as in the rest of the English-speaking world.
(And when I decided to ask google to "define:peevery", I was entertained by the fact that most of matches are for the phrase "pee very", typically followed by words like "often" or "badly". I also discovered the peevery.com web site, which is a lot of fun. ;-)
Or, even more likely, Gates said something vaguely like that that was actually true, and people distorted it into the now-famous "640 should be enough" pseudo-quote.
That sort of distortion happens all the time, and is a major source of our "urban myths".
Another good example of this is the well-known (in the US) attribution to Al Gore the claim that he "invented the Internet". That's a rewriting of something vaguely similar that he said in answer to a question, which was actually true. But it's not nearly as concise (or funny) as the misquote, and it's not as useful to his political enemies. Politics in particular is full of this sort of distorted, out-of-context "quotation", but it occurs in all parts of human society.
Itâ(TM)s easy to see Brittanica going web-only as a story of âoeWikipedia wins, because open beats closed,â ...
Yeah, but it does apply to this story. Except it's Encarta that Wikipedia killed rather than Britannica. As the authors point out, Wikipedia couldn't have killed Britannica, because (print) Britannica went bankrupt five years before Wikipedia was born. The current Britannica isn't the same company.
Encarta was a more subtle case of this phenomenon, though. It really died because it cost money and only ran on one platform. If you already had a Windows box, you might spring for the $100 that Encarta cost, because it was a pretty good product. But once Wikipedia got going, by 2005 or so, Encarta was facing a competitor that was free in both the "free beer" and the "free speech" sense, and accessible from any browser. Wikipedia was rapidly becoming the most comprehensive encyclopedia in the world, it could be used from any kind of computer (and now from our cell phones), and it cost nothing to use over the cost of your computer and your Internet access. Also, if you found an error or important omission, you could fix it.
How could a private, proprietary package compete with that? Microsoft wasn't about to open Encarta and let just any idiot edit it (and it probably would have been a disaster if they had, considering all their enemies ;-).
Yes, "open" was only a part of the story. But Wikipedia's openness is what made them the biggest player in the game, since it gave them a million or so (unpaid) contributors. It's also part of what has kept their quality at roughly the same level as the proprietary encyclopedias, since they are inherently subject to vandalism along with editing by dummies. It's been interesting to see them do well enough to match the business world's best error rates despite this.
It does seem that the inherent accuracy of encyclopedias has a limit, presumably because they're edited by humans. Given this, it's probably no surprise that the one that's biggest, instantly accessible anywhere, and free would turn out to be the winner. But when Wikipedia started, we didn't know that it would match the quality level of the "professionally" produced products.
(And I suspect that the "instantly accessible everywhere" is the main reason that Wikipedia has done so well. If Britannica or Encarta had had that feature, Wikipedia may have never come into existence. Or maybe it would have; we'll never know, because all its competitors were behind paywalls.)
Encyclopedias are what you read when you don't really care all that much about the subject.
Or, more often and more to the point, they're where you start when you don't know anything about a subject, but want to learn.
It has been often pointed out that the most valuable part of a wikipedia entry is the References section. Even those are usually not primary sources, of course, but they usually go into details that are inappropriate for an "encyclopedia" entry. And wikipedia has been relatively good at policing this section, so that readers can quickly get deeper into a topic.
I've occasionally wondered how often teachers who would mark down for a wikipedia (or Britannica) reference fail to notice that all a student did was a bit of paraphrasing, plus copying a subset of the Reference section from the wikipedia entry. ;-)
Mostly useable - zooming out is not easy (is there any way of just zooming out?
Yeah; I've played with it a bit, and I can't make much sense of the zooming. My last attempt was with Safari on this Macbook Pro. When I use the 2-finger "expand" thing, it does what I expect at first, but after about a second, it rescales everything to undo the zooming. So things move around, but they won't stay at a different size.
Several attempts to zoom the timeline widget all had some effects, but not what I expected, and I don't understand why what I did had those results.
Maybe with a bit more experimenting, it'll start to make some sense. I wonder if they have a document on the UI's effects anywhere. I think they're inventing a new way of zooming and moving around in their stuff, and it's different from any of the UI effects that I've learned on other systems.
I should of thought've that!
Thanks for the further example. That isn't in my native dialect; I'd have said "I should've thought o' that" instead. I's a fun example of something that should be instantly understandable to any native speaker, but doesn't quite follow any of the "standard" spelling conventions. Some dialects also string together contractions, e.g., "I shouldn't've ...", though I don't think I would. These contractions don't even have standard spellings, as far as I know, though they should also be understandable to a native speaker.
What I like is getting both a "funny" and a "flamebait" mod for my post. This is probably a case of Poe's Law at work, and it is fun to trigger it in such a transparent fashion. I even included ;-), and the tongue-in-cheek part was still missed.
Since I first got a flamebait+funny mod several years ago, I've been trying for that plus "insightful" or "informative", but I've never got all three together. Maybe this time ...
sworn statement means "if later it is discovered that I was lying, then I'm committing a crime".
Yeah, so what you should do instead is tell the police that there's a phone at a specific location that's sending out unlicensed copies of copyrighted works. They'll believe that without any evidence or sworn statement, go retrieve the phone without a warrant, and charge the owner of the house or car with criminal infringement.
At least that seems to be how such things work these days. Depriving someone of valuable real property like a smartphone isn't a crime worth bothering with; sending a friend a copy of something that someone wrote but doesn't want made public is a serious criminal offense.
(But good luck getting the stolen phone back in either case. ;-)
"the story would of read something like" This makes no sense.
The writer obviously speaks a somewhat different dialect of English than you do. Here's a translation to a somewhat more widely-known dialect:
"The story would have read somewhat like ..."
Anyone have translations to other dialects? Some people have rather limited understanding of English, and can read only a few dialects; we should be nice and help them out in cases like this. ;-)
Is this a trend? High profile employees bashing their own employers over company ethics and purpose ...
We can only hope.
We read far too much here from the "Governments are always evil; corporations are always pure and good" crowd. In reality, since they're both run by humans, they tend to have roughly the same amounts of good and evil. And if either is allowed secrecy, the good part has a real disadvantage.
... Exchange isn't an "email" application--it is a group productivity application that includes email, group calendaring and scheduling, tasks, and collaboration.
Reminds me of the old engineering rule of thumb, to the effect that the more (fewer) tasks a tool is designed to do, the worse (better) it does each of them.
This sort of design is a major reason that computers have their public reputation of being difficult, clumsy, recalcitrant tools that so often don't do quite what you want. But there's strong pressure on developers to add features to every program, until every tool looks like a large "Swiss army knife".
Exchange isn't the only tool with this design. One of the favorite example among geeks is emacs, which is sometimes jokingly described as a good operating system that has a clumsy, hard-to-use editor hidden inside.
The situation with respect to training has been deteriorating for many years and there's one underlying reason. Employees have a habit of taking the training, then moving elsewhere to a better paid job, because they can.
And because the employees understand quite well that their employer has no loyalty to them. This is especially true in the IT world, where once a project is nearing completion (as if that ever actually happens ;-), managers don't see any more need for those geeky IT types, and lay them off. This is a great way to make sure that your employees have no loyalty to the company, and just go with whoever pays them well for an interesting next project.
And, of course, it's usually the most talented/smartest employees who jump ship first, both because they can and because they know that the managers of the current company don't particularly like them. The ones left behind are the ones who couldn't find a new job.
It's an old, old story. You'd think that management experts would have solutions to it after all these centuries. And actually, they do, but short-term profit trumps the long-term benefits of having a team that know each other and can work together effectively.
"Imagine we lived in a world where we used the letter h to represent âoeone halfâ, and had no separate notation for 2h. We would then observe that h is ubiquitous in mathematics. In fact, 2h is the multiplicative identity, so how can one doubt the importance of h? All mathematicians and geeks agree, h is where itâ(TM)s at.
To further stretch this to the breaking point, we might also observe that English, like nearly all other human languages, has a word for 1/2: "half". We use it a lot. Of course, we also have the word "whole", which we also use. But I'd guess offhand that I use "half" more than I use "whole". This is probably because in most phrases, you can just omit "whole", just as you can omit "1 *" in mathematical expressions. Thus, a recipe will call for a "teaspoon" of something, not a "whole teaspoon", and similarly for other uses. But with half of a unit, you need to write "half" or "1/2".
Anyway, we could have a bit of fun arguing that this property of human languages implies that it would be more "natural" for a human mind to have words/symbols for both 1/2 and 1. I wonder why mathematicians don't do this?
Maybe it's for reasons similar to why our languages usually have a word for exclusive-or but not for inclusive-or. But mathematicians (and most computer languages) reverse this, defining "or" to mean inclusive-or, and either not having or rarely using the exclusive-or word/operator. Similarly, they use 1 a lot, 1/2 not so often, unlike common speech.
In any case, tongue-in-cheek technical "debates" like this can be fun, especially when some of the participants take it so seriously. It's almost as much fun as the repeated discussions about the meaning of "planet". ;-)
I actually had math teachers in middle school who claimed as much, and refused to understand the term "transcendental number".
nevermind trascendental, did he ever hear about irrational?
He/they would probably object strongly to the idea of teaching their student something that's irrational. ;-)
(Yeah, I remember teachers like that. I also remember when I was in high school, decided that math was interesting, and read all the school's math texts over a semester. When I went to the math teachers asking for more, they all told me that I "wasn't ready" for more advanced math. So I went to some college kids I knew, and borrowed math books from them. Sometimes the teachers function primarily as a barrier to their students' education.)
(And the story of how pi and other numbers came to be called "irrational" is amusing. Look it up some time.)
I am of the opinion that Usenet was a lot more usable for this than any webforum I've ever come across.
Yeah; I've argued that in a number of discussions, usually triggered by someone saying that usenet has been made obsolete by Web forums. My usual observation is that, with usenet, I can use a single reader to read any forum, and most usenet readers implement tree-structured discussions. Web forums, in contrast, are mostly unique. Everyone of them has a different user interface, so you have to spend a lot of time with each, learning how to navigate it. If you're trying to read more than a handful of forums, you have to remember all of their UI, and try not to confuse them. You end up spending most of your time trying to figure out how to the current forum does X, where X is something that's fairly simple, but the UI doesn't give you any clear clues.
A good example right now: About a year ago, I decided it was time to learn HTML5. The docs are, of course, rather sketchy, and there are zillions of them, mostly very introductory. If you want to learn how to do X in HTML5, good luck googling for it and finding the answer in the millions of hits. So you look for HTML5 forums - and discover that there are hundreds of them, maybe more than a thousand. Most get traffic only once or twice a month, and most of the replies come from the same user id, which is presumably the "moderator". Most questions go unanswered, because the few people who might know the answer can't waste time digging through hundreds of UI-incompatible forums looking for questions to answer.
This is becoming the norm with Web forums, at least for any popular topic. Any dummy can set up their own forum -- and most of them do. Then dummies like you and me can't make any sense of the results.
Nuclear is by far the most heavily subsidised and expensive energy source we have.
Actually, there's a reason for this. Various people who've dug up the numbers have commented that in the US and many other countries, even if all the material, engineering and construction salaries were zero, a nuclear power plant would still be "uneconomic". The reason is that the paperwork required by the government costs more than the total construction costs of any other kind of power plant. Most of this paperwork is imposed by politicians responding to public fear of the word "nuclear", and most of the actual work is done by flocks of drones who never see more than their tiny piece of the puzzle, so for the most part, it's all just pure expense with no safety impact. It's sorta like the anti-terrorism "security theater" stuff: expensive and ineffective, but required to quiet public fears.
So if we are to have the safest current varieties of power plants, they need to be heavily subsidized to make up for the required bureaucratic paper load.
I've occasionally wondered whether we should just burn the paperwork to generate power. Of course, a lot of it is now computerized, but you'd be surprised how much of that is turned into hard copy and stored forever in archives. Those archives could provide a lot of power.
OTOH, historians centuries in the future might find our massive government archives a valuable source of data about our current insanities ...
Go do 100 bad things to one person --- don't greet them, borrow their stuff without returning, invade their personal space ...
Except that if you're married to that person, that doesn't work. Yeah, you can fail to greet them. But you can't very well borrow their stuff without returning it, or if you do, they probably won't even notice, since you share your living space. And you're expected to regularly invade each other's personal space; that's what sex is all about, after all.
Some metaphors are easy to shoot down ...
Some years ago, probably around 1990, I read a report on some experiments done in Europe to test the feasibility of the new do-it-yourself checkout systems that were becoming available to stores. They introduced them in assorted stores in various towns and cities in several countries, and collected data on the honesty of the people using them.
As one might expect, they reported wide variations in the honesty in various locations. The most interesting result that they reported was from two French-speaking communities only a few km from each other, one in Switzerland and one in France. The reported that the Swiss customers were almost completely honest, with fewer "losses" than with live cashiers in the same store. In the nearby French town, they rapidly shut down the test because most of the customers "robbed us blind", as they expressed it.
They reported that, as a result of the tests, they proceeded to install the new checkout equipment in many places in Switzerland, with a corresponding reduction in overhead and lowering of prices. In most of France, they didn't implement this, because they got so many similar results in other French locations. (I think they said that the customers were more honest in northern France, but I don't remember the details.)
I didn't any Scandinavian locations in their test list. Maybe they didn't have any outlets there, and didn't test there. Where and how such tests are done can depend a lot on where the sponsors are doing business (and what sort of orders they have from management ;-). And results can vary over fairly short distances, regardless of whether there's a border involved. As I recall, the French/Swiss border was the only one that they singled out as significant.
For a test person to fill in "sample data" is evidence that (a) these things don't work, or (b) the test person was either incompetent or unethical (and neither of these is acceptable in an industry related to the security of the public like law enforcement).
Well, maybe. But it's well known in the software industry that a large percentage of users of most software will handle "fill in the form" situations by copying the examples in the manual. When you talk to those users, they usually think that the manual was telling them that those were the correct values, so of course they used them. If they make up their own values, chances are they'll get them wrong, but if they use what the manual says, it has to be right, doesn't it?
I was tempted to end that with a ;-), but unfortunately, it's not that much of a joke. What it is, really, is usually an example of how atrocious most of our documentation is. In a few cases of the above, I've checked the "manual", and found that their actions were actually a very reasonable interpretation of what the manual said to do. It's often quite easy to read many examples as "Here's exactly how you should do it." For users who aren't geeks and don't understand half (or more) of the jargon, it can be very difficult to determine what parts of the text you need to copy exactly, and what parts are variable character strings to be filled in with appropriate data. Often the documentation just uses different fonts for literal and variable text, but the fonts aren't consistent, and it's difficult for a user facing a failing system to stop and locate the section saying what those fonts mean in that document. And most of them don't understand that fonts are being used this way, because they don't even know what a "font" is.
So in my experience, the cops in question could easily be total non-geeks who are intimidated by that strange and mysterious computer stuff, and honestly think that the documentation they used was telling them exactly what data to fill in when presented with those forms.
Or they could have just been lazy, knew what they were doing, and thought that they could get away with it. It's hard to know from what we've been told. Maybe the courts will sort it out a deliver an appropriate punishment to the guilty. But I wouldn't bet any amount of money on it. That's not how our "justice" system usually works. Criminals working "inside the system" are rarely punished. The best we can usually hope for is what has been reported here: The victims of the police misbehavior have been set free (but not compensated for their time).
They didn't follow procedure, that's a command issue - reprimand those in charge, correct the procedure, move forward.
Actually, knowingly falsifying evidence is a felony in most jurisdictions, so they really should get more than just a reprimand. I'd wonder whether the victims of this could successfully sue over things like slander, lost income, etc. Probably not, because it's difficult to sue the police for "doing their job".
Also, just reprimanding them and "moving forward" doesn't do anything to fix the more general problem that produces such injustices: Usually, the police are rewarded for catching suspects. If the people are actually guilty, so much the better, but that's less important than catching someone and handing them over to the courts. If the courts declare them not guilty, there are hardly ever any repercussions to the police, who are deemed to have "done their job" when they bring the suspect in.
In the long run, the only way to prevent such atrocities on the part of the police in the future is to work for permanent "openness" in the police force. This could have been prevented, as others have observed, by having independent technicians checking the equipment calibration. Similarly, cross-checks are possible for many other kinds of evidence collection, and they should be done.
Yes, this will make law enforcement more expensive. But the alternative is what we have now: You and I can be nabbed and accused of a crime based on faulty or faked evidence, and we will likely be convicted on bad evidence. And even in cases like this, where the problem was caught, the actual criminals (the police) usually won't be punished. This is not what a sensible person would consider a good law enforcement system; it's just a relatively cheap one that catches and convicts the wrong person some nonzero percent of the time.
(We might also institute laws like, e.g., treating confiscating things like cameras as ipso facto evidence of criminal behavior. In a sensible world, the activity of the police would always be recorded, and kept indefinitely any time there is any "interesting" activity in the record. A sensible society would reward people for recording evidence of police misbehavior. After all, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" is an ancient observation about the problem.)
"incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people"
Not sure why it took "research" to understand this. I thought everyone knew this.
Nah; it's more likely that they're actually competent scientists, who understand that things that "everyone knows" are usually wrong. So they go through the effort of applying scientific methods, which usually weeds out the things that everyone "knows" that aren't actually true. This does have the occasional PR disadvantage that you end up verifying that a common belief is actually true, leading to others ridiculing your apparent waste of time. But in the long run, the successes of scientific methods have slowly led to a world that it better than the old world of people just accepting things on authority or because they "sound right" without bothering to test them.
Perhaps with time we might even build on this study, and discover effective ways of weeding out the mediocre from positions of power. We do know that, to a lot of people, it's "obvious" how to do this, but history tells us that the obvious methods don't seem to work well. They tend to give us even more malevolent oligarchies than the modern democratic systems produce. Maybe there's no way to fix this, but it's possible that methods will be discovered (and verified ;-), and even incorporated into our political and management systems. But, as the saying goes, further research is needed. That research will occasionally verify that something we know is correct. But not as often as we might like.
Actually, I do have lynx on all my machines, and it's one of the browsers that I test against fairly often. It's one of the useful tools for verifying that pages are accessible to the visually impaired. I've also found it useful in some discussions to mention that on several projects, I've been explicitly order to not test against lynx, or any other tools for the disabled. A lot of management has open contempt for people with physical disabilities, at least here in the US.
Oh, wait ... Hmmm; this is a Safari window. I wonder how Safari users rank.
Maybe I should switch to one of my Chrome or Firefox windows, then I might get it right.
It might be interesting if we could get data on users that run multiple browsers. I have at least 10 browsers on this MacBook Pro, slightly fewer on my Ubuntu and Debian boxes, though I've previously found some that I didn't know I had, so I'm not sure how many more their might be. Lots of us developers collect browsers for testing against.
Anyway, it could be interesting if people showed different math abilities when using different browsers. It'd imply that the differences are due to interference from the browsers' UIs, and not inherent in the individual users. I wonder how this study handle such possibilities. We already have good evidence that the programming language you use can help or hinder various sorts of reasoning ability, depending on the way they implement various capabilities. It wouldn't be too surprising if different browsers' UIs affected the ability of users to perform some mental operations. So we don't really know whether this study was comparing the users' math abilities, or the browsers' interference with their users' abilities.
Where is the logic in an automotive manufacture making the braking or acceleration functions remotely controlled? ...
Actually, the logic is quite simple, from a manufacturer's viewpoint. In much of the world, including the US, it's illegal (for about the past half century, depending on country) to make the mechanical parts a "black box" that can only be repaired by manufacturer-approved mechanics. But those laws don't apply to computerized equipment. So anything that can be computerized becomes a part that you must take to the dealer's shop for repairs. They'll tell you what's wrong, and how much you'll have to pay to get your car back in a usable condition. This means huge profits for the authorized dealers.
In another decade or so, new cars will be completely computer-controlled, independent auto mechanics will be out of business, and you'll be paying a lot more to keep your car running than you do now.
Check back in 10 years to see how much of a prophet I am. ;-)
(Actually, this isn't my prophecy at all. Lots of others have predicted the same thing. The auto makers aren't trying to deny it.)