What is with MS and their apparent inability to cope with leap years?
I would like to know the same thing. This seems to be systemic.
Yeah; it's systemic. Or at least it used to be a few years back, and I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't fixed the basic problem yet. The problem is fairly simple: Windows' internal clock is in local time.
To a programmer with experience writing date/time code, I've found that this is all you need to tell them. Any software whose internal clock is in local time will be buggy, and it will never be completely fixed. Attempts to fix bugs will merely introduce bugs elsewhere in the chains of date/time handling. The sensible solution is to adopt a "universal time" internally, and convert at the last stage when you present the date/time to a human user. Yes, you theoretically can work with local time internally, but (teams of) humans can't actually make this work in practice. The best they can do is make it work in the "normal" cases. Bug fixes then tend to just move the time bugs around to different places in the code. But it can be very difficult to get management to accept this and agree to UT-only internally.
Java also used to specify local time internally (and may still do so, but I haven't used it in years). I worked on a number of projects where, after repeated date/time disasters at every switch to/from DST and every Feb 29, java was abandoned and everything was rewritten in a language (usually C++) whose libraries supported a UT timestamp and didn't have all those time bugs.
Does anyone know if MS Windows has introduced a UT internal time yet? If not, then we can reliably predict that such bugs will continue to plague their users.
Actually every hundred year is when a leap year doesn't come along. (unless it's divisible by 400, then it does)
Right; and I wonder how many computer failures will happen on the first of March, 2100, due to part of the software thinking it's the 29th of February, causing random problems while talking to other software that knows the correct date.
Well, I'm puzzled by this. How could it be "lost in translation" when that was the original text? It wasn't (mis)translated from any other language. That's what the pope's astronomer wrote. Actually, the edict was a bit longer than that. The whole thing is online, along with some pretty good translations to French and English, and there seems to be no mention of any time unit smaller than a day.
But I'll have to remember this omission, the next time the all-knowing nature of our religious leaders comes up. "If the bible [or the pope;-] truly tells us all we need to know about the world, where is the commandment on how to implement leap seconds? Inquiring believers want to know..."
After all, if God hadn't wanted us to use leap seconds, He would clearly have set things up so that the day, month and year are all integer multiples of the next-smallest unit. And they'd stay that way, not wavering all over the place on the millisecond level like our world's rotation obviously does. So He must have intended that we come to terms with all the incommensurabilities in the solar system's rotations and orbits. Where is this documented in the canon?
As at least one other poster has commented, this is bogus. It's quite easy to set up new "root" DNS servers, and ICANN won't stop you. Of course, people have to learn about them and put their IP addresses in the appropriate file on their system, but that's a simple edit.
And yes, I've done this. I've been involved with a number of projects that set up their own small set of root servers, which implemented new top-level domain names (typically the name of the project or organization), and where to find the nameservers for those domains (typically the same machines as the root DNS servers). It's easy, nobody outside our clique of users ever cared (or even noticed), and it worked fine.
Just for the experience, I also set up a DNS root server on our home system, to define the ".home" domain. It was also pretty easy, and works fine. Except that I haven't figured out how to tie it into our wifi gadget, which has DHCP running but doesn't seem to have a way to tell the DNS servers what its hosts call themselves. That's something that seems to be a rather murky part of how the Internet works. But maybe it would work, if I could guess the right keywords to google the right docs...
Anyway, the only reason the US's ICANN has any sort of monopoly on the Domain Name System is that other people are too lazy (or ignorant) to set up their own DNS servers. And tell their users how to add them to the common OSs' root-server files. It's not all that difficult; people should google the docs and Just Do It.
There is NOTHING stopping you from setting up a DNS root and running your own DNS system. Go ahead and do it. I don't care. No one else here cares. In fact, not a single person in the World cares. The US won't stop you. They won't even try. Hell, they won't even notice!
Yeah, I was going to post something sorta like that, but you did it first, so thanks! We should be pointing this out whenever DNS's problems come up.
I've worked on a number of projects for which we created our own "root" servers, and added them to the appropriate file in all our systems. It worked fine, and nobody outside our project even noticed.
It's also common for organizations with an internal network (10.*.*.* or 192.168.*.* or whatever) to set up a bunch of internal "root" servers the same way. The DNS system was designed to work this way, and it works fine. I have a couple of DNS servers in my home network, which works fine, and doesn't interfere with anyone's Internet access in the outside world.
Of course, you probably want to define top-level domain names that are different from what the "public" DNS system uses. Most organizations use their own name for this, and that works without problems, too. You can also intercept internal references to the public root domains, if you like, so for instance you can prevent your people from referencing any hosts in the.it top-level domain if you don't want them referencing any Italian sites. You might want to think about this a bit before doing, but again, it won't interfere with (or be noticed by) anyone outside your local network.
We really should be posting explanations of this, whenever we read discussions of the problems with "the DNS system". Just bitching about, say, the US government's random (and unwarranted) takedowns of various organizatios' domain names won't do much to fix the problem. Expanding the DNS system beyond the US so that the US government can't do things like that is a lot more effective. And it's easy enough to do, without permission from anyone.
So we should continue to harp on this at every opportunity.
What I like to do when people seem confused about leap-year calculation is quote them the text in Pope Gregory's definition in the February 24, 1582 document "Inter Gravissimas":
"Deinde, ne in posterum a XII kalendas aprilis aequinoctium recedat, statuimus bissextum quarto quoque anno (uti mos est) continuari debere, praeterquam in centesimis annis; qui, quamvis bissextiles antea semper fuerint, qualem etiam esse volumus annum MDC, post eum tamen qui deinceps consequentur centesimi non omnes bissextiles sint, sed in quadringentis quibusque annis primi quique tres centesimi sine bissexto transigantur, quartus vero quisque centesimus bissextilis sit, ita ut annus MDCC, MDCCC, MDCCCC bissextiles non sint. Anno vero MM, more consueto dies bissextus intercaletur, februario dies XXIX continente, idemque ordo intermittendi intercalandique bissextum diem in quadringentis quibusque annis perpetuo conservetur."
This quote should make the algorithm clear to any competent programmer. Note that it contains the explicit example that in the year 2000, February contains 29 days.
Of course, it can be expressed in many fewer characters in most programming languages. But the pope's astronomer didn't have any programming languages available back in 1582.
It can be fun to point out that the above Latin passage is still the "official" definition of the leap year scheme, since no standards body has tried to revise it. As far as I've been able to determine, that is; let me know if this has ever actually happened. It'd be especially fun if some standards body had tried to rephrase this in a modern language, but got it wrong. If so, they were probably shocked to discover that a 16th-century pope's edict trumped their scientific calcuations.
(The/. software guys might be able to block posting in Russian or Chinese or Arabic, but it's a lot harder to prevent people from using Latin.;-)
Nah; it'll probably hang on for a while yet. And in the long run, it'll probably be around for a long time, though on a much smaller scale than its pushers were hoping for. This is because there are some very good uses for it. If you have stuff that you want to be easily available to lots of people wherever they are (with Net access), and you don't particularly mind if non-subscribers get access to some of your stuff, then the Cloud can be really useful.
I have a number of things online that I don't mind people using. My resume, for instance. And a lot of "demo" software that's public to show people what I can do. I've also got improvements to some of my stuff from other people who downloaded something, found that it didn't do something they wanted, added the code, and sent me the patches. There's a lot of stuff like this that's useful but not really profitable, so you might as well share it. And if you don't have to connect to a server 37 hops away to get at it when you're off somewhere remote, so much the better. Storing it redundantly on scattered servers might be very handy for you and your friends.
But I wouldn't expect a lot of business use of the Cloud. Businesses always consider their data Top Secret (even if nobody else gives a damn about it). All it takes is a manager realizing that everything in the Cloud has to be treated as "public", and they'll run away screaming. Similar in government agencies, which are mostly indistinguishable from businesses when it comes to information about their internal workings.
There's also the problem of Cloud providers claiming ownership of useful things they find on their servers, but that's a different topic that we've already discussed a few times here on slashdot. Suffice it to say that if you want to retain ownership of useful software (or your music or medical records or photos of your children), you don't want it stored on someone else's computers. Marketers see such stuff as tools to be used in their own business.
If there is nothing to hide then why are they hiding it?
They'd probably be happy to tell you after you post all your login account names, number and passwords online. You don't have anything to hide, do you?
You're welcome to post them in a reply to this message...
... hanging the 1% and redistributing their wealth to the other 99% would be quite democratic, wouldn't it?
That would be more communistic.
Nah; a much better precedent would be the French Revolution. It's a nice example where the 99% didn't profit much, if at all. Mostly, it just led to La Terroire, with lots of commoners dying of the blade along with the famous few of the rich and powerful who met their fate there. The government that came out of it was even worse than what was deposed, and eventually led to the coronation of yet another monarch (nowadays referred to as a dictator). So basically not much was changed.
Well, some years back, I read an interesting article on the subject, observing that this was a nearly ideal example in which cause and effect are difficult to disentangle. There are reasonable arguments for the causation to go both ways, and data to support both of them. One conclusion was that it was best explained as a feedback loop, in which having wealth tends to make you part of a social group that's immoral, and when you adopt various immoral behaviors, society rewards you. As long as you have a feel for the boundaries and don't get jailed for your behavior, it's to your personal benefit to follow this feedback loop.
How do we know that? Has there been deep drilling on some other planets that I haven't read about?
Yeah; if I had to place a bet, I'd bet against any of the other planets in our solar system having oil. But that's something different that actually knowing that there's no oil anywhere in all those large areas where we've never drilled at all.
For all we know, the data showing that Europa probably has a deep liquid layer below its surface might be because there's kilometers-deep layer of (extra-virgin olive) oil there.
My first reaction to this was "Why wouldn't they just let them die off when their batteries run down?" In my experience, no GPS device small enough to be hidden in a car will run more than a few days without recharging the battery; most of them die in a matter of hours.
Then my second thought was "How are those gadgets powered?" Do they have a a humongous battery that will last weeks or months? Do they tap into the car's electrical system and not need a battery? If so, will the owner of the car find that the battery is run down when they don't drive it every day? What would be the legal import of the cops tapping into my car's battery and draining it? And, of course, when I took it into the shop and they found the electrical parasite, it would be removed, so this doesn't seem to be a very smart way to power a secret GPS gadget.
You could use a solar charger, but those are sorta hard to conceal.
Anyone know how these things are powered, and how long they can run without either draining the car's battery or dying because their own battery is dead?
Yah, yah. I'd guess that the majority of people here know little if any German, and have no idea what "gestapo" means, or even that it was an acronym. It may be obvious to you and me (and we may both even know how to pronounce it). But on forums like this, it can be useful to bore the more knowledgeable by explaining such terminology.
Actually, it could be interesting to know how many of the denizens of this forum know what that and various other such politically-charged words originally meant. But I suppose there's no practical way to find out. You can't exactly to a scientific poll of/., or any other online forum.
No real Canadian actually thinks they are legitimate.
So what percentage of the Canadian population are "real", and what percentage are fake?
I suppose I'm neither, since I'm not a Canadian. I was born about 50 miles south of the border. But, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are Canadian. I'd like to know how to figure out if they're real or fake.
"Then i will just refer to you as the gestapo. What it is that you want?"
We should perhaps note that "gestapo" is a German acronym for "geheime Staatspolizei", or "secret state's police". This is not really a proper name; it's a generic common-noun phrase. Using it to refer to any secretive government agency isn't a metaphor; you're just using the name literally.
... for the chasm of what the public is told and what actually takes place behind closed doors is growing daily, especially when the Government is involved.
So what evidence do you have that this is actually growing? Are you aware of the uses of government secrecy in previous decades? E.g., the Red-hunting activities back in the 1950s and 60s. Throughout the US government's history, such secret investigations have been used routinely by the people in power to ruin the lives of their perceived enemies, usually without resorting to the court system. And there have always been enemies; they just have different names in different decades.
And I'm not aware of any other governments that behave differently. They always have secrets that are too dangerous to reveal to the public. And these secrets are mostly about their own citizens, though various evil foreigners are the usual excuse.
I don't see that this has changed significantly in recent years. But maybe the increased openness of due to the Internet has made it a bit more obvious to the citizenry.
They already sell your info to advertisers. Maybe if the police offered them a few bucks...
Actually, that's not just funny; it's also probably true. The problem is that the cops have a budget, and they want to get the information for free. But, as a couple of lawyer acquaintances have pointed out, the US Constitution has a very clear ban on "involuntary servitude", which they say they've helped clients use to explain to government agents why they won't work for the government for free.
OTOH, if the government agencies want to hire the company to collect and hand over the information, and is willing to pay what it costs the company to do this (+ 10% is the actual traditional price), they'll probably be happy to comply.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the US's government (at all levels) has developed the idea that they can just walk through a door and order people to work for them without paying for the labor. We should perhaps be disabusing them of this idea, by pointing out that the Supreme Court hasn't yet overturned the 13th Amendment.
How do you protect yourself from liars? Do you begin lying yourself?
Actually, this has been dealt with by the game theory folks. It has also been tested in Real Life by contests pitting implementations of various strategies in games that pairs strategies against each other, and rewards/punishes them depending on various payoff functions. The most popular have been Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games, in which the PD payoff matrix is used, and "players" are allowed to remember what each opponent did in previous encounters.
The simplest strategy that consistently wins against most other strategies is called Tit for Tat, and amounts to: Cooperate with an opponent in the first encounter, and subsequently do whatever they did to you the last time. This tends to produce crowds of cooperators that repeatedly get the payoff of mutual cooperation; occasional defectors are instantly excluded, so they only get the defection payoff once from each opponent. But if a defector wises up and starts cooperating, it is quickly accepted and becomes part of the cooperative society.
An interesting aspect of this is that people have had a lot of trouble finding a strategy that beats TfT in the long run. It's also interesting that it only requires remembering one bit of information about each participant (plus their ID as the lookup key of course). So it can be implemented in RL by critters with fairly low intelligence and memory. Some biologists have had fun applying this result to observations of social species' behavior.
Douglas Hofstadter has written extensively about these games.
And I once had a wedding invitation that said "Please respond to RSVP promptly."
Except that RSVP is different from the other examples in one important way: It's an abbreviation of a French phrase, not an English phrase. So to people who don't speak or read French (which is the overwhelming majority of the world's people), it's just an acronym for a nonsensical phrase, and its individual letters don't stand for anything at all.
But it's fun to mock the ignorant, especially those so ignorant as to not understand French, so please proceed...
I expected something so silly spewed from a technology ignorant, grandpa Senator. But the chairman of the FCC?! Stuff like this makes me wonder if democracy works.
Sure, it works. The FCC's head is a political appointee, and he was appointed by the president that the majority (of the Electoral College;-) voted for. In a democracy, job holders are decided by voting, not by requiring credentials. If the voters want someone competent, they'll vote for someone competent. If they want a president who appoints competent people, they'll vote for a president who's interested in competence.
And yes, customers really are stupid enough to think the malware they have had for years and didn't know about, but were suddenly notified of when they signed up for your [ISP] service, came from you.
Actually, under the proposed scheme, this isn't at all stupid; it would be the sensible approach. After all, the ISP has been officially and legally assigned the task of monitoring all the customer's IP traffic for malware. The fact that it's on my machine means that the ISP totally failed at their government-required task. They are clearly responsible, according to the law, and have allowed the malware to transit their part of the network. They should be responsible for fixing the damage.
If the ISPs don't like this, they should be seriously lobbying against such laws, and for a "common carrier" status that doesn't make them responsible for "content" in this way.
... and in extreme cases may be granted funding to find their own solution.
The obvious solution is to download the TV shows you want to watch using 4G and the Internet. When the phone company complains, you tell them that your lawyer thinks you'd have a good case against them, since they're the ones who bought up the spectrum and are broadcasting signals to "jam" their TV reception.
It might be fun to watch this play out. I wonder how well class actions against such "jamming" would work in the UK.
Of course, in the long run, broadcast TV is dead, and will eventually be moved over to IP-based services. But in the short run, the TV industry has political and economic clout, and can do lots of damage to their up-and-coming competitors.
It's all a plot to extract more money from the customers, of course.
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What is with MS and their apparent inability to cope with leap years?
I would like to know the same thing. This seems to be systemic.
Yeah; it's systemic. Or at least it used to be a few years back, and I wouldn't be surprised if they haven't fixed the basic problem yet. The problem is fairly simple: Windows' internal clock is in local time.
To a programmer with experience writing date/time code, I've found that this is all you need to tell them. Any software whose internal clock is in local time will be buggy, and it will never be completely fixed. Attempts to fix bugs will merely introduce bugs elsewhere in the chains of date/time handling. The sensible solution is to adopt a "universal time" internally, and convert at the last stage when you present the date/time to a human user. Yes, you theoretically can work with local time internally, but (teams of) humans can't actually make this work in practice. The best they can do is make it work in the "normal" cases. Bug fixes then tend to just move the time bugs around to different places in the code. But it can be very difficult to get management to accept this and agree to UT-only internally.
Java also used to specify local time internally (and may still do so, but I haven't used it in years). I worked on a number of projects where, after repeated date/time disasters at every switch to/from DST and every Feb 29, java was abandoned and everything was rewritten in a language (usually C++) whose libraries supported a UT timestamp and didn't have all those time bugs.
Does anyone know if MS Windows has introduced a UT internal time yet? If not, then we can reliably predict that such bugs will continue to plague their users.
Actually every hundred year is when a leap year doesn't come along. (unless it's divisible by 400, then it does)
Right; and I wonder how many computer failures will happen on the first of March, 2100, due to part of the software thinking it's the 29th of February, causing random problems while talking to other software that knows the correct date.
We all know it's gonna happen ...
Well, I'm puzzled by this. How could it be "lost in translation" when that was the original text? It wasn't (mis)translated from any other language. That's what the pope's astronomer wrote. Actually, the edict was a bit longer than that. The whole thing is online, along with some pretty good translations to French and English, and there seems to be no mention of any time unit smaller than a day.
But I'll have to remember this omission, the next time the all-knowing nature of our religious leaders comes up. "If the bible [or the pope ;-] truly tells us all we need to know about the world, where is the commandment on how to implement leap seconds? Inquiring believers want to know ..."
After all, if God hadn't wanted us to use leap seconds, He would clearly have set things up so that the day, month and year are all integer multiples of the next-smallest unit. And they'd stay that way, not wavering all over the place on the millisecond level like our world's rotation obviously does. So He must have intended that we come to terms with all the incommensurabilities in the solar system's rotations and orbits. Where is this documented in the canon?
The US having a monopoly on DNS registration ...
As at least one other poster has commented, this is bogus. It's quite easy to set up new "root" DNS servers, and ICANN won't stop you. Of course, people have to learn about them and put their IP addresses in the appropriate file on their system, but that's a simple edit.
And yes, I've done this. I've been involved with a number of projects that set up their own small set of root servers, which implemented new top-level domain names (typically the name of the project or organization), and where to find the nameservers for those domains (typically the same machines as the root DNS servers). It's easy, nobody outside our clique of users ever cared (or even noticed), and it worked fine.
Just for the experience, I also set up a DNS root server on our home system, to define the ".home" domain. It was also pretty easy, and works fine. Except that I haven't figured out how to tie it into our wifi gadget, which has DHCP running but doesn't seem to have a way to tell the DNS servers what its hosts call themselves. That's something that seems to be a rather murky part of how the Internet works. But maybe it would work, if I could guess the right keywords to google the right docs ...
Anyway, the only reason the US's ICANN has any sort of monopoly on the Domain Name System is that other people are too lazy (or ignorant) to set up their own DNS servers. And tell their users how to add them to the common OSs' root-server files. It's not all that difficult; people should google the docs and Just Do It.
Where do I go to complain against the UNs policies?
Well, for starts, there are lots of online forums. Like this one.
Perhaps it's all smoke in mirrors
I wonder what that looks like.
Look behind you!
(Actually, it's a nice eggcorn. If you don't know the term, google it. ;-)
There is NOTHING stopping you from setting up a DNS root and running your own DNS system. Go ahead and do it. I don't care. No one else here cares. In fact, not a single person in the World cares. The US won't stop you. They won't even try. Hell, they won't even notice!
Yeah, I was going to post something sorta like that, but you did it first, so thanks! We should be pointing this out whenever DNS's problems come up.
I've worked on a number of projects for which we created our own "root" servers, and added them to the appropriate file in all our systems. It worked fine, and nobody outside our project even noticed.
It's also common for organizations with an internal network (10.*.*.* or 192.168.*.* or whatever) to set up a bunch of internal "root" servers the same way. The DNS system was designed to work this way, and it works fine. I have a couple of DNS servers in my home network, which works fine, and doesn't interfere with anyone's Internet access in the outside world.
Of course, you probably want to define top-level domain names that are different from what the "public" DNS system uses. Most organizations use their own name for this, and that works without problems, too. You can also intercept internal references to the public root domains, if you like, so for instance you can prevent your people from referencing any hosts in the .it top-level domain if you don't want them referencing any Italian sites. You might want to think about this a bit before doing, but again, it won't interfere with (or be noticed by) anyone outside your local network.
We really should be posting explanations of this, whenever we read discussions of the problems with "the DNS system". Just bitching about, say, the US government's random (and unwarranted) takedowns of various organizatios' domain names won't do much to fix the problem. Expanding the DNS system beyond the US so that the US government can't do things like that is a lot more effective. And it's easy enough to do, without permission from anyone.
So we should continue to harp on this at every opportunity.
"Deinde, ne in posterum a XII kalendas aprilis aequinoctium recedat, statuimus bissextum quarto quoque anno (uti mos est) continuari debere, praeterquam in centesimis annis; qui, quamvis bissextiles antea semper fuerint, qualem etiam esse volumus annum MDC, post eum tamen qui deinceps consequentur centesimi non omnes bissextiles sint, sed in quadringentis quibusque annis primi quique tres centesimi sine bissexto transigantur, quartus vero quisque centesimus bissextilis sit, ita ut annus MDCC, MDCCC, MDCCCC bissextiles non sint. Anno vero MM, more consueto dies bissextus intercaletur, februario dies XXIX continente, idemque ordo intermittendi intercalandique bissextum diem in quadringentis quibusque annis perpetuo conservetur."
This quote should make the algorithm clear to any competent programmer. Note that it contains the explicit example that in the year 2000, February contains 29 days.
Of course, it can be expressed in many fewer characters in most programming languages. But the pope's astronomer didn't have any programming languages available back in 1582.
It can be fun to point out that the above Latin passage is still the "official" definition of the leap year scheme, since no standards body has tried to revise it. As far as I've been able to determine, that is; let me know if this has ever actually happened. It'd be especially fun if some standards body had tried to rephrase this in a modern language, but got it wrong. If so, they were probably shocked to discover that a 16th-century pope's edict trumped their scientific calcuations.
(The /. software guys might be able to block posting in Russian or Chinese or Arabic, but it's a lot harder to prevent people from using Latin. ;-)
So is this stupid cloud fad about over now?
Nah; it'll probably hang on for a while yet. And in the long run, it'll probably be around for a long time, though on a much smaller scale than its pushers were hoping for. This is because there are some very good uses for it. If you have stuff that you want to be easily available to lots of people wherever they are (with Net access), and you don't particularly mind if non-subscribers get access to some of your stuff, then the Cloud can be really useful.
I have a number of things online that I don't mind people using. My resume, for instance. And a lot of "demo" software that's public to show people what I can do. I've also got improvements to some of my stuff from other people who downloaded something, found that it didn't do something they wanted, added the code, and sent me the patches. There's a lot of stuff like this that's useful but not really profitable, so you might as well share it. And if you don't have to connect to a server 37 hops away to get at it when you're off somewhere remote, so much the better. Storing it redundantly on scattered servers might be very handy for you and your friends.
But I wouldn't expect a lot of business use of the Cloud. Businesses always consider their data Top Secret (even if nobody else gives a damn about it). All it takes is a manager realizing that everything in the Cloud has to be treated as "public", and they'll run away screaming. Similar in government agencies, which are mostly indistinguishable from businesses when it comes to information about their internal workings.
There's also the problem of Cloud providers claiming ownership of useful things they find on their servers, but that's a different topic that we've already discussed a few times here on slashdot. Suffice it to say that if you want to retain ownership of useful software (or your music or medical records or photos of your children), you don't want it stored on someone else's computers. Marketers see such stuff as tools to be used in their own business.
If there is nothing to hide then why are they hiding it?
They'd probably be happy to tell you after you post all your login account names, number and passwords online. You don't have anything to hide, do you?
You're welcome to post them in a reply to this message ...
... hanging the 1% and redistributing their wealth to the other 99% would be quite democratic, wouldn't it?
That would be more communistic.
Nah; a much better precedent would be the French Revolution. It's a nice example where the 99% didn't profit much, if at all. Mostly, it just led to La Terroire, with lots of commoners dying of the blade along with the famous few of the rich and powerful who met their fate there. The government that came out of it was even worse than what was deposed, and eventually led to the coronation of yet another monarch (nowadays referred to as a dictator). So basically not much was changed.
Well, some years back, I read an interesting article on the subject, observing that this was a nearly ideal example in which cause and effect are difficult to disentangle. There are reasonable arguments for the causation to go both ways, and data to support both of them. One conclusion was that it was best explained as a feedback loop, in which having wealth tends to make you part of a social group that's immoral, and when you adopt various immoral behaviors, society rewards you. As long as you have a feel for the boundaries and don't get jailed for your behavior, it's to your personal benefit to follow this feedback loop.
There's no oil in space
How do we know that? Has there been deep drilling on some other planets that I haven't read about?
Yeah; if I had to place a bet, I'd bet against any of the other planets in our solar system having oil. But that's something different that actually knowing that there's no oil anywhere in all those large areas where we've never drilled at all.
For all we know, the data showing that Europa probably has a deep liquid layer below its surface might be because there's kilometers-deep layer of (extra-virgin olive) oil there.
My first reaction to this was "Why wouldn't they just let them die off when their batteries run down?" In my experience, no GPS device small enough to be hidden in a car will run more than a few days without recharging the battery; most of them die in a matter of hours.
Then my second thought was "How are those gadgets powered?" Do they have a a humongous battery that will last weeks or months? Do they tap into the car's electrical system and not need a battery? If so, will the owner of the car find that the battery is run down when they don't drive it every day? What would be the legal import of the cops tapping into my car's battery and draining it? And, of course, when I took it into the shop and they found the electrical parasite, it would be removed, so this doesn't seem to be a very smart way to power a secret GPS gadget.
You could use a solar charger, but those are sorta hard to conceal.
Anyone know how these things are powered, and how long they can run without either draining the car's battery or dying because their own battery is dead?
Yah, yah. I'd guess that the majority of people here know little if any German, and have no idea what "gestapo" means, or even that it was an acronym. It may be obvious to you and me (and we may both even know how to pronounce it). But on forums like this, it can be useful to bore the more knowledgeable by explaining such terminology.
Actually, it could be interesting to know how many of the denizens of this forum know what that and various other such politically-charged words originally meant. But I suppose there's no practical way to find out. You can't exactly to a scientific poll of /., or any other online forum.
No real Canadian actually thinks they are legitimate.
So what percentage of the Canadian population are "real", and what percentage are fake?
I suppose I'm neither, since I'm not a Canadian. I was born about 50 miles south of the border. But, as the saying goes, some of my best friends are Canadian. I'd like to know how to figure out if they're real or fake.
... I ended with an image of workers carrying a ladder under one arm and a bulldozer under the other.
Well, I just thought that the writer was following the well-known rule: Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
"Then i will just refer to you as the gestapo. What it is that you want?"
We should perhaps note that "gestapo" is a German acronym for "geheime Staatspolizei", or "secret state's police". This is not really a proper name; it's a generic common-noun phrase. Using it to refer to any secretive government agency isn't a metaphor; you're just using the name literally.
... for the chasm of what the public is told and what actually takes place behind closed doors is growing daily, especially when the Government is involved.
So what evidence do you have that this is actually growing? Are you aware of the uses of government secrecy in previous decades? E.g., the Red-hunting activities back in the 1950s and 60s. Throughout the US government's history, such secret investigations have been used routinely by the people in power to ruin the lives of their perceived enemies, usually without resorting to the court system. And there have always been enemies; they just have different names in different decades.
And I'm not aware of any other governments that behave differently. They always have secrets that are too dangerous to reveal to the public. And these secrets are mostly about their own citizens, though various evil foreigners are the usual excuse.
I don't see that this has changed significantly in recent years. But maybe the increased openness of due to the Internet has made it a bit more obvious to the citizenry.
They already sell your info to advertisers. Maybe if the police offered them a few bucks...
Actually, that's not just funny; it's also probably true. The problem is that the cops have a budget, and they want to get the information for free. But, as a couple of lawyer acquaintances have pointed out, the US Constitution has a very clear ban on "involuntary servitude", which they say they've helped clients use to explain to government agents why they won't work for the government for free.
OTOH, if the government agencies want to hire the company to collect and hand over the information, and is willing to pay what it costs the company to do this (+ 10% is the actual traditional price), they'll probably be happy to comply.
Part of the problem is that a lot of the US's government (at all levels) has developed the idea that they can just walk through a door and order people to work for them without paying for the labor. We should perhaps be disabusing them of this idea, by pointing out that the Supreme Court hasn't yet overturned the 13th Amendment.
How do you protect yourself from liars? Do you begin lying yourself?
Actually, this has been dealt with by the game theory folks. It has also been tested in Real Life by contests pitting implementations of various strategies in games that pairs strategies against each other, and rewards/punishes them depending on various payoff functions. The most popular have been Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma games, in which the PD payoff matrix is used, and "players" are allowed to remember what each opponent did in previous encounters.
The simplest strategy that consistently wins against most other strategies is called Tit for Tat, and amounts to: Cooperate with an opponent in the first encounter, and subsequently do whatever they did to you the last time. This tends to produce crowds of cooperators that repeatedly get the payoff of mutual cooperation; occasional defectors are instantly excluded, so they only get the defection payoff once from each opponent. But if a defector wises up and starts cooperating, it is quickly accepted and becomes part of the cooperative society.
An interesting aspect of this is that people have had a lot of trouble finding a strategy that beats TfT in the long run. It's also interesting that it only requires remembering one bit of information about each participant (plus their ID as the lookup key of course). So it can be implemented in RL by critters with fairly low intelligence and memory. Some biologists have had fun applying this result to observations of social species' behavior.
Douglas Hofstadter has written extensively about these games.
And I once had a wedding invitation that said "Please respond to RSVP promptly."
Except that RSVP is different from the other examples in one important way: It's an abbreviation of a French phrase, not an English phrase. So to people who don't speak or read French (which is the overwhelming majority of the world's people), it's just an acronym for a nonsensical phrase, and its individual letters don't stand for anything at all.
But it's fun to mock the ignorant, especially those so ignorant as to not understand French, so please proceed ...
I expected something so silly spewed from a technology ignorant, grandpa Senator. But the chairman of the FCC?! Stuff like this makes me wonder if democracy works.
Sure, it works. The FCC's head is a political appointee, and he was appointed by the president that the majority (of the Electoral College ;-) voted for. In a democracy, job holders are decided by voting, not by requiring credentials. If the voters want someone competent, they'll vote for someone competent. If they want a president who appoints competent people, they'll vote for a president who's interested in competence.
(Not sure if I should include a ;-) here ...
And yes, customers really are stupid enough to think the malware they have had for years and didn't know about, but were suddenly notified of when they signed up for your [ISP] service, came from you.
Actually, under the proposed scheme, this isn't at all stupid; it would be the sensible approach. After all, the ISP has been officially and legally assigned the task of monitoring all the customer's IP traffic for malware. The fact that it's on my machine means that the ISP totally failed at their government-required task. They are clearly responsible, according to the law, and have allowed the malware to transit their part of the network. They should be responsible for fixing the damage.
If the ISPs don't like this, they should be seriously lobbying against such laws, and for a "common carrier" status that doesn't make them responsible for "content" in this way.
... and in extreme cases may be granted funding to find their own solution.
The obvious solution is to download the TV shows you want to watch using 4G and the Internet. When the phone company complains, you tell them that your lawyer thinks you'd have a good case against them, since they're the ones who bought up the spectrum and are broadcasting signals to "jam" their TV reception.
It might be fun to watch this play out. I wonder how well class actions against such "jamming" would work in the UK.
Of course, in the long run, broadcast TV is dead, and will eventually be moved over to IP-based services. But in the short run, the TV industry has political and economic clout, and can do lots of damage to their up-and-coming competitors.
It's all a plot to extract more money from the customers, of course.