In recent elections here in the US, we've been reading of studies showing that the voters who are most knowledgeable about the candidates and the issues are those who follow various satirical news sites. The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Onion, and even Wait Wait Don't Tell Me have been named as being highly correlated with informedness. So yes, it makes sense at least minimal sense to have a satire/parody/humor top-level domain.
Of course, Poe's Law applies even here, and we'll continue to see articles posted as fact, even when they're clearly labelled as satire by their URL.
What I'm looking forward to is someone setting up an actual news site there that specializes in stories that really seem like parody or saire, but are actually true. The world has enough such stories to keep at least a small team of journalists busy.
(And I do expect a reply to the above saying "correlation is not causation", so don't disappoint me...)
It's probably just a matter of time, perhaps not much time, before some entrepreneurs figure out that is a generally-useful marketing tactic. We can expect that the little "selfie" cameras on phones and tablets are being turned on briefly by assorted ads delivered along with the web page you looked at, and sent back to the mother ship for later use. You won't have to go through the bother of signing in or otherwise identifying yourself, since your ISP/cell company can supply them with that info (for a price). They can then use the photo and your info to persuade you that you should buy some of their products. Or they can just fake the session in which you ordered what they want to sell you.
I generally keep a bit of opaque tape over those cameras except when I actually want to use them.
Lessee, I took the tape off this laptop's camera; let's see if the slashcode knows how to send y'all my photo. It's a Macbook Pro, which should tell you which exploit to use. I'm currently sitting on the patio, in the shade of a grape vine, waiting for the temperature to reach a new historic high here in the Boston area. If you can find my photo, tell me the text on my t-shirt. If anyone succeeds, it'll show that this story isn't just someone's imagination.;-)
Brewer says, is the way color picking is done in many software programs
'Software programs' is the plural of 'software program'. The word 'software' alone in that context wouldn't work.
If the article just said 'programs', then it could refer to programs in the sense of 'an agreed form [for presenting data]': so it could be about chart presentation in general rather than software design. It would be slightly archaic sounding, but it would be a valid interpretation.
The cringer (diodeus) is perhaps not familiar with such things as concert programs, which are often full-color booklets, or television programs, which have been in color since back in the 1960s or so. In both of these, the colors were originally and sometimes still are rather crappy and unrealistic, so they're on-topic in the current discussion.
Dunno why you'd call them "archaic sounding", though. I've seen lots of concert programs and a few television programs in recent years. The TV is starting to look a bit archaic, though, since with the Web you can see something when it's convenient for you, and you don't have the problem of two things you want to watch being scheduled at the same time. But the term "video" hasn't really replaced the term "program" for what used to be the sole domain of TV, and "program" is still the general public's main term for such chunks of drama received electronically. Maybe as the Web slowly supplants broadcast TV the usage will shift.
So is medical science not "real science" because we've had quite a few stories over the last few years that a ton of results from medical research and drug trials can't be reproduced.
A large percentage of medical studies are funded by manufacturers, and it's fairly well understood that most of those don't get published unless they produce the "right" results. And those that are published are often really "preliminary", based on too little data to be considered reliable. But if a test on 10 or 20 patients gives the "right" results, there is a lot of marketing pressure to get the paper published right away.
This easily explains the growing problem of medical products that are found to be worthless (or even harmful) to the patients, after years of heavy marketing has produced large profits.
There's also the age-old problem that studies with "negative" results usually don't get published at all. As usual, there's a good xkdc comic that explains the methodology in a way that even the minimally numerate reader can understand.
Or maybe we could take a more general look, and observe that pretty much all fiction is intended to induce emotional responses in the readers. We have a number of words for fiction that doesn't do that: boring, weak, forgettable, etc., none of them words of praise.
Can you think of any work of fiction that you've liked, that doesn't clearly be aimed at instilling emotions, attitudes, and other such reaction in the readers? Offhand, I can't think of any. (But I suppose I could have missed a few important works of literature.;-)
And can you think of any important work of fiction that doesn't cast at least a few ruling-class characters in a bad light? There's gotta be a few of them out there...
I've read a number of comments about all the movies that let you know you're in Paris by the fact that you can see the Eiffel Tower through a window. After a while, some viewers start to realize that in the movie's world, the Eiffel Tower is visible from every window in Paris. So is there really a regulation in Paris saying that windows are illegal on the other sides of buildings?
Other readers can probably list a number of other such landmarks that they've spotted. The Golden Gate Bridge is another, so SF apparently has a similar construction regulation.
In other news, you can still buy buggy whips, dial-style telephones, and vinyl records, too.
Nostalgia and straight-up Luddite-like behavior are enough to keep almost anything going at some level -- no matter how low its actual utility as compared to more recent replacement tech may be.
It does generally make more sense to view new technology as adding to existing technology, rather than replacing it. After all, the invention of books didn't replace talking, and the invention of the telephone didn't make person-to-person speech obsolete.
One of the things I liked to point out back in the 1990s, when we still had tech bookstores, was that when you walked into one, the first bookcase you'd see had all the current best sellers, and if you opened them to the first pages, you'd inevitably find a URL where you could download them, usually for free. Many people would be puzzled by this. If you can download the book and display it on your screen, why would you pay so much money for a book. But the real techies generally weren't puzzled; they understood why they (or their employer;-) would pay money for the hard copy.
Of course, amazon has now killed off most of those bookstores. But the hard-copy books are still being produced and bought, and it's still no mystery to those of us who use them. (And we do usually also have the electronic versions in our computers; don't tell anyone...;-)
I also periodically run across comments that music on vinyl records is still produced and selling fairly well. This also makes sense if you give up the idea that new technology replaces the old, and ask yourself what the tradeoffs might be between the various ways of doing things.
Another fun example: I've read a few analyses of the apparent fact that the population of "working" horses has been slowly growing for some decades now. Try to figure out why this might be, before you google it. As with paper books and vinyl records, it turns out there are situations where horses are cheaper or faster or better in some other important way than the available mechanical replacements. True, it's a small "market", and they'll never regain the niche taken over by tractors, but people are figuring out that they're actually a good "solution" in a number of situations.
(I've also had fun pointing out that the web has widely adopted the concept of a "scroll" text format, which used to be the epitome of totally obsolete technology.;-)
Seriously, we need someone like Hillary in office. She is the only person running that is vicious enough to get something done after the soft but firm Obama.
I'd want a snake on my side over a hedgehog.
Hey, c'mon; hedgehogs are incredibly cute. (Pay no attention to those sharp spines hidden out in their cute furry exterior.;-)
And, like many cute critters, they're actually also vicious killers of smaller animals:w.
Actually, it's not obvious just how all this carries metaphorically over to US politics...
You're probably right. Amazon has gotten big enough that they can probably afford to take losses in a lot of "small" markets to bankrupt most of the smaller competitors. It is sorts funny to think that what the local hardware stores sell can be called a "small" market. But I suppose even in what looks like a large market, it might not be all that difficult for a company like amazon to kill off all the smaller competitors in a list of small areas, after which a few judicious buyouts and mergers completes the job.
It is interesting to see this starting to happen to Home Depot, which only a few years ago was the giant moving in and bankrupting all the locally-owned hardware stores.
The "disable advertising" checkbox has never made much sense. If you're reading Slashdot, you ought to be using an adblocker anyway
Yeah; the first time I saw that, my response was "What ads? Does/. have ads?";-)
I've always read/. on Firefox, which has ABP and noscript installed, so I've hardly ever seen any of the ads. I was duly complimented by being told that, due to my "positive contributions to Slashdot", I was allowed to disable ads, but I was also a bit curious, because I thought that/. didn't have ads. Guess I was wrong.
Actually, I have a couple of cell phones with lots of browsers installed, mostly for testing how well various web sites I'm responsible for work on little "mobile" gadgets. I've tried reading/. there, but I gave up because there was so little info visible on the screen. I'm tempted to install all the block software there, but that's become a lot of work and difficult to do right, so I just restrict my "reading" to my laptop, where several of my browsers do a pretty good job of blocking the "active" ads.
And the real ad problems do show up on mobiles, where they invariably use most of the bandwidth and keep the cpu busy, wiping out the battery in a few hours and making the gadget hot to the touch. So maybe I should pick one as my "browsing" phone, and figure out how to make all the blocking software work there. But that would be mostly useful when I'm away from home for more than a day, which isn't often. In the meantime, most of the cpu- and bandwidth-eating stuff can be erased by a reboot, which I tend to do daily. on the mobiles.
In any case, we should be making lots of noise about the ads that eat our batteries and bandwidth. That's not innocent harm on the part of the advertisers. They are actively attacking our mobile devices, eating up the GBs that we pay for and batteries that are supposed to hold a charge good enough for a day of use. That's not acceptable; it's an active attack on the victims' mobile computer gadgets. The advertisers have no "right" (legal, natural, or otherwise) to attack us in that manner.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase.
Yeah, plus funny story: Just last week, a tool I had broke, so I went online looking for a replacement. I first checked out the local hardware stores' web sites (they all have them), fully planning to drive over and pick one up so I could get to work. I found that, although they all listed of it, and could order one for me, none of them had it in stock. I even called the few remaining locally-owned hardware stores, and got the same reply. None of them could get it in less than a week. So I asked amazon, they had it "in stock" (whatever that means;-), and said "next-day delivery" for my address. They also had the cheapest price (including tax and postage). So I ordered it from amazon, and got it the next day. The job is (almost) done now.
Occasionally this approach has worked, and I have in fact driven over and bought what I was looking for. 20 minutes is a lot less than one day, after all. But it is getting hard for local stores to have enough space to match a string of huge warehouses.
What's odd about this story is that amazon could deliver in one day, but none of the commercial hardware stores could, though they all have an online order system, including the choice of shipping to the store or to your address. You'd think that the hardware stores would be more expert than amazon on the topic of deliverable hardware. But apparently not. Even the big-box warehouse-like stores like Home Depot gave me estimates of over a week.
An explanation I've seen from linguistic sources is that "corn" or "korn" is the general term in the Germanic languages for "the most common grain hereabouts".
The term causes well-known problems for historians, because you can't know what grain it refers to without knowing what the people at that time and place were eating. People are always misinterpreting the term to mean whatever grain is most common in their own diet, and not asking about what the writer of a text might have thought it meant.
That's not how classification works. Stamp or no, if the information contained within is considered classified, the format that it exists in is classified....
Back in the 1980s (or maybe late 1970s), there was a really fun example of this that appeared in lots of news sources. It seems that the DoD got curious about what could be learned about the US military forces from publicly-available sources. So they gave a grant to a couple of college profs to run a study of the topic. They (or rather, their grad students;-) dug through lots of local newspapers and other public info sources for mentions of the US military, and after some months, submitted their report to the DoD. Within 24 hours, it was classified (Secret, as I recall).
Everyone who read about this got a good laugh, of course, and we all had fun mocking the idiots in the military security agencies that they would respond like this. But among the jokes, there were occasional mentions of the lesson we all might learn from this: Not being part of the government, not having access to any classified info, etc., isn't protection. We are all told repeatedly that for our democratic government to work, we all should keep up an interest in its activities, pay attention to what's going on, etc. But if we do so, our personal piles of (partly read;-) newspapers, journals, and assorted articles from other sources could easily fall into the same pitfall that this study did. We could easily be in possession of classified information without knowing. If a security agency finds out, we could be in serious legal trouble.
Various commenters at the time suggested that we should be constantly purging our own piles of data of anything that might be related to our government. It's not enough to just ignore it and not read those stories. If we have them in our possession, we could be found guilty of unauthorized possession of classified information from the aggregation of our information.
Or we could just not have any information of any sort among our personal artifacts. Don't even subscribe to anything that might contain information. (Writers usually suggested a few periodicals that should be information-free, such as People, Sports Illustrated, US News & World Report, etc. Nowadays, they'd probably list CNN and Fox News.;-)
Unfortunately, I've forgotten the names of those researchers. It might be fun to find the reports and read them again. Google doesn't seem to know about them (or I just didn't guess the right keywords). Does anyone here remember that news story? Do you know how to find it again?
Sounds precisely why official govt. correspondence shouldn't be handled on one's own personal email server.
Right; that's exactly why I have my email from the Social Security and Medicare folks sent to my gmail account. I'd rather have it sent to the mail server on my home machine, but we're all seeing why this might be a very bad idea. So gmail it is.;-)
Idiot. The emails were "unmarked." That means not stamped with a classification. More, they reached her on an unclassified network. Clinton had every reason to believe they contained no classified information. Indeed, the claim that they do contain classified information remains unsubstantiated.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that your email and mine could as easily contain "top secret" information. How could we know, if we don't have a security clearance?
It's similar to a problem I've heard several groups of musicians discuss: If we know a tune but don't know who might have composed or published it, how can we discover if it's covered by copyright? As far as we know, the only way would be to purchase a copy of every piece of music ever published, and scan them all before performing the "work". There are some practical problems with doing this in our lifetime....
There are also some practical problems with asking (all the world's) security bureaus, for every document on our computer, whether there's anything in it that's "classified". But if we don't, we could find ourselves charged with a criminal security offense. Actually, without a security clearance, few security bureaus in any country will even tell us if our text contains security secrets. They'll just arrest us and charge us with a criminal security offense.
Walt Disney isn't creating any new art since he died.
So? There are many descendents of people who owned real estate, farms, businesses, hotels and restaurants that are enjoying the fruits of their parents' hard work and investments. How about forcing these descendents to donate their parents' assets to the public domain, just like copyrighted works?
Actually, if you track back the chain of property ownership in most of the world, you'll find that within a few centuries, it ends with a gang that took over and killed or exiled the former owners. They then set up their own list of owners of properties, passed laws protecting those owners and their descendants, and set up a government to enforce those laws. In the US's eastern coast strip, this last happened around 1780, and in various later decades for the rest of the country. Most of the exceptions are the areas where all the records have gone missing and we don't know what happened to establish current ownership. (In a few cases, major epidemics eradicated the former owners, leaving the property available to whoever could claim it by force.)
Since that's really how humans deal with such things in the long run, we can expect it to continue happening in most of the world. The only effective way of avoiding it is to die before the next time it happens where you live.
Now back to pretending that it's all real and permanent...;-)
Regarding your number 2... Frequently get tampered with in transit? Really? I have, literally, never seen this....
You're lucky there. I see such tampering several times per day, and fixing the problem often takes a lot of time (and soto-voce swearing;-).
The reason is that I deal with a lot of data that's "plain text", but is computer data of some sort, not a natural language like English (which is sorts stretching the meaning of "natural", but you know what I mean). Or it's in a human language, but not English, and the character encoding uses some 2-byte or longer characters.
The simplest example is computer source code. The tampering is often caused by the "punch-card mentality" coded into a lot of email software, which often doesn't allow lines longer than 80 (or 72) characters, and inserts line feeds to make everything fit. Many programming languages consider line feeds to mean something different than a space, usually "end of statement". Inserting a line feed in the middle of a statement thus changes the meaning, and very often introduces a syntax error.
Even nastier is the munging a lot of other plain-text data representation that mixes letters and numbers. Inserting spaces or a line feed in the middle of a token like "G2EF" usually destroys the meaning in a way that can't be corrected automatically at the receiving end. Usually the way to handle such tampering is to reply to the sender, saying "Can you send me that in quoted-printable or base-64 form?" And you try to teach everyone in the group that such data should always be encoded in a form that's immune to the idiocies of "smart" email handlers.
Text in UTF-8 form, especially Chinese and Japanese text, is especially prone to this sort of tampering, which often leaves the text garbled beyond recovery.
Anyway, there are lots of excuses for such tampering with email in ways that destroy the content. It's not always for nefarious reasons; it's just because the programmers only tested their email-handling code on English-language text. And because they're idiots who think that lines of text should never be longer than 80 (or 72) characters.
When I noticed that the address was the address of my machine, I did a quick find(1), but couldn't find the IMDB files or the takedown letter. Do you think I should contact Universal Pictures and ask them to send me another copy of the letter, so I can figure out which file to take down?
Actually, I noticed that all of our home machines (we have several, including tablets and smart phones) seem to have the same address. I guess that's to be expected, since ISPs only give us a single address, so we all have to use that silly NAT protocol and try to make sense of the confusion that it always creates. Anyway, I did look around on all of them, and still couldn't find anything with "Universal Pictures" inside. I did find a few files that contain "IMDB", but they're in the browsers' cache directories, and I got rid of those by simply telling the browsers to clear their cache(s).
But somehow I don't think this has taken care of the problem. So who should I contact at Universal Pictures to make sure we get a copy of the letter and purge our machines of their files?
(And for the benefit of many/. readers and mods, maybe I should end this with:;-) Nah....
What rate of return would convince you to put your money in an investment if you knew it was going to be 10 years before you received the first dollar back - and there was a 90%+ chance of failure to boot?
Funny thing; those numbers were used back in the 1980s, with interesting results. The topic wasn't drugs, though, but rather solid-state manufacturing, and very similar numbers were widely quoted in east Asia. At the time, it was generally estimated that to build a new solid-state facility would require several billion dollars, and would take around a decade to become profitable, due to the extreme difficulty of achieving the required low level of contaminants inside the equipment. Much of the decade would be spent making test runs, discovering that the output was useless because of some trace contaminant in one part of the process, and redesigning the setup to get past yet another failure. Success wasn't predictable; the 10-year estimate was just the minimum.
But people in east Asia (mostly Japan and Korea) argued publicly that the American companies that controlled most of the production at the time wouldn't be able to get funding for new factories, because American investors would refuse to invest so much money in something with no payoff for a decade. If Asian investors would step in and support the effort, in 10 years they could own the world's solid-state industry. Enough people with money (including government agencies) listened, made the gamble, and a decade longer, they owned the industry.
It's probably just a matter of time before the American drug industry goes the same way. Would you invest in something with no payoff for a decade or more, and wasn't even guaranteed to pay off then because nobody had yet created the drugs that might be created? If you guess that few US (or EU) investors will do this, you're likely right.
In particular, the Republican US Congress is highly likely to continue its defunding of academic basic research, partly due to mistrust of investments that won't pay off during their current terms in office, and also due to a serious religion-based dislike of the biological sciences in general. Without the basic research, the only "new" drugs patented by industry will continue to be mostly small tweaks of existing drugs, which under US law qualify as new, patentable products.
Of course, this is all a bunch of tenuous guesses, based on past behavior of the players. That's what investment is usually like. It's entirely possible that they'll wise up, and not abandon the drug industry the way they abandoned the electronics industry. The US does actually have a few solid-state production facilities, after all, though they're now a small part of the market.
But, as the above poster said, would you be willing to gamble your investment money on the hope that US private drug makers will support the research that the US government is getting out of? Remember that, to corporate management, scientific research appears to have a record of 90% failure; i.e., 90% of funded research projects fail to produce a patentable and marketable product. This is the nature of research, which only discovers facts and theories, not products, and where the outcome of a study is unpredictable before the fact. (If it were predictable, it wouldn't be called "research", it'd be "development".;-)
Why does a car have a wireless system, and why is this wireless system accessible from outside the car?
So that the manufacturer can access the car, collect data on where and how it's been driven, and sell that information to anyone willing to pay for it.
The idea of sending "data" to the car was an afterthought, when they realized it could be useful for things like disabling a car that's behind on the payments.
Note that both of these motives contain the string "pay". That's the hint you need to figure out the other intended uses.;-)
Automotive control interfaces change all of the time.
Really? The "control interface" of my '81 Ford is the same as the day it was purchased.
Well, the auto makers have "fixed" that problem in their latest models. They now have those little "onboard computers" that constantly scan many of the controls and figure out how to map them to physical actions. This means that any "upgrade" to the software can change the functioning of all the controls. You can think you're just getting an upgrade to improve the mileage, but that upgrade can flip the meaning of the turn-signal controls.
Some of the latest models have wifi, so they can do upgrades while you're traveling. We'll probably soon be hearing of accidents caused by a sudden change in meaning of what the driver did with the controls. (Yes, they may say the upgrades won't happen while the car is moving. What that means is that if you stop at a stop sign or light, when you start moving again, the controls may have silently changed. And if you think they wouldn't do upgrades without your permission, you haven't been paying attention.)
If computer-industry history is any guide, it'll probably take decades for all this to settle down to an intuitive, reliable auto UI. And the security problems still won't be solved, so your car can be taken over at any moment by "hackers" - or the police - or your insurance company.
(I wish I were joking... but I'll probably get a "funny" mod for this anyway.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
In recent elections here in the US, we've been reading of studies showing that the voters who are most knowledgeable about the candidates and the issues are those who follow various satirical news sites. The Daily Show, the Colbert Report, the Onion, and even Wait Wait Don't Tell Me have been named as being highly correlated with informedness. So yes, it makes sense at least minimal sense to have a satire/parody/humor top-level domain.
Of course, Poe's Law applies even here, and we'll continue to see articles posted as fact, even when they're clearly labelled as satire by their URL.
What I'm looking forward to is someone setting up an actual news site there that specializes in stories that really seem like parody or saire, but are actually true. The world has enough such stories to keep at least a small team of journalists busy.
(And I do expect a reply to the above saying "correlation is not causation", so don't disappoint me ...)
It says "I'm with stupid", but with no arrow.
Hey, where can I get one of those?
It's probably just a matter of time, perhaps not much time, before some entrepreneurs figure out that is a generally-useful marketing tactic. We can expect that the little "selfie" cameras on phones and tablets are being turned on briefly by assorted ads delivered along with the web page you looked at, and sent back to the mother ship for later use. You won't have to go through the bother of signing in or otherwise identifying yourself, since your ISP/cell company can supply them with that info (for a price). They can then use the photo and your info to persuade you that you should buy some of their products. Or they can just fake the session in which you ordered what they want to sell you.
I generally keep a bit of opaque tape over those cameras except when I actually want to use them.
Lessee, I took the tape off this laptop's camera; let's see if the slashcode knows how to send y'all my photo. It's a Macbook Pro, which should tell you which exploit to use. I'm currently sitting on the patio, in the shade of a grape vine, waiting for the temperature to reach a new historic high here in the Boston area. If you can find my photo, tell me the text on my t-shirt. If anyone succeeds, it'll show that this story isn't just someone's imagination. ;-)
'Software programs' is the plural of 'software program'. The word 'software' alone in that context wouldn't work.
If the article just said 'programs', then it could refer to programs in the sense of 'an agreed form [for presenting data]': so it could be about chart presentation in general rather than software design. It would be slightly archaic sounding, but it would be a valid interpretation.
The cringer (diodeus) is perhaps not familiar with such things as concert programs, which are often full-color booklets, or television programs, which have been in color since back in the 1960s or so. In both of these, the colors were originally and sometimes still are rather crappy and unrealistic, so they're on-topic in the current discussion.
Dunno why you'd call them "archaic sounding", though. I've seen lots of concert programs and a few television programs in recent years. The TV is starting to look a bit archaic, though, since with the Web you can see something when it's convenient for you, and you don't have the problem of two things you want to watch being scheduled at the same time. But the term "video" hasn't really replaced the term "program" for what used to be the sole domain of TV, and "program" is still the general public's main term for such chunks of drama received electronically. Maybe as the Web slowly supplants broadcast TV the usage will shift.
So is medical science not "real science" because we've had quite a few stories over the last few years that a ton of results from medical research and drug trials can't be reproduced.
A large percentage of medical studies are funded by manufacturers, and it's fairly well understood that most of those don't get published unless they produce the "right" results. And those that are published are often really "preliminary", based on too little data to be considered reliable. But if a test on 10 or 20 patients gives the "right" results, there is a lot of marketing pressure to get the paper published right away.
This easily explains the growing problem of medical products that are found to be worthless (or even harmful) to the patients, after years of heavy marketing has produced large profits.
There's also the age-old problem that studies with "negative" results usually don't get published at all. As usual, there's a good xkdc comic that explains the methodology in a way that even the minimally numerate reader can understand.
Has this study been replicated?
Or is it perhaps a replication of an earlier study?
Or maybe we could take a more general look, and observe that pretty much all fiction is intended to induce emotional responses in the readers. We have a number of words for fiction that doesn't do that: boring, weak, forgettable, etc., none of them words of praise.
Can you think of any work of fiction that you've liked, that doesn't clearly be aimed at instilling emotions, attitudes, and other such reaction in the readers? Offhand, I can't think of any. (But I suppose I could have missed a few important works of literature. ;-)
And can you think of any important work of fiction that doesn't cast at least a few ruling-class characters in a bad light? There's gotta be a few of them out there ...
I've read a number of comments about all the movies that let you know you're in Paris by the fact that you can see the Eiffel Tower through a window. After a while, some viewers start to realize that in the movie's world, the Eiffel Tower is visible from every window in Paris. So is there really a regulation in Paris saying that windows are illegal on the other sides of buildings?
Other readers can probably list a number of other such landmarks that they've spotted. The Golden Gate Bridge is another, so SF apparently has a similar construction regulation.
In other news, you can still buy buggy whips, dial-style telephones, and vinyl records, too.
Nostalgia and straight-up Luddite-like behavior are enough to keep almost anything going at some level -- no matter how low its actual utility as compared to more recent replacement tech may be.
It does generally make more sense to view new technology as adding to existing technology, rather than replacing it. After all, the invention of books didn't replace talking, and the invention of the telephone didn't make person-to-person speech obsolete.
One of the things I liked to point out back in the 1990s, when we still had tech bookstores, was that when you walked into one, the first bookcase you'd see had all the current best sellers, and if you opened them to the first pages, you'd inevitably find a URL where you could download them, usually for free. Many people would be puzzled by this. If you can download the book and display it on your screen, why would you pay so much money for a book. But the real techies generally weren't puzzled; they understood why they (or their employer ;-) would pay money for the hard copy.
Of course, amazon has now killed off most of those bookstores. But the hard-copy books are still being produced and bought, and it's still no mystery to those of us who use them. (And we do usually also have the electronic versions in our computers; don't tell anyone ... ;-)
I also periodically run across comments that music on vinyl records is still produced and selling fairly well. This also makes sense if you give up the idea that new technology replaces the old, and ask yourself what the tradeoffs might be between the various ways of doing things.
Another fun example: I've read a few analyses of the apparent fact that the population of "working" horses has been slowly growing for some decades now. Try to figure out why this might be, before you google it. As with paper books and vinyl records, it turns out there are situations where horses are cheaper or faster or better in some other important way than the available mechanical replacements. True, it's a small "market", and they'll never regain the niche taken over by tractors, but people are figuring out that they're actually a good "solution" in a number of situations.
(I've also had fun pointing out that the web has widely adopted the concept of a "scroll" text format, which used to be the epitome of totally obsolete technology. ;-)
Seriously, we need someone like Hillary in office. She is the only person running that is vicious enough to get something done after the soft but firm Obama.
I'd want a snake on my side over a hedgehog.
Hey, c'mon; hedgehogs are incredibly cute. (Pay no attention to those sharp spines hidden out in their cute furry exterior. ;-)
And, like many cute critters, they're actually also vicious killers of smaller animals:w.
Actually, it's not obvious just how all this carries metaphorically over to US politics ...
You're probably right. Amazon has gotten big enough that they can probably afford to take losses in a lot of "small" markets to bankrupt most of the smaller competitors. It is sorts funny to think that what the local hardware stores sell can be called a "small" market. But I suppose even in what looks like a large market, it might not be all that difficult for a company like amazon to kill off all the smaller competitors in a list of small areas, after which a few judicious buyouts and mergers completes the job.
It is interesting to see this starting to happen to Home Depot, which only a few years ago was the giant moving in and bankrupting all the locally-owned hardware stores.
The "disable advertising" checkbox has never made much sense. If you're reading Slashdot, you ought to be using an adblocker anyway
Yeah; the first time I saw that, my response was "What ads? Does /. have ads?" ;-)
I've always read /. on Firefox, which has ABP and noscript installed, so I've hardly ever seen any of the ads. I was duly complimented by being told that, due to my "positive contributions to Slashdot", I was allowed to disable ads, but I was also a bit curious, because I thought that /. didn't have ads. Guess I was wrong.
Actually, I have a couple of cell phones with lots of browsers installed, mostly for testing how well various web sites I'm responsible for work on little "mobile" gadgets. I've tried reading /. there, but I gave up because there was so little info visible on the screen. I'm tempted to install all the block software there, but that's become a lot of work and difficult to do right, so I just restrict my "reading" to my laptop, where several of my browsers do a pretty good job of blocking the "active" ads.
And the real ad problems do show up on mobiles, where they invariably use most of the bandwidth and keep the cpu busy, wiping out the battery in a few hours and making the gadget hot to the touch. So maybe I should pick one as my "browsing" phone, and figure out how to make all the blocking software work there. But that would be mostly useful when I'm away from home for more than a day, which isn't often. In the meantime, most of the cpu- and bandwidth-eating stuff can be erased by a reboot, which I tend to do daily. on the mobiles.
In any case, we should be making lots of noise about the ads that eat our batteries and bandwidth. That's not innocent harm on the part of the advertisers. They are actively attacking our mobile devices, eating up the GBs that we pay for and batteries that are supposed to hold a charge good enough for a day of use. That's not acceptable; it's an active attack on the victims' mobile computer gadgets. The advertisers have no "right" (legal, natural, or otherwise) to attack us in that manner.
I honestly can't remember the last time I actually went to a store to do research for an online purchase.
Yeah, plus funny story: Just last week, a tool I had broke, so I went online looking for a replacement. I first checked out the local hardware stores' web sites (they all have them), fully planning to drive over and pick one up so I could get to work. I found that, although they all listed of it, and could order one for me, none of them had it in stock. I even called the few remaining locally-owned hardware stores, and got the same reply. None of them could get it in less than a week. So I asked amazon, they had it "in stock" (whatever that means ;-), and said "next-day delivery" for my address. They also had the cheapest price (including tax and postage). So I ordered it from amazon, and got it the next day. The job is (almost) done now.
Occasionally this approach has worked, and I have in fact driven over and bought what I was looking for. 20 minutes is a lot less than one day, after all. But it is getting hard for local stores to have enough space to match a string of huge warehouses.
What's odd about this story is that amazon could deliver in one day, but none of the commercial hardware stores could, though they all have an online order system, including the choice of shipping to the store or to your address. You'd think that the hardware stores would be more expert than amazon on the topic of deliverable hardware. But apparently not. Even the big-box warehouse-like stores like Home Depot gave me estimates of over a week.
An explanation I've seen from linguistic sources is that "corn" or "korn" is the general term in the Germanic languages for "the most common grain hereabouts".
The term causes well-known problems for historians, because you can't know what grain it refers to without knowing what the people at that time and place were eating. People are always misinterpreting the term to mean whatever grain is most common in their own diet, and not asking about what the writer of a text might have thought it meant.
That's not how classification works. Stamp or no, if the information contained within is considered classified, the format that it exists in is classified. ...
Back in the 1980s (or maybe late 1970s), there was a really fun example of this that appeared in lots of news sources. It seems that the DoD got curious about what could be learned about the US military forces from publicly-available sources. So they gave a grant to a couple of college profs to run a study of the topic. They (or rather, their grad students ;-) dug through lots of local newspapers and other public info sources for mentions of the US military, and after some months, submitted their report to the DoD. Within 24 hours, it was classified (Secret, as I recall).
Everyone who read about this got a good laugh, of course, and we all had fun mocking the idiots in the military security agencies that they would respond like this. But among the jokes, there were occasional mentions of the lesson we all might learn from this: Not being part of the government, not having access to any classified info, etc., isn't protection. We are all told repeatedly that for our democratic government to work, we all should keep up an interest in its activities, pay attention to what's going on, etc. But if we do so, our personal piles of (partly read ;-) newspapers, journals, and assorted articles from other sources could easily fall into the same pitfall that this study did. We could easily be in possession of classified information without knowing. If a security agency finds out, we could be in serious legal trouble.
Various commenters at the time suggested that we should be constantly purging our own piles of data of anything that might be related to our government. It's not enough to just ignore it and not read those stories. If we have them in our possession, we could be found guilty of unauthorized possession of classified information from the aggregation of our information.
Or we could just not have any information of any sort among our personal artifacts. Don't even subscribe to anything that might contain information. (Writers usually suggested a few periodicals that should be information-free, such as People, Sports Illustrated, US News & World Report, etc. Nowadays, they'd probably list CNN and Fox News. ;-)
Unfortunately, I've forgotten the names of those researchers. It might be fun to find the reports and read them again. Google doesn't seem to know about them (or I just didn't guess the right keywords). Does anyone here remember that news story? Do you know how to find it again?
Sounds precisely why official govt. correspondence shouldn't be handled on one's own personal email server.
Right; that's exactly why I have my email from the Social Security and Medicare folks sent to my gmail account. I'd rather have it sent to the mail server on my home machine, but we're all seeing why this might be a very bad idea. So gmail it is. ;-)
Idiot. The emails were "unmarked." That means not stamped with a classification. More, they reached her on an unclassified network. Clinton had every reason to believe they contained no classified information. Indeed, the claim that they do contain classified information remains unsubstantiated.
It's perhaps worth pointing out that your email and mine could as easily contain "top secret" information. How could we know, if we don't have a security clearance?
It's similar to a problem I've heard several groups of musicians discuss: If we know a tune but don't know who might have composed or published it, how can we discover if it's covered by copyright? As far as we know, the only way would be to purchase a copy of every piece of music ever published, and scan them all before performing the "work". There are some practical problems with doing this in our lifetime ....
There are also some practical problems with asking (all the world's) security bureaus, for every document on our computer, whether there's anything in it that's "classified". But if we don't, we could find ourselves charged with a criminal security offense. Actually, without a security clearance, few security bureaus in any country will even tell us if our text contains security secrets. They'll just arrest us and charge us with a criminal security offense.
So? There are many descendents of people who owned real estate, farms, businesses, hotels and restaurants that are enjoying the fruits of their parents' hard work and investments. How about forcing these descendents to donate their parents' assets to the public domain, just like copyrighted works?
Actually, if you track back the chain of property ownership in most of the world, you'll find that within a few centuries, it ends with a gang that took over and killed or exiled the former owners. They then set up their own list of owners of properties, passed laws protecting those owners and their descendants, and set up a government to enforce those laws. In the US's eastern coast strip, this last happened around 1780, and in various later decades for the rest of the country. Most of the exceptions are the areas where all the records have gone missing and we don't know what happened to establish current ownership. (In a few cases, major epidemics eradicated the former owners, leaving the property available to whoever could claim it by force.)
Since that's really how humans deal with such things in the long run, we can expect it to continue happening in most of the world. The only effective way of avoiding it is to die before the next time it happens where you live.
Now back to pretending that it's all real and permanent ... ;-)
Regarding your number 2... Frequently get tampered with in transit? Really? I have, literally, never seen this....
You're lucky there. I see such tampering several times per day, and fixing the problem often takes a lot of time (and soto-voce swearing ;-).
The reason is that I deal with a lot of data that's "plain text", but is computer data of some sort, not a natural language like English (which is sorts stretching the meaning of "natural", but you know what I mean). Or it's in a human language, but not English, and the character encoding uses some 2-byte or longer characters.
The simplest example is computer source code. The tampering is often caused by the "punch-card mentality" coded into a lot of email software, which often doesn't allow lines longer than 80 (or 72) characters, and inserts line feeds to make everything fit. Many programming languages consider line feeds to mean something different than a space, usually "end of statement". Inserting a line feed in the middle of a statement thus changes the meaning, and very often introduces a syntax error.
Even nastier is the munging a lot of other plain-text data representation that mixes letters and numbers. Inserting spaces or a line feed in the middle of a token like "G2EF" usually destroys the meaning in a way that can't be corrected automatically at the receiving end. Usually the way to handle such tampering is to reply to the sender, saying "Can you send me that in quoted-printable or base-64 form?" And you try to teach everyone in the group that such data should always be encoded in a form that's immune to the idiocies of "smart" email handlers.
Text in UTF-8 form, especially Chinese and Japanese text, is especially prone to this sort of tampering, which often leaves the text garbled beyond recovery.
Anyway, there are lots of excuses for such tampering with email in ways that destroy the content. It's not always for nefarious reasons; it's just because the programmers only tested their email-handling code on English-language text. And because they're idiots who think that lines of text should never be longer than 80 (or 72) characters.
When I noticed that the address was the address of my machine, I did a quick find(1), but couldn't find the IMDB files or the takedown letter. Do you think I should contact Universal Pictures and ask them to send me another copy of the letter, so I can figure out which file to take down?
Actually, I noticed that all of our home machines (we have several, including tablets and smart phones) seem to have the same address. I guess that's to be expected, since ISPs only give us a single address, so we all have to use that silly NAT protocol and try to make sense of the confusion that it always creates. Anyway, I did look around on all of them, and still couldn't find anything with "Universal Pictures" inside. I did find a few files that contain "IMDB", but they're in the browsers' cache directories, and I got rid of those by simply telling the browsers to clear their cache(s).
But somehow I don't think this has taken care of the problem. So who should I contact at Universal Pictures to make sure we get a copy of the letter and purge our machines of their files?
(And for the benefit of many /. readers and mods, maybe I should end this with: ;-) Nah....
What rate of return would convince you to put your money in an investment if you knew it was going to be 10 years before you received the first dollar back - and there was a 90%+ chance of failure to boot?
Funny thing; those numbers were used back in the 1980s, with interesting results. The topic wasn't drugs, though, but rather solid-state manufacturing, and very similar numbers were widely quoted in east Asia. At the time, it was generally estimated that to build a new solid-state facility would require several billion dollars, and would take around a decade to become profitable, due to the extreme difficulty of achieving the required low level of contaminants inside the equipment. Much of the decade would be spent making test runs, discovering that the output was useless because of some trace contaminant in one part of the process, and redesigning the setup to get past yet another failure. Success wasn't predictable; the 10-year estimate was just the minimum.
But people in east Asia (mostly Japan and Korea) argued publicly that the American companies that controlled most of the production at the time wouldn't be able to get funding for new factories, because American investors would refuse to invest so much money in something with no payoff for a decade. If Asian investors would step in and support the effort, in 10 years they could own the world's solid-state industry. Enough people with money (including government agencies) listened, made the gamble, and a decade longer, they owned the industry.
It's probably just a matter of time before the American drug industry goes the same way. Would you invest in something with no payoff for a decade or more, and wasn't even guaranteed to pay off then because nobody had yet created the drugs that might be created? If you guess that few US (or EU) investors will do this, you're likely right.
In particular, the Republican US Congress is highly likely to continue its defunding of academic basic research, partly due to mistrust of investments that won't pay off during their current terms in office, and also due to a serious religion-based dislike of the biological sciences in general. Without the basic research, the only "new" drugs patented by industry will continue to be mostly small tweaks of existing drugs, which under US law qualify as new, patentable products.
Of course, this is all a bunch of tenuous guesses, based on past behavior of the players. That's what investment is usually like. It's entirely possible that they'll wise up, and not abandon the drug industry the way they abandoned the electronics industry. The US does actually have a few solid-state production facilities, after all, though they're now a small part of the market.
But, as the above poster said, would you be willing to gamble your investment money on the hope that US private drug makers will support the research that the US government is getting out of? Remember that, to corporate management, scientific research appears to have a record of 90% failure; i.e., 90% of funded research projects fail to produce a patentable and marketable product. This is the nature of research, which only discovers facts and theories, not products, and where the outcome of a study is unpredictable before the fact. (If it were predictable, it wouldn't be called "research", it'd be "development". ;-)
Why does a car have a wireless system, and why is this wireless system accessible from outside the car?
So that the manufacturer can access the car, collect data on where and how it's been driven, and sell that information to anyone willing to pay for it.
The idea of sending "data" to the car was an afterthought, when they realized it could be useful for things like disabling a car that's behind on the payments.
Note that both of these motives contain the string "pay". That's the hint you need to figure out the other intended uses. ;-)
Automotive control interfaces change all of the time.
Really? The "control interface" of my '81 Ford is the same as the day it was purchased.
Well, the auto makers have "fixed" that problem in their latest models. They now have those little "onboard computers" that constantly scan many of the controls and figure out how to map them to physical actions. This means that any "upgrade" to the software can change the functioning of all the controls. You can think you're just getting an upgrade to improve the mileage, but that upgrade can flip the meaning of the turn-signal controls.
Some of the latest models have wifi, so they can do upgrades while you're traveling. We'll probably soon be hearing of accidents caused by a sudden change in meaning of what the driver did with the controls. (Yes, they may say the upgrades won't happen while the car is moving. What that means is that if you stop at a stop sign or light, when you start moving again, the controls may have silently changed. And if you think they wouldn't do upgrades without your permission, you haven't been paying attention.)
If computer-industry history is any guide, it'll probably take decades for all this to settle down to an intuitive, reliable auto UI. And the security problems still won't be solved, so your car can be taken over at any moment by "hackers" - or the police - or your insurance company.
(I wish I were joking ... but I'll probably get a "funny" mod for this anyway. ;-)
If you're going to link to a site, you should link to one that involves actual scientists using actual science.
Nah; if we do that, they'll all just agree with each other. (Haven't you been paying attention. ;-)
Curious how you decided English has such a poor showing across the world?
English doesn't have to be your primary language to be fluent in it.
Well,yeah, but that's balanced out by the large population of native English speakers with a poor command of the language. ;-)
We're seeing a bit of that here on /. these days ...