"Trust me I'm a scientist" isn't good enough anymore?
Actually, in a very real sense, it never was. The story here is that those that were unwilling to let outsiders (i.e., independent researchers) study their data had a significant error rate. But this has generally been understood by scientists; it's why normal scientific procedure encourages getting second opinions from others outside the group.
If you doesn't want us seeing your data, that will normally be taken as a sign that you know or suspect that there are problems with your data. Attempts to block independent researchers from replicating the experiments or data collection (which is one of the main uses of patent law) is generally taken as an open admission that there's something wrong with your data.
"Trust me I'm a scientist" may sometimes work with the general public, but it really hasn't ever worked with scientists. A real scientist reacts to interesting scientific news with "Further research is needed", and applies for funding to carry out the research.
CarrierIQ on iOS has no ability to monitor text input.
Um, how exactly do we know this? Because someone at Apple said so?
No, really; if there's a way to verify this claim, I'd like to read about it. Where can we find the proof of the above statement? Not just an assertion, but a way of verifying that it can't happen on iOS.
And it'd be useful to have a guaranteed way of verifying it after an upgrade. Computer vendors do have a history of adding new "features" in upgrades; that's part of what upgrades are for.
The judicious approach would be to not believe any security-related assertions without independent verification . It's not clear how this might be done with binary-only "locked" software.
Does your mom have this choice? I know mine would have no clue.
Similarly with mine. But this is perhaps best answered with the canonical auto analogy: My mom also wouldn't have a clue about her car's transmission. Does that mean that transmissions should be "closed" systems that can't be worked on by independent experts (both professional and amateur)?
Saying that something should be "open" doesn't imply that we think that everyone is expected to hack at it themselves. It means that people who don't (care to) know about the details can hire someone who does know. That way people can get their gadgets' problems diagnosed and fixed. Without this, diagnosis and repair can only be done by the manufacturer's people. Many corporations have a history of hiding known problems even when people are dying from them.
If your only choice is to take it to the dealer, you've just been set up as an easy mark. And when it comes to the low-level details of comm devices, you've been set up to have your identity stolen and your bank accounts emptied. You only defense against this is to insist that your stuff (whose innards you don't care about) be open to investigation by people other than the ones who sold it to you.
Actually, the auto analogy applies there pretty well, too. Lots of large organizations have their own auto/truck maintenance & repair departments. They don't buy vehicles without shop manuals, because they want their own people to do the repairs. This isn't saying that everyone who buys a vehicle should have a shop manual and do their own repairs. It's just saying that you'd be a fool to buy a vehicle for which the shop manuals aren't available. Without shop manuals, a vehicle generally doesn't sell well to large organizations who can afford their own staff of experts.
(Though this analogy does have its limits. There are a few high-end extremely expensive cars whose buyers always have work done by a dealer's specialized mechanics. This might apply to super-computers, too. But in those cases, the specialized mechanics still have all the manuals they need to work on the low-level components. And such cars aren't mass-market products.)
"the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default."
This is supposed to be reassuring? How many people will ever read about this? And how long until it's turned on by default? Or perhaps turned on by a remote message.
I've found it useful as an example for people who don't understand why we need free/open software. This story simply means that if you use your phone to access anything that is protected by a password (or PIN or whatever), that little hidden bit of software is making a copy of your login, password, account numbers, etc., and sending it off to some site that you know nothing about. Whoever has that information can then get into your account and do as they like with it. I've seen a lot of worried looks, and I know a number of people who have held off on the idea of using their phone to access their bank accounts as a result of this information.
I try to get the idea across that, as long as there's any software that's not freely available to us software geeks ("hackers" to the media), so that we can study it and expose such little nasties, nobody's information or accounts or identities can be considered safe. This sort of software can and does send all your private information to some unknown strangers.
That would fail for 800x480 netbook screens. Or people on 1280 width screens who do not maximize every window. That is exactly my point: whatever assumptions you make about the client's environment, someone out there will prove you wrong.
Heh. I've found myself often adopting a practice that helps prevent a single web site from occupying most of my screen: If I see a "mobile" link, I automatically click on that one. Such pages are quite readable on this 1920x1200 screen, and leave most of the other stuff still visible. And the "mobile" pages tend to omit a lot of the cruft that clutters up most "main" pages, so I often see more actual information that way. I did this with slashdot, before they provided a layout that used the full window width to display articles and root comments.
I've done this occasionally in front of the web developers, who seem to sputter a bit, and are clearly offended with my audacity. If they ask about it, I bring up their two pages side by side, the same size, and point out that the "mobile" page contains more information, so it's clearly superior. It's fun to watch their reactions to this.
I also do this routinely with several sites that I've developed. This is due to the site's owners insisting on the common design with a big logo bar at the top, a nav bar at the left, an ad bar at the right, and whatever space is left in the middle for content. That's what they wanted, but I also supply the simplified "mobile" version with a shrunken logo and an abbreviated nav bar at the top, then the content at full width, and the ads at the bottom. Their customers appreciate this, and I find that "mobile" page much easier to use for my testing (with a final check that it works in the "Full" layout).
I'd say that life will be easier when the clients will let us developers dispense with the multiple versions. But of course, by then there will be other design fads that they insist on, which look flashy but interfere with clients' access to actual information.
Viewing the front page of a site on a PDA or cell phone would redirect to/m/; doing so on a PC or TV would redirect to/home/.
So can you show us the code on the server that determines the size of the screen (or window) at the client end?
This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. If the Web's standards stated that the client had to send this information, it would be easy. But this hasn't been done. The only "solution" seems to be to use the HTTP_USER_AGENT string, which isn't actually sent by all clients, and which has millions of possible values, some of which don't tell you much about the window/screen size. People who have tried to build a table based on what browsers send have reported using a GB or more of memory, and still not getting it right for many current clients.
Actually, on some recent sites I've built, I've taken care to eliminate all uses of size= or width= or other format-restricting HTML/CSS thingies, with the idea that the client's browser can format it to fit. This does work with a lot of browsers. It fails spectacularly with the iPhone's browser, which formats the text for a much larger screen, then shrinks it to fit, giving what looks like a 3x2 font size. Grrr...
When I first ran across this, questions on a number of forums turned up the suggestion that I just include <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> when the HTTP_USER_AGENT includes "iPhone". I did that, and it worked - for a while. Now, of course, there are iPhones with screens with higher resolutions. So I've commented that code out, and given up.
Maybe what we need is a crowd with torches and pitchforks descending on the W3C's offices, demanding that they add a requirement that clients divulge their window/screen pixel size to the server software.
Or maybe we can demand a requirement that, if a web page is too big for the client's window/screen, the client is required to discard all size restrictions, and revert to full reformatting to fit. It's not clear how one might enforce such things on random web clients, however. They haven't been all that successful at enforcing previous standards, after all.
I thought the whole idea of HTML was that content and presentation would be separated so you wouldn't have to care whether the end-user was viewing the page on an SGI workstation in Spielbergian 3D or an Etch-a-sketch?
Actually, that was one of the primary design goals in Tim Berners-Lee's original HTML. The "markup" was explicitly designed so that when the text reached the client's machine, it could be quickly and easily formatted to fit whatever screen was available.
Of course that was before the 'web designers' came along and suddenly 'this page is best viewed at 1280x1024' was plastered across the web.
I think you nailed it! But we might add that this contempt for the viewer was encouraged by many managers, who just wanted it to look good on the screen that was on their desk. I've worked on any number of projects where, once it worked on the Boss's screen, I was explicitly ordered to make it look exactly the same on all other screens.
In a few cases, we were able to quietly remove all the width= attributes and such format restrictions after a while, and nobody noticed. But in many cases, ongoing testing checked to make sure we weren't sneaking in things that made the pages work on small ("unapproved") screens. So yes, much of the difficulty in using the Web on small portables was done with malice aforethought, by the people in charge of Web development projects.
I guess we can be smug in the knowledge that they're now paying for their antagonism toward (potential) customers, by their need to redesign the stuff that they knowingly and intentionally misdesigned some years back.
(Actually, I've always sorta wondered why browsers don't come with a Preferences setting to ignore all sizes and other formatting attributes. And shrink all images to a thumbnail by default. You'd think this would be a no-brainer.;-)
Why do we still accept communication standards that do not include true end-to-end encryption ?
Because no encryption provided by a 3rd party can be trusted. If you want your communications secure, you have to install your own encryption packages, from trusted sources. If "the Net" or any vendor supplies your encryption, and you lack the ability to study the source code, you must assume that they can read everything you send or receive.
The folks who built the postal system understood that their only important job was getting the mail through. The folks who built the Internet understood that their only job was getting the packets through. That's a technical job that we (mostly) know how to do. Neither imposed a standard for encryption, for well-understood reasons.
Encryption standards are a total waste of time on everyone's part. Well, except for those who want to read our communications, who have a strong interest in getting us to use a "standard" encryption that they can decode. (You wouldn't happen to be one of those people, would you? C'mon; fess up!;-)
If they get it to the point where it's useful to a few populations, the name issue will take care of itself. And there's no need for any forking; we just market it using the names of a few sites where it's installed. People will accept those names, and not be aware of the New! Improved! search sites' history.
Thus, I've already been entertained by a few acquaintances who would never touch anything called "linux" (which we all know is run by communist hippies), but proudly show off their new Android phone that's so much better than that (gay;-) iPhone junk. The Android people don't actually try to deny that it's a packaged version of linux; they just let Marketing take its course.
There's no reason that yacy or racy or lacy or whatever it's called should be limited to just one name. It's quite feasible that the name used in a URL would tell the server what sort of lookup to do in which portion of the distributed database. It could easily end up looking like a number of different search sites to different groups.
Actually, I'm tempted to try just that. I've been involved with one of the couple thousand highly-specialized search sites that deals primarily with just one kind of technical data. It doesn't deal with natural language, just with the technical data, and it was written because google and the other big natural-language search sites were worthless for the job we wanted done. So with yacy, it'd be interesting to see if we could develop appropriate plugins that would interface it to our data, and have that behavior only available at our short list of "portal" sites.
If this is workable, they just might have something that would save a lot of us a lot of work, and could easily make all sorts of specialized data searchable by the small populations that work with that data.
Sorta like what the drupal folks have been trying for, y'know, except maybe with a bit less of the frustrating complexity. Or maybe just with the interfaces better documented.
Of course not; they want to twitter or IM or ICQ or...
But if you think about it, this is just the standard marketer's trick of taking an old product, giving it a new name, and pushing it as a "New! Improved! "product. People fall for it, and want the latest hot stuff, even when it's just a rebranding of a previous fad.
It makes sense to distinguish textual communication (email, "messaging", etc.) from vocal communication (phone, skype, SIP, etc.), but the entries in either class are only trivially different. They're cases of different names having different images due to marketing and fads.
Of course, it did make sense to replace a lot of the old email systems with the radically simplified versions such as ICQ and twitter. But this is really just resurrecting the very earliest versions of email from the 1970s. Back then, bandwidth was very limited, and you had a strong motive to minimize the text's size. Now that we have faster comm systems, "email" in many forms has accumulated a lot of cruft. Some of the GUIs are intimidating, and their users often don't really understand how they work. You can see this from all the "Oop! I didn't mean to Reply All" messages. Replacing these email packages with something that's stripped down to the basics is a real boon to many users (including the us geeks;-).
But pretending that people are abandoning email is just silly, when the list of replacements includes things that differ only in name from the original email packages.
And Thierry Breton's comment "If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word" is especially silly. He allows text messaging, making it clear that he doesn't understand what messaging is and how little it differs from email. He's telling the world that he has fallen for the marketers' hype, hook line and sinker. Someone should tell him that the only significant difference between "messaging" and "email" is the spelling of their names (and the amount of cruft in the email package that your employer foists on you;-).
[Bill Gates]' mother was on the board of directors for IBM wasn't she?
Not quite, but close. Here's a summary paragraph from the wikipedia entry for Bill's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates:
The obituary of Mary Gates in The New York Times on 11 June 1994 was headlined "Mary Gates, 64; Helped Her Son Start Microsoft," and reported that, "She was... appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation," her son's company. "Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."
His parents were fairly well-off, and important people in the Seattle area. This definitely helped him get his start in life, including a place at Harvard that helped him make important connections. His story is pretty much illustrative of the benefits of parents with connections. And he became a "drop-out" at Harvard when it had become obvious that he had the IBM connections to fund the marketing campaigns that made the IBM PC a commercial success. At that point, there was little value in staying at Harvard, so he moved on.
Now here was a smart, logical man who actually believed he had started his investment career out of nothing. He believed that the money his parents had given him somehow didn't count. In essence his parents had paid for the down payment on his house but he would not see it that way.
After that I became curious about where many of the self made men around me had the same story. Many of them had the same story. Rich parents 'invested' money for them and they reaped the rewards.
I've read similar comments in a number of economists' studies, in which they wrote about a multi-factorial analysis of people's wealth and various of other things that could be learned about the sample population. One thing that came out of such studies was that when they could get info on the parent's wealth, many other factors - especially education- dropped out. If you know someone's parents' wealth, there's no need to know their education, since it adds no more predictive power to your data.
Somehow, you never see this sort of study mentioned in colleges' advertising.;-)
(At least one economist classified education as a "proxy" for parental wealth. I.e., if you don't have the family wealth data, but know the details of the children's education, you can make a fairly good estimate of the family wealth. However, in this case, knowing the offsprings' personal wealth is a better predictor for parental wealth, and if you know that, education info adds little or no predictive power.)
: First Amendment. Unlike your government, ours has explicitly no authority to stop anything from being published.
That's sorta naive. In the US, there are all sorts of things which, if you publish them, will land you in a federal prison. Other things will land you in a state prison.
And there's the old comment on the US's "Freedom of the Press": It applies to anyone with the wealth to own and operate a printing press.
Of course, "publishing" online has become much cheaper than publishing on dead trees. The US currently has a lot of behind-the-scenes battles going over who has the right - uh, I mean the power - to limit this sort of publishing. It's not yet clear how this will turn out, but recent revisions to the copyright laws may well be the thing that gives the people in power their power over what mere individuals can "publish". There are a growing number of online "takedowns" that result from copyright claims on information about politicians' and corporations' activities. it used to be that facts couldn't be copyrighted, but this is changing. Stay tuned...
rst, this has to have been written by someone who has either never lived with dogs and/or cats and/or parrots...
In particular, they've obviously never lived with cockatiels or budgies. Those critters' senses of humor stand out to even casual observers. We have two cockatiels and a blue-crowned conure. The conure shows little humor, and considers the cockatiels pests who should be attacked at any opportunity. She has a scary beak that we were afraid of for her first month in our house. The 'tiels figured out early on that they can easily outfly her, and they torment her relentlessly. This includes picking up food that they know she likes, landing with it just out of her reach, and eating it while watching her. They know just how close they can get and still be safe. And you can see the joy on their little faces as they do this. A humorless animal would stay away from a bigger, stronger, antagonistic opponent, but these little guys clearly enjoy teasing her.
Their behavior would definitely fit into the "making someone seem silly or stupid or incompetent" classification.
Many other parrot owners can no doubt post descriptions of their pet's humor.
An analyst types Fikri's name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government's disposal.
And here we see how this will fail, as so many other "security" systems have failed. The name typed in pulls up a wealth of information from lots of databases -- about everyone with a name spelled (or transliterated) into anything vaguely like "Fikri". Any transgression (real or imagined or planted) by any of those people will be used against our Fikri. The good Anglo-European people in the agencies will be unable to tell any of them apart on sight, because they all look vaguely Middle-Eastern, not like the people running the agency. And once again, the entirely wrong people will be fingered and punished for the sins of others unrelated to them. And the victims will react to this treatment as wrongly-punished people have always reacted.
It's an old, old story. The TSA has been supplying us with lots of similar stories over the past decade.
This isn't a totally trivial question. I've often seen comments in forums saying that something works in kernels from the Frosty Ferret release to the Manifest Monkey release. So I want to check out some of the systems that I'm responsible for, and for each of them, I'd like to discover whether they're within the stated range. The problem is that I often can't discover a given kernel's codename. I can get the kernel's release number from "uname -a", but there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to compare that with codenames in forum messages. So I often can't figure out whether such forum messages apply to the kernels that I'm ssh'd to.
So is there a general way to map the dotted-number release numbers to the codenames, and vice-versa? If there is, I could put it into a script that's in the toolkit that I copy around to systems. I'd also put it on my web sites, so I can fetch it quickly from a new machine (and you could, too, as soon as a googlebot stumbles across it, if you guess the right keywords that I'd include in the header comments;-).
So far, the answers to this question all seem to be of the form "If you're on a sytem Foo, here's how you do it...". So you need to know the answer to the question in order to ask the question. I'm hoping for something a bit less circular. And preferably something scriptable.
I've often wondered why this information has been universally excluded from what "uname -a" returns. Making use of forum replies would be a lot easier if either people would use the release numbers, or we had a simple way of mapping codenames to release numbers.
This isn't just a linux problem. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, one of around a half dozen that I have access to. I can get the kernel's number (10.5.8) from the "About this Mac" menu item at the top left, but I don't know the kernel's name. I did a bit of poking around in/etc and/System, and didn't find it. There's probably a table of the names/numbers somewhere at apple.com, but google doesn't seem to know where it is. The problem is similar on other unix-like systems.
Anyone know an algorithm for finding a random kernel's name? (Anything of the form "If it's <X>..." is disqualified.;-)
Actually, "vegetable" and "vegetative" are both terms that are occasionally used by biologists. They're just not all that common, because usually a more specific term is wanted.
But "fruit" is a very common biological term, since it refers to a specific seed-containing reproductive structure in the flowering plants.
There is no need to organize against this law. The day it gets signed (if ever) it will get overturned on first amendment grounds.
Hmmm... You don't seem to have been paying attention. These days, it takes years, sometimes more than a decade, to go through all the appeals to get to the Supreme Court. During those years, whatever "right" you're fighting for can be freely and openly violated by the government agencies that supposedly aren't allowed to do such violations. In some cases, you can be imprisoned for all those years that it takes to get the case against you dismissed.
Lotsa luck getting those years back. Not to mention the legal costs.
It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come, but that has been ruined by ignorance.... This is not a matter of educating the public. The public has been educated yet they ignore it. I have never understood where this profound ignorance comes from. This is a major hot button for me.
Well, I don't know where in the world you may live, but here in the US, it's fairly clear what has happened. The religious crowd has campaigned long and hard against "evolution", and they have pretty much succeeded in eliminating the word and the concept from our educations system. Thus, if you pay attention to news stories about drug resistance, it is always something that micro-organisms develop or acquire; it is hardly ever something that they evolve. The media does this partly out of fear of religious repercussions (i.e., loss of their jobs), and partly because they "know" that evolution takes millions of years and couldn't be happening within our lifetime.
But mostly, the religious people have managed to exclude nearly all information about evolution from school textbooks. A few decades ago, I had high-school biology teachers who told us that the chapter on evolution would be skipped (out of fear for the teachers' jobs), but we could read it if we wanted to understand the issue. Nowadays, most school texts no longer contain that chapter, or any use of the term "evolve" anywhere. Evolution has been expurgated from the American education system.
So no, the public here haven't been educated on the topic; they have been intentionally kept ignorant by the religious folks and the school management people who fear their wrath. The media does nothing to alleviate the situation; they modify their language to imply that micro-organisms "acquire" resistance by some sort of magic that we don't understand. (Or maybe they buy the resistance at tiny stores that stock it.;-)
I get the impression that this suppression hasn't been quite as effective in some other parts of the world. But it has worked pretty well here. Even on/., people can characterize evolution as a slow process that takes millennia, and hardly anyone ever challenges them on such claims. Retail stores (and some medical people) can push anti-bacterial soaps, without anyone pointing out that these products are likely to trigger the evolution of resistance to the antibiotics in those soaps.
What we need to do is to start pushing for the use of the words "evolve" and "evolution" in stories about bacterial resistance. The summary is an example. It says:
Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear...
when it should say:
The evolution of bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear...
So whenever you see such omissions, you might consider contacting the author and explaining to them why they should be inserting these extra words. That might help get across to the public why we have this problem.
IMHO the internet should not be mentioned explicitly. At most, the first amendment might be extended to include electronic communications. Plain and simple language is important, and specifics should be avoided.
Yes, and one of the specifics to be avoided is the term "electronic". This would, for instance, tell the lawyers (and the Supreme Court) that optical fiber isn't covered, since it used photons rather than electrons.
More generally, we should probably tackle the growing problem that, whenever a computer gets involved in any activity, all legal precedent is discarded, and all legal rights must be re-established from scratch. Thus, we see all sorts of limitations of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, etc., because we're doing those activities online rather than in the "real world", and the online world exists primarily inside computers (and their comm links). So people don't see the communications as "speech" or publishing or assembling together, or whatever; they see the communications as electronic and computerized. The US Constitution doesn't mention computers (or electronics or photonics or tachyonics or whatever follows), so the people in power don't think that the US Constitution applies.
What we need is an Amendment that specifically states that our "free" activities can't be limited by the government regardless of the equipment that we use to carry them out. We need to find a way to prevent them from cancelling all the freedoms whenever a new technology comes along that improves our ability to carry out the protected activities. And we need a phrasing that covers new technologies in such a way that the more authoritarian members of the Supreme Court will understand that the freedoms still apply.
(And I refuse to call them "conservatives". An actual conservative would want to preserve our historic freedoms, regardless of whatever newfangled gadgetry we're using to exercise them. These people are "authoritarians", because they support those in positions of authority who want to limit our rights whenever they can think up a new excuse to do so.)
... a culture of misinformation that encourages people to take as few drugs as possible. You don't want to over medicate. The result is people stop taking the antibiotics once they feel better because they don't want to put more drugs in their system than they feel they need to.
The lack of education on this is startling at times.
And the blame is often shared between the medical system and their patients. I often get the feeling that the medical folks' attitude tends toward "Don't worry your little head about it; just do what we tell you and don't ask questions whose answers you couldn't possibly understand." OTOH, I know how the eyes of "customers" often glaze over when you try to explain to them things that they really should understand.
And a good part of the problem, of course, is the drug industry's strong desire to protect their trade secrets by only telling patients (and doctors) the very minimum that the law requires, and then in the vaguest language they think they can get away with. This can extend to not clearly informing people of dosage. This, I recently got a medicine for a skin rash that had instructions to apply it in a "thin layer" over the affected area twice a day. A "thin layer"? WTF does that mean? It became clear that the doctor didn't really know either. But you just know that if I did it wrong, they (and many commenters here;-) would blame me for not doing it right. And you also know that there probably is an accurate dosage (in some units like mg per square cm) that's known to someone; they just consider you and me too stupid to understand it.
Yup; and note that "backup" these days often includes mirroring on other live system.
I've seen backups to tapes and external disks fail more often than I've seen them succeed. I've also over the years seen any number of estimates that around 50% of backup tapes aren't usable when they're needed. I've often been suspicious that there may be large error bars around that number, but so far I haven't seen any evidence on the topic. This makes me further suspicious that the people writing on the topic are assuming that I'm too stupid to understand anything more detailed or informative than "50%", implying to me that the reality could well be even worse than that.
OTOH, since large (whatever that means) disks became reasonably cheap and network access became inexpensive, around 10 years ago, it has become feasible to use rsync for backup. It's easy enough to install more disk than you need on several widely-separated machines, and have all of them back up all the others. This is especially easy if they happen to share a lot of the stuff that needs backing up. The data is stored in its original form, and if your backup media dies, you know about it very quickly. Restoring always works, because it's done via another rsync, which you know how to use (and is documented all over;-).
The only real "gotcha" I've seen with this came in working on projects that had a mixture of Macs and Windows systems, together with the usual unix/linux-based servers. The hokey attempts at "caseless" file names on OS X and Windows, not quite the same on the two OSs (or on different releases;-) causes some, uh, "interesting" name collisions and loss of files. The unix/linux systems can back up OS X and Windows files without problems, since they are agnostic about charsets, but if you try to back up their file systems on an OS X or Windows box, you tend to lose files due to multiple names being mapped to a single name.
I've actually made this work, by learning enough about the OS X and Windows file-name munging to avoid the problem. But we haven't (yet) learned how to avoid the problems with OS X and Windows attempt to mirror each others' file systems. So our rule amounts to "Do all rsyncs from OS X or Windows to/from the unix/linux servers, and don't let OS X or Windows mirror a file system from a different species of OS." (If you must do this, test the results thoroughly to make sure that neither OS is mapping two file names to the same byte string, and repeat the tests frequently to verify that new files don't trigger the problem.)
(I can already hear the shouts of "Mirroring isn't backup, you idiot!". I fully intend to ignore such comments. The term "backup" means any sort of copy that we can later use to restore our data. It doesn't mean tapes. It means anything that I can restore my data from. Nothing more or less than that. So whatever you're trying to sell - or prevent me from buying - is irrelevant. All I want to know is how good your favorite product is at keeping and restoring my data. Well, OK, I also want to know whether I can keep my data private, so I'm ignoring all "cloud" backup schemes. But data security is a different topic from data safety, so I'll ignore that here, too.;-)
Are you beliving that religions are false despite the lack of evidence?
Again, you're confusing refusal to believe that something is true with believing that it's false. You're implying that skepticism is impossible; for any statement X, one must believe either that X is true or that it's false.
Russell's comment amounts to saying "Show me the evidence (for or against); I won't make up my mind until I have a reason to believe one or the other."
Actually, since Russell's time, there has been quite a lot of mathematical work on multi-valued logics. This has even made small inroads in computing, where instead of everything being based on a pure 0/1 dichotomy, there is hardware that can exist indefinitely in an indeterminate state. The circuitry that uses bits sees such things as fluctuating randomly between 0 and 1, and one of the practical uses is in building a true random-number generator (which is very difficult with binary hardware).
Some of the mathematicians involved in multi-valued logic joke about the old Boolean logic being a "simple, child-like first step, with true logic requiring our work to advance to an adult understanding". But they usually grin while saying this. Perhaps this is because they know that most people won't ever advance between the basic 2-valued 1/0 true/false sort of logic, and accept that many things in the universe are unknown (or indeterminate or whatever).
We might note that the term "atheist" was coined from Greek morphemes, and basically meant "without God". In the original Greek it simply meant not partaking in the local religious rituals. Thus, it meant ignoring (the local) god, not believing anything specific about any god that may or may not exist. It was later redefined to mean "belief that no god exists" by people who didn't understand the difference. There was also a strain of "You don't believe in my God, and there is no other god, so you must not believe in any god." Anyway, many dictionaries now give two or more definitions, because the function of a dictionary is to list all the possible meanings of a word (not to decree what it should mean or may have originally meant;-).
No disagreement here! I think it'd be foolish to believe in something for very long without some sort of evidence.
Having said that, I'll read between the lines a little here: you're implying that all religious people in the history of the world have had no evidence, correct? If so, are you certain that that is true? If so, how have you reached that certainty?
Well, actually, I sorta like to argue that there may have been a god or gods around some time in the past. But they disappeared for some reason around the time we developed scientific methods, and carefully hid all evidence that they had ever existed.
It's closely related to the argument that God seems to have created a world full of geological and paleontological evidence of a world more than 4 billion years old, with a long history of biological evolution behind all the living species and the zillions of fossils. The obvious conclusion is that God wants us to believe in this history and evolution, and if we don't believe, we're violating God's will.
This is, of course, all quite untestable (unless those pruported gods screwed up and left some evidence of themselves behind that we haven't found yet). But it's at least as good as the religious theory that one or more gods are still hanging around and we're just too dumb to spot them (or they've gotten really good at hiding).
By Occam's Razor, the judicious approach is to tentatively accept the skeptical approach, and say that the closest thing the religious people have to evidence is what would in a court of law be called "hearsay", which isn't real evidence at all. So we shouldn't accept their claims until they come up with some actual evidence.
We could also bring up the long history of religions being full of fraudsters who see it as a good way to get their hands on our stuff. But that's a different topic that's only marginally related to the topic at hand (and which the religious folks would probably prefer to keep hidden behind that curtain;-).
Slashdot Mirror
"Trust me I'm a scientist" isn't good enough anymore?
Actually, in a very real sense, it never was. The story here is that those that were unwilling to let outsiders (i.e., independent researchers) study their data had a significant error rate. But this has generally been understood by scientists; it's why normal scientific procedure encourages getting second opinions from others outside the group.
If you doesn't want us seeing your data, that will normally be taken as a sign that you know or suspect that there are problems with your data. Attempts to block independent researchers from replicating the experiments or data collection (which is one of the main uses of patent law) is generally taken as an open admission that there's something wrong with your data.
"Trust me I'm a scientist" may sometimes work with the general public, but it really hasn't ever worked with scientists. A real scientist reacts to interesting scientific news with "Further research is needed", and applies for funding to carry out the research.
CarrierIQ on iOS has no ability to monitor text input.
Um, how exactly do we know this? Because someone at Apple said so?
No, really; if there's a way to verify this claim, I'd like to read about it. Where can we find the proof of the above statement? Not just an assertion, but a way of verifying that it can't happen on iOS.
And it'd be useful to have a guaranteed way of verifying it after an upgrade. Computer vendors do have a history of adding new "features" in upgrades; that's part of what upgrades are for.
The judicious approach would be to not believe any security-related assertions without independent verification . It's not clear how this might be done with binary-only "locked" software.
Does your mom have this choice? I know mine would have no clue.
Similarly with mine. But this is perhaps best answered with the canonical auto analogy: My mom also wouldn't have a clue about her car's transmission. Does that mean that transmissions should be "closed" systems that can't be worked on by independent experts (both professional and amateur)?
Saying that something should be "open" doesn't imply that we think that everyone is expected to hack at it themselves. It means that people who don't (care to) know about the details can hire someone who does know. That way people can get their gadgets' problems diagnosed and fixed. Without this, diagnosis and repair can only be done by the manufacturer's people. Many corporations have a history of hiding known problems even when people are dying from them.
If your only choice is to take it to the dealer, you've just been set up as an easy mark. And when it comes to the low-level details of comm devices, you've been set up to have your identity stolen and your bank accounts emptied. You only defense against this is to insist that your stuff (whose innards you don't care about) be open to investigation by people other than the ones who sold it to you.
Actually, the auto analogy applies there pretty well, too. Lots of large organizations have their own auto/truck maintenance & repair departments. They don't buy vehicles without shop manuals, because they want their own people to do the repairs. This isn't saying that everyone who buys a vehicle should have a shop manual and do their own repairs. It's just saying that you'd be a fool to buy a vehicle for which the shop manuals aren't available. Without shop manuals, a vehicle generally doesn't sell well to large organizations who can afford their own staff of experts.
(Though this analogy does have its limits. There are a few high-end extremely expensive cars whose buyers always have work done by a dealer's specialized mechanics. This might apply to super-computers, too. But in those cases, the specialized mechanics still have all the manuals they need to work on the low-level components. And such cars aren't mass-market products.)
"the good news is that it does not appear to actually send any information so long as a setting called DiagnosticsAllowed is set to off, which is the default."
This is supposed to be reassuring? How many people will ever read about this? And how long until it's turned on by default? Or perhaps turned on by a remote message.
I've found it useful as an example for people who don't understand why we need free/open software. This story simply means that if you use your phone to access anything that is protected by a password (or PIN or whatever), that little hidden bit of software is making a copy of your login, password, account numbers, etc., and sending it off to some site that you know nothing about. Whoever has that information can then get into your account and do as they like with it. I've seen a lot of worried looks, and I know a number of people who have held off on the idea of using their phone to access their bank accounts as a result of this information.
I try to get the idea across that, as long as there's any software that's not freely available to us software geeks ("hackers" to the media), so that we can study it and expose such little nasties, nobody's information or accounts or identities can be considered safe. This sort of software can and does send all your private information to some unknown strangers.
That would fail for 800x480 netbook screens. Or people on 1280 width screens who do not maximize every window. That is exactly my point: whatever assumptions you make about the client's environment, someone out there will prove you wrong.
Heh. I've found myself often adopting a practice that helps prevent a single web site from occupying most of my screen: If I see a "mobile" link, I automatically click on that one. Such pages are quite readable on this 1920x1200 screen, and leave most of the other stuff still visible. And the "mobile" pages tend to omit a lot of the cruft that clutters up most "main" pages, so I often see more actual information that way. I did this with slashdot, before they provided a layout that used the full window width to display articles and root comments.
I've done this occasionally in front of the web developers, who seem to sputter a bit, and are clearly offended with my audacity. If they ask about it, I bring up their two pages side by side, the same size, and point out that the "mobile" page contains more information, so it's clearly superior. It's fun to watch their reactions to this.
I also do this routinely with several sites that I've developed. This is due to the site's owners insisting on the common design with a big logo bar at the top, a nav bar at the left, an ad bar at the right, and whatever space is left in the middle for content. That's what they wanted, but I also supply the simplified "mobile" version with a shrunken logo and an abbreviated nav bar at the top, then the content at full width, and the ads at the bottom. Their customers appreciate this, and I find that "mobile" page much easier to use for my testing (with a final check that it works in the "Full" layout).
I'd say that life will be easier when the clients will let us developers dispense with the multiple versions. But of course, by then there will be other design fads that they insist on, which look flashy but interfere with clients' access to actual information.
Viewing the front page of a site on a PDA or cell phone would redirect to /m/; doing so on a PC or TV would redirect to /home/.
So can you show us the code on the server that determines the size of the screen (or window) at the client end?
This turns out to be a non-trivial problem. If the Web's standards stated that the client had to send this information, it would be easy. But this hasn't been done. The only "solution" seems to be to use the HTTP_USER_AGENT string, which isn't actually sent by all clients, and which has millions of possible values, some of which don't tell you much about the window/screen size. People who have tried to build a table based on what browsers send have reported using a GB or more of memory, and still not getting it right for many current clients.
Actually, on some recent sites I've built, I've taken care to eliminate all uses of size= or width= or other format-restricting HTML/CSS thingies, with the idea that the client's browser can format it to fit. This does work with a lot of browsers. It fails spectacularly with the iPhone's browser, which formats the text for a much larger screen, then shrinks it to fit, giving what looks like a 3x2 font size. Grrr ...
When I first ran across this, questions on a number of forums turned up the suggestion that I just include <meta name="viewport" content="width=320"> when the HTTP_USER_AGENT includes "iPhone". I did that, and it worked - for a while. Now, of course, there are iPhones with screens with higher resolutions. So I've commented that code out, and given up.
Maybe what we need is a crowd with torches and pitchforks descending on the W3C's offices, demanding that they add a requirement that clients divulge their window/screen pixel size to the server software.
Or maybe we can demand a requirement that, if a web page is too big for the client's window/screen, the client is required to discard all size restrictions, and revert to full reformatting to fit. It's not clear how one might enforce such things on random web clients, however. They haven't been all that successful at enforcing previous standards, after all.
I thought the whole idea of HTML was that content and presentation would be separated so you wouldn't have to care whether the end-user was viewing the page on an SGI workstation in Spielbergian 3D or an Etch-a-sketch?
Actually, that was one of the primary design goals in Tim Berners-Lee's original HTML. The "markup" was explicitly designed so that when the text reached the client's machine, it could be quickly and easily formatted to fit whatever screen was available.
Of course that was before the 'web designers' came along and suddenly 'this page is best viewed at 1280x1024' was plastered across the web.
I think you nailed it! But we might add that this contempt for the viewer was encouraged by many managers, who just wanted it to look good on the screen that was on their desk. I've worked on any number of projects where, once it worked on the Boss's screen, I was explicitly ordered to make it look exactly the same on all other screens.
In a few cases, we were able to quietly remove all the width= attributes and such format restrictions after a while, and nobody noticed. But in many cases, ongoing testing checked to make sure we weren't sneaking in things that made the pages work on small ("unapproved") screens. So yes, much of the difficulty in using the Web on small portables was done with malice aforethought, by the people in charge of Web development projects.
I guess we can be smug in the knowledge that they're now paying for their antagonism toward (potential) customers, by their need to redesign the stuff that they knowingly and intentionally misdesigned some years back.
(Actually, I've always sorta wondered why browsers don't come with a Preferences setting to ignore all sizes and other formatting attributes. And shrink all images to a thumbnail by default. You'd think this would be a no-brainer. ;-)
Why do we still accept communication standards that do not include true end-to-end encryption ?
Because no encryption provided by a 3rd party can be trusted. If you want your communications secure, you have to install your own encryption packages, from trusted sources. If "the Net" or any vendor supplies your encryption, and you lack the ability to study the source code, you must assume that they can read everything you send or receive.
The folks who built the postal system understood that their only important job was getting the mail through. The folks who built the Internet understood that their only job was getting the packets through. That's a technical job that we (mostly) know how to do. Neither imposed a standard for encryption, for well-understood reasons.
Encryption standards are a total waste of time on everyone's part. Well, except for those who want to read our communications, who have a strong interest in getting us to use a "standard" encryption that they can decode. (You wouldn't happen to be one of those people, would you? C'mon; fess up! ;-)
If they get it to the point where it's useful to a few populations, the name issue will take care of itself. And there's no need for any forking; we just market it using the names of a few sites where it's installed. People will accept those names, and not be aware of the New! Improved! search sites' history.
Thus, I've already been entertained by a few acquaintances who would never touch anything called "linux" (which we all know is run by communist hippies), but proudly show off their new Android phone that's so much better than that (gay ;-) iPhone junk. The Android people don't actually try to deny that it's a packaged version of linux; they just let Marketing take its course.
There's no reason that yacy or racy or lacy or whatever it's called should be limited to just one name. It's quite feasible that the name used in a URL would tell the server what sort of lookup to do in which portion of the distributed database. It could easily end up looking like a number of different search sites to different groups.
Actually, I'm tempted to try just that. I've been involved with one of the couple thousand highly-specialized search sites that deals primarily with just one kind of technical data. It doesn't deal with natural language, just with the technical data, and it was written because google and the other big natural-language search sites were worthless for the job we wanted done. So with yacy, it'd be interesting to see if we could develop appropriate plugins that would interface it to our data, and have that behavior only available at our short list of "portal" sites.
If this is workable, they just might have something that would save a lot of us a lot of work, and could easily make all sorts of specialized data searchable by the small populations that work with that data.
Sorta like what the drupal folks have been trying for, y'know, except maybe with a bit less of the frustrating complexity. Or maybe just with the interfaces better documented.
No one wants to use email anymore.
Of course not; they want to twitter or IM or ICQ or ...
But if you think about it, this is just the standard marketer's trick of taking an old product, giving it a new name, and pushing it as a "New! Improved! "product. People fall for it, and want the latest hot stuff, even when it's just a rebranding of a previous fad.
It makes sense to distinguish textual communication (email, "messaging", etc.) from vocal communication (phone, skype, SIP, etc.), but the entries in either class are only trivially different. They're cases of different names having different images due to marketing and fads.
Of course, it did make sense to replace a lot of the old email systems with the radically simplified versions such as ICQ and twitter. But this is really just resurrecting the very earliest versions of email from the 1970s. Back then, bandwidth was very limited, and you had a strong motive to minimize the text's size. Now that we have faster comm systems, "email" in many forms has accumulated a lot of cruft. Some of the GUIs are intimidating, and their users often don't really understand how they work. You can see this from all the "Oop! I didn't mean to Reply All" messages. Replacing these email packages with something that's stripped down to the basics is a real boon to many users (including the us geeks ;-).
But pretending that people are abandoning email is just silly, when the list of replacements includes things that differ only in name from the original email packages.
And Thierry Breton's comment "If people want to talk to me, they can come and visit me, call or send me a text message. Emails cannot replace the spoken word" is especially silly. He allows text messaging, making it clear that he doesn't understand what messaging is and how little it differs from email. He's telling the world that he has fallen for the marketers' hype, hook line and sinker. Someone should tell him that the only significant difference between "messaging" and "email" is the spelling of their names (and the amount of cruft in the email package that your employer foists on you ;-).
[Bill Gates]' mother was on the board of directors for IBM wasn't she?
Not quite, but close. Here's a summary paragraph from the wikipedia entry for Bill's mother, Mary Maxwell Gates:
The obituary of Mary Gates in The New York Times on 11 June 1994 was headlined "Mary Gates, 64; Helped Her Son Start Microsoft," and reported that, "She was ... appointed to the board of the United Way of America; in 1983, she became the first woman to lead it. Right Time, Right Place. Her tenure on the national board's executive committee is believed to have helped Microsoft, based in Seattle, at a crucial time. In 1980, she discussed with John Opel, a fellow committee member who was the chairman of the International Business Machines Corporation," her son's company. "Mr. Opel, by some accounts, mentioned Mrs. Gates to other I.B.M. executives. A few weeks later, I.B.M. took a chance by hiring Microsoft, then a small software firm, to develop an operating system for its first personal computer."
His parents were fairly well-off, and important people in the Seattle area. This definitely helped him get his start in life, including a place at Harvard that helped him make important connections. His story is pretty much illustrative of the benefits of parents with connections. And he became a "drop-out" at Harvard when it had become obvious that he had the IBM connections to fund the marketing campaigns that made the IBM PC a commercial success. At that point, there was little value in staying at Harvard, so he moved on.
Now here was a smart, logical man who actually believed he had started his investment career out of nothing. He believed that the money his parents had given him somehow didn't count. In essence his parents had paid for the down payment on his house but he would not see it that way. After that I became curious about where many of the self made men around me had the same story. Many of them had the same story. Rich parents 'invested' money for them and they reaped the rewards.
I've read similar comments in a number of economists' studies, in which they wrote about a multi-factorial analysis of people's wealth and various of other things that could be learned about the sample population. One thing that came out of such studies was that when they could get info on the parent's wealth, many other factors - especially education- dropped out. If you know someone's parents' wealth, there's no need to know their education, since it adds no more predictive power to your data.
Somehow, you never see this sort of study mentioned in colleges' advertising. ;-)
(At least one economist classified education as a "proxy" for parental wealth. I.e., if you don't have the family wealth data, but know the details of the children's education, you can make a fairly good estimate of the family wealth. However, in this case, knowing the offsprings' personal wealth is a better predictor for parental wealth, and if you know that, education info adds little or no predictive power.)
: First Amendment. Unlike your government, ours has explicitly no authority to stop anything from being published.
That's sorta naive. In the US, there are all sorts of things which, if you publish them, will land you in a federal prison. Other things will land you in a state prison.
And there's the old comment on the US's "Freedom of the Press": It applies to anyone with the wealth to own and operate a printing press.
Of course, "publishing" online has become much cheaper than publishing on dead trees. The US currently has a lot of behind-the-scenes battles going over who has the right - uh, I mean the power - to limit this sort of publishing. It's not yet clear how this will turn out, but recent revisions to the copyright laws may well be the thing that gives the people in power their power over what mere individuals can "publish". There are a growing number of online "takedowns" that result from copyright claims on information about politicians' and corporations' activities. it used to be that facts couldn't be copyrighted, but this is changing. Stay tuned ...
rst, this has to have been written by someone who has either never lived with dogs and/or cats and/or parrots ...
In particular, they've obviously never lived with cockatiels or budgies. Those critters' senses of humor stand out to even casual observers. We have two cockatiels and a blue-crowned conure. The conure shows little humor, and considers the cockatiels pests who should be attacked at any opportunity. She has a scary beak that we were afraid of for her first month in our house. The 'tiels figured out early on that they can easily outfly her, and they torment her relentlessly. This includes picking up food that they know she likes, landing with it just out of her reach, and eating it while watching her. They know just how close they can get and still be safe. And you can see the joy on their little faces as they do this. A humorless animal would stay away from a bigger, stronger, antagonistic opponent, but these little guys clearly enjoy teasing her.
Their behavior would definitely fit into the "making someone seem silly or stupid or incompetent" classification.
Many other parrot owners can no doubt post descriptions of their pet's humor.
An analyst types Fikri's name into a search box and up pops a wealth of information pulled from every database at the government's disposal.
And here we see how this will fail, as so many other "security" systems have failed. The name typed in pulls up a wealth of information from lots of databases -- about everyone with a name spelled (or transliterated) into anything vaguely like "Fikri". Any transgression (real or imagined or planted) by any of those people will be used against our Fikri. The good Anglo-European people in the agencies will be unable to tell any of them apart on sight, because they all look vaguely Middle-Eastern, not like the people running the agency. And once again, the entirely wrong people will be fingered and punished for the sins of others unrelated to them. And the victims will react to this treatment as wrongly-punished people have always reacted.
It's an old, old story. The TSA has been supplying us with lots of similar stories over the past decade.
This isn't a totally trivial question. I've often seen comments in forums saying that something works in kernels from the Frosty Ferret release to the Manifest Monkey release. So I want to check out some of the systems that I'm responsible for, and for each of them, I'd like to discover whether they're within the stated range. The problem is that I often can't discover a given kernel's codename. I can get the kernel's release number from "uname -a", but there doesn't seem to be any reliable way to compare that with codenames in forum messages. So I often can't figure out whether such forum messages apply to the kernels that I'm ssh'd to.
So is there a general way to map the dotted-number release numbers to the codenames, and vice-versa? If there is, I could put it into a script that's in the toolkit that I copy around to systems. I'd also put it on my web sites, so I can fetch it quickly from a new machine (and you could, too, as soon as a googlebot stumbles across it, if you guess the right keywords that I'd include in the header comments ;-).
So far, the answers to this question all seem to be of the form "If you're on a sytem Foo, here's how you do it ...". So you need to know the answer to the question in order to ask the question. I'm hoping for something a bit less circular. And preferably something scriptable.
I've often wondered why this information has been universally excluded from what "uname -a" returns. Making use of forum replies would be a lot easier if either people would use the release numbers, or we had a simple way of mapping codenames to release numbers.
This isn't just a linux problem. I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro, one of around a half dozen that I have access to. I can get the kernel's number (10.5.8) from the "About this Mac" menu item at the top left, but I don't know the kernel's name. I did a bit of poking around in /etc and /System, and didn't find it. There's probably a table of the names/numbers somewhere at apple.com, but google doesn't seem to know where it is. The problem is similar on other unix-like systems.
Anyone know an algorithm for finding a random kernel's name? (Anything of the form "If it's <X> ..." is disqualified. ;-)
A vegetable is not a biological term. Fruit is.
Actually, "vegetable" and "vegetative" are both terms that are occasionally used by biologists. They're just not all that common, because usually a more specific term is wanted.
But "fruit" is a very common biological term, since it refers to a specific seed-containing reproductive structure in the flowering plants.
There is no need to organize against this law. The day it gets signed (if ever) it will get overturned on first amendment grounds.
Hmmm ... You don't seem to have been paying attention. These days, it takes years, sometimes more than a decade, to go through all the appeals to get to the Supreme Court. During those years, whatever "right" you're fighting for can be freely and openly violated by the government agencies that supposedly aren't allowed to do such violations. In some cases, you can be imprisoned for all those years that it takes to get the case against you dismissed.
Lotsa luck getting those years back. Not to mention the legal costs.
It is massively unfortunate that antibiotics have fallen due to misuse. By all means the *should* be viable for decades to come, but that has been ruined by ignorance. ... This is not a matter of educating the public. The public has been educated yet they ignore it. I have never understood where this profound ignorance comes from. This is a major hot button for me.
Well, I don't know where in the world you may live, but here in the US, it's fairly clear what has happened. The religious crowd has campaigned long and hard against "evolution", and they have pretty much succeeded in eliminating the word and the concept from our educations system. Thus, if you pay attention to news stories about drug resistance, it is always something that micro-organisms develop or acquire; it is hardly ever something that they evolve. The media does this partly out of fear of religious repercussions (i.e., loss of their jobs), and partly because they "know" that evolution takes millions of years and couldn't be happening within our lifetime.
But mostly, the religious people have managed to exclude nearly all information about evolution from school textbooks. A few decades ago, I had high-school biology teachers who told us that the chapter on evolution would be skipped (out of fear for the teachers' jobs), but we could read it if we wanted to understand the issue. Nowadays, most school texts no longer contain that chapter, or any use of the term "evolve" anywhere. Evolution has been expurgated from the American education system.
So no, the public here haven't been educated on the topic; they have been intentionally kept ignorant by the religious folks and the school management people who fear their wrath. The media does nothing to alleviate the situation; they modify their language to imply that micro-organisms "acquire" resistance by some sort of magic that we don't understand. (Or maybe they buy the resistance at tiny stores that stock it. ;-)
I get the impression that this suppression hasn't been quite as effective in some other parts of the world. But it has worked pretty well here. Even on /., people can characterize evolution as a slow process that takes millennia, and hardly anyone ever challenges them on such claims. Retail stores (and some medical people) can push anti-bacterial soaps, without anyone pointing out that these products are likely to trigger the evolution of resistance to the antibiotics in those soaps.
What we need to do is to start pushing for the use of the words "evolve" and "evolution" in stories about bacterial resistance. The summary is an example. It says:
Bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear ...
when it should say:
The evolution of bacterial resistance to said antibiotics is an increasing fear ...
So whenever you see such omissions, you might consider contacting the author and explaining to them why they should be inserting these extra words. That might help get across to the public why we have this problem.
IMHO the internet should not be mentioned explicitly. At most, the first amendment might be extended to include electronic communications. Plain and simple language is important, and specifics should be avoided.
Yes, and one of the specifics to be avoided is the term "electronic". This would, for instance, tell the lawyers (and the Supreme Court) that optical fiber isn't covered, since it used photons rather than electrons.
More generally, we should probably tackle the growing problem that, whenever a computer gets involved in any activity, all legal precedent is discarded, and all legal rights must be re-established from scratch. Thus, we see all sorts of limitations of free speech, freedom of the press, freedom to assemble, etc., because we're doing those activities online rather than in the "real world", and the online world exists primarily inside computers (and their comm links). So people don't see the communications as "speech" or publishing or assembling together, or whatever; they see the communications as electronic and computerized. The US Constitution doesn't mention computers (or electronics or photonics or tachyonics or whatever follows), so the people in power don't think that the US Constitution applies.
What we need is an Amendment that specifically states that our "free" activities can't be limited by the government regardless of the equipment that we use to carry them out. We need to find a way to prevent them from cancelling all the freedoms whenever a new technology comes along that improves our ability to carry out the protected activities. And we need a phrasing that covers new technologies in such a way that the more authoritarian members of the Supreme Court will understand that the freedoms still apply.
(And I refuse to call them "conservatives". An actual conservative would want to preserve our historic freedoms, regardless of whatever newfangled gadgetry we're using to exercise them. These people are "authoritarians", because they support those in positions of authority who want to limit our rights whenever they can think up a new excuse to do so.)
Well sure, the internet is for music!
WHAT?!? Then where do I go to get p0rn?
Doesn't a lot of p0rn come with music? And vice-versa?
... a culture of misinformation that encourages people to take as few drugs as possible. You don't want to over medicate. The result is people stop taking the antibiotics once they feel better because they don't want to put more drugs in their system than they feel they need to. The lack of education on this is startling at times.
And the blame is often shared between the medical system and their patients. I often get the feeling that the medical folks' attitude tends toward "Don't worry your little head about it; just do what we tell you and don't ask questions whose answers you couldn't possibly understand." OTOH, I know how the eyes of "customers" often glaze over when you try to explain to them things that they really should understand.
And a good part of the problem, of course, is the drug industry's strong desire to protect their trade secrets by only telling patients (and doctors) the very minimum that the law requires, and then in the vaguest language they think they can get away with. This can extend to not clearly informing people of dosage. This, I recently got a medicine for a skin rash that had instructions to apply it in a "thin layer" over the affected area twice a day. A "thin layer"? WTF does that mean? It became clear that the doctor didn't really know either. But you just know that if I did it wrong, they (and many commenters here ;-) would blame me for not doing it right. And you also know that there probably is an accurate dosage (in some units like mg per square cm) that's known to someone; they just consider you and me too stupid to understand it.
Yup; and note that "backup" these days often includes mirroring on other live system.
I've seen backups to tapes and external disks fail more often than I've seen them succeed. I've also over the years seen any number of estimates that around 50% of backup tapes aren't usable when they're needed. I've often been suspicious that there may be large error bars around that number, but so far I haven't seen any evidence on the topic. This makes me further suspicious that the people writing on the topic are assuming that I'm too stupid to understand anything more detailed or informative than "50%", implying to me that the reality could well be even worse than that.
OTOH, since large (whatever that means) disks became reasonably cheap and network access became inexpensive, around 10 years ago, it has become feasible to use rsync for backup. It's easy enough to install more disk than you need on several widely-separated machines, and have all of them back up all the others. This is especially easy if they happen to share a lot of the stuff that needs backing up. The data is stored in its original form, and if your backup media dies, you know about it very quickly. Restoring always works, because it's done via another rsync, which you know how to use (and is documented all over ;-).
The only real "gotcha" I've seen with this came in working on projects that had a mixture of Macs and Windows systems, together with the usual unix/linux-based servers. The hokey attempts at "caseless" file names on OS X and Windows, not quite the same on the two OSs (or on different releases ;-) causes some, uh, "interesting" name collisions and loss of files. The unix/linux systems can back up OS X and Windows files without problems, since they are agnostic about charsets, but if you try to back up their file systems on an OS X or Windows box, you tend to lose files due to multiple names being mapped to a single name.
I've actually made this work, by learning enough about the OS X and Windows file-name munging to avoid the problem. But we haven't (yet) learned how to avoid the problems with OS X and Windows attempt to mirror each others' file systems. So our rule amounts to "Do all rsyncs from OS X or Windows to/from the unix/linux servers, and don't let OS X or Windows mirror a file system from a different species of OS." (If you must do this, test the results thoroughly to make sure that neither OS is mapping two file names to the same byte string, and repeat the tests frequently to verify that new files don't trigger the problem.)
(I can already hear the shouts of "Mirroring isn't backup, you idiot!". I fully intend to ignore such comments. The term "backup" means any sort of copy that we can later use to restore our data. It doesn't mean tapes. It means anything that I can restore my data from. Nothing more or less than that. So whatever you're trying to sell - or prevent me from buying - is irrelevant. All I want to know is how good your favorite product is at keeping and restoring my data. Well, OK, I also want to know whether I can keep my data private, so I'm ignoring all "cloud" backup schemes. But data security is a different topic from data safety, so I'll ignore that here, too. ;-)
Are you beliving that religions are false despite the lack of evidence?
Again, you're confusing refusal to believe that something is true with believing that it's false. You're implying that skepticism is impossible; for any statement X, one must believe either that X is true or that it's false.
Russell's comment amounts to saying "Show me the evidence (for or against); I won't make up my mind until I have a reason to believe one or the other."
Actually, since Russell's time, there has been quite a lot of mathematical work on multi-valued logics. This has even made small inroads in computing, where instead of everything being based on a pure 0/1 dichotomy, there is hardware that can exist indefinitely in an indeterminate state. The circuitry that uses bits sees such things as fluctuating randomly between 0 and 1, and one of the practical uses is in building a true random-number generator (which is very difficult with binary hardware).
Some of the mathematicians involved in multi-valued logic joke about the old Boolean logic being a "simple, child-like first step, with true logic requiring our work to advance to an adult understanding". But they usually grin while saying this. Perhaps this is because they know that most people won't ever advance between the basic 2-valued 1/0 true/false sort of logic, and accept that many things in the universe are unknown (or indeterminate or whatever).
We might note that the term "atheist" was coined from Greek morphemes, and basically meant "without God". In the original Greek it simply meant not partaking in the local religious rituals. Thus, it meant ignoring (the local) god, not believing anything specific about any god that may or may not exist. It was later redefined to mean "belief that no god exists" by people who didn't understand the difference. There was also a strain of "You don't believe in my God, and there is no other god, so you must not believe in any god." Anyway, many dictionaries now give two or more definitions, because the function of a dictionary is to list all the possible meanings of a word (not to decree what it should mean or may have originally meant ;-).
No disagreement here! I think it'd be foolish to believe in something for very long without some sort of evidence. Having said that, I'll read between the lines a little here: you're implying that all religious people in the history of the world have had no evidence, correct? If so, are you certain that that is true? If so, how have you reached that certainty?
Well, actually, I sorta like to argue that there may have been a god or gods around some time in the past. But they disappeared for some reason around the time we developed scientific methods, and carefully hid all evidence that they had ever existed.
It's closely related to the argument that God seems to have created a world full of geological and paleontological evidence of a world more than 4 billion years old, with a long history of biological evolution behind all the living species and the zillions of fossils. The obvious conclusion is that God wants us to believe in this history and evolution, and if we don't believe, we're violating God's will.
This is, of course, all quite untestable (unless those pruported gods screwed up and left some evidence of themselves behind that we haven't found yet). But it's at least as good as the religious theory that one or more gods are still hanging around and we're just too dumb to spot them (or they've gotten really good at hiding).
By Occam's Razor, the judicious approach is to tentatively accept the skeptical approach, and say that the closest thing the religious people have to evidence is what would in a court of law be called "hearsay", which isn't real evidence at all. So we shouldn't accept their claims until they come up with some actual evidence.
We could also bring up the long history of religions being full of fraudsters who see it as a good way to get their hands on our stuff. But that's a different topic that's only marginally related to the topic at hand (and which the religious folks would probably prefer to keep hidden behind that curtain ;-).