Yeah; I've seen those figures somewhere.;-) The first one (temp) seems to have peaks at 10 or 20, 130, 240, 325, and 410 or so. The other two are even less regular. If I had a clock that behaved like that, I'd toss it and get one that works.
Sorry; calling that "regular as clockwork" is just dumb. If you want to convince people, you need to use language that isn't so silly that lay people laugh at it. There is something serious going on here, but so badly overstating the precision of the results is no way to convince even moderately intelligent people (who passed their high-school math classes) of anything.
Of course, there's a "signal" there; several of them appear in the Fourier analysis. But nothing that would pass inspection at any "clockworks" factories. Actually, those graphs go along well with my favorite tongue-in-cheek cosmological theory: The universe was actually created by a God or Gods some time back, but in the billions of years that have passed here since then, everything has drifted badly out of spec. This is because the creators have lost interest, and have moved on to more interesting universe simulations. We can see this locally, with a day, month and year that are nowhere the simple multiples in the original design. The rest of the universe is just as worn down and chaotic, and long overdue for routine maintenance. So we're on our own now (as long as we don't do anything that attracts the attention of the creators).
With the current state of the evidence, climate change skepticism is about as reasonable as being skeptical of the rhinovirus virus theory of the common cold.
Heh. In a few discussions like this, I've actually tricked some of the "skeptics" into admitting that diseases "unknown to science" are punishments from their God.;-)
I wonder if we can manage to get the same theoretical explanation from the climate change deniers? Possibly not, because one of the very real possibilities is that they're all corporate sock puppets who know what they're doing. But it's also possible that some are just ignorant and are following their religious leaders; those might be amenable to publicly attributing climate change to God.
Perhaps we should work on finding efficient ways to trick people into exposing any religious bases to their beliefs...
I too admit I'm ambivalent. Certainly, there may be man-made effects involved, but how involved? More than solar cycles, or any number of other phenomena?...
I've run across an estimate from some climate researchers that human activity is responsible for around 115% of the observed warming. I suspect that this phrasing was a bit of intentional climate-geek humor, but it did illustrate their point. We have enough information about our climate to say that, according to most of the theories and models, we should now be in a phrase of slight global cooling. But human input to the system has overpowered the "natural" forces, and converted the cooling into a somewhat slower warming than what was measured in the 1980s and 1990s.
Of course, something you never read in the media accounts is the significant error bars on all the numbers. And since the topic is climate, date for a mere decade is only "interesting", not conclusive. In a few more decades, we'll be able to decrease the error bars a bit more, and say with a bit more certainty what actually happened to our climate back in the 2000-2020 period.
I don't see how a system you describe as "regular as clockwork" system on an approximately 100,000 year cycle could start 80,000 years ahead of schedule. It seems to me you're just ignorant and confused.
What's especially funny about this is the claim that the glacial record shows "regular as clockwork" variations. The glaciation records have been published often and openly, and regardless of the level of detail, the only accurate description of the graphs is "chaotic". There's nothing clock-like about it at any scale. There was a bit of a fuss a while back about the detection of a regular "signal" with a 30-million-year wavelength, but that took some sophisticated statistical work to ferret out, and is still considered somewhat hypothetical.
But I suppose this sort of claim is one simple test for whether a writer knows anything at all about the topic. In discussions with scientific quacks, it does often turn out that the quacks use scientific terminology in a way that's consistently different than how it's used by actual scientists. Once you spot these bits of language skew, you can often quickly classify people's expertise within a few sentences.
One of my favorite examples of this is the way that the term "quantum" has entered common speech meaning "a huge quantity", pretty much the opposite of its scientific meaning. And it turns out that there's a trivial language thing that often distinguishes the two uses: the use of the phrase "quantum leap" rather than "quantum jump". However this came about could be a topic for a master's thesis in field linguistics, but it does seem fairly reliable. Scientists say "quantum jump" and mean the smallest possible change. Non-scientists say "quantum leap" and mean a very large change. Thus, I recently ran across a claim of a "quantum leap in annual income" in a specific population (of financial investment types). By this the writer did not mean an increase of $0.01, the quantum of the US money system; they meant income that had more than doubled. This was signalled by the use of the word "leap" rather than "jump".
News flash: for commercial air flights, all air traffic controllers and pilots are required to speak English.
Well, maybe, if by "English" you mean a language with only a few hundred words and extremely restricted syntax. It's a subset smaller than the language spoken by most British and American 5-year-olds.
And I've seen it pointed out that most of the "content" words in the aviation subset of English are nearly identical to their French and Spanish equivalents. But the phonetics are more like English, or maybe the midpoint between English and Spanish. It doesn't sound very much like French, except when spoken by native speakers of French.
Of course, the airlines do tend to give preference to people with a better than legal minimum English proficiency. They also like to have people in the cockpit who are fluent speakers of the native languages at both ends of a flight. This can be useful in emergency situations.
What we can look forward to, though, is a future of remote-control of airplanes, in which the communication is outsourced to minimum-wage workers in the cheapest part of the world, who have mostly never been in an airplane. The military is pioneering this right now. Then it'll then take decades for the companies to figure out that this isn't working very well...
... isn't it the same as a newspaper reporting on local crime?
No, because it's done via computer. One of the general rules is that no matter how well something is understood, and how much settled law or custom there is on a topic, as soon as a computer gets involved, all this is forgotten, and everything has to be discussed (and sometimes fought to the death) from scratch.
We've been through this process a zillion times, every time some traditional activity involves a computer for the first time. The traditional metaphors don't work, because the mere presence of a computer cancels all human memory, and everything we knew must be relearned.
Its not that Congress is truly outraged about Amazon invading privacy. They're outraged they have competition in privacy invasion.
More likely, they're upset that Amazon's response to Congress's demand for a copy of the information was to send them the price list for various classes of information. Congress wants to get that information for free (like they do now from google); they don't want to be treated like an ordinary corporate customer who pays for information about you.
I wish more Americans knew that their history started well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Sigh.
Yeah; there's a lot that hasn't reached the public mythology. Some decades ago, I read an interesting article about the Portuguese fishing industry's post-Columbus explorations. Part of the story was quotes from trip records in 1500, describing a North American coastline with a village every mile or so, and lots of the local people out at sea, fishing. The records from 1520, however, described a coastline nearly devoid of human settlements, and very few local boats coming out to greet them. In those 20 years, nearly everyone along the coast had died.
Another bit of interesting history is that by 1520, the Portuguese fishermen understood the "North Atlantic Gyre". They routinely sailed southwest to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, then caught the westward North Equatorial Current across to the West Indies, where they turned northwest. They then sailed up along the Bahamas and the North American coast to Nova Scotia, catching fish and preserving them in salt. Then they sailed across to the Azores and northern Spain, and south to home. They understood that this was much faster than sailing clockwise. Modern North Americans generally give Ben Franklin credit for discovering the big Gyre, but the Portuguese were using it 250 years earlier. Some of the ships' logs are still available in Portuguese and Spanish archives.
... In one of my early math course (100 level), I remember have an overbearing wish for the teacher to just hand me all of the future homework, and a copy of the final exam, and let me finish it in a week or two,...
Heh. I had a similar situation in my senior year in college, which triggered a small change in the university's rules. At the end of the first semester, I was only one credit short of the count needed to graduate, and I'd satisfied all the prereqs for a B.A. in math -- except one. I hadn't taken the differential-equations course, which was specifically required for a math degree. And I couldn't take it, because there was a university rule that if you took a course and got an A or B grade, you couldn't take any of its prerequisites for credit. I'd taken number of physics courses that required DiffEq, and gotten A's in all of them, so I couldn't take that last course required for the math degree.
The math profs thought this was quite funny, but the administration wasn't amused. My advisor suggested I take the class's final exam that was coming up, and see what grade I'd get. The instructor agreed, I took the final, and got a B. The math profs went to the administration and "suggested" a change in the rule. They told me that their threat that got cooperation was that they'd testify on my behalf in my lawsuit to get a refund for my 3.5 years of tuition, since my "advanced knowledge" plus the rules precluded my ever getting a math degree there. The class was added to my record, with a "passing" grade, and I left to go to graduate school. I think the admins were happy to see me go. Then I went into computing, where I don't think I've ever seen a differential equation.
I suppose the relevancy to this discussion is that, contrary to the original charge that such problems are due to "teacher unions", in this case the faculty was firmly on my side, and the problem was clearly caused by "management" policies. It's not unusual for organizational rules to have edge cases with perverse effects like this. There probably aren't too many high-school graduates (in the US) who have learned much about differential equations.
Of course, you'd think that a sensible rule might be of the form: If you pay a nominal fee, you can take the final test(s) for a course, and if you get some specific grade or better, you get credit for the course. I think some colleges actually do have an approach like this, but I don't know specific examples.
also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read.
This may or not be true, but it ignores the fact that people learn in different ways, and different forms of teaching benefit different subjects and different skills classes differently.
Hmm... I'm a bit puzzled by two people saying that. It seems to me that "The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read" is a clear (if humorous;-) acknowledgement that there are at least two styles of learning (listening and reading), and that some people are better with one approach than the other. Why would you say that "it ignores" this, when it so clearly states it as true?
Of course, it does gloss over the well-known fact that there are also more than two learning styles. But the quip clearly wasn't intended as a summary of all knowledge of learning styles; it was just a cute way of stating that the number of styles is greater than one.
I found it interesting that one reply was from someone who prefers classroom lectures and finds them faster than reading. I can sorta see this, at least with a poorly-written textbook. But my experience is that I can read much faster than anyone can comfortably talk, and can easily get through the typical transcript of an hour lecture in 10 to 15 minutes. I usually get better understanding from the transcript, because I can easily pause to think about something or look up a definition or whatever, and I can skip quickly over the parts that I already know.
But I'd acknowledge that this might not be the best approach for everyone. I spent some time learning to "skim", and I can understand why someone who hasn't invested time learning this skill might find reading slower than listening to a voice. But even then, unless the student can easily interrupt the speaker to ask questions, a recorded lecture can be easier than a live lecture. Many people are unwilling to hold back a whole room full of listeners to ask their dumb questions, but a recording can easily be paused while you look up definitions or whatever.
Anyway, I wasn't saying that my way is the only way. I was saying pretty much the opposite: One teacher's way isn't the only way that's best for every student. Sitting in a classroom seat listening to a lecture on something I already knew well wasn't the best for me. A good educational system would acknowledge the differences in learning styles, and not hold a student back by forcing them all to use an approach that's suboptimal for many of the students. This is something that our current school system isn't good at, and it's one of the things that online education can help with (if done right).
Well, I'd suggest that "featherbedding" doesn't really require a union or any other such organization.
My high school didn't have a teachers' union. But I ran into a problem when, in my sophomore year, I decided to learn some math. By around Xmas, I'd gone through all the math texts that were available from the math teachers. Then, when I asked them for advice and help in getting more, I was told that I "wasn't ready for such advanced texts" as basic calculus. In talking to them, it was pretty clear that they were unhappy with me, and I got a real feeling that it was because I'd just made all their "advanced" classes useless (to me).
But I had some friends at a nearby college, so I arranged for them to find more math books that I could borrow. Some came from their profs, some from the math department's library. I also verified that there are other US high schools that teach calculus classes; this didn't endear me to my teachers, either.
Actually, the organizational problems didn't end there. A couple of years later, I found myself at a nearby college, where the math dept offered me "advanced placement" into 2nd-year calculus. It rapidly became obvious that I knew the material better than the prof did. Trying to convince the department to let me transfer to a class where I would learn something was pointless, so I wasted my time getting past that and a few other "pre-req" classes that I had to take despite already knowing the material.
It's easy to interpret all of this as a case of teachers blocking a bright kid's advancement, because the kid is making the teachers look unnecessary. And I had any number of discussions of the topic with other kids with an "attitude problem" similar to mine.
I also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read. That does describe a large fraction of the US college student population, of course, so the lecturers are still needed for them. But for the rest of us, regardless of the presence of unions, we're still likely to run into blockades that force us to sit still while the instructors work for their pay.
Since then, I have occasionally wondered whether my getting involved in Internet software development will eventually have any effect on this general problem. If so, don't make the mistake of thinking it was accidental. The topic at hand has been discussed behind the scenes, at least by a few of us. Online "classes" are just one of the attempts to alleviate such problems. There are many students in the world who don't have local access to good teachers, but who do know how to read. I'm one net.developer who isn't very sympathetic with teachers who try to block students' access to information.
Actually, it might just be an excellent example of Poe'sLaw. There don't seem to be any real cues that it's satire or serious, so different people interpret it differently. This is probably more a sign of the readers' mindsets than a comment on the message itself.
And those of us who understand this are presumably examples of the third possibility: a "meta" viewpoint that reads it as both serious and satire simultaneously.
I found myself in a real quandary: Should I post this, or should I give the author another "Funny" mod? Maybe I should first see if I want to reply (seriously or jokingly) to any other posts? Nah...
Well, yeah, but in that case, the OP couldn't have used it, and would have no basis for the complaint:
Damn. I have to type four numbers now instead of a domain name to get to my torrents.
I mean, it's common for/. denizens to not bother reading TFA. But this person seems to be posting a complaint about needing to do something that wouldn't even work. Would a/. reader be dumb enough to complain about something without trying it to see if it's even feasible?
I wonder when the Kindle for iPhone app was designed/started. It could potentially be prior art here.
Well, apparently amazon thinks it's all valid. I did a quick google of "in-app purchase", and on the first page of hits was a report that the kindle iPhone app no longer lets you buy from the kindle store. You have to either buy via Apple's store (and then Apple gets 30% of the price), or you can use the browser. That's sufficiently complex (i.e., more than just one or two clicks) that most non-geek users will probably give up).
The folks at amazon.com have gotta be a bit annoyed by this.
I wonder if the patent would cover an "in-app purchase" from the kindle store on an actual kindle? Lots of apps on non-Apple systems have implemented "digital commerce", probably without those companies applying for patents. With the new "first-to-file" patent rules, could Apple succeed at outlawing online purchases by any non-Apple software on non-Apple systems? That seems absurd, but absurdity isn't a recognized legal concept, and first-to-file does seem like an intent to explicitly implement such takeovers of common practice by a single company.
I haven't bought a kindle, partly due to the story about amazon reaching out and deleting books that customers had purchased, so I can't easily test any of this myself.
Non-computer people place very little value on having an open ecosystem. If you are not a programmer you won't be writing your own apps so having an open system is worth very little.
Oh, I dunno; I suspect you could explain it easily to most people with the canonical auto analogy: Would you consider buying a car if it were impossible to buy any accessories or spare parts from anyone but the auto maker's dealers? Yes, some people do buy everything from their auto dealer. But most people understand that making this mandatory is basically a way to make you pay a lot more money. Who'd want to be restricted to buying, say, new tires only from the dealer?
I'd guess such simple example could easily get across to all but the real dummies why they should support an open market for add-ons of any sort.
Hmmm... When I try 194.71.107.15, I get a blank page, but depiraatbaai.be works just fine, and even gets me The Pirate Bay's main page in English. DNS here tells me that 194.71.107.15 is the IP address of depiraatbaai.be, so you'd think they'd work the same. Both of these were pasted directly into a browser's address widget, so it's not a problem with HTTP_REFERER or something like that. Anyone know what's going on here? Has some other court (or an ISP's management;-) decided to look at the HTTP header and block GET commands that don't include a FQDN?
That seems far to sophisticated for any court (or ISP management;-).
You perfectly illustrated why patents are evil: it is impossible to avoid violating them, you can only wait to see if anyone sues you.
This has been a growing problem with copyright, too, especially during the past couple of decades as society's information has moved online. You can see this clearly in music, where what used to be a routine "performance" can lead to prosecution as a copyright violation.
One way I've found to express it is to ask: If I have a tune in my head, and want to perform it, how can I discover whether it's copyrighted, and if so, who owns the copyright? I've asked reps of a few music publishers this question, and their basic answer (told with a straight face, as far as I can tell) is that I should buy a copy of everything they've ever printed, and search it for the tune.
There is a certain lack of practicality to this, of course, but the only current alternative is to play your music in public, and see if anyone sues you.
We are at the point where we could actually provide a music lookup site, which would look up a fragment of melody, and tell you what published music contains something similar. Yes, there are technical challenges, especially with the variability of all forms of music notation, but they're probably solvable. But the problem is that the database behind such a lookup would itself be a clear violation of copyright, since it would have to contain a representation of every piece of music ever published, and no publisher would agree to having their published works in your database. The only legal way to read their music is from a copy of their publication which you have purchased.
So with both patent and copyright, we have a situation where almost anything you or I do (i.e., create or perform) is possibly a violation of a patent and/or copyright, but we have no way of discovering this except by doing it and waiting to see if someone sues us.
Or we can just refrain from ever creating or performing anything. But even that may not be safe. Consider that corporations are taking out patents on pieces of DNA. This probably means that we can't have children without violating a patent. But it's potentially even worse: Our normal cell production to heal injuries or grow new hair/skin could be a DNA patent violation. We don't know; we can only wait for the courts to decide.
But McCarthy underestimated the communist infiltration of the US government.
What are you talking about? What communist infiltration
This can be explained by understanding that in American politics, "communist", "socialist" and "liberal" are synonyms to a large fraction of the population. To them, the US government has long been full of communists with names like Ted (and John) Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. To some, Bill Clinton was a communist/socialist/whatever.
There's an old tradition in politics everywhere of labelling your enemies with whatever the current scare-words may be. It's only a matter of time until "terrorist" is added to the above list of synonyms in American political speech.
The book has a mere 1112 pages, and a quick check at amazon.com shows that the "typical pages" have the usual margins, plus lots of the white space that techie book designers love these days.
So there's no way it can be "definitive". Or "complete". For something as massively "featureful" as drupal, it can barely qualify as informative.
Yeah. Actually, it's fairly common to install such transceivers on the glass in front of the rear-view mirror, since that's a place that doesn't block any more of your vision, and has good contact with the toll-booth electronics. So to be useful, they'll probably have to mandate that you install them in a spot with a clear view of the interior of your car, and if it can see you, it will inevitably block some of what you can see while driving.
It's not like the government mandated that a unique number be attached to each vehicle by which it could be tracked or anything...
Dunno whether you were writing tongue-in-cheek, but we might point out explicitly that this has been done. Readers who aren't familiar with the topic might try googling "RFID in tires" and reading a few of the articles.
So if you've bought a new car (or got new tires) in the US recently, your car can be tracked by RFID transceivers that you drive past. How much of this data is actually being collected doesn't seem to be much documented. There's an obvious problem in that it does require installing the RFID equipment throughout the road system, and it will probably be difficult to keep such a massive installation a secret for long. Today, you are probably mostly tracked this way when you pass a toll station on a major highway, or enter/exit parking lots of specific organizations that have decided to collect the data. But the installed base of RFID gadgetry on roads will probably slowly expand in the future.
Well, I often find it interesting and useful when people point out that the topic being discussed isn't actually new, and other useful discussions can be found if you look for them. I wasn't trying to stop the discussion; I was mostly just reacting to the claim that this is some sort of new thought. Maybe it was new for the writer, but it's hardly new for anyone who's read much history.
This is much of the reason that some people worry so much about climate change. As the "deniers" like to point out, there have been lots of climate changes in the past, and we're still here. Yeah, but when you can find information about the times of change, you also find lots of wars, famines, deaths, etc.
So reading a claim that this is some sort of new correlation that has just been discovered is yet another indication that someone hasn't learned from history, probably from not being aware of the history.
For example, the past couple decades of local wars in the Sahel are conventionally attributed to the spreading of the desert. People there have faced the choice of staying home and starving, or moving south, where the land is already at carrying capacity and the people are prepared to defend their barely-livable land from the armed refugees from up north.
Similarly, the Viking excursions are typically explained by the increasing population in Scandinavia (and the first significant adoption of agriculture there) in the 8th and 9th centuries, followed by decades in which the crops mostly failed. Again, the Norse had the choice of staying home and starving, or sailing away and looking for better places to live. But all those places were already inhabited, so it was really a choice of starve at home or fight abroad.
So what's new about this story? Isn't it just a repeat of much of our history? Or at least, it's a repeat of our explanations for much of our history.
Slashdot Mirror
Everything I've ever posted on /. is a lie.
(How should the program classify this post? ;-)
Yeah; I've seen those figures somewhere. ;-) The first one (temp) seems to have peaks at 10 or 20, 130, 240, 325, and 410 or so. The other two are even less regular. If I had a clock that behaved like that, I'd toss it and get one that works.
Sorry; calling that "regular as clockwork" is just dumb. If you want to convince people, you need to use language that isn't so silly that lay people laugh at it. There is something serious going on here, but so badly overstating the precision of the results is no way to convince even moderately intelligent people (who passed their high-school math classes) of anything.
Of course, there's a "signal" there; several of them appear in the Fourier analysis. But nothing that would pass inspection at any "clockworks" factories. Actually, those graphs go along well with my favorite tongue-in-cheek cosmological theory: The universe was actually created by a God or Gods some time back, but in the billions of years that have passed here since then, everything has drifted badly out of spec. This is because the creators have lost interest, and have moved on to more interesting universe simulations. We can see this locally, with a day, month and year that are nowhere the simple multiples in the original design. The rest of the universe is just as worn down and chaotic, and long overdue for routine maintenance. So we're on our own now (as long as we don't do anything that attracts the attention of the creators).
With the current state of the evidence, climate change skepticism is about as reasonable as being skeptical of the rhinovirus virus theory of the common cold.
Heh. In a few discussions like this, I've actually tricked some of the "skeptics" into admitting that diseases "unknown to science" are punishments from their God. ;-)
I wonder if we can manage to get the same theoretical explanation from the climate change deniers? Possibly not, because one of the very real possibilities is that they're all corporate sock puppets who know what they're doing. But it's also possible that some are just ignorant and are following their religious leaders; those might be amenable to publicly attributing climate change to God.
Perhaps we should work on finding efficient ways to trick people into exposing any religious bases to their beliefs ...
I too admit I'm ambivalent. Certainly, there may be man-made effects involved, but how involved? More than solar cycles, or any number of other phenomena? ...
I've run across an estimate from some climate researchers that human activity is responsible for around 115% of the observed warming. I suspect that this phrasing was a bit of intentional climate-geek humor, but it did illustrate their point. We have enough information about our climate to say that, according to most of the theories and models, we should now be in a phrase of slight global cooling. But human input to the system has overpowered the "natural" forces, and converted the cooling into a somewhat slower warming than what was measured in the 1980s and 1990s.
Of course, something you never read in the media accounts is the significant error bars on all the numbers. And since the topic is climate, date for a mere decade is only "interesting", not conclusive. In a few more decades, we'll be able to decrease the error bars a bit more, and say with a bit more certainty what actually happened to our climate back in the 2000-2020 period.
I don't see how a system you describe as "regular as clockwork" system on an approximately 100,000 year cycle could start 80,000 years ahead of schedule. It seems to me you're just ignorant and confused.
What's especially funny about this is the claim that the glacial record shows "regular as clockwork" variations. The glaciation records have been published often and openly, and regardless of the level of detail, the only accurate description of the graphs is "chaotic". There's nothing clock-like about it at any scale. There was a bit of a fuss a while back about the detection of a regular "signal" with a 30-million-year wavelength, but that took some sophisticated statistical work to ferret out, and is still considered somewhat hypothetical.
But I suppose this sort of claim is one simple test for whether a writer knows anything at all about the topic. In discussions with scientific quacks, it does often turn out that the quacks use scientific terminology in a way that's consistently different than how it's used by actual scientists. Once you spot these bits of language skew, you can often quickly classify people's expertise within a few sentences.
One of my favorite examples of this is the way that the term "quantum" has entered common speech meaning "a huge quantity", pretty much the opposite of its scientific meaning. And it turns out that there's a trivial language thing that often distinguishes the two uses: the use of the phrase "quantum leap" rather than "quantum jump". However this came about could be a topic for a master's thesis in field linguistics, but it does seem fairly reliable. Scientists say "quantum jump" and mean the smallest possible change. Non-scientists say "quantum leap" and mean a very large change. Thus, I recently ran across a claim of a "quantum leap in annual income" in a specific population (of financial investment types). By this the writer did not mean an increase of $0.01, the quantum of the US money system; they meant income that had more than doubled. This was signalled by the use of the word "leap" rather than "jump".
News flash: for commercial air flights, all air traffic controllers and pilots are required to speak English.
Well, maybe, if by "English" you mean a language with only a few hundred words and extremely restricted syntax. It's a subset smaller than the language spoken by most British and American 5-year-olds.
And I've seen it pointed out that most of the "content" words in the aviation subset of English are nearly identical to their French and Spanish equivalents. But the phonetics are more like English, or maybe the midpoint between English and Spanish. It doesn't sound very much like French, except when spoken by native speakers of French.
Of course, the airlines do tend to give preference to people with a better than legal minimum English proficiency. They also like to have people in the cockpit who are fluent speakers of the native languages at both ends of a flight. This can be useful in emergency situations.
What we can look forward to, though, is a future of remote-control of airplanes, in which the communication is outsourced to minimum-wage workers in the cheapest part of the world, who have mostly never been in an airplane. The military is pioneering this right now. Then it'll then take decades for the companies to figure out that this isn't working very well ...
... isn't it the same as a newspaper reporting on local crime?
No, because it's done via computer. One of the general rules is that no matter how well something is understood, and how much settled law or custom there is on a topic, as soon as a computer gets involved, all this is forgotten, and everything has to be discussed (and sometimes fought to the death) from scratch.
We've been through this process a zillion times, every time some traditional activity involves a computer for the first time. The traditional metaphors don't work, because the mere presence of a computer cancels all human memory, and everything we knew must be relearned.
Its not that Congress is truly outraged about Amazon invading privacy. They're outraged they have competition in privacy invasion.
More likely, they're upset that Amazon's response to Congress's demand for a copy of the information was to send them the price list for various classes of information. Congress wants to get that information for free (like they do now from google); they don't want to be treated like an ordinary corporate customer who pays for information about you.
I wish more Americans knew that their history started well before the arrival of the Pilgrims. Sigh.
Yeah; there's a lot that hasn't reached the public mythology. Some decades ago, I read an interesting article about the Portuguese fishing industry's post-Columbus explorations. Part of the story was quotes from trip records in 1500, describing a North American coastline with a village every mile or so, and lots of the local people out at sea, fishing. The records from 1520, however, described a coastline nearly devoid of human settlements, and very few local boats coming out to greet them. In those 20 years, nearly everyone along the coast had died.
Another bit of interesting history is that by 1520, the Portuguese fishermen understood the "North Atlantic Gyre". They routinely sailed southwest to the Canaries and Cape Verde Islands, then caught the westward North Equatorial Current across to the West Indies, where they turned northwest. They then sailed up along the Bahamas and the North American coast to Nova Scotia, catching fish and preserving them in salt. Then they sailed across to the Azores and northern Spain, and south to home. They understood that this was much faster than sailing clockwise. Modern North Americans generally give Ben Franklin credit for discovering the big Gyre, but the Portuguese were using it 250 years earlier. Some of the ships' logs are still available in Portuguese and Spanish archives.
... In one of my early math course (100 level), I remember have an overbearing wish for the teacher to just hand me all of the future homework, and a copy of the final exam, and let me finish it in a week or two, ...
Heh. I had a similar situation in my senior year in college, which triggered a small change in the university's rules. At the end of the first semester, I was only one credit short of the count needed to graduate, and I'd satisfied all the prereqs for a B.A. in math -- except one. I hadn't taken the differential-equations course, which was specifically required for a math degree. And I couldn't take it, because there was a university rule that if you took a course and got an A or B grade, you couldn't take any of its prerequisites for credit. I'd taken number of physics courses that required DiffEq, and gotten A's in all of them, so I couldn't take that last course required for the math degree.
The math profs thought this was quite funny, but the administration wasn't amused. My advisor suggested I take the class's final exam that was coming up, and see what grade I'd get. The instructor agreed, I took the final, and got a B. The math profs went to the administration and "suggested" a change in the rule. They told me that their threat that got cooperation was that they'd testify on my behalf in my lawsuit to get a refund for my 3.5 years of tuition, since my "advanced knowledge" plus the rules precluded my ever getting a math degree there. The class was added to my record, with a "passing" grade, and I left to go to graduate school. I think the admins were happy to see me go. Then I went into computing, where I don't think I've ever seen a differential equation.
I suppose the relevancy to this discussion is that, contrary to the original charge that such problems are due to "teacher unions", in this case the faculty was firmly on my side, and the problem was clearly caused by "management" policies. It's not unusual for organizational rules to have edge cases with perverse effects like this. There probably aren't too many high-school graduates (in the US) who have learned much about differential equations.
Of course, you'd think that a sensible rule might be of the form: If you pay a nominal fee, you can take the final test(s) for a course, and if you get some specific grade or better, you get credit for the course. I think some colleges actually do have an approach like this, but I don't know specific examples.
also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read.
This may or not be true, but it ignores the fact that people learn in different ways, and different forms of teaching benefit different subjects and different skills classes differently.
Hmm ... I'm a bit puzzled by two people saying that. It seems to me that "The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read" is a clear (if humorous ;-) acknowledgement that there are at least two styles of learning (listening and reading), and that some people are better with one approach than the other. Why would you say that "it ignores" this, when it so clearly states it as true?
Of course, it does gloss over the well-known fact that there are also more than two learning styles. But the quip clearly wasn't intended as a summary of all knowledge of learning styles; it was just a cute way of stating that the number of styles is greater than one.
I found it interesting that one reply was from someone who prefers classroom lectures and finds them faster than reading. I can sorta see this, at least with a poorly-written textbook. But my experience is that I can read much faster than anyone can comfortably talk, and can easily get through the typical transcript of an hour lecture in 10 to 15 minutes. I usually get better understanding from the transcript, because I can easily pause to think about something or look up a definition or whatever, and I can skip quickly over the parts that I already know.
But I'd acknowledge that this might not be the best approach for everyone. I spent some time learning to "skim", and I can understand why someone who hasn't invested time learning this skill might find reading slower than listening to a voice. But even then, unless the student can easily interrupt the speaker to ask questions, a recorded lecture can be easier than a live lecture. Many people are unwilling to hold back a whole room full of listeners to ask their dumb questions, but a recording can easily be paused while you look up definitions or whatever.
Anyway, I wasn't saying that my way is the only way. I was saying pretty much the opposite: One teacher's way isn't the only way that's best for every student. Sitting in a classroom seat listening to a lecture on something I already knew well wasn't the best for me. A good educational system would acknowledge the differences in learning styles, and not hold a student back by forcing them all to use an approach that's suboptimal for many of the students. This is something that our current school system isn't good at, and it's one of the things that online education can help with (if done right).
Well, I'd suggest that "featherbedding" doesn't really require a union or any other such organization.
My high school didn't have a teachers' union. But I ran into a problem when, in my sophomore year, I decided to learn some math. By around Xmas, I'd gone through all the math texts that were available from the math teachers. Then, when I asked them for advice and help in getting more, I was told that I "wasn't ready for such advanced texts" as basic calculus. In talking to them, it was pretty clear that they were unhappy with me, and I got a real feeling that it was because I'd just made all their "advanced" classes useless (to me).
But I had some friends at a nearby college, so I arranged for them to find more math books that I could borrow. Some came from their profs, some from the math department's library. I also verified that there are other US high schools that teach calculus classes; this didn't endear me to my teachers, either.
Actually, the organizational problems didn't end there. A couple of years later, I found myself at a nearby college, where the math dept offered me "advanced placement" into 2nd-year calculus. It rapidly became obvious that I knew the material better than the prof did. Trying to convince the department to let me transfer to a class where I would learn something was pointless, so I wasted my time getting past that and a few other "pre-req" classes that I had to take despite already knowing the material.
It's easy to interpret all of this as a case of teachers blocking a bright kid's advancement, because the kid is making the teachers look unnecessary. And I had any number of discussions of the topic with other kids with an "attitude problem" similar to mine.
I also eventually ran across a clever explanation: The classroom lecture is the best method developed so far to teach students who can't read. That does describe a large fraction of the US college student population, of course, so the lecturers are still needed for them. But for the rest of us, regardless of the presence of unions, we're still likely to run into blockades that force us to sit still while the instructors work for their pay.
Since then, I have occasionally wondered whether my getting involved in Internet software development will eventually have any effect on this general problem. If so, don't make the mistake of thinking it was accidental. The topic at hand has been discussed behind the scenes, at least by a few of us. Online "classes" are just one of the attempts to alleviate such problems. There are many students in the world who don't have local access to good teachers, but who do know how to read. I'm one net.developer who isn't very sympathetic with teachers who try to block students' access to information.
Hey, you're right! Too bad I posted that message; I'd have given you a "funny" mod for that reply. ;-)
(Hmmm ... I wonder what the technical term is for that bit of circular logic.)
Actually, it might just be an excellent example of Poe's Law. There don't seem to be any real cues that it's satire or serious, so different people interpret it differently. This is probably more a sign of the readers' mindsets than a comment on the message itself.
And those of us who understand this are presumably examples of the third possibility: a "meta" viewpoint that reads it as both serious and satire simultaneously.
I found myself in a real quandary: Should I post this, or should I give the author another "Funny" mod? Maybe I should first see if I want to reply (seriously or jokingly) to any other posts? Nah ...
Well, yeah, but in that case, the OP couldn't have used it, and would have no basis for the complaint:
Damn. I have to type four numbers now instead of a domain name to get to my torrents.
I mean, it's common for /. denizens to not bother reading TFA. But this person seems to be posting a complaint about needing to do something that wouldn't even work. Would a /. reader be dumb enough to complain about something without trying it to see if it's even feasible?
I wonder when the Kindle for iPhone app was designed/started. It could potentially be prior art here.
Well, apparently amazon thinks it's all valid. I did a quick google of "in-app purchase", and on the first page of hits was a report that the kindle iPhone app no longer lets you buy from the kindle store. You have to either buy via Apple's store (and then Apple gets 30% of the price), or you can use the browser. That's sufficiently complex (i.e., more than just one or two clicks) that most non-geek users will probably give up).
The folks at amazon.com have gotta be a bit annoyed by this.
I wonder if the patent would cover an "in-app purchase" from the kindle store on an actual kindle? Lots of apps on non-Apple systems have implemented "digital commerce", probably without those companies applying for patents. With the new "first-to-file" patent rules, could Apple succeed at outlawing online purchases by any non-Apple software on non-Apple systems? That seems absurd, but absurdity isn't a recognized legal concept, and first-to-file does seem like an intent to explicitly implement such takeovers of common practice by a single company.
I haven't bought a kindle, partly due to the story about amazon reaching out and deleting books that customers had purchased, so I can't easily test any of this myself.
Non-computer people place very little value on having an open ecosystem. If you are not a programmer you won't be writing your own apps so having an open system is worth very little.
Oh, I dunno; I suspect you could explain it easily to most people with the canonical auto analogy: Would you consider buying a car if it were impossible to buy any accessories or spare parts from anyone but the auto maker's dealers? Yes, some people do buy everything from their auto dealer. But most people understand that making this mandatory is basically a way to make you pay a lot more money. Who'd want to be restricted to buying, say, new tires only from the dealer?
I'd guess such simple example could easily get across to all but the real dummies why they should support an open market for add-ons of any sort.
Hmmm ... When I try 194.71.107.15, I get a blank page, but depiraatbaai.be works just fine, and even gets me The Pirate Bay's main page in English. DNS here tells me that 194.71.107.15 is the IP address of depiraatbaai.be, so you'd think they'd work the same. Both of these were pasted directly into a browser's address widget, so it's not a problem with HTTP_REFERER or something like that. Anyone know what's going on here? Has some other court (or an ISP's management ;-) decided to look at the HTTP header and block GET commands that don't include a FQDN?
That seems far to sophisticated for any court (or ISP management ;-).
You perfectly illustrated why patents are evil: it is impossible to avoid violating them, you can only wait to see if anyone sues you.
This has been a growing problem with copyright, too, especially during the past couple of decades as society's information has moved online. You can see this clearly in music, where what used to be a routine "performance" can lead to prosecution as a copyright violation.
One way I've found to express it is to ask: If I have a tune in my head, and want to perform it, how can I discover whether it's copyrighted, and if so, who owns the copyright? I've asked reps of a few music publishers this question, and their basic answer (told with a straight face, as far as I can tell) is that I should buy a copy of everything they've ever printed, and search it for the tune.
There is a certain lack of practicality to this, of course, but the only current alternative is to play your music in public, and see if anyone sues you.
We are at the point where we could actually provide a music lookup site, which would look up a fragment of melody, and tell you what published music contains something similar. Yes, there are technical challenges, especially with the variability of all forms of music notation, but they're probably solvable. But the problem is that the database behind such a lookup would itself be a clear violation of copyright, since it would have to contain a representation of every piece of music ever published, and no publisher would agree to having their published works in your database. The only legal way to read their music is from a copy of their publication which you have purchased.
So with both patent and copyright, we have a situation where almost anything you or I do (i.e., create or perform) is possibly a violation of a patent and/or copyright, but we have no way of discovering this except by doing it and waiting to see if someone sues us.
Or we can just refrain from ever creating or performing anything. But even that may not be safe. Consider that corporations are taking out patents on pieces of DNA. This probably means that we can't have children without violating a patent. But it's potentially even worse: Our normal cell production to heal injuries or grow new hair/skin could be a DNA patent violation. We don't know; we can only wait for the courts to decide.
But McCarthy underestimated the communist infiltration of the US government.
What are you talking about? What communist infiltration
This can be explained by understanding that in American politics, "communist", "socialist" and "liberal" are synonyms to a large fraction of the population. To them, the US government has long been full of communists with names like Ted (and John) Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, and Barack Obama. To some, Bill Clinton was a communist/socialist/whatever.
There's an old tradition in politics everywhere of labelling your enemies with whatever the current scare-words may be. It's only a matter of time until "terrorist" is added to the above list of synonyms in American political speech.
The book has a mere 1112 pages, and a quick check at amazon.com shows that the "typical pages" have the usual margins, plus lots of the white space that techie book designers love these days.
So there's no way it can be "definitive". Or "complete". For something as massively "featureful" as drupal, it can barely qualify as informative.
So c'mon; pull the other one ...
Mirror.
Yeah. Actually, it's fairly common to install such transceivers on the glass in front of the rear-view mirror, since that's a place that doesn't block any more of your vision, and has good contact with the toll-booth electronics. So to be useful, they'll probably have to mandate that you install them in a spot with a clear view of the interior of your car, and if it can see you, it will inevitably block some of what you can see while driving.
It's not like the government mandated that a unique number be attached to each vehicle by which it could be tracked or anything...
Dunno whether you were writing tongue-in-cheek, but we might point out explicitly that this has been done. Readers who aren't familiar with the topic might try googling "RFID in tires" and reading a few of the articles.
So if you've bought a new car (or got new tires) in the US recently, your car can be tracked by RFID transceivers that you drive past. How much of this data is actually being collected doesn't seem to be much documented. There's an obvious problem in that it does require installing the RFID equipment throughout the road system, and it will probably be difficult to keep such a massive installation a secret for long. Today, you are probably mostly tracked this way when you pass a toll station on a major highway, or enter/exit parking lots of specific organizations that have decided to collect the data. But the installed base of RFID gadgetry on roads will probably slowly expand in the future.
Well, I often find it interesting and useful when people point out that the topic being discussed isn't actually new, and other useful discussions can be found if you look for them. I wasn't trying to stop the discussion; I was mostly just reacting to the claim that this is some sort of new thought. Maybe it was new for the writer, but it's hardly new for anyone who's read much history.
This is much of the reason that some people worry so much about climate change. As the "deniers" like to point out, there have been lots of climate changes in the past, and we're still here. Yeah, but when you can find information about the times of change, you also find lots of wars, famines, deaths, etc.
So reading a claim that this is some sort of new correlation that has just been discovered is yet another indication that someone hasn't learned from history, probably from not being aware of the history.
Anyway, go continue the discussion ...
For example, the past couple decades of local wars in the Sahel are conventionally attributed to the spreading of the desert. People there have faced the choice of staying home and starving, or moving south, where the land is already at carrying capacity and the people are prepared to defend their barely-livable land from the armed refugees from up north.
Similarly, the Viking excursions are typically explained by the increasing population in Scandinavia (and the first significant adoption of agriculture there) in the 8th and 9th centuries, followed by decades in which the crops mostly failed. Again, the Norse had the choice of staying home and starving, or sailing away and looking for better places to live. But all those places were already inhabited, so it was really a choice of starve at home or fight abroad.
So what's new about this story? Isn't it just a repeat of much of our history? Or at least, it's a repeat of our explanations for much of our history.