So you wannabe coders keep saying, all of javascript is documented on google searches, its so easy to copy paste those functions and input your own field names and just seem them work.
Well, I've lately been experimenting with HTML5 canvases, which involves a lot of JS, and I've found that it isn't always quite that easy. Yes, there are zillions of examples that do cute things in a canvas. But they all seem to be made up of lots of hard-coded numbers that aren't explained anywhere in any coherent fashion. So to use them to draw your figures, you spend long hours tweaking the numbers, trying to grok what the relation might be between the numbers and what appears on the screen.
Similarly, there's lots of online HTML5 docs on zillions of sites, but it all seems to involve "handwaving", i.e., it describes what's going on in a "10-km view" fashion, using lots of undefined terms. When you try googling those terms, you find that you're searching through millions of ghits that are mostly about totally unrelated topics that happen to use the same words (with different meanings).
So you try asking in a forum. And you find that there are zillions of HTML5 forums, each of which has maybe 2 or 5 messages per month, and the people (or person;-) there are oh-so-friendly, but don't quite know how to answer your question. You try asking in multiple forums, and it takes forever, due to the fact that people don't like usenet any more; they prefer zillions of forums, each of which has its own GUI that takes days to learn to use effectively.
The "cargo cult" (google it) approach to web programming is widespread. But it can be a recipe for a very long, slow, drawn-out process of coming to some partial understanding of WTF is going on in the code that doesn't quite do what you need, and responds bizarrely to tiny tweaks. Getting downloaded code to do what you need done can take up a rather large chunk of your lifespan. And you are forever plagued by bugs due to your lack of understanding what it does in cases that you haven't tested.
The only way to produce code that actually works correctly is to understand (in every detail, to the bit level) all the things you're working with. Cut-and-paste sounds like a useful idea, but it's much of the reason for the widespread coding disasters that we're plagued with.
Learning to use "New! Improved!" Web tools has a history of being a lot like swimming in molasses. The intro examples look cool, but doing anything even slightly different from the examples tends to lead you down a maze of twisted passages, all alike. So there are reasons to be skeptical of this one, until we've seen some evidence of what it's like, and how much of a time sinkhole learning it will be.
I'm sure the CIA can by this point. It's been known for years that they can resolve a grapefruit sitting on the ground from space, I'd be shocked if they hadn't bettered that by now.
Yeah, if by "resolve" you mean "show as one or two pixels". A common guideline has been that at visual wavelengths, you can't resolve things on the ground to better than about 10 cm, due to atmospheric effects. This is the same phenomenon as stars twinkling, but in the other direction. Resolution is better at IR frequencies, so if the CIA is resolving license plates (or faces) from orbit, that'd be how they're doing it.
But it's a lot more likely that they're doing it with flying cameras inside the atmosphere. There are some really small cameras now, smaller and better than the camera in your cell phone, and they can be carried by the tiny flying thingies that geeks in various labs have been building. Imagine something about the size of a hummingbird or dragonfly, with a downward-pointing camera that weighs a few grams, plus a cell-phone chip about the same size, flying about a km up. It'd be really hard to spot such a gadget as it passes over your neighborhood.
There are a number of videos of some impressively small flying remote-controlled toys at youtube. You'll be able to buy one fairly soon.
But even IRC has prior art, the "imaginary friends" of millions of children throughout history.
I've read a fair amount of science fiction over the years, and whenever I read about interesting aliens (not just humans with fake ears or brows as in the movies), I've often imagined what it would be like giving them a tour of wherever I was at the time. I'd guess that many sci-fi readers have had fun thinking of the reactions of neighbors to a visiting 8-foot insectoid or 100-kg millipede or cute cat-girl or Deinonychus or Pierson's Puppeteer walking down the street, stopping to talk, etc.
I guess when we engage in such daydreams now, we'll have to pay Bill Gates his royalties.
... if i could cut text from a Word cv paste into openoffice manipulate the data and save again in Word format to send to a client (many mandate submission in word format) and garantee it looked the same as it did on my screen I would do it tomorrow.
Well, I'd call BS on that. I've seen plenty of cases where you can't cut from Word doc and paste it into a Word doc,without its appearance changing. And if the source Word doc is more than a few revs old, you sometimes can't even load it into your all-updates current Word without something being garbled.
Word isn't 100% compatible with itself a few revs ago, and pretty much all the routine Word users I know are constantly complaining of that. So saying that you insist on using Word because it's not 100% compatible with another word-processing app is merely PR that's not credible on its face.
A more accurate way to say it is "No two word-processing programs are 100% compatible, not with each other, and not even with themselves a few revs back. So I'll just stick to the IBM/Microsoft axis until everyone else implements 100% compatibility. I know that'll never happen, so I can stick with IBM/MS indefinitely."
How many people are still not using HTML5 browsers?
Or, for that matter, how many people even have a browser that doesn't understand HTML5?
A few months ago, while testing some HTML5 stuff (canvases, etc.), I got curious about how many browsers I could find that did/didn't handle it. I have an even dozen browsers on my Macbook, half a dozen on my two linux boxes (and wonder where I can find more), several on a FreeBSD box that I have an account on, two on my G1 phone (the builtin Browser and Opera Mini), plus the browser on my wife's iPhone. I tested my HTML5 against all of them, and they all handled it without problems.
So I don't have any non-HTML5 browsers in this collection. I didn't consciously choose to do this. So I wonder how many non-HTML5 browsers are actually available.
Actually, my wife has an iMac with a Windows (NT) VM installed, and it has IE6. I should try it; I'm guessing that it doesn't handle HTML5. But I could be wrong again; it might understand HTML5 but intentionally render parts of it incorrectly.
Everything we use can be theoretically used maliciously, such as BitTorrent (pirating), Instant Messaging/Chat (pedophiles), Social Networking (rioting), etc.
This isn't just theoretical. Not long ago, I was among a crowd of probably several hundred people who got Facebook and Twitter messages alerting us to a gathering at a local square that's a transport and commercial hub (Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts). At least several dozen of us grabbed our tools and descended on the square at the appointed time, and organized an unscheduled contra dance out in the open. I took along my accordion, if you can imagine! The "cell" member that sent me the message showed up with her fiddle. Another fellow even brought a string bass. Some passers-by gave us strange, puzzled, or disapproving looks. Others joined in.
This is the sort of thing that our citizenry can be enticed into by this newfangled Social Networking and Instant Messaging stuff. I can easily believe all the other sorts of social things that it's leading to.
So I'd say that it's good that we're warning readers about the consequences of such communication technologies. And participants should be aware that the central message passing sites on the Internet almost certainly have a record of events such as this one, though they may not (yet) know exactly which of the message recipients actually participated. But the fact that we're on the organizers lists tells organizations like Facebook and Twitter that we're associated with such activities.
I do wonder whether they know I have an accordion (and I know how to use it). I should probably assume that they do know this.
It's a BFD if any of us "little people" do it. Apple? Not so much.
Oh, I dunno; remember when Leona Helmsley said "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes"? She lived to regret that comment. Openly challenging the authorities to prosecute you for crimes isn't a always good way to stay out of jail.
OTOH, Warren Buffet has been openly criticizing the US government's tax policies by saying that he pays a much smaller percentage than his employees do. So far, nobody in the US government seems to be trying to challenge him or charge him with tax evasion, because they're pretty sure that he's not talking about criminal tax evasion, and he is likely able to prove in court that his low tax rate is legal.
It could be "interesting" if it turns out that everything Apple's people have been accused of turns out to be legal for corporate employees to do.
Heh. I realized as I typed that I was, in effect, trolling. It's true in an important sense that dinosaurs (and thus birds) are reptiles. But this is true in the same sense that humans are fish.
As others in the discussion have pointed out, more and more recent taxonomies dispense with all forms of the term "reptile" (as was done long ago with "fish), on the grounds that "reptile" (and "fish") is a common-English word describing a set of species that is not monophyletic. Thus, "reptile" (and "fish") should no longer be used as a taxonomic term, and recent taxonomies have substituted other term that are monophyletic.
So, yes, you can classify birds and dinosaurs as reptiles. But that's not a scientific classification any more; it's an informal "plain English" classification with no actual scientific meaning.
Similarly, biologists will say "Yes, of course humans are fish", since we are in the clade that includes the critters called fish. But they tend not to do so outside of scientific circles, because people give them a funny look and treat them as idiots. They understand that "fish" isn't a scientific term any more. The term "reptile" is slowly reaching the same situation. But in this case, TFA (and a number of wikipedia pages) haven't yet caught on and abandoned taxonomic use of the term. Give them another decade. It took that long for the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs to replace the earlier classifications.
All this is, however, a growing source of geek humor in some circles. And debating it serves the same humorous social function as, say, debating whether Pluto is a planet. Fun, yes, but ultimately silly. Such classifications are always susceptible to modification as we learn more. And there's a long list of terms that have been abandoned by scientists, but are still in use in common speech.
(Just last week I heard a use of the term "impetus" as a technical term, not a metaphor. It's going onto 400 years since Newton and Galileo explained that "impetus" was wrong, it's "inertia" and "momentum" that the universe implements. But the general population, even the educated part, knows nothing of this.;-)
I know it's bad form to RTFA, but you should at least take a look at figure 1.
My main thought when I first saw that diagram was "Oh, my!" Then I mentally shrugged at such a radically over-simplified, (and quite possibly incorrect) taxonomy tree, and continued reading.
The main comment many biologists would make about arguing about the relationship between the Reptilia, the Dinosauria, and the Mammalia is "Further research is needed". It's fairly common to just draw a 3-way split. Yes, this is unlikely, but it is the best way to say "We really don't yet have the evidence to resolve this into two 2-way splits".
Of course, some people don't accept this, say that 3-way splits are highly unlikely, and insist on whatever order of splitting they personally guess happened. This doesn't change the fact that we really can't reliably resolve this split yet. Or if we can, maybe someone should give a citation for the evidence. Most of us haven't read about such evidence, and consider a claim that (for example) dinosaurs and birds are a branch of the reptiles to be merely a guess with no supporting evidence. Maybe mammals are closer to reptiles than are the dinosaurs, but that's also a guess with no supporting evidence. All three of the possible branching trees are possible, based on what is generally known.
So if you claim that birds (i.e., dinosaurs) are reptiles, can you give us some citations for the published evidence? They citations should probably be for something we can find online, because if it's behind a paywall (such as an annual subscription), we probably aren't going to pay the money to read it.
Yeah, and there are blond(e) Scots, too. In both countries, the presence of the stereotype hair color of the other country is generally attributed to invaders in previous centuries. Actually, the people doing DNA analysis have already concluded that there are no statistically significant genetic differences between the populations, or between populations in the north-western half of Europe. The perceived differences are attributable to confirmation bias (and use of cosmetics;-).
I give any js task to my nubile red headed Scandinavian assistant...
That red hair has gotta come from a bottle, because everyone knows that Scandinavians are all blond(e).
Maybe (s)he's actually Irish or Scottish, and just pretending to be Scandinavian?
(I have ancestors from all the above areas, so I can get away with mocking the stereotypes of all of them. I couldn't find a way to also mock my French ancestors in this reply, but maybe next time...)
Yeah, but have you ever heard the weather people use that term?;-)
Maybe we should try to teach them a few more weather-related words. Of course, we'd need some precise definitions. "A lotta water falling" isn't quite good enough. Maybe a fall of > 2cm per hour could be the definition of a category-1 deluge. Irene definitely fit that definition around here.
60% of people were preparing for winds, not water.
This has been a weather terminology problem for a long time. Hurricanes are defined by wind speed, not by precipitation amount. There are a lot of "tropical" storms (and smaller-scale temperate-zone thunderstorms) that produce a lot of precipitation, but we don't seem to have any standard names for those storms. Wind and water can both do a lot of damage, and it would make sense to have well-known names for both types of storms.
Some years ago, my wife and I lived in Florida for a few years. While we were there, there was a humongous storm that hit most of the state, and over 10 to 12 hours dropped 15 to 20 inches of rain on most of it. I have vivid memories of people canoeing down the streets of Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach the next day. The extensive canal systems in those cities couldn't handle the load. But the media paid little attention to the storm, because it wasn't a "hurricane", or even a "tropical storm". There was very little wind, and the rain mostly fell straight down in a deluge. It did serious damage all over the state. But the media had no name for it other than "rainstorm", so it got ignored.
OTOH, the Everglades welcomed it, and really benefitted from the soaking.;-)
It's funny that we have "blizzard" for water in the form of ice, but we have no similar name for huge amounts of liquid water falling straight down.
Its like they forgot that the biggest problem with Katrina was that NOLA is BELOW sea level.
Once again we read the refrain that "they" were incompetent with Katrina. In reality, there were extensive studies by the Army Corps of Engineers predicting exactly how the levees would fail. There was a massive emergency-response exercise in 2004 called Hurricane Pam (google it) that showed in detail just how prepared the emergency services were and how things would fail. The problem wasn't that anyone "forgot". The problem was that, when the agencies involved sent the reports to Congress, and asked for funds to fix the problems, Congress turned down the funding requests.
The NOLA/Katrina disaster was predicted in great detail. They only thing they didn't know was the date. It happened because Congress decided to cut funding for required infrastructure maintenance. They didn't forget; they didn't do it out of ignorance. They voted against the funding with full knowledge of what would happen.
Actually, there was at least one good bit of humor about Katrina. The Religious Right folks tried to tell everyone that the disaster was God's punishment for the many sins of New Orleans residents. A lot of people replied to this by asking "So why didn't God punish the French Quarter?" It seems that the French Quarter is mostly (slightly) above sea level. Anyway, the religious people gave up on that explanation fairly quickly.;-)
The 'nothing to hide' argument is perfectly valid when you're talking about a voluntary service that you have chosen to sign up for,...
Well, yes and no. One problem with this reasoning is that people don't always understand what they're signing up for. They learn when the "voluntary" information about them is misused against them, but by then it's too late.
The common situation, which is part of the "real name" issue with G+, is that names aren't unique. You may not have anything to hide, but if the database confuses your data with the data for other people with a similar name, some of those unrelated people may very well have something that you wouldn't want treated as part of your information.
This isn't a hypothetical problem. Law enforcement of all sorts has a long history of arresting people with a name (and some physical features such as being male or black) that is similar. People have been convicted and spent time in prison for crimes committed by someone else with a similar name. The US government's "No Fly List" that's supposed to list suspected terrorists has been used to block people with similar names.
So far, nobody seems to have found a viable way of keeping data for exactly one person, and not confusing people with similar identifying characteristics such as name or physical features. Yes, there are methods that might work in a perfect world. But in a world where the checking is typically done by low-paid, barely literate workers, none of the methods have worked too well.
So thinking "I have nothing to hide" may be correct, but seriously naive. History says that the database will be messy and chaotic, and once your data is confused with someone else's, there will be no way to straighten it out within your lifetime (which may be shortened by the mistakes).
Try googling "convicted similar name" or other similar phrases for lots and lots of stories on the topic. You might add your own country or state name for local examples.
You could have left off the first paragraph and provided an informative response.... But you had to preface a useful bit of information with a put-down. Welcome to slashdot where innocent questions are met with derision and insults.
Welcome to humanity. Such behavior wasn't invented here on slashdot. It's the universal response of "experts" to questions from non-experts who are trying to learn something.
Something I learned long ago was to discount such put-downs, and pay attention to whether the arrogant jerk happened to impart useful information while insulting me. If they did, I thank them, and look for their name in future discussions. I they only insulted me and didn't provide any information, I file them in the "ID10T" bin, and try to avoid their comments in the future.
Actually, in some arenas, you see the opposite problem: People sometimes give a "Don't worry your little head about it" answer, and fail to give any useful information while being oh-so-friendly to the n00b. I ran across this a year or so back, when I tried to learn something about drupal. All the forums I found were full of excruciatingly friendly people - who never answered my questions. I eventually gave up and stopped bothering them with my dumb questions. Then I implemented the sites that I was working on, in less time than I'd wasted in trying to figure out whether drupal could help.
I also use Macs a fair amount and I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro. The Mac forums are full of people who are the friendly-but-unhelpful type. You get very familiar with the mantra "It just works", and come to understand that while something may "work" in some fashion, it may not be doing what you're trying to get it to do due to your misunderstanding of what it was designed to do. And the experts are often oh-so-friendly but unable to explain how to achieve the result you're trying for (perhaps by using a different tool that was designed to do what you want), so they just say "It Just Works" in a friendly, reassuring, and very condescending way.
But the insult-without-answer jerk is a lot more common./. is certainly infested with this sort of person. And the two kinds of non-answering people cover most of the human species, in great part because most people won't answer "I don't know", which is usually the correct answer.
But in all too many cases, the best you can find is the insult-while-answering sort of person. In that case, the best approach is to use their information without becoming one of them.
Another possible reason for this is to handle something that the US government is seriously planning to impose on all its ISPs: a requirement that records be kept of every message sent/received by every customer for several years.
Some of the reports of this have tried to be reassuring by telling us that they'll only have to save the source/dest IP addresses, and presumably also the timestamps. But you might try doing a bit of arithmetic: Assuming a minimum database record of only these three 4-byte quantities (for IPv4), i.e., 12 bytes per message. You might ask your ISP for the total number of messages they handle per day. If you can get this info, or you can estimate it from numbers they will provide, multiply it by 12 (for the DB record) and by 365x2 (for two years storage). You might be impressed by the size of the resulting number.
And, of course, the actual DB requirements could well be much higher. It's possible that the regulation may require saving all header info, for some meaning of "header". For TCP, this would be a minimum of 128 bytes per message. And, of course, there would be all the usual DB (or file system) overhead for all these records, which could easily double the resulting numbers.
There are good reasons that nobody has ever actually kept this sort of data, only various running sums. If the non-computer-savvy regulators decide ("for the children") that ISPs must provide this data, this alone means petabyte-per-day databases must come into existence. Every ISP, except maybe your local mom-and-pop Internet service, will need one to meet the traffic tracking requirements.
Similar requirements are being implemented by many other governments around the world.
The point is, expecting a company like Sony to fold with the same speed a Mom and Pop restaurant does after they infect a bunch of their patrons with Salmonella is silly. 99% of the time it doesn't happen like that, and when it does, that's why it's front page news everywhere.
Actually, it's not silly at all. I remember back in the 1990s reading a report by an economics statistician (whose name I've forgotten, of course) who claimed that for the companies for which we have historical records, lifetime and company size have a zero correlation. He used the prototypical "mom-and-pop" corner store as an example, saying that big corporations like General Motors, Pan American World Airways, IBM or Digital are as likely to be gone in N years as that little mom-and-pop that you're thinking of.
Of course, when corporations disappear, it is only occasionally due to bankruptcy, and more often from a merger. But then, when you and I die, it's not always due to internal collapse (heart attack, cancer, etc), but may also be due to being "eaten" by another species (mostly micro-organisms these days). Or killed by one of those large metal-and-plastic predators that inhabit our road/street system.;-)
I wonder if anyone has done another study of business survival lately. There's a lot of mythology about this, and little significant data. Everyone has their favorite theories explaining who some companies succeed and others fail, but rarely do people actually try to test their favorite theories. I know I don't have access to good data on the topic, and dying businesses have good motives to hide their internal states from prying outsiders.
If a court rules that a company can own an API, then everybody's software becomes infringing!
This isn't a new concern. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I worked (as a "consultant") on a number of projects at Digital. One of the discussions that came up occasionally was why DEC's unix systems were all based on BSD, and not Sys/V. It was well-known that DEC had Sys/V running on their hardware internally, but for some reason they didn't want to sell it.
The explanation that came up every time was that the Digital lawyers had nixed the use of Sys/V and other AT&T code for the same reason that we're discussing now: The run-time libraries all contained AT&T copyright notices in every routine, so if you linked to those libraries, your binaries would contain AT&T copyright notices. This included libc, so pretty much all binaries produced on Sys/V contained lots of AT&T copyright notices. There was a very good chance that AT&T would have a legal claim on any software that contained those copyright notices.
The lawyers apparently did point out that the status of these copyright claims in binaries was a legal "gray area" that had never been properly tested in the courts. Their professional legal advice was to let someone else be the sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hguinea pig who paid the legal fees to fight AT&T on the issue. Until that was decided, using AT&T binary libraries was legally too risky, and since the BSD libraries were not such a legal threat, DEC should stick with BSD, which did the job just fine.
Disclaimer: I never personally talked to any of these purported DEC lawyers to verify this story. But it was widely believed by all the DEC insiders that I talked to. I'd imagine that the same sort of discussions must be going on inside a lot of current companies with respect to java. I'd also guess that a lot of companies lawyers are advising that their clients minimize the use of java until the courts sort out the legal issues, just to be on the safe side. Why risk your company's profits on a language that may be legally incumbered in ways that are unknowable today, when there are similar languages (python, perl, etc.) that the geeks say are just as good and are legally safe to use..
(Yeah, I know I'm risking a language flame war by that last comment. Hopefully the mods here will mark them OT.;-)
You're leaving with a ship full of people who want to be explorers; you're ending with a ship full of people who are doomed to be explorers.
This sounds like what all migrants, refugees, etc. have done throughout human history. (Most of) my ancestors left Europe and moved to North America, thus dooming their descendants to an unknown and unknowable life in a strange land of strange people, far off across a large ocean.
Of course, now we can buy a plane ticket and be in those ancestors' homeland in a few hours. But they couldn't have known that would happen a century or more in the future.
That should've been a "less than 10%"... stupid HTML thing
Heh. That's because the people who designed HTML viewed < and > as "unused" ASCII characters.;-)
(Actually, joking aside, the decision to use < and > for markup tags was done by the SGML crowd, well before HTML ever came into existence. HTML is just a special-case subset of SGML, really, and was chosen mostly because it was an easy way to make text that could be "flowed" to fit whatever screen it was being displayed on. So don't blame Tim Berners-Lee and his buddies at CERN for this unfortunate -- to us geeks -- choice of delimiter characters. Blame the earlier SGML crowd.)
Now I'll go away and wait for the OT mods to this comment...
This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago:...
Yeah, and the topic started showing up in various webcomics in early July. (That thread goes on for several weeks, with occasional 1-shot comics, before the author runs out of jokes on the topic.).
It's a bit surprising that it took so long for it to show up on slashdot. Or maybe the earlier submissions were rejected for unknown reasons.
Maybe because it has become part of a critical service ? ie call 911 ?
It's easy enough to find thousands of discussions of just this scenario, by googling the obvious key phrases. But I haven't actually found any clear evidence that courts have dealt with this in a coherent fashion. The obvious reasoning would be that, before we had cell phones, a medical emergency that led to a death would just be an "Act of God", but once we had technology to prevent the death, intentionally blocking a 911 call would become negligent homicide or something similar. But the question arises: What have the courts actually said? (And is calling 911 a case of Interfering With God's Will?;-)
I've been told by a number of people who operate concert halls and other such public gathering places that they stopped blocking cell phones out of fear of just such an emergency scenario. But they haven't told me about actual prosecutions of people who did such things. It'd be useful to know whether this is an unfounded fear or not. Can businesses intentionally block communication channels in their vicinity, or will they be held legally responsible for the results of interfering with a 911 call?
Are there any lawyers that could give us pointers to the appropriate laws and/or court decisions in a case like this? It could be really handy to be able to trot out a list of links in such discussions, to tell people what the current state of the law is.
"They made us choose between people's ability to use their mobile phones (and) their constitutional right to get from point A to point B."
-- quote from BART...
It's lawyerin' time.
Well, maybe not. I'd guess that the reason they decided to leave the cell towers alive during later protests is that some lawyers already talked to them. The standard scenario to bring up in a case of cell-tower shutdowns is: What if there's a medical emergence such as a heart attack or stroke, people pull out their phones to call 911, can't get service, and the victim dies? As soon as people learn that you shut down the local cell phone system intentionally, they'll fire suit against you before the story even hits Google News.
It's trivially easy to find discussions of just this scenario. Just google the obvious phrases, and you'll find thousands of stories about it. Performance venues like concert halls tried blocking cell phones for a while, but hardly any of them still do this out of fear of just this sort of medical event.
BART's management probably just got it though their thick skulls that they will be held responsible for deaths that result from their blocking cell phones. Free speech has nothing to do with it; it's more a fear of being charged with criminal negligence that leads to deaths.
(Though I'm a bit doubtful about the use of the term "negligence" to refer to intentionally closing down a public communication channel. Usually "negligence" means failing to do something that you should have, not intentionally doing something that you shouldn't.;-)
BART operates those cell towers that it turned off.
Hmmm... the message just above yours on my screen says:
The cell phone antennas in the BART tunnels and platforms are own and operated by the carriers, who pay a hefty sum of cash to BART as rent.
It sure sounds like one of you two must be lying. I wonder how we'd learn who is telling us the truth.
(It can be sorta funny when two adjacent replies assert opposite things with a tone of authority. Usually the conflicting claims are at least separated by a few other messages.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
So you wannabe coders keep saying, all of javascript is documented on google searches, its so easy to copy paste those functions and input your own field names and just seem them work.
Well, I've lately been experimenting with HTML5 canvases, which involves a lot of JS, and I've found that it isn't always quite that easy. Yes, there are zillions of examples that do cute things in a canvas. But they all seem to be made up of lots of hard-coded numbers that aren't explained anywhere in any coherent fashion. So to use them to draw your figures, you spend long hours tweaking the numbers, trying to grok what the relation might be between the numbers and what appears on the screen.
Similarly, there's lots of online HTML5 docs on zillions of sites, but it all seems to involve "handwaving", i.e., it describes what's going on in a "10-km view" fashion, using lots of undefined terms. When you try googling those terms, you find that you're searching through millions of ghits that are mostly about totally unrelated topics that happen to use the same words (with different meanings).
So you try asking in a forum. And you find that there are zillions of HTML5 forums, each of which has maybe 2 or 5 messages per month, and the people (or person ;-) there are oh-so-friendly, but don't quite know how to answer your question. You try asking in multiple forums, and it takes forever, due to the fact that people don't like usenet any more; they prefer zillions of forums, each of which has its own GUI that takes days to learn to use effectively.
The "cargo cult" (google it) approach to web programming is widespread. But it can be a recipe for a very long, slow, drawn-out process of coming to some partial understanding of WTF is going on in the code that doesn't quite do what you need, and responds bizarrely to tiny tweaks. Getting downloaded code to do what you need done can take up a rather large chunk of your lifespan. And you are forever plagued by bugs due to your lack of understanding what it does in cases that you haven't tested.
The only way to produce code that actually works correctly is to understand (in every detail, to the bit level) all the things you're working with. Cut-and-paste sounds like a useful idea, but it's much of the reason for the widespread coding disasters that we're plagued with.
Learning to use "New! Improved!" Web tools has a history of being a lot like swimming in molasses. The intro examples look cool, but doing anything even slightly different from the examples tends to lead you down a maze of twisted passages, all alike. So there are reasons to be skeptical of this one, until we've seen some evidence of what it's like, and how much of a time sinkhole learning it will be.
I'm sure the CIA can by this point. It's been known for years that they can resolve a grapefruit sitting on the ground from space, I'd be shocked if they hadn't bettered that by now.
Yeah, if by "resolve" you mean "show as one or two pixels". A common guideline has been that at visual wavelengths, you can't resolve things on the ground to better than about 10 cm, due to atmospheric effects. This is the same phenomenon as stars twinkling, but in the other direction. Resolution is better at IR frequencies, so if the CIA is resolving license plates (or faces) from orbit, that'd be how they're doing it.
But it's a lot more likely that they're doing it with flying cameras inside the atmosphere. There are some really small cameras now, smaller and better than the camera in your cell phone, and they can be carried by the tiny flying thingies that geeks in various labs have been building. Imagine something about the size of a hummingbird or dragonfly, with a downward-pointing camera that weighs a few grams, plus a cell-phone chip about the same size, flying about a km up. It'd be really hard to spot such a gadget as it passes over your neighborhood.
There are a number of videos of some impressively small flying remote-controlled toys at youtube. You'll be able to buy one fairly soon.
But even IRC has prior art, the "imaginary friends" of millions of children throughout history.
I've read a fair amount of science fiction over the years, and whenever I read about interesting aliens (not just humans with fake ears or brows as in the movies), I've often imagined what it would be like giving them a tour of wherever I was at the time. I'd guess that many sci-fi readers have had fun thinking of the reactions of neighbors to a visiting 8-foot insectoid or 100-kg millipede or cute cat-girl or Deinonychus or Pierson's Puppeteer walking down the street, stopping to talk, etc.
I guess when we engage in such daydreams now, we'll have to pay Bill Gates his royalties.
... if i could cut text from a Word cv paste into openoffice manipulate the data and save again in Word format to send to a client (many mandate submission in word format) and garantee it looked the same as it did on my screen I would do it tomorrow.
Well, I'd call BS on that. I've seen plenty of cases where you can't cut from Word doc and paste it into a Word doc,without its appearance changing. And if the source Word doc is more than a few revs old, you sometimes can't even load it into your all-updates current Word without something being garbled.
Word isn't 100% compatible with itself a few revs ago, and pretty much all the routine Word users I know are constantly complaining of that. So saying that you insist on using Word because it's not 100% compatible with another word-processing app is merely PR that's not credible on its face.
A more accurate way to say it is "No two word-processing programs are 100% compatible, not with each other, and not even with themselves a few revs back. So I'll just stick to the IBM/Microsoft axis until everyone else implements 100% compatibility. I know that'll never happen, so I can stick with IBM/MS indefinitely."
How many people are still not using HTML5 browsers?
Or, for that matter, how many people even have a browser that doesn't understand HTML5?
A few months ago, while testing some HTML5 stuff (canvases, etc.), I got curious about how many browsers I could find that did/didn't handle it. I have an even dozen browsers on my Macbook, half a dozen on my two linux boxes (and wonder where I can find more), several on a FreeBSD box that I have an account on, two on my G1 phone (the builtin Browser and Opera Mini), plus the browser on my wife's iPhone. I tested my HTML5 against all of them, and they all handled it without problems.
So I don't have any non-HTML5 browsers in this collection. I didn't consciously choose to do this. So I wonder how many non-HTML5 browsers are actually available.
Actually, my wife has an iMac with a Windows (NT) VM installed, and it has IE6. I should try it; I'm guessing that it doesn't handle HTML5. But I could be wrong again; it might understand HTML5 but intentionally render parts of it incorrectly.
Everything we use can be theoretically used maliciously, such as BitTorrent (pirating), Instant Messaging/Chat (pedophiles), Social Networking (rioting), etc.
This isn't just theoretical. Not long ago, I was among a crowd of probably several hundred people who got Facebook and Twitter messages alerting us to a gathering at a local square that's a transport and commercial hub (Davis Square in Somerville, Massachusetts). At least several dozen of us grabbed our tools and descended on the square at the appointed time, and organized an unscheduled contra dance out in the open. I took along my accordion, if you can imagine! The "cell" member that sent me the message showed up with her fiddle. Another fellow even brought a string bass. Some passers-by gave us strange, puzzled, or disapproving looks. Others joined in.
This is the sort of thing that our citizenry can be enticed into by this newfangled Social Networking and Instant Messaging stuff. I can easily believe all the other sorts of social things that it's leading to.
So I'd say that it's good that we're warning readers about the consequences of such communication technologies. And participants should be aware that the central message passing sites on the Internet almost certainly have a record of events such as this one, though they may not (yet) know exactly which of the message recipients actually participated. But the fact that we're on the organizers lists tells organizations like Facebook and Twitter that we're associated with such activities.
I do wonder whether they know I have an accordion (and I know how to use it). I should probably assume that they do know this.
It's a BFD if any of us "little people" do it. Apple? Not so much.
Oh, I dunno; remember when Leona Helmsley said "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes"? She lived to regret that comment. Openly challenging the authorities to prosecute you for crimes isn't a always good way to stay out of jail.
OTOH, Warren Buffet has been openly criticizing the US government's tax policies by saying that he pays a much smaller percentage than his employees do. So far, nobody in the US government seems to be trying to challenge him or charge him with tax evasion, because they're pretty sure that he's not talking about criminal tax evasion, and he is likely able to prove in court that his low tax rate is legal.
It could be "interesting" if it turns out that everything Apple's people have been accused of turns out to be legal for corporate employees to do.
Heh. I realized as I typed that I was, in effect, trolling. It's true in an important sense that dinosaurs (and thus birds) are reptiles. But this is true in the same sense that humans are fish.
As others in the discussion have pointed out, more and more recent taxonomies dispense with all forms of the term "reptile" (as was done long ago with "fish), on the grounds that "reptile" (and "fish") is a common-English word describing a set of species that is not monophyletic. Thus, "reptile" (and "fish") should no longer be used as a taxonomic term, and recent taxonomies have substituted other term that are monophyletic.
So, yes, you can classify birds and dinosaurs as reptiles. But that's not a scientific classification any more; it's an informal "plain English" classification with no actual scientific meaning.
Similarly, biologists will say "Yes, of course humans are fish", since we are in the clade that includes the critters called fish. But they tend not to do so outside of scientific circles, because people give them a funny look and treat them as idiots. They understand that "fish" isn't a scientific term any more. The term "reptile" is slowly reaching the same situation. But in this case, TFA (and a number of wikipedia pages) haven't yet caught on and abandoned taxonomic use of the term. Give them another decade. It took that long for the reclassification of birds as dinosaurs to replace the earlier classifications.
All this is, however, a growing source of geek humor in some circles. And debating it serves the same humorous social function as, say, debating whether Pluto is a planet. Fun, yes, but ultimately silly. Such classifications are always susceptible to modification as we learn more. And there's a long list of terms that have been abandoned by scientists, but are still in use in common speech.
(Just last week I heard a use of the term "impetus" as a technical term, not a metaphor. It's going onto 400 years since Newton and Galileo explained that "impetus" was wrong, it's "inertia" and "momentum" that the universe implements. But the general population, even the educated part, knows nothing of this. ;-)
I know it's bad form to RTFA, but you should at least take a look at figure 1.
My main thought when I first saw that diagram was "Oh, my!" Then I mentally shrugged at such a radically over-simplified, (and quite possibly incorrect) taxonomy tree, and continued reading.
The main comment many biologists would make about arguing about the relationship between the Reptilia, the Dinosauria, and the Mammalia is "Further research is needed". It's fairly common to just draw a 3-way split. Yes, this is unlikely, but it is the best way to say "We really don't yet have the evidence to resolve this into two 2-way splits".
Of course, some people don't accept this, say that 3-way splits are highly unlikely, and insist on whatever order of splitting they personally guess happened. This doesn't change the fact that we really can't reliably resolve this split yet. Or if we can, maybe someone should give a citation for the evidence. Most of us haven't read about such evidence, and consider a claim that (for example) dinosaurs and birds are a branch of the reptiles to be merely a guess with no supporting evidence. Maybe mammals are closer to reptiles than are the dinosaurs, but that's also a guess with no supporting evidence. All three of the possible branching trees are possible, based on what is generally known.
So if you claim that birds (i.e., dinosaurs) are reptiles, can you give us some citations for the published evidence? They citations should probably be for something we can find online, because if it's behind a paywall (such as an annual subscription), we probably aren't going to pay the money to read it.
Yeah, and there are blond(e) Scots, too. In both countries, the presence of the stereotype hair color of the other country is generally attributed to invaders in previous centuries. Actually, the people doing DNA analysis have already concluded that there are no statistically significant genetic differences between the populations, or between populations in the north-western half of Europe. The perceived differences are attributable to confirmation bias (and use of cosmetics ;-).
I give any js task to my nubile red headed Scandinavian assistant ...
That red hair has gotta come from a bottle, because everyone knows that Scandinavians are all blond(e).
Maybe (s)he's actually Irish or Scottish, and just pretending to be Scandinavian?
(I have ancestors from all the above areas, so I can get away with mocking the stereotypes of all of them. I couldn't find a way to also mock my French ancestors in this reply, but maybe next time ...)
You used a good one: deluge.
Yeah, but have you ever heard the weather people use that term? ;-)
Maybe we should try to teach them a few more weather-related words. Of course, we'd need some precise definitions. "A lotta water falling" isn't quite good enough. Maybe a fall of > 2cm per hour could be the definition of a category-1 deluge. Irene definitely fit that definition around here.
60% of people were preparing for winds, not water.
This has been a weather terminology problem for a long time. Hurricanes are defined by wind speed, not by precipitation amount. There are a lot of "tropical" storms (and smaller-scale temperate-zone thunderstorms) that produce a lot of precipitation, but we don't seem to have any standard names for those storms. Wind and water can both do a lot of damage, and it would make sense to have well-known names for both types of storms.
Some years ago, my wife and I lived in Florida for a few years. While we were there, there was a humongous storm that hit most of the state, and over 10 to 12 hours dropped 15 to 20 inches of rain on most of it. I have vivid memories of people canoeing down the streets of Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach the next day. The extensive canal systems in those cities couldn't handle the load. But the media paid little attention to the storm, because it wasn't a "hurricane", or even a "tropical storm". There was very little wind, and the rain mostly fell straight down in a deluge. It did serious damage all over the state. But the media had no name for it other than "rainstorm", so it got ignored.
OTOH, the Everglades welcomed it, and really benefitted from the soaking. ;-)
It's funny that we have "blizzard" for water in the form of ice, but we have no similar name for huge amounts of liquid water falling straight down.
Its like they forgot that the biggest problem with Katrina was that NOLA is BELOW sea level.
Once again we read the refrain that "they" were incompetent with Katrina. In reality, there were extensive studies by the Army Corps of Engineers predicting exactly how the levees would fail. There was a massive emergency-response exercise in 2004 called Hurricane Pam (google it) that showed in detail just how prepared the emergency services were and how things would fail. The problem wasn't that anyone "forgot". The problem was that, when the agencies involved sent the reports to Congress, and asked for funds to fix the problems, Congress turned down the funding requests.
The NOLA/Katrina disaster was predicted in great detail. They only thing they didn't know was the date. It happened because Congress decided to cut funding for required infrastructure maintenance. They didn't forget; they didn't do it out of ignorance. They voted against the funding with full knowledge of what would happen.
Actually, there was at least one good bit of humor about Katrina. The Religious Right folks tried to tell everyone that the disaster was God's punishment for the many sins of New Orleans residents. A lot of people replied to this by asking "So why didn't God punish the French Quarter?" It seems that the French Quarter is mostly (slightly) above sea level. Anyway, the religious people gave up on that explanation fairly quickly. ;-)
The 'nothing to hide' argument is perfectly valid when you're talking about a voluntary service that you have chosen to sign up for, ...
Well, yes and no. One problem with this reasoning is that people don't always understand what they're signing up for. They learn when the "voluntary" information about them is misused against them, but by then it's too late.
The common situation, which is part of the "real name" issue with G+, is that names aren't unique. You may not have anything to hide, but if the database confuses your data with the data for other people with a similar name, some of those unrelated people may very well have something that you wouldn't want treated as part of your information.
This isn't a hypothetical problem. Law enforcement of all sorts has a long history of arresting people with a name (and some physical features such as being male or black) that is similar. People have been convicted and spent time in prison for crimes committed by someone else with a similar name. The US government's "No Fly List" that's supposed to list suspected terrorists has been used to block people with similar names.
So far, nobody seems to have found a viable way of keeping data for exactly one person, and not confusing people with similar identifying characteristics such as name or physical features. Yes, there are methods that might work in a perfect world. But in a world where the checking is typically done by low-paid, barely literate workers, none of the methods have worked too well.
So thinking "I have nothing to hide" may be correct, but seriously naive. History says that the database will be messy and chaotic, and once your data is confused with someone else's, there will be no way to straighten it out within your lifetime (which may be shortened by the mistakes).
Try googling "convicted similar name" or other similar phrases for lots and lots of stories on the topic. You might add your own country or state name for local examples.
You could have left off the first paragraph and provided an informative response. ... But you had to preface a useful bit of information with a put-down. Welcome to slashdot where innocent questions are met with derision and insults.
Welcome to humanity. Such behavior wasn't invented here on slashdot. It's the universal response of "experts" to questions from non-experts who are trying to learn something.
Something I learned long ago was to discount such put-downs, and pay attention to whether the arrogant jerk happened to impart useful information while insulting me. If they did, I thank them, and look for their name in future discussions. I they only insulted me and didn't provide any information, I file them in the "ID10T" bin, and try to avoid their comments in the future.
Actually, in some arenas, you see the opposite problem: People sometimes give a "Don't worry your little head about it" answer, and fail to give any useful information while being oh-so-friendly to the n00b. I ran across this a year or so back, when I tried to learn something about drupal. All the forums I found were full of excruciatingly friendly people - who never answered my questions. I eventually gave up and stopped bothering them with my dumb questions. Then I implemented the sites that I was working on, in less time than I'd wasted in trying to figure out whether drupal could help.
I also use Macs a fair amount and I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro. The Mac forums are full of people who are the friendly-but-unhelpful type. You get very familiar with the mantra "It just works", and come to understand that while something may "work" in some fashion, it may not be doing what you're trying to get it to do due to your misunderstanding of what it was designed to do. And the experts are often oh-so-friendly but unable to explain how to achieve the result you're trying for (perhaps by using a different tool that was designed to do what you want), so they just say "It Just Works" in a friendly, reassuring, and very condescending way.
But the insult-without-answer jerk is a lot more common. /. is certainly infested with this sort of person. And the two kinds of non-answering people cover most of the human species, in great part because most people won't answer "I don't know", which is usually the correct answer.
But in all too many cases, the best you can find is the insult-while-answering sort of person. In that case, the best approach is to use their information without becoming one of them.
Another possible reason for this is to handle something that the US government is seriously planning to impose on all its ISPs: a requirement that records be kept of every message sent/received by every customer for several years.
Some of the reports of this have tried to be reassuring by telling us that they'll only have to save the source/dest IP addresses, and presumably also the timestamps. But you might try doing a bit of arithmetic: Assuming a minimum database record of only these three 4-byte quantities (for IPv4), i.e., 12 bytes per message. You might ask your ISP for the total number of messages they handle per day. If you can get this info, or you can estimate it from numbers they will provide, multiply it by 12 (for the DB record) and by 365x2 (for two years storage). You might be impressed by the size of the resulting number.
And, of course, the actual DB requirements could well be much higher. It's possible that the regulation may require saving all header info, for some meaning of "header". For TCP, this would be a minimum of 128 bytes per message. And, of course, there would be all the usual DB (or file system) overhead for all these records, which could easily double the resulting numbers.
There are good reasons that nobody has ever actually kept this sort of data, only various running sums. If the non-computer-savvy regulators decide ("for the children") that ISPs must provide this data, this alone means petabyte-per-day databases must come into existence. Every ISP, except maybe your local mom-and-pop Internet service, will need one to meet the traffic tracking requirements.
Similar requirements are being implemented by many other governments around the world.
The point is, expecting a company like Sony to fold with the same speed a Mom and Pop restaurant does after they infect a bunch of their patrons with Salmonella is silly. 99% of the time it doesn't happen like that, and when it does, that's why it's front page news everywhere.
Actually, it's not silly at all. I remember back in the 1990s reading a report by an economics statistician (whose name I've forgotten, of course) who claimed that for the companies for which we have historical records, lifetime and company size have a zero correlation. He used the prototypical "mom-and-pop" corner store as an example, saying that big corporations like General Motors, Pan American World Airways, IBM or Digital are as likely to be gone in N years as that little mom-and-pop that you're thinking of.
Of course, when corporations disappear, it is only occasionally due to bankruptcy, and more often from a merger. But then, when you and I die, it's not always due to internal collapse (heart attack, cancer, etc), but may also be due to being "eaten" by another species (mostly micro-organisms these days). Or killed by one of those large metal-and-plastic predators that inhabit our road/street system. ;-)
I wonder if anyone has done another study of business survival lately. There's a lot of mythology about this, and little significant data. Everyone has their favorite theories explaining who some companies succeed and others fail, but rarely do people actually try to test their favorite theories. I know I don't have access to good data on the topic, and dying businesses have good motives to hide their internal states from prying outsiders.
If a court rules that a company can own an API, then everybody's software becomes infringing!
This isn't a new concern. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, I worked (as a "consultant") on a number of projects at Digital. One of the discussions that came up occasionally was why DEC's unix systems were all based on BSD, and not Sys/V. It was well-known that DEC had Sys/V running on their hardware internally, but for some reason they didn't want to sell it.
The explanation that came up every time was that the Digital lawyers had nixed the use of Sys/V and other AT&T code for the same reason that we're discussing now: The run-time libraries all contained AT&T copyright notices in every routine, so if you linked to those libraries, your binaries would contain AT&T copyright notices. This included libc, so pretty much all binaries produced on Sys/V contained lots of AT&T copyright notices. There was a very good chance that AT&T would have a legal claim on any software that contained those copyright notices.
The lawyers apparently did point out that the status of these copyright claims in binaries was a legal "gray area" that had never been properly tested in the courts. Their professional legal advice was to let someone else be the sucker^H^H^H^H^H^Hguinea pig who paid the legal fees to fight AT&T on the issue. Until that was decided, using AT&T binary libraries was legally too risky, and since the BSD libraries were not such a legal threat, DEC should stick with BSD, which did the job just fine.
Disclaimer: I never personally talked to any of these purported DEC lawyers to verify this story. But it was widely believed by all the DEC insiders that I talked to. I'd imagine that the same sort of discussions must be going on inside a lot of current companies with respect to java. I'd also guess that a lot of companies lawyers are advising that their clients minimize the use of java until the courts sort out the legal issues, just to be on the safe side. Why risk your company's profits on a language that may be legally incumbered in ways that are unknowable today, when there are similar languages (python, perl, etc.) that the geeks say are just as good and are legally safe to use..
(Yeah, I know I'm risking a language flame war by that last comment. Hopefully the mods here will mark them OT. ;-)
You're leaving with a ship full of people who want to be explorers; you're ending with a ship full of people who are doomed to be explorers.
This sounds like what all migrants, refugees, etc. have done throughout human history. (Most of) my ancestors left Europe and moved to North America, thus dooming their descendants to an unknown and unknowable life in a strange land of strange people, far off across a large ocean.
Of course, now we can buy a plane ticket and be in those ancestors' homeland in a few hours. But they couldn't have known that would happen a century or more in the future.
That should've been a "less than 10%" ... stupid HTML thing
Heh. That's because the people who designed HTML viewed < and > as "unused" ASCII characters. ;-)
(Actually, joking aside, the decision to use < and > for markup tags was done by the SGML crowd, well before HTML ever came into existence. HTML is just a special-case subset of SGML, really, and was chosen mostly because it was an easy way to make text that could be "flowed" to fit whatever screen it was being displayed on. So don't blame Tim Berners-Lee and his buddies at CERN for this unfortunate -- to us geeks -- choice of delimiter characters. Blame the earlier SGML crowd.)
Now I'll go away and wait for the OT mods to this comment ...
This article showed up elsewhere over a month ago: ...
Yeah, and the topic started showing up in various webcomics in early July. (That thread goes on for several weeks, with occasional 1-shot comics, before the author runs out of jokes on the topic.).
It's a bit surprising that it took so long for it to show up on slashdot. Or maybe the earlier submissions were rejected for unknown reasons.
Re:isn't it illegal to shut it off ?
Maybe because it has become part of a critical service ? ie call 911 ?
It's easy enough to find thousands of discussions of just this scenario, by googling the obvious key phrases. But I haven't actually found any clear evidence that courts have dealt with this in a coherent fashion. The obvious reasoning would be that, before we had cell phones, a medical emergency that led to a death would just be an "Act of God", but once we had technology to prevent the death, intentionally blocking a 911 call would become negligent homicide or something similar. But the question arises: What have the courts actually said? (And is calling 911 a case of Interfering With God's Will? ;-)
I've been told by a number of people who operate concert halls and other such public gathering places that they stopped blocking cell phones out of fear of just such an emergency scenario. But they haven't told me about actual prosecutions of people who did such things. It'd be useful to know whether this is an unfounded fear or not. Can businesses intentionally block communication channels in their vicinity, or will they be held legally responsible for the results of interfering with a 911 call?
Are there any lawyers that could give us pointers to the appropriate laws and/or court decisions in a case like this? It could be really handy to be able to trot out a list of links in such discussions, to tell people what the current state of the law is.
"They made us choose between people's ability to use their mobile phones (and) their constitutional right to get from point A to point B." -- quote from BART ...
It's lawyerin' time.
Well, maybe not. I'd guess that the reason they decided to leave the cell towers alive during later protests is that some lawyers already talked to them. The standard scenario to bring up in a case of cell-tower shutdowns is: What if there's a medical emergence such as a heart attack or stroke, people pull out their phones to call 911, can't get service, and the victim dies? As soon as people learn that you shut down the local cell phone system intentionally, they'll fire suit against you before the story even hits Google News.
It's trivially easy to find discussions of just this scenario. Just google the obvious phrases, and you'll find thousands of stories about it. Performance venues like concert halls tried blocking cell phones for a while, but hardly any of them still do this out of fear of just this sort of medical event.
BART's management probably just got it though their thick skulls that they will be held responsible for deaths that result from their blocking cell phones. Free speech has nothing to do with it; it's more a fear of being charged with criminal negligence that leads to deaths.
(Though I'm a bit doubtful about the use of the term "negligence" to refer to intentionally closing down a public communication channel. Usually "negligence" means failing to do something that you should have, not intentionally doing something that you shouldn't. ;-)
BART operates those cell towers that it turned off.
Hmmm ... the message just above yours on my screen says:
The cell phone antennas in the BART tunnels and platforms are own and operated by the carriers, who pay a hefty sum of cash to BART as rent.
It sure sounds like one of you two must be lying. I wonder how we'd learn who is telling us the truth.
(It can be sorta funny when two adjacent replies assert opposite things with a tone of authority. Usually the conflicting claims are at least separated by a few other messages. ;-)