Almost correct. But you got the wrong Kenyan mountain. Mt Kilamanjaro (which has had several spellings) is about 2 degrees south of the equator. This is a common mistake, because that's the African mountain that most people have heard of, probably because it's the biggest one. But there's another large volcano nearby whose glaciers are exactly on the equator.
Ecuador is correct; now we'll see if anyone here can name the mountain. It's been in the scientific news a bit recently, so there may be some/. readers that know its name. It's one of the mountains where the Incas buried people in the ice, for unknown reasons. The rapid melting of the glaciers has exposed some of these mummified bodies, and archaeologists have had to do a lot of work collecting and preserving them and their associated artifacts, before they decay.
I'm not sure how to score this. Maybe you should get one point for each of the country names, and the mountain names should each be worth a point for whoever gets them right.;-)
many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation.
Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you." And Nature never does anything as simple as just X causing Y; the reality is always something much more complex.
Unfortunately, human societies are still unable to deal rationally with anything on the order of complexity as the things that Nature throws at us. We can talk about, and deal with, a situation in which a single X is "the" cause of a result Y. But our social (especially political) institutions can't respond sanely to situations in which several thousands or millions of independent actors do things that produce a short-term profit, but their combined actions produce long-term disasters. We may, as individuals, understand what's happening, but we can't marshal the social activity that would ameliorate (or prevent) the disasters that we see coming. We can only analyze them in retrospect, and record who in the previous generations correctly warned us about what was coming.
... both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.
Um, the problem with this is that the latest "snowball Earth" period that's been proposed from the fossil record was about 650 million years ago. That was well before there were plants (or animals) on land. Multicellular life was just getting its act together in the oceans around then. There is a conjecture that this extreme climate event was one of the things that drove the rapid evolution of multicellular life forms (though good evidence to support this is still a case of "further research is needed").
There were some rather wild climate swings at various times when those masses of greenery did cover our planet's land masses, but so far those haven't been documented as including planet-wide ice.
Or maybe you have some links to research reports that I haven't read. If so, can you post them?
As an aside, some time ago I ran across a cute geography/climate trivial question: What are the two places where there are glaciers on Earth's equator? Most people can name one spot, but usually get the mountain's name wrong. Few people can name both of them (or even the countries that they're in).
Anyway, we are still in a rather cold period, since we do have tropical glaciers right now. But we may not in another decade or three.
I can understand why scientists want to keep all of the theory on earth as opposed to pushing it off earth. It is easier find evidence...
Oh, I dunno; it may turn out a lot easier to find evidence about the origins of life "out there" than here on our home planet. The problem here is that nearly anywhere it lands, a speck of amino acid or other organic compounds will find itself in an environment teeming with lots of tiny, one-celled critters that consider such compounds food. Life may have landed here in a bit of rock 4 billion years ago, but today it wouldn't stand a chance; it'd be gobbled up before it had a chance to find food and reproduce.
OTOH, in interstellar space, life (and food) is spread out rather thinly, and we know that simple organics (up to amino acids) are there in quantity, if not density. It'd probably be good for some of those rocks' contents if they could land on a young planet with lots of simple organics but no organized cellular life yet. But on a world like ours, they'd simply be incorporated into a nearby cell in a very short time.
So if you want to find lots of evidence for the precursors of life, you're probably a lot more likely to find them out in the interstellar dust clouds than anywhere here on Earth.
I'm still waiting for them to find out about Microsoft's [business model].
It might be interesting to look through the flock of Microsoft patents (thousands? millions?) with the idea of listing the patents for things published by NCSA people. More generally, how many patent violations there will be in the new super-computer, and how much will NCSA have to pay for licenses to use the things discovered/invented by their own researchers?
And how many companies in addition to Microsoft will be filing infringement suits against the NCSA? Yeah, we know that IV will be there, but how many others will file in their own names?
When I try to navigate to maps.google.com on my windows 7 phone, it does not work (nor do I get any indication on why it does not).
It works perfectly on my wife's android phone.
Out of curiosity, on your wife's phone, are you/she getting to google maps via the browser, or via the "Maps" app? When you write "navigate to", this sounds like you're using the browser.
I have an android phone, too, and my wife has an iPhone. Both of them have special google-maps apps that work quite well. But when we try to get to maps.google.com via the browsers, it sorta works, but not very well.
I think this is because most phone browsers are rather crippled, and lack some of the features present in most laptop browsers that maps.google.com uses, mostly a full javascript package with lots of libraries. I'd guess that your windows phone has a browser that is similarly crippled, and can't fully handle the maps.google.com pages. Is there a separate google maps app for your windows phone? If so, try it and tell us how it works.
(A quick check with google shows a maps app from a third party was announced last December. I didn't investigate further, but this implies the same sort of problems with accessing maps.google.com through the windows 7 browser. You might want to check this out. If you do, please let us know how well it works.)
The article seems unlikely to be MS propaganda. Note that the writer quotes that one investigator (Rob Lee) as saying that he's never seen a compromised Mac, and he advises his clients to replace their compromised MS-Windows machines with Macs to prevent re-infection. Would a MS-paid writer be likely to put such suggestions in their article?
This does bring up a curious aspect of the "logic" behind all the claims that poor little MS is being picked on because it's so popular. If this were true, you'd think that a sensible person would simply refuse to buy anything with a MS logo. True, if you buy a Mac or Ubuntu or whatever rather than Windows, you machine might be attacked sometime in the remote future. But, since we "know" that no commercial systems are totally secure, it would make sense to choose a system that might be attacked in the far future over one that you know will be attacked repeatedly on the first day and probably compromised in the near future. You don't need to know the technical reason for this; you just need to be sensible enough to trade likely near-future failures for possible far-future failures.
So I'm puzzled about who might be behind all this "MS is only attacked because it's so popular" propaganda. I wouldn't think MS's marketers would be so stupid as to tell everyone such a good reason to avoid their brand. I wouldn't think a Windows fanboy would say this either, because it would amount to admitting that they intentionally bought a machine because it was highly likely to be compromised. But there doesn't seem to be any good reason for other vendors to make this suggestion, either, since it amounts to saying that their security isn't any better than Microsoft's. So who is really behind this bizarre bit of logic? Who profits from it?
It wouldn't even be close to the highest observatory, because those usually go on mountains which still beat the pants off our structures. And they also go as far from civilization as possible because of light pollution.
Oh well. I still see no reason they couldn't put a reasonably big telescope on it!
Yeah; my first thought was that the Mauna Kea observatory is above 4000 meters. I looked it up, and its official "height" (;-) is 4205m.
Anyway, there are some significant observatories functioning in or near cities, usually at universities. They just don't operate in the visual spectrum. There are parts of the spectrum for which even city air is quite transparent, such as the radio and TV portions.
But the top of a tall building wouldn't be a very good place for a telescope, even if it were above the city's poluted-air layer. Tall buildings tend to sway a fair amount in even light winds. That would interfere seriously with long exposures, and make the software that aims the telescope incredibly difficult to get working right.
It's a lot easier to just build on the ground, preferably at a high altitude. And it's usually a lot cheaper to build there than it would be at the top of a major skyscraper in the middle of an urban area.
I do suspect that whoever wrote the summary/article doesn't know the difference between an observatory and an observation deck. Or doesn't care to distinguish them.
It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Actually, it may just be more experience speaking. I've experimented with a bunch of IDEs, and found that all of them are pretty good at speeding up the initial stages of development. They can save time that I'd spend looking up templates and typing boilerplate code. They can also warn me when I've done something stupid (which all programmers do now and then;-).
Where they fall down is later, when you think you've got it all working, you've done all the unit tests, and you try it out on a "real word" situation. It silently goes insane, or crashes without any diagnostics. You try to get the IDE to give you clues, and all it does it run the app 10 times slower, then goes insane without diagnostics. You've hit a "subtle" bug that all that high-level automagic Developement Environment didn't know about.
So you fall back to the old style, adding lots of messages to a logfile. You find the problem, such as an obscure library routine doing something slightly different than the manual said, or maybe you've gone outside its (undocumented) limits on the range of some input. You fix it, and then rather than stripping out all those log messages (because you suspect they'll come in handy later), you make them conditional on a debug flag. Now you've gone all the way back to that primitive way of building software that the IDE fanboys sneer at.
But that's not the whole story. Suppose the above doesn't happen, and your new code gets delivered to a customer site. When run there, it quietly goes insane (without diagnostics). The IDE can't help, because you can't get it installed on the customer's site, and for whatever reason, it doesn't cooperate when you try to run it remotely with the output on your screen 1000 miles away. So again, you're stuck with putting the logfile messages into the deliverable, and holding the customer's hand (since they refuse to give you a remote login) while they run it and email you the logfile.
After fighting many such battles, and realizing that many of the problems aren't technical, but rather due to what your management and your customers will allow you to do, you also understand that your vaunted IDE is really just a good tool for starting up a project. If you really want to make it a quality product, you need a tool that gives you full access to all the low-level details that the IDE people sneer at and assure you you don't need. And after a while, your logbook says that it doesn't seem to have sped up the job measurably. It mostly just erected barriers between you and the code when things didn't quite work right, which always happens.
Then you type replies like this in a forum, also realizing fully that it won't help at all.
The obvious suggestion is that they simply (;-) translate all their java code to python or perl. Or a mixture of both, for even more fun. I'm sure that Guido and Larry would be happy to help google out with that.
Seriously, all three languages have very similar properties and implementations. There have been a number of proposals for merging their VMs, and packaging all three languages on top of the result. Sorta like the flock of different source languages that have first-stage parsers that spit out gcc's intermediate language. The main practical barrier to this has always been that java is proprietary. But a java lookalike under a different name (mocha?) has been a common answer to that, and now that java is owned by one of the Evil Overlords, it's sounding more and more like a good idea.
Cue the interminable religious war among the partisans of all three languages... 3... 2... 1...
I've used a protractor before, when I was in elementary school. I cannot imagine a practical use for one today.
Well, I used one just a few days ago. The occasion was a piece of patio furniture, mostly made of wood, with a piece that was getting old and feeble. I had some pressure-treated boards in the shed, so I decided to just cut a replacement part. One of the tools I used was one of those gadgets that consists of a metal ruler with a rotatable protractor attached. I used it to copy the angles of the original piece, so it would fit correctly. It worked fine, and the patio chair has a bright new segment that I should probably stain to match the rest.
A few days before that, I decided that the old grape arbor in our back yard (over part of the same patio) was leaning a bit much, due to having been built years before without all the diagonal supports that it should have had. I used the same tool to cut a board to the right shape, though in that case I didn't have to measure anything on the arbor itself. The only angles needed were 45-degree angles, and I did this by setting the same gadget to 45 degrees, using its protractor component.
This is probably why that sort of protractor-based tool is still manufactured in large numbers, and sold in hardware stores everywhere. And there's a simple reason that those hardware stores exist: There are still enough people capable of building things that they can stay in business. Those people need the appropriate tools, which hardware stores sell. And among those tools there are a number that include protractors as a component. Look at any table saw, for example; you'll find a protractor built into the blade-tilting mechanism. And lots of us know how to use it. Even us computer geeks.
In reality, the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" have been confused and used interchangeably since they were introduced into English centuries ago. And the "a-" Greek prefix merely means "without"; it doesn't mean that the object doesn't exist. If it meant that, "agnostic" (a+gnostos) would have to mean that knowledge doesn't exist.;-)
English dictionaries typically have entries like the one in wiktionary for "atheism":
1. The rejection of belief that any deities exist.
2. the absence of belief in the existence of any deities.
3. The stance that deities do not exist (gnostic atheism).
This expresses the historical confusion about their meaning pretty well. Lots of people described as "atheist" (by themselves or others) have primarily said that one should live as if there are no god(s), since the evidence is that any gods who may exist seem to be utterly unwilling to intervene in human affairs. And if you pick one to worship, you'll almost certainly pick the wrong one, since there's no evidence at all to help you discover which is the right one.
One of my favorite theories is based on the observation that the Solar System (and the universe as a whole) seems to be chaotic and irregular, with everything misaligned. Why aren't our day, month and year exact multiples of each other? The theory is that when everything was created, the "natural clocks" of the orbits were all very regular, but in the billions of years since then, everything has gotten badly out of adjustment. The god(s) who created it lost interest, and can't be bothered to do regular maintenance. They've all gone off to work on other, more interesting universes, leaving our universe to its own fate, and it has seriously run down. In another trillion years or so, it'll die a "heat death", with everything at a temperature of about 4K, and nothing will ever happen again. Unless, of course, some god develops an interest in those crufty old, abandoned universes, and starts them running again as a sort of hobby. Sorta like people do with old vehicles and computers.
This makes a lot more sense than the claim that there's a God who sees every sparrow. A god that knows how to create universes would find sparrows (and probably humans) just uninteresting data packets, to be recorded perhaps, but not worth any attention unless there's something actually interesting happening in that tiny part of the universe. All our (negative) evidence is that this is exactly what has happened. Either that, or there never has been any intelligence behind our universe, and it has always been a chaotic mess.
Ah, but "territory" is what's called an "abstract concept". This means explicitly that its referent isn't real; it exists only in our minds. It's similar to concepts such as "number", "freedom", "history", "irony", etc. They're all useful concepts, although they don't describe anything with real physical existence.
The religious people generally insist that "God" describes something real that exists in the physical world. Well, except for those that say that God is an incorporeal being, which is hard to distinguish from an abstract concept. But the important difference is the claim that God is an intelligent being that can and does act independently and can cause changes in the physical world. This isn't a property of an abstract concept. Abstract concepts can only affect the physical world indirectly by "persuading" us to do their work.
OTOH, people like mathematicians and lawyers are more honest; they freely admit that their concepts are abstract and need humans to implement their effects. Religious people claim not to believe this, and insist that their abstract concept(s) can directly influence the physical world without our help. I.e., they insist that their God isn't an abstract concept, but is a real actor in the physical world.
So, yes, one should probably believe in "God" as an abstract concept that is believed by many people who will attempt to punish you for not agreeing with their belief. In parts of the world, one should profess to the belief that the local God is real, out of fear of what the local people will do to you if you don't say you believe.
But a rational person wouldn't actually believe that "God" describes anything real, since there is no evidence to support such a belief. And, as others have pointed out, you also shouldn't believe that God isn't real, since there's no evidence to support that belief. And you wouldn't try to argue with dummies who don't understand those two sentences.;-)
(An interesting aspect of the concept of territory is that it's understood not just by us, but also my many animals with much lower levels of intelligence. It may have been the first "abstract concept" implemented by animal life many millions of years ago.)
Actually, it might work better to phrase it something like: Atheism isn't a belief; it's a non-belief. Something can't be both a belief and a non-belief at the same time.
We might also note a logical point that's probably too subtle for most religious people: Not believing in a god (typically on the grounds that there's no evidence supporting a claim that any god exists) isn't the same as believing that there is no god. Atheism is basically a position of a skeptic: If you claim there's a god, you should be prepared to present evidence. Otherwise, you shouldn't bother people who don't think it's been shown that there is a god.
I think the title of this thread sums up the topic pretty well.
The prosecution's theory in this case is that using Twitter to criticize a public figure can be a criminal act if the person's feelings are hurt.
Yay, a law that's about to be ruled as unconstitutional!
Let's hope so. Although at this rate, it's going to be passed sooner or later (I give it 10 years).
To put it in perspective, we should point out that laws making it illegal to say things that offend powerful people are not anything new. There's even a traditional legal term for such an act: lese majeste. Back in the 1700s, most of the world had laws that punished people who said things that offended powerful people. The US's First Amendment was a break with the tradition of such laws. It was intentionally written to legalize saying things (verbally or in writing) that offended powerful people, both political and religious.
Of course, the US has had a long line of powerful people thinking that this doesn't apply to them.
Hmmm... So maybe I should learn how to convince the analysis code that I'm a transvestite female pretending to be a gay male (to satisfy my "wife" who they believe is a gay male). I wonder who could give me lessons in this sort of fakery. I mean, I have no experience actually being female (or gay or transvestite), so I probably wouldn't do it right without some lessons.
...now I just have to get hold of a few Pakistani bank IP addys, set up some sort of listener, and...
Why bother, when you can simply talk to a few people at the bank's ISP, exchange a bit of something under the table, and get a list of all the banks' customers' account numbers, PINs and login info.
That's much simpler than setting up your own listener. And the new law will require the ISP to collect such information, so they might as well productize it.
By "interfere with the ability of ISPs to monitor internet usage", presumably they mean collecting all their customers' account numbers, PINs, login ids, passwords, etc.
The major effect of banning encryption would be to make electronic commerce impossible. If anyone alone the data path can intercept your names, numbers, and passwords, then people will learn very quickly that the Internet simply can't be used for anything that involves a transfer of money.
One usually doesn't append obvious modifiers to their claims like, "right now." or "in it's current state."
That's because, in English and all the other (Indo-)European languages, it isn't necessary. In those languages, and in languages in many other families, verbs have an explicit present tense that means "now".
The problem is that people take a quote from the past, and misinterpret the verb's present tense as meaning "now, when I repeat the quote". As in the example we've seen here about military aircraft, people very often do this with malice aforethought, knowing full well that the quote doesn't reply to their current situation. I you ask them, you'll usually find that they fully understand verbal present tenses, and they know that the quote they misused wasn't meant to apply to the distant future. But they have an agenda, and making a previous "expert" look like an idiot fits their agenda.
In this case, the agenda is pretty clear: The writers are trying to discredit all military experts. It's easy to find historical quotes that were correct when said, but are no longer correct. This suffices to show that one person was wrong in the past. And this obviously applies to the current experts, right?
In the current topic, it might be useful to reflect that the Internet wouldn't exist if it hadn't been pushed (and mostly funded) by the US military. The business and corporate worlds that are trying to claim the Internet as their invention were dragged into it ("kicking and screaming";-) in the early 1990s. Most government agencies jumped on board almost as an afterthought, when they had lots of employees that knew how to use the Internet and pushed internally for agency web sites. But the Internet's prime movers were military people from the same DoD that is now being declared imcompetent.
I'm not quite sure what this says about the current topic. Maybe the lesson is that the DoD should be listening to their own people. Especially those who have retired, but who directed the building of the stuff they're now having such problems with.
The only competence of any government appears to be the ability to endlessly piss away taxpayer money.
Medicare is administrated by the US Government, has lower overhead than any private sector health insurance plan and has the highest satisfaction rating of any health insurance plan in the US. You don't write articles about how great the government is at administration, just about when it messes up administration.
It's part of the American "conservative" ideology, that everything wrong with the world is due to governments, and everything good is due to corporations.
In reality, the problems are present in all human organizations. If an organization, government or corporate or whatever, pays attention to a topic, they can generally solve it. But it's more common for any human organization to become a "power center", with its own internal ideology and mythology, and punish anyone who goes against the organization's culture.
This story is basically about that problem, as applied to computer security issues. If you follow discussions of that topic, you invariably find a strong desire to respond to information about a security problem by 1) pretending that it's not a real problem, and 2) punishing anyone who demonstrates an exploit.
Government agencies do this, and so do corporations. You can see the results all around you. The only organizations that have achieved any reasonable level of security are those who hire and listen to people with expertise in the topic. But most organizations automatically react to demonstrated security problems by labeling the messenger a "hacker", and treating them as a criminal. This gets a message across to people who discover problems: "Kept it quiet, or we'll punish you, too."
In any case, this has little to do with the "government" label. It's a failure of all human organizations. Pretending that only one sort of organization (government) has a real problem is merely trying to impose an ideology rather than solve the problems.
I guess that Harvard etc are private businesses that receive no public funding, so are an example of the inherent benefits of capitalism over socialism.
Yup; Harvard is a private university, and most of its libraries are inaccessible to non-Harvard people. BU (Boston University) is also private, and is a bit more welcoming, but not much. But the "private" part isn't all of the story. I attended several American "public" (state-owned) universities, and while they were more open than the typical private university, they still erected barriers to the general public. As a student, I had numerous instances of being denied access to parts of various departmental libraries. This depended a lot on the department, though, and there were a lot of libraries where I could just walk in and read anything I wanted, no questions asked.
One thing that's different about the Internet is that it appears to (but doesn't) solve the basic barrier with traditional libraries: Most of them are a long distance away. Yes, there is "inter-library loan", but this tends to apply only to fairly common books. If you're looking for something rare, they are often not willing to ship it; you must visit the library to see it.
The Internet potentially solves this. But in many cases, and with most technical journals, there's a "paywall" in the way. Buying a subscription to all the members-only sites online is often beyond the financial capabitities of all but a few. We may solve this eventually. And some technical journals have already started to make material over N years old available to the general public. But this is countered by others that are restricting access. The New York TImes just did this. Though the NYT isn't what you'd call a technical journal, they are a "publication of record", which has legal meaning in the US, and a quick check I did recently showed that their paywall did block my access to things that (in the print form) is public information.
Another problem is the limited digitalization of a lot of material. Some time ago, I wanted to read some music-related material that was left behind by a musician who died about 50 years ago. I found that her papers had been donated to a state historical museum. It had an index of her material online -- but none of the actual documents. I can probably take a 2500-mile trip to the museum to view them, but that appears to be my only access. They have no plans for copying them, much less putting them online.
OTOH, some scholarly fields have been greatly enhanced by the Internet. There are a number of online collections of ancient documents, sometimes in poorly-understood languages, and these have attracted "amateur" historians and linguists who have helped greatly in the transcriptions. One that got a lot of attention a few years back deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains images, transcriptions and translations of may of those documents. These relics were previously totally unavailable to the public, including most scholars, and the documents' "owners" objected strongly to the online copies when they first appeared. There are similar online projects around the world. A lot of Mesoamerican material, especially including Mayan writing, have been put online, and again "amateur" linguists and historians have helped materially in decoding its contents. Google "Mayan writing" for lots of links to information on this.
So the Internet's effectiveness at eliminating the traditional barriers to information is currently in a "mixed" state. There's a lot of information available in seconds that used to take long trips to distant locations to access. But online organizations are experimenting with ways of limiting access to paying customers. And there's a lot of material that will never be online in our lifetime.
We'll see how it all plays out. Or maybe our descendants will.
No, I think you meant: Jupiter shouldn't be considered one either as it also has thousands of asteroids trapped at its Lagrange points.
The numbers are quite a lot smaller for Neptune and Mars, though. And the total mass of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids is quite a bit less than Jupiter's mass.
The real exception continues to be our Earth, which shares its orbit with a dwarf planet with mass only about 1/80 of Earth's mass.
The real problem here is a technical term ("planet") whose definition includes features both intrinsic and extrinsic to the object it describes. Such definitions are always pitfalls when put up against the chaos of the actual universe.
Using a single term for a class of objects that includes both Mercury and Jupiter should also be considered a sign that the term is useless, and at least two new terms are what is really needed. Probably three, actually. But it doesn't look like we're going to get that solution any time soon.
My favorite explanation is that the fuss over "planet" was a joke perpetrated by some astronomers with a twisted sense of humor. They're still laughing at the fuss it produced.
"We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity."
Pretty much every physical measurement of every land animal is positively correlated with absolute latitude. This is because the mean temperature is negatively correlated with distance from the equator, and larger body size is adaptive at colder temperatures. A larger body has relatively smaller heat losses, and thus a more stable temperature. This doesn't matter much in the tropics (except at high altitudes), but it can be important when you get to areas with serious cold seasons.
You can find this as an example of adaptation in most intro biology textbooks. It's not clear that this story adds anything new to this old observation.
As a Java user there is *zero* risk you'll be sued - so please cut spreading the ignorant crap, eh? There is a problem if you write an incompatible Java implementation (as Google did, and Microsoft before them, although for different reasons).
Agreed for a "user". But as a software developer, there are some serious risks with the current fashion (in the US at least) for patent trolling. The patent/copyright laws are more and more being (mis)used to bankrupt small startups and independent developers.
One specific threat that's of growing concern: As you say, "Java is huge", and I read this to mean not its popularity at the management level, but rather the size of its libraries. There's no practical way that I or any other mere human can memorize all the details of everything that's in the java libraries. This means that there's a good chance that I may implement a needed routine not knowing that there's a library routine that already does most of the work. We get a lot of humor (see The Daily WTF for many examples) from developers "reinventing the wheel" by rewriting a routine that they should have known already exists. But we do this all the time for the more obscure corners of libraries. Often the reason is that we used different language in describing the task, so we didn't realize that that routine with a totally different names was in fact doing something isomorphic to what our routine does.
This poses an obvious legal problem. Such a duplication of a library routine can easily be viewed as a patent (or copyright) infringement by the company that sells the library. This is likely to not be noticed until our company's product is out the door and in use by customers. Then, when the vendor's lawyers get their teeth into it, our company is in really big trouble.
This didn't use to be a problem with java, because Sun was trustworthy, and didn't do such evil things to their customers. Oracle isn't like that. I fully expect that, if I ever get involved in a java development project again, I'll be the one that triggers just such an attack by Oracle's lawyers.
Pooh-pooing this won't convince me that I'm wrong. Calling me an idiot won't, either. What might is an explanation (that I understand;-) of exactly how I can avoid such a danger while doing a job that someone is paying me for. Telling me "Don't do something stupid" is not an explanation; it's part of the threat. My brain can't possibly hold all the information needed to avoid all the possible infringements of everything within Oracle's products, even if I could get access to all that information (which I can't). So the only way I can reasonably avoid doing something stupid is to just not develop software in the vicinity of Oracle products.
Of course, that may not protect me either, the way things are going.
You do know that Javascript has nothing to do with Java, right?
Several possible replies come to mind. The first is obviously "Whoooosh!", since you missed what should have be clearly humor in my comment. You also missed the fact that, since I was wishing we had as good an excuse to abandon javascript as we do to abandon java, I was tacitly implying that javascript isn't java.
Another possible reply comes from a number of discussions where people have brought this up, and various replies came back suggesting that people look into the innards of most implementations of javascript, where they'll find that the code invokes the local java libraries. Of course, they also use libc, but that doesn't mean that the code is dependent on (or derived from) libc; it could just mean that the POSIX conventions were followed, and libc happens to be how those are supplied on most systems. But from a programmer's viewpoint, knowing that javascript often calls the java libraries tells us some things that could be useful. It means that on many systems, javascript may inherit a lot of the good and bad features from java. F'rinstance, I remember having a lot of problems with java's date/time stuff twice a year, when local clocks switched to/from DST. This was all explained to me when someone handed me a copy of the (then) java spec stating that the java library's internal clock was in local time. That was sufficient grounds for banning java (and javascript) from a number of projects in which it was important that we have a reliable internal clock across the network. I've never tried serious date/time manipulation in javascript, but I know enough about it to shudder at the thought.
And yet another possible reply is to point out that javascript and java are obviously related. They both start with "java", don't they?;-)
It can be amusing seeing people trying to deal with bogus name/value confusion. And it's amazing how often people fall for this sort of trick. You can find a lot of them in the history of religion, since a lot of religious doctrines are based on specific interpretations of the wording of a sacred book in one specific language. Such things don't translate well, so you get factionalism and heresies from people that are reading the sacred books in different languages, or are using different translations into a single language. So far we don't have computer language confusion leading to holy wars with millions of people killed, but we do have a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication due to our sloppy misuses of language. Mocking it with java(script) should be a bit of obvious humor to any computer geeks with even minimal linguistics backgrounds.
There are probably some other good replies, but the margin is too small to scribble them all out...
Slashdot Mirror
Almost correct. But you got the wrong Kenyan mountain. Mt Kilamanjaro (which has had several spellings) is about 2 degrees south of the equator. This is a common mistake, because that's the African mountain that most people have heard of, probably because it's the biggest one. But there's another large volcano nearby whose glaciers are exactly on the equator.
Ecuador is correct; now we'll see if anyone here can name the mountain. It's been in the scientific news a bit recently, so there may be some /. readers that know its name. It's one of the mountains where the Incas buried people in the ice, for unknown reasons. The rapid melting of the glaciers has exposed some of these mummified bodies, and archaeologists have had to do a lot of work collecting and preserving them and their associated artifacts, before they decay.
I'm not sure how to score this. Maybe you should get one point for each of the country names, and the mountain names should each be worth a point for whoever gets them right. ;-)
many times do you blinkered warmists need to have it spelled out to you. Correlation != causation.
Of course not, but as many people have observed, a statistical correlation is often Ma Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something going on that may be important to you." And Nature never does anything as simple as just X causing Y; the reality is always something much more complex.
Unfortunately, human societies are still unable to deal rationally with anything on the order of complexity as the things that Nature throws at us. We can talk about, and deal with, a situation in which a single X is "the" cause of a result Y. But our social (especially political) institutions can't respond sanely to situations in which several thousands or millions of independent actors do things that produce a short-term profit, but their combined actions produce long-term disasters. We may, as individuals, understand what's happening, but we can't marshal the social activity that would ameliorate (or prevent) the disasters that we see coming. We can only analyze them in retrospect, and record who in the previous generations correctly warned us about what was coming.
... both coal and crude oil were once plants. Plants that grew in a verdant earthly Paradise for hundreds of millions of years until they'd trapped enough CO2 from the atmosphere to ruin their habitat and turn the Earth into a frigid wasteland covered with ice from pole to pole. But for an odd fluke of orbital dynamics we might not have survived to put things back on their former course.
Um, the problem with this is that the latest "snowball Earth" period that's been proposed from the fossil record was about 650 million years ago. That was well before there were plants (or animals) on land. Multicellular life was just getting its act together in the oceans around then. There is a conjecture that this extreme climate event was one of the things that drove the rapid evolution of multicellular life forms (though good evidence to support this is still a case of "further research is needed").
There were some rather wild climate swings at various times when those masses of greenery did cover our planet's land masses, but so far those haven't been documented as including planet-wide ice.
Or maybe you have some links to research reports that I haven't read. If so, can you post them?
As an aside, some time ago I ran across a cute geography/climate trivial question: What are the two places where there are glaciers on Earth's equator? Most people can name one spot, but usually get the mountain's name wrong. Few people can name both of them (or even the countries that they're in).
Anyway, we are still in a rather cold period, since we do have tropical glaciers right now. But we may not in another decade or three.
I can understand why scientists want to keep all of the theory on earth as opposed to pushing it off earth. It is easier find evidence ...
Oh, I dunno; it may turn out a lot easier to find evidence about the origins of life "out there" than here on our home planet. The problem here is that nearly anywhere it lands, a speck of amino acid or other organic compounds will find itself in an environment teeming with lots of tiny, one-celled critters that consider such compounds food. Life may have landed here in a bit of rock 4 billion years ago, but today it wouldn't stand a chance; it'd be gobbled up before it had a chance to find food and reproduce.
OTOH, in interstellar space, life (and food) is spread out rather thinly, and we know that simple organics (up to amino acids) are there in quantity, if not density. It'd probably be good for some of those rocks' contents if they could land on a young planet with lots of simple organics but no organized cellular life yet. But on a world like ours, they'd simply be incorporated into a nearby cell in a very short time.
So if you want to find lots of evidence for the precursors of life, you're probably a lot more likely to find them out in the interstellar dust clouds than anywhere here on Earth.
I'm still waiting for them to find out about Microsoft's [business model].
It might be interesting to look through the flock of Microsoft patents (thousands? millions?) with the idea of listing the patents for things published by NCSA people. More generally, how many patent violations there will be in the new super-computer, and how much will NCSA have to pay for licenses to use the things discovered/invented by their own researchers?
And how many companies in addition to Microsoft will be filing infringement suits against the NCSA? Yeah, we know that IV will be there, but how many others will file in their own names?
When I try to navigate to maps.google.com on my windows 7 phone, it does not work (nor do I get any indication on why it does not). It works perfectly on my wife's android phone.
Out of curiosity, on your wife's phone, are you/she getting to google maps via the browser, or via the "Maps" app? When you write "navigate to", this sounds like you're using the browser.
I have an android phone, too, and my wife has an iPhone. Both of them have special google-maps apps that work quite well. But when we try to get to maps.google.com via the browsers, it sorta works, but not very well.
I think this is because most phone browsers are rather crippled, and lack some of the features present in most laptop browsers that maps.google.com uses, mostly a full javascript package with lots of libraries. I'd guess that your windows phone has a browser that is similarly crippled, and can't fully handle the maps.google.com pages. Is there a separate google maps app for your windows phone? If so, try it and tell us how it works.
(A quick check with google shows a maps app from a third party was announced last December. I didn't investigate further, but this implies the same sort of problems with accessing maps.google.com through the windows 7 browser. You might want to check this out. If you do, please let us know how well it works.)
The article seems unlikely to be MS propaganda. Note that the writer quotes that one investigator (Rob Lee) as saying that he's never seen a compromised Mac, and he advises his clients to replace their compromised MS-Windows machines with Macs to prevent re-infection. Would a MS-paid writer be likely to put such suggestions in their article?
This does bring up a curious aspect of the "logic" behind all the claims that poor little MS is being picked on because it's so popular. If this were true, you'd think that a sensible person would simply refuse to buy anything with a MS logo. True, if you buy a Mac or Ubuntu or whatever rather than Windows, you machine might be attacked sometime in the remote future. But, since we "know" that no commercial systems are totally secure, it would make sense to choose a system that might be attacked in the far future over one that you know will be attacked repeatedly on the first day and probably compromised in the near future. You don't need to know the technical reason for this; you just need to be sensible enough to trade likely near-future failures for possible far-future failures.
So I'm puzzled about who might be behind all this "MS is only attacked because it's so popular" propaganda. I wouldn't think MS's marketers would be so stupid as to tell everyone such a good reason to avoid their brand. I wouldn't think a Windows fanboy would say this either, because it would amount to admitting that they intentionally bought a machine because it was highly likely to be compromised. But there doesn't seem to be any good reason for other vendors to make this suggestion, either, since it amounts to saying that their security isn't any better than Microsoft's. So who is really behind this bizarre bit of logic? Who profits from it?
It wouldn't even be close to the highest observatory, because those usually go on mountains which still beat the pants off our structures. And they also go as far from civilization as possible because of light pollution. Oh well. I still see no reason they couldn't put a reasonably big telescope on it!
Yeah; my first thought was that the Mauna Kea observatory is above 4000 meters. I looked it up, and its official "height" (;-) is 4205m.
Anyway, there are some significant observatories functioning in or near cities, usually at universities. They just don't operate in the visual spectrum. There are parts of the spectrum for which even city air is quite transparent, such as the radio and TV portions.
But the top of a tall building wouldn't be a very good place for a telescope, even if it were above the city's poluted-air layer. Tall buildings tend to sway a fair amount in even light winds. That would interfere seriously with long exposures, and make the software that aims the telescope incredibly difficult to get working right.
It's a lot easier to just build on the ground, preferably at a high altitude. And it's usually a lot cheaper to build there than it would be at the top of a major skyscraper in the middle of an urban area.
I do suspect that whoever wrote the summary/article doesn't know the difference between an observatory and an observation deck. Or doesn't care to distinguish them.
It's amazing to me that in this day-and-age ANYONE can claim that VIM & Makefile's are superior development environments to Eclipse, Netbeans, or name your IDE. That's simply B.S.!
Actually, it may just be more experience speaking. I've experimented with a bunch of IDEs, and found that all of them are pretty good at speeding up the initial stages of development. They can save time that I'd spend looking up templates and typing boilerplate code. They can also warn me when I've done something stupid (which all programmers do now and then ;-).
Where they fall down is later, when you think you've got it all working, you've done all the unit tests, and you try it out on a "real word" situation. It silently goes insane, or crashes without any diagnostics. You try to get the IDE to give you clues, and all it does it run the app 10 times slower, then goes insane without diagnostics. You've hit a "subtle" bug that all that high-level automagic Developement Environment didn't know about.
So you fall back to the old style, adding lots of messages to a logfile. You find the problem, such as an obscure library routine doing something slightly different than the manual said, or maybe you've gone outside its (undocumented) limits on the range of some input. You fix it, and then rather than stripping out all those log messages (because you suspect they'll come in handy later), you make them conditional on a debug flag. Now you've gone all the way back to that primitive way of building software that the IDE fanboys sneer at.
But that's not the whole story. Suppose the above doesn't happen, and your new code gets delivered to a customer site. When run there, it quietly goes insane (without diagnostics). The IDE can't help, because you can't get it installed on the customer's site, and for whatever reason, it doesn't cooperate when you try to run it remotely with the output on your screen 1000 miles away. So again, you're stuck with putting the logfile messages into the deliverable, and holding the customer's hand (since they refuse to give you a remote login) while they run it and email you the logfile.
After fighting many such battles, and realizing that many of the problems aren't technical, but rather due to what your management and your customers will allow you to do, you also understand that your vaunted IDE is really just a good tool for starting up a project. If you really want to make it a quality product, you need a tool that gives you full access to all the low-level details that the IDE people sneer at and assure you you don't need. And after a while, your logbook says that it doesn't seem to have sped up the job measurably. It mostly just erected barriers between you and the code when things didn't quite work right, which always happens.
Then you type replies like this in a forum, also realizing fully that it won't help at all.
The obvious suggestion is that they simply (;-) translate all their java code to python or perl. Or a mixture of both, for even more fun. I'm sure that Guido and Larry would be happy to help google out with that.
Seriously, all three languages have very similar properties and implementations. There have been a number of proposals for merging their VMs, and packaging all three languages on top of the result. Sorta like the flock of different source languages that have first-stage parsers that spit out gcc's intermediate language. The main practical barrier to this has always been that java is proprietary. But a java lookalike under a different name (mocha?) has been a common answer to that, and now that java is owned by one of the Evil Overlords, it's sounding more and more like a good idea.
Cue the interminable religious war among the partisans of all three languages ... 3 ... 2 ... 1 ...
I've used a protractor before, when I was in elementary school. I cannot imagine a practical use for one today.
Well, I used one just a few days ago. The occasion was a piece of patio furniture, mostly made of wood, with a piece that was getting old and feeble. I had some pressure-treated boards in the shed, so I decided to just cut a replacement part. One of the tools I used was one of those gadgets that consists of a metal ruler with a rotatable protractor attached. I used it to copy the angles of the original piece, so it would fit correctly. It worked fine, and the patio chair has a bright new segment that I should probably stain to match the rest.
A few days before that, I decided that the old grape arbor in our back yard (over part of the same patio) was leaning a bit much, due to having been built years before without all the diagonal supports that it should have had. I used the same tool to cut a board to the right shape, though in that case I didn't have to measure anything on the arbor itself. The only angles needed were 45-degree angles, and I did this by setting the same gadget to 45 degrees, using its protractor component.
This is probably why that sort of protractor-based tool is still manufactured in large numbers, and sold in hardware stores everywhere. And there's a simple reason that those hardware stores exist: There are still enough people capable of building things that they can stay in business. Those people need the appropriate tools, which hardware stores sell. And among those tools there are a number that include protractors as a component. Look at any table saw, for example; you'll find a protractor built into the blade-tilting mechanism. And lots of us know how to use it. Even us computer geeks.
Ah, the good old Etymological Fallacy at work. ;-)
In reality, the terms "atheist" and "agnostic" have been confused and used interchangeably since they were introduced into English centuries ago. And the "a-" Greek prefix merely means "without"; it doesn't mean that the object doesn't exist. If it meant that, "agnostic" (a+gnostos) would have to mean that knowledge doesn't exist. ;-)
English dictionaries typically have entries like the one in wiktionary for "atheism":
1. The rejection of belief that any deities exist. 2. the absence of belief in the existence of any deities. 3. The stance that deities do not exist (gnostic atheism).
This expresses the historical confusion about their meaning pretty well. Lots of people described as "atheist" (by themselves or others) have primarily said that one should live as if there are no god(s), since the evidence is that any gods who may exist seem to be utterly unwilling to intervene in human affairs. And if you pick one to worship, you'll almost certainly pick the wrong one, since there's no evidence at all to help you discover which is the right one.
One of my favorite theories is based on the observation that the Solar System (and the universe as a whole) seems to be chaotic and irregular, with everything misaligned. Why aren't our day, month and year exact multiples of each other? The theory is that when everything was created, the "natural clocks" of the orbits were all very regular, but in the billions of years since then, everything has gotten badly out of adjustment. The god(s) who created it lost interest, and can't be bothered to do regular maintenance. They've all gone off to work on other, more interesting universes, leaving our universe to its own fate, and it has seriously run down. In another trillion years or so, it'll die a "heat death", with everything at a temperature of about 4K, and nothing will ever happen again. Unless, of course, some god develops an interest in those crufty old, abandoned universes, and starts them running again as a sort of hobby. Sorta like people do with old vehicles and computers.
This makes a lot more sense than the claim that there's a God who sees every sparrow. A god that knows how to create universes would find sparrows (and probably humans) just uninteresting data packets, to be recorded perhaps, but not worth any attention unless there's something actually interesting happening in that tiny part of the universe. All our (negative) evidence is that this is exactly what has happened. Either that, or there never has been any intelligence behind our universe, and it has always been a chaotic mess.
God is as real as the concept of territory.
Ah, but "territory" is what's called an "abstract concept". This means explicitly that its referent isn't real; it exists only in our minds. It's similar to concepts such as "number", "freedom", "history", "irony", etc. They're all useful concepts, although they don't describe anything with real physical existence.
The religious people generally insist that "God" describes something real that exists in the physical world. Well, except for those that say that God is an incorporeal being, which is hard to distinguish from an abstract concept. But the important difference is the claim that God is an intelligent being that can and does act independently and can cause changes in the physical world. This isn't a property of an abstract concept. Abstract concepts can only affect the physical world indirectly by "persuading" us to do their work.
OTOH, people like mathematicians and lawyers are more honest; they freely admit that their concepts are abstract and need humans to implement their effects. Religious people claim not to believe this, and insist that their abstract concept(s) can directly influence the physical world without our help. I.e., they insist that their God isn't an abstract concept, but is a real actor in the physical world.
So, yes, one should probably believe in "God" as an abstract concept that is believed by many people who will attempt to punish you for not agreeing with their belief. In parts of the world, one should profess to the belief that the local God is real, out of fear of what the local people will do to you if you don't say you believe.
But a rational person wouldn't actually believe that "God" describes anything real, since there is no evidence to support such a belief. And, as others have pointed out, you also shouldn't believe that God isn't real, since there's no evidence to support that belief. And you wouldn't try to argue with dummies who don't understand those two sentences. ;-)
(An interesting aspect of the concept of territory is that it's understood not just by us, but also my many animals with much lower levels of intelligence. It may have been the first "abstract concept" implemented by animal life many millions of years ago.)
"Atheism is a belief" is a non sequitur.
Actually, it might work better to phrase it something like: Atheism isn't a belief; it's a non-belief. Something can't be both a belief and a non-belief at the same time.
We might also note a logical point that's probably too subtle for most religious people: Not believing in a god (typically on the grounds that there's no evidence supporting a claim that any god exists) isn't the same as believing that there is no god. Atheism is basically a position of a skeptic: If you claim there's a god, you should be prepared to present evidence. Otherwise, you shouldn't bother people who don't think it's been shown that there is a god.
I think the title of this thread sums up the topic pretty well.
The prosecution's theory in this case is that using Twitter to criticize a public figure can be a criminal act if the person's feelings are hurt.
Yay, a law that's about to be ruled as unconstitutional!
Let's hope so. Although at this rate, it's going to be passed sooner or later (I give it 10 years).
To put it in perspective, we should point out that laws making it illegal to say things that offend powerful people are not anything new. There's even a traditional legal term for such an act: lese majeste. Back in the 1700s, most of the world had laws that punished people who said things that offended powerful people. The US's First Amendment was a break with the tradition of such laws. It was intentionally written to legalize saying things (verbally or in writing) that offended powerful people, both political and religious.
Of course, the US has had a long line of powerful people thinking that this doesn't apply to them.
Hmmm ... So maybe I should learn how to convince the analysis code that I'm a transvestite female pretending to be a gay male (to satisfy my "wife" who they believe is a gay male). I wonder who could give me lessons in this sort of fakery. I mean, I have no experience actually being female (or gay or transvestite), so I probably wouldn't do it right without some lessons.
...now I just have to get hold of a few Pakistani bank IP addys, set up some sort of listener, and...
Why bother, when you can simply talk to a few people at the bank's ISP, exchange a bit of something under the table, and get a list of all the banks' customers' account numbers, PINs and login info.
That's much simpler than setting up your own listener. And the new law will require the ISP to collect such information, so they might as well productize it.
By "interfere with the ability of ISPs to monitor internet usage", presumably they mean collecting all their customers' account numbers, PINs, login ids, passwords, etc.
The major effect of banning encryption would be to make electronic commerce impossible. If anyone alone the data path can intercept your names, numbers, and passwords, then people will learn very quickly that the Internet simply can't be used for anything that involves a transfer of money.
One usually doesn't append obvious modifiers to their claims like, "right now." or "in it's current state."
That's because, in English and all the other (Indo-)European languages, it isn't necessary. In those languages, and in languages in many other families, verbs have an explicit present tense that means "now".
The problem is that people take a quote from the past, and misinterpret the verb's present tense as meaning "now, when I repeat the quote". As in the example we've seen here about military aircraft, people very often do this with malice aforethought, knowing full well that the quote doesn't reply to their current situation. I you ask them, you'll usually find that they fully understand verbal present tenses, and they know that the quote they misused wasn't meant to apply to the distant future. But they have an agenda, and making a previous "expert" look like an idiot fits their agenda.
In this case, the agenda is pretty clear: The writers are trying to discredit all military experts. It's easy to find historical quotes that were correct when said, but are no longer correct. This suffices to show that one person was wrong in the past. And this obviously applies to the current experts, right?
In the current topic, it might be useful to reflect that the Internet wouldn't exist if it hadn't been pushed (and mostly funded) by the US military. The business and corporate worlds that are trying to claim the Internet as their invention were dragged into it ("kicking and screaming" ;-) in the early 1990s. Most government agencies jumped on board almost as an afterthought, when they had lots of employees that knew how to use the Internet and pushed internally for agency web sites. But the Internet's prime movers were military people from the same DoD that is now being declared imcompetent.
I'm not quite sure what this says about the current topic. Maybe the lesson is that the DoD should be listening to their own people. Especially those who have retired, but who directed the building of the stuff they're now having such problems with.
The only competence of any government appears to be the ability to endlessly piss away taxpayer money.
Medicare is administrated by the US Government, has lower overhead than any private sector health insurance plan and has the highest satisfaction rating of any health insurance plan in the US. You don't write articles about how great the government is at administration, just about when it messes up administration.
It's part of the American "conservative" ideology, that everything wrong with the world is due to governments, and everything good is due to corporations.
In reality, the problems are present in all human organizations. If an organization, government or corporate or whatever, pays attention to a topic, they can generally solve it. But it's more common for any human organization to become a "power center", with its own internal ideology and mythology, and punish anyone who goes against the organization's culture.
This story is basically about that problem, as applied to computer security issues. If you follow discussions of that topic, you invariably find a strong desire to respond to information about a security problem by 1) pretending that it's not a real problem, and 2) punishing anyone who demonstrates an exploit.
Government agencies do this, and so do corporations. You can see the results all around you. The only organizations that have achieved any reasonable level of security are those who hire and listen to people with expertise in the topic. But most organizations automatically react to demonstrated security problems by labeling the messenger a "hacker", and treating them as a criminal. This gets a message across to people who discover problems: "Kept it quiet, or we'll punish you, too."
In any case, this has little to do with the "government" label. It's a failure of all human organizations. Pretending that only one sort of organization (government) has a real problem is merely trying to impose an ideology rather than solve the problems.
I guess that Harvard etc are private businesses that receive no public funding, so are an example of the inherent benefits of capitalism over socialism.
Yup; Harvard is a private university, and most of its libraries are inaccessible to non-Harvard people. BU (Boston University) is also private, and is a bit more welcoming, but not much. But the "private" part isn't all of the story. I attended several American "public" (state-owned) universities, and while they were more open than the typical private university, they still erected barriers to the general public. As a student, I had numerous instances of being denied access to parts of various departmental libraries. This depended a lot on the department, though, and there were a lot of libraries where I could just walk in and read anything I wanted, no questions asked.
One thing that's different about the Internet is that it appears to (but doesn't) solve the basic barrier with traditional libraries: Most of them are a long distance away. Yes, there is "inter-library loan", but this tends to apply only to fairly common books. If you're looking for something rare, they are often not willing to ship it; you must visit the library to see it.
The Internet potentially solves this. But in many cases, and with most technical journals, there's a "paywall" in the way. Buying a subscription to all the members-only sites online is often beyond the financial capabitities of all but a few. We may solve this eventually. And some technical journals have already started to make material over N years old available to the general public. But this is countered by others that are restricting access. The New York TImes just did this. Though the NYT isn't what you'd call a technical journal, they are a "publication of record", which has legal meaning in the US, and a quick check I did recently showed that their paywall did block my access to things that (in the print form) is public information.
Another problem is the limited digitalization of a lot of material. Some time ago, I wanted to read some music-related material that was left behind by a musician who died about 50 years ago. I found that her papers had been donated to a state historical museum. It had an index of her material online -- but none of the actual documents. I can probably take a 2500-mile trip to the museum to view them, but that appears to be my only access. They have no plans for copying them, much less putting them online.
OTOH, some scholarly fields have been greatly enhanced by the Internet. There are a number of online collections of ancient documents, sometimes in poorly-understood languages, and these have attracted "amateur" historians and linguists who have helped greatly in the transcriptions. One that got a lot of attention a few years back deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains images, transcriptions and translations of may of those documents. These relics were previously totally unavailable to the public, including most scholars, and the documents' "owners" objected strongly to the online copies when they first appeared. There are similar online projects around the world. A lot of Mesoamerican material, especially including Mayan writing, have been put online, and again "amateur" linguists and historians have helped materially in decoding its contents. Google "Mayan writing" for lots of links to information on this.
So the Internet's effectiveness at eliminating the traditional barriers to information is currently in a "mixed" state. There's a lot of information available in seconds that used to take long trips to distant locations to access. But online organizations are experimenting with ways of limiting access to paying customers. And there's a lot of material that will never be online in our lifetime.
We'll see how it all plays out. Or maybe our descendants will.
No, I think you meant: Jupiter shouldn't be considered one either as it also has thousands of asteroids trapped at its Lagrange points.
The numbers are quite a lot smaller for Neptune and Mars, though. And the total mass of Jupiter's Trojan asteroids is quite a bit less than Jupiter's mass.
The real exception continues to be our Earth, which shares its orbit with a dwarf planet with mass only about 1/80 of Earth's mass.
The real problem here is a technical term ("planet") whose definition includes features both intrinsic and extrinsic to the object it describes. Such definitions are always pitfalls when put up against the chaos of the actual universe.
Using a single term for a class of objects that includes both Mercury and Jupiter should also be considered a sign that the term is useless, and at least two new terms are what is really needed. Probably three, actually. But it doesn't look like we're going to get that solution any time soon.
My favorite explanation is that the fuss over "planet" was a joke perpetrated by some astronomers with a twisted sense of humor. They're still laughing at the fuss it produced.
"We found a positive relationship between absolute latitude and both eye socket size and cranial capacity."
Pretty much every physical measurement of every land animal is positively correlated with absolute latitude. This is because the mean temperature is negatively correlated with distance from the equator, and larger body size is adaptive at colder temperatures. A larger body has relatively smaller heat losses, and thus a more stable temperature. This doesn't matter much in the tropics (except at high altitudes), but it can be important when you get to areas with serious cold seasons.
You can find this as an example of adaptation in most intro biology textbooks. It's not clear that this story adds anything new to this old observation.
As a Java user there is *zero* risk you'll be sued - so please cut spreading the ignorant crap, eh? There is a problem if you write an incompatible Java implementation (as Google did, and Microsoft before them, although for different reasons).
Agreed for a "user". But as a software developer, there are some serious risks with the current fashion (in the US at least) for patent trolling. The patent/copyright laws are more and more being (mis)used to bankrupt small startups and independent developers.
One specific threat that's of growing concern: As you say, "Java is huge", and I read this to mean not its popularity at the management level, but rather the size of its libraries. There's no practical way that I or any other mere human can memorize all the details of everything that's in the java libraries. This means that there's a good chance that I may implement a needed routine not knowing that there's a library routine that already does most of the work. We get a lot of humor (see The Daily WTF for many examples) from developers "reinventing the wheel" by rewriting a routine that they should have known already exists. But we do this all the time for the more obscure corners of libraries. Often the reason is that we used different language in describing the task, so we didn't realize that that routine with a totally different names was in fact doing something isomorphic to what our routine does.
This poses an obvious legal problem. Such a duplication of a library routine can easily be viewed as a patent (or copyright) infringement by the company that sells the library. This is likely to not be noticed until our company's product is out the door and in use by customers. Then, when the vendor's lawyers get their teeth into it, our company is in really big trouble.
This didn't use to be a problem with java, because Sun was trustworthy, and didn't do such evil things to their customers. Oracle isn't like that. I fully expect that, if I ever get involved in a java development project again, I'll be the one that triggers just such an attack by Oracle's lawyers.
Pooh-pooing this won't convince me that I'm wrong. Calling me an idiot won't, either. What might is an explanation (that I understand ;-) of exactly how I can avoid such a danger while doing a job that someone is paying me for. Telling me "Don't do something stupid" is not an explanation; it's part of the threat. My brain can't possibly hold all the information needed to avoid all the possible infringements of everything within Oracle's products, even if I could get access to all that information (which I can't). So the only way I can reasonably avoid doing something stupid is to just not develop software in the vicinity of Oracle products.
Of course, that may not protect me either, the way things are going.
You do know that Javascript has nothing to do with Java, right?
Several possible replies come to mind. The first is obviously "Whoooosh!", since you missed what should have be clearly humor in my comment. You also missed the fact that, since I was wishing we had as good an excuse to abandon javascript as we do to abandon java, I was tacitly implying that javascript isn't java.
Another possible reply comes from a number of discussions where people have brought this up, and various replies came back suggesting that people look into the innards of most implementations of javascript, where they'll find that the code invokes the local java libraries. Of course, they also use libc, but that doesn't mean that the code is dependent on (or derived from) libc; it could just mean that the POSIX conventions were followed, and libc happens to be how those are supplied on most systems. But from a programmer's viewpoint, knowing that javascript often calls the java libraries tells us some things that could be useful. It means that on many systems, javascript may inherit a lot of the good and bad features from java. F'rinstance, I remember having a lot of problems with java's date/time stuff twice a year, when local clocks switched to/from DST. This was all explained to me when someone handed me a copy of the (then) java spec stating that the java library's internal clock was in local time. That was sufficient grounds for banning java (and javascript) from a number of projects in which it was important that we have a reliable internal clock across the network. I've never tried serious date/time manipulation in javascript, but I know enough about it to shudder at the thought.
And yet another possible reply is to point out that javascript and java are obviously related. They both start with "java", don't they? ;-)
It can be amusing seeing people trying to deal with bogus name/value confusion. And it's amazing how often people fall for this sort of trick. You can find a lot of them in the history of religion, since a lot of religious doctrines are based on specific interpretations of the wording of a sacred book in one specific language. Such things don't translate well, so you get factionalism and heresies from people that are reading the sacred books in different languages, or are using different translations into a single language. So far we don't have computer language confusion leading to holy wars with millions of people killed, but we do have a lot of misunderstanding and miscommunication due to our sloppy misuses of language. Mocking it with java(script) should be a bit of obvious humor to any computer geeks with even minimal linguistics backgrounds.
There are probably some other good replies, but the margin is too small to scribble them all out ...