Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system.
Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco.;-)
The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.
Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)
Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.
In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.
Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly.;-)
Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.
In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.
Even when there is a sign next to it which states "Not fair game"?
Heh. That would really baffle anyone in the 95% of the human population who's not a literate, native speaker of English. (Just imagine a tourist staring at their dictionary, trying to make sense of that set of three simple English words.;-)
Of course, it's not at all unusual for people to put up signs with this level of clarity, nearly anywhere in the world. There's a nice web site, engrish.com, that has a large collection of similar signage, mostly from east Asia, but also from most of the rest of the world.
Don't you know that most explosives work via a reaction with oxygen in the air?
Actually no, most don't, unless you're talking about fuel-air explosions (which can be bloody huge!). Most solid or liquid explosives use an oxidizer that's part of the mix -- or don't use an oxidizer as such at all, but rather their rather unstable molecular configuration degenerates to a lower energy state with much release of energy and component parts (most high explosives).
(Shhh!!! Don't let on that you know something about explosives, especially high explosives. They'll be after you next.;-)
I love how they say that Mercury switches can detonate explosives,... even coffee pots can be considered "bomb making equipment" in their eyes.
That's why the (nearly empty) cup of coffee on the table next to me was made in a small saucepan on the stove. Actually, it's mostly because it makes better-tasting coffee than any of the coffee makers that we have stored in the basement, to be brought out when we have a crowd. And I can easily make just one cup, which is normally all I want. (My wife doesn't drink the stuff; she prefers tea, which she also makes in a cup or in a small pitcher for groups).
Of course, there's a potential danger that the authorities will hear about this, investigate, and decide that I'm making coffee via a Middle-Eastern method, which makes me a terrorist suspect. OTOH, I actually learned the method from my Scandinavian friends and relatives in the Mid-West, so maybe it's OK. And on the third hand, Scandinavians are all liberal socialists, don'cha know?
In any case, it's getting hard to find anything that can't be considered part of bomb making. Are you breathing oxygen? Don't you know that most explosives work via a reaction with oxygen in the air?
Here in the Boston area, we're still making jokes about the 2007 bomb scare caused by a set of "art works" (actually ads), small electronic displays hung up mostly along main streets around the city. Even the Marathon bombing didn't stop the humor surrounding the police takedown of this "art". Rather, the bombing is generally understood as a major bit of evidence that all the supposed security precautions are worthless. "They can stop street artists (or ad agencies;-), but they can't stop actual terrorists." We also hear versions of what this story will no doubt trigger: comments to the effect that it's no surprise that the US can no longer match the technology of most 3rd-world countries; just look at what they do to a kid trying to become competent in some technical specialty. They obviously don't want us turning our kids into chemical engineers, or any other kinds of engineers. To the authorities, that stuff looks a lot like terrorism, y'know.
Stories like this are much of what led to the rise of the phrase "security theater". (If you're not familiar with it, just google it.)
I am disturbed by how many fake rape claims there are though. Something about that should be done.
Perhaps this is awfully unfair of me, but I get the distinct impression that unprosecuted rapes don't bother you half as much.
Actually, this particular bias is to be expected, for both sexes. You'd expect women to worry mostly about unprosecuted rapes, since they're more likely than men to be raped. And you'd expect men to worry mostly about false rape accusations, since they're more likely that women to be falsely accused of rape.
Similarly, you'd expect people with large bank accounts to be more worried about identity thefts than people who store all their money under their mattress, while you'd expect poor people to be more worried about armed robbery of what little cash they have.
People tend to worry mostly about things that can effect them, for obvious reasons.
...If you always tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.
Even in his time, just sticking to the truth was the path of least resistance.
Basically good advice, but the reality is often subtler than that. Sometimes, you need both a good memory for the facts, and also a good memory of exactly what you really said. Ask anyone who's ever run for an elected audience. Your opponents will extract a portion of what you actually said, tweak it just a bit, and claim you said something rather different from what you really said.
And publicising what you actually said, with the expectation that it'll expose your opponents' trickery, isn't always helpful. Google "invented the internet" for a nice example of how poorly exposing the facts can work. At least in the political arena, it's unlikely that anything will have much effect on the prevalence of brazen liars.
Mark Twain also said "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Also, WTF does "If it's an executable digital file, any foreign interests can get a hold of it" mean? Is ISIS unable to use non-executable files?
It means some asshole who doesn't understand computers is talking....
Yeah, this triggered a WTF flag in my head, too. Most of the web servers I've worked with do just the opposite of this: If a web file is non-executable, anyone can download a copy of it. But if it's made executable, attempting to download it causes the server to run it and send you its output. So executable files are the ones that can't be downloaded by anyone.
I wonder how they have their servers configured. Maybe they've figured a way to reverse the meaning of the "x" bits, so that only non-executable files are run, while executables are sent as-is to the client. Ya think?
(Actually, I do have some directories with a.htaccess file that declare nothing there to be executable. I sometimes used that to provide an easy way for clients to download the source code rather than execute it and get its output, as happens in the main directories. But somehow, I don't think this is what that idiot was talking about. I suspect he's clueless about web servers and their capabilities, and was just making stuff up that he thought might mean something to someone.;-)
They need diplomas or certificates in programming.
If they don't understand mathematics or computer systems design then their code will be useless
But note that the question wasn't about understand mathematics or computer systems design; it was about diplomas or certificates in programming. It's fairly well understood that those are orthogonal quantities.;-)
I stand by my words, never regretted clicking send. This is a feature for people for whom 30 seconds is long enough to change their mind on if they have something to say. Maybe they could think for 30 seconds and ask two questions.
Well, a few years ago, I'd have said the same. But then I got involved with several of the latest "smart" phones and tablets. As a result, I now think "Undo Send" sounds like a fine idea.
The reason, of course, is all the times I've been typing a message, when suddenly it blinks out in mid-word, and I find that the partial message has apparently been sent. My muttered "WTF!?" has no effect. I've generally had no idea what I may have done (if anything) that caused the software to act that way. This happened once today on my Android (HTC ONE) phone, and I've seen it on several iPads and Android tablets. My wife reports the same behavior on her iPhone.
Of course, this wasn't a case of me clicking Send, so perhaps your "never regretted clicking send" does apply. But it'll be useful if a Send triggered by the software itself when I didn't want it to send anything will suffice as grounds for wanting an Unsend capability.
The only problem is the 30-second window. The email (and IM) interfaces are getting progressively more baroque, and that may often not be enough time to understand what has gone wrong inside the goofy software. What we really need is a way to tell it "Don't ever send anything unless I explicitly hit the Send button." But the clever software "designers" also seem to be eliminating things as mundane as buttons with words on them, replacing them with idiosyncratic icons (different in every email/message app) whose behaviour can be hard to remember if you routinely work on several different machines, as many of us do.
(Just today, I tried to back out of a messaging app by using what looked a lot like the usual left-pointing "Return to previous screen" button. It sent the message, though I'm not sure who it went to, and I hadn't even intentionally been trying to make a reply. Things really are getting this messed up.;-)
You get more mileage from a cheap pair of speakers.
One of the most popular cafes in this town is successful in great part because of their lack of background music. It's not a fancy place at all, just a deli-style counter with fairly good sandwich and salad makings, lots of good pastries, and a variety of (non-alcoholic) drinkables. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen groups decide to go there explicitly because conversation is possible.
Of course, I can see other restaurant owners deciding to go with the music because it interferes with conversation, so people will just eat and then free up the table for the next customers. Groups that are talking tend to stay around too long for a truly "commercial" establishment. This may well be the main reasons that eateries pay for licenses to play music. They want you to eat and get out in as short at time as possible, not sit around and talk.
The local cafe mentioned above is frequented by the local political crowd, and by the leaders of many local organizations. My wife is involved in organizing an upcoming music & art & food festival, and most of the organization's meetings have been held in that cafe. The cafe's owners presumably like serving this local function (and they also cater events in your home if you prefer). Maybe there's only enough of that sort of business to support one such eatery locally, or there's nobody else that wants to get into that niche.
Of course not. If they're not using the Scientific Method, they're not Physicists.
Right; they're called Mathematical Physicists.;-)
Joking aside, this isn't necessarily bad science. It could be viewed as a mere division of labor. Actual science needs experimentation, observations, etc. to verify good hypotheses or reject bad hypotheses. But there's no real reason this all needs be done by the same person. One could easily argue that, if you have a good theoretician (textbook example: Einstein), it might be to everyone's benefit if they sit off in some ivory tower churning out their equations, while others with good knowledge of current technology work out the testing protocols, and yet others who are good in labs do the actual hands-on work. This might work better than trying to have one person do it all.
Of course, I'm really just suggesting that we continue with what we've been doing for a few centuries. Theoreticians have always turned out lots of ideas that were wrong, while occasionally being right. Sometimes they do some of the experimental/observational verification, but most of that has always been done by others.
The main problem is with educating the media and general public about it all. History says we haven't done a very good job of that. But again, one might argue that that's a part of the scientific enterprise that's best handed over to specialists in such communication. This is also not a very new idea. (Textbook examples: Sagan, Tyson.) We mostly just need more people who are good at that task.
It's been long understood that scientific conjectures and hypotheses must be tested independently by people other than the ones that developed the ideas. Thus, Einstein didn't really much bother with experimental confirmation; that was the job of all the other physicists who (quite properly) didn't accept his ideas and were trying to disprove them. Real science does require verification, of course, but there's no reason to insist that it be done by the people who do the theoretical work. Also, there are known problems with people trying to experimentally verify their own hypotheses, which is why we so often read calls for independent testing.
So what's new about all this today? It sounds like Science As Usual to me. A lot of the hypotheses will never be tested, but that just means that they'll never graduate to the class of "theory".
A parallel that I've found instructive: In the publishing industry, it's well understood that proofreading must be done (if it's done at all;-) by someone other than the author. It's difficult to proofread your own stuff, because you tend to read what you know should be there, not what actually is. I've seen this myself, with people pointing out typos in things I've put online that I know I proofread. I generally just fix the error, and send them a "Thanks" message, then go about what I was doing. Similar comments probably apply any time you're trying to actually get something right in any subject area.
One might be tempted to make the extreme suggestion that people shouldn't bother checking their own work. Just send it to an independent checker, perhaps someone who is willing to send you their work for checking. Send it to several such checkers, who have an understanding that you'll do the same for them. This way, people can concentrate on producing stuff that they're good at, and pay for it by spending time similarly checking other people's work that might not be so close and familiar.
I've seen evidence that this has sorta happened in a few fields. The idea is that you keep all the stuff you're working on online, in a semi-hidden place that your colleagues know how to access, but which isn't really "public". You might send email out occasionally asking them to read through a new document that you're putting together. This sort of setup happens a lot in software development, typically as online repositories clearly labelled as "development" to warn away non-technical "users". A mailing list or blog helps get people together who are willing to download and test new versions and send in bug reports. When you get enough colleages saying it seems to be working, you announce a new public release. This is not really very different from the old scientific concept of independent verification.
Wait - Does anyone not have click-to-play set as their default?
Guess what, Google - you don't get to pick what I consider "important" content. I do.
Well, yeah, I've done that when I can find the setting. But I need to do a lot of web testing, and have lots of browsers installed on my various test machines. With most of them, I can't find any such setting anywhere. This doesn't mean they don't have such controls, of course; it could just mean that I don't recognize whatever they call it. Terms like "click to play" don't seem to exist on any of them, and for the few that I know how to do it, they all use different terminology.
So does someone have a list of where to find the click-to-play setting on lots of browsers? Googling finds a few very short lists, but doesn't seem to have any info on the hundreds of others that are out now. Thus, I just installed Vivaldi on this Macbook Pro, its settings seems to have nothing at all to control active content, and google seems to just find questions about it, not answers. Again, this might just be because I don't know what Vivaldi calls their click-to-play setting.
So if you think that everyone should have click-to-play set by default, you presumably know how to do this on every browser, or you know where there's a list of explanations. Can you give us a link to this list?
Now, the next step - what in the hell do we actually do about it aside from individual protection? Sure, recent congressional actions (Thank you, Sen. Paul!) have put an end to at least one program... problem is, another grew to take its place (basically, the FBI is picking up where the NSA is allegedly leaving off).
I don't think we will ever trust them on this subject again. Individual protection is the only way, and that is exactly why we have so many government officials saying encryption needs to go.
There's really just one major reason they haven't succeeded yet: The world's financial system, including your bank and/or credit union, now uses the internet for most of their communications. If encryption is outlawed, all your account information will be going over the wires unencrypted, for anyone along the route to intercept and store for later usage.
This is probably the main reason that encryption is still legal nearly everywhere (and used without prosecution in many places where it isn't legal). True, it doesn't matter to our rulers whether our account info is flying around unencrypted. But they understand quite well that encryption is what keeps their own large bank accounts safe from raiding by all the world's con men and identity thieves, not to mention their political opponents. Outlawing encryption for The Masses' account info while keeping it legal for anyone with economic or political power is pretty much an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem, so in most countries encryption remains legal.
Of course, they can put pressure on the suppliers of the software, and persuade them to supply encryption that's decodable by their own spy organizations. But this is subject to all the usual gotchas, since decryption keys and code are easily accessible via the usual bribes to the right low-paid admin flunkies in the appropriate organizations. This is something that all our politicians inherently understand, and to protect their own information, they easily decide that their own communications (and their funders') have to remain encrypted.
We can be fairly sure that our banks and other financial institutions will continue to educate our government leaders about all this, as they have done in the past.
(Actually, I keep reading that in much of the world, cell phones are now a major tool for handling financial transactions. I'd guess that this requires effective encryption to prevent interception by the crooks, including those inside the phone companies and government agencies. I haven't read good technical articles about how this actually works, especially dealing with local encryption laws. I wonder where the best docs on the topic might be. Perhaps someone here on/. might know....;-)
And here we have another "troll" mod to this comment, from a reader without a sense of humor.
(Actually, the Koch brothers might not be predictable in this case, since it'd depend on how much they had invested in the companies that manufactured the old, damaging refrigerants. And they might be aware of how easily society reversed that atmospheric problem with relatively little economic effect, so they might want to be careful about getting people comparing it with the effects of our CO2 output.;-)
Except that's rapidly becoming non-viable, since over the past few decades, they've succeeding in capturing most of the money that exists and sequestering it so it's out of reach of the other 99% of us. Soon they'll have to find another approach if they want to continue capturing the money supply as they have been doing.
The reason why "global business leaders" don't know about technology is that they are completely divorced from the daily life that normal humans live. They don't have to know shit, so they don't know shit.
And Carly Fiorina, who Portfolio Magazine named as one of the 20 worst American CEOs in history, now wants to be President of the United States....
She's just upping her game, trying to become the worst American president in history. But she'll find that there's a lot of fierce competition for that title. Can she make it? Stay tuned...
People keep arguing that/. doesn't support Unicode, when it really does - it just uses a narrow whitelist of characters. The reason for this is obvious if you think about it - to prevent situations like this from happening.
Heck, there might be strings out there that will crash any Unicode library implementation, just we haven't found them yet because the search space is huge.
Hmmm... That tempts me to try a test using a couple of file names on this machine that are two of the names for a Mandarin-English dictionary:.html and Ptnghuà.html (and also Pu3Tong1Hua4.html for systems that can only accept ASCII;-). Those names aren't in any sense obscure or tricky; they're strings you'd expect to see in online discussions of text handling in various languages. If you can't handle at least these trivial Chinese strings, you've failed pretty badly. Of course, they look findin this Comment: panel, and will likely survive the Preview button.
Let's see how/. handles them...
Nope; the 3 Hanzi characters didn't show at all, and only the à showed correctly in the second name. But both everything looks correct in this second editing widget. This proves that/. hasn't damaged the actual text in the Preview. Let's see what happens when I try to post it...
I see that the "Comment:" edit widget for this message does have the Hanzi and marked 'u' and 'o' characters missing. So the damage is done after you hit the Submit button. There's no excuse for this. None of those characters have any special meaning to the code, and text containing them can't do any damage to anything. If damage happens, it's the fault of the crappy software handling the text, not the fault of the creator of the text. The right thing to do is to correct the crappy software. Damaging the text is simply idiotic, and interferes with the main reason (communication between literate people) that Unicode was invented.
(And we might note that a significant fraction of the users of the Internet now consists of people who communicate via Hanzi text, or Arabic or any of the hundreds of other character sets that humanity uses to communicate. Damaging those folks' texts to avoid fixing your crappy software is a good way to tell them that you don't want them communicating with other people. This is rapidly becoming a commercially untenable position for people trying to "attract eyes" on the Net.;-)
People keep arguing that/. doesn't support Unicode, when it really does - it just uses a narrow whitelist of characters. The reason for this is obvious if you think about it - to prevent situations like this from happening.
Heck, there might be strings out there that will crash any Unicode library implementation, just we haven't found them yet because the search space is huge.
Hmmm... That tempts me to try a test using a couple of file names on this machine that are two of the names for a Mandarin-English dictionary:.html and Ptnghuà.html (and also Pu3Tong1Hua4.html for systems that can only accept ASCII;-). Those names aren't in any sense obscure or tricky; they're strings you'd expect to see in online discussions of text handling in various languages. If you can't handle at least these trivial Chinese strings, you've failed pretty badly. Of course, they look findin this Comment: panel, and will likely survive the Preview button.
Let's see how/. handles them...
Nope; the 3 Hanzi characters didn't show at all, and only the à showed correctly in the second name. But both everything looks correct in this second editing widget. This proves that/. hasn't damaged the actual text in the Preview. Let's see what happens when I try to post it...
... All affected members will receive letters of apology, offering two years of free credit monitoring and identity threat protection as compensation,...
So they're saying that they have such monitoring/protection, but members who aren't explicitly paying extra for such monitoring/protection aren't being protected from identity theft in any way?
Somehow, I don't find this surprising. But I'm a bit surprised that they'd admit it so blatantly and openly.
(Actually, I'm a bit dubious about their implicit claim to have such monitoring/protection already. But it's fairly common for companies to make such claims for PR purposes, without bothering to actually implement what they're claiming to supply until something like this hits them. Maybe they had another similar incident happen sometime in the past, and are finally getting around to doing something about it?)
(And what exactly does "identity threat protection" mean? Google doesn't seem to have any matches for that phrase, and automatically replaces it with "identity theft protection", which doesn't sound like the same thing at all.;-)
This is one of the favorite "language peevery" examples that get discussed often in (English) language forums (or fora if you prefer;-). The confusion about any purported difference goes back to before there were any actual English dictionaries, and probably 99% of the world's native speakers of English treat them as synonyms. The few that don't can't hardly agree about what their "correct" usages should be. But that doesn't stop such people from harrassing the rest of us about our "misusage". Mostly, it's just a thing they can feel superior about, while the rest of us casually ignore them.
It is a bit curious to see such peevery pop up in a discussion in which General Relativity pretty much rules. Trying to make a strict distinction between distance and time in such discussions is mostly just funny, as well as a signal that the writer lacks understanding of something important to the discussion. But language peevery is rarely based on reality; it's more about some small crowd's attempts to impose strict rules on a language with many dialects and hundreds of millions of speakers.
Now let's all join in singing a round of "Farther along"... (in which the phrase clearly refers to time.;-)
Who pays then, when the government elected by the people do misdeeds?
So where in the US are the police elected by the local citizens? I've never heard of this happening. It certainly hasn't been the practice in or near any place I've ever lived.
I've also never seen any candidate in any election running on a promise to do "misdeeds", so I've never actually been able to vote for or against a candidate on that basis. It'd be interesting to know where this is done, and why it isn't done where I've lived.
Slashdot Mirror
Lakdawalla also added Pluto to a montage of the biggest non-planets in the solar system.
Thus starts another round of the old "Is Pluto a real planet?" fiasco. ;-)
The pseudo-argument is really based on a poor understanding of basic English grammar. The word "dwarf" in the phrase "dwarf planet" is being used as an adjective modifying the noun "planet". A fellow at NASA (whose name I didn't catch) explained the fallacy of saying this means that Pluto isn't a real planet, by giving a few examples of the usage. Thus, we have several "dwarf apple trees" in our yard. Nobody who understand English would say that this means they're not real apple trees; they are real apple trees that bear real apples, but are much smaller (3-4m tall) than most (full-size) apple trees. Similarly, our sun is classified as a "dwarf star". This means that it's a real star that fuses H atoms and gives off light, but it's smaller than most of the stars you can see in the sky. This is a good thing, because a "full-size" star 140 million km from our planet would totally vaporize all our water, and would burn out in a few hundred million years, destroying our planet at the end of its life. If there are other intelligent critters on planets around other stars, those will also be multi-billion-years-old dwarf stars like ours (to within an order of magnitude). Most of the galaxy's stars are dwarf stars.
Readers can probably think of lots of other common uses of "dwarf" or "pygmy" to mean a small version of something. This isn't mysterious; it's standard English syntax. (We have a potted "dwarf jade plant". It's a real jade plant, but its parts only grow to about 1/3 the size of the equivalent "standard" jade plant. It's a very easy sort of bonsai to grow. But when we bring it inside for the winter, we have to protect it from our cockatiels, who find it tasty.)
Other astronomers have pointed out the major problem with the term "planet": It's far too inclusive. It includes object as varied as Mercury and Jupiter, so it's an almost useless classification term. The long-term sensible approach is to prepend various modifiers to say which of a list of classes a given planet is filed under. We have a few of them, like "gas giant", and the more recent "ice giant", of which our solar systems contains two each. The classification "dwarf" was added a few years ago for the tiny planets that can't hold an atmosphere. We still don't seem to have a standard classification for the 3 intermediate-size planets, Venus, Earth and Mars. We also haven't figure out good terminology for the similar objects (Titan, Triton, etc) that also have things like an atmosphere with weather, but which share an orbit with a planet in a larger class. Pluto is an interesting borderline case, because at the recent perihelion, it has had a very thin but significant atmosphere, which is now condensing out as the sun gets more distant.
In the long run, we really should have a reliable set of classes for the sort of astronomical object that's big enough to be (roughly) spherical but too small for fusion to happen in its core. We've found that there are lots more of them in our solar system than we thought, at least 6 with atmospheres denser with ours, and several with thinner atmospheres. Pretty soon, we'll be getting good data on similar objects orbiting other stars.
Calling all the round-but-not-stars objects "planet" is a useful term. But such a vague term really shouldn't ever be used without a prefix. Maybe the astronomical community should get a committee together to come up with a better list of planet classes than the current mess. And try to get the media and general public to use it correctly. ;-)
Or maybe they should just officially declare "planet" to be a non-technical term, with no precise astronomical definition. But then they'd have to come up with some new technical terms, so they probably won't do that.
In any case, saying a "dwarf planet" isn't a planet merely shows ignorance of basic English grammar. Some astronomers have pointed this out. We just need to get the word out to all the people who misunderstand it due to their poor command of the English language.
Even when there is a sign next to it which states "Not fair game"?
Heh. That would really baffle anyone in the 95% of the human population who's not a literate, native speaker of English. (Just imagine a tourist staring at their dictionary, trying to make sense of that set of three simple English words. ;-)
Of course, it's not at all unusual for people to put up signs with this level of clarity, nearly anywhere in the world. There's a nice web site, engrish.com, that has a large collection of similar signage, mostly from east Asia, but also from most of the rest of the world.
Don't you know that most explosives work via a reaction with oxygen in the air?
Actually no, most don't, unless you're talking about fuel-air explosions (which can be bloody huge!). Most solid or liquid explosives use an oxidizer that's part of the mix -- or don't use an oxidizer as such at all, but rather their rather unstable molecular configuration degenerates to a lower energy state with much release of energy and component parts (most high explosives).
(Shhh!!! Don't let on that you know something about explosives, especially high explosives. They'll be after you next. ;-)
I love how they say that Mercury switches can detonate explosives, ... even coffee pots can be considered "bomb making equipment" in their eyes.
That's why the (nearly empty) cup of coffee on the table next to me was made in a small saucepan on the stove. Actually, it's mostly because it makes better-tasting coffee than any of the coffee makers that we have stored in the basement, to be brought out when we have a crowd. And I can easily make just one cup, which is normally all I want. (My wife doesn't drink the stuff; she prefers tea, which she also makes in a cup or in a small pitcher for groups).
Of course, there's a potential danger that the authorities will hear about this, investigate, and decide that I'm making coffee via a Middle-Eastern method, which makes me a terrorist suspect. OTOH, I actually learned the method from my Scandinavian friends and relatives in the Mid-West, so maybe it's OK. And on the third hand, Scandinavians are all liberal socialists, don'cha know?
In any case, it's getting hard to find anything that can't be considered part of bomb making. Are you breathing oxygen? Don't you know that most explosives work via a reaction with oxygen in the air?
Yeah, this is the scariest part of the story. No way can you trust the "authorities" do Do The Right Thing nowdays.
Hmmm ... Do you know a time and place were you could trust them?
If you think this is something new and unusual, you haven't read much history ...
Why??
For their entertainment value? ;-)
Here in the Boston area, we're still making jokes about the 2007 bomb scare caused by a set of "art works" (actually ads), small electronic displays hung up mostly along main streets around the city. Even the Marathon bombing didn't stop the humor surrounding the police takedown of this "art". Rather, the bombing is generally understood as a major bit of evidence that all the supposed security precautions are worthless. "They can stop street artists (or ad agencies ;-), but they can't stop actual terrorists." We also hear versions of what this story will no doubt trigger: comments to the effect that it's no surprise that the US can no longer match the technology of most 3rd-world countries; just look at what they do to a kid trying to become competent in some technical specialty. They obviously don't want us turning our kids into chemical engineers, or any other kinds of engineers. To the authorities, that stuff looks a lot like terrorism, y'know.
Stories like this are much of what led to the rise of the phrase "security theater". (If you're not familiar with it, just google it.)
I am disturbed by how many fake rape claims there are though. Something about that should be done.
Perhaps this is awfully unfair of me, but I get the distinct impression that unprosecuted rapes don't bother you half as much.
Actually, this particular bias is to be expected, for both sexes. You'd expect women to worry mostly about unprosecuted rapes, since they're more likely than men to be raped. And you'd expect men to worry mostly about false rape accusations, since they're more likely that women to be falsely accused of rape.
Similarly, you'd expect people with large bank accounts to be more worried about identity thefts than people who store all their money under their mattress, while you'd expect poor people to be more worried about armed robbery of what little cash they have.
People tend to worry mostly about things that can effect them, for obvious reasons.
...If you always tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything. Even in his time, just sticking to the truth was the path of least resistance.
Basically good advice, but the reality is often subtler than that. Sometimes, you need both a good memory for the facts, and also a good memory of exactly what you really said. Ask anyone who's ever run for an elected audience. Your opponents will extract a portion of what you actually said, tweak it just a bit, and claim you said something rather different from what you really said.
And publicising what you actually said, with the expectation that it'll expose your opponents' trickery, isn't always helpful. Google "invented the internet" for a nice example of how poorly exposing the facts can work. At least in the political arena, it's unlikely that anything will have much effect on the prevalence of brazen liars.
Mark Twain also said "A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes."
Also, WTF does "If it's an executable digital file, any foreign interests can get a hold of it" mean? Is ISIS unable to use non-executable files?
It means some asshole who doesn't understand computers is talking. ...
Yeah, this triggered a WTF flag in my head, too. Most of the web servers I've worked with do just the opposite of this: If a web file is non-executable, anyone can download a copy of it. But if it's made executable, attempting to download it causes the server to run it and send you its output. So executable files are the ones that can't be downloaded by anyone.
I wonder how they have their servers configured. Maybe they've figured a way to reverse the meaning of the "x" bits, so that only non-executable files are run, while executables are sent as-is to the client. Ya think?
(Actually, I do have some directories with a .htaccess file that declare nothing there to be executable. I sometimes used that to provide an easy way for clients to download the source code rather than execute it and get its output, as happens in the main directories. But somehow, I don't think this is what that idiot was talking about. I suspect he's clueless about web servers and their capabilities, and was just making stuff up that he thought might mean something to someone. ;-)
They need diplomas or certificates in programming.
If they don't understand mathematics or computer systems design then their code will be useless
But note that the question wasn't about understand mathematics or computer systems design; it was about diplomas or certificates in programming. It's fairly well understood that those are orthogonal quantities. ;-)
I stand by my words, never regretted clicking send. This is a feature for people for whom 30 seconds is long enough to change their mind on if they have something to say. Maybe they could think for 30 seconds and ask two questions.
Well, a few years ago, I'd have said the same. But then I got involved with several of the latest "smart" phones and tablets. As a result, I now think "Undo Send" sounds like a fine idea.
The reason, of course, is all the times I've been typing a message, when suddenly it blinks out in mid-word, and I find that the partial message has apparently been sent. My muttered "WTF!?" has no effect. I've generally had no idea what I may have done (if anything) that caused the software to act that way. This happened once today on my Android (HTC ONE) phone, and I've seen it on several iPads and Android tablets. My wife reports the same behavior on her iPhone.
Of course, this wasn't a case of me clicking Send, so perhaps your "never regretted clicking send" does apply. But it'll be useful if a Send triggered by the software itself when I didn't want it to send anything will suffice as grounds for wanting an Unsend capability.
The only problem is the 30-second window. The email (and IM) interfaces are getting progressively more baroque, and that may often not be enough time to understand what has gone wrong inside the goofy software. What we really need is a way to tell it "Don't ever send anything unless I explicitly hit the Send button." But the clever software "designers" also seem to be eliminating things as mundane as buttons with words on them, replacing them with idiosyncratic icons (different in every email/message app) whose behaviour can be hard to remember if you routinely work on several different machines, as many of us do.
(Just today, I tried to back out of a messaging app by using what looked a lot like the usual left-pointing "Return to previous screen" button. It sent the message, though I'm not sure who it went to, and I hadn't even intentionally been trying to make a reply. Things really are getting this messed up. ;-)
You get more mileage from a cheap pair of speakers.
One of the most popular cafes in this town is successful in great part because of their lack of background music. It's not a fancy place at all, just a deli-style counter with fairly good sandwich and salad makings, lots of good pastries, and a variety of (non-alcoholic) drinkables. I've lost track of the number of times I've seen groups decide to go there explicitly because conversation is possible.
Of course, I can see other restaurant owners deciding to go with the music because it interferes with conversation, so people will just eat and then free up the table for the next customers. Groups that are talking tend to stay around too long for a truly "commercial" establishment. This may well be the main reasons that eateries pay for licenses to play music. They want you to eat and get out in as short at time as possible, not sit around and talk.
The local cafe mentioned above is frequented by the local political crowd, and by the leaders of many local organizations. My wife is involved in organizing an upcoming music & art & food festival, and most of the organization's meetings have been held in that cafe. The cafe's owners presumably like serving this local function (and they also cater events in your home if you prefer). Maybe there's only enough of that sort of business to support one such eatery locally, or there's nobody else that wants to get into that niche.
Of course not. If they're not using the Scientific Method, they're not Physicists.
Right; they're called Mathematical Physicists. ;-)
Joking aside, this isn't necessarily bad science. It could be viewed as a mere division of labor. Actual science needs experimentation, observations, etc. to verify good hypotheses or reject bad hypotheses. But there's no real reason this all needs be done by the same person. One could easily argue that, if you have a good theoretician (textbook example: Einstein), it might be to everyone's benefit if they sit off in some ivory tower churning out their equations, while others with good knowledge of current technology work out the testing protocols, and yet others who are good in labs do the actual hands-on work. This might work better than trying to have one person do it all.
Of course, I'm really just suggesting that we continue with what we've been doing for a few centuries. Theoreticians have always turned out lots of ideas that were wrong, while occasionally being right. Sometimes they do some of the experimental/observational verification, but most of that has always been done by others.
The main problem is with educating the media and general public about it all. History says we haven't done a very good job of that. But again, one might argue that that's a part of the scientific enterprise that's best handed over to specialists in such communication. This is also not a very new idea. (Textbook examples: Sagan, Tyson.) We mostly just need more people who are good at that task.
It's been long understood that scientific conjectures and hypotheses must be tested independently by people other than the ones that developed the ideas. Thus, Einstein didn't really much bother with experimental confirmation; that was the job of all the other physicists who (quite properly) didn't accept his ideas and were trying to disprove them. Real science does require verification, of course, but there's no reason to insist that it be done by the people who do the theoretical work. Also, there are known problems with people trying to experimentally verify their own hypotheses, which is why we so often read calls for independent testing.
So what's new about all this today? It sounds like Science As Usual to me. A lot of the hypotheses will never be tested, but that just means that they'll never graduate to the class of "theory".
A parallel that I've found instructive: In the publishing industry, it's well understood that proofreading must be done (if it's done at all ;-) by someone other than the author. It's difficult to proofread your own stuff, because you tend to read what you know should be there, not what actually is. I've seen this myself, with people pointing out typos in things I've put online that I know I proofread. I generally just fix the error, and send them a "Thanks" message, then go about what I was doing. Similar comments probably apply any time you're trying to actually get something right in any subject area.
One might be tempted to make the extreme suggestion that people shouldn't bother checking their own work. Just send it to an independent checker, perhaps someone who is willing to send you their work for checking. Send it to several such checkers, who have an understanding that you'll do the same for them. This way, people can concentrate on producing stuff that they're good at, and pay for it by spending time similarly checking other people's work that might not be so close and familiar.
I've seen evidence that this has sorta happened in a few fields. The idea is that you keep all the stuff you're working on online, in a semi-hidden place that your colleagues know how to access, but which isn't really "public". You might send email out occasionally asking them to read through a new document that you're putting together. This sort of setup happens a lot in software development, typically as online repositories clearly labelled as "development" to warn away non-technical "users". A mailing list or blog helps get people together who are willing to download and test new versions and send in bug reports. When you get enough colleages saying it seems to be working, you announce a new public release. This is not really very different from the old scientific concept of independent verification.
Wait - Does anyone not have click-to-play set as their default? Guess what, Google - you don't get to pick what I consider "important" content. I do.
Well, yeah, I've done that when I can find the setting. But I need to do a lot of web testing, and have lots of browsers installed on my various test machines. With most of them, I can't find any such setting anywhere. This doesn't mean they don't have such controls, of course; it could just mean that I don't recognize whatever they call it. Terms like "click to play" don't seem to exist on any of them, and for the few that I know how to do it, they all use different terminology.
So does someone have a list of where to find the click-to-play setting on lots of browsers? Googling finds a few very short lists, but doesn't seem to have any info on the hundreds of others that are out now. Thus, I just installed Vivaldi on this Macbook Pro, its settings seems to have nothing at all to control active content, and google seems to just find questions about it, not answers. Again, this might just be because I don't know what Vivaldi calls their click-to-play setting.
So if you think that everyone should have click-to-play set by default, you presumably know how to do this on every browser, or you know where there's a list of explanations. Can you give us a link to this list?
(Curious web testers want to know ... ;-)
Now, the next step - what in the hell do we actually do about it aside from individual protection? Sure, recent congressional actions (Thank you, Sen. Paul!) have put an end to at least one program... problem is, another grew to take its place (basically, the FBI is picking up where the NSA is allegedly leaving off).
I don't think we will ever trust them on this subject again. Individual protection is the only way, and that is exactly why we have so many government officials saying encryption needs to go.
There's really just one major reason they haven't succeeded yet: The world's financial system, including your bank and/or credit union, now uses the internet for most of their communications. If encryption is outlawed, all your account information will be going over the wires unencrypted, for anyone along the route to intercept and store for later usage.
This is probably the main reason that encryption is still legal nearly everywhere (and used without prosecution in many places where it isn't legal). True, it doesn't matter to our rulers whether our account info is flying around unencrypted. But they understand quite well that encryption is what keeps their own large bank accounts safe from raiding by all the world's con men and identity thieves, not to mention their political opponents. Outlawing encryption for The Masses' account info while keeping it legal for anyone with economic or political power is pretty much an unsolved (and probably unsolvable) problem, so in most countries encryption remains legal.
Of course, they can put pressure on the suppliers of the software, and persuade them to supply encryption that's decodable by their own spy organizations. But this is subject to all the usual gotchas, since decryption keys and code are easily accessible via the usual bribes to the right low-paid admin flunkies in the appropriate organizations. This is something that all our politicians inherently understand, and to protect their own information, they easily decide that their own communications (and their funders') have to remain encrypted.
We can be fairly sure that our banks and other financial institutions will continue to educate our government leaders about all this, as they have done in the past.
(Actually, I keep reading that in much of the world, cell phones are now a major tool for handling financial transactions. I'd guess that this requires effective encryption to prevent interception by the crooks, including those inside the phone companies and government agencies. I haven't read good technical articles about how this actually works, especially dealing with local encryption laws. I wonder where the best docs on the topic might be. Perhaps someone here on /. might know .... ;-)
Skip the middlemen and ask the Koch brothers.
And here we have another "troll" mod to this comment, from a reader without a sense of humor.
(Actually, the Koch brothers might not be predictable in this case, since it'd depend on how much they had invested in the companies that manufactured the old, damaging refrigerants. And they might be aware of how easily society reversed that atmospheric problem with relatively little economic effect, so they might want to be careful about getting people comparing it with the effects of our CO2 output. ;-)
Scientists say the ozone layer is in good shape thanks to the Montreal Protocol
Scientists schmientists. What does Congress have to say?
"Vote for me."
The solution is to give them more money...
Except that's rapidly becoming non-viable, since over the past few decades, they've succeeding in capturing most of the money that exists and sequestering it so it's out of reach of the other 99% of us. Soon they'll have to find another approach if they want to continue capturing the money supply as they have been doing.
And Carly Fiorina, who Portfolio Magazine named as one of the 20 worst American CEOs in history, now wants to be President of the United States. ...
She's just upping her game, trying to become the worst American president in history. But she'll find that there's a lot of fierce competition for that title. Can she make it? Stay tuned ...
People keep arguing that /. doesn't support Unicode, when it really does - it just uses a narrow whitelist of characters. The reason for this is obvious if you think about it - to prevent situations like this from happening.
Heck, there might be strings out there that will crash any Unicode library implementation, just we haven't found them yet because the search space is huge.
Hmmm ... That tempts me to try a test using a couple of file names on this machine that are two of the names for a Mandarin-English dictionary: .html and Ptnghuà.html (and also Pu3Tong1Hua4.html for systems that can only accept ASCII ;-). Those names aren't in any sense obscure or tricky; they're strings you'd expect to see in online discussions of text handling in various languages. If you can't handle at least these trivial Chinese strings, you've failed pretty badly. Of course, they look findin this Comment: panel, and will likely survive the Preview button.
Let's see how /. handles them ...
Nope; the 3 Hanzi characters didn't show at all, and only the à showed correctly in the second name. But both everything looks correct in this second editing widget. This proves that /. hasn't damaged the actual text in the Preview. Let's see what happens when I try to post it ...
I see that the "Comment:" edit widget for this message does have the Hanzi and marked 'u' and 'o' characters missing. So the damage is done after you hit the Submit button. There's no excuse for this. None of those characters have any special meaning to the code, and text containing them can't do any damage to anything. If damage happens, it's the fault of the crappy software handling the text, not the fault of the creator of the text. The right thing to do is to correct the crappy software. Damaging the text is simply idiotic, and interferes with the main reason (communication between literate people) that Unicode was invented.
(And we might note that a significant fraction of the users of the Internet now consists of people who communicate via Hanzi text, or Arabic or any of the hundreds of other character sets that humanity uses to communicate. Damaging those folks' texts to avoid fixing your crappy software is a good way to tell them that you don't want them communicating with other people. This is rapidly becoming a commercially untenable position for people trying to "attract eyes" on the Net. ;-)
People keep arguing that /. doesn't support Unicode, when it really does - it just uses a narrow whitelist of characters. The reason for this is obvious if you think about it - to prevent situations like this from happening.
Heck, there might be strings out there that will crash any Unicode library implementation, just we haven't found them yet because the search space is huge.
Hmmm ... That tempts me to try a test using a couple of file names on this machine that are two of the names for a Mandarin-English dictionary: .html and Ptnghuà.html (and also Pu3Tong1Hua4.html for systems that can only accept ASCII ;-). Those names aren't in any sense obscure or tricky; they're strings you'd expect to see in online discussions of text handling in various languages. If you can't handle at least these trivial Chinese strings, you've failed pretty badly. Of course, they look findin this Comment: panel, and will likely survive the Preview button.
Let's see how /. handles them ...
Nope; the 3 Hanzi characters didn't show at all, and only the à showed correctly in the second name. But both everything looks correct in this second editing widget. This proves that /. hasn't damaged the actual text in the Preview. Let's see what happens when I try to post it ...
... All affected members will receive letters of apology, offering two years of free credit monitoring and identity threat protection as compensation, ...
So they're saying that they have such monitoring/protection, but members who aren't explicitly paying extra for such monitoring/protection aren't being protected from identity theft in any way?
Somehow, I don't find this surprising. But I'm a bit surprised that they'd admit it so blatantly and openly.
(Actually, I'm a bit dubious about their implicit claim to have such monitoring/protection already. But it's fairly common for companies to make such claims for PR purposes, without bothering to actually implement what they're claiming to supply until something like this hits them. Maybe they had another similar incident happen sometime in the past, and are finally getting around to doing something about it?)
(And what exactly does "identity threat protection" mean? Google doesn't seem to have any matches for that phrase, and automatically replaces it with "identity theft protection", which doesn't sound like the same thing at all. ;-)
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/further
Definition 1) Farther
Heh; I think you've got it. ;-)
This is one of the favorite "language peevery" examples that get discussed often in (English) language forums (or fora if you prefer ;-). The confusion about any purported difference goes back to before there were any actual English dictionaries, and probably 99% of the world's native speakers of English treat them as synonyms. The few that don't can't hardly agree about what their "correct" usages should be. But that doesn't stop such people from harrassing the rest of us about our "misusage". Mostly, it's just a thing they can feel superior about, while the rest of us casually ignore them.
It is a bit curious to see such peevery pop up in a discussion in which General Relativity pretty much rules. Trying to make a strict distinction between distance and time in such discussions is mostly just funny, as well as a signal that the writer lacks understanding of something important to the discussion. But language peevery is rarely based on reality; it's more about some small crowd's attempts to impose strict rules on a language with many dialects and hundreds of millions of speakers.
Now let's all join in singing a round of "Farther along" ... (in which the phrase clearly refers to time. ;-)
Who pays then, when the government elected by the people do misdeeds?
So where in the US are the police elected by the local citizens? I've never heard of this happening. It certainly hasn't been the practice in or near any place I've ever lived.
I've also never seen any candidate in any election running on a promise to do "misdeeds", so I've never actually been able to vote for or against a candidate on that basis. It'd be interesting to know where this is done, and why it isn't done where I've lived.