Due to the corporate mentality of I.P. and the subsequent patent/copyright laws that go with it, not everything is on the internet.
The medical field for example has multiple white papers, theories, and discoveries hidden behind a wall of corporate "foundations" that require $$ to gain access to.
So how is this anything new? I remember a few decades ago, when I was a grad student, trying to get at the latest research in several fields. I was effectively blocked at the source by the subscription prices of the relevant journals, which together cost much more than my income allowed. But there were the academic libraries, right? Well, not necessarily. Unless you passed the relevant tests, you were often not allowed access to those inner sanctums, and couldn't read their copies of the journals. Academic libraries routinely restricted access to their own department's students.
This has always been especially true in medical fields. For example, in the 1980s my (future) wife was a grad student at Harvard and BU in economics, with a specialty in medical information. At both universities, she found that her access to the medical libraries was seriously restricted. She wasn't a medical student, after all, and econ students clearly had no "need to know" actual medical information. Even when she managed to get access, doing so often required far more time than the actual reading, and often required the repeated intercession of her profs.
The Internet has opened things up a bit, but we still have a long way to go before a lot of important information is available to someone without the major amounts of money needed to get past the checkpoints.
(This was in the US; YMMV at schools in other countries.)
Actually, a better question might be: Is anyone starting anything new in java? I suppose there's lots of legacy java code that people are stuck with, at least until they can get around to rewriting it. And I've known a few organizations that are pretty much married to the language.
But I can't really imagine starting a new project in java these days, not until we have legally-binding assurances that using the language doesn't mean risking that we'll be sued into bankruptcy.
I do wish we had as good a reason to abandon javascript...;-)
Actually, the discussion on this includes messages with interesting points. The most fun might be the observation that one interpretation of the graph is that the increase in cell-phone users matched the levelling-off of the total cancer incidence, implying that cell phones are preventing a significant portion of the cancers we'd have otherwise.
Of course, fun stuff like this is likely to be drowned out by the chorus of "correlation doesn't imply causation" chanting.
Heh. In our house, my wife occasionally comments on how several well-known online companies (including netflix and google) seem to have decided that she's a gay male. If so, she's very good at impersonating a straight female when I'm around.;-)
So far, we haven't actually found any downside to this, but it's not hard to imagine situations where it could cause serious problems. For example, the guys who killed Matt Shepard might not believe that her "disguise" isn't a disguise. Such things happen in our world.
So I'm not really all that comfortable with the idea that a piece of software somewhere will be inferring things about me related to sex, and giving its conclusions to people who I don't know, to do with as they like. Our society has a long, sorry history telling us what this can lead to.
One thought, I suppose, might be "How can a lot of us work to sabotage things like this and poison their inferences?" Another might be "Is there a way we can learn about who is getting such inferred info about us, and what they're planning to do with it?" Or "It there a way we can find out who has bought this information, and sue the perpetrators if the information is incorrect?"
To play devil's advocate, they didn't exactly lie here. This "GfK" just didn't publish a report that came to the opposite conclusions they were paid to reach.
This has been widely discussed in scientific circles, too, including here on/.. Organizations that fund research often let the researchers know what results are expected, and if the science shows otherwise, the reports are very often suppressed. This is considered a major problem in a number of scientific fields.
It's especially problematic that "no significance" reports are often suppressed. It can be useful to know that X and Y have no relation. But, for example, drug manufacturers don't usually like to hear that their profitable "miracle drug" actually has no effect on the conditions that they claim it will cure. Admitting this publicly means they'll no longer get income from the suckers who have been buying the "drug" to cure their condition.
In general, it may be true that not telling everything you know isn't exactly a lie. But that's not exactly what's going on here. Continuing to say something is true when you've done studies showing that it's false is definitely a lie. This is what companies do when they suppress "no significant effect of X on Y" results, and it's what the **AAs do when they claim something they don't like is hurting sales when their study shows that it doesn't. It's a lie regardless of whether the claimed "piracy" actually helps or has no effect on sales.
So either you're completely daft thinking the real perpetrators of these crimes cannot be pinned down _even while they brag about their exploits to the whole world_, or there really does need to be some new legislation written and powers granted to police the networks our economy pretty well depends on.
What I don't get is the proportion of posters here that think _neither_ is likely...
What I think you're missing is that many of the posters here think that the FBI isn't the least bit interested in catching the "real perpetrators". The FBI is following its common history of looking for a few people that they can parade before the public as perps, but whether they're actually guilty of any crimes is effectively irrelevant. This means that after a few days of perp walks with various FBI and politicians patting themselves on the back, they'll drop the show and move on to other things.
There's a great deal of cynicism among people familiar with the participants in this theater, in great part due to the fact that the FBI (and American politicians in general) have a long, dismal history of just this sort of "find someone to pin it on; if they're actually guilty, so much the better" approach to "crime fighting".
In particular, the FBI has long had a role as a political police force. Read up on the history of the Red Hunts in the 1940-1970 period for lots of examples. Their actions against immigrant groups in the 1920s and 30s also makes for interesting reading. Anyone who lived through this period and was paying attention has good reasons to be cynical about what's going on here.
Neanderthals are extinct. They were evolution's losers. QED.
So are the Cro Magnon. There are none of them left alive today. All that's left is the hybrid population that they and their Neanderthal neighbors left behind. We now have good evidence that the modern Eurasian population was derived from both of them.
Any group goes extinct eventually. The evolutionary question is whether their descendants died out. The Cro Magnon and Neanderthals both have millions of descendants today, so neither is truly extinct.
We can expect that further research will clarify the fraction of their DNA that both contributed to the modern population. Of course, as any geneticist will agree, both were over 99% identical genetically to the modern population. The differences between human subspecies are very small, and mostly superficial.
The question of percent contribution of genes is really talking about a tiny portion of the human genome. And the result was almost certainly the usual result of population mixture: Each population contributed a collection of mutations, many of them adaptive and beneficial. A few hundred generations weeded out the inferior variants, leaving a somewhat better-adapted population than before. And the process continues today.
Now it's "if you aren't 100% African, you're part Neanderthal."
Can someone please explain how. I mean they are both homos right?
Nah, homos usually don't produce very many offspring; it's the Homos that do that.;-)
Typographical jokes aside, the explanation is fairly straightforward. Both this paper and the one from a few months back included DNA from some widely-separated non-African populations, including such isolated areas as New Guinea. They also used data from the past few years' analyses of fossil Neanderthal DNA. They've produced a list of gene variants (mutations) that were found in Neanderthal and non-African modern DNA, but aren't found in any (tested) African populations.
It's possible, of course, that the same mutation will appear in different populations. It's also possible that a gene variant will die out in all populations. But as the numbers increase, the probability of what's been found in these various Homo populations rapidly approaches zero. For Homo sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis to be still classified as separate species requires many cases of either an independent identical mutation, or a gene variant shared by all our ancestors that died out in all the African populations but survived in all non-African species and also in at least a few Neanderthal populations.
The probability is now so low that nobody sensible would seriously consider it. The Neanderthals are now firmly in the Homo sapiens species.
There will, of course, be further independent tests of this reclassification. Challenging such "accepted" things as facts is a popular game among scientists. DNA research continues, especially in humans and our close relatives, and we can expect many more tests of our Neanderthal ancestry to appear as spinoffs of other research. But unless someone comes up with firm evidence to the contrary, anyone with non-African ancestry should now assume that they're part Neanderthal. The most likely outcome of further tests is detailed information making the history clearer.
We can expect at least a little bit of fun about this coming from comedians of African ancestry. Of course, most American blacks also have European ancestry, so they're part Neanderthal, too. But we can hope this won't discourage them from making lots of jokes about it.
Yup. The previous study, by Svante PÃÃbo and friends, was statistical in nature. They showed a significant probability that a collection of gene variants that are found in several tested non-African populations, but not in any of the tested African populations, are of Neandert(h)al origin.
This one seems to be more definitive (though I haven't seen any numbers on the sizes of their test populations). It's about a gene variant that was already known to exist in "all" (whatever that means;-) non-African human populations, but not in any (tested) African population. It was considered to have originated in an unknown archaic human population. The gene variant turns out to be in the recently-published Neandertal genome. So it almost certainly originated in either the Neandertal or the non-African human population, and spread to the other by interbreeding. The researchers point out that their study didn't involve any work with Neandertal remains, so there's no chance of contamination of samples.
There is, of course, a slight possibility that the same mutation could appear in two populations independently. But the probability of this is so low that it can be safely dismissed.
The mutation could have also been from a common ancestor to H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, and died out in all African populations, but the chance of that is also miniscule. The geneticists have been telling us for some time that most human genetic variation is within Africa, with the non-African populations being a minor branch that colonized the rest of the world. For a gene variant to die out in all the African branches, but not the single branch that colonized Eurasia and the America (and Polynesia), is simply so improbable as to be dismissed out of hand.
So now we'll have to revise all the textbooks to replace "Homo neanderthalensis" with "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis". But it shouldn't be any harder than it was to modify the textbooks to no longer list Pluto as a planet. Life can be uncertain for textbook makers.;-)
Just for fun, I decided to check with hanzismatter.blogspot.com and see if I could find that tattoo. On their front page, I found something more fun: There's a photo of another tattoo that was apparently intended to say "ride hard die free". Again, it makes the same two mistakes. The "die" character translates as "die casting/molding"; the "free (2 characters) means "no cost". The poster remarks:
I guess this young man is quite proud and wants everyone to know he enjoys "freely shoving die-casted figurines up his ass"?... Kinky.
Anyway, the English word "free" causes a lot of translation problems, and is a good source of linguistic humo(u)r.
There was a fun failure of the same sort described recently at hanzismatter.blogspot.com, which is dedicated to documenting non-Eastern misuse of Chinese tattoos that don't quite say what the tattoo's owner thought. The explanation of one bizarre tattoo was that the person wanted the slogan "live free or die", and got it, sort of. But the "free" was the Chinese for "no cost", and the "die" was as in "tool and die". The result was baffling to anyone who could read the characters.
Of course, the English use of "free" with several unrelated meanings is known as a major cause of all sorts of problems. For example, how much free space do you have on your disk drive right now? (And wouldn't a disk drive out in free space have a rather long response time?;-)
It's common to get such multi-meaning words wrong in translations. There are a lot of "Engrish" sites that get a good deal of humor from this.
wish i had mod points, this is the correct answer to the question.
Nah; probably not. First, the question wasn't "How do I use my dual WAN router?" The question was "I have two (independent) WAN connections; how do I best use them?"
And "Get a dual-WAN router" isn't a very good answer, especially when the person said explicitly that part of their motivation for the second collection was as a backup to the first. This implies that they want two independent routers, so if one dies, they can still use the other while the dead one gets fixed or replaced. If you have just one dual-WAN router, and it dies, both of your WAN connections are now useless, shooting down your intention to have a backup route.
There are good uses for a dual-WAN router. Answering this person's question isn't one of them, since it simply moves the single-point-of-failure problem from the ISP to the router. If you're trying to avoid single points of failure, you probably don't want to do it by introducing a new one.;-)
(Actually, I do have mod points. But I decided it was better to reply here. I can probably find another discussion to do some mods in. Lessee... There's the one about ad networks not honoring do-not-track. Sure wish there was a "Well, duh!" moderations.;-)
Actually, the original (Bell Labs) unix systems all implemented hard links for directories. Or, more accurately, they implemented hard links for any and all files. The kernel's link() routine restricted linked directories to the super-user. The reason was as others here have mentioned: Hard-linked directories may result in loops in the directory "tree", which produces infinite recursion for naive tree-walking code. Since there was no way to prevent programmers from writing tree-walking code that lacked the obvious loop check, they decided it would be safer to block hard-linking of directories. But, aside from this check, the kernel code was quite capable of hard-linking any file to a new name in any directory.
Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.
I have three iMacs running Time Machine, all directly connected to the disk (one a Time Capsule), and have never seen the behavior you describe.
This reminds me of the old joke: A colleague asks a judge how his latest case is going, and the judge says "We had to let the defendent go." "Huh? I thought the prosecution had three witnesses who could testify that they'd seen him do it." "Yeah, but the defense had twenty witnesses who testified that they hadn't seen him do it."
(You do run across this sort of logic rather often hereabouts.;-)
"Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do."
Tons of people have never had a single problem as you describe. You're probably dicking around with stuff you sholdn't be which is screwing it up. Attempting to prove you "hacker" manhood no doubt.
Well, how it worked in our house might be illustrative. My wife got a Time Machine for her new iMac, and let it run for a few months, until its disk drive turned flakey. She took it back to the Apple store, where they decreed the disk hopeless, and gave her a new one. It had the OS stuff, but not her files, of course, so she plugged in the Time Machine and tried to restore her files. Total failure. After a day or so of getting progressively more frustrated, she took the iMac and the Time Machine back to the store, where it disappeared into their back room for half an hour or so. Then they returned it, saying that it was all loaded. So she took it home, and found that, while her files were loaded, they weren't in the same directory as before, so all sorts of things could find the files.
I poked around a bit, using a few Terminal windows, and eventually used tar (;-) to restore her files to the original pathnames, after which nearly everything worked right.
Now, I can hear you saying she was "dicking around with stuff she shouldn't be which screwed it up". Yeah, she was; but she called it "trying to follow the directions for restoring her files". Apparently the Time Machine wasn't designed for a user who didn't understand how it works, and she shouldn't have been trying to actually use it as advertised, because that would screw it up.
Actually, I don't think the TM was screwed up. The nice folks at the Apple Store didn't seem to think so, and they did do a restore (to the wrong pathnames;-). And I managed to undo that damage fairly quickly.
I think the problem was that it wasn't documented in a way that she could understand and operate properly.
Anyway, I have a Macbook Pro and a couple of linux boxes (that are my "real" internet-facing machines;-). I back all of them up using rsync to an external disk. This works fine for me. I can (and do) restore any files on it to any of the machines, to the directories where I want them restored (which is sometimes the original directory). But I don't do it with any vendor's proprietary software, I use rsync. Or sometimes tar or cpio. Or "cp -r", though that does break hard links, which I tend to use a lot. They have documentation that I can understand, and it easy to verify that the results are usable.
In any case, it might feel good to express contempt for "lusers" who can't get backup software to work right. But this doesn't help those users when they need it. There's a widespread estimate that around half the time, backups turn out to be useless, because when you need to use them on the new hardware, they fail. This was our experience with Apple's vaunted Time Machine. Being told we shouldn't be dicking around with it because we'll screw things up doesn't help; it just persuades me that we made a mistake buying the "user friendly" backup system in the first place.
YMMV, of course.
(And she still likes her iMac. She's just less impressed with Apples so-called quality than she once was. She still runs the TM, but we're not confident that it'll work the next time we need it. This is in part because I don't know how to test it.;-)
I love it when people call China the P.R. or People's Republic... Such a delusional misrepresentation. Do you HONESTLY think that it is YOUR republic and YOU have control?...
So how is this different from the American use of the term "public" to mean "owned by the government"? One could easily see a certain level of cynicism here, since very few of the people who use such terminology would expect that they could just start using any "public property" as their own, and not get arrested and charged with a crime.
The streets on two sides of our yard would be called "public" by nearly everyone, but if I were to start digging up the pavement and converting it to an extension of my flower garden, you can bet I'd be interrupted by police and told in no uncertain terms that I'd done something illegal.
Of course, the Chinese government's habit of calling itself a People's Republic (actually Renmin Gongheguo) is widely understood as the same sort of euphemism, similar to how they continue to insist that their government is Communist, they all follow Marx, etc. Yeah, right. But it's not materially different from the similar pretenses to "public" property here in the US.
You know what site my U.S. govt censors? None. Not a single one. They do shut down a handful of sites though....
So shutting a site down doesn't count as censorship? That's certainly an, uh, "interesting" interpretation of the words. Do you by any chance work for Homeland Security? Or just in advertising?;-)
Someone else has already pointed out the story of the US government forcibly taking over domain names. I suppose some people might also not consider that to be censorship, since you can still use the numeric IP address.
I read TFA (really;-), and noticed that there was no mention of the species of bird. They just claimed that this one species of lizard is as good at solving problems as "birds".
I've known both pigeons and parakeets, and it's pretty obvious that the little 'keets are a lot more intelligent than the much larger pigeons.
I wonder how the Puerto Rican anole compares in brain size and body mass with a budgie. I'd guess they might not be very different.
, I don't but I don't buy that for an instant. Either it is patented (and therefore public information through the patent office) or it is a trade secret...
Um, you misread what I wrote. I didn't say that the patents are being kept secret. Patents are published and publicly available online. What is a secret is the patent-violation claim. Like SCO, MS seems to be saying "Your product contains violations of N of our zillions of patents, but we're not going to tell you the patent numbers outside a courtroom. So you have a choice: You and your legal team can appear in court, and as with SCO, we can make sure that it'll cost you millions and years of time, and we can probably bankrupt you with legal costs. Or you can sign this license agreement and pay us $N for every product you sell, and we'll promise not to sue you as long as you keep paying."
This is the way that the American patent system seems to work these days. It's highly likely that many (or most) of MS's patents would be declared invalid by the courts. But challenging all of them would bankrupt most companies, especially those that are startups or work in a competitive part of the market and thus have relatively little spare cash to throw away on legal battles with giant corporations.
The alternative, of course, is to set up shop outside the jurisdiction of the American legal system.
I would argue that patents are harder than copyrights when it comes to code as the copyrighted must be registered with the Copyright Office.
Actually, in the US (and much of the rest of the world) this hasn't been true for several decades. Documents are now "born copyrighted". All you have to do is attach a copyright claim and the owner's name, and the courts will accept it. You probably have to also present some evidence that you've "published" the text, though it seems that all you need to do is show the court that you've provided copies to a small number of people. But you don't have to give a copy to any government body any more; your copyright is valid as soon as you "publish" the text in some form.
So it can be impossible to know that you've violated someone else's copyright by producing a text that you think is original, but which is substantially similar to something written by someone else in a document that you've never seen (outside the courtroom;-). This is especially problematical for software copyrights, since good programmers are highly likely to produce very similar code to solve the same problem. Courts are likely to consider all but the first to be copyright violations, even when none of the programmers has seen any of the others' code.
But the main comment about such numbers has been "[citation needed]". MS's patent-violation claims seems to be trade secrets. We can't recode the purported violations, because we don't know where in the code they are and what specific patent they violate. MS won't tell us.
This is part of the "patent troll" concept, and it's why people are classifying MS's patent "agreements" as shakedowns and a protection racket.
Myself, I'd be happy to rewrite any of my code so as to avoid patent and/or copyright violations. As an experienced coder, I can usually come up with several ways to do any particular task. But to do that in a way that violates patents or copyrights, I have to know what they are, and how they violate someone's patent or copyright. This information has become nearly impossible to get from claimants, other than by spending millions of dollars on legal expenses.
The whole "IP" fuss in the US is essentially due to the change in the laws some time back, so that patents can be written in legalese rather than engineerese, making them incomprehensible to anyone but lawyers. And often not even to lawyers, who often respond to questions with "I don't know what that means; we'll have to ask the courts." Again, millions of dollars and many lost years before we get an answer.
Copyright is even more bizarre, with corporations even making copyright claims on nothing at all, or blank lines. Some time back, when SCO claimed a specific number of copyright violations in the linux code, someone did a bit of grepping, and reported that the number agreed almost exactly with the count of "/*" and "*/" lines in the code. But again, SCO never actually told us which lines were in violation of a copyright, making it impossible to rewrite them so they didn't infringe.
Anyone know a fast, efficient way to find out exactly what lines of code are in violation of some corporation's patents or copyrights? Until we can quickly determine that information, they can continue their protection racket unhindered by legal concerns.
It seems to me that similar arguments against this fish's "tool use" could also be used (perhaps by a visiting alien, or maybe a human from a "superior" culture) to argue that I'm not a tool user.
Thus, I drove to several places in my car today. But I didn't manufacture the car; I merely used it to accomplish a task. If a tool must be manufactured (or "intentionally modified") by its user to qualify as a tool, then my car probably wouldn't be considered a tool by someone intent on showing that I'm not intelligent enough to use tools. Neither would this computer.
For another example, yesterday I was at a dinner with a few people, and at one point used a straw to suck up part of a drink. I didn't make the straw (or the glass, or the drink for that matter). Does this mean that my using the drinking straw wasn't "tool use"? Again, if you're intent on denigrating my intelligence, you'd probably say that it wasn't.
These aren't totally trivial examples. Historically, people from various "superior" cultures have often argued against the intelligence of people from others. They used reasoning similar to this to show that the "lesser" races and cultures weren't intelligent.
A more reasonable analysis would start with the observation that "tool use" covers a very wide range of complexity. It's obvious that an auto (or a drinking straw) are more complex tools than what this fish was using. But nobody is claiming that fish can manufacture autos. If you're interested in finding the simpler, first-stage uses of tools in various animals, this fish's actions should qualify as being near the bottom of the complexity scale. But, simple as it might be, it should be recognized by biologists as the beginning stage of tool use, and thus worth recording.
Similarly, I've seen seagulls dropping bivalves onto rocks, sidewalks and roads to crack their shells. This should also qualify as a first step along the continuum of tool use.
Slashdot Mirror
Due to the corporate mentality of I.P. and the subsequent patent/copyright laws that go with it, not everything is on the internet. The medical field for example has multiple white papers, theories, and discoveries hidden behind a wall of corporate "foundations" that require $$ to gain access to.
So how is this anything new? I remember a few decades ago, when I was a grad student, trying to get at the latest research in several fields. I was effectively blocked at the source by the subscription prices of the relevant journals, which together cost much more than my income allowed. But there were the academic libraries, right? Well, not necessarily. Unless you passed the relevant tests, you were often not allowed access to those inner sanctums, and couldn't read their copies of the journals. Academic libraries routinely restricted access to their own department's students.
This has always been especially true in medical fields. For example, in the 1980s my (future) wife was a grad student at Harvard and BU in economics, with a specialty in medical information. At both universities, she found that her access to the medical libraries was seriously restricted. She wasn't a medical student, after all, and econ students clearly had no "need to know" actual medical information. Even when she managed to get access, doing so often required far more time than the actual reading, and often required the repeated intercession of her profs.
The Internet has opened things up a bit, but we still have a long way to go before a lot of important information is available to someone without the major amounts of money needed to get past the checkpoints.
(This was in the US; YMMV at schools in other countries.)
So is anyone still using java?
Actually, a better question might be: Is anyone starting anything new in java? I suppose there's lots of legacy java code that people are stuck with, at least until they can get around to rewriting it. And I've known a few organizations that are pretty much married to the language.
But I can't really imagine starting a new project in java these days, not until we have legally-binding assurances that using the language doesn't mean risking that we'll be sued into bankruptcy.
I do wish we had as good a reason to abandon javascript ... ;-)
Someone has to post a link to relevant xkcd comic.
Actually, the discussion on this includes messages with interesting points. The most fun might be the observation that one interpretation of the graph is that the increase in cell-phone users matched the levelling-off of the total cancer incidence, implying that cell phones are preventing a significant portion of the cancers we'd have otherwise.
Of course, fun stuff like this is likely to be drowned out by the chorus of "correlation doesn't imply causation" chanting.
I'm a lesbian trapped in a man's body.
Heh. In our house, my wife occasionally comments on how several well-known online companies (including netflix and google) seem to have decided that she's a gay male. If so, she's very good at impersonating a straight female when I'm around. ;-)
So far, we haven't actually found any downside to this, but it's not hard to imagine situations where it could cause serious problems. For example, the guys who killed Matt Shepard might not believe that her "disguise" isn't a disguise. Such things happen in our world.
So I'm not really all that comfortable with the idea that a piece of software somewhere will be inferring things about me related to sex, and giving its conclusions to people who I don't know, to do with as they like. Our society has a long, sorry history telling us what this can lead to.
One thought, I suppose, might be "How can a lot of us work to sabotage things like this and poison their inferences?" Another might be "Is there a way we can learn about who is getting such inferred info about us, and what they're planning to do with it?" Or "It there a way we can find out who has bought this information, and sue the perpetrators if the information is incorrect?"
To play devil's advocate, they didn't exactly lie here. This "GfK" just didn't publish a report that came to the opposite conclusions they were paid to reach.
This has been widely discussed in scientific circles, too, including here on /.. Organizations that fund research often let the researchers know what results are expected, and if the science shows otherwise, the reports are very often suppressed. This is considered a major problem in a number of scientific fields.
It's especially problematic that "no significance" reports are often suppressed. It can be useful to know that X and Y have no relation. But, for example, drug manufacturers don't usually like to hear that their profitable "miracle drug" actually has no effect on the conditions that they claim it will cure. Admitting this publicly means they'll no longer get income from the suckers who have been buying the "drug" to cure their condition.
In general, it may be true that not telling everything you know isn't exactly a lie. But that's not exactly what's going on here. Continuing to say something is true when you've done studies showing that it's false is definitely a lie. This is what companies do when they suppress "no significant effect of X on Y" results, and it's what the **AAs do when they claim something they don't like is hurting sales when their study shows that it doesn't. It's a lie regardless of whether the claimed "piracy" actually helps or has no effect on sales.
So either you're completely daft thinking the real perpetrators of these crimes cannot be pinned down _even while they brag about their exploits to the whole world_, or there really does need to be some new legislation written and powers granted to police the networks our economy pretty well depends on. What I don't get is the proportion of posters here that think _neither_ is likely...
What I think you're missing is that many of the posters here think that the FBI isn't the least bit interested in catching the "real perpetrators". The FBI is following its common history of looking for a few people that they can parade before the public as perps, but whether they're actually guilty of any crimes is effectively irrelevant. This means that after a few days of perp walks with various FBI and politicians patting themselves on the back, they'll drop the show and move on to other things.
There's a great deal of cynicism among people familiar with the participants in this theater, in great part due to the fact that the FBI (and American politicians in general) have a long, dismal history of just this sort of "find someone to pin it on; if they're actually guilty, so much the better" approach to "crime fighting".
In particular, the FBI has long had a role as a political police force. Read up on the history of the Red Hunts in the 1940-1970 period for lots of examples. Their actions against immigrant groups in the 1920s and 30s also makes for interesting reading. Anyone who lived through this period and was paying attention has good reasons to be cynical about what's going on here.
Neanderthals are extinct. They were evolution's losers. QED.
So are the Cro Magnon. There are none of them left alive today. All that's left is the hybrid population that they and their Neanderthal neighbors left behind. We now have good evidence that the modern Eurasian population was derived from both of them.
Any group goes extinct eventually. The evolutionary question is whether their descendants died out. The Cro Magnon and Neanderthals both have millions of descendants today, so neither is truly extinct.
We can expect that further research will clarify the fraction of their DNA that both contributed to the modern population. Of course, as any geneticist will agree, both were over 99% identical genetically to the modern population. The differences between human subspecies are very small, and mostly superficial.
The question of percent contribution of genes is really talking about a tiny portion of the human genome. And the result was almost certainly the usual result of population mixture: Each population contributed a collection of mutations, many of them adaptive and beneficial. A few hundred generations weeded out the inferior variants, leaving a somewhat better-adapted population than before. And the process continues today.
Now it's "if you aren't 100% African, you're part Neanderthal."
Can someone please explain how. I mean they are both homos right?
Nah, homos usually don't produce very many offspring; it's the Homos that do that. ;-)
Typographical jokes aside, the explanation is fairly straightforward. Both this paper and the one from a few months back included DNA from some widely-separated non-African populations, including such isolated areas as New Guinea. They also used data from the past few years' analyses of fossil Neanderthal DNA. They've produced a list of gene variants (mutations) that were found in Neanderthal and non-African modern DNA, but aren't found in any (tested) African populations.
It's possible, of course, that the same mutation will appear in different populations. It's also possible that a gene variant will die out in all populations. But as the numbers increase, the probability of what's been found in these various Homo populations rapidly approaches zero. For Homo sapiens and H. Neanderthalensis to be still classified as separate species requires many cases of either an independent identical mutation, or a gene variant shared by all our ancestors that died out in all the African populations but survived in all non-African species and also in at least a few Neanderthal populations.
The probability is now so low that nobody sensible would seriously consider it. The Neanderthals are now firmly in the Homo sapiens species.
There will, of course, be further independent tests of this reclassification. Challenging such "accepted" things as facts is a popular game among scientists. DNA research continues, especially in humans and our close relatives, and we can expect many more tests of our Neanderthal ancestry to appear as spinoffs of other research. But unless someone comes up with firm evidence to the contrary, anyone with non-African ancestry should now assume that they're part Neanderthal. The most likely outcome of further tests is detailed information making the history clearer.
We can expect at least a little bit of fun about this coming from comedians of African ancestry. Of course, most American blacks also have European ancestry, so they're part Neanderthal, too. But we can hope this won't discourage them from making lots of jokes about it.
BTW how do you pronounce GLBT anyway.
It's pronounced like "gulped".
It was strongly suspected, but not known.
Yup. The previous study, by Svante PÃÃbo and friends, was statistical in nature. They showed a significant probability that a collection of gene variants that are found in several tested non-African populations, but not in any of the tested African populations, are of Neandert(h)al origin.
This one seems to be more definitive (though I haven't seen any numbers on the sizes of their test populations). It's about a gene variant that was already known to exist in "all" (whatever that means ;-) non-African human populations, but not in any (tested) African population. It was considered to have originated in an unknown archaic human population. The gene variant turns out to be in the recently-published Neandertal genome. So it almost certainly originated in either the Neandertal or the non-African human population, and spread to the other by interbreeding. The researchers point out that their study didn't involve any work with Neandertal remains, so there's no chance of contamination of samples.
There is, of course, a slight possibility that the same mutation could appear in two populations independently. But the probability of this is so low that it can be safely dismissed.
The mutation could have also been from a common ancestor to H. sapiens and H. neanderthalensis, and died out in all African populations, but the chance of that is also miniscule. The geneticists have been telling us for some time that most human genetic variation is within Africa, with the non-African populations being a minor branch that colonized the rest of the world. For a gene variant to die out in all the African branches, but not the single branch that colonized Eurasia and the America (and Polynesia), is simply so improbable as to be dismissed out of hand.
So now we'll have to revise all the textbooks to replace "Homo neanderthalensis" with "Homo sapiens neanderthalensis". But it shouldn't be any harder than it was to modify the textbooks to no longer list Pluto as a planet. Life can be uncertain for textbook makers. ;-)
Well then, it's a good thing that literacy isn't a prerequisite to posting here.
I guess this young man is quite proud and wants everyone to know he enjoys "freely shoving die-casted figurines up his ass"? ... Kinky.
Anyway, the English word "free" causes a lot of translation problems, and is a good source of linguistic humo(u)r.
FREE TIBET! FREE TIBET! FREE TIBET!
FREE?!!!! I'll take two!
There was a fun failure of the same sort described recently at hanzismatter.blogspot.com, which is dedicated to documenting non-Eastern misuse of Chinese tattoos that don't quite say what the tattoo's owner thought. The explanation of one bizarre tattoo was that the person wanted the slogan "live free or die", and got it, sort of. But the "free" was the Chinese for "no cost", and the "die" was as in "tool and die". The result was baffling to anyone who could read the characters.
Of course, the English use of "free" with several unrelated meanings is known as a major cause of all sorts of problems. For example, how much free space do you have on your disk drive right now? (And wouldn't a disk drive out in free space have a rather long response time? ;-)
It's common to get such multi-meaning words wrong in translations. There are a lot of "Engrish" sites that get a good deal of humor from this.
wish i had mod points, this is the correct answer to the question.
Nah; probably not. First, the question wasn't "How do I use my dual WAN router?" The question was "I have two (independent) WAN connections; how do I best use them?"
And "Get a dual-WAN router" isn't a very good answer, especially when the person said explicitly that part of their motivation for the second collection was as a backup to the first. This implies that they want two independent routers, so if one dies, they can still use the other while the dead one gets fixed or replaced. If you have just one dual-WAN router, and it dies, both of your WAN connections are now useless, shooting down your intention to have a backup route.
There are good uses for a dual-WAN router. Answering this person's question isn't one of them, since it simply moves the single-point-of-failure problem from the ISP to the router. If you're trying to avoid single points of failure, you probably don't want to do it by introducing a new one. ;-)
(Actually, I do have mod points. But I decided it was better to reply here. I can probably find another discussion to do some mods in. Lessee ... There's the one about ad networks not honoring do-not-track. Sure wish there was a "Well, duh!" moderations. ;-)
Actually, the original (Bell Labs) unix systems all implemented hard links for directories. Or, more accurately, they implemented hard links for any and all files. The kernel's link() routine restricted linked directories to the super-user. The reason was as others here have mentioned: Hard-linked directories may result in loops in the directory "tree", which produces infinite recursion for naive tree-walking code. Since there was no way to prevent programmers from writing tree-walking code that lacked the obvious loop check, they decided it would be safer to block hard-linking of directories. But, aside from this check, the kernel code was quite capable of hard-linking any file to a new name in any directory.
Apple's hard-linked Time Machine directories may be a case of the same thing. Since the directories are only created by the TM software itself, and the OSX file system doesn't permit hard-linked directories (for non-superusers?), there's no danger of loops appearing in the TM's directory tree. They may have just relaxed the restriction in this case, since the result will usually be a significant saving of disk space.
I have three iMacs running Time Machine, all directly connected to the disk (one a Time Capsule), and have never seen the behavior you describe.
This reminds me of the old joke: A colleague asks a judge how his latest case is going, and the judge says "We had to let the defendent go." "Huh? I thought the prosecution had three witnesses who could testify that they'd seen him do it." "Yeah, but the defense had twenty witnesses who testified that they hadn't seen him do it."
(You do run across this sort of logic rather often hereabouts. ;-)
"Time Machine can't even reliably stay connected to a directly attached device. I shudder to think what adding a network to the mix or heavy forbid a WIRELESS network into the mix would do." Tons of people have never had a single problem as you describe. You're probably dicking around with stuff you sholdn't be which is screwing it up. Attempting to prove you "hacker" manhood no doubt.
Well, how it worked in our house might be illustrative. My wife got a Time Machine for her new iMac, and let it run for a few months, until its disk drive turned flakey. She took it back to the Apple store, where they decreed the disk hopeless, and gave her a new one. It had the OS stuff, but not her files, of course, so she plugged in the Time Machine and tried to restore her files. Total failure. After a day or so of getting progressively more frustrated, she took the iMac and the Time Machine back to the store, where it disappeared into their back room for half an hour or so. Then they returned it, saying that it was all loaded. So she took it home, and found that, while her files were loaded, they weren't in the same directory as before, so all sorts of things could find the files.
I poked around a bit, using a few Terminal windows, and eventually used tar (;-) to restore her files to the original pathnames, after which nearly everything worked right.
Now, I can hear you saying she was "dicking around with stuff she shouldn't be which screwed it up". Yeah, she was; but she called it "trying to follow the directions for restoring her files". Apparently the Time Machine wasn't designed for a user who didn't understand how it works, and she shouldn't have been trying to actually use it as advertised, because that would screw it up.
Actually, I don't think the TM was screwed up. The nice folks at the Apple Store didn't seem to think so, and they did do a restore (to the wrong pathnames ;-). And I managed to undo that damage fairly quickly.
I think the problem was that it wasn't documented in a way that she could understand and operate properly.
Anyway, I have a Macbook Pro and a couple of linux boxes (that are my "real" internet-facing machines ;-). I back all of them up using rsync to an external disk. This works fine for me. I can (and do) restore any files on it to any of the machines, to the directories where I want them restored (which is sometimes the original directory). But I don't do it with any vendor's proprietary software, I use rsync. Or sometimes tar or cpio. Or "cp -r", though that does break hard links, which I tend to use a lot. They have documentation that I can understand, and it easy to verify that the results are usable.
In any case, it might feel good to express contempt for "lusers" who can't get backup software to work right. But this doesn't help those users when they need it. There's a widespread estimate that around half the time, backups turn out to be useless, because when you need to use them on the new hardware, they fail. This was our experience with Apple's vaunted Time Machine. Being told we shouldn't be dicking around with it because we'll screw things up doesn't help; it just persuades me that we made a mistake buying the "user friendly" backup system in the first place.
YMMV, of course.
(And she still likes her iMac. She's just less impressed with Apples so-called quality than she once was. She still runs the TM, but we're not confident that it'll work the next time we need it. This is in part because I don't know how to test it. ;-)
I love it when people call China the P.R. or People's Republic... Such a delusional misrepresentation. Do you HONESTLY think that it is YOUR republic and YOU have control? ...
So how is this different from the American use of the term "public" to mean "owned by the government"? One could easily see a certain level of cynicism here, since very few of the people who use such terminology would expect that they could just start using any "public property" as their own, and not get arrested and charged with a crime.
The streets on two sides of our yard would be called "public" by nearly everyone, but if I were to start digging up the pavement and converting it to an extension of my flower garden, you can bet I'd be interrupted by police and told in no uncertain terms that I'd done something illegal.
Of course, the Chinese government's habit of calling itself a People's Republic (actually Renmin Gongheguo) is widely understood as the same sort of euphemism, similar to how they continue to insist that their government is Communist, they all follow Marx, etc. Yeah, right. But it's not materially different from the similar pretenses to "public" property here in the US.
You know what site my U.S. govt censors? None. Not a single one. They do shut down a handful of sites though. ...
So shutting a site down doesn't count as censorship? That's certainly an, uh, "interesting" interpretation of the words. Do you by any chance work for Homeland Security? Or just in advertising? ;-)
Someone else has already pointed out the story of the US government forcibly taking over domain names. I suppose some people might also not consider that to be censorship, since you can still use the numeric IP address.
I read TFA (really ;-), and noticed that there was no mention of the species of bird. They just claimed that this one species of lizard is as good at solving problems as "birds".
I've known both pigeons and parakeets, and it's pretty obvious that the little 'keets are a lot more intelligent than the much larger pigeons.
I wonder how the Puerto Rican anole compares in brain size and body mass with a budgie. I'd guess they might not be very different.
Crows also. Up to seven, as I recall. After that, they're at the "many" stage....
That's a bigger number than many humans (and a few human societies) can handle.
, I don't but I don't buy that for an instant. Either it is patented (and therefore public information through the patent office) or it is a trade secret ...
Um, you misread what I wrote. I didn't say that the patents are being kept secret. Patents are published and publicly available online. What is a secret is the patent-violation claim. Like SCO, MS seems to be saying "Your product contains violations of N of our zillions of patents, but we're not going to tell you the patent numbers outside a courtroom. So you have a choice: You and your legal team can appear in court, and as with SCO, we can make sure that it'll cost you millions and years of time, and we can probably bankrupt you with legal costs. Or you can sign this license agreement and pay us $N for every product you sell, and we'll promise not to sue you as long as you keep paying."
This is the way that the American patent system seems to work these days. It's highly likely that many (or most) of MS's patents would be declared invalid by the courts. But challenging all of them would bankrupt most companies, especially those that are startups or work in a competitive part of the market and thus have relatively little spare cash to throw away on legal battles with giant corporations.
The alternative, of course, is to set up shop outside the jurisdiction of the American legal system.
I would argue that patents are harder than copyrights when it comes to code as the copyrighted must be registered with the Copyright Office.
Actually, in the US (and much of the rest of the world) this hasn't been true for several decades. Documents are now "born copyrighted". All you have to do is attach a copyright claim and the owner's name, and the courts will accept it. You probably have to also present some evidence that you've "published" the text, though it seems that all you need to do is show the court that you've provided copies to a small number of people. But you don't have to give a copy to any government body any more; your copyright is valid as soon as you "publish" the text in some form.
So it can be impossible to know that you've violated someone else's copyright by producing a text that you think is original, but which is substantially similar to something written by someone else in a document that you've never seen (outside the courtroom ;-). This is especially problematical for software copyrights, since good programmers are highly likely to produce very similar code to solve the same problem. Courts are likely to consider all but the first to be copyright violations, even when none of the programmers has seen any of the others' code.
Allegedly 42 for just the kernel just from MS.
But the main comment about such numbers has been "[citation needed]". MS's patent-violation claims seems to be trade secrets. We can't recode the purported violations, because we don't know where in the code they are and what specific patent they violate. MS won't tell us.
This is part of the "patent troll" concept, and it's why people are classifying MS's patent "agreements" as shakedowns and a protection racket.
Myself, I'd be happy to rewrite any of my code so as to avoid patent and/or copyright violations. As an experienced coder, I can usually come up with several ways to do any particular task. But to do that in a way that violates patents or copyrights, I have to know what they are, and how they violate someone's patent or copyright. This information has become nearly impossible to get from claimants, other than by spending millions of dollars on legal expenses.
The whole "IP" fuss in the US is essentially due to the change in the laws some time back, so that patents can be written in legalese rather than engineerese, making them incomprehensible to anyone but lawyers. And often not even to lawyers, who often respond to questions with "I don't know what that means; we'll have to ask the courts." Again, millions of dollars and many lost years before we get an answer.
Copyright is even more bizarre, with corporations even making copyright claims on nothing at all, or blank lines. Some time back, when SCO claimed a specific number of copyright violations in the linux code, someone did a bit of grepping, and reported that the number agreed almost exactly with the count of "/*" and "*/" lines in the code. But again, SCO never actually told us which lines were in violation of a copyright, making it impossible to rewrite them so they didn't infringe.
Anyone know a fast, efficient way to find out exactly what lines of code are in violation of some corporation's patents or copyrights? Until we can quickly determine that information, they can continue their protection racket unhindered by legal concerns.
It seems to me that similar arguments against this fish's "tool use" could also be used (perhaps by a visiting alien, or maybe a human from a "superior" culture) to argue that I'm not a tool user.
Thus, I drove to several places in my car today. But I didn't manufacture the car; I merely used it to accomplish a task. If a tool must be manufactured (or "intentionally modified") by its user to qualify as a tool, then my car probably wouldn't be considered a tool by someone intent on showing that I'm not intelligent enough to use tools. Neither would this computer.
For another example, yesterday I was at a dinner with a few people, and at one point used a straw to suck up part of a drink. I didn't make the straw (or the glass, or the drink for that matter). Does this mean that my using the drinking straw wasn't "tool use"? Again, if you're intent on denigrating my intelligence, you'd probably say that it wasn't.
These aren't totally trivial examples. Historically, people from various "superior" cultures have often argued against the intelligence of people from others. They used reasoning similar to this to show that the "lesser" races and cultures weren't intelligent.
A more reasonable analysis would start with the observation that "tool use" covers a very wide range of complexity. It's obvious that an auto (or a drinking straw) are more complex tools than what this fish was using. But nobody is claiming that fish can manufacture autos. If you're interested in finding the simpler, first-stage uses of tools in various animals, this fish's actions should qualify as being near the bottom of the complexity scale. But, simple as it might be, it should be recognized by biologists as the beginning stage of tool use, and thus worth recording.
Similarly, I've seen seagulls dropping bivalves onto rocks, sidewalks and roads to crack their shells. This should also qualify as a first step along the continuum of tool use.