As much as we like to think the rest of the world is scary, imagine how they feel about us, and how justified they are when they hear things like this.
We're better than this.
Um, no; clearly we're not. If we were, we wouldn't be so calmly accepting that our "leaders" are doing this. We'd be out with our torches and pitchforks, demanding those people be replaced with "better" people than they obviously are.
The story of the stored smallpox samples is hardly anything new, and it's hardly anything secret. It's not like this was just sprung on us and we have to pause to think it through. The story has been out and around for a couple of decades now. I've read about it at least once a year during those decades. Nobody except very young children has an excuse to not know about it. But we calmly ignore it, and the samples still exist. That tells us a lot about how much "better" we are.
If you test enough hypotheses with the same exact experiment you can practically guarantee that you'll find some statistically significant (and therefore publishable) correlations in your data due to random error, even if no causative relationships actually exist.
There's an xkcd comic that directly deals with this.
Try asking google. Thus, the terms "+tea +cancer +correlation" turn up around 1.25 million hits right now. (You need the '+'s because all three words are just too common and give many millions of hits.) You'll find that lots of correlations have turned up, there is a similar connection as in the current story, but the statistical results alone are merely suggestive and not conclusive.
One recent story reported that drinking very hot tea is associated with an increased risk of esophageal cancer. In this case, the suspicion is that it's the heat that's the problem, and very hot coffee would likely have a similar effect. But again, Further Research is Needed, and may be going on right now.
... that correlation is not necessarily causation. To demonstrate causation they would have to follow up with a clinical trial that eliminates confounding variables. At this point all they have is a hypothesis.
Yup. It's yet another case of the observation that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that states "Further research is needed".
This is not a bad study, but the conclusions need testing via something many people call SCIENCE. It will be necessary to get some subjects and feed them coffee. As is, this is a fun exercise in statistics.
Well, yeah, except that scientific research very often starts with statistical studies like this, followed by more focused studies on the things that turn out to be correlated.
As someone (I've forgotten who) said, a correlation may not mean causation, but it is Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something interesting going on that you should look into."
Since there is standard equipment with video recording for military units, I'd have had those issued, rather than choosing to purposefully have no video of any of the operation.
I've read any number of news stories that claimed the Seals had the video equipment and it was running. Dunno whether this is true of not, of course, since I wasn't there. But a lot of news people seem to believe that there are videos of much of the assassination. If so, they might be declassified in 20 or 30 years...
What I'd like to know is: How many comedians have already made references to "The US Navy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney, Inc." and other similar jokes?
I'll also be looking for the little "TM" superscripts in news stories about the Seals, complete with footnotes like the above.
Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that people made such jokes. Describing the US Congress as a subsidiary of Such-&-Such Corp goes back a long way...
The idea that the photos can be used by those who hate us to drum up support (i.e., LOOK what they did to Bin Laden!) for additional attacks on innocent people is not whimsical.
It's already being mentioned that those people are using the suppression of the photos against the US. There are several ways this can be done. "The US's Seals made such a bloody mess of his body that they don't dare show us the results." "The US can't show us the pictures because they didn't kill him; they dragged him off to a secret prison where they're torturing him." "ObL was actually cooperating with the US all along, playing the part of a Foreign Devil, and wanted to retire, so they faked his assassination and he's living under a fake identity at his luxury retirement villa." Make up your own; it's fun.;-)
There's really no way this can be handled correctly. No matter what the US government does, it's a major PR disaster. The large percent of the US population that's openly calling it "justice" just adds to the disaster.
Put on trial for what, exactly? US law doesn't apply in Pakistan or Afghanistan or whatever fuckistan he happened to be in 10 years ago.
I think you've got it. There have been suggestions that the US had no court anywhere that ObL could have been tried. The obvious place is the ICJ/World Court in the Hague. But it's not clear what the charges might have been. It's likely that the US "had nothing on the guy" for the WTC attack, other than his publicly praising the people who did it, and that's not exactly a criminal act. (If it were, the US would've tried Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for their infamous remarks on the topic.;-) His other purported crimes were likely committed while he was outside the jurisdiction of the US, and probably outside of UN jurisdiction. So they had to "try him in the press", and then use extralegal means to punish him.
Of course, even if you believe that some sort of "justice" was done by sending in a gang of armed men to gun down the guy in his sleep, you might consider the obvious long-term effect of this. The US has been openly and loudly calling this "justice". This isn't being missed by people with similar desires in the rest of the world. Since the US government has effectively announced that killing someone without any sort of trial is "justice", we can expect that many others in the world are planning to bring the US to "justice" in a similar fashion. The US Government clearly approves of this method, so it can't logically complain if others follow its example, right?
This is not at all a hypothetical prospect. It would have been better for our future safety if he had been brought to trial and at least a pretense of a legal process had been made.
Not just wal-mart, but an evil wall mart. If walmart doesn't want to sell yeast, they don't prevent me from buying yeast from a third party. Apple has DRM'ed thier platform so that it is forboden to load apps except through a store they controll.
These people are whining because they went from a 70% to a 40% profit margin on a product that requires no raw materials to "manufacture".
Hmmm... I didn't interpret it as "whining". Rather, I read the comments as a warning to those of us who might be contemplating building apps to sell through the Apple Store: Don't bother; you can't make a living that way. Apple that market sewn up tight, and their commission on the sale will leave you with so little that you might as well not bother.
I have a number of friends who reached this point about 10 years ago with MS Windows. First, we read stories about Windows developers who found that for the latest release, the required software (mostly libraries) needed to test their products was running them around $20,000. This got people nervous, and when they did inquiries, they found that they had a lot of colleagues whose after-taxes income had dropped into the official "poverty" range. They got the message: This was no longer a feasible occupation, and they had to find other ways of making a living.
It seems that the Apple developer crowd is starting to reach the same state about now. This can be interpreted as whining, of course. But it can also be interpreted as a useful warning to those of us who might have been tempted to go into the iOS/OSX app development profession. It looks like we shouldn't bother; you can't make a living that way any more.
So what're the prospects for an Android app developer? The cost of entry is certainly a lot lower, and there's much less chance that any corporate behemoth will be able to lock us all out some time in the future. OTOH, how big is the market, really? It'd be nice to have read data, not just emotional anecdotes...
You're still free to buy this app, then buy ebooks and load them into the app. Of course ebook readers are pretty much identical, so there's really no market for selling one.
What I find curious is that the best "ebook reader" I've seen is nowhere near as easy to use as the worst browser. I wouldn't bother with an ebook reader, except that some books are made available only in one proprietary format. I've also tried subscribing to a couple of journals that are available in PDF or some ebook format, and I'm seriously considering going back to hard copy, because they're so difficult to use on a screen that's only 1920x1200.;-)
What I'd really like to see is a requirement that all electronic texts be made available in HTML. That would make them fairly easy to read on any of my screens (though my "smartphone" has a seriously limited screen).
Either that, or some ebook developers might look into why their software is so inferior to even poor browsers, and do something about it. It's not like browser technology is a carefully-guarded secret, after all. The HTML specs are published and available free, and there's no threat of being sued if you reverse-engineer browser-like capabilities.
Actually, I may be a bit unusual here, because the electronic texts that I have are primarily reference works, not novels or other similar read-through-once-and-discard texts. The ebook readers might work fine as a replacement for paperback novels, for all I know. But they're downright crummy for anything that you want to keep around to look things up in, or sit on a table for reference when you're doing something that requires access to the information.
Or maybe I just haven't seen the right ebook software? I don't think I'd bother investing the many thousands of dollars it would take to buy a copy of each one, and the thousands of hours it would take to thoroughly evaluate each one. (Though if someone wanted to fund me to do this, I'd consider taking the job.;-)
You assume that this was a bug. From what has been seen of Zuckerberg's ethics, I'd say it's just about even money that this was a completely intentional feature to help get his advertising buddies all that juicy demographic info they pay him so well for.
Ah, but if they got the info without paying for it, Zuckerberg would certainly consider it a bug. Probably the highest-priority kind of bug.
We might add that astronomy is one of the "hard" sciences where amateurs can and do make significant contributions. The explanation is simple: Most professional astronomers are busy studying specific things Out There via the many expensive, high-power telescopes in the world and in orbit. Those telescopes generally have a very small field of view, needed to extract information about single distant objects. But there's an ongoing need for sky surveys, to spot interesting events that are outside the fields of view of the high-powered instruments.
This is where amateur astronomers can help a lot. You can get a small telescope and camera that's good for taking pictures of chunks of the night sky in particular wavelengths, and collect a series of pictures taken as often as is convenient for you. Compare them for changes. (There's software available that will help do this.) When you spot a change, fire off an email to the appropriate address. Some astronomer will likely aim a high-power instrument at that point, get more detailed information, and announce to the world what you discovered. If you were the first to finger the event, the thing there will probably be named for you (or someone you choose;-). Some people who look for things like comets, asteroids or supernovae have their name on lots of things in the sky.
The professional astronomers could do all this, of course, but it'd eat into their time analyzing the data from the big telescopes. They learned long ago that there are many people in the world willing to help out for little or no pay. So they've concentrated on being nice to the amateurs, and gently teaching them how to do the job right. There's lots of information available explaining what kind of telescope and camera you should get for your interests, and how to use them to get the best astronomical information. You'll probably need to study a bunch of math, and the astronomy forums can give you good advice on relevant textbooks.
But there's not a lot of income to be made this way. You have to find it interesting. And it's not something insignificant. Astronomy needs the data that amateurs are providing with their small telescopes. You can make real contributions to what's probably the most popular scientific field, for an outlay of a few thousand dollars. And many, many hours of your time.
So why would Facebook or Google be allowed to buy Skype, but not Microsoft? You are just spreading FUD. Larry, is that you?
Heh. We really should be reminding people that this is exactly the sort of "discussion" that attracts flocks of sock puppets. It might not be Larry (or Steve, or the other Steve) personally. But some unknown number of the posts in this discussion are PR posts from accounts that belong to the various interested companies.
Slashdot is a pretty well-known forum in the computer industry. It's hard to imagine that the marketing departments of the larger companies aren't very well aware of this, and consider this a very cheap advertising medium. We should always be assuming the presence of sock puppets in any discussion here. Especially one like this.
So do we have a summary of the available (F)OSS VoIP packages? It could be useful to also have information about interoperability. The phone business has a long, shabby history of interfering with a customer's ability to call someone who uses a competitor's products. It'd be really useful if we could establish a real standard for interoperability.
Not saying that people aren't working on this. It just that, when I've looked around a few times in the past, I was a bit underwhelmed by the offerings . Maybe they're getting better. Maybe I'm not good enough at using google. Anyone have a link to a good summary of the topic?
Just a footnote, but Netscape was nobody's friend in the web browser market. They were introducing proprietary tags in their server products to extend the functionality of their 'free' browser and lock up and own the Web Client/Server market...
Hmmm... Do you know of cases where Netscape really kept their extensions proprietary? Did they ever sue the maker of another browser for implementing one of their tags? Not saying they didn't; I just don't recall reading about it, and google's not much help.
It's not difficult to find tags that they introduced which everyone copied. My favorite is <center>. I periodically run across yet another warning that the center tag is deprecated in official HTML, and you should use CSS instead. So I try the suggested CSS, do a bit of testing, and find that it doesn't work in some browsers or for the thing I'm trying to center. I ask about this on some HTML forum, and get blown off with the "RTFM, n00b" sort of insults. If someone does actually explain why the CSS does what it does, I simply reply that it's no replacement for a center tag, as was claimed. In any case, I go back to using center tags, which are apparently implemented by all the browsers I've ever seen, and works in a way that I can understand. And we have Netscape to thank for this useful tool, silly as it might be, although assorted non-Netscape people are trying to deprecate it.
The other useful things that Netscape created and allowed everyone to implement don't seem to be quite as funny as this case, granted, and some of them might as well be forgotten. (Weren't they the ones who inflicted frames on us?;-) So their record was definitely mixed.
Anyway, I'd be interested in an explanation of that "proprietary tags" claim, with references to how they harrassed other browser makers who tried to copy them.
(And I'd agree that we're better off now with Mozilla than we'd have been with Netscape. So, much as I hate to admit it, maybe Microsoft did us all a favor by killing them.;-)
So how do you find a specific spot? I find the controls rather incomprehensible. They hardly ever seem to move in the direction I want. I found that I can "drag" the picture, but sometimes it drags in a straight line, other times it rotates, and other times it does a combination of both. I keep changing the zoom level accidentally, but I can't make much sense of what seems to trigger the zooming, which is different at different times.
This is on a Macbook Pro, FWIW, using Firefox 4.
Maybe I'll try a few other browsers, and see if it's just FF that's insane and uncontrollable. So far, it's entertaining, but I'm not very successful at getting it to show me something that I know about.
(And is there some tool I don't see that lets me enter the coordinates of an object?)
Nah; your result was correct. The example is a simplified version of a single step in the conventional code to produce a string that's the hex value of an int. It uses 0x0F to pick off the low-order 4 bits of the value (which should be an input variable rather than 257), and uses that 4-bit value as an index into the string of hex digits. This gives a printable char, which is saved somewhere. Then the input value is shifted right by 4 bits, and the process is repeated, until the input value is zero or some fixed number of chars have been produced, whichever you want.
The "tricky" part to the example is that most people not familiar with C don't understand that a quoted string is just an array of chars, and can be indexed like any other array. Most languages would call that subscript operation a syntax error, but in C, you can use anything that is logically an array, indexed by anything that can be converted to an int. This can result in more compact code that is quite readable to an experienced C programmer, but possibly upsetting and mind-bending to people coming from other languages.
As someone else pointed out, and is mentioned in the "C bible" and assorted other C manuals, the subscript operation in C is in fact commutative. It's just the result of indirecting on the sum of a pointer and an int (multiplied by the size of what the pointer points to). The second statement can be, clarified by translating it to "c=*("0123456789ABCDEF"+i)", which is logically equivalent to the version with brackets. The quoted string is of type (char *), so the expression is simply an add and a load of a byte from the resulting address.
The reason for calling this example "safe" is that masking the input value (257) with 0x0F guarantees that the index is within the [0-15] range, and the index operation can't be out of bounds. No bounds checking is one of the favorite criticisms of C. But in this case, a compiler that generates a bounds check is simply wasting both memory and cpu time, since the index is provably in bounds. And the bounds-check code in other languages isn't any faster than what any competent C program can explicitly program when it's necessary. So if you have a competent programmer, C is no more dangerous than other languages, and it's often faster (when the bounds check is unnecessary). But C programmers can still complain that they're being forced to waste human time doing a compiler's job for a tiny saving of cpu time.
Considering that they can't even decide whether 'manmade climate change' would cause drier winters or wetter winters,...
Or maybe it's both. Adding energy to a system (turning up the heat) tends to make for wider excursions around the "norm". Some areas may have drier winters, others wetter winters.
The only problem is that there's only one way to find out - and we're all test subjects.
Actually, the mistake is believing that the climateologists "can't even decide". In fact, the climate models have long predicted such opposite changes in many parts of the world. For example, the models have been saying for some time that in the US, the southwest will be getting drier (in the winter; the summers are already very dry), while the northeast will be getting wetter. We now have a couple of decades more data saying that that's exactly what has happened.
Will it keep changing that way? The models do seem to say "Yes", but of course, they could all be wrong. But if you have to make a bet, who would you listen to? The guys who says "It can't last"? Or the guys (and their models) who who have been right for a couple of decades now?
just imagine in the height of an emergency if the communications system is down or adversely affected.
Um, it's not at all difficult to imagine this, especially if you've ever been involved in disaster relief. Until very recently, the communication systems were one of the first things to fail during most disasters of any sort. Wires are fragile things when faced with the actions of Ma Nature or a military force. This is why, back when (D)ARPA started the work that led to the Internet, almost all the diagrams showed a wireless comm system. It doesn't work too well to connect ships or jet fighters via cables. And even for ground installations, cutting the wires is the first thing that any enemy will do. The commercial world has dragged their feet tremendously, blocking the development of a real, universal wireless system at every stage. Our current cell-phone system is crippled by the lockings and licensing that makes it refuse to do most things we'd like it to do. The wi-fi system is mostly locked down by a hokey "security" system that doesn't much interfere with military decoding, but does prevent most civilians from using the system in over 99% of the US.
And we've just barely made a dent in this problem. It's possible to have trucks (or boats) full of generators and wireless comm gear at the scene in a short time. But this usually takes much longer than it should, due to poor planning, plus active interference from the authorities on the scene.
Our comm system is barely functional in small-scale emergencies much larger than an auto accident. In real disasters, such as Katrina, the comm system simply collapses and takes weeks to come back online.
There's also the example that would be funny if it weren't for all the deaths involved: The collapse in New York of the World Trade Center nearly a decade ago also crippled Manhattan's communication system. The idiots who built the system's infrastructure (mostly the phone company) had run most of the cables for the southern half of the island under the WTC. And they hadn't built redundancy, so there was usually only one path between two specific points. The ARPA people back in the 1960s would have been apalled. People in 2001 who'd been working on the Internet were apalled. There was a lot of discussion of this in any number of comm forums. Reports are that the situation is nearly as bad today. The comm companies see no need to waste money on redundancy (and in fact over-subscribe most of their capacity when they can). And the government agencies are controlled by people who don't believe in "government regulation".
It's interesting to contemplate the idea that someone actually thought we had a comm system that works during major emergency or disaster situations. I wonder who wrote that line, and what their experience in emergency work is.
There was an interesting variant of this back that produced a bit of a "discussion" back in the 1960s. One of the US's national tests (I've forgotten which one) had a question with a curious situation in its multiple-choice answers: one of them was correct by Newton's mechanics, but a different one was correct by Einstein's relativistic equations. You'd think that this was done intentionally, and either would be accepted. But the test's scoring system accepted only the Newtonian answer as correct, and marked your answer wrong if you knew enough to choose Einstein's answer.
When some reporters asked them about this, the answer they gave was that students who knew enough to use Einstein's theories should also know not to use them on a high-school level test. Scientists everywhere were appalled, but this reasoning had widespread support among not just American parents, but also among the teachers.
I've occasionally brought this case up in discussions among educators. I've found that almost all of them agree with the testers' reasoning, and would also mark the relativistic answer wrong. Sometimes their reasoning is more personal: They didn't teach relativity in their classes, so the students shouldn't use it on a test. (And not just their tests, but official nation-wide tests.)
Yeah; the situation here in the US really is that bad. And it's been that bad for all of the vaunted "space age" era with its emphasis on teaching science. It's not obvious how one might fight this. Rolling your eyes doesn't help much.
(I've always wondered whether the person who made up the above test question was a physicist who expected both answers to be accepted, but the test makers had an official rule that a question couldn't have two correct answers, so they rejected one. I never heard this discussed, and after this much time, there's probably nobody around who still remembers.)
The different branches of mathematics complement, rather than contradict, each other.
And if you can point to a historical event where the number theorists massacred large numbers of topologists then I'm all ears[1].
While there don't seem to be any documented mathematical massacres, there have been a number of cases of one group of mathematicians verbally attacking another group, and calling them very bad names. But the reaction to this hasn't been warfare.
For example, a few centuries back, there was a dispute triggered by the proof that some numbers such as the square root of 2 "exist" (whatever that means;-), but can't be represented precisely by the ratio of two integers. The traditionalists criticised the rationality of this bunch of upstarts. Their response was to define two sets of numbers: those which may be written as the ration of two integers, called "rational numbers", and those which cannot be so written, called "irrational numbers". Those are the names still used by mathematicians today, and the term "irrational" has lost all of its pejorative qualities in this context.
Similarly, more recently some mathematicians started taking roots of negative numbers. The traditionalists objected that there were no numbers that could be squared to produce a negative number, so square roots of negative numbers aren't "real" (whatever that means;-). The young upstarts reacted the same way: They referred to the traditionalists' numbers as "real numbers", and the numbers whose squares are negative as "imaginary numbers". Again, we still use those terms, teach them in school, and the "imaginary" has no pejorative meaning.
Of course, with mathematics, usefulness in the real world has a history of forcing acceptance of new ideas. Both irrational and imaginary numbers have turned out to be useful to engineers in various fields, so they're a permanent part of our mathematics. Meanwhile, the integers, rationals and reals are still important subsets of the "complex" numbers, so their properties are also taught regularly.
Perhaps we could adopt the mathematical approach to religious theories. We might teach the "many-worlds" cosmology, and use "imaginary" to describe the relationship between different world lines. Gods might exist, but the evidence is that they exist in only other world lines, "imaginary" to our world line, but real to those others. We might combine this concept with "fictional" world lines, which are much like imaginary world lines, but springing from the mind of a human writer. We could then start long discussions of whether "fictional and "imaginary" world lines are different. It'd be sorta like the P/NP problem in computing...
The critical thing might be whether, like mathematicians, we can use such terms without any pejorative implications. After all, if the many-world hypothesis turns out to be correct, we may someday find a way to study some of the "imaginary" worlds (but probably not the "fictional", as they depend on canon;-).
Why do Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science? What's the gain? I see mostly a dangerous side effect: That pupils will see that they're being taught bullshit and extrapolate that if you get to hear bull in one class, it won't be much better for the others.
So how's that a dangerous side effect? I'd think that's what we want them to learn. After all, it's the correct conclusion from the "research".;-)
What's mind-bogglingly funny about that stance is that in statistics the null hypothesis is "the numbers you got are the result of chance", which must be rejected to conclude that there's some cause for getting the numbers you got.
Indeed. Maybe what we should do is tell them that the only "null" hypothesis in this case is "There was no intelligence at all in the creation of the universe". The hypothesis that there was exactly one intelligent creator should be called the "one hypothesis"; having two cooperating (or opposing) creators would be the "two hypothesis"; and so on.
That should confuse them enough. After all, what does "null" mean? In common speech, it just means that there is/was nothing there. So assuming that there's something there can't be a "null hypothesis".
The actual statistical definition of a "null hypothesis" is probably beyond the mental capacity of these idiots. Rejecting a null hypothesis amounts to a double negative. Double negatives might be common in scientific reasoning, but to most non-scientists, they are generally incomprehensible and not distinguished from single negatives. (This is a fairly standard topic in linguistics circles; there's even a standard linguistics jokes on the topic.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
As much as we like to think the rest of the world is scary, imagine how they feel about us, and how justified they are when they hear things like this. We're better than this.
Um, no; clearly we're not. If we were, we wouldn't be so calmly accepting that our "leaders" are doing this. We'd be out with our torches and pitchforks, demanding those people be replaced with "better" people than they obviously are.
The story of the stored smallpox samples is hardly anything new, and it's hardly anything secret. It's not like this was just sprung on us and we have to pause to think it through. The story has been out and around for a couple of decades now. I've read about it at least once a year during those decades. Nobody except very young children has an excuse to not know about it. But we calmly ignore it, and the samples still exist. That tells us a lot about how much "better" we are.
If you test enough hypotheses with the same exact experiment you can practically guarantee that you'll find some statistically significant (and therefore publishable) correlations in your data due to random error, even if no causative relationships actually exist.
There's an xkcd comic that directly deals with this.
Where are the studies about drinking tea, ...?
Try asking google. Thus, the terms "+tea +cancer +correlation" turn up around 1.25 million hits right now. (You need the '+'s because all three words are just too common and give many millions of hits.) You'll find that lots of correlations have turned up, there is a similar connection as in the current story, but the statistical results alone are merely suggestive and not conclusive.
One recent story reported that drinking very hot tea is associated with an increased risk of esophageal cancer. In this case, the suspicion is that it's the heat that's the problem, and very hot coffee would likely have a similar effect. But again, Further Research is Needed, and may be going on right now.
... that correlation is not necessarily causation. To demonstrate causation they would have to follow up with a clinical trial that eliminates confounding variables. At this point all they have is a hypothesis.
Yup. It's yet another case of the observation that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that states "Further research is needed".
This is not a bad study, but the conclusions need testing via something many people call SCIENCE. It will be necessary to get some subjects and feed them coffee. As is, this is a fun exercise in statistics.
Well, yeah, except that scientific research very often starts with statistical studies like this, followed by more focused studies on the things that turn out to be correlated.
As someone (I've forgotten who) said, a correlation may not mean causation, but it is Nature's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something interesting going on that you should look into."
Since there is standard equipment with video recording for military units, I'd have had those issued, rather than choosing to purposefully have no video of any of the operation.
I've read any number of news stories that claimed the Seals had the video equipment and it was running. Dunno whether this is true of not, of course, since I wasn't there. But a lot of news people seem to believe that there are videos of much of the assassination. If so, they might be declassified in 20 or 30 years ...
What I'd like to know is: How many comedians have already made references to "The US Navy, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Disney, Inc." and other similar jokes?
I'll also be looking for the little "TM" superscripts in news stories about the Seals, complete with footnotes like the above.
Of course, it wouldn't be the first time that people made such jokes. Describing the US Congress as a subsidiary of Such-&-Such Corp goes back a long way ...
The idea that the photos can be used by those who hate us to drum up support (i.e., LOOK what they did to Bin Laden!) for additional attacks on innocent people is not whimsical.
It's already being mentioned that those people are using the suppression of the photos against the US. There are several ways this can be done. "The US's Seals made such a bloody mess of his body that they don't dare show us the results." "The US can't show us the pictures because they didn't kill him; they dragged him off to a secret prison where they're torturing him." "ObL was actually cooperating with the US all along, playing the part of a Foreign Devil, and wanted to retire, so they faked his assassination and he's living under a fake identity at his luxury retirement villa." Make up your own; it's fun. ;-)
There's really no way this can be handled correctly. No matter what the US government does, it's a major PR disaster. The large percent of the US population that's openly calling it "justice" just adds to the disaster.
Put on trial for what, exactly? US law doesn't apply in Pakistan or Afghanistan or whatever fuckistan he happened to be in 10 years ago.
I think you've got it. There have been suggestions that the US had no court anywhere that ObL could have been tried. The obvious place is the ICJ/World Court in the Hague. But it's not clear what the charges might have been. It's likely that the US "had nothing on the guy" for the WTC attack, other than his publicly praising the people who did it, and that's not exactly a criminal act. (If it were, the US would've tried Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson for their infamous remarks on the topic. ;-) His other purported crimes were likely committed while he was outside the jurisdiction of the US, and probably outside of UN jurisdiction. So they had to "try him in the press", and then use extralegal means to punish him.
Of course, even if you believe that some sort of "justice" was done by sending in a gang of armed men to gun down the guy in his sleep, you might consider the obvious long-term effect of this. The US has been openly and loudly calling this "justice". This isn't being missed by people with similar desires in the rest of the world. Since the US government has effectively announced that killing someone without any sort of trial is "justice", we can expect that many others in the world are planning to bring the US to "justice" in a similar fashion. The US Government clearly approves of this method, so it can't logically complain if others follow its example, right?
This is not at all a hypothetical prospect. It would have been better for our future safety if he had been brought to trial and at least a pretense of a legal process had been made.
Not just wal-mart, but an evil wall mart. If walmart doesn't want to sell yeast, they don't prevent me from buying yeast from a third party. Apple has DRM'ed thier platform so that it is forboden to load apps except through a store they controll.
These people are whining because they went from a 70% to a 40% profit margin on a product that requires no raw materials to "manufacture".
Hmmm ... I didn't interpret it as "whining". Rather, I read the comments as a warning to those of us who might be contemplating building apps to sell through the Apple Store: Don't bother; you can't make a living that way. Apple that market sewn up tight, and their commission on the sale will leave you with so little that you might as well not bother.
I have a number of friends who reached this point about 10 years ago with MS Windows. First, we read stories about Windows developers who found that for the latest release, the required software (mostly libraries) needed to test their products was running them around $20,000. This got people nervous, and when they did inquiries, they found that they had a lot of colleagues whose after-taxes income had dropped into the official "poverty" range. They got the message: This was no longer a feasible occupation, and they had to find other ways of making a living.
It seems that the Apple developer crowd is starting to reach the same state about now. This can be interpreted as whining, of course. But it can also be interpreted as a useful warning to those of us who might have been tempted to go into the iOS/OSX app development profession. It looks like we shouldn't bother; you can't make a living that way any more.
So what're the prospects for an Android app developer? The cost of entry is certainly a lot lower, and there's much less chance that any corporate behemoth will be able to lock us all out some time in the future. OTOH, how big is the market, really? It'd be nice to have read data, not just emotional anecdotes ...
You're still free to buy this app, then buy ebooks and load them into the app. Of course ebook readers are pretty much identical, so there's really no market for selling one.
What I find curious is that the best "ebook reader" I've seen is nowhere near as easy to use as the worst browser. I wouldn't bother with an ebook reader, except that some books are made available only in one proprietary format. I've also tried subscribing to a couple of journals that are available in PDF or some ebook format, and I'm seriously considering going back to hard copy, because they're so difficult to use on a screen that's only 1920x1200. ;-)
What I'd really like to see is a requirement that all electronic texts be made available in HTML. That would make them fairly easy to read on any of my screens (though my "smartphone" has a seriously limited screen).
Either that, or some ebook developers might look into why their software is so inferior to even poor browsers, and do something about it. It's not like browser technology is a carefully-guarded secret, after all. The HTML specs are published and available free, and there's no threat of being sued if you reverse-engineer browser-like capabilities.
Actually, I may be a bit unusual here, because the electronic texts that I have are primarily reference works, not novels or other similar read-through-once-and-discard texts. The ebook readers might work fine as a replacement for paperback novels, for all I know. But they're downright crummy for anything that you want to keep around to look things up in, or sit on a table for reference when you're doing something that requires access to the information.
Or maybe I just haven't seen the right ebook software? I don't think I'd bother investing the many thousands of dollars it would take to buy a copy of each one, and the thousands of hours it would take to thoroughly evaluate each one. (Though if someone wanted to fund me to do this, I'd consider taking the job. ;-)
You assume that this was a bug. From what has been seen of Zuckerberg's ethics, I'd say it's just about even money that this was a completely intentional feature to help get his advertising buddies all that juicy demographic info they pay him so well for.
Ah, but if they got the info without paying for it, Zuckerberg would certainly consider it a bug. Probably the highest-priority kind of bug.
We might add that astronomy is one of the "hard" sciences where amateurs can and do make significant contributions. The explanation is simple: Most professional astronomers are busy studying specific things Out There via the many expensive, high-power telescopes in the world and in orbit. Those telescopes generally have a very small field of view, needed to extract information about single distant objects. But there's an ongoing need for sky surveys, to spot interesting events that are outside the fields of view of the high-powered instruments.
This is where amateur astronomers can help a lot. You can get a small telescope and camera that's good for taking pictures of chunks of the night sky in particular wavelengths, and collect a series of pictures taken as often as is convenient for you. Compare them for changes. (There's software available that will help do this.) When you spot a change, fire off an email to the appropriate address. Some astronomer will likely aim a high-power instrument at that point, get more detailed information, and announce to the world what you discovered. If you were the first to finger the event, the thing there will probably be named for you (or someone you choose ;-). Some people who look for things like comets, asteroids or supernovae have their name on lots of things in the sky.
The professional astronomers could do all this, of course, but it'd eat into their time analyzing the data from the big telescopes. They learned long ago that there are many people in the world willing to help out for little or no pay. So they've concentrated on being nice to the amateurs, and gently teaching them how to do the job right. There's lots of information available explaining what kind of telescope and camera you should get for your interests, and how to use them to get the best astronomical information. You'll probably need to study a bunch of math, and the astronomy forums can give you good advice on relevant textbooks.
But there's not a lot of income to be made this way. You have to find it interesting. And it's not something insignificant. Astronomy needs the data that amateurs are providing with their small telescopes. You can make real contributions to what's probably the most popular scientific field, for an outlay of a few thousand dollars. And many, many hours of your time.
So why would Facebook or Google be allowed to buy Skype, but not Microsoft? You are just spreading FUD. Larry, is that you?
Heh. We really should be reminding people that this is exactly the sort of "discussion" that attracts flocks of sock puppets. It might not be Larry (or Steve, or the other Steve) personally. But some unknown number of the posts in this discussion are PR posts from accounts that belong to the various interested companies.
Slashdot is a pretty well-known forum in the computer industry. It's hard to imagine that the marketing departments of the larger companies aren't very well aware of this, and consider this a very cheap advertising medium. We should always be assuming the presence of sock puppets in any discussion here. Especially one like this.
So do we have a summary of the available (F)OSS VoIP packages? It could be useful to also have information about interoperability. The phone business has a long, shabby history of interfering with a customer's ability to call someone who uses a competitor's products. It'd be really useful if we could establish a real standard for interoperability.
Not saying that people aren't working on this. It just that, when I've looked around a few times in the past, I was a bit underwhelmed by the offerings . Maybe they're getting better. Maybe I'm not good enough at using google. Anyone have a link to a good summary of the topic?
Just a footnote, but Netscape was nobody's friend in the web browser market. They were introducing proprietary tags in their server products to extend the functionality of their 'free' browser and lock up and own the Web Client/Server market ...
Hmmm ... Do you know of cases where Netscape really kept their extensions proprietary? Did they ever sue the maker of another browser for implementing one of their tags? Not saying they didn't; I just don't recall reading about it, and google's not much help.
It's not difficult to find tags that they introduced which everyone copied. My favorite is <center>. I periodically run across yet another warning that the center tag is deprecated in official HTML, and you should use CSS instead. So I try the suggested CSS, do a bit of testing, and find that it doesn't work in some browsers or for the thing I'm trying to center. I ask about this on some HTML forum, and get blown off with the "RTFM, n00b" sort of insults. If someone does actually explain why the CSS does what it does, I simply reply that it's no replacement for a center tag, as was claimed. In any case, I go back to using center tags, which are apparently implemented by all the browsers I've ever seen, and works in a way that I can understand. And we have Netscape to thank for this useful tool, silly as it might be, although assorted non-Netscape people are trying to deprecate it.
The other useful things that Netscape created and allowed everyone to implement don't seem to be quite as funny as this case, granted, and some of them might as well be forgotten. (Weren't they the ones who inflicted frames on us? ;-) So their record was definitely mixed.
Anyway, I'd be interested in an explanation of that "proprietary tags" claim, with references to how they harrassed other browser makers who tried to copy them.
(And I'd agree that we're better off now with Mozilla than we'd have been with Netscape. So, much as I hate to admit it, maybe Microsoft did us all a favor by killing them. ;-)
So how do you find a specific spot? I find the controls rather incomprehensible. They hardly ever seem to move in the direction I want. I found that I can "drag" the picture, but sometimes it drags in a straight line, other times it rotates, and other times it does a combination of both. I keep changing the zoom level accidentally, but I can't make much sense of what seems to trigger the zooming, which is different at different times.
This is on a Macbook Pro, FWIW, using Firefox 4.
Maybe I'll try a few other browsers, and see if it's just FF that's insane and uncontrollable. So far, it's entertaining, but I'm not very successful at getting it to show me something that I know about.
(And is there some tool I don't see that lets me enter the coordinates of an object?)
So, where is the Earth?
At the center of the universe, of course.
Nah; your result was correct. The example is a simplified version of a single step in the conventional code to produce a string that's the hex value of an int. It uses 0x0F to pick off the low-order 4 bits of the value (which should be an input variable rather than 257), and uses that 4-bit value as an index into the string of hex digits. This gives a printable char, which is saved somewhere. Then the input value is shifted right by 4 bits, and the process is repeated, until the input value is zero or some fixed number of chars have been produced, whichever you want.
The "tricky" part to the example is that most people not familiar with C don't understand that a quoted string is just an array of chars, and can be indexed like any other array. Most languages would call that subscript operation a syntax error, but in C, you can use anything that is logically an array, indexed by anything that can be converted to an int. This can result in more compact code that is quite readable to an experienced C programmer, but possibly upsetting and mind-bending to people coming from other languages.
As someone else pointed out, and is mentioned in the "C bible" and assorted other C manuals, the subscript operation in C is in fact commutative. It's just the result of indirecting on the sum of a pointer and an int (multiplied by the size of what the pointer points to). The second statement can be, clarified by translating it to "c=*("0123456789ABCDEF"+i)", which is logically equivalent to the version with brackets. The quoted string is of type (char *), so the expression is simply an add and a load of a byte from the resulting address.
The reason for calling this example "safe" is that masking the input value (257) with 0x0F guarantees that the index is within the [0-15] range, and the index operation can't be out of bounds. No bounds checking is one of the favorite criticisms of C. But in this case, a compiler that generates a bounds check is simply wasting both memory and cpu time, since the index is provably in bounds. And the bounds-check code in other languages isn't any faster than what any competent C program can explicitly program when it's necessary. So if you have a competent programmer, C is no more dangerous than other languages, and it's often faster (when the bounds check is unnecessary). But C programmers can still complain that they're being forced to waste human time doing a compiler's job for a tiny saving of cpu time.
Considering that they can't even decide whether 'manmade climate change' would cause drier winters or wetter winters, ...
Or maybe it's both. Adding energy to a system (turning up the heat) tends to make for wider excursions around the "norm". Some areas may have drier winters, others wetter winters.
The only problem is that there's only one way to find out - and we're all test subjects.
Actually, the mistake is believing that the climateologists "can't even decide". In fact, the climate models have long predicted such opposite changes in many parts of the world. For example, the models have been saying for some time that in the US, the southwest will be getting drier (in the winter; the summers are already very dry), while the northeast will be getting wetter. We now have a couple of decades more data saying that that's exactly what has happened.
Will it keep changing that way? The models do seem to say "Yes", but of course, they could all be wrong. But if you have to make a bet, who would you listen to? The guys who says "It can't last"? Or the guys (and their models) who who have been right for a couple of decades now?
just imagine in the height of an emergency if the communications system is down or adversely affected.
Um, it's not at all difficult to imagine this, especially if you've ever been involved in disaster relief. Until very recently, the communication systems were one of the first things to fail during most disasters of any sort. Wires are fragile things when faced with the actions of Ma Nature or a military force. This is why, back when (D)ARPA started the work that led to the Internet, almost all the diagrams showed a wireless comm system. It doesn't work too well to connect ships or jet fighters via cables. And even for ground installations, cutting the wires is the first thing that any enemy will do. The commercial world has dragged their feet tremendously, blocking the development of a real, universal wireless system at every stage. Our current cell-phone system is crippled by the lockings and licensing that makes it refuse to do most things we'd like it to do. The wi-fi system is mostly locked down by a hokey "security" system that doesn't much interfere with military decoding, but does prevent most civilians from using the system in over 99% of the US.
And we've just barely made a dent in this problem. It's possible to have trucks (or boats) full of generators and wireless comm gear at the scene in a short time. But this usually takes much longer than it should, due to poor planning, plus active interference from the authorities on the scene.
Our comm system is barely functional in small-scale emergencies much larger than an auto accident. In real disasters, such as Katrina, the comm system simply collapses and takes weeks to come back online.
There's also the example that would be funny if it weren't for all the deaths involved: The collapse in New York of the World Trade Center nearly a decade ago also crippled Manhattan's communication system. The idiots who built the system's infrastructure (mostly the phone company) had run most of the cables for the southern half of the island under the WTC. And they hadn't built redundancy, so there was usually only one path between two specific points. The ARPA people back in the 1960s would have been apalled. People in 2001 who'd been working on the Internet were apalled. There was a lot of discussion of this in any number of comm forums. Reports are that the situation is nearly as bad today. The comm companies see no need to waste money on redundancy (and in fact over-subscribe most of their capacity when they can). And the government agencies are controlled by people who don't believe in "government regulation".
It's interesting to contemplate the idea that someone actually thought we had a comm system that works during major emergency or disaster situations. I wonder who wrote that line, and what their experience in emergency work is.
There was an interesting variant of this back that produced a bit of a "discussion" back in the 1960s. One of the US's national tests (I've forgotten which one) had a question with a curious situation in its multiple-choice answers: one of them was correct by Newton's mechanics, but a different one was correct by Einstein's relativistic equations. You'd think that this was done intentionally, and either would be accepted. But the test's scoring system accepted only the Newtonian answer as correct, and marked your answer wrong if you knew enough to choose Einstein's answer.
When some reporters asked them about this, the answer they gave was that students who knew enough to use Einstein's theories should also know not to use them on a high-school level test. Scientists everywhere were appalled, but this reasoning had widespread support among not just American parents, but also among the teachers.
I've occasionally brought this case up in discussions among educators. I've found that almost all of them agree with the testers' reasoning, and would also mark the relativistic answer wrong. Sometimes their reasoning is more personal: They didn't teach relativity in their classes, so the students shouldn't use it on a test. (And not just their tests, but official nation-wide tests.)
Yeah; the situation here in the US really is that bad. And it's been that bad for all of the vaunted "space age" era with its emphasis on teaching science. It's not obvious how one might fight this. Rolling your eyes doesn't help much.
(I've always wondered whether the person who made up the above test question was a physicist who expected both answers to be accepted, but the test makers had an official rule that a question couldn't have two correct answers, so they rejected one. I never heard this discussed, and after this much time, there's probably nobody around who still remembers.)
The different branches of mathematics complement, rather than contradict, each other.
And if you can point to a historical event where the number theorists massacred large numbers of topologists then I'm all ears[1].
While there don't seem to be any documented mathematical massacres, there have been a number of cases of one group of mathematicians verbally attacking another group, and calling them very bad names. But the reaction to this hasn't been warfare.
For example, a few centuries back, there was a dispute triggered by the proof that some numbers such as the square root of 2 "exist" (whatever that means ;-), but can't be represented precisely by the ratio of two integers. The traditionalists criticised the rationality of this bunch of upstarts. Their response was to define two sets of numbers: those which may be written as the ration of two integers, called "rational numbers", and those which cannot be so written, called "irrational numbers". Those are the names still used by mathematicians today, and the term "irrational" has lost all of its pejorative qualities in this context.
Similarly, more recently some mathematicians started taking roots of negative numbers. The traditionalists objected that there were no numbers that could be squared to produce a negative number, so square roots of negative numbers aren't "real" (whatever that means ;-). The young upstarts reacted the same way: They referred to the traditionalists' numbers as "real numbers", and the numbers whose squares are negative as "imaginary numbers". Again, we still use those terms, teach them in school, and the "imaginary" has no pejorative meaning.
Of course, with mathematics, usefulness in the real world has a history of forcing acceptance of new ideas. Both irrational and imaginary numbers have turned out to be useful to engineers in various fields, so they're a permanent part of our mathematics. Meanwhile, the integers, rationals and reals are still important subsets of the "complex" numbers, so their properties are also taught regularly.
Perhaps we could adopt the mathematical approach to religious theories. We might teach the "many-worlds" cosmology, and use "imaginary" to describe the relationship between different world lines. Gods might exist, but the evidence is that they exist in only other world lines, "imaginary" to our world line, but real to those others. We might combine this concept with "fictional" world lines, which are much like imaginary world lines, but springing from the mind of a human writer. We could then start long discussions of whether "fictional and "imaginary" world lines are different. It'd be sorta like the P/NP problem in computing ...
The critical thing might be whether, like mathematicians, we can use such terms without any pejorative implications. After all, if the many-world hypothesis turns out to be correct, we may someday find a way to study some of the "imaginary" worlds (but probably not the "fictional", as they depend on canon ;-).
Why do Creationists feel the need to push their faith into science? What's the gain? I see mostly a dangerous side effect: That pupils will see that they're being taught bullshit and extrapolate that if you get to hear bull in one class, it won't be much better for the others.
So how's that a dangerous side effect? I'd think that's what we want them to learn. After all, it's the correct conclusion from the "research". ;-)
What's mind-bogglingly funny about that stance is that in statistics the null hypothesis is "the numbers you got are the result of chance", which must be rejected to conclude that there's some cause for getting the numbers you got.
Indeed. Maybe what we should do is tell them that the only "null" hypothesis in this case is "There was no intelligence at all in the creation of the universe". The hypothesis that there was exactly one intelligent creator should be called the "one hypothesis"; having two cooperating (or opposing) creators would be the "two hypothesis"; and so on.
That should confuse them enough. After all, what does "null" mean? In common speech, it just means that there is/was nothing there. So assuming that there's something there can't be a "null hypothesis".
The actual statistical definition of a "null hypothesis" is probably beyond the mental capacity of these idiots. Rejecting a null hypothesis amounts to a double negative. Double negatives might be common in scientific reasoning, but to most non-scientists, they are generally incomprehensible and not distinguished from single negatives. (This is a fairly standard topic in linguistics circles; there's even a standard linguistics jokes on the topic. ;-)