Actually, if we could start a new volcano, it could get big rather quickly. It wouldn't necessarily take centuries.
Of course, as others have said, a hole of diameter 10 or 20 cm is unlikely to create a volcano. Even with a Deepwater Horizon sort of blowout, the rising magma would cool too rapidly due to contact with crustal rock, blocking the hole.
I wonder if any geophysicists could make a reasonable estimate of how big a hole we'd need to drill to maintain a lava flow for more than a few minutes. A wild back-of-the-envelope calculation says that, unless there's already a ready magma chamber just below the surface, such a hole isn't anywhere near feasible with our current technology. And if we drill into such an existing magma chamber, we're just doing what Ma Nature would have probably done in a few weeks.
Heh. Samba is probably a good "poster child" for the sort of open-source software with so many contributors that nobody can reasonably be expected to coordinate them all to agree on offering a second license. Such discussions would naturally break down into the sort of flamefest that we see here all the time.
But, as someone else just commented, this is somewhat of an extreme case. Most open-source projects have a rather small set of developers, so it's not too hard for them to discuss such things and agree on what licenses they will allow. With only a handful of contributors, it's also possible to decide on how to divide up any income that might arise from such things.
The FOSS model doesn't scale well to large groups of software developers. The image of "herding cats" comes to mind...
In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.
Actually, few biologists would be surprised. One of the more interesting things about previous deep-drilling projects is that they've turned up micro-organisms all the way down. Projecting the microbe count from these holes has produced the estimate that there is more biomass inside the planet than on its surface and in the oceans. Of course, this is based on a very small sample, so nobody takes it too seriously.
But still, the fact that we've found living things everywhere we've drilled means that the default assumption should be that we'll keep finding them. Presumably it'll get too hot for life at some depth, but so far we have no clue at all what this depth might be. The really significant thing would be if we found no decrease in the density of microbes at any depth.
And I don't think the critters down there qualify as "alien". From the few samples that've been studied, they are very similar to the things living inside rocks near the surface. We might have to go to other planets to find something truly alien. And maybe the things living inside the other planets will turn out to be relatives of the things living here.
For further information, ask google about "deep-rock microorganisms" (without the quotes). There's quite a bit of information on the subject online.
Not if you provide the source code of the software you used and make it available to all users,...
Yeah; I guess I wasn't as clear as I might have been. I was basically addressing the people who want to "take the software private", making it a part of their proprietary binary-only package without paying. This is mostly what private companies want to do, and they're frustrated that it's illegal (in most countries). But in fact they can do this, simply by approaching the authors of GPL'd code and asking for a different license. Those authors will probably want to be paid for such a license, as with any software they'd license from a for-profit company. But the companies want the "FOSS" software without even the minimal restrictions of the GPL. So they're playing the "free means I can take it and claim it's mine" gambit, hoping they can get away with it.
It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Hey, I'm gonna have to steal that one.;-)
Hmmm... I wonder if that short list of words would follow under the "fair use" exception to copyright laws./. does warn us that everything we post is copyrighted by the authors.
You're either for software freedom or your not. GPL restricts what you can, therefor is not free.
Well, maybe. But it does seem reasonable that, if you're gonna take a "free" product and resell it, you should share some of your profits with the product's original producers.
The GPL has taken this attitude toward "free" from the start. You can have it for free if you promise to pass it on to others on the same terms. But if you want to grab someone else's work and make a profit from it, you have to buy it (and get a license to resell it).
See, it's sort of a "tit for tat" thing. If you want it to be free, you have to keep it free; if you want to be paid for it, you have to pay for it.
(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, note that most GPL'd software is available from the authors with other licenses. The GPL doesn't preclude providing the software with other licenses. It basically just exists to guarantee that if you don't pay for the software, you can't charge others for it. But most of the authors are quite willing to give you a license to sell their software for profit, if you are willing to share those profits with the authors.)
Even as someone who can write, understand, and modify source code, and someone who often uses OSS software; I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually modified someone else's code before using the their software.
On the other hand, I'd need a lot more hands than two to count the number of times I've modified someone else's code after using their software. And they've usually thanked me for the patches I sent back.
And on the third (gripping;-) hand, I would take many, many hands to count the number of times I've used open-source software that has been similarly modified by other users who happened to be programmers. Some of my most useful software is full of contributions from others than the original author.
The common argument that "I'm not a programmer, so I can't read or modify the code" is just silly when used to say "... so nobody else should be allowed to read the code, either." This is the primary form of the arguments against FOSS, and it misses the point of the "many eyes" theory.
True, it may not be important that you (or any other specific person) be able to read and modify the code. But it is important that we be allowed such access. Without this, you have no idea what nasty surprises might be lurking in your software. And even if you learn about some of the nasties, you can't do much about them. The ongoing problems with "malware" should be all the evidence we need.
If shifting the clock an hour to get more daylight in the hour is such a great idea, why don't we do it year round.
Well, when this topic comes up every year about this time, I always wonder why we don't just shift the clocks by 6 or 8 hours, and thus get 6 or 8 hours more sunlight per day.
And we should do it in winter, when we could really use all those extra hours of sunshine. What's the point of doing it only in the part of the year that already has 12 or more hours of sunlight?
Others in Congress are criticizing the search giant over several flubs, including... sidestepping net neutrality rules through a deal with Verizon.
What? Haven't we been reading in the past few days about Congress discarding the proposed net neutrality rules, the courts tossing out what the FCC had done on the subject, and so on? How can google be "sidestepping" rules that Congress themselves say don't exist?
Did I miss some news on a recent vote? If so, google news doesn't know about it, either. Asking news.google.com about "net neutrality" gets the story dated Mar 11 about "the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology rejecting the FCC's open-internet regulations". The rest of the hits all seem to be about various government agencies either rejecting or doing nothing on the topic.
So what regulations are the Congress people accusing Google of sidestepping?
We're already getting news reports of the damage along the US's West Coast. Nothing to compare with Japan, of course. But a number of harbors have lost piers and boats to the surge, which was 6-8 feet (2-3.5m). Ask google news about Crescent City or Santa Cruz, California.
This isn't especially unusual. Several other large quakes, such as last year's Chile and Samoa quakes, caused similar damage. It depends to a great extent on the exact shape of a harbor. Some harbors concentrate a tsunami's energe; others dissipate it. The former need reconstruction every few years, when such things happen somewhere in the Pacific.
Take that time you'd spend praying and work overtime. Donate the extra money to whoever needs it.
Today's xkcd speaks directly to that topic. The discussion has several variants of your suggestion.
But that's a lot more work than a minute or so of praying, which lets believers feel like they've "done something" when all they did was talk to their invisible deity who didn't do anything to prevent the latest disaster.
I imagine that a person from 2500 years ago, used to reading scrolls, if presented with a computer with a web page open, would find the scrollbar intuitively obvious. They might however have a great deal of trouble with a link at the bottom saying "Next Page".
Apple are doing this is because Microsoft are being such utter douchebags in the first place.
Apple is.
Microsoft is.
Jesus.
Heh. This is a well-known difference between British and American English. In British English, organizations usually take a plural verb form; in American English, the verb is usually singular.
The well-educated English speaker is familiar with both, of course, and doesn't get all peevy about it.
(Native speakers of other forms of English are invited to tell us how your dialect handles this.)
No, the difference is that a CLI is nearly impossible to use if you aren't familiar with it - the semantics and syntax are as, if not more, important than the concepts - whereas a GUI requires much less focussing on the "how", allowing much more focussing on the "what".
While there's a certain truth to this, GUIs are in general a lot less "intuitive" than people tend to believe. Without documentation and training, most users are unaware of most of their GUI's capabilities, and have great difficulty in learning much more than the basics.
An example I've read a number of warnings about in web-design documents is that a significant number (often estimated at around 50%) of "non-geek" users don't understand scroll bars. This is usually mentioned along with the advice to put the important part of your web pages close to the top, because the non-scrolling users won't be able to see anything below that.
Yes, I was dubious when I first read this. But over the years, I've run into several clear examples. I've been involved in building web sites for some very non-geeky organizations. The orgs' leaders generally want a lot of stuff on their main page, and at the top they usually want some text about the organization, its purposes, its main activities, etc. They also agree that it's good to have a list of upcoming public events on the main page, and inevitably that's positioned below the introductory text, so it's often not visible unless the user has a rather large window.
In each case, there were eventually meetings with discussions of how to improve the web site. One thing that would come up was suggestions from users (including members) that the home page should have a list of upcoming events. The leaders have always been dumfounded by this. "But, but,... There is such a list on the home page." "What?? No, there isn't."
Eventually, I have to interrupt, and explain to the org's leaders that they're hearing from people who don't understand scrollbars, have never seen the events table because they don't scroll down to see it. The users are, of course, confused; they know that there's no such table because they've never seen it. We bring up the site on a handy machine (preferably a laptop or tablet with a small screen), and I show the users that it's there by scrolling down to it. Their response again is confusion, because they don't know what I did or how I did it. "Why's it hidden like that?"
So I teach them about scrollbars, and a few users have learned something useful. But this has a more important effect: It gets across to the leaders why their design was wrong, as I'd been telling them, and they'll have a better web site if they'll let me fix it.
One instance of this happened just last week. The org's web site now has that block of extensive history and purpose in a separate box at the bottom of the page, and the table of coming events is positioned near the top, just below the logo bar, where non-geek users will see it and be able to read at least the first few entries.
Examples like this abound in GUI design. Many of the common widgets are not at all intuitive to most people. Even if they accidentally poke at things and trigger the actions, it's often difficult to grasp what the effect was. You see things change, but the changes don't make sense, and have no obvious relation to the icon that you clicked on. Often the icons don't look like anything that most users can name. The result is that most of the GUI is unusable to most of the users.
I wish I knew good ways around this. But truly making a GUI obvious is very difficult, and takes a lot of time studying the users and learning about their misconceptions. I very rarely have the time to do this, and in many cases the people paying me have expressly forbid wasting time with dumb users.
And that's something that's very difficult to program around.;-)
Could be. One of my favorite cosmological theories is that our universe is a simulation. In the "real" universe, there's a big computer that has a data object for every elementary particle in our universe. The simulation software (probably massively parallel) "steps" through the simulation, by calculating the position and velocity of each particle after the next time quantum. The beings running the simulation can stop it, do a bit of editing, and restart, which explains the religious "miracles" that have been so often reported.
It's hard to imagine how we could test this hypothesis. If we were to do a successful test, the simulation could just be stopped, reloaded from backup, and edited so our test came out inconclusive.
Of course, if this is valid, then we should also consider that the simulation might itself be running in a simulated universe...
... documentation for a GUI, if it exists at all, is often useless..,
How true. There popular explanation of the difference between a CLI and a GUI is that CLIs are so complicated that you need a manual to use it, whereas GUIs are so simple and intuitively obvious that no manual is needed.
Of course, the reality is that this attitude allows vendors to supply GUIs without any "unnecessary" manuals, but make the nested tree of windows and menus so deep and complex that nobody can ever remember where everything has been hidden, and there are no good tools to help you find something that you know is in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, the people who build the CLI know that nobody can ever remember it all, so they include tools for finding your way around. They also tend to make the defaults for the commands fit the most common cases, so you don't have to use the manuals all that often. And most tools have a -help option (though they can't quite agree on how to spell it), to provide quick reminders. And the CLI includes a current directory, search paths and aliasing, so you don't have to remember full paths to everything.
One of the ongoing frustrations with every GUI is constantly seeing a new window pop up, which is positioned back at the root directories, and I have to laboriously poke at things to get down to the directory that I'm working in. Then, when I do what the window was opened for, it closes, all that navigation is lost, and I have to do it all over again the next time I want to access a file in the same directory.
GUIs may have some aesthetic appeal (aka "pretty pictures"), but they remain the slowest, clumsiest way to use a computer that we've yet developed. But I trust that people are working on finding ways to make it even clumsier and slower. This seems to be happening with the "cloud" approach, for example.
It's not clear that this is anything new. A number of astronomers have suggested that we should treat the Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon pairs as "double planets" sharing an orbit. And there's a pair of Saturn's moons that share an orbit.
Of course, whether these are counterexamples depends on the picky, legalistic details of how you define the term "planet", which we've discussed to death here on/. already. Fun as such pseudo-arguments may be, the fact is that they're not terribly significant.
Thus, for the Pluto/Charon pair, reclassifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" make it especially an edge case, since it still includes the term "planet" in its classification. But they're both large, spherical bodies in a single orbit around the sun, while also orbiting each other.
The Earth/Luna pair is a bit of a mathematical curiosity. One of the arguments supporting calling our moon a "planet" orbiting the sun is that its orbit is everywhere convex with respect to the sun. You'd expect a "moon" to have a much more wiggly orbit, parts of which are curved away from the sun, and this is true of the other objects in the solar system that we call moons. OTOH, the barycenter of the Earth/Luna pair is (slightly) inside the Earth, which can be used with some definitions to say that it's really a satellite of the Earth.
And, of course, Saturn's two moons in a single orbit can be disqualified because they're obviously not "planets". They're not even big enough to be spheroidal, which is required by most definitions of a planet.
But the fact remains that our solar system contains at least three example of paired bodies sharing an orbit about their primary, and periodically exchanging the lead position. The mechanics of such orbits have been long understood, and astrophysicists can tell you when such orbits are stable. So while this may be "news" in the sense that it's about such orbits around another star, it's hardly news in the astrophysics sense.
What'll be interesting news is the discovery of three astronomical bodies in a "Scottish reel" orbit, which was proved possible several years ago, but to my knowledge hasn't actually been observed yet. Possible places to find them are in the asteroid belt, in Jupiter's "Trojan" asteroid clumps, and in the Kuiper Belt.
Whatever you might say about the Republicans, you can't say they're deceitful. They're completely blatant and open about their motives and methods. The Democrats are worse, because they try to convince you that they're for "hope and change", that they're completely the opposite of the "evil Republicans", but when they're in power, they do the exact same thing. The Democrats are deceitful liars, and con artists.
One of the best comments I've seen on this was in a Doonesbury cartoon a few years back. There were several panels of complaints about how hard it is to choose between the Republican and Democratic candidates, because they're both equally dishonest and corrupt. The last panel's punch line was "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
I've found that take on the subject useful in all sorts of "discussions" since then.
Of course, there's the question of how many people would prefer a leader with no morals or ethics to one who has them but has the strength of character (;-) to ignore them.
I'm surprised that the first fine is due to the portability aspect of the law, not the security portions of the law.
I'm not. Anyone familiar with medical records and computer security issues considers the security portions of HIPAA a joke.
The primary reason is that medical records are pretty much universally kept on MS Windows systems. There are several reasons why this makes data security a joke. The main one has been discussed here at/. several times: Windows has an automatic update feature, which you can turn off for "application" level software. However, it can't be turned off for "system" level software. MS has admitted that this has been true since XP. Their excuse is that kernel security issues are taken seriously, and updates are mandatory.
However, if you think about this for a few seconds, it obviously means that any time your Windows system is connected to the Internet, MS can silently install any new software they like. If your machine isn't reporting the contents of selected files to a.microsoft.com site now, it could be by the time you read this, and unless you're a real Windows security guru, you'd never suspect.
So if you're running Windows, you must assume that anyone who has "socially engineered" a connection at MS has access to all of your data.
And, less you think this is all spurious, you might look around in the records of the internet back in the 1990s when MS was first supplying systems with internet access. There are multiple reports of people getting curious about why their modem's lights were flickering when the machine was idle. Attaching a line monitor showed that the traffic was a list of the contents of the disk, being sent to a.microsoft.com address. The server on the other end could obviously also ask for the contents of files. This was ignored by the media and most managers, but it was noticed by the geeks among us with even minimal understanding of network security. Similar behavior has been reported for most releases of Windows.
This all has obvious application to HIPAA rules. My wife has worked with medical data for several decades now, at several employers. Every one of them worked exclusively on Windows systems. She has a Windows partition on her Mac "for work", and uses it a lot. She also has a work-supplied take-home Windows laptop. It's true that they use VPN to connect to the office computer systems. But this does nothing for the above issues. Since her Windows partition and laptop are connected to our home network, VPN just supplies an internet connection to her office machines, so their "silent upgrade" feature can work any time she's connected. This shoots down any claims that her office is protected from malicious sites (such as microsoft's;-) by VPN. We've verified that both her Windows systems can easily access.microsoft.com web sites while connected via VPN, showing that there is a data path for MS's silent update software to work.
This is hardly a secret. We've discussed it here on/., and it's been discussed in lots of other forums. Microsoft has a clear and obvious silent path to any medical data stored on their systems, any time they have an internet connection, which is almost all medical systems in the US. Anyone who can bribe the right people at MS also has such access.
So the fact that HIPAA rules don't forbid the use of MS Windows makes those rules a joke. I'd bet that many medical records people understand all this. It should be no surprise that they treat HIPAA data security as a joke.
It's interesting to consider non-MS systems in this light. Fully open-source systems are probably immune to such problems, since they'd be exposed fairly quickly. Apple systems are about half open-source, but most of the kernel and the UI have hidden source. Apple systems haven't been documented to have any behavior like those described abov
... the size of the classified section of the local paper and the amount of crime in an area is roughly proportional to the population of the area.
Sounds like they learned something from the recent story about the connection between cell-phone towers and the local birth rate. That one was actually a spoof of such "studies", and some of the media reported it as a real cause-and-effect story, too.
It's an old propaganda technique. As long as the general public and the media are abysmally ignorant of basic statistics, it'll continue to work.
A weeks worth of eye pressure data sampled every 15 minutes. If you had taken the time to at least skim TFA instead of writing a stupid, pointless post you might have learned something.
Well, I read it, and found that, but I didn't see any clue that would tell me how to convert that to bits or bytes. A "week" of data is about as useful as the common "Library of Congress" as a measure of information.
So please explain further why we're being so stupid when we fail to understand such units of measurement.
What will most likely happen when you plant your shoes is that you'll get a crop of plants native to Asia, which will quickly become agricultural pests in your part of the world.
A bit like China that refuses any product that contains a map indicating Taiwan as a country.
But strictly speaking, they're right. Taiwan is the name of an island, not of a country. The country's name is Republic of China. They're not even coterminous, because the RoC includes a number of islands that aren't part of the island of Taiwan.
Yes, people often say "Taiwan" with talking about the RoC, but that's just sloppy speech.
It's no secret that France has long wanted the Meridian to pass through Paris, where other items that define weights and measure reside, so they can all be in one (*ahem* French *ahem*) place.
Once we don't use Greenwich Mean Time the next step will be for France to re-name Paris as "Greenwich",...
Heh. Apparently the French (and probably a lot of Brits, too) haven't heard that GMT hasn't been used for a quarter century now. The Greenwich Observatory got out of the time standard business back in 1986 (google it), when the official time standard was redefined in a way that wasn't dependent on any place or artifact, and renamed "UTC". Since then, "GMT" has been nothing more than a mispelling of "UTC", usually by someone who doesn't understand the difference.
Actually, if you visit the Greenwich Observatory, you'll find that they do have a nice museum exhibit of the history of their time standard, as well as a number of other good exhibits. It's well worth spending a day of your vacation there. Or visit their nice web site (www.nmm.ac.uk).
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Actually, if we could start a new volcano, it could get big rather quickly. It wouldn't necessarily take centuries.
Of course, as others have said, a hole of diameter 10 or 20 cm is unlikely to create a volcano. Even with a Deepwater Horizon sort of blowout, the rising magma would cool too rapidly due to contact with crustal rock, blocking the hole.
I wonder if any geophysicists could make a reasonable estimate of how big a hole we'd need to drill to maintain a lava flow for more than a few minutes. A wild back-of-the-envelope calculation says that, unless there's already a ready magma chamber just below the surface, such a hole isn't anywhere near feasible with our current technology. And if we drill into such an existing magma chamber, we're just doing what Ma Nature would have probably done in a few weeks.
Heh. Samba is probably a good "poster child" for the sort of open-source software with so many contributors that nobody can reasonably be expected to coordinate them all to agree on offering a second license. Such discussions would naturally break down into the sort of flamefest that we see here all the time.
But, as someone else just commented, this is somewhat of an extreme case. Most open-source projects have a rather small set of developers, so it's not too hard for them to discuss such things and agree on what licenses they will allow. With only a handful of contributors, it's also possible to decide on how to divide up any income that might arise from such things.
The FOSS model doesn't scale well to large groups of software developers. The image of "herding cats" comes to mind ...
In all seriousness, that would be a pretty significant discovery if we found life living close to the mantle.
Actually, few biologists would be surprised. One of the more interesting things about previous deep-drilling projects is that they've turned up micro-organisms all the way down. Projecting the microbe count from these holes has produced the estimate that there is more biomass inside the planet than on its surface and in the oceans. Of course, this is based on a very small sample, so nobody takes it too seriously.
But still, the fact that we've found living things everywhere we've drilled means that the default assumption should be that we'll keep finding them. Presumably it'll get too hot for life at some depth, but so far we have no clue at all what this depth might be. The really significant thing would be if we found no decrease in the density of microbes at any depth.
And I don't think the critters down there qualify as "alien". From the few samples that've been studied, they are very similar to the things living inside rocks near the surface. We might have to go to other planets to find something truly alien. And maybe the things living inside the other planets will turn out to be relatives of the things living here.
For further information, ask google about "deep-rock microorganisms" (without the quotes). There's quite a bit of information on the subject online.
Not if you provide the source code of the software you used and make it available to all users, ...
Yeah; I guess I wasn't as clear as I might have been. I was basically addressing the people who want to "take the software private", making it a part of their proprietary binary-only package without paying. This is mostly what private companies want to do, and they're frustrated that it's illegal (in most countries). But in fact they can do this, simply by approaching the authors of GPL'd code and asking for a different license. Those authors will probably want to be paid for such a license, as with any software they'd license from a for-profit company. But the companies want the "FOSS" software without even the minimal restrictions of the GPL. So they're playing the "free means I can take it and claim it's mine" gambit, hoping they can get away with it.
It's the size of the regexp AND how you use it that counts.
Hey, I'm gonna have to steal that one. ;-)
Hmmm ... I wonder if that short list of words would follow under the "fair use" exception to copyright laws. /. does warn us that everything we post is copyrighted by the authors.
You're either for software freedom or your not. GPL restricts what you can, therefor is not free.
Well, maybe. But it does seem reasonable that, if you're gonna take a "free" product and resell it, you should share some of your profits with the product's original producers.
The GPL has taken this attitude toward "free" from the start. You can have it for free if you promise to pass it on to others on the same terms. But if you want to grab someone else's work and make a profit from it, you have to buy it (and get a license to resell it).
See, it's sort of a "tit for tat" thing. If you want it to be free, you have to keep it free; if you want to be paid for it, you have to pay for it.
(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, note that most GPL'd software is available from the authors with other licenses. The GPL doesn't preclude providing the software with other licenses. It basically just exists to guarantee that if you don't pay for the software, you can't charge others for it. But most of the authors are quite willing to give you a license to sell their software for profit, if you are willing to share those profits with the authors.)
Even as someone who can write, understand, and modify source code, and someone who often uses OSS software; I can count on one hand the number of times I've actually modified someone else's code before using the their software.
On the other hand, I'd need a lot more hands than two to count the number of times I've modified someone else's code after using their software. And they've usually thanked me for the patches I sent back.
And on the third (gripping;-) hand, I would take many, many hands to count the number of times I've used open-source software that has been similarly modified by other users who happened to be programmers. Some of my most useful software is full of contributions from others than the original author.
The common argument that "I'm not a programmer, so I can't read or modify the code" is just silly when used to say "... so nobody else should be allowed to read the code, either." This is the primary form of the arguments against FOSS, and it misses the point of the "many eyes" theory.
True, it may not be important that you (or any other specific person) be able to read and modify the code. But it is important that we be allowed such access. Without this, you have no idea what nasty surprises might be lurking in your software. And even if you learn about some of the nasties, you can't do much about them. The ongoing problems with "malware" should be all the evidence we need.
If shifting the clock an hour to get more daylight in the hour is such a great idea, why don't we do it year round.
Well, when this topic comes up every year about this time, I always wonder why we don't just shift the clocks by 6 or 8 hours, and thus get 6 or 8 hours more sunlight per day.
And we should do it in winter, when we could really use all those extra hours of sunshine. What's the point of doing it only in the part of the year that already has 12 or more hours of sunlight?
Oh yeah: ;-)
Others in Congress are criticizing the search giant over several flubs, including ... sidestepping net neutrality rules through a deal with Verizon.
What? Haven't we been reading in the past few days about Congress discarding the proposed net neutrality rules, the courts tossing out what the FCC had done on the subject, and so on? How can google be "sidestepping" rules that Congress themselves say don't exist?
Did I miss some news on a recent vote? If so, google news doesn't know about it, either. Asking news.google.com about "net neutrality" gets the story dated Mar 11 about "the House Subcommittee on Communications and Technology rejecting the FCC's open-internet regulations". The rest of the hits all seem to be about various government agencies either rejecting or doing nothing on the topic.
So what regulations are the Congress people accusing Google of sidestepping?
A TSA spokesperson stated that future radiation studies would be carried out by trained professionals.
And did that spokesperson say what the area(s) of expertise of these professionals would be?
We're already getting news reports of the damage along the US's West Coast. Nothing to compare with Japan, of course. But a number of harbors have lost piers and boats to the surge, which was 6-8 feet (2-3.5m). Ask google news about Crescent City or Santa Cruz, California.
This isn't especially unusual. Several other large quakes, such as last year's Chile and Samoa quakes, caused similar damage. It depends to a great extent on the exact shape of a harbor. Some harbors concentrate a tsunami's energe; others dissipate it. The former need reconstruction every few years, when such things happen somewhere in the Pacific.
Take that time you'd spend praying and work overtime. Donate the extra money to whoever needs it.
Today's xkcd speaks directly to that topic. The discussion has several variants of your suggestion.
But that's a lot more work than a minute or so of praying, which lets believers feel like they've "done something" when all they did was talk to their invisible deity who didn't do anything to prevent the latest disaster.
I imagine that a person from 2500 years ago, used to reading scrolls, if presented with a computer with a web page open, would find the scrollbar intuitively obvious. They might however have a great deal of trouble with a link at the bottom saying "Next Page".
Youtube has a funny video on this very topic.
Apple are doing this is because Microsoft are being such utter douchebags in the first place.
Apple is.
Microsoft is.
Jesus.
Heh. This is a well-known difference between British and American English. In British English, organizations usually take a plural verb form; in American English, the verb is usually singular.
The well-educated English speaker is familiar with both, of course, and doesn't get all peevy about it.
(Native speakers of other forms of English are invited to tell us how your dialect handles this.)
No, the difference is that a CLI is nearly impossible to use if you aren't familiar with it - the semantics and syntax are as, if not more, important than the concepts - whereas a GUI requires much less focussing on the "how", allowing much more focussing on the "what".
While there's a certain truth to this, GUIs are in general a lot less "intuitive" than people tend to believe. Without documentation and training, most users are unaware of most of their GUI's capabilities, and have great difficulty in learning much more than the basics.
An example I've read a number of warnings about in web-design documents is that a significant number (often estimated at around 50%) of "non-geek" users don't understand scroll bars. This is usually mentioned along with the advice to put the important part of your web pages close to the top, because the non-scrolling users won't be able to see anything below that.
Yes, I was dubious when I first read this. But over the years, I've run into several clear examples. I've been involved in building web sites for some very non-geeky organizations. The orgs' leaders generally want a lot of stuff on their main page, and at the top they usually want some text about the organization, its purposes, its main activities, etc. They also agree that it's good to have a list of upcoming public events on the main page, and inevitably that's positioned below the introductory text, so it's often not visible unless the user has a rather large window.
In each case, there were eventually meetings with discussions of how to improve the web site. One thing that would come up was suggestions from users (including members) that the home page should have a list of upcoming events. The leaders have always been dumfounded by this. "But, but, ... There is such a list on the home page." "What?? No, there isn't."
Eventually, I have to interrupt, and explain to the org's leaders that they're hearing from people who don't understand scrollbars, have never seen the events table because they don't scroll down to see it. The users are, of course, confused; they know that there's no such table because they've never seen it. We bring up the site on a handy machine (preferably a laptop or tablet with a small screen), and I show the users that it's there by scrolling down to it. Their response again is confusion, because they don't know what I did or how I did it. "Why's it hidden like that?"
So I teach them about scrollbars, and a few users have learned something useful. But this has a more important effect: It gets across to the leaders why their design was wrong, as I'd been telling them, and they'll have a better web site if they'll let me fix it.
One instance of this happened just last week. The org's web site now has that block of extensive history and purpose in a separate box at the bottom of the page, and the table of coming events is positioned near the top, just below the logo bar, where non-geek users will see it and be able to read at least the first few entries.
Examples like this abound in GUI design. Many of the common widgets are not at all intuitive to most people. Even if they accidentally poke at things and trigger the actions, it's often difficult to grasp what the effect was. You see things change, but the changes don't make sense, and have no obvious relation to the icon that you clicked on. Often the icons don't look like anything that most users can name. The result is that most of the GUI is unusable to most of the users.
I wish I knew good ways around this. But truly making a GUI obvious is very difficult, and takes a lot of time studying the users and learning about their misconceptions. I very rarely have the time to do this, and in many cases the people paying me have expressly forbid wasting time with dumb users.
And that's something that's very difficult to program around. ;-)
It's VMs all the way down.
Could be. One of my favorite cosmological theories is that our universe is a simulation. In the "real" universe, there's a big computer that has a data object for every elementary particle in our universe. The simulation software (probably massively parallel) "steps" through the simulation, by calculating the position and velocity of each particle after the next time quantum. The beings running the simulation can stop it, do a bit of editing, and restart, which explains the religious "miracles" that have been so often reported.
It's hard to imagine how we could test this hypothesis. If we were to do a successful test, the simulation could just be stopped, reloaded from backup, and edited so our test came out inconclusive.
Of course, if this is valid, then we should also consider that the simulation might itself be running in a simulated universe ...
... documentation for a GUI, if it exists at all, is often useless..,
How true. There popular explanation of the difference between a CLI and a GUI is that CLIs are so complicated that you need a manual to use it, whereas GUIs are so simple and intuitively obvious that no manual is needed.
Of course, the reality is that this attitude allows vendors to supply GUIs without any "unnecessary" manuals, but make the nested tree of windows and menus so deep and complex that nobody can ever remember where everything has been hidden, and there are no good tools to help you find something that you know is in there somewhere.
Meanwhile, the people who build the CLI know that nobody can ever remember it all, so they include tools for finding your way around. They also tend to make the defaults for the commands fit the most common cases, so you don't have to use the manuals all that often. And most tools have a -help option (though they can't quite agree on how to spell it), to provide quick reminders. And the CLI includes a current directory, search paths and aliasing, so you don't have to remember full paths to everything.
One of the ongoing frustrations with every GUI is constantly seeing a new window pop up, which is positioned back at the root directories, and I have to laboriously poke at things to get down to the directory that I'm working in. Then, when I do what the window was opened for, it closes, all that navigation is lost, and I have to do it all over again the next time I want to access a file in the same directory.
GUIs may have some aesthetic appeal (aka "pretty pictures"), but they remain the slowest, clumsiest way to use a computer that we've yet developed. But I trust that people are working on finding ways to make it even clumsier and slower. This seems to be happening with the "cloud" approach, for example.
It's not clear that this is anything new. A number of astronomers have suggested that we should treat the Earth/Luna and Pluto/Charon pairs as "double planets" sharing an orbit. And there's a pair of Saturn's moons that share an orbit. Of course, whether these are counterexamples depends on the picky, legalistic details of how you define the term "planet", which we've discussed to death here on /. already. Fun as such pseudo-arguments may be, the fact is that they're not terribly significant.
Thus, for the Pluto/Charon pair, reclassifying Pluto as a "dwarf planet" make it especially an edge case, since it still includes the term "planet" in its classification. But they're both large, spherical bodies in a single orbit around the sun, while also orbiting each other.
The Earth/Luna pair is a bit of a mathematical curiosity. One of the arguments supporting calling our moon a "planet" orbiting the sun is that its orbit is everywhere convex with respect to the sun. You'd expect a "moon" to have a much more wiggly orbit, parts of which are curved away from the sun, and this is true of the other objects in the solar system that we call moons. OTOH, the barycenter of the Earth/Luna pair is (slightly) inside the Earth, which can be used with some definitions to say that it's really a satellite of the Earth.
And, of course, Saturn's two moons in a single orbit can be disqualified because they're obviously not "planets". They're not even big enough to be spheroidal, which is required by most definitions of a planet.
But the fact remains that our solar system contains at least three example of paired bodies sharing an orbit about their primary, and periodically exchanging the lead position. The mechanics of such orbits have been long understood, and astrophysicists can tell you when such orbits are stable. So while this may be "news" in the sense that it's about such orbits around another star, it's hardly news in the astrophysics sense.
What'll be interesting news is the discovery of three astronomical bodies in a "Scottish reel" orbit, which was proved possible several years ago, but to my knowledge hasn't actually been observed yet. Possible places to find them are in the asteroid belt, in Jupiter's "Trojan" asteroid clumps, and in the Kuiper Belt.
Whatever you might say about the Republicans, you can't say they're deceitful. They're completely blatant and open about their motives and methods. The Democrats are worse, because they try to convince you that they're for "hope and change", that they're completely the opposite of the "evil Republicans", but when they're in power, they do the exact same thing. The Democrats are deceitful liars, and con artists.
One of the best comments I've seen on this was in a Doonesbury cartoon a few years back. There were several panels of complaints about how hard it is to choose between the Republican and Democratic candidates, because they're both equally dishonest and corrupt. The last panel's punch line was "Yeah, but when the Democrats do it, they know it's wrong."
I've found that take on the subject useful in all sorts of "discussions" since then.
Of course, there's the question of how many people would prefer a leader with no morals or ethics to one who has them but has the strength of character (;-) to ignore them.
I'm surprised that the first fine is due to the portability aspect of the law, not the security portions of the law.
I'm not. Anyone familiar with medical records and computer security issues considers the security portions of HIPAA a joke.
The primary reason is that medical records are pretty much universally kept on MS Windows systems. There are several reasons why this makes data security a joke. The main one has been discussed here at /. several times: Windows has an automatic update feature, which you can turn off for "application" level software. However, it can't be turned off for "system" level software. MS has admitted that this has been true since XP. Their excuse is that kernel security issues are taken seriously, and updates are mandatory.
However, if you think about this for a few seconds, it obviously means that any time your Windows system is connected to the Internet, MS can silently install any new software they like. If your machine isn't reporting the contents of selected files to a .microsoft.com site now, it could be by the time you read this, and unless you're a real Windows security guru, you'd never suspect.
So if you're running Windows, you must assume that anyone who has "socially engineered" a connection at MS has access to all of your data.
And, less you think this is all spurious, you might look around in the records of the internet back in the 1990s when MS was first supplying systems with internet access. There are multiple reports of people getting curious about why their modem's lights were flickering when the machine was idle. Attaching a line monitor showed that the traffic was a list of the contents of the disk, being sent to a .microsoft.com address. The server on the other end could obviously also ask for the contents of files. This was ignored by the media and most managers, but it was noticed by the geeks among us with even minimal understanding of network security. Similar behavior has been reported for most releases of Windows.
This all has obvious application to HIPAA rules. My wife has worked with medical data for several decades now, at several employers. Every one of them worked exclusively on Windows systems. She has a Windows partition on her Mac "for work", and uses it a lot. She also has a work-supplied take-home Windows laptop. It's true that they use VPN to connect to the office computer systems. But this does nothing for the above issues. Since her Windows partition and laptop are connected to our home network, VPN just supplies an internet connection to her office machines, so their "silent upgrade" feature can work any time she's connected. This shoots down any claims that her office is protected from malicious sites (such as microsoft's ;-) by VPN. We've verified that both her Windows systems can easily access .microsoft.com web sites while connected via VPN, showing that there is a data path for MS's silent update software to work.
This is hardly a secret. We've discussed it here on /., and it's been discussed in lots of other forums. Microsoft has a clear and obvious silent path to any medical data stored on their systems, any time they have an internet connection, which is almost all medical systems in the US. Anyone who can bribe the right people at MS also has such access.
So the fact that HIPAA rules don't forbid the use of MS Windows makes those rules a joke. I'd bet that many medical records people understand all this. It should be no surprise that they treat HIPAA data security as a joke.
It's interesting to consider non-MS systems in this light. Fully open-source systems are probably immune to such problems, since they'd be exposed fairly quickly. Apple systems are about half open-source, but most of the kernel and the UI have hidden source. Apple systems haven't been documented to have any behavior like those described abov
Oh, and if our products have a similar feature, but you use different words to describe it than I do, yours is also disqualified.
... the size of the classified section of the local paper and the amount of crime in an area is roughly proportional to the population of the area.
Sounds like they learned something from the recent story about the connection between cell-phone towers and the local birth rate. That one was actually a spoof of such "studies", and some of the media reported it as a real cause-and-effect story, too.
It's an old propaganda technique. As long as the general public and the media are abysmally ignorant of basic statistics, it'll continue to work.
A weeks worth of eye pressure data sampled every 15 minutes. If you had taken the time to at least skim TFA instead of writing a stupid, pointless post you might have learned something.
Well, I read it, and found that, but I didn't see any clue that would tell me how to convert that to bits or bytes. A "week" of data is about as useful as the common "Library of Congress" as a measure of information.
So please explain further why we're being so stupid when we fail to understand such units of measurement.
What will most likely happen when you plant your shoes is that you'll get a crop of plants native to Asia, which will quickly become agricultural pests in your part of the world.
A bit like China that refuses any product that contains a map indicating Taiwan as a country.
But strictly speaking, they're right. Taiwan is the name of an island, not of a country. The country's name is Republic of China. They're not even coterminous, because the RoC includes a number of islands that aren't part of the island of Taiwan.
Yes, people often say "Taiwan" with talking about the RoC, but that's just sloppy speech.
It's no secret that France has long wanted the Meridian to pass through Paris, where other items that define weights and measure reside, so they can all be in one (*ahem* French *ahem*) place. Once we don't use Greenwich Mean Time the next step will be for France to re-name Paris as "Greenwich", ...
Heh. Apparently the French (and probably a lot of Brits, too) haven't heard that GMT hasn't been used for a quarter century now. The Greenwich Observatory got out of the time standard business back in 1986 (google it), when the official time standard was redefined in a way that wasn't dependent on any place or artifact, and renamed "UTC". Since then, "GMT" has been nothing more than a mispelling of "UTC", usually by someone who doesn't understand the difference.
Actually, if you visit the Greenwich Observatory, you'll find that they do have a nice museum exhibit of the history of their time standard, as well as a number of other good exhibits. It's well worth spending a day of your vacation there. Or visit their nice web site (www.nmm.ac.uk).