Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
Actually, the usage being described (separate "serious" and "game" account names) is an old tradition. With actors, they're called "stage names"; with writers they're called "pen names", etc. It's also common in English-speaking and some other societies for married women with professional careers to use their "maiden name" professionally and their married name socially.
These are all recognized by law in most countries as legitimate cases of multiple public identities. The reason is the same: People everywhere tend to pigeonhole you by your name. So if you want to have several independent roles, you need several names.
This is especially common for writers and actors, for well-known reasons. If you make a name for yourself as a comedian or comedy writer, your serious efforts won't be taken seriously. The only solution is to do them under a different name. This is why, for instance, the mathematician Charles Dodgson published his childrens' stories under the name Lewis Carroll. If he'd published them as written by Charles Dodgson, nobody would have taken his mathematical or other writing seriously.
An example that a lot of people here may appreciate: Many of the well-known science-fiction authors are pen names. The reason is that if you become a successful sci-fi writer, publishers will refuse to publish anything else you write. Once your name is associated with sci-fi, it discredits everything else you write. But this isn't just a sci-fi problem; it applies to nearly every writer who wants to publish in two or more different categories.
For actors, type-casting is a well-known phenomenon. They also have the problem of being celebrities, meaning constant harassment by fans, paparazzi, etc. Using stage names is a very sensible solution to these problems.
It shouldn't be surprising that people would learn the same lesson online, and create multiple identities for different topics that they're interested in. The same pigeonholing has developed very strongly online, and all the old reasons for multiple identities applies here. It's encouraged by the way that so many web sites have rules for acceptable names. I prefer the id "jc", but that was already taken here, so I added two digits that would be meaningful to most/. readers. Other forums forbid 2-char names entirely, so I'm forced to add characters for them. This is a somewhat silly way to get multiple online identities, but web-site culture doesn't allow me to have a single online identity. So I shrug, and keep a list of them, indexed by domain name.
I looked at its (rather small) maps for a few areas, but couldn't figure out how it was telling me about broadband coverage. The maps look normal, with big white and green zones that don't seem to correlate with anything I know about the territory. There are a few brown areas scattered around the map. Nowhere can I find anything saying what the colors might mean.
At the left, there are some bar graphs labelled with various kinds of Net access, but no obvious way to relate them to the maps. Poking around didn't turn up any explanations anywhere.
So how does one decode these purported broadband maps? Anyone know where TFM is hidden?
It's not that vim is inherently bad, it's just that it's *unnecessary*. It includes tons of features that an old-school admin has no use for. Sure, most of us use it anyway because modern Linux systems usually don't include our good friend vi (it's usually just a symlink to vim), but we rarely use the features that separate vim from vi.
Maybe I'm the odd one here, but on this Mac I'm using now, and also on the linux box on the desktop behind it, I have a number of terminal windows open in which I'm explicitly runnng vim and using those features.
The most important one is UTF-8 support, so I can sensibly edit text in a language other than English without it going all mojibake on me when I email it to someone or even try to print it. Thus, there's a window poking out behind this firefox window that's showing a mixture of English and Chinese text, displayed and edited easily by vim.
But I suppose a lot of those "old-school" admins would have the usual American/British organizational contempt for all languages other than English (plus maybe Fortran and Cobol;-). But some of us are part of the new world of i18n that's been slowly creeping up on everyone. People who speak only English are now a distinct minority on the Internet. For the rest of us, tools like vim are quite useful.
Now if I could only get an xterm that handles Arabic and Hebrew sensibly...
LOL... this is all stupid. Comparing and contrasting the distinctions between two idioti...errr... religions viewpoints is so utterly useless.
Ah, but history shows that it has a very important use: Inflaming hatred between the various religious groups (and of the non-religious). This is one of the more important tools in the standard "divide and rule" approach of most ruling classes. It doesn't take more than a few minutes of listening to Beck, Limbaugh, et al to understand that this is their intent.
This isn't criticizing your comment that "this is all stupid". Yes it is; it's based directly on the stupidity of most of the followers of religions. But no matter how stupid it all is, it's important. Those people can kill you. They've done it in the past, and somewhere in the world, they're doing it right now.
(Well, ok; they haven't killed you yet. But you know what I mean. Calling them stupid won't save you when they decide you're the enemy and they have the political power to take you out.;-)
Clouds actually do NOT contribute [to global warming]. Having a high albedo, they reflect a lot of incoming sunlight back into space.
Actually, this is a question that until recently was "in dispute" among actual climate experts. The problem with a simple answer is that the actual situation is complicated.
Some recent studies have been published showing that the actual anwer to "What effects do clouds have on the Earth's surface temperature?" is "It depends on the type of cloud. A lot of low, dense clouds turn out to be a net "greenhouse" phenomenon, intercepting IR and reflecting it back to the surface. Other clouds, especially high ice-crystal clouds, have a net cooling effect by reflecting incoming sunlight. And still other clouds have a mixed effect, with the upper parts reflecting sunlight and the lower parts trapping heat from below and reradiating it back down.
So far, if you check with the summary articles, the consensus seems to be that clouds have an overall effect that's close to neutral, but this varies with time, and doesn't necessarily apply to specific parts of the world. What this means for the future is unclear.
This is a case where the real world can't be reduced to a bumper-sticker slogan. And it's also a case where the best summary is "Further research is needed."
I'm gonna take a guess at the cause: somebody decided to use a Microsoft product to control a critical system on which people's lives depend.
As so often happens with such news reports, you have to take a guess. Out of curiosity, I actually read TFA (;-), and specifically looked for information about what sort of computer system and software they're using. And as usual, there was no such information. All they tell us is that "computers" had a problem.
When we investigate such reports, it seems that the underlying system is always from Microsoft. But news people almost never mention this in their reports. It does make one wonder how much Microsoft paid them to not point fingers. After all, with most stories about major failures in commercial products (e.g., the recent reports on Toyota's problems with uncontrolled acceleration), the very first sentence in a news report usually mentions the brand name. The only common exception is with computers, which are usually just reported as "computers" with no brand names.
Maybe we need to start harassing the news folks about this. We should insist that they tell us the brand names on the equipment, and the brand names of the installed software. This may be the only way we have to get the vendor to actually fix their problems in a meaningful fashion.
(And in this case, "meaningful" especially includes the requirement that the actual users understand how to prevent the problems. Computer software vendors have a long record of selling systems that are so insanely complex that not even the "experts" can figure out how to use them correctly in all situations. Saying "user error" when the users involved don't understand how to properly run the products should not be acceptable. Especially when people's lives may be in danger.)
What I'd wonder is, when you exclude names that contain an obscenity or otherwise objectionable word in any of the world's several thousand languages, how many possible names are left?
It may be that, after a name is submitted to all the national internet bureaus for approval, we'll find that there are only a couple dozen usable names.
(And we could probably eliminate those fairly quickly by a few judicious contributions to urbandictionary.com.;-)
image that a vast oversampling would be required to average out the noise inherent to any one vehicle. I suspect that it will be useless simply because adoption will be too low to provide the necessary data smoothing.
My wife and I use google maps with traffic reports turned on, and we've found that it's generally fairly reliable. It does tend to be up to half an hour out of date around here (Boston), but it's definitely useful enough to be worth the battery power. I've avoided a lot of major traffic problems by checking with it.
Google's traffic scheme is pretty well documented. Basically, your phone's GPS position and velocity are sent to the mother ship every so often, where the server software does the obvious sort of averaging. It presumably discards numbers outside a range; you'd want it to not include things like a car stopped at the side of the road or in a gas station, or a GPS position that's suddenly wildly different than the previous position.
It can be fun to point out to users of google maps that google clearly has the ability to track your phone's position any time google maps is running. What's even more fun is, when they open their phone and turn google maps off, you ask them if they know that it has stopped running, or has just stopped showing its window. Few people know how to ask their phone which apps are actually running.
(I have a G1 phone, with a Terminal app installed, and there's a "top" command that works. Somehow, this mystifies most iPhone users that I've shown it to.;-)
Just of the top of my head the things that will mask your signal: Unknown speed,
The iPhone has GPS, accelerometer and a compass... If you can't figure out when the car is going more than 30 km/h and when it stops, perhaps you should leave programming to someone with a brain?
By that standard, it appears that none of the makers of GPS gadgets have been willing or able to hire any programmers with brains.;-)
My wife and I have at least 5 GPS-enabled gadgets: Her iPhone, my G1 phone, two cars with GPS (a Garmin and the crappy one sold by Honda), plus an older Garmin. All of them show strong signs of being programmed by people without brains.
Thus, a few months ago, while my wife was driving her car and I was a passenger, I passed the time by comparing the car's (Garmin) GPS with google maps on both phones. There were several times when one phone or the other showed us wandering off the highway and driving a mile or so into the countryside. At one point, the phones showed us on opposite sides of the highway, and the iPhone showed us driving across a large lake. The car's GPS kept us on a road, but sometimes it was a local street a block away.
The fun part was when the iPhone showed us suddenly jumping about 100 miles to the southeast, a few miles east of Cape Cod, driving along in the ocean parallel to the shore. This wasn't a fluke; it showed us there for nearly 10 minutes. Then it showed us jumping back to our actual location (on a highway west of Boston).
The cars' GPS gadgets have "trip record" features which we usually leave running. I occasionally check its information, and usually it shows our top speed at over 200 mph, sometimes over 300 mph. We usually do drive in the fastest lane, but I don't think either car has ever been anywhere near 200 mph.
On my G1 phone, when I start up google maps at home, it regularly shows my position about 1/2 mile to the south-southwest, in the middle of a patch of woods next to a reservoir. For a while, sometime a minute or more, it'll show its position wandering in an irregular path across the neighborhood, going through yards and houses, and finally reaching our house. It will sometimes show us back in those woods at random other times.
This seems to be a standard sort of story from people who watch what their GPS toys are saying. It appears that the makers don't know how to fix such things. So where can they hire programmers who have the brains to Get It Right? It does seem a bit odd that an established industry like this should continue to fail so humorously, and nobody can figure out how to program them correctly.
Either that, or the GPS system just can't achieve the level of accuracy and reliability that you assume anyone with a brain could easily produce.
(And yes, I've seen some of the math that goes into GPS programming. I have a couple of math degrees, and I'm impressed that they've made pocket-sized GPS computers that work as well as they do.;-)
The Moto Xoom is overpriced, which will self limit it's sales.
Oh, I dunno; it might sell pretty well to the folks who keep telling us "You get what you pay for".;-)
You'd think that by the time people were old enough to learn to use slashdot (8 or 9?), they'd have learned that very often you get a lot less than what you pay for.
OTOH, lots of folks just buy whatever product has the most and/or the flashiest ads. HP still has a pretty big marketing budget.
One reason this may not be politically possible (even if technically possible, which is questionable), is that the Internet has already reached the state of being an integral part of the American (and European) infrastructure. Disabling large parts of it would be as serious to the economy as the (legally allowed) shutdown of the Interstate Highway System.
There's an interesting parallel with the GPS system. When built, it had a "kill switch" of sorts: The US military could order the system to add a systematic error to the data in its packets. US military GPS equipment has software that can know what the error is, and subtract it out. The idea was that during military actions, the GPS system could be made useless to anyone not in posession of US military-grade GPS equipment.
Several things happened that persuaded them to give up on this. One was that in the first Gulf War, the US military couldn't get delivery of needed GPS equipment, and had to start buying them on the open market. But the bigger development was that during the 1990s, the airline industry (and much international shipping) shifted to GPS as their primary navigation system. It was an "open secret" that airlines and shipping companies were quickly losing the ability to use older navigational techniques. This was mostly for financial reasons. GPS was so much cheaper than earlier methods that companies everywhere cut funding for support of other navigation systems.
So the US DoD was faced with the fact that if they disabled GPS, the result could well be airplanes and large ships crashing into things. They had to face the fact that they would be blamed if this happened, and announced that the GPS error-induction scheme was to be abandoned.
(Whether they've actually done this is a good question. But it's clear what the political repercussions would be if they were to suddenly disable the GPS system intentionally. And it was made moot when the airlines showed how easy it was to defeat the GPS error, by installing GPS "satellite" hardware at fixed positions on the ground. Look that one up; it's a pretty funny story.;-)
Getting back to the Interstate Highways, they are now occasionally closed during local emergencies, such as major storms. And there's no question that military vehicles have precedence over other traffic, but this is also true on local roads. The idea of officially excluding all civilian traffic has been abandoned, simply because those highways are too important to the economic system, and shutting them down would be a economic and political disaster.
It's easy to argue that we are rapidly reaching the same situation with the Internet. Disabling it nationwide would effectively disable all the large corporations that are the major political campaign contributors. It would be a major economic and political disaster, which the corporate world wouldn't tolerate. So it ain't gonna happen.
Also, the "emergency" argument doesn't work for the Internet. It has become clear that, during any major emergency, what's needed is a rapid influx of portable Internet (and other comms) capacity. During disasters, communication is extremely important for disaster workers. So again, it isn't going to be shut down during any "national disaster". The disaster-relief folks are working on exactly the opposite, rapid deployment of mobile comm equipment, mostly providing wireless Internet capability, to disaster areas.
Of course, those of us working in Internet-related occupations should be encouraging this, by making our favorite music and porn distribution system even more indispensable to the economy as a whole.;-)
, that's probably the distinction that 61% of respondents are making. They're all willfully misunderstanding the question...
Maybe not. This could be a good example of a common "problem" with polling (which can also be used to bias the results): The phrasing of the question could have been ambiguous and different people read it differently.
The simple-looking English question "How often do you swear at your computer?" has two very different valid parsings. The one that the pollsters probably intended has "swear at" as a compound verb, and "your computer" as the direct object. The other parsing is perhaps best illustrated by rephrasing the question as "How often do you swear when you're at your computer?"
This second parsing doesn't imply that you're cussing out the computer itself; it merely means that you're using your computer and mutter some swear words. But the target of the swearing may not be the computer (i.e., the physical object) itself. This is a reasonable interpretation if you view the computer as an innocent piece of metal, plastic and silicon, and you understand that the real target of your swearing is the people who inflicted the software on you.
Ambiguous questions like this are the bane of honest pollsters. In this case, it means there are really three kinds of answers: "No, I never swear in the vicinity of my computer", "Yes, I swear at my stupid computer who is causing me so much grief", and "Yes, I swear when I'm at my computer, at the people who programmed it to cause me so much grief".
The problem is that a simple yes/no answer can't distinguish which of the parsings of the question each "Yes" is answering, so we can't distinguish the two kinds of "Yes" answers, and we can't tell how many of the people in the third group answer "No" because they gave the question the first parsing.
And, of course, there's the problem of the dishonest pollster, who intentionally uses an ambiguous question, then claims that the answers were all in response to one specific parsing of the question. This is done in political polls all the time. It's also a favorite tactic of commercial marketers. This may have been done here, but we can't tell unless we can determine the exact question that was asked.
... there used to be a country in South East Asia called Burma, it was renamed to Myanmar about 20 years ago.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. In the major language in Burma/Myanmar, the name didn't change at all. What changed was the "official" transliteration to the Roman alphabet.
Those two spellings may not look similar to you, and they certainly produce different sounds from the mouths of English-speaking readers. But the problem is the usual one: The phonemes of the Burmese (;-) language don't match English phonemes very well. This means that no transliteration scheme will produce a Roman spelling that gets the right pronunciation from English speakers (or European-language speakers in general). But the previous scheme produced especially atrocious mispronunciations from English speakers, so bad that Burmese speakers couldn't figure out what those tourists were trying to say.
So they came up with a new transliteration scheme which still produces heavily-accented sounds from tourists, but those sounds are a lot more comprehensible to the natives in Myanmar.
They didn't change the name of the country or anything in it. They're just trying to get you to pronounce their local place names in a way that they can recognize, and point you in the right direction.
(There's no shortage of information on this on the internet.;-)
I have an alternate theory: maybe they're just a bunch of liars, answering with "what they think would sound better" instead of answering with the truth...
And I have a third theory: A lot of us curse at things our computer does, but the target of our cursing is the gang of malevolent idiots who built the software.
We're quite aware that the computer is just a dumb machine, and is no more responsible or its behavior than, say, a mosquito is when it bites you. But in the case of the computer, we understand why the computer did whatever stupid thing it did. It was programmed that way by people who wanted it to behave that way.
So we may curse a lot in the vicinity of a computer, but the computer isn't our target. The target is the "team" of humans who made it behave that way.
Why do you think it is that ridiculous that someone might think the US would send an enemy to Guantanamo?
Even more to the point, the US has a reputation for sending people who aren't enemies to Guantanamo, and then not releasing them because they've become enemies.
It's also worth pointing out that Julian Assange is widely considered (by Americans who are familiar with his story) a friend of the US. He's just not a friend of some of the US's political leaders.
Everyone knows there is only bias on one side.
The side you do not like.
This is why, in the sciences, there is such a strong emphasis on not accepting results (especially unusual results) until they have been replicated by different observers (with different funding.-). It's well understood that discovering your own biases and blind spots can be extremely difficult, so researchers expect that their discoveries will be double- and triple-checked by others with different biases and blind spots.
The publishing industry has a different sort of example: It's well understood that hardly anyone can "edit" their own work. Simple typos can be very difficult to spot, when you "know" what you wrote. So you hand your text over to someone else to check. Especially difficult to recognize can be text that's ambiguous and has a reading that's radically different than what you were thinking. Spotting such things really takes someone else with a different mind.
At the silliest level, this mental problem leads to the game of finding headlines that have mutliple readings. One of my favorites was from the early 1990s, when the US first got involved in the Iraq war, and one newspaper had a headline that read "American Ships Head to Gulf". There are long lists of such things on a number of web sites. A few were probably intentional, but most examples like this illustrate the difficulty of seeing what you wrote might say to someone with a slightly different mindset. (That sentence is rather complex, and probably has a different reading than I intended, but I can't see it.;-)
In any case, the need of multiple viewpoints with different attitudes and biases is an old, well-recognized problem. And it's even good for a bit of humor at times.
Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it....
This is nothing new. Throughout history, the news "industry" has been run by people with an interest in the news and a strong motive to persuade their readers rather than informing them. Any well-informed person has always tried to hunt down different versions of news stories, with different biases. The pretense that the internet has introduced a new problem here is just that, a pretense. It's just more blatantly obvious, because it's so much easier now to find reports with different biases. It can still be hard, but not nearly as hard as it was in the past.
We do have one very useful example of a news source that works well as a tool to check out a story from sources with different biases: Google News. Right now, if you go to their Business page, it has the AOL/HuffPost story right at the top. And after the first few links, it has a link with the text "all 1,614 news articles >>". This is their list of all known reports of the topic, ordered by google's "secret" ranking algorithm (which for news mostly means by time stamp;-).
Complaining about the biases of news sources goes back as far as we have records of news sources. We haven't ever found a way to produce "unbiased" reporting, and we never will. The best we can do is make all the biases visible, which includes making the source information available. We're not there yet. But so far, the internet has been turning into a better tool for the task than we've had in the past.
We just need to persuade people to stop bitching about biased news sources, and read some of the alternative news sources that have become so easily available.
(What other sites do people here know of that make it easy to find multiple versions of news stories with different biases?)
Thanks for the number. I looked for it, but didn't find it.
Of course, 1400 kn/s is only about.000005 c, so for all practical purposes, the galaxy and its supernova are in our frame of reference. There's probably a much larger error bar on our estimate of the distance, which is probably only good to 2 or 3 decimal places.
But media articles (even the scientific media) usually doesn't give us the error-bar information.;-)
There is something known as the AI Effect which tends to prevent us from recognizing applications of artificial intelligence
Actually, this phenomenon long predates computers. A common textbook example: 200 years ago, it was obvious to anyone that the ability to do simple arithmetic (or even to count) was proof of intelligence. Then people started building mechanical calculators, and very quickly people reclassified arithmetic as not intelligent at all. It became merely a mechanical operation, since it was doable by machines.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when the term AI (Artificial Intelligence) was invented, and you'll find that what the AI researchers were proudly presenting as successes were example of computers doing sophisticated things like list processing and symbol-table manipulation. Computers were things that did "computations", which meant arithmetic, and this new software was manipulating complex data structures that represented "concepts", not numbers. So this was computer intelligence, right?
Well, no. As before, this merely proved that such operations didn't require an intelligent mind; it was doable by a mechanical (ok; electronic) device. Nowadays, lists and symbol tables are a routine part of most computers' builtin software libraries, and are even primitive operations in some programming languages (e.g., perl and python).
A fun experience I've had a few times is people looking at code I've developed, and found that the Makefiles include calls on perl programs that run several man(1) commands, parse the output, extract information, and use it to generate part of the C code. I've seen people really confused by this. "Your code reads the English-language manual, understands it, and writes part of the code???" You can see them thinking "Artificial Intelligence", and trying to come to terms with it. But to any experienced perl (or python) programmer, such things are now a routine part of Software Engineering. So they're not AI at all; they've graduated to "something that a mere mechanical device can do".
The general conclusion is that we will never have "artificial intelligence". Whenever some human mental capability is duplicated in a computer, that capability will no longer be considered a sign of intelligence, because a mere machine can do it. It will be part of Engineering instead.
The only question is whether, after enough time, there will be any human capability left to say that humans are intelligent. It may be that, eventually, the only remaining "purely human" capability will be producing new humans.
Furthermore, the thought that "the event really occurred X years ago" seems to assume a universal standard of time, independent of the location and velocity of the observer, by which far apart events can be ordered. But time is not like that is it?
Well, yes and no. That can be true for events viewed by observers moving at a sufficiently high speed relative to each other. But this remote galaxy is probably only moving relative to us at a few hundred km/sec, which is a sufficiently slow speed that (for our purposes here) they can be considered in the same reference frame. In such cases, comparing time is simple (though perhaps not doable to nanosecond accuracy).
An example on a smaller time scale: Light moves about 299 792 458 km in a second, and the Earth's diameter is about 12,742 km. So the Earth is approximately 43 light-milliseconds in diameter. Yet it's possible (if not trivial) to synchronize clocks on the Earth's surface to nanosecond precision, and there are communication protocols that keep them synchronized. The GPS system wouldn't work if this weren't possible, and those satellites are moving relative to us even faster than the Earth's surface or this supernova.
One interesting use of this where such precision is critical is that astronomers sometimes combine the data from telescopes scattered around the world to make a large telescope with an effective aperture as wide as the Earth. Doing this requires measuring the arrival time of light waves with precision much better than 43 microseconds. The better precision, the less fuzzy the resulting images are.
This is possible because all those telescopes have very small velocities relative to each other. The max relative speed of two objects on the Earth's surface is twice the rotation speed of a spot on the equator. That's such a small fraction of the speed of light that it's negligible, and they can be treated as being in the same frame to many more than 10 decimal places.
If a remote astronomical object were moving at.99c relative to us, calculating relative times from both viewpoints would be complex and a bit strange to most people. But at relative speeds of.000001c or less, as with NGC 2655 and our galaxy, comparing times to within a few years is simple and straightforward (as astronomers measure such things;-).
If only I would of found out about the supernova back in January! Never seen one before and it is possible that there won't be another within my lifetime.
Don't worry. If you accept supernovas like this one, that's in a different galaxy than ours, there are plenty of them somewhere in the universe every year. It's only if you want one in our galaxy that you have to wait, since the frequency is on the order of one per century.
There was one in the Large Magellanic Cloud back in 1987, easily visible to the naked eye (if you were in the southern hemisphere).
Actually, it's getting to be time we had one in our galaxy. But unfortunately, they don't seem to be scheduled anywhere that we can easily read. The schedule has probably been on file at our local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of our years, but we can't be bothered to make the short trip to check it out. So we'll just have to keep looking up at the night sky until something new appears there.
I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.
The main explanation is that they're second-sourcing google's results without giving them due credit.
The evidence for this is that there are a number of sites that openly use google's search, and google doesn't object. There's always lmgtfy.com, of course, which credits google in their name. There's dogpile.com, which searches a list of sites that includes google and has its own scheme for ordering the results.
But bing does this without acknowledging google. When google point out what bing is doing, the reply is to deny it. Microsoft is pretending that the results are bing's, and weren't gotten from another search site.
In scholarly, scientific and mathematical fields, failing to credit your sources is one of the cardinal sins. But if you properly credit your sources, they smile and thank you for the reference. This is basically a case of the same thing in the commercial world.
Some years back, there was a related fuss over Sun's use of Open Source software. The problem wasn't that Sun was including this software in their distributions. Everyone approved of that. Sun's sin was that they stripped out the attributions in the code, claiming in effect that it was all Sun's creation. They got into a lot of trouble with the Open Source crowd until Sun apologized and corrected the problem. If you're not going to pay someone for using their stuff, you should at least acknowledge their work.
Maybe, instead of trying to pretend that they've made a big mistake, Microsoft should just 'fess up, apologize, and add an explanation similar to dogpile's saying whose data they're including. I just did a dogpile search for a question on a mailing list that I read, and the results all include a small-print statement like "Found on: Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search" or "Found exclusively on: Google". If bing were to do this, google would probably withdraw their lawsuit.
Alternatively, bing users might just start using dogpile, which is a lot more honest about where they get their information.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly, it is. But who doesn't have a fake facebook account ?
Actually, the usage being described (separate "serious" and "game" account names) is an old tradition. With actors, they're called "stage names"; with writers they're called "pen names", etc. It's also common in English-speaking and some other societies for married women with professional careers to use their "maiden name" professionally and their married name socially.
These are all recognized by law in most countries as legitimate cases of multiple public identities. The reason is the same: People everywhere tend to pigeonhole you by your name. So if you want to have several independent roles, you need several names.
This is especially common for writers and actors, for well-known reasons. If you make a name for yourself as a comedian or comedy writer, your serious efforts won't be taken seriously. The only solution is to do them under a different name. This is why, for instance, the mathematician Charles Dodgson published his childrens' stories under the name Lewis Carroll. If he'd published them as written by Charles Dodgson, nobody would have taken his mathematical or other writing seriously.
An example that a lot of people here may appreciate: Many of the well-known science-fiction authors are pen names. The reason is that if you become a successful sci-fi writer, publishers will refuse to publish anything else you write. Once your name is associated with sci-fi, it discredits everything else you write. But this isn't just a sci-fi problem; it applies to nearly every writer who wants to publish in two or more different categories.
For actors, type-casting is a well-known phenomenon. They also have the problem of being celebrities, meaning constant harassment by fans, paparazzi, etc. Using stage names is a very sensible solution to these problems.
It shouldn't be surprising that people would learn the same lesson online, and create multiple identities for different topics that they're interested in. The same pigeonholing has developed very strongly online, and all the old reasons for multiple identities applies here. It's encouraged by the way that so many web sites have rules for acceptable names. I prefer the id "jc", but that was already taken here, so I added two digits that would be meaningful to most /. readers. Other forums forbid 2-char names entirely, so I'm forced to add characters for them. This is a somewhat silly way to get multiple online identities, but web-site culture doesn't allow me to have a single online identity. So I shrug, and keep a list of them, indexed by domain name.
I looked at its (rather small) maps for a few areas, but couldn't figure out how it was telling me about broadband coverage. The maps look normal, with big white and green zones that don't seem to correlate with anything I know about the territory. There are a few brown areas scattered around the map. Nowhere can I find anything saying what the colors might mean.
At the left, there are some bar graphs labelled with various kinds of Net access, but no obvious way to relate them to the maps. Poking around didn't turn up any explanations anywhere.
So how does one decode these purported broadband maps? Anyone know where TFM is hidden?
It's not that vim is inherently bad, it's just that it's *unnecessary*. It includes tons of features that an old-school admin has no use for. Sure, most of us use it anyway because modern Linux systems usually don't include our good friend vi (it's usually just a symlink to vim), but we rarely use the features that separate vim from vi.
Maybe I'm the odd one here, but on this Mac I'm using now, and also on the linux box on the desktop behind it, I have a number of terminal windows open in which I'm explicitly runnng vim and using those features.
The most important one is UTF-8 support, so I can sensibly edit text in a language other than English without it going all mojibake on me when I email it to someone or even try to print it. Thus, there's a window poking out behind this firefox window that's showing a mixture of English and Chinese text, displayed and edited easily by vim.
But I suppose a lot of those "old-school" admins would have the usual American/British organizational contempt for all languages other than English (plus maybe Fortran and Cobol ;-). But some of us are part of the new world of i18n that's been slowly creeping up on everyone. People who speak only English are now a distinct minority on the Internet. For the rest of us, tools like vim are quite useful.
Now if I could only get an xterm that handles Arabic and Hebrew sensibly ...
LOL... this is all stupid. Comparing and contrasting the distinctions between two idioti...errr... religions viewpoints is so utterly useless.
Ah, but history shows that it has a very important use: Inflaming hatred between the various religious groups (and of the non-religious). This is one of the more important tools in the standard "divide and rule" approach of most ruling classes. It doesn't take more than a few minutes of listening to Beck, Limbaugh, et al to understand that this is their intent.
This isn't criticizing your comment that "this is all stupid". Yes it is; it's based directly on the stupidity of most of the followers of religions. But no matter how stupid it all is, it's important. Those people can kill you. They've done it in the past, and somewhere in the world, they're doing it right now.
(Well, ok; they haven't killed you yet. But you know what I mean. Calling them stupid won't save you when they decide you're the enemy and they have the political power to take you out. ;-)
Catholics have a trinity of people who are the same, and the Holy Trinity is one God.
It's all very mysterious!
And it's all summarized in the canon of light-bulb jokes:
Q: How many Catholics does it take to change a light bulb?
A: Three, but actually only one.
(Sometimes this is told for all Christians rather than just Catholics, but there are a few denominations that would object to the stereotype. ;-)
Clouds actually do NOT contribute [to global warming]. Having a high albedo, they reflect a lot of incoming sunlight back into space.
Actually, this is a question that until recently was "in dispute" among actual climate experts. The problem with a simple answer is that the actual situation is complicated.
Some recent studies have been published showing that the actual anwer to "What effects do clouds have on the Earth's surface temperature?" is "It depends on the type of cloud. A lot of low, dense clouds turn out to be a net "greenhouse" phenomenon, intercepting IR and reflecting it back to the surface. Other clouds, especially high ice-crystal clouds, have a net cooling effect by reflecting incoming sunlight. And still other clouds have a mixed effect, with the upper parts reflecting sunlight and the lower parts trapping heat from below and reradiating it back down.
So far, if you check with the summary articles, the consensus seems to be that clouds have an overall effect that's close to neutral, but this varies with time, and doesn't necessarily apply to specific parts of the world. What this means for the future is unclear.
This is a case where the real world can't be reduced to a bumper-sticker slogan. And it's also a case where the best summary is "Further research is needed."
I'm gonna take a guess at the cause: somebody decided to use a Microsoft product to control a critical system on which people's lives depend.
As so often happens with such news reports, you have to take a guess. Out of curiosity, I actually read TFA (;-), and specifically looked for information about what sort of computer system and software they're using. And as usual, there was no such information. All they tell us is that "computers" had a problem.
When we investigate such reports, it seems that the underlying system is always from Microsoft. But news people almost never mention this in their reports. It does make one wonder how much Microsoft paid them to not point fingers. After all, with most stories about major failures in commercial products (e.g., the recent reports on Toyota's problems with uncontrolled acceleration), the very first sentence in a news report usually mentions the brand name. The only common exception is with computers, which are usually just reported as "computers" with no brand names.
Maybe we need to start harassing the news folks about this. We should insist that they tell us the brand names on the equipment, and the brand names of the installed software. This may be the only way we have to get the vendor to actually fix their problems in a meaningful fashion.
(And in this case, "meaningful" especially includes the requirement that the actual users understand how to prevent the problems. Computer software vendors have a long record of selling systems that are so insanely complex that not even the "experts" can figure out how to use them correctly in all situations. Saying "user error" when the users involved don't understand how to properly run the products should not be acceptable. Especially when people's lives may be in danger.)
So people who use ebooks are normal people just like you and me. Who'd have thunk?
Not at all. Normal people don't read. If you read dead-tree books or ebooks, you are ipso facto not normal.
Similarly if you read and respond to /. articles. However, if you reply without reading them, you just might be normal.
"ooops, nope, can't use that one!" - NTIA
What I'd wonder is, when you exclude names that contain an obscenity or otherwise objectionable word in any of the world's several thousand languages, how many possible names are left?
It may be that, after a name is submitted to all the national internet bureaus for approval, we'll find that there are only a couple dozen usable names.
(And we could probably eliminate those fairly quickly by a few judicious contributions to urbandictionary.com. ;-)
image that a vast oversampling would be required to average out the noise inherent to any one vehicle. I suspect that it will be useless simply because adoption will be too low to provide the necessary data smoothing.
My wife and I use google maps with traffic reports turned on, and we've found that it's generally fairly reliable. It does tend to be up to half an hour out of date around here (Boston), but it's definitely useful enough to be worth the battery power. I've avoided a lot of major traffic problems by checking with it.
Google's traffic scheme is pretty well documented. Basically, your phone's GPS position and velocity are sent to the mother ship every so often, where the server software does the obvious sort of averaging. It presumably discards numbers outside a range; you'd want it to not include things like a car stopped at the side of the road or in a gas station, or a GPS position that's suddenly wildly different than the previous position.
It can be fun to point out to users of google maps that google clearly has the ability to track your phone's position any time google maps is running. What's even more fun is, when they open their phone and turn google maps off, you ask them if they know that it has stopped running, or has just stopped showing its window. Few people know how to ask their phone which apps are actually running.
(I have a G1 phone, with a Terminal app installed, and there's a "top" command that works. Somehow, this mystifies most iPhone users that I've shown it to. ;-)
Just of the top of my head the things that will mask your signal: Unknown speed,
The iPhone has GPS, accelerometer and a compass... If you can't figure out when the car is going more than 30 km/h and when it stops, perhaps you should leave programming to someone with a brain?
By that standard, it appears that none of the makers of GPS gadgets have been willing or able to hire any programmers with brains. ;-)
My wife and I have at least 5 GPS-enabled gadgets: Her iPhone, my G1 phone, two cars with GPS (a Garmin and the crappy one sold by Honda), plus an older Garmin. All of them show strong signs of being programmed by people without brains.
Thus, a few months ago, while my wife was driving her car and I was a passenger, I passed the time by comparing the car's (Garmin) GPS with google maps on both phones. There were several times when one phone or the other showed us wandering off the highway and driving a mile or so into the countryside. At one point, the phones showed us on opposite sides of the highway, and the iPhone showed us driving across a large lake. The car's GPS kept us on a road, but sometimes it was a local street a block away.
The fun part was when the iPhone showed us suddenly jumping about 100 miles to the southeast, a few miles east of Cape Cod, driving along in the ocean parallel to the shore. This wasn't a fluke; it showed us there for nearly 10 minutes. Then it showed us jumping back to our actual location (on a highway west of Boston).
The cars' GPS gadgets have "trip record" features which we usually leave running. I occasionally check its information, and usually it shows our top speed at over 200 mph, sometimes over 300 mph. We usually do drive in the fastest lane, but I don't think either car has ever been anywhere near 200 mph.
On my G1 phone, when I start up google maps at home, it regularly shows my position about 1/2 mile to the south-southwest, in the middle of a patch of woods next to a reservoir. For a while, sometime a minute or more, it'll show its position wandering in an irregular path across the neighborhood, going through yards and houses, and finally reaching our house. It will sometimes show us back in those woods at random other times.
This seems to be a standard sort of story from people who watch what their GPS toys are saying. It appears that the makers don't know how to fix such things. So where can they hire programmers who have the brains to Get It Right? It does seem a bit odd that an established industry like this should continue to fail so humorously, and nobody can figure out how to program them correctly.
Either that, or the GPS system just can't achieve the level of accuracy and reliability that you assume anyone with a brain could easily produce.
(And yes, I've seen some of the math that goes into GPS programming. I have a couple of math degrees, and I'm impressed that they've made pocket-sized GPS computers that work as well as they do. ;-)
The Moto Xoom is overpriced, which will self limit it's sales.
Oh, I dunno; it might sell pretty well to the folks who keep telling us "You get what you pay for". ;-)
You'd think that by the time people were old enough to learn to use slashdot (8 or 9?), they'd have learned that very often you get a lot less than what you pay for.
OTOH, lots of folks just buy whatever product has the most and/or the flashiest ads. HP still has a pretty big marketing budget.
There's an interesting parallel with the GPS system. When built, it had a "kill switch" of sorts: The US military could order the system to add a systematic error to the data in its packets. US military GPS equipment has software that can know what the error is, and subtract it out. The idea was that during military actions, the GPS system could be made useless to anyone not in posession of US military-grade GPS equipment.
Several things happened that persuaded them to give up on this. One was that in the first Gulf War, the US military couldn't get delivery of needed GPS equipment, and had to start buying them on the open market. But the bigger development was that during the 1990s, the airline industry (and much international shipping) shifted to GPS as their primary navigation system. It was an "open secret" that airlines and shipping companies were quickly losing the ability to use older navigational techniques. This was mostly for financial reasons. GPS was so much cheaper than earlier methods that companies everywhere cut funding for support of other navigation systems.
So the US DoD was faced with the fact that if they disabled GPS, the result could well be airplanes and large ships crashing into things. They had to face the fact that they would be blamed if this happened, and announced that the GPS error-induction scheme was to be abandoned.
(Whether they've actually done this is a good question. But it's clear what the political repercussions would be if they were to suddenly disable the GPS system intentionally. And it was made moot when the airlines showed how easy it was to defeat the GPS error, by installing GPS "satellite" hardware at fixed positions on the ground. Look that one up; it's a pretty funny story. ;-)
Getting back to the Interstate Highways, they are now occasionally closed during local emergencies, such as major storms. And there's no question that military vehicles have precedence over other traffic, but this is also true on local roads. The idea of officially excluding all civilian traffic has been abandoned, simply because those highways are too important to the economic system, and shutting them down would be a economic and political disaster.
It's easy to argue that we are rapidly reaching the same situation with the Internet. Disabling it nationwide would effectively disable all the large corporations that are the major political campaign contributors. It would be a major economic and political disaster, which the corporate world wouldn't tolerate. So it ain't gonna happen.
Also, the "emergency" argument doesn't work for the Internet. It has become clear that, during any major emergency, what's needed is a rapid influx of portable Internet (and other comms) capacity. During disasters, communication is extremely important for disaster workers. So again, it isn't going to be shut down during any "national disaster". The disaster-relief folks are working on exactly the opposite, rapid deployment of mobile comm equipment, mostly providing wireless Internet capability, to disaster areas.
Of course, those of us working in Internet-related occupations should be encouraging this, by making our favorite music and porn distribution system even more indispensable to the economy as a whole. ;-)
, that's probably the distinction that 61% of respondents are making. They're all willfully misunderstanding the question ...
Maybe not. This could be a good example of a common "problem" with polling (which can also be used to bias the results): The phrasing of the question could have been ambiguous and different people read it differently.
The simple-looking English question "How often do you swear at your computer?" has two very different valid parsings. The one that the pollsters probably intended has "swear at" as a compound verb, and "your computer" as the direct object. The other parsing is perhaps best illustrated by rephrasing the question as "How often do you swear when you're at your computer?"
This second parsing doesn't imply that you're cussing out the computer itself; it merely means that you're using your computer and mutter some swear words. But the target of the swearing may not be the computer (i.e., the physical object) itself. This is a reasonable interpretation if you view the computer as an innocent piece of metal, plastic and silicon, and you understand that the real target of your swearing is the people who inflicted the software on you.
Ambiguous questions like this are the bane of honest pollsters. In this case, it means there are really three kinds of answers: "No, I never swear in the vicinity of my computer", "Yes, I swear at my stupid computer who is causing me so much grief", and "Yes, I swear when I'm at my computer, at the people who programmed it to cause me so much grief".
The problem is that a simple yes/no answer can't distinguish which of the parsings of the question each "Yes" is answering, so we can't distinguish the two kinds of "Yes" answers, and we can't tell how many of the people in the third group answer "No" because they gave the question the first parsing.
And, of course, there's the problem of the dishonest pollster, who intentionally uses an ambiguous question, then claims that the answers were all in response to one specific parsing of the question. This is done in political polls all the time. It's also a favorite tactic of commercial marketers. This may have been done here, but we can't tell unless we can determine the exact question that was asked.
... there used to be a country in South East Asia called Burma, it was renamed to Myanmar about 20 years ago.
Strictly speaking, that's not true. In the major language in Burma/Myanmar, the name didn't change at all. What changed was the "official" transliteration to the Roman alphabet.
Those two spellings may not look similar to you, and they certainly produce different sounds from the mouths of English-speaking readers. But the problem is the usual one: The phonemes of the Burmese (;-) language don't match English phonemes very well. This means that no transliteration scheme will produce a Roman spelling that gets the right pronunciation from English speakers (or European-language speakers in general). But the previous scheme produced especially atrocious mispronunciations from English speakers, so bad that Burmese speakers couldn't figure out what those tourists were trying to say.
So they came up with a new transliteration scheme which still produces heavily-accented sounds from tourists, but those sounds are a lot more comprehensible to the natives in Myanmar.
They didn't change the name of the country or anything in it. They're just trying to get you to pronounce their local place names in a way that they can recognize, and point you in the right direction.
(There's no shortage of information on this on the internet. ;-)
I have an alternate theory: maybe they're just a bunch of liars, answering with "what they think would sound better" instead of answering with the truth ...
And I have a third theory: A lot of us curse at things our computer does, but the target of our cursing is the gang of malevolent idiots who built the software.
We're quite aware that the computer is just a dumb machine, and is no more responsible or its behavior than, say, a mosquito is when it bites you. But in the case of the computer, we understand why the computer did whatever stupid thing it did. It was programmed that way by people who wanted it to behave that way.
So we may curse a lot in the vicinity of a computer, but the computer isn't our target. The target is the "team" of humans who made it behave that way.
Why do you think it is that ridiculous that someone might think the US would send an enemy to Guantanamo?
Even more to the point, the US has a reputation for sending people who aren't enemies to Guantanamo, and then not releasing them because they've become enemies.
It's also worth pointing out that Julian Assange is widely considered (by Americans who are familiar with his story) a friend of the US. He's just not a friend of some of the US's political leaders.
Everyone knows there is only bias on one side. The side you do not like.
This is why, in the sciences, there is such a strong emphasis on not accepting results (especially unusual results) until they have been replicated by different observers (with different funding .-). It's well understood that discovering your own biases and blind spots can be extremely difficult, so researchers expect that their discoveries will be double- and triple-checked by others with different biases and blind spots.
The publishing industry has a different sort of example: It's well understood that hardly anyone can "edit" their own work. Simple typos can be very difficult to spot, when you "know" what you wrote. So you hand your text over to someone else to check. Especially difficult to recognize can be text that's ambiguous and has a reading that's radically different than what you were thinking. Spotting such things really takes someone else with a different mind.
At the silliest level, this mental problem leads to the game of finding headlines that have mutliple readings. One of my favorites was from the early 1990s, when the US first got involved in the Iraq war, and one newspaper had a headline that read "American Ships Head to Gulf". There are long lists of such things on a number of web sites. A few were probably intentional, but most examples like this illustrate the difficulty of seeing what you wrote might say to someone with a slightly different mindset. (That sentence is rather complex, and probably has a different reading than I intended, but I can't see it. ;-)
In any case, the need of multiple viewpoints with different attitudes and biases is an old, well-recognized problem. And it's even good for a bit of humor at times.
Finding news that really does not have a 'spin' on it is hard. Fox is right up there with spin. However, you can not sit there with a straight face and say Huffington is any better. Fox is just more blatant about it. ...
This is nothing new. Throughout history, the news "industry" has been run by people with an interest in the news and a strong motive to persuade their readers rather than informing them. Any well-informed person has always tried to hunt down different versions of news stories, with different biases. The pretense that the internet has introduced a new problem here is just that, a pretense. It's just more blatantly obvious, because it's so much easier now to find reports with different biases. It can still be hard, but not nearly as hard as it was in the past.
We do have one very useful example of a news source that works well as a tool to check out a story from sources with different biases: Google News. Right now, if you go to their Business page, it has the AOL/HuffPost story right at the top. And after the first few links, it has a link with the text "all 1,614 news articles >>". This is their list of all known reports of the topic, ordered by google's "secret" ranking algorithm (which for news mostly means by time stamp ;-).
Complaining about the biases of news sources goes back as far as we have records of news sources. We haven't ever found a way to produce "unbiased" reporting, and we never will. The best we can do is make all the biases visible, which includes making the source information available. We're not there yet. But so far, the internet has been turning into a better tool for the task than we've had in the past.
We just need to persuade people to stop bitching about biased news sources, and read some of the alternative news sources that have become so easily available.
(What other sites do people here know of that make it easy to find multiple versions of news stories with different biases?)
Of course, 1400 kn/s is only about .000005 c, so for all practical purposes, the galaxy and its supernova are in our frame of reference. There's probably a much larger error bar on our estimate of the distance, which is probably only good to 2 or 3 decimal places.
But media articles (even the scientific media) usually doesn't give us the error-bar information. ;-)
There is something known as the AI Effect which tends to prevent us from recognizing applications of artificial intelligence
Actually, this phenomenon long predates computers. A common textbook example: 200 years ago, it was obvious to anyone that the ability to do simple arithmetic (or even to count) was proof of intelligence. Then people started building mechanical calculators, and very quickly people reclassified arithmetic as not intelligent at all. It became merely a mechanical operation, since it was doable by machines.
Fast forward to the 1960s, when the term AI (Artificial Intelligence) was invented, and you'll find that what the AI researchers were proudly presenting as successes were example of computers doing sophisticated things like list processing and symbol-table manipulation. Computers were things that did "computations", which meant arithmetic, and this new software was manipulating complex data structures that represented "concepts", not numbers. So this was computer intelligence, right?
Well, no. As before, this merely proved that such operations didn't require an intelligent mind; it was doable by a mechanical (ok; electronic) device. Nowadays, lists and symbol tables are a routine part of most computers' builtin software libraries, and are even primitive operations in some programming languages (e.g., perl and python).
A fun experience I've had a few times is people looking at code I've developed, and found that the Makefiles include calls on perl programs that run several man(1) commands, parse the output, extract information, and use it to generate part of the C code. I've seen people really confused by this. "Your code reads the English-language manual, understands it, and writes part of the code???" You can see them thinking "Artificial Intelligence", and trying to come to terms with it. But to any experienced perl (or python) programmer, such things are now a routine part of Software Engineering. So they're not AI at all; they've graduated to "something that a mere mechanical device can do".
The general conclusion is that we will never have "artificial intelligence". Whenever some human mental capability is duplicated in a computer, that capability will no longer be considered a sign of intelligence, because a mere machine can do it. It will be part of Engineering instead.
The only question is whether, after enough time, there will be any human capability left to say that humans are intelligent. It may be that, eventually, the only remaining "purely human" capability will be producing new humans.
Furthermore, the thought that "the event really occurred X years ago" seems to assume a universal standard of time, independent of the location and velocity of the observer, by which far apart events can be ordered. But time is not like that is it?
Well, yes and no. That can be true for events viewed by observers moving at a sufficiently high speed relative to each other. But this remote galaxy is probably only moving relative to us at a few hundred km/sec, which is a sufficiently slow speed that (for our purposes here) they can be considered in the same reference frame. In such cases, comparing time is simple (though perhaps not doable to nanosecond accuracy).
An example on a smaller time scale: Light moves about 299 792 458 km in a second, and the Earth's diameter is about 12,742 km. So the Earth is approximately 43 light-milliseconds in diameter. Yet it's possible (if not trivial) to synchronize clocks on the Earth's surface to nanosecond precision, and there are communication protocols that keep them synchronized. The GPS system wouldn't work if this weren't possible, and those satellites are moving relative to us even faster than the Earth's surface or this supernova.
One interesting use of this where such precision is critical is that astronomers sometimes combine the data from telescopes scattered around the world to make a large telescope with an effective aperture as wide as the Earth. Doing this requires measuring the arrival time of light waves with precision much better than 43 microseconds. The better precision, the less fuzzy the resulting images are.
This is possible because all those telescopes have very small velocities relative to each other. The max relative speed of two objects on the Earth's surface is twice the rotation speed of a spot on the equator. That's such a small fraction of the speed of light that it's negligible, and they can be treated as being in the same frame to many more than 10 decimal places.
If a remote astronomical object were moving at .99c relative to us, calculating relative times from both viewpoints would be complex and a bit strange to most people. But at relative speeds of .000001c or less, as with NGC 2655 and our galaxy, comparing times to within a few years is simple and straightforward (as astronomers measure such things ;-).
If only I would of found out about the supernova back in January! Never seen one before and it is possible that there won't be another within my lifetime.
Don't worry. If you accept supernovas like this one, that's in a different galaxy than ours, there are plenty of them somewhere in the universe every year. It's only if you want one in our galaxy that you have to wait, since the frequency is on the order of one per century.
There was one in the Large Magellanic Cloud back in 1987, easily visible to the naked eye (if you were in the southern hemisphere).
Actually, it's getting to be time we had one in our galaxy. But unfortunately, they don't seem to be scheduled anywhere that we can easily read. The schedule has probably been on file at our local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of our years, but we can't be bothered to make the short trip to check it out. So we'll just have to keep looking up at the night sky until something new appears there.
Hey, that's truly tasteless! Keep it up ...
I still don't understand how this is in any way dodgey or underhanded.
The main explanation is that they're second-sourcing google's results without giving them due credit.
The evidence for this is that there are a number of sites that openly use google's search, and google doesn't object. There's always lmgtfy.com, of course, which credits google in their name. There's dogpile.com, which searches a list of sites that includes google and has its own scheme for ordering the results.
But bing does this without acknowledging google. When google point out what bing is doing, the reply is to deny it. Microsoft is pretending that the results are bing's, and weren't gotten from another search site.
In scholarly, scientific and mathematical fields, failing to credit your sources is one of the cardinal sins. But if you properly credit your sources, they smile and thank you for the reference. This is basically a case of the same thing in the commercial world.
Some years back, there was a related fuss over Sun's use of Open Source software. The problem wasn't that Sun was including this software in their distributions. Everyone approved of that. Sun's sin was that they stripped out the attributions in the code, claiming in effect that it was all Sun's creation. They got into a lot of trouble with the Open Source crowd until Sun apologized and corrected the problem. If you're not going to pay someone for using their stuff, you should at least acknowledge their work.
Maybe, instead of trying to pretend that they've made a big mistake, Microsoft should just 'fess up, apologize, and add an explanation similar to dogpile's saying whose data they're including. I just did a dogpile search for a question on a mailing list that I read, and the results all include a small-print statement like "Found on: Google, Bing, Yahoo! Search" or "Found exclusively on: Google". If bing were to do this, google would probably withdraw their lawsuit.
Alternatively, bing users might just start using dogpile, which is a lot more honest about where they get their information.