Even if the "flint" ax was no longer in use axes are and I think that would disqualify it.
Indeed. And the "flint" part is alive and well, in a slightly refined form. Some of the sharpest blades available are make from several kinds of flint-like or glassy minerals. One of the markets for these is in surgical supplies, where small, extremely sharp knives are quite useful.
I read a funny story a couple of years ago about a physician was on board a flight somewhere, and realized that in his shirt pocket he had a packet of obsidian blades in his pocket. Since they were glass, the scanners at the airport hadn't seen them. But he realized that in expert hands (such as his;-), they could be very deadly weapons, though of course he used them to save people's lives. Part of the story was his wondering whether he should have informed the airline people of his mistake.
Back in 1980, the US had a documented example where approval voting would have given us a different outcome. There were a number of surveys that turned up the result that the majority of people who said they were voting for either Reagan or Carter said that they actually preferred John Anderson. But they didn't vote for him, because they were convinced that he couldn't win, so this would be "throwing away their vote".
With approval voting, all those people could have voted for Anderson and also their second-favorite, which ever that was. Anderson would have gotten the largest number of votes, and would have won.
There are probably lots more cases where this would have been true, but we don't know because the pollsters didn't record the information.
That weird concept of "throwing away your vote" when the person you voted for doesn't win is probably one of the biggest things wrong with our voting system. Being persuaded to vote for someone other than the candidate you prefer is what's really "throwing away your vote". But it seems that most of the American public (and probably most of the rest of humanity) is dumb enough to fall for this propaganda technique.
Yeah, really. You'd think that "Bauer" would be derived from "bauen" (build), and it might well be, but it's an illustration of the fact that German is no more logical than any other human-developed language. There are a number of German-English dictionaries online; go look it up.
I'd prefer to express it in the currently-popular fashion:
Q: Why do birds fly through the air?
A: Because they can.
This phrasing has the advantage that it tends to prevent people like me from interpreting the question as a request for "ultimate cause", and talking about birds' evolutionary history. That just brings down the wrath of the Intelligent Design (i.e. religious) folks on us, and we wouldn't want that, would we?
I'm not sure how one can turn the case of a suicide bomber into a similar source of humor.
Yeah, Opera is one of the few browsers that run on everything that I have, and also follows the published standards pretty well, so it's one of my main tools for testing web pages.
Actually, I've been finding that I use Safari mostly for my initial testing, but for a completely non-standards-related reason. Many of my clients want use of buttons (<input type=submit...>), rather than links. Safari is the only browser that will respond to a button push by opening the page in a new tab or window. This makes it easy to compare the "before" and "after" pages.
Opera, Firefox, etc. all insist on opening a button's page in the same window/tab as the preceding page, making it difficult to compare see the two at the same time. So during initial testing, Safari noticeably speeds up the work, while the others interfere with debugging by their button behavior.
Of course, I could be wrong, and there might be settings for other browsers that produce this useful behavior. But I've looked for it, and haven't found it. So I start testing with a browser that's developer-friendly in this regard, and then test against the other browsers when the basic page behavior seems pretty close to what I'm looking for.
It was never OK to use a b tag for anything that didn't explicitly need to be BOLD, rather than emphasised or standing out strongly.
How so? I've never seen the b tag described as meaning anything other than "bold", and the main use of bold fonts has always been to make that text stand out. People have always read bold text as emphasis.
Is there a standard (heh;-) somewhere that defines the b tag differently? Does anyone have a link to such a definition?
... Sad and dejected, I sit in my beachfront shack in Cuba. I admire the waves rolling in, and beautiful women on the beach, hoping an approval letter finally comes in, while I churn out more pages of mediocre fiction, knowing that the cycle will repeat endlessly until I die in a few years, with my family not caring where I went, comfortable in the idea that I went with a smile on my face and a local prostitute riding me to my final moments...
Heh. Very nice.
I've long had a number of FAQs on my site, that I cycle among randomly. I've thought of adding code that picks one at random, but I've never gotten around to it.
The one that gets me the best replies is my admission to what I'm doing here on Earth: I'm actual a visiting anthropologist, studying humans. I go in to an explanation of why it turns out there's no "non-interference" police that prevents me from openly admitting this. Experience shows that, even (especially?) when you're completely honest about such things, humans invariably think you're just kidding or making up a fictional story.
So I can be as open as I like, secure in the knowledge that people will at most chuckle at my story. It helps that there's enough variability in humans that it's fairly easy for "humanoid" aliens to disguise themselves as human. And most humans are so unaware of their surroundings that it doesn't actually take a very thorough disguise, since humans rarely examine you in any detail. This is especially useful among us "visitors", since we can easily identify each other at sight, while the humans around us think we're also humans.
Now that humans have the Internet, we also know that it's quite safe to talk about this online, for all the same reasons. It's even harder for humans to identify aliens online, since there's little in the written forms of human languages that's a good tipoff. It does help if you mispell a word or two in everything you post, to add to the human image.
Having browser makers defining the "standard" is the mess we needed to get out of in the first place. What, do we want to return to browser makers making up things as they go along, like goddamn IE?
There's a long history to this that explains it fairly well. The concept of a "standard" was invented to handle the problem that vendors have always cheated customers by having their own definitions for units of measurement. Thus, food seller have always tried sell a "pound" (or whatever the local weight term was) of produce that was short weight.
Governments finally blocked this by making legal definitions of such units of measurement, and prosecuting vendors who used a unit that was different from the standard. This is, historically, the only thing that has ever worked. Anywhere in the world, if you sell, say, 200 grams of meat or rice, and it only weighs 180 grams, you will be found guilty of consumer fraud. If you try to say that you use your own definition of a gram, that statement would be used in court to show that your fraud was intentional. (There are occasionally parts of the world where such things aren't enforced, and the result is always the same: Vendors start cheating their customers.)
The real problem here is that HTML is not actually a "standard". That is, it has no force of law behind it. Any vendor can violate it at will, call their product "HTML", and have no fear that the government standards body will prosecute them for consumer fraud.
The phrase "de-facto standard" is in fact a statement of knowingly committing consumer fraud. It should lead to prosecution. But it doesn't. That's the real reason that we have such problems. If we had an actual HTML standard, enforceable in court, we wouldn't have such problems. (Actually, we'd still have them, but they'd lead to prosecution.;-)
How has backwards thinking like this become so prevalent in modern technology? I don't get it.
It's because "When a computer is involved, all precedent is forgotten, and everything has to be relearned." I've forgotten who said that, but it applies here. The computer industry uses the term "standard" for things that aren't standardized at all. Vendors can freely claim their products "standard" when they don't follow any actual standard, without fear of prosecution for fraud. We have "industry standards" bodies like W3C that have no enforcement power, and thus aren't actually defining standards. They are merely defining pseudo-standards, marketing terms that vendors are free to violate at will without fear of any legal consequences.
The entire history of commerce tells us how vendors will behave in such a situation. They'll define their own "standards", using the same terms as the published pseudo-standards such as HTML. They'll do this knowingly, to persuade the public to buy. Without any legal enforcement, they know they can get away with it.
If we want an actual standard for HTML, it has to have legal import. Without this, vendors will continue to behave as they've always behaved. But there is no sign this is being considered, here in the US or in any other country.
So any HTML "standard" is just a pseudo-standard, a marketing term that vendors can violate at will. We can discuss it all we like, but this will have no effect on the vendors. The only way this can change is if government get involved by having their standards bodies declare actual legal standards that are enforced.
We have millennia of experience showing that this is the only approach that actually gives us a useful standard. Computers haven't changed this fact; they only led us to ignore it and then complain that vendors are violating a "standard". Of course they are; they're vendors who are trying to sell us something, without any legal constraints on their use of terminology.
The idea that "blame" could be assigned to a manufactured object with no mind or volition of its own is decidedly weird. Usually, when a machine is part of the cause of a disaster, the blame is assigned to the people who built and/or operated the machine. It makes no sense to blame the machine, since it had no choice in how it behaved.
Maybe the authors think that we've actually built an Artificial Intelligence and put it in charge of our financial system. If so, maybe we should replace them with one of those computers.
I have yet to see a story about "google censors search terms when you click search".
That's because Google censors searches for those stories.
Well, I decided to test this out a bit. I asked google, yahoo and bing to search for "google censors search terms when you click search". They all found exactly the same list of matches: one. They both linked to your message.
OMG; they're all censoring stories about google censoring things!
I think you're overblowing
the problem of narrow
boxes to enter comments
in. If you have a problem
with websites not using
all of your desktop real
estate, perhaps you just
need to zoom in?
That's one of the longest haikus I've ever seen.;-)
(And I had to edit it again, since the Preview showed it all run together. Their quoting scheme doesn't work too well any more, it seems.)
Party X should not be able to pay for party Y to get less than what has been paid for.
You should also consider the ISP itself. Thus, according to the news from a few days back, Comcast customers are likely to soon discover that they can get unlimited high-speed access to NBC content, but content from other providers will arrive so slowly as to be hardly watchable. The above suggested rules won't apply, since Comcast and NBC will be the same corporation, so there will be no payments between them.
The goal in the US is to "evolve" to a single comm provider, who will have total control over what you can see or provide for others to see. The First Amendment will then be moot, because it doesn't apply to a private corporation, and other kinds of distribution of information will be phased out.
(Damn. The Preview showed that once again, my paragraphs were all run together. So I've added some <p> tags. Let's see how this works.;-)
You can still use the classic comment system under comment prefs,
So where are these "comment prefs" hidden? I've found that I can't locate very many of my account settings any more. Poking at the Options, Accout, or login ID links at the top get me some config pages, but nothing that lets me pick the comment system (or set my mod thresholds or other useful settings).
Also, if this is like my previous comment, my <i>italics</i> tags won't be interpreted, but will be displayed as-is. The previous comment had a little menu to select plain text, HTML, or Extrans (whatever that is); I'd used HTML and that displayed the tags rather than interpreting them, so I next tried Extrans, and that did the same thing. But this reply box doesn't have that menu, only the "Preview", "Quote Parent" and "Options" buttons, plus a "Cancel" link.
This is sorta confusing; my settings seem to be changing behind the scene even if I can't find them to change them myself.
I wonder if there's a user manual ("Slashdot for Dummies"?;-) hidden somewhere that I can't find.?
Hmmm... Now I seem to have lost that choice. Or rather, I seem to have lost most of my user config stuff. Poking around at the links at the top of the page (such as Options, Accounts, or my ID) gets pages that are sorta baffling, and don't contain much that configures anything. Poking around at the links on those pages also doesn't find my config stuff. I wonder what's going on?
Maybe I should wait a few days, and see how it settles down.
Also, this message is three paragraphs, separated by spaces. Previous previews have eliminated all the white space, though I did get a message posted by including HTML "P" tags. So this is a test to see how this message shows up. This try is with just the blank lines between paragraphs, and the "Extrans" menu item selected. Anyone know what the etymology of "Extrans" might be?
OK; the Preview looks fine, with paragraphs preserved. So I'll post it and see if I get four paragraphs or one big paragraph. Here goes...
Please let us choose the original design in our user preferences. Ajax kills performance and has no real purpose.
I stumbled onto a way to do it. I got fed up with some of the new "features" such as several things "floating" above the message text. I was using firefox, so I told NoScript to disable javascript for slashdot.org. This worked fine, and when I went to my user page to twiddle options, I found a message saying that I should turn javascript on - or I might want to choose the original UI stuff (whose name I don't quite remember now). I clicked on that, and it worked!
I still have a problem of the left column becoming a "floating" box that covers up the top messages (but that's only if I make the window less than half the width of my screen.;-), so if anyone knows how to get it to stop doing this, you might post the instructions.
I might try studying the HTML to see how that "floating navbar" thing works. That might tell me how to write some CSS to disable it.
On an iPhone the subject line of the first article is cut off. Also, the text is way too small. I can zoom the page of course, but then I'm scrolling right to left all the time.
That's the "normal" behavior of the Safari browser on the iPhone. There's lots of discussion of this misbehavior online, but no good solutions (that I've read). I've done a bunch of testing with web pages that no size= or width= or other such attributes, and all other browsers respond by sizing everything to fit their window (and resizing to fit if you resize the window). Safari on iPhone seems alone is formatting for a window bigger than the screen, and shrinking the font to unreadability if you "pinch" the page to make it smaller.
The leading hypothesis is that Apple did this intentionally to discourage use of the browser, because they want special iPhone-only apps instead. They've been largely successful at this. But the price, from a user's viewpoint, is that much of the web requires clumsy left-right scrolling to read the pages.
If you find a solution to this, please let us know.
(One solution: Install Opera Mobile. It formats text to fit its screen like browsers are supposed to do. But Apple seems to discourage this for some reason.;-)
But it's easy to say such things; to be convincing, it helps to have real-life examples. There are no shortages of examples where people went to hell in a handbasket, knowing full well what they were doing as they did it.
In the last 100 years, Tokyo has sank relative to the sea by 19 feet. Has anyone noticed?
Actually, the opposite effect has happened in Scandinavia. There, they've long had the problem that the land is still rebounding from the loss of the glaciers, and has been rising at the rate of about a meter per century in recent centuries. This means that seaports (which is where most of the people live) have to migrate downhill over time. There are archaeological sites 5, 10 or 20 km from the shore that were active ports 400 or 1000 years ago. But in the last half century, this rising has slowed down due to the rising sea level.
So far, this hasn't fully compensated for the loss of established ports; it has merely slowed the process a bit. But Scandinavians are looking forward to their shoreline being much more stable over the next century or two, and the sea rise accelerates.
Some parts of the world will benefit from the change. Some parts have already benefited. But it's not clear that this makes up for the problems caused at lower latitudes (and altitudes).
Having walked my dogs in -20C weather this morning, it can't get warmer fast enough.
Here in New England (US, not Australia;-), there are a lot of jokes about how people around here who've heard of global warming think it sounds like a great idea.
Of course, those who live on Cape Cod and the Islands are getting a bit worried...
CO2 and methane are gasses that prevent thermal energy from escaping into space The CO2 and methane levels have been rising Human activity generates CO2 and methane
Thus, there's nothing we can do about it?
Yeah; that sounds about right. We're pretty good at raiding and using resources, but in general we don't give a damn about the waste products of our depredations. Much like most other species, except that we have the intelligence to understand what we're doing. But we don't have the intelligence (or social capabilities) to organize the solutions to the problems that we cause.
History is full of examples of this sort of failures. Thus, historians and archaeologists tell us that the "Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East was a major agricultural land 3000 years ago. The people who built the irrigation systems back then understood how salinification worked. They knew that you have to slightly over-water the land to prevent salt buildups. But in the short term, it was more profitable to maximize the land that was irrigated by using the minimum water required by the crops. The result is the devastated, barren landscape that we see over most of that area now. It was done knowingly, and the humans who did it couldn't organize to stop the process (though they could organize to engage in major wars).
Back in the 1970s and 80s, some researchers did an interesting experiment in that area: They leased a few dozen 2-3 square km plots scattered around the landscape, built goat-proof fences around them, and sat back to watch what happened. A year later, they reported that all these small protected areas were covered with grasses and other herbaceous plants. They suggested that if the grazing animals could be kept penned up for a year, there would be no more deserts in southwest Asia. Did the governments jump on this and eradicate their deserts? You all know the answer to that; you can see it every day in news photos from the area. There's no way humans will ever organize to do that, even when they know the story. (Also, most of the literature is in French, which limits its availability to most of us.;-)
More recently (and close to home here in the US), back in the 1990s the Corps of Engineers did a series of studies on the levee system in the Mississippi delta. They also did a major simulation (google for "Hurricane Pam") of the effect of a major hurricane on New Orleans. Their reports listed all the points of failure that in fact failed when Katrina hit. Their requests for funding to repair and reinforce the levees were turned down by Congress. Then Katrina hit, and people pretended it was an Act of God. But in fact, they knew in great detail exactly what would happen, and it did happen. They couldn't organize to do what was easily within our abilities to prevent the disaster that they knew was coming.
This is human nature. Oil, coal, and natural gas are resources that we can organize to exploit. The side effects of burning all those hydrocarbons is something that we can't organize to control, even when we understand it. All we an do is debate the issue until the disaster is upon us. And, as in the above examples, it'll be too late then to do what we could have done to prevent what we knew was coming.
Actually, in the salinification/desertification example, it's not too late. It can be done any time, and on any scale from a few square km up. But we can't and won't do it on a large scale. Research proceeds on a small scale. Google for "bocage" plus other agriculture-related terms. The information is there, but it's mostly academic, with no local governments getting involved in solving the problem. And note the two meanings of that word "academic", which explains a lot about our attitude toward big problems that we can't organize to solve.
Bah, everyone knows it's Jan 19, 2038 when the world will end.:-)
Only for those still running on 32-bit systems. For the rest of us, who have moved on to 64-bit machines, the universe will continue to exist for a while longer.
It's similar to the ongoing panic over the Dec 2012 "End of Time" in the Mayan calendar. The actual event is an overflow in the first digit in the 5-digit "long count" date. Using the Mayan base-20 number system, with 3 digits for the year and 2 digits for the day within the year, the high digit is now 12, and the date in question is when the other 4 digits reach their max values. (Today is 12.19.18.0.19.)
For those of us who know the Mayan symbol for 13, it's not big deal; the date just overflows to 13.0.0.0.0. For those who can't count past 13 in Mayan, there could be a problem. Though actually, they'd have a problem earlier, since the other two digits in the year first have to reach 19. You'd think that anyone who could handle the Mayan number for the "last day" would know how to put a 13 in the first digit. But if they can't, well, maybe the world is better off without them.
But I don't know how much those people have been actually taught about the Mayan calendar, so I can't really say why time will end for them. It'll keep going for those of us who can count to 19 (in a Mayan language or in Mayan number symbols;-).
JFGI;-) Try "solar system" and "motion" as the search terms.
You can find some of the numbers for the Solar System's orbit at wikipedia. Scan the page for "Solar System". Thus, in the "Sun's location and neighborhood" section, it mentions that our orbital speed around the center of the galaxy is about 220 km/s, roughly in the direction of Vega. At that speed, relativistic effects are measurable, if you have good astronomical instruments, but you probably can't detect the effects with your own senses.
96% of desktops use IE6 and thats because most users are blocked from installing their own apps. Upgrades to IE are rare due to this breaking old web code that they rely on. This is less malice or conspiracy and more stagnancy than anything else.
That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.
Oh, I dunno about that. For some years, my wife and I have played a game of asking people we meet what computer stuff they use at work, and at home. Almost always they'll tell us that at work they have to use Microsoft stuff, Windows and IE and so on. Then they'll say that at home they have a nice Mac (or two or three), and use both Safari and Firefox for browsing.
This seems especially true in government agencies, though my wife works in medical data processing, and she says it's almost universal there, too. So the conclusion would be that not only are all these workers quite capable of being retrained; they have all retrained themselves without prompting from their employers. Regardless of what they use at work, they prefer to spend their own money on computer systems that are actually friendly and easy to use (and don't constantly get bogged down with malware).
It's likely that the real explanation is just "corporate culture" (which includes government). In both the corporate and government worlds, top management rarely if ever actually touches computers themselves, and is generally abysmally ignorant of things like usability issues. Software compatibility is a poorly-understood geek concept that mostly functions to justify never moving to better software. That culture has long made its computer-related decisions by simply buying from IBM (of which Microsoft is a division, right?;-) In management circles, "computer" and "IBM machine" have long been synonyms, and everything else is just a toy that no professional manager would bother investigating.
I've heard many cynical comments along these lines from lots of government workers, as well as in the corporate world. I'd conclude that all the talk of difficulty in retraining is simply a red herring. The "workers" are mostly smart enough to handle new computer systems, and this can be verified by asking what they use at home. So blaming their stupidity for the problems is just a coverup for the poor management at the top.
Here in the US, Microsoft has been one of the top "campaign contributors" for more than a decade now. That's probably the main explanation for the pressure inside government to standardize on Microsoft products. Does anyone have numbers on this in Australia?
Slashdot Mirror
Even if the "flint" ax was no longer in use axes are and I think that would disqualify it.
Indeed. And the "flint" part is alive and well, in a slightly refined form. Some of the sharpest blades available are make from several kinds of flint-like or glassy minerals. One of the markets for these is in surgical supplies, where small, extremely sharp knives are quite useful.
I read a funny story a couple of years ago about a physician was on board a flight somewhere, and realized that in his shirt pocket he had a packet of obsidian blades in his pocket. Since they were glass, the scanners at the airport hadn't seen them. But he realized that in expert hands (such as his ;-), they could be very deadly weapons, though of course he used them to save people's lives. Part of the story was his wondering whether he should have informed the airline people of his mistake.
With approval voting, all those people could have voted for Anderson and also their second-favorite, which ever that was. Anderson would have gotten the largest number of votes, and would have won.
There are probably lots more cases where this would have been true, but we don't know because the pollsters didn't record the information.
That weird concept of "throwing away your vote" when the person you voted for doesn't win is probably one of the biggest things wrong with our voting system. Being persuaded to vote for someone other than the candidate you prefer is what's really "throwing away your vote". But it seems that most of the American public (and probably most of the rest of humanity) is dumb enough to fall for this propaganda technique.
It means "Farmer".
Really?
Yeah, really. You'd think that "Bauer" would be derived from "bauen" (build), and it might well be, but it's an illustration of the fact that German is no more logical than any other human-developed language. There are a number of German-English dictionaries online; go look it up.
Q: Why do birds fly through the air?
A: Because they can.
This phrasing has the advantage that it tends to prevent people like me from interpreting the question as a request for "ultimate cause", and talking about birds' evolutionary history. That just brings down the wrath of the Intelligent Design (i.e. religious) folks on us, and we wouldn't want that, would we?
I'm not sure how one can turn the case of a suicide bomber into a similar source of humor.
Actually, I've been finding that I use Safari mostly for my initial testing, but for a completely non-standards-related reason. Many of my clients want use of buttons (<input type=submit ...>), rather than links. Safari is the only browser that will respond to a button push by opening the page in a new tab or window. This makes it easy to compare the "before" and "after" pages.
Opera, Firefox, etc. all insist on opening a button's page in the same window/tab as the preceding page, making it difficult to compare see the two at the same time. So during initial testing, Safari noticeably speeds up the work, while the others interfere with debugging by their button behavior.
Of course, I could be wrong, and there might be settings for other browsers that produce this useful behavior. But I've looked for it, and haven't found it. So I start testing with a browser that's developer-friendly in this regard, and then test against the other browsers when the basic page behavior seems pretty close to what I'm looking for.
It was never OK to use a b tag for anything that didn't explicitly need to be BOLD, rather than emphasised or standing out strongly.
How so? I've never seen the b tag described as meaning anything other than "bold", and the main use of bold fonts has always been to make that text stand out. People have always read bold text as emphasis.
Is there a standard (heh;-) somewhere that defines the b tag differently? Does anyone have a link to such a definition?
... Sad and dejected, I sit in my beachfront shack in Cuba. I admire the waves rolling in, and beautiful women on the beach, hoping an approval letter finally comes in, while I churn out more pages of mediocre fiction, knowing that the cycle will repeat endlessly until I die in a few years, with my family not caring where I went, comfortable in the idea that I went with a smile on my face and a local prostitute riding me to my final moments...
Heh. Very nice.
I've long had a number of FAQs on my site, that I cycle among randomly. I've thought of adding code that picks one at random, but I've never gotten around to it.
The one that gets me the best replies is my admission to what I'm doing here on Earth: I'm actual a visiting anthropologist, studying humans. I go in to an explanation of why it turns out there's no "non-interference" police that prevents me from openly admitting this. Experience shows that, even (especially?) when you're completely honest about such things, humans invariably think you're just kidding or making up a fictional story.
So I can be as open as I like, secure in the knowledge that people will at most chuckle at my story. It helps that there's enough variability in humans that it's fairly easy for "humanoid" aliens to disguise themselves as human. And most humans are so unaware of their surroundings that it doesn't actually take a very thorough disguise, since humans rarely examine you in any detail. This is especially useful among us "visitors", since we can easily identify each other at sight, while the humans around us think we're also humans.
Now that humans have the Internet, we also know that it's quite safe to talk about this online, for all the same reasons. It's even harder for humans to identify aliens online, since there's little in the written forms of human languages that's a good tipoff. It does help if you mispell a word or two in everything you post, to add to the human image.
Having browser makers defining the "standard" is the mess we needed to get out of in the first place. What, do we want to return to browser makers making up things as they go along, like goddamn IE?
There's a long history to this that explains it fairly well. The concept of a "standard" was invented to handle the problem that vendors have always cheated customers by having their own definitions for units of measurement. Thus, food seller have always tried sell a "pound" (or whatever the local weight term was) of produce that was short weight.
Governments finally blocked this by making legal definitions of such units of measurement, and prosecuting vendors who used a unit that was different from the standard. This is, historically, the only thing that has ever worked. Anywhere in the world, if you sell, say, 200 grams of meat or rice, and it only weighs 180 grams, you will be found guilty of consumer fraud. If you try to say that you use your own definition of a gram, that statement would be used in court to show that your fraud was intentional. (There are occasionally parts of the world where such things aren't enforced, and the result is always the same: Vendors start cheating their customers.)
The real problem here is that HTML is not actually a "standard". That is, it has no force of law behind it. Any vendor can violate it at will, call their product "HTML", and have no fear that the government standards body will prosecute them for consumer fraud.
The phrase "de-facto standard" is in fact a statement of knowingly committing consumer fraud. It should lead to prosecution. But it doesn't. That's the real reason that we have such problems. If we had an actual HTML standard, enforceable in court, we wouldn't have such problems. (Actually, we'd still have them, but they'd lead to prosecution. ;-)
How has backwards thinking like this become so prevalent in modern technology? I don't get it.
It's because "When a computer is involved, all precedent is forgotten, and everything has to be relearned." I've forgotten who said that, but it applies here. The computer industry uses the term "standard" for things that aren't standardized at all. Vendors can freely claim their products "standard" when they don't follow any actual standard, without fear of prosecution for fraud. We have "industry standards" bodies like W3C that have no enforcement power, and thus aren't actually defining standards. They are merely defining pseudo-standards, marketing terms that vendors are free to violate at will without fear of any legal consequences.
The entire history of commerce tells us how vendors will behave in such a situation. They'll define their own "standards", using the same terms as the published pseudo-standards such as HTML. They'll do this knowingly, to persuade the public to buy. Without any legal enforcement, they know they can get away with it.
If we want an actual standard for HTML, it has to have legal import. Without this, vendors will continue to behave as they've always behaved. But there is no sign this is being considered, here in the US or in any other country.
So any HTML "standard" is just a pseudo-standard, a marketing term that vendors can violate at will. We can discuss it all we like, but this will have no effect on the vendors. The only way this can change is if government get involved by having their standards bodies declare actual legal standards that are enforced. We have millennia of experience showing that this is the only approach that actually gives us a useful standard. Computers haven't changed this fact; they only led us to ignore it and then complain that vendors are violating a "standard". Of course they are; they're vendors who are trying to sell us something, without any legal constraints on their use of terminology.
I'm sure there are NYT staffers who could use advice on that subject, too.
Yes, the NYT, which is in the process of making their own wikileaks type site has no reason to portray Assange in any particular light.
Yeah; you'd think they'd have the sense to take him on as an expert consultant. ;-)
Maybe the authors think that we've actually built an Artificial Intelligence and put it in charge of our financial system. If so, maybe we should replace them with one of those computers.
I have yet to see a story about "google censors search terms when you click search".
That's because Google censors searches for those stories.
Well, I decided to test this out a bit. I asked google, yahoo and bing to search for "google censors search terms when you click search". They all found exactly the same list of matches: one. They both linked to your message.
OMG; they're all censoring stories about google censoring things!
I think you're overblowing
the problem of narrow
boxes to enter comments
in. If you have a problem
with websites not using
all of your desktop real
estate, perhaps you just
need to zoom in?
That's one of the longest haikus I've ever seen. ;-)
(And I had to edit it again, since the Preview showed it all run together. Their quoting scheme doesn't work too well any more, it seems.)
Party X should not be able to pay for party Y to get less than what has been paid for.
You should also consider the ISP itself. Thus, according to the news from a few days back, Comcast customers are likely to soon discover that they can get unlimited high-speed access to NBC content, but content from other providers will arrive so slowly as to be hardly watchable. The above suggested rules won't apply, since Comcast and NBC will be the same corporation, so there will be no payments between them.
The goal in the US is to "evolve" to a single comm provider, who will have total control over what you can see or provide for others to see. The First Amendment will then be moot, because it doesn't apply to a private corporation, and other kinds of distribution of information will be phased out.
(Damn. The Preview showed that once again, my paragraphs were all run together. So I've added some <p> tags. Let's see how this works. ;-)
You can still use the classic comment system under comment prefs,
;-) hidden somewhere that I can't find.?
So where are these "comment prefs" hidden? I've found that I can't locate very many of my account settings any more. Poking at the Options, Accout, or login ID links at the top get me some config pages, but nothing that lets me pick the comment system (or set my mod thresholds or other useful settings).
Also, if this is like my previous comment, my <i>italics</i> tags won't be interpreted, but will be displayed as-is. The previous comment had a little menu to select plain text, HTML, or Extrans (whatever that is); I'd used HTML and that displayed the tags rather than interpreting them, so I next tried Extrans, and that did the same thing. But this reply box doesn't have that menu, only the "Preview", "Quote Parent" and "Options" buttons, plus a "Cancel" link.
This is sorta confusing; my settings seem to be changing behind the scene even if I can't find them to change them myself.
I wonder if there's a user manual ("Slashdot for Dummies"?
Hmmm ... Now I seem to have lost that choice. Or rather, I seem to have lost most of my user config stuff. Poking around at the links at the top of the page (such as Options, Accounts, or my ID) gets pages that are sorta baffling, and don't contain much that configures anything. Poking around at the links on those pages also doesn't find my config stuff. I wonder what's going on?
...
Maybe I should wait a few days, and see how it settles down.
Also, this message is three paragraphs, separated by spaces. Previous previews have eliminated all the white space, though I did get a message posted by including HTML "P" tags. So this is a test to see how this message shows up. This try is with just the blank lines between paragraphs, and the "Extrans" menu item selected. Anyone know what the etymology of "Extrans" might be?
OK; the Preview looks fine, with paragraphs preserved. So I'll post it and see if I get four paragraphs or one big paragraph. Here goes
I stumbled onto a way to do it. I got fed up with some of the new "features" such as several things "floating" above the message text. I was using firefox, so I told NoScript to disable javascript for slashdot.org. This worked fine, and when I went to my user page to twiddle options, I found a message saying that I should turn javascript on - or I might want to choose the original UI stuff (whose name I don't quite remember now). I clicked on that, and it worked!
I still have a problem of the left column becoming a "floating" box that covers up the top messages (but that's only if I make the window less than half the width of my screen. ;-), so if anyone knows how to get it to stop doing this, you might post the instructions.
I might try studying the HTML to see how that "floating navbar" thing works. That might tell me how to write some CSS to disable it.
On an iPhone the subject line of the first article is cut off. Also, the text is way too small. I can zoom the page of course, but then I'm scrolling right to left all the time.
;-)
That's the "normal" behavior of the Safari browser on the iPhone. There's lots of discussion of this misbehavior online, but no good solutions (that I've read). I've done a bunch of testing with web pages that no size= or width= or other such attributes, and all other browsers respond by sizing everything to fit their window (and resizing to fit if you resize the window). Safari on iPhone seems alone is formatting for a window bigger than the screen, and shrinking the font to unreadability if you "pinch" the page to make it smaller.
The leading hypothesis is that Apple did this intentionally to discourage use of the browser, because they want special iPhone-only apps instead. They've been largely successful at this. But the price, from a user's viewpoint, is that much of the web requires clumsy left-right scrolling to read the pages.
If you find a solution to this, please let us know.
(One solution: Install Opera Mobile. It formats text to fit its screen like browsers are supposed to do. But Apple seems to discourage this for some reason.
Yeah; I'd say that's a pretty good summary.
But it's easy to say such things; to be convincing, it helps to have real-life examples. There are no shortages of examples where people went to hell in a handbasket, knowing full well what they were doing as they did it.
In the last 100 years, Tokyo has sank relative to the sea by 19 feet. Has anyone noticed?
Actually, the opposite effect has happened in Scandinavia. There, they've long had the problem that the land is still rebounding from the loss of the glaciers, and has been rising at the rate of about a meter per century in recent centuries. This means that seaports (which is where most of the people live) have to migrate downhill over time. There are archaeological sites 5, 10 or 20 km from the shore that were active ports 400 or 1000 years ago. But in the last half century, this rising has slowed down due to the rising sea level.
So far, this hasn't fully compensated for the loss of established ports; it has merely slowed the process a bit. But Scandinavians are looking forward to their shoreline being much more stable over the next century or two, and the sea rise accelerates.
Some parts of the world will benefit from the change. Some parts have already benefited. But it's not clear that this makes up for the problems caused at lower latitudes (and altitudes).
Having walked my dogs in -20C weather this morning, it can't get warmer fast enough.
Here in New England (US, not Australia ;-), there are a lot of jokes about how people around here who've heard of global warming think it sounds like a great idea.
Of course, those who live on Cape Cod and the Islands are getting a bit worried ...
CO2 and methane are gasses that prevent thermal energy from escaping into space
The CO2 and methane levels have been rising
Human activity generates CO2 and methane
Thus, there's nothing we can do about it?
Yeah; that sounds about right. We're pretty good at raiding and using resources, but in general we don't give a damn about the waste products of our depredations. Much like most other species, except that we have the intelligence to understand what we're doing. But we don't have the intelligence (or social capabilities) to organize the solutions to the problems that we cause.
History is full of examples of this sort of failures. Thus, historians and archaeologists tell us that the "Fertile Crescent" in the Middle East was a major agricultural land 3000 years ago. The people who built the irrigation systems back then understood how salinification worked. They knew that you have to slightly over-water the land to prevent salt buildups. But in the short term, it was more profitable to maximize the land that was irrigated by using the minimum water required by the crops. The result is the devastated, barren landscape that we see over most of that area now. It was done knowingly, and the humans who did it couldn't organize to stop the process (though they could organize to engage in major wars).
Back in the 1970s and 80s, some researchers did an interesting experiment in that area: They leased a few dozen 2-3 square km plots scattered around the landscape, built goat-proof fences around them, and sat back to watch what happened. A year later, they reported that all these small protected areas were covered with grasses and other herbaceous plants. They suggested that if the grazing animals could be kept penned up for a year, there would be no more deserts in southwest Asia. Did the governments jump on this and eradicate their deserts? You all know the answer to that; you can see it every day in news photos from the area. There's no way humans will ever organize to do that, even when they know the story. (Also, most of the literature is in French, which limits its availability to most of us. ;-)
More recently (and close to home here in the US), back in the 1990s the Corps of Engineers did a series of studies on the levee system in the Mississippi delta. They also did a major simulation (google for "Hurricane Pam") of the effect of a major hurricane on New Orleans. Their reports listed all the points of failure that in fact failed when Katrina hit. Their requests for funding to repair and reinforce the levees were turned down by Congress. Then Katrina hit, and people pretended it was an Act of God. But in fact, they knew in great detail exactly what would happen, and it did happen. They couldn't organize to do what was easily within our abilities to prevent the disaster that they knew was coming.
This is human nature. Oil, coal, and natural gas are resources that we can organize to exploit. The side effects of burning all those hydrocarbons is something that we can't organize to control, even when we understand it. All we an do is debate the issue until the disaster is upon us. And, as in the above examples, it'll be too late then to do what we could have done to prevent what we knew was coming.
Actually, in the salinification/desertification example, it's not too late. It can be done any time, and on any scale from a few square km up. But we can't and won't do it on a large scale. Research proceeds on a small scale. Google for "bocage" plus other agriculture-related terms. The information is there, but it's mostly academic, with no local governments getting involved in solving the problem. And note the two meanings of that word "academic", which explains a lot about our attitude toward big problems that we can't organize to solve.
Bah, everyone knows it's Jan 19, 2038 when the world will end. :-)
Only for those still running on 32-bit systems. For the rest of us, who have moved on to 64-bit machines, the universe will continue to exist for a while longer.
It's similar to the ongoing panic over the Dec 2012 "End of Time" in the Mayan calendar. The actual event is an overflow in the first digit in the 5-digit "long count" date. Using the Mayan base-20 number system, with 3 digits for the year and 2 digits for the day within the year, the high digit is now 12, and the date in question is when the other 4 digits reach their max values. (Today is 12.19.18.0.19.)
For those of us who know the Mayan symbol for 13, it's not big deal; the date just overflows to 13.0.0.0.0. For those who can't count past 13 in Mayan, there could be a problem. Though actually, they'd have a problem earlier, since the other two digits in the year first have to reach 19. You'd think that anyone who could handle the Mayan number for the "last day" would know how to put a 13 in the first digit. But if they can't, well, maybe the world is better off without them.
But I don't know how much those people have been actually taught about the Mayan calendar, so I can't really say why time will end for them. It'll keep going for those of us who can count to 19 (in a Mayan language or in Mayan number symbols ;-).
JFGI ;-) Try "solar system" and "motion" as the search terms.
You can find some of the numbers for the Solar System's orbit at wikipedia. Scan the page for "Solar System". Thus, in the "Sun's location and neighborhood" section, it mentions that our orbital speed around the center of the galaxy is about 220 km/s, roughly in the direction of Vega. At that speed, relativistic effects are measurable, if you have good astronomical instruments, but you probably can't detect the effects with your own senses.
That and retraining government employees is incredibly difficult.
Oh, I dunno about that. For some years, my wife and I have played a game of asking people we meet what computer stuff they use at work, and at home. Almost always they'll tell us that at work they have to use Microsoft stuff, Windows and IE and so on. Then they'll say that at home they have a nice Mac (or two or three), and use both Safari and Firefox for browsing.
This seems especially true in government agencies, though my wife works in medical data processing, and she says it's almost universal there, too. So the conclusion would be that not only are all these workers quite capable of being retrained; they have all retrained themselves without prompting from their employers. Regardless of what they use at work, they prefer to spend their own money on computer systems that are actually friendly and easy to use (and don't constantly get bogged down with malware).
It's likely that the real explanation is just "corporate culture" (which includes government). In both the corporate and government worlds, top management rarely if ever actually touches computers themselves, and is generally abysmally ignorant of things like usability issues. Software compatibility is a poorly-understood geek concept that mostly functions to justify never moving to better software. That culture has long made its computer-related decisions by simply buying from IBM (of which Microsoft is a division, right? ;-) In management circles, "computer" and "IBM machine" have long been synonyms, and everything else is just a toy that no professional manager would bother investigating.
I've heard many cynical comments along these lines from lots of government workers, as well as in the corporate world. I'd conclude that all the talk of difficulty in retraining is simply a red herring. The "workers" are mostly smart enough to handle new computer systems, and this can be verified by asking what they use at home. So blaming their stupidity for the problems is just a coverup for the poor management at the top.
Here in the US, Microsoft has been one of the top "campaign contributors" for more than a decade now. That's probably the main explanation for the pressure inside government to standardize on Microsoft products. Does anyone have numbers on this in Australia?