Do we know enough to know that an X chromosome can't become a Y chromosome?
While that's highly unlikely, it's also a "straw man" that's not at all necessary to the discussion.
It's well known in medical circles that humans and other species sometimes produce XX males and XY females. The details of how it happens aren't quite known yet, but there's some evidence in the scientific literature.
It's true that XX males and XY females tend to be intermediate in their secondary sexual characteristics, though they are often within the "normal" range.
There have been a few disputes over this in professional sports, mostly cases of XY females who are physically larger and stronger than the typical female. When their genetic makeup is discovered, people often try to get them barred from professional sports on the grounds that they're "not really female". So far, the courts have upheld their rights to compete, on the grounds that if you have female reproductive organs, you're legally female, no matter how big or strong you might be. (And there are XX females that are large and strong, too.)
(Anyone know of a case in which an XY female was successfully barred from sports competition? I'd think it has to have happened, but I don't recall reading about it.)
In any case, even if Jesus was parthenogenetically produced, and was an XX male, it wouldn't imply any sort of magical effect was at work. Such things happen in a number of mammals. It also happens in birds, but their genetics make XX individuals male and XYs female. Thus, domestic turkeys are known to occasionally hatch from unfertilized eggs. They are always XX, and they're male. (So maybe Jesus was actually a turkey?;-)
I've always thought this was what the medical rod of Asclepius and caduceus symbols represented. But I never figured out why all the medical people want to crucify snakes. Anyone know?
When someone tries to use these as an implication of causation, then the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" is quite intelligent.
Nah; it requires no more intelligence than a 1-line perl script to generate that reply. Actually, it's doable with a 1-line sed script, which makes it even less a sign of intelligence.
Now if it required something like a 2-line Prolog program, I might be willing to take it to imply some intelligence. But doesn't take even that much processing power to match for a list of thesaurus entries associated with "correlate" and generate a "correlation does not imply causation" reply.
(I sorta like the reply I once say, to the effect that correlation may not mean causation, but it is often the universe's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something interesting going that you might want to study.";-)
... lower population growth has to be a function of generations; it very likely wouldn't happen in a single generation. At least initially there would be a growth in population as parents would continue to have large families.
Actually, experiments done (sometimes unintentionally) in many parts of the world have shown this to not be true. If local laws are changed to block control by the religious moralists and make affordable birth control available to the poor population, the birth rate shows a sudden drastic drop nine months later.
For example, back in the 1970s and 80s, there were some interesting tests of this in a number of different small towns scattered around India. The government allowed the sale of birth-control at affordable prices, with ongoing predictions that it wouldn't affect the birth rate much, because everyone knew that the Indian lower classes liked big families. In every case, the birth rate a year later was much lower than before. When they did the obvious surveys, they found that the belief was almost correct: The people in the towns mostly agreed that it was good for other people to have big families. But hardly anyone wanted that many children themselves.
Time and again, it has been shown that the primary reason for a high birth rate is a local power structure that blocks access to affordable birth control. When this political/religious control ends and birth control becomes available, the birth rate usually plummets.
But how many parts per billion is this mass deficit?
who cares when you are constructing a DEFINITION, not an object?
I'd guess that everyone involved cares, because if the definition doesn't make it possible for the engineer types to actually apply the definition to real objects, the definition will be moot and unusable.
The physics of it all has been known for most of a century, but the (kilo)gram's definition has remained a physical object due to the known difficulties in high-precision construction of masses precise to the desired number of decimal places. It's happening now partly because our ability to do the real-world measurements has surpassed the precision of the physical kilograms masses.
are you going to bitch about the definition of a meter since it uses the distance a photon travels in x/y seconds? I mean... that definition is talking about a perfect vacuum... we don't live in a perfect vacuum...
But we can measure the speed of light to high precision within our atmosphere, and we can measure the atmosphere's index of refraction to high precision. Plug those numbers into the appropriate equation to translate to speed of light in a vacuum.
This is now high-school physics (in some high schools); it's not abstruse stuff limited to a few high-tech labs.
The only real challenge these days is to get Americans to measure themselves - and their roads - in SI units. But we've already achieved the most difficult task: Americans now buy their booze in liters.;-)
No, they didn't. Any manager with even minimal competence understands that the computer industry has always been in a state of rapid change. Nobody with a grain of sense will "standardize" on something that's controlled by another corporation and likely to change in unpredictable ways in the near future. Standardizing on IE was a sign of incompetence; standardizing on one version of IE was (and still is) a sign of utter, hopeless incompetence.
Sensible managers (and I've known a few of them) knew all along that the sane approach has always been to treat the browser arena as highly unstable. Sensible business practice is to plan for the changes that you know will come, and demand that your own web stuff be as generic as possible. It's easy enough to collect a set of browsers and test against all of them. I've done this since the Web became the hot new thing, and so have lots of other people. Not doing this may be common business practice, but it's still a sign of incompetence.
It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
Indeed. And it's a good example of the short-sighted "don't look beyond the current fiscal year" attitude of much of the corporate world. We've known for a couple of centuries that this leads to economic disasters. The people who make corporate decisions like this should be exposed and ridiculed in public. They shouldn't be held up as example of "how things are done".
What I'm waiting for is the discovery of the gene for the belief that genes encode characteristics or behaviors, rather than proteins.;-)
(This has gotta be one of the most egregious of media distortions of scientific results. I wonder why scientists aren't more vocal about the repeated publishing of this sort of idiocy.)
... the liberals will be the first to suggest change, while the conservatives will want things to stay the same.
Except for places like here in the US, where the "conservatives" are the ones pushing for a radical reconstruction of society, by imposing religious rule, eliminating regulation of corporations, eliminating government support for the disabled and elderly, and so on. Meanwhile, the "liberals" are the ones who want to maintain most of the society that we all grew up in, with the First Amendment keeping us free from religious control, continuing of "socialist" programs like Social Security and Medicare, continued monitoring of corporations to ensure they don't poison us all, and so on.
It does seem like the "conservatives" are really the radical reformers these days, while the "liberals" are the ones encouraging preservation and conservation and related conservative ideas.
But I guess it's pretty much universal for politicians to use words with the opposite meaning of what you'll find in the dictionaries.
American Jesus is an ass kicking,... and is leading the charge in Crusade v2.0 at the moment.
I think you mean Crusade 10.0, don't you? The officially numbered crusades run from 1 to 9 (and doesn't count all those branch crusades that have names but not numbers). The American Crusade is clearly a new one, especially since it's a Fundamentalist Protestant crusade, not sponsored or organized by the Catholic Church, so it deserves its own number. And it's effectively an independent development rather than a clone of the earlier Crusades, since the people running this one don't know much if anything of the other Crusades (or any other actual history), and are making it up as they go.
So its number must be at least 10, and maybe higher.
I like Opera which stores its bookmarks online (can access them anywhere, even work).
Zat so? I've been using opera for several years, and I've never even suspected that it could do that. Is it documented somewhere? A quick check in in its Preferences stuff on my Mac and linux systems didn't turn up anything that looked relevant. Of course, it could be there, but I just don't recognize whatever words they use.
I've occasionally wondered if there might be some systematic way to learn about software features that you'd use if you knew about them. So far, the only heuristic I've found is to look for hints in online forums, and ask questions. Or state rashly that app A doesn't have feature F, to encourage people to call you an idiot for not knowing about it, and in the process, give you enough of a hint to find it.;-)
Those are all good points. Actually, I hinted at the complexity of the issue in my overly-simplified bit of history of the adoption of small computers. Since a good deal of the history was people buying such gadgets inside corporations, with department funds, to defeat the control of the company's computer department, the actual situation was a lot more complex. In such cases, which account for a large fraction of the early purchases of "desktop" computers, the machines in question are actually owned by the same corporation that runs the central computer department. It was (and still is) an issue of corporate inter-department rivalry, with the central department wanting control over everyone's equipment, and the other departments wanting control over their own computing. If the central DP department were truly the "service" department that they all claim to be, the rest of the company would never have bought their own computers. The central computer could have done the job much more cheaply and reliably.
But anyone who's ever worked in a corporate environment understands that this is a fantasy. Whatever it's called, a central computing facility becomes a corporate power center that doesn't work in its users' best interests. There is always a power struggle, between the centralized holder of information and the scattered users of that information. The main power the DP-center folks have is withholding or delaying access to data and processing. So the "logic" I described applies there, despite the fact that ultimate ownership is the corporation's. But the power struggle partly arises because of the heirarchical nature of the corporation. And in most corporations ownership is also heirarchical, with equipment sub-owned (to coin a term) by different departments. The central department naturally wants ownership and control over all the equipment, which may be feasible in a small company, but not in a big heirarchical corporation.
Back around 1980, I worked as an outside software consultant at a big corporation (who shall remain nameless here;-) that had the usual big IBM mainframe "owned" by the DP center. The DP-center folks of course viewed us as interlopers and dragged their feet whenever possible. One evening, a bunch of us decides to stay late and "explore" the system's file security. In the morning, we were able to report to upper management that we could read any file on the system. They were overjoyed, and promptly gave us a list of reports that they'd like have. We'd figured out that the DP center was a power center that top management couldn't control, and management was frustrated by the "inability" of the DP people to give them information that they knew was inside the computer. We'd given them back access to their own data that was being held hostage by the DP center, as part of a typical corporate power struggle.
Some time later, we had a small discussion over whether we should inform IBM of how we'd cracked their file system. Our conclusion was a big "Nah!", because it was to our customer's advantage that our exploits continue to work. We'd been hired by top management, not by the DP center, after all. Also, other customers' management would likely pay us for implementing the same sort of "super-user" access to their own data.
My part in the power struggle came about mostly because I added a number of routines to various report generators that compared the data in different databases, and produced a separate "dubious-data" report listing the inconsistencies it found. Most people's first reaction to this was to get very upset, and want to hide that report. Then, often within a week, it would occur to them that it was better if they got the problem report than that management see it, and they started asking if they could get just the dubious-data report as a separate run. Of course, they could. I also wrote the first interactive database-editing tools they'd ever seen, so they could actually sit down at a terminal and correct the errors in th
Re:Linux has the same drag as Mac in business
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In all fairness, try finding -anything- specific at ibm.com.
Ain't that the truth. Though, again in all fairness, it's hardly anything unique to IBM. Commercial web sites are often annoyingly short of detailed information about their products. They go for the flash, but you and I are too dumb to be given details.
Recently, I've been looking around at high-quality DSLR cameras. I've gotten tired of my old one whose manual focus is so complex that by the time I've got it to work, the cute critter I'm trying to photograph has moved on or flown off. If I use the automatic focus, most of the time it's the twigs in front of the critter or the grass in the background that's in focus, not the critter. So I want to know how the manual focus works. This in formation is incredibly difficult to find in the companies' sales info, even the so-called specs. They merely say that they have a manual focus setting, and then go into a flowery description of the marvels of their multi-point automagic focus system.
With one camera, I finally hunted down the details, and it turned out that the camera didn't have the claimed manual focus at all. It had a list of 7 "preset" focal lengths that you could choose from. I wasted a lot of hours hunting down the info that made me cross that one off my list. A lot of cameras' lenses have what looks like focus rings, but if I can find one in a store to test, I find that it's a dummy that doesn't turn; it's just a sort of grip and shock absorber, not a focus mechanism.
The same sort of approach is used with all sorts of products. You and I don't need the details; we just need to buy their product. Even if it turns out not to be what we were looking for, and won't work for our intended applications.
I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.
Heh. I know quite a lot of people who've tried this, and quickly learned the downside of any sort of centralized or "cloud" computing model: If you miss a payment, all your stuff disappears. Sometimes permanently.
And most of the ISPs who provided the early online storage to customers turned out to have contracts saying that putting a file on their server automatically transfers the copyright to the ISP. I know several friends in bands who tried this and learned the hard way that they had assigned the copyrights to all their work to their ISP, who found things that they liked and used in ads. Other people stored pictures of their kids, pets, etc. on "their" web site, and found the ISP using their photos in ads. Remember the fuss when msn.com was caught doing this, and MSN's reps quoted that passage in their contract?
I also have a couple of friends who lost a parent who had been keeping personal info (pics, diaries, etc.) on a hosted site. They were a bit upset to find that after the parent's death, they had no legal access to anything on the site, because the parent hadn't thought to will it to them. And after a few months, the parent's "site" was purged and lost forever.
Going back a bit, one of the original reasons for the rapid adoption of "personal computers" in work environments back in the 1980s was the growing problem of corporate data centers that more and more controlled what employees were permitted to do on the mainframe. Departments learned that if they wanted the computing capability that they needed, the easiest way was with a little computer that the department owned, and which the data center had no control over. This is a continuing battle in corporations everywhere, with no end in sight.
It's an old story. If you don't own the machine(s) that hold your data, you don't own the data, and you have no say in how it may be used. If this means anything to you, you'd be an idiot to trust your data to an organization that views you as a source of income. You need, and will always need, a computer system that you completely control. (And you need it backed up - on your own hardware, not on someone else's.;-)
Funny you should phrase it that way; my main thought while watching the video was "This is a true point-and-drool interface".
It wasn't until the very end that there was a brief glance at a screen that hinted at the existence of some sort of keyboard somewhere. But that didn't last long enough to scare the keyboard-averse, who are presumably the intended audience.
I also noticed a curious line around the edges that make it look like one of those screens that rotates and flips to hide a keyboard on the inside of the other half. Does this gadget have a physical keyboard hidden inside? Or, alternatively, does it open up to show a second keyboard on the other half?
Maybe I should just visit Dell and see if they have any actual info about it. But that might be too close to RTFA, so maybe I shouldn't admit here to every considering doing such a thing.
What features do you feel that [DB X] is missing? Same question for [DB Y]
When reading such questions, we should always be aware of the standard game that is played to show that a particular brand is needed. For any comparison of X vs Y, there is always some feature that X has that Y either doesn't have or does in some very slightly different way. This is always used by supporters of X as proof that X is absolutely needed, and Y simply can't do the job. Reverse X and Y is you're a supporter of X.
We mostly see this as the explanation of why Microsoft software is absolutely needed, and nothing else can do what is needed. But the same reasoning can be and is used to say that anything else is irreplacable.
In this case, if you're using MySQL and find that it's doing everything you need, then it's the perfect system. All other DBs either do things wrong, or don't have some feature implemented exactly as your software expects, or is too slow because of features that you never use. And we see exactly this reasoning from the PostgreSQL folks for why MySQL is crap and only PostgreSQL can do the job right. And, of course, both are ridiculed by the users of Oracle as toy systems that lack certain invaluable features that every real DB absolutely must have (in exactly the Oracle form). Meanwhile, the users of IIS are snickering at it all, because of course their DB has everything exactly right, Oracle is a weird "non-standard" DB, and everything else is just a toy.
This is fairly visible as most of the basis of the "on the Desktop" discussion, but comparing GUI platforms rather than DBs.
And, of course, if you use the phrase "in business", you know that most of the business community never have and never will consider anything not from the IBM/Microsoft axis to be real computer systems. Competing for their attention is ultimately pointless, because without the right logos, they won't even try your stuff. They already know that your stuff is inferior and will cost too much for their people to learn to use. And the "on the Desktop" discussion always seems to be about business environments, so it's ultimately pointless. Until Microsoft or IBM starts pushing linux, it won't be noticed by "business" people. (Yes, IBM supports linux, but try finding it at ibm.com. They support it, but it's hidden in a back closet where most customers will never think to look.;-).
True story. I once had one go off on me because I said I liked the Marx Brothers.
You should get a copy of the "Sure, I'm a Marxist!" t-shirt. They're right there, Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Karl. I'd bet you'd get a lot of attacks from so-called "conservative" political types if you wore that one.
Yeah; I've seen that British use of "saloon" meaning some (unspecified) vehicle, but I have no idea how it could have evolved.
The first example of "libr-" that popped into my head was "libration", which also has no obvious relation to the basic concept of freedom. So I googled "libration etymology". The first thing that google said was "Did you mean: liberation theology"!
I laughed, of course, and then checked out the etymological results. It turns out that "libration" is derived from "libra", i.e., the pound weight. This also makes no sense at all, and the dictionaries don't explain the derivation. I suspect there's a flaky metaphor at work, probably tied in with the concept of balance scales, which do tend to librate a bit before they reach equilibrium (yet another word that's presumably related).
Whether the latin "liber" and "libra" are related, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if they were, but the link isn't exactly obvious.
All sorts of odd things are found when you dig into word derivations. "What were they thinking?" is a common thought while reading about such things.
The open, anyone can start a website 100% accesible to anyon with no special privileges, internet is an accident. It happened while big companies looked away...
Actually, this is seriously wrong. The "open" nature of the Internet was an intentional design from the start, despite its being nearly 100% funded by the military. This wasn't an anomaly or something subversive. It was a direct, conscious response to a recognized problem: The military found themselves using more and more electronics, but electronics from different vendors could hardly communicate with each other. And contrary to the (later formulated) Hanlon's Law/Razor, this incompatibility wasn't due to incompetence; it was intentional malice on the part of the manufacturers, who didn't want their customers to be able to easily work with competitors' equipment. The military had tried standardization, but found that manufacturers were quite good at being incompatible while following standards. An approach was needed that didn't rely on the good will of manufacturers to get compatibility.
So one of the original ARPAnet design goals was a network that would interface to any and all electronic equipment, translate their output into a standard "network" form, send it anywhere, and translate it to the input form required by the recipient. The intention was to defeat the universal desire of manufacturers to be incompatible with their competitors, and make it possible for any equipment anywhere from any company to talk to any other equipment.
And the big companies mostly weren't looking the other way. From the very beginning, they have always tried to defeat this universality of the ARPA/Internet, and trick their customers into a "walled garden" where competitors' equipment wouldn't work right. All along, we've had exactly this same problem. We've discussed it over and over, for decades. We've mostly won the battles, but Internet developers have always been aware that the war hasn't been won. It can't ever be won, as long as there are manufacturers introducing new equipment, and as long as portions of the Internet are owned and operated by companies that consider each other to be competitors. Those manufacturers and comm companies have always tried to establish a local monopoly (walled garden) that they control, and they will continue to do so. We just have to spot their efforts, identify them for what they are, defeat them once again, and reestablish the open communications that was the primary goal of the earliest ARPAnet projects.
(Something that was understood from the start was that there are obvious network security issues, and that these issues can't be solved at the network layer. They have to be solved by end-to-end encryption, which is the only thing that can't be intercepted and used/modified at intermediate nodes. So the military guys did understand that they were building an open system that could be used by anyone. And, back in the 1960s, they understood that this was actually to their benefit, since it would force the security software to solve things the right way, not with short-term kludges or security-via-obscurity.;-)
English is like a macrophage. We eat everything up, but instead of getting rid of it, we re-purpose it in some way.
Exactly. The textbook (or poster child if you prefer) example is the way English twice "borrowed" the French word salon, which just means "room". The first time, it morphed into "saloon", with all its connotations. The second time, the "salon" spelling was kept, and it morphed into something rather different than "saloon". But in both cases, the generic sense of a room was lost in English, and both descendants came to mean a specific sort of commercial establishment.
In a linguistics class I once took, the prof commented that the main English word-formation method was borrowing. Other languages borrow terms from their neighbors occasionally, but English carts off its neighbors' terminology by the truckload.
It's not clear whether we're borrowing "libre" from French or Spanish, but we've already nabbed and repurposed lots of other forms from the same Latin root, so we might as well make off with "libre", too.
We should also keep reminding ourselves that encrypted data is inherently full of false-positives, for any sort of data test you feed it to. Yes, the sane thing to do would be to note that a file is encrypted and thus not amenable to string-comparison testing. But experience shows that this is not the way it'll be done.
I've seen any number of false positives that resulted from scans of binary executables by programs that didn't verify that their data was even vaguely formatted like the expected data. The programmers generally weren't apologetic when the problem was brought to their attention. "You shouldn't be feeding executables to our app" was the usual reply. Of course, the customers generally didn't know what data was being fed to what, because it was all hidden behind the GUI. It can take a lot of passes through the development cycle to get this sort of insanity straightened out in the typical business (or government;-) bureaucracy.
And god forbid if you should get more out of the treatment than the treatment itself! Not unless they can charge you for it, of course.
Don't worry; even if the Medicare crowd wises up on this, it won't matter. By then, the Net Neutrality issue will be settled in the wireless carriers' favor, and they'll be free to make universal their general practice of blocking everything unless you've paid an extra fee for it. So yes, the iPad will still be able to access youtube, but there'll be a paywall inserted by the phone carrier before it will actually work on your iPad.
This should satisfy both the phone companies and the medicare folks. And it'll end all that silliness about helping out "special needs" kids. It'll be expensive enough that only such kids with wealthy parents will be able to afford it. Medicare might even be able to make a special deal with the phone companies, guaranteeing that the price will be especially high for those kids. It's a medical problem, y'know, so every entertainment video and game will have to be tested for a decade at a cost of millions of dollars to ensure that it's Safe and Effective, before it can be allowed into the hands of special-needs kids, and the phone companies will have to be compensated for that extra expense.
I would hope that when specifically testing for availability, the researchers did a little more than drive around and see if their iphone could associate with the ap;)
Yeah, I'd hope so, too. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Actually, with WiFI, it typically takes several seconds for a "connection" to the AP to stabilize. Consider the typical range of 30 or 40 m with WiFi APs, if you're in a moving vehicle, what are the chances you'd still be in range by the time the reply to a TCP message came back?
... presumably that means "with functioning internet access".
Well, I wouldn't bet on that. In my experience, when the connection-state display widget on a screen says 4 bars of signal, it means you have "reliable" messages between your gadget and one relay tower. It doesn't mean you can reliably exchange data with anything beyond that tower. It's merely the level-1 link status.
Does anyone's handset actually test connection to a remote site before showing its "4 bars" status?
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Do we know enough to know that an X chromosome can't become a Y chromosome?
While that's highly unlikely, it's also a "straw man" that's not at all necessary to the discussion.
It's well known in medical circles that humans and other species sometimes produce XX males and XY females. The details of how it happens aren't quite known yet, but there's some evidence in the scientific literature.
It's true that XX males and XY females tend to be intermediate in their secondary sexual characteristics, though they are often within the "normal" range.
There have been a few disputes over this in professional sports, mostly cases of XY females who are physically larger and stronger than the typical female. When their genetic makeup is discovered, people often try to get them barred from professional sports on the grounds that they're "not really female". So far, the courts have upheld their rights to compete, on the grounds that if you have female reproductive organs, you're legally female, no matter how big or strong you might be. (And there are XX females that are large and strong, too.)
(Anyone know of a case in which an XY female was successfully barred from sports competition? I'd think it has to have happened, but I don't recall reading about it.)
In any case, even if Jesus was parthenogenetically produced, and was an XX male, it wouldn't imply any sort of magical effect was at work. Such things happen in a number of mammals. It also happens in birds, but their genetics make XX individuals male and XYs female. Thus, domestic turkeys are known to occasionally hatch from unfertilized eggs. They are always XX, and they're male. (So maybe Jesus was actually a turkey? ;-)
How do you crucify a snake, anyway?
I've always thought this was what the medical rod of Asclepius and caduceus symbols represented. But I never figured out why all the medical people want to crucify snakes. Anyone know?
When someone tries to use these as an implication of causation, then the phrase "correlation does not imply causation" is quite intelligent.
Nah; it requires no more intelligence than a 1-line perl script to generate that reply. Actually, it's doable with a 1-line sed script, which makes it even less a sign of intelligence.
Now if it required something like a 2-line Prolog program, I might be willing to take it to imply some intelligence. But doesn't take even that much processing power to match for a list of thesaurus entries associated with "correlate" and generate a "correlation does not imply causation" reply.
(I sorta like the reply I once say, to the effect that correlation may not mean causation, but it is often the universe's way of saying "Hey, look over here; there's something interesting going that you might want to study." ;-)
Actually, experiments done (sometimes unintentionally) in many parts of the world have shown this to not be true. If local laws are changed to block control by the religious moralists and make affordable birth control available to the poor population, the birth rate shows a sudden drastic drop nine months later.
For example, back in the 1970s and 80s, there were some interesting tests of this in a number of different small towns scattered around India. The government allowed the sale of birth-control at affordable prices, with ongoing predictions that it wouldn't affect the birth rate much, because everyone knew that the Indian lower classes liked big families. In every case, the birth rate a year later was much lower than before. When they did the obvious surveys, they found that the belief was almost correct: The people in the towns mostly agreed that it was good for other people to have big families. But hardly anyone wanted that many children themselves.
Time and again, it has been shown that the primary reason for a high birth rate is a local power structure that blocks access to affordable birth control. When this political/religious control ends and birth control becomes available, the birth rate usually plummets.
I'd guess that everyone involved cares, because if the definition doesn't make it possible for the engineer types to actually apply the definition to real objects, the definition will be moot and unusable.
The physics of it all has been known for most of a century, but the (kilo)gram's definition has remained a physical object due to the known difficulties in high-precision construction of masses precise to the desired number of decimal places. It's happening now partly because our ability to do the real-world measurements has surpassed the precision of the physical kilograms masses.
But we can measure the speed of light to high precision within our atmosphere, and we can measure the atmosphere's index of refraction to high precision. Plug those numbers into the appropriate equation to translate to speed of light in a vacuum.
This is now high-school physics (in some high schools); it's not abstruse stuff limited to a few high-tech labs.
The only real challenge these days is to get Americans to measure themselves - and their roads - in SI units. But we've already achieved the most difficult task: Americans now buy their booze in liters. ;-)
Corporations had to settle on something.
No, they didn't. Any manager with even minimal competence understands that the computer industry has always been in a state of rapid change. Nobody with a grain of sense will "standardize" on something that's controlled by another corporation and likely to change in unpredictable ways in the near future. Standardizing on IE was a sign of incompetence; standardizing on one version of IE was (and still is) a sign of utter, hopeless incompetence.
Sensible managers (and I've known a few of them) knew all along that the sane approach has always been to treat the browser arena as highly unstable. Sensible business practice is to plan for the changes that you know will come, and demand that your own web stuff be as generic as possible. It's easy enough to collect a set of browsers and test against all of them. I've done this since the Web became the hot new thing, and so have lots of other people. Not doing this may be common business practice, but it's still a sign of incompetence.
It was just less hassle all around to go with IE at the time.
Indeed. And it's a good example of the short-sighted "don't look beyond the current fiscal year" attitude of much of the corporate world. We've known for a couple of centuries that this leads to economic disasters. The people who make corporate decisions like this should be exposed and ridiculed in public. They shouldn't be held up as example of "how things are done".
... every time I read a story like this, I want the good guys to be in charge.
So do most of us. We just disagree over who the "good guys" are.
IMNSHO, a guy who want to impose his/her religious beliefs on me (or my wife or daughter) isn't a "good guy".
(And yes, I'm one of those who regularly use "guy" to refer to both males and females. ;-)
What I'm waiting for is the discovery of the gene for the belief that genes encode characteristics or behaviors, rather than proteins. ;-)
(This has gotta be one of the most egregious of media distortions of scientific results. I wonder why scientists aren't more vocal about the repeated publishing of this sort of idiocy.)
... the liberals will be the first to suggest change, while the conservatives will want things to stay the same.
Except for places like here in the US, where the "conservatives" are the ones pushing for a radical reconstruction of society, by imposing religious rule, eliminating regulation of corporations, eliminating government support for the disabled and elderly, and so on. Meanwhile, the "liberals" are the ones who want to maintain most of the society that we all grew up in, with the First Amendment keeping us free from religious control, continuing of "socialist" programs like Social Security and Medicare, continued monitoring of corporations to ensure they don't poison us all, and so on.
It does seem like the "conservatives" are really the radical reformers these days, while the "liberals" are the ones encouraging preservation and conservation and related conservative ideas.
But I guess it's pretty much universal for politicians to use words with the opposite meaning of what you'll find in the dictionaries.
American Jesus is an ass kicking, ... and is leading the charge in Crusade v2.0 at the moment.
I think you mean Crusade 10.0, don't you? The officially numbered crusades run from 1 to 9 (and doesn't count all those branch crusades that have names but not numbers). The American Crusade is clearly a new one, especially since it's a Fundamentalist Protestant crusade, not sponsored or organized by the Catholic Church, so it deserves its own number. And it's effectively an independent development rather than a clone of the earlier Crusades, since the people running this one don't know much if anything of the other Crusades (or any other actual history), and are making it up as they go.
So its number must be at least 10, and maybe higher.
Thanks for the pointer (and the keyword); it looks like something worth experimenting with.
(And you didn't even call me an idiot for not knowing it. ;-)
So far, I've put off playing with FF4 due to a shortage of time and a surplus of other things to play with, but I'll probably try it sometime soon.
I like Opera which stores its bookmarks online (can access them anywhere, even work).
Zat so? I've been using opera for several years, and I've never even suspected that it could do that. Is it documented somewhere? A quick check in in its Preferences stuff on my Mac and linux systems didn't turn up anything that looked relevant. Of course, it could be there, but I just don't recognize whatever words they use.
I've occasionally wondered if there might be some systematic way to learn about software features that you'd use if you knew about them. So far, the only heuristic I've found is to look for hints in online forums, and ask questions. Or state rashly that app A doesn't have feature F, to encourage people to call you an idiot for not knowing about it, and in the process, give you enough of a hint to find it. ;-)
Those are all good points. Actually, I hinted at the complexity of the issue in my overly-simplified bit of history of the adoption of small computers. Since a good deal of the history was people buying such gadgets inside corporations, with department funds, to defeat the control of the company's computer department, the actual situation was a lot more complex. In such cases, which account for a large fraction of the early purchases of "desktop" computers, the machines in question are actually owned by the same corporation that runs the central computer department. It was (and still is) an issue of corporate inter-department rivalry, with the central department wanting control over everyone's equipment, and the other departments wanting control over their own computing. If the central DP department were truly the "service" department that they all claim to be, the rest of the company would never have bought their own computers. The central computer could have done the job much more cheaply and reliably.
But anyone who's ever worked in a corporate environment understands that this is a fantasy. Whatever it's called, a central computing facility becomes a corporate power center that doesn't work in its users' best interests. There is always a power struggle, between the centralized holder of information and the scattered users of that information. The main power the DP-center folks have is withholding or delaying access to data and processing. So the "logic" I described applies there, despite the fact that ultimate ownership is the corporation's. But the power struggle partly arises because of the heirarchical nature of the corporation. And in most corporations ownership is also heirarchical, with equipment sub-owned (to coin a term) by different departments. The central department naturally wants ownership and control over all the equipment, which may be feasible in a small company, but not in a big heirarchical corporation.
Back around 1980, I worked as an outside software consultant at a big corporation (who shall remain nameless here ;-) that had the usual big IBM mainframe "owned" by the DP center. The DP-center folks of course viewed us as interlopers and dragged their feet whenever possible. One evening, a bunch of us decides to stay late and "explore" the system's file security. In the morning, we were able to report to upper management that we could read any file on the system. They were overjoyed, and promptly gave us a list of reports that they'd like have. We'd figured out that the DP center was a power center that top management couldn't control, and management was frustrated by the "inability" of the DP people to give them information that they knew was inside the computer. We'd given them back access to their own data that was being held hostage by the DP center, as part of a typical corporate power struggle.
Some time later, we had a small discussion over whether we should inform IBM of how we'd cracked their file system. Our conclusion was a big "Nah!", because it was to our customer's advantage that our exploits continue to work. We'd been hired by top management, not by the DP center, after all. Also, other customers' management would likely pay us for implementing the same sort of "super-user" access to their own data.
My part in the power struggle came about mostly because I added a number of routines to various report generators that compared the data in different databases, and produced a separate "dubious-data" report listing the inconsistencies it found. Most people's first reaction to this was to get very upset, and want to hide that report. Then, often within a week, it would occur to them that it was better if they got the problem report than that management see it, and they started asking if they could get just the dubious-data report as a separate run. Of course, they could. I also wrote the first interactive database-editing tools they'd ever seen, so they could actually sit down at a terminal and correct the errors in th
In all fairness, try finding -anything- specific at ibm.com.
Ain't that the truth. Though, again in all fairness, it's hardly anything unique to IBM. Commercial web sites are often annoyingly short of detailed information about their products. They go for the flash, but you and I are too dumb to be given details.
Recently, I've been looking around at high-quality DSLR cameras. I've gotten tired of my old one whose manual focus is so complex that by the time I've got it to work, the cute critter I'm trying to photograph has moved on or flown off. If I use the automatic focus, most of the time it's the twigs in front of the critter or the grass in the background that's in focus, not the critter. So I want to know how the manual focus works. This in formation is incredibly difficult to find in the companies' sales info, even the so-called specs. They merely say that they have a manual focus setting, and then go into a flowery description of the marvels of their multi-point automagic focus system.
With one camera, I finally hunted down the details, and it turned out that the camera didn't have the claimed manual focus at all. It had a list of 7 "preset" focal lengths that you could choose from. I wasted a lot of hours hunting down the info that made me cross that one off my list. A lot of cameras' lenses have what looks like focus rings, but if I can find one in a store to test, I find that it's a dummy that doesn't turn; it's just a sort of grip and shock absorber, not a focus mechanism.
The same sort of approach is used with all sorts of products. You and I don't need the details; we just need to buy their product. Even if it turns out not to be what we were looking for, and won't work for our intended applications.
I seem to remember software company executives in the 90's drooling over the thought that you'd pay them a monthly fee to access their word processor and photo editor apps from your thin client at home.
Heh. I know quite a lot of people who've tried this, and quickly learned the downside of any sort of centralized or "cloud" computing model: If you miss a payment, all your stuff disappears. Sometimes permanently.
And most of the ISPs who provided the early online storage to customers turned out to have contracts saying that putting a file on their server automatically transfers the copyright to the ISP. I know several friends in bands who tried this and learned the hard way that they had assigned the copyrights to all their work to their ISP, who found things that they liked and used in ads. Other people stored pictures of their kids, pets, etc. on "their" web site, and found the ISP using their photos in ads. Remember the fuss when msn.com was caught doing this, and MSN's reps quoted that passage in their contract?
I also have a couple of friends who lost a parent who had been keeping personal info (pics, diaries, etc.) on a hosted site. They were a bit upset to find that after the parent's death, they had no legal access to anything on the site, because the parent hadn't thought to will it to them. And after a few months, the parent's "site" was purged and lost forever.
Going back a bit, one of the original reasons for the rapid adoption of "personal computers" in work environments back in the 1980s was the growing problem of corporate data centers that more and more controlled what employees were permitted to do on the mainframe. Departments learned that if they wanted the computing capability that they needed, the easiest way was with a little computer that the department owned, and which the data center had no control over. This is a continuing battle in corporations everywhere, with no end in sight.
It's an old story. If you don't own the machine(s) that hold your data, you don't own the data, and you have no say in how it may be used. If this means anything to you, you'd be an idiot to trust your data to an organization that views you as a source of income. You need, and will always need, a computer system that you completely control. (And you need it backed up - on your own hardware, not on someone else's. ;-)
Funny you should phrase it that way; my main thought while watching the video was "This is a true point-and-drool interface".
It wasn't until the very end that there was a brief glance at a screen that hinted at the existence of some sort of keyboard somewhere. But that didn't last long enough to scare the keyboard-averse, who are presumably the intended audience.
I also noticed a curious line around the edges that make it look like one of those screens that rotates and flips to hide a keyboard on the inside of the other half. Does this gadget have a physical keyboard hidden inside? Or, alternatively, does it open up to show a second keyboard on the other half?
Maybe I should just visit Dell and see if they have any actual info about it. But that might be too close to RTFA, so maybe I shouldn't admit here to every considering doing such a thing.
What features do you feel that [DB X] is missing? Same question for [DB Y]
When reading such questions, we should always be aware of the standard game that is played to show that a particular brand is needed. For any comparison of X vs Y, there is always some feature that X has that Y either doesn't have or does in some very slightly different way. This is always used by supporters of X as proof that X is absolutely needed, and Y simply can't do the job. Reverse X and Y is you're a supporter of X.
We mostly see this as the explanation of why Microsoft software is absolutely needed, and nothing else can do what is needed. But the same reasoning can be and is used to say that anything else is irreplacable.
In this case, if you're using MySQL and find that it's doing everything you need, then it's the perfect system. All other DBs either do things wrong, or don't have some feature implemented exactly as your software expects, or is too slow because of features that you never use. And we see exactly this reasoning from the PostgreSQL folks for why MySQL is crap and only PostgreSQL can do the job right. And, of course, both are ridiculed by the users of Oracle as toy systems that lack certain invaluable features that every real DB absolutely must have (in exactly the Oracle form). Meanwhile, the users of IIS are snickering at it all, because of course their DB has everything exactly right, Oracle is a weird "non-standard" DB, and everything else is just a toy.
This is fairly visible as most of the basis of the "on the Desktop" discussion, but comparing GUI platforms rather than DBs.
And, of course, if you use the phrase "in business", you know that most of the business community never have and never will consider anything not from the IBM/Microsoft axis to be real computer systems. Competing for their attention is ultimately pointless, because without the right logos, they won't even try your stuff. They already know that your stuff is inferior and will cost too much for their people to learn to use. And the "on the Desktop" discussion always seems to be about business environments, so it's ultimately pointless. Until Microsoft or IBM starts pushing linux, it won't be noticed by "business" people. (Yes, IBM supports linux, but try finding it at ibm.com. They support it, but it's hidden in a back closet where most customers will never think to look. ;-).
True story. I once had one go off on me because I said I liked the Marx Brothers.
You should get a copy of the "Sure, I'm a Marxist!" t-shirt. They're right there, Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Karl. I'd bet you'd get a lot of attacks from so-called "conservative" political types if you wore that one.
Yeah; I've seen that British use of "saloon" meaning some (unspecified) vehicle, but I have no idea how it could have evolved.
The first example of "libr-" that popped into my head was "libration", which also has no obvious relation to the basic concept of freedom. So I googled "libration etymology". The first thing that google said was "Did you mean: liberation theology"!
I laughed, of course, and then checked out the etymological results. It turns out that "libration" is derived from "libra", i.e., the pound weight. This also makes no sense at all, and the dictionaries don't explain the derivation. I suspect there's a flaky metaphor at work, probably tied in with the concept of balance scales, which do tend to librate a bit before they reach equilibrium (yet another word that's presumably related).
Whether the latin "liber" and "libra" are related, I don't know. I wouldn't be surprised if they were, but the link isn't exactly obvious.
All sorts of odd things are found when you dig into word derivations. "What were they thinking?" is a common thought while reading about such things.
The open, anyone can start a website 100% accesible to anyon with no special privileges, internet is an accident. It happened while big companies looked away ...
Actually, this is seriously wrong. The "open" nature of the Internet was an intentional design from the start, despite its being nearly 100% funded by the military. This wasn't an anomaly or something subversive. It was a direct, conscious response to a recognized problem: The military found themselves using more and more electronics, but electronics from different vendors could hardly communicate with each other. And contrary to the (later formulated) Hanlon's Law/Razor, this incompatibility wasn't due to incompetence; it was intentional malice on the part of the manufacturers, who didn't want their customers to be able to easily work with competitors' equipment. The military had tried standardization, but found that manufacturers were quite good at being incompatible while following standards. An approach was needed that didn't rely on the good will of manufacturers to get compatibility.
So one of the original ARPAnet design goals was a network that would interface to any and all electronic equipment, translate their output into a standard "network" form, send it anywhere, and translate it to the input form required by the recipient. The intention was to defeat the universal desire of manufacturers to be incompatible with their competitors, and make it possible for any equipment anywhere from any company to talk to any other equipment.
And the big companies mostly weren't looking the other way. From the very beginning, they have always tried to defeat this universality of the ARPA/Internet, and trick their customers into a "walled garden" where competitors' equipment wouldn't work right. All along, we've had exactly this same problem. We've discussed it over and over, for decades. We've mostly won the battles, but Internet developers have always been aware that the war hasn't been won. It can't ever be won, as long as there are manufacturers introducing new equipment, and as long as portions of the Internet are owned and operated by companies that consider each other to be competitors. Those manufacturers and comm companies have always tried to establish a local monopoly (walled garden) that they control, and they will continue to do so. We just have to spot their efforts, identify them for what they are, defeat them once again, and reestablish the open communications that was the primary goal of the earliest ARPAnet projects.
(Something that was understood from the start was that there are obvious network security issues, and that these issues can't be solved at the network layer. They have to be solved by end-to-end encryption, which is the only thing that can't be intercepted and used/modified at intermediate nodes. So the military guys did understand that they were building an open system that could be used by anyone. And, back in the 1960s, they understood that this was actually to their benefit, since it would force the security software to solve things the right way, not with short-term kludges or security-via-obscurity. ;-)
English is like a macrophage. We eat everything up, but instead of getting rid of it, we re-purpose it in some way.
Exactly. The textbook (or poster child if you prefer) example is the way English twice "borrowed" the French word salon, which just means "room". The first time, it morphed into "saloon", with all its connotations. The second time, the "salon" spelling was kept, and it morphed into something rather different than "saloon". But in both cases, the generic sense of a room was lost in English, and both descendants came to mean a specific sort of commercial establishment.
In a linguistics class I once took, the prof commented that the main English word-formation method was borrowing. Other languages borrow terms from their neighbors occasionally, but English carts off its neighbors' terminology by the truckload.
It's not clear whether we're borrowing "libre" from French or Spanish, but we've already nabbed and repurposed lots of other forms from the same Latin root, so we might as well make off with "libre", too.
We should also keep reminding ourselves that encrypted data is inherently full of false-positives, for any sort of data test you feed it to. Yes, the sane thing to do would be to note that a file is encrypted and thus not amenable to string-comparison testing. But experience shows that this is not the way it'll be done.
I've seen any number of false positives that resulted from scans of binary executables by programs that didn't verify that their data was even vaguely formatted like the expected data. The programmers generally weren't apologetic when the problem was brought to their attention. "You shouldn't be feeding executables to our app" was the usual reply. Of course, the customers generally didn't know what data was being fed to what, because it was all hidden behind the GUI. It can take a lot of passes through the development cycle to get this sort of insanity straightened out in the typical business (or government ;-) bureaucracy.
And god forbid if you should get more out of the treatment than the treatment itself! Not unless they can charge you for it, of course.
Don't worry; even if the Medicare crowd wises up on this, it won't matter. By then, the Net Neutrality issue will be settled in the wireless carriers' favor, and they'll be free to make universal their general practice of blocking everything unless you've paid an extra fee for it. So yes, the iPad will still be able to access youtube, but there'll be a paywall inserted by the phone carrier before it will actually work on your iPad.
This should satisfy both the phone companies and the medicare folks. And it'll end all that silliness about helping out "special needs" kids. It'll be expensive enough that only such kids with wealthy parents will be able to afford it. Medicare might even be able to make a special deal with the phone companies, guaranteeing that the price will be especially high for those kids. It's a medical problem, y'know, so every entertainment video and game will have to be tested for a decade at a cost of millions of dollars to ensure that it's Safe and Effective, before it can be allowed into the hands of special-needs kids, and the phone companies will have to be compensated for that extra expense.
(I hope I'm just joking ... ;-)
I would hope that when specifically testing for availability, the researchers did a little more than drive around and see if their iphone could associate with the ap ;)
Yeah, I'd hope so, too. But I wouldn't bet on it.
Actually, with WiFI, it typically takes several seconds for a "connection" to the AP to stabilize. Consider the typical range of 30 or 40 m with WiFi APs, if you're in a moving vehicle, what are the chances you'd still be in range by the time the reply to a TCP message came back?
... presumably that means "with functioning internet access".
Well, I wouldn't bet on that. In my experience, when the connection-state display widget on a screen says 4 bars of signal, it means you have "reliable" messages between your gadget and one relay tower. It doesn't mean you can reliably exchange data with anything beyond that tower. It's merely the level-1 link status.
Does anyone's handset actually test connection to a remote site before showing its "4 bars" status?