Seriously, consider that US owns majority of the Internet.
Actually, this is wrong in an important way. That majority of the Internet (or more accurately, the long lines and routers) is not owned by the US, but rather by US corporations. Even the US military's internal Internet clone runs mostly on lines owned and operated by corporations.
And those corporations are at best only nominally American. In reality, they are all international corporations, with interests independent of the US, and only minimally controlled by the US government. It's widely believed in the US that the big corporations have more control over the US government than that government has over them.
This isn't necessarily a comforting observation. Most of the core of the Internet is in effect owned and controlled by big organizations that are independent of any democratic or other social controls, and openly proclaim that their only interest is in their shareholders' profits. This should probably make us even more nervous than the thought that it's all American controlled. Americans are a disorganized, chaotic mob that fight each other more than they fight outsiders. Those giant corporations are much better organized, and have a history of effectively targeting their enemies (i.e., smaller corporations) and either killing them or eating them alive.
At least the newspaper has the decency to admit when it's over. It comes with a sports section.
Funny you should mention that. I've been using google news for a while, and usually have a firefox window open with several news.google.com tabs. Recently, since I'm living in New England (the one in the US, not in Australia;-), I told google news to add a "New England" news tab to the set. Most of the time, this tab has almost nothing but sports news. I have no idea why. There's lots of local news hereabouts, and you can find it in the web sites of a lot of local "papers", but you don't see much of it in google's New England news.
Could it be that all the local news sources are blocking googlebots? If so, why would they do something that keeps people from finding them? It seems more likely that there's something weird going on inside google that prevents them from recognizing non-sport news related to this geographical area.
We might also compare it to other proclaimed "wars".
Thus, here in the US, we've been fighting a "war on drugs" for decades now. As a result, we have a larger percent of the population in jail than any other country, most of them charged with drug-related crimes. We've lost a lot of legal protections we used to have, since an anonymous drug charge can lead to our homes being invaded without warrant and our property being confiscated without trial. And the drug "problem" is slowly getting worse. (Or at least the official keepers of the statistics say it is, but that might just be to maintain the justification for the "war".)
Recently I heard of a push for a "war on obesity", which is a growing problem in the US. That'll probably result in us all getting fatter.
But it doesn't always work that way. Back in the 1960s, we had a short "war on poverty". Then one day, a lot of poor people started publicly asking where they could go to surrender. The hostilities ended very quickly after that, though I never heard of any government spokesperson who publicly answered the question. We certainly still have a good number of poor people. I always sorta thought they should have gotten together and demanded armistice talks, but that didn't happen, either.
One problem with the "war" metaphor is that you sorta expect it to be a handy excuse to go out and kill people. BSo far, it hasn't been possible to kill people via computer. But this might be changing. The medical industry is slowly getting computerized, and is learning to use the Net. And our cars are rapidly becoming computerized and networked. So it'll probably soon be possible for a government agency to reach out electronically and interfere with the equipment keeping people alive in hospitals or at home, or cause our cars to go berserk at highway speeds. The Toyota problems might be an early test of this.
Stay tuned. We may soon see what a "cyber-war" brings us. Maybe, like the war on drugs, it'll bring us lots of imprisonment and auto accidents, and also more computers. Maybe it'll implement a Final Solution for dealing with the expenses of elderly people and military retirees on computerized life support. We'll see. Or at least the ones of us who survive will see.
So what's this article doing under "hardware"? All of the so-called "cults" in both articles are centered around specific software. And scanning the discussion supports this, since "hardware" is a relatively rare string in the rapidly growing page.
Is there a clean way with the/. software to unobtrusively reclassify an article and its discussion? Though I suppose we don't have a "cult" classification. Maybe we should.
Yeah, I think TMTOWTDI might be a big part of the "problem" that prevents perl from becoming a cult. Another, which sorta surprised me when it started happening to me, is that there are a lot of companies that actually look for "perl" on resumes (and think it's a good thing;-). When I first learned perl back in the early 90s, I never thought it would ever help me get a job; I just thought it looked like something practical. When people started using it and saying how useful it was, I was afraid for a while that perl would reach cult status. But it doesn't seem to have happened. It's just a widely-used, practical tool, that's now part of the default libraries on all but MS systems (and is even found there with some packaged distros).
Also, I don't think I've ever met anyone who considers perl to be their primary language. I don't, even though it's probably the language that I use the most these days.
But I do keep running into situations where I find myself muttering "This would be so much easier if I could just resolve a prolog expression or use a Snobol4 pattern now." We can all dream, I suppose.;-)
... Which brings me to my idea of reverse subscription. Spam everyone with free papers daily. Advertise that you will stop bringing them for a monthly fee.
Heh. It'd be fun if a newspaper company tried that.
My favorite comment on this issue is that nobody every bought a newspaper because they wanted the paper. This point seems to be missed by most people who write about this topic.
Actually, we have long had a use for newspapers in our house. Because of my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet birds. They're small parrots, actually, and as usual we use newspaper to line their cages. After we finally cancelled our subscription to the local newpaper of note (the Boston Globe), we were at first worried about finding good cage lining. But the free advertising that we get in the mailbox is partly in newsprint format, and we find that sufficient for our cage-lining needs. So we never actually needed the paper, after all. So far, there's no size that ads on cheap paper will ever die out.
As for news, it's getting to be pretty obvious that electronic distribution is far superior to print. Of course, you have to have the sense to understand that not all news is reliable, and to read every story with a certain degree of skepticism. This problem is really helped by the ease with which one can pick out keywords and feed them to a news-search site to get multiple versions of the story with different biases. You can't really do that with printed news, but it's fairly easy for anyone with minimal familiarity with web search sites.
Needless to say, news.google.com is a useful resource here.
Now if slashdot's search thingy worked better than it does...
... silent water is pretty damn flat. If you got a decently sized lake and no wind you can fairly easily show it curves in the middle.
In large lakes such as the North American Great Lakes, you can easily see one of the classical visible signs of the curvature: As you watch a ship moving away from you, you can see it disappear from the bottom up, and approaching ships appear from the top down. Moving around the shore shows the same phenomenon everywhere, which is easily understood by even the dumbest sailor (though maybe not many theologians;-) to indicate the spherical nature of the surface.
There was a cute puzzle based on this in Scientific American some years back. The problem was: Using only technology available to the classical Roman and Greek engineers, and standing in one place, measure the size of the Earth.
The answer turned out to be: Get a surveyor's transit (or any of the similar tools that the ancients used), and go to a shore where you can't see the land on the other side. Do this on a very calm day, so there are no waves on the water's surface. Measure the angle between the horizon and your plumb line, with the plumb bob just barely touching the water. The triangle from the transit to the horizon, then to the center of the Earth, then back to your transit is a right triangle, and you've just measured the larger of its two "small" angles. Measure as precisely as you can the height (H) of your transit above the water. If the Earth's radius is R, R/(R+H) is the cosine of the angle you just measured. Solve for R.
The article pointed out that a classical Roman engineer could have used this method to get within about 5% of the Earth's correct size, which was about as good as the other methods that were available to ancients such as Eratosthenes. The main limitation would probably have been their ability to accurately measure the distance H. (Actually, I'm not too clear on the accuracy of their trig tables. Anyone know?) (And they probably wouldn't have done the calculation using Roman numerals.;-)
We should be pointing out again that people have rarely bought a newspaper because they wanted the paper. If the point of this is to subsidize printing newspapers, then it's not a news-related bill at all. It's a bill to subsidize the killing of trees.
This might be more acceptable if it specifically subsidized non-print news distribution, e.g. via the Internet. That might solve the actual problem, which is that the newspapers are being killed by electronic news distribution.
There is plenty of precedent for this, of course. They go by initials like BBC and NPR, which started life as government subsidies to broadcast news sources. Of course, "news" should be interpreted rather liberally in these cases, since they also subsidized things like music, intellectual discussions, etc. But the general idea did work to a great degree. Stuff such as news and various intellectual pursuits that weren't very successful commercially did get better support and developed into an important part of our societies.
But subsidizing print publication of such things isn't what we need these days. We need to be encouraging the forward-looking organizations that are trying to supply such things via non-print distribution systems.
So spread the news: We didn't buy newspapers for the paper. We don't want the paper now (unless we have a lot of bird cages to line;-). We want the news easily available, not the paper.
The only definition of a species is that two organisms that cannot mate are, by definition, different species.
To illustrate the subtleties in the actual definition(s) used by biologists, a prof in a class I was in wrote a definition very much like the above, and asked the class "What's wrong with this definition?" He was impressed when I spoke up and said "According to that definition, you and I are not the same species." We were (and probably still are;-) both male, so he just grinned and said "Ya got it." Funny thing was that a good percentage of the class still had a puzzled looks on their faces, so he had to explain to them what I'd just said.
He later mentioned that there are other important problems with such definitions. One is that people generally want "the same X as" to be a transitive relation. But Ma Nature throws monkey wrenches into such things. Thus, the domestic dog Canis familiaris can interbreed with wild wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals can't interbreed (or rather, they can, but the few offspring are sterile). So dogs are the same species as wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals are different species. There are many examples like this.
A more subtle sort of example is what are sometimes called "range species", in which matings of critters not too far apart are fertile, but when the distance gets above some threshold, fertile hybrids are no longer possible. This happens in a lot of shoreline species.
We've had a couple of centuries to work out such ideas, and biologists have been fairly successful at dealing with this fairly important concept. But you need more carefully worded definitions than the above.
If you want to read about an especially difficult "species" distinction, google for the results of mating lions with tigers. That should convince anyone how tricky it is to get the definition right.
Last I checked, this was a government by the People for the People,...
Nah; it's a government of the Corporations for the Corporations. Unless you have sufficient spare cash to match their "campaign contributions", you don't count.
(And it doesn't really matter that the "government by the People for the People" phrase is an Americanism; this pretty much applies to most of the governments in the world. You may have a voice with your local government, if it's too small and unimportant to attract corporate campaign contributions, but you probably have little influence above that level.)
It's also illegal in countries with simple basic criminal laws against fraud. No need for "regulatory systems".
Illegal if the victim has the funding to challenge a megacorporation in court, and pay for the decade or more of delaying courtroom tactics, after which (if they get the right judge) they can collect damages.
For the rest of the population, those who would be bankrupted by any attempt to prosecute a megacorporation, a "regulatory system" works a whole lot better. When it works at all, of course.
Heh. Too bad I can't moderate replies to my own messages; I'd give you an "insightful" for that one!;-)
Though I might comment that my wife does more than browse facebook on her iMac. She also reads Andrew Sullivan and Perez Hilton, and she has a list of youtube favorites that you wouldn't believe.
(She's also involved with a number of tech discussion forums, but we can casually ignore those, since they violate the stereotype.;-)
Actually, RedHat and Apple both tried to get some employees to use Microsoft computers and phones, so that they'd have people on staff that were familiar with the MS products. But most the employees flatly refused. The few that went along with the requests also quietly updated their resumes, and quit after a month or two. This can be really frustrating if you're seriously trying to test your equipment against the other major products on the market.;-)
I recently left IBM, but while I was there, there was considerable effort to eliminate M$ products.... Obviously IBM has a love for Linux,...
If so, the marketing folks haven't heard of it. I just checked the "shop for..." section at ibm.com, and looked through their "personal computers" stuff for a linux machine. I couldn't find any page that contained the string "linux" anywhere. Every machine I saw had "Microsoft Windows..." as the installed OS, with no option for anything else. This has been true for the several years that people have been claiming that IBM now supports linux. It's a funny sort of "support" that doesn't entail any mention of the supported product in the sales or configuration pages.
(I suppose there might be an option of a linux machine somewhere at ibm.com, but in 10 or 15 minutes of looking for it, I didn't stumble across it. Anyone know offhand where it might be hidden?)
Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from 'quite senior levels,' one employee said. 'Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,' said another employee."
So what they'll do is get a new linux machine, and install Windows as a "guest" OS in a second partition. It's not that hard these days, and google is reputed to have lots of smart people.
Similarly, my wife telecommutes half time, and is required to run Windows XP at home. She talked to the nice folks at the Apple Store, who explained how to set her Mac up to run virtual OSs, and installed XP in a virtual partition. It works fine. She has since taught a few others at work to do the same, and they're all pretty happy with being able to run a real OS at home and only fire up the Windows that they all hate when they need to do some "work". She gave me her castoff Windows box, which is sitting in the corner running Debian linux and functioning as our firewall/gateway/server machine (and no doubt still listed as another sale to a satisfied Windows customer by MS's bean counters).
And all this is nothing at very new, as far as the computer industry is concerned. Back in 1980, I had a job at a company that mostly used their big IBM mainframe, while the engineers were playing around with unix on some of those funny new "minicomputers". I'd worked on both, so I had the fun of getting together with some Amdahl folks, who delivered their unix that ran on top of VM. We installed it (over a lot of dead IBMer bodies;-), so that the engineering staff could run their stuff on the mainframe. After a while, the big 360 machine with VM was running at least 10 different OSs simultaneously, with each group using the OS that best fit their needs. Granted, there were lots of fanboys who thought their OS was the one that everyone else should be using, but we just ignored them and went about our jobs. Now it's 30 years later, and the "personal computer" part of the industry is discovering this fantastic new idea called "virtual" computing that lets you run more than one OS at the same time...
I wonder how the typographical types like Knuth and the graphics arts types like Tufte would react to the idea of not knowing how their pages will render.
They generally haven't tackled the problem that HTML was designed for: displaying in a usable form in windows on displays of different sizes, shapes, resolutions, and color capabilities. Most "typographical" standards start with the assumption of a print medium, with known pages sizes and the ability to use any kind of ink. This is fine if the goal is a standard for printed material. It fails significantly for electronic displays, whose sizes and other info isn't knowable at "publishing" time, and will vary for different readers.
When a book is published, the entire run is usually made with pages all the same size, and all readers get a book with pages exactly that size. When a web document is created, it is then downloaded by people with screens of wildly different sizes. The same standard for typography/markup/formatting/whatever doesn't work for both of them.
One of the ongoing annoyances with HTML is all the web sites that subvert the design by forcing specific sizes and shapes of things (fonts, panels, etc) in the document. The result is "pages" that don't fit properly on a lot of screens. We're seeing a lot of that right now with the growing popularity of smartphones and similar tablets such as the iPod. But all the problems with poorly designed HTML fade into insignificance compared to the results of trying to read typographical-standard docs in formats like PS and PDF, which almost always require 2-dimensional scrolling on small screens. If the publishers standardize on one of the older "typographical" standards, this is exactly what they'll be foisting on all their customers.
Those customers would be much better off with HTML as the standard, despite all its problems. And with time, most of the small-screen gadgets will probably have better HTML rendering, which will mostly mean ignoring all the size=, width= and height= attributes, and formatting the content intelligently for the screen that's in the reader's hands. And also letting the reader specify things like fonts to fit their eyes.
Of course, we could have done a lot better with HTML, if we'd ignored the pressure from the "artistic" web design crowd to include all the formatting junk that's so popular with much of the current HTML-editing software, and has the side effect of making the pages not work well on screens different from the large screens used to create the pages.
(It's interesting and instructive to try reading/. on a smartphone.;-)
You do realize this was not a corporation ? It was a the police department, technically a government-run, tax-funded public service.
Ummm, it's an American town (in Wisconsin). You should realize that in the US (and in many other countries) almost all cities, towns, villages, and other government organizations based on real estate are corporations. Many of them even post the word "incorporated" plus a date on their welcoming signs at their borders. So it's almost certain that she was working for, and fired from, a corporation.
Granted, this is a "public" corporation. But then, General Motors, AT&T and google.com are also "public" corporations, so the government/corporation distinction has little basis in reality. The corporations we call "governments" are not all that easy to distinguish from the ones we call "private" (and which often call themselves "public"). Especially now that the US has taken to subcontracting out many of its military operations in the rest of the world to private security corporations.
I wonder how many American municipalities have caught onto this approach? After all, as many people here keep pointing out, "private" contractors are often exempt, in practice if not in law, from many of the protections that Americans have from actions by government agencies. But I don't recall reading very much on the topic.
Linux ISO's -are- copywrited, so technically they can cut you off for downloading copywrited material.
An even better example might be that Netflix now supplies movies via download, which is faster and cheaper than sending a DVD via post. Those movies are all copyrighted, of course, but Netflix (presumably) has the legal right to send them to you and you have the legal right to download them (if your subscription is up to date).
Maybe what we need is a few good "honeypot" test cases. Set up a few private residences with subscriptions to several such services, and maybe also a couple of linux users who like to keep up with the latest ISOs. They download encrypted copies whenever possible. Keep careful records. When the ISP cuts them off, get their explanation and accusation, and file suit. You might want to check with a local lawyer to make sure you're keeping the right records to convince a court that all your big downloads were legal, and that you're charging the ISP with the right violation of the right local law. Something similar to "consumer fraud" would probably be appropriate, since the ISP probably advertised their download speeds and capacity, and if they don't permit a customer to use it for legal downloads, their ads were fraudulent.
After the ISP has done this a couple of times, you should be able to get the court to agree to punitive damages, contempt of court, whatever.
It could be interesting to read about this. After all, a "no copyrighted material" is a bogus restriction. This message is copyrighted, as it probably says at the bottom of the page you're reading, and all the other messages on this page are copyrighted. Almost every page on the Web is copyrighted, and you didn't get written permission to download any of them, did you? So technically, the entire Web is one bit copyright violation. The only way out, legally speaking, is for the ISP to determine exactly what you're downloading, and also determine whether you have legal permission to download it.
So who wants to be the guinea pig for an experiment with tricking ISPs into blocking downloads of demonstrably legal material? It'll take a bit of organizing, including finding a few interested lawyers who know the relevant law in each jurisdiction.
I have both a linux (Ubuntu) and Mac (OSX) machine, and I've been trying to find useful documentation for the IMEs on both of them, with the goal of being able to type in Chinese and Japanese. So far, I haven't succeeded. I've read lots of nice-sounding marketing stuff, but the actual information on what keys to hit to get a particular character seems carefully hidden. Any idea where the dumb-novice-user documentation on these IMEs might be hidden? Having a fancy input package isn't too impressive if users can't figure out how to type anything with it.
(Actually, I suspect that my main problem is being in the US. Here, the usual reactions to such questions can be summarized as "Why would anyone need anything but English?";-)
However, the modern Chinese writing system is not pictographic or ideographic...
Bullshit. As someone who has studies and reads/speaks japanese (based on traditional chinese characters) it's _ALL_ about pictographic/ideographic combinations.
This is very easy to test. Make up a sheet showing the first couple dozen Kangxi radicals. Show them to people, tell they that they're pictures, and ask them to tell you what each represents. Tally the results.
I've actually helped run this experiment. We asked several hundred people "in the street". The result was not a single correct guess. (Well, there was the one oriental person who got them all right, but I think we'd all agree that she was an "outlier" that can be dismissed.;-)
Yes, Chinese characters mostly originated as pictures - several thousand years ago. All have undergone "artistic" modification, with the result that few of them look anything like what they originally represented.
Thus, the word for "eye" is a tall, narrow rectangle with two horizontal lines dividing it into three equal-size rectangles. This doesn't look like the eye of any critter that I've ever seen. If you rotate it 90 degrees, and reduce the two end verticals to nothing, the result is very eye-like, and that was the original. But those two simple modifications make it not pictographic at all. Similarly for pretty much all of the supposed "pictures" embedded in Chinese characters. Those pictures may have been there in the distant past, but they're no longer very useful in learning to use the writing system.
There's only so much you can do with pictures. As someone observed, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but most batches of a thousand words can't be replaced by a picture. The need for non-pictorial concepts, plus the natural tendency to simplify and stylize the pictures, slowly makes every "pictographic" writing system develop into something that's just arbitrary characters with no inherent useful pictorial quality. Such changes don't take many generations.
(We might also note that the English/Roman/Greek letter 'A' originated as a stylized drawing of an ox head. How many people using our alphabet can tell you that or explain it? It's certainly not very useful in learning any modern language that uses this alphabet.;-)
... did someone at FEMA go "Yeah no corporate-induced crisis is ever gonna cost more than $75m to clean up..."?
Probably not. The way the US Congress usually works is: Proposed laws and regulations are formulated by committees that consist mostly of lobbyists paid by the interested corporations. The bills are submitted to the staff of a "friendly" Congressperson, and cursorily examined for glaring problems. Then they go to Congress, whose members may cursorily scan them, but more often they just read the summary. Sometimes, as with/., they don't even do that, but rely on what their staff and the lobbyists tell them verbally. They vote on the bill, and if it passes (and is signed by the President), it's published. What it means is then determined by the courts if necessary. But the typical bill, which usually has hundreds or thousands of pages, isn't fully read and understood by anyone. And the only ones with any detailed knowledge of its contents are usually the lobbyists, who have taken care to include language like the things we're discussing here.
When people discover what has been hidden in the hundreds of pages of a law, the Congress folks are usually as surprised as the rest of us. But chances are the sponsors of the bill will favor this sort of clause, since they were chosen as sponsors with the knowledge that they are friendly toward the industries affected by the law.
These days, anybody who knows that you make your computer stop by clicking "start" thinks (s)he's a nerd, even if they couldn't copy a file without a GUI, let alone have ever heard of Linux or BSD or any other non-Microsoft OS (which these days actually have GUIs).
Picky correction: The MS OSs weren't the first to have a GUI. They were effectively the last. GUIs date from the early 1970s, and were developed by people who weren't using a MS OS. The reason for this was simple: Building a usable GUI requires a lot of low-level knowledge of how the OS interfaces to the hardware, and MS treated most of that knowledge as proprietary. Outside of MS's development labs, developers working on other OSs, especially Real-Time OSs and the unixes, had the best-documented the low-level stuff, so they got GUIs working fairly early, and did a lot of experimenting with them. When they had something that worked well enough for non-tech users, MS finally decided to copy them and built its own GUI.
Try googling for "Xerox PARC". Their Alto PC was built in 1973, six years before Microsoft's founding, and it had a GUI that had the basics of the current commercial GUIs. Apple was also founded in 1979, and their first Lisa machine had a GUI, years before anyone as MS was working on such things.
It's a bit annoying for people to give Microsoft credit for things that were developed by others, and them copied by MS when they started to sell. I'm sure others here can give many examples.
(This isn't really a criticism of MS; it's the way that the commercial world mostly works. You let the scientists, engineers and tinkerers come up with new ideas, watch them, and either buy or steal the ideas that look like they have commercial potential. It's how you'd expect a successful corporation to work, and it's mostly how they do work. The criticism is with people getting the history wrong, ignoring the actual innovators, and giving credit to a company with marketing clout.)
Nah; it wouldn't help. First, SETI, is primarily listening, not broadcasting, so it isn't telling any aliens very about us. But the important thing is that we have been broadcasting our existence to the universe for around 90 years now. All of our radio, television, and radar has been radiating a very signal that has been expanding in a sphere for that longy. This isn't a very big volume as the universe (or even the galaxy) goes, but it does contain few thousand stars. And more to the point, it could contain an unknown number of little, invisible monitoring gadgets that are listening for "unnatural" signals.
There have been a number of articles written by astronomers, explaining that our signal would easily be detectable within the volume by our own current technology, and any astronomers within at least 60 or 70 light years would be able to pinpoint our star, determine (from the Doppler shifts) how far our planet is from the sun, and infer likely properties of our planet and technology.
So the damage has long since been done, primarily by the commercial TV industry and the military radar installations. SETI isn't important in comparison. But it just might give us advanced warning if someone is heading our way, so we might as well keep it running.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, consider that US owns majority of the Internet.
Actually, this is wrong in an important way. That majority of the Internet (or more accurately, the long lines and routers) is not owned by the US, but rather by US corporations. Even the US military's internal Internet clone runs mostly on lines owned and operated by corporations.
And those corporations are at best only nominally American. In reality, they are all international corporations, with interests independent of the US, and only minimally controlled by the US government. It's widely believed in the US that the big corporations have more control over the US government than that government has over them.
This isn't necessarily a comforting observation. Most of the core of the Internet is in effect owned and controlled by big organizations that are independent of any democratic or other social controls, and openly proclaim that their only interest is in their shareholders' profits. This should probably make us even more nervous than the thought that it's all American controlled. Americans are a disorganized, chaotic mob that fight each other more than they fight outsiders. Those giant corporations are much better organized, and have a history of effectively targeting their enemies (i.e., smaller corporations) and either killing them or eating them alive.
At least the newspaper has the decency to admit when it's over. It comes with a sports section.
Funny you should mention that. I've been using google news for a while, and usually have a firefox window open with several news.google.com tabs. Recently, since I'm living in New England (the one in the US, not in Australia ;-), I told google news to add a "New England" news tab to the set. Most of the time, this tab has almost nothing but sports news. I have no idea why. There's lots of local news hereabouts, and you can find it in the web sites of a lot of local "papers", but you don't see much of it in google's New England news.
Could it be that all the local news sources are blocking googlebots? If so, why would they do something that keeps people from finding them? It seems more likely that there's something weird going on inside google that prevents them from recognizing non-sport news related to this geographical area.
We might also compare it to other proclaimed "wars".
Thus, here in the US, we've been fighting a "war on drugs" for decades now. As a result, we have a larger percent of the population in jail than any other country, most of them charged with drug-related crimes. We've lost a lot of legal protections we used to have, since an anonymous drug charge can lead to our homes being invaded without warrant and our property being confiscated without trial. And the drug "problem" is slowly getting worse. (Or at least the official keepers of the statistics say it is, but that might just be to maintain the justification for the "war".)
Recently I heard of a push for a "war on obesity", which is a growing problem in the US. That'll probably result in us all getting fatter.
But it doesn't always work that way. Back in the 1960s, we had a short "war on poverty". Then one day, a lot of poor people started publicly asking where they could go to surrender. The hostilities ended very quickly after that, though I never heard of any government spokesperson who publicly answered the question. We certainly still have a good number of poor people. I always sorta thought they should have gotten together and demanded armistice talks, but that didn't happen, either.
One problem with the "war" metaphor is that you sorta expect it to be a handy excuse to go out and kill people. BSo far, it hasn't been possible to kill people via computer. But this might be changing. The medical industry is slowly getting computerized, and is learning to use the Net. And our cars are rapidly becoming computerized and networked. So it'll probably soon be possible for a government agency to reach out electronically and interfere with the equipment keeping people alive in hospitals or at home, or cause our cars to go berserk at highway speeds. The Toyota problems might be an early test of this.
Stay tuned. We may soon see what a "cyber-war" brings us. Maybe, like the war on drugs, it'll bring us lots of imprisonment and auto accidents, and also more computers. Maybe it'll implement a Final Solution for dealing with the expenses of elderly people and military retirees on computerized life support. We'll see. Or at least the ones of us who survive will see.
So what's this article doing under "hardware"? All of the so-called "cults" in both articles are centered around specific software. And scanning the discussion supports this, since "hardware" is a relatively rare string in the rapidly growing page.
Is there a clean way with the /. software to unobtrusively reclassify an article and its discussion? Though I suppose we don't have a "cult" classification. Maybe we should.
Yeah, I think TMTOWTDI might be a big part of the "problem" that prevents perl from becoming a cult. Another, which sorta surprised me when it started happening to me, is that there are a lot of companies that actually look for "perl" on resumes (and think it's a good thing ;-). When I first learned perl back in the early 90s, I never thought it would ever help me get a job; I just thought it looked like something practical. When people started using it and saying how useful it was, I was afraid for a while that perl would reach cult status. But it doesn't seem to have happened. It's just a widely-used, practical tool, that's now part of the default libraries on all but MS systems (and is even found there with some packaged distros).
Also, I don't think I've ever met anyone who considers perl to be their primary language. I don't, even though it's probably the language that I use the most these days.
But I do keep running into situations where I find myself muttering "This would be so much easier if I could just resolve a prolog expression or use a Snobol4 pattern now." We can all dream, I suppose. ;-)
... Which brings me to my idea of reverse subscription. Spam everyone with free papers daily. Advertise that you will stop bringing them for a monthly fee.
Heh. It'd be fun if a newspaper company tried that.
My favorite comment on this issue is that nobody every bought a newspaper because they wanted the paper. This point seems to be missed by most people who write about this topic.
Actually, we have long had a use for newspapers in our house. Because of my wife's allergies to furry critters, we have pet birds. They're small parrots, actually, and as usual we use newspaper to line their cages. After we finally cancelled our subscription to the local newpaper of note (the Boston Globe), we were at first worried about finding good cage lining. But the free advertising that we get in the mailbox is partly in newsprint format, and we find that sufficient for our cage-lining needs. So we never actually needed the paper, after all. So far, there's no size that ads on cheap paper will ever die out.
As for news, it's getting to be pretty obvious that electronic distribution is far superior to print. Of course, you have to have the sense to understand that not all news is reliable, and to read every story with a certain degree of skepticism. This problem is really helped by the ease with which one can pick out keywords and feed them to a news-search site to get multiple versions of the story with different biases. You can't really do that with printed news, but it's fairly easy for anyone with minimal familiarity with web search sites.
Needless to say, news.google.com is a useful resource here.
Now if slashdot's search thingy worked better than it does ...
... silent water is pretty damn flat. If you got a decently sized lake and no wind you can fairly easily show it curves in the middle.
In large lakes such as the North American Great Lakes, you can easily see one of the classical visible signs of the curvature: As you watch a ship moving away from you, you can see it disappear from the bottom up, and approaching ships appear from the top down. Moving around the shore shows the same phenomenon everywhere, which is easily understood by even the dumbest sailor (though maybe not many theologians ;-) to indicate the spherical nature of the surface.
There was a cute puzzle based on this in Scientific American some years back. The problem was: Using only technology available to the classical Roman and Greek engineers, and standing in one place, measure the size of the Earth.
The answer turned out to be: Get a surveyor's transit (or any of the similar tools that the ancients used), and go to a shore where you can't see the land on the other side. Do this on a very calm day, so there are no waves on the water's surface. Measure the angle between the horizon and your plumb line, with the plumb bob just barely touching the water. The triangle from the transit to the horizon, then to the center of the Earth, then back to your transit is a right triangle, and you've just measured the larger of its two "small" angles. Measure as precisely as you can the height (H) of your transit above the water. If the Earth's radius is R, R/(R+H) is the cosine of the angle you just measured. Solve for R.
The article pointed out that a classical Roman engineer could have used this method to get within about 5% of the Earth's correct size, which was about as good as the other methods that were available to ancients such as Eratosthenes. The main limitation would probably have been their ability to accurately measure the distance H. (Actually, I'm not too clear on the accuracy of their trig tables. Anyone know?) (And they probably wouldn't have done the calculation using Roman numerals. ;-)
We should be pointing out again that people have rarely bought a newspaper because they wanted the paper. If the point of this is to subsidize printing newspapers, then it's not a news-related bill at all. It's a bill to subsidize the killing of trees.
This might be more acceptable if it specifically subsidized non-print news distribution, e.g. via the Internet. That might solve the actual problem, which is that the newspapers are being killed by electronic news distribution.
There is plenty of precedent for this, of course. They go by initials like BBC and NPR, which started life as government subsidies to broadcast news sources. Of course, "news" should be interpreted rather liberally in these cases, since they also subsidized things like music, intellectual discussions, etc. But the general idea did work to a great degree. Stuff such as news and various intellectual pursuits that weren't very successful commercially did get better support and developed into an important part of our societies.
But subsidizing print publication of such things isn't what we need these days. We need to be encouraging the forward-looking organizations that are trying to supply such things via non-print distribution systems.
So spread the news: We didn't buy newspapers for the paper. We don't want the paper now (unless we have a lot of bird cages to line ;-). We want the news easily available, not the paper.
The only definition of a species is that two organisms that cannot mate are, by definition, different species.
To illustrate the subtleties in the actual definition(s) used by biologists, a prof in a class I was in wrote a definition very much like the above, and asked the class "What's wrong with this definition?" He was impressed when I spoke up and said "According to that definition, you and I are not the same species." We were (and probably still are ;-) both male, so he just grinned and said "Ya got it." Funny thing was that a good percentage of the class still had a puzzled looks on their faces, so he had to explain to them what I'd just said.
He later mentioned that there are other important problems with such definitions. One is that people generally want "the same X as" to be a transitive relation. But Ma Nature throws monkey wrenches into such things. Thus, the domestic dog Canis familiaris can interbreed with wild wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals can't interbreed (or rather, they can, but the few offspring are sterile). So dogs are the same species as wolves and jackals, but wolves and jackals are different species. There are many examples like this.
A more subtle sort of example is what are sometimes called "range species", in which matings of critters not too far apart are fertile, but when the distance gets above some threshold, fertile hybrids are no longer possible. This happens in a lot of shoreline species.
We've had a couple of centuries to work out such ideas, and biologists have been fairly successful at dealing with this fairly important concept. But you need more carefully worded definitions than the above.
If you want to read about an especially difficult "species" distinction, google for the results of mating lions with tigers. That should convince anyone how tricky it is to get the definition right.
Last I checked, this was a government by the People for the People, ...
Nah; it's a government of the Corporations for the Corporations. Unless you have sufficient spare cash to match their "campaign contributions", you don't count.
(And it doesn't really matter that the "government by the People for the People" phrase is an Americanism; this pretty much applies to most of the governments in the world. You may have a voice with your local government, if it's too small and unimportant to attract corporate campaign contributions, but you probably have little influence above that level.)
It's also illegal in countries with simple basic criminal laws against fraud. No need for "regulatory systems".
Illegal if the victim has the funding to challenge a megacorporation in court, and pay for the decade or more of delaying courtroom tactics, after which (if they get the right judge) they can collect damages.
For the rest of the population, those who would be bankrupted by any attempt to prosecute a megacorporation, a "regulatory system" works a whole lot better. When it works at all, of course.
Heh. Too bad I can't moderate replies to my own messages; I'd give you an "insightful" for that one! ;-)
Though I might comment that my wife does more than browse facebook on her iMac. She also reads Andrew Sullivan and Perez Hilton, and she has a list of youtube favorites that you wouldn't believe.
(She's also involved with a number of tech discussion forums, but we can casually ignore those, since they violate the stereotype. ;-)
Actually, RedHat and Apple both tried to get some employees to use Microsoft computers and phones, so that they'd have people on staff that were familiar with the MS products. But most the employees flatly refused. The few that went along with the requests also quietly updated their resumes, and quit after a month or two. This can be really frustrating if you're seriously trying to test your equipment against the other major products on the market. ;-)
I recently left IBM, but while I was there, there was considerable effort to eliminate M$ products. ... Obviously IBM has a love for Linux, ...
If so, the marketing folks haven't heard of it. I just checked the "shop for ..." section at ibm.com, and looked through their "personal computers" stuff for a linux machine. I couldn't find any page that contained the string "linux" anywhere. Every machine I saw had "Microsoft Windows ..." as the installed OS, with no option for anything else. This has been true for the several years that people have been claiming that IBM now supports linux. It's a funny sort of "support" that doesn't entail any mention of the supported product in the sales or configuration pages.
(I suppose there might be an option of a linux machine somewhere at ibm.com, but in 10 or 15 minutes of looking for it, I didn't stumble across it. Anyone know offhand where it might be hidden?)
Employees wanting to stay on Windows required clearance from 'quite senior levels,' one employee said. 'Getting a new Windows machine now requires CIO approval,' said another employee."
So what they'll do is get a new linux machine, and install Windows as a "guest" OS in a second partition. It's not that hard these days, and google is reputed to have lots of smart people.
Similarly, my wife telecommutes half time, and is required to run Windows XP at home. She talked to the nice folks at the Apple Store, who explained how to set her Mac up to run virtual OSs, and installed XP in a virtual partition. It works fine. She has since taught a few others at work to do the same, and they're all pretty happy with being able to run a real OS at home and only fire up the Windows that they all hate when they need to do some "work". She gave me her castoff Windows box, which is sitting in the corner running Debian linux and functioning as our firewall/gateway/server machine (and no doubt still listed as another sale to a satisfied Windows customer by MS's bean counters).
And all this is nothing at very new, as far as the computer industry is concerned. Back in 1980, I had a job at a company that mostly used their big IBM mainframe, while the engineers were playing around with unix on some of those funny new "minicomputers". I'd worked on both, so I had the fun of getting together with some Amdahl folks, who delivered their unix that ran on top of VM. We installed it (over a lot of dead IBMer bodies ;-), so that the engineering staff could run their stuff on the mainframe. After a while, the big 360 machine with VM was running at least 10 different OSs simultaneously, with each group using the OS that best fit their needs. Granted, there were lots of fanboys who thought their OS was the one that everyone else should be using, but we just ignored them and went about our jobs. Now it's 30 years later, and the "personal computer" part of the industry is discovering this fantastic new idea called "virtual" computing that lets you run more than one OS at the same time ...
ASCII is the universal format type, and unicode ain't far behind these days.
ASCII and Unicode aren't format types; they're character encodings. They say close to nothing about how the text is presented on a page or screen.
I wonder how the typographical types like Knuth and the graphics arts types like Tufte would react to the idea of not knowing how their pages will render.
They generally haven't tackled the problem that HTML was designed for: displaying in a usable form in windows on displays of different sizes, shapes, resolutions, and color capabilities. Most "typographical" standards start with the assumption of a print medium, with known pages sizes and the ability to use any kind of ink. This is fine if the goal is a standard for printed material. It fails significantly for electronic displays, whose sizes and other info isn't knowable at "publishing" time, and will vary for different readers.
When a book is published, the entire run is usually made with pages all the same size, and all readers get a book with pages exactly that size. When a web document is created, it is then downloaded by people with screens of wildly different sizes. The same standard for typography/markup/formatting/whatever doesn't work for both of them.
One of the ongoing annoyances with HTML is all the web sites that subvert the design by forcing specific sizes and shapes of things (fonts, panels, etc) in the document. The result is "pages" that don't fit properly on a lot of screens. We're seeing a lot of that right now with the growing popularity of smartphones and similar tablets such as the iPod. But all the problems with poorly designed HTML fade into insignificance compared to the results of trying to read typographical-standard docs in formats like PS and PDF, which almost always require 2-dimensional scrolling on small screens. If the publishers standardize on one of the older "typographical" standards, this is exactly what they'll be foisting on all their customers.
Those customers would be much better off with HTML as the standard, despite all its problems. And with time, most of the small-screen gadgets will probably have better HTML rendering, which will mostly mean ignoring all the size=, width= and height= attributes, and formatting the content intelligently for the screen that's in the reader's hands. And also letting the reader specify things like fonts to fit their eyes.
Of course, we could have done a lot better with HTML, if we'd ignored the pressure from the "artistic" web design crowd to include all the formatting junk that's so popular with much of the current HTML-editing software, and has the side effect of making the pages not work well on screens different from the large screens used to create the pages.
(It's interesting and instructive to try reading /. on a smartphone. ;-)
You do realize this was not a corporation ? It was a the police department, technically a government-run, tax-funded public service.
Ummm, it's an American town (in Wisconsin). You should realize that in the US (and in many other countries) almost all cities, towns, villages, and other government organizations based on real estate are corporations. Many of them even post the word "incorporated" plus a date on their welcoming signs at their borders. So it's almost certain that she was working for, and fired from, a corporation.
Granted, this is a "public" corporation. But then, General Motors, AT&T and google.com are also "public" corporations, so the government/corporation distinction has little basis in reality. The corporations we call "governments" are not all that easy to distinguish from the ones we call "private" (and which often call themselves "public"). Especially now that the US has taken to subcontracting out many of its military operations in the rest of the world to private security corporations.
I wonder how many American municipalities have caught onto this approach? After all, as many people here keep pointing out, "private" contractors are often exempt, in practice if not in law, from many of the protections that Americans have from actions by government agencies. But I don't recall reading very much on the topic.
Linux ISO's -are- copywrited, so technically they can cut you off for downloading copywrited material.
An even better example might be that Netflix now supplies movies via download, which is faster and cheaper than sending a DVD via post. Those movies are all copyrighted, of course, but Netflix (presumably) has the legal right to send them to you and you have the legal right to download them (if your subscription is up to date).
Maybe what we need is a few good "honeypot" test cases. Set up a few private residences with subscriptions to several such services, and maybe also a couple of linux users who like to keep up with the latest ISOs. They download encrypted copies whenever possible. Keep careful records. When the ISP cuts them off, get their explanation and accusation, and file suit. You might want to check with a local lawyer to make sure you're keeping the right records to convince a court that all your big downloads were legal, and that you're charging the ISP with the right violation of the right local law. Something similar to "consumer fraud" would probably be appropriate, since the ISP probably advertised their download speeds and capacity, and if they don't permit a customer to use it for legal downloads, their ads were fraudulent.
After the ISP has done this a couple of times, you should be able to get the court to agree to punitive damages, contempt of court, whatever.
It could be interesting to read about this. After all, a "no copyrighted material" is a bogus restriction. This message is copyrighted, as it probably says at the bottom of the page you're reading, and all the other messages on this page are copyrighted. Almost every page on the Web is copyrighted, and you didn't get written permission to download any of them, did you? So technically, the entire Web is one bit copyright violation. The only way out, legally speaking, is for the ISP to determine exactly what you're downloading, and also determine whether you have legal permission to download it.
So who wants to be the guinea pig for an experiment with tricking ISPs into blocking downloads of demonstrably legal material? It'll take a bit of organizing, including finding a few interested lawyers who know the relevant law in each jurisdiction.
I have both a linux (Ubuntu) and Mac (OSX) machine, and I've been trying to find useful documentation for the IMEs on both of them, with the goal of being able to type in Chinese and Japanese. So far, I haven't succeeded. I've read lots of nice-sounding marketing stuff, but the actual information on what keys to hit to get a particular character seems carefully hidden. Any idea where the dumb-novice-user documentation on these IMEs might be hidden? Having a fancy input package isn't too impressive if users can't figure out how to type anything with it.
(Actually, I suspect that my main problem is being in the US. Here, the usual reactions to such questions can be summarized as "Why would anyone need anything but English?" ;-)
This is very easy to test. Make up a sheet showing the first couple dozen Kangxi radicals. Show them to people, tell they that they're pictures, and ask them to tell you what each represents. Tally the results.
I've actually helped run this experiment. We asked several hundred people "in the street". The result was not a single correct guess. (Well, there was the one oriental person who got them all right, but I think we'd all agree that she was an "outlier" that can be dismissed. ;-)
Yes, Chinese characters mostly originated as pictures - several thousand years ago. All have undergone "artistic" modification, with the result that few of them look anything like what they originally represented.
Thus, the word for "eye" is a tall, narrow rectangle with two horizontal lines dividing it into three equal-size rectangles. This doesn't look like the eye of any critter that I've ever seen. If you rotate it 90 degrees, and reduce the two end verticals to nothing, the result is very eye-like, and that was the original. But those two simple modifications make it not pictographic at all. Similarly for pretty much all of the supposed "pictures" embedded in Chinese characters. Those pictures may have been there in the distant past, but they're no longer very useful in learning to use the writing system.
There's only so much you can do with pictures. As someone observed, a picture may be worth a thousand words, but most batches of a thousand words can't be replaced by a picture. The need for non-pictorial concepts, plus the natural tendency to simplify and stylize the pictures, slowly makes every "pictographic" writing system develop into something that's just arbitrary characters with no inherent useful pictorial quality. Such changes don't take many generations.
(We might also note that the English/Roman/Greek letter 'A' originated as a stylized drawing of an ox head. How many people using our alphabet can tell you that or explain it? It's certainly not very useful in learning any modern language that uses this alphabet. ;-)
It only takes one step to copy a file in DOS.
Ah, so DOS has a copy(file1,file2) system call, which is implemented via a single opcode? I did not know that.
So what's the opcode? I'd guess that such a system call could be added to other OSs in minutes, if we knew the secret opcode that does it in one step.
... did someone at FEMA go "Yeah no corporate-induced crisis is ever gonna cost more than $75m to clean up..."?
Probably not. The way the US Congress usually works is: Proposed laws and regulations are formulated by committees that consist mostly of lobbyists paid by the interested corporations. The bills are submitted to the staff of a "friendly" Congressperson, and cursorily examined for glaring problems. Then they go to Congress, whose members may cursorily scan them, but more often they just read the summary. Sometimes, as with /., they don't even do that, but rely on what their staff and the lobbyists tell them verbally. They vote on the bill, and if it passes (and is signed by the President), it's published. What it means is then determined by the courts if necessary. But the typical bill, which usually has hundreds or thousands of pages, isn't fully read and understood by anyone. And the only ones with any detailed knowledge of its contents are usually the lobbyists, who have taken care to include language like the things we're discussing here.
When people discover what has been hidden in the hundreds of pages of a law, the Congress folks are usually as surprised as the rest of us. But chances are the sponsors of the bill will favor this sort of clause, since they were chosen as sponsors with the knowledge that they are friendly toward the industries affected by the law.
These days, anybody who knows that you make your computer stop by clicking "start" thinks (s)he's a nerd, even if they couldn't copy a file without a GUI, let alone have ever heard of Linux or BSD or any other non-Microsoft OS (which these days actually have GUIs).
Picky correction: The MS OSs weren't the first to have a GUI. They were effectively the last. GUIs date from the early 1970s, and were developed by people who weren't using a MS OS. The reason for this was simple: Building a usable GUI requires a lot of low-level knowledge of how the OS interfaces to the hardware, and MS treated most of that knowledge as proprietary. Outside of MS's development labs, developers working on other OSs, especially Real-Time OSs and the unixes, had the best-documented the low-level stuff, so they got GUIs working fairly early, and did a lot of experimenting with them. When they had something that worked well enough for non-tech users, MS finally decided to copy them and built its own GUI.
Try googling for "Xerox PARC". Their Alto PC was built in 1973, six years before Microsoft's founding, and it had a GUI that had the basics of the current commercial GUIs. Apple was also founded in 1979, and their first Lisa machine had a GUI, years before anyone as MS was working on such things.
It's a bit annoying for people to give Microsoft credit for things that were developed by others, and them copied by MS when they started to sell. I'm sure others here can give many examples.
(This isn't really a criticism of MS; it's the way that the commercial world mostly works. You let the scientists, engineers and tinkerers come up with new ideas, watch them, and either buy or steal the ideas that look like they have commercial potential. It's how you'd expect a successful corporation to work, and it's mostly how they do work. The criticism is with people getting the history wrong, ignoring the actual innovators, and giving credit to a company with marketing clout.)
... we should shut down SETI immediately ...
Nah; it wouldn't help. First, SETI, is primarily listening, not broadcasting, so it isn't telling any aliens very about us. But the important thing is that we have been broadcasting our existence to the universe for around 90 years now. All of our radio, television, and radar has been radiating a very signal that has been expanding in a sphere for that longy. This isn't a very big volume as the universe (or even the galaxy) goes, but it does contain few thousand stars. And more to the point, it could contain an unknown number of little, invisible monitoring gadgets that are listening for "unnatural" signals.
There have been a number of articles written by astronomers, explaining that our signal would easily be detectable within the volume by our own current technology, and any astronomers within at least 60 or 70 light years would be able to pinpoint our star, determine (from the Doppler shifts) how far our planet is from the sun, and infer likely properties of our planet and technology.
So the damage has long since been done, primarily by the commercial TV industry and the military radar installations. SETI isn't important in comparison. But it just might give us advanced warning if someone is heading our way, so we might as well keep it running.