Well, I don't think that most people think "freshly killed" when they use the term "fresh".;-)
One thing I was thinking is that when I make a sandwich (made of the dead bodies of hundreds or thousands of baby wheat plants and yeast cells), I do often include cheese. That's really just a kind of spoiled milk, of course, and its smell really is the smell of milk that's "gone bad". But for some reason, there are a few things like this that humans like when they're well decayed. It's a bit of a mystery why some spoiled mild smells bad to us, while other spoiled milk is cheese that we pay good money for. Similarly for the spoiled fruit juices that we call "wine".
I've occasionally heard the phrases "fresh cheese" and "fresh wine", and those are real puzzles. These are clearly oxymorons, but people do mean something when they say them.
I've also been reminded by a number of cookbooks that there are parts of the world where cultures are sold for aging meat, because people in those areas think that properly aged meat tastes better than freshly-killed meat. I haven't seen such cultures for sale here in the US, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were to some day become a new upscale way of preparing meat.
Heh. I just picked up my current lunch at the deli counter of a nearby supermarket that has a really good sushi counter. So it looks and smells like something that has just died, because that's what it is. Somehow I don't think this would offend too many of the computer people I know, who mostly seem to like sushi. And the fish probably died at least a few days ago (and its carcass probably spent the time in a freezer), so "just died" isn't really accurate.
One thing I like about this place is that they have brown-rice, which has so much more flavor than the white stuff. Of course, this means that, as with the bread example, my sushi rice was made from a thousand or so living baby rice plants, who were tossed in water and simmered to death. So we should imagine all their tiny ricey screams of horror as the heat slowly killed them.
We might note that killing a single fish will provide sushi for a good number of people (depending on the size of the fish). So that part of it requires orders of magnitude fewer deaths that does the rice in a single meal. OTOH, white rice is long dead when it is cooked, but this is because it was processed by slowly grinding off its outer layers, and then off its embryo ("germ") portion. That's a rather horrible sort of death, too, but I don't hear much about people being offended by the cruelty.
And I doubt that a discussion of how to prepare sushi would offend many people, even if they're eating it. Or even if they don't like the idea of eating raw seafood.
(I have occasionally had some fun with vegetarians, by casually mentioning the deaths of hundreds or thousands of baby wheat or rice plants that went into their meal. It's fun to claim that you're a carnivore for philosophical reasons, since it minimizes the number of deaths required to keep a human alive. Of course, this does ignore the plants eaten by our food animals, so it's only vicariously reducing the death count. But that's too deep an analysis for most people.;-)
Do not bring any food containers that smell like something died inside...
But, but... Almost all my food consists of something that died.
Yeah, there are exception, like the lettuce, tomato, etc., that are technically still alive. But, for example, the bread was made from a pile of baby wheat plants that were ground up (while still alive), then mixed with live yeast and a few other ingredients, then baked at a temperature guaranteed to kill everything in the loaf. Then we slice that up, fill it with slices of dead animals and other things. Only the lettuce leaves and the seeds inside the tomato slices are still alive; the rest is quite dead.
I've found that people tend to think that such food is very "fresh", whatever that might mean, but they're clearly wrong. It's mostly made up of things that have died in the recent past. Some of them, like the baby wheat plants, died a rather awful death by being tossed live into a grinder. Others, like the yeast in the bread, died a horrible death in a bath of steam slowly getting hotter.
When I've priced organic foods vs. non-organic foods, it's often times about twice the price.
Try googling for the concept of "agricultural subsidy" for a good part of the explanation. One of the reasons that corporate farming is cheap is that you're paying for part of it through your taxes, which in turn get handed to the ag corporations as subsidies.
Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for such subsidies. Agriculture has a lot of risks, and farms without government support tend to go bankrupt after a bad year. But such support has a tendency to go to the biggest farm corporations, for reasons that are well known. Government actions can sometimes help by evening out year-to-year money fluctuations, but they can also produce extreme market distortions when you get the usual feedback loops of campaign contributions + subsidy programs + large corporate farms.
A well-documented example in the US is the widespread use of cheap corn syrup in the food industry. The low price is due to corn-growing subsidies, which allows the big farms to sell their corn (and the stalks used to produce the syrup) very cheaply. Producers of the other ("minor") sweeteners can't compete, because they don't get such subsidies. Except for the large sugar-beet growers, of course, who also get a subsidy.
(Warning: This is a very complex subject that can't be covered in a few paragraphs of sound bites. Be prepared for a lot of reading, much of which is written more with the aim of persuading rather than informing you...;-)
You know, trees clone themselves by dropping pointy branches in the mud, but I'm pretty damned sure they don't graft themselves. They have a hard time wrapping the tape.
Actually, there have been numerous reports of trees with interlaced branches ending up with a "graft", in which two branches' bark layers are rubbed off enough for the cambium layers to connect. It's extremely rare, of course, since any good storm that comes along during the initial stages will tear open the graft.
Grafting also works between different plant species, because they don't have immune systems. But it only works between closely-related plants (roughly meaning in the same family) because the vascular systems have to be compatible enough to interoperate. It works a lot better within clumps of a single species.
There's another situation in which grafting is common: Closely-related trees growing together often end up with their root systems inter-connected via grafts. Storms don't tear such underground grafts apart, after all. The process is described in horticulture textbooks, and is known to be important in at least a few species. This provides a path that internal parasites can use to spread among a clump of trees. Some trees in arid areas have been found to pump water from a source to trees farther away via their interconnected root system, allowing the clump to extend somewhat farther from a stream or spring than they could otherwise.
As usual, there's a brief description of the process at wikipedia. Read also the next section on graft hybrids. Also, check out the link to +Laburnocytisus 'Adamii', a chimera that whose tissues consist of a mixture of cells of two different small trees.
Heh. It's easy; I've done it myself. In fact, it's easier than using Windows, which has the most difficult UI in the industry, especially since it's constantly changing.
But that's all irrelevant, because computer security has absolutely nothing to do with sales. It's determined by ad budgets. Microsoft can spend (and has spent) over a billion US$ marketing a releases of Windows. The only other computer company that can come close to this is Apple, and they're more than an order of magnitude away from it. No other "competitor" stands a chance of getting the funding that it takes to get into the market.
And, in a sense, even that is irrelevant to the topic at hand. As far as security is concerned, the 90% or so of the customers who use MS Windows don't spend money on security. It's not something they can see, and they'll never understand the technical details. Building them a secure system is more expensive than not bothering with security, and it wouldn't increase sales past the current 90%, so why should MS bother?
Perhaps the best bit of evidence here is something that came out on/. recently: the discovery that, even if you tell Windows to not update anything automatically, there are still parts of "the system" that get updated whenever MS says (and the machine is connected to the Internet). During the discussion, it came out that this "feature" has been in Windows since XP. Now, to us geeks and nerds, this is obviously a "back door" that was planted purposely with the intention that outsiders be able to install software on a machine without permission. That's what it does, after all, and such things don't get implemented by accident. It's also obvious to us that it won't be limited to only MS employees; all it takes is a bit of "social engineering" (typically in the form of a bit of cash), and info about this back door will be available to essentially anyone. This has all been acknowledged by Microsoft.
But did this produce any outrage or abandonment of MS Windows? I haven't seen or read of any. The customers don't care. Security isn't something they actually use, so it's not interesting. If you try explaining the problems with this automatic update feature, their eyes glass over, they classify you as a computer nerd, and they switch to a topic that's actually interesting.
Actually, this is a case where the canonical auto analogy works quite well. Look at all the safety features that have been put into cars over the past decades. How many of them happened because customers were demanding them? Right; none. Safety features were all forced on the auto makers by government regulators. Customers couldn't even be persuaded to pay for seat belts; they had to be mandated by law. And then, most people refused to use them until the cops started writing tickets. In this case, it's pretty obvious that lives are quite literally at stake, yet people wouldn't pay for (or use) safety features. Safety had to be forced on them by those evil government regulators.
The situation is worse with computers. With cars, most of the safety features are visible and/or unobtrusive. With computers, most security features are either invisible or they become visible by interfering with usability. People don't pay for things they can't see, and they especially don't pay for things that interfere with what they're trying to do. The computer industry obviously doesn't know (or care) how to make security both silent and noninterfering, as the auto industry has (mostly) been able to do.
The computer industry does know a lot about security, of course. But the Market Leader that makes that 90% of delivered systems has no motive to implement good security, because it's a cost that doesn't add to their income, and they know that their customers don't care. They can invest a small amount in "security theater", and that's all they need. They can safely ignore the maybe 5% of the market that understands securit
It's amusing to see the summary, comments, etc. that use the word "first". It seems that offshore wind farms have been built, and it's not too hard to find information about them.
But I suppose this is a story in the American media, and to most Americans, if it didn't happen in the US, it didn't happen.
To be fair, I'd guess that most American civil and electrical engineers are aware of the history.
What human can parse this without an expert to tear apart the context?
Well, I recall that when I first ran across that "N-buffalo" sentence for the first time several years ago, I got it on the second scan.
This time, though, it was a lot harder. This was because of that silly comma. Who ever uses a comma between the subject and verb of a simple declarative statement? But when I decided to try it without the comma, the meaning came right through.
I suppose this could make me an "expert", whatever that may mean. English is my native language, and I have a couple of college degrees, one of which included a minor in linguistics. But I'm not sure that means much. It's probably more meaningful that as part of my CS degree, I worked on machine translation, and thus I saw a lot of perverse examples like this one. (But I first ran across this one after getting that degree.;-)
I did get a good understanding of why translation isn't possible without understanding. And sometimes it's impossible even with understanding, because you understand why a sentence in language X that looks simple may have two or more incompatible translations into language Y, so you need information not provided by the language X statement to decide which translation to choose.
No sane business is going to trust all of their valuable IP with a 3rd party, there isn't a third party out there you can really trust. Not Google, Not Apple, Not Microsoft (LOL)... they've all had very serious and public security failings in their recent history.
So how is it that most businesses are still using Microsoft (and IBM) OSs?
One of the discussions a while back here mentioned the discovery that there are some "system" updates that happen even if you disable updates. MS's management has admitted that this "feature" has been in Windows since NT. So it's public knowledge that, if your Windows machine is on the Net, MS can reach out and "upgrade" anything they like. I.e., they can install any software they like on your machine. They can install a keylogger. They can install something that reads assorted files and copies them to a specific server somewhere on the Net. And anyone who has greased the right palms at MS can get information on how to do the same.
Again, this is public knowledge. Yet business people in particular still insist on running on Microsoft OSs. They show no signs of abandoning MS despite this or the constant flood of stories about Windows' security exploits.
Suggesting that businesses won't trust their "valuable IP" (or their data) with a 3rd party is just silly. They're doing that now, when the risks are public knowledge. It's unlikely that this is going to change any time soon.
(OK; you did say "No sane business". But where in the world do you find those?;-)
And the running joke among Democrats was the Bush was a Nazi as well as the rest of the Republicans, that wasn't over the top was it?
Nah; it was just wrong. Anyone who knows anything about political theories knows that Bush isn't a Nazi; he's a Fascist, as are most of the policies of the Republicans.
If you can't get such well-known epithets right, do you expect us to trust you with anything else?
Jeez; American political rhetoric has become so ignorant these days...
I suppose it was inevitable, though. People have gotten so lazy that they can't even be bothered to look a word up in a dictionary before applying it to their opponents.
Heh. In fact, Iran and Iraq both lost pretty big in that war. They lost people, infrastructure, homes, productive capability, homes, etc. And the result was a stalemate, so neither can even make the claim that they "won" in the sense of having conquered the other. It was a total loss to both sides, with nothing that either can claim as a "win".
This happens in commercial "wars", too. Of course, some historians would argue that all wars are "commercial" in an obvious sense. Whatever the PR claims, the main motive is always to gain control over the work force and productive capacity of opponents.
" that's not even a religious organization" yes, yes it is. In fact, f you are an Atheist you can't be a leader. It's gotten a lot worse with Mormons infecting the BSA.
We weren't if allowed to say Halloween last year. we had to call it ' Fall Harvest'.
Well, yeah, but the official purpose of the Boy Scouts isn't to teach religion; it's to teach outdoorsy stuff. And apparently some troops stick to that. But, as several people have commented, it has widely become infested with religiosity (and others with militariosity - if that's a word;-).
The Halloween thing is funny, because it implies a lack of religious understanding. The name is a shortened form of "All Hallows' Evening", i.e., the evening before All Hallows Day. That's an official Catholic holiday. Whoever decided on the "Fall Harvest" thing has most likely picked up the common American emphasis on devilry, based on the idea that the inhabitants of the underworld come out and party the day before the holiday that is in praise of the Christian Saints. This is primarily a Hollywood sort of image, pushed by the commercial world as a way to sell cute costumes, candy, etc. But this is mostly an American commercial/entertainment thing; the original holiday was very much religious.
Not that it really matters. But I do wonder whether the folks who decided to avoid the name "Halloween" realized that they were in effect putting the final nails in the coffin (heh!) of a religious holiday dedicated to praising and teaching about the Saints. It might be fun to ask them, and watch the confusion.
After all if they can redirect a search, then what's stopping them from blocking kiddie porn, or monitoring users who are filesharing?
They could also redirect your search or download request to a kiddie-porn site, then send a report on the stuff that "you downloaded" to the local police. Of course, they'd probably be more likely to do something like that if you make a fuss about their redirection.
His direct bosses don't make the rules, the elected officials do. The difference is crucial. Furthermore, his following the rules was not to the detriment of the city.
All true, but apparently irrelevant. He was convicted.
The main lesson from this seems clear: Don't even consider taking a job in which you're responsible for the computer security. If something goes wrong, you can go to jail. If nothing goes wrong, you can still go to jail. Specifically, if a superior orders you to violate the published security rules, and you obey, you can go to jail for not following orders; if you don't obey, you can go to jail for violating the published security rules.
There's only way to win this game is to not play. If they want secure systems, let them do the security themselves.
Yeah, I know; that attitude is why we are having so many stupid computer security problems. But I also know that if the people in charge wanted the problems fixed, they'd be rewarding the people who try to do it right. This is just the latest of a long string of examples in which they punish the security people for doing the job they were hired to do. You and I can't fix this general problem. So we should stay out of the line of fire. When they finally decide to get serious about fixing the security problems, we can talk to them, and maybe help them. But only if we can get detailed contracts saying what we can and can't be punished for.
Until then, the safest approach is to not be hired as a security person.
The postal services and private postal companies do not read every letter that comes in,...
Are you sure they don't?;-)
Actually, with email, there's a very real sense in which it all does get read. Almost all email sent via the public Internet is now run through spam filters, which "read" it all to give a spam rating. Granted, it's being "read" by a machine, but the software is examining your words with the intent of bringing your text to the attention of various people that you don't know.
And this is really just the start. Many ISPs routinely scan all email for keywords useful to marketing. Google admits openly that they do this. There was a bit of a fuss a few years ago, when msn.com was caught extracting things from customers' email and web sites (such as photos of their children) and using the material in advertising. And on and on. Maybe the Postal Service doesn't read all your mail, but most personal mail has now shifted to email, and almost all of that is routinely scanned for "interesting" material by one or more of the organizations that own the various comm links used to deliver your email.
If you're not aware of this, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how email and the Internet works. Someday you may be very sorry you thought your communication was private. Unless you've encrypted your email, you should always assume that it will be "read" during transmission, by something or someone.
I recall a story from a while ago about how people can more easily find support for their arguments and position, and so the Internet actually divides as well as unites, while entrenching opinions.
Sometimes. But, at least here in the US, there's a blatant example of the opposite effect. When the anti-Muslim campaign started to heat up (about 8 1/2 years ago;-), I found that a lot of people I knew just asked "What's this Muslim thing all about, anyway?". So they googled it, and found lots of interesting reading online. Lots of it was just the usual religious BS and propaganda, but they got to read the Muslim side of it. All N of the Muslim sides, actually. They also found more than a little interesting history. And they found good information on all the factions inside the Muslim religious communities.
I don't think I know anyone who converted, but I know a lot of people who are now at least somewhat sympathetic, and have a very cynical attitude about the ongoing attempts to demonize that part of the world's population. 15 or 20 years ago, this was hardly possible. Information about Islam was very difficult to come by in most of the US, and what you could find would usually be either proselytizing or blatant anti-Muslim propaganda, none of it with much in the way of actual information. Now you can get the real story straight from the various sources, and make your own judgments about what parts of it are BS and what parts are for real. Among the people I know, this doesn't seem to have led to much "entrenching"; it has led to understanding and (mostly) sympathy.
Except for the true nut cases, of course, which infest the Muslim world to about the same extent as the Christian world. But understanding this can help a lot in undoing any entrenched opinions. Realizing that the partisans on all sides are feeding you a line of BS can go a long way towards proper enlightenment.
Actually, I've seen evidence that the same phenomenon has happened with the old Protestand/Catholic divide. It used to be that the power structures in most of the major churches were fairly good at maintaining ignorance about the others. In particular, it was easy to demonize Catholics in the more fundamentalist Protestant communities, and vice-versa. This is a lot more difficult now, when anyone with a bit of google-fu can quickly locate the actual positions of the various factions. And we can also sometimes find information about their practices, not just their public pronouncements. This is becoming a bit of an embarrassment to the leaders of lots of churches. After all, how many days has it been since you last heard a joke about the sex lives of fundamentalist preachers? Probably not many days at all, right?
So they all have grounds to hate the Internet. Let's hope we can keep them at bay, and keep shining the spotlights on their behavior when they think they're out of public view.
Microsoft does have a bit of history of sinking large amounts of money on totally losing projects, and there have been suggestions that it may be partially intentional.
The poster child for this is Internet Explorer, which was developed and handed out free, for a 100% monetary loss. Various people have suggested that the intent was never to charge for it. The motive wasn't profit; it was control. The idea is that they wanted to control the "browser market", which included killing any startup that wanted to make money on a browser. They succeeded at that, and even the most critical reviewers agree that MS still controls at least 2/3 of the browser "market". From a power viewpoint, IE has been a real success, even if it has been a money sinkhole. It gives MS control of a large part of how the Web works in reality. It has especially been an effective tool at scrambling all attempts to develop rational standards and interoperability.
The only people who consider this a "loss" are those who believe that money is the only corporate motivator. Those who understand a desire for power and control find it easy to understand why corporations like Microsoft would sink so much of their profits into such losing projects.
It's entirely possible that MS's ongoing attempts to get into the search "market" is something along the same line. It may not matter to them how much money they lose, as long as they end up in control, with the insignificant startups all bankrupt and standards irrelevant because Bing is the de facto standard and doesn't interoperate with anything they don't control.
In particular, their main motivator may be all the information on our searches that google is collecting. Imagine what Microsoft could do to the world if they had control of all that information.
(Of course, some of us are starting to worry about the effect of nice guys like google having all that information. And maybe it'd be prudent to not worry about it quite so publicly. After all, google does know what you've been googling...;-)
The Catholic church, as far as I know, doesn't have a monopoly on abuses.
Heh. Just this afternoon, the US's NPR (National Public Radio) had an article about the growing scandal over similar abuse in the Boy Scouts. Officially at least, that's not even a religious organization (though they do push a lot of "God and Country" ideology).
So no, the Catholic church isn't nearly the only organization with that particular problem. And they're all going to find it a lot more difficult to keep a lid on the stories.
Disclaimer: I never was a Boy Scout, so I have no personal experience in this area. I was a Cub Scout, and my aunt Evelyn, my mother's older sister, was the local Cub Scout leader. She was a great lady, and the boys all loved her. (But not in that way, y'know.;-) I never had any interest in the Boy Scouts, though; the local chapter seemed more like a sort of paramilitary boot camp to me, so I just ignored it.
It was originally presented as work to help understand the high diabetes incidence in the tribe, because that was why the blood was collected in the first place, but when that work was done, they still had the DNA. Why not do research to the full extent covered under the agreement? It would have been more polite, perhaps, to for the various researchers working with the samples to keep the tribe updated on their work and findings,...
The "It would have been more polite" part is my main reaction. Whether any printed agreement requires it, I'd think that researchers should have the common courtesy to keep in touch with their research subjects, and inform them of anything that's learned.
And yes, I have done this sort of thing, as part of a number of projects that I've worked on. It can go a long way toward making your clients happy with what you're doing for them. (And it can help to think of them as "clients" rather than "subjects".;-)
In this case, diabetes is known to be partly genetic, and this is something that should be explained to the people involved. You should also make it clear that scientists don't know everything the genetic patterns, and you'd like to take the opportunity to compare their DNA with other closely-related populations, to see what (if anything) you can learn about their particular form of the disease. I'd probably say something like "Maybe we can get a paper out of it, maybe we'll learn something that will be of medical value to you. Or maybe not." I'd think that a lot of the Havasupai would be intelligent enough to understand this, and would encourage you to learn whatever you can on the topic.
And speaking of closely-related populations, it's now well known that most of the "Native American" groups on the Colorado Plateau arrived there from places much farther north only a few centuries before Europeans arrived. Some of the population would like to keep their mythology, but others would find it interesting to know just which groups up north they're actually closely related to. If these researchers had mentioned that this was a possible outcome of the research, I'd expect that a good portion of the tribe would have found it very interesting, and would have encouraged the study.
It's mostly when you do such things in secret that people get their hackles up.
(A few years ago, after some medical lab tests, a doctor asked me if I was partly Native American. I told him that I'd wondered whether they would spot that corner of my DNA, from my father's father's mother. He said they couldn't identify the tribe, so I told him. But he just shrugged and said it was just something they'd noticed. It wasn't relevant to anything at hand, though it could be useful medical information in the future if I ever developed any of a list of conditions related to those genes.)
He did in fact say most which generally means a lot, he did however not say the majority which would mean more than half,...
It may be different in your dialect of English, but in General American, "majority" means more than half, while "most" means a lot more than half. People would rarely use "most" for less than a 2/3 majority, and a lot of people (but maybe not "most" of them;-) would consider you dishonest for saying most in that case. Usually, "most" means something like "all but a small number", i.e., close to but not "all".
Of course, it could be different in other dialects. But I don't think I've ever heard "most" used to mean "less than half"; I'd consider that blatantly dishonest.
That you see a problem with stopping this type of action on the part of the government says a lot about you. It says you think the government has the right to deceive you and abuse the agreements it makes with you.
Yeah, as can be understood by reading the discussion of the Sony EULA story earlier this afternoon, such deceit and abuse is the sole right of corporations. When they do it, it's their natural right supported by law; when the government does it, it's evil.
At least that's the way it is in the US these days. YMMV if you live elsewhere (though it's sorta hard to find a country where a large corporation doesn't have more social and legal power than most of the citizenry).
... if only NNTP had some kind of archival functionality, rather than "take all this news I've got and eat it, then delete it when it expires" I guess you could just disable expiry?
Yeah, I think that has been fairly common at sites that run a specific NNTP feed for a few tech newgroups that they use. It's not unusual that at least the tech newsgroups get "archived" this way at multiple places around the Net.
I did this at one place where I worked. We were developing software to implement a number of standards, and I was one of several "part-time sysadmins" on our main machines. I set up an NTTP feed for newsgroups that discussed the standards, and also for several standards-related mailing lists, and arranged for all of them to be archived on one of our machines. This was in the 1980s, before the advent of the Web. Today I'd also put those directories on the Web, and set up a simple search facility for them. Of course google would also scan them, so you could use that to do the searching. But for such specialized data sets, you could also implement a local search facility that "understands" more of the data than a big, generic search site would.
Yahoo and hotmail also offer [stable email addresses], and have for much longer.
Well, maybe. I've had a number of yahoo accounts. All but the most recent have eventually died, i.e., became unusable because I could no longer login for unknown reasons. Email to their support people were ignored, possibly because I had to send them from an "outside" address, not the yahoo address. So in my experience, yahoo has never supplied a stable address. This may have changed, though, since my most recent yahoo address has been stable for a couple of years now. Those old addresses apparently still exist, because I've tried to recreate them (to get the shorter name), and I've been told I can't because that login already exists.
Hotmail is weirder. I signed up for an address there early on, to see what their approach was like. It disappeared after a few months due to low traffic. I hadn't succeeded in getting any of my friends to use it more than once or twice. A few years later, I signed up again. After a few months, the same thing happened. Maybe I should have notified some spammers of the address? Anyway, I haven't bothered with them since.
In the UK, at least my old uni, my email address was taken off me after graduation:(
That's odd. Most schools figured out quickly that free email accounts are a good way to keep in touch with alumni, and make it easy to hit them up for donations. I've always figured that's why they do it. They typically also let you enter a forwarding address, and all mail will be sent there. That minimizes their need for server space, and provides a useful service: If your ISP email address changes, you can simple enter your new address at your school's site, and it works. This first time your ISP changes your address, you learn to use your school address, and you're encouraged to keep using it and keep in touch with the school.
The admins at your "old uni" apparently aren't smart enough to figure this out.;-)
Actually, a funny thing with this theory is that my "school" address is at mit.edu, and I don't remember ever getting any pleas for money from them. The only email I've ever received from the school has been announcements of events from sources that I've explicitly signed up for. They seem to have missed the "marketing" potential of email entirely. I know that they not only supply permanent mit.edu addresses to all alumni, but also encourage departments to supply permanent addresses (and often login accounts) to everyone ever associated with the department, and many departments do this.
Slashdot Mirror
So you *do* know what fresh means then.
Well, I don't think that most people think "freshly killed" when they use the term "fresh". ;-)
One thing I was thinking is that when I make a sandwich (made of the dead bodies of hundreds or thousands of baby wheat plants and yeast cells), I do often include cheese. That's really just a kind of spoiled milk, of course, and its smell really is the smell of milk that's "gone bad". But for some reason, there are a few things like this that humans like when they're well decayed. It's a bit of a mystery why some spoiled mild smells bad to us, while other spoiled milk is cheese that we pay good money for. Similarly for the spoiled fruit juices that we call "wine".
I've occasionally heard the phrases "fresh cheese" and "fresh wine", and those are real puzzles. These are clearly oxymorons, but people do mean something when they say them.
I've also been reminded by a number of cookbooks that there are parts of the world where cultures are sold for aging meat, because people in those areas think that properly aged meat tastes better than freshly-killed meat. I haven't seen such cultures for sale here in the US, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were to some day become a new upscale way of preparing meat.
Heh. I just picked up my current lunch at the deli counter of a nearby supermarket that has a really good sushi counter. So it looks and smells like something that has just died, because that's what it is. Somehow I don't think this would offend too many of the computer people I know, who mostly seem to like sushi. And the fish probably died at least a few days ago (and its carcass probably spent the time in a freezer), so "just died" isn't really accurate.
One thing I like about this place is that they have brown-rice, which has so much more flavor than the white stuff. Of course, this means that, as with the bread example, my sushi rice was made from a thousand or so living baby rice plants, who were tossed in water and simmered to death. So we should imagine all their tiny ricey screams of horror as the heat slowly killed them.
We might note that killing a single fish will provide sushi for a good number of people (depending on the size of the fish). So that part of it requires orders of magnitude fewer deaths that does the rice in a single meal. OTOH, white rice is long dead when it is cooked, but this is because it was processed by slowly grinding off its outer layers, and then off its embryo ("germ") portion. That's a rather horrible sort of death, too, but I don't hear much about people being offended by the cruelty.
And I doubt that a discussion of how to prepare sushi would offend many people, even if they're eating it. Or even if they don't like the idea of eating raw seafood.
(I have occasionally had some fun with vegetarians, by casually mentioning the deaths of hundreds or thousands of baby wheat or rice plants that went into their meal. It's fun to claim that you're a carnivore for philosophical reasons, since it minimizes the number of deaths required to keep a human alive. Of course, this does ignore the plants eaten by our food animals, so it's only vicariously reducing the death count. But that's too deep an analysis for most people. ;-)
Do not bring any food containers that smell like something died inside ...
But, but ... Almost all my food consists of something that died.
Yeah, there are exception, like the lettuce, tomato, etc., that are technically still alive. But, for example, the bread was made from a pile of baby wheat plants that were ground up (while still alive), then mixed with live yeast and a few other ingredients, then baked at a temperature guaranteed to kill everything in the loaf. Then we slice that up, fill it with slices of dead animals and other things. Only the lettuce leaves and the seeds inside the tomato slices are still alive; the rest is quite dead.
I've found that people tend to think that such food is very "fresh", whatever that might mean, but they're clearly wrong. It's mostly made up of things that have died in the recent past. Some of them, like the baby wheat plants, died a rather awful death by being tossed live into a grinder. Others, like the yeast in the bread, died a horrible death in a bath of steam slowly getting hotter.
When I've priced organic foods vs. non-organic foods, it's often times about twice the price.
Try googling for the concept of "agricultural subsidy" for a good part of the explanation. One of the reasons that corporate farming is cheap is that you're paying for part of it through your taxes, which in turn get handed to the ag corporations as subsidies.
Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for such subsidies. Agriculture has a lot of risks, and farms without government support tend to go bankrupt after a bad year. But such support has a tendency to go to the biggest farm corporations, for reasons that are well known. Government actions can sometimes help by evening out year-to-year money fluctuations, but they can also produce extreme market distortions when you get the usual feedback loops of campaign contributions + subsidy programs + large corporate farms.
A well-documented example in the US is the widespread use of cheap corn syrup in the food industry. The low price is due to corn-growing subsidies, which allows the big farms to sell their corn (and the stalks used to produce the syrup) very cheaply. Producers of the other ("minor") sweeteners can't compete, because they don't get such subsidies. Except for the large sugar-beet growers, of course, who also get a subsidy.
(Warning: This is a very complex subject that can't be covered in a few paragraphs of sound bites. Be prepared for a lot of reading, much of which is written more with the aim of persuading rather than informing you ... ;-)
You know, trees clone themselves by dropping pointy branches in the mud, but I'm pretty damned sure they don't graft themselves. They have a hard time wrapping the tape.
Actually, there have been numerous reports of trees with interlaced branches ending up with a "graft", in which two branches' bark layers are rubbed off enough for the cambium layers to connect. It's extremely rare, of course, since any good storm that comes along during the initial stages will tear open the graft.
Grafting also works between different plant species, because they don't have immune systems. But it only works between closely-related plants (roughly meaning in the same family) because the vascular systems have to be compatible enough to interoperate. It works a lot better within clumps of a single species.
There's another situation in which grafting is common: Closely-related trees growing together often end up with their root systems inter-connected via grafts. Storms don't tear such underground grafts apart, after all. The process is described in horticulture textbooks, and is known to be important in at least a few species. This provides a path that internal parasites can use to spread among a clump of trees. Some trees in arid areas have been found to pump water from a source to trees farther away via their interconnected root system, allowing the clump to extend somewhat farther from a stream or spring than they could otherwise.
As usual, there's a brief description of the process at wikipedia. Read also the next section on graft hybrids. Also, check out the link to +Laburnocytisus 'Adamii', a chimera that whose tissues consist of a mixture of cells of two different small trees.
Don't use Windows. Was that so hard?
Heh. It's easy; I've done it myself. In fact, it's easier than using Windows, which has the most difficult UI in the industry, especially since it's constantly changing.
But that's all irrelevant, because computer security has absolutely nothing to do with sales. It's determined by ad budgets. Microsoft can spend (and has spent) over a billion US$ marketing a releases of Windows. The only other computer company that can come close to this is Apple, and they're more than an order of magnitude away from it. No other "competitor" stands a chance of getting the funding that it takes to get into the market.
And, in a sense, even that is irrelevant to the topic at hand. As far as security is concerned, the 90% or so of the customers who use MS Windows don't spend money on security. It's not something they can see, and they'll never understand the technical details. Building them a secure system is more expensive than not bothering with security, and it wouldn't increase sales past the current 90%, so why should MS bother?
Perhaps the best bit of evidence here is something that came out on /. recently: the discovery that, even if you tell Windows to not update anything automatically, there are still parts of "the system" that get updated whenever MS says (and the machine is connected to the Internet). During the discussion, it came out that this "feature" has been in Windows since XP. Now, to us geeks and nerds, this is obviously a "back door" that was planted purposely with the intention that outsiders be able to install software on a machine without permission. That's what it does, after all, and such things don't get implemented by accident. It's also obvious to us that it won't be limited to only MS employees; all it takes is a bit of "social engineering" (typically in the form of a bit of cash), and info about this back door will be available to essentially anyone. This has all been acknowledged by Microsoft.
But did this produce any outrage or abandonment of MS Windows? I haven't seen or read of any. The customers don't care. Security isn't something they actually use, so it's not interesting. If you try explaining the problems with this automatic update feature, their eyes glass over, they classify you as a computer nerd, and they switch to a topic that's actually interesting.
Actually, this is a case where the canonical auto analogy works quite well. Look at all the safety features that have been put into cars over the past decades. How many of them happened because customers were demanding them? Right; none. Safety features were all forced on the auto makers by government regulators. Customers couldn't even be persuaded to pay for seat belts; they had to be mandated by law. And then, most people refused to use them until the cops started writing tickets. In this case, it's pretty obvious that lives are quite literally at stake, yet people wouldn't pay for (or use) safety features. Safety had to be forced on them by those evil government regulators.
The situation is worse with computers. With cars, most of the safety features are visible and/or unobtrusive. With computers, most security features are either invisible or they become visible by interfering with usability. People don't pay for things they can't see, and they especially don't pay for things that interfere with what they're trying to do. The computer industry obviously doesn't know (or care) how to make security both silent and noninterfering, as the auto industry has (mostly) been able to do.
The computer industry does know a lot about security, of course. But the Market Leader that makes that 90% of delivered systems has no motive to implement good security, because it's a cost that doesn't add to their income, and they know that their customers don't care. They can invest a small amount in "security theater", and that's all they need. They can safely ignore the maybe 5% of the market that understands securit
It's amusing to see the summary, comments, etc. that use the word "first". It seems that offshore wind farms have been built, and it's not too hard to find information about them.
But I suppose this is a story in the American media, and to most Americans, if it didn't happen in the US, it didn't happen.
To be fair, I'd guess that most American civil and electrical engineers are aware of the history.
What human can parse this without an expert to tear apart the context?
Well, I recall that when I first ran across that "N-buffalo" sentence for the first time several years ago, I got it on the second scan.
This time, though, it was a lot harder. This was because of that silly comma. Who ever uses a comma between the subject and verb of a simple declarative statement? But when I decided to try it without the comma, the meaning came right through.
I suppose this could make me an "expert", whatever that may mean. English is my native language, and I have a couple of college degrees, one of which included a minor in linguistics. But I'm not sure that means much. It's probably more meaningful that as part of my CS degree, I worked on machine translation, and thus I saw a lot of perverse examples like this one. (But I first ran across this one after getting that degree. ;-)
I did get a good understanding of why translation isn't possible without understanding. And sometimes it's impossible even with understanding, because you understand why a sentence in language X that looks simple may have two or more incompatible translations into language Y, so you need information not provided by the language X statement to decide which translation to choose.
Insightful? It was modded insightful???
Jeez; whattaya gotta do to get a "funny" mod around here? Use a smiley?
Grumble ....
No sane business is going to trust all of their valuable IP with a 3rd party, there isn't a third party out there you can really trust. Not Google, Not Apple, Not Microsoft (LOL)... they've all had very serious and public security failings in their recent history.
So how is it that most businesses are still using Microsoft (and IBM) OSs?
One of the discussions a while back here mentioned the discovery that there are some "system" updates that happen even if you disable updates. MS's management has admitted that this "feature" has been in Windows since NT. So it's public knowledge that, if your Windows machine is on the Net, MS can reach out and "upgrade" anything they like. I.e., they can install any software they like on your machine. They can install a keylogger. They can install something that reads assorted files and copies them to a specific server somewhere on the Net. And anyone who has greased the right palms at MS can get information on how to do the same.
Again, this is public knowledge. Yet business people in particular still insist on running on Microsoft OSs. They show no signs of abandoning MS despite this or the constant flood of stories about Windows' security exploits.
Suggesting that businesses won't trust their "valuable IP" (or their data) with a 3rd party is just silly. They're doing that now, when the risks are public knowledge. It's unlikely that this is going to change any time soon.
(OK; you did say "No sane business". But where in the world do you find those? ;-)
And the running joke among Democrats was the Bush was a Nazi as well as the rest of the Republicans, that wasn't over the top was it?
Nah; it was just wrong. Anyone who knows anything about political theories knows that Bush isn't a Nazi; he's a Fascist, as are most of the policies of the Republicans.
If you can't get such well-known epithets right, do you expect us to trust you with anything else?
Jeez; American political rhetoric has become so ignorant these days ...
I suppose it was inevitable, though. People have gotten so lazy that they can't even be bothered to look a word up in a dictionary before applying it to their opponents.
"Too bad they can't both lose"
-Henry Kissinger on the iran-iraq war
Heh. In fact, Iran and Iraq both lost pretty big in that war. They lost people, infrastructure, homes, productive capability, homes, etc. And the result was a stalemate, so neither can even make the claim that they "won" in the sense of having conquered the other. It was a total loss to both sides, with nothing that either can claim as a "win".
This happens in commercial "wars", too. Of course, some historians would argue that all wars are "commercial" in an obvious sense. Whatever the PR claims, the main motive is always to gain control over the work force and productive capacity of opponents.
" that's not even a religious organization"
yes, yes it is. In fact, f you are an Atheist you can't be a leader.
It's gotten a lot worse with Mormons infecting the BSA.
We weren't if allowed to say Halloween last year. we had to call it ' Fall Harvest'.
Well, yeah, but the official purpose of the Boy Scouts isn't to teach religion; it's to teach outdoorsy stuff. And apparently some troops stick to that. But, as several people have commented, it has widely become infested with religiosity (and others with militariosity - if that's a word ;-).
The Halloween thing is funny, because it implies a lack of religious understanding. The name is a shortened form of "All Hallows' Evening", i.e., the evening before All Hallows Day. That's an official Catholic holiday. Whoever decided on the "Fall Harvest" thing has most likely picked up the common American emphasis on devilry, based on the idea that the inhabitants of the underworld come out and party the day before the holiday that is in praise of the Christian Saints. This is primarily a Hollywood sort of image, pushed by the commercial world as a way to sell cute costumes, candy, etc. But this is mostly an American commercial/entertainment thing; the original holiday was very much religious.
Not that it really matters. But I do wonder whether the folks who decided to avoid the name "Halloween" realized that they were in effect putting the final nails in the coffin (heh!) of a religious holiday dedicated to praising and teaching about the Saints. It might be fun to ask them, and watch the confusion.
After all if they can redirect a search, then what's stopping them from blocking kiddie porn, or monitoring users who are filesharing?
They could also redirect your search or download request to a kiddie-porn site, then send a report on the stuff that "you downloaded" to the local police. Of course, they'd probably be more likely to do something like that if you make a fuss about their redirection.
... in the course of which data is falsified. I believe we call people who do something like that "terrorists" nowadays.
Nah; we usually call them "marketing". Which is pretty much what's going on in this case.
His direct bosses don't make the rules, the elected officials do. The difference is crucial. Furthermore, his following the rules was not to the detriment of the city.
All true, but apparently irrelevant. He was convicted.
The main lesson from this seems clear: Don't even consider taking a job in which you're responsible for the computer security. If something goes wrong, you can go to jail. If nothing goes wrong, you can still go to jail. Specifically, if a superior orders you to violate the published security rules, and you obey, you can go to jail for not following orders; if you don't obey, you can go to jail for violating the published security rules.
There's only way to win this game is to not play. If they want secure systems, let them do the security themselves.
Yeah, I know; that attitude is why we are having so many stupid computer security problems. But I also know that if the people in charge wanted the problems fixed, they'd be rewarding the people who try to do it right. This is just the latest of a long string of examples in which they punish the security people for doing the job they were hired to do. You and I can't fix this general problem. So we should stay out of the line of fire. When they finally decide to get serious about fixing the security problems, we can talk to them, and maybe help them. But only if we can get detailed contracts saying what we can and can't be punished for.
Until then, the safest approach is to not be hired as a security person.
The postal services and private postal companies do not read every letter that comes in, ...
Are you sure they don't? ;-)
Actually, with email, there's a very real sense in which it all does get read. Almost all email sent via the public Internet is now run through spam filters, which "read" it all to give a spam rating. Granted, it's being "read" by a machine, but the software is examining your words with the intent of bringing your text to the attention of various people that you don't know.
And this is really just the start. Many ISPs routinely scan all email for keywords useful to marketing. Google admits openly that they do this. There was a bit of a fuss a few years ago, when msn.com was caught extracting things from customers' email and web sites (such as photos of their children) and using the material in advertising. And on and on. Maybe the Postal Service doesn't read all your mail, but most personal mail has now shifted to email, and almost all of that is routinely scanned for "interesting" material by one or more of the organizations that own the various comm links used to deliver your email.
If you're not aware of this, you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how email and the Internet works. Someday you may be very sorry you thought your communication was private. Unless you've encrypted your email, you should always assume that it will be "read" during transmission, by something or someone.
I recall a story from a while ago about how people can more easily find support for their arguments and position, and so the Internet actually divides as well as unites, while entrenching opinions.
Sometimes. But, at least here in the US, there's a blatant example of the opposite effect. When the anti-Muslim campaign started to heat up (about 8 1/2 years ago ;-), I found that a lot of people I knew just asked "What's this Muslim thing all about, anyway?". So they googled it, and found lots of interesting reading online. Lots of it was just the usual religious BS and propaganda, but they got to read the Muslim side of it. All N of the Muslim sides, actually. They also found more than a little interesting history. And they found good information on all the factions inside the Muslim religious communities.
I don't think I know anyone who converted, but I know a lot of people who are now at least somewhat sympathetic, and have a very cynical attitude about the ongoing attempts to demonize that part of the world's population. 15 or 20 years ago, this was hardly possible. Information about Islam was very difficult to come by in most of the US, and what you could find would usually be either proselytizing or blatant anti-Muslim propaganda, none of it with much in the way of actual information. Now you can get the real story straight from the various sources, and make your own judgments about what parts of it are BS and what parts are for real. Among the people I know, this doesn't seem to have led to much "entrenching"; it has led to understanding and (mostly) sympathy.
Except for the true nut cases, of course, which infest the Muslim world to about the same extent as the Christian world. But understanding this can help a lot in undoing any entrenched opinions. Realizing that the partisans on all sides are feeding you a line of BS can go a long way towards proper enlightenment.
Actually, I've seen evidence that the same phenomenon has happened with the old Protestand/Catholic divide. It used to be that the power structures in most of the major churches were fairly good at maintaining ignorance about the others. In particular, it was easy to demonize Catholics in the more fundamentalist Protestant communities, and vice-versa. This is a lot more difficult now, when anyone with a bit of google-fu can quickly locate the actual positions of the various factions. And we can also sometimes find information about their practices, not just their public pronouncements. This is becoming a bit of an embarrassment to the leaders of lots of churches. After all, how many days has it been since you last heard a joke about the sex lives of fundamentalist preachers? Probably not many days at all, right?
So they all have grounds to hate the Internet. Let's hope we can keep them at bay, and keep shining the spotlights on their behavior when they think they're out of public view.
Microsoft does have a bit of history of sinking large amounts of money on totally losing projects, and there have been suggestions that it may be partially intentional.
The poster child for this is Internet Explorer, which was developed and handed out free, for a 100% monetary loss. Various people have suggested that the intent was never to charge for it. The motive wasn't profit; it was control. The idea is that they wanted to control the "browser market", which included killing any startup that wanted to make money on a browser. They succeeded at that, and even the most critical reviewers agree that MS still controls at least 2/3 of the browser "market". From a power viewpoint, IE has been a real success, even if it has been a money sinkhole. It gives MS control of a large part of how the Web works in reality. It has especially been an effective tool at scrambling all attempts to develop rational standards and interoperability.
The only people who consider this a "loss" are those who believe that money is the only corporate motivator. Those who understand a desire for power and control find it easy to understand why corporations like Microsoft would sink so much of their profits into such losing projects.
It's entirely possible that MS's ongoing attempts to get into the search "market" is something along the same line. It may not matter to them how much money they lose, as long as they end up in control, with the insignificant startups all bankrupt and standards irrelevant because Bing is the de facto standard and doesn't interoperate with anything they don't control.
In particular, their main motivator may be all the information on our searches that google is collecting. Imagine what Microsoft could do to the world if they had control of all that information.
(Of course, some of us are starting to worry about the effect of nice guys like google having all that information. And maybe it'd be prudent to not worry about it quite so publicly. After all, google does know what you've been googling ... ;-)
The Catholic church, as far as I know, doesn't have a monopoly on abuses.
Heh. Just this afternoon, the US's NPR (National Public Radio) had an article about the growing scandal over similar abuse in the Boy Scouts. Officially at least, that's not even a religious organization (though they do push a lot of "God and Country" ideology).
So no, the Catholic church isn't nearly the only organization with that particular problem. And they're all going to find it a lot more difficult to keep a lid on the stories.
Disclaimer: I never was a Boy Scout, so I have no personal experience in this area. I was a Cub Scout, and my aunt Evelyn, my mother's older sister, was the local Cub Scout leader. She was a great lady, and the boys all loved her. (But not in that way, y'know. ;-) I never had any interest in the Boy Scouts, though; the local chapter seemed more like a sort of paramilitary boot camp to me, so I just ignored it.
It was originally presented as work to help understand the high diabetes incidence in the tribe, because that was why the blood was collected in the first place, but when that work was done, they still had the DNA. Why not do research to the full extent covered under the agreement? It would have been more polite, perhaps, to for the various researchers working with the samples to keep the tribe updated on their work and findings, ...
The "It would have been more polite" part is my main reaction. Whether any printed agreement requires it, I'd think that researchers should have the common courtesy to keep in touch with their research subjects, and inform them of anything that's learned.
And yes, I have done this sort of thing, as part of a number of projects that I've worked on. It can go a long way toward making your clients happy with what you're doing for them. (And it can help to think of them as "clients" rather than "subjects". ;-)
In this case, diabetes is known to be partly genetic, and this is something that should be explained to the people involved. You should also make it clear that scientists don't know everything the genetic patterns, and you'd like to take the opportunity to compare their DNA with other closely-related populations, to see what (if anything) you can learn about their particular form of the disease. I'd probably say something like "Maybe we can get a paper out of it, maybe we'll learn something that will be of medical value to you. Or maybe not." I'd think that a lot of the Havasupai would be intelligent enough to understand this, and would encourage you to learn whatever you can on the topic.
And speaking of closely-related populations, it's now well known that most of the "Native American" groups on the Colorado Plateau arrived there from places much farther north only a few centuries before Europeans arrived. Some of the population would like to keep their mythology, but others would find it interesting to know just which groups up north they're actually closely related to. If these researchers had mentioned that this was a possible outcome of the research, I'd expect that a good portion of the tribe would have found it very interesting, and would have encouraged the study.
It's mostly when you do such things in secret that people get their hackles up.
(A few years ago, after some medical lab tests, a doctor asked me if I was partly Native American. I told him that I'd wondered whether they would spot that corner of my DNA, from my father's father's mother. He said they couldn't identify the tribe, so I told him. But he just shrugged and said it was just something they'd noticed. It wasn't relevant to anything at hand, though it could be useful medical information in the future if I ever developed any of a list of conditions related to those genes.)
He did in fact say most which generally means a lot, he did however not say the majority which would mean more than half, ...
It may be different in your dialect of English, but in General American, "majority" means more than half, while "most" means a lot more than half. People would rarely use "most" for less than a 2/3 majority, and a lot of people (but maybe not "most" of them ;-) would consider you dishonest for saying most in that case. Usually, "most" means something like "all but a small number", i.e., close to but not "all".
Of course, it could be different in other dialects. But I don't think I've ever heard "most" used to mean "less than half"; I'd consider that blatantly dishonest.
That you see a problem with stopping this type of action on the part of the government says a lot about you. It says you think the government has the right to deceive you and abuse the agreements it makes with you.
Yeah, as can be understood by reading the discussion of the Sony EULA story earlier this afternoon, such deceit and abuse is the sole right of corporations. When they do it, it's their natural right supported by law; when the government does it, it's evil.
At least that's the way it is in the US these days. YMMV if you live elsewhere (though it's sorta hard to find a country where a large corporation doesn't have more social and legal power than most of the citizenry).
... if only NNTP had some kind of archival functionality, rather than "take all this news I've got and eat it, then delete it when it expires" I guess you could just disable expiry?
Yeah, I think that has been fairly common at sites that run a specific NNTP feed for a few tech newgroups that they use. It's not unusual that at least the tech newsgroups get "archived" this way at multiple places around the Net.
I did this at one place where I worked. We were developing software to implement a number of standards, and I was one of several "part-time sysadmins" on our main machines. I set up an NTTP feed for newsgroups that discussed the standards, and also for several standards-related mailing lists, and arranged for all of them to be archived on one of our machines. This was in the 1980s, before the advent of the Web. Today I'd also put those directories on the Web, and set up a simple search facility for them. Of course google would also scan them, so you could use that to do the searching. But for such specialized data sets, you could also implement a local search facility that "understands" more of the data than a big, generic search site would.
Yahoo and hotmail also offer [stable email addresses], and have for much longer.
Well, maybe. I've had a number of yahoo accounts. All but the most recent have eventually died, i.e., became unusable because I could no longer login for unknown reasons. Email to their support people were ignored, possibly because I had to send them from an "outside" address, not the yahoo address. So in my experience, yahoo has never supplied a stable address. This may have changed, though, since my most recent yahoo address has been stable for a couple of years now. Those old addresses apparently still exist, because I've tried to recreate them (to get the shorter name), and I've been told I can't because that login already exists.
Hotmail is weirder. I signed up for an address there early on, to see what their approach was like. It disappeared after a few months due to low traffic. I hadn't succeeded in getting any of my friends to use it more than once or twice. A few years later, I signed up again. After a few months, the same thing happened. Maybe I should have notified some spammers of the address? Anyway, I haven't bothered with them since.
In the UK, at least my old uni, my email address was taken off me after graduation :(
That's odd. Most schools figured out quickly that free email accounts are a good way to keep in touch with alumni, and make it easy to hit them up for donations. I've always figured that's why they do it. They typically also let you enter a forwarding address, and all mail will be sent there. That minimizes their need for server space, and provides a useful service: If your ISP email address changes, you can simple enter your new address at your school's site, and it works. This first time your ISP changes your address, you learn to use your school address, and you're encouraged to keep using it and keep in touch with the school.
The admins at your "old uni" apparently aren't smart enough to figure this out. ;-)
Actually, a funny thing with this theory is that my "school" address is at mit.edu, and I don't remember ever getting any pleas for money from them. The only email I've ever received from the school has been announcements of events from sources that I've explicitly signed up for. They seem to have missed the "marketing" potential of email entirely. I know that they not only supply permanent mit.edu addresses to all alumni, but also encourage departments to supply permanent addresses (and often login accounts) to everyone ever associated with the department, and many departments do this.