Hey, you got insightful+troll mods! Congratulations!
(And welcome to the club. I got that mod several years ago, and also funny+troll. I'm now working on getting all three for a single comment. But with a starting score of 2 and a limit of 5, it's very difficult.;-)
I don't understand why oil companies aren't making a 'land grab' for the green technologies.
The most likely reason is the oft-observed shortsightedness of corporate management. In most companies, managers are judged on their department's profitability over time spans of the current quarter and the past year. In such organizations, planning past the current year entails a serious risk of loss of your position. Until "green" energy technologies become unequivocably profitable in the current year, a manager would be a fool to push for them. As new technologies become profitable, we can expect a flurry of corporate buyouts to take control of them.
There is a history of big corporations missing out on such things, though. A lot has been written about the move of solid-state manufacturing to Asia back in the 1980s and 1990s. Asian leaders talked openly about the gamble they were taking. It was based on the estimate that building a solid-state manufacturing facility cost around 1 billion (in US $), and took about ten years to reach profitability. The Asian leaders argued that American corporations were no longer willing or able to make such investments, so anyone who would do so would end up owning the industry. They were pretty much right. American manufacturers read about this, but were unable to overcome their own unwillingness to invest past the current fiscal year, and the industry migrated to where such investments were possible. Much of the basic electronics research still happens in the US, but the manufacturering is mostly outsourced to companies able to make long-term investments.
The same sort of thing could easily happen with "green" energy technologies. There's lots of research going on in North America and Europe. But it's not obvious that American or European corporations will invest in it seriously until it's far too late.
Because it produces so many and issues so few passports.
Heh. Good concise summary.
A longer explanation that's fairly common is that the American First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, the press, and religion, is a major part of it. This has generally been interpreted as protecting the right of any nutjob to say, publish, and practice any sort of ideas (limited by the usual laws against murder, mayhem, and the like). In addition to the well-known value this has for publishing, research, education, etc., it also has a side effect of enabling the nutjobs to work openly.
It's often recognized that this can be a benefit in the long term. Would you rather have the nutjobs working underground, or would you prefer to have them out in the open where we can keep track of them? In particular, every country has a problem with the nutjobs gaining positions of power, where they can impose their nuttiness on everyone. Religious governments are the best known, of course, but we also have anti-religious nutjob governments like the Communists as examples that have done serious damage to their society without the usual excuse that some god told them to do it. The only effective defense we seem to have against this is to encourage the nutjobs to speak openly, and keep them arguing with each other in public.
The US does have a significant population that is profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-science, etc. Every part of the world has such people. The main difference in the US (and a number of other countries) is that those people tend to be visible, so they can be somewhat dealt with. The fake "controversy" over climate change and human responsibility is a minor example of this. We don't much hear from actual scientists in this controversy. Scientists tend to treat it as yet another pseudo-controversy that excites the media but isn't scientifically interesting, so they mostly don't get involved. They just leave the public controversy to the political and religious nutjobs. They continue to quietly collect their data, work on their hypotheses and theories, and cheer on the occasional fool who's willing to toss some red meat to the participants in the public "debate". When fake "research" is exposed, they just quietly delete it from their list of references and continue their work.
The biggest problem in this case is that it's not just the nutjobs. There's also a significant behind-the-scenes involvement by the "astroturf" crowd, those with financial interest in the problem and the money to support people willing to create the propaganda to continue the status quo.
(Actually, it's not surprising to see a Scandinavian name like Lomborg involved. Scandinavia has laws that produce freedoms similar to the US's First Amendment, and they've had similar experiences with groups of nutjobs who are often backed by the financial fat cats. Watch just about any Bergman movie for treatment of this topic. They have also historically exported many of their nutjobs to North America.;-)
why do i think about big pharma never making cures, only treatments?
vaccines?
Actually, vaccines are the primary example of this phenomenon. In the US and many other countries, there is a chronic shortage of most vaccines, because without a subsidy, they're not profitable. The pharma companies are fairly open and honest about the reason. With a vaccine, a patient gets one or maybe two doses, and they're "cured", for decades if not life. With a "treatment" drug for a chronic condition, the patient continues to pay for a much longer time, sometimes permanently. So non-cure treatment drugs are manufactured in large quantity, to the point that the companies run expensive advertising campaigns to increase their sales. But vaccines don't make for repeat business, so the profits on them are very low. In many cases, government subsidies and purchase guarantees are needed to persuade the companies to manufacture them.
I just googled a few things that included "vaccine", such as "vaccine shortage" and "vaccine supply subsidy", and verified that there's quite a lot of discussion of this phenomenon online, from various points of view.
And it's not anything that's at all hidden. The drug companies are quite honest about the situation. It's a straightforward profits vs cost explanation. Any businessman knows that repeat sales to satisfied customers are better than one-time sales to people you'll never see again. What this means for medical drugs is one of the textbook cases of "perversity" in our economic system.
Who knows what kind 'zero-tolerance' befuddled mindset lets them decide that something that looks like a pill was "illegal" via just a webcam shot...
It's probably the same mindset as the school officials in that story a while back, where they called in the police SWAT team because a kid had brought a large burrito to school, and they thought it was a weapon of some sort.
It is interesting that this school's officials are still publicly claiming that their cameras are only used in case of theft, and not dealing with the claim that they'd threatened the kid with punishment for "inappropriate behavior" that they'd seen via the camera. Was this claim a fiction? Or are they just stonewalling it?
... "evolve" has a number of distinct definitions. Choosing a particular one as the proper definition is simply wrong. For example, the story uses "evolves" in the sense of the biological evolution process.
And we might note that in a different field, literature, stories themselves are said to "evolve". This is, of course, a different dictionary entry for the word "evolve". It's the old story of different fields using the same word with different meanings.
It's fairly clear that TFA (and the summary) are talking about biological evolution, so those confusing it with the other non-biological usages are off topic here, and probably should (but won't) be modded as such.
Confusing a word's common-speech definition with the definition used in a technical field is an old problem. It's also something we see over and over.
The original Latin meaning of "evolve" is rather irrelevant to the restricted meaning used in biological or other fields. Just as to us computer geeks, the term "compile" means something specific that's rather different from what librarians or editors mean by the word, or "bar" means something different in musical settings than in building construction or legal licensing or party planning.
OK, let's just get this straight here: some people do not like Apple (myself included) and in general negative Apple comments on Slashdot do get modded down regardless of how true they are.
Funny, I've made a number of (mildly) anti-Apple comments over the years, and very few have got any negative mods at all. Of course, most of them have been along the lines of stating simple facts about specific things that don't work well, or which are implemented somewhat better in other systems.
A lot of them have been comments on sub-optimal or broken parts of the GUI. Thus, a constant annoyance on Macs is the fact that window size can only be modified with the widget in the lower right corner. This works, but it takes more hand motions than the resize borders and corners that most other systems use. The Mac's borderless windows also tends to cause some confusion when there are several similarly-colored overlapping windows. This is worse for windows with darker backgrounds, since the shadowing helps with bright windows. I've also had problems with windows that get resized to be taller than the screen, making the tiny resize widget inaccessible. Sometimes this can be fixed with various "resize" thingies in menus, but some apps lack these. I've got a few useful suggestions when I've made comments about this for specific apps, but it's an ongoing annoyance that could be fixed easily if the Mac GUI had an option to do resize borders like most everyone else does. The borderless style does get supported on aesthetic grounds, but of course that's a matter of taste, so not everyone likes it (and many people don't see what's aesthetic about it).
A funny aside here is that I've occasionally got thin red borders on my Macbook's windows, which really helps with the overlap problem. But I don't know what causes this or how to do it intentionally, and those borders tend to disappear just as mysteriously, so they're not very useful. They probably mean something, but I have no idea what. This does prove that the GUI has the ability to draw borders, though; we just can't use it intentionally like we can on other systems.
Maybe what gets modded down is more the subjective comments, which are plentiful here for just about everything. For statements of fact ("I'm having this problem and googling it doesn't find any answers") about the only relevant mod is "off topic", and such comments usually appear in response to someone else's off-topic comment, so they don't tend to get that mod. OTOH, complaints about details like GUI annoyances don't get modded much at all. And sometimes they even get answers.;-)
My first thought was "Can I tell it to load all 11 of them?" If so, it could make the Windows box useful for real web testing.
I do most of my actual testing on my Macbook Pro, because I have 9 browsers installed there. I also have a linux box with 5 browsers installed. My wife has a Windows XP partition on her iMac that has 3 browsers. For most of these, we had to download them and install them ourselves. A working package of 11 browsers could be really handy, especially when it comes time to reformat and reinstall, which happens quite often with "lab" testing machines.
Anyone know if MS's browser installer has an "All of them" choice?
A few pages above your comment on my screen was a comment by another person who pointed out that videotaping of the children was a violation of state and federal law, and was told that "It can't be illegal, because everyone's doing it".
So this story is likely just the "tip of the iceberg", the rare case of a common practice that happened to get publicity in this one instance.
Others have (proudly?) described their school's new policy of assigning a laptop to every child, with large savings in textbook costs as a result. Tiny onboard cameras are becoming ubiquitous, and we can expect a growing number of (unintended?) images of children dressing or undressing without first closing their computer. I haven't looked, but I'd expect that this is likely starting to happen now. Of course, as with cell phones, some of the images will be made by the kids themselves to entertain their friends.
Do you own a cellphone? Are you aware it is possible for someone with access to the network to activate your phone's mike, turning it into a listening device?
This isn't anything new with cell phones. The old-style desktop phones that go back to the 1920s had the same property. This was essentially because they contained no power source themselves, but were powered by the 50V DC supplied on the line by the phone company. Hanging up didn't cut the power, because without the power, there was no way to ring the phone or make an outgoing call. So the phone was effectively "live" all the time. When "hung up", the phone was generally disconnected from any connection. But a lot of court-ordered "wire tapping" was done inside the phone company's central offices, by simply establishing a permanent connection from your phone to the recording equipment. This would produce a recording of any sound in the vicinity of the phone. (The more sophisticated tapping equipment would stop recording when the incoming sound was below some threshold.)
This was mentioned in assorted articles over the decades that such phones were in use, but it never much entered the public conscience. Much of the public image came from movies, where setting up such a secondary connection wasn't interesting video, so they used a more visually interesting physical tapping scene instead. Physical taps don't make much sense with cell phones, of course, so the movie makers have to go to the more realistic approach of talking to the telco workers to establish a link.
Actually, since cell phone have to have their own power supply, it's feasible for a cell phone to turn off its microphone's power when not in use. But most of them probably do have the ability to turn the mic on in response to an incoming connection, and the software could easily do this without telling you about it.
I've occasionally got calls from my wife's cell phone, and it was obvious when I answered that she hadn't actually called me. I was listening to the background noise, or occasionally to a conversation in her vicinity. Nothing embarrassing to her so far, though. (Or maybe I just didn't listen long enough.;-) I've told her about it each time, and she always gets a bit annoyed, but not annoyed enough to research methods of doing something about it.
Or read both [NYT and Fox News], and make up your own mind. Everything is slanted, and slimming your intake to just a few trusted sources is dangerous on either side of the political spectrum.
Well, maybe, but there are slants and there are slants. It doesn't take much watching to get a feel for Fox News, and to some people, it's downright embarrassing. I only have so 24 hours in a day, and I don't see a good reason to waste any of that time with "news" sources that are so blatantly trying to persuade me rather than inform me. There are much better sources around that will give you varied slants in a form that doesn't waste so much of our limited time.
One of the things I've found informative is to skim through the "all 493 news articles" links at news.google.com, looking for unfamiliar names, and click on a few of them. There are often news sources that are local to a story that give a slant that you don't hear on the MSM sources, and they can be interesting.
This is something that the traditional hard-copy news sources couldn't much do. One of the real advantages to the Internet is that it does an end run around the traditional corporate-controlled news distribution channels, and gives you a window into how the people directly affected by a story might view things. (Or at least the ones that are willing and able to translate their story into a language that you can read, who are not necessarily a typical cross section of the local population.;-)
Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events.
Yeah, but you've gotta consider that we don't have, and have never had, very many *good* newspapers. Dig into some of the old archives. A good start might be at the Library of Congress. You'll be appalled by the quality of much of the reporting. (Others might contribute links to similar archives elsewhere.)
It has gotten worse in the past couple of decades. People blame the Internet for the crappy mainstream-media (MSM) news coverage, but the recent decline predates the public outing of the Internet. Much of the real reason, at least here in the US, was the political ending of enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws. This gave us the rampant buyout/merger process, which left most metro areas with only one newspaper, or sometimes two with a single owner. This allowed most newspapers to save on "costs" by cutting back on expensive things like fact checking and editing.
Then, when they woke up to the existence of the Internet, their response wasn't to restore the previous "added value", but rather to spend more on PR to try to persuade people that something of value was being lost. But most of the value had already been thrown away, or in many cases had never been there.
So go dig out all those archived newspapers and read them with a critical eye on "quality", whatever that means to you. In most cases, you'll be disappointed, and realize that we really haven't lost much.
A more practical approach might be to just say goodbye to the newspaper industry, and focus on how that (mostly imaginary) "value" can be provided online. You might observe that we sorta have the start of it. Among the zillions of blogs, there are some that do a reasonable jobs of fact checking. And, of course, their primary activity is aggregation, as we see here with slashdot, but most of them do more than that. Slashdot's comment and moderations system is an interesting example of something that is obviously far from perfect, but better than anything that a hard-copy newspaper could ever have provided. In particular, we see lots of fact checking here, provided free by readers at very little cost to the site's owners within hours of a story's appearance.
Maybe with a few more decades experimenting, we can come up with a "news" system that's better than what the newspapers gave us. And nobody will object if some of the old news publishers are part of it. They just have to understand that the game has changed, and they no longer have the ability to monopolize a market.
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.
On the contrary, I'll guarantee you that the accountants for the NYT and every other newspaper can tell you to the penny just how much both paper and electronic production and distribution costs them. And comparing the two sets of numbers is totally legitimate in any business setting.
The real problem is that the accountants can't tell you the price point that will maximize their future income from either method. That depends on the whims of their customers, not on any price lists that suppliers can give to the accountants.
Part of the problem, of course, is that electronic distribution now has costs that are orders of magnitude smaller than paper distribution. But this doesn't mean that such costs are some holy Mystery that's unknowable by mere humans. The publishers are just having problems coming to terms with this huge drop in their production costs, since it clearly means they should charge less for delivery by this new technology. But their management structure (and self image) is built partly on the costs of the old hard-copy delivery, and restructuring of such magnitude is always difficult for any human organization.
I think the real question should be, how much should a paid subscription cost?
Excellent phrasing of the issue. Unfortunately, the most elegant phrasing of the answer is something that the many armchair economists here rarely mention:
Whatever the market will bear.
I say "unfortunately" partly because this answer, while accurate, contains no clue about how you determine the price. The answer to that is "trial and error" (or "market research" if you prefer;-). If you just ask people, you'll get as many answers as people asked, and few will have any relation to the actual number. Nobody knows what the correct market price is for news now. The old price included printing and distribution costs, and those have essentially disappeared.
The NYT and other such publishers will just have to experiment with prices, and see where the price point is that maximizes income. And there are difficulties doing this. If you highball the price, lots of people will never respond, and you'll never know that they would have become subscribers at a slightly lower price. OTOH, if you lowball the starting price, you run across the opposite problem of people being offended by frequent price increases for something that they would have paid more for if that had been the starting price.
In any case, as others have pointed out, it's a fact of life for the "news" industry that the raw news is and probably will remain free now. Profit is to be made by supplying organization, explanation, analysis, and commentary on the news. The days are probably over when you can make a profit for just supplying the raw text from the commercial suppliers. People can get that from news.google.com, among others, and you aren't likely to do a better job.
My wife has subscribed to nytimes.com for a while. She recently dropped salon.com, and it'll be interesting to see the price point where she (and others) drop their nytimes.com subscriptions. And whether such companies can get her and others back afterwards.
(As a computer geek and internet programmer from before the Internet existed, I've never subscribed to any MSM news sources. I do subscribe to a few tech/scientific news sources which were once paper but are now electronic. Like many people of my ilk, I have some of my own software for selecting from the online news sources. And I also look around for useful aggregators, such as the one we're reading here.)
Actually, what I imagined was him realizing that the camera might be active and spying on him. So he'd occasionally make rude/insulting/obscene gestures at the camera, just to let them know he was onto them. I can see your typical school admin type getting very upset at this, and labelling it "inappropriate".
I generally put a piece of tape over computers' cameras when I see them. In one place I worked, I noticed that the tape was removed every night. So I taped it again. For some reason, nobody ever mentioned this to me.
Something similar happened in a testing lab where I worked for a while. Lots of the lab's machines had cameras, so everyone in the lab taped them over when they weren't needed for testing. Occasionally, the tape would disappear overnight, and the next day, we'd tape them again. We understood that this wasn't accidental, and we waited for someone to try to "discuss" it with us. Nobody ever did.
This is like McDonalds trying to claim trademark violations if there is anything with "Mc" in front of it. What are they going to do, sue all of Scotland?
Nah; in Scotland it's mostly spelled "MacDonald". The way the legal system works, that's enough of a difference to drag any lawsuit out for decades. Anyway, if they tried, all the MacDonalds (and the few McDonalds who are mostly in Ireland) would countersue on the grounds that their family had the name for centuries before the fast-food chain existed. It's more likely that McDonald's could lose the right to use their name in the UK.
(Actually, there have been a few stories about McDonald's suing various people over their name. Googling for "McDonalds sues" turns up some fun stories, some of them very strange and surrealistic. You can learn a lot about the absurdities in the legal system by reading them.;-)
"it is believed, and therefore averred, that many of the webcam images captured and/or intercepted consist of minors and/or their parents in compromising or embarrassing positions, including, but not limited to, in various stages of dress or undress."
They're saying "we think this probably happened", not "we have evidence that this happened". Since they don't have evidence that such images were created, they certainly can't prove that anyone actually viewed them.
Hmmm... The summary and several articles about the story state:
One student was accused of 'improper behavior in his home' and the school provided a photo taken via his laptop as proof."
This sounds like a confession by at least on school official that such photos existed and he/she had seen them. How else could they have known about the kid's "improper behavior"?
Of course, by now the school has probably destroyed the images, and will deny having had them or seen them. But it could be interesting to ask whether regular backups had been made on the school computers.
What I'm curious about is how long it'll take for these photos to appear on random web sites not associated with the school. We do have a bit of history with such things...
(Sometimes there are problems with dumb users who don't appreciate the Grand Design. But those can be safely ignored, and they'll come around eventually.)
We've had proper reflowing UI in Web applications for ages now,
And yet, the web apps tend to reflow like crap too. Look at the nytimes website, or yahoo.com, even youtube.com - all basically fixed size and there are bazillions more. My experience is that reflowing websites are the exception, not the norm.
Yeah, but in my experience (writing a lot of web code), this is generally because we developers have explicit orders to do it that way. The boss generally wants it one specific size that looks good to him on his screen, and wants that size imposed on everyone else. I've seen a number of crises caused by the boss getting a new machine with a different-size screen than the old one, and now all the size= and width= attributes have to be changed to fit that screen.
(I do wish I were joking.;-)
I've also sunk a lot of time into making the end product work on non-boss screens, while guaranteeing that it will come out as ordered on his screen, so he never suspects that we've semi-violated our orders. In a few cases, the boss has eventually started to suspect what we've done, after seeing the pages come out looking good on someone else's screen, and the pieces are shaped differently. But we've always managed to distract him with some new pretty stuff before it gets too serious.
Oh, and if you prefer, you can substitute "her" for "his" and "him" above. Female bosses can be just as dumb about this as the males.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, you got insightful+troll mods! Congratulations!
(And welcome to the club. I got that mod several years ago, and also funny+troll. I'm now working on getting all three for a single comment. But with a starting score of 2 and a limit of 5, it's very difficult. ;-)
I don't understand why oil companies aren't making a 'land grab' for the green technologies.
The most likely reason is the oft-observed shortsightedness of corporate management. In most companies, managers are judged on their department's profitability over time spans of the current quarter and the past year. In such organizations, planning past the current year entails a serious risk of loss of your position. Until "green" energy technologies become unequivocably profitable in the current year, a manager would be a fool to push for them. As new technologies become profitable, we can expect a flurry of corporate buyouts to take control of them.
There is a history of big corporations missing out on such things, though. A lot has been written about the move of solid-state manufacturing to Asia back in the 1980s and 1990s. Asian leaders talked openly about the gamble they were taking. It was based on the estimate that building a solid-state manufacturing facility cost around 1 billion (in US $), and took about ten years to reach profitability. The Asian leaders argued that American corporations were no longer willing or able to make such investments, so anyone who would do so would end up owning the industry. They were pretty much right. American manufacturers read about this, but were unable to overcome their own unwillingness to invest past the current fiscal year, and the industry migrated to where such investments were possible. Much of the basic electronics research still happens in the US, but the manufacturering is mostly outsourced to companies able to make long-term investments.
The same sort of thing could easily happen with "green" energy technologies. There's lots of research going on in North America and Europe. But it's not obvious that American or European corporations will invest in it seriously until it's far too late.
The man of straw returns.
Huh? When did he ever leave?
"Why does America house so many nutjobs?"
Because it produces so many and issues so few passports.
Heh. Good concise summary.
A longer explanation that's fairly common is that the American First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech, the press, and religion, is a major part of it. This has generally been interpreted as protecting the right of any nutjob to say, publish, and practice any sort of ideas (limited by the usual laws against murder, mayhem, and the like). In addition to the well-known value this has for publishing, research, education, etc., it also has a side effect of enabling the nutjobs to work openly.
It's often recognized that this can be a benefit in the long term. Would you rather have the nutjobs working underground, or would you prefer to have them out in the open where we can keep track of them? In particular, every country has a problem with the nutjobs gaining positions of power, where they can impose their nuttiness on everyone. Religious governments are the best known, of course, but we also have anti-religious nutjob governments like the Communists as examples that have done serious damage to their society without the usual excuse that some god told them to do it. The only effective defense we seem to have against this is to encourage the nutjobs to speak openly, and keep them arguing with each other in public.
The US does have a significant population that is profoundly anti-intellectual, anti-reason, anti-science, etc. Every part of the world has such people. The main difference in the US (and a number of other countries) is that those people tend to be visible, so they can be somewhat dealt with. The fake "controversy" over climate change and human responsibility is a minor example of this. We don't much hear from actual scientists in this controversy. Scientists tend to treat it as yet another pseudo-controversy that excites the media but isn't scientifically interesting, so they mostly don't get involved. They just leave the public controversy to the political and religious nutjobs. They continue to quietly collect their data, work on their hypotheses and theories, and cheer on the occasional fool who's willing to toss some red meat to the participants in the public "debate". When fake "research" is exposed, they just quietly delete it from their list of references and continue their work.
The biggest problem in this case is that it's not just the nutjobs. There's also a significant behind-the-scenes involvement by the "astroturf" crowd, those with financial interest in the problem and the money to support people willing to create the propaganda to continue the status quo.
(Actually, it's not surprising to see a Scandinavian name like Lomborg involved. Scandinavia has laws that produce freedoms similar to the US's First Amendment, and they've had similar experiences with groups of nutjobs who are often backed by the financial fat cats. Watch just about any Bergman movie for treatment of this topic. They have also historically exported many of their nutjobs to North America. ;-)
Hey, when you find you've got such a clever straight man, would you pass up the opportunity to make the obvious reply?
Actually, vaccines are the primary example of this phenomenon. In the US and many other countries, there is a chronic shortage of most vaccines, because without a subsidy, they're not profitable. The pharma companies are fairly open and honest about the reason. With a vaccine, a patient gets one or maybe two doses, and they're "cured", for decades if not life. With a "treatment" drug for a chronic condition, the patient continues to pay for a much longer time, sometimes permanently. So non-cure treatment drugs are manufactured in large quantity, to the point that the companies run expensive advertising campaigns to increase their sales. But vaccines don't make for repeat business, so the profits on them are very low. In many cases, government subsidies and purchase guarantees are needed to persuade the companies to manufacture them.
I just googled a few things that included "vaccine", such as "vaccine shortage" and "vaccine supply subsidy", and verified that there's quite a lot of discussion of this phenomenon online, from various points of view.
And it's not anything that's at all hidden. The drug companies are quite honest about the situation. It's a straightforward profits vs cost explanation. Any businessman knows that repeat sales to satisfied customers are better than one-time sales to people you'll never see again. What this means for medical drugs is one of the textbook cases of "perversity" in our economic system.
Who knows what kind 'zero-tolerance' befuddled mindset lets them decide that something that looks like a pill was "illegal" via just a webcam shot...
It's probably the same mindset as the school officials in that story a while back, where they called in the police SWAT team because a kid had brought a large burrito to school, and they thought it was a weapon of some sort.
It is interesting that this school's officials are still publicly claiming that their cameras are only used in case of theft, and not dealing with the claim that they'd threatened the kid with punishment for "inappropriate behavior" that they'd seen via the camera. Was this claim a fiction? Or are they just stonewalling it?
... "evolve" has a number of distinct definitions. Choosing a particular one as the proper definition is simply wrong. For example, the story uses "evolves" in the sense of the biological evolution process.
And we might note that in a different field, literature, stories themselves are said to "evolve". This is, of course, a different dictionary entry for the word "evolve". It's the old story of different fields using the same word with different meanings.
It's fairly clear that TFA (and the summary) are talking about biological evolution, so those confusing it with the other non-biological usages are off topic here, and probably should (but won't) be modded as such.
Confusing a word's common-speech definition with the definition used in a technical field is an old problem. It's also something we see over and over.
The original Latin meaning of "evolve" is rather irrelevant to the restricted meaning used in biological or other fields. Just as to us computer geeks, the term "compile" means something specific that's rather different from what librarians or editors mean by the word, or "bar" means something different in musical settings than in building construction or legal licensing or party planning.
Unless you're proposing a life form that completely ignores science?
Hey, we have those, too. They're called "creationists".
(English is full of fun ambiguities. ;-)
Ah; another nice example of the etymological fallacy at work. It's a favorite with many people who've studied a bit of linguistics.
In biology, life is defined as have the following characteristics: ...
* Reproduction
Having these characteristics defines something as being "alive." See, not magic.
From this requirement, as has already been pointed out, we can conclude that mules and worker bees are not alive.
Try again.
OK, let's just get this straight here: some people do not like Apple (myself included) and in general negative Apple comments on Slashdot do get modded down regardless of how true they are.
Funny, I've made a number of (mildly) anti-Apple comments over the years, and very few have got any negative mods at all. Of course, most of them have been along the lines of stating simple facts about specific things that don't work well, or which are implemented somewhat better in other systems.
A lot of them have been comments on sub-optimal or broken parts of the GUI. Thus, a constant annoyance on Macs is the fact that window size can only be modified with the widget in the lower right corner. This works, but it takes more hand motions than the resize borders and corners that most other systems use. The Mac's borderless windows also tends to cause some confusion when there are several similarly-colored overlapping windows. This is worse for windows with darker backgrounds, since the shadowing helps with bright windows. I've also had problems with windows that get resized to be taller than the screen, making the tiny resize widget inaccessible. Sometimes this can be fixed with various "resize" thingies in menus, but some apps lack these. I've got a few useful suggestions when I've made comments about this for specific apps, but it's an ongoing annoyance that could be fixed easily if the Mac GUI had an option to do resize borders like most everyone else does. The borderless style does get supported on aesthetic grounds, but of course that's a matter of taste, so not everyone likes it (and many people don't see what's aesthetic about it).
A funny aside here is that I've occasionally got thin red borders on my Macbook's windows, which really helps with the overlap problem. But I don't know what causes this or how to do it intentionally, and those borders tend to disappear just as mysteriously, so they're not very useful. They probably mean something, but I have no idea what. This does prove that the GUI has the ability to draw borders, though; we just can't use it intentionally like we can on other systems.
Maybe what gets modded down is more the subjective comments, which are plentiful here for just about everything. For statements of fact ("I'm having this problem and googling it doesn't find any answers") about the only relevant mod is "off topic", and such comments usually appear in response to someone else's off-topic comment, so they don't tend to get that mod. OTOH, complaints about details like GUI annoyances don't get modded much at all. And sometimes they even get answers. ;-)
My first thought was "Can I tell it to load all 11 of them?" If so, it could make the Windows box useful for real web testing.
I do most of my actual testing on my Macbook Pro, because I have 9 browsers installed there. I also have a linux box with 5 browsers installed. My wife has a Windows XP partition on her iMac that has 3 browsers. For most of these, we had to download them and install them ourselves. A working package of 11 browsers could be really handy, especially when it comes time to reformat and reinstall, which happens quite often with "lab" testing machines.
Anyone know if MS's browser installer has an "All of them" choice?
A few pages above your comment on my screen was a comment by another person who pointed out that videotaping of the children was a violation of state and federal law, and was told that "It can't be illegal, because everyone's doing it".
So this story is likely just the "tip of the iceberg", the rare case of a common practice that happened to get publicity in this one instance.
Others have (proudly?) described their school's new policy of assigning a laptop to every child, with large savings in textbook costs as a result. Tiny onboard cameras are becoming ubiquitous, and we can expect a growing number of (unintended?) images of children dressing or undressing without first closing their computer. I haven't looked, but I'd expect that this is likely starting to happen now. Of course, as with cell phones, some of the images will be made by the kids themselves to entertain their friends.
Do you own a cellphone? Are you aware it is possible for someone with access to the network to activate your phone's mike, turning it into a listening device?
This isn't anything new with cell phones. The old-style desktop phones that go back to the 1920s had the same property. This was essentially because they contained no power source themselves, but were powered by the 50V DC supplied on the line by the phone company. Hanging up didn't cut the power, because without the power, there was no way to ring the phone or make an outgoing call. So the phone was effectively "live" all the time. When "hung up", the phone was generally disconnected from any connection. But a lot of court-ordered "wire tapping" was done inside the phone company's central offices, by simply establishing a permanent connection from your phone to the recording equipment. This would produce a recording of any sound in the vicinity of the phone. (The more sophisticated tapping equipment would stop recording when the incoming sound was below some threshold.)
This was mentioned in assorted articles over the decades that such phones were in use, but it never much entered the public conscience. Much of the public image came from movies, where setting up such a secondary connection wasn't interesting video, so they used a more visually interesting physical tapping scene instead. Physical taps don't make much sense with cell phones, of course, so the movie makers have to go to the more realistic approach of talking to the telco workers to establish a link.
Actually, since cell phone have to have their own power supply, it's feasible for a cell phone to turn off its microphone's power when not in use. But most of them probably do have the ability to turn the mic on in response to an incoming connection, and the software could easily do this without telling you about it.
I've occasionally got calls from my wife's cell phone, and it was obvious when I answered that she hadn't actually called me. I was listening to the background noise, or occasionally to a conversation in her vicinity. Nothing embarrassing to her so far, though. (Or maybe I just didn't listen long enough. ;-) I've told her about it each time, and she always gets a bit annoyed, but not annoyed enough to research methods of doing something about it.
Or read both [NYT and Fox News], and make up your own mind. Everything is slanted, and slimming your intake to just a few trusted sources is dangerous on either side of the political spectrum.
Well, maybe, but there are slants and there are slants. It doesn't take much watching to get a feel for Fox News, and to some people, it's downright embarrassing. I only have so 24 hours in a day, and I don't see a good reason to waste any of that time with "news" sources that are so blatantly trying to persuade me rather than inform me. There are much better sources around that will give you varied slants in a form that doesn't waste so much of our limited time.
One of the things I've found informative is to skim through the "all 493 news articles" links at news.google.com, looking for unfamiliar names, and click on a few of them. There are often news sources that are local to a story that give a slant that you don't hear on the MSM sources, and they can be interesting.
This is something that the traditional hard-copy news sources couldn't much do. One of the real advantages to the Internet is that it does an end run around the traditional corporate-controlled news distribution channels, and gives you a window into how the people directly affected by a story might view things. (Or at least the ones that are willing and able to translate their story into a language that you can read, who are not necessarily a typical cross section of the local population. ;-)
Google news is no substitute for a good newspaper. First, a good newspaper should do the aggregation for you, and so should duplicate what google's doing. Second, a *good* newspaper should provide a balanced, fact checked commentary on the news events.
Yeah, but you've gotta consider that we don't have, and have never had, very many *good* newspapers. Dig into some of the old archives. A good start might be at the Library of Congress. You'll be appalled by the quality of much of the reporting. (Others might contribute links to similar archives elsewhere.)
It has gotten worse in the past couple of decades. People blame the Internet for the crappy mainstream-media (MSM) news coverage, but the recent decline predates the public outing of the Internet. Much of the real reason, at least here in the US, was the political ending of enforcement of the anti-monopoly laws. This gave us the rampant buyout/merger process, which left most metro areas with only one newspaper, or sometimes two with a single owner. This allowed most newspapers to save on "costs" by cutting back on expensive things like fact checking and editing.
Then, when they woke up to the existence of the Internet, their response wasn't to restore the previous "added value", but rather to spend more on PR to try to persuade people that something of value was being lost. But most of the value had already been thrown away, or in many cases had never been there.
So go dig out all those archived newspapers and read them with a critical eye on "quality", whatever that means to you. In most cases, you'll be disappointed, and realize that we really haven't lost much.
A more practical approach might be to just say goodbye to the newspaper industry, and focus on how that (mostly imaginary) "value" can be provided online. You might observe that we sorta have the start of it. Among the zillions of blogs, there are some that do a reasonable jobs of fact checking. And, of course, their primary activity is aggregation, as we see here with slashdot, but most of them do more than that. Slashdot's comment and moderations system is an interesting example of something that is obviously far from perfect, but better than anything that a hard-copy newspaper could ever have provided. In particular, we see lots of fact checking here, provided free by readers at very little cost to the site's owners within hours of a story's appearance.
Maybe with a few more decades experimenting, we can come up with a "news" system that's better than what the newspapers gave us. And nobody will object if some of the old news publishers are part of it. They just have to understand that the game has changed, and they no longer have the ability to monopolize a market.
The overheads to produce, print, distribute and sell a printed newspaper, overnight to every major city in the United States are massive and really cannot be legitimately compared to the digital equivalent.
On the contrary, I'll guarantee you that the accountants for the NYT and every other newspaper can tell you to the penny just how much both paper and electronic production and distribution costs them. And comparing the two sets of numbers is totally legitimate in any business setting.
The real problem is that the accountants can't tell you the price point that will maximize their future income from either method. That depends on the whims of their customers, not on any price lists that suppliers can give to the accountants.
Part of the problem, of course, is that electronic distribution now has costs that are orders of magnitude smaller than paper distribution. But this doesn't mean that such costs are some holy Mystery that's unknowable by mere humans. The publishers are just having problems coming to terms with this huge drop in their production costs, since it clearly means they should charge less for delivery by this new technology. But their management structure (and self image) is built partly on the costs of the old hard-copy delivery, and restructuring of such magnitude is always difficult for any human organization.
I think the real question should be, how much should a paid subscription cost?
Excellent phrasing of the issue. Unfortunately, the most elegant phrasing of the answer is something that the many armchair economists here rarely mention:
Whatever the market will bear.
I say "unfortunately" partly because this answer, while accurate, contains no clue about how you determine the price. The answer to that is "trial and error" (or "market research" if you prefer ;-). If you just ask people, you'll get as many answers as people asked, and few will have any relation to the actual number. Nobody knows what the correct market price is for news now. The old price included printing and distribution costs, and those have essentially disappeared.
The NYT and other such publishers will just have to experiment with prices, and see where the price point is that maximizes income. And there are difficulties doing this. If you highball the price, lots of people will never respond, and you'll never know that they would have become subscribers at a slightly lower price. OTOH, if you lowball the starting price, you run across the opposite problem of people being offended by frequent price increases for something that they would have paid more for if that had been the starting price.
In any case, as others have pointed out, it's a fact of life for the "news" industry that the raw news is and probably will remain free now. Profit is to be made by supplying organization, explanation, analysis, and commentary on the news. The days are probably over when you can make a profit for just supplying the raw text from the commercial suppliers. People can get that from news.google.com, among others, and you aren't likely to do a better job.
My wife has subscribed to nytimes.com for a while. She recently dropped salon.com, and it'll be interesting to see the price point where she (and others) drop their nytimes.com subscriptions. And whether such companies can get her and others back afterwards.
(As a computer geek and internet programmer from before the Internet existed, I've never subscribed to any MSM news sources. I do subscribe to a few tech/scientific news sources which were once paper but are now electronic. Like many people of my ilk, I have some of my own software for selecting from the online news sources. And I also look around for useful aggregators, such as the one we're reading here.)
Actually, what I imagined was him realizing that the camera might be active and spying on him. So he'd occasionally make rude/insulting/obscene gestures at the camera, just to let them know he was onto them. I can see your typical school admin type getting very upset at this, and labelling it "inappropriate".
I generally put a piece of tape over computers' cameras when I see them. In one place I worked, I noticed that the tape was removed every night. So I taped it again. For some reason, nobody ever mentioned this to me.
Something similar happened in a testing lab where I worked for a while. Lots of the lab's machines had cameras, so everyone in the lab taped them over when they weren't needed for testing. Occasionally, the tape would disappear overnight, and the next day, we'd tape them again. We understood that this wasn't accidental, and we waited for someone to try to "discuss" it with us. Nobody ever did.
This is like McDonalds trying to claim trademark violations if there is anything with "Mc" in front of it. What are they going to do, sue all of Scotland?
Nah; in Scotland it's mostly spelled "MacDonald". The way the legal system works, that's enough of a difference to drag any lawsuit out for decades. Anyway, if they tried, all the MacDonalds (and the few McDonalds who are mostly in Ireland) would countersue on the grounds that their family had the name for centuries before the fast-food chain existed. It's more likely that McDonald's could lose the right to use their name in the UK.
(Actually, there have been a few stories about McDonald's suing various people over their name. Googling for "McDonalds sues" turns up some fun stories, some of them very strange and surrealistic. You can learn a lot about the absurdities in the legal system by reading them. ;-)
No; you missed an important point: The camera strapped about the official's neck is pointed down.
And the video stream is online.
Hmmm ... The summary and several articles about the story state:
This sounds like a confession by at least on school official that such photos existed and he/she had seen them. How else could they have known about the kid's "improper behavior"?
Of course, by now the school has probably destroyed the images, and will deny having had them or seen them. But it could be interesting to ask whether regular backups had been made on the school computers.
What I'm curious about is how long it'll take for these photos to appear on random web sites not associated with the school. We do have a bit of history with such things ...
Don't iPhone programmers test their GUIs?
Huh? Why should they? It Just Works.
(Sometimes there are problems with dumb users who don't appreciate the Grand Design. But those can be safely ignored, and they'll come around eventually.)
Yeah, but in my experience (writing a lot of web code), this is generally because we developers have explicit orders to do it that way. The boss generally wants it one specific size that looks good to him on his screen, and wants that size imposed on everyone else. I've seen a number of crises caused by the boss getting a new machine with a different-size screen than the old one, and now all the size= and width= attributes have to be changed to fit that screen.
(I do wish I were joking. ;-)
I've also sunk a lot of time into making the end product work on non-boss screens, while guaranteeing that it will come out as ordered on his screen, so he never suspects that we've semi-violated our orders. In a few cases, the boss has eventually started to suspect what we've done, after seeing the pages come out looking good on someone else's screen, and the pieces are shaped differently. But we've always managed to distract him with some new pretty stuff before it gets too serious.
Oh, and if you prefer, you can substitute "her" for "his" and "him" above. Female bosses can be just as dumb about this as the males.