One thing that allows the Apple app store to be so popular is that the number of screen sizes it need to support is limited to one resolution, with a second larger screen announced but not out yet, and that'll come with a scaling tool so apps that are designed for the small screen will look okay on the bigger screen.
Actually, none of that would be needed if Apple hadn't screwed up the iPhone's browser's rendering so badly. I've worked on "mobilizing" a bunch of web sites so they work on smart phones. This is easy for most of them. You just go through the HTML and remove all the junk that forces specific sizes, so the browser is free to format everything to fit whatever window size it has available. This works for everything we've tested on - except the iPhone. When handed HTML that's free of size constraints, it usually formats it for a window bigger than the screen, and then shrinks it to fit the screen, making the text illegible.
There's a theory going around that this was done intentionally, to force developers to abandon HTML and write specialized iPhone-only apps. It seems to have worked, when you consider that most iPhone apps could be done with one or two pages of HTML (and usually without even any scripting;-).
There are quite a lot of discussions online about the iPhone browser's rendering problems. Nobody seems to have a good solution. The most successful seems to be to use <meta name="viewport" content="width=320">, but this poses a serious problem hinted at with the idea of a scaling tool: It will fail with the iPad, whose screen in portrait layout is wider than 320 pixels. So all web pages will need another test: If it's an iPhone, force width=320; if it's an iPad, force width="768". And, of course, with time, this list will get longer, until most of every web page is megabytes of tests for various iWhatever screen widths.
Of course, we could just do what others are doing, and abandon the Web approach. Instead, we build a separate app for each of the thousands of gadgets on the market. In many cases, the only difference between the thousands of versions of my app will be the different builtin screen width and height. But this will suffice to ensure that a customer won't be able to buy my app just once and copy it to all their gadgets; they'll have to pay the app store a small amount for every place they want to install it.
I'm not sure this is an improvement over what we built during the previous two decades. Crappy and limited as it is, the Web is so far the closest we've managed to come to a "write once, read anywhere" scheme. And for "content" that can be delivered as a document, it works fine. Except on the iPhone.
(So does anyone know a way other than the above meta-viewport kludge to persuade the iPhone browser to render a page sensibly on its screen, so that the user doesn't see a small window into a document formatted for a much bigger screen, and doesn't have to do 2-D scrolling to read it? Inquiring developers' minds want to know...)
... you probably still think digital watches were a good idea...
Heh. Some of us tried them out when they became reasonably cheap back in the 1980s, and after a while decided that they weren't really an improvement on the old kind. So I went back to an analog watch for a while. Then I developed a mild rash under the watch, and stopped wearing it for a while. Before I found another watch I liked, I'd noticed how rarely I actually needed one. This was somewhere around 1995, I think, and what I'd noticed was how difficult it had become to be out of view of a clock. By then, clocks of some sort seemed to be easily visible no matter where I was, and a quick scan around would usually spot one in a second or two. OK, if I was walking around out in the woods, there weren't any clocks, but out there it didn't matter if I got back an hour early or late, and it didn't matter.
So I never got another watch. In recent years, I've read a number of articles explaining that I may have been in on the start of a movement of sorts. It seems the watch-making business has gone downhill quite a bit in the past decade or so. People one by one are noticing that they're redundant in a society that has visible clocks almost everywhere. So unless you're involved in some specialized activity where you need a special watch that does something that the other clocks in your environment can't do, or you just like a watch as jewelry, there's not much reason to wear one any more.
In the rare case I don't see a clock during a quick 2-second scan of the environment, I now reach for the phone in my pocket. Are there any cell phones that don't display a clock when "asleep"?
It is curious to think that we may have returned to pocket watches...
It's not against the ToS (at least for Comcast) unless you're making money from it, at least that's my understanding of the ToS and that's basically what the Comcast CSR told me before I signed up.
If you were only told that, and don't have it in writing, it doesn't mean a thing. And even if you have it in writing, you might still want to take a close look at your contract. (You did get a printed copy of it, right?) Chances are it has one of those clauses saying that they can change anything in it at any time without notifying you.
Comcast is notorious around here (among the geek crowd) for having a different actual policy about servers for nearly every block. They shut people off without notice, and won't discuss it with you (possibly because the "support" people who answer the phone don't have any idea what a server is; they think it's a piece of hardware). Meanwhile, your friend a block or two over is happily running N servers on his home machine without any hassle. For a while.
And, of course, Comcast isn't nearly the only company that behaves this way. Our neighborhood monopolist is Verizon, and they're nearly as inconsistent on such things as Comcast. Sometimes you get a knowledgeable person on the phone; mostly you just get a dummy who barely speaks English.
... real men read their technical manuals on a 65" Plasma Screen
Meh; it's only 1920 x 1080. My laptop has more pixels than that, and at its usual distance while on my lap it subtends a larger angle than that plasma screen would if sitting on the back of my desk.
I'm not impressed by a physically big screens with low pixel counts. But I suppose if I had really bad eyes, I might consider such a screen (and sit really close to it).
This I fundamentaly agree with. In my view "too big to fail" actually means "too wedded into the rest of economy to be alowed to fail".
Yeah, that's one of the common meanings of the phrase. But there's another that might well apply in this case, too: A company is "too big to fail" if it has the clout to, uh, persuade the government to prevent its failure.
This can be (and has been) done in a number of different ways. In the telecom industry, the traditional approach has been to establish a monopoly position that's enforced by the government. This effectively eliminates competition and guarantees a "regulated" profit margin. You can probably think of examples in other economic fields.
In the computer field, we saw a good example of another approach during the US's 2000 election. Prior to this, Microsoft had been only marginally active in politics. In 2000, Microsoft became one of the largest campaign "contributors". They contributed to campaigns in both parties, but mostly to Republicans, especially the Bush/Cheney campaign. Shortly after the winners took office, the Justice department effectively settled the lawsuit about Microsoft's monopolistic practices (of which they had been convicted by a lower court) on terms that were very friendly to Microsoft. The "punishment" was minimal, a few hours worth of MS's profits. They were also to be "regulated" by a 3-person committee, with Microsoft appointing one person and having veto power over the other. You haven't heard much about that committee, because they haven't done anything. Part of the "punishment" was that no further indictments would happen without the committee's approval, and none have happened.
But this example is relevant here mostly because this is a computer-geek forum. Similar examples of "bribery-by-another-name" abound, in other economic fields, and are one of the common meanings of "too big to fail". It means a company that can bribe officials to support it. (You might ask the OLPC folks for more examples.;-)
There are still other meanings to the phrase. Back in the late 1970s, there was an incident in which the head of a department of the state of California implemented a switch from the usual IBM computer systems to some other kind of computer. Which kind didn't matter. What mattered was that the department's top official was forced to justify his decision before the state legislature. It was widely reported that he won, i.e., the legislature permitted him to keep his job. Industry analysts also pointed out that IBM had won really big (despite their apparent loss of the one sale). They had demonstrated that if you're sure you can justify a non-IBM purchase before a committee of computer-illiterate politicians, go right ahead and buy what you want. But if you do, IBM can and will have you dragged before those computer-illiterate politicians, and you'll be fighting for your professional life. If you aren't absolutely sure you want to do this, you'd be better off just buying what your IBM rep says you should buy. We can be sure that managers everywhere understood this lesson.
Anyway, the phrase is a rather elegant way to summarize a wide range of conditions in which the government will guarantee the ongoing success of a giant corporation.
Anyone got any more examples of yet other meanings (or implementations) of the phrase? It might be fun to generate a list of them, complete with links and explanations of how they differ from each other.
One of the fun things I learned while taking some linguistics courses in college was the actual grammar of English. Several of the profs had fun assigning an analysis of English grammar late in their course, after the students had learned something about linguistic analysis. It turns out that our usual terms such as 'verb' and 'noun' are Latin word classes, and are pretty much irrelevant to English. English has valid word classes, but 'verb' and 'noun' aren't among them.
The sentence "Don't verb nouns" is a good illustration. Every native speaker of English instantly understand this, and knows that 'verb' is the verb. How do they know? It's because English syntax tells them that a word in that position is the 'verb', and a word in that other position is the noun. There's nothing in an English verb (except for 3rd person) that marks that word as a verb. Also, 'nouns' could be a 3rd-person singular verb form, but we know it's a plural noun, not because of its form, but because of its position in the sentence.
So 'verb' and 'noun', if they mean anything in English, don't describe word classes. They're the names of syntactical positions within a clause. Pretty much any "content" word (often called "substantives", as opposed to syntactic particles or relational words like prepositions) can be plugged into a verb or noun position, if their basic meaning makes sense there. This was done by Bill Waterson in "Don't verb nouns", as well as in the followup "Verbing weirds language", to good humorous effect. But these also pleased a lot of linguists, because they're both excellent examples of how the English language really works. The real proof that they're both correct English syntax is that we all understand them without any problem. And we understand (if only subconsciously) that they're funny because they violate the invalid grammar rules we've been taught in school.
Now if we could just get the school system to stop trying to impose Latin grammar on English, and teach actual English syntax. But I suppose that won't happen within our lifetime. And it might also eliminate much of the humor that we get out of the whole mess.
We can not trust the markets to resolve this. Consumers will just blindly sleep walk into this if it makes for a easy life now. Which they might with Windows being so bad for malware, virus etc etc...
Microsoft-bashing is of course always fun, but google has something even better going for them in this case. For most of us in the US, the alternatives are companies like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc., which have the traditional local monopolies in most places, and which are all hated pretty much like The Phone Company (whatever it was called that year) has always been hated.
In our neighborhood, Verizon has the FDDI monopoly, legally enforced by the city. That has caused a lot of resistance among the citizenry to the constant junk mail about how wonderful FDDI is, because we all have experience with Verizon, and this tells us what we should really expect. In other places, it's a different telecom giant with the local deal that excludes their competitors and delivers crappy service.
So for now, if google can pull this off, we'll cheer them on. Of course, we expect that they'll proceed to establish the traditional telecom monopoly deal with the local government, and we'll end up hating them like we did their predecessor. But for now they look like the good guys, with the power to break the current monopoly and actually improve things for a while, until their local monopoly is established.
Now if we knew how to make the "regulators" stop establishing local monopolies...
Yeah; for some reason I never get hired to to stand-up at church retreats. I've gotta get some new material. Somehow, I don't think/. is the place to find it, though.
... You sir sound like you may be ignorant of this very important and beneficial part of life. I say this as someone with a sense of humor, who understands things like satire and tongue-in-cheek humor.
Ah, but you should realize that the portion of the brain disabled by the article's surgery is the part that controls the sense of humor. That's where the "spirituality" comes from, since one of the main characteristics of most "spiritual" people is a lack of a sense of humor.
Do you know what the average life expectancy was, back then? Or the child mortality rates? Life expectancy in the US has risen more than 25 years during the 20th Century!
Lots of historians have observed that if you wander through old graveyards and subtract birth dates from death dates, you find that the figures from previous centuries don't differ much from today's. The difference is almost entirely in the child mortality rates. It used to be that most people died before the age of 5, and those that survived to 10 or so usually lived the traditional "three score and ten". That 25-year increase is mostly the result of an average that no longer includes the childhood deaths. If you're an adult, your life expectancy isn't much different than it would have been if you'd been born in 1810 or 1610.
This is true of the "first world" countries, of course, maybe not so true in poorer parts of the world. Some parts of the world still have a high death rate among infants. There is also historical evidence that age of death (of people who survived to adulthood) went down somewhat in industrial parts of the world during the 1700s and 1800s. But the problem here is that the effect was likely small, and the data isn't what a statistician would call high quality.
There's also the fact that such data as exists comes mostly from graveyards in the most affluent parts of a society. It has always been common for poor people to be buried in unmarked, often mass graves, so they aren't part of the data. We've just been hearing reports of this in the modern world, from Haiti. The infrastructure couldn't handle the recent disaster, and many of the bodies have been buried in mass graves. For most of them, we have no record saying that they died, much less how old they were. This has been common in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods throughout history. So the little data we have is somewhat suspect outside the past century or so of the wealthiest countries. But we can say that the more affluent (who were buried in graveyards) often died in their 70s and 80s in past centuries, and those numbers haven't changed much yet.
Even if they were mailing copies to Florida, I don't see how it could, in a sane mind, be constituted as "operating a business" in Florida.
I think you just spotted the critical factor. This isn't about a decision of a "sane mind"; it's about a decision by a judge in a US Federal Court.
Such people are political appointees. They aren't tested for sanity, or even knowledge of the law. They're appointed because they have the right politics.
This may not be a great example, but the last company I worked at saved big when we replaced Exchange with Gmail, which I don't consider an open source product. Not only did we scrap Exchange and the associated server OS licenses, we let the Exchange admin go and replaced them with a lower cost developer. That saved a ton of money and we were able to channel that savings into increased productivity. Double bonus. Gmail is simple enough the help desk could manage the administration.
Depending on your company, there's another possible "cost" that you might want to consider: With gmail, google effectively has access to all your company's email. Since, as you noted, their code isn't open source, you don't really know what it's doing in addition to managing your email. This might not mean anything to you, especially since google has a pretty good reputation so far. But in some cases there might be worries that (for example) a competitor might grease some palms at google to get a copy of all your email.
Of course, this isn't anything special to google. A few years back, a Microsoft subsidiary (msn.com) was caught using data extracted from customers' email and web pages in advertising. You might have read about it on slashdot. Some people got a little upset to find pictures of their kids appearing in their ISP's ads. When challenged, msn.com's reply was that the TOS/EULA explicitly gave them the right to use any files stored on their machines. They did eventually back off and say they'd stop doing it, but nobody with any sense trusts them. (You might check your ISP's contract wording to see if they have a clause like this. If so, you might consider that it's there for a reason.)
And again, this isn't special to Microsoft, either. Any closed-source software you're using should be assumed to contain code that "they" don't want you to know about. If the software is run on a machine with internet access, you should assume that it might have copied any file on that machine to the code's owner's machines.
The only real defense against this is to only run code for which you have all the source, and which you've compiled yourself. Using binaries for which the code is available is somewhat less safe, and good enough for most companies that don't have very serious security concerns. But if there are things like account numbers and names on the machine, you should assume that any closed-source code you've used has sent them off to someone you don't know about.
Probably. At least we won't have real AIs outside a few academic institutions as long as the computer industry is controlled by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Apple. We'll have computers that are much smaller and faster, and with much more memory, but these will continue to be used to implement flashy "eye candy" interfaces. There won't be any memory or cpu cycles left over for anything that approximates thinking.
One good description of the problem came from Henry Petroski, who commented that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." As long as this remains true, we can pretty much forget about real advances in the "intelligence" of our computers. The term "smart" will continue to mean computing gadgets with flashier UIs, not with more sophisticated reasoning ability.
(I have a friend who likes to observe that most of the advances in computing have been motivated by the desire for better games and porn. Of course, some sci-fi writers have proposed that the real advances in AI and/or robotics will be to build better "sexbots".;-)
If a Florida citizen visits playboy.com, the person who gets in trouble would be the citizen for importing contraband, not Playboy (because it isn't a Florida company).
OK, hold on just a minute... There; I've updated one of my web pages so that after a 10-sec delay, it redirects to playboy.com. After all, if you haven't hit the Back button by then, you have clearly consented to the redirection. The CGI script that delivers the page also writes a record of the IP addresses for those requests, which I'll remember to send off to the Florida state police. So anyone who lives in Florida and visits my site may find themselves in a heap o' trouble.
Actually, I have another page where I should do this. It's a demo of the javascript code for "preloading" files into your cache. I mostly use it to make your browser download the logos and other images from the site's pages, so they'll be in your cache when you visit other pages, making them render a lot faster. I'll add links to a few of the playboy.com images to the list, so those will also be in your cache (although no pages on my site actually use them). That way, if any Floridian visits my site, those playboy.com images will be "preloaded" into your cache, for the entertainment of anyone with a court order to search your disk (or anyone working in your employer's IT department, if you happen to visit my site from your work machine).
If you get arrested or fired or your gf^Wmom discovers those images on your machine, let me know.
(Maybe what we need is for someone to pull such tricks on a Florida or Federal judge. That might get across some better conception of how the Web actually works.)
Did you ever consider that *maybe* they were under the mistaken impression that orange juice *was* just for breakfast, but the post informed them that this is no longer the case?;)
And it only took having my same sig for most of 10 years for it to actually be topical. - - - - Tequila - It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Well, maybe not tequila by itself, but I've had a bit of fun occasionally arguing that a margarita is appropriate for breakfast. My reasoning is that everyone accepts orange juice as a breakfast drink, and most people would accept that limeade or lemonade is a reasonable substitute. Of course, limeade and lemonade are just lime or lemon juice with some sugar (which oranges contain naturally) plus enough water to reduce the acidity to about the same as orange juice. And a margarita is merely limeade (with a small amount of orange) diluted with tequila instead of water. And tequila is around half water, so it's not all that big a difference.
It's fun to watch people try to find a way out of this sort of reasoning.
[Google] should rename themselves to EPIC (Evil Privacy Invading Corporation).
Much too late; epic.com is 216.165.132.89, and has been registered since 1990. Whois gives the information:
Registrant:
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EPIC.COM
Created on: 22-Aug-90
Expires on: 21-Aug-10
Last Updated on: 13-Aug-09
Administrative Contact:
Charles, Jeremy hostmaster@epicsystems.com
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
+1.6082719000 Fax -- +1.6084105961
Technical Contact:
Charles, Jeremy hostmaster@epicsystems.com
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
+1.6082719000 Fax -- +1.6084105961
Domain servers in listed order:
XM-DR-DNS01.EPICSYSTEMS.COM
EPIC-DNS3.EPICSYSTEMS.COM
This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error -- just one -- will usually invalidate a computer program.
Back in the 1970s, a bunch of CompSci guys at the university where I was a grad student did a software study with interesting results. Much of the research computing was done on the university's mainframe, and the dominant language of course was Fortran. They instrumented the Fortran compiler so that for a couple of months, it collected data on numeric overflows, including which overflows were or weren't detected by the code. They published the results: slightly over half the Fortran jobs had undetected overflows that affected their output.
The response to this was interesting. The CS folks, as you might expect, were appalled. But among the scientific researchers, the general response was that enabling overflow checking slowed down the code measurably, so it shouldn't be done. I personally knew a lot of researchers (as one of the managers of an inter-departmental microcomputer lab that was independent of the central mainframe computer center). I asked a lot of them about this, and I was appalled to find that almost every one of them agreed that overflow checking should be turned off if it slowed down the code. The mainframe's managers reported that almost all Fortran compiles had overflow checking turned off. Pointing out that this meant that fully half of the computed results in their published papers were wrong (if they used the mainframe) didn't have any effect.
Our small cabal that ran the microprocessor lab reacted to this by silently enabling all error checking in our Fortran compiler. We even checked with the vendor to make sure that we'd set it up so that a user couldn't disable the checking. We didn't announce that we had done this; we just did it on our own authority. It was also done in a couple of other similar department-level labs that had their own computers (which was rare at the time). But the major research computer on campus was the central mainframe, and the folks running it weren't interested in dealing with the problem.
It taught us a lot about how such things are done. And it gave us a healthy level of skepticism about published research data. It was a good lesson on why we have an ongoing need to duplicate research results independently before believing them.
It might be interesting to read about studies similar to this done more recently. I haven't seen any, but maybe they're out there.
Also for the cost of the bank bailout($700Billion) we could of gone to mars and back($55Billion) about 13-14 times
Well, yeah, but then where would the top guys in those banks have gotten their multi-million-dollar bonuses that they need to encourage them to keep up the job they've done on^Wfor the banking system in recent years? Do you think that NASA would have given them their needed bonuses? And they were running low on the funds they needed to buy up smaller banks that were annoying them with that weird "competition" stuff.
The money went where our leaders knew it was needed, and the bankers will surely reward them by generous contributions to their next campaigns. Going to Mars wouldn't have gotten them anywhere near the same contributions.
The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
So far, it seems to be fairly persistent in the human population.
Actually, there's good evidence that our earliest multicellular ancestors didn't have a builtin killswitch, and lived until some predator ate them. This is still true of some kinds of fish. But all the "higher animals" have a builtin natural lifespan, and start to disintegrate after some number of years. So it appears that the "killswitch" has been adaptive in all these species. We do occasionally generate clumps of cells that are immortal, but when this happens, they always kill us, and then they die. About the only clump that has escaped this fate is the infamous HeLa culture, which survives in research laboratories despite all our attempts to eradicate it.
If this guy finds that religion helps him not to do things he shouldn't, who are you to question it?
While such results are commendable, this doesn't alleviate us of the moral responsibility to question religions. After all, in addition to the good that religious leaders claim to have given the world, there is also a lot of evil that also appears to be associated with their leadership.
A sensible person would question such a situation. For starters, is either of these claims supportable, or are they example of "correlation isn't causation"? It has been observed that all religions pretty much agree on their claims for good, and this implies that the concept of "good" is independent of religion. If not, you'd expect the various religions to have more disagreement about what constitutes "good". Since they are in fairly close agreement on the topic, one might infer that "good" is something that people mostly agree on, and religious leaders are merely laying claim on something that is inherent to the human psyche (except for a few psychopaths).
Similarly, as others have pointed out, some anti-religious leaders have induced their followers to commit great evils. Stalin and Mao come to mind, and we have recently examples such as Rwanda and Cambodia to the list. So we clearly can't blame all of the world's evil on religious leaders. On the other hand, we seem to have a lot of historical cases in which the political leaders that instigated great evils were supported (tacitly or openly) by the religious leaders. Again, we could get into a discussion of cause-and-effect, and those religious leaders have typically done just that. And again, there's an alternative hypothesis: Evil is also inherent in the human psyche (except for a few saints). We also have evidence that it has a strong social component, since we have many documented cases of organizations (governments, corporations, whatever) that have perpetrated evil against the clear wishes of (most of) their members.
The whole story can get rather complex. Starting about 1500 years ago, most of Europe's classical civilization was destroyed, and much of the evidence supports the claim that the primary agent of destruction was the church. The religious leaders encouraged destruction of all "heathen" classical learning, and discouraged literacy in all but their priesthood. But a great deal of the classical learning was preserved - by the church's priests and monks, many of whom understood its value.
Similarly, in the 1500s, Spain conquered Central America and wiped out all but a trace of its "heathen" written history. The people were reduced to illiteracy, and only a handful of tomes from their libraries survived - because Spanish priests smuggled them back to Europe. We've only recently relearned to read Mayan writing, which also exists on those thousands of "stelae" that litter the Central American landscape, and which are mostly historical markers. So we again have a case of the soldiers destroying a society for religious reasons, while (a few of) the religious leaders helped save at least some of it.
In general, we have an obvious "null hypothesis": A society's religious beliefs or lack thereof have little if anything to do with the amount of "good" or "evil" in that society. Religious people will responsibility for the good, but do little to actually justify that claim. Meanwhile, religious debunkers assign responsibility for the evil to the religious leaders, again with little evidence to support their claim. Perhaps religion is morally neutral, and it's the people and their society that are the real source of good and evil. The religious people are just going along for the ride, making a living by consoling the people, running a central meeting place for social events, and teaching morality to the people by whatever approach they seem to understand.
I wonder how we'd find real evidence, or whether we'd even be permitted to carry out the studies out of fear for what we'd conclude. After all, as long as
Like Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
Maybe not, but they can make you feel beat up.
Serious physical injuries aren't usually psychological. I had a friend in high school who had been beat up so badly in his previous school that he was hospitalized for most of a year. By the time I graduated, left town, and lost contact, his family was still involved in the court case against the school and town, and it wasn't at all certain that the courts would decide in their favor. The town's attitude was "not our problem; we didn't beat the kid up".
They'd have been better off spending those research dollars trying to figure out how to properly socialize the goddamned bullies, not their victims...
Nah; they'd already figured out that most of the bullies are psychopaths that can't be socialized. So they switched to studying how their victims could be taught to survive.
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
Actually, in linguistic circles, the origin of most of the bogus rules like this is fairly well understood: It comes from the fact that until fairly recently (historically speaking), English was a lower-class "vernacular" that wasn't taught at all. What was taught in schools was Latin and Greek grammar. In those languages, most of the bogus grammatical rules you've learned were actually valid. The problem is that, while schools in the English-speaking countries now claim to teach "English", what they consider "grammar" is still mostly Latin, not English.
Thus, the "ending with a preposition" proscription is talking about a standard grammatical construct in all the Germanic languages (and English is basically Germanic). These languages routinely attach affixes to verbs that are functionally adverbs, modifying the basic meaning of the verb. They're often called "adverbial particles" by linguists. They're etymologically related to prepositions, but aren't. The syntax only occasionally puts them next to the main verb as a prefix or suffix; mostly they're put at the end of the clause. If you study German, you'll learn to call them "separable prefixes", because in the infinitive form they are attached as a prefix with no space in the spelling. But as a main verb in a sentence, only the verb stem (and inflection) goes at the usual place after the subject and before any objects; the adverbial particle goes after the objects.
Splitting of infinitives is another such bogus rule. In Latin, an infinitive is an inflected form, with no auxiliary similar to the English "to", and of course nothing was ever put after a verb stem and before the inflectional ending. In the English, the infinitive form is indicated by the auxiliary "to", and writers have always inserted adverbs between it and the verb. This was common even before the word "English" was invented for the new language (to distinguish it from the older Anglo-Saxon, which lacked all those French borrowings).
What we really need is for the schools to finally start teaching actual English grammar. Until they do that, it makes perfect sense for native speakers to develop contempt for the bogus Latin grammar that their teachers have tried to foist on them, and just speak and write according to the actual grammar that their subconscious minds know about. But don't expect this to happen during your lifetime. The English-teacher subculture has a life of its own, and they so far have shown little interest in learning anything about their language from mere linguists.
Cuz is the new ain't, and has been around since BBS-speak, if not before.
You should be a bit careful with this example, because (;-) the origin of the "cuz" abbreviation is a bit more interesting than just a BBS/IM-type shorthand. As documented by a number of linguists' field work, it's an example of a spreading change in several American dialects: Unstressed initial syllables are frequently dropped. In many cases, young people in areas where such dialects are spoken have rarely if ever heard the first syllable of many common words. A textbook example is "because", which to native speakers of such a dialect appears to contain four silent letters, with only "cus" pronounced. In such cases, it's not surprising that people would react to such a spelling absurdity by adopting the shorthand spelling. In this case, where there are more silent letters in the proper spelling than there are pronounced letters, it's quite easy for the reduced spelling to gain the upper hand.
... and watching the likes Glenn Beck and John Stewart,...
Careful there; someone's going to point out the surveys before recent elections, which reported that the people who watched Jon Stewart's Daily Show (and the Colbert Report, and read theonion.com) were generally the best able to correctly answer questions about various candidates. Stewart himself made a number of jokes about this, of the "Look what a sorry state our country has reached" variety. He has also notoriously chided many in the mainstream media for their failure to report news accurately to the population, and generally argued that the country shouldn't have to rely on professional comedians like him to learn what's going on in the world.
Of course, one of his standard running jokes is the people who just can't seem to understand that he's a comedian, not a journalist, no matter how many times he reminds them. A good deal of his show's material is based on this, especially his staff's "interviews" with people who take the interview seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
One thing that allows the Apple app store to be so popular is that the number of screen sizes it need to support is limited to one resolution, with a second larger screen announced but not out yet, and that'll come with a scaling tool so apps that are designed for the small screen will look okay on the bigger screen.
Actually, none of that would be needed if Apple hadn't screwed up the iPhone's browser's rendering so badly. I've worked on "mobilizing" a bunch of web sites so they work on smart phones. This is easy for most of them. You just go through the HTML and remove all the junk that forces specific sizes, so the browser is free to format everything to fit whatever window size it has available. This works for everything we've tested on - except the iPhone. When handed HTML that's free of size constraints, it usually formats it for a window bigger than the screen, and then shrinks it to fit the screen, making the text illegible.
There's a theory going around that this was done intentionally, to force developers to abandon HTML and write specialized iPhone-only apps. It seems to have worked, when you consider that most iPhone apps could be done with one or two pages of HTML (and usually without even any scripting ;-).
There are quite a lot of discussions online about the iPhone browser's rendering problems. Nobody seems to have a good solution. The most successful seems to be to use <meta name="viewport" content="width=320">, but this poses a serious problem hinted at with the idea of a scaling tool: It will fail with the iPad, whose screen in portrait layout is wider than 320 pixels. So all web pages will need another test: If it's an iPhone, force width=320; if it's an iPad, force width="768". And, of course, with time, this list will get longer, until most of every web page is megabytes of tests for various iWhatever screen widths.
Of course, we could just do what others are doing, and abandon the Web approach. Instead, we build a separate app for each of the thousands of gadgets on the market. In many cases, the only difference between the thousands of versions of my app will be the different builtin screen width and height. But this will suffice to ensure that a customer won't be able to buy my app just once and copy it to all their gadgets; they'll have to pay the app store a small amount for every place they want to install it.
I'm not sure this is an improvement over what we built during the previous two decades. Crappy and limited as it is, the Web is so far the closest we've managed to come to a "write once, read anywhere" scheme. And for "content" that can be delivered as a document, it works fine. Except on the iPhone.
(So does anyone know a way other than the above meta-viewport kludge to persuade the iPhone browser to render a page sensibly on its screen, so that the user doesn't see a small window into a document formatted for a much bigger screen, and doesn't have to do 2-D scrolling to read it? Inquiring developers' minds want to know ...)
... you probably still think digital watches were a good idea...
Heh. Some of us tried them out when they became reasonably cheap back in the 1980s, and after a while decided that they weren't really an improvement on the old kind. So I went back to an analog watch for a while. Then I developed a mild rash under the watch, and stopped wearing it for a while. Before I found another watch I liked, I'd noticed how rarely I actually needed one. This was somewhere around 1995, I think, and what I'd noticed was how difficult it had become to be out of view of a clock. By then, clocks of some sort seemed to be easily visible no matter where I was, and a quick scan around would usually spot one in a second or two. OK, if I was walking around out in the woods, there weren't any clocks, but out there it didn't matter if I got back an hour early or late, and it didn't matter.
So I never got another watch. In recent years, I've read a number of articles explaining that I may have been in on the start of a movement of sorts. It seems the watch-making business has gone downhill quite a bit in the past decade or so. People one by one are noticing that they're redundant in a society that has visible clocks almost everywhere. So unless you're involved in some specialized activity where you need a special watch that does something that the other clocks in your environment can't do, or you just like a watch as jewelry, there's not much reason to wear one any more.
In the rare case I don't see a clock during a quick 2-second scan of the environment, I now reach for the phone in my pocket. Are there any cell phones that don't display a clock when "asleep"?
It is curious to think that we may have returned to pocket watches ...
It's not against the ToS (at least for Comcast) unless you're making money from it, at least that's my understanding of the ToS and that's basically what the Comcast CSR told me before I signed up.
If you were only told that, and don't have it in writing, it doesn't mean a thing. And even if you have it in writing, you might still want to take a close look at your contract. (You did get a printed copy of it, right?) Chances are it has one of those clauses saying that they can change anything in it at any time without notifying you.
Comcast is notorious around here (among the geek crowd) for having a different actual policy about servers for nearly every block. They shut people off without notice, and won't discuss it with you (possibly because the "support" people who answer the phone don't have any idea what a server is; they think it's a piece of hardware). Meanwhile, your friend a block or two over is happily running N servers on his home machine without any hassle. For a while.
And, of course, Comcast isn't nearly the only company that behaves this way. Our neighborhood monopolist is Verizon, and they're nearly as inconsistent on such things as Comcast. Sometimes you get a knowledgeable person on the phone; mostly you just get a dummy who barely speaks English.
... real men read their technical manuals on a 65" Plasma Screen
Meh; it's only 1920 x 1080. My laptop has more pixels than that, and at its usual distance while on my lap it subtends a larger angle than that plasma screen would if sitting on the back of my desk.
I'm not impressed by a physically big screens with low pixel counts. But I suppose if I had really bad eyes, I might consider such a screen (and sit really close to it).
This I fundamentaly agree with. In my view "too big to fail" actually means "too wedded into the rest of economy to be alowed to fail".
Yeah, that's one of the common meanings of the phrase. But there's another that might well apply in this case, too: A company is "too big to fail" if it has the clout to, uh, persuade the government to prevent its failure.
This can be (and has been) done in a number of different ways. In the telecom industry, the traditional approach has been to establish a monopoly position that's enforced by the government. This effectively eliminates competition and guarantees a "regulated" profit margin. You can probably think of examples in other economic fields.
In the computer field, we saw a good example of another approach during the US's 2000 election. Prior to this, Microsoft had been only marginally active in politics. In 2000, Microsoft became one of the largest campaign "contributors". They contributed to campaigns in both parties, but mostly to Republicans, especially the Bush/Cheney campaign. Shortly after the winners took office, the Justice department effectively settled the lawsuit about Microsoft's monopolistic practices (of which they had been convicted by a lower court) on terms that were very friendly to Microsoft. The "punishment" was minimal, a few hours worth of MS's profits. They were also to be "regulated" by a 3-person committee, with Microsoft appointing one person and having veto power over the other. You haven't heard much about that committee, because they haven't done anything. Part of the "punishment" was that no further indictments would happen without the committee's approval, and none have happened.
But this example is relevant here mostly because this is a computer-geek forum. Similar examples of "bribery-by-another-name" abound, in other economic fields, and are one of the common meanings of "too big to fail". It means a company that can bribe officials to support it. (You might ask the OLPC folks for more examples. ;-)
There are still other meanings to the phrase. Back in the late 1970s, there was an incident in which the head of a department of the state of California implemented a switch from the usual IBM computer systems to some other kind of computer. Which kind didn't matter. What mattered was that the department's top official was forced to justify his decision before the state legislature. It was widely reported that he won, i.e., the legislature permitted him to keep his job. Industry analysts also pointed out that IBM had won really big (despite their apparent loss of the one sale). They had demonstrated that if you're sure you can justify a non-IBM purchase before a committee of computer-illiterate politicians, go right ahead and buy what you want. But if you do, IBM can and will have you dragged before those computer-illiterate politicians, and you'll be fighting for your professional life. If you aren't absolutely sure you want to do this, you'd be better off just buying what your IBM rep says you should buy. We can be sure that managers everywhere understood this lesson.
Anyway, the phrase is a rather elegant way to summarize a wide range of conditions in which the government will guarantee the ongoing success of a giant corporation.
Anyone got any more examples of yet other meanings (or implementations) of the phrase? It might be fun to generate a list of them, complete with links and explanations of how they differ from each other.
Verbing nouns has been with us forever, ...
One of the fun things I learned while taking some linguistics courses in college was the actual grammar of English. Several of the profs had fun assigning an analysis of English grammar late in their course, after the students had learned something about linguistic analysis. It turns out that our usual terms such as 'verb' and 'noun' are Latin word classes, and are pretty much irrelevant to English. English has valid word classes, but 'verb' and 'noun' aren't among them.
The sentence "Don't verb nouns" is a good illustration. Every native speaker of English instantly understand this, and knows that 'verb' is the verb. How do they know? It's because English syntax tells them that a word in that position is the 'verb', and a word in that other position is the noun. There's nothing in an English verb (except for 3rd person) that marks that word as a verb. Also, 'nouns' could be a 3rd-person singular verb form, but we know it's a plural noun, not because of its form, but because of its position in the sentence.
So 'verb' and 'noun', if they mean anything in English, don't describe word classes. They're the names of syntactical positions within a clause. Pretty much any "content" word (often called "substantives", as opposed to syntactic particles or relational words like prepositions) can be plugged into a verb or noun position, if their basic meaning makes sense there. This was done by Bill Waterson in "Don't verb nouns", as well as in the followup "Verbing weirds language", to good humorous effect. But these also pleased a lot of linguists, because they're both excellent examples of how the English language really works. The real proof that they're both correct English syntax is that we all understand them without any problem. And we understand (if only subconsciously) that they're funny because they violate the invalid grammar rules we've been taught in school.
Now if we could just get the school system to stop trying to impose Latin grammar on English, and teach actual English syntax. But I suppose that won't happen within our lifetime. And it might also eliminate much of the humor that we get out of the whole mess.
We can not trust the markets to resolve this. Consumers will just blindly sleep walk into this if it makes for a easy life now. Which they might with Windows being so bad for malware, virus etc etc ...
Microsoft-bashing is of course always fun, but google has something even better going for them in this case. For most of us in the US, the alternatives are companies like Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, etc., which have the traditional local monopolies in most places, and which are all hated pretty much like The Phone Company (whatever it was called that year) has always been hated.
In our neighborhood, Verizon has the FDDI monopoly, legally enforced by the city. That has caused a lot of resistance among the citizenry to the constant junk mail about how wonderful FDDI is, because we all have experience with Verizon, and this tells us what we should really expect. In other places, it's a different telecom giant with the local deal that excludes their competitors and delivers crappy service.
So for now, if google can pull this off, we'll cheer them on. Of course, we expect that they'll proceed to establish the traditional telecom monopoly deal with the local government, and we'll end up hating them like we did their predecessor. But for now they look like the good guys, with the power to break the current monopoly and actually improve things for a while, until their local monopoly is established.
Now if we knew how to make the "regulators" stop establishing local monopolies ...
Yeah; for some reason I never get hired to to stand-up at church retreats. I've gotta get some new material. Somehow, I don't think /. is the place to find it, though.
... You sir sound like you may be ignorant of this very important and beneficial part of life. I say this as someone with a sense of humor, who understands things like satire and tongue-in-cheek humor.
Ah, but you should realize that the portion of the brain disabled by the article's surgery is the part that controls the sense of humor. That's where the "spirituality" comes from, since one of the main characteristics of most "spiritual" people is a lack of a sense of humor.
Do you know what the average life expectancy was, back then? Or the child mortality rates?
Life expectancy in the US has risen more than 25 years during the 20th Century!
Lots of historians have observed that if you wander through old graveyards and subtract birth dates from death dates, you find that the figures from previous centuries don't differ much from today's. The difference is almost entirely in the child mortality rates. It used to be that most people died before the age of 5, and those that survived to 10 or so usually lived the traditional "three score and ten". That 25-year increase is mostly the result of an average that no longer includes the childhood deaths. If you're an adult, your life expectancy isn't much different than it would have been if you'd been born in 1810 or 1610.
This is true of the "first world" countries, of course, maybe not so true in poorer parts of the world. Some parts of the world still have a high death rate among infants. There is also historical evidence that age of death (of people who survived to adulthood) went down somewhat in industrial parts of the world during the 1700s and 1800s. But the problem here is that the effect was likely small, and the data isn't what a statistician would call high quality.
There's also the fact that such data as exists comes mostly from graveyards in the most affluent parts of a society. It has always been common for poor people to be buried in unmarked, often mass graves, so they aren't part of the data. We've just been hearing reports of this in the modern world, from Haiti. The infrastructure couldn't handle the recent disaster, and many of the bodies have been buried in mass graves. For most of them, we have no record saying that they died, much less how old they were. This has been common in all but the wealthiest neighborhoods throughout history. So the little data we have is somewhat suspect outside the past century or so of the wealthiest countries. But we can say that the more affluent (who were buried in graveyards) often died in their 70s and 80s in past centuries, and those numbers haven't changed much yet.
Even if they were mailing copies to Florida, I don't see how it could, in a sane mind, be constituted as "operating a business" in Florida.
I think you just spotted the critical factor. This isn't about a decision of a "sane mind"; it's about a decision by a judge in a US Federal Court.
Such people are political appointees. They aren't tested for sanity, or even knowledge of the law. They're appointed because they have the right politics.
This may not be a great example, but the last company I worked at saved big when we replaced Exchange with Gmail, which I don't consider an open source product. Not only did we scrap Exchange and the associated server OS licenses, we let the Exchange admin go and replaced them with a lower cost developer. That saved a ton of money and we were able to channel that savings into increased productivity. Double bonus. Gmail is simple enough the help desk could manage the administration.
Depending on your company, there's another possible "cost" that you might want to consider: With gmail, google effectively has access to all your company's email. Since, as you noted, their code isn't open source, you don't really know what it's doing in addition to managing your email. This might not mean anything to you, especially since google has a pretty good reputation so far. But in some cases there might be worries that (for example) a competitor might grease some palms at google to get a copy of all your email.
Of course, this isn't anything special to google. A few years back, a Microsoft subsidiary (msn.com) was caught using data extracted from customers' email and web pages in advertising. You might have read about it on slashdot. Some people got a little upset to find pictures of their kids appearing in their ISP's ads. When challenged, msn.com's reply was that the TOS/EULA explicitly gave them the right to use any files stored on their machines. They did eventually back off and say they'd stop doing it, but nobody with any sense trusts them. (You might check your ISP's contract wording to see if they have a clause like this. If so, you might consider that it's there for a reason.)
And again, this isn't special to Microsoft, either. Any closed-source software you're using should be assumed to contain code that "they" don't want you to know about. If the software is run on a machine with internet access, you should assume that it might have copied any file on that machine to the code's owner's machines.
The only real defense against this is to only run code for which you have all the source, and which you've compiled yourself. Using binaries for which the code is available is somewhat less safe, and good enough for most companies that don't have very serious security concerns. But if there are things like account numbers and names on the machine, you should assume that any closed-source code you've used has sent them off to someone you don't know about.
Never
Probably. At least we won't have real AIs outside a few academic institutions as long as the computer industry is controlled by the likes of IBM, Microsoft and Apple. We'll have computers that are much smaller and faster, and with much more memory, but these will continue to be used to implement flashy "eye candy" interfaces. There won't be any memory or cpu cycles left over for anything that approximates thinking.
One good description of the problem came from Henry Petroski, who commented that "The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry." As long as this remains true, we can pretty much forget about real advances in the "intelligence" of our computers. The term "smart" will continue to mean computing gadgets with flashier UIs, not with more sophisticated reasoning ability.
(I have a friend who likes to observe that most of the advances in computing have been motivated by the desire for better games and porn. Of course, some sci-fi writers have proposed that the real advances in AI and/or robotics will be to build better "sexbots". ;-)
If a Florida citizen visits playboy.com, the person who gets in trouble would be the citizen for importing contraband, not Playboy (because it isn't a Florida company).
OK, hold on just a minute ... There; I've updated one of my web pages so that after a 10-sec delay, it redirects to playboy.com. After all, if you haven't hit the Back button by then, you have clearly consented to the redirection. The CGI script that delivers the page also writes a record of the IP addresses for those requests, which I'll remember to send off to the Florida state police. So anyone who lives in Florida and visits my site may find themselves in a heap o' trouble.
Actually, I have another page where I should do this. It's a demo of the javascript code for "preloading" files into your cache. I mostly use it to make your browser download the logos and other images from the site's pages, so they'll be in your cache when you visit other pages, making them render a lot faster. I'll add links to a few of the playboy.com images to the list, so those will also be in your cache (although no pages on my site actually use them). That way, if any Floridian visits my site, those playboy.com images will be "preloaded" into your cache, for the entertainment of anyone with a court order to search your disk (or anyone working in your employer's IT department, if you happen to visit my site from your work machine).
If you get arrested or fired or your gf^Wmom discovers those images on your machine, let me know.
(Maybe what we need is for someone to pull such tricks on a Florida or Federal judge. That might get across some better conception of how the Web actually works.)
Did you ever consider that *maybe* they were under the mistaken impression that orange juice *was* just for breakfast, but the post informed them that this is no longer the case? ;)
And it only took having my same sig for most of 10 years for it to actually be topical.
- - - -
Tequila - It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Well, maybe not tequila by itself, but I've had a bit of fun occasionally arguing that a margarita is appropriate for breakfast. My reasoning is that everyone accepts orange juice as a breakfast drink, and most people would accept that limeade or lemonade is a reasonable substitute. Of course, limeade and lemonade are just lime or lemon juice with some sugar (which oranges contain naturally) plus enough water to reduce the acidity to about the same as orange juice. And a margarita is merely limeade (with a small amount of orange) diluted with tequila instead of water. And tequila is around half water, so it's not all that big a difference.
It's fun to watch people try to find a way out of this sort of reasoning.
[Google] should rename themselves to EPIC (Evil Privacy Invading Corporation).
Much too late; epic.com is 216.165.132.89, and has been registered since 1990.
Whois gives the information:
Registrant:
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
Registered through: GoDaddy.com, Inc. (http://www.godaddy.com)
Domain Name: EPIC.COM
Created on: 22-Aug-90
Expires on: 21-Aug-10
Last Updated on: 13-Aug-09
Administrative Contact:
Charles, Jeremy hostmaster@epicsystems.com
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
+1.6082719000 Fax -- +1.6084105961
Technical Contact:
Charles, Jeremy hostmaster@epicsystems.com
Epic Systems Corporation
1979 Milky Way
Verona, Wisconsin 53593
United States
+1.6082719000 Fax -- +1.6084105961
Domain servers in listed order:
XM-DR-DNS01.EPICSYSTEMS.COM
EPIC-DNS3.EPICSYSTEMS.COM
This is hugely worrying when you realise that just one error -- just one -- will usually invalidate a computer program.
Back in the 1970s, a bunch of CompSci guys at the university where I was a grad student did a software study with interesting results. Much of the research computing was done on the university's mainframe, and the dominant language of course was Fortran. They instrumented the Fortran compiler so that for a couple of months, it collected data on numeric overflows, including which overflows were or weren't detected by the code. They published the results: slightly over half the Fortran jobs had undetected overflows that affected their output.
The response to this was interesting. The CS folks, as you might expect, were appalled. But among the scientific researchers, the general response was that enabling overflow checking slowed down the code measurably, so it shouldn't be done. I personally knew a lot of researchers (as one of the managers of an inter-departmental microcomputer lab that was independent of the central mainframe computer center). I asked a lot of them about this, and I was appalled to find that almost every one of them agreed that overflow checking should be turned off if it slowed down the code. The mainframe's managers reported that almost all Fortran compiles had overflow checking turned off. Pointing out that this meant that fully half of the computed results in their published papers were wrong (if they used the mainframe) didn't have any effect.
Our small cabal that ran the microprocessor lab reacted to this by silently enabling all error checking in our Fortran compiler. We even checked with the vendor to make sure that we'd set it up so that a user couldn't disable the checking. We didn't announce that we had done this; we just did it on our own authority. It was also done in a couple of other similar department-level labs that had their own computers (which was rare at the time). But the major research computer on campus was the central mainframe, and the folks running it weren't interested in dealing with the problem.
It taught us a lot about how such things are done. And it gave us a healthy level of skepticism about published research data. It was a good lesson on why we have an ongoing need to duplicate research results independently before believing them.
It might be interesting to read about studies similar to this done more recently. I haven't seen any, but maybe they're out there.
Also for the cost of the bank bailout($700Billion) we could of gone to mars and back($55Billion) about 13-14 times
Well, yeah, but then where would the top guys in those banks have gotten their multi-million-dollar bonuses that they need to encourage them to keep up the job they've done on^Wfor the banking system in recent years? Do you think that NASA would have given them their needed bonuses? And they were running low on the funds they needed to buy up smaller banks that were annoying them with that weird "competition" stuff.
The money went where our leaders knew it was needed, and the bankers will surely reward them by generous contributions to their next campaigns. Going to Mars wouldn't have gotten them anywhere near the same contributions.
The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
So far, it seems to be fairly persistent in the human population.
Actually, there's good evidence that our earliest multicellular ancestors didn't have a builtin killswitch, and lived until some predator ate them. This is still true of some kinds of fish. But all the "higher animals" have a builtin natural lifespan, and start to disintegrate after some number of years. So it appears that the "killswitch" has been adaptive in all these species. We do occasionally generate clumps of cells that are immortal, but when this happens, they always kill us, and then they die. About the only clump that has escaped this fate is the infamous HeLa culture, which survives in research laboratories despite all our attempts to eradicate it.
If this guy finds that religion helps him not to do things he shouldn't, who are you to question it?
While such results are commendable, this doesn't alleviate us of the moral responsibility to question religions. After all, in addition to the good that religious leaders claim to have given the world, there is also a lot of evil that also appears to be associated with their leadership.
A sensible person would question such a situation. For starters, is either of these claims supportable, or are they example of "correlation isn't causation"? It has been observed that all religions pretty much agree on their claims for good, and this implies that the concept of "good" is independent of religion. If not, you'd expect the various religions to have more disagreement about what constitutes "good". Since they are in fairly close agreement on the topic, one might infer that "good" is something that people mostly agree on, and religious leaders are merely laying claim on something that is inherent to the human psyche (except for a few psychopaths).
Similarly, as others have pointed out, some anti-religious leaders have induced their followers to commit great evils. Stalin and Mao come to mind, and we have recently examples such as Rwanda and Cambodia to the list. So we clearly can't blame all of the world's evil on religious leaders. On the other hand, we seem to have a lot of historical cases in which the political leaders that instigated great evils were supported (tacitly or openly) by the religious leaders. Again, we could get into a discussion of cause-and-effect, and those religious leaders have typically done just that. And again, there's an alternative hypothesis: Evil is also inherent in the human psyche (except for a few saints). We also have evidence that it has a strong social component, since we have many documented cases of organizations (governments, corporations, whatever) that have perpetrated evil against the clear wishes of (most of) their members.
The whole story can get rather complex. Starting about 1500 years ago, most of Europe's classical civilization was destroyed, and much of the evidence supports the claim that the primary agent of destruction was the church. The religious leaders encouraged destruction of all "heathen" classical learning, and discouraged literacy in all but their priesthood. But a great deal of the classical learning was preserved - by the church's priests and monks, many of whom understood its value.
Similarly, in the 1500s, Spain conquered Central America and wiped out all but a trace of its "heathen" written history. The people were reduced to illiteracy, and only a handful of tomes from their libraries survived - because Spanish priests smuggled them back to Europe. We've only recently relearned to read Mayan writing, which also exists on those thousands of "stelae" that litter the Central American landscape, and which are mostly historical markers. So we again have a case of the soldiers destroying a society for religious reasons, while (a few of) the religious leaders helped save at least some of it.
In general, we have an obvious "null hypothesis": A society's religious beliefs or lack thereof have little if anything to do with the amount of "good" or "evil" in that society. Religious people will responsibility for the good, but do little to actually justify that claim. Meanwhile, religious debunkers assign responsibility for the evil to the religious leaders, again with little evidence to support their claim. Perhaps religion is morally neutral, and it's the people and their society that are the real source of good and evil. The religious people are just going along for the ride, making a living by consoling the people, running a central meeting place for social events, and teaching morality to the people by whatever approach they seem to understand.
I wonder how we'd find real evidence, or whether we'd even be permitted to carry out the studies out of fear for what we'd conclude. After all, as long as
Like Eleanor Roosevelt said, "No one can make you feel inferior without your consent."
Maybe not, but they can make you feel beat up.
Serious physical injuries aren't usually psychological. I had a friend in high school who had been beat up so badly in his previous school that he was hospitalized for most of a year. By the time I graduated, left town, and lost contact, his family was still involved in the court case against the school and town, and it wasn't at all certain that the courts would decide in their favor. The town's attitude was "not our problem; we didn't beat the kid up".
They'd have been better off spending those research dollars trying to figure out how to properly socialize the goddamned bullies, not their victims ...
Nah; they'd already figured out that most of the bullies are psychopaths that can't be socialized. So they switched to studying how their victims could be taught to survive.
(Only 1/2 ;-)
Some idiotic grammatical prescriptions, such as those against splitting infinitives, beginning sentences with conjunctions, and ending them with prepositions, are nonsense. They don't clarify the language.
Actually, in linguistic circles, the origin of most of the bogus rules like this is fairly well understood: It comes from the fact that until fairly recently (historically speaking), English was a lower-class "vernacular" that wasn't taught at all. What was taught in schools was Latin and Greek grammar. In those languages, most of the bogus grammatical rules you've learned were actually valid. The problem is that, while schools in the English-speaking countries now claim to teach "English", what they consider "grammar" is still mostly Latin, not English.
Thus, the "ending with a preposition" proscription is talking about a standard grammatical construct in all the Germanic languages (and English is basically Germanic). These languages routinely attach affixes to verbs that are functionally adverbs, modifying the basic meaning of the verb. They're often called "adverbial particles" by linguists. They're etymologically related to prepositions, but aren't. The syntax only occasionally puts them next to the main verb as a prefix or suffix; mostly they're put at the end of the clause. If you study German, you'll learn to call them "separable prefixes", because in the infinitive form they are attached as a prefix with no space in the spelling. But as a main verb in a sentence, only the verb stem (and inflection) goes at the usual place after the subject and before any objects; the adverbial particle goes after the objects.
Splitting of infinitives is another such bogus rule. In Latin, an infinitive is an inflected form, with no auxiliary similar to the English "to", and of course nothing was ever put after a verb stem and before the inflectional ending. In the English, the infinitive form is indicated by the auxiliary "to", and writers have always inserted adverbs between it and the verb. This was common even before the word "English" was invented for the new language (to distinguish it from the older Anglo-Saxon, which lacked all those French borrowings).
What we really need is for the schools to finally start teaching actual English grammar. Until they do that, it makes perfect sense for native speakers to develop contempt for the bogus Latin grammar that their teachers have tried to foist on them, and just speak and write according to the actual grammar that their subconscious minds know about. But don't expect this to happen during your lifetime. The English-teacher subculture has a life of its own, and they so far have shown little interest in learning anything about their language from mere linguists.
Cuz is the new ain't, and has been around since BBS-speak, if not before.
You should be a bit careful with this example, because (;-) the origin of the "cuz" abbreviation is a bit more interesting than just a BBS/IM-type shorthand. As documented by a number of linguists' field work, it's an example of a spreading change in several American dialects: Unstressed initial syllables are frequently dropped. In many cases, young people in areas where such dialects are spoken have rarely if ever heard the first syllable of many common words. A textbook example is "because", which to native speakers of such a dialect appears to contain four silent letters, with only "cus" pronounced. In such cases, it's not surprising that people would react to such a spelling absurdity by adopting the shorthand spelling. In this case, where there are more silent letters in the proper spelling than there are pronounced letters, it's quite easy for the reduced spelling to gain the upper hand.
... and watching the likes Glenn Beck and John Stewart, ...
Careful there; someone's going to point out the surveys before recent elections, which reported that the people who watched Jon Stewart's Daily Show (and the Colbert Report, and read theonion.com) were generally the best able to correctly answer questions about various candidates. Stewart himself made a number of jokes about this, of the "Look what a sorry state our country has reached" variety. He has also notoriously chided many in the mainstream media for their failure to report news accurately to the population, and generally argued that the country shouldn't have to rely on professional comedians like him to learn what's going on in the world.
Of course, one of his standard running jokes is the people who just can't seem to understand that he's a comedian, not a journalist, no matter how many times he reminds them. A good deal of his show's material is based on this, especially his staff's "interviews" with people who take the interview seriously.