Actually this is more of a problem on sites that don't offer a mobile version.
It can be a problem even for the people building the "mobile" versions of web sites. The iPhone is a special problem, since its default browser likes to format pages for an arbitrary size, then shrink it to (sometimes) fit the screen. The result can easily be text and buttons that are only a few pixels tall. When you "unpinch" to enlarge it, it doesn't get reformatted to fit the screen; it grows to larger than screen size and requires left-right scrolling to read.
I've built a number of "mobile" pages that carfully avoid ever declaring a size for anything, with the idea that this gives the browser total freedom to format it to fit the screen. This works fine on most smartphones, but with the iPhone, it tends to produce font/button sizes that are either huge or tiny, and requiring 2-dimensional scrolling back and forth to read it all. There's a lot of discussion of this in various online forums, but no good solution that I've found. The best is to use a "meta name=viewport" tag to specify the screen width, but this only works for one of the two layouts, and the sending code can't know which layout the phone is using at the moment. Also, it'll break as soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a higher-res screen that's a different width. The basic problem is an old one: The server-side code can't correctly format things for a client's window, because there's no way it can know its size. HTTP could have included a field specifying the client's screen/window size, but that wasn't done. (If it's possible, I've never seen it, and I've seen a lot of HTTP and HTML headers.)
Of course, even better would be for web clients to sensibly reformat for the screen space it has available. (There's even evidence that the folks who designed HTML thought about this.;-) Many phones' browsers do this, but iPhone's browser doesn't even seem to try. If there's a way to override its default and say "format this for your screen's width", nobody seems to know the magic incantation to make it work.
Funny thing is that my G1 phone reformats automatically when I rotate or resize the screen. So do the couple of other rotatable phones that I've tested. You'd think Apple's devs would know how to do this, too. I wonder why they got it so wrong?
(One theory floating around is that it's intentional, to discourage the use of the iPhone's browser, and encourage people to write iPhone-only apps to do what could be done with a few web pages. I've seen no real evidence for or against this theory.)
So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?
Heh. That's an easy one. Phone manufacturers and "phone companies" are still managed by people who think a real phone is a big black thing that sits on a table and has a rotary dial. They don't have one on their desk, of course, because their personal secretary handles that for them. They may have heard about the newfangled portable phones (most likely if they're managing a cell-phone company;-), but they've never touched one. But they do give orders to people who are designing the latest phones (and their software).
Wish I were joking. But then, it's nearly as bad in the computer industry, where most of top management hasn't heard that the best-selling computers now are little things that fit in your pocket. To them, a computer is a metal cabinet that's taller than they are. Most of them have heard of those minicomputers and desktop computers, but have never touched one. They haven't heard that those are a dying breed, rapidly being replaced by variously-sized portable computers.
No management in either the phone or computer industry has yet heard that their two turfs are right now merging into one.
You're correct. If they evolve, they HAVE genetic material; it's a bit of a tautology.
It might be noted that, before the 1950s, biologists generally argued that DNA couldn't be our "genetic material", because it's structurally too simple. The most widely suggested storage for this sort of information was proteins, because they are the most complex chemical structures in our bodies.
This hypothesis turned out to be wrong. But there's still an old hypothesis that in the early stages 4 billion years ago or so, the early "living" things on our planet were mostly based on proteins. It's hard to come up with good tests of this, though, because RNA and DNA don't fossilize well, and we have no samples of them older than 100 million years or so.
In any case, this story is really just about finding some evidence supporting the protein-based inheritance conjecture. It's apparently valid to some degree in our modern world. It might be more widepread than just prions, but we don't know.
Something that we have known, and which was summarized well by Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", is that our DNA doesn't actually contain a definition of the mapping of DNA to amino acids. That is done by the proteins that "transcribe" RNA strings into the amino-acid strings for the proteins. It would be possible, by doing a bit of swapping around of the active parts of those RNA-reading proteins, to use a different DNA -> amino acid mapping, and a few variants of this mapping are known in nature. The real complexity comes about from the fact that our DNA contains genes that produce the proteins that do this transcription. But without the already-existing transcription proteins in a cell, there would be no way to discover the mapping that we actually use, because the information isn't actually in the DNA. It's "distributed" between the DNA and the already-existing proteins in the cell.
Of course, such multi-factorial causation chains (with feedback) are far too complex for most of the media, even the scientific media. So we pretend that our DNA contains all the information needed to produce us. The biochemists have known for some time that this isn't really true, but they don't make a point of it, because it "would just confuse" most of the reading public.
OTOH, Hofstadter has had pretty good sales of his book. Any nerds or geeks here who haven't read it should do so. It'll teach you a lot of fun stuff about the extreme complexity of the universe we evolved in.
(Religious people who don't believe in evolution shouldn't bother. The book isn't really about evolution per se, but it'll still get you seriously upset or confused about the nature of the universe.;-)
... I had to explain _yet once again_ that, when programming, no unexpected behaviour should really be unexpected.
This is something that programmers generally understand. But this wording is far too abstract for most managers. It sounds like a vague, feel-good cliche from a self-help book. You need to find words that get across how it effects them.
To a human, "one in a million" sounds very unlikely. But one of the major reasons we use computers is that they are capable of doing millions of operations per second without getting bored and losing their concentration. If you can program a routine operation, a computer can do it exactly the same way endlessly without mistakes. But computers aren't intelligent (despite the efforts of the media and movie industries to convince us they are). You have to program every tiny detail, or they'll get it wrong in the unusual cases. Managers and other non-programmers usually don't understand this.
Even a fairly complex operation in a computer can easily happen thousands or millions of times per day, so "once every million times" could mean many times per day. If you can get across the concept that failures inside a computer at a mere "one time per million" rate could flood them with hundreds or thousands of failures per day, you might convince people that it's worthwhile to pay you to make the "unlikely" cases work right.
So what if it is 1 out of 10 million that it will happen.
When I hear this sort of reasoning, I like to point out that with modern computers, something that happens only 1 time out of a million can very easily mean thousands of occurrences per day, each of which will get us a support call. This usually ends the discussion really fast, and they agree to properly implementing the "unlikely" edge cases.
I've also heard to observation that in computing, statistical behavior is generally referred to as "bugs".
Hmmm... I'd think that most techies would immediately think "vaporware".
In English, this doesn't work too well as a metaphor for "life force" (whatever that may be). We get our life force by ingesting "lesser" life forms that supply us with the carbohydrates, amino acids, plus the trace minerals and vitamins that we need to maintain our vitality. We do need oxygen, but we don't usually call it "vapor".
Maybe they really meant the logo to refer to vaporware. Ya think?
Actually, I was assuming they meant the U+6C14 character, which is the right (phonetic) component of the U+6C7D char that I mentioned. It's also qi4, but it has a wider range of meanings. Not surprising as it's standard radical #84, and they're usually vague, general things. "Vital breath" is among the basic meanings, along with "smell", "weather", and "to get/make angry".
There are also qi2 chars that mean "water chestnut", "green frog" and "piebald horse"; I was sorta hoping that they meant one of those.;-)
There's a lot of silliness in the attempts to borrow Chinese words without actually learning anything about how the language works. And Mandarin has so many homonyms to have fun with, especially if you drop the tones...
Consumers will know which products are compliant because they'll carry the consortium's "Qi" logo (pronounced "chee" after the Chinese for life force).
Or maybe it'll be the char (U+6C7D) pronounced "qi4", meaning "vapor, gas, steam".;-)
One online dictionary has 106 Chinese characters pronounced "qi" in Mandarin, with all of the possible tones. Their logo is just a stylized form of the two letters "qi", it could mean any of them. So we could make a lot of jokes about the true meaning of their use of this Chinese syllable.
You are probably right, if the only conclusion were to be scientific knowledge, so that the database would exist only in the interests of science. Unfortunately, the principal purpose of the FBI database is the provision of strong/irrefutable evidence to secure convictions.
Exactly. There are a number of phrases describing this situation, such as "vested interest", "interested party", etc. The FBI has a strong incentive to, uh, select for data and methods that will maximize the conviction rate. They should not be considered a disinterested party in questions about the accuracy of their data or methods. The only way their DNA database should be considered acceptable is if it has been (and is continuously) vetted by independent observers who aren't rewarded or punished for their reports.
The rate of convictions being overturned by study of DNA evidence, and the strong objections that law-enforcement authorities have shown to this use of DNA, should be all that we need to say that the "evidence" in this situation is highly suspect. Anyone who values their own freedom should be interested in seeing law-enforcement DNA databases studied and monitored by independent observers. Otherwise, you may be one of the victims of invalid DNA "evidence" in the future.
Speaking purely about networked appliances (NOT notebooks or phones), why on earth would you ever need unique IP addresses (in the global sense?).
Well, I can give you one fairly good example. I'm typing this on a laptop, a Macbook Pro. It came with a web server, which I enabled, and I routinely use it to test assorted web stuff locally. However, I can't use it as a "real" web server, because I can't get a fixed IP address for it.
I use it for its major function, a portable computer. Under the current IP regime, this means that when I carry it around, its IP address either doesn't exist, or is constantly changing. This means that even when it's exposed on the Net, not behind a firewall, it still can't be found, because the DNS system has no way of tracking a host with a rapidly changing IP address. Imagine that you had a cell phone whose phone number changed as you drove around, always having a number that belonged to the "local" exchange that you were driving through. Do you think that anyone could call you on such a phone? The same problem exists with portable computers of any sort. They can call you, but you can't call them. Two phones of this nature couldn't call each other at all. Similarly, two moving laptops with browsers can't find each others' web servers with the current IP setup.
Actually, I have a G1 "google" phone, and it has the same problem. Since it's running a linux OS, it could easily support a web server, and could "serve" things like pictures that I've just taken. Software on my home machine could automatically download files from the phone as they're created, using "HTTP GET" or scp or rsync or whatever. But this can't be made to work, because the phone's IP address changes rapidly. I've verified that, even sitting here at home, a web server's log shows successive HTTP requests from the phone as coming from different IP addresses. So, even if I did run a server on it, my home machine (or your smart phone) couldn't get to it, because there's no way you could ask the DNS system for its instantaneous IP address. Even if you could, by the time you did a connect(), it's address could have changed. The same sort of thing happens with my wife's iPhone.
If you don't see how this kills a lot of very useful network apps, you don't have much imagination. Maybe it would help to consider: You and a friend both have laptops. Fire up web servers on both of them. Then try to get a browser on each to connect to the web server on the other. Try this while carrying them around. Do you know a way to make this work? Do you understand why it would be useful?
Until we can give every net-enabled gadget its own IP address, there are a lot of things that simply can't be made to work right. IPv4 was designed with the idea that every "host" would have at least one fixed IP address. The NAT stuff is a huge kludge to get around the fact that this isn't possible (and even when it was possible, it wasn't allowed by the ISPs;-). I've seen a number of claims that there are already many more than 2^32 IP-enabled gadgets in existence, most of them with no access to the public Internet. As long as this state remains, there are a lot of useful things that those gadgets can't do.
An interesting one that I worked on a few years ago is IP-enabled medical monitors and implants. A major problem that arose is that, in practice, putting even one of these on or in the body of all existing patients would require more IP addresses than were available then. We did talk about a design of a single wireless device per patient with NAT used to hide the other devices. We had no problems finding objections to this. One was that it would make it difficult for software back at the hospital to connect to a specific device on/in the patient; the device would have to connect to the hospital. This could be fixed by the usual "polling" technique, but the polling messages would quickly overload the low-bitrate channels available to wireless devices. Also, it
Maybe we just have to face the fact that torturing animals for fun and profit is a universal human behavior. You can especially see it in the ways that young children interact with pets. Sorta makes one ashamed for one's species.
... but I don't think the argument that embryos or fetuses aren't human or living doesn't hold much water, scientifically or philosophically.
For that matter, it's fairly clear that our ova and sperm cells are both human and living. Nobody would suggest that they're not living cells, and if not human, what species are they? So if we are morally obligated to preserve all human life, we must preserve all ova and sperm.
Everyone sing along with me: "Every sperm is sacred...".;-)
Barbaric societies generally didn't do research, so you lack a point.
Huh? That was my point. I was basically responding to the people who call animal research "barbaric" by pointing out that barbarians aren't known for doing any sort of scientific research, on animals or anything else. So if you're complaining about the ethics of some sort of research, you're probably talking about the self-styled "civilized" societies.
(Actually, whether this is true or not isn't really known. I've seen historians point out that until about 1900, an American would have had better luck going to an Indian "witch doctor" for help rather than the European-style doctors, because the Indian healers had better medical technology until around then. And other historians have explained that this was because the Indians' healers in fact understood basic scientific methods, and knew how to test whether their treatments worked. Their problem was being part of a closed medical "guild" tradition that kept their discoveries secret. The advances in modern medicine weren't due to knowledge of scientific methods, because people have discovered those throughout history. The advances were mostly due to the new approach of open publication, so people could read and build on each other's knowledge. Anyway, it's likely that many barbarians have known how to do controlled studies. It's just that their discoveries didn't get passed on well, due to a lack of methods to share discoveries with other like-minded people.)
It was specifically mentioned that this "Wi-Di" link does not support HDCP(and thus won't count as a "protected link" for the purposes of playing back blu-ray disks, won't Joe consumer be confused and angered by that one?)... chalk it up to a mixture of "don't want the hassle of having to test and tweak and validate on large numbers of old components not designed with it in mind" and the desire to drive the sale of more laptoops with new intel silicon in them.
Heh. I found it nicely ironic that, on my screen, the next slashdot article after (i.e., before;-) this one is the latest mocking of predictions that "OMG, we're gonna run out of IP addresses real soon now". The discussion there seems to be mostly about how people keep predicting the end if IPv4 in N years, and N years later, we still haven't exhausted the 32-bit IP address space.
As you point out, this article is about developments that will replace a lot of wires with wireless connections. The first commercial wireless stuff has generally used proprietary protocols. But this limits the connectivity to only the devices that support the proprietary protocol, and that usually means "from the same manufacturer". Pretty quickly, if any new sort of connectivity is to succeed, it has to run IP, because that's the only protocol we have that works between arbitrary gadgets from different manufacturers. Wireless screens will eventually all have IP addresses, using up yet more of the IP address space. The growing dominance of laptops (and maybe tablets soon) will require still more IP addresses. For your entertainment center to talk over the internet will require IP addresses. And so on.
Yes, we can kludge things up with non-routable addresses hidden behind a NAT wall. For now we can. But this is true kludgery, and pretty much blocks connections between two gadgets that are each behind a NAT wall, except for the true IP wizards who can sometimes make it work.
And "smart phones", i.e., tiny pocket-size computers with multiple comm capabilities, are starting to sell very well. These all need IP addresses for much of their software to be usable. Currently, many such "phones" get a different IP address for every connection they make, but this is a fatal error to some kinds of networked software. As people move to these gadgets as their permanent electronic companion that connects them to the world, they'll need a real IP address that can be reached by software on other phones.
Maybe I should make a copy of this post, and toss it into the discussion for that other article. As a network developer, I find that the growing kludgery needed to deal with the deficiencies of IPv4 is a major time sink and limit to how well a lot of web stuff can be made to work. It's only a matter of time before these limits start to trickle through to Joe Consumer.
I've already had to try to explain these limits to a number of friends who don't understand the black magic going on inside their networked devices. It's only a matter of time (though I wouldn't want to make a public guess as to how much time) before public pressure starts growing to fix these problems. I have gotten across to a few non-techie friends the idea that we have had solutions to these problems for some time; we just can't get the commercial world to implement the solutions, because they view the IP limits as Someone Else's Problem. Meanwhile, the push for increasing sales of truly networked devices continues, while the sellers show no desire to push a solution to the IP-address wall that is slowly becoming visible in the distance.
People do have a way of ignoring growing problems until there's a disaster.
Explain to me how using a rat or a cat to test something that will save 1,000 human lives is barbaric and uncivilized.
Actually, it's easy to argue that the opposite is true. If you look at the people that have generally been classified as "barbarians", you'll have trouble finding any evidence that any of them have ever used animals in scientific research. All such research (that we know of) has been done in societies that consider themselves "civilized".
So holding animals in labs to observe their reactions to assorted chemicals and diseases is "civilized" behavior. Barbarians generally keep animals for eating, riding, and as pets; they don't usually keep animals in cages and torture them for knowledge.
The RIAA's behavior demonstrates that copyright has nothing to do with remunerating the original authors.
Nothing much new here. The original copyright laws, more than a thousand years back, dealt with copying by scribes, and the authors of the documents (the Bible, Koran, etc) had been dead for centuries.
Copyright has always been about control of sales, to limit the profit to a small number of officially-approved publishers. The main difference is that now, the approved publishers are determined by the owner of the copyright, which is a commodity that's for sale. In the original copyright, the legal publisher of sacred works was determined by the people in power (the king or prince or bishop or whoever), and presumably chosen mostly on the basis of bribes and kickbacks.
Come to think of it, that's not so different than how the modern copyright laws are being made right now. We just say "campaign contributions" rather than "bribes and kickbacks".
In most countries which have copyright laws it extends only 50 or so years after the author dies.
Well, maybe, but this is a fairly recent innovation in copyright law. It dates back to the 1920s. And in many countries (especially the US), there's been a pattern of extending the expiration date when things produced in the 1920s are about to become public domain. So in the US, copyright is now effectively perpetual.
But this isn't anything new, either. If you dig into the origins of copyright law, you'll find it in medieval laws that were designed to control printing of the Bible and other religious works. These laws had no expiration dates at all. They were purely to control publication of socially important documents, so that all the income went to a small number of publishers approved by the church and crown.
One could argue that the US has returned to this sort of copyright, with the change that the dominant religion is now The Market. This explains why modern copyright deals solely with copying anything that is marketable.
Considering medical software is likely to encounter people in their 90s pretty regularly, it's amazing to me that this hasn't been permanently fixed yet for birthdates if nothing else.
There have been sporadic reports of people aged 104 or 105 getting letters addressed to their parents, from the local school system, telling them that it's time to enroll their child in school for next year. These reports go back to at least the 1970s, and it's still happening.
Actually, they were known in 1970. During the first months of that year, a lot of banking software went insane. This is because banks had a lot of 30-year mortgages, and assorted other things of the same duration. For some reason, the banking system has long settled on 30 years as a reasonable "long-term" period for a lot of their business.
So in January of 1970, there were many reports of bank computers treating their oldest mortgages as having an expiration date in 1900, meaning that the loan had been paid off 70 years earlier, and the computers would no longer accept payments on such loans. In some cases, the computers started sending harrassing letters about the loans that weren't yet paid off, and overdue by 70 years. Depending on just how the date code worked (and failed), some very bizarre misbehaviors resulted.
Date-based bugs don't always wait for the critical date to manifest themselves. Any time the software has to deal with future dates, the bugs can pop up well before the critical time. They're just more visible when "now" passes a critical time, because "now" is on the other side of the divide from most of the previous dates stored in the databases.
(So far, I haven't read of any bugs that screwed things up more than 30 years before a critical date. But it wouldn't surprise me.)
Plus, by waiting until the last minute, no labor was wasted in pre-fixing systems that would already be obsoleted by 1999.
Yeah, but recall that in the Y2K bugs were mostly found in corporate COBOL programs, and COBOL code doesn't get retired. It just accumulates in the musty corners of old runtime libraries. There was a lot of COBOL code from the 1960s that was patched for Y2K
To see how bad the COBOL retention syndrome is, consider that IBM has had to supply emulators of older processors, so that customer companies could continue to run binaries for which the COBOL source has been lost. Yes, it really is that bad in the corporate DP/MIS/IT world. Of course, the binary-only programs generally couldn't be fixed for Y2K, and had to be rewritten. But they were rewritten by people adapted to the same corporate culture, and made the same mistakes in date/time handling that they've always made.
I remember reading a story by a fellow who got curious about the date problems in COBOL code, and started collecting examples of COBOL date-manipulating code. He said that when his count of the number of different date formats passed 180, he decided that he understood the problem quite well. This is still going on, as can be seen by looking at the date-handling code in newer software, and we still have the same problems.
Just last week, I gave a demo of some web code that I've been developing for a (mercifully) unnamed client. During the demo, some of the screens exposed the fact that the code internally saves all dates in ISO standard form, for the UT "time zone". I assured them that I could add the obvious translations to local time fairly soon, but this turned out not good enough. They were insistent that they didn't want the code "working on European time", and wanted the internal times all in local time. This despite the fact that they (and their visitors) are scattered across about 10 time zones. Just displaying all times in the local zone isn't acceptable; they object to Universal Time internally on general principles. I've seen this repeatedly on a lot of projects. It tells you a lot about why our software continues to have time-handling problems, whenever any particular ad-hoc time representation reaches a value ending with some number of zeroes (in base two or ten).
It was really funny a few days ago, when we read about spamassassin's bug triggered by the first day of the year 2010. I predict that we'll get reports like this in every year ending with a zero, for as long as any of us is alive.;-)
I can't think really of any math much higher than addition and subtraction that I've really ever had to use in my IT career so far.
I can. Most of it is called "logic". Of course, this won't mean much to people who think that addition and subtraction are "mathematics". But mathematical logic is a well-recognized field among mathematicians. The main way it comes into programming derives from the fact that debugging (especially debugging other people's code) is primarily an exercise in logic.
The software field suffers a lot from the constant lack of logic.
And yes, I have occasionally written out proofs of code, or rather, of the algorithm inside the code. But this has serious limitations, as the proof is always based on assumptions about the behavior of the underlying "system" including the OS, libraries, etc. This behavior is rarely totally knowable in practice, although in any true digital system, it is knowable in theory. Except in the case of a proprietary system, in which the underlying axioms are carefully hidden from the programmers. Some people even consider "information hiding" to be a Good Thing.;-)
You do realize that the Wright Brothers' plane was not the first airplane invented, right?... The Wright Brothers' plane was the first to master turning. Only an idiot would claim the WB invented the first airplane;...
Actually, arguments like this are really just an artifact of the common desire to reduce everything to a bumper-sticker-like slogan. The reality is, as usual, that "the airplane" wasn't invented out of nothing by some single person or team. The real story is more interesting. Powered flight was the result of a century or so of development, in which a large number of people scattered around the globe (but mostly in North America and Europe;-) figured out parts of the puzzle, learned from each other, built things that did something slightly better than before, etc. Finally, in the early decades of the 20th century, they managed to build flying things that were actually practical transport tools.
But any decent history of flight will list a lot of people and their achievements. The Wright brothers' achievement is yet another case of "standing on the shoulders of giants". Any claim that "the airplane" was invented by one person/team at one place is utterly bogus.
Of course, one of the first things to be transported by air in quantity were bombs, as we might expect from briefly skimming the history of human technology.
That would be: ... the words of which you are so ignorant.
That may deserve a "funny" mod, but not "insightful". It's based on a bogus rule of English grammar that derives from attempts to impose Latin grammar on a Germanic language.
The "prepositions" at the ends of phrases are more properly called adverbial particles. They're a distant relative of prepositions, but they don't act at all like prepositions. They don't take noun phrases as objects; they're grammatically part of the verb. They're part of a grammatical construct that is found in all the Germanic languages. If you've studied German, you've heard them called "separable prefixes", because in German they sometimes appear immediately before the main verb, but usually at the end of the clause. We don't use them as prefixes in English, so we don't call them that. In English, their regular position has always been at the end of the clause, the same place that German (and Swedish and Dutch and...) put them for simple verbs.
The reason we have so much trouble in English with pseudo-rules like the ban on final prepositions is that we had a long history in which only Latin grammar was taught in schools, because the grammar of the local vernacular was beneath the dignity of scholars to waste their time teaching (or even learning). So "grammar" meant the way things were phrased in Latin, and anything in the vernacular that wasn't similar to Latin was wrong. Latin put adverbs next to the verb, so the Germanic languages were wrong in putting adverbs at the end of the clause. Linguistically speaking, neither word order is right or wrong; they are just different ways that different languages work. What's really wrong is applying a grammatical rule from a different language.
Probably the best commentary on this sort of pseudo-grammar is the famous comment attributed to Winston Churchill, who, when an editor revised his text to eliminate a final preposition, supposedly commented "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put" (which isn't the correct word order in any Germanic language). Actually, forms of this retort have been reported from earlier than any documented comment by Churchill. But he apparently did make such comments on several occasions, though he may not have been the originator. Of course, he was well known for his sarcastic wit. Another good one, when told by an officious woman that he was drunk, reportedly replied "Madame, you're ugly, and in the morning I'll be sober."
There are 3 kinds of people in the world; those that can count and those that can't.
I much prefer it with "don't" rather than "can't", since that produces an ambiguity between a literal and an idiomatic reading, further confusing the reader as to what you meant.
Well, sure, and that's why I mentioned the demagogue who gets a 2/3 majority.
Also, if the Constitution required a 99% majority to change laws, that would still be "merely" a majority. But it would function as a consensus-based system, not as a democratic system.
Usually when people use "majority" with qualifiers, it means anything greater than 50%, since that's the basic meaning of the word.
Similarly, "democratic" really just means that voting of some sort happens for major decisions, but you need modifiers to distinguish different kinds of "democratic" systems. Otherwise, people will often assume that you mean whatever kind of voting system their country uses. (And nowadays, the countries with "Democratic" in their names are usually the most tyrannical, even if they do have elections.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is more of a problem on sites that don't offer a mobile version.
It can be a problem even for the people building the "mobile" versions of web sites. The iPhone is a special problem, since its default browser likes to format pages for an arbitrary size, then shrink it to (sometimes) fit the screen. The result can easily be text and buttons that are only a few pixels tall. When you "unpinch" to enlarge it, it doesn't get reformatted to fit the screen; it grows to larger than screen size and requires left-right scrolling to read.
I've built a number of "mobile" pages that carfully avoid ever declaring a size for anything, with the idea that this gives the browser total freedom to format it to fit the screen. This works fine on most smartphones, but with the iPhone, it tends to produce font/button sizes that are either huge or tiny, and requiring 2-dimensional scrolling back and forth to read it all. There's a lot of discussion of this in various online forums, but no good solution that I've found. The best is to use a "meta name=viewport" tag to specify the screen width, but this only works for one of the two layouts, and the sending code can't know which layout the phone is using at the moment. Also, it'll break as soon as Apple releases an iPhone with a higher-res screen that's a different width. The basic problem is an old one: The server-side code can't correctly format things for a client's window, because there's no way it can know its size. HTTP could have included a field specifying the client's screen/window size, but that wasn't done. (If it's possible, I've never seen it, and I've seen a lot of HTTP and HTML headers.)
Of course, even better would be for web clients to sensibly reformat for the screen space it has available. (There's even evidence that the folks who designed HTML thought about this. ;-) Many phones' browsers do this, but iPhone's browser doesn't even seem to try. If there's a way to override its default and say "format this for your screen's width", nobody seems to know the magic incantation to make it work.
Funny thing is that my G1 phone reformats automatically when I rotate or resize the screen. So do the couple of other rotatable phones that I've tested. You'd think Apple's devs would know how to do this, too. I wonder why they got it so wrong?
(One theory floating around is that it's intentional, to discourage the use of the iPhone's browser, and encourage people to write iPhone-only apps to do what could be done with a few web pages. I've seen no real evidence for or against this theory.)
So, why does it take companies who aren't cell-phone manufacturers to design great ones?
Heh. That's an easy one. Phone manufacturers and "phone companies" are still managed by people who think a real phone is a big black thing that sits on a table and has a rotary dial. They don't have one on their desk, of course, because their personal secretary handles that for them. They may have heard about the newfangled portable phones (most likely if they're managing a cell-phone company ;-), but they've never touched one. But they do give orders to people who are designing the latest phones (and their software).
Wish I were joking. But then, it's nearly as bad in the computer industry, where most of top management hasn't heard that the best-selling computers now are little things that fit in your pocket. To them, a computer is a metal cabinet that's taller than they are. Most of them have heard of those minicomputers and desktop computers, but have never touched one. They haven't heard that those are a dying breed, rapidly being replaced by variously-sized portable computers.
No management in either the phone or computer industry has yet heard that their two turfs are right now merging into one.
You're correct. If they evolve, they HAVE genetic material; it's a bit of a tautology.
It might be noted that, before the 1950s, biologists generally argued that DNA couldn't be our "genetic material", because it's structurally too simple. The most widely suggested storage for this sort of information was proteins, because they are the most complex chemical structures in our bodies.
This hypothesis turned out to be wrong. But there's still an old hypothesis that in the early stages 4 billion years ago or so, the early "living" things on our planet were mostly based on proteins. It's hard to come up with good tests of this, though, because RNA and DNA don't fossilize well, and we have no samples of them older than 100 million years or so.
In any case, this story is really just about finding some evidence supporting the protein-based inheritance conjecture. It's apparently valid to some degree in our modern world. It might be more widepread than just prions, but we don't know.
Something that we have known, and which was summarized well by Douglas Hofstadter in "Gödel, Escher, Bach", is that our DNA doesn't actually contain a definition of the mapping of DNA to amino acids. That is done by the proteins that "transcribe" RNA strings into the amino-acid strings for the proteins. It would be possible, by doing a bit of swapping around of the active parts of those RNA-reading proteins, to use a different DNA -> amino acid mapping, and a few variants of this mapping are known in nature. The real complexity comes about from the fact that our DNA contains genes that produce the proteins that do this transcription. But without the already-existing transcription proteins in a cell, there would be no way to discover the mapping that we actually use, because the information isn't actually in the DNA. It's "distributed" between the DNA and the already-existing proteins in the cell.
Of course, such multi-factorial causation chains (with feedback) are far too complex for most of the media, even the scientific media. So we pretend that our DNA contains all the information needed to produce us. The biochemists have known for some time that this isn't really true, but they don't make a point of it, because it "would just confuse" most of the reading public.
OTOH, Hofstadter has had pretty good sales of his book. Any nerds or geeks here who haven't read it should do so. It'll teach you a lot of fun stuff about the extreme complexity of the universe we evolved in.
(Religious people who don't believe in evolution shouldn't bother. The book isn't really about evolution per se, but it'll still get you seriously upset or confused about the nature of the universe. ;-)
... I had to explain _yet once again_ that, when programming, no unexpected behaviour should really be unexpected.
This is something that programmers generally understand. But this wording is far too abstract for most managers. It sounds like a vague, feel-good cliche from a self-help book. You need to find words that get across how it effects them.
To a human, "one in a million" sounds very unlikely. But one of the major reasons we use computers is that they are capable of doing millions of operations per second without getting bored and losing their concentration. If you can program a routine operation, a computer can do it exactly the same way endlessly without mistakes. But computers aren't intelligent (despite the efforts of the media and movie industries to convince us they are). You have to program every tiny detail, or they'll get it wrong in the unusual cases. Managers and other non-programmers usually don't understand this.
Even a fairly complex operation in a computer can easily happen thousands or millions of times per day, so "once every million times" could mean many times per day. If you can get across the concept that failures inside a computer at a mere "one time per million" rate could flood them with hundreds or thousands of failures per day, you might convince people that it's worthwhile to pay you to make the "unlikely" cases work right.
So what if it is 1 out of 10 million that it will happen.
When I hear this sort of reasoning, I like to point out that with modern computers, something that happens only 1 time out of a million can very easily mean thousands of occurrences per day, each of which will get us a support call. This usually ends the discussion really fast, and they agree to properly implementing the "unlikely" edge cases.
I've also heard to observation that in computing, statistical behavior is generally referred to as "bugs".
Hmmm ... I'd think that most techies would immediately think "vaporware".
In English, this doesn't work too well as a metaphor for "life force" (whatever that may be). We get our life force by ingesting "lesser" life forms that supply us with the carbohydrates, amino acids, plus the trace minerals and vitamins that we need to maintain our vitality. We do need oxygen, but we don't usually call it "vapor".
Maybe they really meant the logo to refer to vaporware. Ya think?
Actually, I was assuming they meant the U+6C14 character, which is the right (phonetic) component of the U+6C7D char that I mentioned. It's also qi4, but it has a wider range of meanings. Not surprising as it's standard radical #84, and they're usually vague, general things. "Vital breath" is among the basic meanings, along with "smell", "weather", and "to get/make angry".
There are also qi2 chars that mean "water chestnut", "green frog" and "piebald horse"; I was sorta hoping that they meant one of those. ;-)
There's a lot of silliness in the attempts to borrow Chinese words without actually learning anything about how the language works. And Mandarin has so many homonyms to have fun with, especially if you drop the tones ...
Consumers will know which products are compliant because they'll carry the consortium's "Qi" logo (pronounced "chee" after the Chinese for life force).
Or maybe it'll be the char (U+6C7D) pronounced "qi4", meaning "vapor, gas, steam". ;-)
One online dictionary has 106 Chinese characters pronounced "qi" in Mandarin, with all of the possible tones. Their logo is just a stylized form of the two letters "qi", it could mean any of them. So we could make a lot of jokes about the true meaning of their use of this Chinese syllable.
You are probably right, if the only conclusion were to be scientific knowledge, so that the database would exist only in the interests of science. Unfortunately, the principal purpose of the FBI database is the provision of strong/irrefutable evidence to secure convictions.
Exactly. There are a number of phrases describing this situation, such as "vested interest", "interested party", etc. The FBI has a strong incentive to, uh, select for data and methods that will maximize the conviction rate. They should not be considered a disinterested party in questions about the accuracy of their data or methods. The only way their DNA database should be considered acceptable is if it has been (and is continuously) vetted by independent observers who aren't rewarded or punished for their reports.
The rate of convictions being overturned by study of DNA evidence, and the strong objections that law-enforcement authorities have shown to this use of DNA, should be all that we need to say that the "evidence" in this situation is highly suspect. Anyone who values their own freedom should be interested in seeing law-enforcement DNA databases studied and monitored by independent observers. Otherwise, you may be one of the victims of invalid DNA "evidence" in the future.
Speaking purely about networked appliances (NOT notebooks or phones), why on earth would you ever need unique IP addresses (in the global sense?).
Well, I can give you one fairly good example. I'm typing this on a laptop, a Macbook Pro. It came with a web server, which I enabled, and I routinely use it to test assorted web stuff locally. However, I can't use it as a "real" web server, because I can't get a fixed IP address for it.
I use it for its major function, a portable computer. Under the current IP regime, this means that when I carry it around, its IP address either doesn't exist, or is constantly changing. This means that even when it's exposed on the Net, not behind a firewall, it still can't be found, because the DNS system has no way of tracking a host with a rapidly changing IP address. Imagine that you had a cell phone whose phone number changed as you drove around, always having a number that belonged to the "local" exchange that you were driving through. Do you think that anyone could call you on such a phone? The same problem exists with portable computers of any sort. They can call you, but you can't call them. Two phones of this nature couldn't call each other at all. Similarly, two moving laptops with browsers can't find each others' web servers with the current IP setup.
Actually, I have a G1 "google" phone, and it has the same problem. Since it's running a linux OS, it could easily support a web server, and could "serve" things like pictures that I've just taken. Software on my home machine could automatically download files from the phone as they're created, using "HTTP GET" or scp or rsync or whatever. But this can't be made to work, because the phone's IP address changes rapidly. I've verified that, even sitting here at home, a web server's log shows successive HTTP requests from the phone as coming from different IP addresses. So, even if I did run a server on it, my home machine (or your smart phone) couldn't get to it, because there's no way you could ask the DNS system for its instantaneous IP address. Even if you could, by the time you did a connect(), it's address could have changed. The same sort of thing happens with my wife's iPhone.
If you don't see how this kills a lot of very useful network apps, you don't have much imagination. Maybe it would help to consider: You and a friend both have laptops. Fire up web servers on both of them. Then try to get a browser on each to connect to the web server on the other. Try this while carrying them around. Do you know a way to make this work? Do you understand why it would be useful?
Until we can give every net-enabled gadget its own IP address, there are a lot of things that simply can't be made to work right. IPv4 was designed with the idea that every "host" would have at least one fixed IP address. The NAT stuff is a huge kludge to get around the fact that this isn't possible (and even when it was possible, it wasn't allowed by the ISPs ;-). I've seen a number of claims that there are already many more than 2^32 IP-enabled gadgets in existence, most of them with no access to the public Internet. As long as this state remains, there are a lot of useful things that those gadgets can't do.
An interesting one that I worked on a few years ago is IP-enabled medical monitors and implants. A major problem that arose is that, in practice, putting even one of these on or in the body of all existing patients would require more IP addresses than were available then. We did talk about a design of a single wireless device per patient with NAT used to hide the other devices. We had no problems finding objections to this. One was that it would make it difficult for software back at the hospital to connect to a specific device on/in the patient; the device would have to connect to the hospital. This could be fixed by the usual "polling" technique, but the polling messages would quickly overload the low-bitrate channels available to wireless devices. Also, it
Maybe we just have to face the fact that torturing animals for fun and profit is a universal human behavior. You can especially see it in the ways that young children interact with pets. Sorta makes one ashamed for one's species.
... but I don't think the argument that embryos or fetuses aren't human or living doesn't hold much water, scientifically or philosophically.
For that matter, it's fairly clear that our ova and sperm cells are both human and living. Nobody would suggest that they're not living cells, and if not human, what species are they? So if we are morally obligated to preserve all human life, we must preserve all ova and sperm.
Everyone sing along with me: "Every sperm is sacred ...". ;-)
Barbaric societies generally didn't do research, so you lack a point.
Huh? That was my point. I was basically responding to the people who call animal research "barbaric" by pointing out that barbarians aren't known for doing any sort of scientific research, on animals or anything else. So if you're complaining about the ethics of some sort of research, you're probably talking about the self-styled "civilized" societies.
(Actually, whether this is true or not isn't really known. I've seen historians point out that until about 1900, an American would have had better luck going to an Indian "witch doctor" for help rather than the European-style doctors, because the Indian healers had better medical technology until around then. And other historians have explained that this was because the Indians' healers in fact understood basic scientific methods, and knew how to test whether their treatments worked. Their problem was being part of a closed medical "guild" tradition that kept their discoveries secret. The advances in modern medicine weren't due to knowledge of scientific methods, because people have discovered those throughout history. The advances were mostly due to the new approach of open publication, so people could read and build on each other's knowledge. Anyway, it's likely that many barbarians have known how to do controlled studies. It's just that their discoveries didn't get passed on well, due to a lack of methods to share discoveries with other like-minded people.)
It was specifically mentioned that this "Wi-Di" link does not support HDCP(and thus won't count as a "protected link" for the purposes of playing back blu-ray disks, won't Joe consumer be confused and angered by that one?) ... chalk it up to a mixture of "don't want the hassle of having to test and tweak and validate on large numbers of old components not designed with it in mind" and the desire to drive the sale of more laptoops with new intel silicon in them.
Heh. I found it nicely ironic that, on my screen, the next slashdot article after (i.e., before ;-) this one is the latest mocking of predictions that "OMG, we're gonna run out of IP addresses real soon now". The discussion there seems to be mostly about how people keep predicting the end if IPv4 in N years, and N years later, we still haven't exhausted the 32-bit IP address space.
As you point out, this article is about developments that will replace a lot of wires with wireless connections. The first commercial wireless stuff has generally used proprietary protocols. But this limits the connectivity to only the devices that support the proprietary protocol, and that usually means "from the same manufacturer". Pretty quickly, if any new sort of connectivity is to succeed, it has to run IP, because that's the only protocol we have that works between arbitrary gadgets from different manufacturers. Wireless screens will eventually all have IP addresses, using up yet more of the IP address space. The growing dominance of laptops (and maybe tablets soon) will require still more IP addresses. For your entertainment center to talk over the internet will require IP addresses. And so on.
Yes, we can kludge things up with non-routable addresses hidden behind a NAT wall. For now we can. But this is true kludgery, and pretty much blocks connections between two gadgets that are each behind a NAT wall, except for the true IP wizards who can sometimes make it work.
And "smart phones", i.e., tiny pocket-size computers with multiple comm capabilities, are starting to sell very well. These all need IP addresses for much of their software to be usable. Currently, many such "phones" get a different IP address for every connection they make, but this is a fatal error to some kinds of networked software. As people move to these gadgets as their permanent electronic companion that connects them to the world, they'll need a real IP address that can be reached by software on other phones.
Maybe I should make a copy of this post, and toss it into the discussion for that other article. As a network developer, I find that the growing kludgery needed to deal with the deficiencies of IPv4 is a major time sink and limit to how well a lot of web stuff can be made to work. It's only a matter of time before these limits start to trickle through to Joe Consumer.
I've already had to try to explain these limits to a number of friends who don't understand the black magic going on inside their networked devices. It's only a matter of time (though I wouldn't want to make a public guess as to how much time) before public pressure starts growing to fix these problems. I have gotten across to a few non-techie friends the idea that we have had solutions to these problems for some time; we just can't get the commercial world to implement the solutions, because they view the IP limits as Someone Else's Problem. Meanwhile, the push for increasing sales of truly networked devices continues, while the sellers show no desire to push a solution to the IP-address wall that is slowly becoming visible in the distance.
People do have a way of ignoring growing problems until there's a disaster.
Explain to me how using a rat or a cat to test something that will save 1,000 human lives is barbaric and uncivilized.
Actually, it's easy to argue that the opposite is true. If you look at the people that have generally been classified as "barbarians", you'll have trouble finding any evidence that any of them have ever used animals in scientific research. All such research (that we know of) has been done in societies that consider themselves "civilized".
So holding animals in labs to observe their reactions to assorted chemicals and diseases is "civilized" behavior. Barbarians generally keep animals for eating, riding, and as pets; they don't usually keep animals in cages and torture them for knowledge.
The RIAA's behavior demonstrates that copyright has nothing to do with remunerating the original authors.
Nothing much new here. The original copyright laws, more than a thousand years back, dealt with copying by scribes, and the authors of the documents (the Bible, Koran, etc) had been dead for centuries.
Copyright has always been about control of sales, to limit the profit to a small number of officially-approved publishers. The main difference is that now, the approved publishers are determined by the owner of the copyright, which is a commodity that's for sale. In the original copyright, the legal publisher of sacred works was determined by the people in power (the king or prince or bishop or whoever), and presumably chosen mostly on the basis of bribes and kickbacks.
Come to think of it, that's not so different than how the modern copyright laws are being made right now. We just say "campaign contributions" rather than "bribes and kickbacks".
In most countries which have copyright laws it extends only 50 or so years after the author dies.
Well, maybe, but this is a fairly recent innovation in copyright law. It dates back to the 1920s. And in many countries (especially the US), there's been a pattern of extending the expiration date when things produced in the 1920s are about to become public domain. So in the US, copyright is now effectively perpetual.
But this isn't anything new, either. If you dig into the origins of copyright law, you'll find it in medieval laws that were designed to control printing of the Bible and other religious works. These laws had no expiration dates at all. They were purely to control publication of socially important documents, so that all the income went to a small number of publishers approved by the church and crown.
One could argue that the US has returned to this sort of copyright, with the change that the dominant religion is now The Market. This explains why modern copyright deals solely with copying anything that is marketable.
Considering medical software is likely to encounter people in their 90s pretty regularly, it's amazing to me that this hasn't been permanently fixed yet for birthdates if nothing else.
There have been sporadic reports of people aged 104 or 105 getting letters addressed to their parents, from the local school system, telling them that it's time to enroll their child in school for next year. These reports go back to at least the 1970s, and it's still happening.
Y2k issues were known in the 80's.
Actually, they were known in 1970. During the first months of that year, a lot of banking software went insane. This is because banks had a lot of 30-year mortgages, and assorted other things of the same duration. For some reason, the banking system has long settled on 30 years as a reasonable "long-term" period for a lot of their business.
So in January of 1970, there were many reports of bank computers treating their oldest mortgages as having an expiration date in 1900, meaning that the loan had been paid off 70 years earlier, and the computers would no longer accept payments on such loans. In some cases, the computers started sending harrassing letters about the loans that weren't yet paid off, and overdue by 70 years. Depending on just how the date code worked (and failed), some very bizarre misbehaviors resulted.
Date-based bugs don't always wait for the critical date to manifest themselves. Any time the software has to deal with future dates, the bugs can pop up well before the critical time. They're just more visible when "now" passes a critical time, because "now" is on the other side of the divide from most of the previous dates stored in the databases.
(So far, I haven't read of any bugs that screwed things up more than 30 years before a critical date. But it wouldn't surprise me.)
Plus, by waiting until the last minute, no labor was wasted in pre-fixing systems that would already be obsoleted by 1999.
Yeah, but recall that in the Y2K bugs were mostly found in corporate COBOL programs, and COBOL code doesn't get retired. It just accumulates in the musty corners of old runtime libraries. There was a lot of COBOL code from the 1960s that was patched for Y2K
To see how bad the COBOL retention syndrome is, consider that IBM has had to supply emulators of older processors, so that customer companies could continue to run binaries for which the COBOL source has been lost. Yes, it really is that bad in the corporate DP/MIS/IT world. Of course, the binary-only programs generally couldn't be fixed for Y2K, and had to be rewritten. But they were rewritten by people adapted to the same corporate culture, and made the same mistakes in date/time handling that they've always made.
I remember reading a story by a fellow who got curious about the date problems in COBOL code, and started collecting examples of COBOL date-manipulating code. He said that when his count of the number of different date formats passed 180, he decided that he understood the problem quite well. This is still going on, as can be seen by looking at the date-handling code in newer software, and we still have the same problems.
Just last week, I gave a demo of some web code that I've been developing for a (mercifully) unnamed client. During the demo, some of the screens exposed the fact that the code internally saves all dates in ISO standard form, for the UT "time zone". I assured them that I could add the obvious translations to local time fairly soon, but this turned out not good enough. They were insistent that they didn't want the code "working on European time", and wanted the internal times all in local time. This despite the fact that they (and their visitors) are scattered across about 10 time zones. Just displaying all times in the local zone isn't acceptable; they object to Universal Time internally on general principles. I've seen this repeatedly on a lot of projects. It tells you a lot about why our software continues to have time-handling problems, whenever any particular ad-hoc time representation reaches a value ending with some number of zeroes (in base two or ten).
It was really funny a few days ago, when we read about spamassassin's bug triggered by the first day of the year 2010. I predict that we'll get reports like this in every year ending with a zero, for as long as any of us is alive. ;-)
I can't think really of any math much higher than addition and subtraction that I've really ever had to use in my IT career so far.
I can. Most of it is called "logic". Of course, this won't mean much to people who think that addition and subtraction are "mathematics". But mathematical logic is a well-recognized field among mathematicians. The main way it comes into programming derives from the fact that debugging (especially debugging other people's code) is primarily an exercise in logic.
The software field suffers a lot from the constant lack of logic.
And yes, I have occasionally written out proofs of code, or rather, of the algorithm inside the code. But this has serious limitations, as the proof is always based on assumptions about the behavior of the underlying "system" including the OS, libraries, etc. This behavior is rarely totally knowable in practice, although in any true digital system, it is knowable in theory. Except in the case of a proprietary system, in which the underlying axioms are carefully hidden from the programmers. Some people even consider "information hiding" to be a Good Thing. ;-)
You do realize that the Wright Brothers' plane was not the first airplane invented, right? ... The Wright Brothers' plane was the first to master turning. Only an idiot would claim the WB invented the first airplane; ...
Actually, arguments like this are really just an artifact of the common desire to reduce everything to a bumper-sticker-like slogan. The reality is, as usual, that "the airplane" wasn't invented out of nothing by some single person or team. The real story is more interesting. Powered flight was the result of a century or so of development, in which a large number of people scattered around the globe (but mostly in North America and Europe ;-) figured out parts of the puzzle, learned from each other, built things that did something slightly better than before, etc. Finally, in the early decades of the 20th century, they managed to build flying things that were actually practical transport tools.
But any decent history of flight will list a lot of people and their achievements. The Wright brothers' achievement is yet another case of "standing on the shoulders of giants". Any claim that "the airplane" was invented by one person/team at one place is utterly bogus.
Of course, one of the first things to be transported by air in quantity were bombs, as we might expect from briefly skimming the history of human technology.
That may deserve a "funny" mod, but not "insightful". It's based on a bogus rule of English grammar that derives from attempts to impose Latin grammar on a Germanic language.
The "prepositions" at the ends of phrases are more properly called adverbial particles. They're a distant relative of prepositions, but they don't act at all like prepositions. They don't take noun phrases as objects; they're grammatically part of the verb. They're part of a grammatical construct that is found in all the Germanic languages. If you've studied German, you've heard them called "separable prefixes", because in German they sometimes appear immediately before the main verb, but usually at the end of the clause. We don't use them as prefixes in English, so we don't call them that. In English, their regular position has always been at the end of the clause, the same place that German (and Swedish and Dutch and ...) put them for simple verbs.
The reason we have so much trouble in English with pseudo-rules like the ban on final prepositions is that we had a long history in which only Latin grammar was taught in schools, because the grammar of the local vernacular was beneath the dignity of scholars to waste their time teaching (or even learning). So "grammar" meant the way things were phrased in Latin, and anything in the vernacular that wasn't similar to Latin was wrong. Latin put adverbs next to the verb, so the Germanic languages were wrong in putting adverbs at the end of the clause. Linguistically speaking, neither word order is right or wrong; they are just different ways that different languages work. What's really wrong is applying a grammatical rule from a different language.
Probably the best commentary on this sort of pseudo-grammar is the famous comment attributed to Winston Churchill, who, when an editor revised his text to eliminate a final preposition, supposedly commented "This is the sort of English up with which I will not put" (which isn't the correct word order in any Germanic language). Actually, forms of this retort have been reported from earlier than any documented comment by Churchill. But he apparently did make such comments on several occasions, though he may not have been the originator. Of course, he was well known for his sarcastic wit. Another good one, when told by an officious woman that he was drunk, reportedly replied "Madame, you're ugly, and in the morning I'll be sober."
There are 3 kinds of people in the world; those that can count and those that can't.
I much prefer it with "don't" rather than "can't", since that produces an ambiguity between a literal and an idiomatic reading, further confusing the reader as to what you meant.
Well, sure, and that's why I mentioned the demagogue who gets a 2/3 majority.
Also, if the Constitution required a 99% majority to change laws, that would still be "merely" a majority. But it would function as a consensus-based system, not as a democratic system.
Usually when people use "majority" with qualifiers, it means anything greater than 50%, since that's the basic meaning of the word.
Similarly, "democratic" really just means that voting of some sort happens for major decisions, but you need modifiers to distinguish different kinds of "democratic" systems. Otherwise, people will often assume that you mean whatever kind of voting system their country uses. (And nowadays, the countries with "Democratic" in their names are usually the most tyrannical, even if they do have elections. ;-)
And in IBM's internal corporate database, LOL expands to "Lots of Lawyers".
OA (Ob Abbreviation): IANAL.