Nah; the dust is forced out of the Solar System by the solar wind. For a good explanation of this, look up "heliopause". That's basically the surface where the solar wind reaches interstellar space, and the light pressure from our sun is no longer the strongest force on particles.
Of course, it's more complex than that. As someone else mentioned, anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory. The other planets have similar, but much smaller effects. But this only affects a small fraction of the thin cloud of gas, dust particles, and bacterial spores that are being forced out of the solar system. Much of the solar wind and the various planets' dust tails is forced out of the system over a few years' time.
Yeah, Jupiter would be a sinkhole for a lot of the debris being pushed out by the solar wind. But it's not all that effective. After all, Earth has a couple hundred recognizable impact craters, things the Jupiter wasn't able to grab. Astronomers have also been able to measure the smaller incoming particles, and they amount to several tons per day. (I wonder whether this is more or less than the loss via the dust tail. Anyone know the numbers?)
I've seen a few references to an astronomer's comment that the Solar System is the sun, Jupiter, and a lot of insignificant rubble. I've also seen a suggestion that this could turn out true for living things, too. Of course, the sun would tend to dissociate the molecules of any living thing that falls into it, unless there's "life" that exists in a plasma state. But if you look at the chemical constituents of Jupiter's atmosphere, it does look a lot like a huge biochechemical reactor system. Lots of yummy molecules with C, H, O, N and trace elements. It just might turn out that most of the life in the Solar System is inside Jupiter are various depths. It may be a while before we have a good Jupiter Explorer bot, though. There aren't any Earth-like conditions there anywhere.
B) They keep their dynamic state, all the good editors leave, and Wikipedia becomes a text only 4chan.org
Ummm, don't look now, but wikipedia has pictures...
Oh, well, maybe they'll settle on being a version of 4chan whose pictures don't disappear after half an hour. And then reappear at random times every few days or weeks forever after.
Actually, we'd probably do even better if we could find a way to run even more such experiments, but in parallel rather than serially. It's not difficult to think up interesting new policies for an encyclopedia-like site. Wikipedia was one, and lived up to much of its promise, but also has a lot of the predicted problems. (OTOH, it's interesting to look at a lot of the dire warnings that didn't come true.)
If we really want to develop a networked repository of all human knowledge, we could do better than just picking one or two policies at a time, and waiting years to see how they turn out. Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom is a lot faster at finding the succesful approaches.
The big problem, really, is that such efforts take a lot of hardware and a good population of brains. This isn't cheap in money or personal time. I wonder if there are ways of making it more accessible to the masses. I wouldn't mind contributing what I know about a few subject to several such 'pedias. Lately, I've been contributing a lot more to wiktionary than to wikipedia, since it seems my contributions are more encouraged there (and have actually never been reverted or deleted, or even vandalized).
But more to the point, I suppose, is that I've drifted toward spending my spare time working on a number of much smaller-scale project with narrower focus. None of them would qualify as "notable" to wikipedia. But most of the world's knowledge isn't notable, except to a small minority interested in the topic.
Maybe what we need is a way to easily develop the more specialized sites that aren't appropriate for the encyclopedic sites or mass-market search sites. I wonder if there are effective tools to get around all the repetetive "hacking" needed to get a new specialized site up and limping along?
It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries,...
Actually, astronomers figured it out a few decades ago. They concluded that, while the Mars -> Earth trip is difficult and unlikely, the other direction has happened with probability around 0.999999.... The mechanism is the Earth's "dust tail", a stream of gases and dust much like a comet's tail, but even thinner. It is thick enough to cause a problem for some astronomical observations, though, which is why some astronomers studied it during the 1960s and 70s. They found that the tail includes "dust" as large as bacteria, and since high-altitude airplane and balloon samples had shown bacteria at all altitudes, our default assumption should be that there are bacteria (mostly in spore form) in our planet's dust tail. This wouldn't be a million-year trip. The solar wind blows Earth's dust tail outward along the plane of Earth's orbit. It would sweep over each of the outer planets about once per year, contaminating each planet with bacterial spores in each pass.
So if we find life on any outer planet that is chemically similar to bacteria here, we can't conclude anything about where it originated, except that the most likely source is Earth. It could have reached Earth from the outside, of course, and is just making the return trip.
A fun part of these studies was the conclusion that this thin stream of bacterial spores does eventually get blown out of the solar system. Distances out there are large, of course, but if you look at the numbers, you find that the Earth takes roughly 4 trips around the galaxy every billion years. Since the earliest known bacterial life developed here, we've made 15-20 trips around the galaxy, spewing bacterial spores along our path the whole time. Chances are that they've pervaded the entire galaxy (very, very thinly). If they can survive the millions or billions of years in interstellar space, then we're one of the sources for the panspermia hypothesis.
Of course, the astronomers didn't know anything at all about the survivability of bacterial spores in space. We still don't know much about it. That's the weak link in the whole guessing game.
But it's highly likely that there are bacteria living underground on Mars, and they came from Earth. It would be a lot more fun if we found some there whose biochemistry was different from the micro-organisms on this planet.
(I googled for this topic a couple of years ago, and didn't find much of anything. I wonder if there are any astronomers here who could point us to more details.)
Zoologists have documented a number of species of animals in which the young normally consume small quantities of the adults' feces. This is generally understood to be a way of establishing the species' normal intestinal flora, which their digestive system depends on. It seems to mostly happen in animals that eat a lot of greenery, since leaves are very difficult to digest, and animals generally need bacterial help to break down the plant cell walls.
One of the more curious example I read of was a species of lizard in which the adults normally spend all their time in the forest canopy. Field researchers were noticing that the newly-hatched young would climb down the trees and run around on the ground, as if they were looking for something. It turned out that they were looking for the adults' droppings, and eating them. Then they'd climb back up the trees, and after a few weeks, they'd stop going down to the ground.
Ah yes, the basement nerds favorite diagnosis. "I'm not a smelly slob, I have a medical condition!"
Heh. Actually, that doc really didn't describe it as a "medical condition". He was more like "People take too many baths or showers these days; they don't really need to be that clean." And I'm not sure I really followed his advice exactly. I did a lot of swimming and generally had at least 3 showers a week to get the chlorine off. That just meant that I didn't have to bother showering back at the apartment, since I'd done it a few hours earlier at the pool.
He also made a point of saying that some people have oilier skin than others. The stereotype of greasy people with ancestors from certain parts of the world is semi-accurate, and is probably a reaction to a drying environment. In my case, with ancestors mostly from northern Europe, I have the typical dry skin of that climate, which is somewhat more sensitive to the effects of soap. But, as someone else here pointed out, you can also correct for that by not taking long, hot showers. The doc did comment that a shower lasting 10 minutes is long enough, and longer will just damage the skin. So I learned to take short, warm showers, which pretty much solved the problem.
But I can see some people having the typical over-reaction to studies like the article's. "OMG; scientists say we shouldn't ever get clean!" It might be fun to try to watch for people with this sort of reaction. Maybe make fun of them in public or something. I suppose the "basement nerds" could be a good place to start.
It could be that the process of cleansing is itself stressful to the skin when carried to excess.
This has been understood for at least several decades.
When I was in college, back in the late 60s and early 70s, a doctor diagnosed my dry, cracked skin and ongoing rashes as the result of too many showers. He recommended only one or two showers a week, with the qualification that any heavy exercise that produced sweating could probably be followed by a shower. I tried following his advice, and the problems cleared up. His explanation is that soap doesn't just clear away dirt and micro-organisms; it also removes surface skin cells and destroys oils, and this isn't too good for the skin.
This whole story is basically just reaffirming what has been understood in the medical community for a long time. As with most other biological topics, extremes in cleanliness aren't especially good for your health. You're better off being mostly clean, but with a small surface sprinkling of the sort of stuff that we evolved with. Soapy water does the same thing to your skin cells as it does to the bacteria. Your skin cells to have mechanisms (proteins) that bind them together, so they don't wash away all that easily. But your skin does succumb eventually to the same chemical attacks that remove the bacteria, if you hit it with too strong an attack.
What I think would be fun would be if google still indexed those sites and returned them in searches, but instead of a link to the sites, you got a link to a google page explaining why they didn't give you the link. Presumably they'd make those links visibly different, perhaps in a different color, so their users would quickly learn to recognize them and skip over them.
This would make it fairly obvious that what Murdoch and Ballmer have done is blocked reader access to their own content.
Anyway, the whole issue is likely to be entertaining in a geeky way, so we should stay tuned...
I agree that Google's click tracking is annoying, and they certainly are datawhores... but so far I haven't seen any evidence that they're using this data irresponsibly.
I've seen it. Several years ago, a site that I'm responsible for started to really bog down from a huge increase in traffic. When I investigated, it turned out that 99% of these new "interested customers" were googlebots. And their pattern was interesting. I found that when I connected to the site from an "outside" address and used the tool that does a search in our database (and sent google ads), I found that within a minute or so an identical query came in from a google address.
This was just the start of the problem. The results returned included a list of local "raw" files, each accompanied by a string of links which you could click on to get the data returned in a list of formats, including PS, EPS, PDF, GIF, PNG, and others. With time, the server would get requests that matched every one of the format-conversion links.
So every time an actual human would send in a request for something, googlebots would follow it up by requesting the same data, converted to every format that we produced. Just returning the data was no problem, and we liked the idea of google indexing our stuff in their own way (though some of the data wasn't in any human language and their search wasn't very useful for those files). But when the flooded our server with requests for cpu-expensive conversions to all the different out put formats, it pretty much put the server out of commission for real human users.
My response was to study the problem, and add code to the conversion routines that looked for various signs of being from search bots. It turned out that it wasn't just google; several other search sites were doing "deep searching" in the same manner. I managed to cut the traffic back to not much more than what it had been before. But ever since then, I've been on the lookout for other attempts to do the same thing. I've seen several variants of this "attack", from google and other search sites, each of which I've found a way to block.
One funny thing is that the server still gets frequent requests for format conversions of files that haven't existed for several years. It's around 10% of the requests in the server log. The server and the conversion scripts do send a 404 back, of course, but the requests keep coming. Presumably they're checking to see if we've restored our "lost" files. Most are from google, with msnbots a distant second. A quick tail of the error_log shows a burst of requests for a file in all the output formats from "msnbot", 1 or 2 seconds apart, within the past minute.
Overall, search-bot requests are about 90% of our server's traffic, and this is with active measures to block the above kinds of abuse. I wouldn't call this responsible behavior on the part of the search sites. It's certainly not something that a web site can safely ignore.
The correct phrase should be, "There is no such thing as a 100% secure system that can still be used to do useful work."
The problem with that is that at least 80% of the population is incapable of handling such nested constructs, and only remember that you said "There is no such thing as a 100% secure system". They may or may not remember that you said something after that, but they won't remember what was in your follow-on phrase. When you get to political and media people, the fraction rises to around 99%. You can see this phenomenon a lot here on/., though it's possible that computer geeks are somewhat more able to handle such nesting due to their experience with programming languages.
It's similar to how most people ignore clauses that start with "If...", and only remember the B part of "If A then B". I've seen this repeatedly, where they'll quote me or someone else as having said B, when I know that the original statement had a conditional attached. Others will remember the A without the initial "if", with B as a separate and independent statement. Preventing this is hopeless, because the typical human brain can't handle syntax that's that deep.
(And I can already see the flames from the people who now know that I claimed that "the typical human brain can't handle syntax".;-)
This is how Microsoft lost the Netscape case in the first place.
Wait, Microsoft lost? Netscape is dead. MS controls the browser "market" with better than 80 of the installed base and net browser traffic. Most computer users now think that MS invented the Web. Any so-called fines are less than a single day's profit for MS, not even qualifying as the proverbial "slap on the wrist". And we're reading stories of them now using similar tactics to take over yet another market.
If this is losing, how can I arrange to lose so big? Can I arrange for US courts to "punish" me the same way?
What people are fishing (heh!) around for here is the term synecdoche, which refers to the sort of metaphor in which "a part represents the whole". Some common examples are "head" to refer to an entire creature ("head of cattle"), "hired hand" to mean a worker, and "eyes" to mean readers of a text or viewers of video material. People do this all the time, in all languages.
Two opposite example I've run across: It is well known that the English like their "tea" in the afternoon, but it seems that the majority drink coffee (to the despair of the true traditionalists;-). The term "tea" is just what the mid-afternoon snack is called; it doesn't mean that nothing but tea is served. In the opposite direction, Finns refer to the same sort of light snack as "kahvi" (pronounced "coffee"), and often have hot water and tea available for the people who prefer that drink, plus the pastries or semi-sweet bread that are usually on the table. Both are examples of synecdoche, using the name of a locally-standard drinkable to name a certain kind of meal.
The Japanese term "sushi" is another example. As noted by others, the word refers to a variety of sticky rice that works well for the kind of food that consists of a bite-size clump of the rice, lightly seasoned with vinegar and topped or mixed with other edibles. This is typical synecdoche, using the grain to refer to the entire meal. In much of the rest of the world where it has been introduced, the remarkable part of this food is the frequent topping of uncooked fish. But even with this misunderstanding of the Japanese term, it's still straightforward synecdoche, because it's using one component of the food to refer to the whole. Even when people think "sushi" means raw fish, they expect it to come with rice; without the rice it's called "sashimi".
Here in the US, we have the Thanksgiving holiday coming up in a few days. It's common to refer to the standard meal as "turkey", although that's only a part of the conventional meal (which is actually mostly vegetarian). Some people don't particularly like turkey, and serve something else such as ham. This doesn't much effect the language used; people still call it "turkey day".
Objecting to this process might make sense in a strictly logical sense. But you're fighting a losing battle. Some of the oldest written texts we have, in the oldest written languages, have examples of this literary device. People use this sort of metaphor in every spoken language (even Esperanto;-). You can't stop people from using such colorful language. So don't bother complaining about it; we ain't gonna change our behavior any time soon.
Sushi, and other words, are defined by how people use them.... Then english language, unlike C, does not have an ansi standard.
But the English language does, and it's in Oxford.
This is simply false. Nobody who has actually studied language could make this mistake.
Why exactly do you think that, if you've studied language, you must necessarily give up on linguistic prescriptivism?
Nah; I think what the poster was getting at is that the OED folks, like almost all dictionary makers, don't push their publications as an authoritative guide to correct English usage. Rather, their task is to document the history of the English language. If you look around randomly in the OED and read many of its cites, you'll find plenty that aren't what you'd call good English. This is because they're trying to document the earliest uses of words with various meanings, not the earliest correct usage (whatever that might be).
Documenting correct usage would be a hopeless task anyway. Could you imagine how valuable the OED would be for its users if it contained only "correct" cites? They'd be perpetually bogged down in flame wars over what constitutes correct English, and they'd be unable to produce the primary reason for their value.
I was a bit amused by the thought of the OED being made an ANSI standard...
(Hmmmm... I seem to have triggered a bug in '.'s handling of nested tags. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get it to handle those levels of quotes in any sensible manner. The HTML is massaged into something a bit bizarre - and not quite correct. It appears that the code can't handle four levels of nesting. Apparently this is the first time I've tried such a thing.;-)
For those agonizing over the morality issues, note that there's an excellent Doonesbury Comic today on the topic. It's about torture rather than censorship, but it's probably good enough to apply to most moral and ethical quandaries.
I'm curious about that an2 that I found in the dictionary. It won't show up here, due to/.'s anti-UTF-8 policy, but you can see it at U+557D. Like the wiktionary.org and mandarintools.com entries, this includes a mention of Cantonese in the definition, probably meaning that it's one of those chars that really isn't used in Mandarin (although a Mandarin pronunciation is given). This interpretation is encouraged by the 'kou' radical in the char, which is common in the collection of Cantonese-only chars. OTOH, a Kangxi index is listed for it, so it's an old character. Maybe it has died out in Mandarin.
There are a lot of obscure nooks and corners in Chinese writing. If they had any sense, they'd've gotten rid of it centuries ago. But I suppose that'll happen about the same time that English adopts a phonetic spelling system.;-)
Why look at your watch when you're dash has a clock.
Actually, that's one of the things that persuaded me to give up on watches.
The main trigger was about 10 years ago, when I suddenly developed a serious rash on my wrist under the watch. I carried it in my pocket for a week or so, to see what happened. The rash slowly went away, and a doctor told me that he'd seen quite a lot of watch-caused rashes recently. He didn't know what they were putting in or on the metal, but it wasn't anything good. Meanwhile, I'd noticed that I hardly ever took the watch out of my pocket. The reason was that I'd found it rare to be out of sight of a clock. In addition to the one on my car's dashboard, it seemed like nearly everywhere I went, I could quickly glance around for a clock faster than I could pull the watch out of my pocket.
So I decided the hell with watches. I started leaving my old watch home, and I didn't miss it. Of course, I was an early adopter of cell phones, and I've had one in my pocket most of the time for the past decade. (When I was wearing pants, of course.;-)
So wrist watches now are really nothing but a fashion accessory. If you like that sort of jewelry, fine, buy yourself a nice-looking one. I'll just go bare wristed. Every few days I'll find myself in a place where I can't spot a clock within one or two seconds, and I'll pull my phone (a G1 this year) out of my pocket. And I no longer get a rash on my wrist from whatever the watch makers were putting in the alloy on the back of their watches.
Pardon me, but what if the Chinese searcher in question doesn't know English?
Most of them don't. But the more interesting question is: What happens when people in China realize that bing.com works better if they use the traditional characters? The obvious guess is a slow growth of requests in the trad-char form (aided by some trivial software that converts between the two character "standards"). Then the Chinese government slowly realizes what's happening, and pressures Microsoft to apply the same filtering to the trad chars. This doesn't go over so well, because that would affect searches originating in Taiwan and Japan (and to a lesser extent Korea and Vietnam).
With time, Bing will probably have to switch over to a scheme more like google's. But in the meantime, it does make the whole thing look silly.
Meanwhile, I also wonder if the various sorts of filtering in use in "the Western World" can be similarly avoided by judicious mispellings? (Or is that misspelings or Miss Spellings?)
The Chinese population has also learned that a lot of filtering can be defeated by an especially silly measure: If you look at Chinese characters, you quickly see that most of them are made by taking two simpler characters and squashing them together, usually horizontally, but sometimes vertically. So what they do is send the two simpler characters instead of a single complex one. Thus, the Falun Gong followers will write the 2-char Falun as 4 chars, expanding the two chars in the obvious way. This can be done with the Gong char, too. Varying which characters you expand makes it difficult for software to decipher your text. Eventually, this sort of thing will stop working, but experience shows that government agencies can take decades to catch on to what's being done.
Actually, "tien" rather than "tian" for the Chinese symbol for sky/heaven/day is from an older romanization that you don't see much any more. Mandarin phonetics don't line up too well with the phonemes of English, and since the Chinese haven't used the Roman alphabet until recently, there was really no true standard way to write phonetic Chinese until Mao's government declared a standard. Various groups tried, mostly religious (missionary) groups, and some of their schemes are wildly different from the others.
The vowels are especially problematical, since all six of them have a rather wide variation, and they overlap English vowels in ways that seem odd to English-speaking people. A simple way to put it is that there's no mapping from the "Roman" (either Latin or English) vowel symbols to Mandarin vowels that will cause English-speaking people to pronounce Mandarin vowels correctly. Pinyin was partly an attempt to do that, and they did a better job than most earlier Romanization schemes. But if you read pinyin words as if they were English, people who speak Mandarin will have a lot of trouble figuring out what you're trying to say. Thus, the 3rd syllable of Tiananmen has a vowel like the first syllable of the word "Monday", not like the vowel in "men" (and it has a rising tone, making it sound like a question to English ears;-).
This isn't unusual, of course. Phonemes in different languages rarely line up very well, even in closely-related languages.
The real problem is the tendency of people everywhere to preserve old misspellings and mispronunciations of "foreign" words, and ignore the native speakers when they try to correct the mistakes. Consider the old spelling "Peking" for Beijing. Except for the tones, "Beijing" should produce a fairly accurate pronunciation by English speakers. "Peking" really never was very close (from an English viewpoint), but lots of writers prefer it because it's what they learned when they were young. OTOH, the American media has developed a pronunciation that has a "zh" as in "measure" sound in the middle of "Beijing", which is odd because Mandarin doesn't have that consonant. I read a discussion recently on a linguistics blog/list about this. They weren't able to discover where that bizarre mispronunciation could have come from. They ended up basically classifying it as an example of mysterious pack behavior on the part of American journalists, who apparently learned it from each other. (If anyone knows who started this, I could pass the info along to the linguists.;-)
Inputs can be "Tiananmen" or tian1an2men2 in simplified Chinese...
Or tian1an1men2 in pinyin;-).
The dictionary I have only lists one character for an2, which means "to speak", and that would give a somewhat surrealistic name to the gate. Not that the Chinese are opposed to surrealism, of course, as you can see by visiting the various sites such as engrish.com that have some very entertaining signage, much of it from China.
I do keep wondering how hard it would be to clone slashdot and start up a UTF-8-encoded version. While we're at it, we could simplify it by tossing out most of the WEB 2.n stuff. Neither he Great Firewall nor Bing wouldn't be likely to object to our doing that.
I think New Orleans would be Noah's version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe, I dunno.
You might want to be careful with that comparison. A number of our religious fundamentalists claimed publicly that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans' sinful ways. People immediately started asking them why God chose to spare the French Quarter, which was well known as NO's most sinful zone.
Actually, it probably has more to do with the French Quarter being (slightly) above sea level. So it was mostly shut down for a while, but it wasn't flooded. When the electricity came back on, they opened for business again right away. Some of them had their own generators, so they were back in business even sooner.
There's precious little evidence of any God taking a hand in any of this. The Gulf Coast gets hit by several hurricanes per year, and their path seems essentially random. You'd sorta think that a vengeful God would do a better job of aiming, but this appears not to be true. His shots seem to have all the properties of a random-number generator, hitting the righteous and the sinners with equal probability and equal force.
And how, pray tell, are regular folks supposed to determine whether the maintenance has been adequate. AFAIK, no one is claiming a complete lack of maintenance,...
In general, it's difficult or impossible for "regular folks" to find out much of anything about such things. But in this case, it turns out that the information had been publicly available (even on the Internet;-) for years before Katrina. The Army Corps of Engineers had presented a series of reports to Congress, detailing the problems and pretty much predicting exactly where the failures would occur. They also submitted proposals for maintenance, repairs and enhancements, and those reports are part of the public record. The votes in Congress denying the funding are also public record. There were ongoing discussions (some on the Internet;-) of all this.
So in this case, Americans where weren't aware of it are all "responsible", in the sense that the information was easily and widely available, and it was their elected representatives who publicly voted down the funding for the needed work. Saying "But I didn't know" is a poor excuse in this case. If you'd been interested, you would have known. A few million other Americans knew about the problems before Katrina; why didn't you?
I remember watching the satellite images at weather.gov as Katrina developed, and wondering whether this would be the one to devastate New Orleans. Several earlier storms had missed, but it was well-known to be just a matter of time.
(This all assumes that you're an American, of course. The information probably wasn't quite as easily available to most people living outside North America. Though much of it was on the Internet. It's gotten easier since then to learn a lot about similar danger zones in the rest of the world. Just ask google.)
There have also been any number of stories published about the Army Corps of Engineers' analyses of the New Orleans levee system over the past decade. The Corps sent a good number of reports to Congress, predicting most of what actually happened during Katrina. This included pinpointing all the actual points of failure. They submitted proposals for maintenance and enhancements. Congress pretty much turned them all down.
So yes, the Army Corps of Engineering was "responsible", in the obvious sense that they understood the situation quite well, knew what had to be done, and didn't do it. They didn't do it because they were denied the funding.
The Dutch situation is an interesting comparison. A similar storm devastated Holland in 1953, breaching the dikes and flooding most of the area below sea level. Their response was a huge project to improve their system so it wouldn't happen again. An interesting aspect of this was that their engineers got together with Japanese engineers, because Japan is the country with the most people living below sea level, and they had a lot of useful experience with dikes and levees. The result was greatly improved technology in both countries. Japan's situation is even worse: Millions of people live below sea level in the Tokyo-Yokohama metro area, they're in a major earthquake zone, and they have frequent hurricanes (or typhoons if you prefer). If you're into natural disasters, the history of this area makes for some interesting reading.
The US government tends to take a different approach, more like "We're the most advanced society in the world, and we don't have anything to learn from the rest of you turkeys." Their attitude towards New Orleans has also been pretty clear, along the lines of what others have said here: "That's what you get for living in a flood zone." I.e., "Tough luck, suckers."
But the American population keeps voting for them, so what happened must be what most Americans want, right?
Almost every story I've ever heard complaining about GIMP ends with "...so I'm sticking with Photoshop," like the person is trying to fix something that's not broken, learning a new system when the old one works fine for them.
Nah; that's not what I was saying. I don't know much about Photoshop, either, and my few encounters with it have been as unenlightening as my experiments with GIMP. I've used a few of the very basic image editors, such as the old bitmap and a few similar things, and I've found them fairly intuitive. But both Photoshop and GIMP are wild, uncontrollable beasts that I wasn't able to tame at all in the relatively few hours (for Photoshop) or days (for GIMP) that I spent on them before giving up. I don't have anything to unlearn about them, because I've never learned anything (useful) about either of them. I have no model in my head about how such an editor should work.
Maybe I should just approach GIMP (or Photoshop;-) in the "standard" way, not bothering to read any documentation at all, but just start playing with them. But my brief encounters with them imply that it could take a lot of years out of my life to reach any sort of comprehension. As I mentioned, I was able to do a lot of image editing with GIMP. It was just that the changes made no sense, and were best described as "damage" that I couldn't predict, control, or reproduce.
Of course, I could be wrong, and after a couple weeks it would suddenly all make sense. But I'm not sure I want to gamble an unknown amount of my time again, without some reason to expect it'll turn out better than the other times.
I'm a graphics professional and have been using linux for about 10 years. I can safely say, all the times I've tried to use the GIMP even for simple tasks it's just pissed me off.
I'm not, and I have somewhat the same reaction. I've gotten ahold of one or more GIMP docs and tried to step through them to learn how to use it. I generally found that, although I could easily learn to tell it to do all sorts of things to an image, what it did was rarely what I expected, and couldn't be explained by reading the docs that I had. So I was able to use it to do all sort of damage to images, but I could rarely get it to make the changes that I wanted to make.
Obviously, this was due to my ignorance of GIMP. Right; and that's why I was stepping through TFM, trying to learn. Each time, I decided that I didn't have the right FM for a novice like me. Maybe someday, I'll find an intro GIMP tutorial that actually teaches me how to make the changes that I want to make, rather than just frobbing the controls and watching amusing but uncontrollable damage being done. Until then, I don't think I'll consider using it for anything important.
Slashdot Mirror
Nah; the dust is forced out of the Solar System by the solar wind. For a good explanation of this, look up "heliopause". That's basically the surface where the solar wind reaches interstellar space, and the light pressure from our sun is no longer the strongest force on particles.
Of course, it's more complex than that. As someone else mentioned, anything that gets within an AU or so of Jupiter is seriously deflected, and sent off on a different trajectory. The other planets have similar, but much smaller effects. But this only affects a small fraction of the thin cloud of gas, dust particles, and bacterial spores that are being forced out of the solar system. Much of the solar wind and the various planets' dust tails is forced out of the system over a few years' time.
Yeah, Jupiter would be a sinkhole for a lot of the debris being pushed out by the solar wind. But it's not all that effective. After all, Earth has a couple hundred recognizable impact craters, things the Jupiter wasn't able to grab. Astronomers have also been able to measure the smaller incoming particles, and they amount to several tons per day. (I wonder whether this is more or less than the loss via the dust tail. Anyone know the numbers?)
I've seen a few references to an astronomer's comment that the Solar System is the sun, Jupiter, and a lot of insignificant rubble. I've also seen a suggestion that this could turn out true for living things, too. Of course, the sun would tend to dissociate the molecules of any living thing that falls into it, unless there's "life" that exists in a plasma state. But if you look at the chemical constituents of Jupiter's atmosphere, it does look a lot like a huge biochechemical reactor system. Lots of yummy molecules with C, H, O, N and trace elements. It just might turn out that most of the life in the Solar System is inside Jupiter are various depths. It may be a while before we have a good Jupiter Explorer bot, though. There aren't any Earth-like conditions there anywhere.
B) They keep their dynamic state, all the good editors leave, and Wikipedia becomes a text only 4chan.org
Ummm, don't look now, but wikipedia has pictures ...
Oh, well, maybe they'll settle on being a version of 4chan whose pictures don't disappear after half an hour. And then reappear at random times every few days or weeks forever after.
Actually, we'd probably do even better if we could find a way to run even more such experiments, but in parallel rather than serially. It's not difficult to think up interesting new policies for an encyclopedia-like site. Wikipedia was one, and lived up to much of its promise, but also has a lot of the predicted problems. (OTOH, it's interesting to look at a lot of the dire warnings that didn't come true.)
If we really want to develop a networked repository of all human knowledge, we could do better than just picking one or two policies at a time, and waiting years to see how they turn out. Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom is a lot faster at finding the succesful approaches.
The big problem, really, is that such efforts take a lot of hardware and a good population of brains. This isn't cheap in money or personal time. I wonder if there are ways of making it more accessible to the masses. I wouldn't mind contributing what I know about a few subject to several such 'pedias. Lately, I've been contributing a lot more to wiktionary than to wikipedia, since it seems my contributions are more encouraged there (and have actually never been reverted or deleted, or even vandalized).
But more to the point, I suppose, is that I've drifted toward spending my spare time working on a number of much smaller-scale project with narrower focus. None of them would qualify as "notable" to wikipedia. But most of the world's knowledge isn't notable, except to a small minority interested in the topic.
Maybe what we need is a way to easily develop the more specialized sites that aren't appropriate for the encyclopedic sites or mass-market search sites. I wonder if there are effective tools to get around all the repetetive "hacking" needed to get a new specialized site up and limping along?
It could be hit and miss. Just because fossil evidence got here doesn't mean anything living made the trip. But, it does open up a lot of questions. If the Mars microbes didn't make it, that doesn't mean something else didn't. We'll figure it out in a few centuries, ...
Actually, astronomers figured it out a few decades ago. They concluded that, while the Mars -> Earth trip is difficult and unlikely, the other direction has happened with probability around 0.999999.... The mechanism is the Earth's "dust tail", a stream of gases and dust much like a comet's tail, but even thinner. It is thick enough to cause a problem for some astronomical observations, though, which is why some astronomers studied it during the 1960s and 70s. They found that the tail includes "dust" as large as bacteria, and since high-altitude airplane and balloon samples had shown bacteria at all altitudes, our default assumption should be that there are bacteria (mostly in spore form) in our planet's dust tail. This wouldn't be a million-year trip. The solar wind blows Earth's dust tail outward along the plane of Earth's orbit. It would sweep over each of the outer planets about once per year, contaminating each planet with bacterial spores in each pass.
So if we find life on any outer planet that is chemically similar to bacteria here, we can't conclude anything about where it originated, except that the most likely source is Earth. It could have reached Earth from the outside, of course, and is just making the return trip.
A fun part of these studies was the conclusion that this thin stream of bacterial spores does eventually get blown out of the solar system. Distances out there are large, of course, but if you look at the numbers, you find that the Earth takes roughly 4 trips around the galaxy every billion years. Since the earliest known bacterial life developed here, we've made 15-20 trips around the galaxy, spewing bacterial spores along our path the whole time. Chances are that they've pervaded the entire galaxy (very, very thinly). If they can survive the millions or billions of years in interstellar space, then we're one of the sources for the panspermia hypothesis.
Of course, the astronomers didn't know anything at all about the survivability of bacterial spores in space. We still don't know much about it. That's the weak link in the whole guessing game.
But it's highly likely that there are bacteria living underground on Mars, and they came from Earth. It would be a lot more fun if we found some there whose biochemistry was different from the micro-organisms on this planet.
(I googled for this topic a couple of years ago, and didn't find much of anything. I wonder if there are any astronomers here who could point us to more details.)
Zoologists have documented a number of species of animals in which the young normally consume small quantities of the adults' feces. This is generally understood to be a way of establishing the species' normal intestinal flora, which their digestive system depends on. It seems to mostly happen in animals that eat a lot of greenery, since leaves are very difficult to digest, and animals generally need bacterial help to break down the plant cell walls.
One of the more curious example I read of was a species of lizard in which the adults normally spend all their time in the forest canopy. Field researchers were noticing that the newly-hatched young would climb down the trees and run around on the ground, as if they were looking for something. It turned out that they were looking for the adults' droppings, and eating them. Then they'd climb back up the trees, and after a few weeks, they'd stop going down to the ground.
Ah yes, the basement nerds favorite diagnosis. "I'm not a smelly slob, I have a medical condition!"
Heh. Actually, that doc really didn't describe it as a "medical condition". He was more like "People take too many baths or showers these days; they don't really need to be that clean." And I'm not sure I really followed his advice exactly. I did a lot of swimming and generally had at least 3 showers a week to get the chlorine off. That just meant that I didn't have to bother showering back at the apartment, since I'd done it a few hours earlier at the pool.
He also made a point of saying that some people have oilier skin than others. The stereotype of greasy people with ancestors from certain parts of the world is semi-accurate, and is probably a reaction to a drying environment. In my case, with ancestors mostly from northern Europe, I have the typical dry skin of that climate, which is somewhat more sensitive to the effects of soap. But, as someone else here pointed out, you can also correct for that by not taking long, hot showers. The doc did comment that a shower lasting 10 minutes is long enough, and longer will just damage the skin. So I learned to take short, warm showers, which pretty much solved the problem.
But I can see some people having the typical over-reaction to studies like the article's. "OMG; scientists say we shouldn't ever get clean!" It might be fun to try to watch for people with this sort of reaction. Maybe make fun of them in public or something. I suppose the "basement nerds" could be a good place to start.
It could be that the process of cleansing is itself stressful to the skin when carried to excess.
This has been understood for at least several decades.
When I was in college, back in the late 60s and early 70s, a doctor diagnosed my dry, cracked skin and ongoing rashes as the result of too many showers. He recommended only one or two showers a week, with the qualification that any heavy exercise that produced sweating could probably be followed by a shower. I tried following his advice, and the problems cleared up. His explanation is that soap doesn't just clear away dirt and micro-organisms; it also removes surface skin cells and destroys oils, and this isn't too good for the skin.
This whole story is basically just reaffirming what has been understood in the medical community for a long time. As with most other biological topics, extremes in cleanliness aren't especially good for your health. You're better off being mostly clean, but with a small surface sprinkling of the sort of stuff that we evolved with. Soapy water does the same thing to your skin cells as it does to the bacteria. Your skin cells to have mechanisms (proteins) that bind them together, so they don't wash away all that easily. But your skin does succumb eventually to the same chemical attacks that remove the bacteria, if you hit it with too strong an attack.
What I think would be fun would be if google still indexed those sites and returned them in searches, but instead of a link to the sites, you got a link to a google page explaining why they didn't give you the link. Presumably they'd make those links visibly different, perhaps in a different color, so their users would quickly learn to recognize them and skip over them.
This would make it fairly obvious that what Murdoch and Ballmer have done is blocked reader access to their own content.
Anyway, the whole issue is likely to be entertaining in a geeky way, so we should stay tuned ...
I agree that Google's click tracking is annoying, and they certainly are datawhores... but so far I haven't seen any evidence that they're using this data irresponsibly.
I've seen it. Several years ago, a site that I'm responsible for started to really bog down from a huge increase in traffic. When I investigated, it turned out that 99% of these new "interested customers" were googlebots. And their pattern was interesting. I found that when I connected to the site from an "outside" address and used the tool that does a search in our database (and sent google ads), I found that within a minute or so an identical query came in from a google address.
This was just the start of the problem. The results returned included a list of local "raw" files, each accompanied by a string of links which you could click on to get the data returned in a list of formats, including PS, EPS, PDF, GIF, PNG, and others. With time, the server would get requests that matched every one of the format-conversion links.
So every time an actual human would send in a request for something, googlebots would follow it up by requesting the same data, converted to every format that we produced. Just returning the data was no problem, and we liked the idea of google indexing our stuff in their own way (though some of the data wasn't in any human language and their search wasn't very useful for those files). But when the flooded our server with requests for cpu-expensive conversions to all the different out put formats, it pretty much put the server out of commission for real human users.
My response was to study the problem, and add code to the conversion routines that looked for various signs of being from search bots. It turned out that it wasn't just google; several other search sites were doing "deep searching" in the same manner. I managed to cut the traffic back to not much more than what it had been before. But ever since then, I've been on the lookout for other attempts to do the same thing. I've seen several variants of this "attack", from google and other search sites, each of which I've found a way to block.
One funny thing is that the server still gets frequent requests for format conversions of files that haven't existed for several years. It's around 10% of the requests in the server log. The server and the conversion scripts do send a 404 back, of course, but the requests keep coming. Presumably they're checking to see if we've restored our "lost" files. Most are from google, with msnbots a distant second. A quick tail of the error_log shows a burst of requests for a file in all the output formats from "msnbot", 1 or 2 seconds apart, within the past minute.
Overall, search-bot requests are about 90% of our server's traffic, and this is with active measures to block the above kinds of abuse. I wouldn't call this responsible behavior on the part of the search sites. It's certainly not something that a web site can safely ignore.
The correct phrase should be, "There is no such thing as a 100% secure system that can still be used to do useful work."
The problem with that is that at least 80% of the population is incapable of handling such nested constructs, and only remember that you said "There is no such thing as a 100% secure system". They may or may not remember that you said something after that, but they won't remember what was in your follow-on phrase. When you get to political and media people, the fraction rises to around 99%. You can see this phenomenon a lot here on /., though it's possible that computer geeks are somewhat more able to handle such nesting due to their experience with programming languages.
It's similar to how most people ignore clauses that start with "If ...", and only remember the B part of "If A then B". I've seen this repeatedly, where they'll quote me or someone else as having said B, when I know that the original statement had a conditional attached. Others will remember the A without the initial "if", with B as a separate and independent statement. Preventing this is hopeless, because the typical human brain can't handle syntax that's that deep.
(And I can already see the flames from the people who now know that I claimed that "the typical human brain can't handle syntax". ;-)
This is how Microsoft lost the Netscape case in the first place.
Wait, Microsoft lost? Netscape is dead. MS controls the browser "market" with better than 80 of the installed base and net browser traffic. Most computer users now think that MS invented the Web. Any so-called fines are less than a single day's profit for MS, not even qualifying as the proverbial "slap on the wrist". And we're reading stories of them now using similar tactics to take over yet another market.
If this is losing, how can I arrange to lose so big? Can I arrange for US courts to "punish" me the same way?
What people are fishing (heh!) around for here is the term synecdoche, which refers to the sort of metaphor in which "a part represents the whole". Some common examples are "head" to refer to an entire creature ("head of cattle"), "hired hand" to mean a worker, and "eyes" to mean readers of a text or viewers of video material. People do this all the time, in all languages.
Two opposite example I've run across: It is well known that the English like their "tea" in the afternoon, but it seems that the majority drink coffee (to the despair of the true traditionalists ;-). The term "tea" is just what the mid-afternoon snack is called; it doesn't mean that nothing but tea is served. In the opposite direction, Finns refer to the same sort of light snack as "kahvi" (pronounced "coffee"), and often have hot water and tea available for the people who prefer that drink, plus the pastries or semi-sweet bread that are usually on the table. Both are examples of synecdoche, using the name of a locally-standard drinkable to name a certain kind of meal.
The Japanese term "sushi" is another example. As noted by others, the word refers to a variety of sticky rice that works well for the kind of food that consists of a bite-size clump of the rice, lightly seasoned with vinegar and topped or mixed with other edibles. This is typical synecdoche, using the grain to refer to the entire meal. In much of the rest of the world where it has been introduced, the remarkable part of this food is the frequent topping of uncooked fish. But even with this misunderstanding of the Japanese term, it's still straightforward synecdoche, because it's using one component of the food to refer to the whole. Even when people think "sushi" means raw fish, they expect it to come with rice; without the rice it's called "sashimi".
Here in the US, we have the Thanksgiving holiday coming up in a few days. It's common to refer to the standard meal as "turkey", although that's only a part of the conventional meal (which is actually mostly vegetarian). Some people don't particularly like turkey, and serve something else such as ham. This doesn't much effect the language used; people still call it "turkey day".
Objecting to this process might make sense in a strictly logical sense. But you're fighting a losing battle. Some of the oldest written texts we have, in the oldest written languages, have examples of this literary device. People use this sort of metaphor in every spoken language (even Esperanto ;-). You can't stop people from using such colorful language. So don't bother complaining about it; we ain't gonna change our behavior any time soon.
Nah; I think what the poster was getting at is that the OED folks, like almost all dictionary makers, don't push their publications as an authoritative guide to correct English usage. Rather, their task is to document the history of the English language. If you look around randomly in the OED and read many of its cites, you'll find plenty that aren't what you'd call good English. This is because they're trying to document the earliest uses of words with various meanings, not the earliest correct usage (whatever that might be).
Documenting correct usage would be a hopeless task anyway. Could you imagine how valuable the OED would be for its users if it contained only "correct" cites? They'd be perpetually bogged down in flame wars over what constitutes correct English, and they'd be unable to produce the primary reason for their value.
I was a bit amused by the thought of the OED being made an ANSI standard ...
(Hmmmm ... I seem to have triggered a bug in '.'s handling of nested tags. No matter how I tried, I couldn't get it to handle those levels of quotes in any sensible manner. The HTML is massaged into something a bit bizarre - and not quite correct. It appears that the code can't handle four levels of nesting. Apparently this is the first time I've tried such a thing. ;-)
For those agonizing over the morality issues, note that there's an excellent Doonesbury Comic today on the topic. It's about torture rather than censorship, but it's probably good enough to apply to most moral and ethical quandaries.
I'm curious about that an2 that I found in the dictionary. It won't show up here, due to /.'s anti-UTF-8 policy, but you can see it at U+557D. Like the wiktionary.org and mandarintools.com entries, this includes a mention of Cantonese in the definition, probably meaning that it's one of those chars that really isn't used in Mandarin (although a Mandarin pronunciation is given). This interpretation is encouraged by the 'kou' radical in the char, which is common in the collection of Cantonese-only chars. OTOH, a Kangxi index is listed for it, so it's an old character. Maybe it has died out in Mandarin.
There are a lot of obscure nooks and corners in Chinese writing. If they had any sense, they'd've gotten rid of it centuries ago. But I suppose that'll happen about the same time that English adopts a phonetic spelling system. ;-)
Actually, that's one of the things that persuaded me to give up on watches.
The main trigger was about 10 years ago, when I suddenly developed a serious rash on my wrist under the watch. I carried it in my pocket for a week or so, to see what happened. The rash slowly went away, and a doctor told me that he'd seen quite a lot of watch-caused rashes recently. He didn't know what they were putting in or on the metal, but it wasn't anything good. Meanwhile, I'd noticed that I hardly ever took the watch out of my pocket. The reason was that I'd found it rare to be out of sight of a clock. In addition to the one on my car's dashboard, it seemed like nearly everywhere I went, I could quickly glance around for a clock faster than I could pull the watch out of my pocket.
So I decided the hell with watches. I started leaving my old watch home, and I didn't miss it. Of course, I was an early adopter of cell phones, and I've had one in my pocket most of the time for the past decade. (When I was wearing pants, of course. ;-)
So wrist watches now are really nothing but a fashion accessory. If you like that sort of jewelry, fine, buy yourself a nice-looking one. I'll just go bare wristed. Every few days I'll find myself in a place where I can't spot a clock within one or two seconds, and I'll pull my phone (a G1 this year) out of my pocket. And I no longer get a rash on my wrist from whatever the watch makers were putting in the alloy on the back of their watches.
Pardon me, but what if the Chinese searcher in question doesn't know English?
Most of them don't. But the more interesting question is: What happens when people in China realize that bing.com works better if they use the traditional characters? The obvious guess is a slow growth of requests in the trad-char form (aided by some trivial software that converts between the two character "standards"). Then the Chinese government slowly realizes what's happening, and pressures Microsoft to apply the same filtering to the trad chars. This doesn't go over so well, because that would affect searches originating in Taiwan and Japan (and to a lesser extent Korea and Vietnam).
With time, Bing will probably have to switch over to a scheme more like google's. But in the meantime, it does make the whole thing look silly.
Meanwhile, I also wonder if the various sorts of filtering in use in "the Western World" can be similarly avoided by judicious mispellings? (Or is that misspelings or Miss Spellings?)
The Chinese population has also learned that a lot of filtering can be defeated by an especially silly measure: If you look at Chinese characters, you quickly see that most of them are made by taking two simpler characters and squashing them together, usually horizontally, but sometimes vertically. So what they do is send the two simpler characters instead of a single complex one. Thus, the Falun Gong followers will write the 2-char Falun as 4 chars, expanding the two chars in the obvious way. This can be done with the Gong char, too. Varying which characters you expand makes it difficult for software to decipher your text. Eventually, this sort of thing will stop working, but experience shows that government agencies can take decades to catch on to what's being done.
Actually, "tien" rather than "tian" for the Chinese symbol for sky/heaven/day is from an older romanization that you don't see much any more. Mandarin phonetics don't line up too well with the phonemes of English, and since the Chinese haven't used the Roman alphabet until recently, there was really no true standard way to write phonetic Chinese until Mao's government declared a standard. Various groups tried, mostly religious (missionary) groups, and some of their schemes are wildly different from the others.
The vowels are especially problematical, since all six of them have a rather wide variation, and they overlap English vowels in ways that seem odd to English-speaking people. A simple way to put it is that there's no mapping from the "Roman" (either Latin or English) vowel symbols to Mandarin vowels that will cause English-speaking people to pronounce Mandarin vowels correctly. Pinyin was partly an attempt to do that, and they did a better job than most earlier Romanization schemes. But if you read pinyin words as if they were English, people who speak Mandarin will have a lot of trouble figuring out what you're trying to say. Thus, the 3rd syllable of Tiananmen has a vowel like the first syllable of the word "Monday", not like the vowel in "men" (and it has a rising tone, making it sound like a question to English ears ;-).
This isn't unusual, of course. Phonemes in different languages rarely line up very well, even in closely-related languages.
The real problem is the tendency of people everywhere to preserve old misspellings and mispronunciations of "foreign" words, and ignore the native speakers when they try to correct the mistakes. Consider the old spelling "Peking" for Beijing. Except for the tones, "Beijing" should produce a fairly accurate pronunciation by English speakers. "Peking" really never was very close (from an English viewpoint), but lots of writers prefer it because it's what they learned when they were young. OTOH, the American media has developed a pronunciation that has a "zh" as in "measure" sound in the middle of "Beijing", which is odd because Mandarin doesn't have that consonant. I read a discussion recently on a linguistics blog/list about this. They weren't able to discover where that bizarre mispronunciation could have come from. They ended up basically classifying it as an example of mysterious pack behavior on the part of American journalists, who apparently learned it from each other. (If anyone knows who started this, I could pass the info along to the linguists. ;-)
Inputs can be "Tiananmen" or tian1an2men2 in simplified Chinese ...
Or tian1an1men2 in pinyin ;-).
The dictionary I have only lists one character for an2, which means "to speak", and that would give a somewhat surrealistic name to the gate. Not that the Chinese are opposed to surrealism, of course, as you can see by visiting the various sites such as engrish.com that have some very entertaining signage, much of it from China.
I do keep wondering how hard it would be to clone slashdot and start up a UTF-8-encoded version. While we're at it, we could simplify it by tossing out most of the WEB 2.n stuff. Neither he Great Firewall nor Bing wouldn't be likely to object to our doing that.
I think New Orleans would be Noah's version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe, I dunno.
You might want to be careful with that comparison. A number of our religious fundamentalists claimed publicly that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans' sinful ways. People immediately started asking them why God chose to spare the French Quarter, which was well known as NO's most sinful zone.
Actually, it probably has more to do with the French Quarter being (slightly) above sea level. So it was mostly shut down for a while, but it wasn't flooded. When the electricity came back on, they opened for business again right away. Some of them had their own generators, so they were back in business even sooner.
There's precious little evidence of any God taking a hand in any of this. The Gulf Coast gets hit by several hurricanes per year, and their path seems essentially random. You'd sorta think that a vengeful God would do a better job of aiming, but this appears not to be true. His shots seem to have all the properties of a random-number generator, hitting the righteous and the sinners with equal probability and equal force.
And how, pray tell, are regular folks supposed to determine whether the maintenance has been adequate. AFAIK, no one is claiming a complete lack of maintenance, ...
In general, it's difficult or impossible for "regular folks" to find out much of anything about such things. But in this case, it turns out that the information had been publicly available (even on the Internet ;-) for years before Katrina. The Army Corps of Engineers had presented a series of reports to Congress, detailing the problems and pretty much predicting exactly where the failures would occur. They also submitted proposals for maintenance, repairs and enhancements, and those reports are part of the public record. The votes in Congress denying the funding are also public record. There were ongoing discussions (some on the Internet ;-) of all this.
So in this case, Americans where weren't aware of it are all "responsible", in the sense that the information was easily and widely available, and it was their elected representatives who publicly voted down the funding for the needed work. Saying "But I didn't know" is a poor excuse in this case. If you'd been interested, you would have known. A few million other Americans knew about the problems before Katrina; why didn't you?
I remember watching the satellite images at weather.gov as Katrina developed, and wondering whether this would be the one to devastate New Orleans. Several earlier storms had missed, but it was well-known to be just a matter of time.
(This all assumes that you're an American, of course. The information probably wasn't quite as easily available to most people living outside North America. Though much of it was on the Internet. It's gotten easier since then to learn a lot about similar danger zones in the rest of the world. Just ask google.)
There have also been any number of stories published about the Army Corps of Engineers' analyses of the New Orleans levee system over the past decade. The Corps sent a good number of reports to Congress, predicting most of what actually happened during Katrina. This included pinpointing all the actual points of failure. They submitted proposals for maintenance and enhancements. Congress pretty much turned them all down.
So yes, the Army Corps of Engineering was "responsible", in the obvious sense that they understood the situation quite well, knew what had to be done, and didn't do it. They didn't do it because they were denied the funding.
The Dutch situation is an interesting comparison. A similar storm devastated Holland in 1953, breaching the dikes and flooding most of the area below sea level. Their response was a huge project to improve their system so it wouldn't happen again. An interesting aspect of this was that their engineers got together with Japanese engineers, because Japan is the country with the most people living below sea level, and they had a lot of useful experience with dikes and levees. The result was greatly improved technology in both countries. Japan's situation is even worse: Millions of people live below sea level in the Tokyo-Yokohama metro area, they're in a major earthquake zone, and they have frequent hurricanes (or typhoons if you prefer). If you're into natural disasters, the history of this area makes for some interesting reading.
The US government tends to take a different approach, more like "We're the most advanced society in the world, and we don't have anything to learn from the rest of you turkeys." Their attitude towards New Orleans has also been pretty clear, along the lines of what others have said here: "That's what you get for living in a flood zone." I.e., "Tough luck, suckers."
But the American population keeps voting for them, so what happened must be what most Americans want, right?
Almost every story I've ever heard complaining about GIMP ends with "...so I'm sticking with Photoshop," like the person is trying to fix something that's not broken, learning a new system when the old one works fine for them.
Nah; that's not what I was saying. I don't know much about Photoshop, either, and my few encounters with it have been as unenlightening as my experiments with GIMP. I've used a few of the very basic image editors, such as the old bitmap and a few similar things, and I've found them fairly intuitive. But both Photoshop and GIMP are wild, uncontrollable beasts that I wasn't able to tame at all in the relatively few hours (for Photoshop) or days (for GIMP) that I spent on them before giving up. I don't have anything to unlearn about them, because I've never learned anything (useful) about either of them. I have no model in my head about how such an editor should work.
Maybe I should just approach GIMP (or Photoshop ;-) in the "standard" way, not bothering to read any documentation at all, but just start playing with them. But my brief encounters with them imply that it could take a lot of years out of my life to reach any sort of comprehension. As I mentioned, I was able to do a lot of image editing with GIMP. It was just that the changes made no sense, and were best described as "damage" that I couldn't predict, control, or reproduce.
Of course, I could be wrong, and after a couple weeks it would suddenly all make sense. But I'm not sure I want to gamble an unknown amount of my time again, without some reason to expect it'll turn out better than the other times.
I'm a graphics professional and have been using linux for about 10 years. I can safely say, all the times I've tried to use the GIMP even for simple tasks it's just pissed me off.
I'm not, and I have somewhat the same reaction. I've gotten ahold of one or more GIMP docs and tried to step through them to learn how to use it. I generally found that, although I could easily learn to tell it to do all sorts of things to an image, what it did was rarely what I expected, and couldn't be explained by reading the docs that I had. So I was able to use it to do all sort of damage to images, but I could rarely get it to make the changes that I wanted to make.
Obviously, this was due to my ignorance of GIMP. Right; and that's why I was stepping through TFM, trying to learn. Each time, I decided that I didn't have the right FM for a novice like me. Maybe someday, I'll find an intro GIMP tutorial that actually teaches me how to make the changes that I want to make, rather than just frobbing the controls and watching amusing but uncontrollable damage being done. Until then, I don't think I'll consider using it for anything important.