ISPs should just provide internet access not police and monitor traffic.
Basically a good approach, though it does have some gotchas. The main reason for wanting such a policy has already been mentioned here: BitTorrent traffic would be classified as "malware" by many ISPs. Also, there is a history of ISPs classifying any non-Microsoft software as malware and trying to ban it. When the Internet started to go commercial back in the 1990s, there were a lot of ISPs that restricted access to Windows machines. There was an especially annoying case of that hereabouts: The local linux/unix users group gave a lot of free help to several of the first ISPs, to get home access up and running. When it finally went public, the ISPs all restricted access to Windows only. That's the sort of thanks you get for helping the commercial folks.
Most ISPs now "support" MS WIndows and Mac OSX, but many of them still refuse service to linux (or Solaris) users, even if they're using those OSs themselves. The only feasible solution for this in general is to outlaw such discrimination. In many places, it is probably already illegal, under "restraint of trade" or similar anti-monopoly laws.
The proposed Australian law has a very real possibility of locking out all non-MS software as "malware".
Oh, probably, but I have no idea how I might have done it, or how to do it on purpose if I wanted to. And I haven't stumbled on any way to control it. Its behavior doesn't seem to have any reliable relation to what I do with the trackpad, and if it's controllable from the keyboard, I don't know how to do it. If I could find the documentation, maybe I could learn to use it (though I'd be happy just learning how to turn it off, since it doesn't seem to do anything that I'd find useful).
Accidental triggering complex, undocumented behavior isn't especially fun. I find that the Mac does this a lot. Ms Windows does it somewhat less, and I haven't really had much trouble with it when using any version of X Windows.
I found it impossible to... Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen!
That happens on Windows too if you increase the font size and add the screen magnifier (for elderly people with bad sight).
This has happened to me several times in the months I've had a Macbook Pro. For some reason, it sometimes goes into this sort of mode, where everything is 2 to 3 times bigger, and there's some sort of (apparently undocumented) panning scheme that I don't know how to control. When this happens, I've found that I can only get to the middle half of the "desktop"; things near the edges can't be moved to be visible on the screen. I've asked on a couple of Mac forums, and got the brushoff, replies that basically say "It should work; you must have done something dumb." Probably, but I don't have any idea how I've been triggering this mode, and the only way I know out of it is to reboot.
I do find it curious that this sort of thing is an unforgivable sin when it happens on linux, but it's acceptable when MS Windows or OS X does it to you.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck. That was pretty much the final straw that made me reach for my XP restore disc.
Funny; I frequently use Windows (XP, Vista) "for work", and I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro with a 1920x1200 screen. I've seen similar behavior on many occasions with both of these, where a window is partly off screen and I can't figure out how to get the thing I need to get at to appear on the screen. This seems to be a design problem with all GUIs, regardless of OS. If a programmer wants to put a window partly off screen, all of the common GUIs allow it.
But of course, when an app does this in linux; it's proof that linux "isn't ready for the desktop". When it happens on Windows, it's accepted as the way computers are, and you just have to live with it. When it happens in OS X, it's evidence that the user just doesn't appreciate the beauty of the design, which Just Works; you must have screwed it up yourself and are too dumb to figure out what you did wrong.
I think the real difference is the size of the ad budgets. Microsoft and Apple have bigger ad budgets than all the linux vendors combined, so of course their systems are "better" to most people. This probably won't change soon.
Most of my stuff that I consider important, I keep on one of my linux boxes. That way, I know that when (not if) some app screws things up, I can easily get into the data and unscrew it. Most of the time, I can get into the source code and fix the problem. Sometimes I've even got thanks from the app's owners for my fixes. With Microsoft and Apple systems, the critical code is usually not available to a nobody like me, so I just have to learn to live with the problems, or hack together some kludgery to get around it despite not really understanding what's going on inside the black-box software that's biting me.
But to each his own. I'm just glad that so far, the industrial heavyweights haven't found a way to squash things like linux and the rest of the open-source stuff. So far, people like me can get ourselves out of trouble when we're using such software, and maybe even get the software fixed within our lifetimes.
not? Because the results are not perfect? Jesus, man... Point out errors as you find them to Google or Microsoft if you truly want them fixed.
Yup, just as the authors of the article did. And google seems to have fixed those errors now.
Of course, we could also complain about the people who are so publicly pointing out all the errors in google's data. But the public comments here and in various other "scholarly" forums have served quite nicely to bring the problem to the attention of a lot of people. Many of the readers will just criticize google and/or the authors of such articles. But many other people will dig into the data, find more errors, and tell google about them.
The main problem is that, as a few people have pointed out, when you've found 50 or 500 errors, google's reporting mechanism is overly complex and takes far too many clicks. But maybe if some of us do the work and complain about the time it takes to send in the error reports, google's programmers will come up with a more time-efficient way to mark errors on our screens and send in a batch of corrections in one click.
This whole thing is obviously just a Good Start. It can obviously be improved. That will happen mostly because people cooperate with google.
But publicizing the problem is also a good idea. Otherwise, the few of us who are willing to help fix the problems would likely never known about the problems.
One obvious suggestion is to do the error correction via a wiki-like mechanism. I'd guess that some folks at google are looking into it. And, as anyone who has contributed to wikipedia knows, this approach has its own obvious and well-known problems. But with proper controls, it could help to cut down the error rate by a few orders of magnitude.
IMHO, a candidate should publicly denounce any unauthorized robocalls, and ask his supporters not to run them if he/she does not want them to.
Indeed, and some of them do that. But it does nothing to prevent your opponents from making fraudulent calls in your name. You might consider investigating, and if you get the evidence, you could sue the culprits. But politicians tend to not want to do this, as they fear it will make them look "mean and vicious" and lose them votes.
Robocalls says something about the character of the candidate.
That's only true if the robocall actually came from the candidate (or his campaign organization).
As others have pointed out, many political robocalls come from a candidate's opponent, in an attempt to get voters sufficiently annoyed at the candidate to vote against him/her. Unless you can verify that a robocall is actually from the candidate, it tells you nothing at all about the candidate.
Fraud is a routine part of many (perhaps most) political campaigns. It's routine to try to get voters to accept lies about your opponent. This is just one of many ways to do so. Google for "push poll" for another popular method.
Lets say I did not miss your point, I just conveniently ignored it while making my own.;)
Y'know; I was a bit suspicious...
(And ignoring the point of what you're replying to is sorta conventional here on/. But, as with other sorts of humor, it can be hard to detect from language in text form.;-)
What'd make even more "sense", though, is to not document to format and sell unoffending specialised modules yourself....
Ah, but you missed my point, which was to be able to say in all innocence that you aren't supplying the things that offend the retailers' or censors' sensibilities. That's being done by other people that have nothing to do with you.
Actually, I suppose it could be useful to cooperate on the side with the developers of the add-on modules. A true entrepreneur would do this, for a price, and get some handy royalties from all those follow-on sales. But if the bluenose crowd found out, they'd probably be all over you for "aiding and abetting" immorality. If you're really worried about this (as we apparently must be with Apple), the safest approach would be to keep your distance. Document how others can make add-on modules, since that will make your basic product sell better, but don't take part in the add-ons that bring out the people with torches and pitchforks (or control over the retail outlets).
My main question would be: Does Comcast intercept and answer all DNS requests on its wires?
My reason for asking is that I've generally found that it's not a very good idea to use the ISP's nameservers. They never work very well, in my experience. When I've been responsible for such things, I've generally looked for a few good nameservers that are (electronically) nearby, and tell my machines to use them. I usually get faster and more accurate DNS resolution that way.
But if the ISP is looking specifically for any DNS requests, ignoring their destination address, and forging an answer that points to their own machine, then the above strategy won't work.
Yes, forging replies to packets not addressed to you is a nasty thing to do. Comcast has been caught red-handed doing this, e.g. to tell both ends of a P2P connection that the other has closed the connection. So it seems likely that they may be doing the same thing here. But I can't quite tell from what I've read.
...and does anybody think these kids don't already know all the dirty words anyway?
Well, I for one have my doubts that even by the age of 10, any kid knows all the dirty words. Especially considering how quickly new dirty words (or new dirty meanings for old words) are being coined in English these days.
Visit urbandictionary.com, for example, and see how many of the definitions you or your child know before reading them there.
Keeping up with the latest fashions in dirty words is more than a full-time job.
This guy is free to register ninjawords.com and put up his dictionary as a web application...
My immediate thought was that if I were developing a dictionary app, I'd simply (simply? Hah!;-) include a feature that allows for downloading dictionary "modules" from the Web. And I'd document the files' formats.
Of course, the first thing many users would download would be the "naughty words" module. But my justification would be something different. There are all sorts of specialized sub-dialects of English that use specialized jargon. Computer software is one. Medicine is another (with a tree of sub-specialties). World of Warfare is another. There are zillions of them. Just imagine how useful it could be if the people dealing with a specialty with its own jargon could provide a dictionary module to everyone in their field. That would be a prime selling point of a dictionary.
The program itself probably wouldn't even come with a built-in dictionary. Instead, it could read a "basic English" module that lacks all the objectionable words, as well as the huge stock of words most people have never heard. Then it would contact a list of known dictionary-module sites, and present the modules to the user as a checklist. If they want the dirty-word module, they can check it. If they want the fly-fishing-jargon or the Hello-Kitty module, they can check it.
Nobody in any software store would have any reason to object to my basic distribution. And I wouldn't be responsible for the words or definitions on some obscure web site that I've never heard of.
It could also be a useful approach for dictionaries in other languages, too. Just make sure it supports Unicode, and other people could start setting it up themselves.
(OTOH, there's wiktionary.org, which could probably do something similar today. Dunno how easy it would be to make an excerpt for just one or two languages, though.)
The father is rich, well-connected to the police, and hellbent on getting the word out, yet he couldn't even get more than the most basic details of the crime.
And this probably answers the question posed in this thread's title. If a rich, well-connected father has to fight the "blue wall of silence", what chance have other parents who aren't so rich and/or well-connected?
Whenever you find only the powerful being successful at publicising bad news, you should assume that you're just seeing the "tip of the iceberg", and the less powerful are being successfully kept out of sight.
(OTOH, there's the argument that poorer people probably can't afford to send their kids to such camps.;-)
I don't think they're even a gulag for political prisoners -- if they were, the beatings and such would at least make a modicum of sense (a perverted one, but sense nonetheless)...
Ah, but there are lots of parts of the world where nerdy kids are routinely beaten up by the local gangs of jocks. It's socially acceptable in much of the US and the UK, and any number of other countries.
Of course, they usually don't kill their victims. That's usually reserved for kids that are suspected of being "gay".
Dunno how that dynamic works out in China, though.
I have to ask what is probably an ignorant question: it was intentional that they made it work only with vista or XP? I thought it was just that they were too lazy to add support for anything else.
It pretty much has to be intentional. There's no shortage of off-the-shelf wifi access points that implement standard Internet protocols, and work with anything. You can walk into any Radio Shack or Best Buy outlet and walk out with one. If this isn't true for their access points, they had to have bypassed all the existing access points, and implemented new protocols that specifically require a Microsoft OS underneath. This is harder than just using standard off-the-shelf libraries, so it must have taken them some effort to implement it.
As a result my "signature" has shortened to my initials to avoid using cursive all together.
Why? Isn't a simple X still acceptable? The only people to bother me about using print for my signature have been my parents.
Actually, using a "printing" script for your signature is a good idea, according to a number of forensic experts that I've read. They explain that the typical "squiggle" signature is incredibly easy to forge. Nearly anyone can make a similar squiggle, and few people will be able to tell the difference between two illegible scribbles. But people are better than you might think at spotting small differences in the fonts/scripts of readable text. If your signature is legible enough to spell out your name, it will be difficult to forge, because people will see the small differences in someone else's attempts to copy the details of your writing style. This is just as true for "printed" signatures as for cursive or any other script. The important thing is that it should be legible. The fine details will take care of themselves if you just write it in a relaxed fashion.
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
Actually, the makers of fancy pens have been reporting increasing sales over the past several decades. The number of people who are studying and practicing good writing may not be increasing as fast as the population, but the number is increasing. So there's a good chance that there will still be experts in all sorts of handwriting in another 70 or 80 or 100 years. It'll just be the great masses who were never educated in the topic who won't be able to read all those old letters and logbooks.
To use the ob automotive analogy, I have a number of friends who raise horses. There may have been a drop in the number of horses back in the early 20th century, but for some decades now, horse breeding has been on the increase. And it's not just race or show horses; various kinds of work horses are also being bred and trained. It turns out that there are a number of situations where horses are very practical tools for getting a job done. And people usually like them a lot better than machines.
I've read comments by a number of historians to the effect that new technology rarely totally obsoletes what came before. The new tools may take over a lot of the work, but there are usually situations where the old tools are still the best for some jobs. Thus, people who have several power drills usually have even more wrist-powered screwdrivers. And even though they know how to build with screws, they still use simple nails and hammers for some jobs.
So handwritten text probably also has a good future. The percentage of the population using it may decline, but we'll still have a reasonable population using it for the foreseeable future.
No one's talking about being unable to write. What's happening is the death of script. The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand.
Well, maybe, but you can get an even faster and more relaxed handwriting by switching to italic. I did that after a couple of years learning assorted historic scripts. It was sorta fun, and good for impressing people. "Hey, you can really write that stuff!" After a while, I figured out the script that was fastest to write (for a given level of legibility), and gave up on that silly American Longhand that they'd foisted on me in grade school. Well, actually, I suppose it's no sillier than any of the hundreds of other scripts that people have developed. But it's not especially fast or relaxing - or legible.
One of the fun things with experimenting with different scripts was that I knew a bunch of people back then (the 1960s) who were into handwriting analysis. I sorta viewed it as a pseudo-science, since it seemed to have no actual scientific foundation that anyone could find. So when they asked me for handwriting samples, I'd write in one of the scripts that I'd learned well, but in a fast, relaxed fashion. It was fun to read their analyses, which were clearly dealt more with the script that I was consciously using, not with anything that was inherent to my own mind or psyche or whatever. They would even give different analyses for samples using the same script, which I thought was pretty good evidence about the accuracy of their analytical tools. But the fact that they couldn't distinguish a script change from a personality change was good evidence all by itself.
With the iPhone being sold into 20% of Fortune-100s and into the military, just how worried should we be with such shoddy security?
Well, as someone who isn't part of any Fortune-100 corporation or military force, I guess my response would be "Not at all."
It's generally understood and widely acknowledged that the secrecy in such organizations functions primarily to keep their inner workings private from their own populations, i.e., us "little people" who pay to keep them running but aren't allowed to look into their inner workings. If they are riddled with holes in their communications because they're using iPhones or MS Windows or whatever, that means that there's a good chance that investigators can find out what they're up to and inform the rest of us.
Consider the last few years of disasters in the American financial industry. It's pretty clear now that the perpetrators knew quite well what they were doing, and were profiting quite well from it all. It's the "little people" who are paying for the collapse, while the officers of the corporations are still taking home huge paychecks and bonuses. The reason it went on for so long was that the companies involved were able to keep their shady dealings secret from the great majority of their investors. If we'd had better security holes to see inside them, maybe some of the disaster could have been avoided.
It's hardly a secret that military security primarily functions to hide their internal corruption (and bungling) from their own citizenry. Making their internal communications available to the citizenry via poor comms security seems like a win for the country as a whole.
You're missing one important difference. Cost accounting. Back in the decentralization movement, users would compare the cost of a pile of hardware with the cost of services from the Data Processing department.
Actually, what I remember from back then (the 1980s and the move from mainframes to "personal" or "desktop" computers) was something different. In every case I saw or heard of from the participants, the problem wasn't money; it was the DP department. The problem was that DP (or IT as it's now known) was and is a power center. If you used their machines, they owned your data, and you could only do what they permitted you to do. It was widely understood that the small machines looked more expensive to the bean counters. But the problem with the mainframe was that most of the things that management was breathing down your necks to do couldn't be done on the mainframe at all, at any price. The DP people held it hostage. The choice wasn't between doing your work on the PC or the mainframe; it was between doing it on the PC and not getting it done at all, because the DP people couldn't be bothered to help insignificant users like you.
This hasn't much changed, actually. Pretty much everywhere, the IT people have used the advent of networking to take control of much of the small-computing work in most organizations. In many companies, departments now must have not just hardware purchases approved by the IT people; you also have to get approval for installing software on your departmental machines. And management is still breathing down your neck, while the IT folks block everything that you need to get your job done, typically by muttering mysterious incantations about "security".
This appears to be a major part of the "cloud computing" thing. It's a way to move your work out of the hands of the local IT department, and put it in the hands of an outside contractor who (at least for now) is in your pay and will actually help you get things working right, because that's what you're paying them for.
My cynical response tends to be along the lines of "Just wait; they'll end up just another sort of DP or IT department, with total control over your data and the software that you're allowed to run. Then you'll have to find another buzz phrase to describe your next attempt to get control back for the tools you need to do your job. But the data will be out of your control, for sale on the sly to anyone willing to pay the price that CloudCompCo is asking."
And of course most people don't listen to such advice. They just go with the latest fad and hope that it helps in the ongoing battle for control of all the organization's computing facilities.
Also, in the 17th century, the term 'computer' used to refer to the human being performing the actual calculations (for calculating the trajectory of cannon balls for example).
That usage only died out recently. My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". This was around 1970, when she got a job working for a civil engineering firm, using their fancy new desktop calculators to do the math for surveying work. She actually only got out of that line of work in the mid 1980s, when the calculating was finally being moved over to those fancy new desktop computers. The use of "computer" as a job title had died out by 1980, though, as it had by then become widely known as the name of a kind of electronic device and was thus inappropriate to describe a human.
Now she does computing work for medical organizations, which are finally being dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age. Her iMac is more powerful, and has more pixels on its screen, than any in use at her office. But it'll probably still be some years before your typical MD understands what can be done with those newfangled electronic gadgets.
Wikipedia does have a big free online rival: Search engines.
Right; and that gives us a possible clue to what's really going on behind the scenes.
Part of the ongoing battle over copyright is the stories about people who download something from a web site and use it, mostly putting it in their own web site. Then the owner of the something (an image, a few paragraphs of text, a piece of music, whatever) sues them for copyright infringement. This is often a case of "entrapment", since most people would just assume that if something is on a web site, that means that you can download it to your own machine. Few people have enough legal understanding to go beyond that and consider what can be done to you later if you do anything with what you downloaded.
Wikipedia is a "non-profit" operation. What money they make mostly goes into maintaining and upgrading their servers and internet connections, without which wikipedia wouldn't exist. They can't afford to be hit by a million-dollar lawsuit for copyright infringement. So it makes sense that they would be very wary of being tricked into "distributing" copyrighted material that someone "donated" to them. They can't really know much about who is donating material or what their motives might be.
Since, as has already been pointed out, wikipedia is an information site, not a celebrity site, they have no need of high-res promo pics of anyone. They only need images that suffice for the main purpose of being accurate and identifiable.
In particular, wikipedia needs images that come with a clear license that allows them to distribute the images. Everything on wikipedia is there for the sole purpose of distribution, and if they don't have the right to distribute something, they shouldn't accept it. They don't need gifts that are potential entrapments into expensive lawsuits. Not when we have rabid "intellectual property" corporations that sic lawyers on everyone and their grandmother, and have got exorbitant court decisions in some cases.
And note that there are publishers who would love to have an excuse to shut down wikipedia. Anyone who is making anything available online for free is potentially a victim of lawsuits from publishers who are trying to eliminate free competition.
This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual. Which has consequences. Not the expected consequences of helping keep a president in power, but (even more notably) in helping to keep one ousted by a coup this past week out of power, boosting arguments of his corruption.
And how exactly do we know that this story is true, and the "election results" weren't faked by the current government? There's plenty of history everywhere of evidence of crimes being planted by the prosecutors, especially when political power is at stake.
Note that I'm not claiming that they faked the evidence. I'm asking how we know that it wasn't faked. Given that all the known evidence apparently comes solely from the prosecution, and would have been very easy to fake, I'd think that people should have some serious questions about the story. Is there independent evidence that hasn't passed through the hands of the prosecution?
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ISPs should just provide internet access not police and monitor traffic.
Basically a good approach, though it does have some gotchas. The main reason for wanting such a policy has already been mentioned here: BitTorrent traffic would be classified as "malware" by many ISPs. Also, there is a history of ISPs classifying any non-Microsoft software as malware and trying to ban it. When the Internet started to go commercial back in the 1990s, there were a lot of ISPs that restricted access to Windows machines. There was an especially annoying case of that hereabouts: The local linux/unix users group gave a lot of free help to several of the first ISPs, to get home access up and running. When it finally went public, the ISPs all restricted access to Windows only. That's the sort of thanks you get for helping the commercial folks.
Most ISPs now "support" MS WIndows and Mac OSX, but many of them still refuse service to linux (or Solaris) users, even if they're using those OSs themselves. The only feasible solution for this in general is to outlaw such discrimination. In many places, it is probably already illegal, under "restraint of trade" or similar anti-monopoly laws.
The proposed Australian law has a very real possibility of locking out all non-MS software as "malware".
Did you trigger the zoom-in feature?
Oh, probably, but I have no idea how I might have done it, or how to do it on purpose if I wanted to. And I haven't stumbled on any way to control it. Its behavior doesn't seem to have any reliable relation to what I do with the trackpad, and if it's controllable from the keyboard, I don't know how to do it. If I could find the documentation, maybe I could learn to use it (though I'd be happy just learning how to turn it off, since it doesn't seem to do anything that I'd find useful).
Accidental triggering complex, undocumented behavior isn't especially fun. I find that the Mac does this a lot. Ms Windows does it somewhat less, and I haven't really had much trouble with it when using any version of X Windows.
This has happened to me several times in the months I've had a Macbook Pro. For some reason, it sometimes goes into this sort of mode, where everything is 2 to 3 times bigger, and there's some sort of (apparently undocumented) panning scheme that I don't know how to control. When this happens, I've found that I can only get to the middle half of the "desktop"; things near the edges can't be moved to be visible on the screen. I've asked on a couple of Mac forums, and got the brushoff, replies that basically say "It should work; you must have done something dumb." Probably, but I don't have any idea how I've been triggering this mode, and the only way I know out of it is to reboot.
I do find it curious that this sort of thing is an unforgivable sin when it happens on linux, but it's acceptable when MS Windows or OS X does it to you.
One other annoyance with Linux Ubuntu is when I switched my screen size to 640x480 to play some Atari and NES gaming. I found it impossible to switch it back to 1280x1024. Why? Because the dialogue box did not fit, and the "okay" button was off the screen! I ended-up stuck. That was pretty much the final straw that made me reach for my XP restore disc.
Funny; I frequently use Windows (XP, Vista) "for work", and I'm typing this on a Macbook Pro with a 1920x1200 screen. I've seen similar behavior on many occasions with both of these, where a window is partly off screen and I can't figure out how to get the thing I need to get at to appear on the screen. This seems to be a design problem with all GUIs, regardless of OS. If a programmer wants to put a window partly off screen, all of the common GUIs allow it.
But of course, when an app does this in linux; it's proof that linux "isn't ready for the desktop". When it happens on Windows, it's accepted as the way computers are, and you just have to live with it. When it happens in OS X, it's evidence that the user just doesn't appreciate the beauty of the design, which Just Works; you must have screwed it up yourself and are too dumb to figure out what you did wrong.
I think the real difference is the size of the ad budgets. Microsoft and Apple have bigger ad budgets than all the linux vendors combined, so of course their systems are "better" to most people. This probably won't change soon.
Most of my stuff that I consider important, I keep on one of my linux boxes. That way, I know that when (not if) some app screws things up, I can easily get into the data and unscrew it. Most of the time, I can get into the source code and fix the problem. Sometimes I've even got thanks from the app's owners for my fixes. With Microsoft and Apple systems, the critical code is usually not available to a nobody like me, so I just have to learn to live with the problems, or hack together some kludgery to get around it despite not really understanding what's going on inside the black-box software that's biting me.
But to each his own. I'm just glad that so far, the industrial heavyweights haven't found a way to squash things like linux and the rest of the open-source stuff. So far, people like me can get ourselves out of trouble when we're using such software, and maybe even get the software fixed within our lifetimes.
If the government asked for my private key then I would simply exercise my right to remain silent.
That's probably best answered by a link to the appropriate xkcd comic.
Yes, you have the right to remain silent. But if there are no witnesses, they have the ability to do whatever they like to convince you to cooperate.
not? Because the results are not perfect? Jesus, man... Point out errors as you find them to Google or Microsoft if you truly want them fixed.
Yup, just as the authors of the article did. And google seems to have fixed those errors now.
Of course, we could also complain about the people who are so publicly pointing out all the errors in google's data. But the public comments here and in various other "scholarly" forums have served quite nicely to bring the problem to the attention of a lot of people. Many of the readers will just criticize google and/or the authors of such articles. But many other people will dig into the data, find more errors, and tell google about them.
The main problem is that, as a few people have pointed out, when you've found 50 or 500 errors, google's reporting mechanism is overly complex and takes far too many clicks. But maybe if some of us do the work and complain about the time it takes to send in the error reports, google's programmers will come up with a more time-efficient way to mark errors on our screens and send in a batch of corrections in one click.
This whole thing is obviously just a Good Start. It can obviously be improved. That will happen mostly because people cooperate with google.
But publicizing the problem is also a good idea. Otherwise, the few of us who are willing to help fix the problems would likely never known about the problems.
One obvious suggestion is to do the error correction via a wiki-like mechanism. I'd guess that some folks at google are looking into it. And, as anyone who has contributed to wikipedia knows, this approach has its own obvious and well-known problems. But with proper controls, it could help to cut down the error rate by a few orders of magnitude.
IMHO, a candidate should publicly denounce any unauthorized robocalls, and ask his supporters not to run them if he/she does not want them to.
Indeed, and some of them do that. But it does nothing to prevent your opponents from making fraudulent calls in your name. You might consider investigating, and if you get the evidence, you could sue the culprits. But politicians tend to not want to do this, as they fear it will make them look "mean and vicious" and lose them votes.
Robocalls says something about the character of the candidate.
That's only true if the robocall actually came from the candidate (or his campaign organization).
As others have pointed out, many political robocalls come from a candidate's opponent, in an attempt to get voters sufficiently annoyed at the candidate to vote against him/her. Unless you can verify that a robocall is actually from the candidate, it tells you nothing at all about the candidate.
Fraud is a routine part of many (perhaps most) political campaigns. It's routine to try to get voters to accept lies about your opponent. This is just one of many ways to do so. Google for "push poll" for another popular method.
Lets say I did not miss your point, I just conveniently ignored it while making my own. ;)
Y'know; I was a bit suspicious ...
(And ignoring the point of what you're replying to is sorta conventional here on /. But, as with other sorts of humor, it can be hard to detect from language in text form. ;-)
What'd make even more "sense", though, is to not document to format and sell unoffending specialised modules yourself. ...
Ah, but you missed my point, which was to be able to say in all innocence that you aren't supplying the things that offend the retailers' or censors' sensibilities. That's being done by other people that have nothing to do with you.
Actually, I suppose it could be useful to cooperate on the side with the developers of the add-on modules. A true entrepreneur would do this, for a price, and get some handy royalties from all those follow-on sales. But if the bluenose crowd found out, they'd probably be all over you for "aiding and abetting" immorality. If you're really worried about this (as we apparently must be with Apple), the safest approach would be to keep your distance. Document how others can make add-on modules, since that will make your basic product sell better, but don't take part in the add-ons that bring out the people with torches and pitchforks (or control over the retail outlets).
So if Rupert sends me a bill for something that I've never ordered, do I have to pay him?
If not, how does he expect to make any money?
If so, I think I'll send him a rather large bill for a bridge that I just sold him.
My main question would be: Does Comcast intercept and answer all DNS requests on its wires?
My reason for asking is that I've generally found that it's not a very good idea to use the ISP's nameservers. They never work very well, in my experience. When I've been responsible for such things, I've generally looked for a few good nameservers that are (electronically) nearby, and tell my machines to use them. I usually get faster and more accurate DNS resolution that way.
But if the ISP is looking specifically for any DNS requests, ignoring their destination address, and forging an answer that points to their own machine, then the above strategy won't work.
Yes, forging replies to packets not addressed to you is a nasty thing to do. Comcast has been caught red-handed doing this, e.g. to tell both ends of a P2P connection that the other has closed the connection. So it seems likely that they may be doing the same thing here. But I can't quite tell from what I've read.
...and does anybody think these kids don't already know all the dirty words anyway?
Well, I for one have my doubts that even by the age of 10, any kid knows all the dirty words. Especially considering how quickly new dirty words (or new dirty meanings for old words) are being coined in English these days.
Visit urbandictionary.com, for example, and see how many of the definitions you or your child know before reading them there.
Keeping up with the latest fashions in dirty words is more than a full-time job.
This guy is free to register ninjawords.com and put up his dictionary as a web application ...
My immediate thought was that if I were developing a dictionary app, I'd simply (simply? Hah! ;-) include a feature that allows for downloading dictionary "modules" from the Web. And I'd document the files' formats.
Of course, the first thing many users would download would be the "naughty words" module. But my justification would be something different. There are all sorts of specialized sub-dialects of English that use specialized jargon. Computer software is one. Medicine is another (with a tree of sub-specialties). World of Warfare is another. There are zillions of them. Just imagine how useful it could be if the people dealing with a specialty with its own jargon could provide a dictionary module to everyone in their field. That would be a prime selling point of a dictionary.
The program itself probably wouldn't even come with a built-in dictionary. Instead, it could read a "basic English" module that lacks all the objectionable words, as well as the huge stock of words most people have never heard. Then it would contact a list of known dictionary-module sites, and present the modules to the user as a checklist. If they want the dirty-word module, they can check it. If they want the fly-fishing-jargon or the Hello-Kitty module, they can check it.
Nobody in any software store would have any reason to object to my basic distribution. And I wouldn't be responsible for the words or definitions on some obscure web site that I've never heard of.
It could also be a useful approach for dictionaries in other languages, too. Just make sure it supports Unicode, and other people could start setting it up themselves.
(OTOH, there's wiktionary.org, which could probably do something similar today. Dunno how easy it would be to make an excerpt for just one or two languages, though.)
The father is rich, well-connected to the police, and hellbent on getting the word out, yet he couldn't even get more than the most basic details of the crime.
And this probably answers the question posed in this thread's title. If a rich, well-connected father has to fight the "blue wall of silence", what chance have other parents who aren't so rich and/or well-connected?
Whenever you find only the powerful being successful at publicising bad news, you should assume that you're just seeing the "tip of the iceberg", and the less powerful are being successfully kept out of sight.
(OTOH, there's the argument that poorer people probably can't afford to send their kids to such camps. ;-)
I don't think they're even a gulag for political prisoners -- if they were, the beatings and such would at least make a modicum of sense (a perverted one, but sense nonetheless)...
Ah, but there are lots of parts of the world where nerdy kids are routinely beaten up by the local gangs of jocks. It's socially acceptable in much of the US and the UK, and any number of other countries.
Of course, they usually don't kill their victims. That's usually reserved for kids that are suspected of being "gay".
Dunno how that dynamic works out in China, though.
I have to ask what is probably an ignorant question: it was intentional that they made it work only with vista or XP? I thought it was just that they were too lazy to add support for anything else.
It pretty much has to be intentional. There's no shortage of off-the-shelf wifi access points that implement standard Internet protocols, and work with anything. You can walk into any Radio Shack or Best Buy outlet and walk out with one. If this isn't true for their access points, they had to have bypassed all the existing access points, and implemented new protocols that specifically require a Microsoft OS underneath. This is harder than just using standard off-the-shelf libraries, so it must have taken them some effort to implement it.
Actually, using a "printing" script for your signature is a good idea, according to a number of forensic experts that I've read. They explain that the typical "squiggle" signature is incredibly easy to forge. Nearly anyone can make a similar squiggle, and few people will be able to tell the difference between two illegible scribbles. But people are better than you might think at spotting small differences in the fonts/scripts of readable text. If your signature is legible enough to spell out your name, it will be difficult to forge, because people will see the small differences in someone else's attempts to copy the details of your writing style. This is just as true for "printed" signatures as for cursive or any other script. The important thing is that it should be legible. The fine details will take care of themselves if you just write it in a relaxed fashion.
And according to this news, it will be unlikely what anyone will be able to decipher your handwriting by then : )
Actually, the makers of fancy pens have been reporting increasing sales over the past several decades. The number of people who are studying and practicing good writing may not be increasing as fast as the population, but the number is increasing. So there's a good chance that there will still be experts in all sorts of handwriting in another 70 or 80 or 100 years. It'll just be the great masses who were never educated in the topic who won't be able to read all those old letters and logbooks.
To use the ob automotive analogy, I have a number of friends who raise horses. There may have been a drop in the number of horses back in the early 20th century, but for some decades now, horse breeding has been on the increase. And it's not just race or show horses; various kinds of work horses are also being bred and trained. It turns out that there are a number of situations where horses are very practical tools for getting a job done. And people usually like them a lot better than machines.
I've read comments by a number of historians to the effect that new technology rarely totally obsoletes what came before. The new tools may take over a lot of the work, but there are usually situations where the old tools are still the best for some jobs. Thus, people who have several power drills usually have even more wrist-powered screwdrivers. And even though they know how to build with screws, they still use simple nails and hammers for some jobs.
So handwritten text probably also has a good future. The percentage of the population using it may decline, but we'll still have a reasonable population using it for the foreseeable future.
No one's talking about being unable to write. What's happening is the death of script. The advantage of cursive over printing is that it is faster and less fatiguing to the hand.
Well, maybe, but you can get an even faster and more relaxed handwriting by switching to italic. I did that after a couple of years learning assorted historic scripts. It was sorta fun, and good for impressing people. "Hey, you can really write that stuff!" After a while, I figured out the script that was fastest to write (for a given level of legibility), and gave up on that silly American Longhand that they'd foisted on me in grade school. Well, actually, I suppose it's no sillier than any of the hundreds of other scripts that people have developed. But it's not especially fast or relaxing - or legible.
One of the fun things with experimenting with different scripts was that I knew a bunch of people back then (the 1960s) who were into handwriting analysis. I sorta viewed it as a pseudo-science, since it seemed to have no actual scientific foundation that anyone could find. So when they asked me for handwriting samples, I'd write in one of the scripts that I'd learned well, but in a fast, relaxed fashion. It was fun to read their analyses, which were clearly dealt more with the script that I was consciously using, not with anything that was inherent to my own mind or psyche or whatever. They would even give different analyses for samples using the same script, which I thought was pretty good evidence about the accuracy of their analytical tools. But the fact that they couldn't distinguish a script change from a personality change was good evidence all by itself.
With the iPhone being sold into 20% of Fortune-100s and into the military, just how worried should we be with such shoddy security?
Well, as someone who isn't part of any Fortune-100 corporation or military force, I guess my response would be "Not at all."
It's generally understood and widely acknowledged that the secrecy in such organizations functions primarily to keep their inner workings private from their own populations, i.e., us "little people" who pay to keep them running but aren't allowed to look into their inner workings. If they are riddled with holes in their communications because they're using iPhones or MS Windows or whatever, that means that there's a good chance that investigators can find out what they're up to and inform the rest of us.
Consider the last few years of disasters in the American financial industry. It's pretty clear now that the perpetrators knew quite well what they were doing, and were profiting quite well from it all. It's the "little people" who are paying for the collapse, while the officers of the corporations are still taking home huge paychecks and bonuses. The reason it went on for so long was that the companies involved were able to keep their shady dealings secret from the great majority of their investors. If we'd had better security holes to see inside them, maybe some of the disaster could have been avoided.
It's hardly a secret that military security primarily functions to hide their internal corruption (and bungling) from their own citizenry. Making their internal communications available to the citizenry via poor comms security seems like a win for the country as a whole.
(Yeah; I know; "Such a dreamer." ;-)
You're missing one important difference. Cost accounting. Back in the decentralization movement, users would compare the cost of a pile of hardware with the cost of services from the Data Processing department.
Actually, what I remember from back then (the 1980s and the move from mainframes to "personal" or "desktop" computers) was something different. In every case I saw or heard of from the participants, the problem wasn't money; it was the DP department. The problem was that DP (or IT as it's now known) was and is a power center. If you used their machines, they owned your data, and you could only do what they permitted you to do. It was widely understood that the small machines looked more expensive to the bean counters. But the problem with the mainframe was that most of the things that management was breathing down your necks to do couldn't be done on the mainframe at all, at any price. The DP people held it hostage. The choice wasn't between doing your work on the PC or the mainframe; it was between doing it on the PC and not getting it done at all, because the DP people couldn't be bothered to help insignificant users like you.
This hasn't much changed, actually. Pretty much everywhere, the IT people have used the advent of networking to take control of much of the small-computing work in most organizations. In many companies, departments now must have not just hardware purchases approved by the IT people; you also have to get approval for installing software on your departmental machines. And management is still breathing down your neck, while the IT folks block everything that you need to get your job done, typically by muttering mysterious incantations about "security".
This appears to be a major part of the "cloud computing" thing. It's a way to move your work out of the hands of the local IT department, and put it in the hands of an outside contractor who (at least for now) is in your pay and will actually help you get things working right, because that's what you're paying them for.
My cynical response tends to be along the lines of "Just wait; they'll end up just another sort of DP or IT department, with total control over your data and the software that you're allowed to run. Then you'll have to find another buzz phrase to describe your next attempt to get control back for the tools you need to do your job. But the data will be out of your control, for sale on the sly to anyone willing to pay the price that CloudCompCo is asking."
And of course most people don't listen to such advice. They just go with the latest fad and hope that it helps in the ongoing battle for control of all the organization's computing facilities.
Also, in the 17th century, the term 'computer' used to refer to the human being performing the actual calculations (for calculating the trajectory of cannon balls for example).
That usage only died out recently. My wife likes to tell people that her first job title was "computer". This was around 1970, when she got a job working for a civil engineering firm, using their fancy new desktop calculators to do the math for surveying work. She actually only got out of that line of work in the mid 1980s, when the calculating was finally being moved over to those fancy new desktop computers. The use of "computer" as a job title had died out by 1980, though, as it had by then become widely known as the name of a kind of electronic device and was thus inappropriate to describe a human.
Now she does computing work for medical organizations, which are finally being dragged kicking and screaming into the computer age. Her iMac is more powerful, and has more pixels on its screen, than any in use at her office. But it'll probably still be some years before your typical MD understands what can be done with those newfangled electronic gadgets.
Wikipedia does have a big free online rival: Search engines.
Right; and that gives us a possible clue to what's really going on behind the scenes.
Part of the ongoing battle over copyright is the stories about people who download something from a web site and use it, mostly putting it in their own web site. Then the owner of the something (an image, a few paragraphs of text, a piece of music, whatever) sues them for copyright infringement. This is often a case of "entrapment", since most people would just assume that if something is on a web site, that means that you can download it to your own machine. Few people have enough legal understanding to go beyond that and consider what can be done to you later if you do anything with what you downloaded.
Wikipedia is a "non-profit" operation. What money they make mostly goes into maintaining and upgrading their servers and internet connections, without which wikipedia wouldn't exist. They can't afford to be hit by a million-dollar lawsuit for copyright infringement. So it makes sense that they would be very wary of being tricked into "distributing" copyrighted material that someone "donated" to them. They can't really know much about who is donating material or what their motives might be.
Since, as has already been pointed out, wikipedia is an information site, not a celebrity site, they have no need of high-res promo pics of anyone. They only need images that suffice for the main purpose of being accurate and identifiable.
In particular, wikipedia needs images that come with a clear license that allows them to distribute the images. Everything on wikipedia is there for the sole purpose of distribution, and if they don't have the right to distribute something, they shouldn't accept it. They don't need gifts that are potential entrapments into expensive lawsuits. Not when we have rabid "intellectual property" corporations that sic lawyers on everyone and their grandmother, and have got exorbitant court decisions in some cases.
And note that there are publishers who would love to have an excuse to shut down wikipedia. Anyone who is making anything available online for free is potentially a victim of lawsuits from publishers who are trying to eliminate free competition.
This story is important because it crossed the line from possible, to (evidently) actual. Which has consequences. Not the expected consequences of helping keep a president in power, but (even more notably) in helping to keep one ousted by a coup this past week out of power, boosting arguments of his corruption.
And how exactly do we know that this story is true, and the "election results" weren't faked by the current government? There's plenty of history everywhere of evidence of crimes being planted by the prosecutors, especially when political power is at stake.
Note that I'm not claiming that they faked the evidence. I'm asking how we know that it wasn't faked. Given that all the known evidence apparently comes solely from the prosecution, and would have been very easy to fake, I'd think that people should have some serious questions about the story. Is there independent evidence that hasn't passed through the hands of the prosecution?