I agree that we are not trying to explain how a tool works, but we're also not trying to define what it is. That part has to be done outside of experiments about animals using them. Here we are trying to define what animals do or don't use, to redefine the definition of a tool based on the outcome of the experiment on if animals use them is very bad science. Unfortunately some bad scientists have already defined tool in their mind as "something only humans use" and therefore keep altering the definition to avoid having to admit that what they see in nature is in fact tool use.
No experiment can work if you can't agree on the terms of the experiment without first seeing the outcome, and that's exactly what's happening here, redefining the terms to make the outcome match expectations, instead of re-evaluating our knowledge of the world based on the observations.
Science must discard it's old notions, prejudices and preconceptions, viewing the world through it's own version of rose-coloured glasses. It must stop filtering out, rejecting whatever does not conform to it's prejudices and start observing objectively, fairly.
Science already does. Bad scientists however often do not. The problem isn't science, it's the implementation of science by some specific individuals.
Science works by re-evaluating our world view based on the results of the experiment. Only bad science re-evaluates the definitions of the words in the original hypothesis to cause the desired result instead. Proper science would have the hypothesis that humans are the only ones who make and use tools, upon seeing another animal make and use tools, we would adjust the hypothesis to say "only humans and _____ make and use tools" or some such. Instead we find people re-defining "tools" so that their original hypothesis remains correct despite evidence to the contrary. This isn't science.
As much as I'd love to believe that, I don't think this has anything at all to do with internal combustion vs electric. This strikes me more as a "there's new competition in town and I hate competition" issue. I'd be willing to bet that if Tesla was selling internal combustion vehicles this case would still be exactly the same.
I really wish companies in general (in every market segment) would stop using the courts to enforce a profit. Compete on merit and we all win, compete on legalities and everyone looses.
Just to be clear, I agree with your overall point, but your view of diesel vs gas seems to be skewed. Diesel prices should be lower than gas, diesel takes less work to refine than gasoline. Around here diesel is cheaper than gas all summer, but equal price or more expensive all winter (the same production lines used to refine diesel are used to refine heating oil for the east coast, so demand goes up in the winter)
How often you have to clean the rollers depends on the cleanliness of the environment... maybe you compute in a dirtier spot than I do? not to mention that "cleaning" is really just popping it open, wiping the ball on my pant leg, my fingernail along the rollers, and popping it back together, takes less than a minute. The ball does work on soft surfaces, though my desktop doesn't reach my bed, so I can't say for sure if it would work well there, I suspect it would though. It works fine on my pant leg, or a magazine, or the bare desk, or the arm of the couch. I have an optical version of the same mouse, I used it for about a week before I gave up and went back to the ball one. I also have a microsoft wireless optical mouse that I use with my tablet, I don't like it much either. The problem is that most optical mice are extremely picky about the surface they work on. My desk, despite being a fairly standard wood grain, doesn't seem to work for optical mice. I like having the freedom to use the mouse wherever it lands, I don't want to have to have a mouse pad which restricts where I can position the mouse.
There is actually a native linux program (Congruity) that interfaces with the logitech website. It makes programming the remote no more painful than on windows (which unfortunately is not exactly a glowing recommendation) Great remotes once they are set up... but I don't know if they could have made the setup process much more painful..
And let's not even get in to the nightmare interface they use to program those remotes! One of the worst designed pieces of software I've ever seen. Their database is notoriously bad at knowing all the features of each device, so often it will think you have a different number of inputs to cycle through than you actually do or some such, all of this can be changed in the program, but good luck finding it! I've always found that those harmony remotes are amazing once you get them going, but the setup process can be a real pain. (I work for a TV provider that tried using harmony remotes for all our customers at one point, the huge amount of time it took our technicians to set the things up on each install eventually killed that)
And this is why I still cling to my IntelliMouse (microsoft ergonomic mouse) (and no, I don't like microsoft, and don't use any of their software, but their hardware seems decent) It's got a cord and a ball, it never needs new batteries, works on every surface I've ever tried it on, and has never caused me any issues. need to clean the ball and rollers every so often (probably as often as most people replace a mouse) but otherwise no issues. Of course it also requires a PS/2 port on the computer, so I have a feeling it's days are numbered when I buy a new computer. I'll miss it.
All I can do is laugh... I agree proper grounding is important, as is surge protection. I also know for a fact that you are completely out to lunch with your paranoia.
Except that it is impossible to buy car insurance on a car you don't have because you can't give them the make, model, and VIN number which are required for the policy.
Marketers are jerks, the fact that they are calling and trying to sell car insurance vs carpet cleaning doesn't change that, but it also doesn't change the fact that this person CAN NOT buy car insurance for the car they don't have. this is also very different from the original post about a TV license because one is a government organization which can force you to pay for the license despite not having a TV, and the other is a private company being too aggressive in it's marketing, and who wouldn't even sell you the insurance anyway if you tried to buy it to make them go away.
I couldnt' even find a way to calibrate the N810, it simply NEVER needed it, it didn't ask you to do it on first boot, never. so it's obvious that this was quite possible before capacitive screens.
I'm not talking "infrequent" I'm talking NEVER. It's not the only device I've used like that either, touchscreens have been around for a very long time, and calibrating them has not been needed (or even possible) on most high end devices for almost as long.
This doesn't need copyright rules to fix, and in fact it doesn't look like they've been charged with any copyright infringement, so doesn't look like copyright helped at all here. Get them under breach of trust or contract issues, get them under various hacking laws. When you have a dozen different laws you can apply to each situation, that says that you have a dozen less one too many laws that apply to that situation.
I guess they wanted to go easy on him. The correct charge would be copyright infringement, but the punishment for that these days is so severe that you're better off charged with theft...
This is not theft. nothing was stolen from anyone. It is copyright infringement, (which courts have decided is one of the most heinous crimes possible with punishments far harsher than simple theft) It may also fall under various hacking laws It probably also falls under "mischief" which is always a good catch-all Likely it also falls under various clauses of their employment contract, so they can say goodbye to their jobs too.
Of course I still don't know who thinks they can take naked pictures of themselves and never expect them to get to anyone they didn't intend...
It's hard to be certain what led to looking at the pictures themselves. most likely they shouldn't have been looking, but sometimes things are just set up in such a way that you aren't sure if the folder you're looking at is pictures the customer wants, or images built in to some app that will be re-loaded anyway. The bigger issue is what happened next. Keeping those pictures is obviously wrong, showing them to other customers... well that's just plain stupid.
Moderately related story... I once worked as a network admin for a small company (about a dozen people in 3 different offices). Part of my job was maintaining backups of everyone's data. I told everyone that if it was stored on the server it would be backed up, but if they kept it on their PC they were out of luck. Unfortunately though I also knew that the CEO didn't follow those sorts of rules, thinking it was beneath him, and I also knew that if his PC crashed and it wasn't backed up, I'd be in trouble regardless of what I had made clear to everyone. I decided the best course of action was to bite the bullet and figure out what stuff on his machine needed to be backed up too. While doing so I unwittingly came across some pictures and videos of his wife... let's just say they didn't involve clothing, but did involve whipped cream and cherries... once I figured out what I had stumbled across I stopped looking, and I certainly didn't copy them for myself, or show them to anyone else. The worst part though was that his wife was also my boss... must say it was very difficult to take her seriously after that!
This has absolutely nothing to do with resistive vs capacitive screens. My old Nokia N810 had a resistive screen and it never needed calibrating. Not when brand new, not 3 years later, not after sitting in a box for a year, never. I've certainly seen devices that insist on being calibrated all the time, and I don't know what the reason is, but I can tell you from experience that it isn't the resistive/capacitive thing.
Ok, I get that it's not as bad as many machines... but I'm failing to see the advantage over having just the ballot and a pen? Why add the complexity of the machine at all if it is truly as you say. (or is this just an excuse to funnel money to somebody's friend to make/maintain the machines?)
Of course I'm coming from a country where we use pencil and paper counted by humans (supervised by representatives of each candidate) and results are known 2 hours after the polls close...
My point is not about the VMs, I personally agree that there is no need to have many of those services on their own VM. However the original argument was multiple physical machines vs multiple virtual ones, My point was in getting them all on to one box more than it was about using VMs vs multiple services on one box. With them all on one physical box, whether virtualized or not, it makes it easier to have a second physical machine which is a backup of the first, rather than multiple individual primaries with multiple individual backups. more reliable too.
I didn't get in to the VM vs multiple services argument for the simple reason that without further information about the particular setup and exactly which auxiliary services they run, along with who is responsible for what, and the bureaucracy behind it all it's impossible to know what can be consolidated and what can not for this particular example.
GPS antennas don't tend to stick up any further than any of a number of other protrusions on the roof of a normal building. If your building doesn't normally get hit by lighting, then the GPS antenna will not change that in any way.
That said, proper grounding is always important and I would never argue against doing so.
The alternative is a whole bunch of individual points of failure of individual services. No better really as any one of those boxes going offline is likely critical.
Either way you need a backup of your services. In your scenario you need a dozen primary boxes, and a dozen backups. In mine you need one primary machine and one backup, much simpler to administer, and at least as reliable if not more so. You could even have a tertiary backup and still have fewer physical machines to worry about than just your primaries.
While I agree that the proper solution for a rack is rack mount equipment, the fact that something is not rack-mount is not an excuse for it to be a rat's nest of cables. I have installed non-rack mount equipment, there's no reason the cords can't be just as neat and tidy as the rack-mount stuff if you do it right. That said, the better answer is to smack whoever decided to go with non-rack mounted equipment in the first place...
Redundancy doesn't mean having different services on separate boxes, it means having the same services in multiple places. In fact it's easier with one VM box hosting everything, because it's easier to keep it backed up and sync'd to a spare then it is to do a whole bunch of individual ones.
If you care enough to use a GPS receiver instead of a network time source, you should also care enough to get the antenna on to the roof... We have many such time sources controlling timing in the basements of buildings, but the antenna always ends up on the mast.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree that we are not trying to explain how a tool works, but we're also not trying to define what it is. That part has to be done outside of experiments about animals using them.
Here we are trying to define what animals do or don't use, to redefine the definition of a tool based on the outcome of the experiment on if animals use them is very bad science.
Unfortunately some bad scientists have already defined tool in their mind as "something only humans use" and therefore keep altering the definition to avoid having to admit that what they see in nature is in fact tool use.
No experiment can work if you can't agree on the terms of the experiment without first seeing the outcome, and that's exactly what's happening here, redefining the terms to make the outcome match expectations, instead of re-evaluating our knowledge of the world based on the observations.
Science must discard it's old notions, prejudices and preconceptions, viewing the world through it's own version of rose-coloured glasses. It must stop filtering out, rejecting whatever does not conform to it's prejudices and start observing objectively, fairly.
Science already does. Bad scientists however often do not. The problem isn't science, it's the implementation of science by some specific individuals.
Science works by re-evaluating our world view based on the results of the experiment. Only bad science re-evaluates the definitions of the words in the original hypothesis to cause the desired result instead.
Proper science would have the hypothesis that humans are the only ones who make and use tools, upon seeing another animal make and use tools, we would adjust the hypothesis to say "only humans and _____ make and use tools" or some such. Instead we find people re-defining "tools" so that their original hypothesis remains correct despite evidence to the contrary. This isn't science.
As much as I'd love to believe that, I don't think this has anything at all to do with internal combustion vs electric. This strikes me more as a "there's new competition in town and I hate competition" issue. I'd be willing to bet that if Tesla was selling internal combustion vehicles this case would still be exactly the same.
I really wish companies in general (in every market segment) would stop using the courts to enforce a profit. Compete on merit and we all win, compete on legalities and everyone looses.
Just to be clear, I agree with your overall point, but your view of diesel vs gas seems to be skewed. Diesel prices should be lower than gas, diesel takes less work to refine than gasoline. Around here diesel is cheaper than gas all summer, but equal price or more expensive all winter (the same production lines used to refine diesel are used to refine heating oil for the east coast, so demand goes up in the winter)
How often you have to clean the rollers depends on the cleanliness of the environment... maybe you compute in a dirtier spot than I do? not to mention that "cleaning" is really just popping it open, wiping the ball on my pant leg, my fingernail along the rollers, and popping it back together, takes less than a minute.
The ball does work on soft surfaces, though my desktop doesn't reach my bed, so I can't say for sure if it would work well there, I suspect it would though. It works fine on my pant leg, or a magazine, or the bare desk, or the arm of the couch.
I have an optical version of the same mouse, I used it for about a week before I gave up and went back to the ball one. I also have a microsoft wireless optical mouse that I use with my tablet, I don't like it much either. The problem is that most optical mice are extremely picky about the surface they work on. My desk, despite being a fairly standard wood grain, doesn't seem to work for optical mice. I like having the freedom to use the mouse wherever it lands, I don't want to have to have a mouse pad which restricts where I can position the mouse.
There is actually a native linux program (Congruity) that interfaces with the logitech website. It makes programming the remote no more painful than on windows (which unfortunately is not exactly a glowing recommendation)
Great remotes once they are set up... but I don't know if they could have made the setup process much more painful..
And let's not even get in to the nightmare interface they use to program those remotes! One of the worst designed pieces of software I've ever seen.
Their database is notoriously bad at knowing all the features of each device, so often it will think you have a different number of inputs to cycle through than you actually do or some such, all of this can be changed in the program, but good luck finding it!
I've always found that those harmony remotes are amazing once you get them going, but the setup process can be a real pain. (I work for a TV provider that tried using harmony remotes for all our customers at one point, the huge amount of time it took our technicians to set the things up on each install eventually killed that)
And this is why I still cling to my IntelliMouse (microsoft ergonomic mouse) (and no, I don't like microsoft, and don't use any of their software, but their hardware seems decent)
It's got a cord and a ball, it never needs new batteries, works on every surface I've ever tried it on, and has never caused me any issues. need to clean the ball and rollers every so often (probably as often as most people replace a mouse) but otherwise no issues.
Of course it also requires a PS/2 port on the computer, so I have a feeling it's days are numbered when I buy a new computer. I'll miss it.
All I can do is laugh... I agree proper grounding is important, as is surge protection. I also know for a fact that you are completely out to lunch with your paranoia.
Except that it is impossible to buy car insurance on a car you don't have because you can't give them the make, model, and VIN number which are required for the policy.
Marketers are jerks, the fact that they are calling and trying to sell car insurance vs carpet cleaning doesn't change that, but it also doesn't change the fact that this person CAN NOT buy car insurance for the car they don't have. this is also very different from the original post about a TV license because one is a government organization which can force you to pay for the license despite not having a TV, and the other is a private company being too aggressive in it's marketing, and who wouldn't even sell you the insurance anyway if you tried to buy it to make them go away.
All works are automatically copyright by their creator, so yes, they were under copyright.
I couldnt' even find a way to calibrate the N810, it simply NEVER needed it, it didn't ask you to do it on first boot, never. so it's obvious that this was quite possible before capacitive screens.
I'm not talking "infrequent" I'm talking NEVER. It's not the only device I've used like that either, touchscreens have been around for a very long time, and calibrating them has not been needed (or even possible) on most high end devices for almost as long.
This doesn't need copyright rules to fix, and in fact it doesn't look like they've been charged with any copyright infringement, so doesn't look like copyright helped at all here.
Get them under breach of trust or contract issues, get them under various hacking laws. When you have a dozen different laws you can apply to each situation, that says that you have a dozen less one too many laws that apply to that situation.
I guess they wanted to go easy on him. The correct charge would be copyright infringement, but the punishment for that these days is so severe that you're better off charged with theft...
This is not theft. nothing was stolen from anyone.
It is copyright infringement, (which courts have decided is one of the most heinous crimes possible with punishments far harsher than simple theft)
It may also fall under various hacking laws
It probably also falls under "mischief" which is always a good catch-all
Likely it also falls under various clauses of their employment contract, so they can say goodbye to their jobs too.
Of course I still don't know who thinks they can take naked pictures of themselves and never expect them to get to anyone they didn't intend...
It's hard to be certain what led to looking at the pictures themselves. most likely they shouldn't have been looking, but sometimes things are just set up in such a way that you aren't sure if the folder you're looking at is pictures the customer wants, or images built in to some app that will be re-loaded anyway. The bigger issue is what happened next. Keeping those pictures is obviously wrong, showing them to other customers... well that's just plain stupid.
Moderately related story... I once worked as a network admin for a small company (about a dozen people in 3 different offices). Part of my job was maintaining backups of everyone's data. I told everyone that if it was stored on the server it would be backed up, but if they kept it on their PC they were out of luck. Unfortunately though I also knew that the CEO didn't follow those sorts of rules, thinking it was beneath him, and I also knew that if his PC crashed and it wasn't backed up, I'd be in trouble regardless of what I had made clear to everyone. I decided the best course of action was to bite the bullet and figure out what stuff on his machine needed to be backed up too. While doing so I unwittingly came across some pictures and videos of his wife... let's just say they didn't involve clothing, but did involve whipped cream and cherries... once I figured out what I had stumbled across I stopped looking, and I certainly didn't copy them for myself, or show them to anyone else. The worst part though was that his wife was also my boss... must say it was very difficult to take her seriously after that!
This has absolutely nothing to do with resistive vs capacitive screens. My old Nokia N810 had a resistive screen and it never needed calibrating. Not when brand new, not 3 years later, not after sitting in a box for a year, never. I've certainly seen devices that insist on being calibrated all the time, and I don't know what the reason is, but I can tell you from experience that it isn't the resistive/capacitive thing.
Ok, I get that it's not as bad as many machines... but I'm failing to see the advantage over having just the ballot and a pen? Why add the complexity of the machine at all if it is truly as you say. (or is this just an excuse to funnel money to somebody's friend to make/maintain the machines?)
Of course I'm coming from a country where we use pencil and paper counted by humans (supervised by representatives of each candidate) and results are known 2 hours after the polls close...
My point is not about the VMs, I personally agree that there is no need to have many of those services on their own VM. However the original argument was multiple physical machines vs multiple virtual ones, My point was in getting them all on to one box more than it was about using VMs vs multiple services on one box. With them all on one physical box, whether virtualized or not, it makes it easier to have a second physical machine which is a backup of the first, rather than multiple individual primaries with multiple individual backups. more reliable too.
I didn't get in to the VM vs multiple services argument for the simple reason that without further information about the particular setup and exactly which auxiliary services they run, along with who is responsible for what, and the bureaucracy behind it all it's impossible to know what can be consolidated and what can not for this particular example.
GPS antennas don't tend to stick up any further than any of a number of other protrusions on the roof of a normal building. If your building doesn't normally get hit by lighting, then the GPS antenna will not change that in any way.
That said, proper grounding is always important and I would never argue against doing so.
The alternative is a whole bunch of individual points of failure of individual services. No better really as any one of those boxes going offline is likely critical.
Either way you need a backup of your services. In your scenario you need a dozen primary boxes, and a dozen backups. In mine you need one primary machine and one backup, much simpler to administer, and at least as reliable if not more so. You could even have a tertiary backup and still have fewer physical machines to worry about than just your primaries.
While I agree that the proper solution for a rack is rack mount equipment, the fact that something is not rack-mount is not an excuse for it to be a rat's nest of cables. I have installed non-rack mount equipment, there's no reason the cords can't be just as neat and tidy as the rack-mount stuff if you do it right. That said, the better answer is to smack whoever decided to go with non-rack mounted equipment in the first place...
Redundancy doesn't mean having different services on separate boxes, it means having the same services in multiple places. In fact it's easier with one VM box hosting everything, because it's easier to keep it backed up and sync'd to a spare then it is to do a whole bunch of individual ones.
If you care enough to use a GPS receiver instead of a network time source, you should also care enough to get the antenna on to the roof... We have many such time sources controlling timing in the basements of buildings, but the antenna always ends up on the mast.