As I recall, the problem with the Corvair was ultimately traced to improper tire inflations. Unfortunately, that didn't come out until well after all the hoorah and circus-mania about how "unsafe" they were.
The Pinto was the one with the gas tank issue, right? Guess no one noticed that for decades, the gas tank in pickup trucks was right behind the seat, and caused no more problems there than having it anywhere else.
As to media hype, I'm reminded of the TV news following an airliner crash a few years back. Most news reports noted that "The DC-whatever has a long history of safety, with only N-few-crashes in NN-many-lots-of-years of service." The local tabloid station phrased it rather differently: "The DC-whatever has a HISTORY OF CRASHES!"
I had a gate with an aluminum frame. Where it was close to (not touching) a damp spot on the adjacent fence, it corroded through in about two years. (As in big hole, not just little cracks.)
I have an older trailer with an aluminum skin. Despite being anodized and painted, and spending most of its life in the very dry desert, the skin eventually became porous, to the point that it seeps when it gets rained on. I've been told this is a typical issue with aluminum house siding too, after a couple decades of weathering.
Anyway, you can see why I don't buy the common notion that aluminum is forever!!
More to the point, Betamax said Thou Shalt Not License Our Tape Format For Porn, so the Porn industry said Fuck You and went with VHS. And whatever tech the porn industry picks, the whole world eventually follows.
That would probably be easy to make, too... just collect human waste from anywhere (grey water from public laundries would be a great source) and process it down to a suitable form.
I had a related thought: Okay, so let's say a nifty new law is passed that forces the cops to discard your DNA *sample* after NN-long has passed.
This does nothing to limit *propagation* of your extremely portable DNA profile, which is nothing but a list of markers that looks like this:
AA BB CC CE DJ etc.
Even if the cops purge their database as well as their sample cabinet, are you so sure that in the meantime, your profile (with all your associated personal info) hasn't migrated somewhere else?
Think of your DNA profile as a credit card that cannot be cancelled in the event of loss or misuse, and guard it accordingly.
Not Exactly again. DNA profiles are *NOT* of your full genetic makeup, but rather of only a very small sample thereof. Frex, the standard DNA-ID profile for dogs presently only looks at 20 pairs of markers (recently upped from the previous standard of 13 pairs of markers). If you have a closely-related population (not unlikely in a village-bound culture), it's quite possible to have duplicates within the limited number of markers that make up the standard profile.
That's one of the problems with taking DNA samples for "might and maybe" reasons. It establishes a precedent that fishing expeditions are perfectly acceptable.
Oh, I believe you... I'm reminded of a "HD crash" a friend suffered. Long story short, I wound up doing file reconstruction, and from the pieces (almost always some multiple of 4k) of files stuck inside other files, concluded that there was probably nothing wrong with the HD, but rather, the RAID controller was writing intact data but to random locations -- like it had got its "which HD this data belongs on" count off by one. And there was evidence that the corruption started long before anyone noticed the problem.
Occurs to me that RAID may not be the only HD controller system that can misfire this way. Who knows what specific actions might tickle a chipset bug, such as someone else mentioned up above?
Yet another reason to never ever toss old backups, because the backup made since just MIGHT contain errors!
Intersting... don't know how plausible it is, but still interesting.
And how about another theory, which I've just this instant pulled out of my ass: the northern coast of Russia is navigable during high summer. What's to say the occasional Norseman didn't sail that way, clear across to Alaska??
Also, don't forget that the Vikings were no strangers to portages. A little detail like a few miles of ice wouldn't have stopped them.
Who needs an ad agency? Yonder is P2P -- let your POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS advertise for you, at their own expense. Make sure there's a purchase-point URL in each ID3 tag, and a detailed info file with each torrent. Collect 100% of the profits.
"Funding police isn't like that. Funding police generally doesn't increase crime, unless you've got corrupt cops.
Three words: "War On Drugs".
Probably nothing else is as responsible for the high crime rate in target areas. So... funding police for a losing battle very much akin to the **AA's efforts does indeed increase crime.
My first thought was "local gravitational shift" but that wouldn't explain why units brought in from elsewhere are heavier; they should become lighter as they approach the anomaly.
[backs up, thinks up different crackpot theorum]
Okay, how about this one: maybe something in the local gravitational field is changing the way the root unit behaves with respect to gravity; IOW, it's become "less attractive" so masses less.
So they need a newly-minted unit to sit right next to the old one, and a long time to observe whether it changes in the same ways. In fact a line of 'em stretching across the continent would be useful to examine the scope of the shift.
Of course, it could just be aliens stealing atoms, one at a time, from places where they didn't think a few atoms would be missed.
That's what I thought too, from the summary -- Oh boy, now I can run my WinApps on linux without needing to muck about with Wine, VMs, etc..... aw phooey, just an installer:(
But yeah, what is the average Windows user going to think, when his antivirus pipes up with "debian.exe is a destructive program" -- which most AV apps will (rightfully) say of ANY program that messes with the boot sector.
Well, I guess it's one way to teach people not to click on random download links..!!:)
But as to what it really is... yeah, I can see the usefulness. I've run into almost-modern systems that cannot boot from CDROM, and if you plan to install debian on the machine that you're downloading it to anyway, why do the interim steps of burning the ISO to disk if you don't need to?
Okay, how does this work? I gather it acts as a pass-through to a VM or Wine or whatever, but from the user's perspective, what do I have to do? does this come preinstalled with any linux distros?
Place and time: somewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The phone rings at KGB headquarters.
"Hello?"
"My neighbor Ivan Asimov is an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his woodshed."
"This will be noted."
The next day, the KGB goons go over to Asimov's house. They search the shed where the firewood is
kept, break every piece of wood, find no diamonds, swear at Asimov, and leave.
The phone rings at Asimov's house.
"Hello, Ivan! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes."
"Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."
But it's not really redunancy. Think of normal words as uncompressed data, and "redundancy removed words" as *compressed data*. It's more work to "unzip" the word, then read it, than it would have been to just read the uncompressed word in the first place.
I am normally a fairly fast reader (my comfortable speed for fiction is about 800wpm, tho I can read non-fiction much faster). On the deliberately jumbled posts up above, I'd guess my reading speed was down around 200wpm for the average-jumbles, and somewhat less for the creatively-jumbled. Furthermore, I quickly noticed that reading the creative-jumbles takes more effort (considerably more than for the average-jumbles), and I lost patience with it and stopped trying before I got to the end of those posts.
'As for children "basically guessing at what words mean" that's been the case for as long as children have been learning to read.'
Er, well, not for those taught phonics. To us, ALL words consist of recognisable parts, and we almost never have to make a wild guess at the meaning; rather, we can judge probable meaning by those parts we CAN decipher. Which means we're never entirely lost, even in a sea of unfamilar words.
In my observation, "whole word recognition" (or "see first three letters, make WAG at rest of word") is how many dyslexics read (actually, ALL those I know personally and have watched reading do WWR of some sort). WWR simply teaches everyone to read at the minimal level achieved by untutored dyslexics. IOW, it makes everyone equally crippled!
When I RTFA, my first thought was -- Oh, that explains "letters crawl around" dyslexics; their brain doesn't re-integrate the letter groups properly.
I'm also reminded of a friend who has been in the dyslexia research program at the university in San Diego for over 25 years... where they found that an instant cure could be achieved by reading glasses which cause "lag" for one eye, causing the letters to be processed in the correct order.
So... TFA isn't so much news as confirmation of what we already knew.
An AC quips, "OK, so no truck would be seen, but your headlights aren't puke green, are they?"
Not unless I've recently run thru a plague of locusts.... but what would YOU think if two headlights came floating down the street toward you, apparently without any vehicle attached?:)
Guess they won't be watching The Seventh Seal either, will they... Do they read the balloons in comics?:)
(I haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth, not being much of a moviegoer at all... but thanks to all for the reviews/comments.... now I think I ought to see it.:)
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall, the problem with the Corvair was ultimately traced to improper tire inflations. Unfortunately, that didn't come out until well after all the hoorah and circus-mania about how "unsafe" they were.
The Pinto was the one with the gas tank issue, right? Guess no one noticed that for decades, the gas tank in pickup trucks was right behind the seat, and caused no more problems there than having it anywhere else.
As to media hype, I'm reminded of the TV news following an airliner crash a few years back. Most news reports noted that "The DC-whatever has a long history of safety, with only N-few-crashes in NN-many-lots-of-years of service." The local tabloid station phrased it rather differently: "The DC-whatever has a HISTORY OF CRASHES!"
A couple of anecdotes about aluminum:
I had a gate with an aluminum frame. Where it was close to (not touching) a damp spot on the adjacent fence, it corroded through in about two years. (As in big hole, not just little cracks.)
I have an older trailer with an aluminum skin. Despite being anodized and painted, and spending most of its life in the very dry desert, the skin eventually became porous, to the point that it seeps when it gets rained on. I've been told this is a typical issue with aluminum house siding too, after a couple decades of weathering.
Anyway, you can see why I don't buy the common notion that aluminum is forever!!
More to the point, Betamax said Thou Shalt Not License Our Tape Format For Porn, so the Porn industry said Fuck You and went with VHS. And whatever tech the porn industry picks, the whole world eventually follows.
That would probably be easy to make, too... just collect human waste from anywhere (grey water from public laundries would be a great source) and process it down to a suitable form.
I foresee yet another banned technology.....
I had a related thought: Okay, so let's say a nifty new law is passed that forces the cops to discard your DNA *sample* after NN-long has passed.
This does nothing to limit *propagation* of your extremely portable DNA profile, which is nothing but a list of markers that looks like this:
AA BB CC CE DJ etc.
Even if the cops purge their database as well as their sample cabinet, are you so sure that in the meantime, your profile (with all your associated personal info) hasn't migrated somewhere else?
Think of your DNA profile as a credit card that cannot be cancelled in the event of loss or misuse, and guard it accordingly.
Not Exactly again. DNA profiles are *NOT* of your full genetic makeup, but rather of only a very small sample thereof. Frex, the standard DNA-ID profile for dogs presently only looks at 20 pairs of markers (recently upped from the previous standard of 13 pairs of markers). If you have a closely-related population (not unlikely in a village-bound culture), it's quite possible to have duplicates within the limited number of markers that make up the standard profile.
That's one of the problems with taking DNA samples for "might and maybe" reasons. It establishes a precedent that fishing expeditions are perfectly acceptable.
Oh, I believe you... I'm reminded of a "HD crash" a friend suffered. Long story short, I wound up doing file reconstruction, and from the pieces (almost always some multiple of 4k) of files stuck inside other files, concluded that there was probably nothing wrong with the HD, but rather, the RAID controller was writing intact data but to random locations -- like it had got its "which HD this data belongs on" count off by one. And there was evidence that the corruption started long before anyone noticed the problem.
Occurs to me that RAID may not be the only HD controller system that can misfire this way. Who knows what specific actions might tickle a chipset bug, such as someone else mentioned up above?
Yet another reason to never ever toss old backups, because the backup made since just MIGHT contain errors!
Intersting... don't know how plausible it is, but still interesting.
And how about another theory, which I've just this instant pulled out of my ass: the northern coast of Russia is navigable during high summer. What's to say the occasional Norseman didn't sail that way, clear across to Alaska??
Also, don't forget that the Vikings were no strangers to portages. A little detail like a few miles of ice wouldn't have stopped them.
Who needs an ad agency? Yonder is P2P -- let your POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS advertise for you, at their own expense. Make sure there's a purchase-point URL in each ID3 tag, and a detailed info file with each torrent. Collect 100% of the profits.
"Funding police isn't like that. Funding police generally doesn't increase crime, unless you've got corrupt cops.
Three words: "War On Drugs".
Probably nothing else is as responsible for the high crime rate in target areas. So... funding police for a losing battle very much akin to the **AA's efforts does indeed increase crime.
My first thought was "local gravitational shift" but that wouldn't explain why units brought in from elsewhere are heavier; they should become lighter as they approach the anomaly.
[backs up, thinks up different crackpot theorum]
Okay, how about this one: maybe something in the local gravitational field is changing the way the root unit behaves with respect to gravity; IOW, it's become "less attractive" so masses less.
So they need a newly-minted unit to sit right next to the old one, and a long time to observe whether it changes in the same ways. In fact a line of 'em stretching across the continent would be useful to examine the scope of the shift.
Of course, it could just be aliens stealing atoms, one at a time, from places where they didn't think a few atoms would be missed.
That's what I thought too, from the summary -- Oh boy, now I can run my WinApps on linux without needing to muck about with Wine, VMs, etc. .... aw phooey, just an installer :(
:)
But yeah, what is the average Windows user going to think, when his antivirus pipes up with "debian.exe is a destructive program" -- which most AV apps will (rightfully) say of ANY program that messes with the boot sector.
Well, I guess it's one way to teach people not to click on random download links..!!
But as to what it really is... yeah, I can see the usefulness. I've run into almost-modern systems that cannot boot from CDROM, and if you plan to install debian on the machine that you're downloading it to anyway, why do the interim steps of burning the ISO to disk if you don't need to?
[reads linked article, becomes confused, rereads article, stays confused]
:)
Okay, how does this work? I gather it acts as a pass-through to a VM or Wine or whatever, but from the user's perspective, what do I have to do? does this come preinstalled with any linux distros?
Use smaller words than Wikipedia did, please
Place and time: somewhere in the Soviet Union in the 1930s. The phone rings at KGB headquarters.
"Hello?"
"My neighbor Ivan Asimov is an enemy of the State. He is hiding undeclared diamonds in his woodshed."
"This will be noted."
The next day, the KGB goons go over to Asimov's house. They search the shed where the firewood is
kept, break every piece of wood, find no diamonds, swear at Asimov, and leave.
The phone rings at Asimov's house.
"Hello, Ivan! Did the KGB come?"
"Yes."
"Did they chop your firewood?"
"Yes, they did."
"Okay, now it's your turn to call. I need my vegetable patch plowed."
I'd guess the phone-home component is still fully functional. That's "reduced functionality" if ever I heard it.
(som)-e+(th)+(ng) l+(ike) (thi)+s. ;)
But it's not really redunancy. Think of normal words as uncompressed data, and "redundancy removed words" as *compressed data*. It's more work to "unzip" the word, then read it, than it would have been to just read the uncompressed word in the first place.
I am normally a fairly fast reader (my comfortable speed for fiction is about 800wpm, tho I can read non-fiction much faster). On the deliberately jumbled posts up above, I'd guess my reading speed was down around 200wpm for the average-jumbles, and somewhat less for the creatively-jumbled. Furthermore, I quickly noticed that reading the creative-jumbles takes more effort (considerably more than for the average-jumbles), and I lost patience with it and stopped trying before I got to the end of those posts.
'As for children "basically guessing at what words mean" that's been the case for as long as children
have been learning to read.'
Er, well, not for those taught phonics. To us, ALL words consist of recognisable parts, and we almost never have to make a wild guess at the meaning; rather, we can judge probable meaning by those parts we CAN decipher. Which means we're never entirely lost, even in a sea of unfamilar words.
In my observation, "whole word recognition" (or "see first three letters, make WAG at rest of word") is how many dyslexics read (actually, ALL those I know personally and have watched reading do WWR of some sort). WWR simply teaches everyone to read at the minimal level achieved by untutored dyslexics. IOW, it makes everyone equally crippled!
When I RTFA, my first thought was -- Oh, that explains "letters crawl around" dyslexics; their brain doesn't re-integrate the letter groups properly.
I'm also reminded of a friend who has been in the dyslexia research program at the university in San Diego for over 25 years... where they found that an instant cure could be achieved by reading glasses which cause "lag" for one eye, causing the letters to be processed in the correct order.
So... TFA isn't so much news as confirmation of what we already knew.
Actually, most places if someone's dog craps on your lawn, the dog's owner is guilty of littering.
Preferably vehicles belonging to the NZ equivalent of the highway patrol. ;)
Or better yet, a boat. See what they make of THAT tracking data!!
An AC quips, "OK, so no truck would be seen, but your headlights aren't puke green, are they?"
:)
Not unless I've recently run thru a plague of locusts.... but what would YOU think if two headlights came floating down the street toward you, apparently without any vehicle attached?
Guess they won't be watching The Seventh Seal either, will they... Do they read the balloons in comics? :)
.... now I think I ought to see it. :)
(I haven't seen Pan's Labyrinth, not being much of a moviegoer at all... but thanks to all for the reviews/comments