Bias can sneak in because of changes in terminology, presumably in both directions, although I've noticed it more on the right these days. As Robert Anton Wilson famously observed, you can go from liberal to conservative without changing a single idea if you wait long enough -- the reverse is also true, depending on the domain in which you have your ideas.
For instance, an article about taxation written in the 1990s might be considered neutral in its time, and talk about the "inheritance tax" a lot. Fast forward ten years, during which the term "death tax" has come into prominence, and the old term "inheritance tax" is only used by fogies and liberals. The textual analysis of the unchanged article will now score it as "liberal", because the terms of the debate have shifted.
This can happen with policies, too -- I remember when a carbon tax was considered a compromise position between liberals, who wanted to directly regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and conservatives, who felt that some kind of market mechanism would provide useful flexibility. Carbon taxes were a technocratic, ideologically neutral solution when they were proposed, but now they're seen as liberal social engineering.
It doesn't always go rightward, of course, some debates have been successfully re-framed by the left, as well, I think -- "global warming" used to be a neutral descriptive term, but the warming isn't uniform, so "climate change" is the preferred term, and I think it's mostly conservatives who use the term "global warming".
That ought to blow up my karma for a solid year...
This is slightly off the mark, and worth an OT reply, I think. (I am motivated in part by also having a Canadian background; I am now a naturalized US citizen.)
The electoral college is made up of "electors", with one elector being in the college for each congressman and senator, plus three additional electors for the District of Columbia (represent!). The electors are nominally free to vote for any eligible presidential candidate, but in practice vote for the candidate who wins a majority of the votes in their state, and have done so in every modern election.
The reason a president can win the electoral college without winning the popular vote is that the electors in the electoral college are not apportioned according to population. Each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, and various states' congressional districts are different sizes in practice. This means that low-population states are over-represented in the college relative to their proportion of the population, so it's possible to put together a majority of electoral college votes corresponding to a minority of US voters.
The possibility that a member of the electoral college might vote for a different candidate than the popular vote in their state has a name, it's called the "faithless elector". This does happen, but has never changed the outcome of a US election.
Where I work, we call this "the much-faster 'wrong' algorithm". It's frequently a side-effect of overly-enthusiastic attempts at optimization, sometimes by people, and sometimes by compilers.
All will be forgiven if this standard is better than the current scheme. The *only* thing that's consistent about it is the width.
The current scheme has a lot of problems with rail-kits fitting into some racks and not others, because they're too deep, or not deep enough, or because one rack has small threaded holes on the inside of the posts, and another has the big square ones. In my set-up, we only have five racks, and already we're running into problems placing equipment because of differences in the mounting geometry.
Actually, I don't even really need standard mounts, I'd settle for consistent nomenclature -- then at least I could buy adapters, and finally be able to put any piece of equipment in any rack.
In the US at least, wireless services are also exempt from the neutrality requirements that the telcos negotiated with content providers.
So, switching to wireless-only for your home internet may, depending on your provider, mean opening yourself up to all that non-neutral stuff -- deep-packet inspections, throttled torrenting, blocked or throttled access to non-ISP-provided streaming video, and so forth. As far as I know, none of the LTE carriers are doing any of this now, but Verizon fought pretty hard for the exemption, they must have had a reason.
If you search for "net neutrality wireless exemption", you'll get lots of good hits, like this one.
> Given the amount that I've personally spent on legal immigration, this pisses me off a little bit.
You must have a nice, even temper. I'm also a legal immigrant to the US, and this stuff pisses me off a lot.
I was an academic H1-B for a while, and got a pretty good view of the hoops that my host university had to go through to do it, so I understand about the hassle and expense referred to in the article. The consensus where I did this was that the regulatory burden was mostly due to the corporate history of cheating, and they resented it a fair amount, but they were also pretty much terrified of screwing it up, even accidentally, because this might jeopardize their numerous federal grants. They were very, very careful to comply with all the regs.
If we could find a way to put that kind of fear into the corporate types, this problem would go away.
You're assuming that the fault lies entirely with the "stupid" consumer if they don't get what they want, even in the face of deliberate attempts to deceive them.
I think this neglects a rather obvious imbalance of power between a fraudulent seller, who (presumably) stands to gain a lot from the (again, presumably) numerous known fraudulent transactions he will make, versus the consumer, for whom this is only one transaction out of many of different types, and who faces the task of proving a negative in order to ensure that he is not being swindled (and gets called "stupid" on web forums if he fails).
In this particular case, it seems very clear to me that requiring vendors to be held accountable to a third party for the basic honesty of their claims is both reasonable and economically efficient -- if customers have confidence that they can believe reasonable claims in advertisements, the time costs of product selection and consumption are greatly reduced, and customers and vendors both benefit from the correspondingly greater rate of transactions. In principle, there is no particular reason why the third party in question has to be the government, it could be a private reporting bureau of some kind. There are advantages to having a government role, they have better access to commercial data, and a pre-existing enforcement mechanism, and it's not obviously a crime against liberty for them to play this role. When benefits of actions are societal, as is often the case for confidence-increasing measures, it seems reasonable for society to act through governmental mechanisms to secure these benefits.
Or so it seems to me, anyways. We don't have to make laws to protect people from their own stupidity, but at least in the case of truth-in-advertising, it's economically beneficial and compassionate to do so.
Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.
The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen. In practice, I connect via SSH with the X session forwarded, and run the graphical app that way.
The loss of network transparency makes remote access much more complicated. It's not lethal, there are things you can do with remote desktop viewers that work, but you end up hacking together a rickety, insecure new solution to what used to be a solved problem -- it really doesn't feel like progress.
So, at what point does it become a problem for you?
Suppose the site your reach described Toyota trucks in loving detail, but called them Fords throughout? Suppose the vendor in question puts "Ford" logos on the trucks coming out of the Toyota factories. Suppose the consumer actually buys one of these, thinking it's a Ford. Is all of this OK? After all, the consumer evaluated the specifications, presumably found them satisfactory, and made the purchase of his own free will. Does that make the deception immaterial?
Maybe I'm too old-school, but when I think "systems language", I think about something that would be good for embedded devices or kernel device drivers, stuff that's pretty close to the metal. I wouldn't use Go for that, garbage-collection and concurrency mean there's heap traffic and IPC signaling under the hood that I probably want to control.
I agree with the "C but better" characterization, but the ways in which it's better disqualify it from being a good systems tool, I think.
This reading requires a willful repudiation of the intent of the founders -- both Jefferson and Madison were clear in their many writings about the roles of the respective institutions, and the very phrase "separation of church and state" (along with "wall of separation", also often heard in this context) come from their writings.
Also, there is an eighteenth-century usage of the word "establish" which means what we might now call "mainstreaming" or "favoring", and not just creating or founding something.
I think it would be obviously unconstitutional, for example, if the US government were to use tax revenue to pay the salaries of the clergy in some church or other. The British government did this in the American colonies, the founders were quite familiar with it as a possible function of government, and quite deliberately excluded it.
The Sheffield that's pronounced "sheffield" is actually in Yorkshire, pronounced "yorkshire", which is where this research took place.
The Sheffield you're thinking of is the one that's pronounced "glasgow", and even there, you're more likely to run into Scots (a dialect of English, ye ken) than Scottish Gaelic, which is more of a highland thing.
I RT first part of the FA (no, not actually new here...), and an important point is that the paper is talking about *orbital* angular momentum of the light beam. The circular polarization states correspond to *spin* angular momentum of the photons, orbital angular momentum is a different thing with its own phase space.
Infinite channels still seems unlikely, it has to be true that detectors for orbitally-tuned light beams won't be perfect, and will detect "nearby" orbitally-tuned beams as well, and it's likely that some parts of the space of orbital angular momentum will be more difficult to generate than others, so I remain skeptical of the claim.
But, the mechanism is not a trivial one. I note with some surprise that TFS actually correctly notes that it's orbital angular momentum they're talking about.
> When, exactly, was Microsoft good, interesting, or cool?
In the mid- to late 1980s.
In those days, IBM a monopolistic corporate behemoth that suppressed innovation to protect their market, and we all suspected that their long term strategy in the PC marketplace was "embrace and extinguish", in favor of the more lucrative mainframe trade that restricted computation to people who could pay a lot.
Microsoft, on the other hand, had a reasonably well-documented OS with lots of hooks to hang extensions on, and decent development tools that weren't too expensive. MS-DOS opened up the machine and gave you convenient access to it at many levels, you really felt like you could do anything with it.
> Tractor feed printer. Still the best way to handle logging of system errors for systems that you really really need to know what's happening on:)
OT, I suppose, but I have to disagree with part of this. Not the principle, console logging on a separate device is enormously valuable, but the console log recorder should not be a printer.
What you really want is to record the unbuffered serial console output to a file on a separate device. You can use a small but durable secondary computer with a serial port (or USB/serial adapter) running "minicom" in recording mode, or you can buy expensive enterprise gear for this -- we used to have "Cyclades" embedded terminal servers for this, but I don't think they make those anymore.
The reason you want this is that the console output can be quite voluminous -- either because it's done routine operations for a long time, or because it's being DDOS-ed. It's important for the console log to be searchable, and it's nice if it's fast enough to keep up when the server is having a panic attack and dumping kernel-oops stack-traces several times per second.
The major advantage of the printer is that the output is "tamper-evident", and there's a single authoritative master copy -- this is valuable for forensics, but, at least for me, doesn't beat speed and searchability.
The blood-flow argument was also why my doctor told me that antibiotics wouldn't cure my formerly-chronic sinus infections, although they can help to keep it from spreading through your body.
What I started doing, at my doctor's suggestion, was regular sinus irrigation with a simple buffered saline solution. This isn't the hippy-dippy neti-pot thing, it's an 8-oz squeeze bottle that you use to force a stream of the solution in one nostril and out the other. It's a bit messy, but I found that by incorporating this into my daily hygiene ritual, my formerly-seasonal, formerly-debilitating sinusitis is much milder, and sometimes skips a season entirely.
Part of what I like about this approach is that it's completely clear how it works, it's just lavage. No mystery drugs with side-effects, *and* no new-agey holistic malarky either.
For those audience members who respect scriptural authority, but aren't exactly sure what's in there, I feel duty-bound to point out that the Gospel of Thomas, quoted by the parent, is non-canonical. Useful link here.
Whether this fact changes your opinion of its authority is, of course, your call.
For something branded as "honesty", it's a little incomplete. In fact, it's probably more fair to say that the GNU tools (bash, gcc, etc.) are work-alikes of older technology. Linux, which as we all know is primarily a kernel, has evolved a great deal over the years, and has support for functionality (like journaling filesystems, for instance) that just plain didn't exist in System V or Berkeley. And, in fact, the kernel is even famous/infamous for its unstable ABI, tuning parameters, and changes in its scheduler. There's the hierarchical file system, of course, and the file-based device access scheme in/dev, but on the whole, I think it's fair to say that the Linux kernel is not, in fact, a work-alike of other OSs.
Note that he turned to port in order to get to shallower water, probably with the idea of beaching the thing, as an alternative to having it go all the way under. This was a reasonable idea, but it's unclear (to me, from fragmentary media reports) if this actually saved any lives or property. The winners of this bet were people who had an extra margin of time to evacuate because the ship didn't go completely under the water. The losers of this bet were people who got trapped on the starboard side because of the listing, and then drowned when the water rose around them. It will probably be some time before we know the ratio of winners to losers.
Slashdot Mirror
Bias can sneak in because of changes in terminology, presumably in both directions, although I've noticed it more on the right these days. As Robert Anton Wilson famously observed, you can go from liberal to conservative without changing a single idea if you wait long enough -- the reverse is also true, depending on the domain in which you have your ideas.
For instance, an article about taxation written in the 1990s might be considered neutral in its time, and talk about the "inheritance tax" a lot. Fast forward ten years, during which the term "death tax" has come into prominence, and the old term "inheritance tax" is only used by fogies and liberals. The textual analysis of the unchanged article will now score it as "liberal", because the terms of the debate have shifted.
This can happen with policies, too -- I remember when a carbon tax was considered a compromise position between liberals, who wanted to directly regulate carbon dioxide emissions, and conservatives, who felt that some kind of market mechanism would provide useful flexibility. Carbon taxes were a technocratic, ideologically neutral solution when they were proposed, but now they're seen as liberal social engineering.
It doesn't always go rightward, of course, some debates have been successfully re-framed by the left, as well, I think -- "global warming" used to be a neutral descriptive term, but the warming isn't uniform, so "climate change" is the preferred term, and I think it's mostly conservatives who use the term "global warming".
That ought to blow up my karma for a solid year...
This is slightly off the mark, and worth an OT reply, I think. (I am motivated in part by also having a Canadian background; I am now a naturalized US citizen.)
The electoral college is made up of "electors", with one elector being in the college for each congressman and senator, plus three additional electors for the District of Columbia (represent!). The electors are nominally free to vote for any eligible presidential candidate, but in practice vote for the candidate who wins a majority of the votes in their state, and have done so in every modern election.
The reason a president can win the electoral college without winning the popular vote is that the electors in the electoral college are not apportioned according to population. Each state gets two senators, irrespective of population, and various states' congressional districts are different sizes in practice. This means that low-population states are over-represented in the college relative to their proportion of the population, so it's possible to put together a majority of electoral college votes corresponding to a minority of US voters.
The possibility that a member of the electoral college might vote for a different candidate than the popular vote in their state has a name, it's called the "faithless elector". This does happen, but has never changed the outcome of a US election.
Where I work, we call this "the much-faster 'wrong' algorithm". It's frequently a side-effect of overly-enthusiastic attempts at optimization, sometimes by people, and sometimes by compilers.
All will be forgiven if this standard is better than the current scheme. The *only* thing that's consistent about it is the width.
The current scheme has a lot of problems with rail-kits fitting into some racks and not others, because they're too deep, or not deep enough, or because one rack has small threaded holes on the inside of the posts, and another has the big square ones. In my set-up, we only have five racks, and already we're running into problems placing equipment because of differences in the mounting geometry.
Actually, I don't even really need standard mounts, I'd settle for consistent nomenclature -- then at least I could buy adapters, and finally be able to put any piece of equipment in any rack.
In the US at least, wireless services are also exempt from the neutrality requirements that the telcos negotiated with content providers.
So, switching to wireless-only for your home internet may, depending on your provider, mean opening yourself up to all that non-neutral stuff -- deep-packet inspections, throttled torrenting, blocked or throttled access to non-ISP-provided streaming video, and so forth. As far as I know, none of the LTE carriers are doing any of this now, but Verizon fought pretty hard for the exemption, they must have had a reason.
If you search for "net neutrality wireless exemption", you'll get lots of good hits, like this one.
> Given the amount that I've personally spent on legal immigration, this pisses me off a little bit.
You must have a nice, even temper. I'm also a legal immigrant to the US, and this stuff pisses me off a lot.
I was an academic H1-B for a while, and got a pretty good view of the hoops that my host university had to go through to do it, so I understand about the hassle and expense referred to in the article. The consensus where I did this was that the regulatory burden was mostly due to the corporate history of cheating, and they resented it a fair amount, but they were also pretty much terrified of screwing it up, even accidentally, because this might jeopardize their numerous federal grants. They were very, very careful to comply with all the regs.
If we could find a way to put that kind of fear into the corporate types, this problem would go away.
Missiles can be magic. But a magic rocket is just stupid.
You're assuming that the fault lies entirely with the "stupid" consumer if they don't get what they want, even in the face of deliberate attempts to deceive them.
I think this neglects a rather obvious imbalance of power between a fraudulent seller, who (presumably) stands to gain a lot from the (again, presumably) numerous known fraudulent transactions he will make, versus the consumer, for whom this is only one transaction out of many of different types, and who faces the task of proving a negative in order to ensure that he is not being swindled (and gets called "stupid" on web forums if he fails).
In this particular case, it seems very clear to me that requiring vendors to be held accountable to a third party for the basic honesty of their claims is both reasonable and economically efficient -- if customers have confidence that they can believe reasonable claims in advertisements, the time costs of product selection and consumption are greatly reduced, and customers and vendors both benefit from the correspondingly greater rate of transactions. In principle, there is no particular reason why the third party in question has to be the government, it could be a private reporting bureau of some kind. There are advantages to having a government role, they have better access to commercial data, and a pre-existing enforcement mechanism, and it's not obviously a crime against liberty for them to play this role. When benefits of actions are societal, as is often the case for confidence-increasing measures, it seems reasonable for society to act through governmental mechanisms to secure these benefits.
Or so it seems to me, anyways. We don't have to make laws to protect people from their own stupidity, but at least in the case of truth-in-advertising, it's economically beneficial and compassionate to do so.
This.
Network transparency is huge -- I often need to run graphical installers for commercial software, or run graphical diagnostic software, on systems that live in my machine room, and have fairly basic video cards, and in any case don't routinely have graphical displays attached.
The really-right answer to this, of course, is to separate the display from the the installer and/or diagnostic executable, and connect over a network socket or something, but in practice this doesn't happen. In practice, I connect via SSH with the X session forwarded, and run the graphical app that way.
The loss of network transparency makes remote access much more complicated. It's not lethal, there are things you can do with remote desktop viewers that work, but you end up hacking together a rickety, insecure new solution to what used to be a solved problem -- it really doesn't feel like progress.
So, at what point does it become a problem for you?
Suppose the site your reach described Toyota trucks in loving detail, but called them Fords throughout? Suppose the vendor in question puts "Ford" logos on the trucks coming out of the Toyota factories. Suppose the consumer actually buys one of these, thinking it's a Ford. Is all of this OK? After all, the consumer evaluated the specifications, presumably found them satisfactory, and made the purchase of his own free will. Does that make the deception immaterial?
> Here in Switzerland this is already implemented.
I'm not surprised -- most countries already don't produce Canadian pennies.
Maybe I'm too old-school, but when I think "systems language", I think about something that would be good for embedded devices or kernel device drivers, stuff that's pretty close to the metal. I wouldn't use Go for that, garbage-collection and concurrency mean there's heap traffic and IPC signaling under the hood that I probably want to control.
I agree with the "C but better" characterization, but the ways in which it's better disqualify it from being a good systems tool, I think.
Surely if you fire them out of a canon, they wind up in the apocrypha?
Done earlier than that, check out the Gossamer Condor from 1977. This looks like it's probably an ancestor of Daedalus.
This reading requires a willful repudiation of the intent of the founders -- both Jefferson and Madison were clear in their many writings about the roles of the respective institutions, and the very phrase "separation of church and state" (along with "wall of separation", also often heard in this context) come from their writings.
Also, there is an eighteenth-century usage of the word "establish" which means what we might now call "mainstreaming" or "favoring", and not just creating or founding something.
I think it would be obviously unconstitutional, for example, if the US government were to use tax revenue to pay the salaries of the clergy in some church or other. The British government did this in the American colonies, the founders were quite familiar with it as a possible function of government, and quite deliberately excluded it.
Fortunately, I have lots of time for this sort of thing.
The Sheffield that's pronounced "sheffield" is actually in Yorkshire, pronounced "yorkshire", which is where this research took place.
The Sheffield you're thinking of is the one that's pronounced "glasgow", and even there, you're more likely to run into Scots (a dialect of English, ye ken) than Scottish Gaelic, which is more of a highland thing.
I RT first part of the FA (no, not actually new here...), and an important point is that the paper is talking about *orbital* angular momentum of the light beam. The circular polarization states correspond to *spin* angular momentum of the photons, orbital angular momentum is a different thing with its own phase space.
Infinite channels still seems unlikely, it has to be true that detectors for orbitally-tuned light beams won't be perfect, and will detect "nearby" orbitally-tuned beams as well, and it's likely that some parts of the space of orbital angular momentum will be more difficult to generate than others, so I remain skeptical of the claim.
But, the mechanism is not a trivial one. I note with some surprise that TFS actually correctly notes that it's orbital angular momentum they're talking about.
> When, exactly, was Microsoft good, interesting, or cool?
In the mid- to late 1980s.
In those days, IBM a monopolistic corporate behemoth that suppressed innovation to protect their market, and we all suspected that their long term strategy in the PC marketplace was "embrace and extinguish", in favor of the more lucrative mainframe trade that restricted computation to people who could pay a lot.
Microsoft, on the other hand, had a reasonably well-documented OS with lots of hooks to hang extensions on, and decent development tools that weren't too expensive. MS-DOS opened up the machine and gave you convenient access to it at many levels, you really felt like you could do anything with it.
You may vacate my lawn at your convenience.
> Tractor feed printer. Still the best way to handle logging of system errors for systems that you really really need to know what's happening on :)
OT, I suppose, but I have to disagree with part of this. Not the principle, console logging on a separate device is enormously valuable, but the console log recorder should not be a printer.
What you really want is to record the unbuffered serial console output to a file on a separate device. You can use a small but durable secondary computer with a serial port (or USB/serial adapter) running "minicom" in recording mode, or you can buy expensive enterprise gear for this -- we used to have "Cyclades" embedded terminal servers for this, but I don't think they make those anymore.
The reason you want this is that the console output can be quite voluminous -- either because it's done routine operations for a long time, or because it's being DDOS-ed. It's important for the console log to be searchable, and it's nice if it's fast enough to keep up when the server is having a panic attack and dumping kernel-oops stack-traces several times per second.
The major advantage of the printer is that the output is "tamper-evident", and there's a single authoritative master copy -- this is valuable for forensics, but, at least for me, doesn't beat speed and searchability.
The blood-flow argument was also why my doctor told me that antibiotics wouldn't cure my formerly-chronic sinus infections, although they can help to keep it from spreading through your body.
What I started doing, at my doctor's suggestion, was regular sinus irrigation with a simple buffered saline solution. This isn't the hippy-dippy neti-pot thing, it's an 8-oz squeeze bottle that you use to force a stream of the solution in one nostril and out the other. It's a bit messy, but I found that by incorporating this into my daily hygiene ritual, my formerly-seasonal, formerly-debilitating sinusitis is much milder, and sometimes skips a season entirely.
Part of what I like about this approach is that it's completely clear how it works, it's just lavage. No mystery drugs with side-effects, *and* no new-agey holistic malarky either.
For those audience members who respect scriptural authority, but aren't exactly sure what's in there, I feel duty-bound to point out that the Gospel of Thomas, quoted by the parent, is non-canonical. Useful link here.
Whether this fact changes your opinion of its authority is, of course, your call.
For something branded as "honesty", it's a little incomplete. In fact, it's probably more fair to say that the GNU tools (bash, gcc, etc.) are work-alikes of older technology. Linux, which as we all know is primarily a kernel, has evolved a great deal over the years, and has support for functionality (like journaling filesystems, for instance) that just plain didn't exist in System V or Berkeley. And, in fact, the kernel is even famous/infamous for its unstable ABI, tuning parameters, and changes in its scheduler. There's the hierarchical file system, of course, and the file-based device access scheme in /dev, but on the whole, I think it's fair to say that the Linux kernel is not, in fact, a work-alike of other OSs.
Replying to undo bad mod. Mod parent "informative", please.
Note that he turned to port in order to get to shallower water, probably with the idea of beaching the thing, as an alternative to having it go all the way under. This was a reasonable idea, but it's unclear (to me, from fragmentary media reports) if this actually saved any lives or property. The winners of this bet were people who had an extra margin of time to evacuate because the ship didn't go completely under the water. The losers of this bet were people who got trapped on the starboard side because of the listing, and then drowned when the water rose around them. It will probably be some time before we know the ratio of winners to losers.