Mostly? Sane defaults. By which I mean, the default for most permissions should be "no", and the installer for any given application would be expected to request the privileges that app will need, and the OS would prompt the user with a single dialog box at that time, as a normal part of the install process, and the user can smack a single "ok" button to allow all the ones the app requested. A more knowledgeable user could be pickier if desired (delving into the details, perusing the list, and possibly unchecking certain items), since of course some apps might request permission to do things that some users wouldn't really need them to be able to do. Just one example: I know for a fact most media players would request permission to retrieve stuff from the internet, which they almost certainly don't strictly need, and some users would want to deny them that.
Most end users would never delve into the details, of course. Even then they would get some benefit, insofar as the application would only have the permissions that the creators of the application specifically expected it to need, rather than all the ones they didn't bother to specifically drop, so if the application gets hijacked, the malware or attacker would hopefully be more limited in what it can do.
But yeah, it's better if as many users as possible do at least have a cursory look at what permissions the apps they install are requesting. With a view toward making that easier, I'd suggest that the OS should classify permissions into categories like "green: many applications legitimately need this permission, and it's mostly harmless", "yellow: a few applications need this permission, though there are some risks associated with giving it out unnecessarily", "orange: most applications don't need this permission, and it's potentially dangerous", and "red: only very special applications need this, and it's inherently dangerous". The install-time dialog that prompts the user for the permissions the app wants should probably give numbers for how many green, yellow, and orange permissions the app wants, and explicitely list any red ones individually.
An example of a green permission would be retrieving information from the internet. An example of a yellow permission would be reading any files to which the user has read access. An example of an orange permission would be deleting or changing any file to which the user has write access (as opposed to just files the app itself creates). An example of a red permission would be listening on a low-numbered port. If the user chooses to delve into details, the list would be presented sorted by color, probably with the scary colors at the top. Each permission should have a human-readable name (though behind the scenes no doubt it would have a mnemonic identifier of some kind that developers might use to refer to it), a short description that would be displayed with it in the detailed list, and a longer explanation viewable in some way on a per-permission bases (possibly by clicking on a question-mark button or something; the exact details of the UI should be hashed out by a team of usability people and run past some users as a sanity check).
Yeah, I know, we have to accept that a lot of home users are going to frob the "ok" button and have done. In fact I think that's what I'd encourage them to do assuming A) that they are in fact deliberately installing software when the dialog comes up (not, say, just trying to get their email) and B) that they don't have a computer geek handy to ask about it.
On the other hand, a lot of end users don't really want to install their own software in the first place, and if computers came with more of the software they need out of the box (here the OEM serves as the system administrator initially, though of course an informed user can make revisions later or even do a fresh install), that would probably help somewhat.
There should probably also be a fifth category of permissions, "blue: all apps have this permission by default, and must spe
> Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to > travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly
Oh, come on. I'm not a big fan of excessive and gratuitous restrictions, but this claim is just bizarre. Who holds political rallies on airplanes? There's absolutely no way the assembly clause was meant to apply here. Airplanes aren't even public property, really. Any normal activist group (insofar as there is such a thing as a "normal" activist group) assembles in front of the courthouse or city hall or the capitol or whatever, on the ground. In a Jetsons world where people build whole cities in the sky there would be a legitimate need for assembly up there, but we haven't even seen a flying car released on the family car market yet, so that's clearly not the world we currently live in.
Restricting air travel is in principle no different from restricting who can get a driver's license, which we've been doing for decades (based, if nothing else, on the ability to pass the test). That doesn't make stupid and unnecessary restrictions a good idea, far from it, but claiming that they violate the assembly clause is totally left field.
Historically, the most significant improvement ever made to mousetrap technology, at least in terms of having a direct positive impact on sales, was printing the word "disposable" on the packaging.
> I often see people write sentences like "It is a big, red, house."
On the internet, you will see all kinds of weird punctuation. I've never seen that particular usage in a book, and every set of English punctuation rules I've ever seen would consider it incorrect, at least in the usual case.
However, comma usage in English does tend to be pretty lax, and in fact some sets of rules even explicitely say, in effect, "if any of these rules causes a lack of clarity in your sentence, then break it".
The other poster, who says that some style guides forbid the comma here and others mandate it, is confusing adjective separation with the comma-separated list. The instance he's talking about is more like "We painted the house red, green, and blue", which some style guides insist should be "We painted the house red, green and blue". There's a lot of disagreement over that one, but in the case you were talking about, I've never seen a style guide suggest, much less mandate, separating the adjectives with a comma from the noun they modify. That's just a punctuation mistake, plain and simple. But if you read English mostly on the internet, you will see a lot of punctuation mistakes. Most people don't bother proofreading what they write on the internet, much less getting it checked by an editor.
> except lol, which gets you ridiculed if you say it but confuses people if you spell it out (laugh out loud?)
LOL is a special case because it has shifted so much in meaning. Originally, LOL meant, approximately, "I'm laughing out loud at what you just said, because it's so funny I can't help myself", but these days it expresses a much milder reaction, almost closer to "eh, whatever you say, mate", or at most "heh, yeah". The original meaning has been pretty much entirely taken over by more emphatic forms, such as ROFL and FOCL. "Laughing Out Loud" is the etymology of LOL, but it's no longer the meaning, or at least not the primary meaning.
The only way I can imagine pronouncing it, incidentally, is "Ell Oh Ell", but then again I also say "Tee Cee Pee Aye Pee" and "Oh Tee Oh Aych" and "Eks Emm Ell" and "Ess Kew Ell", so maybe I just like to spell things out. (OTOH, I pronounce "mySQL" in two syllables. Then there are local place names. I've heard "Bucyrus" pronounced as one syllable, though it's usually two, three only if you're not from around here...)
> Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two > or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
This is why we have semicolons, so we can include entries in a list that themselves contain commas: The sandwich selection included ham and cheese on rye; bacon, lettuce, and tomato; egg and grilled onion; and reuben.
On the other hand...
> The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances.
Yes, and that's an extremely poor argument. For *most* of the things we use commas for, they aren't necessary for clarity in most instances. Aposition, for instance, would usually be clear enough without being set off by commas, but we set it off because the normal conventions for punctuating the English language call for that.
Until very recently, there was no debate about the last comma in a list: one simply always included it. I'm not sure exactly where the change came from, but I view it as an unnecessary and unwarranted change and an impediment to clarity.
However, I think it's already too far gone to stop. Almost a third of the population, perhaps more, are now writing lists without the last comma, exclusively. The convention almost certainly cannot be restored to its former near-universal state.
In particular, I would really like to see the Commander Keen series remade as a 3D FPS. Because riding that pogo stick and those floating platforms and so forth, combined with the cartooney atmosphere of the Keen series, would at the same time be very cool and yet also very different from the usual FPS experience.
I scarcely ever buy games, that one would tempt me greatly.
> I wonder how much of that spending went to training their employees
On average, not nearly enough. Employee training practically always gets shortchanged, and I'm not just talking about computer security, or even just about computer technology generally. It's true across the board in most industries.
Worse, in a lot of industries, the money that _is_ budgetted for employee training gets mostly wasted on worthless nonsense, not spent on the training the employees could actually *use*.
> Unless they count a UPS, RAID and tape drives as security, there is no way that security can eat up > that much of the budget, except maybe if the surveyed all use Windoze...
I'm sure a significant percentage of them use Windows, but what you're probably missing is that a lot of the security stuff that's typically sold to corporations (including, even, firewall solutions) is sold on a subscription basis, so that you have to pay every n (typically, twelve) months just to keep the same level of protection that you already had.
Most other computer stuff is licensed for an indefinite period of time, so if a given system has a lifespan of five years, you only pay for the hardware, OS, office suite, and so forth every five years, but you pay for the security stuff five times as often. So it could cost 1/20th as much as the rest and still take up 1/5th of the budget.
For instance, you might buy a workstation for $500, which comes with Windows XP included and a keyboard and mouse. To go along with that you might also buy a $250 LCD and a $650 license for MS Office, and you might use the thing for five years. During that time you might pay for Norton Internet Security every year, at about $70 a pop. Those aren't atypical figures these days, but if you multiply it out, security is one-fifth of the total budget for that workstation over five years.
It does get a little weirder when line-of-business software is included (you know, stuff in the "let us know you're interested and we'll assign a sales team" price range), because that stuff usually has annually-renewed maintenance contracts on everything, including the hardware. OTOH, security solutions at that kind of level tend to be more expensive as well, e.g., the vendor might roll one of Symantec's enterprise-level security products right into your plan and consider it a required part of the solution.
> Are software programs what you run on your hardware computers?
You can run software programs on hardware computers, and many people do, but that isn't necessarily the _only_ way to do things. You can also run software programs on virtual VMs, for instance. Hope this clears things up for you. HTH.HAND.
It's the "full privileges of the user" part that's really the problem.
Applications handling untrusted data (e.g., data retrieved from the internet) should always be run with limited privileges, no access to the user's home directory, and so on and so forth.
This is not currently done on any operating system of which I am aware; certainly Windows, OS X, Linux, and BSD all get it wrong, so it's hard to blame any specific OS or vendor. Individual applications could voluntarily surrender privileges (as server apps often do, e.g., Apache) if the OS supports that, which some do, but really the OS ought to be more involved in providing this type of security. The system administrator should be able, when installing *any* application, to specify what privileges it should have and not have -- just as he can do for users when creating their accounts. The application shouldn't need to voluntarily surrender its privileges; the system should simply not provide them in the first place, unless the sysadmin agrees that that application has a legitimate need for the capability in question.
We already have a certain amount of that, for capabilities like listening on ports (assuming your OS provides at least a minimal firewall, which most do these days, though not every distribution turns it on by default, and they should), but it ought to be more comprehensive.
> Wouldn't it be easier to sneak in a time-sucking loop into another patch? > A user would go, "Gee.. My computer is much, much slower since Patch Tuesday. > I need to buy a new Windows Vista computer!
That risks bad PR if it gets out. Instead, just sign a cooperative agreement with Symantec to give free three-month trials of NAV to all current XP users. That ought to do just about the same thing, but you don't have to worry about being discovered, because you can publically admit to rolling out three-month free NAV trials and say it was for better security, which is a big PR win.
Lawyers say all kinds of junk. They're a lot like marketing departments that way. If it's obviously completely bogus, just toss it in the circular file. A letter from a lawyer does not have any inherent legal force. It's not a court order or anything, just a letter. You don't have to respond unless the thing has enough merit to *warrant* a response. Otherwise, you can just delete it and get on with your life.
Other than potentially better performance stats, is this actually anything we need to know about?
To me it sounds like an implementation detail, which ought to be encapsulated behind the interface (SATA or whatever), so that nobody but hardware developers should ever actually need to know about it. Am I just weird, looking at it from a too-high-level perspective, or is this kind of detail completely irrelevant in practice?
I've heard (from an experienced RN, for whatever that's worth) that if your natural flora are all killed off for some reason (e.g., aggressive medical treatments such as chemo), one way to facilitate the return of your gastrointestinal tract to normal is to eat a cup of yogurt.
Of course, yogurt does not contain all of the types of bacteria that your digestive system normally has in it. For instance, the lower intestinal tract normally contains escherichia coli, but grocery stores probably wouldn't be selling yogurt if it contained e. coli. Perhaps the e. coli are preserved in the appendix? Or in small numbers throughout the colon? An interesting question.
I'd be interested in seeing research on which types of gut flora you need _specifically_ (as in, other types can't do their job for them in their absense), and how each of those types gets restored after an eradication incident.
There may be more going on than that. Nigeria is more densely populated than Ohio, but Nigeria is mostly black, with little grey dots at Lagos, Port Harcourt, and a couple of other places (cities, presumably). Ohio is pure white, even in rural areas like Morrow County. One could just about believe that's accurate.
On the other hand, clearly there ARE some problems with the data. For instance, there are a significant number of dots are in the Pacific Ocean, a hundred miles off the coast of Chili, which is clearly not right, and Canada is almost totally black, which strikes me as very unlikely.
> Yes, but would they actually do that? There's a hell of a lot more money to be made by > treating the symptoms, rather than curing the disease.
For all we know this may *be* a symptom. The patient has observable problems (e.g., mood swings, swolen feet, and so on and so forth) because the blood sugar is not what it should be. The blood sugar is wrong because the insulin production is wrong. Now we think the insulin production is wrong because there's too much of this enzyme, but why is there so much of the enzyme, and if we treat the patient with drugs that tie up the enzyme, will the body just produce more of the enzyme to compensate? What happens if there's too *little* of the same enzyme?
In other words, finding something like this is just the next step down a long road of trying to understand what's really going on, and for all we know we could still be figuring it out three hundred years from now.
I rather like the Gimp user interface. I find myself wishing other programs were more like it. For example, I find myself wishing that other programs' Save As dialogs would let me just type the extension on the end to specify the type of file I want to save, rather than scrolling through a lengthy and poorly-organized list of file types. (Yes, office suites, I'm talking to YOU.)
Not that it's perfect. The default docking locations for the dialogs, for instance, are pretty bad, but you can easily rearrange them. (My preference is to dock everything I use under the toolbox in one big set, with the following order: tool options, layers, channels, paths, brushes, patterns, gradients, undo history. Then I place this window along the left edge of the screen, and use the rest of the screen for the image window(s). YMMV.) Certain of the filters have significantly suboptimal interfaces, as well. On the whole, though, the Gimp user interface works pretty well.
Photoshop's interface, on the other hand... Yeesh. I had to work with Photoshop for a few months once. (Long story.) It took me two days to figure out why I couldn't save as the filetype I wanted... Turns out Photoshop isn't smart enough to just warn you "Hey, Filetype X doesn't support feature Y, so saving in that format will mean performing operation Z" (e.g., PNG doesn't support layers, so they be merged), and let you click Okay and then _do_ it. Gimp's been doing that since version 0.mumble in the mid nineties (back when people were still using Netscape Navigator 4.08, remember that?), but can Photoshop handle such basic usability features? Of course not. No, in Photoshop, zenith of usability that it is, you have to just *know* what the problem is, know what steps are necessary to get the image into a state where it doesn't contain anything the target format can't support, manually take each of those steps, and only then can you do your Save As and select that format. If word processing software functioned that way, nobody would ever figure out how to interchange documents between Word and Works, much less between software made by different vendors. Then there's the whole business of all the Photoshop windows being linked so that when you bring one to the foreground they ALL come with. Heaven forfend you should have your own ideas about which windows you want in front of which other windows, because as a lowly user you have no business having an opinion on such matters, apparently, the Photoshop developers have decided what is best for you. Ugh. In short, Adobe fanboys have no business complaining about the Gimp's UI.
That list doesn't make sense. In the first place, most of the entries are not so well-known as to really deserve a mention. In the second place, some are languages (e.g., Java) and others are APIs provided by operating systems (e.g., Windows threads). Code written in Java might use Windows threads when run on the Windows platform, or the same code might use some other underlying mechanism when run on another kind of platform, which really after all is the major point of using a platform-independent language.
Also, I can't believe POE was left off the list;-)
> I've heard rumours that smoking drives down the possibility of brain-related diseases > (alzheimers(sp?), parkinsons).
Makes sense. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are both diseases that mostly attack the elderly. Typically they don't set in until after you're a septagenarian and don't get serious until you're over eighty. Regular smoking significantly reduces the likelihood you'll ever get that old. As a regular smoker, you're far more likely to die of cardiovascular and/or respiratory diseases, probably between the ages of 50 and 70, depending on when you started smoking.
As a corrolary, your risk of developing macular degeneration is also reduced if you're a heavy smoker. Ditto osteoporosis.
> English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will)
I'm not sure that's still true. Certainly that *has* happened, but if anything now English as a lingua franca may be losing ground (in some geographical areas) to other globally important languages, e.g., Chinese, Arabic, or even Spanish. Where it's gaining, it's gaining at the expense of regional dialects and obscure languages with small numbers of speakers.
Not that English is _going_ anywhere, mind you. It's still the single most widely used language, bar none (and if that changes it will only be because of higher population growth in regions where other languages are paramount).
What's going in is this: the endless proliferation of thousands upon thousands of languages is, in my opinion, a thing of the past, a relic of a time when transportation and communication across long distances were expensive and relatively uncommon. Everything now seems to be moving toward a much smaller number of globally important languages: English, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and so on.
The situation does not, however, seem to be heading toward one world language. The languages that are disappearing are the ones with the fewest speakers -- dozens, hundreds, or even thousands, but not millions. Languages with millions and millions of native speakers are gaining influence, not losing it. Even languages like Japanese and Modern Greek, which are spoken mostly just in their own small corners of the world (and among people from there who have moved elsewhere recently), don't seem to be going away, at least, not at a perceptible rate. Languages like Arabic and Chinese and so on are gaining by leaps and bounds, wiping out the small local languages in their regions of influence, just as English has already done some areas.
Then there's Hebrew. That's a special case. A century or two ago Hebrew was a dead language with zero native speakers, studied for the purpose of reading a relatively small body of ancient writings, and now Modern Hebrew has millions of native speakers and is actively growing. But that is very much the exception, rather than the rule. Normally when a language gets down to fewer than a couple hundred native speakers it's on the fast track to permanent oblivion (if there is no globally-significant literature written in it) or permanent academically-studied-but-not-spoken status (e.g., Sanskrit, Latin).
> What will happen to the grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling differences between > British English and American English (as well as others)?
As far as spelling, it's pretty much already happened: in an international context (e.g., on the internet), both spellings are acceptable.
Pronunciation is largely a matter of dialect. With global communications, dialects are diverging less and converging more, but that's a gradual process. You can already see a certain amount of that, as some of the more extreme dialects have been "softened" a little by the influence of television over the last fifty years or so. As children grow up hearing not just the local pronunciation, but also the more widely accepted dialect common across a larger area, they are better able to understand one another across dialect boundaries.
Grammar is more complicated, but the differences in English grammar between geographical areas are relatively small compared to the changes that were already underway anyhow. Fundamentally, English had its roots in and takes almost all of its vocabulary from inflected languages (chiefly Germanic languages and Latin for the grammar, those plus Greek and French for vocabulary, French being substantially the least inflected of the lot), but English itself has definitely become a word-order language, and the inflections are dropping out. The distinctions between the subjective and objective case in pronouns, for instance, are gradually being lost. Of the many different forms of the being verb, fewer than half of them are still in widespread use. And so on. In a few hundred years, the English language may quite possibly have no inflection left at all.
I don't usually comment on signatures, but I'll make an exception in this case...
> Saudi Arabia spent $45 million on a mosque in Rome, but forbids churches in its kingdom.
Not surprising, really. However, it's what follows that I really want to address...
> We need a new Charles Martel.
I don't think going to war against the Saudis is a good idea. They're one of the most consistently sane states in their geopolitical region (and arguably the most consistently sensible OPEC member). Not that that's saying a whole lot given who it compares them to, but it's important nonetheless.
I'm not saying I agree with all of their political stances (quite the contrary), but the Saudi leaders obviously make a significant effort to understand what's going on around them, take into consideration what impact their actions will have, and do things that will maintain a reasonable level of stability in their region. Those kinds of things are SOME OF the most important parts of governing well. There are plenty of things I'd like to see them do better or different, but most of the nations around them do considerably worse.
Israel really doesn't count here, because the other nations in the region cannot and will not respect Israel or follow their lead in anything, much less consider them as any kind of role model, due to fundamentally irreconcileable ideological differences. (Many of the governments in the Middle East refuse to even acknowledge that Israel has any right to _exist_ as a sovereign nation.) Even if they were the paragon of doing absolutely everything right, the other nations in the region would never follow Israel. So Saudi Arabia is in a lot of ways the best role model they have, in the region.
Thus, attacking Saudi Arabia could have significant undesirable consequences. It could further destabilize a region that has always been a bit short on political stability and quite frankly doesn't need any further destabilization. In short, it's a bad idea. Overall, it would almost certainly make things worse, not better.
I say that as an anabaptist. We (anabaptists) have little good to say about any state-established religion, and Islam in Arabia is nothing if not state-established. Nonetheless, getting ourselves a Charles Martel for the modern era and sending him marching on the Saudis is certainly not a viable approach to the problem.
Of course nations that oppose state-established religion (e.g., the US) can exert what political pressures they can bring to bear, but I would be significantly pessimistic about what results to expect. If we were willing to make it a major issue and make some calculated sacrifices, and if we thought it would yield useful results, we could do a pretty good number on their economy (the US is both the leading consumer of petroleum _and_ the largest producer that's not an OPEC member, so we have or at least can have a very significant influence on the price of crude oil, if we are willing to suffer some domestic displeasure over it and take a few political hits in the UN), but I would not expect them to even think about relenting based on that. Indeed, it would be quite out of character for them to do so. Plus it would also hurt Iraq, which right now would be significantly counterproductive.
Whether there _is_ anything that can be done (about the state-religion problem in the Middle East), that would actually be effective, is an interesting question. I tend to think that there isn't, and the church in Arabia will simply have to continue as it is doing (there and in most of the Middle East), meeting underground and regularly losing members to the unsafe levels of persecution. I don't like that, but I don't see any way to fix it.
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Mostly? Sane defaults. By which I mean, the default for most permissions should be "no", and the installer for any given application would be expected to request the privileges that app will need, and the OS would prompt the user with a single dialog box at that time, as a normal part of the install process, and the user can smack a single "ok" button to allow all the ones the app requested. A more knowledgeable user could be pickier if desired (delving into the details, perusing the list, and possibly unchecking certain items), since of course some apps might request permission to do things that some users wouldn't really need them to be able to do. Just one example: I know for a fact most media players would request permission to retrieve stuff from the internet, which they almost certainly don't strictly need, and some users would want to deny them that.
Most end users would never delve into the details, of course. Even then they would get some benefit, insofar as the application would only have the permissions that the creators of the application specifically expected it to need, rather than all the ones they didn't bother to specifically drop, so if the application gets hijacked, the malware or attacker would hopefully be more limited in what it can do.
But yeah, it's better if as many users as possible do at least have a cursory look at what permissions the apps they install are requesting. With a view toward making that easier, I'd suggest that the OS should classify permissions into categories like "green: many applications legitimately need this permission, and it's mostly harmless", "yellow: a few applications need this permission, though there are some risks associated with giving it out unnecessarily", "orange: most applications don't need this permission, and it's potentially dangerous", and "red: only very special applications need this, and it's inherently dangerous". The install-time dialog that prompts the user for the permissions the app wants should probably give numbers for how many green, yellow, and orange permissions the app wants, and explicitely list any red ones individually.
An example of a green permission would be retrieving information from the internet. An example of a yellow permission would be reading any files to which the user has read access. An example of an orange permission would be deleting or changing any file to which the user has write access (as opposed to just files the app itself creates). An example of a red permission would be listening on a low-numbered port. If the user chooses to delve into details, the list would be presented sorted by color, probably with the scary colors at the top. Each permission should have a human-readable name (though behind the scenes no doubt it would have a mnemonic identifier of some kind that developers might use to refer to it), a short description that would be displayed with it in the detailed list, and a longer explanation viewable in some way on a per-permission bases (possibly by clicking on a question-mark button or something; the exact details of the UI should be hashed out by a team of usability people and run past some users as a sanity check).
Yeah, I know, we have to accept that a lot of home users are going to frob the "ok" button and have done. In fact I think that's what I'd encourage them to do assuming A) that they are in fact deliberately installing software when the dialog comes up (not, say, just trying to get their email) and B) that they don't have a computer geek handy to ask about it.
On the other hand, a lot of end users don't really want to install their own software in the first place, and if computers came with more of the software they need out of the box (here the OEM serves as the system administrator initially, though of course an informed user can make revisions later or even do a fresh install), that would probably help somewhat.
There should probably also be a fifth category of permissions, "blue: all apps have this permission by default, and must spe
> Hasbrouck submitted that requiring clearance in order to
> travel violates the US First Amendment right of assembly
Oh, come on. I'm not a big fan of excessive and gratuitous restrictions, but this claim is just bizarre. Who holds political rallies on airplanes? There's absolutely no way the assembly clause was meant to apply here. Airplanes aren't even public property, really. Any normal activist group (insofar as there is such a thing as a "normal" activist group) assembles in front of the courthouse or city hall or the capitol or whatever, on the ground. In a Jetsons world where people build whole cities in the sky there would be a legitimate need for assembly up there, but we haven't even seen a flying car released on the family car market yet, so that's clearly not the world we currently live in.
Restricting air travel is in principle no different from restricting who can get a driver's license, which we've been doing for decades (based, if nothing else, on the ability to pass the test). That doesn't make stupid and unnecessary restrictions a good idea, far from it, but claiming that they violate the assembly clause is totally left field.
Historically, the most significant improvement ever made to mousetrap technology, at least in terms of having a direct positive impact on sales, was printing the word "disposable" on the packaging.
> I often see people write sentences like "It is a big, red, house."
On the internet, you will see all kinds of weird punctuation. I've never seen that particular usage in a book, and every set of English punctuation rules I've ever seen would consider it incorrect, at least in the usual case.
However, comma usage in English does tend to be pretty lax, and in fact some sets of rules even explicitely say, in effect, "if any of these rules causes a lack of clarity in your sentence, then break it".
The other poster, who says that some style guides forbid the comma here and others mandate it, is confusing adjective separation with the comma-separated list. The instance he's talking about is more like "We painted the house red, green, and blue", which some style guides insist should be "We painted the house red, green and blue". There's a lot of disagreement over that one, but in the case you were talking about, I've never seen a style guide suggest, much less mandate, separating the adjectives with a comma from the noun they modify. That's just a punctuation mistake, plain and simple. But if you read English mostly on the internet, you will see a lot of punctuation mistakes. Most people don't bother proofreading what they write on the internet, much less getting it checked by an editor.
> except lol, which gets you ridiculed if you say it but confuses people if you spell it out (laugh out loud?)
LOL is a special case because it has shifted so much in meaning. Originally, LOL meant, approximately, "I'm laughing out loud at what you just said, because it's so funny I can't help myself", but these days it expresses a much milder reaction, almost closer to "eh, whatever you say, mate", or at most "heh, yeah". The original meaning has been pretty much entirely taken over by more emphatic forms, such as ROFL and FOCL. "Laughing Out Loud" is the etymology of LOL, but it's no longer the meaning, or at least not the primary meaning.
The only way I can imagine pronouncing it, incidentally, is "Ell Oh Ell", but then again I also say "Tee Cee Pee Aye Pee" and "Oh Tee Oh Aych" and "Eks Emm Ell" and "Ess Kew Ell", so maybe I just like to spell things out. (OTOH, I pronounce "mySQL" in two syllables. Then there are local place names. I've heard "Bucyrus" pronounced as one syllable, though it's usually two, three only if you're not from around here...)
On the one hand...
> Longer lists with more complicated syntax get even more confusing, requiring rereading two
> or three times to clarify. Some sentences will never be clear without the Harvard comma.
This is why we have semicolons, so we can include entries in a list that themselves contain commas: The sandwich selection included ham and cheese on rye; bacon, lettuce, and tomato; egg and grilled onion; and reuben.
On the other hand...
> The argument against the Harvard comma is that it isn't necessary in most instances.
Yes, and that's an extremely poor argument. For *most* of the things we use commas for, they aren't necessary for clarity in most instances. Aposition, for instance, would usually be clear enough without being set off by commas, but we set it off because the normal conventions for punctuating the English language call for that.
Until very recently, there was no debate about the last comma in a list: one simply always included it. I'm not sure exactly where the change came from, but I view it as an unnecessary and unwarranted change and an impediment to clarity.
However, I think it's already too far gone to stop. Almost a third of the population, perhaps more, are now writing lists without the last comma, exclusively. The convention almost certainly cannot be restored to its former near-universal state.
> At least, "job", isn't pronounced like, "jaerb".
Ew. Go warsh your mouth out with soap.
In particular, I would really like to see the Commander Keen series remade as a 3D FPS. Because riding that pogo stick and those floating platforms and so forth, combined with the cartooney atmosphere of the Keen series, would at the same time be very cool and yet also very different from the usual FPS experience.
I scarcely ever buy games, that one would tempt me greatly.
> I wonder how much of that spending went to training their employees
On average, not nearly enough. Employee training practically always gets shortchanged, and I'm not just talking about computer security, or even just about computer technology generally. It's true across the board in most industries.
Worse, in a lot of industries, the money that _is_ budgetted for employee training gets mostly wasted on worthless nonsense, not spent on the training the employees could actually *use*.
> Unless they count a UPS, RAID and tape drives as security, there is no way that security can eat up
> that much of the budget, except maybe if the surveyed all use Windoze...
I'm sure a significant percentage of them use Windows, but what you're probably missing is that a lot of the security stuff that's typically sold to corporations (including, even, firewall solutions) is sold on a subscription basis, so that you have to pay every n (typically, twelve) months just to keep the same level of protection that you already had.
Most other computer stuff is licensed for an indefinite period of time, so if a given system has a lifespan of five years, you only pay for the hardware, OS, office suite, and so forth every five years, but you pay for the security stuff five times as often. So it could cost 1/20th as much as the rest and still take up 1/5th of the budget.
For instance, you might buy a workstation for $500, which comes with Windows XP included and a keyboard and mouse. To go along with that you might also buy a $250 LCD and a $650 license for MS Office, and you might use the thing for five years. During that time you might pay for Norton Internet Security every year, at about $70 a pop. Those aren't atypical figures these days, but if you multiply it out, security is one-fifth of the total budget for that workstation over five years.
It does get a little weirder when line-of-business software is included (you know, stuff in the "let us know you're interested and we'll assign a sales team" price range), because that stuff usually has annually-renewed maintenance contracts on everything, including the hardware. OTOH, security solutions at that kind of level tend to be more expensive as well, e.g., the vendor might roll one of Symantec's enterprise-level security products right into your plan and consider it a required part of the solution.
> Are software programs what you run on your hardware computers?
You can run software programs on hardware computers, and many people do, but that isn't necessarily the _only_ way to do things. You can also run software programs on virtual VMs, for instance. Hope this clears things up for you. HTH.HAND.
It's the "full privileges of the user" part that's really the problem.
Applications handling untrusted data (e.g., data retrieved from the internet) should always be run with limited privileges, no access to the user's home directory, and so on and so forth.
This is not currently done on any operating system of which I am aware; certainly Windows, OS X, Linux, and BSD all get it wrong, so it's hard to blame any specific OS or vendor. Individual applications could voluntarily surrender privileges (as server apps often do, e.g., Apache) if the OS supports that, which some do, but really the OS ought to be more involved in providing this type of security. The system administrator should be able, when installing *any* application, to specify what privileges it should have and not have -- just as he can do for users when creating their accounts. The application shouldn't need to voluntarily surrender its privileges; the system should simply not provide them in the first place, unless the sysadmin agrees that that application has a legitimate need for the capability in question.
We already have a certain amount of that, for capabilities like listening on ports (assuming your OS provides at least a minimal firewall, which most do these days, though not every distribution turns it on by default, and they should), but it ought to be more comprehensive.
> Wouldn't it be easier to sneak in a time-sucking loop into another patch?
> A user would go, "Gee.. My computer is much, much slower since Patch Tuesday.
> I need to buy a new Windows Vista computer!
That risks bad PR if it gets out. Instead, just sign a cooperative agreement with Symantec to give free three-month trials of NAV to all current XP users. That ought to do just about the same thing, but you don't have to worry about being discovered, because you can publically admit to rolling out three-month free NAV trials and say it was for better security, which is a big PR win.
Lawyers say all kinds of junk. They're a lot like marketing departments that way. If it's obviously completely bogus, just toss it in the circular file. A letter from a lawyer does not have any inherent legal force. It's not a court order or anything, just a letter. You don't have to respond unless the thing has enough merit to *warrant* a response. Otherwise, you can just delete it and get on with your life.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
Other than potentially better performance stats, is this actually anything we need to know about?
To me it sounds like an implementation detail, which ought to be encapsulated behind the interface (SATA or whatever), so that nobody but hardware developers should ever actually need to know about it. Am I just weird, looking at it from a too-high-level perspective, or is this kind of detail completely irrelevant in practice?
I've heard (from an experienced RN, for whatever that's worth) that if your natural flora are all killed off for some reason (e.g., aggressive medical treatments such as chemo), one way to facilitate the return of your gastrointestinal tract to normal is to eat a cup of yogurt.
Of course, yogurt does not contain all of the types of bacteria that your digestive system normally has in it. For instance, the lower intestinal tract normally contains escherichia coli, but grocery stores probably wouldn't be selling yogurt if it contained e. coli. Perhaps the e. coli are preserved in the appendix? Or in small numbers throughout the colon? An interesting question.
I'd be interested in seeing research on which types of gut flora you need _specifically_ (as in, other types can't do their job for them in their absense), and how each of those types gets restored after an eradication incident.
There may be more going on than that. Nigeria is more densely populated than Ohio, but Nigeria is mostly black, with little grey dots at Lagos, Port Harcourt, and a couple of other places (cities, presumably). Ohio is pure white, even in rural areas like Morrow County. One could just about believe that's accurate.
On the other hand, clearly there ARE some problems with the data. For instance, there are a significant number of dots are in the Pacific Ocean, a hundred miles off the coast of Chili, which is clearly not right, and Canada is almost totally black, which strikes me as very unlikely.
> Yes, but would they actually do that? There's a hell of a lot more money to be made by
> treating the symptoms, rather than curing the disease.
For all we know this may *be* a symptom. The patient has observable problems (e.g., mood swings, swolen feet, and so on and so forth) because the blood sugar is not what it should be. The blood sugar is wrong because the insulin production is wrong. Now we think the insulin production is wrong because there's too much of this enzyme, but why is there so much of the enzyme, and if we treat the patient with drugs that tie up the enzyme, will the body just produce more of the enzyme to compensate? What happens if there's too *little* of the same enzyme?
In other words, finding something like this is just the next step down a long road of trying to understand what's really going on, and for all we know we could still be figuring it out three hundred years from now.
> The user interface is just horrendous
I rather like the Gimp user interface. I find myself wishing other programs were more like it. For example, I find myself wishing that other programs' Save As dialogs would let me just type the extension on the end to specify the type of file I want to save, rather than scrolling through a lengthy and poorly-organized list of file types. (Yes, office suites, I'm talking to YOU.)
Not that it's perfect. The default docking locations for the dialogs, for instance, are pretty bad, but you can easily rearrange them. (My preference is to dock everything I use under the toolbox in one big set, with the following order: tool options, layers, channels, paths, brushes, patterns, gradients, undo history. Then I place this window along the left edge of the screen, and use the rest of the screen for the image window(s). YMMV.) Certain of the filters have significantly suboptimal interfaces, as well. On the whole, though, the Gimp user interface works pretty well.
Photoshop's interface, on the other hand... Yeesh. I had to work with Photoshop for a few months once. (Long story.) It took me two days to figure out why I couldn't save as the filetype I wanted... Turns out Photoshop isn't smart enough to just warn you "Hey, Filetype X doesn't support feature Y, so saving in that format will mean performing operation Z" (e.g., PNG doesn't support layers, so they be merged), and let you click Okay and then _do_ it. Gimp's been doing that since version 0.mumble in the mid nineties (back when people were still using Netscape Navigator 4.08, remember that?), but can Photoshop handle such basic usability features? Of course not. No, in Photoshop, zenith of usability that it is, you have to just *know* what the problem is, know what steps are necessary to get the image into a state where it doesn't contain anything the target format can't support, manually take each of those steps, and only then can you do your Save As and select that format. If word processing software functioned that way, nobody would ever figure out how to interchange documents between Word and Works, much less between software made by different vendors. Then there's the whole business of all the Photoshop windows being linked so that when you bring one to the foreground they ALL come with. Heaven forfend you should have your own ideas about which windows you want in front of which other windows, because as a lowly user you have no business having an opinion on such matters, apparently, the Photoshop developers have decided what is best for you. Ugh. In short, Adobe fanboys have no business complaining about the Gimp's UI.
It's the humidity that'll kill you. I'll be here all week.
That list doesn't make sense. In the first place, most of the entries are not so well-known as to really deserve a mention. In the second place, some are languages (e.g., Java) and others are APIs provided by operating systems (e.g., Windows threads). Code written in Java might use Windows threads when run on the Windows platform, or the same code might use some other underlying mechanism when run on another kind of platform, which really after all is the major point of using a platform-independent language.
;-)
Also, I can't believe POE was left off the list
> I've heard rumours that smoking drives down the possibility of brain-related diseases
> (alzheimers(sp?), parkinsons).
Makes sense. Alzheimer's and Parkinson's are both diseases that mostly attack the elderly. Typically they don't set in until after you're a septagenarian and don't get serious until you're over eighty. Regular smoking significantly reduces the likelihood you'll ever get that old. As a regular smoker, you're far more likely to die of cardiovascular and/or respiratory diseases, probably between the ages of 50 and 70, depending on when you started smoking.
As a corrolary, your risk of developing macular degeneration is also reduced if you're a heavy smoker. Ditto osteoporosis.
> English is wiping other languages out (becoming the lingua franca, if you will)
I'm not sure that's still true. Certainly that *has* happened, but if anything now English as a lingua franca may be losing ground (in some geographical areas) to other globally important languages, e.g., Chinese, Arabic, or even Spanish. Where it's gaining, it's gaining at the expense of regional dialects and obscure languages with small numbers of speakers.
Not that English is _going_ anywhere, mind you. It's still the single most widely used language, bar none (and if that changes it will only be because of higher population growth in regions where other languages are paramount).
What's going in is this: the endless proliferation of thousands upon thousands of languages is, in my opinion, a thing of the past, a relic of a time when transportation and communication across long distances were expensive and relatively uncommon. Everything now seems to be moving toward a much smaller number of globally important languages: English, Chinese, Arabic, Spanish, and so on.
The situation does not, however, seem to be heading toward one world language. The languages that are disappearing are the ones with the fewest speakers -- dozens, hundreds, or even thousands, but not millions. Languages with millions and millions of native speakers are gaining influence, not losing it. Even languages like Japanese and Modern Greek, which are spoken mostly just in their own small corners of the world (and among people from there who have moved elsewhere recently), don't seem to be going away, at least, not at a perceptible rate. Languages like Arabic and Chinese and so on are gaining by leaps and bounds, wiping out the small local languages in their regions of influence, just as English has already done some areas.
Then there's Hebrew. That's a special case. A century or two ago Hebrew was a dead language with zero native speakers, studied for the purpose of reading a relatively small body of ancient writings, and now Modern Hebrew has millions of native speakers and is actively growing. But that is very much the exception, rather than the rule. Normally when a language gets down to fewer than a couple hundred native speakers it's on the fast track to permanent oblivion (if there is no globally-significant literature written in it) or permanent academically-studied-but-not-spoken status (e.g., Sanskrit, Latin).
> What will happen to the grammatical, pronunciation, and spelling differences between
> British English and American English (as well as others)?
As far as spelling, it's pretty much already happened: in an international context (e.g., on the internet), both spellings are acceptable.
Pronunciation is largely a matter of dialect. With global communications, dialects are diverging less and converging more, but that's a gradual process. You can already see a certain amount of that, as some of the more extreme dialects have been "softened" a little by the influence of television over the last fifty years or so. As children grow up hearing not just the local pronunciation, but also the more widely accepted dialect common across a larger area, they are better able to understand one another across dialect boundaries.
Grammar is more complicated, but the differences in English grammar between geographical areas are relatively small compared to the changes that were already underway anyhow. Fundamentally, English had its roots in and takes almost all of its vocabulary from inflected languages (chiefly Germanic languages and Latin for the grammar, those plus Greek and French for vocabulary, French being substantially the least inflected of the lot), but English itself has definitely become a word-order language, and the inflections are dropping out. The distinctions between the subjective and objective case in pronouns, for instance, are gradually being lost. Of the many different forms of the being verb, fewer than half of them are still in widespread use. And so on. In a few hundred years, the English language may quite possibly have no inflection left at all.
I don't usually comment on signatures, but I'll make an exception in this case...
> Saudi Arabia spent $45 million on a mosque in Rome, but forbids churches in its kingdom.
Not surprising, really. However, it's what follows that I really want to address...
> We need a new Charles Martel.
I don't think going to war against the Saudis is a good idea. They're one of the most consistently sane states in their geopolitical region (and arguably the most consistently sensible OPEC member). Not that that's saying a whole lot given who it compares them to, but it's important nonetheless.
I'm not saying I agree with all of their political stances (quite the contrary), but the Saudi leaders obviously make a significant effort to understand what's going on around them, take into consideration what impact their actions will have, and do things that will maintain a reasonable level of stability in their region. Those kinds of things are SOME OF the most important parts of governing well. There are plenty of things I'd like to see them do better or different, but most of the nations around them do considerably worse.
Israel really doesn't count here, because the other nations in the region cannot and will not respect Israel or follow their lead in anything, much less consider them as any kind of role model, due to fundamentally irreconcileable ideological differences. (Many of the governments in the Middle East refuse to even acknowledge that Israel has any right to _exist_ as a sovereign nation.) Even if they were the paragon of doing absolutely everything right, the other nations in the region would never follow Israel. So Saudi Arabia is in a lot of ways the best role model they have, in the region.
Thus, attacking Saudi Arabia could have significant undesirable consequences. It could further destabilize a region that has always been a bit short on political stability and quite frankly doesn't need any further destabilization. In short, it's a bad idea. Overall, it would almost certainly make things worse, not better.
I say that as an anabaptist. We (anabaptists) have little good to say about any state-established religion, and Islam in Arabia is nothing if not state-established. Nonetheless, getting ourselves a Charles Martel for the modern era and sending him marching on the Saudis is certainly not a viable approach to the problem.
Of course nations that oppose state-established religion (e.g., the US) can exert what political pressures they can bring to bear, but I would be significantly pessimistic about what results to expect. If we were willing to make it a major issue and make some calculated sacrifices, and if we thought it would yield useful results, we could do a pretty good number on their economy (the US is both the leading consumer of petroleum _and_ the largest producer that's not an OPEC member, so we have or at least can have a very significant influence on the price of crude oil, if we are willing to suffer some domestic displeasure over it and take a few political hits in the UN), but I would not expect them to even think about relenting based on that. Indeed, it would be quite out of character for them to do so. Plus it would also hurt Iraq, which right now would be significantly counterproductive.
Whether there _is_ anything that can be done (about the state-religion problem in the Middle East), that would actually be effective, is an interesting question. I tend to think that there isn't, and the church in Arabia will simply have to continue as it is doing (there and in most of the Middle East), meeting underground and regularly losing members to the unsafe levels of persecution. I don't like that, but I don't see any way to fix it.