This may sound extreme, but I've completely given up on so-called science journalism. Whenever I see anything about my own field in the serious news outlets, I'm appalled about the picture that gets painted: granted, the journalists do a decent job at taking notes and correctly quoting the scientists that they interview, but still the end result is a very skewed picture, a patch work of one anecdote here, one off-the-cuff remark there, and some hand-waving and cloud-shaped drawings yonder.
The worst reporting is when the journalists, directly or indirectly, affirm the old and tired stereotype that science is generally hard and inaccessible, and only god-like geniuses can and would want to do it. But, as with any craft, if you have some basic talent and passion for it, give it ten years and you'll probably be good at it. Oh, and yes, in the popular media there is such a thing as "science" and it's all alike. In (my) reality, even minor subfields differ so much in their approaches, theories, and methodology that it's hard to see any unifying principle, other than "theories come and go; meanwhile, do take your data seriously".
The most acceptable form of science journalism IMHO are popular book-length introductions that are thorough while not assuming any background; very few books meet both criteria. I don't know how a layperson would pick out the good ones from the big pile of crap, though.
but it's not as if the CLI itself has improved dramatically
Don't you think that command-line interfaces have outlived past predictions from around the time when GUIs started to become mainstream? I find having to go back to plain (Bourne) sh or DOS command.com a painful experience, compared with modern shells and CLIs. Readline and editline are terrific, productivity-enhancing tools/libraries. Programmed completion in modern shells is just fabulous. I definitely see dramatic improvements compared with vanilla sh and even old ksh.
The one major feature that's missing from the CLI is the ability to switch between multiple sessions, but thankfully that's made easy thanks to screen, virtual terminals, multiple xterms, and tabbed terminals like the GNOME 2 terminal. Isn't that an area where GUIs have enhanced the CLI?
If I dare to add: Unix is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It has joined the Bleedin' Choir Invisible. This is an X-OS.
Is it just me, or does the press dig around for 'news' in about as diligent a manner as Slashdot?
It's just you.
In related news: Aviation Security Expert Says Outdated Airtraffic Control System Still in Use 24 Months after Better, RADAR-Based System Deployed; Tries to Convince Unaware Public "No Bad Things Will Happen"; Canada Apologizes for Insufficient RADAR Coverage.
is the portrayal of malicious software developers a.k.a. crackers a.k.a "hackers". Anyone remember the computer "nerd" in "The Score"? "Golden Eye"? Just plain embarassing.
Due to whatever cultural factors, certain professions etc. receive a disproportionate amount of skewed media coverage. Be grateful if you are not a gay black jewish lawyer with Italian ancestors. On the other hand, if you're a civil engineer, polymer scientist, or music(ol)ologist, for example, you don't exist, as far as the mainstream media are concerned.
I hate to disappoint you, but no font is ever going to cover all of Unicode. That's not because Unicode is basically open-ended, but because Unicode is (the specification of) a collection of characters and a font is (an implmentation of) a collection of glyphs. And for many writing systems (e.g. the Indic scripts, or Arabic, which I don't see listed on the STIX site), the mapping between a sequence of characters and a sequency of glyphs is a lot more complicated than what can be done by a simple table look-up. So you need Pango or something comparable, and a glyph-inventory that may be much larger than the character-inventory (only think of what would have happened if Hangul had not been treated monolithically in Unicode). STIX is clearly geared towards scientific publications, not towards full coverage of Unicode.
"You'll see a shift from Microsoft to preaching the benefits [of its software], not the theological arguments"
OK, so they finally realized that negative campaigning does not work. The only surprise here is how late that realization came. But if the next thing from MS is warm/fuzzy stories about its own products instead of FUD about Linux and Friends, we're not much better off, if perhaps slightly less annoyed.
Ideally, why would anyone want to make decisions based on MS's own opinion of its software? We need some sound, objective, independent studies of comparative costs and benefits, frequency of incompatible changes, mean time to lack of support, etc. And no, studies sponsored by MS won't give us that.
But some Microsoft executives point out that Linux has yet to face the army of hackers, bent on finding weaknesses, that has assailed its own software and exposed security flaws that have dented Microsoft's reputation for reliability.
What's next? The tobacco industry claiming that recent class action lawsuits have dented its reputation for promoting a healthy lifestyle?
At least those MS executives seem to implicitly acknowledge that open-source OSs do have a reputation for reliability.
Free software has powerful attractions - which Microsoft exploited when it bundled a free internet browser into its operating system to challenge Netscape.
Yet another indication that attempts to distinguish between free-as-in-RMS-has-a-dream and free-as-in-AOL-CDs are completely lost on the mainstream media.
What other Western country is ruled by a powerful religious lobby?
Germany. Well, maybe not so much at the federal level currently, but consider this: the popular right-wing party is called the Christian Democratic Union; you have to declare your religious affiliation to your employer so that if you belong to either of the two major Christian churches the federal government will withhold taxes that go to those fine organizations; also if you're affiliated with those organizations, then religious education is mandatory in public schools, which, by the way, are generously equipped with crosses, but which ban teachers who insist on wearing a head scarf, because that is perceived to be an expression of religious belief that's inappropriate in school.
Granted, there's no unbiased reporting, but am I the only one who's disturbed by the headline of the NYT article (Studios Using Digital Armor to Fight Piracy)? Setting aside the slightly strange metaphor (using armor to fight stuff?), it is mostly the studios' view that DRM is "fighting" "piracy", but this view is adopted without any qualifications and could easily be mistaken as a statement of facts.
Brian Wozny, 52, so liked the idea of watching a Steve McQueen movie without going to a video store that he recently paid $1.99 to download "The Hunter" over Movielink [...] Then he learned [...] that it would disappear from his hard drive 24 hours after he started watching it.
At my local independent video store, I pay $1.50 for DVDs ($1 for VHS) and get to keep it for 48 hours. A 5 minute walk to the video store and back probably takes less time and has more health benefits than waiting for the download of the online movie to finish. Where exactly is the added convenience for the higher price of the online service?
And by the way, a true Steve McQueen fan would not shy away from riding three days on horseback to the nearest video store.
It couldn't hurt to inform us when the spending pays off; could it?
But would you believe it if your government told you "23 terrorist plots foiled this month"? They probably couldn't be more specific than that, and without any details or corroboration, who's to say. I'm all for openness and accountability, but if it's unlikely that one would get these here (there are better areas for this, like public health care), then I can do without monthly statistics that one would have to take on faith.
In Soviet Russia official statistics were made up all the time, and dismissed just as often or more.
if a program only used POSIX libc calls, it is not a derivative work of any C library it uses.
How would you determine that in practice? A standard such as ISO C or the POSIX family defines names of functions and imposes constraints on the behavior of a conforming implementation. Suppose the standard prescribes that function foo() returns zero on success and a non-zero value in case an error occurred. Let's say the Quux library implements foo() in such a way that it returns 17 for certain errors and 42 for certain other errors. Nothing wrong with that, and the Quux library is certified to be standards compliant. Now you write a program that links against the Quux library and calls the library function foo(). If you check for errors using (result != 0) you're fine; but if you check (result == 42), have you then created a derivative work? What if these error codes are a common (but non-standard) extension used by most library implementations of foo()?
In reality, many tools of the GNU system deliberatly violate the POSIX standard (unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT aka POSIX_ME_HARDER is set), and not just on a whim, but for good reasons that Make Sense In Context. If you rely on any of those features in programs you write (sh scripts, C code, etc.), are you thereby creating derivative works?
Sure, you can easily store 150 TB of data per year. But the problem is: how are you going to get anything out of it? You'll need an index, but what would you put in the index if all you have is phonemes? Similarly, you can search for suspicious words, but you can't easily build word-based concordances from just phonemes. So the phoneme-based word spotting technology (which, by the way, is not all that new) is definitely not something that any form of TIA should be based on, if it's supposed to have any practical utility.
Re:Just one more step on the road to TIA
on
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· Score: 4, Interesting
How long before the feds start digitizing all of our telephone conversations and using this technology to google our private conversations?
Let's see, given 5000 billion dial equipment minutes in 2001, we'd have around 150 trillion seconds of conversations. Assuming you could code everything at a bitrate of 8kbps, this would mean roughly 150 terabytes of compressed data for 2001 alone. Presumably the storage would be distributed at the switches where you record the conversations. So the problem is now to compress, transcribe, index, search, decompress, and access 150 terabytes of distributed storage.
And keep in mind that doing a phoneme transcription rather than full-blown speech-to-text is likely to generate a whole lot of nonsense transcriptions, precisely because you don't have any guiding information from the words in the conversation.
While I enjoy Popular Paranoia as much as the next guy, the whole TIA thing does not really get to me. My reaction is mostly: bring it on, if you really think you can convince yourself that it can be done.
Unfortunately, no database checksummer will ever counteract the case when the OS kernel itself is compromised, potentially returning one file when scanned and another when executed.
Not if you execute your md5sum or other checksum program in a trusted environment, e.g., after booting a rescue system from CD/DVD-ROM. If you suspect that your system has been compromised, you probably wouldn't want to run any executables directly on that system.
I was a bit disappointed to read about the potential scenarios for using GPLed libraries on page 24 of this otherwise excellent report. One could easily misread the report as saying: if you develop some code that crucially relies on a GPLed library that you've thus created GPLed software. But that's far from being the case for in-house research or development. If you never release any of your code or binaries (correct me if I'm wrong), you can use supporting GPLed libraries.
People would be less familiar with the design of the bill and be more likely to discount inconsistencies in the design by the fact that it is a different circulation.
Great, then I'll start circulating my newly made Ontario state quarters.
Slashdot Mirror
This may sound extreme, but I've completely given up on so-called science journalism. Whenever I see anything about my own field in the serious news outlets, I'm appalled about the picture that gets painted: granted, the journalists do a decent job at taking notes and correctly quoting the scientists that they interview, but still the end result is a very skewed picture, a patch work of one anecdote here, one off-the-cuff remark there, and some hand-waving and cloud-shaped drawings yonder.
The worst reporting is when the journalists, directly or indirectly, affirm the old and tired stereotype that science is generally hard and inaccessible, and only god-like geniuses can and would want to do it. But, as with any craft, if you have some basic talent and passion for it, give it ten years and you'll probably be good at it. Oh, and yes, in the popular media there is such a thing as "science" and it's all alike. In (my) reality, even minor subfields differ so much in their approaches, theories, and methodology that it's hard to see any unifying principle, other than "theories come and go; meanwhile, do take your data seriously".
The most acceptable form of science journalism IMHO are popular book-length introductions that are thorough while not assuming any background; very few books meet both criteria. I don't know how a layperson would pick out the good ones from the big pile of crap, though.
but it's not as if the CLI itself has improved dramatically
Don't you think that command-line interfaces have outlived past predictions from around the time when GUIs started to become mainstream? I find having to go back to plain (Bourne) sh or DOS command.com a painful experience, compared with modern shells and CLIs. Readline and editline are terrific, productivity-enhancing tools/libraries. Programmed completion in modern shells is just fabulous. I definitely see dramatic improvements compared with vanilla sh and even old ksh.
The one major feature that's missing from the CLI is the ability to switch between multiple sessions, but thankfully that's made easy thanks to screen, virtual terminals, multiple xterms, and tabbed terminals like the GNOME 2 terminal. Isn't that an area where GUIs have enhanced the CLI?
If I dare to add: Unix is no more. It has ceased to be. Bereft of life, it rests in peace. It has joined the Bleedin' Choir Invisible. This is an X-OS.
Is it just me, or does the press dig around for 'news' in about as diligent a manner as Slashdot?
It's just you.
In related news: Aviation Security Expert Says Outdated Airtraffic Control System Still in Use 24 Months after Better, RADAR-Based System Deployed; Tries to Convince Unaware Public "No Bad Things Will Happen"; Canada Apologizes for Insufficient RADAR Coverage.
If Yahoo!(TM) were to make a similar claim, we could point our collective fingers at them for verbing "yahoo" in their own ads.
Nothing wrong with "slashdotting" either. Though there are unpleasant aspects of being slashdotted.
Searched the web for googling. Results 1 - 10 of about 21,700. Search took 0.09 seconds.
Searched the web for googled. Results 1 - 10 of about 12,700. Search took 0.07 seconds.
Searched the web for googles. Results 1 - 10 of about 43,600. Search took 0.05 seconds.
Searched the web for googleing. Results 1 - 10 of about 397. Search took 0.17 seconds.
You are right: most things you learn in school do turn out to be irrelevant for you later in life. But you are totally wrong about which ones.
And you are also right about this one: The teacher who always gets needlessly upset about stuff will in fact die from a heart attack.
is the portrayal of malicious software developers a.k.a. crackers a.k.a "hackers". Anyone remember the computer "nerd" in "The Score"? "Golden Eye"? Just plain embarassing.
Due to whatever cultural factors, certain professions etc. receive a disproportionate amount of skewed media coverage. Be grateful if you are not a gay black jewish lawyer with Italian ancestors. On the other hand, if you're a civil engineer, polymer scientist, or music(ol)ologist, for example, you don't exist, as far as the mainstream media are concerned.
The STIX fonts are going to cover all of Unicode.
I hate to disappoint you, but no font is ever going to cover all of Unicode. That's not because Unicode is basically open-ended, but because Unicode is (the specification of) a collection of characters and a font is (an implmentation of) a collection of glyphs. And for many writing systems (e.g. the Indic scripts, or Arabic, which I don't see listed on the STIX site), the mapping between a sequence of characters and a sequency of glyphs is a lot more complicated than what can be done by a simple table look-up. So you need Pango or something comparable, and a glyph-inventory that may be much larger than the character-inventory (only think of what would have happened if Hangul had not been treated monolithically in Unicode). STIX is clearly geared towards scientific publications, not towards full coverage of Unicode.
"You'll see a shift from Microsoft to preaching the benefits [of its software], not the theological arguments"
OK, so they finally realized that negative campaigning does not work. The only surprise here is how late that realization came. But if the next thing from MS is warm/fuzzy stories about its own products instead of FUD about Linux and Friends, we're not much better off, if perhaps slightly less annoyed.
Ideally, why would anyone want to make decisions based on MS's own opinion of its software? We need some sound, objective, independent studies of comparative costs and benefits, frequency of incompatible changes, mean time to lack of support, etc. And no, studies sponsored by MS won't give us that.
But some Microsoft executives point out that Linux has yet to face the army of hackers, bent on finding weaknesses, that has assailed its own software and exposed security flaws that have dented Microsoft's reputation for reliability.
What's next? The tobacco industry claiming that recent class action lawsuits have dented its reputation for promoting a healthy lifestyle?
At least those MS executives seem to implicitly acknowledge that open-source OSs do have a reputation for reliability.
Free software has powerful attractions - which Microsoft exploited when it bundled a free internet browser into its operating system to challenge Netscape.
Yet another indication that attempts to distinguish between free-as-in-RMS-has-a-dream and free-as-in-AOL-CDs are completely lost on the mainstream media.
What other Western country is ruled by a powerful religious lobby?
Germany. Well, maybe not so much at the federal level currently, but consider this: the popular right-wing party is called the Christian Democratic Union; you have to declare your religious affiliation to your employer so that if you belong to either of the two major Christian churches the federal government will withhold taxes that go to those fine organizations; also if you're affiliated with those organizations, then religious education is mandatory in public schools, which, by the way, are generously equipped with crosses, but which ban teachers who insist on wearing a head scarf, because that is perceived to be an expression of religious belief that's inappropriate in school.
Granted, there's no unbiased reporting, but am I the only one who's disturbed by the headline of the NYT article (Studios Using Digital Armor to Fight Piracy)? Setting aside the slightly strange metaphor (using armor to fight stuff?), it is mostly the studios' view that DRM is "fighting" "piracy", but this view is adopted without any qualifications and could easily be mistaken as a statement of facts.
Brian Wozny, 52, so liked the idea of watching a Steve McQueen movie without going to a video store that he recently paid $1.99 to download "The Hunter" over Movielink [...] Then he learned [...] that it would disappear from his hard drive 24 hours after he started watching it.
At my local independent video store, I pay $1.50 for DVDs ($1 for VHS) and get to keep it for 48 hours. A 5 minute walk to the video store and back probably takes less time and has more health benefits than waiting for the download of the online movie to finish. Where exactly is the added convenience for the higher price of the online service?
And by the way, a true Steve McQueen fan would not shy away from riding three days on horseback to the nearest video store.
It couldn't hurt to inform us when the spending pays off; could it?
But would you believe it if your government told you "23 terrorist plots foiled this month"? They probably couldn't be more specific than that, and without any details or corroboration, who's to say. I'm all for openness and accountability, but if it's unlikely that one would get these here (there are better areas for this, like public health care), then I can do without monthly statistics that one would have to take on faith.
In Soviet Russia official statistics were made up all the time, and dismissed just as often or more.
How would you determine that in practice? A standard such as ISO C or the POSIX family defines names of functions and imposes constraints on the behavior of a conforming implementation. Suppose the standard prescribes that function foo() returns zero on success and a non-zero value in case an error occurred. Let's say the Quux library implements foo() in such a way that it returns 17 for certain errors and 42 for certain other errors. Nothing wrong with that, and the Quux library is certified to be standards compliant. Now you write a program that links against the Quux library and calls the library function foo(). If you check for errors using (result != 0) you're fine; but if you check (result == 42), have you then created a derivative work? What if these error codes are a common (but non-standard) extension used by most library implementations of foo()?
In reality, many tools of the GNU system deliberatly violate the POSIX standard (unless the environment variable POSIXLY_CORRECT aka POSIX_ME_HARDER is set), and not just on a whim, but for good reasons that Make Sense In Context. If you rely on any of those features in programs you write (sh scripts, C code, etc.), are you thereby creating derivative works?
Sure, you can easily store 150 TB of data per year. But the problem is: how are you going to get anything out of it? You'll need an index, but what would you put in the index if all you have is phonemes? Similarly, you can search for suspicious words, but you can't easily build word-based concordances from just phonemes. So the phoneme-based word spotting technology (which, by the way, is not all that new) is definitely not something that any form of TIA should be based on, if it's supposed to have any practical utility.
Let's see, given 5000 billion dial equipment minutes in 2001, we'd have around 150 trillion seconds of conversations. Assuming you could code everything at a bitrate of 8kbps, this would mean roughly 150 terabytes of compressed data for 2001 alone. Presumably the storage would be distributed at the switches where you record the conversations. So the problem is now to compress, transcribe, index, search, decompress, and access 150 terabytes of distributed storage.
And keep in mind that doing a phoneme transcription rather than full-blown speech-to-text is likely to generate a whole lot of nonsense transcriptions, precisely because you don't have any guiding information from the words in the conversation.
While I enjoy Popular Paranoia as much as the next guy, the whole TIA thing does not really get to me. My reaction is mostly: bring it on, if you really think you can convince yourself that it can be done.
of well-known spammers? Like an entire list of snail-mail addresses that someone has harvested? Just curious.
You need to work on your procrastination technique. May I suggest Structured Procrastination?
I was a bit disappointed to read about the potential scenarios for using GPLed libraries on page 24 of this otherwise excellent report. One could easily misread the report as saying: if you develop some code that crucially relies on a GPLed library that you've thus created GPLed software. But that's far from being the case for in-house research or development. If you never release any of your code or binaries (correct me if I'm wrong), you can use supporting GPLed libraries.
One could also use WordsEye and maybe add a speech frontend.
People would be less familiar with the design of the bill and be more likely to discount inconsistencies in the design by the fact that it is a different circulation.
Great, then I'll start circulating my newly made Ontario state quarters.