...is that it provides people with a really strong incentive not to sideswipe you, since all that energy would be dumped into your car when you hit the panel. I am sure the pyrotechnics would be quite pretty.
No, I was referring to what my grandparents used to have to do in the spring if they hadn't been able to set aside enough food the previous year. That's right, literally, eat grass because it's better than having an empty stomach, even though it has no nutritional value. We imagine that we are safe from such things in these modern times, but it was only a few generations ago when this was commonplace. You have to get a fair way up Maslow's hierarchy before you have the wherewithal to care about the NSA, unfortunately. Keep the people poor, and they will be too busy keeping their heads above water to challenge you.
...has got us a wee bit distracted? I mean, the good news is that after our currency tanks, the NSA won't be able to afford their spy center in Utah and their $60 billion budget, but the bad news is that we'll all be eating grass. So it's a bit hard to get exercised over something as trivial as whether somebody in Utah is reading our email.
Um. How is that different from a grocer card? The bribe is different—fuel discounts rather than food discounts—but the effect is the same: they track your purchases.
More likely the shelf will urge you to get the king size instead of the regular. What makes you think the advertisers will take your interests to heart?
I've actually found that change tracking in Word is very easy to use—it's one of Word's better features. Revision control software typically falls down because it does line-by-line diffs rather than word-by-word diffs, and the diffs and their annotation can't be kept together easily. In principle revision control tools ought to totally rock for this kind of work, but in practice the UI isn't there except for übergeeks, and even for us it's really not all that convenient if the changes are extensive and need to be reviewed one by one.
The situation in publishing is very different than what you're imagining. Word is just how the text gets edited up to the point where page production starts. Then the whole thing is converted to InDesign or QuarkExpress. The reason to use Word is actually just because it's convenient and supports change tracking and reviewing, so it's convenient for communicating copy edits and dev edits to the author, and allows the author to accept or reject changes proposed by the copy editor.
What would be better would be a common document format that is used by the tool authors use, the tool copy editors use (probably the same tool) and the tool designers use. The designers would simply style the text for a specific page layout, which avoids the issues you're talking about. Significant edits after layout would still break the layout, but that's something the designers have to deal with during the final edit of the page proofs anyway.
The problem is that neither Microsoft nor Adobe is at all interested in an open format for their tools, for reasons Stross explains pretty well in his article. And since there is no competing tool that _does_ provide this functionality, the situation persists. What Charlie is complaining about now is what I was complaining about in 1997 when I co-wrote the DHCP Handbook. I find it amazing that nobody has successfully broken this deadlock, despite all the changes in the publishing industry since 1997 (it was actually old news even in 1997).
Anyway, the reason I mention HTML as a good format is that if the tools supported it, it could literally carry through all the way from the author to the final electronic book. Any shared format would work; HTML just happens to be insanely popular and widely used, which is what makes it (IMHO) the right choice.
Publishers generally give you a very simple style, using fixed-width fonts. Word is replacing typewritten text, not formatted text. That's what makes it all so sad.
Publishers sometimes will accept camera-ready PDF, but that's a _lot_ of work, and in the age of digital publishing, a complete non-starter, because PDF is more like paper than text. Submitting in MS Word is much easier. It's a royal pain in the ass, especially since the MS Word document is essentially a consumable, and is thrown away as soon as the publisher goes to typesetting. It means that page proof edits have to be done by hand, and that second editions often don't capture all the page proof corrections, because those corrections never go into the word document unless the author does it, but that's also time consuming, because the author has to not only incorporate the page proof edits, but all of the copyedits as well.
The whole thing is a monumental waste of everybody's time—if it were possible to do all the edits to the same document, throughout the life of the book, it would be much more efficient. Style-sheet-oriented HTML is actually a better choice than Word, but nobody uses it because there isn't a good HTML editor that does change control.
I didn't claim that they are equally biased—I claimed that they shared the same quality of being biased. There is no way to compare bias in the sense that you mean, because it isn't a number, or even a vector. The idea that that is the right way to address the problem of poor journalism is a red herring.
Practices like starting from your bias and looking for facts to confirm it, and then writing the story around those facts, are common, and produce garbage. Practices like going and getting someone's take on the story without doing your own careful research, and then finding someone who disagrees with the first person you went to and presenting the story in the context of the disagreement between these two parties, implying that balance is to be found somewhere between their positions, also produce garbage. This is because this reporting is not being done by the reporter, but simply packaged up based on what a few sources have said about their own positions and each others' positions. So it's fairly useless for actually coming to any understanding about the topic.
What I do want is a news source that does actual reporting: asking experts, sure, but then fact-checking what they say. Not pitting the experts against each other, but testing their arguments, doing their best to figure out what's really going on, and then reporting on that, with as much information about how they arrived at their conclusion as possible. Then, even if they are biased, I can correct for that. If the input is garbage, the bias doesn't matter, because when you correct for it, you're still left with garbage.
The BBC is great, but they are just as biased as any news outfit. Their bias tends to be toward a sort of civilized middle-of-the-road establishment view, but it's a mistake to think that that is not a bias.
You could go so far as to say that if a news outlet claims to be free from bias, they probably aren't doing journalism. Because they probably mean that they present "balanced" stories, meaning not neutral, reality-based stories, but rather stories that always present two and only two sides to an issue, even if the only proponent for one side is an obvious idiot or crook, and even when there are four sides with equally valid points to make.
I think that's a bit unfair. I appreciate very much what the Guardian is doing with Snowdon's revelations, and would love to support them. It's too bad that their best user interface is the free web version, and all the editions you'd pay for are less usable. It's a classic case of "why won't you take my money?" I have the same problem with Wired—I'd gladly pay to get access to the web site without ads, but that's not on offer, and I do not want a subscription to their paper version or their horrible iPad edition.
However, in the case of electronic editions, one can subscribe to it just for the sake of doing it, and not actually read that version. This works okay for the Guardian web site, which has a pretty good ad-to-content ratio.
Just because you want neither candidate that could win doesn't mean voting for someone else is the right thing to do, unless you consider both candidates equivalent, which unfortunately I did not. Otherwise what you say would be true, although it would not have been the Libertarian candidate I would have voted for.
Unfortunately, with the current two-party system in the U.S., the only way to change the choice at the presidential level is the long hard slog of getting a bunch of local people of your preferred party elected, and then starting to elect national-level candidates from that party, and finally, if your party gains enough ground to actually be taken seriously at a national level, fielding a presidential candidate. The strategy the Libertarian party and the Green party take of running candidates in the presidential election is self-defeating—if your candidate gets one or two percent of the vote, it's most likely going to sway the election away from the viable candidate you would least have minded winning.
The government has the money to spend on either. But it is only authorized by Congress to do one of the two. If federal employees do what you suggest, they are subject to arrest (yes, arrest, not just firing). This is not something that Obama decided on—it's the law, passed by Congress. If you think it should be handled differently, call your congresscritters.
I'm a little bit surprised to see DD-WRT getting such prominent billing. I've been using OpenWRT very happily for a long time, and had trouble getting DD-WRT to do what I want. It's possible that things have changed since I last investigated, of course.
I'm a bit biased in that I wanted something hackable; I've been able to make packages for OpenWRT and have them work with very little effort, and even been able to debug stuff under gdb on the router. This is probably also possible with DD-WRT, but when I investigated, OpenWRT seemed clearly easier to develop on. Building the router image from source was dead easy; customizing it was easy with "make menuconfig" and building packages within the build tree (with support for the packages in "make menuconfig") was easily done as well.
My point here isn't to say "don't use DD-WRT," because I have nothing bad to say about it; rather it is that it's worth considering OpenWRT as well. Personally I've had a lot of success with it, and recommend it highly as a development router OS.
Right, the problem is that IPsec doesn't really solve the keying problem. The most typical use of IPsec depends on PKI, which is at risk from other NSA attacks. Opportunistic encryption and ssh-style leaps of faith are not without value, but you can't just wave your hands and say "IPsec," any more than you can hand someone who's never baked a five pound bag of flour and some yeast and expect them to produce a loaf of bread.
The fires I'm talking about were gasoline fires, and the car was fully involved—no fire extinguisher you could carry would have helped. I've also experienced electrical fires; if you break the short the smoke stops. Fire extinguisher might help prevent it from starting a gasoline fire, but only breaking the circuit or the battery dying will kill the heat source. The main thing to do in situations like this is get the passenger(s) out and stand back.
In all fairness, the person you're responding to has a point. I once utterly smoked the wiring harness of my Triumph while I was working on it. Not a fun outcome. Of course, there was no need to call the fire department, but I suppose it could have gone rather badly if the tank had gotten hot before I disconnected the battery.
Ha! Yes, this is true. But they also burn in real life. I've seen it happen twice. The heat that comes off of a burning gasoline car is intense even from a couple of lanes away. It's nothing like what's shown in this video. I think the Tesla engineers can pat themselves on the back—it looks like the battery of this car was severely compromised, and still did not dump all its energy at once.
Slashdot Mirror
...is that it provides people with a really strong incentive not to sideswipe you, since all that energy would be dumped into your car when you hit the panel. I am sure the pyrotechnics would be quite pretty.
Har!
No, I was referring to what my grandparents used to have to do in the spring if they hadn't been able to set aside enough food the previous year. That's right, literally, eat grass because it's better than having an empty stomach, even though it has no nutritional value. We imagine that we are safe from such things in these modern times, but it was only a few generations ago when this was commonplace. You have to get a fair way up Maslow's hierarchy before you have the wherewithal to care about the NSA, unfortunately. Keep the people poor, and they will be too busy keeping their heads above water to challenge you.
My point was that if they'd actually defaulted and devalued the currency, this would no longer be an option.
...has got us a wee bit distracted? I mean, the good news is that after our currency tanks, the NSA won't be able to afford their spy center in Utah and their $60 billion budget, but the bad news is that we'll all be eating grass. So it's a bit hard to get exercised over something as trivial as whether somebody in Utah is reading our email.
Um. How is that different from a grocer card? The bribe is different—fuel discounts rather than food discounts—but the effect is the same: they track your purchases.
More likely the shelf will urge you to get the king size instead of the regular. What makes you think the advertisers will take your interests to heart?
I've actually found that change tracking in Word is very easy to use—it's one of Word's better features. Revision control software typically falls down because it does line-by-line diffs rather than word-by-word diffs, and the diffs and their annotation can't be kept together easily. In principle revision control tools ought to totally rock for this kind of work, but in practice the UI isn't there except for übergeeks, and even for us it's really not all that convenient if the changes are extensive and need to be reviewed one by one.
Har! Yes, I'm sure it is.
The situation in publishing is very different than what you're imagining. Word is just how the text gets edited up to the point where page production starts. Then the whole thing is converted to InDesign or QuarkExpress. The reason to use Word is actually just because it's convenient and supports change tracking and reviewing, so it's convenient for communicating copy edits and dev edits to the author, and allows the author to accept or reject changes proposed by the copy editor.
What would be better would be a common document format that is used by the tool authors use, the tool copy editors use (probably the same tool) and the tool designers use. The designers would simply style the text for a specific page layout, which avoids the issues you're talking about. Significant edits after layout would still break the layout, but that's something the designers have to deal with during the final edit of the page proofs anyway.
The problem is that neither Microsoft nor Adobe is at all interested in an open format for their tools, for reasons Stross explains pretty well in his article. And since there is no competing tool that _does_ provide this functionality, the situation persists. What Charlie is complaining about now is what I was complaining about in 1997 when I co-wrote the DHCP Handbook. I find it amazing that nobody has successfully broken this deadlock, despite all the changes in the publishing industry since 1997 (it was actually old news even in 1997).
Anyway, the reason I mention HTML as a good format is that if the tools supported it, it could literally carry through all the way from the author to the final electronic book. Any shared format would work; HTML just happens to be insanely popular and widely used, which is what makes it (IMHO) the right choice.
Publishers generally give you a very simple style, using fixed-width fonts. Word is replacing typewritten text, not formatted text. That's what makes it all so sad.
Publishers sometimes will accept camera-ready PDF, but that's a _lot_ of work, and in the age of digital publishing, a complete non-starter, because PDF is more like paper than text. Submitting in MS Word is much easier. It's a royal pain in the ass, especially since the MS Word document is essentially a consumable, and is thrown away as soon as the publisher goes to typesetting. It means that page proof edits have to be done by hand, and that second editions often don't capture all the page proof corrections, because those corrections never go into the word document unless the author does it, but that's also time consuming, because the author has to not only incorporate the page proof edits, but all of the copyedits as well.
The whole thing is a monumental waste of everybody's time—if it were possible to do all the edits to the same document, throughout the life of the book, it would be much more efficient. Style-sheet-oriented HTML is actually a better choice than Word, but nobody uses it because there isn't a good HTML editor that does change control.
I didn't claim that they are equally biased—I claimed that they shared the same quality of being biased. There is no way to compare bias in the sense that you mean, because it isn't a number, or even a vector. The idea that that is the right way to address the problem of poor journalism is a red herring.
Practices like starting from your bias and looking for facts to confirm it, and then writing the story around those facts, are common, and produce garbage. Practices like going and getting someone's take on the story without doing your own careful research, and then finding someone who disagrees with the first person you went to and presenting the story in the context of the disagreement between these two parties, implying that balance is to be found somewhere between their positions, also produce garbage. This is because this reporting is not being done by the reporter, but simply packaged up based on what a few sources have said about their own positions and each others' positions. So it's fairly useless for actually coming to any understanding about the topic.
What I do want is a news source that does actual reporting: asking experts, sure, but then fact-checking what they say. Not pitting the experts against each other, but testing their arguments, doing their best to figure out what's really going on, and then reporting on that, with as much information about how they arrived at their conclusion as possible. Then, even if they are biased, I can correct for that. If the input is garbage, the bias doesn't matter, because when you correct for it, you're still left with garbage.
The BBC is great, but they are just as biased as any news outfit. Their bias tends to be toward a sort of civilized middle-of-the-road establishment view, but it's a mistake to think that that is not a bias.
You could go so far as to say that if a news outlet claims to be free from bias, they probably aren't doing journalism. Because they probably mean that they present "balanced" stories, meaning not neutral, reality-based stories, but rather stories that always present two and only two sides to an issue, even if the only proponent for one side is an obvious idiot or crook, and even when there are four sides with equally valid points to make.
I think that's a bit unfair. I appreciate very much what the Guardian is doing with Snowdon's revelations, and would love to support them. It's too bad that their best user interface is the free web version, and all the editions you'd pay for are less usable. It's a classic case of "why won't you take my money?" I have the same problem with Wired—I'd gladly pay to get access to the web site without ads, but that's not on offer, and I do not want a subscription to their paper version or their horrible iPad edition.
However, in the case of electronic editions, one can subscribe to it just for the sake of doing it, and not actually read that version. This works okay for the Guardian web site, which has a pretty good ad-to-content ratio.
Just because you want neither candidate that could win doesn't mean voting for someone else is the right thing to do, unless you consider both candidates equivalent, which unfortunately I did not. Otherwise what you say would be true, although it would not have been the Libertarian candidate I would have voted for.
Unfortunately, with the current two-party system in the U.S., the only way to change the choice at the presidential level is the long hard slog of getting a bunch of local people of your preferred party elected, and then starting to elect national-level candidates from that party, and finally, if your party gains enough ground to actually be taken seriously at a national level, fielding a presidential candidate. The strategy the Libertarian party and the Green party take of running candidates in the presidential election is self-defeating—if your candidate gets one or two percent of the vote, it's most likely going to sway the election away from the viable candidate you would least have minded winning.
The mods who rated this funny apparently didn't understand the soul-sucking horror of having only these two to choose from.
The government has the money to spend on either. But it is only authorized by Congress to do one of the two. If federal employees do what you suggest, they are subject to arrest (yes, arrest, not just firing). This is not something that Obama decided on—it's the law, passed by Congress. If you think it should be handled differently, call your congresscritters.
I'm a little bit surprised to see DD-WRT getting such prominent billing. I've been using OpenWRT very happily for a long time, and had trouble getting DD-WRT to do what I want. It's possible that things have changed since I last investigated, of course.
I'm a bit biased in that I wanted something hackable; I've been able to make packages for OpenWRT and have them work with very little effort, and even been able to debug stuff under gdb on the router. This is probably also possible with DD-WRT, but when I investigated, OpenWRT seemed clearly easier to develop on. Building the router image from source was dead easy; customizing it was easy with "make menuconfig" and building packages within the build tree (with support for the packages in "make menuconfig") was easily done as well.
My point here isn't to say "don't use DD-WRT," because I have nothing bad to say about it; rather it is that it's worth considering OpenWRT as well. Personally I've had a lot of success with it, and recommend it highly as a development router OS.
Right, the problem is that IPsec doesn't really solve the keying problem. The most typical use of IPsec depends on PKI, which is at risk from other NSA attacks. Opportunistic encryption and ssh-style leaps of faith are not without value, but you can't just wave your hands and say "IPsec," any more than you can hand someone who's never baked a five pound bag of flour and some yeast and expect them to produce a loaf of bread.
The fires I'm talking about were gasoline fires, and the car was fully involved—no fire extinguisher you could carry would have helped. I've also experienced electrical fires; if you break the short the smoke stops. Fire extinguisher might help prevent it from starting a gasoline fire, but only breaking the circuit or the battery dying will kill the heat source. The main thing to do in situations like this is get the passenger(s) out and stand back.
IPsec isn't that interesting if the keys are all compromised.
In all fairness, the person you're responding to has a point. I once utterly smoked the wiring harness of my Triumph while I was working on it. Not a fun outcome. Of course, there was no need to call the fire department, but I suppose it could have gone rather badly if the tank had gotten hot before I disconnected the battery.
The best part is that they often explode while still airborne!
Ha! Yes, this is true. But they also burn in real life. I've seen it happen twice. The heat that comes off of a burning gasoline car is intense even from a couple of lanes away. It's nothing like what's shown in this video. I think the Tesla engineers can pat themselves on the back—it looks like the battery of this car was severely compromised, and still did not dump all its energy at once.