Sigh. A lot of the opposition to evolution isn't just to drag in the religious-conservative voters, it's to get them used to distrusting science. The "Don't trust Climate Change Science" is the real payload, because there are a lot of companies that don't want the government regulating their industries, and they'd rather have idiocracy.
Depends on whether "dark matter" counts as an element. They used to say that the most common elements were "hydrogen and stupidity", so maybe that's what dark matter's made of?
Meanwhile, if we're going to use plant-based fuels instead of oil-based, it ought to be hemp. Not because it's any more efficient or the rest of that tree-hugging hippie crap, it's just because it'll keep more of the current drivers off the road and on their couch.
I've had the opposite experience - bad male bosses get just as emotional as bad female bosses, and men have been encouraged to be aggressive all their lives so they're more likely to do it inappropriately. Also, in the male-dominated technology jobs I've had, people were more likely to get promoted for their technical skills, regardless of whether they had people-management skills, so there's a bias towards male bosses not being good managers. I've spent about 40% of my career working for female managers, mostly doing consulting and systems engineering for large customers, working with a sales team which 3/4 of the time was led by women.
By now I don't remember what year it happened, but 2002 seems about right. I got a call from the internet deaf relay on a Sunday night on my work cellphone, with somebody who had a business proposition for me. I was in a noisy restaurant so I couldn't really hear the operator, and asked them to call back in the daytime; he called again the next evening. I don't think the guy really understood the concept of time zones, and he certainly didn't know that Memorial Day was a holiday and therefore a really unlikely time to sell my company whatever scam he was pushing.
As RC says, the purple stuff that you got high on was the ditto machine. It was cheaper and easier than a real mimeograph, and good enough for elementary school. Mimeographs used real ink, usually black.
A few years back, a friend of mine wanted to put out a newspaper at Burning Man. It's a fairly hostile environment for computer equipment - playa dust does nasty things to laser printers. She looked around on eBay and was able to find a genuine Gestetner Mimeograph machine, and she used a manual typewriter to cut stencils.
The article comments that he's not the typical fat person who you'd expect to get Type 2 diabetes (and my blood sugar is just fine, thank you very much:-) That's what made it surprising when it showed up - but the article also comments on it being an "N=1" kind of result, so it's still just a well-documented anecdote, not up to being a real theory yet. But it's the kind of thing that now they can do more research about.
The purpose of SEO is to make Google's robots think your website is more interesting than it actually is, so humans who use Google will waste their time reading it instead of some site that would have been more interesting to them. Frankly, I don't care if following their advice costs you a lot of money to implement - if you're hiring them, it's because your site isn't interesting enough to humans to get you the advertising revenue you hoped it would, and if what you're doing is changing the structure rather than improving the content, you're still wasting the time of anybody who reads it, because what you care about is your revenue, not the value you're providing to the readers. Even if they can boost your rankings temporarily, don't be that guy who hires them.
SEOs lie to search engine robots so the robots will lie to humans about how interesting a website is. If Google finds a new way to detect SEO cheating, that means that there are websites which have been getting ranked as more interesting than they really are, so it's perfectly fair to give them lower-ranked results for a while to balance that out, and the fact that they were hiring an SEO to boost their results is good evidence that either they were a pretty uninteresting site to begin with, or that they were dumb enough to hire a liar, and therefore also probably weren't very interesting.
Beyond that, though, it's worth it to everybody if anybody who tried cheating search results gets spanked hard enough not to do it again. Spank the websites so they'll stop hiring SEOs, and spank the SEOs so they'll stop using that method of cheating, and maybe go out of business.
There are two reasons to add content like this - because it's actually interesting content, or because it's statistically similar to interesting content. Getting people all over your company to write content is going to get a lot more variety and currency than having the marketing department (or whoever) write it, but it'll be a lot less focused, and may not be as well written, and it's likely that a year or two from now many of those pages will be out of date with no plan for updating them. If you're doing it to make the site more useful, fine; if you're doing it because Google tends to rate sites highly if they're always adding new content, that's sort of spammy. I certainly run into enough corporate websites that provide lots of content on the current product, but don't keep up the pages on their older hardware, so it's really hard to find good information on the old stuff (which is what's out there in the field.) Random-employee content doesn't always help that, but it's sometimes the best you can get.
Google uses robots to model what websites humans find interesting, so they can deploy the interesting links first. SEOs model what Google's robots are doing so they can lie to the robots and promote their uninteresting site, and have you waste your time reading it instead of some site that would have what you want.
Google's in a constant arms race to figure out how the SEOs are lying to the robots, so they can get the robots to ignore or downrate sites that do that. They've already done a lot to fight link farms, which exploited Google's original key insight (which was that people link to websites they're interested in, so websites that lots of people are interested in will have lots of links to them.)
People use search engines to find interesting sites. Search engines use robots to model what's interesting, because it's not possible to scale using actual humans. "Search Engine Optimization" is telling the humans that your site is more interesting by adapting your site to a model of what the robots are doing, so they'll read your website instead of the one they would have read.
Some people do this by fixing your website so that the robots can easily find it. You can describe how to do it in one or two screens of instructions, but some businesses find it more effective to hire consultants to do it instead of doing it themselves. The consultants who do this don't usually call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "software testers", or occasionally "software engineers who tell your people to stop writing everything in Flash".
Some people do this by making their websites actually more interesting to humans. Consultants who do this don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "editors" or sometimes "web designers" or "Web 2.0 buzzword buzzword buzzword consultants".
Some people do this by adding features to their websites that actually interesting websites use, as opposed to really developing better content. Hey, some people don't have much to say, but sometimes they'll get lucky and a user comment section will be popular.
Some people do this by lying to the robots so they'll lie to the humans. Consultants who do this call themselves SEOs. We call them "scum" or "spammers".
SpeechJammer interferes with your target's ability to speak by playing back their speech with a ~200ms delay, enough to be really distracting. The hack that's described in that article uses a reasonably directional speaker and mike, so it can use less power and mainly bother the speaker. It's still rude, but less dangerous, and doesn't interfere with people you're not aiming at, like the person making the 911 call or using a headset with a good mike so they don't need to yell.)
(Or you could just yell at the person that you think using a cellphone is rude, if you like that sort of thing.)
If they want to charge a buck or so for the labor of digitizing the DVD, burning it onto a new memory stick, handling all the plastic, etc., that's fine. I probably won't use the service, but it's reasonable. On the other hand, if they want to charge me a higher price for a license to view the intellectual property that I've already paid for, no, that's Piracy and I want no part of it:-)
Meanwhile, I've bought DVDs that have some stupid Macrovision copy protection on them, and I can't play them on my Tivo's DVD drive because my TV has a built-in VCR, and something about it triggers the copy protection so the picture keeps dimming in and out. Is there any easy way to get rid of it by ripping it onto my PC and then burning a DVD myself, or does the copy protection slip through that?
I'd be surprised if they sent a tech out to the site rather than testing remotely, but 200ms to anywhere in North America certainly indicates that either there's a problem or you're testing to something that doesn't respond very fast. Usually a high latency indicates that there's a buffer somewhere that's full, either because you're trying to push more traffic through it than it has room for right now (go read Gettys's Bufferbloat paper), or that there's a piece of equipment that's not working right (so "more traffic than it has room for right now" is much different than "more traffic than it's supposed to have room for), or something's misconfigured (like an Ethernet that ended up at 10mbps half-duplex instead of 100 or 1Gig full-duplex.) If there's wifi anywhere in the path, maybe it's getting a low speed connection or interference, so your 10 Mbps DSL or 60 Mbps cable modem is cramming bits toward a 2 Mbps wifi, or you're losing enough packets that you're getting TCP timeouts and retransmission, etc. Or maybe your copper access line is bad - I remember having similar discussions a few decades ago when I could only get 1200 baud instead of 2400 on my modem line, because the phone wire was rubbing against a tree branch.
But if the problem's anywhere upstream from your nearest network box, it usually means that either something's broken (and maybe you're the first person complaining), or there's a capacity planning problem (rare for the wired part of the network - they usually overprovision because it's simpler and cheaper than troubleshooting, but occasionally they'll do load balancing tricks instead), or something's gone weird with routing.
The first question I'd have about high latency numbers is how you're measuring them. Lots of devices are pretty slow about responding to pings and traceroutes. (Big routers, in particular, tend to make that a much lower priority than routing packets or doing other useful work, and the ping response comes from the CPU. while the actual packet routing happens in ASICs.) On the other hand, doing a traceroute to some distant site can let you see a bunch of dubious measurements, and the smallest numbers tell you a lot because they're a ceiling on the latency of everything up to that point. I've also seen throughput measurement tools that think sending 18000-byte pings is a good idea, and they're not only hopelessly broken for measuring throughput, they get really entertaining latency results as well. The quick and dirty test is "ping 8.8.8.8" followed by "traceroute 8.8.8.8", which points you to Google's anycasted DNS servers.
Traceroute also gives you some hints about routing - if you're in San Francisco, and your route to google.com is going by way of New York, something's weird with your ISP's peering. (I've seen that kind of thing happen - the user's ISP in Denver had recently moved, so their upstream link to the Tier 1 the user's headquarters used was down for a couple of months until they got a bigger access line built to the new site, and their ISP's other Tier 1 upstream didn't peer with the first Tier1 in Denver, and the San Francisco peering was overloaded back then so they were getting routed somewhere awkwardly far away.) But even so, it's really hard to burn more than an extra 120ms with bad routing unless you cross an ocean. (That's two extra round-trips across North America, or dancing around Europe; Asian users can occasionally get weird routes.)
The next thing to do is be sure you're really really not running anything else while running your latency tests. Jim Gettys's "Bufferbloat" paper is really insightful, and you need to read it (but don't measure your latency while you're downloading it:-) A typical latency problem is that you're trying to download more bandwidth than something on your access line can support (such as your wifi router), so the device buffers traffic, and what you're really seeing is that bittorrent or big http transfer is filling up your wifi to maximize throughput, which is trashing your latency. Or alternatively, you've got something hogging your upstream, making it difficult for ACKs on downstream traffic to get through.
Either way, making a false claim about owning the intellectual property in order to get money from it (through Google's advertising revenue) is obviously against the law.
On the other hand, there's the question about whether the person who posted the video gets to sue, or only the bird whose song was used in it...
OpenBSD has a fanatical devotion to security, and a rather prickly-looking fish. But other than access to more hardware drivers, why would I want to run DragonFly instead of OpenBSD? Sure, a faster file system is nice, but basically anything these days is a lot faster than SunOS 4.3 (my last serious BSD use), and it sounds like it's friendlier to install. I can see why I might want to run NetBSD occasionally, because I might have a toaster or wristwatch that needs a better OS, but the big attraction of the BSDs for a while, other than licensing, has been OpenBSD's security.
Star Wars wasn't just a standard movie trope, it was everything Lucas could borrow from Joseph Campbell, plus westerns, war movies, space opera, Casablanca, anybody else who's borrowed The Hero's Journey from Campbell, etc., done fairly well.
And when it came out, it was the first movie in a while that had well-defined good guys (Yay!) and bad guys (Boo!), as opposed to a whole string of popular movies that had disgruntled anti-heroes, typically a morally grey gritty cop protagonist taking down some darker grey more corrupt cops or gangsters. But even then, in the movie that I saw, Han shot first, unlike the bowdlerized SW4:ANH.
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Boing-Boing conveniently just posted a pointer to an appropriate cartoon over at The Oatmeal called How to get More Likes on Facebook.
Sigh. A lot of the opposition to evolution isn't just to drag in the religious-conservative voters, it's to get them used to distrusting science. The "Don't trust Climate Change Science" is the real payload, because there are a lot of companies that don't want the government regulating their industries, and they'd rather have idiocracy.
Depends on whether "dark matter" counts as an element. They used to say that the most common elements were "hydrogen and stupidity", so maybe that's what dark matter's made of?
Meanwhile, if we're going to use plant-based fuels instead of oil-based, it ought to be hemp. Not because it's any more efficient or the rest of that tree-hugging hippie crap, it's just because it'll keep more of the current drivers off the road and on their couch.
I don't care if the video was fake and the physics were all wrong, the pilot was clearly having a great time flying, and that made it fun to watch.
I've had the opposite experience - bad male bosses get just as emotional as bad female bosses, and men have been encouraged to be aggressive all their lives so they're more likely to do it inappropriately. Also, in the male-dominated technology jobs I've had, people were more likely to get promoted for their technical skills, regardless of whether they had people-management skills, so there's a bias towards male bosses not being good managers. I've spent about 40% of my career working for female managers, mostly doing consulting and systems engineering for large customers, working with a sales team which 3/4 of the time was led by women.
By now I don't remember what year it happened, but 2002 seems about right. I got a call from the internet deaf relay on a Sunday night on my work cellphone, with somebody who had a business proposition for me. I was in a noisy restaurant so I couldn't really hear the operator, and asked them to call back in the daytime; he called again the next evening. I don't think the guy really understood the concept of time zones, and he certainly didn't know that Memorial Day was a holiday and therefore a really unlikely time to sell my company whatever scam he was pushing.
As RC says, the purple stuff that you got high on was the ditto machine. It was cheaper and easier than a real mimeograph, and good enough for elementary school. Mimeographs used real ink, usually black.
A few years back, a friend of mine wanted to put out a newspaper at Burning Man. It's a fairly hostile environment for computer equipment - playa dust does nasty things to laser printers. She looked around on eBay and was able to find a genuine Gestetner Mimeograph machine, and she used a manual typewriter to cut stencils.
The article comments that he's not the typical fat person who you'd expect to get Type 2 diabetes (and my blood sugar is just fine, thank you very much :-) That's what made it surprising when it showed up - but the article also comments on it being an "N=1" kind of result, so it's still just a well-documented anecdote, not up to being a real theory yet. But it's the kind of thing that now they can do more research about.
The purpose of SEO is to make Google's robots think your website is more interesting than it actually is, so humans who use Google will waste their time reading it instead of some site that would have been more interesting to them. Frankly, I don't care if following their advice costs you a lot of money to implement - if you're hiring them, it's because your site isn't interesting enough to humans to get you the advertising revenue you hoped it would, and if what you're doing is changing the structure rather than improving the content, you're still wasting the time of anybody who reads it, because what you care about is your revenue, not the value you're providing to the readers. Even if they can boost your rankings temporarily, don't be that guy who hires them.
SEOs lie to search engine robots so the robots will lie to humans about how interesting a website is. If Google finds a new way to detect SEO cheating, that means that there are websites which have been getting ranked as more interesting than they really are, so it's perfectly fair to give them lower-ranked results for a while to balance that out, and the fact that they were hiring an SEO to boost their results is good evidence that either they were a pretty uninteresting site to begin with, or that they were dumb enough to hire a liar, and therefore also probably weren't very interesting.
Beyond that, though, it's worth it to everybody if anybody who tried cheating search results gets spanked hard enough not to do it again. Spank the websites so they'll stop hiring SEOs, and spank the SEOs so they'll stop using that method of cheating, and maybe go out of business.
There are two reasons to add content like this - because it's actually interesting content, or because it's statistically similar to interesting content. Getting people all over your company to write content is going to get a lot more variety and currency than having the marketing department (or whoever) write it, but it'll be a lot less focused, and may not be as well written, and it's likely that a year or two from now many of those pages will be out of date with no plan for updating them. If you're doing it to make the site more useful, fine; if you're doing it because Google tends to rate sites highly if they're always adding new content, that's sort of spammy. I certainly run into enough corporate websites that provide lots of content on the current product, but don't keep up the pages on their older hardware, so it's really hard to find good information on the old stuff (which is what's out there in the field.) Random-employee content doesn't always help that, but it's sometimes the best you can get.
Google uses robots to model what websites humans find interesting, so they can deploy the interesting links first. SEOs model what Google's robots are doing so they can lie to the robots and promote their uninteresting site, and have you waste your time reading it instead of some site that would have what you want.
Google's in a constant arms race to figure out how the SEOs are lying to the robots, so they can get the robots to ignore or downrate sites that do that. They've already done a lot to fight link farms, which exploited Google's original key insight (which was that people link to websites they're interested in, so websites that lots of people are interested in will have lots of links to them.)
That's the point of SEO. They want you to look at their web page instead of a more interesting web page, and they don't care if that wastes your time.
People use search engines to find interesting sites. Search engines use robots to model what's interesting, because it's not possible to scale using actual humans. "Search Engine Optimization" is telling the humans that your site is more interesting by adapting your site to a model of what the robots are doing, so they'll read your website instead of the one they would have read.
Given how everything else that Bush left Obama with was a total disaster, no surprise that the White House email was a mess too.
SpeechJammer interferes with your target's ability to speak by playing back their speech with a ~200ms delay, enough to be really distracting. The hack that's described in that article uses a reasonably directional speaker and mike, so it can use less power and mainly bother the speaker. It's still rude, but less dangerous, and doesn't interfere with people you're not aiming at, like the person making the 911 call or using a headset with a good mike so they don't need to yell.)
(Or you could just yell at the person that you think using a cellphone is rude, if you like that sort of thing.)
If they want to charge a buck or so for the labor of digitizing the DVD, burning it onto a new memory stick, handling all the plastic, etc., that's fine. I probably won't use the service, but it's reasonable. On the other hand, if they want to charge me a higher price for a license to view the intellectual property that I've already paid for, no, that's Piracy and I want no part of it :-)
Meanwhile, I've bought DVDs that have some stupid Macrovision copy protection on them, and I can't play them on my Tivo's DVD drive because my TV has a built-in VCR, and something about it triggers the copy protection so the picture keeps dimming in and out. Is there any easy way to get rid of it by ripping it onto my PC and then burning a DVD myself, or does the copy protection slip through that?
I'd be surprised if they sent a tech out to the site rather than testing remotely, but 200ms to anywhere in North America certainly indicates that either there's a problem or you're testing to something that doesn't respond very fast. Usually a high latency indicates that there's a buffer somewhere that's full, either because you're trying to push more traffic through it than it has room for right now (go read Gettys's Bufferbloat paper), or that there's a piece of equipment that's not working right (so "more traffic than it has room for right now" is much different than "more traffic than it's supposed to have room for), or something's misconfigured (like an Ethernet that ended up at 10mbps half-duplex instead of 100 or 1Gig full-duplex.) If there's wifi anywhere in the path, maybe it's getting a low speed connection or interference, so your 10 Mbps DSL or 60 Mbps cable modem is cramming bits toward a 2 Mbps wifi, or you're losing enough packets that you're getting TCP timeouts and retransmission, etc. Or maybe your copper access line is bad - I remember having similar discussions a few decades ago when I could only get 1200 baud instead of 2400 on my modem line, because the phone wire was rubbing against a tree branch.
But if the problem's anywhere upstream from your nearest network box, it usually means that either something's broken (and maybe you're the first person complaining), or there's a capacity planning problem (rare for the wired part of the network - they usually overprovision because it's simpler and cheaper than troubleshooting, but occasionally they'll do load balancing tricks instead), or something's gone weird with routing.
The first question I'd have about high latency numbers is how you're measuring them. Lots of devices are pretty slow about responding to pings and traceroutes. (Big routers, in particular, tend to make that a much lower priority than routing packets or doing other useful work, and the ping response comes from the CPU. while the actual packet routing happens in ASICs.) On the other hand, doing a traceroute to some distant site can let you see a bunch of dubious measurements, and the smallest numbers tell you a lot because they're a ceiling on the latency of everything up to that point. I've also seen throughput measurement tools that think sending 18000-byte pings is a good idea, and they're not only hopelessly broken for measuring throughput, they get really entertaining latency results as well. The quick and dirty test is "ping 8.8.8.8" followed by "traceroute 8.8.8.8", which points you to Google's anycasted DNS servers.
Traceroute also gives you some hints about routing - if you're in San Francisco, and your route to google.com is going by way of New York, something's weird with your ISP's peering. (I've seen that kind of thing happen - the user's ISP in Denver had recently moved, so their upstream link to the Tier 1 the user's headquarters used was down for a couple of months until they got a bigger access line built to the new site, and their ISP's other Tier 1 upstream didn't peer with the first Tier1 in Denver, and the San Francisco peering was overloaded back then so they were getting routed somewhere awkwardly far away.) But even so, it's really hard to burn more than an extra 120ms with bad routing unless you cross an ocean. (That's two extra round-trips across North America, or dancing around Europe; Asian users can occasionally get weird routes.)
The next thing to do is be sure you're really really not running anything else while running your latency tests. Jim Gettys's "Bufferbloat" paper is really insightful, and you need to read it (but don't measure your latency while you're downloading it :-) A typical latency problem is that you're trying to download more bandwidth than something on your access line can support (such as your wifi router), so the device buffers traffic, and what you're really seeing is that bittorrent or big http transfer is filling up your wifi to maximize throughput, which is trashing your latency. Or alternatively, you've got something hogging your upstream, making it difficult for ACKs on downstream traffic to get through.
He's spot on. The other question is how you're measuring the latency - lots of systems place a low priority on responding to pings, for instance.
Either way, making a false claim about owning the intellectual property in order to get money from it (through Google's advertising revenue) is obviously against the law.
On the other hand, there's the question about whether the person who posted the video gets to sue, or only the bird whose song was used in it...
No, these are bold-faced lies!.
OpenBSD has a fanatical devotion to security, and a rather prickly-looking fish. But other than access to more hardware drivers, why would I want to run DragonFly instead of OpenBSD? Sure, a faster file system is nice, but basically anything these days is a lot faster than SunOS 4.3 (my last serious BSD use), and it sounds like it's friendlier to install. I can see why I might want to run NetBSD occasionally, because I might have a toaster or wristwatch that needs a better OS, but the big attraction of the BSDs for a while, other than licensing, has been OpenBSD's security.
But now it's a series of tubes.
Star Wars wasn't just a standard movie trope, it was everything Lucas could borrow from Joseph Campbell, plus westerns, war movies, space opera, Casablanca, anybody else who's borrowed The Hero's Journey from Campbell, etc., done fairly well.
And when it came out, it was the first movie in a while that had well-defined good guys (Yay!) and bad guys (Boo!), as opposed to a whole string of popular movies that had disgruntled anti-heroes, typically a morally grey gritty cop protagonist taking down some darker grey more corrupt cops or gangsters. But even then, in the movie that I saw, Han shot first, unlike the bowdlerized SW4:ANH.