...in the hope it would be used to monitor what his former girlfriend was doing on her PC.
I wouldn't describe that as a "prank." More like an "attempt at stalking." Rearranging her icons would be a prank. Screen-shotting her emails and bank account info is malicious.
It also seems to not jive with the currently understood mechanics of evolution. DETECTING such a stench would lead to a survival advantage, but actually emitting it is something done after death - so there is no natural selection at work to lead to the unification of a "death scent" to evolve towards.
I don't know any more than you do, but here's a possible scenario: when bugs died, they emitted a slight odor as an accidental part of the decomposition process. Insect X is born with a gene that makes him dislike that odor, so he and his offspring avoid diseased corpses and are slightly less likely to die. But it's not foolproof, because the odor is slight.
Later, one of those insects develops a "be extra stinky when you die" gene. Maybe it means he has more of a certain chemical in his exoskeleton, which bacteria like. It doesn't really help him survive, but it doesn't hurt him either. He has some offspring, and later dies. All his offspring avoid his corpse like crazy, and start doing the same for each other's corpses. Now that whole population is less likely than before to catch disease, and that particular gene keeps getting passed on.
Think of the gene itself as an organism, with the actual insect being just a host. Would those organisms help either other reproduce? I think so.
A few decades ago, Edward O. Wilson proved that ants mark their trails with scent by removing their organs individually and smearing them around. Eventually he found one that would cause them to follow the trail, and would demonstrate his discovery by writing his name in ants.
I heard a recorded lecture where he told this story, and he also mentioned that they discovered the "dead ant" smell that would signal the colony that "this one is dead, go put it on the pile." When they put the scent on a live ant, the other ants would carry it off to the pile, ignoring the fact that it was squirming the whole way there. And until the stinky ant cleaned itself off enough, they would keep putting it back every time it left the pile.
Airlink Ravens are cellular modems with Ethernet jacks. You can attach any kind of antenna you want to it - mount it on the roof if you like. Run the signal you get through a cellular amplifier and that's about as good as you can ask for in the cellular world.
Also - yes, Cradlepoint makes good routers. Some of them can load-balance between two cellular data cards and effectively give you twice the bandwidth. Extra bonus if you're in 4G coverage and 4G-capable cards (which in your case is extremely unlikely, as 4G isn't even in most major cities yet). But again, you have to have signal.
It won't help if there's NO signal, but in weak signal areas, signal boosting equipment can give you better cellular reception.
I work in the cellular industry, and Wilson Electronics' stuff is well-respected.
Disclosure: my company is a dealer. We have been told by carrier engineers that the carrier itself recommends and uses this equipment, though. And notice that I'm not giving you a link to our site.
This kind of equipment is expensive - somewhere around the $600 range - but you can get one setup that will work simultaneously for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (and probably others), because it depends on frequency, not encoding. And of course it's a one-time purchase, not an extra monthly fee.
Well to be honest, morals and ethics are just trivial rules communally agrees upon by a society. We find it unethical, perhaps even immoral, to have sex with a 14 year old. But even our own society less than 200 years ago saw nothing unusual in 40 year old men marrying 14 year old girls.
Your example doesn't prove your point. The age limit varies, but all cultures would say an adult shouldn't have sex with a baby. And if we heard it was "normal" to do so in Country X, we would all say "that society has agreed on something that is, nevertheless, wrong."
You may disagree intellectually, but I'd bet money that your behavior shows you have a sense of absolute morals. If someone purposefully burned down your house, you wouldn't just be upset at the loss, and you wouldn't just observe that society benefits from locking up people who do that. You would feel in your gut that arson is wrong in a way that accidental fires are not - even though the result to you is the same. And anyone in any culture would agree with you.
I agree that it seems funny, but then again, until there were a bunch of people using, for example, Gmail, nobody needed to export. Or to put it another way, you're going to launch a product with X features. If nobody uses it, you'll never add any more. If it becomes popular, you'll keep adding features. The ability to export data isn't an obvious starting feature - on day 1, nobody even HAD any data in Gmail.
The fact that newspaper conglomerates keep harping on about how necessary they are for the proper functioning of democracy means nothing to me without evidence and I'm afraid the only evidence that counts is a failed industry followed by a failed democracy.
Newspaper conglomerates aren't necessary for democracy, but objective journalism is. Let me lay it out for you.
Democracy relies on people voting
To vote well, people need reliable information. (Case in point: how do you even know who's running for Congress, much less who to vote for? You'd better hope you have more sources than the campaigns themselves.)
Reliable information is hard to find. This is especially true if people in power want to hide it.
Therefore, it takes hard work to find reliable information: research, phone calls, travel, relationships with people who know things. You can't do it well if it's a hobby. In other words, it's a full-time job. It's called reporting.
Reporters need to eat. They have to get money from somewhere.
As SatanicPuppy pointed out elsewhere, that money either comes from advertisers or readers/viewers. If it's from advertisers, it tends to influence the news. ("This news report is brought to you by the companies who are lobbying Congress against your interests!") Reader-supported news can be more objective.
Therefore, reader-supported news is important to democracy
Now, notice I said nothing about print vs video vs web vs piping straight to your brain, or profit vs nonprofit. This is just "people collecting and distilling information." And yes, traditional news has plenty of flaws. But it's better than state-run media or random hearsay.
Maybe we don't value good news right now, and won't pay for it. I don't think democracy will collapse overnight, but I do think corruption will grow. Maybe when that comes to light, people will get mad and demand objective news, and be willing to pay someone to gather it. If your way of thinking wins, I guess we'll find out.
If your customer is the advertiser, then you are beholden to the advertiser. If your customer is an individual who pays then you have some independence.
Mod parent up! This is a truth that is too frequently overlooked in Slashdot conversations.
...despite the rise of Firefox, Internet Explorer remains the standard option for inside-the-firewall apps."
Not here. I write my internal web apps to work with any browser, and we've installed Firefox for almost all our employees, because it works better and faster. There is one (very important) third-party app we use that requires IE, and frankly it's the worst app I've ever seen, so I doubt there's a reason for that beyond laziness or incompetence.
IE will probably be the "standard option" for stuff inside the firewall until those apps die, but the ones being written today will likely be browser neutral.
I don't know. Our local email has gone down a few times since I've been here, and this is the first I've heard of Gmail being down.
Also our local email search sucks horribly. I can find a trivial personal message from 4 years ago on Gmail in a fraction of the time I can find suddenly-important work email from six months ago, if I find it at all.
I'm glad you mentioned range voting. I Googled it and found this site: http://rangevoting.org/
This, to me, is the single dumbest thing about our democracy: that our current voting system makes you vote for who you can tolerate and think can win, as opposed to who you actually like.
I encourage everyone to visit the link above to read about a better voting system.
To them I say: Someday, "loose" may be the correct spelling of "lose". Until that future day, you still need to learn the difference because you're wrong.
Alternately, you can keep spelling it that way, and influence enough other people to do likewise, that it becomes accepted.
I will join in the fist-shaking, but it will be irrelevant.
It's just ghetto talk by a bunch of morons who can't speak proper English.
One might say the same thing about American English as opposed to British, but the fact is that America's power in the world is such that our "incorrect" version is at least as influential now as British English is.
Just because some "academic" came along and defined a set of rules for it doesn't magically make it something other than what it is.
The academic argument is that the speakers define the rules by speaking it, and academics merely try to describe them. It is exactly the same process by which every language is created. You don't think anyone sat down and planned out English, do you? It just happened. Dictionaries and grammar books came later.
At one time, French was just backwoods talk by a bunch of morons who couldn't speak proper Latin. But as it grew more and more "improper" by Latin standards, and as "proper" Latin died, and French-speaking people grew in cultural influence and political power, people starting respecting it as a language. Same process with every language that now exists today. And it could happen again with Ebonics or any other dialect. The fact that Ebonics is primarily spoken by poor people with little economic or political power makes it unlikely, but not impossible.
And that is exactly how I will probably get Windows 7 on my wife's next computer. And I will grumble, because it will still take a while to boot and do simple tasks, even though the computer will have hardware I couldn't have dreamed of when I grumbled at my first computer.
And usually, the irregularities are shorter than the regular versions.. "ate", one syllable, "eated", two. The words that get used the most are the ones that get the most irregular.
That's true, and a good point about efficiency. Although it seems it's actually the reverse - the ones that get used the most can STAY irregular (because we hear them enough to remember their oddities), whereas less common words become regular (because their oddities are forgotten). This is a great article on the subject: http://sciencecodex.com/harvard_scientists_predict_the_future_of_the_past_tense. They predict that words like "wed" are next in line for regularization - "we wedded last summer" as opposed to "we wed."
What he created is probably as natural as any real language, perhaps even more since it's shaped around one man's linguistic vision and not centuries of collected oddities that crop up.
I don't doubt that it's good, but by definition a language created by one man, or even a committee, isn't natural.
On the other hand, I certainly agree that the "centuries of collected oddities" can be frustrating. Sometimes I wish we could just all agree to start spelling everything the way it sounds and make all our verbs regular (like eat, eated).
I suggest you go to Columbus, Ga and try to order something more complicated than "number 7 with Coke" from the drive-through.
I suggest you try the same in Germany. Oh, it doesn't work? I guess they don't speak a real language, then.
Also, I already said this in my post: "Yes, anybody who wants to succeed in business needs to be able to speak and write "standard" English (the one used in Universities and businesses) to make a good impression and communicate with people of varying races and backgrounds."
For those dismissing this as paranoia - which it may be, I don't know - it may help to understand that Belarus has suffered considerably from the Chernobyl fallout.
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
For those who haven't studied linguistics, yes, every dialect has its own grammatical rules. Those who speak a dialect learn the rules by example rather than from books - the same way you know (if you're a native English speaker) that "the big red ball" is correct and "the red big ball" is incorrect. Nobody taught you that. Most of the rules of language, in fact, are embedded in your brain before you ever go to school - how else could you talk?
In the same way, dialects like Ebonics have rules that insiders know without learning them from a book. Those people can understand each other, so it's perfectly valid language. And just like say, Spanish evolved from "backwoods" Latin, Ebonics could conceivably become an independent language.
Yes, anybody who wants to succeed in business needs to be able to speak and write "standard" English (the one used in Universities and businesses) to make a good impression and communicate with people of varying races and backgrounds. But there's nothing wrong with using Ebonics, or any other "uneducated" dialect, among friends.
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I'm sick of these malvertisements peddling scareware, crapulizing the comfuser's failurating system. It's just not cromulent.
I wouldn't describe that as a "prank." More like an "attempt at stalking." Rearranging her icons would be a prank. Screen-shotting her emails and bank account info is malicious.
I don't know any more than you do, but here's a possible scenario: when bugs died, they emitted a slight odor as an accidental part of the decomposition process. Insect X is born with a gene that makes him dislike that odor, so he and his offspring avoid diseased corpses and are slightly less likely to die. But it's not foolproof, because the odor is slight.
Later, one of those insects develops a "be extra stinky when you die" gene. Maybe it means he has more of a certain chemical in his exoskeleton, which bacteria like. It doesn't really help him survive, but it doesn't hurt him either. He has some offspring, and later dies. All his offspring avoid his corpse like crazy, and start doing the same for each other's corpses. Now that whole population is less likely than before to catch disease, and that particular gene keeps getting passed on.
Think of the gene itself as an organism, with the actual insect being just a host. Would those organisms help either other reproduce? I think so.
A few decades ago, Edward O. Wilson proved that ants mark their trails with scent by removing their organs individually and smearing them around. Eventually he found one that would cause them to follow the trail, and would demonstrate his discovery by writing his name in ants.
I heard a recorded lecture where he told this story, and he also mentioned that they discovered the "dead ant" smell that would signal the colony that "this one is dead, go put it on the pile." When they put the scent on a live ant, the other ants would carry it off to the pile, ignoring the fact that it was squirming the whole way there. And until the stinky ant cleaned itself off enough, they would keep putting it back every time it left the pile.
Airlink Ravens are cellular modems with Ethernet jacks. You can attach any kind of antenna you want to it - mount it on the roof if you like. Run the signal you get through a cellular amplifier and that's about as good as you can ask for in the cellular world.
Also - yes, Cradlepoint makes good routers. Some of them can load-balance between two cellular data cards and effectively give you twice the bandwidth. Extra bonus if you're in 4G coverage and 4G-capable cards (which in your case is extremely unlikely, as 4G isn't even in most major cities yet). But again, you have to have signal.
It won't help if there's NO signal, but in weak signal areas, signal boosting equipment can give you better cellular reception.
I work in the cellular industry, and Wilson Electronics' stuff is well-respected.
Disclosure: my company is a dealer. We have been told by carrier engineers that the carrier itself recommends and uses this equipment, though. And notice that I'm not giving you a link to our site.
This kind of equipment is expensive - somewhere around the $600 range - but you can get one setup that will work simultaneously for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint (and probably others), because it depends on frequency, not encoding. And of course it's a one-time purchase, not an extra monthly fee.
Your example doesn't prove your point. The age limit varies, but all cultures would say an adult shouldn't have sex with a baby. And if we heard it was "normal" to do so in Country X, we would all say "that society has agreed on something that is, nevertheless, wrong."
You may disagree intellectually, but I'd bet money that your behavior shows you have a sense of absolute morals. If someone purposefully burned down your house, you wouldn't just be upset at the loss, and you wouldn't just observe that society benefits from locking up people who do that. You would feel in your gut that arson is wrong in a way that accidental fires are not - even though the result to you is the same. And anyone in any culture would agree with you.
I agree that it seems funny, but then again, until there were a bunch of people using, for example, Gmail, nobody needed to export. Or to put it another way, you're going to launch a product with X features. If nobody uses it, you'll never add any more. If it becomes popular, you'll keep adding features. The ability to export data isn't an obvious starting feature - on day 1, nobody even HAD any data in Gmail.
Maybe so, but better late than never. Does Hotmail let you export everything? Does Yahoo?
Do they also teach you to suck blood?
Newspaper conglomerates aren't necessary for democracy, but objective journalism is. Let me lay it out for you.
Now, notice I said nothing about print vs video vs web vs piping straight to your brain, or profit vs nonprofit. This is just "people collecting and distilling information." And yes, traditional news has plenty of flaws. But it's better than state-run media or random hearsay.
Maybe we don't value good news right now, and won't pay for it. I don't think democracy will collapse overnight, but I do think corruption will grow. Maybe when that comes to light, people will get mad and demand objective news, and be willing to pay someone to gather it. If your way of thinking wins, I guess we'll find out.
Mod parent up! This is a truth that is too frequently overlooked in Slashdot conversations.
Not here. I write my internal web apps to work with any browser, and we've installed Firefox for almost all our employees, because it works better and faster. There is one (very important) third-party app we use that requires IE, and frankly it's the worst app I've ever seen, so I doubt there's a reason for that beyond laziness or incompetence.
IE will probably be the "standard option" for stuff inside the firewall until those apps die, but the ones being written today will likely be browser neutral.
I don't know. Our local email has gone down a few times since I've been here, and this is the first I've heard of Gmail being down.
Also our local email search sucks horribly. I can find a trivial personal message from 4 years ago on Gmail in a fraction of the time I can find suddenly-important work email from six months ago, if I find it at all.
I'm glad you mentioned range voting. I Googled it and found this site: http://rangevoting.org/
This, to me, is the single dumbest thing about our democracy: that our current voting system makes you vote for who you can tolerate and think can win, as opposed to who you actually like.
I encourage everyone to visit the link above to read about a better voting system.
Alternately, you can keep spelling it that way, and influence enough other people to do likewise, that it becomes accepted.
I will join in the fist-shaking, but it will be irrelevant.
Grammar Nazi says: "When your sentences' contain plural's, the plural's do not need apostrophe's. Apostrophe's are for possesive's and contraction's."
One might say the same thing about American English as opposed to British, but the fact is that America's power in the world is such that our "incorrect" version is at least as influential now as British English is.
Just because some "academic" came along and defined a set of rules for it doesn't magically make it something other than what it is.
The academic argument is that the speakers define the rules by speaking it, and academics merely try to describe them. It is exactly the same process by which every language is created. You don't think anyone sat down and planned out English, do you? It just happened. Dictionaries and grammar books came later.
At one time, French was just backwoods talk by a bunch of morons who couldn't speak proper Latin. But as it grew more and more "improper" by Latin standards, and as "proper" Latin died, and French-speaking people grew in cultural influence and political power, people starting respecting it as a language. Same process with every language that now exists today. And it could happen again with Ebonics or any other dialect. The fact that Ebonics is primarily spoken by poor people with little economic or political power makes it unlikely, but not impossible.
And that is exactly how I will probably get Windows 7 on my wife's next computer. And I will grumble, because it will still take a while to boot and do simple tasks, even though the computer will have hardware I couldn't have dreamed of when I grumbled at my first computer.
That's true, and a good point about efficiency. Although it seems it's actually the reverse - the ones that get used the most can STAY irregular (because we hear them enough to remember their oddities), whereas less common words become regular (because their oddities are forgotten). This is a great article on the subject: http://sciencecodex.com/harvard_scientists_predict_the_future_of_the_past_tense. They predict that words like "wed" are next in line for regularization - "we wedded last summer" as opposed to "we wed."
I don't doubt that it's good, but by definition a language created by one man, or even a committee, isn't natural.
On the other hand, I certainly agree that the "centuries of collected oddities" can be frustrating. Sometimes I wish we could just all agree to start spelling everything the way it sounds and make all our verbs regular (like eat, eated).
I suggest you try the same in Germany. Oh, it doesn't work? I guess they don't speak a real language, then.
Also, I already said this in my post: "Yes, anybody who wants to succeed in business needs to be able to speak and write "standard" English (the one used in Universities and businesses) to make a good impression and communicate with people of varying races and backgrounds."
For those dismissing this as paranoia - which it may be, I don't know - it may help to understand that Belarus has suffered considerably from the Chernobyl fallout.
If I were them, I'd be paranoid, too.
True, but I would argue that Ebonics is a more valid and complete language/dialect, being that it arose naturally.
For those who haven't studied linguistics, yes, every dialect has its own grammatical rules. Those who speak a dialect learn the rules by example rather than from books - the same way you know (if you're a native English speaker) that "the big red ball" is correct and "the red big ball" is incorrect. Nobody taught you that. Most of the rules of language, in fact, are embedded in your brain before you ever go to school - how else could you talk?
In the same way, dialects like Ebonics have rules that insiders know without learning them from a book. Those people can understand each other, so it's perfectly valid language. And just like say, Spanish evolved from "backwoods" Latin, Ebonics could conceivably become an independent language.
Yes, anybody who wants to succeed in business needs to be able to speak and write "standard" English (the one used in Universities and businesses) to make a good impression and communicate with people of varying races and backgrounds. But there's nothing wrong with using Ebonics, or any other "uneducated" dialect, among friends.