Posts by Grey Bird 67 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Apr 2012
That sounds a lot like users doing weird things with documents than an issue with the word processor. I've seen people do really strange things creating documents. Back in the days of WordPerfect when you could see all the formatting, I'd have a document doing something odd and find out the line had something like "[tab][tab][center tab][tab][tab][space][space][space][tab]actual text you read". which did _crazy_things_ when you were editing that line.
You seem to think that historians only exist to write historical text books. This is not true, it is also not true that historians just crib previous textbooks to do their work. There is this thing called research, which requires going back to original sources, some of which were actually created at the time of the historical events! While admittedly many basic history textbooks seem to exist only to rehash basic events which have been taught for many decades there is much more to history, and if you think that is all it is then o wonder you don't hold it in high regard. Those courses, however, are far from the best that studying history holds and using them to form your complete view of what history is shows a lack of critical thinking. (...and no, I didn't major in history or any other humanities subjects.)
Back in the day, my wife and I bought an eMac from a newly retired librarian. we brought it home and started looking it over and turned the keyboard, which had a clear case, over and discovered what looked like bits of cockroach and dried orange stuff that had probably been orange juice. We ended up disassembling the keyboard and washing all the key caps and the inside of the case.
My problem with this is his statement, "The thing LLMs are worst at detecting is the thing they're designed to do, which is trust text and resources," which is not correct. LLMs are designed at their base to figure out what word comes next based on their training data and prompts. That is their core. What he's saying is what they're hyped to do, that they have proven again and again that they cannot do with reliability because they absolutely do not know what reality is because they don't know anything. They don't "understand" what they're trained on like a human reading the material could. They were designed to pass the Turing test, which they do really well, and that is how people are convinced they understand things. They seem to be able to have conversations and discourse on subjects like a human being, but they don't actually know what they are saying at all. They just are able to use their training data to put words together that makes it seem like they do. So having the data he fed into their training data spat back at him is exactly what they are designed to do as they found those words statistically close together in the combination of their prompts from him and their training data that he input.
Typically, when you refer to aircraft for an aircraft carrier, you're talking planes. There are these other ships called helicopter carriers which carry... helicopters. If an aircraft carrier, which is designed to carry planes, doesn't have any planes to carry but has helicopters on it, then the previous statement would be accurate. Saying there are F35s in Cyprus doesn't change that, unless they are the carrier variant with pilots trained and qualified to take off and land on an aircraft carrier.
I dunno, My Prius and Maverick Hybrids seem to be pretty close to what fueleconomy.gov says they are. Prius is supposed to average 46 mpg & gets 45.4 mpg and the Maverick is supposed to average 37 mpg and so far gets 41.4 mpg. Are you using a different source for your mileage figures?
I don't know whether current models still have it, but my Prius has an easily accessible button to turn off the proximity sensor. It also seems to turn it off if the car isn't driven for a certain number of days, so you have to use the button on the remote to open the door which also re-enables it in that case. If you have manually turned it off, there's a slot to insert the remote to enable starting the car with the push-button. So this engineering/security problem has been solved before, more than 15 years ago.
I don't think they consider the releases from shattered batteries to be more toxic to Joshua trees and agave than nuclear fallout. I believe it's more that releasing garbage into the air isn't considered acceptable now, while it was when nuclear testing was still done. Not that it should have been; people are still dealing with health issues from the nuclear testing.
That reminds me when, back in the day, I copied a CD to my PC that a co-worker couldn't get to work on theirs. I had autorun turned off, so the software Sony had on the disc didn't install on my PC and the copy was easy. This was shortly before the Sony BMG rootkit scandal became public.
One of the thing I've done over the years is write procedures, primarily for equipment operation. At one place I worked, there was a group of people that were supposed to review the procedures, give feedback on them and approve them. Some people were notorious for letting them sit on their desk for months, so management fixed that with procedure review and approval meetings. The procedures were still sent out for review as before, and after all feedback received was incorporated as appropriate, they would be put on a meeting agenda where everyone needed to sign for approval would attend. That fixed the problem previously mentioned, as at the meeting they would have to either give feedback or indicate they would sign it. However there was this one guy who would send feedback, but hold some back so he could present it at the meeting. He did this every single time he was required to approve a procedure, which guaranteed it would take 2 meetings for any procedure where he was involved.
My credit union created a problem when they changed how to access online monthly statements, which were PDFs. They apparently had a separate server run by a different company that was hosting the documents and it was supposed to pass the credentials and open another window. The first time I tried to access my statement after they did this, I got a new tab in the browser but nothing in it. I tried logging out and back in, clearing the cookies. Made sure that site was allowed popups. Nothing worked. Then I tried another browser and it worked. It turned out whoever had designed it had only made it work for Safari on the Mac and Internet Explorer on Windows and no other browser worked. After a few months, they got it working for Chrome and much later for Firefox. Then years later, I was changing my ISP and so was changing email address for everything since I'd used the one supplied by the ISP I was leaving for everything important. A few places I just couldn't get them to accept the new email. The credit union was one; I'd changed the email address in the settings, but it kept sending the monthly emails that new statements were available to the old one. I even went in and tried to get them to fix it and they couldn't figure it out. I eventually accidentally figured it out when getting statements and saw something on that page that seemed to indicate you could email if there were issues. Apparently, when the credit union first set things up with this other company, they gave them account holders emails and that company kept them separately in a profile that could only be changed while accessing the statements or other online forms because there wasn't an independent login.
You are falling into the paradox of Tolerance. Basically, giving tolerance to the intolerant actually leads to more intolerance. History has shown this to be the case, and we actually need to not tolerate those who promote intolerance as this woman did. While there does need to be a certain amount of tolerance to those who promote intolerance, there needs to be a limit and the courts apparently agreed that she crossed that limit.
The architect that designed the building I work in is one of those. First, he made the building curved, like 2 bananas back to back. So nothing is square. There's a room that is occupied 24/7/365. The bathrooms are on the other side of the building in the other banana, and it didn't have a lunch room to prepare food. There's a three story atrium with walkways on the 2nd and 3rd stories with bridges to cross from side to side and a glass ceiling with an overhang from the roof on one side that drops filth onto the glass ceiling. Oh, it also has big can lights mounted in the floor that have never been used because they would blind anyone walking there. Those can lights were also installed outside in the courtyard to light trees and bushes and flags. I think you can see where this is going... Yes, there have been issues with water leaking into the some of the light fixtures outside and filling the can until the circuit shorts out for all the outside lights. Apparently the architect didn't think about installing some kind of drainage system under the lights so any water would flow away instead of collecting. There is more, but those are the highlights.
For a long time, my dad used a TUI editor called See that came with a C compiler he bought. It didn't have mouse support, but did allow you to have 2 files opened simultaneously and easily switch between them for copy paste or whatever. I remember him still using it under NT4, but don't remember whether he used it after that or not. Having used editors under CP/M and all earlier versions of DOS, he had a lot of TUI editor experience to compare it with and it was pretty slick.
When I was in, the USN had 6 hydrofoil boats. When I asked one of the crew how fast they could go, the answer was "That's classified, but they can run circles around US carriers going at full bell." So, fast. And since they're up on foils, the speed isn't limited by hull length the same way as described earlier in the thread.
On summer break while in college, I worked for a company that made filter tow for cigarette filters. Specifically, I worked for their customer support group which had 1 of each machine their customers had to make the actual filters in a room. Sometime before I worked there, a salesman had sold them a strain gauge so they could measure from the elevated boom when the machine picked up more of the tow due to how it was packed into the box. They had abandoned the equipment, removing the machine part the salesman had installed the strain gauge on from the machine and replacing it with an identical part. They did so because they were getting nonsensical data on the computer, and asked me to determine the problem. I re-installed the part with the strain gauge on it and attached the serial cable to the PC where the associated software was installed. I then turned on the machine and saw the same nonsensical data they had seen. There were spikes in the strain gauge data the weren't associated with actual issues with the filter tow begin pulled over the boom. I looked around the room where some of the other machines were also running. Then I went into their shop and got a heat gun, plugged it in across the room where I could see the computer screen and triggered it. Sure enough, every time I triggered the heat gun there was an associated spike on the screen. I then got on a ladder and removed the electrical tape wrapping the connection from the strain gauge to the cable that went to the computer and saw that the salesman had used unshielded cabling and that the gauges shield connection was attached to nothing, making the cable a really great antenna picking up the AC spikes in the room when the many motors on the various machines started during their cycles of operation. I rewired the equipment using shielded cable readily available in their shop and the problem went away.
I don't know that there are any combinations of LEDs that won't be a problem for some variety of color blindness. (I don't know what kind you have that makes yellow and green LEDs look the same and green traffic lights sometimes look blue. There seems to be a lot of variations of vision among people both in colors they see and how well their night vision is. I can't seem to convince a friend that I can see perfectly fine in light that to him is was too dim.
I have a Prius that had the remove bumper to change headlight instructions. I found a YouTube video that showed removing a fairly small plastic piece behind the headlight gave you _just_ enough clearance to remove the weather cover and then the headlight. ...and without blood loss too!
Formatting with tabs is nonsense? I've been doing that since WordPerfect was the big dog in documents, if not before. (I don't remember for sure that WordStar did that, but I'm pretty sure it did.) I haven't used Open Office or Libre Office for a while, but I thought they did that too.
There's an engineer (named Mark Rober) here in the states that took a different approach when his packages were stolen. He created glitter bomb packages that made the thieves sorry they took the packages as well as capturing it on video. There was not just glitter, but a foul smell sprayed at the thief. He did this for multiple years with improvements each year. The first year video is here https://youtu.be/xoxhDk-hwuo?si=JEVbAApDmyJR5EV3
Your attempt at a joke? aside. All the copies you described are likely authorized copies per copyright law, unless some of them were illegal printings with no compensation to the copyright holder(s). Copyright law does not forbid copying only unauthorized copying, and reselling of authorized copies has long been established as legal.
The news site your talking about didn't talk about it, they gave detailed instructions on how to hack the software which isn't the same thing. Also, the car example is totally bogus, since the DCMA doesn't apply even remotely. The paper example works depending on the software you're using. Some software, like MS Word, can be told to print 2 sided on a single sided printer and it tells you when to turn the paper over and sometimes even what direction.
There are probably legitimate examples of companies suing to stop legitimate disclosures, but there aren't any in your comment and you misunderstood what happened at the Hackaday.com site. They were issued the takedown specifically because they "posted instructions for how to hack [Tektronix'] modules and thereby violate Tektronix’ copyrights" as they detailed in a later posting. The reason hackaday posted the instructions in the first place was because the security of the "key" was astoundingly unsecure and hackaday modified the post to remove the specific instructions while still reporting the actual story of the horrible security snafu that was the key.
Personally, I think they should have something in your profile where you can specify if you have a gaming console and what kind, and if you have a Blu-ray player or just a DVD player and what format you'd like the suggested discs to be if you have a Blu-ray player. It doesn't make sense to me to suggest a bunch of movies in Blu-ray if you don't have one, or to keep suggesting XBox games of you don't have an XBox. I definitely agree with VinceH that suggesting different formats of the same movie as if they were completely unrelated makes no sense, and they should just suggest the movie and let you pick what format after you've evidenced interest.
I realize a lot of you are really into saying that what this person did wasn't stealing, and semantically and legally (at least in the US and apparently in the UK) that would be technically correct. However, You're just nit-picking. What illegal copying and sales/distribution of movies and music does is deprive the legitimate owner of the IP of income, and in this case, making money by selling something that doesn't belong to the seller. To me, even though the guy making and selling the copies didn't deprive the owner of the physical movie he deprived him of money that could have been made from people who wanted to see it and maybe have their own copy to watch when they wanted. That may not technically be stealing, but it's certainly a kissing cousin of stealing.
I don't know about where you are, but here "processed meat" would be things like bologna, hot dogs, and other things where bits and parts are ground up and mashed into something people will eat. So to me, bacon is _not_ processed meat. Smoking, salting, etc. doesn't constitute processing since it just improves the bacon and doesn't dilute it with lesser cuts of the pig.. Neither does just grinding, like hamburger, since it's usually particular cuts like chuck roast that are ground.
Your example of feeding sparrows is bollocks. If you put out food for birds, it isn't going to save any weak birds that would have died naturally. The stronger sparrows are going to get the majority of the food you put out, not the weak ones. If the weak one were going to lose out on food available without you, they're still going to lose out on the food you provide.
As far as "Free market" goes, a large well financed company can afford to waste money on products sometimes. That's actually part of a free market. Of course, a large well financed company with a lousy product can out market a small company with a better product and put them out of business too. That's also a part of free market theory.
I have a gamepad that is articulated in the middle that is great fun to use, and a Trackball Explorer that is really great also. Of course, they're both discontinued with the most recent OS version the game pad can be used with being XP. So maybe they got rid of all their good hardware people and removed their products so they could start fresh! (...and screw it up without interference!!)
Don't forget your electric racket for killing mosquitoes and other insects. Mine is something like this one, but uses D cell bateries: http://www.amazon.com/Garden-Creations-JB5285-Electronic-Zapper/dp/B000EPPFEC/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1385757051&sr=8-6&keywords=electric+racket
Btw, to the author: puffer fish can't poison you unless you eat them. So unless you encounter one trying to suicide by becoming sushi you should be safe. :-)
Apple hasn't ever charged for service packs either. Service packs don't include additional functionality or applications, just fixes to the code. At least that's all I ever got for a Microsoft Service Pack.
Congratulations on having a 9 month old Android with the latest OS. :-) I'm glad you have a phone manufacturer and carrier that update their phones. I sincerely wish All Android manufacturers and carriers would do this, at least for phones capable of the OS, so people would stop going on about it. It would also help Android users to have more secure phones with the latest bug fixes.
I'm not sure what you mean by saying our digestive system is designed to eat meat. Are you trying to say we're carnivores? We aren't, we're omnivores. If we were carnivores we would have a much shorter digestive track and no grinding teeth. Our long digestive track and grinding teeth are specifically designed to get nutrition from fruits and grains. (Yes, grains. Despite what you've said we have evolved to consume grains, hence the teeth we have etc.) We also need proteins, such as meat, to be healthy. You are correct that what we need is a balance of nutrients to be healthy. Meats can be a part of that, but too much meat isn't good for us any more than too many sweets (aka carbohydrates.)
If this experiment works out, it at least would give us a way to create meat that is healthier for us, without all the antibiotics that current methods seem to prefer.
The author of El Reg's article is pointing out how this person seized on a paper done on what is essentially beta software as part of its testing to claim that climate modeling is wrong. Song-You Hong was testing the climate modeling software looking for problems that needed fixing. Anthony Watts of Wattsupwiththat decided that what the paper meant was that this paper proves that climate modeling doesn't work, and some of the commenters here apparently agree with that.
Seriously people, that paper was just saying "hey look, I found a bug in your _Beta_ software." End of story.
