Actually, he didn't even say that. His comment is consistent with the conjecture that they didn't find anything because they didn't even bother looking.

;-)

That's a nice example of how poorly people often handle reporting of such stories. The setback was to the polio eradication efforts, mostly in Pakistan and Nigeria where polio is still a problem. Smallpox has been eradicated (at least until one of the places that keep preserved sample of that virus manages to screw up and release a sample to the general public ;-).

But the polio part is wrong, too, since the CIA's agents were disguised as medical people providing accinations for hapatitus B. The religious folks in Pakistan and Nigeria apparently couldn't get this right, and turned on medical people providing polio vaxination.

But it's a nice example of how poorly parts of the public (both the religious folks and the people posting here at /.) can't be bothered to even get the easily verified information right. It also illustrates how damaging things like the CIA disguising their agents as medical workers can actually be. When made public, the story was a setback to lots of medical projects, not just for the disease involved in the original story, but for other unrelated diseases. How can people around the world be sure that visiting medical workers aren't actually agents of some nefarious military spy agency with a record of hunting down and killing people? If the CIA can get away with it, how many other such agencies are now working on the same approach?

Maybe, or it might be the other way 'round: Immigrants tend to be the people who were smart enough to get themselves out of a bad social environment where they were born, and moved to another environment where they'd have better access to education and/or better jobs.

Or maybe both are true, and there are multiple processes that produce the widely-recognized "immigrants are smarter" phenomenon.

On a somewhat related track, I've read of a few studies showing that children with multiple "parents" (through whatever processes) tend to turn out smarter, better educated, etc. Or, more generally, variety in their environment tends to turn kids indo adults who seem smarter, more knowledgeable, etc.

How so? I'd think that pulling out into traffic coming from behind (and in the "blind spot" for most cars) is inherently more difficult than pulling out into oncoming traffic that you can clearly see without turning your head or using a rear-view mirror. Both have inherent dangers, but safely entering traffic in a way that requires watching other vehicles coming from both directions seems like the more dangerous.

So do we have statistics dealing with this? I don't think I've ever seen any, and a quick google check doesn't seem to turn up anything at all based on facts.

Also, the laws about this in the US seem to be generally local and quite inconsistent. Is there actually a federal law that deals with this? I've never heard of one, and don't seem to be able to find it. Without a few [citation needed]s, I'd suspect that people are just making rules up based on whatever they might have heard in a driver's ed class years ago. ;-)

Hereabouts (western suburbs of Boston), it's common to see cars parked on "local" streets in pretty much any orientation, and I've never heard of anyone getting ticketed for something so inherently silly. OTOH, as a student in a midwestern university a few of decades back, I do recall my surprise when I actually got a parking ticket for parking on the "wrong side". It was on a very local street that was narrow enough that two cars couldn't pass if there were cars parked on both sides, and I'd parked there temporarily to make it easy to carry stuff from the car into a friend's apartment without interfering with the (minimal) traffic. At the time, I'd never heard of the concept of "parking on the wrong side". On local streets, you parked in the place closest to where you were going, though if you were a nice guy, you might also try to leave as wide a path in the center of the street that you could, so you might park farther away if there was a wide vehicle across from where you preferred to park.

Well, I fired up a new Chrome window and went to maps.google.com. I then looked around for the options/settings/whatever controls. I didn't find them. I googled "google maps settings options controls" (without the quote), which gave 2.76 million hits. The first few looked encouraging, so I looked at them. They all failed to enlighten me on the topic. One did find "Search options", which has a rather sketchy set of checkable items dealing with google searches. There were several that showed me javascript that I could use to control some options, but attempts to learn how to enter the JS into my copy of google maps didn't turn up anything that worked.

So how might we find the controls that will re-enable the missing city/road names that TFA is talking about? (Yes, I tried adding "city road names" to the list, but it didn't turn up much more than complaints about what's now missing. ;-)

It seems that google has not only dialed such things down; it has also hidden the controls so that we don't have to worry our pretty little heads about such arcane things that we can't possibly understand.

And yeah, I expect that if I had only guessed the right keywords, I'd have found exactly what I wanted. Too bad there's no way to ask google what are the right keywords to find something. ;-)

If that's true, then how do you explain the way they've cut way back on the number of street and town names on their maps? You'd expect they'd use the small text size to enable labelling of more things, not fewer.

Methinks it's just a classical case of Dumbing Down, which seems to happen to most successful companies as their management shifts into the usual "sell to the maximum number of people, especially the half of the population who can't read" mode.

So how do we know that he didn't do all the things people are suggesting, cease-and-desist letter, negotiating, etc.? It well could be that he tried to deal reasonably with them, hoping they'd hire him for more work, but they seem to have thumbed their noses at him. We might be reading about the final stage of dealing with a recalcitrant corporate culture, as far as we know. Anyone know more about what might have passed between his discovery of the rather extensive violation of the contract and this lawsuit? There is a somewhat sketchy mention of some sort of negotiation, but TFA doesn't seem to really say much about it.

Nah; it was probably running ITRON. It may well have included a POSIX library, but that wouldn't qualify it as a version of linux, even if some linux code is included there.

I haven't actually bothered to dig up the info, but that's what anyone acquainted with how such things are done in Japan would guess for a situation with serious RT requirements. Maybe it'd be interesting to investigate, to get an idea whether the OS and system libraries might have had anything to do with the failures.

That's not really a very good metaphor. Shit is quite legal in the US and most of the world. The plant nurseries hereabouts are now in full Spring-planting mode, and that includes selling sacks of cattle manure, both raw (dried and ground to a coarse sand) and composted (with the consistency of topsoil). It's fully legal, and good stuff for your garden.

So maybe we should find a more accurate X to use in phrases like "... as X", something that is at least somewhat illegal. ;-)

Ah, but did they make the tools (saws, hammers, nails, etc.) used to build their log cabins? Did they mine and smelt the steel to make those tools? If not, they they still took advantage of the education and labor of earlier people. ;-)

Cynics and accountants. ;-)

If you look into the history of the concept of a "corporation", you'll find that it was developed for exactly this purpose. The idea is that if it's illegal for a person to do something, you can create a corporation consisting of several people, together they do the thing that would be illegal for any of them to do, and if there's a legal challenge, they can just say "Hey, I didn't do it; the corporation did." The legal system can punish the corporation if so desired, but the corporation doesn't pass the punishment along to its employees. This is referred to as "limited liability", and it's the primary reason that corporations were invented. It insulates the corporation's owners from legal liability.

Probably because Venmo is handled by a private corporation (and a flock of banks), and the US Constitution is generally considered by the legal system to apply only to the US government. Corporations can legally do lots of things that the government can't, such as enforce religions, ban unacceptable speech, etc., etc.

There are laws again theft that do apply to corporations, and Venmo may be charged under such laws. But corporations commit thefts like this all the time, and they often get away with it.

(Actually, if Venmo were a government agency, they'd probably drag the suspected terrorist off to a holding cell for a bit of "enhanced interrogation". So maybe the victim should be glad they're only stealing his money. ;-)

C'mon; everyone accepts "nevertheless" and "nevermore" as single words; "nevermind" is an obvious next entry in that particular list.

Of course, the peevers have to object to anything they didn't learn by 5th grade, including some things that have been part of the language for centuries. (Lately, people have been objecting to usages that date back to published works of Shakespeare. ;-)

To veer slightly in an on-topic direction, such usages might be considered simple cases of text compression to minimize the physical resources needed to communicate them. We can expect lots of compression in data sent back by the proposed probes, including text-message-style features in any textual parts of the data. And when published, we'll see the usual objections from the peevers about the probes' failure to use "standard English".

I've known a number of people in their 20s who would qualify as "senile". ;-)