While working on a linguistics minor for my CS degree, I heard a number of versions of the quip that a linguist is someone who knows 100 words in each of 100 different languages. Of course, this should be followed with the observation that the main focus of linguistics is understanding the structures of languages, and vocabulary is interesting only in that it shows relations between languages. This doesn't generally require having a large enough vocabulary to be fluent. Most of the actual linguists I've met are fluent in only a few languages. These are often languages that are radically different from each other, though, since radical differences in how to express something would be interesting to a linguist.

It should be. But history (e.g. the "only sell through registered dealers" laws) says it won't be. It'll be in favor of whoever pays the most bribes to the right officials.

That's already the case in the US (and as I recall, we discussed it here a few years back). US law for some time has required that new auto tires contain an RFID tag. Granted, those can't be read at a distance, but they can be read by sensors under the roadway or in poles next to the street.

It's hard to believe that the purpose of this can be anything but tracking. Yeah, such tags might have other uses, but would any of those uses have resulted in laws mandating the tags?

Well, maybe, and maybe not.

I recall a couple years ago, when I was traveling south on a street in a nearby town, but when I glanced at the GPS gadget, it showed me about a block north of where I was -- and headed north. Traffic was light, so I looked at it frequently, to see what it did, and it showed me continuing north, until my actual location was nearly a mile south of what it showed. Then it decided I'd made a U-turn, and was proceeding south at a rather high speed. Finally, the little You-Are-Here icon reached my actual position, and slowed down to match me. A bit later, I checked its records of that trip, and it showed a max speed somewhat over 250 mph.

So if the police had access to that data, I'd have got a ticket for going about 8 times the legal speed limit. I sorta suspect that most judges would laugh and toss it out. But if it'd been only twice the speed limit, I'd probably have had a large fine to pay.

And note that the position was credible, though it was roughly a mile off. A couple of months ago, however, I noticed that, while my bearing and speed seemed accurate, my GPS position was roughly 100 miles SE of my actual position, which put me maybe 10 or 20 miles east of Cape Cod, driving along in the ocean. It stayed that way for at least 15 minutes, and then suddenly popped over to a local street a few blocks from my actual position.

I've also seen it showing my position as being in north-central Canada, and somewhere in Nevada, when I was actually in the Boston metro area.

So if the police are tracking our GPS position and speed, we have no defense. Yes, maybe the judges will dismiss the tickets that are obviously so badly wrong. But if they're only off by a few miles or mph, we'll all be getting completely bogus tickets that we'll have to pay.

Of course, they may still dismiss them for people who "look right" and "talk right", as they do with claimed drug offenses. ;-)

In my experience, it is still a problem. Some years back, I signed up to run some google ads on a few web sites that I was responsible for, added their code to my pages, and got a few hundred dollars a month for the orgs that I was helping run the sites. After a while, I got a notice from google that the sites were violating some unspecified terms in their TOS, and the money stopped. I sent a good number of emails to various google support addresses, asking for details of the claimed violation. I never heard back from anyone at google. So I removed the ads from the sites.

Presumably the small amount they paid these orgs to run their ads was a small portion of what google got from the advertisers. But this apparently didn't justify wasting their people's time explaining to us what we were doing wrong. The wording in their TOS docs were ambiguous enough that, as a programmer, I couldn't figure out what might be wrong, and I couldn't see any way of testing changes to the code to see if I could turn the contract on and off by changing a site's behavior. If their response time has a quantum of a month, it's difficult to test the effect of changes.

We suspected that their problem with us was that we had a rather low click-through rate. The ads I saw were remarkably irrelevant to the topics of the sites, and no amount of playing with keywords changed this by much. Our keywords did work well with google search to direct people to the sites, but this apparently wasn't good enough to also direct the right ads to the sites. Mostly, I just shrugged, and said "So much for google's vaunted targeting of ads".

But our inability to get any response at all from their support people didn't do much to fix whatever they thought the problems might have been.

Really? Do you have a reference for the research?

If it's true that T.rex is closer to chickens than to pheasants, peafowl, and other Phasianinae, it would mean that the Phasianinae family dates back to before the K-T disaster. This would sorta imply a major reorg of the Therapsids, as well as the entire Aves class.

So it's be interesting to read about the research on this discovery.

Wrong; I noticed the mispelling in the summary, and I noticed the misspeling in the article. And I noticed the comment about it in the short "discussion" below the article. So when I came here, I did a scan for "spell" to see how many people noticed. What, no matches? So I slid the little sliders that control the level of comments visible, all the way to the right -- and I found your comment. Of course, with with a score of 0, it might be missed by a lot of readers. But I didn't have mod points, so I replied instead, to tell you that you were wrong to say "Every single one of you" missed it.

There are probably others, too, but they just shrugged, mumbled something about the poor knowledge of geography in the kids these days, and read on.

(And I do have a general policy of mispeling the word "misspell" during spelling flames, but so far hardly anyone has ever called me on it, so I conclude that it's a futile exercise in meta-humor. ;-)

Very true, but the operators of those have (so far) usually been part of the" cargo". This has ensured that they're interested in their own survival. And the massive flying objects have been sufficiently expensive that corporate bean counters and their bosses actively support serious safety measures (which are mostly successful).

What we're talking about now is the prospect that, when we walk out our door into our yard, we'll find ourselves in the midst of a flock of tiny, computer-controlled flying objects that include bundles of rapidly-whirling blades. These objects will, of course, be trying to deliver all that junk mail that we're finding in our mailbox every day. And they won't know or care about the welfare of those unidentifiable living creatures that are in the way of making their database-ordained deliveries.

It's hard to reassure people about the minimal danger here, especially when there are frequent news reports of those big, expensive flying things crashing into houses or skyscrapers and killing everyone within. The same corporate overlords who can't prevent such incidents will also be the ones sending orders to the databases and onboard chips that control the little thingies with small whirling blades that buzz about without a controlling human mind.

The phrase "What could possibly go wrong?" comes to everyone's mind here. It's gonna take some serious psych research and PR campaigns to overcome this apprehension ...

Well, maybe, but neither the sender nor the recipient knows anything about the various other addresses that have received a copy of the document, plus information on the send/receive times.

It's not clear how any of this could be made secure to either party's satisfaction. If the printer can decode the document and make a legible copy, it can also forward the electronic version of that copy (and/or the decoding keys) to a third party.

It's likely that a portion of the story is something that we also see here on /.: None of them really support anything that might be called a true "discussion". The reason both here and FB and the other "social media" is the approach of having a running string of "latest" topics, which quickly scroll off the bottom and out of sight. If you don't happen to see a thread in the first hour or so, you generally won't ever see it, and won't contribute to it. So, except for a few rabid topics like religion or partisan politics, where a small group can have fun running it out to thousands of rephrasings of each person's personal views, most discussion threads are typically shallow, and peter out at a depth in the single digits.

I've talked to a number of people here who express disappointment at how shallow the /. discussions usually are. They start of hoping to find in-depth analyses that point them to information that they hadn't run across or noticed. But they're disappointed with most of the threads, which only repeat a few things that those familiar with the topic already know, and then the threads just stop.

FB is quite a lot worse this way than /., of course. I've been on it for some years, and I've never noticed a "discussion" that got to depth greater than 3. I'm sure they exist; I've just never seen them. And a lot of my friends are quite well-informed "geeks" who in person can engage in long discussions. Why don't they do this on FB? Well, they may try, but quickly learn that few people ever read, much less reply to, their comments. Over here, we do sometimes get a bit deeper than that, and I've seen a lot of good information here at depth 5 or 6. But still, that's not very deep as discussions go.

I've seen much better (i.e., deeper and more informative) discussions on nearly every mailing list I've been on. If you want actual informative, socially interactive discussions, that's a noticeably better model for a forum's structure.

But the "social media" is primarily just an electronic form of the old "see and be seen" sort of social event. Such things have always been known as shallow and uninformative, although they can be fun if populated by the right crowd.

Or, as some physicists like to argue, we actually live in an 11-dimensional space, but in 8 of them, the universe is only one particle or so thick, so we can usually get away with pretending that we're living in a 3-dimensional world.

(And that's ignoring the time dimension of it all. Lessee; how many of those are there? ;-)

Maybe it's just a case of what the news industry calls "independent verification". Of course, the way it typically works is that the original source X passes copies to friends Y and Z, who slightly paraphrase the wording and send it in to the news organization through different channels. X, Y and Z then all get paid for their work. Governmental information agencies have long understood how this "verification" process works.

And true negatives. Why don't we ever hear those reported? Why is this kept a secret?

(Actually, I did once see a news spoof for a "Good News Only" program. It had a long list of people and places that had no disasters of any sort happening. Somehow the idea has never caught on. ;-)

How so? I didn't see anying that says that. The video just ends suddenly, after the warning not to bump the steering wheel. But there was nothing I could see that said anything went wrong. It seems to be a video showing a perfectly functioning "self-driving car", despite the warning. Did something happen after the end of the video?

Well, I was wondering about that. What happened to him? After the buildup, and the warning not to bump the steering wheel, we see him bump the steering wheel -- and the video just ends. Did it crash? Did it continue down the road? Did it slow to a stop? I don't see any clue, and none of the comments seem to mention this.

Everyone seems to be calling him an idiot, but how do we know that he didn't just continue riding to his destinatiion? What am I missing?