> I remember back in the 2000s writing purely XML websites with stylesheets for display
Awesome! I made a blog using XML+XSLT, back in high school. It was worth it just to see the flabbergasted look on my friends faces when I told them to view the source code of the page, and it was just XML with no visible HTML or CSS[0].
> they want my serial number to let me download it.
Out of curiosity, why is that a problem to you? Granted, it is strange; I went through the process for my TCL Roku who's wifi stopped working (still not fixed, and now a second, 3yo TCL Roku has bricked itself. nice!)
I don't care in principle, but it's not just that. You have to give your serial, you have to boot the TV to the update, which then sends a challenge-response to their servers that must be correctly answered (you use your computer for this, so the TV isn't actually on the internet) for the upgrade to proceed.
I don't know what's in that data. And if I don't know what's in it, I'm not inclined to proceed; you might need my serial number to know if you're giving me the right software, but you don't need challenge/response for that. They sold me a cheap TV in hopes of collecting info on everything I watch, whether via Roku or just screen analysis. No thanks, and I have no interest in making it easier for them to break into my WiFi. I'm sure it would connect itself automatically to an open WiFi.
It's a little paranoid, but they really are out to get us (or at least our data).
Looks like the website has been overwhelmed with spam, and, possibly hacked/exploited [1]. It looks like someone has been able to create directories & upload scripts [2]?
I do bug bounty in my spare time so this was an interesting live find.
Scripts are permitted in html uploads (all content is iframed and served from a separate domain), though I will go through and remove blank directories for now.
I’ll likely add checks for an index.html for any upload and turn off indexing in the future to prevent these.
Spectrum was the first company that came to my mind, too. Last week, my mom recently signed up for spectrum & she bought the traditional TV + Internet + Phone package, when she only needed Internet. I've been putting off calling them since I don't want to deal with talking to anyone.
& yep, it is very easy to upgrade your subscription on spectrum's website but there is no way at all to cancel/downgrade online.
I'm in a similar situation. Distro hopped quite a bit, (OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian).
For 5 years now, I've ran Fedora on an old laptop that resides at my parents house, 5000 KM away from me. In that time I have not once physically been in contact with that server. I've done all updates via ssh, including full system upgrades (e.g. Fedora 32 -> Fedora 33) without any hiccups.
> Maine, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, Idaho, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Oregon
Are the eight states from the title. Though it seems New York should be included since it says "The bumblebee species have declined by 99 percent in New York."
Also noteworthy
> In the Midwest and Southeast, population numbers have dropped by more than 50 percent.
To nobodies surprise, the culprit is pesticides. Interestingly the west's bumblee population isn't listed as being in trouble.
North Dakota is generally considered the mid-west, no? I suppose mid-west is a sort of west, but I tend to think "the west" starts when the Rocky Mountains start; about half-way through Montana.
One common definition is west of the 100th meridian, or about halfway through North Dakota. Montana is firmly in the west, as are the other 3 states mentioned, plus Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and Washington.
Do you have a source pointing at that common definition? I lived a majority of my life in the West US (ID, MT, WA), and have never heard North Dakota referred to as the West.
Maybe it's a Canadian thing? -100W is the border of Manitoba and Alberta?
I've heard it used for bird ecology for sure. The 100th meridian is the general cutoff between eastern bird species and western bird species. I think it holds true in other areas of biology.
I've driven back and forth across it a lot. Obviously it's a gradient and not some magic barrier the great-tailed grackles cannot cross. And we do get western kingbirds a couple hundred miles east as well as western meadowlarks. It's still a handy boundary so that you know more or less what to expect in a given area ecologically.
Where in N. Dakota? I can see that being so for east of Missouri River to the border with Minnesota, but towards the border with Montana the state is decidedly Western in culture and climate.
There are many articles that have found viral audiences throughout the 02000s about how other bee species are on extinction spirals because of the American agriculture industry's lack of regulation. This happening to the bumblebee is not a real surprise and we've definitely seen it coming within the window to act.
The whole idea is bonkers and self-contradictory. If NLP hasn't advanced to understand the context of shorthand dates in old texts in 10,000 years time, I'd say thats a pretty pessimistic view on long term progress. Yet the idea is to add 0s because of a long term view on human progress? Doesn't make sense to me.
Regarding the RFC - check out the publication date.
From my impressions on the Long Now (and I found Deep Time a rather interesting read) the issue is not just sticking a zero on to say "think about the future" but rather that our current culture doesn't think about the future beyond the next news cycle, quarterly report, or election.
I'd contend that The Clock of the Long Now (and the intended level of technology to repair it) and the Rosetta Project are very pessimistic about the future of humanity. ( https://rosettaproject.org/about/ )
> Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
That a several hundred year old grove was planted because the builders, being familiar with wood construction, knew that in a few hundred years that it would need to be repaired and they'd need the materials to do the repair.
> The answer to the question, have new oaks been planted, is probably. Somewhere on the land owned by the New College are oaks that are, or will one day, be worthy of use in the great hall, assuming that they are managed in the same way they were before. It is in this management by the Forester in which lies the point. Ultimately, while the story is perhaps apocryphal, the idea of replacing and managing resources for the future, and the lesson in long term thinking is not.
I had a professor who was very excited about their work. Coming from an environmental and ecological point of view with a decent amount of idealism, I thought the whole thing was a little pie-in-the-sky wackadoodle. I feel like they do have some projects that made some sense and had some promise, but I sure can't find them to cite now.
The idea of planning for further out is not a bad one. I'm not sure how a giant clock inside a mountain helps with that.
So here's a question to think about... how do you tell a culture 5000 years from now of an arbitrary technology that the nuclear waste dumps that we have are "bad"?
The Clock of the Long Now is an artifact from thinking about that and other questions.
I'll certainly grant that many times the art or artifact that comes from that idea may become more visible than the idea itself... but for people who are inspired by the artifact and go on to disover the idea behind it, it can be, well, inspirational - and a way of doing something today that will have repercussions centuries and millennia from now.
I've read an article about the project that's in the works to discourage future humans from digging up nuclear waste. It's a heck of a conundrum. Not that we shouldn't try, but I've got the feeling that no matter how we go about indicating that these sites are dangerous and that there is nothing to be gained by digging there, it's almost human nature to dig it back up. A primitive culture is probably the only kind that would heed the warnings laid down. Can you imagine modern humans stumbling upon something like the site that's being proposed? The only thing that might stop us before it's too late is if someone was smart enough to bring a Geiger counter.
It's obviously a place that the people who built it didn't want dug up. Just like all the ancient places that the people who built them didn't want dug up. Like the pyramids. We knew they were supposed to be dangerous and cursed and booby-trapped and whatnot. Didn't stop modern humans for a second.
I do really like the thought process, and again, I really want this to be a neat organization pushing people to think long-term. Unfortunately, when every project has the vast majority of people scratching their heads and trying to figure out what kind of drugs these folks are on, they're not really accomplishing much on that front.
> Human civilization has evolved to the point at which we have begun consciously sending messages into the far future. How should we communicate who we are, what we know, to asyet-unmet intelligent beings elsewhere in both time and space? Will they be able to decipher what we say? And what information will we leave to Earth's occupants a million years hence? How can we address an unknown destiny in which human culture itself may no longer exist?
> Combining the logical rigor of a scientist with the lyrical beauty of a novelist, Gregory Benford explores these and other fascinating questions in a provocative analysis of humanity's attempts to make its culture immortal, to cross the immense gulf that such deep-time messages must span in order to be understood. In clear, crisp language, he confronts our growing influence on events hundreds of thousands of years into the future, and explores the possible "messages" we may transmit to our distant descendants in the language of the planet itself -- from nuclear waste to global warming to the extinction of species.
So 10,000 years ago is approximately the start of the agricultural revolution. So the start of cities and I believe I can get away with saying the beginning of modern civilization. So 8000 years in the future is when they expect to encounter these issues with 4-digit dates. 8000 years in the past, no one had invented the alphabet. Someone double check me, but I believe that's before proto-Indo-European is believed to have developed. So the language that became the languages that became the languages that we speak today in Europe and various parts of the world isn't believed to have become distinct from its own progenitor yet.
It just seems kind of cocky to think that we can forsee what sorts of problems are going to need to be solved in the year 10k. At least as far as technology is concerned. I can see arguing for a long-term outlook on social issues. Of course we need to be looking well down the road on environmental issues. But technology? They really think that we're going to have a problem with the number of digits in the date in the year 10k? It wasn't even really a problem in 2000.
Thinking about the future is important. I have the feeling they're not literally worried about the number of digits in the date. I'm pretty sure it's just supposed to get you thinking. But nothing they're doing makes logical sense. Yes we should be thinking about the future, but trying to shoehorn it into our modern framework is misguided in my opinion. The idea itself isn't bad, but I'm not sure they actually understand how to use it constructively.
I haven't read much about this group in 10 years. If someone has more recent experience with the concepts, please let me know where I'm wrong here. I honestly want this to be a useful group, but nothing I've seen them do actually helps accomplish anything useful.
An aside, but Y100K-limited fixed-length years are dumb. They don’t fix a Y10K problem, because untruncated variable-length years don’t have a Y10K problem. The Y2K problem was caused by truncated 2-digit years with an assumed two-digit prefix, and the problems when the assumed prefix became an incorrect assumption.
Its true that software that only reserves four digits for years becomes a problem in Y10K, but fixing that internal representation problem shouldn't have any effect on presentation, and if it does “5 digits fixed” presentation is a soft indication of the most short-sighted possible solution.
I think that, given current estimates on lifespans and advances in nanotechnology, it's plausible that I'll be around when Y10K happens, and being able to search through my collected writings in a simple, uniform way will be nice. I'm lazy, and would be unlikely to write a script to convert the dates automatically.
I think it is significantly less likely that I'll be around when Y100K hits. I don't particularly care about anything that happens after my death. That's somebody else's problem.
You know how silly this all sounds right? The idea that you need to add 0s in front of comments that already have post dates for context, yet nanotech will make quantum leaps. Those two circles don't square. If the nanotech proposition comes to fruition, you won't need 0s in front of dates for old texts to be properly contextualized.. You'll have NLP tech so advanced that adding 0s will look like you were rubbing sticks together.
On the broader subject of the 0s, it's ironic that they are added for reasons of long-term optimism. Because if NLP hasn't advanced to understand the context of shorthand dates in old texts in 10,000 years time, I'd say thats a pretty pessimistic view on long term progress.
The computing device I use most right now is twenty years old, and powered off of two double-A batteries. It serves all of my non-entertainment needs, and I will never need anything more for essential use. It is fully-programmable, and works fine. If I go a thousand years in the future, I want my thrift-store Palm Pilot to continue working. Some people drive old cars, I like old PDAs.
Natural language processing is a joke of a field, and I don't see any future in which I will run a natural language processor that works on my old computers and takes all information and reformats it in a way that makes it most aesthetically pleasing to me. As a result, my only option is to write in a way that aesthetically pleases me and allows me to get away with the least amount of future effort. Rather than dedicate hours of my life to reformatting old text, I'll just write it correctly now.
We don't need to put 0s in front of dates before 1000. Why do we need to do it for dates before 10000? Any date after that will have at least 5 digits, which distinguishes it from dates before then, which only have four digits.
There are other bumble bee species in “the west”. that seems likely to be true in other areas.
In the Seattle area there are:
yellow bumble bee
tricolored bumble bee
yellow-faced bumble
Western Bumble Bee
Franklin's bumble bee
Rusty patched bumble bee
I have seen reports that at least some of these species ranges are greatly reduced.
Right. I didn't mean to imply there are no bees here. My question/point was more on it most folks were getting distracted by other species.
I've also heard most bees are effectively invasive, at this point. And now they we have murder hornets... I really don't know what to think we far as actionable things.
Not that I'm arguing for giving up. Or rampant insecticide.
There are a lot of species people call bumblebees. This one particular species, Bombus pensylvanicus, has disappeared from much of its range. You may be seeing insects that are called bumblebees, but not likely the species being talked about in the article. If you do have the knowledge and experience to be certain that you are seeing lots of Bombus pensylvanicus in particular, get in contact with your nearest Fish and Wildlife Service office. That's a big deal.
Quite. Also its way more complicated than that. I'm not an apiarist per se but I am interested in them - an interested amateur if you like.
To me there are roughly three classes of bee: There are honey bees, which are the ones that are farmed by humans ie domesticated. They live in colonies of around 50,000 in mostly man made hives. There are wild bees that naturally form colonies. Bumblebees for example, live in colonies of around 20 to 2000 individuals. Finally we have the solitary bees. These do not form colonies at all.
What is happening is that various species of really useful insects are being wiped out. This isn't just in the US but everywhere.
Is this type of comment helpfully, generally? Ancedotes are typically ignores because they don't show the full picture. If we have verifiable evidence of a staggering decline in population of a given species, "yeah well I've seen plenty of 'em!" doesn't seem particularly useful - to the larger discussion, toward any sort of objective "truth," or really... anything.
Anecdotes can be useful in aggregate, where they can validate or give reason to question a claim. There is a lot of sloppy science and reporting on environmental subjects like these - look at the stuff about feral cats being a danger to songbirds estimating annual predation levels higher than the regional songbird population.
So even though you have no way of knowing if the species of bee this person is seeing is the same one in the article, you find the information valuable?
apparently, turkeys have a pretty understandable language. There's a documentary, My Life as a Turkey [1]; he was able to decipher what each call meant (e.g. which squawk meant "snake" and which one meant "eagle"). So, if you were walking with a turkey, and you saw a snake and wanted to warn it about it, you could, in theory, communicate with it.
As a bug bounty hunter, I can attest to having an awful experience at times. The three companies I have worked with @ HackerOne have all taken forever to payout or fix bugs. Currently, I have been waiting 4 months to be paid by a company on HackerOne, for a pretty dang high impact bug that leaves all their customers vulnerable; I checked today, & they still haven't fixed it, let alone paid out.
You also have to be aware of policy changes. I've noticed companies remove language that told how much they'd pay out. Some companies have a mandatory pay out of 7-14 days but they are rare; with everyone else, you just have to hope they pay you, and they do, I guess... whenever they feel like it.
Awesome! I made a blog using XML+XSLT, back in high school. It was worth it just to see the flabbergasted look on my friends faces when I told them to view the source code of the page, and it was just XML with no visible HTML or CSS[0].
[0] https://www.w3schools.com/xml/simplexsl.xml - example XML+XSLT page from w3schools