The real problem, which gets far too little discussion, is that Hillary Clinton seems to have set up a system where state department employees (from the "ops" team) would read classified emails on the secure email system, and then type up a summary and send the summary to her personal (non-secure) email system.
In the first e-mail, Clinton curtly instructs Sullivan, "It's a public statement. Just email it." Minutes later, Sullivan responds, "Trust me, I share your exasperation. But until ops converts it to the unclassified email system, there is no physical way for me to email it. I can't even access it."
Naturally, when ops "converted" the emails, they didn't copy over any classification markings, allowing Hillary Clinton to truthfully say she never received any emails marked as classified.
It is partisan spin to use the word "retroactively" to describe these emails being newly marked with classification markings. If the information in the emails was classified, the emails were classified all along; it doesn't matter whether the emails were marked as classified or not... and Hillary Clinton, who is not dumb and is a lawyer, knows this.
This process of "converting" emails from secure to insecure is go-to-prison stuff. It's truly amazing that Hillary Clinton thought she could get away with doing this.
Unless the information in this article is fabricated or otherwise untrue, she is going to be in very big trouble:
That Hillary and her staff at Foggy Bottom were wittingly involved in a scheme to place classified information into ostensibly unclassified emails to reside on Clinton's personal, private server is the belief of every investigator and counterintelligence official I've spoken with recently, and all were at pains to maintain that this misconduct was felonious.
"The FBI will get someone to talk, we always do."
"This was about a lot more than just some classified emails," a senior Capitol Hill staffer told me, "and we'll get to the bottom of it. But we're happy to let the FBI do the heavy lifting for right now."
The Powell's technical bookstore closed, but Powell's opened a replacement called Powell's 2. This was a smaller store with fewer books, but it was right across the street from the "City of Books" main store.
However, Powell's 2 also closed. I guess the technical books are just in the main store now because they no longer list a special location for technical books.
Can't be perfectly measured, but can be estimated by interviewing people and asking questions. (Similarly, before an election, the number of votes for each candidate is unmeasurable; yet the polls accurately predicted that Barack Obama would be elected President.)
Because of the different methods used to collect the data, estimates vary wildly. But all of the estimates agree that most of the time, a weapon is not even fired, let alone someone killed by a defensive gun use.
Maybe you are going for emotional manipulation instead of reason. Is that the case?
So, the only way to handle the issue without having godlike powers is to take all of them.
Can't be done. Impossible. You are dreaming.
As long as we are going to wish for the impossible, I wish that all the people who are willing to hurt others would simply be kind people who don't want to hurt others.
If you want me to believe that you can keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals, first show me a place where junkies are unable to buy crack cocaine. Crack cocaine is not legal for anyone, anywhere... we have Draconian laws about it and those laws are enforced.
And yet the junkies are able to get their fix, week after week. (Most violent criminals who have a gun don't get a new one very often... certainly not every week.)
Thus, our choices as a society: either only criminals will have firearms, or everyone will have firearms. And Gary Kleck's research shows that legal firearms in the hands of ordinary citizens deters a substantial amount of violent crime each year.
I read an essay that I found very moving. It was written by a guy who worked for civil rights for black people in the deep South in the 1950's. He said that he will forever be opposed to any attempt to make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to have guns, or to give the police department authority to decide who may have guns and who may not. Black folks being legally armed prevented an uncountable but nonzero number of lynchings, and he said in some cases the local recruiting station for the KKK was the local police department.
TL;DR If you take away the legal defensive uses of firearms you will increase the amount of violent crime (by preventing some violent crimes from being deterred) and you will not prevent violent crime because criminals will still be armed.
Sure, the link between handguns and violence is obvious.
Handguns can be used to commit violent crimes, but they do not cause crimes. Violent criminals regard a firearm as a necessary tool of their trade, and they will have one.
If you somehow got the magical ability to get rid of all the firearms, people would still kill each other with knives, blunt instruments, and hands and feet. More people are killed by hands and feet each year in the USA than are killed by any weapon in the UK each year.
In the past two decades, the number of firearms in the USA has dramatically increased while at the same time the number of violent crimes has decreased. If guns caused crime, this would not be the case.
So, in the end, you and I want the same thing: as few violent crimes as possible, ideally none. We disagree on how best to achieve that.
I read the Gary Kleck piece and he seems to be pretty biased and actually narcissistic in his presentation.
Hmm, then I apologize for choosing a poor link to use. What I got out of that is "for two decades I have been hearing the same criticisms and none of them are invalid" and I guess what you got from it is "narcissistic".
And the other URLs you gave are obviously from pro-gun sites so I didn't go there.
Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the Kellerman study was published in an obviously anti-gun publication.
Also, Arthur Kellerman has been a member of at least one anti-gun organization. (The latter link is to an obviously pro-gun web site, but it reproduces a letter to the editor published in a medical journal by a doctor. The doctor is an obviously pro-gun doctor, but he is providing evidence that Kellerman is an obviously anti-gun doctor, and I don't know how I would go about finding a completely unbiased source you would accept who has taken the trouble to research Kellerman and report on his membership in anti-gun organizations.)
Finally, here is a book I recommend: it thoroughly covers the statistics around violence and gun ownership. It concludes that cultural factors are much more important in violence than the number of available firearms. The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy
It's scientists trying to deal with an illness and its causes, rather than folks who started with a point and then used Polya's tactics to justify it.
Oh, really? I have provided multiple links to you showing that Kellerman's study was structurally unsound. We cannot put error bars on its conclusions, it had a small sample size, and it only counted defensive uses of a firearm if they resulted in a dead body (which drastically under-counts defensive uses). Even if you believe that it was intended as an unbiased study, its flaws render its results useless.
Also, its predictions have not been borne out in the following two decades. I have provided evidence for you that the number of guns in the USA rose dramatically since the publication of the Kellerman study, while shootings of all kinds (accidental and intentional) declined dramatically. I am not going to claim that the drastic increase in guns caused the decline in shootings; but pretty clearly if a gun is 43 times more likely to hurt you than to be a benefit, the drastic increase in guns should have been correlated with a drastic increase in harm.
Here's a reference that presents these facts. This Economist article has graphs that show firearms deaths declining drastically since the early 1990s at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA dramatically increased. (By the way, the article ends with a sentence saying that the link between guns and violence "is obvious" despite the clear evidence to the contrary presented in the article. I doubt they cherry-picked any data to try to make firearms look less dangerous.)
Finally, if it is unbiased research you want, I recommend you read the Wright/Rossi/Daly book. The Carter administration funded research into gun control, and Wright and Rossi engaged in the research expecting to prove that gun control prevents violence. Their research showed the opposite, and changed their minds on the subject.
The Kellerman study was badly and tendentiously designed.
The worst flaw: that study only counted uses of a firearm that resulted in a dead body. If some guy kicked in the front door of a home, and the woman inside pointed a gun at him and he left, then Kellerman's study would not count that as a "use" of a firearm. Because most defensive uses of a firearm do not result in the weapon being fired, let alone anyone dying, this structurally stacked the deck against defensive gun uses.
That study also lumps in suicides with homicides. I have not seen any honest study that shows that a gun in the home causes an increase in the suicide rate.
The study started with people killed by firearms, which meant there was a 100% chance of a firearm being present, but then guessed whether there was a firearm in the home of a "matching" person. We have no way of knowing how many of the "guesses" were correct, and each case where they guessed wrong would lower their result. We literally cannot put error bars on the result.
Kellerman's own data showed much higher correlations: having an adult in the home who has a previous felony conviction for a violent crime is a much better predictor of the chance of violence.
There are plenty of articles on the flaws in the Kellerman study.
And I just posted links showing that the number of shootings (both accidental and intentional) has dramatically fallen at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA has dramatically risen. If the Kellerman study's conclusions were accurate, the number of shootings should have risen when the number of guns rose so much.
Since the early 90's, the number of intentional shootings has also fallen roughly in half. It fell more quickly than the unintentional numbers but then plateaued. Note that this statistic excludes suicides... properly, IMHO, as I don't believe that guns cause suicide.
And both of these declines are despite the fact that there are more firearms available than ever before. This article has a chart that starts in 1996; it shows that in 1996 there were less than 250 million firearms in the USA, and currently there are over 350 million firearms in the USA. That's over a 40% increase in the number of firearms.
Therefore, the increase in guns must prove that the guns caused the reduction in violence, right? Well, no. Correlation doesn't prove causation.
However, these numbers do show that guns don't magically cause violence. If guns caused violence, then the massive increase in the number of guns should be correlated with an increase of violence rather than a decline.
So: if you "live your life by real numbers", and you want to argue in favor of taking firearms away from the law-abiding, then please provide some statistics that support your plan.
Intel's compilers still use the CPUID instruction to decide whether to emit efficient code or not. Intel has an official notice to this effect. Charmingly, the notice is only available as an image file. I presume this is to make it harder to search for the notice.
I didn't realize that quantum computers were commercially sold now. I wondered about the price; I wasn't able to find out how much this new computer costs. But per Wikipedia, the first model of this computer sold for about $10 million; and I presume that this new and more powerful version costs more. (The press releases say that this thing computes at extremely low temperatures, so it must include an expensive cooling system.)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article says that a lot of famous people were dubious about whether these quantum computers would work. A professor from UC Berkeley predicted that the quantum computer would be about as powerful as a cell phone. This result reported by Google would seem to disprove the criticism.
The Init System "We don't care. It doesn't affect us."
logind Allows KDE to provide user-switching features.
Device Management Allows KDE to have access to your mouse and keyboard without root access and without random applications being able to sniff your keystrokes.
Inhibitor Locks Allows KDE to react to notifications like "the system is about to go down" and delay until a condition is met (example: delay a suspend until the lock screen is displayed and all your desktop windows are hidden behind the lock screen).
timedated and Friends Allows KDE to set time and date without root; allows KDE apps to be notified if time and date gets changed. (KDE currently runs a daemon just to watch for time and date changes, and they would like to get rid of this daemon and simplify their code.)
User Units If KDE takes advantage of the "units" in systemd, then when any part of KDE crashes or hangs, systemd will restart the misbehaving part.
that implies they won't work on *BSD at all. Right?
"Projects like [SystemBSD] bring the interfaces we need to BSD and as it gets more stable we should be able to start distributing features."
So really, choice is being taken away clear across the board. Either that or I'm missing something really big which implies systemd is not a strict dependency.
I encourage you to read the whole article and see what big things you are missing.
I don't know about you, but when I read that article I didn't think "Man those KDE guys are idiots, why would they want any of that." It all makes sense to me.
It's easier for me to believe that SystemD has some merit than to believe that all the Debian core developers are idiots, plus all the Ubuntu developers, and now all the KDE developers and for that matter the Gnome developers.
My biggest concerns with systemd are the monoculture of it all, so projects like UselessD and SystemBSD sound great to me. Force the SystemD guys to document and justify everything, and provide alternatives.
About 70 years ago, E. E. "Doc" Smith wrote a series of books that are wonderful space opera: the "Lensman" series. The space battles just keep escalating throughout the series, getting more over-the-top.
My favorite plot point: they used the principles of a vacuum tube to make a device whose pieces included grids mounted in the asteroid belt, with more in other orbits closer in to the sun. In effect they turned the inner Solar System into one honking big vacuum tube, and created a weapon that could concentrate a significant fraction of the sun's output onto attacking enemy fleets. This was called the "Sunbeam". (Believe it or not, this wasn't the end of the escalation. The battles got even bigger after that.)
When you say "ultimate" vacuum tube, I think that one is pretty hard to top.
P.S. 200-word crossover fan fiction: what would have happened if the Battlestar Galactica reboot show had found Earth, and it was the Earth of the Lensman series?
When I was a teen and read those books, I just enjoyed them, but now I'm thinking that it would take a lot of trust to allow Kimball Kinnison to run around acting as judge, jury, and executioner. As readers of the books, we know that he was vetted as deeply as anyone could be by the Arisians, so he can be trusted with that kind of power; but it would be hard for the ordinary people in the world of the books to trust him that much.
I have stated as fact that the fear of individuals possibly carrying firearms and defending themselves is not a significant factor in the criminal mind.
Okay, I misunderstood your point. Duly noted.
Studies have also shown that criminals are deterred if they think their victims might be armed. See the decline in violent crime after concealed carry of firearms became more common:
Knives happen to have sharp edges, so trying to take one away is less of a winning proposition.
I'd really like some citations to go along with these claims you are making.
Hint, what you are saying here doesn't square with what my self-defense instructors have told me. The best single tool for self-defense is a firearm; a knife has a place in self-defense but it is definitely not the preferred tool.
We actively discourage vigilantism.
You keep phrasing things in weird ways, but if I'm not mistaken, you and I are in agreement on this point: society is currently telling people that they shouldn't do anything when violence occurs, just sit back and let the police handle it.
At which point you bring up a whole lot of inconsistent research that manage to conclude something with a 312.5% margin of error and with extremely poor experimental design, and from a biased source to boot.
Dunno where you get that margin of error. Professor Kleck's book about his research led to him being awarded the Hindelang Award by the American Society of Criminology. I guess they thought his research was okay.
Did you know global warming is bunk, too? Exxon-Mobil published a study. There is no pollution from coal at all.
Still waiting for you to offer any sort of citation to support your propositions. By the way, I hate coal.
You're a retard.
Huh. I think you are not worth my time and this will be my last comment to you.
Perhaps, however, you misunderstood my comment. If a guy with a gun goes into a school or whatever and starts shooting the place up, all the people in that school are his victims IMHO. The ones he shoots are the worst off, of course, but everyone else can be said to be the victims of assault at minimum.
You ascribed a particular motive to the people who don't attack a school shooter: "Nobody stands up to put a stop to it, because they might get shot a few seconds earlier."
So, did I misunderstand you again? Were you not saying that the people who failed to attack the shooter were motivated out of a willingness to watch others die rather than increase their own personal risk?
I explained the role of society in deterrence, and you claim victim-blaming. I specifically said the victim has NO POWER over the situation, and it's the fault of everyone else in the world.
It's possible for "victims" to take a more active role in their own self-defense, and I'm in favor of that. It's also possible for bystanders to take a more active role in the defense of others, and I'm in favor of that too.
I'm less interested in blaming the bystanders for not acting, than in changing society to make it more likely that bystanders will act.
You claim I'm blaming Sally for getting raped by complaining that Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. Are Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill the victim?
Depends on the circumstances. If they watch some brute assault Sally with his bare hands and they do nothing, they aren't any kind of victims, and IMHO they should do something. If, however, the rapist has a buddy who his pointing a gun at all of them to cow them into inaction, then they are victims as well. I would actually prefer that they do something, rather than standing around; obviously the worst victim is Sally in this horrific scenario.
I'll say it again: if some guy with a gun crashes into a school and starts walking around shoo
I consider myself a libertarian, but I am a minarchist and not an anarchist.
I view the proper role of government as enforcing the contracts that people freely enter into, plus defending people from actual harm.
I've read the Utopian visions of anarcho-captialism, where the free market solves all the problems, but I don't believe in it. How do you solve the "free rider problem" with respect to national defense? When someone is just insane and will not cooperate, how does voluntary arbitration resolve a dispute that person has with someone else?
If you want me to believe in the cooperative model of anarchy running as a smooth society, please give me an actual example from history where a country operated as an anarchy and it worked. (I can give you examples of minarchy that in my opinion worked.)
Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.
Citations, please. You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.
There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.
A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.
You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.
I suggest to you that a larger problem is that the majority of people have no idea how to handle a violent situation. The news media, and many of our celebrities, push a meme that ordinary people should never be armed for self-defense, and by extension shouldn't even train for self-defense. The same people who would like to ban all firearms in civilian hands would tell you that people shouldn't fight back against assailants; they should let the police handle the situation. (As the old saying goes, though, "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!" There is no guarantee that the police will arrive in time to save lives.)
If a person is totally untrained, and suddenly face to face with horrible violence, it is unlikely that the person will swiftly and decisively come up with a plan to counter-attack and take out the assailant. I don't blame the victims the way you seem to, but I do wish more people would train in self-defense.
I agree with Larry Correia: our society would achieve a net reduction in violence if more people got trained in the use of weapons for defense, and more people carried concealed firearms.
P.S. I once, in an online discussion, commented that if people shouldn't defend themselves but rather should rely purely on the police to protect them, maybe people shouldn't have fire extinguishers in their homes and should rely purely on the fire department to protect them. A person I was debating agreed with this proposition. I didn't agree with her but I give her props for intellectual consistency.
Once I started using GNOME 2.x I started using Gnome Terminal. I quickly grew to love having a terminal emulator with multiple tabs. I am still using it (well, now it's MATE Terminal) but I also use tmux to have multiple windows per tab.
Each tab is a different computer. Tab 1 is generally the local computer upon which I am working; then tabs 2 through whatever are the various remote machines. I ssh to the remote machine, then run tmux and open as many windows as I need.
tmux is essential so that I can pick up where I left off if anything interrupts my work... with SSH, if your Internet connection glitches, you lose your connection; with tmux you can re-attach to your previous session and continue your work right where you left off.
I have met someone who runs doubly-nested tmux sessions. He binds both Ctrl+A and Ctrl+B as prefixes, and he uses one of them to switch "outer" sessions (which are one per machine) and the other to switch nested terminal windows (multiple windows for working within a machine). I like having the separation of using Alt+1 through Alt+0 to switch machines and then Ctrl+A,1 through Ctrl+A,0 to switch windows on a particular machine. (Besides, I'm a vi user and I actually use Ctrl+B when editing.)
In a previous job I had to work on Windows a lot, so I used Console. I customized its hotkeys so that it works just like Gnome Terminal.
For a while I was daydreaming about a GUI terminal that can use the tmux protocol and have tmux features perfectly integrated into the terminal: use the GUI scrolling thumb to scroll within the tmux history buffer, etc. But these days I'm used to working within tmux and I don't really need the features to be part of the GUI terminal application.
A bonus of being used to the way tmux works: I can still do all the same things when logged in using JuiceSSH on my Android tablet. I buy Bluetooth keyboards that have the control key somewhere sensible so I can type commands and be productive.
There is some sort of sign-up to book the theatre room in advance. And I think most people will have some sort of TV in their apartments, so they would have recourse if the theatre room was booked.
BTW the "hotel room" rooms aren't free; they have a nightly cost. I think the other shared resources are included and just need to be reserved ahead of time.
It's not just any apartment complex. It's specifically designed to provide shared stuff for the benefit of the people staying there.
But I agree with you that it's not unprecedented. I visited a complex in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and it was much like this: small, efficient apartments plus shared amenities.
There is a very nice "home theatre" setup (not exactly home since it's shared in an apartment complex) that could seat about 16 people; a shared kitchen/dining space next to the theatre; on the roof, shared outdoor cooking grills; a yoga studio and space for art; and some kind of gym. There are "hotel room" units that residents can book for their guests. There are a few shared offices, used for people who work at home and sometimes need to meet with clients or consultants. There are storage spaces available for monthly rental, so people who have too much stuff for their small apartments can just walk down the hall to access the stored stuff. I think there is some kind of small clothes washer/dryer in the apartments but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of large ones somewhere for shared use.
Overall I think it is a solid concept. If you want a huge TV screen once a week to watch a football game, you could use the theatre room and probably end up meeting everyone else in the complex who likes football. If you sometimes like to throw a party with lots of guests, again the theatre room with its attached kitchen is the place to do it. Your apartment doesn't need to be big enough to have guests overnight because you can book the "hotel rooms" ahead of time. In short, the apartments can be smaller because of all the shared stuff and it seems to work.
This was built years ago and I doubt it's unique. When I visited it I thought "there will be more like this in the future."
You need to remember that at the time Heinlein wrote that, computers did exist, but not general-purpose stored-program computers. Back then, computers were special-built things that had one purpose, like fire-control computers in the Navy; you couldn't make a fire-control computer do something else by swapping out a program.
All that said, you aren't wrong. Starman Jones is actually a bit clumsy; the computer works the way it's shown in the book because it has to work that way for the story to play out as Heinlein wanted it to. The idea of humans using pencil and paper to quickly compute the numbers to feed into the computer is silly; at a minimum there should have been another special-purpose computer device there to help them with the figuring.
P.S. I also enjoyed Beyond This Horizon where a computer expert in the far future wishes he could build a computer with 4-dimensional cams, since the three-dimensional ones weren't complex enough for the calculations he wanted to perform; and in Methuselah's Children (set in the 22nd Century) the protagonists steal a spaceship that had "one of the new computers with no moving parts".
What I find interesting is that it took a tremendously more advanced technology to render slide rules obsolete.
To make a slide rule, you need to figure out logarithms, then make exact marks on wood or something.
To make a modern calculator, you need to invent the microchip! You also need to invent a suitable display technology: light-emitting diodes or liquid crystal displays. We literally put a man on the moon before anyone was able to make a pocket calculator.
I love reading old science fiction stories set in the far future, where in the year 3423 or whatever people are still using slide rules. I imagine in the year 3423 people will still be using chairs, and probably spoons won't be too different... and back when those old stories were being written, slide rules seemed like that kind of basic item that wouldn't be going away.
P.S. Before the "pocket" calculator was invented, there were electronic desk calculators using Nixie tubes! Watch this video and think of how much labor it would be to assemble one of these. The soldering work alone guarantees that a typical college student could never afford one of these, but I'm sure NASA had calculators like this for engineers to use.
It seems to me like the best possible way to clean a space station would be to use a steam vapor cleaner. The environmental systems have to already be designed to deal with water vapor in the air, and the steam vapor cleaner uses no chemicals other than water, which would be recycled. A good steam vapor cleaner doesn't get things very wet... the steam is very hot.
I wonder whether they can afford the power to make steam... I don't know how much spare power they have from the solar power system. Maybe future space station designs could have a built-in steam cleaning system that uses solar power to directly heat the steam.
I bought a steam vapor cleaner, coincidentally because I wanted to use it to kill some mold. It worked perfectly for that purpose. I got a Vapamore MR-100 and I would buy it again.
If you really want total control over your own devices, you can't beat Android. The trick is to choose a cell phone carrier that lets you own your own device.
I was a customer of Verizon for years and years, and I was happy with the quality of the cell phone service. I bought a Galaxy Nexus, happy that I would get updates (it's a Nexus device, right?).
Then I didn't get updates. Google released the updates, but Verizon didn't let them through. My Galaxy Nexus became so slow it was almost unusable, and I firmly believe that the Android 4.3 update (which added "TRIM" support) would have fixed my speed problems. All Galaxy Nexus users got the 4.3 update... except Verizon customers.
So I switched carriers. We are on T-mobile now and we have Nexus 5 phones. Overall, we are happy with T-mobile.
The Galaxy Nexus is past its end-of-life and Google isn't supporting it... but if I were to root it, I could put Cyanogenmod on it and get KitKat and the latest security patches. With the Nexus 5, I wouldn't even need to root it to use community-supported firmware builds; the devices aren't locked.
If you want total control of your own devices, Android devices plus a carrier that lets you buy your own devices is the way to go.
Samsung wants to sell me an $800 tablet
I love my Nexus 9 tablet. I got it, new, for about $365 and it is on my T-mobile cellular data plan, not just WiFi. And as it is a Nexus device it gets updates.
I don't have a clear picture of what your organization will be doing, but your comment about "managing that data (=measurements + reports)" made me wonder if you will want to use the IPython notebook.
When people work to analyze measurements (make plots, etc. and make decisions) and then write new code, if they do so step by step in an IPython Notebook, and then other scientists can peer-review the notebooks, this might be even more useful to you than version control. It would give you a history of how the analysis was done and why the reports were made the way they were.
In my job, I do some analysis and work in databases, and I seriously want to start using IPython Notebook as my SQL client, and save my notebooks for later review. It would document the queries I ran and the results I got, so later I could find the queries again to re-run them, and see how they worked out before re-running them.
You know, it occurs to me that you probably quit reading the novel at the worst possible place. You are so qualified to spot mistakes with chemistry and indoor gardening that you were repeatedly outraged and stopped a quarter of the way through. You missed on the later parts where the problems being solved had nothing to do with chemistry and indoor gardening.
I read an article where a couple of orbital dynamics guys said that Any Weir got the orbital dynamics stuff basically right; I've read multiple comments that said that the NASA politics stuff was believable; and in one of my favorite parts, Watney was stuck with a spacesuit whose helmet faceplate's glass had broken and he had to solve the problem of getting back to safety with a rather leaky spacesuit. There are other parts I don't want to mention because they are too spoilery.
You are probably too soured on the book to enjoy it, but if you ever try finishing it, I think you will find that the rest of the book offends you less than the first quarter of it did.
Seriously, how can you read this tripe without wanting to hit your head against a wall? How can you call a novel that has this sort of nonsense and does almost every single chemistry equation wrong "hard science fiction"? Does anything that spouts pseudoscientific BS qualify as "hard science fiction" these days?
IMHO you are being too hard on the book. In the book, the things Watney does are plausible solutions to problems that make sense to me.
Andy Weir said he didn't want Watney being "hit by lightning" over and over. The initial chain of events that leads to Watney being stranded is implausible (and Andy Weir is the first to admit that the physics is wrong there, because the atmosphere of Mars is so thin). But once Watney is stranded, the rest of it makes sense to me.
This isn't like a story where someone needs to "restart the sun" by flying a ship made of "Unobtanium" into the sun and lighting off nuclear bombs. If you fix the science mistakes in a story like that, there is no story left; it's just fundamentally wrong.
In an interview, Andy Weir mentioned getting feedback from some chemist, and he said something like "I loved that, because chemistry is what I'm worst at". It sounds like you are so expert at the chemistry stuff that every mistake was a torment for you, and I think I get it... I can picture how annoyed I would be if the book was about software development, and lots of little stuff was constantly wrong.
One of his mistakes: someone actually calculated how much the Hab would heat up from burning up the rocket fuel to make water, and concluded that if Watney burned the fuel as fast as described, the Hab would heat up to 400 degrees C. But that mistake doesn't ruin the book for me, because we can assume that he just didn't burn the fuel as fast, or he arranged some sort of heatsink or something to get rid of the heat. Fundamentally, you can make water by burning hydrazine in the presence of oxygen, so it works for me.
I also liked the way he portrayed NASA. On the one hand, everything NASA does is expensive and takes forever, but on the other hand, his equipment works and he trusts it; and there was one launch that failed, and Weir listed two places where NASA procedures would have prevented the failure if there had been more time. (Someone would have studied the effects of a "shimmy" on protein cubes, and also someone would have found a minor defect in a bolt and replaced it with a perfect one; either of these would have prevented the failure.)
A novel that I hated, that I just couldn't get through, is The Windup Girl. I bought it figuring "anything that wins both the Hugo and the Nebula must be worth reading" but I hated it. I couldn't swallow the science upon which the whole plot rests. It's the future, and the worst predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming came to pass: the sea levels have risen, temperatures are high, lots of people died off. As a result, fossil fuels are no longer used by anyone, and the world is in a horrible depression. So, you might think that nuclear power, solar power, and Internet telecommuting would be a big deal? Nope, cities are lighted with methane gas lamps, and the methane is made from animal feces, and moving things are powered by kinetic energy stored in "kink-springs" and the springs are wound by elephant-sized bioengineered animals. No buildings seem to have solar panels on them, and at one point the protagonist uses a computer powered by a treadle! The Internet barely seems important, which is hard to believe given that the Internet is already hugely important... but in this future catastrophe world it now takes months for a business executive to travel from America to Thailand (he has to travel by wind-powered ship), yet they still send the executive instead of using teleconferencing.
I hated The Windup Girl as much as you seem to have hated The Martian
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem, which gets far too little discussion, is that Hillary Clinton seems to have set up a system where state department employees (from the "ops" team) would read classified emails on the secure email system, and then type up a summary and send the summary to her personal (non-secure) email system.
http://www.nationalreview.com/classified-rules-hillarys-disregard-for-them
Naturally, when ops "converted" the emails, they didn't copy over any classification markings, allowing Hillary Clinton to truthfully say she never received any emails marked as classified.
It is partisan spin to use the word "retroactively" to describe these emails being newly marked with classification markings. If the information in the emails was classified, the emails were classified all along; it doesn't matter whether the emails were marked as classified or not... and Hillary Clinton, who is not dumb and is a lawyer, knows this.
This process of "converting" emails from secure to insecure is go-to-prison stuff. It's truly amazing that Hillary Clinton thought she could get away with doing this.
Unless the information in this article is fabricated or otherwise untrue, she is going to be in very big trouble:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/09/02/will-hillary-clinton-s-emails-burn-the-white-house.html
The Powell's technical bookstore closed, but Powell's opened a replacement called Powell's 2. This was a smaller store with fewer books, but it was right across the street from the "City of Books" main store.
However, Powell's 2 also closed. I guess the technical books are just in the main store now because they no longer list a special location for technical books.
http://www.powells.com/locations
your first example is unmeasurable
Can't be perfectly measured, but can be estimated by interviewing people and asking questions. (Similarly, before an election, the number of votes for each candidate is unmeasurable; yet the polls accurately predicted that Barack Obama would be elected President.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_gun_use
https://reason.com/blog/2015/03/09/how-to-count-the-defensive-use-of-guns
Because of the different methods used to collect the data, estimates vary wildly. But all of the estimates agree that most of the time, a weapon is not even fired, let alone someone killed by a defensive gun use.
Maybe you are going for emotional manipulation instead of reason. Is that the case?
No, that is not the case.
So, the only way to handle the issue without having godlike powers is to take all of them.
Can't be done. Impossible. You are dreaming.
As long as we are going to wish for the impossible, I wish that all the people who are willing to hurt others would simply be kind people who don't want to hurt others.
If you want me to believe that you can keep guns out of the hands of violent criminals, first show me a place where junkies are unable to buy crack cocaine. Crack cocaine is not legal for anyone, anywhere... we have Draconian laws about it and those laws are enforced.
And yet the junkies are able to get their fix, week after week. (Most violent criminals who have a gun don't get a new one very often... certainly not every week.)
Thus, our choices as a society: either only criminals will have firearms, or everyone will have firearms. And Gary Kleck's research shows that legal firearms in the hands of ordinary citizens deters a substantial amount of violent crime each year.
I read an essay that I found very moving. It was written by a guy who worked for civil rights for black people in the deep South in the 1950's. He said that he will forever be opposed to any attempt to make it illegal for law-abiding citizens to have guns, or to give the police department authority to decide who may have guns and who may not. Black folks being legally armed prevented an uncountable but nonzero number of lynchings, and he said in some cases the local recruiting station for the KKK was the local police department.
TL;DR If you take away the legal defensive uses of firearms you will increase the amount of violent crime (by preventing some violent crimes from being deterred) and you will not prevent violent crime because criminals will still be armed.
Sure, the link between handguns and violence is obvious.
Handguns can be used to commit violent crimes, but they do not cause crimes. Violent criminals regard a firearm as a necessary tool of their trade, and they will have one.
If you somehow got the magical ability to get rid of all the firearms, people would still kill each other with knives, blunt instruments, and hands and feet. More people are killed by hands and feet each year in the USA than are killed by any weapon in the UK each year.
In the past two decades, the number of firearms in the USA has dramatically increased while at the same time the number of violent crimes has decreased. If guns caused crime, this would not be the case.
So, in the end, you and I want the same thing: as few violent crimes as possible, ideally none. We disagree on how best to achieve that.
I read the Gary Kleck piece and he seems to be pretty biased and actually narcissistic in his presentation.
Hmm, then I apologize for choosing a poor link to use. What I got out of that is "for two decades I have been hearing the same criticisms and none of them are invalid" and I guess what you got from it is "narcissistic".
Better then would be to read his actual book. http://www.amazon.com/Point-Blank-Guns-Violence-America/dp/020230762X The American Society of Criminology awarded Professor Kleck the Hindelang award for this book.
And the other URLs you gave are obviously from pro-gun sites so I didn't go there.
Perhaps you didn't realize it, but the Kellerman study was published in an obviously anti-gun publication.
Also, Arthur Kellerman has been a member of at least one anti-gun organization. (The latter link is to an obviously pro-gun web site, but it reproduces a letter to the editor published in a medical journal by a doctor. The doctor is an obviously pro-gun doctor, but he is providing evidence that Kellerman is an obviously anti-gun doctor, and I don't know how I would go about finding a completely unbiased source you would accept who has taken the trouble to research Kellerman and report on his membership in anti-gun organizations.)
Finally, here is a book I recommend: it thoroughly covers the statistics around violence and gun ownership. It concludes that cultural factors are much more important in violence than the number of available firearms. The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy
It's scientists trying to deal with an illness and its causes, rather than folks who started with a point and then used Polya's tactics to justify it.
Oh, really? I have provided multiple links to you showing that Kellerman's study was structurally unsound. We cannot put error bars on its conclusions, it had a small sample size, and it only counted defensive uses of a firearm if they resulted in a dead body (which drastically under-counts defensive uses). Even if you believe that it was intended as an unbiased study, its flaws render its results useless.
Also, its predictions have not been borne out in the following two decades. I have provided evidence for you that the number of guns in the USA rose dramatically since the publication of the Kellerman study, while shootings of all kinds (accidental and intentional) declined dramatically. I am not going to claim that the drastic increase in guns caused the decline in shootings; but pretty clearly if a gun is 43 times more likely to hurt you than to be a benefit, the drastic increase in guns should have been correlated with a drastic increase in harm.
Here's a reference that presents these facts. This Economist article has graphs that show firearms deaths declining drastically since the early 1990s at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA dramatically increased. (By the way, the article ends with a sentence saying that the link between guns and violence "is obvious" despite the clear evidence to the contrary presented in the article. I doubt they cherry-picked any data to try to make firearms look less dangerous.)
Finally, if it is unbiased research you want, I recommend you read the Wright/Rossi/Daly book. The Carter administration funded research into gun control, and Wright and Rossi engaged in the research expecting to prove that gun control prevents violence. Their research showed the opposite, and changed their minds on the subject.
The Kellerman study was badly and tendentiously designed.
The worst flaw: that study only counted uses of a firearm that resulted in a dead body. If some guy kicked in the front door of a home, and the woman inside pointed a gun at him and he left, then Kellerman's study would not count that as a "use" of a firearm. Because most defensive uses of a firearm do not result in the weapon being fired, let alone anyone dying, this structurally stacked the deck against defensive gun uses.
That study also lumps in suicides with homicides. I have not seen any honest study that shows that a gun in the home causes an increase in the suicide rate.
The study started with people killed by firearms, which meant there was a 100% chance of a firearm being present, but then guessed whether there was a firearm in the home of a "matching" person. We have no way of knowing how many of the "guesses" were correct, and each case where they guessed wrong would lower their result. We literally cannot put error bars on the result.
Kellerman's own data showed much higher correlations: having an adult in the home who has a previous felony conviction for a violent crime is a much better predictor of the chance of violence.
There are plenty of articles on the flaws in the Kellerman study.
http://www.firearmsandliberty.com/kellerman-schaffer.html
http://guncite.com/gun-control-kellermann-3times.html
Professor Gary Kleck's research shows that firearms are used effectively for defensive purposes many times per year.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/defensive-gun-ownership-gary-kleck-response-115082
And I just posted links showing that the number of shootings (both accidental and intentional) has dramatically fallen at the same time that the number of firearms in the USA has dramatically risen. If the Kellerman study's conclusions were accurate, the number of shootings should have risen when the number of guns rose so much.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=8501517&cid=51151345
It is a mistake to base any decisions on dishonest research.
Honest citizens are still mostly badly trained dumbasses.
And yet, GP's point is still correct. Taking guns away from the law-abiding would not decrease your risk.
Do you live your life by real numbers or just gut feelings?
Oh, real numbers, definitely.
Since 1992, the number of unintentional shootings has declined by 57% in the USA:
http://sssfonline.org/nssf-report-unintentional-firearms-fatalities-historic-low/
Since the early 90's, the number of intentional shootings has also fallen roughly in half. It fell more quickly than the unintentional numbers but then plateaued. Note that this statistic excludes suicides... properly, IMHO, as I don't believe that guns cause suicide.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/10/21/gun-homicides-steady-after-decline-in-90s-suicide-rate-edges-up/
And both of these declines are despite the fact that there are more firearms available than ever before. This article has a chart that starts in 1996; it shows that in 1996 there were less than 250 million firearms in the USA, and currently there are over 350 million firearms in the USA. That's over a 40% increase in the number of firearms.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/05/guns-in-the-united-states-one-for-every-man-woman-and-child-and-then-some/
Therefore, the increase in guns must prove that the guns caused the reduction in violence, right? Well, no. Correlation doesn't prove causation.
However, these numbers do show that guns don't magically cause violence. If guns caused violence, then the massive increase in the number of guns should be correlated with an increase of violence rather than a decline.
So: if you "live your life by real numbers", and you want to argue in favor of taking firearms away from the law-abiding, then please provide some statistics that support your plan.
Intel's compilers still use the CPUID instruction to decide whether to emit efficient code or not. Intel has an official notice to this effect. Charmingly, the notice is only available as an image file. I presume this is to make it harder to search for the notice.
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/optimization-notice/
Every time I see benchmarks now, I wonder whether the results were affected by the use of an Intel compiler.
I try very hard to not buy Intel products.
I didn't realize that quantum computers were commercially sold now. I wondered about the price; I wasn't able to find out how much this new computer costs. But per Wikipedia, the first model of this computer sold for about $10 million; and I presume that this new and more powerful version costs more. (The press releases say that this thing computes at extremely low temperatures, so it must include an expensive cooling system.)
Interestingly, the Wikipedia article says that a lot of famous people were dubious about whether these quantum computers would work. A professor from UC Berkeley predicted that the quantum computer would be about as powerful as a cell phone. This result reported by Google would seem to disprove the criticism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems#Reception
It's good to see the veil lifted on Nethack development. Give ESR a little bit of credit for helping them out.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6389&cpage=1#comment-1207141
All of your questions are easily answered by reading the link provided at the top of the article:
http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/blog/systemd-and-plasma
Why does the desktop care who's booted it up?
The Init System "We don't care. It doesn't affect us."
logind Allows KDE to provide user-switching features.
Device Management Allows KDE to have access to your mouse and keyboard without root access and without random applications being able to sniff your keystrokes.
Inhibitor Locks Allows KDE to react to notifications like "the system is about to go down" and delay until a condition is met (example: delay a suspend until the lock screen is displayed and all your desktop windows are hidden behind the lock screen).
timedated and Friends Allows KDE to set time and date without root; allows KDE apps to be notified if time and date gets changed. (KDE currently runs a daemon just to watch for time and date changes, and they would like to get rid of this daemon and simplify their code.)
User Units If KDE takes advantage of the "units" in systemd, then when any part of KDE crashes or hangs, systemd will restart the misbehaving part.
that implies they won't work on *BSD at all. Right?
"Projects like [SystemBSD] bring the interfaces we need to BSD and as it gets more stable we should be able to start distributing features."
So really, choice is being taken away clear across the board. Either that or I'm missing something really big which implies systemd is not a strict dependency.
I encourage you to read the whole article and see what big things you are missing.
I don't know about you, but when I read that article I didn't think "Man those KDE guys are idiots, why would they want any of that." It all makes sense to me.
It's easier for me to believe that SystemD has some merit than to believe that all the Debian core developers are idiots, plus all the Ubuntu developers, and now all the KDE developers and for that matter the Gnome developers.
My biggest concerns with systemd are the monoculture of it all, so projects like UselessD and SystemBSD sound great to me. Force the SystemD guys to document and justify everything, and provide alternatives.
About 70 years ago, E. E. "Doc" Smith wrote a series of books that are wonderful space opera: the "Lensman" series. The space battles just keep escalating throughout the series, getting more over-the-top.
My favorite plot point: they used the principles of a vacuum tube to make a device whose pieces included grids mounted in the asteroid belt, with more in other orbits closer in to the sun. In effect they turned the inner Solar System into one honking big vacuum tube, and created a weapon that could concentrate a significant fraction of the sun's output onto attacking enemy fleets. This was called the "Sunbeam". (Believe it or not, this wasn't the end of the escalation. The battles got even bigger after that.)
When you say "ultimate" vacuum tube, I think that one is pretty hard to top.
P.S. 200-word crossover fan fiction: what would have happened if the Battlestar Galactica reboot show had found Earth, and it was the Earth of the Lensman series?
http://archiveofourown.org/works/495034
When I was a teen and read those books, I just enjoyed them, but now I'm thinking that it would take a lot of trust to allow Kimball Kinnison to run around acting as judge, jury, and executioner. As readers of the books, we know that he was vetted as deeply as anyone could be by the Arisians, so he can be trusted with that kind of power; but it would be hard for the ordinary people in the world of the books to trust him that much.
I have stated as fact that the fear of individuals possibly carrying firearms and defending themselves is not a significant factor in the criminal mind.
Okay, I misunderstood your point. Duly noted.
Studies have also shown that criminals are deterred if they think their victims might be armed. See the decline in violent crime after concealed carry of firearms became more common:
https://www.gunowners.org/sk0802htm.htm
Knives happen to have sharp edges, so trying to take one away is less of a winning proposition.
I'd really like some citations to go along with these claims you are making.
Hint, what you are saying here doesn't square with what my self-defense instructors have told me. The best single tool for self-defense is a firearm; a knife has a place in self-defense but it is definitely not the preferred tool.
We actively discourage vigilantism.
You keep phrasing things in weird ways, but if I'm not mistaken, you and I are in agreement on this point: society is currently telling people that they shouldn't do anything when violence occurs, just sit back and let the police handle it.
At which point you bring up a whole lot of inconsistent research that manage to conclude something with a 312.5% margin of error and with extremely poor experimental design, and from a biased source to boot.
Dunno where you get that margin of error. Professor Kleck's book about his research led to him being awarded the Hindelang Award by the American Society of Criminology. I guess they thought his research was okay.
Did you know global warming is bunk, too? Exxon-Mobil published a study. There is no pollution from coal at all.
Still waiting for you to offer any sort of citation to support your propositions. By the way, I hate coal.
You're a retard.
Huh. I think you are not worth my time and this will be my last comment to you.
Perhaps, however, you misunderstood my comment. If a guy with a gun goes into a school or whatever and starts shooting the place up, all the people in that school are his victims IMHO. The ones he shoots are the worst off, of course, but everyone else can be said to be the victims of assault at minimum.
You ascribed a particular motive to the people who don't attack a school shooter: "Nobody stands up to put a stop to it, because they might get shot a few seconds earlier."
So, did I misunderstand you again? Were you not saying that the people who failed to attack the shooter were motivated out of a willingness to watch others die rather than increase their own personal risk?
I explained the role of society in deterrence, and you claim victim-blaming. I specifically said the victim has NO POWER over the situation, and it's the fault of everyone else in the world.
It's possible for "victims" to take a more active role in their own self-defense, and I'm in favor of that. It's also possible for bystanders to take a more active role in the defense of others, and I'm in favor of that too.
I'm less interested in blaming the bystanders for not acting, than in changing society to make it more likely that bystanders will act.
You claim I'm blaming Sally for getting raped by complaining that Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill all stood by and did nothing. Are Tim, Bob, George, Amanda, Mark, Joseph, and Bill the victim?
Depends on the circumstances. If they watch some brute assault Sally with his bare hands and they do nothing, they aren't any kind of victims, and IMHO they should do something. If, however, the rapist has a buddy who his pointing a gun at all of them to cow them into inaction, then they are victims as well. I would actually prefer that they do something, rather than standing around; obviously the worst victim is Sally in this horrific scenario.
I'll say it again: if some guy with a gun crashes into a school and starts walking around shoo
I consider myself a libertarian, but I am a minarchist and not an anarchist.
I view the proper role of government as enforcing the contracts that people freely enter into, plus defending people from actual harm.
I've read the Utopian visions of anarcho-captialism, where the free market solves all the problems, but I don't believe in it. How do you solve the "free rider problem" with respect to national defense? When someone is just insane and will not cooperate, how does voluntary arbitration resolve a dispute that person has with someone else?
If you want me to believe in the cooperative model of anarchy running as a smooth society, please give me an actual example from history where a country operated as an anarchy and it worked. (I can give you examples of minarchy that in my opinion worked.)
Victims are harmless, armed or not; you take them by surprise and you take them down. If they have weapons, you take them away before they can use them--this is hilariously easy when you attack someone and they turn out to have a firearm. A knife is actually more of a difficult proposition.
Citations, please. You have stated as fact that nobody ever successfully uses a firearm to prevent a violent attack, and that a knife is more likely to work for this purpose.
There is solid research estimating that firearms are used in the USA about two million times each year to prevent a violent crime. Most of these "defensive gun uses" do not involve anyone being killed or even anyone firing the gun; the defender deterred the assailant just by having a gun.
http://www.guncite.com/gun_control_gcdguse.html
If you think a knife is a better defensive weapon, please read through this discussion.
https://www.reddit.com/r/knives/comments/3alo5f/why_is_a_knife_for_self_defence_a_bad_idea/
A society of armed loners who only care about themselves is a society of targets.
You seem to be arguing that the average person is a sociopath who is willing to just watch others be hurt.
I suggest to you that a larger problem is that the majority of people have no idea how to handle a violent situation. The news media, and many of our celebrities, push a meme that ordinary people should never be armed for self-defense, and by extension shouldn't even train for self-defense. The same people who would like to ban all firearms in civilian hands would tell you that people shouldn't fight back against assailants; they should let the police handle the situation. (As the old saying goes, though, "When seconds count, the police are just minutes away!" There is no guarantee that the police will arrive in time to save lives.)
If a person is totally untrained, and suddenly face to face with horrible violence, it is unlikely that the person will swiftly and decisively come up with a plan to counter-attack and take out the assailant. I don't blame the victims the way you seem to, but I do wish more people would train in self-defense.
I agree with Larry Correia: our society would achieve a net reduction in violence if more people got trained in the use of weapons for defense, and more people carried concealed firearms.
http://monsterhunternation.com/2012/12/20/an-opinion-on-gun-control/
P.S. I once, in an online discussion, commented that if people shouldn't defend themselves but rather should rely purely on the police to protect them, maybe people shouldn't have fire extinguishers in their homes and should rely purely on the fire department to protect them. A person I was debating agreed with this proposition. I didn't agree with her but I give her props for intellectual consistency.
Once I started using GNOME 2.x I started using Gnome Terminal. I quickly grew to love having a terminal emulator with multiple tabs. I am still using it (well, now it's MATE Terminal) but I also use tmux to have multiple windows per tab.
Each tab is a different computer. Tab 1 is generally the local computer upon which I am working; then tabs 2 through whatever are the various remote machines. I ssh to the remote machine, then run tmux and open as many windows as I need.
tmux is essential so that I can pick up where I left off if anything interrupts my work... with SSH, if your Internet connection glitches, you lose your connection; with tmux you can re-attach to your previous session and continue your work right where you left off.
I have met someone who runs doubly-nested tmux sessions. He binds both Ctrl+A and Ctrl+B as prefixes, and he uses one of them to switch "outer" sessions (which are one per machine) and the other to switch nested terminal windows (multiple windows for working within a machine). I like having the separation of using Alt+1 through Alt+0 to switch machines and then Ctrl+A,1 through Ctrl+A,0 to switch windows on a particular machine. (Besides, I'm a vi user and I actually use Ctrl+B when editing.)
In a previous job I had to work on Windows a lot, so I used Console. I customized its hotkeys so that it works just like Gnome Terminal.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/
For a while I was daydreaming about a GUI terminal that can use the tmux protocol and have tmux features perfectly integrated into the terminal: use the GUI scrolling thumb to scroll within the tmux history buffer, etc. But these days I'm used to working within tmux and I don't really need the features to be part of the GUI terminal application.
A bonus of being used to the way tmux works: I can still do all the same things when logged in using JuiceSSH on my Android tablet. I buy Bluetooth keyboards that have the control key somewhere sensible so I can type commands and be productive.
There is some sort of sign-up to book the theatre room in advance. And I think most people will have some sort of TV in their apartments, so they would have recourse if the theatre room was booked.
BTW the "hotel room" rooms aren't free; they have a nightly cost. I think the other shared resources are included and just need to be reserved ahead of time.
It's not just any apartment complex. It's specifically designed to provide shared stuff for the benefit of the people staying there.
But I agree with you that it's not unprecedented. I visited a complex in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, and it was much like this: small, efficient apartments plus shared amenities.
There is a very nice "home theatre" setup (not exactly home since it's shared in an apartment complex) that could seat about 16 people; a shared kitchen/dining space next to the theatre; on the roof, shared outdoor cooking grills; a yoga studio and space for art; and some kind of gym. There are "hotel room" units that residents can book for their guests. There are a few shared offices, used for people who work at home and sometimes need to meet with clients or consultants. There are storage spaces available for monthly rental, so people who have too much stuff for their small apartments can just walk down the hall to access the stored stuff. I think there is some kind of small clothes washer/dryer in the apartments but I wouldn't be surprised if there were a couple of large ones somewhere for shared use.
Overall I think it is a solid concept. If you want a huge TV screen once a week to watch a football game, you could use the theatre room and probably end up meeting everyone else in the complex who likes football. If you sometimes like to throw a party with lots of guests, again the theatre room with its attached kitchen is the place to do it. Your apartment doesn't need to be big enough to have guests overnight because you can book the "hotel rooms" ahead of time. In short, the apartments can be smaller because of all the shared stuff and it seems to work.
This was built years ago and I doubt it's unique. When I visited it I thought "there will be more like this in the future."
You need to remember that at the time Heinlein wrote that, computers did exist, but not general-purpose stored-program computers. Back then, computers were special-built things that had one purpose, like fire-control computers in the Navy; you couldn't make a fire-control computer do something else by swapping out a program.
All that said, you aren't wrong. Starman Jones is actually a bit clumsy; the computer works the way it's shown in the book because it has to work that way for the story to play out as Heinlein wanted it to. The idea of humans using pencil and paper to quickly compute the numbers to feed into the computer is silly; at a minimum there should have been another special-purpose computer device there to help them with the figuring.
P.S. I also enjoyed Beyond This Horizon where a computer expert in the far future wishes he could build a computer with 4-dimensional cams, since the three-dimensional ones weren't complex enough for the calculations he wanted to perform; and in Methuselah's Children (set in the 22nd Century) the protagonists steal a spaceship that had "one of the new computers with no moving parts".
What I find interesting is that it took a tremendously more advanced technology to render slide rules obsolete.
To make a slide rule, you need to figure out logarithms, then make exact marks on wood or something.
To make a modern calculator, you need to invent the microchip! You also need to invent a suitable display technology: light-emitting diodes or liquid crystal displays. We literally put a man on the moon before anyone was able to make a pocket calculator.
I love reading old science fiction stories set in the far future, where in the year 3423 or whatever people are still using slide rules. I imagine in the year 3423 people will still be using chairs, and probably spoons won't be too different... and back when those old stories were being written, slide rules seemed like that kind of basic item that wouldn't be going away.
P.S. Before the "pocket" calculator was invented, there were electronic desk calculators using Nixie tubes! Watch this video and think of how much labor it would be to assemble one of these. The soldering work alone guarantees that a typical college student could never afford one of these, but I'm sure NASA had calculators like this for engineers to use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mig3TeKh0aU
It seems to me like the best possible way to clean a space station would be to use a steam vapor cleaner. The environmental systems have to already be designed to deal with water vapor in the air, and the steam vapor cleaner uses no chemicals other than water, which would be recycled. A good steam vapor cleaner doesn't get things very wet... the steam is very hot.
I wonder whether they can afford the power to make steam... I don't know how much spare power they have from the solar power system. Maybe future space station designs could have a built-in steam cleaning system that uses solar power to directly heat the steam.
I bought a steam vapor cleaner, coincidentally because I wanted to use it to kill some mold. It worked perfectly for that purpose. I got a Vapamore MR-100 and I would buy it again.
I'm sticking with Apple devices from now on.
If you really want total control over your own devices, you can't beat Android. The trick is to choose a cell phone carrier that lets you own your own device.
I was a customer of Verizon for years and years, and I was happy with the quality of the cell phone service. I bought a Galaxy Nexus, happy that I would get updates (it's a Nexus device, right?).
Then I didn't get updates. Google released the updates, but Verizon didn't let them through. My Galaxy Nexus became so slow it was almost unusable, and I firmly believe that the Android 4.3 update (which added "TRIM" support) would have fixed my speed problems. All Galaxy Nexus users got the 4.3 update... except Verizon customers.
So I switched carriers. We are on T-mobile now and we have Nexus 5 phones. Overall, we are happy with T-mobile.
The Galaxy Nexus is past its end-of-life and Google isn't supporting it... but if I were to root it, I could put Cyanogenmod on it and get KitKat and the latest security patches. With the Nexus 5, I wouldn't even need to root it to use community-supported firmware builds; the devices aren't locked.
If you want total control of your own devices, Android devices plus a carrier that lets you buy your own devices is the way to go.
Samsung wants to sell me an $800 tablet
I love my Nexus 9 tablet. I got it, new, for about $365 and it is on my T-mobile cellular data plan, not just WiFi. And as it is a Nexus device it gets updates.
I don't have a clear picture of what your organization will be doing, but your comment about "managing that data (=measurements + reports)" made me wonder if you will want to use the IPython notebook.
http://ipython.org/notebook.html
When people work to analyze measurements (make plots, etc. and make decisions) and then write new code, if they do so step by step in an IPython Notebook, and then other scientists can peer-review the notebooks, this might be even more useful to you than version control. It would give you a history of how the analysis was done and why the reports were made the way they were.
In my job, I do some analysis and work in databases, and I seriously want to start using IPython Notebook as my SQL client, and save my notebooks for later review. It would document the queries I ran and the results I got, so later I could find the queries again to re-run them, and see how they worked out before re-running them.
https://github.com/catherinedevlin/ipython-sql
You know, it occurs to me that you probably quit reading the novel at the worst possible place. You are so qualified to spot mistakes with chemistry and indoor gardening that you were repeatedly outraged and stopped a quarter of the way through. You missed on the later parts where the problems being solved had nothing to do with chemistry and indoor gardening.
I read an article where a couple of orbital dynamics guys said that Any Weir got the orbital dynamics stuff basically right; I've read multiple comments that said that the NASA politics stuff was believable; and in one of my favorite parts, Watney was stuck with a spacesuit whose helmet faceplate's glass had broken and he had to solve the problem of getting back to safety with a rather leaky spacesuit. There are other parts I don't want to mention because they are too spoilery.
You are probably too soured on the book to enjoy it, but if you ever try finishing it, I think you will find that the rest of the book offends you less than the first quarter of it did.
Seriously, how can you read this tripe without wanting to hit your head against a wall? How can you call a novel that has this sort of nonsense and does almost every single chemistry equation wrong "hard science fiction"? Does anything that spouts pseudoscientific BS qualify as "hard science fiction" these days?
IMHO you are being too hard on the book. In the book, the things Watney does are plausible solutions to problems that make sense to me.
Andy Weir said he didn't want Watney being "hit by lightning" over and over. The initial chain of events that leads to Watney being stranded is implausible (and Andy Weir is the first to admit that the physics is wrong there, because the atmosphere of Mars is so thin). But once Watney is stranded, the rest of it makes sense to me.
This isn't like a story where someone needs to "restart the sun" by flying a ship made of "Unobtanium" into the sun and lighting off nuclear bombs. If you fix the science mistakes in a story like that, there is no story left; it's just fundamentally wrong.
In an interview, Andy Weir mentioned getting feedback from some chemist, and he said something like "I loved that, because chemistry is what I'm worst at". It sounds like you are so expert at the chemistry stuff that every mistake was a torment for you, and I think I get it... I can picture how annoyed I would be if the book was about software development, and lots of little stuff was constantly wrong.
One of his mistakes: someone actually calculated how much the Hab would heat up from burning up the rocket fuel to make water, and concluded that if Watney burned the fuel as fast as described, the Hab would heat up to 400 degrees C. But that mistake doesn't ruin the book for me, because we can assume that he just didn't burn the fuel as fast, or he arranged some sort of heatsink or something to get rid of the heat. Fundamentally, you can make water by burning hydrazine in the presence of oxygen, so it works for me.
I also liked the way he portrayed NASA. On the one hand, everything NASA does is expensive and takes forever, but on the other hand, his equipment works and he trusts it; and there was one launch that failed, and Weir listed two places where NASA procedures would have prevented the failure if there had been more time. (Someone would have studied the effects of a "shimmy" on protein cubes, and also someone would have found a minor defect in a bolt and replaced it with a perfect one; either of these would have prevented the failure.)
A novel that I hated, that I just couldn't get through, is The Windup Girl. I bought it figuring "anything that wins both the Hugo and the Nebula must be worth reading" but I hated it. I couldn't swallow the science upon which the whole plot rests. It's the future, and the worst predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming came to pass: the sea levels have risen, temperatures are high, lots of people died off. As a result, fossil fuels are no longer used by anyone, and the world is in a horrible depression. So, you might think that nuclear power, solar power, and Internet telecommuting would be a big deal? Nope, cities are lighted with methane gas lamps, and the methane is made from animal feces, and moving things are powered by kinetic energy stored in "kink-springs" and the springs are wound by elephant-sized bioengineered animals. No buildings seem to have solar panels on them, and at one point the protagonist uses a computer powered by a treadle! The Internet barely seems important, which is hard to believe given that the Internet is already hugely important... but in this future catastrophe world it now takes months for a business executive to travel from America to Thailand (he has to travel by wind-powered ship), yet they still send the executive instead of using teleconferencing.
I hated The Windup Girl as much as you seem to have hated The Martian