I am no longer a graybeard. Both my beard and ponytail are now white. A lot of chicks think that's hot, so I'm happy. Retirement can be fun.
My original UID was in the high 5 digits, I don't remember it or what I used as a login name, so while slashdot would still have it on record, it has been lost since 2002. I screwed up when I moved that year. I found my backup disks about 5 years later. Lesson learned: some things you need to pack yourself, rather than relying on friends or a soon-to-be exwife.
My second account was under the name "MysticGoat" since I wanted separation between my career and my private life. That account is still around, but dormant, as #582871. I started using it in June 2002, and other than just now checking to see if it is still there, I've not done anything with it for years.
I began my current account as will.woodhull about 5 years ago when I decided that I was so close to retirement that I didn't need to protect my private life from prying cow-orkers.
Other relevant experience: first course in programming: 1972 Summer elective in Fortran. First computer: in 1980, an Apple ][+. Degree in Business, Computer Programming: in 1988, programming experience was split evenly between HP Business BASIC and COBOL, but it turns out the courses in business law and accounting have had more lasting value. Self-employment: building and supporting custom computers and small networks, 1988 to 1995 full time, then tapering part time until out of that dead-end line of work in 2002.
You really can't trust the/. UID for estimating age or experience. A lot of us who have been doing this for a quarter century or more have had reasons to abandon old/. accounts and start new ones from time to time.
Another thing: no matter how much experience you may have on your own computers, it does not compare with the experience gained from supporting other person's hardware and software.
Win3.11 was as good as it gets, for that time and that available hardware, especially when used on top of DR-DOS. Win98 was okay. WinXP grew into becoming perhaps the best ever, though that growth took longer than it really should have. All the rest of the Win-whatever were crap. Jump from WinXP to Ubuntu, that is the natural upgrade path. For after WinXP Microsoft fail it.
Perhaps Microsoft should go make phones or something. There can be gracefulness in falling from great height; there can be elegance in descent. No way to do the final splat with grace or elegance, unfortunately. But such a long way to drop! What a trip!
It would make sense to classify the Earth - Moon as a binary planet. Life-as-we-know-it is most likely to occur in binary planet situations, where large tides are the stirring rods that keep the proto-life soups from settling into non-interactive stratifications. Creating the class of binary planet with the Earth - Moon as the prototypical first pair would help focus exoplanetary studies, and also inject new considerations into Earth science studies, such as plate tectonics, geomagnetism, possibly meteorology and climate studies, etc.
As to Pluto: Yep, its a planet. Has been one all along. 260-odd astronomers at a convention of more than 2,000 astronomers have no scientific basis for saying otherwise. No matter how important their foible makes them feel.
[Is this post a good troll? I think it is a good troll. I think it is like a storm surge on top of a super tide, that would stir things up, keep the cauldron bubbling. But in a good way.]
Of course truly random monkeys would contain many random mutations many of which are not going to be viable, which means that room no matter that it is infinitely big, is going to be full of the stench of dead, decaying monkey flesh. The whole damn metaphor stinks.
Parent post presents a reasonable argument. But the argument depends on an unstated assumption that cannot be verified and is most likely not true. The assumption being that our observational skills are so highly developed that we would recognize a break in causality if we saw it.
On every scale from the dark matter/energy that makes galaxies the way they are to the mysteries of quantum foam, there are a multitude of indications that we really are not very good observers. For if we were, there would be a lot fewer oddities that the science teachers kick into the corner and tell the students to ignore them.
You speak as if you live in a reality where there can be an objective third party point of view, and where physics has some kind of existence outside human imagination. How 19th century quaint.
The Copenhagen interpretation is the best we've got since the upsets by Heisenberg et al.. To whit: physics is our best imaginary model of what the Universe might be like. That's not only as good as it gets, by the very nature of things that's as good as it can ever get. There is no objective reality. It is all in your head.
Which is not to say that you cannot shape your imagination so that it is congruent with (but still separate from) somew of what is actually out there. Leading to things like the Apollo project, the Manhattan project, etc.
"I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on." --The Sugar Beats
The best thing you can do for your hero is to STFU and hope that everyone forgets all about this mess before the campaign season starts to warm up. And pray that none of those whose identity has been compromised by this fiasco files a very loud law suit.
Another thing: I doubt very much that this was some IT guy's mistake. There cannot be anyone in IT at the level of this kind of decision who is not cognizant of the need to protect the privacy of private citizens. No, this was botched by some campaign guru who had been given a level of access to the databases that was well beyond his comprehension. JB is at serious fault for failure to manage his minions, and the proof of that is one of his minions just shot him in the foot. With a shotgun.
Where are you seeing evidence that the multiple reports of SSNs having been published are wrong? If that were the case it would have been hollered to the skies, for we are all very aware that the USA political Right scrutinizes the press very closely, and yells quite loudly over any hint of bias against their favorite sons.
And why do you feel that it is somehow not a problem for an aspiring Presidential candidate to be so incapable of managing his subordinates that this kind of stupid mistake could be made in his name? Do you really feel it is acceptable for someone claiming he's presidential material to give the wrong subordinate so much free rein that they could cause him this kind of headache?
A word of advice: The best thing JB supporters could do for him right now is to STFU about this snafu, and hope everyone forgets about it before the campaign season gets into full swing.
Did anyone else hear that "Whoosh?" I thought it was pretty loud.
"jeb@jeb.org" is almost as official as "whatmeworry@gmail.com". Or my favorite for the email harvesters: "nobody@nowhere.nul".
Gathering data piecemeal through FOIA requests is so yesterday, now that we have a highly placed politician who just lays the feast out there on a streetside table, where every black hat passer-by can help themself.
So its okay for a black hat to harvest email addresses in Florida by simply sending a FOIA request to the Guvner?
Oh wait, in Florida you don't even have to do that...
Jeb just lost any chance of getting my vote. Not because of what he's done, but because he has demonstrated a level of ignorance about how the world now works that is just unbelievable.
I don't know anything about Jeb Bush. But I certainly won't be voting for him now. If he cannot be trusted to keep confidential correspondence, including Social Security numbers, confidential, then he lacks some basic values that I regard as essential in a President. Or in anyone filling just about any other elected office.
Why do you think that would make a difference to us who are trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of our boxen? Wasted GPU cycles are still wasted, on a machine that could be tuned to offload some of the rendering work or number crunching from the cores to the GPU.
I do some CG. A "simple" three minute animation can easily take more than 30 hours to render, even with four cores AND the GPU cooking.
There is a reason why anyoine doing serious computer work today is using one of the Linux distros.
I don't knock Windows or even Apple. If all you are doing with the computer is the same stuff your Grandma and Grandpa used to do with a pegboard accounting system and a sliderule, then by all means get a box that will play the games you enjoy. But trying to compare that OS with a serious computing OS is like trying to compare the best ever go-cart with a Formula One race car. Yeah they can run on the same track, but that's about all they have in common.
That's a really bad car analogy. About the worst I've ever heard. Really really bad.
Yeah. It was bad. The best I could do under the circumstances.
Short answer: I am not a fanbois of Linux or any particular OS or application. It is just that I have neither the time nor the money to play around in any of the closed gardens-- the two biggest being Microsoft and Apple. In the rare occasion that I need a Microsoft only product, like upgrading my Garmin GPS, I can do that through WINE or by running Win7 in a VM, under Linux, with all the safeguards against malware or corruption of the filing system that come built into Linux.
Why, why is this still and issue? Are you using a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM? Otherwise I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015. Every OS works fine with decent hardware, and if you use computers for a living I can't believe you're not able to buy 8GB of RAM.
Spoken like someone who has never used a computer for anything that could not be done in a week's time with paper and pencil.
Computer graphics and animation. Audio editing (the high quality stuff, not mashing together lossy mp3s). Statistical analysis. To be brief, much of what is done today by many artists and small business owners. All of these are done measuably better on computers that do not waste resources on OS and GUI shiny distractions.
I have been using XFCE for several years.It comes with Studio Ubuntu, which also uses a kernel optimized for audio editing and CG rendering. My passion is CG, and if using XFCE helps to shave a half hour off a 10 hour rendering task, then you bet I'm going to use it.
Another benefit I have noticed is that I spend a lot less time messing about in the GUI time sinks. I look for an OS to provide a fast and economical way to get to the applications where I do my work. Code that supports fifty different ways to color the file manager screen is deadweight and frought with potential bugs, and I'm happy to be free of it.
A third benefit of XFCE: I am as susceptible to shiny distractions as the next guy, so I appreciate that XFCE has far fewer ways to wander off into the woods than KDE. There were a number of features in Gnome 2 that I miss, and if the Gnome 3 train wreck had not happened, I might never have moved to Studio Ubuntu and XFCE. Yet considering today's alternatives to XFCE, I have no regrets.
The moon has a side facing away from Saturn which is darker then the side facing saturn. It seems to be due to collecting dust from a larger ring that is on the border of its orbit.
You said that very succinctly. Unfortunately it is also very wrong.
Read TFA again. The dark side (of Iapetus-- not the Force) is the side that is facing forward in its orbit.
"North" is a geocentric concept that can be projected outward upon the solar system.
That one is simple and easy since there is a clear consensus among Earth dwellers as to which way is north.
In other situations it can get more complicated, such as when projecting the egocentric concept of "Left" and "Right" outward from an individual point of view. The simplest case is when looking at a photo of Mutt and Jeff, and being told that Mutt is on the left. Even though when the photo was taken both Jeff would have said that Mutt was on his right side.
There are even greater problems when there is no consensus within the group. For instance, for a libtard "going to the Left" is definitely right, but "going to the Right" is clearly wrong, which is as succinct a summary of the state of USA politics as you can get. Well, except for the die hard Tea Partiers, where "Right" is always right, and "Left" is always wrong. But then after rejecting everything that is not right, all the Tea Partiers have left is right. Which is at best terribly confusing.
It was all so much simpler during the last American civil war, when everything was either North or South.
There is only the small problem of getting to court when NSA and FBI regulations come into play before the courts are involved. When those regulations stipulate that property can be confiscated, bank accounts can be frozen, and you could be turned out into the street with nothing more than the cash in your pocket, that is a powerful incentive to STFU and do whatever the Man says to do.
You may not have any effective allies, either, since there is nothing preventing your lawyer from being gifted with an NSL gives him a bad bit of conflict of interest wrt your case.
Slashdot Mirror
I am no longer a graybeard. Both my beard and ponytail are now white. A lot of chicks think that's hot, so I'm happy. Retirement can be fun.
My original UID was in the high 5 digits, I don't remember it or what I used as a login name, so while slashdot would still have it on record, it has been lost since 2002. I screwed up when I moved that year. I found my backup disks about 5 years later. Lesson learned: some things you need to pack yourself, rather than relying on friends or a soon-to-be exwife.
My second account was under the name "MysticGoat" since I wanted separation between my career and my private life. That account is still around, but dormant, as #582871. I started using it in June 2002, and other than just now checking to see if it is still there, I've not done anything with it for years.
I began my current account as will.woodhull about 5 years ago when I decided that I was so close to retirement that I didn't need to protect my private life from prying cow-orkers.
Other relevant experience: first course in programming: 1972 Summer elective in Fortran. First computer: in 1980, an Apple ][+. Degree in Business, Computer Programming: in 1988, programming experience was split evenly between HP Business BASIC and COBOL, but it turns out the courses in business law and accounting have had more lasting value. Self-employment: building and supporting custom computers and small networks, 1988 to 1995 full time, then tapering part time until out of that dead-end line of work in 2002.
You really can't trust the /. UID for estimating age or experience. A lot of us who have been doing this for a quarter century or more have had reasons to abandon old /. accounts and start new ones from time to time.
Another thing: no matter how much experience you may have on your own computers, it does not compare with the experience gained from supporting other person's hardware and software.
My arse. GEM/TOS on the Atari ST fucking pwned it.
True enough. For the kiddies who were playing games.
Those of us who were in the trenches of the computer revolution were soldiering on with workhorse computers rather than playpen hobby horses.
Win3.11 was as good as it gets, for that time and that available hardware, especially when used on top of DR-DOS. Win98 was okay. WinXP grew into becoming perhaps the best ever, though that growth took longer than it really should have. All the rest of the Win-whatever were crap. Jump from WinXP to Ubuntu, that is the natural upgrade path. For after WinXP Microsoft fail it.
Perhaps Microsoft should go make phones or something. There can be gracefulness in falling from great height; there can be elegance in descent. No way to do the final splat with grace or elegance, unfortunately. But such a long way to drop! What a trip!
It would make sense to classify the Earth - Moon as a binary planet. Life-as-we-know-it is most likely to occur in binary planet situations, where large tides are the stirring rods that keep the proto-life soups from settling into non-interactive stratifications. Creating the class of binary planet with the Earth - Moon as the prototypical first pair would help focus exoplanetary studies, and also inject new considerations into Earth science studies, such as plate tectonics, geomagnetism, possibly meteorology and climate studies, etc.
As to Pluto: Yep, its a planet. Has been one all along. 260-odd astronomers at a convention of more than 2,000 astronomers have no scientific basis for saying otherwise. No matter how important their foible makes them feel.
[Is this post a good troll? I think it is a good troll. I think it is like a storm surge on top of a super tide, that would stir things up, keep the cauldron bubbling. But in a good way.]
There is a word for persons who place their idealism above what is good for the country, and that word is "Republican".
There is a word for those persons who fight so strongly for their ideals that they are willing to destroy democracy, and that word is "Tea Party".
Discuss. Do try to keep it civil.
Your monkeys are deficient in randomness.
Of course truly random monkeys would contain many random mutations many of which are not going to be viable, which means that room no matter that it is infinitely big, is going to be full of the stench of dead, decaying monkey flesh. The whole damn metaphor stinks.
Hey I want some of those moneys. I'm at a keyboard doing my bit, so where are my moneys?
Well said. If I had not already posted here, I would have given you a mod point. Probably "insightful", but "informative" would also work.
Parent post presents a reasonable argument. But the argument depends on an unstated assumption that cannot be verified and is most likely not true. The assumption being that our observational skills are so highly developed that we would recognize a break in causality if we saw it.
On every scale from the dark matter/energy that makes galaxies the way they are to the mysteries of quantum foam, there are a multitude of indications that we really are not very good observers. For if we were, there would be a lot fewer oddities that the science teachers kick into the corner and tell the students to ignore them.
You speak as if you live in a reality where there can be an objective third party point of view, and where physics has some kind of existence outside human imagination. How 19th century quaint.
The Copenhagen interpretation is the best we've got since the upsets by Heisenberg et al.. To whit: physics is our best imaginary model of what the Universe might be like. That's not only as good as it gets, by the very nature of things that's as good as it can ever get. There is no objective reality. It is all in your head.
Which is not to say that you cannot shape your imagination so that it is congruent with (but still separate from) somew of what is actually out there. Leading to things like the Apollo project, the Manhattan project, etc.
"I can't believe I used to think that what I thought was happening was really going on." --The Sugar Beats
Look, Jeb and Co. screwed up big time on this.
The best thing you can do for your hero is to STFU and hope that everyone forgets all about this mess before the campaign season starts to warm up. And pray that none of those whose identity has been compromised by this fiasco files a very loud law suit.
Another thing: I doubt very much that this was some IT guy's mistake. There cannot be anyone in IT at the level of this kind of decision who is not cognizant of the need to protect the privacy of private citizens. No, this was botched by some campaign guru who had been given a level of access to the databases that was well beyond his comprehension. JB is at serious fault for failure to manage his minions, and the proof of that is one of his minions just shot him in the foot. With a shotgun.
Where are you seeing evidence that the multiple reports of SSNs having been published are wrong? If that were the case it would have been hollered to the skies, for we are all very aware that the USA political Right scrutinizes the press very closely, and yells quite loudly over any hint of bias against their favorite sons.
And why do you feel that it is somehow not a problem for an aspiring Presidential candidate to be so incapable of managing his subordinates that this kind of stupid mistake could be made in his name? Do you really feel it is acceptable for someone claiming he's presidential material to give the wrong subordinate so much free rein that they could cause him this kind of headache?
A word of advice: The best thing JB supporters could do for him right now is to STFU about this snafu, and hope everyone forgets about it before the campaign season gets into full swing.
Did anyone else hear that "Whoosh?" I thought it was pretty loud.
"jeb@jeb.org" is almost as official as "whatmeworry@gmail.com". Or my favorite for the email harvesters: "nobody@nowhere.nul".
Gathering data piecemeal through FOIA requests is so yesterday, now that we have a highly placed politician who just lays the feast out there on a streetside table, where every black hat passer-by can help themself.
So its okay for a black hat to harvest email addresses in Florida by simply sending a FOIA request to the Guvner?
Oh wait, in Florida you don't even have to do that...
Jeb just lost any chance of getting my vote. Not because of what he's done, but because he has demonstrated a level of ignorance about how the world now works that is just unbelievable.
I don't know anything about Jeb Bush. But I certainly won't be voting for him now. If he cannot be trusted to keep confidential correspondence, including Social Security numbers, confidential, then he lacks some basic values that I regard as essential in a President. Or in anyone filling just about any other elected office.
Why do you think that would make a difference to us who are trying to squeeze every bit of performance out of our boxen? Wasted GPU cycles are still wasted, on a machine that could be tuned to offload some of the rendering work or number crunching from the cores to the GPU.
I do some CG. A "simple" three minute animation can easily take more than 30 hours to render, even with four cores AND the GPU cooking.
There is a reason why anyoine doing serious computer work today is using one of the Linux distros.
I don't knock Windows or even Apple. If all you are doing with the computer is the same stuff your Grandma and Grandpa used to do with a pegboard accounting system and a sliderule, then by all means get a box that will play the games you enjoy. But trying to compare that OS with a serious computing OS is like trying to compare the best ever go-cart with a Formula One race car. Yeah they can run on the same track, but that's about all they have in common.
That's a really bad car analogy. About the worst I've ever heard. Really really bad.
Yeah. It was bad. The best I could do under the circumstances.
What circumstances?
Can't justify wasting any more time on this.
Oh. Yeah, I see your point.
Short answer: I am not a fanbois of Linux or any particular OS or application. It is just that I have neither the time nor the money to play around in any of the closed gardens-- the two biggest being Microsoft and Apple. In the rare occasion that I need a Microsoft only product, like upgrading my Garmin GPS, I can do that through WINE or by running Win7 in a VM, under Linux, with all the safeguards against malware or corruption of the filing system that come built into Linux.
or consume to many resources
Why, why is this still and issue? Are you using a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM? Otherwise I can't comprehend how on earth you would claim any OS to be "resource intensive." There's no such thing in 2015. Every OS works fine with decent hardware, and if you use computers for a living I can't believe you're not able to buy 8GB of RAM.
Spoken like someone who has never used a computer for anything that could not be done in a week's time with paper and pencil.
Computer graphics and animation. Audio editing (the high quality stuff, not mashing together lossy mp3s). Statistical analysis. To be brief, much of what is done today by many artists and small business owners. All of these are done measuably better on computers that do not waste resources on OS and GUI shiny distractions.
Why would anyone set window borders to 1 px wide? This sounds like a PIBKAC thing. (Oh dear. Did I just date myself?)
I have been using XFCE for several years.It comes with Studio Ubuntu, which also uses a kernel optimized for audio editing and CG rendering. My passion is CG, and if using XFCE helps to shave a half hour off a 10 hour rendering task, then you bet I'm going to use it.
Another benefit I have noticed is that I spend a lot less time messing about in the GUI time sinks. I look for an OS to provide a fast and economical way to get to the applications where I do my work. Code that supports fifty different ways to color the file manager screen is deadweight and frought with potential bugs, and I'm happy to be free of it.
A third benefit of XFCE: I am as susceptible to shiny distractions as the next guy, so I appreciate that XFCE has far fewer ways to wander off into the woods than KDE. There were a number of features in Gnome 2 that I miss, and if the Gnome 3 train wreck had not happened, I might never have moved to Studio Ubuntu and XFCE. Yet considering today's alternatives to XFCE, I have no regrets.
The moon has a side facing away from Saturn which is darker then the side facing saturn. It seems to be due to collecting dust from a larger ring that is on the border of its orbit.
You said that very succinctly. Unfortunately it is also very wrong.
Read TFA again. The dark side (of Iapetus-- not the Force) is the side that is facing forward in its orbit.
May the Farce be with you.
That's no moon; that's half a binary planet.
"North" is a geocentric concept that can be projected outward upon the solar system.
That one is simple and easy since there is a clear consensus among Earth dwellers as to which way is north.
In other situations it can get more complicated, such as when projecting the egocentric concept of "Left" and "Right" outward from an individual point of view. The simplest case is when looking at a photo of Mutt and Jeff, and being told that Mutt is on the left. Even though when the photo was taken both Jeff would have said that Mutt was on his right side.
There are even greater problems when there is no consensus within the group. For instance, for a libtard "going to the Left" is definitely right, but "going to the Right" is clearly wrong, which is as succinct a summary of the state of USA politics as you can get. Well, except for the die hard Tea Partiers, where "Right" is always right, and "Left" is always wrong. But then after rejecting everything that is not right, all the Tea Partiers have left is right. Which is at best terribly confusing.
It was all so much simpler during the last American civil war, when everything was either North or South.
There is only the small problem of getting to court when NSA and FBI regulations come into play before the courts are involved. When those regulations stipulate that property can be confiscated, bank accounts can be frozen, and you could be turned out into the street with nothing more than the cash in your pocket, that is a powerful incentive to STFU and do whatever the Man says to do.
You may not have any effective allies, either, since there is nothing preventing your lawyer from being gifted with an NSL gives him a bad bit of conflict of interest wrt your case.