I'm a software engineer so my knowledge is rather limited, but I'd have assumed that the orbits of planets would tend to be in the same plane as the spinning of the galaxy, so if you look at a mostly flat galaxy, you'll find mostly aligned orbits, and if a galaxy was more... "chaotic", the orbits would be likewise less aligned in respect with each other.
Well, each solar system has an invariable plane perpendicular to its aggregate angular momentum vector. The rotation of the star and the orbits of the planets tend to be quite close to this plane. The exception is when the orbits have been perturbed by passage of an object of significant mass at an angle to the plane. Note that the invariable plane of any particular solar system in a galaxy is not necessarily similar to that of the galaxy as a whole, although aggregated over all solar systems in the galaxy they are the same.
I may be wrong, but whenever I have seen jargon used by journalists, it's been used wrongly. Sometimes the public has even picked up the misnomer, with confusion as a result, until one side or the other "won".
A disgracefully simple example is blue moon which was misrepresented by a journalist in a magazine which should have been competent in the area. This wrong definition was picked up by the less erudite (partly because they trusted Sky and Telescope magazine in such matters) and the wrong meaning almost predominates nowadays, despite decades of active correction by those who know better.
I think you're a little confused as to what "on-call" actually means... it is typcially uncompensated. Your job is to respond if called. Otherwise you can do what you want.
This must be some new meaning for "on call" with which I am unfamiliar. We pay our people to be on-call for specific off-hours periods, and that pay is by the on-call hour and in addition to their base salary. If they are actually called on, then they get yet another additional payment, depending on how long it took to address the issue. Those eligible for on-call duty are also free to decline any or all on-call duty, if they wish. We expect our people to remain sober and capable when on-call, even if they are attending social events such as parties. This has a price, as it should.
Which industry/country do you work in, where on-call time is free (and possibly compulsory and/or unlimited)?
I wish him luck. It takes cojones grandes to be the first. If he's patient, deliberate, extraordinarily cautious, and more than a little lucky then he can pull it off.
Yep, it sounds like he's in the running for a Darwin Award.
The main benefit you would lose by changing to a NAS is the centralized domain authentication, assuming you have one. If you don't have a domain then a NAS would work great. I've setup a couple of Synology before, they perform well and are easy to manage.
That was true a few years ago, but newer Synology boxes can be LDAP servers. My DS211 supports this, but my older DS207 does not.
I recently installed a small DS212+ for a small office of 5 using around 1tb of data. The NAS was chosen as a low cost option but after running it for a few weeks it's actually better than a windows box for this use case, mostly because of its excellent software and ease of use. It has a built in VPN server and access to a host of 3rd party apps. Highly recommended.
Agree with the recommendation for Synology; they're hard to beat on value although you can find cheaper NAS boxes. I presently have both a DS207 (1TB) and a DS211 (6TB), and they work like a charm. Both are configured with a pair of disks in RAID0 so they're fairly quick, and have automatic incremental backup to a group of USB drives. Synology's web server is solid enough, but you might want to harden it with suitable Apache configuration files and sensible policies. As parent said, there are excellent free applications available for download - we use their mail server, media server, and photo station, but there are also DHCP, VPN, LDAP, and ERP possibilities.
A DS1512 would absolutely blow away the DS211 in performance, and is marketed as being suitable for use by SMEs.
TFA says "Preloaded with Debian 6, Metasploit, SET, Fast-Track, w3af, Kismet, Aircrack, SSLstrip, nmap, Hydra, dsniff, Scapy, Ettercap, Bluetooth/VoIP/IPv6 tools, & more". Which leads us to a question, since they're distributing it: are they in compliance with relevant licenses (e.g. GPL) if they have they modified any of the FOSS packages ?
I still use old telephone service for dialup. $7/month and unlimited data. None of those 3 GB caps for me!
The shocking result being that at typical modem speeds (30-57 kbps), this would be about 7½-14GB running it 24/7 for a month. You'd end up looking at the "buffering" text for most of a movie, but the total capacity of the link would be greater than that for many higher speed plans in the US.
Care to point to the Google policy which you claim is being breached by The Sex Party? Someotherparties in Australia also have donate buttons on their websites, and there is no sign of Google refusing their election ads.
Yes, they can refuse to do business with any specific person/entity based on uniformly applied policies, what they can not do is refuse to do business with a group of people defined by race, social standing, religion, sexual orientation etc.
I suppose the Australian Sex Party could make a case that they're being discriminated against based on their sexual orientation. They also have a policy that religion should be kept out of politics, which might preclude discrimination against them on religious grounds.
And three of them are mine. I use one of them and am not tempted to make an account with my real name. G+ probably would not believe my real name, anyway.
On FB, I made about a dozen with my real name (quite uncommon and distinctive, think "Gaius Julius Caesar" or similar) a few years ago, then abandoned them. I have not had any FB account or any FB presence since then.
The problem in Canada, I'm guessing, is that it's so far north that one is less likely to have a good enough view of the southern sky.
Maybe not. We have a small satellite dish at our cottage, which is at 61.5N - further north than any major population center in Canada (between Whitehorse and Yellowknife in latitude). It works fine, with the added benefit that its angle is steep enough that snow does not accumulate in it; apparently this is a problem in parts of the Midwest. The usual issues with satellite still apply, such as heavy rainclouds degrading the signal, and making sure the path to the satellite is free of trees and expected to remain so for a few decades.
Minor gripe: why does slashcode not render the degree symbol (° or °)?
Regarding the ads, yes, that is exactly the premise cable companies launched their service with. You paid a monthly fee and got ad-free programming. But ads make money and the cable providers liked money, soooo
While an interesting exercise, with outstanding payoff, I'd prefer to memorize the names of people that have been convicted of breaking into systems and abusing them, then sentenced to 30-50 years in a Gulag.
Think about it: forcing yourself to memorize a long stupid string because there are jerks out there that will break into your stuff, steal your identity, and give your credit card numbers for pennies per. There's something wrong here.
Exactly. There is value for most people in being able to divulge the password under duress. Merely denying that you know the password - even if true - won't get you far in court.
And anyway, I use passwords that I can remember, which are not words or composite words or leet-modified words or phrases, and they have rather more than 38 bits of entropy. A quick calculation indicates almost 62 bits of entropy for the password I use here, and I use several passwords of similar or greater complexity for other purposes.
As a typical conservative, I'm opposed to forcing all airline passengers to choose between a full body porno scan or receive a groping from a TSA employee.
A real conservative would insist that all would-be passengers get both, of course.
Except that those unAmerican pinko commie pedophile pirate terrorist pervert traitors at EPIC would be guaranteed to get the "rough" version of the groping. Repeatedly.
What about dissidents here in Google's home country, the United States of America?
Now I'm confused. Was "dissidents" a misspelling of traitors, terrorists, pedophiles, or pirates?
It's a shame that this old AC was being serious in his post (which keeps it's original Score: 0). But your satirical reply has earned you a +4 Funny.
What about us dissidents here in the USA? I assume, of course, that Google also has a de-obfuscation filter to HELP identify us:(
Actually, I was going for irony rather than satire, but that's OK, too.
Any dissident in the US will inevitably be castigated as a pirate or pedophile or terrorist or traitor or a member of some other group that it's acceptable to impugn unconditionally. In the old days they would have been labeled "unAmerican pinko commies" but that's almost comically retro nowadays, while alleging that they're "sexual deviants" is quite ineffective.
Well, I endorse the intent of this, but the main reason the free flow of digital goods is blocked by region is because of the balkanized licensing of media. Geo-IP blocking is a consequence of this, not a cause of it.
If you want global viewing of content or global distribution of software, then the balkanization is the problem. For media such as movies and music, the solution would involve getting rid of local licensing and extortion by local media groups - good luck with that. For software, there are language and legal issues which differ from country to country, and a software maker may prefer to have these handled by a "distributor/importer" who gouges the consumer. In some cases, the "importer/distributor" is actually a local subsidiary of the overseas supplier, but still adds extra cost.
It's not going to work with conservatives. They want to punish all teachers, although bad teachers especially. Rewarding good behavior isn't in their MO... Only rewarding greed and selfishness works for them.
But the STEM teachers must be greedy and selfish, otherwise why would they be attracted to the $ bonuses, pay increments, and promotion prospects? You don't think they're like other teachers, who impart their knowledge/ignorance out of love[*] of doing so...
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
This is one of the keys - a teacher should know the subject he/she is teaching. Having a teacher who fears/dodges off-syllabus questions is probably quite demotivating for the student. When I was in high school (some decades ago), our maths teacher died suddenly two years before we were due to graduate, and there was "difficulty" finding a replacement. The solution was that two postgrad engineering students did it as part-time jobs. They were great, not just being closer in age to us than the older teachers, but they both knew more than enough maths, were very keen on the subject, and imparted all sorts of unifying insights that weren't on the syllabus then. We had a "real" maths teacher again for the final year of high school, but he made the subject dull again.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The second key is the parents, since it is they who will impart the love of learning (or not) at an early age, and provide encouragement (or not) by the way they value their kids' achievements at school. This key is largely missing in the more deprived areas, and consequent problems involving discipline and rejection of authority can be contagious when large numbers of the kids are dismissive of education. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, unless one adopts some kind of dispersal of the kids among other schools whose pupils are more attuned to learning (this is also not without drawbacks, and bussing has a poor reputation in the US).
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
Teachers' unions in the US - good luck with that. Your image of "two teachers one cup" is probably accurate enough as an estimate of their reaction.
We can expect that Apple will wriggle to avoid doing this in any meaningful way. What's the smallest size ad they can place? What's the smallest typeface? Do all elements need equal prominance?
They'd likely put a huge ad saying "Buy Apple iPad, the judge said it's cool" in a large font with the "Samsung did not copy" message in a tiny font in a corner of the ad (maybe even upside-down text). They'll go as far as they think they can while avoiding a contempt finding.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a software engineer so my knowledge is rather limited, but I'd have assumed that the orbits of planets would tend to be in the same plane as the spinning of the galaxy, so if you look at a mostly flat galaxy, you'll find mostly aligned orbits, and if a galaxy was more... "chaotic", the orbits would be likewise less aligned in respect with each other.
Well, each solar system has an invariable plane perpendicular to its aggregate angular momentum vector. The rotation of the star and the orbits of the planets tend to be quite close to this plane. The exception is when the orbits have been perturbed by passage of an object of significant mass at an angle to the plane. Note that the invariable plane of any particular solar system in a galaxy is not necessarily similar to that of the galaxy as a whole, although aggregated over all solar systems in the galaxy they are the same.
I may be wrong, but whenever I have seen jargon used by journalists, it's been used wrongly. Sometimes the public has even picked up the misnomer, with confusion as a result, until one side or the other "won".
A disgracefully simple example is blue moon which was misrepresented by a journalist in a magazine which should have been competent in the area. This wrong definition was picked up by the less erudite (partly because they trusted Sky and Telescope magazine in such matters) and the wrong meaning almost predominates nowadays, despite decades of active correction by those who know better.
It's not just you. Stud finders don't work for anybody.
Yep. They should be called nail/screw finders, because that's what they can find. And electrical cables, if you're unlucky...
Yeah? Whose court? Most governments enjoy sovereign immunity.
Well, not exactly in the UK. Perhaps the threatened case would involve a writ of mandamus against the relevant ministers.
For instance, if redtube required you to use your real name...
I think you're a little confused as to what "on-call" actually means ... it is typcially uncompensated. Your job is to respond if called. Otherwise you can do what you want.
This must be some new meaning for "on call" with which I am unfamiliar. We pay our people to be on-call for specific off-hours periods, and that pay is by the on-call hour and in addition to their base salary. If they are actually called on, then they get yet another additional payment, depending on how long it took to address the issue. Those eligible for on-call duty are also free to decline any or all on-call duty, if they wish. We expect our people to remain sober and capable when on-call, even if they are attending social events such as parties. This has a price, as it should.
Which industry/country do you work in, where on-call time is free (and possibly compulsory and/or unlimited)?
I wish him luck. It takes cojones grandes to be the first. If he's patient, deliberate, extraordinarily cautious, and more than a little lucky then he can pull it off.
Yep, it sounds like he's in the running for a Darwin Award.
The main benefit you would lose by changing to a NAS is the centralized domain authentication, assuming you have one. If you don't have a domain then a NAS would work great. I've setup a couple of Synology before, they perform well and are easy to manage.
That was true a few years ago, but newer Synology boxes can be LDAP servers. My DS211 supports this, but my older DS207 does not.
I recently installed a small DS212+ for a small office of 5 using around 1tb of data. The NAS was chosen as a low cost option but after running it for a few weeks it's actually better than a windows box for this use case, mostly because of its excellent software and ease of use. It has a built in VPN server and access to a host of 3rd party apps. Highly recommended.
Agree with the recommendation for Synology; they're hard to beat on value although you can find cheaper NAS boxes. I presently have both a DS207 (1TB) and a DS211 (6TB), and they work like a charm. Both are configured with a pair of disks in RAID0 so they're fairly quick, and have automatic incremental backup to a group of USB drives. Synology's web server is solid enough, but you might want to harden it with suitable Apache configuration files and sensible policies. As parent said, there are excellent free applications available for download - we use their mail server, media server, and photo station, but there are also DHCP, VPN, LDAP, and ERP possibilities.
A DS1512 would absolutely blow away the DS211 in performance, and is marketed as being suitable for use by SMEs.
TFA says "Preloaded with Debian 6, Metasploit, SET, Fast-Track, w3af, Kismet, Aircrack, SSLstrip, nmap, Hydra, dsniff, Scapy, Ettercap, Bluetooth/VoIP/IPv6 tools, & more". Which leads us to a question, since they're distributing it: are they in compliance with relevant licenses (e.g. GPL) if they have they modified any of the FOSS packages ?
I still use old telephone service for dialup. $7/month and unlimited data. None of those 3 GB caps for me!
The shocking result being that at typical modem speeds (30-57 kbps), this would be about 7½-14GB running it 24/7 for a month. You'd end up looking at the "buffering" text for most of a movie, but the total capacity of the link would be greater than that for many higher speed plans in the US.
Care to point to the Google policy which you claim is being breached by The Sex Party? Some other parties in Australia also have donate buttons on their websites, and there is no sign of Google refusing their election ads.
Yes, they can refuse to do business with any specific person/entity based on uniformly applied policies, what they can not do is refuse to do business with a group of people defined by race, social standing, religion, sexual orientation etc.
I suppose the Australian Sex Party could make a case that they're being discriminated against based on their sexual orientation. They also have a policy that religion should be kept out of politics, which might preclude discrimination against them on religious grounds.
There are a ton of fake names on G+.
And three of them are mine. I use one of them and am not tempted to make an account with my real name. G+ probably would not believe my real name, anyway.
On FB, I made about a dozen with my real name (quite uncommon and distinctive, think "Gaius Julius Caesar" or similar) a few years ago, then abandoned them. I have not had any FB account or any FB presence since then.
The problem in Canada, I'm guessing, is that it's so far north that one is less likely to have a good enough view of the southern sky.
Maybe not. We have a small satellite dish at our cottage, which is at 61.5N - further north than any major population center in Canada (between Whitehorse and Yellowknife in latitude). It works fine, with the added benefit that its angle is steep enough that snow does not accumulate in it; apparently this is a problem in parts of the Midwest. The usual issues with satellite still apply, such as heavy rainclouds degrading the signal, and making sure the path to the satellite is free of trees and expected to remain so for a few decades.
Minor gripe: why does slashcode not render the degree symbol (° or °)?
Regarding the ads, yes, that is exactly the premise cable companies launched their service with. You paid a monthly fee and got ad-free programming. But ads make money and the cable providers liked money, soooo
And the cable companies are owned by people like Frito "I like Money" Pendejo.
You should have modded yourself offtopic.
You can't mod and post on the same article, which is a pretty good policy.
Except if you post as AC, which GGP probably should have done.
Then we could even see a +1 insightful comment on frosty piss by an AC...
While an interesting exercise, with outstanding payoff, I'd prefer to memorize the names of people that have been convicted of breaking into systems and abusing them, then sentenced to 30-50 years in a Gulag.
Think about it: forcing yourself to memorize a long stupid string because there are jerks out there that will break into your stuff, steal your identity, and give your credit card numbers for pennies per. There's something wrong here.
Exactly. There is value for most people in being able to divulge the password under duress. Merely denying that you know the password - even if true - won't get you far in court.
And anyway, I use passwords that I can remember, which are not words or composite words or leet-modified words or phrases, and they have rather more than 38 bits of entropy. A quick calculation indicates almost 62 bits of entropy for the password I use here, and I use several passwords of similar or greater complexity for other purposes.
As a typical conservative, I'm opposed to forcing all airline passengers to choose between a full body porno scan or receive a groping from a TSA employee.
A real conservative would insist that all would-be passengers get both, of course.
Except that those unAmerican pinko commie pedophile pirate terrorist pervert traitors at EPIC would be guaranteed to get the "rough" version of the groping. Repeatedly.
What about dissidents here in Google's home country, the United States of America?
Now I'm confused. Was "dissidents" a misspelling of traitors, terrorists, pedophiles, or pirates?
It's a shame that this old AC was being serious in his post (which keeps it's original Score: 0). But your satirical reply has earned you a +4 Funny.
What about us dissidents here in the USA? I assume, of course, that Google also has a de-obfuscation filter to HELP identify us :(
Actually, I was going for irony rather than satire, but that's OK, too.
Any dissident in the US will inevitably be castigated as a pirate or pedophile or terrorist or traitor or a member of some other group that it's acceptable to impugn unconditionally. In the old days they would have been labeled "unAmerican pinko commies" but that's almost comically retro nowadays, while alleging that they're "sexual deviants" is quite ineffective.
What about dissidents here in Google's home country, the United States of America?
Now I'm confused. Was "dissidents" a misspelling of traitors, terrorists, pedophiles, or pirates?
Well, I endorse the intent of this, but the main reason the free flow of digital goods is blocked by region is because of the balkanized licensing of media. Geo-IP blocking is a consequence of this, not a cause of it.
If you want global viewing of content or global distribution of software, then the balkanization is the problem. For media such as movies and music, the solution would involve getting rid of local licensing and extortion by local media groups - good luck with that. For software, there are language and legal issues which differ from country to country, and a software maker may prefer to have these handled by a "distributor/importer" who gouges the consumer. In some cases, the "importer/distributor" is actually a local subsidiary of the overseas supplier, but still adds extra cost.
It's not going to work with conservatives. They want to punish all teachers, although bad teachers especially. Rewarding good behavior isn't in their MO... Only rewarding greed and selfishness works for them.
But the STEM teachers must be greedy and selfish, otherwise why would they be attracted to the $ bonuses, pay increments, and promotion prospects? You don't think they're like other teachers, who impart their knowledge/ignorance out of love[*] of doing so...
[*] For positive and negative values of love.
In terms of strengths, he quite openly admits that the salary supplement (which was less than the GBP equivalent of $20,000 when he joined - closer to around $8,000 equivalent) was a very attactive consideration, given that he was graduating with a fair old pile of debt. None of the other career options he was considering would have made it possible for him to move away from the parents and live independently in London quite so quickly. He's also noted that he (and others like him) actually know his subject (maths) to the extent that they can actually field questions from students that go away from the narrow syllabus. He was horrified by how many of his older colleagues were dependant on being allowed to stick to a very narrow syllabus.
This is one of the keys - a teacher should know the subject he/she is teaching. Having a teacher who fears/dodges off-syllabus questions is probably quite demotivating for the student. When I was in high school (some decades ago), our maths teacher died suddenly two years before we were due to graduate, and there was "difficulty" finding a replacement. The solution was that two postgrad engineering students did it as part-time jobs. They were great, not just being closer in age to us than the older teachers, but they both knew more than enough maths, were very keen on the subject, and imparted all sorts of unifying insights that weren't on the syllabus then. We had a "real" maths teacher again for the final year of high school, but he made the subject dull again.
On the other side of the coin, a lot of his intake to the graduate scheme dropped out relatively quickly - within the first year in many cases. The scheme was highly focussed on underperforming schools - which largely tend to be those which have the most severe discipline problems. It's no secret that many classes in those schools are more about crowd control than education. As my friend is the oldest of 6 siblings, he came to this with a natural advantage. By contrast, those who had gotten onto the scheme on the basis of academic ability often simply couldn't cope with the levels of misbehaviour, abuse and violence that are endemic in our less impressive schools and dropped out.
The second key is the parents, since it is they who will impart the love of learning (or not) at an early age, and provide encouragement (or not) by the way they value their kids' achievements at school. This key is largely missing in the more deprived areas, and consequent problems involving discipline and rejection of authority can be contagious when large numbers of the kids are dismissive of education. It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, unless one adopts some kind of dispersal of the kids among other schools whose pupils are more attuned to learning (this is also not without drawbacks, and bussing has a poor reputation in the US).
The other problem revolved around the reactions of other teachers - and particularly the teaching unions - to the scheme members. This is a profession where pay and career advancement had long been (and is still largely expected to be) determined by length of service, rather than performance or potential. Having a bunch of "bright young things" on additional pay and a fast track to Department-head and other management positions went down in most staff-rooms like a cup of cold sick. At the same time, the unions (membership of which is not mandatory, but is widespread) did everything they legally could to make life unpleasant for them. If you find yourself on a "Fast Track" scheme like this, you need to be prepared to be a bit of a staff room pariah.
Teachers' unions in the US - good luck with that. Your image of "two teachers one cup" is probably accurate enough as an estimate of their reaction.
We can expect that Apple will wriggle to avoid doing this in any meaningful way. What's the smallest size ad they can place? What's the smallest typeface? Do all elements need equal prominance?
They'd likely put a huge ad saying "Buy Apple iPad, the judge said it's cool" in a large font with the "Samsung did not copy" message in a tiny font in a corner of the ad (maybe even upside-down text). They'll go as far as they think they can while avoiding a contempt finding.