... that I'm finding is that people are being hired into positions where most of their "Internet" experience has been AOL. I've hit a few situations where bringing up topics covered, say, in RFC's is met with completely blank stares because they've never heard of USENET, (or RFC's). This has evolved to the point where on some projects I'm working on, other members of teams are proposing "radically new ideas" that are just re-hashes of things that existed on the net years before AOL, etc., yet for THEM since it wasn't on AOL, it wasn't on the Internet. Another example: in providing user support for a portal site, we've had to apply the suffix "@aol.com" to e-mail addresses without an @ sign because changing them manually (or dealing with the after effects of just ignoring the problem) became too time consuming. In each case, there's the assumption that AOL is the Internet, or that the Internet is largely AOL. (Of course, one can also insert "Microsoft" there too --- I've had too many discussion cum arguments trying to convince people that Microsoft didn't "invent" the Internet any more than Al Gore did.)
Heh - I once sat in with someone who was "leading" (in several senses of the word) a discussion group on how to detect Earth-type planets. He had his pet idea and it was clear to me that he wanted everyone to "realize" that his was the best plan, etc.
He didn't appreciate it when he asked the floor as to what other options people had for getting a resolution of something like 1 km on an Earth-type planet, I raised my hand and said that the most cost-effective solution is to fund SETI, make contact, and have them send us a postcard. In terms of the comparative costs, it ended up working out to about a factor of a million to one.
Several people have already pointed out the reasons for wanting digital copies: searching, accessibility for the sight-impaired, etc. I'd like to add to this list --- electronic books take up a LOT less space than hardcopy editions! I could actually get a cheaper place to live if I didn't use up so much space with bookcases!
That being said, curling up with a nice large book is a pleasure, and when I do that, I'm typically alone, and there's that smug feeling of doing something fun (arrogant). Hmmm --- I think the person at the Library of Congress should spend more time reading...!
--- I like to sit in front of a fire with a copy of ``War and Peace''... a big book like that can feed a fire for hours! --- Emo Philips
Heh - the best Area 51 stuff is the trio of books by Robert Doherty. He manages to pull together just around every "unsolved mystery" into one plotline.:-) Great light (as in helium) reading if you're on a transcontinental flight and the only onboard movie is "The Avengers" with Uma Thurman (who's contact with the original TV show had to have been 3rd hand at best).
However, with the demise of Area 51, the BIG question is --- what will become of the Ale-i Inn? (I know I'm getting the name wrong.)
I fear the faster we go, the dumber we get...
on
Faster
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· Score: 1
I haven't read the book yet, (but I plan to purchase it on my next book buying run) but I've been increasingly concerned about what I see as a general decay of knowledge in society.
As things get faster, are more people being left behind? OK, 100 years ago most people didn't finish high school, let alone take calculus in high school, but I'll bet most of them could handle small math problems in their head. Several times now, I've thought I've seen every oddity concening store clerks and their increasing inability to make simple change. (The latest: cashier has to give the money to the manager to make change which is handed back to the cashier who hands it to me --- I kid you not!)
I have read reports which claim that over the last generation (about 30 years) people read less, and our vocabularies(?) have, like, dropped(?) significantly enough to affect word usage (i.e., words are changing meaning through misuse).
Could it be that it's an intentional bug to put in the x98 class of products, that just happens to be "discovered" after the 2000 suite has been released?
It'll be interesting if M$'s "solution" to the problem is "buy the 2000 series software --- it doesn't have that bug!", neglecting to mention that some similar "feature" has been included to push people along the next time they haven't lined up at the trough to purchase whatever the newest M$ offering is.
Pinkerton claims there is demand for their product, but most of the schools that are asking for it are public (i.e., tax-funded) schools. So, *we're* the ones putting money in their pockets.
Therefore, one approach would be to make noise that tax funds not be used for programs that utilize anonymous reporting as the brunt of their database. (Yeah, like that will fly.)
At the very least - we should be talking to local, state, and federal officials to show them the danger of these products.
Assuming that one could create a sufficiently intelligent program, what is the potential impact of intelligent viruses? Aside from the likelihood that AI "vaccines" or AI "anti-virals" would also be developed (before or after, it's hard to say), do you forsee problems with the inability for people to code "more intelligent" software to keep pace?
(I realize that this conjures up images from uncountable TV and movie plots, but seems to me that as soon as AI becomes semi-widely demonstrated, it will be exploited for annoying or sinister means!)
So... if a user never causes a problem, he/she is rewarded by having their access cut off.
It's a good thing this isn't implemented (widely) in the "real world" (sarcasm mode on):
Yes, Mr. Smith you are in perfect health, but because these other people have had health problems, we're raising your premiums!
You're a model employee, Ms. Brown, but we have to let you go because funds are tights and everyone else has seniority
You might be right in the eyes of the law, but we have more (expensive) lawyers than you can ever afford, so we'll win anyway.
Sigh. Life sucks and is unfair whenever it would be inconvenient for people (and esp. bureaucracies) to do the "right thing". I know that this episode is just a minor inconvenience (the idea of doing anything important on IRC vanished for me around 1992) but it definitely illustrates the addage "cutting one's nose off to spite one's face".
One of the things that hasn't been mentioned that occurred to me today while reading up on this thread is that the incidence of suicide attempts among teens is three times more likely among non-heterosexual teens.
A program like WAVE has at its fundamental core, the belief that all students are basically the same: it's the ones who are out of the ordinary who have to be watched, profiled, and who are the ones likely to cause trouble.
How long would it be before such a program began targeting kids who were already ostracized for their orientation (remembering that the overwhelming number of US states do not even prevent discrimination on the basis of orientation, let alone outwardly offer any support for non-heterosexual teens!) are singled out further?
I fear that programs like WAVE could end up making things much MUCH worse than better.
... as MSCE's cowering under the prospects of having to learn about computers and (gasp) cross-platform application support, and (double gasp) choosing for themselves where they want to go today (and in doing so undertaking the responsibility that goes with it).
One of the things that I've noticed over the last couple of years is that living under M$'s wing gives one a great way to avoid responsibility. If something wasn't working the way it was desired to (or was intended) you could blame Microsoft, and Maaaaaaaaybe it'd be addressed in a later patch^H^H^H^H^Hservice pack, but the eyes (and blame) weren't necessarily on you.
In the "post-M$" world (and of course there is no such thing - M$ will continue on in some for, at least for the foreseeable future), the stakes may well be a little higher for admins or admin posers (the ones who don't actually have to keep things running or clean up the messes, but somehow get to make all the decisions and delegate responsibilities to others:-).
It will be an interesting year. I wonder if some of the more vocal supporters of M$ throughout the litigation to date will turn on them as things are tarnished further, or if there will be this "grass roots" drive to prevent too much in the way of intervention of M$'s dealings.
Well, it has the practical use for humanity as a whole in that it gives us some perspective on the Universe and our place in it. For now, we only know that other planets exist, and that most of them are nothing like the nine we are accustomed to. That in of itself is something amazing: ten years ago the entire idea we'd be detecting things with at the level of Saturn's mass would have been (and was) laughed at. Now, we actually doing it.
With time we'll catalog more of the "zoophony" of planet types, and hopefully will start finding some object that bear a resemblance to those with which we are most famliar. As that happens as a race we become part of that community (I know that sounds very Sagan-esque, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice). That's valuable because it's at least something that unites us planet-wide --- we're now starting to think as a planet when comparing ourselves to other systems. I find that a very positive step for the future, and that to me has a practical use.
... is that they're only as good as the data fed to them. So, if it's anonymous, why not enter in the entire school roster? After all, any kid has the *potential* to be violent, from the geeky nerd to the jocks, etc. The system is only feeding on the fear and the false hope that the person who would commit a crime is already an "outsider".
I'm reminded of the line in the first Addams Family movie where Wednesday is dressed up for Halloween. She's completely non-descript because serial killers "look just like everyone else".
IMHO (and IANAPatentL) it would have to be large enough to work outside of the parent body.
Without the original code, the patch is meaningless: you can't run it by itself, whereas you can run the parent program. Of course there's the situation where the patch exists to repair the parent program, but I assert that that "flavor" of patches are the least likely to have any claim to their own license.
Modules/plug-ins are a different story. They are not necessary, per se, but enhance an existing program. I could see users agreeing to licensing terms for a plug-in (although I might opt out most of the time, but that's just me).
Given how many M$ press releases we've seen as of late trying (pathetically IMHO) to show how feeble Linux is compared to Win9X/NT/Y2K, I'm wondering if by the end of the weekend we'll see something from Redmond talking about how the conference has been cancelled because of lack of interest, or because there are too few Linux users...
... no wait: it'll be "... because interest in Linux reached a peak in 1999, and is dropping out of site, esp. since the release of WinY2K..."
Iridium flashes while meteor observing
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R.I.P. Iridium
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· Score: 2
The first time I saw an Iridium flash was while I was observing the Perseid meteor shower...
It took me a moment to realize what it was that I was seeing, but for a few tense seconds....:-)
The poster notes that the Galileo mission is doing very well because it has been extended beyond the end of its program in 1997.
/. readers might also be interested to know about the International Ultraviolet Explorer which was launched in (I think) 1978 for a two-year mission. It lasted nineteen years in orbit taking data until it was turned off (in other words, it didn't fail - the switch was thrown).
Where in the heck did you get this idea? As someone who has done a little extragalactic astronomy...
I "got this idea" from listening to lots of extra-galactic astronomers over the last 20 years, and counting the number of times a derived value of H0 was presented as "better" than all of the other values of H0 that came before it (and in a few cases, all those to come after it:-).
Seeing the article in/., I was reminded in particular of the M100 Cepheid study because 1) the tables in the ApJ paper are messed up (the columns in some of the tables are ordered in the same way as the ID column so it's impossible to reconstruct how the value of H0 was arrived at - and no, I have no idea how it got past the referee and the editor); and 2) in many cases the number of photometric observations used to determine the periods of the Cepheids got to as low as 5-8 per star. Having something like 20 years of experience deriving periods from unevenly-sampled time series data (photometry and other measurements), it wasn't clear to me that it was possible to get any sort of definitive result at all (the window function kills you).
Yet, from all the press releases, etc., one might be led to conclude that the problem was sewn up. My comment was more tongue-in-cheek than you apparently read it.
Me, I've never been convinced that there is a single value of H0 that fits for all types of observation for all places in the Universe.
(Oh, did I forget to mention that I've [also] done a little bit of extra-galactic astronomy?)
Why I'm happy: a few years ago there was all this excitement over determining the age of the Universe from redshifts in (comparatively) nearby galaxies using HST.
The problem? It came out to be 8 billion years.
So a bunch of extra-galactic types dusted off their hands and said "well, that's done" and completely ignored that for years stellar evolution models had the lifetime of stars like the Sun to be on the order of 10 billion years, with lower-mass stars having older life times. There are lots of halo stars whizzing by near the Sun that are definitely older than 10 billion years, and the CMD's for globular clusters place their ages over 10 billion years.
Uh - you have to be really careful about who you read, and check their biases. There a lot that's put out of the sort "my computer model which doesn't include water doesn't match the satellite data and therefore it's not the Sun".
The "It's still mostly our fault" still doesn't pass Physics 101 --- the temperature rises before the anthropogenic gas buildup takes place. Until that is explained (and no anthropogenic model has done so), claims that solar forcing can't be it so it's "still" man (there's no "still there, really, since it was never proven through any rigorous analysis) should be treated with much skepticism --- solar forcing still accounts for MUCH more of the variance than any GCM.
Slashdot Mirror
... that I'm finding is that people are being hired into positions where most of their "Internet" experience has been AOL. I've hit a few situations where bringing up topics covered, say, in RFC's is met with completely blank stares because they've never heard of USENET, (or RFC's). This has evolved to the point where on some projects I'm working on, other members of teams are proposing "radically new ideas" that are just re-hashes of things that existed on the net years before AOL, etc., yet for THEM since it wasn't on AOL, it wasn't on the Internet. Another example: in providing user support for a portal site, we've had to apply the suffix "@aol.com" to e-mail addresses without an @ sign because changing them manually (or dealing with the after effects of just ignoring the problem) became too time consuming. In each case, there's the assumption that AOL is the Internet, or that the Internet is largely AOL. (Of course, one can also insert "Microsoft" there too --- I've had too many discussion cum arguments trying to convince people that Microsoft didn't "invent" the Internet any more than Al Gore did.)
He didn't appreciate it when he asked the floor as to what other options people had for getting a resolution of something like 1 km on an Earth-type planet, I raised my hand and said that the most cost-effective solution is to fund SETI, make contact, and have them send us a postcard. In terms of the comparative costs, it ended up working out to about a factor of a million to one.
That being said, curling up with a nice large book is a pleasure, and when I do that, I'm typically alone, and there's that smug feeling of doing something fun (arrogant). Hmmm --- I think the person at the Library of Congress should spend more time reading...!
--- I like to sit in front of a fire with a copy of ``War and Peace''... a big book like that can feed a fire for hours! --- Emo Philips
However, with the demise of Area 51, the BIG question is --- what will become of the Ale-i Inn? (I know I'm getting the name wrong.)
As things get faster, are more people being left behind? OK, 100 years ago most people didn't finish high school, let alone take calculus in high school, but I'll bet most of them could handle small math problems in their head. Several times now, I've thought I've seen every oddity concening store clerks and their increasing inability to make simple change. (The latest: cashier has to give the money to the manager to make change which is handed back to the cashier who hands it to me --- I kid you not!)
I have read reports which claim that over the last generation (about 30 years) people read less, and our vocabularies(?) have, like, dropped(?) significantly enough to affect word usage (i.e., words are changing meaning through misuse).
I've been calling it the "New Dark Ages".
It'll be interesting if M$'s "solution" to the problem is "buy the 2000 series software --- it doesn't have that bug!", neglecting to mention that some similar "feature" has been included to push people along the next time they haven't lined up at the trough to purchase whatever the newest M$ offering is.
Therefore, one approach would be to make noise that tax funds not be used for programs that utilize anonymous reporting as the brunt of their database. (Yeah, like that will fly.)
At the very least - we should be talking to local, state, and federal officials to show them the danger of these products.
(I realize that this conjures up images from uncountable TV and movie plots, but seems to me that as soon as AI becomes semi-widely demonstrated, it will be exploited for annoying or sinister means!)
It's a good thing this isn't implemented (widely) in the "real world" (sarcasm mode on):
Sigh. Life sucks and is unfair whenever it would be inconvenient for people (and esp. bureaucracies) to do the "right thing". I know that this episode is just a minor inconvenience (the idea of doing anything important on IRC vanished for me around 1992) but it definitely illustrates the addage "cutting one's nose off to spite one's face".
Yes, but with karma points you get an extra 25% off!
One of the things that hasn't been mentioned that occurred to me today while reading up on this thread is that the incidence of suicide attempts among teens is three times more likely among non-heterosexual teens.
A program like WAVE has at its fundamental core, the belief that all students are basically the same: it's the ones who are out of the ordinary who have to be watched, profiled, and who are the ones likely to cause trouble.
How long would it be before such a program began targeting kids who were already ostracized for their orientation (remembering that the overwhelming number of US states do not even prevent discrimination on the basis of orientation, let alone outwardly offer any support for non-heterosexual teens!) are singled out further?
I fear that programs like WAVE could end up making things much MUCH worse than better.
One of the things that I've noticed over the last couple of years is that living under M$'s wing gives one a great way to avoid responsibility. If something wasn't working the way it was desired to (or was intended) you could blame Microsoft, and Maaaaaaaaybe it'd be addressed in a later patch^H^H^H^H^Hservice pack, but the eyes (and blame) weren't necessarily on you.
In the "post-M$" world (and of course there is no such thing - M$ will continue on in some for, at least for the foreseeable future), the stakes may well be a little higher for admins or admin posers (the ones who don't actually have to keep things running or clean up the messes, but somehow get to make all the decisions and delegate responsibilities to others :-).
It will be an interesting year. I wonder if some of the more vocal supporters of M$ throughout the litigation to date will turn on them as things are tarnished further, or if there will be this "grass roots" drive to prevent too much in the way of intervention of M$'s dealings.
With time we'll catalog more of the "zoophony" of planet types, and hopefully will start finding some object that bear a resemblance to those with which we are most famliar. As that happens as a race we become part of that community (I know that sounds very Sagan-esque, but it's the best I could come up with on short notice). That's valuable because it's at least something that unites us planet-wide --- we're now starting to think as a planet when comparing ourselves to other systems. I find that a very positive step for the future, and that to me has a practical use.
I'm reminded of the line in the first Addams Family movie where Wednesday is dressed up for Halloween. She's completely non-descript because serial killers "look just like everyone else".
That e-mail address again is support@idcide.com so you can remind them that they need to do better about cross-platform and cross-browser support.
IMHO (and IANAPatentL) it would have to be large enough to work outside of the parent body.
Without the original code, the patch is meaningless: you can't run it by itself, whereas you can run the parent program. Of course there's the situation where the patch exists to repair the parent program, but I assert that that "flavor" of patches are the least likely to have any claim to their own license.
Modules/plug-ins are a different story. They are not necessary, per se, but enhance an existing program. I could see users agreeing to licensing terms for a plug-in (although I might opt out most of the time, but that's just me).
It took me a moment to realize what it was that I was seeing, but for a few tense seconds.... :-)
I "got this idea" from listening to lots of extra-galactic astronomers over the last 20 years, and counting the number of times a derived value of H0 was presented as "better" than all of the other values of H0 that came before it (and in a few cases, all those to come after it :-).
Seeing the article in /., I was reminded in particular of the M100 Cepheid study because 1) the tables in the ApJ paper are messed up (the columns in some of the tables are ordered in the same way as the ID column so it's impossible to reconstruct how the value of H0 was arrived at - and no, I have no idea how it got past the referee and the editor); and 2) in many cases the number of photometric observations used to determine the periods of the Cepheids got to as low as 5-8 per star. Having something like 20 years of experience deriving periods from unevenly-sampled time series data (photometry and other measurements), it wasn't clear to me that it was possible to get any sort of definitive result at all (the window function kills you).
Yet, from all the press releases, etc., one might be led to conclude that the problem was sewn up. My comment was more tongue-in-cheek than you apparently read it.
Me, I've never been convinced that there is a single value of H0 that fits for all types of observation for all places in the Universe.
(Oh, did I forget to mention that I've [also] done a little bit of extra-galactic astronomy?)
The problem? It came out to be 8 billion years.
So a bunch of extra-galactic types dusted off their hands and said "well, that's done" and completely ignored that for years stellar evolution models had the lifetime of stars like the Sun to be on the order of 10 billion years, with lower-mass stars having older life times. There are lots of halo stars whizzing by near the Sun that are definitely older than 10 billion years, and the CMD's for globular clusters place their ages over 10 billion years.
I just like seeing things overturned. :-)
The "It's still mostly our fault" still doesn't pass Physics 101 --- the temperature rises before the anthropogenic gas buildup takes place. Until that is explained (and no anthropogenic model has done so), claims that solar forcing can't be it so it's "still" man (there's no "still there, really, since it was never proven through any rigorous analysis) should be treated with much skepticism --- solar forcing still accounts for MUCH more of the variance than any GCM.
It's nice to see changes happening that will finally improve the journalistic integrity of the New York Times! ;-)