Every time a study comes out saying that Windows is more secure, faster and cheaper than Linux, the first thing Slashdotters ask is "Who funded this study?" Which is exactly what the Chairman is attempting to establish. Are these scientists unbiased, or are they in the pocket of some lobby group. It's a critical question. Having said that, it can also most definitely be a form of harassment.
Based solely on the editorial, it looks like in this case it is more the latter than the former. But we don't know the whole picture. In fact that one-sided editorial is an excellent example of bias; nowhere does it even outline the Chairman's view.
It comes down to an interesting question. If personal and professional finances are off-limits, how else can politicians determine whether a complex statistical report has been "paid for" by an interested party?
> At the levels seen in recent days, the price of Google's traded shares implies that it is the world's most valuable media company, with a market cap comfortably in excess of Time Warner's $76 billion, even though the latter had $42 billion in sales last year to Google's $3.2 billion.
I don't know about most people, but if Time Warner went bankrupt tomorrow, I would not notice (beyond having to delete channels 33&44 (CNN) from my grandmother's TV). Whereas if Google went bankrupt tomorrow, I would honestly be devastated. Heck, even my grandmother would be upset, she'd wonder where "the Internet" went. Granted, the vacuum would be filled very quickly by one or more entities.
Google also have an unusual combination of being both a) at the forefront of its market and b) good and ethical. Contrast with companies like Microsoft (forefront and evil), companies like Apple (distant second and good), and companies like SCO ('nuff said). Name another company that's both #1 in market share and #1 in user respect...
Argh. I have had it with people and organisations cashing in on terrorism. Some quick facts:
* Population of London: 5.5m
* Average deaths per day: 215
* Increase of death rate on 7 July: 23%
If there had been 50 extra heart attacks in London on 7 July, do you think that it would have been noticed? If it weren't for the wall to wall media coverage, this would have been a non-event.
Britain used to have a really good track record on terrorism. When the IRA blew something up, there would be a brief note about it on the news, then nothing. Terrorism is about publicity, and over-reporting it simply feeds it. But it seems that the dymanics have changed. Now there are too many organisations who have a vested interest in a continual state of terrorism.
"Of course, they plan to leave the exploding parts out of their next versions."
Erm, actually they are keeping the "exploding bits" and leaving out the bits that so far haven't exploded. The SDV will include the solid rockets (which doomed Challenger) and the fuel tank (which doomed Columbia). The only bit they are leaving out is the orbiter, which has so far has worked properly.
Having said that, it is still an extremely good design. It's almost exactly what the Soviet Union built (separate Energia heavy lift and Soyuz crew vehicles). The only difference is the use of solid motors (which explains why the stock price of Thiokol's parent company has been going up like a, erm, rocket).
> "People who do (AJAX development) are rocket scientists," Fitzgerald said.
Pfft. AJAX is easy. It's cross-platform AJAX that's brutally hard. You expect us to trust Microsoft to create a framework that will allow perfect portability between Opera, Safari, Mozilla and MSIE? Uh huh.
One of the odd points about this train (other than the retractable cat ears) is that it isn't symmetrical. One end is a completely different shape than the other. Apparently this is just for testing purposes. The US airforce calls it a "flyoff", where two designs are built and tested head to head. In this case it seems they are having trouble determining what the best nose shape is. Normally this is a fairly simple problem, but Japan has a lot of tunnels, and diving into a tunnel at 360kph is a rather difficult aerodynamic problem. Nothing like a full-scale model.
For much more detailed information, see this press release. (Japanese press releases have a habit of actually being informative, unlike their North American counterparts.)
There's another factor at work. IE and Opera both understand that many users double-click everything they see. These browsers filter out the double clicks. Mozilla on the other hand fires off two requests. Thus doubling its market share.
Bug 55279 tried to fix this five years ago. But the feeling was that Mozilla users were smarter than the average user and wouldn't do this (which may have been true back then). Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
First, if you look at the diagram, you'll see that it plainly shows a plutonium core. Problem, Nazi Germany did not have an operational nuclear reactor. Thus they had no ability to create kilograms of plutonium. This makes the diagram a pipe-dream at best.
Second, if you look at the diagram you'll see that it is initiated a gun-type trigger, something that is impossible for Pu. This makes the diagram look like the work of someone that doesn't know what they are doing. Maybe this was deliberate (though rather obvious) misinformation by a scientist who didn't want Hitler to get the bomb.
Third, it is undated, and unnamed, from an unknown source. Not worth even reading.
In any event, Germany had no means of effectively delivering such a weapon. They lacked the heavy aircraft which the USA used. The V2 rocket only had a fraction of the payload capacity needed. The best they could have done is load it on a cargo vessel and attempt to sail into someone's harbour. Or leave it behind in a city like Paris after retreating. Neither of which would have been terribly impressive, since they would be ground-bursts and not much different from a few tons of dynamite.
Don't take these polls too seriously. I remember one I took a few years back which asked:
Q. Do you believe UFOs exist?
A. Yes. (Well duh, anything we see in the sky but can't immediately identify is a UFO. Was I supposed to answer 'No'?)
Q. Do you believe aliens exist?
A. Yes. (With billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, it's a pretty safe guess that somewhere out there is another planet with life.)
As a result, I'm recorded as just one more nut-job who believes that little green men are abducting our sheep. That particular survey was merely incompetent. Much more entertaining results can be obtained from surveys which are actively rigged.
In this SETI-National Geographic poll they appeared to have asked people if they thought that life exists somewhere out there. They got a 60% yes. It would have been interesting to ask half of those people if they thought that we are the only life in the universe. My guess is that those opposite questions when added up wouldn't even come close to 100%.
> They could stop the shuttle program and use the money in the few years in between now and when the new man-rated launch-vehicle comes out to seed promising space initiatives by private firms. I'm sure this would more than pay for itself.
The Shuttle is the only vehicle capable of completing the International Space Station. If you stop flying the shuttle right now, the Space Station would be doomed. That's billions of dollars worth of hardware wasted.
Don't care about ISS? Then what about other countries? America convinced Canada, Brazil, most of Europe, Japan and Russia to pool its resources and focus on building the space station. Pull out now, and you will NEVER be trusted again. Even if ISS isn't worth the price of the shuttle, pulling a multi-billion dollar fraud on the rest of the space-faring world will hurt America for decades to come.
Oh yeah, and without the shuttle, there's no Hubble. Nasa's new administrator is still thinking about the pros and cons of sending a shuttle up to fix it.
No, the mature thing to do is to hurry up and finish the space station, then drop the shuttle. Which is exactly what Nasa is planning.
Who the heck are GlobalSpec? Is it news when some random company decides to award someone famous? Can I get also get front-page Slashdot story if my company gives "a crystal globe" to Linus Torvalds and/or Bill Gates?
No criticism to the Apollo 13 engineers. What they did was amazing. But what's this story got to do with them?
Don't worry, Netspeak is temporary. Within a few years I expect the net will be awash with video. Technologically we're almost there, we just need a little bit more penetration of broadband and a killer app to get the ball rolling. Once this happens, most of the casual textual material will vanish. I don't know what the net will look like or how it will operate. It will probably be similar to the change that happened when the web replaced gopher. The web is not simply gopher with images, it is an entirely different beast that is used in different ways. Likewise, the addition of video will be one of those proverbial "paradigm shifts".
> NOT mentioned in the actual article. Remember? You're reading Slashdot...
It may not be mentioned in the article, but Oracle are mentioned on the Ability Alliance's membership page. The Slashdot summary is completely correct.
Incase you are wondering about the/.ed animation, it is a two-frame, black and white, 1MB gif. The first frame shows a small whirlwind in the distance, the second frame doesn't show the whirlwind.
Not impressive compared to the tornado footage we're used to from the local TV station. But one must remember that the rovers' actions are scripted in advance. So it was a complete coincidence that a whirlwind happened to be in-frame when they took a photo. Which says something about how common they must be if we just happened to snag a picture of one.
What's 5.7 teraflops in more familiar units? Like SETI@home workunits/day?
By my calculations that's 1.5 workunits every second. Give or take. By comparison the entire SETI@home network is currently running at 67 teraflops.
There's no problem with floaters, they are no more evil than with blinking text, bad colour schemes or any other number of ugly special effects. They are simply an attribute of the website. If you don't like them (I hate them), click the back button and go somewhere else.
The problem with popups is that clicking the back button was not enough, one had to clean up the mess -- sometimes a mess that would keep respawning itself. Floaters look superficially similar to popups, but floaters are completely contained within the window. That makes them just another (usually bad) design feature.
> Except conducting experiments that require zero gravity, what does astronauts do in space stations?
First of all, microgravity is an astonishingly useful thing to have when conducting experiments. For instance, imagine how much better one can grow crystals if everything is just floating and one doesn't have a dish to corrupt the crystal formation. Not interested in growing snowflakes? Crystals grown from organic seeds allow one to develop medical cures. So it's not a stetch to say that a microgravity experiment might be what cures AIDS or cancer.
Second, even if one doesn't care about microgravity, space has another feature: vacuum. Lots and lots of it. The Japanese science module is specifically designed to conduct experiments in the vacuum outside. They've got an exposed pallet and a bunch of waldos.
> Why is NASA even bothering with shuttle launches at this point?
Because if they don't, nobody in the world will ever partner with the USA in space again.
History lesson: In the 80s Europe and Japan were both making steady progress towards building their own manned space program. In the 90s, Russia was undertaking a project to build Mir2. But the USA persuaded all these countries to put their chips in with the US effort and build an international space station.
If the USA cancels the shuttle (which is the only possible vehicle with which to finish the space station), the rest of the world will have spent two decades and billions of rubles/yen/euros in vain. If that happened, none of these parties would partner with the US again.
I visited the Saturn V in 1991 and took a series of panoramic photos.
What strikes most people who stand next to it is how *big* it is. Yes it is big on the scale of a human. Maybe I'm weird, but what struck me was how *small* it is. It can go to the Moon and come back, yet it's smaller than a freight train.
> I'll email your friend and if his script is still having troubles I'll try to sort out what's going on.
Thanks Jamie & Cecil. I've increased my polling to six times an hour and will let you know if I start getting errors again.
Stats show that usage of my Slashdot feed is slowly declining. This is most likely due to the gradual migration from Mozilla (which has that great sidebar) to Firefox (which has its own RSS abilities).
If you are learning, stay exactly where you are. You don't want to discover how horrible it is to attend class after class, year after year, and be learning nothing. I'm currently studying at a well-known university that's crashed a probe into Mars. But reputation and content are two very different things. As long as you're learning, stay where you are.
Besides, your university credentials are mainly useful in getting your first job. After that they are more interested in your previous jobs. So at worst an unknown university will just add one stepping stone on your career path.
Contrary to popular belief, porn is not a fundamental human right. Note that the UN decalration says "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person." Contrast with the USA's "life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."
Just because a society is different, don't necessarily mean that its peoples are oppressed (and need 'liberating'). It's a big planet, there's nothing wrong with a little diversity.
> I still don't get...
>...why people refuse to use PHP. How far are you
> going to trust Microsoft to get it right?
> How many vulnerabilities does it take?
Maybe you could help me with this one. I've never figured out how one could make a secure PHP program on a multi-user system. All PHP scripts run using the web server's perms, not the programmer's. Which means all data files must be writable and all SQL passwords must be readable by the web server. Which means other people's PHP scripts on the same server also have permission to write to those files or read those passwords.
[blink] [blink]
What am I missing? As far as I can see, there's zero inter-user security when using PHP. CGI scripts on the other hand get to take advantage of suEXEC which allows them to run under the programmer's perms instead of the web server's. But PHP is left out.
For the day to day tasks of running a space program, nothing beats the Russian Soyuz vehicle. Cheap, simple, reliable and safe. But now and again you do need to get stuff down from orbit. Soyuz can't do that. Indeed the Russians loved it when the US shuttle visited Mir since it offered them a rare opportunity to bring back stuff.
On the whole, the Shuttle has proved to be an impractical vehicle; it tries to be everything and does nothing properly. Most people in the industry now believe that the Shuttle flights should end 2010. Replace them with three different vehicles: a capsule like Soyuz for getting people into space and back again, expendable launches for hauling cargo up to space, and (something we haven't seen before) an inflatable return vehicle for bringing back large objects. I'm only aware of one instance of the latter, Russia has it (see last entry on this page).
Slashdot Mirror
Based solely on the editorial, it looks like in this case it is more the latter than the former. But we don't know the whole picture. In fact that one-sided editorial is an excellent example of bias; nowhere does it even outline the Chairman's view.
It comes down to an interesting question. If personal and professional finances are off-limits, how else can politicians determine whether a complex statistical report has been "paid for" by an interested party?
I don't know about most people, but if Time Warner went bankrupt tomorrow, I would not notice (beyond having to delete channels 33&44 (CNN) from my grandmother's TV). Whereas if Google went bankrupt tomorrow, I would honestly be devastated. Heck, even my grandmother would be upset, she'd wonder where "the Internet" went. Granted, the vacuum would be filled very quickly by one or more entities.
Google also have an unusual combination of being both a) at the forefront of its market and b) good and ethical. Contrast with companies like Microsoft (forefront and evil), companies like Apple (distant second and good), and companies like SCO ('nuff said). Name another company that's both #1 in market share and #1 in user respect...
Google's worth every penny of its valuation.
* Population of London: 5.5m
* Average deaths per day: 215
* Increase of death rate on 7 July: 23%
If there had been 50 extra heart attacks in London on 7 July, do you think that it would have been noticed? If it weren't for the wall to wall media coverage, this would have been a non-event.
Britain used to have a really good track record on terrorism. When the IRA blew something up, there would be a brief note about it on the news, then nothing. Terrorism is about publicity, and over-reporting it simply feeds it. But it seems that the dymanics have changed. Now there are too many organisations who have a vested interest in a continual state of terrorism.
Erm, actually they are keeping the "exploding bits" and leaving out the bits that so far haven't exploded. The SDV will include the solid rockets (which doomed Challenger) and the fuel tank (which doomed Columbia). The only bit they are leaving out is the orbiter, which has so far has worked properly.
Having said that, it is still an extremely good design. It's almost exactly what the Soviet Union built (separate Energia heavy lift and Soyuz crew vehicles). The only difference is the use of solid motors (which explains why the stock price of Thiokol's parent company has been going up like a, erm, rocket).
Pfft. AJAX is easy. It's cross-platform AJAX that's brutally hard. You expect us to trust Microsoft to create a framework that will allow perfect portability between Opera, Safari, Mozilla and MSIE? Uh huh.
One of the odd points about this train (other than the retractable cat ears) is that it isn't symmetrical. One end is a completely different shape than the other. Apparently this is just for testing purposes. The US airforce calls it a "flyoff", where two designs are built and tested head to head. In this case it seems they are having trouble determining what the best nose shape is. Normally this is a fairly simple problem, but Japan has a lot of tunnels, and diving into a tunnel at 360kph is a rather difficult aerodynamic problem. Nothing like a full-scale model. For much more detailed information, see this press release. (Japanese press releases have a habit of actually being informative, unlike their North American counterparts.)
Bug 55279 tried to fix this five years ago. But the feeling was that Mozilla users were smarter than the average user and wouldn't do this (which may have been true back then). Bug 238159 attempted to address just one aspect of the problem, double-clicking submit forms (which causes tons of race conditions). But again, nobody seems to care.
Second, if you look at the diagram you'll see that it is initiated a gun-type trigger, something that is impossible for Pu. This makes the diagram look like the work of someone that doesn't know what they are doing. Maybe this was deliberate (though rather obvious) misinformation by a scientist who didn't want Hitler to get the bomb.
Third, it is undated, and unnamed, from an unknown source. Not worth even reading.
In any event, Germany had no means of effectively delivering such a weapon. They lacked the heavy aircraft which the USA used. The V2 rocket only had a fraction of the payload capacity needed. The best they could have done is load it on a cargo vessel and attempt to sail into someone's harbour. Or leave it behind in a city like Paris after retreating. Neither of which would have been terribly impressive, since they would be ground-bursts and not much different from a few tons of dynamite.
Q. Do you believe UFOs exist?
A. Yes. (Well duh, anything we see in the sky but can't immediately identify is a UFO. Was I supposed to answer 'No'?)
Q. Do you believe aliens exist?
A. Yes. (With billions of galaxies each containing billions of stars, it's a pretty safe guess that somewhere out there is another planet with life.)
As a result, I'm recorded as just one more nut-job who believes that little green men are abducting our sheep. That particular survey was merely incompetent. Much more entertaining results can be obtained from surveys which are actively rigged.
In this SETI-National Geographic poll they appeared to have asked people if they thought that life exists somewhere out there. They got a 60% yes. It would have been interesting to ask half of those people if they thought that we are the only life in the universe. My guess is that those opposite questions when added up wouldn't even come close to 100%.
The Shuttle is the only vehicle capable of completing the International Space Station. If you stop flying the shuttle right now, the Space Station would be doomed. That's billions of dollars worth of hardware wasted.
Don't care about ISS? Then what about other countries? America convinced Canada, Brazil, most of Europe, Japan and Russia to pool its resources and focus on building the space station. Pull out now, and you will NEVER be trusted again. Even if ISS isn't worth the price of the shuttle, pulling a multi-billion dollar fraud on the rest of the space-faring world will hurt America for decades to come.
Oh yeah, and without the shuttle, there's no Hubble. Nasa's new administrator is still thinking about the pros and cons of sending a shuttle up to fix it.
No, the mature thing to do is to hurry up and finish the space station, then drop the shuttle. Which is exactly what Nasa is planning.
No criticism to the Apollo 13 engineers. What they did was amazing. But what's this story got to do with them?
Until someone types a tab instead of spaces, and the application goes AWOL.
So who's going to be the next Netscape?
It may not be mentioned in the article, but Oracle are mentioned on the Ability Alliance's membership page. The Slashdot summary is completely correct.
Not impressive compared to the tornado footage we're used to from the local TV station. But one must remember that the rovers' actions are scripted in advance. So it was a complete coincidence that a whirlwind happened to be in-frame when they took a photo. Which says something about how common they must be if we just happened to snag a picture of one.
If you are still interested, here's a mirror.
What's 5.7 teraflops in more familiar units? Like SETI@home workunits/day? By my calculations that's 1.5 workunits every second. Give or take. By comparison the entire SETI@home network is currently running at 67 teraflops.
The problem with popups is that clicking the back button was not enough, one had to clean up the mess -- sometimes a mess that would keep respawning itself. Floaters look superficially similar to popups, but floaters are completely contained within the window. That makes them just another (usually bad) design feature.
First of all, microgravity is an astonishingly useful thing to have when conducting experiments. For instance, imagine how much better one can grow crystals if everything is just floating and one doesn't have a dish to corrupt the crystal formation. Not interested in growing snowflakes? Crystals grown from organic seeds allow one to develop medical cures. So it's not a stetch to say that a microgravity experiment might be what cures AIDS or cancer.
Second, even if one doesn't care about microgravity, space has another feature: vacuum. Lots and lots of it. The Japanese science module is specifically designed to conduct experiments in the vacuum outside. They've got an exposed pallet and a bunch of waldos.
For lots more examples, see NASA's ISS science page.
Because if they don't, nobody in the world will ever partner with the USA in space again.
History lesson: In the 80s Europe and Japan were both making steady progress towards building their own manned space program. In the 90s, Russia was undertaking a project to build Mir2. But the USA persuaded all these countries to put their chips in with the US effort and build an international space station.
If the USA cancels the shuttle (which is the only possible vehicle with which to finish the space station), the rest of the world will have spent two decades and billions of rubles/yen/euros in vain. If that happened, none of these parties would partner with the US again.
When you make a promise, stick with it.
What strikes most people who stand next to it is how *big* it is. Yes it is big on the scale of a human. Maybe I'm weird, but what struck me was how *small* it is. It can go to the Moon and come back, yet it's smaller than a freight train.
Thanks Jamie & Cecil. I've increased my polling to six times an hour and will let you know if I start getting errors again.
Stats show that usage of my Slashdot feed is slowly declining. This is most likely due to the gradual migration from Mozilla (which has that great sidebar) to Firefox (which has its own RSS abilities).
If you are learning, stay exactly where you are. You don't want to discover how horrible it is to attend class after class, year after year, and be learning nothing. I'm currently studying at a well-known university that's crashed a probe into Mars. But reputation and content are two very different things. As long as you're learning, stay where you are.
Besides, your university credentials are mainly useful in getting your first job. After that they are more interested in your previous jobs. So at worst an unknown university will just add one stepping stone on your career path.
Just because a society is different, don't necessarily mean that its peoples are oppressed (and need 'liberating'). It's a big planet, there's nothing wrong with a little diversity.
>
> going to trust Microsoft to get it right?
> How many vulnerabilities does it take?
Maybe you could help me with this one. I've never figured out how one could make a secure PHP program on a multi-user system. All PHP scripts run using the web server's perms, not the programmer's. Which means all data files must be writable and all SQL passwords must be readable by the web server. Which means other people's PHP scripts on the same server also have permission to write to those files or read those passwords.
[blink] [blink]
What am I missing? As far as I can see, there's zero inter-user security when using PHP. CGI scripts on the other hand get to take advantage of suEXEC which allows them to run under the programmer's perms instead of the web server's. But PHP is left out.
On the whole, the Shuttle has proved to be an impractical vehicle; it tries to be everything and does nothing properly. Most people in the industry now believe that the Shuttle flights should end 2010. Replace them with three different vehicles: a capsule like Soyuz for getting people into space and back again, expendable launches for hauling cargo up to space, and (something we haven't seen before) an inflatable return vehicle for bringing back large objects. I'm only aware of one instance of the latter, Russia has it (see last entry on this page).