> Actually, I would not be surprised if the media companies were > busily trying to invent a self-corrupting DRM format to replace > DVDs and suchlike.
Any physical medium is automatically self-corrupting. Leave a DVD on the back shelf of a car for a summer afternoon if you don't believe that.
> The solution proposed by the author: two headers and error correction code (ECC) in every file."
When there are two possibilities, which one do you chose? Three allows the software to have a vote among the headers, and ignore or correct the loser (assuming that there IS one, of course).
Also, keeping the headers in text, rather than using complicated encoding schemes to save space where it doesn't much matter, is probably a good idea, as well. Semantic sugar is your friend here.
> Dude... I also own a swiss knife and since I bought it, I > sold my tools, my car, my explosives and my house. I did > buy all episodes of MacGyver though.
Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?
> but certainly not realistic.
As opposed to transporters or tractor beams? Anyway, anything that depends on mutant powers doing more than letting someone metabolize something new (like cellulose) or synthesize something (like vitamin C), I would call that Fantasy, not SF (unless a heck of a lot of explanation goes along with it, as in Niven's The Magic Goes Away series).
> Deregulating alcohol sales a bit would help with that.
The Pennsylvania Liquor Board would never do that. They have a monopoly on all liquor sales in the state (bars and restaurants just buy at wholesale rates), as well as controlling who gets beer distributor licenses. Actually, the PLB is the largest alcohol purchaser in the world (or at least used to be).
Supposedly, this helps to prevent underage drinking and excessive purchasing (thus alcoholism). Someone else can look up how well that actually works.
> As a brit, it was weird finding supermarkets with no alcohol section
When I started working in New Jersey, I found it just as weird seeing private liquor stores everywhere:-)
> If you want to pick up a bottle to take to a party, make sure you plan a few days in advance.
Only if the party is on Sunday night. Otherwise, just hit the State Store before it closes (beer distributors are harder to find, actually, as they cannot afford to locate in the best shopping centers).
> The beer in Salt Lake City was better too...
Well, that will teach you NOT to drink Iron City -- I knew that just from growing up in the area:-)
> And while the students do pay some local taxes (sales taxes, etc)
Only 1% of the sales tax goes to Allegheny County and/or Pittsburgh. The other 6% goes to general Commonwealth of PA revenue. The main contribution that students make to the tax base is paying the local and county Amusement taxes when they go to a bar, restaurant, or concert, and parking fees and fines.
> Is it fair to charge more to CMU students compared to Pitt students just because they pay more tuition?
Is it fair to charge one group of taxpayers more than another just because they make more taxable income? Society has said yes to that, regardless of whether it might drive out the higher income payers.
> Campuses have their own police forces.
With almost no police powers. They are basically just a bunch of security guards.
The solution to this problem is just to have the local colleges act as the collection agents for the city, which will just seem to the students (or their parents) like another tuition increase (CMU students should certainly be used to that:-). They might also have to make adjustments for students with large amounts of financial aid, and might not have the authority to tax students at the state schools (Univ. of Pittsburgh, and I think that Penn State Univ. also has a Pgh. campus).
> People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing > that they seem to have forgotten about the "Ford is supposed to be funny" thing...
Screw Ford being black or not funny; the movie was supposed to be funny (and wasn't).
Still, I was impressed with it, because at no time did I want to gouge out my eyeballs, as I expected I would.
Re:Google is the Foundation
on
Less Than Free
·
· Score: 1
This was a joke based on Asimov's Foundation series. The first (public) purpose of the Foundation was to produce an Encyclopedia Galactica summarizing all knowledge.
Actually, they shouldn't have any psychologists -- the Terminus group only had one, at the start, and he had no students, there (no idea about what he had in the Trantor group that became the Second Foundation).
> Studies have shown that life in prison and the death penalty have a 0% recidivism rate./sarcasm
Actually, that is wrong. Here in PA, there was a rapist and murderer, Stanley Haas, who still managed to kill a guard and another prisoner while in solitary confinement. As the death penalty laws had been set aside during that period, all that could be done, each time, was to put him back in solitary and hope that he would reform (I think that he died of cancer, eventually). The death penalty only works after it is applied.
> What about the possibility that alien species have not Fallen or suffered from Original Sin?
Supposedly, 1/9th (1/3rd, according to Milton's Lucifer's speech) of the angels fell in Lucifer's revolt, and they had they advantage of existing in the Presence.
Free Will for species X inevitably means that some X sin, and thus need salvation. Any biological entity will almost certainly be Fallen, just like humans, since biological needs lead to sin as the easiest solution.
Given the great use that Spain made of the wealth of the Indies, that may not be the best example to use. Since you used "world exploration" I would suggest using the example of Portugal, in a complaint about how much Prince Henry "the Navigator" was "wasting" on new ship designs and the idea of sailing around Africa when one could just pay the Turks their markup for spices.
> So I have abandoned commercial radio and television, and, frankly, I don't miss it.
And, of course, they won't miss you, since it sounds like you were never a potential customer of their direct customers, the ad agencies, or their indirect customers, the advertised companies.
> Advertising has gone from annoyance to something that I consider to be unethical > and a serious contributor to our problems as a consumer society.
So, how long have you been in recovery from your Home Shopping Network addiction?
> Write your elected officials in support of S.1714,
and remember to actually write, not send email, or sign someone's emailed petition, or what ever else sounds good because you only need to spend five minutes on it. The elected officials respond not just to the numbers but the passion level of their constituents, because if all you care about an issue is to sign a petition handed you by some hot number of the appropriate sex, you won't remember to vote for them if they vote your way, or against them if they were against your transient whim.
Given how few people will probably care deeply on this issue (textbook publishing is done more for the prestege added to the rest of the company than profits, although they try not to deliberately run at a loss, so even they will not care much), your voice can matter more.
BTW, Robert A. Heinlein wrote a nice non-fiction book about this (political tactics) back in the late 1940s, called variously Take Back Your Government! or How To Be A Politian that was carefully written to not reveal his leanings either way. It was not published at the time, but has been excerpted in one or more collections of his works, as well as later published separately. I just checked Amazon, and it starts at about $30.
My 6th grade class spent a month learning how to, then building our own, and launching them at the end of the year. You can get into it fairly cheaply, and it can be as simple or as complex as you want, given your students.
> but that level of reporting is part for the course in science.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ "par for the course" -- it is a golf analogy.
Alternately, you could have used "part and parcel" of science reporting to imply that it is always like that except in very special cases like the Nobel Prize winner in Physics writing an article for Popular Mechanics.
One thing I read was that the UK might have more to do with ending the Soviet Union than the US, the UK opened up vast oil fields in the sea and it supposedly cut the value of oil for some time. The USSR was selling oil and they needed that money to stay afloat.
Source? The Soviet Union was also a major supplier of gold and diamonds, ramping up to rival South Africa, and so had other sources of foreign exchange. Likewise, the North Sea fields didn't supply that much oil, or the European price
Fighting in Afghanistan probably didn't help either. I guess it was good of the CIA to help form what is now called the Taliban to help them fight out the USSR. (sarcasm). Oops.
The CIA helped the Northern Alliance (and others). The Taliban formed after the Soviets left, and the various Afghan groups fell to fighting amongst themselves, as a reaction against that (and as a way of the Pakistan Intelligence agency to influence/control the Afghans). If you are going to paraphrase anti-American paranoia, do it right. Al Quaeda was the group that claimed to have been instrumental in defeating the Soviets, and that the CIA supposedly started (like the USSR was started by the German War Minister whose cousin was the first Chairman of the Federal Reserve).
> At that point we could all use characters such as Thor that were stolen from the public domain.
A blonde-haired Thor who converted to a lame physician was never in the public domain; that is purely the creation of someone employed by Marvel (apparently Kirby, but I have never bothered checking).
The Thor in the public domain was a red-haired carl-grown-god-sized, who had goats that could return from the dead each day, but who would barely have made it through high school, let alone pre-med, and definitely not made it into or through medical school. As such, you can use the Norse Thor as much as you like (although cannot call him "The Mighty Thor" due to trademarks), or a black-haired short man with excessive wit named Thor, or any other concept in the public domain that you want to call Thor (again, barring trademark infringements on the was-Marvel Thor). So do anything that you want with Thor The Ettin (aka, Giant) Slayer.
I submit that glory and adventure in themselves are not a very good reason to get people killed, especially people who haven't been able to provide actual informed consent to the risks.
You clearly don't know many test pilots. You probably don't even know any fighter pilots (some of whom become test pilots, and some of those become astronauts), either. I likewise think that the mission specialists are willing, knowing a couple of failed volunteers.
Glory and adventure may not be a good reason for spending millions or billions of dollars, but thinking that the people dying are being lied to about the risks, when some of them generate the risk assessments, isn't.
> I believe a lot of the decline of the space program has to do with the attitude of the American public in general.
Except that the American public usually supports the space program, in polls. It is Congress and the Office of Management and Budget that have proxmired away the NASA budget, and NASA cannot legally lobby the public to get it back, and lacks the networking that the military and welfare have had for years.
> So apparently, there is no defense against a bad editor > misrepresenting something, unless you ignore the press altogether.
Barring defenses detailed by Mark Twain (tar and feathering, blowing up the presses, shooting reporters on sight, etc.), there is no defense even if you ignore the press. They can just make up whatever they want, and are only liable for libel to the extent that a jury thinks you have been financially harmed (and don't deserve it, if they thought that PGP really *did* help in 9/11). Only if people shun a source because they believe it prints nonsense, does merely proving fabrication work.
(insert anti-Fox News, NY Times, or National Enquirer comments here)
> But what happens to the waste energy? All the rest is heat is stored in a big water tank for your home warm water.
What about during summer? Or are German summers much cooler than they are in the Mid-Atlantic states of the USA?
How efficient will it be to run the gas generator, using the waste heat on your hot water heater, then crank up the air conditioner when it gets too hot?
Slashdot Mirror
> Actually, I would not be surprised if the media companies were
> busily trying to invent a self-corrupting DRM format to replace
> DVDs and suchlike.
Any physical medium is automatically self-corrupting. Leave a DVD on the back shelf of a car for a summer afternoon if you don't believe that.
> The solution proposed by the author: two headers and error correction code (ECC) in every file."
When there are two possibilities, which one do you chose? Three allows the software to have a vote among the headers, and ignore or correct the loser (assuming that there IS one, of course).
Also, keeping the headers in text, rather than using complicated encoding schemes to save space where it doesn't much matter, is probably a good idea, as well. Semantic sugar is your friend here.
> Dude... I also own a swiss knife and since I bought it, I
> sold my tools, my car, my explosives and my house. I did
> buy all episodes of MacGyver though.
Where do you keep your duct tape, then?
> Like the TV show Heroes? It's fun to watch
Are you watching the same series that I stopped watching after season 2?
> but certainly not realistic.
As opposed to transporters or tractor beams? Anyway, anything that depends on mutant powers doing more than letting someone metabolize something new (like cellulose) or synthesize something (like vitamin C), I would call that Fantasy, not SF (unless a heck of a lot of explanation goes along with it, as in Niven's The Magic Goes Away series).
> Deregulating alcohol sales a bit would help with that.
The Pennsylvania Liquor Board would never do that. They have a monopoly on all liquor sales in the state (bars and restaurants just buy at wholesale rates), as well as controlling who gets beer distributor licenses. Actually, the PLB is the largest alcohol purchaser in the world (or at least used to be).
Supposedly, this helps to prevent underage drinking and excessive purchasing (thus alcoholism). Someone else can look up how well that actually works.
> As a brit, it was weird finding supermarkets with no alcohol section
When I started working in New Jersey, I found it just as weird seeing private liquor stores everywhere :-)
> If you want to pick up a bottle to take to a party, make sure you plan a few days in advance.
Only if the party is on Sunday night. Otherwise, just hit the State Store before it closes (beer distributors are harder to find, actually, as they cannot afford to locate in the best shopping centers).
> The beer in Salt Lake City was better too...
Well, that will teach you NOT to drink Iron City -- I knew that just from growing up in the area :-)
> And while the students do pay some local taxes (sales taxes, etc)
Only 1% of the sales tax goes to Allegheny County and/or Pittsburgh. The other 6% goes to general Commonwealth of PA revenue. The main contribution that students make to the tax base is paying the local and county Amusement taxes when they go to a bar, restaurant, or concert, and parking fees and fines.
> Is it fair to charge more to CMU students compared to Pitt students just because they pay more tuition?
Is it fair to charge one group of taxpayers more than another just because they make more taxable income? Society has said yes to that, regardless of whether it might drive out the higher income payers.
> Campuses have their own police forces.
With almost no police powers. They are basically just a bunch of security guards.
The solution to this problem is just to have the local colleges act as the collection agents for the city, which will just seem to the students (or their parents) like another tuition increase (CMU students should certainly be used to that :-). They might also have to make adjustments for students with large amounts of financial aid, and might not have the authority to tax students at the state schools (Univ. of Pittsburgh, and I think that Penn State Univ. also has a Pgh. campus).
> People got so hung up on the "Ford isn't supposed to be black" thing
> that they seem to have forgotten about the "Ford is supposed to be funny" thing...
Screw Ford being black or not funny; the movie was supposed to be funny (and wasn't).
Still, I was impressed with it, because at no time did I want to gouge out my eyeballs, as I expected I would.
This was a joke based on Asimov's Foundation series. The first (public) purpose of the Foundation was to produce an Encyclopedia Galactica summarizing all knowledge.
Actually, they shouldn't have any psychologists -- the Terminus group only had one, at the start, and he had no students, there (no idea about what he had in the Trantor group that became the Second Foundation).
> Studies have shown that life in prison and the death penalty have a 0% recidivism rate. /sarcasm
Actually, that is wrong. Here in PA, there was a rapist and murderer, Stanley Haas, who still managed to kill a guard and another prisoner while in solitary confinement. As the death penalty laws had been set aside during that period, all that could be done, each time, was to put him back in solitary and hope that he would reform (I think that he died of cancer, eventually). The death penalty only works after it is applied.
> What about the possibility that alien species have not Fallen or suffered from Original Sin?
Supposedly, 1/9th (1/3rd, according to Milton's Lucifer's speech) of the angels fell in Lucifer's revolt, and they had they advantage of existing in the Presence.
Free Will for species X inevitably means that some X sin, and thus need salvation. Any biological entity will almost certainly be Fallen, just like humans, since biological needs lead to sin as the easiest solution.
Given the great use that Spain made of the wealth of the Indies, that may not be the best example to use. Since you used "world exploration" I would suggest using the example of Portugal, in a complaint about how much Prince Henry "the Navigator" was "wasting" on new ship designs and the idea of sailing around Africa when one could just pay the Turks their markup for spices.
> So I have abandoned commercial radio and television, and, frankly, I don't miss it.
And, of course, they won't miss you, since it sounds like you were never a potential customer of their direct customers, the ad agencies, or their indirect customers, the advertised companies.
> Advertising has gone from annoyance to something that I consider to be unethical
> and a serious contributor to our problems as a consumer society.
So, how long have you been in recovery from your Home Shopping Network addiction?
> Write your elected officials in support of S.1714,
and remember to actually write, not send email, or sign someone's emailed petition, or what ever else sounds good because you only need to spend five minutes on it. The elected officials respond not just to the numbers but the passion level of their constituents, because if all you care about an issue is to sign a petition handed you by some hot number of the appropriate sex, you won't remember to vote for them if they vote your way, or against them if they were against your transient whim.
Given how few people will probably care deeply on this issue (textbook publishing is done more for the prestege added to the rest of the company than profits, although they try not to deliberately run at a loss, so even they will not care much), your voice can matter more.
BTW, Robert A. Heinlein wrote a nice non-fiction book about this (political tactics) back in the late 1940s, called variously Take Back Your Government! or How To Be A Politian that was carefully written to not reveal his leanings either way. It was not published at the time, but has been excerpted in one or more collections of his works, as well as later published separately. I just checked Amazon, and it starts at about $30.
My 6th grade class spent a month learning how to, then building our own, and launching them at the end of the year. You can get into it fairly cheaply, and it can be as simple or as complex as you want, given your students.
> so i guess two wings didn't do the job of flight for this proto birds
It had no wings, just arms, and the feathers were there for insulation, not flying.
> but that level of reporting is part for the course in science.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
"par for the course" -- it is a golf analogy.
Alternately, you could have used "part and parcel" of science reporting to imply that it is always like that except in very special cases like the Nobel Prize winner in Physics writing an article for Popular Mechanics.
Source? The Soviet Union was also a major supplier of gold and diamonds, ramping up to rival South Africa, and so had other sources of foreign exchange. Likewise, the North Sea fields didn't supply that much oil, or the European price
The CIA helped the Northern Alliance (and others). The Taliban formed after the Soviets left, and the various Afghan groups fell to fighting amongst themselves, as a reaction against that (and as a way of the Pakistan Intelligence agency to influence/control the Afghans). If you are going to paraphrase anti-American paranoia, do it right. Al Quaeda was the group that claimed to have been instrumental in defeating the Soviets, and that the CIA supposedly started (like the USSR was started by the German War Minister whose cousin was the first Chairman of the Federal Reserve).
> At that point we could all use characters such as Thor that were stolen from the public domain.
A blonde-haired Thor who converted to a lame physician was never in the public domain; that is purely the creation of someone employed by Marvel (apparently Kirby, but I have never bothered checking).
The Thor in the public domain was a red-haired carl-grown-god-sized, who had goats that could return from the dead each day, but who would barely have made it through high school, let alone pre-med, and definitely not made it into or through medical school. As such, you can use the Norse Thor as much as you like (although cannot call him "The Mighty Thor" due to trademarks), or a black-haired short man with excessive wit named Thor, or any other concept in the public domain that you want to call Thor (again, barring trademark infringements on the was-Marvel Thor). So do anything that you want with Thor The Ettin (aka, Giant) Slayer.
Teddy Roosevelt, is that you?
You clearly don't know many test pilots. You probably don't even know any fighter pilots (some of whom become test pilots, and some of those become astronauts), either. I likewise think that the mission specialists are willing, knowing a couple of failed volunteers.
Glory and adventure may not be a good reason for spending millions or billions of dollars, but thinking that the people dying are being lied to about the risks, when some of them generate the risk assessments, isn't.
Alas for moderation. This post, in context with its parent, is both very insightful and very off-topic.
> I believe a lot of the decline of the space program has to do with the attitude of the American public in general.
Except that the American public usually supports the space program, in polls. It is Congress and the Office of Management and Budget that have proxmired away the NASA budget, and NASA cannot legally lobby the public to get it back, and lacks the networking that the military and welfare have had for years.
> So apparently, there is no defense against a bad editor
> misrepresenting something, unless you ignore the press altogether.
Barring defenses detailed by Mark Twain (tar and feathering, blowing up the presses, shooting reporters on sight, etc.), there is no defense even if you ignore the press. They can just make up whatever they want, and are only liable for libel to the extent that a jury thinks you have been financially harmed (and don't deserve it, if they thought that PGP really *did* help in 9/11). Only if people shun a source because they believe it prints nonsense, does merely proving fabrication work.
(insert anti-Fox News, NY Times, or National Enquirer comments here)
> But what happens to the waste energy? All the rest is heat is stored in a big water tank for your home warm water.
What about during summer? Or are German summers much cooler than they are in the Mid-Atlantic states of the USA?
How efficient will it be to run the gas generator, using the waste heat on your hot water heater, then crank up the air conditioner when it gets too hot?
Not quite an epic fail, but close.
Or not displaying the size of that important bulge in their pants.
I mean, their wallets, of course.