I'm trying to remember which astronaut it was - I think it was Dr. Musgrave - who said "You don't feel like you're floating, you feel like you're falling. Because you're falling."
Yes, science is a team effort. Having someone who understands the nuances is helpful. And we have quite a few scientist astronauts.
I've already seen Harrision Schmidt.
But we also have:
Dr. Mike Barratt (MD)
Captain Robert Behnken (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
Dr. Bonnie Dunbar (PhD Mechanical/Biomedical Engineering)
Dr. Linda Godwin (PhD Physics)
Dr. Steven Hawley (PhD Astronomy and Astrophysics)
Dr. Shannon Lucid (PhD Biochemistry)
Dr. James Newman (PhD Physics)
Dr. Ellen Ochoa (PhD Electrical Engineering)
Dr. Robert Parker (PhD Astronomy)
Lt. Commander Mario Runco (PhD Earth Sciences)
Dr. Andrew Thomas (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
And then there are these few:
Captain David Brown, USN (MD)
Dr. Kalpana Chawla (PhD Aerospace Engineering)
Commander Laural Clark, USN (MD)
Dr. Ronald McNair (PhD Physics)
Dr. Judith Resnik (PhD Electrical Engineering)
And I personally know several engineers and physicists of various stripe who have talked seriously about joining the program, but would like to do more than "orbit aimlessly overhead."
I'd like to see
Rodger Doxsey's desktop. I'll have to see if he makes it into the office tomorrow.
These guys have a cool desktop, if you can call it that.
Riccardo Giacconi was using a fairly ordinary CDE on Solaris desktop on a beautiful 24 inch wide-screen monitor the last time I saw it, with some very cool galaxy images from the
Chandra Deep Field.
Steven Squyres probably also has an interesting desktop, and I think I saw it on ABC News last week, before they switched to talking about the problems with the rover.
You can see Asia Carrera's desktop in the background, but it's not safe from work. Looks mundane.
I wonder if
Pheobe has a cool desktop. Not Alyssa Milano, but her character.
Speaking of fiction, I wonder whether
David Kay uses Windows or Mac?
While I like innovators, I'm more interested in users. They at least try to do useful things. That was the problem with
Alan Kay. He always has interesting desktops. He showed
squeak at a conference a few years ago that just stunned people, but none of us could figure out what we would actually do with it.
I really think the only surprise was her first
poop. I'll describe that in a bit.
I'm a geek (getting paid to build software systems
for 25 years now, so maybe a dino-geek) and my
wife is an attorney. While I still make more
than she does, some years it's been close. We
had our one child, Teela, seven years ago next
Friday.
Everybody says you won't get any sleep. We
managed to get sleep by planning. I took four
weeks off after Teela was born and then spent
another four weeks working two or three days
a week. My wife left the firm she was in (a
two-woman shop, but she was a partner) and spent
a year doing temp assignments two to four days
a week. Whoever didn't have to work the next day
took care of bathing, overnight feedings and
changing, etc. while the other got a solid
eight hours. The person who only got five
or so hours could catch up the next evening. We
did, however, give up most television. No great
loss.
We got two baby slings like
this
and carried Teela everywhere for the first
six months. I really believe that it helped.
Our pediatrician showed us a journal article
that indicated babies with constant parental
contact were less fussy during the day and
slept better at night. My experience bore
that out.
I heard lots of horror stories. It seemed like
everybody had their favorite disease or condition
for which we needed to have her tested. We did
a lot of research, and talked to a lot of
people, both parents and pediatricians.
The only thing she ended up being tested for
was lead, and that was a state requirement,
mostly because Baltimore has such incredible
lead contamination. She was fine.
The
only bit of health advice I have is something
that should be obvious: Put your baby down
to sleep on her or his back. Not her tummy,
even if it seems she sleeps more readily or
soundly, and she's fussy on her back. Put
her on her back until she can roll herself
over on her tummy. Once she can roll over,
let her pick her own orientation and don't
worry about it.
There is now a ton of data on sleeping posture,
and the relationship to SIDS and other problems,
and it all boils down to this: Put your baby
down to sleep on his or her back. So do that.
Pay attention to all those safety things: Never
leave a baby in a tub, even for a second. Never
leave a baby in a car. Never move the car unless
the baby is strapped into a properly secured car
seat.
Car seats are easy to misinstall. Around here
we fairly regularly get events where cops will
check your seat to see if it's correctly
installed. Usually they see more than 90 percent
incorrect installation. We had two cars, one
of the seats was fine, the other was just loose
enough that the Trooper helped me tighten it
up to make sure it was really safe.
Okay, the poop story.
When Teela was four days old, I was doing her
usual evening changing while my wife and mother
collaborated on dinner for the grownups.
Suddenly they heard me yell "Oh shit!" and
began racing each other up the stairs. By
the time they arrived I was laughing. Teela
had squirted her first stream of poop over
the diaper through the air about two feet
into my hand. I had heard of projective
vomiting, but never projectile pooping. And
I had no reason to suspect her first poop
would be so firmly delivered.
It wasn't really a surprise, but I am still
amazed by was what a joy she
has been. I keep hearing how "kids are
great at that age", but the age keeps
changing to whatever age she is. She has
been, and is, the most amazing person.
When people meet her for the first time,
I don't introduce her as "my daughter, Teela."
The ownership runs the other way. I tell
people "this is
Teela, and I'm Teela's dad."
there's nothing stopping you from providing the NY Times false information
Actually, there is. As part of the registration,
you agree to provide accurate information:
6.1 As part of the registration process, you will select a password and a subscriber ID. You also have to give us certain registration information, all of which must be accurate and updated.
That's a license agreement, every bit as binding
as, say,
this one.
Please don't argue that it's not "good" or "fair"
for the NYT to have such a license. But please
do make any argument about the NYT license that
you are also willing to make about the GPL.
Yep. I watch good ads. If an ad is good enough,
I'll back up and watch it again. Sometimes I'll
even make initial purchasing decisions based on
what I see in an ad.
For example, there are certain car dealers I won't
even talk to because their ads are so annoying.
I am also a very big fan of the "This Bud's for you" series, to the point that I actually regret that Anheuser-Busch doesn't make any good beers.
We tried the newest version of JumpStart on the strength of a TV ad, and we have tried a couple of local eateries based in part on local inserts on cable. A well-done ad for something that matches my interests might get my attention. Otherwise it's "run it ahead thirty seconds, dear."
Of course, the ads work all too well on my six
year old daughter. Sigh.
I visited
Plasmon
before we selected their MO jukebox, and the
guys there confirmed that you could use the
CD-R drives to play music CDs, with the
appropriate audio mixer and drivers.
This may, however, be a bit more expensive than
you'd like.
Do you think everything out this thoroughly? They provide a phone on the desk too. Does that mean that you can only use it for company business and that they have the right to record all of your phone conversations? I guess they can listen in when you call the doctor, or the Workman's compensation claim division, or any number of things.
Generally, yes. And this has been litigated to death.
Employers can monitor phone calls, go through your notebooks, and rifle through your desk drawers. Whether they can check your personal briefcase or examine your locker depends on a variety of factors.
Mail coming into a workplace also has a reduced expectation of privacy. One facility at which I worked opened and screened every bit of incoming mail, and outgoing mail with company stamps had to be left unsealed. There was an attempt to litigate that issue, but the court found for the company, at least partly on the strength of pre-employment notice. Not agreement, notice.
Worker's Comp cases are an interesting problem, since the claim is a workplace injury, and the employer generally can get some access to the medical information anyway. Union conversations (many of which are not only permitted, but required, to occur on company time,) are a likely exception: If the monitoring manager realizes they are listening in on an activity governed by a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the CBA often requires that they terminate the monitoring and forget everything they heard. My father is a shop steward, and regularly gets calls about grievances. As a result his calls are almost never monitored, since it would be too annoying to sort out which were covered by the CBA.
Not so clear cut, actually. Even accepting that the organization is non-profit, if the film festival charged money, then it's a commercial use, and every commercial use is presumptively...unfair"(Sony v Univeral, 464 U.S. 417, which is the case on this subject, includes that little gem as part of the overall analysis that made VTR's legal.
Further, the MPAA and their associates regard DVDs not as movies, but as software, and assert that under the DMCA that any use other than the use which the producer intended is illegal. (See, for example, Valenti's deposition and the related slashdot discussion.)
If Valenti and the MPAA are correct, then there is perhaps no legal way for you to use that image without permission. The implications of DMCA in this regard are still to be litigated.
It's always important to remember that the law doesn't mean what you want it to mean, even when you want something reasonable. It means whatever five Justices agree that it means. Of course, since the 55mph speed limit created a whole generation of Americans who believe that laws are optional, I guess we'll have to expect more "technical" piracy.
So does this mean that there will never again be an excuse for nuclear weapons testing?
That's the hope, if not the plan. This simulation is described as part of the "stockpile stewardship" program. Instead of grabbing a warhead off the shelf or out of the silo, sticking it down the hole, and setting it off to see if the expected shelf life matches reality, they fiddle with the initial conditions and "set off" a virtual device.
DOE has in fact discussed sharing the software, and perhaps access to the hardware, with the French, though I haven't seen any press on this recently.
There is still a case where you would need to light up a new device: If somebody came up with a new, safer, approach to weapons design. But that hasn't happened in quite some time. Most recent testing (both ours and others) has been around safety issues: Will the device that has been sitting quietly for a decade or three still behave as you expect?
I have been using StarOffice for a while now, both under Windows2K and Linux.
Then maybe you can answer my questions.
Is StarOffice really bloatware, or is there just a lot of code because it does so many things? In particular, how much "bloat" is input/output filters to make it actually useful?
Does it produce output that MS Word users can include without further massaging? Or does it produce "close, but not quite" results?
Does it produce something that would let me be a "stealth StarOffice" user?
I use MS Word because I have to (contractual obligations that I can't evade) not because I want to. Fortunately the cost of Word, which if not bloatware itself certainly runs on bloatware, is borne by somebody else. If I could evade using Word, but nobody in the contracting office would be any wiser, I'd do it.
Ah yes, my age is showing again. 20 years ago I published a parody of one of my (then) company's press releases:
"I'm pleased to announce that Dave Bootlicker has accepted the position of Chief of Quality Insurance for UNINET. In this position Dave will be responsible for monitoring the cluelessness of our product managers and assuring that we have enough insurance to cover the likely lawsuits, bad press, and extended downtime that our crack development team is so good at generating."
For some reason, the new QA guy didn't think it was all that funny. Now, of course, he'd be a real innovator, and damn proud of it.
The trap just grabs everything. The only analysis this invention claims to do is detection of the nitrogen compounds that go bang. It does mention the possibility of detecting other molecules, but even if you could pick out the long chains of DNA, all this invention would do is tell you that there was DNA present, not whose DNA.
On the other hand, this is a nice approach. No blowing air up your skirt/kilt, no wrecking your hairdo. Just pause for a moment under the box, while natural convection reveals your chemical secrets.
You could do on-the-fly drug screening for anything that gets stuck in scalp flakes, for example. The device can find THC byproducts as readily as THC, so look for this at a high school near you....
And NPR did a wonderful interview with Marc Levoy last month, available on their web site as David's Eyes which includes things that the laser scan missed, and the news that all of the art history books are wrong.
Ah, yes. I remember having that same experience at 20. In a steakhouse in San Fransisco on my first business trip, I realized my parents could never have afforded to eat there.
Most Americans, I think, regard this as normal if incremental: Each generation does a little better than the previous one. The kids in their teens and twenties today, though, have less respect for their parents, and rightly so. The change this time is less incremental, particularly for those kids who can use the technologies that their parents find daunting.
These kids grew up believing that laws were optional, as they watched their parents routinely flout the 55 mph speed limit, dabble in illicit substances, and hide assets from the Tax Man. They don't respect authority in large part because it isn't worthy of their respect, and they sieze on opportunities to gain control (as the kid in the article did on IRC). They watched their parents run up huge deficits while demanding more and more from government, while contributing less. They watched their grandparents' generation go to the moon, but then their parents' generation abandoned any exploration that didn't serve a short term, selfish interest.
Using computers to subvert authority within a family isn't the most important social change recent generations, it's just the on change slashdotters are likely to notice.
So I did this, and got a remarkably lucid, if unsatisfactory, response from the Orange Box Web Team.
They understand the problem. The current "solution" was the result of internationalization and the desire to have a degree of customization. They (now) understand that it's annoying, which makes me think I'm not the only one to complain. They say they are looking for a better solution. (If they were running Apache, I could give them the right solution. They're using Netscape Enterprise Server on HP-UX, so I can't help them. If anybody knows how to do the old-to-new-redirection(extern) type behavior with NES, please drop them a line.)
Gee, give 'em feedback and they at least listen. Amazing. Maybe there's hope?
Now if I could get them to stock a decent grade of molding....
Quite. Some of us run VMWare Winders machines on our systems at work just so the sysadmins won't figure out we're running Linux on them.
They send us remote updates, the WinNT VM very happily eats the update, and the Red Hat stays firmly in place.
We have to check the VM every few days, in case we need to report the BSoD that the remote update generated. Usually the all-WinNT box in the hall gives us a hint.
Better yet, make one last trip to the Orange Box site, pick the "Contact Us" tab, and send them a little bit of feedback about the zero-second redirect. Be sure to include that you won't be coming back until they quit running their site like a porn site.
I agree with the television example (which isn't yours originally, and you should at least try to provide a citation or at least disclaim authorship)
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that this was my idea. I first had it explained to me by a local TV account exec about 20 years ago. She didn't come up with the idea either, she was just explaining what everybody in the business knew, but few consumers/viewers understood.
I disagree with its utility as an analogy. Customers are actually directly consuming CPUs...
I don't think this is really true. Very few people do what I did, and buy a motherboard, case, disks, memory, and a CPU, and put them together themselves. They buy a complete system, often with some services attached. They are, at best, indirect consumers.
Perhaps a better analogy is Thiokol. I doubt many automobile purchasers think of themselves as Thiokol customers, and Thiokol certainly doesn't think of drivers as their customers. GM, Ford, DCX and the other automakers who put airbags in their vehicles are the customers for Thiokol's "automotive inflators".
In any case, the point is still valid: I'm not an Intel customer. The vendor I bought my last three CPUs from is not a major Intel customer. Compaq, Dell, Gateway and few other system builders are the customers about which Intel should care.
This seems to be a good thing for computer sellers...
Someone remarked earlier that Intel needs to listen to their customers. Since computer sellers are Intel's customers (not us poor computer buyers) I'd say Intel has indeed caught on.
Understanding the identity of the actual customer is an important problem frequently overlooked. For example, the customer for a TV program is not the couch potato in front of the screen. The mass of couch potatoes is, in fact, the product. The customer is the ad buyer who wants to put something in front of that target demographic.
Intel, as the article described, listened to Compaq, and a few other big buyers of this one tiny little part of their servers, and is concentrating on meeting their customers' needs.
So yes, this is a very good thing for computer sellers, which is exactly what Intel intended.
Yah, the size problem is a killer for me. I won't deal with anything smaller than 8x6 inches, and I would want 8 & 1/8 x 10 & 7/8ths, plus at least one page that unfolds to 10 & 7/8ths by 22 inches before it could replace the magazine I most like to see each month.
Even when they try to get good names, the names get mangled. The huge radio telescope at Green Bank, WV is officially named The Green Bank Telescope but everyone I know who has seen it calls it The Great Big Telescope.
Slashdot Mirror
You might appear to be floating, but you're not.
I'm trying to remember which astronaut it was - I think it was Dr. Musgrave - who said "You don't feel like you're floating, you feel like you're falling. Because you're falling."
But we also have:
- Dr. Mike Barratt (MD)
- Captain Robert Behnken (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Col. Yvonne Cagle (MD)
- Dr. Traci Caldwell (PhD Chemical Engineering)
- Dr. Charles Camarda (PhD Aerospace Engineering)
- Dr. Greg Chamitoff (PhD Aeronautical Engineering)
- Dr. Leroy Chiao (PhD Chemical Engineering)
- Lt. Col. Catherine Coleman (PhD Polymer Chemistry)
- Dr. Andrew Feustel (PhD Siesmology)
- Dr. Anna Fisher (MD)
- Dr. Michael Foale (PhD Astrophysics)
- Lt. Col. Kevin Ford (PhD Aeronautical Engineering)
- Dr. Michael Gernhardt (PhD Bioengineering)
- Dr. John Grunsfeld (PhD Physics)
- Col. Scott Horowitz (PhD Aerospace Engineering)
- Dr. Janet Kavandi (PhD Analytical Chemistry)
- Dr. Stanley Love (PhD Astronomy)
- Dr. Edward Lu (PhD Applied Physics)
- Dr. Michael Massimino (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. Megan McArthur (PhD Oceanography)
- Captain Lee Morin (MD, MPH)
- Dr. Karen Nyberg (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. John Olivas (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. Scott Parazynski (MD)
- Dr. Nicholas Patrick (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. Donald Pettit (PhD Chemical Engineering)
- Dr. John Phillips (PhD Geophysics ans Space Physics)
- Dr. James Reilly (PhD Geosciences)
- Dr. Garrett Reisman (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. Stephen Robinson (PhD Mechanical Engineering)
- Dr. Piers Sellers (PhD Biometeorology)
- Dr. Steven Swanson (PhD Computer Science)
- Dr. Donald Thomas (PhD Materials Science)
- Dr. Janice Voss (PhD Aeronautics and Astronautics)
- Dr. Peggy Whitson (PhD Biochemistry)
- Dr. David Wolf (MD)
That doesn't count a few non-Americans in our program:- Dr. Takao Doi (PhD Aerospace Engineering)
- Dr. Christer Fuglesang (PhD Particle Physics)
- Dr. Steve MacLean (PhD Physics)
- Dr. Robert Thirsk (MD, MBA - go figure)
- Dr. Dafydd Williams (MD)
And it doesn't count the ex-astronauts who have moved on to other NASA positions:And then there are these few:
And I personally know several engineers and physicists of various stripe who have talked seriously about joining the program, but would like to do more than "orbit aimlessly overhead."
So we should be able to find people.
Don't expect to see this right away. After all, the Roman network wasn't built in a day.
(Sorry.)
These guys have a cool desktop, if you can call it that.
Riccardo Giacconi was using a fairly ordinary CDE on Solaris desktop on a beautiful 24 inch wide-screen monitor the last time I saw it, with some very cool galaxy images from the Chandra Deep Field.
Steven Squyres probably also has an interesting desktop, and I think I saw it on ABC News last week, before they switched to talking about the problems with the rover.
You can see Asia Carrera's desktop in the background, but it's not safe from work. Looks mundane.
I wonder if Pheobe has a cool desktop. Not Alyssa Milano, but her character.
Speaking of fiction, I wonder whether David Kay uses Windows or Mac?
While I like innovators, I'm more interested in users. They at least try to do useful things. That was the problem with Alan Kay. He always has interesting desktops. He showed squeak at a conference a few years ago that just stunned people, but none of us could figure out what we would actually do with it.
I'm a geek (getting paid to build software systems for 25 years now, so maybe a dino-geek) and my wife is an attorney. While I still make more than she does, some years it's been close. We had our one child, Teela, seven years ago next Friday.
Everybody says you won't get any sleep. We managed to get sleep by planning. I took four weeks off after Teela was born and then spent another four weeks working two or three days a week. My wife left the firm she was in (a two-woman shop, but she was a partner) and spent a year doing temp assignments two to four days a week. Whoever didn't have to work the next day took care of bathing, overnight feedings and changing, etc. while the other got a solid eight hours. The person who only got five or so hours could catch up the next evening. We did, however, give up most television. No great loss.
We got two baby slings like this and carried Teela everywhere for the first six months. I really believe that it helped. Our pediatrician showed us a journal article that indicated babies with constant parental contact were less fussy during the day and slept better at night. My experience bore that out.
I heard lots of horror stories. It seemed like everybody had their favorite disease or condition for which we needed to have her tested. We did a lot of research, and talked to a lot of people, both parents and pediatricians. The only thing she ended up being tested for was lead, and that was a state requirement, mostly because Baltimore has such incredible lead contamination. She was fine. The only bit of health advice I have is something that should be obvious: Put your baby down to sleep on her or his back. Not her tummy, even if it seems she sleeps more readily or soundly, and she's fussy on her back. Put her on her back until she can roll herself over on her tummy. Once she can roll over, let her pick her own orientation and don't worry about it. There is now a ton of data on sleeping posture, and the relationship to SIDS and other problems, and it all boils down to this: Put your baby down to sleep on his or her back. So do that.
Pay attention to all those safety things: Never leave a baby in a tub, even for a second. Never leave a baby in a car. Never move the car unless the baby is strapped into a properly secured car seat.
Car seats are easy to misinstall. Around here we fairly regularly get events where cops will check your seat to see if it's correctly installed. Usually they see more than 90 percent incorrect installation. We had two cars, one of the seats was fine, the other was just loose enough that the Trooper helped me tighten it up to make sure it was really safe.
Okay, the poop story.
When Teela was four days old, I was doing her usual evening changing while my wife and mother collaborated on dinner for the grownups. Suddenly they heard me yell "Oh shit!" and began racing each other up the stairs. By the time they arrived I was laughing. Teela had squirted her first stream of poop over the diaper through the air about two feet into my hand. I had heard of projective vomiting, but never projectile pooping. And I had no reason to suspect her first poop would be so firmly delivered.
It wasn't really a surprise, but I am still amazed by was what a joy she has been. I keep hearing how "kids are great at that age", but the age keeps changing to whatever age she is. She has been, and is, the most amazing person.
When people meet her for the first time, I don't introduce her as "my daughter, Teela." The ownership runs the other way. I tell people "this is Teela, and I'm Teela's dad."
It's the love of Money that is the root of all evil. Which is why guys love "bad girls."
Actually, there is. As part of the registration, you agree to provide accurate information:
6.1 As part of the registration process, you will select a password and a subscriber ID. You also have to give us certain registration information, all of which must be accurate and updated.
That's a license agreement, every bit as binding as, say, this one.
Please don't argue that it's not "good" or "fair" for the NYT to have such a license. But please do make any argument about the NYT license that you are also willing to make about the GPL.
tc>
For example, there are certain car dealers I won't even talk to because their ads are so annoying.
I am also a very big fan of the "This Bud's for you" series, to the point that I actually regret that Anheuser-Busch doesn't make any good beers.
We tried the newest version of JumpStart on the strength of a TV ad, and we have tried a couple of local eateries based in part on local inserts on cable. A well-done ad for something that matches my interests might get my attention. Otherwise it's "run it ahead thirty seconds, dear."
Of course, the ads work all too well on my six year old daughter. Sigh.
Yah, that'll work.
tc>
We have several of the 480-disk model in the office for storing the digitized sky survey and the Multimission Archive at Space Telescope, excluding the Hubble Data Archive. (We keep the Hubble data on other, larger capacity media.)
I visited Plasmon before we selected their MO jukebox, and the guys there confirmed that you could use the CD-R drives to play music CDs, with the appropriate audio mixer and drivers.
This may, however, be a bit more expensive than you'd like.
tc>
Generally, yes. And this has been litigated to death.
Employers can monitor phone calls, go through your notebooks, and rifle through your desk drawers. Whether they can check your personal briefcase or examine your locker depends on a variety of factors.
Mail coming into a workplace also has a reduced expectation of privacy. One facility at which I worked opened and screened every bit of incoming mail, and outgoing mail with company stamps had to be left unsealed. There was an attempt to litigate that issue, but the court found for the company, at least partly on the strength of pre-employment notice. Not agreement, notice.
Worker's Comp cases are an interesting problem, since the claim is a workplace injury, and the employer generally can get some access to the medical information anyway. Union conversations (many of which are not only permitted, but required, to occur on company time,) are a likely exception: If the monitoring manager realizes they are listening in on an activity governed by a Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA), the CBA often requires that they terminate the monitoring and forget everything they heard. My father is a shop steward, and regularly gets calls about grievances. As a result his calls are almost never monitored, since it would be too annoying to sort out which were covered by the CBA.
tc>
Not so clear cut, actually. Even accepting that the organization is non-profit, if the film festival charged money, then it's a commercial use, and every commercial use is presumptively ...unfair"(Sony v Univeral, 464 U.S. 417, which is the case on this subject, includes that little gem as part of the overall analysis that made VTR's legal.
Further, the MPAA and their associates regard DVDs not as movies, but as software, and assert that under the DMCA that any use other than the use which the producer intended is illegal. (See, for example, Valenti's deposition and the related slashdot discussion.)
If Valenti and the MPAA are correct, then there is perhaps no legal way for you to use that image without permission. The implications of DMCA in this regard are still to be litigated.
It's always important to remember that the law doesn't mean what you want it to mean, even when you want something reasonable. It means whatever five Justices agree that it means. Of course, since the 55mph speed limit created a whole generation of Americans who believe that laws are optional, I guess we'll have to expect more "technical" piracy.
tc>
That's the hope, if not the plan. This simulation is described as part of the "stockpile stewardship" program. Instead of grabbing a warhead off the shelf or out of the silo, sticking it down the hole, and setting it off to see if the expected shelf life matches reality, they fiddle with the initial conditions and "set off" a virtual device.
DOE has in fact discussed sharing the software, and perhaps access to the hardware, with the French, though I haven't seen any press on this recently.
There is still a case where you would need to light up a new device: If somebody came up with a new, safer, approach to weapons design. But that hasn't happened in quite some time. Most recent testing (both ours and others) has been around safety issues: Will the device that has been sitting quietly for a decade or three still behave as you expect?
Or so I'm told.
tc>
Then maybe you can answer my questions.
I use MS Word because I have to (contractual obligations that I can't evade) not because I want to. Fortunately the cost of Word, which if not bloatware itself certainly runs on bloatware, is borne by somebody else. If I could evade using Word, but nobody in the contracting office would be any wiser, I'd do it.
tc>
"I'm pleased to announce that Dave Bootlicker has accepted the position of Chief of Quality Insurance for UNINET. In this position Dave will be responsible for monitoring the cluelessness of our product managers and assuring that we have enough insurance to cover the likely lawsuits, bad press, and extended downtime that our crack development team is so good at generating."
For some reason, the new QA guy didn't think it was all that funny. Now, of course, he'd be a real innovator, and damn proud of it.
tc>
On the other hand, this is a nice approach. No blowing air up your skirt/kilt, no wrecking your hairdo. Just pause for a moment under the box, while natural convection reveals your chemical secrets.
You could do on-the-fly drug screening for anything that gets stuck in scalp flakes, for example. The device can find THC byproducts as readily as THC, so look for this at a high school near you....
tc>
tc>
Ah, yes. I remember having that same experience at 20. In a steakhouse in San Fransisco on my first business trip, I realized my parents could never have afforded to eat there.
Most Americans, I think, regard this as normal if incremental: Each generation does a little better than the previous one. The kids in their teens and twenties today, though, have less respect for their parents, and rightly so. The change this time is less incremental, particularly for those kids who can use the technologies that their parents find daunting.
These kids grew up believing that laws were optional, as they watched their parents routinely flout the 55 mph speed limit, dabble in illicit substances, and hide assets from the Tax Man. They don't respect authority in large part because it isn't worthy of their respect, and they sieze on opportunities to gain control (as the kid in the article did on IRC). They watched their parents run up huge deficits while demanding more and more from government, while contributing less. They watched their grandparents' generation go to the moon, but then their parents' generation abandoned any exploration that didn't serve a short term, selfish interest.
Using computers to subvert authority within a family isn't the most important social change recent generations, it's just the on change slashdotters are likely to notice.
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They understand the problem. The current "solution" was the result of internationalization and the desire to have a degree of customization. They (now) understand that it's annoying, which makes me think I'm not the only one to complain. They say they are looking for a better solution. (If they were running Apache, I could give them the right solution. They're using Netscape Enterprise Server on HP-UX, so I can't help them. If anybody knows how to do the old-to-new-redirection(extern) type behavior with NES, please drop them a line.)
Gee, give 'em feedback and they at least listen. Amazing. Maybe there's hope?
Now if I could get them to stock a decent grade of molding....
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They send us remote updates, the WinNT VM very happily eats the update, and the Red Hat stays firmly in place.
We have to check the VM every few days, in case we need to report the BSoD that the remote update generated. Usually the all-WinNT box in the hall gives us a hint.
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Better yet, make one last trip to the Orange Box site, pick the "Contact Us" tab, and send them a little bit of feedback about the zero-second redirect. Be sure to include that you won't be coming back until they quit running their site like a porn site.
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Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that this was my idea. I first had it explained to me by a local TV account exec about 20 years ago. She didn't come up with the idea either, she was just explaining what everybody in the business knew, but few consumers/viewers understood.
I disagree with its utility as an analogy. Customers are actually directly consuming CPUs...
I don't think this is really true. Very few people do what I did, and buy a motherboard, case, disks, memory, and a CPU, and put them together themselves. They buy a complete system, often with some services attached. They are, at best, indirect consumers.
Perhaps a better analogy is Thiokol. I doubt many automobile purchasers think of themselves as Thiokol customers, and Thiokol certainly doesn't think of drivers as their customers. GM, Ford, DCX and the other automakers who put airbags in their vehicles are the customers for Thiokol's "automotive inflators".
In any case, the point is still valid: I'm not an Intel customer. The vendor I bought my last three CPUs from is not a major Intel customer. Compaq, Dell, Gateway and few other system builders are the customers about which Intel should care.
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Someone remarked earlier that Intel needs to listen to their customers. Since computer sellers are Intel's customers (not us poor computer buyers) I'd say Intel has indeed caught on.
Understanding the identity of the actual customer is an important problem frequently overlooked. For example, the customer for a TV program is not the couch potato in front of the screen. The mass of couch potatoes is, in fact, the product. The customer is the ad buyer who wants to put something in front of that target demographic.
Intel, as the article described, listened to Compaq, and a few other big buyers of this one tiny little part of their servers, and is concentrating on meeting their customers' needs.
So yes, this is a very good thing for computer sellers, which is exactly what Intel intended.
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