The main point was that saying that there was nothing to do seems a bit foolish. NASA has pulled some pretty significant rabbits out of the hat in cases of having to deal with unexpected but non-catastrophic failures before. This one was not definitively catastrophic until reentry.
I don't think that terrorist investigations have any relevance to this. The relevant study to compare it is the Rogers commission from when Challenger blew up. And that definitely was quality work, and I have confidence that this one can be the same.
So you already know, without knowing the actual extent of any theoretical damage that a minimal approach rather than the normal one would have made no difference? What would have stopped them from, e.g. getting another shuttle up, stopping by the space station, etc.?
In paleontology, archaeology, and related professions, fraud has often been screamed because someone's favorite ox (theory, religious belief, doctrine, etc.) had been gored by an unanticipated discovery.
I don't recall saying that the NPR person was saying it was a fraud. They explicitly said the opposite.
As for my ox being gored...god knows as a computer tech, I have such a vested interest in there being no such thing as 4 winged dinosaurs.
Peer reviewers or not, when I heard this described on NPR last night, they commented that "usually fossils come out in fragments and are very difficult to piece together. These came out very whole, and amazingly detailed, down to all the feathers details." That just screams fraud to me.
I've always been convinced that this was more about which vendors were willing to actually announce that they had problems and try to fix them, rather than any meaningful measure of quality. Sun has always announced and released more patches by sheer number than IBM or HP, for example.
In this particular case, truth is really all that matters, and the truth is obscured by all the gorilla dust being thrown by both sides, motivated by politics.
Having purchased easily 1000 CDs in the time period in question, I don't think "me == -$100" is an accurate reflection of reality. It is at least "me == -$1000". So how much am I out again?
And be bilked out of a few hundred times that $20 by the recording industry. Might be nice to recover some of THAT money. (for the record I currently own >1500 CDs, the majority of which were purchased during the time frame in question, and that doesn't count the hundreds that I've bought and then resold because I ended up deciding I didn't care enough about them any more).
And I suppose I should add that there are other jobs that she could do as a sign interpreter that also require her to be certified without requiring her to join a union, and without her doing educational interpreting.
Given that my wife had to be certified even for the job she was working when she *didn't* belong to a union, I think you're projecting your dislike of unions onto this issue unnecessarily.
There you go. Again, not a profession where safety mandates certification. BTW, a sign language interpreter in a classroom is not a teacher. They translate what the teacher says for deaf students.
Sign language interpreters are certified and licensed, both locally (in many states) and nationwide in the US. While *some* of them may have to deal with matters of life and death, that would be a very tiny fraction of all of them. My wife worked in a high school, arguably not a likely place for life and death interpreting skills, and still had to be certified to get the job.
I don't think safety issues are the primary thing in certifications--setting consistent professional standards usually set by the profession itself usually is the driving force behind certifications.
On one hand this could be a good idea. Certification programs (most of them regulated at the state level, see law bar exams, sign language interpreter certification, etc) do help to improve the professionalism and standards of a given occupation. And that includes occupations that are not necessarily going to be dealing in safety issues--the certification simply notes that the certified individual is competent or better than competent to do the job at hand.
On the other hand, certification programs are inconsistent state to state, and frequently fraught with other problems of politics etc. especially in the initial phases.
In particular, regulating "computer service techs" could be a huge bag of worms. Not only do you have different hardware (PC, Mac, PDA types, bigger iron CPUs, etc), but a vast range of OS options (various flavors of linux, various flavors of windows, macos, pda OS'). I think this makes the problem much more complex than even cars, and cars are already a pretty complex area (usually you get a certification for a particular line of cars, right?).
Finally, I have some certifications myself (solaris sysadmin I & II, network admin, others more obscure), and I can tell you that those tests don't really say a damn thing about how good an admin I could be. They really address how well I was able to remember the trivia of what the options to lpadmin are (for example). Any sysadmin worth their salt knows the man pages are more reliable than his or her own memory. So, while the face of the idea is good, the implementation is likely to be problematic at best, and potentially a disastrous mess at worst.
"Honey, what do you suppose is on this odd little black square with the gold contacts? Do we still have anything that will read this?"
If you think people archive their photos on their smartcards, you're insane. That'd mean buying a new $50 smartcard every time you filled one up. Or memory stick or whatever. People with digital cameras are people who upload their photos to a computer. They can keep them there, burn them to CD, whatever, but chances are any photos they really care about will get migrated to the next computer etc. etc. barring any major disasters like a disk crash with no backups. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that if JPG goes the way of the dodo, there will be a means to migrate to the next format before it's completely dead.
And as for prints of digital images. I'm guessing that you don't mean the home image printers that use paper lasting a few months...
The sentence was so incomprehensible, it took three reads to figure out what you were trying to say. It wasn't one typo or two typos, but a whole slew of bad grammar to boot.
If you have all this time to "not waste replying" but still reply, you'd think a smack on the preview button might be worth the time to not look like a moron.
And you keep claiming the refutation was "obvious" but not giving exactly what that refutation was. Perhaps it's obvious to one of your immense intellectual prowess, but poor miserable me who can only resort to typo slams just can't seem to get it. Perhaps if your prowess were so immense you'd have realized that too, and actually stated your refutation, eh?
But since it doesn't really seem to exist, I figure I'm just wasting my time waiting for your reply. You might note that I didn't disagree with your point that the software ought to be installable wherever, just that it seems bloody stupid that the "reason" is so you can reprint forms that you ought to have saved paper copies of in safe places; there are so many better reasons that Intuit is doing the wrong thing here.
Um....how many negatives have lasted all this time? How many silver nitrate films are deteriorating in the vaults?
If you print your images and keep the prints, you've probably got as good longevity as anything from film today. Images you care about having digital copies of, you'll incrementally upgrade the formats as formats change. No generation is going to move forward without some way to convert forward (look at all the image formats supported by PSP & Photoshop today).
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The main point was that saying that there was nothing to do seems a bit foolish. NASA has pulled some pretty significant rabbits out of the hat in cases of having to deal with unexpected but non-catastrophic failures before. This one was not definitively catastrophic until reentry.
I don't think that terrorist investigations have any relevance to this. The relevant study to compare it is the Rogers commission from when Challenger blew up. And that definitely was quality work, and I have confidence that this one can be the same.
So you already know, without knowing the actual extent of any theoretical damage that a minimal approach rather than the normal one would have made no difference? What would have stopped them from, e.g. getting another shuttle up, stopping by the space station, etc.?
Are you the only eeediot who can't see that the title is "kill wesley crusher" not "kill wil wheaton"?
that doesn't make sense. The uranium has to split to generate energy, how can it be more uranium?
None of that in Linux, mind you.
I don't recall saying that the NPR person was saying it was a fraud. They explicitly said the opposite.
As for my ox being gored...god knows as a computer tech, I have such a vested interest in there being no such thing as 4 winged dinosaurs.
I'd put that up with "the long boom" as really great Wired predictions.
Peer reviewers or not, when I heard this described on NPR last night, they commented that "usually fossils come out in fragments and are very difficult to piece together. These came out very whole, and amazingly detailed, down to all the feathers details." That just screams fraud to me.
I've always been convinced that this was more about which vendors were willing to actually announce that they had problems and try to fix them, rather than any meaningful measure of quality. Sun has always announced and released more patches by sheer number than IBM or HP, for example.
In this particular case, truth is really all that matters, and the truth is obscured by all the gorilla dust being thrown by both sides, motivated by politics.
Exactly my point. The person claiming $20 is a reasonable deal is full of it. Not that it's the lawyers' fault that it's so low, but even so....
Dude, you should have used napster if you're that upset about paying money for music.
Ever try to find the latest song by Bleep & Booster on Napster? Didn't think so.
Beyond that, I don't object to paying for music, I personally prefer a real CD to MP3. I object to being stiffed when I'm doing the Right Thing [tm]
Having purchased easily 1000 CDs in the time period in question, I don't think "me == -$100" is an accurate reflection of reality. It is at least "me == -$1000". So how much am I out again?
And be bilked out of a few hundred times that $20 by the recording industry. Might be nice to recover some of THAT money. (for the record I currently own >1500 CDs, the majority of which were purchased during the time frame in question, and that doesn't count the hundreds that I've bought and then resold because I ended up deciding I didn't care enough about them any more).
Nowhere on the site does it ask for receipts. Get a clue.
Figure the odds.
And I suppose I should add that there are other jobs that she could do as a sign interpreter that also require her to be certified without requiring her to join a union, and without her doing educational interpreting.
Given that my wife had to be certified even for the job she was working when she *didn't* belong to a union, I think you're projecting your dislike of unions onto this issue unnecessarily.
There you go. Again, not a profession where safety mandates certification. BTW, a sign language interpreter in a classroom is not a teacher. They translate what the teacher says for deaf students.
I don't think safety issues are the primary thing in certifications--setting consistent professional standards usually set by the profession itself usually is the driving force behind certifications.
On the other hand, certification programs are inconsistent state to state, and frequently fraught with other problems of politics etc. especially in the initial phases.
In particular, regulating "computer service techs" could be a huge bag of worms. Not only do you have different hardware (PC, Mac, PDA types, bigger iron CPUs, etc), but a vast range of OS options (various flavors of linux, various flavors of windows, macos, pda OS'). I think this makes the problem much more complex than even cars, and cars are already a pretty complex area (usually you get a certification for a particular line of cars, right?).
Finally, I have some certifications myself (solaris sysadmin I & II, network admin, others more obscure), and I can tell you that those tests don't really say a damn thing about how good an admin I could be. They really address how well I was able to remember the trivia of what the options to lpadmin are (for example). Any sysadmin worth their salt knows the man pages are more reliable than his or her own memory. So, while the face of the idea is good, the implementation is likely to be problematic at best, and potentially a disastrous mess at worst.
If you think people archive their photos on their smartcards, you're insane. That'd mean buying a new $50 smartcard every time you filled one up. Or memory stick or whatever. People with digital cameras are people who upload their photos to a computer. They can keep them there, burn them to CD, whatever, but chances are any photos they really care about will get migrated to the next computer etc. etc. barring any major disasters like a disk crash with no backups. Therefore it's reasonable to assume that if JPG goes the way of the dodo, there will be a means to migrate to the next format before it's completely dead.
And as for prints of digital images. I'm guessing that you don't mean the home image printers that use paper lasting a few months...
I believe the word you're looking for is "duh".
If you have all this time to "not waste replying" but still reply, you'd think a smack on the preview button might be worth the time to not look like a moron.
And you keep claiming the refutation was "obvious" but not giving exactly what that refutation was. Perhaps it's obvious to one of your immense intellectual prowess, but poor miserable me who can only resort to typo slams just can't seem to get it. Perhaps if your prowess were so immense you'd have realized that too, and actually stated your refutation, eh?
But since it doesn't really seem to exist, I figure I'm just wasting my time waiting for your reply. You might note that I didn't disagree with your point that the software ought to be installable wherever, just that it seems bloody stupid that the "reason" is so you can reprint forms that you ought to have saved paper copies of in safe places; there are so many better reasons that Intuit is doing the wrong thing here.
If you print your images and keep the prints, you've probably got as good longevity as anything from film today. Images you care about having digital copies of, you'll incrementally upgrade the formats as formats change. No generation is going to move forward without some way to convert forward (look at all the image formats supported by PSP & Photoshop today).