"Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home."
I probably have more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in my basement right now. That doesn't mean that any of them contain anything dangerous. Most of them, in fact, are empty.
"Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said."
Again, the same is true of my home. Mostly cleaning supplies, but there's a few cans of paint from when my wife didn't like the color of anyone's bedroom, some fertilizer and insecticide, and other things I'm sure I've forgotten.
Just because the "authorities" say something, doesn't make it so.
Imagine how far wrong an individual chemist, working alone, without review, might be.
If I had mod points, I'd rate this funny. Or were you being serious? Han Solo said, "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit." In practice, what people can imagine far exceeds what can be accomplish. Even bin-Laden imagined a lot more than what al-Qaeda was able to achieve.
Heinlein and Rand notwithstading, experience shows that an individual working alone isn't going to get too far. Compare David Hahn to Union Carbide, for instance.
I want to know when there's going to be a clearance sale on Medeco locks? I need new locks, and since I don't live near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, these sound perfect.
Thunderbird can back up gmail, and the Zindus extension will back up you address book. Lifehacker had a story in the past month about using wget to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks; I presume it can be adapted to Googlepages and your blog. Finally, if you install Google Gears, a lot of content will be cached on your laptop. I don't know how you'd retrieve it, but at least you'd know where it was.
I've actually suspected that this would be done with a nice round number of years since the events, such as 100 years later.
Actually, you's probably want a multiple of 28 years, so that the days of the week line up. For a short period of time, a multiple of 7 is probably OK, but if you pass over any leap years, they'll throw things off.
Perhaps they recently added that, but the article itself does list Ars as the source now.
Yeah, right, it just said "from Ars Technica", with no links, and no hints about how to find it. I has to go to Ars and type the woman's name into their search box to find the article.
The solution is, to let everyone grow to his own level of expertise in the program. We need a program that starts out being as easy as it gets, but grows with your involvement. (=if you work more with it.) Something like difficulty modes in games. Just it's not the difficulty. It's the shortcuts, the special view modes, the application layout, the shown controls, the wizards, and so on. Of course you can always set that level yourself.
I've seen lots of people advocate this approach, and a few actually release something based upon it. It doesn't work, because "level of expertise" isn't a linear spectrum. For example, everyone starts out with about the same level of expertise when they first learn to drive a car, but then people start to go in different directions. Most just commute along a set route every day, and use the standard interface. Many, however, has special needs; they become experts in different aspects of driving and use specialized interfaces that are all different from each other. The dashboard of a limousine is different from that of a diesel truck, which is different from that of a taxi. And even if you just commute, the dashboard of a sub-compact has differences from that of a mini-van. (And this is just "street legal" vehicles...)
Microsoft, a few years back, changed Office to use menus that hid infrequently used options, apparently thinking that each user would evolve an interface specialized to their specific needs. I didn't hear of any positive reviews, and the next release returned to "standard" menus.
I suspect that images captured by this device won't be intended for display. Instead, it could be used in computer vision systems. If you're taking a picture of everyone walking past a point in an airport concourse, you'd like the people at the edge of the image to be undistorted; it would make the terrorist recognition software a bit easier to write. Likewise, an autonomous vehicle could use this to better recognize its environment.
That's more than a little disturbing. That, or a great route to corporate espionage (I'm betting it'd be trivially easy to install keyloggers in your average corporate office, particularly given how small and discrete those things are). Not to mention the fun a disgruntled employee could have...
1) Install hardware key logger on your own computer. 2) Wait for someone from desktop support to log in for some reason. 3) Profit! (Or at least install all that stuff that requires admin rights.)
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but how seriously are they considering the possibility of contamination? Because unless I'm remembering something wrong, perchlorates are most excellent oxidizers and hence commonly used in, oh, say, solid rocket fuel, among other things.
I think it's important to note that the White House briefing was due to the following:
The results from Sunday's TEGA experiment, which analyzed a sample taken directly above the ice layer, found no evidence of this compound.
"This is surprising since an earlier TEGA measurement of surface materials was consistent with but not conclusive of the presence of perchlorate," said Peter Smith, Phoenix's principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
In other words, the important part is that they didn't find perchlorate once they used the trenching tool. So, either the landing rockets contaminated the top layer of soil, or some sort of wierd chemistry is forming perchlorate when sunlight hits the soil. Either way, the subsurface chemistry seems to be conducive to life. I get the feeling that you just need to add water and tomato seeds to get a vegetable garden growing. (Either that, or my earlier comment turns out to be true.)
Is the presence of perchlorate needed to manufacture fuel in situ? If so, this would make some of the proposed manned missions a bit harder. On the other hand, it may mean that along with making fuel, robots could farm food and other plants for future astronauts to consume while staying on Mars.
These are intermediate results, and should be treated as such. From TFA,
The team also is working to totally exonerate any possibility of the perchlorate readings being influenced by terrestrial sources which may have migrated from the spacecraft, either into samples or into the instrumentation.
Wouldn't it be amusing if some joker, before launch, had sprinkled a handful of dirt into the analysis chambers? (And by "amusing", I mean in the "How close do you think I can steer this ocean liner to that iceberg?" sort of way.)
Why the hell is there a tiny url (http://www.tinyurl.com/6ehog5) in this story? Where does it point? Goatse? Tubgirl? Some random PDF? This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen slip by the editors. It's not like this is Twittr, where you're limited to 140 bytes.
Maybe Slashcode needs something to automatically follow links in articles and replace them with their target if they redirect.
Take a shower? If there isn't one in your building, there's probably one in a gym that isn't too far from your building.
I used to work for a start-up in an office park. We occupied half of the third floor, so company provided facilities weren't likely and the YMCA was five miles away. One day I discovered that the restrooms in the basement all had a shower. *Sweet!*
You needs a very small team that understands what the product is supposed to accomplish, not how it is supposed to accomplish it. The user interface flows from there.
It was 1995 and a man was walking around with a wood block in his shirt pocket. Occasionally he would take it out and fiddle with it as if he were checking appointments. Some might have thought him crazy, but he was not.
The man was Jeff Hawkins, and he would soon revolutionize the technology industry with a device known as a Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA. It would be called the Palm Pilot and sell over one million units in its first 18 months alone. Jeff Hawkins didn't invent the PDA, but his Palm Pilot would be the first to attain widespread acceptance. There were other PDAs before the Palm Pilot: Apple produced one that came to be called the Newton in 1993, but it failed to achieve the success of the Palm Pilot due to its high price and the fact that it was just too large to fit inside a pocket; a Windows-based PDA was introduced around the same time as the Palm Pilot, using a software called Windows CE, which enabled one to open and create Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets. The interface resembled Windows 95 with the familiar Start menu. Unfortunately, these devices were much more expensive and drained way too much battery power.
The block of wood in Jeff Hawkin's pocket represented an approach to design that would serve him well. He did not want to just design yet another electronic gadget, but something that was eminently usable; a tool. His experiments with the block of wood helped him to determine the right size for the Palm Pilot -- small enough to fit in a man's shirt pocket.
With disposable phones so prevalent now, how do you know which call to listen in on? This is why the gov't can't get a warrant. If you think about how it works, you will understand. Take this hypothetical:
A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's no other option but to listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day. Most of which are harmless. Do you get a warrant for each and every one?
What don't you understand about warrants? FISA was specifically designed to grant warrants in exactly these cases. If someone spots a call from "a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC" then they walk across the hall and ask for a warrant to tap all calls to or from either phone. Five minutes later, they have one good for a few days and start listening. If there's anything interesting, they reapply for a longer term; if it's nothing, they let it expire.
The point is, there's someone who's outside the executive branch acting as a circuit breaker. Most of the time, yeah, he's a rubber stamp, but the judge is the guy who can't be fired for saying "no" if the Attorney General wants to listen in on his wife's phone calls to Mexico.
The truth of the matter is conversations originating overseas from known or suspected terrorist organizations to their contacts in the U.S. may be monitored. Your chats with Grandma about what to get little Jimmy for his birthday are of no interest to anyone and cannot be legally intercepted without a warrant. Trying to find out what next big operation terrorists are planning against us ought to be everybody's interest, and perhaps it would be if most Democrat weren't afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Any conversation with anyone outside the US can be intercepted, not just the ones that originate overseas or are from known or suspected terrorist organizations. If Grandma is in London, England, or even London, Ontario, the conversation can now be legally listened to. Also, the FISA courts were set up as a rubber stamp. IIRC, there's a special room at the NSA where a federal judge does nothing but grant warrants for FISA wiretaps. The whole process takes about five minutes, and the warrant was retroactive for a few days so that nothing important would be missed. The current administration felt that this was too restrictive, so they just stopped following the law.
Before I even looked at the/. comments, I clicked through to the Wired article, found the link to saysme.tv, and tried to buy an ad. However, I live in St. Louis, and was very disappointed to see that they don't yet support my area, nor any nearby cites up to and including Chicago and Memphis.
Of course, I'm not a cable subscriber, I watch satellite TV. Anyone know if/when DirectTV and DishNetwork will be supported?
Also, while some areas are cheap, some are expensive. I expect that satellite TV will also be expensive. They need a way to put money down for a part of an ad, which would run when enough people sign up for that area.
My point was that programmers shouldn't use eval() in Javascript, just like programmers shouldn't use goto statements. That doesn't mean that you can't use tools that use those features (I use yacc and lex many times a year), it just means that using them is very hazardous and best avoided. And yes, I realize that this means that there are exceptions to the rule, since it is programmers who write those tools, but those exceptions are very, very, limited. Thinking that you can whip out some code that uses eval() just because json.js uses it is a supreme act of hubris. I wouldn't let anyone I work with use an eval(), no matter what the circumstances, because circumstances change and it's unlikely that the code will change in lockstep. Nor would I use some random library that someone found somewhere. I'd want code that had been looked at by a lot more eyes than mine and tested in the field in a lot of deployments. Crockford's stuff meets that criteria. Anything you might come up with is unlikely to.
The good news: George Lucas is not involved in this one, but rumor is that Pixar may be.
At first, I was going to cry, "Bullshit", but then I thought about it a bit more. On the 25th anniversay DVD, John Lassiter tells us that TRON inspired him to get into CGI animation, and let's face it, any one of us could replicate TRON's special effects at home today. The day after Disney acquired Pixar, I could see Lassiter saying, "OK, I want to do my first live action movie, and I want it to be TRON". With all those pitch-black backgrounds and such, that trailer does't need the CPU cycles that even the original Toy Story required; Pixar could do all the needed effects for the movie using their secretaries' computers during lunch. What TRON needs is a good story, and story is exactly what sets Pixar ahead of everyone else doing CGI these days.
Yeah, I can see Pixar wanting to stretch a bit, create something a bit darker and more adult than their previous efforts. I can see TR2N being that movie.
Speed Racer showed us physics-defying CGI cars, and pretended that it was happening in the real world. The result was, hmmm, kinda sucky. TR2N, otoh, is going to give us physics-defying CGI light-cycles, but admit that it's all happening in an unreal world. I expect that this movie will be a visual orgasm.
PS I watched that trailer five times before coming back here to post this.
Slashdot Mirror
"Firefighters found more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in the basement Tuesday afternoon, after they responded to an unrelated fire in an air conditioner on the second floor of the home."
I probably have more than 1,500 vials, jars, cans, bottles and boxes in my basement right now. That doesn't mean that any of them contain anything dangerous. Most of them, in fact, are empty.
"Vessels of chemicals were all over the furniture and the floor, authorities said."
Again, the same is true of my home. Mostly cleaning supplies, but there's a few cans of paint from when my wife didn't like the color of anyone's bedroom, some fertilizer and insecticide, and other things I'm sure I've forgotten.
Just because the "authorities" say something, doesn't make it so.
Imagine how far wrong an individual chemist, working alone, without review, might be.
If I had mod points, I'd rate this funny. Or were you being serious? Han Solo said, "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit." In practice, what people can imagine far exceeds what can be accomplish. Even bin-Laden imagined a lot more than what al-Qaeda was able to achieve.
Heinlein and Rand notwithstading, experience shows that an individual working alone isn't going to get too far. Compare David Hahn to Union Carbide, for instance.
I want to know when there's going to be a clearance sale on Medeco locks? I need new locks, and since I don't live near Sioux Falls, South Dakota, these sound perfect.
Here are some mostly self-explanatory links:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/thunderbird/
http://www.zindus.com/
http://lifehacker.com/software/download-managers/geek-to-live--wget-local-copies-of-your-online-research-delicious-digg-or-google-notebook-200360.php
http://lifehacker.com/399407/how-to-sync-any-desktop-calendar-with-google-calendar
http://gears.google.com/
Thunderbird can back up gmail, and the Zindus extension will back up you address book. Lifehacker had a story in the past month about using wget to backup your del.icio.us bookmarks; I presume it can be adapted to Googlepages and your blog. Finally, if you install Google Gears, a lot of content will be cached on your laptop. I don't know how you'd retrieve it, but at least you'd know where it was.
I've actually suspected that this would be done with a nice round number of years since the events, such as 100 years later.
Actually, you's probably want a multiple of 28 years, so that the days of the week line up. For a short period of time, a multiple of 7 is probably OK, but if you pass over any leap years, they'll throw things off.
From TFA:
Source: Ars Technica
Perhaps they recently added that, but the article itself does list Ars as the source now.
Yeah, right, it just said "from Ars Technica", with no links, and no hints about how to find it. I has to go to Ars and type the woman's name into their search box to find the article.
The solution is, to let everyone grow to his own level of expertise in the program. We need a program that starts out being as easy as it gets, but grows with your involvement. (=if you work more with it.) Something like difficulty modes in games. Just it's not the difficulty. It's the shortcuts, the special view modes, the application layout, the shown controls, the wizards, and so on.
Of course you can always set that level yourself.
I've seen lots of people advocate this approach, and a few actually release something based upon it. It doesn't work, because "level of expertise" isn't a linear spectrum. For example, everyone starts out with about the same level of expertise when they first learn to drive a car, but then people start to go in different directions. Most just commute along a set route every day, and use the standard interface. Many, however, has special needs; they become experts in different aspects of driving and use specialized interfaces that are all different from each other. The dashboard of a limousine is different from that of a diesel truck, which is different from that of a taxi. And even if you just commute, the dashboard of a sub-compact has differences from that of a mini-van. (And this is just "street legal" vehicles...)
Microsoft, a few years back, changed Office to use menus that hid infrequently used options, apparently thinking that each user would evolve an interface specialized to their specific needs. I didn't hear of any positive reviews, and the next release returned to "standard" menus.
I suspect that images captured by this device won't be intended for display. Instead, it could be used in computer vision systems. If you're taking a picture of everyone walking past a point in an airport concourse, you'd like the people at the edge of the image to be undistorted; it would make the terrorist recognition software a bit easier to write. Likewise, an autonomous vehicle could use this to better recognize its environment.
That's more than a little disturbing. That, or a great route to corporate espionage (I'm betting it'd be trivially easy to install keyloggers in your average corporate office, particularly given how small and discrete those things are). Not to mention the fun a disgruntled employee could have...
1) Install hardware key logger on your own computer.
2) Wait for someone from desktop support to log in for some reason.
3) Profit! (Or at least install all that stuff that requires admin rights.)
Perhaps I'm missing something obvious here, but how seriously are they considering the possibility of contamination? Because unless I'm remembering something wrong, perchlorates are most excellent oxidizers and hence commonly used in, oh, say, solid rocket fuel, among other things.
I think it's important to note that the White House briefing was due to the following:
The results from Sunday's TEGA experiment, which analyzed a sample taken directly above the ice layer, found no evidence of this compound.
"This is surprising since an earlier TEGA measurement of surface materials was consistent with but not conclusive of the presence of perchlorate," said Peter Smith, Phoenix's principal investigator at the University of Arizona, Tucson.
In other words, the important part is that they didn't find perchlorate once they used the trenching tool. So, either the landing rockets contaminated the top layer of soil, or some sort of wierd chemistry is forming perchlorate when sunlight hits the soil. Either way, the subsurface chemistry seems to be conducive to life. I get the feeling that you just need to add water and tomato seeds to get a vegetable garden growing. (Either that, or my earlier comment turns out to be true.)
Is the presence of perchlorate needed to manufacture fuel in situ? If so, this would make some of the proposed manned missions a bit harder. On the other hand, it may mean that along with making fuel, robots could farm food and other plants for future astronauts to consume while staying on Mars.
These are intermediate results, and should be treated as such. From TFA,
The team also is working to totally exonerate any possibility of the perchlorate readings being influenced by terrestrial sources which may have migrated from the spacecraft, either into samples or into the instrumentation.
Wouldn't it be amusing if some joker, before launch, had sprinkled a handful of dirt into the analysis chambers? (And by "amusing", I mean in the "How close do you think I can steer this ocean liner to that iceberg?" sort of way.)
Yeah, but did you follow the link to the random PDF? ;-)
I'm planning to use it to put the face of that girl I've been stalking onto the body of some porn start. I wonder how well it'll work on video?
Why the hell is there a tiny url (http://www.tinyurl.com/6ehog5) in this story? Where does it point? Goatse? Tubgirl? Some random PDF? This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen slip by the editors. It's not like this is Twittr, where you're limited to 140 bytes.
Maybe Slashcode needs something to automatically follow links in articles and replace them with their target if they redirect.
Take a shower? If there isn't one in your building, there's probably one in a gym that isn't too far from your building.
I used to work for a start-up in an office park. We occupied half of the third floor, so company provided facilities weren't likely and the YMCA was five miles away. One day I discovered that the restrooms in the basement all had a shower. *Sweet!*
You needs a very small team that understands what the product is supposed to accomplish, not how it is supposed to accomplish it. The user interface flows from there.
From http://www.counselormagazine.com/content/view/674/55/
It was 1995 and a man was walking around with a wood block in his shirt pocket. Occasionally he would take it out and fiddle with it as if he were checking appointments. Some might have thought him crazy, but he was not.
The man was Jeff Hawkins, and he would soon revolutionize the technology industry with a device known as a Personal Digital Assistant, or PDA. It would be called the Palm Pilot and sell over one million units in its first 18 months alone. Jeff Hawkins didn't invent the PDA, but his Palm Pilot would be the first to attain widespread acceptance. There were other PDAs before the Palm Pilot: Apple produced one that came to be called the Newton in 1993, but it failed to achieve the success of the Palm Pilot due to its high price and the fact that it was just too large to fit inside a pocket; a Windows-based PDA was introduced around the same time as the Palm Pilot, using a software called Windows CE, which enabled one to open and create Word Documents and Excel Spreadsheets. The interface resembled Windows 95 with the familiar Start menu. Unfortunately, these devices were much more expensive and drained way too much battery power.
The block of wood in Jeff Hawkin's pocket represented an approach to design that would serve him well. He did not want to just design yet another electronic gadget, but something that was eminently usable; a tool. His experiments with the block of wood helped him to determine the right size for the Palm Pilot -- small enough to fit in a man's shirt pocket.
With disposable phones so prevalent now, how do you know which call to listen in on? This is why the gov't can't get a warrant. If you think about how it works, you will understand. Take this hypothetical:
A call comes in from Pakistan from an unknown number. It's a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC. Another call comes in from London to the same number. Another call comes in from Iran to that number. How do you know if it's tap-worthy? There's no other option but to listen in. You listen in and find out that it's just someone talking with relatives scattered all over the globe because grandma just died. No threat, so you stop listening. Do you get a warrant now because you listened in? There are thousands of calls that come in like this every single day. Most of which are harmless. Do you get a warrant for each and every one?
What don't you understand about warrants? FISA was specifically designed to grant warrants in exactly these cases. If someone spots a call from "a disposable cell phone in the northern "tribal" region to a disposable phone in Washington DC" then they walk across the hall and ask for a warrant to tap all calls to or from either phone. Five minutes later, they have one good for a few days and start listening. If there's anything interesting, they reapply for a longer term; if it's nothing, they let it expire.
The point is, there's someone who's outside the executive branch acting as a circuit breaker. Most of the time, yeah, he's a rubber stamp, but the judge is the guy who can't be fired for saying "no" if the Attorney General wants to listen in on his wife's phone calls to Mexico.
The truth of the matter is conversations originating overseas from known or suspected terrorist organizations to their contacts in the U.S. may be monitored. Your chats with Grandma about what to get little Jimmy for his birthday are of no interest to anyone and cannot be legally intercepted without a warrant. Trying to find out what next big operation terrorists are planning against us ought to be everybody's interest, and perhaps it would be if most Democrat weren't afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome.
Any conversation with anyone outside the US can be intercepted, not just the ones that originate overseas or are from known or suspected terrorist organizations. If Grandma is in London, England, or even London, Ontario, the conversation can now be legally listened to. Also, the FISA courts were set up as a rubber stamp. IIRC, there's a special room at the NSA where a federal judge does nothing but grant warrants for FISA wiretaps. The whole process takes about five minutes, and the warrant was retroactive for a few days so that nothing important would be missed. The current administration felt that this was too restrictive, so they just stopped following the law.
It's just easier to pretend you fear terrorists than admit you fear the guy next door ? Especially if he has a darker skin than yours ?
Hey! My skin's darker than my neighbors, you insensitive clod!
Before I even looked at the /. comments, I clicked through to the Wired article, found the link to saysme.tv, and tried to buy an ad. However, I live in St. Louis, and was very disappointed to see that they don't yet support my area, nor any nearby cites up to and including Chicago and Memphis.
Of course, I'm not a cable subscriber, I watch satellite TV. Anyone know if/when DirectTV and DishNetwork will be supported?
Also, while some areas are cheap, some are expensive. I expect that satellite TV will also be expensive. They need a way to put money down for a part of an ad, which would run when enough people sign up for that area.
My point was that programmers shouldn't use eval() in Javascript, just like programmers shouldn't use goto statements. That doesn't mean that you can't use tools that use those features (I use yacc and lex many times a year), it just means that using them is very hazardous and best avoided. And yes, I realize that this means that there are exceptions to the rule, since it is programmers who write those tools, but those exceptions are very, very, limited. Thinking that you can whip out some code that uses eval() just because json.js uses it is a supreme act of hubris. I wouldn't let anyone I work with use an eval(), no matter what the circumstances, because circumstances change and it's unlikely that the code will change in lockstep. Nor would I use some random library that someone found somewhere. I'd want code that had been looked at by a lot more eyes than mine and tested in the field in a lot of deployments. Crockford's stuff meets that criteria. Anything you might come up with is unlikely to.
The good news: George Lucas is not involved in this one, but rumor is that Pixar may be.
At first, I was going to cry, "Bullshit", but then I thought about it a bit more. On the 25th anniversay DVD, John Lassiter tells us that TRON inspired him to get into CGI animation, and let's face it, any one of us could replicate TRON's special effects at home today. The day after Disney acquired Pixar, I could see Lassiter saying, "OK, I want to do my first live action movie, and I want it to be TRON". With all those pitch-black backgrounds and such, that trailer does't need the CPU cycles that even the original Toy Story required; Pixar could do all the needed effects for the movie using their secretaries' computers during lunch. What TRON needs is a good story, and story is exactly what sets Pixar ahead of everyone else doing CGI these days.
Yeah, I can see Pixar wanting to stretch a bit, create something a bit darker and more adult than their previous efforts. I can see TR2N being that movie.
I just use VBA to sweep my emails and store them someplace else.
Speed Racer showed us physics-defying CGI cars, and pretended that it was happening in the real world. The result was, hmmm, kinda sucky. TR2N, otoh, is going to give us physics-defying CGI light-cycles, but admit that it's all happening in an unreal world. I expect that this movie will be a visual orgasm.
PS I watched that trailer five times before coming back here to post this.