Believe it or not, that's false. Your HR department would have you believe otherwise, but in the United States the National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal to fire workers for revealing their salaries. I believe the only exception is if you do it during working hours and/or on company property. On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer, do don't blame me if you get your ass fired.
Can you explain B a little more? You're saying hypothetically the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea attained more advanced metal-making abilities than their neighbors because...why? Because before it was a seabed, the underlying land was rich in metals they could turn into gold and high-carbon-silicon steel?
And if that's the case, is the modern seabed also rich in these metals? What's the evidence against Welles' theory?
It's pretty obvious once you know the argument. It's due to light-scattering. There's so much energy in the sky all day that it doesn't matter what color you absorb, there's plenty at any visible wavelength. But during sunset and sunrise there's predominantly red light in the sky, and a green plant would be more efficient at absorbing red light (they're complementary colors) than if the plant were another color. This blog entry goes into it:
Hopefully the Plainfield School District will learn from the folly of the nearby Oceanport School District and end this before they, too, are forced to settle out of court with the student and his family for an exorbitant amount of money that would have been better spent on books and teachers.
I actually was a student in the Oceanport School District not all that long ago, and lived not all that far from Plainfield; let me tell you, there's nothing unusual about these towns at all. They're your average run-of-the-mill suburbs. I point out just how normal these towns are to underscore that this kind of free-speech-violating-bullshit can and will happen everywhere unless we actually shout and scream and go out of our way to stop it from happening.
This is actually the middle school I graduated from back in 1998. In fact, I learned HTML making the school's web site back in 6th grade. The poor bastards have barely changed it since. Anyway...
Here's what you should know: Maple Place School is not unusual in any way, shape, or form. Students don't have rights anywhere. It's about time that changed.
Oh, and since defending the ACLU is almost a hobby of mine, on a related note, my sister's friend's mother works for the middle school, and is complaining that now the school can't enforce any sort of dress code, "thanks to the ACLU." Apparently a lot of girls are dressing very slutty now. I've heard this same criticism about similar cases, that dress codes are being overturned thanks to the ACLU, turning schools into orgies, strip clubs, etc.
Well, guess what? The ACLU isn't handing out thongs, tank tops, and 6-inch heels to girls in front of schools across the country. These kids have parents. Parents who give them money to buy all of this slutty clothing. Parents who let their kids walk out the door looking like the prostitutes who hang out in front of the subway stop near my apartment. Parents who let their kids watch MTV and don't make any effort to give girls positive role models.
So if you want to blame someone, blame the parents of these kids. It doesn't take a village to raise a child, just a parent with his or her head on straight and priorities right. The ACLU is fighting the good fight.
At Boston University there are 2 ways to afford the tuition: scholarship, or whoring yourself to corporate America. And you don't need to keep a 3.5 GPA to whore yourself to corporate America.
On a related note, I go to BU, and this past week, while crossing the street, I noticed a Microsoft OneNote ad chalked with a stencil on the pavement between the T tracks (the T is what Bostonians call their subway, i.e. train or tram).
From the article: "Many [student representatives] are specially trained, sometimes at corporate headquarters, Gossett said, as in the case with Microsoft."
The T runs above-ground through BU, but the first stop after the campus is underground. So if you are crossing the street and see this chalked advertisement (which is quite blurry and in fact barely legible, because, hey, it rains a lot in Boston and chalk runs), your natural response is to stop walking for a moment so that you can look down and and actually make out what it says. Specifically, you need to stop on the T tracks...50 feet from where the T goes above-ground. Perfect conditions for getting run over with a 20 ton subway car.
Micro Center is fantastic. I used to live in the Radisson right next to the Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, (because BU decided accepting more applicants than it had dorms for was a good idea, despite guaranteeing housing). I'm glad I did because otherwise I might not even know about the place.
There's a huge selection and a really knowledgeable staff (the store is about half a mile from MIT, so the supply of intelligent employees is high, and the demand for quality parts and service is similarly high). So, it makes sense that a place like Micro Center wouldn't be afraid of Linux. I can't speak for the other Micro Center stores, but if you live in the Boston area, you should check this place out next time you need hardware.
I don't know about the Atomic boards specifically, but in general, charging money for forum access keeps out the riff raff (read: trolls, spammers, etc.), and this is a good thing.
Slashdot's discussions do okay because of the moderation system, despite its flaws. But ever read an unmoderated discussion on say...Ain't It Cool News? Read their Talk Backs for 10 seconds and you'll wish you still had a CRT monitor so that you could punch through it and end your painful existence.
By charging for access, you keep out the riff raff.
The ViewAskew.com boards (View Askew is Kevin Smith's production company), among others, has been doing something similar for a while now. To register on the View Askew boards you need to pay 2 bucks. It's a low fee, and it all goes to a rape/incest survivor charity, because, after all, Smith isn't trying to make a profit from this registration...the money is really just a gate keeping mechanism. $2 is low enough to not be prohibitive for legitimate users, but high enough to keep out the idiots.
As a US citizen, I'm happy to see that someone cares about keeping tabs on US activities. After all, it's good when the People know what the government For the People and By the People is up to.
FYI, these are quotes from the season 4 episode of Mr. Show with Bob and David titled "Patriotism, Pepper, Professionalism", which also happens to be the last episode of Mr. Show ever. They are in the transition between the opening and the scene with Bob and Jill getting back together after a week-long breakup.
This sort of thing happens all the time. Prosecutors are always willing to adjust or drop charges in exchange for information which would lead to big arrests for other people. Sure these guys caused $2 million in damages, but maybe the government knows these guys could help them find other people that have caused $10 million in damages, or maybe these guys could help the government find other people who are planning these attacks before these other people do $2 million or $10 million in damages.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but I've taken some criminal law classes taught by experienced attorneys, and I watch Law & Order. On the other hand, maybe there's something I'm missing.
"There is nothing that says you can't go back and sign up for more stuff."
Yes, there is. The Gratis TOS says only one account is allowed per household, as the site linked in the parent makes clear. Rumor has it they also check for identical IP addresses to enforce this.
My friend came to me back in the summer, asking me to sign up under him at freeipods.com. At this point there wasn't much information about Gratis' operation on the Internet, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how the hell these guys could make money by giving away iPods.
I ended up posting my results here. Quick summary: It's economically viable. I wish I had thought of this first.
Assuming this isn't a joke, are you aware the show on which he lost was recorded back in September? Jeopardy films weeks worth of episodes in a few days.
A lot of people might wonder why the government is spending so much money on this program, with terrorism and urban warfare being the new big threat to the country and its soldiers (or so we're told). After all, there isn't a navy on the planet that can go toe to toe with the U.S. fleet today, nevermind in 7 years. The Cold War is over.
Well, beyond the "just in case" part of things, this a big step towards phasing out the chemical rockets traditionally fired from ships. This is good for a few reasons. 1) The rail gun projectiles are cheaper than rockets, and easier to maintain 2) They don't need the amount of fuel rockets do (making them even cheaper, and making the chance of a catastrophic ordinance explosion less likely ) and 3) They are small (check out the figure at the link), which means you can store more on a ship, where space is always limited.
It's a nice solution to current problems, making things cheaper and more reliable (theoretically).
1) No one knows if it is meant to be difficult to crack, or if it is just an abbreviated message to someone who would know instantly what it meant. This is an important distinction, because it determines if solving this thing is in the domain of linguists, or of cryptographers. Linguists decipher things which are not maliciously written to be obtuse (e.g., Champollion didn't have to crack any codes to figure out Egyptian Hieroglyphs, he solved it because he knew several languages and made some educated guesses based on his cultural knowledge). On the other hand, cryptographers decipher things which *are* meant to be obfuscated. This is done primarily through mathematical analyses, rather than historical and cultural knowledge. This is the reason that no cryptographer has been responsible for the decipherment of a language. This problem has been exploited in the past, such as the famous use of Navajo in World War II to confuse German code-breakers. Cryptographers can exploit the qualities of a language (such as examining letter frequency), but they aren't even sure what language this thing is in!
2) The sample set is staggeringly small. Whether you are deciphering a language or a code, it's extremely difficult (and generally close to impossible) to do so without several different, lengthy samples. Often, people make the claim that something is "gibberish" when there's only one or two samples (as someone does in this article). This is really a baseless claim, since there are probably *dozens* of valid decipherments of anything. This is the sole reason why so many undeciphered languages have not been deciphered (e.g., Etruscan and Linear A).
When I read the summary, the first thing I thought of was the Phaistos Disk. It was found on Crete in 1908 (at Phaistos). It is a disk-shaped tablet, with strange, oddly un-Minoan, characters on both sides, spiraling in towards the center. It is even stranger because the characters appear to be stamped or pressed into the clay. (This is the earliest known example of such stamped writing.) Because the disk is so strange, many have claimed it's an elaborate hoax, but the amount of work necessary to create such a stamped tablet (making all of the stamps with which to place the characters on the disk) would mean it is a *very* elaborate hoax. Most archaeologists think it's for real, but, despite people's best efforts, no progress has been made in its decipherment. Since the sample set is so damned small (1 tablet), and since no one knows what language it's in, *and* since it is clearly unrelated to Linear A or B, there's little hope in it ever being understood. Go on Google and type in "Phaistos Disk" and you're sure to find lots of sites claiming they know the solution.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript sets even more historical precedent for the difficulty of this task, and shows that cryptographers are not successful when it comes to solving an unencoded inscription. William F. Friedman (who broke the Japanese Purple Code and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII) and some guys from the NSA have tried to decipher it, and failed. He claims it's a fake language, composed of gibberish, but it follows Zipf's law, which means it appears, based on the ratios of sign frequencies, to be real...so if someone wrote a gibberish language, they knew what they were doing to make it look real...even though Zipf, who discovered this relationship, wasn't even alive when this thing was written.
Sorry I didn't make any links, but I'm lazy, and if you type any of this stuff into Google, you'll find lots of articles.
(Wow, looks like I learned something from my Lost Languages and Decipherment course, thank-you, Professor Zimansky.)
Most importantly folks, this is a fantastic opportunity to go outside and yell "That's no moon! It's a space station!" at people who pass you on the street.
Until now, Snorks had to swim or ride seahorses to get from point A to point B. The underwater Segway will fill the niche in-between, and ultimately result in Snork cities being completely built around this wonderous new technology.
Actually, with just the naked eye, Chinese astronomers were able to look at the sun and see sunspots. There are over 100 documented accounts of sunspots in a period of 1600 years up to the years that the Jesuits arrived from Europe. These accounts are so accurate that if one examines Chinese sunspot records from 43 B.C. to A.D. 1638, the 11-year cycle of sunspots, not discovered until 1843, can, in fact, be determined to be 10.6+/-.43 years!
Don't believe me? You can read up on the subject in Chen Xiaozhong's paper "Records of Astronomical Events", from the publication "Ancient China's Technology and Science", published by the Foreign Languages Press in 1986.
I'm sure a lot of you have read this already, this being Slashdot and all...but Gabe over at Penny-Arcade recently acquired one of these crazy Tablet PC contraptions and was thrilled with it. See his post about it (below Tycho's) over at http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -27. Apparently these things are great electronic sketch books for artists (not that many artists I know can afford the damned things...)
Slashdot Mirror
Believe it or not, that's false. Your HR department would have you believe otherwise, but in the United States the National Labor Relations Act makes it illegal to fire workers for revealing their salaries. I believe the only exception is if you do it during working hours and/or on company property. On the other hand, I'm not a lawyer, do don't blame me if you get your ass fired.
Can you explain B a little more? You're saying hypothetically the nations bordering the Mediterranean Sea attained more advanced metal-making abilities than their neighbors because...why? Because before it was a seabed, the underlying land was rich in metals they could turn into gold and high-carbon-silicon steel?
And if that's the case, is the modern seabed also rich in these metals? What's the evidence against Welles' theory?
It's pretty obvious once you know the argument. It's due to light-scattering. There's so much energy in the sky all day that it doesn't matter what color you absorb, there's plenty at any visible wavelength. But during sunset and sunrise there's predominantly red light in the sky, and a green plant would be more efficient at absorbing red light (they're complementary colors) than if the plant were another color. This blog entry goes into it:
. view&FriendID=187945&blogMonth=9&blogDay=24&blogYe ar=2006
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog
Well, I meant, uh...nearby on a galactic scale...yeah, that's the ticket.
Hopefully the Plainfield School District will learn from the folly of the nearby Oceanport School District and end this before they, too, are forced to settle out of court with the student and his family for an exorbitant amount of money that would have been better spent on books and teachers.
I actually was a student in the Oceanport School District not all that long ago, and lived not all that far from Plainfield; let me tell you, there's nothing unusual about these towns at all. They're your average run-of-the-mill suburbs. I point out just how normal these towns are to underscore that this kind of free-speech-violating-bullshit can and will happen everywhere unless we actually shout and scream and go out of our way to stop it from happening.
Here's what you should know: Maple Place School is not unusual in any way, shape, or form. Students don't have rights anywhere. It's about time that changed.
Oh, and since defending the ACLU is almost a hobby of mine, on a related note, my sister's friend's mother works for the middle school, and is complaining that now the school can't enforce any sort of dress code, "thanks to the ACLU." Apparently a lot of girls are dressing very slutty now. I've heard this same criticism about similar cases, that dress codes are being overturned thanks to the ACLU, turning schools into orgies, strip clubs, etc.
Well, guess what? The ACLU isn't handing out thongs, tank tops, and 6-inch heels to girls in front of schools across the country. These kids have parents. Parents who give them money to buy all of this slutty clothing. Parents who let their kids walk out the door looking like the prostitutes who hang out in front of the subway stop near my apartment. Parents who let their kids watch MTV and don't make any effort to give girls positive role models.
So if you want to blame someone, blame the parents of these kids. It doesn't take a village to raise a child, just a parent with his or her head on straight and priorities right. The ACLU is fighting the good fight.
On a related note, I go to BU, and this past week, while crossing the street, I noticed a Microsoft OneNote ad chalked with a stencil on the pavement between the T tracks (the T is what Bostonians call their subway, i.e. train or tram).
From the article: "Many [student representatives] are specially trained, sometimes at corporate headquarters, Gossett said, as in the case with Microsoft."
The T runs above-ground through BU, but the first stop after the campus is underground. So if you are crossing the street and see this chalked advertisement (which is quite blurry and in fact barely legible, because, hey, it rains a lot in Boston and chalk runs), your natural response is to stop walking for a moment so that you can look down and and actually make out what it says. Specifically, you need to stop on the T tracks...50 feet from where the T goes above-ground. Perfect conditions for getting run over with a 20 ton subway car.
That's some nice training, there, Microsoft.
Micro Center is fantastic. I used to live in the Radisson right next to the Micro Center in Cambridge, MA, (because BU decided accepting more applicants than it had dorms for was a good idea, despite guaranteeing housing). I'm glad I did because otherwise I might not even know about the place.
There's a huge selection and a really knowledgeable staff (the store is about half a mile from MIT, so the supply of intelligent employees is high, and the demand for quality parts and service is similarly high). So, it makes sense that a place like Micro Center wouldn't be afraid of Linux. I can't speak for the other Micro Center stores, but if you live in the Boston area, you should check this place out next time you need hardware.
I don't know about the Atomic boards specifically, but in general, charging money for forum access keeps out the riff raff (read: trolls, spammers, etc.), and this is a good thing.
Slashdot's discussions do okay because of the moderation system, despite its flaws. But ever read an unmoderated discussion on say...Ain't It Cool News? Read their Talk Backs for 10 seconds and you'll wish you still had a CRT monitor so that you could punch through it and end your painful existence.
By charging for access, you keep out the riff raff.
The ViewAskew.com boards (View Askew is Kevin Smith's production company), among others, has been doing something similar for a while now. To register on the View Askew boards you need to pay 2 bucks. It's a low fee, and it all goes to a rape/incest survivor charity, because, after all, Smith isn't trying to make a profit from this registration...the money is really just a gate keeping mechanism. $2 is low enough to not be prohibitive for legitimate users, but high enough to keep out the idiots.
As a US citizen, I'm happy to see that someone cares about keeping tabs on US activities. After all, it's good when the People know what the government For the People and By the People is up to.
FYI, these are quotes from the season 4 episode of Mr. Show with Bob and David titled "Patriotism, Pepper, Professionalism", which also happens to be the last episode of Mr. Show ever. They are in the transition between the opening and the scene with Bob and Jill getting back together after a week-long breakup.
This sort of thing happens all the time. Prosecutors are always willing to adjust or drop charges in exchange for information which would lead to big arrests for other people. Sure these guys caused $2 million in damages, but maybe the government knows these guys could help them find other people that have caused $10 million in damages, or maybe these guys could help the government find other people who are planning these attacks before these other people do $2 million or $10 million in damages.
I Am Not A Lawyer, but I've taken some criminal law classes taught by experienced attorneys, and I watch Law & Order. On the other hand, maybe there's something I'm missing.
"There is nothing that says you can't go back and sign up for more stuff."
Yes, there is. The Gratis TOS says only one account is allowed per household, as the site linked in the parent makes clear. Rumor has it they also check for identical IP addresses to enforce this.
My friend came to me back in the summer, asking me to sign up under him at freeipods.com. At this point there wasn't much information about Gratis' operation on the Internet, so I did some back of the envelope calculations to figure out how the hell these guys could make money by giving away iPods.
I ended up posting my results here. Quick summary: It's economically viable. I wish I had thought of this first.
Assuming this isn't a joke, are you aware the show on which he lost was recorded back in September? Jeopardy films weeks worth of episodes in a few days.
You've been saving that up for months now, haven't you?
One of the bases disappeared mysteriously after the Vorlons needed it to fight the Shadows in the last Great War.
A lot of people might wonder why the government is spending so much money on this program, with terrorism and urban warfare being the new big threat to the country and its soldiers (or so we're told). After all, there isn't a navy on the planet that can go toe to toe with the U.S. fleet today, nevermind in 7 years. The Cold War is over.
Well, beyond the "just in case" part of things, this a big step towards phasing out the chemical rockets traditionally fired from ships. This is good for a few reasons. 1) The rail gun projectiles are cheaper than rockets, and easier to maintain 2) They don't need the amount of fuel rockets do (making them even cheaper, and making the chance of a catastrophic ordinance explosion less likely ) and 3) They are small (check out the figure at the link), which means you can store more on a ship, where space is always limited.
It's a nice solution to current problems, making things cheaper and more reliable (theoretically).
There are two problems with deciphering this:
1) No one knows if it is meant to be difficult to crack, or if it is just an abbreviated message to someone who would know instantly what it meant. This is an important distinction, because it determines if solving this thing is in the domain of linguists, or of cryptographers. Linguists decipher things which are not maliciously written to be obtuse (e.g., Champollion didn't have to crack any codes to figure out Egyptian Hieroglyphs, he solved it because he knew several languages and made some educated guesses based on his cultural knowledge). On the other hand, cryptographers decipher things which *are* meant to be obfuscated. This is done primarily through mathematical analyses, rather than historical and cultural knowledge. This is the reason that no cryptographer has been responsible for the decipherment of a language. This problem has been exploited in the past, such as the famous use of Navajo in World War II to confuse German code-breakers. Cryptographers can exploit the qualities of a language (such as examining letter frequency), but they aren't even sure what language this thing is in!
2) The sample set is staggeringly small. Whether you are deciphering a language or a code, it's extremely difficult (and generally close to impossible) to do so without several different, lengthy samples. Often, people make the claim that something is "gibberish" when there's only one or two samples (as someone does in this article). This is really a baseless claim, since there are probably *dozens* of valid decipherments of anything. This is the sole reason why so many undeciphered languages have not been deciphered (e.g., Etruscan and Linear A).
When I read the summary, the first thing I thought of was the Phaistos Disk. It was found on Crete in 1908 (at Phaistos). It is a disk-shaped tablet, with strange, oddly un-Minoan, characters on both sides, spiraling in towards the center. It is even stranger because the characters appear to be stamped or pressed into the clay. (This is the earliest known example of such stamped writing.) Because the disk is so strange, many have claimed it's an elaborate hoax, but the amount of work necessary to create such a stamped tablet (making all of the stamps with which to place the characters on the disk) would mean it is a *very* elaborate hoax. Most archaeologists think it's for real, but, despite people's best efforts, no progress has been made in its decipherment. Since the sample set is so damned small (1 tablet), and since no one knows what language it's in, *and* since it is clearly unrelated to Linear A or B, there's little hope in it ever being understood. Go on Google and type in "Phaistos Disk" and you're sure to find lots of sites claiming they know the solution.
Finally, the Voynich Manuscript sets even more historical precedent for the difficulty of this task, and shows that cryptographers are not successful when it comes to solving an unencoded inscription. William F. Friedman (who broke the Japanese Purple Code and worked at Bletchley Park during WWII) and some guys from the NSA have tried to decipher it, and failed. He claims it's a fake language, composed of gibberish, but it follows Zipf's law, which means it appears, based on the ratios of sign frequencies, to be real...so if someone wrote a gibberish language, they knew what they were doing to make it look real...even though Zipf, who discovered this relationship, wasn't even alive when this thing was written.
Sorry I didn't make any links, but I'm lazy, and if you type any of this stuff into Google, you'll find lots of articles.
(Wow, looks like I learned something from my Lost Languages and Decipherment course, thank-you, Professor Zimansky.)
Most importantly folks, this is a fantastic opportunity to go outside and yell "That's no moon! It's a space station!" at people who pass you on the street.
Until now, Snorks had to swim or ride seahorses to get from point A to point B. The underwater Segway will fill the niche in-between, and ultimately result in Snork cities being completely built around this wonderous new technology.
Actually, with just the naked eye, Chinese astronomers were able to look at the sun and see sunspots. There are over 100 documented accounts of sunspots in a period of 1600 years up to the years that the Jesuits arrived from Europe. These accounts are so accurate that if one examines Chinese sunspot records from 43 B.C. to A.D. 1638, the 11-year cycle of sunspots, not discovered until 1843, can, in fact, be determined to be 10.6+/-.43 years!
Don't believe me? You can read up on the subject in Chen Xiaozhong's paper "Records of Astronomical Events", from the publication "Ancient China's Technology and Science", published by the Foreign Languages Press in 1986.
Problem: Credit card theft by a scam artist web site.
/.ing the slimey bastards til their servers cry out for mercy.
/. for using their powers for good instead of evil (this time). Hey, someone start submitting stories with links to riaa.org.
Solution:
Kudos to
I'm sure a lot of you have read this already, this being Slashdot and all...but Gabe over at Penny-Arcade recently acquired one of these crazy Tablet PC contraptions and was thrilled with it. See his post about it (below Tycho's) over at http://www.penny-arcade.com/news.php3?date=2002-11 -27. Apparently these things are great electronic sketch books for artists (not that many artists I know can afford the damned things...)
"Things like floating remote controls and underwater lightning are also included."
Underwater lightning? No wonder these things cost so much, the liability insurance must be insane.