This is why they attempted to take over Afghanistan; in order to have access to the Pacific Ocean, for pipeline transport of Siberian reserves. It was a desperate move. (because they still would have had to get through Pakistan, and/or Iran - Iran having recently had a regime-change unfriendly to the Soviet Union) -
Their economy was based on oil priced as it was in 1979, relatively expensive. When Reagan cut a deal with the Saudis to make an end-run around Opec, and open the spigots, this made the value of oil plummet, which destroyed the income capability of the Soviet Economy. It took years for this to have the desired effect - the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. They did not have the shelter of the sophisticated banking system of the West.
Had the oil market not been gamed the way it was, the Soviet Union would have easily survived.
A better approach would be something that got in front of the satellite, and vented a mass of foam, or highly magnetized dust (assuming the KV wasn't magnetic), or maybe a net.
Attempting to alter the satellite's path with light would require a lot of light over a long period of time. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. In fact, this is a legitimate error that has to be accounted for in orbital mechanics. It's just that, an artificial light source has it's own issues.
But fouling it up with a bunch of goo, or snaring it, would also change it's mass and velocity. The "kill vehicle" could ascend into orbit ahead of the target, and use attitude control thrusters to line-up and get close, discharge the foam/goo/dust/net, as it crossed paths - if a net were used, then it could use braking thrusters to really decrease the target's velocity.
The technology for a head-on intercept is pretty fantastic, and 20 years ago, was considered pure fantasy, yet that's the approach we've been taking now. (and apparently, so have the Chinese). A co-orbital intercept has a lot less problems (though, launch-vehicle expense, and launch-site sourcing would be a huge problem). And with robotic rendezvous craft delivering supplies to the ISS, we're not too far from that technology.
Given the public press statements about the capabilities of the x-37, it sounds like this may be the direction we're headed. Soft intercept. (the example of the problem with this approach - this payload is launched on an Atlas V. There's only like 4 or 5 places in the world you can launch one of those. And you have to pick a set of 2 or another set of 3, depending on which orbital inclination you're trying to target - yes, the x-37 supposedly can change it's orbit, but I don't believe it can change inclination significantly - not enough delta-v in the upper stage).
Yeah, a steady light source solves a lot of these problems. What solves the problem of cloud-cover? Energy source? (unless you're talking about a giant space-mirror).
None of us people who actually create things and do the work wanted to see software patents become a reality. But the businessmen and lawyers have had their way with us. Now we just have to do all the extra work to create working computer systems, while a few individuals go laughing to the bank.
. . . you mean, the businessmen and lawyers who SELL our work, and pay us to do our work. Face it. We like creating things - and these guys get a huge cut for running the cash register. Because not many of us like doing that. And without someone running the cash register, most of us will starve, no matter how much we like to create.
I'm not saying it's right - personally, I think middlemen get WAY overpaid in our economic system.
Personally, I thought that the whole point of commercializing the internet was to eliminate middlemen. (remember? 1993? Before that, the Internet, a PUBLIC resource, funded by taxpayers, not private investment, was purely military/academic).
Personally, allowing middlemen to dictate the legal terms on a national or international scale (ie. by altering copyright and patent law to incredibly abusive degrees) is tantamount to giving SOVERIEGN power, to folks who would otherwise be used-car salesmen. How did this happen?
This system does not improve innovation. What it does is improve the middleman's ability to skim off the profits of others' labor and creation. While they're skimming - I suppose it's wise to recall that Money=Power.
How did this happen? Money=Power, and we've handed over our political power to. . . well, congress is mostly lawyers and businessmen. So whose interests do you think they govern to? You can just forget what Article I says. I'm sure most of them never read it.
Now; there actually WAS a time, in the late 1990's, where it became oddly fashionable for "high tech" companies to give EVERYONE from the executive staff (lawyers and businessmen) down to the rank and file employees and janitors, an exclusive perk known as Stock Options. Remember the days of free sodas? Those days. . . mostly past. The conventional wisdom they pushed onto us was that all that wealth and speculation at the consumer level caused a bubble, and a market crash.
1996-1999. Wasn't this about the same time the DMCA (and other atrocities, like the 1996 Telecommunications Act) were passed? Yes. And while everyone was joyfully blissing-out to their skyrocketing Cisco stocks, they were "purchasing" political "property" - in the form of these draconian copyright laws. Who were we to argue? We thought we were fucking rich beyond our wildest dreams. We ALL thought we ALL were going to retire at age 35. None of us gave a crap about all this commie stuff. Microsoft and Intel could take over the world - that was fine.
Now - the level of options handed out at the lower ranks, for many of us, yielded what seemed to be an insane fortune. But not insane enough to survive what was coming. Only the amount of capital that was handed out at the executive level had any shot of surviving. Most of the people I know who were talking about retiring at age 35, back in 1999, are flat busted, either unemployed or working their asses off at two jobs, hoping they don't get prostate cancer, nervously looking at how they're going to make their house payments as they keep working until their SSI kicks in at 75.
You bet your ass they're on the Open Source "screw Microsoft" "I hate Software Patents" bandwagon now. But not the middlemen. The middlemen took their money, bought some congressmen, bought some laws, and they're getting more money; because that's how they tilted the playing field.
ZIP and JPG file formats were encumbered. Heck, so was MP3, for that matter. Yeah, patent-trolls came a knockin. And were sent away with a rolled-up summons shoved up their butts.
Widely adopt - they can't sue everyone, and by the time they can, something else, open, comes along to replace it, because everyone then realizes how foolish they were supporting a closed standard. But they won't realize that UNLESS or UNTIL the patent troll gets off his fat *ss - and he may just be smart enough, this time, to know better than to lose his meal-ticket. (or not).
Actually; as a national organization - it is PROHIBITED to discriminate.
But as far as local, individual units go, particularly LDS units (I'll happily single those out) - they are given wide latitude to set their own policies, even if it violates national policies. National usually kind of gets wishy washy, looks the other way.
In my own unit, I have fought (and lost against) anti-women bigotry for going on 5 years now. The anti-women bigots have finally grandfathered out of the local unit, and our policies are now changed. Hooray for progress. Nobody in our local unit ever said one thing about atheists or gays. If we have an atheist or gay boy in our unit, nobody knows, nobody cares. It's a private matter concerning that boy. If he shares it, I'm sure feathers will be ruffled, but there is nothing in policy that bans that boy, and I'm pretty sure nobody's going to get torqued off. If the boy's ever subject to teasing or bullying because of this - well, THAT behavior is expressly against local and national written policy, and we will put a stop to it.
So just because there are SOME jerkwads out there who choose to run their individual units that way, doesn't mean the entire BSA organization is bigoted. Most people in scouting, that I know of, are fairly liberal on social issues (particularly nature and wildlife conservation) - then, very conservative on gun control. . .
Well, Baden-Powell's (not that he's some kind of deity or anything, he wasn't) original reason for starting scouting in the first place was really more of a means of getting boys off the streets, giving them a structured environment for learning skills for self-reliance, etc. (Well, quite honestly, the real reason was probably, he was a veteran, war-hero, retired, rich, and bored, and maybe had guilt-issues to resolve and wanted to give-back? - who knows?)
Granted, it's evolved into something much more than that; and granted, the original vision was based on "scoutcraft" which is the skillset he accumulated while serving colonial britain, in various remote regions of the world - he did this with a positive outlook; (as most colonial/imperial powers ever have done) - "we're civilizing them, bringing them as peacefully as we can under one modern, Christian/(honestly, more unitarian) rule). "Scoutcraft" had to do with revering the "locals" (Indian/African/native tribes) just enough to gain their friendship and trust, in order to accomplish roughly the same goals that US Army Rangers do today: win hearts and minds, get the locals to fight our battles for us, yeild intelligence for the main forces, etc. If you look on it in harsh terms, it's really not at all pretty. If it didn't involve boys - well, it very likely could have included how to do long-range head-shots with a rifle, how to instruct cavalry regiments in finding the proper location for mass-graves after slaughtering entire villages, and even primitive biological warfare with smallpox-infested blankets.
(FWIW; Baden-Powell was known to have dabbled in Nazi-ism, and later denied it. We all make mistakes, eh? I'm not saying he was a monster, either, but he was very much a part of the zeitgeist of imperial, or at least post-imperial britain).
Other, more practical elements of scoutcraft, of course, knot tying, camping, fire building, camping, wilderness survival, all that fun stuff. Much has been added since the 18th century "military scout" definition.
But the point of modern scouting, as we adherents like to think - is all about teaching boys life and leadership skills. I don't think most units even do a lot of the hardcore camping and hiking anymore. Especially the ones outside the USA.
As it applies to boys aged 5 to 11 (cub scouts); in the 21st century. . . navigating our modern-equivalent "colonial wilderness" (the Internet), I think this achievement pin is freaking spot-on. And I say that as a Scoutmaster. I would absolutely have encouraged my son to look at this one.
Uh, yeah. Reagan's "big idea" was the MX ballistic missile system, which was going to prevent the soviets from "winning" in a full-out nuclear exchange, by hiding our launchers in railway boxcars.
They didn't even pretend at secrecy. It was a great big "please, nuke all our railroads too!" sign painted across America. At a time when the soviets clearly had the surplus capacity to do it.
Yeah - start talking negotiations. Then your enemy develops technology for more effectively coming out ahead in negotiations.
The fact is - it is a FEATURE of all life, including human life, to compete for supremacy. Yes - humans do also cooperate with eachother. Until there's nothing more to be gained. Then they compete. And you are correct. Human competition is such that, ultimately, a fatal (for the species) mis-step is inevitable - that appears pretty blindingly obvious. Even if we kill all of THEM before they kill all of US; we'll eventually squabble amongst ourselves. (aren't we already?).
Sorry to bust your bubble. I'd also like things to not be this way.
Well; basically, flash makes most YouTube videos into slideshows on Apple systems. Even modern Apple systems. I've read it's an OS-architecture thing, but Apple believes the ball is in Adobe's court to fix. And Adobe refuses (or continues to fail) to fix it.
In any case - I first noticed the problem on an ancient G3 iMac, several years ago. Then, my dual G5 started doing it last year. Now, my 2 year old intel MacBook is doing it. Doesn't matter what browser or set of plugins we use. It is a problem that got progressively worse. All of my Macs now slideshow YouTube videos. I tried installing PPC Linux on another old G3 iMac, but I couldn't get a Flash plugin to compile quite right, so I couldn't compare there. On my Intel Ubuntu Linux machines. . . works fine. I think this has also been a huge factor in why NetFlix has delayed OnDemand video for the Mac platform.
So - hell, if what I'm reading about Adobe is true, good effing riddance. Hey, so-long to their damn flash-embedded unblockable ad-banners too.
Because if my customer asks for it, as far as I'm concerned, I'm giving them what they paid for. All the headaches, tradeoffs, and everything else that goes with it. The worse Microsoft cripples the Windows ecosystem - the happier I am to push every line of crippleware out to their customers. There is enough literature out there, and people have dealt with Microsoft products' limitations long enough - even non-technical users should know better by now. I'm not responsible for their poor choices. I do that job to the ethical best of my ability. (If Windows is *not* up to the task, I'll give them my technical opinion. But I won't waste project time debating the issue or trying to redesign the system around an alternate OS - unless that's my specified task).
The sooner my customers realize they're paying me to shoot them in the foot - the sooner they'll start paying me to load Ubuntu (or whatever) disks. But some people just seem to live in denial forever. Maybe human nature? Dunno.
. . . Hollywould "gets it". . . LONG after PKD's coolness buzz has faded. That's the way Big Money works. It's the way Big Money has ALWAYS worked. It's really what "cool" was first all about - until they tried to package and market cool to us. Then it was what "punk" was all about. (wash-rinse-repeat).
Change the name, but it will always be the same: The folks who try to tell us that getting rich is all about taking risks, are really the most financially secure (relatively), and therefore the most risk-averse folks on the planet, and therefore, as far as cultural trends go, will always pretty much be positioned way far back on the long-tail as far as coolness goes.
A person with a $400 million trust-fund in the bank risking his own $5 million investing in a film based on a PKD story, in 2010, is NOT anything like "cool". Though, the rank and file hoi polloi market will reward him generously.
A person with $20 in the bank risking $5 (possibly tomorrow's dinner, or the electric bill, or prescription co-pay for his antidepressant meds) on a paperback novel by a new, unknown, unpromoted writer published by an off-brand house (maybe self-published, these days), with fresh ideas that haven't been recycled a dozen thousand times by low-budget mass-market screenwriters - is the definition of cool. That guy will earn the small-scale social respect of his peers by relating his experience in reading the book, in casual conversation. That's how social animals work.
Then, in 15 years, when the trustafarians decide this writer's popularity has safely gained enough critical mass that they can risk.001% (insured) of their net worth on a film, that "cool" person, and his peers will puke when they see the trailer.
Nobody expresses this phenomenon as succinctly as "Indy-rock Pete" in Diesel Sweeties. Which, I think, ceased being cool about 5 minutes before I "discovered" and started reading it. I'm waiting for the Michael Bey version of Diesel Sweeties. 16-bit graphics and all. In 3D Imax, Dolby Surround.
Actually, the thing that really kills.NET for me, is when you try to install a service pack for.NET 3.5, even on a reasonably beefy dual core machine with plenty of RAM, MSI kind of goes out to lunch for about 30 minutes, disk is chewing away at god knows what. Holy crap what a bunch of voodoo.
How long does it take to install jdk 1.6.0 r17? 5 minutes? Tops? (well, maybe we'll see how badly Oracle FUBARs java in the next few releases. . . )
The key is not necessarily supervision, so much as parents modeling behavior and 'good' (healthy - not codependent) values. If the parents convey their values, and their feelings to their children (and permit their children to communicate their feelings as well, rather than conditioning them to be passive-aggressive, as our culture typically does: "shut up! I'll give you something to cry about!") - the self-supervised children will more than likely follow the behavior that was modeled for them. Truly leading by example is the way to go.
Given that I've "lost" several tracks now to Apple's DRM, (and my own platform mobility - go figure, I use several computers, have upgraded over the years, even *gasp* forgot my iTMS account password! God forbid I should shop at one store a few times, decide I don't like them, and stop shopping there, yet desire to continue using the product I purchased.) - given that, I paid $.99, I don't feel like paying the extra "price" of having to rip a downloaded.MP3 to a blank CD in AIFF format, re-ripping it (losing audio quality in the process) just to make the track transferrable. . .
Also, given that I now have TWO acquaintances who I've had to console over lost music libraries; failed hard drives with no backup. . .
- I think I'll keep my library of "quaint" Audio CD disks.
Downloading is no cheaper, it is only more convenient at the Point of Purchase, and is less convenient thereafter, and product quality is lower. Which has pretty much been my argument since 1996.
I figured they'd win me over when downloads were $.05. They almost had me with iPods though.
No - not a diesel; you're describing direct injection diesel. Traditional diesel is not injected under such high pressures, but is compressed in the cylinder by the piston. But modern automotive diesels (mostly) use direct injection, up to 1800 psi. (Shop manuals actually warn mechanics that when you're working on the fuel injection system, if you operate an injector opened, it can literally squirt diesel fuel through your skin, if you're not careful. And this is lethal, of course, unless you get immediate medical attention.)
It doesn't affect GPS. It affects the accuracy of surveys taken PRIOR to this (and any other) geological movement.
And there are actually many many other factors that affect the accuracy of such surveys, including, different standards of what a "foot" is, (meters? oh, that's what the commies and faggy french use), AND tidal forces from the moon and sun acting on the earth (not just the liquid ocean, the crust actually flexes DAILY as well; and not uniformly either - different, depending on composition, topography, etc.)
GPS is pretty much always mathematically perfect and spot-on, based on radio signals; really only affected by relativistic issues and clock-drift, which are pretty much well-understood and compensated for.
It's the unstable, wobbly, oddly-shaped, poorly measured physical object we're mapping the GPS coordinates TO, that is the problem.
Dude; A crowd of people walked out of a talk that Bill Nye was giving in Waco Texas last year, because he mentioned sunlight reflecting off the moon - and to them, that was contradictory to biblical scripture, and therefore blasphemy.
This is a small example of a huge freaking problem, which I believe is the MOST difficult problem that humanity faces, in the challenge to become a spacefaring civilization. Not faster-than-light travel. Not artificial gravity. Not sustainability of colonies (let alone our original home planet - which we still have not figured out yet). And I'm not preaching hardcore atheism-by-force. I'm simply saying, you're proposing a grand unified activity for a large group of people, when you can't even find a sample of a subset of, I'd even bet 100,000 people, who agree on that vision. I'd bet you'd find at least one person among every 100,000 who would fight to the death to sustain some backwards belief like, the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth is 5000 years old, and there's no need to colonize space because the saints are all going to be raptured by their savior. I don't think one can understate this problem.
Your points are all fine and dandy, it's a nice plan and all. But you're never going to see a politically and economically stable environment in which to execute it. Not with humans, anyway.
Based on what evidence? Based on what science? The Theory of the Invisible Hand?
Economics has a LONG way to go before it catches up to the credibility level of climate science. Especially with damaged spokespeople like Bernard Madoff.
I suppose we all know the "drill" - to steal from many sources is "research".
1. I look at the assignment, I read the materials, I don't understand it. 2. I look at the examples - I see going from step 7 to 8, seems like magic. WTF? 3. I reckon I never copied from another student outright. But there are sources, anyone can use Google. 3a. You say you can detect cheating if the indenting is the same, variable names are the same, braces are the same? I guess it's a good thing I'm a bit anal about my coding style. . . 3b. I take my source, and I kind of run it through my mental clipboard, I copy it line for line, but if anything can change, or be done "my way" - I re-write it. I indent it to MY style. I use MY bracketing style. I use MY way scheme of variable and object naming. I comment - copiously. If I have to come back to this code in 3 months, and read it, and try to figure out what the hell I was thinking, I'll explain it to myself in detail. I'll write a novel in comments. Especially, if I had to do any trial-and-error to get it to work, and if I had to do anything freaky. Sometimes, I'm hoping a better coder will come along, see what I did, and why I was confused, and then send me an email, and explain what I was doing wrong. (never - in 15 years - has that happened). 3c. At the end of this process - maybe I didn't come up with the solution to the problem creatively. But I learned how it was done, and how to do it on my own the next time. 4. At the end: what I turn in, or compile - you probably can't run through any automated means of detecting plagiarism. But the algorithm is probably the same. The logic is the same. I'd bet the bytecode is probably pretty similar.
What is the purpose of the class?
To learn how to learn how to do task X. To understand that step 7->8 "magic".
What is the purpose of the professional project?
To get task X done - while still doing due-diligence in respecting intellectual property, and perhaps, making a small-time investment on behalf of your employer, in improving your own future productivity.
If I were ever doing anything earthshatteringly innovative, (not likely) of course, I'm citing ANY significant use of someone else's code. That's how my parents raised me, that's how my ethics professor trained me, it's what my peers, my employer, and our customers expect.
But with the crappy little "ten million feet have trod before you" tasks I'm usually doing, it's just not a concern. And if there are a hundred other script monkeys out there copying and refactoring my code the same way, I don't really give a crap.
Does this include the "science" of Economics? If so - I think that would be a VERY good thing. Particularly in the area of derivatives trading.
It's estimated that 20% of the global economy now relies on trading derivatives, whose valuation is based on formulae, that are considered "proprietary" - and therefore, you're supposed to just trust the seller on the valuation. (by the way, I've got this bridge I'm selling, in Alaska . . . )
Ironic that Climate science is regarded with such skepticism, yet people in the high institutions of banking or the University of Chicago, Economics department so feverishly cling to the belief in some "invisible hand".
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The Soviet Union was a net oil producer.
This is why they attempted to take over Afghanistan; in order to have access to the Pacific Ocean, for pipeline transport of Siberian reserves. It was a desperate move. (because they still would have had to get through Pakistan, and/or Iran - Iran having recently had a regime-change unfriendly to the Soviet Union) -
Their economy was based on oil priced as it was in 1979, relatively expensive. When Reagan cut a deal with the Saudis to make an end-run around Opec, and open the spigots, this made the value of oil plummet, which destroyed the income capability of the Soviet Economy. It took years for this to have the desired effect - the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. They did not have the shelter of the sophisticated banking system of the West.
Had the oil market not been gamed the way it was, the Soviet Union would have easily survived.
A better approach would be something that got in front of the satellite, and vented a mass of foam, or highly magnetized dust (assuming the KV wasn't magnetic), or maybe a net.
Attempting to alter the satellite's path with light would require a lot of light over a long period of time. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with this approach. In fact, this is a legitimate error that has to be accounted for in orbital mechanics. It's just that, an artificial light source has it's own issues.
But fouling it up with a bunch of goo, or snaring it, would also change it's mass and velocity. The "kill vehicle" could ascend into orbit ahead of the target, and use attitude control thrusters to line-up and get close, discharge the foam/goo/dust/net, as it crossed paths - if a net were used, then it could use braking thrusters to really decrease the target's velocity.
The technology for a head-on intercept is pretty fantastic, and 20 years ago, was considered pure fantasy, yet that's the approach we've been taking now. (and apparently, so have the Chinese). A co-orbital intercept has a lot less problems (though, launch-vehicle expense, and launch-site sourcing would be a huge problem). And with robotic rendezvous craft delivering supplies to the ISS, we're not too far from that technology.
Given the public press statements about the capabilities of the x-37, it sounds like this may be the direction we're headed. Soft intercept. (the example of the problem with this approach - this payload is launched on an Atlas V. There's only like 4 or 5 places in the world you can launch one of those. And you have to pick a set of 2 or another set of 3, depending on which orbital inclination you're trying to target - yes, the x-37 supposedly can change it's orbit, but I don't believe it can change inclination significantly - not enough delta-v in the upper stage).
Yeah, a steady light source solves a lot of these problems. What solves the problem of cloud-cover? Energy source? (unless you're talking about a giant space-mirror).
. . . yeah,just not on a dual G5 PPC. . .
None of us people who actually create things and do the work wanted to see software patents become a reality. But the businessmen and lawyers have had their way with us. Now we just have to do all the extra work to create working computer systems, while a few individuals go laughing to the bank.
. . . you mean, the businessmen and lawyers who SELL our work, and pay us to do our work. Face it. We like creating things - and these guys get a huge cut for running the cash register. Because not many of us like doing that. And without someone running the cash register, most of us will starve, no matter how much we like to create.
I'm not saying it's right - personally, I think middlemen get WAY overpaid in our economic system.
Personally, I thought that the whole point of commercializing the internet was to eliminate middlemen. (remember? 1993? Before that, the Internet, a PUBLIC resource, funded by taxpayers, not private investment, was purely military/academic).
Personally, allowing middlemen to dictate the legal terms on a national or international scale (ie. by altering copyright and patent law to incredibly abusive degrees) is tantamount to giving SOVERIEGN power, to folks who would otherwise be used-car salesmen. How did this happen?
This system does not improve innovation.
What it does is improve the middleman's ability to skim off the profits of others' labor and creation. While they're skimming - I suppose it's wise to recall that Money=Power.
How did this happen? Money=Power, and we've handed over our political power to. . . well, congress is mostly lawyers and businessmen. So whose interests do you think they govern to? You can just forget what Article I says. I'm sure most of them never read it.
Now; there actually WAS a time, in the late 1990's, where it became oddly fashionable for "high tech" companies to give EVERYONE from the executive staff (lawyers and businessmen) down to the rank and file employees and janitors, an exclusive perk known as Stock Options. Remember the days of free sodas? Those days. . . mostly past. The conventional wisdom they pushed onto us was that all that wealth and speculation at the consumer level caused a bubble, and a market crash.
1996-1999. Wasn't this about the same time the DMCA (and other atrocities, like the 1996 Telecommunications Act) were passed? Yes. And while everyone was joyfully blissing-out to their skyrocketing Cisco stocks, they were "purchasing" political "property" - in the form of these draconian copyright laws. Who were we to argue? We thought we were fucking rich beyond our wildest dreams. We ALL thought we ALL were going to retire at age 35. None of us gave a crap about all this commie stuff. Microsoft and Intel could take over the world - that was fine.
Now - the level of options handed out at the lower ranks, for many of us, yielded what seemed to be an insane fortune. But not insane enough to survive what was coming. Only the amount of capital that was handed out at the executive level had any shot of surviving. Most of the people I know who were talking about retiring at age 35, back in 1999, are flat busted, either unemployed or working their asses off at two jobs, hoping they don't get prostate cancer, nervously looking at how they're going to make their house payments as they keep working until their SSI kicks in at 75.
You bet your ass they're on the Open Source "screw Microsoft" "I hate Software Patents" bandwagon now. But not the middlemen. The middlemen took their money, bought some congressmen, bought some laws, and they're getting more money; because that's how they tilted the playing field.
ZIP and JPG file formats were encumbered. Heck, so was MP3, for that matter. Yeah, patent-trolls came a knockin. And were sent away with a rolled-up summons shoved up their butts.
Widely adopt - they can't sue everyone, and by the time they can, something else, open, comes along to replace it, because everyone then realizes how foolish they were supporting a closed standard. But they won't realize that UNLESS or UNTIL the patent troll gets off his fat *ss - and he may just be smart enough, this time, to know better than to lose his meal-ticket. (or not).
Actually; as a national organization - it is PROHIBITED to discriminate.
But as far as local, individual units go, particularly LDS units (I'll happily single those out) - they are given wide latitude to set their own policies, even if it violates national policies. National usually kind of gets wishy washy, looks the other way.
In my own unit, I have fought (and lost against) anti-women bigotry for going on 5 years now. The anti-women bigots have finally grandfathered out of the local unit, and our policies are now changed. Hooray for progress. Nobody in our local unit ever said one thing about atheists or gays. If we have an atheist or gay boy in our unit, nobody knows, nobody cares. It's a private matter concerning that boy. If he shares it, I'm sure feathers will be ruffled, but there is nothing in policy that bans that boy, and I'm pretty sure nobody's going to get torqued off. If the boy's ever subject to teasing or bullying because of this - well, THAT behavior is expressly against local and national written policy, and we will put a stop to it.
So just because there are SOME jerkwads out there who choose to run their individual units that way, doesn't mean the entire BSA organization is bigoted. Most people in scouting, that I know of, are fairly liberal on social issues (particularly nature and wildlife conservation) - then, very conservative on gun control. . .
Well, Baden-Powell's (not that he's some kind of deity or anything, he wasn't) original reason for starting scouting in the first place was really more of a means of getting boys off the streets, giving them a structured environment for learning skills for self-reliance, etc. (Well, quite honestly, the real reason was probably, he was a veteran, war-hero, retired, rich, and bored, and maybe had guilt-issues to resolve and wanted to give-back? - who knows?)
Granted, it's evolved into something much more than that; and granted, the original vision was based on "scoutcraft" which is the skillset he accumulated while serving colonial britain, in various remote regions of the world - he did this with a positive outlook; (as most colonial/imperial powers ever have done) - "we're civilizing them, bringing them as peacefully as we can under one modern, Christian/(honestly, more unitarian) rule). "Scoutcraft" had to do with revering the "locals" (Indian/African/native tribes) just enough to gain their friendship and trust, in order to accomplish roughly the same goals that US Army Rangers do today: win hearts and minds, get the locals to fight our battles for us, yeild intelligence for the main forces, etc. If you look on it in harsh terms, it's really not at all pretty. If it didn't involve boys - well, it very likely could have included how to do long-range head-shots with a rifle, how to instruct cavalry regiments in finding the proper location for mass-graves after slaughtering entire villages, and even primitive biological warfare with smallpox-infested blankets.
(FWIW; Baden-Powell was known to have dabbled in Nazi-ism, and later denied it. We all make mistakes, eh? I'm not saying he was a monster, either, but he was very much a part of the zeitgeist of imperial, or at least post-imperial britain).
Other, more practical elements of scoutcraft, of course, knot tying, camping, fire building, camping, wilderness survival, all that fun stuff. Much has been added since the 18th century "military scout" definition.
But the point of modern scouting, as we adherents like to think - is all about teaching boys life and leadership skills. I don't think most units even do a lot of the hardcore camping and hiking anymore. Especially the ones outside the USA.
As it applies to boys aged 5 to 11 (cub scouts); in the 21st century. . . navigating our modern-equivalent "colonial wilderness" (the Internet), I think this achievement pin is freaking spot-on. And I say that as a Scoutmaster. I would absolutely have encouraged my son to look at this one.
Uh, yeah. Reagan's "big idea" was the MX ballistic missile system, which was going to prevent the soviets from "winning" in a full-out nuclear exchange, by hiding our launchers in railway boxcars.
They didn't even pretend at secrecy. It was a great big "please, nuke all our railroads too!" sign painted across America. At a time when the soviets clearly had the surplus capacity to do it.
Yeah - start talking negotiations. Then your enemy develops technology for more effectively coming out ahead in negotiations.
The fact is - it is a FEATURE of all life, including human life, to compete for supremacy.
Yes - humans do also cooperate with eachother. Until there's nothing more to be gained. Then they compete. And you are correct. Human competition is such that, ultimately, a fatal (for the species) mis-step is inevitable - that appears pretty blindingly obvious. Even if we kill all of THEM before they kill all of US; we'll eventually squabble amongst ourselves. (aren't we already?).
Sorry to bust your bubble. I'd also like things to not be this way.
Damn, they must have tripped over their own balls!
Well; basically, flash makes most YouTube videos into slideshows on Apple systems. Even modern Apple systems. I've read it's an OS-architecture thing, but Apple believes the ball is in Adobe's court to fix. And Adobe refuses (or continues to fail) to fix it.
In any case - I first noticed the problem on an ancient G3 iMac, several years ago. Then, my dual G5 started doing it last year. Now, my 2 year old intel MacBook is doing it. Doesn't matter what browser or set of plugins we use. It is a problem that got progressively worse. All of my Macs now slideshow YouTube videos. I tried installing PPC Linux on another old G3 iMac, but I couldn't get a Flash plugin to compile quite right, so I couldn't compare there. On my Intel Ubuntu Linux machines. . . works fine. I think this has also been a huge factor in why NetFlix has delayed OnDemand video for the Mac platform.
So - hell, if what I'm reading about Adobe is true, good effing riddance. Hey, so-long to their damn flash-embedded unblockable ad-banners too.
Really?
Because if my customer asks for it, as far as I'm concerned, I'm giving them what they paid for. All the headaches, tradeoffs, and everything else that goes with it. The worse Microsoft cripples the Windows ecosystem - the happier I am to push every line of crippleware out to their customers. There is enough literature out there, and people have dealt with Microsoft products' limitations long enough - even non-technical users should know better by now. I'm not responsible for their poor choices. I do that job to the ethical best of my ability. (If Windows is *not* up to the task, I'll give them my technical opinion. But I won't waste project time debating the issue or trying to redesign the system around an alternate OS - unless that's my specified task).
The sooner my customers realize they're paying me to shoot them in the foot - the sooner they'll start paying me to load Ubuntu (or whatever) disks. But some people just seem to live in denial forever. Maybe human nature? Dunno.
. . . Hollywould "gets it". . . LONG after PKD's coolness buzz has faded. That's the way Big Money works. It's the way Big Money has ALWAYS worked. It's really what "cool" was first all about - until they tried to package and market cool to us. Then it was what "punk" was all about. (wash-rinse-repeat).
Change the name, but it will always be the same: The folks who try to tell us that getting rich is all about taking risks, are really the most financially secure (relatively), and therefore the most risk-averse folks on the planet, and therefore, as far as cultural trends go, will always pretty much be positioned way far back on the long-tail as far as coolness goes.
A person with a $400 million trust-fund in the bank risking his own $5 million investing in a film based on a PKD story, in 2010, is NOT anything like "cool". Though, the rank and file hoi polloi market will reward him generously.
A person with $20 in the bank risking $5 (possibly tomorrow's dinner, or the electric bill, or prescription co-pay for his antidepressant meds) on a paperback novel by a new, unknown, unpromoted writer published by an off-brand house (maybe self-published, these days), with fresh ideas that haven't been recycled a dozen thousand times by low-budget mass-market screenwriters - is the definition of cool. That guy will earn the small-scale social respect of his peers by relating his experience in reading the book, in casual conversation. That's how social animals work.
Then, in 15 years, when the trustafarians decide this writer's popularity has safely gained enough critical mass that they can risk .001% (insured) of their net worth on a film, that "cool" person, and his peers will puke when they see the trailer.
Nobody expresses this phenomenon as succinctly as "Indy-rock Pete" in Diesel Sweeties. Which, I think, ceased being cool about 5 minutes before I "discovered" and started reading it. I'm waiting for the Michael Bey version of Diesel Sweeties. 16-bit graphics and all. In 3D Imax, Dolby Surround.
Actually, the thing that really kills .NET for me, is when you try to install a service pack for .NET 3.5, even on a reasonably beefy dual core machine with plenty of RAM, MSI kind of goes out to lunch for about 30 minutes, disk is chewing away at god knows what. Holy crap what a bunch of voodoo.
How long does it take to install jdk 1.6.0 r17? 5 minutes? Tops?
(well, maybe we'll see how badly Oracle FUBARs java in the next few releases. . . )
The key is not necessarily supervision, so much as parents modeling behavior and 'good' (healthy - not codependent) values. If the parents convey their values, and their feelings to their children (and permit their children to communicate their feelings as well, rather than conditioning them to be passive-aggressive, as our culture typically does: "shut up! I'll give you something to cry about!") - the self-supervised children will more than likely follow the behavior that was modeled for them.
Truly leading by example is the way to go.
"640 volts ought to be enough for anybody. . . "
Given that I've "lost" several tracks now to Apple's DRM, (and my own platform mobility - go figure, I use several computers, have upgraded over the years, even *gasp* forgot my iTMS account password! God forbid I should shop at one store a few times, decide I don't like them, and stop shopping there, yet desire to continue using the product I purchased.) - given that, I paid $.99, I don't feel like paying the extra "price" of having to rip a downloaded .MP3 to a blank CD in AIFF format, re-ripping it (losing audio quality in the process) just to make the track transferrable. . .
Also, given that I now have TWO acquaintances who I've had to console over lost music libraries; failed hard drives with no backup. . .
- I think I'll keep my library of "quaint" Audio CD disks.
Downloading is no cheaper, it is only more convenient at the Point of Purchase, and is less convenient thereafter, and product quality is lower. Which has pretty much been my argument since 1996.
I figured they'd win me over when downloads were $.05. They almost had me with iPods though.
No - not a diesel; you're describing direct injection diesel. Traditional diesel is not injected under such high pressures, but is compressed in the cylinder by the piston. But modern automotive diesels (mostly) use direct injection, up to 1800 psi. (Shop manuals actually warn mechanics that when you're working on the fuel injection system, if you operate an injector opened, it can literally squirt diesel fuel through your skin, if you're not careful. And this is lethal, of course, unless you get immediate medical attention.)
It doesn't affect GPS.
It affects the accuracy of surveys taken PRIOR to this (and any other) geological movement.
And there are actually many many other factors that affect the accuracy of such surveys, including, different standards of what a "foot" is, (meters? oh, that's what the commies and faggy french use), AND tidal forces from the moon and sun acting on the earth (not just the liquid ocean, the crust actually flexes DAILY as well; and not uniformly either - different, depending on composition, topography, etc.)
GPS is pretty much always mathematically perfect and spot-on, based on radio signals; really only affected by relativistic issues and clock-drift, which are pretty much well-understood and compensated for.
It's the unstable, wobbly, oddly-shaped, poorly measured physical object we're mapping the GPS coordinates TO, that is the problem.
Dude;
A crowd of people walked out of a talk that Bill Nye was giving in Waco Texas last year, because he mentioned sunlight reflecting off the moon - and to them, that was contradictory to biblical scripture, and therefore blasphemy.
This is a small example of a huge freaking problem, which I believe is the MOST difficult problem that humanity faces, in the challenge to become a spacefaring civilization. Not faster-than-light travel. Not artificial gravity. Not sustainability of colonies (let alone our original home planet - which we still have not figured out yet).
And I'm not preaching hardcore atheism-by-force. I'm simply saying, you're proposing a grand unified activity for a large group of people, when you can't even find a sample of a subset of, I'd even bet 100,000 people, who agree on that vision. I'd bet you'd find at least one person among every 100,000 who would fight to the death to sustain some backwards belief like, the sun revolves around the earth, or the earth is 5000 years old, and there's no need to colonize space because the saints are all going to be raptured by their savior. I don't think one can understate this problem.
Your points are all fine and dandy, it's a nice plan and all. But you're never going to see a politically and economically stable environment in which to execute it. Not with humans, anyway.
Based on what evidence? Based on what science? The Theory of the Invisible Hand?
Economics has a LONG way to go before it catches up to the credibility level of climate science. Especially with damaged spokespeople like Bernard Madoff.
. . . that is, until the data mining tools become smart enough. (or maybe they already are - who knows? )
I suppose we all know the "drill" - to steal from many sources is "research".
1. I look at the assignment, I read the materials, I don't understand it.
2. I look at the examples - I see going from step 7 to 8, seems like magic. WTF?
3. I reckon I never copied from another student outright. But there are sources, anyone can use Google.
3a. You say you can detect cheating if the indenting is the same, variable names are the same, braces are the same? I guess it's a good thing I'm a bit anal about my coding style. . .
3b. I take my source, and I kind of run it through my mental clipboard, I copy it line for line, but if anything can change, or be done "my way" - I re-write it. I indent it to MY style. I use MY bracketing style. I use MY way scheme of variable and object naming. I comment - copiously. If I have to come back to this code in 3 months, and read it, and try to figure out what the hell I was thinking, I'll explain it to myself in detail. I'll write a novel in comments. Especially, if I had to do any trial-and-error to get it to work, and if I had to do anything freaky. Sometimes, I'm hoping a better coder will come along, see what I did, and why I was confused, and then send me an email, and explain what I was doing wrong. (never - in 15 years - has that happened).
3c. At the end of this process - maybe I didn't come up with the solution to the problem creatively. But I learned how it was done, and how to do it on my own the next time.
4. At the end: what I turn in, or compile - you probably can't run through any automated means of detecting plagiarism. But the algorithm is probably the same. The logic is the same. I'd bet the bytecode is probably pretty similar.
What is the purpose of the class?
To learn how to learn how to do task X. To understand that step 7->8 "magic".
What is the purpose of the professional project?
To get task X done - while still doing due-diligence in respecting intellectual property, and perhaps, making a small-time investment on behalf of your employer, in improving your own future productivity.
If I were ever doing anything earthshatteringly innovative, (not likely) of course, I'm citing ANY significant use of someone else's code. That's how my parents raised me, that's how my ethics professor trained me, it's what my peers, my employer, and our customers expect.
But with the crappy little "ten million feet have trod before you" tasks I'm usually doing, it's just not a concern. And if there are a hundred other script monkeys out there copying and refactoring my code the same way, I don't really give a crap.
Oh - lets not even get started discussing the difference in coding style between software industry professional developers, and computer scientists.
Does this include the "science" of Economics?
If so - I think that would be a VERY good thing.
Particularly in the area of derivatives trading.
It's estimated that 20% of the global economy now relies on trading derivatives, whose valuation is based on formulae, that are considered "proprietary" - and therefore, you're supposed to just trust the seller on the valuation. (by the way, I've got this bridge I'm selling, in Alaska . . . )
Ironic that Climate science is regarded with such skepticism, yet people in the high institutions of banking or the University of Chicago, Economics department so feverishly cling to the belief in some "invisible hand".