UK-based company First 4 Internet (F4i) is a new entrant into the field - or rather, minefield of CD 'copy protection'
*boom*
Re:It;s not always fun to be above average.
on
The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 1
I agree with you. But no matter how nicely or politely I put things, someone always disagreed, even if, in the end, the task at hand was done in the way I showed.
What I have figured out is that most probably most people around me feel inadequate (and possibly envy) when I show them their mistakes...but I accept others showing me my errors, even in front of others; why others do not accept that? no one is perfect.
Here's something to try, if you haven't already completely poisoned your coworkers against you. Become a mentor. Try teaching them how to come up with a way to solve the problem. Present them with the pieces of the issue, and try to guide them to make good choices to discover the solution. If they've learned your technique, they'll come up with a similar solution to yours. If it's somewhat different, that's still OK -- let them run with it and then they can be proud of what they produce. If they make a decision that seems somewhat risky, point out the risks and try to get them to come up with the less-risky alternative that you pictured. Sometimes they'll have valid reasons for their choices; in that case I typically let them go with it and just tighten the safety net somewhere else to accomodate their decision.
This also works for showing them "mistakes". Ask them the questions that point out the weakness of their solution, and let them work out why their solution isn't optimum. Get them to justify their solution to you. And be willing to accept that they will have different methods, and different ideas. They may have thought of a different reason that their solution will work.
Oh, and NEVER reprimand someone in front of others. EVER. Take them aside, schedule a private meeting, whatever. There is no faster road to being a professional ***hole than to be the guy who berates or belittles coworkers for mistakes.
There's a huge difference between "telling people what to do" and "showing them how to do it for themselves." From their point of view, it's very difficult to be a creative person who feels stifled under the watchful eye of an arrogant leader. If you're the project architect, yes, you can tell the engineers to do certain things -- that's the nature of leadership. (That part's easier with contractors, btw.) But if you're working with people that need to get design experience, help them get it themselves rather than giving it to them. You'll create less animosity that way.
Wow, that is an exact copy of my story. Too bad we didn't go to school together, or we could have had serious fun getting into trouble!:-)
Anyway, my question is: do we want to do something special to encourage kids like us, or should we let them just "get along"? Think of it as an "extra test": only those kids who take the challenge and actually rise above the rest of us are going to be the "world changers." Not only do they have the smarts, but they recognize their surroundings and personally choose to demonstrate motivation (which seems to be lacking in so many high potential kids.)
The reason I offer such a callous attitude is: what do typical high-potential programs actually do? They put smarter kids in classes for smarter kids -- giving them extra challenges in the same old areas. High potential kids need more than just "extra homework" to realize that potential. (And they also need to lay off World of Warcraft -- are you reading this, Eric?:-)
No, your power supply switch absolutely does control the power by switching the "hot" wire itself, and consumption-wise it's the same as pulling the power cord. (For power-supply maintenance reasons it technically isn't as safe because your computer could be plugged into a miswired outlet, meaning you're switching the neutral wire, and allowing line current to enter your power supply.) Your computer is drawing zero power if you throw that switch.
One device I worry about powering down too often are hard drives. I have are a couple of concerns regarding mechanical components.
When a rotating part on a bearing surface is stopped, gravity continues to pull the pieces together. The now-non-moving lubricants are squeezed aside, allowing metal-on-metal contact. This causes tiny flat spots on the bearing surfaces where they touch. For most equipment, these tiny flats don't have much of an effect. With disk drives, however, alignment is crucial, and vibrations can be catastrophic. Think of a gravel road that degenerates over time after it's been graded. It starts out smooth, but one little rut leads to bouncing tires. It's the bouncing of the tires that forms the characteristic washboard surface. Now, think of your hard disk as a big inertia-filled platter not too dissimilar from a tire. If you create a big enough flat spot on the bearing, it can eventually cause a similar bouncing resulting in the destruction of the drive. So, I like to keep them spinning just to prevent the formation of the flat spots in the first place.
I believe that when I hear a disk drive going bad that this is the cause of the failure. It also explains why old drives in the junk box are frequently dead when I try to resurrect them.
Another issue used to be one of "stiction" (more properly static friction.) It manifests itself as a platter that refuses to turn. It used to be way more common with drives like the old 5-1/4" Winchester hard disks. Basically, the motors that spin the drives have just barely enough torque to get them spinning under normal conditions. These drives ran a lot faster than their lubricants were originally designed for, and so they ran hotter. When these old lubricants heated up, they would break down into several components, some of which were physically sticky, like tar. Shut the spindle off, and these sticky components would settle onto the bearing surfaces. Power it back up, and sometimes the drive motor simply didn't have the horsepower required to overcome the stickiness. If we could manage to get the drive to spin again (a Fonzie-like tap on the cabinet,) we'd run for the tape drives to make a quick backup before it died.
Obviously you have absolutely no idea how many people don't turn off their gear when they leave. Do you have a clue just how much fuel has been saved by having equipment idle itself down? ATX was a huge win for saving energy.
As the grandparent poster was discussing, decent power supplies DO have a hardware switch in the back that disconnects the mains power. Everyone knows the "soft off" button leaves the mobo energized. I always require a hardware switch when shopping for power supplies. I prefer to leave the computers plugged in while I work on them because I like having the chassis grounded.
[Re: Al Gore -- grow up. He was most likely speaking in generics; people do it all the time. Most people, especially groups of college students, are able to understand the difference between a generic statement an a personal accusation. Perhaps now you can see that there are exceptions to every generalization, which is why they're not called "absolutes." ]
Are there any inexpensive devices that will monitor the power use of individual devices? I'm even more interested in how much power is being used by all the standby lights around the house.
My APC power supply has a "status screen" that tells me the current power it's supplying. I'm not saying that it would be easy to drag all your electronic gear into your computer room and test it one brick at a time, but if you have one already it's free.
I've been in a meeting where the presenter had some spyware installed and she had scantily clad women propositioning the audience throughout her presentation. (It was supposed to be a demonstration of some source code control system usage.)
It really bothered me that she didn't apologize for the popups, even though it was so unprofessional. (She did kind of squirm a bit.) I really believe she must think everybody gets popups, as in "this is normal."
Granted, it was an internal meeting, it's not like she was a traveling salesman bringing porn advertising to a client site. But it still reflected very poorly on her, and because of that her entire message was lost to us.
Then I'll apologize too, my original post was pretty inflammatory. And, I'll answer your questions. No, I certainly won't write the kid off; thanks for the compliment; and Glenfiddich.....mmmm... Glenfiddich. (My wife was mad at me because that bottle was hers, and I drank it instead of my Oban.....mmmm.... Oban!)
I'm asking why are you impressed? Engineering is about making the most from the least.
And this card is about making more from less. They're clocking their stock chipset far above their previous 7800 card and massively piling on heat-reduction gear like a rabid overclocker in a copper tube factory. And they're making more money:-)
Keep in mind that it's not about the frame rate. It's about keeping the frame rate high in increasingly complex situations. Obviously, a frame rate higher than your monitor's refresh rate is "excess capacity." (Hell, my card gets 300 FPS when I'm looking at a black screen!) But having that capacity means you can have more details while still maintaining visual smoothness. Most games deal with complexity by fogging stuff in the distance, or by not painting stuff until it's within some range. With a juiced-up graphics card like this, you can have less fog or more distant objects rendered. Better, you can have crowds of people (such as in a raid party) all dynamically rendered, nice and smooth. You don't get the screaming laggies just because a bunch of monsters and fireballs hit your screen at the same time. You get to see it in all its anti-aliased 24-bit color glory. That's why gamers want more power.
My FX5200 was capable of playing games like UT2k4 just fine. My 6600 is more than enough for things like Far Cry.
And now I don't understand you, because it doesn't seem like you're being self consistent. You had an FX5200 but you upgraded to a 6600? When the 6600 came out it would have been a $150 investment, which is an awful lot of extra expense for a graphics card, especially when your FX5200 was 'just fine'. Or did you get the 6600 with a new computer, even though most motherboards come with on-board 3D graphics chipsets that are 'just fine' for consumer PCs?
Right now it sounds like you have a pretty arbitrary "line in the sand": it's somehow acceptable to spend $150 for a graphics card, but anyone who spends $650 is an 'idiot'. What's your cutoff line for idiocy? $200? $300? $649.99? $150.01? Or is it more of a sliding scale, ranging from $150==genius to $300==dummy to $650==idiot?
Oh, wait. I get it now. IHBT. Thank you very much.
Don't be fooled just because it's not an official benchmark program. Remember Quack vs Quake? A benchmarker renamed Quake3 to Quack3, and found the ATI card's performance dropped because the drivers were tuned to the specific application named Quake3.exe.
What they never identified was an answer to this question: "Was this an optimization for Quake, or was this a deliberate attempt to improve ATI's standings in the benchmark wars?" If you download the ATI drivers, you'll find that every new driver patch contains a list of games that have had driver bugs fixed that address title-specific problems. So we have plenty of evidence that card makers look at specific games, but without mind-reading abilities it's impossible to know their motives.
Because nVidia wasn't the only company cheating. ATI was also found to be "optimizing" for benchmarks, too. Yes, it was a couple of years ago. But you give too much credit to think that people have stopped being stupid. It won't surprise me at all if it happens again.
And frankly I don't know why you guys are impressed... I do play games but really not a big part of my daily life.
Because games ARE a big part of the daily life of many people. (Not ALL people, but many.) Leaving computer graphics aside for a moment, how many sports fans do you know? Football, baseball, hockey, basketball? How many of them covet HDTV sets so they can watch the big game in more detail, or see larger-than-life closeups? And when one of these guys gets a plasma TV, is it coincidence that his friends come over to watch the game at his house?
So then, why is it OK for a football fan to spend $5,400 for an HDTV to watch his games, but not $650 for a World Of Warcraft gamer to want the best graphics for his game? Many of the gamers I know are addicts, spending far more time with their "entertainment gear of choice" than even the football fans with big screen TVs.
Please, feel free to save your money. If you're satisfied with your setup, then hooray for you! You've saved money that other people haven't. But you might want to consider that not everyone has the same spending priorities as you.
How about "WTF? Who wants to look at crappy graphics on a console when you can have creamy goodness from high-end cards like these?" Once you get used to nice graphics, consoles just look like Fisher Price toys - big, safe, chunky, blocky, slow, and mostly made of primary colors. Put a real rendering engine to work for you some time and there is just no way you want to play on crap like an XBox or PS2 ever again. And unless you've got a spectactular television, there's simply no way an NTSC-based display can stack up against a computer monitor, either.
Bigger question: have any of the reviews discovered if nVidia's cheated on this benchmark yet?
It seems that any time ATI or nVidia releases a new card, they've also got some drivers that "optimize" for the 3DMark benchmarking software. So I figure it must just mean that nobody's found out how they're doing it yet.
It's kind of sad to think that when they announce some obviously kick-ass hardware that all I can think of is "how did they cheat this time?"
I looked at all the shiny stuff on their site, and then figured "OK, I'll sign up and try it." But the signup page said "IE 6 only". OK, fine, I'll hold my nose and fire up IE. Only after that do I discover the alpha phase is by "email invite only".
It's almost as if they were exactly prepared for a slashdotting! Very clever people, indeed.
Where did I say they couldn't pray for their kids? Did I say they couldn't teach their kids this crap? No.
What I said was that teaching their kids this nonsense was going to produce children that wouldn't accept other ideas. If kids are exposed to these ideas 24x7, then that's what most of them are going to believe. They are taught NOT to accept alternate viewpoints because they come from "the devil."
It's sad, but I know a certain bright young man who could go far. I believe he has a very high IQ. The problem is his religious teachings have prevented him from seriously evaluating facts. He literally has no internal mechanism for dealing with evidence that conflicts with his religion. I can't blame a kid for this, but neither can I blame the public schools for teaching him creationist nonsense. He had to get it from somewhere, so I blame both his church and his parents. It was strongly reinforced at his home (I know his parents.) This kid could be on top of the world -- he's the drum major in a large high school, very talented on the French horn, and an 'A' student. He was smart enough to pass his biology tests by parroting the teacher's viewpoints on evolution, and he actually said these exact words to me: "even though I know none of it's true."
Not every kid is a rebel. Many kids believe their parents absolutely. This kid believes his parents, just as my son believes me. Do I think this kid's teachings have been toxic? Absolutely. Am I afraid he's going to grow up to be another fundamentalist nutjob? Yes. Do I blame his parents for giving him a deleterious fundamentalist upbringing? Well, where else could he have gotten it?
Yes, parents are going to teach their kids whatever they believe. And many kids will accept it carte blanche. It's a viral meme that's forced on junior by mom & dad, and that was my point all along. And because of their teachings, there's no chance for public schools to break this particular chain of stupidity. That does not give those idiots the right to foist it off on non-fundamentalist kids as a "alternative fact."
[ I apologize in advance for any rambling in this post, I'm about four whiskeys on the distant side of sober. ]
I'm assuming the MIR astronauts could have suited up and opened the doors to let some "fresh vacuum in" (yes, it's a joke), much the same way we earthbound people open the windows if the dog poops on the carpet. But I'm betting that wouldn't have worked.
The techniques that we'd normally use to sterilize mold on earth would include flame and chemicals. Fire in a spacecraft is generally a really bad idea. It would have been especially bad considering some of the mold was growing on electrical wire insulation, which was probably not designed for direct exposure to flame. And any chemical used, such as bleach, would have made the compartment atmosphere toxic and might not have been scrubbable by the filters. The chlorine probably would have damaged the filters (although they probably could have designed extra 'bleach filters' to use for the duration of the cleaning process.)
I think the Russians tried everything they could afford to to eradicate the mold. In space vacuum and cold are both cheap and plentiful; so if that even had a remote chance to kill the mold don't you think they'd have tried it?
Slashdot Mirror
Or can you at least test it until you need glasses? Oh, wait ... nevermind.
Just to stray on topic a bit, how about building a "Myth"TV box so you don't have to stay home on Wednesday nights?
UK-based company First 4 Internet (F4i) is a new entrant into the field - or rather, minefield of CD 'copy protection'
*boom*
What I have figured out is that most probably most people around me feel inadequate (and possibly envy) when I show them their mistakes...but I accept others showing me my errors, even in front of others; why others do not accept that? no one is perfect.
Here's something to try, if you haven't already completely poisoned your coworkers against you. Become a mentor. Try teaching them how to come up with a way to solve the problem. Present them with the pieces of the issue, and try to guide them to make good choices to discover the solution. If they've learned your technique, they'll come up with a similar solution to yours. If it's somewhat different, that's still OK -- let them run with it and then they can be proud of what they produce. If they make a decision that seems somewhat risky, point out the risks and try to get them to come up with the less-risky alternative that you pictured. Sometimes they'll have valid reasons for their choices; in that case I typically let them go with it and just tighten the safety net somewhere else to accomodate their decision.
This also works for showing them "mistakes". Ask them the questions that point out the weakness of their solution, and let them work out why their solution isn't optimum. Get them to justify their solution to you. And be willing to accept that they will have different methods, and different ideas. They may have thought of a different reason that their solution will work.
Oh, and NEVER reprimand someone in front of others. EVER. Take them aside, schedule a private meeting, whatever. There is no faster road to being a professional ***hole than to be the guy who berates or belittles coworkers for mistakes.
There's a huge difference between "telling people what to do" and "showing them how to do it for themselves." From their point of view, it's very difficult to be a creative person who feels stifled under the watchful eye of an arrogant leader. If you're the project architect, yes, you can tell the engineers to do certain things -- that's the nature of leadership. (That part's easier with contractors, btw.) But if you're working with people that need to get design experience, help them get it themselves rather than giving it to them. You'll create less animosity that way.
Anyway, my question is: do we want to do something special to encourage kids like us, or should we let them just "get along"? Think of it as an "extra test": only those kids who take the challenge and actually rise above the rest of us are going to be the "world changers." Not only do they have the smarts, but they recognize their surroundings and personally choose to demonstrate motivation (which seems to be lacking in so many high potential kids.)
The reason I offer such a callous attitude is: what do typical high-potential programs actually do? They put smarter kids in classes for smarter kids -- giving them extra challenges in the same old areas. High potential kids need more than just "extra homework" to realize that potential. (And they also need to lay off World of Warcraft -- are you reading this, Eric? :-)
No, your power supply switch absolutely does control the power by switching the "hot" wire itself, and consumption-wise it's the same as pulling the power cord. (For power-supply maintenance reasons it technically isn't as safe because your computer could be plugged into a miswired outlet, meaning you're switching the neutral wire, and allowing line current to enter your power supply.) Your computer is drawing zero power if you throw that switch.
When a rotating part on a bearing surface is stopped, gravity continues to pull the pieces together. The now-non-moving lubricants are squeezed aside, allowing metal-on-metal contact. This causes tiny flat spots on the bearing surfaces where they touch. For most equipment, these tiny flats don't have much of an effect. With disk drives, however, alignment is crucial, and vibrations can be catastrophic. Think of a gravel road that degenerates over time after it's been graded. It starts out smooth, but one little rut leads to bouncing tires. It's the bouncing of the tires that forms the characteristic washboard surface. Now, think of your hard disk as a big inertia-filled platter not too dissimilar from a tire. If you create a big enough flat spot on the bearing, it can eventually cause a similar bouncing resulting in the destruction of the drive. So, I like to keep them spinning just to prevent the formation of the flat spots in the first place.
I believe that when I hear a disk drive going bad that this is the cause of the failure. It also explains why old drives in the junk box are frequently dead when I try to resurrect them.
Another issue used to be one of "stiction" (more properly static friction.) It manifests itself as a platter that refuses to turn. It used to be way more common with drives like the old 5-1/4" Winchester hard disks. Basically, the motors that spin the drives have just barely enough torque to get them spinning under normal conditions. These drives ran a lot faster than their lubricants were originally designed for, and so they ran hotter. When these old lubricants heated up, they would break down into several components, some of which were physically sticky, like tar. Shut the spindle off, and these sticky components would settle onto the bearing surfaces. Power it back up, and sometimes the drive motor simply didn't have the horsepower required to overcome the stickiness. If we could manage to get the drive to spin again (a Fonzie-like tap on the cabinet,) we'd run for the tape drives to make a quick backup before it died.
As the grandparent poster was discussing, decent power supplies DO have a hardware switch in the back that disconnects the mains power. Everyone knows the "soft off" button leaves the mobo energized. I always require a hardware switch when shopping for power supplies. I prefer to leave the computers plugged in while I work on them because I like having the chassis grounded.
[Re: Al Gore -- grow up. He was most likely speaking in generics; people do it all the time. Most people, especially groups of college students, are able to understand the difference between a generic statement an a personal accusation. Perhaps now you can see that there are exceptions to every generalization, which is why they're not called "absolutes." ]
My APC power supply has a "status screen" that tells me the current power it's supplying. I'm not saying that it would be easy to drag all your electronic gear into your computer room and test it one brick at a time, but if you have one already it's free.
Speaking of "join 'em", did you read the roster in TFA? No mention of SORNY, MAGNETBOX, or PANAPHONICS anywhere.
It really bothered me that she didn't apologize for the popups, even though it was so unprofessional. (She did kind of squirm a bit.) I really believe she must think everybody gets popups, as in "this is normal."
Granted, it was an internal meeting, it's not like she was a traveling salesman bringing porn advertising to a client site. But it still reflected very poorly on her, and because of that her entire message was lost to us.
Then I'll apologize too, my original post was pretty inflammatory. And, I'll answer your questions. No, I certainly won't write the kid off; thanks for the compliment; and Glenfiddich. ....mmmm... Glenfiddich. (My wife was mad at me because that bottle was hers, and I drank it instead of my Oban. ....mmmm.... Oban!)
"Well, can I just do it until I need glasses?"
And this card is about making more from less. They're clocking their stock chipset far above their previous 7800 card and massively piling on heat-reduction gear like a rabid overclocker in a copper tube factory. And they're making more money :-)
Keep in mind that it's not about the frame rate. It's about keeping the frame rate high in increasingly complex situations. Obviously, a frame rate higher than your monitor's refresh rate is "excess capacity." (Hell, my card gets 300 FPS when I'm looking at a black screen!) But having that capacity means you can have more details while still maintaining visual smoothness. Most games deal with complexity by fogging stuff in the distance, or by not painting stuff until it's within some range. With a juiced-up graphics card like this, you can have less fog or more distant objects rendered. Better, you can have crowds of people (such as in a raid party) all dynamically rendered, nice and smooth. You don't get the screaming laggies just because a bunch of monsters and fireballs hit your screen at the same time. You get to see it in all its anti-aliased 24-bit color glory. That's why gamers want more power.
My FX5200 was capable of playing games like UT2k4 just fine. My 6600 is more than enough for things like Far Cry.
And now I don't understand you, because it doesn't seem like you're being self consistent. You had an FX5200 but you upgraded to a 6600? When the 6600 came out it would have been a $150 investment, which is an awful lot of extra expense for a graphics card, especially when your FX5200 was 'just fine'. Or did you get the 6600 with a new computer, even though most motherboards come with on-board 3D graphics chipsets that are 'just fine' for consumer PCs?
Right now it sounds like you have a pretty arbitrary "line in the sand": it's somehow acceptable to spend $150 for a graphics card, but anyone who spends $650 is an 'idiot'. What's your cutoff line for idiocy? $200? $300? $649.99? $150.01? Or is it more of a sliding scale, ranging from $150==genius to $300==dummy to $650==idiot?
Oh, wait. I get it now. IHBT. Thank you very much.
What they never identified was an answer to this question: "Was this an optimization for Quake, or was this a deliberate attempt to improve ATI's standings in the benchmark wars?" If you download the ATI drivers, you'll find that every new driver patch contains a list of games that have had driver bugs fixed that address title-specific problems. So we have plenty of evidence that card makers look at specific games, but without mind-reading abilities it's impossible to know their motives.
Because nVidia wasn't the only company cheating. ATI was also found to be "optimizing" for benchmarks, too. Yes, it was a couple of years ago. But you give too much credit to think that people have stopped being stupid. It won't surprise me at all if it happens again.
Because games ARE a big part of the daily life of many people. (Not ALL people, but many.) Leaving computer graphics aside for a moment, how many sports fans do you know? Football, baseball, hockey, basketball? How many of them covet HDTV sets so they can watch the big game in more detail, or see larger-than-life closeups? And when one of these guys gets a plasma TV, is it coincidence that his friends come over to watch the game at his house?
So then, why is it OK for a football fan to spend $5,400 for an HDTV to watch his games, but not $650 for a World Of Warcraft gamer to want the best graphics for his game? Many of the gamers I know are addicts, spending far more time with their "entertainment gear of choice" than even the football fans with big screen TVs.
Please, feel free to save your money. If you're satisfied with your setup, then hooray for you! You've saved money that other people haven't. But you might want to consider that not everyone has the same spending priorities as you.
How about "WTF? Who wants to look at crappy graphics on a console when you can have creamy goodness from high-end cards like these?" Once you get used to nice graphics, consoles just look like Fisher Price toys - big, safe, chunky, blocky, slow, and mostly made of primary colors. Put a real rendering engine to work for you some time and there is just no way you want to play on crap like an XBox or PS2 ever again. And unless you've got a spectactular television, there's simply no way an NTSC-based display can stack up against a computer monitor, either.
It seems that any time ATI or nVidia releases a new card, they've also got some drivers that "optimize" for the 3DMark benchmarking software. So I figure it must just mean that nobody's found out how they're doing it yet.
It's kind of sad to think that when they announce some obviously kick-ass hardware that all I can think of is "how did they cheat this time?"
So why would a guy with a mac.com address ever put up with an IE 6 only restriction?
Sweet! Works like a charm. Thanks!
Try explaining that email to her!
It's almost as if they were exactly prepared for a slashdotting! Very clever people, indeed.
What I said was that teaching their kids this nonsense was going to produce children that wouldn't accept other ideas. If kids are exposed to these ideas 24x7, then that's what most of them are going to believe. They are taught NOT to accept alternate viewpoints because they come from "the devil."
It's sad, but I know a certain bright young man who could go far. I believe he has a very high IQ. The problem is his religious teachings have prevented him from seriously evaluating facts. He literally has no internal mechanism for dealing with evidence that conflicts with his religion. I can't blame a kid for this, but neither can I blame the public schools for teaching him creationist nonsense. He had to get it from somewhere, so I blame both his church and his parents. It was strongly reinforced at his home (I know his parents.) This kid could be on top of the world -- he's the drum major in a large high school, very talented on the French horn, and an 'A' student. He was smart enough to pass his biology tests by parroting the teacher's viewpoints on evolution, and he actually said these exact words to me: "even though I know none of it's true."
Not every kid is a rebel. Many kids believe their parents absolutely. This kid believes his parents, just as my son believes me. Do I think this kid's teachings have been toxic? Absolutely. Am I afraid he's going to grow up to be another fundamentalist nutjob? Yes. Do I blame his parents for giving him a deleterious fundamentalist upbringing? Well, where else could he have gotten it?
Yes, parents are going to teach their kids whatever they believe. And many kids will accept it carte blanche. It's a viral meme that's forced on junior by mom & dad, and that was my point all along. And because of their teachings, there's no chance for public schools to break this particular chain of stupidity. That does not give those idiots the right to foist it off on non-fundamentalist kids as a "alternative fact."
[ I apologize in advance for any rambling in this post, I'm about four whiskeys on the distant side of sober. ]
The techniques that we'd normally use to sterilize mold on earth would include flame and chemicals. Fire in a spacecraft is generally a really bad idea. It would have been especially bad considering some of the mold was growing on electrical wire insulation, which was probably not designed for direct exposure to flame. And any chemical used, such as bleach, would have made the compartment atmosphere toxic and might not have been scrubbable by the filters. The chlorine probably would have damaged the filters (although they probably could have designed extra 'bleach filters' to use for the duration of the cleaning process.)
I think the Russians tried everything they could afford to to eradicate the mold. In space vacuum and cold are both cheap and plentiful; so if that even had a remote chance to kill the mold don't you think they'd have tried it?