This might work up until grade 4 or 5. After that the smart-alecks will make a big joke of it. The whole class can get "in" on it. They will click the answer that is either the most outrageous, the one potentially the most humorous, or the one diametrically opposed to what they truly think. Come on! It's a great idea, don't get me wrong, but human nature being what it is I don't think anyone can realistically expect students to take it seriously. Haven't you ever seen Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? There are always some jokers in the studio audience who vote for the wrong answer ON PURPOSE. It will become endemic. If it's truly anonymous teachers won't be able to figure out who the trouble makers are, and it really won't matter because most of the kids will be snickering and participating in the hoax. I can see it now:
Q. Who was the most influential person of the 20th Century?
A. Pope John Paul II B. Franklin Roosevelt C. Ronald Wilson Reagan D. Ghandi E. Hitler
When 90% of the class votes "E" and 100% of the class is cracking up these devices will last a month at most.
And to think they do this just to get airplay. Imagine what they're paying to the politicians themselves. They don't care. They know it's wrong and illegal and they just don't care. Money has corrupted every level of government it seems except for the NY Attorney General. Good on ya' Mr. Spitzer.
From TFA: "The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask. "That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe." "Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?" "I guess so," says Gary. "What were the ship names?" "I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
This is too funny! They can make an example out of him in both the War on Terrah and the War on Drugs!
After this there will be a Patent Policy Czar for Europe to make "suggestions" to the EU. Soon there will be a cabinet-level agency, the Department of Intellectual Property. When energy prices really start to take off and the economy starts to tank, the pols in DC will claim that "intellectual property" makes up a large chunk of what the country exports, and deserves the greatest "protections" available.
I wish slashdot had a way to tag names when you put them on your friend-or-foe lists. That way I could put "supports telemarketer slimebags" next to the red dot now next to your name. Then when I see other posts by you in the future with the red dot I could refer back to the tag that tells me why I think you're a slime bucket.
Will they finally open the Workplace Shell? It's a truly object-oriented desktop design that's still superior - a decade later - to anything Windows has to offer. Looking back it's hard to believe a lot of the early FUD from MS against OS/2 was aimed at scaring people away because, hey, 2 megabytes of memory was just an absurd requiremet! They also claimed multithreaded programming was no big deal. If they open up the Workplace Shell maybe OS/2 could preserve some of its legacy. It would rock on Linux.
Bwahahaha! Hopefully this revelation will lead to a bunch of lawsuits against the directors and officers of SCO for willful malfeasance. This may be the opening that allows them to pierce the corporate veil and go after them personally. Darl is not the only one richly deserving of jail time.
Remember when the air force told NASA to expect something like 1 in 20 missions to blow up, because that was their record with SRBs? NASA has been doing WAY better than that.
Most of your post is accurate but I don't remember the Air Force ever saying such a thing. Got a source for that? I know NASA themselves said the chance of a catastrophic failure was something like 1/10,000 but when they were pressed on it after the Challenger conflagration (it really didn't blow up) they admitted they pulled that figure out of their asses.
I think the astronaughts would be slightly more concerned if their engines shut down at say, 10000 feet, than if they sustained a bit of engine damage. Just a thought
True but an uncontained turbopump failure is more than "a bit" of engine damage. At least with engine shutdown there's the possibility of landing the thing somewhere in one piece. Granted, saying the tank is on E when it's not, and saying there's plenty left when it's really bone dry are both double-plus ungood.
Very nice. I'm glad I didn't see the off-topic mods for this or I would have been really ticked off.
By now we all know the race to the Moon and Apollo were rooted in the Cold War, and politics had as much to do with that magnificent success as science and exploration. Yet, it was an adventure people will forever look back upon even after those of us who remember the day are gone.
For many, myself included, who were young and not driven by politics or Cold War rhetoric and one-upsmanship, landing on the Moon stands as one of the proudest moments of our lives, even if it happened before we were even teenagers. Not just for America, but for the entire world.
The current U.S. manned spaceflight program is perhaps only a shell of its former self, but to this day I think the plaque left on the Moon, attached to the Eagle's landing gear sums it up beautifully:
Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July, 1969 A.D. We came in peace for all mankind.
I used to have a little 4x6 inch replica of that plaque around, but it was misplaced at some point during the intervening years. Of all the little meaningless mementos and trivial souvenirs I've collected along the way it's the one I miss most.
Have you ever looked at the zlib source code? I used it to embed some PNG capability into a utility I wrote several years ago. It's a mess. There are typedefs, macros, typedefed maros and macro'ed typedefs all over the place. I guess it's for portability but that doesn't necessarily make it programmer-friendly. I am not surprised at all.
Seriously, I have never heard of Drupal until I saw this article. It may be useful software, very useful, but who knows? FA like this should really start off like this:
"Drupal, the leading PHP blog server provider, has problems..."
Then maybe/.ers can figure out what the hell you're talking about. Your pet tech doesn't mean everybody else immediately knows what you're talking about.
I almost fell out of my chair when I RTFA. "Mercury is a planet few people, even astrologers, have ever seen." WTF? Is this Slashdot or the Nancy Reagan hotline? There's a better article at Sky and Telescope without any of the mumbo jumbo.
Well, it's a start. How about we require a warrant for EVERY goddamned search so that the RIGHT of the people to be secure in their homes, papers and posessions is not abridged? It's only in the freaking Constitution for Christ's sake. At the very least they should eliminate the sneaky trick that they don't even have to TELL you you're a target of an investigation. When will these bozos realize that terrorists are CRIMINALS, not "foreign combatants" who need to be locked up without any rights at all in some gulag for years under military supervision? If this goes on much longer it will be a simple matter to apply the "T" label to anyone for any reason at all under the strictest secrecy possible and they won't even have to tell you about it until it's too late.
America is sending tons of money to China for their cheap goods produced with cheap labor under a ruthless regime. What do they do with all that money? They LEND it back to us. Our national debt is running, what, like $1 Billion a day now? Lots of it is being bankrolled by China.
Not only do we pay them lots of money for their goods, as citizens contributing to the balance of trade deficit, but then the govt lends them billions and billions affecting the other big defecit: the national budget defecit.
The effect of all this is low interest rates in the U.S. that are keeping the housing market going pretty strong. All it takes is China to decide they don't feel like lending us any more money and you can guess what happens then. Hint: it ain't pretty.
100% of politicians lie, cheat and steal. Even scientists are *gasp* human. Unethical behavior should not be condoned, but what I'd like to see is a similar report done on lawyers and politicians. THe only problem is none of them would answer honestly! At least this research got some people to admit they were fudging numbers. The actual results are probably skewed to the low side, if anything, because undoubtedly there are some scientists who will lie to cover up their other lies. These are the wannabes to watch out for. Like Bill Frist.
God what a nightmare that would be. Give me a freakin' break, please. Business people want to "maximize their productive time", fine, let them do it in business class. No business class on the discaount airlines? Sorry, no cell phones either.
On the other hand I don't think interference with SETI should be a reason to ban them. If that's the best argument against using cell phones on planes then the battle is already lost.
SETI is a privately funded operation, right? Well so are cell phone companies and the airlines are at least quasi-private companies (can you say govt. $3 billion bailout?)
If they ever allow cell phones on planes - and the reasons for banning them in the first place were never scientifically sound - it would be interesting to see how an airline would do if they maintained a no-cellphone policy.
I think it's remarkable that they work on airplanes at all. Faraday cage and all that while you're sitting inside an aluminum tube.
The SCOTUS refusing to hear this appeal has good and bad aspects. On the one hand Lexmark's abuse of the DMCA is at an end. On the other hand, the SCOTUS did not undertake a full review of the case and rule on the constitutionality of the issues at hand with respect to that fundamentally deficient law.
So far so good, I guess. They could have reviewed the case and said, "Oh yeah, you can use the DMCA to do that!"
I'm an American and it makes me sad to see American technology sold to Chinese companies. When China decides to stop funding Americans' debt-laden lifestyles we'll all end up working for them. And to think that the right-wingers blamed Clinton for allegedly "allowing" a Chinese spy in Los Alamos "give" nuclear secrets to China. What a farce that turned out to be. But when it's them doing the giving it's OK. Sorry to rant about this, but China is getting ready to eat our lunch as long as the big corporations are able to start using Americans for their new-century 3rd-world labor they could not care less.
Let's not forget the billions and billions poured into bogus Star Wars missile defense technology R&D over the last 20 years. It doesn't work. It never did work. It never will work. Ande even if it DID work it's easily defeated. Not to mention that it could never be tested in any realistic scenario. Most of this absolutely wasted money was spent as part of classified budgets so nobody really knows exactly how much of a boondoggle it really is. When all you hear about are the much publicized tests - virtually all of which end in failure - you know there's a lot more that never sees the light of day.
I was reading aboout this stuff in my World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid. This knowledge has been more or less freely available in unclassified form for years and years and years. I'm no physicist, but the term "uranium hexafluoride" were not completely new to me either.
What they should do is a feature similar to TFA but explaining how the recenet reactor accident in England will take years to clean up and cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions. It's errily similar to Three Mile Island which took place more than 25 years ago.
I believe in 50 years the U.S. will be a heavy user of nuclear energy despite the environmental concerns people have. When the oil runs out there is no alternative that can fulfill the demand. When it comes down to a choice between not having enough electricity for "the children" and risking a 10,000 year toxic accident, you know which way people will vote.
More than anything we need some kind of truth-in-advertising regulations placed on the commercial nuclear power industry. GE and the others in that field have been telling us for decades how safe their designs are. And for decades they have been shown wrong. In the future, any company who makes, sells or operates a nuclear power facility should have its owners, its officers and its Board of Directors held personally responsible for any "accidents" that occur. Life in prison sounds like a reasonable penalty in the event of a catastrophic accident.
Having them put their asses on the line, personally, is the only way to ensure that they will deliver the safest possible systems. The cost for a nuclear power generating facility will be much higher but will still look cheap when compared with the alternatives.
Solar, wind, geothermal and other environmentally friendly sources of energy are important but the gubmint, in the name of its citizens, should have been funding research into these alternative sources for many years already and they have not. The oil is running out and when we need the electricity badly enough there will be only one place to turn to get it in large enough quantities.
Slashdot Mirror
This might work up until grade 4 or 5. After that the smart-alecks will make a big joke of it. The whole class can get "in" on it. They will click the answer that is either the most outrageous, the one potentially the most humorous, or the one diametrically opposed to what they truly think. Come on! It's a great idea, don't get me wrong, but human nature being what it is I don't think anyone can realistically expect students to take it seriously. Haven't you ever seen Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? There are always some jokers in the studio audience who vote for the wrong answer ON PURPOSE. It will become endemic. If it's truly anonymous teachers won't be able to figure out who the trouble makers are, and it really won't matter because most of the kids will be snickering and participating in the hoax. I can see it now:
Q. Who was the most influential person of the 20th Century?
A. Pope John Paul II
B. Franklin Roosevelt
C. Ronald Wilson Reagan
D. Ghandi
E. Hitler
When 90% of the class votes "E" and 100% of the class is cracking up these devices will last a month at most.
And to think they do this just to get airplay. Imagine what they're paying to the politicians themselves. They don't care. They know it's wrong and illegal and they just don't care. Money has corrupted every level of government it seems except for the NY Attorney General. Good on ya' Mr. Spitzer.
From TFA:
"The Americans have a secret spaceship?" I ask.
"That's what this trickle of evidence has led me to believe."
"Some kind of other Mir that nobody knows about?"
"I guess so," says Gary.
"What were the ship names?"
"I can't remember," says Gary. "I was smoking a lot of dope at the time. Not good for the intellect."
This is too funny! They can make an example out of him in both the War on Terrah and the War on Drugs!
After this there will be a Patent Policy Czar for Europe to make "suggestions" to the EU. Soon there will be a cabinet-level agency, the Department of Intellectual Property. When energy prices really start to take off and the economy starts to tank, the pols in DC will claim that "intellectual property" makes up a large chunk of what the country exports, and deserves the greatest "protections" available.
"Intellectual property" is not real property.
Congrats. You just got a red dot too. Telemarketing scumbag.
I wish slashdot had a way to tag names when you put them on your friend-or-foe lists. That way I could put "supports telemarketer slimebags" next to the red dot now next to your name. Then when I see other posts by you in the future with the red dot I could refer back to the tag that tells me why I think you're a slime bucket.
Will they finally open the Workplace Shell? It's a truly object-oriented desktop design that's still superior - a decade later - to anything Windows has to offer. Looking back it's hard to believe a lot of the early FUD from MS against OS/2 was aimed at scaring people away because, hey, 2 megabytes of memory was just an absurd requiremet! They also claimed multithreaded programming was no big deal. If they open up the Workplace Shell maybe OS/2 could preserve some of its legacy. It would rock on Linux.
Bwahahaha! Hopefully this revelation will lead to a bunch of lawsuits against the directors and officers of SCO for willful malfeasance. This may be the opening that allows them to pierce the corporate veil and go after them personally. Darl is not the only one richly deserving of jail time.
Remember when the air force told NASA to expect something like 1 in 20 missions to blow up, because that was their record with SRBs? NASA has been doing WAY better than that.
Most of your post is accurate but I don't remember the Air Force ever saying such a thing. Got a source for that? I know NASA themselves said the chance of a catastrophic failure was something like 1/10,000 but when they were pressed on it after the Challenger conflagration (it really didn't blow up) they admitted they pulled that figure out of their asses.
I think the astronaughts would be slightly more concerned if their engines shut down at say, 10000 feet, than if they sustained a bit of engine damage.
Just a thought
True but an uncontained turbopump failure is more than "a bit" of engine damage. At least with engine shutdown there's the possibility of landing the thing somewhere in one piece. Granted, saying the tank is on E when it's not, and saying there's plenty left when it's really bone dry are both double-plus ungood.
By now we all know the race to the Moon and Apollo were rooted in the Cold War, and politics had as much to do with that magnificent success as science and exploration. Yet, it was an adventure people will forever look back upon even after those of us who remember the day are gone.
For many, myself included, who were young and not driven by politics or Cold War rhetoric and one-upsmanship, landing on the Moon stands as one of the proudest moments of our lives, even if it happened before we were even teenagers. Not just for America, but for the entire world.
The current U.S. manned spaceflight program is perhaps only a shell of its former self, but to this day I think the plaque left on the Moon, attached to the Eagle's landing gear sums it up beautifully:I used to have a little 4x6 inch replica of that plaque around, but it was misplaced at some point during the intervening years. Of all the little meaningless mementos and trivial souvenirs I've collected along the way it's the one I miss most.
I'll echo m0ng0l and offer a rousing
Huzzah!
as well.
Have you ever looked at the zlib source code? I used it to embed some PNG capability into a utility I wrote several years ago. It's a mess. There are typedefs, macros, typedefed maros and macro'ed typedefs all over the place. I guess it's for portability but that doesn't necessarily make it programmer-friendly. I am not surprised at all.
Seriously, I have never heard of Drupal until I saw this article. It may be useful software, very useful, but who knows? FA like this should really start off like this:
Then maybe
I almost fell out of my chair when I RTFA. "Mercury is a planet few people, even astrologers, have ever seen." WTF? Is this Slashdot or the Nancy Reagan hotline? There's a better article at Sky and Telescope without any of the mumbo jumbo.
And we borrow $3 billion dollars a day. That's "borrow", not "import". Imports are separate and they're quite a bit too.
Americans are consuming more than they produce and it's being fueled in large part by the housing bubble. It's not sustainable for very long.
Well, it's a start. How about we require a warrant for EVERY goddamned search so that the RIGHT of the people to be secure in their homes, papers and posessions is not abridged? It's only in the freaking Constitution for Christ's sake. At the very least they should eliminate the sneaky trick that they don't even have to TELL you you're a target of an investigation. When will these bozos realize that terrorists are CRIMINALS, not "foreign combatants" who need to be locked up without any rights at all in some gulag for years under military supervision? If this goes on much longer it will be a simple matter to apply the "T" label to anyone for any reason at all under the strictest secrecy possible and they won't even have to tell you about it until it's too late.
America is sending tons of money to China for their cheap goods produced with cheap labor under a ruthless regime. What do they do with all that money? They LEND it back to us. Our national debt is running, what, like $1 Billion a day now? Lots of it is being bankrolled by China.
Not only do we pay them lots of money for their goods, as citizens contributing to the balance of trade deficit, but then the govt lends them billions and billions affecting the other big defecit: the national budget defecit.
The effect of all this is low interest rates in the U.S. that are keeping the housing market going pretty strong. All it takes is China to decide they don't feel like lending us any more money and you can guess what happens then. Hint: it ain't pretty.
And the State Department too. Where, oh where, are my mod points when I need them?
100% of politicians lie, cheat and steal. Even scientists are *gasp* human. Unethical behavior should not be condoned, but what I'd like to see is a similar report done on lawyers and politicians. THe only problem is none of them would answer honestly! At least this research got some people to admit they were fudging numbers. The actual results are probably skewed to the low side, if anything, because undoubtedly there are some scientists who will lie to cover up their other lies. These are the wannabes to watch out for. Like Bill Frist.
God what a nightmare that would be. Give me a freakin' break, please. Business people want to "maximize their productive time", fine, let them do it in business class. No business class on the discaount airlines? Sorry, no cell phones either.
On the other hand I don't think interference with SETI should be a reason to ban them. If that's the best argument against using cell phones on planes then the battle is already lost.
SETI is a privately funded operation, right? Well so are cell phone companies and the airlines are at least quasi-private companies (can you say govt. $3 billion bailout?)
If they ever allow cell phones on planes - and the reasons for banning them in the first place were never scientifically sound - it would be interesting to see how an airline would do if they maintained a no-cellphone policy.
I think it's remarkable that they work on airplanes at all. Faraday cage and all that while you're sitting inside an aluminum tube.
The SCOTUS refusing to hear this appeal has good and bad aspects. On the one hand Lexmark's abuse of the DMCA is at an end. On the other hand, the SCOTUS did not undertake a full review of the case and rule on the constitutionality of the issues at hand with respect to that fundamentally deficient law.
So far so good, I guess. They could have reviewed the case and said, "Oh yeah, you can use the DMCA to do that!"
I'm an American and it makes me sad to see American technology sold to Chinese companies. When China decides to stop funding Americans' debt-laden lifestyles we'll all end up working for them. And to think that the right-wingers blamed Clinton for allegedly "allowing" a Chinese spy in Los Alamos "give" nuclear secrets to China. What a farce that turned out to be. But when it's them doing the giving it's OK. Sorry to rant about this, but China is getting ready to eat our lunch as long as the big corporations are able to start using Americans for their new-century 3rd-world labor they could not care less.
Ha ha. Funny stuff. What a waste.
Let's not forget the billions and billions poured into bogus Star Wars missile defense technology R&D over the last 20 years. It doesn't work. It never did work. It never will work. Ande even if it DID work it's easily defeated. Not to mention that it could never be tested in any realistic scenario. Most of this absolutely wasted money was spent as part of classified budgets so nobody really knows exactly how much of a boondoggle it really is. When all you hear about are the much publicized tests - virtually all of which end in failure - you know there's a lot more that never sees the light of day.
I was reading aboout this stuff in my World Book Encyclopedia when I was a kid. This knowledge has been more or less freely available in unclassified form for years and years and years. I'm no physicist, but the term "uranium hexafluoride" were not completely new to me either.
What they should do is a feature similar to TFA but explaining how the recenet reactor accident in England will take years to clean up and cost the taxpayers hundreds of millions. It's errily similar to Three Mile Island which took place more than 25 years ago.
I believe in 50 years the U.S. will be a heavy user of nuclear energy despite the environmental concerns people have. When the oil runs out there is no alternative that can fulfill the demand. When it comes down to a choice between not having enough electricity for "the children" and risking a 10,000 year toxic accident, you know which way people will vote.
More than anything we need some kind of truth-in-advertising regulations placed on the commercial nuclear power industry. GE and the others in that field have been telling us for decades how safe their designs are. And for decades they have been shown wrong. In the future, any company who makes, sells or operates a nuclear power facility should have its owners, its officers and its Board of Directors held personally responsible for any "accidents" that occur. Life in prison sounds like a reasonable penalty in the event of a catastrophic accident.
Having them put their asses on the line, personally, is the only way to ensure that they will deliver the safest possible systems. The cost for a nuclear power generating facility will be much higher but will still look cheap when compared with the alternatives.
Solar, wind, geothermal and other environmentally friendly sources of energy are important but the gubmint, in the name of its citizens, should have been funding research into these alternative sources for many years already and they have not. The oil is running out and when we need the electricity badly enough there will be only one place to turn to get it in large enough quantities.