Just because the Michelson-Morley experiment was based on the wrong idea doesn't mean it's not an important experiment in the history of science. It's probably the one that gets pounded into the heads of high-school physics students the most. I mean, you can't explain *why* it was wrong without understanding Special Relativity and E=MC^2, which is pretty cool. And the whole discussion of SR vs. the Lorentz Transform is fascinating in itself. I think the editors of this article were biased toward experiments that were easy to explain and understand, and shied away from experiments that failed but still advanced science.
Depth of Field (DOF) is a function of the small CCD size the the short focal length of the lens. A true digital SLR like the 1Ds will offer wonderful control offer DOF. The 330 is so small that any camera larger than it will go better. I'd look at the Canon G2 or Sony 707.
Go post over at DPReview.com and you'll get all sorts of good advice.
KIP THORNE: I believe we will know in ten to 15 years when we have the full laws of quantum gravity in our hands. My best guess, and I would be willing to lay a fairly heavy odds on this on a bet with Hawking but he won't take the other side, my best guess is that when we have those full laws in our hands they will say no, you cannot make a time machine and go backward in time ever. But until we have those full laws we just have to leave it as a possibility that remains a possibility.
STEPHEN HAWKING: I wouldn't take a bet against the existence of time machines. My opponent might have seen the future and knows the answer.
Well... I don't see this as being an issue until we actually find something on the Moon or Mars that's worth staking a claim on.
Right now, in 2002, interplanetary travel is a pipe dream, beyond the reach of all of us. Maybe in a decade we'll be able to say otherwise. Maybe fifty years from now we'll be able to have a conversation about whether Mars should be a colony, a soverign country on the same level as Earth's nation-states, or a "peer planet" to Earth or maybe even something else.
I think whatever debates people are having about the UN will be resolved by then. Funny how, in science fiction, there's a tacit assumption that planets where the land mass is divided among competing, soverign nation-states is considered a quaint concept that intelligent beings eventually grow out of as part of their evolution, but try talking about that in real-world terms and people get very, very emotional about it. The debates we are currently having about "globalization" are just the beginning, I would say...
I was with the author of the National Review article, right up to the point where he started bashing the UN. He retreats into the tired old right-wing attacks without really backing up anything he's saying.
Why wouldn't an arrangement based upon international cooperation work? Why does he reject it out of hand? Why can't we use Antarctica as a model for off-world activity? I mean, have we ever had any problems down there?
All I Want...
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Arguing A.I.
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Is a PDA I can talk to. Imagine a Palm Pilot with a microphone. You press the "record" button and say, "I have a doctor's appointment at one o'clock on Friday. Remind me one hour ahead of time." The Palm Pilot not only can parse your speech, but "understand" what you want it to do and do it with no further action necessary on your part.
I know this sounds trivial, but we've been promised something like this for years. And no one can realisitically tell us when we'll have it. Also, this isn't just AI for use in yuppie toys. It would be a revolution in the usability of computers by the handicapped.
The truth is I get really sick of these discussions because they've been going on for years and we still don't have anything to show for it. Unless you count things like the Microsoft Paperclip, which supossedly has fairly deep AI in it.
Oh well...
Re:This is like the Randal Schwarz Case...
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McOwen Case Settled
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· Score: 1
My original point is that whether the guy deserves my support or not doesn't matter. What matters is that the current body of law (both "on-the-books" law and case law) is pretty pathetic in terms of how the rights of companies and other institutions who run computer labs are balanced against the rights of individuals not to be harassed just because they overstepped their duties and pissed off their employer. Computer crime is a serious matter, but a "firing offense" is not the same thing as illegally trespassing onto or stealing company property. And stealing computer cycles is not the same thing as stealing trade secrets or embezzling company funds.
When that kind of common sense makes it into the body of law I'll breathe a lot easier.
It seems like the key issue here is that when a sysadmin gets too "chummy" with his or her network, and treats it like his own backyard, sooner or later there will be negative consequences. And if you get dragged into court, and try to prove that what you did wasn't that really all that bad because your workplace had a lax culture when it comes to security enforcement, and besides that no tangible damage was done, it doesn't seem to work because the law bans "unauthorized access" but doesn't hold the "authorizing party" to any real standard of accountability. This makes false or grossly exaggerated accusations very difficult to defend against.
It's a collision between the culture of the courts and the culture of being a sysadmin. I think a few states have better laws (i.e., the "victim" has to meet a higher standard to show how the unauthorized acts caused harm), but I'm not sure which ones.
Forgive me for being an amateur, but all they are saying here is that some scientists got some neutrons to display observable QM behavior in response to gravity. Quantum gravity as theorized requires a particle to bear the force (gravitons). If they had discovered gravitons interacting with the neutrons this would have been an epoch-making discovery. What we have here is a "stunning observational achievment" but to say we're all just going to pack up GR and move on to the next level is a bit premature.
If the question "What's the best revenue/business model for a growing web
site, given the current conditions in the dot-com world" could be answered
in a satisfactory manner simply by posting it to Slashdot, then the world
would be a very different place from what it actually is.
Having said that, I still wish you the best of luck in your efforts.
The one thing I'm curious about is how this affects the non-profit FFRDC's (Federally Funded Research and Development Corporations) like Rand, Mitre, BBN, etc. Do they follow the Federal pay scales?
When I was in my 20's (the 80's) I tried a few times to work in those places but it never worked out. Then as I met people who did work for those
places they'd always complain about budget cuts and the whole post-cold-war thing.
I'm still curious about these places, after all they still hold an important place in the history of computing and the internet in particular, and I assume there's still some prestige factor in being able to say you work there, or did at some point in your career. Thanks in advance for any info.
EVs are a net loss for the local environment around the power stations,
the greenies don't want us to build the one type of powerstation (with
current technology) that minimizes polution -- fission reactors.
I agree, but the problem is more than just the greenies. Nuclear power
is rapidly falling out of favor these days for a number of reasons. We've
been trying to do nuclear right for almost 40 years and we still can't
solve problems like the fact that the waste products are among the most
toxic substances known to man, and also contribute to fears of nuclear
proliferation, which gives a lot of folks the willies in the post-cold-war
world.
The worst part is that we're still nowhere near a breakthrough on fusion
after twenty years, and as far as more advanced, safer designs for fission
reactors, where's the research being done? It's almost nonexistent.
So we're still relying on fossil fuels and no one can see where this is
going end, except in some sort of ecological disaster in 100 or 200 years.
Maybe more, maybe less, who knows. And no one knows how to put limits on
the individual desire to consume and reproduce, which is of course the root
of the problem.
There are a lot of things that can lead to Programmer Burnout. My experince is that most of the time, programmers who are burning out, and looking for "creative" ways to get back on track, are working on projects that are having problems (I wonder if any Mozilla programmers are posting into this thread (just kidding (sort of:-o))). Anyways the types of problems any non-trival development project can have are numerous, and can have a variety of effects on the invidual programmers working on it. One of the skills of a seasoned programmer is the ability to spot these situations.
Sometimes it's that you are being asked to do something beyond your abilities. This is good when you get to learn new stuff on company time, but if you're expected to, for example, write a command-processor when you don't have a CS degree and haven't been exposed to lex or yacc or bison before, then you have a boss who's either doesn't know what he's doing, or does but should be ashamed of himself.
Most programmers, especially those early in their careers, get to do lots of maintenance/enhancement programming. This requires the ability to read large amounts of other people's code and understand it, but it also requires time that your boss should be allocating to you, separate and apart from the time expected to actually do the maintenance/enhancement tasks. Also, does all this archaic code have comments? Functional specs? Did the previous programmers leave anything to help you out, or does this code look like too many people have been over it, each for a short time. Maybe the code itself is a clue that you're working someplace where the management culture with regards to the development process is dysfunctional.
One of the things that can make a huge difference is that you feel you can ask for help when you need it, both from your managers and your peers. If you are in a work culture where it's deadly to admit you don't know something, but at the same time the information you need to get from Point A to Point B isn't readily available, then something is very wrong.
If you are on a Death March project, you hate your job, and you just can't work up the motivation to get out of your rut, then you have to start looking at ways to make the best of a bad situation. You can walk away, or you can go to your boss and say someting like "This situation is screwed and I'm ready to quit. But if we can put all the bullshit and bad feelings in the past and find a way to move forward, then I'll do the best I can to stay and make this situation work". If your boss doesn't fire you on the spot, that's the sign that you have a chance. You should feel like you can re-negotiate deadlines with out getting that The-Other-Shoe-Is-About-To-Drop feeling. However, you should never threaten to quit unless you're prepared to do it for real. As with any relationship, you usually have to be willing to risk the whole enchilada if you're to have any chance at causing a genuine change in the power dynamic.
As you move through your career, one of the things you will learn is that people who are good at managing programmers are rare. You will encounter more bad managers than good ones. Once you realize you are working under a bad manager, try to make a good-faith effort to straighten things out. A lot of the time bad managers are just good people who lack political or interpersonal skill, or lack the judgement to assess what it takes to move a development project to completion, and then get the needed support from upper management. But once you've done your due diligence and things haven't changed, move on and don't look back. Over time you'll get better and telling the difference between good places to work and bad ones.
Sorry if I rambled too much. Bottom line - software development is inherently difficult. Don't dump on yourself if things are going badly. It may just be you, but it's far more likely that your experience of the situtation is a clue to deeper problems in your work environment. As they say on TV, the truth is out there.
I think people are missing the point here. Hypercard was a brilliant product, ahead of it's time, and pointed the way to Tim Berners-Lee and the World Wide Web, which literally changed the world (Note: I have no personal knowledge as to wheter TBL ever used Hypercard).
The whole point of Open-Source, however, is that an OS that does not come bundled with a REAL development toolkit that can produce REAL binary object code, must be considered a closed system. In the case of the Mac it has always been tough as nails for the end-user to get to the holy grail of making his own object-code, double-clickable, icon-on-the-desktop, standalone application.
I personally haven't used Macs much since my college days (the 80's when System 6.0.whatever was the norm, before it became MacOS). As far as OS X is concerned, I'll be the first to do handsprings when I can download my favorite tarball onto a Mac, get to a shell prompt, untar it, run a./configure followed by a make, and have the end result be a real double-clickable application.
A lot of people have been waiting a very long time for that.
The problem is that Princess Mononoke was a HUGE hit in Japan - the highest grossing domestic film in that country's history. A "good" anime-on-DVD allows people to view it either dubbed, subbed, or neither - in other words just plain Japanese.
Since there has NOT been a Japanese-language, region-2 DVD of PM for the Japanese market, the release of a US (region 1) DVD which can be enjoyed in all three ways I just described is problematic to the people who will eventually distribute the PM R2 DVD in Japan.
Here in the US PM only did small art-house-type business - less that $30 million IIRC. So it comes down to pissing off a relatively small market of anime fans, or risking the revenue that will be provided when the most popular domestic film in Japanese history makes it to DVD in its home country.
Then there's the other issue - the fact that the powers-that-be in Japan (Buena Vista Japan to be specific) don't think they can trust the region encoding mechanism to enforce international market segmentation. This is doubly ironic, since the main reason for that nasty MPAA-DeCSS legal fight is (presumably) the DVD industry asserting its rights against people who want to do things like unraveling region encoding.
Hopefully, this is just going to be a Princess Mononoke thing. I think the main thing people are on about (go look at Ain't It Cool News for an example) is that this is going to affect all the other Miyazaki titles (Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa/Castle in the Sky), and NONE of them will get the "proper" DVD treatment (look at "Grave of the Firefiles" for an example of a well-done anime-on-DVD).
I apologize for using/. as a place to post a CD-wanted ad, but I was wondering if anyone out there knows where I can get the original Conet Project 4CD set. I've been looking for about a year (around the same time as the original Irdial pressing sold out). The folks at Aquarius in SF don't have any to sell (no surprise there). I sent an email to Irdial last fall, and someone wrote back saying that there were plans to re-press the 4CD set, but nothing seems to have come of it.
Thanks, as always for any help on this. If someone has a copy they'd be willing to part with, you can email me at rss@idiom.com. Again, thanks.
I predict that this issue won't be settled for a long, long time. IMHO an appropritate analogy is the UN and the Security Council. Most people agree that we need to change the rules for who gets to be on it but no one agrees on exactly how it's to be done or who gets to join. Therefore, the system that was put in place by the victors of WWII will remain in place for the forseeable future.
By the same token, it looks like the top-level structure that's been in place since the days of ARPA and the RFC process will remain, since no one seems to be able to take leadership and create a workable consensus. Therefore, all the discussion taking place will almost certainly be for nought, and the current system will prevail. Hopefully, that won't be such a bad thing after all.
- Will the show focus on the adventures aboard a single starship or will they try to move the focus around to make it interesting? (prediction: it will be set on the "first" Enterprise (remember that scene from ST:TMP?)
- Will there be a central "Alpha" Captain figure or will it be more of an ensemble show? (prediction: yes there will be a central Captain character)
- Will the Captain chatacter be a white male? (prediction: The powers that be at Paramount know that Mulgrew was a mistake and will not repeat. We will get a strong charismatic white male at the helm. Besides, how can you have a female Captain when she'll still have to wear a miniskirt?:)
- Given that there is no Holodeck in the 22nd century, what device will they use as a backdoor to introduce whatever plot kludge is deemed necessary once the writers run out of ideas? (prediction: this one's a no-brainer - time travel is the perfect backdoor for bad SF writing)
- How will they handle stuff like spacecraft designs that need to be cool but still predate the TOS designs? (prediction: this is the one problem that will get solved in a cool manner. The rest will get screwed up.)
Just my $0.02. But wait BZZZZT!! I win a prize for being the one zillionth person to post an opinion about Star Trek on the Internet!!! Film at 11!!!! Yeahhh!!!!!
I'm also one of the Silicon Valley folks who caught this on KTEH last month. It's a good show since it tries to explain what it's like to work in the software biz to people who would normally never have a chance to find out what that world is like. If you work for a software startup, you can tape this and give it to your parents.
It has some really irritating parts. For one thing they give way too much screen time to JWZ. Maybe it's just me, but when he talks about how the whole stock option game is a con, well, Jamie, that's easy for you to say. (Note: I have nothing against JWZ. I use xscreensaver in Matrix mode on all my workstations;-).
The main thing I wonder about now that I've seen it, is what happened to the other Netscape people who were featured (Tara Hernandez, Michael Toy, Jim Roskind, Scott Collins). They only mention very briefly what happened to each of them. I'd like to see a "Where Are They Now" follow-up someday.
Well, here I am, another computer geek who doesn't really grok Physics, and I'm going to post. "MrScience" if that's your name, the distinction between "anti-gravity" and "gravitation shielding" is a moot point. In each case, you run up against Einstein and General Relativity. If I understand the gist of GR, it tells us in very strong terms that you cannot shield gravity.
Or to be more precise, you cannot, in a particular region of space, create a local nullification or diminishing of a the gravitational field created by a nearby massive object. To do so would be to interfere with the space's basic ability to sustain matter. In other words, Einstein's definition of gravity in terms of curvature of four-dimensional spacetime does not allow for a nullification effect.
MrScience, if you are proposing that Podkletnov's work implies the necessity for a correction to GR, could you please give us some idea of what that correction might look like?
Before flaming me or calling me clueless, let's get some basic facts straight:
Einstein gave us General Relativity, which tells us that what we experience as gravity is actually a manifestation of massive objects causing curvature in a four-dimensional spacetime continuum. It tells us nothing about what kind of internal mechanism gravity relies upon to function. It doesn't even require such a mechanism to exist. Many people respond to this by deciding that Einstein wasn't really all that brilliant. I tend to go in the other direction, if you take my meaning.
Quantum Mechanics tells us that all forces found in nature can be understood in terms of subatomic particles exchanging energy with one another.
The central question in modern Physics is: How do we reconcile GR and QM to create a unified theory of Gravity that explains how Gravity works? That explains what Gravity *IS* ????
Over the past fifty years, thousands of brilliant minds have been banging their heads up against this question and come up empty.
It's strange, that something as simple as why an apple falls to the ground when you let go of it cuts to the heart of the deepest mysteries of the universe. But it does. Deal with it.
Bottom line: We'd all like to defy Gravity and levitate around. We want to solve the strong AI problem and get computers so smart that we can talk to them and they'd understand what we want. We want things like Warp Drive so we can get around Special Relativity and travel to distant stars in reasonable periods of time, and see if they have life-sustaining planets orbiting them. These things are not going to happen soon, and they may never happen at all. If any one of the three things I've mentioned in this paragraph happen in my lifetime I'll be very happy, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hard problems are hard, and Einstein was more of a genius than 99.99% of people understand. Please try to get that. Thanks.
I'm surprised no one's really raised the issue of money yet. If there's any one thing that puts a wedge into the left/right dynamic of geek politics, it's the way all this money that's being plowed into the Internet economy has put a lot of us in awkward positions.
Speaking as a geek working in Silicon Valley, I must confess that I'm quite a hypocrite, since if anyone asks, I'll profess to have liberal ideals. I certainly want to see Gays/Lesbians (the GLBT community, to be PC) get stronger protection under the law. And I also want to see the poor get more of a leg up, like it was back in the 60's under Lyndon Johnson.
But on the other hand I sure as hell don't want to see any *genuine* economic restructuring that would endanger my ability to cash in my stock options and use that money to finally afford a decent, well-located house in the Bay Area.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I respect and admire RMS for what he stands for, but at the same time I'd never want his ideals to come to fruition because it might get in the way of my financial plans. Once you've gotten used to being a highly-paid software professional, and you have a wife, kids, mortgage, etc., all of the sudden things start looking a lot different.
Sorry if I sound like yuppie scum from hell, but I think this aspect of the question is at least as valid as the others that have been discussed here.
F2K was good, could have been a lot better. Mind, you, I've never done the tedious, painstaking work that even mediocre animation demands of you, so I don't have a lot of right to pass judgment, but...
I really wish the animators had taken more advantage of the possibilities of IMAX. Most of it was conventional animation blown up to IMAX, just like Pokemon was TV animation blown up to normal theatrical standards.
If you get the chance, see the IMAX "Old Man And The Sea" that got an Oscar nomination recently. It was playing at the Sony IMAX in New York until F2K premiered (Disney is strong-arming all IMAX venues into not showing any other IMAX movies while they show F2K - This is why in Los Angeles they had to build a TENT to show F2K even though the California Science Center 10 miles away has a new state-of-the-art theater with really nice seats - The tent had sucky seats and was too damn cold, and Disney still wants $20 a pop).
Anyways, back to Old Man And The Sea. This IMAX animated short is a true work of art and puts every short in F2K to shame. If you are a fan of top-drawer animation you MUST see this film. Hopefully it will win the Oscar and then maybe more IMAX venues will be shamed into screening it even though it's never going to be a huge draw.
Now back to F2K. When you take out the live-action interludes and Sorcerer's Apprentice, it's a damn short movie. I doubt the new animated material was more than 40 minutes. And, speaking of Sorcerer's Apprentice, it's a digital transfer/remastering job by Cinesite. IMHO they did a poor job. If you pay close attention you will see digital artifacts in several places.
Now for the stuff I liked. Rhapsody in Blue was quite good. Pines of Rome was good except for the disparity between the CGI whales and hand-drawn backgrounds, and the fact that it was inspired by those stupid "Wyland" posters they used to sell at the mall back in 1992. My favorite was the last one - The Firebird Suite. It was my favorite because I absolutely love Princess Mononoke and this bit was, well, not quite a rip-off but damn close.
It's pretty obvious that whoever thought this up saw Mononoke Hime in Japan in 1997 and was inspired to do this one. It's about a Goddess/Nymph/Female version of the Forest God with Ashitaka's trusty elk as a sidekick. I was tempted to yell out "Yakkuru" every time the elk was on screen, but I knew it would get me thrown out so I didn't.
Bottom line - F2K was pretty good, given that any animation collection, be it Spike & Mike or whatever, is basically a hit-and-miss kind of thing. It didn't have the feeling of being tied together into a creative whole the way the original Fantasia did. In the end, it begs the question of whether ANYTHING that is put out by modern-day Hollywood deserves to be called art in any real sense of the word. IMHO the original Fantasia did, and this one doesn't even come close.
But please see it for yourself so you can have the chance to disagree with me. Just don't see it in LA because that damn tent is too damn cold. And don't see it in a curved IMAX/Omnimax like the San Jose Tech Museum because curved IMAX is an abomination. Also don't forget to catch "Old Man And The Sea" if it ever gets a wide release. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because the Michelson-Morley experiment was based on the wrong
idea doesn't mean it's not an important experiment in the history of
science. It's probably the one that gets pounded into the heads of
high-school physics students the most. I mean, you can't explain
*why* it was wrong without understanding Special Relativity and
E=MC^2, which is pretty cool. And the whole discussion of SR vs. the
Lorentz Transform is fascinating in itself. I think the editors of
this article were biased toward experiments that were easy to explain
and understand, and shied away from experiments that failed but still
advanced science.
Depth of Field (DOF) is a function of the small CCD size the the short
focal length of the lens. A true digital SLR like the 1Ds will offer
wonderful control offer DOF. The 330 is so small that any camera
larger than it will go better. I'd look at the Canon G2 or Sony 707.
Go post over at DPReview.com and you'll get all sorts of good advice.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2612time
Here's my favorite part:
KIP THORNE: I believe we will know in ten to 15 years when we have the
full laws of quantum gravity in our hands. My best guess, and I would
be willing to lay a fairly heavy odds on this on a bet with Hawking
but he won't take the other side, my best guess is that when we have
those full laws in our hands they will say no, you cannot make a time
machine and go backward in time ever. But until we have those full
laws we just have to leave it as a possibility that remains a
possibility.
STEPHEN HAWKING: I wouldn't take a bet against the existence of time
machines. My opponent might have seen the future and knows the answer.
I think this sums things up quite nicely.
Well... I don't see this as being an issue until we actually find
something on the Moon or Mars that's worth staking a claim on.
Right now, in 2002, interplanetary travel is a pipe dream, beyond the
reach of all of us. Maybe in a decade we'll be able to say otherwise.
Maybe fifty years from now we'll be able to have a conversation about
whether Mars should be a colony, a soverign country on the same level
as Earth's nation-states, or a "peer planet" to Earth or maybe even
something else.
I think whatever debates people are having about the UN will be
resolved by then. Funny how, in science fiction, there's a tacit
assumption that planets where the land mass is divided among
competing, soverign nation-states is considered a quaint concept that
intelligent beings eventually grow out of as part of their evolution,
but try talking about that in real-world terms and people get very,
very emotional about it. The debates we are currently having about
"globalization" are just the beginning, I would say...
I was with the author of the National Review article, right up to the
point where he started bashing the UN. He retreats into the tired old
right-wing attacks without really backing up anything he's saying.
Why wouldn't an arrangement based upon international cooperation work?
Why does he reject it out of hand? Why can't we use Antarctica as a
model for off-world activity? I mean, have we ever had any problems
down there?
Is a PDA I can talk to. Imagine a Palm Pilot with a microphone. You press the "record" button and say, "I have a doctor's appointment at one o'clock on Friday. Remind me one hour ahead of time." The Palm Pilot not only can parse your speech, but "understand" what you want it to do and do it with no further action necessary on your part.
I know this sounds trivial, but we've been promised something like this for years. And no one can realisitically tell us when we'll have it. Also, this isn't just AI for use in yuppie toys. It would be a revolution in the usability of computers by the handicapped.
The truth is I get really sick of these discussions because they've been going on for years and we still don't have anything to show for it. Unless you count things like the Microsoft Paperclip, which supossedly has fairly deep AI in it.
Oh well...
My original point is that whether the guy deserves my support or not doesn't matter. What matters is that the current body of law (both "on-the-books" law and case law) is pretty pathetic in terms of how the rights of companies and other institutions who run computer labs are balanced against the rights of individuals not to be harassed just because they overstepped their duties and pissed off their employer. Computer crime is a serious matter, but a "firing offense" is not the same thing as illegally trespassing onto or stealing company property. And stealing computer cycles is not the same thing as stealing trade secrets or embezzling company funds.
When that kind of common sense makes it into the body of law I'll breathe a lot easier.
It seems like the key issue here is that when a sysadmin gets too "chummy" with his or her network, and treats it like his own backyard, sooner or later there will be negative consequences. And if you get dragged into court, and try to prove that what you did wasn't that really all that bad because your workplace had a lax culture when it comes to security enforcement, and besides that no tangible damage was done, it doesn't seem to work because the law bans "unauthorized access" but doesn't hold the "authorizing party" to any real standard of accountability. This makes false or grossly exaggerated accusations very difficult to defend against.
It's a collision between the culture of the courts and the culture of being a sysadmin. I think a few states have better laws (i.e., the "victim" has to meet a higher standard to show how the unauthorized acts caused harm), but I'm not sure which ones.
Forgive me for being an amateur, but all they are saying here is that some scientists got some neutrons to display observable QM behavior in response to gravity. Quantum gravity as theorized requires a particle to bear the force (gravitons). If they had discovered gravitons interacting with the neutrons this would have been an epoch-making discovery. What we have here is a "stunning observational achievment" but to say we're all just going to pack up GR and move on to the next level is a bit premature.
Having said that, I still wish you the best of luck in your efforts.
When I was in my 20's (the 80's) I tried a few times to work in those places but it never worked out. Then as I met people who did work for those places they'd always complain about budget cuts and the whole post-cold-war thing.
I'm still curious about these places, after all they still hold an important place in the history of computing and the internet in particular, and I assume there's still some prestige factor in being able to say you work there, or did at some point in your career. Thanks in advance for any info.
I agree, but the problem is more than just the greenies. Nuclear power is rapidly falling out of favor these days for a number of reasons. We've been trying to do nuclear right for almost 40 years and we still can't solve problems like the fact that the waste products are among the most toxic substances known to man, and also contribute to fears of nuclear proliferation, which gives a lot of folks the willies in the post-cold-war world.
The worst part is that we're still nowhere near a breakthrough on fusion after twenty years, and as far as more advanced, safer designs for fission reactors, where's the research being done? It's almost nonexistent.
So we're still relying on fossil fuels and no one can see where this is going end, except in some sort of ecological disaster in 100 or 200 years. Maybe more, maybe less, who knows. And no one knows how to put limits on the individual desire to consume and reproduce, which is of course the root of the problem.
Sometimes it's that you are being asked to do something beyond your abilities. This is good when you get to learn new stuff on company time, but if you're expected to, for example, write a command-processor when you don't have a CS degree and haven't been exposed to lex or yacc or bison before, then you have a boss who's either doesn't know what he's doing, or does but should be ashamed of himself.
Most programmers, especially those early in their careers, get to do lots of maintenance/enhancement programming. This requires the ability to read large amounts of other people's code and understand it, but it also requires time that your boss should be allocating to you, separate and apart from the time expected to actually do the maintenance/enhancement tasks. Also, does all this archaic code have comments? Functional specs? Did the previous programmers leave anything to help you out, or does this code look like too many people have been over it, each for a short time. Maybe the code itself is a clue that you're working someplace where the management culture with regards to the development process is dysfunctional.
One of the things that can make a huge difference is that you feel you can ask for help when you need it, both from your managers and your peers. If you are in a work culture where it's deadly to admit you don't know something, but at the same time the information you need to get from Point A to Point B isn't readily available, then something is very wrong.
If you are on a Death March project, you hate your job, and you just can't work up the motivation to get out of your rut, then you have to start looking at ways to make the best of a bad situation. You can walk away, or you can go to your boss and say someting like "This situation is screwed and I'm ready to quit. But if we can put all the bullshit and bad feelings in the past and find a way to move forward, then I'll do the best I can to stay and make this situation work". If your boss doesn't fire you on the spot, that's the sign that you have a chance. You should feel like you can re-negotiate deadlines with out getting that The-Other-Shoe-Is-About-To-Drop feeling. However, you should never threaten to quit unless you're prepared to do it for real. As with any relationship, you usually have to be willing to risk the whole enchilada if you're to have any chance at causing a genuine change in the power dynamic.
As you move through your career, one of the things you will learn is that people who are good at managing programmers are rare. You will encounter more bad managers than good ones. Once you realize you are working under a bad manager, try to make a good-faith effort to straighten things out. A lot of the time bad managers are just good people who lack political or interpersonal skill, or lack the judgement to assess what it takes to move a development project to completion, and then get the needed support from upper management. But once you've done your due diligence and things haven't changed, move on and don't look back. Over time you'll get better and telling the difference between good places to work and bad ones.
Sorry if I rambled too much. Bottom line - software development is inherently difficult. Don't dump on yourself if things are going badly. It may just be you, but it's far more likely that your experience of the situtation is a clue to deeper problems in your work environment. As they say on TV, the truth is out there.
The whole point of Open-Source, however, is that an OS that does not come bundled with a REAL development toolkit that can produce REAL binary object code, must be considered a closed system. In the case of the Mac it has always been tough as nails for the end-user to get to the holy grail of making his own object-code, double-clickable, icon-on-the-desktop, standalone application.
I personally haven't used Macs much since my college days (the 80's when System 6.0.whatever was the norm, before it became MacOS). As far as OS X is concerned, I'll be the first to do handsprings when I can download my favorite tarball onto a Mac, get to a shell prompt, untar it, run a ./configure followed by a make, and have the end result be a real double-clickable application.
A lot of people have been waiting a very long time for that.
Since there has NOT been a Japanese-language, region-2 DVD of PM for the Japanese market, the release of a US (region 1) DVD which can be enjoyed in all three ways I just described is problematic to the people who will eventually distribute the PM R2 DVD in Japan.
Here in the US PM only did small art-house-type business - less that $30 million IIRC. So it comes down to pissing off a relatively small market of anime fans, or risking the revenue that will be provided when the most popular domestic film in Japanese history makes it to DVD in its home country.
Then there's the other issue - the fact that the powers-that-be in Japan (Buena Vista Japan to be specific) don't think they can trust the region encoding mechanism to enforce international market segmentation. This is doubly ironic, since the main reason for that nasty MPAA-DeCSS legal fight is (presumably) the DVD industry asserting its rights against people who want to do things like unraveling region encoding.
Hopefully, this is just going to be a Princess Mononoke thing. I think the main thing people are on about (go look at Ain't It Cool News for an example) is that this is going to affect all the other Miyazaki titles (Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Laputa/Castle in the Sky), and NONE of them will get the "proper" DVD treatment (look at "Grave of the Firefiles" for an example of a well-done anime-on-DVD).
Thanks, as always for any help on this. If someone has a copy they'd be willing to part with, you can email me at rss@idiom.com. Again, thanks.
By the same token, it looks like the top-level structure that's been in place since the days of ARPA and the RFC process will remain, since no one seems to be able to take leadership and create a workable consensus. Therefore, all the discussion taking place will almost certainly be for nought, and the current system will prevail. Hopefully, that won't be such a bad thing after all.
- Will the show focus on the adventures aboard a single starship or will they try to move the focus around to make it interesting? (prediction: it will be set on the "first" Enterprise (remember that scene from ST:TMP?)
- Will there be a central "Alpha" Captain figure or will it be more of an ensemble show? (prediction: yes there will be a central Captain character)
- Will the Captain chatacter be a white male? (prediction: The powers that be at Paramount know that Mulgrew was a mistake and will not repeat. We will get a strong charismatic white male at the helm. Besides, how can you have a female Captain when she'll still have to wear a miniskirt? :)
- Given that there is no Holodeck in the 22nd century, what device will they use as a backdoor to introduce whatever plot kludge is deemed necessary once the writers run out of ideas? (prediction: this one's a no-brainer - time travel is the perfect backdoor for bad SF writing)
- How will they handle stuff like spacecraft designs that need to be cool but still predate the TOS designs? (prediction: this is the one problem that will get solved in a cool manner. The rest will get screwed up.)
Just my $0.02. But wait BZZZZT!! I win a prize for being the one zillionth person to post an opinion about Star Trek on the Internet!!! Film at 11!!!! Yeahhh!!!!!
I'm also one of the Silicon Valley folks who caught this on KTEH last month. It's a good show since it tries to explain what it's like to work in the software biz to people who would normally never have a chance to find out what that world is like. If you work for a software startup, you can tape this and give it to your parents.
It has some really irritating parts. For one thing they give way too much screen time to JWZ. Maybe it's just me, but when he talks about how the whole stock option game is a con, well, Jamie, that's easy for you to say. (Note: I have nothing against JWZ. I use xscreensaver in Matrix mode on all my workstations ;-).
The main thing I wonder about now that I've seen it, is what happened to the other Netscape people who were featured (Tara Hernandez, Michael Toy, Jim Roskind, Scott Collins). They only mention very briefly what happened to each of them. I'd like to see a "Where Are They Now" follow-up someday.
Well, here I am, another computer geek who doesn't really grok Physics, and I'm going to post. "MrScience" if that's your name, the distinction between "anti-gravity" and "gravitation shielding" is a moot point. In each case, you run up against Einstein and General Relativity. If I understand the gist of GR, it tells us in very strong terms that you cannot shield gravity.
Or to be more precise, you cannot, in a particular region of space, create a local nullification or diminishing of a the gravitational field created by a nearby massive object. To do so would be to interfere with the space's basic ability to sustain matter. In other words, Einstein's definition of gravity in terms of curvature of four-dimensional spacetime does not allow for a nullification effect.
MrScience, if you are proposing that Podkletnov's work implies the necessity for a correction to GR, could you please give us some idea of what that correction might look like?
Before flaming me or calling me clueless, let's get some basic facts straight:
It's strange, that something as simple as why an apple falls to the ground when you let go of it cuts to the heart of the deepest mysteries of the universe. But it does. Deal with it.
Bottom line: We'd all like to defy Gravity and levitate around. We want to solve the strong AI problem and get computers so smart that we can talk to them and they'd understand what we want. We want things like Warp Drive so we can get around Special Relativity and travel to distant stars in reasonable periods of time, and see if they have life-sustaining planets orbiting them. These things are not going to happen soon, and they may never happen at all. If any one of the three things I've mentioned in this paragraph happen in my lifetime I'll be very happy, but I'm not holding my breath.
Hard problems are hard, and Einstein was more of a genius than 99.99% of people understand. Please try to get that. Thanks.
I'm surprised no one's really raised the issue of money yet. If there's any one thing that puts a wedge into the left/right dynamic of geek politics, it's the way all this money that's being plowed into the Internet economy has put a lot of us in awkward positions.
Speaking as a geek working in Silicon Valley, I must confess that I'm quite a hypocrite, since if anyone asks, I'll profess to have liberal ideals. I certainly want to see Gays/Lesbians (the GLBT community, to be PC) get stronger protection under the law. And I also want to see the poor get more of a leg up, like it was back in the 60's under Lyndon Johnson.
But on the other hand I sure as hell don't want to see any *genuine* economic restructuring that would endanger my ability to cash in my stock options and use that money to finally afford a decent, well-located house in the Bay Area.
I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I respect and admire RMS for what he stands for, but at the same time I'd never want his ideals to come to fruition because it might get in the way of my financial plans. Once you've gotten used to being a highly-paid software professional, and you have a wife, kids, mortgage, etc., all of the sudden things start looking a lot different.
Sorry if I sound like yuppie scum from hell, but I think this aspect of the question is at least as valid as the others that have been discussed here.
Just a few thoughts...
F2K was good, could have been a lot better. Mind, you, I've never done the tedious, painstaking work that even mediocre animation demands of you, so I don't have a lot of right to pass judgment, but...
I really wish the animators had taken more advantage of the possibilities of IMAX. Most of it was conventional animation blown up to IMAX, just like Pokemon was TV animation blown up to normal theatrical standards.
If you get the chance, see the IMAX "Old Man And The Sea" that got an Oscar nomination recently. It was playing at the Sony IMAX in New York until F2K premiered (Disney is strong-arming all IMAX venues into not showing any other IMAX movies while they show F2K - This is why in Los Angeles they had to build a TENT to show F2K even though the California Science Center 10 miles away has a new state-of-the-art theater with really nice seats - The tent had sucky seats and was too damn cold, and Disney still wants $20 a pop).
Anyways, back to Old Man And The Sea. This IMAX animated short is a true work of art and puts every short in F2K to shame. If you are a fan of top-drawer animation you MUST see this film. Hopefully it will win the Oscar and then maybe more IMAX venues will be shamed into screening it even though it's never going to be a huge draw.
Now back to F2K. When you take out the live-action interludes and Sorcerer's Apprentice, it's a damn short movie. I doubt the new animated material was more than 40 minutes. And, speaking of Sorcerer's Apprentice, it's a digital transfer/remastering job by Cinesite. IMHO they did a poor job. If you pay close attention you will see digital artifacts in several places.
Now for the stuff I liked. Rhapsody in Blue was quite good. Pines of Rome was good except for the disparity between the CGI whales and hand-drawn backgrounds, and the fact that it was inspired by those stupid "Wyland" posters they used to sell at the mall back in 1992. My favorite was the last one - The Firebird Suite. It was my favorite because I absolutely love Princess Mononoke and this bit was, well, not quite a rip-off but damn close.
It's pretty obvious that whoever thought this up saw Mononoke Hime in Japan in 1997 and was inspired to do this one. It's about a Goddess/Nymph/Female version of the Forest God with Ashitaka's trusty elk as a sidekick. I was tempted to yell out "Yakkuru" every time the elk was on screen, but I knew it would get me thrown out so I didn't.
Bottom line - F2K was pretty good, given that any animation collection, be it Spike & Mike or whatever, is basically a hit-and-miss kind of thing. It didn't have the feeling of being tied together into a creative whole the way the original Fantasia did. In the end, it begs the question of whether ANYTHING that is put out by modern-day Hollywood deserves to be called art in any real sense of the word. IMHO the original Fantasia did, and this one doesn't even come close.
But please see it for yourself so you can have the chance to disagree with me. Just don't see it in LA because that damn tent is too damn cold. And don't see it in a curved IMAX/Omnimax like the San Jose Tech Museum because curved IMAX is an abomination. Also don't forget to catch "Old Man And The Sea" if it ever gets a wide release. Thanks.