Yeah, I know, right? Doesn't that just drive you nuts?
The word "volcanism" came about in 1864 (according to Merriam-Webster), then just the other day, in 1877, some young upstart misspelled it "vulcanism" and the new name stuck.
I mean, the word "volcanism" existed a whole 13 years before someone added the modern variant a mere 133 years ago.
Yes, "stratellite" is a poor term for many reasons, one of which being that this thing will never reach anywhere near stratospheric altitude, one being that this is not a satellite, and a third being that it's just a goddamn stupid word to make up.
However, commercial airliners routinely fly into the stratosphere. The stratosphere starts at under 33,000 feet, while a typical transatlantic flight would tend to fly at between 35,000 and 39,000 feet. Admittedly, they don't go very far into the stratosphere, but there are probably a good number of commercial airliners up in the stratosphere at any given time.
At a max of 6km (or a tad over 19,500 feet), you're absolutely right. These airships are barely capable of achieving Class A airspace (FL 180, or 18,000 feet, is the minimum altitude to be in Class A airspace).
So "stratellite" is apparently intended to be double-speak for "High Altitude Airship", which the subject of the article is clearly not:)
We appear to have, and further appear to be successfully wielding, the power to make the Earth incompatible with the current population levels of many species, including homo sapiens. Fortunately, these sorts of things have a way of sorting themselves out.
If (as global warming proponents propose is happening) the atmosphere warms up, the oceans will rise, we'll lose some waterfront land, we'll have significant pollution problems from the now-submerged structures along the fishing coastlines, we'll lose arable land and fresh water to drought and to saltwater incursion, storms will become stronger and more frequent disrupting food production in the arable land we have, and we'll reach the point where we cannot raise/harvest enough calories to keep the current population above the starvation line. The system will then inevitably adjust itself. After the Food/Water Wars, the population of humans will probably be smaller by about an order of magnitude or so, and we may have lost most of the technology we enjoy today, and many of the species we know today will be gone, but the Earth will do just fine with the species that survive.
We can't kill Earth, but we can significantly change it from the form we enjoy it in today. We're doing a marvelous job of that, in the name of economic expediency. The Piper's gonna come knocking, and he's gonna want to be paid. Someday.
... hosted on a site that requires you allow Javascript just to read a static-looking page that only provides a summary and a hyperlink to another major malware vector - a PDF file.
They sure appear to use a lot of unnecessary and insecure crap to serve up an article about how everyone else's web designs suck.
I'm thinking "High Altitude Airship" would also be a good term, but it's actually descriptive and not at all clever like inventing a nonsense word composed of the amalgam of two perfectly good words, neither of which even accurately describe the subject.
I think we'll just call it a "Magiragon", which is an mushing together of the words "Magical" and "Dragon". Two other words which do not at all describe this craft, but sound good to 12-year-olds when you smush them together into a single word.
You'd think that would be the case, but there are several reasons why humans are a better solution to this than a computer program:
1. Recognition like this requires complex interpretation. Computers might be able to interpret them, but you have no way of validating that interpretation, and computers are pretty literal about it anyway. Multiple humans with cross-checked results are going to give you (by and large) more accurate results. If we can't manage it with OCR of clearly-written and cleanly-scanned written words (hence projects like "distributed proofreaders" - http://www.pgdp.net/c/ - to put OCR scans of books through multiple human validations to make sure the OCR worked), we're surely not going to do terribly well scanning imperfect photographs of novel landscapes for hard-to-recognize features.
2. Programming such recognition costs time and money. Showing volunteers pictures costs a lot less time and money.
3. Having people volunteer and become actively involved in any aspect of science is good for the popularity of the science. Look at SETI @ Home.
Yes, they probably could get the recognition to acceptable levels. But why bother when there are hordes of free labor willing to do a better job?
Yes, they are. I'm not saying they are violating the GPL at all, only responding to the comment that "most Cisco/Linksys routers are Linux-based".
Those that are, tend to be GPL-compliant. It may take a little time for the code to be released in some rare cases, but it's usually very quick.
Those that are not based in Linux are (by definition) GPL-compliant (or GPL-irrelevant?) (*) because they don't use GPL code, so there's no GPL license to violate.
(*): unless their third party vendor stole GPL code, of course. But there's no accusation of that I've ever heard.
If you shouldn't do something, or don't want people to know about something, you probably shouldn't do it or talk about it in public, or in the presence of someone who is known for revealing secrets.
"Social Network" and "Privacy" are diametric opposites. They are the modern equivalent of bulletin boards (not electronic ones, I mean the cork thingies you still find at the entrances to many supermarkets) except everyone has fingerprint readers and knows who has posted what.
Social networks exist, as a business model, so you may sell aspects of your privacy in return for the convenience of keeping in touch with your friends. Large-scale sites need money in order to survive, and if you aren't paying them money you are paying them in something for the services they provide. Frankly, I'm more concerned about sites that offer to protect me from Facebook "free of charge". Because the First Rule Of Acquisition is that almost no one does anything without a motive for profit. Google? Facebook? I know their motive for profit. I can choose whether or not to participate, knowing what they offer and knowing exactly what they intend to do - sell the shit out of anything I divulge to them to anyone with a bag of gold.
Half of my friends are on a social network, and the other half who really freak out about their privacy are not on a social network. I'm on it, but I post very little that I wouldn't post, say, here on Slashdot or say to my boss at work. And I still understand that other people might say things about me on Facebook that my boss could still read, or Google (or Reuters) could catch me snogging CowboyNeal, whether or not I join and participate in any of the services they offer. There's not a whole lot I can do about such things, and those risks have existed a lot longer than Google or Facebook have been in business. It all started with that nasty invention of the written word, and even Ogg could say nasty things about Zogg and his nasty mastadon fetish behind his back.
That would actually work well, since it would not protect the version as released, only the additions to the work. People can still freely use the old version as-is, or even as a basis for their own derivative works.
If you want to continue profiting from your intellectual property, release a new version every few years that's better than the one you released before. People can then choose between the older version (which is free of copyright encumbrance) or the newer version (which you've put work into to make it more desirable than the old version). Just make sure you do it better than anyone else, because the instant copyright runs out anyone can use it as the basis for new art.
This is the way it should be. If you want to keep getting paid for something you wrote 50 years ago, then you should keep working on it and improving it. Your older versions (for what is not currently, and should be, a reasonable definition of "older") should be available for everyone after you've had a reasonable amount of time to profit from it. "Years" is reasonable. "Generations" is not.
Many Cisco/Linksys routers are, but I wouldn't call it "most" any more. They started building them using a closed-source OS about 3-4 years ago, and actually converted the WRT54G and WRT54GS to it mid-stream. Later, they re-released the Linux version of the WRT54G under the model name "WRT54GL".
Having said all that, Linksys has been pretty good about releasing the source code of those things they use GPL-licensed code for. Unfortunately, they tend to use the Broadcomm radios for which source code is not available, though they do publish their wrappers that control the Broadcomm binary driver.
(a) this is an unprecidented[sic] engineering failure,
Yes, no one has ever had a deep-well fail causing a massive leak before. Oh, wait...
(b) there were multiple safeguards,
... just not ones that many other countries have required for decades, and one report I read mentioned that one of the safety features failed due to a dead battery pack, but other than that...
(c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil
No. It's the least expensive way to get energy, until something like this happens. Then it becomes really, really, really expensive. Just not for the company that was extracting the oil.
And if it's so economically necessary, we could easily afford the $500,000 it would have cost to put the cutoff system that likely would have prevented this, right?
, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
Agreed. That's why you work out "what could possibly go wrong" and think about possible solutions before it happens, and when it does happen you stop thinking about ways to continue to extract the oil and concentrate on ways to stop the flow.
Color me paranoid (which is a lovely shade of lavender with just a hint of puce) but I'm still suspicious of that.
If all the major players are adopting h.264 and encouraging its use by offering it for free, I'm suspicious of the possibility of them suddenly implementing a royalty on free-for-the-end-user video (which is the only thing exempted now) and/or jacking the costs WAY up for any other use once H.264 is a completely adopted standard.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I know, right? Doesn't that just drive you nuts?
The word "volcanism" came about in 1864 (according to Merriam-Webster), then just the other day, in 1877, some young upstart misspelled it "vulcanism" and the new name stuck.
I mean, the word "volcanism" existed a whole 13 years before someone added the modern variant a mere 133 years ago.
I blame the whigs.
Be sure to use an older version of Ubuntu, the color scheme is perfect.
Yes, "stratellite" is a poor term for many reasons, one of which being that this thing will never reach anywhere near stratospheric altitude, one being that this is not a satellite, and a third being that it's just a goddamn stupid word to make up.
However, commercial airliners routinely fly into the stratosphere. The stratosphere starts at under 33,000 feet, while a typical transatlantic flight would tend to fly at between 35,000 and 39,000 feet. Admittedly, they don't go very far into the stratosphere, but there are probably a good number of commercial airliners up in the stratosphere at any given time.
I stand corrected.
At a max of 6km (or a tad over 19,500 feet), you're absolutely right. These airships are barely capable of achieving Class A airspace (FL 180, or 18,000 feet, is the minimum altitude to be in Class A airspace).
So "stratellite" is apparently intended to be double-speak for "High Altitude Airship", which the subject of the article is clearly not :)
Yeah, but remember, they are shooting for version 10^100. They have a long way to go.
We appear to have, and further appear to be successfully wielding, the power to make the Earth incompatible with the current population levels of many species, including homo sapiens. Fortunately, these sorts of things have a way of sorting themselves out.
If (as global warming proponents propose is happening) the atmosphere warms up, the oceans will rise, we'll lose some waterfront land, we'll have significant pollution problems from the now-submerged structures along the fishing coastlines, we'll lose arable land and fresh water to drought and to saltwater incursion, storms will become stronger and more frequent disrupting food production in the arable land we have, and we'll reach the point where we cannot raise/harvest enough calories to keep the current population above the starvation line. The system will then inevitably adjust itself. After the Food/Water Wars, the population of humans will probably be smaller by about an order of magnitude or so, and we may have lost most of the technology we enjoy today, and many of the species we know today will be gone, but the Earth will do just fine with the species that survive.
We can't kill Earth, but we can significantly change it from the form we enjoy it in today. We're doing a marvelous job of that, in the name of economic expediency. The Piper's gonna come knocking, and he's gonna want to be paid. Someday.
I just hope he waits until long after I'm dead.
... hosted on a site that requires you allow Javascript just to read a static-looking page that only provides a summary and a hyperlink to another major malware vector - a PDF file.
They sure appear to use a lot of unnecessary and insecure crap to serve up an article about how everyone else's web designs suck.
And turning off Javascript will help you how?
The links themselves are google links, regardless of whether JS is on or off, your click goes to something like:
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBoQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fblah.blah.com%2Fbyu%2Findex.php%3Fp%3D15365%26more%3D1%26c%3D1%26tb%3D1%26pb%3D1&ei=2fn7S4mMEsGBlAem2fTBDw&usg=AFQjCNHWjfNi_UtFFF-vpxP0qcH9eQKvzg&sig2=pjkVdJt9EijRDfi3g7eMsA
And Google captures the bits they want then sends you to the page they showed you in the first place.
Retype the URL from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.
I'm thinking "High Altitude Airship" would also be a good term, but it's actually descriptive and not at all clever like inventing a nonsense word composed of the amalgam of two perfectly good words, neither of which even accurately describe the subject.
I think we'll just call it a "Magiragon", which is an mushing together of the words "Magical" and "Dragon". Two other words which do not at all describe this craft, but sound good to 12-year-olds when you smush them together into a single word.
As far as I can determine, the Library of Congress is a 5-story building. That means that this is 4.6 LoCs long.
More importantly, it is somewhere on the order of 42 Smoots.
Drat, I managed to reply to the wrong post, thereby partly disproving my own theory about the accuracy of humans. ;)
This was meant to be in reply to "Crazy idea..." below.
You'd think that would be the case, but there are several reasons why humans are a better solution to this than a computer program:
1. Recognition like this requires complex interpretation. Computers might be able to interpret them, but you have no way of validating that interpretation, and computers are pretty literal about it anyway. Multiple humans with cross-checked results are going to give you (by and large) more accurate results. If we can't manage it with OCR of clearly-written and cleanly-scanned written words (hence projects like "distributed proofreaders" - http://www.pgdp.net/c/ - to put OCR scans of books through multiple human validations to make sure the OCR worked), we're surely not going to do terribly well scanning imperfect photographs of novel landscapes for hard-to-recognize features.
2. Programming such recognition costs time and money. Showing volunteers pictures costs a lot less time and money.
3. Having people volunteer and become actively involved in any aspect of science is good for the popularity of the science. Look at SETI @ Home.
Yes, they probably could get the recognition to acceptable levels. But why bother when there are hordes of free labor willing to do a better job?
While I don't disagree with the sentiment...
What the hell was wrong with "x hours of productivity" which came long before "man-hour"? Why do we even need a term that refers to gender at all?
Now get off my lawn. :)
Still pales in comparison to the average Slashdot Idle story...
Yes, they are. I'm not saying they are violating the GPL at all, only responding to the comment that "most Cisco/Linksys routers are Linux-based".
Those that are, tend to be GPL-compliant. It may take a little time for the code to be released in some rare cases, but it's usually very quick.
Those that are not based in Linux are (by definition) GPL-compliant (or GPL-irrelevant?) (*) because they don't use GPL code, so there's no GPL license to violate.
(*): unless their third party vendor stole GPL code, of course. But there's no accusation of that I've ever heard.
And corrected:
If you shouldn't do something, or don't want people to know about something, you probably shouldn't do it or talk about it in public, or in the presence of someone who is known for revealing secrets.
"Social Network" and "Privacy" are diametric opposites. They are the modern equivalent of bulletin boards (not electronic ones, I mean the cork thingies you still find at the entrances to many supermarkets) except everyone has fingerprint readers and knows who has posted what.
Social networks exist, as a business model, so you may sell aspects of your privacy in return for the convenience of keeping in touch with your friends. Large-scale sites need money in order to survive, and if you aren't paying them money you are paying them in something for the services they provide. Frankly, I'm more concerned about sites that offer to protect me from Facebook "free of charge". Because the First Rule Of Acquisition is that almost no one does anything without a motive for profit. Google? Facebook? I know their motive for profit. I can choose whether or not to participate, knowing what they offer and knowing exactly what they intend to do - sell the shit out of anything I divulge to them to anyone with a bag of gold.
Half of my friends are on a social network, and the other half who really freak out about their privacy are not on a social network. I'm on it, but I post very little that I wouldn't post, say, here on Slashdot or say to my boss at work. And I still understand that other people might say things about me on Facebook that my boss could still read, or Google (or Reuters) could catch me snogging CowboyNeal, whether or not I join and participate in any of the services they offer. There's not a whole lot I can do about such things, and those risks have existed a lot longer than Google or Facebook have been in business. It all started with that nasty invention of the written word, and even Ogg could say nasty things about Zogg and his nasty mastadon fetish behind his back.
How will the Infinite Improbability Drive work now? It depended on Brownian motion. Now probability can never come off 1:1 and it'll never work!
We must discover time travel immediately so we can go back and stop these researchers immediately! I mean, sooner!
Tomorrow is Towel Day! We cannot allow a travesty like this to stand.
This tweet brought to you by Ex-Lax. Strong enough to break up a Fail Whale. Gentle on your stomach.
"That" and "which" are not interchangeable.
Agreed, but the summary could have also used parenthesis to denote precedence.
((This action taken by Twitter could be a hard hit for small publishers) that relied on the paid tweets) that will be blocked shortly.
OR a complete rewrite to eliminate passive voice.
"This will hurt spammers."
That would actually work well, since it would not protect the version as released, only the additions to the work. People can still freely use the old version as-is, or even as a basis for their own derivative works.
If you want to continue profiting from your intellectual property, release a new version every few years that's better than the one you released before. People can then choose between the older version (which is free of copyright encumbrance) or the newer version (which you've put work into to make it more desirable than the old version). Just make sure you do it better than anyone else, because the instant copyright runs out anyone can use it as the basis for new art.
This is the way it should be. If you want to keep getting paid for something you wrote 50 years ago, then you should keep working on it and improving it. Your older versions (for what is not currently, and should be, a reasonable definition of "older") should be available for everyone after you've had a reasonable amount of time to profit from it. "Years" is reasonable. "Generations" is not.
Altitude.
Many Cisco/Linksys routers are, but I wouldn't call it "most" any more. They started building them using a closed-source OS about 3-4 years ago, and actually converted the WRT54G and WRT54GS to it mid-stream. Later, they re-released the Linux version of the WRT54G under the model name "WRT54GL".
Having said all that, Linksys has been pretty good about releasing the source code of those things they use GPL-licensed code for. Unfortunately, they tend to use the Broadcomm radios for which source code is not available, though they do publish their wrappers that control the Broadcomm binary driver.
(a) this is an unprecidented[sic] engineering failure,
Yes, no one has ever had a deep-well fail causing a massive leak before. Oh, wait...
(b) there were multiple safeguards,
... just not ones that many other countries have required for decades, and one report I read mentioned that one of the safety features failed due to a dead battery pack, but other than that...
(c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil
No. It's the least expensive way to get energy, until something like this happens. Then it becomes really, really, really expensive. Just not for the company that was extracting the oil.
And if it's so economically necessary, we could easily afford the $500,000 it would have cost to put the cutoff system that likely would have prevented this, right?
, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
Agreed. That's why you work out "what could possibly go wrong" and think about possible solutions before it happens, and when it does happen you stop thinking about ways to continue to extract the oil and concentrate on ways to stop the flow.
Color me paranoid (which is a lovely shade of lavender with just a hint of puce) but I'm still suspicious of that.
If all the major players are adopting h.264 and encouraging its use by offering it for free, I'm suspicious of the possibility of them suddenly implementing a royalty on free-for-the-end-user video (which is the only thing exempted now) and/or jacking the costs WAY up for any other use once H.264 is a completely adopted standard.
Time will tell.