just because the speed limit is 80 it doesn't make it any more fuel efficient to go over 70...
YMMV, literally. It sort of depends on your engine and transmission. My car's US EPA mileage rating for highway is 29mpg, presumably based on 55mph. I consistently get about 34mpg on the highway at 70mph. Measured by the on-board mpg display and confirmed via gas pump fuel dispensed and odometer. I haven't tried 75, but for all I know the sweet spot could be over 70, or under. Yeah, 80 sounds a bit too much but who knows. I guess I have an experiment for that next road trip to Vegas.
While in college there was still a working punch card machine on campus. Our intro to computer science professor made us write our first program using punch cards. He said we would get two things out of it. We would understand why some things are the way they are with respect to programming languages and command lines. And we would have book marks for life (the program was short but we had to buy a deck of blanks at the bookstore). I still use these cards for bookmarks.
Perhaps not with "old," but "MBA" still will We'll call 50/50 odds on an exception applying to MBAs in IT/IS from major universities, though the community colleges teach that stuff better at the associates level.
That doesn't seem to work either. 8 years ago 1/3 of the class in my MBA program were coming from engineering backgrounds. Those that did not seemed to have no problem dealing with technology. 100% used a VPN regularly to access campus resources when off campus.
I get your sentiment, I used to share it. One of the things that made business school so much fun was to learn how wrong I was and laugh at myself. Seriously, an MBA program is nothing like you think it is. The execs you see on the nightly news are pretty much examples of what they tell you not to do in business school. Its not unlike what I saw in computer science. We were all taught how to write well designed, maintainable and reliable code; yet after entering industry so few actually practiced what they were taught and just slapped crap together as fast as they could with no thought beyond immediate rewards.
That's the issue when people use security by obscurity. The obscurity was the difficulty in networking the serial port. Anything made in the past 20 years should have had an Ethernet port and real security. Yes, even this SCADA stuff.
Its more security through physical access, not so much obscurity. The original intent was probably to give a tech in the room, or a user in a nearby room, access. Also its the ease of turning a serial port into a remote connection that is at the heart of the problem.
YMMV but such stuff I worked on in the 90s had multilevel (user, tech, admin,...) passwords, even on serial port access. Ethernet or serial port, it makes no difference when the site does not change the passwords from their factory settings.
Try to convince an old plant manager he needs vpn. Try to explain to him what one is.
Define "old". Some 50 year olds were playing with TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II computers when they were kids in high school. I think we are at, or soon will be, past the point where "old" equates to unfamiliarity with digital technology.
Yes. For example in one application they were picking parts for assembly. Changing the orientation of the parts as necessary and placing it into a jig.
True enough in the lab. This is industrial robotics, where reliability is key.
Finding and picking parts among noise and clutter, parts at any orientation, parts that may be partially obscured by other parts laying on top of them. That was on factory floors in the 1990s.
... The ratio of crappy versus good cops seems to go up when you're dealing with rent-a-cops and security, yes...
Campus police may be real cops, especially so at state schools. At the University of California they are actually equivalent to state police and may patrol areas off campus with large concentrations of students. At my campus when a nearby bank was robbed the UC Police were the first on scene, confronting and containing armed robbers. When a local police officer was shot during a routine traffic stop one night, and the suspect fled into a nearby industrial park, the UC Police, the local police and the police from the neighboring town were searching and clearing the buildings in the park. I forget which department actually found the guy.
I think you are conflating belief in no god with no belief in god. Atheists have no belief in god given the unlikeliness of god's existence. However, I do not believe the English language has a term for someone who believes in "no god".
Actually, "atheist" is the word for that. There seems to be a popular misconception that "atheist" is the prefix "a" in front of "theist" and therefore "not a believer in god". In truth it is derived from the ancient greek word "atheos" (latin spelling). The prefix "a" in front of "theos" and therefore "against god" or "without god". A definition more of rejection or disbelief, not doubt.
I do not believe in flying green monsters or fairies, either. That does not mean I am in denial about their existence.
Regrettably "in denial" is a loaded phrase. To be clear, no one is suggesting "denial" as in denying something in the face of evidence. There is no evidence regarding a deity.
It merely means that debating their existence merits little effort, and for all intents and purposes, it is unlikely that they exist.
No problem. The only point I am trying to make is that this would be an agnostic type perspective rather than an atheistic type perspective. One based on unlikelihood, doubt. See definition argument below.
Similarly, god in the traditional, religious sense of the word is also quite likely a human fantasy, and merits little debate. That's not to say there isn't a miniscule probability of god's existence -- sure, anything is possible. But it's just pretty unlikely, and for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as a non-entity unless proven otherwise.
No problem. Again, an agnostic type perspective. Unlikely, disregard until evidence.
Atheism, by definition is non-belief, and agnostics, unless they believe, are also atheists. The distinction is important.
I think that definition is a little off. Historically the atheist definition is more non-god, not non-belief(*). Subtle, but as you say the distinction is important. Non-god is not synonymous with non-belief, it implies something beyond doubt and disregard. The notion that agnostics are also atheists is a very atheistic perspective. Agnostics generally do no accept this perspective, they generally take the perspective that both theists and atheists are making a "leap of faith" given that there is no evidence. I think it is fair to let the agnostics define what agnosticism is and what its relationship to atheism is.
Well, the emergency response seemed to be on the ball, minimizing the damage.
Circumstances greatly facilitated that. There were doctors, nurses and medical personnel on site near the finish line. Marathon organizers put together a huge medical team. The minutes saved by being very near to the attack site surely saved lives.
Now we get to see whether the surveillance technologies are up to scratch after the fact.
At an event like this I'd wager cell phone photos and videos dwarf the traditional surveillance cameras.
I think you're conflating absolute disbelief from simply not giving an idea any credence.
Well said.
Giving the idea no credence does not distinguish between atheists and agnostics. It is not being at that point of no credence, it is the thought process that brought one to that point that makes the distinction. Thoughts involving denial or disbelief versus those involving doubt. Religious like beliefs do not require absolute certainty, just enough certainty to reach a conclusion.
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist...
It looks that way doesn't it, but its not. The word actually comes from the ancient greek word "atheos" (latin spelling obviously), which means "godless". Which found its way into French as "athée", and then into English as "atheist". "Theist" actually shows up nearly 100 years after "atheist". There is a stange bit of trivia that can win a bar bet or two.
The "a" in "atheos" is a prefix in the ancient greek, but it means negation or absence. "Theos" means god, not a believer in a god. So "atheos" means against god or without god.
In any case, the definition is one of rejection or disbelief, not doubt. In other words a conclusion has been formed.
The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion.
Except in a discussion regarding the existence of God, where it is clear what knowability is referring to.
Words like "agnostic" and "religious" have a context. Have you never heard the word "religious" used in a discussion unrelated to deities, for example with respect to highly enthusiastic Mac or Linux fans?
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times we've hardly got a carcass. Yes, actually, you can.
Let's take the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's made of spaghetti and two meatballs. We know that these two components neither have sentience or the ability to fly...
You don't have kids yet do you? When you do, you will learn that spaghetti and meatballs can indeed fly.:-)
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
One definition of religion is a group of people with a shared belief, in particular a belief that can not be proven. Given that a deity can be neither proven nor disproven, people who believe or disbelieve in a deity are both operating in a religious manner.
An agnostic is a person who has formed no conclusion, who does not know whether or not a deity exists because there is no evidence either way.
It would seem that the agnostic is the person operating on a non-religious manner.
The thing that bugs me about a Big Bang Theory is where did this singularity come from?
I am not a physicist. My limited understanding is that under M-Theory the universe may be a higher-dimensional membrane, a "brane". Furthermore, the universe is not unique, there are numerous branes, a multiverse. Its been suggested that when two branes collide a new one is formed... a new brane, a new universe, a big bang.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it,
...Yet
It aint gonna happen. The Mac App Store is fine for small and/or "not well known" vendors. However for the "big guys" who have the resource to have their own stores and digital download infrastructure the Mac App Store has little advantage, certainly nothing worth losing a 30% cut. These big well known vendors don't need to be discovered via the Mac App Store's listings and search capabilities, their potential customers know off the vendor and their products. Not letting these vendors sell direct will just cause them to drop the Mac OS X platform. Good bye Blizzard games, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. It aint gonna happen.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan. The walled garden with all of it's ways of providing a continuing revenue stream after the initial purchase will eventually be the way of all Apple systems.
No. Apple is not doing that.
They have an optional simplified user interface that resembles iOS a little, but they have always had an alternative simplified user interface. Only this simplified alternative has changed, the default standard interface is pretty much the same as it has been for many years.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it, neither developers not users. You can get Mac OS X apps directly from a publisher and install it yourself as you always have been able to.
The best selling laptop on amazon right now is the Chromebook. It's #1. There's a chance, a small chance, but a chance that Linux on the desktop may actually come to fruition as a viable alternative. If it happens, it will be wrapped in the cloak of Google, and it will be called Chrome.
Its not a Linux Desktop if Linux is used as an inaccessible embedded OS, hidden from the user. To make such a claim Linux would need to be fully accessible, as the BSD environment is under Mac OS X.
If you have a Chromebook, you will be able to surf the web as long as you are connected. No Google means no Google services, but your device is not reduced to a paper weight.
However a tablet is probably more convenient in such a scenario. There is little point to something like a chromebook without an array of "industrial strength" web apps. One could argue extended typing, but on such rare occasions a blue tooth keyboard seems a better option, again under this scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
The dolphins and mice demonstrate that they do want to come. ;-)
just because the speed limit is 80 it doesn't make it any more fuel efficient to go over 70...
YMMV, literally. It sort of depends on your engine and transmission. My car's US EPA mileage rating for highway is 29mpg, presumably based on 55mph. I consistently get about 34mpg on the highway at 70mph. Measured by the on-board mpg display and confirmed via gas pump fuel dispensed and odometer. I haven't tried 75, but for all I know the sweet spot could be over 70, or under. Yeah, 80 sounds a bit too much but who knows. I guess I have an experiment for that next road trip to Vegas.
Some day you'll be at the point where you don't equate 50 with "old."
I don't now, but when I was learning to program on my Apple II I did. ;-)
While in college there was still a working punch card machine on campus. Our intro to computer science professor made us write our first program using punch cards. He said we would get two things out of it. We would understand why some things are the way they are with respect to programming languages and command lines. And we would have book marks for life (the program was short but we had to buy a deck of blanks at the bookstore). I still use these cards for bookmarks.
Perhaps not with "old," but "MBA" still will We'll call 50/50 odds on an exception applying to MBAs in IT/IS from major universities, though the community colleges teach that stuff better at the associates level.
That doesn't seem to work either. 8 years ago 1/3 of the class in my MBA program were coming from engineering backgrounds. Those that did not seemed to have no problem dealing with technology. 100% used a VPN regularly to access campus resources when off campus.
I get your sentiment, I used to share it. One of the things that made business school so much fun was to learn how wrong I was and laugh at myself. Seriously, an MBA program is nothing like you think it is. The execs you see on the nightly news are pretty much examples of what they tell you not to do in business school. Its not unlike what I saw in computer science. We were all taught how to write well designed, maintainable and reliable code; yet after entering industry so few actually practiced what they were taught and just slapped crap together as fast as they could with no thought beyond immediate rewards.
That's the issue when people use security by obscurity. The obscurity was the difficulty in networking the serial port. Anything made in the past 20 years should have had an Ethernet port and real security. Yes, even this SCADA stuff.
Its more security through physical access, not so much obscurity. The original intent was probably to give a tech in the room, or a user in a nearby room, access. Also its the ease of turning a serial port into a remote connection that is at the heart of the problem.
...) passwords, even on serial port access. Ethernet or serial port, it makes no difference when the site does not change the passwords from their factory settings.
YMMV but such stuff I worked on in the 90s had multilevel (user, tech, admin,
Try to convince an old plant manager he needs vpn. Try to explain to him what one is.
Define "old". Some 50 year olds were playing with TRS-80, Commodore PET and Apple II computers when they were kids in high school. I think we are at, or soon will be, past the point where "old" equates to unfamiliarity with digital technology.
yeah, but could the robot find it and pick it up?
Yes. For example in one application they were picking parts for assembly. Changing the orientation of the parts as necessary and placing it into a jig.
True enough in the lab. This is industrial robotics, where reliability is key.
Finding and picking parts among noise and clutter, parts at any orientation, parts that may be partially obscured by other parts laying on top of them. That was on factory floors in the 1990s.
Read the article. I didn't really see much there that was not in the computer vision and robotics literature in the 1990s.
Finding parts at any orientation amongst noise, parts that may be partially obscured. That was also on the factory floors in the 90s.
Stacking and unstacking boxes/items to get to a desired box/item, again, 90s. Tossing the box to a person, perhaps that is new.
An image on the TV news of the boat in the backyard looks like a Google Street View image.
Caught because someone noticed something strange in the backyard and called it in.
Like many other problems, ordinary folks pitching in to help in an appropriate way can sure help to fix things.
... The ratio of crappy versus good cops seems to go up when you're dealing with rent-a-cops and security, yes ...
Campus police may be real cops, especially so at state schools. At the University of California they are actually equivalent to state police and may patrol areas off campus with large concentrations of students. At my campus when a nearby bank was robbed the UC Police were the first on scene, confronting and containing armed robbers. When a local police officer was shot during a routine traffic stop one night, and the suspect fled into a nearby industrial park, the UC Police, the local police and the police from the neighboring town were searching and clearing the buildings in the park. I forget which department actually found the guy.
I think you are conflating belief in no god with no belief in god. Atheists have no belief in god given the unlikeliness of god's existence. However, I do not believe the English language has a term for someone who believes in "no god".
Actually, "atheist" is the word for that. There seems to be a popular misconception that "atheist" is the prefix "a" in front of "theist" and therefore "not a believer in god". In truth it is derived from the ancient greek word "atheos" (latin spelling). The prefix "a" in front of "theos" and therefore "against god" or "without god". A definition more of rejection or disbelief, not doubt.
I do not believe in flying green monsters or fairies, either. That does not mean I am in denial about their existence.
Regrettably "in denial" is a loaded phrase. To be clear, no one is suggesting "denial" as in denying something in the face of evidence. There is no evidence regarding a deity.
It merely means that debating their existence merits little effort, and for all intents and purposes, it is unlikely that they exist.
No problem. The only point I am trying to make is that this would be an agnostic type perspective rather than an atheistic type perspective. One based on unlikelihood, doubt. See definition argument below.
Similarly, god in the traditional, religious sense of the word is also quite likely a human fantasy, and merits little debate. That's not to say there isn't a miniscule probability of god's existence -- sure, anything is possible. But it's just pretty unlikely, and for all intents and purposes, I will treat it as a non-entity unless proven otherwise.
No problem. Again, an agnostic type perspective. Unlikely, disregard until evidence.
Atheism, by definition is non-belief, and agnostics, unless they believe, are also atheists. The distinction is important.
I think that definition is a little off. Historically the atheist definition is more non-god, not non-belief(*). Subtle, but as you say the distinction is important. Non-god is not synonymous with non-belief, it implies something beyond doubt and disregard. The notion that agnostics are also atheists is a very atheistic perspective. Agnostics generally do no accept this perspective, they generally take the perspective that both theists and atheists are making a "leap of faith" given that there is no evidence. I think it is fair to let the agnostics define what agnosticism is and what its relationship to atheism is.
(*) If curious look at another response http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3658423&cid=43478579.
Well, the emergency response seemed to be on the ball, minimizing the damage.
Circumstances greatly facilitated that. There were doctors, nurses and medical personnel on site near the finish line. Marathon organizers put together a huge medical team. The minutes saved by being very near to the attack site surely saved lives.
Now we get to see whether the surveillance technologies are up to scratch after the fact.
At an event like this I'd wager cell phone photos and videos dwarf the traditional surveillance cameras.
Well said.
Giving the idea no credence does not distinguish between atheists and agnostics. It is not being at that point of no credence, it is the thought process that brought one to that point that makes the distinction. Thoughts involving denial or disbelief versus those involving doubt. Religious like beliefs do not require absolute certainty, just enough certainty to reach a conclusion.
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
The word "theist" is derived from the word for god and means someone who believes in one or more gods. The prefix "a" means "not" and an atheist is simply someone who is not a theist ...
It looks that way doesn't it, but its not. The word actually comes from the ancient greek word "atheos" (latin spelling obviously), which means "godless". Which found its way into French as "athée", and then into English as "atheist". "Theist" actually shows up nearly 100 years after "atheist". There is a stange bit of trivia that can win a bar bet or two.
The "a" in "atheos" is a prefix in the ancient greek, but it means negation or absence. "Theos" means god, not a believer in a god. So "atheos" means against god or without god.
In any case, the definition is one of rejection or disbelief, not doubt. In other words a conclusion has been formed.
The word "gnostic" derives from the word for knowledge and refers to a set of beliefs about "knowability" which is more a branch of philosophy than religion.
Except in a discussion regarding the existence of God, where it is clear what knowability is referring to.
Words like "agnostic" and "religious" have a context. Have you never heard the word "religious" used in a discussion unrelated to deities, for example with respect to highly enthusiastic Mac or Linux fans?
We (I am an atheist) cannot prove the non-existance of God.
This is a dead horse that's been beaten to death so many times we've hardly got a carcass. Yes, actually, you can.
Let's take the Flying Spaghetti Monster. He's made of spaghetti and two meatballs. We know that these two components neither have sentience or the ability to fly ...
You don't have kids yet do you? When you do, you will learn that spaghetti and meatballs can indeed fly. :-)
Why do you religious people keep saying that atheism is a religion?
Because atheists have formed a conclusion, they have a belief, they merely have come to the opposite conclusion, the opposite belief.
One definition of religion is a group of people with a shared belief, in particular a belief that can not be proven. Given that a deity can be neither proven nor disproven, people who believe or disbelieve in a deity are both operating in a religious manner.
An agnostic is a person who has formed no conclusion, who does not know whether or not a deity exists because there is no evidence either way.
It would seem that the agnostic is the person operating on a non-religious manner.
The thing that bugs me about a Big Bang Theory is where did this singularity come from?
I am not a physicist. My limited understanding is that under M-Theory the universe may be a higher-dimensional membrane, a "brane". Furthermore, the universe is not unique, there are numerous branes, a multiverse. Its been suggested that when two branes collide a new one is formed ... a new brane, a new universe, a big bang.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it,
...Yet
It aint gonna happen. The Mac App Store is fine for small and/or "not well known" vendors. However for the "big guys" who have the resource to have their own stores and digital download infrastructure the Mac App Store has little advantage, certainly nothing worth losing a 30% cut. These big well known vendors don't need to be discovered via the Mac App Store's listings and search capabilities, their potential customers know off the vendor and their products. Not letting these vendors sell direct will just cause them to drop the Mac OS X platform. Good bye Blizzard games, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, etc. It aint gonna happen.
Apple has chosen to migrate to an all iOS world slowly, subtly. Give them time, it's in the grand plan. The walled garden with all of it's ways of providing a continuing revenue stream after the initial purchase will eventually be the way of all Apple systems.
No. Apple is not doing that.
They have an optional simplified user interface that resembles iOS a little, but they have always had an alternative simplified user interface. Only this simplified alternative has changed, the default standard interface is pretty much the same as it has been for many years.
They have a Mac App Store but no one is required to use it, neither developers not users. You can get Mac OS X apps directly from a publisher and install it yourself as you always have been able to.
The best selling laptop on amazon right now is the Chromebook. It's #1. There's a chance, a small chance, but a chance that Linux on the desktop may actually come to fruition as a viable alternative. If it happens, it will be wrapped in the cloak of Google, and it will be called Chrome.
Its not a Linux Desktop if Linux is used as an inaccessible embedded OS, hidden from the user. To make such a claim Linux would need to be fully accessible, as the BSD environment is under Mac OS X.
If you have a Chromebook, you will be able to surf the web as long as you are connected. No Google means no Google services, but your device is not reduced to a paper weight.
However a tablet is probably more convenient in such a scenario. There is little point to something like a chromebook without an array of "industrial strength" web apps. One could argue extended typing, but on such rare occasions a blue tooth keyboard seems a better option, again under this scenario.