It kept me from ever being in danger of becoming an unprepared teen father. So it either kept you from having sex as a teenager or in some way you feel it prepared you for fatherhood.
The nukes are typically reserved for the last day of war. Yea, but you're getting cause and effect mixed up. When nukes are used, it IS the last day of the war.
The authors hypothesize that life is common in the universe, but that multi-cellular life is rare. One may be familiar with the Drake Equation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation ) but Rare Earth puts some meaning behind the variables in that equation. We're all familiar with habitable zones around stars, parts where the temperature is just right for liquid water. Rare Earth suggests there may be a habitable zone around galaxies... too close in and the interstellar radiation is too high to support multicellular life. Too far away and you don't have the heavier elements that come from 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation stars because the density of stars is too low for that to happen.
Part of the reason why they believe complex life is rare but simple life may be "common" is the history of life on this planet. Single celled life formed just a few million years after the planet cooled enough to support life, but it was several billion years after that before multicellular life arose.
Rare Earth points to our moon as possibly being a rare but necessary component of the rise of multicellular life on this planet. It stabilizes our poles, apparently planets w/o a heavy moon wobble so much that over a million years or so the poles flip, preventing long term stable climate in any single region.
Additionally Rare Earth also points out that Jupiter protects our Earth from too frequent comet/asteroid collisions. Given the large number of Jupiter sized planets we're finding I personally do not think that a Jupiter per solar system may be that rare an event after all, but it's in the book.
In short... rocks and water may be enough for single celled life, but you also need low radiation and a long-term stable climate.
Or, if an artist paints a painting and sells it, does he deserve to be pissed off when the guy he sold it to sells it for a profit? I disagree with your example. A more correct one would be where an artist paints a painting and sells it and the guy he sold it to makes copies of it and sells those copies. Should the original artist get a cut of that. My answer is "maybe" it depends on the terms of the original sale.
I am not a copyright lawyer nor a musician, but it occurs to me that some artists get paid as in your painter example above... specifically a one time lump sum for all rights to the work they created, and other artists get paid in the "installment plan" where they get a fraction of the sales of each copy sold. In the lump-sum case I'd agree completely with you. However, that rarely happens, seems like more often than not most of these type of artists are being paid in the installment plan and you're suggesting getting rid of that mode entirely.
Commercial software actually provides a good example since many readers here are probably professional programmers. You're probably paid a salary to produce a program that your employer completely owns. An alternative model would be that your employer doesn't pay you anything till the product ships, but then you get like 1% of the retail price of the product. Now imagine that said "royalty-paying employer" modified that 1% deal by putting a cap on it that once total payments reached... let's say $5million, he'll just stop paying you and by consequence put that extra cash in his own pocket. Is that fair? You took a gamble by agreeing to the 1% rate in the first place. You had to work w/o compensation for the months it took to create the product. Your employer CUT his risk by not laying out his cash upfront to pay you before the product shipped. Seems to me if your employer wanted to cap your earnings he should have paid you a salary in the first place.
In some sense programmers are being paid this way, when they get paid in stock in their start-up company. Should you cap the value of the stock at some level? Once your stock reaches... say $5million... should you be forced to sell it because "you got compensated enough"?
The problem is that SOMEONE is going to make money off of those works. All the arguments against giving an artist a "life time income" through these copyright laws seem to be missing the point that even if the copyright were to go away the result would merely be more money for the publisher of the material. So... if I have to choose more money in the publisher's pocket or more money in the creator's pocket. I'll choose the creator's pocket every time.
That article linked to in the summary from the Minneapolis StarTribune is the worst piece of journalism I've seen in a while. It is in stark contrast to the facts of the article as reported in Ms Campbell's blogspot entry.
For example: "Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday," - Campbell's whole point of this is to get exposure. I seriously doubt she intentionally avoided the call. How long did Jackie Crosby give Ms Campbell to reply? 10 minutes?
"Best Buy Spokeswoman said Campbell was offered and collected $1110.35" if you read Ms Campbell's story BB deposited this straight into her credit card account w/o prior discussion. Would have been nice if Ms Crosby mentioned this fact in her news story.
"Melissa Ngo, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.,... said consumers need to get smart about protecting their data to avoid such situations." This is completely off topic.
Re:You need to clarify your question
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Ethics In IT
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I used to believe like you do, until I got involved with small start-up companies. Now, to be clear, I agree with your point of view when it comes to large established firms selling established products. In that case there is absolutely no reason why the sales people need to... let's call it "embellish"... the product when trying to sell it.
However, your case appears different because you mentioned that you're sitting across the desk from the sales people. That implies a small company. You also stated that the sales people were making comments about the products you were creating, so it does appear that your example is for products not yet completely developed.
Why the difference? Practicality. Starting a small biz on a thin budget is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Sure, it'd be great to be able to completely make a product, have it in hand and then hire a sales force to go out and sell that product. A then B. But in reality you want to be able to sell your product on the very day that it's completed. That requires sales people going out and trying to pre-sell the product. A and B simultaneously. To make matters "worse", practicality also dictates that it's a much easier sell if your customers have some confidence that you'll be around and your product will be around. You need to be truthful about the planned delivery dates, but in reality the sales force needs to show more confidence in the product than just the delivery date. Now, I'm not advocating doing anything illegal. It'd clearly be wrong to go and collect dollars from "pre-sales" and then be unable to refund said dollars if the product never materializes, but frequently in a start-up you gotta push it right up to the limit of what's legal.
Additionally... pre-sales activities such as promising features that you currently aren't working on, could be a form of "market research". If enough people demand such a feature, the sales force should pass that info on to you, the product development people, so that you can add it. I'm not saying that's what they are doing, and believe me... I've seen a few where the sales force does what you describe and keeps all those promises to themselves, so it's not unusual for sales people to be as slimy as you imply. But... have you wondered why your boss put the developers across the table from the sales force? It could very well be to facilitate this sort of communication. You should listen to what new features they're promising. You should maybe call a meeting with them to see which new features appear to be in high demand and then huddle up with the developers to see what it takes to add those features.
The cordless battery issue he mentions is one of my pet peeves too. However, it seems to stem from a misguided attempt by the manufacturers to capture an extra part of the "razors and razor blade" market. (Sell the razor for below cost and clean up on the repeat sales of above cost blades.) We see (or suspect) this is happening in ink-jet printers.
I find it funny (and hence am not 100% convinced) that this is happening in the cordless battery realm because the cost of a replacement battery is something like 80% of the cost of the original tool. At least from a recent experience I had when one of my batteries died. At that price level it may just be enough for me to buy a new one from a diff manufacturer and hence break the razor-and-blade scheme.
However it may be interesting to consider situations where IMPROVEMENTS have been made for no obvious market benefit. For example, most modern remote controls are ergonomically styled so as to feel comfortable in your hand. Earlier styles of remote controls were simple rectangular boxes. The question is WHY did the manufacturers switch to these ergonomically designed units? It seems to me that on the list of "must have" features on a new TV or stereo an ergonomically designed remote should be so low that it would never get addressed.
I feel the same way about the car unlock complaint as well as the passenger seatbelt complaint Jamie made. But... when I'm looking for horsepower, gas mileage and reliability, door unlock feature just doesn't measure up to be a "no-buy" decision. Yet, like the remote control example above... something may yet force these designers to put these features in.
I am a bit disappointed in this article. The subject made me think of some really beautiful pieces of code that I've seen in my life. Breseham's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham's_line_algorithm which is an integer arithmetic method of drawing a line on a computer monitor. I would love to have seen 12 more such examples of "artful code" but instead I get a link to a slashdotted article which appears to contain interesting 3D scenes and maybe animations done with older hardware. Boring.
The part of the article that mentioned JAVA is used to entice students to try CS. So the problem isn't really JAVA but it's JAVA-AS-THE-ENDPOINT.
I think colleges and even high schools should offer MORE teaser programs to expose students to as wide a variety of (for lack of a better term) career choices as possible. If said colleges want to make such programs as fun as possible they should also offer better guidance counseling so that someone will tell these kids what they're really in for if they adopt X as a career choice.
Black like this probably has a few oddities that make it hard for us to process visually, but invisible? No.
First, this thing's shadow is probably lighter than the thing itself!
Somewhat related, any shadows cast on this stuff would indeed be invisible. Direct light cast on this is probably no lighter than ambient light cast on it. So... if you imagine a brick building coated in this stuff you would not be able to see the indentations of the masonry because the shadows the outward bricks would cast on the mortar joints would not be significantly darker than the color of the bricks. The upshot is that we wouldn't be able to see surface detail and that visual cue would be missing for us.
But beyond an inability to see surface detail, we may not be able to see even the corners on a building painted with this stuff. The part of the building that's in direct sunlight would not be any brighter than the part that's not. We'd probably think it's a cylinder even if it's a square or rectangle.
Without the benefit of having RTFA I would say that the government is realizing that normal email is sent "in the clear" as we all know. So it seems like an easy argument to claim that such communication isn't private as you made not effort to protect it and even low-level techies know that standard email is not secure. It seems similar to me to claiming that a loud conversation in a bar is private, a conversation over CB-radios is private or a conversation over analog cell phones is private(though this may well be considered private).
The act of encrypting it though should make it private as you clearly took steps to keep it private. Thus requests for your keys should be denied. We should have a right to private communications, and if, as individuals, some of us have the ability to take a formerly public conversation private by, say speaking in a private code at a bar, then the law should allow our right to privacy to extend to any area where we try to extend it.
But that's what I would do if I were in charge... unfortunately... we'll have to see how congress reacts to this draft policy.
The solution is simple... extract it from the butts of Hynerians. http://www.farscape-1.com/index.php?title=Hynerians (look up farting helium... one of the most outrageous claims ever on a sci-fi show. Man those writers failed chem-101!)
The Helium market is an odd one... the gas is a by-product of mining Natural Gas. According to a recent science friday interview http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200710122 the supply/demand market is set for natural gas and not directly helium. In other words... it is not ecomomical to drill into natural gas mines solely for helium. At least not at current helium prices. So the production capacity is driven by the supply/demand needs for natural gas not directly helium.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, there are various refineries around the world that are under repair or otherwise offline.
I agree with this completely, but allow me to sell the original poster on it from another angle.
First, he states that he's breezing through his courses w/o much trouble. Sounds like he has spare capacity for a few extra classes. While I personally believe biz/mgmt classes will be exactly the leg-up that the poster above mentions, you may do better to add extra non-CS courses that YOU personally find interesting. If you like economics better than marketing... take an econ course. If you like physics and math, take some of those courses. If you don't know if you'll like something, try to take a freshman level course in a related area. If you hate it and it's hard, it shouldn't be too hard after all it is freshman level and/or you could hopefully make up your mind before it's too late to drop out. Alternatively... DON'T (formally) TAKE ANYTHING, but audit the course instead. Many universities (here in the US at least) allow you to sit in on classes for no credit. I think you'll learn more if you take something for credit, but if you're nervous about going too far afield from the CS dept then go crazy and audit first, then if you liked it as an auditor... see if you can enroll for grades in a subsequent term.
Bottom line... if you merely get better at CS then... how unique will you be in the work force? Even in the case where you can finish a masters level of work while an undergrad, you're still as useful to an employer as any other masters level student. But... how many CS majors have minors in biology, mathematics, economics, marketing, journalism, political science, etc... You want to distinguish yourself? Go further afield.
And oh yea... I agree with the comment of learning 1-2 programming languages really well rather than a lots but only at a beginner level.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and speak for the religious fundamentalists who profess to not believe in evolution.
I believe the problem these folks have with evolution has nothing to do with what they're complaining about. Religious people believe God created Man with a Soul. But when evolution came along it suddenly appeared that science contradicted that belief. Where in the chain of evolution did Man get his Soul? It is simply much easier for these religious fundamentalists to believe that God created Man whole-cloth and hence Soul came in there. Or that God directly tampered with evolution (ID) and Soul came in there. To believe that somewhere between Australopithecus and Homo Sapiens the soul jumped in is apparently too much for these people to believe.
Until these religious fundamentalists come clean with themselves and realize that THIS is the heart of their problem with evolution, this debate will unfortunately continue to rage on and on.
There's that management exercise of dividing tasks into the 4 categories between "urgent and important" to "not urgent and not important". I personally believe the problem with TV news is that their ranking of "newsworthy" items is: 1) Urgent and Important (eg Bhutto's assassination) 2) Urgent and not Important (eg Paris Nicole Spears) 3) Not Urgent and Important (eg almost every longer term story, for example, Darfur) 4) Not Urgent and Not Important (who cares)
The pressure the networks feel is to get people to watch NOW. All their advertising and ratings are based off of ratings "today" or "this hour". Face it... anything in the not urgent but important category can wait. One can learn about it later in the day and possibly through another source, but if you have the viewers eyeballs... what's the best thing to show them to keep them viewing? Urgent stuff of course.
My gold standard for reporting on "not urgent and important" stuff is Frontline. If TV news re-focused the staff they have that track Urgent and Not Important items and had them do stories on Not Urgent and Important stuff to the caliber of Frontline then... well... it would go a long way toward addressing my concerns with TV news.
I read some of the links provided and your comment above doesn't quite seem right. It isn't that the US is treating domestic businesses differently than foreign ones, it's that it's treating ONLINE businesses differently than Brick&Mortar ones. The law prevents credit card companies from collecting payments related to online gambling. If I understand the US law correctly here, this applies to both domestic and foreign online gambling.
Am I reading this correctly? If so, this is goofy in that the WTO apparently sees no difference between physical and online gambling while the US apparently does? Are there any other examples of online vs physical businesses that any country/state/whatever treats differently?
I choose the same password for all low-security applications. There are [also?] several Web sites where I pay for access, and I have the same password for all of them. Has there been any survey of how various systems store passwords? Schneier's policy above is very similar to mine, and I was surprised recently when my Sprint password, which I thought was "secure" was plainly visible to the customer service clerk at my local Sprint store!
Specifically I do not care how my low-security passwords are stored. But for my high security passwords, I would like them all to be stored in a unix-like way, namely only cyphertext is stored and it's impossible for anyone to know what that password is. Sure they may be able to change it on my behalf, but can they tell what it is? No!
I've had this concern for quite a while now and I'm surprised that I haven't found a security certified label that addresses this concern. Sure there are other labels like http://www.truste.org/ or "Verisign Secured", but where's there one that tells me my user-password is stored in a "unix-like" manner?
I read TFA and she apparently got fired for passing along an email about an upcoming presentation by an apparent Anti-Creationist author.
Since TFA doesn't include any reference to the actual email it's hard to tell if the email was "professional" in that it merely alerted recipients to this presentation w/o taking "sides" or if the Director included language meant to show her position on the matter.
Before I go further I should say Creationism and ID are a load of crap. However, if the school board wants to have a policy of "not publicly taking sides" that is disappointing, but not killer (though I haven't seen the Texas Biology Curriculum). I believe, in principle, that the former director could have done something that was against this "don't take sides" directive. (For all the article states, the Texas School authority could be in favor of Evolution, but want to appear at least "neutral" so as to appease that fraction of their voter base who prefer ID.)
What I'm getting at is: a) if the email was just something to the effect of "here's an upcoming presentation that may be useful in our discussions on this topic", that seems like it should be allowed even by this goofy "don't take sides" attitude of the Texas School authority. b) it would be nice to have an alternate reality machine to see if they would have fired her if she wrote a similar email about an upcoming presentation favoring ID. I bet not.
Medicine as it is is normally taught and used as treatment has never been science
So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.
Recently there was a Science Friday pod cast on this very subject. The book referred to by this is discussed on the website here: http://www.overtreated.com/the_book.html/
All you have to do is listen to it for the first 3 minutes to hear quotes like these:
"There is a lot of medicine that doesn't have a lot of valid science behind it."
"Institute of Medicine estimates that maybe 1/2 of what physicians do has valid evidence to back it up."
From a simple-end-user point of view, a firewall isn't an application. If you're trying to design a simple functional "firewall" interface for average non-techie user to use you need to put some of the firewall configuration functionality in the apps requesting the service in the first place.
Imagine, Bonjour (or MSN Messenger) start up and notice that the firewall setting is blocking them, and right there alerts the user to this fact and asks the user if they want to change their firewall setting to allow this communication to take place. That's the sort of thing a non-techie user would understand and expect.
Are there security problems with this approach? Only if the app/os is designed to let 3rd party apps directly change the firewall settings, but that's not what I'm advocating. I'm suggesting the interface be changed so that the app can tell the firewall is blocking it (or can reasonably guess) and the app can at least activate the firewall configuration screen and let the user proceed from there.
I live in an area where power outages for a few days happen at least once a winter. When the power goes out, often times the cable does too. We have a generator, and use the Comcast DVR quite heavily. Imagine my surprise when during one recent power outage we thought we'd watch some DVRed programs only to find out that THE DVR DIDN'T WORK. I couldn't bring up the menu system w/o an active connection to Comcast central.
I built a machine for my family a few years ago. I bought an SLI mobo and only ONE of the SLI video cards. My plan was that... while this card would be expensive NOW in about a year it will be cheaper and I can buy the 2nd of the 2 and get better video performance as an upgrade.
A few things were wrong with that. a) the price of this particular card didn't drop that much b) there appear to be some goofy bottlenecks in the dual mode SLI that are still keeping it down.
It's a 6600 series card (two in SLI mode) and... now I'm wondering which is better.. a single 8800 card referred to in the article or these dual SLI 6600 series cards.
Slashdot Mirror
in some way
you feel it prepared you for fatherhood.
Care to tell us which you meant?
This documentary was no doubt based on the book Rare Earth ( http://www.amazon.com/Rare-Earth-Complex-Uncommon-Universe/dp/0387987010 ). To summarize:
The authors hypothesize that life is common in the universe, but that multi-cellular life is rare. One may be familiar with the Drake Equation ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_equation ) but Rare Earth puts some meaning behind the variables in that equation. We're all familiar with habitable zones around stars, parts where the temperature is just right for liquid water. Rare Earth suggests there may be a habitable zone around galaxies... too close in and the interstellar radiation is too high to support multicellular life. Too far away and you don't have the heavier elements that come from 2nd, 3rd and 4th generation stars because the density of stars is too low for that to happen.
Part of the reason why they believe complex life is rare but simple life may be "common" is the history of life on this planet. Single celled life formed just a few million years after the planet cooled enough to support life, but it was several billion years after that before multicellular life arose.
Rare Earth points to our moon as possibly being a rare but necessary component of the rise of multicellular life on this planet. It stabilizes our poles, apparently planets w/o a heavy moon wobble so much that over a million years or so the poles flip, preventing long term stable climate in any single region.
Additionally Rare Earth also points out that Jupiter protects our Earth from too frequent comet/asteroid collisions. Given the large number of Jupiter sized planets we're finding I personally do not think that a Jupiter per solar system may be that rare an event after all, but it's in the book.
In short... rocks and water may be enough for single celled life, but you also need low radiation and a long-term stable climate.
I am not a copyright lawyer nor a musician, but it occurs to me that some artists get paid as in your painter example above... specifically a one time lump sum for all rights to the work they created, and other artists get paid in the "installment plan" where they get a fraction of the sales of each copy sold. In the lump-sum case I'd agree completely with you. However, that rarely happens, seems like more often than not most of these type of artists are being paid in the installment plan and you're suggesting getting rid of that mode entirely.
Commercial software actually provides a good example since many readers here are probably professional programmers. You're probably paid a salary to produce a program that your employer completely owns. An alternative model would be that your employer doesn't pay you anything till the product ships, but then you get like 1% of the retail price of the product. Now imagine that said "royalty-paying employer" modified that 1% deal by putting a cap on it that once total payments reached... let's say $5million, he'll just stop paying you and by consequence put that extra cash in his own pocket. Is that fair? You took a gamble by agreeing to the 1% rate in the first place. You had to work w/o compensation for the months it took to create the product. Your employer CUT his risk by not laying out his cash upfront to pay you before the product shipped. Seems to me if your employer wanted to cap your earnings he should have paid you a salary in the first place.
In some sense programmers are being paid this way, when they get paid in stock in their start-up company. Should you cap the value of the stock at some level? Once your stock reaches... say $5million... should you be forced to sell it because "you got compensated enough"?
The problem is that SOMEONE is going to make money off of those works. All the arguments against giving an artist a "life time income" through these copyright laws seem to be missing the point that even if the copyright were to go away the result would merely be more money for the publisher of the material. So... if I have to choose more money in the publisher's pocket or more money in the creator's pocket. I'll choose the creator's pocket every time.
That article linked to in the summary from the Minneapolis StarTribune is the worst piece of journalism I've seen in a while. It is in stark contrast to the facts of the article as reported in Ms Campbell's blogspot entry.
... said consumers need to get smart about protecting their data to avoid such situations." This is completely off topic.
For example:
"Campbell, who could not be reached Tuesday," - Campbell's whole point of this is to get exposure. I seriously doubt she intentionally avoided the call. How long did Jackie Crosby give Ms Campbell to reply? 10 minutes?
"Best Buy Spokeswoman said Campbell was offered and collected $1110.35" if you read Ms Campbell's story BB deposited this straight into her credit card account w/o prior discussion. Would have been nice if Ms Crosby mentioned this fact in her news story.
"Melissa Ngo, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, D.C.,
I used to believe like you do, until I got involved with small start-up companies. Now, to be clear, I agree with your point of view when it comes to large established firms selling established products. In that case there is absolutely no reason why the sales people need to... let's call it "embellish" ... the product when trying to sell it.
... have you wondered why your boss put the developers across the table from the sales force? It could very well be to facilitate this sort of communication. You should listen to what new features they're promising. You should maybe call a meeting with them to see which new features appear to be in high demand and then huddle up with the developers to see what it takes to add those features.
However, your case appears different because you mentioned that you're sitting across the desk from the sales people. That implies a small company. You also stated that the sales people were making comments about the products you were creating, so it does appear that your example is for products not yet completely developed.
Why the difference? Practicality. Starting a small biz on a thin budget is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Sure, it'd be great to be able to completely make a product, have it in hand and then hire a sales force to go out and sell that product. A then B. But in reality you want to be able to sell your product on the very day that it's completed. That requires sales people going out and trying to pre-sell the product. A and B simultaneously. To make matters "worse", practicality also dictates that it's a much easier sell if your customers have some confidence that you'll be around and your product will be around. You need to be truthful about the planned delivery dates, but in reality the sales force needs to show more confidence in the product than just the delivery date. Now, I'm not advocating doing anything illegal. It'd clearly be wrong to go and collect dollars from "pre-sales" and then be unable to refund said dollars if the product never materializes, but frequently in a start-up you gotta push it right up to the limit of what's legal.
Additionally... pre-sales activities such as promising features that you currently aren't working on, could be a form of "market research". If enough people demand such a feature, the sales force should pass that info on to you, the product development people, so that you can add it. I'm not saying that's what they are doing, and believe me... I've seen a few where the sales force does what you describe and keeps all those promises to themselves, so it's not unusual for sales people to be as slimy as you imply. But
The cordless battery issue he mentions is one of my pet peeves too. However, it seems to stem from a misguided attempt by the manufacturers to capture an extra part of the "razors and razor blade" market. (Sell the razor for below cost and clean up on the repeat sales of above cost blades.) We see (or suspect) this is happening in ink-jet printers.
I find it funny (and hence am not 100% convinced) that this is happening in the cordless battery realm because the cost of a replacement battery is something like 80% of the cost of the original tool. At least from a recent experience I had when one of my batteries died. At that price level it may just be enough for me to buy a new one from a diff manufacturer and hence break the razor-and-blade scheme.
However it may be interesting to consider situations where IMPROVEMENTS have been made for no obvious market benefit. For example, most modern remote controls are ergonomically styled so as to feel comfortable in your hand. Earlier styles of remote controls were simple rectangular boxes. The question is WHY did the manufacturers switch to these ergonomically designed units? It seems to me that on the list of "must have" features on a new TV or stereo an ergonomically designed remote should be so low that it would never get addressed.
I feel the same way about the car unlock complaint as well as the passenger seatbelt complaint Jamie made. But... when I'm looking for horsepower, gas mileage and reliability, door unlock feature just doesn't measure up to be a "no-buy" decision. Yet, like the remote control example above... something may yet force these designers to put these features in.
I am a bit disappointed in this article. The subject made me think of some really beautiful pieces of code that I've seen in my life. Breseham's algorithm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bresenham's_line_algorithm which is an integer arithmetic method of drawing a line on a computer monitor. I would love to have seen 12 more such examples of "artful code" but instead I get a link to a slashdotted article which appears to contain interesting 3D scenes and maybe animations done with older hardware. Boring.
The part of the article that mentioned JAVA is used to entice students to try CS. So the problem isn't really JAVA but it's JAVA-AS-THE-ENDPOINT.
I think colleges and even high schools should offer MORE teaser programs to expose students to as wide a variety of (for lack of a better term) career choices as possible. If said colleges want to make such programs as fun as possible they should also offer better guidance counseling so that someone will tell these kids what they're really in for if they adopt X as a career choice.
Black like this probably has a few oddities that make it hard for us to process visually, but invisible? No.
First, this thing's shadow is probably lighter than the thing itself!
Somewhat related, any shadows cast on this stuff would indeed be invisible. Direct light cast on this is probably no lighter than ambient light cast on it. So... if you imagine a brick building coated in this stuff you would not be able to see the indentations of the masonry because the shadows the outward bricks would cast on the mortar joints would not be significantly darker than the color of the bricks. The upshot is that we wouldn't be able to see surface detail and that visual cue would be missing for us.
But beyond an inability to see surface detail, we may not be able to see even the corners on a building painted with this stuff. The part of the building that's in direct sunlight would not be any brighter than the part that's not. We'd probably think it's a cylinder even if it's a square or rectangle.
Without the benefit of having RTFA I would say that the government is realizing that normal email is sent "in the clear" as we all know. So it seems like an easy argument to claim that such communication isn't private as you made not effort to protect it and even low-level techies know that standard email is not secure. It seems similar to me to claiming that a loud conversation in a bar is private, a conversation over CB-radios is private or a conversation over analog cell phones is private(though this may well be considered private).
The act of encrypting it though should make it private as you clearly took steps to keep it private. Thus requests for your keys should be denied. We should have a right to private communications, and if, as individuals, some of us have the ability to take a formerly public conversation private by, say speaking in a private code at a bar, then the law should allow our right to privacy to extend to any area where we try to extend it.
But that's what I would do if I were in charge... unfortunately... we'll have to see how congress reacts to this draft policy.
The solution is simple... extract it from the butts of Hynerians.
http://www.farscape-1.com/index.php?title=Hynerians
(look up farting helium... one of the most outrageous claims ever on a sci-fi show. Man those writers failed chem-101!)
The Helium market is an odd one... the gas is a by-product of mining Natural Gas. According to a recent science friday interview http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200710122 the supply/demand market is set for natural gas and not directly helium. In other words... it is not ecomomical to drill into natural gas mines solely for helium. At least not at current helium prices. So the production capacity is driven by the supply/demand needs for natural gas not directly helium.
Additionally, as others have pointed out, there are various refineries around the world that are under repair or otherwise offline.
I agree with this completely, but allow me to sell the original poster on it from another angle.
First, he states that he's breezing through his courses w/o much trouble. Sounds like he has spare capacity for a few extra classes. While I personally believe biz/mgmt classes will be exactly the leg-up that the poster above mentions, you may do better to add extra non-CS courses that YOU personally find interesting. If you like economics better than marketing... take an econ course. If you like physics and math, take some of those courses. If you don't know if you'll like something, try to take a freshman level course in a related area. If you hate it and it's hard, it shouldn't be too hard after all it is freshman level and/or you could hopefully make up your mind before it's too late to drop out. Alternatively... DON'T (formally) TAKE ANYTHING, but audit the course instead. Many universities (here in the US at least) allow you to sit in on classes for no credit. I think you'll learn more if you take something for credit, but if you're nervous about going too far afield from the CS dept then go crazy and audit first, then if you liked it as an auditor... see if you can enroll for grades in a subsequent term.
Bottom line... if you merely get better at CS then... how unique will you be in the work force? Even in the case where you can finish a masters level of work while an undergrad, you're still as useful to an employer as any other masters level student. But... how many CS majors have minors in biology, mathematics, economics, marketing, journalism, political science, etc... You want to distinguish yourself? Go further afield.
And oh yea... I agree with the comment of learning 1-2 programming languages really well rather than a lots but only at a beginner level.
I'm going to go out on a limb here and speak for the religious fundamentalists who profess to not believe in evolution.
I believe the problem these folks have with evolution has nothing to do with what they're complaining about. Religious people believe God created Man with a Soul. But when evolution came along it suddenly appeared that science contradicted that belief. Where in the chain of evolution did Man get his Soul? It is simply much easier for these religious fundamentalists to believe that God created Man whole-cloth and hence Soul came in there. Or that God directly tampered with evolution (ID) and Soul came in there. To believe that somewhere between Australopithecus and Homo Sapiens the soul jumped in is apparently too much for these people to believe.
Until these religious fundamentalists come clean with themselves and realize that THIS is the heart of their problem with evolution, this debate will unfortunately continue to rage on and on.
There's that management exercise of dividing tasks into the 4 categories between "urgent and important" to "not urgent and not important". I personally believe the problem with TV news is that their ranking of "newsworthy" items is:
1) Urgent and Important (eg Bhutto's assassination)
2) Urgent and not Important (eg Paris Nicole Spears)
3) Not Urgent and Important (eg almost every longer term story, for example, Darfur)
4) Not Urgent and Not Important (who cares)
The pressure the networks feel is to get people to watch NOW. All their advertising and ratings are based off of ratings "today" or "this hour". Face it... anything in the not urgent but important category can wait. One can learn about it later in the day and possibly through another source, but if you have the viewers eyeballs... what's the best thing to show them to keep them viewing? Urgent stuff of course.
My gold standard for reporting on "not urgent and important" stuff is Frontline. If TV news re-focused the staff they have that track Urgent and Not Important items and had them do stories on Not Urgent and Important stuff to the caliber of Frontline then... well... it would go a long way toward addressing my concerns with TV news.
I read some of the links provided and your comment above doesn't quite seem right. It isn't that the US is treating domestic businesses differently than foreign ones, it's that it's treating ONLINE businesses differently than Brick&Mortar ones. The law prevents credit card companies from collecting payments related to online gambling. If I understand the US law correctly here, this applies to both domestic and foreign online gambling.
Am I reading this correctly? If so, this is goofy in that the WTO apparently sees no difference between physical and online gambling while the US apparently does? Are there any other examples of online vs physical businesses that any country/state/whatever treats differently?
Given that this is Texas and the recent ID news from there http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/01/0551221 I would have thought EVOLUTION qualified as "weird science" in Texas.
Specifically I do not care how my low-security passwords are stored. But for my high security passwords, I would like them all to be stored in a unix-like way, namely only cyphertext is stored and it's impossible for anyone to know what that password is. Sure they may be able to change it on my behalf, but can they tell what it is? No!
I've had this concern for quite a while now and I'm surprised that I haven't found a security certified label that addresses this concern. Sure there are other labels like http://www.truste.org/ or "Verisign Secured", but where's there one that tells me my user-password is stored in a "unix-like" manner?
I read TFA and she apparently got fired for passing along an email about an upcoming presentation by an apparent Anti-Creationist author.
Since TFA doesn't include any reference to the actual email it's hard to tell if the email was "professional" in that it merely alerted recipients to this presentation w/o taking "sides" or if the Director included language meant to show her position on the matter.
Before I go further I should say Creationism and ID are a load of crap. However, if the school board wants to have a policy of "not publicly taking sides" that is disappointing, but not killer (though I haven't seen the Texas Biology Curriculum). I believe, in principle, that the former director could have done something that was against this "don't take sides" directive. (For all the article states, the Texas School authority could be in favor of Evolution, but want to appear at least "neutral" so as to appease that fraction of their voter base who prefer ID.)
What I'm getting at is:
a) if the email was just something to the effect of "here's an upcoming presentation that may be useful in our discussions on this topic", that seems like it should be allowed even by this goofy "don't take sides" attitude of the Texas School authority.
b) it would be nice to have an alternate reality machine to see if they would have fired her if she wrote a similar email about an upcoming presentation favoring ID. I bet not.
So, please, enlighten us as to where you're getting this idea that modern medicine is taught unscientifically, because as far as I can tell your notion is not based in reality.
Recently there was a Science Friday pod cast on this very subject. The book referred to by this is discussed on the website here: http://www.overtreated.com/the_book.html/ All you have to do is listen to it for the first 3 minutes to hear quotes like these: "There is a lot of medicine that doesn't have a lot of valid science behind it." "Institute of Medicine estimates that maybe 1/2 of what physicians do has valid evidence to back it up."From a simple-end-user point of view, a firewall isn't an application. If you're trying to design a simple functional "firewall" interface for average non-techie user to use you need to put some of the firewall configuration functionality in the apps requesting the service in the first place.
Imagine, Bonjour (or MSN Messenger) start up and notice that the firewall setting is blocking them, and right there alerts the user to this fact and asks the user if they want to change their firewall setting to allow this communication to take place. That's the sort of thing a non-techie user would understand and expect.
Are there security problems with this approach? Only if the app/os is designed to let 3rd party apps directly change the firewall settings, but that's not what I'm advocating. I'm suggesting the interface be changed so that the app can tell the firewall is blocking it (or can reasonably guess) and the app can at least activate the firewall configuration screen and let the user proceed from there.
My Comcast DVR is already like this.
I live in an area where power outages for a few days happen at least once a winter. When the power goes out, often times the cable does too. We have a generator, and use the Comcast DVR quite heavily. Imagine my surprise when during one recent power outage we thought we'd watch some DVRed programs only to find out that THE DVR DIDN'T WORK. I couldn't bring up the menu system w/o an active connection to Comcast central.
Go figure.
I built a machine for my family a few years ago. I bought an SLI mobo and only ONE of the SLI video cards. My plan was that ... while this card would be expensive NOW in about a year it will be cheaper and I can buy the 2nd of the 2 and get better video performance as an upgrade.
... now I'm wondering which is better.. a single 8800 card referred to in the article or these dual SLI 6600 series cards.
A few things were wrong with that.
a) the price of this particular card didn't drop that much
b) there appear to be some goofy bottlenecks in the dual mode SLI that are still keeping it down.
It's a 6600 series card (two in SLI mode) and