I was under the impression that 3D printing currently only worked with a few materials, and usually was just used with plastics. But 3D printing with metal? Welcome to the future.
As SOPA/PIPA revealed, not all the power groups in the US are of one mind about this issue. And the system of "checks and balances" allows for an out in this sort of scenario, when some power groups are willing to fight it out.
Seriously. I'm not a big fan of Anonymous's tactics, but I'm not a big fan of the FBI's tactics, either. And historically, we know that far more damage is done by unconstrained police forces than by Molotov cocktail tossing anarchists.
Some of the content of the WSJ article denied that the warming trend was significant, and otherwise made specific criticisms of the scientific consensus. So yes, there was some stuff in their that would call for actual scientists to cite evidence in order to refute.
But the main thrust of the piece was political economics: "Don't listen to the hippie communists! Exponentially increasing production and consumption forever!"
We don't have direct access to truth. The closest and most reliable approximations to truth we have are scientific methodologies, and accumulated information collected and organized through those methodologies. If you don't understand the distinction, you don't understand science.
And so, yes, it makes sense to treat "scientific truth" as the more or less democratic expression of the majority of scientists at a given moment. If there are a few dozen scientists arguing against the conclusions reached by thousands of other scientists, then it makes sense to lean towards the conclusion of the larger number of scientists, barring a sudden outbreak of large numbers of scientists acknowledging that the smaller number had presented new evidence that contradicted the prevailing theory, that their criticisms were cogent, or that a new theory explains evidence better than the old.
Furthermore, we're primarily discussing policy based upon climate science, not climate science directly, so this is explicitly a political move. Of course the sixteen scientists have the right to dissent from the scientific consensus, and to argue for different policies. The problem is that, given the way journalism works, and given who controls mass media and who pays for election campaigns, it's very likely that the opinion of a few dozen scientists will be presented as carrying just as much weight as the opinion of thousands of other scientists, and this is a distortion.
Because, like it or not, WSJ has some influence, and if they prominently feature an open letter signed by several scientists that questions AGW, then you can pretty well expect that it's going to have an impact on debates on policy. We can pretty well expect the Republican candidates for the US presidency to cite this in the next few days, for instance.
The opinion of sixteen scientists shouldn't outweigh the opinion of several thousand scientists, even assuming the sixteen are competent, but with all the powerful interests that are opposed to action on climate change, you can bet that their opinion will be given more weight than it merits.
I'm not just asking rhetorically: the article is lacking any meaninful information, and begs many questions. It says that online interactions do not substitute for "real" interactions, but why aren't online interactions "real", and if they are distinctly different in character from offline interactions, what makes them worse, rather than better, or rather than simply different?
What social problems are we talking about? Are we talking about differences that young women would themselves consider problems? Or is it simply a preference for online interaction?
It's entirely likely that the actual study cites real problems. But like everyone else here, I've had a lot of experiences with people denouncing my interests as "not real" and inferior to "real" activities, and I'm conscious that there's a lot of social pressure on people in general and women in particular to conform to toxic social norms. So I can't help but suspect that the study is complaining that some women are nerds. And we like nerds here.
I'm 41, and I went to UC Berkeley; I don't remember the exact fees, but it was far more than $1000 per semester; more like $4000 per semester, as I recall. I worked, got grants and scholarships, and still had to take out loans; I'm still in debt for those loans.
I had in mind people in the 1960s, during the great boom of university construction; the UC and CSU systems didn't even charge tuition, so students just had to meet their own living expenses, and rents were much lower then.
No rigorous study, but my experience of work, and what I have seen of friends and family.
For instance, for several years I worked for a company that printed blueprints. Typically, an order would involve many sets of prints, each set dozens of pages long or longer, the paper typically 42"x30" or 36"x24". We would take the paper off printers, straighten the pages, count them, staple them, and ship them. There would be half a dozen or a dozen sets. Most of the architects and construction firms involved were regular customers. So, for a particular building project, we'd ship to a particular set of people. And the next day, we'd print and ship revised copies of the same blueprints of the same project to the same people. For a particular project, this would be repeated for several days in a row; usually, after a week or two, there would be another several rounds of revised blueprints. And those same people would receive blueprints for many different projects on the same day. So, one person would be receiving several hundred sheets of large, highly detailed diagrams, each day, each only varying slightly from those received the previous day.
Eventually, it occurred to me that it was extremely implausible that any of the people receiving these documents was actually going through hundreds of pages of documents and comparing them, in detail, to practically identical documents received the previous day. To make things worse, the blueprints were printed from PDFs -- anyone could read them without special software. I've been on job sites, and seen well-thumbed sets of blueprints, but the foremen generally had laptops, and could view those blueprints as PDFs, without the trouble of printing them. They may have good reason to prefer physical prints, but even so, that wouldn't require a tenth the number of physical copies we produced. The only way I could understand it was that there were legal or contractual obligations to produce physical copies of blueprints whenever a change to the blueprints was made. As I later found out, the company I worked for was a relatively small one in a crowded field of blueprint production.
So, from what I could see, I was working hard, tending machines and assembling tangible products, but I was producing nothing useful; instead, it was a near total waste of resources.
As I recall, "spring break" was the period between when your term papers were assigned, and when they were due. I spent them in the library. I didn't have time or money to see my family, much less take a vacation anywhere. And I didn't know anyone for whom that wasn't true.
I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Here's the thing that bothers me: the academic subjects that do not directly correspond to vocational skills shouldn't require much in the way of resources to teach or study. Liberal arts students basically need access to a library or a museum, and to meet each other and discuss ideas. That shouldn't be expensive, but I paid far more to study literature at a university than I did to study more practical skills in IT at community college.
And there's no good reason for that. Studying literature is a matter of reading books and discussing them, and the cost of producing a book has gone down over time. Textbooks are notoriously overpriced. Some fields require more expensive equipment -- but in general, that equipment has become cheaper to produce, or at worst has stayed at the same price. College instructors aren't particularly well paid.
I am also tired of a model of social organization that cannot cope with the implications of exponentially growing productivity. I am becoming increasingly convinced that most paid labor amounts to busywork.
And we're talking about teenagers, who've probably had an email account for only a few years at most, and generally don't have lists of business contacts.
Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.
Was this recent? As I recall, this was an issue a few years ago, but was addressed by the draft RFC "Happy Eyeballs", and I gather most systems have more or less implemented it. I haven't heard of anyone disabling IPv6 for that reason for a while.
If you're counting the reserved IPv4 address blocks, like 224.0.0.0 through 254.0.0.0, there's the problem that the embedded firmware in network devices like routers, etc., will reject those addresses. Fixing that problem would be no easier than fixing the problem of such devices not handling IPv6, and fixing them to use IPv6 is a long term solution.
From what I can make out, the general form of IPv6 was laid out twenty years ago, and we were supposed to start transitioning to IPv6 ten years ago, through dual-stacking and through offering both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for Websites and Internet services. Most operating systems have been configured for dual-stacking for many years. In all the cases I've seen, the idea with dual-stacking is that IPv6 is tried first, and if that fails, fall back to IPv4. What should have happened is that, with the main functionality in place, most things should have worked with IPv6, and the inevitable bugs and oversights should have been identified and resolved, and workarounds found for embedded devices and the like, long before we ran out of IPv4 addresses and had to deal with IPv6-only nodes.
So instead of that, we've had a lot of heads stuck in the sand, and a near guarantee of expensive problems in the near future. And it drives me nuts every time there's a discussion of IPv6, in which someone mentions carrier-grade NAT, or some other horrible kludge to extend IPv4 a little longer, and gets a bunch of responses that now we don't need to worry about implementing IPv6. Also, there are the inevitable posts in which people hit on the brilliant scheme of extending IPv4 by just adding some more digits, which they seem to think would be easier to implement than IPv6.
While it's a fair point that Wikipedia is an obvious starting point, I would have to say that the article on OLAP seems to suggest that OLTP is a synonym for OLAP, and the article on OLAP is short but dense. I'm left with an impression that there's a distinction being made between two approaches for constructing end-user interfaces to databases, but what the distinction between OLTP and OLAP is still unclear to me, and I don't have any idea why the distinction would be so significant as to constitute a career transition.
All those things could have contributed to a security oversight. But I was answering the question of why the network would have ten-year-old equipment. CCSF has had several rounds of layoffs and course cancellations, and has had to completely drop summer courses. So under those conditions, old equipment may stick around for a while.
It depends upon which classes you take, of course. CCSF has a couple of smaller labs used by CS and CNIT students. The big computer labs seemed to be used primarily by students watching movies, secondarily by students writing essays or doing other sorts of homework.
I have to admit that one time, after using a flash drive on a Windows PC in the main computer lab at CCSF, and later using that flash drive on a Linux box, I noticed there was some sort of malware on my flash drive that would autoexecute on a Windows system. I wiped my flash drive, and I think I told one of the attendants at the lab about it, but I can't remember if I did. At the time, I thought of it as just an inevitable, but trivial, annoyance from using a busy shared computer lab with Windows PCs.
Slashdot Mirror
I was under the impression that 3D printing currently only worked with a few materials, and usually was just used with plastics. But 3D printing with metal? Welcome to the future.
As SOPA/PIPA revealed, not all the power groups in the US are of one mind about this issue. And the system of "checks and balances" allows for an out in this sort of scenario, when some power groups are willing to fight it out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tadeusz_Ko%C5%9Bciuszko
Seriously. I'm not a big fan of Anonymous's tactics, but I'm not a big fan of the FBI's tactics, either. And historically, we know that far more damage is done by unconstrained police forces than by Molotov cocktail tossing anarchists.
Some of the content of the WSJ article denied that the warming trend was significant, and otherwise made specific criticisms of the scientific consensus. So yes, there was some stuff in their that would call for actual scientists to cite evidence in order to refute.
But the main thrust of the piece was political economics: "Don't listen to the hippie communists! Exponentially increasing production and consumption forever!"
We don't have direct access to truth. The closest and most reliable approximations to truth we have are scientific methodologies, and accumulated information collected and organized through those methodologies. If you don't understand the distinction, you don't understand science.
And so, yes, it makes sense to treat "scientific truth" as the more or less democratic expression of the majority of scientists at a given moment. If there are a few dozen scientists arguing against the conclusions reached by thousands of other scientists, then it makes sense to lean towards the conclusion of the larger number of scientists, barring a sudden outbreak of large numbers of scientists acknowledging that the smaller number had presented new evidence that contradicted the prevailing theory, that their criticisms were cogent, or that a new theory explains evidence better than the old.
Furthermore, we're primarily discussing policy based upon climate science, not climate science directly, so this is explicitly a political move. Of course the sixteen scientists have the right to dissent from the scientific consensus, and to argue for different policies. The problem is that, given the way journalism works, and given who controls mass media and who pays for election campaigns, it's very likely that the opinion of a few dozen scientists will be presented as carrying just as much weight as the opinion of thousands of other scientists, and this is a distortion.
Because, like it or not, WSJ has some influence, and if they prominently feature an open letter signed by several scientists that questions AGW, then you can pretty well expect that it's going to have an impact on debates on policy. We can pretty well expect the Republican candidates for the US presidency to cite this in the next few days, for instance.
The opinion of sixteen scientists shouldn't outweigh the opinion of several thousand scientists, even assuming the sixteen are competent, but with all the powerful interests that are opposed to action on climate change, you can bet that their opinion will be given more weight than it merits.
I'm not just asking rhetorically: the article is lacking any meaninful information, and begs many questions. It says that online interactions do not substitute for "real" interactions, but why aren't online interactions "real", and if they are distinctly different in character from offline interactions, what makes them worse, rather than better, or rather than simply different?
What social problems are we talking about? Are we talking about differences that young women would themselves consider problems? Or is it simply a preference for online interaction?
It's entirely likely that the actual study cites real problems. But like everyone else here, I've had a lot of experiences with people denouncing my interests as "not real" and inferior to "real" activities, and I'm conscious that there's a lot of social pressure on people in general and women in particular to conform to toxic social norms. So I can't help but suspect that the study is complaining that some women are nerds. And we like nerds here.
That does make more sense.
Some days, I live up to my chosen pseudonym too well.
I'll have to assume that's more accurate than my memory.
I'm 41, and I went to UC Berkeley; I don't remember the exact fees, but it was far more than $1000 per semester; more like $4000 per semester, as I recall. I worked, got grants and scholarships, and still had to take out loans; I'm still in debt for those loans.
I had in mind people in the 1960s, during the great boom of university construction; the UC and CSU systems didn't even charge tuition, so students just had to meet their own living expenses, and rents were much lower then.
No rigorous study, but my experience of work, and what I have seen of friends and family.
For instance, for several years I worked for a company that printed blueprints. Typically, an order would involve many sets of prints, each set dozens of pages long or longer, the paper typically 42"x30" or 36"x24". We would take the paper off printers, straighten the pages, count them, staple them, and ship them. There would be half a dozen or a dozen sets. Most of the architects and construction firms involved were regular customers. So, for a particular building project, we'd ship to a particular set of people. And the next day, we'd print and ship revised copies of the same blueprints of the same project to the same people. For a particular project, this would be repeated for several days in a row; usually, after a week or two, there would be another several rounds of revised blueprints. And those same people would receive blueprints for many different projects on the same day. So, one person would be receiving several hundred sheets of large, highly detailed diagrams, each day, each only varying slightly from those received the previous day.
Eventually, it occurred to me that it was extremely implausible that any of the people receiving these documents was actually going through hundreds of pages of documents and comparing them, in detail, to practically identical documents received the previous day. To make things worse, the blueprints were printed from PDFs -- anyone could read them without special software. I've been on job sites, and seen well-thumbed sets of blueprints, but the foremen generally had laptops, and could view those blueprints as PDFs, without the trouble of printing them. They may have good reason to prefer physical prints, but even so, that wouldn't require a tenth the number of physical copies we produced. The only way I could understand it was that there were legal or contractual obligations to produce physical copies of blueprints whenever a change to the blueprints was made. As I later found out, the company I worked for was a relatively small one in a crowded field of blueprint production.
So, from what I could see, I was working hard, tending machines and assembling tangible products, but I was producing nothing useful; instead, it was a near total waste of resources.
As I recall, "spring break" was the period between when your term papers were assigned, and when they were due. I spent them in the library. I didn't have time or money to see my family, much less take a vacation anywhere. And I didn't know anyone for whom that wasn't true.
I am romantically in favor of the idea of the mysty eyed dreamer going to school for indian tribal botany or some other esoteric pursuit of knowledge for its own sake.
Here's the thing that bothers me: the academic subjects that do not directly correspond to vocational skills shouldn't require much in the way of resources to teach or study. Liberal arts students basically need access to a library or a museum, and to meet each other and discuss ideas. That shouldn't be expensive, but I paid far more to study literature at a university than I did to study more practical skills in IT at community college.
And there's no good reason for that. Studying literature is a matter of reading books and discussing them, and the cost of producing a book has gone down over time. Textbooks are notoriously overpriced. Some fields require more expensive equipment -- but in general, that equipment has become cheaper to produce, or at worst has stayed at the same price. College instructors aren't particularly well paid.
So where's all the money going?
I am.
I am also tired of a model of social organization that cannot cope with the implications of exponentially growing productivity. I am becoming increasingly convinced that most paid labor amounts to busywork.
And we're talking about teenagers, who've probably had an email account for only a few years at most, and generally don't have lists of business contacts.
Sharing email account passwords isn't nearly as big a deal as people here seem to think.
And I find the hostility to the idea of expressing trust and intimacy rather unsettling.
Disclaimer: my only experience with IPv6 was on a Linux client machine. For me, it meant horribly slow web browsing as many requests involved waiting for IPv6 to timeout before if would fall back and try IPv4. I opted for lazy and just disabled IPv6 rather than go looking for a solution.
Was this recent? As I recall, this was an issue a few years ago, but was addressed by the draft RFC "Happy Eyeballs", and I gather most systems have more or less implemented it. I haven't heard of anyone disabling IPv6 for that reason for a while.
If you're counting the reserved IPv4 address blocks, like 224.0.0.0 through 254.0.0.0, there's the problem that the embedded firmware in network devices like routers, etc., will reject those addresses. Fixing that problem would be no easier than fixing the problem of such devices not handling IPv6, and fixing them to use IPv6 is a long term solution.
From what I can make out, the general form of IPv6 was laid out twenty years ago, and we were supposed to start transitioning to IPv6 ten years ago, through dual-stacking and through offering both IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for Websites and Internet services. Most operating systems have been configured for dual-stacking for many years. In all the cases I've seen, the idea with dual-stacking is that IPv6 is tried first, and if that fails, fall back to IPv4. What should have happened is that, with the main functionality in place, most things should have worked with IPv6, and the inevitable bugs and oversights should have been identified and resolved, and workarounds found for embedded devices and the like, long before we ran out of IPv4 addresses and had to deal with IPv6-only nodes.
So instead of that, we've had a lot of heads stuck in the sand, and a near guarantee of expensive problems in the near future. And it drives me nuts every time there's a discussion of IPv6, in which someone mentions carrier-grade NAT, or some other horrible kludge to extend IPv4 a little longer, and gets a bunch of responses that now we don't need to worry about implementing IPv6. Also, there are the inevitable posts in which people hit on the brilliant scheme of extending IPv4 by just adding some more digits, which they seem to think would be easier to implement than IPv6.
While it's a fair point that Wikipedia is an obvious starting point, I would have to say that the article on OLAP seems to suggest that OLTP is a synonym for OLAP, and the article on OLAP is short but dense. I'm left with an impression that there's a distinction being made between two approaches for constructing end-user interfaces to databases, but what the distinction between OLTP and OLAP is still unclear to me, and I don't have any idea why the distinction would be so significant as to constitute a career transition.
I was talking about layoffs of instructors and support staff such as counselors, not about the retirement of administrators.
All those things could have contributed to a security oversight. But I was answering the question of why the network would have ten-year-old equipment. CCSF has had several rounds of layoffs and course cancellations, and has had to completely drop summer courses. So under those conditions, old equipment may stick around for a while.
It depends upon which classes you take, of course. CCSF has a couple of smaller labs used by CS and CNIT students. The big computer labs seemed to be used primarily by students watching movies, secondarily by students writing essays or doing other sorts of homework.
I have to admit that one time, after using a flash drive on a Windows PC in the main computer lab at CCSF, and later using that flash drive on a Linux box, I noticed there was some sort of malware on my flash drive that would autoexecute on a Windows system. I wiped my flash drive, and I think I told one of the attendants at the lab about it, but I can't remember if I did. At the time, I thought of it as just an inevitable, but trivial, annoyance from using a busy shared computer lab with Windows PCs.