Hm, yeah, I can imagine that if you get this stuff down the throat, you're in deep trouble. Hm, every time I've done it, I have found it completely impossible to get it anywhere near the throat before it evaporates. Douglas Osheroff (nobel laureate in physics) told me that he actually got some nitrogen down the throat when he did this. But I mean, the whole point of the demonstration is to make things look cool, and getting it down the throat makes no impression, because people can't see down your throat. If you only keep it in your mouth, then, it is quite safe. You would have to really work hard to get it down the throat, and that, you obviously shouldn't do. It is not because it is cold, but because liquid nitrogen has, what 700 times? the density of vapor, that's how much it expands.
Well, I'm not so sure all the kids like things that explodes. Some may only be frightened, and they will forever think that science is only about destroying things. It is a real problem that many people think that.
I much rather like demonstrations that are counter-intuitive. Especially things that seem "supernatural" to do, yet are very natural indeed. I'd like to point out the work of David Willey, whom I've worked with. He organized a world-record firewalk, and I attended (yeah, I've got a world record in firewalking...:-) ).
David has done quite a lot of explosions and rocketry too, he knows all about that too, but his best demos is really those that seem risky, but are not. The liquid lead is among them.
I do dome "risky" demos. I've got a world record in firewalking, I've done the lead thing, and it's not that extreme at all. Firewalking is of course the demo but it takes a lot of resources.
I'd say: get a bed of nails. The bed of nails is probably the demo that hurts the most of the things I do, but it is not dangerous. It doesn't hurt just lying there, but then you put some brick s on you chest, and you get someone in the audience to break them with a sledgehammer. But it looks absolutely astonishing.
Check out David Willey's homepage. There's not much info on how to do things, but he does all kinds of weird things, and he's the guy who organized these firewalking record events.
This is actually a lot more fun if you put your hand on fire. It is possible and quite safe. Add some salt to the mix to, to get a yellow flame rather than a blue one.
I've done that demonstration., it's cool, and I have a hard time understanding how you can possibly have so much water on your hand you get this problem.
Throwing lead up in the air is cool too, they come down as drops...:-)
Don't put liquid nitrogen or dry ice in your mouth.
These are both cool and very safe experiments. I've done them both, several times. You can really trust the Leidenfrost effect, it is very well understood, and it works every time.
The point with drinking liquid nitrogen is that how hard you attempt to drink it, it will never get down your throat, because it evaporates so fast, and you'll get fumes (vapor) out your nose. Looks really cool!
But then, when you're demonstrating things to kids, you have the added responsibility that they don't go home and do stupid things. But for non-drunk adults, I see no reason not to do these things.
Hehe, yeah, R is going to kill your company, whoever you are!:-) (I'm not a statistician, but I used R for my thesis, and I loved it, but I also found some bugs, especially one in rpois was quite scary).
The basic point of the article still stands, you can't verify things yourself. For any scientist, that should be bad. And for a Human Rights worker, who quite certainly has someone powerful who doesn't want him to do whatever he's doing, it is of paramount importance.
Really, I find it strange that in science, you are supposed to openly document all you're doing except the software implementation of what you did... I don't think that can last.
If you use Excel for statistics, you should be booed off the stage. You will never get an article through peer-review in a reputable scientific journal. If you try that, you will be given the following reference and be told to get a clue: B.D. McCullough and Berry Wilson. 1999. On the accuracy of statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97. Computational Statistics and Data Analysis, 31(1): 27-37
The problems have not been corrected in an XP box I just tried.
It is my firm belief that the code must be available for review for it to be good science, and closed source is one of the greatest problems in science today. You are expected to document every aspect of your research, except for the actual implementation, that doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't need to be free as in speech or even Open Source in the OSI sense, but it sure helps.
Yeah, I'm a major Pooh lover, and what I've seen Disney do to Pooh and his friends makes it quite clear that Disney has hurt the artistic value of Pooh. It would have been a lot better if Pooh had entered the Pubilc Domain, so anybody could use the character in their writings.
AFAIK, Disney bought the rights to make films of Winnie-the-pooh in the 60-ties. I'm not aware that they bought the whole character.
Just look at what they've done: In Milne's stories, Tigger is bouncy. But there is a lot to that. That Tigger is bouncy means lots of things. It teaches that you have to accept people as they are, tolerance. It teaches that there are more important things in life than to get upset by small annoyances. There are many things to be learned from that Tigger is bouncy.
And all Disney has made from it is that Tigger bounces around on his tail... Unbelievable.
I would really like to see it enter the public domain, so that we can get a more balanced view of what goes on in the Hundred Acre Wood.
However, people would probably not fetch the public key from the same place, but from a keyserver. That helps a bit, but not a lot. There is nothing that stops anyone from generating a keypair with the same name and address as the original source, and quite possibly, you would see the file verified, but still by the wrong key.
Even if you would have two public keys, you would have no idea which one to trust.
So, signing is no magic bullet.
We have to get much better at organizing keysigning parties. Keysigning parties are really the key (yeah, pun intended, puns are cool!:-) ) to this problem.
Gather friends every now and then, make sure you have a printout on you fingerprint on you at all times, whenever you travel, try to find somebody to meet, and so on. That way, we will build a web of trust which is so strong, people can identify valid keys, and then we're an awful lot better prepared to face this kind of problems.
Make sure you sign up at Biglumber, that you check it when you're out travelling, and that you subscribe to the "keysignings" list to keep up to date when things are happening in you area.
And, then, I'd really like to see my distro check sigs by default.
Well, there is a lot of fun you can have with Sodium.
Back in school, there was a big mark in the roof, after a guy that just came out from college was teaching a class, and got a little bit too eager with the Sodium. My teacher only took a small piece (looked cool), but this guy had apparently taken a major chunck...
My father worked in a lab, and one night, the cleaning personell had thrown two small pieces of gray rock into the water they used for cleaning... They were quite surprised when it blew up, and it was probably the last time they'd touch anything in a chemistry lab...
Finally, one of the kids in my class said that he once stole some Sodium at school, threw in a can of water and put the lid on. To his disappointment, nothing happened. So he went over to the can, and shook it. Then, something happened. Last time I met him, he still had both hands, though...
Then you do not visit it often enough, because it was announced there like everything. It was in fact on the homepage on August 20th, that is, long before the flood that the articles of The Register and/. started.
It is indeed excellent that this is the turn-out, but there is no reason to imply that the W3C was Bad[tm] in this respect. TimBL made it very clear in his book that software patents posed the greatest obstacle to innovation, yeah, and BTW:
Lessig is also quoting out of context. The next few lines in the same FAQ states that you go to NANAE to present your case. Everybody who is participating in SPEWS are expected to read NANAE, so that is the forum they are presenting. This is a completely open forum, in fact, more open than/. where you can be modded into oblivion. In fact, go to the SPEWS site and look for delistings. They do listen. Lessig has no point here at all. However, I nevertheless think that blacklists should be abandoned, see my other post.
I agree with some of your points. Lessig has really written a very bad piece. I usually quite Lessig when he's quoting Rosen saying that Hollywood should control all distribution of everything, but the quote that you can't contact SPEWS is bullshit to the extend that almost becomes dishonest. I'm not sure I can quote Lessig after this. SPEWS FAQ Q41 states that you talk to SPEWS folks in NANAE. You'll meet them all there.
For obvious reasons, and "ADV" wont work. Now, Lessig makes the mistake of thinking that the US is the whole world. That's a very bad mistake. Another mistake is not to realize that my mailserver and bandwidth has suffered from the spam if I accept it. These costs are very large indeed. The only way to avoid this cost is that spam is never sent.
I've been a regular in NANAE for a long time (not right now), and I have supported RBL and SPEWS, and I still see many positive things about them.
Yet, I don't think people realize how much power they have, and what costs a mistake will have. Use of RBL and SPEWS is voluntary, so Lessigs "vigilantism" reference is highly inappropiate. But effectively, so many people are using them that an error on the part of us is too costly for those that it hits.
Mistakes are human, and we all make mistakes, but it is easier to make mistakes when you're not working full-time on an issue, when you don't have the time to research properly. Nevertheless, these mistakes are unacceptable. By mistakes I'm not talking about the RBLing of Peacefire. They chose to stand by scumbags and chose to go to the press rather than resolve it in a manner that everybody would benefit from. I'm talking like the case of Ed Felten's "Freedom to Tinker" experiences with SpamCop and the SPEWS listing of The Linux Kernel Archives. These are examples of things that should never happen. Most of us strive for many 9s of uptime, and can appreciate what it is like to be blocked for days. Traumatic, that's what it is.:-)
Yet, that is going to happen many times more if we continue with current practices.
I think the US needs good laws. Here in Norway we have a law that requires confirmed opt-in and bans business to consumer spam. It works quite well. While I get quite a lot of religous spam from US, I get nothing from Norway, though that is not regulated. It could be that the message is quite strong that spamming is unacceptable anyway, so even the morons don't spam.
While spammers can move off-shore, I wouldn't mind blocking whole countries untill they get good laws. Moving off-shore won't work.
It will not totally stop spam, but only totalitarian regimes want total solution to problems. With laws in place, we may get a spam a month, I don't mind as long as I can turn the spammer over to the justice system and let them decide whether he overstepped the boundaries or not. That's what the justice system is there for.
Now, Lessig's proposal is bad from another angle too, and that is that it to a great extent encourages vigilantism. I really don't want a bunch of script-kiddies running around trying to obtain evidence that some randomly accused person committed spamming. Joe-jobs happen a lot, I've been joed myself. True spamfighters know a joe-job when they see it, but a random script-kiddie out to make a fast $10k won't.
A US ban on spam is needed. Blacklists should be abandoned.
Actually, I got a message "warning" me about this scam the other day. It did actually seem to come from a real person. But obviously, I didn't go any further.
No. It would have been neat if you didn't have to secure your wireless network, because it could then have been used as an emergency network if it was really needed.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and will be for a very long time to come, so it must be managed wisely.
The ideal world is not one would you would have to secure everything to hold on to it. The ideal world is one would people would have the social intelligence to stay away from things that don't belong to them. You could say I'm utopia now, but I don't think so: It is not hard to run away from a restaurant without paying. It is not hard to grab a newspaper from an outlet and not paying. Even so, few people are doing it, because they know it is wrong.
Similarily, people should stay away from using the bandwidth of wireless networks where they're not wanted. That way, if a neighbourhood is covered, if somebody there needs emergency assistance for some reason, they can communicate this need. Otherwise, they will just be rejected as a possible intruder.
As for your cancer, well, you need to read more physics.
I've lost about 25 pounds without dieting at all. I wrote a big thesis in astrophysics, which made me sit in front of a computer 13 hours a day. That's not good for you. I guess I'm kind of a super-healthy person; not drinking coffee, not even coke, no smoking. I used to be an endurance athlete, and in some ways, I always was, but the studies took so much of my time, I just didn't have the time to train.
But then, I finally got the time to get out there. Enjoying the woods as I always did. Just seize every opportunity. Also, I spent the summer climbing to about 20000 feet.
I enjoy training a lot, so the first thing I did when I finished was to start training again. At that time, I weighed ~85 kg. It was 7 months ago. Now I'm 71 kgs, which I'm pretty comfortable with.
In the meantime I was eating a lot. You've got to do that when your burning as much as I do.
My advice is rather than diets (OK, stay away from things that are obviously bad), go out training. Burn it. But it means that you have to be dedicated, and that you seize the opportunity to go out when you've got it.
I agree! Free software is about freedom, also for commercial vendors. They are free, just like J. Random Hacker to tweak it to suit their needs, and the needs of their customers.
I'm a KDE user myself, and I think the KDE folks will also come to the conclusion that RH isn't doing anything nasty when they think more about it.
However, I do not agree that Linux needs a Single Unified Desktop. On the contrary, the competition now is good. It allows more room to experiment, it allows for different developers to have different priorities.
And it allows vendors to choose the best parts from each project to provide a unified desktop in their product. Or, leave the choice to their customers if customers want choice.
Korganizer's native format is vCalendar (was anyway). So it is quite likely that these things would be able to talk together. After all they are all internet standards (more about iCal/iCard).
Well, I'd really like somebody to do some real statistics on this matter. I'm not a statistician (though I play one on TV:-) ), but I figured that a nice analysis of variance might do the trick. What you do is that you input CD sales, compare it with some good metric of what P2P did, like number of downloads, if that number exist. Then you input metrics of how the general economy was doing. Also input the for example how albums were received by music critics. In a similar manner, you include metrics for what could conceivably influence CD sales. This is usually what you do in statistics to find out what factors contribute to the variations in a certain variable. Often, the important factors make themselves known very clearly by a good analysis. This is something I'd like to see, but it should be done by a real statistician, not by people like me...
Slashdot Mirror
Hm, yeah, I can imagine that if you get this stuff down the throat, you're in deep trouble. Hm, every time I've done it, I have found it completely impossible to get it anywhere near the throat before it evaporates. Douglas Osheroff (nobel laureate in physics) told me that he actually got some nitrogen down the throat when he did this. But I mean, the whole point of the demonstration is to make things look cool, and getting it down the throat makes no impression, because people can't see down your throat. If you only keep it in your mouth, then, it is quite safe. You would have to really work hard to get it down the throat, and that, you obviously shouldn't do. It is not because it is cold, but because liquid nitrogen has, what 700 times? the density of vapor, that's how much it expands.
I much rather like demonstrations that are counter-intuitive. Especially things that seem "supernatural" to do, yet are very natural indeed. I'd like to point out the work of David Willey, whom I've worked with. He organized a world-record firewalk, and I attended (yeah, I've got a world record in firewalking... :-) ).
Check out his article in Skeptical Inquirer: The Physics Behind Four Amazing Demonstrations.
David has done quite a lot of explosions and rocketry too, he knows all about that too, but his best demos is really those that seem risky, but are not. The liquid lead is among them.
I'd say: get a bed of nails. The bed of nails is probably the demo that hurts the most of the things I do, but it is not dangerous. It doesn't hurt just lying there, but then you put some brick s on you chest, and you get someone in the audience to break them with a sledgehammer. But it looks absolutely astonishing.
Check out David Willey's homepage. There's not much info on how to do things, but he does all kinds of weird things, and he's the guy who organized these firewalking record events.
This is actually a lot more fun if you put your hand on fire. It is possible and quite safe. Add some salt to the mix to, to get a yellow flame rather than a blue one.
Throwing lead up in the air is cool too, they come down as drops... :-)
These are both cool and very safe experiments. I've done them both, several times. You can really trust the Leidenfrost effect, it is very well understood, and it works every time.
The point with drinking liquid nitrogen is that how hard you attempt to drink it, it will never get down your throat, because it evaporates so fast, and you'll get fumes (vapor) out your nose. Looks really cool!
But then, when you're demonstrating things to kids, you have the added responsibility that they don't go home and do stupid things. But for non-drunk adults, I see no reason not to do these things.
The basic point of the article still stands, you can't verify things yourself. For any scientist, that should be bad. And for a Human Rights worker, who quite certainly has someone powerful who doesn't want him to do whatever he's doing, it is of paramount importance.
Really, I find it strange that in science, you are supposed to openly document all you're doing except the software implementation of what you did... I don't think that can last.
statistical procedures in Microsoft Excel 97. Computational Statistics and
Data Analysis, 31(1): 27-37
The problems have not been corrected in an XP box I just tried.
It is my firm belief that the code must be available for review for it to be good science, and closed source is one of the greatest problems in science today. You are expected to document every aspect of your research, except for the actual implementation, that doesn't make any sense.
It doesn't need to be free as in speech or even Open Source in the OSI sense, but it sure helps.
AFAIK, Disney bought the rights to make films of Winnie-the-pooh in the 60-ties. I'm not aware that they bought the whole character.
Just look at what they've done: In Milne's stories, Tigger is bouncy. But there is a lot to that. That Tigger is bouncy means lots of things. It teaches that you have to accept people as they are, tolerance. It teaches that there are more important things in life than to get upset by small annoyances. There are many things to be learned from that Tigger is bouncy.
And all Disney has made from it is that Tigger bounces around on his tail... Unbelievable.
I would really like to see it enter the public domain, so that we can get a more balanced view of what goes on in the Hundred Acre Wood.
However, people would probably not fetch the public key from the same place, but from a keyserver. That helps a bit, but not a lot. There is nothing that stops anyone from generating a keypair with the same name and address as the original source, and quite possibly, you would see the file verified, but still by the wrong key.
Even if you would have two public keys, you would have no idea which one to trust. So, signing is no magic bullet.
We have to get much better at organizing keysigning parties. Keysigning parties are really the key (yeah, pun intended, puns are cool! :-) ) to this problem.
Gather friends every now and then, make sure you have a printout on you fingerprint on you at all times, whenever you travel, try to find somebody to meet, and so on. That way, we will build a web of trust which is so strong, people can identify valid keys, and then we're an awful lot better prepared to face this kind of problems.
Make sure you sign up at Biglumber, that you check it when you're out travelling, and that you subscribe to the "keysignings" list to keep up to date when things are happening in you area.
And, then, I'd really like to see my distro check sigs by default.
Yeah, and my keyid is 6A6A0BBC.
Back in school, there was a big mark in the roof, after a guy that just came out from college was teaching a class, and got a little bit too eager with the Sodium. My teacher only took a small piece (looked cool), but this guy had apparently taken a major chunck...
My father worked in a lab, and one night, the cleaning personell had thrown two small pieces of gray rock into the water they used for cleaning... They were quite surprised when it blew up, and it was probably the last time they'd touch anything in a chemistry lab...
Finally, one of the kids in my class said that he once stole some Sodium at school, threw in a can of water and put the lid on. To his disappointment, nothing happened. So he went over to the can, and shook it. Then, something happened. Last time I met him, he still had both hands, though...
Then you do not visit it often enough, because it was announced there like everything. It was in fact on the homepage on August 20th, that is, long before the flood that the articles of The Register and /. started.
It is indeed excellent that this is the turn-out, but there is no reason to imply that the W3C was Bad[tm] in this respect. TimBL made it very clear in his book that software patents posed the greatest obstacle to innovation, yeah, and BTW:
2002-05-12 09:59:23 TimBL Speaks Up Against RAND (articles,patents) (rejected)
So, why didn't /. want to tell us about this? :-)
Thanks, Bruce and others for the great work you've done!
Lessig is also quoting out of context. The next few lines in the same FAQ states that you go to NANAE to present your case. Everybody who is participating in SPEWS are expected to read NANAE, so that is the forum they are presenting. This is a completely open forum, in fact, more open than /. where you can be modded into oblivion. In fact, go to the SPEWS site and look for delistings. They do listen. Lessig has no point here at all. However, I nevertheless think that blacklists should be abandoned, see my other post.
For obvious reasons, and "ADV" wont work. Now, Lessig makes the mistake of thinking that the US is the whole world. That's a very bad mistake. Another mistake is not to realize that my mailserver and bandwidth has suffered from the spam if I accept it. These costs are very large indeed. The only way to avoid this cost is that spam is never sent.
I've been a regular in NANAE for a long time (not right now), and I have supported RBL and SPEWS, and I still see many positive things about them.
Yet, I don't think people realize how much power they have, and what costs a mistake will have. Use of RBL and SPEWS is voluntary, so Lessigs "vigilantism" reference is highly inappropiate. But effectively, so many people are using them that an error on the part of us is too costly for those that it hits.
Mistakes are human, and we all make mistakes, but it is easier to make mistakes when you're not working full-time on an issue, when you don't have the time to research properly. Nevertheless, these mistakes are unacceptable. By mistakes I'm not talking about the RBLing of Peacefire. They chose to stand by scumbags and chose to go to the press rather than resolve it in a manner that everybody would benefit from. I'm talking like the case of Ed Felten's "Freedom to Tinker" experiences with SpamCop and the SPEWS listing of The Linux Kernel Archives. These are examples of things that should never happen. Most of us strive for many 9s of uptime, and can appreciate what it is like to be blocked for days. Traumatic, that's what it is. :-)
Yet, that is going to happen many times more if we continue with current practices.
I think the US needs good laws. Here in Norway we have a law that requires confirmed opt-in and bans business to consumer spam. It works quite well. While I get quite a lot of religous spam from US, I get nothing from Norway, though that is not regulated. It could be that the message is quite strong that spamming is unacceptable anyway, so even the morons don't spam.
While spammers can move off-shore, I wouldn't mind blocking whole countries untill they get good laws. Moving off-shore won't work.
It will not totally stop spam, but only totalitarian regimes want total solution to problems. With laws in place, we may get a spam a month, I don't mind as long as I can turn the spammer over to the justice system and let them decide whether he overstepped the boundaries or not. That's what the justice system is there for.
Now, Lessig's proposal is bad from another angle too, and that is that it to a great extent encourages vigilantism. I really don't want a bunch of script-kiddies running around trying to obtain evidence that some randomly accused person committed spamming. Joe-jobs happen a lot, I've been joed myself. True spamfighters know a joe-job when they see it, but a random script-kiddie out to make a fast $10k won't.
A US ban on spam is needed. Blacklists should be abandoned.
Have you looked at Kernel.org lately?
While you're probably safe in front of you computer, you should probably not play games with them.
But don't bother forwarding the spam to the police. They've got tons of it, and they're not interested.
Actually, I got a message "warning" me about this scam the other day. It did actually seem to come from a real person. But obviously, I didn't go any further.
Bandwidth is a scarce resource, and will be for a very long time to come, so it must be managed wisely.
The ideal world is not one would you would have to secure everything to hold on to it. The ideal world is one would people would have the social intelligence to stay away from things that don't belong to them. You could say I'm utopia now, but I don't think so: It is not hard to run away from a restaurant without paying. It is not hard to grab a newspaper from an outlet and not paying. Even so, few people are doing it, because they know it is wrong.
Similarily, people should stay away from using the bandwidth of wireless networks where they're not wanted. That way, if a neighbourhood is covered, if somebody there needs emergency assistance for some reason, they can communicate this need. Otherwise, they will just be rejected as a possible intruder.
As for your cancer, well, you need to read more physics.
But then, I finally got the time to get out there. Enjoying the woods as I always did. Just seize every opportunity. Also, I spent the summer climbing to about 20000 feet.
I enjoy training a lot, so the first thing I did when I finished was to start training again. At that time, I weighed ~85 kg. It was 7 months ago. Now I'm 71 kgs, which I'm pretty comfortable with.
In the meantime I was eating a lot. You've got to do that when your burning as much as I do.
My advice is rather than diets (OK, stay away from things that are obviously bad), go out training. Burn it. But it means that you have to be dedicated, and that you seize the opportunity to go out when you've got it.
Hehe, I should have slapped a [tm] on that, so everyone would see that it was written with a ;-)
I'm a KDE user myself, and I think the KDE folks will also come to the conclusion that RH isn't doing anything nasty when they think more about it.
However, I do not agree that Linux needs a Single Unified Desktop. On the contrary, the competition now is good. It allows more room to experiment, it allows for different developers to have different priorities.
And it allows vendors to choose the best parts from each project to provide a unified desktop in their product. Or, leave the choice to their customers if customers want choice.
Oh, wait...
Korganizer's native format is vCalendar (was anyway). So it is quite likely that these things would be able to talk together. After all they are all internet standards (more about iCal/iCard).
Well, GnuPG is being developed by a similar contract, so I wouldn't be surprised at all if this was all GPLed.
Well, I'd really like somebody to do some real statistics on this matter. I'm not a statistician (though I play one on TV :-) ), but I figured that a nice analysis of variance might do the trick. What you do is that you input CD sales, compare it with some good metric of what P2P did, like number of downloads, if that number exist. Then you input metrics of how the general economy was doing. Also input the for example how albums were received by music critics. In a similar manner, you include metrics for what could conceivably influence CD sales. This is usually what you do in statistics to find out what factors contribute to the variations in a certain variable. Often, the important factors make themselves known very clearly by a good analysis. This is something I'd like to see, but it should be done by a real statistician, not by people like me...