I don't like New Zealand Telecom any more than a lot of people here, but it's not fair to slag them just because of those prices. The Internet in New Zealand has always been expensive.
Firstly, your currency conversion rate was slightly on the high side. It's not 0.6, it's about 0.56. Secondly, if you don't like the Telecom port blocking then you have plenty of alternative ISP's to choose from that offer competitive rates and services.
Apart from that, New Zealand is an Island nation, so what do you expect? National traffic has always been dirt cheap, but most people can't live on national traffic because there's almost no useful content here.
Compare this with the US, which has a massive localised infrastructure where the majority of content that people want is nearby. International traffic isn't in as much demand, and it doesn't cost any extra because it's not a huge overhead for the ISP's on top of the national infrastructure already available. If 100 million Americans all suddenly wanted to access Australian content on a medium term basis, international charges in the states would go through the roof.
Irrespective of how much money they have, it cost Telecom a lot of money to get the Southern Cross cable laid, and in an age where many applications are beginning to demand a lot of bandwidth, there's still a limited amount of bandwidth that can flow through it.
The combination of everyone wanting international traffic and only having a limited infrastructure to provide it with leads to the international traffic cost that we have.
Science and academia are increasingly a joke. For some time now, it has been more about public image than genuine contribution to the human understanding of the world around them.
Have you ever tried talking to a reporter about something vaguely scientific? I agree with you that there are people in the public eye who make a living out of hyping up the media, but I tend to disagree with a lot of what you've said.
As someone who's had to talk to the media on several occasions about scientific subjects, I can say with some certainty that with very few exceptions, the media does everything they possibly can to sensationalise whatever information you give it. They can and do chop and change whatever you might say to put whatever spin they want to put on it, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Welcome to capitalism, where populist media determines public opinion.
I've seen lots of friends get caught out by this. It's easy to read people quoted in the paper as saying something, and assume they were stupid to say it. In actuality it's much more likely that the reporter's chopped out every second word and rearranged some sentances to get a desired effect as well as completely and absolutely ignoring the 95% of your conversation where you stressed that whatever you said was excessively unlikely. They will have done just enough to have quoted you completely out of context, but stopped mind numbingly short of mis-quoting altogether.
Worse than that, though, is the way that several agencies will advertise the same position with subtly different descriptions - and you don't realise until you get called for an interview. In one case an agency told me that they wouldn't put me forward for a position I was applying for because I'd also registered with another agency!
This is quite normal and understandable, but it shouldn't take until the interview to find out that it's the same job. Ideally they'd talk to you first on the phone.
An employment agency doesn't want to present someone who's already being presented by another agency. It'd be like two competing products approaching an advertising agency. It's silly because one side of the deal has an obvious conflict of interests. In the first case it's you (who has two agencies) and in the second case it's the advertisers (who have two products).
In theory I guess you could argue that the employment agency is presenting several people for the job instead of just you, but they can do that because they're in a better position than you are.
When I was job hunting a while ago several job agencies were often looking for people from the same job. The first question every one of them would ask once they'd described the job to me in more detail on contacting them was if I was already talking to another agency about it. If I was, they can't also represent me.
Consider though the design and launch of such a thing will train another group of engineers in the art of spacecraft design. There are still many of us, now in our 50's and 60's that originally designed a lot of the missions when they were popular in the late 70's, but we are aging.
While I appreciate that keeping the engineering teams trained is a good thing and I'm in no way against this particular mission, I was wondering if you could please clarify what you're saying here.
Specifically, is there any reason why the engineering teams need to be trained up on a mission going to the Kuiper belt? There's hardly a lack of current and future JPL missions that involve sending probes to other bodies in the Solar System.
that points out a very specific problem with the open/free source movements... plenty of hardcore coders but a serious lack of good ui designers.
Open source could do just as well as Microsoft by employing graphic artists -- expert UI designeers need not apply. Apple seems to at least be trying, but sometimes I wonder if Microsoft's even employing user interface experts at all. If they do have them then they're not taking any serious notice of them. It seems more like they're aiming to make the interface look pretty and attractive, but no more useful than before.
A lot of what's being shown off in the screenshots are feature enhancements, but the basic problems of the UI with Windows and Office haven't changed at all. It's as if Microsoft is just throwing in any idea the programmers or feature-developers come up with, without properly testing it or verifying that it's actually useful and not going to create more problems for the user than it solves. For example:
The screenshots are still full of modal dialogs.
The interface is still full of toolbars with lots of tiny buttons that violate Fitts Law and Hicks Law, making it more complicated for people to choose a target and click on it.
The UI still ignores the edges and corners of the screen, which has been well demonstrated to be one of the easiest places for a user to accurately move the mouse to. (I haven't properly used XP but it looks like that from the screenshots. Hopefully someone can confirm this.) Instead there's normally a pixel border or something similar there, causing the user to just miss clicking something that they were probably aiming for, and having to backtrack and fight with the mouse.
Much of the UI is still customisable-by-accident, allowing elements to be dragged around and placed in unexpected places accidently. This allows for novice users to reconfigure their UI without realising it, and then become lost and confused about what's going on. This is especially true if they close the program down and open up the next day to something different, and I've seen it happen over and over again.
There are still scrollbars everywhere, both on main windows in list/selection boxes, text edit boxes, and so on. This is despite that it's been well known for at least a decade now that scrollbars are bad for UI navigation.
Also after at least eight years and probably longer, Microsoft apparently hasn't fixed the font selection dialog box which is full of check-boxes where, by their own UI guidelines, they should be using radio buttons.
Assuming that these screenshots are genuine, then Microsoft might have made minor presentation tweaks here and there, but it still hasn't fixed any of the real UI problems. Every one of these issues has been documented for years by experts who've spent a lot of effort researching them. Most of the issues have suggested solutions, but Microsoft's done absolutely nothing about it that's reached the consumer.
If open source developers want to mimic windows to attract users that way then I guess they can. But this doesn't mean it's a good interface. It's the opposite. Personally I'm hoping that the various independent-from-Microsoft open source UI projects come through and win the race with some good UI's, but I don't know what the chance of that is.
If Baysean filtering makes its way to the general public -- or is introduced at an ISP level, then it will reduce the amount of spam that gets through to potential customers, and hence make each spamming less profitable.
I'm quite skeptical about this. Someone can correct me but as far as I'm aware, the majority of spam profit doesn't come from reachnig customers or selling products. It comes from the illusion that that's happening.
Professional spammers don't make money from selling products via email. They make money from selling the spamming service to naive businesses who don't realise that spamming people doesn't work.
It's worth pointing out that if you live south of the equator (especially New Zealand, Australia, Southern Africa, parts of South America, etc), you should be able to see the comet within a few days from now after sunset.
It's been approaching the Sun through the northern sky until it swung around to the other side, and now it's moving away in the southern hemisphere skies. It's getting fainter every night, so by the time it's far enough from the Sun to see, it's likely you'll at least need binoculars and have to look quite carefully.
KDE developer Mosfet shows how the KDE Project has managed to bridge the gap between the 'highly configurable' and 'less is more' camps.
This article doesn't show anything of the sort. Having read the whole thing, it's just another article arguing that more configurability in KDE is better. There's nothing wrong with arguing this, but it certainly doesn't (successfully) explain how any gap is being bridged.
If anything, it again fails to solve the main problem that highly configurable interfaces have: That most people don't know what the best interface for them is.
If lots of configuration options are offered, people will choose what they think they like at the time. This doesn't mean they're right. It doesn't mean they'll get things done better or more efficiently. It doesn't mean they'll improve their reaction times with respect to Fitts law or Hicks law. It doesn't mean they'll have a better or more enjoyable experience using the interface. It doesn't mean they'll design a superior interface that'll prevent them from getting RSI or damaging their eyes. It certainly doesn't mean that someone else will be able to quickly and intuitively adapt to their interface, nor that they will be able to quickly and intuitively adapt to someone else's interface.
All that a configurable interface allows is for a user to change it to something that they think might be useful. Frequently, a person won't get around to changing the option, even if they realise they've made a mistake. Unfortunately, users aren't experts.
There certainly are problems that need to be solved, but the linked article doesn't solve anything.
I think it depends a lot on what your username is. A possibility that you didn't mention is that the account you created has a username that was previously owned by someone else. (Microsoft did a sweep of old, unused hotmail addresses some time ago.) If this is the case, it's probable that it's been being spammed for the entire time that it's been inactive.
Also random username guessing is fairly normal for hotmail. If you have a relatively short name then it's almost certain it'll be on a spam list. I have two particular hotmail accounts -- one with an 18 character user name and another with a 37 character username (that's four words joined by underscores), and neither of them have ever attracted any spam. A year ago I created an account with a 5 character username that wasn't even a dictionary word, and it was being spammed within a month.
If you want to avoid spam on hotmail, you need to do more than keep your address secret and make sure that you uncheck or check all of the appropriate boxes on signing up. You also have to have a long enough username to make it infeasible for spammers to randomly guess it.
Well for one thing Weta will most probably be dissolved after Return of the King, or more precisely they will go to the same size before LOTR (like when they were doing stuff for Xena). After all how many big productions are gonna go to New Zeland. Unless Jackson can find them a steady stream of projects, maybe a Hobbit film and his long delayed King Komg version. But most probably most of the artists will go back home (many are from California) after the last LOTR film wraps. post production. In the future New Line would probably have to get bids like everyone else.
Hmmm, I mostly disagree with what you've said here. Firstly, where the artists come from and where they might return to isn't exactly relevant. They're in New Zealand and working for WETA because WETA commisioned them to do a job.
WETA has always been an independent company, and it was paid by New Line (through Peter Jackson's film budget) to do a job. With the success of the effects in LOTR, Richard Taylor now has project offers coming out of his ears. WETA can afford to pick and choose what it wants to do. No doubt some of this will include future Peter Jackson films, because Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor originally created WETA to produce effects for the films that Jackson wanted to make. It'll certainly include other things, though.
When WETA gets future projects (and that's a certainty), they'll get those artists or other artists out again. It's not as if WETA doesn't have the reputation to get enough money now, and New Zealand has more going for it than a good job. It's also a pretty nice place to live.
The other main thing is that the cost of production is very cheap compared with most parts of the US. In fact, the whole cost of living is cheap.
As the head of a non-profit group based in NY (can't say which, legal reasons), it is tremendously easy to provide a boilerplate to people concerned about issues rather than make them write an individual letter.
How do you know that these people actually understand the issue that you're campaigning about, and that they're not just sheep being led on by manipulist tactics? At least as importantly, how does the person receiving the letters know?
This is the central reason that I never sign petitions or send form letters, and also the reason why I don't give much credit to them. I'm constantly amazed at how many people will sign anything put in front of them at a moment's notice, based on a few seconds of thought based solely on information provided by the person asking them to sign it. There's no way to verify that people sending the letters actually understand the issue, or have taken any time to put any thought in.
If I feel strongly about something then I do write a letter or take action on my own initiative. I've written three or four in the past year. I'm also not afraid to admit that I'm not fully informed on some issues. If I think they're worth my time however, I'll get reasonably informed before I start acting on them.
If form letters and petitions were officially filed in the trash can and openly ignored, it might be easier for people reading correspondence to find the more carefully thought through responses.
I think there are a few loopholes and potential abuses in here that would need to be addressed. For example:
1) After the original period of 14 years, a copyright may be renewed once, unless no editions of the work have been released for sale in the past three years and plans have not been formally announced to release it within the following year.
As it's worded, I think this is potentially unfair on content creators. It obligates them to republish a work if they want to hold it, even if there's no need to republish it. (For example, the original publication is still widely available.) It's also not clear what is meant by "republish". The methodology for making money might be to have an exclusively available limited edition publication at a high price. Being forced to republish it at a specific time in order for copyright to be renewed could devalue it's worth.
2) Copyrights apply to specific versions or editions of works, rather than the work in general.
It's a bit unclear what an edition or version is. What about if it's re-released with different chapter headings, or with a forwarding note in the front?
3) All copyright-protection mechanisms must stop working when the copyright expires. While this need not necessarily be automatic, if it isn't then the mechanism to disable the protection must be made available to the public, free of charge, at that time.
...or alternative to releasing a mechanism, perhaps an unprotected copy shouold be required to be released. One way to ensure this happens might be to legally require that any copy protected works have an unprotected edition registered with a government escrow agent before they can be distributed. I guess this would require some quite good definitions about what constitutes copy protection as well as some effort to make sure that it doesn't overly inconvenience smaller publishers.
8) Congress may, at its option, pass laws extending these terms, by no more than five years at a time. Further, these laws may apply only to copyrights on works created after said extension was put into force.
Why not say that copyrights can be extended by small amounts on a case-by-case basis following special applications to a specified agency? (Sometimes this may be warranted.) Perhaps throw in a catch that says it gets re-examined by congress after a certain point.
Why is whenever the US catches up with the rest of the world in phone technology it is considered "news"?
Since when were longer phone numbers considered a sign of progress?
Human short term memory is engineered such that it can only accurately remember about seven chunks of information. Any more digits in a number and the system is not being engineered to cater to people efficiently.
In fact, any phone system that's still based around using numbers should be considered a legacy system that's behind the times and having room for improvement. Number-based systems don't scale up well. Old systems shouldn't be replaced with more complex implementations of the same thing, they should be replaced with name-based systems.
Most mobile phones are based around using names instead of numbers these days, although they're still not perfect because people still have to enter the numbers and therefore think about them.
The Internet's a much better example of using names. The Domain Name System has been around for years. There's almost never a requirement for average users to use an IP address, or even have to realise that they exist. Imagine if you had to remember and type in 06603525015080 all day. (That's Slashdot's IP address adjusted to look more like one of today's phone numbers that people seem to put up with because they think they have to.)
Skymap Pro's telling me that it's 11649 +/- 7856 light years away, so the 10,000 figure isn't necessarily very accurate. I'm not sure which catalogue it's pulling it from.
Most of the experienced skywatchers in the world are amateurs. Professional astronomy hardly ever involves directly looking at the sky. The amateurs are the people who go out on their own initiative and look at the sky, get to know small regions containing thousands of stars (or more), and can often immediately spot any change and report it. Back yard astronomers frequently provide historical observation data that professionals refer to later on when it's relevant to whatever they're studying.
Supernova 1987A was first discovered by several such people who've spent most of their lives learning where the stars should be, and could immediately tell that something was different.
I can't find the article, because the link now seems to be broken, but Donald Norman has/had quite a lot to say about the interface of aircraft cockpits in his book "Things that make us smart".
From memory though, he was mostly impressed with the current evolution of aircraft control panels rather than scathing of them in any serious way. Among other things, the large and mechanical controls have an important side-effect of aiding communication between the pilot and co-pilot and what each of them is doing at any given time.
His main negative comment, which I think I agree with in principle although I'm not a pilot, was that some of the dials had several needles, and they weren't automatically intuitive to read. Looking at them had to be learned, and it wasn't so much of a surprise that many accidents in the past have been caused by things like pilots mis-reading the altitude indicator.
Much of this could be fixed (in theory at least) by using digital numeric displays instead of dials, but there are other problems. Also base 10 numbers made from arabic numerals arguably aren't intuitive. Interpreting ordinary numbers is another thing to be learned, and although virtually everyone in modern society can read numbers, there have still been measured differences between looking at a number and interpreting what it stands for.
Getting a glimpse of a four digit number could mean something comparably big (9111) or comparably small (2111). Compare this with a graphical representation of the numbers using bar comparisons for example, and there's instantaneous recognition of the meaning without all the brain processing that needs to go on.
Can anyone please describe what the group was intending to research? I've read through the article, but it's not very specific at all, apart from that it's an AI laboratory.
Were they planning to work on research that could be applied to something like missile guidance, for example?
I can remember all the way back to when Slashdot had news stories Linux geeks cared about. Not dinner party conversation starters. What's next Dream analysis? Sheesh.
Definitely. If I wanted to know something like this I'd go and read a book or ask a psychologist, because most of the questions were probably answered at least 50 years ago by people who know a whole lot more about what they're doing than a bunch of slashdot readers.
If it freely orbits a star, is IN THAT STAR'S PLANE OF THE ECLIPTIC, it's a planet (note: this knocks Pluto off the list).
I disagree, mostly because I think that trying to put such labels on things is always going to end up in ambiguities. The reason we call these things planets at all is because ancient observers saw them wandering through the sky. The reason satellites are often called moons is that Moon was the proper noun previously used to name the Earth's most obvious natural satellite. When more satellites were found around Jupiter and other planets, people called them moons. (I think the moon thing is true, but I haven't confirmed it.)
Furthermore, your definition is based on ruling out bodies that "weren't formed as part of the star's disc", but it hasn't even been established that stars (and planets) formed in such a way. What's so bad about ambiguities?
Humans are naturally experienced and equipped to deal with ambiguities. It's one of the things people excel at that machines don't. Why does it need to be categorised? Computers normally need categorisation for calculations, but computers can do what they need to do just by seeing them as blobs orbiting other blobs. Arbitrary labels are irrelevant. That's my point of view, anyway.
Seriously though, how old are these children? Are they taking science classes yet?
Those specific children were probably mostly between about 5 and 10 years old, at a guess. Surely if we're talking about NASA inspiring the future generation of explorers, this should be an important group. Again, how can they be inspired if they think that NASA's lying to them and it never really happened?
It wasn't only the belief in moon hoax consipiracies that frustrated me, though. It was that they were even allowed to go ahead and think that by the adults who were supposed to be guiding them. This was partly because their teachers and parents didn't have any idea of how to argue against it. It was often because they appeared to have no inclination to correct them, demonstrate that there were ways to refute the hoax claims, or provide them with any alternative information to help them figure it out themselves.
Those children mostly will grow out of thinking the Moon landings were a hoax (although some certainly won't). Most of them won't grow into a state where they can critically evaluate information, knowing what questions should be asked and when to ask them.
Most of their parents were there too, and many of them were the sorts of people who frequently tie themselves to astrology, psychics and talk shows. It's not really a wonder to me that they often aren't concerned about their children being able to evaluate integrity of information. I hate to sound like I'm saying "think of the children", but if young children are going to be one of the main audiences of this media trash and it's encouraged by everyone, it's understandable that they'll grow up not knowing much else.
What,s so stupid about that? It's not as if non-IE users are locked out, since they can probably use an external editor quite easily.
If IE provides a native feature that will enhance the product for those users without hurting other users, it'd be stupider not to enable it. Would you say it's stupid for someone to design a website that works either way, but only gives advanced layout features to browsers that support SVG? If there's any stupidity, it only starts when you lock people out.
The article goes on to say a California computer science professor has statistics to show that a programmer's career is not much longer than a pro-football player.
I live in New Zealand rather than the USA, but the situation sounds fairly similar here.
A few months ago I applied for a job, and experimented with saying on my application that in addition to programming, in the longer term I'd also like to develop my more generic skills such as decision making and taking responsibility for various things.
In that instance, I didn't get past an interview with a recruitment agent. She asked me about this, and I told her that I didn't think a programming career would survive me for my whole career, so I also wanted to develop other skills where I could move into other jobs later on.
Keeping in mind that I'd spent 5 years of full time study getting a computer science first class honours degree specialising in software engineering, she appeared to ignore it and then accused me of not backing my own programming skills and might not be very confident at coding. Her reasoning was that it didn't seem like I was heavily interested in a programming job. In the end, she decided not to put me forward because I "didn't have enough commercial visual basic experience".
Honestly compared with the others I talked to, that was one of the dumbest recruitment agents I talked to. She was probably new to IT. My view hasn't changed, though. Although I'm only 24 at the moment, these days when I go to a job interview for a job that might be long term, one of my questions to the employer will be along the lines of "how to you treat old people?" I still plan to develop my other skills.
Would you settle for saying that science requires pursuit of proof? I think it's possible to work with a scientific mindset withoot actually proving something.
Quick! Go ask the first 100 people you see whether or not we have visited the moon. I think that you will see that the majority of people whole-heartedly believe, or at least suspect, that we have.
Have you been to a school recently? Because that's where it's hurting worst. A couple of months ago I talked to 150 children in one night as a travelling astronomer, most of whom firmly believed that the Moon landing was a hoax. No joke.
NASA's core business is delivering science and engineering, not education.
One of Nasa's three stated mission objectives is "to inspire the next generation of explorers". Exactly how could the next generation be inspired if they think NASA was lying up-front about its most inspiring accomplishment?
Slashdot Mirror
I don't like New Zealand Telecom any more than a lot of people here, but it's not fair to slag them just because of those prices. The Internet in New Zealand has always been expensive.
Firstly, your currency conversion rate was slightly on the high side. It's not 0.6, it's about 0.56. Secondly, if you don't like the Telecom port blocking then you have plenty of alternative ISP's to choose from that offer competitive rates and services.
Apart from that, New Zealand is an Island nation, so what do you expect? National traffic has always been dirt cheap, but most people can't live on national traffic because there's almost no useful content here.
Compare this with the US, which has a massive localised infrastructure where the majority of content that people want is nearby. International traffic isn't in as much demand, and it doesn't cost any extra because it's not a huge overhead for the ISP's on top of the national infrastructure already available. If 100 million Americans all suddenly wanted to access Australian content on a medium term basis, international charges in the states would go through the roof.
Irrespective of how much money they have, it cost Telecom a lot of money to get the Southern Cross cable laid, and in an age where many applications are beginning to demand a lot of bandwidth, there's still a limited amount of bandwidth that can flow through it.
The combination of everyone wanting international traffic and only having a limited infrastructure to provide it with leads to the international traffic cost that we have.
Have you ever tried talking to a reporter about something vaguely scientific? I agree with you that there are people in the public eye who make a living out of hyping up the media, but I tend to disagree with a lot of what you've said.
As someone who's had to talk to the media on several occasions about scientific subjects, I can say with some certainty that with very few exceptions, the media does everything they possibly can to sensationalise whatever information you give it. They can and do chop and change whatever you might say to put whatever spin they want to put on it, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it. Welcome to capitalism, where populist media determines public opinion.
I've seen lots of friends get caught out by this. It's easy to read people quoted in the paper as saying something, and assume they were stupid to say it. In actuality it's much more likely that the reporter's chopped out every second word and rearranged some sentances to get a desired effect as well as completely and absolutely ignoring the 95% of your conversation where you stressed that whatever you said was excessively unlikely. They will have done just enough to have quoted you completely out of context, but stopped mind numbingly short of mis-quoting altogether.
This is quite normal and understandable, but it shouldn't take until the interview to find out that it's the same job. Ideally they'd talk to you first on the phone.
An employment agency doesn't want to present someone who's already being presented by another agency. It'd be like two competing products approaching an advertising agency. It's silly because one side of the deal has an obvious conflict of interests. In the first case it's you (who has two agencies) and in the second case it's the advertisers (who have two products).
In theory I guess you could argue that the employment agency is presenting several people for the job instead of just you, but they can do that because they're in a better position than you are.
When I was job hunting a while ago several job agencies were often looking for people from the same job. The first question every one of them would ask once they'd described the job to me in more detail on contacting them was if I was already talking to another agency about it. If I was, they can't also represent me.
While I appreciate that keeping the engineering teams trained is a good thing and I'm in no way against this particular mission, I was wondering if you could please clarify what you're saying here.
Specifically, is there any reason why the engineering teams need to be trained up on a mission going to the Kuiper belt? There's hardly a lack of current and future JPL missions that involve sending probes to other bodies in the Solar System.
Open source could do just as well as Microsoft by employing graphic artists -- expert UI designeers need not apply. Apple seems to at least be trying, but sometimes I wonder if Microsoft's even employing user interface experts at all. If they do have them then they're not taking any serious notice of them. It seems more like they're aiming to make the interface look pretty and attractive, but no more useful than before.
A lot of what's being shown off in the screenshots are feature enhancements, but the basic problems of the UI with Windows and Office haven't changed at all. It's as if Microsoft is just throwing in any idea the programmers or feature-developers come up with, without properly testing it or verifying that it's actually useful and not going to create more problems for the user than it solves. For example:
Assuming that these screenshots are genuine, then Microsoft might have made minor presentation tweaks here and there, but it still hasn't fixed any of the real UI problems. Every one of these issues has been documented for years by experts who've spent a lot of effort researching them. Most of the issues have suggested solutions, but Microsoft's done absolutely nothing about it that's reached the consumer.
If open source developers want to mimic windows to attract users that way then I guess they can. But this doesn't mean it's a good interface. It's the opposite. Personally I'm hoping that the various independent-from-Microsoft open source UI projects come through and win the race with some good UI's, but I don't know what the chance of that is.
I'm quite skeptical about this. Someone can correct me but as far as I'm aware, the majority of spam profit doesn't come from reachnig customers or selling products. It comes from the illusion that that's happening.
Professional spammers don't make money from selling products via email. They make money from selling the spamming service to naive businesses who don't realise that spamming people doesn't work.
It's worth pointing out that if you live south of the equator (especially New Zealand, Australia, Southern Africa, parts of South America, etc), you should be able to see the comet within a few days from now after sunset.
It's been approaching the Sun through the northern sky until it swung around to the other side, and now it's moving away in the southern hemisphere skies. It's getting fainter every night, so by the time it's far enough from the Sun to see, it's likely you'll at least need binoculars and have to look quite carefully.
This article doesn't show anything of the sort. Having read the whole thing, it's just another article arguing that more configurability in KDE is better. There's nothing wrong with arguing this, but it certainly doesn't (successfully) explain how any gap is being bridged.
If anything, it again fails to solve the main problem that highly configurable interfaces have: That most people don't know what the best interface for them is.
If lots of configuration options are offered, people will choose what they think they like at the time. This doesn't mean they're right. It doesn't mean they'll get things done better or more efficiently. It doesn't mean they'll improve their reaction times with respect to Fitts law or Hicks law. It doesn't mean they'll have a better or more enjoyable experience using the interface. It doesn't mean they'll design a superior interface that'll prevent them from getting RSI or damaging their eyes. It certainly doesn't mean that someone else will be able to quickly and intuitively adapt to their interface, nor that they will be able to quickly and intuitively adapt to someone else's interface.
All that a configurable interface allows is for a user to change it to something that they think might be useful. Frequently, a person won't get around to changing the option, even if they realise they've made a mistake. Unfortunately, users aren't experts.
There certainly are problems that need to be solved, but the linked article doesn't solve anything.
I think it depends a lot on what your username is. A possibility that you didn't mention is that the account you created has a username that was previously owned by someone else. (Microsoft did a sweep of old, unused hotmail addresses some time ago.) If this is the case, it's probable that it's been being spammed for the entire time that it's been inactive.
Also random username guessing is fairly normal for hotmail. If you have a relatively short name then it's almost certain it'll be on a spam list. I have two particular hotmail accounts -- one with an 18 character user name and another with a 37 character username (that's four words joined by underscores), and neither of them have ever attracted any spam. A year ago I created an account with a 5 character username that wasn't even a dictionary word, and it was being spammed within a month.
If you want to avoid spam on hotmail, you need to do more than keep your address secret and make sure that you uncheck or check all of the appropriate boxes on signing up. You also have to have a long enough username to make it infeasible for spammers to randomly guess it.
Hmmm, I mostly disagree with what you've said here. Firstly, where the artists come from and where they might return to isn't exactly relevant. They're in New Zealand and working for WETA because WETA commisioned them to do a job.
WETA has always been an independent company, and it was paid by New Line (through Peter Jackson's film budget) to do a job. With the success of the effects in LOTR, Richard Taylor now has project offers coming out of his ears. WETA can afford to pick and choose what it wants to do. No doubt some of this will include future Peter Jackson films, because Peter Jackson and Richard Taylor originally created WETA to produce effects for the films that Jackson wanted to make. It'll certainly include other things, though.
When WETA gets future projects (and that's a certainty), they'll get those artists or other artists out again. It's not as if WETA doesn't have the reputation to get enough money now, and New Zealand has more going for it than a good job. It's also a pretty nice place to live.
The other main thing is that the cost of production is very cheap compared with most parts of the US. In fact, the whole cost of living is cheap.
How do you know that these people actually understand the issue that you're campaigning about, and that they're not just sheep being led on by manipulist tactics? At least as importantly, how does the person receiving the letters know?
This is the central reason that I never sign petitions or send form letters, and also the reason why I don't give much credit to them. I'm constantly amazed at how many people will sign anything put in front of them at a moment's notice, based on a few seconds of thought based solely on information provided by the person asking them to sign it. There's no way to verify that people sending the letters actually understand the issue, or have taken any time to put any thought in.
If I feel strongly about something then I do write a letter or take action on my own initiative. I've written three or four in the past year. I'm also not afraid to admit that I'm not fully informed on some issues. If I think they're worth my time however, I'll get reasonably informed before I start acting on them.
If form letters and petitions were officially filed in the trash can and openly ignored, it might be easier for people reading correspondence to find the more carefully thought through responses.
I think there are a few loopholes and potential abuses in here that would need to be addressed. For example:
As it's worded, I think this is potentially unfair on content creators. It obligates them to republish a work if they want to hold it, even if there's no need to republish it. (For example, the original publication is still widely available.) It's also not clear what is meant by "republish". The methodology for making money might be to have an exclusively available limited edition publication at a high price. Being forced to republish it at a specific time in order for copyright to be renewed could devalue it's worth.
It's a bit unclear what an edition or version is. What about if it's re-released with different chapter headings, or with a forwarding note in the front?
Why not say that copyrights can be extended by small amounts on a case-by-case basis following special applications to a specified agency? (Sometimes this may be warranted.) Perhaps throw in a catch that says it gets re-examined by congress after a certain point.
Since when were longer phone numbers considered a sign of progress?
Human short term memory is engineered such that it can only accurately remember about seven chunks of information. Any more digits in a number and the system is not being engineered to cater to people efficiently.
In fact, any phone system that's still based around using numbers should be considered a legacy system that's behind the times and having room for improvement. Number-based systems don't scale up well. Old systems shouldn't be replaced with more complex implementations of the same thing, they should be replaced with name-based systems.
Most mobile phones are based around using names instead of numbers these days, although they're still not perfect because people still have to enter the numbers and therefore think about them.
The Internet's a much better example of using names. The Domain Name System has been around for years. There's almost never a requirement for average users to use an IP address, or even have to realise that they exist. Imagine if you had to remember and type in 06603525015080 all day. (That's Slashdot's IP address adjusted to look more like one of today's phone numbers that people seem to put up with because they think they have to.)
Skymap Pro's telling me that it's 11649 +/- 7856 light years away, so the 10,000 figure isn't necessarily very accurate. I'm not sure which catalogue it's pulling it from.
Most of the experienced skywatchers in the world are amateurs. Professional astronomy hardly ever involves directly looking at the sky. The amateurs are the people who go out on their own initiative and look at the sky, get to know small regions containing thousands of stars (or more), and can often immediately spot any change and report it. Back yard astronomers frequently provide historical observation data that professionals refer to later on when it's relevant to whatever they're studying.
Supernova 1987A was first discovered by several such people who've spent most of their lives learning where the stars should be, and could immediately tell that something was different.
I can't find the article, because the link now seems to be broken, but Donald Norman has/had quite a lot to say about the interface of aircraft cockpits in his book "Things that make us smart".
From memory though, he was mostly impressed with the current evolution of aircraft control panels rather than scathing of them in any serious way. Among other things, the large and mechanical controls have an important side-effect of aiding communication between the pilot and co-pilot and what each of them is doing at any given time.
His main negative comment, which I think I agree with in principle although I'm not a pilot, was that some of the dials had several needles, and they weren't automatically intuitive to read. Looking at them had to be learned, and it wasn't so much of a surprise that many accidents in the past have been caused by things like pilots mis-reading the altitude indicator.
Much of this could be fixed (in theory at least) by using digital numeric displays instead of dials, but there are other problems. Also base 10 numbers made from arabic numerals arguably aren't intuitive. Interpreting ordinary numbers is another thing to be learned, and although virtually everyone in modern society can read numbers, there have still been measured differences between looking at a number and interpreting what it stands for.
Getting a glimpse of a four digit number could mean something comparably big (9111) or comparably small (2111). Compare this with a graphical representation of the numbers using bar comparisons for example, and there's instantaneous recognition of the meaning without all the brain processing that needs to go on.
Perhaps this is what the intent of the article is
Can anyone please describe what the group was intending to research? I've read through the article, but it's not very specific at all, apart from that it's an AI laboratory.
Were they planning to work on research that could be applied to something like missile guidance, for example?
Definitely. If I wanted to know something like this I'd go and read a book or ask a psychologist, because most of the questions were probably answered at least 50 years ago by people who know a whole lot more about what they're doing than a bunch of slashdot readers.
I disagree, mostly because I think that trying to put such labels on things is always going to end up in ambiguities. The reason we call these things planets at all is because ancient observers saw them wandering through the sky. The reason satellites are often called moons is that Moon was the proper noun previously used to name the Earth's most obvious natural satellite. When more satellites were found around Jupiter and other planets, people called them moons. (I think the moon thing is true, but I haven't confirmed it.)
Furthermore, your definition is based on ruling out bodies that "weren't formed as part of the star's disc", but it hasn't even been established that stars (and planets) formed in such a way. What's so bad about ambiguities?
Humans are naturally experienced and equipped to deal with ambiguities. It's one of the things people excel at that machines don't. Why does it need to be categorised? Computers normally need categorisation for calculations, but computers can do what they need to do just by seeing them as blobs orbiting other blobs. Arbitrary labels are irrelevant. That's my point of view, anyway.
Those specific children were probably mostly between about 5 and 10 years old, at a guess. Surely if we're talking about NASA inspiring the future generation of explorers, this should be an important group. Again, how can they be inspired if they think that NASA's lying to them and it never really happened?
It wasn't only the belief in moon hoax consipiracies that frustrated me, though. It was that they were even allowed to go ahead and think that by the adults who were supposed to be guiding them. This was partly because their teachers and parents didn't have any idea of how to argue against it. It was often because they appeared to have no inclination to correct them, demonstrate that there were ways to refute the hoax claims, or provide them with any alternative information to help them figure it out themselves.
Those children mostly will grow out of thinking the Moon landings were a hoax (although some certainly won't). Most of them won't grow into a state where they can critically evaluate information, knowing what questions should be asked and when to ask them.
Most of their parents were there too, and many of them were the sorts of people who frequently tie themselves to astrology, psychics and talk shows. It's not really a wonder to me that they often aren't concerned about their children being able to evaluate integrity of information. I hate to sound like I'm saying "think of the children", but if young children are going to be one of the main audiences of this media trash and it's encouraged by everyone, it's understandable that they'll grow up not knowing much else.
What,s so stupid about that? It's not as if non-IE users are locked out, since they can probably use an external editor quite easily.
If IE provides a native feature that will enhance the product for those users without hurting other users, it'd be stupider not to enable it. Would you say it's stupid for someone to design a website that works either way, but only gives advanced layout features to browsers that support SVG? If there's any stupidity, it only starts when you lock people out.
I live in New Zealand rather than the USA, but the situation sounds fairly similar here.
A few months ago I applied for a job, and experimented with saying on my application that in addition to programming, in the longer term I'd also like to develop my more generic skills such as decision making and taking responsibility for various things.
In that instance, I didn't get past an interview with a recruitment agent. She asked me about this, and I told her that I didn't think a programming career would survive me for my whole career, so I also wanted to develop other skills where I could move into other jobs later on.
Keeping in mind that I'd spent 5 years of full time study getting a computer science first class honours degree specialising in software engineering, she appeared to ignore it and then accused me of not backing my own programming skills and might not be very confident at coding. Her reasoning was that it didn't seem like I was heavily interested in a programming job. In the end, she decided not to put me forward because I "didn't have enough commercial visual basic experience".
Honestly compared with the others I talked to, that was one of the dumbest recruitment agents I talked to. She was probably new to IT. My view hasn't changed, though. Although I'm only 24 at the moment, these days when I go to a job interview for a job that might be long term, one of my questions to the employer will be along the lines of "how to you treat old people?" I still plan to develop my other skills.
Would you settle for saying that science requires pursuit of proof? I think it's possible to work with a scientific mindset withoot actually proving something.
Have you been to a school recently? Because that's where it's hurting worst. A couple of months ago I talked to 150 children in one night as a travelling astronomer, most of whom firmly believed that the Moon landing was a hoax. No joke.
One of Nasa's three stated mission objectives is "to inspire the next generation of explorers". Exactly how could the next generation be inspired if they think NASA was lying up-front about its most inspiring accomplishment?