They don't use two-body approximations for the NASA missions to Mars!
They use high-precision numerical integration for the trajectory of the spacecraft, using one of the standard high-precision general ephemerides as background data. (Textbooks mentioned by posters elsewhere in this thread decribe in general terms the astronav. techniques used for mission planning, but as soon as they get down to mapping the trajectory as precisely as possible, they need the background ephemeris as well.)
For the recent Mars missions, the background ephemeris is a very highly refined ephemeris "DE410" produced by the JPL, this appears to be a local improvement intended especially to reduce errors in the neighborhood of Mars and Saturn, relative to the DE405 ephemeris which remains the world standard for official ephemeris publications. It seems they got an accuracy in the region of Mars as close as only "a few meters"!!!
See details of DE410 on the public JPL site here, and especially you might want to look at the background report on DE410.
I've bought HP printers since 1990. Recently I found that the hp 'support' website has deleted online manuals/info for older models. No longer available electronically.
ok, maybe everybody should make sure not to lose theirs. But it used to look as if HP cared about helping people to use HP's products.
I wonder how much saving they make by no longer hosting this user information? Nothing that makes it worth treating their users badly, I would guess.
Other posters have already suggested you check whether the papers are already in some kind of useful order. Whatever you do, preserve them. To you, they are the originals and points of reference against which all errors fall to be compared.
As for digital format, I suggest you consider plain (ASCII) text. It's likely to outlast more complex formats.
I've tried some specialised genealogy software, and it looks like a mixed blessing. It usually forces the data into pre-ordained types, and quite a lot of data don't fit the types and get distorted in the effort to fit them in, generating eventual errors. (For example, suppose the paper data are silent on whether a family member was married or not. The data gets entered into software that renders 'no marriage data' as 'unmarried'. An instant source of error and misunderstanding.) Keep it simple. Narrative text documents are easily searchable.
Bin Laden and al Qaeada are very clear on their objectives:
* All non-Muslims OUT of the Middle East (basically any nation that is Muslim or that is CLAIMED by Muslims)
* Spread Islam throughout the world
Shortly after 9/11 I read in the regular news media a translation of bin Laden's aggressive declaration of war or something like it, dating from the mid-90s. It was significantly more specific than that even. First he complained that the US was still in Saudi Arabia (specially the country with the two holiest Islamic shrines) in spite of (he said) asking to come in only to liberate Kuwait and promising to be out of there when that was done. Second he complained about US support for Israel (and what Israel was doing against the Arabs). Specific Mid-East issues. Nothing about spreading Islam worldwide. Objectives can change, sure. But that's how they were reported earlier.
A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
The formulae are to some extent empirical as well as being approximations. The evolution of delta-t is also extremely 'noisy', and is far from a good fit with any of the formulae.
For the last few years it's been at around 64 seconds (see data in here), which comes to about 3 or 4 seconds less for the present time than some recent formulae were predicting even only a few years ago, and last time I checked nobody had a really good explanation. So it's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
I thought that almost any orchestra performance ends up paying royalties to someone, is that an exaggeration?
I find that hard to call. In the UK, dues/royalty to the Performing Rights Society are calculated on a per-concert basis, according to the tariffs I've seen. There is a performer's habit of mixing old and new in many concert programmes, which means that if there is even just one short newer work in a programme that is mostly made up of out-of-copyright stuff, then the concert as a whole is in for a royalty payment. (I don't know what it is that legally entitles the licensing scheme people to construct their tariff like this, because the design of it seems to mean that a lot of money is in effect collected as royalty on out-of-copyright works.)
Then again at the old end of the musical timescale, current interest is reviving really old works that need editing and perhaps reconstruction as much as transcription to be playable, and for that the editors can now claim copyright much as if they were the composers.
So the copyright-free zone is practically limited at both ends of the time spectrum -- and maybe it's getting squeezed from both ends too.
As I understand it, nobody plays the original Beethovan|Bach|whoever scores, because modern instruments don't sound the same as the ones he composed for.
Everyone plays modern arrangements of the classical pieces, which someone does have a valid copywright to.
Not quite correct. First, the issue of how modern instruments sound: this doesn't in itself affect the scores. Changes of sound quality apart, the players can still play all the notes (technique permitting), and regularly do -- or try to! (I was recently playing from a photocopy of an 18th-century printed part, the printing style looked a bit weird in places, but it is quite playable.)
Second, 'the original' identical scores may sometimes not be obtainable, ok, but there are still plenty of early-enough editions around that copyright should not be an issue. (Although, to look at recent publishers' facsimile reprints of 19th-century scores of 18/19th century music, you might pick up an impression that the publishers want you to believe there is still a copyright in force there!).
None of this denies that a new arrangement can have a valid copyright (but there are lots of questions just what is covered by the copyright in a new edition that has only minor changes relative to the out-of-copyright original).
What seems to have happened here is that first of all someone unknown appears to have posted a message on the 'indymedia' server that has now been seized, apparently claiming to have been involved in train vandalism. Dropping large rocks from bridges on to trains, cars and lorries is unfortunately not unknown as a habit of some UK vandals, and injuries and deaths have occurred. Not surprisingly, the police want to lay hands on criminals of this kind.
The police seem to have asked for the indymedia people's help in identifying the correspondent and possible train vandal, and they seem to have got a refusal.
I don't know why the indymedia people would want to treat a person who volunteered a posting that boasted of criminal activity as if protected by a special journalistic privilege (which probably isn't legally recognised in the UK in this kind of scenario anyway).
Against a background like that I'm not surprised that the police were not inclined to take no for an answer -- but it is of course open to question whether they have been overly high-handed in seizing the server in this sort of situation. I guess that what they really want to do is see whether the box contains any traces of routing data, that could give them a lead back to the source of the train-vandalism claim. In the absence of any help from the server's owners, I can imagine that the police may take some time to sift through for any traces of data relevant to their search.
I don't understand why the indymedia people seem to want to shield a train-vandal who on the face of his own boasts may be responsible for a particularly nasty crime of violence. If they had offered some hope of help in tracing the person claiming to be a perpetrator, they might well not have had their server seized.
I guess if it works, it could reproduce the music exactly, since the music was probably done on synthesizers equipment anyway.
Some sounds have not yet been synthesized very well: take the nuances of bowed violin sound for example (a succession of transients). Still a long way, I'd guess, from re-doing an early performance of Joachim or Busch, or even a more recent but still early Heifetz or Menuhin performance....
... because as the parent correctly pointed out, there is a special statute in the US (28 USC 1498) for getting compensation for government use of patented inventions.
It's worth pointing out one feature of this special regime: there are no injunctions available to make the government stop: it's a money issue. So even if a patent holder could legally stop the rest of the OSS world -- hopefully that won't arise -- it couldn't stop the government.
In other countries there are similar special regimes for government use of patented inventions. On the other hand, the scope of 'government' needs to be checked out in each national case, to check whether it covers publicly-owned services or the activities of municipalities, if these are the focus of the question -- the answer on that point clearly can't be assumed without a check.
"Why is this scary? Because it's new? Are you a luddite?
What is most obviously concerning to me about this type of work is a risk of encouraging human-adapted forms of animal infectious agents, such as animal viruses.
Some of the barriers to cross-species infection arise because of cross-species differences between functional proteins -- proteins of the immune system for example.
These chimeric animals appear to provide some human-identical proteins in an environment where infective agents normally endemic to the non-human animal can live in time-extended association with the human materials. There is a potential for undesirable (for humans) evolutionary adaptation of infective agents in this scenario.
-wb-
'Evil'? Surely not, how about 'fatalistic humor'?
on
Bastard Tetris Hates You
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Any game where the goal is to shuffle around parts desperately until you fail in the end, and where 'winning' is just a matter of how long you survived, has a whiff of evil about it.
It's not at all ironic that Tetris originates from someone who grew up under Soviet rule.
As a game of inevitable failure, tetris struck me as inspired by a rather dark fatalistic humor -- but surely 'evil' is too strong?:) Anyway this aspect of Russian humor was seemingly around long before the Soviets (think Chekhov)!
Well I did actually look at the article. Funny/sad is what I'd call it... but a rather obvious April fool joke for all that.
The item that really made me laugh today was the one about the Gentoo experimental release built on the Microsoft NT Kernel, the only thing is, I think _they_ have me for an April fool, because they made it look so plausible except for the lack of released code....:)
The real culprit is the cracker who found the way in.
I think Harvard's reaction against the 119 who followed the indicated route is pitifully excessive.
But the 119 now have an early lesson in how certain business managers cynically deflect blame in order to save face.
It appears to be beyond Harvard's ability to track down the cracker, so they hit out at whoever is within reach.
-wb-
Wiki resistant to accuracy: a sample experience
on
FUD-Based Encyclopedias
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I would have thought that in matters such as encyclopedias, the biggest indicator of quality would be accuracy.
Exactly. I can report a small sample of experience in seeing how accuracy has been managed in a particular wiki. That sample does not inspire me with confidence.
In a nutshell, I read a wiki page, saw some incorrect data about a subject which has been my bread and butter, and I added a note giving correct data (plus citations for independent verification by whoever might want to check it out).
A day later, the note had been removed to a discussion page accompanied by a comment by someone who seemed to be taking a role as the wiki's maintainer, saying that he 'didn't feel like' putting that stuff in 'right now'. Several months later, the correct info still was not back on the wiki page, the information on the wiki page was as incorrect as it had been when I first saw it.
I didn't try to push the correction, it's a free medium, seemingly the maintainer and maybe everybody else (or maybe not?) has a right to offer and put in what they please.
That freedom clearly has a lot of pluses. But accuracy, or an assurance of accuracy, equally clearly isn't one of them.
I don't know how many wiki pages have maintainers. But that's what I saw happening.
My conclusion is that a wiki appears to be as accurate (or inaccurate) as its maintainer keeps it; or if there is no maintainer, then it is as likely to be as inaccurate as the most careless of its contributors.
I've heard it said (or claimed) that something is art if it's intended to be art by its maker. On this criterion the computer-generated works would not appear to be art, for lack of the needed intent -- unless maybe the computer was only a tool in the hands of a directing artistic mind.
But I prefer to think that art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the listener). On any criterion like that, it would all depend what the computer-created work looks like, or what it sounds like, to its human beholders or hearers.
I still don't understand how typing apt-get install PROGRAMX is complicated.
That is not where the problem lies. The additional problems in ascending order of size are --
1 -- (for the non-geek mum/dad user) getting used to the CLI
2 -- (for quite a lot of others too) figuring out what to do if
apt-get install programx coughs over a dependency issue and shows up with screeds of error messages.
I'd be quite interested to read your simple advice to get over problem 2!
I'm sure you're right when you talk about the importance of physical access, but when you say... You should not be carrying any sensitive work related items or data home... I think you are speaking for yourself and not necessarily others, it depends entirely on the nature of the materials and the work.
I've got the habit of releasing my IP using the DHCP process when not actually using my internet connection -- my needs don't include an unchanging IP. I guess this reduces the exposure time to the wild 'intarweb' out there, and with it the likelihood of a hack that could get through my firewall.
Additionally, there is only a very short list of things it [i.e. copyright] pertains to: reading is not one of them.
Amen to that. But part of the poison in the European CR Directive and the laws that implement it in the member-states, is that where they prohibit the unlocking of copy-protection, they also, in effect, bring reading under the scope of copyright. Previously, reading was not an act restricted by copyright -- as the parent poster points out. But by this change it becomes covered indirectly.
All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed
Sadly true for any useful treatment of disease so far.
Really the current news is about a scientific discovery, not about gene-therapy at all. But so many people seem to need to say the words 'gene therapy', just to make the thing look newsworthy.
It seems to be a discovery about comparative or evolutionary biology of the immune system. How these gene differences arose and how they were perpetuated are interesting questions in themselves. For example, which (if either) is the ancestral version of the gene? Did humans lose it or did the other primates gain it? Do the monkeys represent survivors of an originally more genetically diverse population, after continuing exposure to an environment rich in HIV-like viruses?
I'd suspect that if this discovery can provide any avenue towards improved human HIV therapy at all, then it may be more likely to happen by a different route than by gene-therapy. It may be that the current discovery leads to further discoveries about differences in the binding of smaller molecules by the proteins that are specified by the newly identified gene-variants. That in turn my lead to development of inhibitory pharmaceuticals intended to block the infective process. But on any scenario it will be a long haul.
So what is it with all these dead drives? Why are they all giving up?
I've tried W2K and WNT (but not XP).
One of the things about W2K/WNT that horrified me on the first time (and every other time) I booted it up was the long loud disk-grinding noises -- not just from the hd that carried the OS but also from every other physical disk on the system. WTF? How many times do you need to try the hds and fds when you boot an OS? None of the win websites I looked at seemed to have any explanation for this excessive disk activity, nor any tips for how to stop it. So I just don't regularly use them, keep one aside for occasional test/diagnostic use and that's it.
My personal vote stays with a dual-boot linux and W9x system. DOS used to go very gently on the hardware, W9x and linux seem to hit it harder than DOS did, but nothing like the intensity that W2K seems to throw at it. After over 15 years' using hard-disks, so far none of my own disk hardware failed, all supersedure has been for reasons of disk-size (hm, better check those backups:-/).
Btw I really like and use Knoppix for s/w hangups.
Old people often have failing memories and need tools that remind them of specifics.
What I should have said to be more specific, is that the failure often is about _recall from memory_. External supply of a specific prompt, maybe sometimes a single word, can trigger recall and release of a flood of associated momories, often very valuable ones.
I've sometimes wondered why 'Eliza' can have any ring of plausibility at all, as it can seem to have in spite of its obvious defect of emptiness. Maybe it is that in talking to a real-life counsellor, there can be a phase that looks superficially like the empty wandering that 'Eliza' does. (But then the real person will hopefully home in intelligently on something as a prompt, and produce something to the point about it, and all resemblance to Eliza is at an end.)
Old people often have failing memories and need tools that remind them of specifics. One thing they would need above all out of a machine like this (if they can get over the shock of the idea of looking to a machine for this kind of help anyway) would be intelligent prompting, with specific words or items that they are likely to have forgotten.
I agree the description makes this robot sound like an expensive 'Eliza'. If reflecting and being vague rather than specific prompting is really what it will do, then it's going to be specially useless to the elderly.
I have about 30 floppies containing drafts of my mother's first novel. She wrote it in the early nineties on an IBM, using some early version of wordperfect. [...] I cant get any software to read her files.
You can still download the WordPerect 5.1/DOS convert utility which enables WordPerfect formats as far back as version 4.2 and up to 5.1 to be converted to various other formats (including plain vanilla text if none of the other options are usable any more). If your mother was advanced enough to have WP 6, it should still be readable with newer WP versions or with MS Word at least at the Office 97 level.
Slashdot Mirror
They don't use two-body approximations for the NASA missions to Mars!
They use high-precision numerical integration for the trajectory of the spacecraft, using one of the standard high-precision general ephemerides as background data. (Textbooks mentioned by posters elsewhere in this thread decribe in general terms the astronav. techniques used for mission planning, but as soon as they get down to mapping the trajectory as precisely as possible, they need the background ephemeris as well.)
For the recent Mars missions, the background ephemeris is a very highly refined ephemeris "DE410" produced by the JPL, this appears to be a local improvement intended especially to reduce errors in the neighborhood of Mars and Saturn, relative to the DE405 ephemeris which remains the world standard for official ephemeris publications. It seems they got an accuracy in the region of Mars as close as only "a few meters"!!!
See details of DE410 on the public JPL site here, and especially you might want to look at the background report on DE410.
-wb-
I've bought HP printers since 1990. Recently I found that the hp 'support' website has deleted online manuals/info for older models. No longer available electronically.
ok, maybe everybody should make sure not to lose theirs. But it used to look as if HP cared about helping people to use HP's products.
I wonder how much saving they make by no longer hosting this user information? Nothing that makes it worth treating their users badly, I would guess.
Other posters have already suggested you check whether the papers are already in some kind of useful order. Whatever you do, preserve them. To you, they are the originals and points of reference against which all errors fall to be compared.
As for digital format, I suggest you consider plain (ASCII) text. It's likely to outlast more complex formats.
I've tried some specialised genealogy software, and it looks like a mixed blessing. It usually forces the data into pre-ordained types, and quite a lot of data don't fit the types and get distorted in the effort to fit them in, generating eventual errors. (For example, suppose the paper data are silent on whether a family member was married or not. The data gets entered into software that renders 'no marriage data' as 'unmarried'. An instant source of error and misunderstanding.) Keep it simple. Narrative text documents are easily searchable.
-wb-
Bin Laden and al Qaeada are very clear on their objectives:
* All non-Muslims OUT of the Middle East (basically any nation that is Muslim or that is CLAIMED by Muslims)
* Spread Islam throughout the world
Shortly after 9/11 I read in the regular news media a translation of bin Laden's aggressive declaration of war or something like it, dating from the mid-90s. It was significantly more specific than that even. First he complained that the US was still in Saudi Arabia (specially the country with the two holiest Islamic shrines) in spite of (he said) asking to come in only to liberate Kuwait and promising to be out of there when that was done. Second he complained about US support for Israel (and what Israel was doing against the Arabs). Specific Mid-East issues. Nothing about spreading Islam worldwide. Objectives can change, sure. But that's how they were reported earlier.
-wb-
A common formula for approximating the evolution of delta-T over time is 31 * Cy^2, where Cy is expressed in centuries.
The formulae are to some extent empirical as well as being approximations. The evolution of delta-t is also extremely 'noisy', and is far from a good fit with any of the formulae.
For the last few years it's been at around 64 seconds (see data in here), which comes to about 3 or 4 seconds less for the present time than some recent formulae were predicting even only a few years ago, and last time I checked nobody had a really good explanation. So it's a bit optimistic to extrapolate over 1000 years!
-wb-
I thought that almost any orchestra performance ends up paying royalties to someone, is that an exaggeration?
I find that hard to call. In the UK, dues/royalty to the Performing Rights Society are calculated on a per-concert basis, according to the tariffs I've seen. There is a performer's habit of mixing old and new in many concert programmes, which means that if there is even just one short newer work in a programme that is mostly made up of out-of-copyright stuff, then the concert as a whole is in for a royalty payment. (I don't know what it is that legally entitles the licensing scheme people to construct their tariff like this, because the design of it seems to mean that a lot of money is in effect collected as royalty on out-of-copyright works.)
Then again at the old end of the musical timescale, current interest is reviving really old works that need editing and perhaps reconstruction as much as transcription to be playable, and for that the editors can now claim copyright much as if they were the composers.
So the copyright-free zone is practically limited at both ends of the time spectrum -- and maybe it's getting squeezed from both ends too.
-wb-
As I understand it, nobody plays the original Beethovan|Bach|whoever scores, because modern instruments don't sound the same as the ones he composed for.
Everyone plays modern arrangements of the classical pieces, which someone does have a valid copywright to.
Not quite correct. First, the issue of how modern instruments sound: this doesn't in itself affect the scores. Changes of sound quality apart, the players can still play all the notes (technique permitting), and regularly do -- or try to! (I was recently playing from a photocopy of an 18th-century printed part, the printing style looked a bit weird in places, but it is quite playable.)
Second, 'the original' identical scores may sometimes not be obtainable, ok, but there are still plenty of early-enough editions around that copyright should not be an issue. (Although, to look at recent publishers' facsimile reprints of 19th-century scores of 18/19th century music, you might pick up an impression that the publishers want you to believe there is still a copyright in force there!).
None of this denies that a new arrangement can have a valid copyright (but there are lots of questions just what is covered by the copyright in a new edition that has only minor changes relative to the out-of-copyright original).
-wb-
What seems to have happened here is that first of all someone unknown appears to have posted a message on the 'indymedia' server that has now been seized, apparently claiming to have been involved in train vandalism. Dropping large rocks from bridges on to trains, cars and lorries is unfortunately not unknown as a habit of some UK vandals, and injuries and deaths have occurred. Not surprisingly, the police want to lay hands on criminals of this kind.
The police seem to have asked for the indymedia people's help in identifying the correspondent and possible train vandal, and they seem to have got a refusal.
I don't know why the indymedia people would want to treat a person who volunteered a posting that boasted of criminal activity as if protected by a special journalistic privilege (which probably isn't legally recognised in the UK in this kind of scenario anyway).
Against a background like that I'm not surprised that the police were not inclined to take no for an answer -- but it is of course open to question whether they have been overly high-handed in seizing the server in this sort of situation. I guess that what they really want to do is see whether the box contains any traces of routing data, that could give them a lead back to the source of the train-vandalism claim. In the absence of any help from the server's owners, I can imagine that the police may take some time to sift through for any traces of data relevant to their search.
I don't understand why the indymedia people seem to want to shield a train-vandal who on the face of his own boasts may be responsible for a particularly nasty crime of violence. If they had offered some hope of help in tracing the person claiming to be a perpetrator, they might well not have had their server seized.
-wb-
I guess if it works, it could reproduce the music exactly, since the music was probably done on synthesizers equipment anyway.
....
Some sounds have not yet been synthesized very well: take the nuances of bowed violin sound for example (a succession of transients). Still a long way, I'd guess, from re-doing an early performance of Joachim or Busch, or even a more recent but still early Heifetz or Menuhin performance
-wb-
... because as the parent correctly pointed out, there is a special statute in the US (28 USC 1498) for getting compensation for government use of patented inventions.
It's worth pointing out one feature of this special regime: there are no injunctions available to make the government stop: it's a money issue. So even if a patent holder could legally stop the rest of the OSS world -- hopefully that won't arise -- it couldn't stop the government.
In other countries there are similar special regimes for government use of patented inventions.
On the other hand, the scope of 'government' needs to be checked out in each national case, to check whether it covers publicly-owned services or the activities of municipalities, if these are the focus of the question -- the answer on that point clearly can't be assumed without a check.
-wb-
"Why is this scary? Because it's new? Are you a luddite?
What is most obviously concerning to me about this type of work is a risk of encouraging human-adapted forms of animal infectious agents, such as animal viruses.
Some of the barriers to cross-species infection arise because of cross-species differences between functional proteins -- proteins of the immune system for example.
These chimeric animals appear to provide some human-identical proteins in an environment where infective agents normally endemic to the non-human animal can live in time-extended association with the human materials. There is a potential for undesirable (for humans) evolutionary adaptation of infective agents in this scenario.
-wb-
Any game where the goal is to shuffle around parts desperately until you fail in the end, and where 'winning' is just a matter of how long you survived, has a whiff of evil about it.
:) Anyway this aspect of Russian humor was seemingly around long before the Soviets (think Chekhov)!
It's not at all ironic that Tetris originates from someone who grew up under Soviet rule.
As a game of inevitable failure, tetris struck me as inspired by a rather dark fatalistic humor -- but surely 'evil' is too strong?
-wb-
Well I did actually look at the article. Funny/sad is what I'd call it ... but a rather obvious April fool joke for all that.
.... :)
The item that really made me laugh today was the one about the Gentoo experimental release built on the Microsoft NT Kernel, the only thing is, I think _they_ have me for an April fool, because they made it look so plausible except for the lack of released code
The real culprit is the cracker who found the way in.
I think Harvard's reaction against the 119 who followed the indicated route is pitifully excessive.
But the 119 now have an early lesson in how certain business managers cynically deflect blame in order to save face.
It appears to be beyond Harvard's ability to track down the cracker, so they hit out at whoever is within reach.
-wb-
I would have thought that in matters such as encyclopedias, the biggest indicator of quality would be accuracy.
Exactly. I can report a small sample of experience in seeing how accuracy has been managed in a particular wiki. That sample does not inspire me with confidence.
In a nutshell, I read a wiki page, saw some incorrect data about a subject which has been my bread and butter, and I added a note giving correct data (plus citations for independent verification by whoever might want to check it out).
A day later, the note had been removed to a discussion page accompanied by a comment by someone who seemed to be taking a role as the wiki's maintainer, saying that he 'didn't feel like' putting that stuff in 'right now'. Several months later, the correct info still was not back on the wiki page, the information on the wiki page was as incorrect as it had been when I first saw it.
I didn't try to push the correction, it's a free medium, seemingly the maintainer and maybe everybody else (or maybe not?) has a right to offer and put in what they please.
That freedom clearly has a lot of pluses.
But accuracy, or an assurance of accuracy, equally clearly isn't one of them.
I don't know how many wiki pages have maintainers. But that's what I saw happening.
My conclusion is that a wiki appears to be as accurate (or inaccurate) as its maintainer keeps it; or if there is no maintainer, then it is as likely to be as inaccurate as the most careless of its contributors.
-wb-
I've heard it said (or claimed) that something is art if it's intended to be art by its maker. On this criterion the computer-generated works would not appear to be art, for lack of the needed intent -- unless maybe the computer was only a tool in the hands of a directing artistic mind.
But I prefer to think that art, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder (or the ear of the listener). On any criterion like that, it would all depend what the computer-created work looks like, or what it sounds like, to its human beholders or hearers.
-wb-
I still don't understand how typing apt-get install PROGRAMX is complicated.
That is not where the problem lies. The additional problems in ascending order of size are --
1 -- (for the non-geek mum/dad user) getting used to the CLI
2 -- (for quite a lot of others too) figuring out what to do if
apt-get install programx
coughs over a dependency issue and shows up with screeds of error messages.
I'd be quite interested to read your simple advice to get over problem 2!
-wb-
I'm sure you're right when you talk about the importance of physical access, but when you say ... You should not be carrying any sensitive work related items or data home ... I think you are speaking for yourself and not necessarily others, it depends entirely on the nature of the materials and the work.
I've got the habit of releasing my IP using the DHCP process when not actually using my internet connection -- my needs don't include an unchanging IP. I guess this reduces the exposure time to the wild 'intarweb' out there, and with it the likelihood of a hack that could get through my firewall.
-wb-
There are plenty of wikis out there that provide revisioning, change logging and annotate these changes with user information --
May be good in theory, but who in a busy hospital will have the time to implement it in practice, and keep it under the needed supervision?
-wb-
Additionally, there is only a very short list of things it [i.e. copyright] pertains to: reading is not one of them.
Amen to that. But part of the poison in the European CR Directive and the laws that implement it in the member-states, is that where they prohibit the unlocking of copy-protection, they also, in effect, bring reading under the scope of copyright. Previously, reading was not an act restricted by copyright -- as the parent poster points out. But by this change it becomes covered indirectly.
-wb-
All experimental treatments that involve gene therapy on humans have failed
Sadly true for any useful treatment of disease so far.
Really the current news is about a scientific discovery, not about gene-therapy at all. But so many people seem to need to say the words 'gene therapy', just to make the thing look newsworthy.
It seems to be a discovery about comparative or evolutionary biology of the immune system. How these gene differences arose and how they were perpetuated are interesting questions in themselves. For example, which (if either) is the ancestral version of the gene? Did humans lose it or did the other primates gain it? Do the monkeys represent survivors of an originally more genetically diverse population, after continuing exposure to an environment rich in HIV-like viruses?
I'd suspect that if this discovery can provide any avenue towards improved human HIV therapy at all, then it may be more likely to happen by a different route than by gene-therapy. It may be that the current discovery leads to further discoveries about differences in the binding of smaller molecules by the proteins that are specified by the newly identified gene-variants. That in turn my lead to development of inhibitory pharmaceuticals intended to block the infective process. But on any scenario it will be a long haul.
-wb-
So what is it with all these dead drives? Why are they all giving up?
:-/).
I've tried W2K and WNT (but not XP).
One of the things about W2K/WNT that horrified me on the first time (and every other time) I booted it up was the long loud disk-grinding noises -- not just from the hd that carried the OS but also from every other physical disk on the system. WTF? How many times do you need to try the hds and fds when you boot an OS? None of the win websites I looked at seemed to have any explanation for this excessive disk activity, nor any tips for how to stop it. So I just don't regularly use them, keep one aside for occasional test/diagnostic use and that's it.
My personal vote stays with a dual-boot linux and W9x system. DOS used to go very gently on the hardware, W9x and linux seem to hit it harder than DOS did, but nothing like the intensity that W2K seems to throw at it. After over 15 years' using hard-disks, so far none of my own disk hardware failed, all supersedure has been for reasons of disk-size (hm, better check those backups
Btw I really like and use Knoppix for s/w hangups.
-wb-
Old people often have failing memories and need tools that remind them of specifics.
What I should have said to be more specific, is that the failure often is about _recall from memory_. External supply of a specific prompt, maybe sometimes a single word, can trigger recall and release of a flood of associated momories, often very valuable ones.
I've sometimes wondered why 'Eliza' can have any ring of plausibility at all, as it can seem to have in spite of its obvious defect of emptiness. Maybe it is that in talking to a real-life counsellor, there can be a phase that looks superficially like the empty wandering that 'Eliza' does. (But then the real person will hopefully home in intelligently on something as a prompt, and produce something to the point about it, and all resemblance to Eliza is at an end.)
-wb-
Why does it sound like a 5600$ version of Eliza?
Old people often have failing memories and need tools that remind them of specifics. One thing they would need above all out of a machine like this (if they can get over the shock of the idea of looking to a machine for this kind of help anyway) would be intelligent prompting, with specific words or items that they are likely to have forgotten.
I agree the description makes this robot sound like an expensive 'Eliza'. If reflecting and being vague rather than specific prompting is really what it will do, then it's going to be specially useless to the elderly.
-wb-
I have about 30 floppies containing drafts of my mother's first novel. She wrote it in the early nineties on an IBM, using some early version of wordperfect.
[...]
I cant get any software to read her files.
You can still download the WordPerect 5.1/DOS convert utility which enables WordPerfect formats as far back as version 4.2 and up to 5.1 to be converted to various other formats (including plain vanilla text if none of the other options are usable any more). If your mother was advanced enough to have WP 6, it should still be readable with newer WP versions or with MS Word at least at the Office 97 level.
-wb-