Re:So who served the donuts?
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Who won?
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>And NOBODY ratted them out?
There was the whistleblower who told of a company VP running around with a last-minute unreviewed patch to install. Another leaked the memos in which employees were told to discourage election boards from buying printers, by lying about what the printers would cost.
Whisteblower Stephen Heller found himself up on felony charges: if there has been a deliberate plan to steal elections (as opposed to spectacular incompetence), then anyone who knows about it can see the downside of coming forward. And s/he wouldn't get any more attention than any of the other whistleblowers have.
Purely illegal from the start, which is why Reagan's deputy attorney general Bruce Fein said that Congress should either change the law or impeach.
The administration's argument was that Congress couldn't interfere with the powers of the Commander in Chief, that the President could issue any orders to the military without any restraint. The Constitution says otherwise in Article I, Section 8, clause 14.
Isp relates pretty directly to exhaust velocity. The difference is a unit conversion and some small correction factors.
Speed and force are separate ideas. Thrust is proportional to Isp *times the mass flow rate*. Throwing something heavy out the exhaust gives you more kick, but lifting and carrying something heavy is inefficient.
Ion drives show the tradeoff really well. They have spectacular Isp but the mass flow rate is a trickle. They have tiny amounts of thrust, but great fuel efficiency.
Specific impulse is what you need for efficient deep space travel. Thrust is what you need in order to correct the mistake of being on a planetary surface.
>Does anybody have any idea what this guy's talking about?
It isn't rocket science:-)
The most important concept being taken for granted here is "specific impulse" or I(subscript)sp. It's pounds (force) of thrust divided by fuel burn rate in pounds (weight) per second. If you have an Isp of 300, then (oversimplifying outrageously) you'd use 1/300th of your fuel to hover for a second.
Higher Isp is very good. It appears in an exponent in the "rocket equation" (see Wikipedia). Small improvements make big differences in what you can accomplish. To get a high Isp for a given energy content, you want the fuel to be really really light.
One tradeoff is that the lightest fuel we have is hydrogen, which takes up ridiculous amounts of room, which means the tanks are larger and heavier. Plus you have the fun of pumping and storing something only 20 degrees from absolute zero. Sometimes a denser fuel with lower Isp gives you a better system design.
The Saturn V first stage burned kerosene and oxygen. It didn't have to lift its own weight very far. The upper stages had to be light and were hydrogen/oxygen.
There are, regularly, highly moderated posts which o advocate individual responsibility for individual actions o support government limited to its Constitutional powers o take a positive view of legal firearms ownership o want a strong national defense o insist on the rule of law and many other points of view which have generally been considered conservative.
It's the meaning of the word "conservative" that has drifted.
>What I really don't understand is why all the surprisingly non-geek-oriented but heavily political stories are appearing on Slashdot.org.
Either because they create page views or because government is the ultimate machine and we care that it's malfunctioning.
They get exercises that involve football scores (real example).
After they sweat and study to get into a selective program, they aren't exposed to people sneering that they got in as a result of affirmative action (even if they did get in through "legacy preference" or some other euphemism).
>For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
Why not inquire as to the reason?
That's what Margolis and Fisher did. For women coming up through CS programs, one issue is that the women, statistically, tended to prefer applications with tangible benefit but the curriculum was aimed at theory. There were a zillion subtle messages of "you don't belong" given to the students. These, remember, are people who chose computers, were so good that they got into an elite CS school, and often gave up and switched majors.
The hurdles began well before college. Over and over, the interviewers heard from students who said that their brother(s) got all the time on the family computer. That's why the proposal to encourage self-taught women, I believe, targets them too late in life to make a big difference.
>Consider a telcom I worked for..
Consider a smart company instead. Bill Hewlett and David Packard made it clear to every graduating class that skilled women were welcome at their company. The women they hired passed the word along to their friends. HP got a steady stream of good hires by word of mouth without heavy recruiting expenses.
>Treating every issue as if it has two sides means that often you have to go out and invent a second side.
The way it used to work was that nothing happened until someone "demanded equal time". ABC/NBC/CBS didn't have to cover flat earthers unless the flat earthers convinced the FCC that they deserved equal time.
>Legislating "fairness" in political discourse is bad.
Regulating monopolies and oligopolies can be good.
The Daily Kos and Frontpagemag wouldn't be required to be "fair". The broadcast media, controlled by a handful of firms like Disney, would be the target of regulation.
>I have no idea how this could be implemented and not have it backfire.
It's been implemented before. It didn't result in a government takeover.
Where it backfired, if you can call it that, is that the media may have been more reluctant to be controversial, since the price would have been handing over broadcast time, their greatest asset, to the other side.
Of course the civil service was less politicized back then.
Tough in general but there's often some bit of data that points one way or another.
If a whole bunch of URLs get hit half a second apart it's pretty safe to assume malware did it. On the other hand, malware doesn't seem likely to spell the name of a site wrong and then get it right fifteen seconds later. (Note to prosecuting attorneys: that is NOT beyond reasonable doubt).
There's also a key in the registry that distinguishes between what sites got visited via the address bar and which were visited by following links.
(I hate getting called in on these. All you porn surfers out there, use your %^&@! home machine).
Lately some of the most dangerous places to visit have been "free games" collections. Avoiding porn and warez is useful but still leaves you exposed to all sorts of clean-looking boobytrapped goodies.
Security is like an analogy. It only works up until the point that someone considers an angle or aspect that you haven't previously considered and accounted for.
Australia's legal structure inherits from the UK, as does the US system. The guy did mention that his speculations might well apply to the US and the UK.
Thank you, and you deserved to get moderated way out of zero-land. That was informative.
Thing is, if the existing layer is solid enough to not slump under its own weight, is it too late for it to form a single blob with the next layer above it? In other words, does this build a concrete wall, or a stack of concrete layers?
Anyone here can learn a new interface quickly. Many people here can fix broken software. But if it's closed source and broken there's no real hope.
In terms of functionality I've usually wound up having to Google in order to wrestle Word into doing something logical, e.g. with numbered lists or outlines ("always use styles" is good advice but far from complete).
Wondering whether I was just incapable of learning new things, I asked a professional tech writer whether I was imagining that every new revision of Word was harder to use than the one before. She said they really were going downhill.
The advice I'm getting now from someone who uses Office for a living (as opposed to playing with it for a review) is to avoid Office 2007. Maybe Excel is better: one of their goals was to make pivot tables accessible to non-accountants.
If there isn't reinforcement, how does the floor on the second story (first story for the UK project:-)) support itself? Is it arched or something?
How does it stay watertight? Do they just mean it will keep the rain off for long enough to get a real roof installed? Or are they planning on leaving it with a concrete roof?
What keeps the concrete from slumping while it's being sprayed? Does someone have to put up forms ahead of time?
>Knowing how to use a computer is like learning how to drive:
Or is it closer to learning to play a musical instrument? That used to be expected in society, at least in the upper classes. The complexity is similar. Sometimes there's even a similar degree of motor coordination. Hold a finger in place too long on a musical instrument and you get a wrong note. Hold a finger on the shift key too long and "rm *.BAK" turns into "rm *>BAK".
Or is it like being a test pilot? Is today's software really much more reliable than an experimental jet? Test pilots, according to _The Right Stuff_, developed a psychological defense mechanism of blaming every crash on pilot error, so they could believe they would stay alive because they were so skilled and careful. Is it the same psychology when we claim it's obvious that nobody should click on a.PIF file?
>users should not be allowed to install any software, not even a screen saver
I know what you mean, but the example isn't the best. Installing a free screensaver is not a safe experiment, and removing some spyware is harder than getting rid of crabgrass.
>Even plumbers know that their work is appreciated.
"Even" plumbers?
I own a house. I've tried doing my own electrical work and my own plumbing work. I succeed at the electrical work. Plumbing is way harder. Those people are experts who can do difficult things safely in a short time.
Who has saved more lives, doctors, or plumbers?
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
"Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot"
I've helped customers develop policy and set up awareness programs, and if you care whether those work you'd better have explanations handy, and those explanations damn well better not include the term "hypervisor-based rootkit". My approach is to build on what clients already know. There's a danger of overusing metaphor, of course.
Slashdot Mirror
>And NOBODY ratted them out?
There was the whistleblower who told of a company VP running around with a last-minute unreviewed patch to install. Another leaked the memos in which employees were told to discourage election boards from buying printers, by lying about what the printers would cost.
Whisteblower Stephen Heller found himself up on felony charges: if there has been a deliberate plan to steal elections (as opposed to spectacular incompetence), then anyone who knows about it can see the downside of coming forward. And s/he wouldn't get any more attention than any of the other whistleblowers have.
Purely illegal from the start, which is why Reagan's deputy attorney general Bruce Fein said that Congress should either change the law or impeach.
The administration's argument was that Congress couldn't interfere with the powers of the Commander in Chief, that the President could issue any orders to the military without any restraint. The Constitution says otherwise in Article I, Section 8, clause 14.
Here's why.
Isp relates pretty directly to exhaust velocity. The difference is a unit conversion and some small correction factors.
Speed and force are separate ideas. Thrust is proportional to Isp *times the mass flow rate*. Throwing something heavy out the exhaust gives you more kick, but lifting and carrying something heavy is inefficient.
Ion drives show the tradeoff really well. They have spectacular Isp but the mass flow rate is a trickle. They have tiny amounts of thrust, but great fuel efficiency.
Specific impulse is what you need for efficient deep space travel. Thrust is what you need in order to correct the mistake of being on a planetary surface.
>Does anybody have any idea what this guy's talking about?
:-)
It isn't rocket science
The most important concept being taken for granted here is "specific impulse" or I(subscript)sp. It's pounds (force) of thrust divided by fuel burn rate in pounds (weight) per second. If you have an Isp of 300, then (oversimplifying outrageously) you'd use 1/300th of your fuel to hover for a second.
Higher Isp is very good. It appears in an exponent in the "rocket equation" (see Wikipedia). Small improvements make big differences in what you can accomplish. To get a high Isp for a given energy content, you want the fuel to be really really light.
One tradeoff is that the lightest fuel we have is hydrogen, which takes up ridiculous amounts of room, which means the tanks are larger and heavier. Plus you have the fun of pumping and storing something only 20 degrees from absolute zero. Sometimes a denser fuel with lower Isp gives you a better system design.
The Saturn V first stage burned kerosene and oxygen. It didn't have to lift its own weight very far. The upper stages had to be light and were hydrogen/oxygen.
32 megajoules is less than 9 kilowatt hours.
Heat might be more of an issue. That would be over 30,000 BTUs, or a 60 degree rise in a quarter ton of cooling water.
There are, regularly, highly moderated posts which
o advocate individual responsibility for individual actions
o support government limited to its Constitutional powers
o take a positive view of legal firearms ownership
o want a strong national defense
o insist on the rule of law
and many other points of view which have generally been considered conservative.
It's the meaning of the word "conservative" that has drifted.
>What I really don't understand is why all the surprisingly non-geek-oriented but heavily political stories are appearing on Slashdot.org.
Either because they create page views or because government is the ultimate machine and we care that it's malfunctioning.
>What advantages do men have that women dont?
They get exercises that involve football scores (real example).
After they sweat and study to get into a selective program, they aren't exposed to people sneering that they got in as a result of affirmative action (even if they did get in through "legacy preference" or some other euphemism).
They get curricula that match their interests.
They have the comfort of being in a majority.
They have role models.
>For some reason men choose computers, women don't.
Why not inquire as to the reason?
That's what Margolis and Fisher did. For women coming up through CS programs, one issue is that the women, statistically, tended to prefer applications with tangible benefit but the curriculum was aimed at theory. There were a zillion subtle messages of "you don't belong" given to the students. These, remember, are people who chose computers, were so good that they got into an elite CS school, and often gave up and switched majors.
The hurdles began well before college. Over and over, the interviewers heard from students who said that their brother(s) got all the time on the family computer. That's why the proposal to encourage self-taught women, I believe, targets them too late in life to make a big difference.
>Consider a telcom I worked for..
Consider a smart company instead. Bill Hewlett and David Packard made it clear to every graduating class that skilled women were welcome at their company. The women they hired passed the word along to their friends. HP got a steady stream of good hires by word of mouth without heavy recruiting expenses.
Then: 13 channels per market.
Now: 6 media conglomerates. Which do push agendas and in one case even organized demonstrations.
Maybe it's an antitrust issue.
>Treating every issue as if it has two sides means that often you have to go out and invent a second side.
The way it used to work was that nothing happened until someone "demanded equal time". ABC/NBC/CBS didn't have to cover flat earthers unless the flat earthers convinced the FCC that they deserved equal time.
>Legislating "fairness" in political discourse is bad.
Regulating monopolies and oligopolies can be good.
The Daily Kos and Frontpagemag wouldn't be required to be "fair". The broadcast media, controlled by a handful of firms like Disney, would be the target of regulation.
>I have no idea how this could be implemented and not have it backfire.
It's been implemented before. It didn't result in a government takeover.
Where it backfired, if you can call it that, is that the media may have been more reluctant to be controversial, since the price would have been handing over broadcast time, their greatest asset, to the other side.
Of course the civil service was less politicized back then.
Funny you should mention that. Just this year, a woman looking for her wallet pushed open a door to a parked airplane at Newark. An alarm went off. Nobody paid any attention. She was alone on the airplane for several minutes checking around the seat for her wallet.
The banner that appears when you start TOR says it's experimental software and that you shouldn't rely on it for strong anonymity.
Tough in general but there's often some bit of data that points one way or another.
If a whole bunch of URLs get hit half a second apart it's pretty safe to assume malware did it. On the other hand, malware doesn't seem likely to spell the name of a site wrong and then get it right fifteen seconds later. (Note to prosecuting attorneys: that is NOT beyond reasonable doubt).
There's also a key in the registry that distinguishes between what sites got visited via the address bar and which were visited by following links.
(I hate getting called in on these. All you porn surfers out there, use your %^&@! home machine).
Lately some of the most dangerous places to visit have been "free games" collections. Avoiding porn and warez is useful but still leaves you exposed to all sorts of clean-looking boobytrapped goodies.
Australia's legal structure inherits from the UK, as does the US system. The guy did mention that his speculations might well apply to the US and the UK.
Thank you, and you deserved to get moderated way out of zero-land. That was informative.
Thing is, if the existing layer is solid enough to not slump under its own weight, is it too late for it to form a single blob with the next layer above it? In other words, does this build a concrete wall, or a stack of concrete layers?
Anyone here can learn a new interface quickly. Many people here can fix broken software. But if it's closed source and broken there's no real hope.
In terms of functionality I've usually wound up having to Google in order to wrestle Word into doing something logical, e.g. with numbered lists or outlines ("always use styles" is good advice but far from complete).
Wondering whether I was just incapable of learning new things, I asked a professional tech writer whether I was imagining that every new revision of Word was harder to use than the one before. She said they really were going downhill.
The advice I'm getting now from someone who uses Office for a living (as opposed to playing with it for a review) is to avoid Office 2007. Maybe Excel is better: one of their goals was to make pivot tables accessible to non-accountants.
If there isn't reinforcement, how does the floor on the second story (first story for the UK project :-)) support itself? Is it arched or something?
How does it stay watertight? Do they just mean it will keep the rain off for long enough to get a real roof installed? Or are they planning on leaving it with a concrete roof?
What keeps the concrete from slumping while it's being sprayed? Does someone have to put up forms ahead of time?
>Knowing how to use a computer is like learning how to drive:
.PIF file?
Or is it closer to learning to play a musical instrument? That used to be expected in society, at least in the upper classes. The complexity is similar. Sometimes there's even a similar degree of motor coordination. Hold a finger in place too long on a musical instrument and you get a wrong note. Hold a finger on the shift key too long and "rm *.BAK" turns into "rm *>BAK".
Or is it like being a test pilot? Is today's software really much more reliable than an experimental jet? Test pilots, according to _The Right Stuff_, developed a psychological defense mechanism of blaming every crash on pilot error, so they could believe they would stay alive because they were so skilled and careful. Is it the same psychology when we claim it's obvious that nobody should click on a
>users should not be allowed to install any software, not even a screen saver
I know what you mean, but the example isn't the best. Installing a free screensaver is not a safe experiment, and removing some spyware is harder than getting rid of crabgrass.
>Even plumbers know that their work is appreciated.
"Even" plumbers?
I own a house. I've tried doing my own electrical work and my own plumbing work. I succeed at the electrical work. Plumbing is way harder. Those people are experts who can do difficult things safely in a short time.
Who has saved more lives, doctors, or plumbers?
"The society which scorns excellence in plumbing because plumbing is a humble activity, and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because philosophy is an exalted activity, will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water."
-- John W(illiam) Gardner
"Men must be taught as if you taught them not,
And things unknown proposed as things forgot"
I've helped customers develop policy and set up awareness programs, and if you care whether those work you'd better have explanations handy, and those explanations damn well better not include the term "hypervisor-based rootkit". My approach is to build on what clients already know. There's a danger of overusing metaphor, of course.