> > This is the administration that forbade the tour guides at the Grand Canyon from mentioning how old is is, lest they offend creationists.
> How about a citation there? That sounds like unvarnished bullshit to me.
As others have pointed out down-thread, this has proved to be a myth, and Shermer's group put out a retraction today, complete with first-hand reports from employees of the park service. I therefore retract it as well.
Unfortunately, from what I've read the PEER group that started the tale does not seem interested in retracting it.
> Since when did Libre get added? Is this another lame attempt at a cute acronym? At one time it was open source, then the acronym weenies attacked and we had OSS. The GNU zealots came along and insisted that we beat the definition of "free" into the ground, thus FOSS was born. Libre? Idiotic.
OSS -> FOSS -> FLOSS. If you project this trend 20 years into the future, you'll find a great deal of lost productivity just from the time people spend typing the name of it!
> Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted in less than one year.
Got that, folks? These are manly costs, so tell your boss no one will think he's gay for switching to OSS.
> And before you believe any of the reported modelling, it needs to deliver the 100ky cycle of glaciations before anything else (since this is such a huge first-order variation), or else it's total bunkum.
You'll be interested to see the 650K-year graph in the latest Scientific American, available in a {book,grocery} store near you.
I, for one, am more inclined to believe the scientists that actually study it rather than all the Slashdotters who tell me I shouldn't.
> Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
> There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
So, you dispute the phyiscs of greenhouse gasses? You should publish your evidence against it, so we can put all this nonsense behind us.
> > Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.
> Can we mark a submission, as -1, Unnecessary Trolling?
Unfortunately, it's hard for reasonable people to avoid considering the proposition.
This is the administration that forbade the tour guides at the Grand Canyon from mentioning how old is is, lest they offend creationists.
Personally I think the Moon/Mars mission decision was an attempt to construct a legacy. But like I said, I can't very well prevent the other explanation from crossing my mind.
A "state of" emergency has ever been the excuse for taking away people's liberties. GWB thinks 9/11 gives him the right to do whatever he pleases, constitution be damned.
I enjoy it, but there are lots of annoyances. Too much micromanagement; that's how the AI wins. Conversely, the helper-AI needs lots of work - it's annoying as hell to send two tanks down the road and have them create a traffic jam for each other, or have one of them decide to drive backwards.
> Not a troll. If your system is appropriately configured, you (and your applications) won't be *allowed* to save things anywhere on the local drive other than your home directory.
No, unless it's a personal application, its data should not be in your personal directory tree.
> I hear that lots of Navy developers use Linux laptops. I wonder if/how this will apply to them.
Don't know whether it meets the requirements, but you can encrypt Linux partitions with dm-crypt. I did a couple on a new system I built recently, and haven't had any problems with it.
> Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
No, you also need/var,/tmp, and your swap partitions (or the partitions your swap files are on), and any other directories/partitions where data is stored, even temporarily.
FWIW, you can now do this pretty easily with dm-crypt, though I can't remember whether it encrypts everything or just the data. (Some systems leave e.g. the filenames unincrypted.)
> This mathematical proof is clearly interesting from a mathematics-proofs-point-of-view. But I'm surprised it's considered the breakthrough of the year.
The actual breakthrough of the year was that a Slashdotter got laid back in February, but they couldn't include it in the list because they haven't been able to confirm the details. So this one is a sort of symbolic stand-in.
> I'll admit, I didn't read the entire 52 page PDF report, but I skimmed it. I'm having trouble seeing how they can reach those conclusions just by looking at drug trends in number of NMEs vs non-NMEs since 1993. Also, considering where the pdf was posted, and taking into account the democratic party's desire to take over the health care industry, I suspect a political motive.
a) The problem has already been known for about a decade.
> I realize that making drugs (or any other product, for that matter) requires research and testing, etc., and manufacturers need to recoup that money spent. Plus, profits from a block-buster drug go into funding expensive research on drugs that can only target a very small portion of the population.
Actually (according to various news outlets over the past several years), these companies spend ten dollars on marketing for every dollar they spend on research.
Slashdot Mirror
> > This is the administration that forbade the tour guides at the Grand Canyon from mentioning how old is is, lest they offend creationists.
> How about a citation there? That sounds like unvarnished bullshit to me.
As others have pointed out down-thread, this has proved to be a myth, and Shermer's group put out a retraction today, complete with first-hand reports from employees of the park service. I therefore retract it as well.
Unfortunately, from what I've read the PEER group that started the tale does not seem interested in retracting it.
> Since when did Libre get added? Is this another lame attempt at a cute acronym? At one time it was open source, then the acronym weenies attacked and we had OSS. The GNU zealots came along and insisted that we beat the definition of "free" into the ground, thus FOSS was born. Libre? Idiotic.
OSS -> FOSS -> FLOSS. If you project this trend 20 years into the future, you'll find a great deal of lost productivity just from the time people spend typing the name of it!
> Costs to migrate to an open solution are relevant and an organization needs to consider an extra effort for this. However these costs are temporary and manly are budgeted in less than one year.
Got that, folks? These are manly costs, so tell your boss no one will think he's gay for switching to OSS.
> And before you believe any of the reported modelling, it needs to deliver the 100ky cycle of glaciations before anything else (since this is such a huge first-order variation), or else it's total bunkum.
You'll be interested to see the 650K-year graph in the latest Scientific American, available in a {book,grocery} store near you.
I, for one, am more inclined to believe the scientists that actually study it rather than all the Slashdotters who tell me I shouldn't.
> Instead of using the logic of "10 million lemmings must be right", global warming advocates would do well in looking at the underlying scientific knowledge instead. The measurements are scientific and wholly honest for the most part, but the popular interpretations are not scientific at all, and should be ignored by those who value science above advocacy and social posturing.
> There is a very wierd popular meme that the fact that a large number of scientists *THINK* that there is a substantive correlation between CO2 levels and the melting ices indicates that there actually *IS* a causal effect. Well, science doesn't work that way. The number of adherents to an interpretation has absolutely no bearing on science, despite the popular feeling that "it must be right".
So, you dispute the phyiscs of greenhouse gasses? You should publish your evidence against it, so we can put all this nonsense behind us.
> > Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming.
> Can we mark a submission, as -1, Unnecessary Trolling?
Unfortunately, it's hard for reasonable people to avoid considering the proposition.
This is the administration that forbade the tour guides at the Grand Canyon from mentioning how old is is, lest they offend creationists.
Personally I think the Moon/Mars mission decision was an attempt to construct a legacy. But like I said, I can't very well prevent the other explanation from crossing my mind.
> According to Electric Universe theory, which explains the cosmos much better than nuclear physics, relativity, and quantum physics
That's wishful thinking. Everyone knows that Time Cube Theory is the correct one.
not to keep any resolutions.
> I have my own reasons for learning to play music
Yes, it's called "girls".
A "state of" emergency has ever been the excuse for taking away people's liberties. GWB thinks 9/11 gives him the right to do whatever he pleases, constitution be damned.
Why they printed an article by Bill Gates rather than one of the hundreds of professional robotics researchers in the country.
> Company of Heroes (PC):
I enjoy it, but there are lots of annoyances. Too much micromanagement; that's how the AI wins. Conversely, the helper-AI needs lots of work - it's annoying as hell to send two tanks down the road and have them create a traffic jam for each other, or have one of them decide to drive backwards.
Still, like I said, I enjoy it.
> Does anybody else have any recommendations for good FOSS games ?
I still get fun out of Battle of Wesnoth when I have time.
FYI 1.2 just came out; their page warns to uninstall your old version before installing it.
> the Top 10 Top 10 Lists of 2006.
Then we can have the top ten Slashdottings of the year.
"That's no face, it's a butte!"
(Oh, admit it - we're all juvenile here.)
> read that as "Naked Astronomy" at first, or was it just me?
You've got to watch the difference between "naked-eye astronomy" and "naked eye-astronomy".
> Not a troll. If your system is appropriately configured, you (and your applications) won't be *allowed* to save things anywhere on the local drive other than your home directory.
No, unless it's a personal application, its data should not be in your personal directory tree.
> I mean, if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear, right?
a) How many times per year do you hear about n million people's SSNs or medical records being on some public employee's stolen laptop?
b) Even on a system for purely personal use, do you want a thief or meddler to have access to your correspondence?
> I hear that lots of Navy developers use Linux laptops. I wonder if/how this will apply to them.
Don't know whether it meets the requirements, but you can encrypt Linux partitions with dm-crypt. I did a couple on a new system I built recently, and haven't had any problems with it.
> Why full disk encryption and not just the home directory?? Maybe things are so mixed up on Windows that you need full disk, but on OS X, Linux, and other Unixes it should be sufficient to encrypt only the home directory of users.
/var, /tmp, and your swap partitions (or the partitions your swap files are on), and any other directories/partitions where data is stored, even temporarily.
No, you also need
FWIW, you can now do this pretty easily with dm-crypt, though I can't remember whether it encrypts everything or just the data. (Some systems leave e.g. the filenames unincrypted.)
> This mathematical proof is clearly interesting from a mathematics-proofs-point-of-view. But I'm surprised it's considered the breakthrough of the year.
The actual breakthrough of the year was that a Slashdotter got laid back in February, but they couldn't include it in the list because they haven't been able to confirm the details. So this one is a sort of symbolic stand-in.
Next time your class stud mentions his 9", you can counter by mentioning that your 6.5" consumes less power and gets the job done faster!
> I'll admit, I didn't read the entire 52 page PDF report, but I skimmed it. I'm having trouble seeing how they can reach those conclusions just by looking at drug trends in number of NMEs vs non-NMEs since 1993. Also, considering where the pdf was posted, and taking into account the democratic party's desire to take over the health care industry, I suspect a political motive.
a) The problem has already been known for about a decade.
b) The Demoncrats don't pwn the GAO.
> If we really want to see new drugs AND get cheaper health care, banning advertisements is a good start.
And it used to be banned in the USA, until "someone" bought enough congressmen to get that reversed.
(Same with the ambulance chasers that you mentioned in passing.)
> I realize that making drugs (or any other product, for that matter) requires research and testing, etc., and manufacturers need to recoup that money spent. Plus, profits from a block-buster drug go into funding expensive research on drugs that can only target a very small portion of the population.
Actually (according to various news outlets over the past several years), these companies spend ten dollars on marketing for every dollar they spend on research.