Exactly this. It's the same reason why there are missing episodes of Doctor Who and other early television shows. Yes, it was the first moon landing, but tape was expensive and people didn't think about saving this stuff as much. After all, if we had gone by aspirations from the 1960's, we'd have had a moon base by now with permanent residents. Going to the moon might have been akin to going on vacation to a far off foreign country - a special trip you take once or twice if you can afford it. Not something for the masses, but not quite "rich people only" either.
*remembers that there hasn't been a moon landing in my lifetime*
Exactly. I did an IMDB search and found a Sci Fi movie from 1969 - Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun. Take a look at some of the effects. They were probably state of the art then and must have looked amazing, but they look extremely fake nowadays. Even if NASA had gotten the best and brightest of Hollywood on the "moon landing production", I doubt that 1) they could have pulled it off with so much realism, 2) they could have all kept the secret for so long, and 3) they wouldn't have used their knowledge from faking the moon landing to make more realistic movie special effects.
If you're on shared hosting, you should get off ASAP. I used to have a few sites on shared hosting and we'd either a) be impacted by other users using too many resources or b) be threatened with disconnection by the host for using too many resources. The sites were small and not using that much in the way of resources, but shared hosting is tossing a thousand people into a pool and then kicking out the ones who try to swim the slightest bit. The hosts can do this because they know that there's a line of people ready to jump in to take the place of those kicked out.
Instead of going the shared hosting route, get a Virtual Private Server. It won't set you back that much. I pay $34 a month - and that's for managed hosting, unmanaged is much cheaper if you're comfortable managing the server yourself. Yes, this is more money than the $2 a month for "unlimited" space/bandwidth shared hosting, but you'll actually get what you pay for instead of being crammed together with a thousand other sites on an overloaded server.
(You could get a Dedicated Server, but these cost a lot more and only make sense for the biggest of websites. Get a VPS first and if your site grows to the point that it needs a dedicated box, then congrats.)
My father was fired from a job (decades ago) and received a severance package. He was made to sign a contract that said that merely talking to a lawyer about why he was fired would be cause for the company to revoke his severance. Could a decent lawyer have ripped this to shreds? Probably. However, my father needed the money and couldn't risk losing his severance - much less spending time/money on a lawsuit instead of finding a new job.
What "is legal to do" and "what is done" are often two different things and companies will often bank on people not having the resources of a big company to fight back legally.
You start a company. You make 1billion shares. You sell one share to your mom for 40USD. BOOM! your company is worth 40 billion.
Next step: You sell your company to another company for a "reasonable" $1 billion and leave before the purchasing company realizes that your company wasn't worth anywhere near that amount.
But it is impossible; editors are apparently compelled by some powerful force to cut corners continuously, even without any information theory analysis of how many corners would be too many.
I believe the cutting-corners kind of thinking runs along these lines: "We cut ONE_THING and our profits went up 2%. If we cut TWENTY_MORE_THINGS, we'll have 40% more profits!" Somehow, they fail to realize that cutting everything won't get you more and more profits. Cutting out one or two inefficiencies? Sure, that'll boost your profits. Cutting out an important thing? That might result in a temporary profit boost (which might be enough for an executive who's looking to raise stock prices until he bails). Cutting out a lot of important things will just result in chaos and losses (both people leaving and money intake dwindling).
One of the reasons the court gave for making the website responsible for its commenters postings was that the commenters in question couldn't easily be identified and prosecuted. Maybe these comments weren't "good" comments (they were allegedly defamatory), but they were people exercising free speech. Anonymous speech and free speech have a long history together. In the US, some of the founding fathers wrote under pen names because using their real names might cause backlash.
1GB? When I got my first PC, it had a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking "what would you EVER put on this to fill up that huge of a drive." Of course, nowadays, I carry a "hard drive" with hundreds of times the storage capacity, not to mention a better monitor, faster processor, and faster connection to the Internet. It fits right in my pocket when I'm not using it to browse the web, make calls, play games, etc. It makes me wonder what my kids will wistfully think about the tech they use nowadays when they are my age. "I can't believe we once had to actually TOUCH the screen on a device in our hands to make things happen. Cranial-ocular implanted computers are SO much better!"
I found his Facebook page. Not only did he have his photo, but his full name on the page as well. If posting under your real name counts as a pseudonym, then I guess I'm posting under a pseudonym as well. *sits back confident that nobody will EVER guess my real name*
Wow. For all the troubles the American court system has (and there are plenty of them), the Indian court system makes the American one seem like Utopia by comparison.
Exactly this. Facebook - and other websites with "real name" policies - hardly seem the place to post anonymously. Want to post anonymously for free? Set up a Wordpress.com site under a pseudonym and post there. You can even share it on Twitter under a pseudonym account. Will it be impossible for people to find out who you are and where you live? Of course not, but if you do it right, it should be much harder to track than Facebook.
I found his FB page and it not only shows his photo, but lists his name (Jagendra Singh) right in the header. If that's anonymous than my Slashdot username is anonymous as well!
The news stories will be three sentences in length, and distributed within shareable images.
So their news stories will be brief snippets (no linking to sources or examining issues in depth). In addition, they will be posted as images so you can't copy snippets easily (not without posting the entire image). Three sentences is fine for a comment, but news stories often require more in-depth coverage than three sentences will allow.
I actually was cheating with the 2 digit years. Good point about using YY-MM-DD format, though. Using that, I'll have a palindrome birthday in 15 years!
I am Jewish and I only need to live 890 years to reach mine. As a bonus, if I live ten more years, I'll be able to say "When 900 years you reach, look as good you will not." Whether anyone will get the reference 860 years from now is another story.
My son's birthday this year happened to be a palindrome. I also told him that he would only get one Palindrome Birthday ever. He got excited when I explained what a palindrome was. I, on the other hand, got sad when I realized that my Palindrome Birthday took place in 2008 and I missed celebrating it.
As far as the "nerd-glee" goes, I feel that every time my odometer hits a big round number (e.g. 47,000 miles), a palindrome (e.g. 47,674 miles), or some other mathematically significant number.
Scary "TERRORISM!" scenario aside, you don't have an expectation of privacy when you walk down the street. You can't tell someone that he can't take a photo of you walking down the street (or run that photo through a facial recognition algorithm) because it violates your privacy. Now, if you have facial recognition being forced on you in your own house, that might be an issue.
Yeah, that's one thing the US Congress excels at - enacting well written laws.
Hey, Congress can enact well written laws. It just so happens that the industry that the laws benefit might be the folks who wrote the well written laws. Also "well written" doesn't neccessarily mean "protects consumers." In these cases, the laws are written well to protect the industry in their quest to get as much money and power as possible.
I agree with you about religion in a religious studies/history class. You could also put religion in a philosophy or social studies class and it would fit nicely. As you said, it should be presented as "some people believe X", not "this is the absolute truth." Also, while I understand that class time wouldn't allow all religions to be discussed, a decent sampling should be covered.
Of course, there is sure to be controversy when 1) Islam is covered and the Islamophobes freak out over "public schools converting our kids to Islam", 2) Christianity is covered from a historical perspective and the religious folks don't like hearing that the "Virgin Mary" and Christmas stories evolved as a method to help assimilate some tribes, or 3) Wicca is covered leading the religious folks to cry out over witchcraft in the schools.
Exactly this. Even if we were to make the huge assumption that US law enforcement would only use their double-secret encryption backdoors for good, it would only be a matter of time before $RANDOM_HACKER figured out how to get into that backdoor. If you add "law enforcement only back doors" into encryption, you might as well just unlock the front door and put down a welcome mat.
I think I would be fine with considering that religion be seriously explored if everyone with religion could just reach a consensus.
Religion hasn't reached a consensus in thousands of years and I doubt it would if given a thousand more. Even within the same religion, there are disagreements. When "religion in public school" advocates talk, they obviously mean Christianity in public schools, but what form of Christianity varies. Catholicism is different from Protestantism which is different than Southern Baptist. Even if the "religion in public school" advocates won and religion was put into all public schools, it would turn into a war as to WHICH variation was added.
(This division exists within Judaism also. Orthodox Jews aren't one group but a loose collection of a hundred different groups, each with it's own particular quirks and practices.)
But you're going to need two strong arms to lift that drumstick!
And now the math/science/food geek in me wants to calculate just how many humans an Apatosaurus would feed.
Given that 1 pound of turkey is considered a serving (accounting for bone weight) and assuming a similar bone-meat ratio in Apatosaurus (a big assumption, I know but this is a quick calculation), a 16.4 metric ton (36,155.8 pounds) Apatosaurus would feed over 36,000 people. Eighteen thousand if everyone had seconds.
Who wants to cure world hunger by cloning dinosaurs?
In the strict definition, it is a theory which means it's a "hypothesis supported by facts and evidence which leads us to conclude it's the best explanation for what we experience"
As much of an opponent I was of the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate (I didn't see any point in Nye "debating" Ham and it just gave Ham publicity), there was one good exchange. They were both asked what it would take for them to change their opinions. For Nye to accept creationism or for Ham to accept evolution. Nye said that it would take proof that the things that science accepts as facts (e.g. atomic clocks can't be reset) aren't true. This would be extraordinary proof to be sure, but it would be evidence that science is wrong. Meanwhile, Ken Ham replied that nothing would change his mind. God himself could shout out "Hey Ken! Evolution is fact" and Ken would pound his Bible and declare evolution wrong.
I've spent time with creationists. They view science's changing theories as a weakness and religion's constant "God did it as explained in the Bible" as strength. In fact, it's the other way around. Science changes theories based on different evidence. It's willing to toss old, once beloved theories aside if the evidence comes in proving it wrong. You want to prove evolution wrong? Find a rabbit fossil from the Triassic. Creationism, on the other hand, is never willing to change*. They just march on in the same direction even if all signs point to that being the wrong direction.
* They are never willing to change, but over the years their interpretations of the Bible passages might change which changes their creationist theories. They will never admit this, though, and just insist that they've always believed this.
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools. When people say "teach religion in schools" (outside of some comparative religion/philosophy class), what they really mean is "teach Christianity in schools." Try teaching Islam in a public school and you'll see all of those "we need to put religion back into public school" advocates go crazy.
I might be religious, but I try not to force my religion on others. I'm willing to discuss it with others if they ask questions, but I don't discuss it in a "my religion is so great, you need to convert now or else" manner. To me, religion is a personal matter and definitely not something for public schools to cover in a science class. You want to believe that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago when God sneezed it into his cosmic hanky? Go right ahead. You can even tell your kids that at home. Just don't try teaching MY kids that in public school because you can't deal with your kids learning about evolution.
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly this. It's the same reason why there are missing episodes of Doctor Who and other early television shows. Yes, it was the first moon landing, but tape was expensive and people didn't think about saving this stuff as much. After all, if we had gone by aspirations from the 1960's, we'd have had a moon base by now with permanent residents. Going to the moon might have been akin to going on vacation to a far off foreign country - a special trip you take once or twice if you can afford it. Not something for the masses, but not quite "rich people only" either.
*remembers that there hasn't been a moon landing in my lifetime*
*gets very sad*
Exactly. I did an IMDB search and found a Sci Fi movie from 1969 - Journey To The Far Side Of The Sun. Take a look at some of the effects. They were probably state of the art then and must have looked amazing, but they look extremely fake nowadays. Even if NASA had gotten the best and brightest of Hollywood on the "moon landing production", I doubt that 1) they could have pulled it off with so much realism, 2) they could have all kept the secret for so long, and 3) they wouldn't have used their knowledge from faking the moon landing to make more realistic movie special effects.
If you're on shared hosting, you should get off ASAP. I used to have a few sites on shared hosting and we'd either a) be impacted by other users using too many resources or b) be threatened with disconnection by the host for using too many resources. The sites were small and not using that much in the way of resources, but shared hosting is tossing a thousand people into a pool and then kicking out the ones who try to swim the slightest bit. The hosts can do this because they know that there's a line of people ready to jump in to take the place of those kicked out.
Instead of going the shared hosting route, get a Virtual Private Server. It won't set you back that much. I pay $34 a month - and that's for managed hosting, unmanaged is much cheaper if you're comfortable managing the server yourself. Yes, this is more money than the $2 a month for "unlimited" space/bandwidth shared hosting, but you'll actually get what you pay for instead of being crammed together with a thousand other sites on an overloaded server.
(You could get a Dedicated Server, but these cost a lot more and only make sense for the biggest of websites. Get a VPS first and if your site grows to the point that it needs a dedicated box, then congrats.)
My father was fired from a job (decades ago) and received a severance package. He was made to sign a contract that said that merely talking to a lawyer about why he was fired would be cause for the company to revoke his severance. Could a decent lawyer have ripped this to shreds? Probably. However, my father needed the money and couldn't risk losing his severance - much less spending time/money on a lawsuit instead of finding a new job.
What "is legal to do" and "what is done" are often two different things and companies will often bank on people not having the resources of a big company to fight back legally.
Next step: You sell your company to another company for a "reasonable" $1 billion and leave before the purchasing company realizes that your company wasn't worth anywhere near that amount.
Repeat the above steps as many times as possible.
I believe the cutting-corners kind of thinking runs along these lines: "We cut ONE_THING and our profits went up 2%. If we cut TWENTY_MORE_THINGS, we'll have 40% more profits!" Somehow, they fail to realize that cutting everything won't get you more and more profits. Cutting out one or two inefficiencies? Sure, that'll boost your profits. Cutting out an important thing? That might result in a temporary profit boost (which might be enough for an executive who's looking to raise stock prices until he bails). Cutting out a lot of important things will just result in chaos and losses (both people leaving and money intake dwindling).
One of the reasons the court gave for making the website responsible for its commenters postings was that the commenters in question couldn't easily be identified and prosecuted. Maybe these comments weren't "good" comments (they were allegedly defamatory), but they were people exercising free speech. Anonymous speech and free speech have a long history together. In the US, some of the founding fathers wrote under pen names because using their real names might cause backlash.
Or like an ISP charging a user for Internet access to use Netflix and then charging Netflix for access to the ISP's users.
1GB? When I got my first PC, it had a 40MB hard drive. I remember thinking "what would you EVER put on this to fill up that huge of a drive." Of course, nowadays, I carry a "hard drive" with hundreds of times the storage capacity, not to mention a better monitor, faster processor, and faster connection to the Internet. It fits right in my pocket when I'm not using it to browse the web, make calls, play games, etc. It makes me wonder what my kids will wistfully think about the tech they use nowadays when they are my age. "I can't believe we once had to actually TOUCH the screen on a device in our hands to make things happen. Cranial-ocular implanted computers are SO much better!"
What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
I found his Facebook page. Not only did he have his photo, but his full name on the page as well. If posting under your real name counts as a pseudonym, then I guess I'm posting under a pseudonym as well. *sits back confident that nobody will EVER guess my real name*
Wow. For all the troubles the American court system has (and there are plenty of them), the Indian court system makes the American one seem like Utopia by comparison.
Exactly this. Facebook - and other websites with "real name" policies - hardly seem the place to post anonymously. Want to post anonymously for free? Set up a Wordpress.com site under a pseudonym and post there. You can even share it on Twitter under a pseudonym account. Will it be impossible for people to find out who you are and where you live? Of course not, but if you do it right, it should be much harder to track than Facebook.
I found his FB page and it not only shows his photo, but lists his name (Jagendra Singh) right in the header. If that's anonymous than my Slashdot username is anonymous as well!
So their news stories will be brief snippets (no linking to sources or examining issues in depth). In addition, they will be posted as images so you can't copy snippets easily (not without posting the entire image). Three sentences is fine for a comment, but news stories often require more in-depth coverage than three sentences will allow.
I actually was cheating with the 2 digit years. Good point about using YY-MM-DD format, though. Using that, I'll have a palindrome birthday in 15 years!
I am Jewish and I only need to live 890 years to reach mine. As a bonus, if I live ten more years, I'll be able to say "When 900 years you reach, look as good you will not." Whether anyone will get the reference 860 years from now is another story.
My son's birthday this year happened to be a palindrome. I also told him that he would only get one Palindrome Birthday ever. He got excited when I explained what a palindrome was. I, on the other hand, got sad when I realized that my Palindrome Birthday took place in 2008 and I missed celebrating it.
As far as the "nerd-glee" goes, I feel that every time my odometer hits a big round number (e.g. 47,000 miles), a palindrome (e.g. 47,674 miles), or some other mathematically significant number.
Scary "TERRORISM!" scenario aside, you don't have an expectation of privacy when you walk down the street. You can't tell someone that he can't take a photo of you walking down the street (or run that photo through a facial recognition algorithm) because it violates your privacy. Now, if you have facial recognition being forced on you in your own house, that might be an issue.
Hey, Congress can enact well written laws. It just so happens that the industry that the laws benefit might be the folks who wrote the well written laws. Also "well written" doesn't neccessarily mean "protects consumers." In these cases, the laws are written well to protect the industry in their quest to get as much money and power as possible.
I agree with you about religion in a religious studies/history class. You could also put religion in a philosophy or social studies class and it would fit nicely. As you said, it should be presented as "some people believe X", not "this is the absolute truth." Also, while I understand that class time wouldn't allow all religions to be discussed, a decent sampling should be covered.
Of course, there is sure to be controversy when 1) Islam is covered and the Islamophobes freak out over "public schools converting our kids to Islam", 2) Christianity is covered from a historical perspective and the religious folks don't like hearing that the "Virgin Mary" and Christmas stories evolved as a method to help assimilate some tribes, or 3) Wicca is covered leading the religious folks to cry out over witchcraft in the schools.
Exactly this. Even if we were to make the huge assumption that US law enforcement would only use their double-secret encryption backdoors for good, it would only be a matter of time before $RANDOM_HACKER figured out how to get into that backdoor. If you add "law enforcement only back doors" into encryption, you might as well just unlock the front door and put down a welcome mat.
Religion hasn't reached a consensus in thousands of years and I doubt it would if given a thousand more. Even within the same religion, there are disagreements. When "religion in public school" advocates talk, they obviously mean Christianity in public schools, but what form of Christianity varies. Catholicism is different from Protestantism which is different than Southern Baptist. Even if the "religion in public school" advocates won and religion was put into all public schools, it would turn into a war as to WHICH variation was added.
(This division exists within Judaism also. Orthodox Jews aren't one group but a loose collection of a hundred different groups, each with it's own particular quirks and practices.)
And now the math/science/food geek in me wants to calculate just how many humans an Apatosaurus would feed.
Given that 1 pound of turkey is considered a serving (accounting for bone weight) and assuming a similar bone-meat ratio in Apatosaurus (a big assumption, I know but this is a quick calculation), a 16.4 metric ton (36,155.8 pounds) Apatosaurus would feed over 36,000 people. Eighteen thousand if everyone had seconds.
Who wants to cure world hunger by cloning dinosaurs?
As much of an opponent I was of the Bill Nye-Ken Ham debate (I didn't see any point in Nye "debating" Ham and it just gave Ham publicity), there was one good exchange. They were both asked what it would take for them to change their opinions. For Nye to accept creationism or for Ham to accept evolution. Nye said that it would take proof that the things that science accepts as facts (e.g. atomic clocks can't be reset) aren't true. This would be extraordinary proof to be sure, but it would be evidence that science is wrong. Meanwhile, Ken Ham replied that nothing would change his mind. God himself could shout out "Hey Ken! Evolution is fact" and Ken would pound his Bible and declare evolution wrong.
I've spent time with creationists. They view science's changing theories as a weakness and religion's constant "God did it as explained in the Bible" as strength. In fact, it's the other way around. Science changes theories based on different evidence. It's willing to toss old, once beloved theories aside if the evidence comes in proving it wrong. You want to prove evolution wrong? Find a rabbit fossil from the Triassic. Creationism, on the other hand, is never willing to change*. They just march on in the same direction even if all signs point to that being the wrong direction.
* They are never willing to change, but over the years their interpretations of the Bible passages might change which changes their creationist theories. They will never admit this, though, and just insist that they've always believed this.
I'm not an Athiest (I'm Jewish), but even I don't want religion taught in schools. When people say "teach religion in schools" (outside of some comparative religion/philosophy class), what they really mean is "teach Christianity in schools." Try teaching Islam in a public school and you'll see all of those "we need to put religion back into public school" advocates go crazy.
I might be religious, but I try not to force my religion on others. I'm willing to discuss it with others if they ask questions, but I don't discuss it in a "my religion is so great, you need to convert now or else" manner. To me, religion is a personal matter and definitely not something for public schools to cover in a science class. You want to believe that the Earth was created 10,000 years ago when God sneezed it into his cosmic hanky? Go right ahead. You can even tell your kids that at home. Just don't try teaching MY kids that in public school because you can't deal with your kids learning about evolution.