all we need is to lure people into using Linux, ship a user friendly OGG video editor (now in Ubuntu 10.04) and also some GUI widget that prompts the user "Do you want to install missing codecs from www.someh.264.site.com? (y/n)"
You can't be serious. What do you think Grandma is going to say when she's prompted to install "missing codecs." My Grandma would say, "What the fuck is a codec?" Yours might be more polite, but regardless, prompting for codecs is NOT going to lure any average person, i.e.: Non/. type person, into using Linux. That's laughable and is a perfect illustration of why Linux isn't there yet.
No, Captain Sully retired because he turned 60, which is the mandatory retirement age. He was and is certainly angry about the pay cuts and the pension devaluations, but that is not the REASON he retired; he was forced to.
Where would you go? Is there any country in the world where a citizen is treated fairly and reasonably by his government or the legal system? I'm loathe to think of one.
Very similar to my experience, except my troubles were with Dish Network. I have never been treated so rudely. I fired them and got Comcast. I've never had a problem with Comcast. I also do Qwest DSL, which has been just fine. I figure one should NOT "bundle" (which all of them want you to do.) Having all your eggs in one basket: internet, TV, and telco, is not a good thing.
The many examples here of array declarations or variable initializations are not sufficient to get you pegged as a cheater. But when you get multi-line programs of dozens of lines that are precisely the same, even including comments, THAT will ring alarm bells. I don't think anyone writing a simple 'Hello, world' program that is exactly like mine will get called out. If you turn in a hundred line program full of regression equations to plot the Fry Readability Index in a matrix graph that is precisely like mine? Busted!
This isn't really off topic and should not be modded as such. Someone needs to mod it back up. If you will remember, when Spartacus and his rag tag slave army was defeated by the Roman army, the general demanded that Spartacus be turned over. Spartacus said, "I am Spartacus." whereupon everyone else also yelled the same thing. I think that is an appropriate allusion here. Who posted these anonymous emails? Get it yet? Surely this is not too deep for/.
but we just ran a cracker program on the passwd file )on Solaris at the time) and exposed about 50% of the passwords. Then we went to the affected users and said, "This is your password, right?" After the first shock passed we would say, "It's too easy. You need to change it. Next week we'll run the cracker program again." We also sent around a little tutorial on how to create good passwords by using initials of a memorized sentence (as some have suggested here) After about four runs we were down to less than 10%, and we called it good.
Michael Horn is a tireless, fast-talking promoter of Billy Meier who will argue with you endlessly trying to make you believe that the Billy Meier photographs are real. Actually, the pics have been proven fake many times. They've used garbage can lids, models, and props. They've lifted pictures from books--one of a dinosaur to 'prove' Billy traveled back in time. Besides being fake, it's about the silliest story you could ever read. If you want to make UFOs a laughingstock subject, this is the way to do it.
Horn can talk all he wants, but the fact is, he's flat out busted.
A car going 30 mph travels 44 feet per second. (5,280 / 120 = 44). The stopping distance of a vehicle is a function of friction, speed, and mass. One of the calculators is here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/crstp.html. Just google 'vehicle stopping distance' and you have a choice of several calculators and you can look at the full formula, which is impossible to write correctly here. Assuming you have good tires, and all other things being equal, the stopping distance from 30 mph is 37 feet. Most studies on this issue assume it is fair to give a driver one second to determine whether to stop. First, you must recognize the yellow light, then assess the situation. Are you going downhill? Are the streets wet? Do you have a bowl of goldfish on the seat beside you? This is not trivial. Stopping on wet pavement requires twice the distance. Here's an article that says more or less the same thing: http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/stopping-distances.htm.
The basic issue here is that it will take you at least two seconds to stop from 30 mph on dry pavement, four seconds if it is wet. It takes one second to react and one second to stop (though deceleration throws a curve on time here). But in terms of distance this means you absolutely must be MORE than 81 feet away from the stop light to stop at all. My car is 16 feet long. If mine is average, that means five car lengths are required to stop. If that yellow light is less than two seconds long and you are within 81 feet of the light, you will go through on red. You have no choice; the laws of physics dictate it.
The last time I was stopped by the State Patrol for this I said, "Look. It was pretty close. I was doing 40 mph on a hill and the streets were wet. Plus, I thought about it. If I had just slammed on the brakes, I might have been able to stop, but the extra half second cost me." He let me go.
The idea expressed here that you just 'stop on yellow' is ridiculous. If your vehicle is within that window close to the light, you cannot stop, ever. Adjust for wind speed. If you are ever given a ticket for this, vidceotape the intersection to prove tghe length of the yellow light, compute the calculations, and take it to the judge.
In our area, they can ticket you, but it does not appear as a moving violation on your driver's record so your insurance will not go up. There is also some sentiment that putting in these cameras results in more rear-end accidents because drivers become hypersensitive. It's definitely a money-making issue.
Depends on what you revere. I own no Apple products. My last Apple was an Apple ][. I like Woz as a person better than Jobs, but the fact is without Jobs Woz would be nothing. Woz's genius is a special kind: Detailed with a mind-blowing ability to see patterns and concepts no one else can. But his ability to do the same thing in the marketplace and business just isn't there. Woz got lucky by being in the right place at the right time. I still expect someday to read that Woz is broke.
Woz wasn't/isn't the only genius hacker in Silicon Valley. Lee Felsenstein, for example, is another one. He designed the Osborne I, but Osborne got most of the credit. He's faded into obscurity. The one thing that made a difference to Woz was Steve Jobs. You can like him or hate him, disagree with his philosophy or not, but you can't deny Jobs' amazing ride and string of successes.
Mod parent up. Where are you going to go? Any technologically advanced country is just as bad as here vis-a-vis government intrusion. There's no place left to go. Perhaps you could move to a failed state like Mexico or Somalia where they have pretend governments, but then your net access isn't so reliable--and neither is your personal safety.
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
Actually, Mendel may have cheated, or his assistant may have arranged the results to match what he knew Mendel wanted. The problem is that, statistically speaking, Mendel's results are too good to be true. There is some controversy about this. I'm not taking sides--just pointing it out, e.g. http://www.ayubmed.edu.pk/JAMC/PAST/19-3/22%20Faraz.pdf
Although I immensely respect math PhDs for their understanding and accomplishments, I'm not sure having a PhD in math grants expertise in computer and network security. My guess is their expertise is used largely in encryption efforts. Insofar as that is useful for network security, fine and great, but there's a lot more to network security than just encryption.
I really see no evidence that the NSA has scooped up the smartest math PhDs. In fact, the age of Google is making it harder for the NSA to attract mathematical talent. They simply cannot compete in wages, for example, though they may be able to compete on lifestyle issues. Here's an article that addresses the issue: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968007.htm
Aren't they smart enough and rich enough to hire their own geeks? SIGINT is the main job of NSA, period. If you want to hire the wolf to guard the hen house, you take the consequences.
'$5,000 to $10,000 apiece' is the cost of a traditional seisometer--not a computer. I know, you actually have to read the post to understand that, but just sayin'
That is correct to a point, but the manufacturing costs are really not that great a percentage and distribution is an add-on that bookstores have to pay: "Plus shipping." One of the things a publisher will do is seek a price point where printing of the book is reduced. For example, if they figure a given title will sell 10,000 copies, but the break point of the hard copy price falls from $3.50 apiece to $3.25 apiece at 12,000 copies, then they will go ahead and print 12,000 copies, sell the 10,000 (assuming their projections are correct), then sell the extra 2,000 as 'remainders' for $5.00 apiece. That way, they make more money by reducing the cost of the print run and still recover the cost of the over-printing decision. The point is that the physical cost to print a book is a relatively small percentage of the total cost of the book.
Really? Of course, you're lumping incarceration in with executions, but how about if you separate out executions just for fun. In 2008, for example, the US executed 37 people. China executed at least 1700 and, according to Amnesty International, probably a lot more. Kind of puts a different spin on things, doesn't it?
he got his 15 minutes of fame from Cuckoo's Egg, the book AND the movie. He's a PhD astonomer who was in the right place at the right time. I've heard him speak. He's witty, funny, and energetic, a delight to hear, really. I've never understood why he turned on the Net. He was, after all, on the bleeding edge for a time, and seemed poised to take off on a career of internet promotion rather than demotion. Strange.
Then anything you do will slow you down, at least at first. I'm a 2-3 finger typist and I can get to 60. That's respectable and really quite fast enough for me and I cannot imagine wasting any learning time learning to be slower so I can eventually become faster. It's just not worth it. In my experience seeing people switching from a typewriter to a word procerssor, most people get a 50% speed increase. Of course these days, most people typing on keyboards have never typed on a typewriter, so the point may be moot. If you see it as a game or a sport, none of this applies.
Slashdot Mirror
Fer Christ's sake, it's a JOKE! It's a fucking JOKE! Get over yourself!
all we need is to lure people into using Linux, ship a user friendly OGG video editor (now in Ubuntu 10.04) and also some GUI widget that prompts the user "Do you want to install missing codecs from www.someh.264.site.com? (y/n)"
You can't be serious. What do you think Grandma is going to say when she's prompted to install "missing codecs." My Grandma would say, "What the fuck is a codec?" Yours might be more polite, but regardless, prompting for codecs is NOT going to lure any average person, i.e.: Non /. type person, into using Linux. That's laughable and is a perfect illustration of why Linux isn't there yet.
No, Captain Sully retired because he turned 60, which is the mandatory retirement age. He was and is certainly angry about the pay cuts and the pension devaluations, but that is not the REASON he retired; he was forced to.
Where would you go? Is there any country in the world where a citizen is treated fairly and reasonably by his government or the legal system? I'm loathe to think of one.
Very similar to my experience, except my troubles were with Dish Network. I have never been treated so rudely. I fired them and got Comcast. I've never had a problem with Comcast. I also do Qwest DSL, which has been just fine. I figure one should NOT "bundle" (which all of them want you to do.) Having all your eggs in one basket: internet, TV, and telco, is not a good thing.
When did you stop beating your wife? Oh, wait.... This is /. When did you stop beating your, oh, never mind.
The many examples here of array declarations or variable initializations are not sufficient to get you pegged as a cheater. But when you get multi-line programs of dozens of lines that are precisely the same, even including comments, THAT will ring alarm bells. I don't think anyone writing a simple 'Hello, world' program that is exactly like mine will get called out. If you turn in a hundred line program full of regression equations to plot the Fry Readability Index in a matrix graph that is precisely like mine? Busted!
This isn't really off topic and should not be modded as such. Someone needs to mod it back up. If you will remember, when Spartacus and his rag tag slave army was defeated by the Roman army, the general demanded that Spartacus be turned over. Spartacus said, "I am Spartacus." whereupon everyone else also yelled the same thing. I think that is an appropriate allusion here. Who posted these anonymous emails? Get it yet? Surely this is not too deep for /.
but we just ran a cracker program on the passwd file )on Solaris at the time) and exposed about 50% of the passwords. Then we went to the affected users and said, "This is your password, right?" After the first shock passed we would say, "It's too easy. You need to change it. Next week we'll run the cracker program again." We also sent around a little tutorial on how to create good passwords by using initials of a memorized sentence (as some have suggested here) After about four runs we were down to less than 10%, and we called it good.
He's part of the problem. But here's the "Official UFO Quiz" to test yourself on what you do know. http://www.scribd.com/doc/13586254/The-Official-UFO-Quiz
Michael Horn is a tireless, fast-talking promoter of Billy Meier who will argue with you endlessly trying to make you believe that the Billy Meier photographs are real. Actually, the pics have been proven fake many times. They've used garbage can lids, models, and props. They've lifted pictures from books--one of a dinosaur to 'prove' Billy traveled back in time. Besides being fake, it's about the silliest story you could ever read. If you want to make UFOs a laughingstock subject, this is the way to do it.
Horn can talk all he wants, but the fact is, he's flat out busted.
A car going 30 mph travels 44 feet per second. (5,280 / 120 = 44). The stopping distance of a vehicle is a function of friction, speed, and mass. One of the calculators is here: http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/HBASE/crstp.html. Just google 'vehicle stopping distance' and you have a choice of several calculators and you can look at the full formula, which is impossible to write correctly here. Assuming you have good tires, and all other things being equal, the stopping distance from 30 mph is 37 feet. Most studies on this issue assume it is fair to give a driver one second to determine whether to stop. First, you must recognize the yellow light, then assess the situation. Are you going downhill? Are the streets wet? Do you have a bowl of goldfish on the seat beside you? This is not trivial. Stopping on wet pavement requires twice the distance. Here's an article that says more or less the same thing: http://www.driveandstayalive.com/info%20section/stopping-distances.htm.
The basic issue here is that it will take you at least two seconds to stop from 30 mph on dry pavement, four seconds if it is wet. It takes one second to react and one second to stop (though deceleration throws a curve on time here). But in terms of distance this means you absolutely must be MORE than 81 feet away from the stop light to stop at all. My car is 16 feet long. If mine is average, that means five car lengths are required to stop. If that yellow light is less than two seconds long and you are within 81 feet of the light, you will go through on red. You have no choice; the laws of physics dictate it.
The last time I was stopped by the State Patrol for this I said, "Look. It was pretty close. I was doing 40 mph on a hill and the streets were wet. Plus, I thought about it. If I had just slammed on the brakes, I might have been able to stop, but the extra half second cost me." He let me go.
The idea expressed here that you just 'stop on yellow' is ridiculous. If your vehicle is within that window close to the light, you cannot stop, ever. Adjust for wind speed. If you are ever given a ticket for this, vidceotape the intersection to prove tghe length of the yellow light, compute the calculations, and take it to the judge.
In our area, they can ticket you, but it does not appear as a moving violation on your driver's record so your insurance will not go up. There is also some sentiment that putting in these cameras results in more rear-end accidents because drivers become hypersensitive. It's definitely a money-making issue.
Depends on what you revere. I own no Apple products. My last Apple was an Apple ][. I like Woz as a person better than Jobs, but the fact is without Jobs Woz would be nothing. Woz's genius is a special kind: Detailed with a mind-blowing ability to see patterns and concepts no one else can. But his ability to do the same thing in the marketplace and business just isn't there. Woz got lucky by being in the right place at the right time. I still expect someday to read that Woz is broke.
Woz wasn't/isn't the only genius hacker in Silicon Valley. Lee Felsenstein, for example, is another one. He designed the Osborne I, but Osborne got most of the credit. He's faded into obscurity. The one thing that made a difference to Woz was Steve Jobs. You can like him or hate him, disagree with his philosophy or not, but you can't deny Jobs' amazing ride and string of successes.
Mod parent up. Where are you going to go? Any technologically advanced country is just as bad as here vis-a-vis government intrusion. There's no place left to go. Perhaps you could move to a failed state like Mexico or Somalia where they have pretend governments, but then your net access isn't so reliable--and neither is your personal safety.
Of course, there's always Wyoming.
I'm one of those people who downloaded the 40MB foia.zip file. I've read the emails. I've read the HARRYREADME file, and I've looked at the code examples. I get the impression from reading the comments here that most people have not actually done that. Oh, they'll say "The data proves" but they haven't actually LOOKED at the data. I would have thought that slashdot readers, being the objective technically-minded people they say they are, would have wanted to tear into that code and take a look.
What you will find is really fascinating. It's not very good. Climate scientists, on the whole, aren't really very good programmers; and they are not good statisticians. Why should they be? You can't be expert in everything. So you have a situation where Michael Mann, for example, rather than use the statistical manipulation suite "R" instead used Fortran, sometimes. When you read through poor "Harry's" lament you find a kind of frustration only a programmer could feel. Missing data, bad data, programs that throw an error, don't tell you, and keep on going. Missing data sets for entire countries.
Now, the essence of science is replicability, correct? If you're going to claim 'cold fusion' you publish your data and your methods and other scientists attempt to replicate your findings, or not. But the climate gate folks have steadfastly refused to release their methods, including their computer code, and the data they did release was not the data they used in their publications. Further, they 'lost' some data altogether.
Let us turn to the most famous of the emails: "I've just used Mike's Nature trick to hide the decline." Jones says he used the word "trick" to mean a "clever thing to do." Let's look at his "cleverness." What he actually did is meld together the historical record, based on proxies like tree rings, and the more recent instrumental record. On the surface that looks like an okay thing to do, but why did he do it?
The reason is that the tree ring data showed a warming since the early 1800's, and the instruments showed a warming since 1960 or so. Meld them together and you get warming! Global Warmimng! Yay! But why take out the tree ring data? Did it not continue and show warming into the nineties along with the instruments, thus verifying what these guys were saying?
No, it did not, thus you have the problem of "divergence" which is a fancy way of saying the tree ring data wasn't cooperating and showed COOLING since 1960! Well, these Climategate guys decided it 'must be something else' so rather than include the tree ring signal, they CUT IT OFF to HIDE THE DECLINE it showed. Thus an 'inconvenient truth' was 'disappeared' in favor of not 'confusing' the issue. They were afraid that if they showed just this one tree-ring line in their spaghetti chart declining, they'd have to explain it.
And they could not. In fact, the issue of the tree rings not cooperating calls into question using tree-ring data AT ALL. If it's not an accurate 'treemometer' how can you base historical climate on it? This is but one example of dozens and dozens of manipulations done by the Hockey Team as they attempt to salvage their careers and grants. It is simply not true that 'thousands of scientists' have replicated Global Warming. They have not. They have all used the same corrupted data sets in their calculations.
The Himalayan glaciers are not disappearing. The rain foretss are not turning into grasslands. African crops are not failing. Arctic ice is normal in every respect. There were 2500 polar bears a couple of decades ago and now there are 15,000. The Antarctic has record ice. The Netherlands is not 50% below sea level and the sea levels are not rising any faster than they have since 1800. Hurricanes are not more frequent, nor are tornados. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions. Geologists for Space
Here's the solution to that: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZ4PtafRB9c&feature=player_embedded
"Fuck PJ."
Umm, I don't think she wants you, but it's probably okay to keep her in your maturbatory Rolodex if you want.
Actually, Mendel may have cheated, or his assistant may have arranged the results to match what he knew Mendel wanted. The problem is that, statistically speaking, Mendel's results are too good to be true. There is some controversy about this. I'm not taking sides--just pointing it out, e.g. http://www.ayubmed.edu.pk/JAMC/PAST/19-3/22%20Faraz.pdf
Although I immensely respect math PhDs for their understanding and accomplishments, I'm not sure having a PhD in math grants expertise in computer and network security. My guess is their expertise is used largely in encryption efforts. Insofar as that is useful for network security, fine and great, but there's a lot more to network security than just encryption.
I really see no evidence that the NSA has scooped up the smartest math PhDs. In fact, the age of Google is making it harder for the NSA to attract mathematical talent. They simply cannot compete in wages, for example, though they may be able to compete on lifestyle issues. Here's an article that addresses the issue: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_04/b3968007.htm
Aren't they smart enough and rich enough to hire their own geeks? SIGINT is the main job of NSA, period. If you want to hire the wolf to guard the hen house, you take the consequences.
'$5,000 to $10,000 apiece' is the cost of a traditional seisometer--not a computer. I know, you actually have to read the post to understand that, but just sayin'
That is correct to a point, but the manufacturing costs are really not that great a percentage and distribution is an add-on that bookstores have to pay: "Plus shipping." One of the things a publisher will do is seek a price point where printing of the book is reduced. For example, if they figure a given title will sell 10,000 copies, but the break point of the hard copy price falls from $3.50 apiece to $3.25 apiece at 12,000 copies, then they will go ahead and print 12,000 copies, sell the 10,000 (assuming their projections are correct), then sell the extra 2,000 as 'remainders' for $5.00 apiece. That way, they make more money by reducing the cost of the print run and still recover the cost of the over-printing decision. The point is that the physical cost to print a book is a relatively small percentage of the total cost of the book.
Really? Of course, you're lumping incarceration in with executions, but how about if you separate out executions just for fun. In 2008, for example, the US executed 37 people. China executed at least 1700 and, according to Amnesty International, probably a lot more. Kind of puts a different spin on things, doesn't it?
Lanier was 100% tongue in cheek in that article--really.
he got his 15 minutes of fame from Cuckoo's Egg, the book AND the movie. He's a PhD astonomer who was in the right place at the right time. I've heard him speak. He's witty, funny, and energetic, a delight to hear, really. I've never understood why he turned on the Net. He was, after all, on the bleeding edge for a time, and seemed poised to take off on a career of internet promotion rather than demotion. Strange.
Then anything you do will slow you down, at least at first. I'm a 2-3 finger typist and I can get to 60. That's respectable and really quite fast enough for me and I cannot imagine wasting any learning time learning to be slower so I can eventually become faster. It's just not worth it. In my experience seeing people switching from a typewriter to a word procerssor, most people get a 50% speed increase. Of course these days, most people typing on keyboards have never typed on a typewriter, so the point may be moot. If you see it as a game or a sport, none of this applies.