Let me get this straight - the Mars guys build a probe to go to Mars and crash (its designed for this) and it can't. They tank another mission because they can't tell Metric from Imperial (Who really uses Imperial anymore anyway? backward...) measurementsl....
These NEAR guys build a ship that isn't meant to land on anything, and they land it and take it off again....
Clearly, we know who should be getting the budget upgrade!
One of my buddies is an Instrument Scientist on NEAR. He tells me they've got pretty much everything they could have asked for our of NEAR (I guess they're just playing around now because they can and maybe to avoid putting a lid on things... *wink*). He ran the Infrared Interferometer (or something like that) and he was really busy when they were on the approach run in the first place.
These guys have done an awesome job and I think they deserve all of the Kudos they can get. This is an example of how space missions should be run. Hurrah!
Tomb
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
You *can* conflict (and you certainly must defend) but prosperity is achieved through a careful balance of scientists and entertainers in your cities, a good ecological and urban planning strategy, and massive use of trade routes.
It is competitive, but it is not zero sum.
And it accounted for far too many hours of my University time.... Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
We like to think that, despite our smaller population and average income and despite our less valuable dollar and fewer number of sports franchises, that we actually deserve a capital letter for our country. (as in Canada).
Fun poking aside, if you want the home of intellectual freedoms like speech and thought and whatnot, I wouldn't rush up here. We have plenty of undemocratic process left buried in our governmental system and plenty of hidebound thinkers in the intelligentsia.
OTOH, at least up here you have to PROVE that you are a Gerbil with a problem and that a class of such Gerbils actually exists before you can launch a class action lawsuit on behalf of the millions of aggrieved Gerbils affected by Red Nail Polish....
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Someone who can afford the time to wish a community to die a death (virtual or otherwise) is rather pathetic in a sociopathic kind of way. And someone who does not have the stones to stand up and be counted _by_name_ is as insignificant as his mindless blatherings themselves.
If you don't like it here, leave. No one's forcing you to stay. If you just enjoy provoking others, get a life. Or get therapy. Either would be an improvement.
Tomin8tor Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
I'd have to agree that kids will be kids and will certainly take advantage of poorly monitored libraries. While I'm certainly not a fan of censorship I don't think I want my kids completely unprotected.
Try this new-fangled thing called education. You can try to ward children from untoward and unpleasant influences and hide from them things that make us uncomfortable like sex, violence, and whatnot... but the world will show it to them sometime when our gaurd falls. The only TRUE defence is education, raising your children to be strong, sensible, and to know right from wrong. If you street-proof your children, that goes a lot further (as does regular participation in the life of your child, rather than letting the child meander through life unsupervised and unattended) than any step to "protect the innocent" ever will.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
You really think that a normal encyclopedia is unbiased? I'm sure if Britannica was run past a bunch of natives from any of N countries, they'd have some sort of a comment about the bias. I'm not singling just them out either. Any kind of report written about some historical event or place is a composite of the factual data, the perceptions of that data by observers, and the (probably unknowing) bias of the author. There are better and worse attempts at being unbiased, but any kind of representation has inherent to it some form of bias, be it based on psychology, language, culture, or whatever.
I would, admittedly, worry more about the bias in some document compiled by those who don't have any incentive ($$$) to be unbiased, but I suppose one could easily argue that those motivated by $$$ have a market-driven bias.
I think Open Source and the whole "Open everything" movement is interesting because it tries to acheive effective product through diverse contribution (many eyes theory). That has strengths (flaws get spotted) but it can lead to quite a patchwork of styles (ever read open source code?). This might lead to quite a different kind of work in an Encyclopoedia.
At any rate, it'll be an interesting experiment. Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
A full announcement is expected next week from NASA -- wouldn't it be nice if they would simply release news as it happens rather than create News Happenings?
Don't begrudge the NASA dudes the "hype" generated by pre-announcing an announcement. Though it is kind of annoying on some level, every bit of focus that is put to NASA work (and that of other related teams like those of NEAR) is another PR victory for the whole space-exploration effort.
If we don't want to be stuck on this ball long after we've depleted it (since we show few signs of stopping that trend) , we'd better get out there and look for other options for resources... which requires exploration.
Strong crypto applied to voice communications (phones) and to email, etc. (generally, to all point-to-point person-to-person communications) - this will probably make this "log" a little less useful for the government.
Ultimately, the gov't will use this to prey on the lazy or less well informed. Why? Because smart crooks (yes they exist) will be making massive use of strong crypto as will all the geeks who just have no interest in the government reading _THEIR_ stuff (be it pr0n, their sappy love letters, or hearing their telephone calls to 976 numbers).
And of course, one way to make this a royal pain in the ass for the gov't once you have broadband always-up access and crypto - send lots and lots and lots of useless traffic around. The gov't won't be able to differentiate meaningful and non-meaningful traffic in their logs... and so they will have to crack it all.
And crypto on voice systems will also serve to make the audio logs unintelligible without decrypt gear.
This is a retarded idea on several levels: It isn't wise to give the gov't this kind of power (even if it is rather benign like the UK gov't), it isn't technically feasible as things stand today without stupifying financial inputs, it is easy to compromise/oppose to render it even less feasible, and ultimately the only purpose one can define for it is to aide in the apprehension of the truly stupid (Anyone with any smarts won't be caught by it).
Taken altogether, this says "waste of taxpayers money" to me. Smacks of Empire building in the UK intelligence apparatus (but hey, Empire building is a UK tradition, eh?).
This reminds me of a quotation that seems to fit:
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
You take yourself seriously, yet you say things like this:
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
I'm sure the youth, especially the digerati believe this. Youth always have believed their elders don't understand them, are outmoded, and have antiquarian values. To delude ourselves into thinking this is any more prevalent today is quite a hilarious thought.
Obviously many older people do have useful things to pass along, especially their experiences with life and their accumulated perspectives. But there are also cultural and technological advances, more all the time, that they simply can't grasp. It often seems that only adolescents really have the time, instincts and motor skills to grasp the mechanics of cutting-edge gaming, programming and other digital technologies.
Mighty generous of you to allow that older people have something to contribute. What a relief.... now we don't have to throw them into the tar pits because they serve no purpose.
The unspoken implication in the last sentence here is that the grasp of mechanics, programming, and digital technologies is terribly important, as opposed to the knowledge, life experience, and perspective of the elders. Whereas I don't claim it is irrelevant, I am fairly certain that living life gives one amazing lessons about oneself and through that about how humans work which the young just haven't had time to absorb.
The absorption of the mechanics and trivia of a new technology or culture does not mark one as competent to understand that culture or to fit it correctly into the context of human experience. Assimilation of geektopian technological information does not translate into an ability to understand your fellow man or yourself, either aspect of which is infinitely more useful than the technological grasp alone.
Otherwise, we'll breed a generation of geek idiot-savants... people who get tech but don't get life, brilliant engineers and programmers without a shred of understanding of their social context and responsibilities. And whatever anyone may like to say, the best way to get a clue is to experience through living or learning from those who have lived. And the elders have done that. Denigrate and ignore their knowledge at your peril.
General Santa Anna would be laughing his ass off....
If you store your MP3s inside of an archive of some type (encrypted or not), can they justify deleting the archive? Especially if it might contain non-MP3 material? Can they justify "shotgun" deletions of things that violate your service agreement as well as things that do not?
If this is a problem, change the extension. They have specified MP3 file format files cannot be distributed this way. Where do they draw the line? File extension? Magic scan of the contents to look for a pattern match?
What about a non-MP3 format file (for example a word document) with the.MP3 extension? This is *TOTALLY* legal for a word document from a technical perspective. Are they now telling me this is forbidden because their script gets confused? Will they delete my harmless word document that just happens to match a ".mp3" search criterion for deletion? This might be a perfectly valid extension for any number of file types (configuration file #3 for your main processor for example... or whatever).
If they search for both a combination of.MP3 extension and a pattern scan of the file itself for some "magic bits", then defeating either of these techniques would probably render the deletion unworkable. If they just delete anything ending with.MP3, then they sure run a risk of deleting perfectly valid non-music files with.mp3 as an extension. That's just ignorant.
I understand the fear of ISPs - litigation has been brought agains ISPs for all manner of idiot things done by their clients. That is plain stupid. Cases such as that should be thrown out of court. But this response does seem like using a machine-gun instead of a sniper rifle....
On the surface of mars while little elfin-faced faeries dance around like they're on a mixture of speed and shrooms.... then you have the description of Obfuscated Prolog...
For new people, read the original work. Herbert wrote an interesting book in Dune (though I think some of the later works were rather sad follow ons).
And Zahn writes great SF pretty much every time he puts pen to paper - be it putting in his 0.02 in the Star Wars machine or writing his own SF like Blackcollar and the various Cobra books.
As for the movies, neat SFX, but not much there. The longer version (about 30 extra minutes IIRC) is easier to follow, but even then being a Dune disciple helps. Those who just saw the theatrical cut probably left the theatre thinking "what the heck was that about?".
Hopefully any new follow on TV or Movies will be much better.
Saari advocates an election method called the Borda count election, in which each voter ranks all of the candidates from top to bottom. If there are five candidates, then a voter's leading candidate gets 5 points, his second-ranked candidate gets 4, etc. In the end, the points are added up to determine the winner. The Borda count, once used in the Roman Senate, was named after a French physicist and American Revolutionary War hero named Jean-Charles deBorda. This method is used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Tell me, if this was used by the Roman Senate, why is it named after someone in the Revolutionary War? Did the Romans not have a name? Or is this just some sort of cultural imperialism? And if the Roman system differed, in what particulars did it differ?
For what it is worth, the first few harmless moves made by a small, non-descript Austrian corporal were seen as not much of a threat and not much to worry about by any number of people, important and otherwise.
The end result was a lot of people losing liberty for a time and a (probably avoidable) conflict killing millions.
The road to Hell isn't paved with good intentions, it is paved with pebbles, each one of which didn't seem terribly significant.
If you don't have privacy, chances are shortly you won't have freedom.
I probably was (with the exception of good old C2H5OH) scared off drugs, but mostly due to my mom being a nurse and telling me some stories about nasty hyperallergic reactions. They only hit me because I saw how innocent people were damaged by idiots spiking punch bowls and the like with narcotics. And probably because I had a drug allergy or six too, and was very conscious of how I would likely be allergic to non-prescription drugs too.
But most kids can't be scared off something their friends are into by Bullsh*t. Most drug "education" comes under this category because it follows the "all drugs bad, all drugs evil, all drugs kill you, make you loser" approach. As someone else pointed out, it fails to distinguish hard drugs from soft drugs.
The big drug of interest seems to be Ecstasy where I'm at. And the amount of bogus rumor about it is gross. The drug-busters all blather on with the "bad! bad!" chant, while the Ravegoers and many others find the Rave drug experience offers something transcendent. If anything it brings people closer together. In many ways, alcahol is far more dangerous than E or weed. It has known bad effects and often turns people into instant @ssholes.
The major marketing hurdle to drug education is the belief that a simple (but flawed) message is what kids need. The fact is, if you aren't selling truth, kids will realize that and throw out the message completely. You lose crediblity.
The major technical hurdle is that with many of the newer designer or engineered drugs, people don't yet know the full scientific details of the effects. It takes years to know. Experimentation with these drugs is just that - playing craps with your lives. Most casual users/experimenters don't consider the possibility of long term damage that doesn't manifest for years to come.
And the law enforcement community tries to scare people off using rhetoric when they lack facts. Instead of just sanely saying "this drug seems to contain these substances, here is why we believe there is a risk now and later...", they end up lying and trying to feed the kids a line of Bullsh*t.
Kids are inexperienced. Kids think they know more than they do. Kids think they'll live forever and can't get hurt. (I remember that phase!). But Kids are NOT STUPID. Kids Today are also very media savvy (moreso than the last generation)and can smell a line of BS a mile away!
If we treat kids like they are incapable of understanding any substantive risks, then they will figure out we think they are incapable of thought and will treat us with the same level of respect....
Companies have rights not to have their stuff fraudulently or illegally posted by someone cracking (electronically or by social engineering) their heirarchy and obtaining documents they never had a right to see or by posting those they had a right to see but not to distribute or publish.
So Rogers should be mad.
Consumers, upon discovering this policy, should be mad but unsurprised. Unlike most people, I've had good luck with Tech Support staff, but mostly because I've worked as one in situations that make Rogers problems look like a minor itch not worthy of scratching and know how to talk to them. That helps a lot.
A lot of people treat tech support staff like dirt and display abysmal manners and that won't generally be too useful in getting them to go "over and above the call" for you. Treat people with respect and you'll generally get more done - and if that fails, you've always got the other option.
The question of whether the policy should be allowed to be private or not is fully divorced from the right or wrong of these documents being posted. I personally think customer support policies and privacy policies should be _legally_mandated_ to appear verbatim internally and externally and companies should be forced to hew to them (and not, as with most privacy policies, able to change them at a whim and retroactively). BUT THAT IS ANOTHER ISSUE.
This fellow was probably in the wrong. If he was, he should be punished.
Rogers is not in the wrong legally, but is morally reprehensible. They should be discouraged by hitting them in the pocket book and making such things publicly known - bad press won't make them happy.
I know an instrument scientist who is working with some Infrared something-or-other-ometer aboard NEAR. He missed an important social get together in late February on account of the heavy data load coming in. They've been working like dogs for quiet a bit of time.
The NEAR team is racking up phenominal amounts of data about asteroids in general (and obviously this one in specific) that will undoubtedly take quite a while to analyze.
This project is one example of an effective, efficient, non-disasterous project that demonstrates that space can be done for cheap cost (relatively speaking) with the right management and mission concepts.
Now if only we can persuade NASA that the standard probe design (or even lander design) should not imitate the recreational lawn dart....
I have to disagree with some of your analysis of OS/2 and its demise at the hands of MicroShaft. Quite frankly, the IBM hardware sales machine were staffed by folks that seemed to have less than no interest in moving OS/2 - they sold lots of boxes with Windoze on them, but OS/2 wasn't commonly available.
Now, that OS had a big weak point in that it could be an ironclad S.O.B. to install, but once you got it up and running, it was a pretty kick ass OS. They had one of be best word processors (describe), some of the best little utilities (EPM, etc), and the OS was pretty fast. And the IBM compiler seemed to produce some pretty fast executable code and compiled quickly compared with my NT MSVC.
I used OS/2 Warp (3/4) and found it to be a stable platform with really good process and thread scheduling - the scheduler is still (IMO) better than the one in NT (which I think sucks @ss). And the memory management for threads was pretty decent too.
Compared to dealing with the guts of NT, it was a pleasure to code to - IBM knew how to write APIs.
And the command line capabilities were great.(once you roamed the Usenet groups and online resources to find out about these - I'm sure the OS/2 PM programmers purposefully ommitted most documentation on the command line - "little" things like how to kill a process from the command line....)
I miss OS/2. I like my NT4 box (though I wish USB and Direct-X support were up to snuff), but I have a feeling the same machine running OS/2 Warp would kick its ass speedwise for most things.
And the OS/2 hackers on the net always seemed a wonderfully easy to deal with, well educated, and quite design savvy bunch. Kind of like a smaller sector of the./ and Linux mentality.
It's a good product that got buried by p*ss poor marketing. Now we've got maturing mediocrity - otherwise known as NT.
The argument "the tool is not to blame", while entirely correct, is also not entirely complete.
One can argue that people can be killed by guns, knives, bottlecaps and thimbles of water. However, these items each have a character and a purpose for which they were developed.
Look closely at the firearm. It has been developed over the last few hundred years nearly exclusively for the purposes of killing other humans more effectively. One could argue a hunting rifle is just that, but assault weapons, machine guns, and handguns have pretty much evolved for the purpose of taking down and taking out our fellow men.
This suggests that the tool and the task to which it is put are linked, not entirely distinct from one another. A knife is a utility item which can be used to kill. A sword is a military weapon. Their _IS_ a distinction.
Now, before anyone jumps on me with the flamethrower going, I am a firearms enthusiast and a former member of the armed services. I do support civilian gun ownership. I just believe the arguments in favour of civilian gun ownership are based around the concept of personal freedoms and responsibilty and the existence of a force to help counterbalance oppressive regimes.
We don't need to argue that guns don't kill people or that that isn't what they were designed to do or that they are just a tool with no purpose. They were designed to kill people and they've been perfected (most of them) with that in mind. You can shoot targets with it, but its development has been inextricably linked and dominated by the requirement to injure or kill other humans.
There are times where this lethal tool can serve admirably in defence of the weak, the oppressed, and those who stand for freedom. But let us not mistake that the gun is an item devoid of purpose. We should be focused on WHY and WHEN we might want or need to use them for the purpose for which they were designed rather than arguing that they have no particular purpose...
Everyone has a memory of their first Linux distro, and its installation.
Mine was the original Yggdrasil release (and how can you not like a company with a name straight out of the same mythos that spawned Thor, Odin, Asgard, Loki, etc?). It installed reasonably painlessly (had to rebuild the kernel to get the old sound blaster working right, but that was just one of those i/o address things IIRC). It worked *great* after that and the kernel rebuild was a neat experience. Gave me a bulletproof (mostly) multi-tasking OS with support for sound. I even got an earlier X version working on it, though at the time I was a command line maniac. It even read my FAT drives from DOS.
And the installation was quick and mostly painless, unlike OS/2 2.1, which never could install even with hours of help from IBM in Florida. Unlike Windoze 3.1 which installed but ran like a dead sloth and often blue screened.
The Yggdrasil distro was good for its time. And their was a gal at their tech support, handle of manx@yggdrasil.com IIRC, who was one of the friendliest, perkiest and most helpful tech support people I ever dealt with.
Only one time did that distro ever freak me out... when I saw (for the first time, never having heard of one before) the words "kernel panic" come across my screen late one a.m. after doing some rather obnoxious things with some registers I shouldn't have touched. Even this was a valuable learning experience that opened up new doors for me.
I'm glad to see they aren't dead. As somebody said, compared to these guys, the latecomers that dominate the market today are "newbies".
------------------------------------------------ --
"VIsual editor? *THAT'S* what it stands for? Were they on drugs?"
How often do single transistors said aforementioned Pentium go TU? Not that often.
Electronics, treated well and well engineered, tend to outlast the span of time their useful life entails (witness I still have a perfectly functional 386, but no idea what I'd use it for).
Hmmm.
Perhaps there are MDTs still in use in some major centers. But many policing agencies using mobile devices are very concerned with security issues. I would hope that any CIO for any PD of size in the US is investigating options for the support of encrypted wireless data. Canadian federal policing agencies have been involved in this security development for quite a time.
One of the principal problems with this situation is the low bandwidth wireless link. The kind of encryption that works on a 10 Mbps Ethernet will NOT work on an MDC4800 or RDLAP19.2 network. Things like key exchanges involving multiple transactions become problematic when a cop needs to jump in his car and login and begone to a crime in progress. So operational and technical limitations have had some effect of restricting the amount of security that can be deployed.
But don't doubt that as new wireless technologies increase BW and new encryption schemes are available, subject to budget limitations, the PDs *will* adopt them. They are aware of their responsibilities... they just often have finite budgets and limited technical assets.
I have to agree with the other poster. I've had an NT4 SP4 system up and running for a good length of time now. I've done development on it, I've run open GL games, office apps, you name it. The only time I ever had BSOD issues (one very bad) was in the early days when I didn't know the SBLive had a patch to coexist with my TNT. Once I had the right patches installed, it has been rock stable - I can blow down DevStudio with a nasty bit of coding, but the OS is rock-solid.
I'd heard that the step to W2K was like cutting 300 Mhz off your processor (according to one of my consultant buddies) but another who develops regularly in a heterogeneous Linux/Windoze environment says it isn't that bad.
I'd like to get USB and Direct X for NT... but I suspect Win2K is my only real choice. Linux would be okay if it'd support all the stuff to make direct X games and the standard use office apps run on it. Otherwise, it'll just stay as the cheap-ass firewall/masquerading box and maybe a place to play around.
If the US is behind, Canada is almost right off the map. I live in Silicon Valley North and our cell networks drop calls 2000m from the places that make the bleedin' phones!
Somebody (name escapes me) has a law (Shannon perhaps) that describes the range of a cellular system falling off with the escalation of the data rate.
So these high BW systems require more towers meaning more tower locations meaning more hassles with real estate/environmental concerns/public safety, etc.
Also, note that in Alberta, three CDPD towers can service a city and a lot of its burbs (Red Deer, not huge but not small) whereas if you had to cover the same areas with the smaller coverage diameter high speed systems you'd need a lot more.
And from my own pricing of cellular towers, at the time we looked into it, a Bell ARDIS tower (MDC4800 or RDLAP19.2)was somewhere well over a hundred grand Cdn.
By contrast, Mobitex (Ericsson) has a base-station-in-a-box for filling in coverage gaps, quick setup, demos, etc. that works well and costs about $40-60K. Even that is expensive.
If you could get the small, high speed cell node costs down to $25K-30K then you'd probably make deployment of networks across Urban centres more feasible.
Support of the poor buggers in rural areas at high data rates... ha ha ha... good luck people.
It might happen eventually, but if you live in Innuvik or out in Death Valley I wouldn't be holding your breath.
Just my 0.02.
One thing missing from journalism today
on
The New Mediascape
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· Score: 1
... is research and verification. I don't mean every journalist fails in his responsability, but the time-to-market framework of modern media has put such a premium on speed that errors are frequent. Consequently, traditional media like TV and newspapers, that used to be havens of safe reliable data...aren't. And retractions or corrections? Rarely seen and often on the back page or as a footnote. Damage done.
New media like/. offers us fast up to the minute data from a variety of sources (doesn't require one small group of people to come up with it or decide what matters - well, not entirely anyway..) and then it offers lots of criticism/correction/validation so as to give you confidence or alternate perspectives. If anything, given the speed people want things at, I'm quite sure this format of media is as likely (or moreso) to give you good valid information as the traditional media formats.
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Let me get this straight - the Mars guys build a probe to go to Mars and crash (its designed for this) and it can't. They tank another mission because they can't tell Metric from Imperial (Who really uses Imperial anymore anyway? backward...) measurementsl....
These NEAR guys build a ship that isn't meant to land on anything, and they land it and take it off again....
Clearly, we know who should be getting the budget upgrade!
One of my buddies is an Instrument Scientist on NEAR. He tells me they've got pretty much everything they could have asked for our of NEAR (I guess they're just playing around now because they can and maybe to avoid putting a lid on things... *wink*). He ran the Infrared Interferometer (or something like that) and he was really busy when they were on the approach run in the first place.
These guys have done an awesome job and I think they deserve all of the Kudos they can get. This is an example of how space missions should be run. Hurrah!
Tomb
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
Addiction in a few million bytes.
You *can* conflict (and you certainly must defend) but prosperity is achieved through a careful balance of scientists and entertainers in your cities, a good ecological and urban planning strategy, and massive use of trade routes.
It is competitive, but it is not zero sum.
And it accounted for far too many hours of my University time....
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
So, screw this, I'm moving to canada.
We like to think that, despite our smaller population and average income and despite our less valuable dollar and fewer number of sports franchises, that we actually deserve a capital letter for our country. (as in Canada).
Fun poking aside, if you want the home of intellectual freedoms like speech and thought and whatnot, I wouldn't rush up here. We have plenty of undemocratic process left buried in our governmental system and plenty of hidebound thinkers in the intelligentsia.
OTOH, at least up here you have to PROVE that you are a Gerbil with a problem and that a class of such Gerbils actually exists before you can launch a class action lawsuit on behalf of the millions of aggrieved Gerbils affected by Red Nail Polish....
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
AC:
Someone who can afford the time to wish a community to die a death (virtual or otherwise) is rather pathetic in a sociopathic kind of way. And someone who does not have the stones to stand up and be counted _by_name_ is as insignificant as his mindless blatherings themselves.
If you don't like it here, leave. No one's forcing you to stay. If you just enjoy provoking others, get a life. Or get therapy. Either would be an improvement.
Tomin8tor
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
I'd have to agree that kids will be kids and will certainly take advantage of poorly monitored libraries. While I'm certainly not a fan of censorship I don't think I want my kids completely unprotected.
Try this new-fangled thing called education. You can try to ward children from untoward and unpleasant influences and hide from them things that make us uncomfortable like sex, violence, and whatnot... but the world will show it to them sometime when our gaurd falls. The only TRUE defence is education, raising your children to be strong, sensible, and to know right from wrong. If you street-proof your children, that goes a lot further (as does regular participation in the life of your child, rather than letting the child meander through life unsupervised and unattended) than any step to "protect the innocent" ever will.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
You really think that a normal encyclopedia is unbiased? I'm sure if Britannica was run past a bunch of natives from any of N countries, they'd have some sort of a comment about the bias. I'm not singling just them out either. Any kind of report written about some historical event or place is a composite of the factual data, the perceptions of that data by observers, and the (probably unknowing) bias of the author. There are better and worse attempts at being unbiased, but any kind of representation has inherent to it some form of bias, be it based on psychology, language, culture, or whatever.
I would, admittedly, worry more about the bias in some document compiled by those who don't have any incentive ($$$) to be unbiased, but I suppose one could easily argue that those motivated by $$$ have a market-driven bias.
I think Open Source and the whole "Open everything" movement is interesting because it tries to acheive effective product through diverse contribution (many eyes theory). That has strengths (flaws get spotted) but it can lead to quite a patchwork of styles (ever read open source code?). This might lead to quite a different kind of work in an Encyclopoedia.
At any rate, it'll be an interesting experiment.
Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
There was never a genius without a tincture of madness.
A full announcement is expected next week from NASA -- wouldn't it be nice if they would simply release news as it happens rather than create News Happenings?
Don't begrudge the NASA dudes the "hype" generated by pre-announcing an announcement. Though it is kind of annoying on some level, every bit of focus that is put to NASA work (and that of other related teams like those of NEAR) is another PR victory for the whole space-exploration effort.
If we don't want to be stuck on this ball long after we've depleted it (since we show few signs of stopping that trend) , we'd better get out there and look for other options for resources... which requires exploration.
Plus, it is kinda cool....
Strong crypto applied to voice communications (phones) and to email, etc. (generally, to all point-to-point person-to-person communications) - this will probably make this "log" a little less useful for the government.
Ultimately, the gov't will use this to prey on the lazy or less well informed. Why? Because smart crooks (yes they exist) will be making massive use of strong crypto as will all the geeks who just have no interest in the government reading _THEIR_ stuff (be it pr0n, their sappy love letters, or hearing their telephone calls to 976 numbers).
And of course, one way to make this a royal pain in the ass for the gov't once you have broadband always-up access and crypto - send lots and lots and lots of useless traffic around. The gov't won't be able to differentiate meaningful and non-meaningful traffic in their logs... and so they will have to crack it all.
And crypto on voice systems will also serve to make the audio logs unintelligible without decrypt gear.
This is a retarded idea on several levels: It isn't wise to give the gov't this kind of power (even if it is rather benign like the UK gov't), it isn't technically feasible as things stand today without stupifying financial inputs, it is easy to compromise/oppose to render it even less feasible, and ultimately the only purpose one can define for it is to aide in the apprehension of the truly stupid (Anyone with any smarts won't be caught by it).
Taken altogether, this says "waste of taxpayers money" to me. Smacks of Empire building in the UK intelligence apparatus (but hey, Empire building is a UK tradition, eh?).
This reminds me of a quotation that seems to fit:
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
You take yourself seriously, yet you say things like this:
Adults still insist they have lessons to teach the next generation. But the young have come to believe, with increasing justification, that their elders know much less than they do, and have little worth passing along. All they have to offer are boring and outmoded educational systems, political structures that no longer work, and exhausted forms of fading, sacrosanct, heavily subsidized "culture."
I'm sure the youth, especially the digerati believe this. Youth always have believed their elders don't understand them, are outmoded, and have antiquarian values. To delude ourselves into thinking this is any more prevalent today is quite a hilarious thought.
Obviously many older people do have useful things to pass along, especially their experiences with life and their accumulated perspectives. But there are also cultural and technological advances, more all the time, that they simply can't grasp. It often seems that only adolescents really have the time, instincts and motor skills to grasp the mechanics of cutting-edge gaming, programming and other digital technologies.
Mighty generous of you to allow that older people have something to contribute. What a relief.... now we don't have to throw them into the tar pits because they serve no purpose.
The unspoken implication in the last sentence here is that the grasp of mechanics, programming, and digital technologies is terribly important, as opposed to the knowledge, life experience, and perspective of the elders. Whereas I don't claim it is irrelevant, I am fairly certain that living life gives one amazing lessons about oneself and through that about how humans work which the young just haven't had time to absorb.
The absorption of the mechanics and trivia of a new technology or culture does not mark one as competent to understand that culture or to fit it correctly into the context of human experience. Assimilation of geektopian technological information does not translate into an ability to understand your fellow man or yourself, either aspect of which is infinitely more useful than the technological grasp alone.
Otherwise, we'll breed a generation of geek idiot-savants... people who get tech but don't get life, brilliant engineers and programmers without a shred of understanding of their social context and responsibilities. And whatever anyone may like to say, the best way to get a clue is to experience through living or learning from those who have lived. And the elders have done that. Denigrate and ignore their knowledge at your peril.
General Santa Anna would be laughing his ass off....
If you store your MP3s inside of an archive of some type (encrypted or not), can they justify deleting the archive? Especially if it might contain non-MP3 material? Can they justify "shotgun" deletions of things that violate your service agreement as well as things that do not?
.MP3 extension? This is *TOTALLY* legal for a word document from a technical perspective. Are they now telling me this is forbidden because their script gets confused? Will they delete my harmless word document that just happens to match a ".mp3" search criterion for deletion? This might be a perfectly valid extension for any number of file types (configuration file #3 for your main processor for example... or whatever).
.MP3 extension and a pattern scan of the file itself for some "magic bits", then defeating either of these techniques would probably render the deletion unworkable. If they just delete anything ending with .MP3, then they sure run a risk of deleting perfectly valid non-music files with .mp3 as an extension. That's just ignorant.
If this is a problem, change the extension. They have specified MP3 file format files cannot be distributed this way. Where do they draw the line? File extension? Magic scan of the contents to look for a pattern match?
What about a non-MP3 format file (for example a word document) with the
If they search for both a combination of
I understand the fear of ISPs - litigation has been brought agains ISPs for all manner of idiot things done by their clients. That is plain stupid. Cases such as that should be thrown out of court. But this response does seem like using a machine-gun instead of a sniper rifle....
On the surface of mars while little elfin-faced faeries dance around like they're on a mixture of speed and shrooms.... then you have the description of Obfuscated Prolog...
For new people, read the original work. Herbert wrote an interesting book in Dune (though I think some of the later works were rather sad follow ons).
And Zahn writes great SF pretty much every time he puts pen to paper - be it putting in his 0.02 in the Star Wars machine or writing his own SF like Blackcollar and the various Cobra books.
As for the movies, neat SFX, but not much there. The longer version (about 30 extra minutes IIRC) is easier to follow, but even then being a Dune disciple helps. Those who just saw the theatrical cut probably left the theatre thinking "what the heck was that about?".
Hopefully any new follow on TV or Movies will be much better.
Saari advocates an election method called the Borda count election, in which each voter ranks all of the candidates from top to bottom. If there are five candidates, then a voter's leading candidate gets 5 points, his second-ranked candidate gets 4, etc. In the end, the points are added up to determine the winner. The Borda count, once used in the Roman Senate, was named after a French physicist and American Revolutionary War hero named Jean-Charles deBorda. This method is used to rank college football and basketball teams.
Tell me, if this was used by the Roman Senate, why is it named after someone in the Revolutionary War? Did the Romans not have a name? Or is this just some sort of cultural imperialism? And if the Roman system differed, in what particulars did it differ?
For what it is worth, the first few harmless moves made by a small, non-descript Austrian corporal were seen as not much of a threat and not much to worry about by any number of people, important and otherwise.
The end result was a lot of people losing liberty for a time and a (probably avoidable) conflict killing millions.
The road to Hell isn't paved with good intentions, it is paved with pebbles, each one of which didn't seem terribly significant.
If you don't have privacy, chances are shortly you won't have freedom.
... at least most times.
I probably was (with the exception of good old C2H5OH) scared off drugs, but mostly due to my mom being a nurse and telling me some stories about nasty hyperallergic reactions. They only hit me because I saw how innocent people were damaged by idiots spiking punch bowls and the like with narcotics. And probably because I had a drug allergy or six too, and was very conscious of how I would likely be allergic to non-prescription drugs too.
But most kids can't be scared off something their friends are into by Bullsh*t. Most drug "education" comes under this category because it follows the "all drugs bad, all drugs evil, all drugs kill you, make you loser" approach. As someone else pointed out, it fails to distinguish hard drugs from soft drugs.
The big drug of interest seems to be Ecstasy where I'm at. And the amount of bogus rumor about it is gross. The drug-busters all blather on with the "bad! bad!" chant, while the Ravegoers and many others find the Rave drug experience offers something transcendent. If anything it brings people closer together. In many ways, alcahol is far more dangerous than E or weed. It has known bad effects and often turns people into instant @ssholes.
The major marketing hurdle to drug education is the belief that a simple (but flawed) message is what kids need. The fact is, if you aren't selling truth, kids will realize that and throw out the message completely. You lose crediblity.
The major technical hurdle is that with many of the newer designer or engineered drugs, people don't yet know the full scientific details of the effects. It takes years to know. Experimentation with these drugs is just that - playing craps with your lives. Most casual users/experimenters don't consider the possibility of long term damage that doesn't manifest for years to come.
And the law enforcement community tries to scare people off using rhetoric when they lack facts. Instead of just sanely saying "this drug seems to contain these substances, here is why we believe there is a risk now and later...", they end up lying and trying to feed the kids a line of Bullsh*t.
Kids are inexperienced. Kids think they know more than they do. Kids think they'll live forever and can't get hurt. (I remember that phase!). But Kids are NOT STUPID. Kids Today are also very media savvy (moreso than the last generation)and can smell a line of BS a mile away!
If we treat kids like they are incapable of understanding any substantive risks, then they will figure out we think they are incapable of thought and will treat us with the same level of respect....
Companies have rights not to have their stuff fraudulently or illegally posted by someone cracking (electronically or by social engineering) their heirarchy and obtaining documents they never had a right to see or by posting those they had a right to see but not to distribute or publish.
So Rogers should be mad.
Consumers, upon discovering this policy, should be mad but unsurprised. Unlike most people, I've had good luck with Tech Support staff, but mostly because I've worked as one in situations that make Rogers problems look like a minor itch not worthy of scratching and know how to talk to them. That helps a lot.
A lot of people treat tech support staff like dirt and display abysmal manners and that won't generally be too useful in getting them to go "over and above the call" for you. Treat people with respect and you'll generally get more done - and if that fails, you've always got the other option.
The question of whether the policy should be allowed to be private or not is fully divorced from the right or wrong of these documents being posted. I personally think customer support policies and privacy policies should be _legally_mandated_ to appear verbatim internally and externally and companies should be forced to hew to them (and not, as with most privacy policies, able to change them at a whim and retroactively). BUT THAT IS ANOTHER ISSUE.
This fellow was probably in the wrong. If he was, he should be punished.
Rogers is not in the wrong legally, but is morally reprehensible. They should be discouraged by hitting them in the pocket book and making such things publicly known - bad press won't make them happy.
I know an instrument scientist who is working with some Infrared something-or-other-ometer aboard NEAR. He missed an important social get together in late February on account of the heavy data load coming in. They've been working like dogs for quiet a bit of time.
The NEAR team is racking up phenominal amounts of data about asteroids in general (and obviously this one in specific) that will undoubtedly take quite a while to analyze.
This project is one example of an effective, efficient, non-disasterous project that demonstrates that space can be done for cheap cost (relatively speaking) with the right management and mission concepts.
Now if only we can persuade NASA that the standard probe design (or even lander design) should not imitate the recreational lawn dart....
I have to disagree with some of your analysis of OS/2 and its demise at the hands of MicroShaft. Quite frankly, the IBM hardware sales machine were staffed by folks that seemed to have less than no interest in moving OS/2 - they sold lots of boxes with Windoze on them, but OS/2 wasn't commonly available.
./ and Linux mentality.
Now, that OS had a big weak point in that it could be an ironclad S.O.B. to install, but once you got it up and running, it was a pretty kick ass OS. They had one of be best word processors (describe), some of the best little utilities (EPM, etc), and the OS was pretty fast. And the IBM compiler seemed to produce some pretty fast executable code and compiled quickly compared with my NT MSVC.
I used OS/2 Warp (3/4) and found it to be a stable platform with really good process and thread scheduling - the scheduler is still (IMO) better than the one in NT (which I think sucks @ss). And the memory management for threads was pretty decent too.
Compared to dealing with the guts of NT, it was a pleasure to code to - IBM knew how to write APIs.
And the command line capabilities were great.(once you roamed the Usenet groups and online resources to find out about these - I'm sure the OS/2 PM programmers purposefully ommitted most documentation on the command line - "little" things like how to kill a process from the command line....)
I miss OS/2. I like my NT4 box (though I wish USB and Direct-X support were up to snuff), but I have a feeling the same machine running OS/2 Warp would kick its ass speedwise for most things.
And the OS/2 hackers on the net always seemed a wonderfully easy to deal with, well educated, and quite design savvy bunch. Kind of like a smaller sector of the
It's a good product that got buried by p*ss poor marketing. Now we've got maturing mediocrity - otherwise known as NT.
The argument "the tool is not to blame", while entirely correct, is also not entirely complete.
One can argue that people can be killed by guns, knives, bottlecaps and thimbles of water. However, these items each have a character and a purpose for which they were developed.
Look closely at the firearm. It has been developed over the last few hundred years nearly exclusively for the purposes of killing other humans more effectively. One could argue a hunting rifle is just that, but assault weapons, machine guns, and handguns have pretty much evolved for the purpose of taking down and taking out our fellow men.
This suggests that the tool and the task to which it is put are linked, not entirely distinct from one another. A knife is a utility item which can be used to kill. A sword is a military weapon. Their _IS_ a distinction.
Now, before anyone jumps on me with the flamethrower going, I am a firearms enthusiast and a former member of the armed services. I do support civilian gun ownership. I just believe the arguments in favour of civilian gun ownership are based around the concept of personal freedoms and responsibilty and the existence of a force to help counterbalance oppressive regimes.
We don't need to argue that guns don't kill people or that that isn't what they were designed to do or that they are just a tool with no purpose. They were designed to kill people and they've been perfected (most of them) with that in mind. You can shoot targets with it, but its development has been inextricably linked and dominated by the requirement to injure or kill other humans.
There are times where this lethal tool can serve admirably in defence of the weak, the oppressed, and those who stand for freedom. But let us not mistake that the gun is an item devoid of purpose. We should be focused on WHY and WHEN we might want or need to use them for the purpose for which they were designed rather than arguing that they have no particular purpose...
Everyone has a memory of their first Linux distro, and its installation.
- --
Mine was the original Yggdrasil release (and how can you not like a company with a name straight out of the same mythos that spawned Thor, Odin, Asgard, Loki, etc?). It installed reasonably painlessly (had to rebuild the kernel to get the old sound blaster working right, but that was just one of those i/o address things IIRC). It worked *great* after that and the kernel rebuild was a neat experience. Gave me a bulletproof (mostly) multi-tasking OS with support for sound. I even got an earlier X version working on it, though at the time I was a command line maniac. It even read my FAT drives from DOS.
And the installation was quick and mostly painless, unlike OS/2 2.1, which never could install even with hours of help from IBM in Florida. Unlike Windoze 3.1 which installed but ran like a dead sloth and often blue screened.
The Yggdrasil distro was good for its time. And their was a gal at their tech support, handle of manx@yggdrasil.com IIRC, who was one of the friendliest, perkiest and most helpful tech support people I ever dealt with.
Only one time did that distro ever freak me out... when I saw (for the first time, never having heard of one before) the words "kernel panic" come across my screen late one a.m. after doing some rather obnoxious things with some registers I shouldn't have touched. Even this was a valuable learning experience that opened up new doors for me.
I'm glad to see they aren't dead. As somebody said, compared to these guys, the latecomers that dominate the market today are "newbies".
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"VIsual editor? *THAT'S* what it stands for? Were they on drugs?"
...unless you mishandle the device.
How often do single transistors said aforementioned Pentium go TU? Not that often.
Electronics, treated well and well engineered, tend to outlast the span of time their useful life entails (witness I still have a perfectly functional 386, but no idea what I'd use it for).
Hmmm. Perhaps there are MDTs still in use in some major centers. But many policing agencies using mobile devices are very concerned with security issues. I would hope that any CIO for any PD of size in the US is investigating options for the support of encrypted wireless data. Canadian federal policing agencies have been involved in this security development for quite a time. One of the principal problems with this situation is the low bandwidth wireless link. The kind of encryption that works on a 10 Mbps Ethernet will NOT work on an MDC4800 or RDLAP19.2 network. Things like key exchanges involving multiple transactions become problematic when a cop needs to jump in his car and login and begone to a crime in progress. So operational and technical limitations have had some effect of restricting the amount of security that can be deployed. But don't doubt that as new wireless technologies increase BW and new encryption schemes are available, subject to budget limitations, the PDs *will* adopt them. They are aware of their responsibilities... they just often have finite budgets and limited technical assets.
I have to agree with the other poster. I've had an NT4 SP4 system up and running for a good length of time now. I've done development on it, I've run open GL games, office apps, you name it. The only time I ever had BSOD issues (one very bad) was in the early days when I didn't know the SBLive had a patch to coexist with my TNT. Once I had the right patches installed, it has been rock stable - I can blow down DevStudio with a nasty bit of coding, but the OS is rock-solid. I'd heard that the step to W2K was like cutting 300 Mhz off your processor (according to one of my consultant buddies) but another who develops regularly in a heterogeneous Linux/Windoze environment says it isn't that bad. I'd like to get USB and Direct X for NT... but I suspect Win2K is my only real choice. Linux would be okay if it'd support all the stuff to make direct X games and the standard use office apps run on it. Otherwise, it'll just stay as the cheap-ass firewall/masquerading box and maybe a place to play around.
If the US is behind, Canada is almost right off the map. I live in Silicon Valley North and our cell networks drop calls 2000m from the places that make the bleedin' phones!
Somebody (name escapes me) has a law (Shannon perhaps) that describes the range of a cellular system falling off with the escalation of the data rate.
So these high BW systems require more towers meaning more tower locations meaning more hassles with real estate/environmental concerns/public safety, etc.
Also, note that in Alberta, three CDPD towers can service a city and a lot of its burbs (Red Deer, not huge but not small) whereas if you had to cover the same areas with the smaller coverage diameter high speed systems you'd need a lot more.
And from my own pricing of cellular towers, at the time we looked into it, a Bell ARDIS tower (MDC4800 or RDLAP19.2)was somewhere well over a hundred grand Cdn.
By contrast, Mobitex (Ericsson) has a base-station-in-a-box for filling in coverage gaps, quick setup, demos, etc. that works well and costs about $40-60K. Even that is expensive.
If you could get the small, high speed cell node costs down to $25K-30K then you'd probably make deployment of networks across Urban centres more feasible.
Support of the poor buggers in rural areas at high data rates... ha ha ha... good luck people.
It might happen eventually, but if you live in Innuvik or out in Death Valley I wouldn't be holding your breath.
Just my 0.02.
... is research and verification. I don't mean every journalist fails in his responsability, but the time-to-market framework of modern media has put such a premium on speed that errors are frequent. Consequently, traditional media like TV and newspapers, that used to be havens of safe reliable data...aren't. And retractions or corrections? Rarely seen and often on the back page or as a footnote. Damage done. New media like /. offers us fast up to the minute data from a variety of sources (doesn't require one small group of people to come up with it or decide what matters - well, not entirely anyway..) and then it offers lots of criticism/correction/validation so as to give you confidence or alternate perspectives. If anything, given the speed people want things at, I'm quite sure this format of media is as likely (or moreso) to give you good valid information as the traditional media formats.