We have a shuttle launch every few months, and every time the general public's reaction is almost total apathy. Satellites are launched into space all the time, and nobody cares.
We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel. Sending tiny robots into space is not interesting to most people, and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).
The way to get national interest in space travel up again is twofold:
1. Get NASA going full-bore on manned exploration of space. Put the Mars mission on an Apollo-like timetable. Of course, no one wants to spend the money for this because nobody cares about space, so we have to use the next point to get them there:
2. Aggressively support commercial manned space travel. Give more people a chance to go into space, even just LEO, and you'll have a lot more willingness to fund aggressive exploration missions. This means the price for a trip has to go way down, and the safety has to go way up. If we can get to a point where a trip to space costs the same as, say, an all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean, everyone will want to go.
The current strategy of announcing big initiatives and then starving them of funds, and letting commercial space ventures limp along with inadequate funding and no direction, is not getting anybody anywhere. As long as NASA is saying 20 years just to get back to the Moon (assuming the funding isn't cut, which it always is), and it still costs $20 million to get a private citizen into LEO, interest in space travel will remain low. Launching more rockets filled with tiny robots is not going to fix that.
Interestingly, TFA is from Fox News, which pretty much NEVER fails to note the party of a political official in a scandal, regardless of the party they are in, including this one.
Right, Fox News just lies about what party the scandal-ridden politicians belong to.
Seriously, after they repeatedly represented scandal-ridden Republicans as Democrats, and misrepresented footage from previous events as being from more recent ones (tea parties, Palin book signings) to make crowds look larger than they actually were, I don't know how anyone can hold up Fox News as a paragon of journalistic integrity anymore. And please don't trot out the old tired argument that "everyone else is just as bad or worse". The fact is Fox News routinely does this sort of thing, and acting like they're in any way "fair and balanced" is just absurd.
Protocols aren't any more open than any other piece of code. I can develop a completely closed protocol that governs how one of my own programs interacts with one of my other programs. If you attempt to use the protocol without my permission, you would likely be guilty of unlawful reverse engineering under the terms of our old friend the DMCA, which prohibits reverse engineering except in very limited circumstances.
So how often do you download a package from somewhere, unpack it, and go line by line through the source to make sure it's safe before installing it on your box? Probably not very often, because that would be a huge pain and even most Linux users won't be able to understand the code well enough to make a good judgment. On a server box, you'll likely stick to production repositories direct from your vendor, so the risk of malware is low, but I'm sure most people have downloaded packages from third parties for their desktop systems and run them without being absolutely sure they were safe. With Linux, you can get away with this because none of the malware writers care enough about Linux to port their software to it, but they certainly would if it gained significant market share.
You'd be amazed at how many people I used to work with that I've since run into in other jobs, even across the country. I had a boss that I absolutely hated at one job. Even so, I worked hard for him, and gave him 2 weeks notice when it was time for me to move on. 7 years later, I was unemployed and he was able to find me another job.
Alienating anyone in the field is a very bad idea, because it WILL come back to bite you eventually, and you never know who might prove useful down the line.
If the apps did what they were supposed to, why fake reviews?
Because there are so many apps on the app store, even getting your app noticed at all is difficult. A new app with no reviews may not get a single download, or a very few at most. After that, if no one has left a review (and only a small fraction of app users will review the app), your app is lost in the noise of all the others. Having a bunch of five star reviews makes it more likely people will see and download your app.
Pick any random 25 conference attendees. If at least one of them doesn't end up waking up in a ditch on the side of a highway 50 miles from your conference with no memory of the preceding three days except vague flashes involving tequila, three midgets, and a donkey, the conference is too lame for anyone to go to.
Keep in mind that the game itself still has access to all of your information. The Facebook terms of service prohibits the game from using or storing that information for anything not game-related, but there's nothing other than the honor system and Facebook's vague threats to occasionally enforce the rules that prevents it from doing so. The API itself will happily grant access to everything, whether the game needs it or not.
Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.
As long as we're talking about things that could never even come close to happening to anyone on this site, why bother with the invisibility cloak? You could just as easily jump out the bedroom window, land on your pegasus, which is floating just outside said window, and fly off to your Fortress of Solitude, which is totally not your parents' basement.
You're absolutely correct that the mujahedeen (or however you spell that) in Afghanistan were bankrolled and given weapons by the CIA, and bin Laden's contacts within that organization became al Qaeda, and so the West definitely deserves some blame for that. However, there's no particular reason to believe that the CIA had any ongoing interest in any of them once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. There's certainly no evidence and no reason to believe that they actually helped plan or carry out 9/11.
The major problem with the idea that the US government had anything to do with 9/11 is that there's no credible evidence of it and there's no reason to believe their assistance would have been required to carry it out. At the heart of it, the 9/11 attack was supremely unsophisticated. All the hijackers needed was some box cutters and plane tickets, and training to fly a plane. All of these things are widely available, and anybody could have done it. The fact is, it's quite easy to believe some dude in a cave could have planned and carried it out, especially when that dude in a cave happens to be as wealthy as Osama bin Laden, heir to the bin Laden construction fortune.
I know none of that is convincing to conspiracy buffs, but the fact is a perfectly simple and plausible explanation for the event exists that requires no massive conspiracies: a highly motivated group of people did something that anyone could have done with a little time and a few thousand dollars.
Microsoft has legions of people whose sole job is producing documentation, and they pay well. My post was more referring to the reasons why Open Source projects (which can't pay people to write documentation) have such lousy documentation, and why that probably isn't going to change.
Sure, you probably don't have a lot of social butterflies on this site, but I'd wager that very few of them are really the reclusive shut-in that you would have to be to accomplish such a feat. There are levels of obsession with anything, and this guy's case seems pretty extreme by any measure. I can't even imagine the amount of time this sort of thing would take, and how many other things he could have been doing.
I don't want to sit around mocking this guy for this, but I do feel sorry for him. After all, after his own personal sense of accomplishment over this feat has faded, he's going to be left looking back at all the time he spent on it, and the fact that he ultimately has nothing of any value to show for it. That can be very depressing.
man pages are written by techs for techs, and are intended more as a reference than as a how to. They're very useful for people who are already familiar with Linux and just need to know the syntax for particular commands, but are not particularly helpful for people just getting into Linux.
Most of the previous attempts to create beginner documentation for Linux and other Open Source projects have suffered from the same basic problems:
1.) Nobody likes writing documentations. Technical people in particular hate writing documentation. It's tedious, boring, and generally unrewarding work. So, documentation tends to be sparse at best.
2.) The people who do bite the bullet and decide to write some documentation misunderstand their audience. They write at their own level, and make it easy for themselves, and perhaps their other technically-minded peers, to understand. Documentation is either very sparse, assuming a level of background knowledge that doesn't exist among beginners, or extremely precise, dense, and difficult to understand.
3.) Nobody reads the documentation anyway. People hate reading documentation almost as much as they hate writing it. When's the last time you bought something and actually read the manual that came with it? Reading documentation is boring and tedious, especially when most of it is so poorly written. People would rather tinker, then ask someone else for help when they break something, rather than slogging through documentation.
The basic result of this is we have two alternating types of stories on a semi-annual basis on Slashdot: Stories about someone trying to start a new Linux documentation effort, and stories about how much Linux documentation sucks. Meanwhile, the state of Linux documentation stays essentially the same: a mix of outdated and difficult to follow documents interspersed with large gaps where no documentation exists at all.
It's powered, but it's powered through the phone line. The telephone company has lots of battery backups and generators in their central offices so that the phone service stays on even if your electricity goes out. This can be a vital link to have in an emergency, and until they can figure out how to make VoIP similarly resistant to power outages, I'd rather keep POTS around.
There's no way he could possibly have committed an offense worse than using some variation of the phrase "alien seeking" that many times in a serious news article.
There's a strong possibility that the reporter was in high school in this district while this was going on. Further, the school district probably could not afford enough thesauruses (thesauri?) to meet their needs because they were spending all of their money keeping up with the power bill, meaning the reporter might have gone years without access to any synonyms at all, to say nothing of the total lack of antonyms. Thus, this guy's actions may have directly led to the overuse of a single phrase in this news article, which contributed to its painful unreadability. How can you say that's not a heinous offense?
no shit. hey, i bought a PC with a beige case and painted it orange. do i get my own slashdot story now too? we can talk about the technical differences between latex and enamel paints, glossy versus flat, and other really fascinating pieces of technicality! it'll be great... for a slow news day
Don't be absurd, that's not news at all.
Now if you were to make a stencil of the Apple logo and paint it on the side of your machine, you could write a howto on that and make the front page of Slashdot for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
We have a shuttle launch every few months, and every time the general public's reaction is almost total apathy. Satellites are launched into space all the time, and nobody cares.
We don't need more frequent launches, we need a manned space program that actually makes progress if we want people to get excited about space travel. Sending tiny robots into space is not interesting to most people, and sending people to the same rock over and over again is also not exciting to most people (witness the rapid dropoff in interest during the Apollo era).
The way to get national interest in space travel up again is twofold:
1. Get NASA going full-bore on manned exploration of space. Put the Mars mission on an Apollo-like timetable. Of course, no one wants to spend the money for this because nobody cares about space, so we have to use the next point to get them there:
2. Aggressively support commercial manned space travel. Give more people a chance to go into space, even just LEO, and you'll have a lot more willingness to fund aggressive exploration missions. This means the price for a trip has to go way down, and the safety has to go way up. If we can get to a point where a trip to space costs the same as, say, an all-inclusive vacation to the Caribbean, everyone will want to go.
The current strategy of announcing big initiatives and then starving them of funds, and letting commercial space ventures limp along with inadequate funding and no direction, is not getting anybody anywhere. As long as NASA is saying 20 years just to get back to the Moon (assuming the funding isn't cut, which it always is), and it still costs $20 million to get a private citizen into LEO, interest in space travel will remain low. Launching more rockets filled with tiny robots is not going to fix that.
Why does it have to be either/or? Both you AND twitter are the most annoying things to take off in years.
Interestingly, TFA is from Fox News, which pretty much NEVER fails to note the party of a political official in a scandal, regardless of the party they are in, including this one.
Right, Fox News just lies about what party the scandal-ridden politicians belong to.
Seriously, after they repeatedly represented scandal-ridden Republicans as Democrats, and misrepresented footage from previous events as being from more recent ones (tea parties, Palin book signings) to make crowds look larger than they actually were, I don't know how anyone can hold up Fox News as a paragon of journalistic integrity anymore. And please don't trot out the old tired argument that "everyone else is just as bad or worse". The fact is Fox News routinely does this sort of thing, and acting like they're in any way "fair and balanced" is just absurd.
Protocols aren't any more open than any other piece of code. I can develop a completely closed protocol that governs how one of my own programs interacts with one of my other programs. If you attempt to use the protocol without my permission, you would likely be guilty of unlawful reverse engineering under the terms of our old friend the DMCA, which prohibits reverse engineering except in very limited circumstances.
He could use the lessons learned from his mistake as a parable for the importance of integrity no matter what kind of job he's applying for.
Yeah right...at this point you'd be lucky to end up on page 5 of the Google search results, behind everyone else who's had sex with Tiger.
So how often do you download a package from somewhere, unpack it, and go line by line through the source to make sure it's safe before installing it on your box? Probably not very often, because that would be a huge pain and even most Linux users won't be able to understand the code well enough to make a good judgment. On a server box, you'll likely stick to production repositories direct from your vendor, so the risk of malware is low, but I'm sure most people have downloaded packages from third parties for their desktop systems and run them without being absolutely sure they were safe. With Linux, you can get away with this because none of the malware writers care enough about Linux to port their software to it, but they certainly would if it gained significant market share.
as we don't care so much about how to properly feed, exercise and clean ponies
On the contrary, I've had an inexplicable interest, some might even say obsession, with ponies since April 1, 2006.
You'd be amazed at how many people I used to work with that I've since run into in other jobs, even across the country. I had a boss that I absolutely hated at one job. Even so, I worked hard for him, and gave him 2 weeks notice when it was time for me to move on. 7 years later, I was unemployed and he was able to find me another job.
Alienating anyone in the field is a very bad idea, because it WILL come back to bite you eventually, and you never know who might prove useful down the line.
If the apps did what they were supposed to, why fake reviews?
Because there are so many apps on the app store, even getting your app noticed at all is difficult. A new app with no reviews may not get a single download, or a very few at most. After that, if no one has left a review (and only a small fraction of app users will review the app), your app is lost in the noise of all the others. Having a bunch of five star reviews makes it more likely people will see and download your app.
Pick any random 25 conference attendees. If at least one of them doesn't end up waking up in a ditch on the side of a highway 50 miles from your conference with no memory of the preceding three days except vague flashes involving tequila, three midgets, and a donkey, the conference is too lame for anyone to go to.
Keep in mind that the game itself still has access to all of your information. The Facebook terms of service prohibits the game from using or storing that information for anything not game-related, but there's nothing other than the honor system and Facebook's vague threats to occasionally enforce the rules that prevents it from doing so. The API itself will happily grant access to everything, whether the game needs it or not.
Your best bet, if you must play FB games, is to maintain an entirely separate profile just for that purpose, and put nothing personally identifiable on it.
As long as we're talking about things that could never even come close to happening to anyone on this site, why bother with the invisibility cloak? You could just as easily jump out the bedroom window, land on your pegasus, which is floating just outside said window, and fly off to your Fortress of Solitude, which is totally not your parents' basement.
You're absolutely correct that the mujahedeen (or however you spell that) in Afghanistan were bankrolled and given weapons by the CIA, and bin Laden's contacts within that organization became al Qaeda, and so the West definitely deserves some blame for that. However, there's no particular reason to believe that the CIA had any ongoing interest in any of them once the Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan. There's certainly no evidence and no reason to believe that they actually helped plan or carry out 9/11.
The major problem with the idea that the US government had anything to do with 9/11 is that there's no credible evidence of it and there's no reason to believe their assistance would have been required to carry it out. At the heart of it, the 9/11 attack was supremely unsophisticated. All the hijackers needed was some box cutters and plane tickets, and training to fly a plane. All of these things are widely available, and anybody could have done it. The fact is, it's quite easy to believe some dude in a cave could have planned and carried it out, especially when that dude in a cave happens to be as wealthy as Osama bin Laden, heir to the bin Laden construction fortune.
I know none of that is convincing to conspiracy buffs, but the fact is a perfectly simple and plausible explanation for the event exists that requires no massive conspiracies: a highly motivated group of people did something that anyone could have done with a little time and a few thousand dollars.
It's not a pyramid scheme...it's a pyramid scheme OF SCIENCE!
Microsoft has legions of people whose sole job is producing documentation, and they pay well. My post was more referring to the reasons why Open Source projects (which can't pay people to write documentation) have such lousy documentation, and why that probably isn't going to change.
I think you'd serve the world better by releasing that idea into the public domain immediately.
Sure, you probably don't have a lot of social butterflies on this site, but I'd wager that very few of them are really the reclusive shut-in that you would have to be to accomplish such a feat. There are levels of obsession with anything, and this guy's case seems pretty extreme by any measure. I can't even imagine the amount of time this sort of thing would take, and how many other things he could have been doing.
I don't want to sit around mocking this guy for this, but I do feel sorry for him. After all, after his own personal sense of accomplishment over this feat has faded, he's going to be left looking back at all the time he spent on it, and the fact that he ultimately has nothing of any value to show for it. That can be very depressing.
man pages are written by techs for techs, and are intended more as a reference than as a how to. They're very useful for people who are already familiar with Linux and just need to know the syntax for particular commands, but are not particularly helpful for people just getting into Linux.
Most of the previous attempts to create beginner documentation for Linux and other Open Source projects have suffered from the same basic problems:
1.) Nobody likes writing documentations. Technical people in particular hate writing documentation. It's tedious, boring, and generally unrewarding work. So, documentation tends to be sparse at best.
2.) The people who do bite the bullet and decide to write some documentation misunderstand their audience. They write at their own level, and make it easy for themselves, and perhaps their other technically-minded peers, to understand. Documentation is either very sparse, assuming a level of background knowledge that doesn't exist among beginners, or extremely precise, dense, and difficult to understand.
3.) Nobody reads the documentation anyway. People hate reading documentation almost as much as they hate writing it. When's the last time you bought something and actually read the manual that came with it? Reading documentation is boring and tedious, especially when most of it is so poorly written. People would rather tinker, then ask someone else for help when they break something, rather than slogging through documentation.
The basic result of this is we have two alternating types of stories on a semi-annual basis on Slashdot: Stories about someone trying to start a new Linux documentation effort, and stories about how much Linux documentation sucks. Meanwhile, the state of Linux documentation stays essentially the same: a mix of outdated and difficult to follow documents interspersed with large gaps where no documentation exists at all.
It's powered, but it's powered through the phone line. The telephone company has lots of battery backups and generators in their central offices so that the phone service stays on even if your electricity goes out. This can be a vital link to have in an emergency, and until they can figure out how to make VoIP similarly resistant to power outages, I'd rather keep POTS around.
What's the big deal? You're going to need a single-chip cloud computer if you want to operate in the Semantic Web.
It was called Bangalore to remind you where to call if you need any support for it.
There's no way he could possibly have committed an offense worse than using some variation of the phrase "alien seeking" that many times in a serious news article.
There's a strong possibility that the reporter was in high school in this district while this was going on. Further, the school district probably could not afford enough thesauruses (thesauri?) to meet their needs because they were spending all of their money keeping up with the power bill, meaning the reporter might have gone years without access to any synonyms at all, to say nothing of the total lack of antonyms. Thus, this guy's actions may have directly led to the overuse of a single phrase in this news article, which contributed to its painful unreadability. How can you say that's not a heinous offense?
Of course your machine stays up, you have the administrators of at least 3 different botnets making sure of it!
no shit. hey, i bought a PC with a beige case and painted it orange. do i get my own slashdot story now too? we can talk about the technical differences between latex and enamel paints, glossy versus flat, and other really fascinating pieces of technicality! it'll be great ... for a slow news day
Don't be absurd, that's not news at all.
Now if you were to make a stencil of the Apple logo and paint it on the side of your machine, you could write a howto on that and make the front page of Slashdot for sure.