The funny part of all that is that people could get tuition for free elsewhere. E.g. in Germany tuition is either free or the fees are very low, for everyone (yes, including foreign students), and several of the major universities offer courses in English for international students.
In all fairness, if you want to make a contribution that is worth co-authorship of a paper, you might need at least a good amateur telescope (maybe on the order of 10 inch aperture) and a CCD camera.
With such equipment, and clear skies, you can do photometric monitoring of stars (e.g. for outbursts, or planet transits). Asronomers always have the problem that big observatories focus on big telescopes, and it's difficult to do things that require small telescopes, but long-term monitoring.
One example would be monitoring of the transits of extrasolar planets, to detect timing anomalies (which could be caused by undetected additional planets). Or monitoring stars with planets detected by radial velocity variations, to discover eventual transits. Or monitoring of ongoing gravitational lens events... there are quite a few oportunities for amateurs.
Ubuntu has apparmor sandboxing of firefox as an option that's turned off by default, and even if you turn it on it's not sandboxed enough IMO (firefox can read and write almost anything in the user's home directory with the exclusion of just a few directories).
It's trivial to simply run Firefox under a different user id. I use about three applications that need to access the net (web, mail, chat), and each of them gets started (via a simple wrapper script) under a different, dedicated UID.
There isn't any useful data to work with that we have about stars - only their light.
Yet some people have seen that as a challenge, and have built a whole branch of science on it.
There's plenty of obvious structure in that visualisation, meaning there's plenty of information.
I have a separate sandbox user for each application that accesses the net (mail, browser,...). Each of these sandbox users is in its own group, and thus has access only to their own files and world readable (and eventually writeable, like/tmp) locations. Applications get started from my "real" account with sudo. I wonder why distros don't support that out of the box at least for the browser, because it would be fairly trivial to set up as part of a "create new user" script.
The problem with videoconferencing is that you see half of the audience only through the tiny "keyhole" of the video screen. In a public seminar talk, it's distracting and confusing for the speaker and the part of the audience that is physically present. I've been at seminar talks involving videoconferencing, and I've been in SL seminar talks, and I found the latter a much better, more consistent experience.
..and their verification process was extremely intrusive and I know many people who just decided to stop using second life entirely over it. It involves basicaly forking over Credit Card information, in some cases a Birth Certificate, and yuor home address..
Totally wrong. Thanks to the relaxed privacy standards in the US of A, there's tons of readily available personal information in online databases that you can use to pass the age verification.
They measure cumulative size distribution (how many groups of size >= N) and churn (how many people leave the group for another one in a given period).
They are able to come up with a simple mathematical model for the behaviour of players (essentially: recruit people with diverse attributes/skills) that reproduces the observed data extremely well. And they also show that the alternative 'kinship' model (recruit people with similar attributes/skills) fails to reproduce the observed data.
I would say that their model does quite a good job at modeling some rather nontrivial data.
It's a big hit among the people who have the creativity to actually do something, rather than just consuming. It's a big fail with those who expect a game with a set goal, those who need to cling to someone/something telling them what to do.
I'm doing freeform roleplay, and it's great fun. There's plenty of roleplay communities in SL.
Depends on your local jurisdiction. In Germany there was a lawsuit against a government agency because it logged IP addresses of website vistors. The court decided that IP addresses are individual user information, and the agency was ordered to stop logging IP addresses because it was a violation of privacy laws.
Au contraire.. it's probably one of the few countries where there is a place for this. In Europe, Greenbaum would now face a lawsuit because of privacy violation (I'm sysadmin in Germany, I am well aware that I would probably lose my job if I did what that Greenbaum guy has done).
3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.
I beg to differ - it wasn't an issue, but now it is one. Once upon a time, every app supported the standard way of cut and paste (right and middle mouse button).. but now we have apps who do it like this, and others who want me to do Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V because someone thought it would be cool to emulate MS Windows and force me to get my hand from the mouse and to the keyboard. And then there are apps where cut and paste would work one way for some input fields, and the other way for some other input fields...
The Linux manpage (on Ubuntu 8.04) says ldd prints the shared libraries required by each program or shared library specified on the command line. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that the program is executed, and doesn't contain any security warning. If there is no hint of the problem at the primary source of usage information, then the issue IS undocumented.
I offer some of my software for 'pick your price'. I recommend a price, but clearly state that any price is ok. Most buyers buy at the recommended price. Very few pay significantly less (pay is through Paypal, which I think imposes a minimum price of $1). And - not quite unexpectedly - almost nobody ever pays more:-)
Spots -do- change line positions. The reason is that the star rotates, so half of the visible surface moves towards us, half of it recedes. Now imagine that part of either the receding or approaching surface is covered by a spot...
However, this also changes the shape of a spectral line, not just the position of the centre. This is why people do a 'bisector analysis' (basically, split line in half, compare right/left side to discover distortions).
Also, spot activity can be measured independently. With sufficiently big spots, the stellar rotation period can be determined photometrically (i.e. by measuring the periodic darkening in the stellar luminosity). Or one can infer the period from the doppler broadening of the lines caused by stellar rotation. Spot activity also shows up by certain emission lines in the spectrum (also for the Sun - these lines vary in intensity during the solar cycle).
Stellar pulsations are another problem, since unlike spots they don't change the line shape, so one can't rule them out with a bisector analysis. However, stellar pulsations would cause the star to periodically change its surface temperature and/or luminosity, which again can be measured independently.
It's the instrumentation that really counts. There are lots of old telescopes which just gather dust, because they have no competitive instruments attached to their focal plane. On the other hand, the success of the HARPS spectrograph clearly shows that even with old telescopes one can do great science.
The biggest problem is plausible deniability - if they search your computer and find the software, how do you explain its presence?
There is really only one way to solve this problem: the software must credibly pass as malware. It must have at least some of the traits of malware, and it must be actively used as malware, otherwise it's not credible, and in sufficiently oppressive countries you will likely end in prison for just having it on your machine.
The existence of life can in principle be inferred from the composition of a planets' atmosphere, which could be determined spectroscopically.
E.g. earths' atmosphere is oxygen-rich, which would not be possible without life (oxygen is agressive, and would disappear quickly by forming compounds with surface minerals, if it wasn't replenished by photosynthesis).
There is research on ways to do this, and on the kind of instruments that would be required. However, this research focuses on life as we know it, which requires water. 'Hot Jupiters' like this planet are much too hot, and most scientists would not seriously consider them candidates for any kind of life.
Duh. I have a simple measurement for libc lack of quality: the number of #ifdef's I need to work around library bugs or oddities. *BSD beats all large commercial UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) and Glib combined. In all fairness, FreeBSD is better than OpenBSD, but both show the lack of developer manpower.
By contrast virtually all of a standard Linux desktop will compile to ARM. You might be missing some important pieces like Flash player, Sun Java and some other stuff, but the core experience would all be there. You'd get Firefox, OpenOffice, media players and everything else, subject to the system's other limitations such as memory & disk footprint.
Yes, and here's the catch. It has been my experience that if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with the offerings from Microsoft, in compatibility, functionality, and eye candy, you are looking into something pretty heavyweight: Gnome or KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, all of them heavyweight stuff, not to mention the ever-increasing number of deamons that are running in the background (hald, NetworkManager, Dbus,...). It doesn't work well on low-end hardware on which Windows XP will still run smoothly.
We use cfengine with close to 100 machines and works quite fine. My only gripe is that on Ubuntu 8.04, it has a bug such that it can't determine which packages are already installed. And since Desktop is first priority for Ubuntu, their maintenance of software for larger environments is abysmal.
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In many European countries, the "age of consent" is something like 14-16. Check Wikipedia.
Try Czech. Where words are written in phonetic spelling, but no foreigner will ever manage to learn the pronounciation :)
The funny part of all that is that people could get tuition for free elsewhere. E.g. in Germany tuition is either free or the fees are very low, for everyone (yes, including foreign students), and several of the major universities offer courses in English for international students.
In all fairness, if you want to make a contribution that is worth co-authorship of a paper, you might need at least a good amateur telescope (maybe on the order of 10 inch aperture) and a CCD camera.
With such equipment, and clear skies, you can do photometric monitoring of stars (e.g. for outbursts, or planet transits). Asronomers always have the problem that big observatories focus on big telescopes, and it's difficult to do things that require small telescopes, but long-term monitoring.
One example would be monitoring of the transits of extrasolar planets, to detect timing anomalies (which could be caused by undetected additional planets). Or monitoring stars with planets detected by radial velocity variations, to discover eventual transits. Or monitoring of ongoing gravitational lens events... there are quite a few oportunities for amateurs.
Ubuntu has apparmor sandboxing of firefox as an option that's turned off by default, and even if you turn it on it's not sandboxed enough IMO (firefox can read and write almost anything in the user's home directory with the exclusion of just a few directories).
It's trivial to simply run Firefox under a different user id. I use about three applications that need to access the net (web, mail, chat), and each of them gets started (via a simple wrapper script) under a different, dedicated UID.
There isn't any useful data to work with that we have about stars - only their light. Yet some people have seen that as a challenge, and have built a whole branch of science on it. There's plenty of obvious structure in that visualisation, meaning there's plenty of information.
I have a separate sandbox user for each application that accesses the net (mail, browser, ...). Each of these sandbox users is in its own group, and thus has access only to their own files and world readable (and eventually writeable, like /tmp) locations. Applications get started from my "real" account with sudo. I wonder why distros don't support that out of the box at least for the browser, because it would be fairly trivial to set up as part of a "create new user" script.
The problem with videoconferencing is that you see half of the audience only through the tiny "keyhole" of the video screen. In a public seminar talk, it's distracting and confusing for the speaker and the part of the audience that is physically present. I've been at seminar talks involving videoconferencing, and I've been in SL seminar talks, and I found the latter a much better, more consistent experience.
..and their verification process was extremely intrusive and I know many people who just decided to stop using second life entirely over it. It involves basicaly forking over Credit Card information, in some cases a Birth Certificate, and yuor home address..
Totally wrong. Thanks to the relaxed privacy standards in the US of A, there's tons of readily available personal information in online databases that you can use to pass the age verification.
They measure cumulative size distribution (how many groups of size >= N) and churn (how many people leave the group for another one in a given period).
They are able to come up with a simple mathematical model for the behaviour of players (essentially: recruit people with diverse attributes/skills) that reproduces the observed data extremely well. And they also show that the alternative 'kinship' model (recruit people with similar attributes/skills) fails to reproduce the observed data.
I would say that their model does quite a good job at modeling some rather nontrivial data.
It's a big hit among the people who have the creativity to actually do something, rather than just consuming. It's a big fail with those who expect a game with a set goal, those who need to cling to someone/something telling them what to do.
I'm doing freeform roleplay, and it's great fun. There's plenty of roleplay communities in SL.
Depends on your local jurisdiction. In Germany there was a lawsuit against a government agency because it logged IP addresses of website vistors. The court decided that IP addresses are individual user information, and the agency was ordered to stop logging IP addresses because it was a violation of privacy laws.
Au contraire.. it's probably one of the few countries where there is a place for this. In Europe, Greenbaum would now face a lawsuit because of privacy violation (I'm sysadmin in Germany, I am well aware that I would probably lose my job if I did what that Greenbaum guy has done).
3 - Cut and Paste really isn't an issue anymore, either.
I beg to differ - it wasn't an issue, but now it is one. Once upon a time, every app supported the standard way of cut and paste (right and middle mouse button).. but now we have apps who do it like this, and others who want me to do Ctrl-C / Ctrl-V because someone thought it would be cool to emulate MS Windows and force me to get my hand from the mouse and to the keyboard. And then there are apps where cut and paste would work one way for some input fields, and the other way for some other input fields...
The Linux manpage (on Ubuntu 8.04) says ldd prints the shared libraries required by each program or shared library specified on the command line. Note that it doesn't mention anywhere that the program is executed, and doesn't contain any security warning. If there is no hint of the problem at the primary source of usage information, then the issue IS undocumented.
I offer some of my software for 'pick your price'. I recommend a price, but clearly state that any price is ok. Most buyers buy at the recommended price. Very few pay significantly less (pay is through Paypal, which I think imposes a minimum price of $1). And - not quite unexpectedly - almost nobody ever pays more :-)
Spots -do- change line positions. The reason is that the star rotates, so half of the visible surface moves towards us, half of it recedes. Now imagine that part of either the receding or approaching surface is covered by a spot...
However, this also changes the shape of a spectral line, not just the position of the centre. This is why people do a 'bisector analysis' (basically, split line in half, compare right/left side to discover distortions).
Also, spot activity can be measured independently. With sufficiently big spots, the stellar rotation period can be determined photometrically (i.e. by measuring the periodic darkening in the stellar luminosity). Or one can infer the period from the doppler broadening of the lines caused by stellar rotation. Spot activity also shows up by certain emission lines in the spectrum (also for the Sun - these lines vary in intensity during the solar cycle).
Stellar pulsations are another problem, since unlike spots they don't change the line shape, so one can't rule them out with a bisector analysis. However, stellar pulsations would cause the star to periodically change its surface temperature and/or luminosity, which again can be measured independently.
It's the instrumentation that really counts. There are lots of old telescopes which just gather dust, because they have no competitive instruments attached to their focal plane. On the other hand, the success of the HARPS spectrograph clearly shows that even with old telescopes one can do great science.
However, 'ng' is a single phoneme, and 'sch' is also a single phoneme. So 'ngstschr' is 8 letters, but only 5 consonants, both in Dutch and German.
The biggest problem is plausible deniability - if they search your computer and find the software, how do you explain its presence?
There is really only one way to solve this problem: the software must credibly pass as malware. It must have at least some of the traits of malware, and it must be actively used as malware, otherwise it's not credible, and in sufficiently oppressive countries you will likely end in prison for just having it on your machine.
The existence of life can in principle be inferred from the composition of a planets' atmosphere, which could be determined spectroscopically. E.g. earths' atmosphere is oxygen-rich, which would not be possible without life (oxygen is agressive, and would disappear quickly by forming compounds with surface minerals, if it wasn't replenished by photosynthesis).
There is research on ways to do this, and on the kind of instruments that would be required. However, this research focuses on life as we know it, which requires water. 'Hot Jupiters' like this planet are much too hot, and most scientists would not seriously consider them candidates for any kind of life.
Saturns' moon Titan is close to the methane triple point, which is one of the prime reasons scientists are very interested in studying it.
Duh. I have a simple measurement for libc lack of quality: the number of #ifdef's I need to work around library bugs or oddities. *BSD beats all large commercial UNIX (AIX, HP-UX, Solaris) and Glib combined. In all fairness, FreeBSD is better than OpenBSD, but both show the lack of developer manpower.
By contrast virtually all of a standard Linux desktop will compile to ARM. You might be missing some important pieces like Flash player, Sun Java and some other stuff, but the core experience would all be there. You'd get Firefox, OpenOffice, media players and everything else, subject to the system's other limitations such as memory & disk footprint.
Yes, and here's the catch. It has been my experience that if you want a Linux desktop that can compete with the offerings from Microsoft, in compatibility, functionality, and eye candy, you are looking into something pretty heavyweight: Gnome or KDE, OpenOffice, Firefox, all of them heavyweight stuff, not to mention the ever-increasing number of deamons that are running in the background (hald, NetworkManager, Dbus, ...). It doesn't work well on low-end hardware on which Windows XP will still run smoothly.
We use cfengine with close to 100 machines and works quite fine. My only gripe is that on Ubuntu 8.04, it has a bug such that it can't determine which packages are already installed. And since Desktop is first priority for Ubuntu, their maintenance of software for larger environments is abysmal.