Instead of asking someone to type in the letters, numbers or how many cats
there are in the photo, just randomly generate some scenario:
That would work wonderfully, if you could truly randomize it (by which I don't
mean anything so stringent as neutron sources or the like), rather than using a
library of question templates.
The problem, though, you need a better quality of AI to generate arbitrary
easy-but-obscure questions as you do to solve them... Keep in mind you need
questions that anyone with a 3rd-grade education could read and solve, which limits
you to simple grammar, small words, concrete ideas, and no math harder than
addition, subtraction, and inequality. Modern AI can already parse and solve
those problems fairly well.
So, you end up using a library of question templates, and once an attacker has seen
enough of them, he can reliably fill in the blanks and arrive at a deterministic answer,
no massive CPU power or cool AI required.
Ask yourself this, do you really want to be a programmer?
He should have asked himself that 4 (or 5... or 6...) years ago. Now, he needs
to either like coding, or suffer through it for a decade to afford a go at a
new career.
I agree, though, far too many people seem to go for CS (or related) degrees
who really don't like coding. Big mistake, IMO. Now, personally,
I truly love programming... I did it before college, I did it to help pay for college,
I do it for a living, I do it in my spare time, hell, when I slack off a bit for some
mental downtime at work, I sneak in a bit of coding on unrelated personal projects. I
admit I might count as a bit more obsessive about it than most, but if you can't
at least relate to the idea, run away screaming from anything even resembling a CS
degree.
Anyone not "approved" by the two big parties, simple as that.
And I would extend that beyond mere "Democrats" and "Republicans"... If in 50 years we
see Greens vs Libertarians, they will most likely have grown just as bad as the current
idiots in power. But as long as their candidates need to struggle for their slice
of power, they act as an effective filter against the inbred* Harvard-vs-Yale sycophants
we inexplicable keep voting into office.
* Yes, "inbred" - Look at the family trees of the most powerful thousand or so men in
the US at any given time - A few dozen families appear over and over and over throughout
history. The comparison with "crazy king George" goes much further than mere dislike
for Bush's policies.
I'm sill using Chrome, so I'm currently an outcast
I tried it... It didn't look too bad, but it really had nothing to offer me
over FF3, and lacked the ability to use my favorite set of plugins. If they
keep working on it, I'll try it again next year, but expect the same outcome.
It is actually faster for me to load all the extra crap with Chrome than
it is for adblock to remove it and render the page with stuff missing
The web becomes even faster when you browse with JS completely turned
off (easily toggled on a per-site basis thanks to NoScript or QuickJava or the
like). Why waste the CPU time to process "features" you don't even
want in the first place, when you can completely ignore them?
you do know your PEDs are not license for use in the air, don't you? No, of course you don't.
Actually, I do have at least a vague awareness of that fact - But not much better
than that. And I say that as a geek, with a far greater than average interest in the
intersection between technology and law.
Try asking the same question to the kids playing wirelessly-linked multiplayer DS games... Or
the self-important businessman who insists on texting nonstop for the entire flight... Or the
dozen laptop users who don't have the faintest clue how to disable their wireless even if they
cared enough to try.
that would require research, reason and thinking.
Traits in which I find the general population greatly deficient.
With just about any other product, engineers optimize every aspect of the design
towards resilience and best-case modes of failure. But put 150 people 30k feet above
the planet flying along at 600mph, and we accept that weak RF chatter can induce a
catastrophic loss of control? "yes, lets not ahve any of this understanding what's going on, understanding risk, or even trying to understand that this happens on ALL airplanes". Amen,
brother!
You can either trust that the other 149 morons, who can't even remember
not to bring knives and pepper spray on a flight, will both comprehend and understand the
rules governing low power RF transmitters as they pertain to aviation; Or you can demand
that Airbus and Boeing manage to obey the same underlying principles of engineering safety
as every other industry outside China.
Loss of communication and navigation, or for that matter all electronics on a plane,
should never mean a plane crashes; they should just mean the pilot needs to actually
work, rather than sit back and play tour-guide.
In the defense of so many airlines and the FAA, I will state that I would
rather read a book than work on a laptop if it means reducing a very low risk.
No. This has nothing to do with "I want to use my laptop/DS/phone, so make
me happy as the paying customer", and everything to do with "if an unauthorized
wireless mouse can bring down a plane, we need the entire fleet of such badly defective
planes grounded and fixed yesterday".
Seriously. Any system that can't deal with weak RF interference needs to hit the
scrapheap. In any other industry, we'd see the customers suing - Imagine if Ford
said using a bluetooth headset in their vehicles violates your warranty... They'd
go bankrupt overnight. Only the fact that the aviation industry has slowly boiled
the frog, making us expect horrible customer service at unpredictable (but high)
prices, allows any of the BS we've put up with for the past 20 years (and the
shout-and-taze squads aside, the airlines had problems long before 9/11).
Second, there is no caveat of "ULTRA" in the current collection, and no, there
are no "secret" caveats. There are classified SCIs and SAPs, but they are never
indicated by a single word, much less a meaningful word like "ULTRA".
You mean like the CIA's now-well-exposed and fairly well documented
MK-Ultra program,
wherein they dosed unaware and nonconsenting American citizens with LSD
(and other less well-known drugs)?
Nope, they'd certainly never use words like that...
...Again.
The only real question involves what they call it now; not whether
or not they still do crap like that.
You crossed that line the moment you considered a trade of a life-long
restriction for some few coins being even remotely "fair".
When you graduate, you'll find your radical Marxist rants don't impress your future
slave-masters quite so much as they do the ladies in Soc 101.;-)
Seriously, you make some of my own anti-unconstrained-capitalism diatribes sound sane by comparison.
"Fair" in this case amounts to whatever the FP author considers fair. If he
doesn't like the deal, he has the option to turn it down. Simple as that.
Perhaps he really really really loves the "freedom" to work on this
exact project; and further, also cares "even to the point of our life being less dear"
that he work on it as FOSS rather than get paid to develop it for some company. So... He
can say no, and keep his freedom to work on whatever he wants.
Or perhaps he just "likes" the project, and considers a good chunk of change fair
compensation for his "life-long enslavement" (aka not working on one particuar open
source project anymore). He can choose that option too; and if he didn't consider
it at least fair enough to seriously consider the offer, he wouldn't have asked
Slashdot for advice.
The moment you decide that "cash in hand" is worth abandoning one's principles
I think you've hit the core of our failure to communicate here... I said nothing at
all about "principles" (nor did the FP)... Just a discussion of whether or not he
considers it fair to trade something he enjoys for money. You could reduce the discussion
to any work, since getting up and going to work every day involves irrevocably
giving up eight or nine hours of my life in service to my corporate masters.
In short they wish to enslave him by denying him the use of some of his abilities
forever (or in practical terms until he dies) in exchange for what amounts to a set
of glass beads
Someone wants to pay him because they see commercial value in his work, right? They
presumably want to sell his work, and won't sell very much if he can just
backport his work into the free version. Thus, they want him to promise not to work
on the free version of the project anymore.
I count as about as anti-corporate as they come, but I don't see how you can consider
their request unreasonable, to the extent they can actually enforce it via the FP
poster's actions... Yes, he should probably negotiate for a minimum term of employment,
or royalties, or a lump sum up front; But if he chooses to accept their offer as it stands,
what does he really have to lose?
Worst case scenario, they fire him the first day. He can no longer work on the free version
of the project, but it can continue without him and, most importantly, the company doesn't
actually get anything! He doesn't have the right or power to withdraw his existing codebase
from the project, only to fork it and release future work under a different license (note that
I don't consider that rules-lawyering, in that he doesn't need to do anything in breach
of his contract for it to happen, the company apparently just doesn't understand how the BSD
license works).
The only thing even remotely approaching "adequate" compensation for such
a thing are perpetual payments from these "employers" or an up-front amount
guaranteeing him life-long comfort
Again, spare me the drama. "Life-long comfort" for no longer donating his
time to an open source project? Although we don't have all the details,
what exactly do you do you think the guy has written, firmware to turn a
$17 toaster into a dialysis machine?
You on the other hand are just a typical greed monkey whose
"brain" locks up as soon as some dollar bills are in view.
"Practical" != "Greedy"... Like it or not, we live in a world that
requires us to pay for our food, our shelter, our transportation, and
just about any leisure activities we might enjoy. Nothing "noble" about
starving in the streets because of that. At the same time, what you and
so many others seem to forget, we can do a hell of a lot more good
with cash-in-hand, than by donating our time to some obscure open source
project - Strangely enough, food-banks and shelters don't take code.
And y'know, "Profit" has more than four letters in it. What we choose to do with
money makes it (and us) dirty; By itself, it just represents a tokenized form of our
efforts that we can use for good or bad, for necessities or luxuries, for helping others
or for hoarding.
Because that's the real question. Are they paying enough to own you?
Oh, puh-lease... Right now we have 25 highly-modded drama-queens dominating the discussion
on this topic.
I code for a living - I MAKE MONEY for selling the product of my skills. Welcome to
the real world, folks.
I also code for fun, because I enjoy doing it. Not often, however, do the two categories
overlap... I don't often profit from my for-fun code, and although I find the problem-solving
aspect of it satisfying, I can't really say I "enjoy" the code I write to put food on my table
(in the sense that I wouldn't do it for fun if no one paid me for it).
We all need to make a living, so this question really boils down to one question, which
has nothing to do with "soul", or really anything to do with the specifics of the BSD
license (if the FP author agrees with the intention of lawyering up on a technicality,
even if he wins, he will lose far more than he will make from this deal):
Does the amount you will make adequately compensate you for the loss of your
ability to continue working on a "fun" project?
If yes, then take the offer and find a new pet project. If no, then you already
know your final answer (unless you desperately need the money, in which case, you still
already know your final answer).
What you want isn't backups, since it doesn't make sense for different people to share
backups any more than it makes sense for different people to share a single networked hard
disk or networked home directory
Although I agree that the GP has something other than just "backups" in mind, I would still
consider the result quite a decent form of backup (moreso even than the notorious "works
perfectly until you need to recover" tape archive) - If you have copies available locally, at
a remote repository, and at several additional nonlocal users' machines, as well as versioning
to allow recovery of previous incarnations of the files, you have an impressively resilient means
of recovery in the event of disaster/accidents/hardware failure.
I think Dropbox has the right idea, with one glaring flaw - You need to trust
your data to a third party (Amazon S3), and that third party needs to continue
to exist (and offer the service) for Dropbox to keep working.
For most purposes, I wouldn't consider that a major problem - I doubt Amazon really cares
about the contents of my personal collection of apps to which I'd like to have access anywhere
I go, or my family photos, or the contents of my to-do list; and I highly doubt they'll go under
any time soon. But as the only option, I'd call that a showstopper.
If I could run a Dropbox server (by which I mean the coordinating server, not the
client-side daemon) on a box at home, I'd use it in a heartbeat. Even if
I never actually used it, just having the option makes a world of difference between
"Dependent on Amazon" and "viable backup/synchronization solution".
The exact quote was, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral
votes to the president next year."
At a Republican fundraiser, and with "the president" not in the future tense.
Yes, he phrased it such that an out-of-context, text-only quoting doesn't sound
quite so bad. In-context, it leaves so little ambiguity as to make those of us who
actually care about the ideals of fair and democratic elections (terms I don't use as
buzzwords for "kill iraqis") stand dumbfounded that O'Dell didn't find himself up on
charges of election fraud. Oh, wait, Bush won.
And for the record, I don't consider myself a Democrat, either. Both parties
suck, but at least we usually have a fair chance to pick between Tweedle-Dee
and Tweedle-Dum.
Conspiracy theorists need to put away their tinfoil hats on this one.
It's pretty obvious what's going on here.
Obvious, yes - Sequoia's systems suck, and the judge has decided to
protect them because commerce takes precedence over such petty little
concerns as "fair elections".
Not sure where the tinfoil hat comes into this... Unless you mean to
imply that those of us who took Diebold's promise to deliver 2004 to
Bush (and did so) at face value somehow count as conspiracy theorists.
Windows has always been about multi-monitor support rather than virtual desktops.
However, I doubt most users care about or use either.
You joke, right?
Once you've set up a two-headed machine, you will never go back. Even if it means
you have to buy your own to use on your work machine. It helps that much.
Perhaps if you only ever have one app open at a time, you wouldn't care. If you do any
software development, any multimedia work, any online research where you might like having
two browser windows (or a browser and a word processor) open at once, two monitors makes
a world of difference between having to switch between programs.
Large widescreen monitors do lessen the improvement somewhat, as you can fit two
golden-rectangle halfscreen apps side-by-side... But even then, a second monitor
means you have other useful apps visible, or even a third full-screen app (personally,
I use my second display in portrait mode - True 8.5x11" WYSIWYG,
to-scale and all on one screen).
I always have Process Explorer (relevant to TFA) open on one screen... A music player,
a chat client... You just can't have enough screen real-estate.
Hardcore data analysis in Excel is almost always a bad idea. You can
almost always find a way to do it in excel, and you can almost always
find a way to do it better, faster, and cheaper somewhere else.
I would have to disagree, having used both Excel and "rolled my own" in
pure C.
My own code runs a few thousand times faster, I know exactly where
the errors might pop up, and I don't need to try to squeeze the data into
a form suitable to whatever MS decided I should use this week, I just handle
anything I want, however I want it done. I can graph it any way I like,
save the data to any format I like ("Hmm, I wonder what that function
sounds like... Okay, where'd I put that RIFF header code?"),
and I can implement ways to massage data never seen outside pretty hardcore
mathematical research journals.
All of that, while undeniably "superior" in nearly every aspect to Excel, takes
time to implement - Potentially quite a lot of it.
And then we have Excel... I can take list of raw numbers in most common list- or
table-like formats, paste it in, and run a polynomial regression on it in 30 seconds
flat, with another minute or two to graph it in 99% of the ways I would ever think
of using. I can prettify the data for showing PHBs with a half-dozen clicks. I
can save my results in a format anyone can view, without having to write a specific
set of routines to export this particular blob of data to format-X. I can trivially
preprocess the data in a wide variety of ways to see how it affects the results, and
see the changes happen as I go.
In short, Excel makes it much, much easier to "play" with data than most
programs designed specifically for "serious" mathematical work - In much the same
way that I can do most simple image touch-ups in MS Paint faster than GIMP would even
finish loading all its plugins.
Now, I sure as hell wouldn't publish (or more likely for me, sell to a client) results
or methods based on a quick-n'-dirty Excel sheet... But I can try a hundred different
approaches to working with the data in the time it would take to rigorously code just
one of them, and then spend my actual effort (aka "the client's money") on coding up
what looks like the best approach to the data.
Now, exactly what the WMAP's findings mean... Well, physicists
and cosmologists will probably argue about that for the next century.
But as a scientifically-literate non-expert, I would say that an anisotropic
CMB seems consistent with (though certainly doesn't require) the
"bubble" theory mentioned in TFA.
First you say "men code better than women simply because men problem-solve better than women" and then
you say "which does not mean women can't make excellent coders". So, Which is it?
I can also say (and doubt you or anyone else would disagree) that "men can bench-press more than women (on
average)", but have no doubt that the top women weight lifters could put me to shame by comparison.
I'll apologize for not qualifying my generalization as such (I considered it an obvious generalization,
but accept my omission), but as a generalization, I stand by what I said.
I'm a female programmer and I'm willing to get tested and compared to any male programmer to see if
there is any intrinsic difference attributable only to my gender.
And you may well have the skill to out-code 99% of the field. I'll even accept that, conceivably, you
(or any individual, of either gender) could possibly outcode everyone else on the planet.
But that still doesn't change the generalization.
When a venture capitalist walks into a programming shop with his MBA that has
taught him to stereotype people as much as possible to fit them into market segments
the last thing he wants to see is a female programmer telling him how she is going
to change the world
Spoken like a true Politically-Correct zombie... Insisting we have a male-heavy list
due to discrimination, despite the fact that the dominant categories of paths-to-CS-godhood
mentioned in TFA tend to involve either academic funding (with a strong bias in favor
of females in domains they tend to shy away from) or "lone-gunman" style projects which
require little to no external funding.
Sorry, Ms Steinem, but put bluntly, men code better than women simply because men
problem-solve better than women, and coding boils down to little more than solving big
problems by breaking them down into trivial ones. The fact that we see a higher ratio of males
among "Famous Programmers" than in the CS world in general nicely illustrates that
fact, contrasted against the background of universities desperate to get women in
engineering majors (if not for which, you wouldn't see so many women in the general
CS population either).
Which, incidentally, does not mean women can't make excellent coders - TFA
mentions several. But sometimes, lopsided numbers actually reflect reality
rather than prejudice.
Of COURSE it helps fuel efficiency! Generating more power for the same
amount of fuel means you'll use less fuel to do the job when driving.
No. You have misused the word "power" to refer to the total work done rather than
the rate of work done... "Faster" does not equal "more". Whether you turn
on a 1200W floodlight for an hour, or leave a 50W table lamp on for a full day,
both use 1.2KWH; The more "powerful" floodlight does the exact same total amount
of "work" as the table lamp, it just does it in less time.
Try this another way - If you light a lump of charcoal on fire, it will slowly
burn for 15-30 minutes, giving off a lot of heat but not very fast. If you powder
that same lump of charcoal and light it, the powder will flare up in a much more
impressive burst of flame for a few seconds, then go out. The total energy released
comes out exactly the same in each case, even though the powdered version
burned much faster (ie, had more power).
Yes, except this one has a paper published, and lab tests on the
fuel injector mist as well as a dynanometer and other tests.
No one said the device doesn't do something to the fuel... The real question
comes from whether or not modern engines already burn as much of the fuel as possible.
They have lab tests showing smaller droplets. Okay. So? That would only matter if
modern engines don't already burn fuel fairly completely. By the rather straightforward reasoning
that a car spitting incompletely burnt fuel out the exhaust pipe won't pass CA emissions standards
(used in about half the US states), I think we can safely say that doesn't apply.
Now - Smaller droplets burn faster, so it makes sense this would boost torque (for those
who don't know what a dynanometer does). That does not equate to better fuel
efficiency, however. And if the head/valves/injectors/whatever can't deal with a peak
pressure significantly greater than the intended design limit, you may end up paying a
hell of a lot in repairs for that small boost in pickup.
You can measure a lot of things, but they don't mean "better". The classic mileage
booster of adding water to your fuel also "changes" the fuel in a measurable way. It
also makes your car run like crap and rots your valves and fuel pump.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this device to really work... But we don't need a magic wand,
we need to look at why Europe can have 65MPG Ford (yes, the same Ford that has given us
15 years of single-digit MPG tanks) diesel hybrids, while we piss and moan in the US about
whether to rase CAFE standards to a "competitively unfair" 35MPG.
The republican VP candidate is usually smarter than this year. Not necessarily
'better', mind you, but usually at least allowed to speak in public. [/troll]
I don't know why you would consider that a troll... I really have no clue what
people see in Palin - She has almost no qualifications; can't speak intelligently
on any issues, whether political, economic, or even social (the ultimate
soft-ball of "hard" questions); and even her home life (off-limits unless she
brings it up yet again? BS!) looks like a disaster in the light of her own set of
beliefs.
And the hypocrisy of the pundits... The same traits for which they blast Biden,
they praise in Palin. Do they not even listen to themselves???
Fortunately, the VP has no actual responsibilities except to break ties in the senate,
but still, it utterly astonishes me that she has helped McCain's campaign... God
forbid he actually die in office, we'd end up looking back at Bush as an outright
intellectual by comparison.
And for the fanboys of one party or the other - I consider both parties
basically identical, just different masks on the same crooks.
Or will they just open up reserved addresses or something stupid like that?
The world already uses more than 4 billion IP addresses, thanks to those reserved
ranges (we probably have over a hundred million just in the 192.168 range).
Open them up, and watch the internet crumble instantly.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of asking someone to type in the letters, numbers or how many cats there are in the photo, just randomly generate some scenario:
That would work wonderfully, if you could truly randomize it (by which I don't mean anything so stringent as neutron sources or the like), rather than using a library of question templates.
The problem, though, you need a better quality of AI to generate arbitrary easy-but-obscure questions as you do to solve them... Keep in mind you need questions that anyone with a 3rd-grade education could read and solve, which limits you to simple grammar, small words, concrete ideas, and no math harder than addition, subtraction, and inequality. Modern AI can already parse and solve those problems fairly well.
So, you end up using a library of question templates, and once an attacker has seen enough of them, he can reliably fill in the blanks and arrive at a deterministic answer, no massive CPU power or cool AI required.
Ask yourself this, do you really want to be a programmer?
He should have asked himself that 4 (or 5... or 6...) years ago. Now, he needs to either like coding, or suffer through it for a decade to afford a go at a new career.
I agree, though, far too many people seem to go for CS (or related) degrees who really don't like coding. Big mistake, IMO. Now, personally, I truly love programming... I did it before college, I did it to help pay for college, I do it for a living, I do it in my spare time, hell, when I slack off a bit for some mental downtime at work, I sneak in a bit of coding on unrelated personal projects. I admit I might count as a bit more obsessive about it than most, but if you can't at least relate to the idea, run away screaming from anything even resembling a CS degree.
Exception at line ("Then keep chopping it down every two years"): Attempt to chop down an already chopped-down tree.
Catch
{
if(!Tree.Willow.Grewback()) Wait(OneMoreYear);
}
So who exactly are we SUPPOSED to vote for?
Anyone not "approved" by the two big parties, simple as that.
And I would extend that beyond mere "Democrats" and "Republicans"... If in 50 years we see Greens vs Libertarians, they will most likely have grown just as bad as the current idiots in power. But as long as their candidates need to struggle for their slice of power, they act as an effective filter against the inbred* Harvard-vs-Yale sycophants we inexplicable keep voting into office.
* Yes, "inbred" - Look at the family trees of the most powerful thousand or so men in the US at any given time - A few dozen families appear over and over and over throughout history. The comparison with "crazy king George" goes much further than mere dislike for Bush's policies.
I'm sill using Chrome, so I'm currently an outcast
I tried it... It didn't look too bad, but it really had nothing to offer me over FF3, and lacked the ability to use my favorite set of plugins. If they keep working on it, I'll try it again next year, but expect the same outcome.
It is actually faster for me to load all the extra crap with Chrome than it is for adblock to remove it and render the page with stuff missing
The web becomes even faster when you browse with JS completely turned off (easily toggled on a per-site basis thanks to NoScript or QuickJava or the like). Why waste the CPU time to process "features" you don't even want in the first place, when you can completely ignore them?
you do know your PEDs are not license for use in the air, don't you? No, of course you don't.
Actually, I do have at least a vague awareness of that fact - But not much better than that. And I say that as a geek, with a far greater than average interest in the intersection between technology and law.
Try asking the same question to the kids playing wirelessly-linked multiplayer DS games... Or the self-important businessman who insists on texting nonstop for the entire flight... Or the dozen laptop users who don't have the faintest clue how to disable their wireless even if they cared enough to try.
that would require research, reason and thinking.
Traits in which I find the general population greatly deficient.
With just about any other product, engineers optimize every aspect of the design towards resilience and best-case modes of failure. But put 150 people 30k feet above the planet flying along at 600mph, and we accept that weak RF chatter can induce a catastrophic loss of control? "yes, lets not ahve any of this understanding what's going on, understanding risk, or even trying to understand that this happens on ALL airplanes". Amen, brother!
You can either trust that the other 149 morons, who can't even remember not to bring knives and pepper spray on a flight, will both comprehend and understand the rules governing low power RF transmitters as they pertain to aviation; Or you can demand that Airbus and Boeing manage to obey the same underlying principles of engineering safety as every other industry outside China.
Loss of communication and navigation, or for that matter all electronics on a plane, should never mean a plane crashes; they should just mean the pilot needs to actually work, rather than sit back and play tour-guide.
In the defense of so many airlines and the FAA, I will state that I would rather read a book than work on a laptop if it means reducing a very low risk.
No. This has nothing to do with "I want to use my laptop/DS/phone, so make me happy as the paying customer", and everything to do with "if an unauthorized wireless mouse can bring down a plane, we need the entire fleet of such badly defective planes grounded and fixed yesterday".
Seriously. Any system that can't deal with weak RF interference needs to hit the scrapheap. In any other industry, we'd see the customers suing - Imagine if Ford said using a bluetooth headset in their vehicles violates your warranty... They'd go bankrupt overnight. Only the fact that the aviation industry has slowly boiled the frog, making us expect horrible customer service at unpredictable (but high) prices, allows any of the BS we've put up with for the past 20 years (and the shout-and-taze squads aside, the airlines had problems long before 9/11).
Not to mention all the Tennessee Tuxedo fans, who are not going to be happy about it either.
;-)
Sorry, wrong site - You want AARP, not Slashdot.
Easy mistake, no doubt you arrived here from a misspelled Google search for "ARPA".
Second, there is no caveat of "ULTRA" in the current collection, and no, there are no "secret" caveats. There are classified SCIs and SAPs, but they are never indicated by a single word, much less a meaningful word like "ULTRA".
...Again.
You mean like the CIA's now-well-exposed and fairly well documented MK-Ultra program, wherein they dosed unaware and nonconsenting American citizens with LSD (and other less well-known drugs)?
Nope, they'd certainly never use words like that...
The only real question involves what they call it now; not whether or not they still do crap like that.
You crossed that line the moment you considered a trade of a life-long restriction for some few coins being even remotely "fair".
;-)
When you graduate, you'll find your radical Marxist rants don't impress your future slave-masters quite so much as they do the ladies in Soc 101.
Seriously, you make some of my own anti-unconstrained-capitalism diatribes sound sane by comparison.
"Fair" in this case amounts to whatever the FP author considers fair. If he doesn't like the deal, he has the option to turn it down. Simple as that.
Perhaps he really really really loves the "freedom" to work on this exact project; and further, also cares "even to the point of our life being less dear" that he work on it as FOSS rather than get paid to develop it for some company. So... He can say no, and keep his freedom to work on whatever he wants.
Or perhaps he just "likes" the project, and considers a good chunk of change fair compensation for his "life-long enslavement" (aka not working on one particuar open source project anymore). He can choose that option too; and if he didn't consider it at least fair enough to seriously consider the offer, he wouldn't have asked Slashdot for advice.
The moment you decide that "cash in hand" is worth abandoning one's principles
I think you've hit the core of our failure to communicate here... I said nothing at all about "principles" (nor did the FP)... Just a discussion of whether or not he considers it fair to trade something he enjoys for money. You could reduce the discussion to any work, since getting up and going to work every day involves irrevocably giving up eight or nine hours of my life in service to my corporate masters.
In short they wish to enslave him by denying him the use of some of his abilities forever (or in practical terms until he dies) in exchange for what amounts to a set of glass beads
Someone wants to pay him because they see commercial value in his work, right? They presumably want to sell his work, and won't sell very much if he can just backport his work into the free version. Thus, they want him to promise not to work on the free version of the project anymore.
I count as about as anti-corporate as they come, but I don't see how you can consider their request unreasonable, to the extent they can actually enforce it via the FP poster's actions... Yes, he should probably negotiate for a minimum term of employment, or royalties, or a lump sum up front; But if he chooses to accept their offer as it stands, what does he really have to lose?
Worst case scenario, they fire him the first day. He can no longer work on the free version of the project, but it can continue without him and, most importantly, the company doesn't actually get anything! He doesn't have the right or power to withdraw his existing codebase from the project, only to fork it and release future work under a different license (note that I don't consider that rules-lawyering, in that he doesn't need to do anything in breach of his contract for it to happen, the company apparently just doesn't understand how the BSD license works).
The only thing even remotely approaching "adequate" compensation for such a thing are perpetual payments from these "employers" or an up-front amount guaranteeing him life-long comfort
Again, spare me the drama. "Life-long comfort" for no longer donating his time to an open source project? Although we don't have all the details, what exactly do you do you think the guy has written, firmware to turn a $17 toaster into a dialysis machine?
You on the other hand are just a typical greed monkey whose "brain" locks up as soon as some dollar bills are in view.
"Practical" != "Greedy"... Like it or not, we live in a world that requires us to pay for our food, our shelter, our transportation, and just about any leisure activities we might enjoy. Nothing "noble" about starving in the streets because of that. At the same time, what you and so many others seem to forget, we can do a hell of a lot more good with cash-in-hand, than by donating our time to some obscure open source project - Strangely enough, food-banks and shelters don't take code.
And y'know, "Profit" has more than four letters in it. What we choose to do with money makes it (and us) dirty; By itself, it just represents a tokenized form of our efforts that we can use for good or bad, for necessities or luxuries, for helping others or for hoarding.
Because that's the real question. Are they paying enough to own you?
Oh, puh-lease... Right now we have 25 highly-modded drama-queens dominating the discussion on this topic.
I code for a living - I MAKE MONEY for selling the product of my skills. Welcome to the real world, folks.
I also code for fun, because I enjoy doing it. Not often, however, do the two categories overlap... I don't often profit from my for-fun code, and although I find the problem-solving aspect of it satisfying, I can't really say I "enjoy" the code I write to put food on my table (in the sense that I wouldn't do it for fun if no one paid me for it).
We all need to make a living, so this question really boils down to one question, which has nothing to do with "soul", or really anything to do with the specifics of the BSD license (if the FP author agrees with the intention of lawyering up on a technicality, even if he wins, he will lose far more than he will make from this deal):
Does the amount you will make adequately compensate you for the loss of your ability to continue working on a "fun" project?
If yes, then take the offer and find a new pet project. If no, then you already know your final answer (unless you desperately need the money, in which case, you still already know your final answer).
What you want isn't backups, since it doesn't make sense for different people to share backups any more than it makes sense for different people to share a single networked hard disk or networked home directory
Although I agree that the GP has something other than just "backups" in mind, I would still consider the result quite a decent form of backup (moreso even than the notorious "works perfectly until you need to recover" tape archive) - If you have copies available locally, at a remote repository, and at several additional nonlocal users' machines, as well as versioning to allow recovery of previous incarnations of the files, you have an impressively resilient means of recovery in the event of disaster/accidents/hardware failure.
Ars technica did a nice review of Dropbox
I think Dropbox has the right idea, with one glaring flaw - You need to trust your data to a third party (Amazon S3), and that third party needs to continue to exist (and offer the service) for Dropbox to keep working.
For most purposes, I wouldn't consider that a major problem - I doubt Amazon really cares about the contents of my personal collection of apps to which I'd like to have access anywhere I go, or my family photos, or the contents of my to-do list; and I highly doubt they'll go under any time soon. But as the only option, I'd call that a showstopper.
If I could run a Dropbox server (by which I mean the coordinating server, not the client-side daemon) on a box at home, I'd use it in a heartbeat. Even if I never actually used it, just having the option makes a world of difference between "Dependent on Amazon" and "viable backup/synchronization solution".
The exact quote was, "committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year."
At a Republican fundraiser, and with "the president" not in the future tense.
Yes, he phrased it such that an out-of-context, text-only quoting doesn't sound quite so bad. In-context, it leaves so little ambiguity as to make those of us who actually care about the ideals of fair and democratic elections (terms I don't use as buzzwords for "kill iraqis") stand dumbfounded that O'Dell didn't find himself up on charges of election fraud. Oh, wait, Bush won.
And for the record, I don't consider myself a Democrat, either. Both parties suck, but at least we usually have a fair chance to pick between Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum.
Conspiracy theorists need to put away their tinfoil hats on this one. It's pretty obvious what's going on here.
Obvious, yes - Sequoia's systems suck, and the judge has decided to protect them because commerce takes precedence over such petty little concerns as "fair elections".
Not sure where the tinfoil hat comes into this... Unless you mean to imply that those of us who took Diebold's promise to deliver 2004 to Bush (and did so) at face value somehow count as conspiracy theorists.
Windows has always been about multi-monitor support rather than virtual desktops. However, I doubt most users care about or use either.
You joke, right?
Once you've set up a two-headed machine, you will never go back. Even if it means you have to buy your own to use on your work machine. It helps that much.
Perhaps if you only ever have one app open at a time, you wouldn't care. If you do any software development, any multimedia work, any online research where you might like having two browser windows (or a browser and a word processor) open at once, two monitors makes a world of difference between having to switch between programs.
Large widescreen monitors do lessen the improvement somewhat, as you can fit two golden-rectangle halfscreen apps side-by-side... But even then, a second monitor means you have other useful apps visible, or even a third full-screen app (personally, I use my second display in portrait mode - True 8.5x11" WYSIWYG, to-scale and all on one screen).
I always have Process Explorer (relevant to TFA) open on one screen... A music player, a chat client... You just can't have enough screen real-estate.
Hardcore data analysis in Excel is almost always a bad idea. You can almost always find a way to do it in excel, and you can almost always find a way to do it better, faster, and cheaper somewhere else.
I would have to disagree, having used both Excel and "rolled my own" in pure C.
My own code runs a few thousand times faster, I know exactly where the errors might pop up, and I don't need to try to squeeze the data into a form suitable to whatever MS decided I should use this week, I just handle anything I want, however I want it done. I can graph it any way I like, save the data to any format I like ("Hmm, I wonder what that function sounds like... Okay, where'd I put that RIFF header code?"), and I can implement ways to massage data never seen outside pretty hardcore mathematical research journals.
All of that, while undeniably "superior" in nearly every aspect to Excel, takes time to implement - Potentially quite a lot of it.
And then we have Excel... I can take list of raw numbers in most common list- or table-like formats, paste it in, and run a polynomial regression on it in 30 seconds flat, with another minute or two to graph it in 99% of the ways I would ever think of using. I can prettify the data for showing PHBs with a half-dozen clicks. I can save my results in a format anyone can view, without having to write a specific set of routines to export this particular blob of data to format-X. I can trivially preprocess the data in a wide variety of ways to see how it affects the results, and see the changes happen as I go.
In short, Excel makes it much, much easier to "play" with data than most programs designed specifically for "serious" mathematical work - In much the same way that I can do most simple image touch-ups in MS Paint faster than GIMP would even finish loading all its plugins.
Now, I sure as hell wouldn't publish (or more likely for me, sell to a client) results or methods based on a quick-n'-dirty Excel sheet... But I can try a hundred different approaches to working with the data in the time it would take to rigorously code just one of them, and then spend my actual effort (aka "the client's money") on coding up what looks like the best approach to the data.
So therefore, the universe should appear to have different properties in different directions. Has anybody seen that?
Yes. The Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe looked for (and found!) exactly that.
Now, exactly what the WMAP's findings mean... Well, physicists and cosmologists will probably argue about that for the next century. But as a scientifically-literate non-expert, I would say that an anisotropic CMB seems consistent with (though certainly doesn't require) the "bubble" theory mentioned in TFA.
First you say "men code better than women simply because men problem-solve better than women" and then you say "which does not mean women can't make excellent coders". So, Which is it?
I can also say (and doubt you or anyone else would disagree) that "men can bench-press more than women (on average)", but have no doubt that the top women weight lifters could put me to shame by comparison.
I'll apologize for not qualifying my generalization as such (I considered it an obvious generalization, but accept my omission), but as a generalization, I stand by what I said.
I'm a female programmer and I'm willing to get tested and compared to any male programmer to see if there is any intrinsic difference attributable only to my gender.
And you may well have the skill to out-code 99% of the field. I'll even accept that, conceivably, you (or any individual, of either gender) could possibly outcode everyone else on the planet. But that still doesn't change the generalization.
When a venture capitalist walks into a programming shop with his MBA that has taught him to stereotype people as much as possible to fit them into market segments the last thing he wants to see is a female programmer telling him how she is going to change the world
Spoken like a true Politically-Correct zombie... Insisting we have a male-heavy list due to discrimination, despite the fact that the dominant categories of paths-to-CS-godhood mentioned in TFA tend to involve either academic funding (with a strong bias in favor of females in domains they tend to shy away from) or "lone-gunman" style projects which require little to no external funding.
Sorry, Ms Steinem, but put bluntly, men code better than women simply because men problem-solve better than women, and coding boils down to little more than solving big problems by breaking them down into trivial ones. The fact that we see a higher ratio of males among "Famous Programmers" than in the CS world in general nicely illustrates that fact, contrasted against the background of universities desperate to get women in engineering majors (if not for which, you wouldn't see so many women in the general CS population either).
Which, incidentally, does not mean women can't make excellent coders - TFA mentions several. But sometimes, lopsided numbers actually reflect reality rather than prejudice.
Of COURSE it helps fuel efficiency! Generating more power for the same amount of fuel means you'll use less fuel to do the job when driving.
No. You have misused the word "power" to refer to the total work done rather than the rate of work done... "Faster" does not equal "more". Whether you turn on a 1200W floodlight for an hour, or leave a 50W table lamp on for a full day, both use 1.2KWH; The more "powerful" floodlight does the exact same total amount of "work" as the table lamp, it just does it in less time.
Try this another way - If you light a lump of charcoal on fire, it will slowly burn for 15-30 minutes, giving off a lot of heat but not very fast. If you powder that same lump of charcoal and light it, the powder will flare up in a much more impressive burst of flame for a few seconds, then go out. The total energy released comes out exactly the same in each case, even though the powdered version burned much faster (ie, had more power).
Yes, except this one has a paper published, and lab tests on the fuel injector mist as well as a dynanometer and other tests.
No one said the device doesn't do something to the fuel... The real question comes from whether or not modern engines already burn as much of the fuel as possible.
They have lab tests showing smaller droplets. Okay. So? That would only matter if modern engines don't already burn fuel fairly completely. By the rather straightforward reasoning that a car spitting incompletely burnt fuel out the exhaust pipe won't pass CA emissions standards (used in about half the US states), I think we can safely say that doesn't apply.
Now - Smaller droplets burn faster, so it makes sense this would boost torque (for those who don't know what a dynanometer does). That does not equate to better fuel efficiency, however. And if the head/valves/injectors/whatever can't deal with a peak pressure significantly greater than the intended design limit, you may end up paying a hell of a lot in repairs for that small boost in pickup.
You can measure a lot of things, but they don't mean "better". The classic mileage booster of adding water to your fuel also "changes" the fuel in a measurable way. It also makes your car run like crap and rots your valves and fuel pump.
Don't get me wrong, I would love this device to really work... But we don't need a magic wand, we need to look at why Europe can have 65MPG Ford (yes, the same Ford that has given us 15 years of single-digit MPG tanks) diesel hybrids, while we piss and moan in the US about whether to rase CAFE standards to a "competitively unfair" 35MPG.
The republican VP candidate is usually smarter than this year. Not necessarily 'better', mind you, but usually at least allowed to speak in public. [/troll]
I don't know why you would consider that a troll... I really have no clue what people see in Palin - She has almost no qualifications; can't speak intelligently on any issues, whether political, economic, or even social (the ultimate soft-ball of "hard" questions); and even her home life (off-limits unless she brings it up yet again? BS!) looks like a disaster in the light of her own set of beliefs.
And the hypocrisy of the pundits... The same traits for which they blast Biden, they praise in Palin. Do they not even listen to themselves???
Fortunately, the VP has no actual responsibilities except to break ties in the senate, but still, it utterly astonishes me that she has helped McCain's campaign... God forbid he actually die in office, we'd end up looking back at Bush as an outright intellectual by comparison.
And for the fanboys of one party or the other - I consider both parties basically identical, just different masks on the same crooks.
Or will they just open up reserved addresses or something stupid like that?
The world already uses more than 4 billion IP addresses, thanks to those reserved ranges (we probably have over a hundred million just in the 192.168 range).
Open them up, and watch the internet crumble instantly.