What makes a fan a fan...
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
...is that a fan enjoys reading everything his or her idol writes, regardless of whether it's much good.
Of course it isn't going to be any good.
Of course I'm going to read it.
People who say "his earlier stuff is better than his later stuff" are thinking of the forties and fifties,when he really hit his stride. His earliest stuff reads all too much like "Doc" Smith, to my way of thinking.
I don't expect very much from this, but it will be nice to have it.
"Initial customer feedback from the entertainment industry in general has been very favorable," Eades added.
That's funny, when I buy a computer, I tend to think of myself as the customer, not "the music industry."
Why can't we see "canals" by squinting at photos?
on
A Traveler's Guide To Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Something that's been bothering me for years.
Why can't I see "canals" by looking at high-quality photographs of Mars from a distance, and/or squinting?
Percival Lowell and his team at Flagstaff published detailed drawings in which there was a veritable spiderweb of canals, dozens and dozens of them spanning the whole planet.
It's now accepted that these long, linear features were a kind of optical illusion.
But why can't I experience the optical illusion for myself?
An interesting near-contemporary account is givenin this article in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica "Of the reality of the better marked ones there can be no doubt, as they have been seen repeatedly by many observers, including those at the Lick Observatory, and have actually been photographed at the Lowell Observatory. The doubt is therefore confined to the vast network of lines so fine that they never certainly have been seen elsewhere than at Flagstaff. The difficulty of pronouncing upon their reality arises from the fact that we have to do mainly with objects not plainly visible (or, as Lowell contends, not plainly visible elsewhere). The question therefore becomes one of psychological optics rather than of astronomy. When the question is considered from this point of view it is found that combinations of light and shaded areas very different from continuous lines, will, under certain conditions, be interpreted by the eye as such lines; and when such is the case, long practice by an observer, however carefully conducted, may confirm him in this interpretation. "
I want a cell phone with a big honking gyro that resists any attempt to change its orientation in space. When I put it on my belt clip and try to turn a corner, I want it to precess, fall off my belt, hit the ground with the antenna downward, and slowly rotates around in a cone-shaped evolute. I want it to exercise my wrist muscles when I pick it up and clip it on again.
It would be JUST as useful as that silly tilt control, and a lot cooler.
I also want it to have flip-out accessories for clipping nails, opening cans, and extracting stones from horse's hooves.
I've given up on the things ever being reliable ways to make telephone calls.
The cause of the current problem is only partially due to insecure Microsoft software. It is very noteworthy that Windows 98 and 95 were immune from the latest round of malware (W32/Blaster, W32/Welchia, W32/Sobig.F). The main cause is monoculture--the dominance of a single operating system, Windows NT and its variants.
What we need is a truly competitive market in which many operating systems compete, no single operating system dominates, and a market that uses many operating systems therefore demands and rewards inoperability and writing software to standards rather than writing to a single vendor's API.
Why don't we have it? Because Microsoft was allowed to get a monopoly and the Justice Department is not doing its job and breaking it up.
It wouldn't be any different if IBM were the dominant company--as it was a few decades ago--or Apple, or what have you.
The problem is not Microsoft. The problem is monopolization. And the answer is not the free market--monopolies exist only when the market has already failed.
specifically "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams," by Tom deMarco and Timothy Lister, and leave them around.
Not that it will do any good. It's too late.
But it does make a number of points, one being that cubicles reduce productivity. (They have some pointed things to say about telephones and paging systems, too).
It's interesting to see how this is all playing out. No doubt in the future digital bandwidth will be high enough that there's no quality tradeoff, but in the present I find it fascinating that, on the one hand you have audiophiles insisting that CD's are an impossibly compromised format while, on the other hand, the public seems to be perfectly happy with the distinctly lower quality of.mp3 (and.aac).
Now we have DVD's which are far inferior to, say, traditional 70mm projection to begin with... people watching DVD's on small portable players... and, soon, people watching highly compressed digital video on even tinier players.
Will cheap, plentiful, convenient low-quality digital media undercut the market for HDTV, huge plasma displays, etc?
I think the very last thing I would ever have expected would be for digital media to result in a general lowering of quality--not the subtle lowering audiophiles claim to be so disturbed by, but gross, obvious lowering.
Perhaps in a few years I will be sitting down to enjoy Lawrence of Arabia in 640x480 pixels at 15 fps...
What year was it? Maybe 1982 or 1983... Lotus 1-2-3 was the hottest success story in the history of the personal computer.
Not just the trade press, but the the mainstream business press was raving about the hot new product, Ovation. It was going to have more rows and columns that Lotus ever dreamed of. It had fabulous screen shots and videos showing how it would work. And it had really, really professional management, MBA's all, who were doing the best job yet of raising financing--something like $7 million--lining up distributions deals with Tandy Radio Shack, and so forth and so on.
It was taken absolutely seriously by everyone from Byte to The Wall Street Journal. Everyone thought it would be a serious rival to 1-2-3.
The business geniuses who dreamed it up did everything right and didn't miss on a single detail. Oh, well, one little detail maybe--they never started development of the product.
No, no, NO! Give it a try. I've been able to see Mars just about everywhere... most recently in the parking lot of Crescent Ridge Dairy in Sharon, MA, the salient point being that the parking lot is FULL of extremely bright security lights. When you look up, you can just barely see Vega... but you can see Mars easily.
I've seen Mars from our bathroom window, with the dirty glass pane and the screen in place, on a night which was distinctly hazy, despite the lights from the neighbors house and a streetlight.
Just go outside anywhere and look vaguely toward the southeast anytime after about 10 p.m. If you don't see it, walk a little bit so that you can see different parts of the sky through the gaps in the surrounding buildings. Eventually you'll see a distinct orangy light. It will be Mars.
Anytime you're outdoors at night, just look for it. You'll find it.
If you can see the Moon from your location, you will almost certainly be able to see Mars. It is much brighter than the very brightest star.
Oh, come on. Mars is in opposition every couple of years. Does anyone think it will look THAT much bigger and brighter subtending 25.1 seconds this year than it did in Jun 2001 subtending 20.5 seconds?
And if you do care about sitting in the front row of the theatre instead of two rows back, well, Mars is in opposition near the point where the two orbits are closest every 15 or 16 years or so. In August of 1971 it subtended 24.8 seconds of arc.
This once-in-60000-years or whatever is a silly technicality. There will be one magic bit of time lasting--how long?--when it will set the Guinness record for closest approach in umpty-thousand years but your view of it will depend a lot more on the weather and the local street lighting and whether your neighbor's tree is in the way.
It's a great time to look up and see Mars looking so nice bright and red. Or, at least, distinctly orangish to a middle-aged eyeball who can barely detect a difference in color between Vega and Arcturus. And if you have any kind of telescope, you really should run out to your nearest schoolyard and point it at that bright orangy star in the southeast.
But almost equally good opportunities occur every couple of years.
"Have you heard/About the stars/Next July we collide with Mars/Well, did you evah?/What a swell party this is!"--Cole Porter
...and that's worth pointing out, too. The three viruses/worms of recent days are all W32 worms.
Microsoft's legacy older "home" operating systems (Windows 95 and 98) have, in practice, more security than the supposedly industrial-strength enterprise caliber NT-derived systems
There is no security in obscurity, but there is a definite measure of security in diversity. For national security reasons as well as economic reasons, we should not permit any OS to dominate the installed base.
...with bogus "bounced mail" messages, I'd say, yes, it's time for a change.
I've yet to receive Sobig.F in a direct mail from another person (i.e. the people who send me email apparently have clean systems).
But I've now received between fifty and a hundred copies of the Sobig.F, all in bounce messages from servers. So apparently I've sent email a lot of people who a) have the Sobig.F virus, and b) have a lot of bad email addresses in their address books.
Each of these messages is about 100K in size. That can fill up a mailbox quickly.
But why should any server include the attachments when they bounce a message. Why? Why? Even in the absense of viruses, all I need to know is enough to identify the message that didn't get through.
The article just says it's technologically feasible. How boring.
In the movie The Right Stuff, and, IIRC in the book,a congressman says to an astronaut "What makes your rockets go up?" The astronaut starts to saying something about reaction masses and exhaust velocity, and the comgressman cuts him short and says, "No. What makes your rockets go up is funding."
Of course a Moon base is technologically feasible. Goodness, if we're just talking technological feasibility we should be able to be a lot more imaginative than that. (Project Orion, anyone?).
But unless someone "salts" the Moon with gold nuggets (I believe it's in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes in which someone starts a rumor that there's gold on the Moon, and so many people start heading for the Moon that the person who started the rumor figures there must be something in it after all and joins them) I don't see how it's going to happen.
(Another nugget from The People, Yes "Another baby in Cuyahuga County, Ohio--why did she ask: 'Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?'" I'd give a nickel to know whether Heinlein read that before writing "The Man who Sold the Moon.")
During [Aurora, CO's] annual bluegrass festival in 2000, officers posted signs saying "Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead" and "Narcotics canine ahead". They then hid on a hill, clad in camouflage, and watched for any people who turned around or appeared to toss drugs out of their windows after seeing the signs.
Stephen Corbin Roth, 60, was pulled over for littering after he threw out what appeared to be a marijuana pipe. Police found a marijuana pipe and mushrooms during a search of his car and he appealed his conviction on possession of drug paraphernalia to the appeals court.
Under the procedure that day, an officer down the road would be told by radio to pull over any vehicle seen littering while an officer on the hill would run down and find the items thrown away.
The appeals court ruled drug checkpoints are illegal because motorists are stopped at random and without reasonable suspicion of committing a crime. However, in Roth's case, the court concluded that finding the marijuana pipe gave the officers probable cause to stop Roth's vehicle.
According to a radio report on NPR, Tampa did not spend money directly on the system. The surveillance cameras were already in place (and will remain in place) and Identix provided the software on some kind of free-trial or beta basis. Of course, I'm sure a great deal of police time = money was wasted on training, etc.
The reporter discussed the issue of false positives with the interviewee, in a somewhat vague way. The reporter said, sensibly enough, something like "Isn't the problem that if you require too many measurements to match you don't get identifications, and that if you only require a few you get false positives?" The interviewee concurred. I got the impression that the police department might have insisted that the system be tuned to a level where they were not wasting time on false positives, and at that level there were simply no matches.
The reporter also asked (also sensibly) whether the apparent lack of success could have been because the system's installation was widely publicized and the bad guys knew better than to show up in Ybor City. Interestingly enough, the interviewee said something like "If I believed that, it would be a great thing and I'd want to keep the system in place forever." I was, however, left with the distinct impression that the interviewee did NOT believe that.
...when someone ascends to a high enough position that they CAN change a name, they DO change the name. It's a way of assuring themselves that they're actually in charge.
It's simple: if you only issue orders that have a rational reason, you can never tell whether your subordinates are obeying them because you actually hold power, or simply because the orders make sense.
On the other hand, if you issue orders that are irrational, you can tell whether or not you actually have power, but if people obey them it will hurt the company which, in the long run, could affect your career.
The only safe way to demonstrate your authority is by issuing an order that is _arbitrary_ and has no significant effect for better or for worse.
Of course, there's always a cover story about how the new name, color scheme, typography, etc. "projects a more contemporary corporate image." (In the case of a magazine, whenever a new editor takes over they always revamp the typeface and the amount of whitespace around things, and the stated reason is always "to help you find information faster.")
See Antoine de Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince"--the part where the Little Prince visits the tiny planet with the king who can command the sun to set, but only after checking an almanac to make sure that he issues the command at the right time.
I'm completely baffled by what seems like a totally pointless system. If you're going to put a pair of "glasses on the computer," all you need to do is use a pair of lenses that have the right focal length to view the screen sharply, and the right amount of "prism" to provide a comfortable amount of convergence to the eyes.
This is essentially what the Wheatstone stereoscope--the familiar Victorian parlor stereoscope--did, well over a century ago.
The cellophane and the polarizers add nothing much useful to this, except to contribute eyestrain by forcing you to become crosseyed or walleyed.
And the obvious question is: how is a system that requires you to hold your head in a fixed position better than one that forces you to wear glasses but allows at least a small amount of freedom of head motion?
...should "actually *look* at the material before they" issue that patent. Good heavens, that would be like the Boston Strangler to the multibillion dollar sideways swinging industry.
For as long as there have been micros, we have played the game of "by guess and by gosh."
Why doesn't every card and component in a system have a clearly marked indication of its power requirement?
And why don't power supplies issue unmistakable warnings when the system draws more power than the supply can reliably provide?
Every fuse and circuit breaker in a house has the amperage clearly marked on it, and so does every appliance.
Why can't the insides of our computers come up to the same standards as our toasters and washing machines? This isn't rocket science, this is simple arithmetic.
When we did our first (thickwire) Ethernet installation, we were impressed with all the warnings about the importance of maintaining, IIRC, a six inch bend radius. Just for fun, we took a scrap piece with the idea of bending it too sharply just to see what would happen. What we found was that the cable was very, very hard to bend. It seemed that you'd need tools--or a very muscular person trying very deliberately to bend it--to violate the spec.
So, what's the situation with optical fiber? A 13 mm bend diameter sounds likea pretty sharp bend to me. Is it something that you could easily do unintentionally? Or only something that happens when you know you're in a tight spot and are deliberately forcing it?
Ethics? Where was the human studies committee?
on
Smart Kindergarten
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Uh, it doesn't say anywhere in the article that this got a signoff from any human studies committee. Shouldn't it have? It seems to me that this study presents an ethical issue or two
Precisely why is it more valuable scientifically to track kids' classroom interactions than it would be to track the interactions of, say, executives working in a corporation?
My cynical answer: it isn't. They're studying kids because no adult would ever be likely to give permission to be studied in that way.
This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the "Fernald Science Club" of the fifties in which MIT scientists fed mentally retarded kids radioactive tracers in nutritional experiments. It wasn't supposed to harm the kids,and it probably didn't, but it was highly unethical anyway--even by the standards of the time.
In That Hideous Strength, one of C. S. Lewis's characters remarks on the fact that performing experiments on children is considered wrong, yet it's perfectly all right to put the children in an "experimental school."
As we all know, market forces are omniscient and omnivident. The market suffereth long, and is kind; the market envieth not; the market vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.
So, what we need is an online futures market in which cosmologists could put their money where their mouth is.
You say the universe will collapse in a big splat in 20 billion years? Fine, bet on it. 20 billion years if the universe hasn't collapsed, you'd better pay off. 20 billion years' worth of interest should make you think carefully before mouthing off!
You say there's a parallel universe nearby? OK, plunk down your money. If there is one, you win. (And your counterpart in the parallel universe, of course, loses. What point is there in parallel universes unless we can transfer money between them?)
An asteroid might slam into the Earth a year from now, destroying all human life, but if you manage to pick the exact day it happens, you could be rich!
Slashdot Mirror
...is that a fan enjoys reading everything his or her idol writes, regardless of whether it's much good.
Of course it isn't going to be any good.
Of course I'm going to read it.
People who say "his earlier stuff is better than his later stuff" are thinking of the forties and fifties,when he really hit his stride. His earliest stuff reads all too much like "Doc" Smith, to my way of thinking.
I don't expect very much from this, but it will be nice to have it.
"Initial customer feedback from the entertainment industry in general has been very favorable," Eades added.
That's funny, when I buy a computer, I tend to think of myself as the customer, not "the music industry."
Something that's been bothering me for years.
Why can't I see "canals" by looking at high-quality photographs of Mars from a distance, and/or squinting?
Percival Lowell and his team at Flagstaff published detailed drawings in which there was a veritable spiderweb of canals, dozens and dozens of them spanning the whole planet.
It's now accepted that these long, linear features were a kind of optical illusion.
But why can't I experience the optical illusion for myself?
An interesting near-contemporary account is givenin this article in the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica "Of the reality of the better marked ones there can be no doubt, as they have been seen repeatedly by many observers, including those at the Lick Observatory, and have actually been photographed at the Lowell Observatory. The doubt is therefore confined to the vast network of lines so fine that they never certainly have been seen elsewhere than at Flagstaff. The difficulty of pronouncing upon their reality arises from the fact that we have to do mainly with objects not plainly visible (or, as Lowell contends, not plainly visible elsewhere). The question therefore becomes one of psychological optics rather than of astronomy. When the question is considered from this point of view it is found that combinations of light and shaded areas very different from continuous lines, will, under certain conditions, be interpreted by the eye as such lines; and when such is the case, long practice by an observer, however carefully conducted, may confirm him in this interpretation. "
I want a cell phone with a big honking gyro that resists any attempt to change its orientation in space. When I put it on my belt clip and try to turn a corner, I want it to precess, fall off my belt, hit the ground with the antenna downward, and slowly rotates around in a cone-shaped evolute. I want it to exercise my wrist muscles when I pick it up and clip it on again.
It would be JUST as useful as that silly tilt control, and a lot cooler.
I also want it to have flip-out accessories for clipping nails, opening cans, and extracting stones from horse's hooves.
I've given up on the things ever being reliable ways to make telephone calls.
The cause of the current problem is only partially due to insecure Microsoft software. It is very noteworthy that Windows 98 and 95 were immune from the latest round of malware (W32/Blaster, W32/Welchia, W32/Sobig.F). The main cause is monoculture--the dominance of a single operating system, Windows NT and its variants.
What we need is a truly competitive market in which many operating systems compete, no single operating system dominates, and a market that uses many operating systems therefore demands and rewards inoperability and writing software to standards rather than writing to a single vendor's API.
Why don't we have it? Because Microsoft was allowed to get a monopoly and the Justice Department is not doing its job and breaking it up.
It wouldn't be any different if IBM were the dominant company--as it was a few decades ago--or Apple, or what have you.
The problem is not Microsoft. The problem is monopolization. And the answer is not the free market--monopolies exist only when the market has already failed.
Dear Bill: Would you please give me one good reason why a system intended for home use needs to implement remote procedure calls at all?
Would you please point out one benefit this provides to the average home user?
Stocks are property, yes.
Bonds are property, yes.
Machines land, buildings, are property, yes.
A job is property,
No, nix, nah nah.
--Carl Sandburg, The People, Yes, section 38
And time to rethink the concept of "property." If songs are property, and words are property, and ideas are property, why shouldn't a job be property?
specifically "Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams," by Tom deMarco and Timothy Lister, and leave them around.
Not that it will do any good. It's too late.
But it does make a number of points, one being that cubicles reduce productivity. (They have some pointed things to say about telephones and paging systems, too).
It's interesting to see how this is all playing out. No doubt in the future digital bandwidth will be high enough that there's no quality tradeoff, but in the present I find it fascinating that, on the one hand you have audiophiles insisting that CD's are an impossibly compromised format while, on the other hand, the public seems to be perfectly happy with the distinctly lower quality of .mp3 (and .aac).
Now we have DVD's which are far inferior to, say, traditional 70mm projection to begin with... people watching DVD's on small portable players... and, soon, people watching highly compressed digital video on even tinier players.
Will cheap, plentiful, convenient low-quality digital media undercut the market for HDTV, huge plasma displays, etc?
I think the very last thing I would ever have expected would be for digital media to result in a general lowering of quality--not the subtle lowering audiophiles claim to be so disturbed by, but gross, obvious lowering.
Perhaps in a few years I will be sitting down to enjoy Lawrence of Arabia in 640x480 pixels at 15 fps...
What year was it? Maybe 1982 or 1983... Lotus 1-2-3 was the hottest success story in the history of the personal computer.
Not just the trade press, but the the mainstream business press was raving about the hot new product, Ovation. It was going to have more rows and columns that Lotus ever dreamed of. It had fabulous screen shots and videos showing how it would work. And it had really, really professional management, MBA's all, who were doing the best job yet of raising financing--something like $7 million--lining up distributions deals with Tandy Radio Shack, and so forth and so on.
It was taken absolutely seriously by everyone from Byte to The Wall Street Journal. Everyone thought it would be a serious rival to 1-2-3.
The business geniuses who dreamed it up did everything right and didn't miss on a single detail. Oh, well, one little detail maybe--they never started development of the product.
No, no, NO! Give it a try. I've been able to see Mars just about everywhere... most recently in the parking lot of Crescent Ridge Dairy in Sharon, MA, the salient point being that the parking lot is FULL of extremely bright security lights. When you look up, you can just barely see Vega... but you can see Mars easily.
I've seen Mars from our bathroom window, with the dirty glass pane and the screen in place, on a night which was distinctly hazy, despite the lights from the neighbors house and a streetlight.
Just go outside anywhere and look vaguely toward the southeast anytime after about 10 p.m. If you don't see it, walk a little bit so that you can see different parts of the sky through the gaps in the surrounding buildings. Eventually you'll see a distinct orangy light. It will be Mars.
Anytime you're outdoors at night, just look for it. You'll find it.
If you can see the Moon from your location, you will almost certainly be able to see Mars. It is much brighter than the very brightest star.
Oh, come on. Mars is in opposition every couple of years. Does anyone think it will look THAT much bigger and brighter subtending 25.1 seconds this year than it did in Jun 2001 subtending 20.5 seconds?
And if you do care about sitting in the front row of the theatre instead of two rows back, well, Mars is in opposition near the point where the two orbits are closest every 15 or 16 years or so. In August of 1971 it subtended 24.8 seconds of arc.
This once-in-60000-years or whatever is a silly technicality. There will be one magic bit of time lasting--how long?--when it will set the Guinness record for closest approach in umpty-thousand years but your view of it will depend a lot more on the weather and the local street lighting and whether your neighbor's tree is in the way.
It's a great time to look up and see Mars looking so nice bright and red. Or, at least, distinctly orangish to a middle-aged eyeball who can barely detect a difference in color between Vega and Arcturus. And if you have any kind of telescope, you really should run out to your nearest schoolyard and point it at that bright orangy star in the southeast.
But almost equally good opportunities occur every couple of years.
"Have you heard/About the stars/Next July we collide with Mars/Well, did you evah?/What a swell party this is!"--Cole Porter
...and that's worth pointing out, too. The three viruses/worms of recent days are all W32 worms.
Microsoft's legacy older "home" operating systems (Windows 95 and 98) have, in practice, more security than the supposedly industrial-strength enterprise caliber NT-derived systems
There is no security in obscurity, but there is a definite measure of security in diversity. For national security reasons as well as economic reasons, we should not permit any OS to dominate the installed base.
...with bogus "bounced mail" messages, I'd say, yes, it's time for a change.
I've yet to receive Sobig.F in a direct mail from another person (i.e. the people who send me email apparently have clean systems).
But I've now received between fifty and a hundred copies of the Sobig.F, all in bounce messages from servers. So apparently I've sent email a lot of people who a) have the Sobig.F virus, and b) have a lot of bad email addresses in their address books.
Each of these messages is about 100K in size. That can fill up a mailbox quickly.
But why should any server include the attachments when they bounce a message. Why? Why? Even in the absense of viruses, all I need to know is enough to identify the message that didn't get through.
The article just says it's technologically feasible. How boring.
In the movie The Right Stuff, and, IIRC in the book,a congressman says to an astronaut "What makes your rockets go up?" The astronaut starts to saying something about reaction masses and exhaust velocity, and the comgressman cuts him short and says, "No. What makes your rockets go up is funding."
Of course a Moon base is technologically feasible. Goodness, if we're just talking technological feasibility we should be able to be a lot more imaginative than that. (Project Orion, anyone?).
But unless someone "salts" the Moon with gold nuggets (I believe it's in Carl Sandburg's The People, Yes in which someone starts a rumor that there's gold on the Moon, and so many people start heading for the Moon that the person who started the rumor figures there must be something in it after all and joins them) I don't see how it's going to happen.
(Another nugget from The People, Yes "Another baby in Cuyahuga County, Ohio--why did she ask: 'Papa, what is the moon supposed to advertise?'" I'd give a nickel to know whether Heinlein read that before writing "The Man who Sold the Moon.")
According to this story
During [Aurora, CO's] annual bluegrass festival in 2000, officers posted signs saying "Narcotics checkpoint, one mile ahead" and "Narcotics canine ahead". They then hid on a hill, clad in camouflage, and watched for any people who turned around or appeared to toss drugs out of their windows after seeing the signs.
Stephen Corbin Roth, 60, was pulled over for littering after he threw out what appeared to be a marijuana pipe. Police found a marijuana pipe and mushrooms during a search of his car and he appealed his conviction on possession of drug paraphernalia to the appeals court.
Under the procedure that day, an officer down the road would be told by radio to pull over any vehicle seen littering while an officer on the hill would run down and find the items thrown away.
The appeals court ruled drug checkpoints are illegal because motorists are stopped at random and without reasonable suspicion of committing a crime. However, in Roth's case, the court concluded that finding the marijuana pipe gave the officers probable cause to stop Roth's vehicle.
According to a radio report on NPR, Tampa did not spend money directly on the system. The surveillance cameras were already in place (and will remain in place) and Identix provided the software on some kind of free-trial or beta basis. Of course, I'm sure a great deal of police time = money was wasted on training, etc.
The reporter discussed the issue of false positives with the interviewee, in a somewhat vague way. The reporter said, sensibly enough, something like "Isn't the problem that if you require too many measurements to match you don't get identifications, and that if you only require a few you get false positives?" The interviewee concurred. I got the impression that the police department might have insisted that the system be tuned to a level where they were not wasting time on false positives, and at that level there were simply no matches.
The reporter also asked (also sensibly) whether the apparent lack of success could have been because the system's installation was widely publicized and the bad guys knew better than to show up in Ybor City. Interestingly enough, the interviewee said something like "If I believed that, it would be a great thing and I'd want to keep the system in place forever." I was, however, left with the distinct impression that the interviewee did NOT believe that.
...when someone ascends to a high enough position that they CAN change a name, they DO change the name. It's a way of assuring themselves that they're actually in charge.
It's simple: if you only issue orders that have a rational reason, you can never tell whether your subordinates are obeying them because you actually hold power, or simply because the orders make sense.
On the other hand, if you issue orders that are irrational, you can tell whether or not you actually have power, but if people obey them it will hurt the company which, in the long run, could affect your career.
The only safe way to demonstrate your authority is by issuing an order that is _arbitrary_ and has no significant effect for better or for worse.
Of course, there's always a cover story about how the new name, color scheme, typography, etc. "projects a more contemporary corporate image." (In the case of a magazine, whenever a new editor takes over they always revamp the typeface and the amount of whitespace around things, and the stated reason is always "to help you find information faster.")
See Antoine de Saint Exupery's "The Little Prince"--the part where the Little Prince visits the tiny planet with the king who can command the sun to set, but only after checking an almanac to make sure that he issues the command at the right time.
I just wrote a quick demonstration program to find them...
I'm completely baffled by what seems like a totally pointless system. If you're going to put a pair of "glasses on the computer," all you need to do is use a pair of lenses that have the right focal length to view the screen sharply, and the right amount of "prism" to provide a comfortable amount of convergence to the eyes.
This is essentially what the Wheatstone stereoscope--the familiar Victorian parlor stereoscope--did, well over a century ago.
The cellophane and the polarizers add nothing much useful to this, except to contribute eyestrain by forcing you to become crosseyed or walleyed.
And the obvious question is: how is a system that requires you to hold your head in a fixed position better than one that forces you to wear glasses but allows at least a small amount of freedom of head motion?
...should "actually *look* at the material before they" issue that patent. Good heavens, that would be like the Boston Strangler to the multibillion dollar sideways swinging industry.
For as long as there have been micros, we have played the game of "by guess and by gosh."
Why doesn't every card and component in a system have a clearly marked indication of its power requirement?
And why don't power supplies issue unmistakable warnings when the system draws more power than the supply can reliably provide?
Every fuse and circuit breaker in a house has the amperage clearly marked on it, and so does every appliance.
Why can't the insides of our computers come up to the same standards as our toasters and washing machines? This isn't rocket science, this is simple arithmetic.
When we did our first (thickwire) Ethernet installation, we were impressed with all the warnings about the importance of maintaining, IIRC, a six inch bend radius. Just for fun, we took a scrap piece with the idea of bending it too sharply just to see what would happen. What we found was that the cable was very, very hard to bend. It seemed that you'd need tools--or a very muscular person trying very deliberately to bend it--to violate the spec.
So, what's the situation with optical fiber? A 13 mm bend diameter sounds likea pretty sharp bend to me. Is it something that you could easily do unintentionally? Or only something that happens when you know you're in a tight spot and are deliberately forcing it?
Uh, it doesn't say anywhere in the article that this got a signoff from any human studies committee. Shouldn't it have? It seems to me that this study presents an ethical issue or two
Precisely why is it more valuable scientifically to track kids' classroom interactions than it would be to track the interactions of, say, executives working in a corporation?
My cynical answer: it isn't. They're studying kids because no adult would ever be likely to give permission to be studied in that way.
This is uncomfortably reminiscent of the "Fernald Science Club" of the fifties in which MIT scientists fed mentally retarded kids radioactive tracers in nutritional experiments. It wasn't supposed to harm the kids,and it probably didn't, but it was highly unethical anyway--even by the standards of the time.
In That Hideous Strength, one of C. S. Lewis's characters remarks on the fact that performing experiments on children is considered wrong, yet it's perfectly all right to put the children in an "experimental school."
As we all know, market forces are omniscient and omnivident. The market suffereth long, and is kind; the market envieth not; the market vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up.
So, what we need is an online futures market in which cosmologists could put their money where their mouth is.
You say the universe will collapse in a big splat in 20 billion years? Fine, bet on it. 20 billion years if the universe hasn't collapsed, you'd better pay off. 20 billion years' worth of interest should make you think carefully before mouthing off!
You say there's a parallel universe nearby? OK, plunk down your money. If there is one, you win. (And your counterpart in the parallel universe, of course, loses. What point is there in parallel universes unless we can transfer money between them?)
An asteroid might slam into the Earth a year from now, destroying all human life, but if you manage to pick the exact day it happens, you could be rich!