There was a cross on permanent display in the chapel. Because the room is used for secular purposes, and by other non-Christian groups, the decision was made to only display the cross during Christian events, on Sundays, and on major Christian holidays.
The Chapel (not a church -- no full-time clergy are employed) is indeed old. However, Anglican chapels of that era did not display. The cross in question was donated to The College in the 1930s when a parish in Williamsburg purchased a new cross for their own chapel. It's display was actually historically inaccurate, especially considering that the building dates from the 1600s.
Likewise, the poorly-named Sex Workers Art Show made an appearance at W&M before the current president, and has also appeared at other Virginia universities without as much as a murmur of controversy.
It's a complex issue, but not nearly as complex as Bill O'Reilly would have you believe.
There's a bit of a difference between spy satellites and CCTV cameras in highly populated public spaces. CCTV, for instance, won't follow you into your own back yard, or track you along the highway.
Likewise, CCTV footage is quite a bit more useful to a jury than an eyewitness account or satellite surveillance. I'm not a big fan of the "big brother" attitude, but CCTV systems do actually seem to be a legitimately good crime-fighting tool with an admirably low rate of false positives. Eyewitness accounts have been conclusively and scientifically proven to be horrendously bad.
Like I've said.... I'm ambivalent about how this is all panning out. Spy satellites seem to give the government a bit too much power, although CCTV seems a whole lot more innocuous. If you're walking down the streets of New York or London, chances are that somebody's already watching anyway.
Somewhat offtopic, but it would seem that universities are bowing to pressure from a lot more than the RIAA these days.
Earlier in the week, The College of William & Mary fired its president on ideological grounds, after he removed a religious symbol from a public building, and chose to uphold students' 1st Amendment rights in light of a controversial event. The ensuing conservative smear campaign was too much for The College to handle, and he was dismissed.
How is it that Universities, which have historically been strongholds for civil rights and liberties are now ceding so easily to external demands?
Hopefully, we'll move to a point where we have decent alternatives to incandescent bulbs for a wide range of applications.
Right now, I'd like to find a nice alternative to CFLs that doesn't require mercury or other moderately hazardous chemicals to manufacture. After that, we can rest for a bit, and work on reducing energy consumption elsewhere. The amount of power used by CFLs is absolutely negligible compared to most other devices.
Oh, and get rid of the damn street lamps. I'm not even an astronomer, but I can appreciate that the earth doesn't need to be lit up like a torch while we sleep. There's no reason for the parking lot of my grocery store to be illuminated 8 hours after it closes. Or just install motion sensors....
The system is completely voluntary, so privacy concerns should be kept to an absolute minimum... The only reason you'd want to use this system is to permanently attach you identity to your photos, thus intentionally sacrificing a bit of privacy.
In return, you receive nearly-absolute proof of ownership for said photos. This prevents some twat from pulling my photo off of Flickr, selling it to Reuters, and pocketing the profits. However, it doesn't do anything prevent the photo from being copied or propagating across the web (which is something that most "traditional" DRM systems would do).
It seems like a very nice compromise wherein the rights of the content producers and end-users are both protected. End-users are free to do what they please with the content (a la Creative Commons), while the content-producers may retain ownership of their own work, and reserve commercial rights to that work (which they're perfectly entitled to do!).
The "Space Shuttle" system was, and remains, one of the most complex and sophisticated 'machines that moves' ever designed and built. This doesn't strike me as necessarily being a good thing. Quite the opposite -- with the space shuttle, there are literally billions of things that can go wrong. Challenger failed because a few bits of rubber had slightly different thermal properties than were originally anticipated.
A capsule-based launch system offers far greater simplicity, and also offers numerous modes of recovery in the event of a failure. Apollo 13 was nearly torn to shreds, and managed to orbit the moon and land safely. The presence of a Launch-Escape-System also adds a very significant layer of safety against booster failure and launchpad incidents.
Do we even know that those plans even still exist?
Buran/Energia was certainly a cool platform, although it very well may have had its own set of faults apart from the Shuttle. It does make me sad that it only flew a single time.
As it stands, Russia's next-gen vehicle, Kliper, offers the closest thing to a "best of both worlds" solution, and stands a good chance of becoming operational before Orion.
Are the designs to the Space Shuttle even worth stealing? It's thus far proven to be an expensive and unreliable launch platform.
If anything, China would serve itself better by looking to the North, and copying Soyuz. Hell... I'm sure the Russians would be willing to sell the designs/equipment for most of their spacecraft for a very reasonable price, given their perpetual funding woes.
Even ignoring all that, it's still 1970s technology.
If you want an extremely liberal license, use the zlib license instead -- it includes an indemnity clause, which is a very important thing to have if you want to limit your legal liability. As a bonus, it's also human-readable.
/* zlib.h -- interface of the 'zlib' general purpose compression library
version 1.2.2, October 3rd, 2004
Copyright (C) 1995-2004 Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler
This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied
warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages
arising from the use of this software.
Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any purpose,
including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it
freely, subject to the following restrictions:
1. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented; you must not
claim that you wrote the original software. If you use this software
in a product, an acknowledgment in the product documentation would be
appreciated but is not required.
2. Altered source versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not be
misrepresented as being the original software.
3. This notice may not be removed or altered from any source distribution.
Jean-loup Gailly jloup@gzip.org
Mark Adler madler@alumni.caltech.edu
Obama wants to audit the government, and make changes where deemed necessary after a reasonable consultation process. Trim the fat, but keep the government operational.
Ron Paul wants to dismantle the federal government, hand power to the states, and turn the US into something more closely resembling the EU. That's not reform -- that's radical, and I can very easily see why the media and the public don't care much for it. There's also the small problem that the system of checks and balances in congress would almost certainly prevent him from enacting any of his ideas into law.
Similarly, his voting record doesn't bode well for a president. Sure, he voted against Iraq --- he voted against nearly everything placed in front of him. Would you like a president that vetoes everything?
Given the choice, I'd pick Torvalds over RMS any day.
Although the analogy's not perfect, Torvalds is the Steve Jobs of the OSS world, whilst RMS is Ballmer.
(And please don't view this as 100% of a flame. RMS's contributions to the Open Source world have been vast. However, I don't think he's particularly good as a spokesman or to be "at the helm" of Open-Source development. He's also a bit too stubborn on his ideologies, as shown with the GPLv3 debacle.)
Like I said. It's the greatest 80s action flick ever made. I'm putting it in the same league as the original Die Hard, not Schindler's List.
24 isn't meant to be sophisticated. It's a simple pleasure, and you'd be nuts to treat it as anything else.
However, I agree with you about Lost. The first season was absolutely brilliant, but they took it too far. It seems that the writers didn't actually have a conclusion in mind for the series (reportedly, so many networks turned down the pilot that the writers felt it was doomed, and never made a proper outline of the plot)
I've actually been rather impressed with some of the new TV programming over the past few years. Also remember that 99% of anything is crap (and that includes reality shows)
Lost is far from formulaic and repetitive, although the writers have been taking it a bit too far, and need to start winding down the series (ideally in one or two seasons, rather than the proposed three). I lost track halfway through the second season, so I can't comment on how it's been recently.
Heroes is one of the most popular shows today, and has terrific nerd-appeal. The current season has been somewhat subpar, but the original series was engaging and enjoyable.
Battlestar Galactica is easily the best-written and produced Sci-Fi series to air in years. It's also quite a bit more palatable for normal audiences.
24 is the best 80s action movie ever made. Although I don't particularly agree with its politics, it's quite an engaging storyline.
House is quite good. Perhaps becoming a bit repetitive, but definitely the best of the "medical" shows.
Mythbusters? How can you read slashdot and not love mythbusters, even in spite of their disregard for the scientific method?
The Daily Show and Colbert Report singlehandedly got an apathetic generation interested in politics. That's no small feat.
Over in the UK, they've got Top Gear, The Mighty Boosh, the current incarnation of Dr Who, along with a fantastic array of other programming that doesn't make it to the US -- Thanks to advances in filmmaking technology, their documentaries and nature series are also absolutely captivating to watch.
(After writing this post, I feel the need to assert that I'm not a couch potato! The magic of TiVo lets me save the good stuff for saturday nights.)
Your complaints have to be reasonable in order for you to be taken seriously.
I was more implying the sort of store that's exorbitantly expensive, and disgustingly dirty compared to other stores in the same chain. If my local Food Lion were almost as clean and affordable as the supermarket 15 minutes further down the road, I'd shop there a whole lot more often. However, given that the management don't give a damn about what their customers think, they'll either go out of business, or cling on by using the people who don't want to drive the extra few minutes to the nicer food store.
And given that none of these things have any chance of happening, my analogy is still perfectly suitable. The only different part is that DHS/TSA can't go out of business, and can only continue to spend our tax dollars and piss us off to no end.
When referring to politics as a discipline, the word can be treated as a singular noun, or plural depending upon the context. Historically, it was also appropriate to use plural in all contexts.
No policies were changed as a result of blog comments.
What *did* happen was that a few bloggers indicated that TSA employees were searching bags in a manner that is prohibited by the TSA's own rules.
Given just how much organizations like the TSA love rules and procedures, the fact that they clamped down isn't a surprise at all. Although it's a big step for the TSA to actually be accountable to its own rules, we still have a long way to come.
If I walk into Safeway/Kroger/Food Lion, and tell the manager that one of their cashiers is stealing money out of the register, there's no doubt that he'll respond immediately. If I walk in and tell the manager that his store is dirty, and that prices are too high, I doubt I'll receive any sympathy.
Obviously the problem was just that Intel makes a better laptop processor, and not that IBM is some kind of awful supplier. Motorola was a genuinely bad supplier, and screwed up Apple orders that were made well in advance. Moto also had numerous revenue woes that hurt its supply chain and crippled its microprocessor business.
IBM and Motorola also skimped on R&D, whilst making numerous promises to Apple that they couldn't deliver. This was the "final straw" for Apple, who finally pulled the plug after the G5. PowerPC probably was a better architecture, but IBM and Moto were being far too boneheaded about R&D to keep it competitive in the desktop space. Apple bit the bullet, and cut the cord permanently.
Yes, but only to a certain extent. Most windowing systems these days are still woefully single-threaded. Ever get stuck with an hourglass at a dialogue box while some unrelated process waits to complete?
Virtually every OS today does this, and with modern technology, it's *completely and totally unnecessary*. Why exactly should my Photoshop composition be placed in a locked state while it spools to the printer?
Yes, Photoshop will do SMP for many operations, simply because it's easy to split the image up into multiple tiles, and hand each core a chunk to work on. However, at its core, it's a very antiquated single-threaded application.
BeOS was the only OS to properly thread its toolkits and processes. Even though it might not have benchmarked as being a remarkably fast Operating System, it unequivocally *felt* like the fastest, as the UI was amazingly snappy. Every operation imaginable was done in a separate thread, and the scheduler in the kernel was designed with this in mind.
Naturally BeOS was abandoned, and is no longer actively being developed or used.
If my bank detects what it thinks is fraudulent activity on my account, I get a robo-call *immediately*, where I can quickly indicate whether the transaction was legit, or wait to be connected to a real person who can resolve the situation.
This seems like a pretty appropriate use of robo-calls.
On the other hand, I'd *LOVE* to ban hold queues in excess of 10 minutes for customer/technical support lines in favor of callbacks, or to set penalties for companies with absolutely abysmal customer service.
I can just hang up on a phone call. I find junk mail to be far more annoying & damaging to the environment. -- Ron Paul for President [ronpaul2008.com]! Funny. I was just about to say the same thing about political sigs on public fora....
Say what you want, Roland's stories are generally quite interesting, and more closely resembles the sort of content that slashdot used to post back in its heyday.
If you haven't noticed, today's also a rather slow news day. If you're not interested in politics*, gaming, or cell phones, there are precious few/. stories that will interest you these days.
(That's not to say that politics aren't important, especially now. However, political discussions definitely seem to be dominating slashdot these days)
That's irrelevant. An A4 Skyhawk is also equipped with a tank of jet fuel, and a set of engines, which, as of the last time I checked, a sparrow still lacks.
Considering that the laws of physics scale uniformly with size (as long as we're talking about objects bigger than a molecule and smaller than a planet) this shouldn't matter.
Were an enormous 11,000kg unladen swallow to exist, it should exhibit pretty much the same characteristics as the 10g swallow, with a slight penalty for increased air resistance.
Considering that a tiny living organism exhibits characteristics vastly in excess of the cutting-edge of aviation technology is certainly significant, even if there are other factors in play. Practical concerns will undoubtedly prevent us from actually matching these characteristics, but we can still likely learn quite a bit by studying nature's designs.
Along those same lines, with UAVs becoming increasingly commonplace, there is quite a bit of motivation to design aircraft that are extremely small and lightweight.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite.
There was a cross on permanent display in the chapel. Because the room is used for secular purposes, and by other non-Christian groups, the decision was made to only display the cross during Christian events, on Sundays, and on major Christian holidays.
The Chapel (not a church -- no full-time clergy are employed) is indeed old. However, Anglican chapels of that era did not display. The cross in question was donated to The College in the 1930s when a parish in Williamsburg purchased a new cross for their own chapel. It's display was actually historically inaccurate, especially considering that the building dates from the 1600s.
Likewise, the poorly-named Sex Workers Art Show made an appearance at W&M before the current president, and has also appeared at other Virginia universities without as much as a murmur of controversy.
It's a complex issue, but not nearly as complex as Bill O'Reilly would have you believe.
There's a bit of a difference between spy satellites and CCTV cameras in highly populated public spaces. CCTV, for instance, won't follow you into your own back yard, or track you along the highway.
Likewise, CCTV footage is quite a bit more useful to a jury than an eyewitness account or satellite surveillance. I'm not a big fan of the "big brother" attitude, but CCTV systems do actually seem to be a legitimately good crime-fighting tool with an admirably low rate of false positives. Eyewitness accounts have been conclusively and scientifically proven to be horrendously bad.
Like I've said.... I'm ambivalent about how this is all panning out. Spy satellites seem to give the government a bit too much power, although CCTV seems a whole lot more innocuous. If you're walking down the streets of New York or London, chances are that somebody's already watching anyway.
Somewhat offtopic, but it would seem that universities are bowing to pressure from a lot more than the RIAA these days.
Earlier in the week, The College of William & Mary fired its president on ideological grounds, after he removed a religious symbol from a public building, and chose to uphold students' 1st Amendment rights in light of a controversial event. The ensuing conservative smear campaign was too much for The College to handle, and he was dismissed.
How is it that Universities, which have historically been strongholds for civil rights and liberties are now ceding so easily to external demands?
Right. Pick the right tool for the job.
Hopefully, we'll move to a point where we have decent alternatives to incandescent bulbs for a wide range of applications.
Right now, I'd like to find a nice alternative to CFLs that doesn't require mercury or other moderately hazardous chemicals to manufacture. After that, we can rest for a bit, and work on reducing energy consumption elsewhere. The amount of power used by CFLs is absolutely negligible compared to most other devices.
Oh, and get rid of the damn street lamps. I'm not even an astronomer, but I can appreciate that the earth doesn't need to be lit up like a torch while we sleep. There's no reason for the parking lot of my grocery store to be illuminated 8 hours after it closes. Or just install motion sensors....
This seems all quite innocuous.
The system is completely voluntary, so privacy concerns should be kept to an absolute minimum... The only reason you'd want to use this system is to permanently attach you identity to your photos, thus intentionally sacrificing a bit of privacy.
In return, you receive nearly-absolute proof of ownership for said photos. This prevents some twat from pulling my photo off of Flickr, selling it to Reuters, and pocketing the profits. However, it doesn't do anything prevent the photo from being copied or propagating across the web (which is something that most "traditional" DRM systems would do).
It seems like a very nice compromise wherein the rights of the content producers and end-users are both protected. End-users are free to do what they please with the content (a la Creative Commons), while the content-producers may retain ownership of their own work, and reserve commercial rights to that work (which they're perfectly entitled to do!).
I must say that I like this quite a bit.
Because there are significant compatibility issues that still exist with legacy applications.
If you purchased 32-bit Vista as a retail product, Microsoft will send you a 64-bit upgrade disc for a few bucks to cover shipping.
I agree that this offer should be extended to OEM copies, but Microsoft isn't being particularly evil in this case.
A MIRV is a whole lot scarier than an ICBM.
A capsule-based launch system offers far greater simplicity, and also offers numerous modes of recovery in the event of a failure. Apollo 13 was nearly torn to shreds, and managed to orbit the moon and land safely. The presence of a Launch-Escape-System also adds a very significant layer of safety against booster failure and launchpad incidents.
Do we even know that those plans even still exist?
Buran/Energia was certainly a cool platform, although it very well may have had its own set of faults apart from the Shuttle. It does make me sad that it only flew a single time.
As it stands, Russia's next-gen vehicle, Kliper, offers the closest thing to a "best of both worlds" solution, and stands a good chance of becoming operational before Orion.
Are the designs to the Space Shuttle even worth stealing? It's thus far proven to be an expensive and unreliable launch platform.
If anything, China would serve itself better by looking to the North, and copying Soyuz. Hell... I'm sure the Russians would be willing to sell the designs/equipment for most of their spacecraft for a very reasonable price, given their perpetual funding woes.
Even ignoring all that, it's still 1970s technology.
Obama wants to audit the government, and make changes where deemed necessary after a reasonable consultation process. Trim the fat, but keep the government operational.
Ron Paul wants to dismantle the federal government, hand power to the states, and turn the US into something more closely resembling the EU. That's not reform -- that's radical, and I can very easily see why the media and the public don't care much for it. There's also the small problem that the system of checks and balances in congress would almost certainly prevent him from enacting any of his ideas into law.
Similarly, his voting record doesn't bode well for a president. Sure, he voted against Iraq --- he voted against nearly everything placed in front of him. Would you like a president that vetoes everything?
Given the choice, I'd pick Torvalds over RMS any day.
Although the analogy's not perfect, Torvalds is the Steve Jobs of the OSS world, whilst RMS is Ballmer.
(And please don't view this as 100% of a flame. RMS's contributions to the Open Source world have been vast. However, I don't think he's particularly good as a spokesman or to be "at the helm" of Open-Source development. He's also a bit too stubborn on his ideologies, as shown with the GPLv3 debacle.)
Like I said. It's the greatest 80s action flick ever made. I'm putting it in the same league as the original Die Hard, not Schindler's List.
24 isn't meant to be sophisticated. It's a simple pleasure, and you'd be nuts to treat it as anything else.
However, I agree with you about Lost. The first season was absolutely brilliant, but they took it too far. It seems that the writers didn't actually have a conclusion in mind for the series (reportedly, so many networks turned down the pilot that the writers felt it was doomed, and never made a proper outline of the plot)
I've actually been rather impressed with some of the new TV programming over the past few years. Also remember that 99% of anything is crap (and that includes reality shows)
Lost is far from formulaic and repetitive, although the writers have been taking it a bit too far, and need to start winding down the series (ideally in one or two seasons, rather than the proposed three). I lost track halfway through the second season, so I can't comment on how it's been recently.
Heroes is one of the most popular shows today, and has terrific nerd-appeal. The current season has been somewhat subpar, but the original series was engaging and enjoyable.
Battlestar Galactica is easily the best-written and produced Sci-Fi series to air in years. It's also quite a bit more palatable for normal audiences.
24 is the best 80s action movie ever made. Although I don't particularly agree with its politics, it's quite an engaging storyline.
House is quite good. Perhaps becoming a bit repetitive, but definitely the best of the "medical" shows.
Mythbusters? How can you read slashdot and not love mythbusters, even in spite of their disregard for the scientific method?
The Daily Show and Colbert Report singlehandedly got an apathetic generation interested in politics. That's no small feat.
Over in the UK, they've got Top Gear, The Mighty Boosh, the current incarnation of Dr Who, along with a fantastic array of other programming that doesn't make it to the US -- Thanks to advances in filmmaking technology, their documentaries and nature series are also absolutely captivating to watch.
(After writing this post, I feel the need to assert that I'm not a couch potato! The magic of TiVo lets me save the good stuff for saturday nights.)
I was more implying the sort of store that's exorbitantly expensive, and disgustingly dirty compared to other stores in the same chain. If my local Food Lion were almost as clean and affordable as the supermarket 15 minutes further down the road, I'd shop there a whole lot more often. However, given that the management don't give a damn about what their customers think, they'll either go out of business, or cling on by using the people who don't want to drive the extra few minutes to the nicer food store.
And given that none of these things have any chance of happening, my analogy is still perfectly suitable. The only different part is that DHS/TSA can't go out of business, and can only continue to spend our tax dollars and piss us off to no end.
When referring to politics as a discipline, the word can be treated as a singular noun, or plural depending upon the context. Historically, it was also appropriate to use plural in all contexts.
Oxford and Webster both agree with me.
It's right there in the summary.
No policies were changed as a result of blog comments.
What *did* happen was that a few bloggers indicated that TSA employees were searching bags in a manner that is prohibited by the TSA's own rules.
Given just how much organizations like the TSA love rules and procedures, the fact that they clamped down isn't a surprise at all. Although it's a big step for the TSA to actually be accountable to its own rules, we still have a long way to come.
If I walk into Safeway/Kroger/Food Lion, and tell the manager that one of their cashiers is stealing money out of the register, there's no doubt that he'll respond immediately. If I walk in and tell the manager that his store is dirty, and that prices are too high, I doubt I'll receive any sympathy.
IBM and Motorola also skimped on R&D, whilst making numerous promises to Apple that they couldn't deliver. This was the "final straw" for Apple, who finally pulled the plug after the G5. PowerPC probably was a better architecture, but IBM and Moto were being far too boneheaded about R&D to keep it competitive in the desktop space. Apple bit the bullet, and cut the cord permanently.
Yes, but only to a certain extent. Most windowing systems these days are still woefully single-threaded. Ever get stuck with an hourglass at a dialogue box while some unrelated process waits to complete?
Virtually every OS today does this, and with modern technology, it's *completely and totally unnecessary*. Why exactly should my Photoshop composition be placed in a locked state while it spools to the printer?
Yes, Photoshop will do SMP for many operations, simply because it's easy to split the image up into multiple tiles, and hand each core a chunk to work on. However, at its core, it's a very antiquated single-threaded application.
BeOS was the only OS to properly thread its toolkits and processes. Even though it might not have benchmarked as being a remarkably fast Operating System, it unequivocally *felt* like the fastest, as the UI was amazingly snappy. Every operation imaginable was done in a separate thread, and the scheduler in the kernel was designed with this in mind.
Naturally BeOS was abandoned, and is no longer actively being developed or used.
If my bank detects what it thinks is fraudulent activity on my account, I get a robo-call *immediately*, where I can quickly indicate whether the transaction was legit, or wait to be connected to a real person who can resolve the situation.
This seems like a pretty appropriate use of robo-calls.
On the other hand, I'd *LOVE* to ban hold queues in excess of 10 minutes for customer/technical support lines in favor of callbacks, or to set penalties for companies with absolutely abysmal customer service.
--
Ron Paul for President [ronpaul2008.com]! Funny. I was just about to say the same thing about political sigs on public fora....
Say what you want, Roland's stories are generally quite interesting, and more closely resembles the sort of content that slashdot used to post back in its heyday.
/. stories that will interest you these days.
If you haven't noticed, today's also a rather slow news day. If you're not interested in politics*, gaming, or cell phones, there are precious few
(That's not to say that politics aren't important, especially now. However, political discussions definitely seem to be dominating slashdot these days)
That's irrelevant. An A4 Skyhawk is also equipped with a tank of jet fuel, and a set of engines, which, as of the last time I checked, a sparrow still lacks.
Considering that the laws of physics scale uniformly with size (as long as we're talking about objects bigger than a molecule and smaller than a planet) this shouldn't matter.
Were an enormous 11,000kg unladen swallow to exist, it should exhibit pretty much the same characteristics as the 10g swallow, with a slight penalty for increased air resistance.
Considering that a tiny living organism exhibits characteristics vastly in excess of the cutting-edge of aviation technology is certainly significant, even if there are other factors in play. Practical concerns will undoubtedly prevent us from actually matching these characteristics, but we can still likely learn quite a bit by studying nature's designs.
Along those same lines, with UAVs becoming increasingly commonplace, there is quite a bit of motivation to design aircraft that are extremely small and lightweight.