On the other-hand, the AG isn't normally allowed to continue to enforce laws that have been repealed. Having the power to veto bills that change laws in ways he doesn't like would effectively give him this ability (limited to any override process).
I'm usually a fan of Apple's minimalistic design, but the iPad feature set is worthless to me.
Reading: the main purpose of a device like this, but reflective displays are much nicer than emissive. +1 Notion Ink Drawing: these ought to be great for drawing and sketching but iPad can't due to lack of stylus. -1 Apple Note taking: again this could be a major use case, but the iPad doesn't support it at all. -1 Apple Slide Shows: external monitor support, both will require dongles for some situations, iPad always will. -0.5 Apple Data Transfer: Even for a view-only device I need to copy things off of USB drives and cameras. -1 Apple Data Sync: I don't want to have to use a fucking remote server to sync with my desktop computer. -1 Apple Multitasking: I wanted in on the Palm Pilot, you bet your ass I'm going to want it here. -1 Apple Single hand use: I agree that the UI of these should allow one barehand control for everything it can, which both the iPhone OS and Android should do a better job at than previous Windows Tablets +1 Apple & Notion Ink
And that isn't even getting into the fact that Apple has set itself up as a gatekeep for what applications are even allowed on the device. I love my 20GB iPod and Mac OS X and can see the appeal of the iPhone. I don't get the iPad at all.
Actually, I still like the way the original iBook and iMacs looked, especially the tangerine and later green color. However the flower and polka-dot iMacs were ugly as sin.
MacOS 9 was trapped by the legacy that was pre-MacOS X. If you're going to fault MacOS9 for being a weak OS for being released in that era, then you really have to slam Win2K, XP, Vista, and Windows7 - all trapped by the legacy that was WindowsNT.
Except that NT was a perfectly capable legacy to be trapped in - it had all the technical underpinnings needed for a good operating system, and it just took a while to get the user shell to the same level. On the other-hand, System 7 was lacking some very basic things like pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory. It may have been enough to compete with Win 9x, which had enough serious bugs to overshadow it's benefits on paper, but it was a joke compared to Win2k and XP.
Making a significant change to an OS such as MacOS 9 to MacOS X is a big gamble. Apple took that risk and won, Microsoft on the other hand has not.
Microsoft has never had to make that risk because they never backed themselves into a corner the way Apple did. They transitioned from Win 9x to Win NT, a major technical improvement, while Apple was floundering with Copland and did a very smooth job at it. The transition to Vista saw drops in performance and compatibility issues, but they were much less than the transition to OS X. The main problem with the Vista transition was that there just wasn't enough improvement to justify the regressions to users, unlike OS X.
I've had the same problem in my graduate level classes. The foreign students just can't seem to get it through their heads that they need to do their own homework. As a result, the professors have been forced to put more and more emphasis on exams, especially for the core classes.
This is really difficult for me, as I have never been a fast worker. In my undergrad, I usually got one of the best grades on the exams, but was also one of the last to finish. The first exam I took last semester, I got a 57% - which amounted to 95% on the 6 problems I finished and 4 which I didn't even have time to start. I've gotten better at studying for the tests knowing that I have to finish them in 1/6 of the time I spend on comparable homework, but it is still frustrating to me.
The other unfortunate aspect is that most of the foreign students have a relatively strong background in theory, but have difficulty applying it. This emphasis on exams just reinforces that and doesn't push them to improve where they are weak.
That is because the table support in Word is a flaming piece of crap, and you have to spend more time formatting the table than entering data. If I am making a simple list or table I'd prefer to use something along the lines of Omni-Outliner, but since most people that I need to share data with don't have that, I end up using either a plain text file or a spreadsheet.
Yes, there are stubborn idiots that will believe what they want regardless of the evidence. There are self-entitled people that complain no matter how good of a service you provide. There are unreasonable assholes in this world.
However, since nothing I do will appease them, why should I give a moments consideration to them whatsoever? I am going to base my actions on what will best convince/serve the reasonable people, on top of what makes the best science. Hiding data and and not being responsive to criticisms is counterproductive to those goals.
Case in point. The recent inclusion of data that had not been peer reviewed in the IPCC report didn't convince me that everything in the report was garbage, but it meant that everything in there had to be weighed on it's own merits, as I couldn't trust the vetting process done by the IPCC. It didn't discredit climate change itself, but it did undermine the ability of the IPCC to act as a credible distiller of the state of climate change research.
These are the issues that you need to be concerned about, not how the ideologues and pundits are going to react.
If you RTFA, you would see that they mention several examples. This is not about lectures. Some of them are educational videos, which I tend to agree are often a waste of time. However, some of the videos are absolutely necessary for the course (in some form or another), like this one:
Eric Gans, a French cinema professor, has also been impacted by the video ban. Because his class falls on Mondays and Wednesdays, Mondays are usually designated to watch the movies that they discuss on Wednesdays. However, two weeks this quarter, due to the national holidays that fall on Mondays, Gans’ 40 students will have to individually watch the one copy of the movie held at reserve in the Media Lab.
“If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful,” Gans said. “I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement.”
I imagine that buying a dozen imported french films would be fairly expensive for a student, so it would be nice if they could come to some sort of arrangement that is better than a single reserve copy.
When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required.
This is false. There is an explicit exemption for use of videos in the classroom. From 17 USC 110 (1):
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;
However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing. IIRC (can't find a link right now), there have been cases where schools tried to include videos in distance learning classes, and the judge ruled that it was not fair use.
I have mod points, but this sentiment has been stated several times in this thread, and I haven't seen an adequate response.
All treaties are negotiated by the executive branch on behalf of the president - it's in the constitution. They are then approved by Congress. This bill isn't taking power away from congress - they never had power to negotiate treaties to begin with and will still approve any negotiated by the NIST. If anything, this might be interpreted as taking power from the President as it limits who can negotiate treaties on standards on his behalf. In practice, this is a boring area and he will gladly let the NIST handle it, until a special case comes up at which point it will be within his constitutional power to appoint someone else if he wants, regardless of what this law says.
My question is, since the Dream Chaser seems to be designed for that same niche, are they supporting both so they can have their pick of crew vehicles in case one doesn't pan out, or is there another reason?
These contracts were awarded as part of NASA's CCDev program. The purpose is to stimulate the market, and can be thought of more as research grant than being paid to deliver a product. The amounts awarded will give the companies enough money to fully flush out their design and begin prototyping. The idea is that as they get closer to completion NASA will pick the best one to fully fund for actual production and use.
They were already given a contract to develop the Falcon and Dragon for use with delivering cargo to the ISS. See this (now out of date) wikipedia entry on NASA's COTS program for more information.
Right now the Delta and Atlas rocket are the closest thing we have to a man-rated rocket after the shuttle retires, so it only makes sense that NASA would look into this route. NASA is very excited about what SpaceX is doing and once the Falcon 9 proves itself with unmanned cargo, I have no doubt that they will look into getting it man-rated.
Assuming it could attach well enough that swallowing/choking wouldn't be a concern, this would be very nice to use an alarm clock that wouldn't wake up other people in the same bed / dorm room / apartment.
Maybe it's just my fingers, but every touch interface I have used has been absolutely horrible. They only register my touches about 7/8 of the time. And then of the times they register a touch, the only do what I intended about 3/4 of the time. They scroll when I wanted them to zoom, click when I wanted to scroll. It's an exercise in frustration everytime I have to use the damn things, regardless of whether it's an iTouch or Droid or the HP tablets or any of the other random phones that I have had to use on occasion. The only touch device that worked was my original Palm Pilot with a stylus.
It's really discouraging that all the smartphones are going to touch interfaces - even the ones with keyboards expect you to point and click with your fingers. It's the main reason that I have stuck with plain old phone.
The 15 to 20 years estimate is always for energy-positive, viable power plant. The one year date is just when this particular device will be fully operational. There are already many operational fusion devices that exist for research, and this adds another that may or may not give us a breakthrough.
Interesting. When my parents had Discover it had maintenance fees, but supposedly made up for it with their cash-back rewards program. However, they could never find enough stores that actually took the card to earn enough cash back to cover the maintenance fees, so the eventually canceled it.
I thought and still think that it is dumb to encourage consumers to type confidential information into a random pop-up page from a different web site than the one they are visiting.
No kidding. What is worse is that every time I have been shown the verification page isn't wasn't even hosted at something obviously legitimate like verify.visa.com, but rather the domain was some other corporation related to Visa (can't remember the name right now).
My credit card (Visa issued by my bank) doesn't have it either. I've been thinking about getting a second card that does have it solely for online use, but have been turned-off by the issuers I've seen with that feature. Is there anyone here that can recommend a credit card issuer that supports single-use numbers?
My requirements: * No monthly/yearly fees * Standard grace period * Sane fraud protection (call me if you see something suspicion, but don't freeze my card) * Can be paid using standard electronic transfers (ie I can use my bank's website to pay bill not the CC's) * Visa or MasterCard are preferred. * I don't care about earning airline miles, bonus points, whatever.
While most of the communication between protesters after the Iran Election was done other ways - word of mouth, cell phones etc - the biggest impact of twittering was getting unfiltered reports out of the country to the rest of the world. The reaction of other governments to this news was relatively muted. But at least in the US I think that younger people are much more aware and concerned about what is going on in Iran than they would have been otherwise. A country with citizens that are more informed about what is going on in the world, will eventually effect the foreign affairs of the government.
So even if the only people that install the software in country are the ones spreading info, not the ones receiving it, it can still be useful.
Actually I think this is more interesting than either FrontPage or LabView, because it allows you to script GUI apps that were not designed to be scriptable. Even for apps that are scriptable, it provides an increase in user efficiency as you don't have to learn the API commands to do things that you already know how to do in the GUI.
How useful it is will depend on how well the image pattern matching deals with corner cases. Consider you need to click on a text field, however there are many identically looking (empty) text fields, with the only distinguishing factor being the label beside them, and clicking on the label does not select the text field. Like screen scraping, it is also somewhat fragile to UI changes (although not as much as other GUI scripting tools that rely on pixel location).
The way I see it tablet:eBook as smartphone:cell phone.
I have been looking more and more into getting an eBook reader for various reasons. The low power consumption and reflective display puts them into a completely different class of devices than laptops or notebooks in my opinion. But then the feature-creep ideas start coming. It would be really nice to be able to take notes on it as well, and keep a calendar, and browse the web, and view maps, etc. An eBook reader that had good touch screen support, and an open development environment would push me from "thinking about it" to "gotta have it". That is why the Nook and and other recent tablet designs that are more inspired by eBook/netbooks have really been catching my eye.
At every large site that I know of that has tried to implement passphrases, the end result is that the user has to memorize two secrets - the passphrase that works on most systems, and another password for all the legacy systems that don't support long passwords. So users still need a password, but use it less often so it is harder to remember. Heck I still see shit around that has an 8 character password limit.
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On the other-hand, the AG isn't normally allowed to continue to enforce laws that have been repealed. Having the power to veto bills that change laws in ways he doesn't like would effectively give him this ability (limited to any override process).
I'm usually a fan of Apple's minimalistic design, but the iPad feature set is worthless to me.
Reading: the main purpose of a device like this, but reflective displays are much nicer than emissive. +1 Notion Ink
Drawing: these ought to be great for drawing and sketching but iPad can't due to lack of stylus. -1 Apple
Note taking: again this could be a major use case, but the iPad doesn't support it at all. -1 Apple
Slide Shows: external monitor support, both will require dongles for some situations, iPad always will. -0.5 Apple
Data Transfer: Even for a view-only device I need to copy things off of USB drives and cameras. -1 Apple
Data Sync: I don't want to have to use a fucking remote server to sync with my desktop computer. -1 Apple
Multitasking: I wanted in on the Palm Pilot, you bet your ass I'm going to want it here. -1 Apple
Single hand use: I agree that the UI of these should allow one barehand control for everything it can, which both the iPhone OS and Android should do a better job at than previous Windows Tablets +1 Apple & Notion Ink
And that isn't even getting into the fact that Apple has set itself up as a gatekeep for what applications are even allowed on the device. I love my 20GB iPod and Mac OS X and can see the appeal of the iPhone. I don't get the iPad at all.
Thanks, I'd always wondered how the OLPC screen managed to be both emit light and be reflective. I learned something new today.
Actually, I still like the way the original iBook and iMacs looked, especially the tangerine and later green color. However the flower and polka-dot iMacs were ugly as sin.
MacOS 9 was trapped by the legacy that was pre-MacOS X. If you're going to fault MacOS9 for being a weak OS for being released in that era, then you really have to slam Win2K, XP, Vista, and Windows7 - all trapped by the legacy that was WindowsNT.
Except that NT was a perfectly capable legacy to be trapped in - it had all the technical underpinnings needed for a good operating system, and it just took a while to get the user shell to the same level. On the other-hand, System 7 was lacking some very basic things like pre-emptive multitasking and protected memory. It may have been enough to compete with Win 9x, which had enough serious bugs to overshadow it's benefits on paper, but it was a joke compared to Win2k and XP.
Making a significant change to an OS such as MacOS 9 to MacOS X is a big gamble. Apple took that risk and won, Microsoft on the other hand has not.
Microsoft has never had to make that risk because they never backed themselves into a corner the way Apple did. They transitioned from Win 9x to Win NT, a major technical improvement, while Apple was floundering with Copland and did a very smooth job at it. The transition to Vista saw drops in performance and compatibility issues, but they were much less than the transition to OS X. The main problem with the Vista transition was that there just wasn't enough improvement to justify the regressions to users, unlike OS X.
I've had the same problem in my graduate level classes. The foreign students just can't seem to get it through their heads that they need to do their own homework. As a result, the professors have been forced to put more and more emphasis on exams, especially for the core classes.
This is really difficult for me, as I have never been a fast worker. In my undergrad, I usually got one of the best grades on the exams, but was also one of the last to finish. The first exam I took last semester, I got a 57% - which amounted to 95% on the 6 problems I finished and 4 which I didn't even have time to start. I've gotten better at studying for the tests knowing that I have to finish them in 1/6 of the time I spend on comparable homework, but it is still frustrating to me.
The other unfortunate aspect is that most of the foreign students have a relatively strong background in theory, but have difficulty applying it. This emphasis on exams just reinforces that and doesn't push them to improve where they are weak.
That is because the table support in Word is a flaming piece of crap, and you have to spend more time formatting the table than entering data. If I am making a simple list or table I'd prefer to use something along the lines of Omni-Outliner, but since most people that I need to share data with don't have that, I end up using either a plain text file or a spreadsheet.
Yes, there are stubborn idiots that will believe what they want regardless of the evidence. There are self-entitled people that complain no matter how good of a service you provide. There are unreasonable assholes in this world.
However, since nothing I do will appease them, why should I give a moments consideration to them whatsoever? I am going to base my actions on what will best convince/serve the reasonable people, on top of what makes the best science. Hiding data and and not being responsive to criticisms is counterproductive to those goals.
Case in point. The recent inclusion of data that had not been peer reviewed in the IPCC report didn't convince me that everything in the report was garbage, but it meant that everything in there had to be weighed on it's own merits, as I couldn't trust the vetting process done by the IPCC. It didn't discredit climate change itself, but it did undermine the ability of the IPCC to act as a credible distiller of the state of climate change research.
These are the issues that you need to be concerned about, not how the ideologues and pundits are going to react.
If you RTFA, you would see that they mention several examples. This is not about lectures. Some of them are educational videos, which I tend to agree are often a waste of time. However, some of the videos are absolutely necessary for the course (in some form or another), like this one:
Eric Gans, a French cinema professor, has also been impacted by the video ban. Because his class falls on Mondays and Wednesdays, Mondays are usually designated to watch the movies that they discuss on Wednesdays. However, two weeks this quarter, due to the national holidays that fall on Mondays, Gans’ 40 students will have to individually watch the one copy of the movie held at reserve in the Media Lab.
“If we want students to write a paper on the film over the weekend, it’s more convenient for the student to rewatch the movie online over the weekend. (The ban) makes teaching cinema more difficult (because) Video Furnace was extremely useful,” Gans said. “I very much hope (the university) will reach some kind of agreement.”
I imagine that buying a dozen imported french films would be fairly expensive for a student, so it would be nice if they could come to some sort of arrangement that is better than a single reserve copy.
When you buy a DVD, it has an implicit license to the conditions under which you can watch it (That FBI warning at the beginning indicating you can't show it to a large audience). To comply with copyright law, an "instructional" DVD which permits showing to an audience is required.
This is false. There is an explicit exemption for use of videos in the classroom. From 17 USC 110 (1):
(1) performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction, unless, in the case of a motion picture or other audiovisual work, the performance, or the display of individual images, is given by means of a copy that was not lawfully made under this title, and that the person responsible for the performance knew or had reason to believe was not lawfully made;
However, this does not cover posting videos online, like UCLA was doing. IIRC (can't find a link right now), there have been cases where schools tried to include videos in distance learning classes, and the judge ruled that it was not fair use.
I have mod points, but this sentiment has been stated several times in this thread, and I haven't seen an adequate response.
All treaties are negotiated by the executive branch on behalf of the president - it's in the constitution. They are then approved by Congress. This bill isn't taking power away from congress - they never had power to negotiate treaties to begin with and will still approve any negotiated by the NIST. If anything, this might be interpreted as taking power from the President as it limits who can negotiate treaties on standards on his behalf. In practice, this is a boring area and he will gladly let the NIST handle it, until a special case comes up at which point it will be within his constitutional power to appoint someone else if he wants, regardless of what this law says.
My question is, since the Dream Chaser seems to be designed for that same niche, are they supporting both so they can have their pick of crew vehicles in case one doesn't pan out, or is there another reason?
These contracts were awarded as part of NASA's CCDev program. The purpose is to stimulate the market, and can be thought of more as research grant than being paid to deliver a product. The amounts awarded will give the companies enough money to fully flush out their design and begin prototyping. The idea is that as they get closer to completion NASA will pick the best one to fully fund for actual production and use.
There is more to man-rated than the design.
They were already given a contract to develop the Falcon and Dragon for use with delivering cargo to the ISS. See this (now out of date) wikipedia entry on NASA's COTS program for more information.
Right now the Delta and Atlas rocket are the closest thing we have to a man-rated rocket after the shuttle retires, so it only makes sense that NASA would look into this route. NASA is very excited about what SpaceX is doing and once the Falcon 9 proves itself with unmanned cargo, I have no doubt that they will look into getting it man-rated.
Especially when the lad searching for the meteorite to give to his love, finds that it is not a rock but a girl.
Assuming it could attach well enough that swallowing/choking wouldn't be a concern, this would be very nice to use an alarm clock that wouldn't wake up other people in the same bed / dorm room / apartment.
Maybe it's just my fingers, but every touch interface I have used has been absolutely horrible. They only register my touches about 7/8 of the time. And then of the times they register a touch, the only do what I intended about 3/4 of the time. They scroll when I wanted them to zoom, click when I wanted to scroll. It's an exercise in frustration everytime I have to use the damn things, regardless of whether it's an iTouch or Droid or the HP tablets or any of the other random phones that I have had to use on occasion. The only touch device that worked was my original Palm Pilot with a stylus.
It's really discouraging that all the smartphones are going to touch interfaces - even the ones with keyboards expect you to point and click with your fingers. It's the main reason that I have stuck with plain old phone.
The 15 to 20 years estimate is always for energy-positive, viable power plant. The one year date is just when this particular device will be fully operational. There are already many operational fusion devices that exist for research, and this adds another that may or may not give us a breakthrough.
Interesting. When my parents had Discover it had maintenance fees, but supposedly made up for it with their cash-back rewards program. However, they could never find enough stores that actually took the card to earn enough cash back to cover the maintenance fees, so the eventually canceled it.
If they've changed that I may look into it.
I thought and still think that it is dumb to encourage consumers to type confidential information into a random pop-up page from a different web site than the one they are visiting.
No kidding. What is worse is that every time I have been shown the verification page isn't wasn't even hosted at something obviously legitimate like verify.visa.com, but rather the domain was some other corporation related to Visa (can't remember the name right now).
My credit card (Visa issued by my bank) doesn't have it either. I've been thinking about getting a second card that does have it solely for online use, but have been turned-off by the issuers I've seen with that feature. Is there anyone here that can recommend a credit card issuer that supports single-use numbers?
My requirements:
* No monthly/yearly fees
* Standard grace period
* Sane fraud protection (call me if you see something suspicion, but don't freeze my card)
* Can be paid using standard electronic transfers (ie I can use my bank's website to pay bill not the CC's)
* Visa or MasterCard are preferred.
* I don't care about earning airline miles, bonus points, whatever.
While most of the communication between protesters after the Iran Election was done other ways - word of mouth, cell phones etc - the biggest impact of twittering was getting unfiltered reports out of the country to the rest of the world. The reaction of other governments to this news was relatively muted. But at least in the US I think that younger people are much more aware and concerned about what is going on in Iran than they would have been otherwise. A country with citizens that are more informed about what is going on in the world, will eventually effect the foreign affairs of the government.
So even if the only people that install the software in country are the ones spreading info, not the ones receiving it, it can still be useful.
Actually I think this is more interesting than either FrontPage or LabView, because it allows you to script GUI apps that were not designed to be scriptable. Even for apps that are scriptable, it provides an increase in user efficiency as you don't have to learn the API commands to do things that you already know how to do in the GUI.
How useful it is will depend on how well the image pattern matching deals with corner cases. Consider you need to click on a text field, however there are many identically looking (empty) text fields, with the only distinguishing factor being the label beside them, and clicking on the label does not select the text field. Like screen scraping, it is also somewhat fragile to UI changes (although not as much as other GUI scripting tools that rely on pixel location).
The way I see it tablet:eBook as smartphone:cell phone.
I have been looking more and more into getting an eBook reader for various reasons. The low power consumption and reflective display puts them into a completely different class of devices than laptops or notebooks in my opinion. But then the feature-creep ideas start coming. It would be really nice to be able to take notes on it as well, and keep a calendar, and browse the web, and view maps, etc. An eBook reader that had good touch screen support, and an open development environment would push me from "thinking about it" to "gotta have it". That is why the Nook and and other recent tablet designs that are more inspired by eBook/netbooks have really been catching my eye.
At every large site that I know of that has tried to implement passphrases, the end result is that the user has to memorize two secrets - the passphrase that works on most systems, and another password for all the legacy systems that don't support long passwords. So users still need a password, but use it less often so it is harder to remember. Heck I still see shit around that has an 8 character password limit.