My contract is with AT&T Broadband, not Comcast. Comcast changed the terms of service when they bought AT&T, but I never agreed to the change
Two things wrong with this:
There is a legal term for this, Novation, which means that one company assumes the debts and obligations of the company they purchase. Thus corporate mergers can continue to happen without having to renegotiate all sorts of contracts. IANAL, but I work for BigBank Corp, just purchased by AnotherBigerBankCorp, and I heard this term in connection with some actions BigBank and AnotherBiggerBank could conceivably have to (or want to) do in order to make sure they meet their legal/moral/financial obligations. Novation is a completely normal business transaction. In some other cases, the novation process might not work - there might be some contracts that will have to be modified by explicit agreement, as opposed to a blanket legal arrangement. Again, IANAL, this is just basic business stuff I've overheard or asked about.
Terms of service usually include a specific codicil that says, "These terms may change. Notice of changes will be provided 30 days before the change occurrs. If you do not agree to the changes, you may discontinue service any time before that 30-day grace period is up."
Thus, (1) The new corp. takes over all legal contracts, and (2) If you continue service, you are tacitly agreeing to the change in the terms of service.
So, basically, you're screwed unless the provider you are using has competition to switch to.
But, in law as it is in marriage, sometimes it's good to stick with what you've got and overlook the small stuff in favor of the goodness you've got in front of you.
Not that I'd compare Comcast to June Cleaver, but I might compare Comcast to some tough, older, single-mom Waitress with 4 kids that behave correctly because she's all they have, and they'll get slapped if they get out of line.
I know there's lots of fellow geeks who could do blindfold narration on how to make my home PC into a global webserver and thus save my $6/month webhosting fee.
The trouble is, the villanous but typical corporate curmudgeon Comcast is my ISP. They have in their rules that I'm not to run a webserver from my home. This is so they can provide max bandwidth to residential customers and charge a flat fee.
I understand this (though I don't like it), but I am beholden to them because they are the only viable option. Yah, there are others but they're more expensive than $45/month for 1.5 mbps.
It seems like the only thing stopping you from running your own webserver is the ISP, since the hardware could run from a rack in your basement.
What I'm wondering is, is there another option? How much does Comcast charge, or any other DSL provider charge, for a 'business' connection that allows for running a webserver, not just surfing the web?
It really is a rip-off here, and I'm wondering if there's enough competition yet to allow for the minimization of these charges? The last time I checked about 2 years ago, Ameritech wanted $2000/month for a T1 to my residence, plus installation charges. That's kind of high (especially vs. $45/month for the same technical bandwidth, never mind sharing with neighbors). I'm 'just browsing', which uses lots less than T1 on average, a random company or personal webserver might use only half a T1 on average, but would like the reduced time-to-render of T1 versus dialup speed...
The court system in the United States is set up (I believe) as follows:
The constitution provides that there shall be a judiciary consisting of a Supreme Court, and whatever other courts that the supreme court shall deem useful.
The supremes long ago divided up the U.S. into a set of federal districts. In each of these districts, there are a set of judges and an appelate division (for appeals).
I'm a little unclear about how the civil and criminal parts of this are set up...
Regardless, each of these district courts have an organization which is paid for out of the federal budget. I believe this is a block grant granted by congress to the Supreme Court's organization. The money goes to this organization and they decide how to spend it, thus preventing congress from preventing allocation of funds to district X in retribution for their ruling on case Y.
This subordinate organization, the 'clerk's office' of the court, accepts properly formatted (defined clearly in U.S. code) motions, etc. These official documents are processed by this judical branch office and funneled for review to a judge through the judge's office (set up I believe at their discretion).
The post above was: "Now who tells the court they have to tell the prosecutor to file?" This is the writ of Mandamus that I was referring to. It means that you, a private citizen, can file a motion with the clerk of the federal district court in which you ask for a writ. A judge will act on this motion (is this enforced by a law itself, that some action must be taken in response to a properly filed motion????). That action will be to create a writ of mandamus (or not - you may not convince the Judge to act on your motion if you're asking the prosecutor to prosecute "Men From Mars"(tm). This writ is a legal order to the prosecutor's office to do something.
If they don't do something, and probably they must do it to a judge's satisfaction, they will will be in contempt of a federal court order, in which case all sorts of bad things start happening from other divisions within the exective branch as well as the judicial branch, I think (someone, please correct me??)
I should make a point here about Federal Judges. Don't mess with them. Don't think of messing with them. Don't even think about thinking about it. By 'mess with' I mean 'gain the attention of in an unfavorable manner'. Judges can cite ordinary people, organizations, etc. with contempt charges and functionally put them away for a long, long time. Of course, there's the appeals process to remediate this, but in contempt cases I believe this is given wide latitude. Can some lawyers comment on this?
This should probably be in a Wikipedia article but I coudn't find one that explained the organization of the courts.
It would be nice if that seperation were as clean as you suggest. Unfortunately, the exectutive branch appoints the guy who's in charge of deciding which cases to prosecute...
There's something called a 'writ of mandamus' (i am not a lawyer=IANAL).
This writ is used to call upon a judge to compel a prosecutor (executive branch) to prosecute a case (or do several other things).
This means any citizen can notice, "Hey, this guy's committing a crime and they're not prosecuting them!", file a writ of mandamus, and a court will tell the prosecutor, "You have to prosecute this guy." and they do under pain of contempt (I believe).
I've been tempted to try this, but my wife has overruled all discussion of it. She has something against hot neutron sources in the house when we have 3 small kids. Alas. (Especially since this thing emits the particles in 3 dimensions, so shielding would be significant.)
SO: MY QUESTION FOR THE EXPERIMENTERS: WHAT IS THE TOTAL ENERGY (JOULES) PUT INTO THIS EXPERIMENT VS. HOW MUCH EMITTED? Is this going to be another wildly inefficient methodology, or does it have advantages over Fusor or Tocamak designs?
A common early rocket fuel / oxidizer was Kerosene with Red Fuming Nitric Acid, which was obviously quite NASTY stuff. A technical link to this is here.
I've read that the people who fueled these rockets had to know (a) exactly what to wear because some rubber was eaten by the acid and other protective gear was not, and (b) exactly which way the wind was blowing at all times so they could run upwind if there was a spillage. The stuff apparently became gaseous very quickly and a being in a cloud of nitric acid can ruin your whole day.
We had quite a lot of rather disastrous fires in our early rocket programs, too. Since many were military, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't all revealed to the public as 'rocketry disasters' instead of being 'experimental failures' or 'military accidents'.
I believe I speak for all space enthusiasts (ok this is unrealistic) when I offer our condolences on the tragic loss of life in India. Progress has costs, and hopefully the cost of these lives will buy improvements in the knowledge about, and operational safety with, rocket technologies.
"We choose to go to the moon and do these other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John Kennedy knew that it's important to dedicate onself to a noble task and boldly pursue it. I hope India's space program advances on those noble goals we all set, the lifting of humanity from the face of this humble rock to the place where the real action is, Space.
Sorry to give the idea that Crystal is this memorization-intensive product. Not the case. I just found it to be quite non-intuitive, and limited from doing exactly what we wanted it to do.
One of my teammates who I believed to be rather bright (but didn't work with her that long) was constantly harping on how it didn't work the way she expected it to, either.
One thing she worked for a week on was a gui control that didn't look like it could be changed. Turns out Crystal had a 1 YES ONE pixel down-arrow for a dropdown box to select other various values. Yuck.
We were trying to use it for some very complex reporting, that we ended up using about 400+ sql queries for in just one report (of about 20 in the project). The learning curve I'm mentioning was us trying to figure out how to put multiple reports together easily (not happening).
It seems that for the simple stuff, Crystal can do well. The complex stuff (combinations of anything Crystal hasn't anticipated us doing) has a very sharp curve and is more than slightly frustrating. My learning curve reference meant getting to the end point requiring a lot of trial and error instead of reference material, intuitive interface, or quick-turnaround support.
I work at a large bank. We had reports we needed to produce in PDF format with nice graphics. We tried many solutions including print-to-HTML from Excel, Crystal Reports, Ephiphany, and Insightful's S-Plus.
The best solution for a compact format was a scripted solution (VBA / COM) that prints XLS, DOC, PPT, etc. to a file with thus creating a postscript file, then using ghostscript to convert.ps to.pdf, then moving the files to a Solaris Apache webserver.
S-Plus required lots of programming and display was not compact enough. Ephiphany likewise. Crystal has a HUGE HUGE IMMENSE VAST WAY-BIG Learning curve and still didn't do what we wanted. Alas.
For all it's worth. -- Kevin J. Rice, justanyone.com
Sorry, this may be apocryphal, but here's two stories I remember reading:
A house in Britain that was moved / removed. Underneath the stone and misc. flooring (which was all removed) a bunch of flowers sprouted that were totally unlike any in the area, but which matched descriptions from the middle ages of flowers at the time. But these flowers are long gone from Britain now.
Likewise, I've heard that some wheat taken from an Egyptian tomb was planted and it sprouted (this was probably great for some genetic diversity study).
What I'm wondering is, I wonder if any seeds (or at least pollen) can be found preserved by extreme cold in the Antartic that could grow to be real plants ? If so, it seems to me a study of the amino acids, etc. in the plants might be worthwhile of study.
Does anyone know if plants have DNA? I am thinking that only animals have DNA, that plants have different structures like RNA or something. Sorry for my ignorance, I'm willing to read this online if someone can point me in the right direction to a site on the basics of plant biology without being too 'biochemical genetic engineering' (expert level) text. I've had HS bio, and college chem, and lots and lots and lots of physics, but that's it...
I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.
The same goes for OpenSSL and a bunch of other tools that would be great to have but that I cannot count on being there.
On the other front, having Gnome as a gui readily available is definitely deserving of kudos. If only I had more than ssh access to most of the boxes I work with, I could actually use it. We have Hummingbird Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.
1. Marimba Castanet (I know, I love to hate them, too) has a technology that provides auto-updates to files on a box, and can even be scripted to stop and restart the process. I have used this and while it is expensive, somewhat complex internally, and a bit slow, it does work, and is highly scalable to 10,000+ boxes quite easily.
2. Rsync (a very common open-source Samba project) will synchronize files across a network, sending only the file differences, handling file deletion if so requested, etc. Very, Very good product, widely used. Set this up with any *nix (Linux, Solaris, etc.). Or, for Windows, configure Cygwin to run cron as a service, and have a rsync run as a crontab entry.
If you need to reboot, have the synchronizer write a "DoRebootNow.txt" file with the box's name in it. The service watches the file and looks for its own box name, and if found, does a reboot and does a cgi post to a cgi that removes the boxname from that file.
Cumbersome in parts, either of these systems can work for you very reliably and effectively. I would estimate both jobs at between 1 and 2 weeks of labor, including writing the scripting or learning about Castanet. That depends of course on testing requirements, method of deployment to clients, etc. Some large installations could take a person-month just to install all the clients on the boxes!
Also, I've heard of SMS, but I don't know much about it. Sorry...
So, it seems Apple, like White Castle, among other companies, is debt free.
However, being debt free is not necessarily a good thing. I was informed by an accounting / MBA friend that having corporate debt can be a very, very good thing when it comes to tax time. Apparently, it's useful to mortgage certain properties (including real estate, physical plant, etc.). This lets you write down things or depreciate them differently I think.
I'm sure there's accountants out there (though how many of them read Slashdot is an open question). Can anyone explain this? Or Refute it?
-- Kevin J. Rice, programmer (not accountant!), Chicago area.
Did they replace the hardware or just the software?
Does anyone know?
Also, what is the basis of a search engine? Sparse-matrix navigation? How does this stuff really work? Any links to summaries of this stuff? It happened after I graduated (1992, BSCS)...
I'm willing to pay for music, video on demand, etc., but I'm not rich.
I'd be willing to pay
as much as $0.025 (2.5 cents) per song
for the right to have 256-bit mp3's of the top 10,000 songs of all time. That translates to 10000 *.01 = $250. That would be a reasonably complete music collection, and by my count, it would be about 100 GB of storage, not unreasonable at all given today's hard drive sizes.
But, what I'd really like to do is pay that directly to the artists involved. Or, I'm willing to pay the copyright owners, as long as that's not a firm that's rampantly cheating the artists out of their fair share.
I say, let someone accumulate enough distribution rights, and I'll be willing to purchase some music online. Until then, I'm sticking to my old LP's, some CD's I have received as gifts, and what I hear off the air. I don't like being a criminal, but I also don't like being price-gouged (or a party to price-gouging of recording artists who aren't really that wealthy either).
I'm wondering if this would just breed resistance to having body parts susceptible to sonic disruption. After all, mosquitoes breed in incredibly large numbers, so in very few generations, resistance to this should develop.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "Better Living Thru No Chemicals" (tm) (grin) but I just see this thing as flawed in its longevity given the natural forces at work.
How much does ultrasonic propogate through water? These larvae are in water, right? So, the larvae that are on the surface are killed (which is most of them if memory serves about how their life cycle works). But, what about the ones slightly below the surface? And even farther? They get less of a sonic dose, and are bred for resistance.
This is the same kind of thing that's being done with lysteria and myriad other diseases/organisms by administering antibiotics in small doses to cattle / other livestock. We're breeding for better organisms that will evade our better efforts.
Good job, though, and hearty thanks to the 15 year old.
I might suggest people build more bat houses, though. Bats are known to eat half their weight in insects, mostly skeeters, per NIGHT. Note: I think skeeters must be high fiber (grin) or this would be really filling (!!!).
I have a bat house; we just moved, and I'm going to reinstall it at our new house. They're like birdhouses, but specific to bats (whose natural habitat, rotting trees and caves, are very scarce in suburbia). Contrary to popular opinion, bats don't carry disease readily because they're rather fragile creatures, they just die and people find them, think they're the disease carriers instead of the victims. Bats are actually very, very useful, and really harmless creatures. Give them a home, I say, and get rid of the skeeters that way.
Evolutionary pressures have been balancing out this predator / prey for a long time.
I also work at a financial services company. Our Policy:
If the open source is supported by a company, then we can sue the company, and it's okay to use it.
On the other hand, we use Perl extensively (though not as extensively as I might hope) and though we officially get our modules from an ActiveState CD, we do have modules from CPAN, though ones I've tested well.
I used to work at a company that had an exceptionally good policy. I'd like to expand on theirs and propose one that is like this:
1. Open Source software is to be considered equally with closed source software when it comes to product features.
2. Support for open source products should be considered alongside support options for closed source products and both purchase and support costs counted into the total cost of purchase / ownership.
3. Small one-off and/or utility products should not be required to be supported by a vendor. This means primarily code and products that are easily understood and thus where support for them in-house is not difficult or problematic.
4. Any time a large open-source product is considered, such as Apache, MySQL, Linux, etc., some investigation should be made of viable support options along with the true cost of in-house support (learning curve short or steep, etc.)
5. Large support vendors (PC desktop support companies) should be encouraged / required to provide support for open source desktop applications such as MySQL admin tools, etc.
6. Internal projects whose functions are not firm-specific should be strongly considered for placement in an open source mode.
7. Attention should be paid in the design of all projects to move proprietary or business-specific information from source code into configuration files. This will enable easier decision making about making a project open source.
8. Projects that are designated by a manager as open source should be hosted in a publically accessible location such as SourceForge.
9. One project lead should be designated (usually the project manager, but it may be the chief technical person). This person should be responsible for filtering all proprietary information out of the code and documents placed in the open source repository.
10. A project homepage and some documentation should be created for the open source repository. This should also include release notes and postings on FreshMeat.org on a semi-regular basis. The dual goals of the publicity should be to encourage others to use the software and thus contribute to the development / support of it. This should include the web-search-ability of the project to make sure anyone searching for it will be able to find it.
1. NASA should be required to make any purchase of over $50M in a competitive bidding process. This can be open auction if need be, or sealed bid, but bids must be published afterwards.
2. No Cost-Plus contracts should be awarded unless a congressional waiver is granted.
3. PRIZES: NASA should award at least $100M per year of all-or-nothing prizes for technology demonstration projects. Requirements should include disclosure of all technology used, so the experience curve (a.k.a. learning curve) of other companies benefits from this tech. Patents are always possible.
Prize 1: first private launch into space (100 km) using air-breathing engines for > 50% of time of flight. Prize 2: First two-stage to orbit flight using wholly reusable components (>90% by mass re-used) for 2 subsequent flights. Similar to X-Prize, only going to orbit.
4. NASA should auction delivery of consumables (Air, Water, fuel) to within 200 meters the ISS (not necessary to dock). PAYMENT SHOULD BE C.O.D. FOR CONSUMABLES AT THE ISS. No payment should be made if nothing is delivered. Contractors should arrange for their own insurance, everything.
5. Likewise, NASA should offer payment of 0.1 cents per pixel (or something close to that) for delivery of all photographs of any planetary body taken from orbit around that body. Maximum award per body should be set by committee.
6. The space shuttle, conceived in 1968 and an albatross around the neck of NASA, should be RETIRED immediately and bids taken on its separate primary functions (delivery to ISS and higher orbits of personnel).
7. NASA administrators should be given real power to reform their agency, without irrelelevent Line-Item appropriations from congress. Facilities should be able to be closed. Existing power structures (political ones) should be phased out or replaced with different ones somehow. NASA KILLS TOO MANY PROJECTS DONE BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR, DON'T LET THAT HAPPEN!
Just some humble suggestions I like to call the K. Rice Plan.
This story is documented in a new, VERY EXCELLENT book, "Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA", by Greg Klerkx, page 107. The description above is echoed in the book. The 'turf war' is NASA vs. all projects that threaten the shuttle/station. There are wonderful people working at NASA, but there are also career bureaucrats who delight in protecting their program and making politics out of everything, forget the engineering.
This book is fantastic - it highlights exactly why each one of the advanced projects - NASP, DC-X, K-1, X-38, etc., failed. They were killed, most often by gobbling up the entity, doing a 'study' and condcluding the idea was, in the end, unworkable (regardless of initial promise).
The power bases at NASA are multiple levels deep, cross-organizational, and so entrenched the best thing would be to eliminate NASA, fire everyone, and farm out the projects to Darpa, JPL, DOD, and several other departments. Then, a few years later, re-form the organization under a different name, like the Dept. of Transportation's Federal Bureau of Aerospace Exploration.
This new dept. would contract to purchase exploration missions on a COD basis (my term) - cash of delivery. We want to buy images of Mars at 1 pixel = 1 meter, we'll pay $1 per pixel for them. You get there, you do the job. If you succeed, we'll buy the pictures. You take the risk, you optimize your own business plan and technology.
Likewise, we'd pay to put FBAE astronauts on Mars - We get to choose the mission profile. That means we specify the location and the scientist, you put them there. We pay x days minimum for their time, at $20K dollars per hour.
We should pay for all material delivered to orbit on a per-pound basis, auctioned off. We have a package - a probe, let's say - we want in geosync. You pay for the insurance on the probe. We only pay if it is delivered to the location, working.
Further, all science has to become public knowledge. Engineering specs for all components must become public record before payoff is made. This encourages patenting improvments, and makes everyone more efficient.
Just some ideas I've come up with after reading this book (some ideas stolen from the book, some are my own).
Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA, by Greg Kerkx at amazon here
Slashdot Mirror
Two things wrong with this:
Thus, (1) The new corp. takes over all legal contracts, and (2) If you continue service, you are tacitly agreeing to the change in the terms of service.
So, basically, you're screwed unless the provider you are using has competition to switch to.
But, in law as it is in marriage, sometimes it's good to stick with what you've got and overlook the small stuff in favor of the goodness you've got in front of you.
Not that I'd compare Comcast to June Cleaver, but I might compare Comcast to some tough, older, single-mom Waitress with 4 kids that behave correctly because she's all they have, and they'll get slapped if they get out of line.
-- Kevin J. Rice
I know there's lots of fellow geeks who could do blindfold narration on how to make my home PC into a global webserver and thus save my $6/month webhosting fee.
The trouble is, the villanous but typical corporate curmudgeon Comcast is my ISP. They have in their rules that I'm not to run a webserver from my home. This is so they can provide max bandwidth to residential customers and charge a flat fee.
I understand this (though I don't like it), but I am beholden to them because they are the only viable option. Yah, there are others but they're more expensive than $45/month for 1.5 mbps.
It seems like the only thing stopping you from running your own webserver is the ISP, since the hardware could run from a rack in your basement.
What I'm wondering is, is there another option? How much does Comcast charge, or any other DSL provider charge, for a 'business' connection that allows for running a webserver, not just surfing the web?
It really is a rip-off here, and I'm wondering if there's enough competition yet to allow for the minimization of these charges? The last time I checked about 2 years ago, Ameritech wanted $2000/month for a T1 to my residence, plus installation charges. That's kind of high (especially vs. $45/month for the same technical bandwidth, never mind sharing with neighbors). I'm 'just browsing', which uses lots less than T1 on average, a random company or personal webserver might use only half a T1 on average, but would like the reduced time-to-render of T1 versus dialup speed...
-- Kevin J. Rice
Re: must create Python program to figure out Pi. I've created a simple Excel spreadsheet. It took about 5 minutes. Here it is:
1 1 1 1 1 0.785394347 3.141577386
2 3 0.333333333 -1 -0.333333333
3 5 0.2 1 0.2
4 7 0.142857143 -1 -0.142857143
5 9 0.111111111 1 0.111111111
6 11 0.090909091 -1 -0.090909091
7 13 0.076923077 1 0.076923077
8 15 0.066666667 -1 -0.066666667
9 17 0.058823529 1 0.058823529
10 19 0.052631579 -1 -0.052631579
11 21 0.047619048 1 0.047619048
12 23 0.043478261 -1 -0.043478261
13 25 0.04 1 0.04
14 27 0.037037037 -1 -0.037037037
15 29 0.034482759 1 0.034482759
The result was 3.141577 for 65500 iterations (max rownums in Excel).
Pretty close, but yeah, it would have taken a while to figure this one out.
The court system in the United States is set up (I believe) as follows:
The constitution provides that there shall be a judiciary consisting of a Supreme Court, and whatever other courts that the supreme court shall deem useful.
The supremes long ago divided up the U.S. into a set of federal districts. In each of these districts, there are a set of judges and an appelate division (for appeals).
I'm a little unclear about how the civil and criminal parts of this are set up...
Regardless, each of these district courts have an organization which is paid for out of the federal budget. I believe this is a block grant granted by congress to the Supreme Court's organization. The money goes to this organization and they decide how to spend it, thus preventing congress from preventing allocation of funds to district X in retribution for their ruling on case Y.
This subordinate organization, the 'clerk's office' of the court, accepts properly formatted (defined clearly in U.S. code) motions, etc. These official documents are processed by this judical branch office and funneled for review to a judge through the judge's office (set up I believe at their discretion).
The post above was: "Now who tells the court they have to tell the prosecutor to file?" This is the writ of Mandamus that I was referring to. It means that you, a private citizen, can file a motion with the clerk of the federal district court in which you ask for a writ. A judge will act on this motion (is this enforced by a law itself, that some action must be taken in response to a properly filed motion????). That action will be to create a writ of mandamus (or not - you may not convince the Judge to act on your motion if you're asking the prosecutor to prosecute "Men From Mars"(tm). This writ is a legal order to the prosecutor's office to do something.
If they don't do something, and probably they must do it to a judge's satisfaction, they will will be in contempt of a federal court order, in which case all sorts of bad things start happening from other divisions within the exective branch as well as the judicial branch, I think (someone, please correct me??)
I should make a point here about Federal Judges. Don't mess with them. Don't think of messing with them. Don't even think about thinking about it. By 'mess with' I mean 'gain the attention of in an unfavorable manner'. Judges can cite ordinary people, organizations, etc. with contempt charges and functionally put them away for a long, long time. Of course, there's the appeals process to remediate this, but in contempt cases I believe this is given wide latitude. Can some lawyers comment on this?
This should probably be in a Wikipedia article but I coudn't find one that explained the organization of the courts.
It would be nice if that seperation were as clean as you suggest. Unfortunately, the exectutive branch appoints the guy who's in charge of deciding which cases to prosecute...
There's something called a 'writ of mandamus' (i am not a lawyer=IANAL).
This writ is used to call upon a judge to compel a prosecutor (executive branch) to prosecute a case (or do several other things).
This means any citizen can notice, "Hey, this guy's committing a crime and they're not prosecuting them!", file a writ of mandamus, and a court will tell the prosecutor, "You have to prosecute this guy." and they do under pain of contempt (I believe).
-- Kevin J. Rice
...so astronomers are hedging their bets on how bright they will be. Guesses range from plus infinity to minus infinity
... BACHELOR'S degree... in SCIENCE!).
oh yeah?!???!?!!
Well, I'm a scientist, too (I have a
And I say, it's going to plus double infinity squared! Nya! Feh!
(grin) (tounge is firmly in cheek here, no flames please)
Desktop fusion is no big deal, after all - the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor (
Here's a link ) does this.
The fusor operates by accelerating deuterons in a static electrical field towards a central locus ('juicy nugat center')(grin).
The trick to a fusor is that there's a lot of possible factors to setting one up:
among other factors. more info is at a homebrew club of amateur experimentors
I've been tempted to try this, but my wife has overruled all discussion of it. She has something against hot neutron sources in the house when we have 3 small kids. Alas. (Especially since this thing emits the particles in 3 dimensions, so shielding would be significant.)
SO: MY QUESTION FOR THE EXPERIMENTERS: WHAT IS THE TOTAL ENERGY (JOULES) PUT INTO THIS EXPERIMENT VS. HOW MUCH EMITTED? Is this going to be another wildly inefficient methodology, or does it have advantages over Fusor or Tocamak designs?
-- Kevin J. Rice
> Nope; They found Marvin. Consequently, Spirit is no longer operational.
Gud ting dey deedunt fiynd Ehlmer Fudd, tuh huh.
Of course, he can be a vewee vewee quiet wabbit hunter!
(grin)
-- Kevin J. Rice
A common early rocket fuel / oxidizer was Kerosene with Red Fuming Nitric Acid, which was obviously quite NASTY stuff. A technical link to this is here.
I've read that the people who fueled these rockets had to know (a) exactly what to wear because some rubber was eaten by the acid and other protective gear was not, and (b) exactly which way the wind was blowing at all times so they could run upwind if there was a spillage. The stuff apparently became gaseous very quickly and a being in a cloud of nitric acid can ruin your whole day.
We had quite a lot of rather disastrous fires in our early rocket programs, too. Since many were military, I wouldn't be surprised if they weren't all revealed to the public as 'rocketry disasters' instead of being 'experimental failures' or 'military accidents'.
I believe I speak for all space enthusiasts (ok this is unrealistic) when I offer our condolences on the tragic loss of life in India. Progress has costs, and hopefully the cost of these lives will buy improvements in the knowledge about, and operational safety with, rocket technologies.
"We choose to go to the moon and do these other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard." John Kennedy knew that it's important to dedicate onself to a noble task and boldly pursue it. I hope India's space program advances on those noble goals we all set, the lifting of humanity from the face of this humble rock to the place where the real action is, Space.
-- Kevin J. Rice
Sorry to give the idea that Crystal is this memorization-intensive product. Not the case. I just found it to be quite non-intuitive, and limited from doing exactly what we wanted it to do.
One of my teammates who I believed to be rather bright (but didn't work with her that long) was constantly harping on how it didn't work the way she expected it to, either.
One thing she worked for a week on was a gui control that didn't look like it could be changed. Turns out Crystal had a 1 YES ONE pixel down-arrow for a dropdown box to select other various values. Yuck.
We were trying to use it for some very complex reporting, that we ended up using about 400+ sql queries for in just one report (of about 20 in the project). The learning curve I'm mentioning was us trying to figure out how to put multiple reports together easily (not happening).
It seems that for the simple stuff, Crystal can do well. The complex stuff (combinations of anything Crystal hasn't anticipated us doing) has a very sharp curve and is more than slightly frustrating. My learning curve reference meant getting to the end point requiring a lot of trial and error instead of reference material, intuitive interface, or quick-turnaround support.
-- Kevin
I work at a large bank. We had reports we needed to produce in PDF format with nice graphics. We tried many solutions including print-to-HTML from Excel, Crystal Reports, Ephiphany, and Insightful's S-Plus.
The best solution for a compact format was a scripted solution (VBA / COM) that prints XLS, DOC, PPT, etc. to a file with thus creating a postscript file, then using ghostscript to convert
S-Plus required lots of programming and display was not compact enough. Ephiphany likewise. Crystal has a HUGE HUGE IMMENSE VAST WAY-BIG Learning curve and still didn't do what we wanted. Alas.
For all it's worth.
-- Kevin J. Rice, justanyone.com
What I'm wondering is, I wonder if any seeds (or at least pollen) can be found preserved by extreme cold in the Antartic that could grow to be real plants ? If so, it seems to me a study of the amino acids, etc. in the plants might be worthwhile of study.
Does anyone know if plants have DNA? I am thinking that only animals have DNA, that plants have different structures like RNA or something. Sorry for my ignorance, I'm willing to read this online if someone can point me in the right direction to a site on the basics of plant biology without being too 'biochemical genetic engineering' (expert level) text. I've had HS bio, and college chem, and lots and lots and lots of physics, but that's it...
Thanks,
-- Kevin J. Rice
I know this is a trivial thing, but it's a real pain in the butt to have to use ksh all the time because most Solaris boxen I've worked on don't have Bash installed by default.
The same goes for OpenSSL and a bunch of other tools that would be great to have but that I cannot count on being there.
On the other front, having Gnome as a gui readily available is definitely deserving of kudos. If only I had more than ssh access to most of the boxes I work with, I could actually use it. We have Hummingbird Exceed, but it's such a HUGE pain to set up. Neither myself, a reasonably good programmer, nor any of the sysadmins at the very large bank where I work know how to set it up.
Alas.
-- Kevin J. Rice
I suppose there's a bunch of jokes possible about this project being for Women only (Y chromosome, etc.)
1. Marimba Castanet (I know, I love to hate them, too) has a technology that provides auto-updates to files on a box, and can even be scripted to stop and restart the process. I have used this and while it is expensive, somewhat complex internally, and a bit slow, it does work, and is highly scalable to 10,000+ boxes quite easily.
2. Rsync (a very common open-source Samba project) will synchronize files across a network, sending only the file differences, handling file deletion if so requested, etc. Very, Very good product, widely used. Set this up with any *nix (Linux, Solaris, etc.). Or, for Windows, configure Cygwin to run cron as a service, and have a rsync run as a crontab entry.
If you need to reboot, have the synchronizer write a "DoRebootNow.txt" file with the box's name in it. The service watches the file and looks for its own box name, and if found, does a reboot and does a cgi post to a cgi that removes the boxname from that file.
Cumbersome in parts, either of these systems can work for you very reliably and effectively. I would estimate both jobs at between 1 and 2 weeks of labor, including writing the scripting or learning about Castanet. That depends of course on testing requirements, method of deployment to clients, etc. Some large installations could take a person-month just to install all the clients on the boxes!
Also, I've heard of SMS, but I don't know much about it. Sorry...
-- KevinJRice
You know, it'd be great if I could play pong with my TV remote control and maybe an RCA jack passthru connector with some kind of IR port on it.
Somebody ought to do that...
While they're at it, make the TV remote work on my wife (grin)...
So, it seems Apple, like White Castle, among other companies, is debt free.
However, being debt free is not necessarily a good thing. I was informed by an accounting / MBA friend that having corporate debt can be a very, very good thing when it comes to tax time. Apparently, it's useful to mortgage certain properties (including real estate, physical plant, etc.). This lets you write down things or depreciate them differently I think.
I'm sure there's accountants out there (though how many of them read Slashdot is an open question). Can anyone explain this? Or Refute it?
-- Kevin J. Rice, programmer (not accountant!), Chicago area.
What hardware are they running it on?
Did they replace the hardware or just the software?
Does anyone know?
Also, what is the basis of a search engine? Sparse-matrix navigation? How does this stuff really work? Any links to summaries of this stuff? It happened after I graduated (1992, BSCS)...
-- Kevin
I'd be willing to pay
- as much as $0.025 (2.5 cents) per song
for the right to have 256-bit mp3's of the top 10,000 songs of all time. That translates to 10000 *But, what I'd really like to do is pay that directly to the artists involved. Or, I'm willing to pay the copyright owners, as long as that's not a firm that's rampantly cheating the artists out of their fair share.
I say, let someone accumulate enough distribution rights, and I'll be willing to purchase some music online. Until then, I'm sticking to my old LP's, some CD's I have received as gifts, and what I hear off the air. I don't like being a criminal, but I also don't like being price-gouged (or a party to price-gouging of recording artists who aren't really that wealthy either).
Hey:
I'm wondering if this would just breed resistance to having body parts susceptible to sonic disruption. After all, mosquitoes breed in incredibly large numbers, so in very few generations, resistance to this should develop.
Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "Better Living Thru No Chemicals" (tm) (grin) but I just see this thing as flawed in its longevity given the natural forces at work.
How much does ultrasonic propogate through water? These larvae are in water, right? So, the larvae that are on the surface are killed (which is most of them if memory serves about how their life cycle works). But, what about the ones slightly below the surface? And even farther? They get less of a sonic dose, and are bred for resistance.
This is the same kind of thing that's being done with lysteria and myriad other diseases/organisms by administering antibiotics in small doses to cattle / other livestock. We're breeding for better organisms that will evade our better efforts.
Good job, though, and hearty thanks to the 15 year old.
I might suggest people build more bat houses, though. Bats are known to eat half their weight in insects, mostly skeeters, per NIGHT. Note: I think skeeters must be high fiber (grin) or this would be really filling (!!!).
I have a bat house; we just moved, and I'm going to reinstall it at our new house. They're like birdhouses, but specific to bats (whose natural habitat, rotting trees and caves, are very scarce in suburbia). Contrary to popular opinion, bats don't carry disease readily because they're rather fragile creatures, they just die and people find them, think they're the disease carriers instead of the victims. Bats are actually very, very useful, and really harmless creatures. Give them a home, I say, and get rid of the skeeters that way.
Evolutionary pressures have been balancing out this predator / prey for a long time.
I also work at a financial services company. Our Policy:
If the open source is supported by a company, then we can sue the company, and it's okay to use it.
On the other hand, we use Perl extensively (though not as extensively as I might hope) and though we officially get our modules from an ActiveState CD, we do have modules from CPAN, though ones I've tested well.
I used to work at a company that had an exceptionally good policy.
I'd like to expand on theirs and propose one that is like this:
1. Open Source software is to be considered equally with closed source software when it comes to product features.
2. Support for open source products should be considered alongside support options for closed source products and both purchase and support costs counted into the total cost of purchase / ownership.
3. Small one-off and/or utility products should not be required to be supported by a vendor. This means primarily code and products that are easily understood and thus where support for them in-house is not difficult or problematic.
4. Any time a large open-source product is considered, such as Apache, MySQL, Linux, etc., some investigation should be made of viable support options along with the true cost of in-house support (learning curve short or steep, etc.)
5. Large support vendors (PC desktop support companies) should be encouraged / required to provide support for open source desktop applications such as MySQL admin tools, etc.
6. Internal projects whose functions are not firm-specific should be strongly considered for placement in an open source mode.
7. Attention should be paid in the design of all projects to move proprietary or business-specific information from source code into configuration files. This will enable easier decision making about making a project open source.
8. Projects that are designated by a manager as open source should be hosted in a publically accessible location such as SourceForge.
9. One project lead should be designated (usually the project manager, but it may be the chief technical person). This person should be responsible for filtering all proprietary information out of the code and documents placed in the open source repository.
10. A project homepage and some documentation should be created for the open source repository. This should also include release notes and postings on FreshMeat.org on a semi-regular basis. The dual goals of the publicity should be to encourage others to use the software and thus contribute to the development / support of it. This should include the web-search-ability of the project to make sure anyone searching for it will be able to find it.
Here are some humble suggestions:
1. NASA should be required to make any purchase of over $50M in a competitive bidding process. This can be open auction if need be, or sealed bid, but bids must be published afterwards.
2. No Cost-Plus contracts should be awarded unless a congressional waiver is granted.
3. PRIZES: NASA should award at least $100M per year of all-or-nothing prizes for technology demonstration projects. Requirements should include disclosure of all technology used, so the experience curve (a.k.a. learning curve) of other companies benefits from this tech. Patents are always possible.
Prize 1: first private launch into space (100 km) using air-breathing engines for > 50% of time of flight.
Prize 2: First two-stage to orbit flight using wholly reusable components (>90% by mass re-used) for 2 subsequent flights. Similar to X-Prize, only going to orbit.
4. NASA should auction delivery of consumables (Air, Water, fuel) to within 200 meters the ISS (not necessary to dock). PAYMENT SHOULD BE C.O.D. FOR CONSUMABLES AT THE ISS. No payment should be made if nothing is delivered. Contractors should arrange for their own insurance, everything.
5. Likewise, NASA should offer payment of 0.1 cents per pixel (or something close to that) for delivery of all photographs of any planetary body taken from orbit around that body. Maximum award per body should be set by committee.
6. The space shuttle, conceived in 1968 and an albatross around the neck of NASA, should be RETIRED immediately and bids taken on its separate primary functions (delivery to ISS and higher orbits of personnel).
7. NASA administrators should be given real power to reform their agency, without irrelelevent Line-Item appropriations from congress. Facilities should be able to be closed. Existing power structures (political ones) should be phased out or replaced with different ones somehow. NASA KILLS TOO MANY PROJECTS DONE BY THE PRIVATE SECTOR, DON'T LET THAT HAPPEN!
Just some humble suggestions I like to call the K. Rice Plan.
Cordially yours,
-- Kevin Rice
-- Kevin J. Rice
This story is documented in a new, VERY EXCELLENT book, "Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA", by Greg Klerkx, page 107. The description above is echoed in the book. The 'turf war' is NASA vs. all projects that threaten the shuttle/station. There are wonderful people working at NASA, but there are also career bureaucrats who delight in protecting their program and making politics out of everything, forget the engineering.
This book is fantastic - it highlights exactly why each one of the advanced projects - NASP, DC-X, K-1, X-38, etc., failed. They were killed, most often by gobbling up the entity, doing a 'study' and condcluding the idea was, in the end, unworkable (regardless of initial promise).
The power bases at NASA are multiple levels deep, cross-organizational, and so entrenched the best thing would be to eliminate NASA, fire everyone, and farm out the projects to Darpa, JPL, DOD, and several other departments. Then, a few years later, re-form the organization under a different name, like the Dept. of Transportation's Federal Bureau of Aerospace Exploration.
This new dept. would contract to purchase exploration missions on a COD basis (my term) - cash of delivery. We want to buy images of Mars at 1 pixel = 1 meter, we'll pay $1 per pixel for them. You get there, you do the job. If you succeed, we'll buy the pictures. You take the risk, you optimize your own business plan and technology.
Likewise, we'd pay to put FBAE astronauts on Mars - We get to choose the mission profile. That means we specify the location and the scientist, you put them there. We pay x days minimum for their time, at $20K dollars per hour.
We should pay for all material delivered to orbit on a per-pound basis, auctioned off. We have a package - a probe, let's say - we want in geosync. You pay for the insurance on the probe. We only pay if it is delivered to the location, working.
Further, all science has to become public knowledge. Engineering specs for all components must become public record before payoff is made. This encourages patenting improvments, and makes everyone more efficient.
Just some ideas I've come up with after reading this book (some ideas stolen from the book, some are my own).
Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA, by Greg Kerkx at amazon here
So, I like the idea. Thus I'm looking for an RPM for Fedora Core 1 on Athalon, and/or a Yum repository-site that I can use for same.
Any hints out there? 2.6 sounds nice, I'd like to use it...