An excellent example is the mars probe that was (more or less) recently lost due to a problem with units. Or back in the day, when no one could decide on the compression standards for 14.4 modems.
The problem isn't with adopting a standard, the problem is getting mired in a zillion groups formed to decide exactly what that standard is. Since many companies and all governments are monolithic in nature, it takes forever for them to decide what the standards are, and invariably they go to the highest bidder.
Another take on the original slashdot posting.
on
Databases and Privacy
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Read this first. Then read this and this. Now do you understand?
Anyone that has had a high school physics class or a few semesters of introductory physics in college remembers snell's law and that infernal little quantity called 'n' that describes the characteristics of the material with respect to light. What they don't tell you in those classes is that you aren't even getting half of the picture.
Initially, you see n defined as c/v, where v is the speed of light in the material. Since v is less than c (always) this number is always greater than 1 except for vacuum. This is where the 'wierd science' part comes is, and the fact that you're only getting a fraction of the picture. In reality, n has both real and imaginary parts - the imaginary part decribes the 'folding' or how much the wave magnitude decays in the medium over distance and time. For example, if you took something that measured the intensity of light outside in the sunlight and compared it to the intensity of light behind a window in a house, the intensity *inside* would be less because the glass absorbs a certain amount of energy of the light as it passes through. As you can see, this 'n' thing is a little more complicated than what you learned initially in high school and college - end result, well, they sorta lied to you. In fact, the above is just scraping the barrel because you're still trying to give physical credence to a mathematical model.
The 'bad science' comes from putting too much faith in what the math really means. Guys, math is just a tool to *model* reality. If you put too much credence in it you start to think that stuff like virtual particles and feynman diagrams are real. They aren't. They're a tool used by physicists to get an answer that agrees with experiment. For more info on negative index of refraction stuff look at what these guys did, and also look here for a little more info.
Not that it isn't cool to hope that things go faster than light and that we're just getting part of the picture...
I am way excited and the countdown is going for children of dune.
But.
WHAT THE HELL did they do to riverworld? Has anyone bothered to read the synopsis of it? No richard burton, now everyone speaks the same language, etc. Total crap for anyone that has read the books.
The cool thing was that the primary character was burton BECAUSE he was a superior linguist and swordsman and explorer. I actually read a bio of him once I read these books because I couldn't believe that someone like him was legit.
Now we can overprescribe yet another antibiotic and thus churn out zillions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
God, I *really* hope this is used only as a last ditch effort and is used correctly. It makes me ill when a doctor offers me an antibiotic for a viral infection.
I have a friend that has been DMing and playing since D&D first came out, and he still uses the original booklets as his world basis. I've read them, they're awesome compared to the shallow crap that TSR releases now.
I can just see the next generation of game requirements.
OS: No later than 3.1 windows
Internet Connection Speed: 2400 bps or lower
CPU: 486 or lower
etc.
Brilliant move. Now we know what they are gonna do with all that surplus outdated hardware:D
There are no naval units in it or carpetbombing, even though the into movie shows them.
I'm gonna have to say that this one looks like it was released half-baked.
actually, navigators don't bend space, machines bend space. Navigators use their prescience to pick the right path through space, hence them being called navigators.
There's nothing troll about this comment, it's the truth. Universities are money making institutions first and foremost, if you don't believe it then you haven't attended one.
I can't begin to tell you how many people I've met that were allowed 'tenative' enrollment because they had none of the prerequisites so that the administration could get its greasy little hands on that prize of all prizes, financial aid money. Hell, as a grad student TA at my current university, you're forced to sit through the 'how things work' orientation, and there they give you a list of classes in which you are NOT allowed to give a student an F in because 'college is hard and students need chances' rrt wrong no, college administration needs more money so keep the student around longer.
I've also had the misfortune to work with someone that is on the 'academic excellence' comittee here, and the requirements for excellence and renewal of a contract for a professor is 1. how much money they bring in, 2. how much they produce, 3. how many grad students they turn out. 2 and 3 can be overlooked if 1 is well satisfied, and it doesn't matter what quality a teacher the person is.
So, in conclusion, he's right. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and tastes like a duck then it's probably a duck, and they should just waive the requirements for admission and what have you and allow everyone to attend.
How much of a kickback from ETS does a university get from requiring that students take the GRE? It's a pointless test, the real culling of the herd occurs after the comprehensives - and it's not like departments don't look at the student's transcripts before sending a positive admissions letter and offer letter.
So the real issue isn't forcing quality of students, it's a way for the university and a 3rd party to scam a little cash before taking the next 2-6 years of your life. People really don't realize how poorly this test reflects ability - when I first took it, I took it cold and got a 1300 on it. I bought a cheapo study guide and then made a 2200 on it. The only thing I did was practice a little on the included online adaptive program and look at some of the TRICKS at getting quick and easy answers.
Warning! Top Secret Clam facts are about to be exposed. This may cause jaw pain and extreme cases of uncontrolled laughter.
All over the internet, the latest question due to well known controversies originating from alt.religion.scientology seems to be, "What is this bit about clams?" "Why do people on ARS think this is funny?", and the ever popular, "Can I be in on the joke?"
Well, here are some answers to all of this and more. L. Ron Hubbard late in 1952 wrote a book called "What To Audit", later renamed "The History Of Man". It is still sold by the Church Of Scientology and this book contains many of the basic beliefs of the Church Of Scientology. It is considered by many connosieurs of kook literature as a true classic of kook nonsense and it is well worth looking for this book in used books stores if you are indeed interested in a book that proves that there isn't anything so stupid that people won't believe in it if it's in a book.
L. Ron Hubbard in the introduction claimed it was "a cold blooded look at your last 60 trillion years." How could this be wrong? He also claimed his book finally proved the theory of evolution.
(Patience, we will get to them clams soon enough.)
This following excert of History Of Man is taken from the book Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a fine book for the neophyte Scientologist watcher and clam afficionado. Thanks also to Diane Richardson who originally typed this excerpt up and posted it to ARS.
In a narrative style that wobbled uncertainly between schoolboy fiction and a pseudo-scientific medical paper, Hubbard sought to explain the the human body was occupied by both a thetan and a 'genetic entity', or GE, a sort of low- grade soul located more or less in the centre of the body. To underpin his new science, Hubbard created an entire cosmology, the essence of which was that the true self of an individual was an immortal, omniscient and ominpotent entity called a 'thetan'. In existence before the beginning of time, thetans picked up and discarded millions of bodies over trillions of years.
('The genetic entity apparently enters the protoplasm line some two days or a week prior to conception. There is some evidence that the GE is actually double, one entering on the sperm side...') The GE carried on through the evolutionary line, 'usually on the same planet', whereas the thetan only came to earth about 35,000 years ago to supervise the development of caveman into homo sapiens. Thus the GE was once 'an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgetten continents or a mollusc seeking to survive on the shore of some lost sea'. The discovery of the GE (Hubbard hailed every fanciful new idea as a 'discovery') 'makes it possible at last to vindicate the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin'.
Much of the book was devoted to a re-working of evolution, starting with 'an atom, complete with electronic rings' after which came cosmic impact producing a 'photon converter', the first single-cell creature, then seaweed, jellyfish and the clam.
^^^^^^ Look! Clams!
Many engrams, for example, could be traced back to clams. The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced, by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time making an opening and closing motion with thumb and forefinger. This gesture, he said, would upset large numbers of people.
'By the way,' he warned, 'your discussion of these incidents with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc. Should you describe the "clam" to some one [sic], you may restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw pain. Once such victim, after hearing about a clam death, could not use his jaws for three days.'
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Does your jaw ache, dear reader? Bwahahahhahahahaha! Clams! And people pay to be taught stuff like this from silly lads who believe stuff like this. And they claim it is science! And a religion! Low level Scientologists are discouraged from reading this book and are told it will all be explained later when they are ready to understand the higher secrets of Scientology.
'Clam' is a word used on alt.religion.scientology to describe scientologists who believe stuff like this and explains the rash of clam jokes of alt.religion.scientology.
More secrets of Scientology:
After the clam became the 'Weeper' or the 'Boohoo', a mollusc that rolled in the surf for half a million years, pumping sea water out of its shell as it breathed, hence its name. Weepers had 'trillions of misadventures', prominent among them the anxiety caused by trying to gulp air before being swamped by the next wave. 'The inability of a pre-clear to cry,' Hubbard explained, 'is partly a hang-up in the Weeper. He is about to be hit by a wave, has his eyes full of sand or is frightened about opening his shell because he may be hit.'
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Progressing along the genetic time-track, evolution arrived at the sloth, which 'had bad times falling out of trees', the ape and the famous Piltdown Man, which was the cause of a multitude of engrams, ranging from obsessions about biting to family problems. These could be traced back to the fact that 'the Piltdown teeth were enormous and he was quite careless as to whom and what he bit.' Indeed, so careless was the Piltdown Man, Hubbard recorded, that he was sometimes guilty of 'eating one's wife and other somewhat illogical activities.' (Unfortunately for Hubbard, just twelve months after The History of Man was published, the supposed fossil remains of primitive man found in gravel on Piltdown Common in the south of England were exposed as a hoax. The Piltdown Man had never existed.
The History of Man drifted into pure science fiction when Hubbard came to the point of explaining how thetans moved from body to body. Thetans abandoned bodies earlier than GEs, it appeared. While the GE stayed around to see the body through to death, thetans were obliged to report to a between-lives 'implant station' where they were implanted with a variety of control phases while waiting to pick up another body, sometimes in competition with other disembodied thetans. Hubbard revealed that most implant stations were on Mars, although women occasionally had to report elsewhere in the solar system and there was a 'Martian implant station somewhere in the Pyrenees'.
Well, there you have it. How can we deny the genius of L.Ron Hubbard? The thoughtful and useful ideas he taught the world? He obvious deep learning and careful judgement? The certain correctness and amazing insights of the basic beliefs of Scientology?
More tartar sauce with your clams?
Poor Little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Poor Little Clams! Snap! Snap! Snap! Pope Charles SubGenius Pope Of Houston Slack!
It seems like they're moving towards the kook psychic and horror stuff. This is truly a shame, but the point at which this season ended really made me wonder.
Are they going to even bother trying to end it with continuity, or are they going to pull a voyager and cram everything into one episode?
It's the first amendment. You can monitor whoever you want as much as you want. It's a problem when you *restrict* speech.
I say that I'm going to blow up the local mall. Because of this, other things I say are monitored and I'm watched closely. I might even be picked up and hassled. But I shouldn't be imprisoned because I said it.
I envision a whole new world. One in which differences of opinion are solved by ddos attacks. Don't like the way your senator voted? ddos him. Object to the afghan campaign? ddos a few military networks. Think that abortion is wrong? ddos ddos ddos.
Blah. Why do people elect retards?
Slashdot Mirror
An excellent example is the mars probe that was (more or less) recently lost due to a problem with units. Or back in the day, when no one could decide on the compression standards for 14.4 modems.
The problem isn't with adopting a standard, the problem is getting mired in a zillion groups formed to decide exactly what that standard is. Since many companies and all governments are monolithic in nature, it takes forever for them to decide what the standards are, and invariably they go to the highest bidder.
Read this first. Then read this and this. Now do you understand?
because of the uncertainty principle, you'll never know exactly how to write your program in it and still have it run 100% correctly.
insert 'surrender is an option' joke here
Anyone that has had a high school physics class or a few semesters of introductory physics in college remembers snell's law and that infernal little quantity called 'n' that describes the characteristics of the material with respect to light. What they don't tell you in those classes is that you aren't even getting half of the picture.
Initially, you see n defined as c/v, where v is the speed of light in the material. Since v is less than c (always) this number is always greater than 1 except for vacuum. This is where the 'wierd science' part comes is, and the fact that you're only getting a fraction of the picture. In reality, n has both real and imaginary parts - the imaginary part decribes the 'folding' or how much the wave magnitude decays in the medium over distance and time. For example, if you took something that measured the intensity of light outside in the sunlight and compared it to the intensity of light behind a window in a house, the intensity *inside* would be less because the glass absorbs a certain amount of energy of the light as it passes through. As you can see, this 'n' thing is a little more complicated than what you learned initially in high school and college - end result, well, they sorta lied to you. In fact, the above is just scraping the barrel because you're still trying to give physical credence to a mathematical model.
The 'bad science' comes from putting too much faith in what the math really means. Guys, math is just a tool to *model* reality. If you put too much credence in it you start to think that stuff like virtual particles and feynman diagrams are real. They aren't. They're a tool used by physicists to get an answer that agrees with experiment. For more info on negative index of refraction stuff look at what these guys did, and also look here for a little more info.
Not that it isn't cool to hope that things go faster than light and that we're just getting part of the picture...
I am way excited and the countdown is going for children of dune.
But.
WHAT THE HELL did they do to riverworld? Has anyone bothered to read the synopsis of it? No richard burton, now everyone speaks the same language, etc. Total crap for anyone that has read the books.
The cool thing was that the primary character was burton BECAUSE he was a superior linguist and swordsman and explorer. I actually read a bio of him once I read these books because I couldn't believe that someone like him was legit.
gotta be a slow news day.
the terrorism funds you!
No wonder I always get stomped by the arabs while playing my pirated copy of C&C generals, al quaeda musta funded it.....
The biggest structure is the great great white non-spot that surrounds the great dark spot.
Now we can overprescribe yet another antibiotic and thus churn out zillions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
God, I *really* hope this is used only as a last ditch effort and is used correctly. It makes me ill when a doctor offers me an antibiotic for a viral infection.
I have a friend that has been DMing and playing since D&D first came out, and he still uses the original booklets as his world basis. I've read them, they're awesome compared to the shallow crap that TSR releases now.
I can just see the next generation of game requirements. :D
OS: No later than 3.1 windows
Internet Connection Speed: 2400 bps or lower
CPU: 486 or lower
etc.
Brilliant move. Now we know what they are gonna do with all that surplus outdated hardware
There are no naval units in it or carpetbombing, even though the into movie shows them.
I'm gonna have to say that this one looks like it was released half-baked.
actually, navigators don't bend space, machines bend space. Navigators use their prescience to pick the right path through space, hence them being called navigators.
There's nothing troll about this comment, it's the truth. Universities are money making institutions first and foremost, if you don't believe it then you haven't attended one.
I can't begin to tell you how many people I've met that were allowed 'tenative' enrollment because they had none of the prerequisites so that the administration could get its greasy little hands on that prize of all prizes, financial aid money. Hell, as a grad student TA at my current university, you're forced to sit through the 'how things work' orientation, and there they give you a list of classes in which you are NOT allowed to give a student an F in because 'college is hard and students need chances' rrt wrong no, college administration needs more money so keep the student around longer.
I've also had the misfortune to work with someone that is on the 'academic excellence' comittee here, and the requirements for excellence and renewal of a contract for a professor is 1. how much money they bring in, 2. how much they produce, 3. how many grad students they turn out. 2 and 3 can be overlooked if 1 is well satisfied, and it doesn't matter what quality a teacher the person is.
So, in conclusion, he's right. If it quacks like a duck, looks like a duck, and tastes like a duck then it's probably a duck, and they should just waive the requirements for admission and what have you and allow everyone to attend.
Who is going to play Lars?
How much of a kickback from ETS does a university get from requiring that students take the GRE? It's a pointless test, the real culling of the herd occurs after the comprehensives - and it's not like departments don't look at the student's transcripts before sending a positive admissions letter and offer letter.
So the real issue isn't forcing quality of students, it's a way for the university and a 3rd party to scam a little cash before taking the next 2-6 years of your life. People really don't realize how poorly this test reflects ability - when I first took it, I took it cold and got a 1300 on it. I bought a cheapo study guide and then made a 2200 on it. The only thing I did was practice a little on the included online adaptive program and look at some of the TRICKS at getting quick and easy answers.
Warning! Top Secret Clam facts are about to be exposed.
This may cause jaw pain and extreme cases of uncontrolled
laughter.
All over the internet, the latest question due to well known
controversies originating from alt.religion.scientology seems to
be, "What is this bit about clams?" "Why do people on ARS think
this is funny?", and the ever popular, "Can I be in on the joke?"
Well, here are some answers to all of this and more.
L. Ron Hubbard late in 1952 wrote a book called "What To Audit",
later renamed "The History Of Man". It is still sold by the
Church Of Scientology and this book contains many of the basic
beliefs of the Church Of Scientology. It is considered by many
connosieurs of kook literature as a true classic of kook nonsense
and it is well worth looking for this book in used books stores
if you are indeed interested in a book that proves that there isn't
anything so stupid that people won't believe in it if it's in a book.
L. Ron Hubbard in the introduction claimed it was "a cold blooded
look at your last 60 trillion years." How could this be wrong?
He also claimed his book finally proved the theory of evolution.
(Patience, we will get to them clams soon enough.)
This following excert of History Of Man is taken from the book
Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, a fine book for the neophyte
Scientologist watcher and clam afficionado.
Thanks also to Diane Richardson who originally typed this excerpt
up and posted it to ARS.
In a narrative style that wobbled uncertainly between
schoolboy fiction and a pseudo-scientific medical paper,
Hubbard sought to explain the the human body was occupied by
both a thetan and a 'genetic entity', or GE, a sort of low-
grade soul located more or less in the centre of the body.
To underpin his new science, Hubbard created an entire
cosmology, the essence of which was that the true self of
an individual was an immortal, omniscient and ominpotent
entity called a 'thetan'. In existence before the beginning
of time, thetans picked up and discarded millions of bodies
over trillions of years.
('The genetic entity apparently enters the protoplasm line
some two days or a week prior to conception. There is some
evidence that the GE is actually double, one entering on the
sperm side...') The GE carried on through the evolutionary
line, 'usually on the same planet', whereas the thetan only
came to earth about 35,000 years ago to supervise the
development of caveman into homo sapiens. Thus the GE was
once 'an anthropoid in the deep forests of forgetten
continents or a mollusc seeking to survive on the shore of
some lost sea'. The discovery of the GE (Hubbard hailed
every fanciful new idea as a 'discovery') 'makes it possible
at last to vindicate the theory of evolution proposed by Darwin'.
Much of the book was devoted to a re-working of evolution,
starting with 'an atom, complete with electronic rings'
after which came cosmic impact producing a 'photon
converter', the first single-cell creature, then seaweed,
jellyfish and the clam.
^^^^^^ Look! Clams!
Many engrams, for example, could be traced back to clams.
The clam's big problem was that there was a conflict
between the hinge that wanted to open and the hinge that
wanted to close. It was easy to restimulate the engram
caused by the defeat of the weaker hinge, Hubbard pronounced,
by asking a pre-clear to imagine a clam on a beach opening
and closing its shell very rapidly and at the same time
making an opening and closing motion with thumb and
forefinger. This gesture, he said, would upset large
numbers of people.
'By the way,' he warned, 'your discussion of these incidents
with the uninitiated in Scientology can cause havoc.
Should you describe the "clam" to some one [sic], you may
restimulate it in him to the extent of causing severe jaw
pain. Once such victim, after hearing about a clam death,
could not use his jaws for three days.'
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Does your jaw ache, dear reader?
Bwahahahhahahahaha!
Clams! And people pay to be taught stuff like this from silly lads
who believe stuff like this. And they claim it is science!
And a religion! Low level Scientologists are discouraged from
reading this book and are told it will all be explained later
when they are ready to understand the higher secrets of Scientology.
'Clam' is a word used on alt.religion.scientology to describe
scientologists who believe stuff like this and explains the rash of
clam jokes of alt.religion.scientology.
More secrets of Scientology:
After the clam became the 'Weeper' or the 'Boohoo', a
mollusc that rolled in the surf for half a million years,
pumping sea water out of its shell as it breathed, hence
its name. Weepers had 'trillions of misadventures',
prominent among them the anxiety caused by trying to gulp
air before being swamped by the next wave. 'The inability
of a pre-clear to cry,' Hubbard explained, 'is partly a
hang-up in the Weeper. He is about to be hit by a wave,
has his eyes full of sand or is frightened about opening
his shell because he may be hit.'
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Poor little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Progressing along the genetic time-track, evolution arrived
at the sloth, which 'had bad times falling out of trees',
the ape and the famous Piltdown Man, which was the cause
of a multitude of engrams, ranging from obsessions about
biting to family problems. These could be traced back to
the fact that 'the Piltdown teeth were enormous and he was
quite careless as to whom and what he bit.' Indeed, so
careless was the Piltdown Man, Hubbard recorded, that he
was sometimes guilty of 'eating one's wife and other
somewhat illogical activities.' (Unfortunately
for Hubbard, just twelve months after The History of Man
was published, the supposed fossil remains of primitive
man found in gravel on Piltdown Common in the south of
England were exposed as a hoax. The Piltdown Man had
never existed.
The History of Man drifted into pure science fiction when
Hubbard came to the point of explaining how thetans
moved from body to body. Thetans abandoned bodies earlier
than GEs, it appeared. While the GE stayed around to see
the body through to death, thetans were obliged to report
to a between-lives 'implant station' where they were
implanted with a variety of control phases while waiting
to pick up another body, sometimes in competition with
other disembodied thetans. Hubbard revealed that most
implant stations were on Mars, although women occasionally
had to report elsewhere in the solar system and there
was a 'Martian implant station somewhere in the Pyrenees'.
Well, there you have it. How can we deny the genius of
L.Ron Hubbard? The thoughtful and useful ideas he taught
the world? He obvious deep learning and careful judgement?
The certain correctness and amazing insights of the basic beliefs
of Scientology?
More tartar sauce with your clams?
Poor Little clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Poor Little Clams! Snap! Snap! Snap!
Pope Charles
SubGenius Pope Of Houston
Slack!
It seems like they're moving towards the kook psychic and horror stuff. This is truly a shame, but the point at which this season ended really made me wonder.
Are they going to even bother trying to end it with continuity, or are they going to pull a voyager and cram everything into one episode?
It's the first amendment. You can monitor whoever you want as much as you want. It's a problem when you *restrict* speech.
I say that I'm going to blow up the local mall. Because of this, other things I say are monitored and I'm watched closely. I might even be picked up and hassled. But I shouldn't be imprisoned because I said it.
So much for grad students checking out books for research.
for making life hard for the rest of us at NASA. Because of this, every person interning at NASA is going to be put under the microscope.
Who cares? The key here is *interplanetary*.
I envision a whole new world. One in which differences of opinion are solved by ddos attacks. Don't like the way your senator voted? ddos him. Object to the afghan campaign? ddos a few military networks. Think that abortion is wrong? ddos ddos ddos.
Blah. Why do people elect retards?