This Microsoft press release has an embarrasing ammount of "rah-rah" cheerleading, right up there to the same level as Steve Jobs in full blast at MacWorld. (There goes my karma; both sides will moderate me down now.)
Sure, I expect a press release to be from the releaser's point of view, and even a bit of spin, but really, it ought to be toned down from "preaching to the faithful" levels for a general press release.
The fact that you're confusing the ozone issue and the global warming issue proves that you haven't a clue what you're talking about. They're two entirely different things. I haven't read Sagan's book, but I'd be utterly astonished if he made such a blunder.
A lot of this is a problem blacks will need to fix
on
Racism At Microsoft?
·
· Score: 1
At a company where I used to work, there were some blacks in the administration side, but none at all in the technical side of the business. Lots of Asians and Indians, no blacks.
Our Director of Personnel was black, so I don't think it was a corporate policy against blacks.
The whole time I was there, I do not recall a single black showing up for an interview in the technical side, and on that, you can't know until you call the number on the resume and ask them to come in.
Why?
A big part of it, I think, is an even more unpleasant version of what Jon Katz has written about in his "Voices from the Hellmouth" series, with a particularly pernicious strain of racism added to the brew.
My mother was a school teacher. One of the things that exasperated her, and drove her black collegues to tears, was the way any black child who showed any interest in academic things was treated by their black peers. It started with "You're trying to be white," and got worse from there. One brilliant girl in a neighboring school, whose ambition was to become a medical doctor, bled to death on the school bus one morning after one of these thugs slit her throat for the crime of "acting white".
And a significant portion of the students thought the murdering thug was a heroine, because "She really showed that Oreo." The rest are terrorized into acting the way the thugs define "black".
Which is not exactly compatible with getting the sort of education which might lead to a tech carreer.
I don't know how to fix this. There's a culture in many schools that celebrates ignorance and viciously attacks learning that has got to be defeated. There was an item in the papers a few years ago about how the schools in Washington DC handed out academic awards in secret, because the lives of any black kids who got an academic award would be in serious danger, from their fellow black students.
Perhaps the solution is to identify kids who are interested in learning, and separate them far, far away from the stupid thugs.
This is a series of articles on the Chernobyl accident that were posted to the Jerry Pournelle RoundTable on GEnie back in 1990 by one of the regulars. It is a really blood-curdling story. (If mention of Jerry Pournelle's name makes your knee jerk, you really should ignore that for now, check out the article, and let it speak for itself.)
(Please don't critique my HTML too harshly; I just banged the minimum HTML into this antique text file necessary to make it format halfway decently in a web browser.)
The thing is, one or more of the solutions to the nuclear waste problem will be implemented, because we have to. We have no choice. There's already a lot of nuclear waste sitting in those holding pools that we're going to have to do something with.
So, once the disposal solution is implemented, it'll hold plenty of waste, and "no place to dispose of the waste" will no longer be an issue. Note in your message you point out that the plants are still storing all the waste they've ever produced. In volume, it's a very small problem.
There are solutions. It's just that "the usual suspects" will never be satisfied with any solution; they will always have ever more contrived and unlikely scenarios to nitpick with.
I'm more than half convinced that the "No Nooks Shut Them Down" types don't want the waste disposed of. They want it right there on the surface, where it forms a priceless publicity resource whenever they can contrive to appear on the evening news wringing their hands over it.
As for decommissioning an old plant, one of the simplest plans is to just lock the door and weld it shut. The reactor building takes up a fairly small portion of the power plant's real estate. Just build the new one next to the old one.
Every Hollywood movie about cloning but one has portrayed cloning as some kind of instant 3-D Xerox(TM) machine which makes an identical copy of the adult original.
I'm sure everyone here knows what a load of fetid dingo's kidneys that is.
Yeah, I'm sure "The Sixth Day" (I haven't seen it; don't plan to) had some kind of Trekkian tecknobabble about reading someone's memories out through their eyeballs or something, and growing the infant to adulthood in days, including all the physical attributes that develop through interaction with the environment, like muscle, bone, and calluses on the soles of the feet, but gimme a break.
The one exception, the one movie I've seen that did cloning pretty much right, was "The Boys from Brazil." (The plot is that an underground Nazi organization managed to save a tissue sample from Hitler, and has cloned 90 copies, who are all (as of the movie) kids of about 10. They're secretly trying to duplicate Hitler's upbringing, including murdering the kids' adopted fathers at the age when Hitler's father died, hoping that at least one of them will turn out... very very badly.)
The fact is, clones are almost exactly the same sort of thing as identical twins, except for the age difference of course. Twins are separate individuals, so are clones.
The "almost" in that is that clones are less alike than identical twins. Aside from the age difference and the environment difference, identical twins have identical mitochondrial DNA. Clones don't necessarily, only the nucleus is transferred.
And even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints!
I thought this Baron was pretty good. He didn't strike me as oafish. He was far better than the leperous doofus of Lynch's monstrosity.
I've always thought that the ideal Baron Harkkonen would be Orson Welles, of "We Will Sell No Wine Before Its Time" vintage. Alas, he's dead now, and would be too old now even if he were alive.
Carbon 14 has a half-life of only 1200 years or so, so it's completely useless for things this old.
One of the more common dating techniques for really old stuff is potassium-argon dating. It's less sensitive to initial conditions, and tells you how long ago the rock was formed as a solid. Potassium-40 decays to Argon-40, and you can determine both how much argon is trapped in the rock, and how much K40 is still there. The argon all escapes until the rock is solid.
There are some interesting ideas coming from some Christians who try to look at both the physical evidence and the Bible. Glenn Morton is one of the more interesting. He accepts the "mainstream" accepted ages of the Earth and fossils. His hypothesis is that Adam and Eve were probably either homo habilis, or perhaps even australopithicus, and that "Noah's Flood" was the flooding of the Mediterranean basin about 2 million years ago. (Not a global flood, but a pretty huge one that there is good evidence for.)
This one, in principle, could even be testable. If it's true, you might be able to find ruins of cities on the bottom of the Mediterranean. Or, perhaps, fossil evidence that genus Homo originated down there.
In either case, though, this 2.6 billion year old stuff is a thousand times older than any of that.
The thing that offends me about Netscape (4.7something) is that when I go to POP my email, it holds my email hostage while it laboriously downloads this stupid "news and features" web page in my email window, chock full of time-wasting graphics and other such bloated cruft.
I don't normally use Netscape for email (I use mutt in a Unix shell, which is the way email ought to be) but every now and then I get some html or images that I actually do want to see, so I bounce it to a POP account I use for nothing else but looking at those few emails with Netscape.
And it always infuriates me, to the point where I'm about this close (fingers two microns apart) from looping all netscape.com IPs back to localhost. I don't mind ads, as long as they don't hold the content I'm after hostage while they download, like this Netscape/AOL crap does.
I've looked at Mozilla a bit, but last time I looked (a few weeks ago) it crashed. A lot. More than Netscape 4.72. Maybe it's time to give it another look.
Maintain secrecy of ballot. Ideally, an individual shouldn't be able to prove which way they voted even if asked, to make vote-buying and intimidation more difficult.
Make fraud as difficult as possible, both traditional "dead voter, vote early vote often", and hack attacks against the system.
Good "user friendliness", making mistakes less likely. Warn the voter if something invalid is entered, show them how their vote is going to be recorded and ask them "is this OK?".
Flexibility, usable with "instant runoff" or "multiple preference" type votes.
Allow individuals to verify that their vote was cast as they intended, and, later, that it was counted as they cast it.
(1) seems to conflict with (5). Perhaps there's some way with digital signatures and one-way keys to accomplish this? Perhaps the voter has a printed token that they can use to verify their vote is "as cast", without revealing what it was, and if they have significant doubt (like in the Palm Beach butterfly ballot) and don't mind revealing how they voted, they could combine their token with the Registrar of Voters' token to see how their vote was recorded; the same information as on the screen when they voted. You need both the token on the slip of paper the voter got and the Registrar token to get the individual vote information.
Absentee ballots definitely fail (1), but I don't see any help for that. (Guess why the Democrat operatives were carting the homeless down to the Registrar's office to pick up absentee ballots in exchange for cigarettes, rather than to the ballot box on election day?)
Unfortunately, any Internet voting scheme is also going to fail (1), because you can't verify that the voter is alone at his/her PC. Unless, perhaps, you make it possible for the voter to change his/her vote at any time before the polls close.
Yes they could. The homeless people in Wisconsin picked up absentee ballots in exchange for cigarettes. Who actually filled those absentee ballots out... is an open question.
I wonder where that was. I graduated from high school in 1972, and they never showed Reefer Madness. I recall hearing it mentioned, but in the context that it was dated and silly. Reefer Madness was made in the 30's, right? Hey, what am I doing guessing when I can call up imdb.com? Yep, 1936. I didn't see it until college, and then it was a student group which showed it as a comedy film, on a double feature with "Schlitz Movie Orgy", if I recall correctly.
They did have anti-drug presentations by local police at my high school (a precursor to the DARE program, I suppose) but Reefer Madness was never a part of it.
(And the only illegal drugs I've ever done is half a bottle of beer when I was 17. Too paranoid, I suppose; I expected an arrest scene like the one in Brazil when someone pulled out a baggie in my dorm.)
MousePotato asks "How many of us were forced to watch Reefer Madness".
I think for the group of people reading this, the number approximates zero. I don't think much of the audience of Slashdot is old enough that Reefer Madness was taken seriously when they were born.
(A bunch of stoned college students watching Reefer Madness for laughs doesn't count.)
Everybody who flames does it for their own reasons. A lot it is just teenage posturing, the electronic equivalent of grafitti taggers. And a lot of it is various forms of fanaticism. (By Winston Churchill's definition: a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject.)
But there is another subset of flamers, those who have made flaming into performance art. Like in all art forms, there is good art, and bad art. The very best of the "performance art" flamers are joys to read. Even when when their point of view is wrong-headed (i.e, when they're roasting you) as long as you have some sense of humor and perspective, you can enjoy their missives.
Good points. I'll add to it that George Washingon rolled his cannon across the frozen Hudson to attack the British. The Hudson hasn't frozen hard enough to do that in over 100 years.
Terrestrial temperatures correlate very closely to solar activity. They correlate poorly to not at all with human activity.
There is something that seems very much like story-book wizardry in hacking. Like the really wonderful Steve Savitsky song, a computer's innards are
A world where magic rules,
Where the only rule is logic,
Webs of words the only tools.
Maybe that has something to do with the "magical" inclination, and also not taking it too seriously. For most, it seems to me, it's more a game than anything else. I heard one neopagan define his religion as "a religion you make up as you go along", though I'm sure there are those who will object that that's taking it too "not seriously".
It seems to me there are a lot more "mainstream" sorts than you might think from reading the Jargon File item. I get the impression that saying orthodox Christianity was "rare" somewhat overstates the case. "Somewhat unusual" seems closer to the mark, and some are quite prominent hackers.
That's the impression I've gotten of the Time-Warner conglomerate from other sources. In particular, when "Babylon 5" was looking for a home at the collapse of PTEN (a Warner Brothers producer of programs for syndication) it seemed obvious to say "Hey, Warner Brothers has their own network. How about that?"
J. Michael Straczynski said at the time that the WB network was a different part of Warner Brothers than the part that had provided a home for Babylon 5, and that the two parts of the company were such bitter rivals that B5's association with PTEN was utter poison, as far as any possiblity of moving it to the WB Network was concerned.
Seems like a stupid way to run a business to me, but they haven't gone bankrupt yet.
I just sent this message to comments@comcastpc.com. Let's see what they say.
Subject: PLEASE CLARIFY TERMS OF SERVICE: @home and VPN
I have been informed of the following item of concern in the Terms of Service of "@home" Internet cable modem.
6.Prohibited Uses of the Service.
...
b.In addition, Customer agrees not to:
viii.... CUSTOMER AGREES NOT TO
USE THE SERVICE... IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN
(VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING
PROTOCOL
Many of our employees use the Internet at thier homes for their personal use, and Cable Modem and DSL have become very popular. Naturally, when our employees want to connect into the office from home, they want to use their high-speed connection rather than the traditional dialup.
Our company has installed VPN hardware and software in order to make it possible for our employees to do so without compromising our network security.
The plain language of this item in your Terms of Service seems to tell me that our employees can not use @home in this manner.
Please clarify this, and let me know if this is correct. If our employees can not use VPN from @home, I need inform our 8,000 employees that, when they're making decisions about what broadband services to install at their homes for their personal use, that if they want to use that broadband connection to access their work account, they had better choose some other provider than @home.
Very nice analysis. If I had moderator points today, I'd bump this one up to 5.
One small clarification - The atmospheric temperature that is important for retention of atmosphere is the exobase temperature - the temperature of the atmosphere at the altitude where the gas molecules stop acting as a gas, and start acting as individual particles. This is affected by (among other things) solar wind, and whether the planet has a magnetic field. Mars has little magnetic field, so solar wind heats the exobase more than it would on a planet with a magnetic field.
I certainly agree with Jeff that all browsers should scale fonts properly. But that doesn't alter the fact that the browsers that many people use (everybody who uses Netscape on non-Windows platforms, for instance) do not scale fonts properly, or at all.
I strongly disagree with the practice of designing web pages for "The Way Browsers Ought To Work", and ignoring the way most browsers actually work out in the real world.
Jeff wrote is web page so it can't be read on my Sun workstation unless the font can be scaled up from his teensy tiny font size, and since Netscape on the Sun doesn support that yet, his web page is entirely unreadable.
Good web page design is designing so that it is accessible for everyone, not just those people who use the browser you think is best.
I don't care about the "ugliness" of the site that many people complained about. I care about content rather than style. I'll return again and again to the ugliest site in the world, as long as it has content that I am interested in.
As to whether the site has any content at all, I can not tell. It displays on my Sun workstation in a font that is only very slightly more readable than a "greeked" iconized xterm. That is, by putting my nose up against the CRT and squinting real hard, I can make out about one word in three.
Netscape on the Sun does not have the ALT-[ ALT-] commands to increase and decrease the font, so in order to read this page, I would have to either "Show Source" and read the HTML source, or go into my Netscape preferences and tell it "Reasonable size font, and use my font no matter what the idiot document says to use." This *sometimes* helps; I haven't tried it with this site. Since he's going so far as to specify his page at the pixel level, I suspect this might be one of the sites whose author has taken great pains to override all reader preferences.
I hate setting the "use only my font" config, because sites which use reasonable fonts often use them for reasonable purposes, and I don't want to lose that in my web browsing.
Normally, sites that are so thoroughly unreadable as this one, I hit the "Back" button on my browser. That's what I did with this one.
("Small favors" department: At least he didn't render his preferred page layout into a.GIF file. I have seen pages like that.)
(Desired feature for Mozilla: A "minimum font size" config tag which triggers a "display everything in Times-Roman 12, period, no exceptions" rule.)
Slashdot Mirror
This Microsoft press release has an embarrasing ammount of "rah-rah" cheerleading, right up there to the same level as Steve Jobs in full blast at MacWorld. (There goes my karma; both sides will moderate me down now.)
Sure, I expect a press release to be from the releaser's point of view, and even a bit of spin, but really, it ought to be toned down from "preaching to the faithful" levels for a general press release.
The fact that you're confusing the ozone issue and the global warming issue proves that you haven't a clue what you're talking about. They're two entirely different things. I haven't read Sagan's book, but I'd be utterly astonished if he made such a blunder.
At a company where I used to work, there were some blacks in the administration side, but none at all in the technical side of the business. Lots of Asians and Indians, no blacks.
Our Director of Personnel was black, so I don't think it was a corporate policy against blacks.
The whole time I was there, I do not recall a single black showing up for an interview in the technical side, and on that, you can't know until you call the number on the resume and ask them to come in.
Why?
A big part of it, I think, is an even more unpleasant version of what Jon Katz has written about in his "Voices from the Hellmouth" series, with a particularly pernicious strain of racism added to the brew.
My mother was a school teacher. One of the things that exasperated her, and drove her black collegues to tears, was the way any black child who showed any interest in academic things was treated by their black peers. It started with "You're trying to be white," and got worse from there. One brilliant girl in a neighboring school, whose ambition was to become a medical doctor, bled to death on the school bus one morning after one of these thugs slit her throat for the crime of "acting white".
And a significant portion of the students thought the murdering thug was a heroine, because "She really showed that Oreo." The rest are terrorized into acting the way the thugs define "black".
Which is not exactly compatible with getting the sort of education which might lead to a tech carreer.
I don't know how to fix this. There's a culture in many schools that celebrates ignorance and viciously attacks learning that has got to be defeated. There was an item in the papers a few years ago about how the schools in Washington DC handed out academic awards in secret, because the lives of any black kids who got an academic award would be in serious danger, from their fellow black students.
Perhaps the solution is to identify kids who are interested in learning, and separate them far, far away from the stupid thugs.
(A good idea for kids of all races, I think.)
(Please don't critique my HTML too harshly; I just banged the minimum HTML into this antique text file necessary to make it format halfway decently in a web browser.)
It's about 64K in size.
The thing is, one or more of the solutions to the nuclear waste problem will be implemented, because we have to. We have no choice. There's already a lot of nuclear waste sitting in those holding pools that we're going to have to do something with.
So, once the disposal solution is implemented, it'll hold plenty of waste, and "no place to dispose of the waste" will no longer be an issue. Note in your message you point out that the plants are still storing all the waste they've ever produced. In volume, it's a very small problem.
There are solutions. It's just that "the usual suspects" will never be satisfied with any solution; they will always have ever more contrived and unlikely scenarios to nitpick with.
I'm more than half convinced that the "No Nooks Shut Them Down" types don't want the waste disposed of. They want it right there on the surface, where it forms a priceless publicity resource whenever they can contrive to appear on the evening news wringing their hands over it.
As for decommissioning an old plant, one of the simplest plans is to just lock the door and weld it shut. The reactor building takes up a fairly small portion of the power plant's real estate. Just build the new one next to the old one.
Every Hollywood movie about cloning but one has portrayed cloning as some kind of instant 3-D Xerox(TM) machine which makes an identical copy of the adult original.
... very very badly.)
I'm sure everyone here knows what a load of fetid dingo's kidneys that is.
Yeah, I'm sure "The Sixth Day" (I haven't seen it; don't plan to) had some kind of Trekkian tecknobabble about reading someone's memories out through their eyeballs or something, and growing the infant to adulthood in days, including all the physical attributes that develop through interaction with the environment, like muscle, bone, and calluses on the soles of the feet, but gimme a break.
The one exception, the one movie I've seen that did cloning pretty much right, was "The Boys from Brazil." (The plot is that an underground Nazi organization managed to save a tissue sample from Hitler, and has cloned 90 copies, who are all (as of the movie) kids of about 10. They're secretly trying to duplicate Hitler's upbringing, including murdering the kids' adopted fathers at the age when Hitler's father died, hoping that at least one of them will turn out
The fact is, clones are almost exactly the same sort of thing as identical twins, except for the age difference of course. Twins are separate individuals, so are clones.
The "almost" in that is that clones are less alike than identical twins. Aside from the age difference and the environment difference, identical twins have identical mitochondrial DNA. Clones don't necessarily, only the nucleus is transferred.
And even identical twins do not have the same fingerprints!
I thought this Baron was pretty good. He didn't strike me as oafish. He was far better than the leperous doofus of Lynch's monstrosity.
I've always thought that the ideal Baron Harkkonen would be Orson Welles, of "We Will Sell No Wine Before Its Time" vintage. Alas, he's dead now, and would be too old now even if he were alive.
Carbon 14 has a half-life of only 1200 years or so, so it's completely useless for things this old.
One of the more common dating techniques for really old stuff is potassium-argon dating. It's less sensitive to initial conditions, and tells you how long ago the rock was formed as a solid. Potassium-40 decays to Argon-40, and you can determine both how much argon is trapped in the rock, and how much K40 is still there. The argon all escapes until the rock is solid.
There are some interesting ideas coming from some Christians who try to look at both the physical evidence and the Bible. Glenn Morton is one of the more interesting. He accepts the "mainstream" accepted ages of the Earth and fossils. His hypothesis is that Adam and Eve were probably either homo habilis, or perhaps even australopithicus, and that "Noah's Flood" was the flooding of the Mediterranean basin about 2 million years ago. (Not a global flood, but a pretty huge one that there is good evidence for.)
This one, in principle, could even be testable. If it's true, you might be able to find ruins of cities on the bottom of the Mediterranean. Or, perhaps, fossil evidence that genus Homo originated down there.
In either case, though, this 2.6 billion year old stuff is a thousand times older than any of that.
The thing that offends me about Netscape (4.7something) is that when I go to POP my email, it holds my email hostage while it laboriously downloads this stupid "news and features" web page in my email window, chock full of time-wasting graphics and other such bloated cruft.
I don't normally use Netscape for email (I use mutt in a Unix shell, which is the way email ought to be) but every now and then I get some html or images that I actually do want to see, so I bounce it to a POP account I use for nothing else but looking at those few emails with Netscape.
And it always infuriates me, to the point where I'm about this close (fingers two microns apart) from looping all netscape.com IPs back to localhost. I don't mind ads, as long as they don't hold the content I'm after hostage while they download, like this Netscape/AOL crap does.
I've looked at Mozilla a bit, but last time I looked (a few weeks ago) it crashed. A lot. More than Netscape 4.72. Maybe it's time to give it another look.
(Internet Exploiter, of course, is Right Out.)
(1) seems to conflict with (5). Perhaps there's some way with digital signatures and one-way keys to accomplish this? Perhaps the voter has a printed token that they can use to verify their vote is "as cast", without revealing what it was, and if they have significant doubt (like in the Palm Beach butterfly ballot) and don't mind revealing how they voted, they could combine their token with the Registrar of Voters' token to see how their vote was recorded; the same information as on the screen when they voted. You need both the token on the slip of paper the voter got and the Registrar token to get the individual vote information.
Absentee ballots definitely fail (1), but I don't see any help for that. (Guess why the Democrat operatives were carting the homeless down to the Registrar's office to pick up absentee ballots in exchange for cigarettes, rather than to the ballot box on election day?)
Unfortunately, any Internet voting scheme is also going to fail (1), because you can't verify that the voter is alone at his/her PC. Unless, perhaps, you make it possible for the voter to change his/her vote at any time before the polls close.
Yes they could. The homeless people in Wisconsin picked up absentee ballots in exchange for cigarettes. Who actually filled those absentee ballots out ... is an open question.
A few years ago, AGIS (Is that spelled right?) tried to openly become the ISP of Spammers. It hurt them bad. Where are they now?
Now, PSINet is trying to do the same thing, only covertly.
I vote, BLACKHOLE PSINET!! Drop usenet postings from PSINet addresses, drop their packets, drop their email. DEATH TO SPAM! DEATH!! DEATH!!!
Picket their booths at trade shows, buy a share or two and complain at their stockholders meetings.
Anyone who does business with PSINet, try to convince them to switch.
Hit them high, hit them low, make supporting spammers such a source of intense, continuing, increasing pain that they will stop -- one way or another.
I wonder where that was. I graduated from high school in 1972, and they never showed Reefer Madness. I recall hearing it mentioned, but in the context that it was dated and silly. Reefer Madness was made in the 30's, right? Hey, what am I doing guessing when I can call up imdb.com? Yep, 1936. I didn't see it until college, and then it was a student group which showed it as a comedy film, on a double feature with "Schlitz Movie Orgy", if I recall correctly.
They did have anti-drug presentations by local police at my high school (a precursor to the DARE program, I suppose) but Reefer Madness was never a part of it.
(And the only illegal drugs I've ever done is half a bottle of beer when I was 17. Too paranoid, I suppose; I expected an arrest scene like the one in Brazil when someone pulled out a baggie in my dorm.)
MousePotato asks "How many of us were forced to watch Reefer Madness".
I think for the group of people reading this, the number approximates zero. I don't think much of the audience of Slashdot is old enough that Reefer Madness was taken seriously when they were born.
(A bunch of stoned college students watching Reefer Madness for laughs doesn't count.)
Everybody who flames does it for their own reasons. A lot it is just teenage posturing, the electronic equivalent of grafitti taggers. And a lot of it is various forms of fanaticism. (By Winston Churchill's definition: a fanatic is someone who can't change his mind, and won't change the subject.)
But there is another subset of flamers, those who have made flaming into performance art. Like in all art forms, there is good art, and bad art. The very best of the "performance art" flamers are joys to read. Even when when their point of view is wrong-headed (i.e, when they're roasting you) as long as you have some sense of humor and perspective, you can enjoy their missives.
Good points. I'll add to it that George Washingon rolled his cannon across the frozen Hudson to attack the British. The Hudson hasn't frozen hard enough to do that in over 100 years.
Terrestrial temperatures correlate very closely to solar activity. They correlate poorly to not at all with human activity.
Here's an intesting plot of temperature vs. solar activity.
There is something that seems very much like story-book wizardry in hacking. Like the really wonderful Steve Savitsky song, a computer's innards are
A world where magic rules,
Where the only rule is logic,
Webs of words the only tools.
Maybe that has something to do with the "magical" inclination, and also not taking it too seriously. For most, it seems to me, it's more a game than anything else. I heard one neopagan define his religion as "a religion you make up as you go along", though I'm sure there are those who will object that that's taking it too "not seriously".
It seems to me there are a lot more "mainstream" sorts than you might think from reading the Jargon File item. I get the impression that saying orthodox Christianity was "rare" somewhat overstates the case. "Somewhat unusual" seems closer to the mark, and some are quite prominent hackers.
Alas, the site sank under the weight of the flash crowd from slashdot...
/dev/null
It now contains only:
Sorry, this machine is too small to handle the volume of traffic being generated by httpd requests for the A-News archive.
The site is now offline.
Such is the price of fame.
Comments to: anews@communication.ucsd.edu
Complaints to:
That's the impression I've gotten of the Time-Warner conglomerate from other sources. In particular, when "Babylon 5" was looking for a home at the collapse of PTEN (a Warner Brothers producer of programs for syndication) it seemed obvious to say "Hey, Warner Brothers has their own network. How about that?"
J. Michael Straczynski said at the time that the WB network was a different part of Warner Brothers than the part that had provided a home for Babylon 5, and that the two parts of the company were such bitter rivals that B5's association with PTEN was utter poison, as far as any possiblity of moving it to the WB Network was concerned.
Seems like a stupid way to run a business to me, but they haven't gone bankrupt yet.
I just sent this message to comments@comcastpc.com. Let's see what they say.
...
... CUSTOMER AGREES NOT TO
... IN CONJUNCTION WITH A VPN
Subject: PLEASE CLARIFY TERMS OF SERVICE: @home and VPN
I have been informed of the following item of concern in the Terms of Service of "@home" Internet cable modem.
6.Prohibited Uses of the Service.
b.In addition, Customer agrees not to:
viii.
USE THE SERVICE
(VIRTUAL PRIVATE NETWORK) OR A VPN TUNNELING
PROTOCOL
Many of our employees use the Internet at thier homes for their personal use, and Cable Modem and DSL have become very popular. Naturally, when our employees want to connect into the office from home, they want to use their high-speed connection rather than the traditional dialup.
Our company has installed VPN hardware and software in order to make it possible for our employees to do so without compromising our network security.
The plain language of this item in your Terms of Service seems to tell me that our employees can not use @home in this manner.
Please clarify this, and let me know if this is correct. If our employees can not use VPN from @home, I need inform our 8,000 employees that, when they're making decisions about what broadband services to install at their homes for their personal use, that if they want to use that broadband connection to access their work account, they had better choose some other provider than @home.
Very nice analysis. If I had moderator points today, I'd bump this one up to 5.
One small clarification - The atmospheric temperature that is important for retention of atmosphere is the exobase temperature - the temperature of the atmosphere at the altitude where the gas molecules stop acting as a gas, and start acting as individual particles. This is affected by (among other things) solar wind, and whether the planet has a magnetic field. Mars has little magnetic field, so solar wind heats the exobase more than it would on a planet with a magnetic field.
I certainly agree with Jeff that all browsers should scale fonts properly. But that doesn't alter the fact that the browsers that many people use (everybody who uses Netscape on non-Windows platforms, for instance) do not scale fonts properly, or at all.
I strongly disagree with the practice of designing web pages for "The Way Browsers Ought To Work", and ignoring the way most browsers actually work out in the real world.
Jeff wrote is web page so it can't be read on my Sun workstation unless the font can be scaled up from his teensy tiny font size, and since Netscape on the Sun doesn support that yet, his web page is entirely unreadable.
Good web page design is designing so that it is accessible for everyone, not just those people who use the browser you think is best.
I don't care about the "ugliness" of the site that many people complained about. I care about content rather than style. I'll return again and again to the ugliest site in the world, as long as it has content that I am interested in.
.GIF file. I have seen pages like that.)
As to whether the site has any content at all, I can not tell. It displays on my Sun workstation in a font that is only very slightly more readable than a "greeked" iconized xterm. That is, by putting my nose up against the CRT and squinting real hard, I can make out about one word in three.
Netscape on the Sun does not have the ALT-[ ALT-] commands to increase and decrease the font, so in order to read this page, I would have to either "Show Source" and read the HTML source, or go into my Netscape preferences and tell it "Reasonable size font, and use my font no matter what the idiot document says to use." This *sometimes* helps; I haven't tried it with this site. Since he's going so far as to specify his page at the pixel level, I suspect this might be one of the sites whose author has taken great pains to override all reader preferences.
I hate setting the "use only my font" config, because sites which use reasonable fonts often use them for reasonable purposes, and I don't want to lose that in my web browsing.
Normally, sites that are so thoroughly unreadable as this one, I hit the "Back" button on my browser. That's what I did with this one.
("Small favors" department: At least he didn't render his preferred page layout into a
(Desired feature for Mozilla: A "minimum font size" config tag which triggers a "display everything in Times-Roman 12, period, no exceptions" rule.)
Jason's mom installs censorware on the "I-Fruit" computer:
i f
http://www.foxtrot.com/comics/strips/ft000412.g
Many people here probably already have this bookmarked, but I'm astonished this link wasn't in the story:
Mit Hacks Archive
(Strange... very slow to answer.... Has it been pre-slashdotted?)
(Ah, there it is. I was afraid for a minute this was lost in the Land of Broken Links.)