Preservation of information for future generations, and conversely providing information generated past generations to the present.
I can walk into my nice, but hardly cutting edge public library and look up my hometown paper's front page for December 8, 1941 and read about the reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack. I can look for science fiction books published in the 1950s by publishers that have gone out of business. I can find strange, but interesting books that have never been digitized and are very hard to find, like a military history of the bicycle written in the 1960s.
If I go to a *world class* library, like the main branch of the Boston Public Library, I can examine rare manucripts, maps and sheet music, although they have been making an effort to digitize that stuff. If I needed a service manual for a fifty year-old TV set, this is the first place I'd look.
I can understand going primarily ebook for a community that can't afford a real library, but even such a library needs stacks where it preserves books of local interest for future generations. Given that they've given up physical books and all the associated expenses, 10,000 books seems like an awfully thin collection to me.
Alright, how do I, for example, vote Cisco out of business?
Or take Facebook. Even if I don't use it, other people do, and they don't like Facebook's privacy policies they see Facebook as an essential service.
That points the way to a better analogy. Most of us would allow that the NSA does certain essential services, we don't like the way Obama is running it. But we have a mechanism by which we can vote the NSA a new boss who would make it run differently.
So what we'd need to trust private industry more is a mechanism to vote out a private firm's management and vote in a new management. Since we can't do that without violating the stockholders' property rights, that means that private industry will always be less trustworthy than government, low as that benchmark might be.
Well, *I* purchased Windows 8. Normally I use MINT or Xubuntu, but I do like to keep tabs on what's happening in the Windows and Mac worlds.
Here's my assessment on Windows 8: it's gimmicky and the whole idea of converging tablet UI and notebook UI is ill-conceived. But it ain't that bad.
I can see how somebody who's been using nothing but XP for the last ten years could find it horribly disorienting, and many of those people might do well to consider Mac OSX, but I had no difficulty adjusting to it. The big "problem" with the missing start menu took some getting used to, but in the end app search + pinning the 15 most used apps to the taskbar proved perfectly serviceable for day to day use.
The thing I like about Windows 8 is that it has proved to be stable and consistent in its response. Response time consistency is underrated. The big problem with Vista was that they tried to hard to optimize its average performance, without paying enough attention to the worst case. Vista would find itself starved for memory because of all the aggressive caching it did, so several times a day it would freeze up for several seconds in order to deliver performance gains most of the time which weren't noticeable. Windows 8 doesn't make this mistake. Its performance is acceptable on the six year old hardware I'm using.
The thing I don't like about Windows 8 is that some of the stuff doesn't quite work right on a 16:10 aspect ratio display that doesn't have a touchscreen.
All in all I'd be happier with Windows 8 if it were more like Windows 7, but in the end its quirks don't matter. Windows 8 fades into the background the way a desktop should.
Context is important to whether a joke is funny, or just stupid. If this were a conscientious councilman who was forced by circumstance to resign, this story would be cute. But this is an egotistical blowhard who used his position as a platform for obstructive ass-hattery (e.g., voting "no" on everything, including motions to adjourn), quitting because even he'd got tired of the stupid game. See MrEricSir's link above.
This guy was a disgrace to his office, and now he's brought disgrace on fan-dom.
It's not at all clear to me that a quantum attack on encryption would *necessarily* have to proceed along the lines you propose, which is to use the quantum computer to remove N bits of entropy from the key, then to attack the rest of the key with brute force and conventional algorithms.
Why would you even *consider* such hopeless approach?
It seems to me that there are two other possible ways a quantum computer could be used. The first is to attack some other aspect of a cryptogrphic protocol that is hard with conventional computing, say a weakness in a random number generator.
Another would be an algorithm which be some kind of operation which requires a number of quantum computer runs that is polynomial in the length of the key.
Now that's a scary thought. The Empire of Japan's spurious belief it needed to militarily secure access to Southeast Asia to be a viable economic power led them to attack Pearl Harbor. Once they dug themselves out from the hole they'd dug themselves into, that belief was proved spectacularly wrong.
The Chinese regime has shown some of the same worrying signs of jingoistic paranoia.
a lot of the important parts of my job could have been done by someone who didn't know much about software architecture or programming. Not all, but *some*. A lot of it is keeping developers from being distracted by BS, which is a thankless job. When you do that right, developers start to believe that work is just about getting paid to work on interesting things; nobody will miss you until you're gone.
In most software projects there has to be an interface between the technical folks and the non-technical users and management. What is the chance that that position is unimportant? Practically none.
And look at it from the other side. You don't like it when your boss acts like a technical ignoramus, but *his* boss doesn't like it when he acts like a *management* ignoramus. The person who sits in the middle has to have a certain mental agility that not all developers or managers have. He's got to fit in on both sides of the equation.
Strawman argument. I didn't say "never make changes". I'm talking about making changes just to be seen as innovative or keeping up with other projects.
If you try to be "creative" or "innovative", the result is usually a disaster. You need to struggle with what the user is struggling with, and make that the driver of change rather than change for its own sake or because other projects are changing.
I have no problem with emacs changing, as long as it still remains emacs and doesn't try to become eclipse or something unrecognizable as emacs; it would be better to start a whole new project from scratch than to stop serving people who use emacs for what it is. Gnome made that mistake with Gnome 3, which drove many users to Mint, XFCE or even OSX. The ambition of the developers was admirable, but the result had many of us voting with our feet.
Citation needed, mostly because I can't believe anyone would be that delusional.
I find it quite easy to believe. There are people out there who think they can evade responsibility for debts by signing their name on contracts with an irregular capitlization and can escape taxes simply by claiming to be a non-resident alien on their tax forms. These are the far right-wing lunatic fringe of the people who see something sinister in the Fed manipulating the money supply.
Why should it innovate? Emacs is roughly as good at being Emacs as it is likely ever be.
I became disenchanted with Gnome and KDE, not because they did new things, but because they couldn't do those new things without undermining what I liked about them. As for emacs, the world may have passed it by, but it probably has more users today than when I first learned it in the 1980s. That's healthy enough for an ongoing project. It doesn't have to, say, beat Eclipse at being an IDE, emacs has to meet the needs of its users. The fact that other, somewhat different projects are successful doesn't make Emacs a failure.
Lex and YACC are awesome tools, but they're quite special purpose when compared to something like an editor. Also these days its much less common to devise special purpose languages for data interchange tasks; tasks I would have used lex and yacc for twenty-five years ago I'd do in XML or JSON today.
It took a long time to wean myself off of Emacs and onto Eclipse, but the thing that finally did it for me was refactoring support. The one thing I still use Emacs for is poking around very large data files, which it does better than anything. Some of the things I might use PERL for, if they're one-off tasks, I'll do in Emacs because the interactivity outweighs repeatability.
Well, maybe we *are* headed toward fascism, but in *this* case it seems more likely we have an incompetent customs inspector.
The rules actually state that it is permissible to import manufactured items without a permit as long as the plant material in them is thoroughly dead and incapable of propagating. Items made of certain materials like bamboo are subject to inspection and possible fumigation if they are found to be infested. The only exception is bamboo garden stakes, which are low value items that are intended for an application with a very high risk of transmitting agricultural pests. It makes no economic sense to spend money to fumigate a garden stake when a traveler can purchase a replacement at a garden store for $0.25.
This is in fact quite sensible policy. Had the NYC customs inspectors followed it, Mr. Razgui's instruments would have been inspected then released. The question is, why didn't the inspector do his job properly?
Now for a fact that hasn't been widely reported. Mr. Razgui was also transporting new, green reeds for making flutes along with his finished flutes. There are not allowed into the country without a permit, and *should* have been destroyed. So my guess is that the customs inspectors found bag full of reeds, and noting some of them were green just destroyed the whole thing. This wasn't proper, in fact it was careless and lazy; but it wasn't quite the act of incomprehensible cultural vandalism depicted in the media.
Sorry, but the Sun has everything to do with climate change when combined with the variable orbit geometry of the Earth around the Sun.
This is absolutely true -- over millions of years. It does not explain the warming trend in the past century. Your mode of argument is like saying "all will eventually die of old age, therefore automobile accidents don't kill people." There can be more than driver of climate change, and the timescale over which a driver of change operates is very important. Even if car accidents are less likely to kill you than old age, the fact that they kill you at 19 years old rather than 90 makes a big difference.
Four degrees C rise over 100,000 years is no bit deal for the human race. The same change over a century is a very big deal. Not species extinction for humanity by any means, but massive economic dislocation. Imagine the western US as much more arid than it is now; it could mean the end of agriculture on the Great Plains.
I care more about *how much* and *how often* you read, than *what* you read. If you read more than 50 books a year that tells me a lot more about you than the titles you read. I think everyone should read at least 20 books a year, with two or three genres of fiction and non-fiction represented. Once we get to that point, THEN we can argue what titles should be in the "canon".
This is not the middle ages, where a gentleman could return from university with a library of fifty or so books that'd do him for the rest of his life. There's just too much information in the world and entering the world to rely exclusively on a canonical list of titles. It's more important to be a habitual knowledge seeker who can take pleasure in reading.
And we need some kind of antidote to the 24 hour news cycle, in which the more people read or watch the less informed they become. That antidote is books, in large quantities.
Unfortunately for you, this style of argumentation is just easily refuted in the same style: SEZ YOU. You're obviously a mindless puppet of the Koch brothers. Not a very satisfying argument, is it?
If you want to debate this at a higher level than middle-school playground reparte, you should address the researcher's argument: that at higher temperatures the cloud forming moisture at lower levels gets dispersed into the upper atmosphere. This reduces the rate of cloud formation, which in turn reduces the albedo of the Earth. That means that models which weight reduction of cloud formation higher are more likely to be accurate.
Feel free to take issue with any of the points raised in the previous paragraph. Or we can leave it as SEZ YOU.
Researches Using Hubble Telescope Confirm Exoplanet Has Clouds
Would have made more sense. There is a dangling something or other in there.
I think this story must be cursed or something.
Anyhow, what we have in the story title is a misplaced modifier. The phrase "Using Hubble Telescope" functions as an adverb modifying the verb "confirm", but the editor has *misplaced* it in such a way that it could easily be misread as an adjective modifying "clouds". Yet while this modifier is misplaced, it is not quite "dangling"; to dangle it must refer to something that isn't in the sentence at all.
Dangling is usually the result of incomplete editing. You might start with "Using the Hubble Telescope, researchers find evidence of clouds on an exoplanet." After editing, you might end up with "Using Hubble Telescope, clouds are discovered on an exoplanet." The latter is a dangling modifier; its target "discovered" has been removed from the sentence, leaving the adverbial phrase "dangling". There is no alternative parsing in which the orphaned modifier makes sense, because what its target simply isn't there.
this is about religious organizations with employees with the same religious values. here's a pro-tip, don't work for a religious organization if you don't hold their beliefs.
Wrong. The argument is not that religious *organizations* ought to have some special privilege, it's that employers in general have a right not to cover medical treatments they disagree with.
Medical treatment choices should be matters of *personal* conscience. The Church has every right to teach its opinions to anyone it pleases; it has no right to force its opinions about legal, private behavior on its employees, or to punish them for their purely private behavior.
Slashdot Mirror
The better solution is actually to digitize all that stuff. Paper is absolutely terrible for archiving information.
Over what timescale? Digital has proven even *worse* for archiving information more than a couple decades old.
Preservation of information for future generations, and conversely providing information generated past generations to the present.
I can walk into my nice, but hardly cutting edge public library and look up my hometown paper's front page for December 8, 1941 and read about the reaction to the Pearl Harbor attack. I can look for science fiction books published in the 1950s by publishers that have gone out of business. I can find strange, but interesting books that have never been digitized and are very hard to find, like a military history of the bicycle written in the 1960s.
If I go to a *world class* library, like the main branch of the Boston Public Library, I can examine rare manucripts, maps and sheet music, although they have been making an effort to digitize that stuff. If I needed a service manual for a fifty year-old TV set, this is the first place I'd look.
I can understand going primarily ebook for a community that can't afford a real library, but even such a library needs stacks where it preserves books of local interest for future generations. Given that they've given up physical books and all the associated expenses, 10,000 books seems like an awfully thin collection to me.
Well, archive.org for one. The US National Archives for special topics.
But why "other than project gutenberg?" Project Gutenberg as 4x as many books as this "library" claims to have.
Alright, how do I, for example, vote Cisco out of business?
Or take Facebook. Even if I don't use it, other people do, and they don't like Facebook's privacy policies they see Facebook as an essential service.
That points the way to a better analogy. Most of us would allow that the NSA does certain essential services, we don't like the way Obama is running it. But we have a mechanism by which we can vote the NSA a new boss who would make it run differently.
So what we'd need to trust private industry more is a mechanism to vote out a private firm's management and vote in a new management. Since we can't do that without violating the stockholders' property rights, that means that private industry will always be less trustworthy than government, low as that benchmark might be.
We would trust private firms also if we could vote them out of business.
Well, *I* purchased Windows 8. Normally I use MINT or Xubuntu, but I do like to keep tabs on what's happening in the Windows and Mac worlds.
Here's my assessment on Windows 8: it's gimmicky and the whole idea of converging tablet UI and notebook UI is ill-conceived. But it ain't that bad.
I can see how somebody who's been using nothing but XP for the last ten years could find it horribly disorienting, and many of those people might do well to consider Mac OSX, but I had no difficulty adjusting to it. The big "problem" with the missing start menu took some getting used to, but in the end app search + pinning the 15 most used apps to the taskbar proved perfectly serviceable for day to day use.
The thing I like about Windows 8 is that it has proved to be stable and consistent in its response. Response time consistency is underrated. The big problem with Vista was that they tried to hard to optimize its average performance, without paying enough attention to the worst case. Vista would find itself starved for memory because of all the aggressive caching it did, so several times a day it would freeze up for several seconds in order to deliver performance gains most of the time which weren't noticeable. Windows 8 doesn't make this mistake. Its performance is acceptable on the six year old hardware I'm using.
The thing I don't like about Windows 8 is that some of the stuff doesn't quite work right on a 16:10 aspect ratio display that doesn't have a touchscreen.
All in all I'd be happier with Windows 8 if it were more like Windows 7, but in the end its quirks don't matter. Windows 8 fades into the background the way a desktop should.
Congratulations. You have just set the 2014 benchmark for a predictable Slashdot response.
Context is important to whether a joke is funny, or just stupid. If this were a conscientious councilman who was forced by circumstance to resign, this story would be cute. But this is an egotistical blowhard who used his position as a platform for obstructive ass-hattery (e.g., voting "no" on everything, including motions to adjourn), quitting because even he'd got tired of the stupid game. See MrEricSir's link above.
This guy was a disgrace to his office, and now he's brought disgrace on fan-dom.
It's not at all clear to me that a quantum attack on encryption would *necessarily* have to proceed along the lines you propose, which is to use the quantum computer to remove N bits of entropy from the key, then to attack the rest of the key with brute force and conventional algorithms.
Why would you even *consider* such hopeless approach?
It seems to me that there are two other possible ways a quantum computer could be used. The first is to attack some other aspect of a cryptogrphic protocol that is hard with conventional computing, say a weakness in a random number generator.
Another would be an algorithm which be some kind of operation which requires a number of quantum computer runs that is polynomial in the length of the key.
You mean hire a secretary take part in product positioning exercises and that sort of thing?
Now that's a scary thought. The Empire of Japan's spurious belief it needed to militarily secure access to Southeast Asia to be a viable economic power led them to attack Pearl Harbor. Once they dug themselves out from the hole they'd dug themselves into, that belief was proved spectacularly wrong.
The Chinese regime has shown some of the same worrying signs of jingoistic paranoia.
a lot of the important parts of my job could have been done by someone who didn't know much about software architecture or programming. Not all, but *some*. A lot of it is keeping developers from being distracted by BS, which is a thankless job. When you do that right, developers start to believe that work is just about getting paid to work on interesting things; nobody will miss you until you're gone.
In most software projects there has to be an interface between the technical folks and the non-technical users and management. What is the chance that that position is unimportant? Practically none.
And look at it from the other side. You don't like it when your boss acts like a technical ignoramus, but *his* boss doesn't like it when he acts like a *management* ignoramus. The person who sits in the middle has to have a certain mental agility that not all developers or managers have. He's got to fit in on both sides of the equation.
Strawman argument. I didn't say "never make changes". I'm talking about making changes just to be seen as innovative or keeping up with other projects.
If you try to be "creative" or "innovative", the result is usually a disaster. You need to struggle with what the user is struggling with, and make that the driver of change rather than change for its own sake or because other projects are changing.
I have no problem with emacs changing, as long as it still remains emacs and doesn't try to become eclipse or something unrecognizable as emacs; it would be better to start a whole new project from scratch than to stop serving people who use emacs for what it is. Gnome made that mistake with Gnome 3, which drove many users to Mint, XFCE or even OSX. The ambition of the developers was admirable, but the result had many of us voting with our feet.
Citation needed, mostly because I can't believe anyone would be that delusional.
I find it quite easy to believe. There are people out there who think they can evade responsibility for debts by signing their name on contracts with an irregular capitlization and can escape taxes simply by claiming to be a non-resident alien on their tax forms. These are the far right-wing lunatic fringe of the people who see something sinister in the Fed manipulating the money supply.
By your definition, the *dollar* isn't fiat currency.
Projects should make changes to meet the needs of their users, not to "keep up with the modern day".
Why should it innovate? Emacs is roughly as good at being Emacs as it is likely ever be.
I became disenchanted with Gnome and KDE, not because they did new things, but because they couldn't do those new things without undermining what I liked about them. As for emacs, the world may have passed it by, but it probably has more users today than when I first learned it in the 1980s. That's healthy enough for an ongoing project. It doesn't have to, say, beat Eclipse at being an IDE, emacs has to meet the needs of its users. The fact that other, somewhat different projects are successful doesn't make Emacs a failure.
Lex and YACC are awesome tools, but they're quite special purpose when compared to something like an editor. Also these days its much less common to devise special purpose languages for data interchange tasks; tasks I would have used lex and yacc for twenty-five years ago I'd do in XML or JSON today.
It took a long time to wean myself off of Emacs and onto Eclipse, but the thing that finally did it for me was refactoring support. The one thing I still use Emacs for is poking around very large data files, which it does better than anything. Some of the things I might use PERL for, if they're one-off tasks, I'll do in Emacs because the interactivity outweighs repeatability.
Well, maybe we *are* headed toward fascism, but in *this* case it seems more likely we have an incompetent customs inspector.
The rules actually state that it is permissible to import manufactured items without a permit as long as the plant material in them is thoroughly dead and incapable of propagating. Items made of certain materials like bamboo are subject to inspection and possible fumigation if they are found to be infested. The only exception is bamboo garden stakes, which are low value items that are intended for an application with a very high risk of transmitting agricultural pests. It makes no economic sense to spend money to fumigate a garden stake when a traveler can purchase a replacement at a garden store for $0.25.
This is in fact quite sensible policy. Had the NYC customs inspectors followed it, Mr. Razgui's instruments would have been inspected then released. The question is, why didn't the inspector do his job properly?
Now for a fact that hasn't been widely reported. Mr. Razgui was also transporting new, green reeds for making flutes along with his finished flutes. There are not allowed into the country without a permit, and *should* have been destroyed. So my guess is that the customs inspectors found bag full of reeds, and noting some of them were green just destroyed the whole thing. This wasn't proper, in fact it was careless and lazy; but it wasn't quite the act of incomprehensible cultural vandalism depicted in the media.
You can't spare the time to read one book a week on average? Really?
Sorry, but the Sun has everything to do with climate change when combined with the variable orbit geometry of the Earth around the Sun.
This is absolutely true -- over millions of years. It does not explain the warming trend in the past century. Your mode of argument is like saying "all will eventually die of old age, therefore automobile accidents don't kill people." There can be more than driver of climate change, and the timescale over which a driver of change operates is very important. Even if car accidents are less likely to kill you than old age, the fact that they kill you at 19 years old rather than 90 makes a big difference.
Four degrees C rise over 100,000 years is no bit deal for the human race. The same change over a century is a very big deal. Not species extinction for humanity by any means, but massive economic dislocation. Imagine the western US as much more arid than it is now; it could mean the end of agriculture on the Great Plains.
I care more about *how much* and *how often* you read, than *what* you read. If you read more than 50 books a year that tells me a lot more about you than the titles you read. I think everyone should read at least 20 books a year, with two or three genres of fiction and non-fiction represented. Once we get to that point, THEN we can argue what titles should be in the "canon".
This is not the middle ages, where a gentleman could return from university with a library of fifty or so books that'd do him for the rest of his life. There's just too much information in the world and entering the world to rely exclusively on a canonical list of titles. It's more important to be a habitual knowledge seeker who can take pleasure in reading.
And we need some kind of antidote to the 24 hour news cycle, in which the more people read or watch the less informed they become. That antidote is books, in large quantities.
Globalist Climate Change Research = CRAP SCIENCE.
Unfortunately for you, this style of argumentation is just easily refuted in the same style: SEZ YOU. You're obviously a mindless puppet of the Koch brothers. Not a very satisfying argument, is it?
If you want to debate this at a higher level than middle-school playground reparte, you should address the researcher's argument: that at higher temperatures the cloud forming moisture at lower levels gets dispersed into the upper atmosphere. This reduces the rate of cloud formation, which in turn reduces the albedo of the Earth. That means that models which weight reduction of cloud formation higher are more likely to be accurate.
Feel free to take issue with any of the points raised in the previous paragraph. Or we can leave it as SEZ YOU.
Researches Using Hubble Telescope Confirm Exoplanet Has Clouds
Would have made more sense. There is a dangling something or other in there.
I think this story must be cursed or something.
Anyhow, what we have in the story title is a misplaced modifier. The phrase "Using Hubble Telescope" functions as an adverb modifying the verb "confirm", but the editor has *misplaced* it in such a way that it could easily be misread as an adjective modifying "clouds". Yet while this modifier is misplaced, it is not quite "dangling"; to dangle it must refer to something that isn't in the sentence at all.
Dangling is usually the result of incomplete editing. You might start with "Using the Hubble Telescope, researchers find evidence of clouds on an exoplanet." After editing, you might end up with "Using Hubble Telescope, clouds are discovered on an exoplanet." The latter is a dangling modifier; its target "discovered" has been removed from the sentence, leaving the adverbial phrase "dangling". There is no alternative parsing in which the orphaned modifier makes sense, because what its target simply isn't there.
wrong.
this is about religious organizations with employees with the same religious values. here's a pro-tip, don't work for a religious organization if you don't hold their beliefs.
Wrong. The argument is not that religious *organizations* ought to have some special privilege, it's that employers in general have a right not to cover medical treatments they disagree with.
Medical treatment choices should be matters of *personal* conscience. The Church has every right to teach its opinions to anyone it pleases; it has no right to force its opinions about legal, private behavior on its employees, or to punish them for their purely private behavior.