If they know that, they sure as heck don't DO anything with that knowledge. Farm irrigation is horribly inefficient in the USA. Huge streams of water going hundreds of feet through the air in the middle of a 40C day in the brightest, hottest part of the day, with high fractions evaporating before it ever reaches the ground, in areas with water shortages...
I'll admit that some people do use systems that are efficient, but it's really about the bottom line. If the water is cheap (water shortages or not), less efficient (read: cheaper) irrigation systems are going to be used.
The kind of thing you are talking about is something like this, thought much of the time it's attached directly to a well head and not a reel. But, if you take a drive through irrigated farmland, you will often see systems like this, which are very efficient given other constraints. There are more efficient systems in terms of water delivery, but they are less efficient in terms of field productivity. For example, water-drip systems are very efficient, but try using them on a field where you are going to be using machines for tilling or harvesting. The added time and labor cost to remove the lines and put them back can outweigh the loss of water used in a less efficient irrigation system.
As far as watering during the hottest part of the day, well, this is when the plants are losing the most water and are in danger of wilting. If it's an area with especially low humidity, this water loss is great and the plant will need to replace the water as soon as possible. Soil characteristics and the type of crop grown can make it necessary to irrigate during the hottest part of the day because of this, otherwise crop damage can result. It is also not desirable to have water droplets sitting on the leaves and fruit of some crops overnight.
It cannot be the answer, because in rural america people do not understand technology, but in India they do. Big difference.
That's the biggest line of bullshit I think I've ever seen. Typical of someone who hasn't spent a day outside of the city.
Having grown up in rural America, I can safely say that we understand technology just fine. Not just mechanical technology such as engines, combines, hay bailers, and other complex machines (which any farmer certainly knows better than you). There are plenty of examples of high-techequipment that rural America understands better than you.
How about irrigation technology? With the price of water rights and well permits going up, farmers have to be especially concerned with water delivery systems. Farmers know what kind of irrigation systems deliver the most irrigation to the ground while minimizing evaporation. Do you?
What appears to be a simple 5 man hours of work can easily balloon into 50, especially when you have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminial conviction.
Yeah, because if he had actually destroyed $10,000 worth of computer equipment, that is one thing, but if all they needed to do was disable his account access and restore that guys account from the previous back up then at most they are out a couple of days salary.
Something tells me you wouldn't feel the same if it was your business.
This is hardly $10,000 worth of damage. $500 worth of damage tops.
What if it was a system that falls under SOx? What if it handles credit cards and therefore is subject to PCI audits?
It's a lot more work to document that you have performed a *complete* inspection of the system and every system it's attached to in order to assure the auditors that there's nothing compromised. I think you don't have a clue about the true cost of things like this.
And they say the public education system is failing us.
As an aside, I was here when slashdot started registration. I stayed an AC for a while on some stupid principle. And then I decided I really wanted good karma. Looking back, I should have registered immediately... I could have sold it on eBay.
50 man days to -2. Find out who was responsible. 1. Find exactly when and what happened. 0. Find out exactly how much damage was done. 1. undo what little damage he did, and 2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
So would I, after my minor additions. (Yeah, they were implied, but you have to spell this kind of thing out for some people.)
Even further, according to my Atmospheric Studies textbook, and Wikipedia "structurally, a tropical cyclone is a large, rotating system of clouds, wind and thunderstorm activity"
Boot off flash and NFS mount a partition to a server in another room and you have your perfectly silent PC.
Did you even read the post? At all? You know, it starts with "I am building a new home server..."
He wants a silent *server*, not a silent workstation. And the server he speaks of is evidently going to be in is bedroom (likely because Mom doesn't want it in the living room).
obviously I have a commercial interest
Obviously. That's why you ignored what the original poster asked for and offered a solution that didn't really apply. Welcome to the Marketing Department!
I have a Sun system with a Sun keyboard, and I work with Sun servers at work. I also deal with several PCs at home and work. There are no less than five keyboard variations.
I have problems switching between the Sun keyboard and the PC keyboard due to the row change of the backspace key. It takes 10-15 minutes before I am confident I won't make mistakes. Depending on which PC keyboard I was using last, a mistake may mean hitting enter or '\' instead of backspace. That can be a fatal error when you are root. At work, I always use a PC keyboard to ssh to the Sun systems, that way I don't make mistakes.
Then there are keyboards that have ESC where I prefer '`'.
The worst is that there are no less than three ways to position the '\' key on PC keyboards. Sometimes, the placement affects either the size of the backspace key or the shape of the enter key.
I prefer the enter key to be a rectangle (none of that backwards-L shaped crap), the backspace key to be at least as big as two normal keys, and the '\' key to be in between them.
So, you're asking me if I want to change a dozen or more keys around?
There is exactly *one* article that I can find that covers this.
My guess is that the unnamed student didn't get the book in time, or was otherwise late in turning in his paper. So the student makes up this story to tell his professors.
I'm a senior in college, and in the years at school, I have seen bomb threats called in for buildings on campus, twice for unspecified locations on final exam days, and once for the library, called in by a student who hadn't finished a paper that was due the next day.
With all kinds of conspiracy theorists in the ranks of the professors at my school, I could probably tell them something like this and get away with it, too.
It's all to convenient that the supposed government agents "brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student". From which library did they get the book they brought, or was it their copy?
This whole thing stinks of a student trying to cheat for extra time or lenience in grading. When this comes out as a hoax, I look forward to hearing about him getting an F for academic dishonesty. It's too bad most colleges don't believe in expulsion.
Bright-eyed young nerds graduate from college and enter the real world. They discover it sucks, and that college was much better, but they have student loans to think about repaying, or families, or some dreams they want to make reality.
They go and get their first jobs where they are eagerly employed at much cheaper rates than the senior employees, who slowly disappear. The programmers work for five to ten years and some of them begin to develop some origin-influenced thoughts on life:
* Those from the Americas: "I'm getting so white. And fat." and "Gee, it's been almost a decade since I've seen a woman." * Those from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: "USians suck." * Those from Asia and the Pacific Isles: "America and Americans are okay, but I miss home. That is, my family misses home."
All of them develop some common thoughts as well: "Gee, programming seemed like a good idea at the time" and "this is getting boring" and "Crap! My salary has plateaued."
These thoughts begin to fester. Some of them decide at the time, as they are offered, to go into management. As the fortieth birthday approaches, most of the ones who did not go into management finally make the decision to make a change.
Some of them go back to the place from where they came, where they have accumulated enough money to retire. The good ones go into consulting and make a lot more money. Some of them go back to college to get more education and perhaps teach at the local community college or tech school. And finally, some of them, especially the American ones, just decide for a career change after being burned out with programming and seriously pent-up with the stress of not having been laid for 40 years.
It is the last group that is the sad case. They cash their stock, and live on it while searching for a new career. They soon discover that all other jobs on the planet require having actual social skills, which they lack. They are unhappy with the pay they get even when they find someone willing to employ them. Eventually, they run out of money, and end up stranded on the streets with almost nothing. They desperately wish they'd just gone into management or stayed with programming.
It is these old programmers that you see along the interstate highways and in major cities along the west coast... grey hair, dirty clothes, big backpack, and a handwritten cardboard sign that says "Bay Area", "San Francisco" or sometimes "Cupertino". They are just trying to get back where they belong.
I'm not saying your assessment of the developers of this so-called AI is wrong, I just think your methodology is wrong.
Determining an individual's intelligence and/or merit based on what OS/server combination is publishing their information is rather like phrenology.
So if you look at who's running what, you get some idea of where they cluster. A bit like looking at someone's zipcode, SAT scores, etc. to figure out how much money they make.
No. You're making a judgement about an individual without knowing them at all.
I don't think it is "prejudiced" to do this -- unless you consider statistical inference prejudiced.
Sure it is. Prejudice is "an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts."
All you have is what you got from Netcraft. That's hardly examining the facts.
Yeah, because nobody with more than a high school education is using a commercial closed-source web server.
Come on, I like open source and prefer Unix/Unix-alikes of any flavor over Windows, but judging the merit of someone's research claims based on what web server their site uses is just plain stupid.
It's a lot like judging someone's value/contribution to society based on the style of clothing they wear. Are you really that prejudiced?
His commentary also takes aim at internet providers and the laws that allow them to act as common carriers without liability for the actions of their users.
I didn't RTFA, so this is purely a response that assumes the accuracy of the poster's above assessment of the commentary:
So, if someone in a crowded park or on a crowded sidewalk shouts "In Soviet Russia, John Seigenthaler Sr was involved in the assasination of JFK!!!", the city should be liable because they provided the sidewalk or park?
Nice. Isn't the Earth liable for providing the air that the shout traveled through?
I'm starting to think he did spend a fair amount of time in Soviet Russia. It was one of the few places where they thought that providing a public forum for communication was a bad thing and tried to prevent it.
IMNSHO, attacking the people who facilitate speech and communication is the same thing as attacking communications and speech themselves, whether it's the government who's facilitating communication, or some mom and pop ISP.
I have performed tech support for math/computer science professors with doctoral degrees. I actually got the infamous "my machine won't turn on" issue that is resolved by plugging it in. Ph.D.'s don't necessarily reflect intelligence or for another matter, credibility.
As my algorithms teacher routinely quoted Dijkstra: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I firmly believe that some CIS professors have never actually written a real program for a real compiler running on a real computer.
It took government intervention to keep them from completely draining Mono Lake, but they're still slurping a monsterous percentage of the Colorado River.
Is it a good time to point out that Mono Lake and the Colorado River are completely unrelated except for Los Angeles drawing water from each?
Your sentence implies that Mono Lake is nearly dry due to L.A. drawing water from the Colorado River, which is simply not true. They are taking the water from minor streams and rivers in the Sierra Nevada that feed Mono Lake, which is nowhere near the Colorado River.
People bitching about people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about how much Slashdot sucks suck. If you don't like people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about it, leave. It's really very, very, very, very, very simple.
You see, we have something called "freedom of association" in the United States. It's right in our Constitution, and that was voted on well over 200 years go. Just because the people/groups choosing to associate have money and influence is no reason to stop them. If they aren't committing crimes, there is no justification in preventing their association from forming. (Disclaimer: I'm not here to debate whether or not the RIAA is engaging in any criminal acts)
Nobody in the United States "voted" the RIAA into existence or into power, and infact a vote on the issue would likely have been unconstitutional. It's true that voters in the U.S. may have voted for candidates that support the end goals of the RIAA, but it's likely that when people vote, they have far more things on their mind than the recording industry. You know, real issues like whether or not and how these elected people are going to support "the war", school funding, lower taxes, reducing poverty, etc. You know, issues that people deal with every day that directly affect them.
Most people don't care that CDs cost $16 or that the RIAA doesn't want you copying them. They also don't care about basement-dwelling music pirates (popular term, I'm not going to euphemize it into "customers" or "enthusiasts"), either. The market still buys CDs. 16-year olds are still going to buy the latest boy band.
Your statement is both idiotic and a troll.
(I don't vote/rape)
Hahahaha. That's as good as "all men are rapists". Apathy is a human right and you are free to not participate, but equating voting to raping? What would you suggest in its place? A benevelent dictatorship? Anarchy? Good luck.
Slashdot Mirror
If they know that, they sure as heck don't DO anything with that knowledge. Farm irrigation is horribly inefficient in the USA. Huge streams of water going hundreds of feet through the air in the middle of a 40C day in the brightest, hottest part of the day, with high fractions evaporating before it ever reaches the ground, in areas with water shortages...
I'll admit that some people do use systems that are efficient, but it's really about the bottom line. If the water is cheap (water shortages or not), less efficient (read: cheaper) irrigation systems are going to be used.
The kind of thing you are talking about is something like this, thought much of the time it's attached directly to a well head and not a reel. But, if you take a drive through irrigated farmland, you will often see systems like this, which are very efficient given other constraints. There are more efficient systems in terms of water delivery, but they are less efficient in terms of field productivity. For example, water-drip systems are very efficient, but try using them on a field where you are going to be using machines for tilling or harvesting. The added time and labor cost to remove the lines and put them back can outweigh the loss of water used in a less efficient irrigation system.
As far as watering during the hottest part of the day, well, this is when the plants are losing the most water and are in danger of wilting. If it's an area with especially low humidity, this water loss is great and the plant will need to replace the water as soon as possible. Soil characteristics and the type of crop grown can make it necessary to irrigate during the hottest part of the day because of this, otherwise crop damage can result. It is also not desirable to have water droplets sitting on the leaves and fruit of some crops overnight.
It cannot be the answer, because in rural america people do not understand technology, but in India they do. Big difference.
That's the biggest line of bullshit I think I've ever seen. Typical of someone who hasn't spent a day outside of the city.
Having grown up in rural America, I can safely say that we understand technology just fine. Not just mechanical technology such as engines, combines, hay bailers, and other complex machines (which any farmer certainly knows better than you). There are plenty of examples of high-tech equipment that rural America understands better than you.
How about irrigation technology? With the price of water rights and well permits going up, farmers have to be especially concerned with water delivery systems. Farmers know what kind of irrigation systems deliver the most irrigation to the ground while minimizing evaporation. Do you?
What about the role of GPS in farming? How about Zaurus PDAs used in cattle herding?
Shall we talk about milk next? Technology in that field is fairly advanced, too.
Yes, rural America understands technology. You clearly don't understand rural America.
What should be a 5 minute problem usually blows out to wasting hours of my time trying to get in contact with somebody with 2/3 of a clue.
You got someone with 2/3 of a clue? You're lucky. Last time I called support, I got someone with 1/10 of a clue.
What appears to be a simple 5 man hours of work can easily balloon into 50, especially when you have to prove things beyond a reasonable doubt for a criminial conviction.
Not to mention for SOx and/or PCI audits.
Yeah, because if he had actually destroyed $10,000 worth of computer equipment, that is one thing, but if all they needed to do was disable his account access and restore that guys account from the previous back up then at most they are out a couple of days salary.
Something tells me you wouldn't feel the same if it was your business.
This is hardly $10,000 worth of damage. $500 worth of damage tops.
What if it was a system that falls under SOx? What if it handles credit cards and therefore is subject to PCI audits?
It's a lot more work to document that you have performed a *complete* inspection of the system and every system it's attached to in order to assure the auditors that there's nothing compromised. I think you don't have a clue about the true cost of things like this.
His ID: 714956
My ID: 33885
And they say the public education system is failing us.
As an aside, I was here when slashdot started registration. I stayed an AC for a while on some stupid principle. And then I decided I really wanted good karma. Looking back, I should have registered immediately... I could have sold it on eBay.
Well, I didn't want to delete 2, but I figured that 0 had to happen before 1 could.
I just call 2 the "double check".
50 man days to
-2. Find out who was responsible.
1. Find exactly when and what happened.
0. Find out exactly how much damage was done.
1. undo what little damage he did, and
2. make damn sure he didn't do anything more serious and insidious?
I'd call that about right.
So would I, after my minor additions. (Yeah, they were implied, but you have to spell this kind of thing out for some people.)
Isn't it quite obvious that he should go to jail for this?
You're new here, aren't you?
Even further, according to my Atmospheric Studies textbook, and Wikipedia "structurally, a tropical cyclone is a large, rotating system of clouds, wind and thunderstorm activity"
You can't have thunderstorms without lightning.
Boot off flash and NFS mount a partition to a server in another room and you have your perfectly silent PC.
..."
Did you even read the post? At all? You know, it starts with "I am building a new home server
He wants a silent *server*, not a silent workstation. And the server he speaks of is evidently going to be in is bedroom (likely because Mom doesn't want it in the living room).
obviously I have a commercial interest
Obviously. That's why you ignored what the original poster asked for and offered a solution that didn't really apply. Welcome to the Marketing Department!
Seems the editor forgot to post any link to any article about the discovery of the Little Red Book hoax.
We'll it's not like nobody gave them the link.
Oh, and to reiterate: I told you so!
I have a Sun system with a Sun keyboard, and I work with Sun servers at work. I also deal with several PCs at home and work. There are no less than five keyboard variations.
I have problems switching between the Sun keyboard and the PC keyboard due to the row change of the backspace key. It takes 10-15 minutes before I am confident I won't make mistakes. Depending on which PC keyboard I was using last, a mistake may mean hitting enter or '\' instead of backspace. That can be a fatal error when you are root. At work, I always use a PC keyboard to ssh to the Sun systems, that way I don't make mistakes.
Then there are keyboards that have ESC where I prefer '`'.
The worst is that there are no less than three ways to position the '\' key on PC keyboards. Sometimes, the placement affects either the size of the backspace key or the shape of the enter key.
I prefer the enter key to be a rectangle (none of that backwards-L shaped crap), the backspace key to be at least as big as two normal keys, and the '\' key to be in between them.
So, you're asking me if I want to change a dozen or more keys around?
Hell no!
There is exactly *one* article that I can find that covers this.
My guess is that the unnamed student didn't get the book in time, or was otherwise late in turning in his paper. So the student makes up this story to tell his professors.
I'm a senior in college, and in the years at school, I have seen bomb threats called in for buildings on campus, twice for unspecified locations on final exam days, and once for the library, called in by a student who hadn't finished a paper that was due the next day.
With all kinds of conspiracy theorists in the ranks of the professors at my school, I could probably tell them something like this and get away with it, too.
It's all to convenient that the supposed government agents "brought the book with them, but did not leave it with the student". From which library did they get the book they brought, or was it their copy?
This whole thing stinks of a student trying to cheat for extra time or lenience in grading. When this comes out as a hoax, I look forward to hearing about him getting an F for academic dishonesty. It's too bad most colleges don't believe in expulsion.
But you didn't see any violations of privacy under Clinton.
Were you living under a rock while Clinton was president? WTF do you think this was?
Bright-eyed young nerds graduate from college and enter the real world. They discover it sucks, and that college was much better, but they have student loans to think about repaying, or families, or some dreams they want to make reality.
They go and get their first jobs where they are eagerly employed at much cheaper rates than the senior employees, who slowly disappear. The programmers work for five to ten years and some of them begin to develop some origin-influenced thoughts on life:
* Those from the Americas: "I'm getting so white. And fat." and "Gee, it's been almost a decade since I've seen a woman."
* Those from Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: "USians suck."
* Those from Asia and the Pacific Isles: "America and Americans are okay, but I miss home. That is, my family misses home."
All of them develop some common thoughts as well: "Gee, programming seemed like a good idea at the time" and "this is getting boring" and "Crap! My salary has plateaued."
These thoughts begin to fester. Some of them decide at the time, as they are offered, to go into management. As the fortieth birthday approaches, most of the ones who did not go into management finally make the decision to make a change.
Some of them go back to the place from where they came, where they have accumulated enough money to retire. The good ones go into consulting and make a lot more money. Some of them go back to college to get more education and perhaps teach at the local community college or tech school. And finally, some of them, especially the American ones, just decide for a career change after being burned out with programming and seriously pent-up with the stress of not having been laid for 40 years.
It is the last group that is the sad case. They cash their stock, and live on it while searching for a new career. They soon discover that all other jobs on the planet require having actual social skills, which they lack. They are unhappy with the pay they get even when they find someone willing to employ them. Eventually, they run out of money, and end up stranded on the streets with almost nothing. They desperately wish they'd just gone into management or stayed with programming.
It is these old programmers that you see along the interstate highways and in major cities along the west coast... grey hair, dirty clothes, big backpack, and a handwritten cardboard sign that says "Bay Area", "San Francisco" or sometimes "Cupertino". They are just trying to get back where they belong.
I'm not saying your assessment of the developers of this so-called AI is wrong, I just think your methodology is wrong.
Determining an individual's intelligence and/or merit based on what OS/server combination is publishing their information is rather like phrenology.
So if you look at who's running what, you get some idea of where they cluster. A bit like looking at someone's zipcode, SAT scores, etc. to figure out how much money they make.
No. You're making a judgement about an individual without knowing them at all.
I don't think it is "prejudiced" to do this -- unless you consider statistical inference prejudiced.
Sure it is. Prejudice is "an adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts."
All you have is what you got from Netcraft. That's hardly examining the facts.
4) Using Open Source for their webserver?
Yeah, because nobody with more than a high school education is using a commercial closed-source web server.
Come on, I like open source and prefer Unix/Unix-alikes of any flavor over Windows, but judging the merit of someone's research claims based on what web server their site uses is just plain stupid.
It's a lot like judging someone's value/contribution to society based on the style of clothing they wear. Are you really that prejudiced?
His commentary also takes aim at internet providers and the laws that allow them to act as common carriers without liability for the actions of their users.
I didn't RTFA, so this is purely a response that assumes the accuracy of the poster's above assessment of the commentary:
So, if someone in a crowded park or on a crowded sidewalk shouts "In Soviet Russia, John Seigenthaler Sr was involved in the assasination of JFK!!!", the city should be liable because they provided the sidewalk or park?
Nice. Isn't the Earth liable for providing the air that the shout traveled through?
I'm starting to think he did spend a fair amount of time in Soviet Russia. It was one of the few places where they thought that providing a public forum for communication was a bad thing and tried to prevent it.
IMNSHO, attacking the people who facilitate speech and communication is the same thing as attacking communications and speech themselves, whether it's the government who's facilitating communication, or some mom and pop ISP.
I have performed tech support for math/computer science professors with doctoral degrees. I actually got the infamous "my machine won't turn on" issue that is resolved by plugging it in. Ph.D.'s don't necessarily reflect intelligence or for another matter, credibility.
As my algorithms teacher routinely quoted Dijkstra: "Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
I firmly believe that some CIS professors have never actually written a real program for a real compiler running on a real computer.
Yeah sure, because here at the university, I've never met someone with a Ph.D who was pretty much a complete dumbass in many respects.
I've seen the kind of people who are issued doctorates, so the fact that the author is a doctor doesn't really lend to its credibility.
It took government intervention to keep them from completely draining Mono Lake, but they're still slurping a monsterous percentage of the Colorado River.
Is it a good time to point out that Mono Lake and the Colorado River are completely unrelated except for Los Angeles drawing water from each?
Your sentence implies that Mono Lake is nearly dry due to L.A. drawing water from the Colorado River, which is simply not true. They are taking the water from minor streams and rivers in the Sierra Nevada that feed Mono Lake, which is nowhere near the Colorado River.
Enough said!
People bitching about people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about how much Slashdot sucks suck. If you don't like people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about people bitching about it, leave. It's really very, very, very, very, very simple.
Ahh yes, because I remember specifically seeing this on one of my ballots:
Not...
You see, we have something called "freedom of association" in the United States. It's right in our Constitution, and that was voted on well over 200 years go. Just because the people/groups choosing to associate have money and influence is no reason to stop them. If they aren't committing crimes, there is no justification in preventing their association from forming. (Disclaimer: I'm not here to debate whether or not the RIAA is engaging in any criminal acts)
Nobody in the United States "voted" the RIAA into existence or into power, and infact a vote on the issue would likely have been unconstitutional. It's true that voters in the U.S. may have voted for candidates that support the end goals of the RIAA, but it's likely that when people vote, they have far more things on their mind than the recording industry. You know, real issues like whether or not and how these elected people are going to support "the war", school funding, lower taxes, reducing poverty, etc. You know, issues that people deal with every day that directly affect them.
Most people don't care that CDs cost $16 or that the RIAA doesn't want you copying them. They also don't care about basement-dwelling music pirates (popular term, I'm not going to euphemize it into "customers" or "enthusiasts"), either. The market still buys CDs. 16-year olds are still going to buy the latest boy band.
Your statement is both idiotic and a troll.
(I don't vote/rape)
Hahahaha. That's as good as "all men are rapists". Apathy is a human right and you are free to not participate, but equating voting to raping? What would you suggest in its place? A benevelent dictatorship? Anarchy? Good luck.