I'm not sure that people are talking about the "Fantasy" bookshelves, but the fact that plots of SciFi toss out realistic concepts of technology, instead just using science to replace magic in fantasy plots. Like Star Trek... where most of the stories were fantasy plots and the implications of technology were mostly glossed over.
I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.
There are lots of exceptions where Star Trek had some sci-fi plots, like the morality of Data deciding not to be dismantled, or... I'm sure there's more... they're not very common.
"The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is."
No... there is OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE that global warming is going to seriously cause problems for humanity and the debate is what we're going to do about it.
I was doing it for years on Slackware and it was one of my biggest gripes with package management.
I used to do stuff like download an xmodem protocol app, compile it and run it as a binary from my home directory. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to install OpenOffice in ~/bin/Openoffice instead of/usr/bin/... except that package managers don't work for non-root users.
FOSS tools are disadvantaged when it comes to certification because certification is expensive, time consuming and resists changes in the project. On the other hand, for-profit vendors are disadvantaged when it comes to security because scrutiny is limited and the motive changes from quality to profitability.
It's the expectation that after 35 years, it would be contributed to society, and not locked in some money making vault long after you're dead. To me, that's a renegotiation of the contract.
It's the fault of the government for making unilateral retroactive copyright changes.
This all sounds like security certification speak.
Among the recommendations from the article: "Use certified products. While certification can never eliminate risk, it substantially reduces risk by ensuring that products meet objective, publicly vetted criteria."
This shouldn't be on Slashdot. We all know that the best software tools are FOSS, subject to the most rigourous testing and peer review. "Certified Products" are a black box with a "Trust us" next to a logo for a "Limited Liability Coproration."
The article should be lumped in with the Gartner reports and marketing materials.
It's not a matter of leverage. By changing the copyright act, they changed deals which were already closed.
If it was 1970, and I gave you my work for 35 years before it naturally fell into public domain, then in the 1990s, the law changes it to 75, shouldn't *I* have some say about it?
"Of course the allies led in technology. That's why they won the war. "
The Allies won the war because of Hitler's master plan:
10 Invade your neighbour
20 Goto 10
30 An empire which will exist for 1000 years!
The U.S. was fully prepared to declare Germany the winner in Europe and let life go on.
Technology did end the war in the Pacific though. But if Hitler didn't declare war on the U.S. and Russia, regardless of the Pacific, Europe would be a Nazi superpower. It was a strange time in history. The man was clearly insane.
Looking at the history, it seems like war was inevitable. Hitler started sabre-rattling and the USSR then Japan all followed suit. It was like all this new weapons technology came about just waiting for the nuts to take advantage of it. These aircraft, bombers and stuff existed in a world where people could clearly remember a time before aircraft or the automobile were invented.
And that makes me think about current changes in technology, and how we all remember a time when the government didn't have computers, cameras and all this new tech to track everyone's move and create/destroy mass information at a whim. What's going to happen in 10 years?
China has something to prove, so they'll probably be next.
The space race was always politics. When the cold war ended, there was no more tech race. There never was any altruism, except on the part of the scientists, astronauts/cosmonauts.
This is the right math. My solver is a bit slow though:
attempts=0 while [ $score -lt 60 ] do score=0 i=0 while [ $i -lt 100 ] do q=$((RANDOM % 4)) a=$((RANDOM % 4)) if [ $q = $a ] then score=$(($score + 1)) fi
Of course he didn't mean he wants to sit on his butt and wait for the government to hand him a job.
It's naive to believe that government programs have no impact on job creation. Just studying what economic forces discourage people from creating small business in the neighbourhood is, in and of itself a government effort towards job creation. Finding out that neighbouring states or neighbouring towns are attracting small business or that box stores are outsourcing overhead and paying negligible taxes, might make all the difference in governments efforts towards job creation.
Blaming the people living there is just... stupid.
There's nothing wrong with that. Some guys come out of the IT trenches and some come out of the management world. Most of these security guys are presenting themselves to middle and upper level management. They only need to know how to make charts and graphs, for which VB is really very good.
They of course also need to know how to get policies signed, walk into strange meeting rooms, identify and get key people into meetings to understand those policies, implement and audit them regularly. If they have time to pick up a little bit of VB hacking on the side, I'm happy that they can better understand the nuts and bolts. VB is fun in small doses.
I downloaded it. This little thing might be interesting:-)
You mean the Harmony Project? Which probably was the cause of QT eventually going GPL? (not LGPL..)
IMHO, KDE depending on QT was a bad decision. It ignored the fatal flaws in the licensing, until the eventual cooperation of TrollTech. It led to the creation of Mandrake (because Redhat wouldn't touch QT), the fracturing of the Linux desktop (Debian wouldn't touch QT either) and may very well have set back the Linux Desktop long enough that it will never be relevant.
It's a long and messy history. It wasn't until January of this year that they FINALLY went LGPL. Finally having a license appropriate for a toolkit on the Linux Desktop. It only took a decade.
Ugh. Don't go calling people morons in a subject you don't know anything about.
This house was built long before ground wires were used.
The ground is nowhere near as protective as you think it is.
This is perfectly legal, perfectly safe, and was a REQUIREMENT of my inspection.
If you're in North America, go read the local electrical code before commenting on house wiring. I can't comment if you're in an area with 240VAC, they're more strict about electrocution hazards.
Also do some thinking about your imaginary computer power supply malfunction on a non-GFIC protected outlet. All case-grounded appliances on the circuit are now case-live. Somebody leans on a radiator to plug in a fully functional case-ground vacuum cleaner. Now there's a secondary path from live on the computer, through the shared ground, into the case of the vacuum, through the right arm, through the chest, down the left arm and through the radiator going to ground.
Current doesn't travel the path of least resistance, it shares the paths. Your ground wires are not super-conductors, so while they'll create a secondary path to ground, they won't negate a third path.
That said, ungrounded outlets are not desirable. They're not safe for (unless they have a working GFIC), and they mess up shielding for devices like guitar amplifiers. They also don't have a discharge path for static electricity.
And BTW, if you short live to ground, you *will* blow the breaker unless your ground is installed improperly.
Nope, it's a toroid which generates current to trip a switch when there's a difference in the current between the hot and the neutral. It works just fine with no ground at all. The only time you'd have a difference between these at the outlet, is if current escapes the system through a path other than the outlet.
I looked into it when the electrical code forced me to replace the illegally retrofitted three conductor grounded outlets in my house with ground-fault circuits. It didn't make any sense to me without a ground... but lo and behold, they do indeed work with no ground at all.
If I'm reading somebody's email, all I take away from it is.... spam, spam, spam, real email, spam, porn, script-gone-bonkers, script-gone-bonkers, real email.
I don't actually read the contents. Maybe the sender-recipient pairs, but I won't talk about what I see.
When you write programs which deal with time like this, you never use floating point math. If your required precision is 1/10 of a second, your units are in 1/10 of a second. You do not resort to floating point. I'd probably use 1/100 or go to 64 bit and use 1/10000 of a second. With a high level language, there are better ways to do it of course.
The reboot hack is a reasonable workaround in the field, as long as the downtime is documented and understood by leadership, and as somebody mentioned, the severity of the problem needs to be communicated to the field. Ship an alarm clock with the launcher, with clear instructions to reboot it and reset the unit when the alarm clock says so.
The *requirement* of this kind of field maintenance from overstressed people in the field is a bad idea. When writing disaster recovery instructions for fieldwork in normal systems, I like to remind my coworkers...
"...these instructions are for the *least* qualified admin, three years from now, at 2:00 in the morning, on Christmas, to be able to do this without assistance, with second line management yelling at them, while everyone else is on vacation, partying, or utterly unreachable. They need to be able to find the instructions, and execute them, with a minimum of stress or doubt as to the accuracy of the documentation."
I've never done military work, but I can just imagine...
...the new guy doing shift rotation on the Patriot system at 2am on Christmas, he never got proper training, isn't sure if the last guy rebooted the system, realizes his cell is dead... now there's been talk of heightened awareness. An alarm goes off. There's a sticker next to it. "For the love of all that is holy, Press this button when this alarm goes off!" Does he hit the button?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure that people are talking about the "Fantasy" bookshelves, but the fact that plots of SciFi toss out realistic concepts of technology, instead just using science to replace magic in fantasy plots. Like Star Trek... where most of the stories were fantasy plots and the implications of technology were mostly glossed over.
I think the unrealistic science is really what makes the difference between the two genres. Fantasy, you don't question that the dragons breathe fire. In Sci-fi, you should question the implications of artificial gravity and how the ships in Star Trek have it all. Ditto for universal translators, massive humanoid predominance, force fields, human command of bridges, predominantly manned exploration, predominantly manned warships, etc.
There are lots of exceptions where Star Trek had some sci-fi plots, like the morality of Data deciding not to be dismantled, or ... I'm sure there's more... they're not very common.
You sir, need to step away from the computer and have a nap.
"The idea that Anthropogenic CO2 is the sole cause of any warming is where the debate is."
No... there is OVERWHELMING EVIDENCE that global warming is going to seriously cause problems for humanity and the debate is what we're going to do about it.
Why does it matter if humans caused it?
Press the key to continue.
...it automatically contacts the Sales department whenever an aircraft is shot down?
I was doing it for years on Slackware and it was one of my biggest gripes with package management.
I used to do stuff like download an xmodem protocol app, compile it and run it as a binary from my home directory. There's no reason I shouldn't be able to install OpenOffice in ~/bin/Openoffice instead of /usr/bin/... except that package managers don't work for non-root users.
FOSS tools are disadvantaged when it comes to certification because certification is expensive, time consuming and resists changes in the project. On the other hand, for-profit vendors are disadvantaged when it comes to security because scrutiny is limited and the motive changes from quality to profitability.
It's the expectation that after 35 years, it would be contributed to society, and not locked in some money making vault long after you're dead. To me, that's a renegotiation of the contract.
It's the fault of the government for making unilateral retroactive copyright changes.
This all sounds like security certification speak.
Among the recommendations from the article: "Use certified products. While certification can never eliminate risk, it substantially reduces risk by ensuring that products meet objective, publicly vetted criteria."
This shouldn't be on Slashdot. We all know that the best software tools are FOSS, subject to the most rigourous testing and peer review. "Certified Products" are a black box with a "Trust us" next to a logo for a "Limited Liability Coproration."
The article should be lumped in with the Gartner reports and marketing materials.
It's not a matter of leverage. By changing the copyright act, they changed deals which were already closed.
If it was 1970, and I gave you my work for 35 years before it naturally fell into public domain, then in the 1990s, the law changes it to 75, shouldn't *I* have some say about it?
Even people who believe in the same God can't reach a consensus about who Jesus was.
"Of course the allies led in technology. That's why they won the war. "
The Allies won the war because of Hitler's master plan:
10 Invade your neighbour
20 Goto 10
30 An empire which will exist for 1000 years!
The U.S. was fully prepared to declare Germany the winner in Europe and let life go on.
Technology did end the war in the Pacific though. But if Hitler didn't declare war on the U.S. and Russia, regardless of the Pacific, Europe would be a Nazi superpower. It was a strange time in history. The man was clearly insane.
Looking at the history, it seems like war was inevitable. Hitler started sabre-rattling and the USSR then Japan all followed suit. It was like all this new weapons technology came about just waiting for the nuts to take advantage of it. These aircraft, bombers and stuff existed in a world where people could clearly remember a time before aircraft or the automobile were invented.
And that makes me think about current changes in technology, and how we all remember a time when the government didn't have computers, cameras and all this new tech to track everyone's move and create/destroy mass information at a whim. What's going to happen in 10 years?
China has something to prove, so they'll probably be next.
The space race was always politics. When the cold war ended, there was no more tech race. There never was any altruism, except on the part of the scientists, astronauts/cosmonauts.
Your family seems to think that saving $100 is more important than spending the day with you.
This is the right math. My solver is a bit slow though:
Why has the STD distro not been updated in over 5 years?
Have you tried http://www.remote-exploit.org/backtrack.html? It's geared towards pen testing and ethical hacking... but it's VERY good, and modern.
That's smarmy and insulting.
Of course he didn't mean he wants to sit on his butt and wait for the government to hand him a job.
It's naive to believe that government programs have no impact on job creation. Just studying what economic forces discourage people from creating small business in the neighbourhood is, in and of itself a government effort towards job creation. Finding out that neighbouring states or neighbouring towns are attracting small business or that box stores are outsourcing overhead and paying negligible taxes, might make all the difference in governments efforts towards job creation.
Blaming the people living there is just... stupid.
There's nothing wrong with that. Some guys come out of the IT trenches and some come out of the management world. Most of these security guys are presenting themselves to middle and upper level management. They only need to know how to make charts and graphs, for which VB is really very good.
They of course also need to know how to get policies signed, walk into strange meeting rooms, identify and get key people into meetings to understand those policies, implement and audit them regularly. If they have time to pick up a little bit of VB hacking on the side, I'm happy that they can better understand the nuts and bolts. VB is fun in small doses.
I downloaded it. This little thing might be interesting :-)
Oh no. Evidence is not required in this case. This failure to comply with the GPL means that Microsoft is governed by Copyright law in this matter.
Their Internet service provider must be notified so that their Internet connection can be terminated.
You mean the Harmony Project? Which probably was the cause of QT eventually going GPL? (not LGPL..)
IMHO, KDE depending on QT was a bad decision. It ignored the fatal flaws in the licensing, until the eventual cooperation of TrollTech. It led to the creation of Mandrake (because Redhat wouldn't touch QT), the fracturing of the Linux desktop (Debian wouldn't touch QT either) and may very well have set back the Linux Desktop long enough that it will never be relevant.
It's a long and messy history. It wasn't until January of this year that they FINALLY went LGPL. Finally having a license appropriate for a toolkit on the Linux Desktop. It only took a decade.
Ugh. Don't go calling people morons in a subject you don't know anything about.
If you're in North America, go read the local electrical code before commenting on house wiring. I can't comment if you're in an area with 240VAC, they're more strict about electrocution hazards.
Also do some thinking about your imaginary computer power supply malfunction on a non-GFIC protected outlet. All case-grounded appliances on the circuit are now case-live. Somebody leans on a radiator to plug in a fully functional case-ground vacuum cleaner. Now there's a secondary path from live on the computer, through the shared ground, into the case of the vacuum, through the right arm, through the chest, down the left arm and through the radiator going to ground.
Current doesn't travel the path of least resistance, it shares the paths. Your ground wires are not super-conductors, so while they'll create a secondary path to ground, they won't negate a third path.
That said, ungrounded outlets are not desirable. They're not safe for (unless they have a working GFIC), and they mess up shielding for devices like guitar amplifiers. They also don't have a discharge path for static electricity.
And BTW, if you short live to ground, you *will* blow the breaker unless your ground is installed improperly.
"GFCI sense current to ground"
Nope, it's a toroid which generates current to trip a switch when there's a difference in the current between the hot and the neutral. It works just fine with no ground at all. The only time you'd have a difference between these at the outlet, is if current escapes the system through a path other than the outlet.
I looked into it when the electrical code forced me to replace the illegally retrofitted three conductor grounded outlets in my house with ground-fault circuits. It didn't make any sense to me without a ground... but lo and behold, they do indeed work with no ground at all.
If I'm reading somebody's email, all I take away from it is.... spam, spam, spam, real email, spam, porn, script-gone-bonkers, script-gone-bonkers, real email.
I don't actually read the contents. Maybe the sender-recipient pairs, but I won't talk about what I see.
What if a missile hit something because shipping was delayed to retool and repeat testing?
I agree it's always better to fix it properly, but it depends on time lines.
When you write programs which deal with time like this, you never use floating point math. If your required precision is 1/10 of a second, your units are in 1/10 of a second. You do not resort to floating point. I'd probably use 1/100 or go to 64 bit and use 1/10000 of a second. With a high level language, there are better ways to do it of course.
The reboot hack is a reasonable workaround in the field, as long as the downtime is documented and understood by leadership, and as somebody mentioned, the severity of the problem needs to be communicated to the field. Ship an alarm clock with the launcher, with clear instructions to reboot it and reset the unit when the alarm clock says so.
The *requirement* of this kind of field maintenance from overstressed people in the field is a bad idea. When writing disaster recovery instructions for fieldwork in normal systems, I like to remind my coworkers...
"...these instructions are for the *least* qualified admin, three years from now, at 2:00 in the morning, on Christmas, to be able to do this without assistance, with second line management yelling at them, while everyone else is on vacation, partying, or utterly unreachable. They need to be able to find the instructions, and execute them, with a minimum of stress or doubt as to the accuracy of the documentation."
I've never done military work, but I can just imagine...
...the new guy doing shift rotation on the Patriot system at 2am on Christmas, he never got proper training, isn't sure if the last guy rebooted the system, realizes his cell is dead... now there's been talk of heightened awareness. An alarm goes off. There's a sticker next to it. "For the love of all that is holy, Press this button when this alarm goes off!" Does he hit the button?