IQ is just a number, but there are areas of intelligence. Spatial, logical, mathematical, and verbal intelligence are all areas addressed by a reasonable IQ test. There is also the question of speed. Some people take longer but get to the same (or better) answer for problems. All of these are factors and not easily addressed by the shorthand of a single number.
There isn't really a good 'automatic' interpretation of what the results mean. (Actually, there is, but the Non Disclosure Agreement I had to sign forbids me from mentioning that there IS a good expert system). I can tell you that 18 statements are broken down into 2 groups of nines are broken into 3 groups of 3.
The 3 'Axis' looked at by the tests are 'Intrinsic', 'Extrinisic', and 'Systemic'. And then it looks at the combinations. "I-E", "I-I", "I-S", "E-I","E-E","E-S"...
You get information from the test by seeing how the candidate's ordering of the 18 statements varies from the 'Real' ordering of the 18 statements. You see which statements were moved, how far, and in what direction. Based on that, you can tell which parts of a person's value system is unbalanced. The unbalance might be very minimal (you're mostly normal, move along), the unbalance might be substantial but symmetric (your values might be off the norm, but they are structured in a sensible logical way), the unbalance might be substantial and unstructured (which probably means that you don't see the appropriate relationships between action and results).
Because the test is divided into three areas, the results talk about balance, symmetry, and values in all of the areas and how those areas relate with each other. AND THAT'S JUST SCRATCHING THE SURFACE of what information you can get out of these things. Hartman won a Nobel Prize for this work (I think in '73) and the people who specialize in this work (Axiological Theory) are still discovering things that the tests are saying. It's fascinating stuff, but super complex. I've been programming a system around this for 3 years and I still don't *understand* a lot of this information.
Oh! I just remembered that there was a piece about Hartman on the radio program This American Life in the spring of 2003, I think.
There IS a test for this, it's called the Hartman Value Profile. It's basically a test to see if you are evil. The Nixon administration was planning on implementing it to test kids to see who would end up going to jail later in life.
The test was accurate, and unchangeable. If you were a sick person at 8, you were going to be just as screwy at 18 or 28. It looked at your world view.
Anyway, telling someone, "You're values are screwy, you'll end up in jail or as a burden to society and there's nothing you can do about it" lacks a certain . . . niceness. So the idea was killed off.
Now the test is used to see if you would be a good salesperson:)
The wizards of Discworld have built a computer named Hex that is powered by Ants, with bees being used for long-term information storage. Was he just lucky or 8 years ahead of the curve?
There are devices like this now, Vonage http://www.vonage.com, comes to mind, though the early VOIP providers are going through a price war/shakeout so it's hard to see who will come out on top (or with the standard). There is a basic assumption in the original post, local calls are not free here in the Netherlands. You pay for every minute on the phone, it's just a question of how much. And individual connection points doesn't scale well. VOIP and traditional telcos will merge only with the agreement and participation of the telcos. The race right now is to see which road we go down, a complete one for one replacement of traditional phone connections or a merging of telcos into VOIP. Several telcos are starting to move their internal traffic over IP right now, so I think we'll see the second future. Nothing is really free (as in beer), and if it is, it's only because someone hasn't figured out how to charge you for it.
When I worked at a radio station many moons ago, we would occasionally go through an ASCAP audit. Basically, the radio station carefully logs every song played on the air for a specific time period and then uses this playlist (along with other radio stations' playlists from around the USA) to allocate payments between its member composers. The radio station (and any venue that plays music, including restaurants, bars, etc) pay a yearly ASCAP fee.
Why doesn't the RIAA offer something like this as well? We, as consumers, have the option of coughing up 10 bucks a year for a blanket licensing agreement. With this license, a consumer can swap and trade files to their heart's content and the RIAA could keep track of which files are being traded the most online to allocate how that pool of license fees should be divided among its constituents.
Maybe it isn't the RIAA, but some new organization that handles the royalty pool. I'm just pointing to the most visible blanket representative of the music recording industry.
The New Licensing Agency would provide feedback to artists and recording companies about what songs are hot on the internet among file sharing services. The recording companies have an incentive to bring good music to market and to PROMOTE that music because that brings them a greater share of the license fees. Consumers purchase protection from the spot raids and outrageous legal actions we have seen in the past. The NLA would be open to even the smallest music distributor. If you are good at online marketing and can steer downloaders toward copies of your music, you get paid.
This gets rid of all the DRM craziness. I'd fork over 30 bucks (which is about double what I spend on CD's in a year) a year to have unlimited file sharing ability.
Imagine a return to the halcyon days of original Napster but without the legal risks. Servers that were fast, reliable, and (relatively) trustworthy. Nirvana for all.
I'm really interested in seeing if you can see any holes in this argument, I would love to read them. -oakbox
Do something physical outside the home. Get involved in some kind of team sport, even if it's bowling. The important thing here is 'outside the home with other people'.
I have a 3 year old in the house with me and have found play groups to be a life saver. It's nice to occasionally be defined by something other than my work persona.
Online relationships do NOT make a good substitute for face to face relationships (I'm not just talking about romantic interests here). If your work and your personal life are coming to you through a box on your desk, you will begin to hate the box.
You are working from home and it is good to remind yourself of that occasionally. Jump up and go to a movie or take a walk. I usually just go biking around town.
Realize that everyone goes through a gray area when starting off. The move from a highly structured environment imposed on you from the outside to a self/un-structured environment is a tough transition. You will either learn to deal, learn to structure, or go back to the office. None of these options is a failure.
To the parent, let me say that I get about 100 spam messages a day. If you aren't feeling the pain, good for you. Some of us ARE.
someone's heads should hit the basket at my ISP. It's a precedent that hasn't yet been set, but damn well should be; ISPs have no business taking upon themselves the role of censor.
Are you saying that an ISP should never look at your mail AND be held accountable for the contents of that mail?
I think of spam the way I think of pornography or any other offensive speech: if you don't like it, don't fucking listen.
I agree right up to the point where the offensive speech is blaring at me from a bullhorn in my living room. If there were one or two innocuous messages a week, I could simply not 'fucking listen'. This isn't one or two messages a week. This is a mountain that even POPfile has trouble staying on top of. Spam is not free speech. Spam is advertising. Advertising is not covered under the first amendment, there are rules for commercial speech that are separate from private speech.
-Oakbox
The good thing, the really important thing, is that you are working on this now, before you become an employee. I made the HUGE mistake of going to work for a company to further one of my projects. The project got further along, but there were some major disagreements in management and the company split.
So now, who owns the code? WE DON'T KNOW. Make sure that your contract covers all the bases. Who owns what and for how long and what enhancements in the proprietary code can migrate back to your code base and how can those things be audited. What happens when the business relationship ends?
The company has a legitimate interest in having full value from the code they are paying to have created. YOU have a legitimate interest in not having your hard work sucked up into an IP litigation nightmare if things go south. Draw lines, talk to a lawyer, cover your ass.
Huzzah to the parent! If you can build it, you can patent it. If you cannot, tough beans. I may have designed a brain enhancing helmet with optional pleasure amplifiers, but I DO NOT think I deserve to earn cash off of the folks who actually come up with a working model of it. I'm a little confused, because I remember back in the 80's several patent applications being knocked down because a working model couldn't be produced (a perpetual motion machine, I think). Look at it this way, if Edison had just needed to sit on his ass and 'think up' stuff instead of working himself and his employees like dogs to actually BUILD things, where would we be now? The long and short of it is, if you are smart enough to be the creator of something really amazing, you SHOULD make money off of it. But that means hard work. There shouldn't be any free rides.
They rebroadcast it here in the Netherlands about 2 months ago. I remember watching the original and being scared as hell (I was 10 or so). Now it seems kind of hokey. I can only hope that the special effects and the acting is better the second time around.
God, I LOVE BitTorrent. I got the file in about 10 minutes (11 Mb) and I seem to be only one of a group because my upload is cranking out 12 Kb/s now. You should give a little to get a lot.
Did you know that in the early years of the US of A, that the government did not recognize foreign patents? That's right, we stole technology left and right until we started churning out our own stuff, and THEN we started to enforce patents here so that our patents would be enforced by other countries.
What happens when most of the R&D in tech is taking place overseas (and it might be argued that most of the R&D going on right now is taking place outside of the USA) and they have these very strict IP laws in place? The IP laws were put in place to protect American interests (presumably) but what happens when they become a serious stumbling block to the US economy (well, in a more obvious way than it already is). Imagine if BT had been able to enforce their hyperlinking patent and had begun demanding licensing fees of every company in the US?
I think this is an ideal situation to slap congress around to the fact that IP laws need to be changed to a more reasonable framework. Reward the inventor, yes, but granting monopolies isn't going to help society or the economy in the long run.
NOT the first of it's kind
on
Soundless Music?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
As the concert at the Metropolitan Cathedral was the first of its kind, the experiment must be repeated to ensure that the affects are caused by infrasound and not by another stimulus.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but I was a member of a band in 1997 (Urilliasekt) that did several infrasound performances. I didn't have a 12m long pipe and a big expense account, so settled for using computer generated tones through performance speakers that harmonized at the desired frequencies. Even though I thought I was brilliant in coming up with the idea, I later found out that someone else had thought of it first. The British Army experimented with harmonzing tones to produce infrasound in 1973. . . as a form of crowd control in Ireland. They had to stop because it induced epileptic seizures in some of the listeners.
He describes what he asserts to be inaccurate portrayals of developers in War Games, TRON, and The Net
These movies PRECISELY describe what I do all day. Why, right this minute, I'm typing on one of my 8 totally custom made keyboards suspended in the air around me by a complex system of racks and harnesses, while glancing from side to side at the 21 monitors hanging around my control chair (with power swivel), and protecting my neon-lit plexiglass-cased server from being attacked by rogue agents and crackers going after the kernel! I'm regularly stopped by agents in expensive suits and 400 dollar Ray-Bans on the street and threatened about my attempts to bring down the national infrastructure with my super password cracking program that, if released, would allow instant access to every system on the planet. And don't even get me started with my super intense VR room in the back that let's me have hyper-realistic "intimate encounters" with my computer-generated love slave(s).
I think we need to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding our profession and let the world know that we absolutely have the best fucking jobs on the planet.
Okay, I must admit that I winced a little bit at the Piers Anthony reference in the original post. Piers is good stuff when you're an adolescent male (which I view as "until I turned 23") but the joke wore thin.
But I come not to bash Piers, but to praise the One True Author, Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett writes books that set your soul and imagination on fire. Terry Pratchett makes you laugh, fight back tears, and grip the pages in white-knuckled suspense, sometimes all on the same page. Terry Pratchett is so good, that I can't get all the overly-fawning words typed out in one place without warping time and space.
Terry Pratchett created Discworld, "A world and a mirror of worlds" and if you haven't read his (magnificent, wonderful, awe-inspiring, just plain inspiring, incredible, fantastic, amazing) [choose all because the all apply] books, then I pity your empty and meaningless life.
The above statements include no hyperbole what so ever.
I was 3 years old. I found an old bucket of paint under the porch and managed to get it open, then I splashed some around to see how everything looked in yellow. My memory is this, my Mom standing over me asking me who did it and me blaming my 1 year old brother. "You see officer, I had to vandalize that building and frame that guy for it, it's genetic."
What happens if your T1 provider goes belly up or drops the ball? (I just love colloquiallisms, even if I can't spell colloquiallisms) Seriously, what I'm buying is piece of mind and a lot of expertise that I don't need to have. UPS, networking knowledge, redundant pipes to the net on different providers, and someone on the phone if I need help with a sticky problem on my server. Then there are those extra little expenses like power cleaners, air conditioning, physical security, and hardware that I don't have to foot the bill for. And I don't know about you, but I move around (3 times in 5 years) to where the work is. I couldn't deal with the downtime a move would place on systems that I self-hosted. I host with Vastnet (www.vastnet.net) and have been with them for 3 years now. I'm happy with the job they do.
I read somewhere that Herbert did 8 YEARS of research for Dune and that it was originally going to be an ecologically centered book. Large parts of Children and Messiah were written during this time, but didn't fit into Dune, so were pushed into later books. You can see this attention to detail in the appendix. Just amazing stuff. Dune is one of those books I go back and read again every 1 or 2 years. Always something new and interesting to discover.
There are a lot of comments here about 'how wasteful and dumb it is to have a space station' and 'where is the return on investment?' and 'shouldn't we be putting our money into something else?' The simple fact of the matter is that we don't really know a whole lot about living out there. We need a platform like the ISS to learn on. You figure out how to live in space, then you step up to the moon, then work your way outward. For those of you who are still wondering why we need to do these things, let me remind you about the several close passes of asteroids in the last few years and little things like. . . oh, I don't know, the K/T Boundary extinction. The Earth may seem all homey and comfy now, but this is NOT the status quo. We need to spread the human race out. This isn't short term economic viability, this is LONG TERM SURVIVAL of your SPECIES.
When I read the 'denial' message here, I was pretty shocked. I can't believe that they think this kind of thing makes people want to come back to their site.
And how about foolishly allowing people to alter the URL and change the message? How stupid is that?
Don't they have to prove intent to commit a crime?
Not in America. If your roommate gets caught with some pot . . . or pretty much anything that can be used in any way to make an illicit chemical, you lose your stuff, and you might go to jail yourself. The RICO laws in the states are beyond draconian, and the mandatory sentencing laws in place in many states means that once you are in the pipeline (even if you did not intend or even actually commit a crime) there is nothing anyone can do to stop you from sliding down it. "Listen Judge, I've been living there for a week and I needed a place to crash." 'Sorry son, my hands are tied.'
Slashdot Mirror
IQ is just a number, but there are areas of intelligence. Spatial, logical, mathematical, and verbal intelligence are all areas addressed by a reasonable IQ test. There is also the question of speed. Some people take longer but get to the same (or better) answer for problems. All of these are factors and not easily addressed by the shorthand of a single number.
There isn't really a good 'automatic' interpretation of what the results mean. (Actually, there is, but the Non Disclosure Agreement I had to sign forbids me from mentioning that there IS a good expert system). I can tell you that 18 statements are broken down into 2 groups of nines are broken into 3 groups of 3.
...
The 3 'Axis' looked at by the tests are 'Intrinsic', 'Extrinisic', and 'Systemic'. And then it looks at the combinations. "I-E", "I-I", "I-S", "E-I","E-E","E-S"
You get information from the test by seeing how the candidate's ordering of the 18 statements varies from the 'Real' ordering of the 18 statements. You see which statements were moved, how far, and in what direction. Based on that, you can tell which parts of a person's value system is unbalanced. The unbalance might be very minimal (you're mostly normal, move along), the unbalance might be substantial but symmetric (your values might be off the norm, but they are structured in a sensible logical way), the unbalance might be substantial and unstructured (which probably means that you don't see the appropriate relationships between action and results).
Because the test is divided into three areas, the results talk about balance, symmetry, and values in all of the areas and how those areas relate with each other. AND THAT'S JUST SCRATCHING THE SURFACE of what information you can get out of these things. Hartman won a Nobel Prize for this work (I think in '73) and the people who specialize in this work (Axiological Theory) are still discovering things that the tests are saying. It's fascinating stuff, but super complex. I've been programming a system around this for 3 years and I still don't *understand* a lot of this information.
Oh! I just remembered that there was a piece about Hartman on the radio program This American Life in the spring of 2003, I think.
There IS a test for this, it's called the Hartman Value Profile. It's basically a test to see if you are evil. The Nixon administration was planning on implementing it to test kids to see who would end up going to jail later in life.
:)
The test was accurate, and unchangeable. If you were a sick person at 8, you were going to be just as screwy at 18 or 28. It looked at your world view.
Anyway, telling someone, "You're values are screwy, you'll end up in jail or as a burden to society and there's nothing you can do about it" lacks a certain . . . niceness. So the idea was killed off.
Now the test is used to see if you would be a good salesperson
Because it has already occured to a few different folks. :)
Something to do with a phone, maybe with a GTE phone van sitting in what looks like someone's back yard.
The wizards of Discworld have built a computer named Hex that is powered by Ants, with bees being used for long-term information storage. Was he just lucky or 8 years ahead of the curve?
There are devices like this now, Vonage http://www.vonage.com, comes to mind, though the early VOIP providers are going through a price war/shakeout so it's hard to see who will come out on top (or with the standard).
There is a basic assumption in the original post, local calls are not free here in the Netherlands. You pay for every minute on the phone, it's just a question of how much. And individual connection points doesn't scale well. VOIP and traditional telcos will merge only with the agreement and participation of the telcos.
The race right now is to see which road we go down, a complete one for one replacement of traditional phone connections or a merging of telcos into VOIP. Several telcos are starting to move their internal traffic over IP right now, so I think we'll see the second future.
Nothing is really free (as in beer), and if it is, it's only because someone hasn't figured out how to charge you for it.
When I worked at a radio station many moons ago, we would occasionally go through an ASCAP audit. Basically, the radio station carefully logs every song played on the air for a specific time period and then uses this playlist (along with other radio stations' playlists from around the USA) to allocate payments between its member composers. The radio station (and any venue that plays music, including restaurants, bars, etc) pay a yearly ASCAP fee.
Why doesn't the RIAA offer something like this as well? We, as consumers, have the option of coughing up 10 bucks a year for a blanket licensing agreement. With this license, a consumer can swap and trade files to their heart's content and the RIAA could keep track of which files are being traded the most online to allocate how that pool of license fees should be divided among its constituents.
Maybe it isn't the RIAA, but some new organization that handles the royalty pool. I'm just pointing to the most visible blanket representative of the music recording industry.
The New Licensing Agency would provide feedback to artists and recording companies about what songs are hot on the internet among file sharing services. The recording companies have an incentive to bring good music to market and to PROMOTE that music because that brings them a greater share of the license fees. Consumers purchase protection from the spot raids and outrageous legal actions we have seen in the past. The NLA would be open to even the smallest music distributor. If you are good at online marketing and can steer downloaders toward copies of your music, you get paid.
This gets rid of all the DRM craziness. I'd fork over 30 bucks (which is about double what I spend on CD's in a year) a year to have unlimited file sharing ability.
Imagine a return to the halcyon days of original Napster but without the legal risks. Servers that were fast, reliable, and (relatively) trustworthy. Nirvana for all.
I'm really interested in seeing if you can see any holes in this argument, I would love to read them.
-oakbox
Do something physical outside the home. Get involved in some kind of team sport, even if it's bowling. The important thing here is 'outside the home with other people'.
I have a 3 year old in the house with me and have found play groups to be a life saver. It's nice to occasionally be defined by something other than my work persona.
Online relationships do NOT make a good substitute for face to face relationships (I'm not just talking about romantic interests here). If your work and your personal life are coming to you through a box on your desk, you will begin to hate the box.
You are working from home and it is good to remind yourself of that occasionally. Jump up and go to a movie or take a walk. I usually just go biking around town.
Realize that everyone goes through a gray area when starting off. The move from a highly structured environment imposed on you from the outside to a self/un-structured environment is a tough transition. You will either learn to deal, learn to structure, or go back to the office. None of these options is a failure.
- Richard
So, this is all a stock scam from spammerville?
someone's heads should hit the basket at my ISP. It's a precedent that hasn't yet been set, but damn well should be; ISPs have no business taking upon themselves the role of censor.
Are you saying that an ISP should never look at your mail AND be held accountable for the contents of that mail?
I think of spam the way I think of pornography or any other offensive speech: if you don't like it, don't fucking listen.
I agree right up to the point where the offensive speech is blaring at me from a bullhorn in my living room. If there were one or two innocuous messages a week, I could simply not 'fucking listen'. This isn't one or two messages a week. This is a mountain that even POPfile has trouble staying on top of. Spam is not free speech. Spam is advertising. Advertising is not covered under the first amendment, there are rules for commercial speech that are separate from private speech. -Oakbox
The good thing, the really important thing, is that you are working on this now, before you become an employee. I made the HUGE mistake of going to work for a company to further one of my projects. The project got further along, but there were some major disagreements in management and the company split.
So now, who owns the code? WE DON'T KNOW. Make sure that your contract covers all the bases. Who owns what and for how long and what enhancements in the proprietary code can migrate back to your code base and how can those things be audited. What happens when the business relationship ends?
The company has a legitimate interest in having full value from the code they are paying to have created. YOU have a legitimate interest in not having your hard work sucked up into an IP litigation nightmare if things go south. Draw lines, talk to a lawyer, cover your ass.
Huzzah to the parent! If you can build it, you can patent it. If you cannot, tough beans. I may have designed a brain enhancing helmet with optional pleasure amplifiers, but I DO NOT think I deserve to earn cash off of the folks who actually come up with a working model of it.
I'm a little confused, because I remember back in the 80's several patent applications being knocked down because a working model couldn't be produced (a perpetual motion machine, I think). Look at it this way, if Edison had just needed to sit on his ass and 'think up' stuff instead of working himself and his employees like dogs to actually BUILD things, where would we be now?
The long and short of it is, if you are smart enough to be the creator of something really amazing, you SHOULD make money off of it. But that means hard work. There shouldn't be any free rides.
They rebroadcast it here in the Netherlands about 2 months ago. I remember watching the original and being scared as hell (I was 10 or so). Now it seems kind of hokey. I can only hope that the special effects and the acting is better the second time around.
God, I LOVE BitTorrent. I got the file in about 10 minutes (11 Mb) and I seem to be only one of a group because my upload is cranking out 12 Kb/s now. You should give a little to get a lot.
What happens when most of the R&D in tech is taking place overseas (and it might be argued that most of the R&D going on right now is taking place outside of the USA) and they have these very strict IP laws in place? The IP laws were put in place to protect American interests (presumably) but what happens when they become a serious stumbling block to the US economy (well, in a more obvious way than it already is). Imagine if BT had been able to enforce their hyperlinking patent and had begun demanding licensing fees of every company in the US?
I think this is an ideal situation to slap congress around to the fact that IP laws need to be changed to a more reasonable framework. Reward the inventor, yes, but granting monopolies isn't going to help society or the economy in the long run.
Sorry to burst the bubble, but I was a member of a band in 1997 (Urilliasekt) that did several infrasound performances. I didn't have a 12m long pipe and a big expense account, so settled for using computer generated tones through performance speakers that harmonized at the desired frequencies. Even though I thought I was brilliant in coming up with the idea, I later found out that someone else had thought of it first. The British Army experimented with harmonzing tones to produce infrasound in 1973. . . as a form of crowd control in Ireland. They had to stop because it induced epileptic seizures in some of the listeners.
-oakbox
These movies PRECISELY describe what I do all day. Why, right this minute, I'm typing on one of my 8 totally custom made keyboards suspended in the air around me by a complex system of racks and harnesses, while glancing from side to side at the 21 monitors hanging around my control chair (with power swivel), and protecting my neon-lit plexiglass-cased server from being attacked by rogue agents and crackers going after the kernel! I'm regularly stopped by agents in expensive suits and 400 dollar Ray-Bans on the street and threatened about my attempts to bring down the national infrastructure with my super password cracking program that, if released, would allow instant access to every system on the planet. And don't even get me started with my super intense VR room in the back that let's me have hyper-realistic "intimate encounters" with my computer-generated love slave(s).
I think we need to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding our profession and let the world know that we absolutely have the best fucking jobs on the planet.
-Oakbox
Okay, I must admit that I winced a little bit at the Piers Anthony reference in the original post. Piers is good stuff when you're an adolescent male (which I view as "until I turned 23") but the joke wore thin.
But I come not to bash Piers, but to praise the One True Author, Terry Pratchett. Terry Pratchett writes books that set your soul and imagination on fire. Terry Pratchett makes you laugh, fight back tears, and grip the pages in white-knuckled suspense, sometimes all on the same page. Terry Pratchett is so good, that I can't get all the overly-fawning words typed out in one place without warping time and space.
Terry Pratchett created Discworld, "A world and a mirror of worlds" and if you haven't read his (magnificent, wonderful, awe-inspiring, just plain inspiring, incredible, fantastic, amazing) [choose all because the all apply] books, then I pity your empty and meaningless life.
The above statements include no hyperbole what so ever.
I was 3 years old. I found an old bucket of paint under the porch and managed to get it open, then I splashed some around to see how everything looked in yellow. My memory is this, my Mom standing over me asking me who did it and me blaming my 1 year old brother.
"You see officer, I had to vandalize that building and frame that guy for it, it's genetic."
What happens if your T1 provider goes belly up or drops the ball? (I just love colloquiallisms, even if I can't spell colloquiallisms)
Seriously, what I'm buying is piece of mind and a lot of expertise that I don't need to have. UPS, networking knowledge, redundant pipes to the net on different providers, and someone on the phone if I need help with a sticky problem on my server. Then there are those extra little expenses like power cleaners, air conditioning, physical security, and hardware that I don't have to foot the bill for.
And I don't know about you, but I move around (3 times in 5 years) to where the work is. I couldn't deal with the downtime a move would place on systems that I self-hosted.
I host with Vastnet (www.vastnet.net) and have been with them for 3 years now. I'm happy with the job they do.
I read somewhere that Herbert did 8 YEARS of research for Dune and that it was originally going to be an ecologically centered book. Large parts of Children and Messiah were written during this time, but didn't fit into Dune, so were pushed into later books.
You can see this attention to detail in the appendix. Just amazing stuff.
Dune is one of those books I go back and read again every 1 or 2 years. Always something new and interesting to discover.
There are a lot of comments here about 'how wasteful and dumb it is to have a space station' and 'where is the return on investment?' and 'shouldn't we be putting our money into something else?'
The simple fact of the matter is that we don't really know a whole lot about living out there. We need a platform like the ISS to learn on. You figure out how to live in space, then you step up to the moon, then work your way outward. For those of you who are still wondering why we need to do these things, let me remind you about the several close passes of asteroids in the last few years and little things like. . . oh, I don't know, the K/T Boundary extinction. The Earth may seem all homey and comfy now, but this is NOT the status quo. We need to spread the human race out.
This isn't short term economic viability, this is LONG TERM SURVIVAL of your SPECIES.
And how about foolishly allowing people to alter the URL and change the message? How stupid is that?
Oakbox
Not in America. If your roommate gets caught with some pot . . . or pretty much anything that can be used in any way to make an illicit chemical, you lose your stuff, and you might go to jail yourself. The RICO laws in the states are beyond draconian, and the mandatory sentencing laws in place in many states means that once you are in the pipeline (even if you did not intend or even actually commit a crime) there is nothing anyone can do to stop you from sliding down it. "Listen Judge, I've been living there for a week and I needed a place to crash." 'Sorry son, my hands are tied.'