On a laptop... yes, for the wrong reason
on
Is Swap Necessary?
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· Score: 0
Goddammit I can't suspend my laptop because my swap partition is insufficient in size. Why should I have 2 GB of disk space *empty* all the time just so I can close the lid.
Someone please fix acpi hibernate to do something sane...
The big thing that scares me about nuclear power is that publicly traded for-profit energy companies have a motivation to cut corners on safety and regulatory standards. I shudder when I think about the fact that Ontario's nuclear power facilities are no longer in the hands of a regulatory body that has no profit motive. There are nearly 6 million people living within 100kms of the pickering plant. Luckily, most of them are up-wind..
Speaking as someone who understands the value of choosing hard-to-guess passwords, the biggest problem I have is with the sheer volume of passwords I need to remember. So often I go back to a site I've registered at and wind up with my account locked because I can't remember which password mnemonic I used.
With mnemonics, I would imagine that access to one or two of a user's passwords would enable an attacker to guess many of their other passwords. It seems like an all-too-obvious attack to set up a pr0n site with user registration, collect user names and passwords, and them run them on yahoo, hotmail, online-banking, etc. One could easily harvest hundreds of passwords this way. (Uh-oh, I hope this kind of idle speculation isn't some kind of DMCA or Patriot violation...;-)
How do slashdotter's deal with password volume? Even the no-no of writing them all down can be a difficult task to manage..
In Bayesian statistics, a priori knowledge is the information you have before a new piece of evidence arrives. So whatever we know about these guys before they come running down the mountain with boat fragments constitutes a priori evidence (from a Bayesian viewpoint). Once we assimilate this new information (the boat fragments/photos/yeti/whatever), we have an a posteriori probability that it's the truth, conditioned on our prior knowledge that they are/aren't quacks.
As if pictures can't be doctored and are absolute proof....
An important part of the scientific method is building credibility as a scientist. If these guys are serious achaeologists, they'll be risking their credibility, and their careers as academics, to falsify their results. otoh, if they're just out to make a quick buck, sell movie and book rights, etc, then I guess anything goes.
As opposed to idle speculation of the 'these guys are kooks' vein, can anyone supply any a priori evidence that they're for real (or not..)?
New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user. (insert tongue firmly in cheek) It comes as a great relief to me that scientific truth will soon rest firmly in the hands of the people with the deepest pockets. I can't imagine that special interest groups would *ever* try to take advantage of that kind of system.
These discussions bring to mind a quote of Carl Sagan's:
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." (from Billions and Billions, iirc)
Whether it's little green men, intelligent design or gun control, people have a tendency to shape their arguments (and distort the facts) to reflect their desire for how they would like the universe (world, society, whatever) to operate, without regard for how it actually functions. I think it's our greatest failure as a species.
I agree that configuring multiple clients is a huge pain in the ass. My preferred option is ssh/pine. One host/client to rule them all.;-) Sometimes, though, resorting to a web client is the only option. What I really don't like about that is that usually it's the only option when all you have is a terminal that you'd really rather not type a password into.
I think Cringely's right, but that doesn't mean the Canadian model is perfect.
Recent Canadian elections, particularly in the province of Quebec, have been subject to all kinds of abuse. While there is a balance of scrutineers, they're not necessarily balanced, so to speak. In the 1995 Quebec referendum on separation, there were serious irregularities related to rejected ballots. Vote tallys tend to be skewed in favour of the party with the most obnoxious scrutineer.
One can only begin to imagine the outcome of a scrutineer system in the US, where the concealed weapon factor comes in to play.;-)
It's not a mozilla/ie issue, it's a social issue. Mozilla is likely to have its share of egregious security holes (but probably not as many). Even if patches are released within hours of the discovery of a bug, the likelihood that joe user will install the patch is slim. We can all hoot and holler-- install Mozilla! but if Mozilla gained majority market share, people would still fail to take the time to patch their systems, and it's inevitable that moz security bugs will be discovered too.
A most research-oriented universities, teaching ability is a secondary consideration for job/tenure candidacy, after scientific contribution. Sticking to my own sphere of knowledge- tenure at McGill University is granted on the basis of contribution to TWO of THREE categories-- research, teaching, and 'community service' (ie departmental/university committees sat on). Beyond that, these days even a lousy teaching dossier can be boosted by #of grad students supervised, and #of PhD students graduated. Speaking from my own ugrad experience, I had more than a handful of profs who probably did fantastic research, but whose teaching performance was less than adequate.
Funny that both of them are profs at Canadian schools.
Probably what's most significant is that they both do interesting and valuable research.
In general, I think a certain degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a requirement for a faculty job. If you're too normal, you don't make for a good candidate.
I see only one problem with your arguments about the MPAA dinosaur-- at present they seem to have a stranglehold on screens. I don't know enough about how the industry operates or to what extent the MPAA actually owns theatres, but when the only movies the huge megaplexes will play are the ones distributed by the MPAA juggernaut, then moviegoers will never have a choice about what they see.
The jobs are there, or will be in a year or two. Yes, Intel, Microsoft Research, NEC, Honda, Boeing, etc, etc, etc all hire PhD's out of comp sci and comp eng programs.
HOWEVER, there are two *big* caveats, speaking from my own experience: 1. DON'T expect to find a job in your home town, even if it's Manhattan. You will find that your opportunities are highly geographically distributed and so you shouldn't count on keeping your roots in one place. 2. DO depend on networking to find work. Publish, go to conferences and schmooze. In the end you will probably find yourself working for someone who has close ties to your supervisor or committee. Of course, you might find other avenues for work, but in general, creating visibility for yourself is important.
If you play your cards well, you'll land in a stimulating, high paying job. There's just the small matter of passing your comps and that pesky dissertation.
My god, it's been how many years and backspace and delete still behave strangely and inconsistently between xterm, kterm, gnome-terminal, etc. Half the time, only C-h does the trick. And then there's these terminals' inconsistent ability to deal with unicode and color characters so half the man pages render incorrectly. Someone stop the madness!
If C++==D then the next gen should be E. Actually, if we count pre and post ISO standards, we've moved on to F, which is a fine letter, imho. F, of course will add the exponentiation operator **, so we can compute F**k.;-)
Does mutt support roles, like in pine (or arbitrary From: header spoofing?) That's something I love about pine that neither MozMail or Evolution can deal with. I use one-time email addresses in web forms (like thisisasillycomment@simra.net) to keep tabs on where spammers get my address, but when I want to reply to legit mail I want to be able to set my email address manually.
Short of 'telnet mailhost 22', or clumsily creating new mail folders for every onetime address, I don't know many mail readers that let me manipulate my headers. (See, there ARE legit reasons for changing From and Reply-To headers.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Goddammit I can't suspend my laptop because my swap partition is insufficient in size. Why should I have 2 GB of disk space *empty* all the time just so I can close the lid.
Someone please fix acpi hibernate to do something sane...
they're all odd.
(Waiting for my spot in the math hall of fame)
The big thing that scares me about nuclear power is that publicly traded for-profit energy companies have a motivation to cut corners on safety and regulatory standards. I shudder when I think about the fact that Ontario's nuclear power facilities are no longer in the hands of a regulatory body that has no profit motive. There are nearly 6 million people living within 100kms of the pickering plant. Luckily, most of them are up-wind..
Speaking as someone who understands the value of choosing hard-to-guess passwords, the biggest problem I have is with the sheer volume of passwords I need to remember. So often I go back to a site I've registered at and wind up with my account locked because I can't remember which password mnemonic I used.
;-)
With mnemonics, I would imagine that access to one or two of a user's passwords would enable an attacker to guess many of their other passwords. It seems like an all-too-obvious attack to set up a pr0n site with user registration, collect user names and passwords, and them run them on yahoo, hotmail, online-banking, etc. One could easily harvest hundreds of passwords this way. (Uh-oh, I hope this kind of idle speculation isn't some kind of DMCA or Patriot violation...
How do slashdotter's deal with password volume? Even the no-no of writing them all down can be a difficult task to manage..
In Bayesian statistics, a priori knowledge is the information you have before a new piece of evidence arrives. So whatever we know about these guys before they come running down the mountain with boat fragments constitutes a priori evidence (from a Bayesian viewpoint). Once we assimilate this new information (the boat fragments/photos/yeti/whatever), we have an a posteriori probability that it's the truth, conditioned on our prior knowledge that they are/aren't quacks.
As if pictures can't be doctored and are absolute proof....
An important part of the scientific method is building credibility as a scientist. If these guys are serious achaeologists, they'll be risking their credibility, and their careers as academics, to falsify their results. otoh, if they're just out to make a quick buck, sell movie and book rights, etc, then I guess anything goes.
As opposed to idle speculation of the 'these guys are kooks' vein, can anyone supply any a priori evidence that they're for real (or not..)?
New business models are being tested by publishers, including open access, in which the author pays and content is free to the user.
(insert tongue firmly in cheek)
It comes as a great relief to me that scientific truth will soon rest firmly in the hands of the people with the deepest pockets. I can't imagine that special interest groups would *ever* try to take advantage of that kind of system.
These discussions bring to mind a quote of Carl Sagan's:
"The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition." (from Billions and Billions, iirc)
Whether it's little green men, intelligent design or gun control, people have a tendency to shape their arguments (and distort the facts) to reflect their desire for how they would like the universe (world, society, whatever) to operate, without regard for how it actually functions. I think it's our greatest failure as a species.
Someone should do the study again
;-) I'm partial to pine myself, but maybe that explains why I'm not as happy as you are. :-)
I think you just did.
I agree that configuring multiple clients is a huge pain in the ass. My preferred option is ssh/pine. One host/client to rule them all. ;-) Sometimes, though, resorting to a web client is the only option. What I really don't like about that is that usually it's the only option when all you have is a terminal that you'd really rather not type a password into.
Sigh... back in the day, including an MS product in a slashdot review would have required asbestos gloves. I guess times have changed. ;-)
I think Cringely's right, but that doesn't mean the Canadian model is perfect.
;-)
Recent Canadian elections, particularly in the province of Quebec, have been subject to all kinds of abuse. While there is a balance of scrutineers, they're not necessarily balanced, so to speak. In the 1995 Quebec referendum on separation, there were serious irregularities related to rejected ballots. Vote tallys tend to be skewed in favour of the party with the most obnoxious scrutineer.
One can only begin to imagine the outcome of a scrutineer system in the US, where the concealed weapon factor comes in to play.
It's not a mozilla/ie issue, it's a social issue. Mozilla is likely to have its share of egregious security holes (but probably not as many). Even if patches are released within hours of the discovery of a bug, the likelihood that joe user will install the patch is slim. We can all hoot and holler-- install Mozilla! but if Mozilla gained majority market share, people would still fail to take the time to patch their systems, and it's inevitable that moz security bugs will be discovered too.
A most research-oriented universities, teaching ability is a secondary consideration for job/tenure candidacy, after scientific contribution. Sticking to my own sphere of knowledge- tenure at McGill University is granted on the basis of contribution to TWO of THREE categories-- research, teaching, and 'community service' (ie departmental/university committees sat on). Beyond that, these days even a lousy teaching dossier can be boosted by #of grad students supervised, and #of PhD students graduated. Speaking from my own ugrad experience, I had more than a handful of profs who probably did fantastic research, but whose teaching performance was less than adequate.
Steve Mann
One of the more eccentric profs I've encountered. Although his web page serves as no indicator, his brother, Richard, is only slightly less eccentric:
Richard Mann
Funny that both of them are profs at Canadian schools.
Probably what's most significant is that they both do interesting and valuable research.
In general, I think a certain degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder is a requirement for a faculty job. If you're too normal, you don't make for a good candidate.
.. the moon is 384,500km away. This asteroid was one-quarter that distance. I would call that close, but hardly a near miss.
I agree completely. Now, whenever I read the Council of Elrond, I mentally insert a threatening "Mr Anderson" every time Elrond speaks.
I was actually thinking more along the lines of UID 0.
Add printer ink to that list.. garr..
I see only one problem with your arguments about the MPAA dinosaur-- at present they seem to have a stranglehold on screens. I don't know enough about how the industry operates or to what extent the MPAA actually owns theatres, but when the only movies the huge megaplexes will play are the ones distributed by the MPAA juggernaut, then moviegoers will never have a choice about what they see.
The jobs are there, or will be in a year or two. Yes, Intel, Microsoft Research, NEC, Honda, Boeing, etc, etc, etc all hire PhD's out of comp sci and comp eng programs.
HOWEVER, there are two *big* caveats, speaking from my own experience:
1. DON'T expect to find a job in your home town, even if it's Manhattan. You will find that your opportunities are highly geographically distributed and so you shouldn't count on keeping your roots in one place.
2. DO depend on networking to find work. Publish, go to conferences and schmooze. In the end you will probably find yourself working for someone who has close ties to your supervisor or committee. Of course, you might find other avenues for work, but in general, creating visibility for yourself is important.
If you play your cards well, you'll land in a stimulating, high paying job. There's just the small matter of passing your comps and that pesky dissertation.
My god, it's been how many years and backspace and delete still behave strangely and inconsistently between xterm, kterm, gnome-terminal, etc. Half the time, only C-h does the trick. And then there's these terminals' inconsistent ability to deal with unicode and color characters so half the man pages render incorrectly. Someone stop the madness!
Most of the geeks I know (self included) like beer. If you're that kind of geek, don't waste your time in the States-- come straight to Canada. ;-)
If C++==D then the next gen should be E. Actually, if we count pre and post ISO standards, we've moved on to F, which is a fine letter, imho. F, of course will add the exponentiation operator **, so we can compute F**k. ;-)
Does mutt support roles, like in pine (or arbitrary From: header spoofing?) That's something I love about pine that neither MozMail or Evolution can deal with. I use one-time email addresses in web forms (like thisisasillycomment@simra.net) to keep tabs on where spammers get my address, but when I want to reply to legit mail I want to be able to set my email address manually.
:-)
Short of 'telnet mailhost 22', or clumsily creating new mail folders for every onetime address, I don't know many mail readers that let me manipulate my headers. (See, there ARE legit reasons for changing From and Reply-To headers.