I work for a university research group that is working with NOAA and other organizations to improve data collection and predictions associated with severe weather in our area. The truth is, there is not just one organization controlling all the information in the event of, for example, a hurricane.
NOAA, FEMA, and state emergency management groups work together in the event of a disaster. They create plans ahead of time as to who will do what in order to avoid confusion. So it's NOAA's responsibility to decide whether a hurricane is category 3 or 4, but it's the state EMD's responsibility to tell people what to do in the event of a hurricane.
It's important to have a detailed disaster plan to avoid exactly the kind of scenario you describe. The current plan includes everything from when the Governor should announce a highway lane reversal to the format my research group's storm surge prediction should be delivered in. The media can use this plan to know who to contact for what information, and to tell people what to expect.
And, to chime in on the topic, I think that NOAA's data should absolutely be free. Don't stifle research.
I'm surprised to hear about so many problems with Slashdot on Mozilla. I've never had one, that I can remember.
However, I wouldn't put the blame totally on Mozilla. Slashdot's front-end is old and meandering and patched-together. Frankly, it's a marvel that it renders on _any_ browser.
For more information about orphaned films, you can read the archives of USC's Orphan Film Symposium. This might also be a good place to look for people to contact on this subject. The 2001 symposium had a session on Preservation and Copyright.
Re:I think the Time article misses the point
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 1
Our paper is pretty good for the area where I live. They do report news and perspectives from the surrounding towns, not just the big city. I know when I lived in a more rural area, though, it was harder to find relevant news in the paper.
That being said, there are a lot of people in the Upstate and the Lowcountry who object to the name of the paper being The State because it mostly covers the Midlands, which is only 1/3 of the state. It tends to favor stories about state government because the capitol is here, and plenty of people complain that it's biased in one direction or another. However, I still think it's one of the better local papers I've read.
Re:I think the Time article misses the point
on
Meet Joe Blog
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· Score: 2, Insightful
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form.
Not necessarily. I still get a dead tree paper because it's the best way for me to get local news. The local TV news only reports on a few top stories and the paper's web site doesn't include everything from the print version. If I want to know exactly what's going on in my county, city, and neighborhood, from what the governor's up to down to who bought the house for sale down the street, I read the paper.
If you live in a really big city, you might have more options for online news sources. But where I live, there's not much right now.
I usually skim the links on the Daypop Top 40 every day. When it's working, it lists the top 40 things bloggers are linking to. This is how I discovered a lot of the blogs mentioned in the article. Except for Slashdot and boingboing, I don't read these blogs every day. But the top 40 list works as a sort of daily "best of the blogs" for me, and as the list is politically neutral I get to see what both sides are saying.
we a) make our own playlists and our own decisions
I was a DJ at my college's radio station (WUTS) and they had a policy that anyone without a specialty show (e.g. Reggae Hour, Classical) was required to play at least a certain number of songs an hour (I think it was 2 or 3) off of a specific list. I don't know where the list came from, since I was not part of the group that ran the station. I guessed at the time that it had something to do with the arrangement of how the radio station got its free promotional CDs, i.e. "We'll keep sending you music as long as you play these songs every so often." I can't really comment on the details of the list, though, because I had a specialty show so I never had to play anything on it.
Thinking back on my experience as a DJ, I remember that we had to write down the name and artist of every song played and the time it was played. It didn't occur to me then, but now I wonder if that was so the radio station could pay royalties. If that was the case, it makes me happy to think that the artists I played on my show got some small amount of remuneration, since I made a point of playing songs that, at that time, were not being played on the radio anywhere else.
Hollywood et all would be forced to allow people to age more naturally on screen
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I think it's more likely that actors, particularly women, would have shorter careers as they get replaced by fresh-faced teens the moment they get their first wrinkle. All the "aging" actors would then have to move into the parent/judge/old codger roles much sooner than they do now.
Will people forget their childhood after a couple hundred years?
Or will we just continue to extend our childhoods? A long time ago, 16 was a common age at which to start a family and a lifelong career. Nowadays we think of 16-year-olds as "kids". Heck, I've heard people refer to 21-year-olds as kids recently. If 100 becomes the average lifespan and fertility, youthfulness and quality of life continue to be enhanced later in life, will 30- or 40-year-olds be considered kids in the future?
There's a login for this site available on bugmenot. However, I can't guarantee that it works because clicking on the login button does nothing so I couldn't even get to the login page to try it myself.
Maybe the broken login button is all part of a diabolical plan to make people subscribe to the magazine every time they want to read an article online, even if they're already subscribers.
I was thinking that this didn't adequately answer the question of how a company would deal with manufacturing and distribution of free hardware. Software, having fewer raw materials and a simpler distribution model, makes more sense.
But then I thought about how phone companies have come up with a model where the hardware is "free" and you pay for the service. A lot of people just get whatever phone comes with their mobile plan. So why hasn't this worked for computers? PeoplePC tried it and gave up. Is it that ISPs/ASPs don't want to deal with being hardware retailers, or do consumers just want the added choice and customization that they get from selecting their own computers?
Re:So what is a good ragchew site these days?
on
On Collaborative Weblogs
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I'd suggest visiting forums where you find people with shared interests. The key is to find someplace big enough that it won't die out, but not so huge that you can't get to know people.
The Geek Culture forums are pretty good, if skewed toward Mac and Linux fans, and there's a Slashbox option. CNet's Builder Buzz community was great back in the day and is still pretty good in its user-created reincarnation, Hiveminds. If you've got a favorite TV show (or one you love to hate), check out the smaller show forums on Television Without Pity.
You're right! We do that and it hadn't even occurred to me! We've got a CD recorder rigged up to the microphone in the pulpit. The organist presses a button before the sermon and the whole thing is recorded. We don't have a CD duplicator, though. Too expensive. Instead, I rip the sermons to MP3 and put them up on our web site. (This week's should be up this evening - I'm a little behind right now.)
with current support you can hack up a page that look basically the same in both browsers
Opera and Safari?;)
I remember the bad old days when everyone had either Netscape or IE and all the monitors were 800x600. Nowadays, there's such a wide variety of clients for end-users. Fortunately, like you said, current standards give us the flexibility to create sites that work almost anywhere, for anyone.
Most web developers don't make any money, the good ones get rich!
Yes, and I guess that's all I'm going to get. Since this is a subject I'm really interested in, I'm always looking for good new web standards resources. I guess I was hoping to find more information so I'd know whether to bookmark his page as a resource or look for his name in articles or forums elsewhere. I did find StyleMaster on VersionTracker.
I'd like to know a little bit about the guy who wrote this article. He links to some of the usual standards gurus in his sidebar (Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS Zen Garden) but I can't find any background information on him.
I'm not saying that his musings aren't valid, but I'd like to know where he's coming from and what sort of relevant work he does that involves web standards. This would give the article more context and help me to understand better why he says what he does.
The lagoons didn't break, but they did flood and overflow in the wake of Hurricane Floyd in '99. This article has an aerial view of a farm covered with liquid hog waste. Nass-tee.
I read an article a while back comparing the safety of different cars. Statistics showed the percentage of SUVs involved in accidents was higher than for smaller cars. They compared an SUV (an Explorer, I think) and a Jaguar in a driving test. The Jag was actually shown to be safer because it was more maneuverable and could avoid accidents. The SUV was designed to simply survive accidents rather than avoid them.
The main point of the article was the false sense of security people feel in big cars like SUVs. They're high off the ground and surrounded by lots of steel, so they feel safe when really they're less safe.
I wish I could find the article, it was on daypop a few months ago.
Good point. Here's something to think about: the copyright extensions created in the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act expire in 2019. That means, if this is important to you, you have several election cycles to vote the people who supported it out of office and vote in legislators with a more consumer-friendly viewpont.
Slashdot Mirror
Completely OT, but I love your new sig. That is one of my favorite silly songs EVAR.
I'm from the IRS! *slam!*
I work for a university research group that is working with NOAA and other organizations to improve data collection and predictions associated with severe weather in our area. The truth is, there is not just one organization controlling all the information in the event of, for example, a hurricane.
NOAA, FEMA, and state emergency management groups work together in the event of a disaster. They create plans ahead of time as to who will do what in order to avoid confusion. So it's NOAA's responsibility to decide whether a hurricane is category 3 or 4, but it's the state EMD's responsibility to tell people what to do in the event of a hurricane.
It's important to have a detailed disaster plan to avoid exactly the kind of scenario you describe. The current plan includes everything from when the Governor should announce a highway lane reversal to the format my research group's storm surge prediction should be delivered in. The media can use this plan to know who to contact for what information, and to tell people what to expect.
And, to chime in on the topic, I think that NOAA's data should absolutely be free. Don't stifle research.
I'm surprised to hear about so many problems with Slashdot on Mozilla. I've never had one, that I can remember.
However, I wouldn't put the blame totally on Mozilla. Slashdot's front-end is old and meandering and patched-together. Frankly, it's a marvel that it renders on _any_ browser.
For more information about orphaned films, you can read the archives of USC's Orphan Film Symposium. This might also be a good place to look for people to contact on this subject. The 2001 symposium had a session on Preservation and Copyright.
Our paper is pretty good for the area where I live. They do report news and perspectives from the surrounding towns, not just the big city. I know when I lived in a more rural area, though, it was harder to find relevant news in the paper.
That being said, there are a lot of people in the Upstate and the Lowcountry who object to the name of the paper being The State because it mostly covers the Midlands, which is only 1/3 of the state. It tends to favor stories about state government because the capitol is here, and plenty of people complain that it's biased in one direction or another. However, I still think it's one of the better local papers I've read.
These days almost all the news that's fit to print has been all over the internet before you can get it in printed form.
Not necessarily. I still get a dead tree paper because it's the best way for me to get local news. The local TV news only reports on a few top stories and the paper's web site doesn't include everything from the print version. If I want to know exactly what's going on in my county, city, and neighborhood, from what the governor's up to down to who bought the house for sale down the street, I read the paper.
If you live in a really big city, you might have more options for online news sources. But where I live, there's not much right now.
I usually skim the links on the Daypop Top 40 every day. When it's working, it lists the top 40 things bloggers are linking to. This is how I discovered a lot of the blogs mentioned in the article. Except for Slashdot and boingboing, I don't read these blogs every day. But the top 40 list works as a sort of daily "best of the blogs" for me, and as the list is politically neutral I get to see what both sides are saying.
I wouldn't worry, unless the plants start turning gray and dying.
we a) make our own playlists and our own decisions
I was a DJ at my college's radio station (WUTS) and they had a policy that anyone without a specialty show (e.g. Reggae Hour, Classical) was required to play at least a certain number of songs an hour (I think it was 2 or 3) off of a specific list. I don't know where the list came from, since I was not part of the group that ran the station. I guessed at the time that it had something to do with the arrangement of how the radio station got its free promotional CDs, i.e. "We'll keep sending you music as long as you play these songs every so often." I can't really comment on the details of the list, though, because I had a specialty show so I never had to play anything on it.
Thinking back on my experience as a DJ, I remember that we had to write down the name and artist of every song played and the time it was played. It didn't occur to me then, but now I wonder if that was so the radio station could pay royalties. If that was the case, it makes me happy to think that the artists I played on my show got some small amount of remuneration, since I made a point of playing songs that, at that time, were not being played on the radio anywhere else.
Hollywood et all would be forced to allow people to age more naturally on screen
Maybe I'm a pessimist, but I think it's more likely that actors, particularly women, would have shorter careers as they get replaced by fresh-faced teens the moment they get their first wrinkle. All the "aging" actors would then have to move into the parent/judge/old codger roles much sooner than they do now.
The Torgo virus is more annoying than dangerous - it just causes your computer to sprout gigantic knees.
...unless you're Strom Thurmond.
Will people forget their childhood after a couple hundred years?
Or will we just continue to extend our childhoods? A long time ago, 16 was a common age at which to start a family and a lifelong career. Nowadays we think of 16-year-olds as "kids". Heck, I've heard people refer to 21-year-olds as kids recently. If 100 becomes the average lifespan and fertility, youthfulness and quality of life continue to be enhanced later in life, will 30- or 40-year-olds be considered kids in the future?
There's a login for this site available on bugmenot. However, I can't guarantee that it works because clicking on the login button does nothing so I couldn't even get to the login page to try it myself.
Maybe the broken login button is all part of a diabolical plan to make people subscribe to the magazine every time they want to read an article online, even if they're already subscribers.
I was thinking that this didn't adequately answer the question of how a company would deal with manufacturing and distribution of free hardware. Software, having fewer raw materials and a simpler distribution model, makes more sense.
But then I thought about how phone companies have come up with a model where the hardware is "free" and you pay for the service. A lot of people just get whatever phone comes with their mobile plan. So why hasn't this worked for computers? PeoplePC tried it and gave up. Is it that ISPs/ASPs don't want to deal with being hardware retailers, or do consumers just want the added choice and customization that they get from selecting their own computers?
I'd suggest visiting forums where you find people with shared interests. The key is to find someplace big enough that it won't die out, but not so huge that you can't get to know people.
The Geek Culture forums are pretty good, if skewed toward Mac and Linux fans, and there's a Slashbox option. CNet's Builder Buzz community was great back in the day and is still pretty good in its user-created reincarnation, Hiveminds. If you've got a favorite TV show (or one you love to hate), check out the smaller show forums on Television Without Pity.
You're right! We do that and it hadn't even occurred to me! We've got a CD recorder rigged up to the microphone in the pulpit. The organist presses a button before the sermon and the whole thing is recorded. We don't have a CD duplicator, though. Too expensive. Instead, I rip the sermons to MP3 and put them up on our web site. (This week's should be up this evening - I'm a little behind right now.)
with current support you can hack up a page that look basically the same in both browsers
;)
Opera and Safari?
I remember the bad old days when everyone had either Netscape or IE and all the monitors were 800x600. Nowadays, there's such a wide variety of clients for end-users. Fortunately, like you said, current standards give us the flexibility to create sites that work almost anywhere, for anyone.
Most web developers don't make any money, the good ones get rich!
Yeah, I'm still working on trying to get good.
Yes, and I guess that's all I'm going to get. Since this is a subject I'm really interested in, I'm always looking for good new web standards resources. I guess I was hoping to find more information so I'd know whether to bookmark his page as a resource or look for his name in articles or forums elsewhere. I did find StyleMaster on VersionTracker.
I'd like to know a little bit about the guy who wrote this article. He links to some of the usual standards gurus in his sidebar (Eric Meyer, Jeffrey Zeldman, CSS Zen Garden) but I can't find any background information on him.
I'm not saying that his musings aren't valid, but I'd like to know where he's coming from and what sort of relevant work he does that involves web standards. This would give the article more context and help me to understand better why he says what he does.
The lagoons didn't break, but they did flood and overflow in the wake of Hurricane Floyd in '99. This article has an aerial view of a farm covered with liquid hog waste. Nass-tee.
I read an article a while back comparing the safety of different cars. Statistics showed the percentage of SUVs involved in accidents was higher than for smaller cars. They compared an SUV (an Explorer, I think) and a Jaguar in a driving test. The Jag was actually shown to be safer because it was more maneuverable and could avoid accidents. The SUV was designed to simply survive accidents rather than avoid them.
The main point of the article was the false sense of security people feel in big cars like SUVs. They're high off the ground and surrounded by lots of steel, so they feel safe when really they're less safe.
I wish I could find the article, it was on daypop a few months ago.
IIRC the saga of Webb Hubbell goes back to 1994 or thereabouts.
(Hey, what good is karma if I can't burn it with wildly offtopic lame jokes?)
Good point. Here's something to think about: the copyright extensions created in the Sony Bono Copyright Extension Act expire in 2019. That means, if this is important to you, you have several election cycles to vote the people who supported it out of office and vote in legislators with a more consumer-friendly viewpont.