If I were you I'd skip the shows from the 80s and earlier (I can't imagine acquiring that taste today) and just rent a DVD of any of the recent episodes. Seasons have overall plot arcs that build up to a climax in the season closer, but it's not the kind of show that you have to watch from the beginning. Most episodes are essentially self-contained stories.
It doesn't matter which way you enter the address into your browser, it still resolves to the same IP. If that IP is blocked, you won't get through even if you use this method.
Unless, I guess, your filter allows you to specify IP addresses to be filtered as strings and then compares them to the addresses of requests as strings. It would be lazy, sloppy, bad programming -- but that's never stopped anyone.
Still, that behavior would be trivial enough to fix.
Please watch this video for a demonstration of the *40 times more performance* available with SSD:
First, your link doesn't work. Second, I've recently replaced my boot drive with an Intel X25-M SSD. It's peppy enough, but in no way does it approach anything close to a 40x speed increase versus my old drive. That's pure hype. It boots pretty fast, which is useful when you have to reboot after Windows updates. But for day-to-day operations, your average computer user is barely going to notice the difference between an SSD and a traditional drive. Seriously. The speed increase feels about as dramatic as when you first ditched your old computer with IDE drives for a SATA-2 system. It's nice, but that's all.
Why do you need two inputs? I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack. If you were hoping a line-in jack would somehow give you better audio quality, I think you'll have to look to more professional gear for that. Try Guitar Center.
I read a story about this in a recent issue of The Economist. The article focuses more on the other direction -- how quantum dots can be used to enhance LEDs to create more pleasing/efficient/versatile lighting. But it also mentions how they can be used to read light, too; for example, to make better solar panels.
BIND is thirty years old and a core piece of Internet infrastructure.
Actually, BIND 9 -- "the most popular DNS implementation on the Internet," according to the submitter -- is merely 10 years old, and was itself a major rewrite of BIND 8. BIND 8 was only declared "end of life" in 2007.
That a completely new design and re-write of such a fundamentally important piece of software is "inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs" highlights the continuing immaturity of the computer software industry.
Really. So the fact that a software developer plans to take "the next couple of years" (again, re: the submitter) to complete a software project is symptomatic of the total failure of an entire industry. Interesting perspective. Thanks for that.
It is about a news aggregator publicly disseminating PRIVATE information - buy/sell is professional advice and not news.
Errrm... but...
If I'm a CEO and my lawyer tells me to put the money I've embezzled in the Cayman Islands and the Wall Street Journal finds out about it, that's professional advice and not news.
If I'm the mayor of my town and my wife is leaving me because I've been philandering with prostitutes, that's private information (to the family, and pertinent to the divorce proceedings) and not news.
If I'm a private contractor and I'm hired by a government to write a report detailing radiation leaks in nuclear power plants around the country and some reporter gets a copy of that report, that's private information and not news.
Today social networks, tomorrow the world! No, I'm serious... wouldn't it be great if you had something like that and could apply it not just to Facebook and MySpace but to things like, ohhh... your medical records? Credit history? Credit card purchase history? What magazines you subscribe to? Whether you checked in to that hotel as one or two occupants?
So what is this "your data" that he wants to fetch? I don't think most people are aware of having any "data" on social networks. Their favorite bands, their favorite movies... that's not "data," it's information about themselves that they post to social networks because they want other people to know it.
The problem with commercial social networks is their interpretation of what "your data" is. The stuff they're interested in has less to do with whether you say you like Blink 182 and more to do with who all your friends are, how often you communicate with them, what keywords show up most often in your posts, what groups you join and who else is in them, and all that other stuff that can be data-mined. In other words, it's the record of your social interactions that's the "data" -- so why would you want to preserve that in a brand-new network?
I thought it was about cervical cancer. And the complaint is that it will encourage girls to be whores. At least, that's what the Religious Right says when they stand up at school board meetings and argue for preventing a cancer vaccine from being given.
Uh huh. And that bit about the "pharmacorp sponsored studies" implies you are absolutely sure that the vaccines didn't cause autism, right? And you find yourself having to explain yourself over and over because your position is so convincingly crystal clear... right?
Did you follow all that or should I start drawing pictures?
Well I don't know. Can you draw? 'Cause you sure can't argue a point.
"Assault"? Now who's begging not to be taken seriously? If you're still quaking in your boots over a needle-stick they gave you when you were 18 months old, I say you've got some baggage.
3. Humans survived for a long time before the invention of vaccination and whole countries manage to survive without it still.
1. There is no country in the world that "manages to survive" without smallpox vaccination. Previously, there was no country in the world without smallpox.
2. The fact that a population "manages to survive" while still being decimated by disease does not somehow make that population healthier than another population that does not need to "manage" because it has access to vaccination.
3. Among other means, humans survived before vaccination by having lots more kids at a younger age (because they also expected to die at a much younger age). To this day, it's common for families to have lots of kids in places like sub-Saharan Africa because the threat of malaria means as much as 50 percent of the workforce might be incapacitated at any given time. The economics of this situation all but doom a large portion of humanity to poverty and malnutrition. Unfortunately there is no vaccine against malaria, but no one argues against taking measures to fight the disease.
4. You seem to be arguing that the presence of anomalous populations that thrive without access to modern medicine counts as experimental evidence in favor of abandoning modern medicine. That ignores the many thousands of years of data that predate your hypothesis. Consider, for example, all those Biblical plagues they talk about. You know what a plague is, right?
Your point about herd immunity is valid, but herd immunity isn't the only reason people get vaccinated, and your very next point proves it. The people in Indiana who didn't get measles didn't resist the disease because other people had been vaccinated. They didn't come down with measles because they themselves had been vaccinated. Herd immunity had nothing to do with it.
Not getting vaccinated against measles is pretty stupid. My emerging infectious diseases teacher explained it this way: If I, a man, were to have unprotected vaginal sex with a woman who had AIDS, the chance of me becoming infected with HIV might be 1 or 2 percent. If, on the other hand, we were all sitting in a classroom and the professor came to class with measles, stood at the podium, and coughed a few times, by the end of the hour everyone in the room would have been exposed to measles, and most of those who had not been vaccinated would likely come down with the disease. Measles is just that infectious.
No matter what the court or the pharmacorp sponsored studies may say autism went from 1:10,000 to 1:120 in the span of a decade at the same time that new vaccination protocols where implemented.
Riiight. And absolutely nothing else in society has changed in the same period of time. Says the Slashdot reader.
Now that thimerosal is being replaced it will be interesting to see if the autism rate changes.
Currently, the United States has a big enough stockpile of smallpox vaccine to vaccinate everyone in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency.
The smallpox vaccine is an effective treatment post-infection if administered before symptoms appear.
Of course there's a question. It pops up semiregularly. Here in the United States, the most recent debate arose because some schools began to require vaccination for HPV (human papilloma virus). This was controversial because:
Only girls can be vaccinated; there is not yet any vaccine for boys.
HPV is vilified in our culture as the virus that causes genital warts. It's believed to cause a lot of other things besides, but this is the most widely known effect.
Antivax people think vaccinations are dangerous.
The fact that only girls can be vaccinated was an issue for some, but a very minor one. (If a medicine exists that can lower blood pressure but which only really works on people of African descent, that's not racism, no matter what anyone says.)
Most of the vocal complaints tended to focus on the third point: that parents were afraid that more vaccines exposed their children to greater risks. While some dissenters actually believed this, however, this argument also tended to conceal the debate over the second point.
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease is tantamount to implying they will be having sex. Vaccinating very young girls, therefore, is absolutely abhorrent and -- to conservative Christians, in particular -- only underscores the moral depravity of modern society.
Now, just to be clear, the reason you want to vaccinate girls against HPV is not to keep them from getting unsightly genital warts when they go out having sex with strange men while they're in primary school. The reason you vaccinate them at a young age is because they're not having sex then, and a vaccine only works before you catch the disease. (Some studies suggest that up to 90 percent of the adult population carries some form of HPV.) And the reason you vaccinate them at all is not to enhance their sex lives, but because if they do catch a certain form of HPV it can lead to papillomas that can be very hard to detect until they turn into cervical cancer, which, if not detected, can kill them stone dead. In other words, this is a vaccine you give someone as a girl to aid her chances of living to become an old woman.
The problem for some, though, is that removing the threat of sexually transmitted disease tends to undermine abstinence-only sexual education programs in the United States, which are a key component of the platforms of the Christian Right and anti-abortion activists. That's right; for some people, the real problem is not that vaccination gets you autism. The problem is that vaccination gets you abortions. They don't like to talk about that, though, because abortion is such a hot-button issue and many on the Left immediately tune out at any whiff of a religious undercurrent in politics. So instead they jump on the bandwagon claiming all vaccinations are "untested," "experimental," "have unknown side effects," etc. Even people who don't believe in religion can fall for junk science.
This is just one example of how these issues can quickly become clouded by politics, but it also demonstrates why we must continue to emphasize the science and the science alone. Vaccines save lives. If you get vaccinated and it doesn't directly save your life, it still might have saved mine (through effects such as herd immunity). People shouldn't die young of any disease, be it mumps, measles, polio, of cervical cancer caused by HPV.
Smallpox is wiped out, should we still immunize for it?
Interestingly enough, in the United States we don't. So I guess the "pro-vax" folks aren't as crazy as the antivax folks want to believe.
It has been wiped out as a threat to public health. If you're in the United States, you're not likely to have been vaccinated if you're under 40. You don't need to be vaccinated, because there's no disease.
but it's still a disservice to their fans to not give them a legitimate avenue other than "buy a CD" (which for me personally would amount to maybe 20% to 30% of a Pink Floyd album that I actually like.
Sure, but as a practical matter, until that $7/month hosting provider offers PostgreSQL as an option instead of MySQL, and then Wordpress will install with a couple clicks and set up its own tables on PostgreSQL... until that happens, Joe Sixpack who just wants to host his own blog isn't going to be interested in PostgreSQL. And if Joe Sixpack isn't interested, and he's the customer, why should a hosting provider push him toward PostgreSQL?
Furthermore, is Wordpress so terrible, running as it does on countless sites, that we must save it from MySQL? As another AC poster said, "Blogs with cached content that make a DB query every 10 minutes aren't a real test of quality." OK fine, but that argument sounds pretty much like saying, "MySQL does absolutely everything a trivial Wordpress site needs to do, and flawlessly, and MySQL is available for free everywhere, therefore we must pull out all the MySQL code from Wordpress and replace it with PostgreSQL." It doesn't hold water.
A programmer who tries to use MySQL for things it isn't suited for is going to end up feeling dumb. A non-techy customer who tries to use MySQL for things it's very well-suited for will end up feeling like he's master of his own destiny. Let's not confuse the two.
It's not just "instant gratification." CFOs like expenses they can get their heads around. They pay a monthly bill for the lights, for the phones, for their lease. Traditional software, on the other hand, can be pretty hard to budget effectively. How many heads do you need to count for licenses? When will the new version be released, and how long should you wait to upgrade? Sun Microsystems switched to a per-employee, per-month licensing scheme for its software (based on the total size of your organization, not the number of machines that would have the software installed) and it claimed its customers were much happier with the new way of reckoning cost.
The other part of it, of course, is what you allude to. The sticker price of any on-premise software is just a small fraction of its total cost of ownership. You need the hardware to deploy it on, plus hardware to QA patches. But the real cost is in the ongoing maintenance required to keep it running, secure and up to date. With cloud services you roll those costs into the monthly fee. No more haggling the price of health insurance, vacation time, redundant employees for maintenance roles and the managers to supervise them. The quoted price is what you pay. That's appealing to a lot of business managers.
Slashdot Mirror
If I were you I'd skip the shows from the 80s and earlier (I can't imagine acquiring that taste today) and just rent a DVD of any of the recent episodes. Seasons have overall plot arcs that build up to a climax in the season closer, but it's not the kind of show that you have to watch from the beginning. Most episodes are essentially self-contained stories.
This claim may be new to the submitter, and to Soulskill, but not to Slashdot.
It doesn't matter which way you enter the address into your browser, it still resolves to the same IP. If that IP is blocked, you won't get through even if you use this method.
Unless, I guess, your filter allows you to specify IP addresses to be filtered as strings and then compares them to the addresses of requests as strings. It would be lazy, sloppy, bad programming -- but that's never stopped anyone.
Still, that behavior would be trivial enough to fix.
Please watch this video for a demonstration of the *40 times more performance* available with SSD:
First, your link doesn't work. Second, I've recently replaced my boot drive with an Intel X25-M SSD. It's peppy enough, but in no way does it approach anything close to a 40x speed increase versus my old drive. That's pure hype. It boots pretty fast, which is useful when you have to reboot after Windows updates. But for day-to-day operations, your average computer user is barely going to notice the difference between an SSD and a traditional drive. Seriously. The speed increase feels about as dramatic as when you first ditched your old computer with IDE drives for a SATA-2 system. It's nice, but that's all.
Pfff. HP 50g. Just sayin'.
Why do you need two inputs? I highly doubt there's much difference between the line-in jack on your sound card and the stereo microphone jack. If you were hoping a line-in jack would somehow give you better audio quality, I think you'll have to look to more professional gear for that. Try Guitar Center.
I read a story about this in a recent issue of The Economist. The article focuses more on the other direction -- how quantum dots can be used to enhance LEDs to create more pleasing/efficient/versatile lighting. But it also mentions how they can be used to read light, too; for example, to make better solar panels.
BIND is thirty years old and a core piece of Internet infrastructure.
Actually, BIND 9 -- "the most popular DNS implementation on the Internet," according to the submitter -- is merely 10 years old, and was itself a major rewrite of BIND 8. BIND 8 was only declared "end of life" in 2007.
That a completely new design and re-write of such a fundamentally important piece of software is "inefficient, difficult to work with, and riddled with bugs" highlights the continuing immaturity of the computer software industry.
Really. So the fact that a software developer plans to take "the next couple of years" (again, re: the submitter) to complete a software project is symptomatic of the total failure of an entire industry. Interesting perspective. Thanks for that.
It is about a news aggregator publicly disseminating PRIVATE information - buy/sell is professional advice and not news.
Errrm... but...
You get my drift. Where does it end?
Today social networks, tomorrow the world! No, I'm serious... wouldn't it be great if you had something like that and could apply it not just to Facebook and MySpace but to things like, ohhh... your medical records? Credit history? Credit card purchase history? What magazines you subscribe to? Whether you checked in to that hotel as one or two occupants?
Yeah, but it's a total pipe dream.
Perhaps Slashdot should implement some kind of safety measure that could have saved him when he saw it.
So what is this "your data" that he wants to fetch? I don't think most people are aware of having any "data" on social networks. Their favorite bands, their favorite movies... that's not "data," it's information about themselves that they post to social networks because they want other people to know it.
The problem with commercial social networks is their interpretation of what "your data" is. The stuff they're interested in has less to do with whether you say you like Blink 182 and more to do with who all your friends are, how often you communicate with them, what keywords show up most often in your posts, what groups you join and who else is in them, and all that other stuff that can be data-mined. In other words, it's the record of your social interactions that's the "data" -- so why would you want to preserve that in a brand-new network?
Virii is the Latin plural
No it isn't. Virii would be the plural for the Latin word virius (two i's), which doesn't exist. Viri is the plural of vir, meaning "man."
which has established itself as the plural for computer virii (at least it has in the scene)
Yeah, well "the scene" being as full of intelligent, literate individuals as it is, I guess we should go with that, then.
I thought it was about cervical cancer. And the complaint is that it will encourage girls to be whores. At least, that's what the Religious Right says when they stand up at school board meetings and argue for preventing a cancer vaccine from being given.
So... you read my post, right?
Uh huh. And that bit about the "pharmacorp sponsored studies" implies you are absolutely sure that the vaccines didn't cause autism, right? And you find yourself having to explain yourself over and over because your position is so convincingly crystal clear... right?
Did you follow all that or should I start drawing pictures?
Well I don't know. Can you draw? 'Cause you sure can't argue a point.
"Assault"? Now who's begging not to be taken seriously? If you're still quaking in your boots over a needle-stick they gave you when you were 18 months old, I say you've got some baggage.
3. Humans survived for a long time before the invention of vaccination and whole countries manage to survive without it still.
1. There is no country in the world that "manages to survive" without smallpox vaccination. Previously, there was no country in the world without smallpox.
2. The fact that a population "manages to survive" while still being decimated by disease does not somehow make that population healthier than another population that does not need to "manage" because it has access to vaccination.
3. Among other means, humans survived before vaccination by having lots more kids at a younger age (because they also expected to die at a much younger age). To this day, it's common for families to have lots of kids in places like sub-Saharan Africa because the threat of malaria means as much as 50 percent of the workforce might be incapacitated at any given time. The economics of this situation all but doom a large portion of humanity to poverty and malnutrition. Unfortunately there is no vaccine against malaria, but no one argues against taking measures to fight the disease.
4. You seem to be arguing that the presence of anomalous populations that thrive without access to modern medicine counts as experimental evidence in favor of abandoning modern medicine. That ignores the many thousands of years of data that predate your hypothesis. Consider, for example, all those Biblical plagues they talk about. You know what a plague is, right?
Your point about herd immunity is valid, but herd immunity isn't the only reason people get vaccinated, and your very next point proves it. The people in Indiana who didn't get measles didn't resist the disease because other people had been vaccinated. They didn't come down with measles because they themselves had been vaccinated. Herd immunity had nothing to do with it.
Not getting vaccinated against measles is pretty stupid. My emerging infectious diseases teacher explained it this way: If I, a man, were to have unprotected vaginal sex with a woman who had AIDS, the chance of me becoming infected with HIV might be 1 or 2 percent. If, on the other hand, we were all sitting in a classroom and the professor came to class with measles, stood at the podium, and coughed a few times, by the end of the hour everyone in the room would have been exposed to measles, and most of those who had not been vaccinated would likely come down with the disease. Measles is just that infectious.
No matter what the court or the pharmacorp sponsored studies may say autism went from 1:10,000 to 1:120 in the span of a decade at the same time that new vaccination protocols where implemented.
Riiight. And absolutely nothing else in society has changed in the same period of time. Says the Slashdot reader.
Now that thimerosal is being replaced it will be interesting to see if the autism rate changes.
Scientific evidence says it won't.
smallpox vaccines no longer exist.
Also untrue. According to the Centers for Disease Control:
Currently, the United States has a big enough stockpile of smallpox vaccine to vaccinate everyone in the United States in the event of a smallpox emergency.
The smallpox vaccine is an effective treatment post-infection if administered before symptoms appear.
Of course there's a question. It pops up semiregularly. Here in the United States, the most recent debate arose because some schools began to require vaccination for HPV (human papilloma virus). This was controversial because:
The fact that only girls can be vaccinated was an issue for some, but a very minor one. (If a medicine exists that can lower blood pressure but which only really works on people of African descent, that's not racism, no matter what anyone says.)
Most of the vocal complaints tended to focus on the third point: that parents were afraid that more vaccines exposed their children to greater risks. While some dissenters actually believed this, however, this argument also tended to conceal the debate over the second point.
HPV is a sexually transmitted disease. Vaccinating girls against a sexually transmitted disease is tantamount to implying they will be having sex. Vaccinating very young girls, therefore, is absolutely abhorrent and -- to conservative Christians, in particular -- only underscores the moral depravity of modern society.
Now, just to be clear, the reason you want to vaccinate girls against HPV is not to keep them from getting unsightly genital warts when they go out having sex with strange men while they're in primary school. The reason you vaccinate them at a young age is because they're not having sex then, and a vaccine only works before you catch the disease. (Some studies suggest that up to 90 percent of the adult population carries some form of HPV.) And the reason you vaccinate them at all is not to enhance their sex lives, but because if they do catch a certain form of HPV it can lead to papillomas that can be very hard to detect until they turn into cervical cancer, which, if not detected, can kill them stone dead. In other words, this is a vaccine you give someone as a girl to aid her chances of living to become an old woman.
The problem for some, though, is that removing the threat of sexually transmitted disease tends to undermine abstinence-only sexual education programs in the United States, which are a key component of the platforms of the Christian Right and anti-abortion activists. That's right; for some people, the real problem is not that vaccination gets you autism. The problem is that vaccination gets you abortions. They don't like to talk about that, though, because abortion is such a hot-button issue and many on the Left immediately tune out at any whiff of a religious undercurrent in politics. So instead they jump on the bandwagon claiming all vaccinations are "untested," "experimental," "have unknown side effects," etc. Even people who don't believe in religion can fall for junk science.
This is just one example of how these issues can quickly become clouded by politics, but it also demonstrates why we must continue to emphasize the science and the science alone. Vaccines save lives. If you get vaccinated and it doesn't directly save your life, it still might have saved mine (through effects such as herd immunity). People shouldn't die young of any disease, be it mumps, measles, polio, of cervical cancer caused by HPV.
Smallpox is wiped out, should we still immunize for it?
Interestingly enough, in the United States we don't. So I guess the "pro-vax" folks aren't as crazy as the antivax folks want to believe.
It has been wiped out as a threat to public health. If you're in the United States, you're not likely to have been vaccinated if you're under 40. You don't need to be vaccinated, because there's no disease.
but it's still a disservice to their fans to not give them a legitimate avenue other than "buy a CD" (which for me personally would amount to maybe 20% to 30% of a Pink Floyd album that I actually like.
Doesn't sound like you're much of a "fan" to me.
Sure, but as a practical matter, until that $7/month hosting provider offers PostgreSQL as an option instead of MySQL, and then Wordpress will install with a couple clicks and set up its own tables on PostgreSQL... until that happens, Joe Sixpack who just wants to host his own blog isn't going to be interested in PostgreSQL. And if Joe Sixpack isn't interested, and he's the customer, why should a hosting provider push him toward PostgreSQL?
Furthermore, is Wordpress so terrible, running as it does on countless sites, that we must save it from MySQL? As another AC poster said, "Blogs with cached content that make a DB query every 10 minutes aren't a real test of quality." OK fine, but that argument sounds pretty much like saying, "MySQL does absolutely everything a trivial Wordpress site needs to do, and flawlessly, and MySQL is available for free everywhere, therefore we must pull out all the MySQL code from Wordpress and replace it with PostgreSQL." It doesn't hold water.
A programmer who tries to use MySQL for things it isn't suited for is going to end up feeling dumb. A non-techy customer who tries to use MySQL for things it's very well-suited for will end up feeling like he's master of his own destiny. Let's not confuse the two.
It's not just "instant gratification." CFOs like expenses they can get their heads around. They pay a monthly bill for the lights, for the phones, for their lease. Traditional software, on the other hand, can be pretty hard to budget effectively. How many heads do you need to count for licenses? When will the new version be released, and how long should you wait to upgrade? Sun Microsystems switched to a per-employee, per-month licensing scheme for its software (based on the total size of your organization, not the number of machines that would have the software installed) and it claimed its customers were much happier with the new way of reckoning cost.
The other part of it, of course, is what you allude to. The sticker price of any on-premise software is just a small fraction of its total cost of ownership. You need the hardware to deploy it on, plus hardware to QA patches. But the real cost is in the ongoing maintenance required to keep it running, secure and up to date. With cloud services you roll those costs into the monthly fee. No more haggling the price of health insurance, vacation time, redundant employees for maintenance roles and the managers to supervise them. The quoted price is what you pay. That's appealing to a lot of business managers.