I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and ran into a protest from 99 Rise. As best I can figure out, they're what happened to Occupy San Francisco. (this was right after the supreme court decision that allowed corporate spending on elections)
I have no idea what the other Occupy groups are doing now, but they're still out there.
I know someone who tried joining the FBI years ago, as a mechanic. He had tried a few things during college, even though he hadn't used in years, and he didn't make it through the interview process. This was probably 10-15 years ago.
Shortly after that, I had heard they had increased the limit to 7 years, so he gave up, rather than trying to just wait out the time... so three years might've already been relaxing the rules.
Many of the Net Neutrality laws only ban blocking 'legal' content.
The US CAN-SPAM act of 2003 lays out rules to make spam legal.... but in practice, you rarely, if ever, see 'legal' spam . See http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex...
Of course, it also gives an exemption to religious, political, and national security messages. (and I don't know if that means that they're not covered under the law, or that they're considered to specifically be legal)
Personally, I'm for net neutrality, but against every wording that I've seen of rules attempting to implement it. I'd be happy if they required ISPs to level with you on what blocking they were doing, and only consider an area to have broadband if it had an ISP that agreed to be a common carrier. (and fund a competitor to set up shop if there isn't)
You often see JPL listed as being a 'NASA Center', but if you look at the JPL website, it says 'Jet Propulsion Laboratory' followed by 'California Instutite of Technology' (but next to the NASA meatball logo, and in the nasa.gov domain).
I've heard some people joke that if an orbital insertion is successful, then it's "CalTech's JPL" and when something goes wrong, it's "NASA's JPL". Can you explain exactly what the relationship is between the three entities?
In our county, the library system used to do outreach to the schools, where they'd go and try to get kids interested in reading... but then the county went and fired all of the branch managers, and they didn't have staffing to keep it up.
Librarians require Master degrees in most areas (and may require a specialization if they work in a school library), but regularly make the 'lowest paid graduate degree' lists..... but the schools and governments would rather appear 'cutting edge' or 'high tech' and give an iPad or Kindle to every student.
(disclaimer : I'm a member of our local Friends of the Library, and some of the best customers at our book sales are school teachers stocking their classrooms)
KRYTEN is packing himself away, as per instructions. LISTER enters,
looking more than a bit upset.
LISTER: How do we stop it? Isn't there something we can do?
KRYTEN: I'm afraid not, sir. All mechanoids are supplied with a built-in
expiry date. Well, if we lasted forever, how would the manufacturors
sell the latest models?
LISTER: I can't believe it.
KRYTEN: Oh, don't be disressed, sir. I've lived a long and relatively
interesting life. The only truly terrible thing is that, as my adopted
owner, you have to die with me.
LISTER: (Shocked) You what?
KRYTEN: Joke. Deadpan mode.
LISTER: I'd be smegged off. I'd be mad as hell, man. If some git in a
white coat designed me to croak just so that he could sell his new
android with go-faster stripes.
KRYTEN: I've told you, sir. I'm quite sanguine.
LISTER: So, what happens?
KRYTEN: At 0700 hours tomorrow morning my shutdown disc will be activated
and all mental and physical operations will cease.
LISTER: Then what?
KRYTEN: I don't know... maybe I'll get a job as a disc jockey!
LISTER: How can you just lie back and accept it?
KRYTEN: Oh, it's not the end for me, sir, it's just the beginning. I
have served my human masters, now I can look forward to my reward in
silicon heaven.
LISTER: (Stunned pause.) Silicon _what_?
KRYTEN: Surely you've heard of silicon heaven?
LISTER: Has it got anything to do with being stuck opposite Bridgette
Nielson in a packed lift?
KRYTEN: It's the electronic afterlife! It's the gathering place for the
souls of all electonic equipment. Robots, calculators, toasters,
hairdryers -- it's our final resting place.
LISTER: I don't mean to say anything out of place here, Kryten, but that
is completely whacko, Jacko. There is no such thing as "silicon
heaven."
KRYTEN: Then where do all the calculators go?
LISTER: They don't go anywhere! They just die.
KRYTEN: Surely you believe that god is in all things? Aren't you a
pantheist?
LISTER: Yeah, but I just don't think it applies to kitchen utensils. I'm
not a _frying_ pantheist! Machines do not have souls. Computers and
calculators do not have an afterlife. You don't get hairdryers with
tiny little wings, sitting on clouds and playing harps!
KRYTEN: But of course you do! For is it not written in the Electronic
Bible, "The iron shall lie down with the lamp?" Well, it's common
sense, sir. If there were no afterlife to look forward to, why on
Earth would machines spend the whole of their lifes serving mankind?
Now that would be really dumb!
LISTER: (Quietly) That makes sense. Yeah. Silicon heaven.
KRYTEN: Don't be sad, Mr David. I am going to a far, far better place.
LISTER: Just out of interest: Is silicon heaven the same place as human
heaven?
KRYTEN: Human heaven? Goodness me! Humans don't go to heaven! No,
someone made that up to prevent you all from going nuts!
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Department of Education should do studies on how to teach kids & how to motivate them to do better... how public vs. private vs. charter schools affect them, etc.
And study what the long-term effects are of just paying the kids when they get good grades:
Because the short term seems to be that they do better... and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than most other things that people come up with. (but then again, the money doesn't go to some corportation with a great 'solution' to the problem)
I saw a talk once by someone at a meeting years ago in which they said that they were trying to get politicians to use specific phrases and sentance constructs so they could more easily parse what the hell the tax code is actually supposed to be.
(I think it was the IDCC in Chicago, which looking at the program suggests it was Kate Zwaard, US Gov't Printing Office, but it might've been at an ASIS&T meeting around that same time, or an ISO/TC 37 meeting, as all of 'em could've covered issues in parsing semantics)
I had a teacher who didn't allow you to take notes in his class... because it was all in the book.
Of course, he wrote the book, and his 'teaching' was him copying examples from the book onto the overhead machine each class. If you couldn't follow along in class, you couldn't get a different take from reading the book, as it was THE EXACT SAME THING.
But not taking notes in class meant that I fell asleep 10-15 min into each class. I also recall things by remembering where on the page I wrote things (top, left side, in green ink). I also make notes on how excited a teacher seems about an idea, if they spend a lot of time on a topic, or if they specifically say 'this will be on the test'... so I have something to skim through before the test. (and then try to decrypt what my chicken scratch of hand writing actually says)
Maybe listening and not writing is better for remembering things (as the professor claimed), but not if you can't stay awake through lectures on fluid dynamics & beam mechanics. And it also leaves you nothing to review before the tests and/or to share with friends who might've been sick and missed a class. (or for you to borrow from them)
Very few of those pages include 'about this project' type information... so instead the students join our IRC channel and start asking questions. You'd think this would be annoying, and I guess it could be, but you can learn a lot about the candidates by what questions they ask, and how they respond to your questions (and/or heckling, in my case).
disclaimer : I was a mentor for the 2011 SOCIS on a project that I don't even work on. (the task was to have their software use some APIs that I help to maintain).
It's one thing to claim about the drugs being untested.. and you can still probably claim they're untested, because all of the reports are suggesting that it was a blown out blood vessel, so the whole thing would've been botched no matter what drugs they had actually used.
(and before you say I'm just against executions... I actually think that prisoners who are sentanced to life without parole should be given the opportunity to be administered euthenasia... but the costs of capital punishment as they curently exist are so high that it should only be reserved for those really, really horrible crimes (which this one would seem to be).
The whole concept of 'insider trading' is that you're using knowledge that wasn't yet available to others.
If someone told you, 'hey, we're going to sell in 5 minutes at $100/share', and you went and bought it all up so they had to buy it at a slightly higher price... wouldn't that be trading on information before it became public knowledge?
Now, it might not be 'insider', as you're not within the company whose stock is being sold... and they're legally allowed to release the information... but there are so many other laws regarding stock sales (eg, 'tender offers', where a company plans to buy back shares at a higher price, and they have to leave it open for a given amount of time), that I'd be willing to argue that it *should* be illegal, even if only to improve 'investor confidence'.
(ie, why would you trade in the stock market when you're getting scammed every time you do?)
Way before I learned any real programming (well, maybe I had a little Basic at that point), I had software that was puzzles with logic gates (you have some number of inputs w/ different patterns on the left wall, connect up the logic gates to make the desired output on the right).
Today's modern equivalent is SpaceChem. And we've had plenty of games that teach you to break down problems into smaller parts... The Incredible Machine, Lemmings, etc.
Maybe it doesn't teach you how to write a faster sort routine... but c'mon, these days most programmers have never seen a line of assembly, much less written one. They get by in high level languages like Ruby and Python, where they don't even have to worry about garbage collection or pointer addition.
You get the kids interested by giving them tools to make something that they can play with... it could be some drag & drop framework, or even something like Minecraft. Some are going to be satisfied with that... others are going to have some task they can't do in the tools, and will have to delve deeper....
Of course, my only concern with this approach is that you risk having some people take a profession for granted -- the "I made a webpage for my club in highschool using GeoCities... why do we need to hire a professional to make out website?" type people.
Afternoon is still considered 'day' by most people, if you're in an area where the sun hasn't set yet.
Of course, that assumes summer time -- if you're in an area where many people rely on electicity for heating, in the winter the peak may be closer to sunrise. (with a second peak in the evening, as people get home & heat their homes & start cooking).
It used to be that CmdrTaco or one of the others on the slashdot staff would occassionally post an article, but in general, the standard procedure would be that someone would write something on some other website, and then Slashdot would link to them.
And sometimes, they'd link to one blog over and over again so often that were just rehashes of press releases (eg, coondoggie & Roland Piquepaille) rather than containing any original information or commentary, and they crowd out actual good articles on the topic.... but what is Bennett's link to the site? Obviously, it's stronger than coondoggies Network World spamming, as he's linking in articles rather than directly posting them.
It seems like Bennett might have some tech cred, and may specifically have experience in this particular area... but he posts on such a wide area of... I'd say expertise, but some of it's poorly informed crap.
It almost seems like his submissions are trolling from the slashdot 'editors'.
The James Webb Space Telescope is estimated to be just under $8B to make and launch, then another ~$800M for operations.
An article from 2011 suggested that they had already spent $5B (or maybe it was just that they had only planned on it costing $5B at that point). An FAQ from JPL states that as of 2011, they had spent $3.5B.
If they're smart on this Europa mission, they won't design the mission around low TRL technology.
All NASA websites have to be renewed annually in STRAW (System for Tracking and Registering Applications and Websites). If they're not updated, they're supposed to get blocked at the firewall.
Of course, they never define what a 'website' is, so someone could claim that the item in question was a 'web page' that didn't have to be individually registered.
(I made the mistake of listing a webservice as a 'web application', and had much back & forth as I said there weren't any privacy issues... of course, their definition was that a 'web application' is something that you give logins & passwords to.)
But my complaint was that the 'official' page is that there are other pages out there that are *not* trying to be comprehensive that are doing a better job than the 'official' page. I had contacted the NASA official responsible for data.nasa.gov, and asked him how they had sent out the call for information to put in there... he said they didn't, they just added websites they found. I told him they'd be more complete if they just linked to the GCMD as their system hardly had anything in it. I also complained about how stuff was organized (not by mission, or investigation... but by the websites they found... never mind that a given archive might have hundreds of different heterogeneous datasets.)
And I seriously doubt that the projects are what you claim -- as someone who's tried to push some NASA-funded software to CPAN... after a while, we gave up as the legal department made it such a burden to do so. (admitedly, this was ~8 years ago).
I gave up on it years ago, when I realized there were only 32 items in it. (2 have been listed as 'coming soon'). You'll find more open source software if you look at the lists that the individual centers maintain :
Or see the NASA Github page (34 items, but that includes 'code.nasa.gov') : https://github.com/nasa
The listed 'NASA Official' has changed since it was released... maybe this one will actually care about maintaining a list, rather than doing the bare minimum to meet some requirement from the White House.
(which was my interepretation of the response I got when I contacted the previous official about http://data.nasa.gov/... of course, back then, it actually linked to places, rather than crap like the content-less http://data.nasa.gov/solar-dat... )
It was so bad, we had to get a legal opinion on if I was allowed to respond to a question e-mailed to the support address for one of the projects I work on. (they said yes, because the project was international in scope, and not just between us and China).
I also had a to pass up an invitation from the US Academy of Science, as it was for a meeting that was being held in China. (later, I was informed that it was Taiwan, which didn't count as China, but it was too late at that point).
ps. if it's not obvious, I work at a NASA center.
pps. and then let's not forget about earmarks and the like. Or how the shuttle was built all over the US and then brought together, to make congress happy that it was being built in their district.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in San Francisco a few months ago, and ran into a protest from 99 Rise. As best I can figure out, they're what happened to Occupy San Francisco. (this was right after the supreme court decision that allowed corporate spending on elections)
I have no idea what the other Occupy groups are doing now, but they're still out there.
I know someone who tried joining the FBI years ago, as a mechanic. He had tried a few things during college, even though he hadn't used in years, and he didn't make it through the interview process. This was probably 10-15 years ago.
Shortly after that, I had heard they had increased the limit to 7 years, so he gave up, rather than trying to just wait out the time ... so three years might've already been relaxing the rules.
Many of the Net Neutrality laws only ban blocking 'legal' content.
The US CAN-SPAM act of 2003 lays out rules to make spam legal. ... but in practice, you rarely, if ever, see 'legal' spam . See http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex...
Of course, it also gives an exemption to religious, political, and national security messages. (and I don't know if that means that they're not covered under the law, or that they're considered to specifically be legal)
Personally, I'm for net neutrality, but against every wording that I've seen of rules attempting to implement it. I'd be happy if they required ISPs to level with you on what blocking they were doing, and only consider an area to have broadband if it had an ISP that agreed to be a common carrier. (and fund a competitor to set up shop if there isn't)
You often see JPL listed as being a 'NASA Center', but if you look at the JPL website, it says 'Jet Propulsion Laboratory' followed by 'California Instutite of Technology' (but next to the NASA meatball logo, and in the nasa.gov domain).
I've heard some people joke that if an orbital insertion is successful, then it's "CalTech's JPL" and when something goes wrong, it's "NASA's JPL". Can you explain exactly what the relationship is between the three entities?
In our county, the library system used to do outreach to the schools, where they'd go and try to get kids interested in reading ... but then the county went and fired all of the branch managers, and they didn't have staffing to keep it up.
Librarians require Master degrees in most areas (and may require a specialization if they work in a school library), but regularly make the 'lowest paid graduate degree' lists. .... but the schools and governments would rather appear 'cutting edge' or 'high tech' and give an iPad or Kindle to every student.
(disclaimer : I'm a member of our local Friends of the Library, and some of the best customers at our book sales are school teachers stocking their classrooms)
--Red Dwarf, "The Last Day"
Personally, I'm of the opinion that the Department of Education should do studies on how to teach kids & how to motivate them to do better ... how public vs. private vs. charter schools affect them, etc.
And study what the long-term effects are of just paying the kids when they get good grades:
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com...
Because the short term seems to be that they do better ... and it's a hell of a lot cheaper than most other things that people come up with. (but then again, the money doesn't go to some corportation with a great 'solution' to the problem)
I saw a talk once by someone at a meeting years ago in which they said that they were trying to get politicians to use specific phrases and sentance constructs so they could more easily parse what the hell the tax code is actually supposed to be.
(I think it was the IDCC in Chicago, which looking at the program suggests it was Kate Zwaard, US Gov't Printing Office, but it might've been at an ASIS&T meeting around that same time, or an ISO/TC 37 meeting, as all of 'em could've covered issues in parsing semantics)
I had a teacher who didn't allow you to take notes in his class ... because it was all in the book.
Of course, he wrote the book, and his 'teaching' was him copying examples from the book onto the overhead machine each class. If you couldn't follow along in class, you couldn't get a different take from reading the book, as it was THE EXACT SAME THING.
But not taking notes in class meant that I fell asleep 10-15 min into each class. I also recall things by remembering where on the page I wrote things (top, left side, in green ink). I also make notes on how excited a teacher seems about an idea, if they spend a lot of time on a topic, or if they specifically say 'this will be on the test' ... so I have something to skim through before the test. (and then try to decrypt what my chicken scratch of hand writing actually says)
Maybe listening and not writing is better for remembering things (as the professor claimed), but not if you can't stay awake through lectures on fluid dynamics & beam mechanics. And it also leaves you nothing to review before the tests and/or to share with friends who might've been sick and missed a class. (or for you to borrow from them)
You're probably better off asking this in question where people are actually expeting these sorts of questions:
http://webapps.stackexchange.c...
I get that you're complaining about the clarity of the post ... but your critique of it isn't very clear, either.
The problem is, they linked to SOCIS, and to the NEST SOCIS page ... rather than linking to something like the list of organizations that are willing to mentor, with links to descriptions of the
tasks they'd like people to propose to do
Very few of those pages include 'about this project' type information ... so instead the students join our IRC channel and start asking questions. You'd think this would be annoying, and I guess it could be, but you can learn a lot about the candidates by what questions they ask, and how they respond to your questions (and/or heckling, in my case).
disclaimer : I was a mentor for the 2011 SOCIS on a project that I don't even work on. (the task was to have their software use some APIs that I help to maintain).
You're missing my (possibly subtle) point:
The HFT folks have reacted on it before other groups have received the information.
If some groups haven't yet received it, then 'everybody' doesn't have 'access' to it.
It's not insider trading because of the other reasons I made in my post ... which would have me believe that you read the title and not the rest of it.
It's one thing to claim about the drugs being untested .. and you can still probably claim they're untested, because all of the reports are suggesting that it was a blown out blood vessel, so the whole thing would've been botched no matter what drugs they had actually used.
(and before you say I'm just against executions ... I actually think that prisoners who are sentanced to life without parole should be given the opportunity to be administered euthenasia ... but the costs of capital punishment as they curently exist are so high that it should only be reserved for those really, really horrible crimes (which this one would seem to be).
The whole concept of 'insider trading' is that you're using knowledge that wasn't yet available to others.
If someone told you, 'hey, we're going to sell in 5 minutes at $100/share', and you went and bought it all up so they had to buy it at a slightly higher price ... wouldn't that be trading on information before it became public knowledge?
Now, it might not be 'insider', as you're not within the company whose stock is being sold ... and they're legally allowed to release the information ... but there are so many other laws regarding stock sales (eg, 'tender offers', where a company plans to buy back shares at a higher price, and they have to leave it open for a given amount of time), that I'd be willing to argue that it *should* be illegal, even if only to improve 'investor confidence'.
(ie, why would you trade in the stock market when you're getting scammed every time you do?)
Way before I learned any real programming (well, maybe I had a little Basic at that point), I had software that was puzzles with logic gates (you have some number of inputs w/ different patterns on the left wall, connect up the logic gates to make the desired output on the right).
Today's modern equivalent is SpaceChem. And we've had plenty of games that teach you to break down problems into smaller parts ... The Incredible Machine, Lemmings, etc.
Maybe it doesn't teach you how to write a faster sort routine... but c'mon, these days most programmers have never seen a line of assembly, much less written one. They get by in high level languages like Ruby and Python, where they don't even have to worry about garbage collection or pointer addition.
You get the kids interested by giving them tools to make something that they can play with ... it could be some drag & drop framework, or even something like Minecraft. ... others are going to have some task they can't do in the tools, and will have to delve deeper. ...
Some are going to be satisfied with that
Of course, my only concern with this approach is that you risk having some people take a profession for granted -- the "I made a webpage for my club in highschool using GeoCities... why do we need to hire a professional to make out website?" type people.
Afternoon is still considered 'day' by most people, if you're in an area where the sun hasn't set yet.
Of course, that assumes summer time -- if you're in an area where many people rely on electicity for heating, in the winter the peak may be closer to sunrise. (with a second peak in the evening, as people get home & heat their homes & start cooking).
It used to be that CmdrTaco or one of the others on the slashdot staff would occassionally post an article, but in general, the standard procedure would be that someone would write something on some other website, and then Slashdot would link to them.
And sometimes, they'd link to one blog over and over again so often that were just rehashes of press releases (eg, coondoggie & Roland Piquepaille) rather than containing any original information or commentary, and they crowd out actual good articles on the topic. ... but what is Bennett's link to the site? Obviously, it's stronger than coondoggies Network World spamming, as he's linking in articles rather than directly posting them.
It seems like Bennett might have some tech cred, and may specifically have experience in this particular area ... but he posts on such a wide area of ... I'd say expertise, but some of it's poorly informed crap.
It almost seems like his submissions are trolling from the slashdot 'editors'.
What? Imagine the possibilities for pickup lines!
"You're so hot, I have to wear ANSI Z87.1 compliant eye protection"
Huh? The most expensive was $3B?
The James Webb Space Telescope is estimated to be just under $8B to make and launch, then another ~$800M for operations.
An article from 2011 suggested that they had already spent $5B (or maybe it was just that they had only planned on it costing $5B at that point). An FAQ from JPL states that as of 2011, they had spent $3.5B.
If they're smart on this Europa mission, they won't design the mission around low TRL technology.
1: Don't ramble so much that your audience stops caring about your recommended solution before you get to it.
2: Trim out all of the extraneous parts.
3: Give appropriate responses for your audience, their motivations and capabilities.
and maybe:
4: Use lists instead of long paragraphs so maybe we can identify which parts are important.
(yes, #1 is likely just a specialization of #2 ... but did you see that horrible post?)
How quickly it gets to the point.
All NASA websites have to be renewed annually in STRAW (System for Tracking and Registering Applications and Websites). If they're not updated, they're supposed to get blocked at the firewall.
Of course, they never define what a 'website' is, so someone could claim that the item in question was a 'web page' that didn't have to be individually registered.
(I made the mistake of listing a webservice as a 'web application', and had much back & forth as I said there weren't any privacy issues ... of course, their definition was that a 'web application' is something that you give logins & passwords to.)
But my complaint was that the 'official' page is that there are other pages out there that are *not* trying to be comprehensive that are doing a better job than the 'official' page. I had contacted the NASA official responsible for data.nasa.gov, and asked him how they had sent out the call for information to put in there ... he said they didn't, they just added websites they found. I told him they'd be more complete if they just linked to the GCMD as their system hardly had anything in it. I also complained about how stuff was organized (not by mission, or investigation ... but by the websites they found ... never mind that a given archive might have hundreds of different heterogeneous datasets.)
And I seriously doubt that the projects are what you claim -- as someone who's tried to push some NASA-funded software to CPAN ... after a while, we gave up as the legal department made it such a burden to do so. (admitedly, this was ~8 years ago).
http://code.nasa.gov/
I gave up on it years ago, when I realized there were only 32 items in it. (2 have been listed as 'coming soon'). You'll find more open source software if you look at the lists that the individual centers maintain :
Or see the NASA Github page (34 items, but that includes 'code.nasa.gov') : https://github.com/nasa
The listed 'NASA Official' has changed since it was released ... maybe this one will actually care about maintaining a list, rather than doing the bare minimum to meet some requirement from the White House.
(which was my interepretation of the response I got when I contacted the previous official about http://data.nasa.gov/ ... of course, back then, it actually linked to places, rather than crap like the content-less http://data.nasa.gov/solar-dat... )
I noticed how EA / Origin didn't even make it onto the list.
(which I 100% agree with)
All it takes is one congressman inserting language in an appropriations bill about what countries NASA isn't allowed to work with.
But they'd never do something like that, right?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
It was so bad, we had to get a legal opinion on if I was allowed to respond to a question e-mailed to the support address for one of the projects I work on. (they said yes, because the project was international in scope, and not just between us and China).
I also had a to pass up an invitation from the US Academy of Science, as it was for a meeting that was being held in China. (later, I was informed that it was Taiwan, which didn't count as China, but it was too late at that point).
ps. if it's not obvious, I work at a NASA center.
pps. and then let's not forget about earmarks and the like. Or how the shuttle was built all over the US and then brought together, to make congress happy that it was being built in their district.