I'll agree with you on the increasing the budget -- but I won't agree on the rest as there are a few good elected officials out there -- they just don't consider themselves "politicians" because they're not active in party politics. (although, they are part of the civil administration, so meet one of the other definitions of "politician")
And yes, I'm an elected official (for a rather small municipality) -- and I'm not affiliated with any political party.
If you want to get rid of politicians -- find someone with some morals and a backbone who's willing to run against them. And once you find them, support them -- it doesn't have to be money. You could volunteer some hours managing their website, or use whatever skills you might have.
Or go to meetings and tell the sitting officials exactly what you think of their ways (although, be careful, it could get you elected). Remember, their job is to serve *you*... make sure they remember that. (although, I'm not allowed to advocate the violent overthrow of government, as Maryland considers me to be a state employee (but won't give me a state ID card so I can get discounts on hotels), and there's a law against advocating overthrow, which I feel violates the 1st amendment).
I've played through Fallout 3 twice, and each of the first two more than that. I've even played Fallout: Tactics.
It's not the same game, but it's still very good. Some of my major complaints:
The humor's just not the same. Yes, there's humor there, and I had hope in Bethesda (the lead on Oblivion was also an author of the RPG Paranoia), but it's not what I would've hoped for
The morality aspects are massively simplified -- there's a whole *one* karma meter; there's no concept of factions. (for those who didn't play the originals -- you'd have to develop your reputation with the Brotherhood of Steel, the Bandits, each town you came to, etc.)
Most of the perks are pretty boring -- and if you go to level 30, it's even worse. The original allowed you to take disadvantages to get more points to spend on other things.
It's too easy to max your skills... tag skills are just +15 to a skill. I wanted to say that in the original, it was harder to get skills up to the higher levels (like it started costing 2 points per skill point, but it only cost 1/2 for tag skills)
Fast travel is lame... you never have the random encounters in-transit, although they do make it so you drop right into the middle of the area you're going to fully populated with people (I regularly go to Wheaton Armory to make some fast money). And the times are completely unrealistic -- the time that passes on the clock is negligible compared to walking it. (which wasn't even possible in the originals)
And when walking it -- you have something that just magically tells you when here's areas worth investigating nearby? I guess that gives you a reward for walking about, but they could've at least done it so you don't know about everything when you're 5mi away. (some areas are going to be noticable from miles away; some aren't)
VATS was well done, but I miss shooting out the eyes -- even if it didn't kill, it gave you a chance to even the odds.
There's now variant weapons, but no variant ammo to give you a slight boost, but have to conserve. And ammo gets to be *way* too plentiful. (I used it like caps, as it had no weight -- and anyone who's ever carried around a case of 1000 rounds of anything (other than 22, perhaps) for an extended amount of time knows that's not true)
They screwed up on what's of value... caps inside a safe? Sure, if it's an area that's in use... in an old vault, they should be in trash cans. And any time you find old money in trash cans, that's just stupid.
The explanation for mutants doesn't fit the original story line
And then, there were some other issues that just didn't make sense to me:
A can of pork and beans weighs a pound. An empty can weighs a pound; The same holds true for bottles of stuff and empty bottles.
It's set *much* later than the earlier two -- This means that just about any pre-prepared food isn't going to be safe. Any food stores would've been raided years ago. (a soda machine that still has soda in it?).
The Washington Monument is made from *stone*. There is *no* metal framework on the inside that would've resulted in it looking liked it did in the game
Vendors suddenly just have more money every couple of days... wouldn't they slowly make other sales, especially the traveling vendors?
All of that being said, I still played through twice, and I even started a 3rd play-through. (just put it down 'til I finish another project... and was debating Mass Effect 2, but was told it sucked without an HD TV). It's a good game. It's got some of the personality of the original, and I might be biased as I lived in DC for years, and still live in the metro area, so I got a lot of the places and references. Fallout 3 was well done, and it's a good game, but it could've been better, based on the heritage of the original. As it was, it's more like a ne
Even distant observations might still be useful if it was shot at a different angle than other observations of the event, and as it's in the sky, and you're 70 miles away, it's a different angle.
The problem with video is that it's not as useful for judging the speed of things coming towards you, or away from you, unless it's of a fixed size, it's not tumbling, and you have sufficient resolution. If this had a different plane of the sky as the other 'official' footage, it could be used to test any 3d models that might've been made of the disaster, and if it disproves them, provide input for a new model to be made.
Disclaimer -- I work at a NASA center as a contractor, but I have absolutely nothing to do with the shuttle program.
I admit, IMLS doesn't do education in general, but they've been around for some time, and fund museums and libraries. US Dept. of Education has some grants for education... so the only thing differentiating this one from stuff that's well established is that it's all about 'digital technologies'.
I'm less than impressed. All that this is going to do is add bureaucracy. You're going to have people attempting to apply for grants at all of the available places, and with such limited funding, I wouldn't be surprised if they spent more in evaluating proposals and administering the program than in awards.
(I've sat on a few government grant review panels, although not in this field, and the amount to be awarded is down, but the number of proposals is up... and we make sure that *every* proposal is given a fair evaluation, which means a *lot* of people being involved, so you have enough expertise to understand what's being proposed and what its potential impacts are. On the review boards I've been a member of, each proposal is assigned a primary and two secondary reviewers, who have to submit their reviews before review starts, then you meet face-to-face (in groups of 8-12 people) to review a block of maybe 25-40 proposals, and you have to have a written report for each proposal to submit to the program head by the end of the last day of the review period. As there will be multiple groups, each with a different special focus, you might also pass some proposals around so they're seen by even more people.)
As some of us get travel reimbursement and/or honorariums, and the government employees are pulled from their normal jobs, it's probably safe to say that the review boards alone might cost a person-day per proposal, not including all of the other administration that goes into it.
I admit it, I've done it before... and it *was* an AOL e-mail address, but it was more for the user name (in d00dsp34k), and there were a few other things on their resume that suggested that they weren't really qualified for the job. I typically go through resumes with two colors of highlighter -- one for all of the good things on there, one for all of the bad things, (it triggered my 'bad' sensor), and then when I've gone through them all, I pull out the ones that are more bad than good, and weed them down to a reasonable number to deal with.
These days, I'd take a different approach -- this is a person who's stuck with the email address, and not tried jumping on whatever the latest fad is.* They've probably been around for a while, and aren't trying to hide their e-mail address and changing up every few months. It might trigger a thought more like 'A Boy Named Sue' than anything else.
Oh, and yes, my mom still has an AOL address, as does my older brother. They don't use AOL for the connection, but they understand the advantage to not getting rid of an address they've been using for over a decade. Only well, my mom's wouldn't be particularly professional. My brother's is fine for his profession. (automechanic, and he's got a mustang racing reference in his).
*(of course, I'm not even sure what the latest fad in e-mail addresses is)
** I admit, I don't let on that my main e-mail address is 'annoying.org' on my resume when I'm actually trying to get a job... I do have it listed on the version of my resume that the contracting company I "work" makes us keep on record.
Okay, there's an issue of being more conservative to a certain degree, but I can come up with lots more reasons that might give a bias to engineering:
When I was an undergrad (~12 years ago), the school with the highest percentage of middle-eastern students in it was... the engineering department. If this is still true, then you'd be more likely to find a engineering student who had first-hand experiences in western society.
Engineers tend to think about problems differently than most other people. In the case of civil engineering, it tends to be big-picture issues, with people just a bunch of numbers (eg, amount of live load) Could you end up with people with Aspergers or otherwise less empathetic as engineers?
Many engineering students have high hopes and want to change the world... then you get stuck in school and realize you're just another cog. Could the handling of student's expectations be partially to blame?
Now, luckily, in my case, I'm now an elected official, so have other ways to channel my energies to better the world... but I think many of us have had the discussion of what could be done if we nuked the planet from orbit and started all over again. Or even a tornado... I'm sure we could fix up our downtown if we could get rid of a few of the eyesore buildings that the county built.
Yes, it's good to have people care about NASA so that maybe Congress will actually fund them, and not just keep shoving pork on them.
However, the need for more launches is to be able to do science. Yes, the launches themselves can be exciting, but you could put on a fireworks display for a lot less money.
And NASA can't set their priorities and timetables when they have no control over their budget. I have no idea just how many projects got cut when the whole 'go back to the moon' thing happened, but I know the one I was working on got cut in a major way, and I know of a few that were canned entirely.... and then there's the problem with launch vehicles -- even the unmanned. STEREO would have launched months earlier if it hadn't been for a strike by a certain launch vehicle manufacturer. As a result, we got grounded, and the costs of storing a satellite on the ground in Florida is *more* than the cost of operating it while it's in space, *and* analyzing the data. There was a discussion if it was worth risking moving everything twice to get it back to Goddard, and then ship it back down to Florida when we were past the launch delays.
NASA is much more than just manned space missions. There are a whole lot of engineers, scientists, computer programmers and people who support them who have absolutely nothing to do with the manned missions.
I don't know what sort of responsibilities they give the 'Tech Lead' in your company, but you might offer to compromise, and do some sort of mentoring program or run other training for the others in the group... so it's not quite management, but not solely tech.
The other option is being a supervisor, without being a manager. So, you're then responsible for watching over the people, doing evaluations, maybe assigning people to tasks as needed... but all of the budget issues and most of the meetings with executives are handled by someone else. You might get input into hiring and firing, but the ultimate decision would go to the manager.
Of course, then your manager gets replaced, and suddenly you're working for a complete tool who doesn't understand the relationships in the office, and you might run into some personality conflicts which prompt you to resign, or they try to force you to resign (not understanding that 'constructive discharge' violates the right-to-work provisions)
Actually, I confirmed it with one of the scientists (Joe Gurman) cited in the article -- there was an article from March that was inaccurate, and this was a correction to that previous article.
But, instead of marking it as a correction, it was posted as a new article. (I can't find the older article, so I don't know if it was removed)
They also linked straight to the movie, rather than to the explanation of what is being seen in the movie, or cite the original posting of the article, which had different images:
Joe also said that this was in fact "tsunami-like" in that it was the result of an initially downward wave that reflected back up, as opposed to other CMEs.
(and I probably should've added a disclaimer earlier -- I work for the STEREO Science Center)
Even if the middle score (5, assuming you allow the full range of 0-10) means that the game is 'average', then 6 would be 'slightly above average'.
Which technically, isn't 'completely sucks', but when you have to decide between games that are near average, and those that are actually 'good' or 'excellent', it comes down to giving the average games a pass.
So, as both 'slightly above average' and 'suck' to me means 'not worth my time to play' and/or 'not worth buying', then yes, '6' and 'rock bottom suckiness' are the same.
Because of the computing power to generate the higher level data products, some data systems are serving level 1 data (calibrated data), not the raw sensor recordings (level 0).
Knowledge of the sensor's characteristics are thus encoded into the products being served, and this, from an Information Science standpoint, you could characterize the higher level data products as "Information", not "Data".... see, I *did* actually read the first chapter of Donald Case's book. (although, I proved that by criticizing it when I met him at the ASIS&T annual meeting a few years back, and he said he had just sent the second edition to press, and could've used the comments a little earlier)
There *are* large data systems online now, even if they're not of the scope of LSST. The big difference is that the EOS-DIS (earth science) has funding to cover it stuff like building giant unified data centers (I think they pull 2TB/day... per satellite), while the rest of us us in the "space sciences" are trying to figure out how to get enough bandwidth to serve our data, and using various distributed data systems (PDS, the VxOs, etc.). Once SDO finally launches (early next year?), we'll be generating over 2TB/day of useful data products (4TB/day of raw data), which is much larger than solar physics has been dealing with.
Oh... and to make things fun -- as someone else commented about today's hard drive sizes -- because of requirements to get things certified by required deadlines, and planning for procurement lag, plus whatever launch delays (or construction delays for LSST) the data systems might be 3+ years old by the time there's first light.
(disclaimer -- if it wasn't obvious, I actually work with these 'big science' data systems)
I have no idea how many might be out there (hopefully, this bill will result in them being easier to find), but I know that IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and NSF (National Science Foundation) gives grants for writing curriculum. There was a talk at last year's ASIS&T meeting about the work done so far on a series of modules that teachers could use to build curriculum for digital libraries classes. (either from the Library or Comp. Sci side of things).
It's also pretty common for educational materials to be developed as parts of other funding. I think there were guidelines for all of NASA programs to spend 2% of their budget on EPO (Education and Public Outreach). Much of it's available on the internet, but there might've been other materials made, too.
The sad thing is, I've actually been on NASA review panels before, and it gets even more meta than that.
Most of us were using spreadsheets to track the scoring of each of the proposals. By the second day of the last review I was on, one of the other reviewers had customized her spreadsheet enough (I think there was some automatic colorizing, some formulas to sort the overall rankings (which were from 'poor' to 'excellent')... that people brought up the fact that every reviewer does this each time we have a review, and there needed to be some grants given to improve the whole reviewing processing.
I know NSPIRES had an upgrade in the last year or so, but that's a much more formal process for actually proposing to get grants, which would be way too much overhead for what they're trying to do with this contest.
The CAN-SPAM act makes spam legal, so long as it complies with the act.
Do you want to get into the details of legal spam vs. illegal spam?
What we should be doing is requiring the telecommunications companies to declare themselves as "Common Carrier" or not. If they are, then they get protections under the law but can't discriminate. If they aren't, they can filter, but lose some of their legal protection.
So, ISPs could offer "family safe filtering" or the like, but to do so, they have to declare that they're not a "Common Carrier".
Disclaimer: I used to work for a small (3k user) ISP, and still hold stock in the company that bought it out. I'm also an elected official, and know that passing even the most mundane of laws takes months, and even then likely doesn't plan for every possibility.
Larry Warman (Lawrence K. Warman, Jr) is turning over in his grave right now.
Tuesday was the third anniversary of his death.
(and before I'm marked off topic -- Larry was the head engineer for the IT department of PG County Schools, and before that was a Vice Principal at Crossland, where among other things was responsible for manually reconciling schedules to avoid conflicts (overcrowding classes, making sure kids weren't in classes they had already taken, etc.))
Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device
I'll have to read the bill, but if this is like the last ones, I have my same complaints -- spam is legal under CAN-SPAM (so long as it meets certain requirements), and this will make it illegal for ISPs to block it unless it's 'illegal'.
(which may or may not have been part of the inspiration for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, or visa-versa, as they came out within a year or so of each other)
I'm surprised that no one's tried to remake AutoDuel / CarWars.
When Mechwarrior 3 came out as a 3D simulator, I was hoping that Autoduel would get a similar treatment, as a driving simulator with guns. (or you might be able to pull off something more like Grand Theft Auto, too)
It'd be a great sandbox game -- you could run courier tasks, compete in the dueling circuit, try to hijack other couriers, be a vigilante, etc.
... and unlike today's games where you just save every 5 min and reload when you do something stupid, they had a built in "save" system -- you had to pay to have a clone made (or refreshed with memories), and when you died, you went back down to that skill level, and lost whatever car you had been driving.
That works so long as they also provide the necessary information to compile it.
... just having the source code is not enough, if it's in some undocumented language with no compiler available.
(and even with that, I see some sort of code obfuscation being done on anything that's published, and all comments stripped out to make it difficult to understand what's actually being submitted)
... actually, in all seriousness, I have most of their older catalog, but stopped buying albums after "the black album". Stuff like "Unforgiven" just grated on me... I'd much rather listen to Master of Puppet, Ride the Lightning or And Justice for All. I didn't stop buying their stuff because of Napster... I stopped buying their stuff because it started to suck.
(yes, I know, I'm setting myself up for the comments of "started to suck? They always sucked", etc.)
Although this might help against some types of denial of service attempt where they're making your machine work harder by servicing what look to be legitimate requests, it does not help against attempts at network saturation from incoming packets unless you can block it at the upstream router.
Huh, that's funny. Last I checked you normally don't get jail time for copyright infringement. Search warrants? For your computer maybe. Serving papers for a court date? Sure. Arrested on the spot? Don't think so. Jail time? Not to my knowledge.
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I'll agree with you on the increasing the budget -- but I won't agree on the rest as there are a few good elected officials out there -- they just don't consider themselves "politicians" because they're not active in party politics. (although, they are part of the civil administration, so meet one of the other definitions of "politician")
And yes, I'm an elected official (for a rather small municipality) -- and I'm not affiliated with any political party.
If you want to get rid of politicians -- find someone with some morals and a backbone who's willing to run against them. And once you find them, support them -- it doesn't have to be money. You could volunteer some hours managing their website, or use whatever skills you might have.
Or go to meetings and tell the sitting officials exactly what you think of their ways (although, be careful, it could get you elected). Remember, their job is to serve *you* ... make sure they remember that. (although, I'm not allowed to advocate the violent overthrow of government, as Maryland considers me to be a state employee (but won't give me a state ID card so I can get discounts on hotels), and there's a law against advocating overthrow, which I feel violates the 1st amendment).
NASA has a website for educators:
http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/index.html
Most missions have a public outreach person who will send materials to teachers for use in their classroom.
And for those joking about looking at the sun, see :
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/classroom/for_students.html
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/classroom/classroom.shtml
I've played through Fallout 3 twice, and each of the first two more than that. I've even played Fallout: Tactics.
It's not the same game, but it's still very good. Some of my major complaints:
And then, there were some other issues that just didn't make sense to me:
All of that being said, I still played through twice, and I even started a 3rd play-through. (just put it down 'til I finish another project ... and was debating Mass Effect 2, but was told it sucked without an HD TV). It's a good game. It's got some of the personality of the original, and I might be biased as I lived in DC for years, and still live in the metro area, so I got a lot of the places and references. Fallout 3 was well done, and it's a good game, but it could've been better, based on the heritage of the original. As it was, it's more like a ne
Even distant observations might still be useful if it was shot at a different angle than other observations of the event, and as it's in the sky, and you're 70 miles away, it's a different angle.
The problem with video is that it's not as useful for judging the speed of things coming towards you, or away from you, unless it's of a fixed size, it's not tumbling, and you have sufficient resolution. If this had a different plane of the sky as the other 'official' footage, it could be used to test any 3d models that might've been made of the disaster, and if it disproves them, provide input for a new model to be made.
Disclaimer -- I work at a NASA center as a contractor, but I have absolutely nothing to do with the shuttle program.
I admit, IMLS doesn't do education in general, but they've been around for some time, and fund museums and libraries. US Dept. of Education has some grants for education ... so the only thing differentiating this one from stuff that's well established is that it's all about 'digital technologies'.
I'm less than impressed. All that this is going to do is add bureaucracy. You're going to have people attempting to apply for grants at all of the available places, and with such limited funding, I wouldn't be surprised if they spent more in evaluating proposals and administering the program than in awards.
(I've sat on a few government grant review panels, although not in this field, and the amount to be awarded is down, but the number of proposals is up ... and we make sure that *every* proposal is given a fair evaluation, which means a *lot* of people being involved, so you have enough expertise to understand what's being proposed and what its potential impacts are. On the review boards I've been a member of, each proposal is assigned a primary and two secondary reviewers, who have to submit their reviews before review starts, then you meet face-to-face (in groups of 8-12 people) to review a block of maybe 25-40 proposals, and you have to have a written report for each proposal to submit to the program head by the end of the last day of the review period. As there will be multiple groups, each with a different special focus, you might also pass some proposals around so they're seen by even more people.)
As some of us get travel reimbursement and/or honorariums, and the government employees are pulled from their normal jobs, it's probably safe to say that the review boards alone might cost a person-day per proposal, not including all of the other administration that goes into it.
I admit it, I've done it before ... and it *was* an AOL e-mail address, but it was more for the user name (in d00dsp34k), and there were a few other things on their resume that suggested that they weren't really qualified for the job. I typically go through resumes with two colors of highlighter -- one for all of the good things on there, one for all of the bad things, (it triggered my 'bad' sensor), and then when I've gone through them all, I pull out the ones that are more bad than good, and weed them down to a reasonable number to deal with.
These days, I'd take a different approach -- this is a person who's stuck with the email address, and not tried jumping on whatever the latest fad is.* They've probably been around for a while, and aren't trying to hide their e-mail address and changing up every few months. It might trigger a thought more like 'A Boy Named Sue' than anything else.
Oh, and yes, my mom still has an AOL address, as does my older brother. They don't use AOL for the connection, but they understand the advantage to not getting rid of an address they've been using for over a decade. Only well, my mom's wouldn't be particularly professional. My brother's is fine for his profession. (automechanic, and he's got a mustang racing reference in his).
*(of course, I'm not even sure what the latest fad in e-mail addresses is)
** I admit, I don't let on that my main e-mail address is 'annoying.org' on my resume when I'm actually trying to get a job ... I do have it listed on the version of my resume that the contracting company I "work" makes us keep on record.
Okay, there's an issue of being more conservative to a certain degree, but I can come up with lots more reasons that might give a bias to engineering:
Now, luckily, in my case, I'm now an elected official, so have other ways to channel my energies to better the world ... but I think many of us have had the discussion of what could be done if we nuked the planet from orbit and started all over again. Or even a tornado ... I'm sure we could fix up our downtown if we could get rid of a few of the eyesore buildings that the county built.
Yes, it's good to have people care about NASA so that maybe Congress will actually fund them, and not just keep shoving pork on them.
However, the need for more launches is to be able to do science. Yes, the launches themselves can be exciting, but you could put on a fireworks display for a lot less money.
And NASA can't set their priorities and timetables when they have no control over their budget. I have no idea just how many projects got cut when the whole 'go back to the moon' thing happened, but I know the one I was working on got cut in a major way, and I know of a few that were canned entirely. ... and then there's the problem with launch vehicles -- even the unmanned. STEREO would have launched months earlier if it hadn't been for a strike by a certain launch vehicle manufacturer. As a result, we got grounded, and the costs of storing a satellite on the ground in Florida is *more* than the cost of operating it while it's in space, *and* analyzing the data. There was a discussion if it was worth risking moving everything twice to get it back to Goddard, and then ship it back down to Florida when we were past the launch delays.
NASA is much more than just manned space missions. There are a whole lot of engineers, scientists, computer programmers and people who support them who have absolutely nothing to do with the manned missions.
(disclaimer -- I'm a NASA contractor)
I don't know what sort of responsibilities they give the 'Tech Lead' in your company, but you might offer to compromise, and do some sort of mentoring program or run other training for the others in the group ... so it's not quite management, but not solely tech.
The other option is being a supervisor, without being a manager. So, you're then responsible for watching over the people, doing evaluations, maybe assigning people to tasks as needed ... but all of the budget issues and most of the meetings with executives are handled by someone else. You might get input into hiring and firing, but the ultimate decision would go to the manager.
Of course, then your manager gets replaced, and suddenly you're working for a complete tool who doesn't understand the relationships in the office, and you might run into some personality conflicts which prompt you to resign, or they try to force you to resign (not understanding that 'constructive discharge' violates the right-to-work provisions)
Actually, I confirmed it with one of the scientists (Joe Gurman) cited in the article -- there was an article from March that was inaccurate, and this was a correction to that previous article.
But, instead of marking it as a correction, it was posted as a new article. (I can't find the older article, so I don't know if it was removed)
They also linked straight to the movie, rather than to the explanation of what is being seen in the movie, or cite the original posting of the article, which had different images:
http://stereo.gsfc.nasa.gov/news/SolarTsunami.shtml
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/stereo/news/solar_tsunami.html
Joe also said that this was in fact "tsunami-like" in that it was the result of an initially downward wave that reflected back up, as opposed to other CMEs.
(and I probably should've added a disclaimer earlier -- I work for the STEREO Science Center)
From the article :
Since when does 9 months ago count as 'recent' ?
Even if the middle score (5, assuming you allow the full range of 0-10) means that the game is 'average', then 6 would be 'slightly above average'.
Which technically, isn't 'completely sucks', but when you have to decide between games that are near average, and those that are actually 'good' or 'excellent', it comes down to giving the average games a pass.
So, as both 'slightly above average' and 'suck' to me means 'not worth my time to play' and/or 'not worth buying', then yes, '6' and 'rock bottom suckiness' are the same.
(and it's not basic math, it's economics -- specifically, 'opportunity cost'.)
Because of the computing power to generate the higher level data products, some data systems are serving level 1 data (calibrated data), not the raw sensor recordings (level 0).
Knowledge of the sensor's characteristics are thus encoded into the products being served, and this, from an Information Science standpoint, you could characterize the higher level data products as "Information", not "Data". ... see, I *did* actually read the first chapter of Donald Case's book. (although, I proved that by criticizing it when I met him at the ASIS&T annual meeting a few years back, and he said he had just sent the second edition to press, and could've used the comments a little earlier)
That was my first thought in reading this, too.
There *are* large data systems online now, even if they're not of the scope of LSST. The big difference is that the EOS-DIS (earth science) has funding to cover it stuff like building giant unified data centers (I think they pull 2TB/day ... per satellite), while the rest of us us in the "space sciences" are trying to figure out how to get enough bandwidth to serve our data, and using various distributed data systems (PDS, the VxOs, etc.). Once SDO finally launches (early next year?), we'll be generating over 2TB/day of useful data products (4TB/day of raw data), which is much larger than solar physics has been dealing with.
Oh ... and to make things fun -- as someone else commented about today's hard drive sizes -- because of requirements to get things certified by required deadlines, and planning for procurement lag, plus whatever launch delays (or construction delays for LSST) the data systems might be 3+ years old by the time there's first light.
(disclaimer -- if it wasn't obvious, I actually work with these 'big science' data systems)
I have no idea how many might be out there (hopefully, this bill will result in them being easier to find), but I know that IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services) and NSF (National Science Foundation) gives grants for writing curriculum. There was a talk at last year's ASIS&T meeting about the work done so far on a series of modules that teachers could use to build curriculum for digital libraries classes. (either from the Library or Comp. Sci side of things).
It's also pretty common for educational materials to be developed as parts of other funding. I think there were guidelines for all of NASA programs to spend 2% of their budget on EPO (Education and Public Outreach). Much of it's available on the internet, but there might've been other materials made, too.
The sad thing is, I've actually been on NASA review panels before, and it gets even more meta than that.
Most of us were using spreadsheets to track the scoring of each of the proposals. By the second day of the last review I was on, one of the other reviewers had customized her spreadsheet enough (I think there was some automatic colorizing, some formulas to sort the overall rankings (which were from 'poor' to 'excellent') ... that people brought up the fact that every reviewer does this each time we have a review, and there needed to be some grants given to improve the whole reviewing processing.
I know NSPIRES had an upgrade in the last year or so, but that's a much more formal process for actually proposing to get grants, which would be way too much overhead for what they're trying to do with this contest.
The CAN-SPAM act makes spam legal, so long as it complies with the act.
Do you want to get into the details of legal spam vs. illegal spam?
What we should be doing is requiring the telecommunications companies to declare themselves as "Common Carrier" or not. If they are, then they get protections under the law but can't discriminate. If they aren't, they can filter, but lose some of their legal protection.
So, ISPs could offer "family safe filtering" or the like, but to do so, they have to declare that they're not a "Common Carrier".
Disclaimer: I used to work for a small (3k user) ISP, and still hold stock in the company that bought it out. I'm also an elected official, and know that passing even the most mundane of laws takes months, and even then likely doesn't plan for every possibility.
Larry Warman (Lawrence K. Warman, Jr) is turning over in his grave right now.
Tuesday was the third anniversary of his death.
(and before I'm marked off topic -- Larry was the head engineer for the IT department of PG County Schools, and before that was a Vice Principal at Crossland, where among other things was responsible for manually reconciling schedules to avoid conflicts (overcrowding classes, making sure kids weren't in classes they had already taken, etc.))
I'll have to read the bill, but if this is like the last ones, I have my same complaints -- spam is legal under CAN-SPAM (so long as it meets certain requirements), and this will make it illegal for ISPs to block it unless it's 'illegal'.
Bah, we've already got Richard and Alan's Escape from Hell.
(which may or may not have been part of the inspiration for Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, or visa-versa, as they came out within a year or so of each other)
I'm surprised that no one's tried to remake AutoDuel / CarWars.
When Mechwarrior 3 came out as a 3D simulator, I was hoping that Autoduel would get a similar treatment, as a driving simulator with guns. (or you might be able to pull off something more like Grand Theft Auto, too)
It'd be a great sandbox game -- you could run courier tasks, compete in the dueling circuit, try to hijack other couriers, be a vigilante, etc.
... and unlike today's games where you just save every 5 min and reload when you do something stupid, they had a built in "save" system -- you had to pay to have a clone made (or refreshed with memories), and when you died, you went back down to that skill level, and lost whatever car you had been driving.
That works so long as they also provide the necessary information to compile it.
... just having the source code is not enough, if it's in some undocumented language with no compiler available.
(and even with that, I see some sort of code obfuscation being done on anything that's published, and all comments stripped out to make it difficult to understand what's actually being submitted)
weren't they the group that killed Napster?
... actually, in all seriousness, I have most of their older catalog, but stopped buying albums after "the black album". Stuff like "Unforgiven" just grated on me ... I'd much rather listen to Master of Puppet, Ride the Lightning or And Justice for All. I didn't stop buying their stuff because of Napster ... I stopped buying their stuff because it started to suck.
(yes, I know, I'm setting myself up for the comments of "started to suck? They always sucked", etc.)
Although this might help against some types of denial of service attempt where they're making your machine work harder by servicing what look to be legitimate requests, it does not help against attempts at network saturation from incoming packets unless you can block it at the upstream router.
What? next, you'll tell me that Don't Download This Song was a parody.