A colleague at work is fond of asking people if they had Lego
or Meccano when they were growing up. It seems that the vast
majority of engineering types around here had Meccano growing up. I did.
At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, the big issue is
parental involvement with their kids. Technology is a handy scapegoat,
but it's really the parents. I see too many over-stimulated kids
who don't know even how to calm down. Every minute of their days
is programmed by their parents, who are too busy to interact
with them and foist their responsibilities off on others.
I'm Auntie Laura several times over, and one thing all
the members of our family's younger generation have learned growing
up is that sometimes it's good to run around like a little hellion,
and other times it's good to calm down and be quiet. Their
parents were there for them, and it shows.
I often wonder which was cause and which was effect, since lots
of people in the 1960s were influenced by Star Trek and the space program
to pursue scientific and technical careers. I know I was.
I didn't see much of the first season of Star Trek at the
time (I was only 5, after all), but I vividly remember the 2nd and 3rd seasons. It was
on Thursday night at 8, which was past my bedtime, but my Mom and Dad let me stay up late to watch it.
To this day Thursdays are special for me. I saw 2001 at the time too.
Yes, I was only 7 in 1968, but, again, my Mom and Dad thought I'd appreciate it. I did.
Looking back now, some of the episodes hold up well, some must be viewed
in the context of the time that made them, and a few are just plain bad. Like all shows,
in other words. Other shows of that era don't hold up as well: I remember
being fascinated by Lost in Space as a child, but as an adult I'm damned if I can
see why.
Us Canadians use plain old paper ballots, and are able to count
them all within a few hours, even after a federal election. The votes
are the paper trail.
I'm reminded of the election in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
The whole notion of feminist as shrew/feminazi/whatever you want to
call it is almost entirely an invention of male-dominated right-wing media,
representing a group who are horrified to find that times have changed,
and that they must now share the power that they once jealously kept
for themselves. Worse, they have to share it with people like me.
The way I've always looked at it is that power, privilege and opportunity
are not functions of gender. Do your job well, and this is how it
works in any company worth working for. Is anything else needed?
Well, it was 1963, you have to make some allowances for the attitudes of the time. Eileen Collins was the first shuttle commander after the Columbia disaster and Ansari will be the 40somthingth woman in space.
In 1963 everything to do with space was A Big Deal.
At the time of Mercury and Gemini a number of women quietly tried out to be astronauts.
They did well, but NASA would have absolutely nothing to do with women in space. The 20 year
gap between Valentina Tereshkova and Sally Ride included U.S. president Nixon signing
legislation mandating equal employment opportunity for all U.S. federal government agencies.
There were no exceptions, so NASA was dragged kicking and screaming in to the 20th century.
...laura, who meets Shuttle height requirements but would need to lose some weight
A curious thing about that: In theory, the one-time pad is provably unbreakable. In practice, no specific implementation of a one-time pad is provably unbreakable. The problem is that there is no provably unpredictable source of data for the pad.
Let's be careful with terminology here.
When a one-time pad cipher is said to be unbreakable, what it means is that without access to the key,
an enemy cryptanalyst cannot determine the plaintext with any probability greater than a random
selection from all possible plaintext messages.
People who actually use one-time pad encryption use radioactive decay and similar processes
to generate their key material. These really are random, since you cannot predict
when a nucleus is going to blow apart, or which one it will be. How would you break that?
All decrypts of one-time pad encryption (e.g. Venona) have been the result of
agents getting careless and misusing their pads. When they do that the encryption
is no longer random.
Programming isn't learning languages - it's learning how to give instructions to a machine.
That's programming. But it isn't what you learn when you do a B.Sc.
in Computer Science. What you will learn is how to represent, abstract, organize
and
manipulate information. You will learn what information actually means, and
what the limits are (e.g. P vs. NP).
Programming is the tool to manipulate information, but it's not
what a B.Sc. is about. When I interview somebody I assume they can program,
and that if they need to pick up a new language they will figure it out,
as needed. What
I want to know is if they understand the concepts. One question that
always gets interesting results is "Tell me an application of binary trees."
Follow on question: "Other than searching and sorting."
Slackware is still my distro of choice. It's utterly stable, and it just works.
I actually like the text-based install: it's the right technology
for what it does. What more do you need?
Besides, it really will run
on anything.
Slackware is one of the few distros that realizes that it's OK for
a Linux box to look and feel like Unix. And, yes, I have used real
Unix, back in my VAX days. I still have a Solaris box in my cubicle,
and I do real work with it.
Americium 241 is indeed primarily an alpha emitter,
but that isn't the end of the story. It goes through a whole bunch of
intermediate radionuclides before ending up as stable bismuth 209.
And some of those intermediaries are far more radioactive
than plain old americium.
It was the same story when Marie Curie started working with uranium.
Uranium 238 is an alpha emitter with a half-life of 4.5 billion years,
not very radioactive at all.
In between uranium and lead are substances like radium and polonium.
Play with those too much and you're in trouble.
It is a common mistake to conclude that radioactive == BAD. The applications
may be bad, but that's not intrinsic to the substance itself. Radioactive
substances have their uses.
...laura who sometimes takes her geiger counter to the supermarket
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Star Trek franchise has
run dry and the kindest thing they can do is let it die.
TOS was revolutionary in the 1960s. I was little, but remember it well.
A generation passed, and TNG showed what the format could do.
DS9 had its moments.
Voyager was unwatchable.
I'm not sure why they bothered with Enterprise.
Part of what made TNG special was the fact that a generation had passed. They had
new stories to tell, and new views of old stories. It worked. Since then all it's all
been downhill.
It's had its day. Let it die. No franchise can last forever, and I see no point
in prolonging the agony on this one.
Hollywood has long since ceased to show any creativity.
It's just about money; nothing else matters. Art, stories,
characters? All irrelevant. So we have
remakes, sequels, plot-free special effects "movies",
movies based on old tv shows, and so on. I remember asking people
what the various Matrix movies were actually about, and nobody seemed to
have an answer. They just taked about the special effects...
But not all movies are made in Hollywood. There are lots
of good independents out there. Hollywood may view "small but interesting"
movies as not commercially viable, but here in Canada that's all we can
afford to make, so we go ahead and make them anyway.
Some of them are self-indulgent crap, but we've made some amazingly good
ones too. Some of them tell universal stories, like
My American Cousin
and Outrageous, while others push the boundaries,
like the beautiful and bizarre (and very sad, in the end)
Kissed. We also have a substantial movie industry
in Quebec, who come up with stuff like
Liste Noire
and
La Contesse de Baton Rouge.
All quirky films, but we do quirky well...
Other countries do their thing: they tell their stories, their
way. This is not necessarily Hollywood's way, but with
the garbage Hollywood churns out nowadays, who the hell cares?
Do not get me started on reality tv. U.S. reality shows are all garbage.
Reality can be done well (e.g.
Girl Friday and
Spy), but, like all devices,
reality can get stale very quickly if it's over-used. And why are both my examples
BBC productions?
Apparently when the Japanese heard the Code Talkers on the radio they
couldn't even transcribe what they heard, let alone even think of interpreting it.
If you want privacy,
you will always have ways to get it. Eventually the Powers That Be
will realize they really can't do what they're trying to do.
I played my mandolin tonight. It sounded pretty good.
One time pad is about the only way I would really trust, and I don't trust that. Good thing I have little to hide...
As long as the key material is really random, not just generated-by-a-computer pseudo-random,
one-time pad encryption is perfectly secure if applied correctly. No re-using pads, in other words
(cf. Venona et al).
The definition of "perfectly secure" is a precise one: no attack by an enemy
cryptanalyst can determine the correct plaintext with any greater probability than any
other putative plaintext. I still like the idea of recording a CD full of static,
or timing geiger counter hits, or some other random phenomenon, and using
it to send secret email to my Mom.
Of course, if you use codes, you can say anything you like and nobody will know
if "I'm buying groceries tomorrow" means you're actually going to the supermarket, or if the bomb is
armed and ready go to off when you press the button...
Reminds me of my first run-in with wireless at home.
After noting that the same bozos kept connecting to my network as soon as I powered
it up, I tried configuring the wireless router to only accept the MAC addresses
of my computers. No dice: at best it didn't work, at worst
the router locked up and I had to do a hard reset.
So I phoned tech support. Rather than answering my question ("Why can't
I lock the router to specific MAC addresses?") they proceeded to attempt to walk me through
setting up WEP. I told them that wasn't what I wanted to do, that it was my router,
my network, and I did in fact know a thing or two about networks. Eventually 2nd level tech support called and admitted that locking
to MAC addresses was broken, and they had no ETA for a fix. I took the
router back and bought one from a different manufacturer. It works fine.
I still like the idea of leaving part of it public and dispensing scrambled content...LOL!
Being an undergraduate, I'm wondering - how does one afford to go to Graduate school and quiting their job? Do they go to Graduate School while working? how does this work?
It's called funding. Call it the difference between immediate financial disaster
and slowly bleeding to death.:-)
I went back to school in my late 30s. It was an adjustment, going from A Real Job (tm)
to being a starving student.
My first post-grad-school job included a 50% raise on
my last pre-grad-school job, but the real reason for going back to school
remains very simple: I went back to school for the hell of it. And, sadly, I was
in that bad place where I had enough experience to be perceived as expensive,
but didn't have the degree to make it palatable to prospective employers.
The Dish was a fun movie, and the Parkes Observatory folks are happy
with the publicity it got them.
The Dish is also a work of fiction (though a delightful one).
The real story
is available and makes a fascinating read.
The Visitor's Centre at Parkes has the replica control console
they made for The Dish
on display. The real one had long since been upgraded. I've been there: it's
a short drive north of Parkes, NSW. A town of strip malls and fast
food: the exterior shots in The Dish were done in Forbes, the next town
down the highway.
The bit in the film about getting the Moon's coordinates wrong because
they weren't in the nothern hemisphere really
happened. They also had a major technical problem at a bad time, but
it was a blown-up television scan converter.
And, yes, it's still in the middle of
a sheep paddock...
So does this mean that it's illegal for broadcast and cable stations to edit shows for content and length? I think that is a bigger travesty. At least trading in your DVD was a voluntary act, being subjected to bleeps, blurs and horrible dubbed lines should be deemed illegal as well.
Depends on the country. Here in Canada movies shown in the evening are generally shown un-cut,
nudity, profanity, etc. intact. Epecially on channels like
Bravo and
IFC, who make a point
of caring about films.
Bravo showed Beverly Hills
Cop the weekend before last, for example. Uncut, every 4 letter word intact. You don't
like it? Don't watch. That's what the warnings are for.
It sometimes seems like any tv show worth watching
carries a warning about violence, coarse language, mature subject matter, etc., when what's
really happening is that adult characters are going to act like adults.
Many years ago Siskel & Ebert did a special about film ratings, and they
propsed a new A rating, to replace the X ratine that once merely meant "adult content",
nothing to do with pornography. Instead of movie producers desperately cutting their movies
to avoid an X or NC-17 rating, an A rating would be a mark of distinction,
something to aspire to. A condition of an A rating was that it would be shown uncut,
exactly as the director intended.
Just like XP, very few people will rush out and actually
buy
Vista. They will get it when they buy a new computer.
I'm already seeing new computers that come with XP, but have
a sticker on them that says they're Vista Compatible.
Just for the hell of it I got a DVD of Vista Beta 2 and loaded
it on an XP box at home. It blue screened whenever I tried
to browse the file system (thanks a bunch Trend Micro!)
and the Control Panel evaporates whenever I try to launch it.
The computer (3 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM) is working fairly hard
to run Vista.
But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required.
Nothing new about that: this was an issue as far back as Mercury.
Everybody figured the first spacecraft would be a follow-on to the research that
produced the X-15, which in its highest flights became an official spacecraft (altitude > 100 km), complete
with something that looked a lot like re-entry. NASA thought otherwise, and went for the
Man in a Can approach. The first Mercury capsule design didn't even have any windows.
Having driven in both Pennsylvania and France, I'll take France, thank you.
Yeah, so you have to throw some money at the autoroute companies, like
the nice folks who run
the roads in the north (I've driven a number of times between Paris and Brussels
and know SANEF well).
They're good roads, and somebody has
to pay for them. France's funding model seems to work.
Better drivers, too. People get out of your way if you come up
behind them. The cops do it right: the speed limit is 130, but if the traffic
and weather are favourable they tolerate 160. And the Porsches still blow
by you at 220. They also have absolutely no sense of
humour about speed if conditions aren't good. This is exactly how it should be.
Vive la France!
A propos the U.S.: several states have tried no open-highway speed
limits. Many moons ago it was Nevada. Then it was Montana.
(you usually see 2-strokes in things like chainsaws and dirtbikes -
you have to mix oil in with the gas)
The
biggest engines in the world are 2 strokes.
They don't run oil through their crankcases; instead, they have
an air blower that blows fresh air in through ports at the bottom of the stroke ("scavenging").
There used to be a very popular series of industrial engines
made by GMC/Detroit Diesel, nicknamed Jimmy Diesels. These were two strokes, with
a mechanical scavenge blower (favoured as a supercharger by drag racers)
and a very distinctive sound. Canadians who
grew up in the 1970s will have heard it, whenever
Nick Adonidas hopped in to
Persephone and took off.
It may be at its limit for the number of megapixels but, there's still a lot of things to improve like the maximum color range a digital camera can record. With 16 bits color channel, we would be able to record a lot more informations so we wouldn't be limited as much when we try to capture a high dynamic range picture. There's tools like in Photoshop CS2 to give you the abilities to have high dynamic range but it would be a lot better to have it directly in the camera.
The CCD cameras used by astronomers routinely produce 16 bits per pixel.
Most of these are monochrome devices: to shoot a colour picture you must shoot
pictures through red, green and blue filters, then combine them.
The key advantages for astronomy are zero reciprocity failure (film
loses sensitivity in long exposures; CCDs don't), high quantum efficiency (almost all the photons
intercepted by the sensor are noticed)
and excellent linearity (you can digitally subtract extraneous light, like city lights).
However, even in astronomy, there is a hard core who still do film. There
are many reasons: some people just like the look, others enjoy the craft
of wet darkroom work, and so on.
My favourite camera is a 4x5 press camera, a
Crown Graphic.
It takes perfect 1950s newspaper photographer pictures. And I develop and
print them myself.
I don't have a myspace account, nor have I ever had one.
However, I keep getting all these MySpace News emails.
Damned if I know why. The usual opt-out garbage, but since I never opted-in in the first place...
"Death to Spammers" = flamebait? Has Slashdot gone soft in its old age?
Slashdot Mirror
A colleague at work is fond of asking people if they had Lego or Meccano when they were growing up. It seems that the vast majority of engineering types around here had Meccano growing up. I did.
At the risk of sounding like an old fogey, the big issue is parental involvement with their kids. Technology is a handy scapegoat, but it's really the parents. I see too many over-stimulated kids who don't know even how to calm down. Every minute of their days is programmed by their parents, who are too busy to interact with them and foist their responsibilities off on others.
I'm Auntie Laura several times over, and one thing all the members of our family's younger generation have learned growing up is that sometimes it's good to run around like a little hellion, and other times it's good to calm down and be quiet. Their parents were there for them, and it shows.
...laura
So that's why they keep sending me emails to update the information on my account!
...laura
I often wonder which was cause and which was effect, since lots of people in the 1960s were influenced by Star Trek and the space program to pursue scientific and technical careers. I know I was.
I didn't see much of the first season of Star Trek at the time (I was only 5, after all), but I vividly remember the 2nd and 3rd seasons. It was on Thursday night at 8, which was past my bedtime, but my Mom and Dad let me stay up late to watch it. To this day Thursdays are special for me. I saw 2001 at the time too. Yes, I was only 7 in 1968, but, again, my Mom and Dad thought I'd appreciate it. I did.
Looking back now, some of the episodes hold up well, some must be viewed in the context of the time that made them, and a few are just plain bad. Like all shows, in other words. Other shows of that era don't hold up as well: I remember being fascinated by Lost in Space as a child, but as an adult I'm damned if I can see why.
Thanks, Gene.
...laura
Yes, there are 10 times as many people in the U.S.
This is a logistical issue only. You have 10 times as many ballots to count, so you need 10 times as many people to count them.
...laura
Indeed.
Us Canadians use plain old paper ballots, and are able to count them all within a few hours, even after a federal election. The votes are the paper trail.
I'm reminded of the election in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.
...laura
Click.
The whole notion of feminist as shrew/feminazi/whatever you want to call it is almost entirely an invention of male-dominated right-wing media, representing a group who are horrified to find that times have changed, and that they must now share the power that they once jealously kept for themselves. Worse, they have to share it with people like me.
The way I've always looked at it is that power, privilege and opportunity are not functions of gender. Do your job well, and this is how it works in any company worth working for. Is anything else needed?
...laura, uppity commie dyke bitch
In 1963 everything to do with space was A Big Deal.
At the time of Mercury and Gemini a number of women quietly tried out to be astronauts. They did well, but NASA would have absolutely nothing to do with women in space. The 20 year gap between Valentina Tereshkova and Sally Ride included U.S. president Nixon signing legislation mandating equal employment opportunity for all U.S. federal government agencies. There were no exceptions, so NASA was dragged kicking and screaming in to the 20th century.
...laura, who meets Shuttle height requirements but would need to lose some weight
Let's be careful with terminology here.
When a one-time pad cipher is said to be unbreakable, what it means is that without access to the key, an enemy cryptanalyst cannot determine the plaintext with any probability greater than a random selection from all possible plaintext messages.
People who actually use one-time pad encryption use radioactive decay and similar processes to generate their key material. These really are random, since you cannot predict when a nucleus is going to blow apart, or which one it will be. How would you break that?
All decrypts of one-time pad encryption (e.g. Venona) have been the result of agents getting careless and misusing their pads. When they do that the encryption is no longer random.
...laura
That's programming. But it isn't what you learn when you do a B.Sc. in Computer Science. What you will learn is how to represent, abstract, organize and manipulate information. You will learn what information actually means, and what the limits are (e.g. P vs. NP).
Programming is the tool to manipulate information, but it's not what a B.Sc. is about. When I interview somebody I assume they can program, and that if they need to pick up a new language they will figure it out, as needed. What I want to know is if they understand the concepts. One question that always gets interesting results is "Tell me an application of binary trees." Follow on question: "Other than searching and sorting."
I did my Masters for the hell of it. So there.
...laura, B.Sc., M.A.Sc.
Hear! Hear!
Slackware is still my distro of choice. It's utterly stable, and it just works. I actually like the text-based install: it's the right technology for what it does. What more do you need? Besides, it really will run on anything.
Slackware is one of the few distros that realizes that it's OK for a Linux box to look and feel like Unix. And, yes, I have used real Unix, back in my VAX days. I still have a Solaris box in my cubicle, and I do real work with it.
Keep up the good work, Patrick. Thank you.
...laura, typing this on a Slackware 10.2 box
Americium 241 is indeed primarily an alpha emitter, but that isn't the end of the story. It goes through a whole bunch of intermediate radionuclides before ending up as stable bismuth 209. And some of those intermediaries are far more radioactive than plain old americium.
It was the same story when Marie Curie started working with uranium. Uranium 238 is an alpha emitter with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, not very radioactive at all. In between uranium and lead are substances like radium and polonium. Play with those too much and you're in trouble.
It is a common mistake to conclude that radioactive == BAD. The applications may be bad, but that's not intrinsic to the substance itself. Radioactive substances have their uses.
...laura who sometimes takes her geiger counter to the supermarket
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the Star Trek franchise has run dry and the kindest thing they can do is let it die.
TOS was revolutionary in the 1960s. I was little, but remember it well.
A generation passed, and TNG showed what the format could do.
DS9 had its moments.
Voyager was unwatchable.
I'm not sure why they bothered with Enterprise.
Part of what made TNG special was the fact that a generation had passed. They had new stories to tell, and new views of old stories. It worked. Since then all it's all been downhill.
It's had its day. Let it die. No franchise can last forever, and I see no point in prolonging the agony on this one.
...laura
Hollywood has long since ceased to show any creativity. It's just about money; nothing else matters. Art, stories, characters? All irrelevant. So we have remakes, sequels, plot-free special effects "movies", movies based on old tv shows, and so on. I remember asking people what the various Matrix movies were actually about, and nobody seemed to have an answer. They just taked about the special effects...
But not all movies are made in Hollywood. There are lots of good independents out there. Hollywood may view "small but interesting" movies as not commercially viable, but here in Canada that's all we can afford to make, so we go ahead and make them anyway. Some of them are self-indulgent crap, but we've made some amazingly good ones too. Some of them tell universal stories, like My American Cousin and Outrageous, while others push the boundaries, like the beautiful and bizarre (and very sad, in the end) Kissed. We also have a substantial movie industry in Quebec, who come up with stuff like Liste Noire and La Contesse de Baton Rouge.
All quirky films, but we do quirky well...
Other countries do their thing: they tell their stories, their way. This is not necessarily Hollywood's way, but with the garbage Hollywood churns out nowadays, who the hell cares?
Do not get me started on reality tv. U.S. reality shows are all garbage. Reality can be done well (e.g. Girl Friday and Spy), but, like all devices, reality can get stale very quickly if it's over-used. And why are both my examples BBC productions?
...laura
Apparently when the Japanese heard the Code Talkers on the radio they couldn't even transcribe what they heard, let alone even think of interpreting it.
If you want privacy, you will always have ways to get it. Eventually the Powers That Be will realize they really can't do what they're trying to do.
I played my mandolin tonight. It sounded pretty good.
...laura
As long as the key material is really random, not just generated-by-a-computer pseudo-random, one-time pad encryption is perfectly secure if applied correctly. No re-using pads, in other words (cf. Venona et al).
The definition of "perfectly secure" is a precise one: no attack by an enemy cryptanalyst can determine the correct plaintext with any greater probability than any other putative plaintext. I still like the idea of recording a CD full of static, or timing geiger counter hits, or some other random phenomenon, and using it to send secret email to my Mom.
Of course, if you use codes, you can say anything you like and nobody will know if "I'm buying groceries tomorrow" means you're actually going to the supermarket, or if the bomb is armed and ready go to off when you press the button...
...laura
Reminds me of my first run-in with wireless at home.
After noting that the same bozos kept connecting to my network as soon as I powered it up, I tried configuring the wireless router to only accept the MAC addresses of my computers. No dice: at best it didn't work, at worst the router locked up and I had to do a hard reset.
So I phoned tech support. Rather than answering my question ("Why can't I lock the router to specific MAC addresses?") they proceeded to attempt to walk me through setting up WEP. I told them that wasn't what I wanted to do, that it was my router, my network, and I did in fact know a thing or two about networks. Eventually 2nd level tech support called and admitted that locking to MAC addresses was broken, and they had no ETA for a fix. I took the router back and bought one from a different manufacturer. It works fine.
I still like the idea of leaving part of it public and dispensing scrambled content...LOL!
...laura
It's called funding. Call it the difference between immediate financial disaster and slowly bleeding to death. :-)
I went back to school in my late 30s. It was an adjustment, going from A Real Job (tm) to being a starving student. My first post-grad-school job included a 50% raise on my last pre-grad-school job, but the real reason for going back to school remains very simple: I went back to school for the hell of it. And, sadly, I was in that bad place where I had enough experience to be perceived as expensive, but didn't have the degree to make it palatable to prospective employers.
...laura, B.Sc., M.A.Sc.
The Dish was a fun movie, and the Parkes Observatory folks are happy with the publicity it got them.
The Dish is also a work of fiction (though a delightful one). The real story is available and makes a fascinating read.
The Visitor's Centre at Parkes has the replica control console they made for The Dish on display. The real one had long since been upgraded. I've been there: it's a short drive north of Parkes, NSW. A town of strip malls and fast food: the exterior shots in The Dish were done in Forbes, the next town down the highway.
The bit in the film about getting the Moon's coordinates wrong because they weren't in the nothern hemisphere really happened. They also had a major technical problem at a bad time, but it was a blown-up television scan converter.
And, yes, it's still in the middle of a sheep paddock...
...laura
Depends on the country. Here in Canada movies shown in the evening are generally shown un-cut, nudity, profanity, etc. intact. Epecially on channels like Bravo and IFC, who make a point of caring about films. Bravo showed Beverly Hills Cop the weekend before last, for example. Uncut, every 4 letter word intact. You don't like it? Don't watch. That's what the warnings are for.
It sometimes seems like any tv show worth watching carries a warning about violence, coarse language, mature subject matter, etc., when what's really happening is that adult characters are going to act like adults.
Many years ago Siskel & Ebert did a special about film ratings, and they propsed a new A rating, to replace the X ratine that once merely meant "adult content", nothing to do with pornography. Instead of movie producers desperately cutting their movies to avoid an X or NC-17 rating, an A rating would be a mark of distinction, something to aspire to. A condition of an A rating was that it would be shown uncut, exactly as the director intended.
...laura
Just like XP, very few people will rush out and actually buy Vista. They will get it when they buy a new computer. I'm already seeing new computers that come with XP, but have a sticker on them that says they're Vista Compatible.
Just for the hell of it I got a DVD of Vista Beta 2 and loaded it on an XP box at home. It blue screened whenever I tried to browse the file system (thanks a bunch Trend Micro!) and the Control Panel evaporates whenever I try to launch it. The computer (3 GHz P4 with 1 GB RAM) is working fairly hard to run Vista.
Thanks, Microsoft.
Sigh.
...laura
Nothing new about that: this was an issue as far back as Mercury.
Everybody figured the first spacecraft would be a follow-on to the research that produced the X-15, which in its highest flights became an official spacecraft (altitude > 100 km), complete with something that looked a lot like re-entry. NASA thought otherwise, and went for the Man in a Can approach. The first Mercury capsule design didn't even have any windows.
The rest is, as they say, history...
...laura
Having driven in both Pennsylvania and France, I'll take France, thank you.
Yeah, so you have to throw some money at the autoroute companies, like the nice folks who run the roads in the north (I've driven a number of times between Paris and Brussels and know SANEF well). They're good roads, and somebody has to pay for them. France's funding model seems to work.
Better drivers, too. People get out of your way if you come up behind them. The cops do it right: the speed limit is 130, but if the traffic and weather are favourable they tolerate 160. And the Porsches still blow by you at 220. They also have absolutely no sense of humour about speed if conditions aren't good. This is exactly how it should be.
Vive la France!
A propos the U.S.: several states have tried no open-highway speed limits. Many moons ago it was Nevada. Then it was Montana.
...laura
The biggest engines in the world are 2 strokes. They don't run oil through their crankcases; instead, they have an air blower that blows fresh air in through ports at the bottom of the stroke ("scavenging").
There used to be a very popular series of industrial engines made by GMC/Detroit Diesel, nicknamed Jimmy Diesels. These were two strokes, with a mechanical scavenge blower (favoured as a supercharger by drag racers) and a very distinctive sound. Canadians who grew up in the 1970s will have heard it, whenever Nick Adonidas hopped in to Persephone and took off.
...laura
The CCD cameras used by astronomers routinely produce 16 bits per pixel. Most of these are monochrome devices: to shoot a colour picture you must shoot pictures through red, green and blue filters, then combine them.
The key advantages for astronomy are zero reciprocity failure (film loses sensitivity in long exposures; CCDs don't), high quantum efficiency (almost all the photons intercepted by the sensor are noticed) and excellent linearity (you can digitally subtract extraneous light, like city lights).
However, even in astronomy, there is a hard core who still do film. There are many reasons: some people just like the look, others enjoy the craft of wet darkroom work, and so on.
My favourite camera is a 4x5 press camera, a Crown Graphic. It takes perfect 1950s newspaper photographer pictures. And I develop and print them myself.
...laura
I don't have a myspace account, nor have I ever had one.
However, I keep getting all these MySpace News emails. Damned if I know why. The usual opt-out garbage, but since I never opted-in in the first place...
"Death to Spammers" = flamebait? Has Slashdot gone soft in its old age?
...laura