Department store telescopes are the pits. A good spotting scope is more use, particularly if you're going to be interested in bird watching (the flying kind, not the arrested if ).
Particularly good advice to buy a Dob. 8" to 12". In my opinion 10" is just right, particularly if you have a large car and don't have medical issues that prevent you carrying some weight (but get a trolley anyway!) Much larger than 10-12" and you need a trailer or Van, or you need to get to you need to align your telescope (Harder to align a telescope if you have to take it apart)
A zero power finder - Telrad or (can't remember the other one I have)....Oh and get a laser collimator and learn to use it early on. No point in spending money on all that metal and glass only to look through a blurry non-aligned piece of rubbish.
Where in the above post did I say all technically proficient females must be ugly.
It was a dig at management hiring practices not a dig at women (hiring someone incompetent and ill suited to do a job). You must have worked really hard to misread that into an attempt to belittle intelligent women. I would think if you were going to attack anything it would be the initial use of the word 'slut'. So take your femo-nazi bullshit elsewhere. Oh and by the way I'm not looking for a date thanks: I'm getting married in just over a month, and while she's not a techy girl, she's most proficient at her job.
FUD isn't slang for something you don't agree with. The article in question might be awful but the story on/. is even worse. It sounds like it was written by a 12 year old involved in a schoolyard scuffle. Any coherent counter argument would have been better than sounding like a goddamned whiny child. If you fight legitimately bad arguments so stupidly it makes your point of view, no matter how valid, sound childish. The person who submitted this story has done GPLv3 no favours.
For goodness sake people. Troll does not mean "I don't agree with him". "Flamebait" is only flamebait if it's written for no other reason than to upset people. FUD is only FUD if it was intended to spread unfounded Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.
That's all they're doing here. Make it sound like the only ones interested are a bunch of sicko porn-freaks and you can then pass and/or enforce draconian laws without having people up in arms.
Let me tell you, nothing motivates me more at work than a project groupie who will bang me for completing on time.
You do realize that if management hired her and she was up to the usual standards she'd be inept in the sack, be ugly and have about 3 good teeth...and if women were scarce it would be a fat alcoholic man in a dress. You'd then be told you had to make do, bring it across the line, take one for the team etc. etc.
1) You still haven't addressed the issue of highly taxing cigarettes creating a black market. Government taxed cigarettes cost $30 each. No problem get them from Vinnie the vice at $1 each, but don't buy too many from him on credit or he'll break your legs.
2) Extending your "way of looking at things" to its logical conclusion, you should aim to have everyone die early. There is no good or humane way to do this. You end up with a state that denies treatment and/or eventually this argument leads to one where someone should be killed once they reach an age where they are likely to be a medical burden. Bad move if you care about anyone who gets past 30.
3) Plenty of smokers die a long slow and agonizing death. I had one relative who took 3 operations, and 15 years. Had he stayed off the cigs after the first bought of cancer he might have stood a chance. Smokers don't all die early, and even those that do tend to take a disproportionate amount of medical resources to live for as long as they can. They do therefore place a much bigger care burden on society than healthier long lived people.
In short your math is bogus and I still think you're trying to justify your habit.
Invoking Godwin's law is nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated way of telling a person to shut up. (Slightly more sophisticated because it assumes knowledge of Internet history that makes it slightly elitist). In short's childish and stupid. You're now proposing another "law" modeled on that childish stupidity, and being moderated as "Insightful".
...and sometimes if enough good people reject a position, it becomes obvious that it's been filled with a pliable and unqualified yes-man.
We all make compromises sometimes, but that doesn't mean we should always compromise our principles to save our necks. Do that often enough and you're not part of the problem - you ARE the problem.
When I completed my Astronomy masters access to publicly available data from various sources (most notably NASA data made free to the public) was a real boon. It meant we could do analysis on actual real data instead of artificial or sanitized textbook material. A couple of the students built on this to do some original research. (Sadly that's not the way I went, as my time was more limited).
There are also lots of amateurs out there running a wide variety of very specialized packages to do everything from discovering asteroids to keeping tabs on the brightness of stars and watching for supernovae.
Would the law then become "Don't do anything we think might be suspicious"? At that point, you're saying the US government becomes an arbitrary entity, abandoning all constitutionally based jurisprudence - and the courts are happy to go along with it.
You mean like the US president's little habbit of wiretapping without a warrant, or your CIA's little habbit of spiriting people off to foreign countries and holding them without charge for almost 5 years? Or how about the whole thing with the RIAA/MPAA decide to financially ruin someone because they think one of their private dicks found an IP address somewhere in a log that may have belonged to them. I think you're being a bit naive.
As for the licensed crypto, you would also have to ensure that such legislation was effectively global, or people would just use a proxy based outside of the host country.
So they'd transmit in the clear (which could be intercepted) to a remote (read slow) proxy? What'd be the point if you're transmitting the information unencrypted to begin with? That makes no sense.
I'm not a fan of banning smoking or cigarette sales outright. That's what has been done with "hard" drugs and all you end up with is a criminal supply chain that thrives off this business. I also happen to think it's a losing battle trying to get people to do the right thing for themselves by forcing them into it. Laws intended to protect you from yourself assume stupidity of the individual and sacrifice their right to self-determination. Good laws focus on preventing people from infringing on each other's lives. So I have no problem with laws that set aside places where people can smoke. The trouble is that smokers don't just affect themselves but everyone within breathing distance - their friends and family first and foremost.
As for taxing cigarettes you'd have to tax them VERY heavily before you'd break even as you suggest. One major smoking related illness will cost more to treat than many many cartons of cigarettes. The trouble with making them even more expensive is that once again illegal supply chains come into being. The higher the price, the greater the potential reward running cigarettes illegally. Whereas the tax will price people out of smoking, illegal suppliers will find a price that's just within the smoker's financial tolerance. You also end up with an increase in crime as people struggle to pay for their habbit the way you see an increase in crime due to heroine addiction.
Also I have issues with a technique that relies on our citizens dying off. From a moral standpoint it's reprehensible. From a practical one, what happens as the techniques for extending these people's lives (but not quality of life) improves? The system falls apart.
Well I'm seeing the opposite running Vista Ultimate. Boot times aren't a huge issue for me (though XP wins out here too), but application start times and responsiveness are important to me,a nd Vista feels much slower here.
People can call me a liar, "call BS" or whatever else. I'm just reporting what I see.
You can call BS all you like. Do you usually call people you don't know liars?
I have a computer that works just as I've described. Both operating systems are running off the same drive. Boot time isn't my biggest concern either. Starting and running various apps however does. The whole thing feels a lot slower on Vista.
Boot is slower, but I could live with that. Everything is slowed down after boot to varying degrees. The more resource intensive the app the more I seem to notice it. Once again subjective.
As for "crapware" I haven't done a clean install but I have uninstalled several items that could be considered crapware. I am however running an antivirus suite (McAfee).
Well I'm dual booting Vista and XP on a new (less than 2 week old) Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Core 2, a go7900GS, and 2 Gig of RAM. XP flies. Vista crawls. Sorry I don't have less subjective benchmarks to give you but believe me booting into Vista feels like a chore. Sometime soon I'll turn down all the useless eyecandy and see if it's okay then.
Way to rationalize your addiction to or support of smoking.
Care to explain away the dozens of other smoking related illnesses, especially emphysema? I was watching a show about hospital treatment and patients and one patient was a guy that smoked for 30 years and had emphysema. An old bloke. They removed half his lungs and put him through therapy but he still struggles to do anything other than read and sleep because taking a few steps is exhausting. He admitted his condition was all self-inflicted. His recommendation on the disease: Don't get it if you can possibly avoid it.
Here's another idea. Try and calm down more naturally. Take up meditation or something. Change jobs, or relationships, or take a holiday. Get away from what's stressing you.
Seriously giving up one drug for another because you prefer one set of side-effects to another is bullshit. Depression meds are all way over-perscribed. They should be a last resort for people who are going to become psychotic or harm themselves or others even though they've tried more natural remedies. That doesn't mean smoking is under-prescribed by a long shot.
Your argument reminds me of the other nut bag on/. He was ranting about giving up caffeinated soft drinks and how he felt better for it but started his post with "I was going to do blah blah blah but I was too drunk". Moving from soft drink to water might be healthy but from softdrink to excessive alcohol is not. Moving from anti-depresenants to ciggarettes when your own flesh and blood has been killed by the ciggies in fucking insane.
Honestly, some people are incredibly intelligent but have no fucking clue when it comes to "common" sense.
He's a genuine magician alright. If you're taken in by his "magic", your wallet disappears. What's the bet the money doesn't actually disappear though but ends up contributing to Uri's lifestyle.
The way they've worked around it probably goes like this: "Free pr0n sets! See more of this hot chick! We don't want automated downloads of these sets, so you need to solve this code to get the download. What? It looks just like the hotmail cpachas? Yeah, we're using the same advanced technology here."
Salary has to do with supply and demand. Demand is only partly driven by quality. I've seen way too many employers focus on what knowledge an employee is bringing into the company and too few focus on an employee's ability to learn and their flexibility in coding.
I think the key to increasing the quality of coders out there is continued education, and plenty of peer review. It has to be constructive peer review and directed education. The peer review should take someone ideally completely unfamiliar with the code and ask them to look at it to see what's difficult to understand, and what's done badly. (Also what's done well. It can't all be a case of cutting down a person's work). Adherence to standards while important shouldn't be the focus. The focus should be managable and efficient code and those standards are necessary only where integration, redability and efficiency are concerned, not so you can fill in some damned ISO 9001 or 6 sigma document.
As for training, most employers are lucky to allocate a week out of the working year to education, yet expect their employees to be completely up to date with the technology they're using. Also learning algorithms and techniques be they general or specific to one environment shouldn't stop when you're done with a bachelor's degree.
Extremely unlikely. You'd be trashing the entire electronic commerce infrastructure which relies on solid encryption. And there's no way a corporately oriented government system is going to do that.
How about introducing a license to employ encryption. One where the banks and electronic trade organizations covered had a license that covered the end user. Anything done to employ encryption that hasn't been approved by an organization with a license is illegal. That'd make using PGP to send messages illegal for the guy on the street, but using a web browser to view an encrypted Internet banking page legal for the same guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Good advice there.
Department store telescopes are the pits. A good spotting scope is more use, particularly if you're going to be interested in bird watching (the flying kind, not the arrested if ).
Particularly good advice to buy a Dob. 8" to 12". In my opinion 10" is just right, particularly if you have a large car and don't have medical issues that prevent you carrying some weight (but get a trolley anyway!) Much larger than 10-12" and you need a trailer or Van, or you need to get to you need to align your telescope (Harder to align a telescope if you have to take it apart)
A zero power finder - Telrad or (can't remember the other one I have)....Oh and get a laser collimator and learn to use it early on. No point in spending money on all that metal and glass only to look through a blurry non-aligned piece of rubbish.
Where in the above post did I say all technically proficient females must be ugly.
It was a dig at management hiring practices not a dig at women (hiring someone incompetent and ill suited to do a job). You must have worked really hard to misread that into an attempt to belittle intelligent women. I would think if you were going to attack anything it would be the initial use of the word 'slut'. So take your femo-nazi bullshit elsewhere. Oh and by the way I'm not looking for a date thanks: I'm getting married in just over a month, and while she's not a techy girl, she's most proficient at her job.
FUD isn't slang for something you don't agree with. The article in question might be awful but the story on /. is even worse. It sounds like it was written by a 12 year old involved in a schoolyard scuffle. Any coherent counter argument would have been better than sounding like a goddamned whiny child. If you fight legitimately bad arguments so stupidly it makes your point of view, no matter how valid, sound childish. The person who submitted this story has done GPLv3 no favours.
For goodness sake people. Troll does not mean "I don't agree with him". "Flamebait" is only flamebait if it's written for no other reason than to upset people. FUD is only FUD if it was intended to spread unfounded Fear Uncertainty and Doubt.
If you were a professional astronomer I'd say it sounds like you'd be better off finding a different organization to work for.
Try looking at cited sources on published papers for starters. http://arxiv.org/ will give you plenty of pre-publications. Here too http://sesame.stsci.edu/library.html
I'm well out of touch but here's what you get just from Google:
Skyview is a must. Images in any wavelength (multiple instruments)
http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Learn about the FITS data format. Not just pretty pictures by any means.
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/
Chandra data
http://cxc.harvard.edu/cda/public.html
You want Hubble data? (and software to process it)
http://archive.stsci.edu/
More software to process astro data:
http://www.stsci.edu/resources/
SOHO use to publish their images in real time and if you want data...and apparently still do.
http://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/data/data.html
There's lots more out there if you look at the major space instrument's web pages. I'm sure some of it is paid and a lot of it is held back for a year or so, but there's a LOT out there.
That's all they're doing here. Make it sound like the only ones interested are a bunch of sicko porn-freaks and you can then pass and/or enforce draconian laws without having people up in arms.
Let me tell you, nothing motivates me more at work than a project groupie who will bang me for completing on time.
You do realize that if management hired her and she was up to the usual standards she'd be inept in the sack, be ugly and have about 3 good teeth...and if women were scarce it would be a fat alcoholic man in a dress. You'd then be told you had to make do, bring it across the line, take one for the team etc. etc.
3 problems with your logic
1) You still haven't addressed the issue of highly taxing cigarettes creating a black market. Government taxed cigarettes cost $30 each. No problem get them from Vinnie the vice at $1 each, but don't buy too many from him on credit or he'll break your legs.
2) Extending your "way of looking at things" to its logical conclusion, you should aim to have everyone die early. There is no good or humane way to do this. You end up with a state that denies treatment and/or eventually this argument leads to one where someone should be killed once they reach an age where they are likely to be a medical burden. Bad move if you care about anyone who gets past 30.
3) Plenty of smokers die a long slow and agonizing death. I had one relative who took 3 operations, and 15 years. Had he stayed off the cigs after the first bought of cancer he might have stood a chance. Smokers don't all die early, and even those that do tend to take a disproportionate amount of medical resources to live for as long as they can. They do therefore place a much bigger care burden on society than healthier long lived people.
In short your math is bogus and I still think you're trying to justify your habit.
Elitist indeed. Have you read the way your posts come off lately?
Considering that your post was so easily misconstrued as a support for Godwin's law I wouldn't talk if I were you.
Invoking Godwin's law is nothing more than a slightly more sophisticated way of telling a person to shut up. (Slightly more sophisticated because it assumes knowledge of Internet history that makes it slightly elitist). In short's childish and stupid. You're now proposing another "law" modeled on that childish stupidity, and being moderated as "Insightful".
/. is just painful.
Sometimes reading
...and sometimes if enough good people reject a position, it becomes obvious that it's been filled with a pliable and unqualified yes-man.
We all make compromises sometimes, but that doesn't mean we should always compromise our principles to save our necks. Do that often enough and you're not part of the problem - you ARE the problem.
When I completed my Astronomy masters access to publicly available data from various sources (most notably NASA data made free to the public) was a real boon. It meant we could do analysis on actual real data instead of artificial or sanitized textbook material. A couple of the students built on this to do some original research. (Sadly that's not the way I went, as my time was more limited).
There are also lots of amateurs out there running a wide variety of very specialized packages to do everything from discovering asteroids to keeping tabs on the brightness of stars and watching for supernovae.
Would the law then become "Don't do anything we think might be suspicious"? At that point, you're saying the US government becomes an arbitrary entity, abandoning all constitutionally based jurisprudence - and the courts are happy to go along with it.
You mean like the US president's little habbit of wiretapping without a warrant, or your CIA's little habbit of spiriting people off to foreign countries and holding them without charge for almost 5 years? Or how about the whole thing with the RIAA/MPAA decide to financially ruin someone because they think one of their private dicks found an IP address somewhere in a log that may have belonged to them. I think you're being a bit naive.
As for the licensed crypto, you would also have to ensure that such legislation was effectively global, or people would just use a proxy based outside of the host country.
So they'd transmit in the clear (which could be intercepted) to a remote (read slow) proxy? What'd be the point if you're transmitting the information unencrypted to begin with? That makes no sense.
I'm not a fan of banning smoking or cigarette sales outright. That's what has been done with "hard" drugs and all you end up with is a criminal supply chain that thrives off this business. I also happen to think it's a losing battle trying to get people to do the right thing for themselves by forcing them into it. Laws intended to protect you from yourself assume stupidity of the individual and sacrifice their right to self-determination. Good laws focus on preventing people from infringing on each other's lives. So I have no problem with laws that set aside places where people can smoke. The trouble is that smokers don't just affect themselves but everyone within breathing distance - their friends and family first and foremost.
As for taxing cigarettes you'd have to tax them VERY heavily before you'd break even as you suggest. One major smoking related illness will cost more to treat than many many cartons of cigarettes. The trouble with making them even more expensive is that once again illegal supply chains come into being. The higher the price, the greater the potential reward running cigarettes illegally. Whereas the tax will price people out of smoking, illegal suppliers will find a price that's just within the smoker's financial tolerance. You also end up with an increase in crime as people struggle to pay for their habbit the way you see an increase in crime due to heroine addiction.
Also I have issues with a technique that relies on our citizens dying off. From a moral standpoint it's reprehensible. From a practical one, what happens as the techniques for extending these people's lives (but not quality of life) improves? The system falls apart.
Well I'm seeing the opposite running Vista Ultimate. Boot times aren't a huge issue for me (though XP wins out here too), but application start times and responsiveness are important to me,a nd Vista feels much slower here.
People can call me a liar, "call BS" or whatever else. I'm just reporting what I see.
You can call BS all you like. Do you usually call people you don't know liars?
I have a computer that works just as I've described. Both operating systems are running off the same drive. Boot time isn't my biggest concern either. Starting and running various apps however does. The whole thing feels a lot slower on Vista.
Boot is slower, but I could live with that. Everything is slowed down after boot to varying degrees. The more resource intensive the app the more I seem to notice it. Once again subjective.
As for "crapware" I haven't done a clean install but I have uninstalled several items that could be considered crapware. I am however running an antivirus suite (McAfee).
Well I'm dual booting Vista and XP on a new (less than 2 week old) Dell Inspiron 9400 with a Core 2, a go7900GS, and 2 Gig of RAM. XP flies. Vista crawls. Sorry I don't have less subjective benchmarks to give you but believe me booting into Vista feels like a chore. Sometime soon I'll turn down all the useless eyecandy and see if it's okay then.
Way to rationalize your addiction to or support of smoking.
Care to explain away the dozens of other smoking related illnesses, especially emphysema? I was watching a show about hospital treatment and patients and one patient was a guy that smoked for 30 years and had emphysema. An old bloke. They removed half his lungs and put him through therapy but he still struggles to do anything other than read and sleep because taking a few steps is exhausting. He admitted his condition was all self-inflicted. His recommendation on the disease: Don't get it if you can possibly avoid it.
Here's another idea. Try and calm down more naturally. Take up meditation or something. Change jobs, or relationships, or take a holiday. Get away from what's stressing you.
/. He was ranting about giving up caffeinated soft drinks and how he felt better for it but started his post with "I was going to do blah blah blah but I was too drunk". Moving from soft drink to water might be healthy but from softdrink to excessive alcohol is not. Moving from anti-depresenants to ciggarettes when your own flesh and blood has been killed by the ciggies in fucking insane.
Seriously giving up one drug for another because you prefer one set of side-effects to another is bullshit. Depression meds are all way over-perscribed. They should be a last resort for people who are going to become psychotic or harm themselves or others even though they've tried more natural remedies. That doesn't mean smoking is under-prescribed by a long shot.
Your argument reminds me of the other nut bag on
Honestly, some people are incredibly intelligent but have no fucking clue when it comes to "common" sense.
Try gimshop. It addresses many but not all of your issues.
http://gimpshop.blogspot.com/
Have you tried gimpshop? Basically gimp recompiled to make the defaults and windowing more like Photoshop.
http://gimpshopdotnet.blogspot.com/
http://gimpshop.blogspot.com/
He's a genuine magician alright. If you're taken in by his "magic", your wallet disappears. What's the bet the money doesn't actually disappear though but ends up contributing to Uri's lifestyle.
The way they've worked around it probably goes like this: "Free pr0n sets! See more of this hot chick! We don't want automated downloads of these sets, so you need to solve this code to get the download. What? It looks just like the hotmail cpachas? Yeah, we're using the same advanced technology here."
Wooohoooo! Free pr0n! Link please.
Salary has to do with supply and demand. Demand is only partly driven by quality. I've seen way too many employers focus on what knowledge an employee is bringing into the company and too few focus on an employee's ability to learn and their flexibility in coding.
I think the key to increasing the quality of coders out there is continued education, and plenty of peer review. It has to be constructive peer review and directed education. The peer review should take someone ideally completely unfamiliar with the code and ask them to look at it to see what's difficult to understand, and what's done badly. (Also what's done well. It can't all be a case of cutting down a person's work). Adherence to standards while important shouldn't be the focus. The focus should be managable and efficient code and those standards are necessary only where integration, redability and efficiency are concerned, not so you can fill in some damned ISO 9001 or 6 sigma document.
As for training, most employers are lucky to allocate a week out of the working year to education, yet expect their employees to be completely up to date with the technology they're using. Also learning algorithms and techniques be they general or specific to one environment shouldn't stop when you're done with a bachelor's degree.
Extremely unlikely. You'd be trashing the entire electronic commerce infrastructure which relies on solid encryption. And there's no way a corporately oriented government system is going to do that.
How about introducing a license to employ encryption. One where the banks and electronic trade organizations covered had a license that covered the end user. Anything done to employ encryption that hasn't been approved by an organization with a license is illegal. That'd make using PGP to send messages illegal for the guy on the street, but using a web browser to view an encrypted Internet banking page legal for the same guy.
Scary but doable I'm afraid.