Well stated. I'm gonna continue with a couple of points and apologize for calling troll since you put some thought on this response.
No worries, rapidly escalating, and de-escalating, arguments is a/. tradition.
I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.
I know they would like more than $7.5k, but you have to start somewhere. That amount will get you some bandwidth and hardware that can survive the/. effect or render a decent animation.
I think you could probably use an open source development model to design a pretty decent spaceship. That's not that different than designing an OS, though the dynamics are a little different since people can't really use a set of schematics the way they can use a program so I don't know if they'll be as motivated.
But actually building the hardware requires serious capital. I honestly wouldn't even try to raise the $7500, it's like someone announcing you're going to open a restaurant, then asking to borrow $2 to buy a cup of coffee. It just doesn't inspire confidence.
SpaceShipOne cost $25 million, the only open source(ish) project I can think of that raises nearly that much money is Wikipedia, and even they're probably a bit short. If they're going to have a shot they need some serious corporate sponsors who are willing to give them what they need in the way of funding and building space in exchange for advertising. Or a billionaire passionate about the project. And for either of those they'll need a lot of publicity and some good evidence that its going to succeed. And they should probably solicit the businesses and billionaires individually since they generally don't surf the web and think "Hmm, I'd like to donate several million dollars there"
They have some partners already, they should be looking there for the $7500 and the rack space, then get someone on board with serious capital backing who tells people that its a serious effort and they should come to help design a spaceship.
Just because one side of the debate has used bad data and judgment doesn't mean there is no merit to the debate. The other side does too. The trick is finding the truth in the whirlwind of lies and deceit.
Anecdotally, my brother works for a hospital. Everyone who works in the Emergency room was offered the H1N1 vaccine as soon as it became available. Each of those who got the vaccine came down with swine flu. Most of those who were unvacinated didn't.
These companies do make mistakes. Like any large organization with money at stake, they want to believe they can handle these problems quietly without large payouts. Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. I don't believe for a moment that the debate is over.
I readily acknowledge that the debate isn't over as Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have obviously yet to concede.
But the scientific debate has been over for years. There are definitely cases where pharmaceuticals have done unethical things, but the questions of vaccines and autism has been studied far too thoroughly by multiple scientists for that to be the case.
It's like using the fact that dirty judges exist to make the claim that the US legal system is staffed entirely by members of the Illuminati, conspiracies just don't scale like that.
There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
Anecdotal evidence can provide motivation for scientific research, but the moment you get good scientific research that addresses the issues and accounts for the anecdotes you can forget about the anecdotes.
Also, not to engage in Ad-Hominems, but when your movement is led by an unethical doctor with massive conflicts of interest and airhead former playboy models, and every study you try to publish has massive and obvious flaws, than it's a pretty good indication that the movement is full of BS.
>But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never >effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.
I thought that was just what Russia and the US did in the 50's and 60's. Granted they had the budgets of their whole countries to wager on it, but that doesn't hold water as an argument either for many reasons. I'll propose one - it may be hard, but not so fantastic to think that a project like this could be done in 2010 for a couple of orders of magnitude less dollars than in 1960.
If a couple other efforts had gotten there I may agree, but the USSR never made it, China hasn't make it, India hasn't made it. A faster processor isn't going to get you to the moon, you still need a lot of fuel and a lot of hardware.
I'm sorry you are so jaded by your open source volunteer work that you have lost all ability to dream big. Go back to your cube now and do whatever it is you do. Let the dreamers dream big, you sir are apparently not suited to it.
I'm not jaded, I'm very optimistic about open source and communities as a development model. But I'm also realistic enough to know that open source isn't a magic wand, you need conditions to make it work and I don't see those present.
Now that the site is up I do see they have some actual University and Industry partners, and if those groups are willing to devote significant manpower and resources than yes, they may have a shot (at least at landing robots on the moon).
But they're also trying to raise $7500 in donations. I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.
I hope they prove me wrong, if this effort succeeded that would be unbelievably awesome on multiple fronts. But hope alone isn't sufficient, and I just don't think it will work.
With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).
And your server, which you posted to/., can't even handle the/. effect!!
I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.
Ok, Sure, Why don't you volunteer and write that wikipedia page for us. That's what Community involvement is about. and, With that kind of community involvement, we'll get some people to take care of the servers, and well, even, eventually get to the moon. It all has to start somewhere!
How do I write the wikipedia page, I know nothing about your group other than the fact that you have unrealistic goals and your server is down.
As for a community I've run an open source project, and I know at the core you need some very dedicated people to do a lot of the heavy lifting. And for a hardware project where there are significant costs and geographic requirements that heavy lifting becomes a lot heavier. You don't just say "I'm going to do X" and a big group assembles and does most of X, you do a bunch of X and people show up when you have significant success. To do that for a moon shot you're going to need an initial group that's talented enough and financed enough to actually build some kind of test rocket that shows you're serious before you even start to build a real community.
Is this development model even tested? I know of no highly successful open source style hardware projects, if you can find a way to make your development model work with a car or laptop people might start taking you seriously. But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.
I know I sound very discouraging, and I'm trying to be. I've wasted my time on unrealistic projects before and I wish I had the common sense to bail earlier, even volunteer man-hours aren't free.
I know you're just asking for CAD advice and I hope you get some. But my advice is look at this with an outsiders perspective and seriously ask yourself if your plans are feasible.
With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).
And your server, which you posted to/., can't even handle the/. effect!!
I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.
I have always wondered if that would be a good way to go about reclaiming deserts. Less violently though, I'm not sure nukes would be all that effective at moving sand where you want it to go. Then again, that's a lot of digging.
True, but my method is also a type of Nuclear disarmament.
In fact it even allows Iran to acquire, and use Nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. Iran's nuclear program could save the world!
4. The extra CO2 acidifies the oceans screwing with the fishies and shellfish.
So now I give you the perfect geo-engineering solution to all these problems!
Step 1: Set off a bunch of Nukes in a desert somewhere, excavating giant holes in the ground.
Step 2: Dig a little path to the ocean and have it fill in the holes.
Benefits: First the ocean levels go down to their regular levels, yay! Second the resulting Nuclear winter offsets global warming, another yay! Third the desert is now ocean front property and not as deserty, maybe more farm land (do this in Africa for bonus famine offsetting points).
And lastly to handle the acidy oceans... the fallout from the Nukes mutates the fishies and shellfish to adapt to the carbonic acid oceans!
Now can I have my Nobel Peace now? Other than some minor side-effects this should be a pretty effective solution.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
I read that more as "Silverlight 4 finally supports these totally awesome features that everyone's been asking for, and that we already had in Moonlight. So now we (the Mono people) need to implement the rest of Silverlight 3 and 4, so we can run the upcoming flood of apps that use these features but don't specifically worry about being cross-platform."
Hmm, on second reading I think your interpretation is fairly accurate, I think the style threw me the first time I read it because it really does read like an official press release.
I still feel the emphasis really is on Silverlight, not Moonlight (the free implementation), which isn't ideal but is fine with me if the blog normally focuses on Moonlight and the post fits into the wider picture.
I should note I don't really know if that post in particular was a big issue, the iTWire summary drew that conclusion.
Splitting with GNU over a discussion of what can be written on Planet GNOME, seems a little extreme IMO...:)
And really I believe it is relevant to discuss what should be on Planet GNOME... Promotion for products shouldn't be there... Unless these products are GNOME related, and even then I'd say that ads shouldn't be on a community blog aggregation... Noted that the line between, review and promo/ad isn't always clear... So breaking with GNU over a discussion about that seems a bit out of hand...
Yeah, I just glanced at the discussion but don't think anything is coming of this. If the rest of the devs thought there was an actual possibility of GNOME leaving GNU I would have expected a LOT more action in the thread. Really I think this is best thought of as some members of a development team grumbling about internal politics over a few drinks.
The discussion itself seemed interesting, I think that things like Miguel's post don't belong on Planet GNOME, but someone talking about their development setup, which happens to include vmware as a tool, well that I think would be acceptable.
There is a blog aggregator called Planet GNOME which pulls together blog posts from various Gnome developers. One of these developers is Miguel de Icaza, a fairly senior GNOME developer (I believe he started both the GNOME and Mono projects, though I don't know his current position in them). Miguel is known, and somewhat infamous, for supporting MS Standards like C# (hence Mono, an opensource implementation of it), and OOXML.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
This was not the only time something like this had happened, these are blogs afterall, people write about all sorts of stuff. Thus people started discussing a code of conduct about appropriate topics for blogs on Planet GNOME.
Stallman stopped by to offer his opinion (just couple very short posts in a long discussion) saying that people shouldn't use Planet GNOME to talk about proprietary projects like promos for Silverlight or even talk about using vmware since Gnome is a GNU project and opposed to proprietary software.
Philip Van Hoof responded saying he disagreed and started talking about a split, a few other people started talking about the rules surrounding the vote and the rest kept talking about the idea of a code of conduct.
I don't really know who anyone is other than Miguel and Stallman, but my gut says that no vote is going to occur.
We all know we're supposed to work 9-5 completely focused on our tasks except for an hour for lunch and 2x15 minute breaks. But can anyone here actually do that?
Sometimes when I'm really focused on a task I'll stop the music, particularly if it has understandable lyrics which distract me from coding, but a lot of other times it's a choice between some slightly distracting music, or no distractions at all and just zoning out.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
You don't know about Microsoft's actions on privacy and you have no idea what they say about it. Did you know that both Bing and Google have their (very extensive) privacy policies linked on the bottom of their search pages?
Microsoft have got quite good at listing privacy policies and asking for permission before having their Windows software call back to home base. Generally speaking you can opt out of sending info back to their servers with the obvious exceptions like Genuine Windows Advantage and the annoying exception of Microsoft Security Essentials - where you have to choose either basic or advanced membership of Microsoft SpyNet (which collects info about discovered malware). I'm sure that previously you could opt out of that system.
I've read some of Google's privacy policies, as for MS I haven't read their policies and don't use any of their products.
Using Windows as the basis for comparison isn't the best thing since it's a different business model. Google's ad based model relies on a certain lack of privacy, and unless MS plans to lose money on Bing they'll have to look at the same trade-offs.
I'm all for discussion and criticism of Schmidt's statement, but I'm not sure I want to punish a company because their CEO was actually honest about their beliefs.
What more do you want? Confirmation from Netcraft? These sort of PR slips aren't allowed very often, and for good reason.
If you don't agree with the CEO's attitude, why shouldn't you stop using their services?
I'd rather go by the actions of the company.
In Google's case their actions show they don't respect your privacy, but they're pretty open about their lack of respect.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
And here we see Google falling because they think they're "too big" and "dont-be-evil" to take their users privacy seriously...
I actually applaud Firefox for this change. Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
Google certainly doesn't have a great track record for privacy, but is MS any better?
I'm all for discussion and criticism of Schmidt's statement, but I'm not sure I want to punish a company because their CEO was actually honest about their beliefs.
Say you're teaching them how to use mathematical approximation algorithms to quickly compute line intersections.
You could use a simple graphing package and have them use their algorithm to draw the two vectors and see how close they get.
Or you could turn the vectors into arrows and have them try to shoot down another arrow in mid-flight.
Which would you have more fun writing?
The first. I don't know about you, but I never took one class at a time in college. If the professor had the option of assigning two different assignments, which both taught exactly the same subject matter, but the "fun" option was going to add 3x the time commitment, I would take the quicker and equally educational assignment almost every time. Besides, even if I had the academic time for the longer assignment, it was usually more valuable to socialize than make a computer arrow shoot another computer arrow just because.
That said, the correct assignment in such cases is usually to assign the first, and tack on some trivial bonus credit for the second. That's usually just enough motivation that the people who think the additional task looks fun, that they'll do it and thoroughly enjoy themselves, while those with different priorities don't have much reason to waste their time with it.
Well my concept wasn't that you have to write the code to draw a line or an arrow, just that you're calling libraries with a different function.
A better example is I'm TAing a 1st year perl course, one of the recent assignments was a battleship game. It was probably one of the tougher assignments, not because it was a game, just because it was tougher. But the students actually did better than average on it. I suspect that one of the big reasons is that they found it a lot more fun to work on, partially because it was a game, but moreso because they knew its purpose.
Also note that even with a full course load your big constraint isn't time, it's willpower. Even if a particular assignment is more absolute work, if it's also more fun to work on chances are that you'll be able to complete before the slightly simpler but boring assignment because you want to work on it.
I think the point isn't that the courses are teaching useless stuff, but rather they're teaching the things using examples that the students don't find relevant. A lot of CS assignments consist of fairly contrived tasks that test the immediate task and nothing else. They do the job but the student doesn't have a sense of accomplishment since their program hasn't really done anything useful, just completed a contrived task. Games on the other hand have the objective of fun, so the moment the user has written a game they've written a useful application. This gives them a much greater sense of accomplishment.
Say you're teaching them how to use mathematical approximation algorithms to quickly compute line intersections.
You could use a simple graphing package and have them use their algorithm to draw the two vectors and see how close they get.
Or you could turn the vectors into arrows and have them try to shoot down another arrow in mid-flight.
You're right, I hide things that are confusing to the user.
Except scientists should not hide their data and should never ever paint over statistically calculated trends with trends they assume must be there.
If the hockey stick curve faced downwards the last few years, then so be it.
But I will never trust scientists that make changes to their data because they think the results are not right.
But my point is that they're not hiding data, they're hiding misleading trends.
Granted, it's something that you need to look at very carefully, and be very open about when you're doing it. But if it makes the paper more correct than I think it's allowable.
Real scientists either re-create the data points if possible, exclude them if they are not critically important or carefully analyze their methodology if the suprising trend persists.
But real scientists will not mask a surprising trend. Only liars and hypocrites do.
According to the explanation given this isn't a surprising or unexplained trend they're trying to hide. It's a case of "we know the data is good up till X but afterwards has a bad trend because of Y, so lets try to hide Y" when everyone is familiar with X and Y.
Why not? I mean, sure Torvalds isn't exactly a Ghandi (who ironically never got one, IIRC)...
...but then again, look who else got one: Jimmy Carter, Al Gore, Barack Obama - not as if these three gents had really done too much to earn it (okay, Carter brokered the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement back in the 1970's which later fell apart, and did a lot of post-presidential negotiation work, but really... not much done by any of 'em - esp. compared to the likes of Martin Luther King Jr, FFS...)
Well I think Gore deserves credit for turning climate change into a legitimate political issues in the US. I don't know if/when legislation will come out of it but Gore certainly has done a lot in casting himself as the American AGW champion.
Sure there could be a blatant bombshell but that's probably not what will happen.
My concern is that with something like this you need a lot of experience with the science to evaluate it, and a lot of time to go through the emails to figure out what they're saying.
You basically need the same level of understanding that you'd get reading a scientific paper, but in this case you don't have a paper, just some random emails.
So besides someone very skilled and with a lot of time you need someone with a ton of integrity since it's very easy to take private comments out of context.
Do you honestly think those are the people who will be combing these emails?
Whether a scientist's discoveries support or debunk global warming hypotheses, they still get the same amount of grant money.
Good God, who made you up? Grant money flows to scientists whose results are published by respected journals, and cited by other scientists.
And how do you get published in respected journals and cited by other scientists? Write good papers and do solid research. Sure it's possible that some kind of crazy groupthink is going on suppressing the good anti-AGW papers.
But isn't is also possible that they aren't getting published and cited because they aren't writing good papers or doing solid research? I mean if AGW is correct than it would be pretty hard to write a good anti-AGW paper...
Apparently, you missed the emails where the following was written:
"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that-take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...What do others think?"
"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"
Yes, this sounds like the scientific method at its best - try to shut up and demean anyone who disagrees with you, ensure that they aren't published or cited, and hence are shut out of the grant money gravy train. Meanwhile, hide your data from public view, and privately chat about how you manipulated it.
I'm no authority on whether AGW exists or doesn't, but the actions of those who claim it is true certainly don't fill me with any confidence.
I don't see anything wrong with this. They're saying that an editor with a strong bias is letting junk papers into a journal that gives false legitimacy to the papers. What do you expect them to write in that scenario.
Feel free to provide a context, a hypothetical context, a flat our fairytale if you like. But make us believe that a self-respecting scientist uses the word "hide" when they mean "correct" and "*the* decline" when they mean "*an* error". This would not happen if the scientist was a dyslexic mutant with Tourette's.
Really? It seems a perfectly reasonable turn of speech to me. You're trying to graph something, but the function shows an erroneous decline at some point, so you try to "hide the decline" that occurs at that point. In another context I'm writing a program and a that is normally useful button is confusing users at one point, so I try to "hide the button" at that point, I'm not trying to mislead people just remove misinformation.
As for the "dyslexic mutant with Tourette's" I don't know if you've ever heard a scientist talk, but they generally talk pretty much like normal people, including the usage of sometimes odd phrases that can sound bad when taken out of context.
"Hide the decline" means covering a statistical trend and that is truly nefarious and unworthy of any scientist, no matter whose money sponsors the labcoats at this particular place. Even a real error correction would've needed more explanation on what exactly was the noise or error and what was the signal or trend, to make sure it wasn't the other way around.
Futzing results of statistical analysis is a great boo-boo in any but all cases and we caught AGW red-handed.
It certainly is possible that this scientist in particular was trying some sleight of hand with their data, frankly the quote is consistent with either situation.
As for catching AGW red-handed? You have a case of ONE scientist in ONE email sounding like they might have done something dishonest in a paper. And you're translating that into proof of some big conspiracy? You should give Jenny McCarthy a call, you're just the kind of scientific investigator that the anti-vaxxers love.
Slashdot Mirror
Well stated. I'm gonna continue with a couple of points and apologize for calling troll since you put some thought on this response.
No worries, rapidly escalating, and de-escalating, arguments is a /. tradition.
I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.
I know they would like more than $7.5k, but you have to start somewhere. That amount will get you some bandwidth and hardware that can survive the /. effect or render a decent animation.
I think you could probably use an open source development model to design a pretty decent spaceship. That's not that different than designing an OS, though the dynamics are a little different since people can't really use a set of schematics the way they can use a program so I don't know if they'll be as motivated.
But actually building the hardware requires serious capital. I honestly wouldn't even try to raise the $7500, it's like someone announcing you're going to open a restaurant, then asking to borrow $2 to buy a cup of coffee. It just doesn't inspire confidence.
SpaceShipOne cost $25 million, the only open source(ish) project I can think of that raises nearly that much money is Wikipedia, and even they're probably a bit short. If they're going to have a shot they need some serious corporate sponsors who are willing to give them what they need in the way of funding and building space in exchange for advertising. Or a billionaire passionate about the project. And for either of those they'll need a lot of publicity and some good evidence that its going to succeed. And they should probably solicit the businesses and billionaires individually since they generally don't surf the web and think "Hmm, I'd like to donate several million dollars there"
They have some partners already, they should be looking there for the $7500 and the rack space, then get someone on board with serious capital backing who tells people that its a serious effort and they should come to help design a spaceship.
Just because one side of the debate has used bad data and judgment doesn't mean there is no merit to the debate. The other side does too. The trick is finding the truth in the whirlwind of lies and deceit.
Anecdotally, my brother works for a hospital. Everyone who works in the Emergency room was offered the H1N1 vaccine as soon as it became available. Each of those who got the vaccine came down with swine flu. Most of those who were unvacinated didn't.
These companies do make mistakes. Like any large organization with money at stake, they want to believe they can handle these problems quietly without large payouts. Is there a link between vaccines and autism? I don't know. I don't believe for a moment that the debate is over.
I readily acknowledge that the debate isn't over as Wakefield and Jenny McCarthy have obviously yet to concede.
But the scientific debate has been over for years. There are definitely cases where pharmaceuticals have done unethical things, but the questions of vaccines and autism has been studied far too thoroughly by multiple scientists for that to be the case.
It's like using the fact that dirty judges exist to make the claim that the US legal system is staffed entirely by members of the Illuminati, conspiracies just don't scale like that.
There's way too much anecdotal evidence, even if there is no merit.
The plural of anecdote isn't data.
Anecdotal evidence can provide motivation for scientific research, but the moment you get good scientific research that addresses the issues and accounts for the anecdotes you can forget about the anecdotes.
Also, not to engage in Ad-Hominems, but when your movement is led by an unethical doctor with massive conflicts of interest and airhead former playboy models, and every study you try to publish has massive and obvious flaws, than it's a pretty good indication that the movement is full of BS.
Ok, I'm gonna feed the Troll on this one...
>But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never >effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.
I thought that was just what Russia and the US did in the 50's and 60's. Granted they had the budgets of their whole countries to wager on it, but that doesn't hold water as an argument either for many reasons. I'll propose one - it may be hard, but not so fantastic to think that a project like this could be done in 2010 for a couple of orders of magnitude less dollars than in 1960.
If a couple other efforts had gotten there I may agree, but the USSR never made it, China hasn't make it, India hasn't made it. A faster processor isn't going to get you to the moon, you still need a lot of fuel and a lot of hardware.
I'm sorry you are so jaded by your open source volunteer work that you have lost all ability to dream big. Go back to your cube now and do whatever it is you do. Let the dreamers dream big, you sir are apparently not suited to it.
I'm not jaded, I'm very optimistic about open source and communities as a development model. But I'm also realistic enough to know that open source isn't a magic wand, you need conditions to make it work and I don't see those present.
Now that the site is up I do see they have some actual University and Industry partners, and if those groups are willing to devote significant manpower and resources than yes, they may have a shot (at least at landing robots on the moon).
But they're also trying to raise $7500 in donations. I honestly think that if you have the resources to have a legitimate shot than $7500 isn't an amount you'd bother fund-raising.
I hope they prove me wrong, if this effort succeeded that would be unbelievably awesome on multiple fronts. But hope alone isn't sufficient, and I just don't think it will work.
You're going to put a man on the moon.
With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).
And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!
I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.
Ok, Sure, Why don't you volunteer and write that wikipedia page for us. That's what Community involvement is about. and, With that kind of community involvement, we'll get some people to take care of the servers, and well, even, eventually get to the moon. It all has to start somewhere!
How do I write the wikipedia page, I know nothing about your group other than the fact that you have unrealistic goals and your server is down.
As for a community I've run an open source project, and I know at the core you need some very dedicated people to do a lot of the heavy lifting. And for a hardware project where there are significant costs and geographic requirements that heavy lifting becomes a lot heavier. You don't just say "I'm going to do X" and a big group assembles and does most of X, you do a bunch of X and people show up when you have significant success. To do that for a moon shot you're going to need an initial group that's talented enough and financed enough to actually build some kind of test rocket that shows you're serious before you even start to build a real community.
Is this development model even tested? I know of no highly successful open source style hardware projects, if you can find a way to make your development model work with a car or laptop people might start taking you seriously. But you don't start by landing a manned spaceship on the moon using a development model that's never effectively been applied to large scale hardware projects.
I know I sound very discouraging, and I'm trying to be. I've wasted my time on unrealistic projects before and I wish I had the common sense to bail earlier, even volunteer man-hours aren't free.
I know you're just asking for CAD advice and I hope you get some. But my advice is look at this with an outsiders perspective and seriously ask yourself if your plans are feasible.
You're going to put a man on the moon.
With your organization that doesn't even have a wikipedia page (okay, maybe it will now since I posted the link).
And your server, which you posted to /., can't even handle the /. effect!!
I hope you and the other readers get some interesting suggestions about modelling tools, but I'm sorry, you don't have a remote possibility of making a moon shot.
Actually this means advertising is funding open source, which is fine with me.
If MS/Yahoo offer a service to Ubuntu users, and both parties benefit from that arrangement, than I don't really see a big problem here.
Too bad the material that gets removed to make a crater has to go somewhere.
It does go somewhere, it goes to the side of the crater and vaporized into the atmosphere.
Be honest, you just wanna see a huge kaboom, like everyone else here!
Not just any kaboom, it's supposed to be an earth-shattering kaboom!
I have always wondered if that would be a good way to go about reclaiming deserts. Less violently though, I'm not sure nukes would be all that effective at moving sand where you want it to go. Then again, that's a lot of digging.
True, but my method is also a type of Nuclear disarmament.
In fact it even allows Iran to acquire, and use Nuclear weapons for peaceful purposes. Iran's nuclear program could save the world!
This research has inspired me to save the planet.
Consider, what are the 3 big problems with AGW?
1. The climate gets warmer than we'd like.
2. The sea levels rise.
3. Mass famine as the farmland goes dry.
4. The extra CO2 acidifies the oceans screwing with the fishies and shellfish.
So now I give you the perfect geo-engineering solution to all these problems!
Step 1: Set off a bunch of Nukes in a desert somewhere, excavating giant holes in the ground.
Step 2: Dig a little path to the ocean and have it fill in the holes.
Benefits: First the ocean levels go down to their regular levels, yay! Second the resulting Nuclear winter offsets global warming, another yay!
Third the desert is now ocean front property and not as deserty, maybe more farm land (do this in Africa for bonus famine offsetting points).
And lastly to handle the acidy oceans... the fallout from the Nukes mutates the fishies and shellfish to adapt to the carbonic acid oceans!
Now can I have my Nobel Peace now? Other than some minor side-effects this should be a pretty effective solution.
In this instance Miguel wrote a blog post about Silverlight that reads like a press release. Silverlight is a proprietary and patent-encumbered replacement for Flash written by Microsoft.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
I read that more as "Silverlight 4 finally supports these totally awesome features that everyone's been asking for, and that we already had in Moonlight. So now we (the Mono people) need to implement the rest of Silverlight 3 and 4, so we can run the upcoming flood of apps that use these features but don't specifically worry about being cross-platform."
Hmm, on second reading I think your interpretation is fairly accurate, I think the style threw me the first time I read it because it really does read like an official press release.
I still feel the emphasis really is on Silverlight, not Moonlight (the free implementation), which isn't ideal but is fine with me if the blog normally focuses on Moonlight and the post fits into the wider picture.
I should note I don't really know if that post in particular was a big issue, the iTWire summary drew that conclusion.
Splitting with GNU over a discussion of what can be written on Planet GNOME, seems a little extreme IMO... :)
And really I believe it is relevant to discuss what should be on Planet GNOME... Promotion for products shouldn't be there... Unless these products are GNOME related, and even then I'd say that ads shouldn't be on a community blog aggregation... Noted that the line between, review and promo/ad isn't always clear... So breaking with GNU over a discussion about that seems a bit out of hand...
Yeah, I just glanced at the discussion but don't think anything is coming of this. If the rest of the devs thought there was an actual possibility of GNOME leaving GNU I would have expected a LOT more action in the thread. Really I think this is best thought of as some members of a development team grumbling about internal politics over a few drinks.
The discussion itself seemed interesting, I think that things like Miguel's post don't belong on Planet GNOME, but someone talking about their development setup, which happens to include vmware as a tool, well that I think would be acceptable.
There is a blog aggregator called Planet GNOME which pulls together blog posts from various Gnome developers. One of these developers is Miguel de Icaza, a fairly senior GNOME developer (I believe he started both the GNOME and Mono projects, though I don't know his current position in them). Miguel is known, and somewhat infamous, for supporting MS Standards like C# (hence Mono, an opensource implementation of it), and OOXML.
In this instance Miguel wrote a blog post about Silverlight that reads like a press release. Silverlight is a proprietary and patent-encumbered replacement for Flash written by Microsoft.
Thus a promo for Silverlight was showing up on Planet GNOME.
This was not the only time something like this had happened, these are blogs afterall, people write about all sorts of stuff. Thus people started discussing a code of conduct about appropriate topics for blogs on Planet GNOME.
Stallman stopped by to offer his opinion (just couple very short posts in a long discussion) saying that people shouldn't use Planet GNOME to talk about proprietary projects like promos for Silverlight or even talk about using vmware since Gnome is a GNU project and opposed to proprietary software.
Philip Van Hoof responded saying he disagreed and started talking about a split, a few other people started talking about the rules surrounding the vote and the rest kept talking about the idea of a code of conduct.
I don't really know who anyone is other than Miguel and Stallman, but my gut says that no vote is going to occur.
That's a valid argument. They've actually done a study finding that people can remember things better when doodling.
We all know we're supposed to work 9-5 completely focused on our tasks except for an hour for lunch and 2x15 minute breaks. But can anyone here actually do that?
Sometimes when I'm really focused on a task I'll stop the music, particularly if it has understandable lyrics which distract me from coding, but a lot of other times it's a choice between some slightly distracting music, or no distractions at all and just zoning out.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
You don't know about Microsoft's actions on privacy and you have no idea what they say about it. Did you know that both Bing and Google have their (very extensive) privacy policies linked on the bottom of their search pages?
Microsoft have got quite good at listing privacy policies and asking for permission before having their Windows software call back to home base. Generally speaking you can opt out of sending info back to their servers with the obvious exceptions like Genuine Windows Advantage and the annoying exception of Microsoft Security Essentials - where you have to choose either basic or advanced membership of Microsoft SpyNet (which collects info about discovered malware). I'm sure that previously you could opt out of that system.
I've read some of Google's privacy policies, as for MS I haven't read their policies and don't use any of their products.
Using Windows as the basis for comparison isn't the best thing since it's a different business model. Google's ad based model relies on a certain lack of privacy, and unless MS plans to lose money on Bing they'll have to look at the same trade-offs.
I'm all for discussion and criticism of Schmidt's statement, but I'm not sure I want to punish a company because their CEO was actually honest about their beliefs.
What more do you want? Confirmation from Netcraft? These sort of PR slips aren't allowed very often, and for good reason.
If you don't agree with the CEO's attitude, why shouldn't you stop using their services?
I'd rather go by the actions of the company.
In Google's case their actions show they don't respect your privacy, but they're pretty open about their lack of respect.
For MS I honestly don't know a lot about their actions on privacy, but I doubt they'd be any better than Google and I don't want to reward them for hiding their intentions.
And here we see Google falling because they think they're "too big" and "dont-be-evil" to take their users privacy seriously...
I actually applaud Firefox for this change. Marketing companies shouldn't just fuck everyone in the ass for their own gain.
Google certainly doesn't have a great track record for privacy, but is MS any better?
I'm all for discussion and criticism of Schmidt's statement, but I'm not sure I want to punish a company because their CEO was actually honest about their beliefs.
Say you're teaching them how to use mathematical approximation algorithms to quickly compute line intersections.
You could use a simple graphing package and have them use their algorithm to draw the two vectors and see how close they get.
Or you could turn the vectors into arrows and have them try to shoot down another arrow in mid-flight.
Which would you have more fun writing?
The first. I don't know about you, but I never took one class at a time in college. If the professor had the option of assigning two different assignments, which both taught exactly the same subject matter, but the "fun" option was going to add 3x the time commitment, I would take the quicker and equally educational assignment almost every time. Besides, even if I had the academic time for the longer assignment, it was usually more valuable to socialize than make a computer arrow shoot another computer arrow just because.
That said, the correct assignment in such cases is usually to assign the first, and tack on some trivial bonus credit for the second. That's usually just enough motivation that the people who think the additional task looks fun, that they'll do it and thoroughly enjoy themselves, while those with different priorities don't have much reason to waste their time with it.
Well my concept wasn't that you have to write the code to draw a line or an arrow, just that you're calling libraries with a different function.
A better example is I'm TAing a 1st year perl course, one of the recent assignments was a battleship game. It was probably one of the tougher assignments, not because it was a game, just because it was tougher. But the students actually did better than average on it. I suspect that one of the big reasons is that they found it a lot more fun to work on, partially because it was a game, but moreso because they knew its purpose.
Also note that even with a full course load your big constraint isn't time, it's willpower. Even if a particular assignment is more absolute work, if it's also more fun to work on chances are that you'll be able to complete before the slightly simpler but boring assignment because you want to work on it.
I think the point isn't that the courses are teaching useless stuff, but rather they're teaching the things using examples that the students don't find relevant. A lot of CS assignments consist of fairly contrived tasks that test the immediate task and nothing else. They do the job but the student doesn't have a sense of accomplishment since their program hasn't really done anything useful, just completed a contrived task. Games on the other hand have the objective of fun, so the moment the user has written a game they've written a useful application. This gives them a much greater sense of accomplishment.
Say you're teaching them how to use mathematical approximation algorithms to quickly compute line intersections.
You could use a simple graphing package and have them use their algorithm to draw the two vectors and see how close they get.
Or you could turn the vectors into arrows and have them try to shoot down another arrow in mid-flight.
Which would you have more fun writing?
Not entirely.
Depending on the application, and the user, there are a lot of advantages in using applications managed by packaged.
And while some packages can be easily installed in the user's home directly, others do require / as an install base.
You're right, I hide things that are confusing to the user.
Except scientists should not hide their data and should never ever paint over statistically calculated trends with trends they assume must be there.
If the hockey stick curve faced downwards the last few years, then so be it.
But I will never trust scientists that make changes to their data because they think the results are not right.
But my point is that they're not hiding data, they're hiding misleading trends.
Granted, it's something that you need to look at very carefully, and be very open about when you're doing it. But if it makes the paper more correct than I think it's allowable.
Real scientists either re-create the data points if possible, exclude them if they are not critically important or carefully analyze their methodology if the suprising trend persists.
But real scientists will not mask a surprising trend. Only liars and hypocrites do.
According to the explanation given this isn't a surprising or unexplained trend they're trying to hide. It's a case of "we know the data is good up till X but afterwards has a bad trend because of Y, so lets try to hide Y" when everyone is familiar with X and Y.
Why not? I mean, sure Torvalds isn't exactly a Ghandi (who ironically never got one, IIRC)...
Well I think Gore deserves credit for turning climate change into a legitimate political issues in the US. I don't know if/when legislation will come out of it but Gore certainly has done a lot in casting himself as the American AGW champion.
Sure there could be a blatant bombshell but that's probably not what will happen.
My concern is that with something like this you need a lot of experience with the science to evaluate it, and a lot of time to go through the emails to figure out what they're saying.
You basically need the same level of understanding that you'd get reading a scientific paper, but in this case you don't have a paper, just some random emails.
So besides someone very skilled and with a lot of time you need someone with a ton of integrity since it's very easy to take private comments out of context.
Do you honestly think those are the people who will be combing these emails?
This is a quote-miners dream.
Whether a scientist's discoveries support or debunk global warming hypotheses, they still get the same amount of grant money.
Good God, who made you up? Grant money flows to scientists whose results are published by respected journals, and cited by other scientists.
And how do you get published in respected journals and cited by other scientists? Write good papers and do solid research. Sure it's possible that some kind of crazy groupthink is going on suppressing the good anti-AGW papers.
But isn't is also possible that they aren't getting published and cited because they aren't writing good papers or doing solid research? I mean if AGW is correct than it would be pretty hard to write a good anti-AGW paper...
Apparently, you missed the emails where the following was written:
"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that-take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...What do others think?"
"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"
Yes, this sounds like the scientific method at its best - try to shut up and demean anyone who disagrees with you, ensure that they aren't published or cited, and hence are shut out of the grant money gravy train. Meanwhile, hide your data from public view, and privately chat about how you manipulated it.
I'm no authority on whether AGW exists or doesn't, but the actions of those who claim it is true certainly don't fill me with any confidence.
I don't see anything wrong with this. They're saying that an editor with a strong bias is letting junk papers into a journal that gives false legitimacy to the papers. What do you expect them to write in that scenario.
I cant think of any context that would transmute
written "hide the decline"
into
meaning "correct an error"
Feel free to provide a context, a hypothetical context, a flat our fairytale if you like. But make us believe that a self-respecting scientist uses the word "hide" when they mean "correct" and "*the* decline" when they mean "*an* error". This would not happen if the scientist was a dyslexic mutant with Tourette's.
Really? It seems a perfectly reasonable turn of speech to me. You're trying to graph something, but the function shows an erroneous decline at some point, so you try to "hide the decline" that occurs at that point. In another context I'm writing a program and a that is normally useful button is confusing users at one point, so I try to "hide the button" at that point, I'm not trying to mislead people just remove misinformation.
As for the "dyslexic mutant with Tourette's" I don't know if you've ever heard a scientist talk, but they generally talk pretty much like normal people, including the usage of sometimes odd phrases that can sound bad when taken out of context.
"Hide the decline" means covering a statistical trend and that is truly nefarious and unworthy of any scientist, no matter whose money sponsors the labcoats at this particular place. Even a real error correction would've needed more explanation on what exactly was the noise or error and what was the signal or trend, to make sure it wasn't the other way around.
Futzing results of statistical analysis is a great boo-boo in any but all cases and we caught AGW red-handed.
It certainly is possible that this scientist in particular was trying some sleight of hand with their data, frankly the quote is consistent with either situation.
As for catching AGW red-handed? You have a case of ONE scientist in ONE email sounding like they might have done something dishonest in a paper. And you're translating that into proof of some big conspiracy? You should give Jenny McCarthy a call, you're just the kind of scientific investigator that the anti-vaxxers love.