PBS Has Expose' on Chemical Industry Coverups
on
Monsanto and PCBs
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· Score: 2, Informative
It's quite a coincidence that I just finished watching an expose' on my local PBS station about the chemical industry's pattern of cover ups and how they have made the US government their puppets.Trade Secrets
To those who wonder what GM crops have to do with PCB/chemical dumping, they're missing the point. The point is that if a company has a history of putting profits over public safety and have blatant disregard for human life, then how can you trust them when they say GM crops are safe? They may be safe, they may not be, but I for one do not find their opinions credible.
Show Summary:
Surveys of public opinion show that the majority of Americans believe that the government is making sure that they are protected against harmful chemicals. Is their understanding justified? Journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones report on how the chemical revolution of the past 50 years has produced thousands of man-made chemicals that have not been tested for their effect on the public's health and safety. The report is based on documents never before published and interviews with historians, scientists, and physicians who are exploring how chemicals affect the human body.
Here are some quotes from industry documents from transcript of Trade Secrets. I'll let you interpret them yourself:
September 28, 1981. Government Relations Committee. Pebble Beach.
"The Committee believes that the new climate in Washington is more reasoned and responsive....The election of the Reagan Administration appears to have produced changes which bode well for our industry."
"President Reagan directed EPA to delay proposing or finalizing regulations until it could be determined that they were cost-effective and necessary."
January 11, 1982. CMA Board of Directors. Grand Ballroom, Arizona Biltmore.
"Just ten days ago, TSCA celebrated its fifth birthday. The first five years of TSCA have seen numerous rules proposed by the Agency. To date, we have seen none of these types of rules finalized."
[TSCA: the Toxic Substances Control Act, one law intended to give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate toxic chemicals]
[Fact:To this day - almost 25 years after the Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted - only five types of chemicals, out of thousands, have been banned under the law.]
And yes, this patch has been sent to the author. His comment was more along the line of accountants are not script kiddies, so we don't need to worry too much. That is probably reasonable, too.
Well, now, I doubt all the script kiddies (hey guys!) need to be accountants to want to screw around with some company's money. They're not even technically competent, thereby the derogatory name "script kiddies". But you should not only be afraid of some mischievous kids, but also the very legitimate risk of corporate espionage.
A security hole is a security hole. It's irresponsible of anyone in the open source community to give short shrift to security while at the same time throwing darts at M$ for their lackadasical handling of security issues. I'm personally astonished that you got this kind of response from the SQL Ledger people.
Ah, another PostgreSQL vs. MySQL product comparison.
From the posts, SQL-Ledger uses a pgsql backend and NOLA uses a MySQL backend.
I'm not sure what others think, but I for one would be very scared about using MySQL as a mission-critical backend.
Several articles comparing the two (a good one here) have come up with the same basic complaints, MySQL might be fast in overall, but it fails 3 out of 4 of the basic ACID tests (Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). So it's extremely fault intolerent.
PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant and is thus a more reliable backend.
Yes, there are plug-in table managers for MySQL that are ACID compliant, but it's nicer to know that the core product already meets these basic requirements for a robust database.
So be sure you take a look at technology behind the systems before committing your critical systems to them.
Zork among the greatest? Nah...
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Uplink
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· Score: 1
"Zork was one of the all time greatest games ever, and it had *NO* graphics."
I hate it when people say things that aren't qualified appropriately.
I agree that the lack of graphics doesn't make a game bad. But I disagree with the classification of Zork.
Zork was one of the greatest games FOR ITS TIME. But when using the term "greatest game ever", you have to start including more recent developments.
Zork was great back then because there wasn't Half-Life, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, Age of Empires, Thief. But there were so many things wrong with it. It's interface is among the worst ever. Pure text interface with no indication of what words are valid. It hints that it understands english syntax, but it doesn't really. The synonym list is limited. And it lacked a real story arc. It was, pretty much, a string of close-ended puzzles. There was one, and only one non-intuitive way of solving each puzzle.
To make it one of the best ever, people would have to be willing to play it versus other possible games. [It's available if you're interested at woozle.org. Just use the link to the java applet SSH terminal to play.] I for one would rather play 100 other games before playing Zork. Even as a form of interactive fiction, Thief is much better.
It's easy to be the best when you're the only one on the field. Being important or groundbreaking doesn't make you permanently among the elite. The Model-T Ford is among the most important cars ever, but it is far from being among the best cars ever. I'd much rather do my commute in any of a couple hundred car models produced in the last decade than in a Model-T.
Some things stand the test of time. That makes them among the best ever. Zork hasn't withstood the test of time.
So let's not get all sappy with our reminiscing. Zork, Planetfall, Suspended was fun for their time, but like choose your own adventures, they're not pickin' up the chicks like they used to.
P=NP only means NP-complete problems are solvable in polynomial time O(n^t) where t is some constant (possibly very large constant).
The simplest problem to understand in NP space is optimization. EVERY optimization problem is NP-complete. If you want to find the shortest route to visit every city in the US, this is an optimization problem.
What a problem being in NP-complete space means is that if you can solve one problem in the space, you can solve all problems in that space (by transforming the other problems to look like the solved problem and then solving that).
So if you prove P=NP, then you can solve optimization problems in polynomial time O(n^t). Pick a problem where you could say "I wonder what the fastest/shortest/lightest way of doing this is?" and you could solve it in O(n^t).
4 caveats/common misconceptions:
O(n^t) could be very VERY large. n^237203 still takes a very long time.
As far as I know, encryption algorithms are NOT KNOWN to be NP-complete. So it's UNKNOWN what proving P=NP means to the encryption world.
People who say P=NP is not provable aren't conveying the situation. The situation is that it is UNKNOWN if P=NP or not. They don't know the answer.
There are problems that do not fall into NP-complete class. There are NP problems that are not complete. There are (provably) problems that cannot be solved. So P=NP doesn't really act as a cycle multiplier (you don't just get more pure computation), it just gives you another trick in your bag.
So my answer for what happens if P=NP is proven: Everything in the world gets cheaper.
Maybe the amount of sales of a product in the future SHOULD be part of programmers' earnings. Like actors, recording artists, and writers, programmers should get royalties on what they produce.
Work on enough successful projects over the years, and you can happily retire.
Some would say that this is called "stock options" but the difference between company-based and product-based performance is important.
And for those who say programming is a massive group endeavour that doesn't allow for royalties, I say consider the number of people and the amount of time it takes to make a movie, and still actors get royalties.
Ignoring the low-level implementation details (i.e. specification language, size, performance) which affect user experience in obvious ways, there much more basic issues when it comes to 3D as a user interface.
Lets be sure we're asking the right questions. The most important question is what task is this 3D 'technology' supposed to support.
There are three common types of interaction with system data:
1) Visualization - Seeing the data in an organized fashion
2) Manipulation - Changing the data in some way
3) Navigation - Getting from one piece of data to another
Using 3D often aids in visualization. The two main reasons to use 3D here are when: 1) there's a 3D spatial relationship between the data (molecules) or 2) an additional dimension is useful to see a pattern. Remember that 2D is a subset of 3D and having the 3rd dimension does allow one to convey more information. Perhaps the biggest 'problem' with 3D visualization is occlusion. But if you're using 3D correctly, then the reason you're using 3D is BECAUSE of the information occlusion conveys. If occlusion is bad thing for a particular visualization, then a 2D view will likely be better.
Manipulating 3D objects is often informative because you can look at the dataset from different sides. Defining the view of 3D objects is very natural for people (like when we turn a skull around in our hands). Defining which slice of the data, using a search or coordinate criteria is often harder. So 3D is often good for manipulation.
There are some very good and pretty bad things about 3D when the tasks are to visualize and manipulate data. But the nightmare comes when one attempts to navigate data. There's a reason we like TV and movies: we don't have to physically move to get the information we're interested in. And this is where 3D apps fail in supporting users' tasks. They usually force people to physically fly through the data to get to a related, or even totally unrelated, piece of information. The alternative is to 'teleport' people to the next bit of interesting information. However, as anyone who's fallen asleep in one place and woken up in another can attest to, teleportation is an extremely disorienting experience. So this is the fatal flaw of 3D displays: flying through the data is bad, but teleporting is bad.
Conclusion
So I think 3D can be useful in supporting visualization and manipulation tasks. But it is incredibly bad for navigating through data. Most 3D web projects emphasize navigation, and this is where they fail. Applications using 3D can succeed if they concentrate on what they do best, visualization and, to a lesser extent, manipulation of data. Navigation tasks should be left to the 2D world.
Slashdot Mirror
To those who wonder what GM crops have to do with PCB/chemical dumping, they're missing the point. The point is that if a company has a history of putting profits over public safety and have blatant disregard for human life, then how can you trust them when they say GM crops are safe? They may be safe, they may not be, but I for one do not find their opinions credible.
Show Summary:
Surveys of public opinion show that the majority of Americans believe that the government is making sure that they are protected against harmful chemicals. Is their understanding justified? Journalist Bill Moyers and producer Sherry Jones report on how the chemical revolution of the past 50 years has produced thousands of man-made chemicals that have not been tested for their effect on the public's health and safety. The report is based on documents never before published and interviews with historians, scientists, and physicians who are exploring how chemicals affect the human body.
Here are some quotes from industry documents from transcript of Trade Secrets. I'll let you interpret them yourself:
September 28, 1981. Government Relations Committee. Pebble Beach.
"The Committee believes that the new climate in Washington is more reasoned and responsive. ...The election of the Reagan Administration appears to have produced changes which bode well for our industry."
"President Reagan directed EPA to delay proposing or finalizing regulations until it could be determined that they were cost-effective and necessary."
January 11, 1982. CMA Board of Directors. Grand Ballroom, Arizona Biltmore. "Just ten days ago, TSCA celebrated its fifth birthday. The first five years of TSCA have seen numerous rules proposed by the Agency. To date, we have seen none of these types of rules finalized."
[TSCA: the Toxic Substances Control Act, one law intended to give the Environmental Protection Agency broad authority to regulate toxic chemicals]
[Fact:To this day - almost 25 years after the Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted - only five types of chemicals, out of thousands, have been banned under the law.]
Oh, that's nice, they never get anything.
Well, now, I doubt all the script kiddies (hey guys!) need to be accountants to want to screw around with some company's money. They're not even technically competent, thereby the derogatory name "script kiddies". But you should not only be afraid of some mischievous kids, but also the very legitimate risk of corporate espionage.
A security hole is a security hole. It's irresponsible of anyone in the open source community to give short shrift to security while at the same time throwing darts at M$ for their lackadasical handling of security issues. I'm personally astonished that you got this kind of response from the SQL Ledger people.
From the posts, SQL-Ledger uses a pgsql backend and NOLA uses a MySQL backend.
I'm not sure what others think, but I for one would be very scared about using MySQL as a mission-critical backend.
Several articles comparing the two (a good one here) have come up with the same basic complaints, MySQL might be fast in overall, but it fails 3 out of 4 of the basic ACID tests (Consistency, Isolation, and Durability). So it's extremely fault intolerent.
PostgreSQL is fully ACID compliant and is thus a more reliable backend.
Yes, there are plug-in table managers for MySQL that are ACID compliant, but it's nicer to know that the core product already meets these basic requirements for a robust database.
So be sure you take a look at technology behind the systems before committing your critical systems to them.
"Zork was one of the all time greatest games ever, and it had *NO* graphics."
I hate it when people say things that aren't qualified appropriately.
I agree that the lack of graphics doesn't make a game bad. But I disagree with the classification of Zork.
Zork was one of the greatest games FOR ITS TIME. But when using the term "greatest game ever", you have to start including more recent developments.
Zork was great back then because there wasn't Half-Life, Baldur's Gate, Diablo, Age of Empires, Thief. But there were so many things wrong with it. It's interface is among the worst ever. Pure text interface with no indication of what words are valid. It hints that it understands english syntax, but it doesn't really. The synonym list is limited. And it lacked a real story arc. It was, pretty much, a string of close-ended puzzles. There was one, and only one non-intuitive way of solving each puzzle.
To make it one of the best ever, people would have to be willing to play it versus other possible games. [It's available if you're interested at woozle.org. Just use the link to the java applet SSH terminal to play.] I for one would rather play 100 other games before playing Zork. Even as a form of interactive fiction, Thief is much better.
It's easy to be the best when you're the only one on the field. Being important or groundbreaking doesn't make you permanently among the elite. The Model-T Ford is among the most important cars ever, but it is far from being among the best cars ever. I'd much rather do my commute in any of a couple hundred car models produced in the last decade than in a Model-T.
Some things stand the test of time. That makes them among the best ever. Zork hasn't withstood the test of time.
So let's not get all sappy with our reminiscing. Zork, Planetfall, Suspended was fun for their time, but like choose your own adventures, they're not pickin' up the chicks like they used to.
The simplest problem to understand in NP space is optimization. EVERY optimization problem is NP-complete. If you want to find the shortest route to visit every city in the US, this is an optimization problem.
What a problem being in NP-complete space means is that if you can solve one problem in the space, you can solve all problems in that space (by transforming the other problems to look like the solved problem and then solving that).
So if you prove P=NP, then you can solve optimization problems in polynomial time O(n^t). Pick a problem where you could say "I wonder what the fastest/shortest/lightest way of doing this is?" and you could solve it in O(n^t).
4 caveats/common misconceptions:
O(n^t) could be very VERY large. n^237203 still takes a very long time.
As far as I know, encryption algorithms are NOT KNOWN to be NP-complete. So it's UNKNOWN what proving P=NP means to the encryption world.
People who say P=NP is not provable aren't conveying the situation. The situation is that it is UNKNOWN if P=NP or not. They don't know the answer.
There are problems that do not fall into NP-complete class. There are NP problems that are not complete. There are (provably) problems that cannot be solved. So P=NP doesn't really act as a cycle multiplier (you don't just get more pure computation), it just gives you another trick in your bag.
So my answer for what happens if P=NP is proven: Everything in the world gets cheaper.
Work on enough successful projects over the years, and you can happily retire.
Some would say that this is called "stock options" but the difference between company-based and product-based performance is important.
And for those who say programming is a massive group endeavour that doesn't allow for royalties, I say consider the number of people and the amount of time it takes to make a movie, and still actors get royalties.
__
"What's individual trust data? Never heard of it"
So the restraining order I received for alledgedly stalking Belle (from Beauty and the Best) was ahead of it's time. She's a babe.
If you got it, put it up. Let's use the tech like it's meant to be used.
Vanguard
Ignoring the low-level implementation details (i.e. specification language, size, performance) which affect user experience in obvious ways, there much more basic issues when it comes to 3D as a user interface.
Lets be sure we're asking the right questions. The most important question is what task is this 3D 'technology' supposed to support.
There are three common types of interaction with system data:
1) Visualization - Seeing the data in an organized fashion
2) Manipulation - Changing the data in some way
3) Navigation - Getting from one piece of data to another
Using 3D often aids in visualization. The two main reasons to use 3D here are when: 1) there's a 3D spatial relationship between the data (molecules) or 2) an additional dimension is useful to see a pattern. Remember that 2D is a subset of 3D and having the 3rd dimension does allow one to convey more information. Perhaps the biggest 'problem' with 3D visualization is occlusion. But if you're using 3D correctly, then the reason you're using 3D is BECAUSE of the information occlusion conveys. If occlusion is bad thing for a particular visualization, then a 2D view will likely be better.
Manipulating 3D objects is often informative because you can look at the dataset from different sides. Defining the view of 3D objects is very natural for people (like when we turn a skull around in our hands). Defining which slice of the data, using a search or coordinate criteria is often harder. So 3D is often good for manipulation.
There are some very good and pretty bad things about 3D when the tasks are to visualize and manipulate data. But the nightmare comes when one attempts to navigate data. There's a reason we like TV and movies: we don't have to physically move to get the information we're interested in. And this is where 3D apps fail in supporting users' tasks. They usually force people to physically fly through the data to get to a related, or even totally unrelated, piece of information. The alternative is to 'teleport' people to the next bit of interesting information. However, as anyone who's fallen asleep in one place and woken up in another can attest to, teleportation is an extremely disorienting experience. So this is the fatal flaw of 3D displays: flying through the data is bad, but teleporting is bad.
Conclusion
So I think 3D can be useful in supporting visualization and manipulation tasks. But it is incredibly bad for navigating through data. Most 3D web projects emphasize navigation, and this is where they fail. Applications using 3D can succeed if they concentrate on what they do best, visualization and, to a lesser extent, manipulation of data. Navigation tasks should be left to the 2D world.
Vanguard