Having taken the time to read through it, I was expecting to be informed about what aspects of agile development actually work. What I actually got out of it is "Agile Sux - Google Rox!". There's more details about Google than that, and it's very informative about their environment, but I saw absolutely nothing that would suggest that there's a "good agile" out there, because nothing that the author described has anything with the cannonical agile methodologies. Maybe he can call it Agile from the perspective of "This is how Agile would have been implemented in the Positive Mirror Universe from Episode 27 of All Programmers Live In Hell", but I drew nothing from it that I could use in a less extreme business environment. In fact, I'd say that nobody below the level of CTO could possibly make use of that information.
If you've spent any time in second life, you'd know that the clothing strongly ignores practicality and sensibility. Part of it is that virtual clothes weigh nothing and are indestructable, so you can make any shape or size of outfit you want (even including costumes like Ed-209, and people can wear them with about as much effort as a bikini without having to worry about getting into a car, or even about ever having to wash it. A second lost consideration is fabric. In real life, the difference between satin and cheap cotton is horribly obvious to anyone. In second life, you have to go through a lot of effort to even make that kind of thing noticable, and even then there's no way to make a difference in stiffness. A look at walks down some of the fashion show runways gives people a clue what designers would produce if practicality were meaningless, and second life is an order of magnitude worse than that.
Why is it that we keep hearing about this kind of advancement "to be available in five to ten years", and yet the storage capacity of batteries has been stagnated for at least that long?
I can't moderate this comment up any more than it already is, so I'm foregoing the opportunity to moderate any of this forum in order to suggest that the readers take a good gander at this post and take it seriously.
Any sufficently insular group can convince themselves of any idea they choose simply by weeding out those that don't agree with them. This is a given. What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction. You'll still get plenty of actual facts (or at least well supported truths), but those will require supplementing from an inversely biased truth source.
What you CAN do is identify those thing for which there is no natural bias in the group. That's a little harder, but not impossible. For instance, I don't belive that Slashdotters have a particular reason for supporting Democrats over Republicans, so political statements don't need to be taken with as large a grain of salt. Comments about GWB are an exception to this because Slashdotters notably value intelligence, and he's a blatant idiot.
With Wikipedia, you have a group that is very stringently non-insular. There are people of all biases, and they are encouraged to intelligently consider each other's ideas. The way they rate each other is by how well they back up what they have to say with supporting fact. They're notorious for disregarding credentials as an ad-hominem attack - only the information is important. I think that this particular scale of superiority is especially resistant to the kind of flaws that other rating systems fall prey to.
This isn't really worth responding to, but I'll use it as an excuse to provide some good information for those who are actually listening. I'm sure that this information will slide off of the anononymous coward's consciousness as conflicting with something that he has his ego resting on.
Marijuana is psycologically addictive, similar to television or the reading of fiction. It creates a rest state that we come to rely upon. If you spend more than an hour a day watching television, then you're just as guilty of wasting your life away as your typical pot smoker. If you spend more than two hours a day watching tv, then you're up there with the wake and bakes.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is addictive the same way that morphine is. In fact, by stimulating the production of endogenous morphine (commonly called endorphin), it results in a state where the person feels that alcohol is the answer to all of their problems. Compounded by the disablement of the judgement facilities that alcohol causes (via extensive GABA supplementation), this results in a situation where the user doesn't even realize how bad he's gotten.
With alcohol, the only real way to know how drunk you are (short of "damn, I can't walk any more!") is to count your drinks. The judgment disablement makes it nearly impossible to tell the fine gradients of drunk. With marijuana there is no "judgement relief effect". A stoned person has no problem telling just how stoned he is, and how disabled his reflexes are. Thus, a stoned person may be impared, but will compensate for it. A drunk person, on the other hand, won't realize that they're impared. When driving, this means that drunks try to drive normally while stoners drive like little old ladies.
Also, for the four major illegal drugs used today (marijuana, cocaine, ecstacy, and methamphetamines), use has in all cases increased since illegalization. Marijuana was a minor problem among mexican imigrants and jazz singers in 1937. Since 1970, cocaine use has tripled. Most of us are well aware of the rise of ecstacy and meth. Illegalization doesn't prevent the use of these things, it popularizes them. When prohibition was passed there were about 400 bars in New York City. When it was repealed, an estimated 8,000 speakeasies competed to become respectable bars, but the drop in purchase price of alcohol resulted in most of them folding.
The murder rate skyrocketed during prohibition, dropped immediately after, and has jumped up again in the 40 years since the "War on Drugs" was declared.
Well, no, marijuana prohibition is the alcohol prohibition of the modern age. With the sole details that the drug is significantly less harmful than alcohol, and the effects of the prohibition are significantly more widespread and harmful, it's essentially identical. We're just so used to it that we don't even notice any more.
Here's an interesting twist that I just thought of, and am looking forward to trying. If a bot is grabbing the HTML, then they'll be looking for the name of the entry field to determine where to put their input. So in the HTML field, name a field with the standard website tag, but have the text on the actual page read "If you put anything in this field, you will be permanently banned as a bot:", and then hook it up so that it does this.
No, I'm not going to spout religion or philosophy at you, nor am I going to try to sell you something. What I'm going to describe is strongly backed up by scientific evidence, although it's heavily resisted by those who would normally be responsible for telling you about it because it would largely put them out of business.
Opiates in general work because they are similar to endorphins. Endorphins are a chemical in our system that provides a pleasurable sensation when we're doing something that is contrary to energy efficiency, and yet is beneficial to either individual or genetic survival. Exercise, sex, and "thrilling" activities are the primary examples of this, being called "runner's high" "afterglow" for the first two.
Any time we perform a behavior and it results in us having opioids in our system (endorpin, morphine, whatever), the neural links that were recently fired get stronger -- take less effort to fire. This isn't just a matter of "hey, that felt good, I think I'll do it again", it's a matter of reinforcing the neural linkage that recently occured, and this makes us consider those paths to be more favorable when examining our options in the future. This results in opioid addiction, and is also largely responsible for alcoholism. Alcoholics are mostly people whose system produces an abundance of endorphins.
If you don't have a medical background the cure may seem a little anti-intuitive, but medical experts that I describe it to generally nod their head and say "yea, that makes sense". When we perform a behavior and get flushed with opioids, the connections get stronger. When we perform a behavor and DON'T get flushed with opioids, the connections get weaker, returning to their normal state. What this means about a cure is against a lot of people's grain. First, you take something that blocks your opioid uptake. Endorphin antagonists are commonly sold under the names of ReVia, naltrexone, noloxone and nalphemene. They're generally used to ease opiate withdrawl symptoms and to treat alcoholism. Then you feed your addiction.
In case you missed it, I'll say it again. If you perform the behavior (smoking opium, shooting up heroin, get drunk, whatever) and your body doesn't get the opioid flush, then your body unlearns the addiction. For alcoholism, most patients regain the upper hand on their urges after two or three weeks, and can drink socially without fear of overdrinking or going on a binge after about three months. For this to occur, however, the person MUST perform their addictive behavior, and it works best if they perform their habits when and where they normally do.
There is a lot of information about this. If you're interested, the best place to start is probably the Wikipedia entry on the Sinclair Method.
This is all good conjecture, but there are already less artifical methods of differentiating between stars and planets. That whole "is it big enough to cause nuclear fusion" thing is the dividing line between red dwarfs (the smallest stars) and brown dwarfs (pretenders that don't have enough mass to keep up putting out radiation). Brown dwarfs are technically either planets or free-ranging planetessimals, even if they are 50 Jupiter masses in size.
This whole planet/moon thing is a largely arbitrary way of differentiating between planets and satelites of those planets. The Pluto/Charon system was a detail that totally pointed out the falacy behind the definition of "this orbiting that", and it's good to have a firm way of differentiating that can survive once we are able to start spotting rocky planets and dual planets in other star systems.
Personally I think that this entire thread is ludicrous, though, because it basically states that "some time after the earth and its moon have been engulfed in the Sun's expansion into a red giant, our moon might earn its planethood. I think a better question might be "is it still a planet if it's _INSIDE_ a star".
Many people of science have a hard time understanding why people of faith can't accept cold facts, and many people of faith aren't able to explain it. When it comes right down to it you have look at the very nature of religion to understand why there's a conflict.
Religion is a competition of story telling. Almost everything in religion is a story that someone came up to explain poorly understood phenomena. They fill in the unknown parts with a good story, and the person with the best/most interesting/most appealing story becomes the shaman, and wins the right to tell people how to live their lives. Those who are adherents to the most popular story teller get similar rights via delegation and proximity, so they have good reason to provide their story with support.
For those who are adherents to a popular story teller, science is nothing besides a competing story teller, no different than any other religion. Accepting and spreading the word of that other story teller is no better than the blasphemous suggestion that other religions have their good points, too. This results in the idea that one must dispute science as a matter of doctrine, otherwise your storyteller might lose popularity, and through that lose influence.
Dark matter is something that effects things gravitationally, but doesn't emit or reflect any radiation. We can tell it's there because the galaxies hold themselves together. In fact, for the galaxies to hold themselves together it has to be something like nine times as common as normal visible matter.
So, if you shine a light on dark matter, nothing happens because the light passes right through it, possibly being defracted by the gravitational pull, but that's it.
The two biggest theories about what dark matter consists of are MACHOs and WIMPS.
MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects) are basically rocks floating in space that aren't big enough to ignite into a star (thus giving off light), and aren't close enough to another radiation source for us to see them. This theory is encouraged by findings that trans-neptunian objects are a whole lot more common than we thought they were, but is discouraged by the idea that these things don't float in and out of our solar system as often as we think they should.
WIMPs (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles), on the other hand, are a form of matter that just doesn't interact with normal matter except gravitationally. This theory is actually better supported than the MACHO one, but the reasoning is more complex. For instance, when you subtract all of the non-dark matter from our local dwarf galaxies they all turn out to have almost exactly the same amount of dark matter. There is no way to explain this with the MACHO theory. There is some evidence that individual WIMPs are 1000 light years across with a mass of 30 million suns, which is a tough thought to grasp.
I'll agree with most of what Cruchan has to say, but want to add in a perspective that I've found important. Almost any business case that is capable of making good use of Access's capabilities is also capable of outgrowing Access's utility. Let me be more specific.
Access's primary strength is that it allows a novice but intelligent user to store data in a database and create views with which they can examine, alter, and add to that data. This makes it very attractive for many small business owners to create methods of keeping track of customers, sales, products, whatever. If your business stays small, then you've saved yourself a bit of money and solved a paperwork headache.
If your business (venture, hobby, whatever) grows, then you will invariably run into Access's limitations. It's very easy to use, but a database program of any complexity will eventually run into programming errors that result in data corruption. They aren't everywhere, but when you run into one you're pretty well hosed. Microsoft may have fixed all of these kinds of bugs between their 2000 and 2003 release - I've somewhat gotten out of that kind of business - but I somehow doubt that Microsoft has changed its philosophy that much.
When you do run into that kind of problem, you have two choices. Keep a second paper trail of all of your changes so that you can fix the database when it hits that bug, or pay someone to migrate you to something more reliable. You would think that there would be an option to pay someone to fix your Access implementation, but by the time someone is willing to shell out money for this kind of thing you can pretty well guarantee that the flaws are in Microsoft's software, not in anything the user has done with it.
So on to the user's question - what do you do when you hit that tree and fly through your windshield? You have to remember that Accesss is a front end database management tool, not an actual database. What you need to replace isn't the actual storage of the information, but the routines that alter and display it. LAMP is an entirely viable idiom for this kind of change, even in a Windows environment. I run a LAMP environment on my laptop so I can develop and show off my web site designs while not online, and it's very reliable. Additionally, it allows remote access of information from many locations, although it takes a bit of skill to write something that can be altered from many locations at the same time.
I don't suggest WISP simply because any further growing will either lock you into Microsoft tools (many of which are highly suspect) or result in tedious and expensive searching for obscure features that allow you to attach other people's tools to the Microsoft Architecture.
Moving away from Access involves two things - migrating the data out of that.mdb file and re-creating the data interface in HTML forms. The first is easy via an SQL dump, which Access supports. The second is more difficult because what you're essentially doing is Industrial Engineering.
When you're talking about a 200 table database, you can quite readily start with the Database Documenter. It'll spit out a bunch of stuff that'll tell you what the formats of the tables are, but won't tell you how they're hooked together or what they're used for (unless the person who made the database was very, very professional). Then you need to have someone show you how the database is used. From that you can figure out what the inputs of the data process are, where the information is put, what is done with it, and what form and place it has to exist for it to be viewed and outputted.
From that you can generate charts that show how the various tables are connected, identify what the rules are (all cars shalt have a color), and get an idea for process flow.
No, this isn't easy. For really big databases it can take months. I was on a project where we were attempting to reconcile seven regional AAA databases into a central database and the entire project collapsed for the inability to get someone to tell us how the data was used. There just isn't enough information in a database dump to determine this.
That whole thing about power corrupting isn't just a saying, folks, but it's nice that people are starting to notice. The Drug War Chronicles have been doing a "corrupt cop of the week" series for years now. Drug enforcement is particularly succeptable to corruption because there's very little moral difference between breaking drug laws and enforcing them. As our privacy laws are eroded and the enforcement of laws becomes less and less differentiated from invasion of privacy, you can expect to see that kind of corruption creeping into normal law enforcement, too.
While this is decent advice for streaming and whatnot, what precisely does this have to do with recording long-distance interviews? Are you suggesting that she ask her guests to set up an astrisk telephony environment in their home or place of business? I can see how that might be an improvement, but it's a bit much. Even if she sets up astrisk in her home and the guest calls in over the POTS, it still doesn't answer her question about how to record it.
I produce a podcast called Intellectual Icebergs, and have gone through exactly what you're talking about. We've performed Skype interviews across the country and across the Atlantic, and have run into the quality issues that you describe. We purchased Pamela which pulls the audio straight from Skype's audio stream, so you don't have any issues with format conversion. Our guests have been at least smart enough to set Skype up on their personal computers, and used a variety of microphone setups.
Here's the caveats to this setup.
* You have to do a few trial calls to see how their levels are set. Something that sounds perfectly good in your headset may be stored far too quite in the audio files, and the only way to check them is to stop the call and listen to the file.
* Skype calls being stored by Pamela tend to cause severe jitter after about 20-30 minutes into the call. This can be fixed by hanging up and starting a new call.
* The resulting sound quality is still somewhat questionable, largely due to jitter. I wish there was a program that would record the voice on one side, send it over, and store it on both sides in original recorded form regardless of how late the data packets showed up, but that's not how it works.
* People really don't know how to talk into a microphone that's sitting on a desk. They tend to lean forward when they start a sentence, then lean back and talk more quietly (both and at the same time) as their sentences complete. This results in some highly varied volume levels in the resulting recording. Strongly suggest to the guest that they use a headset mike to at least limit the distance to the mouth problem.
The general consensus of the podcasters that I've talked to is that it's just not worth it. If you want to do an interview over Skype, then do this instead.
* Have both people run Audacity instead of Skype * record both sides of the conversation into their own mono track while talking on a normal phone connection * Have your guest email their side of the conversation to you * Splice it together in Audacity.
The two tracks can be lined up fairly easily if you have the guest put the earpiece of their telephone to their microphone while you speak the word "beep" into your handset and your microphone at the same time.
I hope this helps. If you want further suggestions, I'm reachable from the email addresses found on www.intellectualicebergs.org.
This comment is based on the theory that those who vote are doing so because they've bothered to form an educated opinion. It's already been demonstrated that 80% of the US votes for the same party, every time, regardless of who that party puts up to the job. How much thought goes into that, anyway? No, I'd have to say that this argument presumes too much of the existing population. I'd also have to say that requiring the malcontents to vote may do the country a bit of good. It certainly hasn't hurt anyone who has actually implemented that idea.
It's entirely possible that the remaining 75% that rarely bother to vote would be heavily swayed by meaningless patriotic slogans and re-used rhetoric. It's entirley possible that it wouldn't matter in the least because our two-party system only gives us tweedle dum and tweedle dummer to vote between. It's entirely possible that the election would still go to the guy that threw the most money at his campaign. I don't think that it's a valid reason to oppose change because it doesn't change everything.
The truth is that our political system is broken in so many ways that one fix won't make that much of a difference, but if you oppose every fix for that reason, then the system is guaranteed to stay broken.
Good grief. The RIAA goes to all the trouble and expense to provide us with the highest grade litiginous doublethought, paving the way for their ownership of our very memories themselves, and you apply LOGIC? You should be whipped as an ungreatful clod, I tell ya!
The Geek Squad, as far as I can tell, is an advertising gimick. Take a lot of pretty pictures of guys in thin black ties. Requisition a series of cars that look really cool but are probably bottom of the line cheap under all that paint. Pay a bunch of teenagers just above minimum wage to wear those ties and drive those cars, and throw a few technical manuals at them hoping that your "Geek Squad" catches on to that incomprehensible tech thing that, despite the marketer's inability to understand it, couldn't possibly be that complicated.
Or at least that they catch on before the customers catch on that the whole thing is a big gimick.
The ability to change one's mind about things is something that tends to be exclusive to childhood. As people age, changing your mind about something becomes more difficult as the burden of existing evidence increases our psychological momentum. This is a process that I refer to as calcification. Eventually, a person decides that learning new things and changing their minds is no longer worth the effort. The person becomes less flexible and less adaptable to their environment. It isn't a given, but it's very difficult to avoid as one ages.
Although the article doesn't describe this, I'm wondering if calcification is happening earlier due to a lack of urgency to change one's mind, or if it's happening later because people are presented with more tempting options.
This is also because the eye's frame rate increases when we're under stress. What might seem smooth while we're relaxed in front of a television becomes choppy and jumpy when we're being shot at for the hundredth time and we're simultaneously trying to spot our next target, a good place to hide, and whatever's around that next corner.
This post was obviously written by someone who hasn't spent a lot of time parusing podcasts. Although there is a great profusion of podcasts which are analogous to blogging, the majority of the types of podcasts out there are much more diverse. Some of them compare better to your typical radio music program, published over the internet. Some are more like articles for New Scientist, or take their direction from shows like Cosmos. Others are purely informational, like the ones that provide the morning news, weather, or Slashdot headlines. Suggesting that podcasts are just audio blogs is like suggesting that newspaper articles are all there is to writing.
More importantly, your audience is EXTREMELY different. Podcasting is more of a unidirectional format, whereas those who read blogs get off on being able to comment back at the people. Podcast listeners listen throughout the day, using it as background noise, or as a way to make their car trips more palatable. Most of them use Podcasts to make themselves more productive. Blog readers, on the other hand, use blogs as a way to release tension between things their doing, more as a leisure activity. These two are of a significantly different mindset, and they are attracted to a significantly different presentation of content.
The differences are quite profuse when you get down to it. Even the methods of monetization are very, very different.
Also, this post suggests that most of the material in this book is recycled, which also conveys a complete lack of insight into the creators of the book. Rob Walch has been studying the finer points of podcasting pretty much since its inception, and has provided as much of the information as possible in his podcast. If you want to call it recycled, then it's a compilation of the author's own materials from the Podcast medium into a book. I can't speak for Mur Lafferty, because he was previously unknown to me. I suspect that he was largely responsible for the composition and phrasology in the book, while adding what he knows about podcasting to Rob's already voluminous knowledge.
This is the same as the frame rate of the human eye. We can see around 16 frames per second, and anything below or near this is perceived as flickering. By bumping it up to 24 or 30 (film and video, respectively) we can produce an image that has smooth motion to it. They're doing the same thing with color, now.
Even though the pose a real-life example of robots killing humans, it's really not much different from someone who gets killed by any mechanical device. The entire idea of applying the three laws of robotics is an entirely philosophical one at this point because (1) we don't have the technology to implement it, and (2) We don't follow those laws ourselves. Here's an example.
Law #1: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
How do we define harm? It's all nice and dandy to limit this to "physical harm", but that would leave every robot in the area attempting to kill every mosquito they set their eyes on. Does that include dietary issues? Will a robot refuse to cook a high-fat diet for you because it might lead to obeisity? Would they flush all your alcohol down the drain because their inaction in that department would result in many hangovers to humans?
There are two parts to the first law. If we limit it to physical harm, then a robot is allowed to impose massive psychological trauma in order to prevent humans from harming themselves. They can indescriminately restrict freedom in order to prevent things that might only be mildly uncomfortable. Imagine a robot refusing to allow you to go outside because you'd be sunburned, or you'd breathe the smog.
At what point does the inaction of harm outweigh the action of harm? How do multiple people come into this picture? Is a robot allowed to kill someone who might otherwise bring hundreds of other humans to harm? These are both part of the first law.
Delving further into this, we haven't even adequately defined "human". Do fetuses count? Anencephalic births? The braindead being sustained by mechanical systems? Cyborgs? Since we're talking scifi, then how about a human mind encased in a robotic body?
I would say that we don't even understand the three laws well enough ourselves in order to implement a mechancial reproduction of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Having taken the time to read through it, I was expecting to be informed about what aspects of agile development actually work. What I actually got out of it is "Agile Sux - Google Rox!". There's more details about Google than that, and it's very informative about their environment, but I saw absolutely nothing that would suggest that there's a "good agile" out there, because nothing that the author described has anything with the cannonical agile methodologies. Maybe he can call it Agile from the perspective of "This is how Agile would have been implemented in the Positive Mirror Universe from Episode 27 of All Programmers Live In Hell", but I drew nothing from it that I could use in a less extreme business environment. In fact, I'd say that nobody below the level of CTO could possibly make use of that information.
If you've spent any time in second life, you'd know that the clothing strongly ignores practicality and sensibility. Part of it is that virtual clothes weigh nothing and are indestructable, so you can make any shape or size of outfit you want (even including costumes like Ed-209, and people can wear them with about as much effort as a bikini without having to worry about getting into a car, or even about ever having to wash it. A second lost consideration is fabric. In real life, the difference between satin and cheap cotton is horribly obvious to anyone. In second life, you have to go through a lot of effort to even make that kind of thing noticable, and even then there's no way to make a difference in stiffness. A look at walks down some of the fashion show runways gives people a clue what designers would produce if practicality were meaningless, and second life is an order of magnitude worse than that.
Why is it that we keep hearing about this kind of advancement "to be available in five to ten years", and yet the storage capacity of batteries has been stagnated for at least that long?
I can't moderate this comment up any more than it already is, so I'm foregoing the opportunity to moderate any of this forum in order to suggest that the readers take a good gander at this post and take it seriously.
Any sufficently insular group can convince themselves of any idea they choose simply by weeding out those that don't agree with them. This is a given. What you have to do is identify the obvious biases of a group (i.e. Slashdotters hate Microsoft) and ignore any opinion in that direction. You'll still get plenty of actual facts (or at least well supported truths), but those will require supplementing from an inversely biased truth source.
What you CAN do is identify those thing for which there is no natural bias in the group. That's a little harder, but not impossible. For instance, I don't belive that Slashdotters have a particular reason for supporting Democrats over Republicans, so political statements don't need to be taken with as large a grain of salt. Comments about GWB are an exception to this because Slashdotters notably value intelligence, and he's a blatant idiot.
With Wikipedia, you have a group that is very stringently non-insular. There are people of all biases, and they are encouraged to intelligently consider each other's ideas. The way they rate each other is by how well they back up what they have to say with supporting fact. They're notorious for disregarding credentials as an ad-hominem attack - only the information is important. I think that this particular scale of superiority is especially resistant to the kind of flaws that other rating systems fall prey to.
This isn't really worth responding to, but I'll use it as an excuse to provide some good information for those who are actually listening. I'm sure that this information will slide off of the anononymous coward's consciousness as conflicting with something that he has his ego resting on.
Marijuana is psycologically addictive, similar to television or the reading of fiction. It creates a rest state that we come to rely upon. If you spend more than an hour a day watching television, then you're just as guilty of wasting your life away as your typical pot smoker. If you spend more than two hours a day watching tv, then you're up there with the wake and bakes.
Alcohol, on the other hand, is addictive the same way that morphine is. In fact, by stimulating the production of endogenous morphine (commonly called endorphin), it results in a state where the person feels that alcohol is the answer to all of their problems. Compounded by the disablement of the judgement facilities that alcohol causes (via extensive GABA supplementation), this results in a situation where the user doesn't even realize how bad he's gotten.
With alcohol, the only real way to know how drunk you are (short of "damn, I can't walk any more!") is to count your drinks. The judgment disablement makes it nearly impossible to tell the fine gradients of drunk. With marijuana there is no "judgement relief effect". A stoned person has no problem telling just how stoned he is, and how disabled his reflexes are. Thus, a stoned person may be impared, but will compensate for it. A drunk person, on the other hand, won't realize that they're impared. When driving, this means that drunks try to drive normally while stoners drive like little old ladies.
Also, for the four major illegal drugs used today (marijuana, cocaine, ecstacy, and methamphetamines), use has in all cases increased since illegalization. Marijuana was a minor problem among mexican imigrants and jazz singers in 1937. Since 1970, cocaine use has tripled. Most of us are well aware of the rise of ecstacy and meth. Illegalization doesn't prevent the use of these things, it popularizes them. When prohibition was passed there were about 400 bars in New York City. When it was repealed, an estimated 8,000 speakeasies competed to become respectable bars, but the drop in purchase price of alcohol resulted in most of them folding.
I don't know where you get your information, but it's wrong. The overall crime rate increased 24% between the radification and repeal of prohibition:
a te.htm
http://library.thinkquest.org/04oct/00492/Crime_R
The murder rate skyrocketed during prohibition, dropped immediately after, and has jumped up again in the 40 years since the "War on Drugs" was declared.
http://www.drugwarfacts.org/crime.htm
I stand my ground that there is very little difference between the two.
Well, no, marijuana prohibition is the alcohol prohibition of the modern age. With the sole details that the drug is significantly less harmful than alcohol, and the effects of the prohibition are significantly more widespread and harmful, it's essentially identical. We're just so used to it that we don't even notice any more.
Here's an interesting twist that I just thought of, and am looking forward to trying. If a bot is grabbing the HTML, then they'll be looking for the name of the entry field to determine where to put their input. So in the HTML field, name a field with the standard website tag, but have the text on the actual page read "If you put anything in this field, you will be permanently banned as a bot:", and then hook it up so that it does this.
No, I'm not going to spout religion or philosophy at you, nor am I going to try to sell you something. What I'm going to describe is strongly backed up by scientific evidence, although it's heavily resisted by those who would normally be responsible for telling you about it because it would largely put them out of business.
Opiates in general work because they are similar to endorphins. Endorphins are a chemical in our system that provides a pleasurable sensation when we're doing something that is contrary to energy efficiency, and yet is beneficial to either individual or genetic survival. Exercise, sex, and "thrilling" activities are the primary examples of this, being called "runner's high" "afterglow" for the first two.
Any time we perform a behavior and it results in us having opioids in our system (endorpin, morphine, whatever), the neural links that were recently fired get stronger -- take less effort to fire. This isn't just a matter of "hey, that felt good, I think I'll do it again", it's a matter of reinforcing the neural linkage that recently occured, and this makes us consider those paths to be more favorable when examining our options in the future. This results in opioid addiction, and is also largely responsible for alcoholism. Alcoholics are mostly people whose system produces an abundance of endorphins.
If you don't have a medical background the cure may seem a little anti-intuitive, but medical experts that I describe it to generally nod their head and say "yea, that makes sense". When we perform a behavior and get flushed with opioids, the connections get stronger. When we perform a behavor and DON'T get flushed with opioids, the connections get weaker, returning to their normal state. What this means about a cure is against a lot of people's grain. First, you take something that blocks your opioid uptake. Endorphin antagonists are commonly sold under the names of ReVia, naltrexone, noloxone and nalphemene. They're generally used to ease opiate withdrawl symptoms and to treat alcoholism. Then you feed your addiction.
In case you missed it, I'll say it again. If you perform the behavior (smoking opium, shooting up heroin, get drunk, whatever) and your body doesn't get the opioid flush, then your body unlearns the addiction. For alcoholism, most patients regain the upper hand on their urges after two or three weeks, and can drink socially without fear of overdrinking or going on a binge after about three months. For this to occur, however, the person MUST perform their addictive behavior, and it works best if they perform their habits when and where they normally do.
There is a lot of information about this. If you're interested, the best place to start is probably the Wikipedia entry on the Sinclair Method.
This is all good conjecture, but there are already less artifical methods of differentiating between stars and planets. That whole "is it big enough to cause nuclear fusion" thing is the dividing line between red dwarfs (the smallest stars) and brown dwarfs (pretenders that don't have enough mass to keep up putting out radiation). Brown dwarfs are technically either planets or free-ranging planetessimals, even if they are 50 Jupiter masses in size.
This whole planet/moon thing is a largely arbitrary way of differentiating between planets and satelites of those planets. The Pluto/Charon system was a detail that totally pointed out the falacy behind the definition of "this orbiting that", and it's good to have a firm way of differentiating that can survive once we are able to start spotting rocky planets and dual planets in other star systems.
Personally I think that this entire thread is ludicrous, though, because it basically states that "some time after the earth and its moon have been engulfed in the Sun's expansion into a red giant, our moon might earn its planethood. I think a better question might be "is it still a planet if it's _INSIDE_ a star".
Many people of science have a hard time understanding why people of faith can't accept cold facts, and many people of faith aren't able to explain it. When it comes right down to it you have look at the very nature of religion to understand why there's a conflict.
Religion is a competition of story telling. Almost everything in religion is a story that someone came up to explain poorly understood phenomena. They fill in the unknown parts with a good story, and the person with the best/most interesting/most appealing story becomes the shaman, and wins the right to tell people how to live their lives. Those who are adherents to the most popular story teller get similar rights via delegation and proximity, so they have good reason to provide their story with support.
For those who are adherents to a popular story teller, science is nothing besides a competing story teller, no different than any other religion. Accepting and spreading the word of that other story teller is no better than the blasphemous suggestion that other religions have their good points, too. This results in the idea that one must dispute science as a matter of doctrine, otherwise your storyteller might lose popularity, and through that lose influence.
Kinda like what's going on now.
Dark matter is something that effects things gravitationally, but doesn't emit or reflect any radiation. We can tell it's there because the galaxies hold themselves together. In fact, for the galaxies to hold themselves together it has to be something like nine times as common as normal visible matter.
So, if you shine a light on dark matter, nothing happens because the light passes right through it, possibly being defracted by the gravitational pull, but that's it.
The two biggest theories about what dark matter consists of are MACHOs and WIMPS.
MACHOs (MAssive Compact Halo Objects) are basically rocks floating in space that aren't big enough to ignite into a star (thus giving off light), and aren't close enough to another radiation source for us to see them. This theory is encouraged by findings that trans-neptunian objects are a whole lot more common than we thought they were, but is discouraged by the idea that these things don't float in and out of our solar system as often as we think they should.
WIMPs (Weakly Interactive Massive Particles), on the other hand, are a form of matter that just doesn't interact with normal matter except gravitationally. This theory is actually better supported than the MACHO one, but the reasoning is more complex. For instance, when you subtract all of the non-dark matter from our local dwarf galaxies they all turn out to have almost exactly the same amount of dark matter. There is no way to explain this with the MACHO theory. There is some evidence that individual WIMPs are 1000 light years across with a mass of 30 million suns, which is a tough thought to grasp.
Robert Rapplean
www.intellectualicebergs.org
I'll agree with most of what Cruchan has to say, but want to add in a perspective that I've found important. Almost any business case that is capable of making good use of Access's capabilities is also capable of outgrowing Access's utility. Let me be more specific.
.mdb file and re-creating the data interface in HTML forms. The first is easy via an SQL dump, which Access supports. The second is more difficult because what you're essentially doing is Industrial Engineering.
Access's primary strength is that it allows a novice but intelligent user to store data in a database and create views with which they can examine, alter, and add to that data. This makes it very attractive for many small business owners to create methods of keeping track of customers, sales, products, whatever. If your business stays small, then you've saved yourself a bit of money and solved a paperwork headache.
If your business (venture, hobby, whatever) grows, then you will invariably run into Access's limitations. It's very easy to use, but a database program of any complexity will eventually run into programming errors that result in data corruption. They aren't everywhere, but when you run into one you're pretty well hosed. Microsoft may have fixed all of these kinds of bugs between their 2000 and 2003 release - I've somewhat gotten out of that kind of business - but I somehow doubt that Microsoft has changed its philosophy that much.
When you do run into that kind of problem, you have two choices. Keep a second paper trail of all of your changes so that you can fix the database when it hits that bug, or pay someone to migrate you to something more reliable. You would think that there would be an option to pay someone to fix your Access implementation, but by the time someone is willing to shell out money for this kind of thing you can pretty well guarantee that the flaws are in Microsoft's software, not in anything the user has done with it.
So on to the user's question - what do you do when you hit that tree and fly through your windshield? You have to remember that Accesss is a front end database management tool, not an actual database. What you need to replace isn't the actual storage of the information, but the routines that alter and display it. LAMP is an entirely viable idiom for this kind of change, even in a Windows environment. I run a LAMP environment on my laptop so I can develop and show off my web site designs while not online, and it's very reliable. Additionally, it allows remote access of information from many locations, although it takes a bit of skill to write something that can be altered from many locations at the same time.
I don't suggest WISP simply because any further growing will either lock you into Microsoft tools (many of which are highly suspect) or result in tedious and expensive searching for obscure features that allow you to attach other people's tools to the Microsoft Architecture.
Moving away from Access involves two things - migrating the data out of that
When you're talking about a 200 table database, you can quite readily start with the Database Documenter. It'll spit out a bunch of stuff that'll tell you what the formats of the tables are, but won't tell you how they're hooked together or what they're used for (unless the person who made the database was very, very professional). Then you need to have someone show you how the database is used. From that you can figure out what the inputs of the data process are, where the information is put, what is done with it, and what form and place it has to exist for it to be viewed and outputted.
From that you can generate charts that show how the various tables are connected, identify what the rules are (all cars shalt have a color), and get an idea for process flow.
No, this isn't easy. For really big databases it can take months. I was on a project where we were attempting to reconcile seven regional AAA databases into a central database and the entire project collapsed for the inability to get someone to tell us how the data was used. There just isn't enough information in a database dump to determine this.
Best of luck.
That whole thing about power corrupting isn't just a saying, folks, but it's nice that people are starting to notice. The Drug War Chronicles have been doing a "corrupt cop of the week" series for years now. Drug enforcement is particularly succeptable to corruption because there's very little moral difference between breaking drug laws and enforcing them. As our privacy laws are eroded and the enforcement of laws becomes less and less differentiated from invasion of privacy, you can expect to see that kind of corruption creeping into normal law enforcement, too.
While this is decent advice for streaming and whatnot, what precisely does this have to do with recording long-distance interviews? Are you suggesting that she ask her guests to set up an astrisk telephony environment in their home or place of business? I can see how that might be an improvement, but it's a bit much. Even if she sets up astrisk in her home and the guest calls in over the POTS, it still doesn't answer her question about how to record it.
I produce a podcast called Intellectual Icebergs, and have gone through exactly what you're talking about. We've performed Skype interviews across the country and across the Atlantic, and have run into the quality issues that you describe. We purchased Pamela which pulls the audio straight from Skype's audio stream, so you don't have any issues with format conversion. Our guests have been at least smart enough to set Skype up on their personal computers, and used a variety of microphone setups.
Here's the caveats to this setup.
* You have to do a few trial calls to see how their levels are set. Something that sounds perfectly good in your headset may be stored far too quite in the audio files, and the only way to check them is to stop the call and listen to the file.
* Skype calls being stored by Pamela tend to cause severe jitter after about 20-30 minutes into the call. This can be fixed by hanging up and starting a new call.
* The resulting sound quality is still somewhat questionable, largely due to jitter. I wish there was a program that would record the voice on one side, send it over, and store it on both sides in original recorded form regardless of how late the data packets showed up, but that's not how it works.
* People really don't know how to talk into a microphone that's sitting on a desk. They tend to lean forward when they start a sentence, then lean back and talk more quietly (both and at the same time) as their sentences complete. This results in some highly varied volume levels in the resulting recording. Strongly suggest to the guest that they use a headset mike to at least limit the distance to the mouth problem.
The general consensus of the podcasters that I've talked to is that it's just not worth it. If you want to do an interview over Skype, then do this instead.
* Have both people run Audacity instead of Skype
* record both sides of the conversation into their own mono track while talking on a normal phone connection
* Have your guest email their side of the conversation to you
* Splice it together in Audacity.
The two tracks can be lined up fairly easily if you have the guest put the earpiece of their telephone to their microphone while you speak the word "beep" into your handset and your microphone at the same time.
I hope this helps. If you want further suggestions, I'm reachable from the email addresses found on www.intellectualicebergs.org.
-Robert Rapplean
This comment is based on the theory that those who vote are doing so because they've bothered to form an educated opinion. It's already been demonstrated that 80% of the US votes for the same party, every time, regardless of who that party puts up to the job. How much thought goes into that, anyway? No, I'd have to say that this argument presumes too much of the existing population. I'd also have to say that requiring the malcontents to vote may do the country a bit of good. It certainly hasn't hurt anyone who has actually implemented that idea.
It's entirely possible that the remaining 75% that rarely bother to vote would be heavily swayed by meaningless patriotic slogans and re-used rhetoric. It's entirley possible that it wouldn't matter in the least because our two-party system only gives us tweedle dum and tweedle dummer to vote between. It's entirely possible that the election would still go to the guy that threw the most money at his campaign. I don't think that it's a valid reason to oppose change because it doesn't change everything.
The truth is that our political system is broken in so many ways that one fix won't make that much of a difference, but if you oppose every fix for that reason, then the system is guaranteed to stay broken.
Good grief. The RIAA goes to all the trouble and expense to provide us with the highest grade litiginous doublethought, paving the way for their ownership of our very memories themselves, and you apply LOGIC? You should be whipped as an ungreatful clod, I tell ya!
The Geek Squad, as far as I can tell, is an advertising gimick. Take a lot of pretty pictures of guys in thin black ties. Requisition a series of cars that look really cool but are probably bottom of the line cheap under all that paint. Pay a bunch of teenagers just above minimum wage to wear those ties and drive those cars, and throw a few technical manuals at them hoping that your "Geek Squad" catches on to that incomprehensible tech thing that, despite the marketer's inability to understand it, couldn't possibly be that complicated.
Or at least that they catch on before the customers catch on that the whole thing is a big gimick.
The ability to change one's mind about things is something that tends to be exclusive to childhood. As people age, changing your mind about something becomes more difficult as the burden of existing evidence increases our psychological momentum. This is a process that I refer to as calcification. Eventually, a person decides that learning new things and changing their minds is no longer worth the effort. The person becomes less flexible and less adaptable to their environment. It isn't a given, but it's very difficult to avoid as one ages.
Although the article doesn't describe this, I'm wondering if calcification is happening earlier due to a lack of urgency to change one's mind, or if it's happening later because people are presented with more tempting options.
This is also because the eye's frame rate increases when we're under stress. What might seem smooth while we're relaxed in front of a television becomes choppy and jumpy when we're being shot at for the hundredth time and we're simultaneously trying to spot our next target, a good place to hide, and whatever's around that next corner.
This post was obviously written by someone who hasn't spent a lot of time parusing podcasts. Although there is a great profusion of podcasts which are analogous to blogging, the majority of the types of podcasts out there are much more diverse. Some of them compare better to your typical radio music program, published over the internet. Some are more like articles for New Scientist, or take their direction from shows like Cosmos. Others are purely informational, like the ones that provide the morning news, weather, or Slashdot headlines. Suggesting that podcasts are just audio blogs is like suggesting that newspaper articles are all there is to writing.
More importantly, your audience is EXTREMELY different. Podcasting is more of a unidirectional format, whereas those who read blogs get off on being able to comment back at the people. Podcast listeners listen throughout the day, using it as background noise, or as a way to make their car trips more palatable. Most of them use Podcasts to make themselves more productive. Blog readers, on the other hand, use blogs as a way to release tension between things their doing, more as a leisure activity. These two are of a significantly different mindset, and they are attracted to a significantly different presentation of content.
The differences are quite profuse when you get down to it. Even the methods of monetization are very, very different.
Also, this post suggests that most of the material in this book is recycled, which also conveys a complete lack of insight into the creators of the book. Rob Walch has been studying the finer points of podcasting pretty much since its inception, and has provided as much of the information as possible in his podcast. If you want to call it recycled, then it's a compilation of the author's own materials from the Podcast medium into a book. I can't speak for Mur Lafferty, because he was previously unknown to me. I suspect that he was largely responsible for the composition and phrasology in the book, while adding what he knows about podcasting to Rob's already voluminous knowledge.
This is the same as the frame rate of the human eye. We can see around 16 frames per second, and anything below or near this is perceived as flickering. By bumping it up to 24 or 30 (film and video, respectively) we can produce an image that has smooth motion to it. They're doing the same thing with color, now.
Even though the pose a real-life example of robots killing humans, it's really not much different from someone who gets killed by any mechanical device. The entire idea of applying the three laws of robotics is an entirely philosophical one at this point because (1) we don't have the technology to implement it, and (2) We don't follow those laws ourselves. Here's an example.
Law #1: A robot may not harm a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
How do we define harm? It's all nice and dandy to limit this to "physical harm", but that would leave every robot in the area attempting to kill every mosquito they set their eyes on. Does that include dietary issues? Will a robot refuse to cook a high-fat diet for you because it might lead to obeisity? Would they flush all your alcohol down the drain because their inaction in that department would result in many hangovers to humans?
There are two parts to the first law. If we limit it to physical harm, then a robot is allowed to impose massive psychological trauma in order to prevent humans from harming themselves. They can indescriminately restrict freedom in order to prevent things that might only be mildly uncomfortable. Imagine a robot refusing to allow you to go outside because you'd be sunburned, or you'd breathe the smog.
At what point does the inaction of harm outweigh the action of harm? How do multiple people come into this picture? Is a robot allowed to kill someone who might otherwise bring hundreds of other humans to harm? These are both part of the first law.
Delving further into this, we haven't even adequately defined "human". Do fetuses count? Anencephalic births? The braindead being sustained by mechanical systems? Cyborgs? Since we're talking scifi, then how about a human mind encased in a robotic body?
I would say that we don't even understand the three laws well enough ourselves in order to implement a mechancial reproduction of them.