I'm giving up my opportunity to moderate in saying this, but I thought it was important.
The burning temperature of kerosine has little bearing on this. When kerosine burns, it gives off heat. As long as that heat is contained, the actual temperature will increase. What you really need to calculate is the maxiumum temperature of burned kerosine, which is the total energy given off divided among the atoms which were necessary to make the kerosine undergo the exothermic breakdown in the first place. As mentioned in a lower post, this IS enough to bring steel over anealing temperatures, which would be enough to cause the tower to collapse.
This is complicated, however, by many, many other factors. For instance, you can only burn as much kerosine as there is oxygen to interact with, and the heat has to be distributed not just between the kerosine and the oxygen, but also among the other 79% of the air. Further complicating matters, once things reaches a critical temperature, MANY things will burn. Offices are full of resin-soaked pressboard, for instance, and foam padding. As a kicker, even steel burns. Anyone who has seen a burned car or lit steel wool knows this. If the temperatures were high enough to cause the concrete to crack away from the support pillars, then the steel itself would have begun to oxidize, weakening the structure.
What this comes down to is that I am not the least bit surprised that the towers collapsed. I have nothing to say about WTC7 because, to my knowledge, it didn't collapse at all, but was damaged badly enough from falling depris that they had to demolish it later. No, it doesn't surprise me that it had to be taken down but WTC6 didn't. Disasters aren't the deterministic things that we expect them to be.
What DOES strike me as bizarre is that they collapsed straight down. Anyone who has stomped on a soda can can see the improbability of that. I've heard suggestions that the central core collapsed and the outer grid contained it, but the dynamics behind that should have thrown girders outward in all directions.
This is especially true of the second tower to be hit, where the airplane went through one corner instead of through the middle. If it collapsed from the heat, it should have collapsed on one corner, toppling the upper structure onto the nearby buildings. It, too, however, collapsed straight down.
Oh, a little bit on the actual subject of the article. I took a look at that video. The camera was taking one frame every half second. In the one frame immediately preceding the explosion, there is a white blotch that looks something like an airplane. A braindead monkey could have photoshopped that in, and it would take a braindead monkey to believe that it's evidence of anything. This explains the administration's position on the film.
I'm not saying that this supports the conspiracy theory idea. In fact, I'm saying rather authoritatively that it supports nothing whatsoever. I'm pretty much of the belief that it was released, not to convince anyone, but to remind people that maybe, just maybe, the terrorists are still more of a threat to our nation than those in power.
That's right. Which is why applying it to individuals who commit felonies is truly perverting the meaning.
I disagree. Those under felony conviction are a different social group just as much as any religious or ethnic group. Becoming a felon doesn't mean that you lose all of your rights, just the ones against imprisonment and for voting. What happens to them CAN happen to us. After we get used to doing it to felons, we may start applying it to anyone who collects welfare or medicare. Then we can extend it to anyone who gets any service from the government, which leads to anyone who owns property.
You seem to be of the opinion that felons, as a class, always deserve whatever we dish out to them, no matter now horrible it is. I'd review that if I were you because it's an attitude that someone might be applying to you some day.
The whole point of the quote is to oppose government action against innocent people who are being persecuted simply for being a member of a group (a religious group, an ethnic minority, etc).
Um, no. The whole point is that you shouldn't let government oppression occur simply because it's not happening to your group. If you wait until it happens to your group, there may be nobody left who will help you.
Although this was presented by an Anonymous Coward, I believe it has a kernel of truth in it. It is a poem about not caring about those who are different than us. People are extremely good at assuming that anyone who is different deserves whatever they get, for whatever reason. For instance, many of us assume that the black population deserves tougher drug penalties (and the ratios of arrests and convictions demonstrate this), but the truth is that blacks have a considerably lower drug use percentage than most other enthic populations.
Don't assume that, just because a person deserves incarceration, they also deserve an anal probe, display of their genitals on public television, or to be submitted for genetic experimentation. These are extreme examples, but each references a basic human right that even felons should be granted.
The question still exists of where to draw the line. In this case, I'd have to turn to the nature of the crime. When was the last time a computer cracking crime was solved through DNA evidence? Murder or rape, sure, I can understand that, but cracking? I do not feel that this is in any way warranted.
It really doesn't matter how large a percent of Americans mind if their information gets tapped. Our constitution gives me the right to privacy for my person, papers, and belongings, and this comes under that category. It's already been demostrated that the majority isn't allowed to give away the constitutional rights of a minority.
Our lord leader the shrub, on the other hand, is trying to demonstrate that a powerful enough minority can do whatever the damn well please to the majority, and other members of that minority are trying very hard to make sure he gets away with it.
Get YOUR facts straight. For all of you who haven't bothered to read the text of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, for a judge or jury to find for the plaintiff on one of these typosquatting cases, they must merely find that the defendant's domain on balance violated five or more of the following nine factors listed as violations of the law:
Was this meant to contradict me? It seems that you're supporting my point, so I'll reiterate it. There's nothing wrong with buying a typo-prone domain and putting miscellaneous advertisement on it the way Google does. If they were to create a "look-alike" typosquatting domain with the intent to siphon business off of the non-typo business, then they'd be doing something wrong, but that's not what they're doing.
It's not like opening a restaurant near McDonald's, it's like opening a restaurant near McDonald's and naming it MacDonald's and hoping people won't know the difference.
Um, no. It's like opening a store next to McDonalds (with the golden arches) named MacDonalds (with big green letters on a blue background) and selling lawn and garden supplies. This is only illegal if they also swipe the look and feel of McDonald's logos, such as to encourage people to think that they are in some way affiliated with the fast food company.
It is an extremely rare occasion when people look at a typosquatting site and confuse it with the site that they thought they were looking for. They're pretty obvious. Unless they make some attempt to emulate the typo'd site, then they're not fooling anyone, and they're not doing anything illegal, immoral, or even vaguely in bad taste.
I think I'm going to invent a new term. Googlesniping: trying to convince the world that something is suddenly evil simply because Google has started doing it.
Unfortunately, your analogy is completely unfounded. Human nature dictates that accumulated information will always be accessed for less than noble reasons when it is available.
Point 1: We've created a nation were almost everyone is involved in some form of illegal activity, whether it's the harmless storing of prescription drugs past their proscribed use, or the blatant cheating on our taxes, most of us have something that the government could arrest and prosecute us for.
Point 2: Our government is currently controlled by religious zealots who believe that getting their way is more important than honesty or justice. One look at the Iraq war or the Intelligent Design "debate" is enough to demonstrate this.
Conclusion: Where the religiously intollerant are unable to create laws against moral issues, they are likely to then start prosecuting the "offenders" via selective enforcement of the various laws metioned in Point 1. This has already come to pass in many jurisdictions via racial profiling in the case of drug laws.
The more widely available information linked to us becomes, the more widespread these abuses will become. While some people are capable of making decent decisions in this matter, the vast majority will eventually bend to their personal viewpoints as a priority over standard legal channels. This is how corruption leaks into most organizations, and a country is no different.
While I definitely understand the logic of this, I have to dispute the practicality of it. I've attempted to use many of the lesser used forum softwares, and they're lesser used for a reason. They have considerably less functionality, aren't as user friendly, and tend to be riddled with bugs. I currently use phpbb, and spend a few minutes each week having to weed out the spam from my forum, banning ranges of ip addresses, and deleting bogus members, that kind of thing. This is a drop in the bucket to the amount of tinkering I had to do in order to even make the others functional.
So, while this would be an effective tool for preventing forum spam, I think that the overall request is really how to eliminate the management overhead caused by forum spam. Doing this in a way that increases overall management overhead isn't a practial answer.
I'll second this. By their description I was expecting an encyclopedia of IT knowledge, where you could look up any tool, for instance, to find out its parameters and clever uses. Somewhere that people can post all the cool stuff that you normally have to buy a Tips and Traps book to get to, or be on the development team. Somewhere that I can type in an executable name from my Windows Services window and find out what it does, if it's necessary, and most importantly how to get rid of it. Something with concrete tuning suggestions for each piece of software and hardware.
This is nothing like that. It'll help you figure out what your server is doing wrong based on log files. I'm very disappointed.
I'm afraid your medical knowledge is out of date in one very important respect. You're reference to "stuff we like" and "stuff we don't like" is refered to as the "Common Understanding of Behavior", and has been demonstrated to be a misleading and often harmful oversimplification.
Dopamine reinforces the neurons that have most recently been fired. In essense, it tells us that these are the neurons that produce a beneficial effect. If you inject dopamines into a person while slicing into their skin, they WILL start to crave having their skin sliced into, even if it initially provided them with no pleasure. The person will build up an irrational craving for it. If this were merely an intellectual decision about what we like and don't like, then the person would be able to differentiate between the dopamine shot and the skin slicing, but they don't.
What you're talking about isn't an addiction. We have other words for those - specifically starvation, dehydration, and suffocation. Addiction is a urgent craving for something that is not biologically required. The chemical mechanism that causes runner's high and afterglow is the same mechanism that causes addictions to alcohol, heroin, gambling, and porn. It's a learning mechanism that has gone awry due to circumstances that our evolution has never had to deal with before.
Not even vaguely true. Addiction is only considered a problem when it's destructive. The way our body chemistry works, we also become addicted to sex and exercise. Both of these are exactly what nature intended, and generally have very productive results (in some case reproductive results).
Once agian, someone is using bad science and scare tactics to try to frighten people about something that they don't like. I haven't read the article, but I suspect that somewhere along the line the person is proposing legislation.
Believe it or not, you can get the same air-pressure benefit by reducing the pressure in your suit as you get from increasing the pressure outside. That's how dispersion works. Astronauts take advantage of this by keeping the pressure in their suits no higher than necessary to keep the astronaut alive. IANAA, but I believe that it is about a half to a third of one atmosphere.
The one benefit that you DO get from having any atmostphere at all is that you don't have to engineer your equipment to avoid vaccuum welding. When two pieces of metal slide against each other on earth, they have a thin layer of gas holding them apart like microscopic ballberrings. When you try to do this in a vaccuum, they just might get stuck against each other and have to be pried apart.
Re:Not until the moon dust problem is solved.
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US Plans Lunar Motel
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Sadly, micron is generally abbreviated with a 'u' on a normal keybard instead of an m because it looks more like a mu than an m does. Easy mistake though.
If you think about it, it's common sense. What's worse, living alone, or living with someone who steals all your stuff?
An atmosphere on Earth provides us with many benefits. First, it gives us oxygen to breathe (duh). Second it provides us with ambient pressure so our liquids don't boil. Third, it holds water in solution so we don't dry out. Fourth, it protects us from radiation from space. Fifth, it maintains a livable temperature so we don't boil or freeze. This doesn't include a host of useful and non-immediate applications, like carrying voice communication or supporting airplanes, or providing an environment for us to grow food.
The atmosphere of Mars does none of these things (except mild but inadequate radiation protection) so it's little better than a true vaccum. What it does do is leech heat out of anything it touches. It also carries microfine dust which will make it hell to keep anything mechanical working. So, yes, the "atmosphere" of the Moon (or ultrahigh vaccum, or whatever) is, in fact, less harsh than the one on Mars.
I have no problems with a.xxx TLD. I think it would be great for those web sites that really wanted to advertise what they were doing. It would also give consumers who go to those sites a clear idea of what they're clicking on before they click on it. I'm not sure how effective it would be because so many porn sites rely upon gurrilla pop-ups in order to get traffic. Apparently any person who is looking for information on video games can't help but spend money on porn if bare breasts pop up on his screen during a search.
The only problem with this is that they're forcing people onto it. I don't mind a general rule that porn should exist on a.xxx domain, but once they start forcing it then they get into a contest of who can be offended by the lamest content. This is what results in breast cancer information sites and the site of any radio station that employs a shock jock being stuck in the porn category.
What I'd like to see is a.god extension for religious sites. I think they'd flock to that, and I think that it would make an AWESOME way for me to recognize when the content of a web page is hopelessly religeously biased.
Of course, she did urge people to "act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.". I think it's the "act forcefully" part that gets you investigated.
Granted.
Plus, she *was* using a government computer for non-work related activities.
No, she wasn't. They looked, and COULD have fired her if that was the case. She wrote the letter on her computer at home.
Plus, you just spoke out about Bush. Are you being investigated?
How would I know? I've generally assumed that they have a regularly updated file on me because I'm outspoken. Heck, Denver got in trouble for keeping files on anyone who ever showed up to a Libertarian event, so I know that I've been investigated at some time in the past.
You are making quite a number of assumptions here. For instance...
According to your link, she isn't being investigated for a crime....Her union told her that she was reported to the FBI, but no one from the VA or from the FBI seems to have told her that or confirmed it.
We live in the age of no-warrant wire taps, gag orders and hidden dockets. How would we ever know? She was definitely reported to the FBI, it's reasonable to assume that they've done at least a cursory investigation.
her bosses at the VA were pissed because she identified herself as a VA nurse in her letter, so on the order of their HR director, their IT guys took her work computer for a couple of days to see if she wrote the letter on company time and/or equipment. She's certainly not being harrassed by the FBI...
Again, more assumptions. All that the article said was that the information services guys took her computer, giving her a memo from the higher ups. They had no reason to believe that she'd written the letter from her office computer, and they didn't say who they gave that information to while it was being searched. More importantly, she didn't know, which is more than enough to put fear into her and every coworker that knows about it.
That's the power of secret police forces. It's not the ability to drag away anybody who pisses them off, but the ability to instill fear that if you step out of line, open your mouth in the wrong place, that you might be next.
Basically she wrote a letter to the editor identifying her job and then proceeded to publicly blast her employer as an employee.
Not even close. She criticized the president and his policies, not the VA hospitals. If anything, she said that the VA was getting dumped on because of the administration's poor decisions. This would be more like being an employee of Taco Bell, and criticizing Pepsi for manning all of their plants with illegal immigrants in a letter to the editor. (last I checked, Pepsi owns Taco Bell). While I won't go so far as to say that THAT wouldn't get someone fired (you never know), I will say that the analogy doesn't hold up when someone is expressing an opinion on the performance of publicly elected officials.
Here's your evidence. This lady is a VA nurse who wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper about how poorly Bush has been handling the Iraq war and huricane Katrina.
She's been under investigation by the FBI since then, and they're threatening to throw her in jail on sedition charges. They've been using scare tactics like interrupting her in the middle of her work at the hospital and confiscating her work computer "to look for evidence".
Well, no. There's no input instruction because all of the input needs to be in memory before you start the program. It's not designed to have a user interface. That's outside the scope of the tool. It does, however, need to produce definable results, and having the students send their results to the print function is pretty optimal for that.
"Go" is the start of the program, not a Goto. It isn't labeled Start because each of the names is supposed to have a separate initial, so you can use those initals as commands in the program itself.
There's a lot of truth to what you say, but both sides have to be considered. Programming languages that take all of that out of your hands (garbage collection, memory allocation, type definition, and whatever else) wind up being less efficient and less flexible.
No, I'm not going to argue the idea that X can be written to compile just as efficiently as Y because none of those tests take into account programmer's habit of overusing processor resources when they can't see them being used.
Well, yes and no. I originally ran into TwIPS when taking programming classes at St. Louis Community College. Like, you, I've been completely unable to find any reference to it since then, so I wrote my own. I'd be happy to hand my code base over to anyone who feels like working with it, or drop it onto something like SourceForge.
The twelve instructions are Go, End, Move (copy, really), Jump, Conditional Jump, Subroutine Jump, Return, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, and Print. Ok, that's really eleven, but I couldn't remember what the twelfth one was when I recreated it. It uses a 1000 character text array that acts as your entire memory space. You have to allocate buffers, create your initial variables and strings, and store all your code in that space. It will start execution at location 000, the Go was just something that I remember them including, so I did, too.
I don't think I have any of the exercises I had my students do written down, though, so you'd have to make up your own. It's not too hard.
Sixty hours? A year? You make this amount of practice sound like a lot of time. I'm fifteen years into C++ and I hack kernel and could write my own compiler. Nonetheless, I'm still learning about some of the things it can do.
I'm not a programmer because I love to program, I program to do a function, to make some part of my job easier.
This is a truly key statement in his post. You have to ask yourself what you want to do with programming. If you want to write software that'll do interesting things for your own personal use, then VB is probably about right. It won't produce elegant code, but it will produce simple functionality fairly quickly, and you can build your own tools with it. In a society where computer illiteracy is becoming as problematic as written illiteracy, this kind of programming language definitely has a place.
On the other hand, if you want to produce programs for OTHER people to use, you shouldn't flinch at spending a year learning how to make a programming language do what you want it to do. It's like mechanical or civil engineering. If you want to build a shed out back or a trebuchet then go ahead and pickup some parts at Home Depot and start nailing things together. If you want to design anything that ANYONE ELSE is going to use, like an office building or an automobile, then you had better figure out how to use something a little more sophisticated than 2x4's.
A lot of people will come back with the argument that there should be something easier to learn than C or C++ for the beginners, but in my experience that's a flawed argument. Learning a language is an investment in time, and most people are unwilling to discard that investment. Instead, they've bolted on afterthoughts to the programming languages to make them more functional. For that reason, VB6 was always a horse designed by a committee. If you want to learn how to program like a professional then start with a professional language.
The one exception is Assembly Language. Every time I try to teach people how to program I start by teaching them the Twelve Instruction Programming System (TwIPS), which is a simplified subset of assembly. With this they learn the bare bones of what any piece of software does, how algorithms function inside a computer, and what the instructions are really doing.
And when they get around to learning C++ they find it considerably less tedious than if they had hit it directly.
This reminds me of a Cathy cartoon I said a number of years ago. She's hanging out at a bar with a friend and tells her "sometimes I just want to hang a sign around my neck that says 'Wait, I'm just about to lose 10 pounds!' "
And then they see a guy walk buy with a sign around his neck that says "Soon I'll have the body of Arnold Schwartzeneger", and they have a good laugh.
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I'm giving up my opportunity to moderate in saying this, but I thought it was important.
The burning temperature of kerosine has little bearing on this. When kerosine burns, it gives off heat. As long as that heat is contained, the actual temperature will increase. What you really need to calculate is the maxiumum temperature of burned kerosine, which is the total energy given off divided among the atoms which were necessary to make the kerosine undergo the exothermic breakdown in the first place. As mentioned in a lower post, this IS enough to bring steel over anealing temperatures, which would be enough to cause the tower to collapse.
This is complicated, however, by many, many other factors. For instance, you can only burn as much kerosine as there is oxygen to interact with, and the heat has to be distributed not just between the kerosine and the oxygen, but also among the other 79% of the air. Further complicating matters, once things reaches a critical temperature, MANY things will burn. Offices are full of resin-soaked pressboard, for instance, and foam padding. As a kicker, even steel burns. Anyone who has seen a burned car or lit steel wool knows this. If the temperatures were high enough to cause the concrete to crack away from the support pillars, then the steel itself would have begun to oxidize, weakening the structure.
What this comes down to is that I am not the least bit surprised that the towers collapsed. I have nothing to say about WTC7 because, to my knowledge, it didn't collapse at all, but was damaged badly enough from falling depris that they had to demolish it later. No, it doesn't surprise me that it had to be taken down but WTC6 didn't. Disasters aren't the deterministic things that we expect them to be.
What DOES strike me as bizarre is that they collapsed straight down. Anyone who has stomped on a soda can can see the improbability of that. I've heard suggestions that the central core collapsed and the outer grid contained it, but the dynamics behind that should have thrown girders outward in all directions.
This is especially true of the second tower to be hit, where the airplane went through one corner instead of through the middle. If it collapsed from the heat, it should have collapsed on one corner, toppling the upper structure onto the nearby buildings. It, too, however, collapsed straight down.
Oh, a little bit on the actual subject of the article. I took a look at that video. The camera was taking one frame every half second. In the one frame immediately preceding the explosion, there is a white blotch that looks something like an airplane. A braindead monkey could have photoshopped that in, and it would take a braindead monkey to believe that it's evidence of anything. This explains the administration's position on the film.
I'm not saying that this supports the conspiracy theory idea. In fact, I'm saying rather authoritatively that it supports nothing whatsoever. I'm pretty much of the belief that it was released, not to convince anyone, but to remind people that maybe, just maybe, the terrorists are still more of a threat to our nation than those in power.
That's right. Which is why applying it to individuals who commit felonies is truly perverting the meaning.
I disagree. Those under felony conviction are a different social group just as much as any religious or ethnic group. Becoming a felon doesn't mean that you lose all of your rights, just the ones against imprisonment and for voting. What happens to them CAN happen to us. After we get used to doing it to felons, we may start applying it to anyone who collects welfare or medicare. Then we can extend it to anyone who gets any service from the government, which leads to anyone who owns property.
You seem to be of the opinion that felons, as a class, always deserve whatever we dish out to them, no matter now horrible it is. I'd review that if I were you because it's an attitude that someone might be applying to you some day.
The whole point of the quote is to oppose government action against innocent people who are being persecuted simply for being a member of a group (a religious group, an ethnic minority, etc).
Um, no. The whole point is that you shouldn't let government oppression occur simply because it's not happening to your group. If you wait until it happens to your group, there may be nobody left who will help you.
Although this was presented by an Anonymous Coward, I believe it has a kernel of truth in it. It is a poem about not caring about those who are different than us. People are extremely good at assuming that anyone who is different deserves whatever they get, for whatever reason. For instance, many of us assume that the black population deserves tougher drug penalties (and the ratios of arrests and convictions demonstrate this), but the truth is that blacks have a considerably lower drug use percentage than most other enthic populations.
Don't assume that, just because a person deserves incarceration, they also deserve an anal probe, display of their genitals on public television, or to be submitted for genetic experimentation. These are extreme examples, but each references a basic human right that even felons should be granted.
The question still exists of where to draw the line. In this case, I'd have to turn to the nature of the crime. When was the last time a computer cracking crime was solved through DNA evidence? Murder or rape, sure, I can understand that, but cracking? I do not feel that this is in any way warranted.
It really doesn't matter how large a percent of Americans mind if their information gets tapped. Our constitution gives me the right to privacy for my person, papers, and belongings, and this comes under that category. It's already been demostrated that the majority isn't allowed to give away the constitutional rights of a minority.
Our lord leader the shrub, on the other hand, is trying to demonstrate that a powerful enough minority can do whatever the damn well please to the majority, and other members of that minority are trying very hard to make sure he gets away with it.
I agree with the tagging system. Stupid sheep.
Get YOUR facts straight. For all of you who haven't bothered to read the text of the Anti-Cybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, for a judge or jury to find for the plaintiff on one of these typosquatting cases, they must merely find that the defendant's domain on balance violated five or more of the following nine factors listed as violations of the law:
Was this meant to contradict me? It seems that you're supporting my point, so I'll reiterate it. There's nothing wrong with buying a typo-prone domain and putting miscellaneous advertisement on it the way Google does. If they were to create a "look-alike" typosquatting domain with the intent to siphon business off of the non-typo business, then they'd be doing something wrong, but that's not what they're doing.
It's not like opening a restaurant near McDonald's, it's like opening a restaurant near McDonald's and naming it MacDonald's and hoping people won't know the difference.
Um, no. It's like opening a store next to McDonalds (with the golden arches) named MacDonalds (with big green letters on a blue background) and selling lawn and garden supplies. This is only illegal if they also swipe the look and feel of McDonald's logos, such as to encourage people to think that they are in some way affiliated with the fast food company.
It is an extremely rare occasion when people look at a typosquatting site and confuse it with the site that they thought they were looking for. They're pretty obvious. Unless they make some attempt to emulate the typo'd site, then they're not fooling anyone, and they're not doing anything illegal, immoral, or even vaguely in bad taste.
I think I'm going to invent a new term. Googlesniping: trying to convince the world that something is suddenly evil simply because Google has started doing it.
Unfortunately, your analogy is completely unfounded. Human nature dictates that accumulated information will always be accessed for less than noble reasons when it is available.
Point 1: We've created a nation were almost everyone is involved in some form of illegal activity, whether it's the harmless storing of prescription drugs past their proscribed use, or the blatant cheating on our taxes, most of us have something that the government could arrest and prosecute us for.
Point 2: Our government is currently controlled by religious zealots who believe that getting their way is more important than honesty or justice. One look at the Iraq war or the Intelligent Design "debate" is enough to demonstrate this.
Conclusion: Where the religiously intollerant are unable to create laws against moral issues, they are likely to then start prosecuting the "offenders" via selective enforcement of the various laws metioned in Point 1. This has already come to pass in many jurisdictions via racial profiling in the case of drug laws.
The more widely available information linked to us becomes, the more widespread these abuses will become. While some people are capable of making decent decisions in this matter, the vast majority will eventually bend to their personal viewpoints as a priority over standard legal channels. This is how corruption leaks into most organizations, and a country is no different.
While I definitely understand the logic of this, I have to dispute the practicality of it. I've attempted to use many of the lesser used forum softwares, and they're lesser used for a reason. They have considerably less functionality, aren't as user friendly, and tend to be riddled with bugs. I currently use phpbb, and spend a few minutes each week having to weed out the spam from my forum, banning ranges of ip addresses, and deleting bogus members, that kind of thing. This is a drop in the bucket to the amount of tinkering I had to do in order to even make the others functional.
So, while this would be an effective tool for preventing forum spam, I think that the overall request is really how to eliminate the management overhead caused by forum spam. Doing this in a way that increases overall management overhead isn't a practial answer.
I'll second this. By their description I was expecting an encyclopedia of IT knowledge, where you could look up any tool, for instance, to find out its parameters and clever uses. Somewhere that people can post all the cool stuff that you normally have to buy a Tips and Traps book to get to, or be on the development team. Somewhere that I can type in an executable name from my Windows Services window and find out what it does, if it's necessary, and most importantly how to get rid of it. Something with concrete tuning suggestions for each piece of software and hardware.
This is nothing like that. It'll help you figure out what your server is doing wrong based on log files. I'm very disappointed.
I'm afraid your medical knowledge is out of date in one very important respect. You're reference to "stuff we like" and "stuff we don't like" is refered to as the "Common Understanding of Behavior", and has been demonstrated to be a misleading and often harmful oversimplification.
Dopamine reinforces the neurons that have most recently been fired. In essense, it tells us that these are the neurons that produce a beneficial effect. If you inject dopamines into a person while slicing into their skin, they WILL start to crave having their skin sliced into, even if it initially provided them with no pleasure. The person will build up an irrational craving for it. If this were merely an intellectual decision about what we like and don't like, then the person would be able to differentiate between the dopamine shot and the skin slicing, but they don't.
What you're talking about isn't an addiction. We have other words for those - specifically starvation, dehydration, and suffocation. Addiction is a urgent craving for something that is not biologically required. The chemical mechanism that causes runner's high and afterglow is the same mechanism that causes addictions to alcohol, heroin, gambling, and porn. It's a learning mechanism that has gone awry due to circumstances that our evolution has never had to deal with before.
Not even vaguely true. Addiction is only considered a problem when it's destructive. The way our body chemistry works, we also become addicted to sex and exercise. Both of these are exactly what nature intended, and generally have very productive results (in some case reproductive results).
Once agian, someone is using bad science and scare tactics to try to frighten people about something that they don't like. I haven't read the article, but I suspect that somewhere along the line the person is proposing legislation.
Believe it or not, you can get the same air-pressure benefit by reducing the pressure in your suit as you get from increasing the pressure outside. That's how dispersion works. Astronauts take advantage of this by keeping the pressure in their suits no higher than necessary to keep the astronaut alive. IANAA, but I believe that it is about a half to a third of one atmosphere.
The one benefit that you DO get from having any atmostphere at all is that you don't have to engineer your equipment to avoid vaccuum welding. When two pieces of metal slide against each other on earth, they have a thin layer of gas holding them apart like microscopic ballberrings. When you try to do this in a vaccuum, they just might get stuck against each other and have to be pried apart.
Sadly, micron is generally abbreviated with a 'u' on a normal keybard instead of an m because it looks more like a mu than an m does. Easy mistake though.
If you think about it, it's common sense. What's worse, living alone, or living with someone who steals all your stuff?
An atmosphere on Earth provides us with many benefits. First, it gives us oxygen to breathe (duh). Second it provides us with ambient pressure so our liquids don't boil. Third, it holds water in solution so we don't dry out. Fourth, it protects us from radiation from space. Fifth, it maintains a livable temperature so we don't boil or freeze. This doesn't include a host of useful and non-immediate applications, like carrying voice communication or supporting airplanes, or providing an environment for us to grow food.
The atmosphere of Mars does none of these things (except mild but inadequate radiation protection) so it's little better than a true vaccum. What it does do is leech heat out of anything it touches. It also carries microfine dust which will make it hell to keep anything mechanical working. So, yes, the "atmosphere" of the Moon (or ultrahigh vaccum, or whatever) is, in fact, less harsh than the one on Mars.
I have no problems with a .xxx TLD. I think it would be great for those web sites that really wanted to advertise what they were doing. It would also give consumers who go to those sites a clear idea of what they're clicking on before they click on it. I'm not sure how effective it would be because so many porn sites rely upon gurrilla pop-ups in order to get traffic. Apparently any person who is looking for information on video games can't help but spend money on porn if bare breasts pop up on his screen during a search.
.xxx domain, but once they start forcing it then they get into a contest of who can be offended by the lamest content. This is what results in breast cancer information sites and the site of any radio station that employs a shock jock being stuck in the porn category.
.god extension for religious sites. I think they'd flock to that, and I think that it would make an AWESOME way for me to recognize when the content of a web page is hopelessly religeously biased.
The only problem with this is that they're forcing people onto it. I don't mind a general rule that porn should exist on a
What I'd like to see is a
Of course, she did urge people to "act forcefully to remove a government administration playing games of smoke and mirrors and vicious deceit.". I think it's the "act forcefully" part that gets you investigated.
Granted.
Plus, she *was* using a government computer for non-work related activities.
No, she wasn't. They looked, and COULD have fired her if that was the case. She wrote the letter on her computer at home.
Plus, you just spoke out about Bush. Are you being investigated?
How would I know? I've generally assumed that they have a regularly updated file on me because I'm outspoken. Heck, Denver got in trouble for keeping files on anyone who ever showed up to a Libertarian event, so I know that I've been investigated at some time in the past.
You are making quite a number of assumptions here. For instance...
According to your link, she isn't being investigated for a crime....Her union told her that she was reported to the FBI, but no one from the VA or from the FBI seems to have told her that or confirmed it.
We live in the age of no-warrant wire taps, gag orders and hidden dockets. How would we ever know? She was definitely reported to the FBI, it's reasonable to assume that they've done at least a cursory investigation.
her bosses at the VA were pissed because she identified herself as a VA nurse in her letter, so on the order of their HR director, their IT guys took her work computer for a couple of days to see if she wrote the letter on company time and/or equipment. She's certainly not being harrassed by the FBI...
Again, more assumptions. All that the article said was that the information services guys took her computer, giving her a memo from the higher ups. They had no reason to believe that she'd written the letter from her office computer, and they didn't say who they gave that information to while it was being searched. More importantly, she didn't know, which is more than enough to put fear into her and every coworker that knows about it.
That's the power of secret police forces. It's not the ability to drag away anybody who pisses them off, but the ability to instill fear that if you step out of line, open your mouth in the wrong place, that you might be next.
Basically she wrote a letter to the editor identifying her job and then proceeded to publicly blast her employer as an employee.
Not even close. She criticized the president and his policies, not the VA hospitals. If anything, she said that the VA was getting dumped on because of the administration's poor decisions. This would be more like being an employee of Taco Bell, and criticizing Pepsi for manning all of their plants with illegal immigrants in a letter to the editor. (last I checked, Pepsi owns Taco Bell). While I won't go so far as to say that THAT wouldn't get someone fired (you never know), I will say that the analogy doesn't hold up when someone is expressing an opinion on the performance of publicly elected officials.
Here's your evidence. This lady is a VA nurse who wrote a letter to the editor of a newspaper about how poorly Bush has been handling the Iraq war and huricane Katrina.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/33027/
She's been under investigation by the FBI since then, and they're threatening to throw her in jail on sedition charges. They've been using scare tactics like interrupting her in the middle of her work at the hospital and confiscating her work computer "to look for evidence".
The future is arriving faster than you think.
Well, no. There's no input instruction because all of the input needs to be in memory before you start the program. It's not designed to have a user interface. That's outside the scope of the tool. It does, however, need to produce definable results, and having the students send their results to the print function is pretty optimal for that.
"Go" is the start of the program, not a Goto. It isn't labeled Start because each of the names is supposed to have a separate initial, so you can use those initals as commands in the program itself.
There's a lot of truth to what you say, but both sides have to be considered. Programming languages that take all of that out of your hands (garbage collection, memory allocation, type definition, and whatever else) wind up being less efficient and less flexible.
No, I'm not going to argue the idea that X can be written to compile just as efficiently as Y because none of those tests take into account programmer's habit of overusing processor resources when they can't see them being used.
Is TwIPS just something you made up?
Well, yes and no. I originally ran into TwIPS when taking programming classes at St. Louis Community College. Like, you, I've been completely unable to find any reference to it since then, so I wrote my own. I'd be happy to hand my code base over to anyone who feels like working with it, or drop it onto something like SourceForge.
The twelve instructions are Go, End, Move (copy, really), Jump, Conditional Jump, Subroutine Jump, Return, Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, and Print. Ok, that's really eleven, but I couldn't remember what the twelfth one was when I recreated it. It uses a 1000 character text array that acts as your entire memory space. You have to allocate buffers, create your initial variables and strings, and store all your code in that space. It will start execution at location 000, the Go was just something that I remember them including, so I did, too.
I don't think I have any of the exercises I had my students do written down, though, so you'd have to make up your own. It's not too hard.
Sixty hours? A year? You make this amount of practice sound like a lot of time. I'm fifteen years into C++ and I hack kernel and could write my own compiler. Nonetheless, I'm still learning about some of the things it can do.
I'm not a programmer because I love to program, I program to do a function, to make some part of my job easier.
This is a truly key statement in his post. You have to ask yourself what you want to do with programming. If you want to write software that'll do interesting things for your own personal use, then VB is probably about right. It won't produce elegant code, but it will produce simple functionality fairly quickly, and you can build your own tools with it. In a society where computer illiteracy is becoming as problematic as written illiteracy, this kind of programming language definitely has a place.
On the other hand, if you want to produce programs for OTHER people to use, you shouldn't flinch at spending a year learning how to make a programming language do what you want it to do. It's like mechanical or civil engineering. If you want to build a shed out back or a trebuchet then go ahead and pickup some parts at Home Depot and start nailing things together. If you want to design anything that ANYONE ELSE is going to use, like an office building or an automobile, then you had better figure out how to use something a little more sophisticated than 2x4's.
A lot of people will come back with the argument that there should be something easier to learn than C or C++ for the beginners, but in my experience that's a flawed argument. Learning a language is an investment in time, and most people are unwilling to discard that investment. Instead, they've bolted on afterthoughts to the programming languages to make them more functional. For that reason, VB6 was always a horse designed by a committee. If you want to learn how to program like a professional then start with a professional language.
The one exception is Assembly Language. Every time I try to teach people how to program I start by teaching them the Twelve Instruction Programming System (TwIPS), which is a simplified subset of assembly. With this they learn the bare bones of what any piece of software does, how algorithms function inside a computer, and what the instructions are really doing.
And when they get around to learning C++ they find it considerably less tedious than if they had hit it directly.
This reminds me of a Cathy cartoon I said a number of years ago. She's hanging out at a bar with a friend and tells her "sometimes I just want to hang a sign around my neck that says 'Wait, I'm just about to lose 10 pounds!' "
And then they see a guy walk buy with a sign around his neck that says "Soon I'll have the body of Arnold Schwartzeneger", and they have a good laugh.