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During the Live 8 concerts last summer I had zero trouble viewing the live streams with linux (just had to click through their flash-dependent selector, use the DOM inspector to find the actual windoze media bit, and feed that to mplayer, which is a handy sequence in general). The on-demand clips were a bit trickier until I found out that they were in a format called Nullsoft Streaming Video, using the On2 VP5 codec, which xine supported at that time and probably more players since then. It also took a while to work around the broken bits of javascript in the player window, but all of the content played fine on Linux. Has anyone looked at this to see if it's similar?
Actually, the spent fuel pool is the A-number-one hazard with some of the most dangerous nuclear plants in the United States. In the event that the pool loses water, which could happen among other cases if there is a terrorist attack or even an earthquake, experts believe "an uncontrollable nuclear fire that could release very large amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere" would result. The pool is also connected to the other pools at some reactors, and a failure of the cooling system in any pool or in the main reactor could cause a pool fire. Because a scram of the main reactor terminates power being generated on-site, a total reactor shutdown could actually increase the risk of a pool catastrophe if backup generators and offsite power are not working. A diesel generator could be the only thing sitting between a reactor scram and a Chernobyl level catastrophe during a storm or other emergency.
Now, these exceptionally dangerous plants are not operating by the industry standard -- the density of their spent fuel pools is much higher than in the intended design. But this is the whole problem with nuclear power -- people want it cheap (and lots of it), and they want it safe. You can't have it both ways. The total costs of nuclear power -- including disposing of waste in a safe manner -- need to be accounted for up front, every time. Only then can the public really believe, honestly, that the risks are acceptable.
The fact that the same politicians that support the death penalty and use it as a political scare tactic are loosening enforcement on nuclear power makes my blood boil. The death penalty is another tradeoff where it is possible to reduce the number of innocent people executed, or to reduce the cost to below life incarceration (usually by limiting appeals), but there is no way in hell to do both. Yet the same politicians claim that few innocent people have been executed in the most recent post-1976 round with the death penalty (distinguished from previous experience largely by expensive legal checks and balances), then whine about appeals whenever it is brought up that life in prison is actually cheaper. The death penalty is also a case where ideally you want ZERO error, although the tolerance is certainly larger than for catastrophic nuclear accidents.
You're right about the background radiation from nuclear plants, and about most exposure to radon. Within reason, they are not hazards. Pesticide contamination was a much greater source of carcinogens for decades than radon.
That's funny. I think these days Rat Shack sells other companies' stuff marked up. Maybe that's only the cheaper stuff, but I know you can get all sorts of rebadged headphones (usually Koss) from Radio Shack for an extra 30% or so.
...and how well can you gopher stuff over to the copy machine, run (someone else's) builds, etc.? If you're extra lucky maybe you'll be asked to write some glue code or track down a bug or two.
You may not have noticed, but it's gotten harder and harder to find a well-paying job in the United States recently, where by "well-paying" I mean in the range historically considered middle class ($12-20/hr). If you have a family to support, quitting a job, even one that you vehemently disagree with morally, may not be an option at all. The likely pay cut, the liability from other employers seeing you as someone who rocks the boat, and the extensive delay before completing the hiring process and getting a new job all add up to a really foreboding situation for many Americans. Not a new problem either, but it's gotten a lot worse again as of late. Instead of those jobs there are now a bunch of lower paying service industry jobs, and a handful of elite professional positions which pay more but are exacting in terms of the formal credentials they require and competition for them, and which usually offer less job security.
This is "news for nerds" because it affects a nerdly profession, but it's "stuff that matters" more than anything else because of the effect the current economy is having on very basic freedoms of conscience. Corporate America has much greater leverage over employees than it once did partly because of economic factors that it had a role in manipulating, through lobbyists and Congress. The question might be weak in its phrasing but the issue is a strong one for many of Slashdot's readers. I welcome seeing this kind of question in Ask Slashdot.
It's well known around CMU that most of the masters' programs are a cash cow for the university. PhD programs have an expensive sticker price but most students are subsidized through TA and research positions and a stipend. The masters' programs are only worth it if you see a clear career path coming out of it -- they are designed to appeal to careerism, and priced accordingly. They are also quite a bit easier to get into, overall. You might get a good deal since the program is just starting out, but be really careful of throwing a lot of money at this. Student loans suck.
CMU's masters programs, overall, aren't really that interesting. (The exceptions I can think of offhand are the robotics and entertainment technology programs, and even those are direct career path -- the former into big-time university or defense industry R&D, the latter into being an EA slave). The information and networking program (which is NOT run out of the CS department!) is positively disgusting and run by total idiots -- about three clicks in any direction from that front page will find you some technocrat mumbo-jumbo about cybercrime and cyberthis and cyberthat. These are the people who testify before congress every now and then saying how Internet users need to be protected from themselves.
I should also mention that I've heard from the horse's mouth (a Microsoft engineer that spoke to my operating systems class in college) that MS knows third-party drivers cause most of their kernel crashes (at least in 2000/XP). If Linux is made by hardware vendors to rely on binary drivers, where exactly does that leave its stability advantage?
Also, yeah, that link is wrong in the above comment, it was a bug with the same symptoms but nvidia-caused, not an s/390 specific bug. Unfortunately I can't find a message discussing it on lkml because nvidia had it quietly fixed without ever admitting it was there.
Actually their binary drivers are really crashy historically. There was this bug in all of the 3xxx releases, and most releases through the 4xxx could lock up when X was trying to do certain things (large copies from offscreen seemed to do the trick). I don't even know if the latter was ever fixed because I switched from my old tnt2 to an ATI r200-based card with open-source drivers.
"Even" rendered PNGs? You mean like every version of IE for Windoze since 4.0 and every version of Netscape, for any platform, starting with the 4.04 patch release? About oh, say three years late?
Yeah, I remember ie5 was a godsend... because Mac users started being able to see PNG's like everyone else. What a fucking joke IE 4.x for Mac was, with all the corners it cut. And its support for third-party certification authorities (CAs) was still broken and never got fixed, ever. No version of IE for Mac was a godsend if you worked for an institution that had its own in-house CA. I wonder who at Microsoft got the baksheesh from Verisign for that one.
Actually, that won't do anything. The problem is that Mr Beatles does SEO and is getting more pagerank (supposedly) from being linked from slashdot's FP. The only affirmative action you could take would be to remove any link to slashdot you may have on your web site. If I had one, I'd remove it now. Too bad, because slashdot is such a wonderful time waster...
But thanks for your contribution of typically ill-informed libertarian rhetoric. It's more obvious when you paste it into random situations like this just how bankrupt that argument is.
Ok, I was just pissing in the wind there, but now that really is bullshit.
Why should any doctor agree to work consistent 70 hour weeks (not talking about overtime here)? It's not an overload we're talking about if it's *consistent*. But then you'd have to argue there's a doctor shortage. Now, there is no shortage of people who seem to want a medical career, so either it's near impossible to find qualified people (true beyond a point, but the selectivity of medical schools is high enough that I don't believe this would be an immediate issue), or there just aren't enough slots (which I don't really know anything about), or a medical career is unpalatable because of the way the schools and the profession works (more than likely). And 130 hours in a week -- jesus, did you fail math? There are only 168 hours in a week! That's it! Most human beings require in the neighborhood of 6 to 8 hours of sleep to function properly on a continuing basis. 6 hours times 7 is 42 hours, so we're at the work, sleep, work, sleep stage. Forgive me if I don't believe those doctors working 130 hour "emergency" shifts are going to be very sharp or even very reliable by the end of that week.
Your faux-masochism is contemptible. Here's the only question, IMO: how many more reasonably qualified doctors could be graduated if medical school were not such a PITA? If there would be more doctors who would agree to serve in underserved areas (perhaps with scholarship money paid), out of a larger pool of graduates, nobody would need to take outlandish hours on a regular basis. Furthermore, some of those "new age doctors" you deride might be after something other than an entry into the upper middle class. God forbid that someone practicing medicine have a life!
Oh, but I forgot -- then there would be no need for the huge salaries doctors make. Your entire argument is a tautology. The reality is that the medical profession is in the business of supporting itself, as all professions tend to do. Oh, and meanwhile, look at those health care costs.
I have nothing against medical licensing, only the scheme under which it is done. The state (which has the legal power to impose it) has delegated authority for it to institutions which are at best arm's length, and the public trusts the AMA (an association of people whose personal interest it is often in to limit the supply of doctors) to decide under how and under what circumstances one enters the medical profession. Now we have a situation where a cartel of schools has agreed to let themselves choose where a student may perform a residency, and they routinely work residents 60-120 hours/wk. There is no way that is in the interest of public health, only free labor for the hospitals and a medical profession that is unpalatable to enter. It sucks even more that many of these schools are public, and the rest all receive tons of NIH money. What again are we paying these clowns for?
How the hell would you know what a school does? Most private (and even public) institutions keep their disciplinary proceedings secret. In fact, the best leverage a student has against an institution in cases like these is to threaten to publicize it through a lawsuit or otherwise. By the time you reach a settlement you've still lost up to a year of time in the school; the schools know that given the choice between a de facto one year suspension with a covenant not to sue over it, and an expulsion you will have to challenge in court, with all attendant legal fees, most students will choose the suspension.
I operate under the assumption that all large-scale institutions have some responsibility to the public interest. This goes double for institutions involved in the corrupt, state-endorsed professional licensure schemes for law, medicine, etc.
If you read the Grokster slip opinion, it becomes somewhat clear that the SC punted on the real issue of law, and sent the case back on a procedural issue, as an improper dismissal (there is the issue of what constitutes contributory infringement, but the unanimous part of the opinion focused instead on the business model question, not on P2P as such).
However, you could already see the factions lining up in the concurring opinions. In one corner, you have Breyer, Stevens, and O'Connor, defending the Betamax ruling, and in the other, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Rehnquist, wanting to water it down in favor of copyright holders. Souter stayed out of the fray and Scalia and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. If I had to guess, I'd say Scalia would rule with Rehnquist out of habit, and Souter would probably side with Stevens given that he did not join the Ginsburg concurrence, but speculating about SC votes is kind of pointless. What it's looking like is that if a serious issue of law were brought up regarding the legality of P2P as such, the vote might be 5-4 one way or the other.
If that is surprising, consider that Betamax itself was a 5-4 decision. A right people take for granted today squeaked by the SC in one vote! Google for it on Findlaw, the dissent in Betamax would have been an incredible handout to the copyright industry. Only three justices on the SC at the time are still in today, and all are expected to retire soon. Stevens and O'Connor ruled in favor of the VCR, Rehnquist ruled for the studios. These issues are still up in the air, and it doesn't help that we've acquired justices like Ginsburg and Kennedy since then.
As an aside, I found O'Connor's dissent on the Kelo eminent domain case very readable and damn near convincing -- and this is an issue I am not convinced on either way. I am quite liberal, but I hate the government acting like a corporation and shafting people to increase tax revenue. It made much more sense to me than Thomas' dissent, partly because I am not convinced that the Constitution says anything on it either way, so she bases her argument deeply in common law. It is too bad she won't be around to continue lending her insights and writing skills to the court. I hope someone like Breyer can carry that torch. I'd warmed up to Kennedy after the Lawrence v. Texas case, but between Kelo and Grokster he's in all the wrong places now.
OK, IANAB (I am not a biochemist:D), but there are some questions this analysis raises with me immediately, just as someone who's passed basic college-level biology and chemistry.
If thiomersal is so safe, how the hell is it biologically effective? It's used as a bactericide, first. Other mercury compounds don't need to be broken down to be bioeffective, and some of them are known to accumulate in the body. What's to say this isn't true of thiomersal? It may be toxic and bioaccumulative without any significant chemical or enzymatic changes!
Secondly, that autism is a developmental disorder does not in any way exclude that it may be biochemical or environmental in cause -- the wrong exposure at the wrong time. Nor is a genetic association incompatible with environmental exposure -- some individuals may be more genetically susceptible to various environmental factors in development.
I know someone who is professionally involved with autism research, and he has started taking notes on the mercury/vaccines link. The evidence for it may be increasing. Need to find out more about this though.
By saying that Penrose is a True Believer in free will, you seem to be casting someone who believes the same as probably >80% of humanity as an extremist.
If you redefine "consciousness" and especially "responsibility", you can fit them into any such framework. What you speak of as "consciousness", presumably, is the mental sense that "I" exist, not metaphysical awareness (although the first could encompass an awareness of the second). You can say that those are the same but without proof that's just an opinion. More to the point, your definition of "responsibility" treats people as automata (kind of a given, I guess), and holding people responsible for their actions becomes a matter only of large-scale system administration. This is not what people generally think of as "responsibility".
With determinism, people are saved or damned by circumstance, just like Calvinism. The fact that this has political implications seems to be either ignored by scientists who like to pretend they are above the fray of human affairs, or popularized in useless platitudes.
Moreover, although I don't personally know enough about quantum physics, there are plenty of cases in physics where small effects do not necessarily cancel out at a large scale, generally in fields related to fluid dynamics. The concept of the "butterfly effect" is relevant here.
Some people I know are familiar with some quiz bowl people at CMU. The rumor I've heard is that Kermin is a rather arrogant and cocky fellow. His explanation was rather fitting for him.
I was also kind of irritated by the whole school-pride thing about him (not that I have much pride in CMU, where that kind of arrogance is more the rule than the exception, especially in departments like electrical engineering). People were cheering for him who would never vote for a republican in their lives, and the kid is a classic middle-american suburban/exurban conservative from a red state (Kentucky) who is reportedly rather uncomfortable about gays and abortion (and socioeconomic issues, but since CMU tuition is so high, being wealthy and right-wing economically is common there even if people don't want to admit it). To top it off he uses the interview the school paper gave him to exclaim that CMU represents "solid american values" (read "Calvinist"...unfortunately thetartan.org is down yet again so I can't link to it)
Ah well, never let politics get in the way of a little mindless cheering for That Local Sports Team... and this is the closest thing in memory CMU has had to a sporting contest with people from other schools where students actually paid some attention to it.
I'm not really sure you understand the issues at stake here.
First, a stable module API doesn't matter. nV's drivers have the same fucking bugs for years' worth of releases. It's normal to expect some bugs for such a complicated piece of software when porting it to a new kernel major release, but these bugs happen in 2.4, 2.6, probably 2.2.
Even Microsoft is pissed off about this. I was told by a Microsoft engineer a couple years ago that drivers are the #1 cause of BSOD's on Windows by a long shot. If the Windows kernel is hobbled by bad drivers, what do you think happens to the Linux kernel, which is arguably better quality overall? The fact is, with all the code running in ring 0, and with privileged access to hardware that cannot be easily reinitialized if the driver crashes (ever tried to reload the NVdriver module?), it doesn't matter how good the kernel is. The Linux kernel developers are right to not support this madness because it dramatically lowers the delivered quality of their product. It's just plain old QA.
I do see a potential compromise that I'd embrace. NVidia could work with X.org to add hooks to the "nv" driver, so 2D could be rock solid all the time and I could use the same driver without rebooting for 3D. Even if 3D crashes every now and then, it matters a lot less, especially because I'm not going to get the same 3D elsewhere.
Fucking A -- that's exactly the bug I have all the time with my (old) nvidia card, and I was beginning to suspect bad hardware. It is actually somewhat reproducible when loading very large images with mozilla or xpdf, too.
I was willing to give nVidia the benefit of the doubt since they fixed other bugs (like the infamous kernel oopsing bit back in the 3xxx series), but that does it. This bug has been around for fucking ever. My next video card will be a Radeon 9200.
PRA appears to me to have been written because MUAs (as opposed to MTAs) do not consistently deal with envelope addresses, MAIL FROM, and the resulting Return-Path header. It adds complexity to the outgoing MUA to make sure that the PRA is the same as the envelope from. The incoming MUA will have to follow the PRA algorithm to figure out who's responsible for the mail, rather than just make the Return-Path accessible for spam filtering. The overall feeling is that the designers assumed people couldn't understand how to deal with the return path, so they replaced it with something more complicated and broken.
Don't worry... you can work on Unix your whole time at CMU and still make fun of Linux with the best of them when you get your job at Microsoft along with all the other alums that work there. Supposedly CMU has a higher rate of Microsoft employment per graduated CS student than any other school in the US.
CMU has put out a never-ending stream of disgusting propaganda since last February when Gates gave a "lecture" at CMU. If you don't care to RTFM, CMU's "alumni magazine" (even more of a blatant PR mill than at most schools) spends an entire article bragging about how wonderful it is for CMU to have tons of incestuous connections with Microsoft. (The message: come to CMU and work for Microsoft!)
CMU may have quite a few good individual professors and research projects in CS, but the institution as a whole doesn't think twice about being a corporate-flak career school... from their advertising slogan "The Professional Choice" in the early '80s on (when CMU accepted a certain large donation from IBM and almost decided to make all its students buy PC's in 1982).
Thankfully, many CMU students are still practicing some degree of creative resistance, although a penguin statue allegedly placed on the roof of the student center overnight before the Gates speech was hurriedly removed since apparently CMU values its clean public image more than its students' creativity.
One other thing to note is that this is likely not much more than a matching grant for further increases in students' tuition, which pays for a much higher share of an education at CMU than at many peer schools.
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During the Live 8 concerts last summer I had zero trouble viewing the live streams with linux (just had to click through their flash-dependent selector, use the DOM inspector to find the actual windoze media bit, and feed that to mplayer, which is a handy sequence in general). The on-demand clips were a bit trickier until I found out that they were in a format called Nullsoft Streaming Video, using the On2 VP5 codec, which xine supported at that time and probably more players since then. It also took a while to work around the broken bits of javascript in the player window, but all of the content played fine on Linux. Has anyone looked at this to see if it's similar?
Now, these exceptionally dangerous plants are not operating by the industry standard -- the density of their spent fuel pools is much higher than in the intended design. But this is the whole problem with nuclear power -- people want it cheap (and lots of it), and they want it safe. You can't have it both ways. The total costs of nuclear power -- including disposing of waste in a safe manner -- need to be accounted for up front, every time. Only then can the public really believe, honestly, that the risks are acceptable.
The fact that the same politicians that support the death penalty and use it as a political scare tactic are loosening enforcement on nuclear power makes my blood boil. The death penalty is another tradeoff where it is possible to reduce the number of innocent people executed, or to reduce the cost to below life incarceration (usually by limiting appeals), but there is no way in hell to do both. Yet the same politicians claim that few innocent people have been executed in the most recent post-1976 round with the death penalty (distinguished from previous experience largely by expensive legal checks and balances), then whine about appeals whenever it is brought up that life in prison is actually cheaper. The death penalty is also a case where ideally you want ZERO error, although the tolerance is certainly larger than for catastrophic nuclear accidents.
You're right about the background radiation from nuclear plants, and about most exposure to radon. Within reason, they are not hazards. Pesticide contamination was a much greater source of carcinogens for decades than radon.
That's funny. I think these days Rat Shack sells other companies' stuff marked up. Maybe that's only the cheaper stuff, but I know you can get all sorts of rebadged headphones (usually Koss) from Radio Shack for an extra 30% or so.
...and how well can you gopher stuff over to the copy machine, run (someone else's) builds, etc.? If you're extra lucky maybe you'll be asked to write some glue code or track down a bug or two.
This is an internship, after all. (grin)
This is "news for nerds" because it affects a nerdly profession, but it's "stuff that matters" more than anything else because of the effect the current economy is having on very basic freedoms of conscience. Corporate America has much greater leverage over employees than it once did partly because of economic factors that it had a role in manipulating, through lobbyists and Congress. The question might be weak in its phrasing but the issue is a strong one for many of Slashdot's readers. I welcome seeing this kind of question in Ask Slashdot.
CMU's masters programs, overall, aren't really that interesting. (The exceptions I can think of offhand are the robotics and entertainment technology programs, and even those are direct career path -- the former into big-time university or defense industry R&D, the latter into being an EA slave). The information and networking program (which is NOT run out of the CS department!) is positively disgusting and run by total idiots -- about three clicks in any direction from that front page will find you some technocrat mumbo-jumbo about cybercrime and cyberthis and cyberthat. These are the people who testify before congress every now and then saying how Internet users need to be protected from themselves.
Also, yeah, that link is wrong in the above comment, it was a bug with the same symptoms but nvidia-caused, not an s/390 specific bug. Unfortunately I can't find a message discussing it on lkml because nvidia had it quietly fixed without ever admitting it was there.
Actually their binary drivers are really crashy historically. There was this bug in all of the 3xxx releases, and most releases through the 4xxx could lock up when X was trying to do certain things (large copies from offscreen seemed to do the trick). I don't even know if the latter was ever fixed because I switched from my old tnt2 to an ATI r200-based card with open-source drivers.
Yeah, I remember ie5 was a godsend... because Mac users started being able to see PNG's like everyone else. What a fucking joke IE 4.x for Mac was, with all the corners it cut. And its support for third-party certification authorities (CAs) was still broken and never got fixed, ever. No version of IE for Mac was a godsend if you worked for an institution that had its own in-house CA. I wonder who at Microsoft got the baksheesh from Verisign for that one.
Actually, that won't do anything. The problem is that Mr Beatles does SEO and is getting more pagerank (supposedly) from being linked from slashdot's FP. The only affirmative action you could take would be to remove any link to slashdot you may have on your web site. If I had one, I'd remove it now. Too bad, because slashdot is such a wonderful time waster... But thanks for your contribution of typically ill-informed libertarian rhetoric. It's more obvious when you paste it into random situations like this just how bankrupt that argument is.
Why should any doctor agree to work consistent 70 hour weeks (not talking about overtime here)? It's not an overload we're talking about if it's *consistent*. But then you'd have to argue there's a doctor shortage. Now, there is no shortage of people who seem to want a medical career, so either it's near impossible to find qualified people (true beyond a point, but the selectivity of medical schools is high enough that I don't believe this would be an immediate issue), or there just aren't enough slots (which I don't really know anything about), or a medical career is unpalatable because of the way the schools and the profession works (more than likely). And 130 hours in a week -- jesus, did you fail math? There are only 168 hours in a week! That's it! Most human beings require in the neighborhood of 6 to 8 hours of sleep to function properly on a continuing basis. 6 hours times 7 is 42 hours, so we're at the work, sleep, work, sleep stage. Forgive me if I don't believe those doctors working 130 hour "emergency" shifts are going to be very sharp or even very reliable by the end of that week.
Your faux-masochism is contemptible. Here's the only question, IMO: how many more reasonably qualified doctors could be graduated if medical school were not such a PITA? If there would be more doctors who would agree to serve in underserved areas (perhaps with scholarship money paid), out of a larger pool of graduates, nobody would need to take outlandish hours on a regular basis. Furthermore, some of those "new age doctors" you deride might be after something other than an entry into the upper middle class. God forbid that someone practicing medicine have a life!
Oh, but I forgot -- then there would be no need for the huge salaries doctors make. Your entire argument is a tautology. The reality is that the medical profession is in the business of supporting itself, as all professions tend to do. Oh, and meanwhile, look at those health care costs.
I have nothing against medical licensing, only the scheme under which it is done. The state (which has the legal power to impose it) has delegated authority for it to institutions which are at best arm's length, and the public trusts the AMA (an association of people whose personal interest it is often in to limit the supply of doctors) to decide under how and under what circumstances one enters the medical profession. Now we have a situation where a cartel of schools has agreed to let themselves choose where a student may perform a residency, and they routinely work residents 60-120 hours/wk. There is no way that is in the interest of public health, only free labor for the hospitals and a medical profession that is unpalatable to enter. It sucks even more that many of these schools are public, and the rest all receive tons of NIH money. What again are we paying these clowns for?
How the hell would you know what a school does? Most private (and even public) institutions keep their disciplinary proceedings secret. In fact, the best leverage a student has against an institution in cases like these is to threaten to publicize it through a lawsuit or otherwise. By the time you reach a settlement you've still lost up to a year of time in the school; the schools know that given the choice between a de facto one year suspension with a covenant not to sue over it, and an expulsion you will have to challenge in court, with all attendant legal fees, most students will choose the suspension.
I operate under the assumption that all large-scale institutions have some responsibility to the public interest. This goes double for institutions involved in the corrupt, state-endorsed professional licensure schemes for law, medicine, etc.
However, you could already see the factions lining up in the concurring opinions. In one corner, you have Breyer, Stevens, and O'Connor, defending the Betamax ruling, and in the other, Ginsburg, Kennedy, and Rehnquist, wanting to water it down in favor of copyright holders. Souter stayed out of the fray and Scalia and Thomas were nowhere to be seen. If I had to guess, I'd say Scalia would rule with Rehnquist out of habit, and Souter would probably side with Stevens given that he did not join the Ginsburg concurrence, but speculating about SC votes is kind of pointless. What it's looking like is that if a serious issue of law were brought up regarding the legality of P2P as such, the vote might be 5-4 one way or the other.
If that is surprising, consider that Betamax itself was a 5-4 decision. A right people take for granted today squeaked by the SC in one vote! Google for it on Findlaw, the dissent in Betamax would have been an incredible handout to the copyright industry. Only three justices on the SC at the time are still in today, and all are expected to retire soon. Stevens and O'Connor ruled in favor of the VCR, Rehnquist ruled for the studios. These issues are still up in the air, and it doesn't help that we've acquired justices like Ginsburg and Kennedy since then.
As an aside, I found O'Connor's dissent on the Kelo eminent domain case very readable and damn near convincing -- and this is an issue I am not convinced on either way. I am quite liberal, but I hate the government acting like a corporation and shafting people to increase tax revenue. It made much more sense to me than Thomas' dissent, partly because I am not convinced that the Constitution says anything on it either way, so she bases her argument deeply in common law. It is too bad she won't be around to continue lending her insights and writing skills to the court. I hope someone like Breyer can carry that torch. I'd warmed up to Kennedy after the Lawrence v. Texas case, but between Kelo and Grokster he's in all the wrong places now.
If thiomersal is so safe, how the hell is it biologically effective? It's used as a bactericide, first. Other mercury compounds don't need to be broken down to be bioeffective, and some of them are known to accumulate in the body. What's to say this isn't true of thiomersal? It may be toxic and bioaccumulative without any significant chemical or enzymatic changes!
Secondly, that autism is a developmental disorder does not in any way exclude that it may be biochemical or environmental in cause -- the wrong exposure at the wrong time. Nor is a genetic association incompatible with environmental exposure -- some individuals may be more genetically susceptible to various environmental factors in development.
I know someone who is professionally involved with autism research, and he has started taking notes on the mercury/vaccines link. The evidence for it may be increasing. Need to find out more about this though.
If you redefine "consciousness" and especially "responsibility", you can fit them into any such framework. What you speak of as "consciousness", presumably, is the mental sense that "I" exist, not metaphysical awareness (although the first could encompass an awareness of the second). You can say that those are the same but without proof that's just an opinion. More to the point, your definition of "responsibility" treats people as automata (kind of a given, I guess), and holding people responsible for their actions becomes a matter only of large-scale system administration. This is not what people generally think of as "responsibility".
With determinism, people are saved or damned by circumstance, just like Calvinism. The fact that this has political implications seems to be either ignored by scientists who like to pretend they are above the fray of human affairs, or popularized in useless platitudes.
Moreover, although I don't personally know enough about quantum physics, there are plenty of cases in physics where small effects do not necessarily cancel out at a large scale, generally in fields related to fluid dynamics. The concept of the "butterfly effect" is relevant here.
Some people I know are familiar with some quiz bowl people at CMU. The rumor I've heard is that Kermin is a rather arrogant and cocky fellow. His explanation was rather fitting for him.
I was also kind of irritated by the whole school-pride thing about him (not that I have much pride in CMU, where that kind of arrogance is more the rule than the exception, especially in departments like electrical engineering). People were cheering for him who would never vote for a republican in their lives, and the kid is a classic middle-american suburban/exurban conservative from a red state (Kentucky) who is reportedly rather uncomfortable about gays and abortion (and socioeconomic issues, but since CMU tuition is so high, being wealthy and right-wing economically is common there even if people don't want to admit it). To top it off he uses the interview the school paper gave him to exclaim that CMU represents "solid american values" (read "Calvinist"...unfortunately thetartan.org is down yet again so I can't link to it)
Ah well, never let politics get in the way of a little mindless cheering for That Local Sports Team... and this is the closest thing in memory CMU has had to a sporting contest with people from other schools where students actually paid some attention to it.
I'm not really sure you understand the issues at stake here.
First, a stable module API doesn't matter. nV's drivers have the same fucking bugs for years' worth of releases. It's normal to expect some bugs for such a complicated piece of software when porting it to a new kernel major release, but these bugs happen in 2.4, 2.6, probably 2.2.
Even Microsoft is pissed off about this. I was told by a Microsoft engineer a couple years ago that drivers are the #1 cause of BSOD's on Windows by a long shot. If the Windows kernel is hobbled by bad drivers, what do you think happens to the Linux kernel, which is arguably better quality overall? The fact is, with all the code running in ring 0, and with privileged access to hardware that cannot be easily reinitialized if the driver crashes (ever tried to reload the NVdriver module?), it doesn't matter how good the kernel is. The Linux kernel developers are right to not support this madness because it dramatically lowers the delivered quality of their product. It's just plain old QA.
I do see a potential compromise that I'd embrace. NVidia could work with X.org to add hooks to the "nv" driver, so 2D could be rock solid all the time and I could use the same driver without rebooting for 3D. Even if 3D crashes every now and then, it matters a lot less, especially because I'm not going to get the same 3D elsewhere.
Fucking A -- that's exactly the bug I have all the time with my (old) nvidia card, and I was beginning to suspect bad hardware. It is actually somewhat reproducible when loading very large images with mozilla or xpdf, too.
I was willing to give nVidia the benefit of the doubt since they fixed other bugs (like the infamous kernel oopsing bit back in the 3xxx series), but that does it. This bug has been around for fucking ever. My next video card will be a Radeon 9200.
PRA appears to me to have been written because MUAs (as opposed to MTAs) do not consistently deal with envelope addresses, MAIL FROM, and the resulting Return-Path header. It adds complexity to the outgoing MUA to make sure that the PRA is the same as the envelope from. The incoming MUA will have to follow the PRA algorithm to figure out who's responsible for the mail, rather than just make the Return-Path accessible for spam filtering. The overall feeling is that the designers assumed people couldn't understand how to deal with the return path, so they replaced it with something more complicated and broken.
CMU claims it has 138 alumni working for Microsoft which is about the size of one year's graduating class in CS.
Don't worry... you can work on Unix your whole time at CMU and still make fun of Linux with the best of them when you get your job at Microsoft along with all the other alums that work there. Supposedly CMU has a higher rate of Microsoft employment per graduated CS student than any other school in the US.
The disgusting propaganda link was missing from my post, sorry.
CMU may have quite a few good individual professors and research projects in CS, but the institution as a whole doesn't think twice about being a corporate-flak career school... from their advertising slogan "The Professional Choice" in the early '80s on (when CMU accepted a certain large donation from IBM and almost decided to make all its students buy PC's in 1982).
Thankfully, many CMU students are still practicing some degree of creative resistance, although a penguin statue allegedly placed on the roof of the student center overnight before the Gates speech was hurriedly removed since apparently CMU values its clean public image more than its students' creativity.
One other thing to note is that this is likely not much more than a matching grant for further increases in students' tuition, which pays for a much higher share of an education at CMU than at many peer schools.
eh, so.cal. is a shithole.