I set up a test magento site just a couple weeks ago to see if it had gotten better, and not only was it slow as fsck, but the installer had some hiccups. The URL checking steps broke, and I had to skip them. I had a weird fastcgi + aliasing setup that may have contributed, but an installer should just work with defaults if you keep clicking next. That magento didn't is a big red flag IMO. I'm also not impressed with the admin interface.
The database setup step alone took a number of minutes, long enough that I had to look at the database files to make sure they were changing. They were. Magento is just exceedingly slow, both in initialization and in everyday operation.
Good code doesn't buy you anything if you have to rewrite most of it to get it to run reasonably fast.
S/MIME is easiest to use within, or between, large organizations. Large companies can afford to give all their employees s/mime keys. S/MIME scales within an organization in a way that PGP does not. While individuals can get s/mime keys for free from a few places (NOT Thawte any longer), they're a pain to administer.
There's a reason everyone and their dog uses pgp keys, and not s/mime keys. e.g. http://w2.eff.org/Misc/EFF/?f=pgpkey.eff.txt http://www.kernel.org/signature.html http://www.symantec.com/security/Symantec-Vulnerability-Management-Key.asc
The trusted 3rd party broker and revoker offered by S/MIME is meaningless for most email communications, because Verisign and other CAs cannot cost-effectively vet individual email senders. PGP acknowledges this difficulty and offers an infrastructure for people to be as paranoid or as trusting as they want to be of others' keys.
Pesticides would not stop bacteria and other beasties from chowing down on your lettuce. Perhaps the organic lettuce was also rinsed in dilute bleach solution (fairly common practice to get rid of pesticides, bacteria, and to keep veggies fresh longer). Perhaps you just got really lucky on the organic stuff and really unlucky on the supermarket stuff.
socat (the 2.0 beta versions) is the best app to use for that stuff. It can use arbitrary chains of protocols, which is very useful when dealing with exotic and crazy situations like trying to tunnel stuff through multiple proxies.
The CDC's circumcision factsheet cites studies showing increased transmission of HIV and syphilis in uncircumcised males. It cites a lot of studies on HIV.
For HIV, scientists have shown increased viral uptake using foreskin tissue in the lab. It's hard to get less biased evidence than that.
I would think that most STDs should be transmitted less frequently to circumcised males, even if only slightly, because there's less surface area to be transmitted to. Any conclusions otherwise are immediately suspect for that reason alone. STDs like herpes and HPV that can be transmitted via skin-to-skin contact, not requiring mucus membrane contact, obviously won't have as dramatic a difference in transmission rates as HIV, but I would expect there still to be some difference.
And no, I'm not in favor of circumcision at birth. I think parents and sons should have a reasonable discussion about it when sons are old enough to understand the issue and decide for themselves. Unfortunately, the parents most likely to circumcise their children at birth are also least likely to have any sort of discussion with their boys about sex, beyond "don't have it." Those boys are also the most likely to be having unprotected sex. Banning circumcision at birth is likely to result in (inept) back-alley circumcisions and more STDs among teens from conservative families who didn't opt for back-alley circumcisions, because their parents are too fucking inept and repressed to have honest conversations with their kids about sex and STDs even if it might save their kids' lives.
Also, fuck religion. NOMA my ass. STDs, particularly in Africa, are a case study for how religion can affect people's health in very real and scientifically quantifiable ways.
I don't care that you think logic sucks, and I don't care that you're perfectly willing to ignore scientific studies, rather than disputing them logically. You have the right to those positions. However, don't expect other people to take you seriously.
This article, in the seventh paragraph, starts citing some interesting African studies comparing HIV transmission rates in circumcised and uncircumcised males.
For all we know, the general sentiment that led to religious adoption of circumcision could have been the result of an ancient HIV-like plague, combined with the observation that circumcision reduced transmission rates.
Having said that, I would choose not to have any son(s) circumcised, despite the increased risk of HIV transmission. When they reached an appropriate age, I'd present the argument to them and encourage them to research it themselves, and if they wanted to get circumcised -- for medical reasons, since I would not raise them to be religious -- it'd be fine with me.
Now, Bradbury has decided to make news about the writing of his iconographic work and what he really meant. Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship. Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.
Bradbury, a man living in the creative and industrial center of reality TV and one-hour dramas, says it is, in fact, a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.
I have no objection to some level of concern about television culture, and I have no objection to his advocacy in support of libraries. However, if he were really concerned about those things, he would support technological efforts to bring literary and educational content to people surfing the net or TV, rather than just whining and moaning that there are young whippersnappers on his lawn who have no respect for books.
He also seems to be engaging in a bit of historical revisionism. He couldn't possibly have been too concerned with the television culture when he wrote F-451 in 1953. Maybe he ought to reread his own story, and then chase it down with 1984. No matter how legitimate his current complaints are, he shouldn't rewrite history.
If microsoft didn't make it a pain in the ass to keep a system updated without Microsoft Genuine Advantage, there might just be more people keeping their systems up to date.
Google alone must have prior art on just about every single claim in all 3 patents.
Hopefully Google will also have the guts to bash MS over the metaphorical skull with a ton of overlapping patents. That way MS gets their ass handed to them -- by their worst enemy no less -- and meanwhile the patent examiner who was responsible for granting these also gets reassigned to review patents on toilets and PVC pipe.
I don't think so. Mainstream religions are not different from cults because of their behaviors. Rather, they have different behaviors because mainstream religions already have a massive amount of social proof, while cults do not.
The difference is mainly in the degree to which they hard-sell their belief system using coercive, illegal, or violent tactics. Obviously, Scientology goes beyond most other religious and inflicts more serious collateral damage in the more extreme cases. At their core, however, both mainstream religion and cults seek new converts into their fictional belief systems. If a Church has no problem with an atheist attending, it's not because the church admits the possibility that the atheist is correct; it's because the atheist is a prospective convert.
Mainstream religion doesn't need to resort to the same level of coercion because the Bible, Koran, etc. are already very well recognized and respected even from a secular perspective, and the whole paradise/hellfire thing is a powerful motivator to stay loyal once you're "in." Social pressure influences otherwise level-headed individuals to "convert" to mainstream religion. Scientology doesn't have enough social influence to convert people the same way. It has to be more coercive because it has few other ways of gaining membership.
Any belief system truly interested in truth/enlightenment would never focus on one or a few literary works (as interpreted by a few special people), but would actively seek out new insights everywhere. People who read a lot and/or try lots of different things and really push their boundaries (periodic group (church) trips to Absurdisan or Druglordistan doesn't count) tend not to be the kind of people who commit to organized religion.
So you may not see mainstream religion as coercive, but it is, and not just because of the paradise/perdition issue. Organized religion coerces its followers into a duller, more limited lifestyle and paradigm than they might otherwise have. I don't think it's quite possible to judge whether Christianity is more harmful to society than Scientology is. The $ci church's effects on individuals are worse, but whose to say what their ultimate effects on society might be?
If you want a decent religion, join a book club. Of course there are biases everywhere, but you won't find someone at a book club rejecting Kafka by claiming that Jane Austen's works are divinely inspired descriptions of how life should be; even better, if someone tried that, someone else might argue that maybe their views aren't so different.
Not that books are the one true source of enlightenment either; for that, there's Go.
Ideally that's true, but in practice sponsoring companies with vast robotics experience will on average wipe the floor with everyone else.
That's not to say that FIRST is stupid. Students do learn something about robotics, but they'd learn a lot more with simpler tasks that don't require a large team to get anything done. Smaller tasks means smaller teams which means more individual contribution.
My experience with FIRST every year I was in high school went like this: A bunch of idiots from my school and a bunch of idiots from our sponsoring company (which didn't make anything even remotely resembling robots, they designed fairly static electronic and mechanical equipment) came up with the most unreliable, easy-to-break robots imaginable. They overruled the few people who had the audacity to point out that "Hey, maybe something more reliable would be better." (The typical response was, "This isn't unreliable, we can make it work.")
Once our "team" settled on a design each year, it was very depressing watching frantic attempts to get the thing to work right. Enormous amounts of time and effort went into correcting major problems with the robot designs.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but if students want to learn robotics, FIRST is not a good place to start. With one exception... if you know you want to do embedded systems design or programming for robotics, then you can focus on that part and do the best you can with the robot everyone else comes up with. That is valuable. The mechanical engineering aspect of FIRST robots is simply dependent on too many factors (idiots on the team, skill of corporate sponsor) for it to be very valuable as an engineering learning experience.
First, is 428 billion (3% of 2008 GDP) a good amount to spend given our national, state, and local government debts, and the fact that we won't get the federal budget balanced anytime soon -- even without more science spending?
Second, despite the fact that the government can spend money on useful science R&D, it usually doesn't. There's little motivation to spend money on useful science rather than pork, and even when there is motivation, politicians don't understand science so giving them a blank check is very dangerous. My worry in the current political climate is that if politicians decide 428 billion sounds like a good number for "science", what does't get spent on pork will end up getting funneled into security theater projects to combat terrorism, drugs, and all of society's other boogeymen.
Are you going to tell me "girls gone wild" is worthwhile and productive? because a lot of money goes into making those vids and the commercials for them.
I motion to declare that the "Girls Gone Wild argument." All in favor?
I love science R&D. I would like to see more, but not 428 billion in addition to our current federal budget, and not in this economic climate, with the massive federal, state and local government debts we have.
The science projects you cite were primarily in response to wars... real wars (hot and cold), against enemies that might very well invade us and destroy our country if they won. We have no such motivation currently, and even if we did, our economy couldn't sustain that kind of spending.
Look at the collapse of the Sovient Union. Despite its oppressive political structure, one thing they did do was spend money on science and technology. They were motivated. Still, they couldn't spend enough to prevent economic collapse.
Forcing jobs to remain in the U.S. has to be done very carefully and with limited scope, or it will backfire. What will happen if the industries that need (or want) cheap labor can't offshore jobs? They will move offshore, or they will be overtaken by foreign competitors who will then import competing products/services. That means not only no U.S. jobs, but less tax revenue and less GDP. The only U.S. industries that would be safe are those whose products/services cannot be imported, and those sorts of companies can't offshore very much of their operations to begin with.
That sounds noble, and yes GDP would not be nearly as high without the support that our existing infrastructure provides, but that is mostly old infrastructure.
Want to guess how the government keeps the infrastructure you mention, including roads, libraries, and courts, operational? Taxes. The idea that we have a responsibility to pay 428 billion dollars (CIA Factbook says 2008 GDP was 14.29 trillion) more per year in taxes for science when we can't even pay down our existing debt is insanity. The education you cite? The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1980. Strange that education has declined since then. Strange that Bush's federally-funded No Child Left Behind initiative has done more to hurt education than virtually any other public or private education policy in history.
Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see more money spent on useful science and technology research. However, given our current national and state debts, this is not the time to be talking about spending 428 billion on more science. Public funding of science is always going to encourage graft and waste, particularly here because a majority of congress don't even recognize the benefits of science. If politicians vote for science funding, it's because they think they can get pork for their constuents, and that pork is unlikely to be the kind of science funding you or I want to see.
Broadband? The reason our broadband is terrible in the U.S. is that we've granted effective monopolies (or 2 or 3-party oligopolies) to telecom companies in most metro areas, and then failed to ensure that those telecom companies were motivated to upgrade/modernize. There are two sane ways to approach infrastructure: privatization, with competition; or granting monopolies and ensuring progress through careful progressive regulation. We have done neither. We granted monopolies and then abdicated our responsibility to regulate. More accurately, despite efforts to regulate, the telecom industry's lobbyists convinced all levels of government not to regulate heavily enough.
TL;DR: Can the federal government theroetically find useful areas in science and technology to spend money on, that will generate net returns? Almost certainly. Will they? Almost certainly not. Do we have the money to be spending 428 billion per year on more science? No.
However, just because they're "real" sworn police doesn't mean they're the best and the brightest in law enforcement. Campus police tend to be on the lower end of the police officer bell curve.
(to GP: I'd be rather surprised if any major college these days relied on private security. Maybe some really small colleges do, but when one of the most pressing legal concerns for colleges is what happens if some idiot starts shooting people, having private security seems like a fairly large liability...)
I realize that's the idea behind tax exempt status of churches, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. There are all sorts of laws respecting an establishment of religion... zoning, fire and safety codes, etc. It seems absurd to me that churches get a pass on taxes. If they're heavily involved in charity, great, they can write that off like anyone else could. If they qualify as a 501(c)(3), good for them. Otherwise, they should pay the man... the same as any other organization does.
Isn't it only copy-on-write filesystems like zfs and btrfs that provide the kind of pseudo-transaction behavior you (and most people) are looking for?
Case study:
app repeatedly rewriting.whatever config files by an open() call that truncates and writes, or by explicitly using ftruncate().
app modifying a file's data without changing filesize.
In 1, it makes perfect sense that there's going to be some point in time during which a crash will result in a 0-byte file. That's what truncate means. The complaints (and I know how frustrating it is to see old config files replaced with useless 0-byte files) seem to want to redo truncate semantics. i.e. keep track of the NEW last-byte and truncate on file close. That can STILL result in corrupt files.
In 2, a crash/hwfailure during write will result in some new data blocks, and some old.
Copy on write with sane journaling solves both issues, doesn't it? That's why (AFAIK) everyone seems to recognize that btrfs or something like it is the ultimate goal. Ext4 is just a stopgap.
I encourage everyone with some spare disk space to get 2.6.29, make a test btrfs partition, and test it with non-critical data. The more people provide feedback to the devs, the faster btrfs will progress.
Usually when a minor is a victim of something, they get a separate statute of limitations period once they turn 18 if they want to initiate legal action, since they generally can't while they're a minor. (IANAL, TINLA)
However, the case in question was apparently brought by her parents, years ago.
If these modifications are made during an organism's life, they can be inherited by offspring.
Aren't you skipping over the lateral transfer step?
It's not just about whether there are mechanisms besides DNA that can statically store data, or whether the environment (say, learning) can influence that data storage in a non-random manner.
Even assuming DNA itself could be changed non-randomly in response to the environment, those changes still have to be transferred to gametocytes in order to be inheritable.
I'm not a biologist but I know there are some theories about lateral gene transfer in differentiated organisms, and I thought those were still pretty sketchy. Given the novelty of histone research, I suspect they haven't gotten very far in investigating, much less demonstrating, lateral transfer of histone-encoded data.
So... not at all saying that what you're proposing is impossible, just that it seems pretty speculative.
How long until someone hacks Obama's blackberry, then puts a program on the device that turns it into a monitoring platform? Tempest is a stretch, given the hardware and antenna limitations, but there's quite a lot of mischief possible with access to the presidential blackberry's microphone and camera.
Birth is a completely arbitrary bright line from a scientific point of view, but it is a good legal bright line for several reasons:
Birth is perhaps the most objective/observable event from which to make legal rulings about the status of humans.
Birth is a fairly safe lower-age-bound for meaningful sentience of the sort that should confer human rights, assuming that we're going to continue rejecting any sort of human rights for other species.
Finding a larger lower-age-bound for human-level sentience is non-trivial and arguably beyond the ability of science at this point, meaning that any such determination would be subjective and highly divisive.
It avoids major problems regarding who could legally kill infants. Biological parents? Legal guardians? Must the decision be unanimous? Can grandparents or various other family members veto? There are a lot of possible scenarios, and the social disruption caused by the issue would dwarf the abortion debate.
Of the above, especially websites using SSL. Can't have more than one per IP address.
SSL has nothing to do with the amount of addresses per server. In an NLB or CARP array you can have the same SSL certificate installed on multiple servers. You can even share the SSL cert in a round robbin array (multi-public IP)
GP was talking about multiple SSL vhosts on one IP. There is a solution in a recent TLS extension (SNI), and it's implemented in modern SSL implementations, but older web browsers and older servers still can't do it. Since lots of people still use IE 6 and below (and IE 7 on winxp), SNI is a non-starter for serious SSL-enabled websites.
Standard "block all new incoming connections except on ports a,b,c" firewalls can be implemented in software on in-use computers. Apps would no longer have to request (possibly colliding) rule exceptions from an external firewall; they would request permission from the localhost firewall. If the host itself is compromised an external firewall doesn't matter anyway, because malware can set up outgoing connections and use that as a tunnel back into the compromised machine, or it could get commands from a c&c site and run them whenever.
Dedicated firewalls should be looking for traffic patterns and taking appropriate action, not keeping connection states and providing address translation.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
I set up a test magento site just a couple weeks ago to see if it had gotten better, and not only was it slow as fsck, but the installer had some hiccups. The URL checking steps broke, and I had to skip them. I had a weird fastcgi + aliasing setup that may have contributed, but an installer should just work with defaults if you keep clicking next. That magento didn't is a big red flag IMO. I'm also not impressed with the admin interface.
The database setup step alone took a number of minutes, long enough that I had to look at the database files to make sure they were changing. They were. Magento is just exceedingly slow, both in initialization and in everyday operation.
Good code doesn't buy you anything if you have to rewrite most of it to get it to run reasonably fast.
That's backwards.
S/MIME is easiest to use within, or between, large organizations. Large companies can afford to give all their employees s/mime keys. S/MIME scales within an organization in a way that PGP does not. While individuals can get s/mime keys for free from a few places (NOT Thawte any longer), they're a pain to administer.
There's a reason everyone and their dog uses pgp keys, and not s/mime keys. e.g.
http://w2.eff.org/Misc/EFF/?f=pgpkey.eff.txt
http://www.kernel.org/signature.html
http://www.symantec.com/security/Symantec-Vulnerability-Management-Key.asc
The trusted 3rd party broker and revoker offered by S/MIME is meaningless for most email communications, because Verisign and other CAs cannot cost-effectively vet individual email senders. PGP acknowledges this difficulty and offers an infrastructure for people to be as paranoid or as trusting as they want to be of others' keys.
Pesticides would not stop bacteria and other beasties from chowing down on your lettuce. Perhaps the organic lettuce was also rinsed in dilute bleach solution (fairly common practice to get rid of pesticides, bacteria, and to keep veggies fresh longer). Perhaps you just got really lucky on the organic stuff and really unlucky on the supermarket stuff.
To review: the plural of anecdote is not data.
ncat is still fairly limited.
socat (the 2.0 beta versions) is the best app to use for that stuff. It can use arbitrary chains of protocols, which is very useful when dealing with exotic and crazy situations like trying to tunnel stuff through multiple proxies.
http://www.dest-unreach.org/socat/socat-version2.html
[citation needed]
The CDC's circumcision factsheet cites studies showing increased transmission of HIV and syphilis in uncircumcised males. It cites a lot of studies on HIV.
For HIV, scientists have shown increased viral uptake using foreskin tissue in the lab. It's hard to get less biased evidence than that.
I would think that most STDs should be transmitted less frequently to circumcised males, even if only slightly, because there's less surface area to be transmitted to. Any conclusions otherwise are immediately suspect for that reason alone. STDs like herpes and HPV that can be transmitted via skin-to-skin contact, not requiring mucus membrane contact, obviously won't have as dramatic a difference in transmission rates as HIV, but I would expect there still to be some difference.
And no, I'm not in favor of circumcision at birth. I think parents and sons should have a reasonable discussion about it when sons are old enough to understand the issue and decide for themselves. Unfortunately, the parents most likely to circumcise their children at birth are also least likely to have any sort of discussion with their boys about sex, beyond "don't have it." Those boys are also the most likely to be having unprotected sex. Banning circumcision at birth is likely to result in (inept) back-alley circumcisions and more STDs among teens from conservative families who didn't opt for back-alley circumcisions, because their parents are too fucking inept and repressed to have honest conversations with their kids about sex and STDs even if it might save their kids' lives.
Also, fuck religion. NOMA my ass. STDs, particularly in Africa, are a case study for how religion can affect people's health in very real and scientifically quantifiable ways.
I don't care that you think logic sucks, and I don't care that you're perfectly willing to ignore scientific studies, rather than disputing them logically. You have the right to those positions. However, don't expect other people to take you seriously.
This article, in the seventh paragraph, starts citing some interesting African studies comparing HIV transmission rates in circumcised and uncircumcised males.
For all we know, the general sentiment that led to religious adoption of circumcision could have been the result of an ancient HIV-like plague, combined with the observation that circumcision reduced transmission rates.
Having said that, I would choose not to have any son(s) circumcised, despite the increased risk of HIV transmission. When they reached an appropriate age, I'd present the argument to them and encourage them to research it themselves, and if they wanted to get circumcised -- for medical reasons, since I would not raise them to be religious -- it'd be fine with me.
Evidently, whatever imagination and insight led him to write his great stories has since abandoned him.
From http://www.laweekly.com/2007-05-31/news/ray-bradbury-fahrenheit-451-misinterpreted/ :
I have no objection to some level of concern about television culture, and I have no objection to his advocacy in support of libraries. However, if he were really concerned about those things, he would support technological efforts to bring literary and educational content to people surfing the net or TV, rather than just whining and moaning that there are young whippersnappers on his lawn who have no respect for books.
He also seems to be engaging in a bit of historical revisionism. He couldn't possibly have been too concerned with the television culture when he wrote F-451 in 1953. Maybe he ought to reread his own story, and then chase it down with 1984. No matter how legitimate his current complaints are, he shouldn't rewrite history.
If microsoft didn't make it a pain in the ass to keep a system updated without Microsoft Genuine Advantage, there might just be more people keeping their systems up to date.
Google alone must have prior art on just about every single claim in all 3 patents.
Hopefully Google will also have the guts to bash MS over the metaphorical skull with a ton of overlapping patents. That way MS gets their ass handed to them -- by their worst enemy no less -- and meanwhile the patent examiner who was responsible for granting these also gets reassigned to review patents on toilets and PVC pipe.
I don't think so. Mainstream religions are not different from cults because of their behaviors. Rather, they have different behaviors because mainstream religions already have a massive amount of social proof, while cults do not.
The difference is mainly in the degree to which they hard-sell their belief system using coercive, illegal, or violent tactics. Obviously, Scientology goes beyond most other religious and inflicts more serious collateral damage in the more extreme cases. At their core, however, both mainstream religion and cults seek new converts into their fictional belief systems. If a Church has no problem with an atheist attending, it's not because the church admits the possibility that the atheist is correct; it's because the atheist is a prospective convert.
Mainstream religion doesn't need to resort to the same level of coercion because the Bible, Koran, etc. are already very well recognized and respected even from a secular perspective, and the whole paradise/hellfire thing is a powerful motivator to stay loyal once you're "in." Social pressure influences otherwise level-headed individuals to "convert" to mainstream religion. Scientology doesn't have enough social influence to convert people the same way. It has to be more coercive because it has few other ways of gaining membership.
Any belief system truly interested in truth/enlightenment would never focus on one or a few literary works (as interpreted by a few special people), but would actively seek out new insights everywhere. People who read a lot and/or try lots of different things and really push their boundaries (periodic group (church) trips to Absurdisan or Druglordistan doesn't count) tend not to be the kind of people who commit to organized religion.
So you may not see mainstream religion as coercive, but it is, and not just because of the paradise/perdition issue. Organized religion coerces its followers into a duller, more limited lifestyle and paradigm than they might otherwise have. I don't think it's quite possible to judge whether Christianity is more harmful to society than Scientology is. The $ci church's effects on individuals are worse, but whose to say what their ultimate effects on society might be?
If you want a decent religion, join a book club. Of course there are biases everywhere, but you won't find someone at a book club rejecting Kafka by claiming that Jane Austen's works are divinely inspired descriptions of how life should be; even better, if someone tried that, someone else might argue that maybe their views aren't so different.
Not that books are the one true source of enlightenment either; for that, there's Go.
Ideally that's true, but in practice sponsoring companies with vast robotics experience will on average wipe the floor with everyone else.
That's not to say that FIRST is stupid. Students do learn something about robotics, but they'd learn a lot more with simpler tasks that don't require a large team to get anything done. Smaller tasks means smaller teams which means more individual contribution.
My experience with FIRST every year I was in high school went like this: A bunch of idiots from my school and a bunch of idiots from our sponsoring company (which didn't make anything even remotely resembling robots, they designed fairly static electronic and mechanical equipment) came up with the most unreliable, easy-to-break robots imaginable. They overruled the few people who had the audacity to point out that "Hey, maybe something more reliable would be better." (The typical response was, "This isn't unreliable, we can make it work.")
Once our "team" settled on a design each year, it was very depressing watching frantic attempts to get the thing to work right. Enormous amounts of time and effort went into correcting major problems with the robot designs.
Perhaps I'm jaded, but if students want to learn robotics, FIRST is not a good place to start. With one exception... if you know you want to do embedded systems design or programming for robotics, then you can focus on that part and do the best you can with the robot everyone else comes up with. That is valuable. The mechanical engineering aspect of FIRST robots is simply dependent on too many factors (idiots on the team, skill of corporate sponsor) for it to be very valuable as an engineering learning experience.
I, for one, absolutely agree. Two concerns:
First, is 428 billion (3% of 2008 GDP) a good amount to spend given our national, state, and local government debts, and the fact that we won't get the federal budget balanced anytime soon -- even without more science spending?
Second, despite the fact that the government can spend money on useful science R&D, it usually doesn't. There's little motivation to spend money on useful science rather than pork, and even when there is motivation, politicians don't understand science so giving them a blank check is very dangerous. My worry in the current political climate is that if politicians decide 428 billion sounds like a good number for "science", what does't get spent on pork will end up getting funneled into security theater projects to combat terrorism, drugs, and all of society's other boogeymen.
I motion to declare that the "Girls Gone Wild argument." All in favor?
I love science R&D. I would like to see more, but not 428 billion in addition to our current federal budget, and not in this economic climate, with the massive federal, state and local government debts we have.
The science projects you cite were primarily in response to wars... real wars (hot and cold), against enemies that might very well invade us and destroy our country if they won. We have no such motivation currently, and even if we did, our economy couldn't sustain that kind of spending.
Look at the collapse of the Sovient Union. Despite its oppressive political structure, one thing they did do was spend money on science and technology. They were motivated. Still, they couldn't spend enough to prevent economic collapse.
Forcing jobs to remain in the U.S. has to be done very carefully and with limited scope, or it will backfire. What will happen if the industries that need (or want) cheap labor can't offshore jobs? They will move offshore, or they will be overtaken by foreign competitors who will then import competing products/services. That means not only no U.S. jobs, but less tax revenue and less GDP. The only U.S. industries that would be safe are those whose products/services cannot be imported, and those sorts of companies can't offshore very much of their operations to begin with.
That sounds noble, and yes GDP would not be nearly as high without the support that our existing infrastructure provides, but that is mostly old infrastructure.
Want to guess how the government keeps the infrastructure you mention, including roads, libraries, and courts, operational? Taxes. The idea that we have a responsibility to pay 428 billion dollars (CIA Factbook says 2008 GDP was 14.29 trillion) more per year in taxes for science when we can't even pay down our existing debt is insanity. The education you cite? The U.S. Department of Education was created in 1980. Strange that education has declined since then. Strange that Bush's federally-funded No Child Left Behind initiative has done more to hurt education than virtually any other public or private education policy in history.
Don't misunderstand me, I'd love to see more money spent on useful science and technology research. However, given our current national and state debts, this is not the time to be talking about spending 428 billion on more science. Public funding of science is always going to encourage graft and waste, particularly here because a majority of congress don't even recognize the benefits of science. If politicians vote for science funding, it's because they think they can get pork for their constuents, and that pork is unlikely to be the kind of science funding you or I want to see.
Broadband? The reason our broadband is terrible in the U.S. is that we've granted effective monopolies (or 2 or 3-party oligopolies) to telecom companies in most metro areas, and then failed to ensure that those telecom companies were motivated to upgrade/modernize. There are two sane ways to approach infrastructure: privatization, with competition; or granting monopolies and ensuring progress through careful progressive regulation. We have done neither. We granted monopolies and then abdicated our responsibility to regulate. More accurately, despite efforts to regulate, the telecom industry's lobbyists convinced all levels of government not to regulate heavily enough.
TL;DR: Can the federal government theroetically find useful areas in science and technology to spend money on, that will generate net returns? Almost certainly. Will they? Almost certainly not. Do we have the money to be spending 428 billion per year on more science? No.
However, just because they're "real" sworn police doesn't mean they're the best and the brightest in law enforcement. Campus police tend to be on the lower end of the police officer bell curve.
(to GP: I'd be rather surprised if any major college these days relied on private security. Maybe some really small colleges do, but when one of the most pressing legal concerns for colleges is what happens if some idiot starts shooting people, having private security seems like a fairly large liability...)
I realize that's the idea behind tax exempt status of churches, but it makes absolutely no sense to me. There are all sorts of laws respecting an establishment of religion... zoning, fire and safety codes, etc. It seems absurd to me that churches get a pass on taxes. If they're heavily involved in charity, great, they can write that off like anyone else could. If they qualify as a 501(c)(3), good for them. Otherwise, they should pay the man... the same as any other organization does.
Isn't it only copy-on-write filesystems like zfs and btrfs that provide the kind of pseudo-transaction behavior you (and most people) are looking for?
Case study:
In 1, it makes perfect sense that there's going to be some point in time during which a crash will result in a 0-byte file. That's what truncate means. The complaints (and I know how frustrating it is to see old config files replaced with useless 0-byte files) seem to want to redo truncate semantics. i.e. keep track of the NEW last-byte and truncate on file close. That can STILL result in corrupt files.
In 2, a crash/hwfailure during write will result in some new data blocks, and some old.
Copy on write with sane journaling solves both issues, doesn't it? That's why (AFAIK) everyone seems to recognize that btrfs or something like it is the ultimate goal. Ext4 is just a stopgap.
I encourage everyone with some spare disk space to get 2.6.29, make a test btrfs partition, and test it with non-critical data. The more people provide feedback to the devs, the faster btrfs will progress.
Usually when a minor is a victim of something, they get a separate statute of limitations period once they turn 18 if they want to initiate legal action, since they generally can't while they're a minor. (IANAL, TINLA)
However, the case in question was apparently brought by her parents, years ago.
Aren't you skipping over the lateral transfer step?
It's not just about whether there are mechanisms besides DNA that can statically store data, or whether the environment (say, learning) can influence that data storage in a non-random manner.
Even assuming DNA itself could be changed non-randomly in response to the environment, those changes still have to be transferred to gametocytes in order to be inheritable.
I'm not a biologist but I know there are some theories about lateral gene transfer in differentiated organisms, and I thought those were still pretty sketchy. Given the novelty of histone research, I suspect they haven't gotten very far in investigating, much less demonstrating, lateral transfer of histone-encoded data.
So... not at all saying that what you're proposing is impossible, just that it seems pretty speculative.
How long until someone hacks Obama's blackberry, then puts a program on the device that turns it into a monitoring platform? Tempest is a stretch, given the hardware and antenna limitations, but there's quite a lot of mischief possible with access to the presidential blackberry's microphone and camera.
I hope the NSA has thought this through.
Birth is a completely arbitrary bright line from a scientific point of view, but it is a good legal bright line for several reasons:
GP was talking about multiple SSL vhosts on one IP. There is a solution in a recent TLS extension (SNI), and it's implemented in modern SSL implementations, but older web browsers and older servers still can't do it. Since lots of people still use IE 6 and below (and IE 7 on winxp), SNI is a non-starter for serious SSL-enabled websites.
Standard "block all new incoming connections except on ports a,b,c" firewalls can be implemented in software on in-use computers. Apps would no longer have to request (possibly colliding) rule exceptions from an external firewall; they would request permission from the localhost firewall. If the host itself is compromised an external firewall doesn't matter anyway, because malware can set up outgoing connections and use that as a tunnel back into the compromised machine, or it could get commands from a c&c site and run them whenever.
Dedicated firewalls should be looking for traffic patterns and taking appropriate action, not keeping connection states and providing address translation.
Code better than PEAR?
PHP's unsuitable
But knowing that, safe.
Dammit, I had my name yesterday. Today some chick stole it. Someone please give me a name.
--nameless.
cc: RIAA, MPAA
keywords: theft, piracy.