At work we use email encryption, and more and more of the emails I get from govt employees are digitally signed, and I am constantly getting warnings from the encryption software and having to click through. I'm sure if everything at every company was configured correctly, and companies always renewed their certifications before the expiration dates, that the warnings would go away - but that's not the real world. So, count me among those who "know better" and ignore the warnings.
I keep my weekly logbook in cursive writing.
my logbook must be kept for 6 years after my death for legal reasons. If all goes well, that'll be in 70+ years. It is unlikely at best that anything written on a computer will be readable in that time frame.
I agree this is pretty mind-blowing. Putting aside for a moment whether to consider the issues "ethical" or something else, there are HUGE issues here either way. We are on the precipice of departing from how we as a species naturally reproduce, potentially jumping from sexual to asexual reproduction within two or three generations! Not only that, but exerting direct control over our own genetic code. It is entirely possible that within a couple hundred years people will look back on us in complete disgust because of all our genetic faults and low average intelligence, beauty, etc.
As usual the slashdot headline sends readers in the wrong direction, creating a strawman myth that one would expect a plant to evolve within a few hundred years for its readers to beat down, when the article makes no such assertion.
Here is what the article is about: "to understand the evolution of plant traits, you also need to look at extinct herbivores and their interactions with the plants." In other words, to see why something is the way it is, you may have to uncover evidence that is hard to find because things have changed. Is this a revolutionary idea? No. But they have discovered a likely reason why a particular plant has a curious behavior of changing dramatically mid-life. The article is simply telling that story, not scratching its head in why the plant hasn't lost this adaptation in the 500 years since the extinction of its former predator.
Re:It should be illegal to be so totally inaccurat
on
F-22 Raptor Cancelled
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Have you read that wikipedia page yourself? I quote:
Even though the F-14 did not see a lot of aerial combat as it was first envisioned to do by the Navy and Grumman (due to lack of opportunities), the F-14 morphed into a long range strike fighter in the 1990s due to budget cuts and the early retirement of the A-6 Intruder, saw an upswing of action, and was used successfully as a strike platform over the skies of Afghanistan, the Balkans and Iraq right up to its final deployment in 2006.
In air to air combat, U.S. Navy F-14s have shot down five enemy aircraft for no losses, although one has been lost to a surface-to-air missile.
That's right, a grand total of 5 kills for the 712 F14's we bought. (By the way, one of those kills was a stinking helicopter). You can try to make something out of its re-purposing as a strike aircraft, but with the F18 and F35 already superior to the F22 in that role, it's no argument for churning out a few hundred extra F22's.
Again, how the hell does this get "insightful?" You can't just flip a switch and have airplanes start rolling off the line... some parts can have lead times of a couple years.
You still don't get it? If we can't, neither can potential adversaries. Can it be stated any more simply? So what we need is a head start - which we already have, with 100+ F22's already in service.
The F14 is a good cautionary tale for the F22. They were expensive, high-strung, kick-butt air superiority fighters. And they saw more action in Top Gun than they ever saw in real life. The total number of engagements by the entire fleet of F14's you could count on one hand.
I do believe in designing and building these things to stay sharp, but not thousands of copies in peacetime. (And yes, this is "peacetime" so far as the F22 is concerned - they have flown 0 sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan, and why would they?)
Should we ever find ourselves in a conflict with another Great Power we may well come to regret this decision.
Why? The plane is already designed with 140 already built. Should the need arise, we could obviously ramp production back up much, much faster than (e.g.) China could design, test, and build a large number of competing aircraft. (The bid process for the F22 began in 1986 for cripe's sake!) Instead, what's happening is these potential rivals are plowing their resources into economic growth and that is where we need to stay competitive.
Wonder knowing statistics help? The assumption here is that people weigh risks and probabilities to maximize their expected return. This is only true indirectly, if at all. What motivates people to action (such as paying for and submitting to airport screenings, or getting medical checkups) is fear. It is not about running numbers, it is about assuaging an uncomfortable emotion. That is why public service announcements show an egg representing your brain sizzling on a frying pan rather than running a spreadsheet of overdose statistics across the screen.
59 square miles of land to generate a theoretical maximum of 1500 megawatts (300 turbines x 5 MW each).
Most of the ground in those 59 square miles will still be empty. Is there any reason wind can't co-exist on the same land with agriculture, grazing, or solar power?
This is the history of Apple: there is a market for simple, well-managed products that work out of the box, and maintaining tight proprietary control over the Apple universe is how this is accomplished. I don't know what this says for openness, but there you have it. So long as your use cases aren't too far out of the ordinary, I guess it's worth it to have the trains run on time.
Most building designs are never tested this way at all - think they just plug some numbers into some equations, multiply everything by 5 or 10, and build it. Couches and TVs don't enter into it.
Also it was really light... no siding, no SHINGLES, no furniture, probably no plumbing. NOT impressed.
Yeah, they could have made it much cooler with computer generated graphics, instead they probably blew their whole production budget on the world's largest shake table, a million pounds of wood, and a huge team of highly trained Japanese scientists and engineers. If nothing else, it needs more fire, and way more Godzilla. Two thumbs down!
I really don't understand this trashing of the Geneva Conventions that started under Bush/Cheney. The rationale seems to be that "bad guys" are going to do stuff anyways, so we might as well be one of them. (If you can restate your rationale better, please do so). But the fact is the Geneva Conventions have helped a lot of prisoners over the years. Moreover, we have gained nothing by violating them. Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo have created a lot of global cynicism that has impaired our cause far more than whatever we got out of humiliating and torturing people.
I think that is an excellent point; we're better off the way things are than with fake retouched Hollywood "photos." Look at this wikipedia photo of Jack Nicholson (I picked a celebrity at random). Is there anything at all wrong with this photo, for the purpose? No, not at all. If you ever saw Jack Nicholson in person, that's exactly how he'd look. Like a handsome older man.
You make it sound as if hiring somebody to take a photo for which you retain copyright would command a king's ransome. Why? Celebrities somehow get people to cut their hair, that doesn't generate any downstream revenue. More to the point, movie camera men don't have copyright on the footage they take, either. I doubt even screenwriters keep the copyright for their work, and I'd argue writing is more creative than portraiture.
I'm not saying photographers should be forced to work under specific terms. But taking a decent photo isn't all that difficult after all, and the portraits we're talking about don't have to be pulitzer-worthy. If customers (such as publicists) started offering jobs under which they would retain copyright, the demand would be met by photographers willing to work under those terms.
RAW is way to space-hungry for the marginal increase in possible quality, so I haven't shot anything in it for months.
I was excited to get a RAW-capable camera, and now I don't use that mode. I haven't found that postprocessing can turn poor photos into good ones, nor have I found that starting with RAW instead of jpeg helps the quality all that much when making white balance corrections etc. Admittedly this may be partly due to my toolchain. I like the jpegs out of my camera (Panasonic LX3) more than what I have accomplished with UFRaw/DCRaw (which produces blocky grain), and I use gimp which is still limited to 24 bit depth. But when I look at a lot of the high-rated stuff on flickr most of it is too over-processed for my liking.
I also delete all but my favorite photos. I only want to remember the highlights, not how mundane my life really was:)
I backup everything in the "hard to replace" and "irreplaceable" categories to a seperate (removable but stays in the system) hard disk (so far 1TB has been enough to hold all this data).
1 TB is so much. I am curious how everybody uses so much space? My system partition is 2.7 gig gzipped. My home partition includes my family photos (my most precious data), which is accumulating at 100-150 MB per year and approaching 1 gig. I have 20 gig of mp3's, and 2.5 gigs of other random junk I never look at like old tax returns and data from my dissertation. My drive is "only" 160 GB, and the majority of it is pvr recordings, it does fill up but I've always been able to find shows at least a couple months old I still haven't watched, and clear some out. I don't bother to back those up so my 60 GB backup drive is sufficient. I feel if I had more space I'd probably just lose track of what all I have.
So I'm just curious how people use all the space? Shooting lots of photos and feeling like you need to keep them all in raw mode? Home videos? Yeah, pornography, ha ha, but seriously what takes most of your space?
Maybe we don't need smart appliances.. maybe we need smart users of dumb appliances.
Sure, and instead of automated backups, what we need is more responsible computer users who always make manual backups when they're supposed to. Sure.
The fact is, energy may be getting more complicated soon, going beyond what "smart users" can reasonably accommodate without automation. With predictable (even slow-reacting) energy sources like coal, variable pricing was just about controlling variable consumption (i.e. off-peak hours), which is predictable anyways. A static scheme worked. But now add solar to the mix. Now add wind to the mix. Conditions vary constantly. Eventually it will be like the oil market is today, where nobody even knows why or when prices rise and fall. But nevertheless prices at the pump rise and fall, and you have to decide how often to fill your car.
Besides, I don't know why this article is fixating on variable energy pricing as the only application of "smart" appliances. For one simple thing, I would like my refrigerator notices it is using an excessive amount of energy, due to a door not sealing, or a soon-to-fail compressor. I would like to known how long my payoff would be moving from one water heater to a newer more efficient one, given my family's usage patterns. And I know where's supposed to laugh at the idea of getting email from appliances, but if my house starts to flood because of a rusty water heater or a failed toilet I do want an email, and now!
Curiously, the other main justifications for the Ares I were that it would be finished faster and cost less than EELV-based designs. As it turned out, it's taking far longer than the EELVs were expected to take, and the cost has ballooned by almost an order of magnitude.
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started. As for the safety argument, IMHO it's so hypothetical I don't even care. I still don't think anybody knows how safe the shuttle now is, or isn't.
However, if costs on a program have actually exceeded plans by a factor of 10, I think you have a good argument for developing both in parallel in a big programmatic deathmatch.
A one-income household was viable in the 50's. Hell, it was still viable in the late 70's. But real wages peaked then and have declined unrelentingly ever since. Except for a tiny minority, a one-income household is now economic suicide.
I do think it's amazing how small the economic benefit has been from the move to two family incomes and fewer kids. I don't know if it's because America's position in the world has slipped, or overpopulation making land expensive, or the concentration of wealth at the top, or all the two-income families outbidding each other for housing, or the rising divorce rate meaning a lot of working moms have only their own income, or because moms were almost as economically productive at home as they are in the workplace (so most of the additional income goes to child care and pre-made food), rising health care costs masking the economic benefit of additional workers, or what.
Slashdot Mirror
At work we use email encryption, and more and more of the emails I get from govt employees are digitally signed, and I am constantly getting warnings from the encryption software and having to click through. I'm sure if everything at every company was configured correctly, and companies always renewed their certifications before the expiration dates, that the warnings would go away - but that's not the real world. So, count me among those who "know better" and ignore the warnings.
My reply
Typing has the clear advantage there, since you don't have to look at what you're writing, and it's much much faster than any sort of handwriting.
One word: "printer"
I agree this is pretty mind-blowing. Putting aside for a moment whether to consider the issues "ethical" or something else, there are HUGE issues here either way. We are on the precipice of departing from how we as a species naturally reproduce, potentially jumping from sexual to asexual reproduction within two or three generations! Not only that, but exerting direct control over our own genetic code. It is entirely possible that within a couple hundred years people will look back on us in complete disgust because of all our genetic faults and low average intelligence, beauty, etc.
Here is what the article is about: "to understand the evolution of plant traits, you also need to look at extinct herbivores and their interactions with the plants." In other words, to see why something is the way it is, you may have to uncover evidence that is hard to find because things have changed. Is this a revolutionary idea? No. But they have discovered a likely reason why a particular plant has a curious behavior of changing dramatically mid-life. The article is simply telling that story, not scratching its head in why the plant hasn't lost this adaptation in the 500 years since the extinction of its former predator.
That's right, a grand total of 5 kills for the 712 F14's we bought. (By the way, one of those kills was a stinking helicopter). You can try to make something out of its re-purposing as a strike aircraft, but with the F18 and F35 already superior to the F22 in that role, it's no argument for churning out a few hundred extra F22's.
You still don't get it? If we can't, neither can potential adversaries. Can it be stated any more simply? So what we need is a head start - which we already have, with 100+ F22's already in service.
Don't worry, carrier-capable planes can land on terra firma too :)
I do believe in designing and building these things to stay sharp, but not thousands of copies in peacetime. (And yes, this is "peacetime" so far as the F22 is concerned - they have flown 0 sorties over Iraq and Afghanistan, and why would they?)
Why? The plane is already designed with 140 already built. Should the need arise, we could obviously ramp production back up much, much faster than (e.g.) China could design, test, and build a large number of competing aircraft. (The bid process for the F22 began in 1986 for cripe's sake!) Instead, what's happening is these potential rivals are plowing their resources into economic growth and that is where we need to stay competitive.
Wonder knowing statistics help? The assumption here is that people weigh risks and probabilities to maximize their expected return. This is only true indirectly, if at all. What motivates people to action (such as paying for and submitting to airport screenings, or getting medical checkups) is fear. It is not about running numbers, it is about assuaging an uncomfortable emotion. That is why public service announcements show an egg representing your brain sizzling on a frying pan rather than running a spreadsheet of overdose statistics across the screen.
Most of the ground in those 59 square miles will still be empty. Is there any reason wind can't co-exist on the same land with agriculture, grazing, or solar power?
You may recall this story about how Apple thrives under Steve Jobs dictatorial and secretive management style.
You may even recall the infamous slashdot iPod launch coverage in which it was deemed "lame" because it was less feature-rich than the competition.
This is the history of Apple: there is a market for simple, well-managed products that work out of the box, and maintaining tight proprietary control over the Apple universe is how this is accomplished. I don't know what this says for openness, but there you have it. So long as your use cases aren't too far out of the ordinary, I guess it's worth it to have the trains run on time.
Most building designs are never tested this way at all - think they just plug some numbers into some equations, multiply everything by 5 or 10, and build it. Couches and TVs don't enter into it.
If only they had consulted you before wasting all that time and effort.
Yeah, they could have made it much cooler with computer generated graphics, instead they probably blew their whole production budget on the world's largest shake table, a million pounds of wood, and a huge team of highly trained Japanese scientists and engineers. If nothing else, it needs more fire, and way more Godzilla. Two thumbs down!
(I love slashdot).
I really don't understand this trashing of the Geneva Conventions that started under Bush/Cheney. The rationale seems to be that "bad guys" are going to do stuff anyways, so we might as well be one of them. (If you can restate your rationale better, please do so). But the fact is the Geneva Conventions have helped a lot of prisoners over the years. Moreover, we have gained nothing by violating them. Abu-Ghraib and Gitmo have created a lot of global cynicism that has impaired our cause far more than whatever we got out of humiliating and torturing people.
I think that is an excellent point; we're better off the way things are than with fake retouched Hollywood "photos." Look at this wikipedia photo of Jack Nicholson (I picked a celebrity at random). Is there anything at all wrong with this photo, for the purpose? No, not at all. If you ever saw Jack Nicholson in person, that's exactly how he'd look. Like a handsome older man.
I'm not saying photographers should be forced to work under specific terms. But taking a decent photo isn't all that difficult after all, and the portraits we're talking about don't have to be pulitzer-worthy. If customers (such as publicists) started offering jobs under which they would retain copyright, the demand would be met by photographers willing to work under those terms.
I was excited to get a RAW-capable camera, and now I don't use that mode. I haven't found that postprocessing can turn poor photos into good ones, nor have I found that starting with RAW instead of jpeg helps the quality all that much when making white balance corrections etc. Admittedly this may be partly due to my toolchain. I like the jpegs out of my camera (Panasonic LX3) more than what I have accomplished with UFRaw/DCRaw (which produces blocky grain), and I use gimp which is still limited to 24 bit depth. But when I look at a lot of the high-rated stuff on flickr most of it is too over-processed for my liking.
I also delete all but my favorite photos. I only want to remember the highlights, not how mundane my life really was :)
1 TB is so much. I am curious how everybody uses so much space? My system partition is 2.7 gig gzipped. My home partition includes my family photos (my most precious data), which is accumulating at 100-150 MB per year and approaching 1 gig. I have 20 gig of mp3's, and 2.5 gigs of other random junk I never look at like old tax returns and data from my dissertation. My drive is "only" 160 GB, and the majority of it is pvr recordings, it does fill up but I've always been able to find shows at least a couple months old I still haven't watched, and clear some out. I don't bother to back those up so my 60 GB backup drive is sufficient. I feel if I had more space I'd probably just lose track of what all I have.
So I'm just curious how people use all the space? Shooting lots of photos and feeling like you need to keep them all in raw mode? Home videos? Yeah, pornography, ha ha, but seriously what takes most of your space?
Sure, and instead of automated backups, what we need is more responsible computer users who always make manual backups when they're supposed to. Sure.
The fact is, energy may be getting more complicated soon, going beyond what "smart users" can reasonably accommodate without automation. With predictable (even slow-reacting) energy sources like coal, variable pricing was just about controlling variable consumption (i.e. off-peak hours), which is predictable anyways. A static scheme worked. But now add solar to the mix. Now add wind to the mix. Conditions vary constantly. Eventually it will be like the oil market is today, where nobody even knows why or when prices rise and fall. But nevertheless prices at the pump rise and fall, and you have to decide how often to fill your car.
Besides, I don't know why this article is fixating on variable energy pricing as the only application of "smart" appliances. For one simple thing, I would like my refrigerator notices it is using an excessive amount of energy, due to a door not sealing, or a soon-to-fail compressor. I would like to known how long my payoff would be moving from one water heater to a newer more efficient one, given my family's usage patterns. And I know where's supposed to laugh at the idea of getting email from appliances, but if my house starts to flood because of a rusty water heater or a failed toilet I do want an email, and now!
Oh please, you can't compare the missed milestones of one program against another program that never missed a milestone because it never started. As for the safety argument, IMHO it's so hypothetical I don't even care. I still don't think anybody knows how safe the shuttle now is, or isn't.
However, if costs on a program have actually exceeded plans by a factor of 10, I think you have a good argument for developing both in parallel in a big programmatic deathmatch.
I do think it's amazing how small the economic benefit has been from the move to two family incomes and fewer kids. I don't know if it's because America's position in the world has slipped, or overpopulation making land expensive, or the concentration of wealth at the top, or all the two-income families outbidding each other for housing, or the rising divorce rate meaning a lot of working moms have only their own income, or because moms were almost as economically productive at home as they are in the workplace (so most of the additional income goes to child care and pre-made food), rising health care costs masking the economic benefit of additional workers, or what.