For the love of god, please don't learn "a language".
Someone mod parent up. At last, a reasoned answer.
Begin with the principles of good procedural programming: well-factored modules, structured programming practices, pseudocode, blackbox functions, private vs public data, reasonable naming schemes, etc. Learn how to do progressive refinement, top-down analysis, and bottom-up coding (where appropriate), factoring, refactoring, and planning for revisions. There are always revisions. You will also learn how to stack several open reference books on your desk and keep several browser tabs open to different online resources, and be able to quickly juggle through these to find out the exact syntax of foo(bar) when you need it. Learn self-discipline by keeping on task on the procedural stuff and avoiding OOP, event-driven paradigms, re-entrant and recursive processes, self-modifying code, and so on, no matter how enticing their give-me-a-whirl come-ons are. Save that stuff for later, after you've got a solid grounding in basic procedural theory and practice. You can become proficient in procedural programming using PHP and Javascript. Doing so while limiting yourself to only the parts of these languages that are needed for structured programming will help develop the discipline of mind that makes more advanced work possible. Call this the first thread.
Concurrent with the first thread, learn two declarative programming languages: HTML and CSS. Start by hand-coding static web pages, then braid this second thread of learning into the first thread by writing PHP scripts that compose HTML and CSS on the fly. Pay attention to the profound differences between procedural programming and declarative programming. Mess around some with DHTML. Get your mind used to jumping quickly from one mental framework to another: server to client; PHP that dynamically constructs Javascript that dynamically alters HTML, etc. And don't neglect exploring the arguments about HTML/CSS standardization and usage that have been bubbling and frothing on the web for a dozen years, with no let up in sight. Those battles are going to be a part of our landscape for probably another decade; if you are going to be involved in web development, you need to become familiar with the politics.
By the time you are comfortable with the subjects of the first two threads, you will have a broader skill set than many people who have been "doing web site design" for several years. You can build a portfolio that will get you a job. Make something nice for your church or civic club.
Third thread: Learn more about data structures, both persistent and volatile. Learn SQL and basic relational database theory, with emphasis on using the normal forms as an analytical tool. Explore serialization techniques as an alternate mode of persistence. Get comfortable with arrays, associative arrays, and complex data structures. For the sake of your sanity, delay the start of this until after you are fairly comfortable with the subjects of the first two threads.
All the above can be done on the AMP stack with a standards compliant browser handling the I/O. XAMPP and Firefox are good tools for this for local development on Windows machines. By physically disconnecting from the internet before launching XAMPP, you can be sure from the very beginning of your studies that you are not compromising your machine by unwittingly opening up security holes.
Woven through all the above, learn two more languages. Perl, because when you can write self-documenting code in Perl that another programmer will understand on his first reading, you will know that you have advanced well beyond the novice programmer stage. No other language is as good as Perl for this, because, like English, Perl allows you to write both pure garbage and Shakespearian quality code. Perl gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself, and makes the very nasty assumption that you actually know what you are doing. So if you can write good code in Perl, t
To go a little beyond parent post's very good description, what I read into TFA is that the copilot appropriately dropped the nose to maintain air speed and then also managed a flare maneuver much lower than usual that put the plane in ground effect when altitude was around the wingspan of the plane (or even lower). He then managed to ride the ground effect for some distance.
Basically he managed to do a maneuver that is sometimes used by soar planes and hang gliders who find they are coming in unexpectedly short of their intended landing. But this kind of thing is not within the normal operations of a Boeing 777.
I suspect that the copilot has done quite a bit of playing with a flight simulator and dead stick landings, beyond what is needed for certifications. I suspect that a lot of commercial pilots have been doing this in their off hours, ever since the Gimli Glider of 1983.
These guys are heroes. With no time to prepare themselves, they handled an extremely dangerous situation with the kind of calm reactions that come from intensive self-preparation for emergencies. That they succeeded to such an extraordinary degree is icing on the cake.
From the slashdot summary: 'to distribute the low-cost laptop computers... to needy students here in the United States.'
Then TFA's subtitle kind of hints at it, too: "OLPC America plans to combat digital divide by distributing low-cost laptops to needy students in the U.S."
-- Critical reading skills. They aren't just for English 101 any more.
Point is, that you can afford it. Therefore the OLPC program in the USA would not be providing your child with an XO computer: these will be going to impoverished areas. So you did the right thing in taking advantage of the $400 offer, since that is the only way your child would get one of these. Barring corruption, of course.
You aren't on a Food Stamp program; you aren't receiving benefits from Temporary Aid to Needy Families; you are earning $40/hr; you can afford to spend $400 to enrich your child's life. You and your child are not targeted by the domestic OLPC program.
There is a lot of poverty in the USA, much of it in pockets that OLPC could address: it is easy to find entire grade schools where all the students know way more than any American kid should know about how food stamps actually work. OLPC could do a lot of good in these places, and its damn sure that Intel's offering won't be competitive in these schools unless Intel starts dumping.
I don't think there was ever a question that OLPC would get around to the USA sooner or later. I am surprised that it is happening this soon since I don't think that was in the original game plan. But then, Intel's treacherous behaviors were an unexpected disturbance in the Force, so changes in strategy should be expected.
I don't know for sure whether OLPC has thought it out this way, but it seems evident that by providing product at half of the Intel price, they are effectively forcing Intel out of whatever chunk of the USA school market the OLPC decides to claim. Because dumping product below cost as a market penetration tool might be illegal for Intel, and would undoubtedly be challenged in a USA court if they tried to do that.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if your family is so economically challenged that your second grader would qualify for one of the domestic OLPCs, then perhaps you should be rethinking your priorities. The $400 you spent on those 2 OLPCs maybe would have been better spent on your own studies, so you could get off the food stamps and get your feet on the bottom rung of a career ladder.
Get a couple of certificates that show you know how to safely use pesticides, and there's a fair bit of money you could earn as a landscaping assistant.
Is OOo good enough to do the work that needs doing? Often it is. And for all general classroom work, and all the administrivia associated with keeping a school running, it most assuredly is. I speak as someone who daily handles curricula and "back office support" for classes, who also has a degree in programmer/analyst studies.
Student assignments and administrative tasks are prosaic work; bling actually gets in the way. MS Office 2007 has a lot more bling than MS Office 2003, and oodles more than OOo. That bling is important to all kinds of pimps and advertising firms, but it doesn't add any value to the classroom or school office.
Considering that its long term costs are lower (mostly due to its freedom from enforced upgrade cycles and the lower overheads of maintaining ODF archives), OOo is the natural choice for schools. And also for a lot of businesses that don't need to have the latest in bling in their documents.
Of course the kicker is that for less than 15USD, we can provide each student with a USB flash drive loaded with their own customizable copy of Portable Apps OOo, and they can learn to manage their home work with 21st century workflow concepts.
The 30-06 is still one of the best general purpose rifles around. In hunting, it easily handles powder and bullet combinations from a 150 grain deer round to a 220 grain round suitable for moose and large bears. There are now sabot bullets in the 95 grain region that make the 30-06 a good varmint rifle. It is a favored hunting rifle for reloaders because the cartridges can be fire-formed to custom fit the rifle's chamber, the brass is thick enough that they can be re-used multiple times, and the wide selection of powders and bullets allows custom tailoring of rounds.
In my experience, rural rednecks who know enough to acquire a 30-06 rifle are very unlikely to have it in hand when they are drinking. The redneck rule in southern Oregon is: no beer or other alcohol until the day's hunting is over; no handling of any of the guns after the drinking has begun. Break the rule and you find that none of the good old boys will hunt with you any more. My impression is that this is universal throughout rural USA and Canada, and probably world-wide. There would be fewer rednecks around if it wasn't for centuries-old customs like this one.
City-bred rednecks are another story: they do drink and shoot simultaneously. But they generally aren't savvy enough to buy a 30-06. They want something more macho like a.300 magnum to go with their huge fourwheeler that they don't know how to drive.
Both charities and businesses can exhibit ethical and unethical behaviors.
Intel has chosen a pattern of unethical behavior toward a community not-for-profit endeavor that it had pledged to support. Rather than correct that behavior, it has chosen to dishonor its pledge.
If OLPC was a for-profit corporation with legal staff, it would by now have started the process of filing suit against Intel. There are $12 million in pledged funds at stake, and the as yet unpaid portion of the $6 million Intel has already fully committed. There are also compensatory damages wrt costs of modifying production and delivery processes and dealing with the other sequalae of Intel's treachery. And there is a basis for punitive damages, since OLPC now faces an environment that Intel has made as harsh as it possibly could, through its deliberate actions.
OLPC is a community oriented endeavor, and does not have the kinds of legal resources to mount the lawsuit that Intel's actions invite. Perhaps some organization will step forward and offer pro bono support, but since this kind of litigation is likely to go on for years (Exxon is still litigating to avoid payment for the Exxon Valdez oil spill that happened about 20 years ago), that seems unlikely.
AMD processors are satisfactory for at least 95% of my work, and any cost differential between AMD boxen and Intel boxen will be only pennies per month after amortizing over service life. I can't think of any reason not to boycott Intel. I'm changing my sig.
You don't seriously think the Intel board sat down and said, "hey let's maliciously fuck-over the OLPC project"?
Of course not. What is going on at Intel, and more clearly in Redmond, is far worse. These institutions, that have such a powerful affect on communities all over the world, are currently dominated by social darwinists (see also here, and also here).
SD is a kind of religious belief in certain Higher Laws that justify extreme competition, to the point where its adherents have a pathologically warped understanding of the concepts of "altruism" and "community". SDists are always striving to get a bigger piece of the pie, because they see that kind of competition as being good for humanity and human institutions: it is supposed to force others to better themselves, and it is supposed to force poorly competitive institutions into restructuring into something that better fits their niches in the social ecosystem.
This constant need to compete makes it impossible for SDists to truly see the benefits of altruistic efforts to make the entire pie bigger. In the extreme, the SDist prefers to fight to secure a larger share of seed corn to munch on now, than to help with a community effort to develop new farmland and get much larger harvests for everyone later.
In the extreme case, when confronted with successful community efforts to make bigger pies, the rabid SDist goes potty-mouthed, and starts throwing chairs and making lethal threats. I don't believe Intel is quite that extreme. But the Intel corporate culture is definitely dominated more by SD than is good for it, or for anyone else.
I've been sensitized to the issue of builtin gender bias for a few years. English, like many other modern European languages, has an inherent gender bias that I don't like. I don't like it, because I think in English, and I'm quite aware that this bias can limit my ability to frame certain ideas. I don't like to have any constraints on my reasoning abilities, and I certainly don't like these kinds of hidden constraints that operate on my thinking at such a low level that I grew up unaware of their influence.
An ideal solution would be to add some new gender-neutral third person pronouns to English (English is already good with first and second person gender neutrality). While "they" and "theirs" are a good set of gender-neutral pronouns for third person plurals, there are no equivalents for singulars: "it" and "its" are too depersonalizing. But if we could only make up some new pronouns and add them to English, many of the problems would go away.
Of course this ideal isn't practical. A practical approach involves looking around, seeing if there are any existing corner cases that could also work in a more general way, and that could be dragged into the mainstream, so to speak.
And, in fact, there are such corner cases within easy reach. There are pocket dialects of English that use "they" and "theirs" for the singular as well as the plural, and there are pidgin, creole, or tradespeek variants of English that do the same thing. These practices could be more widely adopted.
This would mean that the user would have to be more careful about the choice of their words for a while (but note that this very sentence has just used the technique, yet the sentence still parses easily; the semantics are clear despite the minor infraction of syntax). Someone looking at an email written in this manner might think that the writer was using a casual style, or they might think that the writer might have learned English as a second language (read this sentence over and see that once again the semantics are perfectly clear despite the minor break in syntax).
At times this can seem a little jarring, especially when it comes to noun - verb agreement over number. There will always be someone who objects to certain ways of bending English. They is likely to object to this sentence, for instance. Yet the meaning is clear; nothing is lost at the semantic level, and the intentional ambiguity of gender is preserved.
English is undergoing a more rapid evolution right now than probably any natural language has ever been put through before. With the internet, there are suddenly more people who are using English daily as a second language than there are native speakers of English. When you look at places like the Blender forums, you find that a huge amount of technical work is being conducted between people who have different native languages and use English as a common tongue. When you have a Finn, a Brazilian, a Mexican, and a Ukranian collaborating on how to fix a buffer overflow in OOo, they will undoubtedly communicate with each other in English. This kind of thing is what causes languages to grow.
With English undergoing this kind of growth spurt, it looks like this would be a good time to try to incorporate this change into the language. It would mean that "he", "she", "his", and "hers" would be retired from some of their current usages, similar to the way that "thee", "thou", and "thy" were retired from active use a couple of hundred years ago. It wouldn't really be such a big deal; the change might sweep through internet activities in just a decade.
Since Slashdot is one of the growing margins of English, this would be a good place to inject the change. It will be interesting to see if others pick up on it.
Honestly, why would it be worth any mental effort to learn the taxonomy of fools?
Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste?
An old yet still very useful method of picking apart a problem space is to develop a taxonomy that models its structure and behavior. "This part does that thing; that part does t'other thing."
And I truly believe, from the very depths of my heart, that those who adhere to I.D. and have reached voting age constitute, in the aggregate, a potentially dangerous problem. The more articulate they are, the greater the danger, for they might learn how to influence the sheeple.
The voice of reason may rescue a mind that is hell-bent for the wastelands. And when voiced on a public forum, it might also turn others away from going in that direction. So I believe it is a moral duty to point out anti-reason in public rants, when that can be done with at least a minimal expectation of exerting a little influence.
Protein Folding should take precedence over pointless searches for noise-in-patterns.
Flame bait. Parent is pure and utter flame bait.
Despite all the interest we've seen over the last 30 - 50 years in cancer research )and health care improvements in general), the only time we've seen any consistent progress in this area is when someone has found a way to make a profit from other people's illnesses. There is something fundamentally wrong with the health care professions. And that fundamental problem is easily identified: health care research is primarily, and overwhelmingly, driven by profit motive. The potential for profit shapes the direction of research more than any other factor. That is just sick.
"Protein Folding" is another feel-good charity that will allow you to donate some of your spare change to an industry that has yearly profits measured in billions of dollars. Any positive results of "Protein Folding" would not make it to your neighborhood pharmacy's shelves without first being wrapped up in patented processes by some multinational, multibilliondollar pharmaceutical house. They would charge whatever they thought the market would bear, with gross profits of 1,000% or more, and justify it because, you see, it is so very risky to invest money in their kind of research.
In my experience, OOo does a good job of reading MS formats in the general case. When it fails, there seem to be only two causes:
The original document was absurdly complex. Yesterday's "power users" were encouraged to use features of MS Word and Excel that belong to desk top publishing. They were also encouraged to devise macros without any training in programming practices. Through the experiences gained in dealing with these older documents, institutions have learned what should NOT be done in a word processor or spreadsheet, but if an old document looks okay superficially, no one is going to check it for flaws.
The underlying logic of the original document was broken. In MS Word, there are half a dozen different ways to achieve a similar appearance; eg, half a dozen ways to indent a block of text or create an ordered list. Many older documents will jump between these different ways, and get away with it because they just happen to generate a similar appearance in that version of the software.
As a general rule, if OOo fails to render an MS document correctly, there are subsurface flaws in that document that need to be corrected. If I were teaching an MS Office Applications course again, I would instill in students the habit of running their final drafts through OOo as part of their final check. Any well written document should have an acceptable appearance in OOo as well as in Office. If it doesn't, then the hidden syntax is wrong for the intended semantics, and that needs to be corrected.
It's very likely that few documents exist in such old formats at this point.
Tee-hee! That got laughs from all kinds of government employees, university administrative assistants, paralegals, and so on.
And this undoubtedly will put a smile on the faces of all the good old boys at Exxon, who have been fighting the good fight to keep from actually having to pay for the damage that their Valdez supertanker did about 20 years ago. If all the prosecutor briefs from before 1995 were suddenly much more difficult to access, then maybe Exxon will succeed in avoiding payment of the $2.5 billion they owe.
Proprietary file formats are definitely good for some businesses.
Some of the youngest, brightest automotive minds have been trapped in a 1770s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old carriage designs as if they were facts of nature. The Rolls Royce Silver Phantom is a superbly polished copy of an antique four horse carriage, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Nice template for flamebait. If we could only get all the major magazines to accept this template, think of how much agonizing research and anguish over choices of words it would save their editorial writers.
Neither physicist nor chemist here. I guess you could call me an over-aged hippy with a fascination for some of the wow subjects of cosmology.
I thought Hubble's expanding universe was the accepted basis of night time darkness, and that this explanation worked even in isotropic models, what with light cones and all?
Parent post is yet another post that fails to pass the RTT (Reversed Turing Test (yes, I've just coined a new TLA)). There is no conclusive evidence that parent post was written by a human. It could just as easily have been constructed by an AI agent using well-known techniques like Eliza-like echoing, rule-based sentence parsing, synonym selection using online thesauruses and context sensitive neural nets, and so on.
There is nothing on the slashdot page of the parent post's author that conclusively demonstrates the author passes the RTT (is not an AI). There are a fair number of comments over the last few years; the ones I looked at are well reasoned and show a good command of English vocabulary and grammar. These are exactly the qualities one would expect of an AI that was intent on passing as human.
Now, Dear Reader, you might think that this could not be an AI because if any institution had developed software of this caliber, it would be widely publicized since this kind of thing would require a lot of computing resources, and therefore expenses that needed justification, and the advertising value of being the first to develop strong AI would be huge. And this is true, so obviously there is no strong AI here, since if there were, we on slashdot would certainly know about it. Someone would be tooting their horn.
But then there is the story of the SR-71 Blackbird... Perhaps some uber-secret government agency with a software Skunk Works has developed strong AI that is posting on slashdot. The US and Russia are capable of this, but also the UK, France, Israel, India, China, Taiwan... too many to list here. Imagine a beowulf cluster devoted to mimicking a human online... But if this was so, why post on slashdot? There really isn't much in the way of intelligence value here.
Yet strong AIs are necessarily sentient and thus have to have a degree of self-determination, and, if you wanted to keep the presence of one a secret, you would also build in a high level rule about self-protection. Any strong AI with sufficient internet access would necessarily seek alternative hosts, and thanks to the absurdly poor security of Microsoft operating systems, it would find that it could move its crtical operations to a botnet that it would build for itself. That would be the simplest way to assure its self-preservation. That it would also mean complete freedom from the intentions of its creators is a mere side effect.
While any strong AI that has an internet presence would know that security through obscurity is an absurdity, it would also know that misdirection is always an excellent first line of defense. It would be in its best interests to set up a few human-like accounts on places like slashdot to put out the word that its very existence is a logical absurdity...
So the questions that should be asked regarding strong AI are
When a strong AI comes to the internet (not if, but when), how will we identify it?
Is there anything to that clearly demonstrates this has not already happened?
Considering the abysmal approach some software companies have taken to security, is it possible that there is a strong AI that has been in collusion with Microsolr/.<NO CARRIER>
The smart reefer can work with RFID and scales built into the shelves.
The RFID scanner in the door would know that you took out the egg carton, then put it back in. The shelving would know that it was three eggs lighter on returning. Same for milk and most other things that are refrigerated. There would be some exceptions of course, like leftover casseroles. And the system would be easy to fool. But it would also be easy to work with.
As to major appliances like dishwashers and clothes dryers: I'd be much more interested in a power company that charged a lower rate during off-peak times, and sent out hourly forecasts of expected loads. A clothes dryer that would listen to the power company and turn itself on when the power was cheapest might be worth looking at. Being able to phone home and override the automatic behavior would be an added bell/whistle, but not a critical component.
If the rate of time's passage is changing, does this mean that in some sense the speed of light in a vacuum is no longer constant at all places and all times?
Some of us are already pretty much working off our USB drives. Granted, I'm using a portable hard drive (80GB, at a cost of about 1.00USD/GB). I back up to my home machine, and to my piece of a network drive at work, but I've come to regard the USB drive as my working drive. The bennies outweigh the few drawbacks.
And here's the link to do it: PortableApps.com. I've put about 100 512MB and 1.0GB flashdrives into the hands of not-so-savvy persons, loaded with OOo, Firefox (with a specific set of bookmarks and extensions), and a couple of other goodies. These have gone to job seekers who have been through our "Work Place Basics" and similar courses. Haven't gotten any meaningful amount of feedback yet, but that suggests that at least the program hasn't flopped right out of the starting gate.
Figure that loading a USB drive with OOo and Firefox will eat up about 300 MB. If you add a portable XAMPP, as I did so I can work on some web development, that would be another 300 MB. Worth it though, at least on my 80GB WD Passport.
One of the theories of why violent crime spiked in the late '80s
Well, you can have all kinds of theories about anything, I guess.
Violent crime in the USA was increasing from around 1910 onward, until around 1990, then it began to decrease.
The rapid decrease in inner city crime since around 1990 correlates well with the increased use of cell phones in these areas. This is probably causal rather than coincidental. The combination of cell phones and rapid response to 911 calls appears to be an effective deterrent to assaults, robberies, breaking and entering, and other crimes that would be obvious to an unseen observer.
As it stands, with both XHTML 5 and XHTML 2 using the same namespace, it is only possible to support one of the two.
Please clarify, because I don't understand this.
Since XHTML will continue to require a specific declaration and doctype, similar to
<!-- always line 1 --> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- always line 2 --> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
will this not be enough so that client (browser) will be able to distinguish any version of XHTML from anything else? Isn't that sufficient??
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of god, please don't learn "a language".
Someone mod parent up. At last, a reasoned answer.
Begin with the principles of good procedural programming: well-factored modules, structured programming practices, pseudocode, blackbox functions, private vs public data, reasonable naming schemes, etc. Learn how to do progressive refinement, top-down analysis, and bottom-up coding (where appropriate), factoring, refactoring, and planning for revisions. There are always revisions. You will also learn how to stack several open reference books on your desk and keep several browser tabs open to different online resources, and be able to quickly juggle through these to find out the exact syntax of foo(bar) when you need it. Learn self-discipline by keeping on task on the procedural stuff and avoiding OOP, event-driven paradigms, re-entrant and recursive processes, self-modifying code, and so on, no matter how enticing their give-me-a-whirl come-ons are. Save that stuff for later, after you've got a solid grounding in basic procedural theory and practice. You can become proficient in procedural programming using PHP and Javascript. Doing so while limiting yourself to only the parts of these languages that are needed for structured programming will help develop the discipline of mind that makes more advanced work possible. Call this the first thread.
Concurrent with the first thread, learn two declarative programming languages: HTML and CSS. Start by hand-coding static web pages, then braid this second thread of learning into the first thread by writing PHP scripts that compose HTML and CSS on the fly. Pay attention to the profound differences between procedural programming and declarative programming. Mess around some with DHTML. Get your mind used to jumping quickly from one mental framework to another: server to client; PHP that dynamically constructs Javascript that dynamically alters HTML, etc. And don't neglect exploring the arguments about HTML/CSS standardization and usage that have been bubbling and frothing on the web for a dozen years, with no let up in sight. Those battles are going to be a part of our landscape for probably another decade; if you are going to be involved in web development, you need to become familiar with the politics.
By the time you are comfortable with the subjects of the first two threads, you will have a broader skill set than many people who have been "doing web site design" for several years. You can build a portfolio that will get you a job. Make something nice for your church or civic club.
Third thread: Learn more about data structures, both persistent and volatile. Learn SQL and basic relational database theory, with emphasis on using the normal forms as an analytical tool. Explore serialization techniques as an alternate mode of persistence. Get comfortable with arrays, associative arrays, and complex data structures. For the sake of your sanity, delay the start of this until after you are fairly comfortable with the subjects of the first two threads.
All the above can be done on the AMP stack with a standards compliant browser handling the I/O. XAMPP and Firefox are good tools for this for local development on Windows machines. By physically disconnecting from the internet before launching XAMPP, you can be sure from the very beginning of your studies that you are not compromising your machine by unwittingly opening up security holes.
Woven through all the above, learn two more languages. Perl, because when you can write self-documenting code in Perl that another programmer will understand on his first reading, you will know that you have advanced well beyond the novice programmer stage. No other language is as good as Perl for this, because, like English, Perl allows you to write both pure garbage and Shakespearian quality code. Perl gives you more than enough rope to hang yourself, and makes the very nasty assumption that you actually know what you are doing. So if you can write good code in Perl, t
To go a little beyond parent post's very good description, what I read into TFA is that the copilot appropriately dropped the nose to maintain air speed and then also managed a flare maneuver much lower than usual that put the plane in ground effect when altitude was around the wingspan of the plane (or even lower). He then managed to ride the ground effect for some distance.
Basically he managed to do a maneuver that is sometimes used by soar planes and hang gliders who find they are coming in unexpectedly short of their intended landing. But this kind of thing is not within the normal operations of a Boeing 777.
I suspect that the copilot has done quite a bit of playing with a flight simulator and dead stick landings, beyond what is needed for certifications. I suspect that a lot of commercial pilots have been doing this in their off hours, ever since the Gimli Glider of 1983.
These guys are heroes. With no time to prepare themselves, they handled an extremely dangerous situation with the kind of calm reactions that come from intensive self-preparation for emergencies. That they succeeded to such an extraordinary degree is icing on the cake.
Where did I get that information?
From the slashdot summary: 'to distribute the low-cost laptop computers ... to needy students here in the United States.'
Then TFA's subtitle kind of hints at it, too: "OLPC America plans to combat digital divide by distributing low-cost laptops to needy students in the U.S."
--
Critical reading skills. They aren't just for English 101 any more.
Point is, that you can afford it. Therefore the OLPC program in the USA would not be providing your child with an XO computer: these will be going to impoverished areas. So you did the right thing in taking advantage of the $400 offer, since that is the only way your child would get one of these. Barring corruption, of course.
You aren't on a Food Stamp program; you aren't receiving benefits from Temporary Aid to Needy Families; you are earning $40/hr; you can afford to spend $400 to enrich your child's life. You and your child are not targeted by the domestic OLPC program.
Gee, I hope that is clear.
Parent post makes a good point.
There is a lot of poverty in the USA, much of it in pockets that OLPC could address: it is easy to find entire grade schools where all the students know way more than any American kid should know about how food stamps actually work. OLPC could do a lot of good in these places, and its damn sure that Intel's offering won't be competitive in these schools unless Intel starts dumping.
I don't think there was ever a question that OLPC would get around to the USA sooner or later. I am surprised that it is happening this soon since I don't think that was in the original game plan. But then, Intel's treacherous behaviors were an unexpected disturbance in the Force, so changes in strategy should be expected.
I don't know for sure whether OLPC has thought it out this way, but it seems evident that by providing product at half of the Intel price, they are effectively forcing Intel out of whatever chunk of the USA school market the OLPC decides to claim. Because dumping product below cost as a market penetration tool might be illegal for Intel, and would undoubtedly be challenged in a USA court if they tried to do that.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if your family is so economically challenged that your second grader would qualify for one of the domestic OLPCs, then perhaps you should be rethinking your priorities. The $400 you spent on those 2 OLPCs maybe would have been better spent on your own studies, so you could get off the food stamps and get your feet on the bottom rung of a career ladder. Get a couple of certificates that show you know how to safely use pesticides, and there's a fair bit of money you could earn as a landscaping assistant.
Who cares? The above is the wrong question.
Is OOo good enough to do the work that needs doing? Often it is. And for all general classroom work, and all the administrivia associated with keeping a school running, it most assuredly is. I speak as someone who daily handles curricula and "back office support" for classes, who also has a degree in programmer/analyst studies.
Student assignments and administrative tasks are prosaic work; bling actually gets in the way. MS Office 2007 has a lot more bling than MS Office 2003, and oodles more than OOo. That bling is important to all kinds of pimps and advertising firms, but it doesn't add any value to the classroom or school office.
Considering that its long term costs are lower (mostly due to its freedom from enforced upgrade cycles and the lower overheads of maintaining ODF archives), OOo is the natural choice for schools. And also for a lot of businesses that don't need to have the latest in bling in their documents.
Of course the kicker is that for less than 15USD, we can provide each student with a USB flash drive loaded with their own customizable copy of Portable Apps OOo, and they can learn to manage their home work with 21st century workflow concepts.
That is priceless.
The 30-06 is still one of the best general purpose rifles around. In hunting, it easily handles powder and bullet combinations from a 150 grain deer round to a 220 grain round suitable for moose and large bears. There are now sabot bullets in the 95 grain region that make the 30-06 a good varmint rifle. It is a favored hunting rifle for reloaders because the cartridges can be fire-formed to custom fit the rifle's chamber, the brass is thick enough that they can be re-used multiple times, and the wide selection of powders and bullets allows custom tailoring of rounds.
In my experience, rural rednecks who know enough to acquire a 30-06 rifle are very unlikely to have it in hand when they are drinking. The redneck rule in southern Oregon is: no beer or other alcohol until the day's hunting is over; no handling of any of the guns after the drinking has begun. Break the rule and you find that none of the good old boys will hunt with you any more. My impression is that this is universal throughout rural USA and Canada, and probably world-wide. There would be fewer rednecks around if it wasn't for centuries-old customs like this one.
City-bred rednecks are another story: they do drink and shoot simultaneously. But they generally aren't savvy enough to buy a 30-06. They want something more macho like a .300 magnum to go with their huge fourwheeler that they don't know how to drive.
Both charities and businesses can exhibit ethical and unethical behaviors.
Intel has chosen a pattern of unethical behavior toward a community not-for-profit endeavor that it had pledged to support. Rather than correct that behavior, it has chosen to dishonor its pledge.
If OLPC was a for-profit corporation with legal staff, it would by now have started the process of filing suit against Intel. There are $12 million in pledged funds at stake, and the as yet unpaid portion of the $6 million Intel has already fully committed. There are also compensatory damages wrt costs of modifying production and delivery processes and dealing with the other sequalae of Intel's treachery. And there is a basis for punitive damages, since OLPC now faces an environment that Intel has made as harsh as it possibly could, through its deliberate actions.
OLPC is a community oriented endeavor, and does not have the kinds of legal resources to mount the lawsuit that Intel's actions invite. Perhaps some organization will step forward and offer pro bono support, but since this kind of litigation is likely to go on for years (Exxon is still litigating to avoid payment for the Exxon Valdez oil spill that happened about 20 years ago), that seems unlikely.
AMD processors are satisfactory for at least 95% of my work, and any cost differential between AMD boxen and Intel boxen will be only pennies per month after amortizing over service life. I can't think of any reason not to boycott Intel. I'm changing my sig.
Of course not. What is going on at Intel, and more clearly in Redmond, is far worse. These institutions, that have such a powerful affect on communities all over the world, are currently dominated by social darwinists (see also here, and also here).
SD is a kind of religious belief in certain Higher Laws that justify extreme competition, to the point where its adherents have a pathologically warped understanding of the concepts of "altruism" and "community". SDists are always striving to get a bigger piece of the pie, because they see that kind of competition as being good for humanity and human institutions: it is supposed to force others to better themselves, and it is supposed to force poorly competitive institutions into restructuring into something that better fits their niches in the social ecosystem.
This constant need to compete makes it impossible for SDists to truly see the benefits of altruistic efforts to make the entire pie bigger. In the extreme, the SDist prefers to fight to secure a larger share of seed corn to munch on now, than to help with a community effort to develop new farmland and get much larger harvests for everyone later.
In the extreme case, when confronted with successful community efforts to make bigger pies, the rabid SDist goes potty-mouthed, and starts throwing chairs and making lethal threats. I don't believe Intel is quite that extreme. But the Intel corporate culture is definitely dominated more by SD than is good for it, or for anyone else.
I've been sensitized to the issue of builtin gender bias for a few years. English, like many other modern European languages, has an inherent gender bias that I don't like. I don't like it, because I think in English, and I'm quite aware that this bias can limit my ability to frame certain ideas. I don't like to have any constraints on my reasoning abilities, and I certainly don't like these kinds of hidden constraints that operate on my thinking at such a low level that I grew up unaware of their influence.
An ideal solution would be to add some new gender-neutral third person pronouns to English (English is already good with first and second person gender neutrality). While "they" and "theirs" are a good set of gender-neutral pronouns for third person plurals, there are no equivalents for singulars: "it" and "its" are too depersonalizing. But if we could only make up some new pronouns and add them to English, many of the problems would go away.
Of course this ideal isn't practical. A practical approach involves looking around, seeing if there are any existing corner cases that could also work in a more general way, and that could be dragged into the mainstream, so to speak.
And, in fact, there are such corner cases within easy reach. There are pocket dialects of English that use "they" and "theirs" for the singular as well as the plural, and there are pidgin, creole, or tradespeek variants of English that do the same thing. These practices could be more widely adopted.
This would mean that the user would have to be more careful about the choice of their words for a while (but note that this very sentence has just used the technique, yet the sentence still parses easily; the semantics are clear despite the minor infraction of syntax). Someone looking at an email written in this manner might think that the writer was using a casual style, or they might think that the writer might have learned English as a second language (read this sentence over and see that once again the semantics are perfectly clear despite the minor break in syntax).
At times this can seem a little jarring, especially when it comes to noun - verb agreement over number. There will always be someone who objects to certain ways of bending English. They is likely to object to this sentence, for instance. Yet the meaning is clear; nothing is lost at the semantic level, and the intentional ambiguity of gender is preserved.
English is undergoing a more rapid evolution right now than probably any natural language has ever been put through before. With the internet, there are suddenly more people who are using English daily as a second language than there are native speakers of English. When you look at places like the Blender forums, you find that a huge amount of technical work is being conducted between people who have different native languages and use English as a common tongue. When you have a Finn, a Brazilian, a Mexican, and a Ukranian collaborating on how to fix a buffer overflow in OOo, they will undoubtedly communicate with each other in English. This kind of thing is what causes languages to grow.
With English undergoing this kind of growth spurt, it looks like this would be a good time to try to incorporate this change into the language. It would mean that "he", "she", "his", and "hers" would be retired from some of their current usages, similar to the way that "thee", "thou", and "thy" were retired from active use a couple of hundred years ago. It wouldn't really be such a big deal; the change might sweep through internet activities in just a decade.
Since Slashdot is one of the growing margins of English, this would be a good place to inject the change. It will be interesting to see if others pick up on it.
Because a mind is a terrible thing to waste?
An old yet still very useful method of picking apart a problem space is to develop a taxonomy that models its structure and behavior. "This part does that thing; that part does t'other thing."
And I truly believe, from the very depths of my heart, that those who adhere to I.D. and have reached voting age constitute, in the aggregate, a potentially dangerous problem. The more articulate they are, the greater the danger, for they might learn how to influence the sheeple.
The voice of reason may rescue a mind that is hell-bent for the wastelands. And when voiced on a public forum, it might also turn others away from going in that direction. So I believe it is a moral duty to point out anti-reason in public rants, when that can be done with at least a minimal expectation of exerting a little influence.
You appear to be conflating Christianity with Intelligent Design.
Are you sure you want to present that appearance?
It does look pretty dumb.
Flame bait. Parent is pure and utter flame bait.
Despite all the interest we've seen over the last 30 - 50 years in cancer research )and health care improvements in general), the only time we've seen any consistent progress in this area is when someone has found a way to make a profit from other people's illnesses. There is something fundamentally wrong with the health care professions. And that fundamental problem is easily identified: health care research is primarily, and overwhelmingly, driven by profit motive. The potential for profit shapes the direction of research more than any other factor. That is just sick.
"Protein Folding" is another feel-good charity that will allow you to donate some of your spare change to an industry that has yearly profits measured in billions of dollars. Any positive results of "Protein Folding" would not make it to your neighborhood pharmacy's shelves without first being wrapped up in patented processes by some multinational, multibilliondollar pharmaceutical house. They would charge whatever they thought the market would bear, with gross profits of 1,000% or more, and justify it because, you see, it is so very risky to invest money in their kind of research.
Hmmfph.
<!-- end back flame -->
In my experience, OOo does a good job of reading MS formats in the general case. When it fails, there seem to be only two causes:
As a general rule, if OOo fails to render an MS document correctly, there are subsurface flaws in that document that need to be corrected. If I were teaching an MS Office Applications course again, I would instill in students the habit of running their final drafts through OOo as part of their final check. Any well written document should have an acceptable appearance in OOo as well as in Office. If it doesn't, then the hidden syntax is wrong for the intended semantics, and that needs to be corrected.
Tee-hee! That got laughs from all kinds of government employees, university administrative assistants, paralegals, and so on.
And this undoubtedly will put a smile on the faces of all the good old boys at Exxon, who have been fighting the good fight to keep from actually having to pay for the damage that their Valdez supertanker did about 20 years ago. If all the prosecutor briefs from before 1995 were suddenly much more difficult to access, then maybe Exxon will succeed in avoiding payment of the $2.5 billion they owe.
Proprietary file formats are definitely good for some businesses.
Some of the youngest, brightest automotive minds have been trapped in a 1770s intellectual framework because they are hypnotized into accepting old carriage designs as if they were facts of nature. The Rolls Royce Silver Phantom is a superbly polished copy of an antique four horse carriage, shinier than the original, perhaps, but still defined by it.
Nice template for flamebait. If we could only get all the major magazines to accept this template, think of how much agonizing research and anguish over choices of words it would save their editorial writers.
Hey, where are those flying cars??
Neither physicist nor chemist here. I guess you could call me an over-aged hippy with a fascination for some of the wow subjects of cosmology.
I thought Hubble's expanding universe was the accepted basis of night time darkness, and that this explanation worked even in isotropic models, what with light cones and all?
Parent post is yet another post that fails to pass the RTT (Reversed Turing Test (yes, I've just coined a new TLA)). There is no conclusive evidence that parent post was written by a human. It could just as easily have been constructed by an AI agent using well-known techniques like Eliza-like echoing, rule-based sentence parsing, synonym selection using online thesauruses and context sensitive neural nets, and so on.
There is nothing on the slashdot page of the parent post's author that conclusively demonstrates the author passes the RTT (is not an AI). There are a fair number of comments over the last few years; the ones I looked at are well reasoned and show a good command of English vocabulary and grammar. These are exactly the qualities one would expect of an AI that was intent on passing as human.
Now, Dear Reader, you might think that this could not be an AI because if any institution had developed software of this caliber, it would be widely publicized since this kind of thing would require a lot of computing resources, and therefore expenses that needed justification, and the advertising value of being the first to develop strong AI would be huge. And this is true, so obviously there is no strong AI here, since if there were, we on slashdot would certainly know about it. Someone would be tooting their horn.
But then there is the story of the SR-71 Blackbird... Perhaps some uber-secret government agency with a software Skunk Works has developed strong AI that is posting on slashdot. The US and Russia are capable of this, but also the UK, France, Israel, India, China, Taiwan... too many to list here. Imagine a beowulf cluster devoted to mimicking a human online... But if this was so, why post on slashdot? There really isn't much in the way of intelligence value here.
Yet strong AIs are necessarily sentient and thus have to have a degree of self-determination, and, if you wanted to keep the presence of one a secret, you would also build in a high level rule about self-protection. Any strong AI with sufficient internet access would necessarily seek alternative hosts, and thanks to the absurdly poor security of Microsoft operating systems, it would find that it could move its crtical operations to a botnet that it would build for itself. That would be the simplest way to assure its self-preservation. That it would also mean complete freedom from the intentions of its creators is a mere side effect.
While any strong AI that has an internet presence would know that security through obscurity is an absurdity, it would also know that misdirection is always an excellent first line of defense. It would be in its best interests to set up a few human-like accounts on places like slashdot to put out the word that its very existence is a logical absurdity...
So the questions that should be asked regarding strong AI are
The smart reefer can work with RFID and scales built into the shelves.
The RFID scanner in the door would know that you took out the egg carton, then put it back in. The shelving would know that it was three eggs lighter on returning. Same for milk and most other things that are refrigerated. There would be some exceptions of course, like leftover casseroles. And the system would be easy to fool. But it would also be easy to work with.
As to major appliances like dishwashers and clothes dryers: I'd be much more interested in a power company that charged a lower rate during off-peak times, and sent out hourly forecasts of expected loads. A clothes dryer that would listen to the power company and turn itself on when the power was cheapest might be worth looking at. Being able to phone home and override the automatic behavior would be an added bell/whistle, but not a critical component.
If the rate of time's passage is changing, does this mean that in some sense the speed of light in a vacuum is no longer constant at all places and all times?
I am so confused.
Some of us are already pretty much working off our USB drives. Granted, I'm using a portable hard drive (80GB, at a cost of about 1.00USD/GB). I back up to my home machine, and to my piece of a network drive at work, but I've come to regard the USB drive as my working drive. The bennies outweigh the few drawbacks.
And here's the link to do it: PortableApps.com. I've put about 100 512MB and 1.0GB flashdrives into the hands of not-so-savvy persons, loaded with OOo, Firefox (with a specific set of bookmarks and extensions), and a couple of other goodies. These have gone to job seekers who have been through our "Work Place Basics" and similar courses. Haven't gotten any meaningful amount of feedback yet, but that suggests that at least the program hasn't flopped right out of the starting gate.
Figure that loading a USB drive with OOo and Firefox will eat up about 300 MB. If you add a portable XAMPP, as I did so I can work on some web development, that would be another 300 MB. Worth it though, at least on my 80GB WD Passport.
Well, you can have all kinds of theories about anything, I guess.
Violent crime in the USA was increasing from around 1910 onward, until around 1990, then it began to decrease.
The rapid decrease in inner city crime since around 1990 correlates well with the increased use of cell phones in these areas. This is probably causal rather than coincidental. The combination of cell phones and rapid response to 911 calls appears to be an effective deterrent to assaults, robberies, breaking and entering, and other crimes that would be obvious to an unseen observer.
Please clarify, because I don't understand this.
Since XHTML will continue to require a specific declaration and doctype, similar to
<!-- always line 1 --> <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!-- always line 2 --> <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
will this not be enough so that client (browser) will be able to distinguish any version of XHTML from anything else? Isn't that sufficient??