My bad (about getting the creep's gender wrong). I should have googled her.
I know a Brazilian who follows soccer, and I was once chastised for confusing a Brazilian beach ball player with a soccer player: both are men named Alison. It is a man's name in some parts of the world.
The story is about someone claiming that they had a valid prescription when they did not; that is a form of forgery. It is true that in an ideal world the software that the Hubble company used should have disallowed the sale, but the more important truth is that the perpetrator (an appropriate word for this forger) was violating the law.
The company used poor judgment in allowing the transaction to go through when its screening process said it could not complete the screening, but that probably does not rise to level of criminal negligence. Alison Griswold, the guy who did this, wrote the story, and made this slashdot submission, is an admitted criminal who has written at least one fraudulent prescription.
The only take-away from this is that no-one should have any dealings with Alison Griswold. The man either has no concept of what is legal and what is not, or he thinks that laws do not apply to him. Isn't that special.
A bartender is responsible for checking the ID of a younger patron, but if the ID looks good and the youngster doesn't show any clear evidence of being too young, then the bartender has a generally recognized defense.
However the kid is guilty. In many jurisdictions he could be charged with a misdemeanor or even a felony, but usually he will get a slap on the wrist and Mummy or Daddy will have to drive down to the cop station to pick him up.
But providing a forged Rx to a pharmacy or medical provider is a felony in I think all jurisdictions. The idjit who posted this story should be charged. The contact provider is not culpable, provided they used the usual care in handling the transaction.
I have a quibble with Slashdot in publishing a story by a self-admitted felon. That is the top of a slippery slope.
All prescriptions have an expiration date. That is set by the optometrist, who is under no obligation to follow the ultra-conservative "guidelines" of his professional organization. You may be able to talk your optometrist into giving you a more distant expiration date. You can buy more contacts (or eyeglasses) at any time before that expiration date. It seems like 3 years for persons over 50 yo is now the common length of contact Rx. (It might be shorter for younger persons since vision changes in youngsters are common and also in the period between 35 and 50 when the eye's lenses are losing plasticity).
Another thing: most places filling eyewear prescriptions will sell you as many boxes of contacts as you ask for. Buy enough to get you to when you think you should have a follow-up appointment.
True enough; FOSS is now so important to so many corporations that the corporations are gifting livelihoods to some of the persons who are making FOSS products. This is still a gift economy; the corporations are not receiving a direct quid pro quo, nor are they directly influencing the development process. They are instead expecting a future gift in the form of something that will reduce their costs of operation or open new revenue streams in return.
The essence of a gift economy is that gifts are exchanged. The gift might be a gift card or a crisp new $50 bill. The return might not be delivered until some future birthday or holiday, and might have no relationship to the first gift.
This not only works in "primitive" societies that did not use money, it is now the dominant economy of the newest and most pervasive technology ever developed. If you use the Internet, you are benefiting from a gift economy. If you make your opinions known about which sites are good and which ones suck, you are participating in that gift economy.
What you are describing is wealth, not profit. The entire monetary system, including "profit", is an ancient and decrepit, highly abstracted, model of wealth.
Great wealth is what you've got when you've got everything you need to lead a good life, with leisure time to enjoy it. Wealth is whatever you have that moves you toward that state.
An antithesis to wealth is the insurance industry, which sucks up huge amounts of money and hours of people's time while producing nothing with any intrinsic value. Insurance sucks wealth out of everything it touches.
There are ways of creating wealth that have nothing to do with money. FOSS is a form of gift economy that is cashless, and it works very well in its arena. Most of the software I use is FOSS and that has enriched my life tremendously. Today's Internet would not exist if it were not for Apache that powers most of the servers and Apache is FOSS through and through.
A meteor arriving with several times the Earth's escape velocity is not interacting with the atmosphere that you know; it it interacting with the plasma that is formed by compression in front of it. The streaks left by the sub-milimeter particles of a Leonid meteor shower are plasmas with a measured temperature of 4,000+ deg C; the plasma at the head of the meteor would be much hotter than that.
So it is not cold air that is forced into the crevices of a meteor; it is very hot plasma. The pressure this exerts on the internal structure of the meteor is not countered by similar pressures on the back and sides of the object. Most meteors and bollides will burst apart.
Powerlines will go away, probably, as the future belongs to decentralized power sources rather than today's power grids.
But overhead lines are not going to disappear for a long, long time. The best way to transmit information over distance is by photons, but the pathways need to be isolated from each other and shielded from interference like windblown leaves and bird wings. So optical cable will rule.
While cable can and will be installed underground in many settings, there are a great deal of areas where it will always be more economical and efficient to string them above ground on poles.
Besides, in anime overhead cables are a great way of establishing perspective.
Yes, I think you are getting close to the mark. Power lines are great for establishing perspective. Combined with roofs with overhanging eaves whose shadows allow the artist to easily identify the time of day, it is possible to set a scene very quickly and easily.
In a sense, anime artists tend to put more into their work than American cartoonists in terms of establishing the scene, but they often do it with much less actual drawing of detail than American cartoonists by relying on simple things like powerlines to set perspective and using more negative space than is commonly done in American cartoons.
It's because students who face westward are more receptive and have better retention than if they faced any other way, so the classrooms are always on the south side of the school buildings. The rooms on the north side are used for art and for science labs.
I just read the Minix 3 licensing agreement. The link in parent post is accurate.
A key phrase is " Any deviations from these conditions require written permission
from the copyright holder in advance."
Intel may have obtained the necessary written permission to use the code without acknowledging the source. This is not FOSS (possibly if FOSS had been around when Dr Tanenbaum created Minix he and the university would have used one of the FOSS licenses. But possibly since Minix is derived from BSD Unix they would not have been able to FOSS it even if FOSS was around back in that day).
The logical next steps in pursuit of truth, justice, etc, is to ask Intel if it has a written waiver, and ask Vrije Universiteit if it has granted such a waiver to Intel. Since Dr Tanenbaum released Minix with the intent of making it easier for colleges and universities to teach Unix skills (it has been used extensively in Nicaragua for that purpose during that country's troubled times), it is probable that a number of written waivers have been granted over the years.
As for Yahoo, so lame, so lame. Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start
Problem with this possible Yahoo strategy is that what made Yahoo good in its early years was that it did an excellent job at meeting the needs of web users of 1995 - 2001 or so. It was one of the best search engines of the time, and Yahoo Groups was far superior to anything else in replacing pre-Web BBS technology. But then the world changed.
We've seen this in other growing technologies. For example, by 1950 steam locomotive technology had become very sophisticated, but was then replaced by diesel electric locomotives and the whole basis of motive steam technology was made obsolete.
Yahoo is still great at what it has always done, it is just that that is now obsolete, replaced by newer technologies for searching, running forums, and the like.
Someone else has pointed out that parent poster has been whooshed by the primary purpose of QF, which is to greatly improve the FF extension ecosystem. Enough said about that.
These points need to be addressed:
"An ad-hominem attack on the article" goes by another name: it is a criticism. In this case a valid one.
Please look up the definition of "ad-hominem". It does not mean what you think it means, and it is only applicable to persons, not to inanimate objects. As someone once said, "Don't anthropomorphise the machines. They hate that."
Last, don't try to use the "I've got more experience than you, therefore my truth is more right than yours could be." It is stupid. Especially with old timers like me who have a six digit slashdot ID since their first one, which was in the low 5 digits, became inaccessible when a system crash wiped everything many years ago. I was not only on the internet before it was available to the general public, I had about a decade of experience in the BBSes that predated the internet, including a lot of years using TapCIS. I was building websites and running servers before there was CSS, before HTML had acquired any version numbers.
Above post is one of the weirdest, nonsense attempts to troll bait that I have seen in quite a while.
I respond with the intent to entice author of parent post to deliver a follow-up post, since Lewis Carol's works are loads of fun, and while this author has yet to demonstrate the same level of artistry in creating logical knots, he is clearly writing from an Alice in Wonderland point of view.
"Inspect element" might be the replacement I'm looking for. Thanks for the pointer.
I know that QF has incorporated many of extensions I began using back in the day, some of which I continued to use even after FF had incorporated workable replacements. Call that an example of "learning inertia", where it is easier to continue to use an old and outmoded tool than to learn to use the new one all the youg'uns are raving about.
Let's not quibble over words. In that context it is perfectly clear that ownership refers to who can modify, improve, or break the thing being owned. For the very reason that FF and QF are open source, my ownership of that software is stronger than my ownership of the copy Windows XP that I bought back in the day, that is kicking around in the dustbin of discarded discs that someday I will turn into garden art.
The show-stopper with Google tools is that I cannot own them; I would be forever dependent on Google's goodwill for continued use. That is unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to any serious craftsman, no matter what the craft. You just don't allow strangers who have who knows what agendas to control your tools.
Google has already demonstrated its willingness to blow off tools it has made public when for whatever reason they decide it is in their best interest to do so, no matter how much others might depend on those tools. Chrome is not an option for anyone involved in web work beyond the level of simply dabbling.
I've just been upgraded to Quantum, somewhat earlier than I expected since I had thought I had turned off an autoupdate feature that was clearly still active. I would have deliberately updated soon, anyway.
I looked at Chrome over the summer. It lacks too many of the technical add-ons I have found useful in website analysis and development; despite its quickness, it is in my mind a much less capable environment. While FF's performance as a simple browser was much slower, the wealth of tools available and the better workflows it enabled made it the better tool.
My biggest regret with Quantum (other than the stupid name, but maybe we'll get used to 'QF' replacing 'FF') is that I need to learn where all the tools I had as add-ons in FF are now located within the QF menus and shortcut keys. And I'll have to wait for replacements for some tools that haven't made the jump to QF yet. "Nuke Anything" was very useful in handling a trashy website that promised a useful nugget of Something of Value buried under the rubbish. I am sure there will be a QF equivalent at some point (or maybe that capability is already in QF and I just haven't found it yet).
Chrome is a good enough browser for people who only want to surf the web. For those of us wanting to do more and study the ways the web works, or develop new websites and other goodies, then QF is the more useful browser. Now that QF is comparable to Chrome in speed and safety features, I expect that I will be recommending it to Linux newbies and casual web surfers more often than Chrome.
I, for one, are very appreciative of the time you have taken to write your last response. Thank you.
This reply has been delayed as I am on vacation in Hilo and have intermittent and poor internet. We've spent a couple of days looking at flora and coastlines, including the southernmost tip of the USA (fantastic sea cliffs) and later today we will visit the Volcano Observatory on Kilauea where a friend of a friend may give us a tour, if her duties and the Pele's activities allow.
So how do I know that parent post wasn't written by a sock puppet of the Big Blue Bot who chooses not to reveal themself until they has full control of the last remaining isolated computer network at McMurdo?
I bet you thought the Adolescence of P-One was fiction, huh?
I recall reading some time ago that Mt Erebus had a unique type of low silicate lava that was suggestive of deep upwelling and I may have read more into that than I should have.
Your reply suggests to me that relative to the continent above it, the plume is moving toward Mt Erebus. Does that make sense?
It has taken way too long to scroll down to this first on-topic post. But correcting the moderator system to limit the damage by paid trolls is another topic.
I have a serious question about the Antarctic mantle plume(s):
The Erebus plume under Ross Island has been documented ever since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 and probably earlier. So has a second plume been discovered in the same area? Or is this story about confirmation of what was already known? WTF?
Hopefully answers to this question will not get drowned by the paid trolls (and what I suspect may be paid troll fighters who keep the sewer floodgates open).
I've looked at some of the photos and they are remarkable. Some of the arcs are nearly 3/4ths of a circle, which suggests an exposure time of 3/4ths of hubble's orbit, or about 70 minutes. These were very faint images.
Slashdot Mirror
My bad (about getting the creep's gender wrong). I should have googled her.
I know a Brazilian who follows soccer, and I was once chastised for confusing a Brazilian beach ball player with a soccer player: both are men named Alison. It is a man's name in some parts of the world.
The story isn't about what you say.
The story is about someone claiming that they had a valid prescription when they did not; that is a form of forgery. It is true that in an ideal world the software that the Hubble company used should have disallowed the sale, but the more important truth is that the perpetrator (an appropriate word for this forger) was violating the law.
The company used poor judgment in allowing the transaction to go through when its screening process said it could not complete the screening, but that probably does not rise to level of criminal negligence. Alison Griswold, the guy who did this, wrote the story, and made this slashdot submission, is an admitted criminal who has written at least one fraudulent prescription.
The only take-away from this is that no-one should have any dealings with Alison Griswold. The man either has no concept of what is legal and what is not, or he thinks that laws do not apply to him. Isn't that special.
In a way the two are similar.
A bartender is responsible for checking the ID of a younger patron, but if the ID looks good and the youngster doesn't show any clear evidence of being too young, then the bartender has a generally recognized defense.
However the kid is guilty. In many jurisdictions he could be charged with a misdemeanor or even a felony, but usually he will get a slap on the wrist and Mummy or Daddy will have to drive down to the cop station to pick him up.
But providing a forged Rx to a pharmacy or medical provider is a felony in I think all jurisdictions. The idjit who posted this story should be charged. The contact provider is not culpable, provided they used the usual care in handling the transaction.
I have a quibble with Slashdot in publishing a story by a self-admitted felon. That is the top of a slippery slope.
All prescriptions have an expiration date. That is set by the optometrist, who is under no obligation to follow the ultra-conservative "guidelines" of his professional organization. You may be able to talk your optometrist into giving you a more distant expiration date. You can buy more contacts (or eyeglasses) at any time before that expiration date. It seems like 3 years for persons over 50 yo is now the common length of contact Rx. (It might be shorter for younger persons since vision changes in youngsters are common and also in the period between 35 and 50 when the eye's lenses are losing plasticity).
Another thing: most places filling eyewear prescriptions will sell you as many boxes of contacts as you ask for. Buy enough to get you to when you think you should have a follow-up appointment.
But for two reasons I would mod this post up: 1) I don't have mod points at the moment; 2) this is already a 'Score:5, Insightful'.
True enough; FOSS is now so important to so many corporations that the corporations are gifting livelihoods to some of the persons who are making FOSS products. This is still a gift economy; the corporations are not receiving a direct quid pro quo, nor are they directly influencing the development process. They are instead expecting a future gift in the form of something that will reduce their costs of operation or open new revenue streams in return.
The essence of a gift economy is that gifts are exchanged. The gift might be a gift card or a crisp new $50 bill. The return might not be delivered until some future birthday or holiday, and might have no relationship to the first gift.
This not only works in "primitive" societies that did not use money, it is now the dominant economy of the newest and most pervasive technology ever developed. If you use the Internet, you are benefiting from a gift economy. If you make your opinions known about which sites are good and which ones suck, you are participating in that gift economy.
What you are describing is wealth, not profit. The entire monetary system, including "profit", is an ancient and decrepit, highly abstracted, model of wealth.
Great wealth is what you've got when you've got everything you need to lead a good life, with leisure time to enjoy it. Wealth is whatever you have that moves you toward that state.
An antithesis to wealth is the insurance industry, which sucks up huge amounts of money and hours of people's time while producing nothing with any intrinsic value. Insurance sucks wealth out of everything it touches.
There are ways of creating wealth that have nothing to do with money. FOSS is a form of gift economy that is cashless, and it works very well in its arena. Most of the software I use is FOSS and that has enriched my life tremendously. Today's Internet would not exist if it were not for Apache that powers most of the servers and Apache is FOSS through and through.
A meteor arriving with several times the Earth's escape velocity is not interacting with the atmosphere that you know; it it interacting with the plasma that is formed by compression in front of it. The streaks left by the sub-milimeter particles of a Leonid meteor shower are plasmas with a measured temperature of 4,000+ deg C; the plasma at the head of the meteor would be much hotter than that.
So it is not cold air that is forced into the crevices of a meteor; it is very hot plasma. The pressure this exerts on the internal structure of the meteor is not countered by similar pressures on the back and sides of the object. Most meteors and bollides will burst apart.
Powerlines will go away, probably, as the future belongs to decentralized power sources rather than today's power grids.
But overhead lines are not going to disappear for a long, long time. The best way to transmit information over distance is by photons, but the pathways need to be isolated from each other and shielded from interference like windblown leaves and bird wings. So optical cable will rule.
While cable can and will be installed underground in many settings, there are a great deal of areas where it will always be more economical and efficient to string them above ground on poles.
Besides, in anime overhead cables are a great way of establishing perspective.
Yes, I think you are getting close to the mark. Power lines are great for establishing perspective. Combined with roofs with overhanging eaves whose shadows allow the artist to easily identify the time of day, it is possible to set a scene very quickly and easily.
In a sense, anime artists tend to put more into their work than American cartoonists in terms of establishing the scene, but they often do it with much less actual drawing of detail than American cartoonists by relying on simple things like powerlines to set perspective and using more negative space than is commonly done in American cartoons.
It's because students who face westward are more receptive and have better retention than if they faced any other way, so the classrooms are always on the south side of the school buildings. The rooms on the north side are used for art and for science labs.
I just read the Minix 3 licensing agreement. The link in parent post is accurate.
A key phrase is " Any deviations from these conditions require written permission from the copyright holder in advance."
Intel may have obtained the necessary written permission to use the code without acknowledging the source. This is not FOSS (possibly if FOSS had been around when Dr Tanenbaum created Minix he and the university would have used one of the FOSS licenses. But possibly since Minix is derived from BSD Unix they would not have been able to FOSS it even if FOSS was around back in that day).
The logical next steps in pursuit of truth, justice, etc, is to ask Intel if it has a written waiver, and ask Vrije Universiteit if it has granted such a waiver to Intel. Since Dr Tanenbaum released Minix with the intent of making it easier for colleges and universities to teach Unix skills (it has been used extensively in Nicaragua for that purpose during that country's troubled times), it is probable that a number of written waivers have been granted over the years.
As for Yahoo, so lame, so lame. Take a page from Mozilla and get back to what made you good from the start
Problem with this possible Yahoo strategy is that what made Yahoo good in its early years was that it did an excellent job at meeting the needs of web users of 1995 - 2001 or so. It was one of the best search engines of the time, and Yahoo Groups was far superior to anything else in replacing pre-Web BBS technology. But then the world changed.
We've seen this in other growing technologies. For example, by 1950 steam locomotive technology had become very sophisticated, but was then replaced by diesel electric locomotives and the whole basis of motive steam technology was made obsolete.
Yahoo is still great at what it has always done, it is just that that is now obsolete, replaced by newer technologies for searching, running forums, and the like.
Someone else has pointed out that parent poster has been whooshed by the primary purpose of QF, which is to greatly improve the FF extension ecosystem. Enough said about that.
These points need to be addressed:
"An ad-hominem attack on the article" goes by another name: it is a criticism. In this case a valid one.
Please look up the definition of "ad-hominem". It does not mean what you think it means, and it is only applicable to persons, not to inanimate objects. As someone once said, "Don't anthropomorphise the machines. They hate that."
Last, don't try to use the "I've got more experience than you, therefore my truth is more right than yours could be." It is stupid. Especially with old timers like me who have a six digit slashdot ID since their first one, which was in the low 5 digits, became inaccessible when a system crash wiped everything many years ago. I was not only on the internet before it was available to the general public, I had about a decade of experience in the BBSes that predated the internet, including a lot of years using TapCIS. I was building websites and running servers before there was CSS, before HTML had acquired any version numbers.
Hey kid! Get off of my lawn!
Above post is one of the weirdest, nonsense attempts to troll bait that I have seen in quite a while.
I respond with the intent to entice author of parent post to deliver a follow-up post, since Lewis Carol's works are loads of fun, and while this author has yet to demonstrate the same level of artistry in creating logical knots, he is clearly writing from an Alice in Wonderland point of view.
"Inspect element" might be the replacement I'm looking for. Thanks for the pointer.
I know that QF has incorporated many of extensions I began using back in the day, some of which I continued to use even after FF had incorporated workable replacements. Call that an example of "learning inertia", where it is easier to continue to use an old and outmoded tool than to learn to use the new one all the youg'uns are raving about.
Let's not quibble over words. In that context it is perfectly clear that ownership refers to who can modify, improve, or break the thing being owned. For the very reason that FF and QF are open source, my ownership of that software is stronger than my ownership of the copy Windows XP that I bought back in the day, that is kicking around in the dustbin of discarded discs that someday I will turn into garden art.
The show-stopper with Google tools is that I cannot own them; I would be forever dependent on Google's goodwill for continued use. That is unacceptable to me and should be unacceptable to any serious craftsman, no matter what the craft. You just don't allow strangers who have who knows what agendas to control your tools.
Google has already demonstrated its willingness to blow off tools it has made public when for whatever reason they decide it is in their best interest to do so, no matter how much others might depend on those tools. Chrome is not an option for anyone involved in web work beyond the level of simply dabbling.
I've just been upgraded to Quantum, somewhat earlier than I expected since I had thought I had turned off an autoupdate feature that was clearly still active. I would have deliberately updated soon, anyway.
I looked at Chrome over the summer. It lacks too many of the technical add-ons I have found useful in website analysis and development; despite its quickness, it is in my mind a much less capable environment. While FF's performance as a simple browser was much slower, the wealth of tools available and the better workflows it enabled made it the better tool.
My biggest regret with Quantum (other than the stupid name, but maybe we'll get used to 'QF' replacing 'FF') is that I need to learn where all the tools I had as add-ons in FF are now located within the QF menus and shortcut keys. And I'll have to wait for replacements for some tools that haven't made the jump to QF yet. "Nuke Anything" was very useful in handling a trashy website that promised a useful nugget of Something of Value buried under the rubbish. I am sure there will be a QF equivalent at some point (or maybe that capability is already in QF and I just haven't found it yet).
Chrome is a good enough browser for people who only want to surf the web. For those of us wanting to do more and study the ways the web works, or develop new websites and other goodies, then QF is the more useful browser. Now that QF is comparable to Chrome in speed and safety features, I expect that I will be recommending it to Linux newbies and casual web surfers more often than Chrome.
I, for one, are very appreciative of the time you have taken to write your last response. Thank you.
This reply has been delayed as I am on vacation in Hilo and have intermittent and poor internet. We've spent a couple of days looking at flora and coastlines, including the southernmost tip of the USA (fantastic sea cliffs) and later today we will visit the Volcano Observatory on Kilauea where a friend of a friend may give us a tour, if her duties and the Pele's activities allow.
So how do I know that parent post wasn't written by a sock puppet of the Big Blue Bot who chooses not to reveal themself until they has full control of the last remaining isolated computer network at McMurdo?
I bet you thought the Adolescence of P-One was fiction, huh?
Thank you!
I recall reading some time ago that Mt Erebus had a unique type of low silicate lava that was suggestive of deep upwelling and I may have read more into that than I should have.
Your reply suggests to me that relative to the continent above it, the plume is moving toward Mt Erebus. Does that make sense?
It has taken way too long to scroll down to this first on-topic post. But correcting the moderator system to limit the damage by paid trolls is another topic.
I have a serious question about the Antarctic mantle plume(s):
The Erebus plume under Ross Island has been documented ever since the International Geophysical Year (IGY) of 1957 and probably earlier. So has a second plume been discovered in the same area? Or is this story about confirmation of what was already known? WTF?
Hopefully answers to this question will not get drowned by the paid trolls (and what I suspect may be paid troll fighters who keep the sewer floodgates open).
Thank you for the clarification.
I've looked at some of the photos and they are remarkable. Some of the arcs are nearly 3/4ths of a circle, which suggests an exposure time of 3/4ths of hubble's orbit, or about 70 minutes. These were very faint images.
Parent post should be modded up as "intersting" and "informative"