Get a shredder. A crosscut shredder won't bulk up as much, but the cheaper ones will wear out faster than a vertical shredder.
Shred one or two sheets of junk mail between each sensitive page
See if you can sweet-talk your bank or employer into adding your bags of sensitive shredding to their bags of sensitive shredding
Many companies are now using secure disposal services that assure that the shredded documents are recycled into oblivion without any thief being able to get to them. If you talk it up right, your boss or your bank might think this is a great perk they could offer you (no cost to them but an obviously valuable service to you).
After RTFM and most of the comments, the phrase that came unbidden to my mind is:
This guy is singing out his netherhole.
So far as I know, this phrase is original. I think it describes Paul Murphy's use of his soapbox fairly adequately, given as how he probably could not have achieved his current position without having digested some knowledge along the way. Which he is now putting before us, sort of.
Anyway, I hereby put the phrase "to sing (out of | from) (his | her | your) netherhole" in public domain. Use it as it you will.
A better example might be a computerized patient record system (CPRS).
In a CPRS, it is clear that the core concerns involve information related to the patient's health. However if the institution is going to stay in business, there is a strong secondary concern with regard to diagnosis and treatment costs, billing, and so on. Obviously a healthy hospital has to deal with both of these.
AOP's promise in this situation is to allow these two mission-critical concerns to be temporarily divorced from each other, so that in a medical emergency the patient will get the treatment he needs in a timely way, without doctors and nurses having to deal with billing and cost issues (Clippy: "It looks like you want to defibrillate the patient. Would you like me to compare the costs of alternate treatment modalities?")
I've not run into this "AOP" thingee before. My impression is that the problems it is supposed to solve would be better approached by a change in the object hierarchy-- that its use would be sort of like adding epicycles to epicycles when a Copernican revolution is really needed. In the CPRS example, rather than having a PATIENT object with healthcare and billing concerns, it might work better to have TREATMENT and BILLING objects that were separate components of the PATIENT object.
I'm not convinced that the problems AOP is intended to solve couldn't be finessed by refactoring into a different hierarchy of objects.
<div style="pedantic" >
The difference between Computer Science and Software Engineering is that in CS theory there is no difference, but in SE practice there is.:-) </div>
I can't see how GOTO has any value in CS. Theory shouldn't ever take shortcuts and in theory if you need faster performance, then you should choose an algorithm that is more efficient in the particular context.
That said, GOTO does sometimes add a great deal of value in practical coding. Sometimes real world dependencies between operations are such that there is no way work out a clean factoring into separate functions in the time available for the project, with the domain knowledge you've currently got. So you've got to contend with a monster function full of complex else-if chains and switch statements to handle all the special cases. IF after you've developed this puppy in proper accordance to theory, EITHER it is a performance bottleneck OR it is going to cause obvious maintenance problems down the line, THEN there is justification for replacing some CS-compliant structures with GOTOs.
But note that when this is done the GOTOs are never built in to the original design; they are used to simplify a design that is theoretically sound, but isn't efficient enough in some way. It is like a high energy particle physicist introducing the fiction of "centrifugal force" to describe events in a car crash-- everyone knows it is not good theory but it is the quickest and surest way to convey information in this particular context.
If you find that the "blinking of bike taillights is as annoying and distrubing [sic] as blinking ads on a web page" then those lights are doing their job properly. Just like the garish ugly clothing that many cyclists feel they have to wear though they hate it improves their chances of not being hit.
There are way too many dumbass motorists out there whose mind is more on the aesthetics of the driving experience than on driving safely. Not that you, Esteemed Sir or Madam, are one of those.
As to safety considerations in 10 years' time: You are now telling me that I should let my imagination of a possible future guide the safety decisions I have to make today. You, Sir or Madam, are FUBARF[1]
[1] F*cked Up Beyond Any Redeeming Features (I just made that up. I hereby release it under the GPL).
I've noticed that the buses in Metro Portland and some of the city trucks are using arrays of LEDs for taillights, brakelights and turn signals. AIR (I really haven't been paying close attention) these are 12 LEDs arranged in a hexagon about 3 inches across.
It looks to me like the main advantage is the redundancy. Even if several LEDs have failed in the turn signal array, the driver's intention is still obvious.
I've been using LED bicycle lights this last season. No question that a 5 LED taillight with a blinking pattern is the most effective way of covering your *ss in traffic. I'm still not certain about the 3 LED headlight in blinking mode. While it is very visible, I think drivers might have trouble estimating distances. I've been looking for some small white LEDs that I could clip to my safety glasses or helmet visor to supplement the blinking light.
I don't think Bush was the one who decided to bring down the hubble, it was NASA, and not because of the budget, but because it is too dangerous to repair.
I have read that there was no formal risk assessment done when NASA decided that using the Shuttle to do the routine maintenance on Hubble was too dangerous. Instead this was apparently the gut level feeling of top NASA bureaucrats (and as such probably had a lot to do with their concerns with the risk to their career possibilities). I believe an article about this was recently posted on/.-- maybe someone will chime in with a reference to it?
I would very much like to see NASA produce a formal risk assessment of the planned Shuttle missions to Hubble. The cost of this kind of study is miniscule compared to the value of Hubble's work. My sense is that while NASA employs lots of good scientists and engineers, the denizens of its highest levels have the kind of bureaucratic mind set where decisions are made based on how they think their bosses will react, and what the long term impact on their own petty little careers might be.
It's just a telescope..
The Hubble is a cutting-edge scientific instrument that has been expanding our knowledge about the universe. The Bush administration has consistently worked to constrict this kind of scientific advancement. Maybe this is for ideological reasons (for instance, it is probably easier to live a "faith-based" life when you aren't presented with new facts about the world every day), or maybe its for more pragmatic reasons (it is best to avoid anything that might contribute to the global warming theory when your power base is Big Oil).
How do my beliefs impact on you? Hardly, if at all, my comments herein and your conversation notwithstanding. It is possible that if enough persons believe as I do that the overall movement might affect you.
Representing articles of your faith as facts damages public discourse and I oppose that aspect of your religious activities. This is not a persecution of you for your religious beliefs; this is my opposition to your attempts to subvert the free exchange of thoughts that is necessary for human rights to exist.
For example, there seems to be enough... "prudishness?"... in America that we have laws banning the public display of nudity. In that way you are affected.
An interesting example-- I wonder why you chose that? Never mind; it serves this discussion well.
When the founding fathers of the USA had completed drafting the US Constitution, they found a surprising amount of resistance to its adoption as it was first framed. Out of this came the Bill of Rights: the first ten ammendments that are also the first clear expression of what has now been generally accepted as inalienable human rights. Out of this also came the first succinct expression of the greatest danger of the democratic process: that democracy unchecked can lead to the tyranny of the majority over the legitimate rights of any minority. Including minorities that consist of only one member.
Your words imply that Christian political action can appropriately use tyranny of the majority as a model for shaping society to what the Christian group believes is acceptable human behavior. I strongly oppose even the faintest whiff of such thinking. Especially when it comes from groups that have a long history of converting others at sword point, burning dissidents and heretics at the stake, supporting systems of slavery and making bloody wars on peoples who live according to other beliefs.
However, I think that there are many Christians who are moderate who feel that society scorns them and flat out rejects their ideals. I've definitely seen this in the course of this discussion thread.
I fail to see how this is a public problem. Does not your church provide you with the guidance and support to come to grips with the emotions these rejections raise in you, such that you can deal with them privately or in your own support groups? Like people of other persuasions who experience the failings of society (which I trow is every one of us) find ways to deal with the rejections that they experience?
There is so much right with the Christian faith that I want others to know about it. I want to reflect God's love and hope that I am doing that well now and always.
I'm glad you've found something that is right for you. I wish it didn't involve this strange concept of evangelism such that you guys are constantly trying to shove your beliefs in other people's faces, but I can be tolerant of that so long as it is not too obnoxious and you follow the rules of fair discussion. Hell, I try to be tolerant of fellow elevator riders who insist on eating lots of garilc for lunch, or who lunch on beef lard and dead cow, and fart continuously from the first to the twenty-second floor.
To wrap this up, I'm going to return to something you wrote near the beginning of your last message:
We do have a key logjam in the discussion over whether to accept the Bible as a source of authority.
You just don't get it. That is not my concern at all. My concern is limited to your misrepresenting articles of your faith as proven facts and the way in which that can influence public opinion. Someone as articulate as you can use such subterfuges to great unfair advantage.
If the world was fair, persons with your level of skill with the language would also be endowed with a stronger moral compass or ethical nature than the average Joe. But there is no fairness in that sense on this earth, and those who can must be ever vigilant to protect society from the effects of persons of great persuasive skills who are not properly encumbered by ethical or moral principles.
So I guess you're not a linux fan, as all distributions are bundles of OS and apps...
I wasn't talking about bundling. I was talking about coupling. Bundling is merely aggregating a bunch of things together (maybe going so far as to make sure they all play nice with each other). Coupling is tech-speak for writing a module that reaches into the innards of another module to pull out some particularly delicious piece of private data or twiddle a private function. Think of it as code rape: the violation of privacy.
Not to mention you realy should let me see these recognitions that this is a bad thing even before 1960! On what computer was that?
Well, Junior, you'll have to do your own research into the history of cyernetics to get that level of detail. However I can assert with confidence that computers made from about 1955 onward by IBM and Honeywell decoupled the operating system from the application software. That made FORTRAN better, and made COBOL possible. By the mid 1960s with the IBM Model 360 this was a soundly established first principle. Which nobody violated until Microsoft said we don't need to do that any more around 1995.
That would be fine if MS was in a race. Where matters of operational efficiency and durability didn't matter. In short, MS has been doing a wonderful job building OSs for games machines.
Businesses don't need Formula One computers. They need general purpose OSs that are reliable and secure.
If you have to have a mechanical analogy to understand this, the model you should use is the farm tractor. This is a general purpose mechanism with power take-offs; a three point hitch that will accept all kinds of drag-behind implements; hydraulics that can power a front loader, forklift attachment, post hole digger, backhoe, or whatever. You get the implements you need separately; you attach them when you need them; you remove them and put them out of your way when you don't need them.
You don't measure the value of a tractor by the speed with which it can go from the barn to the field; you measure its value by the work it does for you, its over-all efficiency, and whether it is likely to break down on you in the middle of harvest season.
MS doesn't fare very well in this metaphor, but I'll leave exploring that as an exercise for the reader.
It looked like a good marketing strategy because it WAS indeed good marketing strategy.
Agreed: over the short term, it has been an excellent marketing strategy. But when I wrote the grandparent, I was also thinking about the long term: that MS's sacrifice of good design on the altar of short term market gain is the root cause of most of their current legal problems and almost all of their security problems. It is also one of the major reasons why their big corporate and government clients are converting from Windows to other OS. The big guys need to be able to do long term forecasts of their expenses and resource requirements as they develop their ten and twenty year plans. You can't do that with Microsoft's products-- I think mostly because of the lack of compartmentalization between OS and apps. Building a long term corporate strategy on top of Windows is like building on a foundation of swiss cheese: you never know when its going to fail and when it does, the stink is going to bother your customers.
Almost everyone of the non-techie users I know likes the fact they can play their video clips, surf da intarweb, read e-mail, etc. without having to go out and buy another software package or download it from somewhere else.
MS could have provided software bundles that did this with properly compartmentalized applications. They have consistently chosen instead to closely couple their apps to the innards of their OS. This first became evident with Win3.1, when it was found that MS Word owed its superior performance over Word Perfect, Word Star, and other word processors to the use of undocumented calls to internal OS routines.
Is it fair or ethical for MS to tie these things into the OS? Personally I think not.
I agree. I also want to emphasize that this is very poor design for the long term. It raises huge maintenance, security, and upgrade problems for both MS and its customers.
I am unwilling to continue this discussion privately. I think our discussion has had some value to our silent audience, and that is more important to me than the subject itself. If we go forward with the discussion, let us do so in public.
Regarding anthropomorphism, however, I am unsure if humans are able to avoid it. However, in our case, God has told us via the Bible that we are made in his image...
These are some of your beliefs; I respect them; I don't see how they impact on me or on anyone else; and they are being presented honestly as matters of faith. I don't see anything here that needs to be discussed.
I have a concern about confusing facts with faith because I see that as a root of intolerance and bigotry. But I have no serious disagreement with most articles of Christian faith that I have come across. I have even met devout Christians who strongly believed in Man having dominion over the rest of Creation who I actually found quite tolerable... since they also believed so strongly that this involved a duty of stewardship toward Creation that their behavior was very responsible.
I recognized this twisted fallacy as needing correction on my first reading. Even though it seems to be a secondary point of discussion for mr mull and myself.
First it would be better in this context not to ascribe to science the attributes of a person (like an ability to "deny" something). While
anthropomorphism can be a convenient and sometimes artistic way of describing things that aren't human, its use is very confusing when the subject of the discussion has to do with what is human and what is not, as is the case here. [see also note 1 , below]
The trained scientist regards the unprovable as being outside the scope of science. Scientific inquiry can investigate questions of "what", "how", and "when", but it is recognized by scientists as being an inappropriate way to address the "why" questions and many of the "who" questions (in the sense of "who ultimately brought this or that about".
So the trained scientist does not deny the unprovable: he attempts to recognize it when he comes across it, and when he does recognize it, he avoids using his tools of scientific inquiry to address it. Many scientists use traditional faith-based methods with these non-scientific parts of the realm of human experience. [A distinction needs to be made between trained scientists and persons like technicians, engineers and teachers who may not be trained in science but accept scientific publications as authoritarian. These persons sometimes have a lot more faith in scientific findings than the scientists themselves.]
A separate issue is that mr mull appears to confuse faith-based belief with the probability-based "belief" that is so often used in science. His discussion on Occam's Razor seems to make sense only if one thinks that a scientist accepts on faith that something must be the cause of observed phenomena because it is the simplest of the various alternatives. Yet scientists don't do that: they accept that something is probably more likely to be the cause than its identified alternatives because when all the available evidence is weighed, it appears to be the candidate with the highest probability. But the scientist recognizes his caveats when he does this: there may be other possibilities he hasn't identified; and further observations may show that there are other factors he hadn't taken into consideration. To be brief about it, mr mull is wrong in implying that Occam's Razor is used to identify facts; instead it is used to identify the most likely hypotheses.
It seems like mr mull is working from the incorrect assumption that science is using the same scholarly tools of reason and understanding that are used by those who study the Bible (or Talmud or greco-roman myths, etc). Perhaps there needs to be a wider recognition that science is not predicated on scholarship but instead is predicated upon empirical observation and a very strict set of rules of hypothesis formulation and testing. When having a scholarly discussion about science, which is what mr mull appears to want to do here, there needs to be an understanding by all participants about what the scientific method is. I see evidence that this is not true in this discussion. Which is why my replies cannot address mr mull's concerns directly: there is a need to correct several wrong assumptions before that can be done.
I still feel that mr mull's confusion of fact with faith to be dangerous and scary. This is one of the necessary conditions for terrorist zealotry.
-----
Note 1: I encountered the following as I was doing my homework for this message. It points out that there is a concern among many biblical scholars about the many passages in the Bible that anthropomorphise God. Typical is this (from a web page that no longer exists, unfortunately):
Thin clients have been "poised" to take over the desktop for 10 years now. It hasn't happened. Nothing is going to change that in the next 12 months.
The thin client approach has promised huge amounts of storage, no hassle upgrades, secure operations, and unfettered user mobility for more than than twenty years. What has recently changed is that now the pipes are fat enough to support it... and Google's new maps are showing that it can be done.
Longhorn is the most significant release of Windows in almost 5 years.
Mind your verb tenses. I agree that this would have been Microsoft's most significant product. But the market wasn't ready for it when it was first ready to go to market, and it now seems doubtful that the market will ever go in a way that would support Longhorn's hunger for faster/bigger hardware. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that Microsoft is no longer able to steer the hardware market (as it did with Win3.x ("the 286 is brain dead"), Win95, WinXP, etc).
When I read your post, it seemed like I was hearing my doubts about Longhorn's success being echoed back at me, after a spin doctor had worked them over.
We are in agreement that several things need to happen before the market will be receptive to Longhorn and that Longhorn's possible success as a entrepreneural killer app (like Win3.1 or MS Office) is now considered improbable. We are also in agreement that MS is yanking core parts of the new technologies out of Longhorn and reworking them so they can be sold as bolt-ons to what is already out there in its installed base.
Microsoft has never developed post-sales support and service into significant revenue streams; it has always relied on the phenomenal sales of a few products (the Windows OS and MS Office) for its profits. Is MS now starting to change itself from an entrepreneural business to a service and support business?
Is anyone else getting a funny feeling that just maybe Longhorn will never make it out the door?
I'm wondering if by the time the market is ripe for Longhorn (ie, enough of us can justify the more expensive hardware it needs that it stands a chance of competing in the market), there will be too many of us who will be migrating core pieces of our daily work to thin client models that run on established internet protocols. As that migration starts to pick up steam, it is going to become increasingly important that all our file formats comply with accepted international standards. I seriously doubt that Longhorn could be revised to meet those criteria.
I'm wondering whether Longhorn is going to be like one of those twelve cylinder straight block touring cars that came out of Detroit in the late 1920s. Fantastic engineering, luxorious coachwork and super powerful, but way too much engine for anybody's needs and dang hard to park when there is twenty feet between the front bumper and the windshield. You don't hear much about those cars; their engineering was good but their marketing plan didn't connect with reality.
I'm wondering whether the Dynamic Marketing Duo of Gates and Allen have recognized this, and are gutting Longhorn's feature set to realize at least some profit from a failed effort.
Mine was a throw-away remark. I've not done any work with Delphi in the last 6 years and it may have evolved in all kinds of ways since then.
When I last used it, Delphi was a hierarchy of library objects sitting on top of an advanced Pascal that was descended from Turbo Pascal. Now I see its COM being described as "... [allowing] you to create COM objects that are not specific to any language, and in some cases, even platforms." So perhaps today's Delphi has become independent of any particular procedural language.
There is a definite difference between being certain in your faith (internally) and claiming as fact (externally) that which cannot be tested or demonstrated by human means. Yes, there are human limitations, but this is not my belief, since I can demonstrate it with the same solidity that I can use to demonstrate the facts of gravity:
For instance, we have an inability to know Pi with absolute precision. Perhaps a god could know Pi with perfect precision, or perhaps not... but there are proofs that it cannot be known within human experience. Another instance: not only can we not measure our ability to use our human imagination, we cannot even conceive of a yardstick that would allow such a measure. We are limited in our ability to comprehend this core part of our nature.
This argument has been presented so many times before, and in so many different formal logical systems, that it can be accepted as a kind of universal axiom (like Plank's Constant, for instance). You can get to it as an extension of the cosmologist's anthropic principle, but there are also ways to get to it from any world view that is not arbitrarily dismissive of new information about the world.
Someone needs to mod this as "-1 infantile philosophy". I think I've been suckered by trolls...
Having the feelings is natural. Natural as in God gave them to us as a part of our physical being. There might be debate as to whether they are there for procreation only, which depends on your version of extremism. However, the feelings ARE natural and purposefully put there.
That does NOT mean that they should be acted on. As a fallen creature, we also have the urges to lie, cheat, steal, hurt others, and even hurt ourselves. These tendencies are seen negatively and should be. We do need to edit our responses to our feelings, sexual or not.
You've given me more insight into the mind set of some Christians than I really wanted-- good gods, you are freaking scary! The parts that I have embolded are where you accept as truth and pass on as truth that which can never be known by human beings (they are matters of "faith").
You guys would be a lot more honest if you prefaced your faith-based assertions with appropriate disclaimers, such as "I believe that..." or "My postulate is...", and then went from there. Of course that would mean that your "faith" couldn't be as strong as a rock-- you would necessarily have to give some at least some consideration to alternatives-- but OTOH you would be fostering more tolerance among us all. Which IIRC was implicit in your Jesus' second commandment ("...upon which is based all the Law and the Prophets").
I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any DHTML techniques that counter ad blocking. I envision Alice clicking on a story and getting only the first paragraph because she has blocked the ads from that site while Bob gets the whole story because an ad that he is not blocking is rewriting the DOM to display or download the rest of the story. I think that coupled with a server side counter of the number of times the ad was actually displayed might be the basis for a better ad revenue model than pay per click.
I think innerHTML, HttpXmlRequest, and so on would be available on any browser with ad blocking capability. I think with something like this, and the user ability to turn ad blocking on and off by web site, we'd end up with marketplace forces determining what is acceptable in advertising.
The clients of my clients. That's what's holier than God.
Personally I don't much care whether the Yahoo toolbar is offered with the Flash player so long as I can opt out. But there is no way in hell I can develop a gizmo for a client when its deployment is going to cause any single one of his clients to question his faith in my client's trustworthiness.
I'll roll my own javascript animations before it comes to that.
I hope you read this, Macromedia. I've worked off and on with DW and Flash for about 6 years, but you've just fixed it so your Flash is unusable to me. And I will be looking more closely at ALL the implications of using your other products, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Many companies are now using secure disposal services that assure that the shredded documents are recycled into oblivion without any thief being able to get to them. If you talk it up right, your boss or your bank might think this is a great perk they could offer you (no cost to them but an obviously valuable service to you).
After RTFM and most of the comments, the phrase that came unbidden to my mind is:
So far as I know, this phrase is original. I think it describes Paul Murphy's use of his soapbox fairly adequately, given as how he probably could not have achieved his current position without having digested some knowledge along the way. Which he is now putting before us, sort of.
Anyway, I hereby put the phrase "to sing (out of | from) (his | her | your) netherhole" in public domain. Use it as it you will.
A better example might be a computerized patient record system (CPRS).
In a CPRS, it is clear that the core concerns involve information related to the patient's health. However if the institution is going to stay in business, there is a strong secondary concern with regard to diagnosis and treatment costs, billing, and so on. Obviously a healthy hospital has to deal with both of these.
AOP's promise in this situation is to allow these two mission-critical concerns to be temporarily divorced from each other, so that in a medical emergency the patient will get the treatment he needs in a timely way, without doctors and nurses having to deal with billing and cost issues (Clippy: "It looks like you want to defibrillate the patient. Would you like me to compare the costs of alternate treatment modalities?")
I've not run into this "AOP" thingee before. My impression is that the problems it is supposed to solve would be better approached by a change in the object hierarchy-- that its use would be sort of like adding epicycles to epicycles when a Copernican revolution is really needed. In the CPRS example, rather than having a PATIENT object with healthcare and billing concerns, it might work better to have TREATMENT and BILLING objects that were separate components of the PATIENT object.
I'm not convinced that the problems AOP is intended to solve couldn't be finessed by refactoring into a different hierarchy of objects.
I can't see how GOTO has any value in CS. Theory shouldn't ever take shortcuts and in theory if you need faster performance, then you should choose an algorithm that is more efficient in the particular context.
That said, GOTO does sometimes add a great deal of value in practical coding. Sometimes real world dependencies between operations are such that there is no way work out a clean factoring into separate functions in the time available for the project, with the domain knowledge you've currently got. So you've got to contend with a monster function full of complex else-if chains and switch statements to handle all the special cases. IF after you've developed this puppy in proper accordance to theory, EITHER it is a performance bottleneck OR it is going to cause obvious maintenance problems down the line, THEN there is justification for replacing some CS-compliant structures with GOTOs.
But note that when this is done the GOTOs are never built in to the original design; they are used to simplify a design that is theoretically sound, but isn't efficient enough in some way. It is like a high energy particle physicist introducing the fiction of "centrifugal force" to describe events in a car crash-- everyone knows it is not good theory but it is the quickest and surest way to convey information in this particular context.
Nice. Much better than Ipsum Lorem.
If you find that the "blinking of bike taillights is as annoying and distrubing [sic] as blinking ads on a web page" then those lights are doing their job properly. Just like the garish ugly clothing that many cyclists feel they have to wear though they hate it improves their chances of not being hit.
There are way too many dumbass motorists out there whose mind is more on the aesthetics of the driving experience than on driving safely. Not that you, Esteemed Sir or Madam, are one of those.
As to safety considerations in 10 years' time: You are now telling me that I should let my imagination of a possible future guide the safety decisions I have to make today. You, Sir or Madam, are FUBARF[1]
I've noticed that the buses in Metro Portland and some of the city trucks are using arrays of LEDs for taillights, brakelights and turn signals. AIR (I really haven't been paying close attention) these are 12 LEDs arranged in a hexagon about 3 inches across.
It looks to me like the main advantage is the redundancy. Even if several LEDs have failed in the turn signal array, the driver's intention is still obvious.
I've been using LED bicycle lights this last season. No question that a 5 LED taillight with a blinking pattern is the most effective way of covering your *ss in traffic. I'm still not certain about the 3 LED headlight in blinking mode. While it is very visible, I think drivers might have trouble estimating distances. I've been looking for some small white LEDs that I could clip to my safety glasses or helmet visor to supplement the blinking light.
"I for one welcome our new Perpendicular Over....""Never mind.
I don't think Bush was the one who decided to bring down the hubble, it was NASA, and not because of the budget, but because it is too dangerous to repair.
I have read that there was no formal risk assessment done when NASA decided that using the Shuttle to do the routine maintenance on Hubble was too dangerous. Instead this was apparently the gut level feeling of top NASA bureaucrats (and as such probably had a lot to do with their concerns with the risk to their career possibilities). I believe an article about this was recently posted on /.-- maybe someone will chime in with a reference to it?
I would very much like to see NASA produce a formal risk assessment of the planned Shuttle missions to Hubble. The cost of this kind of study is miniscule compared to the value of Hubble's work. My sense is that while NASA employs lots of good scientists and engineers, the denizens of its highest levels have the kind of bureaucratic mind set where decisions are made based on how they think their bosses will react, and what the long term impact on their own petty little careers might be.
It's just a telescope..
The Hubble is a cutting-edge scientific instrument that has been expanding our knowledge about the universe. The Bush administration has consistently worked to constrict this kind of scientific advancement. Maybe this is for ideological reasons (for instance, it is probably easier to live a "faith-based" life when you aren't presented with new facts about the world every day), or maybe its for more pragmatic reasons (it is best to avoid anything that might contribute to the global warming theory when your power base is Big Oil).
How do my beliefs impact on you? Hardly, if at all, my comments herein and your conversation notwithstanding. It is possible that if enough persons believe as I do that the overall movement might affect you.
Representing articles of your faith as facts damages public discourse and I oppose that aspect of your religious activities. This is not a persecution of you for your religious beliefs; this is my opposition to your attempts to subvert the free exchange of thoughts that is necessary for human rights to exist.
For example, there seems to be enough ... "prudishness?" ... in America that we have laws banning the public display of nudity. In that way you are affected.
An interesting example-- I wonder why you chose that? Never mind; it serves this discussion well.
When the founding fathers of the USA had completed drafting the US Constitution, they found a surprising amount of resistance to its adoption as it was first framed. Out of this came the Bill of Rights: the first ten ammendments that are also the first clear expression of what has now been generally accepted as inalienable human rights. Out of this also came the first succinct expression of the greatest danger of the democratic process: that democracy unchecked can lead to the tyranny of the majority over the legitimate rights of any minority. Including minorities that consist of only one member.
Your words imply that Christian political action can appropriately use tyranny of the majority as a model for shaping society to what the Christian group believes is acceptable human behavior. I strongly oppose even the faintest whiff of such thinking. Especially when it comes from groups that have a long history of converting others at sword point, burning dissidents and heretics at the stake, supporting systems of slavery and making bloody wars on peoples who live according to other beliefs.
However, I think that there are many Christians who are moderate who feel that society scorns them and flat out rejects their ideals. I've definitely seen this in the course of this discussion thread.
I fail to see how this is a public problem. Does not your church provide you with the guidance and support to come to grips with the emotions these rejections raise in you, such that you can deal with them privately or in your own support groups? Like people of other persuasions who experience the failings of society (which I trow is every one of us) find ways to deal with the rejections that they experience?
There is so much right with the Christian faith that I want others to know about it. I want to reflect God's love and hope that I am doing that well now and always.
I'm glad you've found something that is right for you. I wish it didn't involve this strange concept of evangelism such that you guys are constantly trying to shove your beliefs in other people's faces, but I can be tolerant of that so long as it is not too obnoxious and you follow the rules of fair discussion. Hell, I try to be tolerant of fellow elevator riders who insist on eating lots of garilc for lunch, or who lunch on beef lard and dead cow, and fart continuously from the first to the twenty-second floor.
To wrap this up, I'm going to return to something you wrote near the beginning of your last message:
We do have a key logjam in the discussion over whether to accept the Bible as a source of authority.
You just don't get it. That is not my concern at all. My concern is limited to your misrepresenting articles of your faith as proven facts and the way in which that can influence public opinion. Someone as articulate as you can use such subterfuges to great unfair advantage.
If the world was fair, persons with your level of skill with the language would also be endowed with a stronger moral compass or ethical nature than the average Joe. But there is no fairness in that sense on this earth, and those who can must be ever vigilant to protect society from the effects of persons of great persuasive skills who are not properly encumbered by ethical or moral principles.
So I guess you're not a linux fan, as all distributions are bundles of OS and apps...
I wasn't talking about bundling. I was talking about coupling. Bundling is merely aggregating a bunch of things together (maybe going so far as to make sure they all play nice with each other). Coupling is tech-speak for writing a module that reaches into the innards of another module to pull out some particularly delicious piece of private data or twiddle a private function. Think of it as code rape: the violation of privacy.
Not to mention you realy should let me see these recognitions that this is a bad thing even before 1960! On what computer was that?
Well, Junior, you'll have to do your own research into the history of cyernetics to get that level of detail. However I can assert with confidence that computers made from about 1955 onward by IBM and Honeywell decoupled the operating system from the application software. That made FORTRAN better, and made COBOL possible. By the mid 1960s with the IBM Model 360 this was a soundly established first principle. Which nobody violated until Microsoft said we don't need to do that any more around 1995.
It will be Microsoft's undoing, more than likely.
What Microsoft is doing is coding at F1 levels.
That would be fine if MS was in a race. Where matters of operational efficiency and durability didn't matter. In short, MS has been doing a wonderful job building OSs for games machines.
Businesses don't need Formula One computers. They need general purpose OSs that are reliable and secure.
If you have to have a mechanical analogy to understand this, the model you should use is the farm tractor. This is a general purpose mechanism with power take-offs; a three point hitch that will accept all kinds of drag-behind implements; hydraulics that can power a front loader, forklift attachment, post hole digger, backhoe, or whatever. You get the implements you need separately; you attach them when you need them; you remove them and put them out of your way when you don't need them.
You don't measure the value of a tractor by the speed with which it can go from the barn to the field; you measure its value by the work it does for you, its over-all efficiency, and whether it is likely to break down on you in the middle of harvest season.
MS doesn't fare very well in this metaphor, but I'll leave exploring that as an exercise for the reader.
It looked like a good marketing strategy because it WAS indeed good marketing strategy.
Agreed: over the short term, it has been an excellent marketing strategy. But when I wrote the grandparent, I was also thinking about the long term: that MS's sacrifice of good design on the altar of short term market gain is the root cause of most of their current legal problems and almost all of their security problems. It is also one of the major reasons why their big corporate and government clients are converting from Windows to other OS. The big guys need to be able to do long term forecasts of their expenses and resource requirements as they develop their ten and twenty year plans. You can't do that with Microsoft's products-- I think mostly because of the lack of compartmentalization between OS and apps. Building a long term corporate strategy on top of Windows is like building on a foundation of swiss cheese: you never know when its going to fail and when it does, the stink is going to bother your customers.
Almost everyone of the non-techie users I know likes the fact they can play their video clips, surf da intarweb, read e-mail, etc. without having to go out and buy another software package or download it from somewhere else.
MS could have provided software bundles that did this with properly compartmentalized applications. They have consistently chosen instead to closely couple their apps to the innards of their OS. This first became evident with Win3.1, when it was found that MS Word owed its superior performance over Word Perfect, Word Star, and other word processors to the use of undocumented calls to internal OS routines.
Is it fair or ethical for MS to tie these things into the OS? Personally I think not.
I agree. I also want to emphasize that this is very poor design for the long term. It raises huge maintenance, security, and upgrade problems for both MS and its customers.
I've been mulling over my response.
I am unwilling to continue this discussion privately. I think our discussion has had some value to our silent audience, and that is more important to me than the subject itself. If we go forward with the discussion, let us do so in public.
Regarding anthropomorphism, however, I am unsure if humans are able to avoid it. However, in our case, God has told us via the Bible that we are made in his image...
These are some of your beliefs; I respect them; I don't see how they impact on me or on anyone else; and they are being presented honestly as matters of faith. I don't see anything here that needs to be discussed.
I have a concern about confusing facts with faith because I see that as a root of intolerance and bigotry. But I have no serious disagreement with most articles of Christian faith that I have come across. I have even met devout Christians who strongly believed in Man having dominion over the rest of Creation who I actually found quite tolerable... since they also believed so strongly that this involved a duty of stewardship toward Creation that their behavior was very responsible.
Science denies the unprovable...
I recognized this twisted fallacy as needing correction on my first reading. Even though it seems to be a secondary point of discussion for mr mull and myself.
First it would be better in this context not to ascribe to science the attributes of a person (like an ability to "deny" something). While anthropomorphism can be a convenient and sometimes artistic way of describing things that aren't human, its use is very confusing when the subject of the discussion has to do with what is human and what is not, as is the case here. [see also note 1 , below]
The trained scientist regards the unprovable as being outside the scope of science. Scientific inquiry can investigate questions of "what", "how", and "when", but it is recognized by scientists as being an inappropriate way to address the "why" questions and many of the "who" questions (in the sense of "who ultimately brought this or that about".
So the trained scientist does not deny the unprovable: he attempts to recognize it when he comes across it, and when he does recognize it, he avoids using his tools of scientific inquiry to address it. Many scientists use traditional faith-based methods with these non-scientific parts of the realm of human experience. [A distinction needs to be made between trained scientists and persons like technicians, engineers and teachers who may not be trained in science but accept scientific publications as authoritarian. These persons sometimes have a lot more faith in scientific findings than the scientists themselves.]
A separate issue is that mr mull appears to confuse faith-based belief with the probability-based "belief" that is so often used in science. His discussion on Occam's Razor seems to make sense only if one thinks that a scientist accepts on faith that something must be the cause of observed phenomena because it is the simplest of the various alternatives. Yet scientists don't do that: they accept that something is probably more likely to be the cause than its identified alternatives because when all the available evidence is weighed, it appears to be the candidate with the highest probability. But the scientist recognizes his caveats when he does this: there may be other possibilities he hasn't identified; and further observations may show that there are other factors he hadn't taken into consideration. To be brief about it, mr mull is wrong in implying that Occam's Razor is used to identify facts; instead it is used to identify the most likely hypotheses.
It seems like mr mull is working from the incorrect assumption that science is using the same scholarly tools of reason and understanding that are used by those who study the Bible (or Talmud or greco-roman myths, etc). Perhaps there needs to be a wider recognition that science is not predicated on scholarship but instead is predicated upon empirical observation and a very strict set of rules of hypothesis formulation and testing. When having a scholarly discussion about science, which is what mr mull appears to want to do here, there needs to be an understanding by all participants about what the scientific method is. I see evidence that this is not true in this discussion. Which is why my replies cannot address mr mull's concerns directly: there is a need to correct several wrong assumptions before that can be done.
I still feel that mr mull's confusion of fact with faith to be dangerous and scary. This is one of the necessary conditions for terrorist zealotry.
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Note 1: I encountered the following as I was doing my homework for this message. It points out that there is a concern among many biblical scholars about the many passages in the Bible that anthropomorphise God. Typical is this (from a web page that no longer exists, unfortunately):
Thin clients have been "poised" to take over the desktop for 10 years now. It hasn't happened. Nothing is going to change that in the next 12 months.
The thin client approach has promised huge amounts of storage, no hassle upgrades, secure operations, and unfettered user mobility for more than than twenty years. What has recently changed is that now the pipes are fat enough to support it... and Google's new maps are showing that it can be done.
Longhorn is the most significant release of Windows in almost 5 years.
Mind your verb tenses. I agree that this would have been Microsoft's most significant product. But the market wasn't ready for it when it was first ready to go to market, and it now seems doubtful that the market will ever go in a way that would support Longhorn's hunger for faster/bigger hardware. There doesn't seem to be any doubt that Microsoft is no longer able to steer the hardware market (as it did with Win3.x ("the 286 is brain dead"), Win95, WinXP, etc).
Don't sell Microsoft short.
I don't speculate on stocks.
When I read your post, it seemed like I was hearing my doubts about Longhorn's success being echoed back at me, after a spin doctor had worked them over.
We are in agreement that several things need to happen before the market will be receptive to Longhorn and that Longhorn's possible success as a entrepreneural killer app (like Win3.1 or MS Office) is now considered improbable. We are also in agreement that MS is yanking core parts of the new technologies out of Longhorn and reworking them so they can be sold as bolt-ons to what is already out there in its installed base.
Microsoft has never developed post-sales support and service into significant revenue streams; it has always relied on the phenomenal sales of a few products (the Windows OS and MS Office) for its profits. Is MS now starting to change itself from an entrepreneural business to a service and support business?
That would be fantastic!
Is anyone else getting a funny feeling that just maybe Longhorn will never make it out the door?
I'm wondering if by the time the market is ripe for Longhorn (ie, enough of us can justify the more expensive hardware it needs that it stands a chance of competing in the market), there will be too many of us who will be migrating core pieces of our daily work to thin client models that run on established internet protocols. As that migration starts to pick up steam, it is going to become increasingly important that all our file formats comply with accepted international standards. I seriously doubt that Longhorn could be revised to meet those criteria.
I'm wondering whether Longhorn is going to be like one of those twelve cylinder straight block touring cars that came out of Detroit in the late 1920s. Fantastic engineering, luxorious coachwork and super powerful, but way too much engine for anybody's needs and dang hard to park when there is twenty feet between the front bumper and the windshield. You don't hear much about those cars; their engineering was good but their marketing plan didn't connect with reality.
I'm wondering whether the Dynamic Marketing Duo of Gates and Allen have recognized this, and are gutting Longhorn's feature set to realize at least some profit from a failed effort.
Mine was a throw-away remark. I've not done any work with Delphi in the last 6 years and it may have evolved in all kinds of ways since then.
When I last used it, Delphi was a hierarchy of library objects sitting on top of an advanced Pascal that was descended from Turbo Pascal. Now I see its COM being described as "... [allowing] you to create COM objects that are not specific to any language, and in some cases, even platforms." So perhaps today's Delphi has become independent of any particular procedural language.
Wouldn't mind hearing further comments.
Microsoft hires smart people, from the creator of the Delphi programming language...
Nicklaus Wirth is now working for Microsoft???
There is a definite difference between being certain in your faith (internally) and claiming as fact (externally) that which cannot be tested or demonstrated by human means. Yes, there are human limitations, but this is not my belief, since I can demonstrate it with the same solidity that I can use to demonstrate the facts of gravity:
For instance, we have an inability to know Pi with absolute precision. Perhaps a god could know Pi with perfect precision, or perhaps not... but there are proofs that it cannot be known within human experience. Another instance: not only can we not measure our ability to use our human imagination, we cannot even conceive of a yardstick that would allow such a measure. We are limited in our ability to comprehend this core part of our nature.
This argument has been presented so many times before, and in so many different formal logical systems, that it can be accepted as a kind of universal axiom (like Plank's Constant, for instance). You can get to it as an extension of the cosmologist's anthropic principle, but there are also ways to get to it from any world view that is not arbitrarily dismissive of new information about the world.
Someone needs to mod this as "-1 infantile philosophy". I think I've been suckered by trolls...
You've given me more insight into the mind set of some Christians than I really wanted-- good gods, you are freaking scary! The parts that I have embolded are where you accept as truth and pass on as truth that which can never be known by human beings (they are matters of "faith").
You guys would be a lot more honest if you prefaced your faith-based assertions with appropriate disclaimers, such as "I believe that..." or "My postulate is...", and then went from there. Of course that would mean that your "faith" couldn't be as strong as a rock-- you would necessarily have to give some at least some consideration to alternatives-- but OTOH you would be fostering more tolerance among us all. Which IIRC was implicit in your Jesus' second commandment ("...upon which is based all the Law and the Prophets").
</rant>
A lot of people actually pay for papers just for the ads. I often buy the Sunday paper just for the supermarket flyers and department store ads.
I think this is very insightful. And I think your more general point that papers are basically advertising-delivery mechanisms is also insightful.
I'm surprised that we haven't yet seen any DHTML techniques that counter ad blocking. I envision Alice clicking on a story and getting only the first paragraph because she has blocked the ads from that site while Bob gets the whole story because an ad that he is not blocking is rewriting the DOM to display or download the rest of the story. I think that coupled with a server side counter of the number of times the ad was actually displayed might be the basis for a better ad revenue model than pay per click.
I think innerHTML, HttpXmlRequest, and so on would be available on any browser with ad blocking capability. I think with something like this, and the user ability to turn ad blocking on and off by web site, we'd end up with marketplace forces determining what is acceptable in advertising.
Do you know what's holier than God?
The clients of my clients. That's what's holier than God.
Personally I don't much care whether the Yahoo toolbar is offered with the Flash player so long as I can opt out. But there is no way in hell I can develop a gizmo for a client when its deployment is going to cause any single one of his clients to question his faith in my client's trustworthiness.
I'll roll my own javascript animations before it comes to that.
I hope you read this, Macromedia. I've worked off and on with DW and Flash for about 6 years, but you've just fixed it so your Flash is unusable to me. And I will be looking more closely at ALL the implications of using your other products, too.