You still don't know. The person cleaning the fridge could have cleared out long before the possible cloud of poisonous gasses. The cold refridgerator may have slowed the reaction down just enough that they were mostly unaffected as they left to perform some other task. Then others who entered the breakroom could have hovered out of curiosity and hunger until they needed hospitalization.
They might have used one chemical, perhaps even letting it soak, and then used another chemical (leaving to let it soak too). They might have been a nut, like a former college room mate of mine, and thought that the combined power (and toxic gas) cleaned even more so due to the lethality. Yes, my former room mate purposefully mixed bleach and ammonia to clean the bathroom (he knew the outcome and took precautions).
Just because the cleaning person wasn't affected doesn't mean that it's not the classic Ammonia and Bleach combo.
We have a similar program here in Texas. However, by the time you take all of the additional courses, you might as well pitch in for the extra year to get the full degree.
In attempting to drive up the salaries of teaching, I wonder if the teacher's union looked to the other professions and decided that higher education hurdles worked well for other fields (law, medicine, etc)?
While I agree with you in sentiment, I still arrive back at my questions, "How do the current standards in place not facilitate the current server farms in place?", and "How does a Lego analogy hold up at the scale we are talking about?"
Most Lego bricks have only eight nubs on the top. Yes, there are custom bricks, but the bulk of the Lego trade is the 2x4. How does that scale when you need to attach 8 2x4s to the top of a 2x4? Eight nubs could provide eight points of connection, but geometry gets in the way. It can't be done without stacking another layer or some other intermediary brick.
Standards don't just enable, they limit too. The power of a good standard is that they limit poor choices. If we want to build a standard on the analogy of Lego bricks, are we picking the right model? If the model is known not to scale in common building technology, why hinder the standard by analogy to an problematic model?
I imagine that given a sufficient amount of glue, a Lego three story town home would still collapse provided that it is more brick than glue. Once there is more glue than brick, you have to question if you really have a Lego structure.
I learned that given a large enough supply of Lego bricks, their flaws become readily apparent. We owned a day care centre, so I had literally twenty pounds or more Lego bricks at my disposal (after hours and then after we sold the centre).
Legos are heavily dependent on gravity, the gripping power of a brick is impressive (especially if they are new), but torque is more impressive. There is a limit to how far you can build a Lego ledge, and that includes shoring it up with Lego bracing (diagonal Lego bracing is more susceptible to torque). The torque doesn't apply well to a brick that's designed for straight down pressure.
Legos are heavily bound by gravity. The compressive forces of the walls provide grip. In my attempts to rebuild cathedral wall structures, the compression could not be balanced between the flying buttresses and the inner walls, so the buttresses mainly provided a stabilizing effect. The problem was that at about five or so feet, the bottom bricks would not hold because the weight of the bricks above expanded the plastic enough to negate the brick's grip.
Legos provide little resistance to upward pressure (by design this is how you release them, to a degree). This means that as structures sway, you effectively reduce the gripping power of some connection within the structure. This is the equivalent to stress related failure. A larger Lego structure must be glued or it will fail due to these internal forces.
Finally if you attempt to fix some of these issues by sandwiching critical joints, you add mass, which compounds the problem in other joints. Shoring up those eventually just increases the number of locations where failure could occur and statistics steps in and assures at least one failure, somewhere.
I won't even go into the issues with worn bricks, because those are obvious.
Few data centres expand to the size of our largest data centres, but by "designing like Lego" we will simplify things. The danger is that we might standardize on an architecture that has built-in limits. The architecture we currently have isn't as clean in vision as a Lego brick, but it already scales better than the Lego brick, even if it needs to do so by the default structure being slightly less elegant.
These Lego data centre visionaries have the right goal, making it simple, but they might be going about it in the wrong way. I've never heard a rational argument detailing how Lego bricks and data centre components are the same, so this might turn out to be a bad analogy implemented in hardware. Time will tell, but the centres we currently have did not come as the result of people deliberately trying to make data centres more complex.
I met an alcoholic programmer that's been fired at least five times. He works in a utility industry. Most of the time he takes the jobs where others wouldn't dare go.
He worked a lot in "Oh God, I wouldn't go there!" Africa. He's also very popular wherever there are people getting killed. I met up with him in Baghdad, but after dropping his name, most people in that industry know him (or of him).
I don't know if he's still working, but he had over forty years of experience, so you couldn't show him a system that he couldn't handle. Often he was sober or at least functional. There should be plenty of demand in truly hostile places. I guess he's found his niche.
College professors are an entirely different matter than public school teachers. While a college professor might be a horrible teacher, our colleges and universities are based off the German model, meaning that professors are supposed to be skilled researchers. Only some of the researchers happen to be good teachers.
Public school teachers have no primary role as researchers, so if they cannot teach then it's a full failure of picking the right person for the job.
As colleges and universities drift from being research institutions, their prestige drops. It will be interesting to know if eventually undergraduate professors will be freed of their research duties, and if so freed, will have to demonstrate their skill in their was-secondary role of teaching.
When a teacher fails to correct a paper because they fell into their own Math trap and graded the rest of the class incorrectly, they should be fired. This is the level of the complaints most people are up in arms about. We are not talking about differences of opinion, or some abstract situation, I've had teachers tell me point blank that it's not changing because it would be unfair to the rest of the class to grade the answer correctly.
That's a whole new level of failure to do one's job. Mistakes will be made, but stubborn resistance to fix them based on the democracy of wrong answers is dereliction of duty. That's probably why some of the new "fix education" initiatives coming out of Chicago start with firing everyone in the entire school. They shut it down and reopen it with a mostly new staff.
Yes, it is unfair to throw out the good with the bad, but that's the only option the Teacher's Union allows. If the Teacher's Union would be more open to dismissing their worst teachers, then you could fire only the worst teachers. If you attempt to fire the worst teachers today, you get pressure from every other employee in the school.
I say this even though I have Teacher Union employees in my family. Being an employee in the Union isn't a bed of roses either, you have to follow the Union line, even when you know it is wrong.
If the Teacher's Union was worth it's salt, they would be very quick to boot members which disgrace it so. We are not talking about the average (or even below average) members. We are talking about the worst members, that abuse the Union's bargaining power to provide a level of negligence so extreme it is disheartening.
Oh, and they're usually the first to say they can do a better job if only they received more money. The good teachers are the first to say they could do a better job if only they could write their own lesson plans and prevent the administration from diverting their class time to other subjects to boost the standardized testing scores.
Wow, apparently slashdot filters out the asterisk. I didn't know that a person self-censoring a possible four-letter word was so offensive that the self-censorship needed censoring!
Give Bruce a break, after all, they already named a disease in his honor, Brucellosis!
Hey Bruce, got milk?
Personally, I thought Colburn's stunt was a poor joke that made fun of a bad decision on how to drum up public interest in something that nearly happened unnoticed. NASA shouldn't have resorted to an open ballot democracy; some other pranksters could have called it the " capsule" or "'s folly". Colbert one-ups them with a lower blow, and NASA eventually decides the decision was a bad one, undoing any semblance of true public choice.
When something is messed up and you exploit it, your victory is also a messed up one.
Evolution in action. If you're not the original host to the mutation, then there's a host before you. The news is that they found the original host.
I'm sure that there are quite a few not-quite swine flu viruses around, and that the odds of mutation are sufficiently low, and that the odds of mutation into something harmful are even lower. However, those odds compound over time to practically guaranteeing it will happen someday.
I once worked for a company that had a key person who didn't understand hashing and the hash tables built from them, so I'll add my story
I run into a performance problem, so I implement a hash table, later I get called into Wally's office. Wally tells me that the company doesn't use hash tables. It seems that they tried hashtables, but that eventually pulled out all of the hashtable code because it was benchmarked as slower than linked lists.
This Wally was deeply involved in the code way back when, so in the discussion that followed I found that he was concerned that the hash values could be lost by the system. To make sure that they were not lost he implemented an array to hold them. That the array would sometimes overflow when there were too many hashes to store, so he basically implemented a Vector on top of a singly-linked list of arrays.
At the end of the day, he calculated the hash, then performed a lookup of the hash in the linked list, as an error checking measure to prevent access a non-stored hash. Then he jumped from the list to the array address via pointer, because that was a "good" optimization of the previous attempt (I didn't want to ask). Finally, to reduce the complexity of handling a possible out of memory error, they allocated the linked list nodes and hashtable array ahead of time. Then they tried to add a binary tree search of the linked list of hashes, to speed it up, meaning that the linked list needed to be ordered. For one reason or another, the binary search code never worked properly due to the, so they eventually did sequential access of a sorted list. To add icing to the cake, their solution didn't handle key collisions.
I think of that Wally fondly, because he is a smart guy and very personable. It's just that he never learned what makes a hashtable work, and in his position now he'll never need to learn it. To his credit, he did benchmark before and after and correctly decided to pull out his code.
Every Dec 31st, a new year comes without apocalypse. Every decade passes without one too. Every century passes without one too. Every millennia passes without one too.
Change calendars to the Jewish calendar. They observe the same lack of apocalypse at the transition to the next month, year, etc. Same goes for the Chinese calendar, why would the Mayan calendar be any different?
Just because bad things eventually happen as the years go by doesn't mean that they're scheduled events. Certainly they are not scheduled hundreds of years in advance by human hands undertaking the decision to structure a calendar this way instead of that way.
Basically it's as eventful as watching your car hit 100,000 miles. An event of sorts, but a contrived one, built up by the coincidences of measurement with a lot of extra man specific meaning.
Discovery Channel has been pushing this sort of pseudo-science and junk pop-culture voodoo for a while now. You'd think they were competing with the Sci-Fi (SyFy) Channel.
Just when you think you can get the tune out of your head...
Beware of the blob,
it creeps
and leaps and glides and slides
across the floor
right through the door
and all around the wall
a splotch, a blotch
be careful of the blob
The 2003 North America Blackout was more about safety systems working to preserve the electrical infrastructure after a high energy power power line shorted while the grid operators didn't act due to a software bug.
Somehow I don't equate a deliberate act of destruction of property with the combined failure to perform tree trimming, a bug in a computer system, and a bunch of safety systems disconnecting the generators as they should.
Of course you can review an unfinished movie. You review what's there, and whether it looks to be a promising picture.
Pre-screenings are simply reviews of an unfinished movie, under controlled conditions with a selected audience. Script screening is a review of an even more unfinished movie, prior to production shooting. The producer / director is constantly reviewing the unfinished movie, sometimes even altering it on the fly.
Now if you think the review will be useless when the movie is finished, perhaps it will be to you. Other people (film buffs / film students / ardent fans) will be facinated by the minutea of the changes, and will enjoy the craft of making a film more by seeing what is was, what it might have been, and how it is now through a few key scenes.
That's almost what 90% of the "extra features" disk content. The director voice over with details about the production, the deleted scenes which broke tempo, the side plots which were not deemed relevant, initial artwork, the special effects team showing the work in progress, etc.
I know it's sort of old-fashioned (because a plot is not eye candy), but I'd wager that his review of the plot won't be far from the mark when the film is released.
It's not that HP is dumb, it's greedy. HP owns something on the order of 50% of the IP that goes into an Itanium. If they can effectively block you from buying anything else, you buy into their patents. Intel is the other major patent holder.
Most of the patents for the Itanium are designed to make it impossible to produce an Itanium clone without violation the patents.
Re:I hear lots of negative criticism about Linux.
on
Linux Needs Critics
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· Score: 1
You won't get a bad mod rating.
Sometimes people complain about what they want to do, sometimes they complain about how they want to do it. If you insist that the goal is achieved in a particular way, you might warrant being told that's not the way things work.
I can complain that my coffee spills in my car on the way to work due to the rough road conditions. My mechanic might inspect my suspension, and upgrade or repair it. They might even suggest a different route or call the city to repair the street.
I can complain that my car doesn't float four inches above the road during my drive to work. My mechanic will then explain that cars ride on the road, they don't float above them. In this scenario, all I really want is to not spill my coffee, but I'll argue with my mechanic for hours before leaving in a huff because I never let my mechanic offer the best way to solve my problem.
Asking a professional for his opinion on how to solve the core problem is rare, too many people have solved a core problem in their head one way, and then demanded the professional to provide their solution. With an unlimited budget, perhaps the hover car would work, but then there would be complaints about poor cornering in the queue, followed up by a request to have wheels extend down from the hover car.... you get the idea.
The problem with society is that yes there are critics... BUT the community dismisses them as twits who don't understand or appreciate society...
If society were to take individuals seriously and start solving their problems, then maybe society would move on...
Here is a simple question, why on earth when I have multiple family members using the same vehicle, I have problems arranging the end destinations to the satisfaction of each member? Who on freaken earth thought that one out...
Perhaps the problem is that some members of society demand that society solves their problems, even when their problems make no sense.
Once you expand your user knowledge beyond the limitations of the application and operating system interface, you are a programmer. It's not like programmers are not users, it is just that they are users with more detailed knowledge of what is possible and how things work. Getting two programs to share one video card is akin to getting two people to share one car. At times there will be contention, but with some effort there can be harmony. On the plus side, the programmers are not asking you to install a sound card for each program
Exactly what scenario provides you the ability to do anything without prior knowledge?
Books are sold assuming that you will put in the effort to learn the language and the effort to read them.
Food is sold assuming that you will put in the effort to prepare it and the effort to eat it.
Vehicles are sold assuming that you will put in the effort to learn the local laws for operating a vehicle, possibly take out an insurance policy, pay maintenance, provide fuel, and actually drive or provide someone to drive the vehicle.
Housing is sold or rented assuming that you know how to use the interior plumbing, you pay appropriate housing related taxes, you provide housing related maintenance, and you preform the effort to live in the house.
So there's no free ride. If you know how to check your email, but don't know how to maintain the software in a computer, you pay a professional. The benefit of open source is that you can hire a professional from wherever you like, instead of having to go to an exclusive provider which might turn you away because they can't be bothered to accept your money.
Only you can weigh the benefit of learning enough to "do it yourself" against the dollars that a professional would charge. I know very little about my car's transmission. In my case, I still find it cheaper to pay someone else to rebuild a transmission than the cost I would incur in learning how to rebuild a transmission and rebuilding my own. That's just life. Specialize and be the best at what you do, then pay others when you need to or live with the problem if you can.
RedHat is binary free. You can download any current distribution of RedHat compiled. With some hunting around, you might even find the old ones. What you can't expect is for them to make available the binaries for the patches and bugfixes for that distribution.
Without the binaries for the patches and bugfixes, it is still binary free. You just have to use the rpm build system and do a lot of rpmbuild --rebuild to get the binaries. Failure to do so on your part is not lack of freedom, it's laziness.
RedHat doesn't point the finger at someone else and say "We can't fix it due to him!" There is a reason RedHat supplies so much back to the open source community and a lot of it has to do with supporting their customers.
From both of your statements, I'd wager that you've never paid for a RedHat product; or if you did, you never bothered to register it.
Oracle wants an operating system that's specifically tuned for it's product. That's great if all you intend to do is run Oracle on it, but most people eventually use their system for something else too. Then the tuning doesn't pay off, it works against you.
I remember the earliest Oracle installations, there were so many tweaks and configuration changes to the kernel, shared memory, enabled extensions,... it seemed to go on forever. If Oracle had it's way, I'd imagine that they would eventually turn a PC into an embedded Oracle server. That's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you are in the business of selling full operating systems, like RedHat is.
Perhaps Oracle's treatment of Linux has changed a bit, but I'm not holding my breath. Old dogs use tried-but-true old tricks. Since Oracle still hasn't seen fit to rewrite their init.d stuff to be half sane, I doubt they are concerned about being friendly to others on a Linux server.
As corollary to "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetency", try "Never assume that all business initiatives are foolproof or inherently based on logic."
Bush's PR department was awesome. You just need to catch up with the times.
The trick is to cry that everyone's out to get you, and that they only report things in a one-sided manner, but then to make sure that your side is the only one reported. Remember when the Democrats were blocking things in Congress under his administration? How was that possible with a Republican majority?
Bush effectively killed an entire branch of developmental science in the US. Labs shut down and people lost their jobs. Labs brave enough to continue on had to do so out of their own pocket. If it wasn't an aberration that fertility clinics make a ton of money from people willing to pay anything to have a child, no research on stem cells would have ever occurred in the United States.
So now we're almost ten years behind the rest of the world in discovering treatments with what amounts to a silver bullet that can actually replace dying tissues. That means that in the future, you'll have to import the treatments from other countries or fly there for treatment. Due to religion, America loses yet another manufacturing opportunity.
Did he plan it this way? I don't think so, I think he's just a good church-going guy who is willing to watch Science go to Hell because he believes the arguments that Scientists don't like Jesus.
Bush's PR only took a dive when the facts got so out-of-hand that he couldn't cover them up with more Fox News.
I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
Under the "Spontaneous generation" theory, life comes from non-living matter under the right conditions. Rain water mixed with mud will generate frogs. Meat left to rot will generate flies. Presence of pre-existing life is not a requirement.
For all the benefit that Aristotle bestowed on mankind, his dabblings in the realm of Science put it back for hundreds of years. He was good at forming logical arguments that were quite reasonable. For science you also have to deeply scrutinize the actual world, something that wasn't as easily available to him at the time. His fame (he is Aristotle) then drove his ideas into the world as "facts"; an error that Aristotle would never have permitted if he were alive at the time.
Louis Pasteur finally proved that Aristotle was completely wrong. The Church pre-exists Pasteur, and most of it's doctrine was written pre-Pasteur. So it's easy to see why strongly religious people believe that life is created at birth. They're completely wrong too, but they're going to be far too busy bickering about when birth occurs to think about Pasteur. The message that they should learn is that life is not created, but preserved through offspring.
In a traditional religious culture, the idea that life is preserved through offspring runs counter to idea of spontaneous generation is a fact. Spontaneous generation is deeply rooted in the Bible, as it would be in any book of it's age. Adam and Eve were never represented as having to develop. Moses's staff turned into a snake. Abraham's son Issac was spared from being sacrificed by a sheep that suddenly appeared entangled in a bush. The entire universe was made, and made quickly. After being raised to accept such examples, it's almost forgivable to think that life is created, but it is still completely wrong; life is a continuum that you pass on to your children.
Slashdot Mirror
You still don't know. The person cleaning the fridge could have cleared out long before the possible cloud of poisonous gasses. The cold refridgerator may have slowed the reaction down just enough that they were mostly unaffected as they left to perform some other task. Then others who entered the breakroom could have hovered out of curiosity and hunger until they needed hospitalization.
They might have used one chemical, perhaps even letting it soak, and then used another chemical (leaving to let it soak too). They might have been a nut, like a former college room mate of mine, and thought that the combined power (and toxic gas) cleaned even more so due to the lethality. Yes, my former room mate purposefully mixed bleach and ammonia to clean the bathroom (he knew the outcome and took precautions).
Just because the cleaning person wasn't affected doesn't mean that it's not the classic Ammonia and Bleach combo.
We have a similar program here in Texas. However, by the time you take all of the additional courses, you might as well pitch in for the extra year to get the full degree.
In attempting to drive up the salaries of teaching, I wonder if the teacher's union looked to the other professions and decided that higher education hurdles worked well for other fields (law, medicine, etc)?
While I agree with you in sentiment, I still arrive back at my questions, "How do the current standards in place not facilitate the current server farms in place?", and "How does a Lego analogy hold up at the scale we are talking about?"
Most Lego bricks have only eight nubs on the top. Yes, there are custom bricks, but the bulk of the Lego trade is the 2x4. How does that scale when you need to attach 8 2x4s to the top of a 2x4? Eight nubs could provide eight points of connection, but geometry gets in the way. It can't be done without stacking another layer or some other intermediary brick.
Standards don't just enable, they limit too. The power of a good standard is that they limit poor choices. If we want to build a standard on the analogy of Lego bricks, are we picking the right model? If the model is known not to scale in common building technology, why hinder the standard by analogy to an problematic model?
I imagine that given a sufficient amount of glue, a Lego three story town home would still collapse provided that it is more brick than glue. Once there is more glue than brick, you have to question if you really have a Lego structure.
A company need not be perfect in every way to be good (or perfect) in one way.
I learned that given a large enough supply of Lego bricks, their flaws become readily apparent. We owned a day care centre, so I had literally twenty pounds or more Lego bricks at my disposal (after hours and then after we sold the centre).
Legos are heavily dependent on gravity, the gripping power of a brick is impressive (especially if they are new), but torque is more impressive. There is a limit to how far you can build a Lego ledge, and that includes shoring it up with Lego bracing (diagonal Lego bracing is more susceptible to torque). The torque doesn't apply well to a brick that's designed for straight down pressure.
Legos are heavily bound by gravity. The compressive forces of the walls provide grip. In my attempts to rebuild cathedral wall structures, the compression could not be balanced between the flying buttresses and the inner walls, so the buttresses mainly provided a stabilizing effect. The problem was that at about five or so feet, the bottom bricks would not hold because the weight of the bricks above expanded the plastic enough to negate the brick's grip.
Legos provide little resistance to upward pressure (by design this is how you release them, to a degree). This means that as structures sway, you effectively reduce the gripping power of some connection within the structure. This is the equivalent to stress related failure. A larger Lego structure must be glued or it will fail due to these internal forces.
Finally if you attempt to fix some of these issues by sandwiching critical joints, you add mass, which compounds the problem in other joints. Shoring up those eventually just increases the number of locations where failure could occur and statistics steps in and assures at least one failure, somewhere.
I won't even go into the issues with worn bricks, because those are obvious.
Few data centres expand to the size of our largest data centres, but by "designing like Lego" we will simplify things. The danger is that we might standardize on an architecture that has built-in limits. The architecture we currently have isn't as clean in vision as a Lego brick, but it already scales better than the Lego brick, even if it needs to do so by the default structure being slightly less elegant.
These Lego data centre visionaries have the right goal, making it simple, but they might be going about it in the wrong way. I've never heard a rational argument detailing how Lego bricks and data centre components are the same, so this might turn out to be a bad analogy implemented in hardware. Time will tell, but the centres we currently have did not come as the result of people deliberately trying to make data centres more complex.
I met an alcoholic programmer that's been fired at least five times. He works in a utility industry. Most of the time he takes the jobs where others wouldn't dare go.
He worked a lot in "Oh God, I wouldn't go there!" Africa. He's also very popular wherever there are people getting killed. I met up with him in Baghdad, but after dropping his name, most people in that industry know him (or of him).
I don't know if he's still working, but he had over forty years of experience, so you couldn't show him a system that he couldn't handle. Often he was sober or at least functional. There should be plenty of demand in truly hostile places. I guess he's found his niche.
College professors are an entirely different matter than public school teachers. While a college professor might be a horrible teacher, our colleges and universities are based off the German model, meaning that professors are supposed to be skilled researchers. Only some of the researchers happen to be good teachers.
Public school teachers have no primary role as researchers, so if they cannot teach then it's a full failure of picking the right person for the job.
As colleges and universities drift from being research institutions, their prestige drops. It will be interesting to know if eventually undergraduate professors will be freed of their research duties, and if so freed, will have to demonstrate their skill in their was-secondary role of teaching.
When a teacher fails to correct a paper because they fell into their own Math trap and graded the rest of the class incorrectly, they should be fired. This is the level of the complaints most people are up in arms about. We are not talking about differences of opinion, or some abstract situation, I've had teachers tell me point blank that it's not changing because it would be unfair to the rest of the class to grade the answer correctly.
That's a whole new level of failure to do one's job. Mistakes will be made, but stubborn resistance to fix them based on the democracy of wrong answers is dereliction of duty. That's probably why some of the new "fix education" initiatives coming out of Chicago start with firing everyone in the entire school. They shut it down and reopen it with a mostly new staff.
Yes, it is unfair to throw out the good with the bad, but that's the only option the Teacher's Union allows. If the Teacher's Union would be more open to dismissing their worst teachers, then you could fire only the worst teachers. If you attempt to fire the worst teachers today, you get pressure from every other employee in the school.
I say this even though I have Teacher Union employees in my family. Being an employee in the Union isn't a bed of roses either, you have to follow the Union line, even when you know it is wrong.
If the Teacher's Union was worth it's salt, they would be very quick to boot members which disgrace it so. We are not talking about the average (or even below average) members. We are talking about the worst members, that abuse the Union's bargaining power to provide a level of negligence so extreme it is disheartening.
Oh, and they're usually the first to say they can do a better job if only they received more money. The good teachers are the first to say they could do a better job if only they could write their own lesson plans and prevent the administration from diverting their class time to other subjects to boost the standardized testing scores.
Wow, apparently slashdot filters out the asterisk. I didn't know that a person self-censoring a possible four-letter word was so offensive that the self-censorship needed censoring!
Give Bruce a break, after all, they already named a disease in his honor, Brucellosis!
Hey Bruce, got milk?
Personally, I thought Colburn's stunt was a poor joke that made fun of a bad decision on how to drum up public interest in something that nearly happened unnoticed. NASA shouldn't have resorted to an open ballot democracy; some other pranksters could have called it the " capsule" or "'s folly". Colbert one-ups them with a lower blow, and NASA eventually decides the decision was a bad one, undoing any semblance of true public choice.
When something is messed up and you exploit it, your victory is also a messed up one.
Evolution in action. If you're not the original host to the mutation, then there's a host before you. The news is that they found the original host.
I'm sure that there are quite a few not-quite swine flu viruses around, and that the odds of mutation are sufficiently low, and that the odds of mutation into something harmful are even lower. However, those odds compound over time to practically guaranteeing it will happen someday.
I once worked for a company that had a key person who didn't understand hashing and the hash tables built from them, so I'll add my story
I run into a performance problem, so I implement a hash table, later I get called into Wally's office. Wally tells me that the company doesn't use hash tables. It seems that they tried hashtables, but that eventually pulled out all of the hashtable code because it was benchmarked as slower than linked lists.
This Wally was deeply involved in the code way back when, so in the discussion that followed I found that he was concerned that the hash values could be lost by the system. To make sure that they were not lost he implemented an array to hold them. That the array would sometimes overflow when there were too many hashes to store, so he basically implemented a Vector on top of a singly-linked list of arrays.
At the end of the day, he calculated the hash, then performed a lookup of the hash in the linked list, as an error checking measure to prevent access a non-stored hash. Then he jumped from the list to the array address via pointer, because that was a "good" optimization of the previous attempt (I didn't want to ask). Finally, to reduce the complexity of handling a possible out of memory error, they allocated the linked list nodes and hashtable array ahead of time. Then they tried to add a binary tree search of the linked list of hashes, to speed it up, meaning that the linked list needed to be ordered. For one reason or another, the binary search code never worked properly due to the, so they eventually did sequential access of a sorted list. To add icing to the cake, their solution didn't handle key collisions.
I think of that Wally fondly, because he is a smart guy and very personable. It's just that he never learned what makes a hashtable work, and in his position now he'll never need to learn it. To his credit, he did benchmark before and after and correctly decided to pull out his code.
Every Dec 31st, a new year comes without apocalypse. Every decade passes without one too. Every century passes without one too. Every millennia passes without one too.
Change calendars to the Jewish calendar. They observe the same lack of apocalypse at the transition to the next month, year, etc. Same goes for the Chinese calendar, why would the Mayan calendar be any different?
Just because bad things eventually happen as the years go by doesn't mean that they're scheduled events. Certainly they are not scheduled hundreds of years in advance by human hands undertaking the decision to structure a calendar this way instead of that way.
Basically it's as eventful as watching your car hit 100,000 miles. An event of sorts, but a contrived one, built up by the coincidences of measurement with a lot of extra man specific meaning.
Discovery Channel has been pushing this sort of pseudo-science and junk pop-culture voodoo for a while now. You'd think they were competing with the Sci-Fi (SyFy) Channel.
Just when you think you can get the tune out of your head...
Beware of the blob,
it creeps
and leaps
and glides
and slides across the floor
right through
the door
and all around the wall
a splotch,
a blotch
be careful of the blob
I really think you missed the mark
The 2003 North America Blackout was more about safety systems working to preserve the electrical infrastructure after a high energy power power line shorted while the grid operators didn't act due to a software bug.
Somehow I don't equate a deliberate act of destruction of property with the combined failure to perform tree trimming, a bug in a computer system, and a bunch of safety systems disconnecting the generators as they should.
Beware the cyber backhoe, the natural predator of underground cables. Perpetrator of nearly all hard hack cable attacks.
Only terrorists use backhoes.
Of course you can review an unfinished movie. You review what's there, and whether it looks to be a promising picture.
Pre-screenings are simply reviews of an unfinished movie, under controlled conditions with a selected audience. Script screening is a review of an even more unfinished movie, prior to production shooting. The producer / director is constantly reviewing the unfinished movie, sometimes even altering it on the fly.
Now if you think the review will be useless when the movie is finished, perhaps it will be to you. Other people (film buffs / film students / ardent fans) will be facinated by the minutea of the changes, and will enjoy the craft of making a film more by seeing what is was, what it might have been, and how it is now through a few key scenes.
That's almost what 90% of the "extra features" disk content. The director voice over with details about the production, the deleted scenes which broke tempo, the side plots which were not deemed relevant, initial artwork, the special effects team showing the work in progress, etc.
I know it's sort of old-fashioned (because a plot is not eye candy), but I'd wager that his review of the plot won't be far from the mark when the film is released.
It's not that HP is dumb, it's greedy. HP owns something on the order of 50% of the IP that goes into an Itanium. If they can effectively block you from buying anything else, you buy into their patents. Intel is the other major patent holder.
Most of the patents for the Itanium are designed to make it impossible to produce an Itanium clone without violation the patents.
You won't get a bad mod rating.
Sometimes people complain about what they want to do, sometimes they complain about how they want to do it. If you insist that the goal is achieved in a particular way, you might warrant being told that's not the way things work.
I can complain that my coffee spills in my car on the way to work due to the rough road conditions. My mechanic might inspect my suspension, and upgrade or repair it. They might even suggest a different route or call the city to repair the street.
I can complain that my car doesn't float four inches above the road during my drive to work. My mechanic will then explain that cars ride on the road, they don't float above them. In this scenario, all I really want is to not spill my coffee, but I'll argue with my mechanic for hours before leaving in a huff because I never let my mechanic offer the best way to solve my problem.
Asking a professional for his opinion on how to solve the core problem is rare, too many people have solved a core problem in their head one way, and then demanded the professional to provide their solution. With an unlimited budget, perhaps the hover car would work, but then there would be complaints about poor cornering in the queue, followed up by a request to have wheels extend down from the hover car.... you get the idea.
Perhaps the problem is that some members of society demand that society solves their problems, even when their problems make no sense.
Once you expand your user knowledge beyond the limitations of the application and operating system interface, you are a programmer. It's not like programmers are not users, it is just that they are users with more detailed knowledge of what is possible and how things work. Getting two programs to share one video card is akin to getting two people to share one car. At times there will be contention, but with some effort there can be harmony. On the plus side, the programmers are not asking you to install a sound card for each program
Exactly what scenario provides you the ability to do anything without prior knowledge?
Books are sold assuming that you will put in the effort to learn the language and the effort to read them.
Food is sold assuming that you will put in the effort to prepare it and the effort to eat it.
Vehicles are sold assuming that you will put in the effort to learn the local laws for operating a vehicle, possibly take out an insurance policy, pay maintenance, provide fuel, and actually drive or provide someone to drive the vehicle.
Housing is sold or rented assuming that you know how to use the interior plumbing, you pay appropriate housing related taxes, you provide housing related maintenance, and you preform the effort to live in the house.
So there's no free ride. If you know how to check your email, but don't know how to maintain the software in a computer, you pay a professional. The benefit of open source is that you can hire a professional from wherever you like, instead of having to go to an exclusive provider which might turn you away because they can't be bothered to accept your money.
Only you can weigh the benefit of learning enough to "do it yourself" against the dollars that a professional would charge. I know very little about my car's transmission. In my case, I still find it cheaper to pay someone else to rebuild a transmission than the cost I would incur in learning how to rebuild a transmission and rebuilding my own. That's just life. Specialize and be the best at what you do, then pay others when you need to or live with the problem if you can.
Misinformation extradorinaire!
RedHat is binary free. You can download any current distribution of RedHat compiled. With some hunting around, you might even find the old ones. What you can't expect is for them to make available the binaries for the patches and bugfixes for that distribution.
Without the binaries for the patches and bugfixes, it is still binary free. You just have to use the rpm build system and do a lot of rpmbuild --rebuild to get the binaries. Failure to do so on your part is not lack of freedom, it's laziness.
RedHat doesn't point the finger at someone else and say "We can't fix it due to him!" There is a reason RedHat supplies so much back to the open source community and a lot of it has to do with supporting their customers.
From both of your statements, I'd wager that you've never paid for a RedHat product; or if you did, you never bothered to register it.
Oracle wants an operating system that's specifically tuned for it's product. That's great if all you intend to do is run Oracle on it, but most people eventually use their system for something else too. Then the tuning doesn't pay off, it works against you.
I remember the earliest Oracle installations, there were so many tweaks and configuration changes to the kernel, shared memory, enabled extensions, ... it seemed to go on forever. If Oracle had it's way, I'd imagine that they would eventually turn a PC into an embedded Oracle server. That's not necessarily a bad thing, unless you are in the business of selling full operating systems, like RedHat is.
Perhaps Oracle's treatment of Linux has changed a bit, but I'm not holding my breath. Old dogs use tried-but-true old tricks. Since Oracle still hasn't seen fit to rewrite their init.d stuff to be half sane, I doubt they are concerned about being friendly to others on a Linux server.
As corollary to "Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetency", try "Never assume that all business initiatives are foolproof or inherently based on logic."
Bush's PR department was awesome. You just need to catch up with the times.
The trick is to cry that everyone's out to get you, and that they only report things in a one-sided manner, but then to make sure that your side is the only one reported. Remember when the Democrats were blocking things in Congress under his administration? How was that possible with a Republican majority?
Bush effectively killed an entire branch of developmental science in the US. Labs shut down and people lost their jobs. Labs brave enough to continue on had to do so out of their own pocket. If it wasn't an aberration that fertility clinics make a ton of money from people willing to pay anything to have a child, no research on stem cells would have ever occurred in the United States.
So now we're almost ten years behind the rest of the world in discovering treatments with what amounts to a silver bullet that can actually replace dying tissues. That means that in the future, you'll have to import the treatments from other countries or fly there for treatment. Due to religion, America loses yet another manufacturing opportunity.
Did he plan it this way? I don't think so, I think he's just a good church-going guy who is willing to watch Science go to Hell because he believes the arguments that Scientists don't like Jesus.
Bush's PR only took a dive when the facts got so out-of-hand that he couldn't cover them up with more Fox News.
I think the life begins at conception idea is just a left over from ancient attempts at science. It uses the same ideas behind "Spontaneous generation", that life comes from inanimate matter.
Under the "Spontaneous generation" theory, life comes from non-living matter under the right conditions. Rain water mixed with mud will generate frogs. Meat left to rot will generate flies. Presence of pre-existing life is not a requirement.
For all the benefit that Aristotle bestowed on mankind, his dabblings in the realm of Science put it back for hundreds of years. He was good at forming logical arguments that were quite reasonable. For science you also have to deeply scrutinize the actual world, something that wasn't as easily available to him at the time. His fame (he is Aristotle) then drove his ideas into the world as "facts"; an error that Aristotle would never have permitted if he were alive at the time.
Louis Pasteur finally proved that Aristotle was completely wrong. The Church pre-exists Pasteur, and most of it's doctrine was written pre-Pasteur. So it's easy to see why strongly religious people believe that life is created at birth. They're completely wrong too, but they're going to be far too busy bickering about when birth occurs to think about Pasteur. The message that they should learn is that life is not created, but preserved through offspring.
In a traditional religious culture, the idea that life is preserved through offspring runs counter to idea of spontaneous generation is a fact. Spontaneous generation is deeply rooted in the Bible, as it would be in any book of it's age. Adam and Eve were never represented as having to develop. Moses's staff turned into a snake. Abraham's son Issac was spared from being sacrificed by a sheep that suddenly appeared entangled in a bush. The entire universe was made, and made quickly. After being raised to accept such examples, it's almost forgivable to think that life is created, but it is still completely wrong; life is a continuum that you pass on to your children.