Before you go harping about parity of viruses between Linux and Windows. Show me evidence of parity of viruses between Macintosh and Windows.
Nobody has proven their case that any operating system can achieve virus parity with windows. Everything I've learned about operating system design implies that Windows might be secured, but has a design that makes it much, much, much harder to achieve.
While it is true that more viruses could exist for Linux, asserting that with Linux acceptance comes virus parity with windows is FUD. I mean Windows beats Linux by three orders of magnitude. Windows beats Macintosh by three orders of magnitude. It beats commercial Unix by five orders of magnitude.
You'd better provide some exceptional evidence for making the exceptional claim that Linux virus proliferation is going to grow 50000%. More recent data will be appreciated.
You are right about making do with what you get, but exactly how did he lack resources in this case? He already has RHEL (and updates, so I'm guessing his support contract is up to date).
It's not like they're charging more for a non-caching domain name services server. In fact, he took a perfectly good non-caching name server, and then installed pre-packaged configuration files to make it a caching-nameserver. Then he started hacking away at the config file. Small wonder that fixes to the caching-nameserver config file will interfere with his setup. If the world worked any other way then caching-nameserver config files would never get bug fixes, ever.
He didn't know what he installed, ignored his vendor's documentation warning not to do it this way, ignored the name of the package he was installing, ignored the concept of production in the enterprise (no updates without testing), didn't bother to read RPM's log files, and restored to fire-fighting in an emergency "failure" scenario. There's half-a-dozen routine ways this could have been avoided, but he made mistakes along every step of the way.
In his favor, this sysadmin has balls. After being ignorant of his missteps, he's complaining that RPM saved a copy of his altered config file! I'll bet he won't even diff the changes into it before copying it back to it's original name.
Give this man a fish and he'll complain that you're ruining his diet. Teach him how to fish and he'll complain that you're dumping your fishing responsibilities on him. He just doesn't get it.
Too much gang fighting can worsen your skills on one-on-one combat.
I knew of this one guy who got really good at fighting gangs for local charities and stuff. He was huge, and he didn't even work out. He got his ass kicked by one man.
You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half-a-dozen people than when your only fighting just one person.
Don't worry, assuming they do succeed, they'll just say it's not reproducible.
Assuming they do build a second ship, then it's not scalable.
There's always news to be made in pointing out that old solutions are old and therefore not likely to work in the modern world. But then again, there's always news to be made in pointing out that the modern world is more modern than it need be and old solutions are making a comeback.
I don't think that there's news to be made on how news in itself isn't considered compelling enough that it can stand alone without the unnecessary spin.
True, airship crashes rarely involved the speeds or energy that are associated with airline crashes. In many airship accidents there are survivors (and more of them).
However, dying in an airship crash is not the only means of dying related to airship transportation. Line men (the guys that guided the airships to the mooring masts) would pull the airship into place (for the fine positioning work). They were accustomed to pulling the airship down and occasionally would be lifted off the ground (think big hops). Normally the added weight would pull the ship back down (assuming there were sufficient linemen)
In a few airship related deaths, linemen held to the line for too long (thinking it was going back down) when a sudden change in air pressure would literally pull them hundreds of feet into the air. Under such circumstances, the line men would have to hold onto the line or plummet to near-certain death. If the airship could not respond quickly enough, the line man would tire and drop to his death.
I'm not saying that this makes airship travel less safe than airplane travel, in fact it's much safer. Still different modes of transportation have their own associated risks. Comparing strict apples-to-apples isn't possible. I mean, how many people get kicked and die from their cars (as opposed to horses)?
Sure, there's a lot of ways you can load trucks. You can make them double-wide. You can purpose build them for specific loads. I've even seen videos of hovercraft-like enhanced weight distribution systems for trucks (no idea if it ever went into production).
Still, there are some items that are really so big, you have to start building the infrastructure to move them prior to building them. A ship like this would remove the need to build, maintain, lease, or own the transportation infrastructure. Under the right circumstances, it would even be cost-effective.
PS. For the really heavy stuff, the freeways would be damaged by improper transport. Now that would be really expensive transport!
Someone's been working overtime to overstate a falsehood. The Shenandoah, Akron, and Macon were (I might have one wrong) in the class of airships that were built using either stolen information from Zepplinwerks or war-plan Zepplin design.
The big difference was that anti-aircraft, rockets, and high-altitude air flight was pushing into the previous "safe" altitudes for airships. As a countermeasure the airships were being built even lighter for a higher maximum ceiling. These lighter "war" designs were not nearly as strong or stable as previous designs, but at the time they were drafted, not much could hit them.
Of course everything advances, eventually the Zepplin lost it's military advantage of being a platform that could not be easily hit. Duplicates based on late war-Zepplin plans could not (in any reasonable capacity) be considered the strongest airships in the world.
One billion dollars to fight something we can't consistently or accurately define.
Assuming there's a thousand of these illegal acts performed this year, that's a million dollars per act. This is nearly 7000 houses that could be bought outright and then given away in my neighborhood.
What a waste of money. It's nearly $3.32 of every man, woman, and child in the U.S.A (from 2007 population estimates). Somehow I don't think child pornography is so widespread that it requires this kind of money.
Sure, there will be people saying it's worth $3.32 to know that no child is being molested, but that's not what we're buying here. At best we're buying that people will fight children being exploited; something that we've been paying for already.
You seem to have made a statement which likely follows some sort of structured rule system which probably resembles logic and could represent a predicate in such a way that should the first part be true, then (according to the flawed absolutist theory) the second part is true, or at least I think so, but then again I could be wrong.
It's easy to blame the victim, that way you don't have to listen to his problem because he asked for it.
It's not likely that XBox failure rates are >20% (as another poster indicated would be necessary to randomly pick 11 successive failures). It's probably something much simpler like a repair division, refurbishing returned machines and shipping them as replacements. Such a strategy looks good from a business point of view, as you get to "recover" some of cost of failed hardware. However, should the diagnosis be wrong or incomplete, or if the repair center lacks the resources of the production center, your return will be substantially less reliable than a new machine.
Perhaps he chain smokes and his long haired dog likes to cuddle the machine for warmth while his apartment shakes as trains pass outside tossing droplets of condensing water from his window air conditioner into he beloved XBox 360 which is struggling to deal with the 118 Volt 66 Hz electricity. That still doesn't mean that he deserves to put up with the hassle of replacing his system 11 times. If the repair centers note excessive dog hair, water exposure, vibrational damage, dropping, etc. they should notify him and not entertain a 12th replacement. The fact that they are still returning replacements without cutting him off implies that they know they have bigger problems than an abusive customer.
I'm not saying that gaming systems needs to be mil-spec, but from the descriptions I've heard, the XBox 360 isn't the most robust machine out there. I doubt that they could ALL be wrong, even with the skweaky wheels making more noise.
So if someone with power asks you to do something illegal (so he can disassociate himself from the fallout, should it occur) and you refuse, should they be allowed to fire you and replace you with someone who will?
This case is a perfect example of setting a precedent using a very bad example. This guy would have been found guilty without the Google search, but he's trying to get the case thrown out on a technicality. His only defence is that data gathered from Google is not verified to be truthful, but the judge is saying that he's not throwing the case out because some of the evidence isn't verified to be truthful AS THERE IS ENOUGH VERIFIABLE EVIDENCE FROM OTHER SOURCES to convict him.
Now bring me a case that's based only on Googled evidence, and I hope you'll see a different outcome. If you convict on a case built solely on Googled information, then I expect you could be convicted based on gossip column evidence and other forms of hearsay.
The problems that people are complaining about here on slashdot is that it tends to validate Internet information in the media's eyes to have a court accept it. If such acceptance becomes a legal practice, then why not accept blog posted alibis from unverified sources? Why not accept Jack Thompson's web postings as proof of a video game / murder connection? Why not accept the Flat Earth Society's website as proof that a contractor didn't reinforce an airplane sufficently enough to handle flight too near the edge?
The Internet makes no distinction between fact, fiction, and all the stuff in-between. Habeus Corpus was invented to reduce the chance that you would be convicted on fictional evidence. Widespread admissibility of Internet information increases that chance. Googling allows you to pull up the information you seek, ignoring information that runs contrary to your desired goals. In some ways Google may distort reality by only providing you with information about what you want to know. When there's enough fiction out there, Googling can provide it by the truckload.
A short dark-haired mentor gives me strong warning about using root safely, including the possible dangers of using rm, going as far as to show me the lethal "rm -rf/" command. I get slightly bored and annoyed at being treated like an imbecile, but I'm new and must be seasoned for tasty consumption. Mentor leaves for soda input.
Act Two
Mentor reenters, wielding refreshing cola. Proceeds to perform multistep installation of software guided by a dozen pages of instructions. After completion, we verify correct operation of software, noting that with the other burdens on this machine; it's quite a busy box.
Act Three
Mentor starts closing old X terminals, but then wants to check partition use. Raises an X window and presses enter a dozen or so times to clear text off the top of the screen. Halarity ensues as it's the same root X window with the "rm -rf/" command sitting at the prompt (just like he left it). Mentor tries to type control-C, but it is too late. Too much of the filesystem is gone. Irony is that I was to be trained to install the backup system on the same machine on Monday.
We lost the machine and spent the next three days solid reinstalling it and it's software. I was told by Mentor that it was "good for my training". Once during the reinstall, Mentor lost track of which machine he was telnet-ed into and rebooted me. To his credit, he later became a valued asset of the company. To my credit, I've never typed that command in unintentionally.
It's been a long time for me, but I used to work in the Biological Sciences.
There's an agreement within Biology that the first listed author is the "primary" author of the work; that is, the person who championed the project, did the bulk of the research, and basically was in charge. The last name was for the person who provided the mentor role; that is the guidance to avoid pitfalls, the initial peer review, and typically the laboratory. In papers with more than two names, the intermediate names are listed in order of contribuatory importance.
I think you've misunderstood the implied cultural aspects of name order within Biology. If this were a car race, the professor would be viewed as a sponsor, and the primary author as the driver. For the professor to swap names would be to have the sponsor claim that they drove across the finish line while the real driver was in the restroom.
In big business, eventually the brightest get burnt out after having their ideas rehashed and claimed by others, but in Biology a good first authoriship makes career determining awards, like whether you'll obtain grant funding or be passed over. If this is true, I wouldn't be suprised in the least, and the professor has majorly screwed over his pupil.
Academia is not democratic, but it's not trial by combat either.
So what would differentiate the EFF from any other business. That they are the "good guys"?
Why should I write code for them, if it's not for a cause that's more noble than having a open "hobby license" while depriving me of using that code in my workplace? Why would my company allow me to fix code that they have to then pay to use in their products?
Since most of the open source / GPL licensed code comes from corporate backed programmers (thank you very much RedHat), I think it's biting the hand that feeds the system to make those corporations that donate pay twice. If they pay for the maintenance, improvement, and creation of these products, why should they pay to use them because they desired to lessen their financial burden by open-sourcing it?
Once all the "menial" jobs are replaced, who's going to pick up the slack for the 80% of the population that's no longer spending money on said items since they don't have a job?
We are so dependent on capitalisim that we can't just destroy all of the lower classes in a fell swoop. We need those people to be buying the food off the grocery store shelves.
Another weakness is that the operational costs of a grocery store robot have to be absorbed by the grocery store. Now you might not be fully aware, but most grocery stores are quite competetive already, so who's going to volunteer to raise their prices for the same service to the customer? A customer doesn't care as much that the can was placed on the shelf by a robot as they do about the price is $20 cheaper at the checkout.
And it's a lot easier to replace (aka fire) a defective employee than to repair a defective robot. Don't forget, about 80% of all non-union grocery store workers make less than a dollar over the minimum wage. That's just under $300 / week. And they show up in numbers when needed (scheduled) so you can get an extra three workers on Saturday night (to restock from Saturday sales) without having extra robots stand idle all week long.
One robot won't be enough for a grocery store. If it breaks, then the store is out of order until it's repaired. Might be able to keep it open anyway, but 10% of the items are always the first to sell out. Water sells fast enough to restock the shelves 3 to 4 times a day. Paper towels, milk, and seasonal items, sell quickly too. Some sales are based on presentation (ever buy fresh veggies that are in disarray?) and need constant tending to look good (ever buy a veggie without moving a bunch of them around?).
And if you don't implement the change-over quickly, you'll run into human nature. Like a non-functional robot in the back room because it's been rammed with a pallete jack.
I'd say that the assembly lines where robots have traditionally done so well will benefit from vision improvements to robotics. These vision-enabled robots will be able to perform minor corrections for slightly "out-of-place" parts, making the control of location less critical to high quality production; however, I don't think we'll be buying our food from our robotic grocers just yet.
For robots to work well in a grocery setting, you need to redesign the store to accomodate robots. There's just too many varied tasks, leading to a need for too many "types" of robots (or robots that are not significantly better than people). There's just too much fluctuation in the labor needs, leading to too many robots that need to sit idle until peak hours.
Remeber, with all of the "technology" available today, grocery stores basically use only: 1. Electronic time clocks. 2. Electronic cash registers. 3. Electric pallate jacks. 4. Refridgeration. 5. Closed circuit television cameras. 6. Door sensors. 7. Meat cutting apparatus. 8. Hand held ordering systems.
There's a reson they haven't modernized more. They haven't found it to be more profitable.
Although it's not Bank of America's, my persisting gripe is with the zip code verification of credit cards at the pump.
Sure, I believe that it works flawlessly for millions of people, but I've never been able to use my card without a trip indoors again. Seems that I'm not privy to my own billing address, as nobody tends to believe that their system might be flawed.
What smacks me as a double insult is that they implemented it claiming that it's more secure than pin numbers. My pin number contains more digits than my zip code, and that one number is only known to me, while the other number is known to anyone who can figure out how to look my name up in a phone book. I'll bet that 80% of all gas purchases at my nearby station are made by people that live in the three nearest zip codes. It's not like you can trivially change your zip code, and I'm sure mail theives are appreciative that they now need one less piece of information.
Thank you oil companies for being so stupid. You make my day every time my car runs low on gas and it's raining or cold outside.
At least you don't allow me to fill up my car, because some other inane policy prevents turning the pump on from inside unless you know how much gas you're buying. Which only means that I get to enjoy this inconveinence more often than need be.
Being a dance snob would require some skill in dancing... otherwise it would just be plain foolish!:)
Thanks for the tidbit on coreography. I've been living under the misconception that coreography was mostly tied to ballet, musicals, et. al. I guess non-improvisational solo dance could fall under it too, provided that the dancer's movement was fully planned. And either way, the pantomime category would cover any singular dancer where the coreography left off.
Now that I've taken a mis-step, I guess I'll meet an unsavory dranatic fate at the hands of the Imperial Russian Ballet in a dark alley...
Few dancers tend to be perfect at a dance move on the day they are born. Most will do the electric slide badly at least a few times, and a few will correct their missteps and move on to the correct electric slide. A few will elevate it just a bit further in pursuit of the "perfect" electric slide.
A few truly experienced and seasoned dancers will probably be able to perform the steps correctly the first time, assuming that it's not too challenging (and they have correct instruction).
However, this will never go very far. I can assert my freedom of speech rights and declare that my actions constitute speech, and I'm protesting the constraints upon my person to do such a dance move in a constricting and confining way. If a closed, raised fist can constitute speech (and it damn well should) then a few misplaced dance steps can also constitute speech. Otherwise, the Ministry of Funny Walks might just as well sue the entire world for not performing their walking correctly.
It seems to be pedantic, but coreography is the coordination of dancers. Electric slide only requires one dancer, and what the others on the dance floor do is almost totally irrelevant (barring collision).
I don't believe that the Funky Chicken, the Swim, the Shuffle, the Robot, the Cabbage Patch, the Pistachio, and many others qualify as coreography. Perhaps they legally do, but that smacks of lawyers being paid to bend definitions in the English language as money promotes particular thinking; aka "learned stupidity". Lawyers are not stupid, but they'll act stupid if they're well paid and it's the best strategy available.
It's likely that the historical precendent for determining if a performance falls under the coreography clauses is whether the performance involves a significant portion (or all) of the dancing proximity. I'd expect stiff fines for ripping off a newly coreographed ballet, a musical, or even a cheerleading routine. Not for someone performing the Pony.
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There's prior art to the I am rich app. It's called the pet rock.
Faddish items are always a winning idea, provided that you have to convince the world that your fad is worth their cash.
Before you go harping about parity of viruses between Linux and Windows. Show me evidence of parity of viruses between Macintosh and Windows.
Nobody has proven their case that any operating system can achieve virus parity with windows. Everything I've learned about operating system design implies that Windows might be secured, but has a design that makes it much, much, much harder to achieve.
While it is true that more viruses could exist for Linux, asserting that with Linux acceptance comes virus parity with windows is FUD. I mean Windows beats Linux by three orders of magnitude. Windows beats Macintosh by three orders of magnitude. It beats commercial Unix by five orders of magnitude.
Sure my data is a little old, but here's the source: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/10/06/linux_vs_windows_viruses/
You'd better provide some exceptional evidence for making the exceptional claim that Linux virus proliferation is going to grow 50000%. More recent data will be appreciated.
You are right about making do with what you get, but exactly how did he lack resources in this case? He already has RHEL (and updates, so I'm guessing his support contract is up to date).
It's not like they're charging more for a non-caching domain name services server. In fact, he took a perfectly good non-caching name server, and then installed pre-packaged configuration files to make it a caching-nameserver. Then he started hacking away at the config file. Small wonder that fixes to the caching-nameserver config file will interfere with his setup. If the world worked any other way then caching-nameserver config files would never get bug fixes, ever.
He didn't know what he installed, ignored his vendor's documentation warning not to do it this way, ignored the name of the package he was installing, ignored the concept of production in the enterprise (no updates without testing), didn't bother to read RPM's log files, and restored to fire-fighting in an emergency "failure" scenario. There's half-a-dozen routine ways this could have been avoided, but he made mistakes along every step of the way.
In his favor, this sysadmin has balls. After being ignorant of his missteps, he's complaining that RPM saved a copy of his altered config file! I'll bet he won't even diff the changes into it before copying it back to it's original name.
Give this man a fish and he'll complain that you're ruining his diet. Teach him how to fish and he'll complain that you're dumping your fishing responsibilities on him. He just doesn't get it.
Too much gang fighting can worsen your skills on one-on-one combat.
I knew of this one guy who got really good at fighting gangs for local charities and stuff. He was huge, and he didn't even work out. He got his ass kicked by one man.
You see, you use different moves when you're fighting half-a-dozen people than when your only fighting just one person.
Don't worry, assuming they do succeed, they'll just say it's not reproducible.
Assuming they do build a second ship, then it's not scalable.
There's always news to be made in pointing out that old solutions are old and therefore not likely to work in the modern world. But then again, there's always news to be made in pointing out that the modern world is more modern than it need be and old solutions are making a comeback.
I don't think that there's news to be made on how news in itself isn't considered compelling enough that it can stand alone without the unnecessary spin.
True, airship crashes rarely involved the speeds or energy that are associated with airline crashes. In many airship accidents there are survivors (and more of them).
However, dying in an airship crash is not the only means of dying related to airship transportation. Line men (the guys that guided the airships to the mooring masts) would pull the airship into place (for the fine positioning work). They were accustomed to pulling the airship down and occasionally would be lifted off the ground (think big hops). Normally the added weight would pull the ship back down (assuming there were sufficient linemen)
In a few airship related deaths, linemen held to the line for too long (thinking it was going back down) when a sudden change in air pressure would literally pull them hundreds of feet into the air. Under such circumstances, the line men would have to hold onto the line or plummet to near-certain death. If the airship could not respond quickly enough, the line man would tire and drop to his death.
I'm not saying that this makes airship travel less safe than airplane travel, in fact it's much safer. Still different modes of transportation have their own associated risks. Comparing strict apples-to-apples isn't possible. I mean, how many people get kicked and die from their cars (as opposed to horses)?
For some really big things, roads are not enough.
Sure, there's a lot of ways you can load trucks. You can make them double-wide. You can purpose build them for specific loads. I've even seen videos of hovercraft-like enhanced weight distribution systems for trucks (no idea if it ever went into production).
Still, there are some items that are really so big, you have to start building the infrastructure to move them prior to building them. A ship like this would remove the need to build, maintain, lease, or own the transportation infrastructure. Under the right circumstances, it would even be cost-effective.
PS. For the really heavy stuff, the freeways would be damaged by improper transport. Now that would be really expensive transport!
The strongest airship in the world?
Someone's been working overtime to overstate a falsehood. The Shenandoah, Akron, and Macon were (I might have one wrong) in the class of airships that were built using either stolen information from Zepplinwerks or war-plan Zepplin design.
The big difference was that anti-aircraft, rockets, and high-altitude air flight was pushing into the previous "safe" altitudes for airships. As a countermeasure the airships were being built even lighter for a higher maximum ceiling. These lighter "war" designs were not nearly as strong or stable as previous designs, but at the time they were drafted, not much could hit them.
Of course everything advances, eventually the Zepplin lost it's military advantage of being a platform that could not be easily hit. Duplicates based on late war-Zepplin plans could not (in any reasonable capacity) be considered the strongest airships in the world.
One billion dollars to fight something we can't consistently or accurately define.
Assuming there's a thousand of these illegal acts performed this year, that's a million dollars per act. This is nearly 7000 houses that could be bought outright and then given away in my neighborhood.
What a waste of money. It's nearly $3.32 of every man, woman, and child in the U.S.A (from 2007 population estimates). Somehow I don't think child pornography is so widespread that it requires this kind of money.
Sure, there will be people saying it's worth $3.32 to know that no child is being molested, but that's not what we're buying here. At best we're buying that people will fight children being exploited; something that we've been paying for already.
You can still do it, just be prepared for criminal charges that will follow.
You seem to have made a statement which likely follows some sort of structured rule system which probably resembles logic and could represent a predicate in such a way that should the first part be true, then (according to the flawed absolutist theory) the second part is true, or at least I think so, but then again I could be wrong.
No wonder the sith killed all the Jedi.
It's easy to blame the victim, that way you don't have to listen to his problem because he asked for it.
It's not likely that XBox failure rates are >20% (as another poster indicated would be necessary to randomly pick 11 successive failures). It's probably something much simpler like a repair division, refurbishing returned machines and shipping them as replacements. Such a strategy looks good from a business point of view, as you get to "recover" some of cost of failed hardware. However, should the diagnosis be wrong or incomplete, or if the repair center lacks the resources of the production center, your return will be substantially less reliable than a new machine.
Perhaps he chain smokes and his long haired dog likes to cuddle the machine for warmth while his apartment shakes as trains pass outside tossing droplets of condensing water from his window air conditioner into he beloved XBox 360 which is struggling to deal with the 118 Volt 66 Hz electricity. That still doesn't mean that he deserves to put up with the hassle of replacing his system 11 times. If the repair centers note excessive dog hair, water exposure, vibrational damage, dropping, etc. they should notify him and not entertain a 12th replacement. The fact that they are still returning replacements without cutting him off implies that they know they have bigger problems than an abusive customer.
I'm not saying that gaming systems needs to be mil-spec, but from the descriptions I've heard, the XBox 360 isn't the most robust machine out there. I doubt that they could ALL be wrong, even with the skweaky wheels making more noise.
So if someone with power asks you to do something illegal (so he can disassociate himself from the fallout, should it occur) and you refuse, should they be allowed to fire you and replace you with someone who will?
This case is a perfect example of setting a precedent using a very bad example. This guy would have been found guilty without the Google search, but he's trying to get the case thrown out on a technicality. His only defence is that data gathered from Google is not verified to be truthful, but the judge is saying that he's not throwing the case out because some of the evidence isn't verified to be truthful AS THERE IS ENOUGH VERIFIABLE EVIDENCE FROM OTHER SOURCES to convict him.
Now bring me a case that's based only on Googled evidence, and I hope you'll see a different outcome. If you convict on a case built solely on Googled information, then I expect you could be convicted based on gossip column evidence and other forms of hearsay.
The problems that people are complaining about here on slashdot is that it tends to validate Internet information in the media's eyes to have a court accept it. If such acceptance becomes a legal practice, then why not accept blog posted alibis from unverified sources? Why not accept Jack Thompson's web postings as proof of a video game / murder connection? Why not accept the Flat Earth Society's website as proof that a contractor didn't reinforce an airplane sufficently enough to handle flight too near the edge?
The Internet makes no distinction between fact, fiction, and all the stuff in-between. Habeus Corpus was invented to reduce the chance that you would be convicted on fictional evidence. Widespread admissibility of Internet information increases that chance. Googling allows you to pull up the information you seek, ignoring information that runs contrary to your desired goals. In some ways Google may distort reality by only providing you with information about what you want to know. When there's enough fiction out there, Googling can provide it by the truckload.
Although not a big red button....
/" command. I get slightly bored and annoyed at being treated like an imbecile, but I'm new and must be seasoned for tasty consumption. Mentor leaves for soda input.
/" command sitting at the prompt (just like he left it). Mentor tries to type control-C, but it is too late. Too much of the filesystem is gone. Irony is that I was to be trained to install the backup system on the same machine on Monday.
After a long multi-year Intermisson
Act One
A short dark-haired mentor gives me strong warning about using root safely, including the possible dangers of using rm, going as far as to show me the lethal "rm -rf
Act Two
Mentor reenters, wielding refreshing cola. Proceeds to perform multistep installation of software guided by a dozen pages of instructions. After completion, we verify correct operation of software, noting that with the other burdens on this machine; it's quite a busy box.
Act Three
Mentor starts closing old X terminals, but then wants to check partition use. Raises an X window and presses enter a dozen or so times to clear text off the top of the screen. Halarity ensues as it's the same root X window with the "rm -rf
We lost the machine and spent the next three days solid reinstalling it and it's software. I was told by Mentor that it was "good for my training". Once during the reinstall, Mentor lost track of which machine he was telnet-ed into and rebooted me. To his credit, he later became a valued asset of the company. To my credit, I've never typed that command in unintentionally.
PS. Hi Peter
You only used one click to submit your comment, so GO SUE YOURSELF!
It's been a long time for me, but I used to work in the Biological Sciences.
There's an agreement within Biology that the first listed author is the "primary" author of the work; that is, the person who championed the project, did the bulk of the research, and basically was in charge. The last name was for the person who provided the mentor role; that is the guidance to avoid pitfalls, the initial peer review, and typically the laboratory. In papers with more than two names, the intermediate names are listed in order of contribuatory importance.
I think you've misunderstood the implied cultural aspects of name order within Biology. If this were a car race, the professor would be viewed as a sponsor, and the primary author as the driver. For the professor to swap names would be to have the sponsor claim that they drove across the finish line while the real driver was in the restroom.
In big business, eventually the brightest get burnt out after having their ideas rehashed and claimed by others, but in Biology a good first authoriship makes career determining awards, like whether you'll obtain grant funding or be passed over. If this is true, I wouldn't be suprised in the least, and the professor has majorly screwed over his pupil.
Academia is not democratic, but it's not trial by combat either.
Perhaps it's the new all-covering encryption.
Memories! You're talking about memories!
It's amazing that the charge was dropped when it hit the news. Ever wonder if it would still be around without a lot of attention?
So what would differentiate the EFF from any other business. That they are the "good guys"?
Why should I write code for them, if it's not for a cause that's more noble than having a open "hobby license" while depriving me of using that code in my workplace? Why would my company allow me to fix code that they have to then pay to use in their products?
Since most of the open source / GPL licensed code comes from corporate backed programmers (thank you very much RedHat), I think it's biting the hand that feeds the system to make those corporations that donate pay twice. If they pay for the maintenance, improvement, and creation of these products, why should they pay to use them because they desired to lessen their financial burden by open-sourcing it?
Once all the "menial" jobs are replaced, who's going to pick up the slack for the 80% of the population that's no longer spending money on said items since they don't have a job?
We are so dependent on capitalisim that we can't just destroy all of the lower classes in a fell swoop. We need those people to be buying the food off the grocery store shelves.
Another weakness is that the operational costs of a grocery store robot have to be absorbed by the grocery store. Now you might not be fully aware, but most grocery stores are quite competetive already, so who's going to volunteer to raise their prices for the same service to the customer? A customer doesn't care as much that the can was placed on the shelf by a robot as they do about the price is $20 cheaper at the checkout.
And it's a lot easier to replace (aka fire) a defective employee than to repair a defective robot. Don't forget, about 80% of all non-union grocery store workers make less than a dollar over the minimum wage. That's just under $300 / week. And they show up in numbers when needed (scheduled) so you can get an extra three workers on Saturday night (to restock from Saturday sales) without having extra robots stand idle all week long.
One robot won't be enough for a grocery store. If it breaks, then the store is out of order until it's repaired. Might be able to keep it open anyway, but 10% of the items are always the first to sell out. Water sells fast enough to restock the shelves 3 to 4 times a day. Paper towels, milk, and seasonal items, sell quickly too. Some sales are based on presentation (ever buy fresh veggies that are in disarray?) and need constant tending to look good (ever buy a veggie without moving a bunch of them around?).
And if you don't implement the change-over quickly, you'll run into human nature. Like a non-functional robot in the back room because it's been rammed with a pallete jack.
I'd say that the assembly lines where robots have traditionally done so well will benefit from vision improvements to robotics. These vision-enabled robots will be able to perform minor corrections for slightly "out-of-place" parts, making the control of location less critical to high quality production; however, I don't think we'll be buying our food from our robotic grocers just yet.
For robots to work well in a grocery setting, you need to redesign the store to accomodate robots. There's just too many varied tasks, leading to a need for too many "types" of robots (or robots that are not significantly better than people). There's just too much fluctuation in the labor needs, leading to too many robots that need to sit idle until peak hours.
Remeber, with all of the "technology" available today, grocery stores basically use only:
1. Electronic time clocks.
2. Electronic cash registers.
3. Electric pallate jacks.
4. Refridgeration.
5. Closed circuit television cameras.
6. Door sensors.
7. Meat cutting apparatus.
8. Hand held ordering systems.
There's a reson they haven't modernized more. They haven't found it to be more profitable.
Although it's not Bank of America's, my persisting gripe is with the zip code verification of credit cards at the pump.
Sure, I believe that it works flawlessly for millions of people, but I've never been able to use my card without a trip indoors again. Seems that I'm not privy to my own billing address, as nobody tends to believe that their system might be flawed.
What smacks me as a double insult is that they implemented it claiming that it's more secure than pin numbers. My pin number contains more digits than my zip code, and that one number is only known to me, while the other number is known to anyone who can figure out how to look my name up in a phone book. I'll bet that 80% of all gas purchases at my nearby station are made by people that live in the three nearest zip codes. It's not like you can trivially change your zip code, and I'm sure mail theives are appreciative that they now need one less piece of information.
Thank you oil companies for being so stupid. You make my day every time my car runs low on gas and it's raining or cold outside.
At least you don't allow me to fill up my car, because some other inane policy prevents turning the pump on from inside unless you know how much gas you're buying. Which only means that I get to enjoy this inconveinence more often than need be.
Being a dance snob would require some skill in dancing... otherwise it would just be plain foolish! :)
Thanks for the tidbit on coreography. I've been living under the misconception that coreography was mostly tied to ballet, musicals, et. al. I guess non-improvisational solo dance could fall under it too, provided that the dancer's movement was fully planned. And either way, the pantomime category would cover any singular dancer where the coreography left off.
Now that I've taken a mis-step, I guess I'll meet an unsavory dranatic fate at the hands of the Imperial Russian Ballet in a dark alley...
Few dancers tend to be perfect at a dance move on the day they are born. Most will do the electric slide badly at least a few times, and a few will correct their missteps and move on to the correct electric slide. A few will elevate it just a bit further in pursuit of the "perfect" electric slide.
A few truly experienced and seasoned dancers will probably be able to perform the steps correctly the first time, assuming that it's not too challenging (and they have correct instruction).
However, this will never go very far. I can assert my freedom of speech rights and declare that my actions constitute speech, and I'm protesting the constraints upon my person to do such a dance move in a constricting and confining way. If a closed, raised fist can constitute speech (and it damn well should) then a few misplaced dance steps can also constitute speech. Otherwise, the Ministry of Funny Walks might just as well sue the entire world for not performing their walking correctly.
It seems to be pedantic, but coreography is the coordination of dancers. Electric slide only requires one dancer, and what the others on the dance floor do is almost totally irrelevant (barring collision).
I don't believe that the Funky Chicken, the Swim, the Shuffle, the Robot, the Cabbage Patch, the Pistachio, and many others qualify as coreography. Perhaps they legally do, but that smacks of lawyers being paid to bend definitions in the English language as money promotes particular thinking; aka "learned stupidity". Lawyers are not stupid, but they'll act stupid if they're well paid and it's the best strategy available.
It's likely that the historical precendent for determining if a performance falls under the coreography clauses is whether the performance involves a significant portion (or all) of the dancing proximity. I'd expect stiff fines for ripping off a newly coreographed ballet, a musical, or even a cheerleading routine. Not for someone performing the Pony.