As this relatively well-known piece of paperwork shows (http://www.sbranigan.com/nasa/apollo11-cust.jpg) they are quite fussy about you coming back as well.
I think I probably got a similar experience some years back on a scuba-diving course out of Airlie Beach in Australia. For the last two days of the training we were on a boat moored over the barrier reef some 10-15 miles offshore. That part of Australia is a long way from any major cities and, since it was so hot, I slept on deck. For the first time in my life I realised that the Milky Way actually looks like a splash of milk across the sky.
Plus you got the bonus of when you peed over the side of the boat, incandescent creatures lit up like fireworks.
When I was a member of the ANSI C and C++ standards committees the rule was that you had to have attended two of the last three meetings to be able to vote. But that was ANSI, NOT the Swedish Standards Institute which will have its own rules that apparently (and unsurprisingly) are not the same as ANSI. Its position is then relayed to the ISO/IEC process and is then subject to the rules of procedure that apply there. Each national body is free to make up its own rules as long as it's happy to live by the outcome.
Technically, AFAIK, there is still no European constitution. It was rejected by the voters (not that that has stopped the German presidency from reinstating it in all but name).
And in line with supporting the parent post: Don't trust these lying, cheating bastards an inch. I normally try to be moderate in my choice of words but in recent years I have been more exposed to what goes on at the 'political' level of British and European society. There's a weird other-wordliness about what happens. At one level, they pay great attention to probity, honesty and decency (most of the time) but what they hide or pretend not to notice (in my view) is that the entire system is *intellectually* corrupt and that it poisons the minds of the people who work in it.
There's an old joke about the former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who, it goes, falls in a river and cries for help. Two members of the public go to his aid but the three politicians he was with immediately start debating what he means by 'help'. As in Orwell's world, words do not NOT mean what the public think they mean. Nothing as obvious as the made-up words of doublespeak but instead an insidious corruption of the meaning of words to the point where what a normal person would consider to be plain and obviously of one meaning is taken by those inside the system to mean more or less the opposite.
So when they way that they don't intend to have another computer implemented inventions debate, don't believe a word of it. At face value it probably does mean that there won't be a computer implemented inventions debate. But nothing prevents an automaton implemented inventions debate or a computer assisted implementations debate or anything else the sleazy scum decide to come up with. There is a SERIOUS sickness at the heart of modern western politics but unfortunately there is no sign yet that the patient realises he's ill.
At face value, the list of defect reports might be assumed by a naive reader to suggest that the C standard is full of holes and would metaphorically never float. In fact on rereading it, I think that in the main it supports my point:)
Any standard that's intended for human readership will suffer precisely because it's written for humans. Attempts to use formal specifications (perhaps denotational semantics or something like 'Z') haven't really caught the public imagination though it would have been interesting to try. I'm sure I remember that being discussed tangentially during one of the boozy degenerations of an ANSI meeting after a long day of wordsmithing circa 1985.
Maybe it was a typo that italicised the 'If' in 'If you have been involved'.. my track record in involvement in the ANSI standard for C is well known for those who care to look. For those who don't, ISBN 978-0201544336 and http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/ may assist.
Sadly I'm also caught up in the mire of OOXML fast-track reviewing as a member of the British Standards Institute's panel. There are some very serious questions to be raised about just what can be done with a document that's so big. It probably took hundreds of staff-years of work in total to produce something as short as the C standard. Where does the effort come from to review and QA something so very much bigger?
"You could find similar problems in virtually all specs" Well I would like to see your evidence of that! Having worked on the the original C standard extensively and done a fair bit of work on the C++ standard, I find it rather annoying that an unsubstantiated statement like this is trotted out.
In the standards committee it was typical to find 50 people in a room reading *each* *single* *word* of the draft standard and arguing for hours over a single line - 8 hours a day for five days at a stretch. Immense attention to detail was spent on considering every possible interpretation of the words and wrangling over the best and most precise, unambiguous way to define what the standard was supposed to mean. The fact that the original C standard passed through almost unmodified (though slightly extended) in its later version is testament to all that work. Typically the people who work on standards committees put in vast amounts of effort to avoid precisely the lameness that TFA's article refers to. Seriously - not to specify whether SIN uses degrees or radians is inconceivable for an ISO standard.
Bill Plauger in particular did Trojan amounts of work on the C libraries to avoid dumb mistakes of those kinds.
Do it!!!! I did the same. The more people who contact the Conservatives on this, the more they will listen. They aren't so awash with votes that they can ignore you. Remember, this is a vote-winner for almost nobody, but if they sense a vote-loser, they will tread much more carefully. Of course it's possible that they will weigh campaign contributions more highly, but unless you let them know you hate this idea, they won't be able to tot up the competing costs to them.
.. that if OOXML is accepted as a 'standard' and compliance with the 'standard' must be demonstrated, Massachusetts won't be able to deploy Word 2007 since it doesn't implement OOXML correctly. In fact nobody can implement OOXML correctly since the document is internally contradictory and many of the examples pieces of code are invalid XML.
The hope that anyone will test for compliance is though, probably, a pipe-dream. Maybe if concerned voters raised a legal challenge when procurement was done?
And if the satellite doesn't have all those features, how are they going to be retrofitted?
If the satellite is dumb enough to accept a signal on the uplink frequency and retransmit it on the corresponding downlink without applying any checks, there's nothing the ground controllers can do about it except turn the damn thing off.
And best of luck trying to spot a rogue uplink from bandit country where helicopters are just the juicy kind of target the guys on the ground would like to see...
total boob? Please: 'complete prat' is closer to what you are looking for. You could opt for the shorter 'twat', both of which are fine until you discover what they actually mean in the vernacular.
It may be of interest that 'no comment' can be used in British courts as a symptom of guilt. The right to silence still exists but it is now explicitly stated in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that courts and juries may draw inferences from a suspect's silence in custody or in court (Sections 34 to 39). http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/U kpga_19940033_en_4.htm#mdiv34
I think that the concept of 'running the country' is where the problem lies. I don't believe that politicians are the right people to do that and almost certainly nobody else is. Therefore, the less anyone 'runs' the country the better. That's not to say that strategic decisions should not be taken but there should be as few of those as possible and in the main people should be left to undertake collective decision making at a level much closer to where they live. It's time to rethink what democracy is about - the representative model as currently exercised in the Western world is not working, in my view.
This is so sad: "if the action benefits the people, it's usually postponed many times, if it benefits those in power or the machinery of gov't, it happens more quickly" because it is SO TOTALLY ACCURATE. Thank you for distilling that for me into words - I had sensed it, but not condensed so precisely. And that's why we need to take power away from the politicians and put it back into the hands of ordinary people. This is too important to leave up to them:(
"But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening"
Something that the majority of Slashdot readers seem not to understand (and with justification) is that purchasing decisions are not rational.
A basic training course on sales techniques will, unless it's totally bogus, emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.
As the world becomes a more complex place and huge amounts of information become available to prospective purchasers there's a kind of paradox emerging that will horrify economists who cling to the theory that perfect markets are based on rational purchasers with perfect information, because the reverse is happening.
Most purchasers are not analytic personalities. People who hang around Slashdot underestimate how much they have (in general) honed their own analytic skills with years of practice while most middle-tier managers in corporates never did. For those non-analytic people, being asked to rationally evaluate a mass of facts and statistics is a SCARY proposition. That's not how they got their job, they did that by looking good in a suit and licking backsides more or less assiduously whilst being ok at judging how the politics are shaping up. Their skillset is way different from yours and they react differently.
The more information you make available to those people, the less they are likely to use and the more they will look around for 'safe' decisions. This will be especially true if their promotion prospects may depend on the outcome. THEY ARE NOT SPENDING THEIR OWN MONEY, it's the company's. Their decision will be based on the likelihood of retaining their job or getting promoted before their mistakes are discovered.
So, figure for yourself. On the one hand some technical guy they distrust because he's smart can 'download an ISO from the interweb and build a cluster myself' or 'buy from Microsoft'.
The first bit of irrational figuring will be 'the Microsoft stuff costs tens of thousands but the geek says it's free - that does not compute, he must be wrong'. The second will be 'if it goes wrong who will get the blame'. Guess the outcome of that one for yourself.
The result is fairly predictable IF you understand the parameters. Microsoft's marketing does understand where it's operating and will be well aware that its customer base is heavily loaded with irrational people. Most likely they are hearing squeals from that customer base asking where Microsoft's compute cluster solution is because 'we want to buy one'. It would be foolish not to give them one surely?
I happened to be listening to Evan Davis, the BBC's economics editor on the TV a couple of nights back. His explanation for the high market values (in part) was cash flooding out of China in search of a place to lodge due to a) restrictions on investment in factories and equipment to prevent the economy overheating any more and b) a wish to spread their risk.
I for one would be fascinated to see the public response to a semi-nude calendar of OSS luminaries. When a bunch of middle-aged ladies did it here it made thousands for their organisation and a film got made of it... mind you, it would take a strong stomach to tolerate seeing it pinned to the wall.
In my experience of secondary education in the UK, the lack of support is a key issue in holding back the acceptance of FLOSS in schools. Not the kind of join-a-mailing-list-and-ask support at which most FLOSS packages excel (I find Debian especially good for that) but a different kind of support which is harder for individual package developers to put in place. From what I see, most hard-pressed teachers and heads want someone they can ring and to whom they can, essentially, say "I want to buy one of those" whilst they point to a solution that someone else is already running. The next problem for them is "if I buy that, where can I get a technician to run it?"
They don't want to roll-their-own FLOSS implemenation, they just want stuff that works and needs no wizard to keep it running.
Most schools in the UK can't even pay enough to get good *windows* support technicians, let alone get support for a GNU/Linux guru.
As more are brave enough to go ahead anyhow, the situation will ease but this is a classic symptom of a technically-led young sub-industry - infrastructure like support services will only develop when an emerging pool of early adopters grows to sufficient size.
Because of that, and because of the need for a recognised brand in this area, I have worked on solving some of those issues through Cutter which does provide a pre-packaged and commercially supported 'solution' for shools. Others will probably do so as well. Mostly it's a matter of time but nobody should really be surprised by that finding.
Slashdot Mirror
As this relatively well-known piece of paperwork shows (http://www.sbranigan.com/nasa/apollo11-cust.jpg) they are quite fussy about you coming back as well.
Man that one sounds good. What's the url of the torrent?
Used to be that 1F was a beast of a thing but now they sell 'em in the motor shops to beef up your bass when the wiring can't deliver
100A on peaks
500 of them is heavy, but not THAT heavy - seriously, go take a look at your local auto hi-fi store
For something lighter:
http://www.referenceaudiomods.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=RAM&Product_Code=ELNA_1F
That allegedly weighs just 0.02 pounds, so 500 of them is 10lbs the lot.
I think I probably got a similar experience some years back on a scuba-diving course out of Airlie Beach in Australia. For the last two days of the training we were on a boat moored over the barrier reef some 10-15 miles offshore. That part of Australia is a long way from any major cities and, since it was so hot, I slept on deck. For the first time in my life I realised that the Milky Way actually looks like a splash of milk across the sky.
Plus you got the bonus of when you peed over the side of the boat, incandescent creatures lit up like fireworks.
When I was a member of the ANSI C and C++ standards committees the rule was that you had to have attended two of the last three meetings to be able to vote. But that was ANSI, NOT the Swedish Standards Institute which will have its own rules that apparently (and unsurprisingly) are not the same as ANSI. Its position is then relayed to the ISO/IEC process and is then subject to the rules of procedure that apply there. Each national body is free to make up its own rules as long as it's happy to live by the outcome.
for(int i=60;i>0;i++) ... that loop is going to run for some time, especially if i is declared unsigned
You have to be careful about eating plentiful rabbits lest rabbit starvation occurs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_starvation
Technically, AFAIK, there is still no European constitution. It was rejected by the voters (not that that has stopped the German presidency from reinstating it in all but name).
And in line with supporting the parent post: Don't trust these lying, cheating bastards an inch. I normally try to be moderate in my choice of words but in recent years I have been more exposed to what goes on at the 'political' level of British and European society. There's a weird other-wordliness about what happens. At one level, they pay great attention to probity, honesty and decency (most of the time) but what they hide or pretend not to notice (in my view) is that the entire system is *intellectually* corrupt and that it poisons the minds of the people who work in it.
There's an old joke about the former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who, it goes, falls in a river and cries for help. Two members of the public go to his aid but the three politicians he was with immediately start debating what he means by 'help'. As in Orwell's world, words do not NOT mean what the public think they mean. Nothing as obvious as the made-up words of doublespeak but instead an insidious corruption of the meaning of words to the point where what a normal person would consider to be plain and obviously of one meaning is taken by those inside the system to mean more or less the opposite.
So when they way that they don't intend to have another computer implemented inventions debate, don't believe a word of it. At face value it probably does mean that there won't be a computer implemented inventions debate. But nothing prevents an automaton implemented inventions debate or a computer assisted implementations debate or anything else the sleazy scum decide to come up with. There is a SERIOUS sickness at the heart of modern western politics but unfortunately there is no sign yet that the patient realises he's ill.
At face value, the list of defect reports might be assumed by a naive reader to suggest that the C standard is full of holes and would metaphorically never float. In fact on rereading it, I think that in the main it supports my point :)
.. my track record in involvement in the ANSI standard for C is well known for those who care to look. For those who don't, ISBN 978-0201544336 and http://publications.gbdirect.co.uk/c_book/ may assist.
Any standard that's intended for human readership will suffer precisely because it's written for humans. Attempts to use formal specifications (perhaps denotational semantics or something like 'Z') haven't really caught the public imagination though it would have been interesting to try. I'm sure I remember that being discussed tangentially during one of the boozy degenerations of an ANSI meeting after a long day of wordsmithing circa 1985.
Maybe it was a typo that italicised the 'If' in 'If you have been involved'
Sadly I'm also caught up in the mire of OOXML fast-track reviewing as a member of the British Standards Institute's panel. There are some very serious questions to be raised about just what can be done with a document that's so big. It probably took hundreds of staff-years of work in total to produce something as short as the C standard. Where does the effort come from to review and QA something so very much bigger?
In the standards committee it was typical to find 50 people in a room reading *each* *single* *word* of the draft standard and arguing for hours over a single line - 8 hours a day for five days at a stretch. Immense attention to detail was spent on considering every possible interpretation of the words and wrangling over the best and most precise, unambiguous way to define what the standard was supposed to mean. The fact that the original C standard passed through almost unmodified (though slightly extended) in its later version is testament to all that work. Typically the people who work on standards committees put in vast amounts of effort to avoid precisely the lameness that TFA's article refers to. Seriously - not to specify whether SIN uses degrees or radians is inconceivable for an ISO standard.
Bill Plauger in particular did Trojan amounts of work on the C libraries to avoid dumb mistakes of those kinds.
Do it!!!! I did the same. The more people who contact the Conservatives on this, the more they will listen. They aren't so awash with votes that they can ignore you. Remember, this is a vote-winner for almost nobody, but if they sense a vote-loser, they will tread much more carefully. Of course it's possible that they will weigh campaign contributions more highly, but unless you let them know you hate this idea, they won't be able to tot up the competing costs to them.
.. that if OOXML is accepted as a 'standard' and compliance with the 'standard' must be demonstrated, Massachusetts won't be able to deploy Word 2007 since it doesn't implement OOXML correctly. In fact nobody can implement OOXML correctly since the document is internally contradictory and many of the examples pieces of code are invalid XML.
The hope that anyone will test for compliance is though, probably, a pipe-dream. Maybe if concerned voters raised a legal challenge when procurement was done?
I guess that 6025 counts as pretty low then. Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear!
And if the satellite doesn't have all those features, how are they going to be retrofitted?
...
If the satellite is dumb enough to accept a signal on the uplink frequency and retransmit it on the corresponding downlink without applying any checks, there's nothing the ground controllers can do about it except turn the damn thing off.
And best of luck trying to spot a rogue uplink from bandit country where helicopters are just the juicy kind of target the guys on the ground would like to see
total boob? Please: 'complete prat' is closer to what you are looking for. You could opt for the shorter 'twat', both of which are fine until you discover what they actually mean in the vernacular.
Cheers!
Mike
Depends which country you are in - maybe not in your country, but then 'my country' != 'world' for all countries I am aware of
It may be of interest that 'no comment' can be used in British courts as a symptom of guilt. The right to silence still exists but it is now explicitly stated in the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 that courts and juries may draw inferences from a suspect's silence in custody or in court (Sections 34 to 39). http://www.legislation.hmso.gov.uk/acts/acts1994/U kpga_19940033_en_4.htm#mdiv34
I think that the concept of 'running the country' is where the problem lies. I don't believe that politicians are the right people to do that and almost certainly nobody else is. Therefore, the less anyone 'runs' the country the better. That's not to say that strategic decisions should not be taken but there should be as few of those as possible and in the main people should be left to undertake collective decision making at a level much closer to where they live. It's time to rethink what democracy is about - the representative model as currently exercised in the Western world is not working, in my view.
This is so sad: "if the action benefits the people, it's usually postponed many times, if it benefits those in power or the machinery of gov't, it happens more quickly" because it is SO TOTALLY ACCURATE. Thank you for distilling that for me into words - I had sensed it, but not condensed so precisely. And that's why we need to take power away from the politicians and put it back into the hands of ordinary people. This is too important to leave up to them :(
"But I've finally come to the conclusion that sound technical judgement does not stop absurdity from happening"
Something that the majority of Slashdot readers seem not to understand (and with justification) is that purchasing decisions are not rational.
A basic training course on sales techniques will, unless it's totally bogus, emphasise the fact that purchasing is based on emotion, not rationality. Some 80-90% of all sales are emotion-driven and then sometimes post-facto justified by selectively picking facts.
As the world becomes a more complex place and huge amounts of information become available to prospective purchasers there's a kind of paradox emerging that will horrify economists who cling to the theory that perfect markets are based on rational purchasers with perfect information, because the reverse is happening.
Most purchasers are not analytic personalities. People who hang around Slashdot underestimate how much they have (in general) honed their own analytic skills with years of practice while most middle-tier managers in corporates never did. For those non-analytic people, being asked to rationally evaluate a mass of facts and statistics is a SCARY proposition. That's not how they got their job, they did that by looking good in a suit and licking backsides more or less assiduously whilst being ok at judging how the politics are shaping up. Their skillset is way different from yours and they react differently.
The more information you make available to those people, the less they are likely to use and the more they will look around for 'safe' decisions. This will be especially true if their promotion prospects may depend on the outcome. THEY ARE NOT SPENDING THEIR OWN MONEY, it's the company's. Their decision will be based on the likelihood of retaining their job or getting promoted before their mistakes are discovered.
So, figure for yourself. On the one hand some technical guy they distrust because he's smart can 'download an ISO from the interweb and build a cluster myself' or 'buy from Microsoft'.
The first bit of irrational figuring will be 'the Microsoft stuff costs tens of thousands but the geek says it's free - that does not compute, he must be wrong'. The second will be 'if it goes wrong who will get the blame'. Guess the outcome of that one for yourself.
The result is fairly predictable IF you understand the parameters. Microsoft's marketing does understand where it's operating and will be well aware that its customer base is heavily loaded with irrational people. Most likely they are hearing squeals from that customer base asking where Microsoft's compute cluster solution is because 'we want to buy one'. It would be foolish not to give them one surely?
I happened to be listening to Evan Davis, the BBC's economics editor on the TV a couple of nights back. His explanation for the high market values (in part) was cash flooding out of China in search of a place to lodge due to a) restrictions on investment in factories and equipment to prevent the economy overheating any more and b) a wish to spread their risk.
I for one would be fascinated to see the public response to a semi-nude calendar of OSS luminaries. When a bunch of middle-aged ladies did it here it made thousands for their organisation and a film got made of it ... mind you, it would take a strong stomach to tolerate seeing it pinned to the wall.
This is slashdot. People will correct you even if you are RIGHT!
In my experience of secondary education in the UK, the lack of support is a key issue in holding back the acceptance of FLOSS in schools. Not the kind of join-a-mailing-list-and-ask support at which most FLOSS packages excel (I find Debian especially good for that) but a different kind of support which is harder for individual package developers to put in place. From what I see, most hard-pressed teachers and heads want someone they can ring and to whom they can, essentially, say "I want to buy one of those" whilst they point to a solution that someone else is already running. The next problem for them is "if I buy that, where can I get a technician to run it?"
They don't want to roll-their-own FLOSS implemenation, they just want stuff that works and needs no wizard to keep it running.
Most schools in the UK can't even pay enough to get good *windows* support technicians, let alone get support for a GNU/Linux guru.
As more are brave enough to go ahead anyhow, the situation will ease but this is a classic symptom of a technically-led young sub-industry - infrastructure like support services will only develop when an emerging pool of early adopters grows to sufficient size.
Because of that, and because of the need for a recognised brand in this area, I have worked on solving some of those issues through Cutter which does provide a pre-packaged and commercially supported 'solution' for shools. Others will probably do so as well. Mostly it's a matter of time but nobody should really be surprised by that finding.