Right. Because we have to celebrate everything in exact intervals of one earth-sun-revolution, and only whole-number interval offsets from the time of the original event.
There's no such thing as the 'right' and 'wrong' date. An event happens. Choosing to celebrate that event once a year (where "year" is the amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun once) is arbitrary in the first place. It would be just as 'right' to celebrate it every 12 moon-earth revolutions, or 2 mercury-sun revolutions.
If you're already going to base your celebration intervals on the convenience of how often one ball of rock revolves around one ball of gas because you happen to live on said ball of rock, you might as well always celebrate something on the 259th day of the year, or the 4th time the 4th day of the week falls in the 11th month of the year, or the 1st 7th day of the week following the vernal equinox.
Getting bent out of shape because the commemoration/celebration of an event doesn't have the same calendar date as the original event - especially when the original event occured in a time period where the calendar you're using didn't even exist - seems pretty silly. Especially when you're celebrating the birth/death of the son of God.
All three people who accessed the information were employees of contractors. Some were fired immediately by the contractor before the State Department learned about it. The others the State Department specifically asked that they NOT be fired so they had some leverage to get them to cooperate with the ensuing investigation. (If they were fired, they wouldn't have to do anything unless actually subpoenaed.) Apparently if the state department had not intervened, the contractor would have fired them already. (The exception being the trainee who looked up Hillary instead of a family member during the training exercise - that was (probably properly) viewed as a training error and that employee just had the error explained.)
Regardless, while this is private information, it's not exactly SENSITIVE private information. There's really nothing in these files that isn't a matter of public record (when you applied, where you lived when you applied, name, birthdate) or isn't going to be terribly interesting for any political reason (SS#).
It's pretty safe to assume these breaches were merely the result of idle curiosity, as there's really no other reason to even bother looking at these files with such uninteresting information. That would also explain the fairly wide access thousands of people have to these files.
And to the GP:
Yes, an Obama campaign supporter (donated $2,300) runs one of the contractors whose employees looked at the files. But a Clinton campaing supporter (donated $1,000) runs the other one. Pretty much a wash, unless you're McCain.
1. Use Firefox.
2. Use a firewall (Windows Firewall does the trick).
3. Avoid suspicious.exe/.wmv/(etc) filespam on file sharing networks (if that's your sort of thing).
4. For the love of God, use Firefox.
5. Never click on ads.
6. Never install bundled adware or browser toolbars.
7. Nobody offering free screensavers/themes/ringtones/pr0n/minigames in.exe format en masse is legit.
8. Train yourself to recognize spam in all forms, on all media. Every trendy Internet product, service, feature or meme will have a spam-clone, made either to spread badware or to conduct phishing scams - and you must be ready for both.
9. ???
10. No viruses and no anti-virus! Enjoy your new computer experience. You're welcome.
So that's the list for the PC. Looks like you have 7 legitimate items that you have to do. While they all may be common sense for you or me, they're not common sense for the average consumer.
What do you get in exchange for that? A PC (complete with hard drive, internet connection, support for usb, etc), excpet you can't use it like a PC.
That's the whole point.
When was the last time your Play station got a virus? How much do you spend on your Play station's anti-virus software every month? How many controllers can you plug into your PC? When was the last time you had to install a game on your XBox? Or install drivers for your newest controller? Or work through compatibility issues between your latest game and your PS3's GPU?
It's also true that for the price of a microwave, I can get a nice laptop, that connects to the internet and all that. But it kinda sucks at heating food, doesn't it?
There's a reason the Wii is selling so well, even though it doesn't even support HD graphics. People don't want something with internet, that can do their taxes, that catches viruses, that they can read their email on, or that has the bestest fastest hardware.
They want something they can play fun games on, with other people, in their living area where the television is, on something that isn't the size of a desktop PC. And they want those games to work when they plug them in, every time. About the limit you can expect from a console consumer is blowing the dust off the cartridge pins.
Are PC's more powerful? Sure. But there is a whole bunch of overhead that comes with the advantages of the PC over a game console that are just not worth it to the majority of console players.
Now that I have thought about it a bit more, this is about the money. If they put donotreply@companydomain.com, then the inevitable replies would eat up their bandwidth and processing power on their incoming mail servers.
Because people receiving millions of spam emails a day really care about an extra couple thousand spurious do-not-reply replies.
Emails unwittingly sent in reply to do-not-reply emails consist of such a MINUTE FRACTION of total email traffic it's not even a cost worth worrying about.
I think finding, prosecuting, and maybe accidentally shooting sickos who prey on helpless children to the point of filming/taking pictures of doing unimaginable things to them is way, way, way, way more important than whether you had to spend a lot of time and some money cleaning up identity theft.
Would you rather be the victim of identity theft, or would you rather be the victim of a 40-year-old sliding his finger up your ass when you were 8?
If you eat 11oz of Yellowfin each week, you'll consume the same amount of mercury as eating 1 CF lightbulb each year, or 4oz of swordfish each week....You've apparently never tried to light a room with swordfish.
I saw that episode. With my wife. Now, I'm a BSG fan. My wife watches it because I watch it and some of her friends watch it. Episode ends. And I'm like "WTF does all that mean?" and she's like "They're all Cylons!"
I still don't get it. Nothing about the episode says to me that they're definitely Cylons. Or even probably Cylons. Wouldn't have even occurred to me that it was a possibility if my wife hadn't pointed it out.
I'm hoping it turns out that they're NOT actually Cylons, and have just convinced themselves that they are, and I'm thus just waaaay smarter and less gullible than the average viewer.
Back in the mid 70's, Electronics Australia (hobbyist HAM radio and electronics magazine - now defunct) did a mock project that showed you how to make a non-portable atomic bomb.
We're really screwed when the terrorists figure out how to smuggle us to their bomb!
I'm now definitely going to pass on that offer for a free vacation to tour that time share development in Karachi!
Asking whether scientists should date astrologers is nothing like asking if a catholic should date a muslim.
It's much more like asking if scientists should date catholics.
Catholic + Muslim is an issue of whether people of one religion should interact with people of another religion. Scientist + astrologer and Scientist + Catholic are an issue of whether you can take someone serious as a scientist if they also associate with someone who has beliefs that can not be scientifically validated.
But since we seem to be pretty accepting of scientists that go to church, I don't see how we can be too worried about scientists who date people who go to church. Whether the person is catholic, Muslim, or an astrologer.
Especially if they have a nice rack.
Back to serious - the whole question is based on the biased assumption that somehow astrology is 'less' of a religion than Christianity/Islam. Everyone would be up in arms if it was suggested that scientists don't date Christians. So what does astrology matter? If we're going to accept omnipotent beings that create/control the universe, what's the big deal about destiny controlled by movement of the stars and planets? This whole topic is just a 'Monotheistic religions are better!' attack.
* Do you believe in the killing of unborn children? * Do you believe you have the right to tell a women whos been raped that she has to carry to term the resulting fetus?
There are lots of unborn children who are not being carried by rape victims.
The whole problem with the 'abortion debate' is that the extreme participants argue under the assumption that if you are not universally pro-life, you must be pro-abortion, and if you are not universally pro-choice, you must be pro-government-control of bodies.
That's not the way reasonable people think.
I think abortion is bad *AND* I think the government telling a woman what to do with her body is bad.
On top of that, I realize that not all abortions are equally bad - aborting a one-cell fetus is not even in the same realm of bad as aborting a 38-week-old fetus. And telling a woman who is pregnant as a result of sex she agreed to have that she can't have an abortion is not as bad as telling a woman who never consented to the sex that led to pregnancy that she can't have an abortion.
Now, there is going to be a lot of variance in where most reasonable people decide the 'badness' of allowing women to choose to abort their pregnancies is less bad than forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. Most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of non-differentiated fetuses is a very small amount of bad. And most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of a fetus that is, but for a few inches of position, about to be a live birth as extremely bad. So most REASONABLE people support *BOTH* abortion *AND* limits on choice.
6 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Abort if you want. 38 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Sorry, too late.
A debate about whether abortion is OK or not is stupid. A debate about government intervention in a woman's choice is stupid. There is no debate - both are bad. The debate needs to be about at what point a woman's control of her body is outweighed by the interests of the fetus.
I did do all the problem sets - at least the ones I turned in. (It's been a while, so I don't know that I may not have skipped a couple.) I was the guy who taught the REST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE GROUP how to do the problem sets.
Problem sets were due on Wednesday. We'd get together on Tuesday and spend HOURS working through them damned problem sets. It was hard. I would figure the problem out, and then help the other guys (and the occasional girl) figure it out. And once we all had our homework done, we'd go to the bar.
Now, we all did the work. Some of the other people in the group had help from me in doing the work - but I don't see how that's any different than getting help from the TA to do the work. Ultimately, I did tend to do better on the exams than most everyone else in the group, but that seemed mainly to be that I could finish the exam in the allotted time and they had difficulty doing that, which isn't much of a surprise since the problem sets were comparatively easier for me as well.
But all that said, the problem sets STILL sucked. They were hard, and for some reason my usual geek curiosity was of no help in making them interesting. As a result, my motivation to actually do the damned things was pretty tiny, but the peer pressure of a group of people coming over to pick my brain was a good motivating factor to sit down and actually do them.
10 years of work in the digital/software world later, other than the very basic understanding of what a Fourier transform is, I really have no recollection on how to apply the math. But I will say that Analog Signal Processing was probably one of the 4 or 5 classes I took in my degree area in college where I actually learned something I didn't already know and could have applied later. (there were only 2 or 3 where I learned something I didn't know and actually applied it later.)
Why do you assume I was the guy in the group who couldn't do the problem sets on my own?
Actually, I was that guy, sort of - I had no problems understanding the work, and was the guy who taught the rest of the group how to do the work. But the problem sets STILL sucked ass, and it would have been much more of a challenge to get motivated to do them without the group environment and the trip to the bar after the set was done.
I think I was one of a very few students who actually got an A in that class - and because of that class, also decided that my engineering career was going to be all digital.
The instructor has constructed the class in such a way so that the homework contributes to the educational process of the class,
Says who?
If this is true, then let the students copy all the homework they want. They'll fail the exams anyway.
And if it's not true, then let the students copy all the homework they want, because it is not their fault their professor sucks and wants to use their grade to force them to do homework that isn't teaching them anything.
Don't cheat on exams. Don't turn in papers you didn't write. But problem sets should be optional.
When I was in school, we'd get together in groups of 2-15 to do problem sets. Some kids figured most of it out and taught the other kids until they knew what was up too, and some other kids just showed up and leeched answers. The leechers failed the exams. This is no different than doing it on Facebook except Facebook is more efficient. The people who learn the material will pass and those who don't will fail.
It's not cheating until the people who don't learn the material start passing.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's set in stone on the wrong date.
Right. Because we have to celebrate everything in exact intervals of one earth-sun-revolution, and only whole-number interval offsets from the time of the original event.
There's no such thing as the 'right' and 'wrong' date. An event happens. Choosing to celebrate that event once a year (where "year" is the amount of time it takes the earth to go around the sun once) is arbitrary in the first place. It would be just as 'right' to celebrate it every 12 moon-earth revolutions, or 2 mercury-sun revolutions.
If you're already going to base your celebration intervals on the convenience of how often one ball of rock revolves around one ball of gas because you happen to live on said ball of rock, you might as well always celebrate something on the 259th day of the year, or the 4th time the 4th day of the week falls in the 11th month of the year, or the 1st 7th day of the week following the vernal equinox.
Getting bent out of shape because the commemoration/celebration of an event doesn't have the same calendar date as the original event - especially when the original event occured in a time period where the calendar you're using didn't even exist - seems pretty silly. Especially when you're celebrating the birth/death of the son of God.
It's the first Sunday after the vernal equinox.
The problem isn't that the date is not consistent; it's that the date is set using a DIFFERENT CALENDAR SYSTEM.
Ah! The March of progress.
Next year it will be April again though.
All three people who accessed the information were employees of contractors. Some were fired immediately by the contractor before the State Department learned about it. The others the State Department specifically asked that they NOT be fired so they had some leverage to get them to cooperate with the ensuing investigation. (If they were fired, they wouldn't have to do anything unless actually subpoenaed.) Apparently if the state department had not intervened, the contractor would have fired them already. (The exception being the trainee who looked up Hillary instead of a family member during the training exercise - that was (probably properly) viewed as a training error and that employee just had the error explained.)
Regardless, while this is private information, it's not exactly SENSITIVE private information. There's really nothing in these files that isn't a matter of public record (when you applied, where you lived when you applied, name, birthdate) or isn't going to be terribly interesting for any political reason (SS#).
It's pretty safe to assume these breaches were merely the result of idle curiosity, as there's really no other reason to even bother looking at these files with such uninteresting information. That would also explain the fairly wide access thousands of people have to these files.
And to the GP:
Yes, an Obama campaign supporter (donated $2,300) runs one of the contractors whose employees looked at the files. But a Clinton campaing supporter (donated $1,000) runs the other one. Pretty much a wash, unless you're McCain.
To be sincere, it may seem you just described a mac.
I've also just described my refrigerator, microwave, coffee maker, and vacuum cleaner, but you can't play games on those either.
(duck)
1. Use Firefox. .exe/.wmv/(etc) filespam on file sharing networks (if that's your sort of thing). .exe format en masse is legit.
2. Use a firewall (Windows Firewall does the trick).
3. Avoid suspicious
4. For the love of God, use Firefox.
5. Never click on ads.
6. Never install bundled adware or browser toolbars.
7. Nobody offering free screensavers/themes/ringtones/pr0n/minigames in
8. Train yourself to recognize spam in all forms, on all media. Every trendy Internet product, service, feature or meme will have a spam-clone, made either to spread badware or to conduct phishing scams - and you must be ready for both.
9. ???
10. No viruses and no anti-virus! Enjoy your new computer experience. You're welcome.
So that's the list for the PC. Looks like you have 7 legitimate items that you have to do. While they all may be common sense for you or me, they're not common sense for the average consumer.
For comparison, here's the list for the console:
1. Uh.. nothing.
See?
What do you get in exchange for that? A PC (complete with hard drive, internet connection, support for usb, etc), excpet you can't use it like a PC.
That's the whole point.
When was the last time your Play station got a virus? How much do you spend on your Play station's anti-virus software every month? How many controllers can you plug into your PC? When was the last time you had to install a game on your XBox? Or install drivers for your newest controller? Or work through compatibility issues between your latest game and your PS3's GPU?
It's also true that for the price of a microwave, I can get a nice laptop, that connects to the internet and all that. But it kinda sucks at heating food, doesn't it?
There's a reason the Wii is selling so well, even though it doesn't even support HD graphics. People don't want something with internet, that can do their taxes, that catches viruses, that they can read their email on, or that has the bestest fastest hardware.
They want something they can play fun games on, with other people, in their living area where the television is, on something that isn't the size of a desktop PC. And they want those games to work when they plug them in, every time. About the limit you can expect from a console consumer is blowing the dust off the cartridge pins.
Are PC's more powerful? Sure. But there is a whole bunch of overhead that comes with the advantages of the PC over a game console that are just not worth it to the majority of console players.
Now that I have thought about it a bit more, this is about the money. If they put donotreply@companydomain.com, then the inevitable replies would eat up their bandwidth and processing power on their incoming mail servers.
Because people receiving millions of spam emails a day really care about an extra couple thousand spurious do-not-reply replies.
Emails unwittingly sent in reply to do-not-reply emails consist of such a MINUTE FRACTION of total email traffic it's not even a cost worth worrying about.
I think finding, prosecuting, and maybe accidentally shooting sickos who prey on helpless children to the point of filming/taking pictures of doing unimaginable things to them is way, way, way, way more important than whether you had to spend a lot of time and some money cleaning up identity theft.
Would you rather be the victim of identity theft, or would you rather be the victim of a 40-year-old sliding his finger up your ass when you were 8?
I thought so.
If you eat 11oz of Yellowfin each week, you'll consume the same amount of mercury as eating 1 CF lightbulb each year, or 4oz of swordfish each week. ...You've apparently never tried to light a room with swordfish.
LEDs, one way to make them is with arsenic. Now one diode of arsenic is nothing, put billions in the dump, let the plastics rot a bit and...
You missed the point. LEDs DO NOT GO IN THE DUMP AT ALL, because they pretty much 'never' burn out.
I saw that episode. With my wife. Now, I'm a BSG fan. My wife watches it because I watch it and some of her friends watch it. Episode ends. And I'm like "WTF does all that mean?" and she's like "They're all Cylons!"
I still don't get it. Nothing about the episode says to me that they're definitely Cylons. Or even probably Cylons. Wouldn't have even occurred to me that it was a possibility if my wife hadn't pointed it out.
I'm hoping it turns out that they're NOT actually Cylons, and have just convinced themselves that they are, and I'm thus just waaaay smarter and less gullible than the average viewer.
Somehow I doubt that'll be the outcome though.
Let's say you're Mexico. Wouldn't you feel a bit more comfortable with the US having nukes than you would with, say, Nicaragua having nukes?
There's a reason for that.
Back in the mid 70's, Electronics Australia (hobbyist HAM radio and electronics magazine - now defunct) did a mock project that showed you how to make a non-portable atomic bomb.
We're really screwed when the terrorists figure out how to smuggle us to their bomb!
I'm now definitely going to pass on that offer for a free vacation to tour that time share development in Karachi!
Oh come on....
Even I see the logical argument in 'My Species is Better Than Your Species'.
We don't have any Walmarts here, but what are they like with Windows?
I don't think any Wal-Marts have windows. Just brick all around, glass doors in the front, and some loading docks.
Way too conservative, I'd say. They deleted whole, complete and well researched articles on the Warcraft universe because it wasn't "encyclopedic".
You sure it wasn't just because it was unsourced original research?
Asking whether scientists should date astrologers is nothing like asking if a catholic should date a muslim.
It's much more like asking if scientists should date catholics.
Catholic + Muslim is an issue of whether people of one religion should interact with people of another religion. Scientist + astrologer and Scientist + Catholic are an issue of whether you can take someone serious as a scientist if they also associate with someone who has beliefs that can not be scientifically validated.
But since we seem to be pretty accepting of scientists that go to church, I don't see how we can be too worried about scientists who date people who go to church. Whether the person is catholic, Muslim, or an astrologer.
Especially if they have a nice rack.
Back to serious - the whole question is based on the biased assumption that somehow astrology is 'less' of a religion than Christianity/Islam. Everyone would be up in arms if it was suggested that scientists don't date Christians. So what does astrology matter? If we're going to accept omnipotent beings that create/control the universe, what's the big deal about destiny controlled by movement of the stars and planets? This whole topic is just a 'Monotheistic religions are better!' attack.
Pretty much a federal government, unified basic rights, open borders, (mostly) unified currency...
The one big thing it doesn't have yet is a military.
Back to Web 0.0.
Time to dust off ye ole World Book!
Everyone knows that only 4 out of 5 experts agree!
* Do you believe in the killing of unborn children?
* Do you believe you have the right to tell a women whos been raped that she has to carry to term the resulting fetus?
There are lots of unborn children who are not being carried by rape victims.
The whole problem with the 'abortion debate' is that the extreme participants argue under the assumption that if you are not universally pro-life, you must be pro-abortion, and if you are not universally pro-choice, you must be pro-government-control of bodies.
That's not the way reasonable people think.
I think abortion is bad *AND* I think the government telling a woman what to do with her body is bad.
On top of that, I realize that not all abortions are equally bad - aborting a one-cell fetus is not even in the same realm of bad as aborting a 38-week-old fetus. And telling a woman who is pregnant as a result of sex she agreed to have that she can't have an abortion is not as bad as telling a woman who never consented to the sex that led to pregnancy that she can't have an abortion.
Now, there is going to be a lot of variance in where most reasonable people decide the 'badness' of allowing women to choose to abort their pregnancies is less bad than forcing a woman to carry a pregnancy to term. Most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of non-differentiated fetuses is a very small amount of bad. And most reasonable people are going to agree that the death of a fetus that is, but for a few inches of position, about to be a live birth as extremely bad. So most REASONABLE people support *BOTH* abortion *AND* limits on choice.
6 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Abort if you want.
38 weeks pregnant because you were raped? Sorry, too late.
A debate about whether abortion is OK or not is stupid. A debate about government intervention in a woman's choice is stupid. There is no debate - both are bad. The debate needs to be about at what point a woman's control of her body is outweighed by the interests of the fetus.
So back to your original questions:
#1) Sometimes.
#2) Sometimes.
I did do all the problem sets - at least the ones I turned in. (It's been a while, so I don't know that I may not have skipped a couple.) I was the guy who taught the REST OF THE PEOPLE IN THE GROUP how to do the problem sets.
Problem sets were due on Wednesday. We'd get together on Tuesday and spend HOURS working through them damned problem sets. It was hard. I would figure the problem out, and then help the other guys (and the occasional girl) figure it out. And once we all had our homework done, we'd go to the bar.
Now, we all did the work. Some of the other people in the group had help from me in doing the work - but I don't see how that's any different than getting help from the TA to do the work. Ultimately, I did tend to do better on the exams than most everyone else in the group, but that seemed mainly to be that I could finish the exam in the allotted time and they had difficulty doing that, which isn't much of a surprise since the problem sets were comparatively easier for me as well.
But all that said, the problem sets STILL sucked. They were hard, and for some reason my usual geek curiosity was of no help in making them interesting. As a result, my motivation to actually do the damned things was pretty tiny, but the peer pressure of a group of people coming over to pick my brain was a good motivating factor to sit down and actually do them.
10 years of work in the digital/software world later, other than the very basic understanding of what a Fourier transform is, I really have no recollection on how to apply the math. But I will say that Analog Signal Processing was probably one of the 4 or 5 classes I took in my degree area in college where I actually learned something I didn't already know and could have applied later. (there were only 2 or 3 where I learned something I didn't know and actually applied it later.)
Why do you assume I was the guy in the group who couldn't do the problem sets on my own?
Actually, I was that guy, sort of - I had no problems understanding the work, and was the guy who taught the rest of the group how to do the work. But the problem sets STILL sucked ass, and it would have been much more of a challenge to get motivated to do them without the group environment and the trip to the bar after the set was done.
I think I was one of a very few students who actually got an A in that class - and because of that class, also decided that my engineering career was going to be all digital.
The instructor has constructed the class in such a way so that the homework contributes to the educational process of the class,
Says who?
If this is true, then let the students copy all the homework they want. They'll fail the exams anyway.
And if it's not true, then let the students copy all the homework they want, because it is not their fault their professor sucks and wants to use their grade to force them to do homework that isn't teaching them anything.
Don't cheat on exams. Don't turn in papers you didn't write. But problem sets should be optional.
When I was in school, we'd get together in groups of 2-15 to do problem sets. Some kids figured most of it out and taught the other kids until they knew what was up too, and some other kids just showed up and leeched answers. The leechers failed the exams. This is no different than doing it on Facebook except Facebook is more efficient. The people who learn the material will pass and those who don't will fail.
It's not cheating until the people who don't learn the material start passing.