The fact that they haven't checked whether the shuttle's vital parts are glued on tight or not is more than enough reason to cancel the launch.
The window COVER is meant to protect the shuttle window before launch. It's not a exactly a vital component, as it would be removed before launch anyway. It's not "glued on".
It will be good to have more cameras, but in a sense this violates a NASA truism that indicates not to worry about an issue of which you have absolutely no control over.
If there's something that could hinder the shuttle's ability to land safely (but doesn't prevent them from docking at the ISS), couldn't they hold the shuttle at the ISS until they can fix the problem or figure out another way to get the astronauts home safely?
This assumes that the cameras could catch something that the normal review teams couldn't already detect, and that we knew that this problem would actually be a problem later on, of course.
It depends a lot on where you are. In major markets, they supplement the satellite signal with some radio signal, so that you can still get coverage on the street when you're surrounded by tall buildings.
I'm in Northeastern Ohio at the moment, and I can't get crap on my MyFi without the antenna.
For $13 a month, I'll just stick to XM Radio... it shows me the title and artist of the song I'm listening to. It can even record that info so that I can go back to it later and buy the song or album when I get home.
Sure, it won't identify arbitrary music (just the song currently playing on the tuned station), but it seems like the only time I try to figure out the name of a song is when I'm listening to it on the radio.
Ironically, I got this e-mail from the University of Michigan Credit Union a few hours ago:
This notification has been sent to all members of the U-M community to inform you about an e-mail phishing scam that looks like it has been sent to you from the University of Michigan Credit Union. THE E-MAIL IS A FRAUD AND SHOULD BE DELETED IMMEDIATELY.
Although the e-mail message may look official, its real purpose is to collect personal information that can be used illegally. The University of Michigan Credit Union did not send the e-mail message and would NEVER ask its members to confirm identity or personal information by e-mail. If you receive the e-mail message, please do not respond to it, or provide personal information on the fraudulent Web site as the message requests.
If you have already provided the personal information requested in the message, you should CONTACT THE UM CREDIT UNION IMMEDIATELY BY PHONE and speak with a Member Service Representative at 734-662-8200 or Alan Augustine at 734-662-8200 ext. 2651.
Some people at U-M have been victimized by similar scams and have had money withdrawn from their bank accounts. If you are a victim of fraud because of a phishing scan, you should work directly with your financial institution and the police to resolve the situation.
Financial institutions do NOT request personal information, such as your social security number, account number, or personal identification number by e-mails that require you to follow a link to another site. Please do not respond to such e-mail requests, or click a link embedded in an e-mail to provide personal information. You could put your account at risk, or the phishers could open new accounts with your identity.
TIPS ABOUT PHISHING SCAMS You can sometimes tell that an e-mail is a phishing scam because it will contain many errors. For instance, the message supposedly sent by the UM Credit Union has the following errors: 1. The "reply link" says it goes to umcu.com. The true Web address for the credit union is umcu.org. If you go directly to umcu.com, you find a screen that says "this domain name for sale." 2. The Web site says the "bank" is a member of the FDIC. This is not accurate because credit unions are insured by the NCUA. 3. The e-mail contains misspelled words. The last word of the message is spelled wrong "to fallow."
[...]
Thank you.
[Name Deleted], CISSP Chief Information Technology Security Officer University of Michigan
Exactly. The networking staff in a K-12 school district usually consists of a bunch of MSCEs and maybe a UNIX admin if they're lucky. They aren't going to hire a bunch of programmers to write software for them, especially if there is a low-risk turnkey solution already out there. It's more of an option for colleges and universities because they typically have the technical support to pull something like this off (or, at least they can afford to hire them).
In addition, with the huge cuts to most K-12 district budgets lately, most of the focus has been on how to fiscally survive the next year or two. It'd be nice to think about long-term cost savings, but for now, they're having enough trouble with the short-term. Asking them to cough up an indeterminate amount of money to build their own system is probably a bit much for them.
Preexisting software investment, and perceived software availability for a given platform, seem to be the biggest problems in the schools I've worked with. They all use various windows-only educational software, but the bigger roadblock to FOSS adoption seems to be student management software.
This is the software that lets teachers enter grades and attendence in their classrooms, automatically prints report cards and creates student schedules, and gives parents access to progress reports about their children via the web. The software itself is extremely expensive, but even worse is the cost of getting the technology infrastructure in place for it, training all of the staff and students on the software, keeping the system up and running, and changing school processes to be compatible with the software's idea of school 'workflow'.
A district running this proprietary Windows-only software would need to find somebody that makes a Linux version of student management software, dump the old software (money down the drain), redesign their tech infrastructure to fit the new software's requirements, retrain everybody in the district (notably, most districts seem to have finally on training their staff in tech - this would mean starting from scratch again), AND converting/importing all the old data from the windows software package to the new linux software package.
In a lot of ways, it's really not the cost of the software that seems to keep schools from converting to FOSS... it's the cost of conversion. If FOSS had been in the faces of school administrators back when the tech wave first hit public schools in the US some years ago, it'd stand a much better chance of succeeding in schools. Unfortunately, many schools are now 'locked in' to their current systems for various reasons, and it'd take a lot to convince them to change.
These are my impressions, anyway, based on what I've seen at a number of school districts...
**AVERAGE** That means that 1/2 of their people make more than $60,000/year. I'm sure they have receptionists and janitors making way less.
You're thinking of the median. The average is the sum of every employee's salary, divided by the number of employees. This is easily affected by exceptionally low and/or high salaries.
The median is the 'middle' salary, when the salaries have been arranged in order. This is much more 'stable', in the sense that exceptional salaries wouldn't affect it much.
So, the mean actually does a better job than the median in terms of exposing exceptionally low salaries. This means that either they have a lot of very highly-paid people to offset the low salaries of receptionists and janitors, or that the receptionists and janitors don't make too bad of a salary.
(Or the more likely reason: they probably outsource the low-paying jobs, especially food-service and janitoral) to an outside company, so those salaries aren't directly paid by the company... those wouldn't be included in the average/mean or median.)
Try Trader Joe's, if there's one around you. They don't do cards or store coupons, or even sales - and their prices are generally very reasonable. They have a pretty decent selection, and I could get away with doing all of my shopping there if I wanted to. (There are a few things I can still get much cheaper at Kroger, and a few favorite foods that TJ's doesn't carry.)
Their service is incredible, they've always got free food for you to sample... and many stores have wine tasting too. They also give their employees benefits and good wages, which is a lot more than I can say for most grocery stores. I've been to a lot of their stores, and employees seem genuinely happy there - which makes my shopping experience that much more enjoyable.
One of my professors was telling me how he once had grad students that formed a grocery store card-trading ring. They'd all swap cards with each other every week, use it to buy groceries, and then hand it off to somebody else.
Technically, you're correct... that's his "personal" web space hosted through EECS Departmental Computing Organization (DCO). The EECS "personal" web space is shared with the rest of the EECS department's web site (as in the personal and normal web servers for the department are not on separate servers).
On the other hand, anybody with an active e-mail account (i.e. him) gets 1 GB of space on www-personal.umich.edu, a bank of servers dedicated to hosting personal space for the entire university (and could probably accomodate the load). He probably also gets the 200 MB offered through CAEN, the engineering computer network, hosted at www-personal.engin.umich.edu and also probably more than capable of handling the load.
For whatever reason, the EECS department doesn't seem to have a web server capable of serving very many people, and it's come down a couple times over the last few weeks under normal loads. To think it would be able to withstand a slashdotting is laughable. This infrastructure problems aren't his fault, but it'd seem much more logical to place the page on servers that are designed to handle uber loads, instead of posting it on a shared server that contains project specs and homework assignments that students need access to 24/7.
My comment was only meant to say that he either didn't realize that the EECS web server wasn't a piece of shit, or didn't care that he was going to crash a server that a lot of people need access to right now.
On the other hand, one would think that a major computer science/engineering deparment that is getting grants to research ways to withstand DOS attacks would be able to withstand a slashdotting... obviously that's wishful thinking.
I was just trying to get to some project specs on www.eecs.umich.edu, and couldn't figure out why the server was down. Thanks Slashdot community - maybe this will give me a good reason to request an extension on our latest project.
I don't know why this guy didn't put this on his personal web space instead of the department's web space.
You have a great point - just one slight clarification though.
Congress didn't directly force content filtering in libraries - they threatened to take away federal funding if they didn't use it, and there were several library systems that did forgo federal funding in order to preserve freedom of speech. (I believe that before this, Congress did try to require filtering in all libraries, but the Supreme Court overruled it - can't remember for sure though.)
Try posting a pro-MS comment on Slashdot, for example. There are a lot of bad moderators that would disagree with it (even though it might be a valid opinion) and mod it down because they disagree, not because it's a 'troll'. It doesn't matter how randomly you distribute these, as they can be used to exclude people with unpopular, but valid opinions. Mod points are distributed somewhat randomly, but people still mod-bomb posts into oblivion - I don't think many of them are cases of planned attacks against an individual, but simply a lot of people misusing moderation as a way to disagree with views, rather than a way to promote comments of substance.
If there were a big benefit to black-balling, then it might still make sense, but I don't imagine that we'd benefit much from a system like this. The people that would be 'black-balled' would probably have been moderated down anyway. Given this, it seems like the potential for abuse far outweights any poential benefits we might see from black-balling, at least in my opinion. (Or to put it another way, it could be creating a new problem without doing much to fix the existing one.) Of course any system will be abused, but good systems have benefits that outweigh the costs of these abuses.
Slashdot Mirror
The window COVER is meant to protect the shuttle window before launch. It's not a exactly a vital component, as it would be removed before launch anyway. It's not "glued on".
Of course not, they raise the deflector shields when they get into space...
Umich is the only team that has won three times ('90, '93, '01), more than any other team.
Best of luck to all teams competing this year.
If there's something that could hinder the shuttle's ability to land safely (but doesn't prevent them from docking at the ISS), couldn't they hold the shuttle at the ISS until they can fix the problem or figure out another way to get the astronauts home safely?
This assumes that the cameras could catch something that the normal review teams couldn't already detect, and that we knew that this problem would actually be a problem later on, of course.
Sorry, nobody is going to bend over backwards to make sure you don't have to log in to view an article.
You can always search on the subject in Google News and get alternate stories that may or may not be about the same subject.
You can wait for somebody to copy/paste the text as a comment, or find the workaround for the log-in system for that particular site.
You can choose not to read the story if you want. If you really want to, ignore the stories that link to reg-required sites.
Slashdot, please continue posting stories I might be interested in, and I'll decide for myself if I feel like registering or not. Thanks.
Nothing different - this deal was for the government there, only for Windows, and I doubt it covers anything that is 'pirated' after the settlement.
Furthermore, your opinion is stupid, and you're a stupid person for thinking it.
And if Linux was involved, everything would be ok? Oh, that's right. I don't know what I was thinking.
that's nothing - our local hospital took a .xxx.
It depends a lot on where you are. In major markets, they supplement the satellite signal with some radio signal, so that you can still get coverage on the street when you're surrounded by tall buildings. I'm in Northeastern Ohio at the moment, and I can't get crap on my MyFi without the antenna.
I believe that the current workaround is to use Netscape.
Couldn't company A just "spin off" most of their company into company B, then close company A to relieve themselves of any liability?
For $13 a month, I'll just stick to XM Radio... it shows me the title and artist of the song I'm listening to. It can even record that info so that I can go back to it later and buy the song or album when I get home. Sure, it won't identify arbitrary music (just the song currently playing on the tuned station), but it seems like the only time I try to figure out the name of a song is when I'm listening to it on the radio.
Exactly. The networking staff in a K-12 school district usually consists of a bunch of MSCEs and maybe a UNIX admin if they're lucky. They aren't going to hire a bunch of programmers to write software for them, especially if there is a low-risk turnkey solution already out there. It's more of an option for colleges and universities because they typically have the technical support to pull something like this off (or, at least they can afford to hire them).
In addition, with the huge cuts to most K-12 district budgets lately, most of the focus has been on how to fiscally survive the next year or two. It'd be nice to think about long-term cost savings, but for now, they're having enough trouble with the short-term. Asking them to cough up an indeterminate amount of money to build their own system is probably a bit much for them.
Preexisting software investment, and perceived software availability for a given platform, seem to be the biggest problems in the schools I've worked with. They all use various windows-only educational software, but the bigger roadblock to FOSS adoption seems to be student management software.
This is the software that lets teachers enter grades and attendence in their classrooms, automatically prints report cards and creates student schedules, and gives parents access to progress reports about their children via the web. The software itself is extremely expensive, but even worse is the cost of getting the technology infrastructure in place for it, training all of the staff and students on the software, keeping the system up and running, and changing school processes to be compatible with the software's idea of school 'workflow'.
A district running this proprietary Windows-only software would need to find somebody that makes a Linux version of student management software, dump the old software (money down the drain), redesign their tech infrastructure to fit the new software's requirements, retrain everybody in the district (notably, most districts seem to have finally on training their staff in tech - this would mean starting from scratch again), AND converting/importing all the old data from the windows software package to the new linux software package.
In a lot of ways, it's really not the cost of the software that seems to keep schools from converting to FOSS... it's the cost of conversion. If FOSS had been in the faces of school administrators back when the tech wave first hit public schools in the US some years ago, it'd stand a much better chance of succeeding in schools. Unfortunately, many schools are now 'locked in' to their current systems for various reasons, and it'd take a lot to convince them to change.
These are my impressions, anyway, based on what I've seen at a number of school districts...
You're thinking of the median. The average is the sum of every employee's salary, divided by the number of employees. This is easily affected by exceptionally low and/or high salaries.
The median is the 'middle' salary, when the salaries have been arranged in order. This is much more 'stable', in the sense that exceptional salaries wouldn't affect it much.
So, the mean actually does a better job than the median in terms of exposing exceptionally low salaries. This means that either they have a lot of very highly-paid people to offset the low salaries of receptionists and janitors, or that the receptionists and janitors don't make too bad of a salary.
(Or the more likely reason: they probably outsource the low-paying jobs, especially food-service and janitoral) to an outside company, so those salaries aren't directly paid by the company... those wouldn't be included in the average/mean or median.)
And when work==play?
Segmentation fault
Their service is incredible, they've always got free food for you to sample... and many stores have wine tasting too. They also give their employees benefits and good wages, which is a lot more than I can say for most grocery stores. I've been to a lot of their stores, and employees seem genuinely happy there - which makes my shopping experience that much more enjoyable.
P.S. - try the peppered cashews...
One of my professors was telling me how he once had grad students that formed a grocery store card-trading ring. They'd all swap cards with each other every week, use it to buy groceries, and then hand it off to somebody else.
Here is a slightly better written article on the same topic...
On the other hand, anybody with an active e-mail account (i.e. him) gets 1 GB of space on www-personal.umich.edu, a bank of servers dedicated to hosting personal space for the entire university (and could probably accomodate the load). He probably also gets the 200 MB offered through CAEN, the engineering computer network, hosted at www-personal.engin.umich.edu and also probably more than capable of handling the load.
For whatever reason, the EECS department doesn't seem to have a web server capable of serving very many people, and it's come down a couple times over the last few weeks under normal loads. To think it would be able to withstand a slashdotting is laughable. This infrastructure problems aren't his fault, but it'd seem much more logical to place the page on servers that are designed to handle uber loads, instead of posting it on a shared server that contains project specs and homework assignments that students need access to 24/7.
My comment was only meant to say that he either didn't realize that the EECS web server wasn't a piece of shit, or didn't care that he was going to crash a server that a lot of people need access to right now.
On the other hand, one would think that a major computer science/engineering deparment that is getting grants to research ways to withstand DOS attacks would be able to withstand a slashdotting... obviously that's wishful thinking.
I don't know why this guy didn't put this on his personal web space instead of the department's web space.
Congress didn't directly force content filtering in libraries - they threatened to take away federal funding if they didn't use it, and there were several library systems that did forgo federal funding in order to preserve freedom of speech. (I believe that before this, Congress did try to require filtering in all libraries, but the Supreme Court overruled it - can't remember for sure though.)
If there were a big benefit to black-balling, then it might still make sense, but I don't imagine that we'd benefit much from a system like this. The people that would be 'black-balled' would probably have been moderated down anyway. Given this, it seems like the potential for abuse far outweights any poential benefits we might see from black-balling, at least in my opinion. (Or to put it another way, it could be creating a new problem without doing much to fix the existing one.) Of course any system will be abused, but good systems have benefits that outweigh the costs of these abuses.