Would they also expect me to upgrade my entire otherwise perfectly functional operating system, just so I can install a different version of Microsoft's mostly useless browser? The better choice is not to use Internet Explorer at all.
Yep, here we go again: people executing "bad science" by seeing what they want to see, rather than what is actually there. Those "lines" would actually be depressions, not walls, according to the topography as shown in GE, and they are interrupted by natural peaks and other features in a way that doesn't make much sense, were that actually Atlantis. What's more, there's an even more outstanding example of that same sort of artifacts off the southwest coast of Ireland, below its continental shelf; that area makes it pretty obvious that the cause is exactly as Google claimed: a side effect of the way the region was scanned with sonar.
These folks should go back to staring at the face on Mars and dreaming of meeting little green men.:-)
Yeah, because of another comment here I just became aware of that project. I installed it all a few minutes ago. Ocular seems "good enough". That's a pretty amazing example of cross-platform development.
I might not have seen Okular in that earlier Slashdot review; it does look fairly polished at first glance. That won't work on my primary Windows box, though (at least not directly without virtualization). I have a laptop with PCLOS 2007 on it; I'll install Okular there and take it for a spin.
You have to keep the substrate heated to 1500 degrees Centigrade for twenty-four freaking hours? That's a LOT of expended energy to create the doggone thing, isn't it? Something tells me it takes less energy to make those 250 DVDs.
I don't think this process is going to be qualifying for an Energy Star rating any time soon. Here we go again... using MORE energy like there will never be a Peak Oil event tomorrow.
I'm using a non-Adobe PDF reader: Foxit Reader. It's commercial and not open source, but the non-Pro version is free to use; it's functionally far superior to the open source ones that were mentioned at Slashdot recently. I really hope the OSS projects can reach the level of sophistication of Foxit, because it's really my baseline of minimum PDF-reader functionality. The first OSS reader that can duplicate Foxit's sophistication will get a new convert.
Your response sounds unpleasantly trollish; I would mod you that way myself if I had the ability. Your response was also shortsighted and unimaginative, perhaps deliberately so. And FWIW, having "no one around" sounds pretty damned awesome to me. I'd rather that be in some warm tropical place here, but since that's only possible now for insanely rich fuckers, I have to settle for what I can get without having to be an insanely rich fucker myself, which would violate my values even if it satisfied my desires.
Since you opened this door, lemme ask you: which was more disruptive FOR THE ENTIRE CLASS, the student texting, or the teacher making an authoritarian control issue of it and dragging police and others into the classroom? You don't seem to recognize the very real possibility that this was authoritarianism run amok. The teacher and school officials reacted emotionally to their loss of control to this "disruptive" student, got angry, and reacted very disproportionately.
People in positions of authority over others, from parents on up to emperors, as well as their enforcers by proxy, are sadly still human; their reasoning falls victim to their emotions ALL THE TIME. It shouldn't happen, but it does; this shouldn't be what we value in leaders, but all too often it actually is, because citizens are also mentally frail humans.
Sometimes "disobedience" isn't harmful to the greater good at all: sometimes it's really dissent against selfish or tyrranical authority figures doing more harm than good to the Greater Good. Disobedience and dissent are the EXACT same behaviors, the only difference being whether they have a beneficial or detrimental effect on the greater good.
As I was reminded by another commenter, the delay might have nothing at all to do with any of those constraints, however real; the first optimal launch window may simply be that far out.
That's the beauty of mass production and the inherent standardization, dude: it doesn't matter that it's over-engineered for some occasions, because in practice the mass production paradigm will still make it cheaper than any continual one-off design process. The elimination of the expense of repeated design cycles - the standardization - more than makes up for any excesses the standardized design represents in some missions.
(The sad truth is that much of that value of mass production, for humanity as a whole, is squandered by manufacturers when they employ proprietary tactics and unnecessary redesign cycles to thwart the standardization, all in the name of more profit for THEM and less savings in resources and manpower for society. Many mass-produced things SHOULD be much cheaper than they are - cars, for instance - were it not for what manufacturers do to thwart too much of the savings trickling down to the rest of us. But that's a tangent for another place and time.)
I grew up firmly convinced that I was going to be in one of the first waves to emigrate from this rock. How could I not think that after seeing Armstrong thump onto the moon when I was still a little kid? How could I anticipate how far backward our stupid human frailties would make us slide? It's been very depressing for me to have to relinquish that expectation. Looking at the big picture of my life, that single thing was a significant reason for my loss of faith in humanity (and it's been downhill ever since). While there are INDIVIDUALS who possess the vision, AS A SPECIES we completely lack any vision or direction. There simply is no prescriptive Big Picture, not even a Five Year Mission. Humanity has let me down.
Maybe the Star Trek mythos is more correct than Roddenberry realized: it seems that we will in fact need a serious kick in the pants, as a species, from Vulcans or something else just as epiphanal. I wish I wasn't just joking about being a Vulcan Tourist.
And you wanna repeat that mistake everywhere else and poison the well so we can't ever resolve the life-is-not-unique argument? How about you wait until AFTER we've answered that question before you go about terraforming and pillaging every other rock in sight?
Ah, good point. I had not considered launch windows at all. Hopefully they don't actually spend that entire eleven years applying the Babbage philosophy of design to it! They could get it done in two or three and move on to designing other missions well in advance.
I think your statement oversimplifies some obvious truths to the point of absurdity. Certainly there will always be SOME components that have to be custom creations, but there should be others that would readily lend themselves to off-the-shelf modularity and mass production. Craft that simply make passes and orbits, as these are intended to do, would lend themselves most readily of all to that modularity compared, to, say, the Mars rovers.
Standardization of key components should be a key goal in further missions. Emulating Charles Babbage's design philosophy at this stage is likely to doom us to permanent residence here.
Cooperation is why this mission is happening at all, but competition is the reason why it's taking eleven freaking years to get off the ground... if budget cuts or other competitive bickering don't bench it before it gets to the launchpad.
The TED speech given by Barry Schwartz that someone else referenced (oddly trying to make a contrary point) is very descriptive of what happened in this instance.
Jeez, when it takes eleven years to get even an unmanned mission like this off the ground, I have to wonder if we meatsack critters ourselves are ever gonna make it off again. Certainly not in my lifetime, I guess. I have a hard time accepting that unmanned mission design is still this hard, even after all the missions that have preceded this one! Shouldn't we have off-the-shelf components and some semblance of a mass-production system for them by now?
What you just said isn't derivative of Schwartz' speech, and in fact is counter to his intent. Schwartz made the point that people must be able to BREAK the rules when it is wise to do so. He also used that example of the kid accidentally being given an alcoholic drink which then, because of people following the rules without wisdom, resulted in the boy being separated from his family for weeks! That is nearly a direct parallel to what happened here: school staff and enforcers blindly applying and enforcing rules without wisdom, leading to this only slightly rebellious kid being whisked off to a criminal court.
Schwartz is right: people are so now dependent upon "rules" that they lack wisdom and the moral will to exercise judgement.
Indeed because, as we all know, refusing to comply or follow orders in a non-military school is indeed a crime against all of society punishable by a sentence decreed in a court of law!
And again, if someone is going to devote that kind of effort to it, the intended target clearly has bigger problems than laptop security.
I doubt these face recognition systems were intended to be impregnable; rather they were intended to be a convenience, so that remembering a password isn't necessary. Compare it to a lock on a gate in a six-foot-high redwood fence: the lock merely deters the casual opportunistic thief, since a determined one could manage to hop the fence. A good password is probably still a more effective deterrent, bit it comes with the price of the distraction and having to remember it and type it accurately every time.
Slashdot Mirror
Would they also expect me to upgrade my entire otherwise perfectly functional operating system, just so I can install a different version of Microsoft's mostly useless browser? The better choice is not to use Internet Explorer at all.
Yep, here we go again: people executing "bad science" by seeing what they want to see, rather than what is actually there. Those "lines" would actually be depressions, not walls, according to the topography as shown in GE, and they are interrupted by natural peaks and other features in a way that doesn't make much sense, were that actually Atlantis. What's more, there's an even more outstanding example of that same sort of artifacts off the southwest coast of Ireland, below its continental shelf; that area makes it pretty obvious that the cause is exactly as Google claimed: a side effect of the way the region was scanned with sonar.
These folks should go back to staring at the face on Mars and dreaming of meeting little green men. :-)
Yeah, because of another comment here I just became aware of that project. I installed it all a few minutes ago. Ocular seems "good enough". That's a pretty amazing example of cross-platform development.
The WORST aspect of Adobe Reader is actually that god-awful browser plug-in! Jeezus!
I might not have seen Okular in that earlier Slashdot review; it does look fairly polished at first glance. That won't work on my primary Windows box, though (at least not directly without virtualization). I have a laptop with PCLOS 2007 on it; I'll install Okular there and take it for a spin.
You have to keep the substrate heated to 1500 degrees Centigrade for twenty-four freaking hours? That's a LOT of expended energy to create the doggone thing, isn't it? Something tells me it takes less energy to make those 250 DVDs.
I don't think this process is going to be qualifying for an Energy Star rating any time soon. Here we go again... using MORE energy like there will never be a Peak Oil event tomorrow.
I'm using a non-Adobe PDF reader: Foxit Reader. It's commercial and not open source, but the non-Pro version is free to use; it's functionally far superior to the open source ones that were mentioned at Slashdot recently. I really hope the OSS projects can reach the level of sophistication of Foxit, because it's really my baseline of minimum PDF-reader functionality. The first OSS reader that can duplicate Foxit's sophistication will get a new convert.
I think I covered that explanation already: UNCROWDED. The fewer people (humans) the better.
Your response sounds unpleasantly trollish; I would mod you that way myself if I had the ability. Your response was also shortsighted and unimaginative, perhaps deliberately so. And FWIW, having "no one around" sounds pretty damned awesome to me. I'd rather that be in some warm tropical place here, but since that's only possible now for insanely rich fuckers, I have to settle for what I can get without having to be an insanely rich fucker myself, which would violate my values even if it satisfied my desires.
Since you opened this door, lemme ask you: which was more disruptive FOR THE ENTIRE CLASS, the student texting, or the teacher making an authoritarian control issue of it and dragging police and others into the classroom? You don't seem to recognize the very real possibility that this was authoritarianism run amok. The teacher and school officials reacted emotionally to their loss of control to this "disruptive" student, got angry, and reacted very disproportionately.
People in positions of authority over others, from parents on up to emperors, as well as their enforcers by proxy, are sadly still human; their reasoning falls victim to their emotions ALL THE TIME. It shouldn't happen, but it does; this shouldn't be what we value in leaders, but all too often it actually is, because citizens are also mentally frail humans.
Sometimes "disobedience" isn't harmful to the greater good at all: sometimes it's really dissent against selfish or tyrranical authority figures doing more harm than good to the Greater Good. Disobedience and dissent are the EXACT same behaviors, the only difference being whether they have a beneficial or detrimental effect on the greater good.
That's exaggeration and mis-framing of my point. I was highlighting the excessive disproportionate response, not promoting the anti-social behavior.
As I was reminded by another commenter, the delay might have nothing at all to do with any of those constraints, however real; the first optimal launch window may simply be that far out.
That's the beauty of mass production and the inherent standardization, dude: it doesn't matter that it's over-engineered for some occasions, because in practice the mass production paradigm will still make it cheaper than any continual one-off design process. The elimination of the expense of repeated design cycles - the standardization - more than makes up for any excesses the standardized design represents in some missions.
(The sad truth is that much of that value of mass production, for humanity as a whole, is squandered by manufacturers when they employ proprietary tactics and unnecessary redesign cycles to thwart the standardization, all in the name of more profit for THEM and less savings in resources and manpower for society. Many mass-produced things SHOULD be much cheaper than they are - cars, for instance - were it not for what manufacturers do to thwart too much of the savings trickling down to the rest of us. But that's a tangent for another place and time.)
I grew up firmly convinced that I was going to be in one of the first waves to emigrate from this rock. How could I not think that after seeing Armstrong thump onto the moon when I was still a little kid? How could I anticipate how far backward our stupid human frailties would make us slide? It's been very depressing for me to have to relinquish that expectation. Looking at the big picture of my life, that single thing was a significant reason for my loss of faith in humanity (and it's been downhill ever since). While there are INDIVIDUALS who possess the vision, AS A SPECIES we completely lack any vision or direction. There simply is no prescriptive Big Picture, not even a Five Year Mission. Humanity has let me down.
Maybe the Star Trek mythos is more correct than Roddenberry realized: it seems that we will in fact need a serious kick in the pants, as a species, from Vulcans or something else just as epiphanal. I wish I wasn't just joking about being a Vulcan Tourist.
And you wanna repeat that mistake everywhere else and poison the well so we can't ever resolve the life-is-not-unique argument? How about you wait until AFTER we've answered that question before you go about terraforming and pillaging every other rock in sight?
Ah, good point. I had not considered launch windows at all. Hopefully they don't actually spend that entire eleven years applying the Babbage philosophy of design to it! They could get it done in two or three and move on to designing other missions well in advance.
I think your statement oversimplifies some obvious truths to the point of absurdity. Certainly there will always be SOME components that have to be custom creations, but there should be others that would readily lend themselves to off-the-shelf modularity and mass production. Craft that simply make passes and orbits, as these are intended to do, would lend themselves most readily of all to that modularity compared, to, say, the Mars rovers.
Standardization of key components should be a key goal in further missions. Emulating Charles Babbage's design philosophy at this stage is likely to doom us to permanent residence here.
Cooperation is why this mission is happening at all, but competition is the reason why it's taking eleven freaking years to get off the ground... if budget cuts or other competitive bickering don't bench it before it gets to the launchpad.
Any suggestions as to why what I said above would make me dumber than a fifth grader?
Yes.
I'd mod you up for recognizing a wise thought when you see one, but as it happens I've already commented in this discussion.
The TED speech given by Barry Schwartz that someone else referenced (oddly trying to make a contrary point) is very descriptive of what happened in this instance.
Jeez, when it takes eleven years to get even an unmanned mission like this off the ground, I have to wonder if we meatsack critters ourselves are ever gonna make it off again. Certainly not in my lifetime, I guess. I have a hard time accepting that unmanned mission design is still this hard, even after all the missions that have preceded this one! Shouldn't we have off-the-shelf components and some semblance of a mass-production system for them by now?
What you just said isn't derivative of Schwartz' speech, and in fact is counter to his intent. Schwartz made the point that people must be able to BREAK the rules when it is wise to do so. He also used that example of the kid accidentally being given an alcoholic drink which then, because of people following the rules without wisdom, resulted in the boy being separated from his family for weeks! That is nearly a direct parallel to what happened here: school staff and enforcers blindly applying and enforcing rules without wisdom, leading to this only slightly rebellious kid being whisked off to a criminal court.
Schwartz is right: people are so now dependent upon "rules" that they lack wisdom and the moral will to exercise judgement.
Indeed because, as we all know, refusing to comply or follow orders in a non-military school is indeed a crime against all of society punishable by a sentence decreed in a court of law!
And again, if someone is going to devote that kind of effort to it, the intended target clearly has bigger problems than laptop security.
I doubt these face recognition systems were intended to be impregnable; rather they were intended to be a convenience, so that remembering a password isn't necessary. Compare it to a lock on a gate in a six-foot-high redwood fence: the lock merely deters the casual opportunistic thief, since a determined one could manage to hop the fence. A good password is probably still a more effective deterrent, bit it comes with the price of the distraction and having to remember it and type it accurately every time.