"In other words, contrary to popular belief, the difference in reliability between Shuttle and 'more traditional rockets' is insignificant."
The difference is, when a shuttle launch is 'unreliable', you lose an irreplaceable multi-billion dollar spacecraft and kill the crew... when, say, a Soyuz launch is 'unreliable', you lose a launcher that you were going to throw away anyway, and the crew get an exciting ride.
Heck, if I remember correctly one Soyuz even survived entering the atmosphere backwards: try that with a shuttle and see how far you get.
"The Space Shuttle also experienced zero operational failures within the first 13 flights."
It had some close calls, though. John Young had to take manual control during part of the re-entry on the first flight because the aerodynamics didn't match the model programmed into the computer, tow of the APUs caught fire on another flight (I seem to remember they actually exploded after the landing), and one pilot almost stuffed up the landing.
To be fair, one of the early unmanned Apollo flights had two engines out, and the pogo on Apollo 13 would have destroyed the Saturn V if the center engine hadn't shut down: of course the crew would have escaped since they were in a capsule with parachutes, not a brick with wings.
"Having zero social skills == never having sex without first paying your partner."
Dang: I guess my girlfriend is going to be handing me a big bill soon for ten years of sex... and I guess the other women I've turned down in the last few years were only after my money.
"if you think that lying and bsing are the only skills worth having"
If your goal in life is to have lots of sex with lots of women for free, then lying and BS-ing are definitely the skills to have. Personally I can't be assed to go through all that hassle for a quick shag with someone who's dumb enough to fall for it.
"There are some things you just can't learn from books."
But 'social skills' aren't among them: there are plenty of books on how to manipulate people and make them think you're wonderful... which is, after all, exactly what Joe Jock is doing with his great 'social skills'.
Life's much easier once you realise that the majority of women (well, at least the majority from about their teens to thirties) are clueless and easily manipulated, largely because they're so certain they have great 'social skills': feed them what they want to see and hear, and they'll do whatever you want.
The problem is that once you realise that, they're not very interesting anymore.
"I recommend, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie."
Yeah, I read that years ago, it was an interesting book. There was also one called something like 'how to be a psychopath', which I remember had some evil -- and, frankly, often pretty funny -- ways of manipulating people.
Maybe Slashdot should start up a 'social skills reading list' with these kind of books on it: shouldn't take long for the average person here to learn all they need to know.
"Said slightly differently, we scientists see truth as the thing of most value. That is good, but it is not normal."
I think that's the big issue, really. As someone else touched on, 'social skills' often seem to be about allowing people to save face by pretending that you don't know the things they don't want you to know: whereas when a scientist finds that their colleague stuffed up their research, we'll plaster the fact across the front of major science magazines to prove we're better than they are. Most people can't handle such a cut-throat world.
Actually, I'd say I'm paid rather more than I'm worth for the job that I'm currently doing. I could earn more with a higher-stress job elsewhere, but the money wouldn't compensate for taking more time and mental energy away from the things that matter to me.
"It is far more than lying and bullshitting. In a social situation, most people can talk naturally. They simply say what comes to mind."
I'm still trying to figure out how that's a benefit:).
But let me give an example: recently I went to a gathering of my extended family. Most of them work in agriculture or construction, and few of them can even manage to turn on a computer. What of 'what comes to mind' am I supposed to talk to them about? Trying to get a simulated Apollo Guidance Computer running again in a simulated CSM? Why.NET sucks? Whether the Tibetan Book of the Dead is talking about the same 'near-death experience' that Christians see as a long white tunnel with a guy with a long beard at the end and whether it has any meaning beyond chemical screwups in the brain? What neural network research has to tell us about the nature of 'consciousness'?
I can't even explain to them what I do for a living without them having at least a reasonable grounding in IT. About the closest thing to a common experience is talking to them about my moonlighting on low-budget movies as a hobby: at least they've seen movies.
Now, I like my family, and I don't think they're idiots, but I have little common ground to talk to them about and little reason to do so. You might say that I 'have no social skills' because I don't want to sit there chatting about the latest reality TV show or football scores, but I don't even care.
"They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines"
Again, I'm not convinced. That may well be true with clinically autistic people, but personally when I'm bored or pissed off with someone I love screwing with them by ignoring their 'between the lines' cues and deliberately feeding them 'cues' of my own to make them respond 'wrong'. You would then say I 'lack social skills', whereas I think that being able to deliberately choose what 'cues' to respond to and send is far more skilled than just responding in certain ways because you're programmed to... knowing what 'cues' to send and what to say lets me manipulate most people like crazy if I get the urge to do so: I'm just too 'nice' to abuse it.
"Anyway, I like being oblivious to certain elements, particularly nonverbal cues, of the social environment."
I used to have a girlfriend who complained that I didn't get her 'nonverbal clues'. Actually I got them perfectly well, I just hated her bullshitting and lack of 'telling the truth skills' and 'dealing with reality skills' so I ignored them... what annoyed her was that I refused to go along with her silly little games.
What many people call 'lack of social skills', I call 'no bullshit attitude', and it's far from surprising to me that scientists would have such an attitude... after all, hard science is pretty much a 'no bullshit' world by its very nature. Why is that considered a bad thing?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here. As far as I can see, it's basically lying and bullshitting, which surely can't be hard for any smart person to learn? I'm sure most of us are pretty successful at bullshitting our bosses, if nothing else.
I think what really upsets the average person is not that 'geeks' don't have 'social skills', but that they just can't be bothered to bullshit with someone who has little to nothing in common with them. Why bother? What's the point in spending an evening talking about football scores when you could be doing something constructive and interesting instead? I don't get it.
"Your statement implies that Lincoln was worse than Bush."
Lincoln is the worst President the United States ever had. He single-handedly destroyed the Constitution and created the conditions where a cretin like Bush could act like a monarch.
"I don't think many historians would agree with you."
History is written by the victors. Had the southern states won the Civil War, Lincoln would have been rightfully villified in American schools, not worshipped.
I wish I had mod points today so I could mod the parent up. It's hard to see how Americans could put men on the moon and build hugely complex computer chips and software, yet be stupid enough not to impeach the worst President since Lincoln.
"it's executed in its own thread, rather than taking over the processing thread that was interpreting the metafile in the first place."
But that's only an issue if the WMF-processing code doesn't create a new thread in order to call the subroutine in the valid case. In reality you'd almost certainly want the callback to happen in its own thread, rather than to allow anyone to run abitrary code in the same thread as the print server.
"what possible code could be "fallen through" into that would set CPU execution *inside* the metafile -- moreover, would set CPU execution to the *next byte* after the erroneous header block."
I'm not entirely convinced. The code for the valid case presumably reads the subroutine address from the file, then starts a new thread which jumps to that address: it's not inconceivable to me that if the header is invalid it won't read the target address from the file, so the address variable just contains whatever was previously on the stack... which could well be the address of the data that's been loaded from the file (e.g. if it was previously used to hold the pointer into the header).
It may well be an evil backdoor, but it could just as easily be plain old bad programming.
"I don't think it's impossible to create DRM that won't undermine your system"
DRM undermines the system _by design_: its sole function is to prevent people from accessing data that the copyright owner refuses to let them access. It's impossible to do that effectively without 'undermining the system' by preventing the user from using it in the way they want to use it: to be effective DRM has to be built into the operating system at the very lowest level.
It also opens up plenty of new opportunities for the 'bad guys'.
Let's suppose that Joe Sixpack is raided for suspected tax evasion. He's got a spreadsheet with all his income information in it, so the police sieze his computer.
Oh, but it's protected by DRM, so the police can't read it! Joe is laughing to himself and thanking Bill Gates and the MPAA.
Now, of course, maybe Gates would give the police a special version of Windows which can read any DRM file... but then that defeats the whole point: if the police can read them without permission, then sooner or later anyone will be able to.
"I'm no sleep researcher or psychologist, but it seems that the human brain is incredibly quick (while dreaming) to pick up on external, subconscious influences/input. It's quite amazing, actually."
I disagree. I suspect that what you see when you wake up is being projected back into your memories of being asleep.
After all, you have no proof that you ever really 'dream', since you're not conscious at the time. All you have are some memories that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality (of course that's true of anything thats happened in the past when you were awake too).
I believe the English car manufacturers mastered automatic breaking of their cars years ago: simply starting the engine was often enough to make my old Rover break. I'm surprised that Mercedes would want to reduce their reliability to the same level.
"While 1080i can be deinterlaced, and displayed at 1080p, the artifacts (jumpiness in horizontal and near-horizontal lines) are still there."
Um, I think you missed the whole point of deinterlacing, which is to remove those field artifacts.
However, the whole thing is a moot point for movies which were shot on film and then telecined to 25fps, or which were telecined at 30fps and then deinterlaced to 24fps. Film is, oddly enough, a progressive-scan medium.
""This car seems to belong in the 1990s in terms of engineering,""
As someone who drives a 1990s car, which replaced a 1980s car which was designed in the 1970s, that doesn't sound too bad to me...
Of course if it's anything like the asian 4x4 I rented one time when my car was being fixed (asked for a smaller car but that was all they had left when I got there to pick it up), they won't be able to go fast enough to do much damage in a crash without rolling the thing.
I'd have thought this was a benefit, myself: TV wastes a vast amount of the average person's life. It's about fifteen years since I had a TV myself, and after the first few weeks you really don't miss the damn thing: anything that's actually worth watching will be out on DVD sooner or later anyway.
"As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you."
Sigh. This is nothing to do with 'pirated movies'. I live in Europe and have over three hundred region-1 DVDs: Microsoft is now telling me that I won't be allowed to play those DVDs _THAT I HAVE PAID FOR_ on my PC, with a drive that I've paid for, with an operating system that I've paid for.
Pirates, of course, don't need to worry since they'll rip the DVD to a DivX file or copy it to a disk with no region coding. THIS ONLY HURTS LEGITIMATE PURCHASERS OF DVDS!
Slashdot Mirror
"In other words, contrary to popular belief, the difference in reliability between Shuttle and 'more traditional rockets' is insignificant."
The difference is, when a shuttle launch is 'unreliable', you lose an irreplaceable multi-billion dollar spacecraft and kill the crew... when, say, a Soyuz launch is 'unreliable', you lose a launcher that you were going to throw away anyway, and the crew get an exciting ride.
Heck, if I remember correctly one Soyuz even survived entering the atmosphere backwards: try that with a shuttle and see how far you get.
"two of the APUs caught fire on another flight (I seem to remember they actually exploded after the landing)"
9 .pdf
Ah, they did:
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/news/columbia/anomaly/STS
I forgot the dodgy brakes and the numerous computer failures, which could also have been bad news in different circumstances.
"The Space Shuttle also experienced zero operational failures within the first 13 flights."
It had some close calls, though. John Young had to take manual control during part of the re-entry on the first flight because the aerodynamics didn't match the model programmed into the computer, tow of the APUs caught fire on another flight (I seem to remember they actually exploded after the landing), and one pilot almost stuffed up the landing.
To be fair, one of the early unmanned Apollo flights had two engines out, and the pogo on Apollo 13 would have destroyed the Saturn V if the center engine hadn't shut down: of course the crew would have escaped since they were in a capsule with parachutes, not a brick with wings.
"Having zero social skills == never having sex without first paying your partner."
Dang: I guess my girlfriend is going to be handing me a big bill soon for ten years of sex... and I guess the other women I've turned down in the last few years were only after my money.
"if you think that lying and bsing are the only skills worth having"
If your goal in life is to have lots of sex with lots of women for free, then lying and BS-ing are definitely the skills to have. Personally I can't be assed to go through all that hassle for a quick shag with someone who's dumb enough to fall for it.
"Scientists and Criminals were both people who experienced the drop in outstanding performance."
Also, both groups tend to do their best work before they're forty.
"There are some things you just can't learn from books."
But 'social skills' aren't among them: there are plenty of books on how to manipulate people and make them think you're wonderful... which is, after all, exactly what Joe Jock is doing with his great 'social skills'.
Life's much easier once you realise that the majority of women (well, at least the majority from about their teens to thirties) are clueless and easily manipulated, largely because they're so certain they have great 'social skills': feed them what they want to see and hear, and they'll do whatever you want.
The problem is that once you realise that, they're not very interesting anymore.
"I recommend, "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie."
Yeah, I read that years ago, it was an interesting book. There was also one called something like 'how to be a psychopath', which I remember had some evil -- and, frankly, often pretty funny -- ways of manipulating people.
Maybe Slashdot should start up a 'social skills reading list' with these kind of books on it: shouldn't take long for the average person here to learn all they need to know.
"Said slightly differently, we scientists see truth as the thing of most value. That is good, but it is not normal."
I think that's the big issue, really. As someone else touched on, 'social skills' often seem to be about allowing people to save face by pretending that you don't know the things they don't want you to know: whereas when a scientist finds that their colleague stuffed up their research, we'll plaster the fact across the front of major science magazines to prove we're better than they are. Most people can't handle such a cut-throat world.
"That's why you're underpaid"
Actually, I'd say I'm paid rather more than I'm worth for the job that I'm currently doing. I could earn more with a higher-stress job elsewhere, but the money wouldn't compensate for taking more time and mental energy away from the things that matter to me.
"It is far more than lying and bullshitting. In a social situation, most people can talk naturally. They simply say what comes to mind."
:).
.NET sucks? Whether the Tibetan Book of the Dead is talking about the same 'near-death experience' that Christians see as a long white tunnel with a guy with a long beard at the end and whether it has any meaning beyond chemical screwups in the brain? What neural network research has to tell us about the nature of 'consciousness'?
I'm still trying to figure out how that's a benefit
But let me give an example: recently I went to a gathering of my extended family. Most of them work in agriculture or construction, and few of them can even manage to turn on a computer. What of 'what comes to mind' am I supposed to talk to them about? Trying to get a simulated Apollo Guidance Computer running again in a simulated CSM? Why
I can't even explain to them what I do for a living without them having at least a reasonable grounding in IT. About the closest thing to a common experience is talking to them about my moonlighting on low-budget movies as a hobby: at least they've seen movies.
Now, I like my family, and I don't think they're idiots, but I have little common ground to talk to them about and little reason to do so. You might say that I 'have no social skills' because I don't want to sit there chatting about the latest reality TV show or football scores, but I don't even care.
"They don't hear the emotion or inflection or notice the facial expressions, and they have a difficult time reading (or listening as it were) between the lines"
Again, I'm not convinced. That may well be true with clinically autistic people, but personally when I'm bored or pissed off with someone I love screwing with them by ignoring their 'between the lines' cues and deliberately feeding them 'cues' of my own to make them respond 'wrong'. You would then say I 'lack social skills', whereas I think that being able to deliberately choose what 'cues' to respond to and send is far more skilled than just responding in certain ways because you're programmed to... knowing what 'cues' to send and what to say lets me manipulate most people like crazy if I get the urge to do so: I'm just too 'nice' to abuse it.
"Anyway, I like being oblivious to certain elements, particularly nonverbal cues, of the social environment."
I used to have a girlfriend who complained that I didn't get her 'nonverbal clues'. Actually I got them perfectly well, I just hated her bullshitting and lack of 'telling the truth skills' and 'dealing with reality skills' so I ignored them... what annoyed her was that I refused to go along with her silly little games.
What many people call 'lack of social skills', I call 'no bullshit attitude', and it's far from surprising to me that scientists would have such an attitude... after all, hard science is pretty much a 'no bullshit' world by its very nature. Why is that considered a bad thing?
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here. As far as I can see, it's basically lying and bullshitting, which surely can't be hard for any smart person to learn? I'm sure most of us are pretty successful at bullshitting our bosses, if nothing else.
I think what really upsets the average person is not that 'geeks' don't have 'social skills', but that they just can't be bothered to bullshit with someone who has little to nothing in common with them. Why bother? What's the point in spending an evening talking about football scores when you could be doing something constructive and interesting instead? I don't get it.
"Your statement implies that Lincoln was worse than Bush."
Lincoln is the worst President the United States ever had. He single-handedly destroyed the Constitution and created the conditions where a cretin like Bush could act like a monarch.
"I don't think many historians would agree with you."
History is written by the victors. Had the southern states won the Civil War, Lincoln would have been rightfully villified in American schools, not worshipped.
I wish I had mod points today so I could mod the parent up. It's hard to see how Americans could put men on the moon and build hugely complex computer chips and software, yet be stupid enough not to impeach the worst President since Lincoln.
"it's executed in its own thread, rather than taking over the processing thread that was interpreting the metafile in the first place."
But that's only an issue if the WMF-processing code doesn't create a new thread in order to call the subroutine in the valid case. In reality you'd almost certainly want the callback to happen in its own thread, rather than to allow anyone to run abitrary code in the same thread as the print server.
"what possible code could be "fallen through" into that would set CPU execution *inside* the metafile -- moreover, would set CPU execution to the *next byte* after the erroneous header block."
I'm not entirely convinced. The code for the valid case presumably reads the subroutine address from the file, then starts a new thread which jumps to that address: it's not inconceivable to me that if the header is invalid it won't read the target address from the file, so the address variable just contains whatever was previously on the stack... which could well be the address of the data that's been loaded from the file (e.g. if it was previously used to hold the pointer into the header).
It may well be an evil backdoor, but it could just as easily be plain old bad programming.
"I don't think it's impossible to create DRM that won't undermine your system"
DRM undermines the system _by design_: its sole function is to prevent people from accessing data that the copyright owner refuses to let them access. It's impossible to do that effectively without 'undermining the system' by preventing the user from using it in the way they want to use it: to be effective DRM has to be built into the operating system at the very lowest level.
It also opens up plenty of new opportunities for the 'bad guys'.
Let's suppose that Joe Sixpack is raided for suspected tax evasion. He's got a spreadsheet with all his income information in it, so the police sieze his computer.
Oh, but it's protected by DRM, so the police can't read it! Joe is laughing to himself and thanking Bill Gates and the MPAA.
Now, of course, maybe Gates would give the police a special version of Windows which can read any DRM file... but then that defeats the whole point: if the police can read them without permission, then sooner or later anyone will be able to.
"I'm no sleep researcher or psychologist, but it seems that the human brain is incredibly quick (while dreaming) to pick up on external, subconscious influences/input. It's quite amazing, actually."
I disagree. I suspect that what you see when you wake up is being projected back into your memories of being asleep.
After all, you have no proof that you ever really 'dream', since you're not conscious at the time. All you have are some memories that may or may not bear any resemblance to reality (of course that's true of anything thats happened in the past when you were awake too).
I believe the English car manufacturers mastered automatic breaking of their cars years ago: simply starting the engine was often enough to make my old Rover break. I'm surprised that Mercedes would want to reduce their reliability to the same level.
"While 1080i can be deinterlaced, and displayed at 1080p, the artifacts (jumpiness in horizontal and near-horizontal lines) are still there."
Um, I think you missed the whole point of deinterlacing, which is to remove those field artifacts.
However, the whole thing is a moot point for movies which were shot on film and then telecined to 25fps, or which were telecined at 30fps and then deinterlaced to 24fps. Film is, oddly enough, a progressive-scan medium.
"They should charge more for vehicles who are likely to injure the occupants of other vehicles."
If you choose to drive a death-trap where you're likely to die in a crash, why should other people be penalised for your poor decisions?
""This car seems to belong in the 1990s in terms of engineering,""
As someone who drives a 1990s car, which replaced a 1980s car which was designed in the 1970s, that doesn't sound too bad to me...
Of course if it's anything like the asian 4x4 I rented one time when my car was being fixed (asked for a smaller car but that was all they had left when I got there to pick it up), they won't be able to go fast enough to do much damage in a crash without rolling the thing.
I'd have thought this was a benefit, myself: TV wastes a vast amount of the average person's life. It's about fifteen years since I had a TV myself, and after the first few weeks you really don't miss the damn thing: anything that's actually worth watching will be out on DVD sooner or later anyway.
"As for pirated movies, MS is not there to help you."
Sigh. This is nothing to do with 'pirated movies'. I live in Europe and have over three hundred region-1 DVDs: Microsoft is now telling me that I won't be allowed to play those DVDs _THAT I HAVE PAID FOR_ on my PC, with a drive that I've paid for, with an operating system that I've paid for.
Pirates, of course, don't need to worry since they'll rip the DVD to a DivX file or copy it to a disk with no region coding. THIS ONLY HURTS LEGITIMATE PURCHASERS OF DVDS!
Personally I use wxWindows: however, can't it be built to run on top of GTK+?