There was an old Ghostbusters game--I remember playing it on a PCjr, I think in the late 80s. You needed one of the joystick accessories.
(The PCjr itself, incidentally, is a remarkably funny machine. To add the second 128K RAM, you... wait for it... take a cover off the side of the case and plug in a unit the depth and height of the case that makes it about an inch thicker. There isn't a parallel port on the main case, but there *is* one on the back of the extra 128K RAM, which also takes its own external power supply, if I remember correctly...)
(And you could keep going, adding inches to the case until you had 512 or 640K or some-such.)
Of course it's out of the voter's hands--it's in the courts' hands. An open session now just risks giving the other side more ammunition in court. No one in their right mind would do it, unless it was a carefully scripted open session, which would amount to little more than a press conference.
Well, okay, from the way it skims, they're offering advertisers space to advertise to your friends that you like something you've already decided you don't mind your friends knowing you like. So if I put "West Wing when Aaron Sorkin still running it," maybe West Wing gets an add on the side of my page or a friends' newsfeed. Unless my 2 second skimming is wrong... okay, maybe it was one and a half seconds... it's a far cry from this to the girl who had her flickr photo stolen for a major advertising blitz across multiple mediums.
Because it's something new that they didn't understand. Hence, in the literal form, news. New data! Something that might be a deep and meaningful key to the universe! Or statistically unlikely interference from an old bit of stray noise. I wouldn't say anything that's science is necessarily news for the masses--some people simply don't care when we discover something new unless it impacts their work day or family life.
The construction is a little funny because of the number of negatives... but oughtn't that to be illegal ==> but ought that not to be illegal == Shouldn't that be an illegal thing to do?
I recognize the merit in, when a legal search is conducted, allowing the use of truly coincidental material found to charge someone with a crime. So long as the search was legal and reasonable. (Drumming up happens too much, of course.) That being said, this smacks heavily of abuse of the law, in a way related to the "Hoax device" BS about the Breadboard incident a few days ago: prosecutors or cops seeking to charge someone in order to justify the fact that they've detained the person, looking for a crime to charge a particular person with rather than observing a crime and charging the person responsible for it.
But what about smaller organizations? Satellites tasked for pictures of, for example, terrorist training camps or drug-running? It's a bit easier to look up satellite coverage on a website than it is to scan the sky for a...
Oh.
It's a French website, isn't it?
Okay, here's a new idea: nobody teach French to terrorists.
The news outlets are using "armed" to refer to the B-52 being armed with nuclear weapons, not (so far as I've seen) in reference to the weapons themselves being armed. Though they're not all being as clear about that as they should be.
Still, arming a nuke isn't always as hard as it's cracked up to be... remember all those all-zero launch codes we had during the cold war? Now that's a weak password.:)
> "Lame" is a limp idea or personality, not a description of a limping person.
This has been true for ten years at least. And it's not strictly accurate, either--the one use doesn't preclude the other, and a college student can still use either meaning of "lame," though the former is far more common. It's basically just an adjective that's been extended slightly in scope of application.
And it's help the schools should give or find for someone with your disability. But I also know a lot of kids who needed help with the smarts. Some still do, years later.
(Just a few cents here; I'm a little sleep-deprived, take with a grain of salt.)
The fairly intelligent kids may not need as much help, but the geniuses and even just the top 1 or 2% certainly do. Among the smartest kids I've known, the social IQs have certainly not always been up there. They tend to be overmedicated, not challenged enough, and excluded from certain social events. Almost everyone has ridiculous amounts of mind-numbingly boring work in primary and secondary school, but multiply that by ten or a hundred for these kids--the work isn't just easy for them, it's trivial. ADD kids aren't lazy--they're more often just gifted (or passibly intelligent) students stuck in a classroom that's taught at least three or four grade levels below what they're capable of learning.
"get out of my way" is a huge thing, I'll grant you--but you still want the smart kids to learn, and at a rate they can learn, and stuff that's useful to them.
We're all paying for the public schools. They should be able to have programs for all of our children. Sometimes the bright kids can just read in the back of the class for the two weeks it takes a class to get through a simple chemical equation... but I know a lot of bright kids who came out of their high schools much, much, much more socially immature than the average bear.
Though to be fair, I'd like to see a bunch of statistics before I designed policy one way or the other. Suicide rates, career in ten years, graduation rate, college graduation rate, personality type results... a lot of data. But without that, I want tiered classes. Though I also want someone to be able to take any level of class they want--an ungifted kid might go into the gifted class, but it would be his responsibility to keep on top of the work.
Oh, and while I'm here (since I prolly won't comment elsewhere in this thread,) I think No Child Left Behind gets a bad political rep. It hasn't worked the way everyone hoped it would work--we all know that. But we lose sight of the fact that we knew that we were failing, and we knew we needed to try something new. It was the right to try something, even though it turned out to be the wrong thing, and we shouldn't condemn the people who tried to do it because it didn't work out. We should fix it, or try something else.
Public Transit is almost certain to come under surveillance, though. There's a much better argument for recorded surveillance there, at least for a time: the mass transit system is a terribly appealing terrorist target, I should think.
And the system mentioned in the article notes your license plate if you don't have EZ-PAss.
The problem is that they keep track of the car--even if you don't have EZ-Pass, which makes a record, you have a license plate which is photographed, and then you're billed based on the license plate. So there are feasible alternatives to EZ-Pass, but the privacy concern exists either way.
As a nation, the US has made numerous commitments to the UN, and that includes agreements to follow things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When we *agree* to follow International Law, we ought to, don't you think? Especially when we're heavily involved in creating that law in the first place?
The fact is that the UN, while it does have a lot of problems, is also far more effective and dare-I-say-it even important than most people in the US ever give it credit for. It's far from a perfect system, but it's still the best we have. We're one of the rich kids on the playground, and one of the strong kids on the playground, and we don't always enjoy what the student government wants to do--so we turn away from it sometimes. But that doesn't mean that it isn't important, or helpful, or that it doesn't, sometimes, do what's right. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't work with it, sometimes, and give it more credit for what it does and tries to do.
Instead, we tend to discount it. Because sometimes we don't like what it says about us or others in the playground, and because it's politically convenient (and salable) for our leaders to emphasize our strength and autonomy, all of our accomplishments and our not-inconsiderable military and economic muscle, and all of our pride. Some degree of Nationalism isn't a terrible thing, and we do have a lot to be proud of--but we also still have a lot to do, and to accomplish, as a nation and as members of larger world, and pretending the other children on the playground are irrelevant doesn't help us to do those things.
Also, don't you want the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to apply to US Citizens in a US Court or on the streets? The Bill of Rights is getting stretched more thinly every day, and the anti-terrorist effort (though directed in part by well-meaning people) is cutting swaths in our Constitution.
--Me
The subtlest change in New York is something that people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations -- the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war....
This race -- this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man -- it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.
I love that the lasers are modded redundant. It makes the little boy in me say YAY! Maybe-or-maybe-not-extinct-dolphins who already have lasers! It's like a superhero waiting to happen. Thinking he's the last of his kind, a young Baiji River Dolphin sets out to restore peace and justice to the world's rivers.
That's ridiculous--the moment there's even a shadow of that problem, you weight upper-level classes with a 1.1 or so. The idea is not to punish someone for taking a harder class, after all. (High school math was probably trivial for all of us, but it isn't for everyone.) My high school weighted honors classes at 1.05 when they averaged them into your GPA, and AP classes at 1.10; a similar technique would work here.
It's not exactly high-security, but they might, for example, filter people who say they're a professor at Columbia according to whether they have an @columbia.edu email address. Similarly, a supposedly corporate official from macdonalds.com might have more say than macdonalds_really_important_bloke@hotmail.com
> "TrES-4 appears to be something of a theoretical problem," said study team member Edward Dunham, also of the Lowell Observatory. "Problems are good, though, since we learn new things by solving them."
Dude! This guy should be an adviser to Congress. He can explain science to them.
Can be very different--if I remember the studies at my alma mater, they found that more women were in tech before the dot.com bubble burst, and the burst had a disproportionate effect, because a larger percentage of the women in tech were interested in it because it was a good thing to do from a career-planning standpoint, while the guys tended to be in it because they loved (or liked) doing it. What stayed fairly stable, I think, was the number of interdisciplinary female students--women in other fields (usually hard sciences) who wanted to have the comp sci background that would be useful for them in their disciplines.
They should sell it even cheaper, but with an advertising constraint: sell an add or two at boot-up, shut-down, and maybe once or twice a day. Not more than that--enough so it's not enough hassle to make someone steal the real one, but M$ gets revenue from advertising and steeply discounted sales on boxes that would be pirated otherwise. 100,000,000 copies at $10 a box plus advertising revenue, and soon you're talking real money for what would be near-zero otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an old Ghostbusters game--I remember playing it on a PCjr, I think in the late 80s. You needed one of the joystick accessories.
(The PCjr itself, incidentally, is a remarkably funny machine. To add the second 128K RAM, you... wait for it... take a cover off the side of the case and plug in a unit the depth and height of the case that makes it about an inch thicker. There isn't a parallel port on the main case, but there *is* one on the back of the extra 128K RAM, which also takes its own external power supply, if I remember correctly...)
(And you could keep going, adding inches to the case until you had 512 or 640K or some-such.)
Of course it's out of the voter's hands--it's in the courts' hands. An open session now just risks giving the other side more ammunition in court. No one in their right mind would do it, unless it was a carefully scripted open session, which would amount to little more than a press conference.
The quote, at least as I've heard it, goes as follows:
"To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer."
~Farmers' Almanac, 1978
Well, okay, from the way it skims, they're offering advertisers space to advertise to your friends that you like something you've already decided you don't mind your friends knowing you like. So if I put "West Wing when Aaron Sorkin still running it," maybe West Wing gets an add on the side of my page or a friends' newsfeed. Unless my 2 second skimming is wrong... okay, maybe it was one and a half seconds... it's a far cry from this to the girl who had her flickr photo stolen for a major advertising blitz across multiple mediums.
> ensuring that the science paid for by government agencies US taxpayers is open to everyone.
fixed that for you.
Because it's something new that they didn't understand. Hence, in the literal form, news. New data! Something that might be a deep and meaningful key to the universe! Or statistically unlikely interference from an old bit of stray noise. I wouldn't say anything that's science is necessarily news for the masses--some people simply don't care when we discover something new unless it impacts their work day or family life.
But this is news for nerds, not news for Thoreau.
See the usage note here.
The construction is a little funny because of the number of negatives... but oughtn't that to be illegal ==> but ought that not to be illegal == Shouldn't that be an illegal thing to do?
I recognize the merit in, when a legal search is conducted, allowing the use of truly coincidental material found to charge someone with a crime. So long as the search was legal and reasonable. (Drumming up happens too much, of course.) That being said, this smacks heavily of abuse of the law, in a way related to the "Hoax device" BS about the Breadboard incident a few days ago: prosecutors or cops seeking to charge someone in order to justify the fact that they've detained the person, looking for a crime to charge a particular person with rather than observing a crime and charging the person responsible for it.
IANAL, but oughtn't that to be illegal?
But what about smaller organizations? Satellites tasked for pictures of, for example, terrorist training camps or drug-running? It's a bit easier to look up satellite coverage on a website than it is to scan the sky for a...
Oh.
It's a French website, isn't it?
Okay, here's a new idea: nobody teach French to terrorists.
The news outlets are using "armed" to refer to the B-52 being armed with nuclear weapons, not (so far as I've seen) in reference to the weapons themselves being armed. Though they're not all being as clear about that as they should be.
:)
Still, arming a nuke isn't always as hard as it's cracked up to be... remember all those all-zero launch codes we had during the cold war? Now that's a weak password.
> "Lame" is a limp idea or personality, not a description of a limping person.
This has been true for ten years at least. And it's not strictly accurate, either--the one use doesn't preclude the other, and a college student can still use either meaning of "lame," though the former is far more common. It's basically just an adjective that's been extended slightly in scope of application.
Isn't this in most or all credit card agreements?
And it's help the schools should give or find for someone with your disability. But I also know a lot of kids who needed help with the smarts. Some still do, years later.
Bad in practice.
(Just a few cents here; I'm a little sleep-deprived, take with a grain of salt.)
The fairly intelligent kids may not need as much help, but the geniuses and even just the top 1 or 2% certainly do. Among the smartest kids I've known, the social IQs have certainly not always been up there. They tend to be overmedicated, not challenged enough, and excluded from certain social events. Almost everyone has ridiculous amounts of mind-numbingly boring work in primary and secondary school, but multiply that by ten or a hundred for these kids--the work isn't just easy for them, it's trivial. ADD kids aren't lazy--they're more often just gifted (or passibly intelligent) students stuck in a classroom that's taught at least three or four grade levels below what they're capable of learning.
"get out of my way" is a huge thing, I'll grant you--but you still want the smart kids to learn, and at a rate they can learn, and stuff that's useful to them.
We're all paying for the public schools. They should be able to have programs for all of our children. Sometimes the bright kids can just read in the back of the class for the two weeks it takes a class to get through a simple chemical equation... but I know a lot of bright kids who came out of their high schools much, much, much more socially immature than the average bear.
Though to be fair, I'd like to see a bunch of statistics before I designed policy one way or the other. Suicide rates, career in ten years, graduation rate, college graduation rate, personality type results... a lot of data. But without that, I want tiered classes. Though I also want someone to be able to take any level of class they want--an ungifted kid might go into the gifted class, but it would be his responsibility to keep on top of the work.
Oh, and while I'm here (since I prolly won't comment elsewhere in this thread,) I think No Child Left Behind gets a bad political rep. It hasn't worked the way everyone hoped it would work--we all know that. But we lose sight of the fact that we knew that we were failing, and we knew we needed to try something new. It was the right to try something, even though it turned out to be the wrong thing, and we shouldn't condemn the people who tried to do it because it didn't work out. We should fix it, or try something else.
I didn't read the post you're responding to, but why should a man need to be a psychologist to talk about the mind? No one's asking him for therapy.
*glances at post in question*
Okay, so he could be a lot more tactful, or could use... well, could explain any reasoning he's using there. But still, more flies with honey.
A degree isn't everything.
Public Transit is almost certain to come under surveillance, though. There's a much better argument for recorded surveillance there, at least for a time: the mass transit system is a terribly appealing terrorist target, I should think.
And the system mentioned in the article notes your license plate if you don't have EZ-PAss.
The problem is that they keep track of the car--even if you don't have EZ-Pass, which makes a record, you have a license plate which is photographed, and then you're billed based on the license plate. So there are feasible alternatives to EZ-Pass, but the privacy concern exists either way.
As a nation, the US has made numerous commitments to the UN, and that includes agreements to follow things like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. When we *agree* to follow International Law, we ought to, don't you think? Especially when we're heavily involved in creating that law in the first place?
...
The fact is that the UN, while it does have a lot of problems, is also far more effective and dare-I-say-it even important than most people in the US ever give it credit for. It's far from a perfect system, but it's still the best we have. We're one of the rich kids on the playground, and one of the strong kids on the playground, and we don't always enjoy what the student government wants to do--so we turn away from it sometimes. But that doesn't mean that it isn't important, or helpful, or that it doesn't, sometimes, do what's right. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't work with it, sometimes, and give it more credit for what it does and tries to do.
Instead, we tend to discount it. Because sometimes we don't like what it says about us or others in the playground, and because it's politically convenient (and salable) for our leaders to emphasize our strength and autonomy, all of our accomplishments and our not-inconsiderable military and economic muscle, and all of our pride. Some degree of Nationalism isn't a terrible thing, and we do have a lot to be proud of--but we also still have a lot to do, and to accomplish, as a nation and as members of larger world, and pretending the other children on the playground are irrelevant doesn't help us to do those things.
Also, don't you want the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to apply to US Citizens in a US Court or on the streets? The Bill of Rights is getting stretched more thinly every day, and the anti-terrorist effort (though directed in part by well-meaning people) is cutting swaths in our Constitution.
--Me
The subtlest change in New York is something that people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sound of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
All dwellers in cities must live with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself, and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.
It used to be that the Statue of Liberty was the signpost that proclaimed New York and translated it for all the world. Today Liberty shares the role with Death. Along the East River, from the razed slaughterhouses of Turtle Bay, as though in a race with the spectral flight of planes, men are carving out the permanent headquarters of the United Nations -- the greatest housing project of them all. In its stride, New York takes on one more interior city, to shelter, this time, all governments, and to clear the slum called war.
This race -- this race between the destroying planes and the struggling Parliament of Man -- it sticks in all our heads. The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.
-- E.B. White, from "Here Is New York," 1948
I love that the lasers are modded redundant. It makes the little boy in me say YAY! Maybe-or-maybe-not-extinct-dolphins who already have lasers! It's like a superhero waiting to happen. Thinking he's the last of his kind, a young Baiji River Dolphin sets out to restore peace and justice to the world's rivers.
(Oh, and he has a laser.)
That's ridiculous--the moment there's even a shadow of that problem, you weight upper-level classes with a 1.1 or so. The idea is not to punish someone for taking a harder class, after all. (High school math was probably trivial for all of us, but it isn't for everyone.) My high school weighted honors classes at 1.05 when they averaged them into your GPA, and AP classes at 1.10; a similar technique would work here.
It's not exactly high-security, but they might, for example, filter people who say they're a professor at Columbia according to whether they have an @columbia.edu email address. Similarly, a supposedly corporate official from macdonalds.com might have more say than macdonalds_really_important_bloke@hotmail.com
> "TrES-4 appears to be something of a theoretical problem," said study team member Edward Dunham, also of the Lowell Observatory. "Problems are good, though, since we learn new things by solving them."
Dude! This guy should be an adviser to Congress. He can explain science to them.
(And I mean that!)
> as of June, IE6 was at about 37% market share
Can be very different--if I remember the studies at my alma mater, they found that more women were in tech before the dot.com bubble burst, and the burst had a disproportionate effect, because a larger percentage of the women in tech were interested in it because it was a good thing to do from a career-planning standpoint, while the guys tended to be in it because they loved (or liked) doing it. What stayed fairly stable, I think, was the number of interdisciplinary female students--women in other fields (usually hard sciences) who wanted to have the comp sci background that would be useful for them in their disciplines.
They should sell it even cheaper, but with an advertising constraint: sell an add or two at boot-up, shut-down, and maybe once or twice a day. Not more than that--enough so it's not enough hassle to make someone steal the real one, but M$ gets revenue from advertising and steeply discounted sales on boxes that would be pirated otherwise. 100,000,000 copies at $10 a box plus advertising revenue, and soon you're talking real money for what would be near-zero otherwise.