Oh, I'm certain the priciple goes back further than Poe--people were busy being sneaky bastards long before the 19th century. The Elizabethans played incredible backstabbing spycraft games, for instance. Try looking up the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. He did more than just write plays. I don't understand why history classes are always so dull when history itself is so interesting.
Edgar Allan Poe used "hiding in plain sight" as a plot device for one of his August Dupin stories. Poe invented the detective story, paving the way for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
Well, in that case, me and my original VHS cassettes (and I do mean "original"--Han shoots first) are going to have a little party, and Mr. Lucas won't be invited.
I used to subscribe to the Boston Globe. Hiawatha Bray, despite having a kickass name, is a lousy tech journalist. Poster child for a little learning being a dangerous thing, though he seems to genuinely want to write good articles; I dunno what's up with this one.
iTMS doesn't make Apple any money. It breaks even, maybe takes a little loss, so that Apple can move iPods. (So your AAC-free iPod represents even more profit for Apple than if you used iTMS.) It makes no sense at all for Apple to open the iPod to competing proprietary formats. One of the iPod's selling points is smooth interoperability with iTunes, and Apple wants to create a brand identity and the loyalty that comes with having a powerful brand. They're doing a damn good job of it, too.
Sure, technically, MP3 is proprietary, too, but no one really cares and everybody has a way to rip to MP3. Apple bowed to existing market forces by supporting MP3, otherwise, iPods wouldn't have sold at all. But now, why should Apple dilute their power by supporting formats with low market saturation? (And even if Apple were going to support other formats, why on god's green and bountiful earth would they choose the abyssmally bad RealAudio?)
Glaser...said during a panel discussion Tuesday at PC Forum here that Apple is creating problems for itself by using a file format that forces consumers to buy music from Apple's own iTunes site....Apple could not be reached for comment.
Yes, that's because Apple was on its way to the bank. Laughing, I might add.
You mean like Discovery used to be, before it turned into "all Monster Garage, all the time"? I don't dislike that show, or other new Discovery fare like Mythbusters, but what happened to the science? Discovery has gone downhill, though not as badly as TLC. *shudder*
I can just see it: "Today, on GTechTV4...Trading Cases, where two sets of neighbors trade computers for the weekend and do a killer new mod on one box in each others' homes!"
Traveller, huh? Man, is everything getting sucked into d20?
I'd actually be interested in seeing how the combat mechanics are resolved. The Amber system doesn't have any randomness to it, so my players just tell me what they want to do in terms of strategy and tactics ("I want to scare him into conceding by a display of superiority, so I will go completely aggressive, trying lots of blade beats and striking for every opening I see,") and I narrate combats between the PCs and those NPCs who are their equals or betters based on that. When the players clearly outclass their opponents, I let them narrate and stomp all over the poor doomed NPCs. This seems to work fairly well, but then, my players are mature and more interested in a story than in "winning" (and they know that I will mock them mercilessly in real life if they go all rules-lawyer on me.)
You didn't mention what games your group is interested in. For online play, my friends and I ditched the dice mechanics entirely and I started GMing a play by email game. It doesn't require the time commitment and scheduling of an IRC session, and tends to have a smoother and somewhat more leisurely feel. We take turns writing sections of narration, and we tend to back-channel a bunch so that the players can ask each other clarification questions, or speak to me as GM privately. The system we're using is Amber, which is already diceless, so that helped. I don't think PBEM would translate well to d20 games, since they're so stats and combat-intensive. PBEM may be more like collaborative writing than you're really looking for, but it's some of the coolest world-building I've ever done. If you have a mature group of players who are interested in story more than killin', you might give it a try.
Like all high-tech endeavors, "rocket science" is a blend of many different fields. I happen to think that electrical engineering is far more difficult than aerospace engineering ever could be, but I have helped EE friends with their required mechanical engineering classes, and they got stuck on things I thought were simple and obvious. I'm sure they felt the same way when the time came to help me with my EE requirement. Ditto me and my CS friends. A lot of it is a matter of training and experience.
I'm qualified to work on things like airframes and engines, and I can calculate a pretty mean orbit, if I do say so myself. But I'm lost when it comes to things like avionics or heat shield design. So "rocket science" is indeed complex and tricky, and a successful rocket design will require experts from many fields. But things like compressible flow, which seems to be what Carmack's talking about, aren't really outside the grasp of a dedicated student at all. And of course, all of this sounds like black magic to the nontechnical layman.
Of course, we don't go around telling people this, or we wouldn't be able to look down our noses at everyone else. "I design jet engines, and I've done some work on the Mars program. Oh, you write computer games? Aw, that's cute.";)
I work in New England, contracting for a jet engine manufacturer (and you can get it in two if you know the aero industry). Things like this happen frequently in manufacturing, especially with development hardware, before the kinks have been worked out of the assembly process and parts are ready to go to production. Assembly mistakes range from things that are easy to do but also easy to fix, like cut or cracked O-rings and tool knicks on non-critical parts, to things that are real screw-ups and result in major headaches, like parts left out entirely or vital parts being installed incorrectly and badly damaged because of it. You could consider the entire shuttle program to still be development-phase engineering, since only a few shuttles were ever built.
An example: a while back, we had a test engine spewing fuel all over the test cell for no readily apparent reason, prompting a panic that an entire compartment of the engine would have to be redesigned from scratch--until one of the test engineers found a fuel line seal that had not been reinstalled in the engine after the last teardown and reassembly. How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts. Anyway, they put the seal back in, and the engine worked fine. (I have an NDA, so this is not what actually happened, but it is analogous.)
When I was in school, the more I learned about the environment the shuttle operates in, the more I was impressed by the fact that it worked at all, and now that I'm learning more about manufacturing engineering (not what I studied for; stupid job market), I'm surprised that the shuttles have as few problems as they do.
The guy seems to have a very absolutist view of the world.
It's part of the schtick. I'm not even sure Cecil Adams is a real person.
The point is that there are some subjects where you can have right and wrong, 'the earth is flat' being one of them. But when it comes down to definitions there may not be an ultimate 'truth'.
Well, in the case of the tomato, it's a matter of which side you're coming at it from. To a botanist, a tomato is a fruit. To a chef, it's a vegetable.
I really don't think there was ever a brontosaurus. I mean, they put the wrong head on the skeleton. That's not really a matter of opinion.
Pluto I would call a minor planet. Sedna I might call a minor planet. But you're right, the line isn't bright.
It's a sad day when you don't begrudge your tax dollars because you like infrastructure or because it's something you want. You're too easily giving a blank check away. My point is: _other_ people don't begrudge _your_ tax dollars either because there's something _else_ that _they_ want.
Goddamn, man. You live in a society, you pay for the upkeep of that society, in one form or another. In the US, (I assume you're a fellow USAian), and other First World nations, that form is taxes. I get a value return every year far in excess of what I pay. It's inevitable that my tax money is going to go to some programs I don't like. That's okay; someone else's dollars are going to fund something that they hate and I love. That's another price paid for living a pluralistic society. I'd willingly pay more if it meant I would get longer vacations and shorter working hours. My time is the only capital that really matters to me.
Though I am starting to worry about just how many of my tax dollars are going towards things I find not just to be wastes of money, but ethically reprehensible. That's what the ballot box is for, I suppose...until someone manages to hijack it entirely. I like reading about dark, distopian futures, but I don't want to live in one.
*snip corporate shenanigans*
Yup. True capitalism, like any other pure system, is impossible. The sooner we stop pretending, the better.
For example: broadcast television is "free" but that doesn't mean that you aren't shelling out for it through your tax dollars or service fees imposed on other parts of your life. Major media companies are intimately tied to many other companies and industries through collaborations, contracts, investments, and informally through their executive boards. While they may not be able to charge you to receive broadcast signals their charging the advertisers or receiving supplemental income from government agencies. Trickle down (and around) isn't just about job creation it's also about billing. It may seem free on the front end but rest assured that the suits are getting more than their fair share of revenue from it.
Free? Nope; no reception without cable.
I'm quite okay with TANSTAAFL. I don't begrudge my tax dollars (much) because I like infrastructure. It costs money to run a country. I don't begrudge paying for things I want, or advertisers supporting the programs I watch or the websites I frequent. It costs money to produce things, whether it's chocolate bars or snarky social commentary. Orkut is being underwritten by Google, which I help pay for by clicking through the AdWords text links that advertise services useful to me. Everybody wins.
Now, corporate law and the distribution of wealth...that could use some work.
There is nothing in it for you. It's a business model. If they can't dazzle you with the brilliance of their service they'll get 1000 other people to sign up based upon their b_llsh_t. The end goal of these social networking services is not to work for the advancement of society. Their end goal is to make money. If they can come up with five or six poster children whose lives were advanced then so much the better for their marketing spiel.
Eh. Even if the goal is some sort of marketing social networking map, it's going to skew very geek. Orkut, being invite-only, is self-selecting for early adopters and heavily wired types. I question how much useful data they'll get out of knowing that I'm two degrees away from every geek in New England. I'm also not going to be inviting people with very important social links to me to join...like my parents, or my boss, which will serve to generate an incomplete network at best.
And, Orkut is all kinds of free. It costs them to serve me pages, and they're all dynamically generated. Google isn't making money on Orkut. I tend to trust Orkut a smidgen more than I would another social-networking service, since it comes out of Google Labs. Orkut feels very toy-like right now, as though they're just playing around with the software to see if they hit on something cool. (Their policy on copyright is sketchy, though.)
I imagine that Orkut is working to develop their own social networking mapping software and all of its users are becoming part of a vast experiment in modeling of social systems.
Okay...so what's in it for me? They're not going to get a very accurate map if they can't keep people signed up. There's some potential in the forums, I think, and for business networking, but I don't sign on more than once a week anymore unless I get an alert that someone has friended me.
You are not people. Your number is Liberty-4527.:))))
Flash me back to freshman English again, and I will track you down and force you to read The Fountainhead.;)
Orkut is still beta, so I'm willing to forgive it some hiccups. But the new friend ranking thing is just weird. The whole point of the "friend" class is to link you up to people you know...so why the hell do you need to rank those? You know them. "Oh, right! John Smith is my best friend! I totally would have forgotten that! Thank you, Orkut!"
But, that said...if there's a use for Orkut beyond spammy friend-of-friend messages, I haven't found it yet.
The printer for women thing may be insulting to you (and probably many like you), but are you sure it is as insulting to the women who are the target market? You'd probably be able to handle those big printers where the "Printer is on fire" message might actually be something to worry about.
But why "for women," why not "for the technologically clueless," or whatever marketspeak could sell that concept? Why encourage equating the two concepts? It should be insulting. (Or even "for people who don't want to be bothered.")
Maybe that's why that "printer for women" is a good thing for some women, helps reduce the "carrying it around" discouragement by including a nice handle:).
Oh,:P
If you can write in FORTRAN go ahead:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=fortran
Cool! I don't know how much would fall under my NDA, but I'll definitely poke around. Wonder if there's a finite-element program in there...and if I'm 1337 enough to actually contribute. Most engineers who program write terrible code...I know, I just had to figure out a subroutine written back in early 80's sometime, and it caused me actual pain. I hope I don't subject whomever's reading my code to that in 20 years.;)
I recently hexedited a program for a customer and got it to do something which the vendor has already documented it doesn't do and customers are to buy the vendor's other product to do it... I wasn't aware that that was the official position when I did the hexediting. My boss told me to go fix the customer's problems with the software and I thought that was one of the problems I was supposed to fix... Oops:).
Heheh. I heartily approve.
But again, to drag this slightly back on topic, problem-solving of that sort is encouraged in men, discouraged in women. The pressure on women to be passive is pervasive, and hard to shrug off. Hence my desire for a level societal playing field.
I don't tend to buy conspiracy theories, but I also don't eliminate valid possibilities without investigation because I can make up an explanation. Want to know for sure what the hell the 'Glass Worm' is? Drop a lander there and FIND OUT. That's what scientific investigation is about. Forming a hypothesis and testing it. We seem to be missing the testing on some of these points. Providing an alternate, unporven hypothesis does not constitute proof (or debunking, for that matter).
On some of these, there are clearly valid explanations, such as the 'green spot' photos. On others, I'm sorry, there's simply not.
Certainly, we don't know in the mathematical sense of complete, undeniable proof. But we do not have to forsake sense in the name of fairness. As I recall about the Glass Worm photo, Plait says that perspective is deceptive is many astronomical photos, presents an example that looks like a crater in one orientation and a dome in another, and suggests that a similar perceptual trick is probably at work in the case of the "worm." He also explains the "glassy" appearance in terms of an imaging effect. This is a far better hypothesis than any Hoagland has proposed, and while I would love to be able to explore Mars inch by inch, in the absence of infinite money, work like Plait's is the best we have. And there's no reason at all to fund a mission to go check out Hoagland's assertations about the Martian surface, since they really ought to pin the needle on even a Wal-Mart bullshit detector.
(Besides, it's clearly a Habitrail left over from the Giant Space Hamsters once plentiful on Mars, and sadly unable to survive the climate change.)
Slashdot Mirror
Check out the bitchy replies from the 16 year-old AC's who didn't read the subject line.
I am oppressed by the AC's! Oppressed, I say! I demand immediate moderation of their insensitive comments to "-1, Kneejerk".
Heh.
-Carolyn
And here come the "+5, Funny" mods for tired old sexist jokes that aren't.
"Tee-hee! Women are bad drivers!" Which is of course why insurance premiums are higher for men.
Sure, it's a joke...but try that excuse on a black guy after telling a racist joke and see if you don't get punched in the face.
-Carolyn
Oh, I'm certain the priciple goes back further than Poe--people were busy being sneaky bastards long before the 19th century. The Elizabethans played incredible backstabbing spycraft games, for instance. Try looking up the life and death of Christopher Marlowe. He did more than just write plays. I don't understand why history classes are always so dull when history itself is so interesting.
-Carolyn
Edgar Allan Poe used "hiding in plain sight" as a plot device for one of his August Dupin stories. Poe invented the detective story, paving the way for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
[Yeah. It's offtopic. Neener.]
-Carolyn
A worthy motto indeed, sir. ;)
-Carolyn
Well, in that case, me and my original VHS cassettes (and I do mean "original"--Han shoots first) are going to have a little party, and Mr. Lucas won't be invited.
-Carolyn
I used to subscribe to the Boston Globe. Hiawatha Bray, despite having a kickass name, is a lousy tech journalist. Poster child for a little learning being a dangerous thing, though he seems to genuinely want to write good articles; I dunno what's up with this one.
-Carolyn
Yeah, MP3's are magic like that. ;)
I suspect Apple sees no profit from iTMS because they pay some ridiculously high percentage of their sale price to the record labels.
-Carolyn
iTMS doesn't make Apple any money. It breaks even, maybe takes a little loss, so that Apple can move iPods. (So your AAC-free iPod represents even more profit for Apple than if you used iTMS.) It makes no sense at all for Apple to open the iPod to competing proprietary formats. One of the iPod's selling points is smooth interoperability with iTunes, and Apple wants to create a brand identity and the loyalty that comes with having a powerful brand. They're doing a damn good job of it, too.
Sure, technically, MP3 is proprietary, too, but no one really cares and everybody has a way to rip to MP3. Apple bowed to existing market forces by supporting MP3, otherwise, iPods wouldn't have sold at all. But now, why should Apple dilute their power by supporting formats with low market saturation? (And even if Apple were going to support other formats, why on god's green and bountiful earth would they choose the abyssmally bad RealAudio?)
-Carolyn
Glaser...said during a panel discussion Tuesday at PC Forum here that Apple is creating problems for itself by using a file format that forces consumers to buy music from Apple's own iTunes site....Apple could not be reached for comment.
Yes, that's because Apple was on its way to the bank. Laughing, I might add.
-Carolyn
You mean like Discovery used to be, before it turned into "all Monster Garage, all the time"? I don't dislike that show, or other new Discovery fare like Mythbusters, but what happened to the science? Discovery has gone downhill, though not as badly as TLC. *shudder*
I can just see it: "Today, on GTechTV4...Trading Cases, where two sets of neighbors trade computers for the weekend and do a killer new mod on one box in each others' homes!"
-Carolyn
Traveller, huh? Man, is everything getting sucked into d20?
I'd actually be interested in seeing how the combat mechanics are resolved. The Amber system doesn't have any randomness to it, so my players just tell me what they want to do in terms of strategy and tactics ("I want to scare him into conceding by a display of superiority, so I will go completely aggressive, trying lots of blade beats and striking for every opening I see,") and I narrate combats between the PCs and those NPCs who are their equals or betters based on that. When the players clearly outclass their opponents, I let them narrate and stomp all over the poor doomed NPCs. This seems to work fairly well, but then, my players are mature and more interested in a story than in "winning" (and they know that I will mock them mercilessly in real life if they go all rules-lawyer on me.)
-Carolyn
You didn't mention what games your group is interested in. For online play, my friends and I ditched the dice mechanics entirely and I started GMing a play by email game. It doesn't require the time commitment and scheduling of an IRC session, and tends to have a smoother and somewhat more leisurely feel. We take turns writing sections of narration, and we tend to back-channel a bunch so that the players can ask each other clarification questions, or speak to me as GM privately. The system we're using is Amber, which is already diceless, so that helped. I don't think PBEM would translate well to d20 games, since they're so stats and combat-intensive. PBEM may be more like collaborative writing than you're really looking for, but it's some of the coolest world-building I've ever done. If you have a mature group of players who are interested in story more than killin', you might give it a try.
-Carolyn
Like all high-tech endeavors, "rocket science" is a blend of many different fields. I happen to think that electrical engineering is far more difficult than aerospace engineering ever could be, but I have helped EE friends with their required mechanical engineering classes, and they got stuck on things I thought were simple and obvious. I'm sure they felt the same way when the time came to help me with my EE requirement. Ditto me and my CS friends. A lot of it is a matter of training and experience.
;)
I'm qualified to work on things like airframes and engines, and I can calculate a pretty mean orbit, if I do say so myself. But I'm lost when it comes to things like avionics or heat shield design. So "rocket science" is indeed complex and tricky, and a successful rocket design will require experts from many fields. But things like compressible flow, which seems to be what Carmack's talking about, aren't really outside the grasp of a dedicated student at all. And of course, all of this sounds like black magic to the nontechnical layman.
Of course, we don't go around telling people this, or we wouldn't be able to look down our noses at everyone else. "I design jet engines, and I've done some work on the Mars program. Oh, you write computer games? Aw, that's cute."
-Carolyn
I work in New England, contracting for a jet engine manufacturer (and you can get it in two if you know the aero industry). Things like this happen frequently in manufacturing, especially with development hardware, before the kinks have been worked out of the assembly process and parts are ready to go to production. Assembly mistakes range from things that are easy to do but also easy to fix, like cut or cracked O-rings and tool knicks on non-critical parts, to things that are real screw-ups and result in major headaches, like parts left out entirely or vital parts being installed incorrectly and badly damaged because of it. You could consider the entire shuttle program to still be development-phase engineering, since only a few shuttles were ever built.
An example: a while back, we had a test engine spewing fuel all over the test cell for no readily apparent reason, prompting a panic that an entire compartment of the engine would have to be redesigned from scratch--until one of the test engineers found a fuel line seal that had not been reinstalled in the engine after the last teardown and reassembly. How do you miss something like this when there's a careful set of instructions to follow for every step of the assembly? I don't know, but I do know that humans are fallible, so we are constantly dealing with a stream of lost, damaged, and defective parts. Anyway, they put the seal back in, and the engine worked fine. (I have an NDA, so this is not what actually happened, but it is analogous.)
When I was in school, the more I learned about the environment the shuttle operates in, the more I was impressed by the fact that it worked at all, and now that I'm learning more about manufacturing engineering (not what I studied for; stupid job market), I'm surprised that the shuttles have as few problems as they do.
-Carolyn
That's one of the few things I've seen on Slashdot that actually deserves +5 Funny.
You owe me a new keyboard. Preferably one of those spiffy wooden ones.
-Carolyn
The guy seems to have a very absolutist view of the world.
It's part of the schtick. I'm not even sure Cecil Adams is a real person.
The point is that there are some subjects where you can have right and wrong, 'the earth is flat' being one of them. But when it comes down to definitions there may not be an ultimate 'truth'.
Well, in the case of the tomato, it's a matter of which side you're coming at it from. To a botanist, a tomato is a fruit. To a chef, it's a vegetable.
I really don't think there was ever a brontosaurus. I mean, they put the wrong head on the skeleton. That's not really a matter of opinion.
Pluto I would call a minor planet. Sedna I might call a minor planet. But you're right, the line isn't bright.
-Carolyn
I cite Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, font of all knowledge, to say with authority:
The tomato is botanically a fruit.
Brontosaurus never existed.
And you can blame the Greeks for the continent thing.
That Cecil! Is there anything he doesn't know?
-Carolyn
It's a sad day when you don't begrudge your tax dollars because you like infrastructure or because it's something you want. You're too easily giving a blank check away. My point is: _other_ people don't begrudge _your_ tax dollars either because there's something _else_ that _they_ want.
Goddamn, man. You live in a society, you pay for the upkeep of that society, in one form or another. In the US, (I assume you're a fellow USAian), and other First World nations, that form is taxes. I get a value return every year far in excess of what I pay. It's inevitable that my tax money is going to go to some programs I don't like. That's okay; someone else's dollars are going to fund something that they hate and I love. That's another price paid for living a pluralistic society. I'd willingly pay more if it meant I would get longer vacations and shorter working hours. My time is the only capital that really matters to me.
Though I am starting to worry about just how many of my tax dollars are going towards things I find not just to be wastes of money, but ethically reprehensible. That's what the ballot box is for, I suppose...until someone manages to hijack it entirely. I like reading about dark, distopian futures, but I don't want to live in one.
*snip corporate shenanigans*
Yup. True capitalism, like any other pure system, is impossible. The sooner we stop pretending, the better.
-Carolyn
Be careful when you say "free".
For example: broadcast television is "free" but that doesn't mean that you aren't shelling out for it through your tax dollars or service fees imposed on other parts of your life. Major media companies are intimately tied to many other companies and industries through collaborations, contracts, investments, and informally through their executive boards. While they may not be able to charge you to receive broadcast signals their charging the advertisers or receiving supplemental income from government agencies. Trickle down (and around) isn't just about job creation it's also about billing. It may seem free on the front end but rest assured that the suits are getting more than their fair share of revenue from it.
Free? Nope; no reception without cable.
I'm quite okay with TANSTAAFL. I don't begrudge my tax dollars (much) because I like infrastructure. It costs money to run a country. I don't begrudge paying for things I want, or advertisers supporting the programs I watch or the websites I frequent. It costs money to produce things, whether it's chocolate bars or snarky social commentary. Orkut is being underwritten by Google, which I help pay for by clicking through the AdWords text links that advertise services useful to me. Everybody wins.
Now, corporate law and the distribution of wealth...that could use some work.
-Carolyn
There is nothing in it for you. It's a business model. If they can't dazzle you with the brilliance of their service they'll get 1000 other people to sign up based upon their b_llsh_t. The end goal of these social networking services is not to work for the advancement of society. Their end goal is to make money. If they can come up with five or six poster children whose lives were advanced then so much the better for their marketing spiel.
Eh. Even if the goal is some sort of marketing social networking map, it's going to skew very geek. Orkut, being invite-only, is self-selecting for early adopters and heavily wired types. I question how much useful data they'll get out of knowing that I'm two degrees away from every geek in New England. I'm also not going to be inviting people with very important social links to me to join...like my parents, or my boss, which will serve to generate an incomplete network at best.
And, Orkut is all kinds of free. It costs them to serve me pages, and they're all dynamically generated. Google isn't making money on Orkut. I tend to trust Orkut a smidgen more than I would another social-networking service, since it comes out of Google Labs. Orkut feels very toy-like right now, as though they're just playing around with the software to see if they hit on something cool. (Their policy on copyright is sketchy, though.)
-Carolyn
I imagine that Orkut is working to develop their own social networking mapping software and all of its users are becoming part of a vast experiment in modeling of social systems.
:))))
;)
Okay...so what's in it for me? They're not going to get a very accurate map if they can't keep people signed up. There's some potential in the forums, I think, and for business networking, but I don't sign on more than once a week anymore unless I get an alert that someone has friended me.
You are not people. Your number is Liberty-4527.
Flash me back to freshman English again, and I will track you down and force you to read The Fountainhead.
-Carolyn
Orkut is still beta, so I'm willing to forgive it some hiccups. But the new friend ranking thing is just weird. The whole point of the "friend" class is to link you up to people you know...so why the hell do you need to rank those? You know them. "Oh, right! John Smith is my best friend! I totally would have forgotten that! Thank you, Orkut!"
But, that said...if there's a use for Orkut beyond spammy friend-of-friend messages, I haven't found it yet.
-Carolyn
The printer for women thing may be insulting to you (and probably many like you), but are you sure it is as insulting to the women who are the target market? You'd probably be able to handle those big printers where the "Printer is on fire" message might actually be something to worry about.
:).
:P
;)
:).
But why "for women," why not "for the technologically clueless," or whatever marketspeak could sell that concept? Why encourage equating the two concepts? It should be insulting. (Or even "for people who don't want to be bothered.")
Maybe that's why that "printer for women" is a good thing for some women, helps reduce the "carrying it around" discouragement by including a nice handle
Oh,
If you can write in FORTRAN go ahead:
http://sourceforge.net/search/?words=fortran
Cool! I don't know how much would fall under my NDA, but I'll definitely poke around. Wonder if there's a finite-element program in there...and if I'm 1337 enough to actually contribute. Most engineers who program write terrible code...I know, I just had to figure out a subroutine written back in early 80's sometime, and it caused me actual pain. I hope I don't subject whomever's reading my code to that in 20 years.
I recently hexedited a program for a customer and got it to do something which the vendor has already documented it doesn't do and customers are to buy the vendor's other product to do it... I wasn't aware that that was the official position when I did the hexediting. My boss told me to go fix the customer's problems with the software and I thought that was one of the problems I was supposed to fix... Oops
Heheh. I heartily approve.
But again, to drag this slightly back on topic, problem-solving of that sort is encouraged in men, discouraged in women. The pressure on women to be passive is pervasive, and hard to shrug off. Hence my desire for a level societal playing field.
-Carolyn
I don't tend to buy conspiracy theories, but I also don't eliminate valid possibilities without investigation because I can make up an explanation. Want to know for sure what the hell the 'Glass Worm' is? Drop a lander there and FIND OUT. That's what scientific investigation is about. Forming a hypothesis and testing it. We seem to be missing the testing on some of these points. Providing an alternate, unporven hypothesis does not constitute proof (or debunking, for that matter).
On some of these, there are clearly valid explanations, such as the 'green spot' photos. On others, I'm sorry, there's simply not.
Certainly, we don't know in the mathematical sense of complete, undeniable proof. But we do not have to forsake sense in the name of fairness. As I recall about the Glass Worm photo, Plait says that perspective is deceptive is many astronomical photos, presents an example that looks like a crater in one orientation and a dome in another, and suggests that a similar perceptual trick is probably at work in the case of the "worm." He also explains the "glassy" appearance in terms of an imaging effect. This is a far better hypothesis than any Hoagland has proposed, and while I would love to be able to explore Mars inch by inch, in the absence of infinite money, work like Plait's is the best we have. And there's no reason at all to fund a mission to go check out Hoagland's assertations about the Martian surface, since they really ought to pin the needle on even a Wal-Mart bullshit detector.
(Besides, it's clearly a Habitrail left over from the Giant Space Hamsters once plentiful on Mars, and sadly unable to survive the climate change.)
-Carolyn