I work with special education kids as an aide in a public school system.
The process of working with special ed kids opens a window into how the brain works. Each kid is different, each kid illustrates a different variation on what happens when something is missing or slightly mis-connected.
There is a way in which every special ed kid is different and every reasonably correctly configured person like a ballet dancer or a college student is the same.
I use the phrase "working with special ed kids" to mean the aide helps the youth to do something. As I work in parallel with the young person, it seems I begin to see memory layers and feedback paths. Why can I fit the puzzle piece in the cutout and why does the young lady do three steps of the task and then let go of the piece?
I think the conversations about consciousness are complicated by two aspects of how the brain works.
First, a correctly configured brain generates an illusion of continuity and smoothness. The individual layers are invisible, like a ballet dancer's intense and long drawn out memory and control effort fuses into a beautiful appearance of continuous motion.
Second, the correctly configured brain generates something that should be cautiously called an illusion of consciousness. I mean illusion in a very limited sense: We have spare memory that holds words and images when we close our eyes. We have a limited ability to summon a few memories into consciousness. We can not fetch anything from anywhere in the brain.
But again, from a correctly configured brain we can't discern the layers, but I feel the process of working with special ed kids helps when one does in parallel what the special ed person struggles with.
Piaget has pointed out there is considerable difference between adults at the levels of mentation adults operate with.
The two components I use for understanding the kids I work with are: memory, as something that is organized in layers. Cerebral palsy kids in particular will show very specific areas where they do not maintain memory. The other idea I use for trying to understand kids is: Feedback loops. Autistic kids will show good memory but they have very puzzling behaviours that seem like some kind of a feed back loop.
What is really going on is the automobile makers are announcing they have begun filing patents.
This is a continuation of the industrial patent game that has been played since the beginning of the auto industry.
The patent game is a game played between the auto companies. The payout of the game is membership and position in the global auto manufacturing hierarchy.
What kind of innovation, what software, what interface? Well the patent game allows only a spotty blend of best of breed and second best solutions.
Patents are these strange objects that confer the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a limited period of time. For any manufacturer, patents promise guaranteed business.
I think the patent game should be changed using inspiration from the Creative Commons and Open Source and Free Software movement. The point to focus on is to require patents to be licensed on the same terms and the same price to all applicants. Equal terms for all is to address the problem of patents supporting manufacturing oligopoly and the complementary problem of the best of breed solutions being locked away for scores of years.
Another problem with the patent game is the toxic effects as patent holders grasp for extraordinary or highest possible profits. The unfortunate effect of owning a patent is to the patent holder, the only fair price is "all the market will bear". That monopoly inspired grasping is a really difficult thing to regulate or balance in respect to what is fair for the commons.
The Ubuntu takeover stalled and crashed beginning 5 years ago.
Despite a fine desktop and the great Debian package system the takeover failed because the Ubuntu Install CD has a single 500 + megabyte compressed install file.
Unpacking that install file forces a Windows computer with a Windows marginal quality CD drive to operate beyond it's tested limits.
Even with 15+ years experience, multiple machines and a big name brand DVD drive, I had the install CD failure. I am talking about what went on 5 years ago.
I have a computer buddy who used to build and sell PC's using two storage lockers full of new obsolete hardware typically bought in lots from computer retailers. He has long since given up trying Ubuntu. He says, hey I just stick a Windows Install CD in the drive, hit go and I'm done.
The cause of the Ubuntu failure to take over the computer desktop, in part, is the inability of the Ubuntu designers to comprehend the utter confidence destroying humiliation that their Install CD inflicts on would be newbies.
Most of us will be on the edge of a disaster. I mean, the worst of it will be 20 miles away.
The background fact, not much reported is big disasters have a multi-year time span.
As modelled by the hurricane damage to New Orleans, the time span of the disruption is years for many affected people.
Modest home reserves will ease the 1 week food and water problem.
For my household, the really big problem will be to keep making mortgage payments if either wage earner loses a job.
The stupid over priced California housing market for the last 10 years is a secondary financial disaster ready to spring into operation as soon as an earthquake knocks down a freeway or a bridge.
And the miserable thing about the secondary financial disaster is when you miss 3 payments in a row, your home equity is about to be wiped out. No crash, no boom, no drama. Just a foreclosure.
I have been playing around with using 1% savings and loan banking as a way to de-leverage the single family home business. Get out from under the mountain of mortgage debt in an orderly and legal way.
Here goes. Yes it is sort of a screed written today:
How to organize for a political push to restructure copyright and patent law?
Advocating for changes in copyright and patent law is basically a sharks versus minnows problem. The sharks are the relatively few businesses who are able to write laws and lobby for their passage. The minnows are the 200 million plus people who buy material covered by copyright and patent protection.
At the level of Federal law, the sharks have been winning by arguing for and lobbying for broader laws and longer terms of copyright and patent protection.
I write here about the problem by cutting it into three parts. One part is “How do you organize the minnows.” Part two is: “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws? Part three is: “What law do you write and what do you ask elected representatives to vote for?”
On the problem of “How do you organize the minnows?”
I recently discovered an article that shows how and why an organization effort could plausibly employ a social network site like Facebook. The kind of action group that is plausible is: A loose social network.
The article title is “Small Change Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker magazine, October 4, 2010. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
1. Copyright and patent reform needs to be a non-partisan movement. 2. As an issue for the large numbers of “minnow” advocates, this will be a relatively small commitment activity that does not require the intense friendship and hierarchical structure of the American Civil Rights movement. The Malcom Gladwell article above eloquently disassembles the presumption that a Facebook type advocacy program can create a disciplined, hierarchical organization. Instead of an institution, a Facebook advocacy program tends to create a loose network. 3. The hundreds of thousands of reform advocates need a set of winning arguments. 4. Money and rhetoric: In the absence of a better rule of thumb, the lobbying and campaign donation dollars deployed needs to match or exceed by a factor of two the lobbying and campaign donation dollars spent by the “shark”advocates. The movement needs a well documented estimate of the shark lobby hours and dollars and shark campaign spending and a matching tally for the “minnow” advocates. Unless something changes, let's assume that money talks in politics. The movement needs both money and quality talk. The copyright and patent reform activity needs both a coherent rhetorical argument and matching donations.
On the problem of “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws?”
There are many instances where copyright and patent protections are an encumberance and annoyance. For instance:
The recitation of facts and circumstances in the press announcement is too tidy and too organized. There must be major undisclosed facts and players associated with this case.
First of all note this is a "plea bargain". It is a plea bargain where only the prosecutor is saying anything. Note that the defendant and his attorney is saying nothing.
That means the deal is not justice in the conventional sense of found guilty in open court by a jury.
Notice, a big feature of this deal is all the punishment falls on one individual. There is no mention of the individual being paid except as in employment wages. The theft claim stops at the individual.
Note that the facts disclosed appear to be very prettily organized. The person flew to the perfect airport, The evidence found should not have been on any laptop. The files shouldn't have been on any business laptop owned by a Chinese company. The files show just the right access times to prove illegal access. The encryption used is just good enough to prevent casual access. The FBI is just good enough to forensically decrypt the files and perfectly identify the files as originating at Ford.
At the local courthouse I saw first hand that a lot of criminal prosecutions appeared to be young people pleading "nolo contendre" and accepting rather harsh punishments. I have seen at close hand punishment and criminalization being implemented by the motor vehicles people strictly as an administrative matter that takes the police officer's ticket as nearly incontestable truth.
One problem is, defence attorneys cost $300 per hour and even some attorneys have a 10 hour minimum.
Instead of justice, what we have here is the Federal criminal punishments are so exorbitantly draconian that 1 thumb drive of files means much more that 6 to 8 years in prison.
The government prosecution probably could have locked this hapless engineer up for 90 years.
The prosecutors negotiated with him to only take away 1/5 of his remaining lifetime in prison.
The concern I feel is our justice system is being short circuited by a triple problem: The criminal justice system destroys entire families without the damage being ever measured. The triple problems are: 1. Defence attorneys are generally un-affordable.
2. The punishments are imperial lockup in duration. There is no penitence and correction philosophy. Simply integer fractions of a lifetime are forfeited for chicken misbehaviors.
All those years of "get tough on crime" have given us a criminal prosecution system that causes problems because of the scope and severity of the punishments now written in the law.
3. Prosecutors are getting quick easy long lasting punishments without actually engaging in trial by jury in an open court.
The problem of drivers being distracted by cell phone use can be resolved by adding autonomous vehicle capabilities to existing cars and trucks.
At present, different car makers sell premium models each with small chunks of the autonomous vehicle control solution. Mercedes has a safe following distance speed control, Toyota advertises a self-parallel parking device.
What we need is a design with a software interface to the vehicle mechanicals (something like an Arduino with a usb port), a plug in sensor with a software interface, a software interface to a vehicle map device, two data radios and a general purpose computer like a Linux netbook running autonomous vehicle control programs.
You glue the whole thing together by making the sensor devices present a software self describing interface. A defined software interface makes it possible to develop and test vehicle control software with simulated inputs.
The control computer is a general purpose device that runs programs for the specific control jobs needed. One program might be "learn my commute to work", Another program might be "Steer and brake while the driver uses the cell phone".
The problem as I see it is to get an open source data and control definition out there before some monopolist locks up the scheme like Microsoft locked up their document export definition.
I can hear the hum of the patent attorneys in the distance... All of this is really obvious right?
Sure a car can have computers, even my 93 Dodge has some kind of controller.
Hey we could have another TCP/IP type revolution here... add layers and gain functionality.
What is needed is to connect existing automobiles to an autonomous vehicle interface. The autonomous vehicle interface would provide a connection point for an autonomous vehicle computer to be attached.
The autonomous vehicle computer would query the interface device and get a description response of all the controls and sensors available. The interface would organize and scale the data available from the car. The interface would convert autonomous vehicle computer data into the signals expected by the devices attached to the automobile.
Think of the autonomous vehicle interface as an Arduino Mega that is wired into whatever the vehicle has available. The interface would be like interaction with a python interpreter.
Now the autonomous vehicle computer, think of that as a Linux netbook running a variety of programs for the car. There could be add on sensor devices attached to the autonomous vehicle computer. Like a GPS, a data cell phone and a 802.g wireless connection to nearby vehicles and 802.g radio equipped traffic devices.
So what to do with such a modification: Completely end drunk driving accidents. Reduce the kWh per 100 passenger-kilometres. Do aggressive dynamic insured and paid ride sharing. Dramatically reduce distracted driving damage. Reduce direct fuel use by coasting up to stoplights. All of this with existing vehicles.
The exciting part of doing AVT autonomous vehicle technology like this is: It is not proprietary and locked up in islands of make and model specific functionality. Some aspects of AVT can be backported to most older cars and real energy and safety benefits accrued.
The question in the title "How much math do we really need?" is really the author, Mr. Ramanathan expressing a low opinion of his students, a low opinion of a textbook he used in his classes and a low valuation of all students.
The pesky word "need" is the pivot point for his sophistry.
If your educational model is to create truly educated men and women, you need at least a quality geometry course and four years of college level mathematics.
(See the curriculum provided by the great books colleges, St. John's College at Santa Fe and Annapolis.)
In my opinion, the two great fields of mathematics are: Calculus (based on limit theorems) and Topology (based on Euler's polyhedron theorem). The calculus has been over emphasized and topology has been seriously neglected.
To be real specific, the high school curriculum could really benefit from a topology course that would cover knot theory (with matrix math), paper folding (with solution of equations), lattices, symbolic logic, network theory (with walks), and surfaces(with klein bottles), and an introduction to fractals. It could be parallel to Algebra I.
Topology has both the beauty of pure math and a wealth of applications. Unlike calculus, in knot theory for instance, after a couple days' study a student can encounter unproven theorems.
Right there: obvious things that nobody has been able to prove in 50 years! Yeah, how does that affect the development of your "educated person"?
The thermal efficiency goes up rapidly when the engine compression ratio is increased.
What Mazda has accomplished is the continued refinement of the art of burning gasoline in a very very high compression setting.
The problem is high compression engines are hard to start and hard to make durable.
I compared an 1999 or 2000 Prius product leaflet with the same year early Toyota Echo leaflet. Same body, different engines. The Prius had 10.1:1 compression ratio and the Echo 9.1:1. (Maybe I have the numbers off by.1 )
So the story of why the Prius gets good mileage changes: The trick of the big electric motor and engine computers is to quietly start the high compression engine. The other trick is to keep the high compression engine from destroying it's pistons.
In this view: regenerative braking is a minor contribution to the thermal efficiency of the Prius.
The real trick is a honking big starter motor without a screaming pinion gear noise. Plus lots and lots of computer power managing each cylinder ignition event.
So Mazda's accomplishment? Stratospheric levels of engineering artistry. Probably a super duper gasoline injection device and even more direct control of each individual combustion event.
Here is a toast to the long forgotten 4 cylinder alcohol fueled Offenhauser engine Indy car!
I also looked into developing a cell phone application. My application hopes are modest: I don't expect to make much money and I don't have much money, and I prefer a $15 a month cell phone, In this setting, the android or a Linux based phones are the platforms I considered.
The problem is, the entire cell phone field is divided into little silos. The field is just transitioning from "charge all the market will bear and insist on 2 year contracts." to the slightly more price variability. But cell phones are still bound up because they don't have a visible TCP/IP networking layer and a uniform port 80 service. The cell phone world is like the computer world in the era of bulletin boards and Compuserve.
Thinking of my long gone Turbo Pascal, Mix C compiler and Morrow CP/M and RS-232 interfacing and 2400 Baud dial up connections, I for one realized that computer networking required "something more" but I didn't know what. Like everybody else, I worked my way through Novell Netware, and AOL.
For my educational application, I see it as something a teacher would run on her desktop. I am using the Google App Engine cloud computing system with the Python programming language. Attractions are: cheap to get started, modern programming language, open source, and a simple development environment. Plus, my app will run on most any computer that a user has.
I have an idea for a ride-sharing cell phone application that needs access to a GPS sensor, like dozens of other cell phone applications, the siloing just eliminates an app from running on most phones. A two dollar ride sharing event has broken economics if you have to buy a specific $150 phone and pay $2 a day for wireless service to support the application.
The big picture, the large scale energy consumption events in our lives, we only know to one or two decimal places. The whole research and decision making process, for a large group of Slashdot commentators like you and me, boils down to find an energy waste and fix it.
See: http://www.withouthotair.com/ ; An outstanding accomplishment at viewing the energy situation using consistent units and definitions.
Because many energy usage problems require outside information, my experience is a pad of paper and careful collection of outside information is a big part of reducing energy usage. High quality local data (just a few points are needed) and outside data (got by copying it onto a pad of paper) are needed for energy analysis. I use Gnumeric for my spreadsheet. It helps to save results on the computer and on paper printouts as a specific energy usage problem is addressed.
For the last go round at measuring my home energy instances, I used a Kill-A-Watt meter (Frys.com in Northern California occasionally puts it on sale for under $20.). Note, the Kill-A-Watt will not measure a 1200 watt microwave oven (too much current) and it will not measure a 220 volt electric water heater.
While the Kill-A-Watt told me my refrigerator was an energy hog, it was not a whole lot of help at determining precisely what was wrong with the refrigerator that made it an energy hog. I did a couple of tests exploring various ideas: bad insulation, too many door opening events, weak door gasket magnets, dirty condenser coils, and an unfairly optimistic energy usage rating system. I eventually bought a new refrigerator. That key purchase required going to the store before my wife, copying all the energy usage and model info and price, and then shopping with the wife and a spreadsheet in hand to balance the wife's desire for style and design with energy usage and price issues solved in advance for many of the choices at hand.
The end result was a new refrigerator that has a 1.56 year payoff period.
One of the problems I am looking at now is "Does the gasoline burned by my wife's commute and my commute exceed the amount of energy consumed by the whole house?" It is another case of some outside numbers, some inside numbers and the outcome will be at best a 2 decimal place result. And what will I do when I find the result?
The phrase "Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe..." is a phrase which is teasing the reader and suggesting a big misunderstanding. I suggest there is a translation error here. The people being reported are probably more like historians that are trying to understand the Galilean revolution in perception from different perspectives.
I recall from my college years (at St. John's, where writings of Ptolemy, Galileo and Newton were read), Ptolemy was pretty clear, his book said "I am going to save the appearances...". His math does that.
Galileo was something new, he was studying pendulums, balls rolling down planes and looking at the moons circling Jupiter. Galileo was doing physics. A big change from "saving the appearances".
Now as to the exact language of the transformation that took place with Galileo?
Well there have been a number of expansive interpretations of what happened. It is such an interesting study area that I am inclined to guess the people being described are historians or history buffs or advocates trying to interpret the conflict with the Church in a manner more sympathetic to the Church.
Here is my "non-deliberate" system for recovering emails, files, programs, website copies, correspondence, certification homework, photos and projects, from the last 12 years. All these components have been mentioned earlier except the find text in files command I show you below.
I have the computer I used for the last 11 years sitting turned off with two disk drives. This is a metal case computer isolated from electrical surges by a UPS. I presently have the archive computer set up with an IO Gear device that switches the keyboard, mouse and display to the archive computer if I need to turn it on. I like this better than accessing the archive computer through SSH or a terminal server or remote desktop viewer. The silly but important thing is do not let the archive computer connect to your mailserver and download current emails. I find simply copying entire directories to an 8 gig USB drive is easier than messing around with SCP (secure copy) and SSH (secure shell).
Those two disks go back about 12 years. The email systems I have used over the years have pretty well known names. The older email pattern is one big file containing every email with a blank line separating each email. For a Microsoft system, I use a USB stick as a archive device and I read it on a Linux box.
I can search as much of the disks as I need using the following script (taken from Unix Power Tools)
I store the script in a file called "findscriptfile" because I can't remember it, I just look it up when I need it. I wind up creating files with the same command on various places on my computers. Note the command line below requires blanks as shown. You will have to test and fiddle with the search. Sometimes you need to use "sudo " when file permission error messages cloud the results. The search time for an email address or a copy of a letter or a photo file is 20 minutes.
This find script finds all files starting at the current directory and working down and the script searches each file for the word "thumbnail".
find . -type f -exec grep thumbnail '{}'/dev/null \;
I think one of the interesting things about the original problem posted to Ask Slashdot is what kind of information has enduring value and how much value does it have? Or another question might be what is the cost of storage per month and how many items on the storage system are worth more than the storage cost?
What you have is the dish antenna that is part of a C band satellite TV receiver system.
First thing, I urge you to get in touch with the sellers or landlords and ask: "Do you have the old satellite receiver and LNA (low noise amplifier) that were used with the dish antenna?" The receiver and the LNA don't have much use for any other purpose and you can have a lot of fun if you get the equipment back from who ever may have it.
Satellite TV systems come in two flavours. The older system that uses the large 3 meter dish is called C band. The newer system is called Ku band and it uses a 18" dish. If your dish is fixed, then it is aimed at one satellite. Some dishes can tune in 2 satellites because they have 2 LNA units attached to the dish and the LNAs are at the two foci formed by two satellites that orbit overhead at intervals a few angular degrees apart.
My satellite receiver system is a "free to air" system that uses a motorized 18" dish. I can only tune in Ku or K band transmissions. Your big dish can tune in C band satellites. C band is a lower frequency transmission and a large dish is required because the satellites have an interesting bunch of technical problems related to bandwidth, noise and available electrical power in space.
My setup is a Coolsat 1000 Satellite receiver. It sits on the Cable TV wire, it produces a signal on Tv channel 3 when it is in use. From the receiver up to the roof is a single cable TV coax cable. DC power and a tuning signal is sent up the Coax to the Low noise amplifier. The LNA amplifies and mixes the tuning signal and the satellite signal. The result is down the cable comes the satellite TV signal at some standard frequency. If you have a motor drive, the same coax can carry control signals to the dish motor. On a Coolsat receiver you have to set the receiver with "Lnb power on" and "Lnb type Universal" and "LNB frequency 9.750/10.750" to cause the power to be sent and the conversion signal to be sent.
I knocked on the door of a fellow with a C-band system and the owner says he uses it all the time and no the system is not for sale. (I asked).
Getting my Satellite dish aimed at the right place in the sky took a bit of work. I used the book Positional Astronomy and Astro-Navigation Made Easy by H.R. Mills.
Then I made a satellite finder with a 14" wide sheet of foam board. I drew a 12" arc, 180 degrees (a half circle) with a base line or diameter, I put a 1" high screw at the center of the arc. The 90 degree perpendicular on the foam board I label as 122.5 degrees West, which is my longitude found from a map. Using lyngsat.com for satellite sky longitudes, I compute then plot angles on the foam board, keeping in mind that the 90 degree perpendicular on the foam board points to the 122.5 degree point in the sky. I mount the foam board on a photo tripod. With a compass and an inclinometer you go outside. The diameter of your half circle goes due north and south. The arc lays facing south. You tilt the foam board up until the board is inclined at 90 degrees minus your latitude. I live at 37.5 degrees so the tilt angle is 90 - 37.5. When you sight over the 1" screw head, and right over the arc of the foam board, you are pretty nearly looking at the ecliptic path of ~22,500 mile distant satellites from a ~6,500 km radius earth. The 1" screw head models the radius of the earth where you stand and the ~12" radius circle models the radius to the geosynchronous satellite orbital circle.
On K-band, the free to air material is mostly culture and religious broadcasts. Several of the K band satellites are mostly pay tv. The only un-encrypted channel on one satellite is a message "Congratulations you have tuned into.... blah blah network." Check out Lyngsat.com for what is on C-band. I wish I could confirm what you can pick up on C-band.
The outcome of this battle may be: a settlement that includes patent and technology exchange with relatively little money or damages between Google and Oracle.
The companies have to do a good dramatic performance because anti-competitive business practices are illegal.
But this kind of legal conflict between two of major American computer business organizations is precisely the way in which everybody else is shut out. These two large firms will license to each other huge chunks of intellectual property, under the guise of engaging in a "settlement" to avoid a ruinous court decision.
This instance of patent and copyright litigation is just as ugly as the individual who faces a $60,0000 claim for copyright infringement due to downloading songs.
But note the stunning difference: Google has a settlement pathway available. Google has patents and trade secrets of great value to Oracle.
So if they settle, then each organization has greatly advanced itself into a duopoly, where everybody else is wedged to the business sidelines.
The important point for you and me is:
The patent and copyright system is gradually penetrating the software world. The patent and copyright system shows it's power at inhibiting progress in the useful arts and draining the vitality out of the information systems technical revolution despite the great value of open source software.
So what to do: Publish everything done in University and College courses and research under GPL version 3. Develop a code and comment search to facilitate showing prior art. There are probably 20 implementations before a person writes a patent claim.
Regulate licensing law as it applies to patents and copyrights. Patents are enshrined in the US Constitution, but the licensing of them has been exploited to the extremes of unfairness. The era of patents as a key to industrial supremacy needs to end.
Somebody go look for a bright Law Professor, ask him to write up a draft patent and copyright reform law. Something we can make an election issue. Bring back the American Populist political sensibility.
The Oracle vs Google suit described is yet another Kabuki play that re-enacts how patent and copyright litigation gradually clears the business playing field of all the small players.
The scenario resolves like this: Gradually the big players exclusively cross license each other. Exclusive cross licensing allows the big players to keep playing and it pushes the smaller players to go do something else.
This is the pattern. I read this basic description in my father's machine shop in the 1960's in a book titled "How to patent your invention" or some such title.
The GPL is a brilliant demonstration that non-exclusive cross licensing is ethically, socially and culturally a superior form of copyright and patent rights assignment. Part of the brilliance of the GPL is the same license terms are provided to all. It happens to have a $0 price also.
Approaches to patent system change built around the damage to the public good caused by "exclusive" as a term in cross licensing.
This approach says, modify contract law to alter the toxic results of one patent being issued with different license terms to different parties. (For instance, calling all lawyers...) Replace exclusive cross licensing devised by lawyers with defined by law licensing method that is not exclusive. Remove the duopoly cost savings advantages from cross licensing by requiring each item to have an enumerated per use price. Taxable as income and as a cost of goods used. Make exclusive cross licensing that is too tight an anti-trust violation. Require that a patent holder or copyright holder license the use at one price for all. No exchanges. No triple damages. No blue sky estimates. Make cross licensing agreements taxable transactions. Remove the usage of cross licensing as a practice of building business oligarchies. Make patent licensing the same price for all. Make it with no fixed annual charge and only payment per physical object manufactured only.
It is for Docbook specialists
on
DocBook 5
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· Score: 1
The subtitle "...The Definitive Guide" means this book is for specialists that work with the DocBook publication tag language.
The information in this book isn't for the user of the word processor or editor program.
DocBook is a syntax and tag language and this is a book for people who work with the tag language.
I suggest, the problem with online learning is how to tie it together with the other activities that provide the physical learning and social preparation provided by a physical school.
I seems to me that Western society (like California where I live) needs to switch over to 1/3 the commute distance for everybody everywhere. A neat, but distant analogy is we need to anneal the structural lattice of workers and jobs.
This means lots and lots of people need to be able to move laterally into related but different employment.
So lets look at online education (as has been discussed above, and many shortcomings noted) as a real interesting starting point for re-employment.
Suppose we switch to describing a job in terms of 5 or 6 specific online courses? When you complete those courses, you are at entry level for a specific job.
Suppose, online courses were indexed in a search engine, organized into a tree, staffed with tutors, rated by students and employers?
Go a little further; commented and authored like an Instructable?
How about open source with adaptive exams generated by open source tools?
How about where the local high school "conducts" the copy of the course (maybe an OCW course).
Dodge the academically questionable for profit school system by hosting this program through evening high school.
How about, hosted by high schools? With a monthly meeting for nearby people studying related fields?
How about entire states having "intern days" where every business accepts 5 prospective interns to visit for a day and the whole group of five take home a project to describe and post as yet another Instructable?
So the thinking here is, adapt the online course material to the extremely specific needs of some local employer, enabling a local person to take the job. And second of all, mobilize the boost value of a fresh, enthusiastic new employee with the latest in educational preparation to energize the hiring organization.
So the Idea is... these are ways to convert the rather simple online courses we know today into the learning framework that Western society needs for re-invigorating the "knowledge society" that was proposed by Peter Drucker and others back in the '80s.
I am puzzled why the distribution building process seems to require a lot of hand work to verify that applications and major subsystems work as expected after there are changes made to the lower level libraries and operating system?
I am familiar with printing and sound breaking on Ubuntu. Ubuntu shows more problems after an upgrade than Debian. For instance, I have two Ubuntu versions on two systems right now. The older distro has a working application gthumb and the newer one has the function import within gthumb broken.
So what puzzles me is why don't distributions have a test system, like Rails does?
Could you explain to me, what part in the distro building process doesn't respond to the simple test suite approach?
But the shift of manufacturing offshore happened because an American worker is $20 an hour and an offshore worker is $.50 to $5 per hour.
Why don't we look at other dimensions of the American and "western" industrial system that we can twiddle to help move into the future?
By "twiddle" I mean something like this: change the velocity of consumption to 1/3 or 1/5 by increasing the lifetime of consumer products by a factor of 3x or 5x.
Stipulating a longer the lifetime for a product pushes a lot of changes in directions appropriate for the future: less waste, less trash, less CO2 emission, more value as an asset and less value as an expense. For long lifetime items, the original factory has a relatively smaller economic place.
Funny, how I got this idea. I have noticed a change in the failure modes of coffee makers that parallels the shift of manufacturing to China. The older domestic coffee makers would blow a thermal fuse. Radio shack sells replacements. The last two imported coffee makers failed with sophisticated unrepairable open circuits that developed a few months after the warranty expired. I think there are some very smart Chinese manufacturing engineers tuning their products for a specific life duration.
The Miller-McCune article outlines an American system for funding science.
Looking at it as a system, how should that system be changed?
The main purpose of the existing system was inspired by the World War II understanding of the political and military importance of science.
Lets say that there are two huge failures of the American science system.
1.An absurd waste of highly educated people waiting for autonomy and work appropriate for their preparation. The research universities benefit and the people get by on pittances.
2.A phenomenal drain of scientific research into the wasteland of proprietary intellectual property, patents based on public funded research, and exorbitantly high prices for biochemical items substantially based on research initially funded by the US government. Note the mention of Monsanto interfering with a student science project above.
A side effect of the American science system is that the government has allowed all the innovations to be released to others. The knowledge is locked in expensive journals, out of print books and expensive reverse lookup citation indexes within University libraries.
So the question I hand back to you is: How do we change the system to alter these two bad side effects?
I am first of all puzzled why hand held X-ray spectrometers (XRF) don't get coverage in the popular technology press.
The XRF device is quite close to the technology modelled in the Star Trek science fiction TV series.
These hand held spectrometers retail for $30,000. Several firms are offering similar devices. That means a kit could possibly be offered for $3000 or even $300, given say 3 or 4 years as bargain versions of the key components are gradually put into production.
Even at $30,000, a hand held XRF unit has all kinds of potential as the basis of a materials and environmental testing service that bills customers for $100 to $35 an hour.
The second very disappointing news I pulled out of this article is my son's 2007 high school Chemistry textbook does not mention X-ray spectrometry. He is using a California state approved textbook.
Heck, I look at his book further and note, it doesn't index "chromatography" or "gas chromatography" either.
I have been asking my son "Have you learned how to do inorganic cation analysis yet?" Chemistry class was the high point of my years in high school 45 years ago.
Looking both ways I see a problem: The California high school chemistry curriculum is stuck in the past. He should have used an XRF in chemistry lab.
I'm stuck in the past too. At Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley I took photos of the Lawrence 4" synchrotron. I have been thinking, gee, for some reason I think it would be handy to build a particle accelerator. Now I know, the gadget I might build is for sale. I am going to check EBay for an XRF real soon now.
I am responding to your post on the chance that you are seeing a photo import bug because you use gthumb.
The 16GB flash card you link to in your Ask Slashdot question looks like the 8GB flash card I use in my digital camera.
If you are doing digital photography and using Ubuntu or a Linux, take note that the photo import utility in gthumb is broken in Ubuntu 9.10. The gthumb version is 2.10.11 and the specific thing broken is photo import of jpeg images. Photo import fails if there are.avi movie files on the flash card.
I have had a series of flash card aggravations and here is my version of the preceding AskSlashdot comments:
1. Digital cameras format flash memory cards with minor variations or they store image data with minor variations. I work around potential glitches by keeping the card in the camera and connecting the camera to the Ubuntu computer.
2. Use gthumb (note bug above) or the graphical file tool Nautilus. The top level menu item "Places" in Ubuntu starts Nautilus. Copy the files from the camera to the computer.
3. Speaking about USB flash memory, I feel they have devolved into a Windows quality file transfer device = WQFTD That means, they work using the supplied file system. The success of the same devices using Ext2 and Ext3 file systems is problematic.
4. Measuring the read and write reliability of these WQFTDs at the bit level is a difficult problem. As I mention in my journal, I have a big name DVD drive that is a WQFTD. I know it fails when reading huge 8 bit data files. But, building a tool to prove when and where it fails is beyond my available time as an evening hacker.
5. So one answer is "simplify and work around your WQFTD" without challenging it's limits.
Slashdot Mirror
I work with special education kids as an aide in a public school system.
The process of working with special ed kids opens a window into how the brain works. Each kid is different, each kid illustrates a different variation on what happens when something is missing or slightly mis-connected.
There is a way in which every special ed kid is different and every reasonably correctly configured person like a ballet dancer or a college student is the same.
I use the phrase "working with special ed kids" to mean the aide helps the youth to do something. As I work in parallel with the young person, it seems I begin to see memory layers and feedback paths. Why can I fit the puzzle piece in the cutout and why does the young lady do three steps of the task and then let go of the piece?
I think the conversations about consciousness are complicated by two aspects of how the brain works.
First, a correctly configured brain generates an illusion of continuity and smoothness. The individual layers are invisible, like a ballet dancer's intense and long drawn out memory and control effort fuses into a beautiful appearance of continuous motion.
Second, the correctly configured brain generates something that should be cautiously called an illusion of consciousness. I mean illusion in a very limited sense: We have spare memory that holds words and images when we close our eyes. We have a limited ability to summon a few memories into consciousness. We can not fetch anything from anywhere in the brain.
But again, from a correctly configured brain we can't discern the layers, but I feel the process of working with special ed kids helps when one does in parallel what the special ed person struggles with.
Piaget has pointed out there is considerable difference between adults at the levels of mentation adults operate with.
The two components I use for understanding the kids I work with are: memory, as something that is organized in layers. Cerebral palsy kids in particular will show very specific areas where they do not maintain memory. The other idea I use for trying to understand kids is: Feedback loops. Autistic kids will show good memory but they have very puzzling behaviours that seem like some kind of a feed back loop.
What is really going on is the automobile makers are announcing they have begun filing patents.
This is a continuation of the industrial patent game that has been played since the beginning of the auto industry.
The patent game is a game played between the auto companies. The payout of the game is membership and position in the global auto manufacturing hierarchy.
What kind of innovation, what software, what interface? Well the patent game allows only a spotty blend of best of breed and second best solutions.
Patents are these strange objects that confer the exclusive right to manufacture an invention for a limited period of time. For any manufacturer, patents promise guaranteed business.
I think the patent game should be changed using inspiration from the Creative Commons and Open Source and Free Software movement. The point to focus on is to require patents to be licensed on the same terms and the same price to all applicants. Equal terms for all is to address the problem of patents supporting manufacturing oligopoly and the complementary problem of the best of breed solutions being locked away for scores of years.
Another problem with the patent game is the toxic effects as patent holders grasp for extraordinary or highest possible profits. The unfortunate effect of owning a patent is to the patent holder, the only fair price is "all the market will bear". That monopoly inspired grasping is a really difficult thing to regulate or balance in respect to what is fair for the commons.
The Ubuntu takeover stalled and crashed beginning 5 years ago.
Despite a fine desktop and the great Debian package system the takeover failed because the Ubuntu Install CD has a single 500 + megabyte compressed install file.
Unpacking that install file forces a Windows computer with a Windows marginal quality CD drive to operate beyond it's tested limits.
Even with 15+ years experience, multiple machines and a big name brand DVD drive, I had the install CD failure. I am talking about what went on 5 years ago.
I have a computer buddy who used to build and sell PC's using two storage lockers full of new obsolete hardware typically bought in lots from computer retailers. He has long since given up trying Ubuntu. He says, hey I just stick a Windows Install CD in the drive, hit go and I'm done.
The cause of the Ubuntu failure to take over the computer desktop, in part, is the inability of the Ubuntu designers to comprehend the utter confidence destroying humiliation that their Install CD inflicts on would be newbies.
Most of us will be on the edge of a disaster. I mean, the worst of it will be 20 miles away.
The background fact, not much reported is big disasters have a multi-year time span.
As modelled by the hurricane damage to New Orleans, the time span of the disruption is years for many affected people.
Modest home reserves will ease the 1 week food and water problem.
For my household, the really big problem will be to keep making mortgage payments if either wage earner loses a job.
The stupid over priced California housing market for the last 10 years is a secondary financial disaster ready to spring into operation as soon as an earthquake knocks down a freeway or a bridge.
And the miserable thing about the secondary financial disaster is when you miss 3 payments in a row, your home equity is about to be wiped out. No crash, no boom, no drama. Just a foreclosure.
I have been playing around with using 1% savings and loan banking as a way to de-leverage the single family home business. Get out from under the mountain of mortgage debt in an orderly and legal way.
http://talkabout.hmbreview.com/topic.php?t=7101&c=10&d=
Here goes. Yes it is sort of a screed written today:
How to organize for a political push to restructure copyright and patent law?
Advocating for changes in copyright and patent law is basically a sharks versus minnows problem. The sharks are the relatively few businesses who are able to write laws and lobby for their passage. The minnows are the 200 million plus people who buy material covered by copyright and patent protection.
At the level of Federal law, the sharks have been winning by arguing for and lobbying for broader laws and longer terms of copyright and patent protection.
I write here about the problem by cutting it into three parts. One part is “How do you organize the minnows.” Part two is: “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws? Part three is: “What law do you write and what do you ask elected representatives to vote for?”
On the problem of “How do you organize the minnows?”
I recently discovered an article that shows how and why an organization effort could plausibly employ a social network site like Facebook. The kind of action group that is plausible is: A loose social network.
The article title is “Small Change Why the revolution will not be tweeted.” by Malcolm Gladwell, published in The New Yorker magazine, October 4, 2010.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
1. Copyright and patent reform needs to be a non-partisan movement.
2. As an issue for the large numbers of “minnow” advocates, this will be a relatively small commitment activity that does not require the intense friendship and hierarchical structure of the American Civil Rights movement. The Malcom Gladwell article above eloquently disassembles the presumption that a Facebook type advocacy program can create a disciplined, hierarchical organization. Instead of an institution, a Facebook advocacy program tends to create a loose network.
3. The hundreds of thousands of reform advocates need a set of winning arguments.
4. Money and rhetoric: In the absence of a better rule of thumb, the lobbying and campaign donation dollars deployed needs to match or exceed by a factor of two the lobbying and campaign donation dollars spent by the “shark”advocates. The movement needs a well documented estimate of the shark lobby hours and dollars and shark campaign spending and a matching tally for the “minnow” advocates.
Unless something changes, let's assume that money talks in politics. The movement needs both money and quality talk. The copyright and patent reform activity needs both a coherent rhetorical argument and matching donations.
On the problem of “How do you argue for less restrictive copyright and patent laws?”
There are many instances where copyright and patent protections are an encumberance and annoyance. For instance:
German Kindergartens Ordered To Pay Copyright For Songs http://idle.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/12/29/169253
Several legal arguments are of great importance to the development of an effective advocacy argument. Some thinkers are:
Richard Stallman and the Free Software Foundation.
http://shop.fsf.org/product/free-software-free-society-2/
Lawrence Lessig, law professor and copyright lawyer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig
The intellectual property and entertainment industries have a very strong argument for more restrict
The recitation of facts and circumstances in the press announcement is too tidy and too organized. There must be major undisclosed facts and players associated with this case.
First of all note this is a "plea bargain". It is a plea bargain where only the prosecutor is saying anything. Note that the defendant and his attorney is saying nothing.
That means the deal is not justice in the conventional sense of found guilty in open court by a jury.
Notice, a big feature of this deal is all the punishment falls on one individual. There is no mention of the individual being paid except as in employment wages. The theft claim stops at the individual.
Note that the facts disclosed appear to be very prettily organized. The person flew to the perfect airport, The evidence found should not have been on any laptop. The files shouldn't have been on any business laptop owned by a Chinese company. The files show just the right access times to prove illegal access. The encryption used is just good enough to prevent casual access. The FBI is just good enough to forensically decrypt the files and perfectly identify the files as originating at Ford.
At the local courthouse I saw first hand that a lot of criminal prosecutions appeared to be young people pleading "nolo contendre" and accepting rather harsh punishments. I have seen at close hand punishment and criminalization being implemented by the motor vehicles people strictly as an administrative matter that takes the police officer's ticket as nearly incontestable truth.
One problem is, defence attorneys cost $300 per hour and even some attorneys have a 10 hour minimum.
Instead of justice, what we have here is the Federal criminal punishments are so exorbitantly draconian that 1 thumb drive of files means much more that 6 to 8 years in prison.
The government prosecution probably could have locked this hapless engineer up for 90 years.
The prosecutors negotiated with him to only take away 1/5 of his remaining lifetime in prison.
The concern I feel is our justice system is being short circuited by a triple problem: The criminal justice system destroys entire families without the damage being ever measured. The triple problems are:
1. Defence attorneys are generally un-affordable.
2. The punishments are imperial lockup in duration. There is no penitence and correction philosophy. Simply integer fractions of a lifetime are forfeited for chicken misbehaviors.
All those years of "get tough on crime" have given us a criminal prosecution system that causes problems because of the scope and severity of the punishments now written in the law.
3. Prosecutors are getting quick easy long lasting punishments without actually engaging in trial by jury in an open court.
The problem of drivers being distracted by cell phone use can be resolved by adding autonomous vehicle capabilities to existing cars and trucks.
At present, different car makers sell premium models each with small chunks of the autonomous vehicle control solution. Mercedes has a safe following distance speed control, Toyota advertises a self-parallel parking device.
What we need is a design with a software interface to the vehicle mechanicals (something like an Arduino with a usb port), a plug in sensor with a software interface, a software interface to a vehicle map device, two data radios and a general purpose computer like a Linux netbook running autonomous vehicle control programs.
You glue the whole thing together by making the sensor devices present a software self describing interface. A defined software interface makes it possible to develop and test vehicle control software with simulated inputs.
The control computer is a general purpose device that runs programs for the specific control jobs needed. One program might be "learn my commute to work", Another program might be "Steer and brake while the driver uses the cell phone".
The problem as I see it is to get an open source data and control definition out there before some monopolist locks up the scheme like Microsoft locked up their document export definition.
I can hear the hum of the patent attorneys in the distance... All of this is really obvious right?
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2010/11/proposal-for-autonomous-vehicle.html
Sure a car can have computers, even my 93 Dodge has some kind of controller.
Hey we could have another TCP/IP type revolution here... add layers and gain functionality.
What is needed is to connect existing automobiles to an autonomous vehicle interface. The autonomous vehicle interface would provide a connection point for an autonomous vehicle computer to be attached.
The autonomous vehicle computer would query the interface device and get a description response of all the controls and sensors available. The interface would organize and scale the data available from the car. The interface would convert autonomous vehicle computer data into the signals expected by the devices attached to the automobile.
Think of the autonomous vehicle interface as an Arduino Mega that is wired into whatever the vehicle has available. The interface would be like interaction with a python interpreter.
Now the autonomous vehicle computer, think of that as a Linux netbook running a variety of programs for the car. There could be add on sensor devices attached to the autonomous vehicle computer. Like a GPS, a data cell phone and a 802.g wireless connection to nearby vehicles and 802.g radio equipped traffic devices.
http://lessco2essay.blogspot.com/2010/11/proposal-for-autonomous-vehicle.html
So what to do with such a modification: Completely end drunk driving accidents. Reduce the kWh per 100 passenger-kilometres. Do aggressive dynamic insured and paid ride sharing.
Dramatically reduce distracted driving damage. Reduce direct fuel use by coasting up to stoplights. All of this with existing vehicles.
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_118.shtml
The exciting part of doing AVT autonomous vehicle technology like this is: It is not proprietary and locked up in islands of make and model specific functionality. Some aspects of AVT can be backported to most older cars and real energy and safety benefits accrued.
The question in the title "How much math do we really need?" is really the author, Mr. Ramanathan expressing a low opinion of his students, a low opinion of a textbook he used in his classes and a low valuation of all students.
The pesky word "need" is the pivot point for his sophistry.
If your educational model is to create truly educated men and women, you need at least a quality geometry course and four years of college level mathematics.
(See the curriculum provided by the great books colleges, St. John's College at Santa Fe and Annapolis.)
In my opinion, the two great fields of mathematics are: Calculus (based on limit theorems) and Topology (based on Euler's polyhedron theorem). The calculus has been over emphasized and topology has been seriously neglected.
To be real specific, the high school curriculum could really benefit from a topology course that would cover knot theory (with matrix math), paper folding (with solution of equations), lattices, symbolic logic, network theory (with walks), and surfaces(with klein bottles), and an introduction to fractals. It could be parallel to Algebra I.
Topology has both the beauty of pure math and a wealth of applications. Unlike calculus, in knot theory for instance, after a couple days' study a student can encounter unproven theorems.
Right there: obvious things that nobody has been able to prove in 50 years! Yeah, how does that affect the development of your "educated person"?
The thermal efficiency goes up rapidly when the engine compression ratio is increased.
What Mazda has accomplished is the continued refinement of the art of burning gasoline in a very very high compression setting.
The problem is high compression engines are hard to start and hard to make durable.
I compared an 1999 or 2000 Prius product leaflet with the same year early Toyota Echo leaflet. Same body, different engines. The Prius had 10.1:1 compression ratio and the Echo 9.1:1. (Maybe I have the numbers off by .1 )
So the story of why the Prius gets good mileage changes: The trick of the big electric motor and engine computers is to quietly start the high compression engine. The other trick is to keep the high compression engine from destroying it's pistons.
In this view: regenerative braking is a minor contribution to the thermal efficiency of the Prius.
The real trick is a honking big starter motor without a screaming pinion gear noise. Plus lots and lots of computer power managing each cylinder ignition event.
So Mazda's accomplishment? Stratospheric levels of engineering artistry. Probably a super duper gasoline injection device and even more direct control of each individual combustion event.
Here is a toast to the long forgotten 4 cylinder alcohol fueled Offenhauser engine Indy car!
I also looked into developing a cell phone application. My application hopes are modest: I don't expect to make much money and I don't have much money, and I prefer a $15 a month cell phone, In this setting, the android or a Linux based phones are the platforms I considered.
The problem is, the entire cell phone field is divided into little silos. The field is just transitioning from "charge all the market will bear and insist on 2 year contracts." to the slightly more price variability. But cell phones are still bound up because they don't have a visible TCP/IP networking layer and a uniform port 80 service. The cell phone world is like the computer world in the era of bulletin boards and Compuserve.
Thinking of my long gone Turbo Pascal, Mix C compiler and Morrow CP/M and RS-232 interfacing and 2400 Baud dial up connections, I for one realized that computer networking required "something more" but I didn't know what. Like everybody else, I worked my way through Novell Netware, and AOL.
For my educational application, I see it as something a teacher would run on her desktop. I am using the Google App Engine cloud computing system with the Python programming language. Attractions are: cheap to get started, modern programming language, open source, and a simple development environment. Plus, my app will run on most any computer that a user has.
I have an idea for a ride-sharing cell phone application that needs access to a GPS sensor, like dozens of other cell phone applications, the siloing just eliminates an app from running on most phones. A two dollar ride sharing event has broken economics if you have to buy a specific $150 phone and pay $2 a day for wireless service to support the application.
The big picture, the large scale energy consumption events in our lives, we only know to one or two decimal places. The whole research and decision making process, for a large group of Slashdot commentators like you and me, boils down to find an energy waste and fix it.
See:
http://www.withouthotair.com/ ; An outstanding accomplishment at viewing the energy situation using consistent units and definitions.
Because many energy usage problems require outside information, my experience is a pad of paper and careful collection of outside information is a big part of reducing energy usage. High quality local data (just a few points are needed) and outside data (got by copying it onto a pad of paper) are needed for energy analysis. I use Gnumeric for my spreadsheet. It helps to save results on the computer and on paper printouts as a specific energy usage problem is addressed.
For the last go round at measuring my home energy instances, I used a Kill-A-Watt meter (Frys.com in Northern California occasionally puts it on sale for under $20.). Note, the Kill-A-Watt will not measure a 1200 watt microwave oven (too much current) and it will not measure a 220 volt electric water heater.
While the Kill-A-Watt told me my refrigerator was an energy hog, it was not a whole lot of help at determining precisely what was wrong with the refrigerator that made it an energy hog. I did a couple of tests exploring various ideas: bad insulation, too many door opening events, weak door gasket magnets, dirty condenser coils, and an unfairly optimistic energy usage rating system. I eventually bought a new refrigerator. That key purchase required going to the store before my wife, copying all the energy usage and model info and price, and then shopping with the wife and a spreadsheet in hand to balance the wife's desire for style and design with energy usage and price issues solved in advance for many of the choices at hand.
The end result was a new refrigerator that has a 1.56 year payoff period.
One of the problems I am looking at now is "Does the gasoline burned by my wife's commute and my commute exceed the amount of energy consumed by the whole house?" It is another case of some outside numbers, some inside numbers and the outcome will be at best a 2 decimal place result. And what will I do when I find the result?
Are any of these video games able to measure the fitness of the person to drive car?
Lets say you play a video game a couple of times.
On the fourth time, you drink some alcohol... say enough put you at .01% BAC, or 1/8 of the usual .8% definition level for driving under the influence.
What game would be capable of measuring your impairment?
Well this question partly depends on having some supporting science that playing a video game is parallel in mental challenges to driving a car.
It would be one way to compare the real value of "Zero tolerance alcohol driving laws."
The phrase "Geocentrism, the academic belief that the Earth is immobile in the center of the universe..." is a phrase which is teasing the reader and suggesting a big misunderstanding. I suggest there is a translation error here. The people being reported are probably more like historians that are trying to understand the Galilean revolution in perception from different perspectives.
I recall from my college years (at St. John's, where writings of Ptolemy, Galileo and Newton were read), Ptolemy was pretty clear, his book said "I am going to save the appearances...". His math does that.
Galileo was something new, he was studying pendulums, balls rolling down planes and looking at the moons circling Jupiter. Galileo was doing physics. A big change from "saving the appearances".
Now as to the exact language of the transformation that took place with Galileo?
Well there have been a number of expansive interpretations of what happened. It is such an interesting study area that I am inclined to guess the people being described are historians or history buffs or advocates trying to interpret the conflict with the Church in a manner more sympathetic to the Church.
Here is my "non-deliberate" system for recovering emails, files, programs, website copies, correspondence, certification homework, photos and projects, from the last 12 years. All these components have been mentioned earlier except the find text in files command I show you below.
I have the computer I used for the last 11 years sitting turned off with two disk drives. This is a metal case computer isolated from electrical surges by a UPS. I presently have the archive computer set up with an IO Gear device that switches the keyboard, mouse and display to the archive computer if I need to turn it on. I like this better than accessing the archive computer through SSH or a terminal server or remote desktop viewer. The silly but important thing is do not let the archive computer connect to your mailserver and download current emails. I find simply copying entire directories to an 8 gig USB drive is easier than messing around with SCP (secure copy) and SSH (secure shell).
Those two disks go back about 12 years. The email systems I have used over the years have pretty well known names. The older email pattern is one big file containing every email with a blank line separating each email. For a Microsoft system, I use a USB stick as a archive device and I read it on a Linux box.
I can search as much of the disks as I need using the following script (taken from Unix Power Tools)
I store the script in a file called "findscriptfile" because I can't remember it, I just look it up when I need it. I wind up creating files with the same command on various places on my computers. Note the command line below requires blanks as shown. You will have to test and fiddle with the search. Sometimes you need to use "sudo " when file permission error messages cloud the results. The search time for an email address or a copy of a letter or a photo file is 20 minutes.
This find script finds all files starting at the current directory and working down and the script searches each file for the word "thumbnail".
find . -type f -exec grep thumbnail '{}' /dev/null \;
I think one of the interesting things about the original problem posted to Ask Slashdot is what kind of information has enduring value and how much value does it have? Or another question might be what is the cost of storage per month and how many items on the storage system are worth more than the storage cost?
What you have is the dish antenna that is part of a C band satellite TV receiver system.
First thing, I urge you to get in touch with the sellers or landlords and ask: "Do you have the old satellite receiver and LNA (low noise amplifier) that were used with the dish antenna?" The receiver and the LNA don't have much use for any other purpose and you can have a lot of fun if you get the equipment back from who ever may have it.
Satellite TV systems come in two flavours. The older system that uses the large 3 meter dish is called C band. The newer system is called Ku band and it uses a 18" dish. If your dish is fixed, then it is aimed at one satellite. Some dishes can tune in 2 satellites because they have 2 LNA units attached to the dish and the LNAs are at the two foci formed by two satellites that orbit overhead at intervals a few angular degrees apart.
My satellite receiver system is a "free to air" system that uses a motorized 18" dish. I can only tune in Ku or K band transmissions. Your big dish can tune in C band satellites. C band is a lower frequency transmission and a large dish is required because the satellites have an interesting bunch of technical problems related to bandwidth, noise and available electrical power in space.
My setup is a Coolsat 1000 Satellite receiver. It sits on the Cable TV wire, it produces a signal on Tv channel 3 when it is in use. From the receiver up to the roof is a single cable TV coax cable. DC power and a tuning signal is sent up the Coax to the Low noise amplifier. The LNA amplifies and mixes the tuning signal and the satellite signal. The result is down the cable comes the satellite TV signal at some standard frequency. If you have a motor drive, the same coax can carry control signals to the dish motor. On a Coolsat receiver you have to set the receiver with "Lnb power on" and "Lnb type Universal" and "LNB frequency 9.750/10.750" to cause the power to be sent and the conversion signal to be sent.
I knocked on the door of a fellow with a C-band system and the owner says he uses it all the time and no the system is not for sale. (I asked).
Getting my Satellite dish aimed at the right place in the sky took a bit of work. I used the book Positional Astronomy and Astro-Navigation Made Easy by H.R. Mills.
Then I made a satellite finder with a 14" wide sheet of foam board. I drew a 12" arc, 180 degrees (a half circle) with a base line or diameter, I put a 1" high screw at the center of the arc. The 90 degree perpendicular on the foam board I label as 122.5 degrees West, which is my longitude found from a map. Using lyngsat.com for satellite sky longitudes, I compute then plot angles on the foam board, keeping in mind that the 90 degree perpendicular on the foam board points to the 122.5 degree point in the sky. I mount the foam board on a photo tripod. With a compass and an inclinometer you go outside. The diameter of your half circle goes due north and south. The arc lays facing south. You tilt the foam board up until the board is inclined at 90 degrees minus your latitude. I live at 37.5 degrees so the tilt angle is 90 - 37.5. When you sight over the 1" screw head, and right over the arc of the foam board, you are pretty nearly looking at the ecliptic path of ~22,500 mile distant satellites from a ~6,500 km radius earth. The 1" screw head models the radius of the earth where you stand and the ~12" radius circle models the radius to the geosynchronous satellite orbital circle.
On K-band, the free to air material is mostly culture and religious broadcasts. Several of the K band satellites are mostly pay tv. The only un-encrypted channel on one satellite is a message "Congratulations you have tuned into .... blah blah network." Check out Lyngsat.com for what is on C-band. I wish I could confirm what you can pick up on C-band.
The outcome of this battle may be: a settlement that includes patent and technology exchange with relatively little money or damages between Google and Oracle.
The companies have to do a good dramatic performance because anti-competitive business practices are illegal.
But this kind of legal conflict between two of major American computer business organizations is precisely the way in which everybody else is shut out. These two large firms will license to each other huge chunks of intellectual property, under the guise of engaging in a "settlement" to avoid a ruinous court decision.
This instance of patent and copyright litigation is just as ugly as the individual who faces a $60,0000 claim for copyright infringement due to downloading songs.
But note the stunning difference: Google has a settlement pathway available. Google has patents and trade secrets of great value to Oracle.
So if they settle, then each organization has greatly advanced itself into a duopoly, where everybody else is wedged to the business sidelines.
The important point for you and me is:
The patent and copyright system is gradually penetrating the software world. The patent and copyright system shows it's power at inhibiting progress in the useful arts and draining the vitality out of the information systems technical revolution despite the great value of open source software.
So what to do:
Publish everything done in University and College courses and research under GPL version 3. Develop a code and comment search to facilitate showing prior art. There are probably 20 implementations before a person writes a patent claim.
Regulate licensing law as it applies to patents and copyrights. Patents are enshrined in the US Constitution, but the licensing of them has been exploited to the extremes of unfairness. The era of patents as a key to industrial supremacy needs to end.
Somebody go look for a bright Law Professor, ask him to write up a draft patent and copyright reform law. Something we can make an election issue. Bring back the American Populist political sensibility.
I agree the article is low quality journalism.
The Oracle vs Google suit described is yet another Kabuki play that re-enacts how patent and copyright litigation gradually clears the business playing field of all the small players.
The scenario resolves like this: Gradually the big players exclusively cross license each other. Exclusive cross licensing allows the big players to keep playing and it pushes the smaller players to go do something else.
This is the pattern. I read this basic description in my father's machine shop in the 1960's in a book titled "How to patent your invention" or some such title.
The GPL is a brilliant demonstration that non-exclusive cross licensing is ethically, socially and culturally a superior form of copyright and patent rights assignment. Part of the brilliance of the GPL is the same license terms are provided to all. It happens to have a $0 price also.
Approaches to patent system change built around the damage to the public good caused by "exclusive" as a term in cross licensing.
This approach says, modify contract law to alter the toxic results of one patent being issued with different license terms to different parties.
(For instance, calling all lawyers...)
Replace exclusive cross licensing devised by lawyers with defined by law licensing method that is not exclusive.
Remove the duopoly cost savings advantages from cross licensing by requiring each item to have an enumerated per use price. Taxable as income and as a cost of goods used.
Make exclusive cross licensing that is too tight an anti-trust violation.
Require that a patent holder or copyright holder license the use at one price for all. No exchanges. No triple damages. No blue sky estimates.
Make cross licensing agreements taxable transactions.
Remove the usage of cross licensing as a practice of building business oligarchies. Make patent licensing the same price for all. Make it with no fixed annual charge and only payment per physical object manufactured only.
The subtitle "...The Definitive Guide" means this book is for specialists that work with the DocBook publication tag language.
The information in this book isn't for the user of the word processor or editor program.
DocBook is a syntax and tag language and this is a book for people who work with the tag language.
I suggest, the problem with online learning is how to tie it together with the other activities that provide the physical learning and social preparation provided by a physical school.
I seems to me that Western society (like California where I live) needs to switch over to 1/3 the commute distance for everybody everywhere. A neat, but distant analogy is we need to anneal the structural lattice of workers and jobs.
This means lots and lots of people need to be able to move laterally into related but different employment.
So lets look at online education (as has been discussed above, and many shortcomings noted) as a real interesting starting point for re-employment.
Suppose we switch to describing a job in terms of 5 or 6 specific online courses? When you complete those courses, you are at entry level for a specific job.
Suppose, online courses were indexed in a search engine, organized into a tree, staffed with tutors, rated by students and employers?
Go a little further; commented and authored like an Instructable?
How about open source with adaptive exams generated by open source tools?
How about where the local high school "conducts" the copy of the course (maybe an OCW course).
Dodge the academically questionable for profit school system by hosting this program through evening high school.
How about, hosted by high schools? With a monthly meeting for nearby people studying related fields?
How about entire states having "intern days" where every business accepts 5 prospective interns to visit for a day and the whole group of five take home a project to describe and post as yet another Instructable?
So the thinking here is, adapt the online course material to the extremely specific needs of some local employer, enabling a local person to take the job. And second of all, mobilize the boost value of a fresh, enthusiastic new employee with the latest in educational preparation to energize the hiring organization.
So the Idea is... these are ways to convert the rather simple online courses we know today into the learning framework that Western society needs for re-invigorating the "knowledge society" that was proposed by Peter Drucker and others back in the '80s.
I am puzzled why the distribution building process seems to require a lot of hand work to verify that applications and major subsystems work as expected after there are changes made to the lower level libraries and operating system?
I am familiar with printing and sound breaking on Ubuntu. Ubuntu shows more problems after an upgrade than Debian. For instance, I have two Ubuntu versions on two systems right now. The older distro has a working application gthumb and the newer one has the function import within gthumb broken.
So what puzzles me is why don't distributions have a test system, like Rails does?
Could you explain to me, what part in the distro building process doesn't respond to the simple test suite approach?
Fascinating Andy Grove discussion.
But the shift of manufacturing offshore happened because an American worker is $20 an hour and an offshore worker is $.50 to $5 per hour.
Why don't we look at other dimensions of the American and "western" industrial system that we can twiddle to help move into the future?
By "twiddle" I mean something like this: change the velocity of consumption to 1/3 or 1/5 by increasing the lifetime of consumer products by a factor of 3x or 5x.
Stipulating a longer the lifetime for a product pushes a lot of changes in directions appropriate for the future: less waste, less trash, less CO2 emission, more value as an asset and less value as an expense. For long lifetime items, the original factory has a relatively smaller economic place.
Funny, how I got this idea. I have noticed a change in the failure modes of coffee makers that parallels the shift of manufacturing to China. The older domestic coffee makers would blow a thermal fuse. Radio shack sells replacements. The last two imported coffee makers failed with sophisticated unrepairable open circuits that developed a few months after the warranty expired. I think there are some very smart Chinese manufacturing engineers tuning their products for a specific life duration.
The Miller-McCune article outlines an American system for funding science.
Looking at it as a system, how should that system be changed?
The main purpose of the existing system was inspired by the World War II understanding of the political and military importance of science.
Lets say that there are two huge failures of the American science system.
1.An absurd waste of highly educated people waiting for autonomy and work appropriate for their preparation. The research universities benefit and the people get by on pittances.
2.A phenomenal drain of scientific research into the wasteland of proprietary intellectual property, patents based on public funded research, and exorbitantly high prices for biochemical items substantially based on research initially funded by the US government. Note the mention of Monsanto interfering with a student science project above.
A side effect of the American science system is that the government has allowed all the innovations to be released to others. The knowledge is locked in expensive journals, out of print books and expensive reverse lookup citation indexes within University libraries.
So the question I hand back to you is: How do we change the system to alter these two bad side effects?
There are several kinds of news in this report.
I am first of all puzzled why hand held X-ray spectrometers (XRF) don't get coverage in the popular technology press.
The XRF device is quite close to the technology modelled in the Star Trek science fiction TV series.
These hand held spectrometers retail for $30,000. Several firms are offering similar devices. That means a kit could possibly be offered for $3000 or even $300, given say 3 or 4 years as bargain versions of the key components are gradually put into production.
Even at $30,000, a hand held XRF unit has all kinds of potential as the basis of a materials and environmental testing service that bills customers for $100 to $35 an hour.
The second very disappointing news I pulled out of this article is my son's 2007 high school Chemistry textbook does not mention X-ray spectrometry. He is using a California state approved textbook.
Heck, I look at his book further and note, it doesn't index "chromatography" or "gas chromatography" either.
I have been asking my son "Have you learned how to do inorganic cation analysis yet?" Chemistry class was the high point of my years in high school 45 years ago.
Looking both ways I see a problem: The California high school chemistry curriculum is stuck in the past. He should have used an XRF in chemistry lab.
I'm stuck in the past too. At Lawrence Hall of Science in Berkeley I took photos of the Lawrence 4" synchrotron. I have been thinking, gee, for some reason I think it would be handy to build a particle accelerator. Now I know, the gadget I might build is for sale. I am going to check EBay for an XRF real soon now.
I am responding to your post on the chance that you are seeing a photo import bug because you use gthumb.
The 16GB flash card you link to in your Ask Slashdot question looks like the 8GB flash card I use in my digital camera.
If you are doing digital photography and using Ubuntu or a Linux, take note that the photo import utility in gthumb is broken in Ubuntu 9.10. The gthumb version is 2.10.11 and the specific thing broken is photo import of jpeg images. Photo import fails if there are .avi movie files on the flash card.
I have had a series of flash card aggravations and here is my version of the preceding AskSlashdot comments:
1. Digital cameras format flash memory cards with minor variations or they store image data with minor variations. I work around potential glitches by keeping the card in the camera and connecting the camera to the Ubuntu computer.
2. Use gthumb (note bug above) or the graphical file tool Nautilus. The top level menu item "Places" in Ubuntu starts Nautilus. Copy the files from the camera to the computer.
3. Speaking about USB flash memory, I feel they have devolved into a Windows quality file transfer device = WQFTD That means, they work using the supplied file system. The success of the same devices using Ext2 and Ext3 file systems is problematic.
4. Measuring the read and write reliability of these WQFTDs at the bit level is a difficult problem. As I mention in my journal, I have a big name DVD drive that is a WQFTD. I know it fails when reading huge 8 bit data files. But, building a tool to prove when and where it fails is beyond my available time as an evening hacker.
5. So one answer is "simplify and work around your WQFTD" without challenging it's limits.