First off, people who care that much about what others think about their taste in music (or food, clothes, whatever) are in need of serious psychological help. If you don't have the self-confidence to like what you like, and the hell with the rest of the world, you are (in my book) suffering the deepest kind of herd mentality that deserves disdain at every level.
Slow down, tiger. To some extent, this sort of behaviour (especially at, say, the high-school-ish age level) is part of a search for belonging, and (some people more so than others) are unfortunate enough to be surrounded by a shallow sort of a society where the price of belonging is to maintain certain superficial things - tastes in music, for instance. Some people, if they were found out to like certain things, would be soundly ridiculed, and possibly alienated. Not everyone has the strength to stand up in the face of social isolation. Some people might already be somewhat ostracized. Do they "deserve disdain at every level" for seeking the approval - or even the begrudging acceptance - of peers? I don't think so. The search for belonging, approval, acceptance... that's a basic human impulse.
I'm not saying that it's spectacularly noble, or healthy, or The Thing To Do, but just... something as vehement as "disdain at every level" is too much.
Now, excuse me Slashdot, pop psychology mode off as I return to listening to Enya...
I am working on an art minor and I'm still good enough technically to be worth ~$25/hr for a mere summer internship (with IBM! where they say my code is awesome.:P) and to write my own website mini-CMS from scratch to re-learn XSLT and...
Now, granted, my art stuff isn't quite as good as my little sister's stuff, but I think I'm working on it and getting better. (Sorry I don't have any scans of stuff from my current art class or anything - and if you go browsing the Scraps hard enough, you'll find some stuff at least three years old, but whatever).
Tinkering with such a mammoth natural process is daunting, but in fact about 400 medium-sized coal-fired power plants give off enough sulfur in a year to do the job for the whole Earth. (This in itself suggests just how much we are already perturbing the planet.) There are problems with using coal: Arguing that more air pollution is good for Mother Earth sounds intuitively wrong. Coal plants sit on land, and the clouds would be most effective over the oceans. A savvy international strategy leaps to mind: Subsidize electricity-dependent industry on isolated Pacific islands, and ship them the messiest, sulfur-rich coal... A more boring approach, worked out by the National Academy of Sciences panel, envisions a fleet of coal-burning ships which heap sulfur directly into their furnaces.... The ships spew great ribbons of sulfur vapor far out at sea, where nobody can complain, and cloud corridors form obediently behind. It would be best to use these sulfur clouds to augment the edges of existing overcast regions, swelling them and increasing the lifetime of natural clouds. The continuously burning sulfur freighters would follow weather patterns, guided by weather satellite data.
The biggest political risk here lies with shifts in the weather. The entire campaign would increase the sulfur droplet content in our air by about 25 percent. Probably this would cause no significant trouble, with most of the sulfur raining out into the oceans, which have enormous buffering capacity. Keeping the freighters a week's sailing distance from land would probably save us from scare headlines about sudden acid rains on farmers' heads, since about 30 percent of the sulfur should rain out each day.
Here's an article from 1997 discussing some of the other potential climate-altering things-to-do (some ideas being more grandiose and absurd than others). One of the things they hilighted here was simple global warming mitigation attempts like, say, painting rooftops white and adding recycled glass to standard asphalt to make it slightly more reflective. These not only reflect sunlight directly, but they generally result in cooler cities which need less energy (keeping carbon dioxide out of circulation to begin with). I'd really love to see something like this campaigned for, instead of just the traditional SUVs-are-t3h-3v1l business.
While I appreciate your point about the correlation of income and test scores, and the wealthy being able to spend $$$ on test preparation, there might also be a certain nonzero correlation between income and merit. One could speculate that this is because certain people among the wealthy a) might have become wealthy in part due to their merit, and perhaps some of this 'merit' is heritable, and b) they are able to devote more resources to developing their children to engender this 'merit' besides any intrinsically meritless test prep courses.
I'm certainly not saying that the poor are stupid, just the rich are sometimes rich because they're smart and that there's probably some correlation between someone being smart and their kids being smart too.
I'm a Wikipedia member, and I'm amused. I'm very amused. Have lots of fun over there, Larry-boy! Three cheers if you make it work, but, haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
We're sorry... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
So. Which of these exactly is Slashdot: a computer virus, or a spyware application?
If it is a 100% legitimate Tor node, then the police won't find anything untoward. But the police still have to check - because otherwise, "I was running a Tor node, honest guv'nor!" could become a standard get-out-of-custody-free card for anyone else whose computer is under investigation.
At the same time, consider. It seems that if you ever get your computer seized by the police, the actual chances of you getting it back are slim - and if you do get it back, it will probably be several years afterwards and it will be relatively useless. Does this mean that whenever the police suspect you of doing something wrong with your computers, they can come in and effectively shut you down without niceties like, say, a trial?
I'm sure that there's some precedent with other sorts of seizures like this, but it seems that computers take it to a new level as they may accumulate terabytes of evidence... and from another angle, you would think they would be able to just make a bitwise clone in most cases and return it with the rest of the hardware to the Suspects. Apparently this isn't something that generally happens though....
What i'd be more worried about if I was them would be using an animated gif in massive mailing, surely that is going to heavily suck bandwidth (as much as they do have, a lot of resources go in to the mailing and the hardware to power it)
The key is, they don't pay for those resources. They use some sort of a "bot-net" to send the mail - "zombie" computers, often on residential broadband connections which have been contaminated with some virus (or something virus-like, trojan, backdoor, et cetera - the specifics matter little). It's not their own bandwidth they're wasting.
In a truly fair legal system, the lawyers would only be paid after all appeals were exhausted and both sides' costs would be borne by the losing party.
It sounds nice, but if you don't sort of implicitly assume that all cases are resolved in a just manner. Well... Suppose you have $citizen who wants to sue $EvilCorp for being evil. The citizen does so. The citizen loses. The citizen has to pay EvilCorp's lawyers millions. That's a really good way to discourage suing EvilCorp. (Or consider the other way around. $EvilCorp sues $citizen because it's evil. They win. To add insult to injury, the citizen now also loses millions paying for the lawyers.)
That's the three-second Slashdot version, admittedly, but loser-pays is not all peaches and cream and pretty fluffy bunnies. Here's some random Internet paper that looks to present a few of the issues:
The fundamental problem with a loser-pays proposal is that it would chill counsel from pursuing cases involving potentially legitimate claims where success is uncertain... Given the numerous variables that counsel must weigh, and the uncertainty of the outcome, the prospect of facing automatic sanctions for merely being incorrect would undoubtably deter a great number of claims that warrant pursuit.
It's a pity, but sometimes I guess that the only people who will stand up and fight for this sort of thing are the kind that (I personally) would be least interested in protecting. The people who make nice fluffy happy friendly good stuff don't seem to (as a gross generalization) possess the same sort of element that will make them either a) create things like that or b) fight so hard to keep what they have created.
I remember reading some Libertarian magazine (Reason) about Disney's war against the counterculture. They have all sorts of points, but the thing is, when people look at this Counterculture stuff, it's not something they're going to sympathize with and it probably isn't helping The Cause or anything like that.
I just don't think (even if the number is 500/yr in the USA) that the expense is justified.
Justified? As compared to what... I mean, do you think there's some underfunded cause somewhere that would do better with that money than this? Why, probably, sure. But that's true of a lot of money. And money is fungible, but it's not that fungible.
Had a picnic this summer during my internship. All sorts of other interns were there. One intern had a really nice suit, and remarked how, when wearing a suit, people kept assuming that he was someone important, that he was some sort of management/executive type there to help organize the event. And even in the office, people would hold open doors for him and such...
Dealing with the IBM rep is bad enough but now we will have to deal with them pushing their new products when I just want answers about the product I just bought from them.
I don't work for IBM (anymore! haha, byebye internship) but from what I've seen, IBM's focus is not on providing people spiffy software so much as...
The new message to software vendors: Fix my call centers, don't just sell me a product.
This is very much the direction they are trying to make things head - not a hardware company, not a software company, not even as "software as a service" company so much as a business company - they want to be "all sorts of IT and business services, including software and such to help keep things moving". They will gladly come in and show you all sorts of ways to change (ideally, to streamline) the way you're doing business. (If you pay them to. And I can't speak to their results one way or another. But would you like some links to spiffy promotional literature?)
Hmm. Was the summary written by an IBMer by any chance? I don't see the words "on demand" or "business transformation" or anything like that, but...
Presumably, "fascism" could describe one sort of (hypothetical?) Islamic state, perhaps theoretically the one envisioned by these terrorists. Militarism? Nationalism? cf. Iran. Authoritarianism? Anti-Liberalism? cf. Islamic Law, state religions and such. Corporatism? Dubai has it down, I suppose. Now, reality aside for a moment, it's not too hard to take this sort of "idea cloud" and say "the terrorists want us to be like that!" and it's not that much of a stretch.
Maybe they're not effectively Anti-Anarchist in their current implementatation.
Actually, I can't actually say I have personal experience, but this weekend my aunt and uncle showed up with a brand-new (well, newly-purchased at least) Piper Cherokee Warrior (4-seat little tiny plane). If you're willing to go through all you need to get a pilot's license, it's only ~$37,000 or so - you can find cars for more than that, and they won't go as fast, and the planes hold value a lot better.
Fuel is ~$4 a gallon - no clue whatsoever on mileage. Seeing the place from the air is neat (and you can fly low-ish and see all the places, instead of getting stuffed waaay up over the clouds too soon. Sounds like a fun hobby! Of course, I'm just a little summer intern right now, but maybe later......
The nanotechnologist types I've spoken with (as a component of a university seminar course) who are all quite dismissive of "grey goo" and such. In summary: It's not easy for those little guys to get energy to, say, systematically munch their way through concrete or solid steel or something - it will take more energy than it would consume. When you get down to it, we have little to fear from nano-sized robots that we don't have to fear from, say, bacteria - who already have billions of years' worth of experience in the just-above-the-nano-scale operations. Furthermore, even if we did have some miraculous way of getting those things the amounts of energy they would need, you're probably looking at them blowing apart from the amounts of heat involved. (Mind you, that's blowing apart on the molecluar scale, not blowing up like a bomb, so don't get ideas there either.)
Most nanotechnology concerns at present are materials science affairs, and this is likely to remain the case for a while. Nanoscale robots just aren't very feasible under the currently known laws of physics, especially not the infamous "grey goo" variety.
Here's another question. How much of a difference does that really make? I mean, if it's a snapshot blurred over, say, seven days, and some people are born and some people die during the middle- so what? They were going to be born/die soon anyway, throwing off the census from reality. So is there something of value in the inherent "snapshot"-ness?
If you really must know about the technology, you can be fairly sure that since it's IBM, it's going to be some sort of an on demand configuration. And look at that! Right on IBM's on-demand homepage, a piece on "The Future of Government"!
Tips I learned running a millions-of-hits-a-year website...
Write valid XHTML. Use the magical DOCTYPES that keep Internet Explorer relatively happy. Develop the CSS to target Opera and Firefox (and Konqueror if you can), and install hacks for IE afterwards some way you can keep track of them. Anything else will probably blow up for you.
Consider keeping your structural CSS and your shiny CSS (colors and such) separate. Try to come up with a decent scheme.
You'll have all sorts of files and maybe even stacks of logs, presumably. At some point, you may want to replace a file, and name the previous version.old - don't. Never name anything.new either. There will always be a new new, an old new, an older old, a new old... Use dates - 20060802. YYYYMMDD sorts nicely too.
Use mod_rewrite (or equivalent) and pretty URLs which are purely logical. Try to hide things like 'php' and 'asp' and 'cgi' and such. If you ever want to replace whatever's driving that URL, you will be glad. For God's sake, avoid query strings in your URLs unless someone is sending a query. You'll also keep the search engines happier.
Sign up for a little Google Analytics account if you can. preeeeeeety shiny stats. everyone loves them.
PHP is a fine hypertext preprocessor. It's a lousy programming language. It's excessively convenient... a lot like Windows, really. Avoid it, of course.
If you're writing your own stuff, consider FastCGI and lighttpd instead of PHP+Apache.
I have heard good things about Ruby On Rails. Check it out some time.
You know HTML? Now learn HTTP. Headers. Lots of headers. Beautiful headers. And status codes of all kinds. Learn when to return a 304 versus a 206. And 301 Moved Permanently is a blessing when you're restructuring. [meta name="refresh" value="..."] is a hack.
Cacheability is your friend. If you can keep your public-facing content cacheable and install Squid, things go very very quickly. Otherwise, cache in your application. This usually requires something that's not PHP. FastCGI can do the trick.
There are always many ways to do something. Use the most elegant way possible, the simplest neatest prettiest way. Use the strictest dialect of your language, the most rigorous form of whatever you're doing - go the extra mile, do things which would make your computer science professors proud. When you don't, things will fall apart faster than you think they will.
If you're writing a big function suite or something to get something done, pause and reconsider. There's probably a library or such out there to do it already. Check CPAN if you're Perl, PEAR if you're stuck with PHP... Even if you think you have things under control, check them anyway. Better to look now then say "that would have been so much better" weeks in the future.
Keep the search engines happy. Include your page metadata. Use things like [link rel="previous"] and such. There's a whole suite of these things. Make RSS feeds and sitemaps for Google Sitemaps.
Get a version control system! Stuff your entire site in a Subversion repository. Then develop in a sandbox off to the side and synchronize it back. If you insist on skipping the sandbox, even just having old versions will save you, eventually. (This could also be good for backups- just back up the repository.)
Slashdot Mirror
Slow down, tiger. To some extent, this sort of behaviour (especially at, say, the high-school-ish age level) is part of a search for belonging, and (some people more so than others) are unfortunate enough to be surrounded by a shallow sort of a society where the price of belonging is to maintain certain superficial things - tastes in music, for instance. Some people, if they were found out to like certain things, would be soundly ridiculed, and possibly alienated. Not everyone has the strength to stand up in the face of social isolation. Some people might already be somewhat ostracized. Do they "deserve disdain at every level" for seeking the approval - or even the begrudging acceptance - of peers? I don't think so. The search for belonging, approval, acceptance... that's a basic human impulse.
I'm not saying that it's spectacularly noble, or healthy, or The Thing To Do, but just... something as vehement as "disdain at every level" is too much.
Now, excuse me Slashdot, pop psychology mode off as I return to listening to Enya...
Now, granted, my art stuff isn't quite as good as my little sister's stuff, but I think I'm working on it and getting better. (Sorry I don't have any scans of stuff from my current art class or anything - and if you go browsing the Scraps hard enough, you'll find some stuff at least three years old, but whatever).
Here's an article from 1997 discussing some of the other potential climate-altering things-to-do (some ideas being more grandiose and absurd than others). One of the things they hilighted here was simple global warming mitigation attempts like, say, painting rooftops white and adding recycled glass to standard asphalt to make it slightly more reflective. These not only reflect sunlight directly, but they generally result in cooler cities which need less energy (keeping carbon dioxide out of circulation to begin with). I'd really love to see something like this campaigned for, instead of just the traditional SUVs-are-t3h-3v1l business.
I'm certainly not saying that the poor are stupid, just the rich are sometimes rich because they're smart and that there's probably some correlation between someone being smart and their kids being smart too.
I'm a Wikipedia member, and I'm amused. I'm very amused. Have lots of fun over there, Larry-boy! Three cheers if you make it work, but, haha, we'll see if it goes the way of Nupedia, eh?
So. Which of these exactly is Slashdot: a computer virus, or a spyware application?
I favor the "virus" analogy.
At the same time, consider. It seems that if you ever get your computer seized by the police, the actual chances of you getting it back are slim - and if you do get it back, it will probably be several years afterwards and it will be relatively useless. Does this mean that whenever the police suspect you of doing something wrong with your computers, they can come in and effectively shut you down without niceties like, say, a trial?
I'm sure that there's some precedent with other sorts of seizures like this, but it seems that computers take it to a new level as they may accumulate terabytes of evidence... and from another angle, you would think they would be able to just make a bitwise clone in most cases and return it with the rest of the hardware to the Suspects. Apparently this isn't something that generally happens though....
How long would they be gone? Would I ever get them back? Can they at least clone the disks for me so I can have my data back?
The key is, they don't pay for those resources. They use some sort of a "bot-net" to send the mail - "zombie" computers, often on residential broadband connections which have been contaminated with some virus (or something virus-like, trojan, backdoor, et cetera - the specifics matter little). It's not their own bandwidth they're wasting.
It sounds nice, but if you don't sort of implicitly assume that all cases are resolved in a just manner. Well... Suppose you have $citizen who wants to sue $EvilCorp for being evil. The citizen does so. The citizen loses. The citizen has to pay EvilCorp's lawyers millions. That's a really good way to discourage suing EvilCorp. (Or consider the other way around. $EvilCorp sues $citizen because it's evil. They win. To add insult to injury, the citizen now also loses millions paying for the lawyers.)
That's the three-second Slashdot version, admittedly, but loser-pays is not all peaches and cream and pretty fluffy bunnies. Here's some random Internet paper that looks to present a few of the issues:
-- MARC I. GROSS LOSER-PAYS -- OR WHOSE "FAULT" IS IT ANYWAY: A RESPONSE TO HENSLER-ROWE'S "BEYOND 'IT JUST AIN'T WORTH IT'"That analogy is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a diagonal frog.
I remember reading some Libertarian magazine (Reason) about Disney's war against the counterculture. They have all sorts of points, but the thing is, when people look at this Counterculture stuff, it's not something they're going to sympathize with and it probably isn't helping The Cause or anything like that.
Justified? As compared to what... I mean, do you think there's some underfunded cause somewhere that would do better with that money than this? Why, probably, sure. But that's true of a lot of money. And money is fungible, but it's not that fungible.
That's about what I was thinking too.
And that's just internally.
I turned in my badge and everything! Wait for the batch update. :)
Hmm. Was the summary written by an IBMer by any chance? I don't see the words "on demand" or "business transformation" or anything like that, but...
Maybe they're not effectively Anti-Anarchist in their current implementatation.
Fuel is ~$4 a gallon - no clue whatsoever on mileage. Seeing the place from the air is neat (and you can fly low-ish and see all the places, instead of getting stuffed waaay up over the clouds too soon. Sounds like a fun hobby! Of course, I'm just a little summer intern right now, but maybe later......
Once I was Hungary, so Iran. I put the Turkey in the Greece and then laid it on the China, with some Chile.
Then I tripped on Iraq and the whole thing was just a big mess.
Most nanotechnology concerns at present are materials science affairs, and this is likely to remain the case for a while. Nanoscale robots just aren't very feasible under the currently known laws of physics, especially not the infamous "grey goo" variety.
Here's another question. How much of a difference does that really make? I mean, if it's a snapshot blurred over, say, seven days, and some people are born and some people die during the middle- so what? They were going to be born/die soon anyway, throwing off the census from reality. So is there something of value in the inherent "snapshot"-ness?
If you really must know about the technology, you can be fairly sure that since it's IBM, it's going to be some sort of an on demand configuration. And look at that! Right on IBM's on-demand homepage, a piece on "The Future of Government"!