Acknowledge to him that it's "for" Valentines, but prepare a celebration based on something strange, unique, trivia-laden, or in other ways geekish. The act of having done so, in order to honor the geek in him/her/it, will probably be far more appreciated that a cool gift for a common holiday. Pick a "holiday" near by Valentine's, such as:
Feb 11: White Shirt Day, as well as 40th anniversary of the Beatles first US concert.
Feb 12: Barbie's (the doll) birthday. Dress up like Barbie and um.....
Feb 14: Ferris Wheel Day
Feb 15: National Gum Drop Day, as well as Jewlery Day (something for everyone!)
Feb 20: Hoodie-Hoo Day
Or just celebrate any of the things February is chosen as the 'month of' such as chocolate, snack food or candy.
Hentai (165906) sez: "My gut instinct tells me that in many cases, recombinations of the non-chaotic functions will lead to isomorphic mappings of the other functions.
Lorenz discovered the first strange attractor while modeling weather. His gut instinct said the same as yours. He worked very hard for some time to try to figure out how to make it go away. After all, he was after weather prediction, and his results said prediction became impossible.
Note the interdependence (coupling) of these functions; that is key:
kippy (416183) sez: "Ths ISS is a scandal partly because it was built by a committee, not a group focused on one clear definable goal ("let's build a space station" doesn't count)."
The ISS wasn't built by a committee, it was built by 3 of them: the US space agency, the Russian space agency, and the group of administrators and politicians from both sides tasked with making the other kids take turns and play nice. This last group spent so much time and energy placating nationalistic spoiled brats and making sure everybody got the same amount of things out in with their name on it, that they ended up with problems that put the English/metric SNAFU to shame. I have a long standing acquaintance who worked as a troubleshooter and problem solver, chasing down the problems resulting from this activity. I only wish I had his permission to share some of the stories.
"Almost everything great done in space was the result of competition. We need more of that, not less."
Just because it worked before does not mean it was the best way. Nor does it mean the world in general is served by sticking to that paradigm. The competition before was barely sublimated warfare. If we still need that, we need to grow out of that. Having multiple programs will produce massive redundancy. It would cost everyone much less and accompish far more if they worked together.
I do expect that to take longer than competition. But I see two parallel goals here, and expect it to take more time to accomplish them both. I think the result would be worth it.
"If no one feels any pressure to work toward a goal harder, you will have engineers and administrators world-wide leaning on their shovels for decades to come as they we continue to be bound in low Earth orbit."
You and I must not know any of the same engineers. As for administrators, I agree. That's why engineers should be in charge from top to bottom (except for the basic science research). Engineers and scientists understand the function of structure is to support their work, and so create structures for that purpose. Administrators create structures for administrating. The former end up with mostly self-administrating functional structures based on logic. The latter create machines for covering paper with ink.
"I don't want a dream job...Dream jobs eliminate the one good thing about life. Vacation. Whether that be on the weekends, your random days off in the middle of the week, or the two weeks you spend lounging in Jamaica. They don't call work "work" for nothing." {etc.}
I couldn't disagree more. I have a job that is so much fun that if I had to have a regular job to earn money so I could come do this for free, I would. It comes with vacations of a sort, when I travel to conference to present my work. But to take time off to do something else? A day once a month to catch up on some videos, or launch some model rockets, but that's all. The other 29 days give or take, I'm in the lab.
What I do is not easy by any stretch. It is difficult and complicated and there's very few people to whom I can turn for help. But this just makes it an ultimate situation of problem solving, which I have always loved.
OK, I did take some time "off" last year, first time in 5 years. Two weeks at a workshop for mathematical modeling of neural systems at the Santa Fe Institute. It had the scenery and the touristy stuff (love that southwestern food), but I also got my egde-city science and computer freak out time.
This not not just what I do, but who I am. My self defined the parameters of my dream job, and I found it, rather than having a job mold me to it. Anything less than what I do now, and I've tried many different things, is not enough. I only hope that I can save up enough so that when someplace forces me to retire, if no place else will hire me straight out, I'll have enough to pay my own way and work for them for free. I will not go quietly, and I won't stop on my own. I can't stop being me.
JabberWokky (19442) sez: "The guy from the Enterprise Mission is a regular..."
Regular is not the word I'd use. Apparently he went on Art Bell claiming that pretty much all the visible rocks around Spirit were machine parts. Bell went along with it at first, but by the second day backed off and said "Actually, they all just look like rocks!"
It's so sad when close kooks* fall out.
[* Not in any way flamage. I participate with these guys in their usenet groups regularly. I use the term fondly.]
You'll be getting essentialy what wasn't worth scrambling and selling when the cable companies took over the space waves. There are still people out there with the big dishes (and I sold some of them) who only get this stuff unless they got the new little dish too. Consider it the short wave of TV; not to replace the other, but a neat thing in itself. You *might* catch program feeds before regular broadcast times.
dtfinch (661405) sez: "That's less than teachers, at the very bottom of the list. You'd think they could use their incredible skills of psychological manipulation to negotiate a better salary."
A BSc in engineering makes one an engineer. A BSc in psychology does not make one a psychologist. It only makes one eligible for graduate school, or for a job that requires any old degree (or a job where having a degree just improves your chances of getting hired). Most people who go to work with a basic psychology degree are working in another field altogether. The $25K figure includes those who've gone back to burger-flipology as a manager instead of a cook. I'm not being facetious.
Hentai (165906) sez: "As an armchair chaos mathematician, I find it annoying the one thing he DIDN'T try to apply it to: Chaos mathematics itself."
But it's implicit in his statement that collections of such simple mathematical functions underlie nature, from Heisenberg uncertainty up through human behavior. Nature does not operate on the basis of the special cases we're taught in school; those are just easy to teach with because they're easy to solve. Real natural functions fail to follow these examples either inherently due to their nature or when we try to estimate or model them due to the limitations of calculation, and his point is that these two things are the same.
Many of his results obviously show chaotic activity. It would have been more clear had he not kept most results to such a coarse grained output. It would be an interesting exercise to take say three of his apparently non-chaotic functions, make their calculations interdependent in the nature of the Lorenz function, and examine the combined output in phase space. (For the less versed but interested, see the Matlab demo 'lorenz' under the graphics examples; that's 3 interdependent linear functions combining to create chaos).
"...he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work..."
Well, he did make some rather far reaching claims regarding his effect on others and their subsequent actions. He makes it sound as if he created the entire concept of the Santa Fe Institute and people did what he said, when the fact is he had much the same idea as many others already had and would have followed through on whether he said anything or not.
Having met him, I can say pretty confidently such words and attitude come from not a sense of grandiousity, but rather the extremly internally focused concentration such an advanced independent thinker often operates in. I think his releasing the book online bears that out.
A major complaint against him was a lack of peer review of his work. That came primarily from people who weren't qualified to be his peers. Of those that are, I haven't seen much criticism of the science involved, and that's obviously all that matters to him.
I think all space programs should be collected under the United Nations as the United Nations Space Agency. The ESA serves as an example. Cooperation would accomplish more for more people than competition.
Oh sure, there'd be lots of collisions between agendas and between individuals. That's to be expected. But when it happens those responsible should me marked for replacement rather than placation. It's time we grew out of that sort of nonsense and space exploration is the perfect venue for that.
If the US and the USSR can come together in the Apollo-Soyuz project, surely today's more enlightened countries can set aside differences much less than mutually assured nuclear destruction.
The major problem would be the same problem NASA has: professional administrators and politicians. When engineers ran things we got to the moon. When managers ran things we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April?" and no more Challenger.
Space exploration should be the right, responsibility and heritage of all humanity, not just those who can pry enough GNP away to put together their own team. This is not sports, this is science, and if done right, a chance to evolve socially as a planet.
I heartily concur. Both this story and the WashPost story regarding WHOIS and privacy are excellent prospects for causing a Secondary Slashdot Effect (SSE)*, reasonable reponse in the approriate fashion from so many Slashdot readers that they learn not to be so st00pid when publishing these things. If you knock servers offline just by link clicking, imagine what you'll do not just to the mailbox, but the mind of the editor whose job it is to read the response mail.
On the other hand, a great pile of flamage would do nothing but support the premise of this badly (as in not at all) researched piece.
* SSE, Secondary Slashdot Effect, US Patent Pending -- because I figure anything that the USPTO can be made to allow should be, until everything is patened and we all owe each other royalties for anything we do, right down to basic biological functions. Hey, anyone filed on the Kreb's Cycle yet? Photosynthesis? Oxidation?
It would help to know what about it is presently automated via computers so that open source alternatives for the specific apps you have in mind can be explored. I put in 4 years at a medium sized college station (WUVT; Virginia Tech), and until the transmitter monitor broke down and got replaced with a custom IC board and software (because it was cheaper than buying a replacement) nothing at all about the broadcasting was automated. Without knowing what to replace with open source software, the question appears based more in loyalty than logic.
"High-level languages are great, but learning them will never teach you about computers. Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first."
My first two computer books were the "Green Apple" book, a very detailed accounting of the Apple II, and an Osborne book on CPU and computer functioning.
I learned them in parallel, making sure I understood what was really going on at all levels, from my BASIC programs, down through interpretation, into the machine code, and the actions taken by the machine all the way back out to the output device. Every level took part and needed to be accounted for. The Apple book told what the Apple did and how it did it to some extent. The other book wasn't even about the 6502, so I had to learn to understand what was happening, and how that differeed from how it was being accomplished.
From that I gain a very deep understanding of the similarities under all machines, and ended up with essentially zero learning curve when having to switch between apps, OSs or even fellow geeks (when they tended twoards a certain focal technology).
A person who knows how it works is far better equipment to handle any eventuality than a person who just knows how to make it go.
I wouldn't mind providing accurate data if I could be assured of its privacy. If someone wants to know if a given domain name is taken, fine. Who own it? Why? I've had stalkers attempt to track me, and had NetSol sell my address to umpteen junk mailers, but never once had a legitimate personal contact from someone who used my WHOIS data to find me. I can see the need for a technical contact available to someone who needs to make use of that (and can prove that they can). But mailing address of an owner?
A completely open WHOIS database is a relic of of a kinder, gentler time, now long gone. Time to send it off to join bang paths and cute finger responses.
*SpOoNdRiFt* (722914) sez: "But if we're responsible for killing them for no reason at all, we should rememdy this situation, and let natural selection remain natural."
Humans ARE natural. Humans evolved within, and continue to exist within, nature. Claiming otherwise is the height of egotism, as well as the same sort of mentality that people use to divorce themselves from the damage they do to the environment. Anyone who thinks humans are not part of nature are free to try to exist outside the food chain.
If the problem is that there are too many of us, putting too much pressure on the ecosystem, fine, I can buy that. But we do not come from outside nature and everything we do is part of it.
Some years ago they came out with screw-socket fluourescents. They lasted longer per purchase dollar and cost less to use than light bulbs. But except for installations where changing lots of bulbs constantly was labor cost prohibitive, they never caught on.
SciAm ran an article about them some years back. A focus group was formed to find out why. My favorite quote of one of the participants was "This solves a problem I don't have". Now if only more people could think this way when confronted with incremental obselescence.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
It's only inconvenient for a high burn, one shot thrust at an arbitrary point in time to an arbitrary target.
Twice per orbit ISS is flying parallel to the ecliptic. A burn from that orbit at the appropriate time will send a craft out towards the planets' orbits. So maybe you have to wait until that trajectory lines up with the direction you want to go. You have to do the same from the ground. Any trajectory less than the orbital inclination can be had, with just a matter of timing.
Throw in slingshot trajectories around the moon and the sun, and you can get anywhere. Maybe you have to time it carefully, and maybe it takes a little bit more fuel, but not as much as the "you can't get there from here" that article tries to imply.
You might find more options if you don't limit yourself to microscope accessory makers. Try including telescopes. Although the barrel sizes differ (telescope eyepieces being usually either 1.25 or 2 inch diameter) the technology should be compatible/adaptable. I found this one: http://www.scopetronix.com/digitalcam.htm
The patent office is obviously too stupid to exist. Obviously they know there's prior art -- it's probably on the computers they use at work. What's more, many of the prior art examples are copyrighted, so they can't claim not to know without admitting they're not doing their job in that respect.
This has gone beyond gross incompetence. They're ignoring other laws as well as common sense. They've gone rogue. The USPTO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, with checks and balances built in to prevent this rampant stupidity from reccurring.
Mr. Slippery (47854) sez: "It would be wonderful if schools offered ASL just like a foreign language - sign would have been much more interesting and useful to me than the French I failed back in 8th grade...:-)"
Some do. Last I knew (about 20 years ago) 14 US colleges allowed ASL to satisfy their foreign language requirement. At the time we were trying to get Purdue to do so. The hold up seemed to be that we didn't have a "native" ASL person to teach the second year. The head of the program was born to deaf parents, but she was hearing.
Richthofen80 (412488) sez: "The arguement you make is the exact same arguement that the shuttle had. And you know what? the Shuttle wasn't cheaper in the long run. Re-usable doesn't always mean cheaper. The shuttle is re-useable... but the saftey considerations of re-usable means millions of dollars of refits and inspections between any flight."
The millions of dollars of refits and inspections are due in part to being space worthy aircraft built by aircraft companies, rather than space craft from the initial idea. That, and being a project run by federal employees, hiring corporate contractors on federal money.
"When you complicate the situation, such as doing something so small as sticking the space vehicle on the side like the shuttle versus on the top, you can exponentially increase the failure rate. Its not that scramjets wouldn't work, its that rockets DO work, and work incredibly reliably. their attitude adjustment and flight paths are infinetly simpler than something that has to calculate for air moving at such high speeds through an engine."
A scramjet should be at least as reliable than a rocket once fine tuned. And you won't have to buy a new one every time. Same with comparisons with the shuttle. You can't tell me it'd be cheaper to build them from scratch every time, and you can look up for yourself how much it'd cost for the booster power to lift some of the payloads the shuttle has.
Now, a Big Dumb Booster, that's a grand idea for certain configurations. If there were enough of the right kinds of payloads waiting to go, bulding a hundred or two of these on an assembly line might make them economically viable compared to the shuttle.
Bottom line for me is to look at the design built by the man who's done nothing but exceptional original work from the get-go: Burt Rutan.
...unless you just want the experience if diddling with them. I used to order repeair kits for people with old JBL monitors and original Advents and such. Very few were successful and of those that were, fewer were satisfied. I started selling a full line of individual replacement speakers instead. Far more were satisfied.
If your surrounds are worn out, chances are your speakers are so old that significant advances in speaker technology would get you better speakers for less money.
The populations of birds are for the most part remaining stable. Those that declining are doing so for reasons other than running into windows. Therefore these birds happen to be dying by running into wondows rather than something else that would kill them at about the same rate, quite possibly starvation. Now, which is kinder?
Why not come to the aid of earthworms (which are far more beneficial then most birds) and tell everyone not to walk on the ground after it rains?
To keep most birds from running into windows, cut a piece of black paper or plastic into the shape of the sillouette of a raptor and stick it on the window. Stick it on the outside if reflection is a problem. Any that don't steer clear of a raptor's shadow might as well leave the gene pool.
The problem isn't that they're dying, it's that they're dying where they can be found by someone who can get the media to listen to them as they pretend that if it weren't for Evil Humans the poor birds would live forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Acknowledge to him that it's "for" Valentines, but prepare a celebration based on something strange, unique, trivia-laden, or in other ways geekish. The act of having done so, in order to honor the geek in him/her/it, will probably be far more appreciated that a cool gift for a common holiday. Pick a "holiday" near by Valentine's, such as:
# 14
Feb 11: White Shirt Day, as well as 40th anniversary of the Beatles first US concert.
Feb 12: Barbie's (the doll) birthday. Dress up like Barbie and um.....
Feb 14: Ferris Wheel Day
Feb 15: National Gum Drop Day, as well as Jewlery Day (something for everyone!)
Feb 20: Hoodie-Hoo Day
Or just celebrate any of the things February is chosen as the 'month of' such as chocolate, snack food or candy.
http://www.butlerwebs.com/holidays/february.htm
Hentai (165906) sez: "My gut instinct tells me that in many cases, recombinations of the non-chaotic functions will lead to isomorphic mappings of the other functions.
Lorenz discovered the first strange attractor while modeling weather. His gut instinct said the same as yours. He worked very hard for some time to try to figure out how to make it go away. After all, he was after weather prediction, and his results said prediction became impossible.
Note the interdependence (coupling) of these functions; that is key:
dx/dt = a(y-x)
dy/dt = x(b-z)-y
dz/dt = xy-cz
where a=10; b=28, c=8/3
It has a dimension of 2.08, fractional dimensions equating with strange attractors and therefore chaos.
Side note, he ran down that set of coupled equations using only 3 of the 15 variables he'd started with, and was working entirely with punch cards.
kippy (416183) sez: "Ths ISS is a scandal partly because it was built by a committee, not a group focused on one clear definable goal ("let's build a space station" doesn't count)."
The ISS wasn't built by a committee, it was built by 3 of them: the US space agency, the Russian space agency, and the group of administrators and politicians from both sides tasked with making the other kids take turns and play nice. This last group spent so much time and energy placating nationalistic spoiled brats and making sure everybody got the same amount of things out in with their name on it, that they ended up with problems that put the English/metric SNAFU to shame. I have a long standing acquaintance who worked as a troubleshooter and problem solver, chasing down the problems resulting from this activity. I only wish I had his permission to share some of the stories.
"Almost everything great done in space was the result of competition. We need more of that, not less."
Just because it worked before does not mean it was the best way. Nor does it mean the world in general is served by sticking to that paradigm. The competition before was barely sublimated warfare. If we still need that, we need to grow out of that. Having multiple programs will produce massive redundancy. It would cost everyone much less and accompish far more if they worked together.
I do expect that to take longer than competition. But I see two parallel goals here, and expect it to take more time to accomplish them both. I think the result would be worth it.
"If no one feels any pressure to work toward a goal harder, you will have engineers and administrators world-wide leaning on their shovels for decades to come as they we continue to be bound in low Earth orbit."
You and I must not know any of the same engineers. As for administrators, I agree. That's why engineers should be in charge from top to bottom (except for the basic science research). Engineers and scientists understand the function of structure is to support their work, and so create structures for that purpose. Administrators create structures for administrating. The former end up with mostly self-administrating functional structures based on logic. The latter create machines for covering paper with ink.
"I don't want a dream job...Dream jobs eliminate the one good thing about life. Vacation. Whether that be on the weekends, your random days off in the middle of the week, or the two weeks you spend lounging in Jamaica. They don't call work "work" for nothing." {etc.}
I couldn't disagree more. I have a job that is so much fun that if I had to have a regular job to earn money so I could come do this for free, I would. It comes with vacations of a sort, when I travel to conference to present my work. But to take time off to do something else? A day once a month to catch up on some videos, or launch some model rockets, but that's all. The other 29 days give or take, I'm in the lab.
What I do is not easy by any stretch. It is difficult and complicated and there's very few people to whom I can turn for help. But this just makes it an ultimate situation of problem solving, which I have always loved.
OK, I did take some time "off" last year, first time in 5 years. Two weeks at a workshop for mathematical modeling of neural systems at the Santa Fe Institute. It had the scenery and the touristy stuff (love that southwestern food), but I also got my egde-city science and computer freak out time.
This not not just what I do, but who I am.
My self defined the parameters of my dream job, and I found it, rather than having a job mold me to it. Anything less than what I do now, and I've tried many different things, is not enough. I only hope that I can save up enough so that when someplace forces me to retire, if no place else will hire me straight out, I'll have enough to pay my own way and work for them for free. I will not go quietly, and I won't stop on my own. I can't stop being me.
JabberWokky (19442) sez: "The guy from the Enterprise Mission is a regular..."
Regular is not the word I'd use. Apparently he went on Art Bell claiming that pretty much all the visible rocks around Spirit were machine parts. Bell went along with it at first, but by the second day backed off and said "Actually, they all just look like rocks!"
It's so sad when close kooks* fall out.
[* Not in any way flamage. I participate with these guys in their usenet groups regularly. I use the term fondly.]
You'll be getting essentialy what wasn't worth scrambling and selling when the cable companies took over the space waves. There are still people out there with the big dishes (and I sold some of them) who only get this stuff unless they got the new little dish too. Consider it the short wave of TV; not to replace the other, but a neat thing in itself. You *might* catch program feeds before regular broadcast times.
dtfinch (661405) sez: "That's less than teachers, at the very bottom of the list. You'd think they could use their incredible skills of psychological manipulation to negotiate a better salary."
A BSc in engineering makes one an engineer. A BSc in psychology does not make one a psychologist. It only makes one eligible for graduate school, or for a job that requires any old degree (or a job where having a degree just improves your chances of getting hired). Most people who go to work with a basic psychology degree are working in another field altogether. The $25K figure includes those who've gone back to burger-flipology as a manager instead of a cook. I'm not being facetious.
Hentai (165906) sez: "As an armchair chaos mathematician, I find it annoying the one thing he DIDN'T try to apply it to: Chaos mathematics itself."
But it's implicit in his statement that collections of such simple mathematical functions underlie nature, from Heisenberg uncertainty up through human behavior. Nature does not operate on the basis of the special cases we're taught in school; those are just easy to teach with because they're easy to solve. Real natural functions fail to follow these examples either inherently due to their nature or when we try to estimate or model them due to the limitations of calculation, and his point is that these two things are the same.
Many of his results obviously show chaotic activity. It would have been more clear had he not kept most results to such a coarse grained output. It would be an interesting exercise to take say three of his apparently non-chaotic functions, make their calculations interdependent in the nature of the Lorenz function, and examine the combined output in phase space. (For the less versed but interested, see the Matlab demo 'lorenz' under the graphics examples; that's 3 interdependent linear functions combining to create chaos).
"...he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work..."
Well, he did make some rather far reaching claims regarding his effect on others and their subsequent actions. He makes it sound as if he created the entire concept of the Santa Fe Institute and people did what he said, when the fact is he had much the same idea as many others already had and would have followed through on whether he said anything or not.
Having met him, I can say pretty confidently such words and attitude come from not a sense of grandiousity, but rather the extremly internally focused concentration such an advanced independent thinker often operates in. I think his releasing the book online bears that out.
A major complaint against him was a lack of peer review of his work. That came primarily from people who weren't qualified to be his peers. Of those that are, I haven't seen much criticism of the science involved, and that's obviously all that matters to him.
I think all space programs should be collected under the United Nations as the United Nations Space Agency. The ESA serves as an example. Cooperation would accomplish more for more people than competition.
Oh sure, there'd be lots of collisions between agendas and between individuals. That's to be expected. But when it happens those responsible should me marked for replacement rather than placation. It's time we grew out of that sort of nonsense and space exploration is the perfect venue for that.
If the US and the USSR can come together in the Apollo-Soyuz project, surely today's more enlightened countries can set aside differences much less than mutually assured nuclear destruction.
The major problem would be the same problem NASA has: professional administrators and politicians. When engineers ran things we got to the moon. When managers ran things we got "My God, Thiokol, what do you want me to do, wait until April?" and no more Challenger.
Space exploration should be the right, responsibility and heritage of all humanity, not just those who can pry enough GNP away to put together their own team. This is not sports, this is science, and if done right, a chance to evolve socially as a planet.
I heartily concur. Both this story and the WashPost story regarding WHOIS and privacy are excellent prospects for causing a Secondary Slashdot Effect (SSE)*, reasonable reponse in the approriate fashion from so many Slashdot readers that they learn not to be so st00pid when publishing these things. If you knock servers offline just by link clicking, imagine what you'll do not just to the mailbox, but the mind of the editor whose job it is to read the response mail.
On the other hand, a great pile of flamage would do nothing but support the premise of this badly (as in not at all) researched piece.
* SSE, Secondary Slashdot Effect, US Patent Pending -- because I figure anything that the USPTO can be made to allow should be, until everything is patened and we all owe each other royalties for anything we do, right down to basic biological functions. Hey, anyone filed on the Kreb's Cycle yet? Photosynthesis? Oxidation?
It would help to know what about it is presently automated via computers so that open source alternatives for the specific apps you have in mind can be explored. I put in 4 years at a medium sized college station (WUVT; Virginia Tech), and until the transmitter monitor broke down and got replaced with a custom IC board and software (because it was cheaper than buying a replacement) nothing at all about the broadcasting was automated. Without knowing what to replace with open source software, the question appears based more in loyalty than logic.
"High-level languages are great, but learning them will never teach you about computers. Perhaps it's time that computer science curriculums start teaching assembly language first."
My first two computer books were the "Green Apple" book, a very detailed accounting of the Apple II, and an Osborne book on CPU and computer functioning.
I learned them in parallel, making sure I understood what was really going on at all levels, from my BASIC programs, down through interpretation, into the machine code, and the actions taken by the machine all the way back out to the output device. Every level took part and needed to be accounted for. The Apple book told what the Apple did and how it did it to some extent. The other book wasn't even about the 6502, so I had to learn to understand what was happening, and how that differeed from how it was being accomplished.
From that I gain a very deep understanding of the similarities under all machines, and ended up with essentially zero learning curve when having to switch between apps, OSs or even fellow geeks (when they tended twoards a certain focal technology).
A person who knows how it works is far better equipment to handle any eventuality than a person who just knows how to make it go.
I wouldn't mind providing accurate data if I could be assured of its privacy. If someone wants to know if a given domain name is taken, fine. Who own it? Why? I've had stalkers attempt to track me, and had NetSol sell my address to umpteen junk mailers, but never once had a legitimate personal contact from someone who used my WHOIS data to find me. I can see the need for a technical contact available to someone who needs to make use of that (and can prove that they can). But mailing address of an owner?
A completely open WHOIS database is a relic of of a kinder, gentler time, now long gone. Time to send it off to join bang paths and cute finger responses.
*SpOoNdRiFt* (722914) sez: "But if we're responsible for killing them for no reason at all, we should rememdy this situation, and let natural selection remain natural."
Humans ARE natural. Humans evolved within, and continue to exist within, nature. Claiming otherwise is the height of egotism, as well as the same sort of mentality that people use to divorce themselves from the damage they do to the environment. Anyone who thinks humans are not part of nature are free to try to exist outside the food chain.
If the problem is that there are too many of us, putting too much pressure on the ecosystem, fine, I can buy that. But we do not come from outside nature and everything we do is part of it.
Some years ago they came out with screw-socket fluourescents. They lasted longer per purchase dollar and cost less to use than light bulbs. But except for installations where changing lots of bulbs constantly was labor cost prohibitive, they never caught on.
SciAm ran an article about them some years back. A focus group was formed to find out why. My favorite quote of one of the participants was "This solves a problem I don't have". Now if only more people could think this way when confronted with incremental obselescence.
...specifically orbital mechanics.
"And did you know that to accomodate the Russians, the space station is in an orbit that makes it almost useless as a jumping off point to anywhere?"
It's only inconvenient for a high burn, one shot thrust at an arbitrary point in time to an arbitrary target.
Twice per orbit ISS is flying parallel to the ecliptic. A burn from that orbit at the appropriate time will send a craft out towards the planets' orbits. So maybe you have to wait until that trajectory lines up with the direction you want to go. You have to do the same from the ground. Any trajectory less than the orbital inclination can be had, with just a matter of timing.
Throw in slingshot trajectories around the moon and the sun, and you can get anywhere. Maybe you have to time it carefully, and maybe it takes a little bit more fuel, but not as much as the "you can't get there from here" that article tries to imply.
You might find more options if you don't limit yourself to microscope accessory makers. Try including telescopes. Although the barrel sizes differ (telescope eyepieces being usually either 1.25 or 2 inch diameter) the technology should be compatible/adaptable. I found this one: http://www.scopetronix.com/digitalcam.htm
"What we need is a good old fashioned hanging." -- FTC Commissioner Orson Swindell at the 2003 FTC Spam Conference.
hcg50a (690062) sez: "All they did was refine some data from the 1970s experiment..."
No, they ran an entirely new experiment with equipment and analysis techniques that were more sensitive.
The patent office is obviously too stupid to exist. Obviously they know there's prior art -- it's probably on the computers they use at work. What's more, many of the prior art examples are copyrighted, so they can't claim not to know without admitting they're not doing their job in that respect.
This has gone beyond gross incompetence. They're ignoring other laws as well as common sense. They've gone rogue. The USPTO needs to be dismantled and rebuilt from the ground up, with checks and balances built in to prevent this rampant stupidity from reccurring.
Mr. Slippery (47854) sez: "It would be wonderful if schools offered ASL just like a foreign language - sign would have been much more interesting and useful to me than the French I failed back in 8th grade... :-)"
Some do. Last I knew (about 20 years ago) 14 US colleges allowed ASL to satisfy their foreign language requirement. At the time we were trying to get Purdue to do so. The hold up seemed to be that we didn't have a "native" ASL person to teach the second year. The head of the program was born to deaf parents, but she was hearing.
Richthofen80 (412488) sez: "The arguement you make is the exact same arguement that the shuttle had. And you know what? the Shuttle wasn't cheaper in the long run. Re-usable doesn't always mean cheaper. The shuttle is re-useable... but the saftey considerations of re-usable means millions of dollars of refits and inspections between any flight."
The millions of dollars of refits and inspections are due in part to being space worthy aircraft built by aircraft companies, rather than space craft from the initial idea. That, and being a project run by federal employees, hiring corporate contractors on federal money.
"When you complicate the situation, such as doing something so small as sticking the space vehicle on the side like the shuttle versus on the top, you can exponentially increase the failure rate. Its not that scramjets wouldn't work, its that rockets DO work, and work incredibly reliably. their attitude adjustment and flight paths are infinetly simpler than something that has to calculate for air moving at such high speeds through an engine."
A scramjet should be at least as reliable than a rocket once fine tuned. And you won't have to buy a new one every time. Same with comparisons with the shuttle. You can't tell me it'd be cheaper to build them from scratch every time, and you can look up for yourself how much it'd cost for the booster power to lift some of the payloads the shuttle has.
Now, a Big Dumb Booster, that's a grand idea for certain configurations. If there were enough of the right kinds of payloads waiting to go, bulding a hundred or two of these on an assembly line might make them economically viable compared to the shuttle.
Bottom line for me is to look at the design built by the man who's done nothing but exceptional original work from the get-go: Burt Rutan.
...unless you just want the experience if diddling with them. I used to order repeair kits for people with old JBL monitors and original Advents and such. Very few were successful and of those that were, fewer were satisfied. I started selling a full line of individual replacement speakers instead. Far more were satisfied.
If your surrounds are worn out, chances are your speakers are so old that significant advances in speaker technology would get you better speakers for less money.
The populations of birds are for the most part remaining stable. Those that declining are doing so for reasons other than running into windows. Therefore these birds happen to be dying by running into wondows rather than something else that would kill them at about the same rate, quite possibly starvation. Now, which is kinder?
Why not come to the aid of earthworms (which are far more beneficial then most birds) and tell everyone not to walk on the ground after it rains?
To keep most birds from running into windows, cut a piece of black paper or plastic into the shape of the sillouette of a raptor and stick it on the window. Stick it on the outside if reflection is a problem. Any that don't steer clear of a raptor's shadow might as well leave the gene pool.
The problem isn't that they're dying, it's that they're dying where they can be found by someone who can get the media to listen to them as they pretend that if it weren't for Evil Humans the poor birds would live forever.