A 15 year old kid is going to have more time to stand his ground than a 38 year old researcher, so the battle is immediately lost....
Very true... if you make your scope too wide. After I noticed the sorts of problems you mention (which include one fired senior MIT professor who is now a Wikipedia crank/semi-vandal), I decided to pick one topic, and specifically one article, and defend only that article.
However, if I'd picked e.g. General Relativity, that approach wouldn't work, something that big and notable cannot I suspect be defended by one person.
You have to go active to see targets, particularly well concealed targets and that makes you "visible" as well.
Define "visible".
Knowing that at one point in time there was a plane at a particular location in 3 space (or maybe just along a vector) is far different from being able to lock on to it, get a firing solution, and have your weapon actually hit it.
Knowing that there's an essentially invisible plane or planes out there, somewhere, that you can't hit unless you can use your canon, is... not going to do anything good for the morale of your side.
That's not clear to me. What about the principle of "Don't be stupid", which all companies should follow?
This case looks so bad, it's no wonder one of Google's lawyers is crowing about getting it thrown out in summary judgement before it got in front of a jury.
Now that's been reversed, and this may turn out to be a very expensive stunt on Google's part. Not right by Google at all, if they lose big, with all the attendant publicity.
Plus there's the perception thing. While I doubt they're looking that far ahead, and perhaps they shouldn't, if the company is to last a long time, can they afford a culture that has a perception that they throw away their older staff?
Sure, you can say, "don't worry about it, that's far in the future". But too many actions of the "don't care about the future" type can end up foreclosing having a future.
Important detail: Gary North is neither a scientist nor engineer, and he isn't talking about that subset of PhDs (as he points out implicitly in various places).
Insight: The Parkinson's Law aspect to this may be part of why MIT is so good:
Getting tenure at MIT requires two things: in the eyes of the department and especially its Visiting Committee (the various ones keep all parts of MIT on the straight and narrow), you've got to be #1 or 2 in your field. Maybe #3. This is of course hard.
But then you have to pass the gantlet of your School, Engineering or Science (there are of course others, but I simply don't know much about them, and they aren't large). At this level, the Institute has an obsession about keeping departments from getting too large, especially in a new booming field. Anyone who remembers the early '70s aerospace crash, and who can measure the size of current aero/astro departments will understand why... and this looks to have been wise WRT EECS.
Case in point, one of my classmates was 100% MIT from undergraduate to untenured professor. He passed the department's cut---but not the School of Engineering. He's now teaching at Olin and quite bitter about MIT in general. (On the other hand, karma's a bitch, but that's a matter between me, him, and the universe.:-)
It sounds like the police is running on a little too much testosterone when he said "she's lucky she is in a cell, not a morgue"
It's not "testosterone", more likely it's "My God, we came this close to having to kill an idiot college student".
It's also a literal statement of fact, and a warning to other idiot college students that when the police command you to "stop or we'll shoot", you would be well advised to take them at their word.
You want "testosterone"? Let's see you get within the blast zone of a suspected suicide bomber and ask her to not move, knowing that she can touch it off faster than you can pull your trigger (reaction times are slow, something the police are taught about WRT knife armed opponents).
The Play-Doh is what turns this into such a strong false positive, it looks too much like a plastic explosive. And do we really think this woman walks around all day on campus with "4-5 oz of Play-Doh" in her hands???
That's pretty far to one end of the bell curve of weirdness for those not in physical therapy. If she doesn't normally do this, she's screwed, it will be pretty easy for the prosecutors to establish that one way or another from the people she's frequently around.
Terrorism is the use of violence, frequently against ostensible third parties, to coerce a political action out of a target.
Too loose. By this definition Britains declaration war on Nazi Germany was terrorism.
Agreed. But:
Terrorism is the use of violence against noncombatants to coerce a political action out of a target.
But sometime when my head is not mush I'd want to try to find a definition between the two above.
Problem is, this gets complicated by drawing the line of "noncombatants".
E.g. for Muslims all of us kafir are by definition combatants (an oversimplification, but it will do for the moment), and so who are we to decide that their attack on the WTC was terrorism? Not as they (or this group of them) score people....:
And specifically:
So the war against Germany wasn't terrorism, but the bombing raids against civilian infrastructure was.
In that period of total war, civilians producing in the economy were considered to be combatants. And it just so happens that I'm reading the first economic history of Nazi Germany in many decades (says the author), The Wages of Destruction, and hitting Germany economically was critical.
Nazi Germany's strength was severely constrained by its economic situation, and many of their actions make a lot more sense in that light. And it was a nasty interlocking problem.
E.g. whatever the willingness of occupied or Vichy France to make planes for Germany, they were constrained by a lack of refined aluminum. They had ore and smelters, but not enough power. Their and the lowland's coal output was constrained by food, the miners just couldn't get enough to work at full output (normal, civilian level, not wartime).
I've stopped reading for the moment at the point where the author starts explaining why it was integral to Operation Barbarosa that the urban populations of the untermenchen in the soon to be captured East be starved to death, to remove their useless to the Nazi's mouths and free up that food for their Grosseraum in the West. Hitler and company knew they were living on borrowed time, the combined economic power of the British empire and the US would crush them like bugs in short order.
(Unfortunately, Hitler's world view told him that the International Jewish Conspiracy(TM), headquartered (?) in the USA---FDR being its #1 mouthpiece---was fervently working to exterminate Germany after WWI, so it was essential to start this whole mess before they got any further. There are prices paid for world views that don't track reality....)
And that makes things even more complicated. Every day the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was delayed resulted in... tens of thousands (or so, the number is very large) of civilian deaths in the areas they occupied. In that light, various means including the nuclear bombings look a bit different....
Using illegal tactics to shut down a legitimate site has to be cyberterrorism, right?
No no no! Terrorism is the use of violence, frequently against ostensible third parties, to coerce a political action out of a target. In this case, we could extend the traditional meaning to "exterminate a target", but what the Swedish RIAA types are doing is simple direct action, they are using illegal actions against an legit opponent of theirs.
Animal rights activists who hack and deface sites seems to get that label.
No, they get the label because they e.g. burn out the laboratories and other facilities of their opponents. And in the most recent example, we have pure, 100% terrorism: a researcher drops out of his field because an arson device was left at the house of a neighbor.
This is a crystal clear example of why people resort to pure terrorism: it can work. It's one thing for that researcher to say he'll take the demonstrated risk to himself. It's another for his family to decide to take that risk with him.
But an innocent third party? How moral would it be for that researcher to have continued when the price could be the lives of his neighbors...?
Not to mention the operational likely hood that he'd be run out of his neighborhood in the medium term when it was realized he represented a big risk to his neighbors. They have a stake in medical research, but they didn't sign up for this.
Well, it doesn't sound like most of these pages they are releasing are from actual published editions, but (in this release) are manuscripts along the way to that final edition. I.e. most would be individual unbound pages from a typewriter, very possibly with editing markup.
That material will be on likely paper with acid, in not too great shape, and needing more gentle treatment than the Auto Document Feeds (ADFs) I'm familiar with (none of which were designed for this sort of work).
I'm assuming that all of these are images, so cleanup is just running them through a program like ScanFix and then making sure the entire process through then is of acceptable quality, and rework (rescan) when not.
Are you thinking of taking images one step further to ASCII or the like?
That would only be done for the final version, and in the case of e.g. stuff that had been published by Baen they could probably get the softcopy from them (a long time ago Baen the man was looking into making camera ready copy from normal laser printers, so I would imagine they kept copies).
I know from serious professional experience (designed, wrote and built 6 and 7 figure systems that scanned millions of pages) that the scanning and associated cleanup, rework and organization required would not have been cheap. No idea what it would cost today (been out of the field for a decade), but a lot of it is labor, and that isn't getting any cheaper (not for quality work).
And the faster scanners would be just too harsh on the originals, they probably did much of it page by page on flatbeds (ouch!).
Re:If the journalist was stupid enough to sign it.
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AMD NDA Scandal
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· Score: 3, Insightful
He's also broadcasting the fact that the so called "independent media" of blogs and citizen journalists may not be as independent as it seems, thanks to agreements like this.
EXACTLY.
The important point here is how AMD has poisoned the well with this action.
Just how much (larger) a gain of salt will I have to take anything I read about their new stuff? I know much of tech media are barely more than shills for those they write about, but this (the initial NDA he refused to sign) goes quite a bit beyond anything I can remember hearing for the media.
No K10 chips for me this year or next, I would say....
This was in the late '60s; in no particular order except for the last:
The moon shot program; you aren't going to be able to replicate the excitement of that period, but it was of course a big thing at the time.
The original first run Jonny Quest TV series, as re-runs then. Terribly politically incorrect today, of course, but made back at about the last time in the US that scientists were cool.
The Bell Science series, especially most of the ones directed by Frank Capra (at the time, due to the awfulness of the local public schools, my Catholic mom had put me into a Protestant Christian school, and one great thing they did was to gather everyone (K-6 at minimum) into the chapel and show us neat stuff without concern if you were "too young" to get anything out of it then (I wasn't)).
Apropos reading came later: after first grade, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia set, and I pretty much devoured it over perhaps a year's time. But the hook had been set by the above three items, I knew from second grade on that I was a scientist (and that never changed). Others have covered the good stuff that's more targeted at the age range you're interested in, but these set the hook for me.
Titles and ASIN numbers for what's available of the above, obviously all are out of date in science, but they captured some essential of approach that I would hope are still relevant:
Jonny Quest - The Complete First Season (1964): ASIN: B0001MZ7J6
Uneven in a variety of ways, most probably weren't focused on "science" per se, but a few solidly were, or at least had critical puzzles or mysteries to be solved by something like the methods scientists and the like use.
Our Mr. Sun / Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays (1957): ASIN: B0000AKY5Z
These two, along with one about the organization of the body (the one that showed how a KO temporarily messes up your nervous system, not sure which one was that) were the most influential ones for me.
Hemo the Magnificent / Unchained Goddess (1958): ASIN: B0000AKY5V
I don't think Hemo was the above mentioned title, but I do remember the bit from it on capillaries. I vaguely remember Unchained Goddess, but it didn't have much impact on me.
Also, while I know there's no way any school could officially show this uncut, Real Genius captured some essential truths, at least about MIT and CalTech. The creators of it actually went to both to do research, and several of the characters are modeled on real people. I met the model for the lead woman (the one who sanded her dorm room floor), she assured us she wasn't normally that hyper, they'd just caught her at a particularly hyper time ^_^.
It's not really true (e.g. the classroom lecture sequence of tape recorders) in a variety of ways, but somehow it captured some of the spirit of MIT and I'm told CalTech.
And after you've learned Newtonian physics cold, watching Road Runner cartoons are a blast....
Perhaps showing some of the above could be fruitful for inspiring essays. I know I could write a bunch after re-watching them, from all sorts of angles.
Actually, I occasionally have to power cycle my new GE washer, mostly I sometimes "outsmart" it's microprocessor. Also, hitting stop doesn't really stop it, so to soak clothes I have to pull the plug.
It's otherwise such a fine device I'm extremely happy to put up with the above (like my mom, I'm a "laundry Nazi" ^_^ so I demand a lot more out of one than anyone else I've ever known).
But more to the point, after AC was broadly available, how long did it take for an electric washing machine to even be invented? And how safe was it (not very, I'll bet).
I think we need a sense of history here: imperfect institutions run by imperfect people will not immediately use a new thing like electricity or general purpose computers properly. People will get killed or otherwise harmed when there was no theoretical need for that. Give this new thing a little more time (measured in decades) and I'll bet things will get much better.
Anyone want to bet on Microsoft keeping their monopoly of desktop garbage for 30 more years?
Hopefully, Sun can make money by selling the most technologically advanced sub $20K servers that are optimized for scalability, throughput and middleware (Databases, web, infra etc).
This is a great theory, especially given that Sun is said to pay more attention to build quality than e.g. Dell.
BUT, has Sun solved their basic blocking and tackling problems in selling such machines? Over the years, I've seen countless stories about companies that wanted to buy something less than an E25K simply being unable to do so. Sun won't give them the time of day, the "VARs" and resellers Sun has anointed to do this are generally too incompetent to do so, Sun people say "Buy it off the Web site" and the poor guy responds "Could you tell me which credit card I can use to charge $220,000 to?" (paraphrase of real story), etc. etc. etc.
There are a lot of dissatisfied companies out there with racks of Dell servers simply because Dell will sell them stuff (HP has its own set of problems, acknowledged by their new CEO.)
Doesn't really matter how nice their kit is if they won't sell it to you....
I don't think IBM is quite as dysfunctional as Sun is in sales/order fulfillment; they have their own quirks and legacy issues, and I could be very wrong here, anyone have recent data?
They did use an asbestos based insulation up to a certain height, when NYC joined the anti-asbestos hysteria (if it was as bad as they said back then, we'd all be dead by now, the dose makes the poison and all that).
And the supplier of that material said "if there's a fire above the [insert right floor numbers], it's going to fail.
BUT, the ballistic damage to load bearing members caused by the impact certainly stripped off a lot of insulation, didn't matter how fire resistant it was. The impact angles were planned to cause the maximum damage in this way, and as I remember the terrorist pilots for the most part achieved them.
As has been commented before, all in all the WTC design and construction is a testament to quality, the outcome could have been lots worse. Me, I'm impressed by how they pancaked instead of toppling over, it would have been worse if they'd fallen on top of other buildings (part of the plan of the first bombing was to cause that tower to fall on the other one---too bad for them the explosives prematured before the vehicle got into place...).
I've been watching this drama for a while... and I must say it's extinguished any desire I had to contribute to the Linux kernel.
And parsing the exact truth of the matter is irrelevant: those of us who've been out in the real world long enough can feel in our gut that there's enough truth to the allegations that we just don't want to mess with this sort of thing, we demand payment for this sort of treatment ^_^ !
Instead, there are plenty of FOSS projects out there at all levels that don't have this degree of politics (which are inevitable, man is a political creature and all that).
Maybe FreeBSD will be SMP stable by the time I want or really need to do something like this.... But the bottom line is that I'm in no hurry, so I can carefully choose where to put my various efforts.
Has anyone noticed that a panicked Congress is proposing to rape the hurricane hunter budget to put up a new satellite?
Answer me this: which gives you better data, a plane flying through a hurricane, or a satellite a zillion miles up that only reports surface winds?
Whatever the merits of replacing this satellite, this director is going about it the wrong way. When you have five lead forecasters, one is on vacation, one is critical but not to the point of publicly calling for his removal, and remaing three says he has to go for a bunch of reasons, I strongly suspect we're seeing an example of clueless management (of the sort we're all familiar with) rather than a brave whistleblower.
Errr, we have a sustained example of Communist countries falsifying their statistics, and in some cases with Cuba, they are internally contradictory.
And what makes you think I entirely believe the US Government produced ones?
E.g. the changes in how "unemployment" is scored alone make it useless to compare over long periods of time. One source I haven't followed up on said that if we counted it like we did in the Great Depression (e.g. included "discouraged" workers who have given up on trying to find a job), the current rate would be closer to about 12.5%, half of the peak in the Depression. Which would explain why this recovery doesn't feel so healthy....
And while I haven't investigated this myself, the CPI is very unlikely to be entirely honest, too much of the government's tax income and benefits output is tied to it. Buying CPI indexed bonds, when the government defines the CPI, seems like a particularly foolish thing to do.
Don't you remember the Soviet census guy who was sent to the Gulag (or executed) when Stalin's various purges (plus the Ukraine terror famine) started to make a big dent in the total Soviet population?
Nothing they published after that could be believed. The nomenklatura in Cuba have no need of published honest statistics, and it is the nature of such regimes that internal supposedly honest statistics are often faked by underlings who don't want to get the chop for not making something impossible happen when ordered from on high.
Lower salary + eventual Green Card for alien == Higher salary for permanent resident (citizen or Green Card holder---they too are in the same fix as the rest of us once they get their card!)
Many aliens are willing to work for less money if for no other reason than that their total compensation package when they get the Green Card is high enough.
When viewed that way, they aren't really getting exploited, and they will always be able to outbid permanent residents.
I just got an update: while this is an impression vs. an informal study of a probably statistically valid set of admitees, this pattern still seems to be true at MIT.
Please read the article (the NYT one, at least) for why such a small difference might make a larger difference over time; it's pretty complicated, for the younger siblings for a while tend to score higher. It's also very likely that other factors than raw G make a lot of the difference, but we can't measure those like we can G.
Two decades ago when a friend and I looked, MIT was overwhelmingly admitting first borns and only children.... (And, yes, I'm the first of four....)
MIT as of that time had also found out empirically that class rank (which of course entirely depends on grades) was a very good predictor of success at MIT. They didn't know exactly why, and of course were careful in applying it, but it fell out of the retrospective studies they do on who succeeded and who didn't. (MIT believes that everyone they admit can succeed, but of course statistically in the real world this doesn't happen.)
In all fairness the IBM / Hitachi failure period was over 5 years ago and specific to the 75GXP line (15gb per platter if I recall, maximum 5 platters, hence the 75GXP naming)
Errr, no. Sale started in March 2000. Wikipedia sort of implies sales continued through 2003 (I'm pretty sure though at least 2002), the class action web site, 2005, but in a minimum length search I could find no info on when manufacture stopped of the 75GXP. Obviously it would have been in the supply system for a long time, since anyone who knew would be shunning them after the problem was realized.
Also, according to Wikipedia, "Since the lawsuit, existing Deskstar 120GXP drives had been rerated to 333 power-on hours per month, even though the spec is not new at the time." IBM claims this doesn't really mean anything (except obviously in duty cycle), that the drives can be powered on 24x7, BUT: IBM's mishandling of this bad drive was a lot of the problem, this particular kerfluffle is just one example of how that sort of poison can make it impossible to do business, the ultimate example here is of the sale to Hitachi, and while the highest management is new, I don't know how thorough the house cleaning was....
I won't consider touching any Hitachi drives until next year at minimum, and their warranty periods for Deskstars (see below) will unless changed keep them out of my systems.
I bought two 60GXPs, one for myself and one for a friend in 2001, and the friend's one was still going strong as of a couple of weeks ago when she moved (someone loaned her a laptop so at last count she hadn't yet tried to power up that machine). And I took mine out of service only a month or two ago in favor of a 7200.10 500GB Seagate SATA, and my 8GB SCSI Ultrastars from 1999 were still going strong when I replaced them with a 10K.7 73GB Seagate. IBM indeed did very well for me, those disks lasted well past their design lifes, although I at least am very careful with mine.
In comparison, I had a 32KB section of a 7200.4 or 5 go bad on me in 2003 after a half year of service (with its diagnostics saying it was mechanically failing), and in February I had a total and no warning "send to Ontrack, recovery not complete" mechanical failure of a 10K.6 73GB drive that had been in service for 3.5 years.
"One should start planning the death of the drive, and all one's data, beginning the day one buys the drive." as my friend below says.
For me, personally, if I had been any later in building my friend's machine and the 75GXP price was right for it, I would have blithely put one in it, and that would have been a total support disaster---and IBM's corporate response to the problem would have just compounded it, back then neither I nor my friend had any money to spare.
5 years later, it's likely more than fixed up, I mean I recall the giant 1.6gb Western Digital fiasco, that was a disaster.
(or was it 1.2gb?)
Maybe yes, maybe no, but the 3 year Deskstar vs. 5 year 7100.10 Seagate warranty periods tell me all I need to know about the respective lines. Sure, Seagate could mess up, but now at least I can afford mirroring and RAID-Z/Z2, and soon I will resume tape backup. So I'm looking at TCO over 5+ years, and Seagate still wins over Hitachi for SATA drives at least. 3 year warranty drives aren't even going to be considered.
Anyhow, Hitachi is probably fine but Seagate is really on a good roll (however I've only experienced 7200.8's and 7200.9's - like I said the 7200.10 could be a noisy bastard:( ? who knows)
I wouldn't know, the one I've placed in service so far is in a machine so inherently noisy (2x Slot 2? PIII''s with integral Intel coolers, plus the original PC Power and Cooling 300W *not* Silencer PSU) that the whole affair is exiled to a room far away from my workstation ^_^. So will be the file server I'm building now.
As someone previously noted, the AnandTech reviews came out earlier; I'll note they seem to be a lot better.
I haven't finished reading them (I tend to buy stuff that's just before price for performance takes a big jump, so I'm focusing on 500GB disks at the moment), but the AnandTech article pointed out one big difference between this 7K1000 Hitashi Deskstar and Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda drives: 3 year warranty for the former, 5 year for the latter.
I know which family of disks I'll continue to buy for my arrays; granted, IBM did very well for me, Deskstars and Ultrastars, but I missed buying Deathstars for myself and a friend for whom I built a machine by the tiniest bit. That near death experience has me skeptical about Hitachi until their track record is just a bit more (re-)established.
Corporations are an affront to the free market. Governments have allowed rich people to create legal fiction to protect themselves if there business were to do something questionable. Laws allowing people to incorporate and receive such special protection are wrong and not part of pure Capitalism.
Corporations allow people rich and poor to invest in an enterprise without putting their entire net and future worth on the line. They may not be your idea of "pure Capitalism", but I think they are an acceptable imperfect solution to a real problem. And the non-rich have a lot of money invested in corporations, at least in the US (e.g. through defined contribution retirement plans).
Get rid of corporations? Get rid of most of the investments in businesses. Experience shows that this will reduce them to family run companies that only trust blood relatives to run them, since there is so much on the line (and will often buy protection from the government for the same reason).
The traditional Chinese company and its manifest limitations show the problems with this approach. For one thing, in this business model you can't hire outsiders who have domain knowledge in a area none of your family members have acquired. Look at Wang after the father put one of his sons in charge of R and D; I had a friend working in that part of Wang in 1980 or so, and knew they were doomed back then....
Sorry, but I'll take widely distributed wealth imperfectly but legally gained over the poverty and whatever benefits you imagine are gained by your "pure Capitalism"....
Slashdot Mirror
Very true ... if you make your scope too wide. After I noticed the sorts of problems you mention (which include one fired senior MIT professor who is now a Wikipedia crank/semi-vandal), I decided to pick one topic, and specifically one article, and defend only that article.
However, if I'd picked e.g. General Relativity, that approach wouldn't work, something that big and notable cannot I suspect be defended by one person.
Define "visible".
Knowing that at one point in time there was a plane at a particular location in 3 space (or maybe just along a vector) is far different from being able to lock on to it, get a firing solution, and have your weapon actually hit it.
Knowing that there's an essentially invisible plane or planes out there, somewhere, that you can't hit unless you can use your canon, is ... not going to do anything good for the morale of your side.
That's not clear to me. What about the principle of "Don't be stupid", which all companies should follow?
This case looks so bad, it's no wonder one of Google's lawyers is crowing about getting it thrown out in summary judgement before it got in front of a jury.
Now that's been reversed, and this may turn out to be a very expensive stunt on Google's part. Not right by Google at all, if they lose big, with all the attendant publicity.
Plus there's the perception thing. While I doubt they're looking that far ahead, and perhaps they shouldn't, if the company is to last a long time, can they afford a culture that has a perception that they throw away their older staff?
Sure, you can say, "don't worry about it, that's far in the future". But too many actions of the "don't care about the future" type can end up foreclosing having a future.
Important detail: Gary North is neither a scientist nor engineer, and he isn't talking about that subset of PhDs (as he points out implicitly in various places).
Insight: The Parkinson's Law aspect to this may be part of why MIT is so good:
Getting tenure at MIT requires two things: in the eyes of the department and especially its Visiting Committee (the various ones keep all parts of MIT on the straight and narrow), you've got to be #1 or 2 in your field. Maybe #3. This is of course hard.
But then you have to pass the gantlet of your School, Engineering or Science (there are of course others, but I simply don't know much about them, and they aren't large). At this level, the Institute has an obsession about keeping departments from getting too large, especially in a new booming field. Anyone who remembers the early '70s aerospace crash, and who can measure the size of current aero/astro departments will understand why ... and this looks to have been wise WRT EECS.
Case in point, one of my classmates was 100% MIT from undergraduate to untenured professor. He passed the department's cut---but not the School of Engineering. He's now teaching at Olin and quite bitter about MIT in general. (On the other hand, karma's a bitch, but that's a matter between me, him, and the universe. :-)
It's not "testosterone", more likely it's "My God, we came this close to having to kill an idiot college student".
It's also a literal statement of fact, and a warning to other idiot college students that when the police command you to "stop or we'll shoot", you would be well advised to take them at their word.
You want "testosterone"? Let's see you get within the blast zone of a suspected suicide bomber and ask her to not move, knowing that she can touch it off faster than you can pull your trigger (reaction times are slow, something the police are taught about WRT knife armed opponents).
The Play-Doh is what turns this into such a strong false positive, it looks too much like a plastic explosive. And do we really think this woman walks around all day on campus with "4-5 oz of Play-Doh" in her hands???
That's pretty far to one end of the bell curve of weirdness for those not in physical therapy. If she doesn't normally do this, she's screwed, it will be pretty easy for the prosecutors to establish that one way or another from the people she's frequently around.
Agreed. But:
But sometime when my head is not mush I'd want to try to find a definition between the two above.
Problem is, this gets complicated by drawing the line of "noncombatants".
E.g. for Muslims all of us kafir are by definition combatants (an oversimplification, but it will do for the moment), and so who are we to decide that their attack on the WTC was terrorism? Not as they (or this group of them) score people....:
And specifically:
In that period of total war, civilians producing in the economy were considered to be combatants. And it just so happens that I'm reading the first economic history of Nazi Germany in many decades (says the author), The Wages of Destruction, and hitting Germany economically was critical.
Nazi Germany's strength was severely constrained by its economic situation, and many of their actions make a lot more sense in that light. And it was a nasty interlocking problem.
E.g. whatever the willingness of occupied or Vichy France to make planes for Germany, they were constrained by a lack of refined aluminum. They had ore and smelters, but not enough power. Their and the lowland's coal output was constrained by food, the miners just couldn't get enough to work at full output (normal, civilian level, not wartime).
I've stopped reading for the moment at the point where the author starts explaining why it was integral to Operation Barbarosa that the urban populations of the untermenchen in the soon to be captured East be starved to death, to remove their useless to the Nazi's mouths and free up that food for their Grosseraum in the West. Hitler and company knew they were living on borrowed time, the combined economic power of the British empire and the US would crush them like bugs in short order.
(Unfortunately, Hitler's world view told him that the International Jewish Conspiracy(TM), headquartered (?) in the USA---FDR being its #1 mouthpiece---was fervently working to exterminate Germany after WWI, so it was essential to start this whole mess before they got any further. There are prices paid for world views that don't track reality....)
And that makes things even more complicated. Every day the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was delayed resulted in ... tens of thousands (or so, the number is very large) of civilian deaths in the areas they occupied. In that light, various means including the nuclear bombings look a bit different....
No no no! Terrorism is the use of violence, frequently against ostensible third parties, to coerce a political action out of a target. In this case, we could extend the traditional meaning to "exterminate a target", but what the Swedish RIAA types are doing is simple direct action, they are using illegal actions against an legit opponent of theirs.
No, they get the label because they e.g. burn out the laboratories and other facilities of their opponents. And in the most recent example, we have pure, 100% terrorism: a researcher drops out of his field because an arson device was left at the house of a neighbor .
This is a crystal clear example of why people resort to pure terrorism: it can work. It's one thing for that researcher to say he'll take the demonstrated risk to himself. It's another for his family to decide to take that risk with him.
But an innocent third party? How moral would it be for that researcher to have continued when the price could be the lives of his neighbors...?
Not to mention the operational likely hood that he'd be run out of his neighborhood in the medium term when it was realized he represented a big risk to his neighbors. They have a stake in medical research, but they didn't sign up for this.
Well, it doesn't sound like most of these pages they are releasing are from actual published editions, but (in this release) are manuscripts along the way to that final edition. I.e. most would be individual unbound pages from a typewriter, very possibly with editing markup.
That material will be on likely paper with acid, in not too great shape, and needing more gentle treatment than the Auto Document Feeds (ADFs) I'm familiar with (none of which were designed for this sort of work).
I'm assuming that all of these are images, so cleanup is just running them through a program like ScanFix and then making sure the entire process through then is of acceptable quality, and rework (rescan) when not.
Are you thinking of taking images one step further to ASCII or the like?
That would only be done for the final version, and in the case of e.g. stuff that had been published by Baen they could probably get the softcopy from them (a long time ago Baen the man was looking into making camera ready copy from normal laser printers, so I would imagine they kept copies).
It would be exceedingly odd if they weren't.
They said the average cost per page was one cent.
I know from serious professional experience (designed, wrote and built 6 and 7 figure systems that scanned millions of pages) that the scanning and associated cleanup, rework and organization required would not have been cheap. No idea what it would cost today (been out of the field for a decade), but a lot of it is labor, and that isn't getting any cheaper (not for quality work).
And the faster scanners would be just too harsh on the originals, they probably did much of it page by page on flatbeds (ouch!).
EXACTLY.
The important point here is how AMD has poisoned the well with this action.
Just how much (larger) a gain of salt will I have to take anything I read about their new stuff? I know much of tech media are barely more than shills for those they write about, but this (the initial NDA he refused to sign) goes quite a bit beyond anything I can remember hearing for the media.
No K10 chips for me this year or next, I would say....
(And into the 2nd grade)
This was in the late '60s; in no particular order except for the last:
The moon shot program; you aren't going to be able to replicate the excitement of that period, but it was of course a big thing at the time.
The original first run Jonny Quest TV series, as re-runs then. Terribly politically incorrect today, of course, but made back at about the last time in the US that scientists were cool.
The Bell Science series, especially most of the ones directed by Frank Capra (at the time, due to the awfulness of the local public schools, my Catholic mom had put me into a Protestant Christian school, and one great thing they did was to gather everyone (K-6 at minimum) into the chapel and show us neat stuff without concern if you were "too young" to get anything out of it then (I wasn't)).
Apropos reading came later: after first grade, my parents bought a World Book encyclopedia set, and I pretty much devoured it over perhaps a year's time. But the hook had been set by the above three items, I knew from second grade on that I was a scientist (and that never changed). Others have covered the good stuff that's more targeted at the age range you're interested in, but these set the hook for me.
Titles and ASIN numbers for what's available of the above, obviously all are out of date in science, but they captured some essential of approach that I would hope are still relevant:
Jonny Quest - The Complete First Season (1964): ASIN: B0001MZ7J6
Uneven in a variety of ways, most probably weren't focused on "science" per se, but a few solidly were, or at least had critical puzzles or mysteries to be solved by something like the methods scientists and the like use.
Our Mr. Sun / Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays (1957): ASIN: B0000AKY5Z
These two, along with one about the organization of the body (the one that showed how a KO temporarily messes up your nervous system, not sure which one was that) were the most influential ones for me.
Hemo the Magnificent / Unchained Goddess (1958): ASIN: B0000AKY5V
I don't think Hemo was the above mentioned title, but I do remember the bit from it on capillaries. I vaguely remember Unchained Goddess, but it didn't have much impact on me.
Also, while I know there's no way any school could officially show this uncut, Real Genius captured some essential truths, at least about MIT and CalTech. The creators of it actually went to both to do research, and several of the characters are modeled on real people. I met the model for the lead woman (the one who sanded her dorm room floor), she assured us she wasn't normally that hyper, they'd just caught her at a particularly hyper time ^_^.
It's not really true (e.g. the classroom lecture sequence of tape recorders) in a variety of ways, but somehow it captured some of the spirit of MIT and I'm told CalTech.
And after you've learned Newtonian physics cold, watching Road Runner cartoons are a blast....
Perhaps showing some of the above could be fruitful for inspiring essays. I know I could write a bunch after re-watching them, from all sorts of angles.
Actually, I occasionally have to power cycle my new GE washer, mostly I sometimes "outsmart" it's microprocessor. Also, hitting stop doesn't really stop it, so to soak clothes I have to pull the plug.
It's otherwise such a fine device I'm extremely happy to put up with the above (like my mom, I'm a "laundry Nazi" ^_^ so I demand a lot more out of one than anyone else I've ever known).
But more to the point, after AC was broadly available, how long did it take for an electric washing machine to even be invented? And how safe was it (not very, I'll bet).
I think we need a sense of history here: imperfect institutions run by imperfect people will not immediately use a new thing like electricity or general purpose computers properly. People will get killed or otherwise harmed when there was no theoretical need for that. Give this new thing a little more time (measured in decades) and I'll bet things will get much better.
Anyone want to bet on Microsoft keeping their monopoly of desktop garbage for 30 more years?
This is a great theory, especially given that Sun is said to pay more attention to build quality than e.g. Dell.
BUT, has Sun solved their basic blocking and tackling problems in selling such machines? Over the years, I've seen countless stories about companies that wanted to buy something less than an E25K simply being unable to do so. Sun won't give them the time of day, the "VARs" and resellers Sun has anointed to do this are generally too incompetent to do so, Sun people say "Buy it off the Web site" and the poor guy responds "Could you tell me which credit card I can use to charge $220,000 to?" (paraphrase of real story), etc. etc. etc.
There are a lot of dissatisfied companies out there with racks of Dell servers simply because Dell will sell them stuff (HP has its own set of problems, acknowledged by their new CEO.)
Doesn't really matter how nice their kit is if they won't sell it to you....
I don't think IBM is quite as dysfunctional as Sun is in sales/order fulfillment; they have their own quirks and legacy issues, and I could be very wrong here, anyone have recent data?
They did use an asbestos based insulation up to a certain height, when NYC joined the anti-asbestos hysteria (if it was as bad as they said back then, we'd all be dead by now, the dose makes the poison and all that).
And the supplier of that material said "if there's a fire above the [insert right floor numbers], it's going to fail.
BUT, the ballistic damage to load bearing members caused by the impact certainly stripped off a lot of insulation, didn't matter how fire resistant it was. The impact angles were planned to cause the maximum damage in this way, and as I remember the terrorist pilots for the most part achieved them.
As has been commented before, all in all the WTC design and construction is a testament to quality, the outcome could have been lots worse. Me, I'm impressed by how they pancaked instead of toppling over, it would have been worse if they'd fallen on top of other buildings (part of the plan of the first bombing was to cause that tower to fall on the other one---too bad for them the explosives prematured before the vehicle got into place...).
I've been watching this drama for a while ... and I must say it's extinguished any desire I had to contribute to the Linux kernel.
And parsing the exact truth of the matter is irrelevant: those of us who've been out in the real world long enough can feel in our gut that there's enough truth to the allegations that we just don't want to mess with this sort of thing, we demand payment for this sort of treatment ^_^ !
Instead, there are plenty of FOSS projects out there at all levels that don't have this degree of politics (which are inevitable, man is a political creature and all that).
Maybe FreeBSD will be SMP stable by the time I want or really need to do something like this.... But the bottom line is that I'm in no hurry, so I can carefully choose where to put my various efforts.
Has anyone noticed that a panicked Congress is proposing to rape the hurricane hunter budget to put up a new satellite?
Answer me this: which gives you better data, a plane flying through a hurricane, or a satellite a zillion miles up that only reports surface winds?
Whatever the merits of replacing this satellite, this director is going about it the wrong way. When you have five lead forecasters, one is on vacation, one is critical but not to the point of publicly calling for his removal, and remaing three says he has to go for a bunch of reasons, I strongly suspect we're seeing an example of clueless management (of the sort we're all familiar with) rather than a brave whistleblower.
Errr, we have a sustained example of Communist countries falsifying their statistics, and in some cases with Cuba, they are internally contradictory.
And what makes you think I entirely believe the US Government produced ones?
E.g. the changes in how "unemployment" is scored alone make it useless to compare over long periods of time. One source I haven't followed up on said that if we counted it like we did in the Great Depression (e.g. included "discouraged" workers who have given up on trying to find a job), the current rate would be closer to about 12.5%, half of the peak in the Depression. Which would explain why this recovery doesn't feel so healthy....
And while I haven't investigated this myself, the CPI is very unlikely to be entirely honest, too much of the government's tax income and benefits output is tied to it. Buying CPI indexed bonds, when the government defines the CPI, seems like a particularly foolish thing to do.
And you believe the Cuban statistics???
Don't you remember the Soviet census guy who was sent to the Gulag (or executed) when Stalin's various purges (plus the Ukraine terror famine) started to make a big dent in the total Soviet population?
Nothing they published after that could be believed. The nomenklatura in Cuba have no need of published honest statistics, and it is the nature of such regimes that internal supposedly honest statistics are often faked by underlings who don't want to get the chop for not making something impossible happen when ordered from on high.
Here's what's wrong:
Lower salary + eventual Green Card for alien == Higher salary for permanent resident (citizen or Green Card holder---they too are in the same fix as the rest of us once they get their card!)
Many aliens are willing to work for less money if for no other reason than that their total compensation package when they get the Green Card is high enough.
When viewed that way, they aren't really getting exploited, and they will always be able to outbid permanent residents.
I just got an update: while this is an impression vs. an informal study of a probably statistically valid set of admitees, this pattern still seems to be true at MIT.
Please read the article (the NYT one, at least) for why such a small difference might make a larger difference over time; it's pretty complicated, for the younger siblings for a while tend to score higher. It's also very likely that other factors than raw G make a lot of the difference, but we can't measure those like we can G.
Two decades ago when a friend and I looked, MIT was overwhelmingly admitting first borns and only children.... (And, yes, I'm the first of four....)
MIT as of that time had also found out empirically that class rank (which of course entirely depends on grades) was a very good predictor of success at MIT. They didn't know exactly why, and of course were careful in applying it, but it fell out of the retrospective studies they do on who succeeded and who didn't. (MIT believes that everyone they admit can succeed, but of course statistically in the real world this doesn't happen.)
Errr, no. Sale started in March 2000. Wikipedia sort of implies sales continued through 2003 (I'm pretty sure though at least 2002), the class action web site, 2005, but in a minimum length search I could find no info on when manufacture stopped of the 75GXP. Obviously it would have been in the supply system for a long time, since anyone who knew would be shunning them after the problem was realized.
Also, according to Wikipedia, "Since the lawsuit, existing Deskstar 120GXP drives had been rerated to 333 power-on hours per month, even though the spec is not new at the time." IBM claims this doesn't really mean anything (except obviously in duty cycle), that the drives can be powered on 24x7, BUT: IBM's mishandling of this bad drive was a lot of the problem, this particular kerfluffle is just one example of how that sort of poison can make it impossible to do business, the ultimate example here is of the sale to Hitachi, and while the highest management is new, I don't know how thorough the house cleaning was....
I won't consider touching any Hitachi drives until next year at minimum, and their warranty periods for Deskstars (see below) will unless changed keep them out of my systems.
I bought two 60GXPs, one for myself and one for a friend in 2001, and the friend's one was still going strong as of a couple of weeks ago when she moved (someone loaned her a laptop so at last count she hadn't yet tried to power up that machine). And I took mine out of service only a month or two ago in favor of a 7200.10 500GB Seagate SATA, and my 8GB SCSI Ultrastars from 1999 were still going strong when I replaced them with a 10K.7 73GB Seagate. IBM indeed did very well for me, those disks lasted well past their design lifes, although I at least am very careful with mine.
In comparison, I had a 32KB section of a 7200.4 or 5 go bad on me in 2003 after a half year of service (with its diagnostics saying it was mechanically failing), and in February I had a total and no warning "send to Ontrack, recovery not complete" mechanical failure of a 10K.6 73GB drive that had been in service for 3.5 years.
"One should start planning the death of the drive, and all one's data, beginning the day one buys the drive." as my friend below says.
For me, personally, if I had been any later in building my friend's machine and the 75GXP price was right for it, I would have blithely put one in it, and that would have been a total support disaster---and IBM's corporate response to the problem would have just compounded it, back then neither I nor my friend had any money to spare.
Maybe yes, maybe no, but the 3 year Deskstar vs. 5 year 7100.10 Seagate warranty periods tell me all I need to know about the respective lines. Sure, Seagate could mess up, but now at least I can afford mirroring and RAID-Z/Z2, and soon I will resume tape backup. So I'm looking at TCO over 5+ years, and Seagate still wins over Hitachi for SATA drives at least. 3 year warranty drives aren't even going to be considered.
I wouldn't know, the one I've placed in service so far is in a machine so inherently noisy (2x Slot 2? PIII''s with integral Intel coolers, plus the original PC Power and Cooling 300W *not* Silencer PSU) that the whole affair is exiled to a room far away from my workstation ^_^. So will be the file server I'm building now.
I'm quit
As someone previously noted, the AnandTech reviews came out earlier; I'll note they seem to be a lot better.
I haven't finished reading them (I tend to buy stuff that's just before price for performance takes a big jump, so I'm focusing on 500GB disks at the moment), but the AnandTech article pointed out one big difference between this 7K1000 Hitashi Deskstar and Seagate 7200.10 Barracuda drives: 3 year warranty for the former, 5 year for the latter.
I know which family of disks I'll continue to buy for my arrays; granted, IBM did very well for me, Deskstars and Ultrastars, but I missed buying Deathstars for myself and a friend for whom I built a machine by the tiniest bit. That near death experience has me skeptical about Hitachi until their track record is just a bit more (re-)established.
Corporations allow people rich and poor to invest in an enterprise without putting their entire net and future worth on the line. They may not be your idea of "pure Capitalism", but I think they are an acceptable imperfect solution to a real problem. And the non-rich have a lot of money invested in corporations, at least in the US (e.g. through defined contribution retirement plans).
Get rid of corporations? Get rid of most of the investments in businesses. Experience shows that this will reduce them to family run companies that only trust blood relatives to run them, since there is so much on the line (and will often buy protection from the government for the same reason).
The traditional Chinese company and its manifest limitations show the problems with this approach. For one thing, in this business model you can't hire outsiders who have domain knowledge in a area none of your family members have acquired. Look at Wang after the father put one of his sons in charge of R and D; I had a friend working in that part of Wang in 1980 or so, and knew they were doomed back then....
Sorry, but I'll take widely distributed wealth imperfectly but legally gained over the poverty and whatever benefits you imagine are gained by your "pure Capitalism"....