Didn't they cause England to lose the American colonies by inspiring such events as the Boston Tea Party? I'm not sure I want my government to repeat that folly.
all plants on earth have developed with gravity and tend to use it as reference to build the complex structures we call "food."
It's worth noting that the loophole here might be single celled organisms like yeasts with inserted genes to produce nice things like the essential amino acids, vitamins and like. But this is years away from production at the moment.
I take it from your replies that you're neither science nor engineering educated. Exactly what kind of air-tight "stuff" would you build your house out of? I'm sure we can come up with long lists of permanently secure materials after we look for it; but the point is we haven't ever built anything like it before and the first few attempts are likely to fail. As for plants in low-G, it might be obvious that all plants on earth have developed with gravity and tend to use it as reference to build the complex structures we call "food." So NASA inabillty to "find" them has more to do with them no existing than and (perhaps present) failure on NASA's part.
So you want to start a private voyage to space to setup a permanent habitat? Good for you. But where the hell are you going to get the investment from? Rocketry is almost a century old and we're only now getting to the point where private investors are willing to use their hard earned cash to try and make money from all the mature(-ing) science. Who the hell would give you money to try some hair-brained scheme that is at best centuries away from profit and would most likely fail spectacularly?
I wish modern investors thoughtr more long term, but they don't......but good luck getting to space anyway.
Once there is enough there that people don't need to worry about things like food, water, air - then it could become a useful place to send people and do research.
That points out the chicken and egg problem with space colonization. There's a lot of fundamental research that needs to be done in order to make permanent space habitation possible. The effects on physiology for extreme long term micro gravity (even lunar gravity might cause some surprises down the line), large scale construction with on site materials, reliability (remember that so far all structures we've built in orbit or on earth have a shelf life - even the nuclear missle subs go into dry dock to get refitted), safe and reliable excape routes, and the production of plants that can handle micro gravity and reproduce - or be reproduced - are huge investments that may not show a profit for many years to come.
At present, there are very few corporations who would be willing to suggest this kind of venture to their stock holders; and possibly none that would survive the resulting firestorm in the boardroom. Likewise, the kind of projects needed to push these areas of research aren't sexy and flashy, and so they probably won't get public officials reelected.
So how can we break the stale mate? Perhaps joint private/public ventures. Perhaps space needs its own lobbyist and leader to sell the benefits of space exploration to the average tax paying slob without overselling it.
i am saying that sci fi fans can be such incredibly cranky, perfectionist know-it-alls that you can deduce from their criticism in the end that it is impossible to please them... and therefore, why try?
What rubbish. There is a long series of TV, movie, and literature that is admired by Sci-Fi fans. It is absolutely possible to shorten a story without gutting its plot.
It is also possible to write a script that isn't shallow, rehashed drivel dredged up from pop fiction without any insights into the human condition.
That's at the core of these complaints. Pop media's Sci-Fi is missing all the things that make Sci-Fi fans Sci-Fi fans.
Free TV isn't about art. It's an advertising conduit, and nothing more.
I agree with everything you've said, but would like to point out that the Sci-Fi channel isn't free TV. Sell to a stupid market, and you better not insult their stupidity.
We put Karzai into power via a hand picked tribal meeting with people who didn't have tribal credentials in Afghanistan. We provide him with sercurity (but none of the other candidates - most of whom don't hold office and therefore have no security unless they're a warlord). Rumour has it that we even talked to the other candidates offering them position in the government if they gave up their bit. So I'd say we have quite a bit to do with Afghanistan elections.
The Center on Policy Attitudes released a report on the different realities between Bush and Kerry supporters called "The Separate Realities of Bush and Kerry Supporters". The summary of it is that Bush supporters haven't seen the world lately. It's kinda disturbing when you realize about half of the US are in that group. A super majority believe there were WMD in Iraq or programs to produce them; and - get this - a majority believe that the world is either indifferent to who become the next US president or hopes for another Bush term!
That last one really get me. How can you even watch Fox News and come up with that?
Oh yeah, there's an interview at the end of "To the Point" with the director, Steve Kull.
Do you get a little button from International Socialism every time you mock the Chimpler?
He probably doesn't. But he might bet a button for knowing that webserver configuration denieing service to non-north american sites will not stop a DDOS attack. It probably on slightly reduces the load on the server by substituting a static page for dynamic content.
Is it, in fact, enough safer that we can feel justified in basically ticking off the entire rest of the world aside from England, making our intelligence services into a laughingstock, and swelling the ranks of Al Quaida tenfold?
Perhaps we should be more worried about the 1,113 Islamists released from Egyptian and Yemen prisons - presumably to fight the defensive jihad in Iraq just like an almost identical release during the Red army's occupation of Afghanistan ("Imperial Hubris", by Anonymous, p 98), indicating active involvement by Iraq's neighboring states; or "the fatwas issued by leading Muslin clerics and jurists - libral, conservativem and radical - at the start of the second U.S.-led war agains Iraq" demanding that all Muslims world round resist the American occupation (Ibid. p 256). It occurs to me that these people, along with the next brigade of Jihadis being trained by GWB in Guantanamo Bay, will make our over deployment in a county where they have popular support and we don't a living hell and eventual loss for our armed forces.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Middle Eastern Muslims will throw away that silly religion they've been dedicated to since the 7th century and sing kumbaya with is while they burn their bras (and burkas).
This seems to be due to the elimination of soft money (See the green graph on the right). With my scientific thumb and index finger measurement, it looks like both PAC and Ind. contributions are up from 2002.
...it really comes down to a VERY simple database call to increment a count for each candidate.
The problem is that it doesn't come down to incrementing the number of votes for a candidate, but that's what they're trying to do (poorly). With the system you propose, there's no way to catch errors in reporting after the fact. There needs to be a way of accounting for each vote that was cast from the client, and verifieing that it was correctly recorded at the server.
There are plenty of models to follow to do this, and Diebold is following none of them. That's a problem. From the the CEO's quotes in the article and documents posted from their internal memos (BlackBoxVoting.org?) it's obvious that they aren't interested in fixing the situation. That's a worse problem.
I've heard a lot of people saying good things about REXX. Sadly, it only took one bad experience to sour me to the language.
At CountryWide Home Loans there's a group that's responsible for transfering loan data between the branches and the AS400's. They use a commercial tool that has the option of firing off a program or script at a givien time, kinda like a weak cron.
So, long before I got there, someone said, "Hey, since we're running this on OS/2 we can use REXX for the new service management is asking for." Sadly, none of them were programmers. They added on parts based on when the script was run instead of what is did. Over the years, the whole systems grew into a self referential uneditable monster.
For those who don't know REXX, it defaults all variables to be the text of their names (eg. MYVAR would default to a value of "MYVAR"), REXX behaves like Perl without use strict (all typo's are new variables, initialized to their misspoelled names), and (just about)anything that doesn't parse to something meaningfull in the language is passed along into the shell. This lead to some of the most bizaar emergent behaviour I've ever seen.
Instead of failing completely and dieing a well deserved death, REXX allowed it to twitch on, destroying operators, programmers and management in its path. Add to that someone's brilliant idea to have it page the programmer whenever it idn't complete its task at 2:30AM (I inherited the pager the previous bastard hardcoded into the script).
Since then, I hear my old coworker recoded the entire thing, and it's now a beautiful machine that doesn't fail in any horrible way (if anyone could have done that with REXX, it was him). I don't know. I don't care. Once around the REXX monster is more than enough for me.
Science is always our "best guess". That doesn't mean it's right.
Science is a structured process that leads to support for or against a "best guess." If you RTFA (and RTFR), the problem is that the administration is not allowing scientific process in the research it is interested in.
The significant point about science is that you only need to follow the process to come up with a result. Unlike non-scientific pursuits, you don't need religious vigor to come to a conclusion. Also, there is no guarantee that you will end up supporting your origional assumption. An example of an experiment that went against the scientist's bias is Rutherford's experiment into atomic structure. He was directing a grad student to verify the raisin pudding model and ended up disproving it.
That said, it's true that you can't "prove" anything in science. But that's no reason to abandon scientific inquiry to the folly idiological assertions.
Who cares? The question I care about is: is it good science? Let them be the most politically blind people on earth, but if the data supports their paper, then I'll believe it.
Saddly, I'm afraid the Business 2.0 doesn't have a sense of humour. I laughed my butt off when I saw it. Why can't they at least recognize off-color humour?
My day's dose of irony was when I brought up the article and an MS advertisement for their new licensing scheme was just below the openning paragraph.
Also funny was "If you read Slashdot...even regular participants seem to comment that much of the discussion there is not based on what people have personally perceived but on what they have read about others people's perceptions. "
Yeah, that's slashdot for you. The participants have no personal perception about Microsoft.
More than that, I'd like to point out that "copyright infringement" and "theft" are indeed two very different things. It isn't hair splitting, it's something that would get any first year law student harpooned. The first is an issue between the party that owns the copyright and the person infringing (with the exception of felony infringement); the second is an issue between the state and the party who stole it.
I wish the grandparent poster would do a little reading before making the ignorant statement about "hair splitting." I realize this is slashdot, but after half a decade of continuous comment on this, said poster should have known.
Sorry the usual host of links isn't pasted in, but they've been up so god damn many times it isn't worth it anymore. Just google for "Title 17" and "felony copyright."
But this is counter to the main claim behind closing the rom images for mame (didn't get into it mysqlf, though). The idea that copyright holders should be able to let a work sit out of the public in the off chance that they might decide to sell it sometime in the future.
Under the law as it stands now, this is legal for most copyright works. Only a few have compulsery (sp?) licenses that I know of.
I think his point was that there are many things that an average person would intuitively think harmless that can cause a lot of damage. So yes, the grandparent post was right on target.
Further more, it's also significant that changing the foam on the launch vehicle won't necessarily solve the problem considering the number of pieces of junk in orbit. Hardening the leading edges of the orbiter would.
...if the 50 states could each decide how they wanted to process patent applications, they could try different things.
I'm affraid you'd end up with a few states implementing weak requirements for origionality in order to soak up patent filing fees from disingenuous "inventors." With one patent office, at least there's no competition for business.
Also, I think there's virtue in limiting the number of patents that can be filed. With only one slow (broken) patent office, it's like being shot with a pistol instead of being shot by a 50 pellet shotgun.
Minimization of damage from a poorly working component that you don't have the power to change out.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't they cause England to lose the American colonies by inspiring such events as the Boston Tea Party? I'm not sure I want my government to repeat that folly.
It's worth noting that the loophole here might be single celled organisms like yeasts with inserted genes to produce nice things like the essential amino acids, vitamins and like. But this is years away from production at the moment.
I take it from your replies that you're neither science nor engineering educated. Exactly what kind of air-tight "stuff" would you build your house out of? I'm sure we can come up with long lists of permanently secure materials after we look for it; but the point is we haven't ever built anything like it before and the first few attempts are likely to fail. As for plants in low-G, it might be obvious that all plants on earth have developed with gravity and tend to use it as reference to build the complex structures we call "food." So NASA inabillty to "find" them has more to do with them no existing than and (perhaps present) failure on NASA's part.
...but good luck getting to space anyway.
So you want to start a private voyage to space to setup a permanent habitat? Good for you. But where the hell are you going to get the investment from? Rocketry is almost a century old and we're only now getting to the point where private investors are willing to use their hard earned cash to try and make money from all the mature(-ing) science. Who the hell would give you money to try some hair-brained scheme that is at best centuries away from profit and would most likely fail spectacularly?
I wish modern investors thoughtr more long term, but they don't...
That points out the chicken and egg problem with space colonization. There's a lot of fundamental research that needs to be done in order to make permanent space habitation possible. The effects on physiology for extreme long term micro gravity (even lunar gravity might cause some surprises down the line), large scale construction with on site materials, reliability (remember that so far all structures we've built in orbit or on earth have a shelf life - even the nuclear missle subs go into dry dock to get refitted), safe and reliable excape routes, and the production of plants that can handle micro gravity and reproduce - or be reproduced - are huge investments that may not show a profit for many years to come.
At present, there are very few corporations who would be willing to suggest this kind of venture to their stock holders; and possibly none that would survive the resulting firestorm in the boardroom. Likewise, the kind of projects needed to push these areas of research aren't sexy and flashy, and so they probably won't get public officials reelected.
So how can we break the stale mate? Perhaps joint private/public ventures. Perhaps space needs its own lobbyist and leader to sell the benefits of space exploration to the average tax paying slob without overselling it.
What rubbish. There is a long series of TV, movie, and literature that is admired by Sci-Fi fans. It is absolutely possible to shorten a story without gutting its plot.
It is also possible to write a script that isn't shallow, rehashed drivel dredged up from pop fiction without any insights into the human condition.
That's at the core of these complaints. Pop media's Sci-Fi is missing all the things that make Sci-Fi fans Sci-Fi fans.
I agree with everything you've said, but would like to point out that the Sci-Fi channel isn't free TV. Sell to a stupid market, and you better not insult their stupidity.
We put Karzai into power via a hand picked tribal meeting with people who didn't have tribal credentials in Afghanistan. We provide him with sercurity (but none of the other candidates - most of whom don't hold office and therefore have no security unless they're a warlord). Rumour has it that we even talked to the other candidates offering them position in the government if they gave up their bit. So I'd say we have quite a bit to do with Afghanistan elections.
That last one really get me. How can you even watch Fox News and come up with that?
Oh yeah, there's an interview at the end of "To the Point" with the director, Steve Kull.
He probably doesn't. But he might bet a button for knowing that webserver configuration denieing service to non-north american sites will not stop a DDOS attack. It probably on slightly reduces the load on the server by substituting a static page for dynamic content.
Perhaps we should be more worried about the 1,113 Islamists released from Egyptian and Yemen prisons - presumably to fight the defensive jihad in Iraq just like an almost identical release during the Red army's occupation of Afghanistan ("Imperial Hubris", by Anonymous, p 98), indicating active involvement by Iraq's neighboring states; or "the fatwas issued by leading Muslin clerics and jurists - libral, conservativem and radical - at the start of the second U.S.-led war agains Iraq" demanding that all Muslims world round resist the American occupation (Ibid. p 256). It occurs to me that these people, along with the next brigade of Jihadis being trained by GWB in Guantanamo Bay, will make our over deployment in a county where they have popular support and we don't a living hell and eventual loss for our armed forces.
But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the Middle Eastern Muslims will throw away that silly religion they've been dedicated to since the 7th century and sing kumbaya with is while they burn their bras (and burkas).
This seems to be due to the elimination of soft money (See the green graph on the right). With my scientific thumb and index finger measurement, it looks like both PAC and Ind. contributions are up from 2002.
How many people have been looking in Microsoft's kernels in the last 12 months?
The problem is that it doesn't come down to incrementing the number of votes for a candidate, but that's what they're trying to do (poorly). With the system you propose, there's no way to catch errors in reporting after the fact. There needs to be a way of accounting for each vote that was cast from the client, and verifieing that it was correctly recorded at the server.
There are plenty of models to follow to do this, and Diebold is following none of them. That's a problem. From the the CEO's quotes in the article and documents posted from their internal memos (BlackBoxVoting.org?) it's obvious that they aren't interested in fixing the situation. That's a worse problem.
I've heard a lot of people saying good things about REXX. Sadly, it only took one bad experience to sour me to the language.
At CountryWide Home Loans there's a group that's responsible for transfering loan data between the branches and the AS400's. They use a commercial tool that has the option of firing off a program or script at a givien time, kinda like a weak cron.
So, long before I got there, someone said, "Hey, since we're running this on OS/2 we can use REXX for the new service management is asking for." Sadly, none of them were programmers. They added on parts based on when the script was run instead of what is did. Over the years, the whole systems grew into a self referential uneditable monster.
For those who don't know REXX, it defaults all variables to be the text of their names (eg. MYVAR would default to a value of "MYVAR"), REXX behaves like Perl without use strict (all typo's are new variables, initialized to their misspoelled names), and (just about)anything that doesn't parse to something meaningfull in the language is passed along into the shell. This lead to some of the most bizaar emergent behaviour I've ever seen.
Instead of failing completely and dieing a well deserved death, REXX allowed it to twitch on, destroying operators, programmers and management in its path. Add to that someone's brilliant idea to have it page the programmer whenever it idn't complete its task at 2:30AM (I inherited the pager the previous bastard hardcoded into the script).
Since then, I hear my old coworker recoded the entire thing, and it's now a beautiful machine that doesn't fail in any horrible way (if anyone could have done that with REXX, it was him). I don't know. I don't care. Once around the REXX monster is more than enough for me.
Science is a structured process that leads to support for or against a "best guess." If you RTFA (and RTFR), the problem is that the administration is not allowing scientific process in the research it is interested in.
The significant point about science is that you only need to follow the process to come up with a result. Unlike non-scientific pursuits, you don't need religious vigor to come to a conclusion. Also, there is no guarantee that you will end up supporting your origional assumption. An example of an experiment that went against the scientist's bias is Rutherford's experiment into atomic structure. He was directing a grad student to verify the raisin pudding model and ended up disproving it.
That said, it's true that you can't "prove" anything in science. But that's no reason to abandon scientific inquiry to the folly idiological assertions.
Who cares? The question I care about is: is it good science? Let them be the most politically blind people on earth, but if the data supports their paper, then I'll believe it.
Changing 100,000 lines in a database can be accomplished by one person in less than five minutes.
Not to mention that the votes aren't kept during tabulation, rather the subtotals are sent in. Even easier to abuse or fail.
Saddly, I'm afraid the Business 2.0 doesn't have a sense of humour. I laughed my butt off when I saw it. Why can't they at least recognize off-color humour?
Yeah, and who ever died from the web?
</joke>Saturn too
My day's dose of irony was when I brought up the article and an MS advertisement for their new licensing scheme was just below the openning paragraph.
Also funny was "If you read Slashdot...even regular participants seem to comment that much of the discussion there is not based on what people have personally perceived but on what they have read about others people's perceptions. "
Yeah, that's slashdot for you. The participants have no personal perception about Microsoft.
More than that, I'd like to point out that "copyright infringement" and "theft" are indeed two very different things. It isn't hair splitting, it's something that would get any first year law student harpooned. The first is an issue between the party that owns the copyright and the person infringing (with the exception of felony infringement); the second is an issue between the state and the party who stole it.
I wish the grandparent poster would do a little reading before making the ignorant statement about "hair splitting." I realize this is slashdot, but after half a decade of continuous comment on this, said poster should have known.
Sorry the usual host of links isn't pasted in, but they've been up so god damn many times it isn't worth it anymore. Just google for "Title 17" and "felony copyright."
...and you can't steal what isn't available...
But this is counter to the main claim behind closing the rom images for mame (didn't get into it mysqlf, though). The idea that copyright holders should be able to let a work sit out of the public in the off chance that they might decide to sell it sometime in the future.
Under the law as it stands now, this is legal for most copyright works. Only a few have compulsery (sp?) licenses that I know of.
Your reply is a non sequitur.
I think his point was that there are many things that an average person would intuitively think harmless that can cause a lot of damage. So yes, the grandparent post was right on target.
Further more, it's also significant that changing the foam on the launch vehicle won't necessarily solve the problem considering the number of pieces of junk in orbit. Hardening the leading edges of the orbiter would.
You seem to have missed that.
...if the 50 states could each decide how they wanted to process patent applications, they could try different things.
I'm affraid you'd end up with a few states implementing weak requirements for origionality in order to soak up patent filing fees from disingenuous "inventors." With one patent office, at least there's no competition for business.
Also, I think there's virtue in limiting the number of patents that can be filed. With only one slow (broken) patent office, it's like being shot with a pistol instead of being shot by a 50 pellet shotgun.
Minimization of damage from a poorly working component that you don't have the power to change out.
-RB