Reading the article I found one part which suggested that this is part of a strategy to try to keep the stay in place:
"Vonage currently has no workarounds that moot the need for a stay," the company said.
The idea is, if they had workarounds ready then the court would see the stay as moot and tell them to implement the workarounds now. If they say they have nothing ready now then the court might extend the stay so as not to just kill them immediately.
One small thing I liked: in the observatory there is a "Linux Soda" machine, with a variety of flavors (Fedora, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc...) for the asking.
Theaters, meeting rooms, movie screens and the like all seem like a waste in Second Life, but the potential to "visit" places you normally could not visit seems like it could be useful.
In the movie version, there would be a B-plot about the nerds winning the hearts of two pretty girls through the process. Maybe the girls are interns at GSK.
Except that if you RTFA you'll find that the two science fair students were girls.
I too still teach my students (in physics and astronomy) to use Fortran, for many of the reasons listed above. While it may also be useful for them to go on to learn other languages, their primary focus is on the physics problems they need to solve and the numerical algorithms needed to help them do that. Fortran makes it easy for them to get started and then focus on the calculations, not on grammar or philosophy.
Fortran has been criticized because you can write "spaghetti code" or other crap, while other languages supposedly protect you from the mistakes you can make in Fortran. But you can write crappy code in any language (including "spaghetti classes"). I teach my students to write with good style. They know their code has to be clearly understandable not just to the machine but also to someone else who is familiar with the goal of the code but not the details. Trying to enforce good style through grammar is misguided at best, just as it is in writing in general. Developing good style is a personal, ongoing process for writing anything, including good code.
And Wikipedia's success is far from proven, nor is it entirely truly open either. If anything the area where it fails the most is in Education, since the information it contains is unreliable.
The fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable is not necessarily a bad thing for education, if you approach it properly. It can be a good starting point, but not always a good authoritative source. So I teach my students to be careful in accepting what it says without question. In other words, I teach them to think critically. That's a good thing.
Very different problem. There are fewer ATM's and banks pay a lot more for them. The are put in place once and generally not moved. They are serviced by trained technicians rather than volunteers. The technology is much more mature. And banks are more concerned with security than the average politician / bureaucrat who's simply looking for the lowest bidder.
So let's just add the voting functionality to the existing ATM network.
You have an "election" account along with checking and savings. You can "spend" your vote from any ATM in the system, for a given number of days before the election. (No results tallied or announced until the election is over.) Once spent you don't get more votes until the next election opens up.
I'm used to Fedora but I thought I'd give Ubuntu a try, so I downloaded and burned a copy of the install CD for 6.10 and tried to install it on a ThinkPad A22m which already has W2K on it but more than enough space for something else as well.
Booting from the CD seemed to take a lot longer than, say, booting from a Knoppix CD. And when it was done, I had a desktop with an icon item marked "Install". No helpful dialoge to take me through the process or even a hint of what was expected next.
I assumed that to install Ubuntu on the machine I had to launch the thing marked "Install", so I double-clicked. After a short while the whole thing just froze.
They don't seem to be doing it in the US. HSBC here have just added the virtual keyboard to their site. At the same time I was setting that up I was also forced to change my password, becasue the old one contained special characters and the new policy only allows letters and digits. So that didn't inspire much confidence in their new extra layers of security. Even worse, I think, is that their site fails to function at all if you turn scripting off, so it's ripe and ready for the next JavaScript exploit. I would put more trust in a simple https connection without scripting, using the external cryptocard/dongle.
But they are not the worst. This summer I helped my father learn how to use online banking for US Bank, and found that they have a username/password entry form right on their non-SSL home page . So I had to try to explain to him why not to use it, which was difficult given that they put it right there and he's inclined to trust his own bank.
Find the entry for "browser.tabs.closeButtons". It'll probably be set at "1". Setting it to "2" makes the close button only visible on the active tab. Setting it to "3" makes the close button the right appear again (1.5 behavior).
I tried setting this to "2" and got my first crash.
When I restarted, it was able to resume the session (after asking nicely if it should).
I tried again and succeeded in setting it to "2", and now there are no close buttons at all, not even on the active tab. Setting it to "3" does bring back the single button on the right, which I'm used to.
I dislike "1" because the extra buttons take up space but aren't useful, though it's a nice idea, and shows the user how it's used. "2" would be interesting if it worked. I'll set it to "3" just because that is what I'm used to.
When it crashed I got a feedback form, but only after submitting it did I realize it was for Apple. Then I got one for Mozilla after that.
Can't even find one version... no mirrors seem to exist of it. Shame, since I really want to see
what all the fuss was about.
I didn't mean mirrors of the original site, I meant other people writing their own boarding pass generators. For lots of other airlines, not just Northwest.
Looks like the site may have been taken down. I tried out the default settings and printed a boarding pass (for Osama Bin Laden). Then I started changing the name, destination, flight, etc. but when I submitted the form it was 404 and I can't get to it anymore. This was around 7:26 EDT.
I didn't know about this until I saw the slashdot article. I don't check facebook that often. Suddenly all sorts of events about what I've done, and what my friends have been doing, are visible. That's nice if you wanted it that way, but I didn't.
They added a new feature. They now have a "privacy" control which lets you select what is shown about you and your goings on and what is not shown. And the defaults, for someone who didn't even know about this, are to show everything.
This may end up being a nice feature in the long run, but the initial defaults should have been OFF for everything.
In a low wing aircraft the fuel check is not just to see how much you have. You turn on the aux fuel pump, just in case the main pump fails during a critical flight period. You also switch to the fullest tank. You may have enough to land, but it does you no good if it's in the tank not selected.
Ideally you perform this check a few minutes out or more, before things get real busy, so that any consequences of the tank change can be dealt with (eg. didn't get the selector in the detent, water in the other tank, etc...)
I wonder if the courts would interpret these social sites as an on-line version of "peaceably assembling", as protected in the first ammendment of the US Constitution?
Both the WSJ article and the slashdot discussion which followed failed to mention that with BOINC one can quite easily donate cycles to other efforts besides searching for ET, such as Einstein@Home: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
This is good for schools that currently have to have both Windows and Apple machines in a classroom or lecture hall because some teachers use one, while others use the other. And the virtualization of Windows on Apple will only make it easier to switch between the two.
Physics is way harder science than Biology and Chemistry but still a lot softer than Math, which is the Queen of Science.
Except that Math is not science.
Physics uses observation and experiment and the scientific method as a process to uncover new facts about Nature. Astronomy too.
These are sciences.
Math is stuff humans have made up to logically organize relationships and ideas, and some of it correlates with the natural world, and some of it is quite useful for doing science. But it is not itself science, because it does not use the scientific method.
This month's issue of Physics Today has an article by Steven Weinberg, no slouch himself in physics, on "Einstein's mistakes".
His take is that given what Einstein and others knew about the cosmos at the time it was perfectly reasonable for him to introduce the cosmological constant to try to obtain a 'static' description of the universe.
Slashdot Mirror
One small thing I liked: in the observatory there is a "Linux Soda" machine, with a variety of flavors (Fedora, Mandrake, SUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, etc...) for the asking.
Theaters, meeting rooms, movie screens and the like all seem like a waste in Second Life, but the potential to "visit" places you normally could not visit seems like it could be useful.
I too still teach my students (in physics and astronomy) to use Fortran, for many of the reasons listed above. While it may also be useful for them to go on to learn other languages, their primary focus is on the physics problems they need to solve and the numerical algorithms needed to help them do that. Fortran makes it easy for them to get started and then focus on the calculations, not on grammar or philosophy.
Fortran has been criticized because you can write "spaghetti code" or other crap, while other languages supposedly protect you from the mistakes you can make in Fortran. But you can write crappy code in any language (including "spaghetti classes"). I teach my students to write with good style. They know their code has to be clearly understandable not just to the machine but also to someone else who is familiar with the goal of the code but not the details. Trying to enforce good style through grammar is misguided at best, just as it is in writing in general. Developing good style is a personal, ongoing process for writing anything, including good code.
The fact that Wikipedia can be unreliable is not necessarily a bad thing for education, if you approach it properly. It can be a good starting point, but not always a good authoritative source. So I teach my students to be careful in accepting what it says without question. In other words, I teach them to think critically. That's a good thing.
So let's just add the voting functionality to the existing ATM network.
You have an "election" account along with checking and savings. You can "spend" your vote from any ATM in the system, for a given number of days before the election. (No results tallied or announced until the election is over.) Once spent you don't get more votes until the next election opens up.
I'm used to Fedora but I thought I'd give Ubuntu a try, so I downloaded and burned a copy of the install CD for 6.10 and tried to install it on a ThinkPad A22m which already has W2K on it but more than enough space for something else as well.
Booting from the CD seemed to take a lot longer than, say, booting from a Knoppix CD. And when it was done, I had a desktop with an icon item marked "Install". No helpful dialoge to take me through the process or even a hint of what was expected next.
I assumed that to install Ubuntu on the machine I had to launch the thing marked "Install", so I double-clicked. After a short while the whole thing just froze.
Viable alternative? Not for that machine.
But they are not the worst. This summer I helped my father learn how to use online banking for US Bank, and found that they have a username/password entry form right on their non-SSL home page . So I had to try to explain to him why not to use it, which was difficult given that they put it right there and he's inclined to trust his own bank.
When I restarted, it was able to resume the session (after asking nicely if it should).
I tried again and succeeded in setting it to "2", and now there are no close buttons at all, not even on the active tab. Setting it to "3" does bring back the single button on the right, which I'm used to.
I dislike "1" because the extra buttons take up space but aren't useful, though it's a nice idea, and shows the user how it's used. "2" would be interesting if it worked. I'll set it to "3" just because that is what I'm used to.
When it crashed I got a feedback form, but only after submitting it did I realize it was for Apple. Then I got one for Mozilla after that.
Flashmob anyone? What better way to demonstrate the flaw than a huge crowd at JFK?
Looks like the site may have been taken down. I tried out the default settings and printed a boarding pass (for Osama Bin Laden). Then I started changing the name, destination, flight, etc. but when I submitted the form it was 404 and I can't get to it anymore. This was around 7:26 EDT.
How long until 20 other versions of this pop up?
Forget flash sites, have you ever tried implementing a Captcha system that was usable by the blind
Easy. Just use a sound file instead of an image, and the user has to type in what was said.
To make it difficult for a machine to do this, use a Boston accent.
I didn't know about this until I saw the slashdot article. I don't check facebook that often. Suddenly all sorts of events about what I've done, and what my friends have been doing, are visible. That's nice if you wanted it that way, but I didn't.
They added a new feature. They now have a "privacy" control which lets you select what is shown about you and your goings on and what is not shown. And the defaults, for someone who didn't even know about this, are to show everything.
This may end up being a nice feature in the long run, but the initial defaults should have been OFF for everything.
>>They should use the Tom Sawyer method
>I love that video!
Except as everybody knows, today's Tom Sawyer gets high on news, not music videos.
No announcement until Aug 21st? I guess that is how long they are allowing for the peer review of their results.
In a low wing aircraft the fuel check is not just to see how much you have. You turn on the aux fuel pump, just in case the main pump fails during a critical flight period. You also switch to the fullest tank. You may have enough to land, but it does you no good if it's in the tank not selected.
Ideally you perform this check a few minutes out or more, before things get real busy, so that any consequences of the tank change can be dealt with (eg. didn't get the selector in the detent, water in the other tank, etc...)
I wonder if the courts would interpret these social sites as an on-line version of "peaceably assembling", as protected in the first ammendment of the US Constitution?
Both the WSJ article and the slashdot discussion which followed failed to mention that with BOINC one can quite easily donate cycles to other efforts besides searching for ET, such as Einstein@Home: http://einstein.phys.uwm.edu/
wow, this would be a cool output device for Google Earth.
Based on the conditions listed in TFA, it looks this bill would also require that access be blocked to Einstein@Home, SETI@Home, and similar projects.
This is good for schools that currently have to have both Windows and Apple machines in a classroom or lecture hall because some teachers use one, while others use the other. And the virtualization of Windows on Apple will only make it easier to switch between the two.
A longer article on this in the NY Times says that other astronomers doubt this result.
Except that Math is not science.
Physics uses observation and experiment and the scientific method as a process to uncover new facts about Nature. Astronomy too. These are sciences.
Math is stuff humans have made up to logically organize relationships and ideas, and some of it correlates with the natural world, and some of it is quite useful for doing science. But it is not itself science, because it does not use the scientific method.
This month's issue of Physics Today has an article by Steven Weinberg, no slouch himself in physics, on
"Einstein's mistakes".
His take is that given what Einstein and others knew about the cosmos at the time it was perfectly reasonable for him to introduce the cosmological constant to try to obtain a 'static' description of the universe.