There are chemicals that can kill fish at 3 parts per billion. There are other things like salt that don't bother them as much, but it's really variable.
However, as other people have pointed out, there are lots of other chemicals getting dumped into the water system, including things like cocaine and prozac that have been processed through humans first. With caffeine, humans metabolize it so you wouldn't get much left, but there's all the caffeine in coffee grounds and waste coffee and soda.
Asking for their Facebook user name is one thing - a company might want to see the public profile the person presents, and a creepy HR department might want to see who their friends are. But any HR department that wants your password is exposing the company to legal liability for misuse of the information, and really has some 'splainin to do about why they want it the ability to forge the job candidate's information.
I do computer security - anybody dumb enough to give us their password is too dumb to hire, unless it's a fake honeypot account, in which case if we're dumb enough to risk logging in then we deserve whatever happens to us. HR may think that the link showing they've made Godfather really goes to the real Mafia Wars, but it's a job offer they can't refuse.
It's one thing to ask for somebody's Facebook user name, so you can see if they're posting embarrassing pictures of themselves and friending inappropriate people, and so you can look at their Mom's Facebook page to see if you can find her maiden name.
It's something entirely different to ask for their password, so you can post embarrassing pictures of them on their Facebook account, friend inappropriate people, and write stuff on their Mom's Facebook page wall.
If I asked somebody for their Facebook password in a job interview, and they gave it to me, that would tell me that they don't have enough clue to be worth hiring:-)
Asking for their Facebook user name is different - There are jobs for which it may make sense to see what somebody's public profile looks like (as opposed to what they're showing their friends.) There are HR people who there who would also want to look at who their friends are, which is getting into creepy, of course. And there are jobs that want to see your Klout score, for which xkcd has already covered the topic..
Maybe now I can get a Microsoft email again, now that it's Outlook.com. Many years ago, my cat signed up for Hotmail, and used her real name and age, so when they came out with that "need to be 13 years old" restriction, they froze her account. The only way to unlock it would have been to use a credit card, but if I did that, she'd be logging on to Amazon with it and ordering cases of tuna, so no way. (Although come to think of it, she's probably 13 years old by now; I'll have to check what year we got her.)
You can't get out of the atmosphere by floating on a balloon. It still needs to be enough less dense than the air around it to give you any lift. And no, "heat from friction" doesn't work that way.
Woody Guthrie said that if you're using more than three or four chords in a song you're just showing off. And a lot of the garage bands of the 50s-70s started off only knowing four chords, and that was really enough; you could always transpose if you didn't know the chords.
I play a few genres of traditional music - old-timey, Irish, a bit of bluegrass, some folk, some German. I mainly play mountain dulcimer, which is a diatonic instrument, so changing keys is annoying, since you have to retune, as opposed to guitars, pianos, and accordions where you've got the whole chromatic scale there. It turns out that there's a very wide range of music that not only uses only 3 or 4 chords per song, but always uses the same scale because that's friendly to the fiddle player or piper, and also if you don't have many strings, you can't play very complicated chords. But just because it's the same few chords, that doesn't mean the melodies aren't complex and/or weird, and I don't think they were measuring that.
So it's I, IV, V (or V7, especially for blues), and maybe a VII or the minor ii or minor vi. And the key is usually in D or G, or E minor for Irish, or A for old-timey (though the A tunes might not be an major scale - they're often Dorian or Mixolydian, which are a bit minor, though the chords will usually still be A, D, G, and sometimes E.) So the chords end up as D, G, A, C, and occasionally E or Em or Bm.
French traditional music seems to mostly use a C scale instead of a D (so it's like playing on the white keys of the piano instead of transposed up a whole step.) I've been doing some German beergarden stuff recently, and it's been all over the map - most of it's 3 or 4 chords, but maybe the key is C or F or Bflat (which is brass-friendly), and there are a lot of 7th chords because accordions are good at those and they sound a bit schmaltzier.
And yes, the jazz and classical people always did much fancier chord work. And there are a lot of amazing guitarists out there, and sometimes if you can't figure out how they played something it was because they're using alternate guitar tunings to get different chord inversions, or they threw in an ARRR-flat-7th-diminished-dominant9th chord just to add some color or because it matched the lyrics or covered up the horribly wrong note the bass player had just played. (By contrast, if a bluegrass guitar wants to show off, it's more likely to be by playing a riff extra-fast by adding grace notes, or by throwing in a few bars from another well-known song that's related in some way. And if Woody Guthrie wanted to show off, he'd doing it by writing some really incisive lyrics or getting the audience to go on strike.)
The Apollo 10 astronauts were in a capsule, not skydiving, but that hadn't happened when Kittinger set the record in 1960. Even Yuri Gagarin's flight wasn't until 1961, and the U-2 planes only went up to about 70,000 feet.
"High Schoolers" says that the people manning the help desk are kids who are still in high school. "High School Graduates" implies that they've finished high school but don't have college degrees. There are some help desk jobs for which that's really just fine (as long as they've learned enough English that they can understand the concepts and get some practice with speaking it), and others for which you need a lot of specialized training, much of which depends on concepts you'd learn in college.
Re:When will Ubuntu support Linux 3.5?
on
Linux 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 1
Yes, I probably could build it. I'm asking when it'll show up as part of the regular updates.
Yes, drones can interfere with organized terrorist groups. But the collateral damage and bad target identification and people's general dislike for foreign invaders are still making lots of enemies for the US, just as Obama's failure to fix Gitmo is continuing Bush's best source of new enemies.
AFAICT, Linux-libre takes the standard Linux distribution and removes all software that doesn't have source code, most of which is device drivers, and also removes applications that don't have politically correct licenses. I'm not too worried about applications (apt-get easily fixes that), but I'd rather not load it on my hardware and find I don't have device drivers for the screen or the audio card or whatever. Does using Linux-Libre mean I can't use AMD graphics sets, or NVidia, or both? What about Intel chipsets?
Back when I was running X Windows versions 10.x and early 11s, there was no requirement that I use TWM. And while the Sun 2 came with SunView, the Sun 3 could run either SunView or X, and you could get Grasshopper Group's implementation of NeWS if you preferred, which drove your screen in Postscript. Among other things, that meant that if you wanted to change the font size to match the size of your monitor and your eyesight, you just did it, and What You Saw Was What You Wanted. None of this "need a third-party developer's hack to use the full resolution of the expensive Retina Display you just bought" nonsense. But even if you were running X, you weren't limited to Motif or OpenLook; you could run whatever window manager you liked with it.
As far as "Ubuntu [does] not [have an SDK]" goes, you can use the Gnome SDK or KDE or LXDE or several other fairly full-featured SDKs.
Apple's lack of support for Retina Displays
on
Linux 3.5 Released
·
· Score: 2
Matt Blaze tweeted that Apple doesn't support the full resolution of the Retina display on the MacBook - the most you can set is 1920x1200, and it scales it from there. He also reports that there's a workaround which will let you get the full resolution.
But still, SRSLY? You'd think Apple could get font scaling correct, especially since they've been selling big desktop displays for years.
Remember $500 hammers? Back in the 1980s, there was a big push to reduce government purchasing costs, especially for military projects, through the use of "Commercial Off-The-Shelf" technology, so whenever possible you'd buy COTS products instead of specially-made customized government-market products. It didn't always make sense, but in many cases it could save a huge amount of money, and realistically a large fraction of the stuff the government bought had commercial equivalents that already had economies of scale keeping the costs down. Sometimes the hammer costs $500 because it's made of MIL-SPEC Titanium, sometimes it's because you spend $490 setting up your hammer-making machine to run off two Left-Handed Jet Engine Hammers for the Air Force, sometimes it's because you spend $600 in contact-lawyer time writing an addendum to a ten-year-old contract to sell two more off-the-shelf hammers to replace the MIL-SPEC ones that got lost.
Government procurement has always had a lot of "check the box on the contract" requirements. Sometimes they make sense, like using COTS to save money when there are commercial products available (especially if that means forcing the organization that wants the stuff to be realistic about what they need.) Sometimes they're theoretically required, but in practice the agency can get a waiver (so everything needs IPv6, but they actually use IPv4, and POSIX was required from mid-80s on but everybody got a waiver and used MS-DOS for office equipment.) Sometimes they increase the costs because the purchasing department puts all that stuff in the contract even though the users don't actually need it.
I did work on some projects where COTS didn't make sense. We were bidding on a communications system that used X.25 (which wasn't yet obsolete:-), but the civilian agency that wanted it had asked the NSA for help specifying a system that would be secure. So yes, it was X.25, but with dozens of special options that no commercial equipment used more than a few of. And the contract specified COTS. How do you reconcile the problem and let the agency check off the "COTS" box on their contract? Make the device, offer it for sale to the market, have a couple of your subcontractors buy boxes from you for "testing" or "evaluation".
Another part of that project not only wanted special-flavor X.25 off the shelf, and POSIX, but also wanted a B1-secure operating system (but it was communication gear, so it would have to be Red Book B1, which was still way-future research, and we had one of the first Orange Book B1 Unix boxes), and GOSIP (the OSI networking stack, though nobody had a GOSIP stack that worked with that particular flavor of X.25 options.) A later project I worked on wanted B1 Secure, POSIX, Ada, POSIX Real-Time (even though the spec wasn't baked yet, and the B1 Secure Unix system didn't support it, and getting that re-evaluated would cost $250K even if we could figure out how to make it work:-)
They probably got it wrong because of translating from Russian and back, but it's "Mahdi" in the source code and the file directory shown in the article. Also, that's the standard English-language spelling for the Mahdi, who's approximately the Muslim version of the Messiah (depending on which branch of Islam you're talking to - it comes from hadiths and tradition rather than directly from the Quran.) So it's kind of an arrogant thing to name your program - does that mean it was really done by the Israelis, or by some Arab haxx0r-k1dd13?
The article asserts that the clamshell is the portable computer format that "won". It certainly became popular (especially compared to the lunchbox shape), but the Palm Pilot made its format dominant for a few years, until the iPhone killed it. And the iPod is a more specialized computer, although the iPhone has mostly killed it. And the iPhone is very definitely a portable computer (telephony's only one of many apps on it), though you could argue that it's essentially the same format as the Palm Pilot, just nicer and without the non-functional flip-cover. And the iPad's making an actual serious dent in laptop sales.
Slashdot Mirror
There are chemicals that can kill fish at 3 parts per billion. There are other things like salt that don't bother them as much, but it's really variable.
However, as other people have pointed out, there are lots of other chemicals getting dumped into the water system, including things like cocaine and prozac that have been processed through humans first. With caffeine, humans metabolize it so you wouldn't get much left, but there's all the caffeine in coffee grounds and waste coffee and soda.
And it is Portland.
all the Caffeinated Fish!
If Youtube were doing takedowns by hand, they would have had the sense not to delete a NASA video during the landing.
Asking for their Facebook user name is one thing - a company might want to see the public profile the person presents, and a creepy HR department might want to see who their friends are. But any HR department that wants your password is exposing the company to legal liability for misuse of the information, and really has some 'splainin to do about why they want it the ability to forge the job candidate's information.
I do computer security - anybody dumb enough to give us their password is too dumb to hire, unless it's a fake honeypot account, in which case if we're dumb enough to risk logging in then we deserve whatever happens to us. HR may think that the link showing they've made Godfather really goes to the real Mafia Wars, but it's a job offer they can't refuse.
It's one thing to ask for somebody's Facebook user name, so you can see if they're posting embarrassing pictures of themselves and friending inappropriate people, and so you can look at their Mom's Facebook page to see if you can find her maiden name.
It's something entirely different to ask for their password, so you can post embarrassing pictures of them on their Facebook account, friend inappropriate people, and write stuff on their Mom's Facebook page wall.
If I asked somebody for their Facebook password in a job interview, and they gave it to me, that would tell me that they don't have enough clue to be worth hiring :-)
Asking for their Facebook user name is different - There are jobs for which it may make sense to see what somebody's public profile looks like (as opposed to what they're showing their friends.) There are HR people who there who would also want to look at who their friends are, which is getting into creepy, of course. And there are jobs that want to see your Klout score, for which xkcd has already covered the topic..
Not really a big surprise there....
Maybe now I can get a Microsoft email again, now that it's Outlook.com. Many years ago, my cat signed up for Hotmail, and used her real name and age, so when they came out with that "need to be 13 years old" restriction, they froze her account. The only way to unlock it would have been to use a credit card, but if I did that, she'd be logging on to Amazon with it and ordering cases of tuna, so no way.
(Although come to think of it, she's probably 13 years old by now; I'll have to check what year we got her.)
So is the "Romney's VP" app open-source? Does that mean anybody can announce who Romney's VP is going to be?
You can't get out of the atmosphere by floating on a balloon. It still needs to be enough less dense than the air around it to give you any lift. And no, "heat from friction" doesn't work that way.
Thanks.
Well somebody had to say it!
Woody Guthrie said that if you're using more than three or four chords in a song you're just showing off. And a lot of the garage bands of the 50s-70s started off only knowing four chords, and that was really enough; you could always transpose if you didn't know the chords.
I play a few genres of traditional music - old-timey, Irish, a bit of bluegrass, some folk, some German. I mainly play mountain dulcimer, which is a diatonic instrument, so changing keys is annoying, since you have to retune, as opposed to guitars, pianos, and accordions where you've got the whole chromatic scale there. It turns out that there's a very wide range of music that not only uses only 3 or 4 chords per song, but always uses the same scale because that's friendly to the fiddle player or piper, and also if you don't have many strings, you can't play very complicated chords. But just because it's the same few chords, that doesn't mean the melodies aren't complex and/or weird, and I don't think they were measuring that.
So it's I, IV, V (or V7, especially for blues), and maybe a VII or the minor ii or minor vi. And the key is usually in D or G, or E minor for Irish, or A for old-timey (though the A tunes might not be an major scale - they're often Dorian or Mixolydian, which are a bit minor, though the chords will usually still be A, D, G, and sometimes E.) So the chords end up as D, G, A, C, and occasionally E or Em or Bm.
French traditional music seems to mostly use a C scale instead of a D (so it's like playing on the white keys of the piano instead of transposed up a whole step.) I've been doing some German beergarden stuff recently, and it's been all over the map - most of it's 3 or 4 chords, but maybe the key is C or F or Bflat (which is brass-friendly), and there are a lot of 7th chords because accordions are good at those and they sound a bit schmaltzier.
And yes, the jazz and classical people always did much fancier chord work. And there are a lot of amazing guitarists out there, and sometimes if you can't figure out how they played something it was because they're using alternate guitar tunings to get different chord inversions, or they threw in an ARRR-flat-7th-diminished-dominant9th chord just to add some color or because it matched the lyrics or covered up the horribly wrong note the bass player had just played. (By contrast, if a bluegrass guitar wants to show off, it's more likely to be by playing a riff extra-fast by adding grace notes, or by throwing in a few bars from another well-known song that's related in some way. And if Woody Guthrie wanted to show off, he'd doing it by writing some really incisive lyrics or getting the audience to go on strike.)
Breedlove set world land speed records of 500 and 600 mph, and one of his cars got up to about 675 before crashing.
The Apollo 10 astronauts were in a capsule, not skydiving, but that hadn't happened when Kittinger set the record in 1960. Even Yuri Gagarin's flight wasn't until 1961, and the U-2 planes only went up to about 70,000 feet.
"High Schoolers" says that the people manning the help desk are kids who are still in high school. "High School Graduates" implies that they've finished high school but don't have college degrees. There are some help desk jobs for which that's really just fine (as long as they've learned enough English that they can understand the concepts and get some practice with speaking it), and others for which you need a lot of specialized training, much of which depends on concepts you'd learn in college.
Yes, I probably could build it. I'm asking when it'll show up as part of the regular updates.
Yes, drones can interfere with organized terrorist groups.
But the collateral damage and bad target identification and people's general dislike for foreign invaders are still making lots of enemies for the US, just as Obama's failure to fix Gitmo is continuing Bush's best source of new enemies.
Any ideas when Ubuntu will support the 3.5 kernel? Real Soon, or not until 12.10?
AFAICT, Linux-libre takes the standard Linux distribution and removes all software that doesn't have source code, most of which is device drivers, and also removes applications that don't have politically correct licenses. I'm not too worried about applications (apt-get easily fixes that), but I'd rather not load it on my hardware and find I don't have device drivers for the screen or the audio card or whatever. Does using Linux-Libre mean I can't use AMD graphics sets, or NVidia, or both? What about Intel chipsets?
Back when I was running X Windows versions 10.x and early 11s, there was no requirement that I use TWM. And while the Sun 2 came with SunView, the Sun 3 could run either SunView or X, and you could get Grasshopper Group's implementation of NeWS if you preferred, which drove your screen in Postscript. Among other things, that meant that if you wanted to change the font size to match the size of your monitor and your eyesight, you just did it, and What You Saw Was What You Wanted. None of this "need a third-party developer's hack to use the full resolution of the expensive Retina Display you just bought" nonsense. But even if you were running X, you weren't limited to Motif or OpenLook; you could run whatever window manager you liked with it.
As far as "Ubuntu [does] not [have an SDK]" goes, you can use the Gnome SDK or KDE or LXDE or several other fairly full-featured SDKs.
Matt Blaze tweeted that Apple doesn't support the full resolution of the Retina display on the MacBook - the most you can set is 1920x1200, and it scales it from there. He also reports that there's a workaround which will let you get the full resolution.
But still, SRSLY? You'd think Apple could get font scaling correct, especially since they've been selling big desktop displays for years.
Remember $500 hammers? Back in the 1980s, there was a big push to reduce government purchasing costs, especially for military projects, through the use of "Commercial Off-The-Shelf" technology, so whenever possible you'd buy COTS products instead of specially-made customized government-market products. It didn't always make sense, but in many cases it could save a huge amount of money, and realistically a large fraction of the stuff the government bought had commercial equivalents that already had economies of scale keeping the costs down. Sometimes the hammer costs $500 because it's made of MIL-SPEC Titanium, sometimes it's because you spend $490 setting up your hammer-making machine to run off two Left-Handed Jet Engine Hammers for the Air Force, sometimes it's because you spend $600 in contact-lawyer time writing an addendum to a ten-year-old contract to sell two more off-the-shelf hammers to replace the MIL-SPEC ones that got lost.
Government procurement has always had a lot of "check the box on the contract" requirements. Sometimes they make sense, like using COTS to save money when there are commercial products available (especially if that means forcing the organization that wants the stuff to be realistic about what they need.) Sometimes they're theoretically required, but in practice the agency can get a waiver (so everything needs IPv6, but they actually use IPv4, and POSIX was required from mid-80s on but everybody got a waiver and used MS-DOS for office equipment.) Sometimes they increase the costs because the purchasing department puts all that stuff in the contract even though the users don't actually need it.
I did work on some projects where COTS didn't make sense. We were bidding on a communications system that used X.25 (which wasn't yet obsolete :-), but the civilian agency that wanted it had asked the NSA for help specifying a system that would be secure. So yes, it was X.25, but with dozens of special options that no commercial equipment used more than a few of. And the contract specified COTS. How do you reconcile the problem and let the agency check off the "COTS" box on their contract? Make the device, offer it for sale to the market, have a couple of your subcontractors buy boxes from you for "testing" or "evaluation".
Another part of that project not only wanted special-flavor X.25 off the shelf, and POSIX, but also wanted a B1-secure operating system (but it was communication gear, so it would have to be Red Book B1, which was still way-future research, and we had one of the first Orange Book B1 Unix boxes), and GOSIP (the OSI networking stack, though nobody had a GOSIP stack that worked with that particular flavor of X.25 options.) A later project I worked on wanted B1 Secure, POSIX, Ada, POSIX Real-Time (even though the spec wasn't baked yet, and the B1 Secure Unix system didn't support it, and getting that re-evaluated would cost $250K even if we could figure out how to make it work :-)
They probably got it wrong because of translating from Russian and back, but it's "Mahdi" in the source code and the file directory shown in the article. Also, that's the standard English-language spelling for the Mahdi, who's approximately the Muslim version of the Messiah (depending on which branch of Islam you're talking to - it comes from hadiths and tradition rather than directly from the Quran.) So it's kind of an arrogant thing to name your program - does that mean it was really done by the Israelis, or by some Arab haxx0r-k1dd13?
The article asserts that the clamshell is the portable computer format that "won". It certainly became popular (especially compared to the lunchbox shape), but the Palm Pilot made its format dominant for a few years, until the iPhone killed it. And the iPod is a more specialized computer, although the iPhone has mostly killed it. And the iPhone is very definitely a portable computer (telephony's only one of many apps on it), though you could argue that it's essentially the same format as the Palm Pilot, just nicer and without the non-functional flip-cover. And the iPad's making an actual serious dent in laptop sales.