Any physics nerd should be able to set up a MySQL database pretty easily-- it's not quite as easy as falling out of a tree, but it's not anywhere near as difficult as a lot of other things in physics. A great deal of data acquisition and analysis for many (if not most) physical scientists involves a bunch of custom programming, and many of the theoretical sorts do a lot of computer modeling. MySQL is pretty easy to install on just about anything, and if you have a reasonable idea of what your data will look like it's pretty easy to decide how to set up the tables you need. The first iteration may not be more than a few simple tables and some straightforward queries, but it's way easier to maintain than a tangled nest of symlinks.
(I'm a physical scientist who plays around with SQL for cheap entertainment)
I actually had the bank call me about a charge like that once. I'd bought some expensive software by phone and a cell phone earlier in the day, both legitimate but unusual charges for me, so I thought it was about that when the automated fraud call came in. When I called back and talked to a live person, it was about a $9.99 charge for "somethingsoft" (I can't remember exactly what the name was). The CC company told me they'd reverse it and send me a new card. When I googled the fictitious company it turns out that it was some kind of scam thing where they either collect or generate card numbers and just start applying $9.99 charges because most people either won't notice or won't argue about it because it's too small.
Or they'd declare that they'd changed the formula and hold back on the non-faulty ones for a while. Then start labeling the non-faulty ones as "coke classic" and once they'd finally sold out of the faulty cans just go back to calling the "classic" stuff "coke".
Yeah, a friend of mine has worked with him occasionally. She's frighteningly smart (I've known and worked with large numbers of smart people, and she's scary smart in a population of a lot of smart people) and she thinks he's frighteningly smart.
the flat rate boxes are also a great deal for shipping heavy things that fit inside them across the country. they're generally pretty fast and you can ship up to 70lbs for $15 or less.
on the other hand, they sometimes will ship you an extra one, too, if they're shipping from across the country.
I'm on the 2 at a time plan, and recently they sent me an email that said something like "The movie at the top of your queue is being shipped from the other end of the country. We've shipped the next one down from your local netflix shipping center". USPS got them both to me within about a day of each other (fast from across the country, not slow local) and I had 3 out for a little while.
They probably like me lately though, because I've been watching more online than on disk.
Many areas have or are installing "reverse 911" systems that let them send automated phone calls out to people who are in danger zones for impending emergencies. They're commonly used in southern california to notify people in areas that are at risk from brush fires, and can also be used to automatically call everyone in an area that's especially hard hit by earthquake and notify them of any special precautions or help coming. It's about as close to a landline based EBS that you could have.
You can also get them in every little asian grocery store around LA (and there are a lot of them!). I have a friend who would visit from wisconsin and load up on them to take back.
Herschel and Planck are at L2 now. Spacecraft at L2 don't park exactly on the L2 point, which is unstable, but fly a "quasi-halo" orbit around it, and have propulsion systems that fire occasionally to keep them on the right orbit. The orbits about the L2 point are quite huge, and missions take other missions into account when planning to go there. The stable Lagrange points aren't good places to put spacecraft because other junk accumulates there and can cause collisions with space debris (i.e. rocks).
Besides Phoenix isn't a border town. Neither are L.A., Detroit, N.Y.C, Boston, Atlanta, etc., but those towns damn sure have places where it isn't safe to be unarmed and alone.
The spanish police told the US that the prints were no match, and that they had other real suspects with real evidence, but the FBI chose to keep after him anyway.
In his case they're talking about real fingerprints that have been in use for about 100 years, and they still got it all wrong.
I used to have a car where the engine would suddenly turn off for no reason while driving, often at exciting moments like getting onto the freeway. It was pretty easy to put it into neutral (it was an automatic), turn the key to "acc" and try to restart the engine (usually with success) without accidentally locking the steering wheel.
It went on for some time until I convinced the repair guys to clean all the electrical connections from the computer to the fuel pump. The car had lived most of it's life in cold places with salty roads, and then the problem appeared in california where mechanics don't think of the effects of salt water. Once the connections were clean it behaved fine.
The more awkward bit will be the fact that large amounts of modern scientific instrumentation, and some analysis packages, include giant chunks of closed source software; but are also worth serious cash. You can absolutely forget getting a BSD/GPL release, and even a "No commercial use, all rights reserved, for review only, mine, not yours." code release will be like pulling teeth.
There are certainly ways to deal with this, too.
In notes (and often in the published papers if it's relevant) to publish model numbers of instruments being used, and if it's something with different versions of firmware or software, that gets noted, too. Even having two ostensibly identical instruments one normally notes which one is being used so that anomalies can get traced more easily.
As far as validating instruments, even for fully calibrated instruments it's not hard to put in known test signals yourself and check the outputs. Unfortunately a lot of people who just buy instruments and plug them in don't do this, and I've seen people blindly believe really silly outputs that were clear results of operator error.
Yeah, I haven't seen anybody point it out yet, but my Apple II+ came with *schematics*. Jobs and Wozniak had been at HP, and HP instrumentation of the period (and for quite a long time afterward) had a very standard manual format. Part of that was complete schematics of the instrument. It rubbed off in the early days, particularly since the steves were also part of the bay area homebrew computer culture.
This isn't a new concept. The public pays for scientific research at an institution of higher learning also funded by tax dollars, yet sometimes the only way you could get a copy of the results is pay for an expensive subscription to a scientific journal, which claims copyright on the published data.
That model is starting to go away (with the publishers kicking and screaming). The US government is starting to (started a while ago) include clauses in grant contracts that limit the exclusive data rights of the investigators, and also require gov't funded authors to use copyright transfer agreements that give the publishers a limited time for exclusive publication. I haven't been keeping up closely, but it's inevitable and accelerating.
IANAL, but I believe it also depends on how the facts are organized. If its a simple list by date or time alphabetical order, then they generally aren't copyrghtable. Being able to copyright that would prevent someone else from collecting the same facts independently and publishing them in an obvious order. If there's some creative addition to the data structure or organization then the database may be copyrightable, while the facts themselves are still not copyrightable.
I.e. someone could publish a database with some creative structure and relationships and you can't copy that and republish with the same structure, but if you just take the facts and organize them some other way you can do that.
Or we can use this new common ID that creates a single point of failure in the creation of badges, makes it easier to wander unescorted in facilities that you don't have access to, and adds significant cost and delay in getting people badged. Either way.
ding ding ding
we have a winner!
That's one of the big holes. Another good one is that if you're going to be in the federal facility for 180 days or less, they do a quick criminal background check (check all the public databases) and hand you a badge and let you run wild.
And the process with foreign nationals makes it even more absurd-- foreign nationals are subjected to far less investigation than US citizens/permanent residents. Federal agencies that do science and research (e.g NASA, DOE) use large numbers of foreign nationals as contractors because foreign nationals can't be direct federal employees.
Additionally, Department of Energy operates a bunch of FFRDCs and they developed a much more rational response to HSPD-12. People who have a secret or higher clearance get the PIV badge that requires the investigation, but because they have a clearance they've already had it. People who don't have or need a clearance get a site-local badge that doesn't require the whole investigation thing.
Here in good, ol' Europe no cop will ever ask you to stop shooting photos - if he/she's on duty of course. Best they can do is to turn around. You have the right to video them, photo them when they're doing the job you are paying for.
About 20 years ago a german cop at a demonstration (during Reagan's visit to Berlin) acted like he was going to take my camera for taking pictures of cops at the demo. It was amusing because he was the cop with a camera taking pictures of the demonstrators. I was on the other side of the police line as a spectator and thought it was interesting so I was going to get pics.
Once he figured out I was american (I don't know that he figured out I wasn't a fan of Reagan) he left me alone, though he asked me to stop taking pics of the cops.
I grew up in the Apollo era. Geeks and nerds were even less popular then than they are now. Uber-nerd Bill Gates has actually done a lot to boost the status of geeks.
Totally.
Geek has probably never had a better image in entertainment-- look at the TV shows with geeks in central roles: - Numb3rs (my least favorite for a lot of reasons, mostly that they're way too serious and the science works out too neatly, but it presents a positive image with science and math as important and useful) - Big Bang Theory (which I think is a much more accurate portrayal of scientists than just about any TV show. The science throwaway comments tend to be current and accurate, and I know [or am] the real versions of all the people) - the various police procedurals that revolve around the scientific investigative teams rather than the street cops (CSI:YourTownHere, Bones) - Mythbusters (sure, a lot of their science is oversimplified and some of their conclusions are incorrect, but they follow a basically good process and show how science works in an entertaining hourlong show). - House (Medical shows have always been popular, but usually showing doctors as hotties who save lives, House revolves around him being a really smart guy with a lot of flaws)
I would agree with you, but things should never be easy for the government, or its workers, simply because it has so much power, and it seems it is incredibly easy to abuse that power (eg: telling everybody that these investigations are for national security, and therefore you don't have to reveal anything, when the investigation is against your political adversary so you can illegally dig into his/her private life).
I totally agree with you, and have been pretty active in working to limit the kinds of investigations the gov't can do of employees and contractors that are in the name of national security but appear largely to be just because they think they can.
I was just pointing out why I think there are so many, not that I think it's a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
Any physics nerd should be able to set up a MySQL database pretty easily-- it's not quite as easy as falling out of a tree, but it's not anywhere near as difficult as a lot of other things in physics. A great deal of data acquisition and analysis for many (if not most) physical scientists involves a bunch of custom programming, and many of the theoretical sorts do a lot of computer modeling. MySQL is pretty easy to install on just about anything, and if you have a reasonable idea of what your data will look like it's pretty easy to decide how to set up the tables you need. The first iteration may not be more than a few simple tables and some straightforward queries, but it's way easier to maintain than a tangled nest of symlinks.
(I'm a physical scientist who plays around with SQL for cheap entertainment)
I actually had the bank call me about a charge like that once. I'd bought some expensive software by phone and a cell phone earlier in the day, both legitimate but unusual charges for me, so I thought it was about that when the automated fraud call came in. When I called back and talked to a live person, it was about a $9.99 charge for "somethingsoft" (I can't remember exactly what the name was). The CC company told me they'd reverse it and send me a new card. When I googled the fictitious company it turns out that it was some kind of scam thing where they either collect or generate card numbers and just start applying $9.99 charges because most people either won't notice or won't argue about it because it's too small.
Or they'd declare that they'd changed the formula and hold back on the non-faulty ones for a while. Then start labeling the non-faulty ones as "coke classic" and once they'd finally sold out of the faulty cans just go back to calling the "classic" stuff "coke".
Yeah, a friend of mine has worked with him occasionally. She's frighteningly smart (I've known and worked with large numbers of smart people, and she's scary smart in a population of a lot of smart people) and she thinks he's frighteningly smart.
the flat rate boxes are also a great deal for shipping heavy things that fit inside them across the country. they're generally pretty fast and you can ship up to 70lbs for $15 or less.
on the other hand, they sometimes will ship you an extra one, too, if they're shipping from across the country.
I'm on the 2 at a time plan, and recently they sent me an email that said something like "The movie at the top of your queue is being shipped from the other end of the country. We've shipped the next one down from your local netflix shipping center". USPS got them both to me within about a day of each other (fast from across the country, not slow local) and I had 3 out for a little while.
They probably like me lately though, because I've been watching more online than on disk.
Many areas have or are installing "reverse 911" systems that let them send automated phone calls out to people who are in danger zones for impending emergencies. They're commonly used in southern california to notify people in areas that are at risk from brush fires, and can also be used to automatically call everyone in an area that's especially hard hit by earthquake and notify them of any special precautions or help coming. It's about as close to a landline based EBS that you could have.
You can also get them in every little asian grocery store around LA (and there are a lot of them!). I have a friend who would visit from wisconsin and load up on them to take back.
Herschel and Planck are at L2 now. Spacecraft at L2 don't park exactly on the L2 point, which is unstable, but fly a "quasi-halo" orbit around it, and have propulsion systems that fire occasionally to keep them on the right orbit. The orbits about the L2 point are quite huge, and missions take other missions into account when planning to go there. The stable Lagrange points aren't good places to put spacecraft because other junk accumulates there and can cause collisions with space debris (i.e. rocks).
Besides Phoenix isn't a border town. Neither are L.A., Detroit, N.Y.C, Boston, Atlanta, etc., but those towns damn sure have places where it isn't safe to be unarmed and alone.
uh, Detroit is a border town...
Tell that to Brandon Mayfield: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Mayfield
The spanish police told the US that the prints were no match, and that they had other real suspects with real evidence, but the FBI chose to keep after him anyway.
In his case they're talking about real fingerprints that have been in use for about 100 years, and they still got it all wrong.
I used to have a car where the engine would suddenly turn off for no reason while driving, often at exciting moments like getting onto the freeway. It was pretty easy to put it into neutral (it was an automatic), turn the key to "acc" and try to restart the engine (usually with success) without accidentally locking the steering wheel.
It went on for some time until I convinced the repair guys to clean all the electrical connections from the computer to the fuel pump. The car had lived most of it's life in cold places with salty roads, and then the problem appeared in california where mechanics don't think of the effects of salt water. Once the connections were clean it behaved fine.
The more awkward bit will be the fact that large amounts of modern scientific instrumentation, and some analysis packages, include giant chunks of closed source software; but are also worth serious cash. You can absolutely forget getting a BSD/GPL release, and even a "No commercial use, all rights reserved, for review only, mine, not yours." code release will be like pulling teeth.
There are certainly ways to deal with this, too.
In notes (and often in the published papers if it's relevant) to publish model numbers of instruments being used, and if it's something with different versions of firmware or software, that gets noted, too. Even having two ostensibly identical instruments one normally notes which one is being used so that anomalies can get traced more easily.
As far as validating instruments, even for fully calibrated instruments it's not hard to put in known test signals yourself and check the outputs. Unfortunately a lot of people who just buy instruments and plug them in don't do this, and I've seen people blindly believe really silly outputs that were clear results of operator error.
Mod parent "Too young to remember Apple II".
Yeah, I haven't seen anybody point it out yet, but my Apple II+ came with *schematics*. Jobs and Wozniak had been at HP, and HP instrumentation of the period (and for quite a long time afterward) had a very standard manual format. Part of that was complete schematics of the instrument. It rubbed off in the early days, particularly since the steves were also part of the bay area homebrew computer culture.
This isn't a new concept. The public pays for scientific research at an institution of higher learning also funded by tax dollars, yet sometimes the only way you could get a copy of the results is pay for an expensive subscription to a scientific journal, which claims copyright on the published data.
That model is starting to go away (with the publishers kicking and screaming). The US government is starting to (started a while ago) include clauses in grant contracts that limit the exclusive data rights of the investigators, and also require gov't funded authors to use copyright transfer agreements that give the publishers a limited time for exclusive publication. I haven't been keeping up closely, but it's inevitable and accelerating.
IANAL, but I believe it also depends on how the facts are organized. If its a simple list by date or time alphabetical order, then they generally aren't copyrghtable. Being able to copyright that would prevent someone else from collecting the same facts independently and publishing them in an obvious order. If there's some creative addition to the data structure or organization then the database may be copyrightable, while the facts themselves are still not copyrightable.
I.e. someone could publish a database with some creative structure and relationships and you can't copy that and republish with the same structure, but if you just take the facts and organize them some other way you can do that.
But they did also write the background check requirement into FIPS 201. IIRC, an early version didn't have it, but it got added at some point.
Or we can use this new common ID that creates a single point of failure in the creation of badges, makes it easier to wander unescorted in facilities that you don't have access to, and adds significant cost and delay in getting people badged. Either way.
ding ding ding
we have a winner!
That's one of the big holes. Another good one is that if you're going to be in the federal facility for 180 days or less, they do a quick criminal background check (check all the public databases) and hand you a badge and let you run wild.
And the process with foreign nationals makes it even more absurd-- foreign nationals are subjected to far less investigation than US citizens/permanent residents. Federal agencies that do science and research (e.g NASA, DOE) use large numbers of foreign nationals as contractors because foreign nationals can't be direct federal employees.
Additionally, Department of Energy operates a bunch of FFRDCs and they developed a much more rational response to HSPD-12. People who have a secret or higher clearance get the PIV badge that requires the investigation, but because they have a clearance they've already had it. People who don't have or need a clearance get a site-local badge that doesn't require the whole investigation thing.
The 9th circuit releases audio transcripts of the oral arguments. I haven't checked if the others are the same.
Sweet, all I have to do is make it more expensive for them to shitcan me than keep me. It's pure brilliance!
That's exactly the claim they're using for not fighting the bonuses at AIG...
Here in good, ol' Europe no cop will ever ask you to stop shooting photos - if he/she's on duty of course. Best they can do is to turn around. You have the right to video them, photo them when they're doing the job you are paying for.
About 20 years ago a german cop at a demonstration (during Reagan's visit to Berlin) acted like he was going to take my camera for taking pictures of cops at the demo. It was amusing because he was the cop with a camera taking pictures of the demonstrators. I was on the other side of the police line as a spectator and thought it was interesting so I was going to get pics.
Once he figured out I was american (I don't know that he figured out I wasn't a fan of Reagan) he left me alone, though he asked me to stop taking pics of the cops.
Nobody said TV is less stupid, just that geeks are held in higher esteem on TV.
For geeks as protagonists in incredibly stupid TV:
Beauty and the Geek
I grew up in the Apollo era. Geeks and nerds were even less popular then than they are now. Uber-nerd Bill Gates has actually done a lot to boost the status of geeks.
Totally.
Geek has probably never had a better image in entertainment-- look at the TV shows with geeks in central roles:
- Numb3rs (my least favorite for a lot of reasons, mostly that they're way too serious and the science works out too neatly, but it presents a positive image with science and math as important and useful)
- Big Bang Theory (which I think is a much more accurate portrayal of scientists than just about any TV show. The science throwaway comments tend to be current and accurate, and I know [or am] the real versions of all the people)
- the various police procedurals that revolve around the scientific investigative teams rather than the street cops (CSI:YourTownHere, Bones)
- Mythbusters (sure, a lot of their science is oversimplified and some of their conclusions are incorrect, but they follow a basically good process and show how science works in an entertaining hourlong show).
- House (Medical shows have always been popular, but usually showing doctors as hotties who save lives, House revolves around him being a really smart guy with a lot of flaws)
I would agree with you, but things should never be easy for the government, or its workers, simply because it has so much power, and it seems it is incredibly easy to abuse that power (eg: telling everybody that these investigations are for national security, and therefore you don't have to reveal anything, when the investigation is against your political adversary so you can illegally dig into his/her private life).
I totally agree with you, and have been pretty active in working to limit the kinds of investigations the gov't can do of employees and contractors that are in the name of national security but appear largely to be just because they think they can.
I was just pointing out why I think there are so many, not that I think it's a good thing.