Yeah, you can see the evidence by reading the raw scripts they produced, which are littered with references to... (tech). The scriptwriters would literally write the word "tech" in parentheses to indicate the places where their science writers (who had NO INFLUENCE on the actual PLOT) should insert some technical-sounding jargon.
I'm not saying they didn't make up a fair bit of dialogue as they went along. And I likewise wouldn't expect that their story writers grasped every pseudo-scientific theory upon which the technology supposedly worked. But the fact remains that Star Trek (in its good years) went into far greater detail about the technology than any other work of science fiction I've come across. That kind of dedication to an idealized dream of the future is admirable, even if some choose to deride it.
You watch too many movies. Finding an exploit in something is exciting, and equally exciting is reporting your findings to others and making a name for yourself.
I can't speak for every hacker, but I've known enough of them to say with a degree of certainty that most of them do what they do because it's fun. Getting public recognition for doing something clever is a nice benefit, but its rarely the primary motivation.
Also, your bit about how hackers have a "distaste for hidden details" is BS: why the heck would they care? Are they righteous do-gooders in the unending quest for truth?
Why is it bullshit? A healthy desire for truth and transparency is a common--though not at all universal--hacker trait whether or not you choose to believe it.
Closed, proprietary, systems are usually secretive because they know they've got something to hide. That's the only reason hackers focus so much on them--not because they have a moral imperative to seek the truth, but because they know that's where the juiciest exploits are.
I can't argue with the point that closed systems are often the most attractive to hackers. But it's because the systems are closed that hackers have great fun in reverse engineering them and figuring out how they work. Had the MBTA system been designed properly, these hackers still would have reverse engineered it, or at least attempted to. And they might have still held a conference panel about it. Hackers routinely publish articles and give speeches regarding the inner workings of systems that have no known exploit, but you don't hear anything about those because the popular media isn't interested in stories about amateurs figuring out how a perfectly well-designed system works.
Hackers end up being great for society in that they hack for fun recognition and not for a more evil purpose. Through their own self-interest they end up being a positive force. I would much rather have someone like Kevin Mitnick hack the pentagon before China does. That's not to say I respect why he does it.
It's my turn to tell you that you watch too many movies. The vast majority of hackers don't spend all day trying to break into systems like they're portrayed endlessly in the media. By and large, they enjoy figuring out and working with technology in general, usually in advanced or clever ways. I subscribe to the definition of a hacker that includes anyone passionately seeks out an in-depth understanding of technology. Whether that means writing and debugging code for a complex OS kernel, finding weaknesses in cryptography applications, or dissecting technologies and systems that we use every day. Uncovering exploits and breaking into systems might be fun, but you don't get very far if that's your only motivating goal. Just like the fun of sex isn't from the orgasm alone.
30% is quite a performance difference and is far beyond the almost insignificant margins I discussed in my post. That great a difference is almost certainly attributable to bad or misconfigured hardware, or perhaps a bug in the software which handles the load balancing.
I have to agree with you there. Star Wars is a good tale, but the designers of Star Trek really thought long and hard about what future technology would be like and then came up with plots for how humans (and other species which are really just caricatures for human traits) would use and deal with that technology. This is what drew me to TNG in the first place. The technology was almost as much as part of the story as the characters were. That is *real* science fiction. Other types of drama where the technology takes a distant back seat (like Star Wars and Firefly, excellent though they are) should really occupy a somewhat different genre.
The other day, I came across my old copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual. I fondly remembered flipping through it as a teenager memorizing the (*almost* entirely fictional) technical details of the 1701-D's innards. And then it dawned on me that much of the technology detailed in the book has already come to fruition just in the last 20 years. Our computer systems are not very different than the ones depicted in the 24th century: large touchscreen LCDs are not yet mainstream, but smaller versions are already very popular in handheld devices (our equivalent to tricorders, PADDs). The Internet combined with powerful personal computers rivals the Starfleet mainframe computer systems in almost every regard. Worldwide communications are generally easy and cheap. Computers are getting astonishingly good at recognising human speech, although it will be awhile longer before they can interpret arbitrary questions.
I'm intensely curious to see what the next 20 years will bring.
Here's an exercise: Take 2 brand-new systems with identical configurations and start them at the same time doing some job that takes a few hours and utilizes most of the hardware to some significant degree. Say, compiling some huge piece of code like KDE or OpenOffice. System administrators who do exactly this will tell you that you'll almost never see the two machines complete the job at precisely the same time. Even though the CPU, memory, hard drive, motherboard, and everything else is the same, the system as a whole is so complex that minute differences in timing somewhere compound into larger ones. Sometimes you can even reboot them and repeat the experiment and the results will have reversed. It shouldn't come as a surprise that adding more complexity (in the form of processor cores) would enhance the effect.
I was confused, then, by the term "licensed," which here in the U.S. means, "paid money for the privilege to use." I agree that medical treatments should have to be approved by some regulatory organization before J. Random Doctor can perform them.
If someone asked me if they could do a security audit on my house and I said sure, that'd be cool. If they broke in, were going to give a talk about it to some other dudes and THEN I found out about it, I'd be a bit upset, too. Would I want to fix my security, sure, but I'd be kinda mad they did it without asking. Just because you CAN break in doesn't mean you have a right to do it, it's still MY property, not yours...
Bad analogy.
Your house holds little resemblance to a mass-transit ticketing system. It is not owned by the government (and hence the public at large), it is not funded with taxpayer dollars, and it does not service thousands of individuals who rely on it to get through their daily lives.
The importance of something like a mass transit system means that it's security damn well should be audited lawfully (or at least morally) and frequently by whomever feels like doing it without having to constantly look over their shoulder.
The kids' goal is probably to make a name for themselves, and maybe do something cool by defeating the MBTA's security.
Their goals are unknown, so it's not anyone's place to assume. However, the traditional hacker motive has been to discover how a (often closed) system works, figure out if there are any defects, and share the information gained with other hackers and the public. Hackers of all walks (including and perhaps especially open source developers) have a natural distaste for technology whose details are intentionally hidden from them.
The judge threw out the gag ording, which I assume means the kids can legally make the knowledge public (even if they'll be sued later). By "hiring" the kids to make recommendations on their security, everyone saves a bunch of legal costs, the MBTA keeps the kids' from going public with the exploits, and the kids still get to make a name for themselves, and maybe make a few dollars. Everybody wins.
No, everybody doesn't win:
1. The public still doesn't know that their tax dollars were spent on a shoddy system that can be exploited easily.
2. Regardless of whether the gag order was lifted later, the MBTA still got what they wanted which was to silence the hackers and chill any other research being performed on the system by others.
3. Hackers in general will continue to be censored by bogus court orders and injunctions whenever some company doesn't want their horribly-designed product described publicly for what it is.
Okay, a dual-head laptop is just an insane idea. But then again, the Thinkpad has a long history of crazy features in the product line. Good to see Lenovo is keeping up the tradition.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do some hacking on my T60.
These are more general points than some of the comments posted so far. Take them for whatever they're worth.
1) Go for the least restrictive options possible. If you treat kids like criminals, they're going to act like criminals. Public middle/high schools are enough like jails as it is already.
2) Some kids are going to figure out how to work around almost every restrictive measure you put in place, regardless of what you do. Expect that and when it happens, set the example and deal with it in a mature non-kneejerk way.
3) Related to #2, the kids are going to use the laptops for non-academic purposes. This should be encouraged because to do otherwise is running contradictory to the whole message of telling them to have this laptop and take it home. If you don't want them to use a general-purpose computer for general-purpose activities (communication, music, art, programming) then don't give them a computer.
4) Realize that 99.9% of the "problems" related to the use of the laptops are best resolved with non-technical solutions. If instant messaging in classes is an issue, have the teacher tell them to knock it off and pay attention to class. Don't just take away the chat program and leave it at that, because the underlying problem still remains. Cure the ailments, not the symptoms.
5) Above all, EDUCATE them on what's considered acceptable use of the computer and what's not. For the love of all that is holy, do not just give them the computer and then punish them for using it wrong. Kids have a natural tendency to explore their world and the things in it, don't help the school system destroy that inclination any further.
While I don't doubt that your anecdote is true, deploying an office full of Macs generally doesn't make much financial sense, especially for web development where your primary tools are a terminal and a web browser.
Your situation in particular would have been perfectly suited to a Linux terminal server running a modern desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora. Instead of around $1500 per desktop (assuming you went with the "budget" iMacs), you'd spend maybe $3500 on a beefy server (with built-in redundancy) and a little over $100 per thin client if you bought them brand-new. More importantly, it means there's only one machine to admin and a common set of tools for everyone to use. Since everyone has their own user account, they can configure their desktop however they like and can't break the machine because they don't have the root password.
In fact, Gartner analyst Steve Prentice told the BBC recently that the mouse will be dead in three to five years.
Notice that it's only pundits and "analysts" that make stupid and outrageous claims like these. If you actually pay attention to computing history (instead of pretending to write about its future), you'll see that it takes closer to eight years for any technology to completely replace the one before it from introduction to almost complete market saturation.
The primary domain of the mouse is the desktop computer, but the mouse isn't going anywhere because there's nothing to replace it. A touchscreen certainly won't because nobody wants to keep their arm hanging in mid-air for hours on end. The closest thing would be Microsoft's paper-thin multi-touch trackpad but so far as I've been able to tell, nobody is planning to manufacture such a device. I'd love to have a giant touchpad in lieu of a mouse, but apparently I'm alone in that wish since nobody makes or is even planning to make one.
I'm sorry, but I'd expect an article of this calibre out of an 9th-grade journalism class, not a newspaper that calls itself The Herald. For entertainment purposes, let's take a closer look at this story, shall we?
A spectacular fire stopped traffic and drew crowds of onlookers in Auckland last night.
Fair enough. Big fires are kinda neat.
The blaze broke out in a warehouse on the intersection of Ponsonby Road and McKelvie Street and eight appliances and two aerial appliances were used to quell it.
Wait, what? Appliances? Were they throwing dishwashers and blenders at it?
Firefighters were dampening down hotspots but by 11.30 the fire was out.
It's unclear from this sentence just when the firefighters were dampening down hotspots. Before the fire? After? A week later?
A man was inside the building at the time. He was taken out and treated for a minor cut to his arm.
Here's where the real questions start. What what he doing in the building? Was he supposed to be there? How did he get the cut? Did he see/hear how the fire broke out? Isn't the whole point of journalism to answer questions? I would love to see an article that talks about why the author was unable to obtain the most basic facts about the story. Was the writer prevented from talking to the firefighters and police? Okay, that's a good reason but since it's not in the article I have to assume that the writer was just being lazy.
And by the way, what happened to the good old days when every article came with a by-line so you know who wrote it? You never see those any more unless the writer is gunning for a Pulitzer in some long, drawn-out investigative piece.
No nearby buildings were damaged, but the warehouse roof collapsed in the centre. The Fire Service is not saying yet whether it suspects the blaze was suspicious.
"...suspects the blaze was suspicious"? Oh now he/she isn't even trying.
Some people were convinced the fire was caused by what may have been a meteorite, which was seen from various parts of the upper North Island streaking across the sky just after 10 o';clock.
Several callers claim the light in the sky was very bright, and it was described by some as a blinding flash. Others said it was trailing smoke.
One man, Mike, says he saw the object crash with an exploding noise in the Ponsonby area, and reckons it could have started the fire.
And now we veer headlong into the bizarre. As others have pointed out, meteors are not nearly hot enough to start a fire by the time they reach the ground so unless the place was storing flammable materials, a meteor did not start this fire regardless of whatever random passers-by thought they witnessed. (It should be noted that their stories are contradictory, so it's impossible to tell which, if any of them, actually saw or heard the meteor. People routinely make up stories and observations to make their own lives seem more interesting or important, especially in relation to some semi-major happening nearby.)
Seems like every three months or so, this question pops up on Ask Slashdot:
"Dear Slashdot, please tell me how I can make redundant archives of all of my important data for the indefinite future. Oh and just one other thing: I don't want to pay anything for it nor can I be arsed to put any of my own precious time into it."
Yup, sounds like middle management material to me!
The real answer to the OP's question is that no current consumer-level media is suitable for archival purposes on its own. To really archive something, you need high-quality media that won't degrade easily, a way to read it in the future, and a cool, dark, dry vault to store it in. All of this is (not surprisingly) outside the financial feasibility of most businesses and consumers.
The cheapest, easiest, and most reliable solution is to throw together a network file server with redundant disks and backups. Monitor it continuously for failure and upgrade it every couple of years. If the data is super important, perform periodic audits on it. The advantages to this method are:
1) You have immediate access to your data at all times. Need an old-ass file? Just copy it over the network.
2) You have backups. You can even set up an incremental system if you want, so that you can get that file as it was on Monday that you zapped on Tuesday.
3) You have redundancy. Build the server such that if it one part fails (especially a disk), the system as a whole does not suffer.
4) It scales up and down very gracefully. You can get by with one of those cheap two-disk consumer-level NAS boxes or employ a rack of CORAID boxes, depending on the size of your data set, bandwidth requirements, and how "safe" you want to be from hardware failure.
5) You're actively in control of your data, whereas if you hire it out to a third party, you really have no absolute guarantee that your data is safe.
6) If the system is properly monitored, you are notified when something's going wrong whereas if you write some data to media and stash it on the shelf, you have zero indication if the disk loses its airtight seal, the flash chip is degrading, or the aluminum is slowly delaminating from the plastic disc of the DVD.
If this seems like too much work, then your data isn't important enough to protect in the long term.
The way you phrased that doesn't make it clear why your teachers didn't want "extra" work. If I were teaching a course and asked for a 5-8 page term paper, I'd let the students know I wouldn't have time to read a 10+ page report.
Nah, it wasn't anything like that. I would expect to have points deducted from a 10 page paper if the syallbus said it was supposed to be 5-8 pages long because that's just a failure to follow instructions.
The instances that I had in mind were when I attempted to learn something about the subject by referencing the materials besides those listed in the curriculum or asked them questions about concepts were related to the subject but not explicitly part of the class. In college, at least one of my teachers was not pleased that I bought or checked a book out of the library that dealt with the subject in the class.
Recently, I've been taking online classes from a nearby university and even though the class takes place on the web, many of my teachers so far have quietly (or otherwise) discouraged posting links to other sources of information on the web. Some instructors are really great, but too many of them have the "my way or the highway" kind of attitude towards teaching. They have no problem emphasizing that students are responsible for their own success or failure in the class. But if you try to do any learning outside the bounds of the syllabus, watch out.
It's even worse than all that. I went to a pretty bad public school and from what I've been able to tell, many teachers become teachers simply because they want to be in some position of authority but lack the intelligence and ability required to lead mature adults. So they settle for the next best thing: children who are unable (in most cases) to defend their ideas and dignity.
During the time I did in the public school system, these types of teachers always held the attitude towards their students of, "You'll learn whatever I decide to teach you and anything else is useless, irrelevant, or forbidden." They can't stand the idea that some kid would know something that they don't. These are the teachers who discipline students who correct them, confiscate books that have a little swearing in them, and so on. Even in college, I witnessed more than one teacher who outwardly frowned upon students doing more work than the syllabus required.
Wow, thanks! Google's translation wasn't too bad, I think I understood what you were saying.
Another Slashdotter pointed out that the closest social psychology term for what I described was callled the "door-in-the-face" technique. The main difference between that and what I described is that the in door-in-the-face technique, the second request is usually a much smaller favor than the first. In the case of the U.S. laws I described, there is practically no real difference between the first and second bills so I'm not sure it's quite the same thing, but even if not, it's pretty close.
The scariest part is that these case is absurd on a number of levels, but at least one judge so far thinks this Zebulon J. Brodie whackjob actually had a valid point.
First off, the First Amendment protects freedom of expression. We're not all the way there yet, but most intelligent people (including many judges) agree that anonymity is essential to guarantee free speech without fear of reprisal. One exception of course is for libelous or defamatory statements but those do NOT include negative criticism framed as opinion.
The statement "[one] of the most dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places I have seen," is very clearly an opinion by the author and he or she is making a personal judgment of the place in comparison to other food-service stores.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying they didn't make up a fair bit of dialogue as they went along. And I likewise wouldn't expect that their story writers grasped every pseudo-scientific theory upon which the technology supposedly worked. But the fact remains that Star Trek (in its good years) went into far greater detail about the technology than any other work of science fiction I've come across. That kind of dedication to an idealized dream of the future is admirable, even if some choose to deride it.
I can't speak for every hacker, but I've known enough of them to say with a degree of certainty that most of them do what they do because it's fun. Getting public recognition for doing something clever is a nice benefit, but its rarely the primary motivation.
Why is it bullshit? A healthy desire for truth and transparency is a common--though not at all universal--hacker trait whether or not you choose to believe it.
I can't argue with the point that closed systems are often the most attractive to hackers. But it's because the systems are closed that hackers have great fun in reverse engineering them and figuring out how they work. Had the MBTA system been designed properly, these hackers still would have reverse engineered it, or at least attempted to. And they might have still held a conference panel about it. Hackers routinely publish articles and give speeches regarding the inner workings of systems that have no known exploit, but you don't hear anything about those because the popular media isn't interested in stories about amateurs figuring out how a perfectly well-designed system works.
It's my turn to tell you that you watch too many movies. The vast majority of hackers don't spend all day trying to break into systems like they're portrayed endlessly in the media. By and large, they enjoy figuring out and working with technology in general, usually in advanced or clever ways. I subscribe to the definition of a hacker that includes anyone passionately seeks out an in-depth understanding of technology. Whether that means writing and debugging code for a complex OS kernel, finding weaknesses in cryptography applications, or dissecting technologies and systems that we use every day. Uncovering exploits and breaking into systems might be fun, but you don't get very far if that's your only motivating goal. Just like the fun of sex isn't from the orgasm alone.
30% is quite a performance difference and is far beyond the almost insignificant margins I discussed in my post. That great a difference is almost certainly attributable to bad or misconfigured hardware, or perhaps a bug in the software which handles the load balancing.
I have to agree with you there. Star Wars is a good tale, but the designers of Star Trek really thought long and hard about what future technology would be like and then came up with plots for how humans (and other species which are really just caricatures for human traits) would use and deal with that technology. This is what drew me to TNG in the first place. The technology was almost as much as part of the story as the characters were. That is *real* science fiction. Other types of drama where the technology takes a distant back seat (like Star Wars and Firefly, excellent though they are) should really occupy a somewhat different genre.
The other day, I came across my old copy of the Star Trek Technical Manual. I fondly remembered flipping through it as a teenager memorizing the (*almost* entirely fictional) technical details of the 1701-D's innards. And then it dawned on me that much of the technology detailed in the book has already come to fruition just in the last 20 years. Our computer systems are not very different than the ones depicted in the 24th century: large touchscreen LCDs are not yet mainstream, but smaller versions are already very popular in handheld devices (our equivalent to tricorders, PADDs). The Internet combined with powerful personal computers rivals the Starfleet mainframe computer systems in almost every regard. Worldwide communications are generally easy and cheap. Computers are getting astonishingly good at recognising human speech, although it will be awhile longer before they can interpret arbitrary questions.
I'm intensely curious to see what the next 20 years will bring.
Here's an exercise: Take 2 brand-new systems with identical configurations and start them at the same time doing some job that takes a few hours and utilizes most of the hardware to some significant degree. Say, compiling some huge piece of code like KDE or OpenOffice. System administrators who do exactly this will tell you that you'll almost never see the two machines complete the job at precisely the same time. Even though the CPU, memory, hard drive, motherboard, and everything else is the same, the system as a whole is so complex that minute differences in timing somewhere compound into larger ones. Sometimes you can even reboot them and repeat the experiment and the results will have reversed. It shouldn't come as a surprise that adding more complexity (in the form of processor cores) would enhance the effect.
I was confused, then, by the term "licensed," which here in the U.S. means, "paid money for the privilege to use." I agree that medical treatments should have to be approved by some regulatory organization before J. Random Doctor can perform them.
Bad analogy.
Your house holds little resemblance to a mass-transit ticketing system. It is not owned by the government (and hence the public at large), it is not funded with taxpayer dollars, and it does not service thousands of individuals who rely on it to get through their daily lives.
The importance of something like a mass transit system means that it's security damn well should be audited lawfully (or at least morally) and frequently by whomever feels like doing it without having to constantly look over their shoulder.
Their goals are unknown, so it's not anyone's place to assume. However, the traditional hacker motive has been to discover how a (often closed) system works, figure out if there are any defects, and share the information gained with other hackers and the public. Hackers of all walks (including and perhaps especially open source developers) have a natural distaste for technology whose details are intentionally hidden from them.
No, everybody doesn't win:
1. The public still doesn't know that their tax dollars were spent on a shoddy system that can be exploited easily.
2. Regardless of whether the gag order was lifted later, the MBTA still got what they wanted which was to silence the hackers and chill any other research being performed on the system by others.
3. Hackers in general will continue to be censored by bogus court orders and injunctions whenever some company doesn't want their horribly-designed product described publicly for what it is.
Okay, a dual-head laptop is just an insane idea. But then again, the Thinkpad has a long history of crazy features in the product line. Good to see Lenovo is keeping up the tradition.
Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go do some hacking on my T60.
"licensed this treatment"?
That is without a doubt one of the scariest things I've read lately.
These are more general points than some of the comments posted so far. Take them for whatever they're worth.
1) Go for the least restrictive options possible. If you treat kids like criminals, they're going to act like criminals. Public middle/high schools are enough like jails as it is already.
2) Some kids are going to figure out how to work around almost every restrictive measure you put in place, regardless of what you do. Expect that and when it happens, set the example and deal with it in a mature non-kneejerk way.
3) Related to #2, the kids are going to use the laptops for non-academic purposes. This should be encouraged because to do otherwise is running contradictory to the whole message of telling them to have this laptop and take it home. If you don't want them to use a general-purpose computer for general-purpose activities (communication, music, art, programming) then don't give them a computer.
4) Realize that 99.9% of the "problems" related to the use of the laptops are best resolved with non-technical solutions. If instant messaging in classes is an issue, have the teacher tell them to knock it off and pay attention to class. Don't just take away the chat program and leave it at that, because the underlying problem still remains. Cure the ailments, not the symptoms.
5) Above all, EDUCATE them on what's considered acceptable use of the computer and what's not. For the love of all that is holy, do not just give them the computer and then punish them for using it wrong. Kids have a natural tendency to explore their world and the things in it, don't help the school system destroy that inclination any further.
While I don't doubt that your anecdote is true, deploying an office full of Macs generally doesn't make much financial sense, especially for web development where your primary tools are a terminal and a web browser.
Your situation in particular would have been perfectly suited to a Linux terminal server running a modern desktop distribution like Ubuntu or Fedora. Instead of around $1500 per desktop (assuming you went with the "budget" iMacs), you'd spend maybe $3500 on a beefy server (with built-in redundancy) and a little over $100 per thin client if you bought them brand-new. More importantly, it means there's only one machine to admin and a common set of tools for everyone to use. Since everyone has their own user account, they can configure their desktop however they like and can't break the machine because they don't have the root password.
But firefox can't. :(
Notice that it's only pundits and "analysts" that make stupid and outrageous claims like these. If you actually pay attention to computing history (instead of pretending to write about its future), you'll see that it takes closer to eight years for any technology to completely replace the one before it from introduction to almost complete market saturation.
The primary domain of the mouse is the desktop computer, but the mouse isn't going anywhere because there's nothing to replace it. A touchscreen certainly won't because nobody wants to keep their arm hanging in mid-air for hours on end. The closest thing would be Microsoft's paper-thin multi-touch trackpad but so far as I've been able to tell, nobody is planning to manufacture such a device. I'd love to have a giant touchpad in lieu of a mouse, but apparently I'm alone in that wish since nobody makes or is even planning to make one.
I'm sorry, but I'd expect an article of this calibre out of an 9th-grade journalism class, not a newspaper that calls itself The Herald. For entertainment purposes, let's take a closer look at this story, shall we?
Fair enough. Big fires are kinda neat.
Wait, what? Appliances? Were they throwing dishwashers and blenders at it?
It's unclear from this sentence just when the firefighters were dampening down hotspots. Before the fire? After? A week later?
Here's where the real questions start. What what he doing in the building? Was he supposed to be there? How did he get the cut? Did he see/hear how the fire broke out? Isn't the whole point of journalism to answer questions? I would love to see an article that talks about why the author was unable to obtain the most basic facts about the story. Was the writer prevented from talking to the firefighters and police? Okay, that's a good reason but since it's not in the article I have to assume that the writer was just being lazy.
And by the way, what happened to the good old days when every article came with a by-line so you know who wrote it? You never see those any more unless the writer is gunning for a Pulitzer in some long, drawn-out investigative piece.
"...suspects the blaze was suspicious"? Oh now he/she isn't even trying.
And now we veer headlong into the bizarre. As others have pointed out, meteors are not nearly hot enough to start a fire by the time they reach the ground so unless the place was storing flammable materials, a meteor did not start this fire regardless of whatever random passers-by thought they witnessed. (It should be noted that their stories are contradictory, so it's impossible to tell which, if any of them, actually saw or heard the meteor. People routinely make up stories and observations to make their own lives seem more interesting or important, especially in relation to some semi-major happening nearby.)
Seems like every three months or so, this question pops up on Ask Slashdot:
Yup, sounds like middle management material to me!
The real answer to the OP's question is that no current consumer-level media is suitable for archival purposes on its own. To really archive something, you need high-quality media that won't degrade easily, a way to read it in the future, and a cool, dark, dry vault to store it in. All of this is (not surprisingly) outside the financial feasibility of most businesses and consumers.
The cheapest, easiest, and most reliable solution is to throw together a network file server with redundant disks and backups. Monitor it continuously for failure and upgrade it every couple of years. If the data is super important, perform periodic audits on it. The advantages to this method are:
1) You have immediate access to your data at all times. Need an old-ass file? Just copy it over the network.
2) You have backups. You can even set up an incremental system if you want, so that you can get that file as it was on Monday that you zapped on Tuesday.
3) You have redundancy. Build the server such that if it one part fails (especially a disk), the system as a whole does not suffer.
4) It scales up and down very gracefully. You can get by with one of those cheap two-disk consumer-level NAS boxes or employ a rack of CORAID boxes, depending on the size of your data set, bandwidth requirements, and how "safe" you want to be from hardware failure.
5) You're actively in control of your data, whereas if you hire it out to a third party, you really have no absolute guarantee that your data is safe.
6) If the system is properly monitored, you are notified when something's going wrong whereas if you write some data to media and stash it on the shelf, you have zero indication if the disk loses its airtight seal, the flash chip is degrading, or the aluminum is slowly delaminating from the plastic disc of the DVD.
If this seems like too much work, then your data isn't important enough to protect in the long term.
Tsunami + Obama = Tsubame? ...
(yeah, yeah, I'm going....)
Nah, it wasn't anything like that. I would expect to have points deducted from a 10 page paper if the syallbus said it was supposed to be 5-8 pages long because that's just a failure to follow instructions.
The instances that I had in mind were when I attempted to learn something about the subject by referencing the materials besides those listed in the curriculum or asked them questions about concepts were related to the subject but not explicitly part of the class. In college, at least one of my teachers was not pleased that I bought or checked a book out of the library that dealt with the subject in the class.
Recently, I've been taking online classes from a nearby university and even though the class takes place on the web, many of my teachers so far have quietly (or otherwise) discouraged posting links to other sources of information on the web. Some instructors are really great, but too many of them have the "my way or the highway" kind of attitude towards teaching. They have no problem emphasizing that students are responsible for their own success or failure in the class. But if you try to do any learning outside the bounds of the syllabus, watch out.
curse that nonexistant </blockquote>
Just imagine the whining that would be going on if the iPhone were open source.
It's even worse than all that. I went to a pretty bad public school and from what I've been able to tell, many teachers become teachers simply because they want to be in some position of authority but lack the intelligence and ability required to lead mature adults. So they settle for the next best thing: children who are unable (in most cases) to defend their ideas and dignity.
During the time I did in the public school system, these types of teachers always held the attitude towards their students of, "You'll learn whatever I decide to teach you and anything else is useless, irrelevant, or forbidden." They can't stand the idea that some kid would know something that they don't. These are the teachers who discipline students who correct them, confiscate books that have a little swearing in them, and so on. Even in college, I witnessed more than one teacher who outwardly frowned upon students doing more work than the syllabus required.
Wow, thanks! Google's translation wasn't too bad, I think I understood what you were saying.
Another Slashdotter pointed out that the closest social psychology term for what I described was callled the "door-in-the-face" technique. The main difference between that and what I described is that the in door-in-the-face technique, the second request is usually a much smaller favor than the first. In the case of the U.S. laws I described, there is practically no real difference between the first and second bills so I'm not sure it's quite the same thing, but even if not, it's pretty close.
http://everything2.com/e2node/Door-in-face%2520technique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Door-in-the-face_technique
Ha, well there it is. Now I know what it's called. Thanks for the link.
The scariest part is that these case is absurd on a number of levels, but at least one judge so far thinks this Zebulon J. Brodie whackjob actually had a valid point.
First off, the First Amendment protects freedom of expression. We're not all the way there yet, but most intelligent people (including many judges) agree that anonymity is essential to guarantee free speech without fear of reprisal. One exception of course is for libelous or defamatory statements but those do NOT include negative criticism framed as opinion.
The statement "[one] of the most dirty and unsanitary-looking food-service places I have seen," is very clearly an opinion by the author and he or she is making a personal judgment of the place in comparison to other food-service stores.