But in another life Ilene Rosenthal was a piano teacher, which kind of means she's probably a more than handy musician. Dunno which posse she's down with, though:)
Sure, call Melinda...
on
Random Humor
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· Score: 1
Melinda Gates was the project manager for Microsoft Bob, which became Clippy. Doubt she did much coding on, but she did do a CS degree so hopefully she can code a little.
Re:We may see limitations imposed soon.
on
Sports Technology?
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· Score: 1
I wouldn't be surprised if we see these new style swimsuits banned after the 2004 Summer Olympics. These new suits are very expensive and offer too much an advantage to any team that can afford them.
Too late. Most of swimming's records have already been broken using the new suits, so banning them would make the records untouchable. Having world records fall is an essential part of getting media attention for swimming, so I can't see how they could possibly put the genie back in the bottle now.
If the only drive that's going to have to read it is, well, the same one that wrote it, compatibility's not an issue. Provided the disc can be read *reliably* in the drive that burnt it, I would use this quite a lot.
Of course, my next computer (next few months, I think), will have a DVD burner in it, so the point is a little moot...
Tech has changed my sport totally...
on
Sports Technology?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I play field hockey. I've been playing for 17 (I think) years now, and I've seen how technology has revolutionised the game, mostly for the better but not always.
The biggest change to the game occurred in the mid-1970's with the introduction of astroturf hockey fields instead of grass fields. These became common in club-level hockey by about 1985. The introduction of a predictable surface made possible a lot of things that were impossible to do reliably before - stretching the stick out horizontally, on both the "forestick" (right) and "backstick" (left) sides, to trap the ball, evading players by dragging the ball from left to right, faster passing as players needed much less time to control the ball before laying off the pass, and far greater accuracy in passing and hitting.
Just about every other piece of hockey equipment has changed in response. The balls changed from leather to plastic, and dimples were added. Goalkeeping gear was completely revolutionised, with cricket-style pads replaced with huge foam numbers which are great on synthetic fields but would not survive long on muddy grass. However, the greatest changes occurred in stick design.
On grass fields, sticks were designed to have a fairly wide, flat head. This was great for controlling the ball on a bumpy grass field, but was totally unsuitable for swivelling the stick around to drag the ball from left to right - not to mention horizontal-stick trappings (with the old style sticks the ball would often sail straight under the gap formed by the head of the stick on the ground when this was attempted). So the long, flat heads were replaced with a short, stubby surface.
Around the same time, somebody figured out that a stiffer stick hit the ball more efficiently than a less stiff model, and the wood sticks were gradually reinforced with a succession of materials, starting with fibreglass, then proceeding through various fibreglass/kevlar/carbon fibre composites, and so on. Soon, the only wood left in these sticks was in the heads, which at the time was required by law. Easton even released an aluminium stick featuring replacable heads, which was banned after a couple of seasons on (exaggerated) safety grounds. A rule change saw the emergence of pure composite sticks, which is what I play with now. Even a mug like me can hit the ball extremely hard with one, and the top international players strike the ball at upwards of 100 mph - and remember, a hockey ball is heavier and harder than a baseball or cricket ball. Despite the faster ball speed, the synthetic surface has meant that the ball is far more trappable now than back in the pre-synthetic days.
Then, there are the subsidiary technologies. Instead of playing in studded football boots, we wear astroturf shoes, which are much more comfortable and provide much better shock absorption. Our shin pads have improved tremendously. Even the clothing is more comfortable than when I began.
There are a couple of downsides to the changes, though. The first is that with the faster ball speed, defending "penalty corners" has become much more dangerous than it used to be (the game is still relatively safe, compared to many other sports). The second is the massive cost of the facilities and gear. A top-of-the-range hockey stick costs 150 USD or so, and lasts about a season. Goalkeeping gear now costs over 1000 USD. A synthetic field, even the cheaper "sand-based synthetic" fields, costs about 300,000 USD to set up initially, and needs to be resurfaced about once a decade at a cost of about half that, if I recall correctly. An international-standard "water-based" field costs about 750,000 USD. Considering that very few players can play professionally, it is one of the most expensive team sports there is.
But would I go back to the old days of grass fields? Once every so often for a hit-and-giggle game, maybe. But full-time? Not on your life.
Australian wines are almost the same price in Australia (in AUD) as they are in the US (in USD). That used to make them about half the price, now it's about a third off once you do the conversion.
We rarely bother drinking much else - to get drinkable European wines costs a bomb, and American wines are very expensive and very rare (we only bother importing the good stuff, the rest isn't worth the both).
Idiots that play their stereos so loud (in public, not in a competition like this) that the sound of Britney Spears meets somewhere in your cerebellum despite the fact you're not in the car are making public nuisances of themselves. Whilst I'm not in favour of randomly destroying their equipment, I don't have a problem with appropriate measures to deal with them.
Are you sure you got the best deal you could? I pay
AUD $0.36 per minute for outgoing on Orange, and that's their low-volume plan - going to a higher-volume one you can probably get a better deal.
Oh, and the reason why inbound calls and text are all free is that the person who calls you pays more than to call a landline.
Scientific papers and fait accompli...
on
Hacking the XBox
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· Score: 1
He talks as much about the unsuccessful paths as the ones that paid off. (This is, I think, an ideal model for the scientific community. It's much more educational than the terse papers that present the results as fait accompli.)
I agree with this, but it's sadly not how it works, and there are reasons why it's true.
Conference reviewers and journal editors don't want to public papers about failing to do things, even if it's useful information. If you've got a surplus of papers to publish, what are you going to do - publish the ones about things that worked, or things that didn't?
As far as reporting incremental failures, you're always submitting to strict length limits. Consequently, you have to edit your work down to the bare essentials and essentially try and sell your genius to the reviewers. Unfortunately, publishing incremental failures doesn't tend to help with that.
Until senior scientists start standing up and advocating a change in the way papers are edited a more informative approach isn't going to happen.
Client side filtering is not an ideal spam solution, but it's a good thing on both a micro and macro scale.
For the 99% of people who don't respond to spam, it makes no difference to the spammer whether they filter it or delete it manually. At an individual level, it reduces the amount of spam I have to deal with to managable levels.
For the 1% that *do* respond to spam, having a filter might reduce the amount of spam they respond to and thus reduces the financial rewards for spammers. Anything that reduces the financial rewards for spammers is going to help reduce the spam levels.
If spammers are spending all their time and money figuring out how to beat filters, that's time and money that they're not using to send spam.
As for your indictment of spam filtering providers, could you please explain where the spamassassin devteam is making money?
My choices with regards to spam at the moment are simple. Use spamassassin or something like it, or wade through spam myself. I know which I'd prefer.
This seems like a good idea. Not the revolution that we'd all like, but still a good idea.
However, all the good intentions in the world don't matter if the bill doesn't get up eventually.
Does this bill have any chance of getting through the two houses of Congress?
As far as the neocons are concerned, China is still the main game. Why do you *really* think the US is building its missile defence system? "Rogue states" my arse. It's all about being able to defend Taiwan without having to worry (quite so much) about nuclear blackmail from the Chinese if you do so.
Has it occurred to any of your cinematographer friends that maybe this new media will allow them to do things differently, and maybe better (for some things, at least)? Sure, you might want to use 24 fps for effect, but surely there's times where there's things that can't be shot well now, but could look great at a faster frame rate...
The USD is way, way, way, overvalued, because of the huge capital inflows to the US, thus making American exporters uncompetitive and American manufacturers in the domestic market uncompetitive with imports. Falls in the US dollar will help restore balance to the US economy. It might be a little hard on US consumers as imported goods get more expensive, but a stimulated US economy is a good thing for the US and indeed the world.
Unless you intend travelling overseas in the near future (and that puts you in a minority of Americans) you should be putting your (American-made) party hats on and celebrating this end to an imbalanced economy.
IANAL, but as far as I can tell SCO is suing IBM, not Linus, and the issue of whether Linus is cavalier about patents has precisely nothing to do with the actual lawsuit.
As I understand it, the lawsuit is about IBM contributing code to Linux that SCO claims it owned the rights to, and which they didn't have the right to distribute. There was no way Linus or anyone else who didn't have access to IBM's contracts with SCO, could determine that. In any event, the case certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with patents.
One can only draw the conclusion that they're throwing mud in the hope that some will stick.
I'd imagine IBM don't particularly like companies trying to, when stripped of the legal niceties, basically extort money out of them. Crushing SCO sends a message to anyone else who might try it that IBM isn't going to roll over easy.
Sorry, if you want a geek pinup it has to be Danica McKellar (Winnie Cooper from The Wonder Years). Not only was she hot as Winnie, she's still pretty hot as Elsie Snuffin in The West Wing (as geeky a show - though in a different area of expertise - as has ever been on television), and even better, she's published an article in a peer-reviewed physics journal.
But, you keep on with your video game girl...less competition;)
Basically, we need a huge reduction in space launch costs to be able to build solar power satellites. That's regardless of whether we build them from Earth or try to manufacture them from the Moon or from asteroid material (in this case, to run an off-Earth economy of that size will require much cheaper launch capabilities than what we now have).
If somebody can construct a space elevator that would do nicely...
I haven't read the whole bill, just the fact sheet, but the proposed law isn't great. Here's my take, based on the fact sheet:
The first thing it doesn't do is ban unsolicited commercial email, as is the majority position amongst anti-spam campaigners.
It *does* create a national "do-not-spam" list. If you're on the list, and you get sent spam, it's a criminal offence. The list will be protect by "military-grade encryption", whatever this means. I'd like to see a few more details on how they ensure that spammers can't get addresses out of this database.
It makes it illegal to forge headers and to have misleading subject lines in commercial email. Sounds reasonable enough.
Requires be able to unsubscribe. Whatever. What happens when they shut down their fly-by-night company and sell the addresses on?
Bans dictionary attacks and "address harvesting". This one I'm not really all that keen on, particularly the bans on "address harvesting". It doesn't seem useful - what's to stop a foriegner doing the address harvesting and then selling the collected addresses to an American spammer? There's no mention of a provision in the bill banning the trading of email address lists. More to the point, it targets more activities than are necessary to stop spammers, IMHO.
Increases law enforcement resources and penalties. That's a no-brainer.
It seems we were almost wiped out 70,000 years ago, according to this BBC News article.
IANA geneticist, but I wonder whether some rapid evolution occurred amongst these small subgroups that gave modern humans the advantage over the Neanderthals?
The ones who demanded that the Parkers change the South Park subtitle were the MPAA Ratings committee, which is a private organization.
But what if the only theatres within driving distance are MPAA members?
Call it censorship, call it something else, but I don't see that much difference between a government suppressing something and a near-universal industry association suppressing something. It's still just as suppressed.
But if I recall correctly there was a heck of a lot of other verbiage coming out of the architect's mouth that sounded terribly profound but made no sense at all.
I was wondering whether anybody had made any more sense out of it, or that it was just merely impressive-sounding nonsense. But then again, impressive-sounding nonsense seems to be the main stock in trade of many university Arts faculties at the moment...:)
Slashdot Mirror
But in another life Ilene Rosenthal was a piano teacher, which kind of means she's probably a more than handy musician. Dunno which posse she's down with, though :)
Melinda Gates was the project manager for Microsoft Bob, which became Clippy. Doubt she did much coding on, but she did do a CS degree so hopefully she can code a little.
Too late. Most of swimming's records have already been broken using the new suits, so banning them would make the records untouchable. Having world records fall is an essential part of getting media attention for swimming, so I can't see how they could possibly put the genie back in the bottle now.
If the only drive that's going to have to read it is, well, the same one that wrote it, compatibility's not an issue. Provided the disc can be read *reliably* in the drive that burnt it, I would use this quite a lot.
Of course, my next computer (next few months, I think), will have a DVD burner in it, so the point is a little moot...
The biggest change to the game occurred in the mid-1970's with the introduction of astroturf hockey fields instead of grass fields. These became common in club-level hockey by about 1985. The introduction of a predictable surface made possible a lot of things that were impossible to do reliably before - stretching the stick out horizontally, on both the "forestick" (right) and "backstick" (left) sides, to trap the ball, evading players by dragging the ball from left to right, faster passing as players needed much less time to control the ball before laying off the pass, and far greater accuracy in passing and hitting.
Just about every other piece of hockey equipment has changed in response. The balls changed from leather to plastic, and dimples were added. Goalkeeping gear was completely revolutionised, with cricket-style pads replaced with huge foam numbers which are great on synthetic fields but would not survive long on muddy grass. However, the greatest changes occurred in stick design.
On grass fields, sticks were designed to have a fairly wide, flat head. This was great for controlling the ball on a bumpy grass field, but was totally unsuitable for swivelling the stick around to drag the ball from left to right - not to mention horizontal-stick trappings (with the old style sticks the ball would often sail straight under the gap formed by the head of the stick on the ground when this was attempted). So the long, flat heads were replaced with a short, stubby surface.
Around the same time, somebody figured out that a stiffer stick hit the ball more efficiently than a less stiff model, and the wood sticks were gradually reinforced with a succession of materials, starting with fibreglass, then proceeding through various fibreglass/kevlar/carbon fibre composites, and so on. Soon, the only wood left in these sticks was in the heads, which at the time was required by law. Easton even released an aluminium stick featuring replacable heads, which was banned after a couple of seasons on (exaggerated) safety grounds. A rule change saw the emergence of pure composite sticks, which is what I play with now. Even a mug like me can hit the ball extremely hard with one, and the top international players strike the ball at upwards of 100 mph - and remember, a hockey ball is heavier and harder than a baseball or cricket ball. Despite the faster ball speed, the synthetic surface has meant that the ball is far more trappable now than back in the pre-synthetic days.
Then, there are the subsidiary technologies. Instead of playing in studded football boots, we wear astroturf shoes, which are much more comfortable and provide much better shock absorption. Our shin pads have improved tremendously. Even the clothing is more comfortable than when I began.
There are a couple of downsides to the changes, though. The first is that with the faster ball speed, defending "penalty corners" has become much more dangerous than it used to be (the game is still relatively safe, compared to many other sports). The second is the massive cost of the facilities and gear. A top-of-the-range hockey stick costs 150 USD or so, and lasts about a season. Goalkeeping gear now costs over 1000 USD. A synthetic field, even the cheaper "sand-based synthetic" fields, costs about 300,000 USD to set up initially, and needs to be resurfaced about once a decade at a cost of about half that, if I recall correctly. An international-standard "water-based" field costs about 750,000 USD. Considering that very few players can play professionally, it is one of the most expensive team sports there is.
But would I go back to the old days of grass fields? Once every so often for a hit-and-giggle game, maybe. But full-time? Not on your life.
We rarely bother drinking much else - to get drinkable European wines costs a bomb, and American wines are very expensive and very rare (we only bother importing the good stuff, the rest isn't worth the both).
Oh, and the reason why inbound calls and text are all free is that the person who calls you pays more than to call a landline.
I agree with this, but it's sadly not how it works, and there are reasons why it's true.
Conference reviewers and journal editors don't want to public papers about failing to do things, even if it's useful information. If you've got a surplus of papers to publish, what are you going to do - publish the ones about things that worked, or things that didn't?
As far as reporting incremental failures, you're always submitting to strict length limits. Consequently, you have to edit your work down to the bare essentials and essentially try and sell your genius to the reviewers. Unfortunately, publishing incremental failures doesn't tend to help with that.
Until senior scientists start standing up and advocating a change in the way papers are edited a more informative approach isn't going to happen.
As for your indictment of spam filtering providers, could you please explain where the spamassassin devteam is making money?
My choices with regards to spam at the moment are simple. Use spamassassin or something like it, or wade through spam myself. I know which I'd prefer.
However, all the good intentions in the world don't matter if the bill doesn't get up eventually. Does this bill have any chance of getting through the two houses of Congress?
As far as the neocons are concerned, China is still the main game. Why do you *really* think the US is building its missile defence system? "Rogue states" my arse. It's all about being able to defend Taiwan without having to worry (quite so much) about nuclear blackmail from the Chinese if you do so.
Has it occurred to any of your cinematographer friends that maybe this new media will allow them to do things differently, and maybe better (for some things, at least)? Sure, you might want to use 24 fps for effect, but surely there's times where there's things that can't be shot well now, but could look great at a faster frame rate...
That's the issue we're discussing here. Not whether it makes for a better movie.
IANAL, but surely the fact that directors of the company were under investigation by the FTC for insider trading is irrelevant here?
Unless you intend travelling overseas in the near future (and that puts you in a minority of Americans) you should be putting your (American-made) party hats on and celebrating this end to an imbalanced economy.
As I understand it, the lawsuit is about IBM contributing code to Linux that SCO claims it owned the rights to, and which they didn't have the right to distribute. There was no way Linus or anyone else who didn't have access to IBM's contracts with SCO, could determine that. In any event, the case certainly doesn't seem to have anything to do with patents.
One can only draw the conclusion that they're throwing mud in the hope that some will stick.
I'd imagine IBM don't particularly like companies trying to, when stripped of the legal niceties, basically extort money out of them. Crushing SCO sends a message to anyone else who might try it that IBM isn't going to roll over easy.
But, you keep on with your video game girl...less competition ;)
If somebody can construct a space elevator that would do nicely...
IANA geneticist, but I wonder whether some rapid evolution occurred amongst these small subgroups that gave modern humans the advantage over the Neanderthals?
But what if the only theatres within driving distance are MPAA members?
Call it censorship, call it something else, but I don't see that much difference between a government suppressing something and a near-universal industry association suppressing something. It's still just as suppressed.
I was wondering whether anybody had made any more sense out of it, or that it was just merely impressive-sounding nonsense. But then again, impressive-sounding nonsense seems to be the main stock in trade of many university Arts faculties at the moment... :)
the scene with the Architect, then. Obviously he understands well enough to ban the thing... :)