I've thought about this for a while and just can't figure out what the need to search for life on Mars is all about. Except for 3rd rate B-movies featuring little green men, life on Mars isn't really interesting at all.
Why? Because no matter what is there when we finally get around to building our Mars base will be destroyed in order to develop a useful environment and atmosphere for humans. Mars life be damned.
So this search for minerals and other natural resources (like water) is very important, but finding life (or even making finding evidence of Martian life a priority at all) is a waste of time.
It's a little like buying a used car. It may be interesting to know a little about the previous owner, but the state of the car is no longer attached to the previous owner. It is what it is, and how well it performs after you buy it is wholly up to you. Mars is ours, no matter what kind of critters we find up there.
Military applications can be considered "creative destruction", so it's not all mindless stuff.
On top of that, if you consider the current role of the army as a nation builder, then it is also important that the military be creatively constructive.
The first thing they should probably look into is shared wireless broadband multiplexing. By synchronizing and RSI-ing home wifi routers across whole neighborhoods, it should be possible to create a large enough mesh in which a communal network is created. By then expanding the reach of such a mesh network through the growth of the group itself (through more community members adding themselves to the network by physically adding newly-bought routers) and through the use of technologies like WiMax, it should be possible to reach an internet logon node. At that point, it's pretty much elementary, my dear Watson, to get a working link up.
The benefit is that as the community grows and more benefits appear for each user, the cumulative benefits become attractive to those who were at first unwilling or wary of such a mesh. When they start joining, they provide their own routers which in turn makes the mesh stronger, more resilient to single-point failures, and simply more stable for everyone.
There are plenty of companies providing this type of solution, but the best that I've found (and seen implemented in various small towns across the US) have been home-grown. Good luck to your parents!
How can I simulate the endless compiling of programs in my environment, and look busy doing it?
Serious answer. Look into the Visual Studio macro system.
Holy shit, it's like Microsoft's own engineers built it into the product just to give loafers a means to look busy while actually wasting tons of time.
Actually, on a more serious note, I saw something like this on Discovery (or NatGeo, I can't remember). The purpose of the study wasn't just to observe patients suffering from bed sores and blood clots. They were subjected to 2 minute exercise regimens every day which were designed to keep them in good physical health even though the rest of the day they were bedridden. The goal was to create exercise devices that could be used quickly and simply without the need for gravity that would provide enough exercise to replace the amount we normally perform here on Earth.
It looked pretty grueling, even if only for 2 minutes a day.
Look, you know and I know that NASA has probably got better things to do than pay some labrats to learn how to eat, piss, and shit sitting down. The effects are, as you say, well known and obvious to anyone who has ever studied space travel and microgravity environments. Muscular atrophy, loss of balance, and other problems are well known.
But the department needs to spend its budget or else face cuts next year. With Obama already looking for ways to divert NASA funds into edumacation, the need is dire and if NASA engineers and scientists can't be busy, at least they can look busy.
I get paid a lot of money to do what I do. But sometimes I just sit around and stare at the monitor and space out. In order to not look like I'm wasting time, I run a Perl script in a command window that prints the text of random files on the filesystem until I stop it. It makes me look like I'm waiting for a compile to finish, and that's enough to keep me in the green.
The implications of such news are obvious. Given enough time, our own moon could fall back to earth and wipe everything right the fuck out. Luckily for us, the moon is receding at a relatively slow pace, so it would take something very big to make it change direction and start back in on us.
That is, of course, if you believe in such a ridiculous liberal myth.
You wouldn't want to come home and find that all your Cherry Garcia has melted and your arugula has wilted because your "smart" house decided to take itself off the grid. You need to have some sort of backup power for quite a few appliances. A way to do this is to produce your own power with solar panels or wind turbines, and in fact a lot of people are already doing that (and pushing electricity back into the system as a net supplier!).
But really, the way to avoid the crunch is to make the systems we use more efficient. If we can't live without air conditioning, maybe we can take steps to make it cheaper and less energy-consuming than our current HVACs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_lake_water_cooling
Of course efficiency improvements are only a temporary band-aid. At some point consumption will overtake the gains made in efficiency. However, if we can forestall the inevitable long enough to move more of our power consumption needs to a renewable energy solution, the better off we will be and the less dependent we will be on fossil fuels.
The Matrix asks a lot of important questions about creation, existence, and perception that every individual absolutely must deal with if they are going to choose their place in the world around them, if they are genuinely going to decide to even be an individual. The Matrix is our generation's telling of Allegory of the Cave, which is the root of all Western European thought about both will and epistemology.
It's not a video, but if you have a science-oriented child in your household, Symmetry magazine is a very good choice. It's published by Fermilab and discusses all sorts of things related to scientific discovery, from particle physics to the daily routine of scientists at Fermilab. It's a regular publication and it costs nothing, so it's only a positive for your kid.
I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" side of the argument and he falls on the "speed, memory, and response time at all cost" side.
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?
It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.
Although I think it is a stupid abbreviation scheme, "mebibytes" and "gibibytes" as represented by "MiB" and "GiB" could really catch on due to this kind of confusion. In every industry except computing, base-10 is assumed to be the standard. It is basically only in this industry that base-2 is the standard, and the confusion over storage sizes becomes an issue.
So either the general public needs to learn about MiB and GiB or storage makers need to start labelling their products as holding amounts measured in base-10.
The former probably won't happen, so we'll most likely see tons of ink wasted on the longer small print.
I thought the advantage of standards was to reduce divergence in systems. The more implementations of particular items, such as screws, conform to a standard, such as phillips head, the better it is for the people who use screws.
You'd be incorrect. The advantage of a standard is that it provides a set of guidelines that define an implementation. If an implementation supports a certain standard (or standards), then it can be reasonably expected to work as specified.
There is no reason to believe that only one specification may be supported in a product or (more generally) a market ecosystem. SGML still exists despite XML's rapid emergence. Even your beloved screw head has many different standards which are mixed and matched in products as necessary.
The only valid point against OOXML is that it contains unclear and/or unimplementable aspects, thus denying others from the ability to create supporting implementations. However, if this is the case, and MS is unwilling to create OOXML implementations for non-MS/Apple platforms, how successful do you really expect the standard to be?
In the end, government documents are write-only. The only thing that matters is the final output, so there's really no point in fighting over file formats since the documents will be archived in a completely non-RW format anyway (like PDF).
The UKUUG taking legal action over the corruption in the vote doesn't make them look like whiners. It makes them look like learned elders who are about to take a stick to a bunch of delinquents.
No, it looks like they are whining over a decision that didn't go their way.
Protest against the standardization of OOXML doesn't appear technologically backwards when conducted in an appropriate forum and it portrays OOXML as the backwards step it truly is.
No, it just says to onlookers that Microsoft's standard is so advanced that even the best and brightest of the computing world can't implement the difficult parts of it. Of course this is due to bad inclusions, but it doesn't make you come off any better by crying about it.
This is about a format to be implemented by anyone who can read a specification
Really? And you were expecting someone besides MS to implement OOXML? On top of that, you were expecting someone to buy an implementation of OOXML that was not developed by MS? Look at all these windmills, Don Quixote!
No, you can't do both and expect to be successful.
Take a look at this year's Olympic torch run. It is quite reasonable that China's human rights record in Tibet be scrutinized and criticized and that pressure be brought to bear against them for their wrongdoing. However, the protests which have tried to derail the torch run have done little to legitimize the Tibetan cause. The legitimacy there comes from years of hard work on the ground fighting and publicizing the plight of the Tibetans. The legitimacy remains intact despite the antics of the protestors. The outcome of the protest is neither anti-China/pro-Tibet sentiment nor is it pro-China/anti-Tibet sentiment. It is merely anti-protestor sentiment, and that does no one any good.
So you are of course free to choose to protest OOXML all you like, but Microsoft isn't a big enough threat to anyone for anyone to care about such a pitiful protest.
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Instead of focusing energy on the ISO vote, focus on getting implementations of the standard that *you* think is reasonable into widespread usage. If you think it is ODF or RTF or HTML or any of the hundreds of file formats for document representation that should be the choice of governments, then get good, usable versions of software into the market.
Standing around crying because Microsoft bought a standard is only counterproductive and makes you come off looking like a bunch of whiners. On top of that, because the whining is explicitly anti-this new standard, it is implicitly perceived to be against progress. So you shoot yourself in the foot by appearing to want to go technologically backwards and like whiny bitches at the same time.
Save the energy you want to spend on protests and lawsuits and direct it towards building a better product.
With enough Free (as in Freedom) distributions out there like Debian, it makes one wonder what the motivation would be to create YAFD based on Ubuntu (stripped of its non-free stuff, I presume) which is in turn based on Debian which is as Free as you wanna be.
Unless these folks are making money off of selling the CDs, I just can't understand the motivation to do this when not only do alternatives exist but those alternatives are the basis for the new distro.
Why can't these people with so much time on their hands work on Hurd and get that out into the OS market?
Slashdot Mirror
It's fine and dandy to have Free (as in Speech) Beer, but I would certainly be better off with Free (as in Beer) Beer.
Free beer is only free if your time is worth nothing.
I've thought about this for a while and just can't figure out what the need to search for life on Mars is all about. Except for 3rd rate B-movies featuring little green men, life on Mars isn't really interesting at all.
Why? Because no matter what is there when we finally get around to building our Mars base will be destroyed in order to develop a useful environment and atmosphere for humans. Mars life be damned.
So this search for minerals and other natural resources (like water) is very important, but finding life (or even making finding evidence of Martian life a priority at all) is a waste of time.
It's a little like buying a used car. It may be interesting to know a little about the previous owner, but the state of the car is no longer attached to the previous owner. It is what it is, and how well it performs after you buy it is wholly up to you. Mars is ours, no matter what kind of critters we find up there.
The government must be amenable to accepting help.
Sometimes the ruling junta isn't interested in help
There is a demonstration of bot infestation and parasite removal in this video at the Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23eimVLAQ2c
This has got to be against Geneva Conventions.
Military applications can be considered "creative destruction", so it's not all mindless stuff.
On top of that, if you consider the current role of the army as a nation builder, then it is also important that the military be creatively constructive.
The first thing they should probably look into is shared wireless broadband multiplexing. By synchronizing and RSI-ing home wifi routers across whole neighborhoods, it should be possible to create a large enough mesh in which a communal network is created. By then expanding the reach of such a mesh network through the growth of the group itself (through more community members adding themselves to the network by physically adding newly-bought routers) and through the use of technologies like WiMax, it should be possible to reach an internet logon node. At that point, it's pretty much elementary, my dear Watson, to get a working link up.
The benefit is that as the community grows and more benefits appear for each user, the cumulative benefits become attractive to those who were at first unwilling or wary of such a mesh. When they start joining, they provide their own routers which in turn makes the mesh stronger, more resilient to single-point failures, and simply more stable for everyone.
There are plenty of companies providing this type of solution, but the best that I've found (and seen implemented in various small towns across the US) have been home-grown. Good luck to your parents!
I program ASP.NET apps, you insensitive clod!!!!
How can I simulate the endless compiling of programs in my environment, and look busy doing it?
Serious answer. Look into the Visual Studio macro system.
Holy shit, it's like Microsoft's own engineers built it into the product just to give loafers a means to look busy while actually wasting tons of time.
Actually, on a more serious note, I saw something like this on Discovery (or NatGeo, I can't remember). The purpose of the study wasn't just to observe patients suffering from bed sores and blood clots. They were subjected to 2 minute exercise regimens every day which were designed to keep them in good physical health even though the rest of the day they were bedridden. The goal was to create exercise devices that could be used quickly and simply without the need for gravity that would provide enough exercise to replace the amount we normally perform here on Earth.
It looked pretty grueling, even if only for 2 minutes a day.
you aren't going to poop into a catheter.
I think I saw that movie on the web.
You can lie all you want, I'm pretty sure Rosey knows you're seeing other hands.
Look, you know and I know that NASA has probably got better things to do than pay some labrats to learn how to eat, piss, and shit sitting down. The effects are, as you say, well known and obvious to anyone who has ever studied space travel and microgravity environments. Muscular atrophy, loss of balance, and other problems are well known.
But the department needs to spend its budget or else face cuts next year. With Obama already looking for ways to divert NASA funds into edumacation, the need is dire and if NASA engineers and scientists can't be busy, at least they can look busy.
I get paid a lot of money to do what I do. But sometimes I just sit around and stare at the monitor and space out. In order to not look like I'm wasting time, I run a Perl script in a command window that prints the text of random files on the filesystem until I stop it. It makes me look like I'm waiting for a compile to finish, and that's enough to keep me in the green.
Call me! No wait! Don't call me! *wink wink*
That's a whole lot of money for getting called.
You know who else should get slapped with a fine? Companies that hire telemarketers.
The implications of such news are obvious. Given enough time, our own moon could fall back to earth and wipe everything right the fuck out. Luckily for us, the moon is receding at a relatively slow pace, so it would take something very big to make it change direction and start back in on us.
That is, of course, if you believe in such a ridiculous liberal myth.
What would happen if you had a war and no one showed up?
You wouldn't want to come home and find that all your Cherry Garcia has melted and your arugula has wilted because your "smart" house decided to take itself off the grid. You need to have some sort of backup power for quite a few appliances. A way to do this is to produce your own power with solar panels or wind turbines, and in fact a lot of people are already doing that (and pushing electricity back into the system as a net supplier!).
But really, the way to avoid the crunch is to make the systems we use more efficient. If we can't live without air conditioning, maybe we can take steps to make it cheaper and less energy-consuming than our current HVACs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_lake_water_cooling
Of course efficiency improvements are only a temporary band-aid. At some point consumption will overtake the gains made in efficiency. However, if we can forestall the inevitable long enough to move more of our power consumption needs to a renewable energy solution, the better off we will be and the less dependent we will be on fossil fuels.
The Matrix asks a lot of important questions about creation, existence, and perception that every individual absolutely must deal with if they are going to choose their place in the world around them, if they are genuinely going to decide to even be an individual. The Matrix is our generation's telling of Allegory of the Cave, which is the root of all Western European thought about both will and epistemology.
That's worth a big damn.
Whoa!
It's not a video, but if you have a science-oriented child in your household, Symmetry magazine is a very good choice. It's published by Fermilab and discusses all sorts of things related to scientific discovery, from particle physics to the daily routine of scientists at Fermilab. It's a regular publication and it costs nothing, so it's only a positive for your kid.
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/cms/
Well, the layout and general ugliness of the site gives an indication as to what could possibly be driving the website.
<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Microsoft FrontPage 6.0">
Ah, a clue!
I have an argument with a coworker frequently about architectural orthogonality vs performance. I fall on the "architecture should be clean and easy to understand and maintain" side of the argument and he falls on the "speed, memory, and response time at all cost" side.
What is more important? Is developer time and productivity over the software lifetime more valuable than CPU cycles? If the price of that productivity imposes a maximum limit on performance, how much optimization should be undertaken?
It's a hard question to answer. On the one hand employees are expensive and hardware is cheap. On the other hand, you can't simply forego developing for performance just because of some religious belief that architecture should be clean.
Although I think it is a stupid abbreviation scheme, "mebibytes" and "gibibytes" as represented by "MiB" and "GiB" could really catch on due to this kind of confusion. In every industry except computing, base-10 is assumed to be the standard. It is basically only in this industry that base-2 is the standard, and the confusion over storage sizes becomes an issue.
So either the general public needs to learn about MiB and GiB or storage makers need to start labelling their products as holding amounts measured in base-10.
The former probably won't happen, so we'll most likely see tons of ink wasted on the longer small print.
You'd be incorrect. The advantage of a standard is that it provides a set of guidelines that define an implementation. If an implementation supports a certain standard (or standards), then it can be reasonably expected to work as specified.
There is no reason to believe that only one specification may be supported in a product or (more generally) a market ecosystem. SGML still exists despite XML's rapid emergence. Even your beloved screw head has many different standards which are mixed and matched in products as necessary.
The only valid point against OOXML is that it contains unclear and/or unimplementable aspects, thus denying others from the ability to create supporting implementations. However, if this is the case, and MS is unwilling to create OOXML implementations for non-MS/Apple platforms, how successful do you really expect the standard to be?
In the end, government documents are write-only. The only thing that matters is the final output, so there's really no point in fighting over file formats since the documents will be archived in a completely non-RW format anyway (like PDF).
No, it looks like they are whining over a decision that didn't go their way.
No, it just says to onlookers that Microsoft's standard is so advanced that even the best and brightest of the computing world can't implement the difficult parts of it. Of course this is due to bad inclusions, but it doesn't make you come off any better by crying about it.
Really? And you were expecting someone besides MS to implement OOXML? On top of that, you were expecting someone to buy an implementation of OOXML that was not developed by MS? Look at all these windmills, Don Quixote!
Of course you mean PostScript, right?
To which you retorted:
I went on to suggest:
To which you responded:
So because you can't win, you will complain until your technically superior solution is accepted? That's called whining (or whinging in Britlish).
No, you can't do both and expect to be successful.
Take a look at this year's Olympic torch run. It is quite reasonable that China's human rights record in Tibet be scrutinized and criticized and that pressure be brought to bear against them for their wrongdoing. However, the protests which have tried to derail the torch run have done little to legitimize the Tibetan cause. The legitimacy there comes from years of hard work on the ground fighting and publicizing the plight of the Tibetans. The legitimacy remains intact despite the antics of the protestors. The outcome of the protest is neither anti-China/pro-Tibet sentiment nor is it pro-China/anti-Tibet sentiment. It is merely anti-protestor sentiment, and that does no one any good.
So you are of course free to choose to protest OOXML all you like, but Microsoft isn't a big enough threat to anyone for anyone to care about such a pitiful protest.
The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Instead of focusing energy on the ISO vote, focus on getting implementations of the standard that *you* think is reasonable into widespread usage. If you think it is ODF or RTF or HTML or any of the hundreds of file formats for document representation that should be the choice of governments, then get good, usable versions of software into the market.
Standing around crying because Microsoft bought a standard is only counterproductive and makes you come off looking like a bunch of whiners. On top of that, because the whining is explicitly anti-this new standard, it is implicitly perceived to be against progress. So you shoot yourself in the foot by appearing to want to go technologically backwards and like whiny bitches at the same time.
Save the energy you want to spend on protests and lawsuits and direct it towards building a better product.
With enough Free (as in Freedom) distributions out there like Debian, it makes one wonder what the motivation would be to create YAFD based on Ubuntu (stripped of its non-free stuff, I presume) which is in turn based on Debian which is as Free as you wanna be.
Unless these folks are making money off of selling the CDs, I just can't understand the motivation to do this when not only do alternatives exist but those alternatives are the basis for the new distro.
Why can't these people with so much time on their hands work on Hurd and get that out into the OS market?