While I'm a bit dubious of why Microsoft cares, I'm also coming off two weeks of appalling pain in my left (non dominant) hand. It arrived in the middle of the night after a long day at the keyboard, with enough force to wake me up and keep me awake. A little thought revealed the culprit: A decorative metal strip (sort of like half a pipe) runs around the table where I sit, and my wrists were resting directly on it. Plenty of ibuprofen and padding with a soft towel took care of the immediate problem, but I probably lost three days of productive work. Actually I couldn't drive properly either. A padded wrist rest seems to be helping now. I think it's very easy to sit there and work while being entirely unaware of a low level of discomfort that can then become acute.
Somebody with points should mod your post up as "interesting." I lived in the Far East when I was a child and remember the same thing--at least three readily available bananas with different characteristics--one yellow, one that was green in color even when ripe, and one that was reddish, kind of small, and intensely sweet.
I wouldn't send it to her at all. I'd take it to the consultants and stick around while it's being used, or have them come to my facility to use it under my control and conforming to my policies and procedures. You can use the most ultra-secure encryption you want, and you've got no clue as to what's going to happen as soon as the data gets to the other side. The first rule of security has always been "install a good lock on the door to the computer room." The other platitude that applies here is "good fences make good neighbors." Or in other words, if the consultants don't like your security, you probably need new consultants. The idea of taking the data away from the premises, loading it into a brand-new package, and then bringing the whole thing back inside just gives me the heebie-jeebies. Your HR people need you to tell them this. That's why they're doing HR and you're doing IT.
That for the interval covered by the (Bill) Clinton administration, my inbox was full of conservative (and Republican) generated "pass it on" emails vilifying him and anybody else connected with his administration. I probably got two or three a day. For the past eight years we've had a Republican in office, and I don't remember even a single liberal (or Democratic) generated email vilifying the Republicans. I'd almost have to say that if you observed my inbox, Republicans and conservatives love to send these out and liberals and Democrats don't.
Paper certainly is cheap, and it's been around a long time--a much longer time than exit polls, on-the-spot reporters, and cable news. We've now grown to expect that a winner will be declared in State X fifteen minutes after the polls close there. Used to was, people waited days to know the election results. The famous (or infamous) DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN newspaper headline from the U.S. presidential election in 1948 is certainly an example of premature "certainty" in election results. After television arrived, people could stay up all night "watching the election returns" and retire to bed, exhausted, still not knowing the outcome. It takes a little longer to count paper ballots, but it's certainly worthwhile considering some of the alternatives. We just have to get over our desire for almost-instant gratification.
I'm very proud of the son who followed me into IT. When he got his first "real" job, the joke was that he handed them a copy of my resume and said, "You have to hire me. This woman is my mother, and I have her DNA." (He didn't actually do that, but it's become a tradition to say so.) The other joke, which is actually true, is that people in his shop do not refer to side cutters as "dikes," out of deference to my gender if not my inclination. They're always called "side cutters" or "diagonals" in my honor.
Since then he has far surpassed me in knowledge and skill. I listen to him with great care, ask his opinions, and often follow his advice. Above all, I delighted with him and of all he's accomplished. I do worry a little bit about the twitch he's developed in one eye...
If he's reading, I'll just add: Son, I'm really, really sorry I bought the DLink router. I was in a hurry that day. Next time, I'll buy the one you suggested. Oh. And, grandchildren???
I know, this being Slashdot we have to worry about the privacy issues, compare the Mac to somebody's Vista laptop, disparage the cops, fret about security in general, and not fail to point out that a viola is indeed a stringed instrument.
But there's just something so damned satisfying about imagining these two thugs being caught red-handed with the loot. There's the impression of the victim realizing that she may be onto something. Her "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch!" as the fatal snap takes place. The "Oh, shit" realization of the thief, probably followed by frantic thoughts of how he might go about flushing two widescreen TV's and assorted recreational electronics. The genuine gratification of being able to walk into the police station and say, "Here are photographs of the guys who ripped off our stuff, actually using some of our stuff, and we know who they are..." Perhaps then the THUD THUD THUD at the malefactors' door.
It's got all the elements of the classic cautionary tale, and just reading it should bring at least a brief and sarcastic smile to the face of anybody who's ever been robbed.
If I run off the road or fall off a mountain, I hope you're running the search party rather than the person you've replied to. You can also feel free to call the fire department if you see smoke pouring from my house. I'll be sure to do the same for you.
BOTS? Really? As in BOTnets? Shows how much of a CLUE the journalist who wrote this has.
With respect, the journalist is trying to write for a general, non-technical audience of newspaper readers. If we had a few journalists here who were willing to try to explain technical issues at a basic level, we might have fewer computers ending up compromised.
Yeah, and it's a huge part. It's the 800 pound gorilla part.
Testing for useability needs to come in much, much earlier in development, and it needs to involve a much wider cross-section of human beings. And as it's being done, development of adequate documentation and help needs to go hand and hand with it.
It's so easy to disparage girlfriends, the middle-aged, and the elderly--in short, anyone whose job or study is not technical--that I think it's becoming ingrained in the cultures responsible for developing the various operating-system distributions and open-source software packages. This is going to cause them to suffer over the long haul. It's what makes them such a tough sell to people in business.
There's an immense population of middle-aged people, for example, still in the work force. And interestingly enough, they've actually now all got 20 or 25 years' experience as end-users of computer systems. They're not stupid. They all have jobs that they need to get done. They're not interested in being part of user communities and forums. They're not interested in the ideals of free and open-source software. They're not interested in sticking it to Microsoft. They're not interested in that warm feeling of accomplishment that until recently accompanied getting your printers hooked up to OpenOffice--after wasting hours of productive time doing it. They're interested in using their computers as tools to accomplish their current day's work.
Issues of usability and documentation aren't much fun. They're probably the least glamorous and most boring functions of developing the software. That's why they get such short shrift in open-source development. Nobody really wants to take them on, so we're treated to excrescenses like having people guess how to get out to a command line to install their audio player or their scanner or their printer.
Large-scale developers of proprietary software know precisely where their bread is buttered, and they attend to all this as a matter of course.
"Girlfriend" articles seem to appear quite regularly every few months, so at least somebody is thinking about this even at a ridiculous level. A lot more people need to be thinking about it at a much more serious level.
I have to go work on putting some subversive materials on the server. Maybe then their bots, crawlers, and spammers would leave me the hell alone. It would actually be a merciful relief to be free of them for a while. I probably would have been concerned about that sort of oppression a few years back, but at this point I'd have trouble summoning up enough energy to care.
If it's pre-literate reasoning, then I'm guilty, guilty, guilty. I would submit, though, that it can be an unconscious but powerful force.
Over just the past twelve months I've had to worry about whether I was poisoning my kids, dogs, and self--all with items manufactured in China.
When I sit down to my desk to look at the server logs, the firewall reports that it's blocked umpteen hundred illegal login attempts over the past day--more than half from China. I turn to the website logs and find that the Baidu spiders are mounting the rough equivalent of a DOS attack just because of their interminable crawling. Apparently robots.txt files are for foreigners. I recall with annoyance trying to contact somebody from Baidu with a courteous communication asking how to limit the crawling--only to have my email bounced because my ISP is blocked over there. Blocking out entire ranges of addresses or the TLD seems to me to be an act of bigotry and ignorance. But it is so tempting just to do it to gain some peace and quiet and give the poor server a rest.
My other work (with gemstones and jewelry) is compounded and made more arduous these days. Is this string of turquoise really from the Sleeping Beauty Mine in Arizona, or is it white chalk ground up and dyed Persian blue by some ingenious folks in--where else but China? (The only way to tell for certain is to destroy one of the stones.)
To be very truthful, it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of objectivity and fairness when one is confronted with these constant, nagging, somewhat low-level annoyances. (I'm not sure that having a kid exposed to lead, or dealing with an injured family pet is actually "low-level.")
The Chinese people and government need to realize that they're faced with an enormous public-relations problem. It's like a pernicious weed with roots in all sorts of places. Only one of them involves Tibet. It's tempting to buid a multi-faceted Great Firewall of my own, just to gain some respite from it.
Almost anybody who works around children, or at least that's been the case in Maryland for about twenty years or so. I worked in the IT department of a children's hospital and was fingerprinted along with every other employee including the doctors. (As I recall, we were also all tested for AIDS). As a parent, and as an employee, it doesn't bother me. I'd prefer not to consign my children to the care of someone with a criminal background. Your alternative if the privacy question bothers you would be to seek employment where children aren't involved.
In hindsight (all these years later) it seems there would have been a million-and-one coping strategies or mechanisms both for the person in question and for the rest of the team. We weren't totally devoid of intelligence, understanding, or even empathy--just utterly unable to comprehend what exactly was going on. If we had known what to expect, we would have known how to respond. It's to be hoped that increased understanding by the public (people like me) will eventually lead to more successful work environments. At the same time, it's to be hoped that people who have this condition won't merely have labels pinned on them but will receive the necessary guidance, counselling, therapy, or whatever's needed.
About ten years ago on my second day at a particular job, I met the man who had just been recruited to serve on the same team--we were to be close colleagues. My only recollection of what I was doing is that I was sitting in the back room fooling around with servers--configuring them. After the briefest of introductions, he seated himself in a chair next to me, watched for a few minutes, and proceeded to roll his chair over my feet to get to the box I was working on.
It was the first of innumerable tooth-gnashingly annoying incidents. He had no concept of even the most rudimentary good manners (table manners and the like), no conversational skills at all, no concept of the "person-hood" of other people, whether they were fellow team members, superiors in the company, people of lesser position (such as cleaners, delivery people), or even women he hoped to date. It's as though the rest of the world was two-dimensional to him. In his more communicative moments, he wondered why people, and especially women, disliked him. The rest of the time he kept up a continuously running monologue, doing all within his power to prevent anyone else from voicing a thought or opinion. With all that, he was technically one of the most brilliant engineers I'd ever encountered.
It's good to be around people whose skills are better than yours--but only if you can learn something from them. That was impossible in his case. I was in the midst of a long and fairly prosperous career, and I concluded that he was a sociopath and worked my way into a transfer. I think at some level I thought he might open fire on us all some morning and turn our comfortable little server room into a bloodbath. The transfer improved my working life enormously. Another engineer, a much younger man, simply disappeared into another job and life.
I've come to realize that he was probably suffering from Asperger's or some form of high-functioning autism. These conditions were not as well known then as they are now. For his sake, I hope someone encourages him to seek treatment or therapy. He's got a very lonely old age to look forward to.
Since this "Free Magenta" website has been around for several months in The Netherlands. Lots of food for thought there, such as what do we do about Gay Pride, the Pink Panther, and C*YK color systems? There are suggested error messages for users of Photoshop ("Sorry, this color does not belong to you!") as well as touching eulogies for good old #FF0090 -- or 255-0-144, whichever you prefer. They date the demise of magenta as a free color to 2007.
My first exposure to Clarke wasn't fiction at all but a non-fiction, non-technical look at the future of space travel called "The Exploration of Space." My father must have acquired it in the early Fifties. It was completely understandable to a young reader, and the beautiful illustrations fired the imagination. I went hunting for it on my shelves just now and could not find it; I'm thinking one of my offsprigs must have made off with it just as I appropriated it from my dad when I left home. I was in grammar school when I first read it--didn't encounter his fiction until I was somewhat older. I treasure the memory of it because it wasn't about "IF" we achieve interplanetary travel but rather about "WHEN" we achieve it.
They've taken the legitimate scientific discussion, debates, refinements, questions, and testing and have manufactured a "controversy" where none exists. They've also taken the more scientific definition of the word "theory" (as a hypothesis presented for testing, discussion, and refinement) and given it a popular, fuzzy definition as "something that's not necessarily true."
I think you'll find a lot of Christians out there who are perfectly at home with evolution and other scientific thought because they're secure enough to know that it's not possible to have "proof." Most institutional churches don't take a stand one way or another. I suspect these more intelligent people are in the majority. What we have in the "Discovery Institute" and its ilk is a minority group that was marginalized as lunatics at one point but who've been given a sort of bogus legitimacy by politicians and the press. I suspect the pendulum will swing back and that they'll be marginalized again. Until that happens we need to be concerned with youngsters who may be receiving an inferior and shoddy education.
Carl Sagan in his 1980 pop-astronomy series "Cosmos." He was quite poetic, talking about one "last, perfect day" for Earth as we know it as the sun begins its changes. 'Twas quite a hit in its day, that series (and book).
New York Country Lawyer, you are an asset to Slashdot. I hope you continue to live long and prosper; you've certainly educated me, and I suspect the same is true for a lot of regular Slashdot readers.
I'd like to take a moment to welcome our new amazonian overlords and remind them that men are still very good at mowing lawns and fixing cars.
But parking aside, this sounds like the kind of thing that would have us in genetic hot water in only a few generations. It would be much more encouraging to hear about research into the "shrinkage" of the y-chromosome that seems to be occurring in humans and some other mammals. It would be nice to be able to "fix" this if it ever becomes a real problem.
People don't need to be disenfranchised if they can't fill out a paper ballot. It's quite possible to set up a procedure where the paper ballot is filled in, block by block, by an election official working with the voter, and in the presence of two election judges. The ballot is then reviewed by all concerned. It's a reasonably fair and impartial method, and a private area can be set up at the polling place to accommodate such voters. The presence of the two judges (one from each party) provides a substantial assurance that the ballot will be completed in accordance with the voter's requirements. I've seen this done many times over the years in my own precinct. Ironically, in my own state (Maryland), a goodly majority of the visually impaired citizens who were interviewed for a recent newspaper article have expressed a preference for the paper ballot. They cite exactly the same doubts about electronic voting as the rest of the population.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm a bit dubious of why Microsoft cares, I'm also coming off two weeks of appalling pain in my left (non dominant) hand. It arrived in the middle of the night after a long day at the keyboard, with enough force to wake me up and keep me awake. A little thought revealed the culprit: A decorative metal strip (sort of like half a pipe) runs around the table where I sit, and my wrists were resting directly on it. Plenty of ibuprofen and padding with a soft towel took care of the immediate problem, but I probably lost three days of productive work. Actually I couldn't drive properly either. A padded wrist rest seems to be helping now. I think it's very easy to sit there and work while being entirely unaware of a low level of discomfort that can then become acute.
Somebody with points should mod your post up as "interesting." I lived in the Far East when I was a child and remember the same thing--at least three readily available bananas with different characteristics--one yellow, one that was green in color even when ripe, and one that was reddish, kind of small, and intensely sweet.
According to what I remember reading somewhere, the correct name for this highly-advanced portajohn is the 0 gee whizz...
I wouldn't send it to her at all. I'd take it to the consultants and stick around while it's being used, or have them come to my facility to use it under my control and conforming to my policies and procedures. You can use the most ultra-secure encryption you want, and you've got no clue as to what's going to happen as soon as the data gets to the other side. The first rule of security has always been "install a good lock on the door to the computer room." The other platitude that applies here is "good fences make good neighbors." Or in other words, if the consultants don't like your security, you probably need new consultants. The idea of taking the data away from the premises, loading it into a brand-new package, and then bringing the whole thing back inside just gives me the heebie-jeebies. Your HR people need you to tell them this. That's why they're doing HR and you're doing IT.
I'm in a lot of trouble. By those rules, by Year 5 there won't be any letters left in my first name.
Sincerely yours,
*
Or you might say, "Welcome to America. Would you like to super-size that?"
That for the interval covered by the (Bill) Clinton administration, my inbox was full of conservative (and Republican) generated "pass it on" emails vilifying him and anybody else connected with his administration. I probably got two or three a day. For the past eight years we've had a Republican in office, and I don't remember even a single liberal (or Democratic) generated email vilifying the Republicans. I'd almost have to say that if you observed my inbox, Republicans and conservatives love to send these out and liberals and Democrats don't.
Paper certainly is cheap, and it's been around a long time--a much longer time than exit polls, on-the-spot reporters, and cable news. We've now grown to expect that a winner will be declared in State X fifteen minutes after the polls close there. Used to was, people waited days to know the election results. The famous (or infamous) DEWEY BEATS TRUMAN newspaper headline from the U.S. presidential election in 1948 is certainly an example of premature "certainty" in election results. After television arrived, people could stay up all night "watching the election returns" and retire to bed, exhausted, still not knowing the outcome. It takes a little longer to count paper ballots, but it's certainly worthwhile considering some of the alternatives. We just have to get over our desire for almost-instant gratification.
I'm very proud of the son who followed me into IT. When he got his first "real" job, the joke was that he handed them a copy of my resume and said, "You have to hire me. This woman is my mother, and I have her DNA." (He didn't actually do that, but it's become a tradition to say so.) The other joke, which is actually true, is that people in his shop do not refer to side cutters as "dikes," out of deference to my gender if not my inclination. They're always called "side cutters" or "diagonals" in my honor.
Since then he has far surpassed me in knowledge and skill. I listen to him with great care, ask his opinions, and often follow his advice. Above all, I delighted with him and of all he's accomplished. I do worry a little bit about the twitch he's developed in one eye...
If he's reading, I'll just add: Son, I'm really, really sorry I bought the DLink router. I was in a hurry that day. Next time, I'll buy the one you suggested. Oh. And, grandchildren???
I know, this being Slashdot we have to worry about the privacy issues, compare the Mac to somebody's Vista laptop, disparage the cops, fret about security in general, and not fail to point out that a viola is indeed a stringed instrument.
But there's just something so damned satisfying about imagining these two thugs being caught red-handed with the loot. There's the impression of the victim realizing that she may be onto something. Her "Now I've got you, you son of a bitch!" as the fatal snap takes place. The "Oh, shit" realization of the thief, probably followed by frantic thoughts of how he might go about flushing two widescreen TV's and assorted recreational electronics. The genuine gratification of being able to walk into the police station and say, "Here are photographs of the guys who ripped off our stuff, actually using some of our stuff, and we know who they are..." Perhaps then the THUD THUD THUD at the malefactors' door.
It's got all the elements of the classic cautionary tale, and just reading it should bring at least a brief and sarcastic smile to the face of anybody who's ever been robbed.
If I run off the road or fall off a mountain, I hope you're running the search party rather than the person you've replied to. You can also feel free to call the fire department if you see smoke pouring from my house. I'll be sure to do the same for you.
BOTS? Really? As in BOTnets? Shows how much of a CLUE the journalist who wrote this has.
With respect, the journalist is trying to write for a general, non-technical audience of newspaper readers. If we had a few journalists here who were willing to try to explain technical issues at a basic level, we might have fewer computers ending up compromised.
Yeah, and it's a huge part. It's the 800 pound gorilla part.
Testing for useability needs to come in much, much earlier in development, and it needs to involve a much wider cross-section of human beings. And as it's being done, development of adequate documentation and help needs to go hand and hand with it.
It's so easy to disparage girlfriends, the middle-aged, and the elderly--in short, anyone whose job or study is not technical--that I think it's becoming ingrained in the cultures responsible for developing the various operating-system distributions and open-source software packages. This is going to cause them to suffer over the long haul. It's what makes them such a tough sell to people in business.
There's an immense population of middle-aged people, for example, still in the work force. And interestingly enough, they've actually now all got 20 or 25 years' experience as end-users of computer systems. They're not stupid. They all have jobs that they need to get done. They're not interested in being part of user communities and forums. They're not interested in the ideals of free and open-source software. They're not interested in sticking it to Microsoft. They're not interested in that warm feeling of accomplishment that until recently accompanied getting your printers hooked up to OpenOffice--after wasting hours of productive time doing it. They're interested in using their computers as tools to accomplish their current day's work.
Issues of usability and documentation aren't much fun. They're probably the least glamorous and most boring functions of developing the software. That's why they get such short shrift in open-source development. Nobody really wants to take them on, so we're treated to excrescenses like having people guess how to get out to a command line to install their audio player or their scanner or their printer.
Large-scale developers of proprietary software know precisely where their bread is buttered, and they attend to all this as a matter of course.
"Girlfriend" articles seem to appear quite regularly every few months, so at least somebody is thinking about this even at a ridiculous level. A lot more people need to be thinking about it at a much more serious level.
I have to go work on putting some subversive materials on the server. Maybe then their bots, crawlers, and spammers would leave me the hell alone. It would actually be a merciful relief to be free of them for a while. I probably would have been concerned about that sort of oppression a few years back, but at this point I'd have trouble summoning up enough energy to care.
If it's pre-literate reasoning, then I'm guilty, guilty, guilty. I would submit, though, that it can be an unconscious but powerful force.
Over just the past twelve months I've had to worry about whether I was poisoning my kids, dogs, and self--all with items manufactured in China.
When I sit down to my desk to look at the server logs, the firewall reports that it's blocked umpteen hundred illegal login attempts over the past day--more than half from China. I turn to the website logs and find that the Baidu spiders are mounting the rough equivalent of a DOS attack just because of their interminable crawling. Apparently robots.txt files are for foreigners. I recall with annoyance trying to contact somebody from Baidu with a courteous communication asking how to limit the crawling--only to have my email bounced because my ISP is blocked over there. Blocking out entire ranges of addresses or the TLD seems to me to be an act of bigotry and ignorance. But it is so tempting just to do it to gain some peace and quiet and give the poor server a rest.
My other work (with gemstones and jewelry) is compounded and made more arduous these days. Is this string of turquoise really from the Sleeping Beauty Mine in Arizona, or is it white chalk ground up and dyed Persian blue by some ingenious folks in--where else but China? (The only way to tell for certain is to destroy one of the stones.)
To be very truthful, it's almost impossible to maintain a sense of objectivity and fairness when one is confronted with these constant, nagging, somewhat low-level annoyances. (I'm not sure that having a kid exposed to lead, or dealing with an injured family pet is actually "low-level.")
The Chinese people and government need to realize that they're faced with an enormous public-relations problem. It's like a pernicious weed with roots in all sorts of places. Only one of them involves Tibet. It's tempting to buid a multi-faceted Great Firewall of my own, just to gain some respite from it.
Almost anybody who works around children, or at least that's been the case in Maryland for about twenty years or so. I worked in the IT department of a children's hospital and was fingerprinted along with every other employee including the doctors. (As I recall, we were also all tested for AIDS). As a parent, and as an employee, it doesn't bother me. I'd prefer not to consign my children to the care of someone with a criminal background. Your alternative if the privacy question bothers you would be to seek employment where children aren't involved.
In hindsight (all these years later) it seems there would have been a million-and-one coping strategies or mechanisms both for the person in question and for the rest of the team. We weren't totally devoid of intelligence, understanding, or even empathy--just utterly unable to comprehend what exactly was going on. If we had known what to expect, we would have known how to respond. It's to be hoped that increased understanding by the public (people like me) will eventually lead to more successful work environments. At the same time, it's to be hoped that people who have this condition won't merely have labels pinned on them but will receive the necessary guidance, counselling, therapy, or whatever's needed.
About ten years ago on my second day at a particular job, I met the man who had just been recruited to serve on the same team--we were to be close colleagues. My only recollection of what I was doing is that I was sitting in the back room fooling around with servers--configuring them. After the briefest of introductions, he seated himself in a chair next to me, watched for a few minutes, and proceeded to roll his chair over my feet to get to the box I was working on.
It was the first of innumerable tooth-gnashingly annoying incidents. He had no concept of even the most rudimentary good manners (table manners and the like), no conversational skills at all, no concept of the "person-hood" of other people, whether they were fellow team members, superiors in the company, people of lesser position (such as cleaners, delivery people), or even women he hoped to date. It's as though the rest of the world was two-dimensional to him. In his more communicative moments, he wondered why people, and especially women, disliked him. The rest of the time he kept up a continuously running monologue, doing all within his power to prevent anyone else from voicing a thought or opinion. With all that, he was technically one of the most brilliant engineers I'd ever encountered.
It's good to be around people whose skills are better than yours--but only if you can learn something from them. That was impossible in his case. I was in the midst of a long and fairly prosperous career, and I concluded that he was a sociopath and worked my way into a transfer. I think at some level I thought he might open fire on us all some morning and turn our comfortable little server room into a bloodbath. The transfer improved my working life enormously. Another engineer, a much younger man, simply disappeared into another job and life.
I've come to realize that he was probably suffering from Asperger's or some form of high-functioning autism. These conditions were not as well known then as they are now. For his sake, I hope someone encourages him to seek treatment or therapy. He's got a very lonely old age to look forward to.
Since this "Free Magenta" website has been around for several months in The Netherlands. Lots of food for thought there, such as what do we do about Gay Pride, the Pink Panther, and C*YK color systems? There are suggested error messages for users of Photoshop ("Sorry, this color does not belong to you!") as well as touching eulogies for good old #FF0090 -- or 255-0-144, whichever you prefer. They date the demise of magenta as a free color to 2007.
My first exposure to Clarke wasn't fiction at all but a non-fiction, non-technical look at the future of space travel called "The Exploration of Space." My father must have acquired it in the early Fifties. It was completely understandable to a young reader, and the beautiful illustrations fired the imagination. I went hunting for it on my shelves just now and could not find it; I'm thinking one of my offsprigs must have made off with it just as I appropriated it from my dad when I left home. I was in grammar school when I first read it--didn't encounter his fiction until I was somewhat older. I treasure the memory of it because it wasn't about "IF" we achieve interplanetary travel but rather about "WHEN" we achieve it.
They've taken the legitimate scientific discussion, debates, refinements, questions, and testing and have manufactured a "controversy" where none exists. They've also taken the more scientific definition of the word "theory" (as a hypothesis presented for testing, discussion, and refinement) and given it a popular, fuzzy definition as "something that's not necessarily true."
I think you'll find a lot of Christians out there who are perfectly at home with evolution and other scientific thought because they're secure enough to know that it's not possible to have "proof." Most institutional churches don't take a stand one way or another. I suspect these more intelligent people are in the majority. What we have in the "Discovery Institute" and its ilk is a minority group that was marginalized as lunatics at one point but who've been given a sort of bogus legitimacy by politicians and the press. I suspect the pendulum will swing back and that they'll be marginalized again. Until that happens we need to be concerned with youngsters who may be receiving an inferior and shoddy education.
Carl Sagan in his 1980 pop-astronomy series "Cosmos." He was quite poetic, talking about one "last, perfect day" for Earth as we know it as the sun begins its changes. 'Twas quite a hit in its day, that series (and book).
New York Country Lawyer, you are an asset to Slashdot. I hope you continue to live long and prosper; you've certainly educated me, and I suspect the same is true for a lot of regular Slashdot readers.
But parking aside, this sounds like the kind of thing that would have us in genetic hot water in only a few generations. It would be much more encouraging to hear about research into the "shrinkage" of the y-chromosome that seems to be occurring in humans and some other mammals. It would be nice to be able to "fix" this if it ever becomes a real problem.
People don't need to be disenfranchised if they can't fill out a paper ballot. It's quite possible to set up a procedure where the paper ballot is filled in, block by block, by an election official working with the voter, and in the presence of two election judges. The ballot is then reviewed by all concerned. It's a reasonably fair and impartial method, and a private area can be set up at the polling place to accommodate such voters. The presence of the two judges (one from each party) provides a substantial assurance that the ballot will be completed in accordance with the voter's requirements. I've seen this done many times over the years in my own precinct. Ironically, in my own state (Maryland), a goodly majority of the visually impaired citizens who were interviewed for a recent newspaper article have expressed a preference for the paper ballot. They cite exactly the same doubts about electronic voting as the rest of the population.