The Washington Post writes that the military has met its recruiting goals for this year for the first time since the all-voluntary force. The military is citing economic factors as a reason that recruiting is up.

Some idiot will claim that George W. Bush engineered the recession in order to increase military recruiting for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in 3... 2... 1...

I don't actually have anything to say. Kathleen is due any day, and I'm looking forward to a few weeks of staying home, getting poor sleep, and changing diapers.
But mostly I'm testing to see if journal saving works properly.

We've made some significant updates to the submission/journal system. Visiting Submissions and Journals yields a new form that allows stuff like tags to the data types. There are a number of annoying bugs, but for the most part the dust is starting to settle. More notes will be coming, but this journal entry is really just me putting the final test on the new Journal form.

Sorry, no time for fancy formatting. Here's the article... I don't keep up with the topic, so I don't know why it got yanked. Here's the link, in case it comes back: http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/16/1945246 Enjoy!

The Long Term Impact of Jacobsen v. Katzer
Posted by timothy in The Mysterious Future!
from the stabs-in-the-dark dept.

snydeq (http://www.infoworld.com/) writes
"Lawyer Jonathan Moskin has called into question the long-term impact (http://www.infoworld.com/d/open-source/does-court-ruling-raise-risks-open-source-687) last year's Java Model Railroad Interface court ruling will have on open source adoption among corporate entities. For many, the case in question, Jacobsen v. Katzer (http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/docket/index.shtml), has represented a boon for open source, laying down a legal foundation for the protection of open source developers (http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/03/1447248&tid=185). But as Moskin sees it, the ruling 'enables a set of potentially onerous monetary remedies for failures to comply with even modest license terms, and it subjects a potentially larger community of intellectual property users to liability (http://www.law.com/jsp/legaltechnology/pubArticleLT.jsp?id=1202429618746).' In other words, in Moskin's eyes, Jacobsen v. Katzer could make firms wary of using open source software because they fear that someone in the food chain has violated a copyright, thus exposing them to lawsuit. It should be noted that Moskin's firm has represented Microsoft in anti-trust litigation before the European Union."

Someone on TECHWR-L posted a link to this paper (under the paradoxical title "The Cupertino Effect"), which is about how Excel's autocorrect feature can corrupt statistical analysis of genetic data if/when Excel "makes the wrong assumption" about an entry based on how it looks:

When processing microarray data sets, we recently noticed that some gene names were being changed inadvertently to non-gene names. A little detective work traced the problem to default date format conversions and floating-point format conversions in the very useful Excel program package. The date conversions affect at least 30 gene names; the floating-point conversions affect at least 2,000 if Riken identifiers are included. These conversions are irreversible; the original gene names cannot be recovered.

As the author points out, this can cause gene names to come back in analyses as "unknown," because "[a] default date conversion feature in Excel ... was altering gene names that it considered to look like dates. For example, the tumor suppressor DEC1 ... was being converted to '1-DEC.'"

The authors also note that there is a problem with "RIKEN [4] clone identifiers of the form nnnnnnnEnn" being converted to a floating-point number.

The paper also gives some idea of the devastating scale of the problem and its significance for people doing these sorts of analyses: "A non-expert user might well fail to notice that approximately 3% of the identifiers on a microarray with tens of thousands of genes had been converted to an incorrect form, yet the potential for 2,000 identifiers to be transmogrified without notice is a considerable concern."

As far as I know personally and can glean from the paper, the autocorrect and/or conversion feature is nearly impossible to disable completely, and can only be worked around, possibly unsuccessfully 100% of the time. This suggests that perhaps Excel is not the tool of choice for doing these sorts of analyses. (Does the spreadsheet application in OpenOffice work differently?)

The new freshmeat.net layout completely sucks. The grays are harder to read on a large screen compared to the old format, and impossible to read on a small screen. The color scheme of the previous iteration also made it easy to scan today's updates quickly. When scrolling, the grays just blend together and slow me down.

Well, it made it as a front-page story so I don't have to provide much of a summary of Gov. Ted "Big Brother" Kulongoski's proposed mileage tax on cars.

Briefly, he proposes replacing the gas tax with GPS tracking devices in new cars that will report the miles driven.

The ONLY reason I can think of to use GPS is to also enable tracking of the position and speed of the vehicle. If they just want to know how far it's been driven since the last fuel-up, there is this neat thing built in to the car already called an odometer. Sure, tire size and some other factors can make it slightly off, but it would probably work fine. If you really needed a double-check, there are these neat devices called accelerometers that can be used to determine the speed at which the vehicle is moving at any given time, and therefore be able to calculate mileage. Without tracking the position of your car.

If this becomes law, I predict the following immediate "neat ideas" and abuses will be proposed, with at least some of them becoming reality:

• Law enforcement will be allowed to get information from the device. Since it will likely be activated by radio and transmit by radio, I am sure they will find a way to do so without a warrant.
• Insurance companies will be allowed to get the information in order to surcharge you for driving in certain "risky" areas.
• You will be charged more tax for driving on certain portions of the roadway.
• You will be automatically cited for exceeding posted speed limits on any roadway. Think speed camera on steroids.
• Someone will find a way to hack the tracking device in order to find out where you live, where you work, where you frequent, what your schedule is, etc. and use that information with criminal purposes.

Sure they say that it is only intended to track mileage, but how many other government projects have been abused?

In any case, the proposal is stupid for the following reasons:

• It discourages the purchase and use of higher efficiency vehicles. So much for peak oil and energy independence that Democrats like Kulongoski like to preach. He's a hypocrite.
• Along with that, people driving 6500-pound SUVs will pay the same tax per mile as someone driving a 3000-pound economy car. Road wear contributed by a vehicle is directly affected by weight and surface contact. Thus, the person driving the big SUV or pickup truck and towing a trailer will underpay for their contribution to wear on the road. At least with the gas tax, the bigger vehicle uses more fuel and will pay proportionally more tax.
• Another "neat idea" - remedy the above by charging more per mile to people with the above vehicles.
• The tax applies if you drive on private, unmaintained, forest service, etc. roads that the Oregon tax will not ever contribute to.
• What happens if I fill up in Oregon, drive 1500 miles in other states, and return to Oregon? Does the next Oregon pump fill charge me for the 1300 miles I drove outside of Oregon?
• Someone will find a way to cheat this. All I have to do is jam the signal from common points on my trips, and I will save money. For instance, there is about 1/2 mile of common roadway I take every time I leave my house, and every time I come back. If I can jam the signal for that part of the trip every time I go, the GPS will think I live at the intersection 1/2 mile from my house. I drive it at least twice a day, totaling at least 1 mile untracked per day. While it won't add up to much for me, it will certainly add up for people in rural areas.
• The regular gas tax will still have to be in place perpetually, unless we plan on letting people from out-of-state or country use Oregon roads for free. So what is the benefit here?

Politicians like Kulongoski piss me off. They are proposing this because revenue from the gas tax has gone down due to higher efficiency vehicles and less people driving due to recent high gas prices. You'd think a Democrat like Kulongoski would be talking about how wonderful it is that we are becoming more environmentally friendly and less dependent on foreign oil. Instead he bitches about the revenue stream going away and dreams up a new lopsided tax that clearly will allow subsequent "neat ideas" and abuses. It's the same with the tobacco tax. One of the reasons always cited to raise it is it will cause people to quit. It does have this effect, and then they complain about the revenue being gone. Now, a simple solution to the gas tax revenue loss is to raise the tax. They have done this for cigarettes, but not for gas (the state gas tax has not been raised for decades). The reason? Raising taxes on the general populace (instead of smokers) is unpopular and the legislature is afraid to lose their seats for an unpopular move, no matter how necessary it may be.

I say this: If they truly believe that raising the tax is necessary for the common good, then they should just do it, their seats in the legislature be damned. This is proof that their priority is power and influence, and not the public good. Instead, they are a bunch of cowards. A legislator who truly wanted to serve the public good would do what he/she thought was right even if it meant the populace would be pissed off at first and it cost him/her their seat in the legislature.

If this proposal passes into law, I will move away from Oregon, taking my high wage (and therefore high income tax) with me.

Thoughts from anyone else?

[Edit: Fixed some spelling mistakes now that I have slept. I was evidently tired enough when writing this to ignore the red underline indicating my misspellings.]

Somebody had to say it. Might as well be me. :-)

The weather put a wrench in our normal plans to involving an annual trip to see family, so my wife, daughter, and I will be celebrating Christmas by ourselves. Having counted on being able to travel and do presents elsewhere, the house is almost undecorated and opening presents will take about 30 seconds. It's not exactly the kind of Christmas I want to give to my family. Normally we count on the fun Christmas atmosphere with relatives. Instead, I was scrambling yesterday to buy a tree and other such things that I hadn't planned on doing, as I at least wanted my wife and daughter to have something.

Then again, I am still employed, the house is warm, and we have plenty to eat, so perhaps not much "Bah! Humbug" in it after all.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

Ghosts of Slashdot: 11/13/2008
[This looked like an awesome story, and it's a new discovery, so I wondered why it got yanked. Turned out there was an even more awesome version in the pipeline, that referenced not one but two extraterrestrial systems being imaged, and threw in a jab at the Hubble to boot. Plus, this story linked to a page on the KeckObservatory.org site that doesn't have any actual content (perhaps it was about to get Slashdotted and they blanked it to avoid meltdown?).]

First Picture of an Alien Solar System
Posted by ScuttleMonkey in The Mysterious Future!
from the say-cheese dept.

dtolman writes

"Astronomers at the Keck Observatory have announced that they have taken the first image of an alien solar system. 'The new solar system orbits the dusty young star named HR8799, which is 140 light years away and about 1.5 times the size of our sun. Three planets, roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, orbit the star. The sizes of the planets decrease with distance from the parent star, much like the giant planets do in our system.'"

What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.

Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! And it's not the same as seeing an article come close-but-not-close-enough on the Firehose. These stories were accepted, posted on the front page for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.

For people who do things like this.

One of the joys of being a UNIX sysadmin has been working on Sun systems. While I run Linux on the desktop and have built a multitude of Linux systems that are in production today, I much prefer to stand up big Sun boxes with lots of SPARC CPUs running Solaris.

Today's release of Solaris 10 10/08 brings us ZFS boot and root, enhancements to zones/containers, and some other things. I am looking forward to blasting away the existing installation on my Sun workstation and installing this release.

It's a nice treat for Halloween.

Today was my last day at my (now former) employer. Tomorrow is my first day as an employee of the outsourcing company. There's still no press release from either. In the earnings call this week the CFO said that my (now former) employer was outsourcing "some" IT services. In reality, they are only retaining some.

So my badge went from blue to yellow. I can't use the gym anymore (unless I pay). I can't get employee discounts. My unused PTO was paid out to me. The new employer does not accrue PTO, and has graciously granted me 2.5 days of PTO for the remainder of the year. Gee. Thanks.

I found out some news about where I fit in. I am something called a UNIX Integration Engineer or similar. My manager also went to the outsourcer, and I continue to report to him.

On Monday I am supposed to report to the same place, same time, and do the same thing I did today.

However, it will certainly be different.

Ghosts of Slashdot: 10/24/2008
[Finally, I think this one will *stay* dead! No idea what it's all about, or why it didn't stay on the front page. Probably a dupe, but it's far enough outside my sphere of knowledge that I wouldn't know exactly what to search on. And, I have to admit, I'm not interested enough to find out...]

Antitrust Working For Samba and FSFE
Posted by kdawson in The Mysterious Future!
from the in-an-ideal-world dept.

H4x0r Jim Duggan writes

"It's now just over a year since Microsoft lost their final court case in the EU regarding breaches of antitrust regulation. Samba developer Andrew Bartlet writes in his blog that the documentation and help MS was forced to deliver is proving truly useful: '[T]he bottleneck is our own pace of implementation and comprehension, not missing documentation or the difficult task of network analysis so often required in the past.' FSFE blogger Ciaran O'Riordan also explains the motivations for those years of work. Hint: it wasn't about fines."

What are the Ghosts of Slashdot?
As a Slashdot Subscriber, I get to see stories before they're posted to the general public. This means that I get to see the mistakes -- the articles that almost made it, but got sent to the cutting room floor at the last minute. They become the Ghosts of Slashdot, a URL that points to nothing.

Note that this is NOT the same as whining about article submissions that didn't get accepted! And it's not the same as seeing an article come close-but-not-close-enough on the Firehose. These stories were accepted, posted on the front page for subscribers, and then pulled from the site. Their brief existence gives us a glimpse into the Slashdot post-submission process, for those who are interested in what's going on behind the curtain.

Pudge made a cool change in discussions- if you link to a comment deep inside a thread and click 'More' the sytem is much more intelligent about crawling down and retrieving children, and then parents and grandparents and so forth up the ancestry. So odds are you'll get more related comments sooner.

We now abbreviate journals in the firehose... so they are more like slashdot stories with a Read More link to the full text.

The big user facing change this week was structural: historically we had 2 different "skeletons" on Slashdot, but with this refresh we unified to a single one. This change simplifies maintenance for us quite a bit (maintaining the idle section and the firehose views of the same data was a royal pain).

You also will see some changes to the firehose.pl layout. We're playing with the tab layout a bit, moving some menus around and better integrating the core functions into the site chrome. It's a bit buggy atm, so feel free to email me if you see something wonky. We're extinguishing a few minor brush fires but there's no forest fires that we're aware of.

Zach knows the wind now. I saw him look at the window and see the leaves rustle. He then started making blowing noises. We blow the mobile over his crib whenever we change his diaper, so he knows the blowing noises move objects. But he's translated that to leaves hundreds of feet away through a window. Now I'm not saying he's a genius, but he's pretty awesome.