- Rick Warren: Not willing to stand against executing gays and lesbians – From Sydney.
- Search for aliens costs school employee job – SETI is great but installing it on all 5000 of your school’s computers and bogging down the network, not good. From James Fox.
- Men’s genes “may limit lifespan” – Men carry the seeds of their own destruction in the genes present in their sperm, research suggests. From Steve.
- Virginia yoga instructors sue state on plan to regulate training – “The Old Dominion, they say, has stretched too far into an ancient, spiritual practice.” From Chasmosaur.
Words cannot express my rage at Rick Warren, “The Family,” and the government of Uganda.
A nude male yoga instructor with a minor injury is a Yogi bare with boo boo.
How the hell does it cost $1m to remove Seti @ home from a bunch of computers? It’s called “uninstall”.
@Mark Hall: Apparently Dr. Evil is doing it for them?
@Mark Hall: It costs $1M because they fired the network guy.
@granular_serene: It costs $1M because they fired the network guy.
Possibly also the bureaucracy views this as a perfect excuse to shift the expense for new computers to the maintenance budget.
To any officials associated with the SETI@Home problem: I will be happy to solve your problem for a mere $500,000.
Maybe they *assumed* it was a virus, and ordered a complete re-install of the entire lab. A common end-user error – everything’s a virus if it looks unfamiliar, and you don’t know what it does.
But even still, if you have that many computers, it pays to have a common image that you can reinstall from.
The only way I can imagine it costing that much is if they have a whole sh*t load of computers, or if they’re including the cost of work lost due to network and processor lag. Even that’s a little much.
I’m not sure why it’s surprising Warren refuses to stand against those laws. Why would a fundamentalist Christian be against a law persecuting gays?
It’d be like the Trix Rabbit passing on a bowl of Trix.
My guess is that Rick Warren is just jealous that a law requiring the death of gay people is limited to Uganda and not extended the United States.
I haven’t used S@H for a few years, but back in my System Administrator days, I had it installed as the screensaver on a dozen headless Macs I had stuck in an unused cube. It was fun to have the little farm sitting there churning away. The questions I got about it were amusing too.
Boss: “What’s up with the cube full of hard drives?”
Me: “Those are spare machines, I’m setting them up in case someone’s workstation goes down.”
Boss: “Why are they all on?”
Me: “Updates.”
Boss: “But they don’t have monitors or keyboards.”
Me: “Firmware updates. Very tricky. I ssh into to them from a remote terminal, then route the backups to /dev/null. Makes for faster transfers over the network. Also it allows me to rapidly implement a document standardization system using common industry protocols*.”
Boss: “Keep up the good work.”
*= install microsoft office
I miss that job. Babysitting a nearly all Mac design firm was a great deal of fun. Lots of free time to work on my own projects, endless games of Quake… decent salary… too bad the place imploded.
Oh, and SETI really didn’t affect the network at all that I noticed. The school must have a huge setup, and SETI running as a background task instead of as a screensaver.
Despite the fact that the pro-yoga people in that article sound pretty vapid in their defense, I don’t understand what regulation is supposed to do. Is it doing enough harm that could be stemmed from expensive state regulation? Has this been shown to be the case with, say, personal trainers, or as the article states, ballroom dance?
Bellydance isn’t state regulated, but you can hurt yourself pretty darn well if you are doing it wrong. My teachers go through expensive private certification to be able to teach what (at least seems to be from my experience) a very safe way of dancing, and state regulation on top of that just might shut them down financially.
I just wonder if these regulations are consistent or efficacious.
And…. oh my gosh…. is that really a picture of a UFO on an article about SETI@Home?!
*headdesk*
@Peregrine: “…including the cost of work lost …”
Thats what I was thinking. I suppose it could have been a really large school district with dozens of schools.
@Nicole: Yea, I wasn’t sure if that was the article authors idea of a joke or an editorial comment.
There’s a thread over on the Randi Forum about the Seti@Home on Work PCs issues. Apparently there is more to that story:
The IT Admin in question also forgot to install firewalls, security patches, and other basic functions which may have put private data at risk.
He may also have stolen some hardware.
In short fired for incompetence, while the Media jumped on the sensationalistic angle.
@jsg: It’s almost like it was a scientific discovery they were reporting on, with that botch up.
“Teaching, after all, is speech. Pure and simple,” therefore, teaching absolute pseudoscience for thousands of dollars in college tuition is constitutionally protected. Genius!
@jsg: Thanks for the clarification. I kept saying to myself, “S@H only uses idle bandwidth and cpu time, how did this cause a problem?” so I’m glad to hear it was something more substantial behind this.
I carry the seeds of my destruction in my sperm?
And I was having such a good day.
@Gabrielbrawley: COTW
“Virginia announced that yoga teacher training programs, which officials consider vocational classes that prepare students for a job, must be certified by the state”
If it’s a state sponsored vocational program, the state should be able to demand certification. If it’s a religious experience, it shouldn’t be in a state sponsored vocational program. If it’s not in a state sponsored vocational program, then it gets classified with golf pros, personal trainers, and life coaches – do any of these require state certs?
I’m glad the stuff about Rick Warren and the Family is finally making news. Those people are scary … the more I learn about them, the more I wonder when the movie is coming out.
@Gabrielbrawley: COTW.
Why can’t I be as funny as you?
@Gabrielbrawley: I generally call them “children.”
@jsg: The IT Admin in question also forgot to install firewalls, security patches, and other basic functions which may have put private data at risk.
Wow. That is simultaneously the worst adminning EVER and the worst reporting since the Berlin Daily Mail announced the opening of the Dachau amusement park.
@Gabrielbrawley:
I carry the seeds of my destruction in my sperm?
And I was having such a good day.
Wouldn’t that be reason to get rid of as much of it as possible? Sounds like a medical excuse to me.
@Mark Hall: Idle genitals are the Devil’s Turkey Baster?
@Zapski: Thank you
@marilove: Thank you
@ZachTP: True, true
@Mark Hall: I will take this under advisement. Now if I can just recruit a helper.
Regarding the SETI fellow, it seems that the school also asked him to uninstall it previously and he didn’t do so. Over 3 or 4 years, it isn’t implausible that this could add up to on the order of hundreds of thousands of dollars in electricity costs.
So my genes are dooming me? Stupid Y chromosome [mutters].
They should regulate Yoga teachers everywhere. Don’t get me wrong, the practice of yoga is pretty awesome and indeed beneficial for you, but try to find an instructor that’s not spouting out woo. Just the “open yourself to the universe” nonsense is too much for me to ever pick up yoga.
I carry the seeds of destruction in my sperm and I have spent a lifetime trying to rid myself of as much of it as I am able, sometimes with a little help from my friends.