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Larry Niven wrote a story about this "Safe at any Speed". See http://variety-sf.blogspot.com/2007/12/larry-niven-safe-at-any-speed-short.html

At it's peak the Apollo program had no more than twice the budget than they have now. I wrote an article about this because Bob Zubrin of The Mars Society often says that the average budget during Apollo was the same as the average budget of the comparable period up to today. It isn't, but people who say it was 4x or 8x or 10x or "a budget they could not even dream of today if you ignore inflation", are just as wrong. Yes, the motto of Apollo was "waste anything but time" and that meant they got all the budget they needed, but they had that motto because people didn't think like that, and it had to be drummed into them. Compare that to NASA today.. they piss away money on frivolous programs that are poorly justified, go nowhere and get canceled, then they start another one. In a word, they're "adrift".
 

I agree with Bruce that Peer-to-Patent isn't the answer. In a way, it makes that system even stronger.

However, one cannot generally oppose the idea of patent quality. In other words, if there is a bad patent application and someone happens to spot it on Peer-to-Patent, there's nothing wrong with providing information that helps get the patent application rejected. I don't think we could argue that such patents should be granted, leaving it to someone else to seek their (costly) invalidation much later. A patent that can be invalidated but previously threatens many developers, distributors, publishers and users is a bad kind of pollution.

If the question is whether spending time on Peer-to-Patent is the best use of time to achieve improvement in connection with patents, the problem is that for the time being I don't see hands-down superior alternatives either for the time being. I still hope that the Defensive Patent License will create a framework under which one can obtain patents and use them against everyone except other DPL supporters. In that scenario, I believe it's better to spend time on applications for such patents and to assert them vigorously against those who refuse to support the DPL. There seems to be a delay with the finalization of the DPL, but I still believe it has huge potential. At least the DPL is company-independent.

At this stage the worst of all patent "defense" initiatives out there is the "Open" Invention Network (OIN). Before anyone spends time supporting that scheme, Peer-to-Patent is clearly the better choice.

I agree with Bruce that Peer-to-Patent isn't the answer. In a way, it makes that system even stronger.

However, one cannot generally oppose the idea of patent quality. In other words, if there is a bad patent application and someone happens to spot it on Peer-to-Patent, there's nothing wrong with providing information that helps get the patent application rejected. I don't think we could argue that such patents should be granted, leaving it to someone else to seek their (costly) invalidation much later. A patent that can be invalidated but previously threatens many developers, distributors, publishers and users is a bad kind of pollution.

If the question is whether spending time on Peer-to-Patent is the best use of time to achieve improvement in connection with patents, the problem is that for the time being I don't see hands-down superior alternatives either for the time being. I still hope that the Defensive Patent License will create a framework under which one can obtain patents and use them against everyone except other DPL supporters. In that scenario, I believe it's better to spend time on applications for such patents and to assert them vigorously against those who refuse to support the DPL. There seems to be a delay with the finalization of the DPL, but I still believe it has huge potential. At least the DPL is company-independent.

At this stage the worst of all patent "defense" initiatives out there is the "Open" Invention Network (OIN). Before anyone spends time supporting that scheme, Peer-to-Patent is clearly the better choice.

It is not clear to me that it doesn't hurt anyone. Let me explain how HFT works (as far as I've understood it, anyway):

Let's say that Alice and Bob want to buy and sell something. Alice is willing to buy at $25, and Bob is willing to sell at $23. In a normal trading market (and repeated as an average over many trades), Alice would be probing a bit and Bob would be probing a bit and it would end up at $24, giving Bob $1 over his minimum and earning a trade $1 below her maximum.

In a market with a HFT Eve, Eve "listens in" at communication between Alice and Bob (because the communication happens over the market), and end up tricking Alice into buying at $26 and Bob into selling at $24 - resulting in $2 that would normally would have been split between Alice and Bob being siphoned off to Eve. Eve has profited at the expense of Alice and Bob.

Assuming that the HFTs don't provide a service of any value (which you seemed to posit previously) it clearly seems to hurt people. To the tune of $20 +- 5 billion per year (according to the profit estimates for low latency trading).

And possibly it hurts even more than that profit. Normally, the marker re-arrange profits to go to the people that are best at investing and providing meaningful liquidity. This makes for efficient distribution of resources, where we as a society invest effort in what is able to provide value (profit) in the future. By siphoning off resources from that process, it seems likely that the process becomes less effective - removing additional value in addition to the $20 +- billion per year they're siphoning off directly.

I'll say that I don't understand all the ins and outs of how liquidity influence the financial markets, and when it creates meaningful value and not. So it is possible that HFT's form of liquidity provide some kind of value, which might in that case offset some or all of the damage they are doing. I don't see how, though.

Anybody else think this was a story about Thunderbird 3 vs Thunderbird 2?

Anybody else think this was a story about Thunderbird 3 vs Thunderbird 2?

You may possibly win an award for the most unreadable three lines I've ever seen on Slashdot.

Just for starters, let me introduce you to my pet, the "alot": http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html

Here is one page...granted, Linux is only 5%, but it's not the 0.05% that some people will claim.
Here is another. The percentages here are much more impressive, with Linux share at just about 25%.
Here is a blog post by Hemisphere games about the viability of supporting Linux.

I'd say it's worth it. I may be a little biased, of course (I don't have any windows machines)...but whenever I hear about an upcoming game with Linux support I preorder it immediately.

In addition to the commentary posted here, Cryptome and another blog have both come to the conclusion that this is little more than a publicity stunt.

There's exactly one article on examiner.com that seems to form the foundation of whatever credibility this group may have. That article breathlessly enumerates some of the "big names" on their roster, but doesn't seem to either vet their credentials or even confirm their membership.

Snow job.

Fortunately, you are wrong. See this Cybercrime blog entry (written by a law professor) for the gory legal details. The meat and potatoes of the post:

The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.

Okay, I looked up a bit on Google, and it seems like this is unclear. Some lawyers argue for each position, but there's been no decision on the matter above the district court level. United States v. Boucher is the only case so far on the matter: a magistrate judge ruled that disclosing the key did constitute self-incrimination, but a district judge overruled him and said it didn't. Text of the district court decision is here.

The reasoning was that the court was only demanding that he produce the contents of his laptop, not that he tell them any information. They wouldn't mind if he typed the password into the laptop himself rather than tell it to them. Since the government knew in advance that there were files on the computer that belonged to him – which they'd practically always know when confiscating your laptop and finding an encrypted drive – he's not admitting anything by giving them the passphrase. It's no different from if they demanded the key to a locked cabinet, which they're allowed to do.

But this interpretation isn't binding anywhere yet. The question is still up in the air.

I also suggest subscribing to Norman Spinrad's RSS feed.

Here's the link on how to crack the DRM on the ePubs that Barnes and Nobel delivers their eBooks in, if you buy one.

http://i-u2665-cabbages.blogspot.com/2009/12/circumventing-barnes-noble-drm-for-epub.html

Norman Spinrad has some interesting points about how the publishing and book sales businesses operate. They're like the music industry, only a lot worse in how they calculate the acceptable level of risk... even if an author has proved to be a fairly safe bet.

One thing is that big corporations lobby for software patents all the time; another is that patent holders often treat inadvertent infringers as "pirates", mislabel them as "copycats" etc.

I'm all for intellectual property, but I think those patent holders who enforce their rights against third parties who've committed no wrongdoing often use inappropriate language in describing the "infringers". I understand the patent holders don't say, "we don't know whether the patents we own will even survive reexamination", but they're not just assertive: they also offend those who made independent creations that someone else just happened to patent before.

IBM's statements concerning some mainframe-related technologies, including the Hercules open source mainframe emulator, are particularly obnoxious.

Let's be realistic and let's hope the local activists will keep an eye on developments: the abolition of software patents is far from certain in New Zealand, as I explained on my blog in detail.

To sum up the NZ problem quickly, the announcement made by the minister in charge talked about "a way forward for software patents", which isn't the same as doing away with them entirely, and indeed, the minister's announcement as well as the New Zealand Parliament's decision talk about allowing patents on devices with "embedded software".

My blog article discusses in detail that a distinction between "software" and "devices with embedded software" is extremely difficult under substantive patent law (the part of patent law that defines the scope of patentable subject matter). For an example, is an operating system of a computer "embedded software"? What about smartphones? Unfortunately, the New Zealand Parliament accepted the notion of patents on "telephones" with "embedded software", and while a small part of the operating software of such telephones is really telephone-specific, the largest part is just an operating system like any other.

Even a patent on a device with "embedded software" can be infringed by software: at least in the form of a contributory (indirect) infringement, which from the perspective of the software developer and publisher concerned comes down to the same exclusionary effect as a direct infringement.

To put it very simple, the problem is that the New Zealand Parliament and the minister in charge didn't say that they would do away with all software that could be infringed (be it on a direct or indirect/contributory basis) by software. They only talked about patents on software vs. patents on devices with embedded software, and even the latter can in principle be infringed by standalone software as well. It's harder to draw the line when coming from the angle of patentable subject matter than when looking at it from the infringement point of view. There's no guarantee in the law that software developers, publishers, distributors and users can't be sued over patents...

Again, for details on where this could go in terms of what patents they might allow or not, it's a complicated matter and I tried to explain it on my blog.

Let's be realistic and let's hope the local activists will keep an eye on developments: the abolition of software patents is far from certain in New Zealand, as I explained on my blog in detail.

To sum up the NZ problem quickly, the announcement made by the minister in charge talked about "a way forward for software patents", which isn't the same as doing away with them entirely, and indeed, the minister's announcement as well as the New Zealand Parliament's decision talk about allowing patents on devices with "embedded software".

My blog article discusses in detail that a distinction between "software" and "devices with embedded software" is extremely difficult under substantive patent law (the part of patent law that defines the scope of patentable subject matter). For an example, is an operating system of a computer "embedded software"? What about smartphones? Unfortunately, the New Zealand Parliament accepted the notion of patents on "telephones" with "embedded software", and while a small part of the operating software of such telephones is really telephone-specific, the largest part is just an operating system like any other.

Even a patent on a device with "embedded software" can be infringed by software: at least in the form of a contributory (indirect) infringement, which from the perspective of the software developer and publisher concerned comes down to the same exclusionary effect as a direct infringement.

To put it very simple, the problem is that the New Zealand Parliament and the minister in charge didn't say that they would do away with all software that could be infringed (be it on a direct or indirect/contributory basis) by software. They only talked about patents on software vs. patents on devices with embedded software, and even the latter can in principle be infringed by standalone software as well. It's harder to draw the line when coming from the angle of patentable subject matter than when looking at it from the infringement point of view. There's no guarantee in the law that software developers, publishers, distributors and users can't be sued over patents...

Again, for details on where this could go in terms of what patents they might allow or not, it's a complicated matter and I tried to explain it on my blog.

Similar thoughts here. And we're clearly not alone. Here's how a friend puts it in his blog:

.. do we give up anything when we switch to this 3D medium? I wonder. Quite a lot, I imagine. For the traditional motion picture is less of a technology than it is of a language, an art form, cultivated over generations. Much of that language is a play on the medium's limitations. The composition of the picture, think of golden ratios, for example, is only realized against the bounds defined by the edges of the screen. Moreover, as our minds have become more introspective, more self-reflective, we have developed a more self-aware narrative, the camera behind the camera, the eye that sees the eye that's seeing. A meta language that describes itself and sees its reflection. A way of thought that cherishes its ability to step back and see itself--in a sense, an ability to step out of an immersing experience, the opposite of immersion. (It's this cultivated mental ability that makes the sports bar possible.).. [more here]

The Supreme Court has held, basically, that you're giving testimony - testifying - when you're communicating, i.e., when you're revealing your knowledge of certain facts or sharing your thoughts or opinions with the government. U.S. v. Kirschner, supra. You can't claim the 5th Amendment privilege to refuse to surrender physical evidence such as your blood, hair or saliva; it only applies to communications, i.e., to something that look like what a witness does when she takes the stand at trial.

less setup, doesn't require a kernel patch (which i think OpenVZ does) http://cgrouphacking.blogspot.com/

No sir, they do not.

http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2010/03/blog-post.html

Professor Perry has many posts regarding the imbalance between private and public salaries. The government pays much better than the private sector in most areas.

Comparably, government employees typically have salaries a good bit below that in the private sector.

A common myth that public sector employees believe so that they don't feel bad about agitating for automatic raises.

Does anyone know of any pre-1923 (i.e. out of copyright) series of educational books for early education that could serve as the foundation for some "open source" textbooks?

Thompson's Calculus Made Easy is PD, and it's quite a good book IMO. Actually 1923 isn't really the dividing line. Nearly all books published in the 20's, 30's, and 40's are PD now. If books from that era didn't get their copyrights renewed after an initial 28 years (and only a tiny percentage did), then they went PD. You can check whether a book's copyright was renewed using links from this page.

It's very easy to find old PD algebra books, spellers, etc. In most cases, they're not anything that 99% of today's teachers would consider using.

Please take a look at those: http://bethstepsup.blogspot.com/ http://planet.laptop.org/

That is why you need to save your iOS signatures, so you can restore to 4.0.1 at any time, even when apple stops signing.

Use this tool to do it: http://thefirmwareumbrella.blogspot.com/

Just as a heads up to anyone thinking of buying and/or jailbreaking an iPhone 4, keep in mind that this is a userland jailbreak (like Spirit) and not a bootrom jailbreak like 24Kpwn. This is significant because this jailbreak only works on iOS versions with the vulnerable component, which means that Apple can and surely will patch it out in 4.1. This is also why Apple is signing their firmware: once they do release 4.1 they'll stop signing 4.0.x and it will be impossible to jailbreak new iPhone 4/3GSes as those devices will ship with 4.1 and it will be impossible to downgrade. Existing owners should be sure to backup their SHSH blobs using Cydia or Tiny Umbrella so that you can downgrade or reinstall 4.0.x in the future, otherwise you will be trapped just like new iPhone owners. 3G owners are also encouraged to backup their SHSH blobs, as Apple is soft-signing iOS 4.x on those devices (even though the hardware can't enforce it).

Anyhow, while I'm excited to see an iPhone 4 jailbreak, I'm a bit worried about the fact that it's another userland jailbreak. No one has successfully exploited the Apple bootrom since iBoot-359.3.2 was released last year, which is troubling. It's not possible to replicate the complete jailbreakability of the iPhone/3G without a bootrom exploit, and as iOS can quickly be updated to stamp out new userland exploits there's a distinct risk of the hackers running out of practical ways to jailbreak the platform through such limited means. Unless someone does find a new bootrom exploit, the "golden age" of jailbreaking has probably already sailed, and in the long run this is a very bad thing. The (practically) unhackable computer marches in on all fronts...

Below The Line - How To Vote In South Australia

If Internet Censorship is your main concern this coming election, the following guide has been created online via BelowTheLine.org.au and using the different parties websites and statements on policies to order them.

While they are ordered in preference of internet censorship, the top 2 are ordered based on their ability to influence. The rest are ordered within their preference (against/unknown/for) relatively randomly, except with the Australian Labour Party being given a dead last position, to reduce their influence.

This ballot will result in your vote being against internet censorship, as much as possible.

If you want to change some of the ordering around a bit, feel free to edit the ticket here...
Edit Below The Line - How To Vote In South Australia

Just make sure you keep them in their general positions.

Some information on what positions each party is taking can be found here, though it's good to go over their websites, news articles, and similar...
Australian Political Parties who oppose and support Internet Censorship

Does it make you wonder how much safer everyone would be if parkas, mailing envelopes, cash, and superglue were all evaluated on the same basis?

Well, before they start messing with things like parkas, I hope they take a moment to remember Why Raincoats are Yellow...

Don't know if I would trust the "Tax Foundation" on numbers bashing the White House. I would go with official stats rather than an op-ed. I mean, the Washington Times article has the paragraph:

In pursuit of this agenda, the Obama administration seems intent on creating a fuel shortage designed to raise energy prices for Americans in order to "save the environment" while enabling a transition to "green" energy sources. One thing is certain: This agenda will indeed raise energy costs.

No citing of data, just a bunch of speculation. Try some official numbers from any one of the myriad gov't sites rather than some bullshit from people who are paid to dog everything the Administration does. (Even if it is largely ineffectual, I think the articles seem to conflate malice and incompetence.)

For reference port 4567 is listening on the OUTSIDE interface...the side that faces the internet. This came to my attention some time ago when I decided to switch from Comcast to Verizon. I did a tad bit of research when I was in between jobs and kept a blog on my adventures with port 4567....that CAN'T BE DISABLED. There are ways to keep verizon from spying on you and illegally entering your computer network. My blog posts are here: http://robot5five.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html Cracking the password hash was trivial, although it took me a little time until I found several other folks had already done it.

* Which is a theory proposed by who? And what's the basis for this theory? With what kind of evidence behind it? Has it been published or critiqued, or is it just scribbles on a notepad sitting in some guy's garage? Does it predict planet-wide variation, or limited to a specific geographic region? What's the projected extreme of this variation and is it even more dire than that predicted by the global warning crowd? Because that'd be kind of an important, and certainly far more important than simply disproving our best science to date and getting their own grants [snip, because you get distracted by rhetoric]

The provenance of a theory is mostly irrelevant. (The only part that is relevant is whether the hypothesis comes from a viable model that may generate several more useful and relatively accurate hypotheses.) The question is whether the evidence at our disposal supports it or not. Some of the questions you ask are mostly outside of the scope of the hypothesis of "inadequate sampling". For example, it shouldn't indicate a particular climate change so things could be much worse in one direction or another (eg, even worse global warming or global cooling).

So what evidence could be considered supporting "inadequate sampling"? One example is that we haven't actually measured average global temperature directly (more accurately, global radiance properties that are closely related to an effective temperature radiated to space) until the late 70s with satellites. Before that, all temperature or other climate measurements (with the notable exception of river flow) were in a strong sense local. Past about two centuries ago, we don't even have direct measurements of local temperature. Not having direct measurements of the desired phenomena is consistent with the claim that we have inadequate data.

Second, how do we test climate models which are key elements of climate predictions? Either find some existing or past climate phenomena to model, or wait for the future to reveal itself and determine in that way the consistency of the model with what transpires. Given the huge acknowledged error in existing models and the resulting variation in consequences, it is reasonable to ask whether more sampling of data would provide better models. If there is evidence to support that subclaim (and I might add, that I don't see that there has to be) then that would be supporting evidence for inadequate sampling.

Now I assert a theory of bias towards a particular global warming scenario. It would predict that current predictions are exaggerated and should see a tendency towards lower climate changes than predicted in the scientific models. Where a range of predictions occur, the actual result should tend towards the more conservative part of the predictions. For example, I recall that James Hansen made some predictions about future global warming (a suitably offensive take on that is located here). The actual path of global warming was in the lower, more conservative part of the predictions (I believe the part consistent with some sort of radical carbon emission reduction). That prediction and subsequent mismatch with reality is consistent with bias on Hansen's part. Given that he is an influential climatologist with a powerful political position, I consider that supporting evidence for my theory.

But we, the consumers would lose. Without a healthy competition, there is no pressure to lower prices. And, there is no pressure to innovate on the existing iPad for Apple. So, yes, I would love to see many tablets - some with an Apple OS, some with Windows, and some with Android. What could be better than having the choice?

Microsoft produces really interesting stuff (such as Surface), and they've made good programs, but they seem to have quality only in small things. When they go to building large systems, layers of execs get involved and turn an interesting idea into a shoddy product.

If MS was writing iPad and AndroidTablet apps, items that were small enough to escape attention from all the Dilbert-like pointy-haired-bosses, and put together teams of 5 or 6 people to work on said projects, they'd probably make a lot of interesting things that worked and bring in some money.

But with Ballmer saying "Our new tablet is a huge deal and needs to be an iPad killer!", what that means is that every manager who wants to be an Important Person is going to stick his fingers in it somewhere, and they'll end up a confused mishmash.

Here's a real example of that happening: http://moishelettvin.blogspot.com/2006/11/windows-shutdown-crapfest.html

And here's a comic look at how things at MS can start great and end up with too many cooks spoiling the broth: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeXAcwriid0

I guess what I'm getting at is that Microsoft is more likely to produce something worth using, and thus more likely to contribute to healthy competition, if small teams are building apps for other platforms. If they're trying to build a platform on their own, that'll be a Very Big Deal down at Corporate HW, and the first dozen revisions will have Clippy-like abominations in them, or be Vista-like bloated disasters, or just be Windows95,98,ME-like bugfests.

If anyone wants the the Google link, rather than ripped content to drive up page hits of someone else's website.

On your second citation, even by your own statistics, if 30% of health outcomes was from "genes" and "access to health care", 70% of health outcomes would come from something other than genes and access to sick care.

But, when you think about it, "genes" don't act alone in most cases (excepting a very few rare conditions). Genes interact with the environment and your history of behavior. That also includes nutrition.

For example, here is an African-American health care researcher suggesting vitamin D deficiency has had a big impact on the health of people in the USA with darker skins:
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html
Some other related research:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health/autism/the-black-community.shtml
This is not to argue against social and economic reforms (we need lots IMHO), just to demonstrate how nutrition or outdoor exercise or choice of clothing and so on can have a big effect on your health from even just this one factor, as health emerges from an interaction of genes and environment in the context of our personal choices (and what we know about how their consequences) -- in this case, the CDC has been doing a terrible job for decades at informing people about the connection between vitamin D deficiency and ill-health, or even studying the issue.

Lifestyle choices for anybody that include whether you smoke, how promiscuous you are, how much you exercise, what drugs you use, your connection to nature, how much you drink alcohol, how much you sleep, what sort of job you decide to take or train for, what sort of friends you cultivate, what community you choose to live in, your spiritual practices (including meditation), whether you laugh a lot, what sort of media you watch and how often, as well as what you eat (including whether it is organic), remain dominant factors in how long you live. Still, sure, how polluted your environment is makes a big difference too, but in almost all cases, not as big, and people often still make choices that relate to that as well (like where to live). And, how well your body handles a more toxic environment is also effected to a big degree by nutrition (how well your body can deal with heavy metals or how good it is as preventing cancer).

If the CDC really cared about your health, they would have raised the US RDA for vitamin D by a factor of ten a long time ago.
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml

I don't see how that CDC page backs up your point. Glancing at that page, how do they quantify "small"? The world "small" isn't even on that page. The major killers in our society are heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and some consequences of obesity, and almost all of those preventable (or for cancer, greatly delayable) by excellent nutrition (which links to behavior, since you control what you put in your mouth). Even Alzheimer's and other dementia is probably greatly reduced by good nutrition. Statistics:
"10 Leading Causes of Death in the U.S., 2004"
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005110.html

Dr. Fuhrman, for example, has built an eating plan that works to reduce lots of disease, based on thousands of scientific studies that say nutrition is a very significant aspect of health:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPiR9VcuVWw

BlueZones, as another example, is one approach to building healthier communities that had an immediate significant (one year) reduction of heart disease and mental illness (including by creating parks and promoting healthy nutrition at local restaurants):

What particularly irritates me is that they seem to be reinventing non-desktop features. Not only is this very much against the "Unix way", but they're doing a terrible job of it and the whole mess is wholly unnecessary. I don't know if we as users are doing a poor job of informing the devs about desired functionality, but I would love to meet (and murder) the person who thought Akonadi would be a good idea.

I feel the same way. The sad part is the unhealthy approach the developers tend to take when they get criticism similar to yours, its almost like they are in complete denial. Check this out: http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html

Perhaps I'm a minimalist, but I like KDE for mostly one thing: KIO slaves. I love the fact that I can open up a file browser and treat remote files almost as though they were local. That makes my life as a developer and sysadmin so much easier. Everything else is fluff to me, as long as I can fire up Kate and edit my remote server's configs I'm happy. On the flip side, everything that gets in the way of that location-shifting goodness is EVIL! Akonadi is evil. Half-assed transitions to libssh2 are evil. Godawful "toaster" notifications and ambiguous error messages are evil. The plasma interface engine randomly crashing every few hours is evil. All those unfinished K apps that nobody uses are evil. I could go on...

no

Yes, KIO slaves are the only reason why I keep using KDE. I don't know how Gnome users can live without it, fuse + ssh is not as convenient.

There are several followups on PlanetKDE too. Aaron Seigo (former president of the KDE e.V. board) has made some remarks here.

http://paleo-future.blogspot.com/2007/04/what-may-happen-in-next-hundred-years.html is a good example. The hit rate is remarkably good (in particular, I like the "Hot and Cold air from Spigots", though some of the predictions are just crazy.

Blog entry about the lack of innovation at Microsoft and some perspective.

Beware: it's *cough* my blog, so this is a *cough* shameless plug *sneeze*.

ad hominem, first line. We're off to a great start already.

I'm sorry if you felt that was a personal attack, but I only meant that your view wasn't "a critical and honest view of the entire cycle" which is what you yourself claimed. I don't think that's an ad hominem in the normal sense. I certainly didn't attack you directly about something unrelated to the argument, which is what an ad hominem normally is.

So you're saying that all the problems with ultracentrifuge technology has been solved, it's commercially implemented on an industrial scale in America and that Paducah has been shut down. Before you call me a liar you could send some links supporting your claims as they look like fiction to me.

The only thing I read about CFC use in the enrichment process came from here: http://neinuclearnotes.blogspot.com/2005/07/usec-response-on-caldicotts-cfc.html

My point in bringing it up was not that you were wrong, but that you were not being critical and honest. You should have mentioned that CFCs are currently used in the refinement process but that the plants responsible for them were designed and built in the 1950s before CFCs were even on the radar. Further, efforts are underway to develop a new process that does not use CFCs. And already, the CFC use was reduced by 2/3 since 2001.

Digging a bit further, check out this page: http://www.usec.com/americancentrifuge.htm

They've been working on this for years, but this year in March they have made significant progress:
"Approximately two dozen AC100 machines are operating in a cascade in a commercial cascade plant configuration, which demonstrates USEC’s strategic suppliers' capability to manufacture production ready centrifuge machines and provides the Company with significant additional operational data. This is an important accomplishment in USEC’s efforts to respond to DOE’s technical concerns."

Do you think your remarks, which left out even a mere mention of these developments, were critical and honest about the requirement of CFCs in uranium production? Otherwise, did you run across that information and find something conflicting and credible to reject USEC's claims, and then decide the whole thing is not worth mentioning? Presenting pertinent facts and honest reporting about *both sides* is essential to being critical and honest.

Energy return is already factored into the cost of energy and the operational cost of the plant.

citation please.

Citation? That seems like basic economics and common sense to me. The energy used to gather and refine the fuel obviously costs money. The plants that eventually buy the fuel then sell the electricity produced from that fuel. As energy return goes down, the price per unit has to go up. To make it obvious to your common sense, if it took a million barrels of oil to produce 1 gram of uranium, what would happen to the price of electricity?

I guess you just don't get it, later I might address some of your other points but I'm short on time so I'll summarise. You have provided no evidence to support your assertions. What I provided you were the facts as discovered. If you are going to persist with ad hominem attacks your "argument" really has no credibility.

Wow, you are really sensitive to ad hominems, but you call me "George Bush" which is quite obviously an ad hominem. At least mine was in response to a claim you actually made.

Anyway I doubt you'll accept the evidence I've linked to. I'll note that the evidence you quoted did not support any of your claims. It was merely some information about the supply of uranium. It said nothing about energy return or CFCs. The thing is, I accepted what facts sounded reasonable (the hard vs soft ore was inte

Well said. I agree completely. If you haven't already, you should check out one of Aaron Seigo's posts from earlier this year on his blog:

http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2010/05/i-dont-need-no-stinking-nepomuk-right.html

He attempts to justify and defend the thorough integration of neopomuk and akonadi with KDE4 in his post and the subsequent comments. He mostly fails.

In my opinion Aaron Seigo needs to go. He seems like a really nice guy and all, but he still defends the release strategy of KDE4.0 (and this despite being one of the lead devs of the -at the time- completely bug-ridden and barely functional plasma), and seems to always be at the forefront of KDE4's questionable future plans. They've reached feature parity(?) with 3.5.X. Now they need to work on stability and speed. Stability and speed. Stability and speed. The obsession with social networking integration is stupid and shortsighted. The SC naming scheme is lame. And almost as many users are now annoyed by neopomuk and akonadi as they are by that damn cashew.

you apparently missed the comments in the threads above; things have still snuck by the apple store folk. the only real way to catch this stuff is be conscious of what you're installing, and report suspicious items.

from user -kyz:
Apple is doing an equally bad job of protecting its ecosystem.

There have been several customer-data-grabbing iPhone apps, and these have only been yanked after members of the public alerted Apple to them.

Pinchmedia: http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/2009/07/pinchmedia-anatomy-of-spyware-vendor.html

Storm8: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybenjamin/detail??blogid=150&entry_id=51077

MogoRoad: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/30/iphone_security/

Smuggling tethering past the censors: http://top10.com/mobilephones/news/2010/07/app_smuggles_tethering_onto_iphone/

the moral of the story is, it doesn't matter if it's closed or open-source. the end user is still the difference maker.

Apple is doing an equally bad job of protecting its ecosystem.

There have been several customer-data-grabbing iPhone apps, and these have only been yanked after members of the public alerted Apple to them.

Pinchmedia: http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/2009/07/pinchmedia-anatomy-of-spyware-vendor.html

Storm8: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/ybenjamin/detail??blogid=150&entry_id=51077

MogoRoad: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/30/iphone_security/

Smuggling tethering past the censors: http://top10.com/mobilephones/news/2010/07/app_smuggles_tethering_onto_iphone/

Apple don't look at the source code of apps, they just test the binary and scan it for badness.

Provided the binary encrypts its strings, and does nothing dodgy during the short testing window (less than two weeks), Apple approve it.

Apple's custodianship doesn't protect you from determined data thieves, only the incompetent ones.

Android market, while just as bad as Apple, at least gives you the opportunity to decide if you want an app based on what permissions it demands. If it demands too much, you reject it. Once you give it the "OK", it can't turn around and demand more. I'd prefer that Apple added that (telling you what permissions the code has, not letting it have more), even if they keep their approval process.

The money shot from that, for those who are too lazy to follow the link:
"For the cost of solar electricity, Blackburn and Cunningham relied on reported offers of "commercial scale" solar electricity at a certain price to the grid supplier - without noting that those offers are on a strictly "when available" basis that is also take or pay.

Here is an analogy - if you happen to grow tomatoes in your yard, imagine going to your local grocery store and demanding that the grocer pay you the same price that he charges at retail. The grocer must take all of the tomatoes that your garden produces, but you make no promises about how many you will bring each day. When you want to eat tomatoes at home, but your garden has not produced any, you expect to be able to walk into the store and purchase all of the tomatoes that you need at the same price that you sold them for. (Actually, this is not a very good analogy, because on page 11 of their paper, Blackburn and Cunningham admit that certain solar electricity suppliers will actually be paid a "subsidized" rate of 19 cents per kilowatt hour, which is almost two times the residential retail price in North Carolina of 10.5 cents per kilowatt hour.)

In addition to failing to mention the terms and conditions under which electricity is being offered, Blackburn and Cunningham bury a few "minor" details about solar electricity real costs in an appendix. As they admit in a section that few people will read, the price that some installers are talking about charging utilities is the "net" price - after they receive and bank all currently offered payments from other taxpayers and after they have obtained taxpayer subsidized 25 year amortization, tax free loans. In North Carolina today, a homeowner who purchases a solar energy system receives a 30% cash grant from the federal government and a 35% cash grant from the state government.

Using the example provided in the paper, those cash payments turn a 3 KWe (max capacity), $18,000 system that produces electricity at 35 cents per kilowatt hour (if financed at 6% interest for 25 years) into a system costing the homeowner just $8,190 and producing electricity for a total of 15.9 cents per kilowatt hour - when the sun is shining. Of course, that means that the homeowner has received a grant of $9,810 from his or her neighbors, some of whom may not own a home (renters) or even own a roof (condo and apartment dwellers). Blackburn and Cunningham admit that they did not include energy storage costs of any kind (pg 11)."

and
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_lfibbBnlKt8/TFAYotKn1yI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/e7giOX_5kV4/s1600/LCOE_Electricity_OECD.png ...that shows the sustained price for modern nuclear power to be about $50/MWh or 1/3 of Solar. (That's in the US; in Eur/Jpn/Kor where their proficiency and experience is much better, about $0.033/MWh.)

New York Times guilty of 'writing to their preconceptions' again.

It factors in the subsidies for solar energy. Compares an absolute discount price of solar to the average of nuclear power, ignores the fact that nuclear energy is a constant supplier etc.

In short: sensational and bogus.

I think the rebuke mentioned earlier should be read as well: http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html

Utter bunk. See http://atomicinsights.blogspot.com/2010/07/gullible-reporting-by-new-york-times-on.html

Unfortunately, I totally agree with you. Cruising on most interstates, if I'm going a bit faster than the other cars (pretty common), I'll be on the left to pass. I'll inevitably come up on some jackass doing 50mph talking on his cell phone in the left lane. I'll hang out behind him at a safe distance, but still be obvious that I want to overtake him. Either through dumb luck or because he actually is watching, when I finally give up and move one lane to the right, he'll do the same thing. It's not based on my turn signal. It's when I'm half way into the right lane he'll just swerve over without signaling.

There are areas where the right lane isn't the best lane to stay in. On a 6 lane highway (3 lanes in each direction), the right lane is generally slow with traffic merging on and off. Rather than risk my own safety by dancing to the left then right at every on and off ramp, I'll stay in the center lane. That leaves the left lane open for people driving faster than me, and I stay out of the way of vehicles coming on and off the highway. In rural areas, it becomes less of an issue.

I'm very attentive to vehicles traveling faster than me, and will always signal and then move before they even have to consider slowing down. Oddly enough, that's what most of the laws say to do. On quite a few occasions on rural parts of interstates where it's 4 lanes (2 each way), I'll move to the left to pass large trucks. No offense to those drivers. I actually know a lot of the rules they work under, and understand what it's like to drive a heavy vehicle. Lots of times, when a faster vehicle approaches, I'll move over into the slow lane to let them pass. About half the time, they catch up, match my speed, and linger beside me. No ass, I didn't move over so you could block me in the slow lane. I moved over so you could overtake me. I guess the worst is the people who can't maintain a cruising speed. They'll haul ass up behind me (say 90+ mph), so I'll let them overtake me. I'll then move back to pass the slower traffic. Rather than maintaining their speed, they slow down to under the speed of the slow traffic, and when there's finally a break where I can pass on the right (I know, you're not suppose to), when I attempt to pass, they'll suddenly realize that they're driving slow and speed up. All I can do is be thankful that my car has lots of torque and horsepower, and it's power to weight ratio lets me accelerate quickly. 55 to 90 feels like I just bumped the gas for a second. Then I can resume a normal speed. They'll speed up to follow me for a couple minutes, and then drop way back, and then try to catch up. It's funny to watch if I'm way in front of them, but amazingly annoying if I'm behind them.

Maybe I should move to Germany. I may have to adjust my driving style slightly, but nothing like dealing with American drivers who take a 20 question written test and then prove that they can stay in their lane and parallel park in a 15 minute driving test.

I just had to renew my drivers license here. I've been driving for 20 years. They told me I had to take an exam on the renewal. The exam? A multiple choice test on common road signs. I was laughing while I was taking it, because I had alternative answers that were more entertaining.

Caution, pedophiles following children. Alternatively, it can be an indicator to pedophiles that children are in the area. Either way, the larger target is legal to run over and your damages will be reimbursed by the state.

Caution, snakes following your car. Drive faster!

Any stop sign with a white border only means the stop is suggested. You should yield to larger vehicles.

Vector graphics emulation doesn't seem to be that difficult anymore, since it's already being done.

With Java and OpenGL, even, for cross-platform goodness.

I think it works well enough.

Vector graphics emulation doesn't seem to be that difficult anymore, since it's already being done.

With Java and OpenGL, even, for cross-platform goodness.

I think it works well enough.

Braille porno

The "Hello Kitty Car".

They are way ahead of you. Outside. And inside.