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As long as you use Intelligent Design Sort.

As long as you use Intelligent Design Sort.

nice one my link is too as http://studyelectronics.blogspot.com/2008/10/555-timer-ic.html

He does have the point that you pointed to your blog (which will increase page views / popularity / whatever) instead of directing to the original source, of which the only way to get to is through the original blog posting.

To save others the pain, I went to that blog and saw only references to Wikipedia and self-references to other blog posts of yours. Nowhere in that article you wrote did you link to the EC's own website, as you suggest above. While you may have had good intentions, your posts (and your blog) really seem to just be fishing for hits.

For those interested, check out this photo. This guy needs a new hair style.

Wow...a company tying it's software to the hardware they manufactured! Holy crap...who could have imagined!?!

IBM isn't the only company doing that. But they have a de facto monopoly on mainframes and that's why there's an antitrust issue. It takes a market position that is at least dominant (IBM is even superdominant on mainframes) AND anticompetitive behavior. One of the two isn't enough to make a legal case. I discussed the question of market dominance versus significance in this recent blog posting.

You can use Google's Webpage removal tool and ask them to remove the outdated cached copies from the index, even if the website isn't yours. Besides, does Google Cache cache images?

As for the Internet Archive, you can do the same, provided your country recognizes the right to your own image, or you took the photos personally: http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php#20

A quick visit to Mini-Microsoft yields a lot of insight, especially in the comments thread. The management system's apparently poisonous and horrifically bloated, leading to lots of in-fighting and internecine political battles between rival divisions within the same company. Most employees also languish under a tiered review system that is overtly strict in its implementation and prone to misuse by the aforementioned management. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of promising developments are being sacrificed at the altar of upward career mobility for a largely administrative segment of the company, and that everyone else basically suffers and watches the rest of the world pull ahead.

"The Afghani war was legitimate as an attack on US soil was planned and coordinated from there"

Except the attack was planned and funded by Islamic radicals in Saudi Arabia, where Bin Laden and most of the hijackers came from. And Bin Laden was one of the CIAs best assets in Afghinstan, while he was fighting the Russians. And the US was planning to `liberate' mid-east Oil long before 9/11.

"I wrote an award-winning online essay that asserted Saddam Hussein sealed his fate when he announced in September 2000 that Iraq was no longer going to accept dollars for oil being sold under the UN's Oil-for-Food program, and decided to switch to the euro as Iraq's oil export currency"

"The country's natural resources include .. potentially significant petroleum and natural gas reserves in the North

the Core and the Gap

Oil, Conflict and the Future of Global Energy Supplies

Reference, please?

I did a quick google, and as I expected, it might be difficult to discover the right keywords. Thus, just "Bill of Rights" and "petition" turns up zillions of legal documents that use those words, but aren't about petitions in the sense we mean here.

One of the top google hits, however, was to http://afilreis.blogspot.com/2010/06/bill-of-rights-some-kind-of-subversive.html, which describes a 1951 experiment along this line. Funny thing is that I used to live in Madison, which has long been around 90% a university and government town, so you'd think people there would be familiar with the constitution. But asking 112 (unidentified) people to sign it got 111 refusals, mostly out of fear that "it was some kind of subversive document and thought that if they signed it they would be called Communists."

It might be fun to make an explicit collection of such experiments. I wonder if there's an efficient way to find them?

I found some here, though I'm sure Google would recommend that you use the Stable release branch if you don't want things breaking.

I have seen those. Yes, they are mostly useless as official releases pushed silently to users are concerned.

Chrome opens tabs the way it does to try and keep a rudimentary history going, grouping related tabs together. You will be pleased to know, however, that there is an extension made just for people who don't like this, to enable "Firefox-like" tab ordering.

Well... it kind of ... works: tabs jump around as one opens them. I'm not sure whether it is better than nothing. It spares the menial work of bringing the tabs back in order, but the funky animation side-effect is sure confusing.

N.B. FireFox since 3.5 (or 3.6?) adopted the same tab ordering as the Chrome. But they provided an about:config option to manage it.

Anyway, I see that Chrome is getting better. But it is not there yet. Though if FireFox would continue its advances on front of being dumb and dumber, Chrome might get a real chance on my office laptop.

That leaves though another major hole: silent auto-updates. Year ago there was no option to be prompted on updates. Neither Chrome has yet a semi-decent release notes: even if it's going to suggest an update to me, it is nearly impossible to know what the update might bring as there are no release notes whatsoever. Here I'd love to be proven wrong again.

I found some here, though I'm sure Google would recommend that you use the Stable release branch if you don't want things breaking.

Another minor nag: Chrome opens page in a new tab, next to the current tab. Is it possible to make the new tab to be open as last one? I have in office three standard tabs open and for convenience I keep them as first three. From this first three tabs I open other pages/tabs. Now in Chrome the order gets messed up very quickly and one has to rearrange tabs constantly to keep the first three important tabs in the place where I expect to find them. Is there any option to disable that and make tabs behave as in pre-Fx3.5? (Fx has an about:config option for that.)

Chrome opens tabs the way it does to try and keep a rudimentary history going, grouping related tabs together. You will be pleased to know, however, that there is an extension made just for people who don't like this, to enable "Firefox-like" tab ordering.

I should do the same - dream up some ridiculous position to advocate and then see if I can get CNN to cover it. Maybe I'll start a group demanding that gorillas get the right to vote, or that we execute illegal immigrants, or insisting that everyone adopt a strict fruitarian diet like this guy.

I bet I could pull it off. If I didn't have anything productive to do.

Rob Pike criticism of Java and C++ is really advocacy for the new Google language, Go. Unfortunately, Go isn't a very good language, in my opinion. It makes things simpler by being less powerful. What we really need to replace C++ or Java is a language that can grow on demand. Otherwise, we'll keep hitting the limits of the language. And I can hit the limits of Go pretty quickly.

Also, it's time to go beyond imperative, text-oriented languages. Graphics, anyone? It's possible: Hello World in XL simply looks better!

The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...

The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.

But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.

That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.

The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...

The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.

But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.

That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.

The list of targets picked by that entity is pretty impressive. Even though the article accurately notes that some big names are missing, it almost reads like a Who Is Who of the industry. Sort of duck shooting, but the really big ones...

The bad news is that even such an aggressive behavior isn't the worst that can happen with patents. It's bad, and I'm aware of the fact that non-practicing entities (NPEs) can go extremely far and cause a lot of trouble just to suqeeze the maximum amount of money out of their targets. I don't mean to downplay that problem.

But: form the perspective of a company that gets attacked, an NPE is only the second-worst possibility. At the end of the day, the NPE is just in it for the money and pursues no strategic objectives beyond that. So the big companies that are the targets here (and the IT companies among them are all pro-software-patent regardless) can initially try to get rid of the patent or prove they don't infringe, and if it comes to worst, they can and will negotiate a settlement, write a check and life goes on for them.

That isn't the case when a strategic patent holder seeks to limit the functionality of a competitor's product, possibly to the extent that the competitor gets driven out of business. Exclusionary strategic use of patents is much worse than anything an NPE will ever do. It harms competition and innovation in serious ways. It looks like Apple wants to enforce some patents regardless of whatever royalty the defendant (HTC, and maybe others in the future) would be willing to pay. And there's IBM's use of patents to preserve its mainframe monopoly against such companies as TurboHercules and NEON Enterprise Software.

I recently installed Gentoo on my old G5 and wrote a walk-through. Ultimately, it seems most practical to leave OS X on it, and compile Linux software for OS X as needed.

Maybe someone with a little insight into how BitTorrent works could comment on the rigour of their methodoly?

I did comment on it. You can read it here http://ktetch.blogspot.com/2010/07/ars-forgets-how-torrents-work-cites.html i've been working on, and researching with torrents since 03. TorrentFreak has also covered things http://torrentfreak.com/tech-news-sites-tout-misleading-bittorrent-piracy-study-100724/ They make much the same points. I'm working on a study of my own now, one that avoids tracker bias, by not using trackers as a selection method.

This article explains why the above poster is correct.

That's exactly the point... it's too close to the hardware. Yes, it gives you really fine-grained control over what happens, and you can tweak it to make it as fast as possible. With the speed of today's computers, though, you shouldn't (usually) need that amount of optimization. Plus, the compiler should be robust enough to optimize the program nearly as well as you could anyway.

umm... did you miss the part where the guy also bitched that interpreted languages are "too slow"?

so which is it? where on this stone are you going to squeeze the blood from? it's a tradeoff and the menu of available programming language choices is already comprehensive. this guy expresses it better and more comprehensively than i care to in a /. comment:

http://eatthedots.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-is-c-faster-than-python.html

and compiler research has only yielded 4% annual improvement in performance per Proebsting's law
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/law.htm
http://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2006/cmsc430/lec18.4p.pdf

and compiler researchers concede that a competent human will outperform a compiler for the foreseeable future. so your statement about compilers is total hand-waving away of facts inconvenient to your argument.

Indeed. A blog I follow discussed the motivation behind (and the math which shows that it's a mathmatically better choice) employees cutting costs because they have no stake in the operation. (http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/07/risky-companies.html -- yes, I realize it's a WoW blog.)

Basically, he says that while the company wants to spend the money on preventative maintenance (e.g., $1M cost) in order to avoid the low-risk/high-cost catastrophic event (e.g., $1B damage), the individual employee does not. Because they aren't held responsible for a portion of the damages from a catastrophe, their options are:

- Save $1M and get a raise
- 1% of the time, incur a massive cost on the company, and lose their job.

This boils down to a guaranteed zero raise if they spend their budget on maintenance or other disaster-prevention, versus (potentially) a raise which is very unlikely to have any bad effects on them. When you combine that with people's tendency to underestimate the likelihood of catastrophic events (or, overestimate their ability to avoid them?), we find that many people have numerical motivation for skimping on things which are normally seen only as Costs.

Thank goodness for ethical engineers, who are looking out not just for themselves but for their company, customers, and neighbors.

Darth Vader Begging

Actually, this is how he got his money for the Death Star.

Cold Filtering, like Beach-wood Aging is used to increase the rate of beer production.

Real Americans show their pride in American Industry by drinking Industrial Alcohol. Craft Beers are for luddites.

Cold Filtering, like Beach-wood Aging is used to increase the rate of beer production.

Real Americans show their pride in American Industry by drinking Industrial Alcohol. Craft Beers are for luddites.

A general android exploit working on every phone has been found already: http://c-skills.blogspot.com/2010/07/android-trickery.html It comes with source :)

Things never change at Slashdot. The summary is needlessly incendiary and posters just jump the shark on the strawman without regards to reality. Or maybe it's karma whoring for mod points, but it usually works on here.

Apple supplies iPhones to employees and Google did the same with Nexus one:

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/12/android-dogfood-diet-for-holidays.html
http://gps.about.com/b/2009/12/12/prototype-google-phone-released-to-employees-gps-features.htm

And who the hell talked about "success" in giving phones to employees and where did you get the news about job reviews and employees being forced to give up iPhones?

Before people comment on the McKinnon case, I really think they should be required to read the excellent series of posts on the subject by Jack of Kent - an English lawyer (of both kinds at one point) and award-winning "leading law blogger". It may be a bit legally technical in places, but is very informative and quickly cuts through a lot of the misinformation spewed out by the media on this case.

Proof or GTFO.

It's quite simple. The question isn't where to begin, but rather where to end. Let's start at the present and work backwards shall we?

We've got over racist elements in the Tea Party. ("Obama-nomics: Monkey See Monkey Spend", "Zoo Has an African, and the White House has a Lyin' African!".

Obama as witchdoctor, isn't intrinsically racist, but is racially charged given the context. On the other hand, telling Obama to return to Kenya, isn't racist, it's a mistaken, but not a fringe belief with right wing activists.

Are these fringe elements of the Tea Party? I hope, and believe so. But it's hard to dismiss when the leaders of the "movement," exhibit racist signs themselves. As seen with Daje Robertson, self-refered founder of the Texas Tea Party, and operator of teaparty.org, holds a sign that reads "Congress = Slave Owner; Taxpayer = Niggar [sic]." Most people would have used,"slave," also they would have spelled the word correctly.

Also, we've got the pre-Tea Party the president is a pimp, and the first lady is his (presumably) number one ho, and Michelle Obama is a monkey, and who could forget, "Obama Bucks"?

Now how does the leadership of the GOP respond to statements like this? That's the real question. You might not be able to help it if idiots show up to your public rally, but nothing stops you from calling them out. Well silence.

Why? Well the Republic party has long used racism as a main tactic for stirring up votes.
Jesse Helms' infamous "Hands" ad for instance. So was the ad racist? It certainly was immediately perceived that way, but let's use the words of the Helms' campaign manager, and later CHAIRMAN of the Republican Party, Lee Atwater:

“You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger.’ By 1968, you can't say ‘nigger,’ that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] Blacks get hurt worse than Whites ”

This is called "The Southern Strategy", and hinges almost exclusively on promoting racism, and racist policies. One legacy of this is the fetishization of the Confederacy and Civil War. It is not a coincidence that Confederate flags regained prominence at the start of the Civil Rights movement, long after the symbol had become associated with explicitly racist groups such as the Klan. (See South Carolina,1962; Georgia, 1956) ("It's pride, not prejudice," the apologists say. Yet, many of these people aren't from the Confederacy, regularly make racist statements, and invoke "freedom" and "patriotism" while lionizing, traitors who began an armed rebellion for the "freedom" to keep slaves. The mind reels at the irony.)

Erm....I can't view Facebook, due to having personal data and all, but there isn't a single comment in the link that doesn't look like a well crafted sub-parody. I suspect the linked article is a bit of shameless self-promotion akin to the ones you won't see on MY BLOG!!!!

Whoops.

Seriously, there's far better parodies out there. The Onion for instance, or even better, Tom Chiver's non-parody blog...

We do not need one world government.

This reminds me of something I've once heard...

The last thing I want to see if the U.N. being granted any power with teeth to it.

...And this pretty much confirms it.

Do you, by any chance, believe in the Rapture? As in the Left Behind series?

LOL Look closely at the google panel: how to plug an oil leak

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9ePU/TEb7dj5CrMI/AAAAAAAAFEM/CzVHjYyZBHE/s1600/bpjoke.jpg

ROFLMAO

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/update-on-china.html

Multithreading is really only a feature if it gets you some benefit (usually that benefit is increased performance.) There are reports which mirror my own findings that indicate that Snort performs much better on one core than Suricata. Snort's Vulnerability Response Team has a blog post that just went up on this exact subject--of course, they have a vested interest in promoting Snort.

http://vrt-sourcefire.blogspot.com/2010/07/innovation-you-keep-using-that-word.html

The same physical machine ran Suricata and Snort, and Snort ran almost four time faster:

"Suricata peaked at about 300 Mb/s without dropping packets, provided no rules are loaded.
With rules loaded, Suricata runs up to about 200Mb/s.
Snort, with rules, hits 894Mb/s with no drops" -- Internal VRT Report on Suricata Performance

Now they don't talk about their testbed, so I'm assuming the worst case for Suricata--single core. At four cores, then, Suricata could match Snort's performance. Scaling up further, it could in theory beat it.

Now Suricata is also taking an ethical stand against compiled rules, which I like--to a degree. I recognize that there are tests which are hard or impossible to perform using Snort's rules language, but at the same time, I want to be able to look at the rule and see how likely it is to be a false positive. Over the years, the VRT has put out some rules which I would consider laughable. In a highly tuned context, they might work okay. In a larger context (say an ISP or a university, where the sniffers don't necessarily control every machine on the network) they false like crazy. Snort doesn't publish any information on how likely a rule is to false, and so if I can't read the rule, I can't gauge that at all.

My only question is why is Harrison Ford working for BP? (next to left circle) Once you see it, you will....
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9ePU/TEXJFhjMElI/AAAAAAAAFDk/Susb7Y6PP9I/s1600/fake_GOM_simops_operations_top_kill_houston.jpg

Is it just me... or does the picture at:
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_1xQeOPE9ePU/TEXJFhjMElI/AAAAAAAAFDk/Susb7Y6PP9I/s1600/fake_GOM_simops_operations_top_kill_houston.jpg

have a laptop on the bottom left that's left running the sims... or sim city... or something like that?

Take a look at the large version of that photo. It looks like someone in the office was busy playing transport tycoon instead of trying to manage some real world logistics.

This reminds me of The Gambler by Paolo Bacigalupi, a short story where a reporter on the web tries to pursue meaningful stories rather than the fluff that attracts the most hits, and has trouble meeting his quota as a result. A very good read.

Of course none of us want to be the innocent guy in jail for a murder he didn't commit, but also of course, none of us want to be the victim of the thousand serial murderers you let free.

You'd rather be the victim of the one serial murderer you let free when you imprisoned the innocent guy for his crimes?

The concept is about more than just the one innocent person. That innocent person usually (except in the case of corrupt cops making up false charges) represents a guilty person getting away with it. These days it takes some serious fighting to reopen a case where someone was wrongly convicted. How many other boys suffered because this guy looked scary? (Answer: "at least three" according to the sidebar here.)

The sad fact is that while we pretend to claim "innocent until proven guilty", it remains the defense's job to prove the defendant innocent. The prosecutor can cherry pick whatever evidence he pleases to present to the court, and until recently didn't even have to reveal to the defense that they have evidence showing that the defendant is innocent (and now that they are supposed to, how do you enforce that?)

Google stopped using third-party providers in at the least the US and Canada:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-world-your-map.html

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/keeping-canadas-map-current.html

I've reported a half-dozen mistakes using the "Report a Bug" link, and they've all been responded to within a few days. Most of these have been of the form "Can't turn left", but one was of the "You think that street takes 10 minutes to drive along. It really takes 30, find better directions".

It certainly used to be true that updates took a while. In 2004 I reported a street missing and it took 2 years to see an update, and I really have no idea if the fix was related to my email or not. The new system has a check-box to notify when the report is received, and what the verdict is when it's processed.

If you've had a bad experience before the change, it's worth trying again.

(obDisclosure: I work for Google, but not on the maps teams)

Google stopped using third-party providers in at the least the US and Canada:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2009/10/your-world-your-map.html

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/2010/04/keeping-canadas-map-current.html

I've reported a half-dozen mistakes using the "Report a Bug" link, and they've all been responded to within a few days. Most of these have been of the form "Can't turn left", but one was of the "You think that street takes 10 minutes to drive along. It really takes 30, find better directions".

It certainly used to be true that updates took a while. In 2004 I reported a street missing and it took 2 years to see an update, and I really have no idea if the fix was related to my email or not. The new system has a check-box to notify when the report is received, and what the verdict is when it's processed.

If you've had a bad experience before the change, it's worth trying again.

(obDisclosure: I work for Google, but not on the maps teams)

Timezones also count - and why is no one blaming Rupert Murdoch?

Imagine - a court case is Seattle.WI - press descend tv has best coverage with two crews, and one press journalist turns up. That one report is the basis of global coverage. Later another local to Seattle journalist did some work and dispatched some emails, her knowledge of the technical of the case zero bar the pdf file from the government which was either beyond the reporters ability to get an independent view of the case if speed was the name of the game.

Another example is http://muckandbrass.blogspot.com/ It even took the bbc several attempts to report this correctly and correct its bias.

If speed in the local timezone is all that matters then the sooner this Journalism metric dies the better.

You need to read Where Have All The Hackers Gone. The guy who wrote it got a bronze Olympic medal returned to the US with a Google search. Worth reading.

Maybe I'm missing something, but unless the 6-core system is clocked slower than the 4-core one, the 6-core system should outperform it easily in all tasks.

Oh, if only it were that simple. "From the gut" it would seem that you are correct. Most people think of processing power like logs in a lumber mill - double the number of saws cutting wood, and you double the amount of wood getting cut! But that's not the only factor, and increasingly, it's not even a primary factor.

For example, here's an interesting write-up about a guy who experienced a six-fold performance increase by reducing the number of active CPU cores on his server from 4 to just 1.

There's a *tremendous* cost in cross-connect costs when going multi-core, and often, these cross-connect costs enough to make the whole "multi-core" thing irrelevant or even detrimental. Yes, the majority of the time, more cores IS faster, particularly when you are running multiple applications on a single system. But for dedicated servers, the formula is often not nearly so simple!

Why isn't there a bullet point for using Ubuntu if you just want a machine to browse the internet? Could Dell at least toss Ubuntu a bone and say "Linux currently suffers from less viruses than Windows"?

Well, this is a good point, but even for that relatively simple job there are big problems with Ubuntu. You only need to flick through the archives of Linux Hater to get some idea of what these are.

When I first visited Linux Hater, I thought I was dealing with extreme ignorance. But it quickly became apparent that he/she is actually an expert authority on software in general and Linux in particular. Familiarity has bred contempt. These days I have to concede that he/she is basically right in most cases. One thing about Linux hasn't changed at all in the 14 years I've been using it: users still need to have in-depth knowledge to do basic stuff, like install new applications. Things got slightly better, but it's still way more difficult than it should be. Even with a user-friendly package manager you are still faced with a huge noise to signal ratio created by the large amount of applications that might do what you want, none of which are the application you've heard of. And I'm certain that the web-only user is going to want to use a few things other than the web browser.

It pains me to say it, but Dell is right. Ubuntu could be a great web terminal but it still just isn't, and blaming Dell and Microsoft isn't going to change that. Linux is still for experts and keen amateurs, and that's what Dell is saying. Dell (and Linux Hater) are actually doing us all a huge favour by pointing out where improvements are needed. If only we'd listen.

the woman who tried to thaw a turkey in the clothes dryer...

That would work if you had the shoe-rack option - beats cramming it in the microwave.

How about the guy who cooked crab in the dishwasher?

Useful font stuff here:

http://linuxtweaking.blogspot.com/2010/03/fedora-12-improving-awful-font.html
I've just enabled byte code support on my laptop - makes a big difference.

When you live in an area such as Stockholm where you see direct evidence of the most recent ice age and post-glacial rebound it makes you wonder just how much of this warming trend is anthropogenic.

Ah, yes, that's the problem with climate scientists. They don't appreciate the personal impact of seeing scouring marks on mountains, so they forget that there's been an ice age recently!

Uh, NO. No one ever said "the current interglacial period was all our fault". Ice ages and interglacials are caused by Milankovich cycles, small variations in the earth's orbit and axial tilt.

It's just one thing: those orbital anomalies cause only a very, very small change in temperature by themselves. Not nearly enough to move the earth in and out of an ice age. Yet they have been found to be an excellent explanation for them. Why is that?

Because of climate feedbacks. As white ice sheets melt and turns into dark ocean, the sun absorbs more of the energy striking it. As the oceans warm, their capacity to dissolve gases is reduced, causing them to release higher amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Causing further warming, causing further melting. The earth keeps warming, but all things that become warmer emit more heat radiation. Eventually it becomes hot enough that the heat radiation out is in balance with the additional energy absorbed. But by then the tiny change in temperature from an orbital change has turned an ice age into an interglacial.

I recommend you start read Uppsalainitiativet since you presumably speak Swedish.

And that little website of yours has been answered by thousands of other blogs:

http://reallyrealclimate.blogspot.com/

If you don't want to be an alarmist, you better read the other side of the argument also.

Steve Jobs lying? It can't be!

That's unpossible! Steve Jobs always tells the truth even when he lies, that is what the reality distortion field is for.

But what is Steve Jobs missing? He does not even look very healthy anymore, but John Lithgow has some advice for him, He's got to have pep! Just wear orange prison colored baggy pants, suspenders borrowed from Larry King, and a wacky Hawaiian shirt with blue and white flowers on it. Plus a mini me and some kids and dancing lessons. Don't forget to look angry while doing all this so you let you know your agent you are upset this was the only job he/she could get you and they fired Barny because even he wanted too much.

I'd never heard of anyone hashing a password on the client side, but I don't see how doing so would provide any security. If an attacker is listening in, he might not be able to recover the original password, but at that point, he doesn't really need to. All he needs to do is send an http request with hashed_password=a40387b0f3aa... as a parameter. And I'm not clear on how you would do the salting on the client side. If it comes from the server, then the attacker can capture the salt with all the other traffic. If it's stored in a cookie client-side, then I'd suppose that clearing cookies from the browser would lock you out of the site.

I'm not saying you're wrong. I've just never heard of it. Typing "client-side password hashing" into Google brought up a few results, but the first hit seems to agree with me.

But I think you're right. If you're doing client-side hashing, then you're effectively doing the described attack, but on the (probably longer) hash string rather than the original password. No need to find strings that hash correctly.

how many hand positions you use when making calls? one.

At least two, since I have two hands. Besides, what is the chance that out of 100,000,000 cell phone users all of them use exactly the same position? And if some positions are never tried by anyone, nobody would care if holding the phone there affects the signal.

This is exactly now the iPhone 4 problem was discovered - by lefties that held the phone in a natural, very common way.