Slashdot Mirror

Lots and lots of it. A new analysis of the causality of motion reveals that Aristotle was right to insist that inertial motion needs a cause and that, as a result, normal matter is immersed in an immense lattice of energetic particles, without which motion would be impossible. Soon, we will use this knowledge to create technologies that will allow us to tap into the lattice for energy production and super fast transportation. Floating sky cities, New York to Beijing in minutes, Earth to Mars in hours! That's real the future of energy and transportation. Almost every other form of energy production (waves, fossil fuel, geothermal, solar, wind, etc.) and transportation (cars, airplanes, jets, rockets, boats, trains, etc.) will become obsolete. Even normal walking will become rare.

Read Physics: The Problem with Motion if you're interested in the real future of energy.

Don't forget about the similarly powered vehicles. GM had the Camaro SS and Firebird TransAm WS/6, both similar in power, weight, and handling characteristics to the Corvette. The biggest difference (at least to me) was that the F-bodies have 4 seats, and cupholders. :)

    I think he was probably referring to the soccer moms in their F650, EM-50, or Knight XV.

    [/me goes looking for a place to test drive the Knight XV]

Case in point:
http://wamublamesgrandma.blogspot.com/

It appears grandma outlived Washington Mutual in any event.

...no worries of it crashing into a building either.

No?

Well, here are the Google blog posts mulling over China both then and now:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

So essentially they'll be turning the clock back to 2006, where the Chinese had access to the unfiltered, international version of Google and were more painfully aware of its government's censorship effects.

I'm mostly interested in how much Google actually follows through on their threat. It would still be an interesting PR move if they do (good or bad press is still press), but I'm sure they'll leave some tendrils there. More interesting and depressing if historians come back to this point in time and say this was some major event that lead to a much bigger rift between the East and the West.

Well, here are the Google blog posts mulling over China both then and now:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2006/01/google-in-china.html
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/new-approach-to-china.html

So essentially they'll be turning the clock back to 2006, where the Chinese had access to the unfiltered, international version of Google and were more painfully aware of its government's censorship effects.

I'm mostly interested in how much Google actually follows through on their threat. It would still be an interesting PR move if they do (good or bad press is still press), but I'm sure they'll leave some tendrils there. More interesting and depressing if historians come back to this point in time and say this was some major event that lead to a much bigger rift between the East and the West.

So did the US. Don't believe me? The US protected the bombers of Cubana Flight 455, who included CIA operatives, in 1976. The year before, in 1975, the US supported Indonesia's invasion of East Timor, in which 200,000 East Timorese were massacred. In 1973 the US supported Gen Pinochet's overthrow of Chile's democratically elected government in a coup d'état Thousands of people disappeared afterwards. The US has a history of arming and supporting repressive regimes with large human rights violations.

Heck, at the same tyme the US was supporting Saddam, the US was also arming Iran, who he was fighting against. If the US had allowed democracy in Iran, instead of aiding the overthrow of Iran's elected government and installing the Shah in a dictatorship, there would not have been the revolution in Iran in 1980.

As far as Iraq goes, we had a treaty in place that allowed us to investigate them at will and they broke that treaty.

What treaty was broken and when? After Scott Ritter came out and stated Iraq had no significant WMDs the Neocons in Bush Jr's admin had to besmear him for not supporting their lies.

As for breaking treaties, the US has broken many treaties. I can think of 2 treaties Bush Jr broke or tried to break. With Starwars he was breaking the Anti Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia. In trying to locate the permanent nuclear waste disposal site at Yucca Mount he would also have violated the Treay of Ruby Valley which granted the Western Shoshone Yucca Mount and the surrounding land. The US broke a number of treaties with the Sioux. When Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokee to march on the Trail of Tears he broke a treaty when the Cherokee.

The US also supports Israel who has consistently disregarded UN resolutions, there was an uproar when VP Biden went to Israel and they announced more settlements in occupied territory.

the point was to keep Iran's military in line.

Why then did Reagan administration officials sell weapons to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair? Quite simply they were supporting a number of different sides who were repressive.

At that time there was also a threat by the Soviets against northern Yemen (after they invaded Afghanistan) and Iraq was prepping to fight with Saudi Arabia to defend against them.

Afghanistan was the Soviet's Vietnam. And the same Muslims going there to fight would have fought for the Saudis as well, heck a lot of Saudis went to Afghanistan. After Saddam's invasion of Kuwait al qaeda offered to protect Saudi Arabia against Saddam. They would have caused the Soviets trouble too.

By the way, the USA did NOT give Saddam chemical weapons. Did you just make that up?

• How Reagan Armed Saddam with Chemical Weapons
• Reagan's WMD Connection to Saddam Hussein
• Where Did Saddam Get His Chemical Weapons?
• Arming Iraq: A Chronology of U.S. Involvement
• How Did Iraq Get Its Weapons? We Sold Them
• Congressional Record: September 20, 2002

industry producing at an all time high? financial industry which is able to create money out of thin air and then charge real interest on it, industry which produces all kinds of fraudulently triple-A rated derivatives and sells them to the hardworking suckers abroad. Most of it doesn't produce anything of value, merely shuffles papers and numbers around.

That's one of the problems with the US economy. Honest work is passe, producing tangible items is passe, everyone wants to get rich by taking loans, blowing money on consumption and gambling on the stock market.

http://economicsofcontempt.blogspot.com/2009/03/is-financial-sector-too-big.html

Financial institutions are responsible for 41% of all corporate profits now, while in 1985 it was 16%, their GDP share jumped from 4 to 8% in last 50 years. They simply grow like a cancer while other industries shrink.
GDP numbers are fluff anyway because they don't measure the health and sustainability of the economy. Peter Schiff (mentioned earlier) explains it well in his multiple appearances - many of them precede the meltdown of 2008 (youtube has it all).

Who are these people who would entrust every detail of their business and personal life to a for-profit company?

Chances are, it's you.

Do you have business-critical conversations over the telephone? Few suspected AT&T would open up their network to the NSA to listen to your conversations.

Do you use a social network to share with your acquaintances? Can you trust Facebook to keep your messages private?

Do you do anything on the Internet? If so, can you trust your service provider to not be doing the same sort of thing?

People trust companies with this sort of information all the time, but in the end we tend to continue to trust these companies until they do something to lose our trust. In the end, trust is just another economic value proposition; we weigh the cost of trusting with the cost of not trusting, and so far Google hasn't done anything to erode my trust. They came close with Buzz, but the end result was that they saw that they could improve things, and they did.

I've never seen Google sell the information it collects. Yes, it does perform data analysis, but it does this using automated systems in order to better-target their advertising, which is a far cry from my idea of "data mining". The closest that they come to data mining is with their GoogleGeist aggregated analysis, which they give away for free to everyone. Not offering services "out of the goodness of their corporate heart" doesn't have to be nearly as nefarious as you would lead us to conclude. I'm not saying that Google doesn't have the potential to become evil or careless, but I am saying that I don't think they have yet.

And yes, everyone, please keep asking these difficult questions. But don't try to lead us to false conclusions by asserting false assumptions, especially about Google's "silence". We're smarter than that...

Th C=64 was the first computer I owned that I diden't build from scratch AND it had a disk operating system such as it was... Those were good times.

I still have the hesware 46 forth cartridge for the 64.
(I came across it recently in a box full of old junk, manual too.)

I used to love forth but write only languages are such a pain even for the original developer.
I cant imagine trying to maintain someone elses forth code.
Machine code was so much easier.

Anyway, I salute you Tom Zimmer, wherever you are.
Wow that was easy, http://tomzimmer.blogspot.com/

Well, I've now seen at least one steampunk hearing aid:
http://turonistan.blogspot.com/2009/12/steampunk-hearing-aid.html

There is a way to do it and it has with timing and expectations. Read How to Construct 100% Bug-Free Software if you're interested in solving the reliability crisis once and for all. Of course, one must use a synchronous and reactive software model like COSA.

Google has built quite an empire on making people believe that they are the defacto standard for search. They should be commended for the quality of their applications but sadly the marketing has led people astray. I actually took a trip to my local University to do some research. A day login gave me access to thousands of Scientific papers that I would otherwise have to pay hundreds of pounds for. Doing real research takes footwork and hardwork. The web can do a lot but you have to know where to look. See http://narconews.com/Issue64/article4073.html , http://deepwebresearch.blogspot.com/ , http://society.guardian.co.uk/e-public/story/0,13927,1195901,00.html

when windows had mouse-over focus

Like this? Or this for XP?

As several MySQL experts already noted, Digg isn't even using the indexes that provide maximum performance in the query that they present as problematic for MySQL:
http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/2010/03/index-only.html
http://www.yafla.com/dforbes/Getting_Real_about_NoSQL_and_the_SQL_Performance_Lie/

So you are right about the NoSQL fashion trend. Looks like for some companies it's easier to throw a pile of cheap commodity hardware driven by some NoSQL BigTable-wannabie at the problem instead of carefully optimizing queries and indexes for the best performance.

http://econ-ecoff.blogspot.com/2010/01/king-james-was-liberal-media.html

I would think more Christians would be for removing "In God We Trust" from the money. For one thing, it's obviously a huge lie. Also, it's really ironic if you think about it.

The problem with some American Christians is that they believe in Manifest Destiny, where the USA is a Christian Nation and it's mission is to spread the word throughout the world. Others are Dominionists, Christian Reconstructionists, or other flavors of Christian Talibans. And like the Talibans in Afghanistan and Pakistan if they ever get the chance they've dictate to others they must live "the Christian way". They would even bring back stoning for adulatory and other sins. Here's one that even says The bible permits slavery.

Falcon

Apparently both 'facts' are incorrect.

T

Shoulda known better that the research into Amish autism rates had already been done...

You basically only have to walk down the street with your ears open.

Back when I were a lad, it was routine to insult kids who were not of your group, fatty, lanky, ginger, smelly, stinky, etc.

Today the default insult is "paedo"

I've lost count of the number of times I have seen teenagers and younger, of both sexes, respond to an adult who tells them off for something, eg "stop fucking around with my car" with chants of "paedo!"

Teachers in UK schools essentially live in fear of one of the kids responding to being told off for setting fire to little johnny in 2A with an accusation of violence or sexual assault being made against the teacher.

You won't find a small kid who does not already;

a/ own a mobile phone
b/ know the childline and other abuse numbers by heart

We are sowing what we reaped.

I say in all sincerity, there are a LOT of adults today who have learned this lesson so well that they could witness either an adult women or a schoolgirl being gang raped, and simply walk on by, deliberately seeing nothing, as being the only safe option.

http://falserapesociety.blogspot.com/

this guy created a whole site because of the problem and the iPhones inability to block/stop such behaviour
http://i-phone-home.blogspot.com/

Well, it happened this week in Brussels: two guys with fake guns rob a jewelry shop. The owner of the shop pulls his own real gun but doesn't shoot. The robbers leave the shop with the jewelry and the real gun. Outside, they stop a car and kill the driver with the shopkeeper's gun.

Dude, according to your blog, you belong to a convention-attending "society of atheists" which actively and proudly recruits people. Here's a tip: This is scarier than most religions.

I think the author is mostly on. He's aware Dijkstra was exaggerating for effect, but also completely correct... if you started programming in the early home computing era, you probably started with a BASIC. I was lucky enough to get some varied exposure earlier to some other languages (LOGO and some shallow assembly), but until I was 15, it was pretty much Basic.

And none of my programming habits now resemble anything close to the BASIC I wrote in when I was that age. Except, occasionally, for the rare cases where global state seems to make sense, and even then, I try to namespace things in one way or another. But by and large, I picked up structured programming, I picked up object-oriented programming, I picked up logic programming, and I'm learning to enjoy functional programming.

I will say... there was a time when I was probably close to being "ruined." It was when I was learning C++, and I only really had Pascal, basic C, and Basic under my belt. And I had a pretty solidly structured-imperative mindset, and really hadn't seen any other way of doing things. C++ married data structures and methods in an interesting way, but it didn't seem like more than a stylistic practice to me. I was pretty sure most languages were alike, you just had syntax and typing differences.

But there was one thing: I'd had to learn Prolog for a very specific job. We were teaching it to high school students in a CS summercamp I worked at for a few years. The first year, I just thought "Man, this is weird," more or less got through all the exercises, and left it behind, and did what most people do: dismiss it as an odd research toy. The second year, I thought "this is weird, but interesting." The third year, I thought "Wow. There are all kinds of intriguing ideas here."

And there are, and I still think it could stand to see more usage in mainstream software, but more importantly, I think I'm pretty lucky I got repeated exposure to a language that forced me to think differently before I got very far into actually working in the software industry.

Because I now think there's either a critical period (or possibly, at a minimum, a critical attitude of some kind) after which a lot of programmers tend to lose either the humility or the curiosity that drives people to think about different programming constructs and habits. I think if a programmer has been minimally exposed before they reach it, they'll keep just enough of one or both of those attributes that they'll be interested in what they don't already know, rather than arriving at the point where "they've already learned the last programming language they'll ever need."

And if they don't get so exposed, they become Blub programmers, where generally $Blub is some industry-leading language that does enough you don't easily bump up against tasks that are near impossible in it.

To tie this back in with a point I think the author missed, I suspect that some of the difficulties with Basic are actually part of the reason why it didn't end up ruining more programmers. Almost everybody who really came to grips with it as a tool probably realized that it couldn't possibly be the last programming language you'd ever need (if it weren't enough that any effort to look into working as a programmer revealed that Basic was clearly not the strongest payroll ticket).

Just wait for the CRS-5 to come out. It'll move a HellaLibraryOfCongress per second.

The Reason you use gas is it's easier to turn on and off [than] Coal/Nuclear.

There were a couple of posts talking about this w.r.t. nuclear. I'd like to give a better understanding of this:

While it may be true that the design considerations of our existing nuclear generating facilities cause it to be difficult to ramp up/down easily, it is possible to have nuclear power plants that could do so. What most people are missing is more important than capability of doing so is the cost considerations of continuing running.

Take a look at this chart.

Once you have a nuclear power plant running safely, the cost of fissioning the fuel (or burning coal) is minuscule compared to the cost of burning natural gas. Nuclear power's high costs come from heavy construction cost for high quality components, maintaining the plant in safe condition, and paying the staff - not fuel.

For the time being, the fuel cost of coal power plants are also quite low. This may change once we start taxing waste gasses from fossil fuels. I'm of the opinion that greenhouse ones aren't even the worst.

On the other hand, natural gas prices are highly volatile, and they make up a substantial portion of their operating costs. This is why they are used as make-up, and coal+nuke are our baseload.

Before someone says "Yea, what about the cost of storing that used radioactive fuel," - It's already covered. Nuclear power plants put money into a pool for disposing of the stuff. Aside from the financial aspect, you have to keep in mind that the huge difference in fuel/energy ratio of fission to fossil fuels means that while we burn thousands of pounds of coal per day per plant, all of our existing spent nuclear fuel could be stored in a facility that is as big as a football field. That's without reprocessing.

$0.02 != 0.02 cents

Have we learned nothing? Though since you switched units once in each direction the math is still correct.

I probably spend less than $200 directly on TP per year. But I probably use more than $730 worth, most of that provided gratis and its cost hidden to me. Your point stands.

Great, more JavaShit-ridden bloatware

So, JavaScript makes it bloatware? Last time I checked, Google Docs was faster loading by large factor than OpenOffice, MS Office or any of the other WP/Spreadsheet apps out there. How do you define "bloated," here?

that stores all your stuff on someone else's server

You make it sound as if that comes with no advantages. There are dozens ... here are a few.

• Google's reliable storage which is backed up for you
• documents and be shared or collaborated on with other users
• the options for publishing to and interacting with the Web from docs is, frankly, a game-ender for locally hosted Office suites.
• The ability to continue to access your documents even if your new computer is a different OS or hardware vendor with no purchased software.

One demo of the idea of publishing data to the Web that blew me away was in Google's Official Blog about their public data sources, where they plotted a time-series of world fertility data. There's lots of decent examples on the Google Docs official blog as well.

There's also the fact that all Google applications allow you to export your data to local apps, if you wish. The Open Office format export is quite nice in Google Docs (import is OK, but at least for the spreadsheet it has a ways to go).

while feeding you a steady AJAX-based stream of ads.

Only if you don't want to pay for it. Google Docs via a premium Google Apps domain does not have ads.

The only reason this stuff is so popular now is because people won't pay $99.99 for a MS Office license anymore so instead MS/Google are writing server-side adware to try and get the $99 from advertisers over a couple of years.

Ah... no. That's the reason that they're doing it, not the reason that it's popular. The reason that it's popular is that it's useful and free (again, if you don't want to pay for the ad-free version).

Stuff your anti-spyware scanner would automatically delete for you if it was being run locally.

Most anti-spyware scanners don't give a rat's petard about applications that show ads or applications that store files remotely. Typically, the goal is to ferret out software that does either without the user's knowledge or ability to prevent. In both cases, Google Docs is 100% opt-in and entirely friendly to those who wish to opt out later on.

Web application == Remotely accessed spyware

If your definition of spyware is any Web site that records your activity on the site or saves documents that you create for later use, then you need to include every ecommerce site on the planet. I don't think that's a definition the majority of the technical community would agree with.

Great, more JavaShit-ridden bloatware

So, JavaScript makes it bloatware? Last time I checked, Google Docs was faster loading by large factor than OpenOffice, MS Office or any of the other WP/Spreadsheet apps out there. How do you define "bloated," here?

that stores all your stuff on someone else's server

You make it sound as if that comes with no advantages. There are dozens ... here are a few.

• Google's reliable storage which is backed up for you
• documents and be shared or collaborated on with other users
• the options for publishing to and interacting with the Web from docs is, frankly, a game-ender for locally hosted Office suites.
• The ability to continue to access your documents even if your new computer is a different OS or hardware vendor with no purchased software.

One demo of the idea of publishing data to the Web that blew me away was in Google's Official Blog about their public data sources, where they plotted a time-series of world fertility data. There's lots of decent examples on the Google Docs official blog as well.

There's also the fact that all Google applications allow you to export your data to local apps, if you wish. The Open Office format export is quite nice in Google Docs (import is OK, but at least for the spreadsheet it has a ways to go).

while feeding you a steady AJAX-based stream of ads.

Only if you don't want to pay for it. Google Docs via a premium Google Apps domain does not have ads.

The only reason this stuff is so popular now is because people won't pay $99.99 for a MS Office license anymore so instead MS/Google are writing server-side adware to try and get the $99 from advertisers over a couple of years.

Ah... no. That's the reason that they're doing it, not the reason that it's popular. The reason that it's popular is that it's useful and free (again, if you don't want to pay for the ad-free version).

Stuff your anti-spyware scanner would automatically delete for you if it was being run locally.

Most anti-spyware scanners don't give a rat's petard about applications that show ads or applications that store files remotely. Typically, the goal is to ferret out software that does either without the user's knowledge or ability to prevent. In both cases, Google Docs is 100% opt-in and entirely friendly to those who wish to opt out later on.

Web application == Remotely accessed spyware

If your definition of spyware is any Web site that records your activity on the site or saves documents that you create for later use, then you need to include every ecommerce site on the planet. I don't think that's a definition the majority of the technical community would agree with.

From the post you replied to:

"That the above is true can be verified by looking at the JS sent to the client"*

I'm unable to understand what you're trying to achieve with your rants, sorry.

*) http://tinisles.blogspot.com/2010/01/should-you-trust-lastpasscom.html

The symmetric cipher uses a master password I select as the key. That key is used locally.

I'm not sure what you're after, but I'm going to assume you haven't looked into it. If so, please do first - else I will be spending time writing what others have already written. If you're already well versed as to how LastPass works and know something I don't I'd be very interested in hearing about it though :)

http://devilsadvocatesecurity.blogspot.com/2009/04/lastpass-answering-security-questions.html

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=5901550

NFC has been patented for the purposes mentioned in apples patent for sure. Where is apple in this chart? Of course the innovation here is that it is an iPhone that uses NFC and not some other manufacturers phone.

This is all nonsense. There can indeed be bug-free software and it can be rigorously proven. Examples are thermostat programs that control the temperature of a room. These are programs that can be shown to be 100% correct. The reason that complex software is unreliable can be attributed to the computer scientists of the last century who turned the Turing Machine into a cult symbol. They also worship Frederic Brooks, the man who wrote the famous 'No Silver Bullet' paper in 1986 and convinced everybody that it's impossible to solve the software unreliability crisis. There are others who disagree, of course.

Some of his predictions seem also to be very interesting if true but possibly wrong. For example, in regards to 11 which states that "the Internet will never create a new economy based on voluntary instead of paid work" which is probably true under some interpretations and is already possibly falsified under other interpretations (Larry Lessig's "Remix" discusses this issue in detail).

Other predictions such as 9 and 10 which discuss how daily work-live will change are interesting although they sound somewhat pseudo-utopian.

Overall, this is interesting speculation but probably could have been summarized in about a third the length. Still worth reading though.

http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/10/comic-488-joke-has-apparently-been.html

Toyota is in trouble because software sucks. All the other auto makers or anybody who write safety-critical code will get their turn in the hot seat. After more than half a century of crappy programming, computer scientists still have not solve the software reliability crisis. No surprise here since the Turing Computing Model (worshiped in academia and the entire industry) is the culprit. Toyota would do well to read this:

How to Construct 100% Bug-Free Software

How to Construct 100% Bug-Free Software

Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

But vitamin D supplements or sunbathing is so cheap, there is not profit in telling people about this...
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Why Michelle Obama is More Likely to Die From Breast Cancer than Hillary Clinton"
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment),
http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938
but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...

Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml

Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self

Just to note that curing vitamin D deficiency (very inexpensive, either from sunlight or supplements) can prevent many cases of cancer:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/cancerMain.shtml
as well as many cases of heart disease, stroke, hypertension, autoimmune diseases, diabetes, depression, chronic pain, osteoarthritis, osteoporosis, muscle weakness, muscle wasting, birth defects, periodontal disease, influenza, autism, and more (there are different degrees of scientific evidence for those). See:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/

But vitamin D supplements or sunbathing is so cheap, there is not profit in telling people about this...
"Treating Disease With Vitamin D"
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/treatment.shtml
"Why Michelle Obama is More Likely to Die From Breast Cancer than Hillary Clinton"
http://curtisduncan.blogspot.com/2009/10/why-michelle-obama-is-more-likely-to.html

There are other inexpensive treatments to prevent or cure cancer with various degrees of anecdotal evidence (like IV vitamin C as a cancer treatment),
http://www.medpagetoday.com/HematologyOncology/OtherCancers/2938
but curing vitamin D deficiency (now widespread as we all spend more time indoors at computers) has lots of scientific evidence about its value in relation to cancer and a wide variety of other things because vitamin D is essential to regulating the expression of thousands of gene. That is why being vitamin D deficient has such widespread negative effects -- sort of like deleting thousands of files at random on your hard drive... What's amazing is that humans survive at all with so little sunlight... So big is this effect of vitamin D deficiency on health that for Western Europe alone it has been suggested:
"A Decade Of Vitamin D Supplementation Would Save $4.4 Trillion Over A Decade; Would Save $1346 Per Person Per Annum"
http://www.lewrockwell.com/sardi/sardi111.html

Where are the US CDC, FDA, AMA, and other acronyms doing about all this? Good question...

Essentially, the US RDA for vitamin D is about ten times too low, as it was set decades ago for healthy bones, not a healthy heart, a healthy brain, a healthy immune system, or a healthy weight. The toxicity fears have also been overblown (vitamin A is much more toxic, and according to Dr. Cannell who runs the vitamin D council website, many people through supplements have too much vitamin A which interferes with vitamin D.)
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/vitaminDToxicity.shtml
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/newsletter/2008-december.shtml

Although just how much vitamin D as supplements you need depends on things like your weight, your skin color, your behavior outdoors, your latitude, your personal biochemestry, and so on, so regular blood tests are important (even though people still disagree over what the optimum level should be). Example:
http://heartscanblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/why-rda-for-vitamin-d.html

The average light skinned human adult in a bathing suit at moderate latitudes under noonday summer sun will make 10,000 to 20,000 IUs of vitamin D in twenty minutes or so in their skin, and up to 50,000 units before their skin turns pink (sunburns are of course bad for you). The reaction is self

I highly recommend OSSEC (ossec.net). It will parse your system logs (SSH, Apache, ModSecurity, Snort, and others) and block attacker's IP addresses automatically. There's even a Wordpress plugin that will output to syslog and therefore OSSEC. For more information, please see: http://securityonion.blogspot.com/2010/02/defense-in-depth-using-ossec-and-other.html

Amen.

What most people don't realize is that the decisions you make now with your money are a choice between what you want now and all possible future uses of that money. Do you have a DVD collection, and a TV? You've chosen that your enjoyment of those things now is more important than saving that money and using it to extend your life later. Seems reasonable, but when you don't have that money when you're older and the inevitable medical expenses arrive, is it a good decision?

This isn't a serious problem until other people are paying for your care, and you decide that their DVD's and TV's aren't more important than helping an 80 year old woman live another year or two. Surely we'd all give up most or all of our entertainment expenses to save lives, right? And well, in all honesty, you don't really NEED that second car, and you don't really NEED to heat your house to over 60 degrees F to live...

But nobody thinks about things in these terms, even though this is the exact decision you have to make when talking about health care.

For a more detailed discussion, see here.

Rate limiting helps get rid of the classical rapid-fire variety password guesser, but will not help at all when you're faced with the coordinated 'hail mary cloud' where each individual host could be attempting to access your system or network only every few hours.

As for portknocking, I seriously think the port knockers would be equally well served by switching all passwords to unicode. That provides a practical alphabet of the same number of unique characters (16 bits, remember), and for anyone with a large enough fleet of password guessers, the mechanics of guessing the right one is not all that different. Oh well, I just spilled the beans for the main point of an upcoming column, that won't spoil the fun later, I hope.

I'm a physicists too, but Ockham's Razor hasn't been proved, from Wikipedia:

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In science, Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic (rule of thumb) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models.[4][5] In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.[6][7][8][9]

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I've actually had a good look and Ockham's Razor from the point of view of information theory. See, my blog. The trouble stopping the Razor been robust, is finding a fair language to express the scientific theory in a minimally small way.

As you apparently know, the change in probability from changing representation language is maximally 2^-+c, where c is the size of the smallest program simulating one language with the other.

However, this is an upper bound, and the real difference in probability will in practice be much smaller than this, except for some weird languages. Cellular automaton No.110 is universal, and extremely simple, so c must at worst be the complexity of this.

Solomonoff made some bounds of how fast systems like this can learn, and it is VERY fast. In this case, it is the speed which one language can learn another, and this can be much faster than c.

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In science, Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic (rule of thumb) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models.[4][5] In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.[6][7][8][9]

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I've actually had a good look and Ockham's Razor from the point of view of information theory. See, my blog. The trouble stopping the Razor been robust, is finding a fair language to express the scientific theory in a minimally small way.

No, it does not work. It sucks. Ask Toyota :-). Look at it this way. If software were any good, our cars would be driving themselves by now. The reason that they don't is that the code gets so complex that it cannot be guaranteed to be 100% reliable. In fact, since the publication of Brooks's No Silver Bullet paper, most people are convinced that there is no hope in finding a solution to the software reliability crisis. Others disagree, of course.

I like drag and drop better but I think the ultimate goal of programming research is to open up application development to as many people as possible. Why I Hate All Computer Programming Languages.

Half a Century of Crappy Computing. It's much worse than people think. Crappy code is all around. Computing started out on the wrong foot. The mathematicians and the Turing Machine worshipers are to blame.

Peter N. M. Hansteen has written a nice article about a similar atack. http://bsdly.blogspot.com/2009/11/rickrolled-get-ready-for-hail-mary.html The first thing I would do (at install time) is to disable root login over ssh.

sorry.... i don't want to make you look silly but please have a look at...

http://captionaction2.blogspot.com/2009/07/html-5-has-no-captioning-provisions.html

http://billcreswell.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/html5-youtube-and-why-the-emperor-has-no-captions/

my apologies again!

Parent is referring to Google Voice's less-than-perfect voicemail transcription technology which often leads to odd or hilarious transcriptions.