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I read this is going to be a HUGE user of bandwidth once they start sending the data around the world to be analyzed. Is it a good time to invest in network providers? I think there will be good plays along with all the cool scientific stuff we'll get out of it. I know the economy is looking poor, but I don't see internet usage shrinking any time soon.

I'll be sleeping soundly tonite.

I don't see anyone spending a good 30 minutes tearing open the Prius with powertools, only to run around with a 100+lb weight. At that point, they might as well steal the entire car.

You're not the first one to err in assuming thieves are as smart as you.

My mom likes to tell me of how her father (my grandfather) used to weigh down the bed of his pickup truck with two big barrels of sand to make it easier to drive. Then, one day he had to park in downtown Houston and left his pickup alone for supposedly about ten minutes and when he came back, some guys had stolen two very large very heavy completely worthless barrels of sand. They'd have made out better with a hybrid battery (even if you ignore it being technology that won't be around for decades).

Ah well, at least Ford makes thieves' lives easier by installing special compartments to make sure thieves can see your iPod (item 4) when they pass by your car. Morons.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Two questions, Mr. Beckerman: First, is there some court proceeding in progress which is likely to require one of the crooks to testify under oath?

There are many. In UMG v. Lindor we had noticed MediaSentry's deposition, and were awaiting rulings on our document subpoena from the Magistrate Judge, when the RIAA made a motion to drop their case. However, the case is pending at this time. There are plenty of other cases in which MediaSentry's deposition can and should be taken. E.g., Andersen v. Atlantic, Atlantic v. Boyer, Elektra v. Torres, Arista v. Does 1-27, Arista v. Does 1-17, LaFace v. Does 1-5, to name a few.

Second, assuming they do take the fifth, and the "evidence" upon which all of the cases are based is wiped out, won't SafeNet just hire some people with investigator's licenses to continue the farce? Or is there some reason that a legitimate, licensed investigator would refuse to participate?

I don't know.

Urey and his student Miller showed in the 1950s that amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, can spontaneously form from hydrogen, methane, and ammonia with an electrical current applied to mimic lightning (ScienceMag http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/citation/130/3370/245) (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller-Urey_experiment). Fox later showed that amino acids can spontaneously form small proteins. Of course, many postulate the primordial Earth's atmosphere was carbon dioxide and nitrogen, but that's beside the point. The point is that these chemical reactions happen, and can happen spontaneously given thermodynamics and probability. It's not a matter of IF these reactions occur, just how often they do. They seem to have happened often enough to form life at least once on one planet ... that is unless His Noodly Appendage is to blame for all this. Sonne Times: Political and Social Commentary http://jsonne.blogspot.com/

At least the post apocalyptic t-shirts are ready:

http://fiendfolio.blogspot.com/2008/09/are-you-ready-for-impending-apocalypse.html
   

In fact, current estimates are that 97% of lead used in lead-acid batteries is recycled. 60-80 percent of a new lead-acid battery that you buy is recycled from an older battery. Don't believe the Greenpeace BS - their data is 20 years old, before many laws were passed regulating lead-acid battery recycling.

Disclaimer - I'm a heavy user of lead-acid batteries.

• At least one other "old" news story made it to Google News yesterday. At about 7AM PDT on Sept 8, 2008, the headlining link for the RealNetworks DVD ripping story was to a 3-year old PCWorld article entitled DVD Ripping Flourishes. That old article had a correctly dated byline and appears to have been scooped up by Google at about the same time as the United Airlines Bankruptcy article (10:30pm PDT the night before).
• Also on Sep 8, Google news introduced a new feature that returns old archived news stories to be returned in news searches. Is that a coincidence or what?

Google's official answer on the subject avoids any sort of culpability. Did anyone else come across new "old" news on Monday Sep 8 on Google News?

• At least one other "old" news story made it to Google News yesterday. At about 7AM PDT on Sept 8, 2008, the headlining link for the RealNetworks DVD ripping story was to a 3-year old PCWorld article entitled DVD Ripping Flourishes. That old article had a correctly dated byline and appears to have been scooped up by Google at about the same time as the United Airlines Bankruptcy article (10:30pm PDT the night before).
• Also on Sep 8, Google news introduced a new feature that returns old archived news stories to be returned in news searches. Is that a coincidence or what?

Google's official answer on the subject avoids any sort of culpability. Did anyone else come across new "old" news on Monday Sep 8 on Google News?

Try this one: http://olddisasters.blogspot.com/2007/01/indiana-train-wrecks.html/

You for one.

Your completely ignoring the law enforcements accounting of the situation and pressing the one sided "oh we are innocent" side and your links actually show that.

Unless you meant "you are completely" I don't know what you mean. My completely? Makes no sense. As for my links, as I said before in case you did not understand what I said, I got those links from others. Those links are not mine.

If the cops didn't have solid evidence, the judges wouldn't have issued a warrant.

If they had warrants then why didn't the police show them when they were asked for the warrants? Most were only shown after hours of waiting. Why did they not show the warrants as soon as they were asked for them?

Don't make the mistake that I'm saying the cops are right, I'm saying that informant told them what was going on and they acted on it. That is a good investigation and police work, not some threatening situation or something like your attempting to portray it.

And as one of the links I provided said, those informants only got paid of there was an arrest. Of course you overlook that because it doesn't fit in with your beliefs.

And I looked at a non-biased site and found this.

Perhaps you didn't pay attention but I previously posted 2 links to the same newspaper as you just did. Actually one of them was to the same article.

Yea, and those informants were getting paid only if there was an arrest.

Who cares. If they didn't product enough evidence and someone got killed because of their actions, you would be bitching that they knew and didn't do anything about it

Bullshit. First, so you only care if someone's arrested? Ok, I'll lie to the police so they'll arrest you so I can get paid. If the police wanted the truth they would have paid whether there was an arrest or not, by only paying if there is an arrest you're inviting corruption. Maybe you do mind it but I do, As for what I'd bitch about, so you can read my mind? You're lousy at it. Not only do I bitch about corruption, but in fact I have said a number of tymes I'd rather 1 guilty person go free than to falsely punish one innocent.

the people arrested in the raids and the stuff confiscated along with the information presented by the informants does not point to some innocent intentions or unfounded actions/accusations

How do you know? Ooh, that's right you can read minds.

There were plenty of people in those houses as well as other places in the area who showed no indication of illegal acts and were not arrested nor denied their lawful right to a lawful protest.

Including those who were there to eyewitness and record the raids, and they got detained as well.

That alone debunks your claims of systematic police abuse.

The detaining of those eyewitnesses debunks your claim nothing wrong happened. Even your " non-biased site" said this: "On Saturday afternoon, law agents surrounded 951 Iglehart Av. in St. Paul where members of I-Witness Video, a New York-based group that monitors police conduct during protests, were staying. They were detained and handcuffed but eventually freed without charges. "

Wake the fuck up.

Move to North Korea!

Falcon

most of the american stock exchanges have been going down all year.

It may be funny but when billions of dollars and even lives are at stake, software unreliability is not that funny. Software should work like hardware and should never fail unless there is a physical breakdown. Hardware is reactive, parallel and synchronous. Likewise, software should be reactive, parallel and synchronous. Until computer scientists realize this simple truth, we will continue to have catastrophic software failures and pay the consequences. It's time to say goodbye to the antiquated computing models of the last century. It's time to put the obsolete ideas of Turing and Babbage to rest in the age of multicore processors and massive parallelism. And please, kill the damn threads already; there is a way to implement rock-solid parallelism in a computer that does not involve threads at all. More at the links below.

Why Software Is Bad and What We can do to Fix It

How to Solve the Parallel Programming Crisis

Have you saved copies of those stamped letters and responses to your correspondence (or records of lack thereof) over the years? It seems like that would be wonderful material for a series of blog articles carefully expounding and explaining your positions and presenting the paper trail of your attempts to reason with the game publishers over the years. If it was done well you might see your page rank soar on Google, get a lot of links back to your blog and articles, and maybe even an interview with a game magazine or other major trade publication. For example check out the How copy protection creates pirates article on the Stardock galactic civilizations page and the Pwned blog which collected together some of the relevant articles and discussion threads on the subject. Perhaps you have some original materials that you could add to the discussion? It might be worth a try to extend the reach and enhance the value of your previous efforts. Think of it as giving back to the gaming community that has given all of us so many good times over the years, but now is in danger of losing much of what made gaming great in the years past.

Researcher Proposes New Framework For Understanding Cells, Disease.

Researcher Jamey Marth, publishing recently in Nature Cell Biology, has organized 68 molecular building blocks into four categories and illustrated their roles within cells. Marth suggests that organizing these building blocks, much as chemists organize the periodic table, will "provide a conceptual framework for biology that has the potential to enhance education and research by promoting the integration of knowledge.". Roland Piquepaille and Thomas Joseph offer commentary on their blogs.

I'm kind of surprised. It doesn't look like NZ has any major bandwidth, compared to the rest of the world. Maybe they can get Google to hook them up to the pan-Asian cable going in soon. ;-)

wow, that's rough, but thanks for sharing!

Our generator test-runs every Thursday for a few minutes to make sure everything will be ok. You know, theoretically

It doesn't always work out like that

I know what you mean, but I get nervous about that much water around my computers. A leak would be catastrophic.

When my air conditioner breaks down, I don't have a life threatening situation.

Scientology might own the copyright to their works, but the Dutch supreme court ruled that copyright infringement can be acceptable if it is of interest of the general public. Of course, they have no jurisdiction in the US, but if the copyrighted material can be hosted in the Netherlands, it can be made accesible to anyone.

For those who don't know about Scientology, this AFP news article summarizes the typical non-Scientologist's view of Scientology activities: The controversial Church of Scientology will be tried in a French court for "organised fraud".

This WikiNews report explains more about the current story: the alleged "rights group" does not exist as a physical entity.

leading to gap in U.S. spaceflight capability.

Having lived through one such gap in my lifetime I have to say they seem brief at first, but can extend some. A lot more than you would think at first.

It is not acceptable to me to surrender U.S. spaceflight capability. Not for one minute. Not for 12 years. Not at all. Dammit do we have to let the rest of the world own space? Did you hear? There's a lot more space in space than there is land on land. And more resources. There are entire moons made of hydrocarbons. And the conquering of space leads to us learning valuable lessons that help everyone stuck to this ball of mud. And then there's that whole "an 8' length of rebar dropped from low earth orbit can destroy any tank ever made" thing.

Hey, I heard that a retail 12 megapixel camera attached to a retail telescope can, from orbit, discriminate objects as small as fingerprints, and that advanced video analysis software can identify an individual by his gait if not by his impossible-to-mask facial features. Doesn't that make you wonder what the kind or money that launches stuff into orbit could buy? Could they scan you for cancer? Do I have your attention yet?

Obligatory Toynbee Tiles reference. If you don't know what they are, it behooves you to find out.

I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but no. Just no. We will not surrender space. It is not in our national interest to do so. If the odds of survival are 1:9 we'll still have enough volunteers that filtering them is the biggest challenge of the endeavor. Money is not an issue.

There are a lot of great online resources to help with the transition. tvfool.com is great resource for understanding where you are in relation to local broadcast towers.

I blog about the transition in my free time (shameless plug - DTV Transition.

Seriously, are we really asking what a creationist book burner thinks about technology? She's literally 1 step away from Ted Stevens, hell she even supported his Bridge to Nowhere (until it became a political hot potato) and was a major member of his PAC. Reading up on JUST what has been found out in the first 24-48 hours after McCain chose her (but, apparently before he vetted her) she's by far the most corrupt politician that I've read up on in a long while.

You guy should read the Open Letter (confirmed true by conservative sources) about what she's pulled in her short stint as a poltician. It's a laundry list of disgusting nepotism and mismanagement.
http://thezaftigredhead.blogspot.com/2008/09/open-letter-from-someone-who-knows-gov.html

In short, she's a female version of George W. Bush. Her views on technology probably involve leeches and "internet tubes." Don't be swindled by the current spin cycle coming out of McCain's campaign -- she's woefully inexperienced and completely unsuited to even run a small town of 5000 -- hell, the almost threw her out of town and she drove them so far into debt they won't get out for 100 years.

http://newsfromchernobyl.blogspot.com/2008/01/indian-river-center-of-fish-debate.html

it's going to affect the immediate enviroment...

ZFS is available on Linux via FUSE. I've experimented with it myself. It only works on sparc and x86 architectures, though. I found this out after trying to compile it for my NSLU2.

There's a blog, a wiki, and a google group.

ZFS is the only filesystem I would trust with a large amount of data. We have several ZFS storage units here at work, and I've built a few myself. Personally, I'd run Solaris x86 in a VM and export filesystems via NFS before I'd run anything else.

Monty's been working on the interesting "Maria" transactional engine (evolved from, and compatible with MyISAM), which is slated to become MySQL's future default engine.

Since they recently made a feature-complete ("no known bugs"!) release of Maria, I'm tempted to think that was his personal deadline to quit.

Josh Berkus (core PostgreSQL developer) also recently quit Sun.

I like Sun. I'm sad that they have lost these two brilliant database engineers, and I hope they go on and kick Oracle's (and that other company's) butt anyway.

Please stop spreading misinformation. You should read http://bankdeals.blogspot.com/ before you post about money again. I can (and do) get 5% on 100 bucks easy as pie. Idiot. You're doing it wrong.

google video has the best quality. Also it stores the original video, should they ever use a different compression codec. As proof just google the google-video-to-avi favelet.

Youtube does have a high-quality mpeg4 ipod version of new videos (ones after about 2007?) but you can only see them with an ipod or user-agent switcher, or download them with keepvid.com.

http://pppad.blogspot.com/2007/05/nimh-held-hostage-by-chevron-texaco.html

It's a moot point though. Li-Ion (or a variation of lithium tech) or EEStor's Ultracaps will have surpassed Ni-MH by 2014.

Firefox, Opera and Safari use Google as default search engine and don't include MSN Search as an option.

Don't really need flash for those video sites like youtube, and most everything else is just advertising - check out this info about how to download the videos as mp4 files:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/04/download-youtube-videos-as-mp4-files.html

In the comments there are a lot of sites listed that will automate the process for you.

I think one of the reasons to argue against promulgating anthropogenic global warming is the attitude inherent in your last sentence. Guess what. It doesn't matter what you're eager to repeat. There is nothing so indifferent to human opinion as the weather. And it's the weather that can kill you, not climate change. Half a degree in the average global temperature over the course of a century means absolutely nothing to your personal survival.

The problem with the Kyoto Treaty and every similar thing is that no matter what we change, today or tomorrow, nothing can stop the weather. If you live in New Orleans and the hurricane is coming, you leave. You can't STOP it. You can't even make it hesitate. What are you going to do, stand out on the beach and yell into the wind, "I drive a hybrid you bastard!" ? I don't think so. It doesn't matter if you drive a Hummer or pole a skiff through the bayou by hand, there's always going to be hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wildfires, and sundry other potentially deadly things. You have one and only one choice as far as surviving the weather is concerned: do you get out of the way or do you not.

The only difference between now and and the days of the Toba catastrophe theory is that maybe, just maybe, our technological civilization will empower us to save more of us this time. We've got the satellites to be able to see the hurricanes coming in time, and know that it IS a hurricane, and not just a squall. We know how to build in concrete and steel now, and yeah that takes ginormous amounts of energy by primitive standards, but we can use it to hold back the sea for real, not just make symbolic gestures about the futility of trying.

We can move a million people across the face of the earth in a matter of days, and feed them and house them in astounding comfort, and we think nothing of it. We bandy about phrases like "a million people". It was not so very long ago, in the history of the Earth, that a million people was all the people there was, anywhere. If we refuse to sacrifice our technology in the name of some foolish notion that we can control the planet, we might stand a chance of avoiding being reduced to those numbers again.

A privacy policy is a type of contract. Contract law is a two-way street. Each party can assert terms. If Google can assert its legal privacy terms just by publishing them (on something less than its homepage), then maybe Internet users can assert their own terms of privacy protection just by publishing them! --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html This idea is not legal advice, just something to discuss.

A privacy policy is a type of contract. Contract law is a two-way street. Each party can assert terms. If Google can assert its legal privacy terms just by publishing them (on something less than its homepage), then maybe Internet users can assert their own terms of privacy protection just by publishing them! --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html This idea is not legal advice, just something to discuss.

So, in light of this ... what role does the Sun play in climate change? ... OBVIOUSLY it plays a role. Without the sun, we would cease to exist.

Just a few articles about the recent LACK of sunspots:

• Sun : One Month Without Sunspot
• First month without sunspots in a century
• What's Wrong with the Sun?
• Sun Makes History: First Spotless Month in a Century

If you read these articles, you'll realize that the sun plays a larger part in our climate than we do. In addition, check out the "mini-ice ages" after each of the periods ... from the NASA article ... The longest minimum on record, the Maunder Minimum of 1645-1715, lasted an incredible 70 years. Sunspots were rarely observed and the solar cycle seemed to have broken down completely. The period of quiet coincided with the Little Ice Age, a series of extraordinarily bitter winters in Earth's northern hemisphere. ...

It may appear that the whole "global warming" hysteria is about to come to an end ... and just like the 70's, the next big scare will be "global cooling" ... check out:

• Time Mag Flashback: 1974 Issue Warns of Man-Made 'Global Cooling'
• Another Ice Age?

I'm NOT saying that man doesn't play a trival part, but realistically, we don't matter that much on a global scale.

Just listen to George Carlin ... he DOES make some sense.

They measured the working set, not the private working set. One of the big reasons why Chrome's "spawn a bunch of different processes, all running the same code" strategy isn't a big deal is because Windows shares memory between copies of code when it can.

EULAs are governed by contract law. Contract law is a two-way street. Just as web administrators and software vendors can communicate to visitors/customers what they assert to be the legal terms, customers can communicate back. In principle, contract law does not favor either administrators or customers. Individuals may be able to use contract law to assert their legal terms on other parties, such as search engines. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html My ideas are not legal advice for any particular situation; they are just ideas for public discussion.

EULAs are governed by contract law. Contract law is a two-way street. Just as web administrators and software vendors can communicate to visitors/customers what they assert to be the legal terms, customers can communicate back. In principle, contract law does not favor either administrators or customers. Individuals may be able to use contract law to assert their legal terms on other parties, such as search engines. --Ben http://hack-igations.blogspot.com/2008/05/google-privacy-policy-terms-of-service.html My ideas are not legal advice for any particular situation; they are just ideas for public discussion.

There's more to crime rates than just murders. Again, read the article. The violent crime rate in the UK is five times higher than the US. London, which has a slightly smaller population than NYC, has a crime rate 7 times higher.

The fact is, you're far more likely to be a victim of violent crime in the UK than in most places in the US. If you want to experience UK levels of crime, visit Washington DC, a city famous for its ridiculous crime rate.

You can turn this behavior off.

This was covered last April by William Patry (author of the text, Patry on Copyright), perhaps the most distinguished copyright attorney on the planet, see: http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/04/oregon-goes-wacka-wacka-huna-kuna.html

IMNHO, this kind of action, whether by California or Oregon, is an abomination, anathema to the idea of rule of law.

From Banks & Bros. v. West Pub. Co., 27 F. 50 (C.C.D. Minn. 1886):

[I]t is a maxim of universal application that every man is presumed to know the law, and it would seem inherent that freedom of access to the laws, or the official interpretation of those laws, should be co-extensive with the sweep of the maxim. Knowledge is the only just condition of obedience. The laws of Rome were written on tablets and posted, that all might read, and all were bound to obedience. The act of that emperor who caused his enactments to be written in small letters, on small tablets, and then posted the latter at such height that none could read the letters, and at the same time insisted upon the rule of obedience, outraging as it did the relations of governor and governed under his own system of government, has never been deemed consistent with or possible under ours... Each citizen is a ruler,--a lawmaker,--and as such has the right of access to the laws he joins in making and to any official interpretation thereof.

You can add functionality to block ads and add gestures via some Windows utilities. There's a post here that details how to do it. I just did it, and Chrome is a LOT more usable for me. YMMV, of course.

I'm not sure about that. I think the real jewel is the sandboxed tab infrastructure. FF's tracemonkey js VM will (probably) be as fast or faster than V8, though I don't know enough technical details to compare the two in any other way.

Actually, here's a comparison of Chrome's Javascript speed with Firefox 3.1 and Safari 3.1 (both with their new Javascript engines), and Chrome goes roughly twice as fast as either of them.

Google describe Chrome as 'multi-platform'. They also say that they're tailoring each version to the platform it runs on, so that it doesn't have the 'rough edges' that (for example) Firefox and Safari have.

Chromium's overall design has been multi-platform from the start, but we are also committed to getting the details right for users on each platform.

Oh yes, you are right. In this sense an object can indeed be GCed multiple times.

A nice summary to the problem you mention (finalizer making the object again reachable by putting it into some "global variable" e.g.) is written here: http://java2go.blogspot.com/2007/09/javaone-2007-performance-tips-2-finish.html

angel'o'sphere

P.S. you should not post such important stuff as AC, AC only rarely ged modded up

http://daughteroftheyellowriver.blogspot.com/

I was at this seminar in Aug 2006 and heard (and agreed with) the Hon. D'Amato when he said that in order to reduce the global pollution driven by advanced nations, particularly the USA, we ought to GIVE China the latest anti-pollution technology or equipment. Current practice is for the patent-holding companies to license out this stuff at prices that would exorbitantly drive up the cost of goods to the nations ordering the products.

My take (my opinion before hearing D'Amato speak) on this is:

Since the USA's population (seeking cheap, plentiful goods) is a significant source of orders-based pollution, the US should encourage the transfer (cheap or free) of technology so China can nearly immediately but significantly reduce the amount of pollution China is spewing.

But, then there are those who think that the anti-pollution efforts in technology creation should be performed by China. That, to me, and to others, is a fallacy. Assuming China won't STEAL the technology or clone it in unauthorized output, it would be DECADES before China alone or in painstakingly long and expensive tech transfers manages to reduce the pollution footprint. In that time, millions (possibly hundreds of millions) of people will have either died or been directly impacted by the pollution that might have been averted if the US and some European countries just hand over the technology.

An alternative -- albeit a painful one -- is to take the moral high ground and simply forbid the companies from issuing orders for manufacture in China. That would be unrealistic, and it wouldn't surprise me if corporate CEOs would meet in a cone of silence and arrange a few coups or assassinations.

The US and any countries allowing domestic companies to issue build/make orders to China but not handing over the anti-pollution plans and maintenance steps to China are just be two-faced and will be held accountable when true history is written. China would not HAVE the job of manufacturing if "morally superior" nations didn't fail to nationalize and distribute globally the technology.

So, people here can browbeat and excoriate China and talk about global strategic positioning and other marketing and economic mumbo jumbo, but in the end that technology HAS TO BE transferred. Otherwise, we'll just have more of the same.