Slashdot Mirror

Speaking of Carl Sagan and his book Cosmos here is what he concluded about the Tunguska Cosmic Body (TCB): "The key point of the Tunguska Event is that there was a tremendous explosion, a great shock wave, an enormous forest fire, and yet no impact crater at the site". Someone in a post in this same thread mentioned conventional theory. Everyone seems to believe that because there is no crater or no immediate evidence of a body they assume that the TCB must have been destroyed in the enormous explosion. The question no one has asked is: Obvious question 1: What if the reason there is no crater might be becasue the TCB was not destroyed in the blast? Some people might now think that question is unconventional or unscientific and perhaps is the reason why no one asks it. Others may not and so lets continue with the next obvious (to some) question: Obvious question 2: If the TCB was not destroyed then might it still be in the vicinity of the earth? Which leads to the next obvious (to some) question. Obvious question 3: Does that mean that some people might have seen the TCB since the initial blast? and the next: Obvious question 4: If they saw the TCB would they know what they were looking at? Finally an answer from the Russian Newspaper Sibir in the town of Irkutsk printed the week of the blast: 'in the village of Nizhne-Karelinsk in the northwest high above the horizon, the peasants saw a body shining very brightly -(too bright for the naked eye) with a bluish white light. It moved vertically down-wards for about ten minutes. The body was in the form of a 'pipe' (i.e. cylindrical). The sky was cloudless, except that low down on the horizon in the direction in which this glowing body was observed; a small dark cloud was noticed. It was hot and dry and when the shining body approached the ground it seemed to be pulverized and in its place a huge cloud of black smoke was formed and a loud crash, not like thunder, but as if from the fall of large stones, or from gunfire, was heard. All the buildings shook and at the same time, a forked tongue of flame broke through the cloud. The old women wept, everyone thought that the end of the world was approaching." which leads to the next obvious question: Obvious question 5: Has anyone seen a cosmic body like this since 1908? Check out this web site and look at the last video number 5: http://www.hbccufo.org/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1345 Amazing eh! If you are the unconventional sort who is brave enough to find answers to those more obvious (to some) questions then perhaps you might read this: http://ablebodiedman.blogspot.com/ I think Carl Sagan was right when he said: "Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/c/carlsagan101620.html Which leads to the next obious question: Obvious question 5: Am I unconventional or is everyone else? best regards ablebodiedman

Really? I wasn't at all aware of that. It's not like I actively maintain an Angband variant... And I think you'll find Angband development has kicked off again, whereas ToME doesn't look in danger of releasing a beta quality release of ToME 3 for some time. But hey, the roguelike community is small enough we shouldn't be kicking each other in the shins.

Apparently banks in South America offer this "service" to their customers.

The key to using GIMP effectively is finally learning: EVERYTHING (well, nearly) can be done by right-click on the image window.

Once you get used to it (and some menu choices, like how "image" and "layer" has essentially identical set of menu items with different scope of application, and how many of the options available in the leading proprietary competitor under "mode" or such is under the understated "color" menu in GIMP), you might very well find this much more convenient than the leading proprietary competitor. Your mouse-hand doesn't have to move as much, for one.

P.S. BTW, I don't think ... intelligient GIMP defenders would write you off when you complain about GIMP UI. In fact, GIMP developers are accutely aware of this problem. So accutely that they set up this blog.

No, a calorie is not a calorie, and you don't get fat from eating calories. There is increasing research evidence, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that carbs cause the weight gain, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease. Exercise can help, but the basic answer is chemical. The calorie theory is outdated, and anyone who has tried it for the last 30 years knows it does not work. It is simplistic, and easy to conceive, but a physics lie. The new metabolic dynamic is just as simple and plausible, and by all accounts, far more effective. Scientists agree individually that insulin's primary role is to drive fat production, and carbs primary effect is to drive insulin secretion. So why not take the logical next step and treat fat by reducing carbs? Scientists can't seem to follow their own simple, straightforward logic. Taubes is not saying that exercise has no place in health. He is specifically saying that it does not directly cause weight loss. Taubes agrees with the other benefits of exercise and exercises himself. He is just making the point that medical claims need to be checked for validity by research, which they often have not been. Do not just believe what health "experts" tell you to believe. You should not listen to any doctor who still believes in the low-fat or caloric model of nutrition. Taubes is not a researcher, is a journalist. He is just honestly reporting what the research actually says, which has often been covered up, and the medical community is running scared. Taubes is asking for the research to be done, and the research community is desperately resisting it. Something is rotten in Denmark and Taubes is merely exposing it. For more information and reviews of the research, see the follwing medical and general info websites: http://www.weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/ (Regina Wilshire) http://rjr10036.typepad.com/askdrvernon/ (Dr. Mary Vernon) http://www.proteinpower.com/ (Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades) http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ (Dr. Richard Bernstein) http://www.lowcarb-ca.com/ http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.blogspot.com/ (Jimmy Moore) Read the other reports by Taubes available widely on the web. Read the report by Dr. Ron Rosedale "Insulin and its Metabolic Effects" available widely on the web.

No, a calorie is not a calorie, and you don't get fat from eating calories. There is increasing research evidence, and a great deal of anecdotal evidence, that carbs cause the weight gain, the high cholesterol, the diabetes, the heart disease. Exercise can help, but the basic answer is chemical. The calorie theory is outdated, and anyone who has tried it for the last 30 years knows it does not work. It is simplistic, and easy to conceive, but a physics lie. The new metabolic dynamic is just as simple and plausible, and by all accounts, far more effective. Scientists agree individually that insulin's primary role is to drive fat production, and carbs primary effect is to drive insulin secretion. So why not take the logical next step and treat fat by reducing carbs? Scientists can't seem to follow their own simple, straightforward logic. Taubes is not saying that exercise has no place in health. He is specifically saying that it does not directly cause weight loss. Taubes agrees with the other benefits of exercise and exercises himself. He is just making the point that medical claims need to be checked for validity by research, which they often have not been. Do not just believe what health "experts" tell you to believe. You should not listen to any doctor who still believes in the low-fat or caloric model of nutrition. Taubes is not a researcher, is a journalist. He is just honestly reporting what the research actually says, which has often been covered up, and the medical community is running scared. Taubes is asking for the research to be done, and the research community is desperately resisting it. Something is rotten in Denmark and Taubes is merely exposing it. For more information and reviews of the research, see the follwing medical and general info websites: http://www.weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/ (Regina Wilshire) http://rjr10036.typepad.com/askdrvernon/ (Dr. Mary Vernon) http://www.proteinpower.com/ (Drs. Michael and Mary Dan Eades) http://www.diabetes-normalsugars.com/ (Dr. Richard Bernstein) http://www.lowcarb-ca.com/ http://www.livinlavidalowcarb.blogspot.com/ (Jimmy Moore) Read the other reports by Taubes available widely on the web. Read the report by Dr. Ron Rosedale "Insulin and its Metabolic Effects" available widely on the web.

Remember the scene in "The Voyage Home" where Bones visits a 20th century hospital and is outraged by its barbarous practices ("What is this, the Dark Ages?")? I've pretty much felt the same way about medicine for all of my adult life, and it increasingly seems like others share Bone's and my opinions.

See Warner v. Cassin transcript of June 29, 2007, proceedings.

The CIA wants to make the personal information of everyone public. At least that's what I get from a previous article and this one.

http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/11/11/204231

It's time for Ron Paul. Cause none of the others are going to do a dang thing about it.

It hurt watching this:
http://ivorytowerz.blogspot.com/2007/11/wolf-blitzer-is-human-rights-more.html

Remember this letter by the defense attorney (Merl Ledford, III) who got an RIAA case dropped? One of his key points was that the RIAA suit was instigated by someone not licensed to practice law, but that point hasn't received a lot of press. It appears that anyone can make a buck on behalf of the RIAA by suing filesharers, and it usually goes unnoticed because people generally pay the fine rather than contest the lawsuit. Imagine Danny DeVito in that movie based on a John Grisham novel, the one with Matt Damon. No license to practice law, but ambulance chasing nonetheless. That appears to be the way the RIAA works.

The people who should be worried about the RIAA are the ones who NEVER illegally share files. That's the point. You think it's easy to prove innocence, or inexpensive? No, it will cost you a lot, and if you have a computer and an internet connection, you could already be considered an infringer. Danny DeVito has his eye on you.

There is no legal terminology "making available". That is something the RIAA lawyers made up. They can cite no part of the Copyright Act that refers to it, and they have themselves stopped using it in their complaints, realizing it was indefensible.

While encrypting local data can be a solution, insuring that all sensitive data is properly encrypted can be difficult. Moreover, proving that all such data has been encrypted after a laptop has been lost or stolen is practically impossible. A much better solution is to simply store all data on central servers at the data center, and access them remotely via Server Based Computing: http://ericomguy.blogspot.com/2007/11/sbc-could-save-you-from-jail.html

Just found the Re-Entry Japan Blogspot page on which Gaijin provocateur Arudo Debito has posted that at Narita there will be at least one booth set aside for re-entry permit holders.

I also see some notes that initially, mixed nationality families (like mine) with at least one Japanese parent and children under 16 will be allowed to use the Japanese counters. (possibly to avoid the embarrassment of having the kids ask why Daddy has to be fingerprinted by a criminal)

The the construction you are describing is a closure; indeed they rock and show up in several functional languages. The power of the abstraction (more than just iterators) was well explored in the "Lambda the ultimate..." papers in Scheme in the 1970s. They may well included in Java 1.7 and a prototype is even available (examples here and here). .

The the construction you are describing is a closure; indeed they rock and show up in several functional languages. The power of the abstraction (more than just iterators) was well explored in the "Lambda the ultimate..." papers in Scheme in the 1970s. They may well included in Java 1.7 and a prototype is even available (examples here and here). .

Lubos Motl sounds like an asshole, witness this blog post from a few months ago: http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/08/lubo-motl.html Lubos, methinks you doth protest too much.

"It was bloggers and others who found out who the person was and revealed their name, not the parents."

Outing them may prevent similar acts in the future, and it allows the public to choose (lawful) disconnection and ostracism as options. If I had any business interaction with the Drews I'd sever it and make the severance public.

http://bluemerle.blogspot.com/2007/11/what-you-said-to-megan-meier.html

Hey fyngyrz,

your post prompted me to write this in my blog... ~;-)

eReaders and eBooks
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/11/ereaders-and-ebooks.html

For those who don't want to follow the link and check out all my other zuper ztuff...

  eReaders and eBooks

Here is an idea for all of the companies trying to get this right.

You need a great reader at a great price. This $400 reader I just heard about from Amazon is not the great price by a long shot. $50 sounds ball park off the top of my head. $100 might be pushing it at today's dollar value for my part of the world.

eBooks should be way less than regular books people.

Have every regular book come with an eBook in a sleeve in the back or have a code printed in it that allows for a free download of the book.

Why this last bit? Best of both worlds for people who like physical books. You get the physical book with all of its advantages, plus you get the eBook with all of the searching, bookmarking, cross referencing possibilities.

Stop thinking about how to milk the people. We are not your cows and goats. Give the people a product that will make things better for them and settle for an honest, decent profit while doing so.

drew

Check my NaNoWriMo Novel in progress:
http://dangernovel.blogspot.com/
Danger - A Safe Bahamian Novel

Hey fyngyrz,

your post prompted me to write this in my blog... ~;-)

eReaders and eBooks
http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/11/ereaders-and-ebooks.html

For those who don't want to follow the link and check out all my other zuper ztuff...

  eReaders and eBooks

Here is an idea for all of the companies trying to get this right.

You need a great reader at a great price. This $400 reader I just heard about from Amazon is not the great price by a long shot. $50 sounds ball park off the top of my head. $100 might be pushing it at today's dollar value for my part of the world.

eBooks should be way less than regular books people.

Have every regular book come with an eBook in a sleeve in the back or have a code printed in it that allows for a free download of the book.

Why this last bit? Best of both worlds for people who like physical books. You get the physical book with all of its advantages, plus you get the eBook with all of the searching, bookmarking, cross referencing possibilities.

Stop thinking about how to milk the people. We are not your cows and goats. Give the people a product that will make things better for them and settle for an honest, decent profit while doing so.

drew

Check my NaNoWriMo Novel in progress:
http://dangernovel.blogspot.com/
Danger - A Safe Bahamian Novel

1. forgotten that a child's life was lost and several families destroyed because of this one woman's decisions, actions and words, -or-
2. not read enough to see that the woman was identified and stated as much in a police report readily available to the press, -or-
3. not read enough to realize that the family has now gone public because this happened 13 months ago and law enforcement has said no charges can/will be brought, meaning no one's going to hold these folks accountable if their community doesn't.

The taxpayers will only hold still for a certain amount of screwing. We won't continue to fund every scheme somebody dreams up.

The fact that we've continued to fund Fusion research, now into it's - at least - 40th year with no payback in sight continues to amaze me. And it's only because the payback may be so great that we do so, decade in and decade out.

Some great things come out of academic research, but others are a huge money sink and have to be whacked. If it is so great, good chance somebody else will pick it up and carry on.

These are theones I found useful

http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/sanboot/debian_and_ubuntu
http://www.s-mart.net/aoe.txt
http://www.coraid.com/support/linux/contrib/vantuyl/aoeboot.txt

There's also the SLAX Aoe boot disk http://www.lbserver.org/aoe/

Here's my writeups

http://maht0x0r.blogspot.com/

Cringely talked about those four conditions and the why of it back in July too. In short his take on it was that Google isn't really intending to win this, or it wouldn't have needed to have those conditions guaranteed. The conditions they did have accepted are:
# Open applications: consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
# Open devices: consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
(from google blog)

Here's an 18 year old girl they have been inadvertently pursuing for 4 years, based on 48 song files she downloaded when she was 13 and 14 years old.

This past summer they inadvertently filed a summary judgment motion against her, trying to get a judgment for $36,000 so that she can start off her adulthood with a bankruptcy.

The number of wow players will hit 10 Million will wrath releases. i put my reviews about wrath in my blog: htt://igolg.blogspot.com

This looks neat and very promising, but I don't think it's background free, is it? This is based on page 2, "The building blocks of the standard
model and gravity are fields over a four dimensional base manifold. I think there remains an unanswered question regarding what "x" means in the equations. And you can derive some stuff trying to answer that question. Just 2 cents.

Hey, cool, Lubos doesn't like me either! I must be a genius :-)

For those who may be interested, an interview and a couple of online discussions with Garrett Lisi participating:

http://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?t=179527

http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/08/garrett-lisis-inspiration.html

Meanwhile Lisi, unifies gravity into the SM, in a very odd route, a single gravi-electric-weak model with a SO(7,1) group. Now gravity is supposed to be described by symmetries of space-time, while the electroweak force is supposed to be an internal symmetries of particles, and as Motls describes, a theorem called the Coleman-Mandula theorem proves that never the twain shall met.

So what Lisi's work thus, is add up all the apples and all the oranges in known physics, put them in the same container, but not say anything about, why one thingy is an apple and the other is a orange.

And of course, Lisi model has space left over, all the apples and oranges together don't full E8, instead they's space for another 20 particles, which he fills in on the diagrams, but says nothing about what they might do in practice, (these extra particles are colored, so i immediately worry if the're going to cause proton decay.)

So far, Lisi's model doesn't seem to make any testible predictions, but its early days, and working through from a group and how particles fit in it, to actually physical predictions is a very long trek.

In fact for some-one with a bit of knowledge of group theory, its not a deficult game to play, to take a group from mathematics and try and fill the known elementary particles in on it. In fact its so easy to do, i've done one myself, http://www.geocities.com/ch1rality/E8-E7-E6-F4.html starting from E8, and forming with 3 generations, some extra quark states, and just one extra neutrino.

Why E8? E8 is every mathematians favourite group, there a lots of group that can have any size, just 5 special ones with unique sizes, E8, E7,E6,F4 and G2. And E8 is the biggest baddest group of the special lot.

Meanwhile Lisi, unifies gravity into the SM, in a very odd route, a single gravi-electric-weak model with a SO(7,1) group. Now gravity is supposed to be described by symmetries of space-time, while the electroweak force is supposed to be an internal symmetries of particles, and as Motls describes, a theorem called the Coleman-Mandula theorem proves that never the twain shall met.

So what Lisi's work thus, is add up all the apples and all the oranges in known physics, put them in the same container, but not say anything about, why one thingy is an apple and the other is a orange.

And of course, Lisi model has space left over, all the apples and oranges together don't full E8, instead they's space for another 20 particles, which he fills in on the diagrams, but says nothing about what they might do in practice, (these extra particles are colored, so i immediately worry if the're going to cause proton decay.)

So far, Lisi's model doesn't seem to make any testible predictions, but its early days, and working through from a group and how particles fit in it, to actually physical predictions is a very long trek.

In fact for some-one with a bit of knowledge of group theory, its not a deficult game to play, to take a group from mathematics and try and fill the known elementary particles in on it. In fact its so easy to do, i've done one myself, http://www.geocities.com/ch1rality/E8-E7-E6-F4.html starting from E8, and forming with 3 generations, some extra quark states, and just one extra neutrino.

Why E8? E8 is every mathematians favourite group, there a lots of group that can have any size, just 5 special ones with unique sizes, E8, E7,E6,F4 and G2. And E8 is the biggest baddest group of the special lot.

Please see what a real physicist thinks of this. There's always a chance that he's stumbled onto something awesome of course, but odds are low. Basically he takes some stuff that looks cool and extracts physics from it in various ways.

http://motls.blogspot.com/2007/11/exceptionally-simple-theory-of.html

'That's pretty cute! :-) The author is not constrained by any old "conventions" and simply adds Grassmann fields together with ordinary numbers i.e. bosons with fermions, one-forms with spinors and scalars. He is just so skillful that he can add up not only apples and oranges but also fields of all kinds you could ever think of. Every high school senior excited about physics should be able to see that the paper is just a long sequence of childish misunderstandings.'

This is garbage. Pure and simple.

For eg., look at Lubos Motl's blog entry on the subject:http://motls.blogspot.com/

A media-frenzy over horseshit that makes precisely zero sense.

Care to elaborate?

Even if Lubos comes across pretty rude, he sounds he knows what he is talking about.

The blog featured in the article has a conflict of interest. Lavishsoft sells software products for multi-boxing, so it's just on the ethical side of botting. But, that blog does contain the article http://onwarden.blogspot.com/2007/08/heuristics-and-your-one-unbanned.html But not quite a company selling botting software. --Krelnor P.S. It's not a root kit, for god's sake. At worst, it would be a trojan included in WoW.

Also interesting that while we would apparently give away this, one of our most basic rights, because we don't seem to care, it's notable that the rest of the world probably knows more about our candidates than the average American: From sustainabletechnologies.blogspot.com:

"Know what's funny about the rest of the world? They know a whole lot about us, even though we don't know much about them. I can't even tell you when Ghana's last national election was, but Ghanaians know who the different candidates are in ours, and their platforms. Humbled? You should be. I am."

Refer to "Projected Costs of Generating Electricity: 2005 Update" by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency
I would recommend reading pages 46-52

A summary from the NEI Nuclear Notes blog:
"The study finds that at a 5% discount rate, levelized costs for nuclear range between $21 and $31 per MWh (2.1 to 3.1 cents per KWh), with investment costs representing 50% of total cost on average, while O&M and fuel represent around 30% and 20%, respectively. For gas-fired plants, the study finds levelized costs ranging from $37 to $60 per MWh (3.7 to 6 cents per KWh), with investment costs accounting for less than 15% of total costs, O&M accounting for less than 10%, and fuel costs accounting for nearly 80% of total costs, on average. The study finds levelized costs for coal-fired plants ranging between $25 and $50 per MWh (2.5 to 5 cents per KWh). Investment costs for coal plants account for just over a third of total costs, while O&M and fuel account for around 20% and 45%, respectively."

The design of the Chernobyl and 3 Mile Island Nuclear reactors was based on our primitive understanding of how to harness nuclear energy. But these incidents have by and large shaped the way 90% of the people today see nuclear power generation.

Pebble reactors change the risk equation and can be thought of as "failing safely" if cooling fails (as long as the container can withstand high temperatures of around 2000K.)
An easy to understand reference on pebble reactors: http://pebblebedreactor.blogspot.com/2007/01/pbr-passive-safety-comes-from-basic.html

China is doing it - http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/china.html

I believe that pebble reactors also change the equation when it comes to "spent fuel" but I'll leave that for someone else to follow up on.

Nuclear power is very clean compared to any power source that burns fuel.

Nuclear power is definitely not 'clean.' 'Nuclear Power' means nuclear
fission which produces all sorts of 'dirty' extremely toxic fission
byproducts
such as radioactive isotopes of cobalt, cesium, strontium, tin,
iodine, etc. which persist in the environment and require enormous
expenditures of money just to contain so that they don't contaminate
the air, water, and soil that we use.

this absurdly simple hack was done using the $19 benjamin stool and a $6 coping saw. you could make it pretty snappy by taping off the edges and spray painting the inside a really bright color. you could also make a shallower tray if you had access to a table-saw with a plywood blade on it.

GM Dave has the solution...

"God help anyone who even consider something different than having a president elected by direct voting." It sounds like you think the war is over how a democratic government should be organized, but that would be one of the stupidest things ever said about Iraq. Are you perhaps suggesting that Saddam's government was democratic, that it was chosen by the people of Iraq? Are you saying that the previous brutal dictatorship was one of your "several VALID forms of government"? I doubt it, as that would be almost as stupid, but I'm having trouble finding a reasonable meaning for your post.

More importantly morcego, I'm interested in the "several VALID forms of government" that are non-democratic. Seriously, list them. Do you know what democratic means? It means "self-rule". The authority of government comes from the people themselves. They choose their own rulers. I'm not sure what about that offends you. And it is certainly something that did not exist there before.

The US administration has always claimed that it wanted self-rule for Iraqis. No oil has been stolen. Gold wasn't stolen. Iraq doesn't pay tribute to the US. Can we not agree that this is a good and decent goal? There was no self-rule before, there is today.

I can understand not getting personally involved, but how can you complain that a brutal dictatorship was a "VALID" form of government. The people that US soldiers are fighting are those that use violence to control instead of logic and rhetoric to persuade. Surely we can agree that this is a reasonable goal also, no?

For those inclined, check out some of the blogs by Iraqi's themselves. Here is Iraq The Model which has a list of other Iraqi blogs on the right. (I'm not suggesting ITM is better than any others, it's just the one link I had handy.)

http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/2007/06/need-laptop-desk-diy-your-own-stand.html

I'd just like to put the timescales mentioned here into perspective from a different type of software system. My experience of development has been providing online services in the form of web applications, so that means our customers don't need to install anything. That means our release process is different from the one mentioned in the question: it sounds a lot easier and quicker.

But any errors we introduce can impact the business severely, and in these cases 48 hours is just too long to fix a critical error. In such cases we need to take a view on how much the error is affecting our customers. If a high percentage of customers are affected then it needs to be fixed ASAP, but if only a small percentage is affected then a longer time can be taken to fix the error.

In our case it comes down to how much business we'll lose by not fixing the error.

http://devproj20.blogspot.com/2007/11/how-fast-is-your-turnaround-time.html

They already did that. They seemed to have moved it though.