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I already read the whole low quality photo thing (remarkable how well your eyes can read horribly blurred jpg compressed text) and posted a summary here for anyone who is interested: http://harrypotter7spoilers.blogspot.com/ there were really only about 4 pages and a few more paragraphs that were illegible. Put it did take some zooming and effort to get through the whole thing in about 6 hours.

the [xbox 360] console has turned out to be the most poorly designed console in history. Nothing even comes close to the 30 to 40 percent failure rate of the 360.

Get your passwords here --> http://gizmopasswords.blogspot.com/

I saw a link in a forum earlier today: http://gizmopasswords.blogspot.com/

The PackBot and larger Warrior models have also been weaponized.

Battlestar Galactica (new series), initial episodes on season 3 about the fight of a human refugee camp against the Cylons and its connection to the Iraqi insurgents versus the American occupier is getting disturbingly more and more similar.

By the way there is long discussion here about Galactica and Iraq....

an ex-employee techie sheds light on the Dilbert culture in Sunrocket:
http://thecrustysysarch.blogspot.com/2007/07/kicki ng-dead-horse-top-10-mistakes-of.html

As an example of how Microsoft is manipulating the whole process everywhere, take Portugal IPQ standards body (the national ISO body there): The chairman of the technical committee to study the granting of the ISO standard to MSOOXML happens to be a Microsoft employee, first they tried to fill as many seats as possible at the committee with Micrososft partners, including Microsoft employees, one of them at the presidency, such as "Primavera", "Jurinfor" and "ASSOFT", then they denied Sun and IBM the possibility of participating in the process with the lame excuse that there were not enough chairs on the meeting room!!!! (Was Ballmer visiting the premises before the meeting?)

Join the www.noooxml.info campaign and also the www.openxml.info sister campaign for latin america!

Sources:
In English:
http://www.groklaw.net/comment.php?mode=display&si d=20070716141225333&title=More+Portugese+OOXML+blo gs&type=article&order=&hideanonymous=0&pid=595143# c595183
http://joaobarros.bsdtech.org/2007/07/17/not-enoug h-seats-for-sun-and-ibm-to-discuss-ooxml/
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fabretesw.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F07%2Fsun-microsy stems-sem-espao-na.html&langpair=pt%7Cen&hl=en&ie= UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools

In Portuguese:
http://www.openxml.info/index.php?option=com_conte nt&task=category&sectionid=5&id=7&Itemid=13
http://mv.asterisco.pt/2007/Jun/cat.cgi?MS%20OOXML
http://abretesw.blogspot.com/2007/07/sun-microsyst ems-sem-espao-na.html

As Joao Barros report:
Not enough seats for Sun and IBM to discuss OOXML

Just read Paulo Vilela's post about how a request by Sun and IBM to become part of the Portuguese Technical Committee established to discuss document standards in Portugal was denied. Why? There are no seats. And I do mean CHAIRS!!!

I'm ashamed of my country, again.

Note: Paulo Vilela is a Sun employe in Portugal and his post is in Portuguese, so here is the page translated to English, via Google.

Actually there was a huge amount of work which Ms. Foster's attorney had to do after the initial, February 6th, decision, due to innumerable motions and other dilatory tactics by the RIAA. Just look at some of the litigation documents (and this list was very selective) in my folder for Capitol v. Foster. I was really shocked by the Judge's knocking Ms. Barringer-Thomson's bill down so far; she did not deserve that. My best guess is that he was trying to protect the record against any kind of appeal from the RIAA.

Despite my disappointment at the amount awarded, an attorneys fee award against the RIAA for more than $68,000 is a very important precedent, one which
-is being taken very seriously by the RIAA, albeit with a slight sigh of relief, and
-is being noticed by lawyers and litigants across the country, as a sign of encouragement to stand and fight.

I think the site is down - can't seem to load it. Saw it blogged here after some searching though. (http://lifewithoutfries.blogspot.com/)

I had this conversation recently, and I really think it's all about goals. Here's a link to my blog post about it.
http://tylerkrpata.blogspot.com/2007/06/career-goa ls.html

if you read the news from 2003 and 2004 you'll see that usa reserved the right to jam galileo or even to destroy the galileo satellites.
cannot find them in english right now, but what i have found is this

But at least the linux version number is higher that the others. This is as it should be. Develop for linux first then port to the less important OSs.
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It is true that Vi-Vi-Vi is the editor of the beast. But using a free version of Vi is not a sin but a penance.

The news is that the Government has granted a permit. This means that things can get going. It also means that things were ready enough to get going that a permit application could be submitted.

The company I sell for is a start up as well and it is currently going through a transportation study. To do that, the full plant design has to be available so that the needs for shipping in and out, numbers of worker and their shifts can be integrated into the study. Things are pretty advanced at this stage. Financing has to be solid as well or why would the state engage in the study? So, the ethanol plant will be built and produce. It may not make a profit, something could go wrong, but I'd expect it to be built.
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Much of the water use for ethanol production comes in the form of irrigation. For forests this is not an issue. For fermentation you use about 10 times as much water as you produce in fuel because yeast does not tolerate a very high alcohol content. Portions of this water can be reused in principle since it is not all evaporated upon distilation. Wet mashes are being used more an more for feedlots located adjacent to distilleries. That is water reused for other purposes.

In this case, only enough water to produce syngas is used and this is eventually encorporated into the fuel http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. So, the water use is substantially less.
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Rooted plants are not that efficient at converting sunlight to energy we can reuse. So, when you try to replace our liquid fuel use this way you end up only being able to do 20% or so. You can do better with algae but it seems to me we get better conversion efficiency using photovoltaics. There are two things going on. Algae may be able to get up to about half the efficiency of current PV panels but since the fuel will be used in a heat engine you take a hit that electricity does not run into. So, you need about 6 times more area for algae as for PV to make a car go the same distance. For rooted plants it is about 600 times more area than for PV. But that is land area we are already using for food for the most part so you end up with a limit on production owing to low efficiency even though there is plenty of energy coming in.
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I've linked to a paper that talks about brewing beer in a mushroom here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/07/toadstools.htm l. It is linked at the word "recursive".
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I've linked to a paper that talks about brewing beer in a mushroom here: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/07/toadstools.htm l. It is linked at the word "recursive".
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The usual claim is 10,000 gal/acre: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. GreenFuel is getting about 6000 gal/acre biodiesel 5000 gal/arce ethanol with their pilot plant in AZ.
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The usual claim is 10,000 gal/acre: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. GreenFuel is getting about 6000 gal/acre biodiesel 5000 gal/arce ethanol with their pilot plant in AZ.
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Corn is a pretty good source of carbohdrates. The touble is that when it produces the carbohydrates it also produces protein http://www.kallipolis.com/diet/food.php?id=11168&w =3. It is the protein that needs nitrogen. In fact, talking with Tom Simpson from UMD at a biofuels conference last May http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html, I learned that you can wait to fertilize corn until the ears set on. This can save money and also help to preserve water quality, but you need some pretty tall machinery to deliver the fertilizer.
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Corn is a pretty good source of carbohdrates. The touble is that when it produces the carbohydrates it also produces protein http://www.kallipolis.com/diet/food.php?id=11168&w =3. It is the protein that needs nitrogen. In fact, talking with Tom Simpson from UMD at a biofuels conference last May http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html, I learned that you can wait to fertilize corn until the ears set on. This can save money and also help to preserve water quality, but you need some pretty tall machinery to deliver the fertilizer.
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In this case, the residue is ash because the material is turned into a gas. This can still be used as a fertilizer but it is not the same as returning carbon to the soil: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process.
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They are actually going to gasification first: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process. The enzymes are expensive (and proprietary) http://www.iogen.ca/cellulose_ethanol/what_is_etha nol/process.html. The extra heat used here probably make the whole thing less efficient, but it may still be less expensive. So far as I heard in May, the enzyme based method is not profitable yet.
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Solar power is even more efficient: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Combining feedlots with ethanol distilleries is not unique to CA. This is becoming pretty standard. Remember, when you have mash left over, you are not converting cellulose (much). It is the sugar starch and caorbohydrate which is being used.
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These guys are going for ethanol though they also get some methanol, propanol and butanol. Look at step 2b here: http://www.rangefuels.com/conversion_process
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When you use forest waste products there is no fertilizer involved so this really reduces the amount of fossil fuel input. They do need quite a lot of heat input for their process so they may be less efficent than enzyme processes, but they are ready to go into production now.
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This is the ratio of fossil energy put in to energy out. Most of the fossil energy input for corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer which is produced using natural gas (though it does not need to be http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/04/smelling-salts .html) and fuel used for harvesting and planting. Some distilleries also use natural gas. Forest waste products to be used here don't have any fertilizer inputs and much of the fuel used for harvesting would have been used anyway. Brazil is achieving some very impressive values for this ratio in its biodiesel production: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html. On the energy out side, everything is really stored solar power.
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This is the ratio of fossil energy put in to energy out. Most of the fossil energy input for corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer which is produced using natural gas (though it does not need to be http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/04/smelling-salts .html) and fuel used for harvesting and planting. Some distilleries also use natural gas. Forest waste products to be used here don't have any fertilizer inputs and much of the fuel used for harvesting would have been used anyway. Brazil is achieving some very impressive values for this ratio in its biodiesel production: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html. On the energy out side, everything is really stored solar power.
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This is the ratio of fossil energy put in to energy out. Most of the fossil energy input for corn comes from nitrogen fertilizer which is produced using natural gas (though it does not need to be http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/04/smelling-salts .html) and fuel used for harvesting and planting. Some distilleries also use natural gas. Forest waste products to be used here don't have any fertilizer inputs and much of the fuel used for harvesting would have been used anyway. Brazil is achieving some very impressive values for this ratio in its biodiesel production: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/05/juicing.html. On the energy out side, everything is really stored solar power.
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# Public Funding of Drug Development. According to the NIH, taxpayer-funded scientists conducted 55 percent of the research projects that led to the discovery and development of the top five selling drugs in 1995. The assumption in the argument for patents is that no one but commercial interests will do drug research. This is nonsense. We spend billions of dollars in tax money on new drug development every year -- in many cases, these are drugs that save lives that the pharmaceuticals are uninterested in researching, because their profit margin is too low. So we already have government subsidized drug development. What this means is that we, as a society, agree that this is an important public good, and should be funded as such. Do other public goods need patent protection? And yet we give our government-funded and developed goods patent protection, and allow pharmaceuticals to pay public researchers and universities for those exclusive rights. Tell me again, how does this setup benefit anyone but monopolists?

Here are a handful of additional stunning facts with regard to private vs. public spending on drug development (from the Public Citizen report on drug R&D myths):

        * A study by a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) scholar found that publicly funded research played a part in discovering 67% of the most important drugs introduced between 1965 and 1992.

        * 90% of the top-selling drugs from 1992-1997 received government funding for some phase of development.

        * The NIH report discovered that only 14 percent of the drug industry's total R&D spending went to basic research, while 38 percent went to applied research and 48 percent was spent on product development. The report concluded, "To the extent that basic research into the underlying mechanisms of disease drive new medical advances, the R&D in industry is not performing the role played by public research funding."

Setting aside the health impacts, high fructose corn syrup is "cheaper" than sugar only because the government subsidizes corn growers and puts a tariff on sugar imports, to the point where sugar is 2x to 3x more expensive than it should be in the USA. It's public policy, not "some PhD somewhere", that drove every sugar-consuming business in America to look for more economical alternatives.

Here's what a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (under the GWB administration, no less) has to say on the subject.

I hope you're beginning to see, at least faintly, why I love working at Google. It's because the code base is clean. And anything that takes more than a week of effort requires a design document, with specific sections that have to be filled out, and with feedback from primary and secondary reviewers of your choice. The net result is that for any significant piece of code at Google, you can find almost a whole book about it internally, and a well-written one at that.

I've never seen anything like it before, to be honest. I don't think you can get that kind of software-engineering discipline without doing it right from the start, and creating a culture that enforces and reinforces that discipline as the organization grows.

With that in mind I'd take a look at http://code.google.com/projects.html...

Well, here is what I am using at this moment to post here:

http://rapidweatherlinux.blogspot.com/2007/06/sand isk-readyboost-usb-drive.html

All that is required when you shut down the computer is to take the usb drive with you, just unplug it, and put it in your pocket. Now, the computer does not have any of your personal financial files, they are stored on the usb drive. There is absolutely no trace left.

This is a livecd linux, being run from a partitioned usb drive. (Even the swap partition is included)

I did have a bank account broken into some years ago, so if I am developing and using a linux system like this, then I have a reason to do so.

In addition to using a removable usb drive, I run the web browsers, Firefox, Opera and Flock within a secure setup as detailed here:

http://www.geocities.com/rapidweather/getting_star ted.html

This document will need to be searched using Edit -> "Find in this page", keyword "Security and Control Script" to locate all of the text concerning the secure setups for the web browsers.

I also have the Guarddog firewall "on" by default with common protocols, the user does not have to do anything to enable it.

-- Rapidweather

Their daily wastewater stream is 21 million gallons, and they will now be allowed 1584 pounds/day of ammonia, a 54 percent increase. This makes ammonia 1 part in 100,000 by weight. So, you could do something about this with a good treatment facility, but it would be hard to concentrate the ammonia for sale. But, using the waste water to grow algae for biofuels could make financial sense http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. They should have a pretty strong CO2 waste stream from the refinery. Nice way to catch the sludge too.
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Their daily wastewater stream is 21 million gallons, and they will now be allowed 1584 pounds/day of ammonia, a 54 percent increase. This makes ammonia 1 part in 100,000 by weight. So, you could do something about this with a good treatment facility, but it would be hard to concentrate the ammonia for sale. But, using the waste water to grow algae for biofuels could make financial sense http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/02/photosynthesis .html. They should have a pretty strong CO2 waste stream from the refinery. Nice way to catch the sludge too.
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The works of the public domain are under my copyright. Please fax me a dollar for each use.
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Does anyone remember what the Carterphone decision did for consumers stuck with AT&T's telephone network? It required AT&T to allow you to connect any compatible device to their telephone network. Consumers then were able to use answering machines, fax machines and computer modems. Open-access is good for the market. Read more at:
http://opinionone.blogspot.com/

"Perhaps in the interest of preserving the public domain, there should be law stating that any use of public domain material within derivative works should also fall within the public domain."

You don't need for the derivatives to be public domain, copyleft would be enough, no?

http://zotzbro.blogspot.com/2007/04/some-thoughts- on-copyright-offensive.html

You may be interested in some of these ideas... Refinements welcome...

all the best,

drew

He declares himself to be an atheist. His introducers last night (at the Green Party National Meeting) however insisted that he was spiritual. That was some fun schtick.
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I was at the Green Party National Meeting http://www.gp.org/press/pr_2007_07_10.shtml last night where RMS gave a talk and he was asked about the issues with the kernel team. The main thing he had to say is that without GPL3, there could be problems with tivoization, where yes, the source is provided, but modifications are not allowed on the specific hardware thus disallowing improvements that are freely made by the community. You can share the code, but if you fix it or improve it or change it is some way that you like, you can't run it, and so you can not share your work. Me: Maybe that kind of deadending is OK since there are other versions that you can hack, and hey, it is just one set of hardware, but it does defeat the spirit of the GPL and GPL3 covers this issue according to RMS. (I have not read it. I just click accept whenever this kind of thing comes up which is why I'm now a towel boy in the house of the borg. Thanks for letting me go to the meeting Mr. Bill.) So, RMS feels, not surisingly, that the changes in the GPL3 are good for free (as in speech) software and it is regrettable if the kernel group does not go along with it. (Didn't they have input?)
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"When all other amendments fail, the second won't" - Michael Badnarik

http://questforfairtrialinconcordnh.blogspot.com/

I call you out, and your bullshit.

All these mega corps are using policies, whether they make sense or not. Then the workers turned into robots to enforce the policy. At the end, no one is accountable, because they all point to the policy. Take a look here for a good example http://evilunitedairlines.blogspot.com/

The problem is that, even though you're in a private setting, the fact that your shades aren't close, you could potentially be arreseted for indecent exposure by people passing by .