Slashdot Mirror

You're right that antioxidants in red wine might have some effect, but I would argue that the difference in the "buzz" one gets from red wine and the buzz one gets from vodka is minimal. Ethanol is a single molecule, C2H5OH. Remove the alcohol from red wine, and it is no longer psychoactive. If there's any objective difference between drinking wine and drinking beer, it's confined to effects on absorption and metabolism.

Subjective judgment of the "buzz" is likely highly dependent on social situation. Wine is a more refined drink, and people tend to think it's a more refined drink, and drink it in a more refined social situation. Does that mean it has a more refined buzz? Perhaps subjectively, but this more refined buzz is not something in the composition of the wine itself. Perhaps it's purely psychological, or perhaps it's related to the difference in consumption patterns between wine and vodka drinkers. There are too many variables involved to make any kind of accurate judgment.

Finally, it's far from a well-established scientific fact that mixing beer and liquor is a bad idea. One possibility is, when you start drinking liquor after you're already drunk from drinking too much beer, you can't really judge how much alcohol you're consuming and how fast you're consuming it, so you end up drinking too much and puking. There's also a school of thought that says that the difference is due to the carbonation, and another that says that it's due to the food or liquid content of the stomach. At the core, wine, beer, and hard liquor are all only alcohol delivery mechanisms.

I would argue that when you consume the alcohol is at least as important as how you consume te alcohol. The rate at which you consume alcohol determines how much alcohol is in your bloodstream at any given time, and different amounts of alcohol affect the brain in different ways (the neuropharamacology of alcohol is extremely complex, but Erowid is typically reliable when it comes to drugs). Also, there's the diurnal rhythm of alcohol metabolism. Getting drunk in the morning will leave you drunker longer than getting drunk at night, although, because acetaldehyde mediates many of the toxic effects of alcohol, if acetaldehyde metabolism doesn't follow the same rhythm, drinking in the morning could actually be better or worse for your brain. I'm sure there are some good papers on this topic, if you're interested.

I browse at -1 so I don't miss out on quality comments like that one.

Cool links.

And here's why.

The Wii as Weapon
After seeing the damage that people are doing to their homes, TVs, friends, loved ones, and themselves, I've come to realize that the Wii must be a secret Japanese weapon.
The rest is on my blog at http://truthaboutwomenandmen.blogspot.com//

What is most concerning is not that the justices ruled it was illegal, it was the reasoning they used to arrive at the ruling (reasoning which sets a common law precedent).

As Kim Weatherall put it:

What is striking, however, is the breadth of Branson J's comments on this. As she puts it:

'I conclude that, within the meaning of the paragraph, a person's power to prevent the doing of an act comprised in a copyright includes the person's power not to facilitate the doing of that act by, for example, making available to the public a technical capacity calculated to lead to the doing of that act.

The evidence leads to the inexorable inference that it was the deliberate choice of Mr Cooper to establish and maintain his website in a form which did not give him the power immediately to prevent, or immediately to restrict, internet users from using links on his website to access remote websites for the purpose of copying sound recordings in which copyright subsisted.'

In other words, it would seem - Cooper had the 'power to prevent' infringements because he had the power to take the website down, or to design it a different way.

...

More striking, on this score, is what the judges have to say about the ISP. Both judges suggest that the ISP had the power to prevent, and failed to take reasonable steps to prevent the infringements. The evidence? The ISP could have withdrawn hosting. Yes, that's right - because the ISP did not withdraw hosting, it was liable. Safe Harbour anyone? Not under current Australian law, where only Carriage Service providers get safe harbours from copyright infringement.

I prefer Bidvertiser over Adsense. Bidvertiser shows you the ads available for your site and also how much each ad is worth. This is in complete contrast to Adsense where you have no idea what is going on. I used to earn a few cents a week with adsense in my blog. With bidvertiser I have earned $0.51 in just one day!!!!!!!!!
here here

I won't post anonymous, but state it here load and clear: Gecko is far too big and bloated. Period. Plus, Firefox 2 is to buggy to be taken seriously for any use at all and standards compliance seems to be defined as 'just be a bit better than IE'. Frankly, most recent Mozilla stuff sucks big time, like most other commercially sucessfull software. There it is. Now mod me down please.

Even for Opera 64 megabytes was too little before Nokia's developers optimized Opera for the device. Opera run out of memory very frequently in the OS 2005 releases.

For me Firefox 2 works okay. Maybe there is something wrong with your computer :)

If you didn't know: Firefox is the most standard compliant web browser in the planet. Opera did very good work with Opera 9 and it is very close to the Firefox in the standard compliance.

The company claims to be able to find "a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video."

This is nonsense, setting aside the fact that such things are quite probably fair use. Having any kind of complete catalog of "digital fingerprints" for a given work is (practically) impossible. At best, a few select snippets of a given document could be fingerprinted. Changing even a single bit will change a one-way encryption hash (which is, presumably, the method used here), and it won't change the fingerprint in a predictable way. One would need to catalog hashes for every subset of the given document, and the number of such hashes would grow as n^2, where n is the "word-size" of the document.

I wrote two articles on it on my blog, one general, one mathematical. Read 'em if you'd like. Beware the Digital Snake Oil How Many Substrings in a Given Text?

The company claims to be able to find "a customer's content based on the appearance of as little as a few sentences of text or a few seconds of audio or video."

This is nonsense, setting aside the fact that such things are quite probably fair use. Having any kind of complete catalog of "digital fingerprints" for a given work is (practically) impossible. At best, a few select snippets of a given document could be fingerprinted. Changing even a single bit will change a one-way encryption hash (which is, presumably, the method used here), and it won't change the fingerprint in a predictable way. One would need to catalog hashes for every subset of the given document, and the number of such hashes would grow as n^2, where n is the "word-size" of the document.

I wrote two articles on it on my blog, one general, one mathematical. Read 'em if you'd like. Beware the Digital Snake Oil How Many Substrings in a Given Text?

Sniff this!

Sniff this!

When I use MySQL, it's in the same sort of applications everyone else uses it - web sites and other fairly straightforward applications. I don't know of anyone using MySQL as a shared enterprise database. That market is pretty locked up by the likes of Oracle and IBM DB2, and to a lesser extent, Sybase and Microsoft SQL Server.

You'll often hear people talk about this or that specific technical feature that MySQL doesn't support or doesn't handle well, but beyond that kind of thing I think the deal breaker is just that no-one else is using it in those environments, and there's no reason to be the first person to bet the operations of a multi-billion dollar company on it (other than certain dot-coms).

Read this post about Oracle at Amazon in the early days:
http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/03/early-amazon-o racle-down.html

That's a situation that no admin team wants to find themselves in. It happened at Amazon because they were using the database in unusal ways. The way to avoid that is by using what every other company like you uses (Amazon didn't have that luxury at the time). MySQL hasn't been battle-tested in the sort of environments I'm talking about, and it lacks a whole range of features designed for systems where any downtime at all costs significant dollars. It also lacks an entire ecosystem of tools and personnel aimed at that market. Over time, I imagine MySQL might enter that space, but it'll need to acquire a lot of stuff along the way.

If google really cares about not tricking people into clicking on ads then they should eliminate the link-unit formatting option. I have never seen a site that use that format in a way that wasn't deliberatly trying to trick you into thinking that the links were part of the site's navigation.

PS. It looks like the submission text for the first story got chopped off as it finishes mid-sentance, and there is no link. Here is the announcement from google's adsense blog.

I doubt anyone will read this far down, but this is a good explanation of one reason why that assumption is incorrect. http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-hom e.html

"OK, Alan Goldstein, I will not call you Ishmael. But somewhere along your road to Melville, you took a detour into speculative fiction, because that is clearly the genre of your Salon article, I, Nanobot." More here

"OK, Alan Goldstein, I will not call you Ishmael. But somewhere along your road to Melville, you took a detour into speculative fiction, because that is clearly the genre of your Salon article, I, Nanobot." More here

Over past months, I've read a lot of people commenting on ZFS who have no idea what it is. What it is, is the next generation of filesystems, not a "tweak" of current fs technology. It just happens to "look like" an ordinary POSIX fs, from a distance (if you ignore the administration/pool stuff...) But inside, it's something new under the Sun, folks.

RAID experts don't grok it, because it does things RAID can't do (end-to-end).

Devotees of ext2fs, reiserfs (yay!), NTFS (LOL!), or HFS+ don't grok it, because none of those filesystems do what ZFS does.

Read about it before you write it off as old wine in a new bottle. To ask the question, "Does OS X need a new filesystem?" is a perfect example of missing the point. Once you've looked at what ZFS really brings to the table, you'll see why it's an inevitable future, sooner or later, and you'll stop looking foolish.

Some links I posted this week:

- http://www.osnews.com/story.php/16739/Screenshot-Z FS-in-Leopard - http://mac4ever.com/news/27485/zettabyte_sur_leopa rd/ (older rumour http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=14473)

For OS X people wondering why the fuss about ZFS - summaries include: - http://www.sun.com/2004-0914/feature/ - http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/features/articles/zfs_ part1.scalable.html

"Why ZFS for home": - http://uadmin.blogspot.com/2006/05/why-zfs-for-hom e.html

"Here are ten reasons why you'll want to reformat all of your systems and use ZFS.": http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1446/zfs_ten_reason s_to_reformat_your_...

And some more technical explanations from Chief Engineer: - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/zfs_end_to_end_ data - http://blogs.sun.com/bonwick/entry/smokin_mirrors

Not really.

http://zfs-on-fuse.blogspot.com/

ZFS is an impressive filesystem, and Apple have every reason to be interested in it over and above, say, ext3. Of course, Apple aren't the only ones interested in ZFS - I have seen a great deal of excitement in the Linux community, too. I am pretty confident that a Linux driver for ZFS will emerge, and in the long run, I wouldn't be at all surprised if it ended up being a very common filesystem on Linux systems. For anyone wanting (read-only, ATM) access to ZFS partitions on Linux today, there is a ZFS FUSE driver available.

I don't think porn use causes or prevents rape. I do think it's desensitizing, dehumanizing, etc. I don't think adult porn should be banned but I think the reasons behind its use and the changes it causes in people need to be talked about.

If internet porn causes or reduces rape, we'd see a sharp increase or decline in the rape rate of every internet-connected country beginning in the late 90s. The US and Britain don't exhibit that trend: Britain's rape rate has gone up, and the USA's has gone down.

There are lots of other reasons that could explain Kendall's conclusions. Maybe 15-19 year old girls with access to the 'net are less likely to be raped.

Maybe increased access to feminist and anti-violence resources on the internet led to a decrease in rape. Maybe an increase in access to Slashdot led to a decrease in rape.

There's a good look at the flaws in the methodology used in the report here: http://2x3x7.blogspot.com/2006/10/dont-buy-compute r-but-if-you-do.html

I am happy to draw the line at physically touching those who have not (or due to their youth or mental incapacity are unable to have) given consent.

Well, good, that will probably keep you from going to jail for rape.

I'm both, baby!

Mouse Brain

Swi

I could post more of them... or you could look some of them up yourself. Google is a great place to start - even though it is a pain to find the newer articles mixed in with the old ones.

On top of that - keep in mind that the Business Release wasnt ready for pressing Nov 27th... it was ready earlier than that to allow for manufacturing (Nov 9th-ish)... so, tell me, are there no changes in the Business version that was RTM on Nov 9 compared to the Consumer version not yet released?

If by some chance, factors changed that (according to MS) were delaying the Consumer release, then why is it the release date hasnt been moved up? Just curious... seems weird that they wouldnt be striving for the Holiday Season release (especially with hardware vendors bitching, and MS having to offer coupons for free or discounted upgrades to live up to the promises and appease their channel partners) they originally wanted if the product is ready - as you claim - as MS earlier claimed it was not - a claim they havent retracted in anything but very vague statements that entirely miss the heart of the matter (completing revisions/fixes MS thought necessary for the Consumer release).

They (MS) dont specify what is RTM (Business or Consumer)... and I've already seen numerous releases of Windows that are identified the same but arent actually the same (yeah, if you look at the full version string there is a difference - but nothing on the box, packaging, manual, disk, etc). And there are enough articles just-pre RTM of the business release, as well as post RTM of the business release still claiming the same reason for the consumer release delay. And of course, they have told some of their channel partners, like CompUSA, the same thing. Maybe they are lying. Weird...

ok, a few googled results for you...

Dec 2, 2006 http://1digit.blogspot.com/2006/12/windows-vista-r elease-delayed.html

Jul 11, 2006 http://www.cio.com/blog_view.html?CID=22868

Nov 29,2006 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2006/11/28/AR2006112801697.html

Note the section about them stating that hardware support and software compatibility support is a factor for the consumer release delay. odd...

Link here. Make of it what you want. http://toorg.blogspot.com/

It looks like slashdot inserts the rel="nofollow" attribute on anchor tags, so the rankings in Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines won't be affected.

I'd give you the link, but ironically that would boost his pagerank, so instead

Let's see if Slashdot preserves the rel="nofollow" attribute on anchor tags.

Slashdot seems to preserve the rel attribute in the preview, so I'm guessing Slashdot will preserve the attribute after I post, as well.

Keyboard navigation on the Mac suxx.

Some functionality is not accessible without a mouse (maximizing and restoring minimized windows for example).

Some functionality takes a lot more keystrokes. E.g. navigating application menus.

Dialog boxes don't have keyboard shortcuts (the kind that you activate with Alt+KEY on Windows and Linux). Some don't even have tab navigation -- I'm looking at you, iTunes delete dialog.

For me, Mac OS X is unusable without a mouse or trackpad, which makes me less productive than I was on Windows/Linux.
There are things I like though, but this was a disappointment.

I wrote about this here.

What do you mean? .02 cents == .02 dollars! (especially if you're Verizon)

their CEO, Messrs Steve Ballmer

I refer you to this review of one of the more dishonest scientific episodes in recent memory, in which Patrick Michaels quite deliberately distorted Hansen's 1998 climate predictions (which, ten years later, were actually quite good). If I was Hansen I'd be pissed, too.

Care to provide any links that demonstrate with any shred of integrity why Dr. Hansen's research is crappy? And please don't waste my time with Junk Science or any other previously debunked sites.

Cheers.

Mod parent up!
http://quantumg.blogspot.com/

Nice work on the syndicate data!

...which sells in europe for abt. 40 EURs. The wii remote uses ordinary bluetooth, drivers exist for ALL common OSes (win, osx, linux, see http://wiihacks.blogspot.com/ and http://www.wiili.org/ for further infos) and you got:
- a precise mouse-like pointing device (you've got to build yourself a simple "sensor bar" which consists only of a couple of IR LEDs as wii (hoho) all know)
- 3 dimensional acceleration/motion sensors
- couple of buttons
...and you're done!

As promised in my previous post I would give the idea some more thoughts. Forking MySQL Debian support might not be such a bad idea. MySQL is giving up support on Debian and thereby leaving open the possibilities for this to the community.

The opensource community has proven in the past that they are quite capable of handling things like this. I might even be an idea for a small startup (profit or non-profit) I will post some more info about my idea around this on in this discussion and on my weblog http://johanlouwers.blogspot.com/

Regards,
Johan Louwers.

Of course if you want something that just screams "I am the ubergeek" you could hack a wiimote to control your mouse like these guys.

The Bible says you are supposed to murder homosexuals and misbehaved children. (This is just getting started, by the way. I am in too much a hurry to find references where God commands the murder those who worship other gods or those work on the Sabbath.) Do not say you actually do what the Bible states you should do because I am sure you are far too moral to even contemplate enacting its numerous violent precepts.

On a lighter note, some have written up ideas on how to make the Left Behind games more violent, based on the contents of the Bible. Enjoy!

Douglas Adams and his radio recordist used the standard BBC technique of wrapping their microphone in a condom to record the underwater noise of the Yangtze. Here's the funny segment from Last Chance To See

Yeah, except that people outside the globalist "free market economy" live just fine. It's when the globalists come in to "modernize the economy" that suddenly the rules change and people are forced out of self-sufficiency into working as wage slaves for the benefit of large multinationals, for which they're supposed to feel "grateful" since they've now a "job."

  Sorry, but that's bullshit. It follows on from the recently-popular lie that people in the 18th and 19th century just couldn't wait to go to a city and work in a factory. A real investigation of history (rather than just listening to the spew from bullshit factories like the Cato Institute) will turn up woeful letters from the early industrialists, bemoaning the fact that the average person refused to work in a factory for 14 hours a day to make enough to stay alive for the day when they could work a few short hours on their own and then barter enough (outside the paper-money economy) to survive for the whole week. They wrote letters urging politicians to change the rules, warning of the dangers of an idle populace, and the moral benefits of working your ass off for someone else's benefits.
  In England, this led to the Enclosure of the Commons, a really blatant example of rule-shifting for the benefit of industrialists. Hell, the laws involved a limit on the size of commoner's fucking GARDENS to make sure they couldn't survive on what they could grow, or barter for what their neighbors could grow, and would have to buy things from a capitalistic market -- with money. Forcing them into the wage-earning economy.
  Every single time a multinational has attempted to move into a local, decentralized, artisan economy, it's been necessary to rewrite laws and reshape the economy of the country to destroy the public's self-sufficiency before the economy could be successfully "monetized".
  Arguments that a sweatshop is the "best available alternative" for a person ignores the fact that you've taken all his other alternatives away beforehand.

  Here's a good read on the subject: Free market attack on sweatshops

About half the comments here are on base; some of the others are way out in the weeds. Those who are interested in this topic might like my blog posting at Stop the Myth. It includes some links to some relatively sane analyses of what QKD will and will not be useful for. I do expect QKD to be useful at some point, but at the moment I expect its utility to be in restricted settings. Quantum repeaters are a long way off; they are one of my current research topics. They will be useful for general distributed quantum computation, as well as QKD.

you can find that comment here:

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211606&cid =17228420

suppose a lot of people start passing that around by email and in blog posts and it "goes viral" - will I get in trouble?

As my Another Chance To See blog has been keeping an eye on the Baiji Dolphin and all the other animals from Last Chance To See, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the Northern White Rhino is also on the final brink of extinction with between 2 and 4 animals left in the wild - 2 left?

And if you have a spare few quid, please send them to our Save The Rhino fundraiser. Even if we can't save the Northern White Rhino, there's plenty of other subspecies that need our help.

As my Another Chance To See blog has been keeping an eye on the Baiji Dolphin and all the other animals from Last Chance To See, it would be remiss of me not to mention that the Northern White Rhino is also on the final brink of extinction with between 2 and 4 animals left in the wild - 2 left?

And if you have a spare few quid, please send them to our Save The Rhino fundraiser. Even if we can't save the Northern White Rhino, there's plenty of other subspecies that need our help.

please read my blog or I will be KILLED!

I've spent years downloading mp3s, please read my blog and save my music collection!

But that doesn't make for great Imperial poetry. In fact, by the end of that paragraph, with its African bunny rabbits, transparent wildebeest and brush-clearance program, poor old Mao is banging his head against the coffin-lid. Mao's corpse is praying to Marx, Stalin, and Kwan-Yin for one day back on Earth, just time enough to liquidate this Friedman, whose hack-work shames ideological poets everywhere. In fact, seismologists detect widespread vibrations as Imperial poets from Virgil to Kipling batter their coffin-lids, screaming in agony, as Friedman drones on. -- John Dolan, "Do Fries Come with this Tripe?"

This point has been made before; Ulf Bossel was quoted in Robert Mcleod's blog back in July. Robert summarized the argument perfectly here: http://entropyproduction.blogspot.com/2006/07/hydr ogens-death-knell.html

"That leaves producing hydrogen from the electrolysis of water, which is the supposedly 'green' option. The reality is that the electrolysis to fuel cell path is a terribly inefficient method to convert solar, wind, and nuclear energy to useful work. Let us consider the production of hydrogen from wind power. First you have to rectify the alternating current to direct current to power the electrolyzer, which is about 90 % efficient. An electrolyzer is optimistically 75 % efficient so you lose another quarter of your energy there. Then you need to store the hydrogen, by say compressing it under high pressure. This would consume about 20 % of the energy content of the hydrogen, and distributing it perhaps another 10 %. Now we finally have the hydrogen at the fuel cell but then we have to remember that the fuel cell is maybe 50 % efficient. The product of the fuel cell is direct current electricity, so in the end we've gone through a whole bunch of steps in a big circle. When you multiply all these factors together you find that the well-to-wheel (or source-to-sink) efficiency is only about 25 %.

The obvious question that Ulf Bossel and people such as myself ask is why go to all that trouble? Why not just transmit and use the electricity directly? High-voltage direct current electricity transmission is just as efficient as pipelining hydrogen. If we allow for 90 % efficiency for rectifying and 90 % for transmission we end up with 3.3 times more energy for the electricity economy than the hydrogen economy. If you want to include batteries the math doesn't change much because the round-trip efficiency of batteries is really very high - 90 % for lithium-ion batteries. As Bossel states, hydrogen cannot compete with its own fuel source in this case, electrons. This poor efficiency of the hydrogen economy that I've talked about is not something that has a solution through improved technology. The laws of thermodynamics maintain the limiting factor here. All the extra steps in the hydrogen case produce entropy, and there's no way to get past certain theoretical limits to the efficiency of each stage.

The inefficiency of hydrogen isn't something that we can afford environmentally. Would anyone consider it better to have three wind turbines rather than one, or three nuclear power plants rather than one?"

Friedman doesn't seem to know that cattle herds aren't usually guided by bloodhounds. But the clumsiness of his metaphors is part of his job. He's here to threaten those who seem reluctant to join the herd. Who wants subtlety from a leg-breaker? The cruder the metaphor, the more frightening. Good poets don't make good goons. And Friedman is pure goon, brass-knuckled platitudes all the way. Like a Naked Gun voiceover, he lets his violent metaphors stampede where they will. One of the most ham-handed metaphorical panics is what happens to this "electronic herd." Within pages of its introduction, the "herd" is transformed from cattle to wildebeest, grazing the Savannah. Ah, but that's only the beginning.

Most of the ice volume is on land.

It doesn't all have to melt to raise sea levels as they found out in antarctica. An Ice damn broke away, and a huge land-locked ice field moved into the water (ice can flow under pressure -- it just flows very slowly). Thus before 2040, the could be a lot of sea level rise before all the ice melt -- depends upon geography.

From what I'm reading, the Greenland ice sheets are only a few degrees above freezing at ground level due to geothermal heating. So -- it's going to make the Slide--not melt occur sooner.

And I'll agree with hal2814 -- iceburgs take up the same volume frozen or melted -- the excess volume of expanded ice floats.

About 12% of the earth is covered in ice; http://illconsidered.blogspot.com/2006/03/ice-caps -will-melt-into-aquifers.html
The aforementioned link dismisses the ideas that the water will be absorbed into aquifers, in case anyone brings it up.

97% of the world's water is ocean, let's ignore it. 68.7% of the remaining fresh water is locked up in glaciers and ice caps, the vast majority in ice caps. 30% is currently groundwater.

If the greenland icesheet melts completely it will add ~7 metres, WAIS will add about 8 (it is already mostly below sealevel) the EAIS would add around 65m (http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs2-00/)

Good Old Wikipedia has more; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_level_rise
The sea level has risen more than 120 metres since the peak of the last ice age about 18,000 years ago.
The bulk of that occurred before 6,000 years ago [note; think Noah's arc]
From 3,000 years ago to the start of the 19th century sea level was almost constant, rising at 0.1 to 0.2 mm/yr; since 1900 the level has risen at 1 to 3 mm/yr.
Since 1992 satellite altimetry from TOPEX/Poseidon indicates a rate of about 3 mm/yr.

Various factors affect the volume or mass of the ocean, leading to long-term changes in eustatic sea level. The two primary influences are temperature (because the volume of water depends on temperature), and the mass of water locked up on land and sea as fresh water in rivers, lakes, glaciers, polar ice caps, and sea ice. Over much longer (geological) timescales, changes in the shape of the ocean basins and in land/sea distribution will affect sea level. ...
Ice Shelves float on the surface of the sea and, if they melt, to first order they do not change sea level. Likewise, the melting of the northern polar ice cap which is composed of floating pack ice would not significantly contribute to rising sea levels.

Though the computations are complex, and land shape changes a lot of the factors -- throughout geological history, sea level has been much higher than today -- about 300 meters at it's peak. So you can imagine if ALL the water ice were to melt. And at the last great ice age, it was 100 meters lower than now.

The problem is, the rate of change is going to be hard to estimate. If it is not a slow geological process -- but a manmade process. Certain things that we cannot predict might accelerate the change. Case in point, the Earth Scientists thought the ice had to melt, before a huge ice flow moved out of Antarctica (the size of manhattan island). Also, the Siberian tundra, a huge area of permafrost looks to be melting. The color is going from hazy white to a black wet mud -- absorbing more heat. It's potential is that it could increase the natural release of Carbon Dioxide as much as 50% per year in the coming years.

So these trigger events complicate predictions. Even if global warming is alarmist and looking at extremes -- it is not a reasonable position to look at the "best case scenario" because we are not allowing for unknown effects. There is no downside to reducing Carbon emissions, as far as I can tell -- except if you are an oil company. Only, with peak oil arrived

Yeah, Cairo will definitely support SVG in some principled way, and I think it will also render PDFs without a plugin. I imagine it will eventually do MathML and other specialized XML rendering. But at this point, it's too soon to wring our hands about how it will be faster. Cairo right now is miserably slow. Hopefully that will improve by release-time.

I understand the decision to go with Cairo, but like you said, I hope it's coupled with a commitment to seriously fix Cairo.!

No I'm not making this up. Kenneth S. Deffeyes say's so. http://poweringdown.blogspot.com/2005_11_01_poweri ngdown_archive.html

Since November 2005 we havn't produced more oil then that month. That could well have been the peak. However it does not matter if it was 2005 november or it will be 2009 april... The fact is once we go in decline there is no stopping it. We now have a little bit time to change or energie habbits and to secure your future.

Peakoil might even be good for the locale economie. I don't know however I think things will look bleak and we will go to a dark page in the history of human kind. Why, because the politicians arn't taking this on top of the agenda and transform our economy from Oil based to "solar... based".

There are so many freeware and shareware games that have been released online by independent developers and programming hobbyists.

The Independent Games Festival is a good start. And to make things easier, there are a many sites and blogs that review indie games and make recommendations: the2bears and Shoot the Core cover shoot-em ups/STGs; Jay is Games handles flash and casual games; and TIGSource (for which I'm an editor), Independent Gaming, and Game Tunnel cover all genres of games. You can expect to find some overlapping, but they each have plenty to search through.

know nothing sales people...without understanding the math or the relationships between the data and gave wrong prices to customers