Slashdot Mirror

"If Amazon.com says "we're going to have a great next quarter! Two quarters from now, though, we're going to be out of business", people would sell Amazon stock like hotcakes."

yes, but Amazon wouldn't say that. if they were about to go out of business, i would guess that, given what previous companies have done, they would most likely try to cook the books.

"You're telling the daughter of an oil pres/VP and niece of a former US congressman. That's bloody rich. Sorry to ruin your fantasy world, but we don't live in a batman comic."

oh, it's rich alright. so's this.
http://www.senate.gov/~feingold/releases/00/09/200 0921959.html
wow. a "cost of living" increase. and they even set it up so that they don't have to vote for it!
hey, would your uncle pass a law that would put your dad's company in peril? oh, wait, this isn't batman is it?

"It's called economics."

my point exactly. if you notice in my previous post, i said that the reason why we still have the same design...
"it means that because people are still making money off of the engine, they see no reason to change. so, as people are still making money in the oil industry, there is nothing to drive them to change or to question why things are the way they are."

i was simply trying to say that there are plenty of smart people out there and that we could do a lot better than the internal combustion engine. if you sit there and say, "well, we've made a lot of improvments," i would respond, is that good enough? why should we settle for 30% efficiency?

and now, i hope can restrain myself as i respond to this...
"How on earth are these applicable to the oil industry? Heck, you could at least have cited things that were illegal - there's certainly enough of them out there. Oh wait, though, if you had cited companies doing illegal things, you'd then have to cite their punishments, and that would ruin your argument."

are you a moron ?
in case you are, here are some more links...
(warning, some may involve oil companies...)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon-Mobil
(scroll down to allegations)

http://www.law.washington.edu/pacrim/abstract/12.2 .htm#Awaiting_doe

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20 C14FB3B5B0C778DDDAB0994D9404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50 617FD38590C708EDDAC0894D9404482

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1313246.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1180985.stm

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F00 E11F63B5D0C738EDDAB0994D8404482

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0 71EF83C5D0C778DDDAF0894DE494D81

oh, i got more...
and if you keep responding, you get a lot more.

It had to come to this eventually. If you're doing something that affects millions of people, and any concerns they raise are just deflected with "na na na na na - I can't hear you", then sooner or later, somebody somewhere is going to have no option but to force you to just ANSWER THE FUCKING QUESTION.

Unless, of course, you happen to be President Bush.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/politics/08crawf ord.html

Yea, I know it's off topic, but I wanted to point out that this tactic doesn't always work.

Yahoo buys a billion worth of a chinese internet company...

Or possibly this story about tourists being offered a chance to fly around the moon for 100 million.

Sigh. Maybe its in the mysterious future, but I just don't know what slashdot is coming to these days... It ain't what it used to be.

According to the article, there are some unintended effects to the West's ban on DDT. By banning DDT (notably after malaria was eradicated in their own territories), the West has forced other countries from using DDT.

For example, Zimbabwean tobacco has been blocked from export into the U.S. because of DDT traces on the tobacco. This tends to cause the Zimbabwe's tobacco farmers (a powerful group in the country) to become an anti-DDT lobby.

While there's no call to ban DDT outside of the West, the need to avoid the appearance of hypocrisy ("use this pesticide that we consider too dangerous") and the plan to "phase out" DDT use entirely (Stockholm Convention) makes it difficult for anyone to argue or justify funding for anything related to DDT.

Some international research agencies will simply not fund any studies related to DDT and malaria control. Who wants to be on the hot seat for spraying cancer?

While insecticide-treated bed nets and house spraying is effective, its apparently cheaper to use DDT (the article uses a $1.70 per person per year figure).

The article also mentions that Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" pretty much brought about the modern environmental movement so debates about DDT get rather polarized. Liberals consider DDT the poster child of runaway technologists ("we can control nature") while conservatives consider the DDT ban a win by Luddites using emotion over science.

What's missing in the article are any questions to the people actually suffering from malaria. The questions were too focused on the hospital manager or the international aid organizer. I wish the journalist would have asked folks suffering from malaria how they would have chose in this Faustian bargain: higher malaria deaths (which kills mostly children under 5) or increased chances of cancer later in life?

You can read Joi Ito's New York Times Op Ed on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki here.

1. Bell Canada has finally announced they'll stop forcing the purchase of local service and will begin offering a stand-alone DSL line.
2. Earlier this week, SBC's chief financial officer, Rich Lindner, told analysts at an investor conference that he "expects [SBC] will do trials of naked DSL, especially bundled with wireless." The news was first reported by Dave Burstein in his DSL Prime newsletter.
3. SBC has not yet provided details about its new service.

I'll just post these two links. If you bothered you could find many more yourself:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/08/02/AR2005080201686.html http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/03/politics/03bush. html

Surely you are aware of the degree to which the Enlightenment project has sought to remove Christianity from public discourse?

Has it occurred to you that maybe it's not a movement but just people coming to the conclusion that christianity's time has come and gone? Maybe they've looked at all the hate, dishonesty, stupidity and pure evil that christianity stands for these days and have had enough? Don't be so quick to look for conspiracies.

My son, who will not say it, is held up for daily ridicule because of his religious convictions--and I have no alternative other than to keep paying for the public education that my children will not get. Surely this isn't fair?

I have no children at all. If I have to pay, so do you.

If the ways of the bible are showing up in our public education systems and you don't agree with it, teach your kids your alternative beliefs. I think this is one of the biggest problems these days.

There are a couple of problems with teaching the bible in school:

1) It's unconstitutional unless every religion's holy book is taught.
2) Bible teachers tend to lie a lot about their subject matter. Children aren't served by being taught lies.

As for creationism, it has no place in science classes because it isn't science. Period. People say "teach the controversy" but there is no scientific controversy. There's a political and religious controversy but that doesn't matter in a science class.

Parents don't want to spend enough time teaching their kids the differences between right and wrong.

On this, we definitely agree.

Somehow, the editors removed the Reuters link from the original story.

Also, for those who already have an account (so don't have to fork over their first-borne), from the New York Times.

Furthermore, I have found no refrence to fingernail scoring in carbon-carbon in the CAIB report.

Just read any of the current articles on NASA's plans for a spacewalk to clear dangling "gap filler" from beneath the Discovery. There is real concern that Robinson might accidentally crush a tile if he bumps into it with a tool or his suit, which would certainly be worse than the risk presented by the current damage.

Those things are fragile, but they're not foam- in fact, they're more vulnerable than most foam, which can generally bend instead of shattering.

Is the whole design of the shuttle overly fragile?

Yes, because unlike every previous (and subquesent) operational space-vehicle, it's also an airplane. That means it must be lightweight and have long thin wings to catch air. Imagine a low-speed collision between the strongest airplane (the A-10) and an average tank (like the M1A2)- there is no question about which will survive that crash.

Good, safe landers have the areodynamic qualities of a rock: difficult to damage, but impossible to manuver. The parachute landing will be somewhat random, and you'll just have to cope with a long walk back. On the other hand, the Shuttle was (for distorted reasons) built with opposite charactistics: it can be steered to any landing spot you wish, but is so fragile that any small mistake will mean complete destruction.

Wisely, the proposed shuttle replacement will give up on steerable re-entry, regaining the durability of 1960s-era craft.

Because bugmenot is a kluge.

Use the rss syndication link instead. Such links can be obtained from New York Times Link Generator

teach me not to preview my comments :)

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

more from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

Dr. Brown had still hoped to hold back announcements of 2003 UB313 and another large Kuiper Belt object, 2005 FY9, until October, but his hand was tipped by Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planet Center, who said that he was worried about hanky panky.

Dr. Marsden said that it was possible by looking on the Internet at the logs of one of the telescopes Dr. Brown's team had been using to find out where they had been pointed. He had evidence, he said, that someone had done that and computed crude orbits of the two unannounced planetoids, "presumably" in preparation for their own observations.

perhaps we should call the planet P4w-N3d :)

AN article in the New York Times from today isn't about Padilla but it's relevant all the same.

You should have looked through the replies. I did, and it was posted under the "Reg Free" heading (granted, you did have to dig down one level to find the accurate one).

For your convenience.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmon ey/31hack.html?ex=1280462400&en=31158975e4a4090a&e i=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Click me!

Here's a reg free link courtesty of New York Times Link Generator.

Direct to the article here

Didn't work, but the "New York Times Link Generator" did:

http://nytimes.blogspace.com/genlink

The reg free url is

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmon ey/31hack.html?ex=1280462400&en=31158975e4a4090a&e i=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

The first page of the article was semi interesting. I didn't read the rest.

Geesh people... how hard can it be?

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmon ey/31hack.html?ex=1280462400&en=31158975e4a4090a&e i=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

Paste this link into google and click through for a single page version

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/31/business/yourmon ey/31hack.html?pagewanted=all

no reg required

"This was also true before MLK and is true today. Part of me knows that apathy is a terrible thing. And yet I don't care enough that it is... :-("

Honest and insightful. Don't worry, it's natural to be apathetic to abstract dangers. The abstract danger being that you'll end up in a dictatorship if not all good guys act to supress small and big evils. The danger system of your brain isn't in the newest/modern/logical part but in the middle/mammalian/emotional part of your brain. And that part just doesn't make a big enough connection between not stopping little evils and then ending up in a dangerous society. It works much simpler than that, most of the time anyway.
More on this phenomenon can be found in this article. (save it).

By definition, caring enough to act is a state of mind. It is possible to restructure your beliefs/your way of thinking so you'll be able to act in the right way when you see evil in the future. It seems to me you care enough about being able to care. I mean you care enough to change your ways. I personally find it helpful to take a step back and really think about my own thinking and changing the parts I don't like.

There are ways of doing this and most of those ways are called self-help. You have to be careful of quacks but there are genuine people among the self-help and neuro linguistic programming community. I suggest you download David DeAngelo's "Double Your Dating" video's from somewhere (I downloaded from eMule P2P). The reason is because it combines fun with important.

He talks a lot about other self-help stuff that he found to be good if you want to continue in that way but his vids are a great introduction. He also shows good ways to get laid. David DeAngelo takes a more biological/evolution/nature approach and Ross Jeffries takes a more "nurture" approach.

My suggestion, try to see the fun in taking action. Give your emotional brain some kind of reward for acting the right way like "satisfaction" or "logic buzz" or something.

Have fun with it.

"Even the Pope has given up and accepted that the fossil record is pretty conclusive and hence evolution is true."

This is based on a misreading of the pope's statements.

See Finding Design in Natura

from the NY Times

from here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/29/science/29cnd-pl anet.html

I vote for 'p4wn3d' because....

Dr. Brown had still hoped to hold back announcements of 2003 UB313 and another large Kuiper Belt object, 2005 FY9, until October, but his hand was tipped by Brian Marsden, director of the Minor Planet Center, who said that he was worried about hanky panky.

Dr. Marsden said that it was possible by looking on the Internet at the logs of one of the telescopes Dr. Brown's team had been using to find out where they had been pointed. He had evidence, he said, that someone had done that and computed crude orbits of the two unannounced planetoids, "presumably" in preparation for their own observations.

Also, in the article it says the astronomers themselves have been calling it Xena.... don't think I like that name :(

So Slashdot Doesnt Care that Astronomers are reporting Finding a NEW PLANET?
What is this place Coming to?

...all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage while the shuttle is in orbit may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with." ...if a crack is detected [...] "how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?"

"...the harder they look, they'll find more things."

"There is risk in anything you do."

July 27, 2005

Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 26 - Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission.

But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers an

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981; in 113 missions the orbiters have been hit by debris some 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration replaces about 100 insulating tiles after every flight and repairs many more than that, Stephanie S. Stilson, the vehicle manager for Discovery, said Monday.

In fact, the rest of this article sums up the situation quite nicely:

July 27, 2005
Intense Hunt for Signs of Damage Could Raise Problems of Its Own

By JOHN SCHWARTZ
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla., July 26 - Now that the Discovery is in orbit, the examination begins. Its 12½-day mission will be the most photographed in the history of the shuttle program, with all eyes on the craft to see if it suffered the kind of damage from blastoff debris that brought down the Columbia in February 2003.

There were cameras on the launching pad, cameras aloft on planes monitoring the ascent, cameras on the shuttle checking for missing foam on the external fuel tank, and a camera on the tank itself. One camera caught a mysterious object falling from the shuttle at liftoff; radar detected another, about two minutes into the flight. Cameras aboard the shuttle and the International Space Station will monitor the Discovery until the end of its mission.

But all this inspection may be a mixed blessing. The more NASA looks for damage, engineers and other experts say, the more it will find. And the risks of overreaction to signs of damage while the shuttle is in orbit may be just as great as the risks of playing them down.

"How do you distinguish - discriminate - between damage which is critical and damage which is inconsequential?" asked Dr. David Wolf, an astronaut who spent four months aboard the Russian space station Mir. "We could be faced with very difficult decisions, in part because of all this additional information that we will be presented with."

The shuttle program has lived with damage from debris from the very first flight, in 1981; in 113 missions the orbiters have been hit by debris some 15,000 times, mostly on liftoff. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration replaces about 100 insulating tiles after every flight and repairs many more than that, Stephanie S. Stilson, the vehicle manager for Discovery, said Monday.

Now, though, it will be far easier to spot such damage while the shuttle is still in orbit. Thanks to a $15 million laser camera system developed by a Canadian company, Neptec, for example, NASA can detect a crack of just two-hundredths of an inch, the width of two business cards pressed together. On the leading edge of the orbiter's wing, such a crack could admit dangerous amounts of superheated gas during re-entry. A similar crack elsewhere might not.

It was a large hole in the left wing's leading edge, caused by impact with a 1.67-pound piece of insulating foam during the launching, that led to the Columbia disaster.

But if a crack is detected, said Iain Christie, director of research and development for Neptec, "how is NASA supposed to explain that this is not a problem?"

Nor is it clear how it could be fixed. NASA's efforts to create a repair kit for tile and leading-edge panels, a recommendation of the board that investigated the Columbia accident, have not been successful. Techniques will be tested during a spacewalk in coming days, but they are not ready for an actual repair, and the Discovery astronauts have said they would not want to trust any patchwork on a return to Earth.

Another option, the "safe haven" plan, would involve abandoning the $2 billion shuttle and having the astronauts wait in the space station for a rescue mission. For that to work, another shuttle would have to be launched within a few weeks.

That is theoretically possible but carries risks of its own: the chance, for example, that the orbiting astronauts would run o

Well, vultures or not, the New York Times (register if you must) says "NASA Puts Shuttle Mission's Risk at 1 in 100" Those are not great odds, if you want the program to be more than a cold war pissing contest.

http://www.nytimes.com/video/html/2005/06/29/techn ology/highbandwidth/windowsmedia/20050629_GUEST_VI DEO.html

The external battery is a bit much though...

Ah yes, yet another pretender to the iPod Flea throne. :-)

(Note: embedded WMV. For stills, go here or Google 'ipod flea'.)

You probably never heard of the iPod Flea ?

See it here.

P.S Might not play well on Firefox but see anyway!

They've got nothing on iPod Flea!

immediatly start thinking about the iFlea??

WalMart

• uses Illegal child labor.
• forces people to work off the clock.
• discriminates against women.

Some main points that don't seem to have come out so far in the Slashdot discussion so far are that

• the congressman is parroting criticisms from a certain Canadian gadfly who has been proven on several occasions not to be well educated on matters of physical climatology.
• these criticisms have been picked up by the Wall Street Journal (in an editorial piece that was severely flawed in other ways as well), but carry no weight in the scientific community, and any serious investigation would show this to be the case.
• The letter was accusatory in tone and onerous in its demands. It wasn;t the request for clarification that is at stake, it is the punishment for results that are out of line with what the congressman wants
• The individual result is illustrative of the seriousness of the situation, so it has received a lot of attention, including from the IPCC. Opponents of the scientific consensus, being political rather than scientific, decided this was an opportunity. They are attempting to tar the entire field with the brush of this purportedly bad article
• It's not clear why the authors took so ling to release the code. However, if this means that conservative elements in congress are going to support a mandate for a purely open source tool chain in non-military science, that will certainly be a silver lining!

Anyway, follow the link and read what the main scientific institutions think of this episode before you come to your own conclusions please.

Also, if you don't mind signing in, see the recent editorial in the New York Times. It includes the following:

Sherwood Boehlert of New York - a fellow Republican who is chairman of the House Science Committee and an enlightened moderate on environmental issues - seemed much closer to the truth when he described Mr. Barton's inquisition as "an effort to intimidate scientists rather than learn from them, and to substitute Congressional political review for scientific peer review."

If you actually read 1984 or Animal Farm with any literary sensitivity, you'd see how in both cases Orwell imagines socialism becoming perverted by the actions of power-hungry Communists - the very same thing he saw happening in the Spanish Civil War (and described in Homage to Catalonia, where he sees the Communist Party as second only to Franco's Facists as agents of injustice).

By the end of his life, I believe he found communism to be inevitably corrupt and evil, given the evidence.

Socialism, a watered-down version of communism, may be less corrupt and evil by degree, but it's no less bankrupt in the long run, as many continental nations are in the process of discovering. The central idea of socialism is institutionalized theft by majority rule, making the state a 'robin hood' which steals from the rich to give to the poor. In the long run, this so impacts entrepreneurship and incentives that it leads to stagnation and true income equality, where everyone is equally poor. Of course, true believers pack bag lunches and sing songs of solidarity, but the best of the rest end up brain-draining to America.

Capitalism, on the other hand, in one form or another, has existed since the dawn of human history. Hell, scientific evidence proves that even monkeys can learn how to exchange goods for services.

I think he doesn't understand that all economic systems, capitalist and socialist, are corrosive to democracy because they require either competition (which naturally leads to economic disparities, which give more power to the wealthy, and which therefore undermine democracy) or control (which suppress individual initiative and submits the individual to mass control).

You try to place moral equivalence between capitalism and socialism where there is, in fact, none at all. Economic disparities stem from individual competence, and competition acts as both a valve and a pressor, pushing progress inevitably forward. You are actually describing China when you're talking about a worst-case for capitalism.

China, which has transformed into a fascist country though it calls itself a communist country, is where you'll find the vicious brew of capitalist economy and totalitarian, pro-corporate (thru its institutional ownership of at least half the economy) society. In the Chinese government, international corporations find a willing partner in wage exploitation, labor migration, etc. And people are not permitted to protest, and the press is state-owned or state-controlled.

Also, to be honest, _everything_ is corrosive to democracy, when institutionalized and permitted to metastasize. The key is finding the balance which provides the most individual liberty while preserving common rights and privileges in the most fair and sustainable way.

ObTopic: there's no way anything like V could happen in the USA, because of our free press and broad and deep gun ownership. Besides, unlike England, our armed services and law enforcment swear an oath to protect the principles enshrined in the founding document of our nation, and many even carry copies of this document with them. If you've ever known any military or law enforcement personnel, you'd know how seriously they take that oath. Just look at what happend to MacArthur. Unpopular president fires popular war hero for insubordination, and while the people protest venomously, the general steps down with grace and respect for the Constitutional principle of civilian authority over the military.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy .html

There is no doubt what those new machines come pre-installed with.

There is a NYT editorial today titled "Grand Theft Adult": http://nytimes.com/2005/07/22/opinion/22fri4.html

It seems small I know, but the cumulative effect could be staggering

Instead of targeting A/C, the researchers have pointed to the more mundane things, like roads and parking lots (the dark colour of asphalt absorbs sunlight and turns it into heat) and dark roofs. Areas with sufficient tree coverage, on the other hand, were much cooler. The seemingly trivial change of having a light colour roof can substantially reduce air conditioning requirements (although it can also increase heating requirements).

My vote for the buggiest software besides Microsoft Internet Explorer is Windows Update.

Why does Microsoft want security risks? Maybe this is the answer: When people have problems with their computer, they often buy a new computer. Then Microsoft sells another copy of Windows, which, of course, still has huge security risks.

--
If your gov't chose killing as policy, expect others to choose the same.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/19/opinion/l19compu ters.html

It's the MPAA's fault. Terms like "R rated" are trademarked by the MPAA and they won't let anyone else use them, they've even sent cease and desist letters to fan fiction writers not to use those terms.

Doctors in teaching hospitals today are operating in a kind of Zip drive, where patients are compressed into smaller and smaller space. There are probably several reasons: sicker patients, quicker patient turnover, administrative pressures to cut costs, even rules limiting work hours.
Today I see staff reflexively calling consultants, not because they have legitimate questions but because they don't have the time or inclination to think through a difficult case for themselves. Unlike Dr. House, no one wants to take on challenging cases, so they are tossed back and forth between consultants.

That's an incongruity that goes back a long way in western culture.
A particularly american example would be the puritans. They were legendary in their repression of sexuality. They also committed some of the most heinously violent acts to have occurred in this country. Take the Mystic Massacre during the Pequot War, for example. That this weird dichotomy became part of our societal mindset is probably at least partially due to the extensive puritan influence in America's childhood.

On the same subject there was an interesting statistic in this article today:
The researchers found that "when it comes to popular movies and popular shows, tastes don't differ at all" between religious and nonreligious, said Joseph Helfgot, president of MarketCast. "What you find is that people with conservative religious doctrine are the most likely to see movies rated R for violence. If you compared it to liberals, it's a third more."

The idea of the viability of older machines infringing on PC sales has a counter part:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/17/technology/17spy .html?adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1121714413-DRsR6D+N9V6Va2Tk Eulp+Q

Right. 8 car bombs a day in Baghdad is so much better.