I bought William Shatner's books on his time in Star Trek. I also bought Nichelle Nichols's book, George Takei's book, Walter Koenig's book, and James Doohan's book. (I might even have one or two others I forget now.) In Shatner's book he claims to be bewildered why his former castmates seem to hold him in low regard, and claims that while filming Star Trek he never knew they didn't like him. In all the castmate books, they make clear that Shatner was not popular among the castmates, ever. I haven't read these books in over a decade; but I think their biggest complaint was that Shatner felt his character was far more important than theirs (well, fair enough) and that therefore he felt justified in treating them poorly, which made them consider Shatner a big jerk (well, seems fair enough also).
I read an essay by Harlan Ellison about his experience with Star Trek, when he wrote the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever". (Summary: according to him, he wrote a totally brilliant and award-winning script, which Gene Roddenberry and company then messed up a whole lot, yet even this messed-up version was a fan favorite, and he is bitter about the whole thing even decades later.) The part that really made me wake up, though, was when he described a visit from Shatner.
According to Ellison, Shatner came over to Ellison's home and started going through the script. He counted how many lines of dialog Kirk had compared to the other cast members, and started lobbying Ellison to increase the Kirk dialog (and thus inevitably cut back other dialog).
I guess Ellison could be lying. But I also remember watching the Shatner-directed Star Trek V and I remember how much that movie revolved around Kirk. Of all the characters, only Kirk was smart enough to ask the incredibly insightful question: What does God need with a starship, given that He is omnipotent and all? The Nimoy-directed Trek movies did not focus overmuch on Spock.
Actions are a more dependable guide to character than statements, even earnest ones, from the person in question. There is also the evidence from people around him. I don't think I'd be in a big hurry to be friends with Shatner.
Yet, it seems that Nimoy really is friends with Shatner and has been for decades, so Shatner must have some redeeming qualities that Nimoy sees.
P.S. The most interesting thing from the Nichelle Nichols book was her description of the first black/white interracial kiss on broadcast television. She says that everyone was antsy about the scene, so they decided to film two versions: the real kiss, and an almost-sort-of kiss that might be less offensive to people bent out of shape over race issues. Shatner suggested they film the real kiss first, and they did so. Then, in each take of the fake kiss, Shatner made some obvious gaffe that ruined the scene. He didn't admit he was doing it on purpose, but he ruined every attempt to shoot the fake kiss. Perforce they ran the real kiss as part of the episode and made TV history. Shatner apparently forgot all about this, or at least remembered it differently, and Nichols expressed puzzlement that Shatner could forget such an unusual series of events in which he played such a large role.
You are correct that the screen doesn't have enough pixels to do justice to 1080p. However, I disagree that this is misleading.
They are saying that you can play 1080p video on the thing. As in, there is enough horsepower there to decode the 1080p video, then downsample it to fit on the screen. If you have 1080p video files, you can play them on the thing without needing to transcode them first. This will be particularly interesting if you can stream them off your media server. I don't really want to store all my movies multiple times in multiple transcoded formats; do you?
What would make that significantly more interesting would be if they had an HDMI port, so that you could play 1080p video to an external device such as a giant flatscreen TV. The Galaxy Tab doesn't seem to have one, but I'll bet other Android tablets will have one.
The latest generation of netbooks come with HDMI ports, by the way. I'm somewhat drooling over the Acer Aspire AS1551-5448. (What a catchy name! Don't you get thrilled by all the 1's, 5's, and 4's?) This is an 11.6" screen netbook with a dual-core processor, a graphics accelerator, and a (just barely) full-sized keyboard. http://www.netbooknews.com/3780/acer-aspire-1551-amd-athlon-powered-by-ii-neo-k625/
I'm torn. Part of me wants to buy the Acer netbook, and part of me wants to hold out for a smartbook with a Tegra 2 processor and a Pixel Qi screen, for crazy long battery life.
Look, to 99.9% of iPhone's target market, these news means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. If anything, these news will be taken as a sign that the App Store is working! "Wow, those guys at Apple are really taking the time to approve the apps and not just let everything pass to boost the number of apps!"
So, you are saying that this guy has no potential customers for his app? Nobody cares? Absolutely nobody wishes they could buy this application, or if they do want to buy it, they think three months is reasonable?
There are already more apps available than I can ever use, I am all for anything that Apple do that might increase the quality of the apps available rather than quantity.
It's sad, really, that you are willing to see this issue as one of Apple trying to maintain some kind of quality. Here we have a high-quality app, and Apple has neither approved it, nor declined it with specific advice ("change X and we will approve it"). If the issue were truly one of quality, this app would not be in limbo for three months and counting.
As an iPhone owner, I am willing to PAY for high quality apps. More importantly, I am ABLE to pay for the apps, and very conveniently too.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing special about iPhone owners being willing to pay for quality; Android owners should be equally likely to also be willing to pay for quality. I agree that Google needs to get their act together on the app store situation, but they will. Right now it's much easier to make money as an iPhone developer, but there is no reason to think that will last forever.
How many more people does Apple have to hurt before it starts to tarnish the brand?
Apple has done a fabulous job of polishing the iPhone and iPad. If you really want the best available phone, and you aren't too choosy about your freedom, you buy Apple.
Sure, they won't get my money because I refuse to pay a company to tell me what software I may and may not install on my own device. That's okay, they don't care about me. But the more time goes by, the more stories like this one come to light. How much of this before people start to view Apple not so much as the hip, cool company but rather as the controlling, evil company?
And stories like this one are inevitable, because Apple is exerting such a high degree of control. The approval process isn't a simple rubber-stamp thing. The more innovative and unusual an app is, the harder it is for Apple to decide whether it gives the user too much freedom. In this case, I would guess that the problem is that an app for mocking up new apps is a little too much like an emulator, and Apple can't quite make up its collective mind whether this is a sort of emulator or not. (I can't even guess why Apple approved other app mockup apps while letting this one languish.)
So, the more time goes by, the more wronged people there will be. I guess as long as the majority of Apple customers are happy, and the majority of app developers aren't mistreated too much, the Apple brand will be undiminished.
But you know, if he had released his app for Android, it would be on the market now. He could even make an Android app for mocking up iPhone apps! I wish he would, just for the irony value.
I remember when MPEGLA announced they were considering forming a patent pool for WebM, so that all the patents that WebM infringes could be put in one place, and anyone who wants to use WebM could pay for these patents.
Ever since, I've been waiting for another shoe to drop. Is there even one patent announced to go in that patent pool yet?
I've been hoping that On2 and Google did their homework, and WebM will succeed in being royalty free. The more time that goes by without serious challenge to it, the happier I'm getting.
The basic idea of a theme isn't new. A friend of mine had an XP theme on his desktop, and had a guest at his home using his computer for over half an hour without noticing anything. He asked "Do you find my Linux computer easy to use?" and the guest hadn't even realized it wasn't Windows XP.
That sort of thing is mainly useful as evidence to counter the idea that a Linux desktop is "hard to use".
The major new thing with Windows 7 is its dock. I have never much been interested in docks but it seems like they are popular. Do you use a dock in Linux? If so, could you please answer these questions:
0) Which dock do you use?
1) Why do you prefer your dock to others you have tried?
2) Is your dock similar to the one in Windows 7?
I know someone who uses Gnome Do and Docky, so I'm interested in those, but I know there are others around.
Carrying guns is far more offensive than lumping two disgusting organisations in with each other.
Why? If I carry a gun correctly you won't even know it is there. Why is that offensive?
Do you also find it offensive when people have fire extinguishers in their homes?
Do you also find it offensive when people have baseball bats, tire irons, golf clubs, and similar lethal bludgeons? How about petrol: that has been used to burn down buildings with people inside. Is it offensive to possess petrol?
Guns have been used to murder people. Guns have also been used to stop a violent crime. My claim is that law-abiding people with guns are not the source of violence in society.
This is the trouble with the NRA, they tell lies like those.
Actually, I was thinking of a book called The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy which has lengthy discussion about England. And I am mystified that you think it is a lie to call England a largely non-violent place.
My claim is that England could get rid of its ban on handguns, and it would not become more violent as a result. Violence is a result of people, not of instruments, and the people of England are largely non-violent.
violence has actually halved.
I took a look at those statistics. According to those, only 19% of violent incidents involved a weapon of any kind. Yet all violence went down, not just firearm-related violence. Are you seriously claiming that a ban on handguns led to an immediate reduction in all forms of violence? If so, why hasn't it ever worked that way in the USA?
that's exactly what happened. An incredible decrease in violence.
References, please. As far as I know, there has been a steady decrease in violence in the past ten or fifteen years, while at the same time, gun control laws have been relaxing. The Brady law has sunset, and the majority of states now make it easy for law-abiding citizens to legally carry a handgun. According to your theories, shouldn't violent crime be increasing in the United States?
And perhaps you can explain to me why there are more per-capita violent crimes in Washington D.C., where handguns are banned, than there are in Olympia, WA, where handguns are not banned? If I'm doing my maths correctly, there are over four times as many violent crimes per person in Washington D.C. than in Olympia. Since you don't seem to be a fan of the NRA, I got my numbers from the FBI: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_06.html
And note that when you go to the FBI Uniform Crime Report web site, there is a caution against directly comparing cities to rank them in terms of violence. The caution lists many variables to consider. I submit to you that if you consider all those variables you are likely to get a better prediction on the amount of violence than if you just consider availability of firearms.
It's this kind of blatent lying about life or death matters that makes it OK to lump the NRA in with the Ku Klux Klan.
Is the FBI in on this blatant lying also?
I suspect that I will not be able to persuade you of anything, so I will leave you with just two thoughts:
0) Be suspicious of any overly-simplistic rule, such as "guns inevitably drive people to acts of violence". Society is more complicated than that.
1) Remember that people who disagree with you might not be lying bastards worthy of your hate. It sounds like your views on firearms are rather different than my own, but I don't hate you, and I hope you don't hate me.
The NRA would have one believe so, much as the klu klux klan would have you believe that racism saves people.
Damn, you are offensive. Lumping the NRA in with the Ku Klux Klan? Are you just trolling or are you really this deluded?
statistics from around the world do NOT show people to be safer in countries where there are more handguns.
Based on what I have read in various books, the presence or absence of handguns is a poor predictor of violence. For example, in the USA, police officers always carry handguns, yet we do not expect officers to violently attack people.
Violence is a social issue. Put a gun in Mother Teresa's hand and she will not turn into an insane killer. Pull the gun out of an insane killer's hand, and he will find some other weapon. Or, to put it on the level of countries: England was a largely non-violent place. Then England banned guns. Then England was a largely non-violent place. So, did the gun ban cause England to be a largely non-violent place?
For me, the most important statistical issue is that imposing gun control has never brought a decrease in violence. Also, reducing gun control doesn't bring an increase in violence. When Florida made it much easier to obtain a license to carry concealed handguns, gun opponents predicted that violence would increase; "minor traffic accidents will turn into gun battles", they said, and similar silliness. Violence actually went down.
So, correlation does not prove causation. If a violent city imposes strong gun control and crime goes up, is it because of the gun control? Crime was already on the way up, so maybe the gun control helped. But when gun control is dismantled, as in Florida, crime doesn't go up.
I view gun ownership as being similar to ownership of a first aid kit or a fire extinguisher. Having a gun doesn't make you the police, just as having a fire extinguisher doesn't make you the fire department and having a first aid kit doesn't make you a hospital. If you are sensible and level-headed, you are better off to have all of these things; if you are silly and impulsive, you can get yourself into worse trouble.
What real-world questions did the OLPC XO answer? I've never used one, so I honestly have no idea.
Well, I bought one, so I guess I'm qualified to comment.
I bought mine mostly because I wanted to support the OLPC project and was intrigued by their device. The shining vision was of a rugged laptop with crazy long battery life and a unique screen that is visible in full sunlight. I knew the device would be a tad slow, but I have other computers to use for speed. And I wanted to try out that "view source" key: the idea was that the whole system would be free, open-source software written in Python, and kids would be able to hack their own computers and learn programming (and have fun doing it).
The reality is that the touchpad on my OLPC just doesn't work right, and the device is glacially slow. I'm not even sure which key is the "view source" key for certain; there is no key with that text on it, and I don't grok whatever icon they used to flag it. And it turns out that most of the XO applications don't support it anyway. (Yet?)
The magic and romance went out of the project when I realized that the OLPC management was clueless. They never had a solid plan for how they would make and ship as many laptops as they hoped, they let costs balloon out of control, and they managed to make a device that in some ways is the worst of all worlds: instead of an ARM chip they used an x86 chip (an AMD Geode) but the device is far too constrained to ever really run Windows, and did I mention that it is glacially slow. Instead of using an off-the-shelf window manager from 1998, which would have run reasonably fast, they wrote their own wacky environment "Sugar"; I understand their goals with Sugar, but kids are adaptable, and kids would pick up fvwm or whatever just fine, plus it's more important for the apps to have "view source" than the window manager. Then Negroponte announced that OLPC was going to get into bed with Microsoft, and half of the volunteers writing code for the OLPC instantly quit in disgust. Then OLPC announced that they were going to make a new clamshell tablet device with two full color touchscreens and a hinge for $75, and then they announced they weren't going to make it after all. Now they are going to make a tablet like an iPad for $75. Good on them if they pull it off, but I'm no longer paying attention.
The best thing I can say about the OLPC is that it likely triggered the wave of netbooks that changed the world. I don't know for a fact that Acer looked at the OLPC and said "we can build something like that, less rugged but faster" but the timing is right.
Take the best ideas from the OLPC (including the screen) and make a tablet. Use an ARM core for a CPU. Cut any feature that would make it exceed the target price; it's great if the thing can do WiFi but really kids could do a lot by swapping memory cards back and forth. Pre-load the thing with useful textbooks and perhaps a subset of Wikipedia. And hire industry experts to manage the manufacturing and distribution. That would be exciting.
By the end of the year we should start seeing tablets and "smartbooks" with ARM chips, even the Tegra 2, and some of them will have the Pixel Qi screen. So we will be able to buy a device with crazy long battery life and a screen you can read in direct sunlight, and it won't be glacially slow.
I can't imagine any of the Windows 7 tablets being worth buying. Any x86 chip that can run Windows 7 will burn more battery life and dissipate more heat than an ARM chip. Do you want a heavy tablet (lots of batteries) or a tablet with super-short battery life? I don't. Do you want a tablet with a vent on one side that blows hot air out while you are using it? I don't.
Of the various ARM chips, the exciting one is the Tegra 2. 8 cores: two ARM 9 cores at 1 GHz each, plus audio DSP, video encode and decode, graphics accelerator, an image processor and an ARM 7 core used for housekeeping. All with a typical heat dissipation of 500 milliWatts, or perhaps less. (I saw a YouTube video that claimed a Tegra 2 can decode 1080P video while dissipating only 350 Watts.)
The iPad gets its long battery life and lack of a hot air vent from the A4 chip, which is an ARM core of some sort (IIRC an ARM 8) at 1 GHz. I believe the iPad also has a graphics accelerator. Presumably a Tegra 2 chip can smoke the iPad on performance, and it's already good enough.
Also, Windows 7 was designed for a mouse. Will the Windows 7 tablets come with a stylus for precision pointing? Or will Microsoft make an all-new GUI environment just for tablets? I'd rather just have Android.
So I'm waiting for a smartbook or tablet with a Tegra 2 and a Pixel Qi screen, running some sort of Linux (likely Android). I had hoped that devices like that would ship this summer but I guess they are delayed.
Wikileaks and Julian Assange own this now. The good, and the ill, from publishing that information are on them. And it looks pretty ill to me.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed after the release of these documents. So that's one man dead already. The Taliban has vowed to hunt down and kill anyone who is a "spy", and they are using the Wikileaks information to do it, so there will be more. Some of the people listed in Wikileaks have disappeared, hopefully into hiding rather than dead.
Julian Assange's stance on this is callous. He "insisted that any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information." Okay, at least one man is dead now. What is that "overall importance"? I sure don't see it.
I'm also not buying his idea that this is really the US military's fault, together with Amnesty International, for not helping him redact the critical info. Much of the info is years old. What was the big rush? If Wikileaks didn't have enough volunteers to vet the info carefully, why rush ahead and publish it anyway?
If I were Julian Assange, I wouldn't be sleeping well at night.
At work, I have a Windows machine I need to use. I installed Thunderbird on it to read my personal email.
One day, Thunderbird offered me an update to Thunderbird 3. Sure, why not; I let it upgrade.
So, the next day I got an urgent email from the corporate IT department demanding to know why the corporate antivirus was reporting dozens of viruses on my work computer! I was not pleased.
My email server has a virus scanner (ClamAV of course), and when it detects a virus, it shunts the virus email message into a special folder. I rarely look at the folder or worry about it. Well, Thunderbird 3 changed the default behavior without asking me anything, and downloaded every message in every folder I have. Not just headers, message bodies as well. Thus, it downloaded a bunch of virus emails onto the hard disk of my corporate Windows desktop computer.
Long story short, IT ordered me to uninstall Thunderbird to make sure that this could never happen again. (IT recognizes that the viruses were never active on my system, but they officially have a zero-tolerance policy about viruses being present inside the corporate network at all.)
So I am no longer a Thunderbird user. I found another way to read my personal email while at work.
I was always happy with the old policy, of downloading message headers only, and grabbing the message bodies when I actually opened an email to read it. The new policy might make sense if I had a single machine that I always used to read email and I always wanted my email stuff to be as fast as possible (everything cached to the local hard disk). But I use IMAP and I read my mail from a half-dozen different computers, and the vast majority of my email on my server is old stuff I rarely look at. The new policy of downloading everything makes no sense for me, and I didn't see any way to globally change the setting; it looked to me like you need to change the setting on a folder-by-folder basis. (I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't matter because I had to abandon Thunderbird anyway.)
I don't think defaulting to downloading the entirety of every message on a server is a good idea. And it led to me being forced to abandon Thunderbird, so Thunderbird has at least one fewer user as a result.
Eh, I'm not sure you actually had to be hundreds of miles away to pick up the signal. But I do remember very clearly that they couldn't get the signal from close up (like, at the park).
Basically there aren't any 40 meter repeaters set up, so you either need to get a direct line-of-sight or an atmosphere bounce. So the practical effect was that they had to talk to the guy in another state and have him relay messages back and forth.
a QRP (low power) rig on 40 meters can work hundreds or thousands of miles
When I got my ham radio license, the instructor told the class a funny story.
There was this old guy out hiking, and the old guy carried a 40 meter Morse code radio. The guy hurt his leg and could not continue. Some hikers came along and offered help; the old guy told them "pitch my tent, help me inside, and throw this antenna wire up into the trees." That's all he wanted, and after they did that, they walked away (they never followed up with anyone).
So the old guy started tapping out his emergency report. One old ham operator, hundreds of miles away, was monitoring the 40 meter band and got the report. And in fact you had to be hundreds of miles away to get it; the report wasn't possible to pick up close by. So the ham operator in another state got on the phone to the Snohomish County Search and Rescue, to tell them what was going on.
Our instructor works for the Search and Rescue department, and he disbelieved the initial report. "Did you say the 40 meter band?!?" When S&R got to the park, they couldn't pick up the signal; they had to use cell phones to talk to the guy in another state to communicate with the guy who needed help.
So, the moral of the story is: if you want to whistle up help, maybe a 40 meter rig isn't the best way to go.
Yes. More generally, don't assume evil where stupidity will do.
We still see libertarians regularly on/. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action.
Hi, I'm a libertarian.
You paint an overly simplistic view of the world. There are a bunch of people who consider themselves libertarians, and not all of them are stupid or dupes. The core idea of libertarianism is simple, but people can and do take it in different directions.
stateless, unregulated societies are unstable
I agree with you on this point.
There are some libertarians, the anarcho-capitalists, who believe that we don't need any sort of government at all; that the free market can and will solve all problems, right up to and including the national defense. Like you, I don't think Anarcho-Capitalism has been proven to work in the real world, and indeed you have listed some sobering counter-examples.
Then there are libertarians like me, the minarchists, who believe we do need a government but it should be small and do little. The "government is like fire: a useful servant but a terrible master" libertarians. The libertarians who believe that government should do only what people cannot do for themselves, and little more. (I'm not opposed to government funding for advanced research into space flight, fusion power, and other advanced new technologies.)
But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
A libertarian would tell you that the real problem is that the government is too powerful. People who want to exert power over others are drawn to government because it gives them that power. If the government were cut way back, people might be less drawn to it; certainly if government were less powerful, large companies wouldn't be so compelled to make huge political donations or spend huge sums on lobbyists.
And most importantly, if government were really small and did very little, it wouldn't matter so much whether our rulers were sociopaths or not. If our rulers were perfect angels, and perfectly wise, we could give them unlimited power; since they are just people, and politicians at that, we don't dare trust them with any more power than we must.
[libertarians] simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Some of us can. But let's flip that around. Can you believe that a government would seriously enact a budget that plans to average almost a one trillion dollar deficit per year for the foreseeable future? That's not paying down the debt at all, and adding almost a trillion dollars to the debt each year. Can this continue indefinitely? Will the USA be able to get these planned loans on schedule?
You may not be a fan of the free market, but this is scarier. Under the free market, if a company makes bad decisions, it will be forced out of business by the uncaring feedback of the market: other, better-run companies will beat it. But there is no way for a bad company to wreck the entire economy. Government can do it, though.
Judging by your post, you will probably frown on this, because you have a superficial understanding of what science is or should be.
Hmmm. Judging by your post, you are rather quick to judge people based on small amounts of data.
You sound like one of the people who expects that all science should be 'proven' to the same kind of standards as mathematical proof.
Not necessarily. I do, however, expect that global warming should be 'proven' to rather rigorous standards. Cap-and-Trade would cause a severe and horrible depression, possibly worse than the Great Depression. If AGW is correct and carbon dioxide really is an agent of horrible climate change, it might be worth causing trillions of dollars of harm to the economy of my country, with elderly poor people freezing to death in cold winters, destitute people becoming homeless, and all the rest of it... because the alternative would be even worse. If AGW is not correct, then Cap-and-Trade is worse than the alternative, and it must be stopped. It is vital that we make a correct decision here.
If you use weak data to perform an experiment, and the only down side is that the experiment didn't work out, then you write down what you learned and move on. If you use weak data to justify incredible havoc to the economy, and the down side is horrible suffering of real human beings, I'm not so sanguine.
Perhaps you think I am being melodramatic. But consider that all commerce relies on things being moved around by trucks; food is delivered by trucks; farms rely on trucks and tractors and things that all run on fuel. The whole point of Cap-and-Trade is to make fuel significantly more expensive so that people will use less of it, and this means that everything you might want to buy will become more expensive, and food will become much more expensive. Consider also all the people who rely on coal power now for their electricity, and imagine the price of coal power dramatically spiking upward. (Barack Obama said that under Cap-and-Trade, coal power would become so expensive that it would bankrupt the plant owner.)
there is some real controversy about tree ring data, and it's pretty clear that they thought that they were presenting the data in the clearest form.
If you can spare a moment to explain this a bit more, it would really help me out.
This is my current understanding of the situation. If it is incorrect in any particular I would appreciate the correction; I am not some shill spreading misinformation.
My current understanding is that they were trying to use tree ring data to determine what the temperature was in the past; tree rings were available going far earlier than we have actual measured temperature data. My understanding is that the tree ring data did not successfully predict the temperatures of the recent times, but that once the tree ring data got into recent years, they simply stopped using the tree ring data.
I just don't understand how this is acceptable in any way. If the tree ring data cannot correctly predict temperatures that are known, why should we trust that it can predict older, unknown temperatures? Here's a quote from that Nature article:
Had the tree-ring data been left in, it would not have implied that recent temperatures have been decreasing, but only that the proxy data no longer tracked direct temperature records, says Clarke.
Again I am perplexed. Why does he say the proxy data "no longer" tracked with direct temperature records? Why should we believe it used to track and no longer tracks?
Are there other tree-ring data series out there that do correctly predict the temperatures of modern times?
But hey, a lot of people make a lot of money by making a lot of predictions that can never be confirmed. More power to them, and to anyone who believes them. I don't have to care.
Actually, if you live in any country that is planning to regulate carbon emissions, you should care. If "Cap and Trade" gets implemented in the USA, on top of the current recession/depression, it would destroy the economy. It's worth it if it saves the planet! It's totally not worth it if it doesn't save the planet.
So, I'm very interested in this subject. I'd like to think that the US government won't destroy the economy unless global warming is thoroughly proven. I'm not convinced it's proven to the needed level yet. Other people are, of course.
My head still isn't big enough to think that I can hurt a planet.
Sorry, I'm not with you on that one. Even with 19th century technology it was possible to hunt whale species to extinction. With 20th century technology it became possible to catch fish species to extinction. The use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline has spread lead all over the Earth in detectable amounts. I am quite prepared to buy that humans can hurt the Earth in significant ways.
I'm not convinced yet that the actions of humanity are a major component of global warming. But I definitely accept the possibility. (Geoffrey Landis believes, and he is probably smarter than I am.)
I haven't heard of a major temperature series that has been released with full documentation: all the raw data, all the computer code used to adjust the raw data. I haven't heard of a computer model that can predict the temperature trends of the last ten years by being fed all the available data from before then. The antics of the Hadley CRU have me wishing for a complete do-over, this time with full transparency. And I wonder how much of the global warming is due to natural things like variable solar output.
But I'm not prepared to dismiss everything as cavalierly as you seem to do.
I'm also not confident enough in any prediction that's made for 300 years in the future.
I'm more with you on that one. For example, suppose that fusion power becomes commercially possible 20 years from now[1] and that around that time Tesla is selling family cars at an affordable price. That would do more to change the amount of carbon being put into the air than any three treaties that could be passed. The past 100 years have brought amazing wonders... what will the next 300 years bring? (Of course, I guess World War III might happen, which would likely also have a major effect on the amount of carbon being put into the air.)
When capitalist societies use capitalism to solve problems, the problems are delayed nor postponed, they are entirely eliminated. That's good.
I agree; see my comments about fusion power and Telsa family cars.
steveha
[1] After all, fusion power is predicted for 20 years in the future. It's been 20 years in the future for decades now!
I read TFA and I didn't see anything about "Java's Backup Plan". I'm not sure anyone really has a plan per se.
But I will say that Java has enough momentum now that if Oracle really does a poor job of managing it, Java can and will be forked.
The history of XFree86 shows that when the leadership of a project stop leading effectively, the community can and will fork the project and abandon the old leadership.
In the case of XFree86, it was Keith Packard's X.org fork that made the original irrelevant. In the case of Java, I predict it would likely be Google that would lead the forking effort.
Google likes Java and runs much of their business on it. When you do a Google search or use Google maps, you are using server-side Java code. When you run an app on an Android phone, you are running Java code.
You might have heard that the VM in Android is called Dalvik. When Google made their plans for Java on Android, they made their own VM which is Java-compatible (in features, although not bytecode-compatible). They also provided a tool that can take a compiled Java program and swap the bytecodes around to make a Dalvik program. In this way, Google leveraged the development tools available for Java, while avoiding making any deals with Sun. Google paid nothing, promised nothing, and didn't even need to ask permission.
Of course Dalvik was originally based on Apache Harmony, a free software project to make a Java VM. The Apache project felt that Java was insufficiently free, and you could call Harmony a fork. So far it is a fork intended to be feature-compatible, and nobody is talking about adding new features to Harmony that Java doesn't have. Yet.
With James Gosling gone from Oracle, it may be already too late for Oracle to continue leading the direction of Java. Or it may not be quite too late. But if Oracle does anything that would displease the Java community in general or Google in particular, watch out.
The article is worth reading. Right on the first page it explains what is really going on with the "grip of death".
In other news reports I have seen about iPhone 4, it was explained that the iPhone 4 has a strip of metal wrapped around the body of the phone that serves as the antenna. Not so! There are two strips, of different lengths, serving as two antennas. One antenna is for WiFi and GPS, and the other antenna is for cell phone service. The "grip of death" happens when you make an electrical contact between the two antennas (on the lower-left corner of the phone).
According to the article, bridging the two antennas with your hand causes a drop in cell phone signal to noise ratio of about 24 dB. This can be enough to cause a dropped phone call, if you are already in an area with weak cell signal strength. If you are in an area with good cell strength, you won't drop the call and you might not even see the signal strength bars change.
And according to the article, as long as you don't bridge the two antennas, this phone really does do a better job of locking on to a weak cell phone signal.
So, if you have an iPhone 4, definitely invest in some sort of case that insulates the two antennas. And the article scolds Apple for not having put some sort of insulation over the antennas; presumably a future iPhone will do so.
Other pages of the article discuss other things. I did like the page where Anand explains why Apple's claims are valid that the screen is sharper than the human eye can resolve.
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!
But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX or even LyX to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.
My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here for details).
I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."
Slashdot Mirror
More on the kiss here: http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/Plato's_Stepchildren_(episode)
steveha
I bought William Shatner's books on his time in Star Trek. I also bought Nichelle Nichols's book, George Takei's book, Walter Koenig's book, and James Doohan's book. (I might even have one or two others I forget now.) In Shatner's book he claims to be bewildered why his former castmates seem to hold him in low regard, and claims that while filming Star Trek he never knew they didn't like him. In all the castmate books, they make clear that Shatner was not popular among the castmates, ever. I haven't read these books in over a decade; but I think their biggest complaint was that Shatner felt his character was far more important than theirs (well, fair enough) and that therefore he felt justified in treating them poorly, which made them consider Shatner a big jerk (well, seems fair enough also).
I read an essay by Harlan Ellison about his experience with Star Trek, when he wrote the episode "The City on the Edge of Forever". (Summary: according to him, he wrote a totally brilliant and award-winning script, which Gene Roddenberry and company then messed up a whole lot, yet even this messed-up version was a fan favorite, and he is bitter about the whole thing even decades later.) The part that really made me wake up, though, was when he described a visit from Shatner.
According to Ellison, Shatner came over to Ellison's home and started going through the script. He counted how many lines of dialog Kirk had compared to the other cast members, and started lobbying Ellison to increase the Kirk dialog (and thus inevitably cut back other dialog).
I guess Ellison could be lying. But I also remember watching the Shatner-directed Star Trek V and I remember how much that movie revolved around Kirk. Of all the characters, only Kirk was smart enough to ask the incredibly insightful question: What does God need with a starship, given that He is omnipotent and all? The Nimoy-directed Trek movies did not focus overmuch on Spock.
Actions are a more dependable guide to character than statements, even earnest ones, from the person in question. There is also the evidence from people around him. I don't think I'd be in a big hurry to be friends with Shatner.
Yet, it seems that Nimoy really is friends with Shatner and has been for decades, so Shatner must have some redeeming qualities that Nimoy sees.
P.S. The most interesting thing from the Nichelle Nichols book was her description of the first black/white interracial kiss on broadcast television. She says that everyone was antsy about the scene, so they decided to film two versions: the real kiss, and an almost-sort-of kiss that might be less offensive to people bent out of shape over race issues. Shatner suggested they film the real kiss first, and they did so. Then, in each take of the fake kiss, Shatner made some obvious gaffe that ruined the scene. He didn't admit he was doing it on purpose, but he ruined every attempt to shoot the fake kiss. Perforce they ran the real kiss as part of the episode and made TV history. Shatner apparently forgot all about this, or at least remembered it differently, and Nichols expressed puzzlement that Shatner could forget such an unusual series of events in which he played such a large role.
steveha
Aha! According to Engadget, the 30-pin dock connector does include HDMI.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/02/samsung-galaxy-tab-preview/
So I'd say the ability to play 1080p video is a valid thing to brag about.
steveha
You are correct that the screen doesn't have enough pixels to do justice to 1080p. However, I disagree that this is misleading.
They are saying that you can play 1080p video on the thing. As in, there is enough horsepower there to decode the 1080p video, then downsample it to fit on the screen. If you have 1080p video files, you can play them on the thing without needing to transcode them first. This will be particularly interesting if you can stream them off your media server. I don't really want to store all my movies multiple times in multiple transcoded formats; do you?
What would make that significantly more interesting would be if they had an HDMI port, so that you could play 1080p video to an external device such as a giant flatscreen TV. The Galaxy Tab doesn't seem to have one, but I'll bet other Android tablets will have one.
The latest generation of netbooks come with HDMI ports, by the way. I'm somewhat drooling over the Acer Aspire AS1551-5448. (What a catchy name! Don't you get thrilled by all the 1's, 5's, and 4's?) This is an 11.6" screen netbook with a dual-core processor, a graphics accelerator, and a (just barely) full-sized keyboard.
http://www.netbooknews.com/3780/acer-aspire-1551-amd-athlon-powered-by-ii-neo-k625/
I'm torn. Part of me wants to buy the Acer netbook, and part of me wants to hold out for a smartbook with a Tegra 2 processor and a Pixel Qi screen, for crazy long battery life.
steveha
Look, to 99.9% of iPhone's target market, these news means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. If anything, these news will be taken as a sign that the App Store is working! "Wow, those guys at Apple are really taking the time to approve the apps and not just let everything pass to boost the number of apps!"
So, you are saying that this guy has no potential customers for his app? Nobody cares? Absolutely nobody wishes they could buy this application, or if they do want to buy it, they think three months is reasonable?
There are already more apps available than I can ever use, I am all for anything that Apple do that might increase the quality of the apps available rather than quantity.
It's sad, really, that you are willing to see this issue as one of Apple trying to maintain some kind of quality. Here we have a high-quality app, and Apple has neither approved it, nor declined it with specific advice ("change X and we will approve it"). If the issue were truly one of quality, this app would not be in limbo for three months and counting.
As an iPhone owner, I am willing to PAY for high quality apps. More importantly, I am ABLE to pay for the apps, and very conveniently too.
I'm pretty sure there is nothing special about iPhone owners being willing to pay for quality; Android owners should be equally likely to also be willing to pay for quality. I agree that Google needs to get their act together on the app store situation, but they will. Right now it's much easier to make money as an iPhone developer, but there is no reason to think that will last forever.
steveha
How many more people does Apple have to hurt before it starts to tarnish the brand?
Apple has done a fabulous job of polishing the iPhone and iPad. If you really want the best available phone, and you aren't too choosy about your freedom, you buy Apple.
Sure, they won't get my money because I refuse to pay a company to tell me what software I may and may not install on my own device. That's okay, they don't care about me. But the more time goes by, the more stories like this one come to light. How much of this before people start to view Apple not so much as the hip, cool company but rather as the controlling, evil company?
And stories like this one are inevitable, because Apple is exerting such a high degree of control. The approval process isn't a simple rubber-stamp thing. The more innovative and unusual an app is, the harder it is for Apple to decide whether it gives the user too much freedom. In this case, I would guess that the problem is that an app for mocking up new apps is a little too much like an emulator, and Apple can't quite make up its collective mind whether this is a sort of emulator or not. (I can't even guess why Apple approved other app mockup apps while letting this one languish.)
So, the more time goes by, the more wronged people there will be. I guess as long as the majority of Apple customers are happy, and the majority of app developers aren't mistreated too much, the Apple brand will be undiminished.
But you know, if he had released his app for Android, it would be on the market now. He could even make an Android app for mocking up iPhone apps! I wish he would, just for the irony value.
steveha
I remember when MPEGLA announced they were considering forming a patent pool for WebM, so that all the patents that WebM infringes could be put in one place, and anyone who wants to use WebM could pay for these patents.
Ever since, I've been waiting for another shoe to drop. Is there even one patent announced to go in that patent pool yet?
I've been hoping that On2 and Google did their homework, and WebM will succeed in being royalty free. The more time that goes by without serious challenge to it, the happier I'm getting.
steveha
The basic idea of a theme isn't new. A friend of mine had an XP theme on his desktop, and had a guest at his home using his computer for over half an hour without noticing anything. He asked "Do you find my Linux computer easy to use?" and the guest hadn't even realized it wasn't Windows XP.
That sort of thing is mainly useful as evidence to counter the idea that a Linux desktop is "hard to use".
The major new thing with Windows 7 is its dock. I have never much been interested in docks but it seems like they are popular. Do you use a dock in Linux? If so, could you please answer these questions:
0) Which dock do you use?
1) Why do you prefer your dock to others you have tried?
2) Is your dock similar to the one in Windows 7?
I know someone who uses Gnome Do and Docky, so I'm interested in those, but I know there are others around.
steveha
Carrying guns is far more offensive than lumping two disgusting organisations in with each other.
Why? If I carry a gun correctly you won't even know it is there. Why is that offensive?
Do you also find it offensive when people have fire extinguishers in their homes?
Do you also find it offensive when people have baseball bats, tire irons, golf clubs, and similar lethal bludgeons? How about petrol: that has been used to burn down buildings with people inside. Is it offensive to possess petrol?
Guns have been used to murder people. Guns have also been used to stop a violent crime. My claim is that law-abiding people with guns are not the source of violence in society.
This is the trouble with the NRA, they tell lies like those.
Actually, I was thinking of a book called The Samurai, the Mountie, and the Cowboy which has lengthy discussion about England. And I am mystified that you think it is a lie to call England a largely non-violent place.
My claim is that England could get rid of its ban on handguns, and it would not become more violent as a result. Violence is a result of people, not of instruments, and the people of England are largely non-violent.
violence has actually halved.
I took a look at those statistics. According to those, only 19% of violent incidents involved a weapon of any kind. Yet all violence went down, not just firearm-related violence. Are you seriously claiming that a ban on handguns led to an immediate reduction in all forms of violence? If so, why hasn't it ever worked that way in the USA?
that's exactly what happened. An incredible decrease in violence.
References, please. As far as I know, there has been a steady decrease in violence in the past ten or fifteen years, while at the same time, gun control laws have been relaxing. The Brady law has sunset, and the majority of states now make it easy for law-abiding citizens to legally carry a handgun. According to your theories, shouldn't violent crime be increasing in the United States?
And perhaps you can explain to me why there are more per-capita violent crimes in Washington D.C., where handguns are banned, than there are in Olympia, WA, where handguns are not banned? If I'm doing my maths correctly, there are over four times as many violent crimes per person in Washington D.C. than in Olympia. Since you don't seem to be a fan of the NRA, I got my numbers from the FBI: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius2008/data/table_06.html
And note that when you go to the FBI Uniform Crime Report web site, there is a caution against directly comparing cities to rank them in terms of violence. The caution lists many variables to consider. I submit to you that if you consider all those variables you are likely to get a better prediction on the amount of violence than if you just consider availability of firearms.
It's this kind of blatent lying about life or death matters that makes it OK to lump the NRA in with the Ku Klux Klan.
Is the FBI in on this blatant lying also?
I suspect that I will not be able to persuade you of anything, so I will leave you with just two thoughts:
0) Be suspicious of any overly-simplistic rule, such as "guns inevitably drive people to acts of violence". Society is more complicated than that.
1) Remember that people who disagree with you might not be lying bastards worthy of your hate. It sounds like your views on firearms are rather different than my own, but I don't hate you, and I hope you don't hate me.
steveha
The NRA would have one believe so, much as the klu klux klan would have you believe that racism saves people.
Damn, you are offensive. Lumping the NRA in with the Ku Klux Klan? Are you just trolling or are you really this deluded?
statistics from around the world do NOT show people to be safer in countries where there are more handguns.
Based on what I have read in various books, the presence or absence of handguns is a poor predictor of violence. For example, in the USA, police officers always carry handguns, yet we do not expect officers to violently attack people.
Violence is a social issue. Put a gun in Mother Teresa's hand and she will not turn into an insane killer. Pull the gun out of an insane killer's hand, and he will find some other weapon. Or, to put it on the level of countries: England was a largely non-violent place. Then England banned guns. Then England was a largely non-violent place. So, did the gun ban cause England to be a largely non-violent place?
For me, the most important statistical issue is that imposing gun control has never brought a decrease in violence. Also, reducing gun control doesn't bring an increase in violence. When Florida made it much easier to obtain a license to carry concealed handguns, gun opponents predicted that violence would increase; "minor traffic accidents will turn into gun battles", they said, and similar silliness. Violence actually went down.
So, correlation does not prove causation. If a violent city imposes strong gun control and crime goes up, is it because of the gun control? Crime was already on the way up, so maybe the gun control helped. But when gun control is dismantled, as in Florida, crime doesn't go up.
I view gun ownership as being similar to ownership of a first aid kit or a fire extinguisher. Having a gun doesn't make you the police, just as having a fire extinguisher doesn't make you the fire department and having a first aid kit doesn't make you a hospital. If you are sensible and level-headed, you are better off to have all of these things; if you are silly and impulsive, you can get yourself into worse trouble.
steveha
Er, yes, that's 350 milliWatts. Sorry about that.
What's three orders of magnitude among friends?
steveha
What real-world questions did the OLPC XO answer? I've never used one, so I honestly have no idea.
Well, I bought one, so I guess I'm qualified to comment.
I bought mine mostly because I wanted to support the OLPC project and was intrigued by their device. The shining vision was of a rugged laptop with crazy long battery life and a unique screen that is visible in full sunlight. I knew the device would be a tad slow, but I have other computers to use for speed. And I wanted to try out that "view source" key: the idea was that the whole system would be free, open-source software written in Python, and kids would be able to hack their own computers and learn programming (and have fun doing it).
The reality is that the touchpad on my OLPC just doesn't work right, and the device is glacially slow. I'm not even sure which key is the "view source" key for certain; there is no key with that text on it, and I don't grok whatever icon they used to flag it. And it turns out that most of the XO applications don't support it anyway. (Yet?)
The magic and romance went out of the project when I realized that the OLPC management was clueless. They never had a solid plan for how they would make and ship as many laptops as they hoped, they let costs balloon out of control, and they managed to make a device that in some ways is the worst of all worlds: instead of an ARM chip they used an x86 chip (an AMD Geode) but the device is far too constrained to ever really run Windows, and did I mention that it is glacially slow. Instead of using an off-the-shelf window manager from 1998, which would have run reasonably fast, they wrote their own wacky environment "Sugar"; I understand their goals with Sugar, but kids are adaptable, and kids would pick up fvwm or whatever just fine, plus it's more important for the apps to have "view source" than the window manager. Then Negroponte announced that OLPC was going to get into bed with Microsoft, and half of the volunteers writing code for the OLPC instantly quit in disgust. Then OLPC announced that they were going to make a new clamshell tablet device with two full color touchscreens and a hinge for $75, and then they announced they weren't going to make it after all. Now they are going to make a tablet like an iPad for $75. Good on them if they pull it off, but I'm no longer paying attention.
The best thing I can say about the OLPC is that it likely triggered the wave of netbooks that changed the world. I don't know for a fact that Acer looked at the OLPC and said "we can build something like that, less rugged but faster" but the timing is right.
Take the best ideas from the OLPC (including the screen) and make a tablet. Use an ARM core for a CPU. Cut any feature that would make it exceed the target price; it's great if the thing can do WiFi but really kids could do a lot by swapping memory cards back and forth. Pre-load the thing with useful textbooks and perhaps a subset of Wikipedia. And hire industry experts to manage the manufacturing and distribution. That would be exciting.
By the end of the year we should start seeing tablets and "smartbooks" with ARM chips, even the Tegra 2, and some of them will have the Pixel Qi screen. So we will be able to buy a device with crazy long battery life and a screen you can read in direct sunlight, and it won't be glacially slow.
steveha
I can't imagine any of the Windows 7 tablets being worth buying. Any x86 chip that can run Windows 7 will burn more battery life and dissipate more heat than an ARM chip. Do you want a heavy tablet (lots of batteries) or a tablet with super-short battery life? I don't. Do you want a tablet with a vent on one side that blows hot air out while you are using it? I don't.
Of the various ARM chips, the exciting one is the Tegra 2. 8 cores: two ARM 9 cores at 1 GHz each, plus audio DSP, video encode and decode, graphics accelerator, an image processor and an ARM 7 core used for housekeeping. All with a typical heat dissipation of 500 milliWatts, or perhaps less. (I saw a YouTube video that claimed a Tegra 2 can decode 1080P video while dissipating only 350 Watts.)
The iPad gets its long battery life and lack of a hot air vent from the A4 chip, which is an ARM core of some sort (IIRC an ARM 8) at 1 GHz. I believe the iPad also has a graphics accelerator. Presumably a Tegra 2 chip can smoke the iPad on performance, and it's already good enough.
Also, Windows 7 was designed for a mouse. Will the Windows 7 tablets come with a stylus for precision pointing? Or will Microsoft make an all-new GUI environment just for tablets? I'd rather just have Android.
So I'm waiting for a smartbook or tablet with a Tegra 2 and a Pixel Qi screen, running some sort of Linux (likely Android). I had hoped that devices like that would ship this summer but I guess they are delayed.
steveha
Wikileaks and Julian Assange own this now. The good, and the ill, from publishing that information are on them. And it looks pretty ill to me.
According to Newsweek, a man named Khalifa Abdullah was killed after the release of these documents. So that's one man dead already. The Taliban has vowed to hunt down and kill anyone who is a "spy", and they are using the Wikileaks information to do it, so there will be more. Some of the people listed in Wikileaks have disappeared, hopefully into hiding rather than dead.
Julian Assange's stance on this is callous. He "insisted that any risk to informants' lives was outweighed by the overall importance of publishing the information." Okay, at least one man is dead now. What is that "overall importance"? I sure don't see it.
I'm also not buying his idea that this is really the US military's fault, together with Amnesty International, for not helping him redact the critical info. Much of the info is years old. What was the big rush? If Wikileaks didn't have enough volunteers to vet the info carefully, why rush ahead and publish it anyway?
If I were Julian Assange, I wouldn't be sleeping well at night.
steveha
At work, I have a Windows machine I need to use. I installed Thunderbird on it to read my personal email.
One day, Thunderbird offered me an update to Thunderbird 3. Sure, why not; I let it upgrade.
So, the next day I got an urgent email from the corporate IT department demanding to know why the corporate antivirus was reporting dozens of viruses on my work computer! I was not pleased.
My email server has a virus scanner (ClamAV of course), and when it detects a virus, it shunts the virus email message into a special folder. I rarely look at the folder or worry about it. Well, Thunderbird 3 changed the default behavior without asking me anything, and downloaded every message in every folder I have. Not just headers, message bodies as well. Thus, it downloaded a bunch of virus emails onto the hard disk of my corporate Windows desktop computer.
Long story short, IT ordered me to uninstall Thunderbird to make sure that this could never happen again. (IT recognizes that the viruses were never active on my system, but they officially have a zero-tolerance policy about viruses being present inside the corporate network at all.)
So I am no longer a Thunderbird user. I found another way to read my personal email while at work.
I was always happy with the old policy, of downloading message headers only, and grabbing the message bodies when I actually opened an email to read it. The new policy might make sense if I had a single machine that I always used to read email and I always wanted my email stuff to be as fast as possible (everything cached to the local hard disk). But I use IMAP and I read my mail from a half-dozen different computers, and the vast majority of my email on my server is old stuff I rarely look at. The new policy of downloading everything makes no sense for me, and I didn't see any way to globally change the setting; it looked to me like you need to change the setting on a folder-by-folder basis. (I could be wrong about that, but it doesn't matter because I had to abandon Thunderbird anyway.)
I don't think defaulting to downloading the entirety of every message on a server is a good idea. And it led to me being forced to abandon Thunderbird, so Thunderbird has at least one fewer user as a result.
steveha
Eh, I'm not sure you actually had to be hundreds of miles away to pick up the signal. But I do remember very clearly that they couldn't get the signal from close up (like, at the park).
Basically there aren't any 40 meter repeaters set up, so you either need to get a direct line-of-sight or an atmosphere bounce. So the practical effect was that they had to talk to the guy in another state and have him relay messages back and forth.
steveha
a QRP (low power) rig on 40 meters can work hundreds or thousands of miles
When I got my ham radio license, the instructor told the class a funny story.
There was this old guy out hiking, and the old guy carried a 40 meter Morse code radio. The guy hurt his leg and could not continue. Some hikers came along and offered help; the old guy told them "pitch my tent, help me inside, and throw this antenna wire up into the trees." That's all he wanted, and after they did that, they walked away (they never followed up with anyone).
So the old guy started tapping out his emergency report. One old ham operator, hundreds of miles away, was monitoring the 40 meter band and got the report. And in fact you had to be hundreds of miles away to get it; the report wasn't possible to pick up close by. So the ham operator in another state got on the phone to the Snohomish County Search and Rescue, to tell them what was going on.
Our instructor works for the Search and Rescue department, and he disbelieved the initial report. "Did you say the 40 meter band?!?" When S&R got to the park, they couldn't pick up the signal; they had to use cell phones to talk to the guy in another state to communicate with the guy who needed help.
So, the moral of the story is: if you want to whistle up help, maybe a 40 meter rig isn't the best way to go.
Personally, I'd carry a 406 MHz personal locator beacon.
steveha
Never assume venality where stupidity will do.
Yes. More generally, don't assume evil where stupidity will do.
We still see libertarians regularly on /. who are so sincerely addled by their ideology that they don't recognize state failures like Somalia and the tribal lands in northern Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan as real world examples of their theories in action.
Hi, I'm a libertarian.
You paint an overly simplistic view of the world. There are a bunch of people who consider themselves libertarians, and not all of them are stupid or dupes. The core idea of libertarianism is simple, but people can and do take it in different directions.
stateless, unregulated societies are unstable
I agree with you on this point.
There are some libertarians, the anarcho-capitalists, who believe that we don't need any sort of government at all; that the free market can and will solve all problems, right up to and including the national defense. Like you, I don't think Anarcho-Capitalism has been proven to work in the real world, and indeed you have listed some sobering counter-examples.
Then there are libertarians like me, the minarchists, who believe we do need a government but it should be small and do little. The "government is like fire: a useful servant but a terrible master" libertarians. The libertarians who believe that government should do only what people cannot do for themselves, and little more. (I'm not opposed to government funding for advanced research into space flight, fusion power, and other advanced new technologies.)
But having that debate means first figuring out that we aren't sociopaths on either the left or the right (and don't kid yourself: at the level of the political leadership the left has always been dominated by sociopaths, just like the right, and for the same reasons.)
A libertarian would tell you that the real problem is that the government is too powerful. People who want to exert power over others are drawn to government because it gives them that power. If the government were cut way back, people might be less drawn to it; certainly if government were less powerful, large companies wouldn't be so compelled to make huge political donations or spend huge sums on lobbyists.
And most importantly, if government were really small and did very little, it wouldn't matter so much whether our rulers were sociopaths or not. If our rulers were perfect angels, and perfectly wise, we could give them unlimited power; since they are just people, and politicians at that, we don't dare trust them with any more power than we must.
[libertarians] simply can't believe that people would behave in such obviously idiotic, sub-optimal ways for centuries or longer.
Some of us can. But let's flip that around. Can you believe that a government would seriously enact a budget that plans to average almost a one trillion dollar deficit per year for the foreseeable future? That's not paying down the debt at all, and adding almost a trillion dollars to the debt each year. Can this continue indefinitely? Will the USA be able to get these planned loans on schedule?
You may not be a fan of the free market, but this is scarier. Under the free market, if a company makes bad decisions, it will be forced out of business by the uncaring feedback of the market: other, better-run companies will beat it. But there is no way for a bad company to wreck the entire economy. Government can do it, though.
steveha
Judging by your post, you will probably frown on this, because you have a superficial understanding of what science is or should be.
Hmmm. Judging by your post, you are rather quick to judge people based on small amounts of data.
You sound like one of the people who expects that all science should be 'proven' to the same kind of standards as mathematical proof.
Not necessarily. I do, however, expect that global warming should be 'proven' to rather rigorous standards. Cap-and-Trade would cause a severe and horrible depression, possibly worse than the Great Depression. If AGW is correct and carbon dioxide really is an agent of horrible climate change, it might be worth causing trillions of dollars of harm to the economy of my country, with elderly poor people freezing to death in cold winters, destitute people becoming homeless, and all the rest of it... because the alternative would be even worse. If AGW is not correct, then Cap-and-Trade is worse than the alternative, and it must be stopped. It is vital that we make a correct decision here.
If you use weak data to perform an experiment, and the only down side is that the experiment didn't work out, then you write down what you learned and move on. If you use weak data to justify incredible havoc to the economy, and the down side is horrible suffering of real human beings, I'm not so sanguine.
Perhaps you think I am being melodramatic. But consider that all commerce relies on things being moved around by trucks; food is delivered by trucks; farms rely on trucks and tractors and things that all run on fuel. The whole point of Cap-and-Trade is to make fuel significantly more expensive so that people will use less of it, and this means that everything you might want to buy will become more expensive, and food will become much more expensive. Consider also all the people who rely on coal power now for their electricity, and imagine the price of coal power dramatically spiking upward. (Barack Obama said that under Cap-and-Trade, coal power would become so expensive that it would bankrupt the plant owner.)
steveha
there is some real controversy about tree ring data, and it's pretty clear that they thought that they were presenting the data in the clearest form.
If you can spare a moment to explain this a bit more, it would really help me out.
This is my current understanding of the situation. If it is incorrect in any particular I would appreciate the correction; I am not some shill spreading misinformation.
My current understanding is that they were trying to use tree ring data to determine what the temperature was in the past; tree rings were available going far earlier than we have actual measured temperature data. My understanding is that the tree ring data did not successfully predict the temperatures of the recent times, but that once the tree ring data got into recent years, they simply stopped using the tree ring data.
I just don't understand how this is acceptable in any way. If the tree ring data cannot correctly predict temperatures that are known, why should we trust that it can predict older, unknown temperatures? Here's a quote from that Nature article:
Again I am perplexed. Why does he say the proxy data "no longer" tracked with direct temperature records? Why should we believe it used to track and no longer tracks?
Are there other tree-ring data series out there that do correctly predict the temperatures of modern times?
steveha
But hey, a lot of people make a lot of money by making a lot of predictions that can never be confirmed. More power to them, and to anyone who believes them. I don't have to care.
Actually, if you live in any country that is planning to regulate carbon emissions, you should care. If "Cap and Trade" gets implemented in the USA, on top of the current recession/depression, it would destroy the economy. It's worth it if it saves the planet! It's totally not worth it if it doesn't save the planet.
So, I'm very interested in this subject. I'd like to think that the US government won't destroy the economy unless global warming is thoroughly proven. I'm not convinced it's proven to the needed level yet. Other people are, of course.
steveha
My head still isn't big enough to think that I can hurt a planet.
Sorry, I'm not with you on that one. Even with 19th century technology it was possible to hunt whale species to extinction. With 20th century technology it became possible to catch fish species to extinction. The use of tetraethyl lead in gasoline has spread lead all over the Earth in detectable amounts. I am quite prepared to buy that humans can hurt the Earth in significant ways.
I'm not convinced yet that the actions of humanity are a major component of global warming. But I definitely accept the possibility. (Geoffrey Landis believes, and he is probably smarter than I am.)
I haven't heard of a major temperature series that has been released with full documentation: all the raw data, all the computer code used to adjust the raw data. I haven't heard of a computer model that can predict the temperature trends of the last ten years by being fed all the available data from before then. The antics of the Hadley CRU have me wishing for a complete do-over, this time with full transparency. And I wonder how much of the global warming is due to natural things like variable solar output.
But I'm not prepared to dismiss everything as cavalierly as you seem to do.
I'm also not confident enough in any prediction that's made for 300 years in the future.
I'm more with you on that one. For example, suppose that fusion power becomes commercially possible 20 years from now[1] and that around that time Tesla is selling family cars at an affordable price. That would do more to change the amount of carbon being put into the air than any three treaties that could be passed. The past 100 years have brought amazing wonders... what will the next 300 years bring? (Of course, I guess World War III might happen, which would likely also have a major effect on the amount of carbon being put into the air.)
When capitalist societies use capitalism to solve problems, the problems are delayed nor postponed, they are entirely eliminated. That's good.
I agree; see my comments about fusion power and Telsa family cars.
steveha
[1] After all, fusion power is predicted for 20 years in the future. It's been 20 years in the future for decades now!
I read TFA and I didn't see anything about "Java's Backup Plan". I'm not sure anyone really has a plan per se.
But I will say that Java has enough momentum now that if Oracle really does a poor job of managing it, Java can and will be forked.
The history of XFree86 shows that when the leadership of a project stop leading effectively, the community can and will fork the project and abandon the old leadership.
In the case of XFree86, it was Keith Packard's X.org fork that made the original irrelevant. In the case of Java, I predict it would likely be Google that would lead the forking effort.
Google likes Java and runs much of their business on it. When you do a Google search or use Google maps, you are using server-side Java code. When you run an app on an Android phone, you are running Java code.
You might have heard that the VM in Android is called Dalvik. When Google made their plans for Java on Android, they made their own VM which is Java-compatible (in features, although not bytecode-compatible). They also provided a tool that can take a compiled Java program and swap the bytecodes around to make a Dalvik program. In this way, Google leveraged the development tools available for Java, while avoiding making any deals with Sun. Google paid nothing, promised nothing, and didn't even need to ask permission.
Of course Dalvik was originally based on Apache Harmony, a free software project to make a Java VM. The Apache project felt that Java was insufficiently free, and you could call Harmony a fork. So far it is a fork intended to be feature-compatible, and nobody is talking about adding new features to Harmony that Java doesn't have. Yet.
With James Gosling gone from Oracle, it may be already too late for Oracle to continue leading the direction of Java. Or it may not be quite too late. But if Oracle does anything that would displease the Java community in general or Google in particular, watch out.
steveha
The article is worth reading. Right on the first page it explains what is really going on with the "grip of death".
In other news reports I have seen about iPhone 4, it was explained that the iPhone 4 has a strip of metal wrapped around the body of the phone that serves as the antenna. Not so! There are two strips, of different lengths, serving as two antennas. One antenna is for WiFi and GPS, and the other antenna is for cell phone service. The "grip of death" happens when you make an electrical contact between the two antennas (on the lower-left corner of the phone).
According to the article, bridging the two antennas with your hand causes a drop in cell phone signal to noise ratio of about 24 dB. This can be enough to cause a dropped phone call, if you are already in an area with weak cell signal strength. If you are in an area with good cell strength, you won't drop the call and you might not even see the signal strength bars change.
And according to the article, as long as you don't bridge the two antennas, this phone really does do a better job of locking on to a weak cell phone signal.
So, if you have an iPhone 4, definitely invest in some sort of case that insulates the two antennas. And the article scolds Apple for not having put some sort of insulation over the antennas; presumably a future iPhone will do so.
Other pages of the article discuss other things. I did like the page where Anand explains why Apple's claims are valid that the screen is sharper than the human eye can resolve.
steveha
All 27 users of TeX will be quite excited about this.
Ah yes, the reliable old joke: all X people who care will be happy, where X is a humorously small number. Classic!
But kidding aside, TeX is in heavy use. Most TeX users use LaTeX or even LyX to wrap TeX and make it easier, but TeX is in there doing the work.
My understanding is that TeX is standard in the academic world, because it can correctly typeset serious math equations. Also, Wikipedia uses TeX to process all <math> tags (see here for details).
I have many times read discussion boards where people said something like "I started writing my thesis in Microsoft Word using its equation editor. After my fourth bout of heavy drinking and depression, my friend showed me LaTeX, and I was able to finish my thesis with just a few wine coolers and hardly any Prozac."
steveha