It's like planning to buy a $45,000 vehicle and then claiming I cut spending by buying a $35,000 vehicle. Nevermind the fact that I've increased my spend $35,000.... You may have well reduced spending. An organisation the size of the US government is buying cars (and other goods/services) on a regular basis, they simply need those products to do their job.
They will have budgeted say $450,000 to buy ten cars this month. Instead they now buy the cheaper cars: they lowered spending by $100,000 this way.
You treat the expense as unnecessary: in that case you'd be right. But one needs that car to get from A to B - so an expense has to be made. Buying the cheaper car lowers that expense. Using the current car longer would do the same, as long as it is technically/economically sound to do so.
You're so lucky, or using ancient html only. See my comment before: I coded to standards, CSS and all, W3C said it's all correct, and IE: displays an empty page. Not even broken. Switching back to a tables based layout made the page work in IE as well.
So true.
Call me a loser, but after setting up my website nicely with CSS defined columns, floats, etc - it didn't work in IE. It just displayed an empty page! While it worked fine in Mozilla, FF and Safari.
I recoded the site using tables for lay-out.
When I did that, it worked nicely in IE as well. And I really had the intention to move with the times.
It's a simple company site, partly static, partly dynamic - but using tables was the easiest way out for me, without having to learn even more new things. I've got better things to do with my time.
For me, the best portable I've seen is the old 12" PowerBook G4. It was light and small, but had a fully usable keyboard. I have an iBook G4 12". The less powered, cheaper version of the Powerbook. A great machine, using it daily, and no intention to replace it. The new Apples are simply all bigger! This fits easily in my bag, about the size of an A4 notebook.
A year ago I looked at current offers, only 14" and bigger iirc. And more expensive than what this machine cost me.
A few months ago I bought an EEE PC (the 4G). I love it. The screen is very well readable, also in bright light, it is light weight, and just works. And it's cheap. I can do my e-mail on it (connecting over my mobile phone), surfing, whatnot. The keyboard is small but that's a small sacrifice to portability. The battery life sucks, way too short. That's my only real complaint.
Well, to play the devil's advocate, terrorism in India is a much more realistic threat than terrorism in the US is (a democracy surrounded by Pakistan, an Islamic dictatorship and China, an aggressive communist state). Since when are states responsible for terrorism? Please! Stop being brainwashed by your warmongering presidents and would-be presidents! Terrorism is something different. It is organised by non-government groups that have their own, often extremist or sometimes separatist, agenda. States don't do terrorism, they do war. A big difference in tactics and scale.
India has a serious terrorism threat: this is a mainly internal conflict between religious groups, mostly Hindu and Muslim. China is no direct threat to India, even though they do not go well together (and indeed have some border disputes). Pakistan's government is also not too much of a threat - that is pretty much limited to the disputed Kashmir region. They are indeed involved in an ongoing war, shooting at each other regularly. India's muslim terrorists may well have support from Pakistan, though I doubt it is official government support. If the Pakistan government supports them it's in a passive way, by doing nothing. But then as Pakistan is under threat of terrorism and internal conflict itself (think: Bhutto's assassination) even that support is not likely.
India's government may be afraid of international spying: by rivals Pakistan and China, and likely also the US government. But for the latter, if as a country the US government would not spy on you, that's reason to be worried because then you're truly insignificant.
What I consider the most obscene part of those regulations (this applies not only to the US, but most of the world) is how everyone considers images of sexual activity between consenting adults not good, but has no problem with extreme violence.
Clear example: Grand Theft Auto. Extremely violent, but the greatest outcry was about a "hidden" sex-scene.
Probably it's actually that the powers-that-be like sex too much... makes them feel like doing it or so... and that is bad?
from the do-particles-fight-terror dept. A pretty trollish dept. line there, Mr Editor! Unfortunately I think there is some truth in that the US is allocating too much funds on their "war on terror", instead of science and technology. That is the field where the US has so long been way ahead of the rest of the world, and what it made such a rich and influential country.
I really hope Fermilab can continue to do great research for the better of us all with this grant.
Old enough to remember that crazyness. I was mostly surprised how people got so happy about half-working features that I enjoyed for a few years already in OS/2, particularly multi-tasking. The real thing.
I also didn't say no-one ever buys a boxed set. Just that in volume it's insignificant. I don't believe more than 1% of the sales of Win95 were boxed copies. Except maybe over the first day or two after the release. But yes the hype was enormous - at the time it was already known among the true geeks (I was in my early twenties and sysop of a Fidonet node) that the strongest department of Microsoft was their marketing. Not the software development. None of my friends considered buying Win95.
Come on, editors:
Anyone know anybody who bought Vista except as bundled with hardware? You can make that into "... bought any version of Windows except bundled...". There will be some people who buy the boxed version, but very very few. The vast majority buys Windows only with a new computer. Oh sorry, make that gets Windows with a new computer. There is after all no separate pricing for Windows, it is simply included. And by many users thus perceived as free. Windows you get with your computer, Windows you don't buy. And it will be a very very long time before that idea is gone.
All peer review is doing is fact checking on the articles (numbers used and so), critically thinking whether the methodology is sound and properly explained, and whether or not there are glaring omissions/errors/inconsistencies in the discussion of the results in the article. The results as such are generally not questioned.
I have learned not to blindly trust peer-reviewed articles. The trust in a certain process/result comes when you find more than one article about the same, preferably articles referring to one another, reporting about the same phenomenon. This is called reproducibility. And even then, if you really want to build on that research, to know for sure you have to do the experiment by yourself. Good experience, anyway.
In the case of this cold fusion experiment, what I miss are references to other scientists reporting the same phenomenon, independently. A scientist would see this as something interesting, and then first of all try to copy the experiment. Read the article, look for similar experiments done, contact the author maybe when there are questions on the experimental set-up, and then start measuring. And in case they see the same effect, of course continue the research to figure out what is happening.
There appears to be something happening - but as long as we don't know the mechanism there is nothing to be said about kinetics.
From the article (and some other links in the comments), and assuming fusion really takes place, I would guess that this is some surface-related mechanism. Some unknown mechanism where the D-atoms are first adsorbed on the Pd, and then fusion takes place. If so it can very well be a relative slow process. I have not read the articles in much detail, I'm a chemist, not physicist. The articles also mention that imperfections in the Pd crystals appear to play a major role - again limiting the available area where such a reaction could take place.
And on top of it all, this reaction takes place at much lower temperature than most fusion reactions, thus the movement of the atoms is slower.
All in all, don't let the very slow kinetics put you off the idea that atomic fusion may take place, the most interesting fact reported is that the experiment produces energy over a long period of time and that I think is worth further investigation. First of all of course reproduction of the very experiment by some other scientists, and then improving the efficiency and figuring out what REALLY is going on.
No onboard disk cache, an absolute max bitrate of 2Mb/s, From the state of US Internet services (at least the impression I get on/.), a 2 Mb/s max bitrate is something most people will not even manage to reach most of the time, if at all. Maybe you are so lucky to have such a big pipe, and the allowance of your ISP to actually use that much bandwidth - I'm quite sure most people don't. So it doesn't make sense to accept 10 Mb/s connections, try to pump that much data, only to find out it doesn't work and end up with buffer underruns on the device. Not good for playing.
I think it's a smart move from them to lower the bar a bit, to go for a bandwidth that many households may actually be able to get, without upsetting the ISPs too much (think BBC's iPlayer if you don't believe that may happen).
It is an early-adopter device, for sure. It has limited functionality now, but as I understand an easily be upgraded when/if the extra bandwidth comes available - on both the customer's side and the NetFlix side.
For the rest your comment sounds a lot like what/. had to say about the first iPod... hardware may be less than state-of-the-art, it's more important that it actually just works.
How about... because you dont want to give a single dollar more to Comcast for their abysmal handling of their own internet traffic, and traffic shaping of selective protocols?
How long until they start traffic-shaping the Netflix streams? Sounds to me like large amounts of data.
That is, if they continue to stay in business (and they likely will). I'm sure many many people thought the same of megacorps like Elron.
Don't count on any company to "continue to stay in business", especially if this implies "forever".
...will that include spam? If so it becomes quite useless: >90% of the e-mails are spam these days. Good luck doing anything with such a noise to signal level.
one wonders where our technology would be today if we invested more in the space program and less in killing one another There are quite some evolution researchers who believe that humans got that immense smart brain mainly because of warfare. They believe early human tribes were always fighting each other, and then being smarter is a great evolutionary advantage.
My filter keeps a list of known senders (those who are present in my saved e-mails), e-mails from those senders are delivered without filtering. Goes fine as most spam uses some random from: address these days, never had problems with that.
Then mails with a SpamAssassin score of 5-13 go into a spam box for manual sorting. That results in about 10% of my daily spam, or about 30-40 mails.
Anything with a score greater than that is sure enough to be spam, and gets ditched.
In rare cases (once a month or less) I have a false positive, the score is usually less than 6 pts. This way my spam-problem is manageable.
My business communication is largely done via e-mail. I use a little IM thought Skype (actually don't like it as it requires instant attention).
E-mail is fantastic as it's asynchronous; you can read/reply very efficiently that way.
But when time is critical: I always will try to call that person. If that doesn't work, send an e-mail, and continue trying to call. When time is critical e-mail just doesn't do the job, not just because of the possible delays, but because you never know when the person on the other side actually reads them. Even sitting at the computer I sometimes just don't read e-mails when they come in, they can wait.
With a phone call you know the person is reached (or not) at that very moment, and you can get a reply that very moment. It may be old-fashioned tech, but it does the job very well.
Virtually no-one has Silverlight installed, while virtually anyone has Flash installed. Now the MS web-site is product support, advertising, etc. MS may be crazy, but they are not so stupid as to alienate the vast majority of the Internet population by demanding a specific plug-in to be installed just for their website.
We don't live in the "please install this plugin" era anymore. That time is over. Most people have never, ever installed a plug-in and the rest hasn't done so since the last decade or so.
Microsoft at the moment doesn't have a choice but to provide a website with Flash instead of Silverlight for their animations, the best they could do is create a parallel website supporting/showcasing Silverlight. And that will certainly be a huge operation. Plus the headaches of keeping the two versions in sync...
Also according to tfa the original fine is based on gross revenue. That means all income, before cost. Of course a fine has to be punitive, but gross revenue that of course no-one can pay. Many costs have to be deducted, starting of course with their telephone bills.
Great to hear a telemarketer getting fined though. Irritating lifeforms.
Can anyone please translate this to Layman? I mean I do know bits and pieces about computing but this is really unintelligible for anyone but maybe hardware engineers.
This sounds too scary to be true - and if true, it won't be long for this to be reverse-engineered.
Bypassing passwords/security: that sounds like a built-in back door. Not a security flaw: "this bug is a feature". And those back doors if confirmed to exist will be found soon.
The most unbelievable part is "decrypting passwords". Since when is the actual password stored, instead of a cryptographic hash of it? If decryption were possible, they are using a two-way encryption and a secret key is somewhere hidden in Windows. Every single copy of it. And that I can't believe, really. I call hoax. Still it won't make me use Windows anytime soon.
What is it with people having to know the time at all times?
I stopped wearing a watch many years before I got my first mobile phone. It was after it broke down. I was hanging up the laundry that spent a few days forgotten in the washing machine, and my watch fell out of my pants' pocket. I hadn't even realised my watch was missing over the previous four or five days. It was broken, and I never ever considered to buy a new one.
Nowadays of course my mobile has a clock. Clocks are everywhere - most computer screens have one displayed at all times, watches are simply obsolete.
The software itself, including O/S and other required software,
Money to pay for the energy bill caused by this hardware,
Pay for the modifications to the network required by their system,
Pay for any and all maintenance on their servers,
Pay rent for the space used by their hardware.
I think that about sums it up. It is after all not in the network operator's interest to do this, nor is it a legal obligation for them to monitor their network. I can't think of any reason for a network operator to willingly install this software - it goes against the interests of the users, and does not give any advantage to the operator. Not even a legal immunity against subpoenas from the RIAA. It gives them nothing, it only costs money and inconveniences their users.
By the way, does anyone know what happened to "common carrier" status for ISPs? I do recall they were fighting for that. Installing this kind of sniffer systems completely goes against such a possible status.
Books from the library are read there, or borrowed to be returned later. The number of copies in existence remains the same (unless people go to a copy machine to copy the book - a non-trivial and fairly costly operation, probably more costly than going to the book shop and buy yourself a copy).
Libraries can be compared to music/video rental shops (many book libraries also do this). Those disks are rent or lent, and are returned a week or so later.
Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.
Of course the publishers also complain about libraries (not so much, they are considered a given due to their long historical existence), and video rentals. They claim it also lowers sales. Just like reselling used copies of books/CDs/DVDs. But no matter what, on-line file sharing is in a league on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
They will have budgeted say $450,000 to buy ten cars this month. Instead they now buy the cheaper cars: they lowered spending by $100,000 this way.
You treat the expense as unnecessary: in that case you'd be right. But one needs that car to get from A to B - so an expense has to be made. Buying the cheaper car lowers that expense. Using the current car longer would do the same, as long as it is technically/economically sound to do so.
You're so lucky, or using ancient html only. See my comment before: I coded to standards, CSS and all, W3C said it's all correct, and IE: displays an empty page. Not even broken. Switching back to a tables based layout made the page work in IE as well.
So true.
Call me a loser, but after setting up my website nicely with CSS defined columns, floats, etc - it didn't work in IE. It just displayed an empty page! While it worked fine in Mozilla, FF and Safari.
I recoded the site using tables for lay-out.
When I did that, it worked nicely in IE as well. And I really had the intention to move with the times.
It's a simple company site, partly static, partly dynamic - but using tables was the easiest way out for me, without having to learn even more new things. I've got better things to do with my time.
A year ago I looked at current offers, only 14" and bigger iirc. And more expensive than what this machine cost me.
A few months ago I bought an EEE PC (the 4G). I love it. The screen is very well readable, also in bright light, it is light weight, and just works. And it's cheap. I can do my e-mail on it (connecting over my mobile phone), surfing, whatnot. The keyboard is small but that's a small sacrifice to portability. The battery life sucks, way too short. That's my only real complaint.
India has a serious terrorism threat: this is a mainly internal conflict between religious groups, mostly Hindu and Muslim. China is no direct threat to India, even though they do not go well together (and indeed have some border disputes). Pakistan's government is also not too much of a threat - that is pretty much limited to the disputed Kashmir region. They are indeed involved in an ongoing war, shooting at each other regularly. India's muslim terrorists may well have support from Pakistan, though I doubt it is official government support. If the Pakistan government supports them it's in a passive way, by doing nothing. But then as Pakistan is under threat of terrorism and internal conflict itself (think: Bhutto's assassination) even that support is not likely.
India's government may be afraid of international spying: by rivals Pakistan and China, and likely also the US government. But for the latter, if as a country the US government would not spy on you, that's reason to be worried because then you're truly insignificant.
What I consider the most obscene part of those regulations (this applies not only to the US, but most of the world) is how everyone considers images of sexual activity between consenting adults not good, but has no problem with extreme violence.
Clear example: Grand Theft Auto. Extremely violent, but the greatest outcry was about a "hidden" sex-scene.
Probably it's actually that the powers-that-be like sex too much... makes them feel like doing it or so... and that is bad?
I really hope Fermilab can continue to do great research for the better of us all with this grant.
Old enough to remember that crazyness. I was mostly surprised how people got so happy about half-working features that I enjoyed for a few years already in OS/2, particularly multi-tasking. The real thing.
I also didn't say no-one ever buys a boxed set. Just that in volume it's insignificant. I don't believe more than 1% of the sales of Win95 were boxed copies. Except maybe over the first day or two after the release. But yes the hype was enormous - at the time it was already known among the true geeks (I was in my early twenties and sysop of a Fidonet node) that the strongest department of Microsoft was their marketing. Not the software development. None of my friends considered buying Win95.
There will be some people who buy the boxed version, but very very few. The vast majority buys Windows only with a new computer. Oh sorry, make that gets Windows with a new computer. There is after all no separate pricing for Windows, it is simply included. And by many users thus perceived as free.
Windows you get with your computer, Windows you don't buy. And it will be a very very long time before that idea is gone.
All peer review is doing is fact checking on the articles (numbers used and so), critically thinking whether the methodology is sound and properly explained, and whether or not there are glaring omissions/errors/inconsistencies in the discussion of the results in the article. The results as such are generally not questioned.
I have learned not to blindly trust peer-reviewed articles. The trust in a certain process/result comes when you find more than one article about the same, preferably articles referring to one another, reporting about the same phenomenon. This is called reproducibility. And even then, if you really want to build on that research, to know for sure you have to do the experiment by yourself. Good experience, anyway.
In the case of this cold fusion experiment, what I miss are references to other scientists reporting the same phenomenon, independently. A scientist would see this as something interesting, and then first of all try to copy the experiment. Read the article, look for similar experiments done, contact the author maybe when there are questions on the experimental set-up, and then start measuring. And in case they see the same effect, of course continue the research to figure out what is happening.
There appears to be something happening - but as long as we don't know the mechanism there is nothing to be said about kinetics.
From the article (and some other links in the comments), and assuming fusion really takes place, I would guess that this is some surface-related mechanism. Some unknown mechanism where the D-atoms are first adsorbed on the Pd, and then fusion takes place. If so it can very well be a relative slow process. I have not read the articles in much detail, I'm a chemist, not physicist. The articles also mention that imperfections in the Pd crystals appear to play a major role - again limiting the available area where such a reaction could take place.
And on top of it all, this reaction takes place at much lower temperature than most fusion reactions, thus the movement of the atoms is slower.
All in all, don't let the very slow kinetics put you off the idea that atomic fusion may take place, the most interesting fact reported is that the experiment produces energy over a long period of time and that I think is worth further investigation. First of all of course reproduction of the very experiment by some other scientists, and then improving the efficiency and figuring out what REALLY is going on.
I think it's a smart move from them to lower the bar a bit, to go for a bandwidth that many households may actually be able to get, without upsetting the ISPs too much (think BBC's iPlayer if you don't believe that may happen).
It is an early-adopter device, for sure. It has limited functionality now, but as I understand an easily be upgraded when/if the extra bandwidth comes available - on both the customer's side and the NetFlix side.
For the rest your comment sounds a lot like what
How about... because you dont want to give a single dollar more to Comcast for their abysmal handling of their own internet traffic, and traffic shaping of selective protocols?
How long until they start traffic-shaping the Netflix streams? Sounds to me like large amounts of data.Don't count on any company to "continue to stay in business", especially if this implies "forever".
...will that include spam? If so it becomes quite useless: >90% of the e-mails are spam these days. Good luck doing anything with such a noise to signal level.
My filter keeps a list of known senders (those who are present in my saved e-mails), e-mails from those senders are delivered without filtering. Goes fine as most spam uses some random from: address these days, never had problems with that.
Then mails with a SpamAssassin score of 5-13 go into a spam box for manual sorting. That results in about 10% of my daily spam, or about 30-40 mails.
Anything with a score greater than that is sure enough to be spam, and gets ditched.
In rare cases (once a month or less) I have a false positive, the score is usually less than 6 pts. This way my spam-problem is manageable.
My business communication is largely done via e-mail. I use a little IM thought Skype (actually don't like it as it requires instant attention). E-mail is fantastic as it's asynchronous; you can read/reply very efficiently that way.
But when time is critical: I always will try to call that person. If that doesn't work, send an e-mail, and continue trying to call. When time is critical e-mail just doesn't do the job, not just because of the possible delays, but because you never know when the person on the other side actually reads them. Even sitting at the computer I sometimes just don't read e-mails when they come in, they can wait.
With a phone call you know the person is reached (or not) at that very moment, and you can get a reply that very moment. It may be old-fashioned tech, but it does the job very well.
Virtually no-one has Silverlight installed, while virtually anyone has Flash installed. Now the MS web-site is product support, advertising, etc. MS may be crazy, but they are not so stupid as to alienate the vast majority of the Internet population by demanding a specific plug-in to be installed just for their website.
We don't live in the "please install this plugin" era anymore. That time is over. Most people have never, ever installed a plug-in and the rest hasn't done so since the last decade or so.
Microsoft at the moment doesn't have a choice but to provide a website with Flash instead of Silverlight for their animations, the best they could do is create a parallel website supporting/showcasing Silverlight. And that will certainly be a huge operation. Plus the headaches of keeping the two versions in sync...
Also according to tfa the original fine is based on gross revenue. That means all income, before cost. Of course a fine has to be punitive, but gross revenue that of course no-one can pay. Many costs have to be deducted, starting of course with their telephone bills.
Great to hear a telemarketer getting fined though. Irritating lifeforms.
Can anyone please translate this to Layman? I mean I do know bits and pieces about computing but this is really unintelligible for anyone but maybe hardware engineers.
This sounds too scary to be true - and if true, it won't be long for this to be reverse-engineered.
Bypassing passwords/security: that sounds like a built-in back door. Not a security flaw: "this bug is a feature". And those back doors if confirmed to exist will be found soon.
The most unbelievable part is "decrypting passwords". Since when is the actual password stored, instead of a cryptographic hash of it? If decryption were possible, they are using a two-way encryption and a secret key is somewhere hidden in Windows. Every single copy of it. And that I can't believe, really. I call hoax. Still it won't make me use Windows anytime soon.
What is it with people having to know the time at all times?
I stopped wearing a watch many years before I got my first mobile phone. It was after it broke down. I was hanging up the laundry that spent a few days forgotten in the washing machine, and my watch fell out of my pants' pocket. I hadn't even realised my watch was missing over the previous four or five days. It was broken, and I never ever considered to buy a new one.
Nowadays of course my mobile has a clock. Clocks are everywhere - most computer screens have one displayed at all times, watches are simply obsolete.
I think that about sums it up. It is after all not in the network operator's interest to do this, nor is it a legal obligation for them to monitor their network. I can't think of any reason for a network operator to willingly install this software - it goes against the interests of the users, and does not give any advantage to the operator. Not even a legal immunity against subpoenas from the RIAA. It gives them nothing, it only costs money and inconveniences their users.
By the way, does anyone know what happened to "common carrier" status for ISPs? I do recall they were fighting for that. Installing this kind of sniffer systems completely goes against such a possible status.
Not a very apt comparison.
Books from the library are read there, or borrowed to be returned later. The number of copies in existence remains the same (unless people go to a copy machine to copy the book - a non-trivial and fairly costly operation, probably more costly than going to the book shop and buy yourself a copy).
Libraries can be compared to music/video rental shops (many book libraries also do this). Those disks are rent or lent, and are returned a week or so later.
Music and video downloads (and e-books) however DO increase the number of copies. And copying is as good as free in effort and cost.
Of course the publishers also complain about libraries (not so much, they are considered a given due to their long historical existence), and video rentals. They claim it also lowers sales. Just like reselling used copies of books/CDs/DVDs. But no matter what, on-line file sharing is in a league on its own.