It is incouraging to consider that perhaps small amounts of PCBs may not have as drastic effect on us as they do on some animals.
But lets not rationalize away the problems that are going on here; argueing over the exact effect of minute amounts of PCB exposure almost a Red Herring. You can argue theory all you want, but with levels high enough to sluff the skin off fish & kill them in minutes I'll bet you wouldn't want to take a bath in it yourself, despite theoretical arguments to the contrary. Heck fish can live longer then 3 minutes without WATER. To be honest, it sounds like they were probably dumping more things then just PCBs, but the point remains; they were knowingly poisoning us for their own profit.
I read a short story on the matrix web site where they explained that the reason the humans were kept in a virtual environment was because the machines needed to use the %90 unused portion of the human brain for their own conciousnes. And they needed the human brain to be kept cognatively whole, hence the manufactured world. Makes a lot more sense then the dumbed down 'battery' explanation they gave in the movie. I guess they figured their general audience was too dumb to grasp that concept, so they went with a battery instead.
First of all, one would think that water made by this method would be very expensive, if used primarily for water production.
Second of all, as several people have pointed out, the water would be without minerals. And this IS unhealty for long time use. People used to go on distilled water fads, and they ended up having health problems due to not getting the needed minerals. I imagine taking a multi mineral would help, but why not just drink real water to begin with?
And most importantly of all, I don't know how fuel cells fail, but it strikes me that some types of mechanical failures could result in producing poison/toxix water. There are some pretty toxic/carcinogenic substances which can be associated with natural gas. Even if run on 'pure' hydrogen, there could be issues. The O2 and NO2 used in industrial applications is NOT sutible for medical use due to contamination. Special care must be made to produce medical grade O2 or NO2. I imagine the same would be true of hydrogen. Yes, I know the space shuttle does this, but the equipment on the space shuttle isn't exactly in the relm of a house hold appliance. Aerospace equipment is made under very strict quality control, and is under continual maintenence and inspection.
I bet they've had this technology for years now... It would explain a lot of things. Isn't it obvious? Dan Quale is actually a failed attempt at an AI.
The speculation that the playing field may narrow even further may not be too far off. Looks like AOL & Microsoft are trying for a strategic partnershop.
How does Microsoft's PR people pull this off? The article attempts to
shift the blame by pointing that out the code was "written during the
dispute between Netscape and Microsoft over their versions of
Internet-browser software." When other companies have software holes
found, the media holds the manufacture firmly and ultimately
responsible, even if it was a disgruntled employee. But with when
talking about this Microsoft hole, the article goes way out of it's way
to make hints at subtle this dubious detail in an apparent attempt to
shift the blame. Sure, it COULD have had something to do with the
browser wars. But it could have just as easily been general
anti-Microsoft sentiment. Or someone putting it in for their own
personal gain. Or someone just being a smart ass. Again, when other
companies have security breaches, no one goes "Awww, poor foobar.com,
you're bugs are okay because people are picking on you". No, they rip
the company a new ass hole and their stock takes a dive.
BTW: Before I get flamed, the Hotmail/FreeBSD thing I remember from somewhere, but I can't remember where. I do know its NOT on an NT box, which basically leaves UNIX.
Huh, The last I had heard they had converted the entire front end from BSD to NT, but it cost them having to double the number of servers needed. Evidently even with twice the hardware they still couldn't get it to work right under NT, since (as pointed out) Netcraft shows them running BSD. BUT, regardless of what hotmail's front end is running (the front end = the part the user sees as he/she logs in), the real work of processing and storing the email is done under a major *NIX. In this case Hotmail uses SUNs, though other large instalations such as Netscape and AOL use SGIs. I'm not putting down BSD or LINUX, but currently machines from Sun, SGI or the other big players, handle these truly huge loads much better then BSD or Linux.
I don't know for sure what they are replacing it. But it seems some what of a coincidence that they are selling it within a week of SGI announcing it's new Origin product. The new Origins are faster by more then 40%, and are more scalable Can we say "Upgrade time" kiddies? And if those people wondering about a beowolf cluster of these things are serious and not trolls, the answer is: Systems like this are what beowolf is TRYING to be. These systems can scale to 128-512 processors much better with IRIX then what beowolf can accomplish. This is one of the great things SGI is contributeing to Linux. IRIX has the ability to scale to this huge level. As SGI works Linux into it's core stratagy, SGI has said they will contribute their experience to make Linux much more scalable.
Re:SGI and High Availability Linux Clusters
on
Linux Failover?
·
· Score: 1
To be precise, information about SGI's FailSafe software for Linux is at: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/failsafe/ This software has seen much comercial use, including supporting the highest volume of traffic for the Mars lander web site, (Though that was under IRIX). There was even a Slashdot article about SGI's Failsafe: http://slashdot.org/articles/00/02/26/1224233.shtml
I'd take Slashdot's book reviews a lot more seriously if you guys *ever* gave a bad review.
When I buy technical books, I do so to help solve a problem or learn a new skill. While finding out that a book is "bad" (ignoring the fact that "good" & "Bad" are value judgments) may be helpful, it does not contribute directly towards my goal. Listing a "good" book DOES directly help. Slashdot is not like a newspaper which has lots of room to spare, it only provides 10 or so articles a day. I'd rather the Slashdot article be about a book which will help me, rather then about a book which would be useless to me.
Or ever reviewed a book that you did not sell over at thinkgeek.com.
Maybe, but try look at it the opposite way: If a book is "good enough" to be reviewed on Slashdot, why would you NOT want to sell it on thinkgeek?
What about SETI@home? Has it become too "Popular" to be the in thing to run anymore? It's a moot point for me anyway; Both of SETI@home's linux distributions for my box (i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1 and i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static) core dumped on me under RH 6.1. So, I guess I'll keep my piddly 133mhz pentium busy doing distributed.net stuff, even if they do occasionaly have bugs with their code; at least it runs.
Not so fast... Algae as a food has several problems, read: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ algae.html paying particular attention to the "Possible Toxicity" portion. In addition, I seem to recall that Algae has other things in it which are not particularly good for consumption, even though they are not outright toxic At one time Algae was being touted as the end world hunger. Unfortunatly, no matter how much good protein, mineral & vitamins it has, if you can't digest it, it doesn't do any good. See http://www.colloidal-min.com/quest8.htm for a short piece of info on this.
All this paranoia is worse then any FUD the -*insert your favorite big bad corporation*- could do. Yes, it is prudent to know where the strings are being pulled from, but there are some positive reasons why hardware companies like VA Linux and SGI are making major contributions to Linux. It's because they want to ride the success wave of Linux, and sell us the hardware which runs it. The more they do to help Linux succeed, the bigger the market they have to sell to. This is not just some idle plan; there is serious money being put into the linux comunity. True; not all of this money is being spent to enrich the comunity. Some companys are spending lots of money making closed sourse ports of their applications for linux. But others are putting lots of money and research into projects which will benifit all of us; Slashdot, Freshmeat, OpenGL, XFS.
If you take a look at who is doing what, I think slashdot is in pretty good hands.
Slashdot Mirror
It is incouraging to consider that perhaps small amounts of PCBs may not have as drastic effect on us as they do on some animals.
But lets not rationalize away the problems that are going on here; argueing over the exact effect of minute amounts of PCB exposure almost a Red Herring. You can argue theory all you want, but with levels high enough to sluff the skin off fish & kill them in minutes I'll bet you wouldn't want to take a bath in it yourself, despite theoretical arguments to the contrary. Heck fish can live longer then 3 minutes without WATER. To be honest, it sounds like they were probably dumping more things then just PCBs, but the point remains; they were knowingly poisoning us for their own profit.
I read a short story on the matrix web site where they explained that the reason the humans were kept in a virtual environment was because the machines needed to use the %90 unused portion of the human brain for their own conciousnes. And they needed the human brain to be kept cognatively whole, hence the manufactured world. Makes a lot more sense then the dumbed down 'battery' explanation they gave in the movie. I guess they figured their general audience was too dumb to grasp that concept, so they went with a battery instead.
Second of all, as several people have pointed out, the water would be without minerals. And this IS unhealty for long time use. People used to go on distilled water fads, and they ended up having health problems due to not getting the needed minerals. I imagine taking a multi mineral would help, but why not just drink real water to begin with?
And most importantly of all, I don't know how fuel cells fail, but it strikes me that some types of mechanical failures could result in producing poison/toxix water. There are some pretty toxic/carcinogenic substances which can be associated with natural gas. Even if run on 'pure' hydrogen, there could be issues. The O2 and NO2 used in industrial applications is NOT sutible for medical use due to contamination. Special care must be made to produce medical grade O2 or NO2. I imagine the same would be true of hydrogen. Yes, I know the space shuttle does this, but the equipment on the space shuttle isn't exactly in the relm of a house hold appliance. Aerospace equipment is made under very strict quality control, and is under continual maintenence and inspection.
I bet they've had this technology for years now... It would explain a lot of things. Isn't it obvious? Dan Quale is actually a failed attempt at an AI.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/low/english/business/newsid_ 1368000/1368648.stm
U$oft spin doctors
How does Microsoft's PR people pull this off? The article attempts to
shift the blame by pointing that out the code was "written during the
dispute between Netscape and Microsoft over their versions of
Internet-browser software." When other companies have software holes
found, the media holds the manufacture firmly and ultimately
responsible, even if it was a disgruntled employee. But with when
talking about this Microsoft hole, the article goes way out of it's way
to make hints at subtle this dubious detail in an apparent attempt to
shift the blame. Sure, it COULD have had something to do with the
browser wars. But it could have just as easily been general
anti-Microsoft sentiment. Or someone putting it in for their own
personal gain. Or someone just being a smart ass. Again, when other
companies have security breaches, no one goes "Awww, poor foobar.com,
you're bugs are okay because people are picking on you". No, they rip
the company a new ass hole and their stock takes a dive.
Huh, The last I had heard they had converted the entire front end from BSD to NT, but it cost them having to double the number of servers needed. Evidently even with twice the hardware they still couldn't get it to work right under NT, since (as pointed out) Netcraft shows them running BSD. BUT, regardless of what hotmail's front end is running (the front end = the part the user sees as he/she logs in), the real work of processing and storing the email is done under a major *NIX. In this case Hotmail uses SUNs, though other large instalations such as Netscape and AOL use SGIs. I'm not putting down BSD or LINUX, but currently machines from Sun, SGI or the other big players, handle these truly huge loads much better then BSD or Linux.
I don't know for sure what they are replacing it. But it seems some what of a coincidence that they are selling it within a week of SGI announcing it's new Origin product. The new Origins are faster by more then 40%, and are more scalable Can we say "Upgrade time" kiddies? And if those people wondering about a beowolf cluster of these things are serious and not trolls, the answer is: Systems like this are what beowolf is TRYING to be. These systems can scale to 128-512 processors much better with IRIX then what beowolf can accomplish. This is one of the great things SGI is contributeing to Linux. IRIX has the ability to scale to this huge level. As SGI works Linux into it's core stratagy, SGI has said they will contribute their experience to make Linux much more scalable.
To be precise, information about SGI's FailSafe software for Linux is at: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/failsafe/ This software has seen much comercial use, including supporting the highest volume of traffic for the Mars lander web site, (Though that was under IRIX). There was even a Slashdot article about SGI's Failsafe: http://slashdot.org/articles/00 /02/26/1224233.shtml
When I buy technical books, I do so to help solve a problem or learn a new skill. While finding out that a book is "bad" (ignoring the fact that "good" & "Bad" are value judgments) may be helpful, it does not contribute directly towards my goal. Listing a "good" book DOES directly help. Slashdot is not like a newspaper which has lots of room to spare, it only provides 10 or so articles a day. I'd rather the Slashdot article be about a book which will help me, rather then about a book which would be useless to me.
Or ever reviewed a book that you did not sell over at thinkgeek.com.
Maybe, but try look at it the opposite way: If a book is "good enough" to be reviewed on Slashdot, why would you NOT want to sell it on thinkgeek?
What about SETI@home? Has it become too "Popular" to be the in thing to run anymore? It's a moot point for me anyway; Both of SETI@home's linux distributions for my box (i686-pc-linux-gnu-gnulibc2.1 and i686-pc-linux-gnulibc1-static) core dumped on me under RH 6.1. So, I guess I'll keep my piddly 133mhz pentium busy doing distributed.net stuff, even if they do occasionaly have bugs with their code; at least it runs.
Not so fast... Algae as a food has several problems, read: http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/ algae.html paying particular attention to the "Possible Toxicity" portion. In addition, I seem to recall that Algae has other things in it which are not particularly good for consumption, even though they are not outright toxic At one time Algae was being touted as the end world hunger. Unfortunatly, no matter how much good protein, mineral & vitamins it has, if you can't digest it, it doesn't do any good. See http://www.colloidal-min.com/quest8.htm for a short piece of info on this.
All this paranoia is worse then any FUD the -*insert your favorite big bad corporation*- could do. Yes, it is prudent to know where the strings are being pulled from, but there are some positive reasons why hardware companies like VA Linux and SGI are making major contributions to Linux. It's because they want to ride the success wave of Linux, and sell us the hardware which runs it. The more they do to help Linux succeed, the bigger the market they have to sell to. This is not just some idle plan; there is serious money being put into the linux comunity. True; not all of this money is being spent to enrich the comunity. Some companys are spending lots of money making closed sourse ports of their applications for linux. But others are putting lots of money and research into projects which will benifit all of us; Slashdot, Freshmeat, OpenGL, XFS.
If you take a look at who is doing what, I think slashdot is in pretty good hands.