The third doesn't sound life threatening. Anybody in a boat should be competant to navigate without electronic devices (what happens when the batteries die or the generators are out of gas). Computers on ships (and anything else where they are assistive rather than required) should not be capable of causing life threatening situations.
Ships are generally larger than boats, tend to be less manueverable on the whole, and a whole lot messier if you rip the bottom out on a reef in the fog. So suppose a "terrorist" or some lame script kiddy gets hold of a bit of code that alters the UTM display from WGS84 to NAD27. You could easily be 100 meters or more off course, and because you believe your "assistive" device, you are bound for a catastrophic oil spill in the fog. The system does not have to go down to be dangerous. You do not want it manipulated by the malicious or incompetent either.
After all, shareware like Opera has asked for a payment from anyone who uses the program and finds it useful. Many of us have pulled out our credit cards or checkbooks (or even written the odd postcard) and helped support a worthwhile program. Some of it is crap, some is exceptionally good. Mandrake, unlike shareware, passes along the open source code as well. There is nothing wrong with asking for a donation if you use the product. There are a lot of people out there with broadband connections who don't buy the boxed verions. Yeah the source code is free, but you can always express your appreciation for their effort and send in a little to help support the programers work, if you appreciate the product. PBS does this all the time, and by and large I get less use out of PBS. This "it's bidness" attitude is simple minded not to mention ultimately self defeating, there many other quasi-economic models that are viable that don't include socialism or communism. Obligations and honour for instance. They did the work, they give it to you. What is your moral obligation to them and society as an honourable person? The world simply is not as simple as either capitalist or marxist theory would like it to be, so why should we be that way?
As evil as Microsoft is at least they make tons of money for their shareholders instead of other companies I know of that are in the OS business.
A company doesn't "make money" for its shareholders except by 1) paying a dividend, or 2) appreciating share value. Now, MS does not pay a dividend, so that leaves appreciation, which has been pretty limited for the last couple of years. In fact if you bought MSFT in late 1999 or early 2000, you still have a loser on your hands, and based on company performance, it will stay that way for a while. So if you are really interested in a company that makes money for its shareholders rather than treats them as money cows, may be you ought to rethink your investment strategy.
Whereas in win2k it installs nicely, runs nicely [comment all you want Win2k is in fact very stable] and its very painless to upgrade.
W2K is definitely an improvement over Win9*, but I can still crash it readily by using plug-in-play hardware like a USB card reader: Insert card, read, remove card, crash W2K for the next two or three boots. It's simple. Linux on the other hand doesn't have hysterics and drop into catatonia if I do the same thing with the same hardware. It works better than W2K in that instance.
As far as "easier" goes, perhaps you should do parallel installs with W2K and say Madnrake 8.1. MDK 8.1 is faster and does not require reboots along the way.
You seem to be a little slow on the uptake here. Too much partying? The news agency was Reuters and the URL is a Yahoo link. Now, what was the beef with Slashdot, other than your position as an MS troll?
But even this doesn't mean that mammals were "less" fit before they started to dominate the globe: they got on fine in their respective niches even with the dinosaurs.
That is pretty much the whole point. Fitness is something that operates from moment to moment. I always liked Charles Fort's humourous rendition: "survival of the survivors". It is tautological, but then any feedback system has to be to some extent.
I am a professional scientist and have been for 20 years. The ICR platform commits the common logical error of attempting to prove a prior asumption. They selectively present facts and bogus assumptions (such as the peculiar idea that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics). As for evolution being scientific, it is a functional hypothesis addressing a common set of empirical facts. Darwin and Wallace both recognized the empirical facts and then came to a common explanation of what the facts meant. The evolutionary hypothesis was signally successful even from a predictive view point because it required a mechanism of inheritance that was not "blood" and had to be variable between siblings and other closely related individuals. As regarding texts, college texts are a good place to start because they delineate the actual facts and hypotheses. The ICR sets up straw man arguments and then knocks them down. The ICR doesn't address science or evolution Darwinian or otherwise. It uses its own rules, argues with its own redactions and comes to ultimately empirically meaningless conclusions. You DO need understand the argument first. You simply won't find that understanding in anything presented by the ICR.
The ignorant should stick to something useful like making pottery. Using the ICR as an authority is equivalent to invoking the National Enquirer(sp?). The ICR violates logic and scientific method in an attempt to support a hypothesis for which it has no empirical support.
Darwin's theory was an attempt to explain the fact that selective processes result in changes to new generations of populations like finches, selectively bred dogs, and wheat. This is true regardless of whether the selection is from natural or cultural causes. It is a simple fact that needs an explanation.
The other problem with your ICR is that they assume, like Darwin did, that species are neat, isolated, definable packages. The ICR also assumes species are equivalent to the biblical "kind." One untested assumption follows another. Do some reading somewhere else than on the ICR site before forming an opinion about biology. College texts are a good start.
You make the erroneous assumption - common in the 19th Century and among Christian findamentalists - that evolution is progressive and "going somewhere." This is an essential fallacy. Evolutionary processes are immediate, effecting birth rates among the carriers of traits effected by any of many selective processes. Evolution does not progress and the successful breeders in one generation may be the failures in a another genration as fitness landscapes alter through time. The giant panda is a good example of a species isolated on a fitness peak from which it is unlikely to move without becoming extinct. The presence of these "weaknesses" that you say modern medicine is causing means that selective effects have a broader canvas and more traits with which to work. Far from becoming "weak" this fact increases potential human evolutionary adaptibility.
The concept of evolution can be reduced fairly easily to the change in the frequency of heritable traits in a breeding population. This can happen through multiple avenues. One is the random insertion of mutations into the genome. These are generally lethal and tend to vanish pretty much as they appear, but some survive, increasing population genetic variability. A second avenue is selection which can winnow traits out of a population or encourage exageration of traits (like the peacock's tail). This process reduces genetic variability. A third avenue is to alter the geographic parameters defining the population. Inserting a physical (or even a cultural) boundary will produce two populations that are evolving separately to some degree due to isolation. This tends to yield divergent genomes within the populations (founder's effects) each carrying a subset of the parent population's genome. Endogamous societies artificially isolate their gene pool by restriciting allowable marriages and sometimes by exluding or executing individuals who violate cultural mores. Arab Muslim, Jewish, Gypsy, and Hindu casts come to mind here as preferentially endogamous societies, as well as the European aristocracy to a degree (the increased incidence of blood clotting disorders among the descendants of Britain's Queen Victoria comes to mind). All of these processes satisfy the basic ideas of evolutionary change. Changing the parameters of the breeding population by opening geographic boundaries is no more than another evolutionary change, increasing population genetic diversity.
Among other things the experimental production of a Bose-Einstein condensate means that you are mistaken. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is fundamental, not a problem of being unable to juggle measuring tools. The condensate appears because as the particle (atom in the BEC case) is cooled, its momentum can be known more and more accurately. B and E argued that if Heisenberg's argument were true, then as the temperature of a group of particles approached 0 deg. Kelvin, they would blur together because otherwise their position would become known precisely, just as the momentum was becoming a fixed quantity. B and E thought this was absurd, but recent experimental work verifies the conjecture. Karl Popper corresponded with Einstein about this decades ago (1903s) and, in the light of modern experimental work and they proved just how wrong you can be, while being perfectly logical. Check the appendices to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Monsanto also holds patents on the bovine growth hormone (BGH) used to increase milk production in cattle. If you poke around on the web, at Disinfo for instance, there is a considerable literature about the various ways in which standard procedure was violated by both Monsanto and the FDA itself during the testing and approval of the use of BGH on dairy cattle. The story is enough to cause you to switch to "organic" milk and milk products.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
You are really not this thick are you? Your post WAS just FUD wasn't it? You really DO know that even if the origianl developer gets a day job, OS is called that BECAUSE the source is open and available to OTHER programers who can take up the slack? Not only that, but the program was probably developed with OS tools like the GNU C compiler so, all your hypothetical company needs to pay for is a competent programer to hack the code.
Grow up. Closed source software sells because it's a valuable, solid product. Otherwise, no one would buy it.
Historical ignorance or troll bait. Judging from the pro-MS arguments advanced on your web pages most likely just troll bait.
MS achieved it's monopoly by giving away free programs that were functional, and by selling programs like Office at prices that were subsidized by other, money-making divisions of the company (mostly interesting income sources like the MS tariff on CPUs). It systematically destroyed competition that was smaller by underpricing its software compared to what its less well funded competition could achieve. In the course of this history, it demonstrated that "free" products like IE could displace "valuable, solid product[s]" like Netscape. Whether the source was open or closed was irrelevant. The fact is that when ever it could, MS manipulated the market by artificially manipulating the prices for software. There was little or no success based on simple consumer decisions like "software quality," MS depend(ed/s) more on "simple" consumers.
The idea that open source must somehow mean "free" or that programers can't make living working on OS projects would be surprising to the many Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE employees that ARE doing so, not mention numerous other non-publically owned companies that produce and support OS software.
Besides, as a taxpayer, I would far rather the government used my taxmoney to employ its own programers to develop software on OS platforms for government departments than pay overblown "seat" fees to MS for crap like Access and Outlook.
Make patents last seven years with renewal rights and copyright 25 years with renewal rights for another 25. That lets the "little guys" have a business, and it keeps them working earning the income, inventing and innovating for patents and products, rather than committing asinine actions like trying to patent natural phenomena, Digital Rights protection Operating Systems, "one-click" webpage icons, and business methods. Expand Patent Office funding and narrow the range of patentable ideas to exclude anything that does not yield a physical product. Refer all web-page "engineers" to the copyright office.
All OJ demonstrated was that when the police start manufacturing evidence and the defense flails around like a blind drunk armed with a walking stick in a beer-hall brawl, things based on the considered attempt to rationally determine fact, like the judicial process or science, suffer. The DMCA simply demonstrates that legislators and record companies give a rip about the individual's rights or about protecting their patrons.
I don't think it is due to a Firewall. The link on/. points to an *.shtml page. If you try going in through the Coleman site there is a request for a username and password. Apparently someone protected the page - or hacked it.
Actually, his argument is concerned with a larger scale change on a short time span. The time span is geologically insignificant. The actual change in average global temperature is not insignificant, nor is the speed of the change in mean temperature insignificant. Average global temperatures have not varied much throughout the recent geological epochs - no more than about 10 degrees centigrade (or Celsius for the purists) between maxima and minima. So if the the global temperature averaged 1 degree warmer, over the last 12 years, that would be a 10% change within known variation, certainly not trivial. More over the temperature increase is very abrupt when compared with previous such events as reflected in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The average variation of global mean temperatures over the last century has been measured in fractions of a degree. So your argument about a "small, recent, 'Warming trend'...statistically... insignificant" is in error. Another weakness with arguing that the change is trivial is that cumulative, trivial increases in sea level will place low lying landscapes near the ocean at hazard. Places like Pacific island countries, the Netherlands, and the Californian Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are at risk from even small increases in sea level.
That said, the world still averages cooler than it has been many times in the geological past and the causes of any warming are open to debate. The last Pleistocene interstadial was warmer than the present, with hippo living in Britain, while during the Mediaeval drought, wine grapes grew comfortably England, and conditions were dry and harsh enough in California that the prehistoric human population underwent significant contractions throughout the state. In contrast during the 1960s there was sufficient increase in pack ice and decrease in average temperature that some meteorologists speculated about a neoglacial coming on. Now, with the Martian evidence of warming on another planet, the question rises as to whether the present warming on earth may be due to some change in solar weather.
It is really unlikely that this actually IS a ruin to begin with. Sea level rise at the end of the Pleistocene (say 10,000 years ago) was on the order of 100 meters (300+ feet). The Cuban group is talking about something that is an order magnitude deeper. The first question we would ask is just how a ruin could exist at that depth, unless it is the city of Aquaman and his merpeople. The only way a ruin could get to that depth is if the sea rose or the land sank. But, sea level change can only account for a fraction of the necessary depth so we would have to consider tectonic explanations - an earthquake that dropped the west end of Cuba 3,000 feet. Could a city survive such an event and still be recognizable? I really don't think so.
Having read the interview if the Russian born engineer, I am impressed by the ability of their sonar to discriminate "white sand" from other colors of sand. Good thing they were using sonar though. Without auxiliary light it's black as the inside of a hat at 3,000 feet below the surface.
The most interesting change for us though was StarOffice - about 85% of our staff who were using Office 97 are now using it, and we have 2 people trialling StarOffice 6-beta.
Off topic though it may be, why substitute an ungrammatical, barbarism such as a "verbed noun" like "trialling" or "architected" for perfectly good words like "testing" and "designed?"
But, as you have just pointed out, it is not the structure where IP resides. It is in the actual code that is used to implement the structure.
Re:My view: against encryption, for saving lives
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 1
As well intentioned as your view is, it is also contaminated by an arrogance and ethnocentrism that is probably a large part of why we are so cordially detested overseas. Banning the production, use or export of American encryption will not lead to the end of encryption. There are many, very able cryptographers overseas, probably more than the US can produce. Anyone who was serious about using PGP would probably employ one of the overseas versions anyway. There is also no publically available evidence that either no encryption or back-doored encryption could have saved any lives. One aspect of this action that has not been emphasized enough is the slow approach to the action. Many of these terrorists were apparently in the US for years. Coordination could have been conducted through the mail at such a pace, with the final timing through cell phones. So, offering to give up some of your liberty - and mine as well - is not just well intentioned and generous but arrogant, heedless, and ethnocentric.
--
The only thing more hazardous to your liberty than n politicians is n + 1 politicians.
You need to research the less talked about sides of government more. Martial law is comparatively limited and applies mostly to the use of military personnel to enforce public order. The president can instead issue a declaration of National Emergency per the National Emergencies Act and ALL constitutional rights as related to the emergency go away including the First Amendment and Habeas Corpus. To keep up with what is and is not a National Emergency, check the Federal Register.
Slashdot Mirror
The third doesn't sound life threatening. Anybody in a boat should be competant to navigate without electronic devices (what happens when the batteries die or the generators are out of gas). Computers on ships (and anything else where they are assistive rather than required) should not be capable of causing life threatening situations.
Ships are generally larger than boats, tend to be less manueverable on the whole, and a whole lot messier if you rip the bottom out on a reef in the fog. So suppose a "terrorist" or some lame script kiddy gets hold of a bit of code that alters the UTM display from WGS84 to NAD27. You could easily be 100 meters or more off course, and because you believe your "assistive" device, you are bound for a catastrophic oil spill in the fog. The system does not have to go down to be dangerous. You do not want it manipulated by the malicious or incompetent either.
After all, shareware like Opera has asked for a payment from anyone who uses the program and finds it useful. Many of us have pulled out our credit cards or checkbooks (or even written the odd postcard) and helped support a worthwhile program. Some of it is crap, some is exceptionally good. Mandrake, unlike shareware, passes along the open source code as well. There is nothing wrong with asking for a donation if you use the product. There are a lot of people out there with broadband connections who don't buy the boxed verions. Yeah the source code is free, but you can always express your appreciation for their effort and send in a little to help support the programers work, if you appreciate the product. PBS does this all the time, and by and large I get less use out of PBS. This "it's bidness" attitude is simple minded not to mention ultimately self defeating, there many other quasi-economic models that are viable that don't include socialism or communism. Obligations and honour for instance. They did the work, they give it to you. What is your moral obligation to them and society as an honourable person? The world simply is not as simple as either capitalist or marxist theory would like it to be, so why should we be that way?
As evil as Microsoft is at least they make tons of money for their shareholders instead of other companies I know of that are in the OS business.
A company doesn't "make money" for its shareholders except by 1) paying a dividend, or 2) appreciating share value. Now, MS does not pay a dividend, so that leaves appreciation, which has been pretty limited for the last couple of years. In fact if you bought MSFT in late 1999 or early 2000, you still have a loser on your hands, and based on company performance, it will stay that way for a while. So if you are really interested in a company that makes money for its shareholders rather than treats them as money cows, may be you ought to rethink your investment strategy.
Whereas in win2k it installs nicely, runs nicely [comment all you want Win2k is in fact very stable] and its very painless to upgrade.
W2K is definitely an improvement over Win9*, but I can still crash it readily by using plug-in-play hardware like a USB card reader: Insert card, read, remove card, crash W2K for the next two or three boots. It's simple. Linux on the other hand doesn't have hysterics and drop into catatonia if I do the same thing with the same hardware. It works better than W2K in that instance.
As far as "easier" goes, perhaps you should do parallel installs with W2K and say Madnrake 8.1. MDK 8.1 is faster and does not require reboots along the way.
You seem to be a little slow on the uptake here. Too much partying? The news agency was Reuters and the URL is a Yahoo link. Now, what was the beef with Slashdot, other than your position as an MS troll?
But even this doesn't mean that mammals were "less" fit before they started to dominate the globe: they got on fine in their respective niches even with the dinosaurs.
That is pretty much the whole point. Fitness is something that operates from moment to moment. I always liked Charles Fort's humourous rendition: "survival of the survivors". It is tautological, but then any feedback system has to be to some extent.
I am a professional scientist and have been for 20 years. The ICR platform commits the common logical error of attempting to prove a prior asumption. They selectively present facts and bogus assumptions (such as the peculiar idea that evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics). As for evolution being scientific, it is a functional hypothesis addressing a common set of empirical facts. Darwin and Wallace both recognized the empirical facts and then came to a common explanation of what the facts meant. The evolutionary hypothesis was signally successful even from a predictive view point because it required a mechanism of inheritance that was not "blood" and had to be variable between siblings and other closely related individuals. As regarding texts, college texts are a good place to start because they delineate the actual facts and hypotheses. The ICR sets up straw man arguments and then knocks them down. The ICR doesn't address science or evolution Darwinian or otherwise. It uses its own rules, argues with its own redactions and comes to ultimately empirically meaningless conclusions. You DO need understand the argument first. You simply won't find that understanding in anything presented by the ICR.
The ignorant should stick to something useful like making pottery. Using the ICR as an authority is equivalent to invoking the National Enquirer(sp?). The ICR violates logic and scientific method in an attempt to support a hypothesis for which it has no empirical support.
Darwin's theory was an attempt to explain the fact that selective processes result in changes to new generations of populations like finches, selectively bred dogs, and wheat. This is true regardless of whether the selection is from natural or cultural causes. It is a simple fact that needs an explanation.
The other problem with your ICR is that they assume, like Darwin did, that species are neat, isolated, definable packages. The ICR also assumes species are equivalent to the biblical "kind." One untested assumption follows another. Do some reading somewhere else than on the ICR site before forming an opinion about biology. College texts are a good start.
You make the erroneous assumption - common in the 19th Century and among Christian findamentalists - that evolution is progressive and "going somewhere." This is an essential fallacy. Evolutionary processes are immediate, effecting birth rates among the carriers of traits effected by any of many selective processes. Evolution does not progress and the successful breeders in one generation may be the failures in a another genration as fitness landscapes alter through time. The giant panda is a good example of a species isolated on a fitness peak from which it is unlikely to move without becoming extinct. The presence of these "weaknesses" that you say modern medicine is causing means that selective effects have a broader canvas and more traits with which to work. Far from becoming "weak" this fact increases potential human evolutionary adaptibility.
The concept of evolution can be reduced fairly easily to the change in the frequency of heritable traits in a breeding population. This can happen through multiple avenues. One is the random insertion of mutations into the genome. These are generally lethal and tend to vanish pretty much as they appear, but some survive, increasing population genetic variability. A second avenue is selection which can winnow traits out of a population or encourage exageration of traits (like the peacock's tail). This process reduces genetic variability. A third avenue is to alter the geographic parameters defining the population. Inserting a physical (or even a cultural) boundary will produce two populations that are evolving separately to some degree due to isolation. This tends to yield divergent genomes within the populations (founder's effects) each carrying a subset of the parent population's genome. Endogamous societies artificially isolate their gene pool by restriciting allowable marriages and sometimes by exluding or executing individuals who violate cultural mores. Arab Muslim, Jewish, Gypsy, and Hindu casts come to mind here as preferentially endogamous societies, as well as the European aristocracy to a degree (the increased incidence of blood clotting disorders among the descendants of Britain's Queen Victoria comes to mind). All of these processes satisfy the basic ideas of evolutionary change. Changing the parameters of the breeding population by opening geographic boundaries is no more than another evolutionary change, increasing population genetic diversity.
Among other things the experimental production of a Bose-Einstein condensate means that you are mistaken. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is fundamental, not a problem of being unable to juggle measuring tools. The condensate appears because as the particle (atom in the BEC case) is cooled, its momentum can be known more and more accurately. B and E argued that if Heisenberg's argument were true, then as the temperature of a group of particles approached 0 deg. Kelvin, they would blur together because otherwise their position would become known precisely, just as the momentum was becoming a fixed quantity. B and E thought this was absurd, but recent experimental work verifies the conjecture. Karl Popper corresponded with Einstein about this decades ago (1903s) and, in the light of modern experimental work and they proved just how wrong you can be, while being perfectly logical. Check the appendices to Popper's The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Monsanto also holds patents on the bovine growth hormone (BGH) used to increase milk production in cattle. If you poke around on the web, at Disinfo for instance, there is a considerable literature about the various ways in which standard procedure was violated by both Monsanto and the FDA itself during the testing and approval of the use of BGH on dairy cattle. The story is enough to cause you to switch to "organic" milk and milk products.
Point being... there's no way open-source will work until there's an established set of software requirement standards. We should require that software meet standards prior to being allowed in the marketplace. Unfortunately, there is no such requirement. Hence, we have what we have.
You are really not this thick are you? Your post WAS just FUD wasn't it? You really DO know that even if the origianl developer gets a day job, OS is called that BECAUSE the source is open and available to OTHER programers who can take up the slack? Not only that, but the program was probably developed with OS tools like the GNU C compiler so, all your hypothetical company needs to pay for is a competent programer to hack the code.
Grow up. Closed source software sells because it's a valuable, solid product. Otherwise, no one would buy it.
Historical ignorance or troll bait. Judging from the pro-MS arguments advanced on your web pages most likely just troll bait.
MS achieved it's monopoly by giving away free programs that were functional, and by selling programs like Office at prices that were subsidized by other, money-making divisions of the company (mostly interesting income sources like the MS tariff on CPUs). It systematically destroyed competition that was smaller by underpricing its software compared to what its less well funded competition could achieve. In the course of this history, it demonstrated that "free" products like IE could displace "valuable, solid product[s]" like Netscape. Whether the source was open or closed was irrelevant. The fact is that when ever it could, MS manipulated the market by artificially manipulating the prices for software. There was little or no success based on simple consumer decisions like "software quality," MS depend(ed/s) more on "simple" consumers.
The idea that open source must somehow mean "free" or that programers can't make living working on OS projects would be surprising to the many Redhat, Mandrake, and SuSE employees that ARE doing so, not mention numerous other non-publically owned companies that produce and support OS software.
Besides, as a taxpayer, I would far rather the government used my taxmoney to employ its own programers to develop software on OS platforms for government departments than pay overblown "seat" fees to MS for crap like Access and Outlook.
Make patents last seven years with renewal rights and copyright 25 years with renewal rights for another 25. That lets the "little guys" have a business, and it keeps them working earning the income, inventing and innovating for patents and products, rather than committing asinine actions like trying to patent natural phenomena, Digital Rights protection Operating Systems, "one-click" webpage icons, and business methods. Expand Patent Office funding and narrow the range of patentable ideas to exclude anything that does not yield a physical product. Refer all web-page "engineers" to the copyright office.
That should do wonders.
All OJ demonstrated was that when the police start manufacturing evidence and the defense flails around like a blind drunk armed with a walking stick in a beer-hall brawl, things based on the considered attempt to rationally determine fact, like the judicial process or science, suffer. The DMCA simply demonstrates that legislators and record companies give a rip about the individual's rights or about protecting their patrons.
I don't think it is due to a Firewall. The link on /. points to an *.shtml page. If you try going in through the Coleman site there is a request for a username and password. Apparently someone protected the page - or hacked it.
Actually, his argument is concerned with a larger scale change on a short time span. The time span is geologically insignificant. The actual change in average global temperature is not insignificant, nor is the speed of the change in mean temperature insignificant. Average global temperatures have not varied much throughout the recent geological epochs - no more than about 10 degrees centigrade (or Celsius for the purists) between maxima and minima. So if the the global temperature averaged 1 degree warmer, over the last 12 years, that would be a 10% change within known variation, certainly not trivial. More over the temperature increase is very abrupt when compared with previous such events as reflected in ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica. The average variation of global mean temperatures over the last century has been measured in fractions of a degree. So your argument about a "small, recent, 'Warming trend'...statistically ... insignificant" is in error. Another weakness with arguing that the change is trivial is that cumulative, trivial increases in sea level will place low lying landscapes near the ocean at hazard. Places like Pacific island countries, the Netherlands, and the Californian Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta are at risk from even small increases in sea level.
That said, the world still averages cooler than it has been many times in the geological past and the causes of any warming are open to debate. The last Pleistocene interstadial was warmer than the present, with hippo living in Britain, while during the Mediaeval drought, wine grapes grew comfortably England, and conditions were dry and harsh enough in California that the prehistoric human population underwent significant contractions throughout the state. In contrast during the 1960s there was sufficient increase in pack ice and decrease in average temperature that some meteorologists speculated about a neoglacial coming on. Now, with the Martian evidence of warming on another planet, the question rises as to whether the present warming on earth may be due to some change in solar weather.
It is really unlikely that this actually IS a ruin to begin with. Sea level rise at the end of the Pleistocene (say 10,000 years ago) was on the order of 100 meters (300+ feet). The Cuban group is talking about something that is an order magnitude deeper. The first question we would ask is just how a ruin could exist at that depth, unless it is the city of Aquaman and his merpeople. The only way a ruin could get to that depth is if the sea rose or the land sank. But, sea level change can only account for a fraction of the necessary depth so we would have to consider tectonic explanations - an earthquake that dropped the west end of Cuba 3,000 feet. Could a city survive such an event and still be recognizable? I really don't think so.
Having read the interview if the Russian born engineer, I am impressed by the ability of their sonar to discriminate "white sand" from other colors of sand. Good thing they were using sonar though. Without auxiliary light it's black as the inside of a hat at 3,000 feet below the surface.
The most interesting change for us though was StarOffice - about 85% of our staff who were using Office 97 are now using it, and we have 2 people trialling StarOffice 6-beta.
Off topic though it may be, why substitute an ungrammatical, barbarism such as a "verbed noun" like "trialling" or "architected" for perfectly good words like "testing" and "designed?"
But, as you have just pointed out, it is not the structure where IP resides. It is in the actual code that is used to implement the structure.
As well intentioned as your view is, it is also contaminated by an arrogance and ethnocentrism that is probably a large part of why we are so cordially detested overseas. Banning the production, use or export of American encryption will not lead to the end of encryption. There are many, very able cryptographers overseas, probably more than the US can produce. Anyone who was serious about using PGP would probably employ one of the overseas versions anyway. There is also no publically available evidence that either no encryption or back-doored encryption could have saved any lives. One aspect of this action that has not been emphasized enough is the slow approach to the action. Many of these terrorists were apparently in the US for years. Coordination could have been conducted through the mail at such a pace, with the final timing through cell phones. So, offering to give up some of your liberty - and mine as well - is not just well intentioned and generous but arrogant, heedless, and ethnocentric.
--
The only thing more hazardous to your liberty than n politicians is n + 1 politicians.
You need to research the less talked about sides of government more. Martial law is comparatively limited and applies mostly to the use of military personnel to enforce public order. The president can instead issue a declaration of National Emergency per the National Emergencies Act and ALL constitutional rights as related to the emergency go away including the First Amendment and Habeas Corpus. To keep up with what is and is not a National Emergency, check the Federal Register.
You might want to recalculate using a spherical volume.