However, it is clear from most of the posts here that no one has realized that the experimenter was an 8 year old girl. If she honestly came up with the experiment herself, doubtless of its absolute or not so absolute scientific perfection, she has the making of a future scientist. Her project should not have been canceled. Its so obvious, and yet everyone misses it who posts some silly comment about "no scientific basis". So many posts are judging this little girl's experiment at the level that she must have been a 28 year old sociologist with a PhD who already believes she has all the world's answers. Its grade school folks. She is not a slashdotter and think she knows at all. She took what she thought was a good guess and investigated. We call that creativity. I'm sure several of the other projects were just as wrong, but they didn't involve race, and they were not pulled.
What I even find more appaling about people who agree with the project pull over grounds of scientific correctness, its clear that the project was not pulled by the school because of scientific error. Instead it was pulled because of possible offense to someone, whether or not the fears were founded. That makes for some pretty deep wrongness, considering we are the country of free speech.
Finally, it seems that the know-it-all's here have no separation on the views of discipline, thought processes, and authoritarian control. Its amazing to me that such a group of people that perceive themselves to be great thinkers don't have the *discipline* of basic scientific knowledge and fact surrounding them. That trully scares me. It also proves a long standing assertion of mine -- slashdotters are just appliance operators. Heh, don't get me wrong about my own socialogical database, I don't know jack, but I do know the difference between discipline, free thought, and authoritarian control. I can also realize the difference of a 8 year old grade student and a 28 year old PhD professor, as well as the obvious reason the girl's project was canceled.
It seems that the folks posting here have discipline and authoritarian control improperly lumped together as one thought. I always thought discipline was the idea of self control. You know, the "discipline" to no wack down someone who is speaking ill of you. I guess self control would be the word I am looking for to be equivalent to discipline. You can tell immediately about children whose parents didn't instill proper discipline - these people are ready to fly off the handle if you say something negative at them. These are the types that shoot co-workers, co-students, and anyone else who pisses them off. They have no control or check on their emotions.
But lets also make it clear that discipline has no basis in good morals or bad morals. You could say trained killers are disciplined individuals. A better example though is a good airliner pilot. There are many examples of airline pilots running head first into the ground and the tapes showing the methodical sequencing of engines and control surfaces to attempt to bring the plane into normal operational parameters. These people's rational side control their emotional sides. Thats discipline. Discipline arrives only from steady and continuous training. Do you let your child throw tantrums and act up in public? You may think you are being non-authoritarian, but what is actually happening is a training process. The training process does not instill discipline over the child's emotional state. When older that child will probably act like a big baby.
Authoritarian controls instilled into a child would be something on the order of a child not stealing MP3s because the FBI would break down their door and haul all their computer equipment off, instead of the child/person realizing, hey, thats theft of intellectual property and artists are losing money. The world would be a better place if children were taught the basics of right and wrong, and then allowed to make their own decisions about it, but instead we rely on our authoritarian structures to make sure children and adults stay within the lines. This has great psychological impact down the road for our entire society. We begin to do things because we have too. Habits form and habits make for dull minds.
I probably will get modded to -3 for the intellectual property theft thing... but hopefully I have made sense to some folks here.
This is a overlay for your sound card driver, and can intercept everything going to your card and store it in a file. Your data never hits the analog stage before capture. A similar driver could be whipped up for Linux (the Open Sound System or the Linux audio driver project may support similar features on Linux, but I don't really know).
The UN has placed out the call for followers in these environmental alerts. Each time they scream a bit louder, and get a few more people.
Anyone who listens and obeys, they are sheep, for they feel that themselves and mankind need to be herded and terrified and eventually legistlated into making the right decisions for the environment. Anyone who listens is also of questionable intellect and even more so of a cow-like herd mentality. You need to base your opinions on cold hard facts - concerning polluting emissions from natural events vs. the past 200 years of the industrial revolution. I won't provide them -- its not my job to be your analyst. Oh, do you trust those UN scientists as your analysts?
So then, you trust facts from a organization (namely, the UN), whose primary purpose was to be the diplomatic grounds upon which we'd meet to hash out details of peace before resulting to rocks. The UN now throws its own rocks -- and is so inept, that it can't hit a damned thing with them. You think hard science is any easier than fighting a small skirmish in some third world where they pipe sunlight in? Not hardly. Killing a man is easy, making sure he lives in peace and comfort is extremely complex. So the UN wages ridiculous wars, does little for peace, and generally advances science by releasing terrifying future predictions, and then one upping them several months later. Wow, it was lucky they had such a quick catch on their previous mistakes!!! We could have melted the earth much sooner!!! Wowee!
If you want to do something about the environment, make it financially viable to have the environment be in better condition. Capitalism is the only force in a society that will eventually bring balance to life on this rock. If you allow someone to gain extreme power, especially an organization as inept as the UN, and allow them to regulate environmentalism, then you have a problem. What if they make the wrong decisions? You have given them the authority to make your life operate environmentally, you have told them they know whats best for you, do you think they are going to listen to dissenters? No, capitalism is the ONLY solution. Once people have more cancers, more lung problems, and big landfills in their backyard, capitalism will step in automatically to make sure things start changing, and changing quickly. I am not claiming that I have (all of) the solutions, I am just an agitator, here to keep you from falling into the dark of government regulations and UN international restrictions.
Finally, it trully is funny to read the posts of the anti-religious here on slashdot, then read their posts on environmental stewardship. They say religious people are sheep, to be herded by their God(s). Instead, I counter propose that they are in fact the sheep - as is typical, the anti-religious are all for having powerful central governments to shepherd the masses (of course not them, the enlightened few!!!) into doing the "right thing" whatever that is.
I'll close with this: Be a MAN or a WOMAN, whatever the case that nature necessitates, and be a capitalist, take responsibility and solve your own problems, or be a WUSS and let your government change your world.
David
A smart capitalist never dies, he just moves on to better oppurtunities.
The most effective method for delivering a nuclear weapon is an intercontinental ballistic missile. Nobody has an effective defense against a dozen nuclear weapons raining down at Mach 30. The next most effective is the shorter range missles, or medium range missle. This is similar to the weapons in Cuba. These are effective because they can be launched from a boat far out in international waters. Finally, a terrorist can simply carry a suitcase nuke into a sensitive location.
I can only laugh at people who think there is not a need for NMD, or even think that we haven't actually developed one yet. We have only just a year ago heard of a "publicly announced" laser in the desert capable of the gigawatt (or was it tera-?) range. Some things are better left to national security secrecy. No one needs to know we can probably knock 90% of anything that can fly over out of the air. True, 10% miss rate with WOMD type stuff is bad, but missing it all is alot worse. These NMD political proposals are only (a) foreign relations tests, and (b) political maneuvering to get more money to increase effectiveness into the 98% range.
I am personally all for NMD, and enough money to do it right. The quicker we have a system with near 100% effectiveness, then thats all the more sooner we eliminate the time needed for anyone to consider seriously the act of nuclear assault on the USA. We can pretend all we want about this humanist outlook of other countries against the US, but in the end, if they find a way to put in a knife in our back, they surely will. We are, after all their "humanist debating", the Great Satan, and we will be destroyed if we think they will play nice.
The fact of the matter is, we have played most nation's and group's stupidity for so long, and have made them look so ignorant, that they will adopt numerous "philosophies" on the surface, to both look good to the world, and to eventually make us weak enough to be punished for making them look ignorant. People are not inherently good, no matter how much we wish it to be so.
Antenna's are passive devices, that work on the principle of inductive currents. A changing magnetic field induces a current in the antenna (ever so small). Now, imagine every trace on a circuit board, the pins in your Pentium, and the gold wires between the substrate and the pins. At trillions of watts and a decently close range, a magnetic field can induce currents into the interconnective wiring far beyond the rated acceptable level of the chip's silicon, and will blow enough transistors to make the chip totally useless.
You can shield from it, but there is alot of engineering work. I want to say this is a Faraday shield, but I am not sure if I have the name correct, but the idea is that a object 100% surrounded by a conductor will be protected from the EMP pulse. In the real world, no useful device is totally enclosed (wiring ports, etc.). The engineering required to overcome these obstacles and the subsequent testing and verification is very costly.
Just because American policy makers long ago have found that there is enough useless violence elsewhere in the world that they can exploit for their own good, doesn't make them evil. It just makes these gullible types who actually take a bit of cash and a ride full of guns and explosives, appear to be what they are already recognized as by most Americans -- ignorant.
One day the world will realize the practice of humanism that Europe has so dutifully embraced, is just more corporate crap. Until it is realized that there will always be a group of humans who will kill to get their point across or to get what they want, lasting peace will never exit, because the proper level of mistrust will never be formally acknowledged and accounted for in peace deals. And until then, American policy makers will continue to exploit these unmanaged and ignored violent types.
This is much higher level than what this standard will propose. Its more like content providers will force their way into proprietary OSs, specifically, their drivers and their filesystems. For these code bases to be DMCA compliant (and therefore not threatened by expensive lawsuits), the kernel API's and drivers will have to be able to trigger the correct control bits to make a block "encrypted" or "hidden". Also, this API will allow the reading of the drive's serial number on read, so that (a) it can verify that you are the owner, and (b) that the upper level user application can encode that serial number into the data when its made publicly accessible.
Another feasible application once drives and other devices are united on uniform intelligent buses, is that the OS need not be aware that the device has negotiated an alert to the media provider that you have attempted to violate copyrighted material. Think I'm paranoid? Well, everything in a computer could be classifed as a system with which a user could use to violate copyrights. In that case, even something as simple as a floppy disk controller on firewire/usb bus could very well trigger a general alert to a DMCA compliant modem or ethernet device that could expedite a warning to the media provider.
People here are not being ignorant, mind you, Mr. A.C. Alex. Dual-band is accepted terminology in the good ol' US of A for a PCS (gigahertz and some freq) band/ Analog (800-900 Mhz) band w/FM modulation personal communications device. Why should we give a flyin' flip over what Europeans consider dual band? We don't run our vending machines with our cell phones, and the quicker Nokia realizes this, hopefully the more useful *phones* they will make. As they are they suck and have poor reception (at least those that I have tested).
#9 reveals the fictional nature of the post, hehe....
Why would anyone want to buy European HandyMan Keepers (ala Porsche, Mercedes, special emphasis on BMW...). These 3 brands suck the financial life out of each new financial power in this country. First it was stock brokers, now its techies. I'm suprised Maserati hasn't made a comeback in this age of senseless disposals of hard earned income...
Any of the much cheaper, still usually straight line quicker American alternatives (Mustang, Camaro, Vette), can easily stand with these Eurocrapcars in reliability, more than likely exceed them. Cornering you say? I can make you wet your pants in ditch cleaning terror on any of these three, with utmost confidence of not actually putting the machine in the ditch, and even in my normal agressive driving modes, I don't get close to this level. So there.
The people I've met that claim they can actually find the cornering limits of a American car, are usually the ones that will just as quickly put a European machine in a ditch or into a coupla trees - no driving ability whatsoever, and no room to comment.
If Eurocrapcar buyers can't admit this, they are welcome to continue chunking their hard earned money out the window of their cheap Eurocrapcars, but they need to at least admit they purchased for prestige, not performance.
You forget, the theories were developed here (in the USA) for super-cavitation. Its probably such a mastered technology here, we are just playing cheerleader for Russia to develop it.
Or better yet, we could actually be helping Russia develop the technology.
Alcohol - plant the entire surface of North America with enough corn to synthesize it, and it won't be enough.
Biodiesel - pollutes just as badly diesel fuel (in terms of particulate matter), and replace the crop requirements in corn for alcohol with the crop soy beans of similar size.
Fuel production turn-around time is also a major factor, as well as the materials required to produce the fuel. It seems that the planet's under surface life is a much better fuel producer than anything we have above ground.
Yeah, the United Nations is someone we should trust when it comes for looking out for doing what's right. Just look at the "global economy". More like islands of corporate areas where human rights don't apply.
I trust the United Nations just about as far as I can throw them.
As to your one strong conclusion, it's nothing. Merely intellectual rambling. None of the models fit properly, so the one strong conclusion is flawed.
You are exactly correct in your assertion that scientists have only the data at hand with which to analyze. But the right commands to SAS or Excel, and you can predict and extrapolate just about any conclusion you desire. A 200 year snapshot is not sufficient for determining the future of human life.
As to having a superiority complex for saying that technological solutions can resolve most environmental problems, I disagree. For all of humanity's claims of being the rational adapter in a changing system, we are not. Psychologically, we abhor change and it doesn't happen often unless an easy path is found. We instead will always adapt our surroundings to ourselves -- we always want big cars and SUVs, steak for dinner, and hamburgers for lunch. Many of these processes don't just damage the environment, they damage humans in the process of product creation also. This has not changed anyone's desires, on a macro level, to do anything about them. Ever thought about those charcoal producers in South American that produce charcoal for hardened steel that eventually finds its way into a SUV?
I also argue that scientists are not working for a better environment. Human nature is geared towards attempting to be the biggest fish, and environmental debate is just one outting for the environmental geeks to have more publicity. There may be a subset of a few who are in it for something besides a good living, but I guarantee they are not the idealistic bunch they would all like us to think they are.
Finally, I am sick of hearing about electric cars. If we went into full production on electric vehicles using the supposed "state of the art" of energy storage and conversion, we'd all die of lead or other heavy metal poisoning in just a few years because heavy metal mining and production would skyrocket. The combination of computers and carbon based fuels is alot more appealing to me than the heavy metal poisoning of humanity. The mining, transport, and useage of carbon based fuels are much cleaner than almost any battery or conversion technology we have at present. Of course, we need to be looking for better ways, but in the mean time, gasoline is the best way. Just examine for yourself any of the latest solar, battery, and fuel cell technologies. But don't limit your search to the finished product, examine instead the entire chain of events that ends with that product.
I used to say I would start driving an electric car as soon as they produced one with the proper characteristics for my driving tastes. However, I recently backed away. Instead, build an electric car whose component manufacturing and power generation will not make an environmental mess equal to or greater than that of the gasoline vehicle's entire birthing and using process, and provide me with good driving characteristics, and then I'll buy.
Now, scrape off layer after of layer of that piece of paper, until the paper is only several atoms thick. The number of molecules there is orders of magnitude more than the number of humans on this rock. My point stands, we are inconsequential to planetary atmosphere. If you want global climate changing emissions, a single volcanic eruption can equal our current "greenhouse" output for the last few hundred years, globally, and there is not a single thing we can do about it. We'd have to build some extremely big and extremely ineffecient machines and run them for a few eons before we started impacting our environment on a macro level. We should be much more concerned about the quality of air that lingers immediately above us in our cities, and the water that flows out of our taps.
Nature is it's own biggest polluter, but it's pollution is not as deadly to humankind has humankinds own garbage. If we clean up the environment local to us, we'll have taken responsibility for that which we have control over. We will never be able to affect the ecological history of this planet on a macro level, unless we Nuke the entire thing in a mega-conflagration.
Except the data clearly show that, while the temperature had been decreasing at a rate of about 1-2 degrees per year for a few thousand years, it has increased by about 15 degrees in the last hundred years.
Could you please provide the temperature logs on which you base your conclusions about the planetary temperature of the last few thousand years? I'd be greatful and impressed.
Perhaps I am one helping to propagate our own species' extinction, but get in an airplane or look at space photos. Look at the volume of air in the atmosphere. Humans are an inconsequential deposit on the surface of this rock. What humans should worry about is our own air and water quality in the areas we live in. Fix those, and you have environmental harmony.
For us to think that something as insignificant in size as ourselves can affect something as large as this planet on a macro level, is the product of a superiority complex. Only scientists with a superiority complex (probably characterizes many scientists in the global warming debate -- they seem to like attention) can claim that data collected in the last 50 to 200 years can be interpolated to an entire ecological history of this planet.
Finally, I don't see any of them coming up with new energy storage and conversion technologies that can even clean up our local environments. Instead, they seem to be hung on the idea of sounding alarm bells for something people can't readily see. All changes must start at the small level and become large. Their whining is doing us no good, except accelerating the decay of logical thinking among peoples otherwise inclined to improve life by improving their local environment.
In conclusion, I say these scientists who predict global geological failure, are in fact accelerating our demise. They make it appear that humanity has two choices: 1) Become bush people, 2) destroy ourselves. Naturally, being human, we will pick (2) because its more luxurious and comfortable and (1) is too much trouble.
North Carolina State University uses NDS extensively, and it is not a small network. I don't know the instantaneous login count at any one time, but the system encompasses the same user database as a AFS + Unix system does there on campus. I believe it handles a database of 20K users. Someone from NCSU correct me if this is changed or incorrect. I can say this... it's impressive and the downtime is planned 99% of the time.
Instantaneous useage has to be at least 3000 people there. I think this is a gross underestimation.
However, I will say that Novell Netware doesn't really do anything else as well as Print/File/NDS. Other problems are best solved with other OSs.
David
This is a rather niave view -- that an API will always be there to provide a "defacto standard" for a higher level application. I work in an industry where there is no default app for all jobs and can never be one -- each corporation knowingly buys our libs to right their own application -- ALWAYS!!! The only money can come from the library sale. They do not want customizations, etc. Now where does the money come from? David
Given the typical fiascos and cliques at High Schools everywhere, and the seriousness with which the web publisher was treated... perhaps he should hire a private investigator to uncover the true facts surrounding those who were libeled. Often in high school, many so-called rumors were overkill, but then many others had some truth to them. Serious legal attack demands serious legal retaliation. Lawyers are the new superweapons of society. David
What you fail to realize in using one card with high bandwidth, is that NT probably (probably here because no one has posted benchmarks) can't compete with Linux (with one processor). NT cannot saturate a 1Gbps connection, Novell can. I have no idea about Linux. Thats more than likely why the mindcraft test couldn't test a Gigabit ethernet setup with both OSs. The core of NT is too slow to deal with it, at least back in the days of 300MHz processors. It may not even be a valid performance issue now.... one way Microsoft stays ahead of the game... code for hardware not yet available, cover the inadequacies in the benchmarks, until processing power covers the flaws. David We are David. You will be assimilated.
As for getting to know Chinese before passing judgement on its government, I have done so. I believe from observations and conversations with Chinese people who I know from a University in the States, Chinese people (not government "Can Do's") are kind, outgoing people, who love freedom. And those I spoke with don't want to go back there. They will proclaim to you about how much better it is here in the States, than in China. The only reason they will go back is to provide for their families that they left behind. The ones with no family ties will usually attempt to remain here by applying for citizenship, finding a career, etc. I could only chuckle at the fellow's letter that sparked this debate. Sounds like "canned rhetoric" to me. Later, DLP
Slashdot Mirror
Of course some are proud of this, I'm sure.
However, it is clear from most of the posts here that no one has realized that the experimenter was an 8 year old girl. If she honestly came up with the experiment herself, doubtless of its absolute or not so absolute scientific perfection, she has the making of a future scientist. Her project should not have been canceled. Its so obvious, and yet everyone misses it who posts some silly comment about "no scientific basis". So many posts are judging this little girl's experiment at the level that she must have been a 28 year old sociologist with a PhD who already believes she has all the world's answers. Its grade school folks. She is not a slashdotter and think she knows at all. She took what she thought was a good guess and investigated. We call that creativity. I'm sure several of the other projects were just as wrong, but they didn't involve race, and they were not pulled.
What I even find more appaling about people who agree with the project pull over grounds of scientific correctness, its clear that the project was not pulled by the school because of scientific error. Instead it was pulled because of possible offense to someone, whether or not the fears were founded. That makes for some pretty deep wrongness, considering we are the country of free speech.
Finally, it seems that the know-it-all's here have no separation on the views of discipline, thought processes, and authoritarian control. Its amazing to me that such a group of people that perceive themselves to be great thinkers don't have the *discipline* of basic scientific knowledge and fact surrounding them. That trully scares me. It also proves a long standing assertion of mine -- slashdotters are just appliance operators. Heh, don't get me wrong about my own socialogical database, I don't know jack, but I do know the difference between discipline, free thought, and authoritarian control. I can also realize the difference of a 8 year old grade student and a 28 year old PhD professor, as well as the obvious reason the girl's project was canceled.
TurboD
It seems that the folks posting here have discipline and authoritarian control improperly lumped together as one thought. I always thought discipline was the idea of self control. You know, the "discipline" to no wack down someone who is speaking ill of you. I guess self control would be the word I am looking for to be equivalent to discipline. You can tell immediately about children whose parents didn't instill proper discipline - these people are ready to fly off the handle if you say something negative at them. These are the types that shoot co-workers, co-students, and anyone else who pisses them off. They have no control or check on their emotions.
But lets also make it clear that discipline has no basis in good morals or bad morals. You could say trained killers are disciplined individuals. A better example though is a good airliner pilot. There are many examples of airline pilots running head first into the ground and the tapes showing the methodical sequencing of engines and control surfaces to attempt to bring the plane into normal operational parameters. These people's rational side control their emotional sides. Thats discipline. Discipline arrives only from steady and continuous training. Do you let your child throw tantrums and act up in public? You may think you are being non-authoritarian, but what is actually happening is a training process. The training process does not instill discipline over the child's emotional state. When older that child will probably act like a big baby.
Authoritarian controls instilled into a child would be something on the order of a child not stealing MP3s because the FBI would break down their door and haul all their computer equipment off, instead of the child/person realizing, hey, thats theft of intellectual property and artists are losing money. The world would be a better place if children were taught the basics of right and wrong, and then allowed to make their own decisions about it, but instead we rely on our authoritarian structures to make sure children and adults stay within the lines. This has great psychological impact down the road for our entire society. We begin to do things because we have too. Habits form and habits make for dull minds.
I probably will get modded to -3 for the intellectual property theft thing... but hopefully I have made sense to some folks here.
TurboD
Luckily, you don't have to go to these lengths of entrusting an analogue stage. You need Total Recorder (latest/greatest rev).
See:
www.highcriteria.com
This is a overlay for your sound card driver, and can intercept everything going to your card and store it in a file. Your data never hits the analog stage before capture. A similar driver could be whipped up for Linux (the Open Sound System or the Linux audio driver project may support similar features on Linux, but I don't really know).
TurboD
The UN has placed out the call for followers in these environmental alerts. Each time they scream a bit louder, and get a few more people.
Anyone who listens and obeys, they are sheep, for they feel that themselves and mankind need to be herded and terrified and eventually legistlated into making the right decisions for the environment. Anyone who listens is also of questionable intellect and even more so of a cow-like herd mentality. You need to base your opinions on cold hard facts - concerning polluting emissions from natural events vs. the past 200 years of the industrial revolution. I won't provide them -- its not my job to be your analyst. Oh, do you trust those UN scientists as your analysts?
So then, you trust facts from a organization (namely, the UN), whose primary purpose was to be the diplomatic grounds upon which we'd meet to hash out details of peace before resulting to rocks. The UN now throws its own rocks -- and is so inept, that it can't hit a damned thing with them. You think hard science is any easier than fighting a small skirmish in some third world where they pipe sunlight in? Not hardly. Killing a man is easy, making sure he lives in peace and comfort is extremely complex. So the UN wages ridiculous wars, does little for peace, and generally advances science by releasing terrifying future predictions, and then one upping them several months later. Wow, it was lucky they had such a quick catch on their previous mistakes!!! We could have melted the earth much sooner!!! Wowee!
If you want to do something about the environment, make it financially viable to have the environment be in better condition. Capitalism is the only force in a society that will eventually bring balance to life on this rock. If you allow someone to gain extreme power, especially an organization as inept as the UN, and allow them to regulate environmentalism, then you have a problem. What if they make the wrong decisions? You have given them the authority to make your life operate environmentally, you have told them they know whats best for you, do you think they are going to listen to dissenters? No, capitalism is the ONLY solution. Once people have more cancers, more lung problems, and big landfills in their backyard, capitalism will step in automatically to make sure things start changing, and changing quickly. I am not claiming that I have (all of) the solutions, I am just an agitator, here to keep you from falling into the dark of government regulations and UN international restrictions.
Finally, it trully is funny to read the posts of the anti-religious here on slashdot, then read their posts on environmental stewardship. They say religious people are sheep, to be herded by their God(s). Instead, I counter propose that they are in fact the sheep - as is typical, the anti-religious are all for having powerful central governments to shepherd the masses (of course not them, the enlightened few!!!) into doing the "right thing" whatever that is.
I'll close with this: Be a MAN or a WOMAN, whatever the case that nature necessitates, and be a capitalist, take responsibility and solve your own problems, or be a WUSS and let your government change your world.
David
A smart capitalist never dies, he just moves on to better oppurtunities.
I can only laugh at people who think there is not a need for NMD, or even think that we haven't actually developed one yet. We have only just a year ago heard of a "publicly announced" laser in the desert capable of the gigawatt (or was it tera-?) range. Some things are better left to national security secrecy. No one needs to know we can probably knock 90% of anything that can fly over out of the air. True, 10% miss rate with WOMD type stuff is bad, but missing it all is alot worse. These NMD political proposals are only (a) foreign relations tests, and (b) political maneuvering to get more money to increase effectiveness into the 98% range.
I am personally all for NMD, and enough money to do it right. The quicker we have a system with near 100% effectiveness, then thats all the more sooner we eliminate the time needed for anyone to consider seriously the act of nuclear assault on the USA. We can pretend all we want about this humanist outlook of other countries against the US, but in the end, if they find a way to put in a knife in our back, they surely will. We are, after all their "humanist debating", the Great Satan, and we will be destroyed if we think they will play nice.
The fact of the matter is, we have played most nation's and group's stupidity for so long, and have made them look so ignorant, that they will adopt numerous "philosophies" on the surface, to both look good to the world, and to eventually make us weak enough to be punished for making them look ignorant. People are not inherently good, no matter how much we wish it to be so.
David
Antenna's are passive devices, that work on the principle of inductive currents. A changing magnetic field induces a current in the antenna (ever so small). Now, imagine every trace on a circuit board, the pins in your Pentium, and the gold wires between the substrate and the pins. At trillions of watts and a decently close range, a magnetic field can induce currents into the interconnective wiring far beyond the rated acceptable level of the chip's silicon, and will blow enough transistors to make the chip totally useless.
You can shield from it, but there is alot of engineering work. I want to say this is a Faraday shield, but I am not sure if I have the name correct, but the idea is that a object 100% surrounded by a conductor will be protected from the EMP pulse. In the real world, no useful device is totally enclosed (wiring ports, etc.). The engineering required to overcome these obstacles and the subsequent testing and verification is very costly.
David
Just because American policy makers long ago have found that there is enough useless violence elsewhere in the world that they can exploit for their own good, doesn't make them evil. It just makes these gullible types who actually take a bit of cash and a ride full of guns and explosives, appear to be what they are already recognized as by most Americans -- ignorant.
One day the world will realize the practice of humanism that Europe has so dutifully embraced, is just more corporate crap. Until it is realized that there will always be a group of humans who will kill to get their point across or to get what they want, lasting peace will never exit, because the proper level of mistrust will never be formally acknowledged and accounted for in peace deals. And until then, American policy makers will continue to exploit these unmanaged and ignored violent types.
TurboD
This is much higher level than what this standard will propose. Its more like content providers will force their way into proprietary OSs, specifically, their drivers and their filesystems. For these code bases to be DMCA compliant (and therefore not threatened by expensive lawsuits), the kernel API's and drivers will have to be able to trigger the correct control bits to make a block "encrypted" or "hidden". Also, this API will allow the reading of the drive's serial number on read, so that (a) it can verify that you are the owner, and (b) that the upper level user application can encode that serial number into the data when its made publicly accessible.
Another feasible application once drives and other devices are united on uniform intelligent buses, is that the OS need not be aware that the device has negotiated an alert to the media provider that you have attempted to violate copyrighted material. Think I'm paranoid? Well, everything in a computer could be classifed as a system with which a user could use to violate copyrights. In that case, even something as simple as a floppy disk controller on firewire/usb bus could very well trigger a general alert to a DMCA compliant modem or ethernet device that could expedite a warning to the media provider.
TurboD
People here are not being ignorant, mind you, Mr. A.C. Alex. Dual-band is accepted terminology in the good ol' US of A for a PCS (gigahertz and some freq) band/ Analog (800-900 Mhz) band w/FM modulation personal communications device. Why should we give a flyin' flip over what Europeans consider dual band? We don't run our vending machines with our cell phones, and the quicker Nokia realizes this, hopefully the more useful *phones* they will make. As they are they suck and have poor reception (at least those that I have tested).
David
Star Tacs have nice menus now, too. Dot matrix LCD display on the last few I've seen at Rat Shack.
Personally run a Qualcomm dual-band on Sprint PCS network, in North America, fancy that (making fun of the typo in the lead article).
David
#9 reveals the fictional nature of the post, hehe....
Why would anyone want to buy European HandyMan Keepers (ala Porsche, Mercedes, special emphasis on BMW...). These 3 brands suck the financial life out of each new financial power in this country. First it was stock brokers, now its techies. I'm suprised Maserati hasn't made a comeback in this age of senseless disposals of hard earned income...
Any of the much cheaper, still usually straight line quicker American alternatives (Mustang, Camaro, Vette), can easily stand with these Eurocrapcars in reliability, more than likely exceed them. Cornering you say? I can make you wet your pants in ditch cleaning terror on any of these three, with utmost confidence of not actually putting the machine in the ditch, and even in my normal agressive driving modes, I don't get close to this level. So there.
The people I've met that claim they can actually find the cornering limits of a American car, are usually the ones that will just as quickly put a European machine in a ditch or into a coupla trees - no driving ability whatsoever, and no room to comment.
If Eurocrapcar buyers can't admit this, they are welcome to continue chunking their hard earned money out the window of their cheap Eurocrapcars, but they need to at least admit they purchased for prestige, not performance.
You forget, the theories were developed here (in the USA) for super-cavitation. Its probably such a mastered technology here, we are just playing cheerleader for Russia to develop it.
Or better yet, we could actually be helping Russia develop the technology.
David
Alcohol - plant the entire surface of North America with enough corn to synthesize it, and it won't be enough.
Biodiesel - pollutes just as badly diesel fuel (in terms of particulate matter), and replace the crop requirements in corn for alcohol with the crop soy beans of similar size.
Fuel production turn-around time is also a major factor, as well as the materials required to produce the fuel. It seems that the planet's under surface life is a much better fuel producer than anything we have above ground.
David
Yeah, the United Nations is someone we should trust when it comes for looking out for doing what's right. Just look at the "global economy". More like islands of corporate areas where human rights don't apply.
I trust the United Nations just about as far as I can throw them.
As to your one strong conclusion, it's nothing. Merely intellectual rambling. None of the models fit properly, so the one strong conclusion is flawed.
David
You are exactly correct in your assertion that scientists have only the data at hand with which to analyze. But the right commands to SAS or Excel, and you can predict and extrapolate just about any conclusion you desire. A 200 year snapshot is not sufficient for determining the future of human life.
As to having a superiority complex for saying that technological solutions can resolve most environmental problems, I disagree. For all of humanity's claims of being the rational adapter in a changing system, we are not. Psychologically, we abhor change and it doesn't happen often unless an easy path is found. We instead will always adapt our surroundings to ourselves -- we always want big cars and SUVs, steak for dinner, and hamburgers for lunch. Many of these processes don't just damage the environment, they damage humans in the process of product creation also. This has not changed anyone's desires, on a macro level, to do anything about them. Ever thought about those charcoal producers in South American that produce charcoal for hardened steel that eventually finds its way into a SUV?
I also argue that scientists are not working for a better environment. Human nature is geared towards attempting to be the biggest fish, and environmental debate is just one outting for the environmental geeks to have more publicity. There may be a subset of a few who are in it for something besides a good living, but I guarantee they are not the idealistic bunch they would all like us to think they are.
Finally, I am sick of hearing about electric cars. If we went into full production on electric vehicles using the supposed "state of the art" of energy storage and conversion, we'd all die of lead or other heavy metal poisoning in just a few years because heavy metal mining and production would skyrocket. The combination of computers and carbon based fuels is alot more appealing to me than the heavy metal poisoning of humanity. The mining, transport, and useage of carbon based fuels are much cleaner than almost any battery or conversion technology we have at present. Of course, we need to be looking for better ways, but in the mean time, gasoline is the best way. Just examine for yourself any of the latest solar, battery, and fuel cell technologies. But don't limit your search to the finished product, examine instead the entire chain of events that ends with that product.
I used to say I would start driving an electric car as soon as they produced one with the proper characteristics for my driving tastes. However, I recently backed away. Instead, build an electric car whose component manufacturing and power generation will not make an environmental mess equal to or greater than that of the gasoline vehicle's entire birthing and using process, and provide me with good driving characteristics, and then I'll buy.
David
Now, scrape off layer after of layer of that piece of paper, until the paper is only several atoms thick. The number of molecules there is orders of magnitude more than the number of humans on this rock. My point stands, we are inconsequential to planetary atmosphere. If you want global climate changing emissions, a single volcanic eruption can equal our current "greenhouse" output for the last few hundred years, globally, and there is not a single thing we can do about it. We'd have to build some extremely big and extremely ineffecient machines and run them for a few eons before we started impacting our environment on a macro level. We should be much more concerned about the quality of air that lingers immediately above us in our cities, and the water that flows out of our taps.
David
Nature is it's own biggest polluter, but it's pollution is not as deadly to humankind has humankinds own garbage. If we clean up the environment local to us, we'll have taken responsibility for that which we have control over. We will never be able to affect the ecological history of this planet on a macro level, unless we Nuke the entire thing in a mega-conflagration.
David
Could you please provide the temperature logs on which you base your conclusions about the planetary temperature of the last few thousand years? I'd be greatful and impressed.
Thanks,
David
Perhaps I am one helping to propagate our own species' extinction, but get in an airplane or look at space photos. Look at the volume of air in the atmosphere. Humans are an inconsequential deposit on the surface of this rock. What humans should worry about is our own air and water quality in the areas we live in. Fix those, and you have environmental harmony.
For us to think that something as insignificant in size as ourselves can affect something as large as this planet on a macro level, is the product of a superiority complex. Only scientists with a superiority complex (probably characterizes many scientists in the global warming debate -- they seem to like attention) can claim that data collected in the last 50 to 200 years can be interpolated to an entire ecological history of this planet.
Finally, I don't see any of them coming up with new energy storage and conversion technologies that can even clean up our local environments. Instead, they seem to be hung on the idea of sounding alarm bells for something people can't readily see. All changes must start at the small level and become large. Their whining is doing us no good, except accelerating the decay of logical thinking among peoples otherwise inclined to improve life by improving their local environment.
In conclusion, I say these scientists who predict global geological failure, are in fact accelerating our demise. They make it appear that humanity has two choices: 1) Become bush people, 2) destroy ourselves. Naturally, being human, we will pick (2) because its more luxurious and comfortable and (1) is too much trouble.
David
North Carolina State University uses NDS extensively, and it is not a small network. I don't know the instantaneous login count at any one time, but the system encompasses the same user database as a AFS + Unix system does there on campus. I believe it handles a database of 20K users. Someone from NCSU correct me if this is changed or incorrect. I can say this... it's impressive and the downtime is planned 99% of the time. Instantaneous useage has to be at least 3000 people there. I think this is a gross underestimation. However, I will say that Novell Netware doesn't really do anything else as well as Print/File/NDS. Other problems are best solved with other OSs. David
This is a rather niave view -- that an API will always be there to provide a "defacto standard" for a higher level application. I work in an industry where there is no default app for all jobs and can never be one -- each corporation knowingly buys our libs to right their own application -- ALWAYS!!! The only money can come from the library sale. They do not want customizations, etc. Now where does the money come from? David
Given the typical fiascos and cliques at High Schools everywhere, and the seriousness with which the web publisher was treated... perhaps he should hire a private investigator to uncover the true facts surrounding those who were libeled. Often in high school, many so-called rumors were overkill, but then many others had some truth to them. Serious legal attack demands serious legal retaliation. Lawyers are the new superweapons of society. David
What you fail to realize in using one card with high bandwidth, is that NT probably (probably here because no one has posted benchmarks) can't compete with Linux (with one processor). NT cannot saturate a 1Gbps connection, Novell can. I have no idea about Linux. Thats more than likely why the mindcraft test couldn't test a Gigabit ethernet setup with both OSs. The core of NT is too slow to deal with it, at least back in the days of 300MHz processors. It may not even be a valid performance issue now.... one way Microsoft stays ahead of the game... code for hardware not yet available, cover the inadequacies in the benchmarks, until processing power covers the flaws. David We are David. You will be assimilated.
As for getting to know Chinese before passing judgement on its government, I have done so. I believe from observations and conversations with Chinese people who I know from a University in the States, Chinese people (not government "Can Do's") are kind, outgoing people, who love freedom. And those I spoke with don't want to go back there. They will proclaim to you about how much better it is here in the States, than in China. The only reason they will go back is to provide for their families that they left behind. The ones with no family ties will usually attempt to remain here by applying for citizenship, finding a career, etc. I could only chuckle at the fellow's letter that sparked this debate. Sounds like "canned rhetoric" to me. Later, DLP