Well, gee, it's *really* hard to miss their new ads. It only takes up a good 25% of a 1024x768 browser window, and thankfully for 5% of us, uses
ActiveX to get the point across.
I guess all those warnings on more intrusive advertizing will be realized now...
All I'm saying is that the stars in the local area of the Milky Way were probably all created within a few million years of each other , collesing from the same gas cloud; a few million years again is tiny on the cosmic scale.
And the next step up from galaxies is "galactic cluster", where again it's suggested there's some central object which several galaxies tend to gather about, but certainly not as strong that keeps planets in orbit or stars in orbit.
While reducing emissions is a good thing, it's one
of those things where you reach a practical limit before cost well outweighs effectiveness.
A good example is the process of hydrodesulfurization (HDS). Sulfur is a natural component of crude oil; gas that is burnt with sulfur in it will produce sulfur dioxide, which, of course, is bad as it helps with smog creation. In addition, sulfur is what causes most cat converters to degrade, and if/when we go to fuel cells, sulfur will completely ruin the typical fuel cell catalyst (platinum based).
So the process of HDS removes sulfur from the crude oil to create hydrogen sulfide and clean hydrocarbons; in this form, it's easy to extract the hydrogen sulfide and convert it separately to a non-toxic/hazardous waste form. The problem is is that the sulfur is buried deep in the molecules of hydrocarbon, and to remove these sulfurs will generally destroy the hydrocarbon into smaller pieces.
Now we base our gasoline ratings on octane number, which is a combination of how large the hydrocarbons are and how many are olefins (double bonds) or not; a large number of long-chained hydrocarbons or olefins increases the octane number. If you try to remove all the sulfur before you distribute the gas, the octane number will drop terribly, and the gas will be worse than with the sulfur in it, as there's a better chance of CO production and reduced feul efficiency from low octane gas. So there's a practical balance between the effective sulfur removal levels, and the quality of gasoline that we get.
Mind you, as we head towards feul cells that can use methanol or ethanol as produced by bioproducts as opposed to crude, the amount of sulfur to start with will be much lower, and octane number will not be as great; you still need to deal with it, but you don't really have to worry that much about how much fragmentation of the hydrocarbon that you get.
Now, IMO, most of the problem with Global Warming is not a result of the last 20 years, but of the first 40 years of the 20th century with the unfettered industrial revolution and two wars that introduced aircraft to the world. Since at least 1960, we've been aware of environmental damage, and while it may have not been a consumer issue until the 1980s, we as scientists and engineers were already aware of it and layed the groundwork for what research is being done today to continually improve what we've got. I also think that we still don't have sufficient evidence to yet conclude if we are in a warming or cooling cycle for the planet, though I can't disagree that mankind has had a small effect.
It wouldn't bend around them, radio waves would pass through them. Radio waves tend to be too low of an energy to be picked up by atoms to induce electrion jumps, so they'll pass through objects with no problem (that's why you can get radio and attenna TV inside a house).. although with a planetary-sized body there will be some distortion. Light waves, on the other hand, are easily picked up by most metallic substances, and therefore will be absorbed.
With the only senses that we can trust: sight and touch. We have to GO and find these things, and that means space exploration. In the 2nd Millenium and the beginning of the 3rd, this is certainly not a big priority, but maybe by the year 2500, we'll have the technology that will allow a reasonable way to explore nearby star systems and look for signs of life, whether active or not.
I'm not saying SETI should be shut down -- because there is the possiblity we'll get something and all these arguements are moot. But it's more just looking at the big picture and realizing that we might just be shooting pot shots into space.
I'd based 20,000 years on the assumption that there are things like planet-scale distasters that a race cannot avoid - meteors from space, killer radiation from local stars going nova - in addition to the fact that based on even primitive life on earth, there would always appear to be a "only the strong survive" drive to survival, and whether that means that two warring tribes of the same race wipe each other out with sticks or nuclear weapons, it still suggests that there will always a possibility for self-destruction of one's race.
Now certainly I may be way low -- it HAS been 65 million years from the last major planetary event that caused a mass extinction, but even if you start pushing the timeframe of humans up to 100,000 or a million years, you are still talking about blinks of an eye relative to the estimated age of the universe. But again, the key thing is that one takes the assumption that races might die out -- if you assume otherwise, then yes, as the age of the universe increases, the chance for finding life should increase also.
I rewatched 'Contact' this weekend, and it gets me to thinking on what chance we have as the human race (as in, over the next several millenia) will have in encountering a non-extinct, developed alien race. Humankind has only been around on the order of 10,000 years, and we'll probably have at least that coming in the future, but 20,000 years on the cosmic scale is a blink of the eye. Assuming that other races have similar 'lifespans', it may be easy enough to miss them because we started too late or too early. For example, we know that there's a narrow band where liquid water could exist on a planet based on our sun; what if earth's orbit was a few thousand kilometers closer: would life have developed a bit faster, and maybe humankind would have rose out 100,000 years earlier? Or mnay it would have been slower and we wouldn't be talking about this for yet another 100,000 years. And that's just earth we're talking about -- in any other solar system you'd have to worry about the same facts.
I think the only thing we can safely say about extraterrestial life is that if we are going to find any with sufficient technological progress within the 'lifetime' of humankind, it will have to be from a very small cluster of stars near us, which might have been formed near the same time after the big bang, such that planets capable of supporting life would have all started the evolution timer at the same point. But again, that rate of evolution is so different that the chances of us seeing one another would be very very high.
What I think we should focus on more (and it would be hard to say if we will be able to) is to look for the evidence of early life (single celled protozoa), or evidence of a race gone dorment, on other planets in the nearby cluster.
Finding such would at least tell us that the development of life was not a chance happenstance on Earth.
It may be practical lawmaking power, but it's only because they were given power over a small subset of 'things' by Congress when the department was set up. And if they overstep those bounds, then either Congress or the Judical can take it away.
A good recent case: here in Chicago there was ex-stripped-mine land that had filled over the years and migratory birds were using the small landlocked lake as a temporary waypoint during the early spring/late fall. Local communities, looking to expand their landfills and who owned the rights to the land, wanted to use this area and turn it into landfill. The EPA tried to step in and say that it was protected land because of the migratory birds. It went to court, and just recently was completed by the Supreme Court, which said that the EPA did NOT have the power to controll non-navigatable bodies of water as such, and therefore the cities could go ahead and use it as a new landfill. The EPA has also lost similar cases in the past, particularly when they say they will find companies that put out a hazardous chemical above a certain regulation limit, and affected companies have taken them to court, winning on the arguement that the EPA does not have that much power as granted by Congress.
Now, what the FCC has done here is certain not any regulations; they were more a mediator between content providers and those that will make what that content will be displayed on, as to make sure that there is a common format. They aren't forcing any content provider or manufacture to do anything here; in particular there's no fine or punishment that the FCC hands down if a given manufacture decides to ignore the specification. True, there is the realistic penalty that manufactures that don't comply will have equipment that fails to work with the signal that the olgiarchy of broadcasters plan to put out, but the FCC can't really comment on that until it sees how the system pans out.
Actually, I'd have expanded this question to include: Who regulates the ISP industry in general? If it's not already under the FCC, it should, and even if it is, is there a special taskforce within the department to handle how
ISPs work specifically?
Specifically, the FCC passed a law prohibiting the recording of HDTV digital content.
This is factually wrong in many ways. The FCC is the executive branch, so they have no lawmaking power -- however, they do have authority given to them by Congress to handle communication signals and such. In this case, they approved a plan between broadcasters, equipment makers, and the gov't regarding HDTV.
Second, the agreement does not prohibit the recording; it simply allows that an extra bit of data be included in the HDTV broadcast that says "can be recorded" or "cannot be recorded", and that this will be standardized so that equipment makers need to know how to handle it. Certainly there is abuse for this, say if NBC sets this bit to non-recordable for ALL of it's programming, but the idea is that it is meant to protect pay-per-view events and premiem cable channels. Mind you, the FCC should have put more clauses in this (such as "not more than 5% of your programming can contain this if you are a public or non-premium cable channel") as to protect fair-use.
Copyright protection which takes away fair use rights is basically saying "guilty until proven innocent". By using copyright controls, RIAA and MPAA are considering that all consumers are going to violate copyrights, instead of what really is only the 5% or so that will.
I think what needs to happen is to have a paradigm shift in the way that RIAA/MPAA and others think about copyrights -- if they spent less time in the vigalence of copyrights and instead spent more in improving quality and increasing quantity of titles available, they would still pull in the same profits and possibly more.
As with the thread that was reported in the article yesterday, there seems to be a high disregard for the people that are the underlings in junk mail/telemarketing fields. These are not the people that are causing the problem; most of them took said jobs to make sure ends meet. So by either harassing the telemarketer on the phone, or sending crap in business reply envelopes, you're making the job harder for them (and in the case of the post office, for the mail carriers as well!). So these tactics, particularly thinking that using the business reply envelopes to cost the company money, is not going to do much because only a small fraction of the people that recieve the bulk advertizing will actually do something that costs the company money, and the overall effect is a tiny operating cost.
Instead of such tactics, you need to go after the big people, the ones that run these spamhouses. At least for telemarketters, we have a legal way to deal with that in terms of the do-not-call lists. If the telemarketting group violates that, it can hurt them. Unfortunately, we have no similar provision for mail, mostly because it's non-disruptive and costs us little. We ought to invoke regulations with "do-not-mail" lists for mail as well. These are probably harder to maintain, but *good*, that's the way they should be -- if they want to try targetted advertizing, they better be ready to make sure their target is true.
Of course, all this wouldn't be a problem if we had privacy laws that prevent magazine subscriptions being shared with credit card companies. I get at least 5 of these a WEEK, and they're getting worse. A friend got one with the amazing low APR of 40% -- yeah, right! Maybe require that any advertizing that you get in the mail needs to specifically state where they got your name and address from such that you know which magazine subscriptions do such tactics.
Every employee of NASA does not work on how to send rockets into space. Based on 4 years of interning at NASA Lewis (now Glenn) in Cleveland, I would say that there, only about 20% of the staff was working directly on technology for space-bound missions. The rest were doing the 'A' thing , aeronautics. I was particularly involved with materials research where they were trying to make materials with better stress handling. If we could do that, not only would it help design lighter and better planes, but could easily filter down into more commonplace vehicles. It may not be a direct link, but the possibility is there.
And don't underestimate the value of extra-terrestial research. We as mankind seriously need to think about getting off the rock known as Earth within the next 200 to 500 years, not only for expected population growth but to avoid having all of our eggs in one basket should there be a cosmic-scale disaster. Maybe we should be pushing NASA to work more with other worldwide space programs to create joint ventures to do this, but it's got to happen.
And finally, remember that the millions of dollars that NASA might get in a year is about the same cost for ONE of our best stealth planes. Which, after all is said and done, is going to be of the most value to the general populace? I'd think it would be NASA research which can have a beneficial effect on society.
My understanding was that AOL was blocking non-AIM clients from using the server (that is, there's an undocumented call that the official AIM client sends before initiating the connection). And, Microsoft actually tried to bypass this call, and AOL reprogrammed their servers to block the MS client from connecting. But AOL does let other clients connect, so it's probably who they want to keep as friends, and who they want to make as enemies at this point.
2. I didn't know, but it's a trilogy! Three movies, each to be released at Christmas a year apart. The Fellowship of the Ring 2001, The Two Towers 2002, The Return of the King 2003. Enough screen time to do the story right? Maybe... I hope so!
Go to the Rinkworks (www.rinkworks.com) site, and look for the Bad Bad Bad Movie review page, and find the animated LotR movie entry (this is NOT the one done by Rankin/Bass who also did the Hobbit as a movie). I can't remember when the above movie came out (I think early 70s), but it was advertizes as the whole The Lord of the Rings. When people saw it, they found out it was only part 1 of 2 that they got; thankfully, based on the quality that the comments include above, part 2 was never made.
You'll breeze through Eddings. I hadn't read Tolkien for years before I got into the two (well, 4, but break it into the 12-book set and the 6-book set) Eddings series. On a good reading night, I'd easily get through an Eddings book, mostly because the writing style is not complex, the characters are sufficiently different from each other, and that he repeats the major plot points enough times that by the end of the series, we know that "Heck, yes, Belgarath is freaking old!".
Tolkien is much more challenging to read, and when I picked up the Ring trilogy to read about 2 years ago, it took me a good 3 weeks of before-bed reading to finish one book out of it.
(And on a curiosity note, I find it ironic that several fantasy series all are based on "boy meets strange people, discovers he's got special/magical powers, goes on to save the world" type of ideas, including the Ring triology, Edding's series, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as well as the Sword of Shanadara (sp) series -- add to it Harry Potter, as well as Ender's Game -- I wonder why it always seems to come back to this theme, and nearly always from the POV of the 'boy' in question.
I'm not trying to defend one over another, but offering some valid reasons why people are flocking to IM rather than IRC.
Approach Issues - the concept of chat rooms may be simple, but to *get* to a chat room you need to have software, the name of a server, and the name of the room. IRC software, particularly on the PC, is notorously bad and not intuitive, so even if the user managed to get a cliet up and running, the next step, entering the server, is not apparent from default setups. With IM, the 'server' and the 'room' are predefined, so all you need to do is open the client and you're there. Much simpler for average joes.
Interface issues - the fact that IM generally can be run from a docklet (taskbar), while IRC requires window real estate, generally means it's easier to keep IM open at all times.
Locating People - The only easy ways for this to work on IRC is hope that the person you are looking for is using the same nick they always have, and that the/notify works for you. On the other hand, since you can't change usernames on the fly on IM, you will always be able to locate somebody unless that person has completely left the system (and dropped the username).
The 'Instant' part - assuming from the above that you leave your IM client open at all times, then you have a quick way of dropping a line to a person without having to open a mail client (Yes, with today's computers, that's negliable, but think from a joe average POV). The fact that many of the features of IRC and email are grouped into IM as features you can access 'instantly' without opening another program is a plus to most people.
Location independence - As long as you have a copy of the IM client and an internet connection, you can check into IM and look at your messages, files, or whatever without having to download them at that time --- and then when you get to your 'home' machine, proceed to grab them. With IRC, you're limited to any services bots that might be there for messages, and totally SOL'ed with files.
Legitamite business uses - Many businesses are beginning to use IM as a way for interoffice communication, since for power computer users, sending off an instant message can be faster than
picking up the phone and calling that person. In addition, it's easy to connect two sites of the same company without incuring long distance changes. And as pointed out in regards to the AOL/TW merger, the potental to add video conferencing to AOL's IM is there -- instant video communications with fellow workers is a dream for many PHBs.
Now certainly there are much better things about IRC than IM, IMO, but most are related to the stability and scalability of the system. In addition, there's some privacy concerns, given that with IM, all your information and messages are going through a central server. And there are some things that IM can do that IRC can't, and vice versa. But from John Q. Public, those 'important' features are in IM, and not IRC.
..which in of itself is questionable about fair use. Is it wrong to say that to beat the giant baby at the end of Half-Life, I have to shoot at the yellow crystal, then at the brain? I don't think so.
Mind you, this is a commercial venture (the unofficial guides), so fair uses are limited because of this - there is obvious competition between Nintendo's official guide and Imagine's Unofficial. But this has been going on for years, and if this is only the first time Nintendo has thought about it, they might have a tougher time (Remember: you have to fight copyrights at all times, lest you lose them; you can let patents and trademarks go undefended and fight them at the very end without problems from the legal side).
But if Nintendo wins here, it's a stone's throw away from taking action against numerous fan-based game guides (include one that I wrote for Marathon). Most of these are NOT commercial ventures, so fair use is a bit stronger, but still, this situation is not a good one to think about.
Finally, if Imagine is successful at this, I would love to see this used as a precident to attack how most major sporting leagues can effectively block unofficial reporting of games (eg "any unofficial use of this telecast is strictly prohibited"). By their conditions, you're not even allowed to talk about the big play that won the game at the water cooler, though we know that fair use steps it. But say I've got a mailing list for fans of a team, and after each game I write a summary of the game (using the publicly broadcasted information as opposed to the next day's sports page), and then distribute and archive it to that list freely, I should not have to worry about retailation, because all I'm doing is writing in my own words how I percieved the game -- just like writing a game guide is your perception of the game. A few more legal jumps would mean that silly restrictions on Internet reporting at the Olypics would be removed, and the dominos topple from there.
And trust me a color coded mail is more readable / presentable than one filled with underscores and stars.
This may be one division between anyone introduced to the Internet pre-Netscape, and those after that point (give or take a year). I have no problem with the defacto standards of viewing plaintext "markup" like *emphasized words* or SHOUTING, since I've been reading email and usenet for at least 10 years now. And on the other hand, I find that outside of bold and italics, any color coding done in passages is distracting. The above poster obviously feels different. And while I would love my way to be the right way, I do realize that 90% of the people using the net today are going to be of the latter state of mind. C'est la vie, but here's the important point:
We're moving 'backwards' in terms of display technologies as we get more wireless internet devices where you only have a 24x4 character display to show a message. If only text email existed, there would not be a single problem with handling mail on these devices, but with HTML email abuses, they have to figure out how to parse everything to fit on that. Sure, maybe in 2 years we'll have holograph, 3d displays on all these things capable of effectively large graphic displays, but the NOW is that we don't. If you design for the most effective lowest common demonator, no one will complain. ("Most effective" to avoid any slippery slopes -- I *expect* that to play Q3A, I'm going to need a powerful system, but to read email, I should be able to do that on a Vic20.).
Nearly any email client that has HTML abilities, starting from the first release of NS Communicator, has the option to turn on or off HTML email sending -- but it's an either all-or-nothing situation. Someone else posted that Lookout now can do this option on a contact-by-contact person, but this is still not enough. It needs to be both by email addresses as well as by domains, otherwise if I've decided to use HTML email for any intra-office messages, I'd have to add EVERY person to my contact list, and then set that option. I *don't* think so.
As soon as you talk HTML, you must think portability across platforms and applications, because HTML is supposed to be a platform-independant solution. (on the other hand, plain text *is* a solution, hands down). But 90% of the problem with HTML messages that are sent are the same 90% of the problem with the rest of the web -- these people have no idea how to write HTML code properly. From using malformed HTML markup to using IE-only tricks, these messages are barely readable on most browsers -- strip away the HTML to leave text, and you usually have something unreadable due to poor formating or hiding the content in the HTML (even though, theorhetically, removing HTML tags from a proper HTML document should leave a easily readible plain text file). This is a big concern to anyone using wireless internet devices, such as cel phones -- if that HTML message parsed down to text only is unreadible at 80x24, imaging trying to read it at 25x4, or worse.
You then have to conside the other problem, and that is compatibility with HTML browsers. Most of these email clients link to an existing browser engine, and embed it into a window. Lookout, obvious, and IIRC, Evolution will grab the Gecko engine from mozilla to do any HTML display. So you first run into the standard problems with HTML rendering in the various engines. But particularly on the windows side, these instances of the browser are NOT sandboxes -- all the standard hacks and the like will work in terms of, say, malicious buffer overruns from URLs. In addition, the 1x1 web bugs and other tricks can easily be inserted into the HTML email, and since you usually can't set different privacy and security for that browser instance, you're as vunerable as you would be with normal browsing. Plus I can send code in HTML that would normally be picked up by a cookie-blocker or such if the user had viewed the page via a normal HTTP connection, but would not be blocked in this case, and do the usual tricks of reporting back to a server.
Add to all of this that there is no clear cut standard for sending HTML email to begin with. Sometimes I'll get it in the plaintext client as HTML right after the headers, sometimes as two parts of a mime-encoded message, sometimes as an attachment -- it's a mess!
I believe that two things need to be done to make HTML email a practical thing that sits on top of the current email system that we have. Obviously, we need a standard for how to send and recieve email. Modifying the RFC for email servers to be able to recognize when an email client is sending in HTML, so that it can tag the message appropriately, and then when mail is being retrieved, a numeric can be sent prior to retrival to indicate that HTML or plaintext is desired (ala BINARY and ASCII of ftp servers). The server then would strip any HTML out of messages that contain it before sending the message out, if the plain text feature was enabled.
The other thing, more serious, is to develop a subset of HTML that can be used for email, similar to how/. does a trim of html -encoded messages. Restrict the set to only layout messages, such as B, H1, as well as links etc, and avoid anything that moves outside of just display, such as IMG, SCRIPT, EMBED, etc, such that what really can be sent is a what RTF can provide, in HTML terms. Mail clients can parse this before sending, but the job again would be up to the mail servers.
Putting such a new email server in place, as long as the way HTML was sent uses one of the current methods in use today, would not disrupt how older servers would continue to function, since only the input and output servers have any extra processing of messages to do. But there's a long way to go before this could be commonplace everywhere... it would require much help from MS and other vendors, and they're probably not going to cave in from this.
I wish people would not use "HTML email" as a feature -- this is completely breaking the way that email is supposed to work based on the RFC for email servers. While I run Linux with X all the time, I use mutt because it's usually more configurable and I get my work done much faster than if I had to use a graphical client (even a good one under Linux). I suspect I'm not the only one in that boat. So no matter how much HTML email is pushed at me, I can't (effectively) read it.
Now, I completely understand that in intraoffice communications, because of the braindead-ness of PHBes, HTML or formatted email proliforates badly, just because they can bold the words "and I want it done NOW!". So it's completely understandable that an email client that is to be used on the rogue linux back in a WinNT environment is going to need to not only understand Lookout's protocols but also the ability to view HTML email directly. In addition, it would help to make conversions from WinNT to Linux systems if such were to occur more easier for the PHBs since they still have their pretty email system.
But please oh please limit it to just that. It should not be too hard to set up, by default, limiting HTML email to certain address sets, specifically ones with the same domain as yours, as well as making sure that HTML email is disabled on a normal install. The address sets that can accept HTML should be able to be customized, of course, in case you have contacts that you normally use HTML email with. I don't care if your office mates all email each other in HTML, but if you have to mail me or anyone else on the outside world that you don't know yet, make sure it's in plain text. The current batch of clients that support HTML email (include Lookout) do NOT have any such feature, and this would be highly recommended for any further email clients.
Actually, you probably would die from brain-related problems at some point. You cannot reproduce *that* organ, particularly some of the fundamental system controls built into it.
But if this is not a hoax or a false result, we are probably looking at 10 to 20 years into the future the ability to replace organs with no concerns on compatibility. I certainly hope this is a sign for the human race to significantly think about ZPG. I don't think we need to go as strict as China (one child per family, forcing negative population growth), but, for example in the states, start taking away tax credits for any children beyond the second, or taxing MORE for those (include list of exclusions for this here). Enough sci-fi books have tried to predict what the over-population of earth would be like, and in most cases, that point occured AFTER we had colonized the moon or another planet.
It's being said that it isn't that bad because it doesn't destroy data itself, it merely unloads codes and tries to find more sites to unload more codes.
But reading the advisories, it suggests that the unloaded code not only is a standard script kiddie root pack, but also emails to some sites, most likely the information on how the box reporting can be further hacked. It can tie up your internet connection since the portscanning that it appears to be doing is rapid. It also rewrites the default index page of the server (assuming you use default installs) with that "powered by raman noodles" page.
Which means that if you have this on your system, the only precaution you can take is a full system reinstall least you be "0wn3d" in the future, because some script kiddie somewhere has a way into root on your box.
So this is VERY dangerous as there's a potental for abuse, but that has to be initiated by a human contact, which downgrades this from a virus to a worm. As others have said, if the rootpack had a simple "rm -rf/" or similarly damaging command in it's script, it would be a virus.
I have to agree here: I'm in Chicago. My electric bill for the last 5 months (between the need for central A/C and the current crisis in CA) was around $50.00 a month; during the summer it was $60, thanks to central A/C:D.
My natural gas bills were around $15 a month during the summer, mostly due to the flat customer charge and hot water heater.
Now the natural gas crisis is here; Chicago had a pretty cold Dec, and my first heating bill was $85. Since I have gas heat, I expected my electric bill to remain untouched, but it went up by $10 to $60. I don't think the christmas lights that I had used were costing that much in electricity relative to computers being on 24/7, etc, and it turns out that the cost per kW has gone up. Chicago's certainly not in an electrical shortage at the moment (we might be in the summer when everyone turns on their A/C units, but there's talk of peaker plants), so the only reasons for this increase is the fact that the cost of generating electricity is also up, mostly due from the fact that it's being generated by burning natural gas, but since this is not the only source of electricity, it's not as great an increase as the gas bill.
But, as a country, we need to build more plants, screw NIMBY-philosphies. We need nuclear plants, but people scream bloody murder when the concept is raised even though nuclear plants are much much cleaner and more effective in power delivery than gas burners. The US should be producing 125% of the power used at the maximum load experienced within the last year, and if not there, build more plants or retrofit existing ones to improve output. And rules need to be set up on power sharing; I've read how Oregon and Wash. state power co's are avoiding sharing of the electricity with Calif., partially because they are in similar high-usage periods, but also they want to make sure they get their money from sharing the power, and given that the CA power co's are going bankrupt from this, they haven't that protection. There should be a federal level of guarenteed payment back to the sharing power co, and make the borrowing co pay back that money to the gov't over time with interest.
What they're saying is that in the DivX code, there is non-GPL'ed but copyrighted-and-distributable code from real business entities. Using such code for personal or non-commercial use won't be a problem, ala GPL issues, but even if you tried to make a commercial product without or with source available (ala GPL requirements), you'd still be violating the copyright of those business entities. This is not OpenDivX's problem - only those that might exploit the code "for business purposes".
If there were patents involved, then even just opening up the source without paying massive royalities to the companies in question would be a problem for OpenDivX.
But patents and copyrights are two distinct issues and that CNet quote is baaaad.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess all those warnings on more intrusive advertizing will be realized now...
And the next step up from galaxies is "galactic cluster", where again it's suggested there's some central object which several galaxies tend to gather about, but certainly not as strong that keeps planets in orbit or stars in orbit.
A good example is the process of hydrodesulfurization (HDS). Sulfur is a natural component of crude oil; gas that is burnt with sulfur in it will produce sulfur dioxide, which, of course, is bad as it helps with smog creation. In addition, sulfur is what causes most cat converters to degrade, and if/when we go to fuel cells, sulfur will completely ruin the typical fuel cell catalyst (platinum based).
So the process of HDS removes sulfur from the crude oil to create hydrogen sulfide and clean hydrocarbons; in this form, it's easy to extract the hydrogen sulfide and convert it separately to a non-toxic/hazardous waste form. The problem is is that the sulfur is buried deep in the molecules of hydrocarbon, and to remove these sulfurs will generally destroy the hydrocarbon into smaller pieces.
Now we base our gasoline ratings on octane number, which is a combination of how large the hydrocarbons are and how many are olefins (double bonds) or not; a large number of long-chained hydrocarbons or olefins increases the octane number. If you try to remove all the sulfur before you distribute the gas, the octane number will drop terribly, and the gas will be worse than with the sulfur in it, as there's a better chance of CO production and reduced feul efficiency from low octane gas. So there's a practical balance between the effective sulfur removal levels, and the quality of gasoline that we get.
Mind you, as we head towards feul cells that can use methanol or ethanol as produced by bioproducts as opposed to crude, the amount of sulfur to start with will be much lower, and octane number will not be as great; you still need to deal with it, but you don't really have to worry that much about how much fragmentation of the hydrocarbon that you get.
Now, IMO, most of the problem with Global Warming is not a result of the last 20 years, but of the first 40 years of the 20th century with the unfettered industrial revolution and two wars that introduced aircraft to the world. Since at least 1960, we've been aware of environmental damage, and while it may have not been a consumer issue until the 1980s, we as scientists and engineers were already aware of it and layed the groundwork for what research is being done today to continually improve what we've got. I also think that we still don't have sufficient evidence to yet conclude if we are in a warming or cooling cycle for the planet, though I can't disagree that mankind has had a small effect.
It wouldn't bend around them, radio waves would pass through them. Radio waves tend to be too low of an energy to be picked up by atoms to induce electrion jumps, so they'll pass through objects with no problem (that's why you can get radio and attenna TV inside a house) .. although with a planetary-sized body there will be some distortion. Light waves, on the other hand, are easily picked up by most metallic substances, and therefore will be absorbed.
I'm not saying SETI should be shut down -- because there is the possiblity we'll get something and all these arguements are moot. But it's more just looking at the big picture and realizing that we might just be shooting pot shots into space.
Now certainly I may be way low -- it HAS been 65 million years from the last major planetary event that caused a mass extinction, but even if you start pushing the timeframe of humans up to 100,000 or a million years, you are still talking about blinks of an eye relative to the estimated age of the universe. But again, the key thing is that one takes the assumption that races might die out -- if you assume otherwise, then yes, as the age of the universe increases, the chance for finding life should increase also.
I think the only thing we can safely say about extraterrestial life is that if we are going to find any with sufficient technological progress within the 'lifetime' of humankind, it will have to be from a very small cluster of stars near us, which might have been formed near the same time after the big bang, such that planets capable of supporting life would have all started the evolution timer at the same point. But again, that rate of evolution is so different that the chances of us seeing one another would be very very high.
What I think we should focus on more (and it would be hard to say if we will be able to) is to look for the evidence of early life (single celled protozoa), or evidence of a race gone dorment, on other planets in the nearby cluster. Finding such would at least tell us that the development of life was not a chance happenstance on Earth.
A good recent case: here in Chicago there was ex-stripped-mine land that had filled over the years and migratory birds were using the small landlocked lake as a temporary waypoint during the early spring/late fall. Local communities, looking to expand their landfills and who owned the rights to the land, wanted to use this area and turn it into landfill. The EPA tried to step in and say that it was protected land because of the migratory birds. It went to court, and just recently was completed by the Supreme Court, which said that the EPA did NOT have the power to controll non-navigatable bodies of water as such, and therefore the cities could go ahead and use it as a new landfill. The EPA has also lost similar cases in the past, particularly when they say they will find companies that put out a hazardous chemical above a certain regulation limit, and affected companies have taken them to court, winning on the arguement that the EPA does not have that much power as granted by Congress.
Now, what the FCC has done here is certain not any regulations; they were more a mediator between content providers and those that will make what that content will be displayed on, as to make sure that there is a common format. They aren't forcing any content provider or manufacture to do anything here; in particular there's no fine or punishment that the FCC hands down if a given manufacture decides to ignore the specification. True, there is the realistic penalty that manufactures that don't comply will have equipment that fails to work with the signal that the olgiarchy of broadcasters plan to put out, but the FCC can't really comment on that until it sees how the system pans out.
Actually, I'd have expanded this question to include: Who regulates the ISP industry in general? If it's not already under the FCC, it should, and even if it is, is there a special taskforce within the department to handle how ISPs work specifically?
Second, the agreement does not prohibit the recording; it simply allows that an extra bit of data be included in the HDTV broadcast that says "can be recorded" or "cannot be recorded", and that this will be standardized so that equipment makers need to know how to handle it. Certainly there is abuse for this, say if NBC sets this bit to non-recordable for ALL of it's programming, but the idea is that it is meant to protect pay-per-view events and premiem cable channels. Mind you, the FCC should have put more clauses in this (such as "not more than 5% of your programming can contain this if you are a public or non-premium cable channel") as to protect fair-use.
I think what needs to happen is to have a paradigm shift in the way that RIAA/MPAA and others think about copyrights -- if they spent less time in the vigalence of copyrights and instead spent more in improving quality and increasing quantity of titles available, they would still pull in the same profits and possibly more.
Instead of such tactics, you need to go after the big people, the ones that run these spamhouses. At least for telemarketters, we have a legal way to deal with that in terms of the do-not-call lists. If the telemarketting group violates that, it can hurt them. Unfortunately, we have no similar provision for mail, mostly because it's non-disruptive and costs us little. We ought to invoke regulations with "do-not-mail" lists for mail as well. These are probably harder to maintain, but *good*, that's the way they should be -- if they want to try targetted advertizing, they better be ready to make sure their target is true.
Of course, all this wouldn't be a problem if we had privacy laws that prevent magazine subscriptions being shared with credit card companies. I get at least 5 of these a WEEK, and they're getting worse. A friend got one with the amazing low APR of 40% -- yeah, right! Maybe require that any advertizing that you get in the mail needs to specifically state where they got your name and address from such that you know which magazine subscriptions do such tactics.
Every employee of NASA does not work on how to send rockets into space. Based on 4 years of interning at NASA Lewis (now Glenn) in Cleveland, I would say that there, only about 20% of the staff was working directly on technology for space-bound missions. The rest were doing the 'A' thing , aeronautics. I was particularly involved with materials research where they were trying to make materials with better stress handling. If we could do that, not only would it help design lighter and better planes, but could easily filter down into more commonplace vehicles. It may not be a direct link, but the possibility is there.
And don't underestimate the value of extra-terrestial research. We as mankind seriously need to think about getting off the rock known as Earth within the next 200 to 500 years, not only for expected population growth but to avoid having all of our eggs in one basket should there be a cosmic-scale disaster. Maybe we should be pushing NASA to work more with other worldwide space programs to create joint ventures to do this, but it's got to happen.
And finally, remember that the millions of dollars that NASA might get in a year is about the same cost for ONE of our best stealth planes. Which, after all is said and done, is going to be of the most value to the general populace? I'd think it would be NASA research which can have a beneficial effect on society.
Go to the Rinkworks (www.rinkworks.com) site, and look for the Bad Bad Bad Movie review page, and find the animated LotR movie entry (this is NOT the one done by Rankin/Bass who also did the Hobbit as a movie). I can't remember when the above movie came out (I think early 70s), but it was advertizes as the whole The Lord of the Rings. When people saw it, they found out it was only part 1 of 2 that they got; thankfully, based on the quality that the comments include above, part 2 was never made.
Tolkien is much more challenging to read, and when I picked up the Ring trilogy to read about 2 years ago, it took me a good 3 weeks of before-bed reading to finish one book out of it.
(And on a curiosity note, I find it ironic that several fantasy series all are based on "boy meets strange people, discovers he's got special/magical powers, goes on to save the world" type of ideas, including the Ring triology, Edding's series, Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, as well as the Sword of Shanadara (sp) series -- add to it Harry Potter, as well as Ender's Game -- I wonder why it always seems to come back to this theme, and nearly always from the POV of the 'boy' in question.
Now certainly there are much better things about IRC than IM, IMO, but most are related to the stability and scalability of the system. In addition, there's some privacy concerns, given that with IM, all your information and messages are going through a central server. And there are some things that IM can do that IRC can't, and vice versa. But from John Q. Public, those 'important' features are in IM, and not IRC.
Mind you, this is a commercial venture (the unofficial guides), so fair uses are limited because of this - there is obvious competition between Nintendo's official guide and Imagine's Unofficial. But this has been going on for years, and if this is only the first time Nintendo has thought about it, they might have a tougher time (Remember: you have to fight copyrights at all times, lest you lose them; you can let patents and trademarks go undefended and fight them at the very end without problems from the legal side).
But if Nintendo wins here, it's a stone's throw away from taking action against numerous fan-based game guides (include one that I wrote for Marathon). Most of these are NOT commercial ventures, so fair use is a bit stronger, but still, this situation is not a good one to think about.
Finally, if Imagine is successful at this, I would love to see this used as a precident to attack how most major sporting leagues can effectively block unofficial reporting of games (eg "any unofficial use of this telecast is strictly prohibited"). By their conditions, you're not even allowed to talk about the big play that won the game at the water cooler, though we know that fair use steps it. But say I've got a mailing list for fans of a team, and after each game I write a summary of the game (using the publicly broadcasted information as opposed to the next day's sports page), and then distribute and archive it to that list freely, I should not have to worry about retailation, because all I'm doing is writing in my own words how I percieved the game -- just like writing a game guide is your perception of the game. A few more legal jumps would mean that silly restrictions on Internet reporting at the Olypics would be removed, and the dominos topple from there.
This may be one division between anyone introduced to the Internet pre-Netscape, and those after that point (give or take a year). I have no problem with the defacto standards of viewing plaintext "markup" like *emphasized words* or SHOUTING, since I've been reading email and usenet for at least 10 years now. And on the other hand, I find that outside of bold and italics, any color coding done in passages is distracting. The above poster obviously feels different. And while I would love my way to be the right way, I do realize that 90% of the people using the net today are going to be of the latter state of mind. C'est la vie, but here's the important point:
We're moving 'backwards' in terms of display technologies as we get more wireless internet devices where you only have a 24x4 character display to show a message. If only text email existed, there would not be a single problem with handling mail on these devices, but with HTML email abuses, they have to figure out how to parse everything to fit on that. Sure, maybe in 2 years we'll have holograph, 3d displays on all these things capable of effectively large graphic displays, but the NOW is that we don't. If you design for the most effective lowest common demonator, no one will complain. ("Most effective" to avoid any slippery slopes -- I *expect* that to play Q3A, I'm going to need a powerful system, but to read email, I should be able to do that on a Vic20.).
As soon as you talk HTML, you must think portability across platforms and applications, because HTML is supposed to be a platform-independant solution. (on the other hand, plain text *is* a solution, hands down). But 90% of the problem with HTML messages that are sent are the same 90% of the problem with the rest of the web -- these people have no idea how to write HTML code properly. From using malformed HTML markup to using IE-only tricks, these messages are barely readable on most browsers -- strip away the HTML to leave text, and you usually have something unreadable due to poor formating or hiding the content in the HTML (even though, theorhetically, removing HTML tags from a proper HTML document should leave a easily readible plain text file). This is a big concern to anyone using wireless internet devices, such as cel phones -- if that HTML message parsed down to text only is unreadible at 80x24, imaging trying to read it at 25x4, or worse.
You then have to conside the other problem, and that is compatibility with HTML browsers. Most of these email clients link to an existing browser engine, and embed it into a window. Lookout, obvious, and IIRC, Evolution will grab the Gecko engine from mozilla to do any HTML display. So you first run into the standard problems with HTML rendering in the various engines. But particularly on the windows side, these instances of the browser are NOT sandboxes -- all the standard hacks and the like will work in terms of, say, malicious buffer overruns from URLs. In addition, the 1x1 web bugs and other tricks can easily be inserted into the HTML email, and since you usually can't set different privacy and security for that browser instance, you're as vunerable as you would be with normal browsing. Plus I can send code in HTML that would normally be picked up by a cookie-blocker or such if the user had viewed the page via a normal HTTP connection, but would not be blocked in this case, and do the usual tricks of reporting back to a server.
Add to all of this that there is no clear cut standard for sending HTML email to begin with. Sometimes I'll get it in the plaintext client as HTML right after the headers, sometimes as two parts of a mime-encoded message, sometimes as an attachment -- it's a mess!
I believe that two things need to be done to make HTML email a practical thing that sits on top of the current email system that we have. Obviously, we need a standard for how to send and recieve email. Modifying the RFC for email servers to be able to recognize when an email client is sending in HTML, so that it can tag the message appropriately, and then when mail is being retrieved, a numeric can be sent prior to retrival to indicate that HTML or plaintext is desired (ala BINARY and ASCII of ftp servers). The server then would strip any HTML out of messages that contain it before sending the message out, if the plain text feature was enabled.
The other thing, more serious, is to develop a subset of HTML that can be used for email, similar to how /. does a trim of html -encoded messages. Restrict the set to only layout messages, such as B, H1, as well as links etc, and avoid anything that moves outside of just display, such as IMG, SCRIPT, EMBED, etc, such that what really can be sent is a what RTF can provide, in HTML terms. Mail clients can parse this before sending, but the job again would be up to the mail servers.
Putting such a new email server in place, as long as the way HTML was sent uses one of the current methods in use today, would not disrupt how older servers would continue to function, since only the input and output servers have any extra processing of messages to do. But there's a long way to go before this could be commonplace everywhere... it would require much help from MS and other vendors, and they're probably not going to cave in from this.
Now, I completely understand that in intraoffice communications, because of the braindead-ness of PHBes, HTML or formatted email proliforates badly, just because they can bold the words "and I want it done NOW!". So it's completely understandable that an email client that is to be used on the rogue linux back in a WinNT environment is going to need to not only understand Lookout's protocols but also the ability to view HTML email directly. In addition, it would help to make conversions from WinNT to Linux systems if such were to occur more easier for the PHBs since they still have their pretty email system.
But please oh please limit it to just that. It should not be too hard to set up, by default, limiting HTML email to certain address sets, specifically ones with the same domain as yours, as well as making sure that HTML email is disabled on a normal install. The address sets that can accept HTML should be able to be customized, of course, in case you have contacts that you normally use HTML email with. I don't care if your office mates all email each other in HTML, but if you have to mail me or anyone else on the outside world that you don't know yet, make sure it's in plain text. The current batch of clients that support HTML email (include Lookout) do NOT have any such feature, and this would be highly recommended for any further email clients.
But if this is not a hoax or a false result, we are probably looking at 10 to 20 years into the future the ability to replace organs with no concerns on compatibility. I certainly hope this is a sign for the human race to significantly think about ZPG. I don't think we need to go as strict as China (one child per family, forcing negative population growth), but, for example in the states, start taking away tax credits for any children beyond the second, or taxing MORE for those (include list of exclusions for this here). Enough sci-fi books have tried to predict what the over-population of earth would be like, and in most cases, that point occured AFTER we had colonized the moon or another planet.
But reading the advisories, it suggests that the unloaded code not only is a standard script kiddie root pack, but also emails to some sites, most likely the information on how the box reporting can be further hacked. It can tie up your internet connection since the portscanning that it appears to be doing is rapid. It also rewrites the default index page of the server (assuming you use default installs) with that "powered by raman noodles" page.
Which means that if you have this on your system, the only precaution you can take is a full system reinstall least you be "0wn3d" in the future, because some script kiddie somewhere has a way into root on your box.
So this is VERY dangerous as there's a potental for abuse, but that has to be initiated by a human contact, which downgrades this from a virus to a worm. As others have said, if the rootpack had a simple "rm -rf /" or similarly damaging command in it's script, it would be a virus.
My natural gas bills were around $15 a month during the summer, mostly due to the flat customer charge and hot water heater.
Now the natural gas crisis is here; Chicago had a pretty cold Dec, and my first heating bill was $85. Since I have gas heat, I expected my electric bill to remain untouched, but it went up by $10 to $60. I don't think the christmas lights that I had used were costing that much in electricity relative to computers being on 24/7, etc, and it turns out that the cost per kW has gone up. Chicago's certainly not in an electrical shortage at the moment (we might be in the summer when everyone turns on their A/C units, but there's talk of peaker plants), so the only reasons for this increase is the fact that the cost of generating electricity is also up, mostly due from the fact that it's being generated by burning natural gas, but since this is not the only source of electricity, it's not as great an increase as the gas bill.
But, as a country, we need to build more plants, screw NIMBY-philosphies. We need nuclear plants, but people scream bloody murder when the concept is raised even though nuclear plants are much much cleaner and more effective in power delivery than gas burners. The US should be producing 125% of the power used at the maximum load experienced within the last year, and if not there, build more plants or retrofit existing ones to improve output. And rules need to be set up on power sharing; I've read how Oregon and Wash. state power co's are avoiding sharing of the electricity with Calif., partially because they are in similar high-usage periods, but also they want to make sure they get their money from sharing the power, and given that the CA power co's are going bankrupt from this, they haven't that protection. There should be a federal level of guarenteed payment back to the sharing power co, and make the borrowing co pay back that money to the gov't over time with interest.
If there were patents involved, then even just opening up the source without paying massive royalities to the companies in question would be a problem for OpenDivX.
But patents and copyrights are two distinct issues and that CNet quote is baaaad.