Did anyone else blink an eye at TFA's estimate of how much data CREATED this year? From TFA:
Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.
So, 70.5E9 Hours of video? So, 1 billion people each created 70.5 hours of video worth of data? That's pretty impressive, to the extent that I question the 161 Exabyte figure for internet users. If they include scientific data collection, I'd buy that number, but that doesn't effect our internet; have their own internet, internet 2. Anyone else have a way to explain the data creation figure they quote?
To stretch your box a bit, why do mailing lists have to be Push? Isn't a blog with people following it on RSS readers as immediate as email? People desiring email could still take an RSS feed and use a special reader or reader web site that turned Blog posts to email which you would white list.
Subscription one way mailing lists aren't neccessary; there now exist better technologies for broadcasting the same content to multiple recipients who have voiced their desire to receive it. For instance, with some custom client software, RSS could be bridged to become email. A simple Blog advertising sales would allow for immediate subscription and unsubscription even. (To replace more collaborative mailing lists, a forum is probably better, but we could still use RSS on them.)
There are some interesting implications to an RSS to Email bridge though. On the plus for the user, you could filter the blog posts like you would email because a post would would become an email message. On the downside for the user, companies might use this blog more than they're using a mailing list, but the traffic could be filtered by the bridge or by the email delivery system if there were certain things you really wanted to hear about. (Content provider applied tags seem ideal for this filtering.) On the risk side for the content providers, as opposed to content providers managing the rate emails are sent, these bridges would be waiting out there to slurp up any new content, and would in fact be constantly pinging the system to find new content under the current architecture. So, accordingly, if these bridges caught on, high subscription blogs of any sort might need to use custom RSS server code to to manage bandwidth, but that seems doable. (Better to update modern RSS services as they expand than try to change the existing email system with lots of old crusty code running around.) For a blog with many subscribers, unless you lie to some of the users accessing the RSS feed, (say there's no new content when you can't handle the load), new content would essentially get delivered to all people on the blog over a short time period. This could cause the servers' load to peak as soon as the RSS->Email bridges discovered the content was out there.
All in all, these seem like more manageable issues than trying to allow for mass email lists as we patch up our email system to keep spammers from gaming it. Heck, authenticated RSS could possibly replace email between known contacts if the framework were set up. You'd know that a message came from your bank because you talked to your bank and they told you what the message was, and phishing would be dead. In this world for new contacts, and that might be more manageable. Maybe in this world of RSS, your email could turn into various local RSS sources and the email reader would go away and the RSS readers would get a bit more functional to allow for refiling of mail. Whatever the exact architecture, we're going to need to think outside the box that is "Email is everything" to get rid of the scourge of spam.
I've seen all sorts of people here comment that email is getting too risky for businesses to use. From where I stand, that's not the real problem. The problem that's at the center of both the malware and spam problems is that it's become very hard to quickly determine the credentials of a person sending you information. In the case of email, the solution to the malware problem is simple: strip out all html tags and attachments off as the mail is received. There is no way to get malware from an email without active content. (HTML, Attachments, etc.)
When you make email safe, you then have the real problem distilled to its essence: How do internet users safely receive files over the internet. And the answer to that is authentication, but then credentials become tradeable items, and you have malware going after credentials.
The problem is not with email, it's with the whole internet's permissiveness. Every solution you put in place gets knocked to its core problem that there's no easy way to definitively say what person you're interacting with at the time. And this will be a tough sell; We're used to an anonymous internet. To solve the problem of internet crime once and for all, I predict that we will have to give up our ability to become entirely anonomous. There will be bumps in the road, but once everything that lands on your computer can be attributed to a real person, your email and internet will be as safe and sane as your US-Mail. Maybe even safer, because it will be easier to exclude content from people with bad reputations.
Well, it will prevent a man in the middle attack, but if you get spyware on your machine, it still has a good chance at an opportunity to put itself in the stream between your app and the encryption routines. Vista theoretically prevents this with signing, but how long will it be before that is cracked and there are circumventions that only rely on a bad answer to a single, "Are you sure you want to do that" challenge, before they get in?
Just how prevalent are these men who are in the middle? I've yet to hear about an actual attacker using this strategy. Is that because the middle men are pretty much undetectable and many compromises happen without the user noticing that he didn't do anything 'wrong?' The crackers seem to have an easy enough time phishing their way into your data or doing social engineering to land an executable on your machine. It seems like it's much harder to set yourself up as this man in the middle than it is to find exploits or engineer your way in. No amount of SSL will save users from sending data to the bad guys by impersonation. Once a cracker finds his exploit and has landed code or a file in an arbitrary location on your machine, you're compromised, and the gig is up for the user. Even SSL is vulnerable, since it is so inconvenient, nay, near impossible to run many programs as a limited user under XP. Maybe Vista makes progress, maybe the user clicks so often that he gets duped into nullifying this "security."
That said, I think a browser actually accessing non-"browser system" files on your disk without a warning of some kind is a bad idea. Clicking on links is exploit sensitive, sure, but why make being a man in the middle more than a data collecting trick?
I guess the part that puzzles me, even as a Christian, is what all these the fossils deep in the earth are about if there was no death before man came along. How could there be evidence of the death of so many other plants and animals deep in the ground, long before there's any evidence that man died, or even existed if there were no death before Man existed? Let's forget about all the radiometric aging issues. Independent of actual dates, it seems like there's evidence that a lot of time passed between the first layer of ground that includes dead plants, much later dead animals of all sorts that don't exist any more which also don't include human fossils, and the first layer that contains evidence of dead humans very near the surface of the earth... This seems to me to be the fundamental contradiction between observed facts, and the assertion that "there was absolutely no death before man fell into sin." Man should be among the fossils at the deepest level if he started death, but he is not. That seems like a pretty fundamental problem unless you want to assert that God created a bunch of fake evidence when he created the earth, which makes no sense.
I don't see how pi could change. It's a geometric constant for circles in two dimensional space, not a physics constant like c or e. If you have a projection (repositionning?) of a circle in a third (or even 4th or nth) dimension, and then observed as a two dimensional figure from an oblique vantage point, it becomes an ellipse or other figure, and pi is not related to this non-circle figure.
It's true that all the quantum constants could change, even gravity. If have to measure figures in more dimensions I'm pretty sure you just have to come up with different formulas to describe them.
I think it's still OK. The 1100 degrees is the creation of the cement, and we won't need a fab that can build its own raw materials, it just has to use pre-prepared materials that can be laid down a bit at a time. They don't mention the cement application environment, but it's going to be much better than 1100 degrees.
The interesting thing with the format being free is that VMware could well have a converter or interoperability mode to interoperate with Microsoft Virtual Server.
For the algae, we're already getting excess algae from the extra phosphorous that enters the environment, so we should certainly harvest that and figure out how to add any leftover nutrients back to the water after the bio fuel is made. That seems likely to be a net gain.
I question the assumption that desalinization would reduce the amount of power output from a power plant. Is it not true that after the steam or other working vapor turns the turbine to generate electricity, it is still in need of cooling. So, couldn't that extra heat be used to distill salt water in any existing plant close to an otherwise unusable water source? There are brackish aquifers quite commonly, aren't there? The steam coming off the distilation process could be condensed and used to preheat the incoming salt water like any other distillers, then instead of discharging the hot water used to cool the reactor working fluid into a river or using evaporative cooling, it could be put in tanks to cool and shipped out in pipelines and allowed to cool on the way. Transportation could be an issue if the water is consumed in a different place than it is produced.
With the difficulty of backing up drives, it may be time for the return of the versioning file system. With the proper utilities and aging mechanisms, a versionning file system would be able to insure data content as well.
Useful support facilities beyond recovering old versions would include: - Add the concept of 'vital' files to signal the filesytem to maximize the recoverability of a vital file. - Perhaps pay attention to the sticky bit for 'vital' files so you could have a directory that contained vital files by default. Could be mis-used, but features are what you make of them. - Allow configurable notifications when for when 'large' amounts of data have been changed recently, 'large' numbers of files, or when vital files have been changed. - Enable the user to set up notifications of what history is in danger when free space gets low - Allow the user to make some sort of off-line backups of only the history, only the active files, or vital files only.
This is the sort of innovation that Open Source should be doing. New concepts that solve problems that come up because the innovation of major OS vendors haven't kept up with the changing landscape.
Well, if you conclude that the size of the heliosphere has changed sizes by 10% between the two measurements, there are multiple theories that lead to that conclusion. One of which, is that the sun varies it's energy output rate on some time scale. If the sun's output actually varies, then that could affect the amount of energy the earth absorbed in a year. Energy absorbed is converted into heat, so if the energy is not then re-emmitted into space at a sufficiently high rate, the earth's surface and atmospheric temperatures go up.
Lots of ifs there, but they're all the ifs that the atmospheric scientists have to consider to come up with a model in any case. Except that they're thinking that the sun has constant output. Hard to say if that's correct or for more than the 50 years we've been in space, probably..
I kinda hate discussing this where spammers might watch, but it's a small enough jump ahead that it doesn't matter much...
The killer is when you take this knowledge of who writes to whom, and combine it with simplicity, driving hits to web sites through known interests. With address forging, you can say something, "Hey, I found a cool web site about X" It would not actually be about X (cars, computers, gardening), but it advertises something your contact would talk to you about and send you to a spam web site, and the spammer's hits go way up. If you don't say much, it's probably pretty easy to pass a touring test.
We would then have to start filtering on web addresses since a spam web site should be simple to spot. Spam filtering turns into a search engine like persuit, where you look at the links in email and decide if any of them are spam and then register the status of the web site in a database. A web site black list, if you will. With the amount of spam floating around, that could be effective.
Not saying MS is doing this, but it's not beyond possibility. Consider this additional possibility: - Suppose you had 5 or 10 microsoft employees whose job it was to meta-moderate all day, meta-moderating fairly evenly (or even positively for time's sake), but raining unfair onto any plus mod for comments that criticized microsoft.
Is there enough meta moderation going on that these guys wouldn't artificially skew the ratings? I'm not even sure I understand the ramafications of the majority of meta-moderations on a moderation being 'unfair' does the moderation go away, or does that moderator just get the karma smackdown? Seems complex.
Well, this may be quibbling about the meaning of "project", but neither NIF nor the ITER project have a chance to actually generate electricty. These are still research reactors for two different approaches, Magnetic confinement Fusion and Inertial Confinement (Laser) fusion.
I've cooled on Fusion power being a near term solution, lately. Even if we were to declare it a crisis and create a Manhatan Project type asault on fusion energy, it'll probably be at least 10 years before we get any fusion plant generating a on line, probably more like 20. After we figure out the physics there are huge engineering problems to overcome.
I still hope for fusion power, but in the near term, our hopes are better pinned to things like Cellulosic Ethanol or other bio fuels. A process that turns our waste into useful fuel for our cars seems like progress on two fronts. It may even be that it would be more useful to turn waste paper into alcohol rather than recycling because of the extra processing involved in recycling the paper.
The viruses don't create the fat out of nothing certainly, but that doesn't mean that viruses can't cause fat production. I'm not a biologist, but the following is well within the realm of possibility and would be a big problem. It could be that a virus causes the body to be reprogrammed to store more of the chemicals in food as fat instead of using them for energy. This would make a person so afflicted to need to eat more to provide the neccessary nourishment to their body to make up for the nourishment stored instead of used. If true, this would obviously cause out of control obesity. If these people dieted, they would be unhealthy because their cells were starving for lack of energy. It's possible that our bodies get out of wack in ways we haven't discovered yet, but it certainly bears more study.
Does anyone have a pointer to a web site or book that helps you calculate the average R-value of a house? Seems like it would be not tooo hard to do if you had the right rules. For instance, a table (set of tables really) or web site should be able to correlate effective house R-Value to indoor temperature change rate, average indoor temperature, average outdoor temperature. This is quite a few variables to measure at once, but basic measurements and formulas should be enough. With a few assumptions and repetition, it should be possible to roughly measure effective R-Value and see if there are be easy measures to improve the efficiency of your home. If your walls are R-18 and you measure your house to be effectively R-10, you have a lot of steps you could take before you had to worry about re-insulating your walls.
Even if you're stuck at low R-Value, you can at least compute theoretical cost savings with an ideal heating schedule. With this tool, you could also measure how much various fixes effect the over all R-Value of your house.
For most people, especially our non-career users like our parents and grandparents, a computer does nothing critical, so they're not willing to spend more money than absolutely neccessary. So if something is cheaper, but it does most of the same things that a more expensive alternative will do, it will typically gain popularity, people will put up with the annoying blemishes. Then to make people buy the more expensive or new product, they shove in more features. Since a software feature of given complexity costs roughly a fixed amount of money, putting in more features increases the cost of developing the software, or reduces the amount of money spent on making the software pretty. And if someone is so bold as to spend more money to make the same feature set with fewer blemishes, the investment is greater so the base price has to go up and the software is consequently is less popular. Because there are fewer coppies sold, each copy has to bring in more money to cover the increased investment. At the end of the day, in the current environment, the price to buy more clean software goes up for two different reasons so it's hard to make money being the company that makes better, but no more functional software.
Also there are many forces at work that cause us to always be upgrading our computers and software. We're always getting faster CPUs urging us to pack more complexity into the programs to make use of the faster CPUs. Then the software companies don't survive if people don't buy software, and they're not creative enough to come up with new ideas for new pieces of software that catch on like wild fire, so they upgrade current software. So, we're constantly making our software and hardware more complex. Combine that with the fact that we're not getting THAT much better at implementing software bug free and you get computers that fail for so many reasons that non-experts get confused. Then the non-experts get confused by the fact that by the time they learn something, it's obselete and it's time to learn the next thing already.
Well, there's a likely problem with that theory. Unless someone tells me that HD projectors have modes to take analog Video up to higher resolutions, it makes no sense to have even a component out for High Definition TV, since you lose all the shiny new resolution. Additionally, there is no reason for any Tom, Dick or Harry to buy HD-DVD of any flavor if they have an analog TV, sicne they won't get a much better image out of it. With DVD, we're basically running up against the image quality of the traditional TV, so it makes no sense to hook up a HD-DVD to an analog TV.
BUT, the granparent-cousins are correct, HD-DVD is unlikely to catch on like wild fire because of all these issues. This is especially true because all the people who thought they were preparing for HD-DVD by buying a HD-TV early are getting burned. Hollywood really doesn't want film quality coppies running around, so they're not going to be upset that it doesn't catch on.
It is really stupid that the fundemental HD interface is changing in mid stream, though. The Consumer Electronics industry may lose credibility over this.
Slashdot Mirror
Internet users will create 161 exabytes of new data this year, and this exaflood is a positive development for Internet users and businesses, IIA says. An exabyte is 1 quintillion bytes or about 1.1 billion gigabytes. One exabyte is the equivalent of about 50,000 years of DVD quality video.
So, 70.5E9 Hours of video? So, 1 billion people each created 70.5 hours of video worth of data? That's pretty impressive, to the extent that I question the 161 Exabyte figure for internet users. If they include scientific data collection, I'd buy that number, but that doesn't effect our internet; have their own internet, internet 2. Anyone else have a way to explain the data creation figure they quote?
Ah, so no more 404 messages for web pages. Cool.
What prevents the RSS from happening soon? Blogs are pretty common nowdays.
To stretch your box a bit, why do mailing lists have to be Push? Isn't a blog with people following it on RSS readers as immediate as email? People desiring email could still take an RSS feed and use a special reader or reader web site that turned Blog posts to email which you would white list.
Subscription one way mailing lists aren't neccessary; there now exist better technologies for broadcasting the same content to multiple recipients who have voiced their desire to receive it. For instance, with some custom client software, RSS could be bridged to become email. A simple Blog advertising sales would allow for immediate subscription and unsubscription even. (To replace more collaborative mailing lists, a forum is probably better, but we could still use RSS on them.)
There are some interesting implications to an RSS to Email bridge though. On the plus for the user, you could filter the blog posts like you would email because a post would would become an email message. On the downside for the user, companies might use this blog more than they're using a mailing list, but the traffic could be filtered by the bridge or by the email delivery system if there were certain things you really wanted to hear about. (Content provider applied tags seem ideal for this filtering.) On the risk side for the content providers, as opposed to content providers managing the rate emails are sent, these bridges would be waiting out there to slurp up any new content, and would in fact be constantly pinging the system to find new content under the current architecture. So, accordingly, if these bridges caught on, high subscription blogs of any sort might need to use custom RSS server code to to manage bandwidth, but that seems doable. (Better to update modern RSS services as they expand than try to change the existing email system with lots of old crusty code running around.) For a blog with many subscribers, unless you lie to some of the users accessing the RSS feed, (say there's no new content when you can't handle the load), new content would essentially get delivered to all people on the blog over a short time period. This could cause the servers' load to peak as soon as the RSS->Email bridges discovered the content was out there.
All in all, these seem like more manageable issues than trying to allow for mass email lists as we patch up our email system to keep spammers from gaming it. Heck, authenticated RSS could possibly replace email between known contacts if the framework were set up. You'd know that a message came from your bank because you talked to your bank and they told you what the message was, and phishing would be dead. In this world for new contacts, and that might be more manageable. Maybe in this world of RSS, your email could turn into various local RSS sources and the email reader would go away and the RSS readers would get a bit more functional to allow for refiling of mail. Whatever the exact architecture, we're going to need to think outside the box that is "Email is everything" to get rid of the scourge of spam.
I wouldn't be surprised that if you just gave the money back without a stink when asked, there'd be less likelyhood of having problems with the law.
I've seen all sorts of people here comment that email is getting too risky for businesses to use. From where I stand, that's not the real problem. The problem that's at the center of both the malware and spam problems is that it's become very hard to quickly determine the credentials of a person sending you information. In the case of email, the solution to the malware problem is simple: strip out all html tags and attachments off as the mail is received. There is no way to get malware from an email without active content. (HTML, Attachments, etc.)
When you make email safe, you then have the real problem distilled to its essence: How do internet users safely receive files over the internet. And the answer to that is authentication, but then credentials become tradeable items, and you have malware going after credentials.
The problem is not with email, it's with the whole internet's permissiveness. Every solution you put in place gets knocked to its core problem that there's no easy way to definitively say what person you're interacting with at the time. And this will be a tough sell; We're used to an anonymous internet. To solve the problem of internet crime once and for all, I predict that we will have to give up our ability to become entirely anonomous. There will be bumps in the road, but once everything that lands on your computer can be attributed to a real person, your email and internet will be as safe and sane as your US-Mail. Maybe even safer, because it will be easier to exclude content from people with bad reputations.
Well, it will prevent a man in the middle attack, but if you get spyware on your machine, it still has a good chance at an opportunity to put itself in the stream between your app and the encryption routines. Vista theoretically prevents this with signing, but how long will it be before that is cracked and there are circumventions that only rely on a bad answer to a single, "Are you sure you want to do that" challenge, before they get in?
Just how prevalent are these men who are in the middle? I've yet to hear about an actual attacker using this strategy. Is that because the middle men are pretty much undetectable and many compromises happen without the user noticing that he didn't do anything 'wrong?' The crackers seem to have an easy enough time phishing their way into your data or doing social engineering to land an executable on your machine. It seems like it's much harder to set yourself up as this man in the middle than it is to find exploits or engineer your way in. No amount of SSL will save users from sending data to the bad guys by impersonation. Once a cracker finds his exploit and has landed code or a file in an arbitrary location on your machine, you're compromised, and the gig is up for the user. Even SSL is vulnerable, since it is so inconvenient, nay, near impossible to run many programs as a limited user under XP. Maybe Vista makes progress, maybe the user clicks so often that he gets duped into nullifying this "security."
That said, I think a browser actually accessing non-"browser system" files on your disk without a warning of some kind is a bad idea. Clicking on links is exploit sensitive, sure, but why make being a man in the middle more than a data collecting trick?
I guess the part that puzzles me, even as a Christian, is what all these the fossils deep in the earth are about if there was no death before man came along. How could there be evidence of the death of so many other plants and animals deep in the ground, long before there's any evidence that man died, or even existed if there were no death before Man existed? Let's forget about all the radiometric aging issues. Independent of actual dates, it seems like there's evidence that a lot of time passed between the first layer of ground that includes dead plants, much later dead animals of all sorts that don't exist any more which also don't include human fossils, and the first layer that contains evidence of dead humans very near the surface of the earth... This seems to me to be the fundamental contradiction between observed facts, and the assertion that "there was absolutely no death before man fell into sin." Man should be among the fossils at the deepest level if he started death, but he is not. That seems like a pretty fundamental problem unless you want to assert that God created a bunch of fake evidence when he created the earth, which makes no sense.
I don't see how pi could change. It's a geometric constant for circles in two dimensional space, not a physics constant like c or e. If you have a projection (repositionning?) of a circle in a third (or even 4th or nth) dimension, and then observed as a two dimensional figure from an oblique vantage point, it becomes an ellipse or other figure, and pi is not related to this non-circle figure.
It's true that all the quantum constants could change, even gravity. If have to measure figures in more dimensions I'm pretty sure you just have to come up with different formulas to describe them.
I think it's still OK. The 1100 degrees is the creation of the cement, and we won't need a fab that can build its own raw materials, it just has to use pre-prepared materials that can be laid down a bit at a time. They don't mention the cement application environment, but it's going to be much better than 1100 degrees.
The interesting thing with the format being free is that VMware could well have a converter or interoperability mode to interoperate with Microsoft Virtual Server.
For the algae, we're already getting excess algae from the extra phosphorous that enters the environment, so we should certainly harvest that and figure out how to add any leftover nutrients back to the water after the bio fuel is made. That seems likely to be a net gain.
I question the assumption that desalinization would reduce the amount of power output from a power plant. Is it not true that after the steam or other working vapor turns the turbine to generate electricity, it is still in need of cooling. So, couldn't that extra heat be used to distill salt water in any existing plant close to an otherwise unusable water source? There are brackish aquifers quite commonly, aren't there? The steam coming off the distilation process could be condensed and used to preheat the incoming salt water like any other distillers, then instead of discharging the hot water used to cool the reactor working fluid into a river or using evaporative cooling, it could be put in tanks to cool and shipped out in pipelines and allowed to cool on the way. Transportation could be an issue if the water is consumed in a different place than it is produced.
With the difficulty of backing up drives, it may be time for the return of the versioning file system. With the proper utilities and aging mechanisms, a versionning file system would be able to insure data content as well.
Useful support facilities beyond recovering old versions would include:
- Add the concept of 'vital' files to signal the filesytem to maximize the recoverability of a vital file.
- Perhaps pay attention to the sticky bit for 'vital' files so you could have a directory that contained vital files by default. Could be mis-used, but features are what you make of them.
- Allow configurable notifications when for when 'large' amounts of data have been changed recently, 'large' numbers of files, or when vital files have been changed.
- Enable the user to set up notifications of what history is in danger when free space gets low
- Allow the user to make some sort of off-line backups of only the history, only the active files, or vital files only.
This is the sort of innovation that Open Source should be doing. New concepts that solve problems that come up because the innovation of major OS vendors haven't kept up with the changing landscape.
Well, if you conclude that the size of the heliosphere has changed sizes by 10% between the two measurements, there are multiple theories that lead to that conclusion. One of which, is that the sun varies it's energy output rate on some time scale. If the sun's output actually varies, then that could affect the amount of energy the earth absorbed in a year. Energy absorbed is converted into heat, so if the energy is not then re-emmitted into space at a sufficiently high rate, the earth's surface and atmospheric temperatures go up.
Lots of ifs there, but they're all the ifs that the atmospheric scientists have to consider to come up with a model in any case. Except that they're thinking that the sun has constant output. Hard to say if that's correct or for more than the 50 years we've been in space, probably..
I kinda hate discussing this where spammers might watch, but it's a small enough jump ahead that it doesn't matter much...
The killer is when you take this knowledge of who writes to whom, and combine it with simplicity, driving hits to web sites through known interests. With address forging, you can say something, "Hey, I found a cool web site about X" It would not actually be about X (cars, computers, gardening), but it advertises something your contact would talk to you about and send you to a spam web site, and the spammer's hits go way up. If you don't say much, it's probably pretty easy to pass a touring test.
We would then have to start filtering on web addresses since a spam web site should be simple to spot. Spam filtering turns into a search engine like persuit, where you look at the links in email and decide if any of them are spam and then register the status of the web site in a database. A web site black list, if you will. With the amount of spam floating around, that could be effective.
Not saying MS is doing this, but it's not beyond possibility. Consider this additional possibility:
- Suppose you had 5 or 10 microsoft employees whose job it was to meta-moderate all day, meta-moderating fairly evenly (or even positively for time's sake), but raining unfair onto any plus mod for comments that criticized microsoft.
Is there enough meta moderation going on that these guys wouldn't artificially skew the ratings? I'm not even sure I understand the ramafications of the majority of meta-moderations on a moderation being 'unfair' does the moderation go away, or does that moderator just get the karma smackdown? Seems complex.
Hmm, I wonder how many PHBs understand that they're buying the right to upgrade OSes, not a full site license?
Well, this may be quibbling about the meaning of "project", but neither NIF nor the ITER project have a chance to actually generate electricty. These are still research reactors for two different approaches, Magnetic confinement Fusion and Inertial Confinement (Laser) fusion.
I've cooled on Fusion power being a near term solution, lately. Even if we were to declare it a crisis and create a Manhatan Project type asault on fusion energy, it'll probably be at least 10 years before we get any fusion plant generating a on line, probably more like 20. After we figure out the physics there are huge engineering problems to overcome.
I still hope for fusion power, but in the near term, our hopes are better pinned to things like Cellulosic Ethanol or other bio fuels. A process that turns our waste into useful fuel for our cars seems like progress on two fronts. It may even be that it would be more useful to turn waste paper into alcohol rather than recycling because of the extra processing involved in recycling the paper.
The viruses don't create the fat out of nothing certainly, but that doesn't mean that viruses can't cause fat production. I'm not a biologist, but the following is well within the realm of possibility and would be a big problem. It could be that a virus causes the body to be reprogrammed to store more of the chemicals in food as fat instead of using them for energy. This would make a person so afflicted to need to eat more to provide the neccessary nourishment to their body to make up for the nourishment stored instead of used. If true, this would obviously cause out of control obesity. If these people dieted, they would be unhealthy because their cells were starving for lack of energy. It's possible that our bodies get out of wack in ways we haven't discovered yet, but it certainly bears more study.
Does anyone have a pointer to a web site or book that helps you calculate the average R-value of a house? Seems like it would be not tooo hard to do if you had the right rules. For instance, a table (set of tables really) or web site should be able to correlate effective house R-Value to indoor temperature change rate, average indoor temperature, average outdoor temperature. This is quite a few variables to measure at once, but basic measurements and formulas should be enough. With a few assumptions and repetition, it should be possible to roughly measure effective R-Value and see if there are be easy measures to improve the efficiency of your home. If your walls are R-18 and you measure your house to be effectively R-10, you have a lot of steps you could take before you had to worry about re-insulating your walls.
Even if you're stuck at low R-Value, you can at least compute theoretical cost savings with an ideal heating schedule. With this tool, you could also measure how much various fixes effect the over all R-Value of your house.
For most people, especially our non-career users like our parents and grandparents, a computer does nothing critical, so they're not willing to spend more money than absolutely neccessary. So if something is cheaper, but it does most of the same things that a more expensive alternative will do, it will typically gain popularity, people will put up with the annoying blemishes. Then to make people buy the more expensive or new product, they shove in more features. Since a software feature of given complexity costs roughly a fixed amount of money, putting in more features increases the cost of developing the software, or reduces the amount of money spent on making the software pretty. And if someone is so bold as to spend more money to make the same feature set with fewer blemishes, the investment is greater so the base price has to go up and the software is consequently is less popular. Because there are fewer coppies sold, each copy has to bring in more money to cover the increased investment. At the end of the day, in the current environment, the price to buy more clean software goes up for two different reasons so it's hard to make money being the company that makes better, but no more functional software.
Also there are many forces at work that cause us to always be upgrading our computers and software. We're always getting faster CPUs urging us to pack more complexity into the programs to make use of the faster CPUs. Then the software companies don't survive if people don't buy software, and they're not creative enough to come up with new ideas for new pieces of software that catch on like wild fire, so they upgrade current software. So, we're constantly making our software and hardware more complex. Combine that with the fact that we're not getting THAT much better at implementing software bug free and you get computers that fail for so many reasons that non-experts get confused. Then the non-experts get confused by the fact that by the time they learn something, it's obselete and it's time to learn the next thing already.
Quite a mess.
Well, there's a likely problem with that theory. Unless someone tells me that HD projectors have modes to take analog Video up to higher resolutions, it makes no sense to have even a component out for High Definition TV, since you lose all the shiny new resolution. Additionally, there is no reason for any Tom, Dick or Harry to buy HD-DVD of any flavor if they have an analog TV, sicne they won't get a much better image out of it. With DVD, we're basically running up against the image quality of the traditional TV, so it makes no sense to hook up a HD-DVD to an analog TV.
BUT, the granparent-cousins are correct, HD-DVD is unlikely to catch on like wild fire because of all these issues. This is especially true because all the people who thought they were preparing for HD-DVD by buying a HD-TV early are getting burned. Hollywood really doesn't want film quality coppies running around, so they're not going to be upset that it doesn't catch on.
It is really stupid that the fundemental HD interface is changing in mid stream, though. The Consumer Electronics industry may lose credibility over this.