Yes, the US government runs the site. PACER is intended to give access to court documents, however, to protect the business models of Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis there is an $0.08 charge per page, for both legal filings and for varying definitions of a page for many HTML rendered pages.
In the last quarterly billing cycle I managed to generate $38 in fees, so yes microtransactions do suck and are an extremely bad idea.
Yes, but in some cases there were still multiple CPU sockets available on one board, which logically is what a multicore CPU is. So it follows that the reasons to make GDI multi-threaded have been present since NT 3.5. On the other hand, if XP had a multi-threaded GDI implementation, Vista may have dropped that feature. Vista endured a total redesign of the graphics stack in order to simplify the graphics stack and make the stack more "stable".
Sorry, I was in a bad mood. I was tired of seeing others on the internet claim they were citizens of the state only and actually seemed surprised after being charged and convicted of tax evasion using this claim. You are both a citizen of Texas and of the United States as well. The idiotic position of citizens of the state only is better refuted here: http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html#sovereigncitizens
I also apologize for the the harshness of my original post.
OT: your sig "I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas"
I assume you aren't going to try to deny that you are also a citizen of the United States of America at this point. Other people, now in jail, have tried not to pay income taxes and other federal taxes by claiming that they had renounced their US citizenship and were now just a citizen of the State of X, but not a US citizen any longer. None of these individuals actually successfully argued in court that they were just a citizen of State X and not a US citizen, so they no longer had to pay income tax. Most idiots in this position would have found their lawyer unwilling to make that argument, or if acting as their own lawyer these idiots might have found themselves stopped as soon as they started and fined $5000 each time during trial for even trying. When one makes a frivolous argument that is not valid and that relates to income taxes in court, expect a bill. Obviously the lesson to take back in this argument and with others is to not parse words intentionally incorrectly, and that you will not find any valid loophole to avoid paying any income taxes. Just to suck it up and pay your income taxes like everyone else. If you are behind on filing a year or two, contact a tax lawyer and then negotiate with the IRS and do so before the IRS calls you, you will always end up better off that way.
is no John Carmack.... Im sorry but i ve lost all respect for Cliffy after hes abandoned PC, capitulated on the 'no free DLC on 360 mantra', and basically hasnt made anything original in a VERY long time.
And John Carmack is a NULL, everything since the original Quake has been a copy of previous versions of the engines and he has used awful techniques and idiotic features that have not stood up at all over time. CliffB is not much better, granted. So in reference to your statement, how am I to compare the value of a NULL to the value of another NULL?
I would rather have the economy of the country I live in NOT be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or cyclothymia. The last six years were fairly free of intervention, more corporate profits were good, so even more must better, right? The unnecessary depth of the current recession is the result of the lack of regulation. I'm also fairly certain that the mean value of the area below/above the curve of economic growth/decline was less than the time period after Reconstruction and before the 1920's than the mean for the time after World War II. The 1920's and the Great Depression are a special case. Government intervention is necessary to prevent wild oscillations of the economy, wild oscillations disproportionately hurt the poor and middle class, while doing less damage to the finances of the rich, which is a group I am fairly sure you are not a member of nor will you ever be. Also keep in mind that the economy can grow, but can leave to middle class and the poor behind, this is not acceptable in my book. I suppose government intervention could be lessened if corporations were responsible for more than just enriching their shareholders, but expecting corporations and their executives to be legally responsible and criminally liable for managing the health of the economy would be unpalatable to executives and their lapdog politicians. However, if you want the power and the big bucks and you want less government intervention, you better be willing to take on the responsibilities and be willing to receive any punishments if and when you screw up. Then again, if these executives can't handle themselves in a reasonable manner with the power and responsibilities they had before, why trust these executives now? Oh well, I guess these executives did disprove the Randian/Libertarian/Austrian/Chicago economic hypotheses, that free markets are self regulating and of the presence of perfect information, so I guess it isn't all bad.
You might want to look at this paper linked to below, titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"
This paper may even help explain the situations of Bennett Haselton, who submitted this rubbish, 90% of hardcore libertarians, 95% of hardcore environuts, Sarah Palin, and so many more hardcore weirdos today. However, teaching that many self-imagined geniuses that they are in fact idiots and then making it stick would be hard and a waste of time. However teaching the actual geniuses that there are stupid people out there is another problem as well.
Heck, none of the respondents who were actually bad in either of the mentioned subjects (there had to be a few) had the guts to say that they were bad at these subjects. This relates directly to the subject of the above linked paper itself. I should give the clueless answering that the survey the the benefit of the doubt, the questions had extremely poor wording. However, I still won't give the clueless the benefit of the doubt here.
and determined by their own whims which scientists were to be fired
Wasn't that more of a "Jewish thing"?
Not really, no, it affected every scientist regardless of religion. If you did not tow the party line and follow the prevailing wisdom, you were gone. These talented scientists and engineers ended up disappearing into society or leaving the country and others may have found more menial work.
Anecdote: Before World War II a non-Jewish German engineer who was a private citizen managed to scrounge up enough telephone relays, on his own, to make a decently fast calculator. (Technically the machine was Turing-complete, but it was not intended to be used that way.) It easily could have been used for decryption or other types of uses. A successor machine was partially constructed and was to be Turing-complete and thus a computer, however it was destroyed late in the war by the Allies in a bombing raid. The only government takers this calculator had was from the German Air Force who wanted to use it for calculating aerodynamic of wing designs.
The Nazi government politicized science and in doing this they squandered resources that may have helped them in the war, instead the Germans came up with weapon designs that not usable during World War II. However, later on these designs were adapted and became useful in the Cold War and elements of some of those designs are still in use today, in weapons like the AK-47 and M-16. This is the tragedy that occurs when science is politicized (though not for you or me today), politicians are not scientists, but if they have an agenda science ends up suffering. For instance, there is the agenda Bush recently pushed by stalling stem cell research and when he had global warming reports he didn't like rewritten. The needless complexity and low safety margins in the Space Shuttle are another case (thank Nixon for that).
Keep in mind that when one includes all groups targeted including Jews, 11 to 17 million people died in the The Holocaust, and that roughly six million of those who died were Jewish. That's still quite a few mentally ill individuals, political dissidents, gays, lesbians, Roma, Slavs, and Poles, Soviet POWs, among others. So please keep in mind that Jews were not the only group targeted of the Nazis for extermination.
2^40 would take very little time on a home PC, an afternoon or maybe a day.
40 bits is also the size of the keyspace used by HDCP for HDMI and DVI, for "encrypted" HD displays. I don't feel like doing the math, but determining all of the 40-bit keys used in HDCP could probably be done in a short time on a reasonable home PC, using a man in the middle attack. However, for copying HD video, one would still probably get better quality by showing Macrovision, the MPAA, and the Blu-Ray consortium that using BD+ to protect BD-ROM discs is stupid. For the original developers it was a surprisingly good scam that they managed to pull off on the movie industry. BD+ attempts to determine what physical hardware a Turing-complete machine is running, using an obfuscated Java program. This is futile because another unauthorized Turing-complete machine can easily mimic the behavior of an authorized Blu-Ray player. The ability of any Turing-complete machine to execute the same program as another Turing-complete machine allows for emulation and is a cornerstone of the Church-Turing Thesis. For instance, if done properly, an Apple IIe could run the BD+ decryption program, thus mimicking an authorized Blu-Ray player. However, one should expect quite a bit of floppy disk swapping, and good luck finding enough 5.25" disks in usable shape, especially if you decide to play a 50GB movie on that machine. On the other hand, trying it on an older machine that used punch cards. Imagine the size of a 50GB punch card deck using standard IBM punch cards.
I'm a bit confused here, I remember reading an article on hardware hard drive encryption or perhaps something else, but the my understanding was that AES-256 was just performing AES-128 encryption on the data two times in a row. The logic was that is circumvented various legal restrictions on AES keys longer than 128 bits while still being just as hard to crack as single AES encryption with a 256 bit key. I'm uncertain if I remember it right, I may be confusing it with DES, however.
I'm still using the same serial number of the XP Pro SP1 upgrade version using a copy of NT 4.0 RTM as upgrade media. I bought each copy legally, through educational channels, XP in 2002, NT 4.0 in 1997 and this copy of XP has been on at least half a dozen unique hardware configurations and reinstalled a dozen times on top of that. This copy of XP has only been installed on only one computer at a time. Two years ago, last time I reinstalled XP, this copy just authorized itself without a phone call on my part. When I did have to call MS, there nothing quite like repeating 50 numbers to a computer over the phone, by voice and being unable to punch the numbers in using the phone's keypad.
Add to that the fact that after Hitler rose to power he and his cronies politicized academia and government research, and determined by their own whims which scientists were to be fired and which projects to fund, starving certain potentially useful research project of money. This resulted in many scientists leaving Germany and moving to Allied countries. This obviously ended up giving the Allies and the US in particular additional talented scientists. The Germans developed plenty of potentially effective weapons in World War II, but Hitler was afraid to use some like chemical weapons due to unfounded fears of potential Allied retaliation with chemical weapons. Some weapon systems were not practical to deploy, and by the time other practical designs were capable of being put into mass production it was 1944 or 1945, too late to make a difference due to lack of production facilities and resources in Germany.
And, no, yammering about 'patents' doesn't cut it. For one thing, various fools have been claiming free energy since the 70s, and, guess what?
I assume that you are refering to the 1870s, in which case that's pretty much the situation. Also, replace energy with money, and you describe what more fools claim. This works for both Ponzi schemes and other scammers like libertarians, like those who claim the government creates free money and who espouse the merits of "free" markets. In all cases these groups are wrong and have no clue as to the how the actual theories work that indicate they are wrong. They also conveniently ignore the massive amounts of reliable experimental data that back up these theories. How I pine for a decent, required class on reasoning in American high schools. Meh.
It is however fail when a design team attempts to design a product when the CEO and executives have made idiotic, fixed, immutable design requirements for a product that could never be competitive. The blame for this will not go to the CEO and execs, the design team will take the fall. This is the story with the Atom, Larabee, and the eight-core Nehalem server processors with memory expansion controller chips, nearly all of which seem, to me, to be really stupid ideas. Though who knows, maybe if Intel twists arms, dislocating enough shoulders, fits enough people/companies with concrete galoshes, offers enough illegal payouts, and extracts concessions from governments, it can get away with this or anything, at least in its mind.
With modern passenger jets pilots prefer to fly near the edge of the troposphere, the lowest layer in the atmosphere, right beneath the tropopause, where it is coldest, but where the air pressure is still high enough for their engines to still function. This works great in the at the mid-latitudes that Europe and the US are located at. However, the height of the tropopause and thus the stratosphere which is above it, increases as one goes from the poles to the equator. At the poles the tropopause is roughly 36,000 feet above sea level, at the equator the tropopause is about 58,000 feet above sea level, far above the 42,000 feet service ceiling of a passenger jet. The absolute maximum ceiling on that Airbus plane may be higher, but those altitudes are not good to fly at due to less manuverability. Storms can in some cases can even break through the lower stratosphere, this storm sounds like it could have gone into the lower stratosphere, so flying even higher into the stratosphere would have been bad. Another reason not visit the stratosphere is that, the air processing equipment on that jet would need to remove enough ozone from the bleed air off the engine to make the air of reasonably breathable quality, which is may be unable to do.
You really don't understand the mechanics of an asset based currency, do you. In such a case, bonds are sold, that will be repaid, from the proceeds of the bond sale more money is printed. The bonds are the assets the currency is backed by. This produces orders of magnitude less inflation than just firing up the printing presses, producing money with no assets to back them, and the resultant hyperinflation. The latter method was used intentionally by the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920's to cause an economic collapse and to able to renegotiate reparations from World War I. The Germans then got on the gold backed currency train in the 1920's and rode that into a worldwide depression. Why? Because the supply of gold is inelastic and since the amount of gold changes very little year to year and it is not possible for a government to add money to the supply when necessary during an economic downturn. In severe cases you have people starving on the streets and civil unrest, not good. Also, take a look at the Long Depression on wikipedia for an overview of a different crisis inelastic asset back currencies often cause.
In my mind this either signals that Intel is going to try to make smaller chips (and probably fail, since x86 is a beast), or have a nonexistent target market, but they should have realized this. The only thing I can think of really is that Intel realized that they have no clue what kind of chips embedded software developers need, and they thought the easiest way to get that expertise would be to buy an embedded software company.
Intel could also try to dictate to embedded customers what Intel wants the customers to want. Hey it worked for Intel in the PC market, but seems to be failing in the HPC market with both the Xeon and Itanic. Since neither governments nor the market seems to have contained Intel, lets allow Intel to make Pentium 4 and Rambus sized mistakes in the embedded and HPC markets, then let the government(most likely) or the market(doubtful) tear them to pieces. An open source replacement for VxWorks might show up. Also, without access to many of the patented ruggedization and hardening techniques other manufacturers have that might be unavailable to Intel, maybe VwWon'tWork for Intel.
At a certain point, does shutting down various websites and muzzling the press have the opposite effect than intended? Will anger over shutdown websites have those not in the know to ask what happened on this day, and is this something worth clamping down on by the government? In other words does a government working too hard to suppress knowledge and direct opinions go too far and have the opposite effect and cause unfavorable results? Also, there are many Chinese factory workers that make all sorts of nice, legitimate products that they can't afford because they would need three months of their wages to buy it. Wouldn't it make you a bit angry, especially if you worked 60 hours a week, with few other benefits?
Additionally, mainstream historians are currently of the opinion that what ended communist governments in Eastern Europe had little to do with Ronald Reagan's bluster. Instead, the current theory roughly goes that instead the citizens just got tired of the government became discontented, and found less overt ways to protest or rebel and eventually the unrest and general lack of popular support caused the government to collapse. Sorry, Reagan is God fans and libertarians, but large scale armed resistance or large scale protests will probably not happen in China and the final result will not be a libertarian paradise.
On the other hand, give higher final cost projections to support IE 6 and a lower figure to drop support of IE 6. If these businesses are run by extreme hypercapitalists, dropping IE 6 support should have some sort of business case when IE 6 costs more. If their workers still need IE 6 for other situations, install FireFox 3, make FF the primary browser and IE 6 can be used only when necessary. IE6 and IE8 can't coexist on the same system, but FF3 and IE6 can.
First, about LED lighting: what are the environmental costs of producing it? Remember, semiconductors are usually produced in expensive fabs, which are known for needing a lot of fresh water to run. Of course, they do have the advantage of much longer life than other light sources, so this may not be a big problem.
Well, the solar panels you mentioned below have an issue, like every other solar panel they are made of semiconductors as well and the higher efficiency solar panels generally use multiple layers of different heterojunction semiconductor layers. These panels also use constant vapor deposition (CVD), to grow the semiconductor layers, and the CVD chambers use fun gases like phosphine (PH3), Arsine (AsH3) and other megafun toxic metal hydrides. Eventually, the sealed CVD chamber needs cleaning and gets cleaned by running Chlorine Trifluoride, another nasty, nasty, chemical, through the CVD chamber. If dealt with responsibly, semiconductor manufacturers can make their products with a reasonably small amount of pollution and water use. Intel's chip fab in water poor Israel is not an example of this at all. In any case, the only type of solar panels in wide availability today are silicon based panels and are nowhere near efficient as the multilayer panels.
Secondly, nuclear power is NOT a panacea. Ignoring the radioactive waste issue, you're totally forgetting the environmental destruction it causes on waterways. Like any thermal power generation process, like burning coal, oil, etc., nuclear power needs a plant which sits on a river, so that excess heat can be discharged into it. It is subject to the Carnot cycle, so it's only 40% efficient at most; the rest of the energy produced is lost as heat. This heat goes into the river, which raises its temperature, causing all sorts of problems with the wildlife there. In addition, rivers only have so much heat-carrying capacity; when they hit their limit, the reactor has to shut down. This has happened many times in the summer, right when everyone's running their A/C.
Sorry, but any power source that relies on the Carnot cycle simply isn't sustainable, and certainly not "environmental".
You haven't heard of cooling ponds have you? It isn't like power plant operators can just dump water directly from their plant into the river. In any case, once again you are a bit misinformed, newer fossil fuel plants use much less water than older plants. IIRC these plants cool their water with an additional cooling stage. Also to address the nuclear waste issue, the US could reduce the volume if it allowed material currently labeled as low-level to be processed as normal hazardous waste if its radioactivity currently fell below the level of background radioactivity. Other locations around the US should also be studied in order to replace Yucca Mountain, Northeastern Minnesota is tectonically dead and has bedrock that is igneous.
While I would agree that nuclear power is generally preferable to burning fossil fuels, it's not the solution to our energy needs as you make it out to be. The only real solution is to get our power directly from the sun.
[citation needed], please include a detailed plan that involves a reasonable investment rate, best and worse case scenarios, and with no steps labeled: "???" or "Magic happens".
With ever-increasing photovoltaic efficiencies, we should be able to cover all our buildings with solar panels and get all the power we need, though we'll obviously need some ways of storing it for nighttime and cloudy days.
I answered your solar panels claims, but I did not answer the energy storage problem. A few years ago, the DOE outfitted a building in Wisconsin with molten Sodium Phosphide batteries, to help with power outages. The batteries worked reasonably well for the time period of their use, but required some maintenance, and I don't want to see batteries like that in suburbia.
Silly me, I thought that the people's freedom was more important than the market's freedom, and that market freedom did not enhance or contribute much to the people's freedom. Then again, there is not a great deal of freedom in the OS market or very many browser choices either, which the EU can at least help with somewhat.
Dropping the Socialism = Communism = Fascism = Nazism meme might also help, the rest of the world will probably not fall for that sort of counter-factual logic again from Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians. Also, stop with the made up outlandish thought experiments, if you can't provide an example of actual events that occurred, their causal relationship and their relevance to the current situation, you have a bit of an issue. Also limited microeconomic examples do not translate well or at all into a macroeconomic setting, so try again. Try again as well, especially if you think your lemonade stand experiences at 8 years old are relevant to the worldwide or even a national economic setting. Come to think of it, if you had described your experiences running a lemonade stand at 8 years old it still would have been more compelling than your made up haggis example.
Meh your sig deserves this twisting as well:
In Capitalist America, the commerce controls the government.
Not that either your statement or mine were ever or are very accurate.
Of course there are cases where the market mechanisms fail and thus the market for a good fails. This market is then no longer a "totally free" market. At best, some markets are relatively free and they only get less free, from there. Then the products get more shoddy and more expensive to the consumer, as well. If the government breaks up a company it should do so only when necessary, and in an intelligent manner, leaving each part still capable of producing its product. By doing this, the government can improve the quality and lower the cost of goods to the end (human) consumer, the person we actually care about. There are less severe methods available, that can be used instead, when necessary. Otherwise, like waiting 20 years or more for the "market" to fix the problem, like Intel and Microsoft is unacceptable. Meanwhile, the total damage to the entire economy continues to increase. Heckva job, Market!
On the other hand would you like to show the class any evidence, grounded in reality, that the outcomes you have predicted, have occurred anywhere since World War 2? I don't want to hear about 8th century China, the Wiemar Republic's intentional debasement of its currency in the 1920's, or any example from 18th century New England, they are lessons to learn from certainly, but are in no way predictive of future events. Just like the required disclaimer in ads for financial investments "Past performance does not guarantee future performance".
Because it could never be the market's fault, ever, as it is more perfect than God herself, not that I am a theist. Also, analysis that stating the same thing over and over again gained their party popularity in the past and thus had a positive effect. Also, after 2000 election, there were various insults about Bush tossed about regularly and that made the Republicans lose in 2006 and 2008. Thus, the correct action to take is to say that, Obama iz ebil, more often than it is possible. Further analysis of any other causes is inconceivable and treason. Those are the only actions necessary to bring the Bachmann/Palin ticket to power in 2010 (yes, I actually intended to write 2010).
Slashdot Mirror
This is a site with microtransactions:
http://pacer.psc.uscourts.gov/pacerdesc.html
Yes, the US government runs the site. PACER is intended to give access to court documents, however, to protect the business models of Westlaw and Lexis-Nexis there is an $0.08 charge per page, for both legal filings and for varying definitions of a page for many HTML rendered pages.
In the last quarterly billing cycle I managed to generate $38 in fees, so yes microtransactions do suck and are an extremely bad idea.
Yes, but in some cases there were still multiple CPU sockets available on one board, which logically is what a multicore CPU is. So it follows that the reasons to make GDI multi-threaded have been present since NT 3.5. On the other hand, if XP had a multi-threaded GDI implementation, Vista may have dropped that feature. Vista endured a total redesign of the graphics stack in order to simplify the graphics stack and make the stack more "stable".
Sorry, I was in a bad mood. I was tired of seeing others on the internet claim they were citizens of the state only and actually seemed surprised after being charged and convicted of tax evasion using this claim. You are both a citizen of Texas and of the United States as well. The idiotic position of citizens of the state only is better refuted here:
http://evans-legal.com/dan/tpfaq.html#sovereigncitizens
I also apologize for the the harshness of my original post.
OT: your sig "I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas"
I assume you aren't going to try to deny that you are also a citizen of the United States of America at this point. Other people, now in jail, have tried not to pay income taxes and other federal taxes by claiming that they had renounced their US citizenship and were now just a citizen of the State of X, but not a US citizen any longer. None of these individuals actually successfully argued in court that they were just a citizen of State X and not a US citizen, so they no longer had to pay income tax. Most idiots in this position would have found their lawyer unwilling to make that argument, or if acting as their own lawyer these idiots might have found themselves stopped as soon as they started and fined $5000 each time during trial for even trying. When one makes a frivolous argument that is not valid and that relates to income taxes in court, expect a bill. Obviously the lesson to take back in this argument and with others is to not parse words intentionally incorrectly, and that you will not find any valid loophole to avoid paying any income taxes. Just to suck it up and pay your income taxes like everyone else. If you are behind on filing a year or two, contact a tax lawyer and then negotiate with the IRS and do so before the IRS calls you, you will always end up better off that way.
is no John Carmack.... Im sorry but i ve lost all respect for Cliffy after hes abandoned PC, capitulated on the 'no free DLC on 360 mantra', and basically hasnt made anything original in a VERY long time.
And John Carmack is a NULL, everything since the original Quake has been a copy of previous versions of the engines and he has used awful techniques and idiotic features that have not stood up at all over time. CliffB is not much better, granted. So in reference to your statement, how am I to compare the value of a NULL to the value of another NULL?
I would rather have the economy of the country I live in NOT be diagnosed with bipolar disorder or cyclothymia. The last six years were fairly free of intervention, more corporate profits were good, so even more must better, right? The unnecessary depth of the current recession is the result of the lack of regulation. I'm also fairly certain that the mean value of the area below/above the curve of economic growth/decline was less than the time period after Reconstruction and before the 1920's than the mean for the time after World War II. The 1920's and the Great Depression are a special case. Government intervention is necessary to prevent wild oscillations of the economy, wild oscillations disproportionately hurt the poor and middle class, while doing less damage to the finances of the rich, which is a group I am fairly sure you are not a member of nor will you ever be. Also keep in mind that the economy can grow, but can leave to middle class and the poor behind, this is not acceptable in my book. I suppose government intervention could be lessened if corporations were responsible for more than just enriching their shareholders, but expecting corporations and their executives to be legally responsible and criminally liable for managing the health of the economy would be unpalatable to executives and their lapdog politicians. However, if you want the power and the big bucks and you want less government intervention, you better be willing to take on the responsibilities and be willing to receive any punishments if and when you screw up. Then again, if these executives can't handle themselves in a reasonable manner with the power and responsibilities they had before, why trust these executives now? Oh well, I guess these executives did disprove the Randian/Libertarian/Austrian/Chicago economic hypotheses, that free markets are self regulating and of the presence of perfect information, so I guess it isn't all bad.
You might want to look at this paper linked to below, titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments"
http://www.apa.org/journals/features/psp7761121.pdf
This paper may even help explain the situations of Bennett Haselton, who submitted this rubbish, 90% of hardcore libertarians, 95% of hardcore environuts, Sarah Palin, and so many more hardcore weirdos today. However, teaching that many self-imagined geniuses that they are in fact idiots and then making it stick would be hard and a waste of time. However teaching the actual geniuses that there are stupid people out there is another problem as well.
Heck, none of the respondents who were actually bad in either of the mentioned subjects (there had to be a few) had the guts to say that they were bad at these subjects. This relates directly to the subject of the above linked paper itself. I should give the clueless answering that the survey the the benefit of the doubt, the questions had extremely poor wording. However, I still won't give the clueless the benefit of the doubt here.
and determined by their own whims which scientists were to be fired
Wasn't that more of a "Jewish thing"?
Not really, no, it affected every scientist regardless of religion. If you did not tow the party line and follow the prevailing wisdom, you were gone. These talented scientists and engineers ended up disappearing into society or leaving the country and others may have found more menial work.
Anecdote:
Before World War II a non-Jewish German engineer who was a private citizen managed to scrounge up enough telephone relays, on his own, to make a decently fast calculator. (Technically the machine was Turing-complete, but it was not intended to be used that way.) It easily could have been used for decryption or other types of uses. A successor machine was partially constructed and was to be Turing-complete and thus a computer, however it was destroyed late in the war by the Allies in a bombing raid. The only government takers this calculator had was from the German Air Force who wanted to use it for calculating aerodynamic of wing designs.
The Nazi government politicized science and in doing this they squandered resources that may have helped them in the war, instead the Germans came up with weapon designs that not usable during World War II. However, later on these designs were adapted and became useful in the Cold War and elements of some of those designs are still in use today, in weapons like the AK-47 and M-16. This is the tragedy that occurs when science is politicized (though not for you or me today), politicians are not scientists, but if they have an agenda science ends up suffering. For instance, there is the agenda Bush recently pushed by stalling stem cell research and when he had global warming reports he didn't like rewritten. The needless complexity and low safety margins in the Space Shuttle are another case (thank Nixon for that).
Keep in mind that when one includes all groups targeted including Jews, 11 to 17 million people died in the The Holocaust, and that roughly six million of those who died were Jewish. That's still quite a few mentally ill individuals, political dissidents, gays, lesbians, Roma, Slavs, and Poles, Soviet POWs, among others. So please keep in mind that Jews were not the only group targeted of the Nazis for extermination.
2^40 would take very little time on a home PC, an afternoon or maybe a day.
40 bits is also the size of the keyspace used by HDCP for HDMI and DVI, for "encrypted" HD displays. I don't feel like doing the math, but determining all of the 40-bit keys used in HDCP could probably be done in a short time on a reasonable home PC, using a man in the middle attack. However, for copying HD video, one would still probably get better quality by showing Macrovision, the MPAA, and the Blu-Ray consortium that using BD+ to protect BD-ROM discs is stupid. For the original developers it was a surprisingly good scam that they managed to pull off on the movie industry. BD+ attempts to determine what physical hardware a Turing-complete machine is running, using an obfuscated Java program. This is futile because another unauthorized Turing-complete machine can easily mimic the behavior of an authorized Blu-Ray player. The ability of any Turing-complete machine to execute the same program as another Turing-complete machine allows for emulation and is a cornerstone of the Church-Turing Thesis. For instance, if done properly, an Apple IIe could run the BD+ decryption program, thus mimicking an authorized Blu-Ray player. However, one should expect quite a bit of floppy disk swapping, and good luck finding enough 5.25" disks in usable shape, especially if you decide to play a 50GB movie on that machine. On the other hand, trying it on an older machine that used punch cards. Imagine the size of a 50GB punch card deck using standard IBM punch cards.
I'm a bit confused here, I remember reading an article on hardware hard drive encryption or perhaps something else, but the my understanding was that AES-256 was just performing AES-128 encryption on the data two times in a row. The logic was that is circumvented various legal restrictions on AES keys longer than 128 bits while still being just as hard to crack as single AES encryption with a 256 bit key. I'm uncertain if I remember it right, I may be confusing it with DES, however.
I'm still using the same serial number of the XP Pro SP1 upgrade version using a copy of NT 4.0 RTM as upgrade media. I bought each copy legally, through educational channels, XP in 2002, NT 4.0 in 1997 and this copy of XP has been on at least half a dozen unique hardware configurations and reinstalled a dozen times on top of that. This copy of XP has only been installed on only one computer at a time. Two years ago, last time I reinstalled XP, this copy just authorized itself without a phone call on my part. When I did have to call MS, there nothing quite like repeating 50 numbers to a computer over the phone, by voice and being unable to punch the numbers in using the phone's keypad.
Add to that the fact that after Hitler rose to power he and his cronies politicized academia and government research, and determined by their own whims which scientists were to be fired and which projects to fund, starving certain potentially useful research project of money. This resulted in many scientists leaving Germany and moving to Allied countries. This obviously ended up giving the Allies and the US in particular additional talented scientists. The Germans developed plenty of potentially effective weapons in World War II, but Hitler was afraid to use some like chemical weapons due to unfounded fears of potential Allied retaliation with chemical weapons. Some weapon systems were not practical to deploy, and by the time other practical designs were capable of being put into mass production it was 1944 or 1945, too late to make a difference due to lack of production facilities and resources in Germany.
And, no, yammering about 'patents' doesn't cut it. For one thing, various fools have been claiming free energy since the 70s, and, guess what?
I assume that you are refering to the 1870s, in which case that's pretty much the situation. Also, replace energy with money, and you describe what more fools claim. This works for both Ponzi schemes and other scammers like libertarians, like those who claim the government creates free money and who espouse the merits of "free" markets. In all cases these groups are wrong and have no clue as to the how the actual theories work that indicate they are wrong. They also conveniently ignore the massive amounts of reliable experimental data that back up these theories. How I pine for a decent, required class on reasoning in American high schools. Meh.
It is however fail when a design team attempts to design a product when the CEO and executives have made idiotic, fixed, immutable design requirements for a product that could never be competitive. The blame for this will not go to the CEO and execs, the design team will take the fall. This is the story with the Atom, Larabee, and the eight-core Nehalem server processors with memory expansion controller chips, nearly all of which seem, to me, to be really stupid ideas. Though who knows, maybe if Intel twists arms, dislocating enough shoulders, fits enough people/companies with concrete galoshes, offers enough illegal payouts, and extracts concessions from governments, it can get away with this or anything, at least in its mind.
With modern passenger jets pilots prefer to fly near the edge of the troposphere, the lowest layer in the atmosphere, right beneath the tropopause, where it is coldest, but where the air pressure is still high enough for their engines to still function. This works great in the at the mid-latitudes that Europe and the US are located at. However, the height of the tropopause and thus the stratosphere which is above it, increases as one goes from the poles to the equator. At the poles the tropopause is roughly 36,000 feet above sea level, at the equator the tropopause is about 58,000 feet above sea level, far above the 42,000 feet service ceiling of a passenger jet. The absolute maximum ceiling on that Airbus plane may be higher, but those altitudes are not good to fly at due to less manuverability. Storms can in some cases can even break through the lower stratosphere, this storm sounds like it could have gone into the lower stratosphere, so flying even higher into the stratosphere would have been bad. Another reason not visit the stratosphere is that, the air processing equipment on that jet would need to remove enough ozone from the bleed air off the engine to make the air of reasonably breathable quality, which is may be unable to do.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tropopause
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceiling_(aeronautics)
When thunderstorms go places they do no usually go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overshooting_top
You really don't understand the mechanics of an asset based currency, do you. In such a case, bonds are sold, that will be repaid, from the proceeds of the bond sale more money is printed. The bonds are the assets the currency is backed by. This produces orders of magnitude less inflation than just firing up the printing presses, producing money with no assets to back them, and the resultant hyperinflation. The latter method was used intentionally by the Weimar Republic of Germany in the 1920's to cause an economic collapse and to able to renegotiate reparations from World War I. The Germans then got on the gold backed currency train in the 1920's and rode that into a worldwide depression. Why? Because the supply of gold is inelastic and since the amount of gold changes very little year to year and it is not possible for a government to add money to the supply when necessary during an economic downturn. In severe cases you have people starving on the streets and civil unrest, not good. Also, take a look at the Long Depression on wikipedia for an overview of a different crisis inelastic asset back currencies often cause.
In my mind this either signals that Intel is going to try to make smaller chips (and probably fail, since x86 is a beast), or have a nonexistent target market, but they should have realized this. The only thing I can think of really is that Intel realized that they have no clue what kind of chips embedded software developers need, and they thought the easiest way to get that expertise would be to buy an embedded software company.
Intel could also try to dictate to embedded customers what Intel wants the customers to want. Hey it worked for Intel in the PC market, but seems to be failing in the HPC market with both the Xeon and Itanic. Since neither governments nor the market seems to have contained Intel, lets allow Intel to make Pentium 4 and Rambus sized mistakes in the embedded and HPC markets, then let the government(most likely) or the market(doubtful) tear them to pieces. An open source replacement for VxWorks might show up. Also, without access to many of the patented ruggedization and hardening techniques other manufacturers have that might be unavailable to Intel, maybe VwWon'tWork for Intel.
At a certain point, does shutting down various websites and muzzling the press have the opposite effect than intended? Will anger over shutdown websites have those not in the know to ask what happened on this day, and is this something worth clamping down on by the government? In other words does a government working too hard to suppress knowledge and direct opinions go too far and have the opposite effect and cause unfavorable results? Also, there are many Chinese factory workers that make all sorts of nice, legitimate products that they can't afford because they would need three months of their wages to buy it. Wouldn't it make you a bit angry, especially if you worked 60 hours a week, with few other benefits?
Additionally, mainstream historians are currently of the opinion that what ended communist governments in Eastern Europe had little to do with Ronald Reagan's bluster. Instead, the current theory roughly goes that instead the citizens just got tired of the government became discontented, and found less overt ways to protest or rebel and eventually the unrest and general lack of popular support caused the government to collapse. Sorry, Reagan is God fans and libertarians, but large scale armed resistance or large scale protests will probably not happen in China and the final result will not be a libertarian paradise.
On the other hand, give higher final cost projections to support IE 6 and a lower figure to drop support of IE 6. If these businesses are run by extreme hypercapitalists, dropping IE 6 support should have some sort of business case when IE 6 costs more. If their workers still need IE 6 for other situations, install FireFox 3, make FF the primary browser and IE 6 can be used only when necessary. IE6 and IE8 can't coexist on the same system, but FF3 and IE6 can.
First, about LED lighting: what are the environmental costs of producing it? Remember, semiconductors are usually produced in expensive fabs, which are known for needing a lot of fresh water to run. Of course, they do have the advantage of much longer life than other light sources, so this may not be a big problem.
Well, the solar panels you mentioned below have an issue, like every other solar panel they are made of semiconductors as well and the higher efficiency solar panels generally use multiple layers of different heterojunction semiconductor layers. These panels also use constant vapor deposition (CVD), to grow the semiconductor layers, and the CVD chambers use fun gases like phosphine (PH3), Arsine (AsH3) and other megafun toxic metal hydrides. Eventually, the sealed CVD chamber needs cleaning and gets cleaned by running Chlorine Trifluoride, another nasty, nasty, chemical, through the CVD chamber. If dealt with responsibly, semiconductor manufacturers can make their products with a reasonably small amount of pollution and water use. Intel's chip fab in water poor Israel is not an example of this at all. In any case, the only type of solar panels in wide availability today are silicon based panels and are nowhere near efficient as the multilayer panels.
Secondly, nuclear power is NOT a panacea. Ignoring the radioactive waste issue, you're totally forgetting the environmental destruction it causes on waterways. Like any thermal power generation process, like burning coal, oil, etc., nuclear power needs a plant which sits on a river, so that excess heat can be discharged into it. It is subject to the Carnot cycle, so it's only 40% efficient at most; the rest of the energy produced is lost as heat. This heat goes into the river, which raises its temperature, causing all sorts of problems with the wildlife there. In addition, rivers only have so much heat-carrying capacity; when they hit their limit, the reactor has to shut down. This has happened many times in the summer, right when everyone's running their A/C.
Sorry, but any power source that relies on the Carnot cycle simply isn't sustainable, and certainly not "environmental".
You haven't heard of cooling ponds have you? It isn't like power plant operators can just dump water directly from their plant into the river. In any case, once again you are a bit misinformed, newer fossil fuel plants use much less water than older plants. IIRC these plants cool their water with an additional cooling stage. Also to address the nuclear waste issue, the US could reduce the volume if it allowed material currently labeled as low-level to be processed as normal hazardous waste if its radioactivity currently fell below the level of background radioactivity. Other locations around the US should also be studied in order to replace Yucca Mountain, Northeastern Minnesota is tectonically dead and has bedrock that is igneous.
While I would agree that nuclear power is generally preferable to burning fossil fuels, it's not the solution to our energy needs as you make it out to be. The only real solution is to get our power directly from the sun.
[citation needed], please include a detailed plan that involves a reasonable investment rate, best and worse case scenarios, and with no steps labeled: "???" or "Magic happens".
With ever-increasing photovoltaic efficiencies, we should be able to cover all our buildings with solar panels and get all the power we need, though we'll obviously need some ways of storing it for nighttime and cloudy days.
I answered your solar panels claims, but I did not answer the energy storage problem. A few years ago, the DOE outfitted a building in Wisconsin with molten Sodium Phosphide batteries, to help with power outages. The batteries worked reasonably well for the time period of their use, but required some maintenance, and I don't want to see batteries like that in suburbia.
Silly me, I thought that the people's freedom was more important than the market's freedom, and that market freedom did not enhance or contribute much to the people's freedom. Then again, there is not a great deal of freedom in the OS market or very many browser choices either, which the EU can at least help with somewhat.
Dropping the Socialism = Communism = Fascism = Nazism meme might also help, the rest of the world will probably not fall for that sort of counter-factual logic again from Republicans/Conservatives/Libertarians. Also, stop with the made up outlandish thought experiments, if you can't provide an example of actual events that occurred, their causal relationship and their relevance to the current situation, you have a bit of an issue. Also limited microeconomic examples do not translate well or at all into a macroeconomic setting, so try again. Try again as well, especially if you think your lemonade stand experiences at 8 years old are relevant to the worldwide or even a national economic setting. Come to think of it, if you had described your experiences running a lemonade stand at 8 years old it still would have been more compelling than your made up haggis example.
Meh your sig deserves this twisting as well:
In Capitalist America, the commerce controls the government.
Not that either your statement or mine were ever or are very accurate.
Of course there are cases where the market mechanisms fail and thus the market for a good fails. This market is then no longer a "totally free" market. At best, some markets are relatively free and they only get less free, from there. Then the products get more shoddy and more expensive to the consumer, as well. If the government breaks up a company it should do so only when necessary, and in an intelligent manner, leaving each part still capable of producing its product. By doing this, the government can improve the quality and lower the cost of goods to the end (human) consumer, the person we actually care about. There are less severe methods available, that can be used instead, when necessary. Otherwise, like waiting 20 years or more for the "market" to fix the problem, like Intel and Microsoft is unacceptable. Meanwhile, the total damage to the entire economy continues to increase. Heckva job, Market!
On the other hand would you like to show the class any evidence, grounded in reality, that the outcomes you have predicted, have occurred anywhere since World War 2? I don't want to hear about 8th century China, the Wiemar Republic's intentional debasement of its currency in the 1920's, or any example from 18th century New England, they are lessons to learn from certainly, but are in no way predictive of future events. Just like the required disclaimer in ads for financial investments "Past performance does not guarantee future performance".
Because it could never be the market's fault, ever, as it is more perfect than God herself, not that I am a theist. Also, analysis that stating the same thing over and over again gained their party popularity in the past and thus had a positive effect. Also, after 2000 election, there were various insults about Bush tossed about regularly and that made the Republicans lose in 2006 and 2008. Thus, the correct action to take is to say that, Obama iz ebil, more often than it is possible. Further analysis of any other causes is inconceivable and treason. Those are the only actions necessary to bring the Bachmann/Palin ticket to power in 2010 (yes, I actually intended to write 2010).
Terri Schaivo still could not have been named a corporation, otherwise someone would have tried.