Right. That's a vapor barrier, which prevents air from leaking in and out. Some are aluminum foil, and some are Tyvek (paper over Mylar film.) The concept is decades old.
It's rare to put a vapor barrier in an interior wall, though insulation between an unheated garage and the rest of the building is normal.
Unless you have conductive windows, it's not going to block cell phone reception or in-house WiFi much.
If you have too much house for one WiFi base station, there are WiFi boosters which forward packets.
What this country really needs is a fierce and deadly competitor. The Soviets gave us that and we broke them. It had to be that way too, one side had to prevail sometime. In the interim period it drove some of the best in both our nations.
I've made the point previously that the current problem with capitalism is the absence of ideological competition. When communism looked like a serious threat, capitalism had to deliver a higher standard of living. Communism had a pro-worker ideology, and the USSR made a serious effort to provide most of its citizens with a minimally adequate standard of living. Almost everybody in the USSR from 1950 to 1985 or so had food, clothing, shelter, and a job.
So the capitalist world had to provide at least comparable amenities. US companies used to boast about the American standard of living. Homelessness was rare in the US from the end of the Great Depression until the Reagan administration. The US used to have a reasonably strong welfare system. There were a lot of people doing nothing, but it kept them out of jail. The US now has far less welfare, but 4x as many prisoners. Prisons are much more expensive than welfare housing.
(It's not clear that communism in Russia failed because it was communism. Russia has had imperial rule, communism, anarchic democracy (1990s), oligarchy, and now strongman rule. Of those, communism was the most effective at raising living standards. Anarchic democracy was the worst. Russian history is grim.)
for example, "store.company.com" might have an EV certificate, giving you a high assurance of identity and location, while the main site at "www.company.com" has no high assurance sources
It's rare to see that. Know of a significant example? One might expect it for "store.yahoo.com", but that site won't even accept a HTTPS connection. Neither will "disney.go.com".
Citibank has separate certs for "www.citibank.com" and "online.citibank.com".
GEODSS, from 1980, was the first fully computerized telescope system. It basically looks at the sky, section by section, subtracts out all known objects, and reports the rest. So it finds new satellites, space junk, and even dark objects that occult stars. Three GEODSS sites are still running; a fourth is loaned out to Lincoln Labs to find and track near-Earth asteroids. (Somewhat to the annoyance of astronomers who had been discovering comets and asteroids manually, the automated Lincoln Labs GEODSS discovered them by the thousands.)
Each site has at least two identical telescopes, and some have a wide-angle Schmidt.
One of the less-often mentioned features of GEODSS is that it can illuminate a target. One telescope can be used to aim a laser at an object in low orbit, to get a clear picture of darker objects.
The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.
Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.
This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable, and not in a useful way. Peak demand and peak wind output are unconnected. Averaging wind over a large area doesn't help much. Look at the current wind power output on the PJM dashboard. See it varying over a 4:1 range in 24 hours. Then look at the PJM renewables map, showing all wind installations in the PJM area, which stretches from Illinois to the Atlantic Ocean, and Pennsylvania down to Virginia.
Our SiteTruth system does some "scraping". We're looking for the name and address of the company behind the web site, so we can check the business out. We also look for ad links and a few other things, like BBBonline seals, which we check. We use a user agent name of SiteTruth.com site rating system. We don't look very deeply into a site; if after examining the most likely 20 pages, we haven't found out who runs the site, we figure they're not going to tell us. The site is down-rated accordingly.
One of the more amusing uses of a "robots.txt" file used to be seen on Marchex (the "What you need, when you need it" domainer) pages. The site wasn't blocked from crawling, but the link to the page that told you about Marchex was. That, we suspect, was to keep search engines from noticing that all those domains were really one business. That didn't help Marchex much. Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) is still around, stock way down from the peak and reporting a slight loss this quarter.
We do have one exception to obeying the "robots.txt" file. We look at the home page of the site to see if it's a redirect before looking at the "robots.txt" file. Some sites have both a redirect and a "keep out" robots.txt file on the same domain. This is like posting signs that say "Keep Out" and "Please Use Other Door" on the same entrance. That contradiction was apparently a workaround for an old Google crawler bug. Google would index both "example.com" and "www.example.com" separately, then consider them duplicates, which caused some SEO problems.
Actually logging into sites from a crawler is just wrong. I'm amazed that a deep pocket like Nielsen would do that.
James Cameron wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS. Avatar II, or whatever, will be. He's been pushing 48FPS for a while.
It's about time; 24FPS is way too slow. A big problem with 24FPS is that pans over detailed backgrounds have strobing effects unless the pan is very slow. Sometimes blur is inserted to mask this, either in camera or in post. Cameron likes richly detailed backgrounds ("Titanic", etc.), and this limitation has annoyed him.
Cameron will use higher frame rates well. He's used 3D well. Other directors, probably not so much.
"The United States reports the world's highest incidence of violent crimes...
"According to figures released by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in September 2010, more than 6,600 travelers had been subject to electronic device searches between October 1, 2008 and June 2, 2010, nearly half of them American citizens. A report on The Wall Street Journal on September 7, 2010, said the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was sued over its policies that allegedly authorize the search and seizure of laptops, cellphones and other electronic devices without a reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing. The policies were claimed to leave no limit on how long the DHS can keep a traveler' s devices or on the scope of private information that can be searched, copied or detained. There is no provision for judicial approval or supervision."
"According to a report on Chicago Tribune on May 12, 2010, Chicago Police was charged with arresting people without warrants, shackling them to the wall or metal benches, feeding them infrequently and holding them without bathroom breaks and giving them no bedding, which were deemed consistent with tactics of "soft torture" used to extract involuntary confessions."
"The United States has always called itself "land of freedom," but the number of inmates in the country is the world' s largest. "
"The U.S. regards itself as "the beacon of democracy." However, its democracy is largely based on money. According to a report from The Washington Post on October 26, 2010, U.S. House and Senate candidates shattered fundraising records for a midterm election, taking in more than 1.5 billion U.S. dollars as of October 24. The midterm election, held in November 2010, finally cost 3.98 billion U.S. dollars, the most expensive in the U.S. history. "
"While advocating Internet freedom, the U.S. in fact imposes fairly strict restriction on cyberspace. On June 24, 2010, the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs approved the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act, which will give the federal government "absolute power" to shut down the Internet under a declared national emergency. Handing government the power to control the Internet will only be the first step towards a greatly restricted Internet system, whereby individual IDs and government permission would be required to operate a website. "
"Unemployment rate in the United States has been stubbornly high. From December 2007 to October 2010, a total of 7.5 million jobs were lost in the country "... "The share of residents in poverty climbed to 14.3 percent in 2009, the highest level recorded since 1994 "... . "A report issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in November 2010 showed that 14.7 percent of U.S. households were food insecure in 2009 (www.ers.usda.gov), an increase of almost 30 percent since 2006"... "According to a report by USA Today on June 16, 2010, the number of families in homeless shelters increased 7 percent to 170,129 from fiscal year 2008 through fiscal year 2009."
"The number of American people without health insurance increased progressively every year. "
"The New York Times reported on May 13, 2010, that in 2009, African Americans and Latinos were 9 times more likely to be stopped by the police to receive stop-and-frisk searches than white people. "
"So far, a total of 193 countries have joined the Convention on the Rights of the Child as states parties, but the United States is among the very few countries that have not ratified it."
These are problems the US has that aren't being fixed.
The inexcusable part of all this was the hydrogen explosion. Explosions. That's the cause of all the structural damage. The reactor buildings survived the earthquake and tsunami.
That's a known, expected problem. It was a big worry at Three Mile Island, but they managed to avoid it. It is preventable. There are catalytic recombiners, passive devices which recombine hydrogen and oxygen non-explosively. Many nuclear plants have them, but pre-TMI plants usually don't. If those had been retrofitted in the decades since TMI, this would have been a much smaller disaster. See this IAEA paper, "Mitigation of hydrogen hazards in water-cooled power reactors". They indicate that passive recombiners are necessary, and are in use in Germany, France, Canada, the United States, and Russia. They've been retrofitted to the GE Mark I reactor in other countries. But not, for some reason, in Japan.
The cooling pumps survived the earthquake and tsunami, and continued to run until the battery backups ran out. The hydrogen explosions probably damaged them and their plumbing and wiring. (Nobody can get through the wreckage and radioactivity yet to tell. A remote-controlled backhoe/grab and a dump truck are now being used to dig through the rubble.) If it hadn't been for the hydrogen explosions, restoration of power would have restored reactor and fuel pool cooling.
So that's where TEPCO screwed up. They failed to install a low-cost standard protective device that's been used elsewhere for decades.
Certificate Authorities issue "Relying Party Agreements", which specify their obligations to users relying on their certificates. Some of these specify financial penalties payable to end users.Over the years, as with EULAs, these have been made so favorable to the CAs as to make them meaningless. (See, for example, Verisign's relying party agreement. Or, worse, the one from Starfield, GoDaddy's CA.)
Now it's time to push back.
The Mozilla Foundation should issue a tough standard for CA Relying Party Agreements to get a root cert into Mozilla. One that makes CA's financially responsible for false certs they issue, with a minimum liability limit of at least $100,000. The CA must be required to post a bond. A third party consumer-oriented organization like BEUC (in the EU) or Consumer's Union (in the US), not the CA, must decide claims.
The technology behind SSL is fine. The problem is allowing CA's that aren't doing due diligence on their customers to have root certificates in major browsers. Mozilla all by itself has enough power to tighten up standards in this area. All it takes is the will.
The problem is that content stored on someone else's server, or authorized from it, seems to go away within five years. Often less. That's happened with Circuit City's DIVX (1998-1999), Microsoft's PlaysForSure (2004-2008), WalMart Music (2007-2008), and seems to be about to happen to Microsoft's Zune. Yes, there's usually some way to pry the content loose, but it's usually difficult, unsupported, and won't be done by most consumers.
Of course, you can't sell used "cloud" content, and you can't play it on an unapproved device. You're caught between the service going bust and your devices becoming obsolete.
The basic problem is that space travel with chemical fuels isn't feasible. You just can't pack enough energy per unit mass into the fuel.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
It's been that way for almost forty years. It's not getting any better. No combination of parts will fix this fundamentally broken technology.
Space travel is like lighter-than-air travel. The technology has been around for decades, and it reached its limits a long time ago. It's possible to build vehicles. But the weight limitations are too severe for them to be more than marginally useful.
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
That's still valid. Consider Apollo. They launched a 50-story building and got a minivan back.
Suborbital flight takes far less energy than reaching orbital velocity. What Virgin Atlantic is doing is comparable to Alan Shepard's suborbital flight atop a Redstone ICBM in 1961. It's a roller coaster, not space travel.
Nuclear rocket engines would work, and were tested in the 1950s. That solves the mass ratio problem. But they're rather messy.
What I notice is that when the page goes to google analytics that load process stops while waiting for the server. There was a time when pages would load partial content, and then go for the ads. Now, many pull the ads and analytics first. This would be good if the ad servers were fast, but the seem to be getting slower.
Right. I've commented on this before. If a page loads slowly today, it's usually for one of three reasons.
Page loading is stalling due to ads, trackers, and web bugs.
The page is pulling in vast amounts of CSS or JavaScript code from some third-party source, and that source is slow.
The primary site is building the pages in a content-management system, and the database is a bottleneck.
The SPDY approach won't fix any of these problems. Client side last-mile bandwidth usually isn't the bottleneck.
It might make a difference on mobile, where getting through the air link is a bottleneck. It might help for Google's own pages, where there are multiple components coming in from different Google servers. Google tends not to load content from others on their own pages, so they need more connections to their own servers. Most sites aren't like that.
A new source of delay is "social" features. "Like" buttons for Facebook, Digg, etc. all add to page load time. "Disqus" comment forms add to page load time.
Making all the junk stuff load concurrently creates another problem. As each irrelevant item arrives, the page has to be reformatted to fit. So the user is shown a page which "squirms" as all the unwanted junk is pulled in.
Yes, the USB HID interface is quite easy to use. I've dealt with it from the other side, using a Logitec steering wheel, mouse, and pedals to control a robot vehicle.
Force feedback via that interface is lame, though. I wanted to have the steering wheel track what the vehicle steering was actually doing, so you'd feel the resistance of the real steering. You could spin the steering wheel, and it would take a second or so for the real vehicle's steering to catch up. But the HID interface for steering wheels is more like an audio device, intended for vibration, not positional feedback.
Incidentally, you can have many HID devices, and they don't have to pretend to be the main mouse and keyboard. Applications aware of them can use them for other inputs.
Well, now we know that "+1" isn't about search quality.
Most ad clicks come from a tiny percentage of users. 85% of ad clicks come from 8% of users. Worse, from an advertiser perspective, the heavy clickers don't buy much. Also, ad click-through dropped 50% from 2007 to 2011. Only losers click on ads now.
"+1" is likely to have similar demographics. If it's important to you for your friends to know that you like some product, you probably have no life. Or you're a spambot. As an approach to social networking, it seems rather lame. Wave and Buzz were at least original.
As someone who tracks search spam, I've been underwhelmed by Google in the last six months. The Google Places merge into web search last October, and the subsequent heavy spamming of recommendations, should have taught them that "social signals" are very easily spammed.
Levy's new book "In the Plex", about Google, just came out. I recommend it if you need to understand Google.
While not terribly cheap, the technology for separating dissolved compounds from water(to fairly extreme degrees of purity, in the case of water for lab/analytic use) is very much off-the-shelf.
Right. That was done at Three Mile Island. Bear in mind that you can't make water itself radioactive; hydrogen and oxygen don't have any radioactive isotopes with long half-lives. (The longest, 15O has a half-life of 122 seconds, so it's gone within an hour.)
All the radioactivity is in dissolved solids. So the process looks a lot like desalinization - the water is forced through membranes that catch all the solids.
Eventually, you have dry salts, which you put in casks and bury in some desert or hard-rock cave.
That's the easy part of the problem, though. Remember that the reactor buildings are wrecked from the hydrogen explosions. All the fuel rods in the spent fuel pools have to be carefully moved to some other location, probably newly built spent fuel pools nearby. In 3-5 years, they'll have decayed enough for dry storage, and they'll be put into casks. They can then be moved off site.
This leaves the reactors themselves. Units 1,2, and 3 still haven't reached cold shutdown. Until that's achieved, cleanup can't even start. The situation isn't even close to safe until all three reactors are in cold shutdown, not leaking, and have redundant cooling. Look at the status reports at the Japan Industrial Atomic Forum. Until all the red squares turn yellow, there's a sizable risk of things getting worse.
Decommissioning the damaged reactors will be really tough. They're too damaged to de-fuel, and they need constant cooling, so they can't just be encased in steel and concrete. I don't know what will be done.
This is much, much worse than Three Mile Island. At TMI, the control room was up and running through the whole episode, they reached cold shutdown in a few days, they never had an explosion, and radioactivity was confined to the containment vessel.
40 years ago, the idea of triggering fusion with a laser seemed promising. That's what Lawrence Livermore's Nova laser was supposed to be for. But laser ignition didn't work as an energy source.
The leak that was stopped was from a drain pit to the ocean. The reactor itself is still leaking highly radioactive water. They're running out of places to put it.and are frantically building tanks and ponds.
I'm impressed that the Falcon-9 rocket can lie on its side, supported at only two points. Many large US rockets don't have enough strength in torsion for that, and must be assembled vertically.
This reduces cost. The thing can be built in a factory bay of reasonable size, then barged and/or trucked to the launch site. There's no need to do final assembly near the launch pad.
This is a good sign. One of the big problems with US rocketry has been that fanatical weight reduction resulted in overly fragile vehicles. This thing looks tougher.
Nobody really replaces CPUs. As of a few years ago, 80% of desktop machines were never opened during their lifetime. That's probably higher now, and higher still for laptops.
The most accurate statement is "The taking (and passing) of math levels beyond Algebra I (and maybe Geometry) is the leading predictor of college and work success."
Right. Passing Algebra II is a good predictor and filter. Whether pushing more people to get the skill set Algebra II provides is an open question.
Few people working today have actually designed a high performance airplane. Ben Rich, who ran the Lockheed Skunk Works and designed the propulsion system for the SR-71, wrote on his retirement that he worked on 26 airplanes during his career, but today's aircraft designer would be lucky to work on one.
For the first time since WWII, the USAF no longer has a new fighter plane in development. If and when it becomes necessary to design one, who will know how? Nobody will have the practical experience to get it right.
Rutan was one of the few people who consistently got exotic designs right. He will be tough to replace.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. That's a vapor barrier, which prevents air from leaking in and out. Some are aluminum foil, and some are Tyvek (paper over Mylar film.) The concept is decades old. It's rare to put a vapor barrier in an interior wall, though insulation between an unheated garage and the rest of the building is normal.
Unless you have conductive windows, it's not going to block cell phone reception or in-house WiFi much. If you have too much house for one WiFi base station, there are WiFi boosters which forward packets.
What this country really needs is a fierce and deadly competitor. The Soviets gave us that and we broke them. It had to be that way too, one side had to prevail sometime. In the interim period it drove some of the best in both our nations.
I've made the point previously that the current problem with capitalism is the absence of ideological competition. When communism looked like a serious threat, capitalism had to deliver a higher standard of living. Communism had a pro-worker ideology, and the USSR made a serious effort to provide most of its citizens with a minimally adequate standard of living. Almost everybody in the USSR from 1950 to 1985 or so had food, clothing, shelter, and a job.
So the capitalist world had to provide at least comparable amenities. US companies used to boast about the American standard of living. Homelessness was rare in the US from the end of the Great Depression until the Reagan administration. The US used to have a reasonably strong welfare system. There were a lot of people doing nothing, but it kept them out of jail. The US now has far less welfare, but 4x as many prisoners. Prisons are much more expensive than welfare housing.
(It's not clear that communism in Russia failed because it was communism. Russia has had imperial rule, communism, anarchic democracy (1990s), oligarchy, and now strongman rule. Of those, communism was the most effective at raising living standards. Anarchic democracy was the worst. Russian history is grim.)
for example, "store.company.com" might have an EV certificate, giving you a high assurance of identity and location, while the main site at "www.company.com" has no high assurance sources
It's rare to see that. Know of a significant example? One might expect it for "store.yahoo.com", but that site won't even accept a HTTPS connection. Neither will "disney.go.com". Citibank has separate certs for "www.citibank.com" and "online.citibank.com".
Contact information is on the "about" page.
Sounds like a replacement for GEODSS.
GEODSS, from 1980, was the first fully computerized telescope system. It basically looks at the sky, section by section, subtracts out all known objects, and reports the rest. So it finds new satellites, space junk, and even dark objects that occult stars. Three GEODSS sites are still running; a fourth is loaned out to Lincoln Labs to find and track near-Earth asteroids. (Somewhat to the annoyance of astronomers who had been discovering comets and asteroids manually, the automated Lincoln Labs GEODSS discovered them by the thousands.) Each site has at least two identical telescopes, and some have a wide-angle Schmidt.
One of the less-often mentioned features of GEODSS is that it can illuminate a target. One telescope can be used to aim a laser at an object in low orbit, to get a clear picture of darker objects.
The whole plant (3 units) is expected to generate about 1.2GW at peak. That's about one modern nuclear unit.
Over a full day, a solar plant generates maybe 1/3 of its peak power. That's OK, though. For areas where air conditioning is the peak load, a solar plant produces max power just when it's needed. A reasonable near-term goal would be to get Southern California's entire air conditioning load (10 to 15 GW) onto solar power.
This is solar's big advantage over wind power. Wind power is highly variable, and not in a useful way. Peak demand and peak wind output are unconnected. Averaging wind over a large area doesn't help much. Look at the current wind power output on the PJM dashboard. See it varying over a 4:1 range in 24 hours. Then look at the PJM renewables map, showing all wind installations in the PJM area, which stretches from Illinois to the Atlantic Ocean, and Pennsylvania down to Virginia.
Our SiteTruth system does some "scraping". We're looking for the name and address of the company behind the web site, so we can check the business out. We also look for ad links and a few other things, like BBBonline seals, which we check. We use a user agent name of SiteTruth.com site rating system. We don't look very deeply into a site; if after examining the most likely 20 pages, we haven't found out who runs the site, we figure they're not going to tell us. The site is down-rated accordingly.
Our experience is that 0.1% of sites have a "robots.txt" file that tells us to not look at any pages at all. We don't look at those sites, and their SiteTruth rating information says "Blocked". Total exclusion of crawlers is rare. Most sites want some visibility.
One of the more amusing uses of a "robots.txt" file used to be seen on Marchex (the "What you need, when you need it" domainer) pages. The site wasn't blocked from crawling, but the link to the page that told you about Marchex was. That, we suspect, was to keep search engines from noticing that all those domains were really one business. That didn't help Marchex much. Marchex (NASDAQ: MCHX) is still around, stock way down from the peak and reporting a slight loss this quarter.
We do have one exception to obeying the "robots.txt" file. We look at the home page of the site to see if it's a redirect before looking at the "robots.txt" file. Some sites have both a redirect and a "keep out" robots.txt file on the same domain. This is like posting signs that say "Keep Out" and "Please Use Other Door" on the same entrance. That contradiction was apparently a workaround for an old Google crawler bug. Google would index both "example.com" and "www.example.com" separately, then consider them duplicates, which caused some SEO problems.
Actually logging into sites from a crawler is just wrong. I'm amazed that a deep pocket like Nielsen would do that.
James Cameron wanted to do Avatar at 48FPS. Avatar II, or whatever, will be. He's been pushing 48FPS for a while.
It's about time; 24FPS is way too slow. A big problem with 24FPS is that pans over detailed backgrounds have strobing effects unless the pan is very slow. Sometimes blur is inserted to mask this, either in camera or in post. Cameron likes richly detailed backgrounds ("Titanic", etc.), and this limitation has annoyed him.
Cameron will use higher frame rates well. He's used 3D well. Other directors, probably not so much.
The entire report, "Full Text of Human Rights Record of the United States in 2010", is worth reading. Most of the items on the list are well known, and have even come up on Slashdot.
These are problems the US has that aren't being fixed.
The inexcusable part of all this was the hydrogen explosion. Explosions. That's the cause of all the structural damage. The reactor buildings survived the earthquake and tsunami.
That's a known, expected problem. It was a big worry at Three Mile Island, but they managed to avoid it. It is preventable. There are catalytic recombiners, passive devices which recombine hydrogen and oxygen non-explosively. Many nuclear plants have them, but pre-TMI plants usually don't. If those had been retrofitted in the decades since TMI, this would have been a much smaller disaster. See this IAEA paper, "Mitigation of hydrogen hazards in water-cooled power reactors". They indicate that passive recombiners are necessary, and are in use in Germany, France, Canada, the United States, and Russia. They've been retrofitted to the GE Mark I reactor in other countries. But not, for some reason, in Japan.
The cooling pumps survived the earthquake and tsunami, and continued to run until the battery backups ran out. The hydrogen explosions probably damaged them and their plumbing and wiring. (Nobody can get through the wreckage and radioactivity yet to tell. A remote-controlled backhoe/grab and a dump truck are now being used to dig through the rubble.) If it hadn't been for the hydrogen explosions, restoration of power would have restored reactor and fuel pool cooling.
So that's where TEPCO screwed up. They failed to install a low-cost standard protective device that's been used elsewhere for decades.
Certificate Authorities issue "Relying Party Agreements", which specify their obligations to users relying on their certificates. Some of these specify financial penalties payable to end users.Over the years, as with EULAs, these have been made so favorable to the CAs as to make them meaningless. (See, for example, Verisign's relying party agreement. Or, worse, the one from Starfield, GoDaddy's CA.)
Now it's time to push back.
The Mozilla Foundation should issue a tough standard for CA Relying Party Agreements to get a root cert into Mozilla. One that makes CA's financially responsible for false certs they issue, with a minimum liability limit of at least $100,000. The CA must be required to post a bond. A third party consumer-oriented organization like BEUC (in the EU) or Consumer's Union (in the US), not the CA, must decide claims.
The technology behind SSL is fine. The problem is allowing CA's that aren't doing due diligence on their customers to have root certificates in major browsers. Mozilla all by itself has enough power to tighten up standards in this area. All it takes is the will.
The problem is that content stored on someone else's server, or authorized from it, seems to go away within five years. Often less. That's happened with Circuit City's DIVX (1998-1999), Microsoft's PlaysForSure (2004-2008), WalMart Music (2007-2008), and seems to be about to happen to Microsoft's Zune. Yes, there's usually some way to pry the content loose, but it's usually difficult, unsupported, and won't be done by most consumers.
Of course, you can't sell used "cloud" content, and you can't play it on an unapproved device. You're caught between the service going bust and your devices becoming obsolete.
Bad idea.
(I wrote this on Slashdot back in 2003..)
The basic problem is that space travel with chemical fuels isn't feasible. You just can't pack enough energy per unit mass into the fuel.
Only by desperate weight reduction measures, resulting in incredibly fragile vehicles, is anything made to fly into space at all. The vehicles are almost all fuel. Pieces have to be thrown away after launch. Payloads are dinky for the size of the vehicle. Costs are insanely high.
It's been that way for almost forty years. It's not getting any better. No combination of parts will fix this fundamentally broken technology.
Space travel is like lighter-than-air travel. The technology has been around for decades, and it reached its limits a long time ago. It's possible to build vehicles. But the weight limitations are too severe for them to be more than marginally useful.
Space travel won't work until we get a better energy source.
That's still valid. Consider Apollo. They launched a 50-story building and got a minivan back.
Suborbital flight takes far less energy than reaching orbital velocity. What Virgin Atlantic is doing is comparable to Alan Shepard's suborbital flight atop a Redstone ICBM in 1961. It's a roller coaster, not space travel.
Nuclear rocket engines would work, and were tested in the 1950s. That solves the mass ratio problem. But they're rather messy.
What I notice is that when the page goes to google analytics that load process stops while waiting for the server. There was a time when pages would load partial content, and then go for the ads. Now, many pull the ads and analytics first. This would be good if the ad servers were fast, but the seem to be getting slower.
Right. I've commented on this before. If a page loads slowly today, it's usually for one of three reasons.
The SPDY approach won't fix any of these problems. Client side last-mile bandwidth usually isn't the bottleneck. It might make a difference on mobile, where getting through the air link is a bottleneck. It might help for Google's own pages, where there are multiple components coming in from different Google servers. Google tends not to load content from others on their own pages, so they need more connections to their own servers. Most sites aren't like that.
A new source of delay is "social" features. "Like" buttons for Facebook, Digg, etc. all add to page load time. "Disqus" comment forms add to page load time.
Making all the junk stuff load concurrently creates another problem. As each irrelevant item arrives, the page has to be reformatted to fit. So the user is shown a page which "squirms" as all the unwanted junk is pulled in.
Yes, the USB HID interface is quite easy to use. I've dealt with it from the other side, using a Logitec steering wheel, mouse, and pedals to control a robot vehicle.
Force feedback via that interface is lame, though. I wanted to have the steering wheel track what the vehicle steering was actually doing, so you'd feel the resistance of the real steering. You could spin the steering wheel, and it would take a second or so for the real vehicle's steering to catch up. But the HID interface for steering wheels is more like an audio device, intended for vibration, not positional feedback.
Incidentally, you can have many HID devices, and they don't have to pretend to be the main mouse and keyboard. Applications aware of them can use them for other inputs.
Well, now we know that "+1" isn't about search quality.
Most ad clicks come from a tiny percentage of users. 85% of ad clicks come from 8% of users. Worse, from an advertiser perspective, the heavy clickers don't buy much. Also, ad click-through dropped 50% from 2007 to 2011. Only losers click on ads now.
"+1" is likely to have similar demographics. If it's important to you for your friends to know that you like some product, you probably have no life. Or you're a spambot. As an approach to social networking, it seems rather lame. Wave and Buzz were at least original.
As someone who tracks search spam, I've been underwhelmed by Google in the last six months. The Google Places merge into web search last October, and the subsequent heavy spamming of recommendations, should have taught them that "social signals" are very easily spammed.
Levy's new book "In the Plex", about Google, just came out. I recommend it if you need to understand Google.
Nuclear power has never been economic.
If you charge Gulf War I, Iraq, and Afghanistan to the cost of oil, nuclear looks a lot cheaper.
Crude oil is at $112/bbl today. It's not likely to spend much time below $100 ever again.
While not terribly cheap, the technology for separating dissolved compounds from water(to fairly extreme degrees of purity, in the case of water for lab/analytic use) is very much off-the-shelf.
Right. That was done at Three Mile Island. Bear in mind that you can't make water itself radioactive; hydrogen and oxygen don't have any radioactive isotopes with long half-lives. (The longest, 15O has a half-life of 122 seconds, so it's gone within an hour.) All the radioactivity is in dissolved solids. So the process looks a lot like desalinization - the water is forced through membranes that catch all the solids. Eventually, you have dry salts, which you put in casks and bury in some desert or hard-rock cave.
That's the easy part of the problem, though. Remember that the reactor buildings are wrecked from the hydrogen explosions. All the fuel rods in the spent fuel pools have to be carefully moved to some other location, probably newly built spent fuel pools nearby. In 3-5 years, they'll have decayed enough for dry storage, and they'll be put into casks. They can then be moved off site.
This leaves the reactors themselves. Units 1,2, and 3 still haven't reached cold shutdown. Until that's achieved, cleanup can't even start. The situation isn't even close to safe until all three reactors are in cold shutdown, not leaking, and have redundant cooling. Look at the status reports at the Japan Industrial Atomic Forum. Until all the red squares turn yellow, there's a sizable risk of things getting worse.
Decommissioning the damaged reactors will be really tough. They're too damaged to de-fuel, and they need constant cooling, so they can't just be encased in steel and concrete. I don't know what will be done.
This is much, much worse than Three Mile Island. At TMI, the control room was up and running through the whole episode, they reached cold shutdown in a few days, they never had an explosion, and radioactivity was confined to the containment vessel.
Who the hell is "Pastabagel"? How did this get onto Slashdot?
He has a Twitter feed, where you can read his blithering on other subjects.
40 years ago, the idea of triggering fusion with a laser seemed promising. That's what Lawrence Livermore's Nova laser was supposed to be for. But laser ignition didn't work as an energy source.
Maybe someday, but not yet.
The leak that was stopped was from a drain pit to the ocean. The reactor itself is still leaking highly radioactive water. They're running out of places to put it.and are frantically building tanks and ponds.
I'm impressed that the Falcon-9 rocket can lie on its side, supported at only two points. Many large US rockets don't have enough strength in torsion for that, and must be assembled vertically.
This reduces cost. The thing can be built in a factory bay of reasonable size, then barged and/or trucked to the launch site. There's no need to do final assembly near the launch pad.
This is a good sign. One of the big problems with US rocketry has been that fanatical weight reduction resulted in overly fragile vehicles. This thing looks tougher.
Nobody really replaces CPUs. As of a few years ago, 80% of desktop machines were never opened during their lifetime. That's probably higher now, and higher still for laptops.
The most accurate statement is "The taking (and passing) of math levels beyond Algebra I (and maybe Geometry) is the leading predictor of college and work success."
Right. Passing Algebra II is a good predictor and filter. Whether pushing more people to get the skill set Algebra II provides is an open question.
Few people working today have actually designed a high performance airplane. Ben Rich, who ran the Lockheed Skunk Works and designed the propulsion system for the SR-71, wrote on his retirement that he worked on 26 airplanes during his career, but today's aircraft designer would be lucky to work on one.
For the first time since WWII, the USAF no longer has a new fighter plane in development. If and when it becomes necessary to design one, who will know how? Nobody will have the practical experience to get it right.
Rutan was one of the few people who consistently got exotic designs right. He will be tough to replace.
The punishment for the leak should be that Kroger has to abandon any attempts to collect or store information about their customers.
They're a grocery store. They don't need that info.