Spamming is a scale free phenomena- that is, a small fraction, 20 to 200, account for most of the sucessful spam. You'd just need the legal incentive to go after the big ones.
When I started Usenet around 1988 it was with a university address and my own name. Computer managers did not allow psuedonymns in those days. In those days you'd run out of disk in a week, so I though messages were transient. Little did I know that some guy in Canada keep comprehensive tape backups which eventually came into Google's control. Nor that computers would become powerful enough to store everything online and search it in seconds. (What about exponential dont you understand?:-) So up to 1994 there may be some less than flattering material out there. (Even though google has an opt-out mechanism.)
This "clean and free energy everywhere" echos the
hype of nuclear energy in the late 1940s.
Until they started to build electric power reactors. then it turned out to be more costly and dirty than most people had imagined.
Hydrogen is not as dirty as nuclear, but it may have unforseen problems. It burns explosively. It leaks out things easily. It is a greenhouse gas.
I always enjoyed my grad student life more than the "real world", even though my take-home pay quadrupled. I was surrounded by very smart and interesting people. There was much culture and interesting things to do. I didn't feel that "poor" then- housing, medical, travel, and culture were highly subsidized for students.
Its not the life if you are interested in raising a family while young, or in acquiring material things like houses and cars.
You also dont build any credit toward retirement and have to "catch up" if you enter the work force late.
To be honest, the InterNet has blunted the disadvantages of being away from he university. Groups like slashdot help connect to intelligent people in a way you could only doing at a university or R&D lab in pre-Net days.
In my previous company, PhDs were being hired for what used to be a master level position, mainly because there was a surplus of PhDs. As long as you dont have an ego problem, the more educated people pick up on things quicker.
Ditto for community college and elementary school.
PhDs are replace MS teachers in both places.
P.S. There were some older people doing these engineering tech jobs who didnt even have a college degree! They were people hired in lower positions long ago, but learned the business in their work. This basically means that a PhD hired in the late 1990s might be doing similar work to a masters from the 1980s, a BS from the 1970s, and high school from earlier!
In a 4-deck play there are 16 aces and 64 face cards & 10s. These are the best cards.
These should play out 9.6% of the time.
Whenever there is a surplus of these card remaining, the deck is in your favor.
Peter Malin, the designer of the Mars Surveyor camera, said at his Denver lecture last night that three years of photography have observed the Martian polar ice caps are melting away. Each year they are smaller. This suggests there could be a solar component to global warming if it affects two planets.
I was in an auto accident a few months ago and required lots of medical services. They all had my SSN as an identifier, even though I didnt give it to them!
My employer also uses SSN for many of its benefits, though this is not legal.
I recall a Wired or Technology Review article sometime back saying that if the camera feeds were made available to everyone as well as the security authority, then they would be less onerous. Then everyone would know what everyone was seeing. This capbability is probably feasible in the near term on the InterNet. The article was about ubiquitos British police town-square cameras, but is applicable to any "public" area.
Avoiding Stallman's pun, what exactly is UNIX? Does Linux qualify? Apple OS X+? Exotic OS's like Mach?
In the mid-1980s an industrial/governemnt consortium tried to defined an unified UNIX API, called Posix. Then it would be straight forward to implement the UNIX utilities, command user interfaces, and apps on top this. I recall some companies layering Posix on top of VMS, MVS, and other non-UNIX kernals. Are these UNIX?
Another approach was extending the UNIX philosophy of a simple machine image to more modern computers than those in the early 1970s.
Mach assumed a computer model with multiple CPUs and memory subsystems. BeOS assumed a computer model where multimedia was the norm. So are these OS's "more UNIX-like than UNIX" then?
The ailing SOHO satellite in a parallel orbit to the earth measures vibrations by the Doppler method at 700,000 solar locations several times a minute. This is over a hundred times more locations than earth-based seismographs, where the oceans which make it hard to measure 65% of the earth's surface.
Solar data is "cleaner" and more complete than earth measurements. They dont have soil-coupling problems, nor man-made noise interference. The mathematics of solar seismic waves is the same as earth seismic waves.
They can even see new sunspots forming on the back side of the Sun through helio-siesmology tomography (www.spaceweather.com).
Sunspots are cooler than than rest of the Sun's surface and slow down solar seismic waves.
This is useful, because it takes up to two weeks for the sunspot to become visible on telescopes. In the meantime it may be causing solar flares that could interfere with earth-based electronics.
Mexico City is both cursed and blessed by its earthquake situation. It is built on old lake mud which amplifies seismic waves, making buildings collapse. However, the worst quakes occur on the west coast, which takes seismic waves about five minutes to propagate through the rocks to Mexico City. They've used this delay to install a siren warning system for quakes, so people could leave buildings and turn off power. The first few years it issued too many false alarms, but has worked OK for recent west coast quakes.
A siren system would not work that well in California quakes, because the cities are too close to the earthquake faults for a general warning. However, refineries, power plants, subways, and computer disk farms, all which could react to a 10-30 second warning, are connected to an automatic warning system run by a jopint government corporate progam.
You hit it on the nose. After any large quake a hoarde of people come out the woodwork from astrologists, to psychics, to pet-owners, and an occasional scientist claiming they've predicted the quake. This is routine in Usenet sci.geo.earthquakes.
Actually weather prediction is a good model
on
Anticipating Earthquakes
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Meterologists have found that people ignore tornado predictions until they got into the 20% range for a couple hour, single county window. Before that the citizenry would treat these predictions as spam. Now the warnings are good enough to save lives.
Californians are very blazee, and would ignore predictions of low probability. Scientists are happy if they can beat random probablity, which is about 1 in 20,000 of a destructive quake happening on a given day in Los Angeles. This is a far cry from a 1 in 5 that meteorologists have discovered necessary to get people to react.
Short term earthquake prediction (hours to weeks) has not been unsuccessful due to lack of effort. After some promising hints in Russia and China in the early 1970s, scientists around the world looked for a systematic precursor. All kinds of things happen before A COUPLE of large quakes: well-level changes, radon gas burps, scared animals, magnetic anomalies, heat anomalies, foreshocks, and so on. The problem has been they have not been systematic and repeatable. Is is not clear whether a GENERAL THEORY OF PREDICTION is even possible then. One hypothesis is that each seismic region may have its characteristic precursors. However, even the most active seismic areas like the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles experience large quakes tenty years apart, so its not easy to these this second hypothesis.
Most import prediction: construction standards
on
Anticipating Earthquakes
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Sort-term earthquake prediction- hours to weeks- is pyschologically comforting, but not that important in saving lives or property. One needs to predict the maximum likely earthquake force in a neighborhood in order to properly contruct buildings and roads to last for at least 30 years and save lives. In this area the USGS and State Geologic Surveys have made great progress. Case in point: The 1994 Northridge, California earthquake and 1995 Kobe, Japan were the same magnitude, yet the second killed ONE HUNDRED TIMES more people than the first. The success of the Northridge quake was partially attributed to luck and partly to that Los Angeles had more newer buildings than Japan that had implemented the more serious construction codes. It is tragic that M5 quakes that barely spill coffee in San Jose, California, but level mud-brick buildings and kill hundreds in some third world country.
I've been in three near M7 quakes in California and I can testify how psychologically traumatic a sudden quake is. Short term prediction would be comforting. It would also save some lives in large buildings like schools and stadiums (even though the 1989 San Francisco quake happended during a Wolrd Series baseball game without fatallity). And in reving up rescue crews.
Indians and Chinese cant vote in US elections
on
The "Techie" Vote?
·
· Score: 1
Since the tech community includes about 1.1 H-1B and L-1 visas and abut 3.3 million IT jobs outsourced abroad by 2005, most of these people cant vote in US elections. High-tech US citizens will be a minority soon, if not already.
According the recnt book "The X Chromosome" , the second "X" chromosome in females is 95% deactivated because it is redundant. These become "Barr bodies" which float about independently of the other DNA. An X chromosome is contributed from the mother and father to a female child. In human females, either can be deactivated in a cell. (In other species, sometimes one parental X is only deactivated.)
It is suggested that the higher incidence of auto-immune conditions in females, e.g. lupus, chronic fatigue, etc. may be the immune system reacting againts one of the parental X. (The are alternative hypotheses for auto-immune problems.)
Humans can exist with as few as one X and no Y, up to three or four X's, due the deactivations of the extras X's. Most other chromosome miscounts cause miscarriages. X/Y miscounts happen about one in every 300 births.
I'd add
(11) The electronic computer and internet. These are general and rapidly evolving inventions that continually change he way money is processed.
(12) Electronic trading. New money is created as the value of stocks and bonds increase. Electronic trading has made it nearly as possible for the individual to trade as fast as the big institution.
(13) Micro payments. Though this hasn't caught on yet, sub-cent payments will smooth internet trasactions of the future. Everything now on the net is expensive (a dollar or more) or free (portals, music, email). Either the vendor or ucstomer gets screwed in one of these cases. Micro-payments, e.g one-cent news stories, one-cent email, etc. are a solutions. As computers nad networks grow ever cheaper, so does the overhead of a sub-cent transaction.
(14) Computer auctions. A profitable sale creates money. Companies like EBay create both huge and tiny markets by connecting large pools of buyers and sellers. Auctioning tends to result in higher prices paid.
My brain absorbs technical manuals like a sponge. I can read a coding reference book and write significant working code in a few hours.
I wish I had the same power to learn human languages that way.
US Today says a Lockheed janitor was denied a security clearance to clean a sensitive factory area, solely because of a bad credit history. He didnt pay all of his medical bills.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be on the first DVD.
Spamming is a scale free phenomena- that is, a small fraction, 20 to 200, account for most of the sucessful spam. You'd just need the legal incentive to go after the big ones.
When I started Usenet around 1988 it was with a university address and my own name. Computer managers did not allow psuedonymns in those days. In those days you'd run out of disk in a week, so I though messages were transient. Little did I know that some guy in Canada keep comprehensive tape backups which eventually came into Google's control. Nor that computers would become powerful enough to store everything online and search it in seconds. (What about exponential dont you understand? :-) So up to 1994 there may be some less than flattering material out there. (Even though google has an opt-out mechanism.)
This "clean and free energy everywhere" echos the hype of nuclear energy in the late 1940s. Until they started to build electric power reactors. then it turned out to be more costly and dirty than most people had imagined.
Hydrogen is not as dirty as nuclear, but it may have unforseen problems. It burns explosively. It leaks out things easily. It is a greenhouse gas.
I always enjoyed my grad student life more than the "real world", even though my take-home pay quadrupled. I was surrounded by very smart and interesting people. There was much culture and interesting things to do. I didn't feel that "poor" then- housing, medical, travel, and culture were highly subsidized for students.
Its not the life if you are interested in raising a family while young, or in acquiring material things like houses and cars. You also dont build any credit toward retirement and have to "catch up" if you enter the work force late.
To be honest, the InterNet has blunted the disadvantages of being away from he university. Groups like slashdot help connect to intelligent people in a way you could only doing at a university or R&D lab in pre-Net days.
In my previous company, PhDs were being hired for what used to be a master level position, mainly because there was a surplus of PhDs. As long as you dont have an ego problem, the more educated people pick up on things quicker.
Ditto for community college and elementary school. PhDs are replace MS teachers in both places.
P.S. There were some older people doing these engineering tech jobs who didnt even have a college degree! They were people hired in lower positions long ago, but learned the business in their work. This basically means that a PhD hired in the late 1990s might be doing similar work to a masters from the 1980s, a BS from the 1970s, and high school from earlier!
In a 4-deck play there are 16 aces and 64 face cards & 10s. These are the best cards. These should play out 9.6% of the time. Whenever there is a surplus of these card remaining, the deck is in your favor.
Peter Malin, the designer of the Mars Surveyor camera, said at his Denver lecture last night that three years of photography have observed the Martian polar ice caps are melting away. Each year they are smaller. This suggests there could be a solar component to global warming if it affects two planets.
Now that he is both a rabbit and a kid? "Trix are for kids!"
Niacin depresses liver function in large doses. Vitamin A and D overdoses can kill you.
Your half-life would be about 2000 years if disease, war, and crime were eliminated, but not accidents. You could make things safer and live longer.
I was in an auto accident a few months ago and required lots of medical services. They all had my SSN as an identifier, even though I didnt give it to them!
My employer also uses SSN for many of its benefits, though this is not legal.
I recall a Wired or Technology Review article sometime back saying that if the camera feeds were made available to everyone as well as the security authority, then they would be less onerous. Then everyone would know what everyone was seeing. This capbability is probably feasible in the near term on the InterNet. The article was about ubiquitos British police town-square cameras, but is applicable to any "public" area.
Avoiding Stallman's pun, what exactly is UNIX? Does Linux qualify? Apple OS X+? Exotic OS's like Mach?
In the mid-1980s an industrial/governemnt consortium tried to defined an unified UNIX API, called Posix. Then it would be straight forward to implement the UNIX utilities, command user interfaces, and apps on top this. I recall some companies layering Posix on top of VMS, MVS, and other non-UNIX kernals. Are these UNIX?
Another approach was extending the UNIX philosophy of a simple machine image to more modern computers than those in the early 1970s. Mach assumed a computer model with multiple CPUs and memory subsystems. BeOS assumed a computer model where multimedia was the norm. So are these OS's "more UNIX-like than UNIX" then?
The ailing SOHO satellite in a parallel orbit to the earth measures vibrations by the Doppler method at 700,000 solar locations several times a minute. This is over a hundred times more locations than earth-based seismographs, where the oceans which make it hard to measure 65% of the earth's surface.
Solar data is "cleaner" and more complete than earth measurements. They dont have soil-coupling problems, nor man-made noise interference. The mathematics of solar seismic waves is the same as earth seismic waves.
They can even see new sunspots forming on the back side of the Sun through helio-siesmology tomography (www.spaceweather.com). Sunspots are cooler than than rest of the Sun's surface and slow down solar seismic waves. This is useful, because it takes up to two weeks for the sunspot to become visible on telescopes. In the meantime it may be causing solar flares that could interfere with earth-based electronics.
Mexico City is both cursed and blessed by its earthquake situation. It is built on old lake mud which amplifies seismic waves, making buildings collapse. However, the worst quakes occur on the west coast, which takes seismic waves about five minutes to propagate through the rocks to Mexico City. They've used this delay to install a siren warning system for quakes, so people could leave buildings and turn off power. The first few years it issued too many false alarms, but has worked OK for recent west coast quakes.
A siren system would not work that well in California quakes, because the cities are too close to the earthquake faults for a general warning. However, refineries, power plants, subways, and computer disk farms, all which could react to a 10-30 second warning, are connected to an automatic warning system run by a jopint government corporate progam.
You hit it on the nose. After any large quake a hoarde of people come out the woodwork from astrologists, to psychics, to pet-owners, and an occasional scientist claiming they've predicted the quake. This is routine in Usenet sci.geo.earthquakes.
Meterologists have found that people ignore tornado predictions until they got into the 20% range for a couple hour, single county window. Before that the citizenry would treat these predictions as spam. Now the warnings are good enough to save lives.
Californians are very blazee, and would ignore predictions of low probability. Scientists are happy if they can beat random probablity, which is about 1 in 20,000 of a destructive quake happening on a given day in Los Angeles. This is a far cry from a 1 in 5 that meteorologists have discovered necessary to get people to react.
Short term earthquake prediction (hours to weeks) has not been unsuccessful due to lack of effort. After some promising hints in Russia and China in the early 1970s, scientists around the world looked for a systematic precursor. All kinds of things happen before A COUPLE of large quakes: well-level changes, radon gas burps, scared animals, magnetic anomalies, heat anomalies, foreshocks, and so on. The problem has been they have not been systematic and repeatable. Is is not clear whether a GENERAL THEORY OF PREDICTION is even possible then. One hypothesis is that each seismic region may have its characteristic precursors. However, even the most active seismic areas like the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles experience large quakes tenty years apart, so its not easy to these this second hypothesis.
Sort-term earthquake prediction- hours to weeks- is pyschologically comforting, but not that important in saving lives or property. One needs to predict the maximum likely earthquake force in a neighborhood in order to properly contruct buildings and roads to last for at least 30 years and save lives. In this area the USGS and State Geologic Surveys have made great progress. Case in point: The 1994 Northridge, California earthquake and 1995 Kobe, Japan were the same magnitude, yet the second killed ONE HUNDRED TIMES more people than the first. The success of the Northridge quake was partially attributed to luck and partly to that Los Angeles had more newer buildings than Japan that had implemented the more serious construction codes. It is tragic that M5 quakes that barely spill coffee in San Jose, California, but level mud-brick buildings and kill hundreds in some third world country.
I've been in three near M7 quakes in California and I can testify how psychologically traumatic a sudden quake is. Short term prediction would be comforting. It would also save some lives in large buildings like schools and stadiums (even though the 1989 San Francisco quake happended during a Wolrd Series baseball game without fatallity). And in reving up rescue crews.
Since the tech community includes about 1.1 H-1B and L-1 visas and abut 3.3 million IT jobs outsourced abroad by 2005, most of these people cant vote in US elections. High-tech US citizens will be a minority soon, if not already.
According the recnt book "The X Chromosome" , the second "X" chromosome in females is 95% deactivated because it is redundant. These become "Barr bodies" which float about independently of the other DNA. An X chromosome is contributed from the mother and father to a female child. In human females, either can be deactivated in a cell. (In other species, sometimes one parental X is only deactivated.)
It is suggested that the higher incidence of auto-immune conditions in females, e.g. lupus, chronic fatigue, etc. may be the immune system reacting againts one of the parental X. (The are alternative hypotheses for auto-immune problems.)
Humans can exist with as few as one X and no Y, up to three or four X's, due the deactivations of the extras X's. Most other chromosome miscounts cause miscarriages. X/Y miscounts happen about one in every 300 births.
I'd add
(11) The electronic computer and internet. These are general and rapidly evolving inventions that continually change he way money is processed.
(12) Electronic trading. New money is created as the value of stocks and bonds increase. Electronic trading has made it nearly as possible for the individual to trade as fast as the big institution.
(13) Micro payments. Though this hasn't caught on yet, sub-cent payments will smooth internet trasactions of the future. Everything now on the net is expensive (a dollar or more) or free (portals, music, email). Either the vendor or ucstomer gets screwed in one of these cases. Micro-payments, e.g one-cent news stories, one-cent email, etc. are a solutions. As computers nad networks grow ever cheaper, so does the overhead of a sub-cent transaction.
(14) Computer auctions. A profitable sale creates money. Companies like EBay create both huge and tiny markets by connecting large pools of buyers and sellers. Auctioning tends to result in higher prices paid.
My brain absorbs technical manuals like a sponge. I can read a coding reference book and write significant working code in a few hours.
I wish I had the same power to learn human languages that way.
US Today says a Lockheed janitor was denied a security clearance to clean a sensitive factory area, solely because of a bad credit history. He didnt pay all of his medical bills.