I can hardly wait for the SDK to ship, not so much that I'm craving to install 3rd party applications on my iPhone, but that you will finally be forced to find another mental tic.
I'm surprised by this article. I thought it was common knowledge that botnets are full of these old exploits. The guessed purpose is exactly what's going on. Worms these days don't spread as rapidly as they used to on the wild internet because botnets are serving a purpose -- they are making somebody money. If they spread like wildfire on the internet as a whole, they would attract too much attention, and get cleaned up. They can't get into most corporate networks using worm probes, either, but they can and do get in by exploiting browsers, as email attachments, and so forth. Once inside, they probe around looking for all manner of things. It's not just SQL exploits, either. I'd guess the sample data they looked at was biased somehow. Maybe some big botnet was running a sweep with those particular exploits during the sample period.
Microsoft to borrow money for Yahoo deal
"Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said the software company may take on some debt to finance the cash portion of its 50-50 stock and cash offer for Yahoo, instead of drawing down its entire $21 billion cash pile."
Microsoft will borrow money, but may not go into debt, as their assets will exceed the value of the borrowed sums.
You missed, with the "back off unless you have a double-blind study bit. Insistence on a double blind study is not the demonstration of a rational scientific approach to the issue that it might at first appear. In fact, you have it upside down, in this case. Demanding a double-blind study to support action to *stop* an optional surgical removal of an otherwise healthy body part violates the precautionary principle for example. It's a non-controversial argument to claim that cutting off part of a healthy body for religious, cultural, or other non-medical reasons, without evidence that this *does not* cause harm is at the very least a violation of the precautionary principle.
There also considerable evidence that the practice does cause actual harm, greater in some cases than in others.
Consider another example. Cigarettes are full of substances which cause cancer in laboratory rats. Where are the double blind studies supporting the claim that cigarette smoking causes cancer in people? Well, there really aren't any, because it isn't ethical to conduct these types of studies which would require exposing a group of human volunteers to known or suspected carcinogens. There are other ways to get reasonably reliable data on which to base public policy, however.
The onus in the case of physical mutilation (circumcision of either gender certainly qualifies) should be on those doing the mutilating of the defenseless child. There are no double blind studies which demonstrate that we have not deprived our children of the most sensitive part of their anatomy, and that we haven't permanently deprived them of maximum sexual enjoyment. (All those folk who cry out on any political issue, Think of the children! forget to consider or care about what happens if they mange to make it to adulthood.) With respect to circumcision, however, there are recent studies which indicate that male circumcision might reduce the spread of AIDS. The evidence isn't conclusive, but it does complicate the issue of male circumcision.
Although it might seem clear that female genital mutilation is rather more dramatically barbaric, male circumcision is by no means a harmless practice. Perhaps not all the patients are harmed, but some are undoubtedly harmed, irrevocably.
Finally, it's worth noting that although the extent of the legal and human rights of children remain the subject of debate, it's clear that most modern democratic societies at least, agree that children have some rights. You may be the parent of YOUR children, but the system of laws governing your country almost certainly limit what you may do to them. You certainly would do hard time, and or have the children taken away, in any western democray for amputating part of their nose or their ear or their hand or foot. Why not for amputating part of their penis?
Ooooh, you cannot reach me now
Ooooh, no matter how you try
Goodbye, cruel 'Net, it's over
Surf on by.
Sitting in a bunker here behind fire-wall
Waiting for the worms to come.
In perfect isolation here behind fire-wall
Waiting for the worms to come.
We're {waiting to succeed} and going to convene outside Pharmington
Dot Com where we're going to be...
Waiting to infect their PC.
Waiting to read all their e-mail.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Waiting to set up fake bank sites.
Waiting to update the rootkits.
Waiting to smash in their windows
And change their config.
Waiting for the final solution
To "clean up" this strain.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Waiting to gather their idents
And pretend to be them.
Waiting for windows based desktops
and laptops and cell phones.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Would you like to see deposits
bank, again, my friend?
All you have to do is follow the worms.
Would you like to send your credit rating
Home to me, my friend?
So let me get this straight. You were once near a research program, but not actually a part of it, and the head of a department, but apparently not the head of the department doing the research, dismissed it out of hand, before the research was published, implying to you the data was noisy? Your ass just fell off. Let me hand it to you, so you can re-attach it.
Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?
Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.
Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)
Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.
Propaganda by an opposing industry, you say. Do you mean that bastion of the vast left wing conspiracy against mercury known as the Christian Science Monitor?
Mercury Rising:
"SMOKY SKIES: The coal-burning Gavin Power Plant in Cheshire, Ohio, is one of the US's top producers of mercury, according to the EPA. In the US, power plants account for 60 percent of all mercury released into the air by industry."
Or do you mean an organization like the Department of Energy which has been controlled by an administration which is absurdly friendly to the energy industry? (See: Mercury Emission Control R&D).
Dude. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is in doubt about the mercury released into the atmosphere from human activity, and which then falls into the oceans. Even according to the Bush administration, about a third of this is apparently from burning coal. Oh, and look! The data in the DOE chart is from 1994 and 1995! The data from the Christian Science Monitor is ten years newer. Huh. Imagine that. As mercury emissions are reduced form other industries, the proportion of emissions from coal fire plants has gone up. Bummer. Undermines the DOE case against actually doing anything about the problem of emissions from coal fire plants in the US, which just doubled in importance, right then, by taking the time to understand the attempted deception in the graph.
There are a few reasons that any mercury is released at all from coal burning:
Coal has mercury in it,
we haven't widely deployed the best available technology for scrubbing the mercury out of the emissions, and
we haven't the technical ability to scrub it all out, even with the best available technology, and
even the best available technology is apparently widely variable in effectiveness, ranging from not effective at all (scrubbing zero percent of the mercury from the emissions), to somewhat effective (a third to half of emissions captured).
Although global mercury emissions have fallen in recent decades, they are still absurdly high. Human activity is causing a rising level of mercury found in top level predator fish, the kinds people like to eat, like tuna.
Mercury is a neurotoxin, and a general toxin, and it accumulates in organisms (Bioaccumulation of mercury). In tiny quantities, it's bad for you. It's particularly bad for those unborn children that the "Christian Right" proponents of "Family Values" love to go on and on about. They don't seem to care much if those children are born healthy, only that they get born. But I digress.
Were this not the case, we would not have research programs designed to figure out how to reduce these emissions, under this pro-industry, head-in-the-sand Republican administration. Unfortunately, the "propaganda" is on the other side of the issue. Even though the DOE can't deny this problem, due to the overwhelming nature of the evidence, they can still obfuscate it. Notice how the first paragraph of this article differs pretty dramatically in gestalt view of the problem, as compared to a paragraph from deeper in the body of the content: Mercury Emission Control R&D
"Trace amounts of mercury can exist in coal and other fossil fuels. When these fuels burn, mercury vapor can be released to the atmosphere where it may drift for a year or more, spreading with air currents over vast regions of the globe. In 1995, an estimated 5,500 tons of mercury was emitted globally from both natural and human sources. Coal-fired power plants in the United States contributed less than 1 percent of the total."
How are they revolting? Are they heading over to the Apple Store and buying MacBooks? If they really wanted to revolt, they would install Linux or FreeBSD or buy a Macintosh and never look back. TechNet users are particularly hard core Windows lovers, masochistic, really. I bet they tough this one out. They are not revolting. They are reveling in their delicious pain.
Expect Apple's future iPhone products to be announced using the same general patterns as their iPod and Mac products. Major product refreshes are likely to be announced at an event like MacWorld, or a "special event" where they invite the press and the product is available for purchase that day, to be shipped that day or within a week or two. Minor revisions, like models with additional memory that were released last week will be press releases with shipping products. The six month lead on the original iPhone was an aberration.
When Apple pre-announced the iPhone by six months, they were in a relatively unique position and didn't really have the option to follow their traditional model for "Surprise! Buy Now!" product releases. The rumor mill was already onto the iPhone, and Apple was in a position where they had to provide samples of the unit to AT&T to test it on their networks, file for FCC approval, make commercials and whatnot. They were at the point where they had to go from maybe a dozen people even knowing for sure that the project existed, to at least a few hundred people working actively on production ramp-up, software design, testing, and marketing materials. Furthermore, Apple didn't have any existing sales to cannibalize, so a pre-announcement was pretty safe. Apple will avoid pulling the rug out from existing sales by pre-announcing a new version too far in advance, a marketing phenomenon named the Osborne Effect after a computer company of which nobody has heard, because it's been dead a long time.
The problem with thinking of these network technologies in simple marketing terms like "3G" is that so many different companies and consortiums are working on so many different technologies, and they don't arrive in lock-step. Verizon went with a "sure thing" a few years ago, and invested heavily in EVDO, their "3G" network.
This gave Verizon an edge over EDGE, since EVDO is three or four times faster than EDGE in theory, and also because AT&T deployed a lousy back end infrastructure, making EVDO, in practice, infinitely faster than EDGE, which, in practice, offered zero throughput about half the time in about half the places I tried to use it. EDGE's reputation suffered greatly from experiences of early customers like me, who couldn't get 56k modem speeds from ATT nor TMobile, because their EDGE networks were so poor. AT&T fixed their EDGE network by adding capacity to the backbone (publicly declared) and I suspect by doing other things like upgrading software on their radios, tuning, adding capacity to the radio networks, etc. (which they haven't talked about publicly that I've seen anyway) to support the iPhone, and EDGE works really well now. I use it often to check email, use Google Maps, and fetch web pages. EVDO, however, is still 3 or 4 times faster than EDGE can ever be, and EVDO is now already available everywhere Verizon offers service, and has been for at least a year. EVDO offers 2.4 Mbit/s data rates, with an upgrade path to 3.1 Mbit/sec. Like other iPhone users, I used WiFI networks whenever available (which is often) but I use EDGE at other times and it works better than I expected it to. I'm amazed at how well it works with Google Maps, and I use that feature a lot more often than I thought I would.
Verizon's plans for their "4G" network won't be based on this CDMA2000 family of networks, they'll be switching to the family used by AT&T (and most other phone companies worldwide). Hooray! This is good news for U.S. customers because future roaming agreements between carriers will mean better service for everybody. Why would Verizon switch, though? Well, it's mainly because the other family of radio technologies leapfrogged 'em. AT&T is following the path of "3GPP" networks, and are currently rolling out their HSDPA network which apparently supports speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s in some places in the U.S. already today (although most handsets apparently don't support those speeds yet). Verizon got an early lead with wide area data networks in the U.S. with EVDO, but they will have a hard time keeping the top tier of their customer base, all those early adopters still have early adopter personalities, and they'll be migrating in droves to AT&T when they become aware of the fact that AT&T's 3G network is five times faster than EVDO. Verizon's decision to switch to the UMTS camp will put them on the same playing field with AT&T in the 4G market. Both will use HSOPA. Check out the features, variable bandwidth usage, MIMO. Mmm... yummy. Slashdot iPhone H8trz will be not buying an iPhone because they're waiting for 4G any day now.
Attacks against The Enlightenment (see also: Age of Enlightenment) say for example, upon the idea of freedom of speech, in the name of one religion or another (let's just stick with this one religion for now) have been ongoing since reason began to displace superstition.
More recently, you may remember the cartoon controversy? This faded from the collective consciousness after "they" (people whose minds are captive to superstition of the islamic brand) repeatedly threatened, and then killed Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh , great grandson of the brother (also named Theo) of the famous painter, Vincent. Contemporary Theo was guilty in the eyes of islam of making a film which was critical of the treatment of women under islam.
The great clash between Islam (unwittingly and unstably allied, by the way, with fundamentalist Christian radicals who are working within the western democracies to undermine the same feared Enlightenment values and institutions in favor of their own brand of superstition) on the one side, against the cultures and nations descended from The Enlightenment on the other, is coming to a head in Europe. The demographic trends, and the inability of the European cultures to assimilate their immigrant Muslim populations (alternatively, those populations are disinterested in assimilating), cause concern that Europe's democratic institutions will be subverted as instruments in the religious colonization of those European countries that gave birth to the Enlightenment by Islam, and their eventual conversion to theocracies in fact, if not in name.
It has been suggested that this problem is exacerbated by limited economic opportunity for young people in these countries. An Economist Considers the Riots in France (from 2005, there were more riots last spring, March 2007)
The fact that you want to have sex with Ann Coulter is the main reason you're going to vote for Hillary Clinton is revealing of some deep psychological problem. You should get help.
This seems to me to be a failure of NASA as much as Rocketplane Kistler. The objectives appear to be entirely unrealistic. NASA wants two separate companies to develop two separate vehicles capable of unmanned resupply of the ISS in a very short time frame. Now, this is an agency that has access to literally DOZENS of off the shelf rockets. None of them will do. This is an agency with experience spanning decades, working with several companies to design DOZENS of rockets. None of them cost any less than "many billions of dollars". I'm not saying that it won't be possible to develop a new rocket on the very limited budget and very limited timetable, but NASA would never be willing to do it on these terms. Private investors looked at that and saw what we are starting now to see: a project which is conceptually flawed, and which will almost certainly unravel before a rocket flies, and which will almost certainly not result in a profit on the investment.
Except when trying to take over the plane to protect it from the hijackers. In that case, Justin Long would use his cracked iPhone with an ssh terminal on it. Duh.
Sure the point about the difference between a rat and human brain is valid, but I suspect that most people underestimate the complexity of the brain in general. Here's a picture of a tiny mouse brain that shows some hints about the internal physical structure. mouse brain image and an article about how that image was made.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always suspected that most Slashdot traffic of that type was the result of only a few smelly nerds with bots.
I can hardly wait for the SDK to ship, not so much that I'm craving to install 3rd party applications on my iPhone, but that you will finally be forced to find another mental tic.
I'm surprised by this article. I thought it was common knowledge that botnets are full of these old exploits. The guessed purpose is exactly what's going on. Worms these days don't spread as rapidly as they used to on the wild internet because botnets are serving a purpose -- they are making somebody money. If they spread like wildfire on the internet as a whole, they would attract too much attention, and get cleaned up. They can't get into most corporate networks using worm probes, either, but they can and do get in by exploiting browsers, as email attachments, and so forth. Once inside, they probe around looking for all manner of things. It's not just SQL exploits, either. I'd guess the sample data they looked at was biased somehow. Maybe some big botnet was running a sweep with those particular exploits during the sample period.
Your metaphor is creepy. I won't be using it in any marketing campaigns.
Worse, if you blow 'em up to get 'em off the beach, you just get tiny bits of rotten whale raining from the sky. What not to do with a beached whale.
You missed, with the "back off unless you have a double-blind study bit. Insistence on a double blind study is not the demonstration of a rational scientific approach to the issue that it might at first appear. In fact, you have it upside down, in this case. Demanding a double-blind study to support action to *stop* an optional surgical removal of an otherwise healthy body part violates the precautionary principle for example. It's a non-controversial argument to claim that cutting off part of a healthy body for religious, cultural, or other non-medical reasons, without evidence that this *does not* cause harm is at the very least a violation of the precautionary principle.
There also considerable evidence that the practice does cause actual harm, greater in some cases than in others.
Male circumcision - see the harm to get a balanced picture
Circumcision Complications
Consider another example. Cigarettes are full of substances which cause cancer in laboratory rats. Where are the double blind studies supporting the claim that cigarette smoking causes cancer in people? Well, there really aren't any, because it isn't ethical to conduct these types of studies which would require exposing a group of human volunteers to known or suspected carcinogens. There are other ways to get reasonably reliable data on which to base public policy, however.
The onus in the case of physical mutilation (circumcision of either gender certainly qualifies) should be on those doing the mutilating of the defenseless child. There are no double blind studies which demonstrate that we have not deprived our children of the most sensitive part of their anatomy, and that we haven't permanently deprived them of maximum sexual enjoyment. (All those folk who cry out on any political issue, Think of the children! forget to consider or care about what happens if they mange to make it to adulthood.) With respect to circumcision, however, there are recent studies which indicate that male circumcision might reduce the spread of AIDS. The evidence isn't conclusive, but it does complicate the issue of male circumcision.
Although it might seem clear that female genital mutilation is rather more dramatically barbaric, male circumcision is by no means a harmless practice. Perhaps not all the patients are harmed, but some are undoubtedly harmed, irrevocably.
Finally, it's worth noting that although the extent of the legal and human rights of children remain the subject of debate, it's clear that most modern democratic societies at least, agree that children have some rights. You may be the parent of YOUR children, but the system of laws governing your country almost certainly limit what you may do to them. You certainly would do hard time, and or have the children taken away, in any western democray for amputating part of their nose or their ear or their hand or foot. Why not for amputating part of their penis?
Ooooh, you cannot reach me now
Ooooh, no matter how you try
Goodbye, cruel 'Net, it's over
Surf on by.
Sitting in a bunker here behind fire-wall
Waiting for the worms to come.
In perfect isolation here behind fire-wall
Waiting for the worms to come.
We're {waiting to succeed} and going to convene outside Pharmington
Dot Com where we're going to be...
Waiting to infect their PC.
Waiting to read all their e-mail.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Waiting to set up fake bank sites.
Waiting to update the rootkits.
Waiting to smash in their windows
And change their config.
Waiting for the final solution
To "clean up" this strain.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Waiting to gather their idents
And pretend to be them.
Waiting for windows based desktops
and laptops and cell phones.
Waiting to follow the worms.
Would you like to see deposits
bank, again, my friend?
All you have to do is follow the worms.
Would you like to send your credit rating
Home to me, my friend?
All you need to do is follow the worms.
So let me get this straight. You were once near a research program, but not actually a part of it, and the head of a department, but apparently not the head of the department doing the research, dismissed it out of hand, before the research was published, implying to you the data was noisy? Your ass just fell off. Let me hand it to you, so you can re-attach it.
Perhaps it didn't occur to you that in some cases you can pull signal out of noisy data by looking for regular repeating patterns? Or with maybe some other techniques you hadn't thought of? Maybe some technique described in the research paper, or its references?
Here's the thing. Getting signal from noise is hard, but often possible. As a species, we get better at it as time goes on. If signal could never be pulled from noise, radio, television, cell phones, and the internet wouldn't work. Heck, even without any fancy schmancy scientific instruments, we're pretty darn good at it. A big chuck of most brains (including yours) is devoted to the task. In fact, you couldn't use spoken words to communicate with somebody else in a bar where everybody else was talking, too. Seismographs couldn't detect earthquakes from the other side of the planet, because there are too many people having raucaus sex and too much truck traffic at any given time.
Take this signal, for examle, the pattern of posts dismissing something with a wave of the interjection "meh" when they clearly have no concept, amidst the general noise of Slashdot posts. If I see it once, I think it's just a random person, spouting off, maybe pre-caffeinated, maybe late at night, maybe not thinking it through, whatever it is. When I see "meh" many times, and every time it's from somebody who is seriously and totally lacking clue, then I wonder. Is this "meh" some sort of signal for someone who doesn't realize the limits of their own knowledge? Is there something about the "meh" meme which causes it to preferentially survive in a cesspool of incompletely formed thought, and die out amidst the frenzy of competition in a curious mind? Is "meh" a signal which indicates intellectual laziness? Perhaps it's related to the phenomenon of the unskilled being unable to correctly assess their skill? (This applies to all of us, in domains of our in-expertise. I'm not insulting you, merely pointing out that we all need to become more aware of the areas of our in-expertise, in order to avoid looking like idiots.)
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
(Also available in this HTML version if you prefer.)
Overconfidence
Your geek card is hereby suspended for the weekend, which you should devote to reading about signal processing and astronomy. You are also prohibited from using "meh" for one year.
The Fundamentals of Signal Analysis
Extrasolar Planets
Or do you mean an organization like the Department of Energy which has been controlled by an administration which is absurdly friendly to the energy industry? (See: Mercury Emission Control R&D).
Dude. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is in doubt about the mercury released into the atmosphere from human activity, and which then falls into the oceans. Even according to the Bush administration, about a third of this is apparently from burning coal. Oh, and look! The data in the DOE chart is from 1994 and 1995! The data from the Christian Science Monitor is ten years newer. Huh. Imagine that. As mercury emissions are reduced form other industries, the proportion of emissions from coal fire plants has gone up. Bummer. Undermines the DOE case against actually doing anything about the problem of emissions from coal fire plants in the US, which just doubled in importance, right then, by taking the time to understand the attempted deception in the graph.
There are a few reasons that any mercury is released at all from coal burning:
Although global mercury emissions have fallen in recent decades, they are still absurdly high. Human activity is causing a rising level of mercury found in top level predator fish, the kinds people like to eat, like tuna.
Mercury is a neurotoxin, and a general toxin, and it accumulates in organisms (Bioaccumulation of mercury). In tiny quantities, it's bad for you. It's particularly bad for those unborn children that the "Christian Right" proponents of "Family Values" love to go on and on about. They don't seem to care much if those children are born healthy, only that they get born. But I digress.
Were this not the case, we would not have research programs designed to figure out how to reduce these emissions, under this pro-industry, head-in-the-sand Republican administration. Unfortunately, the "propaganda" is on the other side of the issue. Even though the DOE can't deny this problem, due to the overwhelming nature of the evidence, they can still obfuscate it. Notice how the first paragraph of this article differs pretty dramatically in gestalt view of the problem, as compared to a paragraph from deeper in the body of the content:
Mercury Emission Control R&D
How are they revolting? Are they heading over to the Apple Store and buying MacBooks? If they really wanted to revolt, they would install Linux or FreeBSD or buy a Macintosh and never look back. TechNet users are particularly hard core Windows lovers, masochistic, really. I bet they tough this one out. They are not revolting. They are reveling in their delicious pain.
Expect Apple's future iPhone products to be announced using the same general patterns as their iPod and Mac products. Major product refreshes are likely to be announced at an event like MacWorld, or a "special event" where they invite the press and the product is available for purchase that day, to be shipped that day or within a week or two. Minor revisions, like models with additional memory that were released last week will be press releases with shipping products. The six month lead on the original iPhone was an aberration.
When Apple pre-announced the iPhone by six months, they were in a relatively unique position and didn't really have the option to follow their traditional model for "Surprise! Buy Now!" product releases. The rumor mill was already onto the iPhone, and Apple was in a position where they had to provide samples of the unit to AT&T to test it on their networks, file for FCC approval, make commercials and whatnot. They were at the point where they had to go from maybe a dozen people even knowing for sure that the project existed, to at least a few hundred people working actively on production ramp-up, software design, testing, and marketing materials. Furthermore, Apple didn't have any existing sales to cannibalize, so a pre-announcement was pretty safe. Apple will avoid pulling the rug out from existing sales by pre-announcing a new version too far in advance, a marketing phenomenon named the Osborne Effect after a computer company of which nobody has heard, because it's been dead a long time.
The problem with thinking of these network technologies in simple marketing terms like "3G" is that so many different companies and consortiums are working on so many different technologies, and they don't arrive in lock-step. Verizon went with a "sure thing" a few years ago, and invested heavily in EVDO, their "3G" network.
This gave Verizon an edge over EDGE, since EVDO is three or four times faster than EDGE in theory, and also because AT&T deployed a lousy back end infrastructure, making EVDO, in practice, infinitely faster than EDGE, which, in practice, offered zero throughput about half the time in about half the places I tried to use it. EDGE's reputation suffered greatly from experiences of early customers like me, who couldn't get 56k modem speeds from ATT nor TMobile, because their EDGE networks were so poor. AT&T fixed their EDGE network by adding capacity to the backbone (publicly declared) and I suspect by doing other things like upgrading software on their radios, tuning, adding capacity to the radio networks, etc. (which they haven't talked about publicly that I've seen anyway) to support the iPhone, and EDGE works really well now. I use it often to check email, use Google Maps, and fetch web pages. EVDO, however, is still 3 or 4 times faster than EDGE can ever be, and EVDO is now already available everywhere Verizon offers service, and has been for at least a year. EVDO offers 2.4 Mbit/s data rates, with an upgrade path to 3.1 Mbit/sec. Like other iPhone users, I used WiFI networks whenever available (which is often) but I use EDGE at other times and it works better than I expected it to. I'm amazed at how well it works with Google Maps, and I use that feature a lot more often than I thought I would.
Verizon's plans for their "4G" network won't be based on this CDMA2000 family of networks, they'll be switching to the family used by AT&T (and most other phone companies worldwide). Hooray! This is good news for U.S. customers because future roaming agreements between carriers will mean better service for everybody. Why would Verizon switch, though? Well, it's mainly because the other family of radio technologies leapfrogged 'em. AT&T is following the path of "3GPP" networks, and are currently rolling out their HSDPA network which apparently supports speeds up to 14.4 Mbit/s in some places in the U.S. already today (although most handsets apparently don't support those speeds yet). Verizon got an early lead with wide area data networks in the U.S. with EVDO, but they will have a hard time keeping the top tier of their customer base, all those early adopters still have early adopter personalities, and they'll be migrating in droves to AT&T when they become aware of the fact that AT&T's 3G network is five times faster than EVDO. Verizon's decision to switch to the UMTS camp will put them on the same playing field with AT&T in the 4G market. Both will use HSOPA. Check out the features, variable bandwidth usage, MIMO. Mmm... yummy. Slashdot iPhone H8trz will be not buying an iPhone because they're waiting for 4G any day now.
Attacks against The Enlightenment (see also: Age of Enlightenment) say for example, upon the idea of freedom of speech, in the name of one religion or another (let's just stick with this one religion for now) have been ongoing since reason began to displace superstition.
More recently, you may remember the cartoon controversy? This faded from the collective consciousness after "they" (people whose minds are captive to superstition of the islamic brand) repeatedly threatened, and then killed Dutch Filmmaker Theo van Gogh , great grandson of the brother (also named Theo) of the famous painter, Vincent. Contemporary Theo was guilty in the eyes of islam of making a film which was critical of the treatment of women under islam.
The great clash between Islam (unwittingly and unstably allied, by the way, with fundamentalist Christian radicals who are working within the western democracies to undermine the same feared Enlightenment values and institutions in favor of their own brand of superstition) on the one side, against the cultures and nations descended from The Enlightenment on the other, is coming to a head in Europe. The demographic trends, and the inability of the European cultures to assimilate their immigrant Muslim populations (alternatively, those populations are disinterested in assimilating), cause concern that Europe's democratic institutions will be subverted as instruments in the religious colonization of those European countries that gave birth to the Enlightenment by Islam, and their eventual conversion to theocracies in fact, if not in name.
March 2006:
"If Europe continues as it is now, the rising Muslim tide will, one at a time, transform the members of the European Union into Islamic Republics under Islamic Shari'a law as Muslims become the majority population."
February 2008:
The Archbishop of Canterbury says the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK "seems unavoidable".
It has been suggested that this problem is exacerbated by limited economic opportunity for young people in these countries.
An Economist Considers the Riots in France (from 2005, there were more riots last spring, March 2007)
The non-political nature of the riots in France
plus a hot spare, off-site.
The fact that you want to have sex with Ann Coulter is the main reason you're going to vote for Hillary Clinton is revealing of some deep psychological problem. You should get help.
Uh-huh. Like the Moeller flying car has been in development.
This seems to me to be a failure of NASA as much as Rocketplane Kistler. The objectives appear to be entirely unrealistic. NASA wants two separate companies to develop two separate vehicles capable of unmanned resupply of the ISS in a very short time frame. Now, this is an agency that has access to literally DOZENS of off the shelf rockets. None of them will do. This is an agency with experience spanning decades, working with several companies to design DOZENS of rockets. None of them cost any less than "many billions of dollars". I'm not saying that it won't be possible to develop a new rocket on the very limited budget and very limited timetable, but NASA would never be willing to do it on these terms. Private investors looked at that and saw what we are starting now to see: a project which is conceptually flawed, and which will almost certainly unravel before a rocket flies, and which will almost certainly not result in a profit on the investment.
There. Fixed it for you.
In light of the BSD tidbit above, it could be renamed: OhNO! ... ONO's Not militantly Open enough! (where the "militantly" and "enough" are silent.)
corn derived ethanol is made from the grain. you get fuel or food from growing corn, not both.
Except when trying to take over the plane to protect it from the hijackers. In that case, Justin Long would use his cracked iPhone with an ssh terminal on it. Duh.
Sure the point about the difference between a rat and human brain is valid, but I suspect that most people underestimate the complexity of the brain in general. Here's a picture of a tiny mouse brain that shows some hints about the internal physical structure. mouse brain image and an article about how that image was made.
In a little under a month, it will be the 2000th anniversary of whatever it is.
Information *wants* to be anthropomorphized!