Many times in fact. One of the standard techniques for controling invasive pests in agriculture is to release sterile bugs into the population because most of the bugs mate once and begin to die afterwards. I'm not an entomologist, but my understanding is that most bugs hang around for only a season, lay eggs and die, their job done. So if you short circuit the whole thing by releasing an overwhelming number of sterile insects the population will breed itself to death. The only reason that I know about this is that I grew up in CA during the whole Mediterrean fruit fly thing. If I had choice between aerial malathion spraying and swatting the occasional sterile fruit fly, I'd go with the fly each time.
There used to be a band of wives and girlfriends of Cern physicists called Les Horribles Cernettes. Dunno if they're still around, but they're a hoot. They sing 60's girl band type style, but with particle physics lyrics.
Online retailing hasn't come of age because "online" retailing as a separate type of retail business doesn't really exist. Most of the retailing going on is nothing more than another form of catalog retailing. The only real difference is that the retailer's catalog is more widely available. The people who've done well in online retailing are the people who've done well in catalog sales. LL Bean is a good example that. I dunno if Amazon is an example of much of anything other than how to siphon off VC funds.
The interesting field of online commerce to me is that of retailing services online and brokering. Neither of these has really come of age yet. However, Ebay has been an early success in the area of brokering goods and services. Online travel is another success in this area. I mean how many of us actually buy airline tickets through an agent anymore?
While these exoskeletons look impressive and will add equally impressive capablities, they're not even in proto type yet. The suit pictured in the article is just a mockup to helpd figure out how to attach the servos and sensors. Even so, the military is definitely taking this whole concept very seriously. The suit pictured is intended as a general purpose infantry enhancement allowing a foot soldier to carry heavier weapons, more supplies, or a whole bunch of body armor. Note the "or". These suits are not the "Mobile Infantry" suits of Starship Troopers. For more info, I'd suggest going to www.darpa.gov and entering "exoskeleton" into their search box. Lot's of neat projects and white papers there. They're also working on a back pack helicopter thing that looks totally cool.
An Old and Silly Idea That Won't Go Awayt
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Lunar Lasers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Gawd, I've seen this idea so many times before. It's something they always bring out as a gee-whiz justification of manned space exploration. Y'know, just to show that space has practical applications. The arguements against are pretty persuasive. Safety, cost, and effectiveness. I don't buy it and didn't even think much of it as a kid. I just with these people would stop insulting our intelligence. A better way to address power consumption through technology is in effeciency. A good example that works is the new compact flourescent light bulbs. I've saved my bill before and compared it to after I swithced my apartment over to them. My power bill went down by a little less than half. Pretty nifty. I figure if we can do more with less, we can satisfy our needs for more people, and we can do it without crazy crap like this. In any case, some of the new home solar products are making this thing a moot point. In the meantime, there's lots of better reasons to explore and develop space.
It's not very hard to set up a proxy that sits between your household network and the cable modem. I'm not sure exactly how cable companys can get around that. Given that, how soon are we going to see turn key proxying solutions? Or are they here already? I haven't paid too much attention to home networking since I ditched my cable service a while ago. Before then I was using a surplus 486 as a router proxy.
Give your geek what he/she/it really wants: Junk! Go around to reuse and recying centers and scoop up old 486 PCs, dot matrix printers, and mono-chrome monitors. The geek'll love it. This stuff's better than lego for hours of geek enjoyment. If you have an industrial liquidator outfit in your area, poke around and buy a few bags worth of unidentifiable electronic odds and ends. This will entertain both you and the geek as you watch to see what he/she/it will build next. The kind of junk I'm talking about here is things like transformers off of old TVs, insides of microwaves, starter coils, big ass capacitors and so on. The real mad scientist stuff.
The thinkpads are a great option in old laptops to install linux on. There also a lot of other good older laptops to install linux on. I tried with it my old Olivetti and had no problem whatsoever doing the install. Everything worked the first time, except for X. It only filled up 3/4 of my screen. No incompatiblity with the graphics hardware or anything, just couldn't get things set exactly right in the config and no-one out there had much experience in setting up X on one of these things. This was probably due to the fact that Olivetti got out of the business right after they made my model. Still, if you're X-guru, you can probably make it work, and the command line worked just fine. I had an Echos P-100 with 40 megs of memory wtih an LCD screen. Aside from the display only using 3/4 of the screen, X worked great. I could run a Gnome desktop very nicely. I figure you could pick one of these up for around $100 or two these days, slap in a network card, and you've got a great, cheap command line terminal. I'd probably try to upgrade the HD because at 1.3 Gigs it's pretty small. They come with a CD-ROM and a floppy that you can swap in and out.
I wish I still had my first Tick comic. It was a freebie from New England Comics, announcing that they were going to try publishing their own comics. I thought it pretty decent, but had to make more strategic decisions in my collecting habits at the time. Sorry Ben, I just had to have Akira. Fast forward a few years and suddenly I see the tick everywhere. So my question is this: Where did you think this comic would end up way back at issue one? Were you jsut hoping to have some good stuff in your portfolio by the time you got out of college(or wherever)? Were you hoping for a moderately successful underground classic? Just when did you realize that the Tick was a big hit? What happened then in your life and how did it affect your creation(the comic as well as the character)?
I'd definitely stick it out and finish the degree because comp sci skills still allow you to earn a living. However, you should spend some time exploring things that might be fun. I've started doing that recently with over ten years in the field and am stumbling towards a career in writing. It's a nice dream, but I ain't gonna give my day job anytime soon because it does put a roof over my head. The trick there is to find an institution you enjoy working at. I'm real lucky there. Even so I am getting burned out and I do feel a need to go and do something else. Several years ago I did a public school outreach program where they sent majors in various fields to be a stand in lecturer for a day at Detroit public schools. I had an absolute blast doing that. I was a physics major and I brought all sorts of electromagnetic toys I made out of junk for the kids to check out. I was absolutely drained after a day of excited middle schoolers, but I wanted to do it again. Lately I've been revisting those memories and thinking it might be fun to teach. So that's another field worth exploring because you get to deal with people seeing the subject for the first time and their freshness can make it all fun again. Of course, teaching public schools is quite another thing, and I know enough about the classroom situation, the pay and poltics to balk a little about jumping off CS and getting my teaching certificate, but I'm still looking.
It depends on just how much of their past an employer can know. If they haven't been convicted at the time they enter the program, then there's no record that they have to own up to. Granted there's a lot they may have done prior to getting into the program, but outside the street who knows? In any case, ex-cons who do have solid skills are able to land and keep jobs especially if they have good references from their trainers, and a placement program backing them. And that's what this program gives them: skills, experience, references.
In terms of this economy, what I've seen is that people with solid IT skills seem to be able to keep their jobs or find new ones. The first to feel the downturns are alwasys the people with few skills, and let's face it, a lot of the people swept in the tech boom had very questionable tech skills. Now, in terms of turning around once you've gone, evil, I'd like to ask the question: Are these kids really evil? A lot of people who come down hard on kids in gangs have never been in area that has gangs. In a lot of cases, the gang is the only real family that these kids have. Not to defend them, but gangs provide a lot of the support and mentoring that all kids are instinctively looking for. And that's a real serious problem because gangs are criminal and violent organizations. A kid who's got a good family and connections that lead him--or her--into legitimate social insitutions generally does not turn to the gang. These connections might be a network of friends, a church, or some other kind of outreach, but when they aren't there, a kid reaches out for what's around, or at least gets scooped up by it. So, is a kid evil for not having a better choice? I guess this all goes back to the old question of whether virtue is inherent or learned. If virtue is inherent, then good kids will not join gangs and will do okay no matter where they start life. If virtue is learned, then what do you expect when there is no institution to teach a kid virue? Seems to me that this is what Brother Holub is trying to do.
Re:But what can mortals achive?
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Biking @ 80 MPH
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· Score: 2
Currently, you can spend as little as $500 US and get one heck of a good bike. I wouldn't reccomend spending less because below that mark most bikes aren't durable. If you stay away from fancy gadgets, that chunk of money will get a bike that will last for years with regular maintenance. In terms of ease of riding, a good moutain bike or touring bike will get you going pretty fast for fairly little effort. If you get a mountain bike, swap out the knobby tires for a smoother tread and you'll have a great city bike. I don't much like the so called hybrid bikes which are lame attempt to combine a mountain bike with a road bike. You kinda get the worst of both worlds with those, but this is my opinion only. In any case, if you stay away from department store brands and go to a real bike shop, it's very hard to get a bad bike these days. I got serious into biking over ten years ago, and that five hundred dollar bike you buy today is better than the $1000 bikes back then.
The real key to having a good time with your bike is maintainence and regular use. For instance, if you let your wheels get out of true, they'll rub against the brake pads, making it very hard to keep going. And if you don't use your bike, you'll find it hard to ride. I know I go through this every spring when I have to get back on after the snow melts. In terms of your body declining, it declines a lot slower than you think. Forty isn't so very long away for me, and I can keep getting stronger and faster. When I was in my early twenties, I used to think I was hot shit til some old geezer in fifties blew past me like I was standing still. Of course that geezer had been training and racing thirty years longer than I'd been alive. Just goes to show you that decline is relative. If you build up excess capacity while you're younger, then the decline you inevitably suffer will still you leave functioning at higher level than otherwise.
As to choosing the right bike, you have a lot of options. If you want to do some recreation mountain biking, get one of those. Moutnain bikes are also good for riding in the city because you can hop curbs with ease and deal with just about any pot hole. Touring bikes are sturdy and relatively fast. They have long wheel base with drop out handle bars. Your back will hurt when you start riding one of these, but the muscles will develop the more you ride. You can't hop curbs as easily with one of these, but it can be done. Touring bikes are ideal for longer commutes on roads, especially in suburban or rural areas. Recumbants are another option, but they are not cheap, and they're not as easy to handle. Figure spending at least $2000 on one of these. But, they are the most comfortable bike around. I'm also concerned about the safety of these bikes because they have a much lower profile than conventional bikes, making them harder for cars to see you. So, those geeky orange flags that the driver's ed books say cyclists should be using are must. With any bike you'll want to tuck away another $50-$75 to get good lights. I used to work a night shift at a NOC and wound up riding my bike home at 1:00AM. Having good lights avoided a lot accidents, especially the time the students around here stole the construction barricades marking some serious road work. Glad I had some big ass headlights that time. I also like clipless pedals; pedals which lock your feet to the pedal. You can still get out if you need to and a fall will snap your feet off the pedals, but your feet will stay on the pedals during wet conditions. The drawback is that you have to wear special shoes. If you carry a bunch stuff, you might also want to invest in some good saddle bags or panniers.
Let's not forget that what was probably the first worm, the Morris Worm, was released on Unix machines. I don't remember the year, but it was in the early days of the Internet when about all there was out there was Unix and VMS. The lesson that the Unix community took away from this and other incidents was that they needed to secure their machines and tighten up code. The point here is that no system is immune. When I first started out in the Internet field, almost all attacks were launched against Unix and VMS machines because that's about all that was hooked up to the Net on a constant basis. So, don't get smug just because Micrsoft is victimized today. After MS dies a firey death, something else will become the dominant system on the net and that will be the most attacked system.
I'll throw a little more fuel on the fire here. In general broad band connectivity is a service that the market driven private sector can provide. At least in general. Where the providers beleive they have a market they'll provide services. The problem is perception. I went to school in Washington and am familar with the Sea-Tac area. Tacoma is not a bad town in general, but it's most definitely not as well off as Seattle and Bellvue. In fact, when I lived out in Olympia, people made the place sound like it was bombed out ruin of a city. I was pretty surprised the first time I took a bus out there on my way to airport. Yes, the downtown core did need a little renewal, and yes the area around the Greyhound station was a mess, but every city has its bad places. But, overall Tacoma wasn't a bad place as I would measure one. However, there was a perception that it was a bad place. And that perception seemed to be more firmly entrneched among the better off my college classmates. Given that kind of wide spread view, would a company attempting to make money off a brand new tech service aggressively pursue the market? Often times the answer is no. I'm not saying this is what happened here, but it has happened in other places with other kinds of services. Even a year ago, broad band was just sort of something that people regarded as a luxury or a status symbol, but now it's looking more and more like a necessary communications service in the same way that phone service is. So, if private providers are dragging their feet in providing what's emerging to become a necessary service, then why shouldn't a city step in to provide it. Furthermore, private providers provide a service in places where it makes economic sense. Unfortunately there are many places where people live that the business case for providing services is poor. Rural Washington comes to my mind. In these cases public sector services make sense.
I went Mexico City quite a while ago and one of the many interesting things I saw were buildings that were sinking. There was one church whose entrance had sunk close to twenty feet below street level. It was explained to me that tapping the aquifer under the city had caused the land to settle as it became depleted and the heavier buildings were sinking. This was pre earthquake so who knows what the place looks like these days. Makes me wonder what's going to happen to So. Cal as the population continues to increase.
Don't forget the services market either
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IBM Wants Linux
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· Score: 2
I dunno how much money IBM makes or loses off this, but they've been pushing their various management and consulting services pretty hard. Or, least that's what I remember from a few years ago when I was directly exposed it. Going with Linux like this opens the markets they already have their foot into. AIX, I suspect, is a dead end, and IBM knows it. Not too many people use it these days, and everyone seems to be going into Linux on the server side at least.
I dunno about the differing hardnesses of steel, but it sounds plausible. Anyway, the big reason for deflecting with the back of the blade is two fold: One you don't notch it, and, two, parrying with the back of the blade tends to put the edge in position for a counter strike. At least in what I've seen so far of Japanese sword fighting work. Of course, your point could be the reason why the technique came out that way. Course, I'm still working with wooden practice swords
Many months ago Sciam had a lengthy article about these guys' work. It went into detail about what they did and the difference between their steel and the other stuff. If I remember right one conjecture about why Damascus steel began to vanish is because other sources of iron became cheaper than the sources in India, and the Indian sources simply closed shop. And, the Damascus steel makers couldn't find the right iron. Gotta go dig trhough my stack of back issues and look it up.
One thing to remember is that people at the non-geek level will find any computer not so easy to use at any level. If you're actually interested in what goes on, Linux might be a little harder to get going in, but these are office workers here. What the need to know is how start up, customize a desktop, run apps, access files, and use their apps. From that point, KDE is a whiz. I recently changed my desktop to a not so recent version of KDE and was amazed at how far the Linux users interfaces have come along over the years. This is something that no office worker should have a hard time learning.
The major flaw form the novice geek view is changing configurations on the fly. That still messes me up. Other than that, the installs are reeze these days, and the other big merit is consistent behavior. I can log into my linux box and be assured that it'll run the same it did yesterday. I cannot say that for my windows machine.
One thing that many of the people on these forums forget is how much of a special case we are. Your average office work is never permitted to install their own software. People have been arguing the case for thin clients for year because the average office user has no need to do their own installations and should be discouraged from doing so. I mean, we don't 'em wasting time with net Quake or anything. Not to mention ungodly mess a user administered machine can become. And, if you're running the type of place where people share work-stations like in a call center or clerk desk then you need to preserve uniformity from one session to the next so as not to confuse or completly derail the workers. Customizing the desktop is one thing, but installing any random app is a bad idea.
In that light why the hell should the place even expect the users to need to know stuff like that. ? In terms of apps being available the usual course is to go through IT management and request it. And, if you have a user who's knowledgeable enough to want a specific linux app by name, why not consider moving 'em into the tech department?
Using VNC or any of the other virtual terminal software is nowhere near the same as simply logging in and seeing your desktop and your files come up in your session. That's something that's almost exclusive to the Unix/Linux world.
Anyone intersted in going solar should check out this product from Unisolar. It's about the cheapest I've seen yet. If I've done the math right you could roof a decent sized house with these for about $5000.
If you want to see a graphic demonstration of how closely the Internet is intertwined with the physical world, just watch what happens when there's a fire at a place like the MCI pop in Downers Grove. That was a real mess from a network engineering point of view. The point is that the the Internet is, and always has been, highy centralized at the physical level because there simply are not that many backbone providers. In the US these backbones are controled by a small number of companies and in other places they might be controled by the government. But, the fact of life is that, ultimately, in any country, the Internet is controled by a very small group of entities, many of which operate without public representation. Right now much of the world likes the notion of a free Internet, and most companies don't care go what goes across their backbone as long as they get paid, but that could change.
I remember seeing a/. blurb about just such a thing. If I remember right, after it invaded the system, it patched a security hole, copied itself onto whatever removable media was in the computer and deleted itself. Unfortunately I couldn't find the article in the archives.
In the meantime, this sort of program is pretty trivial, aside from invading a secured host. I've heard talk in various organizations about writing maintenance viruses to crawl the network's hosts and do whatever updating needed to be done. Such ideas are usually tanked because everyone's a little nervous about independent critters running loose, doing things on their computers. Besides, there are more reliable automated ways to install patches and updates. In the meantime, writing one of these as a good samaritan deed would likely get you prosecuted because, 1) You don't own the computers you're infecting 2)You don't know what the configuration is on the machines and your virus might screw 'em up, 3)What if you missed a bug in your code?
Just a minor point here. The summary says that this directly contradicts relativity. Meanwhile the abstract of the actual article says "cannot be explained in the framework of general relativity." This might seem like a quibble, but it's a pretty important point. General Relativity, like Quantum theory is an incomplete description of the universe. They both work very well a describing the universe, but on differnt scales. The physics community is still searching for the unified field theory to unite the two, or rather supersede them. This observation could be the one that leads to the development of a more complete theory. Or, it could be something else.
Slashdot Mirror
Many times in fact. One of the standard techniques for controling invasive pests in agriculture is to release sterile bugs into the population because most of the bugs mate once and begin to die afterwards. I'm not an entomologist, but my understanding is that most bugs hang around for only a season, lay eggs and die, their job done. So if you short circuit the whole thing by releasing an overwhelming number of sterile insects the population will breed itself to death. The only reason that I know about this is that I grew up in CA during the whole Mediterrean fruit fly thing. If I had choice between aerial malathion spraying and swatting the occasional sterile fruit fly, I'd go with the fly each time.
There used to be a band of wives and girlfriends of Cern physicists called Les Horribles Cernettes. Dunno if they're still around, but they're a hoot. They sing 60's girl band type style, but with particle physics lyrics.
Online retailing hasn't come of age because "online" retailing as a separate type of retail business doesn't really exist. Most of the retailing going on is nothing more than another form of catalog retailing. The only real difference is that the retailer's catalog is more widely available. The people who've done well in online retailing are the people who've done well in catalog sales. LL Bean is a good example that. I dunno if Amazon is an example of much of anything other than how to siphon off VC funds.
The interesting field of online commerce to me is that of retailing services online and brokering. Neither of these has really come of age yet. However, Ebay has been an early success in the area of brokering goods and services. Online travel is another success in this area. I mean how many of us actually buy airline tickets through an agent anymore?
While these exoskeletons look impressive and will add equally impressive capablities, they're not even in proto type yet. The suit pictured in the article is just a mockup to helpd figure out how to attach the servos and sensors. Even so, the military is definitely taking this whole concept very seriously. The suit pictured is intended as a general purpose infantry enhancement allowing a foot soldier to carry heavier weapons, more supplies, or a whole bunch of body armor. Note the "or". These suits are not the "Mobile Infantry" suits of Starship Troopers. For more info, I'd suggest going to www.darpa.gov and entering "exoskeleton" into their search box. Lot's of neat projects and white papers there. They're also working on a back pack helicopter thing that looks totally cool.
Gawd, I've seen this idea so many times before. It's something they always bring out as a gee-whiz justification of manned space exploration. Y'know, just to show that space has practical applications. The arguements against are pretty persuasive. Safety, cost, and effectiveness. I don't buy it and didn't even think much of it as a kid. I just with these people would stop insulting our intelligence. A better way to address power consumption through technology is in effeciency. A good example that works is the new compact flourescent light bulbs. I've saved my bill before and compared it to after I swithced my apartment over to them. My power bill went down by a little less than half. Pretty nifty. I figure if we can do more with less, we can satisfy our needs for more people, and we can do it without crazy crap like this. In any case, some of the new home solar products are making this thing a moot point. In the meantime, there's lots of better reasons to explore and develop space.
It's not very hard to set up a proxy that sits between your household network and the cable modem. I'm not sure exactly how cable companys can get around that. Given that, how soon are we going to see turn key proxying solutions? Or are they here already? I haven't paid too much attention to home networking since I ditched my cable service a while ago. Before then I was using a surplus 486 as a router proxy.
Give your geek what he/she/it really wants: Junk! Go around to reuse and recying centers and scoop up old 486 PCs, dot matrix printers, and mono-chrome monitors. The geek'll love it. This stuff's better than lego for hours of geek enjoyment. If you have an industrial liquidator outfit in your area, poke around and buy a few bags worth of unidentifiable electronic odds and ends. This will entertain both you and the geek as you watch to see what he/she/it will build next. The kind of junk I'm talking about here is things like transformers off of old TVs, insides of microwaves, starter coils, big ass capacitors and so on. The real mad scientist stuff.
The thinkpads are a great option in old laptops to install linux on. There also a lot of other good older laptops to install linux on. I tried with it my old Olivetti and had no problem whatsoever doing the install. Everything worked the first time, except for X. It only filled up 3/4 of my screen. No incompatiblity with the graphics hardware or anything, just couldn't get things set exactly right in the config and no-one out there had much experience in setting up X on one of these things. This was probably due to the fact that Olivetti got out of the business right after they made my model. Still, if you're X-guru, you can probably make it work, and the command line worked just fine. I had an Echos P-100 with 40 megs of memory wtih an LCD screen. Aside from the display only using 3/4 of the screen, X worked great. I could run a Gnome desktop very nicely. I figure you could pick one of these up for around $100 or two these days, slap in a network card, and you've got a great, cheap command line terminal. I'd probably try to upgrade the HD because at 1.3 Gigs it's pretty small. They come with a CD-ROM and a floppy that you can swap in and out.
I wish I still had my first Tick comic. It was a freebie from New England Comics, announcing that they were going to try publishing their own comics. I thought it pretty decent, but had to make more strategic decisions in my collecting habits at the time. Sorry Ben, I just had to have Akira. Fast forward a few years and suddenly I see the tick everywhere. So my question is this: Where did you think this comic would end up way back at issue one? Were you jsut hoping to have some good stuff in your portfolio by the time you got out of college(or wherever)? Were you hoping for a moderately successful underground classic? Just when did you realize that the Tick was a big hit? What happened then in your life and how did it affect your creation(the comic as well as the character)?
I'd definitely stick it out and finish the degree because comp sci skills still allow you to earn a living. However, you should spend some time exploring things that might be fun. I've started doing that recently with over ten years in the field and am stumbling towards a career in writing. It's a nice dream, but I ain't gonna give my day job anytime soon because it does put a roof over my head. The trick there is to find an institution you enjoy working at. I'm real lucky there. Even so I am getting burned out and I do feel a need to go and do something else. Several years ago I did a public school outreach program where they sent majors in various fields to be a stand in lecturer for a day at Detroit public schools. I had an absolute blast doing that. I was a physics major and I brought all sorts of electromagnetic toys I made out of junk for the kids to check out. I was absolutely drained after a day of excited middle schoolers, but I wanted to do it again. Lately I've been revisting those memories and thinking it might be fun to teach. So that's another field worth exploring because you get to deal with people seeing the subject for the first time and their freshness can make it all fun again. Of course, teaching public schools is quite another thing, and I know enough about the classroom situation, the pay and poltics to balk a little about jumping off CS and getting my teaching certificate, but I'm still looking.
It depends on just how much of their past an employer can know. If they haven't been convicted at the time they enter the program, then there's no record that they have to own up to. Granted there's a lot they may have done prior to getting into the program, but outside the street who knows? In any case, ex-cons who do have solid skills are able to land and keep jobs especially if they have good references from their trainers, and a placement program backing them. And that's what this program gives them: skills, experience, references.
In terms of this economy, what I've seen is that people with solid IT skills seem to be able to keep their jobs or find new ones. The first to feel the downturns are alwasys the people with few skills, and let's face it, a lot of the people swept in the tech boom had very questionable tech skills. Now, in terms of turning around once you've gone, evil, I'd like to ask the question: Are these kids really evil? A lot of people who come down hard on kids in gangs have never been in area that has gangs. In a lot of cases, the gang is the only real family that these kids have. Not to defend them, but gangs provide a lot of the support and mentoring that all kids are instinctively looking for. And that's a real serious problem because gangs are criminal and violent organizations. A kid who's got a good family and connections that lead him--or her--into legitimate social insitutions generally does not turn to the gang. These connections might be a network of friends, a church, or some other kind of outreach, but when they aren't there, a kid reaches out for what's around, or at least gets scooped up by it. So, is a kid evil for not having a better choice? I guess this all goes back to the old question of whether virtue is inherent or learned. If virtue is inherent, then good kids will not join gangs and will do okay no matter where they start life. If virtue is learned, then what do you expect when there is no institution to teach a kid virue? Seems to me that this is what Brother Holub is trying to do.
Currently, you can spend as little as $500 US and get one heck of a good bike. I wouldn't reccomend spending less because below that mark most bikes aren't durable. If you stay away from fancy gadgets, that chunk of money will get a bike that will last for years with regular maintenance. In terms of ease of riding, a good moutain bike or touring bike will get you going pretty fast for fairly little effort. If you get a mountain bike, swap out the knobby tires for a smoother tread and you'll have a great city bike. I don't much like the so called hybrid bikes which are lame attempt to combine a mountain bike with a road bike. You kinda get the worst of both worlds with those, but this is my opinion only. In any case, if you stay away from department store brands and go to a real bike shop, it's very hard to get a bad bike these days. I got serious into biking over ten years ago, and that five hundred dollar bike you buy today is better than the $1000 bikes back then.
The real key to having a good time with your bike is maintainence and regular use. For instance, if you let your wheels get out of true, they'll rub against the brake pads, making it very hard to keep going. And if you don't use your bike, you'll find it hard to ride. I know I go through this every spring when I have to get back on after the snow melts. In terms of your body declining, it declines a lot slower than you think. Forty isn't so very long away for me, and I can keep getting stronger and faster. When I was in my early twenties, I used to think I was hot shit til some old geezer in fifties blew past me like I was standing still. Of course that geezer had been training and racing thirty years longer than I'd been alive. Just goes to show you that decline is relative. If you build up excess capacity while you're younger, then the decline you inevitably suffer will still you leave functioning at higher level than otherwise.
As to choosing the right bike, you have a lot of options. If you want to do some recreation mountain biking, get one of those. Moutnain bikes are also good for riding in the city because you can hop curbs with ease and deal with just about any pot hole. Touring bikes are sturdy and relatively fast. They have long wheel base with drop out handle bars. Your back will hurt when you start riding one of these, but the muscles will develop the more you ride. You can't hop curbs as easily with one of these, but it can be done. Touring bikes are ideal for longer commutes on roads, especially in suburban or rural areas. Recumbants are another option, but they are not cheap, and they're not as easy to handle. Figure spending at least $2000 on one of these. But, they are the most comfortable bike around. I'm also concerned about the safety of these bikes because they have a much lower profile than conventional bikes, making them harder for cars to see you. So, those geeky orange flags that the driver's ed books say cyclists should be using are must. With any bike you'll want to tuck away another $50-$75 to get good lights. I used to work a night shift at a NOC and wound up riding my bike home at 1:00AM. Having good lights avoided a lot accidents, especially the time the students around here stole the construction barricades marking some serious road work. Glad I had some big ass headlights that time. I also like clipless pedals; pedals which lock your feet to the pedal. You can still get out if you need to and a fall will snap your feet off the pedals, but your feet will stay on the pedals during wet conditions. The drawback is that you have to wear special shoes. If you carry a bunch stuff, you might also want to invest in some good saddle bags or panniers.
Let's not forget that what was probably the first worm, the Morris Worm, was released on Unix machines. I don't remember the year, but it was in the early days of the Internet when about all there was out there was Unix and VMS. The lesson that the Unix community took away from this and other incidents was that they needed to secure their machines and tighten up code. The point here is that no system is immune. When I first started out in the Internet field, almost all attacks were launched against Unix and VMS machines because that's about all that was hooked up to the Net on a constant basis. So, don't get smug just because Micrsoft is victimized today. After MS dies a firey death, something else will become the dominant system on the net and that will be the most attacked system.
I'll throw a little more fuel on the fire here. In general broad band connectivity is a service that the market driven private sector can provide. At least in general. Where the providers beleive they have a market they'll provide services. The problem is perception. I went to school in Washington and am familar with the Sea-Tac area. Tacoma is not a bad town in general, but it's most definitely not as well off as Seattle and Bellvue. In fact, when I lived out in Olympia, people made the place sound like it was bombed out ruin of a city. I was pretty surprised the first time I took a bus out there on my way to airport. Yes, the downtown core did need a little renewal, and yes the area around the Greyhound station was a mess, but every city has its bad places. But, overall Tacoma wasn't a bad place as I would measure one. However, there was a perception that it was a bad place. And that perception seemed to be more firmly entrneched among the better off my college classmates. Given that kind of wide spread view, would a company attempting to make money off a brand new tech service aggressively pursue the market? Often times the answer is no. I'm not saying this is what happened here, but it has happened in other places with other kinds of services. Even a year ago, broad band was just sort of something that people regarded as a luxury or a status symbol, but now it's looking more and more like a necessary communications service in the same way that phone service is. So, if private providers are dragging their feet in providing what's emerging to become a necessary service, then why shouldn't a city step in to provide it. Furthermore, private providers provide a service in places where it makes economic sense. Unfortunately there are many places where people live that the business case for providing services is poor. Rural Washington comes to my mind. In these cases public sector services make sense.
I went Mexico City quite a while ago and one of the many interesting things I saw were buildings that were sinking. There was one church whose entrance had sunk close to twenty feet below street level. It was explained to me that tapping the aquifer under the city had caused the land to settle as it became depleted and the heavier buildings were sinking. This was pre earthquake so who knows what the place looks like these days. Makes me wonder what's going to happen to So. Cal as the population continues to increase.
I dunno how much money IBM makes or loses off this, but they've been pushing their various management and consulting services pretty hard. Or, least that's what I remember from a few years ago when I was directly exposed it. Going with Linux like this opens the markets they already have their foot into. AIX, I suspect, is a dead end, and IBM knows it. Not too many people use it these days, and everyone seems to be going into Linux on the server side at least.
I dunno about the differing hardnesses of steel, but it sounds plausible. Anyway, the big reason for deflecting with the back of the blade is two fold: One you don't notch it, and, two, parrying with the back of the blade tends to put the edge in position for a counter strike. At least in what I've seen so far of Japanese sword fighting work. Of course, your point could be the reason why the technique came out that way. Course, I'm still working with wooden practice swords
Many months ago Sciam had a lengthy article about these guys' work. It went into detail about what they did and the difference between their steel and the other stuff. If I remember right one conjecture about why Damascus steel began to vanish is because other sources of iron became cheaper than the sources in India, and the Indian sources simply closed shop. And, the Damascus steel makers couldn't find the right iron. Gotta go dig trhough my stack of back issues and look it up.
One thing to remember is that people at the non-geek level will find any computer not so easy to use at any level. If you're actually interested in what goes on, Linux might be a little harder to get going in, but these are office workers here. What the need to know is how start up, customize a desktop, run apps, access files, and use their apps. From that point, KDE is a whiz. I recently changed my desktop to a not so recent version of KDE and was amazed at how far the Linux users interfaces have come along over the years. This is something that no office worker should have a hard time learning.
The major flaw form the novice geek view is changing configurations on the fly. That still messes me up. Other than that, the installs are reeze these days, and the other big merit is consistent behavior. I can log into my linux box and be assured that it'll run the same it did yesterday. I cannot say that for my windows machine.
One thing that many of the people on these forums forget is how much of a special case we are. Your average office work is never permitted to install their own software. People have been arguing the case for thin clients for year because the average office user has no need to do their own installations and should be discouraged from doing so. I mean, we don't 'em wasting time with net Quake or anything. Not to mention ungodly mess a user administered machine can become. And, if you're running the type of place where people share work-stations like in a call center or clerk desk then you need to preserve uniformity from one session to the next so as not to confuse or completly derail the workers. Customizing the desktop is one thing, but installing any random app is a bad idea.
In that light why the hell should the place even expect the users to need to know stuff like that. ? In terms of apps being available the usual course is to go through IT management and request it. And, if you have a user who's knowledgeable enough to want a specific linux app by name, why not consider moving 'em into the tech department?
Using VNC or any of the other virtual terminal software is nowhere near the same as simply logging in and seeing your desktop and your files come up in your session. That's something that's almost exclusive to the Unix/Linux world.
Anyone intersted in going solar should check out this product from Unisolar. It's about the cheapest I've seen yet. If I've done the math right you could roof a decent sized house with these for about $5000.
If you want to see a graphic demonstration of how closely the Internet is intertwined with the physical world, just watch what happens when there's a fire at a place like the MCI pop in Downers Grove. That was a real mess from a network engineering point of view. The point is that the the Internet is, and always has been, highy centralized at the physical level because there simply are not that many backbone providers. In the US these backbones are controled by a small number of companies and in other places they might be controled by the government. But, the fact of life is that, ultimately, in any country, the Internet is controled by a very small group of entities, many of which operate without public representation. Right now much of the world likes the notion of a free Internet, and most companies don't care go what goes across their backbone as long as they get paid, but that could change.
I remember seeing a /. blurb about just such a thing. If I remember right, after it invaded the system, it patched a security hole, copied itself onto whatever removable media was in the computer and deleted itself. Unfortunately I couldn't find the article in the archives.
In the meantime, this sort of program is pretty trivial, aside from invading a secured host. I've heard talk in various organizations about writing maintenance viruses to crawl the network's hosts and do whatever updating needed to be done. Such ideas are usually tanked because everyone's a little nervous about independent critters running loose, doing things on their computers. Besides, there are more reliable automated ways to install patches and updates. In the meantime, writing one of these as a good samaritan deed would likely get you prosecuted because, 1) You don't own the computers you're infecting 2)You don't know what the configuration is on the machines and your virus might screw 'em up, 3)What if you missed a bug in your code?
Just a minor point here. The summary says that this directly contradicts relativity. Meanwhile the abstract of the actual article says "cannot be explained in the framework of general relativity." This might seem like a quibble, but it's a pretty important point. General Relativity, like Quantum theory is an incomplete description of the universe. They both work very well a describing the universe, but on differnt scales. The physics community is still searching for the unified field theory to unite the two, or rather supersede them. This observation could be the one that leads to the development of a more complete theory. Or, it could be something else.